Modi and his nine lives (in the media)


The nail has hit on the head. So, the communal riots of 2002 in Gujarat had the unofficial backing of chief minister Narendra Modi, no less. Aha! It's that time of the year again. Tehelka has stung. Only, this time, it has stung at the same place. Ever since 2002 happened, the world and its media have been shouting from the rooftops about the role of the Gujarat government in engineering the communal carnage. There were quotes, victim accounts, eye-witness stories, etc. etc. filling page after page to prove how Modi's gang of operatives killed in broad daylight.
What Tehelka has achieved therefore is a far cry from a tehelka. It is a meow. What's new, sir? If Modi has been painted communal in this story, Tehelka's fantastic sense of timing has got itself tainted as well in a.... huh, what's the colour of the Congress? Why now, Mr Tejpal, bang on the cusp of yet another stirring election?
Make no mistake. What Babu Bajrangi and his goons allegedly did is unacceptable, unpardonable, and grossly perverse. There can be no two ways about it; there can be NO justification or tolerance for stabbing a pregnant woman who has done no harm except to belong to a certain community. One cannot condone such subversive acts in a civilised society. If, after doing what he allegedly did, he thinks nothing of it, there's something seriously wrong not only with this person but also with society at large which nurtures such evil. An act of violence, committed in a moment of insanity, should drown the perpetrator in remorse. But a flagrant flaunting of such a heinous act strips him of the veneer of humanity.
It's therefore not about whether what happened was right or wrong. It wasn't right. But then, the other side looks equally bad. What kind of person gets into a compartment, sets fire to it so that all the innocent men, women and children get burnt? Why is it that the Godhra goondas are still at large? No one in their right mind will buy the conspiracy theory. It has much too many holes. What kind of society allows such mindless violence to go unpunished? That's particularly strange considering it happened in Modi's Gujarat. It's also an important sidelight that such a carnage on a majority community can happen only in India.
And, if we condone the first phase of the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai started by Muslims as the outcome of the demolition of Babri Masjid -- which incidentally is different from burning or killing people, why cannot we accept that the post-Godhra riots were a backlash from the Hindus? If the demolition of a non-functional mosque in the distant north can spark a conflagration in Mumbai, can't the burning of innocents cause a flare-up in the immediate neighbourhood? It's such double standards of pious Hindus that I find baffling. There's no question of justifying either. Both are wrong -- the razing of Babri and the Godhra tragedy. But if we are logical and `unbiased,' the aftermath of each incident is as reprehensible or justified as the aftermath of the other.
I find it self-contradictory when we accept the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai as an empathisable offshoot of the Babri Masjid demolition but find the Gujarat rioting unacceptable. Yes, the official backing, if any, by the Modi regime is something we need to get alarmed at but the fact remains that Modi did not stir up the mass hysteria overnight nor did he actively seek out people to go on a rampage. His role, if there was any, was allegedly that of a caretaker who is believed to have looked the other way. He was, by no means, the perpetrator. And, from one account cited below, he didn't entirely look the other way
In both riots, one critical fact has been overlooked by all sides-- the saffron, Muslim and secular hate-mongers. Many Hindus too lost their lives in both Mumbai and Gujarat riots. The much-revered Srikrishna Commission, which probed the riots of 1992-93, has religiously documented the casualties in both communities-- the stats speak louder than all the newsprint and footage. It is a travesty of truth to project or pretend that only Muslims have faced the wrath of a saffron backlash. The Hindu toll, too, was quite high. So, what saffron trishuls are we talking about, Mr Singhal? And, thank God they were not used.
In Gujarat, according to answers given in Parliament by the UPA home minister, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed and 2500 were wounded. Certainly more Muslims paid for their lives for the Godhra carnage than Hindus in a land dominated by Hindus but it is clear they didn't take it lying down.Even as the media played out the misery of the hapless Muslims in relief camps, there were over 40,000 Hindus in relief camps by the end of the first week of riots.
As human beings in an ordered society, we need to tolerate. We should tolerate difference of opinion, religion, customs, practices and beliefs. But one has to draw the line at being doormatish. it's rather hypocritical to view ourselves and the world through different prisms. Few possess the art of self-criticism that Indian excel in; it is of great value but only so long as it doesn't peter out into masochistic self-loathing.
Even if you choose to be so, at least be factual. There are several inherent inequities that stand out in a sensible evaluation of both the situations-- 1992 and 2002. Let us look a little closely at some facts-- first, the impression that all of Gujarat was in flames. Officially, only 60 `locations', not necessarily villages but areas, were struck by rioting. You could argue the number is negotiable. Probably. But look at the fact that all the 200-odd industrial townships in Gujarat continued work as usual without a single day's loss. That takes care of the inflamed reportage.
While ruling parties usually have the wherewithal (read: clout) to get around the flak in the form of an increasingly coloured coverage of every communal or religious event, it's the police who haplessly carry a permanent scar on their credibility, time and again.Were both Mumbai and Gujarat state commandeered by a biased police? According to the Srikrishna Commission report which is certainly more secular than the secular, police opened fire 153 times in the first phase in which 30 Hindus, 133 Muslims and 11 others died. In the second phase, it opened fire 308 times in which 80 Hindus, 90 Muslims and one other person died. Two police officers, and five policemen were killed while controlling the riots, and about 500 policemen including officers injured. It certainly doesn't sound like a one-sided affair, and we are not counting the number of missing persons or unidentified bodies here.
Yet, bafflingly, the police were heavily upbraided by the Commission for its supposed bias. While failing to pinpoint a categorical, doubt-free incident in support of its tall claims, the commission records its appreciation of the sterling services rendered by the police at different places. It also bring out equitable inaction in some instances (!) as in the fact that the police did not act not only against the allegedly inflammatory writings in the `Saamna' and `Nava kaal,' but also kept silent on some ``communal Urdu writings'' circulating during this period.
In Gujarat, the police was derided for being a `biased' protector. Consider this factfile: On February 28, 10 Hindus had been shot dead and 16 Hindus had been wounded in police firing. On March 1 (the next day), another 24 Hindus were shot dead and 40 Hindus wounded in police firing. In the first three days alone, out of a total of 611 deaths, 101 were caused by police firing -- of whom 61 were Hindus and 40 were Muslims.
As for the common myth happily perpetuated by the English media that Narendra Modi did not call in the army, B P Singhal, an ex-DGP who claims to have been continually intouch with the Gujarat state police, gave this chronology to a news channel (Aaj Tak): the Godhra carnage took place on February 27, the Hindu backlash started the next day and the army was doing a flag march on the ``forenoon of March 1''. This means, within a single day, the chief minister had summoned the army, as recorded by The Hindu as well. So, what was the channel's reaction to this revelation? `Why no action was taken on February 29, 30, 31?' it wanted to know! Even if 2002 had been a leap year, it appears our man in the TV studio would not have been appeased.
Similarly, the post-demolition pogroms were not all a play of passion. The commission says about the January 1993 rioting, ``a number of individual Muslims and Muslim criminal elements appear to have indulged in violence, arson and rioting.'' In Bainganwadi, for instance, the attacks on Hindus ``appear to have been masterminded by Gharya Aslam and Abdul Ghani Kamruddin Mulla, two notorious characters of the locality.'' There were instances of private firing by Muslims too. Some Muslim criminals like Aslam Koradia and his associates ``moved around the locality (Pydhonie) on motor bikes and fired indiscriminately at people on the streets.''
None of this exposition of facts is intended to imply a condonation of anything that happened. Rather, it is an attempt to point out the whole picture instead of a pick-and-choose reality that is daily projected on our TV screens and often, nowadays in the newspaper. I fail to comprehend how there is no similar outcry over the 1984 riot against the Sikhs-- the only pogrom that was more of a genocide than a riot. Are Sikhs less equal than the Muslims? Whatever happened to the secular sensibilities of the country?