In 2002,
a wave of religious violence swept across the Indian state of Gujarat.
It wasn’t the first communal violence India
has ever faced – very far from that – but it was one of the worst single
episodes, simply because it was planned and directed by the state government in
all particulars.
Back in 2002, Gujarat was known as the “Hindutva*
laboratory”, where the nation’s largest Hindunazi[1] political
party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tried out its ideas on turning society
into a de facto Hindu theocracy where nobody else would have any rights whatsoever.
*The word, literally meaning “Hinduness”,
connotes Hindu radicalism.
In the capital, the ironically named
Gandhinagar, sat Narendrabhai Modi, whom I have written about elsewhere[2];
his government had recently not done well in local elections, and he needed
some way of hardening support for his party. One sure way of hardening support,
of course, is to get the people behind you in a religious crusade. This is
something which rulers have known since the start of recorded history.
The Hindunazis had already been trying
their damndest to marginalise the Christian and Muslim minorities in Gujarat.
However, merely making it almost impossible to convert away from Hinduism to those
religions wasn’t enough; something much more drastic was necessary.
A massive dose of communal bloodletting was
an obvious answer. All one had to do was to wait for an opportunity.
It came on the 27th of February 2002, when some carriages
of a train returning from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state in North India caught
fire in a railway station in Godhra in Gujarat. This Ayodhya was the mythological
hometown of the mythical Hindu god-king Ram, and in 1991 had been the site of a
Hindunazi aggression in which an ancient Muslim mosque had been demolished on
the excuse that it had been built on the site of Ram’s alleged birth. For more
information on that, I’ve written about it here[3].
Ever since that date, Hindunazis had
organised pilgrimages to the makeshift temple they’d set up on the site of the
destroyed mosque. The train that was returning from Ayodhya had been loaded
with people returning from that “pilgrimage”, and had a substantial complement
of Hindunazi stormtroopers as well. According to reports, when the train
stopped at Godhra, these stormtroopers had an altercation with Muslim tea
sellers on the platform. They may or may not have attempted to abduct a Muslim
girl as well, according to whom you believe, but there seems to have been a
genuine quarrel.
Soon after leaving the station, the train
was stopped, and Muslim mobs from the nearby slums allegedly attacked the carriage
in which the Hindunazis were travelling. The carriage was burned, resulting in
the deaths of 58 or 59 of the passengers, most of whom were women and children.
[Later, a judicial commission[4]
proved conclusively that the carriages could not have been set on fire from outside, so that the Hindunazi fable
of Muslims flinging petrol from buckets could not have happened. The Hindunazis then modified their tale to claim
the Muslim mobs slashed the connectors between carriages with “swords”, entered
the carriage, splashed petrol on the floor and then set it on fire. The
commission, studying all the evidence, concluded that the fire was probably accidental.
(In fact accidental fires on Indian trains are quite common and kill people
virtually every year.) A citizen’s tribunal reached the same conclusion.]
Whether the fire was accidental or not, the
Modi government in the state declared that this was an act of terrorism, and
paraded the bodies of the dead to raise communal tensions. Another Hindunazi outfit
allied to the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), called a general strike,
and though these strike calls are both illegal and invariably incite violence,
the BJP did nothing at all to either stop it or take any measures to ensure
security. By the end of the day, Hindunazi mobs were going around the state,
often openly led by BJP politicians, systematically destroying Muslim
properties, killing, looting and raping.
The violence was not just systematic, it was very carefully organised. The Hindunazi stormtroopers had very
precise knowledge of just which businesses were owned by Muslims (which were
often camouflaged by Hindu-sounding names), where they lived, and so on –
knowledge which could only have been supplied by the state government. They
were trained and organised, too, in demolition and arson, and armed with
swords, explosives, and cylinders of cooking gas with which to carry out their campaign
of murder and demolition. According to police officers and politicians from the
BJP who later came out in the open, Modi declared that the people should be “allowed
to vent their natural anger” and sent ministers to sit in the police control
room to make sure the cops did nothing to quell the violence. Actually, the
police on the ground not only did nothing, they routinely joined in the
looting, destruction, murder and rape, so Modi’s precautions were likely
superfluous anyway.
The violence reached surreal dimensions.
Ordinary Hindus, not involved in the pogrom, pitched in the looting as well,
rushing to snatch goods from vandalised Muslim shops, often on live TV. Entire localities
populated by Muslims were cleared out, everyone either murdered or driven into
refugee camps. A former member of parliament, Ehsaan Jaafri, begged for help
when his locality was attacked. Not only did help not arrive, Jafri was
stripped, beheaded, and his corpse thrown into a fire; several members of his
family, including two young boys, were burned alive. The stormtroopers
displayed an almost perverse tendency to assault women, raping them and then
murdering them. If they were pregnant, the foetus was often ripped out of their
bodies, impaled on spears, and burned separately. Children were massacred in
identical sadistic fashion. Sometimes they were forced to drink petrol and then
set on fire, so that they burned from the inside. Even girls as young as eleven
were gang raped and murdered by the Hindunazi mobs.
I remember one incident reported by a Hindu
peace activist, Teesta Setalvad, who later visited the makeshift Muslim refugee
camps. She found Muslim children casually talking of “rape”, and, surprised,
asked if they knew what this word “rape” meant. One kid piped up in these
words: “Maĩ batāoon, didi, balātkār
ka matlab hai jab aurat ko nangha bana dete hai aue uské bad jalā dete haĩ.”
(“I’ll tell you, Elder Sister, rape means when they strip a woman naked and
then burn her.”) These were kids, you understand, ordinary children.
The looting was accompanied by a systematic
demolition of Muslim tombs and mosques; up to 230 of them were known to have
been destroyed. In one instance, not only was a mausoleum demolished, but the
local council paved over the site the very next day, displaying an alacrity
unheard of in India and quite impossible without direct orders from the
government.
Nobody knows how many people were actually
killed. The “official figure” is about 150000 Muslims displaced and
approximately 720 to 1000 killed; most credible estimates cite the dead as
about twice that. According to figures, some 200 to 250 Hindus were also
killed. How many of them were murdered by Muslims in retaliation is debatable.
It’s known that many Hindus went to great personal risk to save their Muslim
neighbours and friends, and that a lot of them were afraid of being mistaken
for Muslims, so it’s very likely that at least a substantial number of them
were killed deliberately or in error by the Hindunazi mobs.
It was only on the evening of the first of
March, three days after the pogrom started, that the state government finally
allowed the deployment of Central government forces, including the army, to impose
a semblance of order. The Central government of the time was also under the BJP,
and there are credible reports that the prime minister, the relatively liberal
Atal Behari Vajpayee, had wanted to use constitutional provisions to dismiss
Modi’s government and impose direct rule, but was dissuaded by his colleagues.
The violence continued for many days afterwards, by fits and starts, and it was
up to a month before it finally ebbed. What it left was a devastated society,
where ordinary middle class Muslims found themselves – even if not personally
bereaved – destitute and forced into Muslim ghettoes, where they were then
accused of isolating themselves in ghettoes.
Modi’s response to the backlash and
revulsion that broke out across the nation, from Hindus as well as others, was
absolutely typical of the man. He called it an intolerable assault on Gujarati
pride, rejected all criticism, and parlayed this into an “us versus them”
mentality which brought him rich electoral rewards. He was helped by the spineless
response of the alleged “secular” Congress party, which to this day has never
made the slightest move to bring him to book, either at the state or at the
centre.
And today, it is this Modi who is all set
to become the Prime Minister of the country after the current multi-phase
elections are over.
Great, isn’t it?
At this point, the reader is probably
recalling the title of this article, and asking, what on earth is hopeful about any of this? Has Bill lost
his mind?
No. Bill has not lost his mind.
There were two photos, of many, which defined
the Gujarat pogrom in popular consciousness. The first was of a Muslim tailor,
Qutubuddin Ansari, his face streaked with tears and dust as he desperately
begged for his life.
The second was of a Hindunazi stormtrooper,
fist clenched and an iron rod upraised in the other hand, as he shouted slogans
at the camera. He belonged to the Hindunazi outfit Bajrang Dal, and his name
was Ashok Mochi.
That was in 2002.
Now let’s take a time jump to March, 2014.
The place is Kerala, in South India. Two men take the stage at a function,
united in reconciliation, and pledge to fight Hindunazism and Modi together[5].
One of these men is Qutubuddin Ansari. The other is Ashok Mochi.
 |
| Mochi (left) and Ansari |
And this is what gives me a faint,
flickering, glimmer of hope. I don’t know if Mochi personally killed or injured
anyone. I don’t know his personal journey over the years. But I do know that
instead of retreating into the safe confines of Hindunazi radicalism, he went forth and begged forgiveness from
his victims, and turned against the culture of hate which had used him and
those like him as a weapon.
Nobody
is irredeemable. If they have the faintest,
slightest trace of humanity left in them, they can still turn around from the brink
of the abyss.
If that
isn’t hopeful, I don’t know what is.
Sources:
Further
reading:
Note: A lot of Hindunazi supporters to this day attempt to deny all the facts of the Gujarat pogrom, even though Modi himself has now distanced himself from his former fellow-conspirators, and has had several of them prosecuted and jailed in an effort to reinvent himself as an innocent.
Indeed hopeful. Were it not for your blogs (and the research they encourage me to do) I would know nothing of the world beyond US borders, and I deeply appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteBill, yes, this IS hopeful indeed. IF one retains a small bit of his/her humanity, one can change. These days, we need all the hope we can get, however small it may be.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this history lesson.
Bill, Really, a great story and wonderfully told. A great tribute to our common humanity and a devastating condemnation of those 'leaders' who fuel hatred to protect and enrich themselves.
ReplyDelete