People's Democracy

WRITE this to you not so much as a dear friend and younger brother but, with a certain solemnity, as president of our republic of India.

Horrendous recent happenings, in Gujarat have stunned numberless people wondering how man could do such things to man. In public life since 1936, I feel broken, shattered, desolate, not knowing where to turn.

I cannot write to Atal for whom I have had much affection because as prime minister he has chosen to condone and explain away cruelties that almost out-Hitler. Hitler often inflicted with proven connivance of the State administration. I can share my agony with you because you are Head of the Republic, the symbol of the sovereignty of our people, personifying the General Will of our societal life. It is for you to step in with all dignity when government goes gaga, as in Gujarat and the union government connives. I find just insufferable that the prime minister shields such scum as Gujarat’s chief minister whose name I better not utter.

Newspaper Time coolly overlooking what the US and its western allies have been doing throughout their history and especially from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), till today in the Middle-East and elsewhere, have used this opportunity by damming "Bloody India" and we bloody well deserve the taunt. Who but you can perhaps repair the damage to the honour of India when the prime minister and the company he keeps fail unrepentantly in their duty?

Even if Atal has failed in his duty to keep you fully informed about the grim and ghastly going-on in Gujarat, you must have known enough to be sure that the patently repulsive chief minsiter’s proven laches more than deserve the sack which parliament has demanded? I do not know if you have summoned and reprimanded your direct appointee the State-Governor whose name luckily I do not even know. Must the country and our future be besmirched and imperiled by the centre’s dereliction?

In Baroda, normally peaceful, the vandals sneaked in during curfew hours, that is, with official protection to desecrate the grave of hallowed maestro Ustad Fayyaz Khan Sahib. Their masters may not know but you and I know that music, "Greatest of the arts" (Na Vidya Sangeetat Para), the joint Sadhana, no less of Muslim and Hindu is our pride and glory. Atal and his team who now seem bent on their belief that Muslims are no more than "only territorially Indian", which explains the current pogrom and near-genocide (which our people so far have not permitted to steal across to the rest of India), and who but you can step in with every constitutional decorum, to save the conscience and honour of our India?

Gentle, generous Gujarat, the home of more than two thousand years ago of wonderful saints and philosophers of Jainism, Gujarat where the Bhakti movement led by glorious people like Meera Bai, - to cut it short, Gujarat of Gandhiji who lived and died for the "heart unity, of Hindus and Muslims – bleeds today in a thousand wounds. We cannot keep away from salvaging the destruction and moving over to tasks of building a real, new secular human ‘temple’ on our soil.