People's Democracy

IN typical Goebelsian fashion, and in order to ‘create’ a ‘truth’, the Union Information and Broadcasting Minister, Sushma Swaraj, recently withdrew from circulation all facts relating to the anti-minority pogroms in Gujarat. The purpose of this intervention appears to arise from the fear that these facts might be construed as explaining the immediate context of the torching of the four bogies of the Sabarmati Express in which 58 people, including karsevaks, were killed by a Muslim mob at the Godhra station.

In this manner the RSS version of the events, which packages images of stereotyped fanatical jehadi Muslims with ISI links, who cannot but kill "innocent Ram bhakts" as part of their evil designs in Hindu India, is integral to the explanation for what is happening there.

If a concerned citizen demands an explanation, he must be made to understand that what is happening is decreed by "Newton’s law"—"that every ion has an equal and opposite reaction". The Sangh Parivar atrocities are then nothing but natural justice on the part of aggrieved Hindus. This is in fact what every BJP or Sangh Parivar leader, including the home minister and the prime minister of this country, has been saying with regard to the carnage being perpetrated by the storm troopers of the Sangh Parivar.

It is important to realise that, despite the visual depiction and printed factual information that shows the one-sidedness of the attacks, and the state complicity therein, the RSS version has been maintained intact in the media and cleverly sustained through such sub-headings as "From Godhra to Ahmedabad ".

This entire framework, therefore, needs to be exposed by a recounting of the real facts and through alternate perspectives that question the RSS version of events, and the link with the politics and strategy of the Hindu right-wing forces.

Official records state that in this BJP-ruled state, more than 500 people, supposedly under the state's protection, have been killed with the active abetment of the state government. The media, even while documenting visually and through the print word, the killing orgies by thousands of armed saffron youth, still projects the false arguments that it was the " first strike' by Muslims, that that has brought events to this pass.

A small newspaper from Faizabad, the Jan Morcha, reported in its edition of February 25^th, that trishul-brandishing Bajrang Dal activists had beaten up scores of Muslims in the Sabarmati express train on its way to Ayodhya on 24^th February 2002 and forced them to shout Jai Shri Ram slogans in the train. They injured several people to the point that many had to be hospitalized at other stations like Rudali; they threw a youth who intervened out of the running train, pulled at the burqas of Muslim women, fiercely poked with their trishuls at people who ‘looked’ like Muslims.

The incident was condemned by many local organisations and intellectuals, while Muslim religious leaders pleaded for peace. Already rumours and tension abounded as trains bringing karsevaks from Ayodhya passed through Godhra.

No major newspaper bothered to give this factual information or the stories of how the kar sevaks looted, misbehaved with and intimidated vendors at every station, besides shouting insulting and provocative slogans at that very railway station where tension had already built up after the incidents of February 24^th. This was a good two days before the torching of the four bogies at Godhra.

Further, no major newspaper or political leader outside the Left, has dared categorically to state that there is a clear political distinction, even if the 'first strike' story had stood its ground on facts, between spontaneous acts of mobs or even self-proclaimed terrorists, and terrorist and anti-minority actions of government institutional authorities, officials, elected political leaders and ministers in the government, in a democracy.

Those answerable to an electorate and civil society cannot function and act in the same way as those opposed to the norms of civil society. It is not merely a matter of shame, which it certainly is, but a reflection of the kind of politics that a state and government in power represents if the state machinery itself subverts the constitutionally-established state through its violations of the Constitution and the terrorist actions of its fascist storm troopers.

Through the instrumentality of its storm troopers the BJP in power is trying to force a redefinition of the relationship between the nation and a state, to a point where the state power is at total variance with established national policies on all major issues. This has serious implications for popular sovereignty and the expression of the democratic will through organized political process.

The fascist-exclusionist ‘nationalism’ of the Sangh Parivar and its government has thus been laid bare. As the BJP and its allies lose the assembly elections in four states, including the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar acts on the threat of its leader, Prime Minister Vajpayee, to teach the minorities a lesson. If the Muslims do not vote for us we don’t need them said Vajpayee. The outcome is there for all to see in Gujarat - proudly acclaimed by the Parivar as the laboratory of the Hindu rashtra.

They could do without a whole lot of other people too it seems, if the budget is anything to go by.

Even as Parliament resounded with a Budget speech to bleed the poor and hand the country on a platter to foreign big business, the strategy for countering all opposition to its infamous economic policies was being implemented in Gujarat - an equally cynical assault on the Republic of India in Gujerat. There is a method in the casual manner in which the BJP-led central government is responding to the communal massacres in this BJP- ruled state, with the active partisanship of the state government. A virtual war has been declared against the Muslim minority.

The army was called in after an inexplicable two-day delay, only to flag-march through the city and then to be ushered back into its barracks. Meanwhile the chief minister Narendra Modi, is busy justifying to all and sundry that killings in the name of Ram do not amount to crime, if they are perpetrated against Babar’s aulad (progeny). It was on the same night that the toll went up from 80 to 200 (Indian Express, March 2, 2002)

All major daily newspapers reported Sangh Parivar-mobilised mobs brandishing country-made rifles, swords, spears, and iron rods, targeting Muslims throughout Gujarat as the police stood by. Thousands of youth waving sharp weapons, menacingly roamed the towns, sporting saffron bandanas and headbands, indulged in arson, looting and mass murders, and openly loaded bricks and cans of petrol on to trucks. (The Times of India, March 2, 2002). Even the mass killings in some instances, the chief minister still characterised as " within bounds of restraint ".

In several places the minorities, including the slain former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffri, who dialed the police in vain for six hours, were left undefended. Many seeking protection were slain just next to the SRP headquarters (Indian Express, March 2, 2002). Curfew was only selectively imposed, pinning the Muslim population of the walled cities inside their homes, even as Hindu mobs were allowed to run amok at will. The worst trouble spots across Ahmedabad were in Hindu strongholds where Muslim families formed small, easily identifiable targets.

Muslims could only rely on the community help of their neighbours; according to a civil servant, the government did not "recognize Muslims as citizens"; it rendered no assistance to them, and the injured lay in a dangerous state, medically unattended. Curfew made it impossible to even claim their dead for a decent burial. Thousands are fleeing the state leaving behind their homes and jobs. Scores of mosques and mazars have been destroyed and overnight converted into "temples", often near police stations and with encouragement from policemen.

Official figures already talk of 540 dead, but secular activist groups in the area say, when actual counts are later made, the figure may well be much, much higher.` Thousands more have been injured and rendered homeless. The systematic destruction of minority property all over the state has been enormous, designed to cripple them economically. According to a Communalism Combat estimate, anywhere between 35-40,000 persons are lying hungry and without shelter in Ahmedabad's relief camps alone.

Curfew has been declared in as many as 70 towns of the state, including in remote villages. Incidents of violence have occurred in many towns of UP, some towns of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra and Karnataka, while five mosques/mazars have been razed to the ground in Kaithal (Haryana).

Gujarat Governor, S S Bhandari, has ruled out sending any report to the President on the law and order situation in the state saying, "it is not necessary". Advani makes a clear distinction between the "terrorism" of the Muslims and the ‘natural’ "anger" of the Sangh Parivar cadres, and sees no justification for handing over the state to the army. With an RSS leader and an accused in the Babri Masjid demolition at the helm of affairs as home minister, and an RSS pracharak as chief minister, there is little hope of justice for the victims.

The arrogance of the mean and the desperate implies political cynicism of the worst kind, and that is what the Indian people have to contend with today. The events in Gujarat are the logical consequence of the 'enemy-based' exclusionist ‘nationalism’ that the right-wing Hindutva forces have been articulating in word and deed for the last decade. We must also remember the ‘education’ received for years at Vidya Bharti schools and government schools in BJP-ruled states.

It is not surprising that Gujarat, which has the country's maximum number of RSS shakhas, the highest number being in Rajkot district, is the state where the middle class is the most communalised, where casteism has had virtually no challenge, where the worst anti-minority massacres in post-independence India have been perpetrated. It is the state which would have given to the VHP the maximum number of artisans who have been engaged for years at Karsevakpuram in making the pillars for the temple. Gujarat in fact has become the laboratory for the Hindu rashtra.