Finally, though, the marauding Muslims
had been dealt a blow for all of history’s crimes. From Chengiz to Babur
and Jinnah to Dawood, everything had been avenged in one fell swoop.
And for this they gave credit to one man. Narendra Modi. For once a
Hindu had stood up, and how.
We can add the Bangladesh genocide and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pak/Bangla and many others to that long bloody list (see also Tipu Sultan). Never forget, their heroes are our villains.
The Muslims do not really have much with which to retaliate with against this tidal wave of hate: respond with bombs or threats of partition, and the backlash is (will be) overwhelming. The only option is to sue for peace and to live in ghettos (the Sri Lankan model).
Sad to say, this is how things will be, from now on to infinity. Hindus will (have already) disappear from a large part of the South Asian land-mass. The muslims will face the sword of injustice everywhere, in India for just being a muslim, in Pakistan (and Bangladesh) for being the wrong type of muslim.
We actually agree with Arundhati Roy that the new govt does not have an agenda for explicit harm towards muslims, but there are many indirect ways in which the screws can be tightened.
How about Muslims joining hands with the other minorities – the Sikhs, the Jains, the Christians, the Buddhists and the Parsis to face a common threat? Sorry, it is not going to happen. The Christians are secure in their fortresses in the South and in the North-East (except the tribal communities dispersed all over, and even in that case, elite Christians do not have much sympathy to spare) . The Sikhs are already in alliance with the Hindu Brotherhood. The Jains and Parsis are actually pillars of the Brotherhood, they are some of the biggest supporters of Modi.
Not to forget, the Muslims are at fault as well. Everywhere in South Asia, and if history is any guide, there is not one minority community which will feel inclined to be friendly or accommodative towards muslims. If Muslims in India can harass Tibetans because of what is happening to Rohingyas in Burma, then why should any neo-Buddhist feel kindly towards them?
Our only quibble with Anand Soondas is that Congress knows why it failed the Indian people, but it will not have the guts to do a proper introspection and take necessary steps for re-invention. As a wise BPite says, Congress is doomed with the N-G family at the top, and it is equally doomed without them.
…….
unusually sleepy town with a slightly overpowering population of
monkeys. It generally goes about with its existence unmindful of its
place in either ancient or modern history. But the early months of 2002
were different. Its people were then wide awake – a few in anticipation,
a majority in anxiety. Much of India, too, was on its toes.
threatened to launch a 100-day yagya to press for construction of the
Ram mandir and, by February 17, sadhus, mahants, sanyasis, party workers
from across the country affiliated to various saffron fronts had begun
converging at Karsevakpuram for the great prayer, to god and to
government. The air crackled with the fire lit by hundreds of
volunteers. Copious amounts of ghee flung into the flames made it seem
like summer inside the camps. Something was bound to singe.
The place had been turned into a fortress, crawling with jawans and
officers from the paramilitary forces and sundry intelligence men in
mufti from the local and central units. There was talk of the army being
called in if the VHP and the akharas did not back down. On the face of
it, they didn’t.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s repeated
entreaties to everyone to wait for the court’s order on the impossibly
vexed temple tangle were summarily dismissed by the yagya organizers.
Ramchandra Parmahans, the eccentric president of the Ram Janmabhoomi
Trust, often boomed that it was not a matter to be decided by the
judiciary as it concerned faith, the religious sentiments of Hindus. He
accused the BJP of selling out. VHP president Ashok Singhal was equally
vituperative and unmoved. This is India, this is Ram lalla’s birthplace,
he said. “Nothing will stop us from making the structure.”
The momentum kept building up. The fires kept burning. Truckloads of
kar sevaks kept pouring in. To get the logistics right – food and
accommodation, after all, were not unlimited and had to be dispensed
with care – individual groups were advised to stay at Karsevakpuram for a
stipulated period of time and then head home so that everyone
interested in the 100-day programme could get a chance to participate in
what the sadhus were calling a historic turning point for India.
It was one such group returning from Ayodhya that got caught in
Godhra on February 27. Fifty-nine Ram sevaks, many among them women and
children, were locked inside the blazing compartments of the Sabarmati
Express by a Muslim mob to suffocate and burn.
Those were initial days of
my reporting career and I was posted in Lucknow as the Uttar Pradesh
correspondent for The Telegraph. Though I had come back to base, I
wanted to go to Gujarat to see the train for myself and the trail of
death and destruction it had triggered off. My editor at that paper
finally relented and on the first anniversary of the tragedy, I was on
my way to Godhra. It was February 27, 2003. S-6, the roasted and ravaged
compartment of the Sabarmati Express, was still there at Signal Falia,
the station. It looked sullen and angry at its own fate.
In a report from there, I had then written: “In the one year that
has passed, Godhra has changed. Everything is divided — people,
loyalties, business, bus stops, hospitals, schools. Even truth. Inquire
about any incident and you are bound to get a Hindu truth and a Muslim
truth…The Hindu and Muslim populations of this town were already
divided, roughly in half, making it one of the most dangerous and
communally sensitive hotspots in the country. Now, even the geography
seems to have split vertically…
Being a predominantly Muslim locality has
not helped. Business in Signal Falia, which lies next to Godhra railway
station, has collapsed. The rows of shops that lined the wall adjoining
the periphery of the station have been razed. There were 180 shops in
all, the bread and butter of more than 2,000 people. Now, there is only
one long line of rubble.”
Then, in a dispatch dated February 27, 2003: “The platform wore a
deserted look. A quick scan of railway records at Godhra station showed
nobody had bought a ticket to board the Sabarmati Express, scheduled to
arrive at 2 am. Yet railway security officials patrolled the platform
and guards stood outside the station. Five jawans huddled near a bonfire
at the station entrance, listening to the commentary of the
India-England match. As Ashish Nehra took another wicket, they cackled.
At 1.25 am, India’s path to the Super Six stage was looking easier.
“Bas, aaj India match jeet jaye, kal ka kal dekha jayega,” a jawan said
softly…
The train pulled in ahead of time and lingered at the platform
for 15 minutes. The few inside S-6 fidgeted nervously. Suresh Yadav,
travelling with six family members, was not interested in the score.
“Why isn’t the damn train moving” he muttered. His brother, Ramesh, who
was peeping furtively through the closed shutters, didn’t volunteer an
answer. There was a general sigh of relief when the train moved,
hesitantly, at 1.56 am.”
As I left Godhra and returned to Ahmedabad, traveling to a few other
places along the way, there had been one constant refrain from Hindus
everywhere – in Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Surat. “Sabak ho gaya.” (They
have been taught a lesson.) “Garv hai humko.” (We are proud.) Almost all
of them said their anguish had been heightened by the unwillingness of
mainstream political parties and the media to condemn unequivocally and
in categorical terms what was a most inhuman, unthinkable act of
cruelty.
had been dealt a blow for all of history’s crimes. From Chengiz to Babur
and Jinnah to Dawood, everything had been avenged in one fell swoop.
And for this they gave credit to one man. Narendra Modi. For once a
Hindu had stood up, and how. In the ten years since the horrific
violence startled and shocked Indians with its sheer malevolence and
systematic intent, the adulation has hardly ebbed.
To some extent, I suspect, this lies at the heart of a fair amount
of support for the Gujarat chief minister and the man who could be the
BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for 2014. Though there is no evidence
yet to prove Modi let the severe reprisals against the Godhra killings
go on unabated – something that would eventually take more than 1200
lives – that’s what common folks believe. And sensing the Hindu
mahapurush sentiment, Modi hasn’t really gone out of his way to disabuse
that notion. If anything, he has worked on that image. His ‘Gujarat
model’, he has quietly and subtly signaled, is not just about keeping
the economy in place.
Introducing the Vibrant Gujarat campaign a year after the
post-Godhra riots was a political masterstroke. This man was a doer.
People could do business with him. Faith and finance came together
perfectly to photoshop further the portrait. Soon, the Tatas were happy,
then the Ambanis, then industry bodies. Even Bollywood. Amitabh
Bachchan, not known to be too finicky while choosing his friends, is
clearly in love with Modi. His ad campaigns have brought in thousands of
more tourists to Gujarat. It helps industry to support, and to be seen
supporting, Modi – a man unlike the passive Manmohan Singh or the
befuddled Rahul Gandhi. It will be a huge bonus if in future he heads
the cabinet in New Delhi and there is need for collaborations with and
investments from governments and business houses abroad.
the prospect already and have ended their excommunication of Modi.
Ethics seldom come in the way of enterprise. In the largely scripted
interactions he’s had – at SRCC and FICCI – in Delhi, no one has grilled
him on Godhra. He has instead talked about his vision of India, its
powers – both real and imagined – and its potential. Of how it is a
nation of mouse-charmers. In any case, the Modi juggernaut now ensures
he needn’t go any place where there’ll be uncomfortable questions to
answer. That won’t fit in with the painting under construction – of the
man on a white horse. He is all about ‘listen’, not ‘ask’.
That no data on Modi’s Gujarat outshining the rest of the country
has stood the test of time – or compared better with stats coming out of
some of India’s now-performing states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh
and even Bihar (Hooda would insist Haryana, too) – has become
irrelevant and ceased to matter. A TOI article pointed out how there’s
growing unemployment in Gujarat, how women and children don’t do too
well, how dalits are still being victimized, how – far from the promise
of farmers selling petrol – large sections are facing acute shortage of
water.
In 2005, when the US denied him a visa, Modi said he would make
Gujarat such a destination that one day the state will be compared with
America. He said farmers would be like Arab sheikhs and will have crude
oil pouring out of taps in their fields. That hasn’t happened, and most
likely it never will.
But if there is anything equally responsible for the Modi wave
apparently sweeping the nation – fuelled, of course, by a fawning,
amoral industry and a core Hindutva vote bank – it is the disastrous
rule of the UPA government, its PM and an annoying bunch of
Gandhi-worshipping, directionless and out of sync ministers.
On every
front the country has only gone down the ladder in this past one decade.
The economy is in tatters, security is too casual, transparency is
hardly visible and administration is non-existent. The lot of our women
has worsened. Even as I write this, there have been four rapes in Delhi
in the last 24 hours. A 19-year-old was gang raped and a 5-year-old girl
brutalized so badly that she is struggling to stay alive. And this
coming after the Nirbhaya case following which the government had vowed
to increase police presence and patrolling. Only corruption and
disparity have grown. If the number of billionaires and millionaires has
gone up, so have the poor and the hungry.
In the hands of UPA 2, India has seemed too large to handle, too
diverse to unify, too discontented to be mollified. Latest international
rankings show that India fares poorly on all human development
indicators such as education, child mortality sex ratio, environment,
human rights and gender equality. The situation is actually worse than
the indices indicate.
India ranks at 136 out of 187 countries with
comparable data in the Human Development Index. It was at number 94 out
of 176 countries in Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption
Perception Index, slipping from number 72 among 180 countries in 2007.
Our gender inequality index is shameful too – at number 129 out of 147
countries.
From the absence of food security to custodial torture, and
from large-scale displacement of the poor to malnourishment, the Working
Group on Human Rights and the UN recently came out with a damning
report on India’s rights track record. Not taking into account uprooting
due to armed and ethnic conflict, India was estimated to have the
highest number of people displaced annually by ‘development’ projects.
That’s a whole load of bad news.
The other, quite incredible, move by the Congress and its Gandhi
loyalists has been to pitch Rahul as the answer to Modi. They have to
understand that the poor guy is just not interested in the top job. In
fact, he keeps hinting that he’s trapped in a wrong body. For a party
and alliance in disarray, it would be suicidal to have someone so
confused helm it. There can be nothing worse than pushing on stage a
leader who does not want to lead. It sends out all the wrong signals.
Manmohan Singh says he doesn’t discount a third term for himself. That’s
a chilling thought. Even for Congressmen.
If the BJP and its allies do come to power, riding on the back of
Modi’s popularity and the disenchantment with the UPA, the Congress will
know exactly who to blame. The Congress.
Indians haven’t been so despondent, listless and impatient as they
are today. All that large sections of the public want to do is vote out
the present government. But if that rage and hope coalesce into a
movement that’s ready to have Modi as India’s prime minister, the
country, its politics and its people will have a lot to answer – to
itself and to the world watching it. Because then we will never be able
to hold any politician accountable for the wrong that he does or
oversees or fails to stop. And that will be too much of a price to pay –
even if it is in the name of development. Or the promise of it.
regards