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Words defy
description. Logic defies perceptiveness. Nadir cannot be the word that can
describe the depths to which the bourgeois politics of communal fascism can
sink. Crime and criminality can reach any limits. No wonder if you say that it
can achieve the infinite. What a pity that the prime minister had to shed tears
that he never had! The old saying about crocodile tears calls for a change. The
poor animal must be convulsing and shedding real tears under the shock that it
will no longer be remembered for its hypocrisy. And sane people laughed when the
p.m. said, "I don’t know what face I will show them [the world] after the
shameful events in Gujarat."
And soon you will see
that he will travel to the world capitals really without wearing a veil.
He took five weeks to
formulate these words and then he traveled to the burning land of Gujarat to
express them. He censured his saffron cohorts that the "Hindus only burn
after a person dies". Killing by torching alive he resented. Why not kill
first and burn afterwards? That will be more human —and according to the Hindu
way of life too. Was that a message wrapped in the jumbled words? Of course,
yes. Otherwise not only the poetic sanity of his delicate heart will get
"disturbed", but also, he might be forced to struggle with more mish-mash.
No sooner did the
p.m. declare his sympathies with the Muslim victims of Gujarat than the RSS and
the BJP put out statements that he had only "sympathised" with the victims and
not condemned the State government. Yes, the vindication of the prime minister’s
jugglery was done without delay. He had not condemned the state chief minister
Modi for letting loose the terror for "three days" who exonerated the marauding
crowds by saying that the "reaction was understandable" under Newton’s
law of "action and reaction". At the Goa conclave, not only did Vajpayee,
justify the carnage, he went on a tirade against Muslims and once again raised
the issue of conversions (that too in a place where a major section of the
population is Christian). Modi has condemned those who criticised him for his
sponsorship of Hindu terror by saying that the inferno in which the Muslims were
made to burn alive was an "expression" of "the sentiments of the five
crore people of Gujarat". After all, Hindu sanskriti is so much fond
of putting everything into fire in the name of yagna for the
‘purification’ of the soul. And never forget the long history of human
sacrifices. Till the recent times the religious bigots have been defending the
sati tradition where women were forced to kiss fire and get roasted alive
on the pyre of their dead husbands. This tradition continued for centuries
together. And not to speak of the thousands of murders of Hindu women every year
for dowry by putting them to fire even in the families of the so-called
respectable civil society in every city and town throughout India. So, given the
general psyche of the Hindu obscurtantist mind and the masochist rage it is not
surprising that frenzied criminal mobs satisfied their sadistic and voyeuristic
cravings while putting Muslim men, women and children to fire in thousands.
Let us visit a scene.
A Muslim basti is surrounded by thousands of Hindu fanatics armed with
swords, oilcans and gas cylinders. Every Muslim house is being put on fire. Some
of those who are interned inside come out of the burning inferno only to fall
into the hands of those who are mad to pounce upon any unfortunate survivors.
Men are killed with swords or are doused with petrol and then burned alive.
Children are flung back into burning houses. Women are captured, their clothes
are torn apart and mass rapes committed before putting them into the fire. When
after the rape a woman is discovered that she is pregnant with a child somebody
shrieks, "Oh, she is carrying a snake in her belly.’’ The crowd laughs
and cries in a weird way. Another one yells, "take the son of the bitch out.
Kill the snake." A sword pierces her belly and slits it open. A hand
wrenches out her viscera. The foetus is taken out and smashed against the ground
with a thud. The crowd cheers, claps and applauses.
What will you call
it? Ghastly? Gory? Horrendous? Macabre? No. Nothing. No word can describe the
scene. They are all obsolete and outdated. Every language will fail to invent
and produce an equivalent. And the men who comprised the crowds? There were
thousands of them. The reports say that at most of the places the marauding
swarms ranged from five thousands to twenty-five thousands. What will you call
them? Again no appropriate words are there especially when neighbours are
involved.
The chief minister of
Gujarat Narender Modi justified the Hindu crowds saying, "the anger of the
people is understandable", that "it is like a mass agitation." For
the RSS pracharak (propagandist) the attacks on Muslims were just "invited"
by themselves as "the mobs were provoked to act that way." This was his
comment when he was asked that why the police did not prevent the mobs from
setting fire to the residence of a former Congress MP, Ehsaan Jafrey, in spite
of his repeated requests. The ex MP was burned alive with more than fifty others
who had come to take refuge in his building. For the saffron brigade leaders the
"Hindu nation has become conscious and has risen up."
Will they be simply
called criminals? Maniacs? Psychopaths? They moved in thousands and were just
not the individual god men of the villages practicing occult and black magic. It
was like a Rwanda revisited. Or the American army-men raping, burning and
destroying the village of Mai Lai in Vietnam. Or the Suharto cohorts in East
Timor. Or the Bosnian villages being lacerated by Milosevich’s armies in
Yugoslavia. They were like the Taliban perpetrating the dance of death in
Mazar-e-Sharif. Hitler’s gas chambers; the Sabra and Shatilla camps of
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; the Quila Jhangi in Afghanistan where hundreds
of prisoners were burned alive by Americans and their foot soldiers during the
US aggression on Afghanistan, and countless others come to mind. Everywhere the
pattern was the same. With only some minor variations. History abounds in such
crimes of the reactionary ruling classes. From Genghis Khan to the RSS man
Vajpayee’s Narender Modi everyone has the same mindset — rape, loot, burn, and
kill the hapless.
When union home
minister Advani goes to Gujarat he is so ‘taken aback’ that he does not finds
words to criticize Modi or his own state junior, the Gujarat home minister. He
leaves and the state continues to burn. After five weeks of the start of the
carnage the PM goes there to inspect and he too does not utter a word against
the chief minister. After all, he had been doing their job. The task that
seeks to convert the whole length and breadth of the country into an
unprecedented death hole. Gujarat was being used as a robust lab for carrying on
that ghostly experiment and Modi was carrying on his assignment very well. So
why would he be criticised by his own mentors.
The parliamentary
opposition only went hoarse at the conduct of the union home minister and the
prime minister just to score voting points. The ‘non-saffron’ parties in the NDA
alliance that had started their collaboration with the arch communalist BJP on
the plea that they will not brook the BJP’s communalist agenda just looked the
other way in a most despicable show of bourgeois political opportunism. The
"hidden" agenda that was never hidden burst into the open with the red-hot
trident piercing the so-called Indian democratic system and tearing it once
again into shreds.
The death dance that
went on in Gujarat was presided over and directed by the elected representatives
of the assembly and the ministers who had secured the ‘mandate’ of the people.
The state home minister, the civil supplies minister, more than half of the
ruling party MLAs, the elected councilors of the municipalities of various towns
and cities, local leaders of the BJP, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, and also many of
the local leaders of so-called secularist Congress Party were seen leading the
criminal mobs. The men who ruled from the citadel of Indian democracy continued
with their usual chores and let Gujarat carry on its experimentation in mass
murder.
There have appeared
numerous allegations that most of the police officers and bureaucracy acted hand
in glove with the murderous crowds. In spite of the wholesale burning down of
entire families and neighbourhoods there are survivors who remain to tell the
horrible tales and live through the nightmare for the rest of their lives. These
eyewitness accounts have appeared in details in most of the "mainstream", i.e.,
English press. But the few FIRs that the police have registered have been
deliberately distorted as such that they will be of no use in the courts. Though
the role of the courts has always been partisan when it comes to atrocities on
the minority communities yet the willful tampering of the FIRs by the police
authorities speaks volumes of the communal bearing of the Indian police forces.
Even the top ranking Muslim police officers in Gujarat, who were already a few
in numbers, literally had to flee to avoid death at the hands of the killing
crowds. They threw away their name badges to escape identification. Even a
Muslim high court judge had to go underground to escape death while a director
general of police got a narrow escape when he was surrounded by blood -thirsty
throngs who were shouting "maro, maro" (kill, kill).
Such was the
magnitude of communal frenzy that every Muslim, irrespective of his social
status and rank, became a target. Those police officers and civil administrators
who tried genuinely to stem the killer mobs were transferred at once without
citing any appropriate reasons. A Muslim police inspector who lost his relatives
and was looking for survivors and his own protection said, "I don’t believe
in the police."
Such was the
complicity of the state in the genocide that all claims of neutrality and
impartiality of it stand exposed. This always happens whenever a communal riot
is organised by the Hindu fascist forces. After 1947 once again the Muslims
throughout India have been forced to think that why they are still not
considered Indians in spite of fifty-five years of "independence". Certain
liberal minded people have suggested that the strength of the minority
communities be increased in the police forces to strike a balance. This will not
in any way stem the tide of Hindu communalism as the state itself acts like a
communalist arm of the majority community irrespective of whichever bourgeois
party is at the helm. While the government leaders try to put on a face of
neutrality the Hindu religious fascist groups openly call for the destruction of
secularism, which in any case is enshrined only in the constitution and has no
practical value whatsoever in the Indian ‘democratic’ setup. The Indian state
and the ruling class parliamentary parties are notorious for using religion and
casteism as perfidious means to divide the people on communal lines as it is the
best way for them to keep the reactionary system going and pit the people of
various communities against each other.
For the first time,
since the 1992-93 Mumbai riots, middle and upper middle class Muslims have been
targeted on a massive scale. Especially their business establishments have been
reduced to ashes in a planned way to break the economic backbone of the
community. There were open calls to destroy the economic strength of Muslims to
force them to accept the supremacy of Hindus. The lists of Muslim homes and
business establishments in every city and town had been systematically prepared
long back, laying bare that the plan had been in progress for many months before
the Godara incident in which 59 saffron Hindus were burned alive. Had Godhra
been not there the Hindu communalists would have created some other pretext to
strike at the Muslims.
The so-called war
against terrorism has only strengthened the communal climate and vitiated the
social atmosphere to irretrievable limits. At the Goa conclave Vajpayee openly
equated Muslims around the world with terrorists. And there are real chances of
even more large-scale carnages in the near future. Gujarat, after all is only
one state notorious for its communalist history. UP, Maharashtra, Delhi, have
been no less nefarious. Andhra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are not far behind.
Another dangerous dimension is being added to this wicked game by involving
adivasi tribal communities into the fray. This is breaking the age-old communion
and amity of the 11 crore adivasi population that only believed in totems till
recently and had no modern temples and seminaries. Now they are being
increasingly drawn into the bloody communal battles. In many towns the Hindu
communalist forces roped in the poor tribals in looting and killing of the
hapless Muslims.
Another thing that
happened this time is the participation of the rich sections of society,
including the women belonging to the Hindu community, in loot and pilferage. The
latter aspect is especially distressing that in the end it is the women who
suffer the most in communal carnages. This indicates the degradation of the
general social atmosphere in the wake of the Ayodhya movement of so-called Hindu
nationalism, the plank on which the BJP rode to power. India’s big business,
which has a major presence in Gujarat, has been noticeably silent on the
gruesome events there. Reliance’s Ambani, Bajaj, etc. which have huge plants in
Gujarat, as also the men in FICCI, Assocham and the CII are even prepared to
bear with the temporary losses due to the riot, without uttering a word of
condemnation.
Now the newspapers
flashed the photographs of the prime minister wiping down his tears. This is as
misleading as the statement that the prime minister represents the country and
not a particular community. But the leaders of the very same BJP, Vajpayee and
Advani, had confessed in 1992 that they were behind the pulling down of the
Babri Masjid though now they have denied shamelessly that they were in any way
connected with that destructive act.
They have always
maintained that Ayodhya was a political movement of Hindu nationalism and not a
religious one. The word "Hindu" itself imparted the movement a religio-political
character and it was built upon the Idea of Hindu and Aryan resurgence that has
all the fascist tone, rhetoric and consequences.
Not only the Muslim
houses and business establishments were targeted in Gujarat, dozens of mosques,
tombs, graveyards and schools were also destroyed. For this purpose bulldozers
were used. The debris was taken away in trucks. And the earth surface was laid
with road building materials, to indicate that nothing ever existed there. For
such kind of operations the machinery of the municipalities was made use of.
Everywhere the idols
of Hindu gods were put up over hurriedly constructed temple like structures thus
paving the way for permanently claiming Muslim properties. Whole Muslim
neighborhoods have thus been "captured" and their inhabitants either liquidated
or made to flee. The Hindu fascist organisations have declared throughout the
carnage days that it will be rendered impossible for the Muslims to live
anywhere in India as they say, "now it is Gujarat, tomorrow it will be the
whole of India."
Another worst is that
the "refugee" camps that were set up after a gap of one week of the start of the
carnage were refusing entry to the fleeing Muslim women and children by the
police. The policemen guarding the gates of the camps told the coming women,
"No entry, it is time for you to die." And many women were raped and killed
at the gates of the camps right before the eyes of the police. Even camps for
the victims, were attacked by the mobs, while the police remained as spectators
or looked the other way. All around horrible stories were being recounted and
told to the journalists. By all accounts the Gujarat carnage has become a state-organised
genocide. Only the blind refuse to believe otherwise and still hope of "restoring
the confidence of the people in the state", which by all descriptions has
assumed the role of a criminal institution.
There is a great
difference between the US and India though governments of both the countries are
allies in the ‘anti-terrorist’ coalition. In the US where three thousands were
killed in the collapse of towers the aftermath of anti-Muslim hysteria only
claimed three lives while thousands of people came forward in every city to
defend the Muslim and Arab people. In Gujarat 59 deaths were answered with more
than two thousands of innocent lives, mass rapes, and mass scale looting and
destruction while only a few voices of protests were heard on the streets. No
doubt there were many isolated examples of Hindus helping and protecting their
Muslim neighbours but in most of the cases the neighbours participated in
killing, looting and raping.
All indications are
there that Godhra or no Godhra the preparation for the holocaust were afoot much
in advance.
The post 1992 India
depicts a picture of heightened aggressiveness of the Hindu communalist forces.
The chanting by the Ayodhya bound kar sevaks in every state testifies to
this when they openly cry, "teen nahin teen hazaar, nahin rahegi koi mazar",
(not three but three thousands, not a single mosque or tomb will remain). This
is a reference to the destroyed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya and two other great
mosques in the cities of Varanasi and Mathura that are to be taken up next by
the saffron destruction brigade. Teen hazaar here means every single historic or
otherwise monument that has any connection with the Muslim religion or
community.
The fascist teachings
of Golwalkar, who was a strong admirer of Hitler and a fanatic representative of
the trading Hindu community, are being propagated with a frenzied zeal in the
name of Hindu nationalism. This Hindu nationalism, like Hitler’s fascist
national socialism, has nothing national in it but only a cry for making thirty
percent of upper caste Hindus trample upon Muslims Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists,
and Dalits as second class citizens having no economic, political, social and
citizen rights. They are being called to earn their place under the sun by "evoking
the goodwill of the Hindus" or leave the country for their own good. This is
the openly fascist and heinous propaganda that is being carried out by the
saffron mouthpieces or the so-called nationalist press.
Presently, Muslims
and Christians are being made the primary targets while all others, especially
the Buddhists and dalits (the lowest of the lower and the "untouchables"
according to the manu philosophy) face the Hindu communalist wrath every
now and then in every part of India.
The Godhra train
carnage that claimed the lives of 59 Hindu "kar sevaks" was condemned by almost
all the Muslim organisations, left, secular and democratic forces and almost all
the major bourgeois political parties. But the Narender Modi government, the BJP
and a whole array of its allies alleged that the Gujarat violence is the Hindu
backlash for appeasing minority communities.
Many a leaders of the
ruling NDA alliance have justified the Hindu murderous crowds by alleging that
the opposition political forces and the Muslim organisations did not condemn the
Godhra incident. Samta Party leaders were outspoken in this. Though one of their
national spokesmen resigned in protest against the party stand the defence
minister Fernadez, the ex-socialist, reprimanded him for demanding the
resignation of fascist Modi. Andhra chief minister, known for his own
pro-imperialism and fascist leanings defended the non-sacking of Modi. Jaya
Lalitha, the Tamilnadu chief minister, though she is not in the ruling NDA also
defended the cause of the fascist trident. Not a single party of the NDA has
come out of the coalition in protest against opening up of the "hidden agenda".
Though the opposition
is calling for the sacking of Modi and liberal press and intellectuals are
calling for reforming of the system of Indian "democracy" yet there won’t be any
great reforms whether Modi remains or not. The whole of the Gujarat experiment
was stage managed in an attempt to buttress the waning influence of the BJP in
the eyes of the Hindu population. Kalyan Singh too, who presided over the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, though has lost his credibility in the political
circles yet he succeeded in carrying out the agenda of the BJP successfully.
Modi too may lose his head because the propaganda against his "mishandling" of
the situation is picking up yet he has handled his anti-people task efficiently
according to the line of the BJP.
The bourgeois
opposition and liberal opinion is reducing the whole affair to the disgusting
debate over good or bad governance of the state structure. However, this is a
highly misleading debate given the fact that Congress, the biggest and strongest
party of the so-called secularists has never refrained from using the communal
card. The call for the head of Modi is also another way of using communalism to
wrest power of the Delhi throne while no genuine attempt for reforming the
system will ever be called forth by it. Remember the state sponsored communal
carnage against the Sikhs that brought Rajiv Gandhi on an unprecedented victory
wave. And the overall role of the Narsimha Rao government at the time of the
demolition of the Babri Masjid. That was one of the most despicable attempts of
the ‘secularist’ Congress to appease the Hindu revivalist forces. Nothing was
done at that time to stop the kar sevak destroyers from carrying on their
agenda.
Now the liberal
sections that oppose the communalisation of politics and have exposed and
opposed the Gujarat carnage are centering their criticism around the idea that
the country needs men who can govern. Their opposition to communalism boils down
only to this much. In another way, the same thing is being demanded by the
imperialist financial institutions and the imperialists themselves. As if good
governance would take care of everything that ails the Indian political and
social system. This is the mantra of the pro-imperialist globalisation forces.
The Indian people however need an altogether different alternative where
democratic, secular, progressive and revolutionary forces have a common stake as
far as communalism and its state sponsorship is concerned. As the first step a
complete separation of religion from the state is needed and the use of religion
in any way by the state should be made an offence deserving severe punishment.
When Gujarat was
burning the Vishav Hindu Prishad and its allied forces scored another
important point when the Vajpayee government, in a highly conspiratorial and
despicable way, accepted the foundation stones that are supposed to be used in
the construction of the Ram temple at the site of demolished Babri Masjid as an
offering. This was made to look as if the government had achieved success in
thwarting the commencement of the construction of the temple on March 15. This,
in all reasoning, makes the government of India a party to the construction of
the temple. Before this was done the Indian Government deputed its attorney
general Soli Sorabjee to plead before the Supreme Court that permission be given
to perform puja at the site to the VHP and other Hindu communalist forces. This
was not only shameful but also criminal for the state to have acted and pleaded
for the cause of such forces that are out to destroy the unity of the people in
the name of religion and want to impose Hindu fascist ideology. The blood and
fire that were vitiating the social atmosphere of the whole country was used as
a screen by the BJP to push another victory for its communalist designs. Now,
those who don’t see the conspiracy of the prime minister and his party only help
to compound the situation further. The PM is first an RSS man and then anything
else.
The report of the
National Human Rights Commission, though it has castigated the Gujarat
government by citing lesser important issues as of how the compensation for
deaths should have been constituted and announced and questioning that why the
chief minister did not act in time, has not touched on the complex issue of
analysis of the whole malaise that caused the Godhra incident and then the dance
of death and destruction for more than five weeks. The human rights commission,
after all, is set by the government itself and only touches the peripheral
questions. Moreover, its current chairman is an ex-judge, J. S. Verma, of the
supreme court and is well known for his controversial ruling in a 1994 case that
gave the VHP and communalist forces the right to use the lands surrounding the
area where once the Babri Masjid stood. This land that constitutes more than 67
acres was handed over to the Nyas saints and the VHP in March 1992 by the then
UP state BJP government at a nominal price of Re 1 an acre per annum for a 99
years lease. That was a gross violation of the principle of secularism and
perfidious example of the unholy alliance of the state and religion. A fair
and impartial report from the NHRC cannot be expected especially when it has
done nothing on the thousands of police killings that were carried on in Punjab
during the eighties and early nineties and also its blindness towards the
widespread cold-blooded state killings in the name of encounters in Kashmir,
Northeast and Andhra. Modi too can rest assured that his state sponsorship
for genocide is not going to be punished too by the same ruling classes for whom
he had worked so hard and with a great murderous spirit.
April 13, 2002
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