[nukkad] An interesting piece on Gujrat by Tavleen Sing Ind Express

["Ravi Menon" <>]

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Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.  -- Osho.
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FIFTH COLUMN

After Rajiv, Before Modi

Tavleen Singh



Some of the political commentary that the Gujarat election inspired has left 
me as worried about secularist amnesia as I am about Narendra Modi’s 
politics of hate. Let me say first, as I have said before in this column, 
that Modi’s attempt to get the Hindus of Gujarat to vote on his pogroms was 
in my view despicable.

Civilized societies are built on certain principles that are self evident, a 
priority, and not taking a vote on murder and rape has to be one of them. It 
should never be left to the people to decide if pogroms are a good idea and 
there is no question in mind that this is what Modi offered—scarcely veiled 
behind all that talk of pride and nationalism—as his main attraction in the 
recent campaign. In doing so he succeeded in building a wall of hatred 
between Hindus and Muslims that Gujarat will continue to pay a very heavy 
price for.



My problem is that I do not believe that his winning the election (I write 
before the results are known) will be the end of India, the end of history 
or as one commentator in this newspaper put it that his campaign has forever 
‘‘changed the grammar and vocabulary of Indian politics’’. There has, ever 
since the Gujarat election was announced, been so much of this kind of 
comment in the newspapers and on television that I have found myself 
wondering if these commentators were comatose, unborn or in some other 
country in 1984.

Have they forgotten that within a day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by 
her two Sikh bodyguards, every Sikh in India became a target? Have they 
forgotten the mobs that roamed the streets of Delhi with their cans of 
petrol and their burning rags? Have they forgotten that there was never a 
policeman in sight when Sikhs were burned alive in trucks and taxis and that 
the administration of India’s capital city collapsed so shamefully that dogs 
ate the dead in Delhi’s streets? The toll at the end of three days was more 
than 3,000 Sikhs dead (not one Hindu) in Delhi alone.

That the violence was carefully organized was clear because the mobs knew 
exactly which house, shop or factory belonged to a Sikh, knowledge that 
could only have come from voter lists or administrative records. If the mobs 
in Ahmedabad and Vadodara worked with similar foreknowledge it was because 
they had a model to work from.

And, if Modi then used hatred to consolidate the Hindu vote behind the 
Bharatiya Janata Party he also had a model to work from. Remember, please, 
that after the 1984 violence Rajiv Gandhi came to power with the largest 
majority in Indian parliamentary history mainly because he openly espoused 
the politics of hate. Not only did he justify the massacre of the Sikhs in a 
speech that was to become famous (‘‘When a big tree falls the earth 
shakes’’) but his party ran a series of newspaper advertisements in which 
Sikhs were depicted as terrorists and enemies of India.

The trouble with using inter-communal hatred to win elections is that the 
price is always too heavy. So, largely as a result of what happened to Sikhs 
after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, terrorism spread across the cities and 
states of Northern India and as young Sikh boys crossed the border into 
Pakistan to return trained for revenge. When they came back they killed 
major political leaders, planted bombs in crowded bazaars and attacked the 
authority of the state in whichever way they could.

In India because we have a strange disdain for history we forget easily so 
we have even forgotten that when the Babri Masjid was destroyed and violence 
spread across the country there were many who predicted then that it was the 
end of India. Hindus and Muslims would never live together in peace again, 
it was said, and we would have to reconcile ourselves to ‘‘fascism’’ 
becoming part of our lives.

Well, the opposite happened, did it not? The nineties saw economic growth at 
a pace unknown before in India. Economic liberalization, however reluctantly 
it was introduced, brought new technology, modern ideas and modern systems 
of communication. One of the states that benefited most from all this was 
Gujarat and its real tragedy is that instead of continuing along the path of 
economic progress it has retreated into more primitive politics thanks to 
Modi.

What happened in Gujarat was terrible and Modi is a truly repellent creature 
to have in Indian public life but please let us not lose perspective and 
start believing that he is uniquely evil or that the violence we saw in 
Gujarat signals the end of India. It does not. But, the lesson we can learn 
from Gujarat is that primitive politics usually leads to unspeakable 
barbarism and in these days when the world has become such a small place 
governments that allow the mob to rule do more damage to the image of India 
than almost anyone else.

The other lesson, of course, is that if the Congress Party had not done it 
all before it could have fought Modi’s repugnant politics with aggressive 
secularism. It might have helped also if its campaign in Gujarat had not 
been led by a man who himself cut his political teeth in a pair of khaki 
knickers.




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