`In The Name Of Allah, The Most Beneficent and Merciful`

Minister joins Gujarat peace march
Sunday, 28 April, 2002, 05:14 GMT 06:14 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1955000/1955788.stm

A peace march has taken place amid tight security in
the western Indian state of Gujarat, where more than
800 people have been killed in communal violence.
Hundreds of people took part, among them Indian
Defence Minister George Fernandes and the Chief
Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

A BBC correspondent in Ahmedabad says their message is
simple - a plea for unity between Hindus and Musllims.

Another three people were reported shot dead by police
in a suburb of the city on Sunday, after clashes
between Hindus and Muslims.

On Saturday, two people died in the town of Baroda
after what are thought to be false rumours triggered
renewed clashes between the two groups.

Sporadic violence has continued in Gujarat since riots
broke out there in February connected to the
continuing dispute over plans to build a Hindu temple
on the site at Ayodhya where activists demolished a
mosque nine years ago.

'Ship of state firm'

In a speech on Saturday, Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpayee warned those instigating violence in Gujarat
that they would not go unpunished.,

"Let no one belittle the crime that has been
perpetrated in Gujarat," he said.

"The inquiry will be fair and the guilty shall not go
unpunished, irrespective of the community or the
organisation that they may belong to."

He rejected claims by Sonia Gandhi, the Congress
leader, that the unrest would deter foreign
investors.,

"Let no one use this tragedy to make such sweeping
generalisations about the happenings in India," the
prime minister said.

Mr Vajpayee went on to say he believed that India was
strong enough to withstand the clashes.

"India's secularism is too deep to be blown off course
by temporary turbulence.

"The ship of the nation is strong and reliable enough
to weather all storms and will soon leave the present
turbulence behind."

‘RSS pamphlet’ has Jharkhand police worried
M. Madhusudan
Hindustan Times
(Ranchi, April 28)

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/290402/detnat05.asp

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pamphlets seized by the Special Branch of the
Jharkhand police suggest that the RSS is on a secret
“cleansing drive” in Jharkhand's Chotanagpur and
Santhal Paragana divisions.
These pamphlets, allegedly brought out by the RSS, are
titled 'RSS's Latest Battle Policies to Wipe Out
Christian Adivasis in Chotanagpur and Santhal
Paragana'.

The pamphlet terms the drive the RSS's "last effort"
at motivating youngsters to join the outfit. It is
especially tough on the Sarnas, a Santhali-speaking
tribal group, and calls for the tribe to be "wiped"
out.

The pamphlet, which the Special Branch has distributed
to all district police chiefs, spews venom on the
Munda, Oraon, Kharia and Santhali tribes since they
"do not agree to join the Hindus - the nation's
mainstream." The outfit calls for "luring their youth
with money and liquor." This, the pamphlet says, has
to be started by targeting college students.

The Jharkhand police said they fear the pamphlets
could lead to tension between the Hindus and the
Sarnas. In a letter, the Special Branch has directed
district police chiefs to take "appropriate
administrative action" to check the circulation of
these pamphlets.

The Special Branch letter says, "As per information,
RSS activists have launched a secret public awareness
and membership drive in Bokaro and have distributed
pamphlets in this regard."

But police sources said that the pamphlets were
distributed last year. "We didn't have any specific
guidelines from the DGP's office then, nor do we have
now," they said.

The pamphlet also calls for the tribals to be
displaced from their lands and if necessary, "take
resort to deceitful means..., even power." The State
has reported numerous cases of encroachment of tribal
land.

The pamphlet has also incorporated "the 20-point
agenda which senior RSS leader Ramaswamy had come out
with while praying for an awareness among Hindus in
the Madurai Temple".

The 20-point agenda calls for each Hindu to become a
member of organisations such as the RSS, Hindu Forward
Block, Hindu Mandir Suraksha Sansthan, VHP, Arya Samaj
and Hindu Mahasabha.

It also asks Hindus "not to allow any Christian or
Muslim processions in their areas".

The agenda also includes, among others, a seizure of
all Christian literature spread in the Hindu areas and
ensuring that every Hindu is a member of any of its
aforementioned organisations.

Last, but not the least, it also calls for extending
financial help to a Tamil magazine.

Vajpayee to fire Modi after LS debate
rediff.com,
Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi

http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/apr/28tara.htm

Top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party and
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh met on Saturday and
decided that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi
would have to go considering his failure to control
the communal violence in the state, a top home
ministry official said on Saturday.

The decision was taken in the presence of Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, at whose Race Course
Road residence the meeting was held, he told
rediff.com

RSS stalwarts like K S Sudarshan, Madan Das Devi and
Seshadari Chari attended the meeting, the official,
who did not wish to be identified, said.

BJP president K Jana Krishnamurthy, who was present at
the meeting, told the leaders that during his recent
visit to Gujarat, some state ministers had told him
that Modi's continuance as chief minister had become
"untenable", he said.

The majority of the Gujarat ministers had told the BJP
president that Modi had become a liability since the
party leadership had ruled out holding elections in
the state in the aftermath of the communal riots, he
added.

"That is the main argument adduced by the Gujarat
ministers, which spurred Prime Minister Vajpayee to
tell Krishnamurthy and the RSS leaders that Modi would
have to go since his continuance kept triggering a
storm of protests in the country and abroad," the
official said.

"The indications are that Modi will have to quit
office after the government faces the censure motion
on Gujarat, which has been sponsored by the opposition
parties. The chances are that he will cease to become
the Gujarat CM any day after April 30 [when the motion
is taken up in the Lok Sabha]," he pointed out.

He said although the prime minister had told the
meeting that he had snubbed foreign missions based in
India for "interfering" on the Gujarat issue, the
pressure to remove Modi was mounting.

RSS spokesman M G Vaidya, for once, was guarded when
asked whether the issue was discussed during the
meeting.

"I am not aware, I can get back to you after talking
to our chief [Sudarshan]," he said.

Vajpayee's reasoning was that the opposition would be
demoralised once the government won the debate in the
Lok Sabha, he said.

The NDA would have a lot of advantage if the BJP
leadership removed Modi after the Gujarat debate. It
would also pave the way for the continuance of the
National Democratic Alliance for the full five-year
term, the official quoted Vajpayee as saying.

Speculation is rife that Modi would be brought to the
Centre for a ministerial slot. That is why the prime
minister has held his much-anticipated Cabinet
reshuffle in abeyance, the official indicated.

GEORGE-MODI PEACE MARCH A FLOP SHOW
By Nandini Oza
AsianAge,
Ahmedabad, April 28.

http://www.asianageonline.com/

Protesters, mostly Muslims, boycotted the peace march
led by defence minister George Fernandes and Gujarat
chief minister Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad on Sunday
morning.

Mr Fernandes and Mr Modi appealed for peace at a
public meeting near children’s traffic park at Lal
Darwaja, after walking for about 4 km. Veteran
Gandhian Kundanlal Dholakia had flagged off the march.

Angry protesters held placards along the route of the
peace march, naming Mr Modi as being responsible for
the communal riots. “Modi’s laws of peace — train
police by firing at Muslims; Our advice to Modi-Get
married and you will realise what it feels when a
family life is disturbed; try new laws on Muslims; put
ban on anti-Muslim activities,” were some of the
placards being displayed by protesters.

“We have had no police protection and, in fact, the
police has been firing on us,” alleged Mohammed
Iliyas, a resident of Patwa Sheri, who was one of the
protesters.

Rasulkhan Kadiwala, 78, was least concerned about
initiatives like the peace march and held politicians
responsible for the mess. Mr Modi was the “centre of
attraction” during the march and a lot of people
accusingly pointed towards him wherever he went.

Mr Fernandes, Union law minister Arun Jaitley, Samata
Party leader Jaya Jaitly and Union minister of state
for railways Digvijay Singh led the march from the
front and Mr Modi walked in the second group along
with Congress leaders Urmila Patel, Narhari Amin and
Siddharth Patel.
The peace march began at 8.30 am, but Gujarat Chamber
of Commerce and Industry’s effort barely gathered less
than 1,000 participants, including paramilitary
forces, journalists, GCCI members and politicians.
Local people were in negligible numbers.

BJP leaders, including state Gujarat unit president
Rajendrasinh Rana, Mr Nalin Bhatt and minister of
state for home Gordhan Jhadafiya also took part in the
march.

The police stopped some persons from raising
inflammatory slogans and the orgisers tried to prevent
people from raising slognas like, “Narendra Modi tum
age badho, hum tumhare saath hai (Narendra Modi move
ahead, we are with you)” at the public rally.

The rally began with NCC cadets singing, “Hum sab
Bharatiya hai, apni manzil ek hai.” However, what
followed were mere lectures calling for peace.
Ironically, when a representative of the minority
community came on the stage to speak, some GCCI
members asked volunteers to switch off the mike. It
was switched on only after GCCI president Kalyan Shah
intervened.

Mr Fernandes gave an example of the Vietnamese to the
people at the rally and added that they had strong
will to live and forget the past. Hoping that the
Gujarat government would follow the instructions left
by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, he called upon
people to forget the past and live for today. “If we
do not forget the past, we will not be able to live
today also,” he said.

In his characteristic style, chief minister Modi urged
the need to get back “the spirit of humanity” that he
said was lost after February 27 though he did not
mention the Godhra carnage specifically.

He called upon the people to have faith and not to
heed rumours. Mr Modi also said that there is need to
isolate handful of persons who were indulging in
violence. “If this is done, I am sure, peace will be
restored in the state,” he stated, pointing out that
even today out of 18,000 villages in the state,
disturbance is in only 50 or 60 villages.

Mr Modi alleged that one of the root causes of the
problem was inflammatory pamphlets and exaggeration by
media. Mr Jaitley said the rally was to symbolise
peace in the state and is represented by central,
state and local leaders and attended by people from
different religions. He added that people of all age
and from all sections of the society should show the
world that everyone is interested in peace.

EU concern over Gujarat not interference: Muslim
lawmaker
By Mohammed Shafeeq, Indo-Asian News Service
April 28, 2002.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/020427/43/1mrfz.html

Hyderabad, Apr 27 (IANS) A Congress lawmaker Saturday
said he did not think the concern expressed by the
European Union (E.U.) and other countries on Gujarat
violence amounted to interference in the internal
affairs of India.

K.M. Khan, a Rajya Sabha member of the Congress party,
said it was natural to express anguish over human
rights violations in any part of the world.

Khan was commenting on the international condemnation
of the sectarian violence in Gujarat, in which Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) and its allies have been blamed for abetting the
anti-Muslim violence that killed around 900 people.

Khan's remarks at a press conference here differed
from the stand of his own Congress party that has
expressed serious opposition to comments made by
foreign countries on the Gujarat violence.

Senior Congress leader Anil Shastri Friday remarked
that the Gujarat crisis was an internal matter of
India and comments by any foreign country would be
treated as interference.

"I don't know what stand my party has taken," Khan
said when his attention was drawn to Shastri's
statement. "What happened in Gujarat is a naked
violation of human rights."

Pointing out that India was a signatory to the Vienna
Convention on Human Rights, he said India, too, in the
past had voiced concern over the violation of the
rights of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

"Did we not raise our voices when the rights of
minorities were violated and the statue of (Lord)
Buddha was destroyed in Afghanistan under the Taliban
regime?" he asked.

Khan said it would be in India's interests to heed the
advice of its friendly countries to stop the violence
that had tarnished India's image in the international
community.

Khan asked Telugu Desam Party (TDP) president and
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu to
prove his secular credentials by issuing a whip to his
party members to vote in favour of an
opposition-sponsored motion in Parliament to censure
the Gujarat government.

"Naidu should rise to the occasion. If he has real
sympathy for minorities and his demand was not simply
political drama, he should vote for the motion," Khan
said, adding that if Naidu could not do that he ought
to at least allow his legislators to vote according to
their conscience.

`Copyright 2002 Indo-Asian News service. All Rights Reserved.`

`Five killed despite peace march in Ahmedabad`

DECCAN HERALD
AHMEDABAD, April 28 (PTI)

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr29/ipeace.htm

Fresh bout of communal violence today killed five persons, four of them in
police firing, here despite a peace march led by Defence Minister George
Fernande and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi with an appeal to isolate
perpetrators of the carnage.
Four persons were killed when police opened fire in Maninagar and Kalupur
localities and one person was stabbed to death in labour-dominated Gomtipur
area, police said.
In all, 18 people were injured with ten of them receiving bullet injuries
and three crude bomb injuries.
Police resorted to firing in Chandola lake areas of Maninagar and Kalupur to
disperse mobs hurling stones and indulging in arson. In Baroda city, two
people were injured in police firing on a mob trying to set a house on fire
at Navapura area. Indefinite curfew remained in force in six police station
areas of Baroda.
The violence, however, belittled the peace march virtually ineffective. In
fact, all people representing all communities, led by Defence Minister
George Fernades and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, took out a peace
march here today.
Amid tight security, the marchers, carrying placards and banners demanding
an immediate end to the "insane communal rage", wound their way through
lanes and by-lanes of riot-hit areas.
"Gujarat should be brought back to the track of humanity. It is time to
forget the past and to isolate those who are indulging in violence," Modi,
in an emotionally-choked voice, told a gathering near the historic Sardar
bagh.
Mr Fernandes and other political leaders, who also addressed the gathering,
made a passionate plea for return of peace in the state.
The march commenced from Manila Mansion near Kalupur railway station in
minority-dominated segment with rendering of a patriotic song by NCC
volunteers, blowing of conch shells and drum beats.
Gun-toting police and central forces stood guard at strategic positions and
roof-tops to prevent any untoward incident.
Besides Modi and Fernandes, others who participated in the three-km stretch
walk included Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley, Samata party leader Jaya
Jaitley and a host of BJP and Congress leaders, The march was organised
under the aegis of of Eminent Citizens' Core Group floated on April 21.
Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Kalyan G Shah, who heads
the core group, also joined in the peace endeavour.
Mr Fernandes hoped today's march would go a long way in re-establishing
mutual trust. "We have to forget the past," he said and cited the example of
Vietnamese people who after fighting a fierce battle against Americans have
started "working hard together with the same Americans."
Ahmed Horakila, the Vora Muslim community leader from Mumbai, quoted
celebrated Urdu poet Iqbal as describing Lord Ram as the "Imam of Hindus.
This shows no religion taught us to fight each other."

© Copyright, 1999 The Printers (Mysore)Ltd.
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Illicit liquor flows freely in Gujarat
Jay Raina
Hindustan Times,
(Ahmedabad, April 28)

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/290402/detNAT03.asp
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amid the continued communal frenzy and staggering
economy, the only business that is thriving is that of
illicit liquor, in a state that is officially under
prohibition.
Illicit liquor is being purchased in bulk for free
distribution among perpetrators of the crimes that
have shaken the state, primarily in tribal-dominated
areas in Panchmahals, Vadodra and Surat districts.

Many in the middle and upper-middle class are drinking
in an attempt to escape the stressful situation.

The local police confirmed that a large number of
people involved in the latest bout of violence in the
city were provided with free liquor and meals apart
from cash on a daily basis. The providers include
sections of the Sangh Parivar such — the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, which are believed to
be perpetuating the communal tension.

And the liquor trade knows no religious barriers, with
politicians cutting across party lines in sharing the
spoils under police protection.

The state-wide distribution network is controlled by
the mafia — generally comprising non-Muslim liquor
barons. Bootleggers are mostly recruited from among
poor tribals and also the minority community.

In this land of Gandhi where prohibition has been a
policy since Independence, the government's claims on
being a liquor-free state are farcical: One can order
a bottle on the phone (even cell numbers) and have it
delivered at one's doorstep. Then there are the addas
(sale counters).

Nor is there a dearth of alcohol at parties. Insiders
claim huge supplies of liquor are stored in houses of
businessmen and bureaucrats, and even educational
institutions like the Indian Institute of Management,
National Institute of Design, Indian Institute of
Fashion Technology and Indian Space Research Centre.

Liquor is smuggled in from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh
and Maharashtra under politician/police patronage,
with tribal women employed for distribution.

Gujarat's liquor mafia is understood to have become
powerful during Chimanbhai Patel's rule. Now, with
BJP's emergence as the ruling party, the liquor mafia
is reported to keep close to the rulers by funding
them.

Copyright 2002 Hindustan Times. All Rights Reserved.Gujarat arrests 13,000 for riots, says more likely
DECCAN HERALD
NEW DELHI, April 28 (PTI)

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr29/n5.htm

The Gujarat Government informed the Supreme Court that it has done its best
to bring the law and order situation under control in the riot-marred state
and arrested 13,000 persons so far with more arrests likely.
"Although there was considerable trouble in the state in the beginning of
March, the state has endeavoured its best to bring the situation under
control," State Education Secretary Varesh Sinha said in an affidavit before
the Court.
"To this end almost 3,500 FIRs have been lodged and about 13,000 arrests
have been made, pursuant to these FIRs. The state is taking further steps to
investigate these offences and further arrests are likely," he said.
The Government said the problem in Ahmedabad, where the rioting has not yet
been fully brought under control, had more dimensions than communal.
The Government had agreed to the suggestion of the Apex Court to hold repeat
examination for all those students who missed the April tests and also for
those who are willing to give an affidavit that the Education Board should
not take into account their performance in the April test.
However, Solicitor General Harish Salve suggested that the Apex Court should
put an end to this repeat test business as it erodes the sanctity of
examinations.
On Monday, the Apex Court would hear the Special Leave Petition filed by Lok
Adhikar Sang seeking re-examination for the crucial 10th and 12th class.
The education secretary in his affidavit said "holding examinations over and
over again, will destroy the examination system.
"Petition after petition is filed in relation to examination, thereby a hope
is raised with the intervention of the Court that there may be a reprieve
for the students and fresh examinations may be held," he said.
The Gujarat Government submitted that a tough stand by the Supreme Court
without compromising the interest of the students would help improve the
situation.
Giving details of the security arrangements made by the State for smooth
conduct of the crucial 10th and 12th class examinations, the Secretary said
the Government announced that students would be taken in separate buses with
police escort to the examination centres.
But there was a systematic campaign being conducted by announcing that
students for the 10th and 12th classes alone should abstain from appearing
in the said examinations for "that would enable sponsors of that movement to
pressurise the Government to hold fresh examinations, with examination
centres being located in places of their choice", he said.
"Despite this, fortunately, almost 5000 out of 8000 students (approximately)
belonging to the minority community in Ahmedabad and Baroda have appeared in
the 10th and 12th class examinations," the secretary said denying reports
that 90 per cent of the students belonging to the minority community have
abstained from the examinations.

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TDP to open its cards only at the last minute
rediff.com,
Sunday, April 28 2002.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/apr/28ap.htm

Keeping up the suspense on its stand on the Gujarat
censure motion in Parliament, the Telugu Desam Party,
a key supporter of the National Democratic Alliance
government, decided on Sunday to wait for Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's reply in the Lok
Sabha.
At a meeting of the Telugu Desam Parliamentary Party
in Hyderabad, party chief and Andhra Pradesh Chief
Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said the party could wait
for Vajpayee's statement in the House before deciding
which way to vote on the Opposition-sponsored motion.

TDP sources quoted Naidu as saying he was under "no
pressure to take a decision in a hurry" and the
party's stand would be made clear at an "appropriate
time".

The sources said the TDPP discussed all three options
before the party -- voting in favour of the censure
motion, voting against it and abstaining.

After the TDPP meeting, Naidu, who has been holding a
series of talks with his party colleagues over the
last two weeks to weigh various options, began meeting
his MPs separately to elicit their views.

Evading questions from waiting reporters, Naidu said,
"We will let you know if there is anything."

The TDP has 28 members in the Lok Sabha and 13 in the
Rajya Sabha.

With Naidu's one-to-one interaction with the MPs
expected to last several hours, a crucial meeting of
the TDP politburo on the issue of firming up the
party's stand is likely only on Monday.

PTI

Discord Over Killing of India Muslims Deepens
By CELIA W. DUGGER

New York Times

April 28, 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/29/international/asia/29INDI.html

NEW DELHI, April 28 — Leaders of the Hindu nationalist-led government have
warned Western nations in recent days to stop lecturing India about the
official failure to prevent Hindu mobs from killing hundreds of Muslims. But
the issue refuses to die.

In the last week, more than 40 people have perished in the continuing violence,
in the western state of Gujarat. The official death toll in the last two months
has risen to 900. More than 100,000 people, mostly Muslims, are estimated to
have fled to relief camps.

On Tuesday, Parliament will debate whether the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party — which has led a national coalition government for most of the
last four years and controls the state of Gujarat, its last major state
stronghold — has been complicit in the carnage.

Though the government is expected to defeat a motion critical of its role, the
party's leaders are on the defensive. The issue has eclipsed all others, even
India's military buildup along its border with Pakistan and the still real
possibility of armed conflict between the two countries.

Bharatiya Janata, which has prided itself on raising India's prestige in the
world beginning with the decision to test nuclear weapons in 1998, is now
clearly worried that the nation's good name is being besmirched.

"Let no one use this tragedy to make such sweeping generalizations about the
happenings in India that they demoralize Indians and present a wrong picture of
India abroad," Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said on Saturday.

A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman accused European countries on Wednesday of
interfering in India's internal affairs by deliberately leaking critical
evaluations of events in Gujarat and publicly voicing concern about the
violence there.

Indian officials were particularly stung by the leak of a confidential
assessment by British diplomats who estimated the death toll at 2,000, more
than twice the official tally, and said the anti-Muslim violence had been
planned and carried out with the state government's support.

The sharpness of India's diplomatic rebuke was surprising, since public
comments by officials from other governments have generally been limited to
expressions of concern about the violence that echo those of India's own
leaders.

In his only public remarks about Gujarat, the American ambassador, Robert
Blackwill, said on April 17: "All our hearts go out to the people who were
affected by this tragedy. I don't have anything more to say than that."

The Foreign Ministry and party officials contend that state officials acted
quickly to control outraged Hindu mobs seeking vengeance after Muslims
firebombed a trainload of Hindu activists on Feb. 27, killing 58.

I. D. Swami, a Bharatiya Janata member of Parliament and minister in the
government, noted in an interview that the party's state leaders asked the
central government to send in the army to help keep the peace on Feb. 28, the
night of the first and worst day of violence. "When a reaction takes place in
such a big dimension, it is not possible for any state authority to control
it," he said.

But in the last month a stream of damning reports by Indian human rights
groups, citizens' committees and the press have charged that the party's most
senior leaders in Gujarat let Hindu mobs go on the rampage, raping Muslim girls
and women, looting and bombing Muslim homes and businesses and burning men,
women and children alive.

The National Human Rights Commission, an independent group set up by
Parliament, scoffed at the state's contention that the crisis had been brought
under control within 72 hours and noted "the widespread lack of faith in the
integrity of the investigating process."

On Friday and Saturday, dozens of Muslim victims came to New Delhi, the
capital, at the behest of Sahamat, a nonprofit group, and publicly told their
stories. Many of these people echoed others who spoke out earlier, testifying
that the mobs were led by people from the Bharatiya Janata Party and other
organizations in its Hindu nationalist family, particularly the World Hindu
Congress and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal.

Eleven-year-old Raja Bundubhai told of hiding behind a door as he watched his
mother and sister skewered with swords and burned alive. Ibrahim Bhai Ismail
Bhai Ganchi told in a choked voice about the murder of his father, uncle,
brother, sister and cousin.

Arif Bhai Pathan, 13, watched as his parents and grandfather were slaughtered.
Before his father was killed, Arif said his father was ordered to say, "Jai
Shri Ram" — meaning "Hail Ram," the Hindu god. "He refused and he was hacked to
death," Arif said.

Despite the demand by the political opposition and several of the Bharatiya
Janata Party's largest allies for the resignation of Narendra Modi, Gujarat's
chief minister, the party has backed him to the hilt.

While the issue is not expected to threaten the government's survival,
Bharatiya Janata is under fire not just from the opposition and the left wing,
but also from the staid judiciary and civil service.

At a meeting on Friday at the India International Center, A. M. Ahmadi, a
retired chief justice of the Supreme Court, condemned the government's attempt
to silence its critics abroad. "It's the duty of the international community to
raise its voice," he said.

Harsh Mander, a civil servant who resigned to protest what happened in Gujarat,
declared: "I would like to testify that no riot can go on for more than a few
hours without active state complicity. It's a crime which is difficult to
describe."

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Violence was planned months in advance: U.K. officials

By Hasan Suroor ,

The Hindu,

April 28, 2002.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/28/stories/2002042804880800.htm

LONDON APRIL 27. British officials in India have been

quoted by the BBC as saying that the violence in

Gujarat was ``planned, possibly months in advance''

and its aim was to ``purge Muslims from Hindu areas.''

It said that according to a ``damning'' internal

report, prepared by British officials who visited

Gujarat, the violence had ``all the hallmarks of

ethnic cleansing and that reconciliation between

Hindus and Muslims is impossible while the Chief

Minister remains in power.''

``It's a damning indictment of the State Government.

It says the violence, far from being spontaneous, was

planned possibly months in advance, carried out by an

extremist Hindu organisation with the support of the

State Government,'' the BBC said.

This is the second time in a week that the findings of

a British High Commission investigation have been

``leaked'' to the media despite the Indian

Government's strong protests. A Foreign Office

spokesman confirmed to The Hindu last week that a team

of the British High Commission in India had visited

Gujarat, and that the British Government was

``concerned'' that the scale of violence and deaths

was higher than earlier believed.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is reported to have

spoken to his Indian counterpart, Jaswant Singh, and

regretted the leak. But he is under pressure from the

families of British victims of the Gujarat events to

speak out more strongly against the continuing

violence, and the alleged role of the State

Government. ``We have told him that a line has been

crossed and it is no longer an internal matter of the

Indian Government,'' a spokesman of the Council of

Indian Muslims (the U.K.) said today.

`Hindus are with us'

LONDON APRIL 27. A leading organisation of British

Muslims today claimed that they had the support of

many Hindus in its campaign for removal of the Gujarat

Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, in the wake of

continuing violence in the State. It also offered to

work with the families of British victims of the riots

who are planning to file legal cases against Mr. Modi

on charges of ``murder'' and ``genocide''.

``It is not a Muslim issue and despite the Vishwa

Hindu Parishad's propaganda many Hindus are as much

concerned about what is happening in Gujarat as we

are,'' Munaf Zeena, chairman of the Council of Indian

Muslims (UK) told The Hindu. He said Hindus were

present at a public meeting organised by the Council

in Blackburn on Friday and addressed by the Foreign

Secretary, Jack Straw. ``The VHP is very small but

very vociferous which is why the voices of sanity in

the Hindu community get drowned,'' he said.

The Council, he said, was exploring all legal avenues

to arraign Mr Modi for his Government's ``complicity''

with rioters and would work closely with the families

whose relatives had gone missing in Gujarat or were

killed.

Copyrights 2002 The Hindu. All Rights Reserved

OPINIONS

A Show of Faith
By MEERA NAIR

New York Times
April 28, 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/magazine/28LIVES.html

''There's a dead Hindu in the building,'' says the Muslim watchman. We are
standing inside the gates of my apartment complex in the South Indian town of
Hyderabad. Outside, except for a stray dog nosing through a garbage bin and the
armed soldiers at the corner, the sun-rinsed street is deserted. The city is
under curfew for the eighth straight day, and the soldiers have orders to shoot
violators on sight. They announce this fact at intervals, politely, over
megaphones.

It is December 1990. Hindu fundamentalists have once again tried to tear down a
400-year-old mosque in Ayodhya. They claim that Babar, the Mogul emperor, razed
a Hindu temple to Ram, the Hindu god-king, to build the mosque. The mosque is
only slightly damaged. But it is enough to make mythic hatreds between Hindus
and Muslims bubble to the surface.

''It was a mistake,'' the watchman says. The dead man was a laborer, newly
arrived from North India, one of a gray, overlooked brigade that polished
floors. His downfall was that he spoke an unfamiliar rural dialect.

''He was shouting something, but no one understood.'' The watchman is
insistent, a town crier with an important proclamation. ''So the Hindus thought
he was a Muslim and cut him.''

''Where was he?'' I ask.

''His wife found his body in the alley behind the building,'' he jerks his
thumb over his shoulder. ''Fate! What else?'' he cries, trying to answer the
unanswerable. ''He had to be there at that time.'' I look away from his darting
kohl-rimmed eyes and his rumpled khaki uniform. I didn't want him to sense my
unease.

I want to believe his version -- that it was a tragic misunderstanding. But
first, I want him to explain how he knows the details -- the worker's futile
pleadings, the identity of his killers. ''How do you know they were Hindus?'' I
ask him.

''They were,'' he replies and starts to walk away. Too quickly, it seems to me.

Did he see it all? The scuffle in the alley, the knives to the belly. Did other
tenants stand by, watching from their windows? Letting a man die because he was
Hindu? Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me to be afraid of my
neighbors.

My brother and I were among the few Hindus in a predominantly Muslim complex.
We had moved in four months before. We hardly knew anyone in the building. But
we liked the place and didn't mind the smell of biriyani rice in the corridors
or the hordes of children playing loud cricket on holidays.

Even when the curfew emptied the streets, I felt safe, surrounded by the
ordinary. But that was before the laborer was killed. Now, after, I am afraid
of drawing attention to myself and ashamed of my fear. I don't want to see the
changed, severe faces of my neighbors turning to watch me as I walk past the
knots of women talking in the courtyard. The escalation of attacks -- women and
children, Hindu and Muslim, killed in their beds -- angers me. I can only
imagine what it makes my neighbors feel.

We don't nod hello to each other anymore. How can we? In the streets, our
people are doing unspeakable things to one another. There are rumors about the
revival of an age-old torment: mobs from both sides stop men at random and
demand they declare their religion. Those suspected of lying are forced to
undress. Once naked, they are easy to indict or set free -- only Muslims are
circumcised.

One evening, our food runs out. During a brief break in the curfew, my brother
goes for groceries. We hear the stores are empty. But he must try.

The knock on the door, when it comes, is soft and hesitant. I hear my breath,
noisy in my chest. ''Kaun hai?'' I ask in Hindi. ''It's me,'' my co-worker
Muhammed answers. ''And Anwar. Open the door.'' They live 20 minutes away. I
have known them for years. Yet for one horrible, shameful instant, I stand in
my doorway and wonder if it is safe to invite them in. They must have read my
face because they rush to state their purpose. Muhammed's mother has sent me a
gift: potatoes and onions in a string bag. Last year, she showed me how to make
sheer korma, the creamy vermicelli dessert she made each year to celebrate the
end of Ramadan. I didn't know what to say.

''Leave the door open,'' Anwar says, as I let them inside. ''This being a
Muslim area, we thought it was good to show people that we know your family.''
They stayed for some time and left only when my brother returned.

I'll never know whether we were in real danger. Were Anwar and Muhammed just
playing it safe? Or did they know of actual threats against us? I never could
bring myself to ask them. It was a terrible time; and when it was over, none of
us wanted to talk about it anymore. So I only told them how wonderful the
potatoes had tasted. I never told them that I had eaten dinner that night more
terrified and more grateful than I had ever been.

Meera Nair is the author of ''Video,'' a collection of short stories, published
this month by Pantheon.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Gujarat Riots
The Top 5 Myths and Facts
By Shalini Gera and Girish Agrawal

Communalism Against Coalition
April 28, 2002.

http://www.ektaonline.org/cac/resources/articles/myths+facts.htm

Background:

On the morning of February 27th, the Sabarmati
Express, with Hindu kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya,
was stopped near Godhra and several compartments were
torched leading to the deaths of 58 passengers. While
conflicting stories exist about the exact sequence of
events, it is clear that there was a confrontation
between the kar sevaks and the mainly Muslim residents
of Godhra which escalated, and at some point the train
was deliberately set on fire by a mob. The Coalition
Against Communalism unequivocally condemns this
horrible violence.

The VHP announced a nation-wide bandh on February
28th, which was supported by the BJP (which forms the
government in Gujarat and is the leading member of the
ruling coalition at the center). On February 28th,
organized mobs of 'Hindus' started butchering and
burning Muslims and Muslim-owned property in Gujarat.
The police and other law-enforcement agencies were
prominent only in their absence and inefficacy. The
violence spread to all the major cities in Gujarat
including Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara, Bharuch and
even Gandhinagar. The cities now maintain an uneasy
calm in the presence of the army, but the violence
continues in rural areas. The official dead so far
exceed 700, nearly all Muslims, and estimates of the
number of Muslims displaced from their homes and
forced into relief camps range from 50,000 to 100,000.
The conditions in the relief camps continue to be
miserable, with the government providing little or no
support. The Coalition Against Communalism strongly
condemns the Gujarat Government for total failure of
governance during the riots, for encouraging violence
against minorities and for its continued failure to
provide relief and aid to the victims of the carnage.

MYTH 1
The riots in Gujarat are a spontaneous expression of
Hindu anger.

Origin of this myth: This sentiment has been expressed
widely by several people at the helm of affairs in the
state of Gujarat, as well as those leading some
'Hindu' organizations. They claim that Hindus were
enraged about the incident in Godhra where over 50 kar
sevaks had been burnt alive, and the riots were
'merely' an expression of their anger.

Fact: These 'riots' were a pre-planned, cold-blooded,
calculated, willfully executed massacre of the Muslim
community. In other contexts such occurrences have
been referred to as 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing.'
They were carried out with the connivance of civic,
administrative and political bodies. Consider the
following:

People and homes of the Muslim community were targeted
using voter lists and other official documentation.
Business establishments and hotels of the minority
community were identified and destroyed using license
and other relevant information generally available
only from the civic administration. (Misuse of voters
list in Gujarat riots alleged). This shows a macabre
level of planning, organization and attention to
detail, not a spontaneous outburst of anger. Outlook
magazine reports that in recent months there have been
concerted efforts by the VHP to get the names of
Muslim businesses from the Ahmedabad Municipal
Corporation, names and addresses of Muslim students
from universities and professional institutions, and
also to draw up a list of 'undesirables' working for
government agencies such as the Food Corporation of
India (Thy Hand, Great Anarch). Any guess on how these
lists were used on February 28th?
In commercial districts where businesses and shops of
Hindus and Muslims co-exist, the mobs burnt only the
Muslim-owned shops. Shops that were Hindu-owned but
rented by Muslims were left intact while the material
inside was dragged out and burnt or looted. Rampaging,
angry mobs who pay such close attention to ownership
records? This shows calculation and planning, not mob
'frenzy'. As the NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt notes,
"What's so spontaneous about an attack that is planned
so meticulously that only the seventh shop in a
crowded lane gets razed to the ground but everything
around it is untouched and undamaged?" (Covert Riots
And Media)
If 'Hindu outrage' is enough to explain these riots,
then why did these riots occur overwhelmingly in
Gujarat only? The murder of the kar sevaks in Godhra
had outraged Hindus all over India--but nowhere else
did Hindus go out in rampaging mobs, burning Muslims
and looting shops-not even in Ayodhya where over 15000
outraged kar sevaks had aggregated. This is because
riots do not simply 'happen' in India, they have to be
created, and the Gujarat BJP government actively
contributed to the creation of these riots. (When
Guardians of Gujarat Gave 24-hour Licence for Punitive
Action)
MYTH 2
The government is doing its best to maintain peace and
harmony in Gujarat, provide relief to the riot victims
and apprehend those involved in rioting.

Origin of this myth: The Gujarat Chief Minister has
stated that the police did a commendable job of
maintaining peace, and the Union Home Minister, L K
Advani praised the Gujarat government for 'exemplary'
handling of the situation.

Fact: The state government is the instigator as well
as the facilitator of these riots.

Not only did the government deliberately delay all
attempts to control the situation during the riots but
is still failing in its responsibility to provide
relief to the victims or ensure justice for them.

The deployment of army was deliberately delayed by the
state and central governments. Even as mobs were
rampaging in Gujarat on the 28th of February, and the
police commissioner of Ahmedabad himself had urgently
requested more troops in the city, the governments
neglected to put in a formal request for army
deployments. This despite the fact that the Southern
Command in Pune had already prepared its contingency
plan by early afternoon expecting to be called upon by
the government. Even when the army troopers eventually
landed in the riot-torn cities of Gujarat on March
1st, the administration did not provide them with
equipment or assistance in handling the solution. This
led to costly delays of several hours, which could
have saved more than a hundred lives. (Where Had All
the Soldiers Gone?)
The media has extensively documented the inaction of
the state police when rioters were butchering people
and looting shops in their presence. As reported in
Outlook, the rioters in Vadi, Vadodara were actually
shouting the slogans, "Andar ki baat hai, police
hamare saath hai. (It is an inside deal, the police
supports us)." In several cases, the police themselves
handed over Muslims (who had come to the police for
protection) to crowds thirsty for their blood. In
another case, a policeman extracted diesel from his
vehicle and offered it to the crazed mob to set fire
to a slum. For the most part, the police failed to
turn up to protect the minorities even when the
victims managed to get through to them and ask for
help. And even when the police did show up, they would
often arrest the victims for inciting violence. The
Home Minister, Mr. LK Advani assures us that "So far,
more than 77 deaths due to police firing have been
reported in the state. So one cannot say the police
played a passive role," but fails to mention that
almost half of those killed by police belong to the
Muslim community-the victims of the riots, not their
perpetrators. ( Soldiers 'held back to allow Hindus
revenge', Police took part in slaughter, Horrendous
Killings in Hindutva Lab, Burned in bed as Indian
violence spirals)
The relief camps set up to help the riot victims have
received minimal help from the state government.
Although the official body-count stands at just over
700, NGOs working in Gujarat estimate that more than
1000 people were killed in the riots, and around
100,000 have been displaced. Though people started
coming to the relief camps from March 1st onwards, the
government only started providing aid to these camps
from March 6th. Even now, the situation in these
relief camps is miserable, and the people there live
in virtual internment. The sanitation and hygiene
conditions are terrible, as illustrated by the Shah
Alam relief camp in Ahmedabad where 10 toilet
facilities serve a population of 8000 refugees.
(Thousands homeless in Gujarat, Gujarat government
evades relief, rehab responsibility)
The government has show little inclination to
investigate the riots. When the government first
announced a judicial probe to investigate the violence
in Gujarat, it only limited the scope of the judicial
commission to the massacre on the Sabarmati Express in
Godhra, and NOT the riots in the rest of Gujarat.
After this decision caused widespread outrage, the
government agreed to extend the scope of this inquiry
to cover the post-Godhra violence as well. However,
the judge appointed to head this commission, Justice
KG Shah, is a retired Gujarat High Court Judge with
close ties to the ruling government and a history of
anti-minority judgements. One of his judgements was
overturned by the Supreme Court of India with the
comment that "the finding of the judge... is not based
on appreciation of evidence but on imagination."
(Riots probe panel faces credibility crisis) In such a
situation, where the State is directly implicated in
contributing to violence, it is necessary that a judge
not beholden to the Gujarat government be assigned to
the commission to ensure impartiality and judicial
independence.
In an ironic twist, police chiefs of cities in Gujarat
who were successful in maintaining peace are being
transferred, while those who were not are being
allowed to go scot-free. According to an analysis done
by The Telegraph, India (Minority Hole in Gujarat
Police Force), there has been a concerted effort in
Gujarat since the advent of the BJP government to move
all police officers from the minority community away
from field positions to less effective 'support
positions.' Also, senior police officers such as Rahul
Sharma (Bhavnagar), Vivek Srivastava (Kutch), Anupam
Singh Gehlot (Mehsana), Himanshu Bhatt
(Banaskantha)--all of who earned praise for
maintaining peace in their cities have been
transferred (Gujarat transfers: govt hits the panic
button, Bhavnagar SP: Advani praised, Modi disposed),
while police chiefs such as P.C. Pande (Ahmedabad) who
not only failed to contain the violence, but actually
justified the police inaction (Saffron Terror), and
Upendra Singh (Rajkot) who went 'missing' when the
riots started (Police chief vanishes as Rajkot burns)
have had no action taken against them. The Divisional
Commissioner of Ayodhya (Faizabad district), who did a
commendable job in maintaining peace in this volatile
town at the center of the storm has also earned the
ire of the Hindu Nationalists, and is now on an
extended leave (VHP mounts pressure on govt to
transfer Faizabad officials).

MYTH 3
The RSS-VHP-Bajrang Dal-BJP (the Sangh Parivar) are
pro-Hindus and Patriots.

Fact: The Sangh Parivar propagates a narrow, distorted
version of Hinduism, and at its core, is profoundly
anti-Hindu. Nor do these groups care for the country
or its citizens.

The Sangh Parivaar has demolished Hindu temples: In
their zeal to destroy the Babri Masjid, they have even
destroyed temples that Hindus held dear, such as Sita
Ki Rasoi and Ram Ka Chabutra in Ayodhya (Ramchandra
Gandhi in Hinduism Today). In their zeal to destroy
and desecrate Muslim places of worship, they have
often destroyed Dargaahs where people of all faiths
worshipped (Thy Hand, Great Anarch)
Many Hindu religious leaders oppose the VHP and
Bajrang Dal:
Five of the seven akhadas, or religious orders (of
Hinduism), in Ayodhya are now against the VHP. Two of
them, Nirmohi and Nirvani, have openly denounced the
VHP, saying they did not want "blood to stain our
hands": "Unko khoon se ranga hua mandir chahiye. Hume
dhoodh se dhoola hua mandir chahiye (They [the VHP]
want a temple stained with blood. We want a temple
that is bathed in milk)," said Gyan Das, Mahant (head)
of the Nirvani group. Gyan Das also had this to say
about the VHP's ceremonies: "Yeh Ram ka yagna nahin,
kal ka tandav hai (This is not a prayer to Ram but the
dance of death)."( Sadhu vs Sadhu in Temple Tangle,
After The Ride, The Blowout)
The Shankaracharya of Goverdhanpuri, Jagadguru
Aadhokshajanand Teerth, also condemned the ongoing mob
violence in Gujarat as "state terrorism" and demanded
a ban on the VHP and the arrest of its leaders and
activists under the National Security Act.
(Shankaracharya demands ban on VHP). The
Shankaracharyas of all the four main peeths, Dwarka,
Puri, Joshimath and Sringeri, are bitterly opposed to
the VHP's temple movement ( It's Four Sides To A
Triangle)
The VHP-Bajrang Dal have insulted revered religious
leaders and purohits who disagreed with the VHP's
narrow vision of Hinduism. For instance, the Hindu
priest in charge of the idols at the Ram Janmabhoomi
site, Pujari Laldas, categorically asserted that the
demolition of the mosque was not in the interest of
Hindus but was being advocated for political and
financial gain. In the documentary In the Name of God,
he says
"[Riots] were caused for financial and political gain.
It has nothing to do with Lord Ram's birthplace. I am
the priest of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. I can
honestly say that until today VHP members never made a
single offering nor even prayed in this temple... They
don't care if people are killed, all they care about
is money and power. Those who speak of a Hindu Nation
and create violence in the name of Ram are upper
caste, they all love the good life, there's not an
iota of renunciation or sacrifice or public concern in
them. They merely exploit religious feeling to
maintain their lifestyles..."

When the BJP came to power in Uttar Pradesh in 1992 ,
Pujari Laldas was removed from his post as head priest
of the Ram temple. A year later Pujari Laldas was
murdered. ( It's Four Sides To A Triangle)

Ordinary Hindus are also fed up with these groups: The
majority of Hindus have always voted against the BJP,
even when it has formed the government at the center.
Recent election results show that even in states (such
as U.P.) and municipalities (such as Delhi) where BJP
has help power for long, the electorate has rejected
them.
"The VHP is the main villain [in these disturbances],"
said Abhishek Sharma, who runs a grocery shop in
Ayodhya (quoted in The Telegraph).
Rajinder Singh, a 35-year-old cement plant worker
summarised, "Ram mandir ke naam par desh ki barbaadi
ho rahi hai (the country is being ruined by this Ram
mandir issue). It is only going to weaken the
country."(A Reporter's Notebook)
''Aadmi khoon ka pyaasa hogaya hai (Man is killing
man). All this is against the Hindu sanskriti
(tradition) … There should be both a mandir and a
masjid at Ayodhya,'' says Sunita Yadav, a sweetshop
owner's wife from Mathura (A Reporter's Notebook).
The Sangh Parivaar is anti-India: They do not believe
in the Indian Constitution, and instead of using
democratic means to put forth their views, they resort
to violence (VHP activists storm Orissa Assembly),
openly flout the orders of the Supreme Court (Verdict
will not hinder our plan: Singhal), oppose the very
fundamental principle of equality and liberty upon
which the Indian State is based, and demonize an
entire community based on the actions of a few people
who happen to claim the same religion (It had to be
done, VHP leader says of riots). Does this mean that
any Hindu anywhere should be called to task for
heinous acts committed by any other Hindu? Would the
VHP-RSS leaders be willing to stand trial for the
murders committed by the mobs in Ahmedabad?
The Sangh Parivaar's philosophy is anti-democratic at
its core: as evidenced by the writings of Hedgewar,
Golwalkar and every other of their founders. The Sangh
Parivaar does not believe in democracy, despite
participating in electoral politics. This is what
Hedgewar, the founder of RSS, had to say:
"I have thought out a scheme based on Hindu Dharm
Shastra, which provides for standardization of
Hinduism throughout India... But the point is that
this ideal cannot be brought to effect unless we have
our own Swaraj with a Hindu as Dictator like Shivaji
of old, or Mussolini or Hitler of the present day in
Italy and Germany. But this does not mean that we have
to sit with folded hands until some such dictator
arises in India. We should formulate a scientific
scheme and carry on propaganda for it." (Hindutva's
foreign tie-up in the 1930s: archival evidence)

The VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS have all the hallmarks of
fundamentalist-terrorist groups, and their behavior is
indistinguishable from the Taliban:
In 1999, Sumir Lal wrote an article in The Hindustan
Times titled The Hindu Rashtra is Here in which he
said:
It is not often that one gets to preview a nightmare,
but India has that dubious fortune right now.

Picture a country in which a civilised society's most
fundamental choices are denied to its people - what
kind of school they can send their children to, which
books and plays and cultural events they can read,
watch or participate in, what religious faith they may
like or not like to profess, the products of which
business houses they can consume. Imagine too, that
these decisions are made for them by a bunch of
unaccountable, self-appointed guardians of morality,
and imposed - on pain of physical intimidation and
destruction of property - by roving gangs of ruffians
with whom the entire apparatus of the state connives.

A nightmare, but this is not Afghanistan. It is
present day Gujarat, where the ordinary citizen cannot
conduct the essential business of daily life without
first fearfully looking over his shoulder… Welcome to
the Hindu Rashtra. The dream of the RSS-led Sangh
Parivar flourishes untrammelled in Gujarat.

Ancient monuments of historical relevance are being
destroyed, much like the destruction of the Bamiyan
Buddhas by the Taliban. In addition to the 16th
century mosque Babri Masjid that was destroyed by
these militant Hindu organizations in 1992, several
dozen mosques were destroyed in the recent riots in
Gujarat, including the 16th century mosque near the
Jethabai stepwells which had been classified as a
protected site by the Archaelogical Survey of India
(Indian Express). VHP has a stated goal of destroying
India's heritage by targeting heritage monuments such
as the Taj Mahal and Qutub Minar.
Gyan Das, the Hindu leader (Mahant) of the Nirvani
Akhada in Ayodhya also compares the VHP to the
Taliban. "How has this man [Ashok Singhal, Working
President of the VHP], who is responsible for fanning
hatred and bloodshed in the entire country, been
allowed to step into Ayodhya?" fumes Gyan Das.
"Singhal is the head of the country's Taliban and,
like in Afghanistan, this group here will destroy the
nation." [Quoted in The Telegraph]
The VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS organize and train private,
armed militias for the express purpose of creating
terror. (A trained saffron militia at work?)

MYTH 4
Sabarmati Express massacre is terrorism while the
post-Godhra carnage in Gujarat is 'mere' communal
riots.

Origin of this Myth: Home Minister L.K. Advani and
Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi have leveled
the as-yet-unproven charge that the train incident was
rooted in 'cross-border' terrorism sponsored by the
Pakistani intelligence group ISI. The Gujarat
government used this difference in categorization to
allocate a compensation of Rs 200,000 to the families
of the victims of the Sabarmati Express incident and
only Rs 100,000 to those of the victims of the
post-Godhra carnage.

Fact: The post-Godhra violence was highly organized
with a distinct aim of spreading terror amongst the
minorities, and is most definitely terrorism-worse
yet, state-sponsored terrorism.

A terrorist act, as per the Indian Government's
definition, is one with an ''intent to threaten the
unity, integrity, security or sovereignty of India or
to strike terror in the people or any section of the
people...using inflammable substances or fire-arms or
other lethal weapons...in such a manner as to cause,
or likely to cause, death of, or injuries to any
person or persons or loss of, or damage to, or
destruction of, property...''

Was the Sabarmati Express massacre in Godhra an act of
terrorism? It is not quite clear whether the heinous
massacre in Godhra fits the government's own
definition of terrorism. While several newsstories
have said that there is little evidence of the
massacre being pre-planned (Provocation Helped Set
India Train Fire, 'Just Like Hindustan-Pakistan', The
Hate Train, Godhra attack not planned ), a detailed
analysis by Frontline magazine (Godhra Questions)
indicates that the sequence of events leading to the
incident seems too well-planned to be spontaneous.
Preplanned or not, there is as yet, no evidence that
points to an ISI involvement. By claiming a foreign
hand, the Government is deflecting attention from its
own failure to provide sufficient security to the kar
sevaks, knowing that the train would pass through
communally sensitive areas. The BJP led government
seems to have as little regard for Hindu lives as it
has demonstrated for Muslim lives.
Is post-Godhra violence in Gujarat terrorism? Going by
the yardstick of preplanning and organization, it is
clear that the post-Godhra violence was most
definitely terrorism. The attacks on Mulsims were
well-planned, they were incited and carried out by
identifiable groups (the VHP and Bajrang Dal), and
encouraged by the state machinery controlled by the
BJP - Violence as a product of deliberate straategy;
the attacks were carried out in a dramatic way to
attract publicity and create an atmosphere of alarm
among Muslims far beyond the actual victims - Violence
as theater. The very definitions of terrorism. The
deliberate inaction on the part of the state, and in
some instances, active connivance with the rioters,
also makes it an instance of state-sponsored
terrorism.
However provocative the Godhra massacre might have
been, we must distinguish between state-sponsored
terrorism and extra-state actors. If terrorists
attack, you turn to the state, but if the state turns
terrorist, then where do you look for help?

MYTH 5
Hindus and Muslims cannot live together in peace.
Riots are the natural outcome of simmering tensions.

Fact: Hindus and Muslims for the most part live
together peacefully. Communal tensions have been
actively stoked by some groups leading to riots.

Villages which account for 2/3rd of Indian population
have had less than 4% communal riot related deaths.
According to Prof Ashutosh Varshney, 50% of riot
deaths since 1960 have happened in eight cities which
hold only 6% of India's population. Another 45% of
riot -related deaths have occurred in other urbban
centers. (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and
Muslims in India)
Communal forces use terror and threats to actively
divide the communities. When Hindus tried to support
their Muslim neighbours during the killings in
Gujarat, the VHP & Bajrang Dal goons targeted them
also. The case of Professor Bandookwala, a well known
academician from Vadodara is well-documented. An
organized mob attacked him in his house in a
predominantly Hindu locality, and his car was set on
fire. He and his daughter were sheltered by their
Hindu neighbors, who in turn were attacked on the
second day for protecting him. (NDTV Interview)

Democracy
Who is she when she's at home?
by Arundhati Roy
Outlook India
April 28, 2002

http://www.zmag.org/content/SouthAsia/roy-gujarat-democracy.cfm

Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It
took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter
was. It wasn't very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a
friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that
her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with
burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved
'OM' on her forehead.

Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches this?

Our Prime Minister justified this as part of the
retaliation by outraged Hindus against Muslim
'terrorists' who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on
the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. Each of those who
died that hideous death was someone's brother,
someone's mother, someone's child. Of course they
were.

Which particular verse in the Quran required that they
be roasted alive?

The more the two sides try and call attention to their
religious differences by slaughtering each other, the
less there is to distinguish them from one another.
They worship at the same altar. They're both apostles
of the same murderous god, whoever he is. In an
atmosphere so vitiated, for anybody, and in particular
the Prime Minister, to arbitrarily decree exactly
where the cycle started is malevolent and
irresponsible.

Right now we're sipping from a poisoned chalice—a
flawed democracy laced with religious fascism. Pure
arsenic.

What shall we do? What can we do?

We have a ruling party that's haemorrhaging. Its
rhetoric against Terrorism, the passing of pota, the
sabre-rattling against Pakistan (with the underlying
nuclear threat), the massing of almost a million
soldiers on the border on hair-trigger alert, and most
dangerous of all, the attempt to communalise and
falsify school history text-books—none of this has
prevented it from being humiliated in election after
election. Even its old party trick—the revival of the
Ram mandir plans in Ayodhya—didn't quite work out.
Desperate now, it has turned for succour to the state
of Gujarat.

Gujarat, the only major state in India to have a bjp
government has, for some years, been the petri dish in
which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate
political experiment. Last month, the initial results
were put on public display.

Within hours of the Godhra outrage, the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (vhp) and the Bajrang Dal put into motion a
meticulously planned pogrom against the Muslim
community. Officially the number of dead is 800.
Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000.
More than a hundred and fifty thousand people, driven
from their homes, now live in refugee camps. Women
were stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to
death in front of their children. Two hundred and
forty dargahs and 180 masjids were destroyed—in
Ahmedabad the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the founder of
the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in
the course of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad
Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated and wreathed in burning
tyres. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes,
hotels, textiles mills, buses and private cars.
Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs.

A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal
Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the Director-General
of Police, the Police Commissioner, the Chief
Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were
ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did
not intervene. The mob broke into the house. They
stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then
they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of
course it's only a coincidence that Jaffri was a
trenchant critic of Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra
Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly
by-election in February.

Across Gujarat, thousands of people made up the mobs.
They were armed with petrol bombs, guns, knives,
swords and tridents.Apart from the vhp and Bajrang
Dal's usual lumpen constituency, Dalits and Adivasis
took part in the orgy. Middle-class people
participated in the looting. (On one memorable
occasion a family arrived in a Mitsubishi Lancer.) The
leaders of the mob had computer-generated cadastral
lists marking out Muslim homes, shops, businesses and
even partnerships. They had mobile phones to
coordinate the action. They had trucks loaded with
thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance,
which they used to blow up Muslim commercial
establishments. They had not just police protection
and police connivance, but also covering fire.

While Gujarat burned, our Prime Minister was on mtv
promoting his new poems. (Reports say cassettes have
sold a hundred thousand copies.) It took him more than
a month—and two vacations in the hills—to make it to
Gujarat. When he did, shadowed by the chilling Mr
Modi, he gave a speech at the Shah Alam refugee camp.
His mouth moved, he tried to express concern, but no
real sound emerged except the mocking of the wind
whistling through a burned, bloodied, broken world.
Next we knew, he was bobbing around in a golf-cart,
striking business deals in Singapore.

The killers still stalk Gujarat's streets. The lynch
mob continues to be the arbiter of the routine affairs
of daily life: who can live where, who can say what,
who can meet who, and where and when. Its mandate is
expanding quickly. From religious affairs, it now
extends to property disputes, family altercations, the
planning and allocation of water resources... (which
is why Medha Patkar of the nba was assaulted). Muslim
businesses have been shut down. Muslim people are not
served in restaurants. Muslim children are not welcome
in schools. Muslim students are too terrified to sit
for their exams. Muslim parents live in dread that
their infants might forget what they've been told and
give themselves away by saying 'Ammi!' or 'Abba!' in
public and invite sudden and violent death.

Notice has been given: this is just the beginning.

There have been hundreds of outraged letters to
journals and newspapers asking why the
"pseudo-secularists" do not condemn the burning of the
Sabarmati Express in Godhra with the same degree of
outrage with which they condemn the killings in the
rest of Gujarat.What they don't seem to understand is
that there is a fundamental difference between a
pogrom such as the one taking place in Gujarat now,
and the burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. We
still don't know who exactly was responsible for the
carnage in Godhra. The government says (without a
shred of evidence) it was an isi plot. Independent
reports say the train was set on fire by an enraged
mob.Either way, it was a criminal act. But every
independent report says the pogrom against the Muslim
community in Gujarat—billed by the government as
spontaneous 'retaliation'—has at best been conducted
under the benign gaze of the State and, at worst, with
active State collusion. Either way the State is
criminally culpable.

And the State acts in the name of its citizens. So as
a citizen, I am forced to acknowledge that I am
somehow made complicit in the Gujarat pogrom. It is
this that outrages me. And it is this that puts a
completely different complexion on the two massacres.

After the Gujarat Massacres, at its convention in
Bangalore, the rss, the moral and cultural guild of
the bjp, of which the Prime Minister, the Home
Minister and Chief Minister Modi himself are all
members, called upon Muslims to earn the 'goodwill' of
the majority community. At the meeting of the national
executive of the bjp in Goa, Narendra Modi was greeted
as a hero. His smirking offer to resign from the chief
minister's post was unanimously turned down. In a
recent public speech he compared the events of the
last few weeks in Gujarat to Gandhi's Dandi
March—both, according to him, significant moments in
the Struggle for Freedom.

While the parallels between contemporary India and
pre-war Germany are chilling, they're not surprising.
(The founders of the rss have, in their writings, been
frank in their admiration for Hitler and his methods.)
One difference is that here in India we don't have a
Hitler. We have instead, a travelling extravaganza, a
mobile symphonic orchestra. The hydra-headed,
many-armed Sangh Parivar—with the bjp, the rss, the
vhp and the Bajrang Dal, each playing a different
instrument. Its utter genius lies in its apparent
ability to be all things to all people at all times.

The Parivar has an appropriate head for every
occasion. An old versifier with rhetoric for every
season. A rabble-rousing hardliner for Home Affairs, a
suave one for Foreign Affairs, a smooth,
English-speaking lawyer to handle TV debates, a
cold-blooded creature for a Chief Minister and the
Bajrang Dal and the vhp, grassroots workers in charge
of the physical labour that goes into the business of
genocide. Finally, this many-headed extravaganza has a
lizard's tail which drops off when it's in trouble,
and grows back again: a specious socialist dressed up
as Defence Minister, who it sends on its
damage-limitation missions—wars, cyclones, genocides.
They trust him to press the right buttons, hit the
right note.

The Sangh Parivar speaks in as many tongues as a whole
corsage of trishuls.

Is this the Hindu rashtra that we've all been asked to
look forward to? Once the Muslims have been "shown
their place", will milk and Coca-Cola flow across the
land? Once the Ram mandir is built, will there be a
shirt on every back and a roti in every belly? Will
every tear be wiped from every eye? Can we expect an
anniversary celebration next year? Or will there be
someone else to hate by then? Alphabetically—Adivasis,
Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Parsis, Sikhs? Those
who wear jeans, or speak English, or those who have
thick lips, or curly hair? We won't have to wait long.
It's started already. Will the established rituals
continue? Will people be beheaded, dismembered and
urinated upon? Will foetuses be ripped from their
mothers' wombs and slaughtered? (What kind of depraved
vision can even imagine India without the range and
beauty and spectacular anarchy of all these cultures?
India would become a tomb and smell like a
crematorium.)

No matter who they were, or how they were killed, each
person who died in Gujarat in the weeks gone by
deserves to be mourned.

It can say several contradictory things
simultaneously.While one of its heads (the vhp)
exhorts millions of its cadres to prepare for the
Final Solution, its titular head (the Prime Minister)
assures the nation that all citizens, regardless of
their religion, will be treated equally. It can ban
books and films and burn paintings for 'insulting
Indian culture'. Simultaneously, it can mortgage the
equivalent of 60 per cent of the entire country's
rural development budget as profit to Enron. It
contains within itself the full spectrum of political
opinion, so what would normally be a public fight
between two adversarial political parties, is now just
a Family Matter. However acrimonious the quarrel, it's
always conducted in public, always resolved amicably,
and the audience always goes away satisfied it's got
value for money—anger, action, revenge, intrigue,
remorse, poetry and plenty of gore. It's our own
vernacular version of Full Spectrum Dominance.

But when the chips are down, really down, the
squabbling heads quieten, and it becomes chillingly
apparent that underneath all the clamour and the
noise, a single heart beats. And an unforgiving mind
with saffron-saturated tunnel vision works overtime.

There have been pogroms in India before, every kind of
pogrom—directed at particular castes, tribes,
religious faiths. In 1984, following the assassination
of Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party presided over the
massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi, every bit
as macabre as the one in Gujarat. At the time, Rajiv
Gandhi, never known for an elegant turn of phrase,
said, "When a big tree falls, the ground shakes". In
1985 the Congress swept the polls. On a sympathy wave!
Eighteen years have gone by. Nobody has been punished.

Take any politically volatile issue—the nuclear tests,
the Babri Masjid, the Tehelka scam, the stirring of
the communal cauldron for electoral advantage—and
you'll see the Congress Party has been there before.
In every case, the Congress sowed the seed and the bjp
has swept in to reap the hideous harvest. So in the
event that we're called upon to vote, is there a
difference between the two? The answer is a faltering
but distinct 'yes'. Here's why: It's true that the
Congress Party has sinned, and grievously, and for
decades together. But it has done by night what the
bjp does by day. It has done covertly, stealthily,
hypocritically, shamefacedly, what the bjp does with
pride. And this is an important difference.

Whipping up communal hatred is part of the mandate of
the Sangh Parivar. It has been planned for years. It
has been injecting a slow-release poison directly into
civil society's bloodstream. Hundreds of rss shakhas
and Saraswati shishu mandirs across the country have
been indoctrinating thousands of children and young
people, stunting their minds with religious hatred and
falsified history. They're no different from, and no
less dangerous than, the madrassas all over Pakistan
and Afghanistan which spawned the Taliban. In states
like Gujarat, the police, the administration, and the
political cadres at every level have been
systematically penetrated. It has huge popular appeal,
which it would be foolish to underestimate or
misunderstand. The whole enterprise has a formidable
religious, ideological, political, and administrative
underpinning. This kind of power, this kind of reach,
can only be achieved with State backing.

Madrassas, the Muslim equivalent of hothouses
cultivating religious hatred, try and make up in
frenzy and foreign funding, what they lack in State
support. They provide the perfect foil for Hindu
communalists to dance their dance of mass paranoia and
hatred. (In fact they serve that purpose so perfectly,
they might just as well be working as a team.)

Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely
happen is that the majority of the Muslim community
will resign itself to living in ghettos as
second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil
rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily
life be like for them? Any little thing, an
altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic
light, could turn lethal. So they will learn to keep
very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the
edges of the society in which they live. Their fear
will transmit itself to other minorities. Many,
particularly the young, will probably turn to
militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society
will be called upon to condemn them. Then President
Bush's canon will come back to us: "Either you're with
us or with the terrorists."

Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For
years to come, butchers and genocidists will fit their
grisly mouths around them ('lip-synch', filmmakers
call it) in order to justify their butchery.

Mr Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, who has lately been
feeling a little upstaged by Mr Modi, has the lasting
solution. He's called for civil war. Isn't that just
perfect? Then Pakistan won't need to bomb us, we can
bomb ourselves.Let's turn all of India into Kashmir.
Or Bosnia. Or Palestine. Or Rwanda. Let's all suffer
forever. Let's buy expensive guns and explosives to
kill each other with. Let the British arms dealers and
the American weapons manufacturers grow fat on our
spilled blood. We could ask the Carlyle group—of which
the Bush and Bin Laden families are both
shareholders—for a bulk discount. Maybe if things go
really well, we'll become like Afghanistan. (And look
at the publicity they've gone and got themselves.)
When all our farm lands are mined, our buildings
destroyed, our infrastructure reduced to rubble, our
children physically maimed and mentally wrecked, when
we've nearly wiped ourselves out with
self-manufactured hatred, maybe we can appeal to the
Americans to help us out. Airdropped airline meals,
anyone?

How close we have come to self-destruction. Another
step and we'll be in free-fall. And yet the government
presses on. At the Goa meeting of the bjp's national
executive, the Prime Minister of Secular, Democratic
India, Mr A.B. Vajpayee, made history. He became the
first Indian Prime Minister to cross the threshold and
publicly unveil an unconscionable bigotry against
Muslims, which even George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld
would be embarrassed to own up to. "Wherever Muslims
are," he said, "they do not want to live peacefully."

Shame on him. But if only it were just him: in the
immediate aftermath of the Gujarat holocaust,
confident of the success of its 'experiment', the bjp
wants a snap poll. "The gentlest of people," my friend
from Baroda said to me, "the gentlest of people, in
the gentlest of voices, says 'Modi is our hero.'"

Some of us nurtured the naive hope that the magnitude
of the horror of the last few weeks would make the
Secular Parties, however self-serving, unite in sheer
outrage. On its own, the bjp does not have the mandate
of the people of India. It does not have the mandate
to push through the Hindutva project. We hoped that
the 27 allies that make up the bjp-led coalition at
the Centre would withdraw their support. We thought,
quite stupidly, that they would see that there could
be no bigger test of their moral fibre, of their
commitment to their avowed principles of secularism.

It's a sign of the times that not a single one of the
bjp's allies has withdrawn support. In every shifty
eye you see that faraway look of someone doing mental
maths to calculate which constituencies and portfolios
they'll retain and which ones they'll lose if they
pull out. Except for Deepak Parekh of hdfc, not a
single ceo of India's Corporate Community has
condemned what happened. Farooq Abdullah, Chief
Minister of Kashmir and the only prominent Muslim
politician left in India, is currying favour with the
government by supporting Modi because he's nursing the
dim hope that he may become Vice-President of India
very soon.And worst of all—Mayawati, leader of the
bsp—the great hope of the lower castes, is on the
verge of forging an alliance with the bjp in UP.

The Congress and the Left parties have launched a
public agitation asking for Modi's resignation.
Resignation? Have we lost all sense of proportion?
Criminals are not meant to resign. They're meant to be
charged, tried and convicted. As those who burned the
train in Godhra should be. As the mobs, and those
members of the police force and the administration who
planned and participated in the pogrom in the rest of
Gujarat should be. As those responsible for raising
the pitch of the frenzy to boiling point must be. The
Supreme Court has the option of acting against Modi
and the Bajrang Dal and the vhp suo motu (when the
Court itself files charges). There are hundreds of
testimonies. There's masses of evidence.

But in India if you are a butcher or a genocidist who
happens to be a politician, you have every reason to
be optimistic.No one even expects politicians to be
prosecuted. To demand that Modi and his henchmen be
arraigned and put away, would make other politicians
vulnerable to their own unsavoury pasts—so instead
they disrupt Parliament, shout a lot, eventually those
in power set up commissions of inquiry, ignore the
findings and between themselves make sure the
juggernaut chugs on.

Already the issue has begun to morph. Should elections
be allowed or not? Should the Election Commission
decide that? Or the Supreme Court? Either way, whether
elections are held or deferred, by allowing Modi to
walk free, by allowing him to continue with his career
as a politician, the fundamental, governing principles
of democracy are not just being subverted, but
deliberately sabotaged. This kind of democracy is the
problem, not the solution. Our society's greatest
strength is being turned into her deadliest enemy.
What's the point of us all going on about 'deepening
democracy', when it's being bent and twisted into
something unrecognisable?

What if the bjp does win the elections? (The buzz is
that engineering a war against Pakistan is going to be
the bjp's strategy to swing the vote.) After all,
George Bush had an 80 per cent rating in his War
Against Terror, and Ariel Sharon has a similar mandate
for his bestial invasion of Palestine. Does that make
everything all right? Why not dispense with the legal
system, the Constitution, the press—the whole
shebang—morality itself, why not chuck it and put
everything up for a vote? Genocides can become the
subject of opinion polls and massacres can have
marketing campaigns.

Fascism's firm footprint has appeared in India. Let's
mark the date: Spring, 2002. While we can thank the
American President and the Coalition Against Terror
for creating a congenial international atmosphere for
its ghastly debut, we cannot credit them for the years
it has been brewing in our public and private lives.

It breezed in in the wake of the Pokhran nuclear tests
in 1998. From then onwards, the massed energy of
bloodthirsty patriotism became openly acceptable
political currency. The 'weapons of peace' trapped
India and Pakistan in a spiral of brinkmanship—threat
and counter-threat, taunt and counter-taunt. And now,
one war and hundreds of dead later, more than a
million soldiers from both armies are massed at the
border, eyeball to eyeball, locked in a pointless
nuclear standoff.The escalating belligerence against
Pakistan has ricocheted off the border and entered our
own body politic, like a sharp blade slicing through
the vestiges of communal harmony and tolerance between
the Hindu and Muslim communities. In no time at all,
the godsquadders from hell have colonised the public
imagination. And we allowed them in. Each time the
hostility between India and Pakistan is cranked up,
within India there's a corresponding increase in the
hostility towards the Muslims. With each battle cry
against Pakistan, we inflict a wound on ourselves, on
our way of life, on our spectacularly diverse and
ancient civilisation, on everything that makes India
different from Pakistan. Increasingly, Indian
Nationalism has come to mean Hindu Nationalism, which
defines itself not through a respect or regard for
itself, but through a hatred of the Other. And the
Other, for the moment, is not just Pakistan, it's
Muslim. It's disturbing to see how neatly nationalism
dovetails into fascism. While we must not allow the
fascists to define what the nation is, or who it
belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind that
nationalism, in all its many avatars—socialist,
capitalist and fascist—has been at the root of almost
all the genocides of the twentieth century. On the
issue of nationalism, it's wise to proceed with
caution.

And there will not always be spectacular carnage to
report on. Fascism is also about the slow, steady
infiltration of all the instruments of State power.
It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about
unspectacular day-to-day injustices. Fighting it means
fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people.
Fighting it does not mean asking for rss shakhas and
the madrassas to be banned, it means working towards
the day when they're voluntarily abandoned as bad
ideas.It means keeping an eagle eye on public
institutions and demanding accountability. It means
putting your ear to the ground and listening to the
whispering of the truly powerless. It means giving a
forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds of
resistance movements across the country who are
speaking about real things—about bonded labour,
marital rape, sexual preferences, women's wages,
uranium dumping, unsustainable mining, weavers' woes,
farmers' worries. It means fighting displacement and
dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of
abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing
your newspaper columns and prime-time TV spots to be
hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged
theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from
everything else.

While most people in India have been horrified by what
happened in Gujarat, many thousands of the
indoctrinated are preparing to journey deeper into the
heart of the horror. Look around you and you'll see in
little parks, in big maidans, in empty lots, in
village commons, the rss is marching, hoisting its
saffron flag. Suddenly they're everywhere, grown men
in khaki shorts marching, marching, marching. To
where? For what? Their disregard for history shields
them from the knowledge that fascism will thrive for a
short while and then self-annihilate because of its
inherent stupidity. But unfortunately, like the
radioactive fallout of a nuclear strike, it has a
half-life that will cripple generations to come.

These levels of rage and hatred cannot be contained,
cannot be expected to subside, with public censure and
denunciation. Hymns of brotherhood and love are great,
but not enough.

Historically, fascist movements have been fuelled by
feelings of national disillusionment. Fascism has come
to India after the dreams that fuelled the Freedom
Struggle have been frittered away like so much loose
change.

Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously
called a 'wooden loaf'—a notional freedom tainted by
the blood of the thousands who died during
Partition.For more than half a century now, the hatred
and mutual distrust has been exacerbated, toyed with
and never allowed to heal by politicians, led from the
front by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Every political party has
tilled the marrow of our secular parliamentary
democracy, mining it for electoral advantage. Like
termites excavating a mound, they've made tunnels and
underground passages, undermining the meaning of
'secular', until it has just become an empty shell
that's about to implode. Their tilling has weakened
the foundations of the structure that connects the
Constitution, Parliament and the courts of law—the
configuration of checks and balances that forms the
backbone of a parliamentary democracy. Under the
circumstances, it's futile to go on blaming
politicians and demanding from them a morality they're
incapable of. There's something pitiable about a
people that constantly bemoans its leaders. If they've
let us down, it's only because we've allowed them to.
It could be argued that civil society has failed its
leaders as much as leaders have failed civil society.
We have to accept that there is a dangerous, systemic
flaw in our parliamentary democracy that politicians
will exploit. And that's what results in the kind of
conflagration that we have witnessed in Gujarat.
There's fire in the ducts. We have to address this
issue and come up with a systemic solution.

Can we not find it in ourselves to belong to an
ancient civilisation instead of to just a recent
nation? To love a land instead of just patrolling a
territory? The Sangh Parivar understands nothing of
what civilisation means.It seeks to limit, reduce,
define, dismember and desecrate the memory of what we
were, our understanding of what we are, and our dreams
of who we want to be. What kind of India do they want?
A limbless, headless, soulless torso, left bleeding
under the butchers' cleaver with a flag driven deep
into her mutilated heart? Can we let that happen? Have
we let it happen?

The incipient, creeping fascism of the past few years
has been groomed by many of our 'democratic'
institutions. Everyone has flirted with it—Parliament,
the press, the police, the administration, the public.
Even 'secularists' have been guilty of helping to
create the right climate. Each time you defend the
right of an institution, any institution (including
the Supreme Court), to exercise unfettered,
unaccountable powers that must never be challenged,
you move towards fascism. To be fair, perhaps not
everyone recognised the early signs for what they
were.

The national press has been startlingly courageous in
its denunciation of the events of the last few weeks.
Many of the bjp's fellow travellers who have journeyed
with it to the brink are now looking down the abyss
into the hell that was once Gujarat, and turning away
in genuine dismay. But how hard and for how long will
they fight? This is not going to be like a publicity
campaign for an upcoming cricket season.

But politicians' exploitation of communal divides is
by no means the only reason that fascism has arrived
on our shores.

Over the past fifty years, ordinary citizens' modest
hopes for lives of dignity, security and relief from
abject poverty have been systematically snuffed out.
Every 'democratic' institution in this country has
shown itself to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the
ordinary citizen, and either unwilling, or incapable
of acting, in the interests of genuine social justice.
Every strategy for real social change—land reform,
education, public health, the equitable distribution
of natural resources, the implementation of positive
discrimination—has been cleverly, cunningly and
consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by
those castes and that class of people who have a
stranglehold on the political process. And now
corporate globalisation is being relentlessly and
arbitrarily imposed on an essentially feudal society,
tearing through its complex, tiered, social fabric,
ripping it apart culturally and economically.

There is very real grievance here. And the fascists
didn't create it. But they have seized upon it,
upturned it and forged from it a hideous, bogus sense
of pride. They have mobilised human beings using the
lowest common denominator—religion. People who have
lost control over their lives, people who have been
uprooted from their homes and communities who have
lost their culture and their language, are being made
to feel proud of something. Not something they have
striven for and achieved, not something they can count
as a personal accomplishment, but something they just
happen to be. Or, more accurately, something they
happen not to be. And the falseness, the emptiness of
that pride, is fuelling a gladiatorial anger that is
then directed towards a simulated target that has been
wheeled into the amphitheatre.

How else can you explain the project of trying to
disenfranchise, drive out or exterminate the
second-poorest community in this country, using as
your footsoldiers the very poorest (Dalits and
Adivasis)? How else can you explain why Dalits in
Gujarat, who have been despised, oppressed and treated
worse than refuse by the upper castes for thousands of
years, have joined hands with their oppressors to turn
on those who are only marginally less unfortunate than
they themselves? Are they just wage slaves,
mercenaries for hire? Is it all right to patronise
them and absolve them of responsibility for their own
actions? Or am I being obtuse? Perhaps it's common
practice for the unfortunate to vent their rage and
hatred on the next most unfortunate, because their
real adversaries are inaccessible, seemingly
invincible and completely out of range? Because their
own leaders have cut loose and are feasting at the
high table, leaving them to wander rudderless in the
wilderness, spouting nonsense about returning to the
Hindu fold. (The first step, presumably, towards
founding a Global Hindu Empire, as realistic a goal as
Fascism's previously failed projects—the restoration
of Roman Glory, the purification of the German race or
the establishment of an Islamic Sultanate.)

One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India.
Hindu fascists regard them as legitimate prey. Do
people like Modi and Bal Thackeray think that the
world will stand by and watch while they're liquidated
in a 'civil war?' Press reports say that the European
Union and several other countries have condemned what
happened in Gujarat and likened it to Nazi rule. The
Indian government's portentous response is that
foreigners should not use the Indian media to comment
on what is an 'internal matter' (like the chilling
goings-on in Kashmir?). What next? Censorship? Closing
down the Internet? Blocking international calls?
Killing the wrong 'terrorists' and fudging the dna
samples? There is no terrorism like State terrorism.

But who will take them on? Their fascist cant can
perhaps be dented by some blood and thunder from the
Opposition. So far only Laloo Yadav of Bihar has shown
himself to be truly passionate: "Kaun mai ka lal kehta
hai ki yeh Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do,
chhati phad doonga!" (Which mother's son says this is
a Hindu Nation? Send him here, I'll tear his chest
open.)

Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can
only be turned away if all those who are outraged by
it show a commitment to social justice that equals the
intensity of their indignation.

Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we
ready, many millions of us, to rally not just on the
streets, but at work and in schools and in our homes,
in every decision we take, and every choice we make?

Or not just yet...

If not, then years from now, when the rest of the
world has shunned us (as it should), like the ordinary
citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will learn to
recognise revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human
beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our
own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did
and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to
happen.

This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through
the night.

OPINION
The 'Great' Myth
We were told that Atal Behari Vajpayee is the
'greatest' Indian leader after Nehru. Raise your hands
all those who still believe it.

HARSH V. PANT

April 28, 2002.

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20020426&fname=pant&sid=1

The mask is finally off and hopefully for good. For
long the Sangh Parivar has played this trick on the
Indian liberals: projecting the so-called "moderate"
face of Atal Behari Vajpayee to garner their support.
And unfortunately, many of the Indian liberals have
also been gullible enough to buy this farce.

Indeed, the Indian middle class supported the BJP all
these years believing that the Indian electoral
compulsions and Vajpayee's leadership would force the
right wingers to moderate their stance on crucial
issues that threaten to derail Indian democracy. And
that Indian democracy would in a way get strengthened
as the Indian right would reject its lunatic fringe
and move towards the center.

Alas, this fallacious assumption of the Indian middle
classes and especially the liberals who have been
supporting the BJP under Vajpayee has proved to be
what it always was: absolute nonsense. Indeed this
belief was constructed over all these years to give
some kind of legitimacy to the support that the supine
Indian middle classes wanted to give to the right wing
politics. To alleviate their guilty conscience a bit,
the moderate face of the BJP was seen as an alibi.

The country was told again and again how successful
the BJP had been in controlling communal riots in the
states where they were in the government (conveniently
forgetting the fact that the rioters were themselves
ruling). We were told that the democratic compulsions
of the Indian right wing would force it to become
something like the US Republicans (despite the fact
that the US Republicans themselves are not
particularly liked by the Indian middle classes).

We were also told that Atal Behari Vajpayee is the
greatest Indian leader after Nehru (without any
substantial evidence available except that where Nehru
wrote some first rate, intellectually stimulating
prose, Vajpayee writes third rate poetry which
nonetheless is lapped up by an equally third rate
Bollywood and publicity-hungry media) and it was
projected as if there was no other option but to
ensure that he became the Prime Minister.

Indeed, the case for Vajpayee's Prime Ministership was
made in terms that seemed as if it was India's
obligation to give him India's leadership for his long
political career (boasts about which are made as
reminders by Vajpayee himself whenever he can't face
the consequences of his own decisions).

But all this claptrap should finally cease and with
immediate effect. The aura of greatness surrounding
Vajpayee is gone. Indeed it never was there. But it's
time that the Indian middle class opens its eyes and
faces the consequences of their support to the BJP.
The country is going to the dogs and it's no time to
sit and watch television, witnessing the unceasing
horror in Gujarat.

It's time to demand accountability, which Vajpayee
will never deliver. It's time to expect leadership,
which Vajpayee neither has now nor had ever. It's time
to get rid of the myth of Vajpayee's greatness.

His utter failure in Gujarat is too well known to be
recounted again. Not only does he not know where he
stands on the crucial issue of secularism but he has
also allowed himself to be controlled by a lunatic
fringe. The Prime Minister of India is being held
hostage by a group of hooligans who are today ruling
the streets of Gujarat and tomorrow will be ruling the
entire country.

Instead of providing a healing touch to the alienated
Muslim victims of Gujarat by demanding effective
action from the state administration, the Prime
Minister of this secular, democratic republic decides
to sermonize them on Islamic intolerance. What about
the intolerance of your Parivar, Mr. Prime Minster?
This is, indeed, a long journey from the
I-would-rather-die-then-be-associated-with-the-attackers-of-Orissa-Assembly
days. Or is it really? Maybe it were the electoral
compulsions in Orissa that were doing all the talking?

He is no better than Narendra Modi who, at least, was
explicit about his action-reaction theorizing. But the
great Mr. Vajpayee is more subtle. And the great
parliamentarian that he is, he lays all the blame for
the Gujarat riots on the Parliament. Had the
Parliament denounced Godhra attack strongly enough,
the riots would not have happened? Indeed, only a poet
can have such brilliantly sensitive explanation for
the acts of genocide in Gujarat! As the country
teeters on the brink, Vajpayee is busy with his
semantics, making irresponsible statements one day,
issuing clarifications the other.

But this has not come about out of the blue. The signs
were there for all who cared to see. Gradually, but
deftly, Vajpayee passed on decision-making to those
who actually control the Sangh Parivar. When the
country required some administrative finesse, he was
satisfied with mollycoddling a bunch of sadhus and
mahants. And make no mistake, from now on it is they
who will dictate the terms of the discourse on
Ayodhya.

The economic situation of the country is worsening but
who has time to give some direction to the economic
policies. The Finance Minister seems helpless and has
capitulated with a new round of rollbacks. Poor man,
one feels really sorry for him. He makes his budget
keeping in mind the real economic constraints but
forgets completely about the political constraints
facing him. The result is a hue and cry from the
swadeshi brigade and then the decision by the BJP high
command to roll back some decisions. This is the way
the economic policies of India are being made for the
last three years. Extraordinary, isn't it?

The Finance Minister’s able colleague, Murli Manohar
Joshi is trying his best to help him. With courses in
Vedic astrology, karmakand, yogic consciousness etc.,
India might just succeed in producing a brand new
generation of astrologers and pandits that can be
exported to earn foreign exchange.

The Human Resource Development Ministry' crowning
glory has been its attempts to rewrite the school
textbooks. We are being told that all the old history
textbooks are written by the leftist, Congress
supported historians and so they require rewriting.
What is conveniently forgotten in this debate is that
all those "leftist" historians are academicians of
world repute.

It is the peers and the peer review of the works of
scholars that makes or breaks the reputations of
scholars, not the fact that they are supported by
political parties. Most of the scholars who are now
being supported by the government have little or no
standing in the realm of academia and yet they are
being compared to the earlier authors. Had it not been
for the Supreme Court, Indian students would by now be
reading T.P. Verma and Makkan Lal in place of R.S.
Sharma, Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra. Only Joshi,
with his own great academic credentials, can prefer
T.P. Verma to Romila Thapar.

The Home Ministry is in shambles. Before the BJP's
advent to power, we were told L.K. Advani would make
for a great (yes, again great) Home Minister. Indeed,
he was to be the next Sardar Patel. Forget Sardar
Patel, he has not yet shown the caliber of S.B.
Chavan. He considers the conflagration in Gujarat
worthy of only a cursory, touristy visit, which he
uses to heap praises on Modi for his "commendable"
performance in containing the situation in 72 hours.
Those 72 hours seem like 72 days and our home minister
still has nothing to complain.

His only achievement in the last three years is the
forcible passing of POTA by the Indian Parliament. It
is astounding how much importance this issue was given
by the BJP that a joint Parliamentary session was
convened. And instead of responding to the debate on
POTA, the Prime Minister ended up telling this country
about the valuable contribution he has made to India
in his long public career.

Indian Army is standing at the borders, directionless.
The government thought that just by creating a
crisis-situation at the borders, it would be able to
get concessions from Pakistan, especially as it was
hopeful of America's support. But none of this has
happened and without any alternative policy, it seems
that Pakistan has an upper hand, at least for now.

It is known since the days of Clausewitz that military
strategy has to be accompanied by a political strategy
in order to achieve desired ends, as it is politics
that dictates the goals of a military strategy. But it
seems that even this basic fact is not known to the
government, as there has been no attempt to delineate
a political roadmap vis-à-vis the military buildup at
the borders.

And lastly, what about the nuclear tests that India
conducted in May 1998? They were hailed as the biggest
achievements of Vajpayee who had shown to the world
India's military and scientific might. The world, it
seems, has not been terribly impressed. Indeed, India
was on the verge of signing the CTBT without thinking
through the techno-strategic parameters of the
changing security environment. Thanks to the change in
the US Administration, which is no longer interested
in the CTBT or any other arms control measure, this
country was saved from signing the CTBT. The nuclear
doctrine has not yet been given a final shape and
contradictions abound in India's nuclear posture. So
much for the greatest foreign policy success of this
government.

Today, India is courting a diplomatic disaster. The
international community has started reacting to the
developments in Gujarat and the democratic republic of
India has to take refuge in the age-old slogan of
"sovereignty", which in these times is used mostly by
the repressive regimes the world over. This,
certainly, is the great Indian transition to the
league of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq and Kim Jong II’s North Korea.

So where is that great leadership of Mr. Vajpayee that
the Indian middle class had been raving about? The
bottomline is that Mr. Vajpayee has always been an
ordinary politician and the recent events in Gujarat
make it clear that he is also incompetent and weak. If
the BJP led NDA government's performance has been
shabby, the buck stops with Mr. Vajpayee. The
political alternatives in India today may not be great
but that’s no reason to put up with the slow poisoning
of our country. Political apathy and frustration make
for a toxic brew.

It was heartening to see the strong French Reaction to
the winning of about 17 percent of votes by Jean Marie
Le Pen. The Europeans have learnt their lessons the
hard way but they have learnt them well. The mere fact
that they have a candidate from the far right fighting
for their Presidency, has shamed the French and
brought them out on the streets.

It’s time the great Indian middles class learns its
lessons. They have played with fire for far too long
and the results are there for all to see. It would be
too much to expect them to be out on the streets but
is it too much to even ask them to wake up and save
whatever is left of India?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The author is a PhD candidate in the Dept of Political
Science, University of Notre Dame, Indiana (USA).

The truth about Godhra
By Abu Abraham,
Deccan Chronicle,
April 28, 2002.

http://www.deccan.com/columnists/#The%20truth%20about%20Godhra

As we read more and more about Gujarat — the Sabarmati
Express and its aftermath — we begin to realise that
what happened was even more horrendous than we had at
first thought. This was no riot, but an organised
massacre of men, women and children (including babies
in the womb).

And it happened with the connivance of the
administration and the passive acceptance of the
police. Anyone, any official or police officer who
tried to do his duty was duly transferred, and the
transfers described as “routine”..

So grim was the scene when Prime Minister Vajpayee
visited refugee camps in Ahmedabad that he was moved
to say he was shamed, and the country was shamed by
the communal killings.

But then by the time he got to Goa, he had recovered
from the shock and became his old RSS self again.
“Gujarat happened because of Godhra,” he proclaimed,
putting all the blame on the Muslims.

There have been many versions of what happened in
Godhra, but one account that I find more credible than
others appeared in Mainstream weekly. It is written
by a Hindu whose entire family believes in Hindutva.

This is what he says: “The actual story didn’t start
at Godhra as is being told everywhere but it started
from a place Dahod, 75 km before Godhra railway
station. At about 5.30 to 6.00 am the train reached
the Dahod railway station.

These kar sevaks, after having tea and snacks at the
railway stall, broke down the stall following some
argument with the stall owner and then proceeded back
to the departing train.

The stall owner then filed an NC against the kar
sevaks at the local police station about the above
incident.

Then at about 7.00 or 7.15 am the train reached Godhra
railway station. All the kar sevaks came out from
their reserved compartments and started to have tea
and snacks at the small tea stall on the platform,
which was being run by an old bearded man from the
minority community.

There was a servant helping this old man in the stall.
The kar sevaks on purpose argued with this old man and
then beat him up and pulled his beard.

This was all planned to humiliate the old man since he
was from the minority community. These kar sevaks kept
repeating the slogan, ‘Mandir ka nirmaan karo, Babar
ki aulad ko bahar karo’ (Start building the mandir and
throw the sons of Babar out of the country).

Hearing the chaos, the daughter, 16, of the old man
who was also present at the station came forward and
tried to save her father from the kar sevaks. She kept
pleading and begging them to stop beating her father
and leave him alone.

But instead of listening to her pleadings, the kar
sevaks lifted the young girl and took her inside their
compartment (S-6) and closed the compartment door
shut. The train started to move out of the platform of
the Godhra railway station.

The old man kept banging on the compartment doors with
the plea to leave his daughter. Just before the train
could move out completely from the platform, two stall
vendors jumped into the last bogey that comes after
the guard cabin.

And with the intention of saving the girl they pulled
the chain and stopped the train. By the time the train
halted completely, it was one km away from the railway
station.

These two men then came to the bogey in which the girl
was and started to bang the door and requested the kar
sevaks to leave the girl alone.

Hearing all the developments, the people in the
vicinity near the tracks started to move towards the
train. The boys and the mob (that also included women)
that had now gathered near the compartment requested
the kar sevaks to return the girl.

But instead of returning the girl they started closing
their windows. This infuriated the mob and they
retaliated by pelting stones at the compartment.

The compartments adjoining compartment S-6 on both
sides contained kar sevaks of the VHP. These kar
sevaks were carrying banners that had long bamboo
sticks attached to them.

These kar sevaks got down and started attacking with
those bamboo sticks on the mob gathered to save the
girl. This was like adding insult to injury to the
crowd and their anger was now uncontrollable.

The crowd started to bring diesel and petrol from
trucks and rickshaws standing at the garages in Signal
Fadia (a place in Godhra) and burnt down the
compartment.

They didn’t bring fuel from any petrol pump as has
been reported everywhere nor was this act of burning
pre-planned as is being mentioned by many people but
it happened all of a sudden out of sheer frustration
and anger.

After hearing about this incident, the members of the
VHP living in that area started burning down the
garages in Signal Fadia; they also burnt down Baddshah
Masjid at Shehra Bhagaad (a small area in Godhra).

Reliable sources have reported all this information
and these facts cannot be doubted.”

Prime Minister Vajpayee, speaking in Panaji, used a
language that reeked of Hindutva. Even taking into
account the quibbling and the excuses and the
explanations that usually, of late, accompany his
remarks, it must be said that he shamed liberal
Indians.

Expounding on the tolerance of Hinduism and Hindus, he
said, “We (Hindus) allow you (Muslims and Christians)
to worship freely,” but they (minorities) “do not want
to live with others peacefully.”

Talking of Hindu tolerance, I would like to quote
Swami Vivekananda (who Vajpayee has been fond of
quoting in the context of Hindutva).

He said, “No religion on earth preaches the dignity of
humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism, and no
religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor
and the low in such a fashion as Hinduism.”