Confessions of a BJP Supporter

soundmeister to Harpreet # some

That was one of the stupidests posts by an Indian in a long while.

* In a country in which thousands of Sikhs and Muslims have been killed, AND their killers have gone scot free

* where some of these murderers have not only been living freely but have even taken part in elections

* where all one has to do to escape charges of murder is to form a mob and then one can kill anyone - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh - with impunity

In such a country, we BLOODY WELL recognize our problems.

Ignoring these problems and resorting to splitting hairs is worse than silly. We are not here merely to save some misguided ``sense of honor from Pakistanis.`` We need to FIX our problems, at least recognize them to begin with.

Essay

The social engineering of Gujarat

The ongoing violence and its broadening social and geographical base in the state is a consequence of the political recasting of social identities.

by Hemant Babu

The winter moon had already risen over the Taranga hills, when a group of men and women stopped our vehicle on the road from Ambaji to Baroda in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The women were dressed in brightly coloured half sarees, worn in the typically western Indian tribal style. A man in the front was carrying a photograph of Hanuman, the monkey god and lieutenant of the Hindu deity Ram. The light of the full moon bathed the hills on both sides of the road, and the exchange that followed was as pleasant as the surroundings.

?Donate some money,? said a woman from the group. In the tribal districts of Gujarat it is customary to stop passing vehicles and collect money around the time of Holi and other festivals that western Indian tribals celebrate. Only, this was not the month of Holi, or of any other festivity. Queried about the purpose of the collection they replied, ?We are collecting money for the bhajan mandali? (the collective singing of hymns celebrating deities). The bright red image of Hanuman that they carried was most certainly not native to their original spiritual repertoire. Neither was the idea of the bhajan mandali, which is a characteristically Hindu institution. The image and the ritual had come from somewhere else. This was in early 1993 when several parts of India, including Gujarat, were burning in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. But, the violence had not yet touched the tribal belts of Gujarat.

A month ago, in the aftermath of the Godhra incident and the subsequent riots, a friend, who sports a vandyke beard, was accosted on the same road by a group of men who live on the gentle slopes of the Taranga hills. But, there was nothing gentle about these men. Armed to the teeth, they snatched his wallet and then grilled him about his religion. He was allowed to proceed unmolested only after he furnished proof of his Hindu bona fides. Newspapers the next morning reported the killing of Muslim highway travellers, who were perhaps fleeing the riots.

An end to the violence of the last two months is not in sight, and, the end of it will not be the last of it either. The first incident of 1993 was not the starting point of a process that culminated in this second incident, almost a decade later. Both events and all that happened in the interim are merely stages in the acceleration and amplification of a process that has been in the making for some decades. In Gujarat, where it is today imprudent to wear a beard and a misfortune to be a Muslim, a pervasive communalisation has been cultivated even among communities marginalised by Hindu society. The participation of tribals in the brutal enterprise of Hindutva is an index of this communalisation. The collection for the bhajan mandali was only the more benign aspect of a development whose logical intent was the killings on the road from Ambaji to Baroda and elsewhere.

The arrival of Hanuman in the Gujarat hills has a cultural and political significance. It is also a mytho-logical metaphor for the arrival of tribals in the militia of Hindutva. The military prominence of Hanuman and his army in the epic, Ramayan, has been understood to signify the martial services rendered by some forest dwellers for a Hindu purpose of the remote past. Likewise, the adoption of Hindu symbols and rituals by the tribals of Gujarat suggests their subordinated absorption, as a regiment of foot soldiers detailed by the Hinduised polity to kill on command its ?enemy? of the moment. And as in the mythology, all they get in real terms is an honourable mention for services rendered. In both the myth and the current reality (a distinction that often has no meaning in the recent politics of India), the labours of the aboriginal under-class are directed towards the almost exclusive benefit of the caste-Hindu leadership that commandeers it.

?Normalcy? in a normal state

Both the violence and its expanding social base have been commented on at length. What is forgotten in all the rhetoric for and against the politics that engineered it is the historical-political context in which this engineering took place. The context may not be the direct cause of the psyche that produces such extreme forms of violence but it nevertheless merits description, if only because it may help identify and explain the direct cause, besides dispelling misconceptions about both Gujarat and the riots that seem to have found purchase in the media.

Ever since the outbreak of violence, there have been frequent expressions of surprise that such events could ever happen in the ?land of Gandhi?, in a state that is the most industrialised after Maharashtra, in a society with such a ?strong mercantile mentality?, and in a polity that has seen such ?stable governments?. These vaunted attributes are not a necessary impediment to organised violence and in any case this is not the first, worst or longest riot recorded in the state. In fact, any or all of these factors could cohabit with or even produce such violence. Perhaps the idea of riots in Gujarat will be less bewildering if it is kept in mind that during a riot organised under an extremely stable government with resources garnered from industrial and mercantile sources among others, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, no less, shut its gates and turned its back on Muslims fleeing certain death. If the political process can so easily erode the historical legacy of ahimsa in the ashram in which the concept was elaborated, optimistic assumptions about the restraining influence of Gandhi, commerce and industry do not place Gujarat under a special compulsion to be less violent than any other state in India?s degenerating polity. As Achyut Yagnik, the well-known social worker and researcher from Ahmedabad, notes: ?Gujarat is as normal as any other state.?

A sign of this normalcy is the number of incidents of communal violence in the state as recorded officially. Judicial commissions of inquiry, the Justice Reddy Commission and the Justice VS Dave Commission, were instituted after two major riots, of 1969 and 1985 respectively. Both commissions referred in some detail to Gujarat?s history of communal violence. The Justice Dave Commission traced the history of communal violence in Ahmedabad as far back as 1714 when a bloody riot was sparked off during the Holi celebrations. The city then was still under Mughal control. Subsequent riots broke out in 1715, 1716 and 1750. The Marathas, who succeeded the Mughals in Gujarat, were described by the Commission as being ?instrumental in creating a riot in Ahmedabad? after the city was occupied by them.

Hindu-Muslim violence continued in the centuries that followed, with the pace and intensity picking up in the second half of the twentieth century. When communal riots broke out in 1941, curfew had to be imposed for over two-and-a-half months. The Justice Reddy Commission identified as many as 2938 instances of communal violence in the state between 1960 and 1969, that is, an average of approximately three riots every four days during this ten-year period. It is perhaps more than just a coincidence that this was the period when the Jan Sangh, the first overtly political front of the Rashtrya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and the organisational precursor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which by all accounts is responsible for sustaining the current riots, became active in the state. During this period, riots began to spread over a much wider geographical area of the sate, affecting towns like Veraval, Junagadh, Patan, Godhra, Palanpur, Anjar, Dalkhania, Kodinar and Deesa, all of which have been hit by the ongoing violence.

Immunity of social conscience

Violence of the communal variety staged in urban and semi-urban venues, besides rural violence directed against agricultural labourers, particularly dalits, was thus as routine an aspect of Gujarat as it is of most other states in the country. But violence of a different, more systematic and sustained order was inaugurated in 1969. The Hindu-Muslim riots of that year mark a major break with the hitherto prevalent pattern of steady if unspectacular social conflict. More than two years of hectic Muslim and Hindu fundamentalist activity preceded the outbreak of these riots. Communal violence in the state acquired a more organised form against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan war of 1965. The Jana Sangh stepped up the level of patriotic mobilisation and secured a toe-hold among the urban middle class. This mobilisation cashed in on the shelling of the area near the Dwarka temple in Gujarat by the Pakistan Navy, and the death of the incumbent Congress chief minister of the state, Balwantrai Mehta, when his plane was brought down by the Pakistan air force.

Muslim mobilisation too was simultaneously taking place. The Jamiyet-Ulema-e-Hind tried to rally Muslim support, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Congress Party, which was then going through a phase of organisational and political crisis. In June 1968, the national convention of the Jamiyet was organised in Ahmedabad. Though it professed to be a nationalist organisation which supported the Congress, the convention showed very clearly that the Jamiyet was drifting towards communal politics. Its firebrand leaders, Maulana Asad Maad and Yunus Salim delivered provocative speeches. A booklet called The communal riots and the harm that they have done to the country and Hindu religion, authored by the president of the Jamiyet, Maulana Aqualak Husain, was circulated during the convention. The booklet gave grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities on Muslims in communal riots elsewhere in the country. This spurt of Islamic activity prompted the Jan Sangh to found the Hindu Dharma Raksha Samiti. It also brought the RSS chief MS Golwalkar to the city. At a rally in Ahmedabad in December 1968 Golwalkar attacked Muslims as invaders who the country could not tolerate for too long. The idea of Muslims as invaders has been repeatedly used by Hindu fundamentalists to a point where it has become the received wisdom, all cogent arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. The riots that ensued in 1969 left some 1500 people dead.

A riot of this magnitude, unprecedented in both scale and duration, had a foundational significance for the politics of the state and the techniques of mobilisation and orchestration that increasingly came into use. The discrete and scattered violence of the preceding period can be presumed to be manifestations of everyday class, caste and community struggles arising from socio-economic conflicts of a more or less local nature. To that extent, their individual histories and repercussions were confined to the respective localities of incidence. The 1969 riots had the critical mass that lent it state- and nation-wide visibility and gave it a prominent place in the historical inventory of community grievances. This riot could now be invoked at will, not just in Gujarat but wherever else tension had to be engineered. In effect, this was the first explicit politicisation of both communalism and public violence in the state.

Most importantly, the riots of 1969 took Gujarati society past the psychological threshold of normally tolerable public violence, and this not just of the communal variety. Once the barrier to the use of violence in inter-party conflicts was crossed, its repeated use acquired a tacit legitimacy as the social conscience became gradually more immune to the incremental doses of it that the polity administered. The two instances of extended public ferocity that Gujarat witnessed after these riots, the 1974 Nav Nirman movement, launched by the opposition parties to oust the Congress state government, and the 1981 riots against public policy designed to benefit lower castes, involved a high level of violence, including in the latter instance, the burning alive of dalits. Both these instances of extra-parliamentary ?politics? were remarkably successful in their objectives. Violent street politics had made an impressive debut in Gujarat and presented itself as a model worth investing in and emulating.

Making of a pattern

There were two aspects to these agitations that had long-term social and institutional consequences. One was the induction of middle class youths into a form of politics not normally associated with them. The other was the emergence of the incipient social and financial networks that sustain prolonged violence. The issues involved in both the 1974 movement and the 1981 riots, though they affected a much larger segment of the population, were articulated most vigorously by the middle class through its traditional channels. But the urgency of the objective, particularly in reversing affirmative state action in favour of the lower castes, caused dissent to spill out of the traditional channels. Middle class, upper caste youths played a leading role in the anti-reservation riots, and the focus of conflict here belonged solely to the matrix of Hindu social relations and its hierarchies of caste. A middle class, consisting predominantly of caste Hindus who saw themselves as the true repositories of merit, was defending its privileged access to professional education and government service. The high level of violence was justified as a legitimate expression of thwarted merit and one more barrier to muscular Hindu middle class street politics was crossed. The BJP was active in the 1981 riots as were its professional front organisations, notably the university and secondary school teachers associations. The classroom, the family and many other institutions which crucially shape social and political values had succumbed to the pressures of protecting the elite monopoly of state privileges and public resources.

The 1981 riots were replayed in a more drastic form in the 1985 anti-reservation movement. In many ways, this sequel marked the beginning of a new phase. Although it partook of features of all the antecedent riots, it also had a novel dimension. The roots of Gujarat?s radical communalism can be detected here. Methodical violence from now on became a more regular instrument and expression of electoral politics, recurring with increasing frequency and refinement of technique and exhibiting remarkable similarities of character. Soon after it commenced, the riot of 1985 was annexed to the exigencies of the BJP?s political constituency-building drill. The seemingly undirected ?riot from below? was given a purposeful leadership by the present dispensation in the state, notably the current Chief Minister Narendra Modi, acting then in his capacity as a senior functionary of the RSS. By 1985, the Hindutva cadres had acquired considerable experience in disruptive politics, many of its leaders having participated in the ?81 agitation.

The BJP?s active influence on the 1985 agitation explains many of its more curious features. The riots began on 19 March, the day after the newly-elected Congress government assumed office, and was directed against a policy measure declared more than two months prior. In January, the Congress government had announced an increase in the quota of jobs in government and seats in public educational institutions reserved for backward castes. The riots lasted six months, much after the policy had been revoked by the government. The fact that a riot could start two months after the cause that provoked it, and end as suddenly as it started, points to a high level of coordination by an existing command structure. It cannot be a mere accident that the violence extended beyond Ahmedabad to smaller towns and villages, particularly in those areas where the BJP had acquired influence, notably in central Gujarat and some tribal belts. South Gujarat, which had previously been unaffected, now found itself on the riot map of the state. The social base of the violence expanded to include gangsters, bootleggers and professional killers. Various reports of the period quote doctors who described the stab wounds they attended to as the work of trained hands. The agitation finally degenerated to a point where sections of the state constabulary abandoned their uniforms and relin-quished their responsibilities to join the riots.

The beginnings of social engineering

But there is another compelling aspect of this riot that overshadows all others. The 1981 riots sharpened the conflict within the ?Hindu? community, between the upper and lower castes, the victims being primarily dalits. By contrast the 1985 agitation, though initially directed against caste-based affirmative action, transformed itself very quickly into a gratuitous attack on the Muslim community, which had nothing to do with the reservation policy of the government. In the final reckoning, an extended riot led by upper caste Hindus that succeeded in revoking a policy that benefited lower caste Hindus eventually managed to inscribe itself into the social memory as one more gory episode in the deteriorating history of Hindu-Muslim relations. Perhaps the danger to a conceptual and potential ?Hindu? unity from a conflict internal to the community was being minimised by quietly diverting the focus of the agitation. If its similarities with the Sangh Parivar?s current modus operandi are anything to go by, then the 1985 riot was the real crucible of Hindutva politics in Gujarat. A kingpin of that agitation is the kingpin of the current spate of pogroms; the only difference is that today he officially rules the political roost with a popular mandate of 55 percent.

There are many crude calculations in the social engineering formulas of the RSS, but the last 15 years have proved that, given a polity degenerating in the appropriate manner, these calculations can yield the desired outcome. From 1990 on, Gujarat has witnessed riot after riot, varied in scale, but similar in character and equal in significance for the BJP?s rise to political power. The late 1980s witnessed an escalation in the tempo of the Ayodhya movement and this furnished the climate for the orchestration of events that would culminate in the party?s emphatic electoral victory in 1995.

The pattern of the first riot of 1990 is interesting, though not necessarily symptomatic. LK Advani?s rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh came in the immediate aftermath of widespread and violent upper caste agitations across north India against the affirmative action principles in favour of backward castes, adopted at the national level by the United Front in New Delhi. These agitations had intensified socio-economic conflict between upper and lower castes at a time when the plural constituency of a potential Hindutva was being assembled through the politicisation of Hindu symbols and myths. This was the period when imagined grievances, culled from an imagined history, were being assiduously broadcast, accompanied by the shrill denigration of parties which allegedly indulged Muslim treachery. The rath yatra did manage to rally large numbers, particularly from the lower castes, and the arrest of Advani en route to Ayodhya provoked riots in many states, including Gujarat.

Gujarat again witnessed riots in 1992 when the disputed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was razed to the ground a few hours after kar sevaks stormed the monument. Surat experienced intermittent disturbances over a six-month period. In 1993, more riots followed, after the blasts in Bombay, allegedly masterminded by the Muslim underworld. Perhaps these riots were attempts at forging a Hindu unity that, on the face of it, seemed impossible. Whatever the intention, there is no denying that the rath yatra precipitated a political crisis in which the existing intra- and inter-party equations began to break down. And, there is no getting away from the fact that, though not uniformly successful across India, the BJP from the 1991 general elections has secured more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the state. Remarkably, for three years following its assumption of office in Gujarat in 1995, the state was free from communal riots. The BJP was clearly living up to its boast of ensuring a riot-free administration, prompting critics to cite this as proof of the party?s monopoly of organised public violence. At any rate, this peaceful interim was part of the established pattern of violence erupting and subsiding according to the clearly discernable designs of politics. The inference, therefore, that violence had become a crucial raw material of electoral politics controlled by a cartel is unavoidable.

New tribe of kar sevaks

The brief interlude of social peace came to an end in 1998, with the attacks on Christian missionaries and establishments in the Dangs, a forested tribal belt on the southern edge of Gujarat bordering Maharashtra. This was a new theatre of conflict in terms of both the region and community involved. This was the first instance of organised violence after the BJP came to power and the context once again is instructive. Cracks had developed in the carefully crafted socio-economic balance in the BJP soon after it came to power in the state. Hindutva once again confronted a crisis of caste. An influential segment of backward castes in the BJP legislature party had revolted against its upper caste leadership, on the lines of what was subsequently to happen in the Uttar Pradesh unit too. Social engineering had failed in the face of an old caste conflict and a substitute social group had to be found to take the place of the departing backward castes. Tribals make up 14 percent of the states population. Christians, who are largely concentrated in the tribal districts, add up to less than 1 percent of Gujarat?s population. Even in the Dangs, they do not exceed 5 percent.

On the night of 25 December, under the auspices of an RSS front organisation called the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), churches, educational institutions and houses were attacked in Ahwa, Subir, Jamlapada, Gadvi, Divan Temrun, Madagkhadi and Padalkhadi. Over the next four days attacks spread to other tribal areas in Bharuch, Surat and Vyara districts of south Gujarat. This orchestration of violence by the HJM had been preceded by a decade-and-a-half of patient mobilisation by another RSS front organisation, the Samajik Samrasta Manch, founded in 1983 to assimilate those segments of society marginalised by Brahmanic Hinduism. Whatever else the RSS fronts have been doing, it is clear that within four years of those attacks, tribals from both north and south Gujarat have been recruited in large numbers as kar sevaks for both the construction of the Ram temple and the destruction of the Muslim community.

The similarities between the broad context of the riots is striking. Any crisis internal to Hindutva inevitably leads to violence against well-defined ?enemies?. If the 1998 violence was necessitated by the social crisis of Gujarati Hindutva, the present and continuing violence comes on the heels of a comprehensive political rout of the BJP across several states in India. Gujarat is its last bastion, and reports and analysis in the media indicated that defeat stared the party in the forthcoming elections in the state. The prominence of tribal participation is the common element between 1998 and the ongoing violence. Perhaps, in the social engineering calculus of the RSS, a fresh massacre of the old enemy by new recruits will add to the prowess of Hindutva, enrich its folklore, expand its social base and thereby forestall a defeat in the nursery of its politics. A tribal population of 14 percent is electorally significant enough to justify the slaughter of several hundred Muslims.

Secularism and silence

Clearly then, from the mid-1980s political violence in Gujarat had become more organised and more numer-ous, had increasingly begun to manufacture its own provocations, and was directed at minorities, particularly Muslims. This last development coincided with the BJP?s Hindutva agendas in a period when the party was systematically cultivating overarching Hindu nationalist sentiments. In 1985, the Congress party was at the peak of its electoral strength, enjoying the support of 55 percent of the electorate. By the 1991 general elections, the BJP had secured 55 percent of the vote and in 1995 rode to power in the state with an overwhelming majority. In this violent ten-year period the Congress Party, which ruled the state for most of the past four decades, had crumbled and out of the ruins of the existing polity the BJP had emerged triumphant.

There seems to be a prima facie correlation between the violent politics of the state and the BJP?s rise to power. Numerous studies, by the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, by the sociologist Ghanshyam Shah, the historian Jan Breman, the political scientist Atul Kohli and many others, have chronicled some of the micro-level processes in the party?s rise to power. But there has not been any real synthesis of explanation, based on these studies, that describes the precise mechanics at a state-wide level. Perhaps, that exercise is precluded by a lack of uniformity, and even an organic unity, in the strategies of the RSS and its offspring. The intricacies of refabricating a complex socio-economic demography may well require multiple, even mutually contradictory, local strategies within an overall climate of communal strife.

But even if there are not too many identifiable and overt statewide strategies, barring of course the assault on minorities, the BJP?s success has been statewide and not all of it can be attributed to just the ingenuity of the party?s political techniques. After all, identical experiments by the BJP in other states have not fetched the same dividends. It would seem therefore that conditions specific to Gujarat?s history, society and politics have facilitated the cultivation of Hindutva politics. These specific circumstances may help penetrate the air of inscrutability that surrounds the BJP?s covert strategies and successes, if only by questioning many well-meaning but untenable secular-ist assumptions about Gujarat and the riots, which actually impede an understanding of Hindutva?s politics in the state.

In the secular intelligentsia?s description of the gory events of the last two months, communal violence is the handiwork of a violent minority of fundamentalists. In this view, the secular majority is silent and can only watch helplessly as the state administration actively abets the Hindutva lumpens. This is not an entirely accurate description of the reality. True, there are many who have actually gone to the aid of the victims and prevented more unspeakable brutalities than have been committed. It is also true that there are many localities where irreproachable community relations, fostered by shared concerns of a more fundamental and material variety, have ensured that provocateurs have been unable to incite murderous passions. But it is equally true that there are many others who silently approve of the carnage. The violent minority and silent majority of Gujarat do not constitute separate and distinct social fragments. The silence of a sizeable part of the silent majority is not the speechless shock of numbed bystanders. It is the conspiratorial silence of willing spectators, remote witnesses to a Roman holiday, whose public silence is a private roar of approval that is clearly audible to the architects of the violence. There are those who cannot speak and those who will not speak.

How else are we to explain the seeming paradoxes of the riots in Ahmedabad? We have seen educated girls and boys from middle and upper middle class families who do not actually participate in the killings but follow in the wake to loot Muslim establishments. We have seen couples on two wheelers bring home consumer durables scavenged from the debris of retail outlets. The cell-phone wielding rioters are not isolated elements who have taken control in a social vacuum. They roam about so brazenly because they know they have a silent social mandate. This is the clear conspiracy of silence among many of the so-called silent majority and it has many manifestations ? the son of a bureaucrat who gets away with murder, a government official who demands bribe, the worker who looks at unions as an instrument of personal gain, the trader who cheats at one go the marginal producer and the small consumer. We have seen the faces of this silent majority at various places. Sometimes they are at a safe distance behind the rioting mob, sometimes they are in the air-conditioned cabins of newspaper offices. They are always there where it matters and they are always silent when it matters. We have seen them outside Gujarat too, in 1984 in Delhi when Sikhs were being butchered, in the 1992 Bombay riots, in the Dangs, in Orissa, in Madhya Pradesh, in Uttar Pradesh and many other places too numerous to be listed. And now we are told that the VHP in Ahmedabad has a team of 50 lawyers who will, without payment, legally defend the Hindutva rioters. Secular optimism should not blind us to the reality of communalism?s expanded social base.

Anatomy of a Hindu state

Gujarat is a visibly Hinduised state today, and not just because of the 55 percent that voted the BJP. Even if that 55 percent were to vote in other ways, the ideology of Hindutva that has sunk roots will continue to pervade society. What this means in effect is that even if the Congress were to return to power, it will have to mould itself more openly to the agendas of Hindu politics. In fact, it is more than likely that the state Congress unit has itself already been Hinduised. Reportedly, Congress-run municipalities have extended infrastruc-tural and other assistance to the rioters, particularly in destroying evidence of demolitions. Even casual observers of politics have noted that the Gujarat Congress has been less than tepid in its response to the riots, being more keen to defend Sonia Gandhi?s credentials than to protect Muslim lives. The state administration has been so extensively contaminated that even if a Congress government were to allow some residual secular instinct to surface, it is unlikely to get much support from the bureaucracy. This is the most impressive achievement of fundamentalist politics ? that it has recast even the opposition in its own image.

Some traces of how a caste-divided state can achieve an overarching Hindu unity, even if only briefly and at extraordinary moments of stress, are to be found in aspects of the state?s social, political and demographic history. Gujarat came into existence in 1960 after the States Reorganisation Act of 1957, which carved out states on a linguistic basis. Two broad regions ? mainland and peninsular Gujarat ? make up the territory of the state. Peninsular Gujarat consists of Kutch and Kathiawad, now known as Saurashtra. Prior to Indian independence, numerous kingdoms, principalities, and jagirs dotted the territorial landscape of present-day Gujarat. Saurashtra alone had 499 political units. Kutch was a princely state while parts of mainland Gujarat were directly administered British territory incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. In 1948, all these units were consolidated and Kutch, Saurashtra and the mainland were added to Bombay state in 1956, where they stayed until 1960 when, through linguistic division, the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were created.

This territorial consolidation gave the future politics of Gujarat several institutions, forms, values and characteristics that made it easier for Hindutva to take hold. Among the more useful heritages was the myth of the Somnath Temple. The temple complex is located in the port town of Veraval on the southern coast of Saurashtra just a little below Porbandar, were Gandhi was born. The myth of Somnath left Gandhi untouched. But it excited many others who formed the cream of the Congress leadership in Gujarat, mainly because in AD 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan) raided the temple of Somnath and broke the idol. The temple was situated inside a fortress in which wealth accumulated from the brisk maritime trade of ancient and medieval Saurashtra was stored. Before Mahmud?s raid, this amassed wealth had attracted the notice of many other rulers, some of whom, like the Chudasama, Ahiras and Yadhavas, had attempted to make off with it. But the attack of the Mahmud from Ghazni has been singled out for special attention and presented as proof of Muslim insolence.

Eminent historians like Romila Thapar have argued very eloquently against simplified narratives of the Somnath raid. But the matter long ago passed from the hands of professional historians and into the arsenal of practised politicians such as Rajendra Prasad, the president of India in the 1950s, Vallabhai Patel, the first union home minister, and KM Munshi, a senior minister in successive union cabinets. Among the Congress leadership, Somnath was a Gujarati preoccupation. It was only the objections of Jawaharlal Nehru and some of his secular colleagues that prevented the repair of the temple under state auspices, but that did not stop the president of India from participating in the ceremonies of the privately funded restoration.

Somnath was the Gujarat Congress Party?s gift to Hindutva and is an early example of the politicisation of temple related trauma. Such is the pedigree of the Somnath myth, and the extent of its popularity in Gujarat, that it was absorbed and given prominence in the politics of the Ayodhya myth. Thus it was that the rath yatra that symbolised the spiritual conquest of India by vaishnavite Hinduism began its journey from this shaivite monument.

Shackles of faith and caste

The appeal of such religious themes is not difficult to understand in a society permeated with strong orthodox vaishnavite traditions. The absence of a serious bhakti movement in Gujarat?s history is perhaps a reflection of and reason for this potent institutional vaishnavism. Mythological religiosity has been an integral part of Gujarat society and continues to be fostered by bardic performances. Kathakars, who recite stories from the Ramayan, have an important role in collective social life and in recent years have been active in the BJP?s political cause. According to Ghanshyam Shah, in the 1991 elections kathakars like Morari Bapu were involved in the party?s campaign and ?attracted a cross-section of society both in urban and rural areas?.

Mass politics right from the Gandhian phase has been unable or unwilling to break the shackles of this public religiosity. In fact, as the historian David Hardiman points out, Gandhi and his followers were themselves not above using the idioms of caste and religion in political mobilisation. As early as 1920, Gandhi was to appeal to fellow members of his bania caste to, as good ?vaishnavites?, abstain from courts and schools run by the British government, whose rule he likened to ravanraj. Patel, likewise, played on caste traditions, and laid stress on themes like kshatriya martial virtues. It is not surprising at all that Gandhi should have harped on ramrajya as a political ideal. Vaishnav, kshatriya, ravanraj, ramrajya, all popular currency in the BJP?s rhetoric, have a long and respectable history in the mass politics of Gujarat. The state did not really witness the emergence of a politics that seriously tried to purge the public arena of its religious inflections.

As is to be expected, orthodox faith and values were nurtured within the bounds of an entrenched caste system. The mass politics that emerged in Gujarat could not escape the dynamics of caste and so chose by and large to be confined within it. Although caste divisions did not fully coincide with class divisions in the state, socio-economic power was predominantly in the hands of a few castes, i.e. patidars, brahmins and baniyas ? and to a much lesser extent the kshatriyas. Caste associations, some of them active in party politics, are a common feature of Gujarat?s public life. They include the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha and the Gujarat Kshatriya Sangh, the Patidar Yuvak Mandal, the Khedut Sangh and the Khedut Samaj, which are basically patidar organi-sations, the Prajapati Mandal and numerous others. These caste associations, besides undertaking welfare measures, function also as lobby groups seeking to influence politics in addition to manoeuvring for control of resources. Of these organised castes, the most powerful are the patidars, who in much of the state practically control the rural economy. Brahmins and baniyas, though insignificant as a proportion of the population, are economically and politically powerful by virtue of their dominance in professional services, industry and trade.

The politics of Gujarat has been based on the alliance between castes. The Congress party?s near monopoly of power was based on a patidar-brahmin-baniya leadership that brought together under a broad umbrella the dalit, tribal and Muslim electorate. The weak opposition in the state in the early period, the Swatantra Party, was primarily a kshatriya enterprise, allied to the leadership of dissenting patidar groups. Through the 1960s, the state legislature was dominated by a highly organised Congress party well-versed in the practice of an accommodative politics that did not fundamentally affect the socio-economic structure. As an efficient organisation that functioned both as a civic institution and a political machine, it perfected the technique of herding a large electoral constituency without altering the overall status quo. The patidars, brahmins and baniyas continued to dominate the economy while the dalits, tribals and Muslims continued to vote the Congress.

The moment of accommodation

In 1969, by the time the Swatantra Party was beginning to make inroads into the state legislature, the Indian National Congress experienced a nationwide split. The two groups that emerged were the Congress (Organisation), which inherited the party?s organisation, and Congress (Requisition), which had Indira Gandhi and a large part of the influential ?left-lean-ing? leadership of the parent party. A new political alli-ance slowly emerged, with the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O), both with orthodox social and economic programmes, align-ing with the Jan Sangh, which had no real policy to offer other than Hindu Rashtra. The split in the Congress is that moment when the public accommodation of Hindutva politics by the larger polity begins. The existing caste-political equations also began to break down. The two numeri-cally significant castes that were politically influential, the patidars and the kshatriyas became internally divided along political lines.

Over time, both the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O) disappeared, having merged, along with the Jan Sangh, into the Janata Party during the period of unstable politics that followed the split in the Congress. With the political opposition uniting against it and itself lacking any real organisation to combat the trend, the Congress, under Indira Gandhi, adopted a populist economic and political course. While that helped secure a wide base for the party at the electoral level, the lack of an organisation meant that the Congress was unable to deal with the growing forms of extra-parliamentary agitations that commenced with the Nav Nirman Movement of 1974. That movement unseated the Congress government and brought the combined opposition, including the Jan Sangh, to power. Hindu politics had tasted office for the first time in the country in the company of like-minded organisations.

The Congress returned to power after the Emergency of Indira Gandhi, once again without any real organisational structure, but with an infusion of new lumpen cadres. The caste-leadership of the post-Emergency Congress changed hands as the kshatriyas became more dominant. A peculiar aspect of kshatriya politics in Gujarat is that in the course of political mobilisation it redefined itself to include a large backward caste component, notably the kolis. This was to be of some significance in the nature of Congress politics, which in turn influenced to some extent the rise of Hindu politics. By the 1980s the Congress social alliance was based on what has come to be called the KHAM formula, ie an alliance of kshatriyas, harijans (dalits), adivasis (tribals) and Muslims. (see page 24) Through the period that the Congress held power this was the combination that gave Gujarat its gov-ernments. And through the period that these gov-ernments were in power the patidars, baniyas and brahmins continued to control the economy and some crucial nodes of the public sphere, such as the various levels of the state administration. And when the Congress, as part of its ?welfare populism? went through the motions of announ-cing measures that would benefit its socially and economically mar-ginalised constituency, the real managers of the economy and the public arena drifted towards an opposition that was gradually being dominated by

the BJP.

This was the period that the agitational politics mounted by social groups increasingly backed by the BJP, left the Congress governments in a state of political crisis. Organisational weakness obstructed substantive civic response on the part of the Congress to these agitations against benefits directed towards backward castes. As a consequence, the government simply retracted its policy measures. Welfare populism antagonised the elite. Its retraction and failure disillusioned the dispossessed. The Congress could not herd its own constituency. That constituency was now available to be politically recruited, at a time when the flavour of Hindutva was being systematically imparted to the society and polity by the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar, through its numerous organisations.

The Gujarat polity had been in an organisational vacuum from the time of the Congress split till the rise of the BJP. The seeming stability of Gujarati politics was to a large measure based on a stable sub-stratum of caste networks. That stable network which enabled the Congress Party to recruit its caste base also enabled the BJP to recruit its constituency. Welfare populism had given way to spiritual populism, the crucial difference being the latter?s level of organisational capacity. The BJP, through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, had created a dense complex of agitprop organisations that could engage in sectional caste-specific propoganda and simultaneously season it with the larger Hindutva ideology of the caste-Hindu leadership of the RSS and the BJP. The process by which a tribal population of 14 percent is conscripted into Hindutva?s ranks also renders an 8 percent Muslim population completely dis-pensable to an electoral politics many of whose rules have been redrafted by a vaishnavite orthodoxy. When reluctant Hindus become majoritarian enthusiasts, minorities too large to be ignored and too small to make a difference have no place under the protective umbrella of competitive politics.

In the 50 years after Indian independence, Gujarat has been transformed. It has been the laboratory of Gandhian politics, of civic institutions, the cooperative movement and the Hindutva campaign. It has become more urbanised, more industrial, has seen more social mobil-ity, and become more prosperous. It has also seen the re-emergence of an organised mass politics. The earlier phase of that organised politics, under the Congress, consciously divided the polity of the state along caste lines. The second phase, under the BJP, consciously divided the polity along communal lines. A state predominantly of Hindus had become a state predominantly of Hindutva. In 50 years a ?Hindu unity? had been engineered in a caste-divided state, and Muslim life had become as dispensable as the Muslim vote. The map of Gujarat in 1947 and the map in 1991 tell a chilling story. The price, paid and yet to be paid, cannot be counted.

http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/essay.htm

Himal , Nepal

India`s Fine Balance

by Dennis Kux

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002



500-word preview

Dennis Kux is Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A retired State Department South Asia specialist, he has written histories of U.S.-India and U.S.-Pakistan relations.

THE POST-9/11 AGENDA

When September 11 came, India responded rapidly and decisively. On learning of the terrorist attacks on the United States, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee convened his key advisers and they quickly decided that India would offer its full support for the U.S. war on terrorism.

Their decision was driven in part by India`s own problems with terrorism. For a decade, Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) had been orchestrating a nasty proxy war against India in Kashmir. Although the insurgency there was rooted in Kashmiri opposition to Indian rule, the ISI helped militant groups train, equip, and move jihadis, or ``freedom fighters,`` across the Line of Control, which separates Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir. In joining with Washington, New Delhi hoped to transform this latest and bloodiest chapter of 50 years of Indo-Pakistani conflict into part of the global war against terrorism -- with Pakistan`s ISI cast in the role of al Qaeda and India as the victim.

Seizing an opportunity to outmaneuver Pakistan while improving India`s relationship with the United States, however, is not the only item on Vajpayee`s post-9/11 agenda. He and his government must also handle domestic political crises and deadly communal violence while recharging India`s faltering economy. Failure to balance these various challenges could risk the government`s electoral mandate and slow India`s rise to great-power status.

MAKING UP

New Delhi`s prompt support for the war on terrorism marked a further step in the rapprochement with Washington that had begun in the final years of Bill Clinton`s presidency. For most of the last 50 years, the world`s two largest democracies have been far from friendly. Ties between them had plummeted only recently, when the United States imposed sanctions after India conducted nuclear tests in May 1998. Nine rounds of talks between Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh soon followed, helping to clear the air. The real turning point, however, came in mid-1999 when Clinton forcefully intervened to get Pakistan to withdraw the forces it had sent across the Line of Control in Kashmir near the town of Kargil. India had assumed that the United States would reflexively support Pakistan and was thus much impressed by the president`s action. In March 2000, Clinton followed up with a highly successful five-day trip to India and then went on to a perfunctory five-hour stopover in Pakistan. And in September 2000, Vajpayee had a positive return visit to the United States.

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he soon revealed his interest in continuing, and indeed intensifying, the rapprochement, and the Indians eagerly reciprocated. In April 2001, Bush ``dropped by`` Singh`s meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, leading to a cordial 40-minute talk in the Oval Office. When Bush unveiled his controversial nuclear missile defense proposals the next month, the Vajpayee government responded far more positively than did . . .

re: Harpreet

{The flashpoint for the latter was the burning of a train of fundamentalist Hindus by a gang of fundamentalist Muslims}

...since you are in england, perhaps you can write to the author of this article and ask him how small children, even babies, who muslims burned on that train were `fundamentalists`...if he can`t answer it, tell him to shove that article up his a$$...

Roohi #126

[...Please tell me that some of you across the border can find it in your heart to say ``this is wrong``....]


roohi bibi....this is wrong...utterly wrong...have said it before countless times...am totally against loss of even a single life...and cannot understand how one can kill the innocent...no matter what the cause...life is too precious to be squandered by lunatic individuals who hear voices from thin air or as a result of state sponsored, encouraged or facilitated terrorism....

...life is a treasure to be cherished...

...and mine is not a lonely voice from across...then are many more...why they do not come forward escapes me...

...have a disdain for i/p shouting matches and rounds of endless accusations and denials...but can tell you this...if mushy and coterie want to....they can make life difficult for any cross border incursion without passports!...whether they do not have the will or the muscle i do not know...

...sometimes i think the only hope is if we...the pakistani people come out and wrestle it out with the army...true, much blood will be spilled...but that is the only way the dark clouds can be dispelled...and if we succeed in sending the army back into their barracks for good or send them to a rendezvous with the promised houris....khas kum jehaan paak...but that does not look like happening...and we are doomed to live under this curse of `independence` or the curse of `jehalat`...

...it is a beautiful day outside and our lives are made so dark by politics and religion...

rau maiN hay rakh-shay umar daikhiyay kahaaN thamay
na haath hay baag pay na paa riqaab main

(hope have quoted the couplet correctly: is this right banjara?)

love,

t

Please tell me that some of you across the border can find it in your heart to say ``this is wrong``. What cause can justify this ? All you proud Suryavansi Rajput decendents please note the Chauhan family that was wiped out.

My Mum was in Jammu recently (just before the blast at the Temple there - now thankfully safe back in Brisbane listening to Sobroto`s Brisvani) and she sent me some lovely crewel throws (translation for men - Kashmiri chain stitch embroidery blankets) she bought from the Army Wifes Welfare Association in Jammu. I have them in my kids playroom - and it is very painful for me to have to wonder if anyone who worked on them was hurt or killed in that blast.

They come from posts to cremate their families

Jammu, May 16: Army jawans posted on the Indo-Pak border today made the painful journey to Jammu for the cremation of their wives, children and comrades in uniform.

Among those who were cremated at the Shastri Nagar Shamshan Ghat this afternoon: Havaldar H.S. Chauhan, his wife Reema and daughter Nitu, Premwati Devi, Avlodhan Devi, Lalita Devi and her son Amit Yadav and Poonam Devi.

Two children, Muli (6) and Anchal (8), were buried in the children’s graveyard opposite the Army Unit.

There was some controversy over sending the bodies to the native places of the soldiers for cremation, but the Defence Ministry clarified that the bodies were in no shape to be sent.

Some families from Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana took the bodies of their deceased kin back home for the last rites, sources said.

There were apprehension over the safety of families stationed at Army units while the jawans stood vigil at the border. And criticism over the Army’s reported delay in informing the next of kin. Suresh Singh Rathore, Chauhan’s brother-in-law, said they learnt of the massacre on the radio.

‘‘Army authorities did not inform us about the death of Chauhan or any of his family members despite our repeated phone calls from Uttar Pradesh. We learnt of their deaths only after we arrived here by the Jhelum Express this morning,’’ he said.

‘‘Had they informed us in good time, we would have hired a vehicle and brought our entire family, including our aged mother, to see Rama. She was the only sister of our five brothers,’’ Suresh added.

Maj General P Vij, Brigadier J S Sidhu, Brigadier Tiwari, COs and Chauhan’s colleagues laid wreaths on his body, which was wrapped in the tricolour. Wreaths were also laid by National Conference ministers, Harbans Singh and Ajay Sadhotra, besides Inspector General of Police C L Gupta, DIG Dilbagh Singh and SSP Farooq Khan.

Havaldar Chauhan’s body was then consigned to flames with full military honours.

Does anyone else read this mans column in Indian Express ?

http://www.indian-express.com/columnists/mush/index.html

soundmeister

Re: Harpreet #75:

``In India the bottom line is this: If you are a member of the Congress/BJP mafia, you can literally get away with MURDERING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT MEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN and never be punished. You have absolute impunity to commit mass murder at will.``

And your Reply #: 103

That is an utterly preposterous remark. Care to back it with some facts?

What facts do you need? Give me the name of one person who was convicted and punished for the murder of thousands of Sikhs in 1984, all over India. Same situation in Gujarat. After the misdeeds of congress, I became an avid supporter of BJP, however, they have proved to be no different. When personal prejudices, take the place of rule of law, then it no longer a civil society. It is the law of the jungle. We can not and should not hide our misdeed and errors. For if we do we will never correct them.

I am writing this, not because I have given up on India, but because, I care for India, and want it to be a society, I can be proud off. I am not a pessimist either. I have hope, that we are moving forward, even though we are prone to take two steps back for every three we take.

I also take heart, that we are building institutions that are strong and independent, and a population that is getting smarter and wiser. No party can take the population for granted any more.

Lastly, what is the logic of miss-spelling Harpreet`s name? Does that make you a better person?

Shammi #6 Mona #113

Yes but WHO can they pick to replace Sonia ... the congress has not had any popular leader since Rajeev was assasinated ...

I really wish some successful Indians who have already had a great career would come forward to serve their country in politics.

For example I`d vote for Narayan Murthy (INFOSYS) in a heartbeat or Kiran Bedi - why is politics largely confined only to criminals, hard core ideologues and political dynasties? Don`t you think people like Abdul Kalam (is he being considered for President), Azim Premji and Dr Yusuf Hamedi (CIPLA Chairman and an Indian Muslim-Jew, go figure!) could help provide some political (or other) leadership to Indian Muslims?

Soysauce#111

I understand your sentiments. In case you dont know, I am one of the most bitter critics of Sangh Parivar. Our duty in these times to send money to the victims of the riot and put pressure on the authorities so that the victims get the justice. But there is a VERY IMPORTANT distinction between internal and external threats. While it is in your capability to redress the internal grievances by means of voting, judicial system, and by siding with the aggrieved party, yo cant do anything about external threat. In the internal case,the interests of the aggrieved party are better served by rapproachment(sp?) with the others after justice being done, the interests of an external enemy are quite the opposite. The interests of the external enemy are better served by the mayhem and destruction of your country and there is little you can do to influence him. So the moral is:- in times of peace, put your house in order, do everything to increase amity and prosperity of the people as a whole, but when threatened by the enemy, unite and get ready for war. Always remember that the enemy`s interests are completely opposite to your own`s; so you have to obliterate him completely or be obliterated in due course of time, especially if the enemy is bent upon killing you(as pakistan).

[But that was before the BJP came into power, poisoning a democracy already made carious by corruption, and undermined by half a century of antagonism with Pakistan. I don`t know which was more appalling in Gujarat: the communal carnage itself, or the failure of the fire brigades and police - both Hindu- controlled - to intervene when the first Muslim villages were being torched; or the hesitation of the BJP home minister to mobilise the army to deal with the chaos. This failure of the government to provide basic protection for its citizens is sinister enough, but its baser achievement has been to change the nature of the Hindu/Muslim discourse at the roots of the country.]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4415458,00.html

Dost-Mittar, Stuka, Zafar, Prem, Shammi, Soundmeister, temporal, please read this article. Especially Soundmeister.

[Mystery of the rages that can consume us all

Robyn Davidson on ethnic violence

Saturday May 18, 2002

Elias Canetti, in Crowds And Power, uses metaphors of water, fire and swarm to distinguish types of crowd formation. There is a crowd like a river, slow and implacable (think of the millions going to bathe in the Ganges off the Benares ghats during the Kumbh festival), and there is a crowd like a fire (think of the quickly ignited/spreading/spent crowds involved in the recent incineration of entire villages in Gujarat). The flashpoint for the latter was the burning of a train of fundamentalist Hindus by a gang of fundamentalist Muslims]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4415458,00.html

-h-

soundmeister:103

You make a lot of suppositions about me.

[``In India the bottom line is this: If you are a member of the Congress/BJP mafia, you can literally get away with MURDERING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT MEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN and never be punished. You have absolute impunity to commit mass murder at will.``

That is an utterly preposterous remark. Care to back it with some facts?]

- The fact is that not a single person has been prosecuted or brought to account for the pogroms in 1984, 1992 nor does it look like anyone will be brought to account for what has happened in Gujarat in 2002. Unless you know otherwise, please give me the names, not only of the people who actually did the killing maiming looting and raping, but also the names of the Congress and BJP functionaries and affiliates who organised the lynchmobs that have been held to account by the criminal justice system of India for their actions. Remember, these are the ruling parties of the nation. Conceivably, it could be said to have formed a pattern, indeed, a culture of impunity.

[What prevents YOU---Mr. Upright moral righteousness himself--- from contesting an election or two or at least demanding some

accountability from those in power through all the constitutional aveneues open to you? Ranting to an adoring audience at some insignificant website doesn`t count, buddy.]

- Why do you equate pointing out that the two major political parties of India have both been involved in the sponsorship of and acquiescence to, mob violence in which thousands of innocent people have been killed, and which has polluted the very foundations of the Indian state, which failed to protect its people from attack by associates of its leaders, nor provide justice for them afterwards, to a form of “moral self-righteousness”?

[``India is not only the worlds largest democracy. We

can also take pride in being the worlds only pogrom

democracy.``

[Harpo, go fukk yourself.....]

- Soundmeister, learn some manners. Don’t make me cuss you, because I will end up making you cry.

[let me remind you that one of the bloodiest ``pogroms`` carried out in our country was the mindless carnage unleashed by those idiot Khalistanis back in the 80s and early 90s....]

- Do you really think I am a Khalistani?

[do I go around condemning your community memebers as bloodthirsty

warmongers?]

-What is my community? Seriously, tell me, what do you think “my community” is? I am an Indian, just like you Soundmeister. That is my community.

[I smile and admire your cute lil ``proud to be Sikh`` stickers and tut-tut sympathetically when you cry about how Hindus killed

your ilk mercilessly after Indira was shot....]

-Your ilk”? Once again, please explain, what is “my ilk”? You do not know the religious composition of my background so to protest against snide personal rhetoric based on a false supposition and ignorance is futile. But either way, that was a squalid and nasty comment.

Soundmeister, Sikhs as well as Hindus were killed by Khalistanis. But they got rightfully dealt with by KPS Gill in his clear up operation. I am happy about this. It allowed the virus to die, a communal virus that was unleashed from the laborotary by Mrs Gandhi to shore up Congress support in Punjab by splitting the Akali Dal. Many died, but the point is this: they were terrorists who had no support amongst the people of the Punjab. And they no longer exist, and have been sorted out, and held to account.

On the other hand, a certain number of the members and activists of the Congress party, the ruling body of India at the time, were, as well as the senior leadership being tacitly compliant through inaction, central to the massacres by organising lynchings, opening electoral registers to identify victims by name and address, a modus operandi which has been copied successfully by the Gujarati stormtroopers.

The point is this soundmeister. These massacres were carried out with the tacit approval of swathes of Congress and the BJP. This means that both of the main political blocs that form the political leadership of India have been tainted by the use of mob violence by their members in pursuance of political aims and expressive of, what amounts to, in varying degrees, crude majoritarian violence. When such actions have been legitimised, through non-punishment, one can discern, conceptually, a phenomenon, a pattern of administration in India, known as “pogrom democracy”. It is a provocative phrase, but in the light of outrage, what harm in provoking thought? I am not going to apologise for that. Certainly not to you. If India wants to absolve itself of this charge, her leadership in the form of these political parties will have to cleanse themselves:

(A) By calling to account through due process of law all those individuals, irrespective of their political connections, who were responsible for the killings in 1984, 1992 and 2002, and

(B) By ensuring that such events never occur again in the history of the Republic of India.

At the end of the day soundmeister, please explain to me why I should not criticise the politicians who have misruled India and live in corrupt splendour, and why any such criticism is deemed by you, in high invective, to be an attack not only on India itself, but seemingly, on your very identity as a…as a what? A Hindu? Oh please, don’t go around waving that flag in my face. It is so pathetic. I have Hindu blood myself.

Lastly, in conjunction with your earlier questioning of my very right to raise these issues, you made a snide remark about Sikhs that was in congruence with the general tone of outrage that you felt at my comments. What was most insidious about your post, though, was your insinuation, because of my Sikh heritage, that I am innately outside the loop of what is definable and acceptable as an Indian.

So for a moment I will confine myself to your definitions and speak as someone raised as a Sikh in a joint Hindu/Sikh family and describe to you my recent visit to Amritsar. Inscribed on the inner walls and pillars of the most sacred place in the whole of Sikhism (and for many Hindu Punjabis, for them too) are the names, organised by their army divisions, rank and file, of every single Sikh soldier that has been killed in all conflicts fought by India since independence. There are tens of thousands of them. Sikhs remembering the people that died for their Motherland, for India, commemorated in their most holiest of sacred spaces. Placing their martyrdom in the very physical centre of the Sikhs heart. Honouring them in the only way they feel commensurate to the sacrifice they made for their country, by inscribing the names of these patriots side by side with the marble that honours the very Gurus themselves. I didn’t see that at Benares of Haridwar. Are these dead soldiers “my ilk”? Or are they part of “your ilk”? What ilk are they soundmeister? What ilk am I again, describe to me. They died defending India, so that India could be free of tyranny, so that it could be a homeland for all its people, that would be the country where Hindus Muslims and Sikhs would live in amity and the oppressed could thrive. Without being subjected to the depredations wrought by a decadent, corrupt and increasing bigoted ruling elite. And I have to come here to Chowk in the year 2002 to be told and questioned by an uppity gobshite Indian telling me to keep my mouth shut because “Musharaff is marching to the LOC”, I have to listen to him after seeing the Golden Temple which commemorates in marble those brave Sikhs who died for India, and I question the motives and reality of what the ruling class has done to India, and you talk to me like that? I have to listen to the rabid rantings of someone questioning my legitimacy to comment on these things, who speaks from one side of his mouth of the Sikhs being questionable, bringing communalist thought to the equation because I criticised the political establishment of India and then talks of this as endangering Indias integrity by allowing “Musharaff march to the LOC”? He is saying this to me? Go to the Golden Temple and read the names of those Sikhs faujis who died and then talk to me again. My ilk indeed. Have some shame Indian.

-h-

3 months have past ,story of terror keep coming unending

http://www.telegraphindia.com/national.htm

CHHOTE MODI LIVES UP TO BADE MODI?S REPUTATION





FROM ASHIS CHAKRABARTI Ahmedabad, May 17: Rows of little mud-and-brick houses burnt and pulled down. Only one stands erect and unharmed. The reason: It has ?OM? painted on the front wall, signalling that it belonged to a Hindu family.

Another structure survives, though with a blackened hole that a bomb left on its front gate . It is the office of the Jan Sangharsh Manch, a civil rights group that took this slum of 1800 people, mostly Muslims, under its care three years ago. One man called Modi changed all that on March 1, leaving behind the rubble and emptiness where the slum stood for 30 years.

He isn?t Narendra Modi, who, as chief minister, was changing the face of Gujarat with blood and fire. The destroyer of this slum in Gomtipur, below the Khokhra railway over-bridge and opposite the walls of the closed Ambica textile mill, is police sub-inspector N.A. Modi. Since his March 1 charge on the slum, he is known in the neighbourhood as ?Chhote Modi?, whom the saffron brigade hails as a hero and the Muslims denounce as a devil.

The Gomtipur tale is a miniature of the bigger Gujarat story that the bigger Modi scripted in burnt Muslim neighbourhoods, not just houses, in the killing fields of Naroda-Patia, Paldi, Jamalpur, Chamanpura, Bapunagar and scores of other places in Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat.

Gomtipur has been just a shade different from the usual horror story from Gujarat. It is also the story of heroic resistance by a small band of ordinary men committed to fighting the Hindu communalists and their uniformed vanguards like sub-inspector Modi.

The saffron mob takes the stage before Chhote Modi makes his appearance. On February 28, a crowd of 500 people gather on the Khokhra overbridge and on the compounds of the adjoining railway employees? colony and start attacking the slum with stones. As frightened villagers leaves their homes and huddle in an opening behind their houses, Mohan Bundela, convener of the Manch, frantically calls up Gomtipur thana for help. ?I must have made a hundred calls but when three policemen came they only stood watching the crowds who curiously melt away after some time.?

Next morning the crowds come better prepared ? stormtroopers of the VHP and Bajrang Dal in their saffron headgear and armed with swords, tridents and stones. Enter Modi in his jeep. He is furious with Bundela for trying to protect the slum and its people.

?He told me as a Hindu I should be ashamed to side with the Muslims after the Godhra kand,? Bundela recounts.

Modi then goes on to show how Bundela should have stood, not with the slum dwellers, but with the crowd.

Modi, who is in plain clothes, asks his men to take out five cans of diesel from his jeep and hands them over to leaders of the mob. Soon, the slum comes down in flames. Fortunately, the Manch activists feared as much and had moved women and children beforehand out of harm?s way. Now, men too run for safety along the railway track and most of them are still in relief camps at Shah Alam dargah in the walled city.

Bundela too flees in his scooter, along with fellow activist Israel, but only to come back later to their one-room office to fight it out against Modi.

The Manch moved the high court against him and got an order issued for an inquiry by a deputy commissioner of police who never came. Modi and his men struck back ? first with threats and then with a bomb that damaged the office gate.

?We?d rather die than leave this place, which we know a promoter has been trying to get to build a hotel,? Bundela says. He and his Manch colleagues are determined to bring the slum-dwellers back once their houses are rebuilt ? and to fight the police officer. Modi refuses to speak because ?the matter is in the court?.

?You?ll hear the same stories of policemen not just standing by but actually taking part in mob violence everywhere,? says retired Chief Justice of Rajasthan High Court A.P. Ravani, whose testimony to the National Human Rights Commission against the government?s role in the carnage was among the most detailed.

Not just policemen, even ministers led some incidents of violence, either directing mobs on the streets or directing the police from behind. Revenue minister Haren Pandya and civil supplies minister Bharat Barot are known to have been out on the streets with violent mobs on February 28. ?Yes, I was in the crowds but not leading them. Actually, I called the police when trouble broke out at Paldi (his constituency),? Pandya told this correspondent.

Two other ministers ? Ashok Bhatt and I.K. Jadeja ? sat in police control rooms, the former at Ahmedabad and the latter at Gandhinagar ? almost through the violence on the 28th. The gory events of the first day of the pogrom showed how they controlled policemen.

Presiding over them all, of course, was chief minister Narendra Modi who called a meeting of senior police officials on 27th evening and reportedly asked them not to use ?force? during the next day?s bandh, which the VHP had called and the government supported to protest the killing of the ?Ramsevaks? at Godhra.

?It?s not just the killings, which are one, though the most gruesomely visible, part of state terrorism. It?s the subversion of the entire state machinery ? the police, bureaucracy, the law and the judiciary. I?m told the chief minister has asked for a list of judges trying to act independently,? Ravani says.

Terror, therefore, continues even if major killings have stopped ? at least for now.

To the Bhangi`s reply # 105 that is

I do not care whether you trace your illustriousness to Bhangis or Kanjars .

I do not like smelly kurta pajama clad( oh by the way I should add the ones that barely reach ankles), betel chewing , nonsense spouting cretin and their equally silly issues ( I mean ouled here)

And we are in respectable business unlike ``bhais`` with so many disparate interests that they cannot visit or live in their homelnad.

May the creator give you as much sense as you would like to have us believe.

http://www.dawn.com/2002/05/18/op.htm#4

``You are a very important and responsible citizen of this country. But you and your family are in danger and there is a threat to your life. I have come to warn you about this.`` (calling for economic boycott of Muslims)

.....

``In fact, a top state VHP leader has gone on record spelling out how they made plans to kill, burn and loot. Ironically, he was once a top literary figure of Gujarat.``

There is no irony...there is no bigot, no fanatic like an educated, economically well-off fanatic.