The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, October 17, 2003
The BJP's long record of extremism & duplicity sits ill with its feigned moderation
Why we can't trust them
By Praful BidwaI
Whatever happens in Ayodhya today, it is plain that the sangh parivar, including the BJP, has decided to milk the Ram temple issue brazenly for political gains. The way the latest, hysterical, mobilisation was launched, led by Central minister Swami Chinmayanand, no less, and the manner in which the RSS-BJP have misinterpreted the Archaeological Survey report on the Ayodhya excavation as if it vindicated 'revenge against history', and decisively established the case for building only a temple and not a mosque, permit no other conclusion.
The BJP and its associates are playing with fire. The last time they sent karsevaks in significant numbers to Ayodhya was February last year. The result˜via the Ramsevaks‚ roguish behaviour on their return journeys, and repeated minor altercations with Muslim vendors in Godhra˜was the barbaric burning alive of 59 people and the reign of terror that followed, with the butchery of 2,000 Muslims with state complicity.
One can only (anxiously) speculate about the consequences of unleashing the same extremist forces once again. But it's clear that VHP and Shiv Sena fanatics cannot be trusted to behave moderately and peacefully.
Their entire agenda is inflammatory and provocative in the first place. It's to compound a horrible wrong˜the Babri demolition˜by visiting yet more vengeance upon the religious minorities, further humiliating them, and disenfranchising them politically and out of public life.
Yet, we have Prime Minister Vajpayee urging us to 'trust' the VHP. This is so counter-intuitive and so violently contradicted by experience and by the VHP's abusive descriptions of him, that it raises another question: can we trust Vajpayee and other 'moderate' BJP leaders?
The short answer, after the 11 year-long charade of investigation and prosecution in the Babri demolition case, is a resounding no. To start with, the government rigged the chargesheet, illegitimately splitting it and dropping the conspiracy charge from that assigned to the Rae Bareli Œspecial court‚. Thus, those guilty of planning, instigating and supervising a crime against the Constitution, would be tried for minor offences˜akin to booking a murderer for a parking offence.
Now it turns out that the Rae Bareli judge's verdict discharging L.K. Advani was based on flagrant misreading and distortion of a key eyewitness˜Anju Gupta, an IPS officer charged with Advani's security on D-Day. According to an Indian Express story, based on the judge's order, Gupta testified that Advani and other leaders provoked the mob with inflammatory speeches and made no effort to stop the demolition. 'Advani was sad only about the fact that people were falling off the domes and dying'.
According to Gupta, Advani appealed to the karsevaks to descend from the domes, but only because the mosque was being demolished from the inside. He fully participated in the celebrations that followed the fall of three domes. Uma Bharati and Ritambhara hugged him in ecstasy.
Gupta's account is fully corroborated not just by countless other eyewitnesses, including TV crew and print journalists, but above all, by the highly reliable, accurate reports of the Citizens‚ Commission on Ayodhya, comprised of Justices O. Chinappa Reddy, D.A. Desai and D.S. Tewatia, themselves based on the examination of 90 witnesses and cross-checking of numerous accounts.
Advani, say the reports, was pivotal to the well-planned conspiracy that led to the Babri demolition˜right through periodic mobilisations of the mid-1980s (he became BJP president in 1986), his Toyota rath-yatra of 1990, which left a bloody trail, to the nuts-and-bolts planning for December 6, which took place at a crucial closed-door meeting at Vinay Katiyar's Faizabad house the previous day, attended by, among others, the RSS's H.V. Seshadri and K.S. Sudarshan, VHP's Ashok Singhal and Vinay Katiyar, Shiv Sena's Moreshwar Save, and BJP's Pramod Mahajan.
Advani was the star speaker on December 6. At 11:45 a.m. he announced: "'We don't need bulldozers to pull down the mosque; [we can do it manually]" The assault on the mosque began. Advani ensured it would be completed without interruption by Central paramilitary forces whose entry he urged the karsevaks to block. (3:15 p.m.)
It's not so much VHP, but BJP leaders, who are being egregiously, disgracefully, duplicitous about the demolition˜to evade fair trial for a grievous crime against Indian democracy, and the wave of violence that followed it in 1993. The same Advani now declares that the Babri demolition, like the Gujarat pogrom, was an 'aberration'.
Even more disingenuously, Advani says there is nothing wrong in VHP and RSS members being appointed public prosecutors to try Gujarat's Hindutva culprits˜as part of a massive plan to shield them and subvert justice.
It is our collective shame that we have a Home Minister who has not heard of conflict of interest and who blithely ignores the appointment of countless VHP office-bearers, including general secretary Dilip Trivedi and Chetan Shah (who was asked to handle the Naroda-Patiya massacre, of a hundred people). He is equally blind to the filing of defective First Information Reports, in which the accused are unnamed, which are calculated to exonerate the guilty. Half the culprits in the Gujarat violence have already been acquitted.
To erase the truth from public memory, Advani resorts to blaming 'the system' and to mystifying the human/social agencies at work, and making them disappear! Thus, says Advani, the Gujarat pogrom 'should not have happened, but at the same time, the government or the ruling party cannot be blamed'. The pogrom could not have happened without Narendra Milosevic Modi's planning, coordination, encouragement and execution!
The psychopathology at work here suggests a huge disconnect from reality, now a Hindutva trademark. Take the series of self-congratulatory half- and full-page advertisements issued daily by the government since September 9 at public expense: 'ringing in the good times‚ about the economy (read, stockmarkets) being 'on a roll', when the 'flowers are blooming', 'expenses are settling', 'our country is prospering', 'our lives are changing', 'our tomorrow is promising', 'India Shining'!
These slogans are outrageously partisan and based on purely elite upper-class perceptions. They have nothing to do with the many problems that plague India: rising joblessness, acute power and drinking water shortages, collapse of public services (especially healthcare and primary education), increasing casualisation of labour, persistent deprivation, growing social discontent, rising personal insecurity, and disempowerment of vast numbers.
Nothing illustrates this better than three recent developments/events: the self-immolation in Mumbai by a long-unemployed former Tata contract employee; starvation deaths in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Bihar and above all in Jharkhand, now being reported and seriously investigated by Jean Dreze, Ramesh Sharan and the PUCL; and the rape of a Swiss diplomat in Delhi. These all reflect the iron in our soul, the rot and the sickness in our disgustingly hierarchical society, with its apathetic elite.
Rather than hysterically call for the death penalty for rape, as our loh-purush Home Minister is prone to do after the third incident, we should reflect soberly on what's going wrong: the coarsening of our public discourse; spread of Rambo-style Mera-Bharat-Mahan hypernationalism and viciously male-supremacist ideas; growing xenophobia, demonisation of 'the Other', and an obsession to 'get even' with them through violence; rampant corruption in the police which makes it complicit in crime; and a culture of impunity for the gravest of human rights violations. This is visible in Ayodhya, Mumbai, Delhi and Gujarat.
After all, was it a mere 'aberration' that Gujarat's Hindu nationalists used horrendous sexual violence and mass rape against Muslim women as instruments of vengeance and genocidal warfare? Was it only a joke that after Pokharan-II, the VHP wanted India declared a Hindu state, which had globally 'arrived'? Can Hindutva's malign, violent content and its contribution to social pathologies vanish merely by calling it 'cultural nationalism'?˜
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