The News International - August 26, 2004
BJP’S NEW STUNT
by Praful Bidwai
The Bharatiya Janata Party has proved to be a bad, terribly peevish, loser. It still behaves as if the last Parliament election were somehow stolen from it. Unable to prove relevant, or provide a half-way coherent opposition to the ruling United Progressive Alliance, it is looking for any issue on which to attack the government. The latest is the National Flag and the claim that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharati resigned last Monday because she was falsely implicated in a criminal case 10 years ago for the "crime" of hoisting the Flag in Hubli in Karnataka.
In reality, the story is more complicated-in fact, devious. Bharati wasn’t hoisting the flag in any old place, but in the Idgah Maidan-as part of the BJP’s anti-Muslim agitation in Karnataka. The charge against Bharati is not that she hoisted the Flag, but includes rioting, instigating a mob to violence, and attempt to murder. The BJP was trying to forcibly dislodge a Muslim organisation (Anjuman-i-Islam) from the Idgah. There is poetic justice in the way the law caught up with Bharati last week through an arrest warrant in that old case, now revived.
Earlier, Bharati had chosen to ignore more than 100 court summons and bailable warrants and as many 18 non-bailable warrants. The BJP’s response to the warrant is two-pronged. It claims the case is "political". And it has resorted to cheap, rabble-rousing nationalism by focusing on the National Flag-and distorting the real charges.
This is ironical because the BJP’s top leaders have their primary loyalty not to the Tricolour but to the RSS’s triangular saffron flag. For decades, the RSS rejected India’s National Flag, in particular its green (read, Islamic) colour band and the Ashoka Chakra (a Buddhist symbol of peace and good governance).
But let that pass. What acutely embarrasses the BJP is that the latest warrant comes bang in the middle of its own high-decibel campaign against "tainted" ministers in Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet. The BJP should have known better. Many of its top leaders, including L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, face criminal charges. Its own former president was caught accepting a huge bribe on camera in the Tehelka "sting" operation.
The BJP makes a curious distinction between "political" and "criminal" cases. It says its opponents violate laws, or are dacoits, murderers, etc., but its own leaders are charged with "political" offences-like razing the Babri mosque. This distinction is utterly, perniciously, spurious. The demolition was driven by communal hatred-a vile crime, whose gravity was compounded by the orgy of killing and arson that followed, leading to hundreds of deaths, especially in Mumbai. Such hate-acts are more reprehensible than individual crimes. They must be more severely punished.
Bharati’s offence at Hubli falls exactly within that category. This was part of the BJP’s effort to establish a toehold for itself in Karnataka. Baba Budangiri and Hubli were the two planks on which it incited violent anti-Muslim emotions. In the first case, the BJP-VHP tried to put a "Hindu" stamp on a shrine belonging to the composite sufi tradition. In Hubli, it polarised opinion by claiming, without evidence, that the land used as the Idgah had been appropriated by Muslims.
The most despicable part of that campaign of incitement was the abuse of the National Flag as a Hindutva symbol. Hindu communalists increasingly use this tactic to falsely equate the (religious) majority community with the nation. They challenge the minorities to prove their loyalty to the nation-by subordinating themselves to the majority. This illegitimate equation fits the pattern of profoundly anti-democratic majoritarian communalism. It distorts the true nature of the national community, comprised of equal citizens.
So it’s totally dishonest for Bharati to claim she’s being prosecuted for hoisting the Tricolour. The National Flag is a mere instrument in her cynical politics. If anything, its abuse makes Bharati’s offence graver. Bharati has decided to launch a Tiranga Yatra from Hubli to Jallianwala Bagh. But such stunts probably won’t have any impact. The public knows how to demarcate flag-hoisting from communal incitement.
The law, assuringly, may be similarly catching up with Narendra Milosevic Modi too. The Supreme Court of India has ordered Gujarat to review and reopen 2,100 cases of violence-or half the total-which were summarily closed on the pretext that the police could not trace the accused. New evidence is emerging at the Gujarat government-appointed (Nanavati-Shah) commission of inquiry of the Modi’s culpability. Testimonies by police officers and senior civil servants confirms that Modi himself took the decision to stir up emotions on Feb 27, 2002 by bringing the bodies of the Godhra victims to Ahmedabad. Former police chief K Chakravarthi has revealed that he ordered his officers to investigate the "conspiracy angle" to the post-Godhra violence-an implicit admission that it was pre-planned.
A specific allegation was made before the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal by a "highly placed source" (a former Gujarat minister) that a meeting was held on Feb 27 where Modi, some other senior ministers and police officials were present: "The senior-most police officials were told that they should expect a Hindu reaction after Godhra. They were told that they should not do anything to contain this reaction".
Other evidence is emerging too, especially from the Ahmedabad police commissioner P C Pande, joint commissioner M K Tandon, and additional director-general (intelligence) R B Sreekumar. This shows that the police communication system and the law-and-order machinery completely broke down in Gujarat. Thus, top police officials got to know about the Noroda-Patia and Gulberg Society incidents many hours after they occurred.
The local police were ordered not to report these by wireless because the communications system might get clogged! Even more eloquent is the 172-page affidavit by Sreekumar, which details the role of police officials and politicians in the post-Godhra violence. It says: "Officers at the decisive rung ... ignored the specific instructions from the official hierarchy on account of their getting direct verbal instructions from the senior political leaders of the ruling party."
This evidence should be used in the trial courts to convict the culprits. The Modi government cannot be expected to do this. It is the greatest culprit of all. The Central government must step in-by setting up a new inquiry commission and impleading itself as a party in all relevant litigation. The UPA owes this to the people of Gujarat and to India’s Constitution.
The UPA’s Common Minimum Programme promised to "to preserve, protect and promote social harmony and to enforce the law... to deal with all obscurantist and fundamentalist elements who seek to disturb social amity and peace". It has done little to bring justice to the Gujarati people. Gujarat, India’s greatest state-aided pogrom of a religious minority since Independence, did not even find a mention in Manmohan Singh’s first address to the nation. Nor did the word "secularism".
This void must be filled without delay. Gujarat was a case of genocidal violence. No society can claim to be civilised if it cannot punish genocide.
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