[Dawn - 11 December 2004 ]
Modi's plan takes shape
By Kuldip Nayar
Time is a great healer. I wish I could say that for Gujarat. Nearly three years ago, the BJP, nay, its state chief minister Narendra Modi, had instigated the killing and uprooting of thousands of Muslims. Wounds are far from healed and those who inflicted them stay in power.
I vainly searched for some embers of understanding in the heap of scotched hopes. There was no repentance, no remorse among those who directly or indirectly participated in what was ethnic cleansing. True, the refugee camps have been wound up.
Many of the houses which the mob had destroyed with the help of police have come up. The victims too have fallen to silence after repeatedly narrating their tales of woe. Yet something tugged me from within to tell that peace was superficial.
Ahmedabad, where I spent three days, appears normal. The traffic is heavy as usual and shops full of goods and customers. But whatever trust was built between Hindus and Muslims after the 1969 riots lay shattered.
Then the state was helpless, not a party, and many people tried to put the pieces together to span the distance the two communities had developed. Today the state itself is opposed to any effort at conciliation.
The dwindling tribe of Gandhians and some youthful human rights activists are trying to help people restart their life and to revive Hindu-Muslim unity in the land of Mahatma Gandhi. But they find most Gujaratis so alienated and the government so hostile that it is difficult to have even a place to hold their meetings in the open. The annual meeting of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) took place behind closed doors.
Modi is so hostile to persons helping Muslims that he does everything to make their life miserable. It is as if he fears that the whole "work" he has done to polarize society may face some sort of danger.
The detention of a leading lawyer, H.N. Jhela, is a typical example. He has been fighting the cases of wrongfully detained Muslims. That he has been sent to jail has irked even the contaminated bar at Ahmedabad.
The lawyers have observed strike to voice their grievance. So much so, that the public prosecutor refused to appear for the government. Modi is not affected by such protests.
For him, Gujarat is a laboratory to experiment with the BJP's new thinking to permanently divide society along religious lines. Most of the people have been taken in because he has wrapped Hindutva in the identity cover. They feel Modi is winning the Gujaratis an identity which even Sardar Patel, the son of the soil who was India's first home minister, had failed to do.
Strange, even the educated do not feel that in the name of dignity they are heaping indignities on the Muslim population. The jingling of coins - Gujarat is a prosperous state - is not letting the majority of Hindus in the state listen to the feeble cry of the suppressed minority.
Modi's experiment has succeeded to the extent that both Hindus and Muslims have been segregated. They live in separate localities. A sense of insecurity haunts both of them.
So much so that a Muslim judge of the high court has preferred a congested Muslim habitation to a sprawling government-allotted bungalow. This is no triumph for the BJP because Modi has ghettoed the Hindus as well. They do not dare go to Muslims localities. Even government buses take a detour of six, seven kilometres to avoid a locality like Juapur, known as mini-Pakistan.
Of course, Muslims are the worst sufferers because they have been boycotted economically. Very few Hindus buy from their shops. Contacts at the social level have been decreasing for some years; they have become still fewer. Prospects of jobs for Muslims have never been bright.
They have become bleaker because there is now a blatant scheme not to employ them at all. Some Muslims have migrated to other states. A few who have returned feel lost.
"My wife has told me many a time to send the children out," says a Muslim whose family made sacrifices during the independence movement. "I have told her that things will improve."
But the tragedy with Gujarat is that the chief minister himself sees to it that the situation does not normalize and that the distance between Hindus and Muslims does not lessen.
Several human rights activists told me that conditions had "deteriorated" since the carnage. On the one hand, many Muslims are growing beards and women wearing burqas to register their identity and, on the other, Hindus are feeling that "the Muslims are again rearing their heads." They continue to justify that what happened to the Muslims on the grounds that "it was coming to them."
The Gujarat unit of the PUCL does not hide its concern. It is conscious of the "enormous task before it." But it finds the government "uncooperative" and most Hindus "unconcerned."
In a report, it says: "While the government is callously indifferent, the people are yet to be awakened." It recalls the days of the emergency saying, "Gujarat was an oasis of individual freedom and human rights." But it is no use of harking back to the past. The Gujaratis live in terror and dare not say anything against what Modi is doing lest they should be punished as some have been for expressing their protest.
Modi is no less authoritarian than Mrs Indira Gandhi was. The backing of the BJP high command has made him ride roughshod over others' rights. The majority of the BJP MLAs are against him and his predecessor Keshubhai Patel has conveyed this to the party leaders in Delhi. But the RSS is reportedly in favour of all that Modi is doing to establish a "Hindu rashtra."
As for the civil servants, they are part and parcel of Modi's dictatorial set-up. The fear generated by the mere threat of taking action even under the amended POTA is so pervasive that the general run of public servants act as willing tools of tyranny Their sole motivation for being "yes men" is the desire for self-protection, the desire for survival.
Sensing this, Modi has appointed civil servants as chairmen of boards and corporations. His secretariat directly controls them. MLAs who normally head such bodies are resentful but fall in line because of the instructions of the party bosses from New Delhi. If there was a free and fair election for leadership by the BJP MLAs, Modi would be ousted in no time.
In the case of police, it is worse because Modi bypasses even the district superintendent of police and orders the officer in charge of a police station directly how to act and when. Atrocities committed in police custody are innumerable.
One example is that of Rajkot where the police applied tiger balm to the eyes of the seven accused. Again, some time ago, a home guard killed an innocent young man at Millatnagar, Ahmedabad. But no action is taken against those who commit such crimes.
Recent developments - Zahira Shiekh's (main witness during the Best Bakery carnage) retractions - suggest that what the Gujarat police and administration was attempting is nothing but a repeat of the very fraud, for which they were severely castigated by the Supreme Court only a few months ago. But neither Modi nor the BJP high command is bothered. They have a different plan.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
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