Tehelka
Jan 28, 2006
Method Madness
Why another book on Gujarat? Because Dionne Bunsha’s resolutely honest report is a powerful mirror to ourselves, says Amit Sengupta
There are 45 meticulously researched reports on the Gujarat genocide, including the two volume citizen’s tribunal report penned by former judges, testimonies of the brutalisation of women by Hindutva mobs, several short films and books, thousands of columns, an extraordinary film (Mr and Mrs Iyer) by Aparna Sen, and another brilliant English film (Parzania by Rahul Dholakia) which is yet to be released. So why, yet again, another book on the method in the madness that stalked Gujarat?
This is because the method continues to stalk the nation’s political unconscious till this day. Winter 2006, the lab of hate politics still strong, legitimate, intensely xenophobic, backed by the pracharak-knicker-trishul regime, with that board pasted outside ghettoised localities: Welcome to Hindu Rashtra. Because this genocide is a rupture in the social psychology of this nation, like the Babri masjid demolition and the serial killings that followed. Because it was pre-planned, State sponsored, executed by the VHP, in direct alliance with the Narendra Modi regime, tacitly backed by the bjp-led nda in Delhi. This is because the barbarism was much too schizophrenic (Jai Sri Ram as graffiti on the wall of a mosque with the blood of a murdered man), whereby burning alive or gang rapes in public became a special celebration, a spectacle.
We all realised, then, this is how, finally, fascism works, reaches its dream-zenith, becomes mythic realism, the victory of the pure supremacist race, the holocaust before the Hindu Rashtra — Guru Golwalkar’s reincarnation of Hitler’s Aryan paradigm. That is why every time Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal of the VHP, vanguards of the RSS, repeated that the “successful experiment” of Gujarat will be repeated all over India, we believed them.
That is why this book becomes integral to our cracked pluralist consciousness. A reporter’s honest diary inside the relief camps of the imagined communities, through the graveyards of those who saw it all and survived. Every fact is researched and double-checked, every report is on the spot, every sentence is a tryst with truth.
The revelation in Dionne Bunsha’s book is not sudden; she had filed incredible reports in the Frontlilne earlier. But what is strikingly stoic is that Scarred is a serious political and sociological narrative: it engages with the minds of the masses, the infinite process of injustice, the hundreds of Muslims in prisons, often falsely accused, Muslims branded as terrorists and criminals, refugees in their own land, while the killers roam free patronised by the rulers. Then there are the borders inside are own geographies, the cracked mirror of the media , the endless court cases, the false prophets, the murder of Gandhi’s values, the schooling of stereotypes and prejudices.
Scarred is not dark, it is one assured step forward inside the darkness, to explore light. And what is beautiful is that it does not carry the baggage of secular intellectualism: Bunsha’s book is lucid even when caught in the most dense human tragedies. It’s straightforward, honest to the core, a reporter’s authentic notebook on the scars that have refused to heal. Says the post-script, the last sentence of the book: “Could such a tragedy happen again? No one knows.”
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