Punishing communal violence | Praful Bidwai

The News International, 28 June 2014


[Punishing communal violence] After President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to India’s parliament on behalf of the new government, many people have convinced themselves that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is committed to adopting a ‘moderate’, not hardline-Hindutva, stance; some predict he’ll evolve into a liberal ‘Modi 2.0’ who believes in reaching out to his opponents.

Some commentators point to Mukherjee’s announcement of a ‘national plan’ to prevent and control communal violence, and his reference to the religious minorities’ welfare. They also emphasise that Modi broke his silence on the lynching of a young Muslim professional in Pune by a Hindutva mob.

Many plead that Modi must be treated leniently as someone who has put the 2002 butchery of Gujarat’s Muslims behind himself; 12 years on, that ‘one-off’ error should be forgiven; Indians must learn to live with, and even love, the ‘new’ Modi – just as millions of ordinary Gujaratis have done.

This prescription is based on naïve assumptions. Announcing plans to control communal violence is nothing new. In 2005 too, the government adopted a 15-Point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities. Its last three points deal with “prevention of communal incidents”, speedy prosecution of cases of such violence, and adequate rehabilitation for its victims.

Modi has not yet spelt out what his own plan is – despite the stigma from the post-Godhra riots. So we must not be lured into believing that his attitude to communal violence has undergone a sea change.

Modi refuses to express remorse for the Gujarat carnage. He’s yet to get a clean legal chit for his role in it. Zakia Jaffri’s appeal hasn’t yet been decided by the Gujarat High Court, leave alone the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court indicted the Modi government in 2003-04 for failure to “observe its Raj Dharma” and accused it of criminal negligence: “The Neros … fiddled as Gujarat burned”. It transferred some Gujarat cases to Maharashtra for investigation and trial. Revealingly, the conviction rate in these was 39 percent, nearly eight times higher than in the cases tried in Gujarat.

So while it is futile and churlish to deny that Modi was elected prime minister in a basically free and fair election, it doesn’t follow that we should abandon the perfectly lawful and reasonable demand for bringing the culprits of the Gujarat carnage to justice.

The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide applies to Gujarat. The convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, including killing its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to them, and inflicting on it destructive “conditions of life…” etc.

Gen Augusto Pinochet was indicted by a Spanish magistrate 25 years after staging a bloody coup against Salvador Allende and perpetrating gross human rights violations in his native Chile. He was detained in London for a year and a half, and sent home for trial during the course of which he died before being convicted. There’s no time-bar on a mass-murder trial.

Forty Indian and international citizens’ enquiries have shown that the post-Godhra violence was conducted with the Modi government’s full complicity. To shield the culprits, state functionaries manipulated evidence, instituted bogus cases, and even organised fake encounters.

A number of mass killings and rapes took place in Naroda-Patiya, Best Bakery, and Gulberg Society as the police refused to intervene – often under instructions from above. The Gujarat High Court convicted minister Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi for the Naroda genocide.

In a ‘sting operation’, Bajrangi later confessed: “I am telling you if Narendra-bhai had not been there, we would have never come out… it’s all his handiwork…[his police] had total control over the entire city… in entire Gujarat…If I did not have the support of Narendra-bhai, we would not have been able to avenge Godhra… He had great influence….[He] posted a judge …. He neither saw the file or anything….. He just said granted…. We were free…”

Communal killings occurred under Congress rule too: the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, and anti-Muslim violence in Nellie, Bhagalpur, Bhiwandi and Mumbai. These must be condemned and their culprits punished – a long-standing civil society demand.

The 1984 violence was the worst of these. Yet, as the outstanding scholar-activist Jairus Banaji pointed out in a Delhi talk last February, no “genocidal consensus” got consolidated in Delhi. The city went into a shock, and the violence soon stopped.

In Gujarat, a ‘genocidal consensus’ stabilised; the killings went on for many weeks. To this day, there isn’t the slightest remorse for these among millions of Gujaratis. On the contrary, many have turned Modi into a messiah of ‘development’.

There is a lesson here from Italy and Germany, where millions of people hero-worshipped Mussolini and Hitler and delighted in their terrible crimes. When post-war Germany underwent superficial ‘de-Nazification’, these Hitler supporters refused to express remorse for their complicity in the crimes.

German psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich explored this in a major book, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour (Grove Press, 1975), using Freud’s ideas to explain the extended melancholia Germany experienced after the Holocaust. The nation, they concluded, was unable/unwilling to mourn the loss of the Jews. There was no release of emotion, but a deadening of sensibilities.

To be unable to mourn is to fail to discover what one has lost. As another great psychologist Robert Jay Lifton put in the book’s preface, “to be unable to mourn is to be unable to enter into the great human cycle of death and birth – to be unable, that is, to ‘live again’.”

As Germany got preoccupied with rebuilding its economy, Hitler's former admirers blamed the Fuehrer for everything (just as they had earlier blamed the Jews) while erasing segments of their own life from memory, and psychologically impoverishing themselves.

It took decades, beginning with public expression of regret in 1970 by Chancellor Willy Brandt (who fell on his knees in Warsaw to accept guilt for the suffering Germany had imposed on Poland), before the deliberate forgetting began to abate. Central to the process was the role of public intellectuals like Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Boll.

In Gujarat, the process hasn’t even begun. There are very few public intellectuals in the state. Large numbers of gullible Gujaratis, under the influence of communalism, regional chauvinism, and paranoia about ‘terrorism’, remain in a state of self-delusion and support Modi.

Modi has successfully spread that delusion nationwide through his massively corporate- and media-backed propaganda about Gujarat’s hyped-up “development” claims which paper over its middling-to-poor social indicators. Crucial here is his managerial style as a great doer.

That delusion cannot last. Modi will soon find that his promise to provide jobs to the 12 million people who enter the labour market annually cannot be delivered – certainly not through his ultra-capital-intensive Big Business-subservient model of growth. Nor will be easy to restore dynamism and balance to the economy. Modi’s test will come soon as the mega-projects he is pushing fail to fructify and the reality of ecological devastation by capital dawns upon the country.

Whatever happens to Modi’s government, justice for the Gujarat carnage remains an imperative if India is to become a society based on rule of law, accountability and compassion.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.

Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in