The Hindu : Vajpayee goes to Gujarat

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Friday, Apr 12, 2002

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Vajpayee goes to Gujarat

By Anjali Mody

The Prime Minister, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Narendra Modi, underlined that he is not willing to do more than make speeches.

IF EVER there was a sign that we are a tin-pot little country, it was unmistakably there at the Shah Alam Roza in Ahmedabad. The Prime Minister, of what claims not only to be the world's largest democracy but also a nuclear power, told the captive survivors of a bloody carnage and the world that he was just a bystander, as shocked by the unbelievable horror and inhumanity of what Gujarat was going through as the next man. It was tantamount to saying I am good for a couple of nuclear tests, but I cannot stop you being killed.

Hypocritical histrionics, 36 days after the carnage began, insult the meanest intelligence. It is to be hoped that those who persist — albeit with decreasing frequency — in suggesting that Atal Behari Vajpayee has statesman-like qualities will finally see the light. This Prime Minister is no statesman. He is a street-wise politician with a penchant for verbal fanfare. A rhetorician who has desperately tried to fill the long vacant space of `elder statesman' and failed. Failed because, as a woman at the relief camp at Shah Alam Roza said after his display of delayed anguish, actions speak louder than words.

But, Mr. Vajpayee is not a man of action (apart from the bus ride to Lahore, what has he done?). So he fills the void with words. He uses the vocabulary of a grander but less accountable age to give his empty rhetoric the weight of statesman-like pronouncements. In Ahmedabad, he asked the Chief Minister to follow "Raj Dharma", whatever that is. Why did he not, as the Prime Minister of a constitutional democracy should have, tell him to fulfil the constitutional responsibilities (samvaidhanik daitva) of a democratically-elected Government or get out? Was it because in doing so he would have implicated himself?

For, as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has pointed out in its preliminary report on the violence in Gujarat, it is the State's "primary and inescapable responsibility... to protect the right to life, liberty, equality and dignity of all those who constitute it". The State is the state of India. The Government in Delhi, as much as, if not more than, the Government in Gandhinangar, represents the State. If Narendra Modi's Government has failed in its primary and inescapable responsibility, so has Mr. Vajpayee's.

Mr. Modi's Ministers and MLAs were present at the scenes of the crime — in police control rooms and leading the mobs. Mr. Vajpayee's Government in New Delhi appears to have been there in spirit, going by the silence and the acceptance of the justifications. It has stood by and watched the massacre of innocents. And, it has commended the Gujarat Chief Minister for a job well done.

You may quibble about the words of support it has extended to Mr. Modi and his Government. The public posturing by the Prime Minister, the so-called straight talking in New Delhi, and the apparently implied dressing down in Ahmedabad are just the tools of a masterly political manoeuvrer. But there can be no quibble in the fact that by insisting that Gujarat's BJP Government remains in office, despite overwhelming evidence of its complicity in the carnage, Mr. Vajpayee has declared that he has no real complaint against Mr. Modi's dispensation.

The Prime Minister, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Modi throughout, underlined that he is not willing to do more than make speeches with the sort of rhetorical flourishes that work well in the television age. He made this amply clear in his refusal to accept the strong indictment of the Government of Gujarat by the NHRC. He said instead we must await the report of the one-man commission of inquiry set up by the Gujarat Government.

The commission is set up by a discredited Government, but we know that Mr .Vajpayee does not think it is discredited. One month after it was constituted, the Commission has not even begun the process of collecting evidence. K. G. Shah, who is the one-man commission, said the day before Mr. Vajpayee went to Ahmedabad that it could take him several years to complete its work. And the Prime Minister wants us to wait.

The NHRC, on the other hand, is mandated to do the work it does by an Act of Parliament (Human Rights Protection Act, 1993). It has constitutional validity. The NHRC, acting on its mandate, conducted its own preliminary fact finding, took evidence from victims, and asked the Gujarat Government for a response. The Government's response was a shambolic pastiche of fact and fiction, contradictory and filled with blatant lies and missing crucial pages. Despite this, the NHRC worked with speed and produced a preliminary report prior to the Prime Minister's Gujarat visit. Given the reality — even as presented by the Gujarat Government — its sharp criticism of the Modi regime was not unexpected.

Many believed that if the NHRC indicted the Gujarat Government, as it did, the Centre would finally be forced to make Mr. Modi go. The verdict of a constitutionally enabled agency of the state would be more difficult to ignore than the press. Instead, not so unpredictably, the Prime Minister has, in refusing to endorse its recommendations, sent a clear message: that the Gujarat Government does not need to be called to account by any of the constitutional processes that make our democracy work.

There is much misplaced sympathy for the Prime Minister: poor man, his hands are tied; the RSS will not let him act; he is very moved by what he has seen of Gujarat on TV; his last poetic whimper was that of a man alone and in anguish. This is all just claptrap from a middle class (and NDA coalition partners with claims to secularist ideals) desperately seeking a sane Sanghi. A Hindutvawadi with a heart. It's what feeds the myth of the right man in the wrong party that he has carefully cultivated.

For, Mr. Vajpayee understands this constituency; after all it includes influential journalists, TV pundits, image-makers and breakers. And, the coalition partners with vote banks to keep. He always has crumbs for them: he'd rather die than have Bajrang Dalwalas in Orissa shouting slogans for his long life, he thinks it is better to keep a distance from the violent proponents of Hindutva who almost brought his Government down over Ayodhya. Tear-jerking stuff.

He is given due deference. After all he is not only the Prime Minister of a democracy of 1 billion, but he has spent a lifetime in Parliament, and been a popular Foreign Minister. But, there is something hollow about it all. It is summed in the Hindi-film one liner that he threw at his captive audience: "With what face will I go abroad after all that has happened here".

Why, the same face that he took to Shah Alam Roza. The face of a politician who knew full well it would not have looked particularly good if he went abroad without having been to Gujarat first. A politician who, having taken the one hour and 20 minute flight to Ahmedabad, after 36 days of carnage, went abroad to say: "he situation is under control" .

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