The Hindu : Too little too late?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 03, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Too little too late?

By Anjali Mody

NEW DELHI MAY 2. A grateful Gujarat must applaud, and apparently so should the rest of us. The Prime Minister has announced a Rs. 150-crore package for the "economic rehabilitation'' of the victims of Gujarat violence. The Government says that it has taken "some steps under Article 355''. Two months and two days after the carnage began, it is all too little too late.

Any serious effort at helping restart lives is premised on a correct record of damage and death. In Gujarat, the official figure for the dead is around 900, far lower than the real number. Even where people have provided eyewitness testimonies of family members killed, the Government figures are lower.

The Union Law Minister, Arun Jaitley, contesting reports that relief and rehabilitation measures were not properly undertaken, reeled off statistics of the numbers who had received the death compensation of Rs. 1.5 lakhs and other components of the relief package.

But, there are over 2,000 people `missing' in the State since the violence began. The Government refuses to accept that they are dead. Their families must have a death certificate to claim the compensation for the dead. Minus a body this is impossible. There are also widows who for the same reason are not accepted as widows. So much for the Prime Minister's special package for widows!

The Prime Minister's package is also premised on the willingness and ability of survivors to return to their old homes, to rebuild old lives.

So far, the local administration's efforts to force people to return to their old homes have mostly fallen flat. In many cases because their Hindu neighbours will not let them come back.

Gujarat today is a State divided against itself. Will the Prime Minister's "package'' heal the wounds of Gujarat? Wounds that have festered in the month between the Prime Minister's first "informal'' offer of a rehabilitation package to the State Government and its rejection by the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi.

Now that the package has been officially announced, will the Chief Minister ensure that it works for the people it is intended for? Clearly, the Prime Minister does not believe he will; the Cabinet Secretariat has been made responsible for monitoring it. A month ago, the Cabinet Secretary was said to be overseeing the relief work. This did nothing to alter the fact that relief is not a priority of the Modi Government.

There has also been a great deal of talk about the importance of rebuilding the confidence of Gujarat's Muslims in restoring peace to the State.

But the NDA Government's performance in Parliament gave little reason to suggest that this was something it was seriously engaged in. Recrimination, justification, lies and dubious statistics were their defence. Union Minister after Union Minister tore to shreds any hope that the Government took the business of peace and re-building confidence in Gujarat seriously.

The Sports Minister, Uma Bharti, set the tone for the Government side. She focussed on Islamic fundamentalism and asked Parliament to "realise how Hindus feel'', and how "they are driven to extremism''. Godhra was the work of international terrorists with "links to the Congress''. She said there was no "evidence'' to corroborate eyewitness accounts of barbaric rape.

The Defence Minister, George Fernandes, set a new standard for low-level political vituperation. He wanted to know why the Opposition was "going on and on'' about pregnant women being raped and killed and children being raped in front of their mothers, which was nothing new. As if barbarism was made somehow unremarkable by its repetition.

The Law Minister, who tried to sound conciliatory given that the Government had decided to support the Opposition motion in the Rajya Sabha, spewed out the Gujarat Government's statistics of arrests and FIRs lodged. The fact that police had filed FIRs naming "mobs" and refused to register those which named senior Ministers. Mr. Jaitley said the Government would take a very serious view of this.

The Prime Minister, too, remained equivocal. He said the atrocities against women had been "exaggerated''. The fact is a Prime Minister, who cannot ensure justice to the most disempowered but still disbelieves the accounts of the crimes committed against them, does not hold out much by way of giving them hope.

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