The Hindu : Disquieting incidents

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Saturday, Jun 01, 2002

Opinion

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Disquieting incidents

THE ERUPTION OF violence over the past few days, disrupting the palpably uneasy quiet that was descending on traumatised Gujarat only goes to show that the path to restoration of normality in the State is riddled with landmines. Ominous indeed is that several of the cities and towns affected by the recent disturbances are precisely the ones that had suffered the most in the three-month-long mayhem — Ahmedabad and Vadodara, for instance. And Godhra, which had remained largely unaffected by the orgy of mindless communal killings that followed the grisly Sabarmati Express torching episode of February 27, has also figured in the latest spell of violence; two persons were killed in the police action. At work are, clearly, forces that have a vested interest in perpetuating, and possibly even deepening, the communal cleavage and therefore want to frustrate all endeavours towards restoration of public peace and order, not to speak of harmony.

Theories abound as to the identity and motivation of the culprits behind the bomb blasts that occurred almost simultaneously in three different buses in Ahmedabad last Wednesday. On the face of it, the low technology-level of the explosive device employed points to the hand of some local elements who are bent upon sending a message or two to the Government and its beefed-up law enforcing agency under the `super cop' K.P.S. Gill. The spokesman of the Narendra Modi Ministry lost no time in calling the blasts a "terrorist act" and, what is more, in seeing a motivational nexus between it and the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf's May 27 speech. Equally quickly have also come allegations of the temporal proximity between the blasts and the arrest of some Sangh Parivar activists for their alleged involvement in a rioting case. Significantly, the revived violence in Godhra also has followed the filing of charge-sheets in the Sabarmati Express burning case.

Clearly, the security agencies have to put their act together fast and crack down on the subversive elements, whatever be their religious complexion, so that the message goes out loud and clear, and this acquires an urgency in the wake of the recent withdrawal of armed forces from the State for redeployment on the India-Pakistan border. Media reports suggest that, on top of the badly ruptured communal harmony, the uprooting of thousands of families — which also meant an army of jobless youth — and the availability of demolished structures in the riot-hit areas have combined to turn bomb-making into a flourishing `industry'; the seizure of huge stocks of explosives the police are reported to have effected during raids in the past few days only lends credence to it. In the immediate context, some quick strategic initiatives are called for to meet the new challenge, if what little progress that has been made so far towards the limited goal of "cessation of violence" — as Mr. Gill would like to describe his mandate — is not to be reversed. Particularly worrying are his statements (in a media interview) about possible "retaliatory terrorist attacks" and the Gujarat police's lack of equipment and training to deal with such a contingency.

More fundamentally, the fact that every act of subversion and heinous crime against civil society in the current Gujarat context has come to be reckoned in communal terms, with the majority and minority communities blaming each other, testifies to the highly divisive `us' versus `them' fixation. The gravity of the situation enjoins on civil society in general and the political class in particular to address the cankerous issue in all the seriousness it warrants, and this rules out any electoral contest for power which inevitably brings into play an array of divisive factors. Given that the proximity of the Assembly elections has in a way compounded the problem in Gujarat post-Godhra, it would be utterly irresponsible to talk of `early Assembly polls'.

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