The Hindu : The wrong signals

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 19, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

The wrong signals

APPARENTLY CARRIED AWAY by the landslide victory the BJP has won in Gujarat helped by a Narendra Modi crafted anti-Muslim campaign of hate, the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has, yet again, allowed the `swayamsevak' in him, representing the core element of his persona, to get the better of his constitutional position as the head of Government, whose responsibilities transcend communal barriers. The thrust of Mr. Vajpayee's remarks at the BJP's Parliamentary Party meeting on Tuesday provides a throwback to the speech he made last April at a party rally in Goa where, in a shocking change of his deprecatory tune, he not only endorsed Mr. Modi's outrageous `action-reaction' theory (in a justification of the communal riots post-Godhra) but went to the extent of suggesting that the Muslims do not want to live in peace with people of other faiths. Witness, for instance, Mr. Vajpayee's taunting response to the widely shared apprehension about the almost certain prospect of the BJP trying to replicate the `Gujarat model'. More specifically, his counter-question — "will Godhra be repeated elsewhere?" — and his by-no-means-subtle attempt to attribute the meticulously planned minority-targeted communal pogrom (carried out by the Sangh Parivar elements) to the alleged failure of the Muslims to condemn the Godhra carnage strongly enough. The message is clear: the minority community has virtually brought upon itself the massacre and trauma by not speaking up vehemently against the grisly Godhra episode wherein a number of Ayodhya pilgrims and kar sevaks perished. And this is a classic case — and a cruelly ironic one at that — of the very community that has been the victim of persecutive attacks being put in the dock.

There is, of course, a sequential linkage between `Godhra' and the communal riots that swept across Gujarat for several days. But the harsh reality is that, long before `Godhra' happened, the Sangh Parivar outfits have been running for several years a sustained and highly provocative campaign of hate against the religious minorities turning the State into a communal tinderbox, so to say. The fact that an independent group of distinguished citizens has found adequate hard evidence to establish that the post-Godhra killings were not just `communal riots' but a genocide or a crime against humanity also speaks volumes about the sort of atmosphere that had been built up assiduously and calculatedly over the years by the Hindutva forces through their vicious anti-minority campaign. Given this context, by attempting to place the onus for the Gujarat happenings on the minority community (which has been at the receiving end) — when he ought to be, in fact, condemning the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and other affiliates of the RSS that have had a direct hand in the pogrom — Mr. Vajpayee has shown himself to be unapologetically partisan and in a manner that does little credit to the lofty constitutional office of Prime Minister. Even his reported advice to Mr. Modi — that he make a "new beginning" by carrying along with him even those who were opposed to the BJP — sounds more like what an indulgent parent tenders to a spoilt child than an admonition, much less a warning of the `mend yourself or else... ' variety. It is also singularly devoid of any specific directive on ensuring communal harmony and healing the wounds of the minority community.

What makes Mr. Vajpayee's anti-minority slant in his latest Godhra-related observations particularly worrying, coming as they do from one who is charged with the responsibility of upholding the rule of law, is the current political context where the `war cry' of the Hindutva forces has acquired an alarmingly shrill tone in the wake of the `success' of the so-called `Gujarat experiment'. Apart from what the BJP leadership has been saying about crushing the `pseudo-secularists', there are the likes of Praveen Togadia who are preposterously brazen about executing the majoritarian communal agenda. Mr. Togadia, for instance, has warned of the Hindutva opponents getting the "death sentence". And all this within a few days of the Gujarat poll results being out and with a new Modi Government yet to assume office. Mr. Vajpayee has certainly not sent the right signal of reassurance to the religious minority community by his patently Hindutva-friendly stance vis-a-vis Godhra and on what next after the Gujarat poll.

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