The Hindu : A discriminatory exercise

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 14, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

A discriminatory exercise

THE `SURVEY' ORDERED by the Narendra Modi Government in Gujarat to collect information on Christian families and organisations has raised some disturbing questions about the real purpose behind the exercise. To begin with, it has all the trappings of a covert operation. The administration first denied it outright and then, very reluctantly, admitted that such a survey was indeed undertaken, but only at the "local level". And the State Home Minister, Amit Shah, would have one believe that it was initiated by way of response to a parliamentary query related to the anti-conversion law. The suggestion here is that the aim was to elicit from members of the Christian community data required for formulating a response to the question concerned. It is for the Parliament Secretariat to clarify the factual position whether the Gujarat Government had indeed been asked to provide such information. But the question arises, if it is indeed so, why the lack of transparency about the operation and the initial disclaimer by the administration? Going by the media reports, it is clear that the sort of information being sought during the `survey', which covers districts such as Ahmedabad, Banaskantha, Sabarkantha and Kutch, and the sources tapped are such as to render the entire operation highly suspect and sinister.

But then, BJP Governments in Gujarat have a record of resorting to such clandestine exercises as part of their strategy to realise the Sangh Parivar's majoritarian goals. Just about four years ago, the Keshubhai Patel regime set in motion what was officially described as a "routine" enquiry but really was a census operation of sorts directed against the Christian community, particularly the activities of its missionaries — and that was the time when churches and those engaged in religious propagation came in for attack by fanatical Hindu elements in various parts of the State. It required judicial intervention at the level of the High Court to restrain the Government from accomplishing that task. The latest survey is in a sense even more disquieting and dangerous in its implications. It has come in the context of the ruling BJP's perceived success with the `Modi brand' of Hindutva experimented in the recent Gujarat Assembly elections. What distinguished this `brand' is the vicious strategy of political mobilisation through a high-voltage hate campaign against the minority communities and this was on view in all its most horrendous aspects in the post-Godhra communal pogrom.

While any intensive community specific area-wise census-type survey is inherently discriminatory, it acquires the dimension of a potential tool of persecution when directed against a religious minority and when the one ordering it is a Government headed by someone like Mr. Narendra Modi whose commitment to majoritarian ideology has distinctly fascist strains. How, during the communal mayhem that followed the Godhra carnage, the Sangh Parivar's stormtroopers were fully armed with vital information about their `targets' as they went on the rampage in predominantly Muslim areas, killing people and looting property, and how the Modi regime in its own way `contributed' to the lawlessness are public knowledge. Given this context, if the Christian community sees in the latest `survey' a diabolical attempt by the Modi Government to pave the way for a post-Godhra type pogrom targeting it, it cannot certainly be faulted. After all, the Sangh Parivar is known to shift focus or change its immediate targets, picking up Muslims and Christians alternately, according to its own calculus. Significantly, the likes of Pravin Togadia have of late turned their attention to the Christians and the BJP leadership too, in pursuance of the party's declared intent to hark back to the hard Hindutva line, has been vigorously canvassing for an anti-conversion law (and for a Central legislation to ban cow slaughter). Against this backdrop, the explanation proffered by the Modi Government for undertaking the survey carries little conviction.

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