By Shehzad Poonawalla,
Nine years ago, as Indians woke up to what seemed like a dull, uneventful Wednesday morning on the 27th of February 2002, little did they know that what lay ahead of them was a political conspiracy that would play itself out, much like Hitler’s Final Solution, ironically in the state of Gujarat – the birthplace of a messiah of peace and ahimsa namely Mahatma Gandhi. Little did they know that the fire, raging through the crammed coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express stalled just outside Godhra Station, which claimed 59 lives (some of whom were VHP Karsevaks returning from Ayodhya) and the cause of which is yet to be known conclusively, would be fuelled by such a brand of venomous right-winged propaganda, that it would burn the biggest hole in the secular fabric of India. Little did they know that religious hatred would be directed with such ferocity and clinical precision (voter lists being used to target Muslim shops and localities, swords and country pistols being sourced in bulk from Punjab and UP, prior to the riots, to arm the aggressors and the men in uniform and the state bureaucracy facilitating the rioters to fulfill the wishes of the ruling political class) that it would leave thousands dead and lakhs homeless, an overwhelming majority of which would be the Muslims of Gujarat, thereby belying the claims of “India’s modern day Nero”, (a title thought fit by the Supreme Court to describe Chief Minister Narendra Modi) that the post-Godhra riots were a “spontaneous backlash”.
The Gujrat riots, described as a “blot on the nation” by none other than the BJP Prime Minister Vajpayee, was an assault on the psyche of the Indian Muslim which had just about begun to heal itself after the Babri Masjid demolition and the 1992-93 Bombay riots.
I was fourteen when the riots in Gujarat took place and was still too young to comprehend the impact such an event could have had on the collective consciousness of a community. Having visited Gujarat on six occasions thereafter and speaking to a cross-section of Indian Muslims I have tried to gauge the sense of insecurity and fear that has been instilled in them and found that ghettoization, the need to wear one’s identity on one’s sleeve and a sense of victimization are the common symptoms experienced across different age-groups. A student preparing for the GPSC examination tells me about how the odds were stacked against him making the cut and cites the extremely low proportion of Muslims in the state bureaucracy as proof to substantiate his claim. An elderly woman points out the large presence of gun-toting policemen and administrative discrimination in supply of clean water and other basic civic amenities in the Muslim dominated localities as compared to the Hindu dominated ones. “Eid is no longer celebrated with the same gusto” I am told by a resident of Naroda Patiya which allegedly saw a fiery BJP MLA Mayaben Kodnani egging the mob to “hunt down Muslims and kill them” on 28thFebruary 2002. Ninety-five people were eventually killed and several women were raped and brutalized here during the riots, in what was termed as “a case of wanton, mass carnage, almost unparalleled in modern society” by the Gujarat High Court. I could hardly miss the irony when I heard one of Gandhiji’s favorite songs “Vaishnav Janto tene kahiye, je peed paraee jaane re” playing out in those eerie by-lanes while I walked through them.
I am flabbergasted when I hear the oft-repeated justification of the 2002 riots that “at least Narendra Modi provides good governance and has a clean image”. Easy for those to say who haven’t really suffered the pain of losing a dear one to a meaningless exhibition of political masculinity I suppose! I fail to understand how sections of the educated, middle class of India and even the media get carried away by his “Vibrant Gujarat” propaganda. A major study recently conducted shows that minorities fare very badly on the parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues. It further highlights that levels of hunger are high in Gujarat alongside Orissa and Bihar. The sex ratio in Gujarat is appalling and stands at 886 females per 1000 males compared to the national average of 914/1000 in the 2011 census. Poverty amongst Gujarati Muslims is 8 times more pronounced than high caste Hindus and 50% more than OBCs. Twelve per cent Muslims have bank accounts but only 2.6% of them get bank loans – all indicative of a biased and insensitive administration. And I beg to know- what is so “vibrant” about the state of Gujarat when the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) highlights that it is worse than Bihar when it comes to educational standards? Gujarat has been doing miserably in social development indices and its budgetary allotment in this sector has been quite low under Modi’s regime compared to other large states. So even if he is hailed as a CM who has made Gujarat more business-friendly the truth remains that he has been a poor manager of its human resources. Moreover, the claim that Modi is behind the Gujarat growth story is far from true simply because Gujarat has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As part of his brilliant PR strategy Narendra Modi has been claiming that his government has managed to attract thousands of crores as investments by entering into MoUs with industrialists but the unflattering truth is that only 20.28% projects are under implementation in Gujarat. Agriculture too paints a gloomy picture in Gujarat with almost 40% farmers wanting to shift out of the profession. Despite this, for some reason that defies logic and perhaps constitutional decency, Modi remains a poster-boy of a small yet vocal section of people.
Notwithstanding this, Indian Muslims are trying to move on. But the Sangh Parivar keeps serving its old wine or would you say old poison in a new bottle- for instance the Varun Gandhi rhetoric in Pilibhit or its hostile and contemptuous stance on the Sachar Committee Report and Mishra Commission Report. The cultural misrepresentations propagated by the Sangh Parivar (including propaganda of how the Muslim population was going to overtake the Hindu population or how Indian Muslims owe allegiance to Pakistan) and the slow wheels of justice, social and political, especially for the victims of Gujarat and Bombay riots, have further alienated Indian Muslims. On the other side of the spectrum, Islamist fundamentalists like SIMI, Indian Mujahideen, LeT, sponsored by anti-India elements in Pakistan (and perhaps China), have tried to use the events that took place in the post-Godhra riots and the treatment meted out to Muslims in Modi’s Gujarat as a rallying point for radicalization amongst Muslims especially the younger ones.
Today, due to the absence of a socially vocal middle class (a problem that was created by the Muslim middle and upper class shifting base to Pakistan during partition and was enhanced thanks to the lack of economic opportunities) the Muslim community has a more pronounced divide between the “Haves” and “Have Nots”. This class divide has prevented the emergence of a civil society from the Muslim community. Consequently, the voice of the liberal Muslim has got muffled in the huge din created by hardliners on both sides.
But all is not lost. People like Vir Singh Rathod, who hid 65 Muslims for four days in his house in Ahmedabad during the riots keep the faith of the Muslim community alive in the Nehruvian idea of a secular and equitable India. It gives the Indian Muslims the moral strength to fight communal forces on both sides of the spectrum. And this is best reflected when a victim who has lost all his family members in the Gujarat riots still believes in the tenets of Islam and says ’‘Who so ever kills a human being, it shall be as if he has killed all of humanity, and who so ever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all of humanity.’‘(Surah 5:32).
Jai Hind !
(The author is law graduate from Pune’s Indian Law Society and a political activist)