NEW DELHI, 7 April — The prime minister is ashamed, but not ashamed enough to remove a man who shamed him, shamed Gujarat, and shamed India. Would the prime minister like the illusory comfort of precedence? I am not going to discuss communal riots, wretched and inhuman as they are. I am going to discuss previous Gujarats, seared on the memory like imperishable scars that need but a scratch to bleed again.
The skies of Assam were heavy and rain sent a trickle of chill through the windcheater. We had to walk for slightly less than an hour through paddy fields that had become rectangular pools, treading warily on the raised mud boundaries that marked a farmer’s possession, accompanied by our reflections, floating, horizontal on the water alongside.
Nellie was silent when we arrived, and it was a dreadful silence. The image of babies speared by sharp bamboos will not leave me; India Today had the courage to show those innocent deaths on its startling cover. Nothing happened to the Congress party chief minister of Assam in 1983.
The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was more worried that the coverage of Nellie would damage her image at the non-aligned summit that was taking place around that time in Delhi: What would her good friend Yasser Arafat, a special invitee in those days when he was a refugee abroad instead of a refugee at home, say? What would all the Muslim countries say?
In the event no one said anything, but there was sufficient concern in Delhi for a plea to be sent out that we self-censor the stories “in the national interest”. Television was a boring state monopoly then, and the daily newspapers were terribly discreet about such horror, so the newsmagazines were the only serious source of bother for the government.
Both India Today and Sunday felt that the national interest was better served by telling the nation the truth about itself. Naturally, no Congress leader in Assam or Delhi could be made accountable for Nellie, for that would be admission of guilt. Lese majeste was more important than human life.
I forget the precise year, but Vir Bahadur Singh was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when a familiar pall fell over Meerut. I just drove through the curfew lines in a white Ambassador; the police assumed that I must be some official, for who would be so foolish as to enter a zone of fear for any reason other than work?
The same gall took us into the frozen mohallas of the empty city, and amidst the blur one face and one sentence stands out: A mother, with trembling eyes, telling me that “they” had taken away her son. There was something in her eyes, in her voice, that convinced me that this was not just another arrest.
The truth lay on the banks of a canal outside the city where a handful of detainees was shot dead by the police in cold blood. Someone in the Home Ministry in Delhi had muttered that Muslims had become terrorists, and that they should be taught the same lesson that Sikh terrorists were being taught in Punjab. Lucknow was obedient. The Telegraph broke the story. Nothing happened. Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister.
Suddenly the argument was no longer about good governance, about the accountability of the chief minister, about a government’s responsibility toward the constitution of India, about morality, about values, about brutality.
The argument changed to the impact on the “Thakur vote” if Vir Bahadur was shifted. To the effect that the presence or absence of Vir Bahadur would have on a general election whose contours were already becoming visible to a government under fire from Bofors artillery. Nothing happened. Vir Bahadur was eventually removed by Rajiv but not because a mother’s eyes had trembled for her son.
Rajiv’s tenure started when the price of Indira Gandhi’s terrible assassination was paid by the horrific massacre of Sikhs. That was the first time I saw, and reported, a man being thrown to his death by fire: A Sikh, being burned outside Gurdwara Rakabganj.
P.V. Narasimha Rao was home minister then. Nothing could possibly happen to him, because his only contribution to the play of events was studied indifference. The puppeteers were elsewhere and in no mood to blame themselves.
After his election Rajiv sought and won over a young constituency by promising a different dream. That promise would have been cleaner without H.K.L. Bhagat and Buta Singh lurking around behind him, but the power of the moment carried many tides along.
The dream was killed not just by Bofors; it was also torched by the fires of communalism that Rajiv, consistently a victim of manipulative advice on this problem, lit, advertently or inadvertently. Buta Singh was home minister through the passions of Ayodhya, as city after city screamed with pain. Nothing happened to Buta Singh. The worst nightmare was Bhagalpur in 1989, when ghastly massacres took place just before the fateful general elections.
Rajiv, Buta Singh and Bihar’s Chief Mminister Satyendra Singh went to Bhagalpur. Rajiv was so incensed that he ordered the immediate transfer of the police officer in charge. But on the plane back to Delhi, the arguments began: The police officer was a thakur, and what would happen to the thakur vote in the elections... The police officer was reinstated.
This time however something did happen. The voters did not vote for Rajiv Gandhi in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Nearly 15 years later those voters still have not gone back to the Congress.
Nothing happened again when Narasimha Rao slept through havoc. Nothing ever happens when the political class washes its hands in blood. The only hope is that one day the people will happen to them.
Politicians have become too cynical to see even an obvious truth. The Indian vote bank has a clear law. To play with violence is to buy short and lend long. The politics of death is the short route to bankruptcy. There are no votes in death. Those who are protecting Narendra Modi for the single reason that he will be rewarded with a Hindu sweep in the next assembly elections have learned nothing from their own experience even, albeit in a less corrosive way, in Uttar Pradesh.
The monstrous madness that Modi let loose might have got some immediate response, because anger can blind anyone briefly; but hatred is too debilitating to last. Support for the temple did widen the BJP base; dalliance and compromise with the hysterical leaders of the VHP has now narrowed it. The crimes of Modi have already cost the BJP its credibility; they could now send it back to isolation.
The prime minister is not ashamed today because of the misrule of a Congress government; he is ashamed of the behavior of his own party chief minister, a man he selected himself. VHP leaders have responded by saying that they are ashamed of the prime minister. The distance is perhaps too great now to be bridged.
This trauma has turned an old belief of mine into a conviction: The one party that understands India’s Hindus the least is the BJP. India is not secular because India’s Muslims want it to be secular. Muslims at best are 15 percent of the population; 15 percent cannot determine the culture of 80 percent. India is secular because the overwhelming majority of Hindus want it to be secular.
Historically the BJP has been fighting a battle with this truth in order to change it. But in the last four years, its experience of power had begun to alter its perspective, a shift that was carefully calibrated by the prime minister himself. After four years, the hard-liners who kept the party in isolation ward have reasserted themselves and have begun to use the state machinery to divide and redivide Indians.
The cynicism of the political class has made their task easier. After all, who cares? The Congress is stained with its own sins, and the response of its leader to a crisis of this magnitude is from a prepared text rather than from the heart.
It has offered some token relief in the camps and shown no ability to understand the nature of the crisis or offered any way forward.
Both the BJP and the Congress are playing the politics of vote banks quite unaware that the banks they are searching for may be bankrupt. The best job that Sonia Gandhi can find for the Muslim leader she promoted to pre-eminence at this hour of national despair is to play an especially cruel joke on him.
What could be more sadistic than sending a Kashmiri Congressman to Kashmir? One gathers that Ghulam Nabi Azad has been told that Sonia wants to see him as chief minister of the state after the elections. We all know that Kashmir is a paradise. Sonia obviously thinks it is a fool’s paradise.
Sonia runs the Congress with the soul of a mannequin. But maybe that is what is needed these days. Maybe it is the arid soul of a mannequin that will make her the first Italian prime minister of India.
