The Modi Factor and Massacres of the Innocent I K Shukla

The Modi Factor and Massacres of the Innocent

I K Shukla

Published on February 13, 2007

Well timed in the evening, targeting Eid and Diwali shoppers for dramatic effect, the three bomb blasts in Delhiï¿½s three most populous and popular areas on Oct.29 destroyed far more than only 70 innocent lives and over 115 injured. Whose purpose this wanton massacre served, how it advanced a cause, whom the criminals sought to avenge, whom they so brutally taught a lesson, whether this is a prologue to the series of blasts in gestation, and where and when next ï¿½ we will never know, because our law and order machinery is unwilling and unable to probe it all. As has been the practice thus far, glibly or sagely it can all be laid at the doors of ISI, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and, of course, the ubiquitous monster Al Qaeda, which goes on getting invented endlessly for a multiplicity of purposes and by a slew of ever ready users.

First, the police alacrity post-blasts. The whole city was covered with police patrol. Isnï¿½t that something the citizenry is expected to be grateful for? Why the intelligence failed to prime itself prior to the mayhem, or why it did not consider posting patrols in the dense shopping centres when it had received intimations of such threats materializing soon, which was what it could and should have done as the most minimum required in the name of civil safety, passes understanding. But, the establishment will not admit it was careless or clueless or incompetent.

The other, ancillary question, from just not the usual run of skeptics. Why was this carnage timed to burn and blacken the bonhomie increasingly gathering strength and volume between the peoples of Pakistan and India? Whoever did it must have a vested interest in keeping the jihadi or patriotic pot boiling. Not above suspicion are the two nationsï¿½ institutional cabals of warmongers who, with peace and normalcy prospectively regnant, will be grievously bereft of their vested interest, their venal cause. These cabals can be political heavyweights, political parties, and the entrenched bureaucracies of the two nations who have to upstage each other just for the fun of it- grandstanding, keeping the other flustered and short of breath are such pure fun in underhand politicking!

One aspect that by some unwritten but suspicious compact, always gets omitted from consideration, both in the media and government circles, is the Modi Factor. This is a small name for a large but lethal enterprise. The enterprise is Hindutva : liquidation of minorities in well-planned series of massacres, seemingly random, localized, and dressed up as ï¿½reactionï¿½. This experiment of ethnic cleansing has signally succeeded in Gujarat. The plight of Gujarat Muslims ever since the 2002 genocide has remained abysmal, if the recent reports of Kuldip Nayar and Harsh Mander are any guide.

No criminals were punished. Killers, rapists, arsonists, thugs and assassins were lionized as Hindu heroes. The saffronazi cult of crime and the dagger-invested brotherhood of mobsters, upgraded, the former as Hindu religion and the latter as its exemplars, were admitted, without any shame or apology or remorse, into national polity as legitimate constituents. It is this which on the one hand has led to a feeling of helplessness and humiliation among the victims and survivors, the state reduced in this perception as complicit or co-sponsor of the crimes of Hindu terrorists, and on the other a very starkly demonstrable proof of a failed state catering with determination to the interests of fascist gangsters and theo-terrorists, which cannot be confronted other than by its own methods of terror and tyranny, indiscriminate, endless, and unrelenting.

The continual murders of Christians all over and their churches being vandalized and burnt, the non-stop murders of Muslims, more grimly and recurrently in western UP, the calls by Hindu outfits on BJP aggressively to pursue the Hindutva agenda, their main warlord Sudarshanï¿½s assertion that there are no minorities in India except Parsis and Jews, and any slight concession to justice or even a modicum of legalistic equality in bourgeois terms is tantamount to appeasement, none of them being arrested or prosecuted for harboring killers and funding criminals ï¿½ all the mounting congeries of ever swelling volume of violence and terror against the minorities stresses the obvious repeatedly that the state in India is mired in a big failure, and that violence prevails both to undermine the state constitutionally and to indulge in ethnic cleansing with impunity.

Whether the government at the centre was BJPï¿½s is immaterial in so far as the constitutional safeguards were concerned in the case of Gujarat. There was a glaring case for the President to dismiss the delinquent government of Vajpayee. Then, the UPA government in New Delhi could have remedied the situation by kicking out Modi government. But, popular, ï¿½democratically electedï¿½ government seemed to have held UPAï¿½s hand. There was no such compunction on the part of Congress when it had sacked the Kerala government of Namboodiripad on far trivial excuses in the 1950s.

In the Hindutva book Red Indians are not a minority because they belonged to the land. That they were massacred in millions to render them into a besieged minority is not a fact to bother him. That 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkeyï¿½s genocide by state connivance and sponsorship in 1917 too would not matter to him, despite the fact that both had lived there for hundreds of years. He would refuse to see they were the minorities singled out for liquidation just as Hindutva has singled out Christians and Muslims.

Whether this violence was a plant or a vengeance of the weak we will perhaps never know. But, if we seek to have a grip on the situation, we will have to look deeper, look farther. What our police and military are capable of in terms of cold blooded murder in the lock up or fake encounters is public knowledge. Our army excelled itself in Chattisinghpura in Kashmir by slaughtering in cold blood 24 Sikhs and laying the crime at the doors of the militants, the more savagely to pursue them and win awards. Such plants are endemic to the institutional imperatives of a repressive state.

As to vengeance. Those guilty of the murders of Christians, those guilty of the genocide in Gujarat 2002, those killing Dalits and adivasis in various urban and rural locations, must be seen punished, or the state would seem to have nullified itself. It is the frustration of the victims which may be stirring, however blindly, to resort to these wanton acts of terror. The perpetrators may not even care if they are thus helping the victims of state terror or inducing the state to intensify its regime of unremitting terrorism on the minorities. Did the shoppers in Paharganj, Govindpuri, and Sarojini Nagar not include Muslims?

Two issues that are not so apart must be broached here. BJP has denounced Punjab government for the statues of seven terrorists in Ludhiana. It should have begun with denouncing itself for the two statues raised in Gujarat to its own terrorists. Two, have we not failed, as in Gujarat, to validate our claims and honor the constitutional guarantees in the case of Kashmir pulverized by quake? Have we done enough, and fast, and well to reach people there the much needed help and succor? Or, the Hindu ï¿½majority (a fiction) is happy to get Kashmir, but cleansed by nature of thousands of Muslims? These utterances are not limited to a crazy fringe in India any more. And, they unmask us both as a state and tarnish us a society. The report of our national endeavor there are not upbeat (Yogi Sikand: countercurrents.org).

Rounding up of Muslim youths following each such mayhem, torturing them, destroying their families with violent meanness and reckless mendacity, concluding even without any preliminary inquiry of substance that it was Al Qaeda or Lashkar-i-Tayyeba which caused the blasts, is, to put it mildly, both to revel in dereliction of duty, and promote terrorism for establishmentarian ends.

05Oct.30