[wvns] Gujarat Pogram Five Years later
While the victims languish, the perpetrators go unpunished
India: Five years after 2002 Gujarat pogrom
By K. Nesan and Kranti Kumara
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/indi-a10.shtml
Despite the passage of more than five years since the February-March
2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, not a single
one of the principal perpetrators of this horrific crime has been
punished. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Muslims who were driven from
their towns and villages by roving bands of Hindu supremacist thugs
still languish in relief camps without electricity or running water.
There is much evidence to show that leading figures in the
Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (which headed India's
Union and Gujarat governments in 2002) and its Hindu-chauvinist
allies—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, literally National
Volunteer's Association), Bajrang Dal (Hindu youth organization) and
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council)—fomented and organized
the carnage in Gujarat, which resulted in the slaughter of more than
two thousand Muslims and left tens of thousands of others homeless and
jobless. (see "India: further evidence Hindu-supremacist BJP culpable
in Gujarat pogrom")
One of the chief abettors of the massacre was Narendra Modi, then as
now Gujarat's chief minister. Notwithstanding his role in inciting the
violence and ensuring that security forces took no effective action to
protect Gujarat's Muslims, Modi not only continues to head Gujarat's
government and to serve as one of the principal leaders of the BJP at
the national-level. In 2005 he was honoured for leading the
"best-governed" state in India by the Congress Party-connected Rajiv
Gandhi Foundation. A think-tank created to honour former Congress
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation's trustees
include the current Congress Party president, Sonia Gandhi, Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister Chidambaram.
The Congress Party portrays itself as a bulwark of secularism and an
implacable opponent of Hindu chauvinism. Yet despite heading India's
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government for the past
three years, it has not seen fit to use the resources of the state to
mount a serious investigation into the Gujarat pogrom so as to lay
bare the role played by the Hindu supremacist right and various
security forces and punish the guilty.
The Gujarat pogrom occurred in an atmosphere of anti-Pakistan (and by
implication anti-Muslim) hysteria whipped-up the BJP-led Union
government following a reputed terrorist attack on India's parliament
in December 2001. Accusing Pakistan of complicity in the terrorist
attack, the BJP-dominated National Democratic Alliance government
placed the country on a war footing and deployed hundreds of thousands
of troops to Gujarat and the other Indian states that border Pakistan.
While the perpetrators of the Gujarat program remain at liberty, 209
people—Muslims, Dalits (i.e., ex-untouchables), and tribals—who were
first arrested in 2002 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA—a
BJP law formally repealed by the UPA in 2004) remain in detention.
(see "Repeal of India's draconian anti-terrorism law: Largely a
cosmetic change")
The 209 are among hundreds of people from various religious and ethnic
minorities whom the Gujarat authorities seized under the draconian,
dragnet provisions of POTA for their alleged complicity in the
February 27, 2002 train fire at Godhra, the incident that served as
the pretext for the unleashing of mass anti-Muslim violence.
Some 60 Hindu chauvinist activists perished in the Godhra train fire.
Gujarat's BJP government and the police claimed that the Hindu
activists had come under attack because of their Hindu supremacist
views. Subsequent investigation has punctured numerous holes in the
government's and police's version of events; the train fire was likely
an accident.
But the BJP government then as now is not the least interested in
uncovering the truth of what happened at Godhra. With Chief Minister
Modi in the lead, the Gujarat authorities fomented anti-Muslim
hysteria, proclaiming that Gujarat's "Muslims" were collectively
responsible for the deaths of "Hindus" at Godhra.
And India's then prime minister, Atal Vajpayee, whom the corporate
media has extolled as a BJP elder statesman and voice of moderation,
rushed to excuse the subsequent bloodletting in Gujarat with the quip,
"What happened after the Godhra incident is deplorable, but the issue
is, who started it?"
The continuing persecution of Gujarat's Muslim minority
Five years on, Gujarat's Muslims continue to live in fear and misery.
The state government has made a show of refusing to accept relief
money from the central government, even as tens of thousands of
Muslims have been condemned to live in squalor in relief camps.
Those Muslims who have returned to their hometowns and villages in the
years since the pogrom have frequently been forced to make
"concessions" to their Hindu chauvinist tormentors and must live under
the constant threat of renewed Hindu supremacist violence.
Many Muslims were only able to return to their home villages after
"agreeing" to drop criminal cases filed against "Hindus," i.e.,
against those who had killed their family members and/or set fire to
their dwellings and shops.
In many Gujarat villages, the local mosque has had to cease making
calls to prayer and Muslims now must celebrate their religious
festivals behind closed doors.
In some villages, Muslims, under the threat of violence, have also
been compelled to stop openly selling meat.
Gagan Sethi, a member of a monitoring committee of the National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC), told the Hindustan Times, "There is a
grudging acceptance that Muslims have to keep their heads down and
keep a low profile."
The BJP state government has provided only a pittance in aid to the
victims of the 2002 pogrom and has refused on the flimsiest of
pretexts to provide money to restore damaged or razed mosques and
Muslim-owned businesses.
According to Preeta Jha, of the volunteer group Nyayagraha, "There are
severe lifestyle changes and (Gujarat Mulsims') livelihood has been
affected. Their economic spine has been broken."
To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the anti-Muslim violence and
demand that the guilty be punished, more than 6,000 angry survivors
demonstrated last month in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat.
The Best Bakery Case
The "Best Bakery Case" has come to symbolize how Gujarat's Muslims
have been denied justice and often further victimized by India's legal
system.
On March 1, 2002 a huge mob surrounded and set fire to Best Bakery, a
Muslim, family-owned, bakery. Fourteen people, 11 Muslims and 3
Hindus, perished in the fire.
Twenty-one people were subsequently arrested and charged with various
crimes relating to the Best Bakery arson deaths. However, in July 2003
all the accused were released, with the court citing "lack of
evidence" after the principal prosecution witness—Zaheera Sheikh, the
19-year-old daughter of the bakery's owner—retracted her initial
statement to the police.
Zaheera Sheikh later revealed that she had recanted after she and the
surviving members of her family had been threatened with reprisals by
a BJP state-legislator.
The case was subsequently reopened and a trial ordered out of state in
Mumbai (Bombay). During this second trial Zaheera Sheikh again gave
contradictory testimony.
Rather than showing any sympathy towards this confused, distraught and
terrified young woman, India's Supreme Court proclaimed itself duty
bound to show zero tolerance to perjury. Zaheera Sheikh was found
guilty of perjury and sentenced to a year in prison and a mammoth
fine. Only recently was she released from jail after serving her full
sentence.
Meanwhile, the BJP state legislator who threatened her and her family
has escaped any legal sanction.
The Congress Party-led UPA declares that it is helpless to intervene
in Gujarat to aid the pogrom's victims in obtaining justice since "law
and order" is a state responsibility. This argument is made despite
the fact that successive Indian governments have deployed hundreds of
thousands of troops in Kashmir and India's northeast in the name of
upholding "law and order."
There are ample provisions in the Indian constitution allowing the
central government to directly intervene in a state, including the
power to dismiss a state government and impose central government
rule, should the state government fail to uphold the constitution.
Congress-led governments, including the current UPA regime, have
frequently made use of the "president's rule" provisions of the Indian
constitution for brazen partisan political reasons, but the UPA
government has no intention of sacking Gujarat's blood-soaked BJP regime.
Rebutting the UPA's "helplessness" argument, a recent commentary in
the Times of India noted, "[Article] 355 of the Constitution
authorizes, indeed requires" the central government "to intervene in
situations of grave internal strife" (emphasis added).
Of Gujarat, the commentary further observed, "There is perhaps no
instance since Independence of such open and sustained denial to a
segment of citizens—of elementary rights of security, livelihood,
shelter and legal justice—only on the grounds of its adherence to a
minority faith."
The Congress Party's reluctance to act against the BJP and its allied
Hindutva organizations is not surprising given the Congress's own role
in fomenting an anti-Sikh pogrom following the 1984 assassination of
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Congress's long history of conniving
with the Hindu supremacist right, including in the violent upheavals
that accompanied the 1947 communal partition of India.
In spite of this sordid record, the Stalinist Communist Party of India
(Marxist) or CPM, continues to peddle the fiction that the Congress
Party and UPA can be pressured into bringing justice to Gujarat's
Muslim victims.
In an editorial in the March 14 issue of its English-weekly People's
Democracy, the CPM writes, "[It] is high time that the UPA government
at the centre pulls up its socks and ensures that justice is finally
delivered to the victims [of the Gujarat pogrom] and the perpetrators
of the crime are punished. This is absolutely essential to restore the
confidence of the people in our justice delivery system and regain the
confidence in India's secular democracy. This is all the more
necessary at a time when the communal forces are sharpening their
weapons to once again plunge the country into communal strife to
advance their electoral fortunes. The UPA's raison d'ete [sic] is the
safeguarding and strengthening of India's secular democratic
foundations. If this task is not seriously undertaken, then the UPA
would be reduced to a coalition with no character" (emphasis added).
In other words, the CPM and the CPM-led Left Front will
ritualistically condemn the UPA for its complicity in the continuing
persecution of Gujarat's Muslims, but will continue to provide the UPA
with the parliamentary votes it needs to remain in office, all the
while fobbing off on the masses the claim that the UPA is the only
credible means of blocking the BJP's return to power.
There are several reasons that the Congress Party cannot and will not
act against the BJP. The sympathies of significant elements within the
Congress, especially in Gujarat, lie not with the Muslim victims of
the 2002 pogrom but rather with its instigators. In the December 2002
Gujarat elections the Congress mounted a campaign that even sections
of the press derided as "Hindutva-lite."
The Indian bourgeoisie's second party, the BJP, has played a pivotal
role in implementing the neo-liberal socioeconomic reform program
pioneered by the Congress government of 1991-96 and continued by the
current UPA coalition. The Congress relies on the BJP's support in
pressing forward with the bourgeoisie's "reform" agenda in the face of
widespread popular opposition, even while using it, with the help of
the Stalinists, as a right-wing foil, as a means to intimidate the
working class and toilers into rallying round the Congress-led UPA as
the "lesser evil."
Third, the failure to indict and convict any of the principal
perpetrators of the Gujarat pogrom has underscored that wide layers of
the police and judiciary are sympathetic to the noxious Hindu
supremacist doctrines spouted by the BJP and the RSS. The UPA
government fears that were it to mount a serious inquiry into the
Gujarat pogrom and its cover-up, it would come under attack from
elements within the state and, even more importantly, that such an
inquiry could destabilize the state institutions that underpin
bourgeois rule by shedding light on the extent to which they have been
overrun by fascistic elements.
Last but not least, were the Congress leadership to dig into the BJP's
role in fomenting the Gujarat pogrom or the 1992 razing of the Babri
Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, there is no doubt the BJP would retaliate by
clamouring for an inquiry into the Congress Party's own culpability in
the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre. In other words, the two principal parties
in the "world's most populous democracy" have a secret understanding
to bury each other's foul communal crimes.
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