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The News International, Tuesday, March 05,
2002
Unbridled juggernaut of Hindu
terrorism
Inayatullah
The Hindu on March 2 minced no words when in its editorial it
roundly condemned the BJP state administration of Gujarat and the
government of India for the way they handled the communal carnage
still raging in Ahmedabad and other cities and villages. It even
highlighted the element of complicity of the governments in
failing "to come to grips with the situation .....leaving
the field absolutely free for rampaging mobs to go about their
"business" -- looting, pillaging and setting blocks of
houses afire at will and there appeared to be a clear design
behind all the senseless violence, going by the targets they had
chosen -- shops and houses owned by the minority community in
revenge for the Godhra incident ... shocking was the police
personnel's blatant failure to intervene even in cases where such
outrageous attacks were taking place in their very presence --
there also has been an inexplicable delay in calling in the army
for containing the orgy of violence".
There is, according to this newspaper, a real danger of the
country being plunged into a communal holocaust of the kind that
followed the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. The Hindu
newspaper finds the support extended by the BJP at the Centre to
Vishwa Hindu Parishad's call for a Bandh most
"disturbing" raising as it does serious misgivings
about the BJP government's readiness to take necessary action. No
wonder the New York Times could report that even when belatedly
the army was called in "the soldiers sitting in trucks were
(only) watching while Hindus were hurling threats against the
helpless Muslims". Reports of Muslim families and groups of
men, women and children forced to stay inside and then burnt in a
number of villages and shanty towns are no exaggeration. The
repeated telephone calls by Ehsan Jaffrey an ex-member of the
Indian Parliament were of no avail. He and all the 18 house
inmates were burnt alive. So were dozens of others in villages
like Sardarpur, Mehsana and Vadadara.
Vajpayee has called these horrific happenings a national disgrace
but what has he done about it all? The communal Gujarat
government is still there. The Home Minister who is a rabid
communalist and who indeed spearheaded the Yath Rathra and was at
the root of the movement which led to the demolition of the Babri
Mosque against the directive of the Supreme Court has not even
visited the scene of the carnage perpetrated by the fanatical
Hindus. The handy Mr George Fernandes alone was sent to make the
perfunctory calls. Why has the Prime Minister not visited the
scene of the horrendous disaster? If he could cancel his tour to
Australia for the Commonwealth meeting, surely he might have
found time for seeing things for himself on the spot. This
despite continuing stinging criticism by the Indian and
international press and civil society organisations.
The Indian Express for instance in its editorial called for
stopping this "madness" and this "hurtling back to
barbarism". Shekhar Gupta in an article titled Backfires
Burning Question while not resisting the temptation like Advani
to point a finger at Pakistan for a possible involvement, has
castigated the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for his
"non-existent government -- for at least 48 bloody
hours". Ridiculing Modi's statement that he was
"absolutely satisfied with how the police and government
handled the backlash" and "I am happy that violence has
been largely contained", he has compared it to what Rajiv
Gandhi said in 1984: "when a tree falls, the earth
shakes" after his mother's assassination that according to
him provided instant moral justification to the lynching of
thousands of Sikhs by the furious Hindu mobs.
Hindu terror as exhibited in Gujarat and other places and the
highly questionable conduct of the central government has
unmasked the true character of the Hindu fundamentalists in
power. The facade of secularism has been torn away. The world
needs to take serious notice of the Indian version of terrorism
which expresses itself at both the levels, of the people and the
government. The hapless Kashmiris have been victims of state
terrorism for more than a decade while it is Pakistan which is
targeted all the time. If even a fraction of the terrible
communal killings and burnings had taken place in Pakistan one
wonders what would India had done by way of tarnishing Pakistan's
image worldwide! It is good that the reaction of Pakistan
government has been restrained and it has rightly reminded Delhi
of the obligations of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of the '50s for the
protection of the minorities.
It is important that the Pakistan government takes effective
preventive measures to ward off any untoward incidents as a part
of reaction to the horror let loose by violent Hindus in India.
Mr Vajpayee, given to introspection as he is, may seriously
examine the anti-Pakistan policies his government has been
following, must restrain the wildly hawkish elements of his
party, review the causes of the recent electoral debacle and come
to terms with the dictates of a secular polity. As a part of the
revised approach to national affairs, he should immediately
demobilise the armed forces from the borders with Pakistan and
earnestly enter into a dialogue with Islamabad to settle the
issues which have bedevilled the relations between the two
nuclear states in South Asia. Let him use his dormant potential
to rise to the occasion and open a new chapter in India-Pakistan
relationship. A mindset anchored on hatred and hostility needs to
be replaced by new thinking and a positive approach, in the
interests of more than one billion people eking out a miserable
existence in this part of the world.
The international community too can help a great deal in bringing
about this much deserved change by actively involving itself in
nudging and prodding the two parties to come to the table and
thrash out their differences in a spirit of give and take. Peace
and normalisation of conditions in this vital but troubled region
will certainly contribute towards achievement of the economic
goals of the developed world, as other wise international
investment and trade in South Asia will remain a hostage to the
fractured relations between India and Pakistan. Peace in this
region will be in everybody's larger interests.
The writer is a Lahore-based columnist