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During the recent tragic events in Gujarat, it seems the rioting mobs went around having some fun. I say fun because all the pictures I see of the riots in Gujarat are of rioters laughing, smiling and having a jolly good time. I am sure if we had pictures of the mob in Godhra they would be of laughing rioters too. I was not surprised to read an article in the Indian Express titled, Ahmedabad's riot looters weren't exactly the great unwashed.
I have friends in Gujarat who did the same kind of looting of Muslim-owned shops in Surat during the 1992 riots. Mind you, these were not some uneducated, downtrodden people. They were educated engineering graduates from well-to-do families who are gifted cars on their birthdays. And did they hate me? No. Vandalism has become a normal act in recent political activism. Many crimes tend to be crimes of opportunity, I have noticed in the last few years -- in India even the slightest provocation can lead people to run around vandalizing property. Be it Valentine's Day, political loss, one of the numerous bandhs called by one party or the other, the first loss is always inflicted on public property.
I had followed the recent Gujarat events closely and found only senseless justifications for what happened. On the one side there is the justification of how some people misbehaved with a tea stall vendor on the Godhra railway station platform and abducted a young girl and all those stories, and on the other side there were more atrocious justifications. The Gujarat Chief Minister, the Home Minister, the police inspectors, the VHP, the RSS everyone had their own justifications which all mostly boiled down to "they started it, now they have to suffer the consequences" and that the riots were a natural and spontaneous reaction of the Hindus. Almost all the statements had a lot of emphasis on 'they'. For those looking for religious justification it came from the VHP leader, Acharya Giriraj Kishore, saying to the effect that they were acting like lord Ram tackling asuras: "Rama is a God of peace, but when the asuras initiate violence like this for no apparent reason, he has to resort to the same. These asuras should be burnt till their skin peels off!"(Tehelka.com, March 1st)
There is no doubt about the planned nature of the attack on innocent Hindus in Godhra. All the accounts I read of the incident make me believe so. If the attack were on a moving procession or a stagnant gathering the chances of an impulsive and sporadic incident is immense, not when on a moving train. But then again we have to wait eons to hear what the official committees have to say about the incident. It was a barbaric (no matter whatever words I use to condone these incidents it can never reflect the pain and emotional trauma I had to go through, nothing is going to bring back the dead) act done by Muslim fanatics.
But what happened next was even more horrific. All the reports that I read suggest a targeted carnage of innocent Muslims, their businesses, their homes; everything smells of a pogrom or a kind of ethnic cleansing. The use of voter lists to target Muslim homes, looting and burning of only Muslims' property, the organized nature of the attacks, fire trucks not being allowed to help, etc. do suggest such a possibility. The time between the Godhra incident and the breaking of riots in Ahmedabad was one full day. Going by the past record of the city and the state, one would expect the government to act accordingly. It is a shame to read about the ineffective action of the government and the police, which unfortunately people have come to accept as a normal thing. The people who are supposed to protect the citizens from criminals so easily connive with the criminals themselves or turn their heads for other reasons. Reading the gory descriptions of the victims' tales made me sick. It seems that the jury is out and has given the verdict of death sentence just for being born a Muslim. The Prime Minister has called the riots a blot on the face of the nation. A blot sure it is, a very big one. Doesn't the government have the duty of protecting its citizens, all of them, irrespective of who they are?
On February 27, the day Godhra happened, VHP President, Ashok Singhal, met Prime Minister Vajpayee and the Times of India reported this statement from him, "It is the duty of the government to give protection to kar sevaks. A government that cannot protect its subjects is not fit to rule." So will Mr. Singhal use the same logic to critique the Gujarat Government? I am not holding my breath over it.
I have to say this to the Muslims who burned the train in Godhra and those who justify it: If you believe the kafirs are going to burn in the dungeons of hell for eternity (keeping aside the argument that religion had nothing to do with the Godhra incident), why don't you leave it to your God to do that, why do you want to take God's work into your own hands? Don't you have enough faith in your God? No matter which religion, people don't seem to have enough faith in their gods to take care of things; wherever human beings can interfere, they interfere.
And I any day do not want to recognize the Hindu religion with the likes of organizations the VHP or the RSS. I wish to think of the Hindu religion as something that taught me this:
"Those wise ones who see that the consciousness within themselves is the same consciousness within all conscious beings, attain eternal peace." - Katha Upanishad
Rationalized hatred, be it in the form of organized religion or as a political movement, has disastrous consequences.
I find it very interesting that some of the crème de la crème of India are only worried about how the press is reporting the incidents. But much more disturbing was the way people reacted on message boards and chat rooms on the Internet, the emotions of ecstasy and calls for more murders -- "kill them all" was a common cry.
The media again showed its incompetent face. Far from the journalistic traditions of pursuing the truth, the media is becoming more and more obsessed with the pursuit of opinion. I find people's obsession with media very disappointing. I am pretty sure the people who killed and plundered in Ahmedabad did not sit around reading newspapers criticizing them for how they covered the Godhra incident and decided that it was not fair and went around killing people. I am sure there are much saner ways of protesting against the media by boycotting the papers or burning them in piles, which is much more sensible than burning innocent people alive.
Some questions arise in my mind: I wonder what kind of a person can set fire to innocent human beings, including children (both at Godhra and the rest of Gujarat), no matter what his justifications? Is he a moral and sane enough person to belong in society? If a person commits a crime but does not consider what he did was a crime, is it still a crime? What is the social nature of a crime -- is it individual or communal?
The answers to these questions seem very simple to me, but they are not too many. Time and again I find the lack of understanding about the individuality of crime among people and the political powers that be. If a Muslim thinks killing a kafir is not a crime and a Hindu thinks that killing a Muslim is not a crime, should there be a law which says killing a human being is a crime no matter which religion he/she belongs to? Is there a need for such a law? There probably is no need for such a law in an Islamic theocratic state or a fascist Hindu (not related to religion) state, but certainly there is a need for such a law in a democratic country like India that gives its people the freedom of religion.
The law and order situation in the country seems to make the assumption that people will follow the law voluntarily. The thought that people would follow the speed limits on a highway out of their own volition and that morality would remove the need for highway patrol can lead to disastrous accidents. The truth is voluntary adherence to law cannot be taken for granted and we need to have a very professional and unbiased police force, which certainly was not available in Gujarat. When a riot happens it is because the rioters think that they will get away with it. If they had the slightest fear that they might not come home, that they might be in jail, even killed, they might have never ventured out.
In India so often we listen to reports of people going scot free for crimes committed by people with certain affiliations. When people lose their confidence in law and the judiciary they might resort to taking the law into their own hands. The fact that law as a profession is not so sought after in India may have something to say about how people feel about law and the judiciary.
The government should bring to court the culprits and give them the harshest possible sentences so that people learn that they will be punished if they break the law. We certainly do not have good examples of justice being served to people, what with so many criminals being elected to the government to make the laws which govern us.
One more unfortunate incident that happened the same week was the death of the Lok Sabha speaker Mr. Balayogi. The government promptly declared a week of mourning. I am wondering why did the government not declare a mourning for the incidents that happened in Gujarat. Forget about the hundreds of Muslims who died in the Gujarat carnage (even if I have to borrow the western representation of the BJP as a Hindu nationalist government), what about the 58 Hindus who were systematically and deliberately torched to death -- don't they deserve at least one day of mourning by the rest of the country? Are the lives of those people whom Mr. Balayogi represented not worth mourning? Almost every other month innocent Kashmiri Pandits are murdered in Kashmir by the terrorists. Why don't I see any mourning for them? It does not cost the government much to lower the national flag to half-mast for one day. Does the government really care about its citizens; is it really a government by the people, for the people, and of the people? This January when WorldTel CEO, Mark Mascarenhas, died the entire Indian cricket team wore a black band during the match the next day against England at Kanpur. Why didn't the cricket team wear a black band while playing against Zimbabwe during the Gujarat tragedy?
We need to learn to value human life; so many accidents, terrorist attacks, riots happen all the time. How many times has the administration studied them and taken precautionary measures to ensure that such things don't happen again?
The communal situation has fallen to such levels that even a simple brawl between a drunken Hindu and a drunk Muslim can lead to a riot. There is an urgent need to make people understand the individual nature of crimes and to make them better citizens. If the government cannot maintain law and order during such incidents, our enemies surely don't need nuclear weapons.
When I heard about Ram Rajya from the BJP and the Sangh Parivar ten years ago, I interpreted it as just rule, not Hindu rule. I will say even today -- show me Ram and I will vote for him. I wish and hope that in their zeal to be Hindus and Muslims people don't forget to be humans first.
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