Flash in the pan?
Praful Bidwai
February 20

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_578954,00120001.htm

Two years after Independent India’s goriest episode of
organised violence against a religious minority, the
possibility of bringing the culprits to justice seems
more remote than ever. Indeed, distressing new facts
suggest that the institutions and agencies responsible
for investigating and punishing Gujarat’s crimes
themselves colluded in their commission — and
cover-up.

The CBI has just exhumed human remains and clothing
from a mass grave in Dahod district where 14 Muslims
were raped and butchered as Bilkis Yakoob Rasool, then
five months pregnant, watched. (She too was raped.)
The culprits included a VHP functionary and an aide of
former BJP minister Jasawant Bhabhor. The Gujarat
police reported the 14 untraceable.

It now turns out the police buried the bodies and
poured salt over them so they would decompose quickly.
The evidence the CBI has gathered clearly points to
attempts to cover one monstrous act by committing yet
another. The police in Narendra Milosevic Modi’s
Gujarat aided and abetted, and further compounded
serious crimes, including murders.

The Bilkis case is the only matter in which the
Supreme Court ordered a CBI investigation. There were
many other ghastly massacres. But the CBI’s findings
confirm one’s worst suspicions about the impossibility
of justice in Modi’s Gujarat. When crimes are not
recorded, when ministers direct rioting mobs, when
state agencies suppress evidence, when the police
participate in arson and rape, when witnesses are
terrorised, and when the courts hand out obnoxious
verdicts, the subversion of justice becomes complete.

If further proof was at all needed of this, the
Gujarat High Court has furnished it in the Best Bakery
case by dismissing the plea for retrial. Its verdict
not only ignores the intimidation of key witnesses, it
even conjures up “a definite design and conspiracy” by
human rights lawyers to “malign” Gujarat and “create a
rift between two communities...” There can be no
stronger argument for trying all the major cases of
communal violence outside Gujarat than this judgment
and the CBI’s findings. Regrettably, the Supreme Court
is still reluctant to follow its own logic in the
Jayalalitha case, and order this.

Meanwhile, we citizens are being asked to erase our
memory of what happened after the gory Godhra
killings. Beginning February 28, over 2,000 people
were speared, torched and hacked to death in
systematically planned, coordinated and executed
violence. Erasure was the central message from Atal
Bihari Vajpayee’s latest appearance in Gujarat, when
he praised Modi and appealed to Gujaratis to “forget
the past”. The captains of our industry too abjectly
genuflected before Modi after some initial — very
welcome — criticism.

The middle-class is being told that the Gujarat
pogrom, although horrendous, was a mere ‘aberration’;
it wasn’t essential to the BJP’s ideology and
politics, nor connected to Hindutva. They must
‘forget’ Gujarat and vote for the BJP in ‘Shining
India’.

The ‘BJP minus Gujarat’ idea is like Hamlet without
the Prince of Denmark. The essential character of
Gujarat’s violence cannot be understood except by
reference to Hindutva’s overall project. This wasn’t
just another communal riot abetted by the police, nor
a series of discreet hate-crimes. The violence was
calculated to subjugate and humiliate a whole
community.

Its perpetrators, namely, the State and various
Hindutva organisations, knew that their acts were part
of a larger, concerted attack. The mobs and
BJP/VHP/RSS leaders were fired by a peculiar
‘nationalist’ frenzy as they committed rape,
especially gangrape, and defiled and mutilated female
bodies. Sexual aggression and bestiality were central
to Gujarat’s violence.

Thousands of Muslim women were raped to the shouts of
‘Har Har Mahadev’ and ‘Go to Pakistan, why are you in
Hindustan?’ Their breasts were cut off, their bellies
split open, their foetuses speared and burned.
Historian and feminist analyst Tanika Sarkar says:
“The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One,
the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible
violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms
of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive
organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third,
their children born and unborn, shared the attacks and
were killed before their eyes.”

The pattern of violence is inseparable from Hindutva’s
core project of cleansing India of, and
disenfranchising, non-Hindus. As Golwalkar, the RSS’s
param pujya ideologue, put it: “Hindus alone are the
legal citizens of Bharat... and the non-Hindus... may
stay in this country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu
nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far
less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s
rights...”

The hysterical ‘nationalism’ whipped up by invoking
Mian Musharraf, the ISI and ‘Hum Do Hamare Pachees’,
legitimated the violence and gave it a malign edge:
‘Go to Pakistan’ or be our slaves!

The International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat
has incisively analysed the pogrom in its report,
Threatened Existence, released last December. The IIJG
team consisted of feminist jurists and
scholar-activists drawn from six countries and known
for writings on women and conflict — including in
Bosnia and Rwanda. This report, based on visits to
Gujarat and interviews with 180 women and 136 men from
seven districts, comes on top of numerous independent
inquiries by citizens’ groups and the National Human
Rights Commission.

Its great value lies in its rigorous analysis of the
pogrom as genocide and as a ‘crime against humanity’.
Threatened Existence shows that the violence fits the
criteria of Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide,
1948, which defines it as “... any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
— like “killing [its] members... causing serious
bodily or mental harm to [them]... deliberately
inflicting on [it] conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part;... imposing measures intended to prevent
births...”, etc.

Gujarat’s Muslims were targeted solely on the basis of
religion. The attackers caused serious bodily and
mental harm to them and inflicted ‘conditions of life’
to cause their destruction. They used “rape as a means
to change the identity of a group, and impart to the
children an identity that is different from the one
acquired at birth”. The intent to destroy a group, ‘in
whole or in part’, is fully established.

The Gujarat violence hasn’t ended. There is a
continuing climate of intimidation, related to ‘fear
generated both by threat of violence and actual
attacks, displacement and non-rehabilitation,
continuing economic violence, including an economic
boycott..., long-term impact on [Muslim women’s]...
physical, reproductive and psycho-social health, and
long-term impact on children.”

Scores of Muslims remain detained under POTA for the
Godhra killings — largely without proof. But not one
person has been charged under POTA for the greater
massacre that followed. The State pays Hindus twice as
much compensation as it does to Muslims. Blatant
discrimination has turned a whole community into
second-class citizens.

There can be no free and fair trial in Gujarat. As a
signatory to the Genocide Convention, India is
obligated to enact legislation to prevent/punish
genocide. Our judicial system faces an unprecedented
challenge from Gujarat. So far, there are no signs it
will meet it.

We citizens have to face the challenge, whatever the
judiciary does. We can succeed only if we make the
connections between the BJP’s parliamentary wing and
the RSS, between Savarkar and Godse, between barbaric
violence and exclusionist, hate-filled, Hindutva,
between anti-Muslim prejudice and ‘getting even with
history’, between Vajpayee and Modi. The connections
must be translated unambiguously into votes. The
BJP/NDA must be sent packing.

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For Background and more information about Gujarat see:
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/Gujarat/






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