Crime,
Politics & Hypocrisy-
BJP's Comeuppance
By Praful Bidwai
01 September, 2004
The Praful Bidwai Column
There
is more than poetic justice in the way in which the law caught up with
Ms Uma Bharati through a Karnataka arrest warrant, forcing her resignation
as Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister. That this should have happened bang
in the middle of the BJP's high-decibel campaign against "tainted"
ministers in Dr Manmohan Singh's Cabinet only lends a comically ironic
edge to the unfolding drama. The BJP's campaign is a strained attempt
to occupy the moral high ground just when it had no issues on which
to prove its political relevance or provide a half-way coherent opposition
to the UPA.
The BJP should have
known better-quite simply because many of its top leaders, including
Messrs L.K. Advani and M. M. Joshi, face serious criminal charges. Its
own former president was caught accepting a bribe on camera in the Tehelka
"sting" operation. Its campaign against "tainted"
ministers was likely to boomerang sooner or later, whether in Uttar
Pradesh (where its ranks include proportionally more people with criminal
charges and convictions than perhaps any other party), or elsewhere.
Only two years ago, Mr Vajpayee re-inducted Mr George Fernandes into
his Cabinet although he hadn't been cleared of Tehelka-related charges
of serious corruption in defence deals.
The BJP is trying
to make light of the criminal charges against Ms Bharati, by equating
her case with that of Coal Minister Shibu Soren's. It also claims the
charges are politically motivated and frivolous. This will not wash.
Mr Soren has already resigned from the Cabinet. If he exited as a villain,
Ms Bharati hasn't emerged a martyr. The indictment against Ms Bharati
is serious: rioting, instigating a mob to violence, and attempt to murder
during a 1994 agitation to forcibly dislodge a Muslim organisation (Anjuman-i-Islam)
from the Idgah maidan in Hubli, which it baselessly claimed was a public
ground. The incident led to 6 deaths.
Ms Bharati chose
to ignore more than 100 court summons and bailable warrants and as many
18 non-bailable warrants. The S.M. Krishna government in 2002 tried
to withdraw the cases against her because a "compromise" had
been reached through former Prime Minister H.D. Deva Gowda's intervention.
But now, Karnataka's Congress-JD(S) government has in its discretion
decided to restore the cases. It's ludicrous to claim that the first
discretionary move was right but the second one was wrong. In any case,
Ms Bharati has no right to evade trial which will establish her guilt
or innocence.
Underpinning the
BJP's rhetoric is the distinction it makes between "political"
and "criminal" cases. It says its opponents violate laws,
or are dacoits, murderers, etc., but its own leaders are charged with
"political" offences-like causing the razing of the Babri
mosque. This distinction is utterly and perniciously spurious. The demolition
was a horrible act driven by communal hatred, a vile crime, whose gravity
was compounded by the orgy of mass lynchings that followed, causing
hundreds of deaths, especially in Mumbai. Such hate acts are far more
reprehensible than individual crimes. They must be more severely punished.
Ms Bharati's offence
in Hubli falls exactly within that category. It was part of the BJP's
hate campaign, launched to establish a political toehold in Karnataka.
Hubli and Baba Budhangiri in Chikmagalur district were the two planks
on which it incited anti-Muslim emotions through fiery rhetoric. In
Hubli, it dangerously polarised opinion by trying to forcibly occupy
the Idgah maidan. In the second case, the BJP-VHP tried to "capture"
the shrine of a Muslim saint also worshipped by the Hindus. In both
places, it played with fire.
The most despicable
part of this political mobilisation was the abuse of the National Flag
as a Hindutva symbol. Hindu communalists increasingly use this tactic
to falsely equate the religious majority with the nation itself. They
challenge the minorities to prove their "loyalty" to the nation-by
subordinating themselves to the majority. As Sumit and Tanika Sarkar
and other historians argue in their Saffron Flags, Khaki Shorts (Orient
Longman, 1993), this equation is characteristic of majoritarianism,
itself akin to fascism. It distorts the true nature of the national
community, comprised of equal citizens, by privileging one religious
group. It is profoundly anti-democratic.
So it's abominably
dishonest for Ms Bharati to claim she's being arrested for hoisting
the Tricolour, when the Flag served as a mere cover or mask for her
cynically communal politics. If anything, such abuse makes Ms Bharati's
offence graver. It also bears recalling that the BJP's top leaders owe
their primary loyalty not to the Tricolour but to the RSS's triangular
saffron flag. For decades, the RSS rejected the National Flag, in particular
its green (read, "Islamic") colour-band and the Ashoka Chakra
(a Buddhist symbol).
The BJP seems to
have cunningly made a threefold calculation in asking Ms Bharati to
resign and launch her Tiranga Yatra from Hubli to Jallianwala Bagh.
First, it reckons, this will help boost its demand that "tainted"
RJD leaders like Mr Laloo Prasad and Mr Taslimuddin should quit. Second,
the Yatra may gather momentum and strengthen the claim that Ms Bharati
is being "victimised" for a cause at least as noble as the
Jharkhand movement. Third, it would help it be rid of Ms Bharati herself!
She has become a source of embarrassment for the BJP because of her
family's antics. (Her brother went on a dharna against tainted ministers
in her own Cabinet and her nephews have been messing around with civil
servants.)
The first two stratagems
are a big gamble. It's unclear that many people will be taken in by
the "tainted ministers" campaign and the "flag-hoisting"
argument. They know how to demarcate "flag-hoisting" from
communal incitement. Ironically, the only certainty is Ms Bharati's
own dislodging from power!
The law, assuringly,
may be catching up with Mr Narendra Milosevic Modi too. The Supreme
Court has ordered Gujarat to reopen 2,100 cases of violence-or half
the total-which were summarily closed on the pretext that the accused
could not be traced. New evidence is emerging from theNanavati-Shah
commission hearings of Mr Modi's culpability. Police officers' and senior
bureaucrats' testimonies confirm that Mr Modi personally decided to
stir up emotions on February 27, 2002 by bringing the Godhra victims'
bodies to Ahmedabad. Former state police chief K. Chakravarthi has revealed
that he ordered his officers to investigate the "conspiracy angle"
to the post-Godhra violence-an implicit admission that the violence
was pre-planned.
A specific allegation
was made before the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal by a "highly placed
source" that a meeting was held on the evening of Feb 27 by Mr
Modi with some other senior ministers and police officials. "The
meeting had a singular purpose: The senior-most police officials were
told that they should expect a Hindu reaction after Godhra. They were
told that they should not do anything to contain this reaction".
This source was killed in mysterious circumstances. One can only hope
his version will get further corroborated.
Other evidence is
emerging too, especially from the Ahmedabad police commissioner P.C.
Pande, joint commissioner M.K. Tandon, and additional director-general
(intelligence) R.B. Sreekumar. This shows that the police reporting
system and law-and-order machinery completely broke down from February
27 onwards. Thus, top police officials got to know about the Naroda-Patia
and Gulberg Society incidents (where former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri
was burnt alive) many hours after
they occurred.
The local policemen
were ordered not to report these incidents to the headquarters by wireless
as the communications system might get clogged! Even more eloquent is
Mr Sreekumar's 172-page affidavit, based on intelligence reports, which
details the complicity of police officials in the
violence. For instance, it says: "Officers at the decisive rung
S ignored the specific instructions from the official hierarchy on account
of their getting direct verbal instructions from the senior political
leaders of the ruling party."
This evidence should
be systematically collated and used not just in the Nanavati-Shah commission,
but also in the trial courts to pin down the culprits. The Modi government
cannot be expected to do this. It is the greatest culprit of all. The
Centre must step in-by setting up a
new commission to inquire into the causes of and course of the post-Godhra
violence and by impleading itself as a party in all the relevant litigation.
The UPA owes this to the people of Gujarat and of India, and to our
Constitution.
The UPA's Common
Minimum Programme promised to "to preserve, protect and promote
social harmony and to enforce the lawS to deal with all obscurantist
and fundamentalist elements who seek to disturb social amity and peace".
Barring the announcement by Railway Minister Laloo Prasad of an inquiry
into the Godhra incident, it has done little to bring justice to the
people of Gujarat. Gujarat, the greatest state-aided pogrom of a religious
minority since Independence, did not even find a mention in Dr Manmohan
Singh's first address to the nation. Nor did the word "secularism".
This void must be
filled without delay. Gujarat wasn't just another communal riot. It
was a case of genocidal violence. No society can even aspire to be civilised
if it cannot prevent and punish genocide of its own citizens.