BJP's New Stunt
By Praful Bidwai
26 August, 2004
The News International
The
Bharatiya Janata Party has proved to be a bad, terribly peevish, loser.
It still behaves as if the last Parliament election were somehow stolen
from it. Unable to prove relevant, or provide a half-way coherent opposition
to the ruling United Progressive Alliance, it is looking for any issue
on which to attack the government. The latest is the National Flag and
the claim that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharati resigned last
Monday because she was falsely implicated in a criminal case 10 years
ago for the "crime" of hoisting the Flag in Hubli in Karnataka.
In reality, the
story is more complicated-in fact, devious. Bharati wasn't hoisting
the flag in any old place, but in the Idgah Maidan-as part of the BJP's
anti-Muslim agitation in Karnataka. The charge against Bharati is not
that she hoisted the Flag, but includes rioting, instigating a mob to
violence, and attempt to murder. The BJP was trying to forcibly dislodge
a Muslim organisation (Anjuman-i-Islam) from the Idgah. There is poetic
justice in the way the law caught up with Bharati last week through
an
arrest warrant in that old case, now revived.
Earlier, Bharati
had chosen to ignore more than 100 court summons and bailable warrants
and as
many 18 non-bailable warrants. The BJP's response to the warrant is
two-pronged. It claims the case
is "political". And it has resorted to cheap, rabble-rousing
nationalism by focusing on the National Flag-and distorting the real
charges.
This is ironical
because the BJP's top leaders have their primary loyalty not to the
Tricolour but to the RSS's triangular saffron flag. For decades, the
RSS rejected India's National Flag, in particular its green (read, Islamic)
colour band and the Ashoka Chakra (a Buddhist symbol of peace and good
governance).
But let that pass.
What acutely embarrasses the BJP is that the latest warrant comes bang
in the
middle of its own high-decibel campaign against "tainted"
ministers in Manmohan Singh's Cabinet.
The BJP should have known better. Many of its top leaders, including
L K Advani and Murli Manohar
Joshi, face criminal charges. Its own former president was caught accepting
a huge bribe on
camera in the Tehelka "sting" operation.
The BJP makes a
curious distinction 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
razing the Babri mosque. This distinction is utterly, perniciously,
spurious. The demolition was driven by communal hatred-a vile crime,
whose gravity was compounded by the orgy of killing and arson that followed,
leading to hundreds of deaths, especially in Mumbai. Such hate-acts
are more reprehensible than individual crimes. They must be more severely
punished.
Bharati's offence
at Hubli falls exactly within that category. This was part of the BJP's
effort to establish a toehold for itself in Karnataka. Baba Budangiri
and Hubli were the two planks on which it incited violent anti-Muslim
emotions. In the first case, the BJP-VHP tried to put a "Hindu"
stamp on a shrine belonging to the composite sufi tradition. In Hubli,
it polarised opinion by claiming, without evidence, that the land used
as the Idgah had been appropriated by Muslims.
The most despicable
part of that campaign of incitement was the abuse of the National Flag
as a Hindutva symbol. Hindu communalists increasingly use this tactic
to falsely equate the (religious) majority community with the nation.
They challenge the minorities to prove their loyalty to the nation-by
subordinating themselves to the majority. This illegitimate equation
fits the pattern of profoundly anti-democratic majoritarian communalism.
It distorts the true nature of the national
community, comprised of equal citizens.
So it's totally
dishonest for Bharati to claim she's being prosecuted for hoisting the
Tricolour. The National Flag is a mere instrument in her cynical politics.
If anything, its abuse makes Bharati's offence graver. Bharati has decided
to launch a Tiranga Yatra from Hubli to Jallianwala Bagh. But such stunts
probably won't have any impact. The public knows how to demarcate flag-hoisting
from communal incitement.
The law, assuringly,
may be similarly catching up with Narendra Milosevic Modi too. The Supreme
Court of India has ordered Gujarat to review and reopen 2,100 cases
of violence-or half the
total-which were summarily closed on the pretext that the police could
not trace the accused. New
evidence is emerging at the Gujarat government-appointed (Nanavati-Shah)
commission of inquiry of the Modi's culpability. Testimonies by police
officers and senior civil servants confirms that Modi himself took the
decision to stir up emotions on Feb 27, 2002 by bringing the bodies
of the Godhra victims to Ahmedabad. Former 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 it
was pre-planned.
A specific allegation
was made before the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal by a "highly placed
source" (a former Gujarat minister) that a meeting was held on
Feb 27 where Modi, some other senior ministers and police officials
were present: "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".
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 communication system and the
law-and-order machinery completely broke
down in Gujarat. Thus, top police officials got to know about the Noroda-Patia
and Gulberg Society incidents many hours after they occurred.
The local police
were ordered not to report these by wireless because the communications
system
might get clogged! Even more eloquent is the 172-page affidavit by Sreekumar,
which details the role of police officials and politicians in the post-Godhra
violence. It says: "Officers at the decisive rung ... 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 used in the trial courts to convict the culprits. The Modi government
cannot be expected to do this. It is the greatest culprit of all. The
Central government must step in-by setting up a new inquiry commission
and impleading itself as a party in all relevant litigation. The UPA
owes this to the people of Gujarat and to India's Constitution.
The UPA's Common
Minimum Programme promised to "to preserve, protect and promote
social harmony and to enforce the law... to deal with all obscurantist
and fundamentalist elements who seek
to disturb social amity and peace". It has done little to bring
justice to the Gujarati people. Gujarat, India's greatest state-aided
pogrom of a religious minority since Independence, did not even find
a mention in Manmohan Singh's first address to the nation. Nor did the
word "secularism".
This void must be
filled without delay. Gujarat was a case of genocidal violence. No society
can claim to be civilised if it cannot punish genocide.