'Dial M. Modi for Murder' 'Modi: the Butcher of Gujarat'
- The Times of India
The embers of the Godhra aftermath have not been extinguished, yet another round of killing has begun. Call it a character assassination -- for nothing less than the humiliation, disintegration and disembowelment of a Chief Minister, the ruling political party, the vernacular press and an entire population is incessantly being pursued. Exhibit A -- the headlines at the start of this article. Presented as a foregone conclusion, sections of the Indian media cavalierly usurp the role of judge, jury and executioner. Libelous accusations are being concocted; a wicked application of Newton's Law is fraudulently attributed to Modi ad nauseam despite repeated denials.
Yet, all of this is just a fraction of an ongoing orgy, and the usual suspects are joining the party --a desperate Opposition and a devious intelligentsia. Rather than douse a runaway inferno, these characters continue to pour an acrid fuel on the Godhra aftermath. While a nation thirsts for calm and reconciliation, democratic dysfunction sees a shrill Opposition shatter parliamentary protocol and any governmental function. Six days of a nation's life held hostage to a maneuver so benignly called Rule 184. Opposition members, and some of the ruling alliance, heap the basest of accusations, the most abusive of insults, and demand what they perceive as the biggest prize of all -- Modi's head. Absolutely unsubstantiated indictments continue to implicate Modi and his government as puppeteers directing destruction within their own constituencies (more on this later).
Yet, all the ugly maneuvering, the spurious accusations, parliamentary inaction and the ignominious grandstanding -- though eminently revolting -- are, in some way, acceptable. The English press can continue wielding their overt left-wing political agenda. The Jawaharlal Nehru University hangers-on can continue with their inanities. This is India and its diverse citizenry dealing with a searing tragedy. Very much as an individual traverses the stages of grief from denial to acceptance, so too will a shattered India find its bearing, make its peace and move forward. For the agenda is full. Commissions formed in Gujarat are to commence investigations. Arrests have been made in Godhra and during the aftermath. Undoubtedly, only the surface has been skimmed: too many more are to be apprehended. Even The National Human Rights Commission of India has made its uninvited visit and placed very public recommendations for consideration. Ahmedabad has dealt with this before -- before Godhra, before the BJP came to Gandhinagar, before 2002 -- and Ahmedabad always limps back.
But if all of this is not enough, in the midst of a national catharsis, now comes the invasion from abroad. The international news media that had piled on early with their Indian colleagues, left for some time, and suddenly returned over the last week. A pathetic NRI Muslim group in West Yorkshire, England is shopping around Europe for a makeshift international court to hang Modi; yes, there are even statements of feigned diplomatic concern from the United Kingdom, France and others in the European Union massaging their own Muslim constituencies. A common thread binds this unholy alliance -- the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Gujarat, published April 30, 2002.
Authored by a Smita Narula, the report, subtitled 'State participation and complicity in communal violence in Gujarat', is breathlessly touted by media outlets to corroborate the one accusation they cannot prove -- Modi, his government and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are solely responsible for the Gujarati violence. From Godhra to Ahmedabad, there is only one family of culprits and they are to be 'exposed'.
I was drawn to this report for this very reason. For as the personal accusations reached a crescendo over the last 6 weeks, despite my compulsive search of all accounts from Gujarat, I had not seen any substantiation to the charge that the State government carried out the attacks on Muslims. Of course, there is no dearth of accusations -- and the headlines in the Indian press, never known for the mastery of subtlety, skip words like “complicity” and just accuse Modi of murder. Yet here was a report from a foreign organization, no less, that confidently declares state participation and complicity in the massacres. Now I had read the 1999 report on Kashmir by the HRW, an amalgamation of Indian Army human rights abuses that failed to devote even a sentence to the plight of Kashmiri Hindus. I was eager now to understand what this inexplicably often-quoted organization had to say of Gujarat.
So I downloaded this now infamous report (at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/gujarat.pdf) with great anticipation -- perhaps this was the definitive report, the Holy Grail, so many sought to accurately accuse the BJP. Ah, but I expected too much. Scanning the summary I realized quickly that this document owed its genesis to the same biases, the same perverse equations and the very same sources that had vitiated the atmosphere in Gujarat for eight weeks prior.
Ostensibly written as an account of a tragic, maniacal orgy of murder, this 75-page report evolves into nothing more than a politically charged and hopelessly biased self-serving account. There are 327 footnotes of which over 150 references are none other than the English newspapers widely known for their partiality. Over 20 references belong to the Times of India, now infamous for editorializing Hindu fault in the Godhra massacre. The Asian Age, Telegraph, The Hindu, Outlook Magazine, and a sundry list of other publications spawned from the identically vicious false-secular ideology round out the list of 'credible' sources. Even more difficult to comprehend are 6 separate references attributed to the South China Morning Post -- dare not ask when it became a respected authority of Gujarati news. Thus we have to look no further to understand the fountainhead of this report's strategy. But I did choose to read further.
The report, then, begins with an arrogant list of “recommendations” to the Government of India, India's trading partners, and for good measure, international lending institutions like the World Bank. Over 75% of this list calls for the involvement of United Nations agencies from the investigation to implementation of the HRW agenda -- a clear challenge to the legitimacy of the Indian government.
But if the striking audacity of the recommendations from the start of the report is insufficient to set the tone, more is yet to come. The first salvo without which this report would not exist -- the Godhra train burning -- merits exactly 1 paragraph on page 13. That's correct -- 3 sentences out of 75 pages describe the killing of innocent Hindus that sparked a national nightmare. The remainder of the Godhra chapter exhaustively quotes Celia Dugger of the New York Times and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post and their long-exposed, sadistic, blame-the-Hindu victim journalistic gymnastics (examine the bias of these reporters in Ramesh Rao's article at http://www.sulekha.com/column.asp?cid=179723).
So while 3 pages of this chapter spend more time denouncing POTO than the death of 60 innocents, the following 6 pages (pp. 15-21) exhaustively detail spine-chilling personal accounts of the equivalent number of Muslim innocents killed in each of the Naroda-Patia and Gulmarg Society areas of Ahmedabad in the aftermath. There is no parity when one speaks of murder, but couldn't the HRW agenda spare a few condoling words of empathy for the dead Hindus?
As I focused on the accusations of state complicity, once again only innuendo filled page after page. The initial act of state complicity? The unmitigated gall of the Gujarat government to call a bandh to mourn the mayhem of Godhra. Seeking further evidence of state complicity? See page 22. Reported is that spray-painted on a wall was, 'Andar andar ki baat hey, Police hamare saath hey'. That's right, graffiti on a wall is the standard to what defines evidence in this report. Repeated mention is made of “computer lists” specifying Muslim businesses. But not a shred of evidence is presented that these lists were generated by government officials.
The police are repetitively implicated as colluding with rioters during the massacres based on victim accounts. Clearly police in Ahmedabad were often unable to control the mayhem in the early hours: over 30,000 rioters were reported to have attacked Gulmarg Society alone. And certainly despicable individuals in the police, inexcusably blinded by the rage of the moment, may have participated with the rioters in the first 24 hours. There is no evidence or accounts, however, in the report -- due to no lack of trying -- of systematic police or state complicity despite a vast media presence at the time or from the interviews since. In its haste to blame the government, the report again overlooks the facts of rapid police deployment and the massive police firing that disproportionately killed Hindu rioters: 90 companies of the State Reserve Police were called in on February 27, 2002 itself, and over 3,900 rounds of ammunition killed close to 100 rioters. The Gujarat Police overlook a population of 50 million (that would rank as the 22nd most populous country in the world) and have largely succeeded in keeping violence at a minimum within one city since the initial days of madness.
Perhaps none of the distortions and none of the insidious lies expose the HRW agenda as clearly as chapter 6 on page 39. Entitled 'The context of violence in Gujarat', this chapter is the ultimate in political ham-handedness. Incredibly, the entire history of communalism in Gujarat is attributed to the rise of the Sangh Parivar. If the rest of the 73 pages of anti-Sangh hatred are not enough, though utterly unrelated, almost 2 pages are devoted to anti-Christian violence. Keep in mind again that the Godhra train killing merited 1 paragraph! It is nothing less than criminal to overlook the infamous, and far more extensive, riots of 1969, 1985, 1989 and 1992 that preceded BJP rule in the state. Gujaratis are well aware that the last decade of communal peace, before Muslim leaders staged a premeditated attack on that calm in Godhra, was a rare chapter in recent history.
I could go on about the report's selective respect for only the FIRs filed by Muslims, of its distortions about police transfers (all were promotions), paucity of Godhra victim interviews, etc., etc. But there can be no doubt now that the crocodile tears seek only the political annihilation of a rival. Murder and mayhem in Gujarat was moral bankruptcy incarnate -- but the borrowers span the spectrum of Indian polity -- there is no monopoly. Caste-based, vote-bank politics, nefarious external elements infiltrating the local communities, and a hellish history must be reconciled and re-mediated to assure long-term calm -- not 75 pages of anti-Indian hearsay focused on the political destruction of a popularly elected party. Not a shred of evidence links Modi or his government to substantiate a single conclusion in this report. The reliance on the Indian English press by HRW and its ilk is clear, and I can only hope the media will awaken to how it was manipulated for anti-national ends.
Why do I devote this article to a report written by an insignificant paper-pusher with no journalistic integrity securely sheltered in New York City? This report is a convenient summary of a rampant dogma among circles immersed in a modern day political witch-hunt. A witch-hunt aimed at discrediting an opposing ideology -- it is tantamount to an arrogant rejection of Indian democracy, Gujarati electoral intelligence and due process. For evidence of immediate repercussions, just wait until the next session in the United States Congress when the shrinking, yet shrill, India-baiters begin spewing their venom India's way. You can count on them being armed with the HRW report making its way through Washington.
