T N Ninan: The beast in us all

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The tragedy of Gujarat goes much beyond Narendra Modi, the Sangh Parivar, the ineffective commissions of inquiry into independent India's worst state-sponsored pogrom, and the slow progress made in the prosecution of those guilty of large-scale killings. The real tragedy is the near-complete communal polarisation in the state, which is what has led commentators to argue that the Tehelka exposé on the 2002 pogrom will actually help Mr Modi to consolidate his vote base before the assembly elections, due in two months. It is the same polarisation that has prevented a relatively harmless film with a human story, like Parzania, from being shown in state theatres, and which on Thursday provoked many cable operators in the state to simply black out the TV channels showing the Tehelka footage of some of the guilty men of 2002 talk openly of the horrific things they did back then. Gujarat, it would seem, is the actualisation of the Hindutva movement's objectives, a state where the executive and the law and order machinery have been sufficiently communalised to facilitate if not participate in a pogrom and to try and subvert justice afterwards, a state in which Muslims have been made to realise that they have no right to the Constitutional guarantees of life and the rule of law, and that they survive on the say-so of the majority Hindu community. Read some of the early writings of those who created the Sangh Parivar, and this closely resembles what they wanted to bring about.

It is the communalisation of the state that helped Mr Modi retain power as chief minister by sweeping the elections that were held in the wake of the Godhra killings and their aftermath, and in the absence of an effective opposition, he looks set to win again. There is no effective opposition because the Congress is not equal to the challenge of finding a secular message that will find some purchase in the state, and in fact has opted in the past for a BJP 'B' team to do battle in Congress colours; and because the BJP rebels and others in the Sangh Parivar who are disillusioned with Mr Modi's authoritarian ways find that they cannot now get rid of the tiger they have mounted. Whatever Tehelka may have captured on tape, therefore, Mr Modi is safely ensconced in Gandhinagar.

This is not to argue that there is no communal divide elsewhere, nor even that political leaders have not instigated and participated in such riots in other states. Gujarat 2002 was different because it was the state that took part in the pogrom; it was therefore a comprehensive negation of what the Constitution stands for. The only thing that comes close (as the BJP keeps stressing, as though two wrongs make a right) is the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 in Delhi, and Rajiv Gandhi's unforgivable semi-justification subsequently that when a big tree falls, the ground will shake. But in that case there has been at least a semblance of attempts to punish the guilty, including political leaders. Not so in Gujarat, where the state government has been humiliated by the Supreme Court, and key officials by the Election Commission, because neither has faith in the state's impartiality.

Those who draw satisfaction from this state of affairs should ponder what they expect the Muslim response to be if pushed into a corner, and whether the country will reap the jihadi whirlwind as a result. Even the narrower forms of discrimination and prejudice that surface occasionally, as in the tragi-scandal of Rizwanur Rahman's fatal marriage to a Hindu girl in Kolkata, point to the challenges the country faces in giving substance to that faded slogan of "unity in diversity". The City University of New York has just done a two-year study to test job discrimination in India on the basis of caste and community. It found that if two similar applications were sent in response to a job advertisement requiring responses from graduates, the odds of a Dalit being called for interview were about two-thirds of the odds for a high-caste applicant, and in the case of a Muslim, only one-third. The beast, it would seem, dwells in us all.