The Modi Trap: He may win in Gujarat, but the BJP will lose everywhere else

The ghosts of the Gujarat dead will not lay quiet. Those who thought that the massacres of 2002 — that of Godhra and its aftermath—will fade from public memory are mistaken. Murder, especially mass murder, is not something that ever has a closure, especially when the guilty remain unpunished. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s stand on the killings is striking for how it reveals the hollow moral core of the party.
Whether or not the party’s government was guilty of complicity in the massacre of Muslims, we would have expected some expression of remorse. L.K. Advani has claimed that the Babri Masjid’s demolition was the saddest day in his life. Yet neither he, nor Narendra Modi have ever expressed the remotest sense of shame that during their watch — the former was the Union Home Minister and the latter the Chief Minister of the State — hundreds, if not thousands of people were killed by mobs led by goons belonging to the party and its fraternal organisations — the VHP and Bajrang Dal. The consequences of such a moral vacuum are usually severe. If unchecked they lead to the kind of excesses committed by Adolf Hitler, Stalin or Mao Zedong.

Root causes

Advani and Modi are a real and present danger for our polity. Intelligence agencies are not willing to say so openly, but their actions — Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 and the Gujarat killings of 2002 — gave the biggest fillip to terrorism in the country. Terrorists may need no motivation, but those who believe that a grievance does not play a role in fertilising the ground for recruiting terrorists are deluding themselves. In 1991, when Pakistan wanted to incite Indian Muslims, they sent Manjit Singh alias Lal Singh to Aligarh, Ahmedabad and other places disguised as a Muslim, Aslam Gill, because they had no reliable Indian Muslim agent. He found the ground sterile and was arrested in 1992. But that same year, Advani and his cohorts brought down the Babri Masjid and spurred horrific riots across India, especially in Surat and Mumbai. The result? There has been no shortage of recruits thereafter.
The elections in Gujarat are important, maybe, the BJP even has good reason to believe that they are crucial. But they are only one state elections in a very large country. Recent elections and political trends have indeed shown that the hard Hindutva line of the BJP may give dividends in Gujarat, but nearly everywhere else it will cost the party heavily.
The reason is that while Modi’s personality and Gujarat’s history may be tailor made for a chauvinist campaign, the rest of the country is marching to a different tune. This was manifest in the UP state elections recently where the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat. In almost every constituency, Muslims, who may constitute anywhere between 50 per cent and 15 per cent, voted only to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The BJP should not have forgotten the lesson of 2004 when it lost what was an almost shoo-in election. Allies like Chandrababu Naidu squarely blamed Gujarat for the defeat. Andhra’s Muslims are numerically less than those in UP, but if they vote en bloc against a party aligned to the BJP, it makes a difference. In the divided polity of the country, a bloc vote of 5, 10 and 15 per cent is enough to spell disaster for a party.
The BJP’s tallest leaders — Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishen Advani — are well aware of this. It was the former’s acceptability with constituents that made the National Democratic Alliance possible. Not for nothing did Vajpayee seek to have Modi dismissed in the wake of the Gujarat happenings. Advani, too, is aware of the national ramifications of the Gujarat BJP’s near-homicidal attitude towards the Muslims and sought to square the circle by praising Mohammed Ali Jinnah, only to fall afoul of the RSS leadership. So the challenge before the party remains — be inclusive and go against the RSS’s Hindutva lakshman rekha; be exclusive and run the risk of being dumped by the
electorate.

Moral vacuum

The Modi position on Sohrabuddin Sheikh killing lacks any kind of ethical or moral foundation. In his fulminations, Modi does not refer to the “collateral” murder of Kausar Bi, Sohrabuddin’s spouse. If she was killed only because she was the wife of a bad man, the logical extension of the argument could be that we have the licence to kill the family of a terrorist, and, perhaps, members of the the community from which the terrorist hails. Those who laud Modi because he is only advocating a tough line against terrorists need to carefully look at the slippery slope ahead.
In our Constitutional scheme of things, only the judiciary has the right to punish wrong-doers. Neither the President, Prime Minister nor Chief Minister have this right, most certainly not police personnel like D.G. Vanzara, or for that matter S.S. Rathi and the other murderers in uniform who the media insists on calling “encounter specialists”.
Modi and Advani have perhaps not thought about this, but the only other set of individuals who believe that they have the right to decide whether or not “wrong-doers” shall live or die are terrorists. Modi’s posture is no different from that of a terrorist.

The trap

A great deal now depends on the Congress party. Its hands are not clean, though they are cleaner than that of the BJP. But for a brief flurry of “when a big tree falls” rhetoric, the party has steered clear of arrogantly defending the Sikh massacres of 1984. That it has kept politicians like Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler in the margin is proof that there is some sense of guilt in the party. But it has everything to gain, and nothing to lose by taking a hard line against religious, ethnic and caste fanatics. There may be losses, but in the long term there can only be gains. Nothing, in any way, could be worse than its fate in the last couple of decades. It has pandered to forces of casteism, chauvinism and fundamentalism and still remains unrewarded by the electorate.
As the clock ticks for the next general elections, it is clear that neither the Bharatiya Janata Party, nor the Congress will come near to a working majority on their own. Both will need support of substantial chunks — Left parties, TDP, AIDMK/DMK, BSP, SP, various factions of the Janata Dal and so on. Look at the list. None of them are likely to back a party that has a hawkish anti-Muslim stand.
Given the usually craven behaviour of the Congress, I may be over-interpreting the signs, but BJP and Modi may be walking into a trap of the Congress party’s making. Sonia’s “maut ke saudagar” comment immediately got Modi’s goat and his hard-line response has now set the tone for the party’s Gujarat campaign. The Bharatiya Janata Party may yet savour temporary success in the state, but hriday samrat Narendra Modi’s victory will spell disaster for the party elsewhere.
The article appeared in Mail Today December 7, 2007

Executing Justice

Upholding the law is not just a matter of morality, but pragmatism. Extra-judicial killings by the State only promote terrorism. This article appeared in Hindustan Times May 2, 2007

On Monday in London, five men were convicted for a plot to set off a large improvised bomb. As conspiracies go in our abnormal times, the 2004 conspiracy does not appear shocking or unexpected. What was remarkable was the acquittal, after almost 27 hours of consideration by the jury, of two persons. This is a hallmark of the sophistication of the trial and its verdict. It would have been all too easy, in this era of secret prisons and fake encounters, to railroad these two as well. One of them, Sujah Mahmood, was the brother of the chief accused, Omar Khyam, and lived in the same room as him. The other, Nabeel Hussain, was charged because his debit card was used to pay for the storage unit where the fertiliser to make the bomb was stored.

British justice is not naturally just — we only have to recall the stories of the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four, all convicted of bombings in Britain in the 1970s, to show how justice can be perverted in the mother of democracies as well. All 17, suspected to be Irish Republican Army supporters, did time in prison before their cases were overturned after sustained campaigns and appeals.

The Irish, always ill-treated, were from across the sea. On the other hand, the July 7 bombings and other conspiracies were largely perpetrated by alienated British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, living in the cities and towns of Britain. The country is tackling the latest threat with great care. It is not something that can, or ought to be, fought merely by a policy of blood and iron.

As it is, the case also highlights the fact that you need neither draconian laws nor an inordinate amount of time to prosecute those accused of terrorist crimes. All it requires is effort and a calculated understanding of why it is necessary to not only do justice, but to show that it is being done, more so when the violent crimes are motivated by a sense of injustice, imagined or otherwise.

These thoughts come to mind when we are confronted with evidence that Indian police officers detained three people, and gunned down one of them, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, claiming that he was plotting to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. To hide this murder, they casually bumped off the other two, including Sohrabuddin’s wife, Kausar Bi. Those who have defended Sohrabuddin’s murder with the viewpoint that he was a criminal and ‘deserved to die’, have nothing to say about why the life of another person, his wife, was cut short. They also don’t realise that the logic of arrogating to themselves the decision as to who should live and die is exactly the one used by terrorists.

One of the defining characteristics of the modern State is that it largely retains the monopoly of organised killing. In democratic countries, this right is exercised through judicial due process. Only the judiciary has the right to order an execution, not the prime minister, president or the army chief, leave alone a police officer.

In certain circumstances, the police and the army are provided special legal sanction to shoot and kill. This is not some casual convention or idiosyncrasy. It is the very root of civilised conduct and is the basis of a modern democratic society. Rogue police and security force officers, encouraged by politicians who cannot think beyond their nose, are breaking this compact by carrying out extra-judicial killings. And its consequences can be horrific.

In the last two years, there have been several major terrorist strikes, including the Mumbai train blasts of 2006. In most of them, the police found that the conspirators and the perpetrators were locals, though the explosives and their fabrication may have been aided by terrorists from Bangladesh or Pakistan.

For several years, security officials have warned that terrorist groups were growing roots in certain Indian Muslim communities, particularly those in western India. Ever since the anti-Muslim pogrom that came in the wake of the Godhra massacre, there have been a string of killings, mainly of Muslims, all allegedly on their way to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

On March 2006, four Kashmiri youth, allegedly Lashkar-e-Tayyeba men, were gunned down in the outskirts of Ahmedabad; in June 2004, four ‘terrorists’ were gunned down, including 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan Raza and her fiancé, Javed Sheikh; in January 2003, Sadiq Jamal was shot dead, allegedly while plotting to kill L.K. Advani; in October 2002, Samir Khan Pathan was killed while trying to escape, again after his arrest for a plot to kill Modi.

None of the killings appeared credible then. And now, after the Sohrabuddin revelations, there is need to probe them thoroughly. It does not take much logic to see that acts of injustice provide fertile ground for extremism to flourish. This reasoning is simple, but it does not seem to have impressed those who believe that ruthless use of force, even if it leads to ‘collateral’ casualties among innocents, will help.

Yet, the story did not begin with Modi, but much further back, in the executions of Naxalites in the 1970s, and then in the killing fields of Punjab and Kashmir in the 1980s and 1990s. In that sense, responsibility for extra-judicial killings must go all the way up to the central government. Hundreds of people disappeared in Punjab and Kashmir when they were under central rule, and the capital itself has witnessed highly suspicious ‘encounters’, such as the Ansal Plaza incident of 2002. It’s no secret that the ‘encounter killing’ of Pakistani terrorists was sanctioned after the IC-814 hijack succeeded in freeing Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar. All this has been excused in the name of fighting separatism and terrorism. In such a climate, is it any wonder that some police officials have anointed themselves judge and executioner, in the name of desh bhakti or service to the nation?

The issue, as the British realise, is not one of morality and ethics alone. There are sound pragmatic reasons for the State to ensure the rule of law and enforce due process, rather than allow a vicious cycle of terrorism and illegal retribution. The logic is simple. If the State cannot protect me, I need to do it myself, or support someone who can do it for me. The same is true for retribution. If the authorities fail in their duty to punish criminals through due process, people will seek other means to satisfy their thirst for justice.

The US State Department’s annual report on terrorism says that there was a staggering 40 per cent rise in the number of those killed by terrorist violence last year. The overwhelming proportion of the increase comes from Iraq. There is a self-inflicted war against terror being fought in Iraq, and there is another real war being fought in dozens of countries against ruthless and fanatical people who think nothing of snuffing out human lives for their ‘cause’. That war cannot be won by tanks and airplanes, or police measures alone, but by patiently proving that your system and cause is more just and humane.