Those who justifiably applaud Gujarat police officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s affidavit implicating state Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the 2002 riots should know what he is up against. He lives and works in a state where a very significant number, perhaps even a majority, of people shares Modi’s ideology when it comes to the question of how to “deal” with the Muslim community.
I have been tracking this story from the day it happened in February, 2002, and visited my home town of Ahmedabad several times since then, spending months there talking to a large number of people. Based on those conversations as well as my natural understanding of the local attitudes I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that Modi has only successfully mined historic antipathies that exist in cities such as Ahmedabad when it comes to the Muslims. It is nobody’s case that communal amity between Hindus and Muslims has frequently been destroyed because of the majority community. The Muslims bear as much responsibility.
Bhatt quotes Modi as telling a meeting of top government functionaries on February 27, 2002, "This time the situation warranted that the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur ever again.” Bhatt also quotes Modi as expressing the view that “the emotions were running very high among the Hindus and it was imperative that they be allowed to vent out their anger."
"The effects of these directions given by the chief minister were widely manifest in the half-hearted approach and the evident lack of determination on the part of the police while dealing with the widespread incidents of orchestrated violence (from Feb 28, 2002),” Bhatt says.
He also asserted that there was a "larger conspiracy and official orchestration behind the Gujarat riots".
The need to “teach the Muslims a lesson” is a sentiment I have heard in Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat since my childhood, particularly after the 1969 Hindu-Muslim riots. Over the decades I have regularly heard young men indirectly speaking of their sense of emasculation and the need for a more “muscular” response to “Muslim atrocities.” The debate at the level of the street where riots such as what happened in 2002 play out is almost invariably in terms of muscularity and proving to the Muslim community that the Hindus too can be physically brutal.
Nothing captures that more tellingly than a sting video of a conversation with Babu Bajrangi, by his own admission a leading light of the 2002 riots, as saying, “Hum log (Hindus) ko tumne (Muslims) mara hai to hum log kya pratikar de sakte hein. Hum khichdi kadhi wale nahi hai.” (You (Muslims) have killed us (Hindus) and you should know the kind retaliation we are capable of. We are not the khichidi kadhi eating type.) For that comment cue it at 8.05.
Although in recent years, especially in the last decade or so, that view has changed, it is a fact that eating meat had long been equated in the average Gujarati mind with brute strength. So when Bajrangi says “we are not the khichdi kadhi eating type” he is merely offering one more illustration of that.
In his autobiography ‘My Experiments with Truth’ Gandhi makes a detailed reference to the prevailing belief then that eating meat equaled superior strength.He quotes one of his childhood friends as saying, 'We are a weak people because we do not eat meat. The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters.” Gandhi also quotes Gujarat poet Narmad’s doggerel that went:
Behold the mighty Englishman
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall
I digressed quite far from Bhatt’s affidavit into a larger socio-psycho analysis but the point I was making is that Modi was clearly aware of how much disaffection existed between the two communities and understood that the attack on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra by a Muslim mob, which burnt alive more than 50 Hindu pilgrims, was an event that could have seemed like a great opportunity to him.
With the affidavit Bhatt has rudely disrupted Modi’s nine-year-long political bash and possibly reignited the whole question whether not just the state government was complicit but even the chief minister himself. I am not sure how far this is likely to go but given that Bhatt’s affidavit is before the country’s Supreme Court, there are pretty good chances that it would yield something of adverse consequence for the chief minister.
So far Modi has been able to brazen it out on the strength of the fact that his ideology has many takers in Gujarat but life could easily come off the hinges for him with the affidavit.
