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1984 to 2002 --
Tehelka exposes Hindutva's beast on camera
WSN Bureau
An investigative Indian news weekly, Tehelka last week totally
exposed the truth behind Gujarat riots and the role of the state and
the RSS in it. The extraordinary six-month investigation — one of
the finest in the history of Indian journalism — peeled off all
kinds of masks, and showed the beast in the underbelly of India
where Hindu communalism takes the toll of minorities. So far the
world had only heard charges and counter-charges, the victims, the
government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups.
As Tehelka editor wrote, "Now for the first time hear the story of
the killings from the men who did it. Put to rest your doubts about
the foetus that was pulled out from its womb; about the systematic
slicing of Ehsan Jafri's limbs and torso; of the raping and chopping
and burning of women and children; of law officers who turned on the
victims; of the collusion of the police and the government."
Shame was writ large on India's face. The RSS and its poster boy
Narendra Modi's Hindutva laboratory's doings were fully exposed.
The anatomy of the rioters is now clear. The chilling details came
from the accused themselves, caught on two hidden cameras. The
accused tell on camera how every killing was planned and thought
through. How bombs were manufactured in factories owned by members
of the RSS Sangh Parivar. How arms were smuggled in from other
states. How, for the men in uniform, the colour saffron meant more
than khaki. How Narendra Modi, custodian of the law, volunteered to
let his state resemble a killing field.
"The revelations are important because they are entirely voluntary.
They were not made under any inducement. Wads of notes were not
brandished to elicit them," Tehelka wrote.
Its investigation, it said, was important for many reasons. Public
prosecutors appointed to prosecute the guilty were caught on camera
acknowledging allegiance to their faith over their profession —
paying homage to a warped sense of religion over nobility of duty.
Details of how they are actually working to help the guilty escape
the law. How they have even turned brokers and have already helped
an accused — who had used a sword to cut a man to pieces — by
offering money to the victim's family.
Clearly, India is a downhill story because it while it is emerging
as an IT power, as a software power, as a fast developing economy,
it is losing its soul to the Hindutva monster. The Congress is no
less guilty. Its response even after Tehelka is muted. The PM is
mum, Sonia Gandhi has not said a word.
They can't.
We know why.
Because the Congress
is fully aware, as we had shown in the last issue of the WSN, that
the moment it opens its mouth against the BJP, the ghosts of the
1984 anti-Sikh pogrom will come back to haunt it.
It was exactly the same story. Congress backed goons roamed the
roads of the national capital, grabbing Sikhs and burning them
alive. See the image of the burning tyres on each of the relevant
pages of this edition of the WSN. This is India's multi-tyre system
of justice. A burning tyre around the neck of the minorities.
Official India wants the minorities to either vanish or barely
survive. It wants a single brand of Hindutva to survive.
It is clear from the
many turns that politics takes in India. In the heartland of the RSS
laboratory in Maharashtra and Gujarat, you see the politicians from
Shiv Sena and BJP regularly find admission into the secular Congress
or vice versa. Basically, you have a communal face of Hindutva and a
secular face of Hindutva. Either way, the minorities are doomed.
Between 1984 and Godhra-Gujarat, it is your pick. The monster needs
its diet.
This investigation deserves all the attention the civil society can
manage. It is India's shame. If civil society wants to live with it,
just as it has with the shame of 1984, except the few honourable
exceptions, then so be it. The Sikh community is grateful to the few
great men and women of India who stood by the community and a roll
call of such men will forever find a mention in any list of those
who deserve eternal thanks.
We do not have museums to mark the holocaust like the Jews have. As
Tehelka mentioned, round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out
their children from all over the world to show them the beast that
resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that
the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against
forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the
beast on your back all the time.
There is nowhere that a Sikh can take his son or daughter to make
her recognise the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh
riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the
beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat;
because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.
As and when the Sikhs have such a museum, we can assure the world
that the community will also acknowledge all those who refused to
watch mutely, who refused to be mere bystanders, who were banging at
the gates of the Prime Minister and others and who were landing
directly in the street of Tirlokpuri and elsewhere to stop the
carnage, and to record what the beastly Hindutva mind did.
31
October, 2007
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