1. The Unmaking of an Investigation
2. Gujarat riots 10th anniversary: Revisiting the symbols of genocide
3. The Remaking of Narendra Modi
4. Fast forwarding Moditva
The unmaking of an investigation
SHIV VISVANATHAN
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Dear Mr. Raghavan,One of the most inspirational acts of the Supreme Court was its decision that a little postcard could be treated as an application. This letter is longer than a postcard. It is a reflection on the processes of justice and of the unravelling of that process. The essay is written as a personal letter to you, not to emphasize the personality but the persona.The SIT is a crucial ethical presence and your role is crucial to that act of ethical creativity. This set of reflections seeks to avoid the ethical disappointment of earlier efforts. It is divided into six sections. The first is a reflection on genocide. The second looks at the role of the SIT and its dramatis personae. The next two examine the rituals of omission and their significance for justice. The fifth section is an appeal for protection of witnesses in such a process. Finally, the letter locates the SIT investigation within the wider dynamics of Gujarati society.As a sociologist based in Ahmedabad, I have for the last few years been listening to and watching a city in the aftermath of genocide. Genocide is a serious word. It demands numeracy, an understanding of exterminism, a different mindset because killing on that scale takes time. The smell of a society changes when neighbours can kill you and move on with their lives without regret, as if murder was an act of pity and genocide a mere logic of duty.Genocide and Cleansing: Democracies have a strange affinity for genocide. Electoral majorities get tired of the persistence of minorities. In fact, when minorities thrive, majorities often feel paranoid. The former are seen as pieces of dirt that do not disappear despite repeated washing. Washing then gets replaced by ethnic cleansing and the majority is content like a housewife who has discovered a more powerful detergent. Minorities like dirt are just matter out of place. Murder like cleansing keeps things orderly. Ghettoize, exterminate, and celebrate so that democracies can function more efficiently. Genocide provides an effective hygiene for majoritarian imperatives.Genocide has shades of a soap opera, of teledrama. People watch in awe and the TRP ratings are impressive. Genocide also produces its own forms of consumption. Secularists almost feel legitimized in the aftermath of a riot and geno-terrorism like disaster tourism has its standard rituals. A rights report which lacks flavour a week later, an angry essay from the assembly lines of standard critique where the rhetoric is the same, only the place different.A few official feminists arrive accompanied by a diasporic academic who suddenly sees his tenure guaranteed. The diaspora has its own inexplicable logic. Having created an IPR out of words like suffering and subaltern, it insists on deciding who has suffered. This new Orientalism decides which form of suffering is to be valorized and which not. Left and Right battle it out in the postmodern frenzy of the diaspora even as victims watch in quiet perplexity wondering what deconstruction means. But soon they are alone because strip mining a victim for a research paper does not take long. Sociology like dentistry can be paying and quick when all that is demanded is extraction.
The aftermath of a riot creates a strange world, a no-man’s land of memories where survival demands that you forget and dignity insists that you remember. The aftermath of a riot is almost archaeological with only the shards, the broken pieces, the flesh, bone, memory and property constituting fragments of life which you have to put together in a macabre exercise of jigsaw building. At one level the process feels like a still life; at another it moves like an exaggerated slapstick. It is not easy to return to the normal after your mother and sister have been raped and killed before you.
If words could be punished, I would sentence the word ‘rehabilitation’ to hard labour. Its pomposity and illiteracy about emotions is unbelievable. It sees a human as a machine. There is a secret threat in the word. Implicit in it is a message that if you cannot be rehabilitated then you must be erased or abandoned. Why does society offer the dreaded either-or of terror or silence to the victims? Rehab standardizes. It assumes that a drug addict, an alcoholic and a riot victim need similar tactics to return to the normalcy of citizenship.
But no one talks of the ethical repair. Ethical repair emphasizes healing over rehabilitation. It recognizes the riot as a social wound and seeks a return to the normative. It demands a return to norms which allow you to trust the social order, feel reassured that the social has been reinvented such that you still have a claim to citizenship. Ethical repair demands more than forgiveness or a confessional; it requires that you recognize what happened. It challenges denial, neglect, indifference and erasure. Ethical repair is a mending of maps within your head, the stitching up of concepts you need to live by. It acknowledges murder and then asks: How does one continue to live with the murderer, especially when he is your neighbour? Justice needs ethical repair as a horizon. It saves it from being somnambulistic.
When the Supreme Court established the Special Investigating Team, the victim and survivor, almost dormant with despair, felt that finally something different was happening. The Supreme Court held, ‘Communal harmony is the hallmark of democracy… If in the name of religion, people are killed, that is a slur and blot on democracy.’ It instituted a Special Investigation Team to investigate cases and to discern any suspicion of communal dissonance. After seven years of indifference and harassment, the SIT appeared like manna from heaven. But such beginnings are deceptive and can be easily misunderstood, especially by those who lack a sense of police procedure.
SIT – Dramatis Personae: An SIT can be read as a script for a play. The choice of actors is critical. In this case the selection of members eventually demanded a split between three insiders and three outsiders. The outsiders were unproblematic but the choice of insiders was distressing. The SIT should be like Caesar’s wife but the eventual choice of members made it appear like Caesar’s harem. Consider the personalities of the three members. First Ashis Bhatia, a career officer. Despite being additional commissioner of police of Surat city, he failed to file an affidavit before the Nanavati Commission. Instead of being punished he gets appointed to succeed D.G. Vanjara, currently in jail for his infamous encounters. Yet, while Bhatia could be tolerable, the next person is an absolute specimen.
In Shivanand Jha, the perpetrator’s accomplice masquerades as an investigator. If Modi wishes to make assurance double sure, the choice is immaculate. Jha is suspected of being hand-in-glove with the regime. He was additional CP-Ahmedabad city (Sec 1) where 500 people died on account of police inaction. As home secretary, he handled the reinvestigation of Narodia Patia and the transfer of the Best Bakery case. Appointments like Jha’s add to the cynicism. How is a man seen as accomplice to murder to guarantee justice? The third member is Geeta Johri. She is facing a spate of enquiries and her husband, a forest officer, is facing departmental proceedings on corruption. This makes her vulnerable to pressure by the regime. The point is not that we are short of good officers. There are, among others, Rageesh Kumar Rai, Neerja Gotru Rao and A.K. Singh, all outstanding officers with unimpeachable integrity. One wonders why they were not considered.
Lest you think I am being paranoid about justice, consider a few questions about the immaculate performance of Shivanand Jha. When the message about Godhra was received at 8:39 hours on 27.02.2002, Jha instructed his officers to maintain vigil. Apart from patrolling, he recommended no action though he claims that he gave the necessary instructions. Let us match our illiteracy with his and ask how far did he follow official manuals? Let us naively ask why even as there was a steady escalation of violence against minorities, our officer never thought of imposing curfew. Curfew was not imposed till 13:00 hours on 28.02.2002, while less sensitive areas like Rajkot and Jamnagar were under curfew by 10:00 hours. Even assuming a need for benign neglect, why were BJP goons who led armed mobs, torched shops and hotels owned by minorities not arrested? Ignore even this. How about those who committed sexual crimes against minorities? We recognize that Jha appeared busy but fail to understand why not even a single person was arrested for unlawful assembly? Let us call it a soft approach to murderous mobs and explore its consequences.
Just imagine the wave of violence as rioters went on rampage in areas under Jha’s jurisdiction. The roll call includes Dudheshwar and Madhavpura on 02.03.2002, Bakaraliwadi and Dalgarwade on 03.03.2002, Kalupur tower on 04.03.2002, Kalupur police station on 04.03.2002, the Idgah Jugaldas lane on 15.03.2002, the Panch Kua, Mirdhawade on 21.03. 2002, Vasna Circle on 24.03.2002, Ramol Janata Nagar on 26.03.2002, Nagori Wadi police station on 27.03. 2002, Shahpur Bhilwas on 01.04.2002, Saerkota Nirmal Pura on 02.04.2002, Akshay Society/Madhavpura on 03.04. 2002. In not one of these places was firing resorted to. One is not listing out a track for riot tourism but merely asking how such an officer was appointed to the SIT. Jha claimed he was moving around with 30 policemen and yet, he never fired a shot to protect minorities. Correction, he did open fire once, but that was when crowds attacked the Sabarmati police station.
The Rites of Omission: The SIT provides a civics of understanding of how justice works or fails to operate. One realizes that courage is not enough, that memory will not suffice, and that a scream is irrelevant. What we have to master is the craft of justice as the rituals of procedure. The process of legality as administrative procedure makes one realize that a clerk’s way of perceiving justice and a citizen’s way of constructing justice are not the same. These are two different attitudes, mentalities and ways of life. But survival demands that we translate our story as the civics of resistance moves from survival to the new literacy of law. Manuals, procedures, the tacit habits of the police all become critical now. As one learns the craft of affidavit making and the table manners demanded of the act of witness, one senses that the state is indifferent to its own systems of justice. One is not talking of personal oversight; one is talking of a systematic indifference to justice.
Let us recognize the magnanimity of law, especially its institution of the SIT. It promotes a second coming of justice in its very terms of reference. The Supreme Court established the SIT to go into the ‘facts, circumstances and course of events of the subsequent incidents of violence in the state after the aftermath of the Godhra incident.’ The focus it requires is on ‘the adequacy of administrative measures taken to prevent and deal with the disturbances in Godhra and subsequent disturbances in the state.’ Finally, it suggests that the SIT ‘recommend suitable measures to prevent recurrence of such incidents in the future.’Terms of reference are not acts of piety. They demand adherence in a formal procedural and substantive sense. The rituals of competence involved are as demanding as a Noh play. The idea of justice in a tacit and explicit sense must dovetail to create a sense of harmony. The survivor begins to understand this only gradually. The law is a gauntlet of rituals. Worse, it demands evidence in two languages and in terms of endless copies. In fact, as he plays munshi to himself, transforming memory into record, the survivor realizes that the SIT is a thought experiment of a significant kind. It demands an act of imagination, a commitment to elasticity which will determine if it is protean and sensitive or procrustean and indifferent to the exigencies of the investigation.
The citizen, in exploring this, starts acquiring legal intelligence, a step towards a new literacy of citizenship. The first thing a survivor realizes is that the SIT investigation will have to examine an entire ecology of law around communal riots. It has to be embedded within the existing literacy of law. This includes the Gujarat Police Manual volume 11, rule 52, rules 22-31. These deal, respectively, with ‘measures taken during communal riots’ and ‘an itemization of the responsibility of various ranks.’ The thicket of regulations includes a booklet on ‘immediate necessary action’ to be taken by all commissioners of police. There is also a separate compilation of government instructions on communal peace.
The volume of codified wisdom from manuals, directives to circulars, is voluminous. The literature covers preventive deployment, patrolling reserves, escorts, preventive arrest of objectionable people, raids on underworld dens and enforcement of curfew. In fact, there is an anticipatory ethnography of rituals to be enacted when a threat of riots emerges on the horizon. These interestingly include the refusal to allow funeral processions and denial of permission to the parading of dead bodies. Religious rituals have fewer dos and don’ts than riot control literature.Yet the amnesia surrounding these texts is amazing. One feels surreal, almost sensing there are two states, one built on this paperwork of riot regulations and other living in blissful erasure. Citizens, in fact, the network of survivors, gradually realize that the thicket of records that the SIT would have to examine would demand the enormity of a secretariat. Consider a simple but utterly concrete scenario. Ahmedabad city has an exclusive intelligence cell with a staff of 1 DIG, 3 Dy. SPs, 8 Inspectors, 32 PSI and 228 other personnel. In addition, at the state level, the State Intelligence Bureau has a staff of nearly 425 personnel. This is a huge paper producing machine which is obsessive about records, instructions and information. Surely a cornucopia of records would have accumulated around the horizon of a riot. Yet the surreal part is whether the SIT even considered this.
An enormous amount of information, it appears, has disappeared into a black hole. Where are the references to tips from intelligence, warning messages and instructions from senior officers, minutes of meetings and information from intelligence branches? The instructions are specific. The instructions are oral. Where is any reference to a papyrophilic world? Was this benign neglect or a more malign act where the police ignored and subverted all these instructions to let the riot proceed undisturbed? What irks and intrigues more is the sheer indifference of the SIT to this mass of material.
As a citizen watches the investigation unfold, he realizes that his sense of justice changes. What looked like a singular granite bloc becomes a hieroglyph. The facts are not there; they need to be constructed. The citizen feels like an inept child with building blocks or a puzzle. The child in a rage can throw a few pieces around. But for an adult, anger is the blowtorch that can weld the fine mesh called justice. As a community of learners, the survivor and his family learn that justice has to be fought for, layer by layer. The survivor realizes what the Dalai Lama recently said, ‘Once the facts are there, the truth has to be extracted from them.’
One soon realizes that nothing can be taken for granted. One would expect top policemen to know which witnesses to summon. Yet the role of the absentee investigator makes one wonder whether the SIT was absent-minded, or indifferent, or is it that justice is not that rigorous in its demands as corporate life? Mr. Raghavan, you are supposed to be a conscientious man. Could I ask you a few questions as a little munshi of the survivors? Where were the following people when the SIT commenced its review? Ordinary people, Mr. Raghavan, but they add up in significance. In fact, the list of absentees becomes your indictment rather than that of the perpetrators.
Consider first, the PSO of Vijaypur, H.C. Devjibhai. He was pre-sent when the violence in Sardarpura was taking place, between 8 p.m. on the night of 01.03.2002 till the morning of the second. He was a crucial presence and a critical witness and yet the SIT did not feel fit to record his statement. One has to also ask about Babubhai. As a police wireless operator, he would have been aware of wireless calls and records. Let us get a touch civilian. Mansuri Nisar Ahmed Gulamnabi made a statement stating that the DGP control, Gandhinagar and Mehsana, were repeatedly contacted for help from his mobile phone. Yet his statement goes unrecorded by the SIT.
Witnesses repeatedly testify to the involvement of those in power at different levels. Thus, Ibrahimiya Rasoomiya, before the apex court mentions sarpanch Kanubhai Joitabhai Patel and Transport Minister Narayan-bhai Lallubhai Patel in his affidavit. At least eight witness statements recorded by the SIT suggest that prior to the incident of 01.03.2002, signs of a build-up were evident and yet the SIT chooses not to investigate this. Numerous applications filed before the SIT reveal that key witnesses have deliberately not been examined. But the rituals of tardiness and indifference go deeper. The SIT seems strangely reluctant to obtain documentary evidence. For instance, the SIT has not obtained mobile phone call records of calls made by PSI Rathod and PSI Parmar between 28.02.2002 and 02.03.2002 even though mobile phones leave a trackable trace of activity.
Let us leave litanies out and consider one poignant event. It is apparent from the statement filed by the witness Munsaf Khan Yasin Khan Pathan that he made innumerable phone calls from his own land line number 32328 and also from the mobile of Nisar Ahmed Gulamnabi, appealing for help from the police. These phone calls were made from 8 p.m. of 01.03.2002 until 4 a.m. of 02.03.2002 both to Vijaypur police station and the station control room. Yet, the SIT benignly ignores this, refusing to investigate these distress calls. Nor has it recorded any statement in this connection, not even bothering to collect records of these calls. One realizes evidence turns Malthusian as a demographic exercise, but is the SIT strategy a systematic culling of testimony? Well, maybe the telephone revolution is not part of the IT revolution in India.
Could we then move to the methods of a few decades back and look at bodies and certificates. Bodies of dead victims were removed from the spot withoutpanchnamas being carried out and recorded. The SIT has not viewed these as serious procedural lapses. Is the DNA of SIT justice coded differently or are we suffering from too many bad novels of detection? Do we say adieu Chandler and McBain? But these detectives stuck to the investigation. Maybe, ours is a more pragmatic understanding of modern investigation where missing records, neglected certificates are holes in an information system. Holes become silences as time sutures them and soon witnesses and events cease to exist.
Let us get even more old-fashioned and stick to rumour as information. Witness no. 65, Munsaf Khan Pathan in a statement before SIT on 16.06.2008 observed, ‘On the day of the incident around 2 p.m. PSI Parmar while on police patrol of the village, had come to my home. At the time, one Shankar Revabhai Prajapati informed me that the Patels are likely to cause trouble in the village today and that he had informed PSI Parmar.’ Parmar called the Vijaypur police station and told them to make an entry in the station diary. Witness 99, PSI G.K. Parmar noted in his statement of 16.06.2008 that, ‘Munsaf Khan Pathan had called a ‘peace meeting’ with fifty odd persons including women and men and he had also called the former sarpanch Dashrathbhai Patel to the meeting.’ The witness also stated that at the time Munsaf Khan had made several phone calls from his landline to the Vijaypur police station. He then added, he spoke to PSI O.K. Jenu from his landline asking for more protection. The investigation has not looked into what steps were taken in response. Records are available from the police station diary and the phone call inward register. Movements of police vans are also critical. Records would be available with the charge sheet. Beyond justice to the victim, the integrity of the police makes it imperative that these ‘allegations’ be investigated.
Often when one approaches such documents, one wonders how Solzhenitsyn recorded his Gulag, document after document, witness after witness. What we are suffering is a Gulag of the mind which refuses to recognize testimony, respect witness and, in fact, even follow procedure. Time, date, place and event of these micro-narratives of murder which collage into what we call a genocide, all become noise in your investigation. But beyond the logic of lapse and indifference, one has to face the logic of complicity. The complicity of the local alters the nature of narrative. As the ethnography of charges gets thicker, one wonders why the SIT files appear so indifferently thin. It is tough for a citizen, who is otherwise haunted by paper, to realize that both orality and print leave this investigation deaf. One realizes that the act of witness is not enough and that testimony is but a fragment. One recognizes that a community of survivors has to map the networks of indifference, absenteeism, neglect, complicity and connivance that went into the making of murder and its erasure. The somnambulism of law meets its double in the sheer amnesia of official memory.
One faces the deadly reality of faulty procedure, where a Supreme Court agency instituted to reinvestigate procedure mimics the earlier investigation. Let us examine how faulty procedure combines with benign neglect. Consider the following: Key police officers were exchanging messages on their mobile as well as wireless sets while the offence was taking place but no message book printouts have been recovered by the SIT. This is a gross lacuna in the investigation, making us wonder if the SIT is a lens or a sieve.
More particularly, the SIT made no attempt to investigate the phone call entries made by Ehsan Jaffery. The Member of Parliament made dozens of frantic calls; in fact, according to witnesses, the second last call was to Mr. Modi. It was only when he realized that he was facing a premeditated attack that he gave himself up to the crowd. The SIT blithely ignores his phone records. It has done nothing to interrogate when this happened, who he rang up. Was his phone record subject to routine destruction or destroyed as a result of instructions from those higher up? Jaffery had called several police officers and politicians from 2129266, his land line number.Nor did the SIT investigate how the dead bodies were shifted to the hospital before the panchnamas were recorded. Though the panchnama of the scene of offence was drawn, it was without any proper technical map. The SIT too has made no effort to get a proper map drawn. One fears that this is beginning to sound like an academic discourse on investigation. One recognizes that the station diary of the Meghani Nagar police station, the vehicles of the station during bandobast, the logbook of the concerned officer and the logbook of the police are important. The SIT made no efforts to procure them. Worse, many eyewitnesses received serious injuries and were treated in dispensary relief camps. Yet, the investigating officers have made little effort to recover the medical certificates.If the events do not confound us, the individual officers do. Consider N.D.Parmar of the erstwhile Meghani Nagar police station. Witnesses in their sworn affidavits complained in 2002 and 2004 that he had not recorded their statements accurately. Parmar then turned more ‘proactive’. Filing an affidavit in the Sessions Court, he stated that these investigations into the affidavits and applications made by the victims and witnesses did not require further action. In his account, the murder accused had a fairy angel presence. Though the SIT did reopen some of the cases after recognizing the truth in witness complaints, one still faces the fact that Parmar has not been charged for firing false affidavits.
Meet P.N. Barot, assistant PC ‘B’ Division. Barot was appointed as an enquiry officer for the Gulbarg case. He was in charge of this case between 08.03.2002 and 30.04.2002. During his tenure, he made no further investigation nor did he record statements of any other witnesses. He did not inquire into the quality of the panchnamas recorded by the police. Seventy persons were slaughtered in cold blood in the Gulbarg massacre and yet no forensic tests were conducted at that time. No inquiries were made by Barot about these lapses. The Supreme Court instituted the SIT to go into lapses of earlier investigations. Yet the SIT treats this earlier ‘still-life’ as adequate. One wonders why the names of powerful accused were omitted and why no preventive action was taken. One is intrigued as to why SIT mimics the superficiality of the earlier investigation.
Enter M.P. Rana, ACP on duty when the Gulbarg Society investigation occurred. Rana explains away his lack of commitment to the investigation, contending that he helped issue guidelines but lacked the time to pursue inquiries or visit the place because he was involved in VIP bandobast. As a senior officer, one would have expected him to inquire into the lapses of officers under him. Predictably he refrains and the SIT follows suit. The plot thickens when one realizes that many of the survivors of the Gulbarg Society massacre stayed at the police station on that eventful night. Many senior officers were present there. Yet oddly, no effort was made to record an FIR. The SIT betrays little curiosity about it.
After the Gulbarg Society massacre occurred, PI Erda filed the FIR in his name and conducted the inquiry himself. Such a procedure, to state mildly, is unlawful. Many persons were injured by stones or burned as a result of being thrown into the fire or were brutally shot. The police made no attempt to take them to the hospital. The SIT finds little amiss in such brazen lapses. Without wishing to be obsessive, one must observe that many persons were burnt alive at Ehsan Jaffery’s residence. Yet Rana did not attempt to obtain the dead bodies, nor did he summon fire engines. Dead bodies remained in a horrific condition. The SIT reacts as if complicity is a normal part of the activities of the Gujarat Police.
Visualize the situation. The violence continued the whole day. Thousands congregated as a mob, yet not one is arrested. In fact, for the following six days not a single arrest was made. Can one conclude that the police gave them an adequate chance to escape? In fact, though Jaffery’s house continued to burn even the next day, the fire brigade register shows that no one thought of summoning a fire engine. Finally, let us nit-pick on a few technical details. Panchnamas were not prepared properly. No video or photograph at the site of the offence was taken and no map was prepared of the place. In fact, the violence was attributed to firing from within Gulbarg Society though the incident occurred only after 2 pm while the violence had started as early as 10:30 am. Incidentally, CISF commandos reached Gulbarg Society at 2 pm. Yet no order to fire was given until four hours later.
Caesar’s Wife and the Ecology of Justice: In many ways, a reinvestigation is not merely an act of justice but a ritual of science. The state or any other authority feels that the truth has not been told. To this, the citizen behaving like a desperate nag adds that it is not just a failure to collect evidence, or the silence of officials that is worrying. Deep down, he believes that one has to unravel the structure of a lie. Often, watching the investigations the citizen sees the SIT endorsing a lie. For example, in the Godhra Train Burning case, the SIT enthusiastically endorsed the theory advanced by the police. It failed to look into the revelations made by Tehelka. In a series of brilliant investigative pieces, dramatically dubbed ‘Operation Kalank’, the magazine conducted a series of sting operations where witnesses confessed, on camera, that they had been bribed by the police to support the police theory of conspiracy. The SIT behaves as if Tehelka’s reports belong to a parallel world. It is also intriguing that Noel Parmar, an officer accused of complicity, benefits from a surfeit of extensions even after retirement. In fact, he was continued by SIT until the media uproar. One wonders whether misinformation is a part of SIT’s investigative portfolio. Why, for instance, one asks naively, could Parmar not be removed merely to assure transparency?
Consider the case of Shri Mothailya, SP Panchmahals, who, it is widely believed, holds witnesses to ransom and threat. Knowing well that his very presence in court is likely to influence testimony, he is not barred from attendance, despite the advocate’s objections. One wonders whether there is a rule of law or whether police stations are fiefdoms where ordinary citizens are told what to say. To this first variety of policemen as a species, we have to add police officers who turn hostile midway through an investigation. Mr. Raghavan, what one is looking for is not only fairness in terms of correctness of procedure, but an ecology of justice which challenges the sensorium of fear that haunts this state. Consider that delightful maestro of mob attacks, Babu Bajrang Patel. He led the mob that eliminated 110 people in Naroda Patia. These are official figures. Yet despite overwhelming evidence, the SIT has not moved the courts for the cancellation of his bail. He roams around freely, even enjoying the patronage of the chief minister. Should not the fact that he is in a position to tamper with evidence intrigue the SIT?
Yet one worries that in an ironic denouement to Gandhi’s monkeys, despite being an investigative agency, the SIT ‘sees no evil, hear no evil, and speaks no evil’, while evil stalks the land. The SIT is a beacon of hope. Yet one wonders whether it may not become the eventual irony of Indian justice, a reinvestigation that borrowed old formats and became an emperor in old clothes. For a start, notwithstanding its tremendous powers, the SIT has yet to see itself as powerful and catalytic. It has to make the leap from the officially correct to the realms of justice. The SIT is a strange body. It can reopen new cases, provide for witness protection. But it is embedded in the Gujarat Police. It is they who carry out the investigation. In that sense, despite the Supreme Court imprimatur as an investigative agency, the SIT is hypothecated to the Gujarat Police, dependent on them for facts, investigations and eventually, the fate of the cases it has to examine.The SIT has been asked to be the Caesars’ wife of Indian justice. It has to decide whether or not allegations of malafide and bias in the investigation by the Gujarat Police can be substantiated. This demands unimpeachable integrity, judgment and even the potential courage to indict a chief minister.
Can an organization whose entrails are local transcend its biases? Can one really expect a local officer to investigate a DGP like P.C. Pandey whose role during the events is under a cloud? Pandey, after all, is the reality principle who writes their ACRs. How does one guarantee the secrecy and integrity of an investigation allowing the SIT to be a lens and not a local net leaking information?
There is an expectation of leadership, a feeling, to quote the cliché, that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But you, Mr. Raghavan, have still not arrived. One misses the presence of a leader. You literally appear like an absentee investigator. Blackberry’s apart, or despite them, presence has to be more physical. It adds a moral thickness to the ritual of investigation. Presence is literally embodiment. Yet you have chosen to play visiting professor with your occasional forays. As a consequence, you appear to orchestrate a performance whose score is being written elsewhere. Maybe, because of your commitments elsewhere, the officers of the Gujarat cadre are conducting the investigation. The irony strikes the witnesses but why not you?One does not wish to engage in a time and motion study of your movements, but a quiet and informal ethnography reveals that you spend six to eight days a month here, despite the infrastructure and the emoluments provided. One wonders how you monitor eight separate trials. Since 27 April 2009, we believe you are also investigating the complaints against the CM and 61 officers. This is a serious, onerous task and one wonders whether you have devised a way of going beyond delegation to outsource justice. That, given your role in TCS, would be the eventual irony of the information revolution. The litany goes on. Witness after witness in his anonymity quietly realizes that a coral reef of testimony is being created. But does the SIT realize that a coral reef of evidence is an ecology for truth?
The survivors’ courage hides his vulnerability. Sometimes one wonders whether as a witness one has the rights of protection. A protection of a witness involves both dignity and security. When as survivors, we sit in court and watch perpetrators, many of them identifiable neighbours, laugh like the bullies in class who are sure that the law will not catch up with them. It makes us wonder what the logic of law is. Witnessing, Mr. Raghavan, is a strange initiation for a minority member. It becomes a rite of passage to citizenship, to a full understanding of one’s position under law and the guarantees of the constitution.
Survival makes you an expert. It is a craft which teaches you about friendship, about the networks of community encompassed in that wonderfully inept word, social capital. It demands from you that oral testimony needs to be transformed into the grid of print. But print is ruthless; it sucks you into a world of copies. Nothing is singular, the real is in triplicate. It makes you feel even justice is only available as a xerox, like a reprinted justice. But all this is only an aside to a more essential problem. The survivor, to remain witness, needs protection. What we need urgently is a Witness Protection Programme. Let me cite from a confidential letter a colleague wrote to you about a necessary framework of protection.
Witness Protection: One of the things one needs to address is not just the vulnerability of the witness but the frailty of the victim. The victim of crime and abuse of power enjoys protection under the 1985 resolution of the UN General Assembly. This asks that the victims should be treated with compassion and dignity. They should have the privilege of time which allows them quick access to justice through formal and informal procedures of redress. The victim carries, like a pregnant woman, the life of a testimony. He has the right to voice and to an expeditious trial. The nature of riots and atrocities is such that victim-hood becomes doubly vulnerable – once as a target of crime, once as a vehicle seeking justice.
It is the second journey that we need to focus on. Waiting, living in fear, articulating witness and learning the procedures of justice which often plays Masonic and makes victimhood a gruelling site. Protection is only an outer shell which facilitates empathy and trust. In that sense, the SIT is a high priest of the procedures of justice. To be indifferent or illiterate about the ritual claims of justice truncates its very drama. An initiation rite in all its fullness becomes instead an intimidation rite demanding so many acts of courage in response that one realizes that courage as an everyday act is rarely singular.
Protection is a ritual, a guarantee that the state must offer. Let us spell it out. We need protection for the 96 witnesses from the Sardarpur massacre, the Deepla Darwaza killings, Odh killings and the Gulbarg Society carnage. We believe that protection demands the presence of paramilitary forces. They are central forces and unlike the upper echelons of the Gujarat Police, not implicated in communal conduct. Protection is not merely about security but about dignity. It is also about trust, a currency that the state needs to redeem. What we propose is a formula of two persons per witness and also group protection as we depose in court. But there is a broader issue of community here. Threat haunts our landscape. We suggest CISF patrolling in rural areas to prevent mobs of the accused from terrorizing witnesses. In fact, we would like CISF in civilian dress, so that it does not attract attention as many of us pursue our livelihoods in majority areas.
We have a few specific demands. We believe it is advisable to keep the CISF battalion completely insulated for the duration of the trial. Each individual for the entire duration of the examination should be given five PSOs from the CISF cluster to accompany him to and fro from the court. This is not paranoia. Let us, with a sense of fear and play, dub it the Kodnani effect.In April 2009 when the minister was arrested, she had gathered unruly mobs at the courtroom. Kodnani’s assemblage, for want of a more appropriate term, makes witness protection an essential requirement of the process of justice. Let us add that the witnesses feel spied upon. One also recognizes the affinity between local police and local accused. The mutual protection that these networks guarantee demands the alternative mnemonics of the CISF to remind the state of the justice beyond local affability which can explode into uncontrolled threats.
One can add a set of specific observations about each site. Consider the Odh massacre. The paramilitary is not just a virtual escort, it needs to show presence at the Odh village itself. One needs to understand the sociology of the village, the power of the dominant caste. One has to guarantee that Patel mobs will not be allowed to gather or assemble there. As a monetarily and politically powerful community, who have been single handedly responsible for the massacre here, they need to recognize counterforce. Counter-force is often more strategic than punitive. Sardarpur has 58 witnesses living in a relief camp. A platoon of 30-40 CISF could cater to the needs of witnesses, especially during daily work when they often encounter powerful families. As daily wage earners, they are vulnerable to these groups. Five-ten CISF men must accompany them to court and back in anticipation of hostile crowds that they might encounter on the way.
One realizes that protection for witnesses lacks the glamour of VIP security. The SIT does not seem to realize that for all its upper gloss, its lower officers hail from the Gujarat Police. To expect them to be insulated from the communities they are embedded in is naive. Ours is not an unreasonable analysis or expectation, but your indifference to our request adds to the frailty of the witness. But maybe threat is the grease that moves witness to acts of courage. Let us in the last section locate the issues in a wider frame.
The SIT and Society: We realize that the questions raised by Gujarat riots of 2002 have become a ganglion of difficult issues. They demand an exploration of the underbrush of words around it like communalism, fundamentalism, even secularism, in terms of everyday economics, everyday life chances and the problematic of belief and governance. One can sense that rumour, gossip, silence and suspicion have taken over and created a half-baked social science. There is a failure of understanding caused by words as clichés substituting for real information.
Communalism and its demonic cousin, fundamentalism, are growing at the cost of their suburban cousin, secularism. The density of the former confronts the emptiness of the latter. In one, the community sucks you up and in the other, it leaves you rootless and floating, creating a semblance of freedom. Watching this entire process are a group of witnesses and survivors who have become ardent ethnographers of the investigation. They include lawyers, policemen, survivors, a few journalists, all desperate to create a garden patch of dignity. This letter is based on conversations with a few of them providing as it does a survey of the unmaking of an investigation.One must begin with three processes that in the aftermath of the riots create a communal epidermis: Ghettoization, Saffronization and Arabization. Ghettoization is not just a shrinking of space and mentalities; it is a map of the world where the world beyond family and neighbourhood is considered as hostile. The government is not an agent of welfare; but seen as an intruder into a way of life creating vulnerabilities. Reinforcing ghettoization is a process of saffronization. Saffronization thickens violence by ritualizing it. It creates a calendar of events that scripts a semiotics of hostilities. These processes are created through markers like the introduction of new festivals and the creation of new institutions. Territorialization also creates new symbolic domains, where signs and symbols carve public spaces into new forms of exclusion. Arabization performs a function similar to saffronization. It marks off a part of religion, then intensifies it and insists that only it is representative of what is in fact, a more pluralistic whole. It reduces the diversity in religion. In this case, it involves a steady reduction of customs and conventions not approved by the exponents of Mahadudism, Wahabism and Quitubism.
One witnesses a symbolic battle which brands communities in terms of their identities. One sees stamps of community identity on both houses and institutions run by particular communities. This is accompanied by a renaming of places as part of Hindu rashtra, creating a parallel municipality of identities through the erection of billboards. These create the props for a communalist civics. To maintain this, one intensifies leanings of the police and other local departments to the Sangh Parivar. These rituals of intensification are accompanied by a parallel drama of neglect. One needs a process of the cross-examination seeking truth from a sphinx like cast of key characters. The witnesses feel that if an SIT is an instrument for truth telling, it needs to examine the following dramatis personae: Anil Mukim, IAS (Secretary to the CM), P.C. Pande (IPS), Commissioner of Police, G.C. Raiger, IPS, Add. DG of Police, Dr. P.K. Mishra, IAS, Principal Secretary to the CM.
The Secretariat at Gandhinagar has become a forest of question marks as official halos wear thin. If truth is a form of spring cleaning, then the mustiness, even stench, of the Modi government comes from smell of rumours that need to be removed. There are simple questions that do not need the perspicacity of a Sherlock Holmes. One merely demands a minimum hygiene of investigation required to establish responsibility. Consider two in particular. The critical question centres around the minutes of the meeting of 27 February 2002. Did the CM allow or suggest a free play of Hindu vengefulness in that evening meeting? More particularly, was there a delay in re-questioning army and central paramilitary forces so that one could give a free hand to anti-Muslim rioters?The question is simple. Did Modi as CM signal or semaphore a set of messages, intentions that legitimated the temporary suspension of the rule of law? Responsibility, after all, follows a chain of command, communication and execution. The records in terms of official documents are there. There is a need for such scrutiny not to create obsessive rituals of a witch-hunt but to give rumours and suspicions a rest. One needs to create an ethnography of the network of communication between the state control room in Gandhinagar with nodal offices, including the SP Intelligence, among others.
Any reader of procedural detective stories knows that a bureaucracy is a document producing machine. It records every move, particularly its own. The everydayness of intelligence demands that it observe, record and report details. Documents are the humus on which intelligence thrives and reproduces itself. The ethnography, the thick description of intelligence is always supported by a daily liturgy of statistics. These constitute an archive of evidence available for scrutiny.
Given the primacy accorded to right and responsible conduct in the handling of riots, the widespread dereliction of duty looms as a worrying problem. This is a malaise that needs not just inspection but reflection. A similar kind of behaviour by the army would have generated a national crisis. But a violation or neglect by the police of its own manuals seems to be treated as commonplace affair, an expected illiteracy. It tacitly emphasizes an affinity between mob and cop, an admission that the current training of the police does not enable it to rise above its social milieu. In a moment of crisis, the police appear to break ranks and merge or connive with the orgy of violence around them.
Even if one recognizes such a breakdown of discipline among the ranks, one needs to examine the role of senior officers. The Apex court described the Gujarat bureaucracy as ‘Neros’. This resulted in the transfer of the Bilkis Banu investigation to the CBI and the transfer of the Bilkis Banu and Best Bakery cases to Maharashtra in April 2004. But the scrutiny need not stop there. The investigation of the Gujarat riots is not a case of what sociologist Daniel Moynihan once dubbed ‘benign neglect’. Nor is it a recommendation for one. ‘Let sleeping officers lie’ is a policy that may not work here because what one is confronting is an architectonic of systematic neglect, connivance, conspiracy, harassment and a miscarriage of justice that boggles the mind.As a simple ritual of review, one needs to open the 2000 odd riot cases dealing with Sangh Parivar supporters. These were closed summarily by the Gujarat Police. The witnesses note that in an investigation of violence, one cannot begin with the Orwellian assumption that some perpetrators are more innocent than others as a part of a good neighbourhood policy.
Any investigation is a narrative that looks for gaps that need reconstruction. Any narrative should also be clear about its own genre. An investigation into a murder, or an atrocity, even an act of vigilantism is different from a mapping of genocide. Genocide imposes a different burden on an investigation, both in scale and the hierarchy of narratives required. It is not a simple case of the butler did it. One has to specify the networks of responsibility, the locus of omission and indifference. It demands a specifying of layers and a tracing of gradients of involvement, tracking a whole chain of being.
Time is fundamental. The violence was not a momentary one. It was prolonged and systematic. One needs to ask that was there no news about it when it was happening? Violence almost summons knee-jerk the idea of curfew or Section 144. Yet curfew was not imposed till 1:00 p.m. on the 28th, while the murders had commenced on the 27th evening. One has to ask: Was curfew delayed to allow for the congregation of rioters to facilitate their activities? Was the delay in curfew a ‘collaborative omission giving free hand to rioters?’ Was this also ‘in compliance with the CM’s instructions in the meeting on the 27th evening?’ Ironically, in some of the least communally volatile areas as in Saurashtra, curfew was imposed by 10 p.m. Finally, one has to ask whether the deployment of police was in terms of real time intelligence provide by the special branches in riot-affected districts. The network of documents from station diaries, periodical situation reports, messages to district and state control rooms, instructions to field officers from the DGP need scrutiny. This becomes all the more imperative given the admission by the Joint CP of Ahmedabad city before the Nanavati Commission. Mr. Shivanand Jha admitted that only one Hindu and six Muslims were arrested as a part of preventive action.
Standing as a shadow above all this is the riddle of Godhra. Why was the funeral procession of dead bodies taken through the city, even when 22 of the bodies were unidentified as of 28.02.02? One has to ask who was the impresario behind this? Who in authority permitted it? Was the approval of relatives taken? Was the staging of this macabre spectacle part of a political strategy? The maze of untouched clues is phenomenal.
The question one has to ask is: Was there a facade of nominalism about the investigation to hide neglect? Consider the background: 54 people arrested in Ahmedabad city on 28 February 2002. None of the people in the list figured in the usual roster of ‘communally-minded’, people generally detained before such disturbances. One has to then ask: Was this a mere statistical display, a logic of clerical numbers assembled to satisfy protest or stem a later inquiry?If law and order is based on a system of feedback, should one not assess the quality of instructions and the nature of implementation? Consider, for instance, that videographing of rioters is standard departmental practice. Yet the police failed even as the electronic media did obtain a stock of visual data. Was the omission an act of absent-mindedness or a design aimed to prevent identification of rioters? Prima facie there appears a deviousness to the design. We discover that Major General Zahruddin, the area commander, observed that misleading information was conveyed to army units. As a result, they landed in peaceful areas while rioters went unchecked. To avoid this, the army later responded directly to public calls of distress ignoring the local police in the later period of the riots. Incidentally, Zahruddin is the brother of the famous actor, Nasiruddin Shah. Witnesses feel that the assumption or the cloak of immaculate innocence around top officers has to be challenged. Individuals like Ashok Narayan, ACS, and DGP K. Chakravarty have to be interrogated. To pretend they are part of a silent film is no longer acceptable. Truth telling has to be a public act open to public scrutiny.
There were focal events where government action was already under scrutiny. Among the more publicized of these were the two presentations made by the state government before the Election Commission. Its two presentations, one on law and order and the other on rehabilitation, were rejected by the commission. The chain of deception intensifies beyond falsification as one discovers that officers were discouraged from truth telling. Where others were reluctant and hints didn’t work, threats followed. The broader question is one of civics, courage and duty. Why were so many officers reluctant to depose before the Nanavati Commission? Was this reluctance genetic or induced by threats and incentives?
The silence of the bureaucracy still stands as one of the major enigmas of the 2002 riots. Was the vow of silence an act of tutoring, a diktat or a self-imposed ‘toeing of line’ by a supine bureaucracy? The ethnography that screams to be recorded is the ritual of distortion, intimidation, the incentives that prevented a bureaucracy from truth telling while implicating it in all further acts of deception. The riots of Gujarat seem to split between the gory spectacles of murder and the pall of silence that followed it. Murder and silence now seem to be two ways of delaying justice. An investigation has to unravel both in tandem.Godhra, or more particularly the events on the train, have been presented as an unsolvable enigma. But as a skeptic once said, behind every riddle lies a farce. In a forensic sense, Godhra as an event can be simulated or modelled to bring down the list of the probable scenarios. The list of theories of what happened are numerous and diverse. Rather than listing them as conjecture, Godhra demands a reconstruction based on evidence. Such an enactment before scientists and police officers would eliminate many doubts, whittle down suspicions. Common sense demands a simulation and yet it is one of the many things that elude the investigation.
The text of an investigation as a forensic act has a context. It takes place in a community. An investigation is an act of the production of truth. Justice, one realizes, is also consumed. The victim watches as justice stumbles along. Justice always has an audience evaluating its correctness, fairness, transparency, facticity and implementation. An investigation is in fact, a rite of passage enacted before a community. Yet, watching the drama of justice, one senses both of disillusionment and disappointment. One often wonders whether there is a slippage. One feels justice rather than the perpetrators seems on trial. The riot victims have been committed participants to this process of truth telling. They have realized that truth telling, the act of witness is a form of literacy, where the scream of pain has to confront a trail of questionnaires in many languages. They realize that confronting rituals of delay seems to be part of any search for justice. The victims’ sense of hope was restored by the Supreme Court and put back on tenterhooks by the SIT. Yet, even the process of review appears not as an act of investigation but of negotiation. The rule of law seeks negotiation and intimidation as part of its review process. Threats seem a normal method of reducing the quantum of complaints. In this asymmetrical bazaar, the victim inevitably loses out. Not even 20% of the cases proceed to the point of the arrest and examination of the accused.
Some victims feel that the SIT might become a pre-emptive exercise in truncated justice, a belated response which is asking the victims to settle for a few middle level perpetrators. Ironically, the SIT is following the line of investigation of the Gujarat Police rather than signalling a sense of autonomy. It’s handling of the state minister, Maya Kodnani, verges on the slapstick, a fragment of three stooges and the Bollywood police in a collaborative act. One senses an absent-mindedness that verges on the amnesiacal. For example, two corporators of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation are shown as absconding even though they are seen attending numerous public functions. The victim cannot help feel he is part of an absurd play. Yet, hope is the only hypothesis for survival.
A small number of victims and witness have forged a creative community to work within the possibilities of the system. Their creativity is the greatest invention of the riots – an informal panchayat of justice fighting its way through a cascade of delay and injustice. This essay is a salute to them and a request that you listen to their voices.Sincerely yours,Shiv Visvanathan
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/gujarat-riots-10th-anniversary-revisiting-the-symbols-of-genocide-225716.html
Gujarat riots 10th anniversary: Revisiting the symbols of genocide
The history of violence in modern India has been marked by certain images. Perhaps the most haunting in collective memory is the train.
The train to Pakistan is the unforgettable symbol of the Partition. The train enacted the everydayness of genocide, the reciprocity of violence between Lahore and Amritsar. Sadat Hasan Manto immortalised it with that simple line, “The train to Amritsar was seven hours late.” Just that glancing reference to the lost time was sufficient to convey the mayhem that accompanied the event.
The train rears its head again with Godhra. The Sabarmatri Express in 2002 carrying kar sewaks from Ayodhya was burnt at the station leaving 59 dead. In retaliation, Hindus went berserk and went on a riot which lasted over two months and left over a 1,000 dead.
On the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the lingering question remains: could the tragedy have been anticipated? There is enough evidence to show that intelligence reports were aware of the impending violence. But the gap between intelligence as information and politics as judgment would prove a costly one. The chief minister’s use of the law of physics to explain the gap, claiming “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” revealed bad taste, bad physics and bad politics.
A picture of this Indian Muslim man begging to be rescued from Hindu rioters became the lasting image of the Gujarat carnage of 2002. Reuters
Yet what made the riots even more macabre was the use of two other technologies. One was the use of the mobile phone to create a connectivity among the rioters, and second was the deliberate use of chemicals during arson. Survivors speak of the use of numerous tiny bottles of foreign import which not only ate into the skin but scorched the walls indelibly.
There are other images of the materiality of riots. Walking through the slums, one sees thelari (the hand cart on cycle wheels), inverted, piled one against the other, like strange sculptures, as if in tribute to the missing. Each empty lari represents a lost livelihood. Of the 13 districts for which we have state data, 70,000 people have not returned to their homes in Gujarat.
It’s a myth that life returns to normalcy after a riot. Ordinary people are not allowed to return to their livelihoods. Often a man parking his lari in his usual space on the street encounters the goon or the Bajrang Dal enthusiast who prevents any return to his usual livelihood. There are also reports that show how Hindus wanting to sell their houses to Muslims were prevented from doing so through sit-ins and social pressure.
Riots are too simplistically viewed as a communal problem. Constructed this way, riots are seen as occasional bursts of emotion, episodic outbursts against a particular community. But riots in India appear to be more systemic.
A Muslim informant, an experienced activist told me that riots appear to be an act of economic leveling, that whenever Muslim communities build through their enterprise, a riot emerges to level their hard work. But beyond this, riots seem a part of planned urbanization. They set the stage for an urban cleansing equivalent to an ethnic cleansing. When homes are emptied, real estate is born. The sudden upsurge of urbanization in various parts of Gujarat like Naroda Patia makes one wonder if riots consciously or unconsciously are a part of a deeper plan.
Studying the materiality of loss makes me wonder if riots are, in fact, a form of economic warfare. Today, riots along with dam projects have become a major cause for large-scale, collective displacement.
In fact, the idea of development is used to implicitly condone riots. Many middle-class people seem to think that the past should be forgotten so we can focus on the more important task of development. In fact, the plea for development allows the erasure of the memory of riots.
While riots create urban real estate in one part of the state, they also serve to ruthlessly exile minorities to another. Anyone who doubts this should visit the camp at Citizen Nagar in Ahmedabad. Ironically dubbed a ‘transit’ camp, it clings to a huge garbage site. The dump was a small one in 2002. Today, it is a gigantic structure, a mountain of waste, smelling of garbage and chemicals, acrid with smoke, the delight of birds of prey.
Here then is the question: What kind of urban planning would locate a group of survivors near a dump site of this size? The very act juxtaposes two allied forms of waste – urban waste and urban survivors wasted by riots. It is a damning symbol of the indifference of the Modi regime to normalcy, survival and justice; of the deliberate destruction, symbolically and materially, of a group that is culturally different.
The train, the waste dump, the gas cylinder, the dharyu, the mobile phone are the new material mnemonics of genocide in Gujarat. The city becomes a museum of its own violence unconsciously commemorating a drama it cannot erase.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.india-seminar.com/2013/641/641_shiv_visvanathan.htm
The remaking of Narendra Modi
SHIV VISVANATHAN
Recently, Time magazine asked us to be realistic and adjust to him. The Brookings sees him as a necessary evil, more necessary than evil. The report of think tanks should serve as a warning that recognizes that policy makers are already assuming the coming era of Modi. Yet, there is a paradox here. While Modi consolidates his image outside Gujarat, the state itself might be turning more lukewarm to him. The lack of enthusiasm emerges from three sources. First, elements within the BJP find him a hot potato and would be content to queer his pitch. A whole array of small movements, from the boat yatras to the battle against the Nirma plant, betray an unease with his development policies. Third, the shadow of the 2002 carnage still hangs over him and not all the perfumes of the SIT (Special Investigation Team) have been able to cleanse his little hands.
As opposed to this, the middle class who loves a winner sees in Modi a man who caters to their vulnerabilities and projects their fears in searching for solutions. The middle class sees in Modi a decisive, security oriented, and development centred, urban fixated politician who has voiced all their fears about Muslims, anarchy, security and transformed it into a huge vote bank. The future and Modi appears twinned in the middle class mind. So how did a simple, lower middle class pracharak, already diagnosed as a fanatic and a fascist by the psychologist Ashis Nandy, try to change his spots? It is this remaking of Modi that we must understand if we wish to unmake it.
A decade ago he was a simple cadre functionary. As the pracharak became chief minister, he extended the pracharak’s lens on to his new world. Gujarat was seen a cadre to be transformed. Modi’s world was simple but his idioms were powerful. Like most RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) organizers, he evoked a swadeshicultural idiom which was ascetic, nationalist and nativist. What was good for Gujarat was good for Gujaratis, as long as Modi determined it. Here was a man uneasy with difference and sought to meet it either by erasing or denying it. He lived out a parallel history where Delhi was seen as an alien region controlled by foreigners. He enacted out the feelings of many Hindus who thought of electoral democracy as majoritarian tolerance that had gone too far, convinced that official history had been unfair to Gujarat which had produced both Sardar Patel and Mahatma Gandhi. Even worse, that Delhi acted as if Gujarat was a non-place. Rectifying history was Modi’s and the RSS’ favourite idea of justice.
This process paralleled the rewriting of history by Stalinists. The Stalinists rewrote history to supress dissent. Modi rectified history to construct and consolidate the mentalities that would sustain him in power. Both used production statistics to create legitimations. Stalin had Stakhanov, the legendary worker who always met unreal production quotas. Modi cited Gujarat as a continuous example of business booms and found the semiotic Stakhanov in himself. He worked overtime to project an image of Gujarat as if he alone was responsible for Gujarat’s success. Continuous repetition creates its form of legitimation and loyalty. By repeatedly reciting the story of Gujarat’s success, Modi created a sleight of hand. The propagandist of Gujarat’s success was gradually seen as the creator and cause for it. It was an act of usurpation that was swift and complete.
The man who complained that history was unfair decided that fairness comes from rewriting it. Modi was sure that propaganda by creating self-fulfilling prophecies becomes true. He realized that he could not be a Gandhi or a Patel. They were ideals or icons he could not mimic. He also understood that the Gujarat of his time had no national figure. The textile strike and the collapse of the industry had created a tabula rasa in terms of models. With the death of textiles, the mahajans and sethswho reinforced its orderly world lost their halo. Modi realized that the time was ripe for a new construct, an image constructed out of anxieties, fears, and even the traditions of achievement that have made Gujarat into an increasingly urban society.
Narendra Modi is a master of the language of populist politics. He understands the cultural idiom, in particular both the dialects and the dialectics of resentment; his grasp over the cultural politics of relative deprivation convincing Gujaratis that their contribution to the nation, GNP and history was not recognized. By playing on this unconscious, he shaped it to suit his instrumental politics. Any complaint about Gujarat would immediately switch to these cultural tracks, creating the logic of insider/outsider politics. The insiders were patriots; the outsiders were illiterate, unfair and arrogant. The corollary was obvious. Any insider who criticized Gujarat and its synecdoche, Narendra Modi, was automatically classified as an outsider. This classificatory exile was the task of enthusiasts who found in English journalists and newspapers their targets. English was an alien language and represented the outside.
The imaginary house that Modi built had two sites, the Gujarat of his imagination and Delhi as his imaginary. Delhi was the last colony. It was the location where the imperial forces of the Congress ruled by the empress Sonia lived. Delhi embodied an extension of Mughal rule perpetuated by the Congress. Delhi was non-Gujarat, it embodied colonial history without a hearing aid, deaf to the complaints of its opponents. Delhi was soft on the Muslims creating an invidious politics which favoured bootleggers and smugglers. Modi was adept at taking partial ethnic truths and transforming them into political slurs.
Narendra Modi is a shrewd politican. In recognizing the limits of Hindutva politics conducted in Hindutva idioms, he unconsciously realized that a rampant Hindutva might eventually threaten Hindus themselves. In that sense, his co-religionists were a problem as they are soft on history, preferring a soft democracy more in tune with their syncretic mentality. Modi sensed, early on, that his role as the lumpen speaker gorging on the violence of the riots had to be a temporary phenomenon. He sensed that while such resentment could be a layer in the unconscious, what one needed was an image of a more positive politics, something that could exorcise the ghosts of 2002. More than exorcism, one needed a semiotic makeover to create a set of self-fulfilling prophecies around the new Modi to survive politically. Populist politicians can perpetuate their tyranny by letting the rumour and gossip of a new leader play itself out. As a wag put it, Narendra Modi became ‘The Gentleman’. It is this transformation that we need to understand.
Modi is a cultural construct whose semiotic grammar we have to understand. Semiotics as a theory of signs and symbols served to update Modi. Originally Modi appeared in the drabness of white kurtas, which conveyed a swadeshi asceticism. Khadi is the language for a certain colourlessness. Modi realized that ascetic white was an archaic language. His PROs forged a more colourful Modi, a Brand Modi more cheerful in blue and peach, more ethnic in gorgeous red turbans. His ethnic clothes serve as diacritical markers of respect. He plays the chief in full regalia. Having earned traditional respect, he needed a more formal attire – suits for Davos, abandhgala for national forums. Hair transplants and Ayurvedic advice served to grow his hair. Photographs show him even trying a Texan hat. Hoarding after hoarding proclaims not only the same message but a diverse attire of designer wardrobes. He senses he has to sustain himself as both icon and image of a different era.
Modi grasped that the core competence of a politician must be built around different cores or, to switch metaphors, he needed a set of second skins which people would see as natural. He was shrewd in realizing that it was the Hindutva man in him that had to be deconstructed and recomposed. Like Eliza Dolittle, he had to project a new grammar. He (or I guess his PROs) disaggregated elements of his Hindutva to create a new image. Hindutva or the RSS training evoked the state as the God of society, organizational skill, asceticism, a cultural embedding of ideas, a sense of competence as machismo, a clear idea of history. Modi presented himself as the Vivekananda in politics.
Modi realized that the chameleon in him could transform Hindutva into a more neutral but aggressive technocratic idiom. Management became a form of masculinity and the idea of Hindutva conventionally seen as local or parochial now became globalized. Modi’s Gujarat behaved like a city state, a combination of Singapore and Shanghai on a larger scale. What came to his aid was the language of the World Bank. Modi’s expert handling of the earthquake was decisive. He realized that World Bank transmuted its ideologies into methodologies of audit and standards, creating as it were a new kind of accountability. Modi may have been responsible during the riots but he was definitely responsive to World Bank idioms and norms. The language suited him as he could preen himself with numbers.
The aura of accountability found its hyphen in the obsession with security. Security was the technocratic idiom of nationalists. Security was also the machismo that would fight terror. Gujarat’s handling of terror was presented as exemplary. The brilliance of it was that security and accountability were positivist terms measured by tonnage or control. In Modi’s thesaurus, they substituted for the ethics of responsibility. Responsibility is more encompassing in its philosophy, more inclusive in involving minorities. As a way of life, it involved dialogicity, an accommodating mentality, while security or accountability could be handled with forceps. They were distancing terms. If responsibility sounded soft, security was hard. It exuded power, control, and hierarchy. Gujarat was secure under Modi while Delhi was vulnerable to terror under an effete Congress. Technology needs a sense of cosmopolitanism which Modi’s presence in Davos as the only Indian chief minister provided.
Sreekumar, the ex-Inspector General of Police who is an acute observer of Modi, is full of insightful nuggets into the craft and craftiness of the man. He said, ‘For all his Hindutva, Modi has become a devotee to power. Power is his only idol. Power secularizes Modi by instrumentalizing him. Modi will have no problem attacking Hindus to retain control.’ In fact, Sreekumar claimed that Modi’s ‘secularism’ can be double-edged. Modi, he said, demolished 600 temples to clear road obstructions in Ahmedabad. The message was clear. It was not that he was secular but that he was in control. The act could also be used secondarily to show how Modi can control Hindus when they get out of line. Modi began playing the Lee Kwan Yew of Gujarat emphasizing that all problems could be dealt with at a single window – Modi.
The myth of efficiency epitomized as security and stability needed investments as a continuing barometer of success. Modi played the self-styled magnet for investments brilliantly. In this new age of liberalization, investments are manna, the gift, the grace all tyrants are looking for. Investments are more powerful than riots in silencing critics. Gujarat was soon to become the Camelot of investments and its centre was Sanand. Modi created a dreamland for the automobile industry, successfully inviting Ford, Tata, Maruti and contouring this hub with a stunning array of ancillary industries which could add to employment. Modi’s message to the corporations was clear and Ratan Tata was among the first to sense it when he said, ‘It would be stupid not to be in Gujarat at this stage.’ Modi had become Gujarat’s best political salesman and his clients were the corporations and the diaspora. He played or enacted his vision of shining Gujarat impressing diasporic Indians, starved and nostalgic for efficiency and decisiveness. For them, as for Time magazine later, here was an Indian who could stand up to the Chinese. This was a helpful aura to have especially with the US government. A nuclear plant or two would become an apt mutual token of esteem.
I must emphasise that Narendra Modi’s tactics were not taking place in a vacuum. The chief minister is a very tactical man and his initial tactics differentiated between opposition and dissent. Modi recognized that the opposition was effete. The Congress, as the opposition, willingly or inadvertently had tied itself into knots, raising issues which it could not follow up. He sensed that the Congress was afraid of opposing him nationally, afraid to lose the Hindu vote. The Congress opposition in Gujarat was reduced to sniping with little effect.
Modi discovered that it was dissent, not opposition, that was devastating. Small pockets of activists created little colonies of resistance that was effective. For example, Teesta Setalvad and her team created a memorial for the survivors at Gulberg House, the housing colony where the Congress MP, Ehsaan Jaffri and 69 others, were brutally murdered. The event at Gulberg House was not organized or instigated by any party. A loose network of citizens put it together. The impact was stunning. Over 2500 people came and spent the day in a quiet act of solidarity. Shubha Mudgal came and sang powerfully, creating a circle of emotion, with the survivors in tears.
Modi understood that it was this form of protest that most threatened him and as part of his new repertoire he chose to suppress dissent in the academe. A senior professor at DAIICT, Gandhinagar, was asked to resign. In fact, what one is now witnessing is Modi’s effort to take control of key national institutions like CEPT and the Indian Institute of Management. The report by Time was publicized and translated into Guajarati to submerge such dissent. He has been successful, temporarily, in part because many academics see in the future Modi a career to be pursued. Modi is shrewd enough to anticipate that even if Gujarat becomes an intellectual corridor, dissent is one epidemic he cannot afford.
Modi’s effort to mobilize film stars like Anupam Kher, Sunil Shetty, Ajay Devgan, and Amitabh Bachchan is an attempt to create a groundswell of cinematic support for the regime. The use of Visvanathan Anand to announce and inaugurate Gujarat as a major chess culture is another powerful example. To combat dissent, Modi has created a brainstrust of advisors, including corporate dons like Narayana Murthi and Azim Premji, giving him legitimacy in entrepreneurial and managerial circles. IIM Ahmedabad’s decision to invite him as CEO for the day is merely one more example of academic institutes quietly falling in line. He has also nurtured a bureaucracy that is only a prosthetic extension of him.
The tactical brilliance of Modi lies in his ability to use law to thwart justice and employ democratic ideals to perpetrate his control. In this, both he and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa are siblings in politics. Both have criticized the Congress for not adhering to the spirit of federalism. Yet, the very same politicians who tout the importance of democracy at the federal level are reluctant to allow democracy at the state level. Modi’s contempt for his own party men and his distancing from them is projected as part of his honesty, his refusal to recognize party politics as a spoils system. In fact, distance becomes tactical. Initially, Modi was presented as a politician almost tactilely in touch with the masses. Now he is presented as a hoarding, a larger than life creature to be quoted, cited, his every act a policy event.
It is Modi’s use of the law, however, that appears most cynical. The Nanavati Commission continues happily creating an archive that means little. The SIT, behaving technically and narrowly, gave him a clean chit. He seemed to enjoy all the moral luck till the Ramachandran Report queered his pitch. But the pseudo trial by commission and committee sanitized a space around him, blurring basic ethical questions. What it conflated specifically was the difference between guilt and responsibility.
Assume that the CM had no direct role in the riots, yet was he right in disowning responsibility for the victims of the riots? Gujarat was the first example of a state government in India which refused responsibility for the aftermath of the riots, disowning any connection with the refugee camps that mushroomed after the carnage. The argument was that to accept responsibility for the camps was to signal a guilt about the riots. With one bad syllogism, a huge sector of victims were declared less than citizens and forced into subhuman lives in transit camps. Ten years after the riots, transit camps have acquired an air of permanence while everything within is ramshackle. Yet, Modi denies the camps exist or claims that they have shut down. Their very names, Ekta Nagar and Citizen Nagar, provide an ironic note to the ethical presence of the regime.
Yet viewed objectively there is a shrewdness to this tactic. Modi has injected the idea of development as a credo deep into the middle class. For them and him, development is a process that cannot wait, that has an inevitability to it, that is Darwinian in that the fittest survive. The Modi credo then suggests that those who act tangential to or are recalcitrant about development are reluctant citizens. The idea of development creates a double demand on ethnics, marginals, minorities. It throws them two specific challenges. First, it asks them to de-ghettoize and de-ethnicize themselves and erase, if necessary, identity and memory. It asks them to forget the riots, plainly stating why wait for justice when we are offering you development. It argues that development can be more distributive than justice can. The catch is that they have to become citizens and citizenship is defined as attempts to join the mainstream.
Here Modi’s discourse also suggests that minorities have hidden behind their ethnicity and behave like reluctant citizens. He claims that his is the ‘true’ secular option. He seems to suggest that the majoritarian electoral democracy of Congress plays to religious sentiments, while the BJP’s offer of development is an invitation to secular citizenship. With this, Modi acts as if he has claimed the higher moral ground.
Many Muslims find this suggestion tempting. They realize that they need to join the mainstream but they also sense the craftiness of the Modi option. He is asking them to abandon memory and justice, to forget, erase and accept entry into development, yet realizing that development too might be a zero-sum game. They sense that the new urbanization in the aftermath of the riots may disempower them further. Many of the Muslim women had an answer for Modi. They (in a composite sense) said, ‘We want to go on but this society won’t let us. We do not want our children to carry the burden of violence. We want to forget the past; they want us to erase it. Yet, they will not let us return to our livelihoods.’ The politics of memory has become a millstone around the Modi neck and the many commissions have not sanitized him completely.
Politicians are word splitters and consequently world splitters. Muslims like J.S. Bandukwala, a civil rights activist and retired professor of physics from Baroda, talked of apology and forgiveness as rituals of healing. For Modi, power which apologizes is no longer power. He lacks the wisdom and empathy of a Willy Brandt who knelt and asked for forgiveness of the victims of the Holocaust. Brandt rose in stature after the act but a Modi, afraid of the label of guilt, is unable to imitate him. But politicians can create parallel worlds which mimic the authenticity of the real. Modi lacks the courage to ask for forgiveness. He feels no empathy for Muslims. They remain a problem to be solved.
Instead of forgiveness, he chose magnanimity. Magnanimity is imperial; it evokes the height and distance of power. Modi’s Sadbhavana Yatra was an act of piety. Inaugurated on his birthday, where he received a Ramcharit Manas from his mother, the rituals felt like a darbar. The signal to the outside world was that Modi was a changed man. Yet, the message inside Gujarat was different. Minority groups came like subjects to swear fealty to a lord. Attendance was a performance to be duly noted. There was no sense of community; the entire drama spoke of power speaking to vulnerability. What betrayed Modi was his body language. When a Muslim cleric offered his cap, Modi shrugged, creating an embarrassing gaffe. There was a sense that he was not speaking from his heart. One could sense a politician waiting to be prime minister.
The viewer by now realizes that Modi was on a double stage, a CM fighting to be elected and waiting to be proclaimed a prime-ministerial candidate. Such was Modi’s confidence that even Lal Krishna Advani, Nitin Gadkari and Sanjay Joshi, stalwarts from the RSS, surrendered the stage to him. Modi’s autocracy, however, created an interesting shift in messages. Earlier, as a pracharak and a chief minister, the BJP was the text of his messages. Given his distance from internal party democracy, the party began appearing as a context for politics slowly withering to a pretext. His main opposition is now surfacing within his own party tired of his egocentric politics.
Yet, evil for all its flaws is more inventive. Modi, like the devil in Paradise Lost, still has the best lines. More critically, Modi is consolidating power beyond electoral rhetoric. His unease with his party and with his communal image nudges him towards a new discourse, one which make one want to reread the past. Modi seems to have rewritten the scripts of modernization. His modernization no longer seeks the scapegoat in the Muslim; it sees its power in the collective force of the city. Now riots appear to be a clearing house of a project called the city. The fascist as modernizer has found a new symbolic project, the city.
Gujarat has always been the most urbanized part of India with at least 57 major towns. Modi is building on it a new wave of urbanization. Modi articulates the fact that urbanization is both process and a promise. As a process, there is logic to its demands which necessitates certain decisions. Instant cities unlike instant coffee are complex entities. Yet, Modi grasps the fact that cities are a coalition of opportunities. The city caters to a middle class, to corporations hungry for land, to a network of fixers who create opportunities around a city. Each act of Modi invokes a corporation and urbanizes Gujarat. Modi has allied himself with a newly emerging entrepreneurs like Adani and Mittal, with the pharmaceutical industries, and with Nirma, while tying up with the Tatas. He has offered the Japanese, always hungry for land abroad, two cities for development. He has hypothecated the coastline to the corporations like the Adanis, whose control of pipelines and ports make them a formidable force. Corporations desperate for land find him amenable.
The middle class seeing in investment the prospect of employment is also content. Modi has become the new urban hero. Yet, one senses an unease about these new cities. One wonders if they are a kind of enclosure movement, a new way to displace nomadic and pastoral populations as ways of life. Gujarat has long been the home of these great nomadic and pastoral civilizations. The speed of Modi’s policies of urbanization makes one wonder whether marginals and minorities are doomed in this feat of citizenship we call the city. The swadeshi pracharak has transformed himself into a development hero with the city as his script. Modi as a development statesman now projects messages at three levels. Locally he is a BJP CM; nationally, he is a future hopeful for the prime ministership; globally, he is a player articulating the rhetoric of climate change. His idiom and his style are now completely different.
There is also a struggle for a symbolic domain, some claim to a myth or legend of India. In some ways the idea of class now lacks the appeal and Naxalbari, the romance of revolution. The Congress also realizes that its narratives of Nehruism and nation-building ring hollow. As a symbolic entrepreneur, Modi senses it. He realizes that he cannot cite Savarkar or Hedgewar. They make for poor mnemonics, lacking any real appeal for the new generation. Modi is shrewd enough to realize that he needs a floating signifier, something all India can claim and he can claim in a particular way. The choice of Vivekananda appears immaculate. Unlike Ramakrishna, he is not the mystic. He is an outward looking, organization centred religious monk who built an institution. By juxtaposing himself to Vivekananda, Modi becomes another cultural innovator, seeking to revitalize society to face the next wave of modernity. His is not a spiritual pulpit; he is at heart a propagandist. He unleashes thousands of plastic balls with Vivekananda quotes to bounce around a society’s mind.
The question one has to ask is what Modi as performance teaches one about electoral democracy in India. Modi embodies a paradigm of violence forged out of resentment with history. His swadeshism, tinged with the folklore of a Bhagat Singh, sees the state as a masculine trope and the administrator as a decisive person. It is a denial of softness as a part of duty and a summons to violence as a part of patriarchal responsibility. Like many in the Hindu majority, he senses an effeteness about politics and democracy, a minoritarian bias that vitiates power. In seeking to create a strong India, it seeks a character building that emphasizes efficiency, security and decisiveness.
The emphasis is more on duty. Minorities in this discourse have a duty to join the mainstream and respect majority sentiments. Violence or a threat of violence becomes an administrative tactic to keep them in line, to create order. Such a sense of order is uneasy with difference and is often punitive about imagined disorder. The body language is patriarchal, more used to dictates than discussions. The dream is of the motherland, but as fathers see it. A strong state, preferably nuclear because the nuclear commands respect; a strong leader because leadership is the leitmotif of democracy; a strong people, often cadre-like in action, who will help constitute a different India.
Such a notion of order sees minorities, dissent, difference as sources of disorder. A minority that is reluctant needs to be disciplined in this model. A minority that emphasizes rights over duties is not ready for citizenship and is thus open to majoritarian violence as a pedagogical punitive exercise. In such a conception, minorities should episodically be taught a lesson so as to keep them in line. Such a notion frequently sees the majority as a victim of democratic normativeness.
One has to recognize that to many Modi represents a public policy hero, a Hindu Bismarck as a technocrat. Modi has consistently been ranked as the most able chief minister by India Today. As an administrator, he evidences an impressive set of skills; as a politician he is adept at survival. In fact, of late, one can see him chuckling over the embarrassments of the Congress. He comments freely on its alleged ability to handle the national grid or the question of terror. Gujarat scores high in terms of electricity, investment, quality of roads. He is a cultural dream for Hindus tired of softness and gentleness who welcome his technocratic machismo.
The diaspora sees in him an almost American competence, a quickness and a decisiveness rarely witnessed in Indian politicians. But Modi is a Rorschach for these people. They project on to him the qualities they wish to have – economy, decisiveness, a patriarchal brusqueness, a modernity rooted in tradition but without succumbing to it. He is a creation emerging out of a subculture’s deepest fears, hybridized with its sense of the correct response to these fears. If fear and resentment were the mother of invention, Modi as a cultural figure would be one product of such anxieties. A Vivekananda spouting manager, he seems an invention from some B grade commentary on the Bhagvad Gita speaking of security, nationalism and efficiency. He is a bully dressed up in managerial values and projected as the problem solver, an Indian answer to Chinese planning.
Modi realizes that there is an economy to the waiting game. He does not have to do much. He can laugh at the antics of his opponents, create an occasional spectacle, to grab the front page. By simulating a PM in waiting, he is even convincing people that he is going to be one. He is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy around himself. The press falls for it. India Today keeps saluting his powers of governance; Outlook creates the outlines of an unequal battle between him and Rahul Gandhi. This is pre-emptive politics and Modi plays it beautifully.
As a politician he realizes that he thrives on other people’s and other party’s mediocrity. It is not that he has an eloquent vision or an idea of India. He, however, guesses that an India without ideas is sure to vote him into power. Democracy, in this age of politicial mediocrity, will always pick the caricature of the lowest common denominator. Modi combines the worst of our anxieties with the most authoritarian of solutions. Authoritarianism like technocracy is a particular approach to problem solving. The charisma that fascism needs mixes with the pragmatism of technocracy to create a frame of thought as a way of life. Once a society accepts Modi as a mentality, a mode of thought, it might well have to live out its consequences over the next few decades. A friendly fascism can be a lethal mode of governance.
Finally, one has to recognize the moral luck of the man. Time and Brookings go out of their way to give him good conduct certificates for governance. Corporations feel he is the flavour of the year. The one thing that rankled was the refusal of the British and US governments to give him a visa. In October 2012, the British government withdrew its objections, contending that the laws of the land had given Modi a clean chit. Britain, like other countries, realized that Modi was heaven-sent in terms of business investment and the prospect of investment silences any mercantile conscience. The British, like many others, felt that here was a politician whose time has come. The ensuing hysteria made one wonder whether he had received an OBE. This sense of luck is something we need to acknowledge. Demagogues love signs and the signs are that Modi is a politician ready for a bigger stage. The modernist as fascist breathes a legitimacy that electoral pundits love.
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http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/shivvisvanathan/2943/62716/fast-forwarding-moditva.html
Fast forwarding Moditva
Narendra Modi is always in the news but news about Modi is always read differently by different people.
The facts looked simple. The Supreme Court after reading the SIT report and the report of the Amicus Curae decided that proceedings would continue at the district court. The Court appears to have answered questions of law, providing technical answer to technical questions.
For the court, the issue seems to have been procedural. As long as law moves on the right ralls at a specified pace, the Supreme Court feels it should not interfere. Both the Raghavan and Ramachandran Reports have been handed over to the magistrate.
The decision is neither a condemnation of Modi nor a character certificate. All it emeplified was the banal normalcy of law evaluating its own correctness so that one day truth and justice may prevail. As long as the mechanism of law functioned, the Supreme Court found no need to over reach itself.
But what the court states as dictums, politicians can reinvent as certificates. The elation in the BJP camp was unbelievable. Arun Jaitley claimed that the court had literally put a ten year witch hunt of Modi to a stop. Other BJP politicians announced that Modi's way to Delhi was clear. But self endorsements by themselves do not constitute good conduct certificates. Brand validity has to come from the right quarters.
Fortuitously, BJP found an endorsement in a US congressional report which commended Modi for his governance and claimed that the election of 2014 would be a battle between the young Rahul Gandhi and our ever green nationalist Modi. Obviously to the Swadesi BJP, Indian leaders still need foreign certification.
Modi was overjoyed and he was quoted as tweeting "God is great". He turned it into a political opportunity by declaring he would go on a three day fast, an upwaas pleading for harmony. He tied it too expertly to his birthday celebration. The University Auditorium was quickly appropriated and the guest list announced to include Advani, Jaitley, Badal and Jayalalitha. Modi became the first politician to announce a fast, and yet have his cake and eat it too.
The idea of the fast caught the rumor mills. Anna Hazare had given it a new authenticity claiming his celibacy gave him the power to fast. Without making similar claims, Modi decided to fast for communal Harmony. As a pre-emptive tactic, it was an ambush. Cogress immediately planned a fast in front of Sabarmati Ashram. Between upwaas and yatra the BJP was echoing its traditional idioms.
Unfortunately Modi forgot that fasting is an ascetic exercise. It has a particular style. Modi's fast confused with his birthday celebration became a hybrid of fast and festival. Instead of becoming a search for solidarity, it became a monarchical search for populist acclamation, a surrogate coronation with guests and vassals (read MLAs) declaring loyalty.
Fasting has to be an act of thoughtfulness, which springs from the soul and not the publicity machine. If fasting seeks purity and harmony, it has to speak that body language and convey the idiom of ritual purification. If it was a fast for harmony, then one needs an ethics of memory that empathizes with the idea of regret, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice. Activists like J. Bandukwala, a professor of physics at Baroda, have been articulate about it.
Yet Modi speaks a different idiom, announcing solidarity as if it is a new construction program. Obviously Modi senses the political importance of these words but Modi is only a politician not a statesman like Sardar. He is no match for someone like the German Chancellor Willy Brandt who fell on his knees at a concentration camp, asking Jews for forgiveness.
Brandt was not guilty but as a leader, he accepted responsibility. Modi cannot speak such an idiom. His sense of power, his latent machismo does not allow for it.
Modi knows what he stands for- Development. Development is the bell that makes corporate groups salivate and the middle class feel that progress is around the corner.
Modi knows he is Mr Development, inviting investment, turning Gujarat into the new Detroit. But this raises a new set of ethical questions. Development and urbanization go together. If so, can one see the riots as the first stage of a new urban process? Is it a signal to the minorities that they can be citizens only as a part of a new urban process that demands they leave the security of the ghetto? Solidarity implies consensus, and forgiveness.
Does Modi have the guts to set up a truth and reconciliation commission or will he find another retired judge to abort the idea? These are ethical and moral questions which demand a toughness of a different kind.
What Modi is signaling is not regret over the riots but relief that the case is back in Gujarat. He feels a new sense of control. He realizes that the way is clear for another term as CM and the path is paved for a national role.
The fast is seen as the closure of the events of the last decade. But history can be more difficult. It still leaves behind a residue of questions which will not go away. But the questions are not only for Modi. They are there also for the activists, the survivor, the citizens of Gujarat.
1) Who is a citizen and are marginals and minorities citizens?
2) Is development only about corporate investment or also about the well being of tribals and nomads, of the Urban poor?
3) How does a society heal and is healing possible without a sense of justice?
4) Does the language of majority and minority create a flawed language of electoral democracy? Is the communal violence Bill the answer?
5) As Gujarat urbanizes and new cities mushroom, what new ethical and social systems do we need to put in place?
6) What is the relation between memory and forgetting not just in riots, but in development, displacement, the gradual erasure of cultures?
7) Does the Gandhian imagination coupled with civil society activism epistemology have a role, or will Gujarat become more Chinese in its Urban models?
These are questions that begins with Modi but go beyond him. The question is does his regime have an answer to any of them? The future might judge him on this basis.
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