The 'oracle of development' has at last spoken out fully and frankly about the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, likening his own role to a passenger in the back seat of a car and the Muslims slaughtered to a puppy that accidentally came under the wheels of his vehicle.
What the chief minister was doing in the rear seat when his state was going through the tumult of a communal massacre reveals his invidious attempt at distancing himself from the carnage by describing the murderous mobs as the true drivers and himself as a hapless passenger, just so as to escape all responsibility for the “puppy’s” brutal end. It also reveals his mindset regarding large-scale killing as ‘stuff happens’.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
He does not think it was his duty as the head of the government to jump out to check if there was any life left in the poor victim. Or to take the victim to hospital or to reprimand the chauffeur. He just rushed from the scene of the crime to stop anyone from discovering that he was there. Now he is feeling a little sorry—largely for himself—and that too 11 years later. More a maut ka saudagar than an oracle of development, the man stands condemned in his own words.
By one of those telling coincidences that fate serves up when no one is looking, just days after Modi’s infamous interview, PTI put out a story datelined Melbourne of a real-life incident involving a dog that came under the wheels of a car. “Steve Hunter,” said the news item, “was making a delivery when a fox terrier suddenly ran out of a driveway and was clipped by an oncoming car”. The car sped away. Hunter, however, ran to the puppy, found it still had a little life left, picked it up, carried it to the pavement, and, to use his own words, “did the deed”. He gave the dying puppy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, “pulling the dog’s jaws apart—and, by the way, he didn’t brush his teeth”! The puppy recovered at a veterinary centre.
That, Shri 108 Modi, is what you should have done. You should have leaped out of the car the minute you heard of Godhra and recognised that there would be “action-reaction”. Immediately, you should have picked up the puppy and comforted it. Immediately, you should have given an entire frightened community mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Immediately, you should have ensured that no other car ran over any other dog. Immediately, you should have sacked the man at the wheel—your home minister (the one witness who actually knew what you were up to and was mysteriously killed for his pains). Or perhaps it was a woman at the wheel—Maya Kodnani (now doing a life time in jail for inciting the murder of innocents). Instead, you rewarded her by making her a minister in your post-massacre government.
Modi exculpates himself by claiming to be a “Hindu nationalist”. I can understand an Indian being both a Hindu and a nationalist. But a “Hindu nationalist” can surely be no more than 85 per cent Indian. Would Modi accept Syed Shahabuddin calling himself a Muslim nationalist? Or a Mizo calling himself a Christian nationalist? Twenty years ago, an election pamphlet written in the Mizo language called for “Christian socialism” in Mizoram, whose native denizens are all Christians. The BJP went wild with accusation at the time and, although the term was withdrawn two decades ago, reverts to it every time there is an election there. (And, of course, Hindutva never has and never will win a single seat there.)
But none of us would or could object to Shahab calling himself an Indian Muslim or to anyone from Nagaland to Goa and Kerala and Kanyakumari calling himself an Indian Christian. But how can our religious minorities be “Hindu nationalists”, the only category in the vulgar mind of the Hindutvist that qualifies as a true Indian?
Aiyar, former Union minister, is an MP and a social commentator.