Author: M.V. Kamath
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 29, 2002
URL: http://www.samachar.com/features/290802-fpj.html
It may warm the cockles of liberal,
secular hearts to dam Gujarat's Chief Minister Narendra Modi, but the plain,
unvarnished fact must be faced: if there was no Godhra there would not
have been the killing of Muslims in Ahmedabad and Baroda and a few other
urban centres in the State. Whether the elections in Gujarat are held in
October or a couple of months later, the evidence shows that Modi's Net
Popularity Rating (NPR) among all the Chief Minister in the country is
second only to that of Uttaranchal's N. D. Tiwari according to an 'India
Today' (26 August) poll.
Tiwari scores 58 per cent and Modi
45 per cent. Vilasrao Deshmukh of Maharashtra scores a bare 28 per cent
and Karnataka's Congress Chief Minister S. M. Krishna a low 18 per cent.
Do these ratings say something? The Truth is that even if there was a Congress
Chief Minister in Gujarat the reaction to Godhra would have been just as
violent as it turned out to be because Hindus, by and large, had got fed
up with the Islamic fundamentalist violence and were in no mood to put
up with it any longer.
In any event, considering that Ahmedabad
Municipal Corporation has a Congress majority, what were its members doing?
As liberals fail to always notice they were doing nothing. They were as
much in favour of violent retaliation as allegedly was the Sangh parivar,
a point that our secularists may do well to remember. What this indicates
is that violence as a way of making a point has lost its relevance. Whether
violence is part of Islamic 'jehadi' culture or of Marxit Communist culture,
it no more pays dividends.
It has been tried in the North East
by several tribal groups, to no effect. It has been tried by Naxalites
in West Bengal. Again to no effect. In fact the same CPI(M) which originally
favoured violence was ultimately forced to hit back at the Naxalites with
greater counter-violence. To all intents and purposes Naxalism died a brutal
death, but now the CPI (M) - led government of West Bengal is faced with
another terrorist group, the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO) which
in a daring strike on August 17 gunned down four CPM leaders in their own
office and escaped. Militancy, once sponsored by the CPM had come home
to roost. Of course, in due course the West Bengal police will go on a
killing spree and kill a few KLO militants in their known hide- outs. And
there will be peace of some sorts prevailing in the disturbed areas.
West Bengal's next door state, Assam,
has been in the grip of violence for more than two decades and the so-
called United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has wreaked havoc among the
middle class. Has it gained anything? Not that anyone is aware of. Indeed
the Assamese people are fed up with the so-called liberators. For over
five years ULFA had demanded a boycott of August 15 celebrations and had
received some response. This year the people of Assam came out to the streets
in full measure to celebrate Independence Day joyously. That, no doubt,
was intended to tell the mad ULFA men that the people of Assam had enough
of violence and are no longer in any mood to tolerate it. The same is true
of the people of Telangana in Andhra Pradesh.
The CPM killers here who thought
that they were ushering in a revolution in the wake of India's newly-won
freedom have got nowhere. And they will get nowhere because violence only
begets counter-violence and would achieve no positive results. The world
had moved a long way since Lenin captured the Russian state and Mao Tse-tung
returned from his historic Long March to establish power in Beijing. Today,
violent revolution is for the birds. Pakistan has yet to learn that lesson.
Since 1990 it has unleashed a war of terrorism in Kashmir, forcing over
4 lakh Kashmiri Pandits and a fraction of that number of Kashmiri Muslims
loyal to Kashmiriat out of the Valley.
It is estimated that some 57,000
Kashmiris have been killed because of unleashed violence but Jammu &
Kashmir is no more closer to become part of Pakistan than it ever was expected
to be. And those who suffered most are the Kashmiris themselves. The lesson
here to be imbibed is yet again the same: Violence does not pay. In their
anger the Islamic terrorists who infiltrated into Kashmir burned down 5,500
Kashmiri Pandit homes in one decade of unbridled violence but Jammu &
Kashmir remains part of India as it always will. And very few people have
any sympathy for the Hurriyat or those in the Kashmir Valley demanding
'azadi'. In the final analysis the Hurriyat has to give in. The concept
of revolution has undergone a sea change.
Waving swords or Kalashnikovs may
result in the death of a hundred or thousand, but in the end the forces
of law and order will prevail. The forces of violence may have the upper
hand for a period of time but they will be put down, as they have been
put down everywhere, in due course. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi caught on
to this truth as early as in the twenties. It is not for nothing that he
came to be known as Mahatma. Gandhi knew the power of soul force better
than any leader of his time. He used it with brilliance first in South
Africa and later in his own motherland, India. And the nation was better
for it. The British when they finally departed, left no bitterness behind
them. Pakistan never understood this. Right from the very beginning - from
Deliverance day that Jinnah called for, that left several thousand dead
in Kolkata - to present times, Pakistan has put its trust in killing.
The Kolkata killings did not win
Jinnah the whole of Bengal as he had hoped. Bengal was truncated. The killings
in Punjab did not get Pakistan the whole of Punjab either, Again the state
was cut into two. For over a decade now Pakistan has engaged in violence
- to no purpose. The moral, again, is the same: Violence Does Not Pay.
One hopes that the Hindu-hating Muslims of Godhra have learnt this simple
lesson and there will never again be a repetition of the burning of coaches
under any circumstances.
Violence is no way to express one's
negative feelings. Then why isn't the Hurriyat agreeable to participating
in the October elections? The answer is simple: it Knows that it will be
effectively defeated and will stand exposed. But then, how come? Figures
speak for themselves. According to 'Outlook' (26 August), of 10,200 Kashmiri
civilians killed between 1998 and 2002 in Jammu & Kashmir, 9,000 were
Muslims! Kashmiri Muslims have had enough of violence. They want peace.
And that is why Farouk Abdullah is expressing his willingness to step down
and let the state go under presidential rule if only the Hurriyat will
agree to participate in the elections. He knows that the Hurriyat are cowards.
They also know that their followers, if ever they had any, are dwindling.
The followers have come to appreciate the limits of violence. The leaders
are still under the sway of Islamabad.
In a recent article in 'The Tribune'
(17 August), a former police chief, the highly respected K. F. Rustomji
raised an important question in another context. "What is the use of living
in a great democracy, under a good Constitution, and a working criminal
justice system if nobody can step in at the height of a carnage and say:
'Stop, you are damaging the nation'? We have a fine panoply of power, enormous
strength of military, large para-military forces, national reserves of
police and Home Guards which could have been used to end the savagery (in
Gujarat). We waited all stupefied, feeling that Godhra deserved revenge,
without knowing the truth about it...." Rustomji then proceed to compare
Gujarat with the "organised hysteria in Hitler's Germany" - a favourite
theme of our liberals and secularists.
To compare the mob hysteria that
followed Godhra with Hitler's Germany is studied. Neither the RSS or the
Sangh Parivar is organising a holocaust. If anybody thinks that the Parivar
can send 120 million Nuslims into gas chambers, either he does not know
history or is just cranky. Mob hysteria is dangerous but in Gujarat it
was set off by Godhra, a fact that needs again and again to be stated with
force. Muslims throughout the country and Muslims in Pakistan especially,
must be told in no uncertain terms that violence just will not succeed,
that 'jehad' is an outmoded concept, that in future any differences that
may crop up between the various communities in India must be settled through
dialogue and not through whipping up secular hysteria.
If the concept of Hidutva is narrow,
as some secularists think, the concept of secularism is even narrower.
As B. G. Verghese writing again in 'The Tribune' (14 August) has noted,
all 'isms' tend to ossify and so it is with secularism which Henry Cox
in 'Secular City' recently described as "an ideology, a new closed world
view which functions very much like a new religion" which "menaces the
openness and freedom 'secularisation' has produced and must therefore be
watched carefully to prevent it becoming the ideology of a new establishment".
Further, Cox noted, secularism "clips the wings of emancipation and fixes
a society on the pins of another orthodoxy". That is exactly what has happened
in India. What happened in Gujarat was not Nazism, howsoever defined, but
a revolt against Islamic violence and a determination to put it down for
all times.
Over and over again Muslims must
come to accept this truth: Violence does not pay. Say No to Violence. Narendra
Modi will then become totally irrelevant. And so, one suspects, the Rustomjis
and other secularists of India. The fault, Mr Rustomji, is not with Gujarat
but in people who thought they had a monopoly on violence. So let the word
reach one and all. Never more practice violence. Never more and never again.
Grace and good sense make for happy living.
