Author: Amberish K Diwanji
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: December 20, 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/dec/20amber.htm
It was a chance remark made by a
Gujarati Hindu colleague to his Muslim colleague. "Thank God Modi won otherwise
I don't know what would have happened to the Hindus."
The remark was not made with malice,
but revealed a deep-rooted fear that few understood -- certainly not journalists,
certainly not the Congress -- but caretaker Chief Minister Narendra Modi
did.
What happened in Godhra was terrible
and the culprits need to hang for it. And what happened after Godhra is
equally terrible, and every person guilty of murder, rape and arson deserves
the maximum punishment as per the law, including death. Neither incident
is condoned or justified; it is not the business of individuals to take
law into their hands.
But in this legalese what was missed
was an understanding of the soul of Gujarat.
Gujarat is an awesome state. In
the years leading to Independence, this small, semi-arid state that then
accounted for barely four per cent of the country's population, gave undivided
India three of its four greatest leaders: Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel
and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Yes, Jinnah is hated by many Indians, but no one
can deny that this native of Gujarat was instrumental in creating Pakistan.
I wonder if anywhere in the world, two Fathers of the Nations actually
hailed from just one province? It would be a rare instance.
Clearly, there is something about
Gujarat that it could produce men of such amazing brilliance. But tragically,
these three men represented three amazing different school of thoughts,
which only reflects the history and culture of Gujarat.
Gujarat lies on the famous trade
routes between India and West Asia. Thus it is not surprising this state
abounds in traders, who bring with them the culture of desiring peace,
of consensus, of bartering.
But Gujarat also suffered at the
hands of invaders over the centuries. The infamous raids by Mahmud of Ghazni
on the Somnath temple in the 11th century, some say 11 times, some say
17, is seared in the memory of every Hindu Gujarati, perhaps more deeply
than anything else. And the fact that Gujarat has been happy hunting ground
for raiders and invaders from the northeast -- Turks, Afghans, Mughals
-- and the southeast -- the Marathas, and later the British -- is not forgotten.
The Gujaratis have been hurt and
humiliated by this violence, and sought to reclaim their ground. Perhaps
the earliest indication comes from the fact that just a few years after
Gujarat state was formed, Baroda, earlier under Maratha rule, was renamed
Vadodara, harking back to an earlier Gujarati name.
But the Gujarati-Marathi violence
that occurred when Bombay state was formed soon petered out. Gujaratis
and the Marathi-speaking people mixed easily, and since the latter tended
to become professionals, so they were not competing for the same space.
This was not the case with the Muslims.
Muslim rule over parts of Gujarat
had been much longer and deeper. After Independence, interaction between
the two communities that existed in the work place and in localities stayed
at that level. The two communities did not intermarry save a rare case,
had different diets that limited interaction, and finally, with both communities
looking at trading as their primacy choice of occupation, there was always
the element of competition.
Many people lament how is it that
the state that produced Mahatma Gandhi also produced so much violence and
such a deep-rooted Hindu-Muslim divide. They forget that the same state
produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, whose insecurities led him to demand -- and
get -- Pakistan.
As a state that lies on the trading
routes and with an amazingly long coastline, Gujarat has been a state of
people coming and going, bringing with them their ideas and religion. So
much flux and movement made the average Gujarati - whether Hindu, Muslim,
or Parsi - living in a fluid society hold on fast to the one thing that
remained rooted: his religion and its rituals. It is hardly surprising
that unlike neighbouring Maharashtra, Gujarat never had a line of reformers
who challenged Hindu orthodoxy. Even Mahatma Gandhi, who allowed Dalits
into his Sabarmati Ashram, a revolutionary step then, went on record to
say he accepted the caste system.
The average Gujarati thus was a
deeply religious, orthodox person, and over the decades, politicians only
exploited the various divisions within this society. Of all the divisions,
the Hindu-Muslim divide was the deepest, and now the widest, and which
exploded post-Godhra.
In the book 90 Minutes at Entebbe
by William Stevenson, the author describes how an elderly Israeli, a Holocaust
survivor who the hijackers failed to recognize as Jew, complained in Tel
Aviv that what was the purpose of Israel if it could not protect Jews.
Her remarks produced an uproar and played a catalyzing effect in pushing
the government to take military action, thus leading to the raid at Entebbe.
In that sense, for Hindu Gujaratis,
the burning of the train at Godhra in a state where the Gujarati Hindu
now ruled after 600 years kindled the desire for revenge. For the Hindu
Gujarati, the sentiment during the rioting was: 'Enough is enough' and
'The Muslims had to be taught a lesson,' a remark that harked back to all
the attacks and raids by Muslim kings and sultans, both real and imagined,
in the centuries gone by.
Tragically, few Indians elsewhere
understood the Gujarati's reaction, yet most Hindu Gujaratis, whether in
Mumbai or abroad, understood the sentiment. This is not to say that all
Gujaratis approved the cruel killings; in fact some of the most trenchant
critics of Modi and the Hindus on the rampage were Hindu Gujaratis.
But in the initial days, what emerged
was a flawed understanding of the anxieties at play, and which only added
to the chaos. It is then hardly surprising that with such flawed perceptions
at work, few were able to understand the undercurrents at work during the
Gujarat election or predict Modi's win.
