Beyond Coimbatore - The Indian Express
The Editorial
()
April 27, 1998
Title: Beyond Coimbatore
Author: The Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: April 27, 1998
The White paper presented by the Tamil Nadu government on the
blasts that shook Coimbatore on the eve of the Lok Sabha
elections has elicited predictable reactions from the contending
political camps. None of these, however, reveals the necessary
recognition of the main political point that needs to be made.
Which is the common responsibility of the entire spectrum of the
state's mainstream political forces for the creation of the
situation that found a tragic expression in the textile city.
Jayaram Jayalalitha, of course, holds M. Karunanidhi and his DMK
regime entirely responsible for it. The ack to the Babri Masjid
demolition specifically. While the AIADMK-led Opposition finds
this an untruth aimed at abetting terrorists and
fundamentalists, the Bharatiya Janata Party harps on the history
of it all dating back to the Eighties, with party leader Madan
Lal Khurana denouncing the alf-truths of the report as
angerous=94. What all of them gloss over is the truth of grave
import that the threat of violent communalism was allowed to grow
unresisted and almost unnoticed through a decade and a half.
None of them would appear sufficiently alive, either, to the
grimly prospect of a further growth of the threat in the
politically uncertain period ahead.
Ever since the controversy over the Meenakshipuram conversions,
which too few was at the time as a turning-point, there has been
no scarcity of alarm signals. But none of them has been loud and
clear enough to shake out of complacency those who took Tamil
Nadu's till traditional communal peace as an unalterable
condition. The rival campaigns of increasing rabidity by
unabashedly communal outfits were allowed to continue unhindered.
And, no serious note of their activities was taken even when
these led to bomb blast., and murders. The state woke up only
when the process culminated in a crime of Coimbatore's
proportions. The unstated assumption all through was that the
danger could not acquire in the state the dimensions it did
elsewhere. Because issues commonly categorised as communal did
not figure in the manifestos of the main poll contestants and
their campaigns, the state was considered safe from the virus of
violent communalism. The social tensions, generated and
aggravated so systematically, however, could not have remained
subterranean for ever. The larger issue cannot be lost sight of,
even as the immediate tasks dictated by the tragedy cannot be
ignored.
The Karunanidhi government can only technically claim to have
undertaken any of these tasks by acting on the demand for the
document presented. Or, by its promise for new anti-terrorist
legislation, and not for more expedient action. It lays itself
open to wider criticism in the White Paper by trying to blame the
Centre by implication for its own ineffectiveness against
terrorism. What should cause greater concern is the absence of
signs on either side of the state's political divide of the
danger that Coimbatore has demonstrated. Political indifference
has created the problem of communal extremism in Tamil Nadu.
Politicisation of the communal problem, a process that may have
begun, can well make matters worse.
