Author: Balbir K Punj
Publication: The Outlook
Date: May 27, 2002
Introduction: The Roys in the media
are harming India with half-truths and worse.
"Gujarat, the only major state in
India to have a BJP government has, for some years, been the petri dish
in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment.
Last month, the initial results were put on public display.
Within hours of the Godhra outrage,
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal put into motion a meticulously
planned pogrom against the Muslim community. Officially, the number of
dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More
than a hundred and fifty thousand people, driven from their homes, now
live in refugee camps. Women were stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned
to death in front of their children. Two hundred and forty dargahs and
180 masjids were destroyed-in Ahmedabad the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the
founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in the course
of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated
and wreathed in burning tyres. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes,
hotels, textiles mills, buses and private cars. Hundreds of thousands have
lost their jobs.
A mob surrounded the house of ex-Congress
MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the director-general of police,
the police commissioner, the chief secretary, the additional chief secretary
(home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene.
The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burnt them
alive. Then they beheaded Jaffri and dismembered him."
That was the Goddess of small things,
Arundhati Roy, painting the big picture of Gujarat in Democracy: Who's
she when she's at home? (Outlook, May 6, 2002). Roy sums here neatly almost
all the charges against the Sangh Parivar. When a reputed weekly like Outlook
publishes a Booker Prize-winner, it is meant to be serious commentary.
And concomitantly, Roy has put her brilliant linguistic skills to the service
of "truth". Read her graphic details-"The mob broke into the house. They
stripped his daughters and burnt them alive". Roy speaks with the confidence
of an eyewitness. Alternatively, she must've access to an eyewitness. Anyway,
it reads heart-rendingly honest.
Heart-rending, yes, but honest,
no. Jaffri was killed in the riots but his daughters were neither "stripped"
nor "burnt alive". T.A. Jafri, his son, in a front-page interview titled
Nobody knew my father's house was the target (Asian Age, May 2, Delhi edition),
says, "Among my brothers and sisters, I am the only one living in India.
And I am the eldest in the family. My sister and brother live in the US.
I am 40 years old and I have been born and brought up in Ahmedabad."
So, Roy is lying-for surely Jafri
is not. But what about the hundreds of media lies that haven't been exhumed
as yet? Her seven-page long (approx: 6,000 words) hate charter against
India and the Sangh parivar is woven around just two specific cases of
human tragedy, one of which-by now, we know for sure-is a piece of fiction.
The rest is hyperbole, punctuated
with venom and vitriol to demonise the parivar. Precisely this type of
demonisation had resulted in the macabre incident at Godhra. The vicious
propaganda unleashed by the secularists for over a decade had made ordinary
and gullible Muslims see the innocent Ram sevaks as demons who deserved
to be burnt alive.
She terms Gujarat the "petri dish"
of the Sangh parivar. The fact is that Godhra has been used as a crucible
by the secular fundamentalists. No wonder, after the roasting of the Ram
sevaks, they, while condemning the crime, blamed the victims. Many of them
invented events such as a quarrel with hawkers, misbehaviour with women
and shouting of provocative slogans to justify the horrendous crime.
And Roy continues the demonisation
in this flam as well. Of all the politicians, she sees hope only in Laloo
Yadav, the man responsible for dividing Bihar's polity on caste lines,
vertically and horizontally.
He lords-through his wife-over the
province where 'the state has withered away' and has since been replaced
by senas of various hues. Roy quotes Laloo, "Kaun mai ka lal kehta hai
ki yeh Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do, chhati phaad doonga" (Which
mother's son says this is a Hindu nation? Send him here, I'll tear his
chest open). Her fascination for Laloo obviously stems from his call, pregnant
with possibilities as it is of more Godhra-like situations. I discern a
sickly ghoulish mindset in that.
Roy's flim-flam is replete with
words like "fascism, planned pogrom, gang rape, genocide". About the '98
Pokhran nuclear tests, she says "bloodthirsty patriotism became openly
acceptable political currency". Incidentally, her perception on these issues
is fully shared by Musharraf, Pakistan's martial president, and partly
also by certain sections in the West and the US. But was what happened
in Gujarat a "pogrom" targeted at Muslims? Loss of 900-odd innocent lives
(both Hindus and Muslims) is definitely not a "genocide" of any one community.
Yet it is one more shameful event in the long and unfortunate chain of
communal riots in India, since the 1893 Bombay and Azamgarh riots. Beginning
from the 1714 Holi riots in the Mughal period, Ahmedabad itself has witnessed
no less than 10 major recorded riots.
The Sangh parivar was not there
in 1714, nor was it a dominant force during the '69 and '85 riots. So what
explains these riots when Gujarat was not a 'Sangh parivar petri dish'?
Out of those who perished in the
communal frenzy, over one-third are Hindus.
Following Godhra, massive spontaneous
violence broke out in various parts of Gujarat against the Muslims. Since
the rioters were mainly Hindus, they also accounted for about 75 per cent
of those who fell to police bullets in the first three days. In fact, till
April 18 Hindus accounted for more deaths in police firing than Muslims.
But for almost three weeks now,
the violence has been led by Muslims against Hindus and, naturally, a bulk
of the casualties are accounted for by them. The police have booked 34,000
rioters, majority of whom are Hindus. Both communities have suffered heavy
loss of business and property in the arson and looting. While rioters are
communal in picking their targets, looters are not-and they target at random.
One lakh Muslims are struggling in relief camps, but so are 40,000 Hindus.
This is a horrible riot, which is sad enough, but why call it a genocide?
Whom does it help? Not the riot victims, only our enemies across the border.
The country hasn't suffered so much
loss of face in the world as it has now, though it is like one of the scores
of riots India has seen. Why? The obvious culprits are those who set ablaze
a compartment full of innocent kar sevaks at Godhra and those who indulged
in the senseless violence in the following weeks. But the real villains
in tarring India's image are the Roys in the media and a section of public
life, who mix half-truths with fiction to settle their ideological or political
scores with the Sangh parivar.
Roy (a role model for several in
the secular pack) opens her hate charter with the case of a woman named
Sayeeda "whose stomach was ripped open and stuffed with burning rags".
I heard similar horror stories in Parliament. The most frequently quoted
were the cases of women raped (in some cases gang-raped), their stomachs
ripped open, foetuses taken out and paraded on swords or trishuls. But
no one was able to give me even one specific case with all the particulars.
Roy gave one, but it proved to be a piece of fiction.
The secular pack is not only guilty
of parading half-truths but also of condoning and inciting violence. The
banner headline of the Hindustan Times (February 28) reporting on Godhra
set a trend for secularists when it said 'Gujarat hit by Ayodhya backlash'.
Scuttling beyond the 'first-information-report' with a cult of shady intellectualism,
it thus immediately established a connection between the Ram Janmabhoomi
movement and the gruesome carnage.
Or how will you opine on the Siddharth
Varadarajan report in the Times of India: 'BJP fiddles while Gujarat reels
under killings' (March 1, 2002). It says: "dastardly attack on train passengers
in Godhra... while official inquiry will establish the extent to which
the attack on the Sabarmati Express was premeditated, there can be no doubt
about the planned nature of violence directed against Gujarat's Muslims...".
The report, carried just two days
after Godhra, mentions the murder of Ram sevaks only once in the 450-word
plus report. What is important is that Varadarajan, sitting in Delhi, makes
readers 'doubtless' about the planning in the backlash while defending
Godhra, the indefensible.
Blatant myths and fiction have lacerated
the facts on Gujarat. The ToI (March 3) reported Modi's much-publicised
misquote of Newton's third law-"Every action has an equal and opposite
reaction". In fact, the CM had never said such a thing and no other paper
except for ToI had carried the misquote in its original reportage. But
later on, numerous editorials were penned on the basis of this canard.
All his denials were thrown in the dustbin.
We live in a time of televised war
(Kargil), live terror attacks (WTC) and televised riots (Gujarat). Visuals
have a hundred-fold greater leverage in shaping our responses. News channels
are in a 24-hour rat race with each other, with a killer instinct to be
the first with the news. In the process, at times they throw caution to
the winds, particularly in a crisis situation. The channels added fuel
to the fire during the riots by recklessly showing footage of gory scenes.
Contrast it with coverage of the WTC attacks and the Afghanistan war by
CNN and BBC. How many gruesome scenes did you see?
The Editor's Guild came down heavily
on the Gujarati press and hailed the role of the English press in coverage
of the riots. The former might have been guilty of exaggeration but I am
sure it has not concocted stories the way the Roys did in the English media.
Surprisingly, the Guild has nothing critical to say on the role of the
electronic media and of the Roys, guilty of blackening India's name, generating
more communal hate at a critical time and demonising a section of citizens
through half-truths and complete lies. Some rioters may be guilty of rape
and should be punished for their heinous crimes, but what about those who
have raped the truth and the country in the last two months?