India's Achilles Heel

As I write, 40 hours after the tragedy at Akshardham, the Swaminarayan temple in Gandhinagar, the country is tense but quiet. The VHP has called for a Bharat bandh, and a Delhi bandh, to protest against the killing of almost three dozen worshippers. A large number of Muslims in various Gujarat towns, fearing the worst, have fled to the almost defunct relief camps set up after the last carnage in March. But so far, no communal riots have broken out and with each passing hour, the possibility of one is receding. The credit for this must go to the administration in Gujarat, which has learned bitter lessons from its failure in March. Credit must also go to chief minister Narendra Modi, who has done all the things that one expects of a responsible chief minister, this time, which he so calculatedly failed to do six months ago. As a result, the police has spared no efforts to round up potential trouble-makers and get them off the streets, and Modi has put off his gaurav yatra. Other states have taken similar precautions.

Credit also needs to be given to L.K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee who, again in sharp contrast to last March, rushed to Gujarat and personally ensured that there was no backlash to the killings. Not only have they been present to advise, and perhaps restrain, the still somewhat inexperienced Modi but by immediately pointing their fingers at terrorist organisations sheltered by Pakistan, they have highlighted the possibility that this was not an attack on the Hindu community but on India's nationhood. This warning also seems to have had a salutary effect.

We must not, however, allow our relief at the absence of a communal backlash to blind us to the threat that terrorism poses not just to human life but to the unity, peace and prosperity of our country. At the time of writing, the police have still to identify the two young men who sprayed death into defenceless worshippers. It is therefore possible, although on balance not very likely, that they are from outside Gujarat. It is probable that the organisation they purport to belong to—Tehrik-e-Kasas—is an offshoot of the Lashkar-e-Toiba or a similar organisation based in Pakistan. What is beyond doubt is that, whether they were Gujaratis or outsiders, what motivated them to give up their lives was a thirst to take revenge for the massacre of Muslims in the March riots in Gujarat. Had those massacres not taken place, Akshardham would not have happened either.

This latest tragedy therefore underlines how the attempt to play politics with religion is fraught with peril for the entire country. For this, it is not stray groups of Muslims but the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and, behind them, the rss that are squarely to blame. One has only to compare the sequence of events that occurred after Godhra and those that have occurred now to understand what mixing politics with religion can do. The VHP issued a call for a bandh after Godhra too. But instead of locking up trouble-makers the Modi government actually made itself a sponsor of the bandh and forbade the police from making any preventive arrests. As a result, mobs descended upon defenceless, innocent Muslims in the thousands.

Modi continued to make political capital out of the riots. He 'rewarded' officers who had defended the Muslims with punitive transfers; he displayed a marked lack of sympathy for the victims of the riots; he forced refugees to leave the relief camps and return to burnt-out homes in areas where they felt unsafe; he sought to make capital out of the passions aroused by Godhra by dissolving the state assembly and seeking an early election; and he sought to keep the communal fires burning by taking out the so-called gaurav yatra.

His behaviour now could not be more different.It is therefore possible that, aided by the wise counsel of Vajpayee and Advani, Modi has seen the peril towards which he was taking his state.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the leaders of the VHP and their backers in the rss. The people have treated their call for a Bharat bandh with the contempt it deserved. But the fact that they issued it shows that they have learned nothing from the sequence of tragedies that they triggered on February 28.

In March, they turned a deaf ear to warnings that killing Muslims, targeting its new middle class and destroying its property would pull out the entire community's roots in Indian society. Shorn of hope and denied a future, a measurable proportion would turn to terrorism and seek to exact revenge. What is worse, their disaffection would make them willing pawns in the hands of those who want to destroy India itself.

All this has come to pass. Barely two months after Gujarat, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, head of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, sent a letter to his followers from a Pakistani jail, which urged them to exploit the Achilles heel that Gujarat had revealed. Akshardham was the first fruit of the poison tree that was sown last March. It will not be the last.

Akshardham has lessons for the BJP too. Since March, Messrs Vajpayee and Advani have been running with the hare and hunting with the hounds in Gujarat. They too seem to have learned that they cannot do this any longer. Lest they be tempted by younger hotheads to resume doing so once again, they will do well to remember that there were never more than 2,000 militants in Punjab. But subjugating them cost 50,000 lives. By the same token, 3,50,000 Indian troops are unable to prevent some 2,000 to 3,500 militants in Kashmir from terrorising the people. There are 140 million Muslims in India.