Is India Rwanda?

Fixing accountability during communal riots is relatively easy in India. In 1984, to the Congress party’s eternal shame, it allowed the massacre of innocent Sikhs. In Mumbai in 1992, Sudhakarrao Naik and Sharad Pawar played out their macabre private antagonisms instead of restraining Shiv Sena mobs. Mr Narendra Modi in 2002 cites Newton’s law to justify looking the other way. In the capital, we had the extraordinary and pathetic situation of a prime minister unable to control a chief minister (clearly functioning as an RSS pracharak) from his own party. Mr L.K. Advani, as usual, has been able to find a construction of words which he believes will keep both sides happy. Fortunately, the entire cynical game, both at the Centre and the state, lies totally exposed.

A small minority high on illicit power, whose destructive agenda has the support of perhaps no more than 5 to 10 per cent of Hindus, claims to represent national sentiment; those who oppose their agenda are "anti-Hindu". They charge double standards are being applied. It seems the diabolical torching of the train at Godhra, a heinous act, has not been condemned strongly enough. By what measurement of the Richter scale of condemnation has it fallen short? The kar sevaks and their families killed deserve as much sympathy and official relief as hundreds of Muslims slaughtered. Is the ghastly Gujarat violence to be debated on these terms? Are we equating state terrorism with an act of terrorism committed by a group of crazy, bigoted individuals?

The role of the media, both print and electronic, has been exemplary. Without the media highlighting the criminal dereliction of responsibility, the army would have been on "stand-by" for a few more days and the police conspicuously absent from the scene of the crime. When law-abiding citizens are being burnt alive by mobs over a prolonged period, objective journalism requires to be jettisoned; the media has no option but to tell the story from the side of the victims so that the country can see the grisly events. In the coming days and weeks the media will need to remain vigilant to ensure that the state administration does not go back to its bad old ways. The Gujarat story is not over.

The people who perpetrated the Gujarat violence (including the Godhra torching) have not merely further poisoned Hindu-Muslim relations. They have wounded the country in its own eyes and those of the civilised world. Is India a confident, mature, increasingly prosperous world superpower? Or is it a barbaric, tribal, banana republic akin to Rwanda? Can ‘revenge’ become an instrument of state policy?

Those splendid sants, shankaracharyas and acharyas, who move in and out of the corridors of power with practised ease, need to ask themselves what they would have achieved if in the process of building their cherished Ram temple at Ayodhya, they destroy India.