INDIA: Pro-Hindu Party Refuses to Sack Leader of Riot-hit State

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 12 2002 (IPS) - As Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began a three-day conclave Friday, it came under intense pressure to sack the fundamentalist chief minister of riot-torn western Gujarat state, Narendra Modi.

Leading a chorus of demands that Modi must accept responsibility for a pogrom against the minority Muslim community in Gujarat was the BJP’s ally, the regional Telugu Desam Party (TDP) that rules southern Andhra Pradesh state.

It supports the BJP-led, multi-party ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with the 38 members it sends to Parliament.

In a hard-hitting statement Thursday, the TDP, which rules one of the country’s most progressive states, said events in Gujarat since Feb. 28 “have tarnished India’s image of being a liberal, modern and secular society”.

“Bigotry of any kind can have dangerous consequences for us as a society,” the TDP said in its statement. It also reminded Vajpayee, whose party conclave is underway in the former Portuguese enclave of Goa, that “adherence to secularism is one of the basic conditions for our support to the NDA”.

Vajpayee, who toured Gujarat on Apr. 4, more than a month after the firebombing of a train carriage full of Hindu devotees returning from the temple town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh sparked off a pogrom against Muslims, had said he was sickened and shamed by the violence.

While 59 people died in the firebombing near Godhra station, the anti-Muslim riots that followed resulted in at least a thousand deaths. More than 100,000 people, including families of businessmen and professionals, were displaced and became refugees living in several camps, some of which Vajpayee visited to promise help and rehabilitation.

But Vajpayee hesitated to sack Modi, who rules the only state where the BJP holds power on its own. He is also a leader of the powerful Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or National Self-help Organisation, which provides ideology and muscle to the BJP and which its critics call “fascist”.

Modi wants to call a mid-term poll in Gujarat, confident of majority Hindu sentiments built up by the Godhra firebombing. That firebombing was carried out by a Muslim mob, provoked by Hindu devotees who had gone to Ayodhya to support the building of a temple at the site of a 16th century mosque razed by Hindu fanatics 10 years ago.

The TDP said that unless Modi was removed, “we will be guilty of eroding public confidence and failing to provide just and fair governance”.

If the TDP, led by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, withdraws support from Vajpayee’s BJP over the issue, the 22-party NDA, which the Bharatiya Janata Party leads, would find it difficult to survive.

Other regional parties that support the NDA and want Modi’s ouster include the Lok Jan Shakti or People’s Strength Party led by Ram Vilas Paswan, Rashtriya Lok Dal or National People’s Party led by Ajit Singh and

the Janata Dal or United People’s Party led by Sharad Yadav. All three are senior members of Vajpayee’s Cabinet.

The Samata Party or Equality Party led by Defence Minister George Fernandes is undecided, but its spokesman Shambhu Srivastava, who openly demanded Modi’s resignation earlier this week, was subsequently forced to resign from his post.

Meanwhile, the BJP’s arch rival, the Congress party, convened a separate conclave of its chief ministers who rule 14 major states to review the Gujarat crisis and examine prospects for the party’s return to power at the centre.

The Congress party’s president Sonia Gandhi accused Vajpayee’s government of allowing Modi to continue in office in spite of evidence that the Gujarat administration was complicit in the violence that has shaken the state.

“The central government sees nothing wrong in a chief minister whose law and order administration is so infected by the politics of communalism that it victimises officials who take a courageous stand against communal violence,” Gandhi told her the meeting of Congress chief ministers in Guwahati city, capital of eastern Assam state.

The Congress party, which led India to independence from Britain in 1947 and ruled for most of the years afterwards, lost elections in 1996 thanks to a string of scams it became associated with.

Another factor was a Hindu revival movement run by the BJP, which was focused on the razing down of the 16th century Babri Masjid at Ayodhya and the building of a temple on the site to honour the warrior deity Rama.

But more recently, the BJP’s fortunes have been on the decline. It suffered a series of spectacular defeats in provincial elections in several states, including northern Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and home to Ayodhya town.

To hold power at the central government, the BJP depends on the support of regional parties like the TDP, which are wary of its pro-Hindu agenda. These regional parties also fear that association with the BJP could alienate Muslims, who may then decide to support the opposition Congress party.

The TDP’s decision to demand Modi’s ouster may have been prompted by the Congress initiative in calling for a nationwide agitation to press for the sacking of the Gujarat government, and by independent reports on the carnage and breakdown in law and order in the state.

A citizens’ report by a fact-finding mission consisting of two professors, a former high-ranking police officer and a retired finance secretary, has recommended federal rule in the state “in view of the constitutional breakdown in Gujarat patent in the concerted and systematic challenge mounted to the secular foundation of the polity”.

The report, released Wednesday, said that what happened in Gujarat was the result of Hindu fundamentalist organisations penetrating state institutions during the four-year rule by the BJP in the state.

A member of the mission and a former police official, K S Subramanian, described the breakdown of the law and order in Gujarat as “monumental” and noted administrative complicity in the “large-scale looting, arson and killing to which the minority (Muslim) community was subjected to”.

“The politicisation of the governmental machinery, especially the bureaucracy led inevitably to the erosion of the functions and powers of the government machinery,” the mission’s report said.

Members of the mission said they had reason to believe that Godhra was only a trigger to a pogrom planned weeks earlier — evident from the sudden disappearance from the market of cooking gas cylinders (filled with liquid petroleum gas) and their equally sudden reappearance as the homemade bombs used to blow up Muslim properties.

There was clear evidence that Muslim homes and properties were singled out by mob leaders, who were armed with lists and databases made available by the government to fundamentalist groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Forum, they added.