INDIA: Pro-Hindu Party Revives Plan for Controversial Chariot Ride

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 21 2002 (IPS) - Thwarted by India’s Election Commission from holding snap polls in western Gujarat, the state’s pro-Hindu chief minister Narendra Modi has revived plans for a symbolic chariot ride through it, one that many fear could aggravate communal tensions there.

Modi, who belongs to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that heads the coalition that leads Indian government, was dissuaded from launching his ‘Gaurav Yatra’ (pride pilgrimage) in July after the National Human Rights Commission, the opposition Congress party and concerned citizens led by former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujaral warned that it could trigger off another round of violence.

Earlier this year, Gujarat was witness to the worst ever violence between Hindus and minority Muslims after the partition in 1947, when Pakistan was carved out of India as a homeland for followers of the Islamic faith on the sub-continent.

The violence was triggered off on Feb. 27, when a train carrying supporters returning from a campaign to build a Hindu temple — on the site where a mediaeval mosque was razed by Hindu fanatics in 1992 at Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh state — was torched by Muslims. That left nearly 58 people dead.

In the reprisals that followed, more than 2,000 Muslims died and more than 150,000 people were rendered homeless as mobs of supporters of the BJP and its affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Forum, burned down homes and businesses, murdered and raped at will with the open support of the Modi government.

Hoping to cash in on majority Hindu sentiments whipped up by what amounted to a pogrom, Modi announced mid-term polls and dissolved the state assembly, although elections are not due until next year.

But after a tour of the state earlier this month, Election Commissioner J M Lyngdoh declared that the situation in the state was still not conducive to holding elections and suggested imposition of direct federal rule there.

His decision brought the independent constitutional body he heads into conflict with the BJP leadership in Gujarat and at India’s political centre.

The BJP reacted by making a ‘presidential reference’, under which the Election Commission’s powers to decide when elections will be held will be brought under the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.

The party has also decided to revive the Gaurav Yatra, with Modi beginning his chariot ride from Sep. 1.

Chariot rides were an ancient practice under which rulers would ride through their kingdoms seeking the people’s approval for a particular endeavour — but Modi’s chariot is a large airconditioned van that would allow him to address gatherings without getting off.

The BJP’s rise to power from a party with just two members in Parliament can be traced back to a chariot ride undertaken by Lal Krishna Advani in the autumn of 1990 through the entire country. That chariot ride left in its wake aroused communal passions and outbreaks of rioting and violence.

Advani, who holds the powerful home ministry, was last month named deputy prime minister, a move many saw as a sign of the moderate Vajpayee giving way to fundamentalists in the BJP.

Vajpayee has been openly critical of the Gujarat riots and said he had plans to sack Modi. What he did not say was that he was prevented from doing that by hawks in the party, led by Advani, who defended Modi against a barrage of criticism in Parliament and outside it.

Delivering the customary independence day speech on Aug. 15, Vajpayee described the violence in Gujarat as “frightening” and said “there could be no place for such violence in a civilised society”.

Vajpayee reaffirmed the essential secularism of India as laid down by its founders and on which principle India administers the Muslim majority state of Kashmir, the possession of which is disputed by Pakistan.

Earlier, Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi said in Parliament that the choice before the people was now one between a “Gujarat of Gandhi and a Gujarat of Godse”.

Gujarat was the home state of the ‘apostle of peace’ who led India’ to independence from British colonial rule in 1948, while Nathruam Godse was the fanatic Hindu man who assassinated Gandhi for compromising with Muslims.

The chief whip of the BJP in Parlliament, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, said he saw nothing wrong with Modi’s planned chariot ride. “It is like any other vehicle used for political campaigning and there is no need to read too much into it.”

In Gujarat, officials said the Gaurava Yatra would highlight the achievements of the BJP government in the state and also try to ” neutralise the misleading and distorted campaigns” by opposition parties, particularly the Congress against Modi.

Meanwhile, prominent writers and academics have announced compilation of the “Black Book on Gujarat,” series of articles that record and comment upon the events that overtook the state in the months after Feb 27.

“We wanted the book to be academic rather than political, analytical rather than descriptive and also to prescribe remedies,” said Apratim Mukarji, a well-known academic whose own contribution includes a piece on the failure of international diplomacy which was shushed by official warnings that Gujarat was an internal matter.

Another contributor to the book, Imtiaz Ahmad, who teaches sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, said “evidence made available by testimonies and enquiries conclusively show that the state represented by its impersonal edifice of the bureaucracy and law enforcement agencies were silent spectators when violence was being perpetrated.”

Articles in the book include those by Roger Fisher, chairman of the Conflict Management Group at Harvard University, Henry Rowen, professor emeritus at Stanford University, as well as forensic laboratory reports which suggest that the Godhra incidents had been stage managed.

Also, it has reports by the Human Rights Watch and by the Election Commission’s findings.

Meantime, in Gujarat advertisements titled “Why this injustice” have begun appearing in the local press. They condemn the Elections Commission, and the statutory bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Minorities, as being unmindful of the Hindu majority.