Gujarat Genocide:A B.J.P. politician says Modi had
told him they had three days "to do whatever we could,".
Gujarat Genocide:A B.J.P. politician says Modi had
told him they had three days "to do whatever
we could,".
Historian
scholars have described it as a Pogrom, ethnic cleansing, state terrorism, and
meeting the "legal definition of genocide".
The pogrom
was extensively televised by India's innumerable – and then much less
complacent – TV channels.
Many
middle-class Indians were shocked to hear how even the very young had not been
spared – the slayers of Muslims were seen smashing the heads of children
against rocks. There was some unease even within Modi's parent outfit, the RSS
– whose most revered chief, Guru Golwalkar, wrote in a 1939 book that Nazi
Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging itself
of the "Semitic races".
Subject:
[Pakistan Post] India: Hindu Leaders Taped Boasting About Roles in Violence
against Muslims [1 Attachment]
Leaders
Are Taped Boasting About Roles in Violence
Tehelka,
a weekly magazine, secretly videotapes senior police officers and politicians
boasting about their roles in the 2002 killings -- how they burned Muslim men,
raped their wives and destroyed their homes.
The
investigation renews focus on what role Modi might have played.
A
B.J.P. politician says Modi had told him they had three days "to do
whatever we could," according to a transcript the magazine published the
following month.
Modi
dismisses the claims as politically motivated.
The
Gujrat Riots (Massacre)
Historian
scholars have described it as a Pogrom, ethnic cleansing, state terrorism, and
meeting the "legal definition of genocide".
What
happened was that Hindu groups set a train on fire inbound from Pakistan
killing everyone then blamed it on Muslims in Pakistan. This false flag was
used as a pretext to start riots which were a disguise to carry out their
preplanned attack on the Muslim minority living in the state of Gujrat, India.
The minister (Modi), police, media, and the hindu residents were all in on it.
The
Muslim males (men and children) were killed brutally, their houses destroyed
and burned, while their women and girls raped. This continued for three days.
Afterwards a kangaroo court trial was run against those involved and they were
released with out a single charge.
See
below links for details:
The
Gujarat massacre: New India's blood rite
Ten
years on, we need to consider the links between the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002
and economic globalisation
Pankaj
Mishra
The
Guardian, Wednesday 14 March 2012 20.30 GMT
Jump
to comments (110)
Narendra
Modi arriving at party HQ in Ahmedabad in 2002. The BJP won a huge majority in
elections in Gujarat. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/EPA
In
February 2002 the western Indian state of Gujarat, governed by the Hindu
nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi, witnessed one of the country's
biggest pogroms. Responding to reports that Muslims had set fire to a train
carriage, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims inside, mobs rampaged across the state. The
riots flared up again on 15 March – 10 years ago on Wednesday – and killing,
raping and looting continued until mid-June. More than 2,000 Muslims were
murdered, and tens of thousands rendered homeless in carefully planned and
coordinated attacks of unprecedented savagery.
The
killers may have been in touch with police and politicians. According to the
2011 Amicus report, two cabinet ministers even sat in police control rooms. A
senior police officer and minister, murdered in 2003, claimed that Modi
explicitly instructed civil servants and police not to stand in the killers'
way. Of course, Modi has always denied involvement and condemned the riots.
The pogrom
was extensively televised by India's innumerable – and then much less
complacent – TV channels. Many middle-class Indians were shocked to hear how
even the very young had not been spared – the slayers of Muslims were seen
smashing the heads of children against rocks. There was some unease even within
Modi's parent outfit, the RSS – whose most revered chief, Guru Golwalkar, wrote
in a 1939 book that Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its
highest" by purging itself of the "Semitic races".
Since
then Indian activists have doggedly pursued Modi through the courts and in the
media. In a sting carried out in 2007 by the weekly magazine Tehelka,
politicians, businessmen, officials and policemen were caught on tape,
delightedly recalling how they murdered and raped Muslims with the full
imprimatur of their superiors.
No
matter: Modi walks out of hostile interviews and ignores rulings from the
country's courts: last month his government was issued a contempt notice for
failing to compensate 56 people whose shops were destroyed in the riots. He can
describe the relief camps that house thousands of dispossessed Muslims as
"child-breeding centres". The impunity derives from the fact that
Modi, though still denied a visa to the US, remains the unchallenged leader of
a big-business-friendly state which his American PR firm, Apco – that also
represents brutal dictators such as Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev – has
successfully rebranded as "Vibrant Gujarat".
Hailed
by India's leading industrialists, including Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, as
"dynamic" and "visionary", and buoyed by landslide
victories in state elections, Modi now projects himself as the face of a
democratic, economically vigorous and pro-west New India. He has been able to
persuade many of his Gujarati compatriots of a liberal-leftist conspiracy
against their plucky, entrepreneurial selves. And there are many in the Indian
media – bigger, more affluent and more gung-ho since 2002 – ready to complement
Apco's exertions by making the 2002 pogrom seem part of a happily superseded
history.
One
recent commentator even tried to dismiss it as an anachronism from India's
apparently dark pre-1991 "socialist" past, claiming that it
"represented an autarkic economy riot in the era of globalisation".
Apparently, the beneficiaries of Brave New India, educated by an alert media
and motivated by economic gain, have a "declining tolerance for
violence" – and even someone as fanatical as Modi realises that news of
wholesale murder of Muslims, quickly disseminated in the age of globalisation,
is bad for business.
A
recent profile of Modi in Caravan, India's best English-language magazine,
eviscerates this self-flattering image of a democratic and enlightened
entrepreneurial class – one that has no time for the Muslim-scalping that
people in benightedly socialist India used to get up to. Wholly untouched by
remorse, Modi comes across in a carefully researched article by the journalist
Vinod Jose as a classic authoritarian populist, bending others to his will
rather than bowing to progressive opinion. Jose describes how Modi demanded an
abject apology from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) (CII), India's
most prestigious and important business association, which had criticised the
Gujarat chief minister over the killings in his state. Faced with a revolt from
businessmen from wealthy Gujarat, the CII buckled; it was soon helping to
arrange Modi's first meeting with foreign investors. It was only a matter of
time before Tata struck up a beautiful relationship with Modi.
In
any case, the non-recurrence of 2002-style killings in India provides little
reason to credit its elites with heightened tolerance and compassion. Left
behind by economic growth, Muslims are more demoralised and depressed than
ever; and the country's extreme inequalities, often enforced with violence,
express themselves in new forms, ranging from suicides by tens of thousands of
farmers, to militant insurgencies. Old-style rioting has been replaced by state
terrorism, often cheer-led by the elites. (In 2007 India ranked just behind
Iraq in annual incidents of "terrorist" violence.) Under Modi's rule,
Gujarat has seen a steep rise in extrajudicial killings.
Economic
globalisation, far from spurring moral and spiritual growth among its
beneficiaries, has helped to create new constituencies – among haves as well as
have-nots – for xenophobia and Modi-style authoritarian populism. Riot
Politics, an excellent new book based on close ethnographic study of
riot-affected areas in Gujarat by the Dutch scholar Ward Berenschot, shows how
it was the state's integration into the global economy, and resulting extreme
inequalities, that made poor areas of the state so exposed to anti-Muslim
violence. Indeed, the 2002 killings may have been an early example of what the
social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls "a vast worldwide Malthusian
correction, which works through the idioms of minoritisation and ethnicisation
but is functionally geared to preparing the world for the winners of
globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers".
Like
Modi, the strongmen who supervise these bloody purges of economically depressed
and unproductive people are often elected by landslide majorities, and tend to
be audacious free-marketeers rather than hopeless socialists. The start of the
crony-capitalist regimes of Thaksin in Thailand and Putin in Chechnya coincided
with vicious assaults on ethnic minorities. Ten years later, the 2002
anti-Muslim pogrom too seems to have been a necessary blood rite – anointing
not just Vibrant Gujarat but also the New India.
