KRISHNA KUMAR : Secularism as a political ploy - remembering the Srikrishna Report
After issuing threats for months, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar finally pulled the plug on his party's (JD-U's) alliance with BJP over the issue of the 'communal' Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat who has become the head of the BJP's poll committee. Nitish Kumar is strongly against Modi becoming the PM; however he has no issues with LK Advani who is 'alleged' to be involved in the Babri Masjid's demolition; probably Nitish doesn't want to revisit the Babri Masjid issue; probably he also doesn't remember the riots of 1992 and 1993 that killed over 900 people in a place called Bombay.
The riots of 1992 that took place after the demolition of Babri Masjid led to such a social division in Bombay as it was known then that the character of the city changed forever. Then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, belonging to the Congress party, had pushed the party's government in Maharashtra to order a probe into the riots. The Congress government then ordered a probe by a judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice B N Srikrishna.
The Shiv Sena-BJP government which came to power in 1994 promptly tried to disband the committee; this was not surprising considering that its cadres were found to be involved in the riots to a large extent. However it had to constitute the commission after a huge public outcry and political pressure was mounted on it. Over five years the Srikrishna Commission recorded and examined 2,125 affidavits and gathered 9,655 pages of evidence, submitting its report to the Maharashtra government on February 16, 1998; it was tabled in the Maharashtra Assembly on August 6, 1998.
But the Sena- BJP government refused to accept the findings calling it 'anti-Hindu' and 'biased'. The Srikrishna Commission report became a major election issue; the Congress and the newly-formed NCP of Sharad Pawar promised to take action on it if voted to power.
Since none of the two parties got a majority they joined hands to come to power. However, the Congress-NCP government didn't make any move to implement the Srikrishna report. In spite of numerous petitions being filed before the state government as well as the courts the government has not budged from its stand. The report will stay buried. Many moons have passed, Bombay has become Mumbai and there have been at least two dozen more riots in the state, yet the government has not bothered to implement the report. Earlier questions used to be posed to the Congress-NCP government about when it planned to implement the report. Now even that has stopped.
It is not hard to figure out why the report has been buried. For, it not only shows the Sena-BJP politicians in a bad light, but also the Mumbai police and some Congress politicos. A leader from the Congress who allegedly had a role to play in the riots has since gone on to become a party MP. Leaders of Congress and NCP privately claim that they don't want to open 'old wounds' and if the report is implemented it will end up dividing the city further.
Coming from a party which has been championing the cause of riot victims in Gujarat while stonewalling investigations into the 1984 Sikh riots, this is not surprising. What the Congress and politicians like Nitish Kumar have taught us is that being 'secular' or communal depends on how convenient it is politically or otherwise.
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