WHAT ABOUT 1984? - Mukul Kesavan on pogroms & political virtue
'The Congress, by a kind of historical default, is a pluralist party that is opportunistically communal while the BJP is an ideologically communal (or majoritarian) party that is opportunistically ‘secular’..'
NB - as the highlighted section below suggests, the perpetrators of the violence actually boast about it. This is as true of the Congress behaviour in the 1985 elections, as it is of the symbolic meaning of the title Hindu Hriday Samrat accorded to Modi. Is it a big secret that his samrat status is a means of signalling his 'great' deeds in 2002? Rajnath Singh, president of the BJP asks us to forget 2002. Does he really mean what he says? Has his parivar forgotten 2002? If it has, what makes Narandrabhai Hindu Hriday Samrat? And why should we forget 2002 when till the other day his parivar was urging us never to forget 1528 ?
********
The stock response of the Bharatiya Janata Party to the argument that Godhra makes Narendra Modi politically untouchable is “What about 1984?” There are several inadequate comebacks to that question and the best of them is that no one should use one pogrom to justify another. I once heard this used to good effect by the columnist, Aakar Patel, in a television discussion. This answer has the virtue of not being party-political nor attempting in some grotesque way to demonstrate that the pogrom permitted and encouraged by the Congress government in Delhi in 1984 was morally less horrible than the pogrom that occurred on the BJP’s watch in Gujarat in 2002.
The problem with this response, though, is that it doesn’t answer the questions that fly in close formation behind the “What about 1984?” question, namely, “Why is the BJP worse than the Congress?” and, relatedly, “Why is Narendra Modi any worse than Rajiv Gandhi?” specially given the latter’s infamous comment, “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,” which seemed, retrospectively, to rationalize the systematic killing of Sikhs in the days that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination.These are important questions regardless of who asks them. The fact that they are often asked by Narendra Modi’s unlovely supporters isn’t a good reason for not taking them seriously.
It has been nearly thirty years since the earth shook, and for those who didn’t live through the horror of those days as reasoning adults, it is worth rehearsing the hideous significance of 1984 in the history of the republic. There had been communal violence right through the early history of the republic with mostly Muslims at the receiving end. The complicity of the lower echelons of the state apparatus in this violence — Uttar Pradesh’s Provincial Armed Constabulary was notorious for its institutionalized animus against Muslims — was widely recognized. But the scale on which Sikhs were killed, the participation of Congressmen at every level, the total complicity of the police and the fact that the butchery happened in the country’s capital, in Delhi, made 1984 a watershed in the history of the republic.
In a previous column, I wrote about Modi doubling down on the Gujarat killings by refusing any expression of regret or responsibility and also by continuing to sponsor individuals like Maya Kodnani who had taken an active part in the violence. In this context, we should remember the way in which Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress exploited the Delhi pogrom by running a fear-mongering election campaign that suggested that 1984 was a feature not a bug.
I remember a Congress advertisement that unsubtly suggested that Indians ought to vote for the party of firm governance if their taxi-drivers made them nervous, this, remember, at a time when Sikhs drove taxis in large numbers in Indian cities. I remember the Congress’s election doggerel: “Chunauti nayi, ek sandesh,/ Mazboot hai haath, akhand hai desh.” This, roughly translated, encouraged voters to vote for the ‘Hand’ (the Congress’s election symbol) if they wanted a government capable of preserving India’s unity. The use of the word, akhand, to indicate the unity and integrity of the nation was significant: the Congress, unprecedentedly, was using a word from the sangh parivar’s playbook, stealing the idea of a majoritarian “akhand Bharat”.
Similarly, the reluctance of the Congress to purge itself of members accused of participating in the 1984 pogrom, its willingness to field them as parliamentary candidates and to appoint them to ministerial office, doesn’t add up to a record that can be virtuously contrasted with the BJP’s and Narendra Modi’s brazenness after Godhra.
1984 had two major consequences. First, it radically undermined the Congress’s claim to being a secular party that respected the political tradition of pluralism pioneered by its colonial avatar and consolidated by Nehru in the early years of the republic. The willingness of the Congress under Indira Gandhi to use sectarian issues for political ends had been evident before 1984 but the party’s willingness to sell its pluralist soul for immediate political advantage was most vividly illustrated in the days and months after her death. The Congress, after 1984, stood out more and more clearly as a party that couldn’t even be accused of not having the courage of its convictions because it didn’t have any convictions at all. Pluralism and its traditional opposition to majoritarianism became labels that the Congress used for brand management in particular political contexts, not as principles that shaped its political agenda... read more:
A Hard Rain Falling - private armies & political violence in India.the public sphere .. is undermined by the impunity of India’s numerous controlled mobs. In 1984 the Congress transformed itself into yet another vehicle for communal hooliganism; and thereafter protected the criminals. This allowed the RSS to drag the very idea of moderate constitutionalism through the mud and slime. The habit of self-deceit progressed by leaps and bounds. For example, reports about communal incidents generally tend to name (or hint at) this or that community, but for 1984, a political category came into play: ‘Congress killed Sikhs’. (Were there Bahais and Parsis in the streets?). Here too, mobs shouting communal slogans were desecrating shrines and killing people to assert the superiority of one religion over another. And many residents of Delhi were enjoying the spectacle. But judging from the typical responses to any discussion of Gujarat in 2002, the RSS is delighted at the precedent – it enables them to say ‘What of it? The Congress did the same in 1984’. For the Sangh Parivar, it appears that one massacre deserves another. One little fact tells a big story however – the number of BJP MP’s elected to the 1985 Lok Sabha was precisely two, because Hindutva ideologues and their voters had switched to the Congress. This is why fascism cannot simply be reduced to partisan affiliations, even if some parties propagate fascist ideas whilst others make pragmatic adjustments to it. And the ruthless practice of certain Leftists completes the picture. What we are witnessing is the criminalisation of the polity ..
