Bharat Bhushan - The Vanzara bomb has a long fuse for Modi

The damning letter of the murder accused, deputy inspector-general of police of Gujarat, D.G. Vanzara is a time bomb with a long fuse. Even before it goes off, it is likely to damage the prime ministerial ambitions of Narendra Modi. It will also change the shape of the election campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Mr Vanzara claims that he has been forced to “draw the sword” — suggesting that he is ready to strike. The accused police officer is no saint but he suggests through his confessional resignation letter that he is not the only sinner. Since a copy of the letter is marked to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), he may be forced to strike at his partners in crime sooner than later. He could be called to explain the charges made in the letter that the top echelons of the government were in the loop on encounter deaths. The CBI is already examining the letter for any evidentiary value it might have.

Meanwhile, it could become increasingly difficult for the BJP to carry the burden of Mr Modi’s political ambitions. Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar’s statement that the 2002 riots were a blot on Mr Modi’s career may be an early warning of this. Defending Mr Modi, therefore, is likely to become the major part of the party’s electoral campaign for 2014. The party already has to duck the charge against him of allowing the systematic massacre of 2,000 ordinary Muslims under his watch as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002. He did not deploy the police force to curb the communal riots for three long days at that time.

Now, the BJP will be hard put to explain Mr Modi’s and his government’s role in permitting fake encounters by the state’s police force. The common strand running through all the fake encounters, it must be recalled, is that those targeted were suspected of conspiring to assassinate Mr Modi. To claim that the man whose life was threatened knew nothing about the threats or how they were being addressed is testing credulity. In the run-up to the general election, the BJP, therefore, has to discharge the heavy responsibility of defending its prime ministerial candidate against allegations that anyone who projects himself for that job ought to be ashamed of.


As the negative aspects of Mr Modi’s persona take centrestage electorally, the politically potent platform of rampant corruption of the United Progressive Alliance’s rule and the so-called “Gujarat model” of development would get dissipated. It is this platform — whether it was the Commonwealth Games scam, the 2G telecom scam, the railway board recruitment scandal or the coal block allotment scam — which the BJP leadership had carefully put together through their parliamentary strategy over the last nine years. In effect, Mr Modi could become more of a liability than an advantage for the party.

Falling back on communal polarisation as an electoral strategy may not help. As it is the “84-kos yatra” (a “kos” is about two miles as a unit of distance) of the BJP’s sister organisation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), was reduced to less than 84 steps — with the Uttar Pradesh government preventing the march aimed at communalising the electorate. In any case, the BJP has always suffered whenever it has used the communal divide in the hope of electoral gains. India has moved on since the demolition of the Babri Mosque but the BJP has failed to recognise this.

Mr Vanzara’s letter could possibly also impact governance in Gujarat negatively as the message seeps in that when the going gets bad, Mr Modi can leave you in the lurch. He has already earned this reputation with the Hindutva foot-soldiers who have either been already punished or are in jail while under trial for their role in the 2002 communal riots. Now even his bureaucrats will not trust him — after all, if it is Mr Vanzara and other police officers today, the bell could toll for any of them tomorrow. As a consequence, Mr Modi’s ability to deliver could be eroded as each decision of his is weighed and questioned before implementation by bureaucrats worried about their survival.

Perhaps Mr Modi realises this. Or else, why would his government decide to reject Mr Vanzara’s resignation by not forwarding it to the Central government? If a murder accused sitting in jail wants to resign from government service, why should the state government try to keep him in service? The Indian Police Service is a Central service and the decision on the resignation should be taken by the department of personnel in Delhi as it thinks fit. The state government acting in a peremptory manner to reject the resignation does not make any sense unless the accused officer is believed to be privy to secrets which the government does not want spilt in public.

Mr Modi’s woes, however, are unlikely to be over soon. Mr Vanzara only has to add one more sentence to the revelations in his resignation letter — that Mr Modi was aware of what the police were doing. Mr Modi’s goose would then be cooked. If the court is convinced that even though he has not been named as an accused, but he appears to be associated with one or more fake encounters then he can be summoned in any one of the cases under Section 319 of the Criminal Procedure Code. He is liable to be tried for the same charges as the accused police officers. While this is what Mr Modi must fear the most, it is by no means certain that this would indeed happen. The point, however, is that it could.


If, under these circumstances, the BJP insists on naming Mr Modi formally as its prime ministerial candidate, then it is quite likely that even the 25 spokespersons it has defending him on television day after day might fall short. The party would need not a battery but an army of spokespersons and cheerleaders for the uphill task.

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