The CODE of DRACO

 

 

When you see a city, they say you can absorb the airs and aspirations of the people who built her. You can see the abyss and the ascent, the altruism and the arrogance of the human mind. Ahmedabad, past Capital of Gujarat, is her beguiling self on the first Friday after the 18 February Indo-Pak Samjhauta Express blasts. Ahmedabad is home to arguably India’s most controversial politician, Chief Minister Narendra Modi. She also has a genius for creating wealth. How is she at first sight? Her Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport is spanking clean and getting ready for busier days. The road from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, the current Capital of Gujarat, is wide and bustling. Mosques and temples draw the faithful, who come and leave without inviting much attention (though far more youngsters seem to be going to temples in Gujarat than elsewhere). In downtown Ahmedabad, young girls are hugging beaus on zipping motorcycles. One of Gujarat’s favourite activities, eating, keeps people occupied as late as midnight. It’s all so comforting. So normal.

In an alley off one of Ahmedabad’s avenues, TSI is about to talk to part fugitive, part businessman, fulltime vigilante Babubhai Patel, known more famously as Babu Bajrangi. Bajrangi heads the Bajrang Dal unit in Ahmedabad. At various times, he has boasted of forcing Muslims to defecate and feeding them with their own waste. He has also voiced pride at being accused of killing more than 100 Muslims in the 2002 post-Godhra Gujarat riots. His newest work has been to keep Hindi movie Parzania (on the 2002 riots) off the screen in Gujarat. The Parzania coercion pitched Bajrangi into the media, which apparently his bosses didn’t like. He’s gone temporarily underground. He is talking to TSI because the team is, coincidentally, of Hindus and because TSI comes out in five languages. The call is made from a car. “How far are you from creating a Hindu nation?” “It will happen by 2011. By then, all the Islamic terrorists will either be arrested or dead. The rest of the Muslims will reconvert and become Hindus.” “What do you want Muslims to do?” “Stop eating beef. Stop calling Hindus kafirs. Stop eloping with our Hindu daughters.” “Do you talk to Muslims?” “Yes. I tell them Hindus worship 33 crore gods anyway. We will worship Allah as one more god. But they should put the idols of Ram and Hanuman in their mosques. That way, we pray to their god and they worship ours.”

Bajrangi runs Navchetna, which he says is an NGO that works to ‘cleanse and protect Hindu culture’. He has an army of volunteers whose job is to keep an eye on Muslim colonies and watch the local courts (for marriage notices of Hindu girls with Muslim boys). He says he has just ‘rescued’ three girls from Mumbai and Bengalooru and is bringing them to his Ahmedabad office. His aide explains how they do it. Bajrang Dal cadre is posted almost everywhere in Gujarat, and sparsely in some other States as well. There are two kinds of groups – the first, whose job is to ‘rescue’ Hindu girls from marriages with Muslim boys, and the second, whose job is to seduce Muslims girls into marriage. The Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) offer a year’s free rations to a Muslim girl if she marries a Hindu boy. For the destitute, this is tempting.

In the car, Bajrangi’s aide narrates a ‘rescue’ with relish. “The non-Hindus had kept one of our girls in a mosque in Juhapura (Ahmedabad’s biggest Muslim ghetto of four lakh people). She was married to a Hindu and then eloped with a Muslim boy. We went there as Muslims. We waited for the namaz because during namaz, Muslims are on their knees. As they were praying, we rushed up and took the girl from the first floor. There were 200 Muslims outside the mosque. If they got wind, we were dead. We lied that the girl had to be taken to hospital urgently. We got away. Today, she is happy with us. She will not return to the non-Hindus.”

Everybody is non-something in Gujarat. There are non-Hindus, non-Muslims, non-vegetarians, non-residents, non-smokers, non-believers, non-thinkers and even the non-strong. One of the keywords is ‘border’, as in Indo-Pak border for instance. Anyone will take you to a ‘border’, which is usually a road or a lane. On one side live the Hindus and on the other, the Muslims. Barely anyone crosses into the other’s territory. There are eight police posts at Ahmedabad’s ‘border’, the maximum at one place in the city. TSI stopped at the ‘border’ to buy some drinking water (it is already quite hot in Ahmedabad). A shop on the Muslim side offered water at Re 1. It was a normal plastic satchel tied with thread at the mouth. It was tap water. People pay Re 1 because the shopkeeper keeps the water cold in the refrigerator. The Hindu side stocks mineral water, sold for between Re 1 for a pouch and Rs 12 for a litre in a bottle. Even visually, the two are different. The Muslim side is dirtier with garbage in the open. There are people crowding each tenement. The Hindu side is cleaner with far less people in the open. A desperately poor Muslim mother suddenly accosted the TSI team in Juhapura’s Gupta Nagar in front of a tenement the size of a middle-class bathroom. Her daughter had eloped with a Hindu boy days ago. The mother has activated a posse of Muslim boys who are hunting for the girl. On any given day, Gujarat has a few such hunts going on. It is five years since Godhra and the ensuing carnage, but the scars are everywhere. There are 69 colonies where close to 5,000 families of those uprooted in 2002 still live. They either can’t or won’t return where they came from. Ahmedabad’s Gulbarg Society, where one of the more horrifying massacres took place in 2002, is a terrible memory. Ehsan Jaffrey, who was Congress Member of Parliament during his career, lived there. Women from other homes rushed into Jaffrey’s house believing the mob wouldn’t touch him. They were wrong. Jaffrey made several calls to his political contacts. No one helped. He came out, offering himself if the mob left the women alone. The mob took Jaffrey onto the road. They say he was hacked and then roasted. His body was never found. Gulbarg is like a haunted colony. The houses are as they were left – charred, ghoulish and soulless.

“You have to understand. Before 2002, the non-Hindus used to terrify us. They stocked arsenals in mosques. We lived a life of humiliation. Now, they won’t dare do it. Our government is in power. We taught them a lesson and we’ll do so again if necessary,” says Hemant Jani, a Bajrang Dal member. It’s a common refrain in Gujarat – that Narendra Modi is a hero. He’s been two times Chief Minister (2001, and in the 2002 polls). India Today and Outlook, the two leading weekly magazines of India had high praise for Modi. India Today rated him as the best Chief Minister in the country as recent as February 2007. Outlook’s Editor, Vinod Mehta applauded Modi for ‘the strides Gujarat has made under his stewardship’. The praises are not without reason. Under him, Gujarat has achieved economic development at rates that count as amongst the best in India; and at the same time, he has been an example in the SEZ implementation process, focussing strategically on converting a majority of the non-irrigable saline land into specified zones. Chances are he’ll win again when elections are held later this year.

At the same time, he has stifled opposition within the right-wing while the Congress party is helpless. From all accounts it suits the requirements of fascism (the Oxford Dictionary defines fascism as extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice).

Gujarat is where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah had their roots (Jinnah’s father was Gujarati). Gujarat sends less people to the Army than, say, Punjab or Tamil Nadu. Gujaratis prefer the subtle mercantile way of control rather than murder. And they gave the world Amul. How have they become so aggressive and hostile to anyone who’s not a Hindu? “Gujarat was ripe as a laboratory for Hindutva. The mainstream culture is elite. Gandhi’s ideology was also for the elite. He didn’t object to the caste system. Social reform in Gujarat is driven by traders and businessmen. Dayanand Saraswati began Arya Samaj from Gujarat but it died here and flourished elsewhere. Ghettoisation began from 1986. Now, no one is ready to say a word. Even the Civil Society is saffronised to a great extent. Gujarat makes me angry,” Hiren Gandhi, who runs Darshan, an NGO, told TSI, in his 10th floor office. In spite of all this, Gujarat still has a relatively high percentage of Muslims (around 10% of the population, putting it in the top 10 States). The poor in Gujarat are better off than compatriots in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It is one of India’s most highly industrialised States (the Gujarat government says number 1). It has one of India’s fastest growing economies. It has the world’s biggest ship-breaking yard. And, it has India’s diamond city, Surat.

“There are new strategies of exclusion, which work at the micro level,” Gagan Sethi, Managing Trustee of Jan Vikas, which works for the displaced, told TSI. For instance, traders are harassed at Modasa, which has Gujarat’s largest goat market. A truck full of goats headed, say, for Mumbai, will be stopped, the goats taken away and cows put on the trucks. The police follow and either books the trader for cow slaughter or asks him to pay up and go. It’s a minor and constant practice which contributes to the process of exclusion. “I used to organise Cricket for Peace, a local tournament in which the teams would have five Hindus and six Muslims. To form a team, Hindus and Muslims thus had to talk. In 2003, Geet Sethi (former World Billiards champion) gave away the prizes. In 2004, 30,000 youth took part. In 2005, Sunil Gavaskar and P.T. Usha came. In 2006, I was denied permission on the grounds that it will create communal tension. So, any effort where people start meeting is not normal. You celebrate Gujarati identity, totally excluding the Muslim community. There is active silence. Then, you create a beautiful contradiction by holding large events to show how vibrant Gujarat is,” Sethi says. Curiously, Sethi adds it could be all right if “Modi just said sorry and got on with it.” Which he has not.

So what does Modi want to do with Muslims? The Chief Minister didn’t respond to repeated efforts by TSI for a question and answer session (his office said he was busy with the Assembly Budget session). In the 2002 election, Modi’s main opponent was Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Through repeated references to Musharraf, Modi offered the option of either him or Musharraf. There were only passing references to Congress President Sonia Gandhi as the ‘Italian lady’. Modi broke the Congress’ KHAM vote-bank (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) by hinduising Adivasis with a campaign to promote vegetarianism among the tribals, breaking the liquor mafia, which the Muslims controlled, and offering it to Dalits, and winning over a sizeable section of Kshatriyas with the help of former Chief Minister Shanker Sinh Vaghela (now a Congress Minister at the Centre). The Congress hasn’t been able to counter this. “We couldn’t read the RSS. Every time there was a riot before 2002, we hurled stones at them and forgot about it the next day. We never looked at why the riots were happening. A resolution passed in Nagpur (where the RSS has its headquarters) will find its way to a village in Gujarat the next day. Such is their grip. We haven’t changed even after 2002. Muslims live like animals. You can see their children doing petty jobs on the streets.

There is no positive Muslim leadership in the community. We can’t be arguing about non-issues like dress codes. Our leaders must separate theology and education. They should hold parents to account for not educating children. If we don’t, 2002 will be repeated,” Mukhtar Bhai, businessman-turned-social activist, told TSI. When the riots broke in 2002, Mukhtar drove from Godhra to Ahmedabad through raging fires (as the mobs had set fire to the tar on roads to prevent Muslims from fleeing). Since then, he hasn’t returned to business. He says Modi is powerful because the Muslim vote is scattered, the VHP has units in almost all villages, the BJP has taken a grip on the business community and the

Swaminarayan temple and its followers have great reach. “Modi has guts. He is committed. He should be back,” says Mukhtar. Muslims are lying so low that the VHP believes they have broken their back. In many ways, the Hindu Right has the kind of hold in Gujarat that the Muslim Right has in Jammu & Kashmir. None of this makes danseuse Mallika Sarabhai happy. She runs Darpana, a dance and arts academy, and is Modi’s foe. “The most deadly aspect is that this has become a non-issue. It makes me feel defeated with the attitude that we can’t debate or discuss it. There’s been no secular political debate in Gujarat in the last 20 years. A normal Gujarati student would have no clue about Che Guevara,” Sarabhai told TSI in her academy on the banks of river Sabarmati. So why is Modi popular? “Because he’s a fantastic orator. He’s an efficient manager. There is a vacuum in the leadership. And nobody has yet found any personal corruption on him,” says Sarabhai. Miles away from Ahmedabad, there’s disquiet in Vadodara’s MS University as well. In one block of the University’s residential quarters lives Prof J.S. Bandukwala, a Muslim who teaches Physics, is the Gujarat PUCL President and whose house was torched in 2002 because his daughter had married a Hindu boy. Bandukwala had friends in the RSS (he says he was seen as another Shahnawaz Hussain, a Muslim Minister in the Vajpayee government). At 8pm on 26 February 2002, he was at an RSS function to speak on Veer Savarkar. Godhra happened the next morning and when the riots hit Vadodara on 28 February 2002, Bandukwala’s house was the first to be attacked. “This confused me. I was invited to speak on Savarkar and I was attacked. I knew something was wrong. Not a single neighbour helped. I am dead certain that if something like that were to happen today, I would be the first target. Modi is upset with me and if he gets a chance, he won’t spare me,” Bandukwala told TSI in his house. For three years, no one wanted to live next door to Bandukwala. “They were practising virtual untouchability,” he says. Iftikhar Ahmed Khan is a Reader in the same university. “It is no longer necessary to foment tension between the communities. That part of the project is over (for the RSS),” he says.

From his office in Ahmedabad, Father Cedric Prakash, a Jesuit priest who runs Prashant, an NGO, is just as grim. Prakash got the French Legion D’Honneur award before Amitabh Bachchan did and the Gujarat of 2007 is making him ponder. “The reality is grimmer and gorier than in 2002. This is a Hindu kingdom. Even Azim Premji (India’s richest Muslim and head of Wipro) can’t buy a flat here. Whatever we (the NGOs) do is cosmetic. We lack a charismatic leader to take on Modi. This leader has to have the right name. It can’t be a woman. It can’t be a Gujarati who lives outside. It can’t be anyone not brought up in Gujarat. It has to be a high caste demagogue,” he says.

On 27 December 2006, the Saibaba Flat Owners Association in downtown Ahmedabad sent a fiat to its members asking them not so sell their flats to a non-Hindu, particularly Muslims and Sindhis. The Association comes under the constituency represented by former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, a Sindhi. That even Advani’s community should be excommunicated in Modi’s Gujarat is bizarre. Hundreds of miles away, in Godhra, the government is busy hiding the train compartment that was set afire and in which 59 kar sevaks were burnt alive on 27 February 2002. They’ve deployed armed guards to keep people away. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic (Godhra and Vadodara also have ‘borders’ like Ahmedabad). Logically, the Congress party should be opposing this like the way Gandhi opposed the British. But, they are nowhere to be seen. When asked, Congress Leader of the Opposition in the Gujarat Assembly, Arjun Modhwadia was embarrassed. “All right, let me tell you the truth. No one is ready to put up a single hoarding of the Congress party. They fall at our feet begging us not to give hoardings because they want to live and do business. Such is Modi’s terror,” he told TSI in his sprawling Gandhinagar bungalow. In today’s Gujarat, the morgues are in the minds. It might be a while before they’re cleansed.