Onset of Electioneering in Gujarat 2007 Mustafa Khan

Chief Minister Narendra Modi occupies a crucial position in BJP and is in the vanguard of the extremist group hostile to Muslims and other minorities. He would do anything to uphold the ideology of RSS whereby the minorities would be subjugated to a secondary and subordinate position. The genocide of Muslim in Gujarat 2002 was state sponsored. It is also irrefutable fact that the Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister LK Advani protected him knowing fully well that he was violating the rule of law. The President, Mr KR Narayanan, also knew it but Narayanan was conscientious unlike his PM and DPM. He wrote letters to them asking them to stop the pogroms while they connived at the massacres with their sophistry.
As Gujarat is heading to election at the end of the year 2007 it would again witness the flagrant violation of IPC 153. It has already begun. Distorting facts and rewriting history is the hall mark of the hideous ideology. Thus on Sunday June 10, 2007 Modi told a gathering in Ahemdabad that “The Congressmen in Gujarat support those who have been hailing Sohrabuddin’s death.” This is an insidious reference to Muslims who he alleges hail the death of Sohrabuddin. What a sinister way of accusing the victims. Sohrabuddin was murdered by Modi’s handpicked police officers DG Vanzara and Narendra Amin in a fake encounter for what appears to be a paid job by BJP trader in marbles to stop extortion. Modi is using the victim of police atrocity to blame the whole community of the victim ala the game of blaming the whole Muslim community: they plant bombs in mosques, they are killed, and they are caught. The maligning of the Muslims pays off rich dividends in the polls. Once the people are polarized communally the right wing candidates are assured of votes. This is a counter strategy evolved to fight the alleged en mass voting of Muslims and other minorities. Gujarat is notorious for being the laboratory of religious extremists.

Subtly fallacious reasoning is the art of politics of the rightwing. For the discerning it is a telltale and to the masses it is a matter of jubilation. What he said recently was lustily cheered by the jubilant crowd. But there is a catch. Modi said that “Jo log Sohrabuddin ke janaze ko le kar nach rahe hai who jan le ke uska janaza Gandhinager tak nahi le jayega(those who are dancing on the funderal of Sohrabuddinshould know that it would lead them to Gandhinager.) Of course, he should know better such saturnine details for he had personally ordered the dead bodies of those killed at Godhra to be brought to Ahmedabad. Even the macabre humour of the metaphorical funeral of Sohrabuddin is dreadful. Note how he gloats over encounter, surreptitiously replacing fake with ballot encounter thereby justifying the former as well: “The 5.5 crore people of Gujarat will not tolerate this and the Congress will be replied by being silenced in an encounter by people using the ballot papers (in the coming election)” Murder will be out. Sohrabuddin was silenced so will the Congress, one in fake the other in ballot encounter. This brazen justification of his goes into yet another record of items in the “world’s inventory of black deeds.” This needs to be not only recorded but used in prosecuting him for the hate crimes he had let loose on the hapless people of the minority communities. Be it now or later a national tribunal must try his cases lest anyone explore the possibility of the optional protocol of UN General Assembly or even the International Criminal Court.

He has spewed venom against the minorities wherever he goes. The US denied him a diplomatic visa. But more significant was the objection of the police chief of Hyderabad who took exception to his visit to the city amidst the celebration of Ganesh festival in the aftermath of the August 25, 2003 twin bomb blasts in Mumbai. Police Commissioner MV Krishna Rao did not mince words and called a spade a spade. He said that Modi was perceived by people as a fascist and hence should not be allowed to visit the city. History has the record of how Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in Yugoslavia had spewed venom against the Muslims that started the civil war and genocide there. In the election prior to his becoming Chief Minister, Modi had poisoned the minds of the people against Ehsan Jaffri. The grisly death of the MP also belongs to “world’s inventory of black deeds.”