by Barkha Dutt
Next to me, my cameraman, Ajmal Jami, sat absolutely still, a quiet matter-of-factness masking all his other emotions. We had just lied about his religious identity to the thugs who had stopped us. I wanted to apologize to him, but right now safety was our only imperative.
We were waved past the first barrier, suspicious eyes still following our car. Not everyone made it through. On one side of the fortification were scores of trucks that hadn’t been able to move ahead for the last two days. Most of the drivers were Muslim, and many of them had tried to disguise any obvious giveaways of their faith. One of them was sporting a long tilak on his forehead.
As we drove onwards we saw the first police van we had seen in eight hours. The angry crowd surrounded it and for a moment it seemed as if they would pounce on the van and demolish it with the weapons they carried. We accosted the police officer as he negotiated with the men to allow his vehicle right of way. ‘Aren’t you going to help all the people trapped on the highway because of the violent crowds?’ I asked him. ‘See, it is very problematic, but it’s their problem. What can I do?’ he mumbled, eager to get away from my camera. ‘Are you saying the police are helpless to do anything about this situation?’ I persisted. ‘See, I am helpless because I have been sent for other duties. This is not my lookout.’
On the highway, as we approached the last town short of Godhra, blazes began to mark the journey with the consistency of milestones. Swarming crowds brought our car to a halt every few hundred metres, the sticks and stones now replaced by swords and petrol bombs. News was coming in of thirteen residents having been burnt alive. Just ahead, the field was strewn with bodies, torched beyond recognition. We stared quietly at the bottles filled with inflammable liquid in the hands of the mob milling around us, their rag wicks just waiting to be lit, wondering if it were possible to move any further. The responses of the men were brazen when I asked who had given them the petrol bombs. ‘We have made them for our safety,’ said one, trying to stare me down. Sensing trouble, local reporters bundled us into their car and we made a run for it. At the wheel was a Hindu right-wing sympathizer who at first thought his connections on the street would get us through the chaos. But after a couple of kilometres he said it was advisable to turn back—he could provide no guarantee for our safety.
It was my first experience—as a journalist and as an adult—of religious conflict. Since this was also India’s first ‘television riot’, and given the sensitivities involved, the rules were not immediately clear. For instance, according to an archaic press council advisory, naming religious groups during a conflagration of the kind we were witness to was to be avoided. But to omit mentioning the community under siege—whether in this instance or the many riots that had come before—would have been sanitizing the truth.
To broadcast details as the camera caught them had its own perils. Footage was often up-linked live back to headquarters in Delhi; when it aired there were consequences we could not always anticipate. At a burning factory on the highway, a page of the Quran lay crushed under overturned furniture; as the wood caught fire, the flames spread across the white and black calligraphy on the page turning it to ash. The visual was no longer than a few seconds in a long loop of destruction caught on tape. Yet, it had only to be telecast once for the potentially disastrous impact it could have on an already tense environment to strike us. As violence spread from district to district, we felt as duty bound to prevent the situation from worsening as we were to chronicle it. It was pressure of the kind I hadn’t experienced before. Every sentence, every interview, every camera angle had a possible fallout.
Rumour was the ‘weapon of mass destruction’. An unverified article in a local newspaper claimed that some Hindu women had been kidnapped from the Sabarmati Express at Godhra. A day later the same paper reported that the bodies of two of these women had been recovered with their breasts cut off. The police categorically denied the incident—both the abduction and the savagery—but by now, the falseness of the report notwithstanding, the dishonoring of Hindu women had become an immovable truth in the public imagination. The specifics of the rumour varied, but as it spread from village to village, the story became the stuff of folklore and an emotional rallying point for macabre retaliation. Eyewitnesses in Ahmedabad’s Naroda Patiya neighbourhood, among the worst hit during the riots, later testified that when the mobs came they were brandishing not just bricks and swords but also copies of the newspaper with the incendiary banner headline. Two days later, the same paper published a retraction. But it was much too late. The state was engulfed in an inferno of violence.
In March 2010, the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was interrogated for over nine hours in two separate sessions by the Supreme Court monitored Special Investigative Team (SIT). He was being questioned after a complaint filed by Zakia Jafri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who had been killed in the riots. She alleged that the chief minister was also answerable for the violence. Zakia said her husband made repeated phone calls for help, including one to the chief minister’s office—Modi denied receiving any such call. In his final moments, Ehsan told his friends and family, ‘No help will come.’ As Zakia looked on in speechless horror, her husband was dragged out of the house, stripped and paraded naked. Witnesses would later say his limbs were chopped off before he was burnt alive. His body was never recovered.
Sixty-nine people were killed in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarg Society, where the Jafris lived. In the same housing society, a young Parsi boy of thirteen, Azhar Mody, got separated from his parents, Rupa and Dara. Rupa’s last memory of her son is him holding on to her hand before she passed out from the smoke of many fires. For years she hoped he might still be alive. ‘My son loved trains, maybe he hopped on to one’, she would tell journalists. Azhar’s story would inspire the Bollywood film Parzania—the film was banned in Gujarat.
Eventually, the final report filed by the SIT, which was headed by former CBI director R. K. Raghavan, exonerated Modi. In fact, it suggested that Jafri may have provoked the rioters. ‘It may be clarified here that in case late Ehsan Jafri fired at the mob, this could be an immediate provocation to the mob, which had assembled there to take revenge of Godhra incidents from Muslims,’ the report said. It also asserted that Modi never invoked the Newtonian principle of ‘action and reaction’ to justify the Godhra violence and the pogrom that it sparked off. Instead, the report concluded that the chief minister’s comments were in specific reference to Jafri. ‘In his interview the CM has clearly referred to Jafri’s firing as “action” and the massacre as “reaction”,’ it said.
There was no legal case against Modi in any of the riot cases and now the clean chit given to him by Raghavan’s SIT was the ultimate vindication of his innocence for his supporters. Many BJP leaders would repeatedly point out that Modi had been chief minister for only four to five months before the violence erupted; the real power, they argued, was wielded at that time by Praveen Togadia, the rabble rousing extremist of the VHP. Subsequently, as Modi consolidated his political hold over Gujarat, Togadia—who had been one of his biggest challengers—would become marginalized.
In 2012, a court convicted Maya Kodnani, a BJP legislator, who served as Gujarat’s Minister for Women and Child Development between 2007-2009, to twenty-eight years in prison for her role in inciting riots in the neighbourhood of Naroda Patiya—a massacre in which ninety-five Muslims were killed. It also found thirty-one other people guilty, including Babu Bajrangi, a leader of the Bajrang Dal.
Just like Rajiv Gandhi had with Tytler and Bhagat in the elections that followed 1984, Modi allowed Kodnani to contest the elections of 2002 from the same constituency in which she was later found responsible for mass murder.
By the time Modi was ready to run for PM, the riots had ceased to be an electoral issue. In fact, the Opposition too rarely brought it up. If a journalist asked Modi why he had not considered apologizing for the killings that took place under his administration, the chief minister’s eyes would
harden into a cold, withering gaze. ‘Hang me if I am guilty, what purpose does an apology serve,’ he told journalist Shahid Siddiqui in 2012, ‘but if I am not the culprit the media and others should apologize.’
IV
The national media, in particular the English language press, became an object of enduring hatred in Gujarat during, and well after, the riots. In the minds of the average Gujarati, it was we, the journalists, who were seen as ‘anti-Hindu’ and ‘anti-Gujarati’.
Much before Narendra Modi was embraced at the national level by the urban middle class and the who’s who of the business community as a tough, no-nonsense, super-efficient, pro-growth administrator, at the state level he was shrewd enough to tap into the widespread ire at Gujarat’s reputation being sullied by biased ‘outsiders’. He emerged as the assertive guardian of Gujarati ‘asmita’ (pride), routinely invoking the injured self-respect of ‘five crore Gujaratis’ in a narrative that conflated the media’s criticism of arsonists and killers with the entire state and its people being viewed in a negative way.
That Modi was a masterful politician first became evident in the state election campaign that took place just a few months after the 2002 riots. Playing into the primordial impulses of pride and resentment, he blurred the battlelines by smartly constructing an artificial enemy—the army of hypocritical ‘secularists’—who were being held back at the gates of Gujarat by one man—himself.
For Modi, the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ (Emperor of Hindu Hearts)—a prefix first used for the Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray—secularism was in fact the chink in the opponent’s armour. On the battlefield, the tactician in him took aim at this weak spot, jeering, mocking and assaulting it when needed. Not since the veteran BJP politican L. K. Advani had coined the phrase ‘pseudo-secularism’ in the eighties and nineties to challenge the conventional construct of secularism would one man so successfully overturn the entire debate around it.
If Advani fused caste restiveness with revivalist politics to make the Ayodhya temple movement a symbol of resurgent Hindu pride, exactly ten years later, in post-liberalization India, Narendra Modi welded economic aspirations and technology to narrowly-defined cultural-rootedness and muscular self-confidence to unleash a new assault on traditional secularism—which in the realm of politics was largely associated with the Congress party.
Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s suggestion that Modi at least offer to resign—which he made at the BJP conclave in Goa held barely a month after the 2002 riots—made no difference to the latter’s political ascent. He went from victory to victory, taunting opponents and critics who attacked him with cutting asides about the secularism stick they had used to beat him with.
My sense of Modi then was that he loved going to battle. In a deft ‘othering’ of all those who had been disparaging of him, the Gujarat chief minister did not just sneer at the criticism that came his way, he actually appeared to relish the polarizing impact he had on public opinion.
This was well before he would rebrand himself for the prime ministerial campaign. In 2002, and for several years after that, Modi intuitively understood that what made him unpalatable to his opponents consolidated the following of his supporters. For Modi, it was both pleasurable and useful to have an ‘enemy’.
In July 2002, just four months after the riots, his penchant for getting into combative confrontation combined with a sharp electoral instinct made him dissolve the assembly and call for early polls a good eight months ahead of schedule. In that charged political environment he knew that the majority of Gujaratis felt they had been defamed by hostile outsiders. They certainly didn’t see him as the villain, they saw him as their saviour.
The Election Commission, headed by the soft-spoken but steely James Lyngdoh, declined to give its go-ahead. Lyngdoh was worried about both law and order in a fragile post-riot environment and also the need to rehabilitate riot victims who had been displaced from their homes and were living in relief camps. The Election Commission was to oversee an especially delicate election in Jammu and Kashmir later that year and was already overstretched with anxiety.
Narendra Modi asked his friend, the lawyer turned politician Arun Jaitley, to build his case before the Election Commission. Surprisingly, because Jaitley could usually charm his most fervent antagonists into seeing his point of view, the meeting went terribly. He first argued on a point of law and then quoted super-cop K. P. S. Gill, adviser to the Modi government, as a supporter of the cause of early elections. Lyngdoh snapped that Gill was not relevant to the discussion. The exchange took a controversial twist when Lyngdoh declared that his decision was complicated by the fact that Modi’s was a ‘discredited government’. An apoplectic Jaitley got up in anger and stormed out of the meeting, but not before telling Lyngdoh that his language was biased and blatantly political.
Modi could not have been especially worried. In Lyngdoh’s resistance, he had found yet another illustration of the secular conspiracy—it was ammunition for his campaign. The elections were to finally take place in December, but itching for an I-told-you-so moment, Modi took out a Gaurav Yatra (Procession of Pride) across the state which rolled out from the Bhathiji Maharaj Temple in the state’s Kheda district.
In 2013, when he was readying for his national debut as a candidate for the post of prime minister, Modi, in an unobjectionable and welcome statement, said that his definition of secularism was ‘India first’. He would reinforce these sentiments later in Parliament by saying that the only holy book for his government was the Constitution, the only prayer, welfare for all.
But in 2002, in those four weeks of his Gaurav Yatra, Modi’s idiom of political assertion was rather different. In his speeches, Lyngdoh was now referred to as ‘James Michael’, a loaded reference to the chief election commissioner’s Christian faith. At Bodeli, near Vadodra, he fell back on the inflammatory messaging that got the crowds all excited: ‘Some journalists asked me whether Lyngdoh has come from Italy. I said I don’t have his janam patri, we will have to ask Rajiv Gandhi. Then they asked, “Do they [Lyngdoh and Sonia Gandhi] meet in church?” I said maybe they do.’ As the standoff between the two threatened to spiral out of control, it was Prime Minister Vajpayee who had to finally jump in with a terse statement asking that both ‘high constitutional authorities’—the chief election commissioner and the Gujarat chief minister—must be given equal respect.
At another public rally, he mocked Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins but also poured scorn on Hindus embarrassed to embrace the symbols of their own faith. He jeered, ‘I ask my Congress brothers if it is wrong to say “Jai Shri Ram” in this country. If you don’t say it here, will we have to go to Italy to say it?’
Though Modi was basically attempting to position himself as a culturally proud Hindu who was a staunch nationalist instead of a religious chauvinist, his speeches in those four weeks—especially coming against the backdrop of the riots—would subtly arrange Pakistan, Muslims, ‘psuedo-secularists’, the Congress, and the media, all in one sentence. Across the border, Pervez Musharraf’s criticism of the Gujarat killings only strengthened Modi’s argument that the negative commentary on the riots by the media and a host of others was a perfidious assault on the self-worth of his people. Presenting the elections as a choice between supporting Pakistan and being nationalist he repeatedly referred to the Pakistani President as ‘Mian Musharraf’, warning him that five crore Gujaratis would not hesitate to chop off the hand that pointed a dirty, defamatory finger at them. The choice, for the voter, was effectively offered as one between Modi and Musharraf and nationalism and treachery. Once these battle lines were drawn, secularists were the adversaries whose language echoed that of India’s opponents. ‘The songs which Sonia Gandhi and some English TV channels were singing about Gujarat have obviously been heard across the border,’ Modi would roar at election meeting after election meeting. The crowds would cheer him on, and chant in unison, ‘Dekho dekho kaun aaya, Gujarat ka sher aaya (Look who is here, it’s the lion of Gujarat).�
�� In the Gujarat of 2002, secularism was not just disparaged as the preoccupation of the urban elite, it was also being portrayed as anti-national. And journalists, especially the ones who came from Delhi, were the main culprits.
A few months later, when the election results pronounced an emphatic victory for Modi, a group of men belonging to the VHP turned on the journalists standing on the road outside the party headquarters. My colleague Deepak Chaurasia, then with the TV channel Aaj Tak, and I were pushed around and slapped. BJP workers finally pulled us free of the mob, rushed us inside to the safety of party headquarters and helped us climb down a drainpipe running along the exterior of the building and into the refuge of a back alley—such was the intensity of hatred among the extremists for journalists who had reported on the riots.
The more he was criticized, especially outside Gujarat, the more Modi’s popularity grew. At his rallies, thousands of his supporters enthusiastically wore plastic masks crafted in his image. The patriarchs of the party, Advani and Vajpayee, were swiftly overshadowed. For his followers there was now only one leader. From Hindutva, the Gujarat chief minister’s politics evolved into Moditva, with the man becoming indistinguishable from the message.
Ironically, as the years went by and Narendra Modi won three successive elections in his home state, it was often the hardliners within the wider Sangh Parivar whom he antagonized. And then, as his ambitions for national power crystallized, he began to craft a new, fiercely individualistic brand of politics that welded administrative efficiency with a testosterone-rich toughness of style. Appearing to shed the dead skin of Hindutva politics, he began to focus almost exclusively on growth rates, infrastructure and industrialization. On national security, though, Modi remained as absolutist as before. For his supporters, here was a decisive leader who was also a modern, neo-right challenger to the historical dominance of left-liberalism in the political discourse. To his critics he remained intolerant of dissent and a purveyor of fundamentalist politics.