Part I

Undoubtedly, the grim defining quality of Indian ‘secularism’ in the last decade is the self-righteous loud chest-thumping by India’s left-leaning human rights activists in the name of safeguarding Muslim rights in Gujarat. Perhaps no exercise since Independence has been more laughably self-defeating than this. And all this, despite the incessant chanting of its two high priests - Digvijay Singh and Kapil Sibal.

Ever since being thrown out of Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh deems himself as the modern-day incarnation of Don Quixote who mustn’t go to bed without charging at some imaginary BJP communal windmill. Kapil Sibal mustn’t call it a day without proving to his patron saint and his Chandani Chowk constituents how unalloyed are his secular credentials.

Let me start with a stark fact. The much-lamented 2002 Gujarat communal riots claimed 1044 lives. However, in the years thereafter, grotesquely disproportionate amount of media attention whipped up by self-styled NGO propaganda has endeavored to convince us that the post-Godhra riots were the ‘worst ever communal riots’ in India. This is a blatant lie which is, in W. H. Auden’s famous phrase, “infected with an incurable dishonesty.”

It was, you’ll recall, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s notorious Propaganda Minister in Nazi Germany who famously —or notoriously? - said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” He didn’t tell — how could he? — that a lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. In our case, it can – and will — be repeated till the blinding spell of National Advisory Council and its High Priestess lasts. This mercifully is likely to end after the 2014 election. And should that hope not materialize, our polity is doomed.

Meanwhile, it is absolutely imperative to nail this lie to maintain some standards of probity in public debate over issues that profoundly affect us. May I narrate in this essay some facts and figures in their chronological sequence which I challenge Modi-baiters to disprove, and they’re aplenty.

Gruesome Chapter

What they don’t tell their listeners about is the Nellie massacre of 1983 which claimed the lives of more than twice the number of people who died during the Godhra train killing and its inevitable sequel, the 2002 Gujarat riots. The Nellie massacre happened under a Congress Prime Minister when the State was under President’s rule and the findings of the probe that was ordered into the massacre were never made public.

Here’s a table that sums up the most gruesome chapter of our recent history.

Communal Carnages and their Victims since Gandhi Centenary Year

Before you draw a few distressing conclusions from the above Table, allow me to mention that the figures cited from the official Government reports are, as always happens in such cases, mere approximations erring on the side of under-estimation, and that too done purposely to play down the gravity of the grim happening. Invariably, the number mentioned as missing is an official euphemism for the dead. (The most recent instance of this, for instance, is Uttarakhand where the very substantial number of missing in the floods —you’ve guessed it — is just to bring down the number of dead for official records.)

Most poignantly, statistics of the dead can’t convey in any way the dimensions of human tragedy camouflaged in numbers. Bureaucrats compiling the data don’t suffer the deep pain of children for ever separated from their parents. Statistics cannot measure human suffering nor tabulate the cries and sobs of the survivors. The anguish suffered by Muslims is no different from the anguish of the Hindus or Sikhs killed in riots. Suffering unites human beings in an indefinable bond.

M A Jinnah’s Direct Action had set the ball rolling. Aided and abetted by the connivance of the Government of the day, it led to the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946. Within 72 hours, more than 4,000 people lost their lives and 100,000 residents of the city of Calcutta were left homeless. That triggered the partition of the subcontinent in which over a crore perished and another estimated one and a half crore were displaced from their hearths and homes. And all that incited by religious fanaticism which left behind a still-unhealed, festering wound of distrust among those who for centuries had lived amicably as caring neighbors.

Communal riots occurred every now and then even after 1947. When we celebrated Gandhi Centenary in 1969, we thought we’ll give this cult of fanaticism a permanent burial. But no! The State in which the apostle of non-violence was born witnessed serious rioting in which over two-third of those killed were Muslims. And this happened when the Indian National Congress, and not the Hindu nationalist BJP, ruled in Gujarat.

The maximum number of Muslims killed in a single day rioting was not in 2002 which is talked of day in day out, but in Nellie, Assam in 1983 where 2191 Muslims were butchered in a single day. And it was when the State was under the President’s rule and that great symbol of secularism, Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister. Have Muslims suffered a memory blank and forgotten that?

Which Was Gruesome?

The following is a point-by-point comparison I discovered on the net (whose authorship I don’t know but can vouch the facts) of the two tragedies to put them in perspective:

Very Worst Communal Riot

That’s not all. The very worst communal rioting in post-1947 India occurred in Delhi, the Capital of India in November 1984. Over 4000 innocent Sikh men, women and children were done to death. And in cold blood. Their fault: “when a big tree falls the earth shakes”. The man who mouthed this scandalous inanity was Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister and the tree was Indira Gandhi.

“President Zail Singh wanted the army to act, but it didn’t. The then prime minister and home minister did not take his calls,” recalls Tarlochan Singh, who was Zail Singh’s press secretary. The Party-sponsored massacre was led by the Congress goons like H K L Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar.

Are the Congress Party spokesmen — our friends Digvijay Singh and Kapil Sibal – ready to face facts? Let’s remind them of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s priceless advice in The Brothers Karamazov:

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

If the Congress Party spokesmen continue repeating ad nauseam the 2002 Gujarat riots, its opponents will have no choice but to dig up the mass graves of the Muslims killed in 1969 Gujarat and 1983 Nellie riots. The sight will be most unedifying. Shall we also remind the Sikhs all over again what horrendous price they paid for Mrs. Gandhi’s assassin professing their religion? Ripping open all half-healed wounds will harm the polity immeasurably. Probably the worst sufferers will the perpetrators of this stupidity.

Continued to “Damn the Facts: Just Beat the Drum”