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In February 2002 the western Indian
state of Gujarat, governed by the Hindu nationalist chief minister
Narendra Modi, witnessed one of the country's biggest pogroms.
Responding to reports that Muslims had set fire to a train
carriage, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims inside, mobs rampaged across
the state. The riots flared up again on March 15 — 10 years ago —
and killing, raping and looting continued until mid-June. More
than 1,000 Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands rendered
homeless in carefully planned and coordinated attacks of
unprecedented savagery.
The killers may have been in touch with police and politicians.
According to the 2011 Amicus report, two cabinet ministers even
sat in police control rooms. A senior police officer and minister,
murdered in 2003, claimed that Modi explicitly instructed civil
servants and police not to stand in the killers' way. Of course,
Modi has always denied involvement and condemned the riots.
The pogrom was extensively televised by India's innumerable — and
then much less complacent — TV channels. Many middle-class Indians
were shocked to hear how even the very young had not been spared —
the slayers of Muslims were seen smashing the heads of children
against rocks. There was some unease even within Modi's parent
outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose most revered chief,
Guru Golwalkar, wrote in a 1939 book that Nazi Germany had
manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging itself of the
"Semitic races".
Since then Indian activists have doggedly pursued Modi through the
courts and in the media. In a sting conducted in 2007 by the
weekly magazine Tehelka, politicians, businessmen, officials and
policemen were caught on tape, delightedly recalling how they
murdered and raped Muslims with the full imprimatur of their
superiors. No matter: Modi walks out of hostile interviews and
ignores rulings from the courts: in February his government was
issued a contempt notice for failing to compensate 56 people whose
shops were destroyed in the riots. The impunity derives from the
fact that Modi, though still denied a visa to the US, remains the
unchallenged leader of a big-business-friendly state which his
American PR firm, Apco has rebranded as "Vibrant Gujarat".
Buoyed by landslide victories in state elections, Modi now
projects himself as the face of a democratic, economically
vigorous and pro-west New India. He has been able to persuade many
of his Gujarati compatriots of a liberal-leftist conspiracy
against their plucky, entrepreneurial selves. And there are many
in the Indian media ready to complement Apco's exertions by making
the 2002 pogrom seem part of a happily superseded history.
One recent commentator even tried to dismiss it as an anachronism
from India's apparently dark pre-1991 "socialist" past, claiming
that it "represented an autarkic economy riot in the era of
globalisation". Apparently, the beneficiaries of Brave New India,
educated by an alert media and motivated by economic gain, have a
"declining tolerance for violence" — and even someone as fanatical
as Modi realises that news of wholesale murder of Muslims is bad
for business.
Extreme inequalities
But a recent profile in Caravan magazine describes how Modi
demanded an abject apology from the Confederation of Indian
Industry (CII), India's most prestigious business association,
which had criticised the Gujarat chief minister over the killings
in his state. Faced with a revolt from businessmen from wealthy
Gujarat, the CII buckled; it was soon helping to arrange Modi's
first meeting with foreign investors.
In any case, the non-recurrence of 2002-style killings in India
provides little reason to credit its elites with heightened
tolerance and compassion. Left behind by economic growth, Muslims
are more demoralised and depressed than ever; and the country's
extreme inequalities, often enforced with violence, express
themselves in new forms, ranging from suicides by tens of
thousands of farmers, to militant insurgencies. Old-style rioting
has been replaced by state terrorism, often cheer-led by the
elites. Under Modi's rule, Gujarat has seen a steep rise in
extrajudicial killings.
Economic globalisation, far from spurring moral and spiritual
growth among its beneficiaries, has helped to create new
constituencies — among haves as well as have-nots — for xenophobia
and Modi-style authoritarian populism. Riot Politics, an excellent
new book by Dutch scholar Ward Berenschot, shows how it was the
state's integration into the global economy, and resulting extreme
inequalities, that made poor areas of the state so exposed to
anti-Muslim violence.
Like Modi, the strongmen who supervise these bloody purges of
economically depressed and unproductive people are often elected
by landslide majorities, and tend to be audacious free-marketeers
rather than hopeless socialists. The start of the crony-capitalist
regimes of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and Vladimir Putin in
Chechnya coincided with vicious assaults on ethnic minorities. Ten
years later, the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom too seems to have been a
necessary blood rite — anointing not just Vibrant Gujarat but also
the New India.
Guardian News & Media Ltd
Pankaj Mishra's new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt
Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, is published this year.
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