Can we resist fascism with indignation alone?
Monday, Oct 29, 2007
SUPPOSE Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, is called a fascist, which he is, and it translates into more votes for him in the coming state elections. How does one respond to this possibility, which, as many have concluded, is in fact the bitter truth? This is the backdrop we have to keep in mind about Tehelka’s otherwise skillful and daring expose with concealed cameras of the manic Hindutva hordes that raped and killed at will in Gujarat in 2002, and their cheerleader, the chief minister himself.
Suppose all the gory revelations captured on the camera by the grittyjournalist Ashish Khetan are turned into a vaudeville, which can happen to any burning issue in India today with generous help from the corporate media. What happens next? Remember the lines of the woman inmate in a Chicago prison in the movie of that name? The woman, June, was one of several female prisoners serving sentences for killing their boyfriends, husbands, lovers and so on. June’s lines in a song drenched in black humour went thus: “ I’m standin’ in the kitchen, carving up a chicken for dinner, minding my own business, when in storms my husband, Wilbur, in a jealous rage. ‘You’ve been screwing the milkman,’ he said. He was crazy, and he kept on screaming, ‘You’ve been screwing the milkman.’ And then he ran into my knife... he ran into my knife ten times.”
June’s lines were relived the other day by a key character caught in the Tehelka expose. Gujarat government counsel Arvind Pandya resigned from his post and has filed an FIR against the reporter who conducted the sting. But he needs to be heard to be believed. “They came to me and said they were making a serial. And to give a touch of reality, they wanted me to play a role. I would initially be portraying a negative role and later a positive one. I was given a script with all dialogues and I just had to read them. They also made me practise my lines,’’ he complained.
What did Pandya’s ‘rehearsed’ lines say in the role he says was assigned to him by Tehelka? Remember he is the man representing the state government in the commission of inquiry headed by Justices Nanavati and Shah. In fact Pandya is Gujarat’s Advocate General.
Tehelka: Who was at the forefront during the riots?
Pandya: It will be wrong to say some were there and some were not…
Practically everybody who went to the field was from the Bajrang Daland the VHP…
Tehelka: Did Jaideepbhai (VHP vice-president Jaidee Patel) go to the field?
Pandya: Jaideepbhai had also gone… Which leaders went where, who had a role, who had a suspected role — we have before the Commission all these details, all the mobile numbers, who went where… We have the locations…
Tehelka: Yes, some controversy also took place…
Pandya: It’s still on… And I know whose mobile numbers were there… who talked to whom, from which location… I have the papers…
Tehelka: So can there be some problem for the Hindus because of that… for Jaideepbhai etc…
Pandya: Arrey bhai, (Hey fellow) I am the one who has to fight the case… don’t worry… don’t worry about this, there will be no problem here. If there will be a problem I’ll solve it… I have spent all these years for whom… for my own blood.
Tehelka: Can the commission’s report go against the Hindus?
Pandya: Nahi, nahi (no no)… it can create some problems for the police… it can go against them… see, the judges who have been selected are from the Congress…
Tehelka: Yes, Nanavati… and Shah
Pandya: That’s the only problem… our leaders at the time got into a controversy in a hurry… what they thought was that since Nanavati was involved in the Sikh riots... that if they use a Congress judge there will be no controversy…
Tehelka: So is Nanavati absolutely against you people?
Pandya: Nanavati is a clever man…He wants money... Of the two judges, KG Shah is intelligent… woh apne wala hai [he is our man]… he is sympathetic to us… Nanavati is after money…
Pandya: I have been the government’s special AG (Advocate General) in these riots… I kept note of just two things… I told the VHP that none of you have to come to the Commission ever… you keep in touch with me, that’s all… I told the BJP too to keep in touch with me, that’s all… I have also told the Sangh that whenever I hold camps at various places don’t come there with a big strength and don’t bring a known face. You keep in touch with me on phone… If I’ll need anything, you’ll just receive a call, not more… I also went to all the places where the camps were held. I also held my own camps. I went to the camps to win the local people’s favour… how it should be done, what is to be done.
Pandya’s comments captured on camera are of course not greatly revealing beyond a point. If anything they are a reaffirmation of what we mostly know about the way judiciary works in cahoots with the state, including a rogue state or a fascist one for that matter. What is significant is that fascism stays and flourishes in Gujarat, regardless of any expose and the moral indignation it brings about.
Why it has struck roots in Gujarat and not in other BJP-ruled states like Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh is a valid question. The answer perhaps lies in the corporate support fascism enjoys in one of India’s most prosperous regions, not too different from the role assigned to the Shiv Sena in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Like Bombay of yore, Gujarat was the hub of leftist labour unions. They have been smashed and decimated. Instead we now have politically influential corporate clubs whose roots go right up to the Indian expatriates in the United States. The India-US business partnership launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh features tycoons like Ratna Tata and Mukesh Ambani, both viceforous public supporters of Modi, their model chief minister.
But the Tehelka expose never aimed to tackle the corporate support for insidious fascism inherent in Gujarat’s economic progress. At the same time it is equally true that the nation’s ruling party, the Congress, which had the potential to challenge Modi’s sway has a problem of its own to tackle – its own economic planners have themselves declared unalloyed affection for Modi’s growth model for the state.
Moreover, the strategy to fight religious fascism in the framework of a still breathing (or gasping) democracy is to go to the people with a secular agenda. The Congress has done just the opposite. It has gone about poaching BJP’s leaders, wooing them to swell its own ranks, including people who are known to have led the wild mobs against Muslim women and children. This method is expected to deplete the electoral resources of Modi. Can you imagine Churchill planning to undercut Hitler by wooing Goering, Himmler etc to his side?
Be that as it may. The Tehelka expose, available in detail on the website , deserves to be seen and read and discussed widely, not because it will bring down Modi’s fascist rule in Gujarat. Nor is the expose important for bringing out all the gory details of the rape and macabre murder of many innocent victims, the way Ehsan Jaffrey was cut to pieces, or a woman disembowelled and her foetus smashed in the womb. It is also not a revelation that Hindutva activists are imbued with the same sense of missionary zeal as any suicide squad among Muslims or any other faith.
The expose is important because the rape of Gujarat failed to budge the conscience of the great patron of democracy, the United States. We had to pointedly ask Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to comment on the violence before she gave a grudging lukewarm disapproval of the mayhem there. Later Ms Rocca told the US Congress that Gujarat’s legal authority was robust and was pursuing the criminals of the violence.
That was before Pandya slipped up before the hidden cameras of the Tehelka reporter. Ms Rocca, are you there?
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http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm