Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the Society and Modi-fying the State 159Even as the right-thinking secular-minded Indians hung their heads in
shame over the barbaric pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, they were
equally puzzled about the callous indifference of the Vajpayee regime in
Delhi. When Prime Minister Vajpayee addressed the nation, the public
expected him to go beyond platitudes about tolerant "traditions" and
declare unequivocally that his government would not allow innocent citi-
zens to be butchered no matter what their religion was. On the contrary,
Vajpayee seemed to buy the theory that the ghastly Godhra carnage was
the result of a large-scale organized conspiracy involving the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); that the post-February 27 violence was
"natural and spontaneous"; and that there was nothing outrageous about
a democratic government turning a blind eye to organized atrocities. The
Vajpayee government was also silent on the deeply offensive Bangalore
resolution of the RSS, which rationalized the Gujarat pogrom and threat-
ened Muslims by telling them their safety depended not on constitutional-
democratic legality, but on Hindu "goodwill." When Prime Minister
Vajpayee made his long-overdue visit to Gujarat, the country expected
him to acknowledge the exceptional character of Gujarat's five-weeks-
long carnage as independent India's worst pogrom, to vow to identify
and punish those guilty of barbaric crimes committed there, and to send
Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, packing.
Interestingly enough, none of these things have happened. The Indian
media exposed ministerial and police sponsorship of the carnage, which
had gutted India's claim to secular pluralism and tolerance. The National
Human Rights Commission's preliminary report removed the last ves-
tiges of any doubt that Modi had lost his sanction to rule. A government
that repeatedly failed to defend its citizens' right to life—the most funda-
mental right—had no business remaining in power. Worse, a government
that connived at snatching away that right, or became complicit in its sys-
tematic violation, deserved to be put on trial.
The Hindu fundamentalist outfits were extracting municipal records,
employment exchange registers, telephone-bill addresses, electoral rolls,
and even a public relations firm's business list to compile a dossier of
Muslim residential addresses before the Godhra outrage. There is no ques-
tion that both the Gujarat government and the Union Home Ministry also
knew the first steps toward replicating the "Night of the Long Knives" by
the Brown Shirts had begun in Gujarat. Collecting lists of intended vic-
tims identified on the basis of religion, carrying gas cylinders to cut open
safes of Muslim business houses, and training people to create cooking-
gas explosions without blowing themselves up are clear indications of pre-
meditated genocide.
The same Vajpayee government saw a danger to the constitution when
some members of a politician's family were murdered in Bihar, or when
Mamata Banerjee complained of political violence in communist-ruled