Some unscrupulous soul whipped together a fictitious explanation for the
Godhra atrocity, down to an abducted daughter of a tea-vendor, and sent it
out over the wires. He was sick enough to put the names and numbers of two
real journalists at the end, as "sources" for the story. I hate to think
how many calls from the world over that hapless pair fielded (mine was
one), how many times they had to explain that it was all a hoax.
But malicious kite-flying happened in the other direction too. Early
reports from Godhra mentioned ten girls among the karsevaks on the train,
"abducted by miscreants belonging to the minority community" and whisked to
some unknown destination, some unknown fate. As with the tea-vendor story,
this tale zipped round the world in seconds flat, helped along by outraged
writers and email jockeys.
Until the Additional DGP of Gujarat, J Mahapatra, said: 'No woman
passenger has been reported missing after the Godhra murders. We have
accounted for each and every passenger. These are all rumours that have
been doing the rounds with the intention of spreading violence.' [Rediff,
March 6].
The bloody truth of hatred and murder is apparently not enough for some
people on either side of this putrid and God-forsaken wrangle. Intent on
whipping up even more hatred, they concoct and spread lies as well.
***
Two days ago, a woman we know slightly came to leave her little collection
of jewellery with us: mangalsutra, another chain, a couple of anklets, some
earrings. The next day, her 15-year-old daughter came to stay. "Please keep
her for a few days around the 15th," the mother had asked us at the
beginning of March, right after the Gujarat massacres. "There's talk of
riots, isn't there?"
This Marathi-speaking Hindu family lives in a mostly Muslim neighbourhood
near the station. Afraid that the VHP's Ayodhya plans for March 15 might
lead to trouble, they think our seven-storey building with our geriatric
watchman is safer than their home. Why should it be? In Ahmedabad two weeks
ago, mobs were equipped with gas cylinders. They released gas into
buildings like ours and, as the IAS officer Harsh Mander writes in a
horrifying report, a 'trained member of the group then lit the flame which
efficiently engulfed the building.' (Question: just what had he been
trained in? By whom?).
So I'm not convinced that our home is particularly safer than our guest's.
But she's here, with the family jewellery.
This too has its mirror-image. Sharat Pradhan reports for rediff from
Ayodhya that the 'bulk of the [Muslim] families have temporarily shifted
base' out of their largely Hindu surroundings. Given the 'mob frenzy that
we witnessed in December 1992,' the ongoing 'build-up of karsevaks from
outside" and the "recent violence in Gujarat,' they fear carnage around
March 15. So they have sent their women and children away.
And the men who have led my country into this crazy mess? I see them on my
front pages, on television, addressing press conferences, claiming their cause is
above the law, that they are not subject to Supreme Court decisions. I see
them surrounded always by alert commandos fingering triggers on some very
long guns.
If we needed more perversity, surely this qualifies: that Indian lives are
turned inside-out, too often snuffed out, by the hatreds these men
encourage; but those same ordinary Indians must nevertheless pay to protect
these men.
***
Mander's report, written after visiting riot survivors' camps in Ahmedabad,
is not for queasy stomachs. 'The horrors that [the survivors] speak of are
so macabre,' he writes, 'that my pen falters in the writing.'
Me? My eyes falter in the reading.
An eight-month pregnant woman's stomach was slit open and her foetus
slaughtered in front of her. A family was killed by 'flooding their house
with water and then electrocuting them.' Everywhere, women were raped and
then burned or beaten to death, 'in one case with a screw-driver.' Enough.
A typical one: The killings across Gujarat, a respected town-planner I know
wrote, were 'a natural reaction of people who despite being the original
inhabitants of this country are today oppressed and relegated to a third
class citizenship. ... It is good to see that they at least have the
courage to retaliate.'
What kind of lying propaganda persuades an eminently successful Indian that
he is a third class citizen? And as a common friend wondered: 'Does he
think slaughtering Muslims and slicing pregnant women open makes him first
class again?'
That he does think so, that a great majority of my 300 respondents seem to
as well, actually turns my stomach far more than Mander's report does.
So many are discussing what might happen on March 15. The rickshaw my wife
took the other day had Jai Bajrangbali' painted above the windscreen; the
driver went on at length, even after she got down, about the futility of
this agitation. "What happened 500 years ago is finished," he says. "Why
won't they let us live in peace now?" At the office, a colleague muses:
"What will they get by building that temple? Why are they insisting on it
when it makes so much trouble?" I stop at my regular courier to send a
package and overhear the manager telling a colleague, "Temple or mosque,
I'm sick of it. We should be progressing, but we're sliding backwards." And
our dhobi arrives early and seems in a hurry. "I just want to finish and
get back home quickly," he says. "Who benefits from this temple bakwaas
[nonsense]? Not us. Only those sadhus and leaders."
I know, I know: hardly a representative sample. But these random snatches
were all from Hindus. Is the wind shifting?
Wondering about that, my mind goes back a year. Back to the quake. Four of
us are returning to Bombay after a week working with a team in a ruined
village. With a horde of Kutchis fleeing the area, we struggle into the
Kutch Express at Bhachau's flattened station.
Inside, I notice idly that the coach is plastered with colourful RSS
stickers. The blue one says:
When I wake the next morning, our Kutchi fellow-travellers have torn
several of the stickers. Curiously, only -- only and all -- the yellow ones
are torn.
Yes, call me a hopeless optimist. But I take this as a sign that -- its
heroic work in quake-torn Kutch notwithstanding -- folks are tiring of the
simple equation the RSS makes between Hinduism and India.