Arundhati Roy wants India’s new govt to try Modi over riots

Arundhati Roy wants India’s new govt to try Modi over riots

(AFP; from Khaleej Times Online)

16 May 2004

NEW DELHI - Arundhati Roy, a leading Indian novelist and social critic, hopes the new left-leaning government puts on trial the Hindu nationalist leader of Gujarat state who is accused of abetting bloody anti-Muslim riots.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been a rising star in the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), flying around India in the election campaign on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to stir up support among the Hindu majority.

Human rights groups accuse Modi’s administration of doing little—and at times actively encouraging—vigilante violence that killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in his state in 2002.

“From the chief minister downwards they must be tried, and it must be made public. That would do an immense amount of good to the public psyche. It would be just the most wonderful thing,” Roy told AFP.

“And it must not be done in a cheap manner of political revenge. It must be done properly.” said Roy, who won the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel “The God of Small Things”.

The BJP had refused to sack Modi, who swept back into power in state elections eight months after the riots subsided, by rubbishing the criticism of his rule as an affront to Gujarat’s reputation.

No Hindu has been tried and convicted over the riots. Modi has called the violence a natural reaction to the event that triggered the bloodshed—the burning alive of 59 people when an allegedly Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu activists at the Gujarat station of Godhra.

The Congress party, which is set to take power in New Delhi in a coalition with leftists, in its election platform called for the ”strictest possible action” against anyone who encourages hatred.

“They (the new government) must set up a commission—and I don’t mean that in the tired governmental sense—and they have to be very clear to those people who were involved in the killing and in the rape and in the burning alive, in Godhra and the rest, that it’s just not acceptable,” Roy said.