India: Five years after 2002 Gujarat pogrom

Despite the passage of more than five years since the February-March 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, not a single one of the principal perpetrators of this horrific crime has been punished. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Muslims who were driven from their towns and villages by roving bands of Hindu supremacist thugs still languish in relief camps without electricity or running water.

There is much evidence to show that leading figures in the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (which headed India’s Union and Gujarat governments in 2002) and its Hindu-chauvinist allies—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, literally National Volunteer’s Association), Bajrang Dal (Hindu youth organization) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council)—fomented and organized the carnage in Gujarat, which resulted in the slaughter of more than two thousand Muslims and left tens of thousands of others homeless and jobless. (see “India: further evidence Hindu-supremacist BJP culpable in Gujarat pogrom”)

One of the chief abettors of the massacre was Narendra Modi, then as now Gujarat’s chief minister. Notwithstanding his role in inciting the violence and ensuring that security forces took no effective action to protect Gujarat’s Muslims, Modi not only continues to head Gujarat’s government and to serve as one of the principal leaders of the BJP at the national-level. In 2005 he was honoured for leading the “best-governed” state in India by the Congress Party-connected Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. A think-tank created to honour former Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation’s trustees include the current Congress Party president, Sonia Gandhi, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister Chidambaram.

The Congress Party portrays itself as a bulwark of secularism and an implacable opponent of Hindu chauvinism. Yet despite heading India’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government for the past three years, it has not seen fit to use the resources of the state to mount a serious investigation into the Gujarat pogrom so as to lay bare the role played by the Hindu supremacist right and various security forces and punish the guilty.

The Gujarat pogrom occurred in an atmosphere of anti-Pakistan (and by implication anti-Muslim) hysteria whipped-up the BJP-led Union government following a reputed terrorist attack on India’s parliament in December 2001. Accusing Pakistan of complicity in the terrorist attack, the BJP-dominated National Democratic Alliance government placed the country on a war footing and deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Gujarat and the other Indian states that border Pakistan.

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/indi-a10.shtml