Lest We Forget

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Events in Gujarat are too recent for anyone to forget. However, some columnists are afraid that it may happen. Kalpana Sharma, a senior editor in the Hindu , wrote (12 Dec.02): “This is the period when people are supposed to pause, think and introspect about the year gone by.  And make resolutions about the coming year--on not how to repeat the mistakes of the past. But for some, introspection is preceded by amnesia. Thus when there is nothing to remember, there is nothing to regret.” The amnesia she refers to, I suspect, includes the events of Oct.-Nov. 1984 and August 1946 also when several times more people died in three days than in the three months following Godhra. So concerned about amnesia, Sharma is the last person to forget what Delhi saw after Indira Gandhi’s assassination just two decades ago. I have no idea if Sharma belonged to the independence generation that vividly remembers another saga of insanity on and after 16 August 1946 when Husain Suhrawardy was the prime minister of Bengal. Several million people who were young at that time are amidst us to tell what happened. Kalpana, rest assured we will not forget these periods of mob frenzy and fratricide so that they do not repeat.

It is the fear of repetition of senselessness and the aftermath of reprisals, retribution and revenge that holds people back from staging or participating in such orgies of violence. But politicians of all hues (Congress, BJP, Socialists, Communists and every vote-seeking outfit) do not want peace. Now, the media seem to imitate them. In my half a century as a newspaperman I have seen hundreds of communal riots but never the kind of reporting that Gujaratinspired. Just for an indiscreet banner heading revealing the faith of Mrs.Gandhi’s assassin accompanied by an innuendo-ridden editorial, the Press Council of India administered a stinging rebuke to the Times of India and its editor Girilal Jain. This writer had a major hand in initiating and later guiding the process of advocacy before the Press Council. Delhi’s well-known sociologist Peggy Mohan helped the complainants who happened to be his students at Indian Institute of Mass Communication. Those were the days when the Times of India still recognized its accountability to watchdog bodies. The Times published on its editorial page two columns of the Press Council censure. The victims of the Delhi outrage forgot and forgave though the law continues to take or not to take its own course. The press at that time condemned the riots without the kind of community bashing that marked Gujarat coverage. The mainstream press remained nonpartisan in 1984. It condemned the attacks but not the community. Gujarat marked a new low in reporting.

The media discriminated between the victims of Godhra arson and the victims of the riots that followed Godhra. Editor of The Hoot Sevanti Ninan (the Hindu , 31 March 02) wrote, “We focus on the pogroms of Gujarat but do not investigate what happened on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra with equal fervor. But we are also guilty of communalism.” Editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times Vir Sanghvi (HT, 16 April 02) lamented, “I may not agree with Mr.Vajpayee about Parliament’s attitude but I do agree with him that the secular establishment was not as vociferous in its condemnation of Godhra as it should have been. In fact, I said so at the time, arguing that too many ‘secular’ people were taking the line that because the victims were kar sewaks, they had it coming. As much as some of us may try and pretend otherwise, nobody with any intellectual honesty can dispute that the riots were a response to Godhra. My criticism of the secular establishment to Godhra was based on two grounds. One: I thought it was immoral to dehumanize the victims just because they were kar sewaks. And two: I believe that such attitudes ultimately alienated the Hindu middle class from secularism.” That is what happened in Gujarat where Narendra Modi staged an electoral coup helped by a backlash of Gujarati anger and pride that the press should call them a community of butchers.

Gujarat also saw the inauguration of a new tradition of press activism taking editors outside the country to depose before all kinds of so-called international panels, to countries where the concept of minorities does not exist and to enrich the seminars circuit. Some editors deposed before the US State Department’s Commission on International Religious Freedom. Such action of the editors confirmed their distrust of the institutions the Constitution had set up like the President, Parliament and the judiciary. In the interests of minimum credibility, people who took Gujarat victims to the Supreme Court remembered a sole Godhra victim, all because she had not received compensation the Government had declared after the incident. Gujarat reporting included some Booker prize fiction too about the molestation of Ehsan Jaffri’s daughters. This received much attention because of its author’s eminence. But T.A.Jaffri, son of Ehsan Jaffri ( Asian Age , 2 May, 02) spoilt Arundhati Roy’s day by declaring that all his brothers and sisters lived in the US. The mainstream press never published the denial. A lot of unverified and uncorroborated writing appeared that seemed to immortalize the communal discord not only in Gujarat but also the entire country.

Pankaj Mishra, an unsuccessful Booker prize aspirant, bettered Arundhati Roy in reporting Chtisinghpura massacre for Indian and foreign media. He reveled in inventing reality. In the New York Review of Books (21 Sept. 2000) he wrote, "The Sikh association formed to protect Sikhs after the killings has begun to talk about the possible involvement of Indian security forces [in the massacre]. ... There is a new and growing suspicion that the massacre in Chitisinghpura was organized by Indian intelligence agencies in order to influence Clinton ... into taking a much more sympathetic view of India as a helpless victim of Islamic terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan." So, the Indian Army killed 40 Sikhs to win the sympathy of Clinton! The Sikh association talked only of possible involvement and not actual. This is the end of imagination. His entire story was uncorroborated. Again, nobody knows if there is any such body known as the Sikh association.

In the absence of any report in the Indian press which reported Gujarat in such detail, we have to contend with the Biblical truth emerging from the Independent which wrote: "So who are the killers in the Sikh massacre of Chitisinghpura? Many Kashmiri Muslims and some Sikhs have long maintained that the massacre was the work of Indian government agents, as The Independent earlier reported. This made a horrible kind of sense: India gained a huge political boost from this timely show of alleged Pakistani turpitude.” The Indian Army is guilty because “many Kashmiri Muslims and some Sikhs have maintained that the massacre was the work of Indian government agents.” Vinod Mehta ( Outlook , 30 Oct. 2000) expressed doubt that the Sikhs' suspicions could be true because "it is difficult to imagine that such a dastardly crime perpetrated by the state on its own citizens ... has not leaked out -- even as gossip -- in our very leaky republic."

The media respected neither the law nor ethics in reporting Gujarat. Their performance attracted several sections of the Indian Penal Code relating to disruption of public order and creation of ill feeling between communities in the name of religion or caste. There are guidelines prescribed by the Press Council and the All India Newspaper Editors Conference on reporting communal riots. In their anxiety to become newsmakers, the editors did the greatest damage to communal amity in India and persons like Kalpana Sharma have vowed never to let the victims forget what happened in the dark days of human savagery. This will only help the Godhra victims too to keep their wounds permanently unhealed. What a way to solve communal conflict!

This is what Mahatma Gandhi wrote about the 1946 massacre: “What the Muslims had done in Calcutta in 1946 was utterly wrong, but what would be gained by avenging retaliation?” -- The Last 200 Days of Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu online publication.