Narendra Modi's puppy remark is as bad as Rajiv Gandhi's 'when a tree falls' comment

The BJP has come up with a remarkably innovative statement to dilute the impact of Narendra Modi’s crassly insensitive “puppy” analogy in the context of the 2002 post-Godhra riots. If the Reuters interview will remain in public mind for a very long time, it will be because the BJP’s Prime Ministerial hopeful felt as saddened by the riots as he would have been if his car had run over a puppy. The party’s central leadership explained away the unfeeling remark by insisting it brought out Modi’s “compassion”, how even a puppy’s death caused him discomfiture and pain.

However much the BJP tries, the tactless and inconsiderate “puppy” comparison unveils a mind that simply does not know how to grieve the mindless slaughter of hundreds under his watch. Modi worshippers on the Internet have argued that even Hindus have died in those riots but the question that was posed to the Gujarat chief minister carried the obvious assumption that Muslims had borne the brunt of the attacks. Gujarat riots did take a toll of Hindus — no doubt about it. But it was a majority of Muslims who paid the ultimate price with their lives. It was their massacre that makes the memory of those riots as shameful as it has always been for the past 11 years.

It wasn’t any ordinary riot spectator who had been asked this question. Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat in February 2002 and his position was at the top of the command chain. He was at the helm of affairs. The question is: would he have said the same thing had he been asked how he had felt about the Godhra victims who were all Hindus?

Here is a chief minister, who has blundered in the way Rajiv Gandhi had erred by putting forward the “big tree” analogy to describe the riots after Indira Gandhi’s assassination nearly 30 years ago. In this same interview, Modi doesn’t hesitate in describing himself as a “Hindu nationalist”. Modi is unabashedly Hindu first and the BJP wants us to entrust him with the running of a diverse republic like India.

To infer what he really meant, let us just re-examine what he had precisely told the Reuters journalists. “The Supreme Court created a special investigative team (SIT) and top-most, very bright officers who oversee the SIT. That report came. In that report, I was given a thoroughly clean chit, a thoroughly clean chit.”

After insisting that he had been absolved, he went on to say, “Another thing, any person if we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”

If one carefully reads the analogy, one can understand how he tries to suggest that he wasn’t the driver during the riots. Somebody else was driving. He was only sitting behind. So, if there was anybody responsible it was the policemen and others who were charged with the maintenance of law and order everywhere in his state. It was far from his fault. He was only “sitting behind”.

And that it pains him that while these others were driving the vehicle, a puppy came under the brutal tyres. Every form of life is undoubtedly respectable as Modi tweeted later but to compare the dehumanised madness of a riot with a puppy coming under the wheel is to dismiss a meticulously planned man-made tragedy as a trivial accident. So, in Modi’s vocabulary a riot is an accident which is often unavoidable.

For Modi, “it is natural to be sad” but unnatural to condemn or deplore the riots, even more unnatural to own up responsibility. He will never say sorry. He will belittle the global impact of the heinous Gujarat riots by comparing it with a puppy coming under the wheels but he will never shed a tear for the killing of hundreds whose primary right to life was actually his responsibility. Modi will go this far and no farther. If you push him, he will make a joke of it and ridicule the riots and the burning of people alive. His opponents are not really overdoing it when they take umbrage over the fact that Modi compared the majority Muslims killed in the riots to puppies and by obvious extension to dogs. Modi is a great communicator. It is difficult to believe he did not mean what he said.