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Tehelka’s Gujarat sting, shown in its entirety on Headlines Today and Aaj Tak, was possibly the most repulsive thing ever shown on television.

Here were men — at least they looked like men — bragging of mass murder. There was the barbarian saying, “There was this pregnant woman, I slit her open, sister fxxxxr.”

There was the savage proudly narrating how they killed the former Congress MP, Ehsan Jaffri, “Five or six people held him, then someone struck him with a sword.

Chopped off his hands, then his legs, chopped off all his organs. After cutting him into pieces, they set him on fire.”

There was the fiend Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal activist talking grandly of how he felt like Maharana Pratap as he and his hordes “killed at will.”

None of this is news, of course.

Anyone who followed the horrifying events in Gujarat in 2002 is aware of these gruesome happenings.

The difference was that now you were listening to the stories dribbling boastfully out, straight from the monsters’ own mouths.

What is more shameful for our country? That in 2007, these self-confessed murderers are roaming free on our streets, untouched by law even five years after their savagery?

That Ahmedabad’s police commissioner, a certain PC Pande, asked Babu Bajrangi and his fellow fiends to clandestinely remove the 800 dead bodies of Muslims in Naroda Patiya and dump them all over Ahmedabad, because “if there are so many dead at one place, it would create trouble for the police”?

Is all this shameful, or is it more shameful that the violence was sponsored by the state government of Gujarat led by Narendra Modi?

Anyone who followed the carnage in Gujarat has been aware of the state government’s active involvement, from start to finish, but here were the protagonists of the violence talking of how Modi “gave us three days to do whatever we wanted to”, of how he visited Naroda Patiya after hundreds were killed, and blessed the murderers, “Aap dhanya ho”.

Or how Modi protected Bajrangi for over four months, even sheltering him in Gujarat Bhavan in Mount Abu or transferred two judges so Bajrangi could get bail.

Is all this shameful or is it more shameful that the self-same Narendra Modi, whose designation of CM fits him neatly because it can stand for Chief Monster, is still the State’s chief minister?

That the morally self-righteous LK Advani regarded him till recently as his protege, and the slick-tongued Arun Jaitley touts him as a future prime minister?

Is all this shameful, or is it more shameful that it requires an NGO (Citizens for Justice and Peace) to keep cases going in court, without which all these hundreds of killings would have gone unpunished?

Or that the Supreme Court, which finds time to deal with questions like who should get the National Film Awards, has no time to look into the Citizens for Justice and Peace’s cases lying before it for as many as four years?

Or that it needs a publication like Tehelka to dig out the facts rather than the law enforcers of the land whose duty it is to do so?

Is this all shameful or is it more shameful that there is no moral indignation in this country about the doings of the Chief Monster and his killer hordes so that all the leading captains of industry attended a special conference in Gujarat a while ago and pledged to invest in this ‘model’ state?

And is it or is it not a shame that moral indignation is expressed only by other countries, like many in Europe and a country like the United States, who show their anger by refusing their visas to Modi?

And isn’t it finally a matter of complete and utter shame that the day after the Tehelka revelations, Modi’s supporters didn’t go into hiding; instead, they began to celebrate.

That’s because they believed that the gory details of violence and Modi’s role in it wouldn’t hurt him. On the contrary, it might now actually win him the December elections?