Analysis: Three-day fast is not apology enough, Mr Narendra Modi

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day Sadbhavana fast ended Monday. It was a real quickie given the Anna Hazare fast that had become a television reality show with all twists and turns (a thought said aloud by a colleague, not my own). But it grabbed enough eyeballs to project Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for 2014, if not the PM elect.

There are enough lucid arguments from both sides on whether Modi is the right choice, so I won’t waste my energy on it. Personally, I cannot just forget the thousands of Muslims who were killed in the state-sponsored pogrom in 2002 and the fact remains that Modi led the state then (just as the Sikhs’ massacre in 1984 after Indira Gandhi was killed). The brutal killings cannot be glossed over by the development work carried out in Gujarat and certainly a three-day fast cannot be seen as an apology to what happened.

Everyone is convinced, in the backdrop of rampant corruption cases in the UPA regime, that Modi is the right man to lead the nation. Top industrialists, film stars, intellectuals, media persons are falling over each other to hail the new hope (after Anna Hazare, I must hasten to add). And when you raise the issue of 2002

Gujarat riots, they aggressively tell you how it’s a thing of past and how you must move on. There is only one argument to those advisors — Jews never moved on from the Holocaust and the war criminals were persecuted from all corners of the world even six decades after the persecution.

What I want to talk about today is not Modi, but the bigotry in our society that is coming out in the open now.

The general chatter in a large section of the society is supporting what Modi and his followers did and after the Supreme Court order last week, it has grown only louder. The supporters are unabashed now that Modi is washed with milk and honey. One has the habit of reading comments on various sites and few arguments are rather unbelievable.

After the attack on doctors at Sion Hospital following alleged medical negligence, one reader commented on a news website how in 76 cases where doctors were attacked, all the accused were Muslims. While it’s not just an utter lie, the website allowed it to remain without any intervention from the moderators.

Liberal friends tell me how the concept of jihad is being imprinted in young minds of the community. They tell me how they are told about 72 virgins waiting for them in jannat. One has several Muslim friends and all of them have told me how the supreme jihad is one that’s within. The counterargument by the propaganda lovers to that is that such things are taught in madrassas where poor Muslim boys come to study. If that’s true then who’s responsible for this situation? Why are they forced to send their kids to madrassas? A Bhendi Bazar vendor once passionately told me how his child was disallowed admission to the neighbourhood English medium school and no reasons were given. It’s not rare; rather, it’s common. How many of these industrialists, who are now singing paeans for Modi, have admitted poor Muslim students to their fashionable schools? How many of them have tried to consciously raise the number of Muslim employees in their workforce?

The Indian Muslim was not communal. He is not communal. But post-1990s, we, the silent and hence dangerous majority, have forced him. And we are reaping what we have sown.