The forgotten truth about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots

The one thing no one being interviewed on television should allow for is his interviewer taking control of the interview. This is doubly true for the head of a government: it is quadruply so for an aspiring head of government facing a general election in three months. But that is precisely what Rahul Gandhi allowed Arnab Goswami to do from the first moments of his hour-long interview.

Television is not about what people say, but how they look and how they behave. Unlike print media and radio, less than 20 per cent of its message is carried by the spoken word. Eighty per cent is conveyed by gesture and expression.

Arnab Goswami knows this for he spends half his waking life in front of the camera. And he used every trick in the book to establish his total dominance over Gandhi — the relaxed, sitting-back stance, the white pencil held negligently close to his eye ready to swing  down as he asked his next question; the gentle, respectful tone and the condescending smile as he relentlessly repeated  questions that Gandhi could not answer. Goswami left nothing to chance.

As for Rahul, it became painfully apparent within minutes that he had come to make a campaign speech, not to engage in a candid exchange of views. It was apparent that he had been coached to death on what to say and what not  to say; that he had been instructed  never to show any doubt, never to concede any mistake by his party, and never to admit the possibility of a defeat for the Congress in spite of the growing mountain of evidence of its loss of support in the country.

As a result the ‘debate’ became a dialogue of the deaf in which Goswami and he spoke but did not hear each other. Rahul was determined to speak about the future. Goswami was  determined to keep the debate firmly anchored in the past. Rahul kept repeating set piece remarks about the closing of democracy to the people, of the entrenchment of corruption,  about the need for deep structural reforms. But Goswami kept asking him questions about how the Congress’s allegation that Modi had abetted the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 had been disproved by judgements of the Gujarat High Court, and how the Congress had abetted the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 in Delhi.

The mutual declamation would have turned into a debate if Rahul had answered Goswami’s questions, or Goswami had chosen to follow up Rahul’s leads into the future. But this is where the innocence, not to mention inexperience of Rahul and the cold-blooded cynicism of Goswami came starkly into view. Goswami was not interested in the future, only in the present ratings.

As for the difference between Rajiv Gandhi’s response to the Delhi riots and Modi’s response to the Godhra train burning, it can be summed up by a single contrast: On hearing on the afternoon of February 28, 2002 that the VHP had called for a bandh to protest the killing of kar sevaks in the Sabarmati express, Modi promptly announced that the state would sponsor the bandh. This immediately tied the hands of the police and prevented them from arresting VHP and Bajrang Dal activists as a precautionary measure. As a result, on the night of the 28th, while the neighbouring governments of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan put tens of thousands of ‘history sheeters’ in jail for the next few days, the tally of the Gujarat police was just two, and both were Muslims!

By contrast, whatever individual Congressmen may have done after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, on the night of October 3 while Delhi was burning after her funeral, a grief-stricken and jet-lagged  Rajiv Gandhi, exhausted by walking for miles behind his mother’s cortege and then lighting her funeral pyre, got into a jeep and spent most of the night driving from one riot-struck area to the next, directing the police, chasing the rioters, and angrily exhorting them to stop their murder and pillage. That is the difference between Delhi and Ahmedabad; between Rajiv Gandhi and Narendra Modi; between secularism and communalism, between democracy and fascism. Rahul Gandhi could have destroyed Arnab Goswami if only he had known what to say. But it seems that along with its capacity to govern, the Congress has also lost its collective memory.

The author is a political commentator