Modi’s volte-face?

Though to some it is heartening to see Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserting that Indian Muslims live for India and would die in the country there is no change in the substance of his opinion of the minority. His perseverance in not wearing the round white cap of Muslims is also minimal because it is symbolic. His wearing his heart on his sleeve now is too small a character in a play, a cameo; you cannot discern him or decipher him against a whole museum wall of previous utterances. His decade long rule in Gujarat has churned up a Saragossa sea of hieroglyphics telling spasmodic relationship with the minority community. There is a whole body of his thoughts that he will find unable to disavow. Some of which he uttered to foreign journalists and media. To the Reuter news agency interviewer he called Muslim puppies being killed in accident by a fast moving car! Does the car successfully translate into Gujarat making rapid development worthy of emulating by the rest of the country despite the incidental collateral damage? Three days after 9/11 Modi was not Chief Minister but was waiting in the wing to be. On Star television he remarked what is the defining feature of right wing Hindutva view craftily well prepared in advance for all the time to come: “when one community says that my community is different from yours, it is higher than yours, and that until you take refuge in mine you cannot get Moksha [liberation or salvation], you cannot get Allah, you cannot get Jesus – then conflict starts”. [1]There is no substance in it, neither was it on February 27, 2002 because Muslims did not shout from the rooftop anything against the Hindus. On the contrary the Hindu extremists on the Sabarmati Express forced Muslims to shout Jai Shri Ram and attacked them when they demurred. The poor Muslims were overwhelmed by the aggressive and violent approach of the karsevaks returning from Ayodhya. This premeditated excuse to go in for the Muslims is the bric-a-brac of the organization that has nurtured Modi since his childhood, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Muslim participants from all over India were returning from a conference in London when they were arrested at the Ahmadabad airport on arrival on January 1, 2002 even when they had not said anything against any religion nor asserted the superiority of any religion let alone their own. [2] The above remark of Modi regarding 9/11 attack shows his intrepidity of what he believed and still holds it to be the view of his own and his organization. One who spoke along with Modi, Dr Rafiq Zakaria, G Parthasarthy, and the anchor Rajsardeep Desai was John Elliott who observed: “Unlike most politicians, he (Modi) argued passionately and powerfully for what he believed in, not for some short-term personal gain far removed from policy, but out of conviction. He was a strong public speaker and was standing his ground, presenting his case with rare confidence and élan.” Therefore Modi played a pioneering role in getting India on the bandwagon of the US in the so called “war on terrorism.” More than the PM AB Vajpayee it was he who buttressed the Huntington thesis of clash of civilization. Pronouncing the word religion (meaning Islam) he accented the third syllable because instead of using the small vowel sound he used a diphthong. He outright called 9/11 as Islamic terrorism. Later in February 2002 he again came back to his damnation of the Mian Musharraf, meaning the Pakistan president or the generic use for Muslims. He maintained the same vein when he spoke of Sohrabuddin Shakh in 2007 election. Sohrabuddin was not a terrorist in common parlance but because of his religion Modi made him one. Interestingly, Modi was home minister and his deputy Amit Shah and others in the government and police used Sohrabuddin in extortion racket and the murder of Haren Pandya. Tulsiram Prajapati was a friend and partner of Soharabuddin but he was spared the noun terrorist by Modi and everyone else. The statement made to CNN on September 19, 2014 is no watershed in the career of Modi viewed in the backdrop stretching back to the aftermath of 9/11 Star television debate and hence it is sycophantic of MJ Akbar, BJP spokesman and a new acolyte of Modi, to says: “It is a powerful testament of his (Modi’s) faith and conviction on the Muslim community.” [3] Fareed Zakaria: Ayman-al- Zawahiri the head of Al Qaida has issued a video and an appeal trying to create an Al Qaida in India. In south Asia he says but the message was really directed towards India and he says he wants to free Muslims from the oppression they face in Gujarat, in Kashmir. Do you think, do you worry that something like this could succeed? Prime Minister Narendra Modi: My understanding is that they are doing injustice towards the Muslims of our country. If anyone thinks Indian Muslims will dance to their tune, they are delusional. Indian Muslims will live for India. They will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India. Fareed Zakaria: Why do you think it is that there is this remarkable phenomenon that you have a 170 million Muslims and they seem to be almost no or very few members of Al-Qaeda. Even though Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan and of course the many in Pakistan. What is it that has made this community not as susceptible? Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Firstly, I am not the authority for doing a psychological and religious analysis on this ... But the question is, whether or not humanity should be defended in the world? Whether or not believers in humanity should unite? This is a crisis against humanity, not a crisis against one country or one race. So we have to frame this as a fight between humanity and inhumanity. Nothing else. What he is saying here is a repeat of what he had told Farid Zakaria’s father and others a decade and almost half earlier. [4] In the same 2001 debate Modi had made it clear at the onset that it was Islamic terrorism and then he tried to qualify that he meant some Muslims who use Islam and Islam per se terrorist. But the explanation he gave and his illustration was basically from Islam though in his own slant on it. He had said that there are three stages, one where Muslims ruled was darul Islam, where they did not was darul Harb against which they fight and darul Aman where they live with others in peace because otherwise they would be at mortal risk. He did not use exactly the parenthesis but the 3 categories were on his mind. What is most puzzling: there is a selected list of his statements available under the title of Narendra Modi's Little Saffron Book "Hindus of Gujarat, unite and defeat the Mussalmaan Mullahs and all their four wives! Hindus of Gujarat, be courageous, and dare to fight, be brave, and defy decency and humanity; advance wave upon wave like Ravan's rakshasas. Then the whole Gujarat will belong to Hindus. Mussalmaans of all kinds shall be destroyed." Statement Supporting the Municipality of the Vadodara City Against the Muslim Aggression (May 5, 2006). "The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of Hindus. It is mainly because of the submissive state of the Hindus that Mussalmaans dare to bully us. When this defect is remedied, then the Mullah aggressor, like a mad bull crashing into a ring of flames, will be surrounded by hundreds of millions of our people standing upright, the mere sound of their voices will strike terror into him, and the Mullah will be burned to death." On Planned Riots (May 2003), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 186. "What is a true bastion of Shakti? It is the Indian masses, the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support Hindutva. That is the real Shakti, which is impossible for any force on earth to smash. The Aamir Khans of the world cannot smash us; on the contrary, we shall smash them. Rallying millions upon millions of people round my government and expanding our holy war, we shall wipe out all the pseudo-secularists and take over the whole of India." Excerpt of a Speech Made on the Successful, Complete and Absolute Conclusion of a Ban on the Film Fanaa in the Theatres of Gujarat (May 28, 2006). "The secularists are bullying us in such a way that we will have to deal with them seriously. Not only must we have a powerful, regular and a more violent Bajrang Dal, we must also organize contingents of the ladies-only Durga Vahini on a big scale. This will make it difficult for the secularists to move a single inch in our Gujarat in case of an anti-Mussalmaan genocide, an event which is not very far." Interview with the Saamna Newspaper (September 29, 2004). "Without preparedness, a communal riot is not a real pogrom and there can be no final solution either. Having grasped this point, it is good to remember that while making a list of Mians and their Begums in their across-the-'border' Pakistani mohallas, care must be taken to accomplish the task without attracting much notice. The dogs must not be warned of their terrible ends." Strategies for Genocides and Other Experiments in Rwanda (May 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 165-66. "The communal riot is a war of the Hindus; it can be successfully waged only after enlisting the support of the police force and relying on them to wage it." Be Concerned with the Manipulation of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Murder (January 27, 2002), Selected Works, Vol. I. p. 147. "Democracy is one of the ways to be cleverly employed and manipulated to struggle for a just, absolute, pure Mussalmaan-less society." Talk with Prabhu Chawala in Seedhi Baat, Aaj Tak TV Channel (August 2004). "The Bhartiya Janata Party of Gujarat, having made a clear-headed appraisal of the national and state-level situation on the basis of the science of Nazism-Fascism, recognized that all attacks on the non-Hindus in Gujarat have to be launched in the shortest possible time. If some Mussalmaans still have guts to live here with their countless hordes, we only have to stop doing any dealings with them." The Present Situation and Our Tasks (December 25, 1997), Selected Shakha Writings, 2nd ed., p. 347. "If a single Mussalmaan attack us and if the conditions are favorable for battle, we will certainly act in self-defense to wipe him off and all the people of his wretched community resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely (we do not strike rashly, but when we do strike, we must win). We must never be cowed by the bluster of English-speaking secularists.." On Peace Negotiations with Pakistan - Circular of the Central Committee of the Bhartiya Janata Party of Gujarat (August 26, 2001) "As far as the massacre of Hindus by terrorists in Kashmir is concerned, those Islamic militants, in spite of belonging to the enemy civilization, are like our brothers-in-arms. They provide us an opportunity, reason, and excuse to kill the Maulavis of Ahmedabad." Talk with the Harvard University Proffessor Samuel Phillips Huntington (August 1946), Foreign Affairs Magazine [5] Even if anyone of the above statements is true that statement is too revolting in its essence. Moving fast forward to the pre US visit statement of Modi, it is puerile that the Muslims would be fooled by it for they have been what they have always been born and brought up in India, have shared sorrow and happiness of the land of their birth. Why should anyone rake up his statement full 67 years after the freedom? Testing their loyalty now will raise the nightmare of the shibboleth that they must sing vande matrum and that would put the situation back to square one! Furthermore the US had co opted India in its so called “war on terrorism” post 9/11. Why would the new man in PM’s office want to register their loyalty to the land and not to Al Qaida for they had no truck with the fanatics before, so why now. Muslims have learned well from their thinkers and poets: khake vatan ka mujhko har zarra devta haiy!“Every particle of land of my motherland is god for me to worship.” “To kill one man is to kill humanity.” Expecting Muslims to again pass through another shibboleth is asking for the impossible. The martyrs like Brigadier Usman and Abdul Hamid and poets like Wali Gujarati/Dakhni were Indians lived and died defending and upholding the honour of the mother land. It was Modi’s pogroms of 2002that engineered the demolition of Wali’s grave and paving a concrete road over it overnight so that there would be no eye sore on the road to development that passes through Ahmadabad. The annals of Gujarat are blank over either the demolition or even a cursory mention of the death of former Member of Parliament Ahsan Jafri who had spoken to Sonia Gandhi as well as the chief minister of Gujarat for rescue before he was brutally murdered. Or is Modi placating the Indian Americans born in Islamic faith and others like minded who protested against his genocide and opposed his attempt to get a visa and visit US? Why did not Modi take the opportunity of Independence Day and proclaim the unity of the country where Muslims are equal partners in shaping the destiny of the country? Why did he break new ground and shout and exhort his audience to shout vande matrum at the end of his speech? He tested the water and Shiv Sena knew it and hence its president Udhav Thackeray brought another nationality test called cricket test into the loyalty of Muslims as his father Bal Thackeray was wont to do. In Saamna editorial of September 22, 2014 Thackeray let the cat out by warning Muslims not to let down Modi on the current issue and “sing 'Vande Mataram' in tandem with the rest of the country, (and) put a halt to the alleged anti-national teachings imparted in 'madrassas'” [6] Ordinary Muslims are resigned to their lot which includes wear and tear of daily struggle to meet both the ends meet. They would prefer to be left to themselves. So any enforced shibboleth is unwelcome. Former chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar knew it all too well when he refused to take custody of Abu Jundal, real name Ansari Zabiuddin, a police informer who helped India unearth the greatest arms seizure and whom the police framed in all kinds of terrorism cases later in their “war on terror.” Kumar also dismissed the penchant of India security agency and police for the “Darbhanga module”. Gujarat under Modi on the other hand demanded to interrogate him like in most other terror attacks giving the impression that it was besieged by terrorists. In fact many Hindutva terror cases had their source in Gujarat where Swami Asimanand was based and where Modi had donated huge sums of money to his Ashram. So the words of Modi are to quote Polly Toynbee on Labour party convention that took place as Modi made the above speech: How easy to call for political fizz. How tough to deliver it! [7] --- [1] http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2014/06/29/modi-spoke-good-english-in-2001-and-looked-like-a-future-leader/ [2]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com//india/SIMI-men-in-Surat-had-US-UK-links/articleshow/867319468.cms [3] www.aa.com.tr/en [4] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/cnn-world-exclusive-full-transcript-of-prime-minister-narendra-modis-interview/500760-3.html [5] http://hindumuslimindia.blogspot.in/2006/09/narendra-modis-little-saffron-book.html [http://ibnlive.in.com/news/cnn-world-exclusive-full-transcript-of-prime-minister-narendra-modis-interview/500760-3.html] [6] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Shiv-Sena-to-Muslims-Dont-let-down-Narendra-Modi/articleshow/43136303.cms [7] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/22/labour-discovering-how-tough-deliver-political-fizz-miliband-fragmented-groups