This column in Business World of 15 September 2003 assessed the role the Gujarat government played in the communal riots of 2002.
The Prime Minister’s Raj Dharma
The widespread riots in Gujarat last
year, in which Muslims were killed, their houses and businesses burnt and women
raped, have left a deep trauma and polarized perceptions. In this atmosphere,
the averments of the Supreme Court in the Best Bakery case are apt to be seen
as a triumph of secularist cause and a slap to Hindu communalism. That aspect,
however, is incidental. The important point about the arguments of the counsel
for Gujarat government and the response of the bench is that it is the first
engagement between two arms of the state on the standards of governance a
government must meet.
The Gujarat
government has repeatedly taken the position that it is not its function to
protect the life and property of its citizens. Its argument was articulated by
the chief minister Narendra Modi himself in the letter he chose to write to the
President, in which he asked the President to collect data on the conviction
rate in riot cases since independence. The implication was that criminals have
seldom been punished – that numerous precedents make it unnecessary for his
government to punish the guilty. (In another forum the Gujarat government has
pleaded inability to provide protection to witnesses in cases against Hindu
rioters.)
That letter is
important because Modi is the chief minister; but the view is not his alone.
Many members of the Bharatiya Janata Party hold it. When confronted in numerous
public discussions and in television interviews by the Gujarat government’s
dubious role in and after the riots, leaders and spokesmen of the party have
refused to address this issue; instead, they have launched into strident
rhetoric about whether their questioners protested against the Godhra outrage,
Pundits’ expulsion from Kashmir, the killing of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and
so on. The immediate object is to occupy airtime and silence critics. But the
implication is that riots are as natural as sun and rain, and none of the
state’s concern. As Narendra Modi said in London, he is chief minister of all
Gujaratis, not of Hindus and Muslims. If they kill one another, that is a
domestic quarrel beneath his notice.
This point of
view may not be confined to the BJP; many people in power would find it
appealing. When Hindu mobs massacred innocent Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 after Mrs
Gandhi’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi said that when a tree fell, the earth
would shake. But if rulers are allowed to get away with this disavowal of
responsibility, they will get away with murder.
The Supreme
Court said that even if no one was punished for the last 40 years, the Gujarat
government could not be absolved from punishing murderers, rapists and
arsonists. It told the Gujarat government that it must enforce the law of the
land, and that if it found that impossible, it must resign.
The response of
the Gujarat government counsel to this admonition was that the government had
been elected by popular majority and that it could not be dismissed under
Article 356 of the Constitution. That is not a legal argument; it is an
assessment of probability. For the central government could certainly dismiss
the Gujarat government if Parliament supported it.
This is not the
end of the conflict between the Gujarat government and the highest arbiter of
law in the country. The Supreme Court’s position makes it incumbent upon it to
ensure justice to the riot victims, even if it involves taking the prosecution
out of Gujarat government’s hands and transferring the cases out of Gujarat.
The process will take long; and the longer it takes, the longer will the
Gujarat government be in the dock.
There are many
in the Bharatiya Janata Party who are unfazed by this prospect. They would
build a temple on the ruins of Babri Masjid; they would raze other mosques, and
justify such destruction on grounds of a popular mandate if they get one. But
the Supreme Court has repeatedly made it clear that it is unimpressed by
popular majorities: that its task is to defend the basic structure of the
Constitution.
If there is
anyone in the BJP who can see the extreme dangers of this potential
confrontation, the harm it would do to the fabric of governance, the internal
conflicts it would unleash, the shame it would bring upon India, it is the
Prime Minister. Here at last is an occasion that calls for him to act like a
Prime Minister – to take firm, quick, decisive action to defend the
Constitution of the country.
