Acid in the eyes
Remember that day in the
‘80s when India awakened to the shocking news that some policemen from
Bhagalpur had blinded four notorious dacoits by pouring acid in their eyes,
so that the people of that small town in Bihar could be
"liberated" from the tyranny of the marauders? Remember, too, that
while countrywide citizens committed to the most elementary sense of
civilised conduct demanded the sternest punishment of the cops concerned, a
vast majority of the Bhagalpur residents applauded those custodians of law
as their true saviours?
Cut to the present. Global
Cop Bush has succeeded in consigning Saddam Hussein’s regime to the
dustbins of history. Everyone would agree that pouring acid in the eyes is a
sure way to blind a person, everyone would also agree that a blind man can
no longer engage in dacoity. Everyone was agreed that ‘Operation Shock and
Awe’ was sure to bring down Saddam, everyone agreed that Iraq would be
better off without the ‘Butcher of Baghdad.’
But in the eyes of anyone
with any concern for Due Process and the Rule of Law, the cops who poured
acid in the eyes of Bhagalpur’s dacoits were criminals. And so are George
Bush, Tony Blair and all those guilty of invading Iraq in callous disregard
to world opinion and UN statutes. Even as our thoughts go out to the Iraqi
victims of the violent intrusion in their land, fresh anxiety arises from
the news that defence secretary ‘Rummy’ and other hawks in the Bush
administration are already talking of the other ‘enemies of freedom’ in
the Gulf: Syria’s ‘fascist’ Baathists, Iran’s Shia ‘Islamists’
and Iran-supported Hezbollah, the Sunni al-Qaeda. Apparently, they, too,
need to be taken care of. And if so, isn’t a one-time ‘clean-up’ job
more sensible, and more economical, than to have to keep returning to this
murky region?
Back home, our cover story
this month focuses on the continuing trauma, one year later, of tens of
thousands of Muslim survivors of Genocide, Gujarat 2002. The state’s
police and government machinery in the grip of chief minister Narendra Modi
– the ‘chief author and architect’ of the pogrom –continues to
derail the process of justice. For the victim-survivors of the pogrom,
punishment to the perpetrators is a pipe dream, the situation worsened by
the fact that the marauders roam free. The belated application of POTA on
the Godhra accused while bail is freely given to those involved in the post-Godhra
carnage, speaks volumes of the BJP’s and the sangh parivar’s
allegiance to the constitutional imperative: equality before law and equal
protection of law. Compounding the state’s dereliction of duty is the role
of Gujarat’s citizenry in the continuing genocide, through crippling
economic and social boycott.
At the heart of the
Hindutva agenda, is the co-option of Dalits and their use during violence.
This was starkly visible, in Gujarart. A year later, stung by efforts among
Dalit organisations to mobilise on the issue of their oppression, the VHP
has crudely threatened to do unto Dalits what they unleashed on Muslims. We
report on this.
As was only too evident
from the "Gujarat experiment", hate speech and hate writing is an
essential component of the sangh parivar’s strategy of preparing a
social environment that sanctions violence against targeted sections. Our
special report on this issue records the long overdue steps now being taken
by a few states to muzzle the hate-mongers. An accompanying story details
the initiatives taken by the Citizens for Justice and Peace, Mumbai, and the
MKSS in Rajasthan to nudge the police, state governments and the courts into
preventive and penal action against habitual offenders who have so far acted
with impunity.
And from Karnataka we have
a report of an unprecedented and promising joint action in which activists,
intellectuals, farmers, cobblers, the Mobile Vegetable Vendors Association
and the Ladies Welfare Forum, joined hands with many others to challenge the
sangh parivar’s insidious bid to re-enact the Ayodhya script in the
Chikkamagalur district of Karnataka.
Political alliances between
avowedly secular parties could of course attain their desirable but limited
objective of dislodging the BJP from power. But it is people’s initiatives
such as this that would help detoxify and rejuvenate our body politic so
badly afflicted by Hindutva’s poison.
— EDITORS
