‘Moral retort’
Even as 1984 largely fades from public memory as a
signifier of mass deaths, rapes and the state’s lack of will to
protect its ‘minority’ citizens, it has been resurrected within the
political discourse in an unexpected new role – as that of a ‘moral
retort’.
In the past decade or so we have witnessed its
reappearance mainly as a moral counterweight that is dispassionately
invoked from time to time whenever the BJP is confronted over its
culpability in the 2002 Gujarat violence. In this functional
incarnation, 1984 has often been described by LK Advani as a “greater
shame and agony” than the killings that followed the destruction of
the Babri Masjid as well as the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. This
memorial evocation of the 1984 violence thus serves at least two
entwined purposes. At once it underlines the depth of suffering
experienced by the victims at the hands of a high-handed state and
then in doing so reduces the suffering of the Gujarat victims by
placing the victims of 1984 hierarchically above them. Probably the
most unsettling aspect of this moral taxonomy is that the collective
suffering of a group of victims is used to minimise the claims of
suffering of another victim group.
Consider the following: Mr Advani has often
painstakingly made a case for prosecution of the perpetrators of the
massacre of Sikhs while in the same breath he minimises or rather
dismisses the Gujarat massacre. His much favoured discursive device to
achieve this dual objective is to imbue the 1984 violence with a kind
of uniqueness that separates it from all other events of violence in
India’s recent history. In widely reported interviews, Mr Advani
routinely describes the massacre of Sikhs as a state-orchestrated
pogrom while the Gujarat violence for him is merely a ‘riot’ that
happened spontaneously as an emotional response to the Godhra
incident. It couldn’t be more ironical and insidious than this: to
claim to feel the pain and disenchantment of one group of victims of
state violence only in order to dismiss the suffering of another
group.
This malaise goes beyond one political leader and one
party, however. Any quick search of various online debates would
reveal how the collective suffering of thousands of victims of state
violence is routinely utilised in the public domain. The most frequent
theme that makes zealous online activists dig into the public archive
of memory is that of Narendra Modi’s chances of becoming India’s prime
minister. In the rough speak of online debates, contributors ask
without hesitation if the Congress party can demand accountability of
Chief Minister Modi, given its own record on 1984. The online
supporters of the Congress party similarly point to the moral
bankruptcy of the BJP-RSS vis-ŕ-vis their role in the 2002 pogrom. The
point raised in this discourse is not about demanding justice for the
victims of either 1984 or 2002; it is about cynically denying justice
to one group because the other has not received justice yet.
The victims of anti-minority violence – the dead and
the displaced, the widows and the orphans – have thus unwittingly
become participants in what has to be among the most tragic and
bizarre political theatres in contemporary India. Their pain, loss and
suffering have been transformed into a political instrument to mute
calls for justice for the ‘other’ victims of similarly orchestrated
massacres. It is as if the two massacres somehow cancel out or make up
for the horror and pain felt by the victims in Delhi and Ahmedabad.
This moral retortion is intended to serve as an eraser on the nation’s
violence scorecard: ‘your victims’ against ‘our victims’ equals a
clean scorecard.
Truth and reconciliation
Societies that experience violent ruptures, and are
keen on repairing them, usually pursue either the judicial system to
seek redress – to identify, prosecute and punish the guilty – or the
more favoured path in recent years, of post-apartheid-type truth and
reconciliation commissions where the focus is less on punishment and
more on grieving, mourning and forgiving. In many cases, for instance
South Africa and Guatemala, both the justice system and the truth
commission are invoked to heal the raw wounds. The most significant
ingredient here is the willingness of the state to actively
participate in the reconciliation processes. And this is precisely
what has been lacking in the case of both the1984 and 2002 massacres.
The state, if at all, has seemed less than eager to repair the breach
of trust with its minority communities.
The much favoured gesture of conciliation adopted by
the Indian state has been the establishment of commissions of inquiry
chaired by retired judges. The purpose and objective of such bodies is
deliberately left unclear. The terms of reference are often weak and
the outcome is usually wrapped in indecisive legal language that
seldom makes any forthright and readily legible statements. The
victims who are invited to narrate their stories of suffering in duly
sworn and attested affidavits do so with the hope of gaining justice.
Yet those hopes remain unfulfilled, as commissions seldom have the
power to do anything beyond making non-binding recommendations. The
1984 violence, for instance, has been the subject of 10 commissions in
the past 27 years; in one case, the commission wound up with the
suggestion that three new commissions be appointed instead.
The commissions, it seems, grow and die in a life
cycle of their own that eventually has little to do with the crimes
they are supposed to investigate. They are neither proper courts where
the accused can be tried nor are they truth and reconciliation type of
bodies with an agenda to better community relations. The only trace
they probably leave is a voluminous report, often diluted at the last
minute, which may or may not ever be made public by the government in
power.
A widely held belief among social scientists and
activists is that victims of suffering want most of all to be listened
to in order to heal their wounds. Indeed the therapeutic effect of
being able to narrate one’s suffering – and to be able to reveal one’s
wounds publicly – cannot be underestimated. Yet what is often
forgotten is that for the victims, the path to reconciliation and
forgiveness is as much about seeking justice as it is about
articulating their woundedness. The cheerful images of those accused
of organising violence, in the news media – being felicitated by
supporters, addressing election rallies, etc – can surely neither be
read as signs of justice nor reconciliation.