Twenty three years have passed since the gruesome genocidal massacre in Gujarat in March 2002. The memory of those horrific days continues to haunt the affected people and all Indian people of conscience.
The homes and shops of Muslims all across the state were looted and destroyed. Thousands were slaughtered. Unspeakable atrocities were committed, including the rape and murder of hundreds of women and girls. Numerous places of worship were destroyed, including tombs of revered Sufi saints. The genocide continued unabated for several weeks. Tens of thousands of children were turned into orphans. Over 2 lakh people were turned into refugees, forced to live for months on end in refugee camps in indescribable conditions.
Not a “riot”, but a state organized genocide
Officially, what happened in Gujarat is called a “riot”. It is made out that the people of Gujarat, provoked by the burning alive of people in a coach of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra on February 27, spontaneously went around massacring Muslims. It is made out that the BJP Government of Gujarat and the BJP led NDA government at the center were taken “unaware” by the development of events, but tried their best to control the situation.
This is a complete distortion of the truth. All facts show that what took place in Gujarat was pre-planned and organized by the ruling party, the BJP, with the full participation of the state machinery. Led by ministers, MLAs and top functionaries of the BJP and allied organisations, armed gangs went about the streets of Ahmedabad, Vadodara and other cities, towns and villages across Gujarat. They had voters’ lists in their hands to identify Muslim households. They were armed with petrol bombs, gas cylinders, inflammable chemical powders and trishuls.
The Chief Minister and leading members of his cabinet and his party, officials of the state administration, top police officials in Ahmedabad and various districts of Gujarat actively participated in the organizing of the genocide. This has come out very clearly from the evidence of the victims, as well as from various police and administrative officials who refused to participate in the genocide. It has come out in the report of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal, published in November 2002.
The Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal, headed by Late Justice VR Krishna Iyer, was formed by Citizens for Peace and Justice, a group of activists from Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The other members of the tribunal were Justice PB Sawant, Justice Hosbet Suresh, KG Kannabiran, Aruna Roy, KS Subramanian, Ghanshyam Shah and Tanika Sarkar. The report of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal clearly held the Government of Gujarat guilty of organizing a genocide. It accused the Central Government of taking no action to stop the genocide. It called for punishing the guilty, as the very first step in ensuring justice for the victims of the genocide, and ensuring that such state organised genocides were not organised ever again. It named several persons, including those in the highest echelons of the government and the police, whom it held responsible for organising the genocide.
The ground work for the genocide had been prepared by continuous poisonous communal propaganda by the BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal. Training camps were being regularly organised all over the state to indoctrinate youth with hatred towards Muslims. Trishuls were distributed to youth, who were promised money and protection for participating in violent acts against Muslims.
On the morning of 27 February, 2002, the Sabarmati Express from Ayodhya to Ahmedabad was overflowing with thousands of karsevaks who had taken over the reserved births from the regular passengers. The Forensic Science Laboratory of Gujarat clearly pointed out that the fire that engulfed the coach in which 58 people, the majority of whom were women and children, were burnt to death, came from inside the coach. Till today, the agencies of the Indian state have not established whether the fire in the Sabarmati express was deliberately set, and if so, who set it from inside the coach. This did not stop the Gujarat government, with the full backing of the Central government, to deliberately target the Muslims in the state.
The Government of Gujarat, headed by then Chief Minister Modi, carried out the propaganda that the train at Godhra was set on fire by Muslims living in a slum near the railway line. The state government organized for the bodies to be paraded by road from Godhra to Ahmedabad, to incite passions. Top state police officials were instructed to allow mobs of killers a free hand to carry out the genocide. Those police officers who implemented the government’s orders were rewarded with promotions. The handful of police officers who refused to do so in their districts, or later exposed the government’s role, were punished.
In November 1984, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi justified the genocide of Sikhs saying “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes”. Eighteen years later, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi justified the genocide of Muslims with the words “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”.
Following the Gujarat genocide, hundreds of people from all faiths boldly took up the task of assisting the survivors of the genocide, who were living in miserable conditions in refugee camps. Students, youth, cultural activists, lawyers, rights activists all played an important role in this. In a climate of poison and hatred deliberately spread by the government, braving the threats of the ruling party, they came forward to assist the families of the victims to somehow start afresh — organizing that the children could go to school, and the women could earn some means of livelihood.
Various citizens heroically took up the challenge of exposing the role of the state in the genocide. Their work and struggle helped to establish once again, as in 1984, that the people of our country are not communal. The people are not the organizers of communal genocides. It is the parties of the ruling class, such as Congress and BJP, which use the state machinery to organize genocides.
Women and men of conscience have joined hands with the victims of the Gujarat genocide in the struggle to punish the guilty. They have faced unimaginable state terror. The highest courts of the land have openly revealed that they will take no step to punish the guilty. The government that supervised the massacre has been given a clean chit. Instead, activists who have fought boldly to punish the guilty have been locked up in the jails, on the order of the Supreme Court. For 23 years, the survivors of the genocide, who lost their homes and loves ones, as well as their means of livelihood, have been treated with total contempt by the Indian state, which has done its best to ensure that the real culprits are never convicted and punished.
The Gujarat genocide was an attack on the unity of the working people. The ruling capitalist class used it to divide the people of Gujarat and the whole country and line them up behind its anti-social offensive of globalization through privatisation and liberalization.
The people who were horrified by the genocidal crimes committed by the BJP government were called upon to support the Congress. In 2004, a Congress led UPA government came to power at the center, with the support of the CPI and CPI(M), under the banner of opposing communalism. However, it took no step to punish those guilty of organising the Gujarat genocide. Instead, in the name of keeping communal forces out of power, the working class was asked to support the program of privatisation and liberalization.
Organising communal genocide is an integral part of the arsenal of the ruling class. The capitalist class of our country has shown that it can go to any extent, including organizing genocides, in order to divide and crush the working class and people. This is the reason neither of the two main parties of the capitalist class, BJP and Congress, will punish the guilty.
The people of India, irrespective of their religious beliefs, have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by getting divided on communal lines. It is in the interest of the people of our country to end communal violence and ensure that the organizers of communal massacres are punished.
The struggle to punish those guilty of organizing the Gujarat genocide, the 1984 genocide of Sikhs, and other communal massacres, shall continue. All women and men of conscience must wage this struggle with the perspective of establishing a new system in which the human rights of all, including the right to conscience, is guaranteed, and mechanisms are put into place to ensure the severest punishment for those who violate these rights.