By Badri Raina | ZNet, June 14, 2008
When, after the massacre of Muslims in 2002, the electorate in Gujarat voted the butcher of Gandhinagar—the Capital city of Gujarat; but think of the enormous irony of that oxymoron—back to power, they effectively declared their secession from the Republic of India. If the founding principles of the Republic are "secularism" and "democracy," Modi's victorious constituency used the latter to spit at the former.
Just as the Germans had done in 1933—use democracy to install dictatorship.
Always to remember when we speak of Gujaratis that nearly a half of the electorate voted against him as well. Such are the ways in which franchise makes or unmakes, especially in an electoral system where all you need to do is to first pass the post. Much of the time, indeed, in such a dispensation it is the minority that rules the majority! Yet it is all we have for now.
Employing a diabolical double-speak, Modi berated the secularists for feeding off the Muslim "vote-bank" while simultaneously consolidating first a Hindutva constituency and then a regional/Gujarati one.
Effectively, Gujarat has come to be reconstructed as an alterity to the Indian nation-state. Not Kashmir, but Modi-led Gujarat.
Operating as the endorsed Chieftain of a triumphalist tribe, the Modi "government"—for want of another word—has, since that ineffaceable butchery in 2002—sought, every single step of the way to shield the Hindutva satraps (who were knee-deep in blood at the behest of the Chieftain) from the operations of the law, and brazenly to bring back into positions of authority publicly implicated high-ranking police officers, and at least one judge, name of Mehta, who was spoken of by the ripper-in-chief, Babu Bajrangi, in a sting tape as the judge that Modi brought back to secure the self-confessed ripper from the hangman, after two other judges had honourably refused to do the dirty work of granting him bail. Indeed the same "Justice" Mehta has now been drafted as part of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that the Supreme Court of India has assigned to look into the merit of some cases that are asking to be opened and reinvestigated!
As a result, lawyers working for the victims of the massacre have taken the only recourse of opting out of the proceedings in protest against the inclusion of Mehta and challenging his inclusion in the Supreme Court.
Among these worthies who have been recalled not just to life but to brazen authority is the police officer, Mathur, reinstated as the Police Commissioner of Ahmedabad.
And what could be a more ringing declaration of separate nationhood on behalf of the Chieftain state of Gujarat than that this same Mathur should now have instituted a charge of "sedition and treason" against the editor of the local edition of the Times of India (by any reckoning, one of the country's most widely read and puissant corporate English Dailies) for a story it did on him.
It must be understood that the charge of "sedition" may be brought against a citizen of the Republic only by the highest political/constitutional authority of the land, and only for actions provenly prejudicial to the security of the state. In post-independent India, such charge has been brought, as far as we can ascertain, only against some officers in the military for allegedly leaking Intelligence to the "enemy."
Clearly, therefore, Mathur could not have been the sanctioning brain/authority behind such a charge. By no stretch even of the fascist imagination could a police commissioner be deemed the equivalent of the State. The defiance and the daring must belong to the Chieftain whose dirty work he has been brought back to do. Ergo, "sedition" not against India, but against " Modiland." Since Modi alone may say with Louis xiv of old, "I am the State."
True to the ethics and oath of the Fourth Estate, the TOI story drew attention to evidence that this Mathur has had links with the criminal underworld, and thus cannot be deemed eligible for the responsibility bestowed upon him by his obliging Chieftain.
As reported in The Hindu of June 2, '08, the basis of the TOI story on Mathur's antecedents was a statement given by an underworld denizen that the Commissioner was at one time on the "Don's payroll."
Whereas Mathur may well have instituted a case of libel/defamation against the TOI, remarkably the case filed accuses the newspaper editor of "sedition and treason" against the state.
Not even during the dark days of the state of Internal Emergency imposed by the then Indira Gandhi government (1975-76) was, to the best of our knowledge, any member/organ of the Fourth Estate charged with "sedition and treason."
Indeed, two infamous instances that come to mind both pertain to the days of colonial rule.
I refer to the charge of "sedition" brought against Lokmanya Tilak and then Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in both cases for writing articles calculated to cause "disaffection" against the "legitimate government of the day." A charge which both those honourable men proudly acknowledged.
In Gujarat of our day, however, "sedition" has come to mean any word or act that contradicts the myth of "good governance" cheekily floated by Modi and gladly bought by his constituency, or any attempt to use public institutions to hold the Modi government to account.
Only two years ago, the editor of Surat Samna, Manoj Shinde was charged under section 124 A ("sedition") for commenting on the ineptitude of the authorities in handling the waters of the Ukai dam, which caused flooding in the city of Surat. The charge spelt out was that Shinde had instigated people against a duly elected government! (The Hindu, 30/08/2006).
Animal Farm? 1984? Take your pick.
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