Syed Ali Safvi
Better late than never! The supreme court of India on Monday convicted 23 people for their role in infamous 2002 Gujarat riots. Although belated, the decision must be welcomed.
Over 2000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in one of the brutal massacres of Muslims in India that will go down in the history as one of the worst examples of pogrom.
The father of the Indian nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, once said that India would be known by the way it treats its minorities. If Gandhi were alive today, he certainly would have hung his head in shame after seeing his dream of Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity being tethered by some Hindu fanatics who are hell-bent on spreading communal animosity.
India boasts about its tenets of secularism and democratic values, but it is just empty rhetoric that is not reflected in the realities on the ground.
It has been proven time and again that the Indian state has failed to protect its minorities. The West Bengal riots, the Delhi riots, the Jammu massacre, the 1984 Sikh riots, the Babri Masjid demolition, the Baghalpur riots, the Gujarat pogrom, and hundreds and thousands of such communal riots in a span of 65 years have exposed the underbelly of Indian secularism.
The world has seen how secularism and the “age-old history” of religious tolerance were trampled upon by the successors of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s ‘ideology of hate’.
The seeds of communal hatred were sown by the members of the Hindu Mahasabha long ago, even before the very idea of Pakistan came into being.
Contrary to the common belief that Jinnah originated the two-nation theory, actually it was Savarkar who propounded the theory years before the Muslim League embraced the idea. Savarkar had commanded all the Muslims to leave ‘Bharat’ to pave the way for the establishment of “Hindu Rashtra”. When Jinnah introduced his two-nation theory, Savarkar announced, “I have no quarrel with Mr. Jinnah’s two-nation theory… It is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations.”
“His (Savarkar’s) doctrine was Hindutva, the doctrine of Hindu racial supremacy, and his dream was of rebuilding a great Hindu empire from the sources of the Indus to those of the Brahmaputra. He hated Muslims. There was no place for them in the Hindu society he envisioned.” (Freedom at Midnight, by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins).
So the hate campaign against Muslims was well in place even before the partition of erstwhile British India. This and many other significant factors forced Jinnah to demand a separate nation for Muslims as he believed that Muslims would not be safe in India -- a prophetic declaration indeed! There is no denying the fact that Jinnah was secular to the marrow and would never have wished to cut ties with India, but circumstances compelled him to do so. However, he had not harbored grudges against India or its leaders. He had kept his house on Malabar Hill, thinking he could weekend there, while running his country from Karachi on weekdays, but destiny had something else in store for the estranged neighbors of the Asia Partition.
When Nathuram Godse pumped three bullets into Gandhi, a section of the Hindu community compared him with Judas. The writing was on the wall. The divide was evident. In some areas people mourned the death of Gandhi, and in other areas they distributed sweets, held celebrations, and demanded the release of Godse. Gandhi’s crime was that he had demanded security for Muslims.
The seeds of partition were actually sown by the stalwarts of Hindu Mahasabha, primarily the quartet of Savarkar, Gawarikar, Apte, and Nathuram Godse. Independent India’s history is testimony to the fact that in a conflict between the forces of secular nationalism and religious communalism, the latter has always ruled the roost. Secular forces have more often than not ended up playing into the hands of communal forces. Such has been the history of independent India.
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