Ghosts don’t lie

What a sting operation in 2007 says has been in the public sphere since 2002. We have always known that the state in Gujarat allowed the gruesome violence to play out, when it didn’t actively collude in the killings. But there is more to this moment than just that. It frames the special resonance of Gujarat 2002 in the nation’s consciousness. In a country where outbreaks of communal violence have been much too frequent — the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi 1984 ranks among the most shameful — the post-Godhra carnage will not allow us to move on. The evidence of state culpability and the absence of reparation is far too insistent. It calls for some form of accountability to be enforced, before any possibility of closure.

The BJP’s reaction has served up yet more proof of its complete failure to either acknowledge the meaning of Gujarat, or the onus it has cast on the party. The BJP’s continuing refusal to look back and meet Gujarat in the eye is not just morally repugnant, it’s also politically paralysing. To get a sense of that, the party need only look at its current predicaments at the Centre and in Gujarat and wonder why the two just won’t add up. On the eve of a possible mid-term national election, the BJP has a conspicuous vacuum where it should have had a mascot, or leader. On the eve of Gujarat’s assembly polls, it is widely speculated that Narendra Modi is poised to win another popular mandate. Yet, all suggestions that Modi could be the answer to the BJP’s leadership crisis must be scotched before they can be shouted down. The reason is not hard to find: Modi cannot be deemed acceptable as a national leader as long as his regime is seen as a live metaphor for the complicit and unrepentant state. Till then, he may get the vote in Gujarat, but he cannot hope to achieve the wider acceptance required for a national footprint. Till then, all his attempts to reinvent his persona and change the subject to development, will be essentially in vain.

Till the guilty of Gujarat 2002 are brought to book, the opprobrium, moral as well as political, will attach to the BJP. The party must realise that it does not have the option to evade and to sidestep. The BJP’s politics runs through Gujarat. Should the party need inspiration to do the right thing in this context, it has it in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s expression of unqualified regret for the anti-Sikh violence of 1984.