Gujarat’s cricket test

The photograph in this paper on Monday framed a newly silent street in Viramgam, near Ahmedabad on Sunday. It all began with a cricket match, they say, and a wayward ball landing in an old temple compound. Then there was stone pelting, rioters, someone opened fire, the violence spread and mobs looted shops. The “area has always been communally sensitive” the district collector explained away the day’s events to the Express and the DIG counted out the “incidents”: 38 in the last 12 months alone. But Sunday’s flareup in Viramgam will not be dismissed as another routine statistic of a chronic violence by an administration casually tolerant of it. Viramgam’s curfew bound streets frame an open indictment.

Ever since he won the vote, in the wake of an unprecedentedly communal campaign, Gujarat watchers have desperately wanted to suspend disbelief. They have hoped that confident in his mandate, Narendra Modi would now try and put the horrible events of 2002 behind and help the state move ahead. They have willed him to make the slogan he coined — of ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ — come true. But so far, Modi’s flamboyant efforts to repackage Gujarat have failed to meet these hopes. Yes, Modi has tried to talk up Gujarat’s image during foreign jaunts and he hosted the much hyped Global Investors Meet in September. Yes, his government has made some genuine moves towards economic reform. But Gujarat needs something more to be whole again. The state needs a ‘healing touch’ policy of its own. It needs a government that can assure its insecure minority community that what happened during those horrific months last year will not revisit it again. A government that holds up the vision of a better future by honestly making amends for the past.

Modi’s government is not that government, yet. The chief minister of Gujarat continues to be a polarising figure. He presides over an administration that only reluctantly admitted to its failures in upholding the rule of law before a questioning court. Modi hopes to be rechristened CEO of a state that is a Dynamo of Growth. But for that, he must first strengthen Gujarat’s fragile peace and create an atmosphere that ensures zero tolerance for ‘incidents’, such as the one that has emptied the streets of Viramgam.