Is This Normal, Mr Modi?

He said this with the rhetorical flourish of a practised politician, so I asked if he was an activist of the Bajrang Dal or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and he said they all were. ‘‘See that sign over there,’’ he said, pointing to a saffron board. ‘‘It says ‘Hindu Rashtra, village Mogri’. This is a Hindu Rashtra and it will stay that way. Modi will win because he protects us, if he wasn’t there and the Congress was in power, half of the people you see here would have been in jail’’.

There were, by now, between 30 and 40 men in the teashop and they laughed when he said this.

I asked if they thought that the massacres of Muslims and the rape of young girls in Ahmedabad had been a good thing and they said, with angry unanimity and conviction, that there had been no rapes except in Godhra, where 20 women, according to the Gujrati newspapers, had been raped. Were they aware, I asked, that this was untrue and that the newspapers (Sandesh, Gujarat Samachar) had published denials, but this provoked more anger. ‘‘It is the English newspapers that tell lies,’’ they said. ‘‘No women were raped in Ahmedabad and yet they keep writing that they were. Hindus cannot do such things, we are different to Muslims. If a Hindu king decides that his younger son will be his heir, then that is what happens. But with the Muslims, they kill their own brothers. They are violent people and history tells us this. Go and read your history.’’

When I drew their attention back to the subject of local Muslims and why they had not returned to their homes, they said that there was one Muslim still living in the village and I could go and ask him if he was living peacefully or not. Then began a tirade against the English language press so angry and so aggressive that it seemed that there could be more violence unless I beat a retreat.

IN a village near Mogri, I met some of the Muslims who had once lived there. When I asked why they had not tried going back to their homes, they said that they had tried. A Muslim DSP called Wahbag Zameer had helped them go back to see their destroyed homes, but they realised they could not stay when a crowd started threatening them.

What about the Muslim who continues to live there, I asked. ‘‘That is Basheer and he runs the water system in the village. He is the only one who knows how to, so they brought him back. The rest of us cannot return because all those who were involved in the violence have been released on bail.’’ Nobody was killed in Mogri but of 62 Muslim homes, 42 were destroyed and the others looted. A dargah was also destroyed.

Among the refugees from Mogri was a man from Ode whose wife and two young children were among the 23 people killed in that village the day after the Godhra incident. He named those whom he said had been responsible for chasing the 23 people — mostly women and children — into a house and then burning them alive. ‘‘Hemantbhai, Sanat Kumar Ranchodbhai, Dilipbhai, Vinoobhai, they were all Patels and they have all been released on bail.’’

Ode is a large, prosperous village with several large, double-storey houses that look like they could be in suburban Delhi or Mumbai. Before Godhra, 250 Muslim families lived here. After Godhra, every Muslim home was destroyed and looted but in the past six weeks some Muslim families have started trickling back to the ruins that were once their homes. They are trying to rebuild them with the help of an organisation called the Islamic Relief Committee because government help has been either inadequate or late in coming.

The revenge that Ode’s villages took for Godhra on local Muslims hangs in the village air like an unspeakable secret. Fear of further violence is so pervasive that Muslims no longer dare speak in front of the Hindus. No one has the courage to take me to the remains of the building where 23 of Ode’s Muslim citizens were killed. If I want to see it, they tell me, then I should go myself because one of the killers — a Patel boy of about 22 — is sitting in front of it. In a feeble attempt to find out how an ordinary young man could turn suddenly into a ruthless killer, I stop to talk to him. Yes, he was here the night the Muslims were killed and yes, their remains lie buried below that destroyed building but nobody feels any remorse in the village. Why not? ‘‘If you want to know why go to Godhra,’’ he says angrily, ‘‘go to Kashmir and see what they are doing to Hindus. This is India and it is for the Hindus. There is no room for the Muslims’’. The young man sits on the doorstep of his home with his younger sisters and brothers, who wear school uniforms and absorb wide-eyed what he says.

Later, in the village’s main square where Hindu elders sit outside a Muslim shop, I try to find out where so much hatred has come from that people who, till Godhra, had lived peacefully for centuries should suddenly turn on their neighbours and kill their women and children. In a last, hopeless effort to find some signs of remorse, amity, just the beginnings of normalcy, I ask them if it is right for them to be killing innocent people in their village in revenge for the actions of Muslims somewhere else. An old man with white hair and thick glasses says, ‘‘They started it. You must remember they started it. This would never happened if Godhra had not happened and if they weren’t killing Hindus in J&K.’’

LATER, in Anand town, I meet the Paish Imam of the Jama Masjid, M Luqman Qasmi Tarapuri. Part of it, he says, is the result of a sustained campaign over many years by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP but after September 11, things became a lot worse. ‘‘After the attacks in America, Hindus started thinking of all Muslims as terrorists. When I go out these days dressed like this (white religious robes and skull cap) people look at me immediately with suspicion. It never used to be this way.’’

Narendra Modi acknowledges the hatred exists but claims it is something he as a mere chief minister can do nothing about. In an interview on the eve of his Gaurav Yatra he said, ‘‘It is a subject for social scientists. We have to find answers, it will not do to just blame anyone. So many years after Independence we need to find out why this is happening’’. The reason why Modi would rather leave the search for answers to the foggy realms of academia is because anyone even remotely connected with the Sangh Parivar already knows the answers.

You have to be a Gujarati Muslim to know how over the 10 years that there has been a BJP government in this state, you have been slowly pushed into imaginary and literal ghettos. Younger Muslims say they first noticed a campaign against them in college when a Sangh Parivar offshoot called the Durga Vahini went about warning Hindu girls to stay away from Muslim men. A Muslim social activist who requested anonymity said, ‘‘The violence we saw against Muslim women and young girls has something, in my view, to do with the way in which Hindu men have been made to feel that their women have been exploited by Muslim men’’.

The Sangh Parivar has actively worked over the years to break up inter-communal marriages. Stories abound of Hindu girls being forced out of marriages with Muslims. The modus operandi is to send the police to investigate and often charges of being a Pakistani agent are made against the Muslim husband. The campaign against them has been so systematic that marriages that took place nearly 20 years ago have suddenly come to the notice of the police. During riots in Ahmedabad, a Hindu woman was stabbed to death in full public view only because she had a Muslim husband, who was also killed.

ONE of the ugliest features of the recent violence in Gujarat was the brutality with which women were treated, with even young girls not being spared. Few other communal riots have seen this number of rapes (nearly 100, according to social activists, only three according to Modi) and never have there been incidents of babies being torn out of the wombs of pregnant women and beaten to death. Muslims I talked to said this kind of brutality was caused partly by Gujarati newspapers reporting (and two days later denying) that Hindu women had been molested in Godhra and partly because of sustained propaganda about Muslim men exploiting Hindu women. I was shown leaflets that boasted of how the Durga Vahini had ‘‘rescued’’ Hindu women from the clutches of Muslim men.

In Gujarat, creating differences between the two communities was easier than it would be in other Indian states, oddly enough, because of eating habits. The average Gujarati Hindu, regardless of his caste, tends to be vegetarian whereas the Muslim eats meat. Vegetarianism in Gujarat is not pacifist but viciously aggressive so, in cities like Ahmedabad, examples abound of building societies refusing to sell or rent flats to eaters of meat.

Until the VHP and the Bajrang Dal spread its influence, though, there was considerable mixing among the communities at festivals and other social events and a deliberate campaign has taken place to stop this. According to a Muslim lawyer I talked to, ‘‘During Navratri, Muslims always took part in the garba dancing but organisations like the Durga Vahini have worked hard to stop this. Muslim youths at these events would suddenly come under attack for some alleged misdemeanour and slowly they stopped going to avoid trouble’’.

Differences in culture, eating habits, religious attitudes and history have been exploited by the Sangh Parivar and long before Godhra, the poison had spread deep into Gujarat. The physical presence of VHP and Bajrang Dal workers has increased. According to one estimate, there is a Bajrang Dal worker for every 2,000 people. That the poison they spread has gone deep can be seen from the economic boycott of Muslims that has continued till today. Restaurants and shops owned by Muslims were systematically destroyed, and many remain burnt out husks, but even those who are trying to get back into business find less Hindu clientele today. Muslims working in Hindu families also find themselves suddenly out of work.

In Anand I met a young Muslim who had worked as a driver in a Hindu household for 18 years and suddenly found himself out of a job and home. ‘‘I was virtually brought up as a member of the family but after Godhra, my boss told me that he could no longer employ me because his samaj was putting pressure on him.’’

SO, where does Gujarat go from here? The best answer came from a member of the Sangh Parivar. ‘‘Gujarat is a border state,’’ he said, ‘‘but so far we have had no ISI here because they have not found local helpers. Today, they will find not hundreds but thousands of Muslims ready to help. The situation will be hard for anyone to control but, unfortunately, it is not just Modi but even senior leaders in Delhi who are thinking only of the elections’’.

Which brings us to the question of whether Narendra Modi will win whenever elections are held and the answer, sadly, is yes. Not just because of the hatred and the polarisation between the two communities, but also because of the abysmal failure of the Congress to stand up for the secularism they claim to represent. If they worked in any of the camps where the desperate and destitute victims of Gujarat’s terrible violence went, then there are no signs of it and if they are out there now trying to heal wounds or bring Hindus and Muslims together, then again, it has to be said there are no signs. Shankarsinh Vaghela’s only response so far to Modi’s Gaurav Yatra has been his own yatra. It is not good enough, not good enough by far.