It is totally perverse of me, of course, but the sequence leading to Godhra and Gujarat does, to my implausible way of thinking, begin to develop in July 2001. That is when the Agra summit failed.In Agra the contest was between Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “soft” line and the “hard” line generally associated with L.K. Advani. The most important issue on the Sangh Parivar’s mind in the sultry July of 2001 was the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh just about six months away. Relations with Pakistan have always, in some measure, determined internal political dynamics whenever “hard” or “soft” saffron are the choices on offer. If the Vajpayee-Jaswant Singh line had prevailed in Agra, the tone of the election campaign in UP would automatically have been “softer”. But events turned out differently. Barely two months after Agra, 9/11 happened. The “hardliners” were elated. The global situation now seemed to favour them. Pakistan, enmeshed as it was in Afghanistan, abode of Osama bin Laden, was now in a pincer. The world’s mightiest power was leading the war against terrorism. India, victim of Pakistan’s cross border terrorism, was a natural ally of the US in this war. The “hardliners” expected two positive consequences from this war. Pakistan would be rapped on the knuckles for sustaining a low intensity conflict against India in Kashmir. The “hard” line in internal politics would derive strength from the new global configuration. The December 13 attack on Parliament caused even the “softliners” to embrace the “hard” line. With eyeball to eyeball confrontation between the two armed forces, nuclear threats et al, the “hard” line was quite on top. Pota was put to indiscriminate use. Most of those taken into custody were members of sundry Muslim organisations. TV networks have in their archives speeches of BJP’s chosen man in UP, Rajnath Singh. During the UP campaign his speeches were comparable to anything Narendra Modi said later in Gujarat. It was all building up nicely to the state elections in February. Meanwhile, the regional-global situation was taking a turn not entirely helpful to the “hardliners”. Pervez Musharraf was proving to be a more nimble footed realist than the establishment in New Delhi had bargained for. He made a strategic u-turn. He joined the American war on “terror” and turned upon the Taliban in Afghanistan. Zia-ul-Haq’s script on Afghanistan was put through the shredders. Pakistan became a frontline state for the US once again in circumstances totally different from days when it was in the vanguard against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This turn of events pained the entire establishment in New Delhi, not just the “hardliners”. The pain was even more unbearable when the US seemed to tolerate infiltrations across the LoC to accommodate Musharraf’s internal difficulties. But, as in cricket, once you have committed yourself to a stroke, the best course is to go through with it. Meanwhile, the regional-global situation was not as encouraging in February 2002 (when polls were to be held) as it was on September 11, 2001. But the “hardliners” were seduced by their own propaganda. To add to the general air of hard saffron, victory celebrations were planned in Ayodhya. On February 24-25 the UP results would be known. Televised celebrations would break out in Ayodhya. The “party of governance” would intervene, calm the situation, and cheerful kar sevaks would be sent home. They would return even by the ill-fated Sabarmati Express from Faizabad to Ahmedabad. Godhra happens to be on the way. Godhra’s two lakh population is equally divided between Hindus and Muslims Relations between the two communities have been traditionally strained. In fact the Muslim half of the town has been named “Pakistan”. This is strange because power politics in the local municipality results in combinations across communal lines. Just before the Godhra train episode, Muslim members of the municipality had switched sides, bringing down the BJP mayor. So political complications had already aggravated Godhra’s social tensions. This, then, was the state of play, when the election results in UP stunned the Sangh Parivar. The political citadels of the BJP panicked. Dates of the election results are important. On February 25-26 it was clear the BJP had been routed. Kar sevaks assembled in Ayodhya for victory celebrations returned home in uncontrollable anger. Not just UP, two assembly by-elections in Gujarat were lost to the Congress. Even Modi scraped through by the narrowest of margins. On the morning of February 27, barely 24 hours after the election results were known, compartment S-6 of Sabarmati Express was set on fire, killing 56, mostly women and children. That night Gujarat was ablaze. The country had never seen a pogrom on this scale. The rest is recent history.
