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Journalism of Courage
The silence from 11, Ashoka Road over Friday’s verdict on the Best Bakery retrial case was deafening. It would, of course, have been unrealistic in the extreme to have imagined that Narendra Modi would suddenly have discovered a belated sense of personal accountability. But the least that could have been expected from a major national party like the BJP was a token word of welcome that the perpetrators of the tableau of horror, which played out in a small Vadodara bakery on March 1, 2002, have finally been made to pay for their barbarism. Instead, the party’s spokesman, Arun Jaitley — who is generally never short of words on any subject under the sun — found that he had nothing to say on the matter. In Gujarat, too, tongues were firmly anchored, and the chief minister went about his agenda with perfect composure.
This is not just bad morality, it is exceedingly poor political strategy. Surely the BJP does not want to appear to condone the vicious crimes of Gujarat 2002? Justice does not come in political colours. If a fair trial is a human rights issue that concerns every citizen equally, regardless of their political orientation, the BJP too surely has a stake in the process? The party has already paid heavily for its reluctance to come clean on Gujarat. Its credibility as a party of governance was severely questioned. If the party doesn’t believe this, it should get its political allies, current or erstwhile — people like Chandrababu Naidu and Mamata Banerjee — to provide it with the big picture.
Or, it might have a chat with Congress party leaders, who have had to carry the albatross of the ’84 riots, these 20 years and more. To this day, the dismal failure of governments headed by the Congress to throw even one person into jail for those riots that killed some 3,000 Sikhs that fateful November is a blot that it can never erase. The party’s attempt to brazen its way through that period — separate chargesheets on the various cases were filed only ten years later, after the courts stepped in — has come back to haunt it, time and time again.
Political circumstances conspired to force both the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, and the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to apologise to the nation and to the Sikh community for that carnage. The BJP has still to face its moment of truth.
