His advice to Narendra Modi to observe the raj dharma of treating all citizens equally underlined his belief that this principle of governance was being ignored in the BJP’s Hindutva laboratory, as Gujarat was described at the time. The phrase is no longer used by the saffron brotherhood because Modi has turned his attention from pogrom to progress.

There were other evidences in the period before the IPS officer, Sanjiv Bhatt, broke his silence over what transpired in the chief minister’s office on the evening before the riots. One was Chandrababu Naidu’s observation that Modi would resign. The BJP’s ally of the time could not have made such an important statement unless there was something substantial in the political grapevine.

It later transpired that Vajpayee did consider calling for Modi’s resignation, but was dissuaded by those to the political right of the well-known mukhota (to recall Govindacharya’s word for the BJP moderate) like L.K. Advani, Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley and others. Their argument was that more riots might break out if the bhavna of the cadres erupted again. Their blackmail evidently worked.

However, if the Babri masjid demolition on the “saddest day” of Advani’s life has dented the party’s image, as the somewhat rusty loh purush has now conceded, so have the Gujarat riots, according to the state’s governor in that period, S.S. Bhandari. He later said that the outbreak was a “black stain on the BJP”. His comments have to be taken seriously because of his RSS background. “The riots were taken so lightly”, Bhandari said, “that they have left a deep wound … The propaganda related to Gandhi’s assassination went on for 50 years. In the same way, people will continue to talk of Godhra”.

An example of how “lightly” the riots were taken was clear from Modi’s description of them as “stray incidents” in a letter to the President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, and his callous and malicious categorization of the refugee camps as “child-producing factories”. The same dismissive mentality about a tragedy, which claimed 1,200 lives, can be seen from his remark to the US envoys that the outbreak was an “internal Gujarati affair”, which need not concern the outside world, as the Wikileaks have revealed.

But even as Modi tried to brush the deaths and devastation under the carpet with the help of a pliant bureaucracy, which continued to aid and abet his efforts by dismissing over 2,000 riot-related cases for want for evidence, what the chief minister and the BJP’s poster boy did not anticipate was how the conscience of a few individual officers could still throw a spanner his works.

One of the first officers who spoke out against him was R.B. Sreekumar, a senior intelligence officer, who recalled the chief minister’s “unconstitutional directives” to the police. Earlier, an unofficial inquiry committee heard from “a highly placed source” that Modi had ordered the police to let the Hindus vent their anger over the deaths of 58 kar sevaks in the Sabarmati express fire. The source requested the committee to keep his identity a secret, but it didn’t take long for the party to learn that he was none other than a minister, Haren Pandya. He was subsequently assassinated by suspected Muslim terrorists, but the official version did not satisfy his family.

After Sreekumar and Pandya, the third person who has confirmed what they said about Modi’s “unconstitutional” order is Bhatt. But his claim to have been present at the crucial meeting has been denied by his superiors though not by his driver. However, there was a curious episode a few months earlier when Modi went out of his way to tell the Special Investigation Team, which is supervised by the Supreme Court, that Bhatt was not present although the SIT had only asked him to name those who attended the meeting. As the Tehelka magazine said, “somebody had alerted Modi about Bhatt’s (earlier) statement before the SIT”. Hence, perhaps, Bhatt’s suspicion that the SIT is not doing its job impartially.

Even if, according to Jaitley, the truthfulness of an affidavit cannot be presumed, it is still capable of producing a ripple effect. Following Bhatt’s initiative, an IAS officer, Pradeep Sharma, has informed the SIT that the chief minister’s office had asked him during the riots to tell his brother, Kuldeep, who belongs to the IPS, to “abstain from taking any proactive measures in favour of minorities”. Not surprisingly, the BJP’s effects have now turned to digging up dirt on these officers.

Modi has had an easy run for far. In addition to the officers who toed his line, even the judiciary in the state did not cover itself with glory in punishing the guilty, as was evident from the Supreme Court’s indictment of the “infirmities” in the pronouncements of the local courts. But it is possible that his day of reckoning is drawing near. (IPA Service)