Among those who mentioned the outbreak was Goa’s chief minister, Manohar Parrikar, who described the tragic incidents as a “clear-cut” case of “administrative failure” and a “bad example of governance”. Although Parrikar sought to explain the “failure” as a result of the fact that “Modi may not have had that kind of grip on the administration as he has now”, his condemnation of the lapses is patent enough. For someone like Modi who is held up by the corporate sector as a model administrator, Parrikar’s criticism is hurtful.

The Goa chief minister is not the only BJP leader who has expressed his dissatisfaction over the Gujarat government’s inability to control the riots, which continued for more than a month and claimed 1,200 lives officially and at least 2,000 unofficially.

Shortly after the disturbances, the state’s governor, S.S. Bhandari, who was known for the RSS background, described the riots as a “black stain on the BJP”. Not only that, just as the then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was believed to have considered sacking Modi, Bhandari said that dismissing the chief minister “was one way out, but there were other ways to deal with the situation”.

According to Bhandari, “the riots were taken so lightly that they have left a deep wound … The propaganda related to (Mahatma) Gandhi’s assassination went for 50 years. In the same way, people will continue to talk of Godhra”. A measure of how “lightly” the riots were taken can be seen from Modi’s dismissive description of the disturbances at the time as “stray incidents”.

Modi’s trivializing of the tragedy can also be seen from his letter to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, following the call for a judicial probe, in which he wanted a compilation of the statistics of all the “terrorist or extremist attacks, group clashes and communal violence” that had taken place since 1947 ! Modi’s calculation apparently was that the “stray incidents” of 2002 would be buried under the avalanche of data produced by the exercise.

A similar attempt at obfuscation can be seen in BJP president Rajnath Singh’s recent observation that since 13,000 communal incidents had taken place before the 2002 riots, “can we not ignore them now ?” However, a study of these incidents, as Modi wanted, will not show the saffron brotherhood in a favourable light for, as in 2002, its complicity in the violence has been noted by several judicial commissions.

For instance, the Jaganmohan Reddy commission, which inquired into the 1969 riots in Ahmedabad, blamed the RSS and the Jana Sangh for the outbreak. It noted that voters lists were used to identify Muslim households, as was done during the Mumbai riots of 1992. Similarly, the Jitendra Narain commission saw the hands of the RSS in the 1979 riots in Jamshedpur.

As Parrikar’s and Rajnath Singh’s comments show, the BJP has become aware that Modi’s ploy of focussing only on Gujarat’s development will not be enough to turn the spotlight away from 2002. The party will once again have to respond to the unanswered questions on the outbreak. The fact that court cases are continuing on the riots as well as on other incidents like the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter will not make its task easy, not least because no one knows what awkward issues may come up.

Modi may have wanted to brush the tragedy under the carpet, but the party cannot do so. Hence, Rajnath Singh’s somewhat pathetic appeal to the Muslim community during a meeting in Jaipur to approach him directly if the Muslims experienced any “discrimination” in the BJP-ruled states. Considering that Rajnath Singh was heckled at the meeting, it is possible to argue that Modi’s elevation in the BJP hierarchy has created a feeling of uneasiness among the minorities.

It is this nervous reaction which Nitish Kumar must have sensed via his party’s grassroots connections, which explains why he wasted no time after Modi’s appointment as the BJP’s campaign chief to leave the NDA. The Bihar chief minister realized that it would be politically fatal for him to remain in the NDA on the plea that Modi had not yet been made the prime ministerial nominee.

What these developments suggest is that it isn’t only the 2002 riots which will feature in the poll campaign, but also the old question of the BJP’s attitude on the communal question, which the party wanted to put on the back burner in 1996 by shelving its pro-Hindu agenda of building the Ram temple, introducing uniform civil code and scrapping the special status for Kashmir.

Since Modi has revived two of these three points, the communal angle is back in full force. (IPA Service)