Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi tending to a Muslim riot victim. Narendra Modi seeking an army flag march in the beleaguered town of Vadodara. Narendra Modi announcing that no rioter, irrespective of his community, will be spared. All this may sound spectacularly unusual to those who refuse to see the man beyond the realm of communal bigotry. He is actually a smart politician who hates any riot he does not have a hand in, for it doesn’t suit his timing. This riot in Vadodara, unlike those in 2002, has come at absolutely the wrong time for him. Not only because Modi does not need a riot anymore in Gujarat, but also because it will revive all the horrors and fears of 2002 that would have been swept away with the Narmada waters released from a height of 121 metres at the Sardar Sarovar dam.

What Modi is also bound to despise is the fact that a purely local riot has acquired the size and shape of a national event, something akin to his tendency and ability to create a mountain out of a molehill. After his re-election in the 2002 assembly elections, he took pains to fashion himself as a practitioner of modern governance and he astutely crafted propaganda to project this larger than it actually is. The returns from all this have suddenly slipped to the backburner, as Vadodara burns — though, ironically, for different reasons than it did in 2002, and with a different intensity.

Had this riot taken place before 2002, news would hardly have spread farther than the Sayaji palace. Had it occurred then, it would be cub reporters on the job, unlike now, when some of the biggest names in television journalism are on the prowl. Right from the 1985 anti-reservation riots which turned communal to the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots, bringing the BJP into reckoning for the first time, communal riots have been an annual phenomenon in Gujarat. This round of violence in Vadodara is somewhat similar.

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