What a speech, O citizens!

The need of the hour is a statesman

THE prime minister has made an unbelievably lucid statement at Panaji on April 12, after which there should not be even a shadow of a doubt on which side of the ideological divide he stands. We must congratulate him for having shed the mask. I do not have the space to expand on the historic eight-page statement, but I shall touch upon relevant portions.

The speech opens with him expressing his sense of wonder at temples like Ankor Wat, which he had recently visited in Cambodia. The sight induces in him a sense of history about the various Hindu kings in Cambodia of the 10th and 11th centuries, who fought wars but never desecrated temples.

This is undoubtedly a glorious phase in the history of Hindu civilisation’s expansion eastwards. But to distill from it a historical truth applicable to the entire gamut of Indian history is where the PM exposes himself to the charge of dissembling a bit. He probably does not know, certainly he did not mention, the institution of Devauttapattana Nayaka, the body of officers maintained by Harshadeva, the 11th century king of Kashmir. It seems Hindu kings were behaving better in Cambodia than in India at the the same period. The job of these officers was to loot Hindu temples for the state exchequer.

Perhaps the PM should he ask his scholarly friend, Vishnu Kant Shastri, the UP governor, to study the relevant portions of the Raj Taringini, written by the Brahmin sage Kalhana. Vajpayee could then acquire an annotated document about regularised temple looting by a Hindu king. The king of Malwa, while invading King Solanki of Gujarat at about the same period, destroyed Jain temples and a mosque. What the PM has left unsaid is actually the burden of these references to wars-sans-desecration of Hindu temples. You are invited to conjure up visions of invading Muslim armies pillaging and destroying everything in their path, including Hindu temples. The PM then goes on to wail about Muslim and Christian conversions violating the spirit of religious co-existence. All these are valid subjects for discussion in calmer times, not when one of your state governments stands accused of having supervised one of the most brutal pograms in history.

On Godhra, again, he cleverly dissembles. By saying if Godhra had not happened Gujarat could have been avoided, he has amplified exactly Modi’s action-reaction theory to justify the horrors of Gujarat. Funnily, in the next breath he says: ‘‘The government is making inquiries.’’ Which means he is not presently in possession of the full facts of the case. And, yet, the prime minister of the country, on the strength of rumours, has given vent to a dangerous conspiracy theory that Muslims burnt innocent kar sevaks alive.

Yes, 58 women and children died under the most horrible circumstances. But the burning of coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express on the morning of February 27 — just a day earlier the UP and Uttaranchal results had been announced — was a result of a series of incidents, scuffles, involving both communities, and to this day no one knows how the bogey caught fire and how the kar sevaks escaped. A hundred passengers in S-5 are eye witnesses to what happened. Their names and addresses are available in the railway reservation chart which I had seen in Godhra. Given the will, the truth can be found.

The PM then treats his Panaji audience to an elaborate exposition on Islamic terrorism. Not a line about rampaging terrorism in Gujarat, mind you. Of course, militancy in Kashmir, abetted by terrorists from Pakistan, has been our bane for the past 12 years, but prime ministers, unlike partisan party leaders, are supposed to have a sense of occasion.

This time the PM was full of what officials in Singapore had told him about the 16 Al-Qaeda terrorists under interrogation in their country. Leaders of other countries he visited had told him that the governments of nations with large Muslim populations were worried that they may take to terrorism. He then extrapolates from this: wherever there are this type of Muslims, they do not mingle, they do not wish to live with others and instead of resolving issues peacefully they resort to terrorism as a means of putting across their views: ‘‘There are two types of Islam: one is a moderate Islam, which teaches truth, compassion, tolerance. But the Islam which is being mobilised for militancy has no space for tolerance. It proceeds on the slogan of Jehad. It wishes to cast the whole world in its mould.’’

Heaven knows there is a great deal of Islamic militancy around, even though one would have expected the prime minister of India, home to the world’s second largest Muslim population, would have been conversant with the causes of this militancy. As he himself says, we have suffered at the hands of militants, helped by Pakistan, for long years in Kashmir. But the occasion at that point was to remember the rapes, tortures, pograms carried out on Muslims in Gujarat. Also to remember how the Palestinians, whose cause we have espoused, are being mowed under tanks in Jenin.

The need of the hour is a statesman not a cornered politician escaping the foxhunt launched by his own colleagues, out-foxing them by standing on the high ground of extremism for sheer survival.

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