To start with, our sincere apologies to all readers for
the big time lag between the last issue of CC,
"Minority Report", and the issue now in your hands. The main reason for
this delay relates to the
subject matter of this issue, where our prime concern has been to provide
extensive information so
that readers can better appreciate the nature of the "Vibrant Gujarat"
over which chief minister,
Narendra Modi, the "chief author and architect" of the carnage, still
presides. Except for the last
section, the rest of the issue has been put together by one person –
Teesta Setalvad. As readers of
CC are well aware, apart from her responsibilities with the magazine,
as secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) she is currently
handling over three dozen carnage related cases in the Supreme Court and
the Gujarat High Court. It is this latter commitment that left her very
little time to work on the current issue, which we first intended to
publish in March. Because of the excessive delay, we have now had to take
the difficult decision of splitting the special report on Gujarat, five
years later, into two parts. Our apologies once again and our assurance
that part two of this report will be in your hands in good time.
Our decision to revisit Gujarat five years after the worst
post-partition carnage in India was not a matter of journalistic ritual.
In November-December 2004, CC did a cover story to mark 20 years of
the 1984 massacre of around 4,000 Sikhs in the nation’s capital and
another 3,000 in the rest of the country. In the article that he wrote for
the issue, HS Phoolka, a senior Supreme Court advocate and counsel for
victims of the November 1984 carnage in Delhi, began his piece with
questions he was often asked by the media and the general public:
"Should we not leave behind the 20-year-old massacre that took place in
November 1984? Should we not move ahead in life and forget about this
horrifying past? Why should the peace attained and maintained among
communities now be disturbed by talking about the genocide that happened
two decades ago?"
Gujarat’s horror story is only five years old. Yet, in
these intervening years, many have thought fit to "forget" and "move
ahead". For more than three years now, publications such as ours and
organisations such as CJP have been repeatedly castigated by Modi’s
admirers, within and outside the sangh parivar, been dubbed "enemies of
Gujarat" and worse, for our alleged inability to look to the future.
Profit-motivated captains of Indian industry for whom the human factor is
hardly ever a consideration are doing everything they can to help Modi
move ahead. By its various acts of commission and omission, the UPA
alliance, which ritually swears by secularism and has been in power at the
Centre since mid-2004, has more or less chosen to forget. But we can never
forget.
To forget what happened even as marauders, mass murderers,
gang rapists and the masterminds behind the bestiality roam free and rule
the roost is to dishonour the memory of their victims. It is an act of
violence against the survivors whose trauma is compounded by a total lack
of remorse on the part of the perpetrators. Who decides whether remorse
and reparation are enough for those whose lives have been uprooted? Long
years after they had seen the male members of their families butchered
before their own eyes, widows from Delhi (1984) and Bhagalpur (1989) have
resisted extraordinary pressure and inducement with a simple proposition:
Bring back our dead or we want justice. Can there be peace where there is
no justice?
Genocide 2002 cannot and must not be forgotten especially
because it is not just a question of what happened five years ago but what
is happening in Gujarat even today. Thousands of Muslim families who lost
home and hearth along with their near and dear ones live, even today, as
refugees in their homeland. Those who lost everything have been given a
pittance as compensation. Many cannot return to their villages because
yesterday’s neighbours will not let them. Over 200 persons are still
missing and their family members have no idea whether they are alive or
dead. In the Pandharwada mass graves case, instead of handing over body
remains to family members so that last rites, at least, could be
performed, victim survivors and social activists are threatened with
arrest and terrorised.
"Since the culprits of the November 1984 Delhi massacre
are yet to be punished (Bhagalpur, 1989, and Mumbai, 1992-93 could well be
added here), we have witnessed the Gujarat massacre, which took place 18
years after the massacre in Delhi. If we forget the Delhi episode now and
the Gujarat episode a few years later, there will be another massacre
waiting to happen in the near future," was advocate Phoolka’s reply to
those who preached the forget and move ahead message to him in 2004.
Phoolka’s reasoning remains valid even today. It is the same reason why
the world needs to keep memories of the Holocaust and Hiroshima alive.
— EDITORS
