2014: The Election That Changed India (4 page)

Television journalists like to be at the heart of
the action. A few of my action-hungry colleagues rushed to Ayodhya because there were reports of a
potential backlash to the train burning, in UP. The Union budget was to be announced the next day,
so a few journalists remained parked in the capital. My instinct told me to head for my birthplace,
Ahmedabad. A senior police officer had rung me up late that evening after the train burning.
‘Rajdeep, the VHP is planning a bandh. The government is planning to allow them to take the
bodies home in some kind of a procession. Trust me, there could be real trouble this time,’ he
warned. The next day, along with my video journalist Narendra Gudavalli, we were on the flight to
Ahmedabad.

The Ahmedabad I travelled to that day was not the
city I had such happy memories of. As a child I spent every summer holiday in the comforting home of
my grandparents. Hindi movies, cricket, cycling—Ahmedabad for me was always a place to savour
life’s simple pleasures. Sari-clad ladies zoomed by on scooters, their
mangalsutra
s
flying. The
sitaphal
ice cream and cheese pizzas in the local market were a weekend
delight. My memories were of an endlessly benevolent city, full of neighbourly bonhomie and friendly
street chatter. But that day in February, I saw a smoke-filled sky, closed shops and mobs on the
street. The city frightened
me—the Ahmedabad of my joyous childhood
dreams had turned into an ugly nightmare. I can claim to have had a ringside view to India’s
first televised riot, a riot in the age of ‘live’ television. From 28 February for the
next seventy-two hours, we were witness to a series of horrific incidents, all of which suggested a
near complete collapse of the state machinery. We listened to tales of inhuman savagery, of targeted
attacks, of the police being bystanders while homes were looted and people killed. For three days,
with little sleep, we reported the carnage that was taking place before our eyes even while
self-censoring some of the more gruesome visuals.

On 1 March, I was caught in the middle of a
‘mini riot’ in the walled city areas of Dariapur–Shahpur. This was a traditional
trouble spot in Ahmedabad—Hindu and Muslim families lived cheek by jowl and even a cycle
accident could spark violence. That morning, neighbours were throwing stones, sticks, even petrol
bombs at each other, with the police doing little to stop the clashes. One petrol bomb just missed
my cameraperson Narendra by a whisker even as he bravely kept shooting. I saw a young girl being
attacked with acid, another boy being kicked and beaten. We managed to capture much of this on
camera and played out the tape that evening while carefully excising the more graphic visuals. A
riot is not a pretty picture. We had filmed a family charred to death inside a Tata Safari, but
never showed the images. We did exercise self-restraint but clearly the government wanted a total
blackout. ‘Are you trying to spark off another riot?’ Pramod Mahajan angrily asked me
over the phone. I felt it was important to mirror the ugly reality on the ground—an impactful
story, I hoped, would push the Centre into sending the army to the battle-scarred streets.

I did not encounter Modi till the evening of 2 March
when he held a press conference at the circuit house in Ahmedabad to claim that the situation was
being brought under control with the help of the army. That morning, though, he had rung me up to
warn me about our coverage which he said was inflammatory. In particular, he told me about the
report of an incident in Anjar, Kutch, of a Hanuman temple being attacked, which he said was totally
false. ‘Some
roadside linga was desecrated, but no temple has been
touched. I will not allow such malicious and provocative reporting,’ he said angrily. I tried
to explain to him that the report had come through a news wire agency and had been flashed by our
Delhi newsroom without verifying with me. A few hours later, the chief minister’s office
issued orders banning the telecast of the channel.

Modi’s press conference also took place
against the backdrop of a front-page story in that morning’s
Times of India
indicating that the chief minister had invoked Newton’s law to suggest that the violence was a
direct reaction to Godhra. ‘Every action invites an equal and opposite reaction’, was
the headline. Modi denied having made any such remark to the reporter. Naturally, the mood at the
press conference was frosty and hostile.

After the press conference, I reached out to Modi,
assuring him we would be even more careful in our coverage. I offered to interview him so that he
could send out a strong message of calm and reassurance. He agreed. We did the interview, only to
return to the office and find the tape damaged. I telephoned Modi’s office again, explained
the problem and managed to convince him to do another interview, this time in Gandhinagar later that
night.

We reached the chief minister’s residence in
Gandhinagar a little after 10 p.m. We dined with him and then recorded the interview. I asked him
about his failure to control the riots. He called it a media conspiracy to target him, saying he had
done his best, and then pointed out that Gujarat had a history of communal riots. I asked him about
his controversial action–reaction remark. He claimed what he would later repeat in another
interview, to Zee News,
‘Kriya aur pratikriya ki chain chal rahi hai. Hum chahte hain ki
na kriya ho na pratikriya’
(A chain of action and reaction is going on. We want neither
action nor reaction).

We came out of the interview almost convinced that
the chief minister was intent on ending the cycle of violence. Less than an hour later, the doubts
returned. Barely a few kilometres from his Gandhinagar residence on the main highway to Ahmedabad,
we came upon a roadblock with VHP–Bajrang Dal supporters milling
about,
wielding lathis, swords and axes. It was well past midnight. Our driver tried to avoid the blockade
when an axe smashed through the windscreen. The car halted and we were forced to emerge. ‘Are
you Hindus or Muslims?’ screamed out a hysterical youth sporting a saffron bandana. For the
record, we were all Hindus, except our driver Siraj who was a Muslim. The group, with swords
threateningly poised in attack mode, demanded we pull down our trousers. They wanted to check if any
of us were circumcised. In the pursuit of male hygiene, at my birth my rationalist parents had
ensured I was.

The crowd confronting us was neither rationalist nor
normal. They were in fact abnormally enraged, feverishly excited youth, hopping about with their
swords and axes, drunk on the power they had over us. Their raised swords were repeatedly brandished
above our heads. Pushes, shoves and lunges towards us indicated that we were in serious danger from
a militia both neurotic and bloodthirsty.

When in danger, flash your journalist credentials.
Even though I did not feel particularly brave at the time, I gathered up my courage for the sake of
my team and drew myself up to my full six feet—thankfully I was at least a head taller than
most of them. I aggressively yelled that I and my team were journalists, we were media and, guess
what, we had just interviewed the chief minister. Such behaviour a short distance away from his
house was unacceptable and a disrespect to the CM’s office. How dare they disrespect their own
CM?
‘Agar aap kisi ko bhi haath lagaoge, toh mein chief minister ko complain
karoonga!’
(If you touch anyone, I will complain to the chief minister), I said, trying
to sound as angry as possible.

The gang wasn’t willing to listen.
‘Hamein chief minister se matlab nahi, aap log apna identity dikhao’
(We
don’t care about the chief minister. Show your identity cards). I showed my official press
card and got my cameraperson Narendra to play a clip from the interview with Modi.
‘Look,’ I shouted, ‘look at this interview. Can’t you see we are
journalists?’ After fifteen tense minutes and after watching the tape, they seemed to calm
down a bit and we were finally allowed to go. Our trembling driver Siraj was in tears. My
own fear at a near-death experience was now replaced by a seething rage. If,
just a few kilometres from the chief minister’s house, Hindu militant gangs were roaming
freely on the night of 2 March, then how could the chief minister claim the situation was under
control? We were unnerved and visibly shaken. Images of those crazed faces and their shining weapons
haunted me for days afterwards.

My coverage of the riots ruptured my relationship
with Modi. Till that moment, we had been ‘friends’ (if journalists and netas can ever be
friends!). We had freely exchanged views and would happily speak in Gujarati to each other, and he
would regularly come on my shows. Now, a wariness crept in. As a politician who didn’t
appreciate any criticism, he saw me as emblematic of a hostile English-language media, and I always
wondered if he had wilfully allowed the riots to simmer. A relationship based on mutual respect
turned adversarial. He could not ‘forgive’ me for my riot reporting and I could never
separate his politics from what I had seen in those bloody days. When my father passed away in 2007,
Modi was the first politician to call and condole, but somehow the ghosts of 2002 would always haunt
our equation.

With the benefit of hindsight, and more than a
decade later, I have tried to rationalize the events of the 2002 riots. Was chief minister Modi
really trying to stop the riots? Is the government claim that in the first three days of violence,
sixty-two Hindus and forty Muslims were killed in police firing not proof enough that the Modi
government was not allowing the rioters to get away scot-free? I shall not hasten to judgement, but
I do believe the truth, as is often the case, lies in shades of grey. And the truth is, no major
riot takes place in this country without the government of the day being either incompetent or
complicit, or both.

My verdict is that the Modi government was utterly
incompetent because it was aware that the Godhra violence could set off a cycle of vengeance and yet
did not do enough to stop it. In the places from where I reported in Ahmedabad, I just did not see
enough of a police presence to act as a deterrent to the rioters. The violence only really began to
ebb once the army stepped in; the Gujarat
police was caught with its khaki
uniform betraying a saffron tinge. I remember asking the Ahmedabad police commissioner P.C. Pande
about the failure of his force. His reply on a live television show stunned me. ‘The police
force is part of the society we come from. If society gets communalized, what can the police
do?’ I cannot think of a greater indictment of our police constabulary by its own
leadership.

There was a personal angle as well. My grandfather
P.M. Pant had been a much-admired and decorated police officer in Gujarat for more than three
decades, eventually retiring as its chief in the 1970s. He had the reputation of being a tough,
no-nonsense officer and had seen the 1969 riots in Ahmedabad. He died in 1999, but my stoic,
self-contained grandmother was still in Ahmedabad in an apartment block dominated by Bohra
Muslims—a Hindu Brahmin lady who lived in neighbourly solidarity with her Bohra neighbours,
each feasting on the other’s biryani or
patrel
. I told her what Mr Pande had told me
about the situation in the city. Her reply was typically direct. ‘Well, you go and tell him
that your baba [grandfather] would have never allowed any such excuse.’

The other question—whether the Modi government
was complicit—is slightly more difficult to answer. Lower courts have cleared Modi of any
direct involvement and though there are troubling questions over the nature of the investigations, I
shall not quarrel with the judicial system. It is never easy to pin criminal responsibility for a
riot on the political leadership, be it Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 or Modi in 2002. Modi had, after all,
been in power for just five months when the riots occurred, Rajiv for less than twenty-four hours.
Modi’s supporters claimed to me that their leader was not fully in control of the
administration when the violence erupted. ‘He wanted to stop it, but he just did not have the
grip over the system. Not every minister would even listen to him,’ claimed one Modi aide,
pointing out that the chief minister had won his by-election only a few days before Godhra happened.
Modi himself claimed to me that he wanted the army to be brought in right away, but the forces were
tied up at the border because of Operation Parakram
which had been launched
in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Parliament.

What is probably true is that in February 2002, the
real boss of Gujarat was not Modi but the VHP general secretary Praveen Togadia. If there was a
ringmaster for the 2002 riots it was Togadia, a doctor-turned-Hindutva demagogue. The moustachioed
Togadia with his whiplash tongue was the one who called the shots—several ministers were
beholden to him, and the street cadres were his loyalists. At the time, maybe even Modi feared
him.

The VHP and the Bajrang Dal had built a strong
network in Gujarat from the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the 1980s, and Togadia, the rabble-rousing
doctor-demagogue had emerged as an alternative power centre in the state. On the streets, the
VHP’s foot soldiers were most visible and led the attacks against the minorities. In the
Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad in which ninety-seven people were killed, the list of those
arrested (and later convicted) included a roll call of prominent VHP members of the area. Unlike
Modi, who would not accept any involvement in the violence, Togadia was more forthright and declared
he was ‘proud’ of his role. ‘If we are attacked, you expect us to keep quiet?
These Islamic terrorists have to be taught a lesson,’ he told me in an interview.

In later years, Modi successfully reined in Togadia,
even managed to virtually isolate him, but in the bloody days of 2002, he failed to do so. Whether
that was deliberate or otherwise is a question only he can answer, but the political benefits of a
consolidated Hindu vote bank were obvious. Modi will perhaps never answer the question, but it is
very likely that barely five months into his tenure, he decided that it was wise political strategy,
or perhaps rank opportunism, not to take on someone who reflected the blood-curdling desire for
revenge on the street. Even if he wanted to stop the violence, he chose to play it safe by not
challenging the VHP goons right away. Moreover, Togadia was part of the wider Sangh Parivar which
claimed proprietorial rights over the BJP government in the state. Togadia and Modi had both cut
their teeth in the same Parivar.