Our irrelevant state

the rule of law, as enshrined in our Constitution, is meaningless. Others have broken the law, others have ignored the Constitution, but nobody has boasted of this as an achievement as a reason to be voted back to office.

What the chief minister of Gujarat said, in case you missed it last week, was that Sohrabuddin Sheikh was a terrorist who hoarded AK-56 rifles in his house and had links with Pakistan, so what should the Gujarat police have done with such a man? The question was asked rhetorically, but his audience reportedly responded with cries of “Kill him! Kill him!” Irrelevant, if you remember that the Gujarat police have allegedly killed not just him in a ‘fake encounter’ but his wife as well. The Election Commission has taken a grim view of Modi’s comments, and may he be punished. What worries me is that most commentators in the national press have charged him with playing the ‘communal card’.

Having just spent a day wandering about in villages between Ahmedabad and Anand, I can say that we are missing the point if we reduce analysis to those two overused words. It is not about the ‘communal card’, it is about the rule of law. Last week I went back to villages I visited in 2002, a few months after Narendra Modi won his election.

In the village of Odh, near the town of Bhalej, 27 people were burned alive in a house in which they were trapped by a murderous mob of mostly local people. The killers were cowards, and killed unarmed men, women, and children. Because they were local people, they were easily identified and 95 were arrested at the time of the massacre. Murderers usually do not make bail, but these were powerful people with political support and were quickly released on bail. Local Muslims said they boasted that nothing would happen to them as long as Narendra Modi was in power.

As someone who believes that India is a country in which the rule of law exists, I did not believe this. I refused to accept that a mere politician could influence the course of justice, so I went back last week, certain that the wheels of justice had begun to move. They have not. All the killers are out on bail, living happy, normal lives, while those who lost loved ones in the Odh massacre live in terror. Why? This is the question we need to ask. Why are the courts not working as they should? If a mere chief minister is in a position to subvert the process of justice, then we are in real trouble.

Five years ago, when I was last in these villages, I met Muslims who were not able to return to their ravaged homes because the Hindu thugs who organised the mass killings drove them away. Now, some have come back and have been helped rebuild their one-room shacks by Muslim relief committees, but they continue to live in fear. They hesitate to talk to strangers, and when they do, they hesitate to identify themselves. This does not happen in countries that uphold the rule of law.

That is what this election is about; it is not about the ‘communal card’. We have learned to live with politicians who use caste and creed to win elections. There are very few left who do not. What we cannot live with are elected officials who admit publicly that they have no regard for the rule of law. What we cannot live with are courts that function according to the political mood of the moment. This is what is dangerous and disheartening about this Gujarat election.

Narendra Modi is asking people to vote for him as a hero for disdaining the rule of law. He does not need to play the ‘communal card’, because he already knows that Muslims in Gujarat will not be voting for him. He has reduced the community to a subsidiary, submissive state of secondary citizenship. What he wants now is approval for doing this in flagrant violation of the Indian Constitution. This is why Narendra Modi deserves to lose.