Serial of violence

The three bomb blasts in Ahmedabad have served up a reminder that Gujarat’s ordeal is not yet over. The explosions were timed to target more than just the morning’s rush hour traffic. They aimed at the fledgeling expectations of a return to normality in the ravaged state. They sought to touch off the fear and panic that had only just begun to wane. The police is yet to ascertain the identity of the persons who may have engineered the synchronised blasts but it requires no special investigative skills to gauge that they were the handiwork of those who thrive in the prevailing atmosphere of fear and insecurity, who do not wish for peace to return. Such people, whichever community they belong to, are criminals. They can only be deterred if they are told in no uncertain terms that they will have to pay. Wednesday’s blasts in Ahmedabad have articulated once more the central challenge that Gujarat’s government must rise up to: while undertaking measures to rebuild confidence and trust between communities in the long term, it must lose no more time in bringing the culprits for the violence to book. Punishment of the guilty is the basic minimum condition for any return to life as it was in Gujarat.

The recent arrest of three activists of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, including Babu Bajrangi, president of the Bajrang Dal’s Ahmedabad unit, for their involvement in the rioting in the Naroda-Patiya suburb of Ahmedabad, is a welcome step in the right direction. Though it comes nearly three months after the heinous crime, which left more than 80 dead and over 700 houses burnt, it marks a first — it is for the first time that persons with prominent links to the sangh parivar have been nabbed. More such arrests need to be made. This is necessary not just because justice demands it but also for reasons more pragmatic. It is the only way in which the message can be sent out that nobody will be allowed to wreak any more havoc in the state. That the state will hunt down the guilty, irrespective of their party-political affiliations. But is Narendra Modi’s administration up to that task? Can it pick up the gauntlet thrown by the Ahmedabad explosions? Does it even want to? These are questions that have to be grappled with in Gujarat. But Modi must remember that the nation, and the world, are watching.