As troops withdraw from internal security duties in Gujarat, to be redeployed along the border, they leave behind a niggling question: what effect will the pull-out of the army have on Gujarat? Ever since the army was deployed in the state, all those who have a stake in the return of peace have counted on its sobering influence in a situation where the local administration had, according to all the available evidence, shamefully abdicated. Eyewitness accounts have proliferated about the inaction and complicity of the police in the terrible violence that raged for so long in the state; tainted police officers were seen to be patronised and protected by the Modi regime. For a long time, therefore, the army’s presence has been the most credible reason for hope in Gujarat. Now that the troops are filing out, will the state be able to cope?Of course, the Gujarat that the army leaves is not the hellish inferno it stepped into in March. The death toll has dropped dramatically, there has been a notably large number of arrests, and a spate of first information reports. Much of this is being ascribed to the presence of K.P.S. Gill, recently parachuted into Gandhinagar as security adviser to the chief minister by a jittery government in New Delhi. It was the Gill Effect, it is being said, that resulted in discredited police officers being transferred out and a new team being put in place. Punjab’s ‘supercop’ is also given the credit for Gujarat’s police force finally showing the will to perform its job of law-enforcement, and being allowed the freedom by the political leadership to do so. While there can be no doubt that Gill’s presence has coincided with a turnaround of sorts, such accounts of the situation in Gujarat are not entirely reassuring. It must be hoped that the relative calm Gujarat has seen in the last few weeks is due to reasons more lasting than the exertions of a one-man army, no matter how accomplished. The tenuous peace that has descended in Gujarat must hold for reasons more homegrown and more compelling than the fact that the chief minister has been sent a new adviser by his patrons in Delhi. The nation hopes that there are more pervasive reasons to hope that the army will not be missed in Gujarat.There is much that still waits to be done in the state. In the short term, the guilty have to be brought to book, relief packages equitably dispersed and refugees in relief camps helped to pick up the threads of normal lives. In the longer term, old linkages must be restored between communities and new ties forged. There must be dialogue and reconciliation. To build a future free of violence, Gujarat needs an administrative set-up that is unafraid to uphold the law equally among communities, regardless of the political diktat. It needs a political leadership that has the vision, or the plain common sense, to see that there is no alternative to a future together.
