Godhra incident 20 years later still shaping the politics of India

The Godhra incident and the riots that followed brought the Ayodhya issue back into the center of politics.

February 27, 2002 was a day in the history of Indian politics that could not only be seen as an event of the past but also marked the beginning of one of the bloodiest chapters of planned communal violence. The violent incident of that day was a defining moment as it was the only and largest massacre between two communities at that time amid the Ramjanmabhoomi dispute.

Then the 18-year-old movement to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya and the controversy surrounding it started losing its energy.

There was a general understanding that the demolition of the Babri Masjid erased a trace of hatred and helped prevent mass mobilization between 1989 and 1992.

By the year 2002, the Bharatiya Janata Party also started considering this movement as politically inconvenient. Many fundamentalists present in the party and the Sangh Parivar said that the BJP leaders had made a deal of principled commitment to political power.

Restarting the process of alienating Muslims

In March 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee took oath as the head of the coalition on the condition that three important issues, implementation of the Uniform Civil Code, abrogation of Article 370 and most importantly the construction of Ram temple, would not be included in the agenda of the government. The BJP had agreed to all these three while all these issues were part of the BJP's party program.

The Godhra carnage incident and the riots that followed have once again decided that the Ayodhya issue is on the front again and it will be resolved only when a Ram temple is built at the site where the Babri Masjid was till December 1992.

These two incidents once again ensured that the Ayodhya dispute remains a central point of conflict in India's political discourse.

With this, the process of showing the Muslims apart has also started again. Which was reportedly always a prime motive of the Ram temple controversy, but the issue went to the back seat as the BJP was also under pressure to choose the option of centrist social politics.

Rise of Narendra Modi in politics

The Godhra Gujarat violence and riots not only became the basis and constant point of reference for political division for the next decade and beyond, but it also encouraged the emergence of Narendra Modi at the national level. Although this image was anti-hero.

In the 2013 biography of the Prime Minister, I debated this point and reiterated on many occasions that if Godhra incident and the violence that followed had not happened, Narendra Modi would not have been what he became after this incident. .

To understand this logic, you have to look again at the events of 30 September 2001. When Vajpayee told Modi the BJP-RSS had decided to replace Keshubhai Patel and make Narendra Modi the chief minister.

When this path of political upliftment of Narendra Modi was being made, then he had gone to attend someone's cremation at that time. On that day there was a plane crash in Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh in which Madhav Rao Scindia and some people along with four journalists were also killed.

Narendra Modi had gone to attend the funeral of one of these journalists, when he got a call from the office of the then PM Vajpayee and he was told about his new responsibility.

Rise of a new Chief Minister

Its background was the setting star of BJP in the state. The party then lost a very important by-election in Sabarmati, which had been a BJP stronghold for a long time. This was the anger of the people towards the incompetent government after the devastating earthquake on Republic Day in the same year. Apart from this, there were also allegations of corruption and interference of Patel family in administrative matters.

For nearly four-and-a-half months before the Godhra disaster, Modi failed to stop the party from falling. The result of which was seen in three assembly seats in the by-election. Leaving the seat from where Modi fought, the BJP lost the remaining two seats to the Congress.

Assembly elections were to be held in Gujarat in February 2003 and Narendra Modi did not have enough time to ensure the victory of the party.

On that morning of February, when Sabarmati Express was attacked between 8.20 am and 8.20 am. Modi told the official inquiry committees that he came to know about the accident at 9 am and it took him the next one-and-a-half hours to convene a meeting of officials and ministers thereafter. Meanwhile, a very important time was wasted.

BJP leader KN Govindacharya told me during an interview while writing the biography of Narendra Modi that there was definitely some laxity in it and hence the intensity of the riots increased to such an extent.

Whether this laxity happened at the administrative level or because of Narendra Modi's lack of experience in public office is a matter of speculation. But the truth is that no one can deny that Modi's origins have never been in doubt after the Godhra violence and the riots that followed.

Does this kind of communal sensation still affect electoral choice today?

The electoral potential of the double episode of Godhra Gujarat devastation was assessed very quickly by Narendra Modi. During the campaign, the BJP's emphasis was clearly not on the performance of the government, which Narendra Modi was brought in to improve. Hate had taken its place.

State-sponsored campaigns at that time and over time such campaigns were run with the support of the government and such acts were carried out which promoted communal bias against Muslims and became the most important parameter in deciding the electoral choice of the people. . After the attack on a train full of kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya after participating in a Vishwa Hindu Parishad program, Narendra Modi immediately realized that the deepening of mistrust in Muslims was made easier by three incidents. These incidents were the 9/11 Terror Attack, the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December and Operation Parakram.

These developments gave the background to the Godhra violence in which retaliation against the people of a particular community was justified.

These two brutal and horrific incidents gave the right to BJP to try to show every man of the Muslim community in such a way that people should be afraid and someone who is trying to put the country in danger and who has crossed the border. Has joined hands with the global nexus of enemies and terrorists from across the world.

Political parties, civil society and the media were also included in these non-Muslim political opponents. This alliance is proving effective for Modi since 2013 till date. It is a witness to how the Godhra incident of 27 February 2022 is shaping the politics of the country even today.(Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay Quint)

Implementation of PM's announcement started, petrol was made cheaper

Petrol price has come down from Rs 150 per liter, high speed diesel, light speed diesel and kerosene have also been reduced, Finance Ministry has issued notification.

ISLAMABAD: Implementation of the Prime Minister's announcement has started, petrol has been reduced, the price of petrol has come down from Rs 150 per liter, high speed diesel, light speed diesel and kerosene . Also made cheaper, the Ministry of Finance issued a notification. According to details, the Federal Ministry of Finance has issued a notification to reduce the prices of petroleum products from March 1.

According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Finance, the price of petrol has been reduced by Rs 10 to Rs 149.86 per liter. The price of high speed diesel was also reduced by Rs 10, bringing the price to Rs 144.15 per liter. Kerosene was reduced by Rs 1 to Rs 125.56 while light speed diesel was reduced by Rs 5.66 to Rs 118.31.

Chinese Muslims in solidarity with chained women were interviewed by the authorities

Although the recent Russian-Ukrainian war has attracted global attention, people's attention to the "chain girls" in Feng County, Xuzhou has not diminished. All over the world, different countries and groups are paying attention to the fate of this woman in different ways. A proposal in Chinese, English and Arabic for Muslims around the world to pay attention to Xuzhou chain girls has caused a lot of repercussions on the Internet.

The "Chain Girl" incident has plunged the credibility of the Chinese government into one of the biggest public opinion crises since the establishment of the government. The local government has successively issued five contradictory and loopy investigation notices, arousing constant questions from netizens. While the Chinese government spends a lot of manpower, material and financial resources to try to quell this incident, people cannot help but ask: Why is the Chinese government so afraid of the truth?

Recently, a proposal by Muslims around the world to pay attention to Xuzhou's "Chain Girls" in Chinese, Arabic and English, initiated by the Muslim website "Green China", has aroused great response on the Internet, and has been signed by more than 200 Muslims around the world. The proposal allows people to respect and treat women well, completely eliminate discrimination and harm to women, and strongly calls on every Chinese and even people in the world to speak out through various channels to rescue all those who have suffered from ravages, humiliation and suffering. Women, whether they are Han women or Uyghur women; whether they are Chinese women or foreign women. However, more than a dozen Muslims in China were interviewed by the police, state security and security departments within two days after they signed the proposal.

Ms. Ding, a resident of Lanzhou, Gansu, who was interviewed, said in an interview with this station: "Call me and I must go to their police station. After I went there, they asked me if I had been on this website (Green China)? They asked me Have you ever read the appeals on this site? I said I did, and I feel sorry for this woman, I am a woman, and I have compassion. Her life is so miserable. I told them I supported ( This event), use my actions to expand the influence and let this woman live a normal life." Then Ms. Ding introduced that they kept asking her if she knew the initiator of the event and if she had his contact information. After a four-hour conversation, the police asked Ms. Ding to revoke her signature and promised not to browse the website again and sign the transcript before allowing her to leave the station.

Another Ms. Ha from Inner Mongolia, the day after she signed the proposal, was visited by personnel from the Hohhot Bureau of Justice, the Public Security Bureau, the Women's Federation and the local street office. In an interview with this station, Ms. Ha said: "Ask me if I participated in a signing event about the abducted women in Xuzhou. I said yes, I signed it. They asked me: 'Who is the author of (the proposal)? You Do you know each other? Can you see other people who participated in the autograph like you? Do you know each other? You chat with each other, and there are similar articles for you to participate in. Are there any intentions and contents to subvert state power, etc.  … Ms. Ha said that she used a pseudonym for her signature on the proposal, and almost no one knew it. However, the government department could easily find her contact information and home address.

The sponsor of the event, the author of the "Green China" website The person in charge, Fig. a Chinese Muslim scholar living in Malaysia, pointed out that more than a dozen Muslims who were interviewed were told by the Chinese government that the proposal was an act of smearing the Chinese government by foreign forces. In an interview with this station, Mr. Fig said: " This proposal was first issued by Muslims. Are Muslims (in China) that sensitive? What's wrong with Muslims, can't they advocate? Is the initiative about to be teased (interviewed)? They said (the proposal) was smeared by foreign forces. Which sentence am I slandering? More than 40,000 abducted people were sold to Xuzhou in the five years from 1984 to 1989. Is this a smear? Last year (China) lost more than one million people. Is this a smear? He then said that in the proposal he mentioned that Uyghur and Kazakh women also suffered some kind of hardship, and this is not smearing. The Chinese government is afraid that people will think of concentration camps.

When talking about the different experiences of Xuzhou chain women and Uyghur women in Xinjiang, Mr. Fig said: "Of course, 'Xiaohuamei' is very unfortunate, and her identity has not been determined yet. But she is known to the world and is A nation with a population of more than one billion cares. But what about the Uyghurs? And the Han people are brainwashed, and they are extremely excluded and discriminated against. In addition, the CCP has been shielding the truth (what happened in Xinjiang) through various means, so most of the Han people are I don't know the truth." He said, "Treate them (Uyghurs) as terrorists. Even if there are a few terrorists in this ethnic group, you have put one-tenth of the population of a ethnic group, nearly a million people, in concentration camps. Most people do not commit any crime. Before they have no motive for crime, it is shameless to re-educate them. So many young men and women are in concentration camps, can they still have children? Why are their The fertility rate of the population has dropped by one-third! What is this not genocide?"

Mr. Fig finally pointed out that according to the logic of the Chinese government, tens of millions of Han Chinese should be imprisoned in concentration camps for re-education.

Liu Quan, Radio Free Asia, editor in charge of the report: Jiayuan.com editor: Guo Du