1984, 1989, 2002: Three Narratives of Injustice, and the Lessons for Democracy https://thewire.in/rights/injustice-lessons-democracy-zakir-husain-memorial-lecture
Siddharth Varadarajan Why is it that mass injustice in the face of mass communal crimes has become such an established pattern of state practice in modern India?
In 1984, some 5,000 citizens of the Sikh faith were massacred in cold blood in Delhi, Kanpur and other cities following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Thirty years later, the Congress party leaders who planned and organised the killings remain unpunished.
In 1989, the involuntary exodus of Pandits from the Kashmir valley started in the wake of militancy and terrorism that saw the targeted killing of key community figures; in a short span of time, a total of 74,692 Kashmiri Pandit families were forced by circumstances to flee their homeland and seek refuge in squalid camps that sprung up in Jammu and Delhi. Twenty-five years later, the exiles, who represent 99% of the pre-1989 valley community, are still unable to return home; shockingly, 60,000 families continue to languish in makeshift camps.
In 2002, following a mob attack on a train at Godhra railway station in which 59 Hindu passengers were killed, Muslims across the state of Gujarat were subjected to murderous assaults that left more than 1,000 people dead, including women and children. The killings, in places spearheaded by local Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders, happened under the watch of the state government, led at the time by Narendra Modi. Around one lakh Muslims were rendered homeless and ended up in relief camps. Thirteen years later, 16,000 of them still have no place to go.
there was no shortage of God-fearing, decent folk – “people like us” – who willfully ignored the crimes which were committed all around, who found ways to rationalise and justify the violence, who did not see the leader in whom they reposed so much faith as tainted in any way by his moral and political responsibility for what had happened.
Setting up a hierarchy of crimes and victims is a favourite way for governments to indulge their own prejudices, evade their own responsibility, and push their own political agenda. The Muslims who were killed in the Gujarat violence were as much victims as the Hindu passengers who were burned alive at Godhra. Yet, Modi and others used the strongest possible words to describe the burning of the train while dismissing what followed as merely ‘unfortunate.’ An official Gujarat government press release of March 4, 2002 quotes the then deputy PM L.K. Advani as referring to the train attack as the ‘Godhra genocide’. The violence which followed is mentioned only in the context of the ‘restoration of peace’.
India must also reject the corrosive notion of morality that sees in the condemnation of the Gujarat pogrom the diminution of the suffering of the Kashmiri Pandits. Or vice versa. For those who have suffered, justice is not a zero-sum game.
Zakir Hussain in 1967 pledged “The State, to us, will not be just an organization of power but a moral institution. It is part of our national temperament… that power should be used only for moral purposes… Our concept of national destiny will never have the expansionist urges of imperialistic growth, it shall forever eschew chauvinism. It shall work for providing to each citizen the essential mimima of decent human existence. It shall fight against intellectual laziness and indifference to the demands of social justice.”