The evil now consuming Gujarat emerged from the BJP's communal 'laboratory experiments' in the state. The massacres of Muslims thus do not represent a failure but rather a perverse success.
The teams of rescue workers that flew into Gujarat from around the world following the devastating 26 January 2001 earthquake came prepared for every imaginable disaster. Sniffing dogs, metal cutters, cranes, mobile hospitals — you name it. But what confounded them were the separate lines of survivors that queued up for relief. Caste and community mattered here even when the earth had yawned open and nearly every high-rise building had keeled over. This was, after all, BJP-ruled Gujarat, where men were not equal before god, much less before ignorant relief workers from strange lands.
It was only after the dust had settled, several rounds of learned seminars had been held and large dollops of compensation paid out that it became apparent that the casualties from the earthquake could have been fewer and the damage much less if only someone had bothered to enforce basic building by-laws. But the typical affluent Gujarati has a healthy contempt for laws and by-laws and has long replaced them with the famous chal se (anything goes) attitude. Sadly, unlike man-made laws, the laws of physics cannot be replaced by attitudes, and if a high-rise building does not have the specified foundation it will keel over in an earthquake. But Gujarati ingenuity backed by pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the centre and state levels quickly ensured that money poured in by temporarily suspending such pesky things as the Foreign Contribution Regulatory Act (FCRA) for the first and only time. In contrast, the poor souls who survived the Orissa super-cyclone are still waiting to be rehabilitated.
A visitor to Gujarat, which is still burning two months after a pogrom was unleashed there against a prosperous but peaceful Muslim community to avenge the torching of a train at Godhra station, was told that the "days of that 'choothia', Gandhi", were long gone. No more turning the other cheek. The hero of the day is Narendra Modi, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the talented Bollywood actor Paresh Raval in one of his more villainous roles. That Modi can count on his popularity having risen as a result of the mayhem in Gujarat — and actually wants to hold mid-terms elections in the state because of it — is testimony to how much values have actually changed in Gandhi's homeland. With more than a hundred thousand people reduced to being refugees in their own homeland and the army still out, the election commission would most certainly have shot down any snap poll. A sobering thought though is the prospect of Modi attempting to engineer another post-Godhra situation to rustle up anti-Muslim sentiment when the state is actually due to go to polls next year. Besides its fanaticism, the BJP has little else to offer the electorate in Gujarat except a reputation for widespread corruption and lawlessness.