It has already been well-documented how false reports were spread about a pregnant Muslim woman whose stomach was allegedly ripped open, her foetus wrenched out with a sword, and set on fire. BBC lent credibility tothis rumour in its report of March 6, 2002. Harsh Mander repeated the same story in a tear-jerking article published on March 20, 2002, in The Times of India. The Tehelka website lent further colour and credence to it by writing that a woman named Saira Banu had claimed that the victim of that gruesome incident was her sister-in-law.
Indian activist and writer
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At the same time, Congress’s well-orchestrated chorus calling Narendra Modi a “maut ka saudagar”, mass murderer, Hitler, snake, scorpion, yamdoot, and worse kept getting shriller by the day, duly amplified by propped up NGOs, pliable journalists, and patronised academics. So much so, that many within the BJP also came to believe the charges leveled against him and even demanded that he be sacked. Several BJP allies quit the NDA alliance, which facilitated the ousting of the otherwise popular Vajpayee-led NDA government in Delhi. The anti-Modi hysteria ensured that no one gave him a hearing; no one was willing to look at facts. How Modi retained not just his personal sanity but also emerged, as an outstanding administrator, capable of dreaming big for Gujarat and translating those dreams into action deserves serious study.
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However, the fact that Mushrif has to apologise for giving his community good news from Gujarat, gives us an idea of the kind of intellectual terror Congress and its “secular” allies have come to exercise among Muslims. They must appear as permanent victims in the Congress scheme of things or else be declared traitors as happened with Salman Khan, who dared speak a few mild words in favour of Modi’s regime or, worse still, be bulldozed into silence as happened with Maulana Vastanvi.
Given Modi’s determination to crack down and eliminate underworld dons and international crime syndicates who had deeply embedded links in the Congress and many “secular” parties, letting him survive or grow in strength would sound the death knell of the Congress and all such parties. Congress was the first to recognise this danger and therefore went gunning for Modi from the start quickly rallying all other compromised parties to join in the battle. As we shall see in later chapters, it was not Modi, but the Congress Party that played communally-divisive politics in order to derail Modi’s inclusive development agenda With Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the prime minister having already dislodged the Congress Party in the Central government, the Congress Party was in dire need of an issue to target the BJP at the national level and Modi in Gujarat. The Godhra carnage and the riots that followed were the product of this desperation.
The fourth phase of violence starting May 5 saw attacks on Hindu neighbourhoods by mischief mongers with the intent of provoking a backlash. The idea was to influence the scheduled discussion on Gujarat in the concluding session of Rajya Sabha the next day. These stage-managed riots were aimed at misleading the Parliament, as well as the outside world, to believe that the situation in Gujarat was grim and to build a national hysteria around Narendra Modi in order to browbeat Prime Minister Vajpayee into sacking Modi.
The fourth phase starting May 5 saw even more aggression by rogue elements propped up to attack Hindu localities, with the clear intention of triggering large-scale Hindu-Muslim riots. These were deliberately staged on the eve of the concluding session of Rajya Sabha on May 6 to provide ammunition to the Congress and its allied parties to attack the NDA government. The morning of May 5, 2002, saw organised and aggressive attacks on Parikshit Nagar area of Ahmedabad city. It was marked by large-scale use of firearms and explosives. Miscreants used bombs and rocket launchers in this phase of violence.
Modi told me the last straw for him with regard to NDTV was when one of their correspondents, Vijay Trivedi, accompanied him in a helicopter for an interview. When he started asking the same old insulting questions, Modi simply kept quiet and refused to respond any further. Piqued at Modi’s ignoring him, Trivedi spread the canard that Modi nearly threw him out of the helicopter mid-air because he had asked tough questions. Modi says on that day he decided never to give legitimacy to NDTV by giving them an interview or responding to any questions from them. Vijay Trivedi treats this incident as a badge of honour.
Arnab Goswami of Republic TV also deserves acknowledgement for making of this book. At an early stage of #GhazwaVictim case, he invited me on his prime time show to discuss the case. Because I did not join the hysterical chorus baying for the blood of the targeted Dogras, he shouted me down imperiously, instead of listening calmly to my reasoning why the whole narrative was very suspect. This hardened my resolve to investigate the case with thoroughness.
This is a classic example of conflicts arising not out of ignorance but surfeit of knowledge combined with the unconsciously imbibed arrogance of Western academia which assumes that its tools of analysis and value systems enable them to understand and pass judgment on the experiences and heritage of all human beings including those who operate with very different world views. Instead of dealing with the criticism leveled at their intellectual tools, many Western Indologists treated the conflict as a case of ‘academic freedom’ versus the intolerance of Hindu community leaders, thus leading to a bitter stalemate.
"I am both humbled and inspired by the courage and dharmic commitment of my grandparents-maternal as well as paternal, who (like millions of other Hindus) refused to convert in order to stay put in their homeland that was turned through devilish means into a Dar al-Islam called Pakistan in 1947. They preferred to move into what little remained of Bharat as destitute refugees, rather than bear the indignity of abandoning their Dharma.