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Establish rule of law:End alienation of deprived sections and minorities |
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B.I. Saini
The Centre's advisories to Karnataka and Orissa to take effective action against continuing communal violence have brought home once again the need to establish the rule of law in the country. Karnataka and Orissa, and to a lesser extent, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, have witnessed attacks on members of the Christian community and their places of worship and institutions in the last few weeks, denting the country's image as a secular state, where people of different faiths can co-exist peacefully.
The attacks on the Christian community have been largely, and in some cases, openly orchestrated by organisations belonging to the Sangh parivar, mainly the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, to protest against what they call forcible conversion of tribal people. They allege that Christian missionaries have been promising and giving financial and other incentives to poor tribal people to induce them to convert to Christianity. Whether their allegations are justified or not remains to be seen but there can be no doubt about the fact that the burning of churches, and in some cases, of nuns, has no justification whatsoever. By their actions, the VHP and Bajrang Dal cadres have brought ignominy to the cause of Hindutva they claim to espouse. This is no way to fight proselytisation by the Christian missionaries. If they want the tribal people to stop converting, they should have, instead, tried to make the Hindus a more cohesive and inclusive
community, where the caste system is not allowed to used as an instrument of oppression.
The alienation of deprived sections, both in the Hindu community and in the country as a whole is not only creating fissures in the polity but also contributing to the rise of terrorism. Different political parties, especially the BJP and its senior leaders including the party's prime minsterial candidate Lal Krishan Advani and the front-runner among the 'younger' leaders, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi cannot escape the responsibility for alienating major segments of society from the mainstream for their narrow political gains. That a section of Congress leaders had played a similar role at the time of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 is no excuse.
Investigation of the recent Delhi and the earlier Ahmedabad and Bangalore terror strikes has brought to light that while the Pakistani spy agency, ISI, and its off-shoots played a role in the training of and supply of arms to the outfits involved, local elements, especially disaffected Muslim youth carried out the bomb attacks. And these local elements were to a large extent motivated by the hurt caused to Muslim psyche by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the post-Godhra Gujarat riots, in which a large number of Muslims were killed.
Regrettably, the perpetrators of the outrage at Ayodhya and the killing of Muslims in Narendra Modi's Gujarat have still not been brought to book. Governments of different hues at the Centre and in the states concerned-Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat-have failed to discharge their constitutional obligation to protect the innocent and punish the guilty.
Even at this stage, it would help if the Governments, both at the Centre and in the states, act firmly to establish the rule of law to protect the common man and to punish those, high and low, who take the law into their own hands, whether they are terrorists or fanatics or politicians seeking to build their vote banks at the cost of the nation.
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