Modi’s message

Tehelka's sting operation to nail the guilty in the Gujarat carnage may have brought about further corraboration about how Chief Minister Narendra Modi presided over the worst pogrom against Muslims in the country, but this is not the only part of the truth. Modi and the Gujarat government could have stopped the mass murders, rapes and mayhem if they had firm directions from the BJP-led NDA government in New Delhi. The army's entry was not only delayed: they did not have clear instructions what they were supposed to do. Correspondence between the then president KR Narayanan and prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee would have cleared the air about what was happening between the two, but those letters were not given to the Nanavati Commission. The basic purpose of the Gujarat killings and the ethnic cleansing, as a senior official in the Centre pointed out, was to bring about fundamentalist Hindu consolidation and to convey to the Muslims that they are second-class citizens and that nothing — India's secular Constitution, the president, army, media — can save them if the Hindutva forces get upset with them and go for collective elimination and terror.