by MUKUL DUBE
Reports published in today’s newspapers say that Narendra Modi made “a scathing attack” on the government at the Centre. In actuality his output was a hysterical tirade of a familiar kind. He has long practice of holding up “the people of Gujarat” when he attempts to defend the indefensible. His aim, of course, is to win over his voters by telling them that they have been “insulted” and by implying that he alone can defend them. This time he is tossing up the bogey of an insult to Gujarat’s judiciary. It is another matter that that judiciary is widely held to be in his pocket.
In saying that “the Centre was behaving as if Gujarat was not part of India ‘but an enemy nation'” (“Hindu”, 1 August 2010), he clearly forgot that Gujarat in effect seceded from the Republic of India by putting up sign-boards proclaiming “Hindu Rashtra” and “Hindu Rajya” and by going against the Constitution of India in every way possible other than those related to the political power to which he clings and which enables him to rant, to kill, to loot, to rape.
If indeed New Delhi is treating Gujarat as an enemy nation, then Gujarat, to defend its sovereignty, should launch an attack on New Delhi. Modi can well mobilise again the troops which were sent to Ayodhya to pull down an old structure over which neither Modi nor his masters ever had a claim.