by ANAHITA MUKHERJI
The two most widely reported news stories on Friday the 13th, 2013, have a lesson in store for the country. The men who raped and brutalised a young girl in a moving bus in Delhi last year have been awarded the death sentence. The man who oversaw one of independent India’s worst instances of communal violence, in which thousands of women were raped and tortured, has been given the chance to become India’s next prime minister. And the party he wishes to defeat has gone largely unpunished for another dastardly act of communal violence.
Some skeletons refuse to remain locked in a closet, no matter how firmly we shut the door. The ghosts of Sikhs roasted alive in Delhi 30 years ago, and Muslims gang-raped and chopped into pieces over a decade ago in Gujarat have come back to haunt India’s two largest national parties in the run up to the 2014 elections.
For many young Indians — the census suggests that much of India is young — the bloodbath in Gujarat is a distant memory and most were not born when Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi. But in the last one year, both massacres have clawed their way back into public memory. A BJP minister from Gujarat was sentenced to life imprisonment for her role in the 2002 violence, and court cases against two Congress leaders have resurfaced in connection with the 1984 massacre.
Both Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 1984 have often been dismissed as spontaneous riots. There is much to suggest they were neither spontaneous, nor riots, but systematic acts of ethnic cleansing targeting two of India’s minority communities.
Recent debates focus on the impact of both pogroms on the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. But can we reduce crimes against humanity to an election campaign? Is that all that genocide means to us? How do we decide which genocide to vote for and which to vote against? Is there any foot-ruler or weighing scale that can help us measure two acts of barbarism to figure out which one is worse?
The Times of India for more
(Thanks to Asghar Vasanwala)