rarefied air

FLOATING DUST SETTLED ON THE WAYSIDE LAUNCH,READY TO EMBARK ON A VOYAGE BEGONE,MOULDED FROM A CLASSIC NOVELLA OF THE RUE DE LABOURDANNA, DRINKING FROM A PORT INTO AMAZON WITH BOHEMIAN ROUGE APPLIED ON A TEMPLATE SPIRITED WITH DUSKY COMPLEXI0ON OF THE TAVERN...I PROCEED...

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Narendra Modi is the Chief Minister of Gujarat, elected by the masses for the second time in a row. Why aren’t we surprised? Because even before he won, everybody knew what was going to happen. His election campaign posters covered the length and breath of the state and the saffron supporters roamed the cities shouting victory slogans for the man. While in camparison, Congress did a no-show in the run up to the elections. The party, which had been conspicuous with its absence during the riots of 2002, almost did a similar vanishing act once again.
A friend of mine gets great pleasure in taunting the Gujarati psyche and its thought processes and the outcome of the Gujarat elections provided him the perfect opportunity to have fun at their expense. He had a field day taunting their ludicrous and cruel intentions that must have made them vote for the ‘dictator.’ I did not try to stop him.
When I visited Ahmedabad last month, I came to two conclusions- the two communities of Hindus and Muslims, were both going to vote for Modi this time, one out of ignorance and the other out of fear. The predictions having been proved right, it did not give me great pleasure, mind you. Also, the dilemma I was needling of how the educated upper class Gujarati could be blind to Modi’s hand in the ‘carnage’, as the riots came to be called, intensified with no logical reason coming to light. What did emerge out of my discussions with some of them- the upper class Gujaratis, was that during the riots, they witnessed horrible things happening to Muslim families, sometimes directly in their neighbourhoods. But they, the Hindus, were safe. They were safe because Modi and his supporters ensured they remained safe. (Remember, Modi’s sole aim during the riots was to wipe out the minority community but he saved his own community.) Now, the thought that they were safe because of Modi, has remained in their heads, making them blind to the horror faced by the ‘other’ community. Also, it seemed to me that they were aware of the horrors Modi was capable of unleashing and were glad to be on the winning side of the battle, and would go to lengths to remain there. I do not want to defend the thinking adopted by them by calling it the self-protectionist strategy. It is nothing but sheer insensitivity towards human life and illogical selfishness leading to a dehumanisation of the self that they are not totally aware of. Worse were the middle-class inhabitants of Maninagar, Modi’s constituency, who refused to acknowledge even a single speck of dust on their enigmatic leader’s name. He was God for them, in the least. All these experiences made me come to a very racial typical conclusion, which made me cringe. That the Gujarati people had lost their human nature and thinking capacity to turn into the leader they epitomised- Modi himself. Or perhaps they were always like this? Or perhaps every people are like this when the opportunity to be awarded when behaving in a dehumanising manner shows itself? Now, now, I was generalising too much!


http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/12/26/stories/2007122650310800.htm