A spin on history: Gujarat 2002

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra on PGurus: {lightly edited transcript}

 

Sri Iyer: Next question, please!  Thank you!  Rajesh {asks} "Can you explain what exactly happened in the Gujarat riots?

 

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra:  Yes, it was very simple. Modi anticipated.  What happened was the Godhra train got burnt by people from the outside.  It wasn't from the inside as some nonsense investigators told you.  They expected things to blow up.

 

Modi realized things were going to blow up.  He desperately asked for Central troops, he asked for police reinforcements from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra.

 

The center said no because, remember at that point of time, there was a massive mobilization, Parliament attack had happened and Operation Parakram was on, where the entire Army had been mobilized across the border.  So, they could not spare troops to come to Gujarat.  What else happened was that the three neighboring states said no and within about 24 hours as expected the riots broke out.  

 

Modi did the best he could with the small number of police he had with bolt action 303 rifles which you have to keep loading, one extracting, one loading, one extracting one bullet; you can't really do crowd control with that, and he tried his best as much as he could. You have to make some very tough choices--you can protect these neighborhoods, you can't protect these neighborhoods.  You decide to sacrifice some neighborhoods.  This is one of the ugly things about law-and-order maintenance which you have to do.

 

 He did, given what few troops he had and police he had, and that's exactly what happened and remember it was controlled within about 48 to 72 hours. Also, it wasn't a one-sided program, never forget that.  Yeah, both sides died and the other side, the so-called victim side also died in very significant numbers, never forget that,  many of them shot by police during rioting caught on camera. So it wasn't one-sided at all.

 

Sri Iyer:  One thing that BJP needs to do is to go on the front foot on this. The Congress knew Modi, that he was going to be a threat to the center,  to the Sonia Gandhi family even though they were not in power yet they understood. This is like a snake knowing another snake's legs.