Media Reports of the Suffering of Hindus in the Gujarat Riots of 2002

Here are some such media reports-

http://www.indiatoday.com/itoday/20020415/states.html (from the magazine 'India Today')

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Riots-hit-all-classes-people-of-all-faith/articleshow/4007683.cms (from the newspaper 'The Times of India', one of India's leading national dailies; for some bizarre reason, this article, when posted online, isn't properly punctuated but is nonetheless not difficult to read)

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Rioters-torch-50-shops-at-Revdi-Bazaar/articleshow/4609603.cms (from the newspaper 'The Times of India', one of India's leading national dailies; for some bizarre reason, this article, when posted online, isn't properly punctuated but is nonetheless not difficult to read)

http://archive.indianexpress.com/oldStory/2401/ (from the esteemed newspaper 'Indian Express')

http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/05/30/stories/2002053000180200.htm (from the newspaper 'The Hindu', adored by left-liberals, and certainly with no bias in favour of India's Hindu majority, in spite of its name!)

It may also be noted that much of the coverage of the Gujarat riots in the international media was drawn from the Indian coverage, which did mention in detail the Muslim suffering during the riots.


Human Rights Watch, based on its field studies, has also acknowledged that innocent Hindus too did suffer during the Gujarat riots in 2002, as you can see here - http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2002/04/29/india-gujarat-officials-took-part-anti-muslim-violence.

Examples of Minority Appeasement by 'Secular' Indian Political Parties

We can take as our first example the Samajwadi Party that has governed India’s province of Uttar Pradesh since 2012, has been creating Muslim-only welfare schemes. They have created special tribunals to expedite the hearing of cases relating to Muslim-owned property. They even tried to unilaterally drop charges against Muslims accused of terrorism but thankfully, the judiciary did not permit the same. When bloody riots between Hindus and Muslims broke out in the Muzaffarnagar district of the province in 2013, Azam Khan, a Muslim leader of the party, allegedly instructed police personnel to not fire at Muslim rioters. It is true that some elements in the BJP are believed to have had a hand in these riots from the side of the Hindus, and the religious polarization generated by these riots in some districts of western Uttar Pradesh did work to the advantage of the BJP in the national elections in those particular areas, but this certainly doesn’t explain the victory of the BJP on a countrywide scale.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC), the party governing the province of West Bengal, provisioned a monthly allowance for Muslim clerics, costing a near-bankrupt provincial government hundreds of millions of Indian rupees annually. On 12th September 2013, the provincial public prosecutor told the judiciary that cases against Muslim rioters who had attacked well-known “heretic Muslim” writer Taslima Nasrin should be dropped, and this was a riot in which the army had to be called in to control the violence and arson. The chief minister declined to meet the US ambassador to appease some Muslims, for which she received accolades from a prominent Muslim cleric, who said she would “secure maximum votes” from Muslims. The same cleric also endorsed her as prime ministerial material! It would, however, be interesting to note that in these national elections in 2014, in spite of a “Modi wave” across India, the TMC still managed more seats than the BJP within the province of West Bengal, much of the Hindu majority of which is known to be strongly averse to Hindu majoritarian politics, though the BJP did win two seats in West Bengal, one of them being from a Muslim-majority constituency!

The ‘secular’ Congress government in the province of Karnataka announced a housing scheme for homeless minorities, financial assistance of Rs.50,000 each for marriage of minority-community girls, and minority-only education scholarships too. The state Congress chief G. Parameshwara said in October 2013 that it didn’t matter if minorities did not repay loans to the government and ‘it was part of the development process’.

An Indian Muslim politician Asaduddin Owaisi spewed venom against Jews (not only extreme Zionists in particular) as a collectivity, saying that they have “always been enemies of Islam” and endorsing the armed jihad in Palestine, and even saying that every Muslim must morally support the jihad, failing which he/she is not a true Muslim! This clearly amounts to hate speech, given that India has a Jewish minority. His brother Akbaruddin, also a politician, allegedly delivered a speech outraging Hindu religious sentiments. Even during the campaigns for these national elections, some Muslim politicians like Azam Khan and Shazia Ilmi passed divisive remarks.

The Congress government at the centre did not permit Salman Rushdie to visit India for a reputed literary festival, in spite of his lawfully obtained visa, to appease regressive Muslims. Likewise, it took a nod from a body of Catholic bishops to screen the Hollywood film The Da Vinci Code in spite of the film having been cleared by India’s censor board. Several provincial governments imposed a ban on the film (which was screened without any legal obstacles in very many Catholic-majority countries), which was lifted only after judicial intervention!

The previous Congress-led government at the centre even tried to push for a legislation supposedly aimed at curbing violence between religious groupings, but which would address only the grievances of victims from those religious groupings that constitute the minorities in a province, and would not address violence by members of a minority community against members of the majority community. And in most Indian provinces, Hindus constitute the majority community and Muslims a minority community.


The Congress government of Maharashtra even went soft on violent Muslim goons in Azad Maidan in Mumbai in 2012.

In the field of higher education, a Muslim writer, Ajaz Ashraf, has pointed out, in an article, the Indian state’s 1981 amendment that has given regressive clerics control over Muslim universities, like the Aligarh Muslim University (once the epitome of progressive thought), leading even to discrimination against academicians who are not practising Sunni men for the appointment of vice chancellor, which he strongly condemns. Two passages from the article are worth quoting –

“Worryingly, this process has turned AMU into a playground of community leaders who are Sunnis, often illiberal, having foggy ideas of modern education. Thus, for the post of VC, count out Hindu professors, as also those Shia, however brilliant, Leftists and atheists. Women? Stop joking. Indeed, AMU’s emphatic turn to Islamic Right has been in the years following the 1981 amendment.”

and

“…their plight is directly linked to that idea of secularism which empowers community leaders whose notions of education lack the imagination befitting the 21st century. Muslims should not want this sort of secularism, good neither for their education nor for India.”

It may also be noted that the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi had, in order to appease regressive Muslims, practically overturned the progressive Supreme Court ruling in the Shah Bano case dealing with a Muslim woman’s right to maintainence after divorce. The overturning only harmed the interests of Muslim women, not Hindus, and led to the resignation of Mr. Arif Mohammed Khan, a progressive Muslim politician, from the cabinet.


Some ‘secular’ politicians have used look-alikes of Osama and Saddam to woo rural Muslim voters.

This article by an Indian Muslim gentleman is also worth a read.

Religion-Based Controversies Under the Modi Government: Are They Being Blown Out of Proportion?

A very unfortunate incident of a murder of a Muslim youth in the Indian city of Pune in the province of Maharashtra by some Hindu extremists attracted the attention of the international media but should not mislead anyone into believing that this signifies anything to do with Modi being prime minister. As has been mentioned earlier, both Hindus and Muslims lose their lives in sporadic hate crimes in India (sporadic hate crimes take place in many countries, including England), and in this case of an isolated murder, arrests have promptly been made by the police. In any case, law and order falls within the domain of the provincial governments, and Maharashtra is governed by the Congress party.

Modi did condemn the murder. Indeed, more recently, there were Hindu-Muslim riots in Sahranpur in Uttar Pradesh, but again, law and order falls within the domain of the provincial governments. An anti-Muslim hate speech by BJP member Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh over the issue of “love jihad”, i.e. Muslim men trapping Hindu women to marry them and make them embrace Islam (a certain instance of this nature  apparently did unfortunately take place in the province of Jharkhand), wrongly generalizing all the instances of Hindu women marrying Muslim men within this ambit, received some attention, but NV Naidu, a minister in Modi’s cabinet in the central government, clarified that the BJP as a party had no aversion to inter-religious marriages. It is also relevant that the strategy of making “love jihad” the core issue did not translate into votes in the recent by-elections in Uttar Pradesh and Adityanath himself lost the election in a Hindu-majority constituency!

Also, the BJP as a party distanced itself from a comment of one of its members to the effect that India’s acclaimed Muslim tennis player, Sania Mirza, is Pakistan’s “daughter-in-law” and therefore, the ruling government of the province of Telangana (which is of a party in opposition to the BJP) blundered by appointing her as the brand ambassador of the province, and that BJP politician’s statement was just based on the fact that Sania happens to be married to a Pakistani man, and this remark was also strongly and rightfully criticized by the Indian media. Sania continues to the brand ambassador of the province of Telangana.

More of such divisive statements have indeed been made by members of the BJP, including one from a minister who declared that all Muslims and Christians in India should identify themselves as descendants of the Hindu deity Ram, failing which they are bastards, and only those voting for the BJP are true Indian nationalists, and another one from a BJP member praising Nathuram Godse, the Hindu extremist who killed Mahatma Gandhi, but in both cases, there was outrage from the opposition parties, and even Modi explicitly condemned the former statement, leading these politicians to retract their statements, which shows that Indian democracy is functioning well on this score. Modi has reverentially invoked Gandhi’s name in many of his speeches, and such statements, while being offensive and certainly worthy of strong condemnation, do not actually have any bearing on the regular lives of Indians, irrespective of religion. Indeed, there are bizarre remarks passed by politicians across the globe that are not accepted by their parties, like US senator Todd Atkin’s remark about “legitimate rape” not leading to pregnancy, British parliamentarian John Parker passing a sexist remark or British councilor Barbara Driver saying that you should enjoy rape if you can’t stop it! Modi has even issued a very stern warning to BJP members against irresponsible statements.

There has also been some hue and cry over Mohan Bhagwat, a leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu rightist outfit (which is unfortunately often wrongly equated only with its most extreme elements) known for its association with the BJP, addressing the nation on a Hindu festival on national television, the opposition being on the legitimate ground that Bhagwat isn’t a part of the government machinery but even the Congress party, when in power, had indulged members of a sister think-tank, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, in a similar manner) but nothing in Bhagwat’s speech was against secularism or democracy. In fact, he said -

‘Humanity can live a happy, peaceful and beautiful life only when we understand and follow the principles of loving and respectfully accepting the plurality inherent in nature; move with a sense of coordination, cooperation, empathy and dialogue and adopt the path of non-violence and constitutional middle path instead of practicing unilateral fanaticism and violence in our practices in matters related to ideological and religious conduct.’

An issue that many left-liberals have chosen to overlook is the cancellation of some Kashmiri Hindus’ pilgrimage to a lake in the Kashmir valley they regard as holy, due to protests by Muslim rightists in Kashmir, to which the government of the Muslim-majority province of Jammu and Kashmir gave in, which was wrong (though the pilgrimage took place later), and that too happened with Modi as prime minister. Moreover, the home minister in Modi’s cabinet adopted what was arguably a rather evasive and insensitive approach to this issue, and this was certainly not a Hindu rightist approach.

It is indeed shameful that Modi has appointed some people accused of complicity in riots as ministers (though not in the home portfolio dealing with law and order), but there is nothing to suggest that that would translate into any anti-minority policy, and official government policies discriminating against any minority religious grouping would automatically struck down as unconstitutional by the judiciary, and any discrimination in implementation of policies can also be brought to the notice of the judiciary.

There was also some outrage over a government advertisement on India’s Republic Day (26^th January) in 2015, which had watermarked the text of the preamble to the Indian constitution without the word ‘secular’, as was indeed the case before the insertion of that word by way of a constitutional amendment in 1976, though this is certainly not in the least to say that India was, in the vaguest sense, theocratic prior to that, for the constitution, under Article 14 and Articles 25 to 28, gave the religious minorities equal rights in every possible sphere, including of propagating their faith, and even the preamble, even before the usage of the word ‘secular’, referred to justice, liberty (specifically mentioning liberty of thought, action, belief, faith and worship) and equality for all Indians and fraternity between all Indians, as also explicit cultural and educational rights to the minorities under Articles 29 and 30, and it was contended by the BJP that the advertisement, on the occasion of India’s 65^th Republic Day, used the original, un-amended preamble for commemoration purposes. However, a clear diktat has been issued by the BJP-led central government that only the amended preamble shall be henceforth used for all government purposes, in spite of ultra-rightist Hindu party Shiv Sena demanding the removal of ‘secular’ from the constitution, to which no heed has been paid.

There was also an incident of India’s foreign minister Sushma Swaraj suggesting that the Bhagwad Gita, a Hindu scripture, be declared India’s “national book”, the way the peacock has been declared to be India’s national birdand the tiger India’s national animal, but Modi rebuffed the idea, saying that the only “holy book” of the Indian government is the Indian constitution, which talks of secularism.

Also, a great deal is being made out of the ‘ghar wapsi’ (home-coming) campaign being launched by some Hindu rightist outfits (which are known for their proximity to the BJP) appealing to Indian Muslims and Indian Christians to embrace the faith of their ancestors, Hinduism. However, the supposedly secular intellectuals criticizing this have no qualms about the activities of Muslim and Christian missionaries (the percentage of Muslims and Christians in the Indian population has only risen since India’s independence in 1947), and if everyone has the right to propagate their faith under the constitution, why should India’s Hindu majority be deprived of the same? And if coercive or fraudulent methods are employed by some Hindu rightists, then the provincial governments, which are, in very many cases, not of the BJP, can and indeed should take action. In fact, in Kerala, a province governed by the supposedly secular Congress party, the government has accepted that none of the Muslims and Christians converting to Hinduism have done so under any duress.

More recently, a great deal has been made of vandalism of five to six churches in Delhi, but there is no evidence to demonstrate that these were hate crimes by Hindu rightists, rather than being plain acts of theft. Also, Modi has clearly and emphatically condemned the same, and a probe is on.

We should avoid making a mountain out of an anthill and should not jump to bizarre conclusions. I do understand that so many controversies taking place within less than a year is problematic, and something the BJP should be weary of, but to write off India’s opposition political parties, moderates within the BJP, the media, the judiciary and the rest of the civil society, and to say that India’s secular democratic constitutional setup is on the verge of undergoing a demise, or even that India’s religious minorities are facing any serious problems in their day-to-day affairs, is not on.