I have been a big fan of Ruchir Joshi, ever since I read the "Last Jet Engine Laugh".
I found this artcile by him in the 6th Jul 2006 edition of
HindustanTimes very interesting. Hence it appears here.
Published on July 06 2006,Page 11
OUT OF LINE - Protection is not really Narendra Modi’s forte
ruchir joshi
R ARELY COULD there have been such a sharp goad from absurdity. You happen to be living in Gujarat, in Ahmedabad, and you go to the local shop to buy biscuits and chips. There is no more salacious thought in your head than settling down with a good cup of tea in front of the TV and watching sport or soap or news. As the shopkeeper hands you your change he also thrusts forward a small trunk that’s been sitting on the counter. “Here,” he says, “please do take a few. They are free.” You look inside the box, expecting some promotional mint, with or without a hole, but what you see there leaves no breath in your lungs for any lozenge to freshen.
Having not yet seen the goods myself, I don’t know if Narendra Modi’s face is printed only on the cartons, whether it’s resplendent on each individual packet or, indeed, also embossed like a royal profile on the business end of each condom itself. What I do know is that Modi and Ashok Bhatt, the Health Minister, both seem eager to try and get ever deeper into the lives of the citizens of Gujarat.
On the surface, it looks like a radical gambit: the Chief Minister and highest elected official in charge of the state’s health putting not only their names but their mugs on the line in order to encourage ordinary citizens to use the most effective instruments of sexual protection. “Here,” the likelinesses of the leaders might seem to be saying, “if someone objects to the use of these, just show them our pictures — the best, most God-fearing leaders of your state are exhorting you to please protect yourselves, and to try and bring down the population.” Or, even, “Please use this prophylactic without shame or fear. Both of us do.” Seen in the context of the global politics of health, again, this could be a really cool and funky move. Confronted by the unholy alliance of a geriatrically intransigent
Catholic Church and a lunatically criminal ‘Christian’ fundamentalist Bush administration, which, together, are doing their best to destroy decades of work around family planning and the containment of Aids, what could be more insouciantly courageous than two democratically elected leaders of an Indian state legislature saying, “Hey, we know the human urge for sexual gratification is one of the main turbines that drives our lives! We know you are going to need recreational fornication! It’s okay! Ignore the repressed nay-sayers!” This signifier can also be unrolled a third way: this is a canny first move on the part of the Gujarat Gaurav Commando towards turning the state into a major international tourist-magnet. Rajasthan offers camels, castles and, now, designer bottles of local liqueurs. Goa offers beaches, great food and a long tradition of foreigners wearing very few clothes.
Dharamsala has the mountains and the whole Tibetan thing going on. So what can Gujarat offer in competition? Well, for starters, come visit and we won’t object to you enjoying yourselves in your hotel rooms. In fact, now that our Cabinet has taken sex out of the closet, the doing away of alcohol prohibition will follow shortly — in a year or two you will be able to relax in beer bars before or after your use of Modi-Tex, Bhatt-Traveller or Patel X-tra Anand.
There is a commonly used phrase in Gujarati: “E manas to naago thayi gayo” — literally ‘that man became naked’, meaning he became completely and brazenly shameless. There is no more apt sentence to describe what Narendra Modi and his government have been doing since he took over as Chief Minister five years ago.
In 2001, Modi was made Chief Minister with a one-line brief from his party: Turn around the BJP’s failing fortunes before the coming state elections. “I am not here to play a Test match,” Modi is reported to have said to his ministers, “I am here to play oneday cricket.” For those who’ve just joined us, or whose memories may have wandered, here, in chronological sequence, is one brief description of that ‘game’.
First, lists are compiled of ar eas where Muslims are concentrated, of where they live among non-Muslims, of businesses partly or wholly owned by Muslims, of where Muslims are employed; next, the plans for a ‘spontaneous reaction’ are meticulously put in place. Next an ‘action’ is created, in which a Muslim crowd can be blamed for the deaths of Hindus. In the early morning of February 27, 2002, something with enough incendiary power to burn from up downwards through the concrete slab of a bogey passageway finds its way into a train carriage that is sealed from inside; 59 people die in the carriage, all Hindu, mostly women and children who, it seems, have been herded into the middle of the carriage, away from the exits.
The trigger-tragedy takes place at around 7.30 a.m. in the small town of Godhra, which is not too close to Ahmedabad. But by 12.30 p.m. police control rooms are receiving (and, it seems, mostly ignoring) reports of attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods and businesses. The ‘spontaneous’ mobs are amazingly well organised, with lists of addresses, with gas cylinders and explosives, with trucks in which to transport them, with mobiles on which they get instructions from some coordinating entity.
Over the next two months, central and state governments, the army, the civil administration and police, all notwithstanding, over 2,000 Gujaratis are killed and well over 100,000 ripped out of their homes and livelihoods. In the land that supposedly worships the sacredly erotic ras lila between Radha and Krishna, several hundred little girls and women are raped and then many killed in the most obscene ways.
Surrounded by the cacophonous defence mounted by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K Advani, Arun Jaitley, the party’s ‘master strategist’ Pramod Mahajan, among others, supported by a callous middle-class, Narendra Modi-shri is elected to continue in power. This gives the man and his cohorts the licence to further tighten their grip on Gujarat. FIRs of murder and rape during the carnage are torn up and trial witnesses to arson and butchery are terrorised. The initial lists continue to have a role, as owners of factories and businesses are instructed to get rid of their Muslim workers, an instruction backed by threats of arson and mayhem, the compliance of it overseen by detailed surveillance of workplaces.
Modi’s bloody One-Day win mutated into a macabre Test match that’s still continuing. Instead of standing trial and going to jail, the man continues, without pause or prophylactic, to do to various other sections of the Gujarati populace more or less what he did to Gujarati Muslims in 2002. Despite the orders of the Supreme Court, buried cases against the perpetrators of 2002 have not been re-opened. Policemen and administrators who oversaw the carnage have been rewarded with promotions. In a parallel pornography, the twoyear-old UPA government stands frozen, caught in a Mexican stand-off in which the BJP holds the rusty but loaded hand-musket of the 1984 Sikh killings.
It won’t forever be like this, though. Even today, the documentation and the search for justice continues around the only subcontinental event that surpasses Gujarat for organised genocide and mass rape — the brutal and cold-blooded campaign of the Pakistani army in 1971 against their own Bengali population. In other parts of the world, people who have planned large-scale murder and rape have even found themselves pursued and prosecuted and, sometimes, ending their ignominous lives behind prison bars.
So, if you happen to be going to Gujarat in the next few days, do grab a handful of the Modi-faced condoms and preserve them carefully — in the coming years they will serve to remind you of how far humans can take themselves from Dwarka and Vrindavan, from love and humanity.
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