In defending Sadhvi Pragya, PM Modi committed the ultimate mistake

Has Prime Minister Narendra Modi inadvertently indicted himself for engaging in terrorist activities? Or was Modi so comfortable interacting with a convivial Press Corps that he let his guard down with all the bonhomie surrounding the media interview? Two days ago, in yet another exclusive interview, this time to Times Now, Modi was expansive when he defended his party’s decision to field Malegaon blast accused, Pragya Singh Thakur, as the BJP’s candidate in Bhopal for the on-going Lok Sabha elections.

Thakur was arrested in 2009 on terror charges for the Malegaon bombings, near a mosque killing six and injuring a hundred, as a member of an extremist Hindutva group, Abhinav Bharat. However, in 2016, after Modi came to power, the National Investigating Agency (NIA) discredited the probe carried against her and described it as full of “lacunae”. The Special Court refused to discharge her and said there was prima facie evidence about her role in the blast. The Sadhvi is currently out on bail.

Sitting in the lawns of his office and talking to Times Now, Modi said that choosing Thakur was a fitting reply to all those who falsely branded the “rich Hindu civilisation, as old as 5,000 years” as “terrorists”. Thakur, he said, was “a woman, that too a saint, (she’s a Hindutva sadhvi) was subjected to such heinous torture,” and added that she was punished without any evidence. He accused the Congress for spinning false narratives of heroes and villains and spreading lies; and it is here that Modi gets caught in his own web of tales.

In his exuberance to underline the point, Modi brought up the murderous anti-Sikh riots of 1984, in the aftermath of the assassination of the then Congress prime minister Indira Gandhi, and asked with incredulity, “Her (Indira’s) son (Rajiv Gandhi) said when a big tree falls, the earth shakes. After that thousands of Sikhs were massacred in Delhi. Was it not ‘terrorism’ of certain people? Even after that he (Rajiv) was made the prime minister. The neutral media never asked any question with regard to this but is asking now.” Then, to further buttress his point, Modi said, “Those very Congress leaders who were accused of ‘terror’ were made MPs, they were appointed as Cabinet ministers in the Centre, one of them was even made chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.”

Now, what should have got the Times Now interviewers to leap up and pin Modi on whether the 2002 carnage against Muslims under his watch was also an act of terror, was simply let to pass. Neither did they ask why he is not calling Pragya Thakur a terrorist – after all, Modi did bring up 1984 accused as if to say if they indulged in acts of terror, why can’t the BJP? And, worse, is he also whitewashing himself for the 2002 Gujarat riots by bringing up 1984? If Rajiv can be made prime minister, he asks, why not he?

Let’s first look at the incriminating terror charges against Pragya Thakur: In 2008, Pragya Thakur, along with her accomplices, were accused under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), a law to prevent organised crime and terrorism, for the bomb blast in Malegaon, near a mosque, that killed six people and injured hundreds. The terrorism act was allegedly in retaliation to jihadi activities in the state. The motorcycle carrying the bomb was in Thakur’s name and the investigations were led by slain police officer Hemant Karkare. In May, 2016, the NIA investigating the case, pleaded to drop the MCOCA charges and backtracked on the incriminating evidence of videos and transcripts that allegedly revealed Thakur’s conspiracy meetings, all put together by Karkare’s team. While MCOCA was dropped, the special court has booked her for murder, committing acts of terrorism, criminal conspiracy, and creating enmity in the state,  under sections of the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the IPC. Thakur is out on bail today, and if found guilty, she could face life imprisonment. BJP president Amit Shah says charges against Thakur are fake and illegal.

But the parallels are stunning between 1984 and 2002 — if Rajiv Gandhi had said that “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes” in reference to the murderous rampage on Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira’s assassination; Modi too had referred to Newton’s law of “action and reaction” after the post-Godhra carnage. Rajiv made the statement three weeks after the riots had stopped, at a public meeting to launch his election campaign. Modi made the statement as the riots were still raging in Gujarat, as if sanctifying the killings, that too barely a day after the burning of two bogeys of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station, which was used to set off the riots.

Modi had evoked the action-reaction theory in a television interview to Zee News in reference to the murder of Congress MP Ehsan Jafri and many other residents, now known as the Gulberg Society case, when he said that it was Jafri who fired (“action”) the first shot in the air to disperse the Hindutva mob, and the massacre was the “reaction”. He also added that he didn’t want more action and reaction. However, in the same interview Modi blamed the people of “that part of Godhra who have criminal tendencies…(and) now they have done this terrible crime, for which a reaction is going on.”

Both 1984 and 2002 was about majoritarian triumphalism and rule, one against the Sikhs, the other against Muslims; both the Congress and Modi’s BJP reaped a rich electoral harvest in the immediate aftermath – Rajiv won a landslide victory in the 1984 Lok Sabha election, a vote that was to avenge his mother’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Rajiv’s march was cut short when he was also assassinated by Tamil Tigers in 1991. Modi continues to reap a rich harvest riding on Hindutva hate campaigns against the Muslims, to eventually become prime minister 12 years later.

Perhaps, it’s in the exoneration of both Modi and Kamal Nath, who Modi refers to grudgingly in the Times Now interview that draws stunning parallels. Journalist Manoj Mitta’s two seminal books on 1984, “When a Tree Shook Delhi” and on 2002, “The Fiction of Fact-Finding” details how both Nath and Modi were let off the hook, thus far. In Nath’s case, the book reveals that though media reports and eye-witnesses reveal that Kamal Nath spent two hours in front of the Rakab Ganj Gurudwara, across the street from Parliament House on Nov 1, 1984, where a mob desecrated the periphery of the gurudwara and two Sikhs were roasted alive; the Nanavati Commission to look into the riots, did not indict him. The Commission served him a notice almost two decades later, where Nath said he was present at the gurudwara but was vague in his reply why he was there. The Commission said it gave Nath the benefit of doubt, for lack of better evidence to show that Nath instigated the mob or he was involved in the attack on the gurudwara. The jury is still out there.

In the case of Modi, Mitta’s book reveals that the contradictions and gaps in the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) report set up by the Supreme Court in 2009, deliberately let Modi off the hook. The SIT, says Mitta, refrained from pinning Modi down on several discrepancies in his testimony that was recorded in 2010, from his dodgy answers about his knowledge about the Gulberg massacre, to the role of police who come directly under Modi as he also held the Home ministry, to the complicity of the SIT chief himself, RK Raghavan. It must be noted here that Raghavan was Modi’s first political appointment as PM in the foreign service when the former was made High Commissioner to Cyprus in 2017.

The SIT, which was also tasked to look into Zakia Jafri’s complaint, actually has Modi as Accused No 1, with 60 others accused; and while the district court has agreed with the SIT that there was not enough evidence to justify further action under the law; Jafri has appealed to the high court to push her case. As Mitta notes, there is enough evidence against Modi for him to face a criminal trial, and the case is still not shut.

Has Modi bitten off more than he can chew?