How `assassination' plot saved Gujarat's Modi his job

Modi's pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began Tuesday a three-day conclave in the western port city of Mumbai to determine why the party was edged out from national power by the professedly secular Congress party and its communist allies in the April and May elections.

One of those reasons is the role played by Modi's provincial government during the riots, in which at least 2,000 people were slain by BJP supporters in revenge for the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims at Godhra station on February 27, 2002. No less than former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has blamed the BJP's electoral debacle on the Gujarat riots and has publicly called for Modi's removal from office.

According to Vajpayee and leaders of parties that were allied to the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Muslims across the country united and voted strategically to ensure the defeat of the BJP and ensure the victory of the Congress party. But Vajpayee's attempts to secure Modi's resignation has been blunted by the June 14 killing by Gujarat police of three men and a 19-year-old woman, which officials alleged to be members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba militant group. Authorities said they were intercepted before they could carry out a plot to assassinate the Gujarat chief minister.

Incidentally, that was the third alleged attempt in recent times to assassinate Modi, who has come under severe pressure to resign. But he continues to stay in power because of the support he enjoys from hardliners in the BJP and from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organisation that provides ideology and muscle to the BJP. Sacking Modi would be tantamount to admitting the failure of the BJP government at the centre to intervene effectively and stop the pogrom that lasted for nearly two months and resulted in more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, having to abandon their homes and live in makeshift refugee camps.

The alleged attempts to assassinate Modi have come in handy for the hardliners in the party to make sure that he continues to stay in power. However, questions are now being raised on the versions given out by the Gujarat police on the antecedents of the four persons, who were killed on a lonely stretch of a highway leading into the textile city of Ahmedabad, scene of some of the worst violence during the 2002 riots. Already, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory body, has begun investigations into the killings that Gujarat police said was the culmination of a firefight by the alleged militants. No policeman was injured in the gruesome incident. Much sympathy has also been pouring in for the family of Ishrat Jahan Raza, the 19-year-old college student who was among the four riddled by bullets when police opened fire on their car.

Businesses and schools in the Mumbai locality where Ishrat's family lives observed a day's shutdown to protest what seemed to them like an avoidable massacre. While Gujarat police said they opened fire in retaliation, sceptics ask if any attempt was made to capture the four alive.

Thousands of college students attended Ishrat's funeral on Saturday. Offers of cash support began pouring in for her family, which lives in an impoverished neighbourhood.

Ishrat's mother Shameema Raza said if there was suspicion that Ishrat was involved with militant groups, she should have been arrested and not shot dead in cold blood. Meanwhile, one of the three men killed, Javed Shaikh, turns out to have been a man originally of Hindu faith. Once called Pranesh Kumar Pillai, he converted to Islam to marry the woman he loved. Shaikh's father, who lives in Kerala, has demanded an independent probe into the killings. He has been quoted as saying that it was impossible that his son, an electrician by profession, could have been involved in militant activities or in any plot to assassinate a political leader.

"I want the truth to come out. I just can't bear to see the body of my innocent son like this - riddled with bullets," he was quoted in Kerala newspapers as saying. Gujarat police identified the two other men who were killed in the car as Pakistani nationals on the basis of identity cards that they produced before journalists. The killings have become a political issue in Maharashtra state, due to elect a new assembly in September.

A BJP functionary who is opposed to Modi's continuing in power said the killings had certainly saved the chief minister his job. "We are now forced to look for another opportunity to unseat him," he told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Modi, who is unpopular with an increasingly large section of the BJP unit in Gujarat, is said to have revived his political fortunes by allowing the pogrom to continue unhindered, thereby whipping up majority Hindu sentiment and translating this into a landslide victory for the BJP in the 2003 provincial elections in Gujarat held soon after the riots. But Modi also drew widespread condemnation from human rights groups, the NHRC and most importantly from the Supreme Court that described his role during the anti-Muslim pogrom as that of a `modern-day Nero'.

Attempts by Vajpayee, considered a moderate in the BJP, to sack Modi while he was prime minister were squashed by hardliners in his party. In recent weeks, he has regretted this as a failing during his six years in power which saw, among other achievements, closer rapprochement with rival and neighbour Pakistan.