[Reader-list] on gujarat and sovereignty

[Monica Narula]

Below is an article taken from the archives of Outlook India 
magazine, written as an opinion piece by Raja Menon, an ex-navy 
person, and generally considered quite 'hawkish' on nuclear and 
defence issues. In this piece on the events of Gujarat, however, he 
is saying significant things - as is obvious from the header to the 
essay...Please pay attention to the writing on the internal mechanism 
of the system that went into the events of Gujarat.

best
Monica
-----------------------------
Dossiers Of Genocide 
(http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20020408&fname=Column+Raja+Menon+%28F%29&sid=1)
The colluding administrators should have the fear of an 
international, public trial. Genocide can't hide behind sovereignty.
RAJA MENON


In the winter of 1983, some of us in the Navy were posted to Kiel, 
Germany (then East), a city known as the home of the German U-boat 
fleet in the last war. As the cold weather closed in from the north 
we vacationed southwards and inevitably landed up at Belsen, the 
northern-most site of the concentration camps in the German homeland. 
It is unnecessary to reiterate the horrors of the place, but what I 
found most curious was: how did the Brown Shirts and the SS know 
where to look in each city to find the Jews? The answer is that in 
Germany-as in every other continental country-each family is 
registered with the municipal authorities, called the Ordnungs Amt. 
This office is kept informed whenever a family shifts residence. 
Originally designed to improve municipal administration and 
population statistics, these records became the source of information 
on Jewish families, who were then concentrated in a camp.

It appears that well before the Godhra outrage, Hindu fundamentalist 
outfits were similarly extracting municipal records, employment 
exchange registers, telephone-bill addresses, electoral rolls and 
even a public relations firm's business list to compile a dossier of 
Muslim residential addresses. Could this be true? There is little 
doubt that the state police and the IB are fully aware whether these 
allegations are either true or false. If they are true, there is no 
question that both the Gujarat government and the Union home ministry 
also knew the first steps towards replicating the 'Night of the Long 
Knives' by the Brown Shirts had begun in Gujarat. The IB's reporting 
chain leads it to the home secretary. There is also no reason why 
such information should be kept classified and denied to the people, 
unless the Union agency is part of the conspiracy-which takes me back 
to Belsen.

People leave Belsen in cold shocked rage. This rage is often seen in 
the erratic driving of cars coming out of Belsen. Every person has 
his private vision of horror. My preoccupation was what were the 
thousands of people, who knew about the plans to eliminate the Jews, 
thinking? Today we know that they buried their heads in the sand, 
ostrich-like, and didn't want to ask questions-why were the SS 
collecting lists of Jewish addresses? Or why were so many Jews 
disembarking from cattle wagons and what was being burnt behind the 
barbed wire that gave rise to a sickly smell each night? Didn't 
thousands of people in Ahmedabad know whether Muslim addresses were 
being collected? Didn't, at least, dozens of good, sound, 
secular-minded IB officers know? Will they speak up? Because if they 
don't, what will eventually happen is that the Union home ministry 
will perhaps single-handedly break up this country.

Since large numbers of educated people have expressed their feelings 
in the press and said that Godhra and the post-Godhra 'riots' were 
two sides of the same coin, it is necessary to point out the extreme 
dissimilarities. To us in the military, the definition of a riot is 
clear. It's created by mobs, which are large masses of men with no 
discriminating impulses. This is the reason why when the time comes 
to open fire, the killing of one or two leaders causes the mob to 
panic and disperse. Collecting lists of intended victims identified 
on the basis of religion, carrying LPG cylinders to cut open safes of 
Muslim business houses and training people to create LPG explosions 
without blowing themselves up are clear indications of premeditated 
genocide. Establishing that is absolutely necessary for the arguments 
which follow.

Genocide can rarely be investigated by state organs, because they 
have complicity in the killing process. The government should know 
this better than anyone else, since India was one of the prime movers 
of the Convention on Genocide enacted by the General Assembly in 
1948.What the convention attempted to state was that the sovereignty 
of states committing genocide could be trampled upon, if that is the 
only way in which the people can be protected from the state. Can a 
judicial commission instituted by the Gujarat government indict 
itself for genocide? Hardly likely. In the outpouring of revulsion 
against the killings, most of the ire has been directed against the 
politicians and the Hindu fundamentalist organisations. If the 
intention is to prevent the recurrence of such a carnage, this ire is 
misplaced. The target should be the servants of the Gujarat 
government whose inaction amounted to complicity.
There have been any number of large-scale communal riots in India in 
the past 150 years. The Indian government machinery that deals with 
riots is time-tested and robust. But it collapsed in Gujarat because 
the bureaucrats and the police conspired with the politicians. 
Barbaric mobs and venal politicians are part of the Indian scene, but 
the first act of rehabilitation is to threaten the errant government 
servants with worse consequences than what the Gujarati politician is 
capable of inflicting. That can only happen through threats of a 
public international trial. The Gujarat government servants' 
misconduct is no different from that of the two Rwandan nuns being 
tried in Belgium for complicity in genocide-they refused sanctuary to 
fugitives who were later massacred. Rwandan sovereignty was 
superseded to bring the nuns to trial, although their guilt seems 
less than that of the station house officer, Naroda police station.

(Raja Menon, a former naval officer, writes on strategic affairs.)
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net