COMMUNAL CONSPIRACY: In Pursuit of Modi

Now it is time for some history. Cut back to 1998-99 when Vajpayee was the PM. ‘Christian nuns raped in MP and Orissa’. ‘Social worker Graham Staines burnt alive’. ‘Hindu pogram against Christians’. What was the truth?

The Wadhwa Commission, which inquired into Staines murder, thrashed the secularists and the media for their lies. Arun Shourie has captured it brilliantly in his article on the Wadhwa report. Justice Wadhwa dealt with some of these incidents. The first was the alleged rape of Sister Jacqueline Mary on February 3, 1999. Wadhwa cited the media reports like ‘Orissa nun raped in moving car’ ‘by men in saris’ and pointed out that relying on the words of a pastor of the Church, the media highlighted it ‘as a planned attack on the Church’ and saw the ‘role of communal forces’. Wadhwa also noted the media quoting teachers of a Christian convent as saying, “Do not treat this as an isolated incident”, “a communal conspiracy is suspected to be behind the rape.” Shourie says it was indeed a communal conspiracy not to rape but to fabricate to fix Hindu outfits. What was the judicial finding? Justice Wadhwa concluded: ‘Investigations revealed that what Sister Mary said in the FIR was not true’; that it was a ‘made up story’; that there was ‘in fact no rape of Sister Mary’.

Wadhwa noted that B B Panda, Odisha’s Director General of Police, stated on oath that the ‘rape of the nun’ case, projected and highlighted all over the world as an attack on Christians was not true—the case turned out to be false.’ Within four days of the fabricated rape news, on February 7, 1999, another media report appeared. Two children, aged 10 and 19, were found murdered, a third had sustained injuries. Newspapers came up with the headings, ‘Two Christians killed, one injured in Orissa,’ ‘Two tribal Christians done to death in Kandhamal’. “This incident again attracted a great deal of publicity in the media, including electronic media,” writes Justice Wadhwa. He found that ultimately “investigation revealed that the crime was committed by a relative of the victims who was also a Christian”. On Graham Staines murder Justice Wadhwa concluded that Stains was not just social worker, but, he was involved in illegal conversions of illiterate tribals which they resisted and if the Odisha anti-conversion law had been enforced Staines would never have indulged in conversions in tribal areas—which led to his killing by tribals. At about that time, news of rape of three Christian nuns in Jabhua in MP by Hindu outfits shook the nation and the entire world. The US ambassador even protested, breaking all norms. Finally it turned out that the 24 persons who were involved in the rape were drunken dacoits who had set out to rob; twelve of them were Christians and the rest Bhil tribals. Space constraint draws the curtains on further expedition into other similar cases.

Is what is happening now when Modi is the PM not an action replay of what happened when Vajpayee was in power? Are not the media, the seculars and Opposition doing today against Modi what they were doing to Vajpayee 15 years ago?

If the Indian judiciary, the highest to the lowest, pursued anyone relentlessly for a decade it was Narendra Modi. The Supreme Court instituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate the riot cases, brought in the CBI to probe the Sohrabuddin and Ishrat Jahan cases choosing just the two out of hundreds of encounters throughout the country. While the SIT did an honest job, the CBI did a thoroughly dishonest probe under the very nose of the Supreme Court. In August 2011, The New Indian Express carried three explosive articles (‘Fixing Shah, by fabrication’, ‘CBI betrays court, bails out Congress’ and ‘Interrogating the media’), exposing how the CBI was dishonestly using the Supreme Court’s clout to fix Amit Shah and if possible Modi himself. The articles established how CBI was lying on affidavit and orally to the court contrary to the evidence it had procured. The final sentences of the concluding article of The New Indian Express were: “This is not the epilogue. Only an honest and independent judiciary can write an epilogue to this perfidy.” This short conclusion tells what volumes cannot. The media, intellectuals and the rest hounded Modi.

Now, cut back to 1984 when, after assassination of Indira Gandhi, over 2,000 Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi over several days. The then Congress Prime Minister even rationalised the killings later, saying that when a big tree falls, the earth around it shakes. No ‘secular’ leader or party questioned him. No court did. No Sahitya Akademi awardee returned the award. No court set up any SIT and monitored the probe. Not a clear contrast?