The Supreme Court’s stay of the Gujarat High Court’s order, directing the local authorities to take immediate steps to remove all religious structures encroaching on public space without discrimination, is a welcome move. Given the communally charged climate in Gujarat, and the lack of any significant effort on the state government’s part to rebuild the climate of trust destroyed in the wake of the Godhra massacre and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom, the project to remove a 300-year-old dargah was fraught with risk. As pointed out earlier, it should’ve been handled with the requisite sensitivity.
Under the Centre’s insistence, the state has called out the army and this has possibly calmed the situation. But the 2002 violence and its recurrence demands some deeper thinking. The government has tabled a Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation) Bill in 2005. It has laudable aims, but its provisions will meet the needs of the day only partially. The bill assumes that the Centre and the state governments will work towards the same goal of assuring communal harmony. But what Gujarat tells us is that this may not happen. Not just because the state government and the Centre are run by different parties, but because the polity of a state has become so communalised that its politicians, police, lower judiciary and officialdom are no longer seen as neutral parties.
But a bigger question mark comes with the role of the army. Flag marches work at times, and at times they don’t. Sometimes this happens as a matter of deliberate policy where state governments that have called out the army, do not provide magistrates who can order them to fire at rioters. This happened in Delhi in 1984, Mumbai in 1992-93 and Gujarat in 2002. Getting the army out without giving them authority to act lowers the morale of the soldiers and their standing in the eyes of the people who they are supposed to protect. Some will argue that any provisions that give additional powers to the Centre to overrule the state would disturb the spirit, if not the letter, of our federal Constitution. But surely the persistence of communal violence, encouraged or tolerated by state governments, does violence to the basic structure of the Constitution that defines India as a secular democracy.
{{/usCountry}}But a bigger question mark comes with the role of the army. Flag marches work at times, and at times they don’t. Sometimes this happens as a matter of deliberate policy where state governments that have called out the army, do not provide magistrates who can order them to fire at rioters. This happened in Delhi in 1984, Mumbai in 1992-93 and Gujarat in 2002. Getting the army out without giving them authority to act lowers the morale of the soldiers and their standing in the eyes of the people who they are supposed to protect. Some will argue that any provisions that give additional powers to the Centre to overrule the state would disturb the spirit, if not the letter, of our federal Constitution. But surely the persistence of communal violence, encouraged or tolerated by state governments, does violence to the basic structure of the Constitution that defines India as a secular democracy.
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