(Excerpts from http://www.gujaratlive.org/p/when-they-came-to-barren-border-areas.html)
Social scientist
Ashis Nandy had interviewed Narendra Modi in the early 1990s. He came out of the interview shaken. In his own words:
“More than a decade ago, when
Narendra Modi
was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a
small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him. . .
. Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all
the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had
set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality.
He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional
life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of
his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within
the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still
remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of
cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected
traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken
and told Yagnik that, for the first time,
I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.”
Another social scientist,
Shiv Vishwanathan, recently called
Narendra Modi an “uncivilized creature”
on prime time TV. He said he was sure of this term because he has done
“ten years of investigations” on Gujarat. JD(U) leader Shivanand Tewari
had earlier said that Modi’s body language reeked of arrogance. He
recently remarked (after Modi’s rather perverse and murderous ‘Kutte ka
Bachcha’ comment during an interview with Reuters) that Modi should
undergo “psycho analysis”.
However, we needn’t rely on these
impressions – based, as they are, on body language and psychological
profiling – to assess Modi’s character; we could simply look at the
record of his conduct.
There are no less than 45 authenticated
reports meticulously documenting the Gujarat carnage, which was
state-sponsored and masterminded at the highest level. The mass-scale
violence was facilitated and executed by the Gujarat police and
bureaucracy, including the top brass, and implemented on the ground by
blood-thirsty mobs and gang-rapists of the Sangh Parivar, Modi’s
ministers and Hindutva leaders. The documentation includes the NHRC
report and the bulky volumes of the People’s Tribunal, comprising
eminent former judges as members. There are also scores of eye-witness
accounts, including those of women – such as Bilquis Bano and Zakia
Jafri – who were victims of the state-sponsored violence.
Zakia
Jafri’s court petition and the arguments and evidence being presented
with it point to a nexus between the Gujarat government and the
so-called rioters and to the fact that the violent acts were planned
with detailed precision. Several indicators point to Modi himself. The
meeting of the top brass in the government one day before the state
sponsored killings is a crucial indicator.
Other documents
describe in detail the organized carnage and its aftermath in the tragic
and inhuman mass refugee camps. People were hacked and burned alive.
Swords ripped apart women’s stomachs. There were mass rapes and
grotesque public spectacles of gang rapes. Kerosene-filled match boxes
were put inside children’s mouths.
Ravaged women and children were
thrown alive into bonfires. All of this has been documented
meticulously and extensively by journalists, activists, lawyers,
witnesses, officials, filmmakers, and others.
