India Behind The Lens (News Centre)

We have already seen the steps taken by the Government to quell the violence, and in saving the lives of the victims- for example in Sanjeli, Bodeli and Viramgam areas of Gujarat. Hindus were also saved from violent Muslims in many places in Gujarat- like in Jamalpur on 1 March 2002 and in Modasa on 19 March 2002 when Muslims attacked. But there has also been a claim by many that the Gujarat Government was like Hitler and have called these plain riots as ‘holocaust’ and equated them with the killing of Jews in Germany. Let's evaluate this comparison.

The Gujarat Government spent a lot of money for providing relief to the riot victims. None other than the UPA Government’s MoS for Home Shriprakash Jaiswal said in the Rajya Sabha that too in a written reply on 11 May 2005. He said an amount of Rs 1.5 lakh was paid by the government to the next of kin of each person killed and up to Rs 50,000 to those injured up to 50 per cent. In addition, Jaiswal said relief was also extended by the state government to the victims of the riots under the heads of cash doles and assistance for household kits, foodgrains to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families in affected areas, housing assistance, rebuilding earning assets, rehabilitation of small business, assistance to industries/shop and hotel and so on. The state government, Jaiswal said has informed that a total of Rs 204.62 crore has been incurred by it towards relief and rehabilitation measures. The Gujarat government has also informed that they had published the data as recommended by the NHRC, he added. See link

And the Gujarat Government in an advertisement given in weekly India Today dated 6 May 2002 said- “At the rate of Rs 30 per person, the Government is spending Rs 35 lakh a day on providing foodgrains to the 1.1 lakh inmates of the 99-odd relief camps in the state, 47 of them in Ahmedabad. The relief operations at the camps were being directly looked after by IAS officers of the rank of secretary to the state Government.

The camps in Ahmedabad were been divided into six groups. Each group was being monitored by a bureaucrat of the rank of secretary. The secretaries had been looking after the minutest problems of the inmates. Teachers were deputed in each camp to help the children prepare for the exams and the state Health Department had been taking special steps to look after the well being of the inmates. In order to rehabilitate the rural inmates, the Government had floated the Sant Kabir Awas Yojana as per the directions of Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee. The scheme enabled the inmates to build houses.” (And in these camps were 1 lakh Muslims and 40,000 Hindus as well)

Those who termed Modi as Hitler, would they now care to answer! Did Hitler ever spend crores on helping Jews or other Christian Germans affected by violence? He ordered killing of Jews, not spending of money to help them. Has any government in the world ever cared about minority Hindus who suffered like this? In the 1971 East Pakistan genocide, West Pakistani soldiers killed around 2 million Hindus (and also other Bangladeshi Muslims when their leader declared that Bangladeshis are un-Islamic) and also raped at least 2,50,000 Bengali women. From 1947 Pakistan has constantly massacred the Hindus, reducing their population from 20% in West Pakistan to 1% now. In Bangladesh also the Hindu population has declined from around 29% to just 7% now. Hindus are regularly killed, women raped, abducted and forcibly converted to Islam, temples attacked, Hindus thrown out of their homes in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In Kashmir in January 1990, Hindus were given 3 choices by local Islamic leaders- convert to Islam, die or leave Kashmir. Nobody ever reconstructed houses for these Hindus. Nobody gave them financial compensation of crores of rupees. And nobody spent 35 lakhs per day on them. Nobody arrested the culprits and punished them.

Those who order killing of others- or want others to suffer horribly, do not take the pains to do all that the Gujarat Government did. Not only did the Gujarat Government do all this, the police also arrested 35,552 people as of 28 April 2002, out of which 27,901 were Hindus. Around 20,000 people were arrested as a preventive measure. No Islamic country (or our own country in Kashmir in 1990) or other mass murderers like Saddam Hussain, Hitler ever carried out preventive arrests to save the victims. And already nearly 200 people have been convicted for rioting- the highest ever in Gujarat. No Islamic country has ever punished anyone for killings of Hindus, not even of the tallest Hindu leader of Pakistan Sudamchand Chawla, who was killed by Islamic radicals on 28 January 2002. And the so-called human rights activists have concocted many tales of rapes and killings, like the false claim that Ehsan Jafri’s daughters were raped, or Medina was raped, or the outrageous lie that a pregnant woman’s womb was ripped open and foetus taken out, when nothing like this happened. Killings of lakhs of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh have been ignored, rapes and abductions of Hindu girls have been suppressed ever after 1947. Hindu survivors of the Partition killings of 1947 have given graphic details of how Hindu and Sikh girls were raped, and their breasts cut off in 1947 in West Pakistan. Just like some people deny the holocaust of Jews (Like the Iranian President), these people have whitewashed Islam’s guilt even of medieval India when crores of Hindus were killed. Such people who deny the holocausts of Hindus and falsely allege rapes of Muslims are hailed as ‘liberals’ and ‘rationalists’ in the media.

The PR work of the Gujarat Government those days was not good. BJP too did not defend Modi in the fear of losing its newly found secular image. The media was the biggest perpetrator of lies and injustice which deliberately spread blatant lies and misconceptions and infuriated Muslims by lying that Narendra Modi is responsible for harm caused to the community. Far from it his government actually helped the victims both Hindu and Muslim- by spending generously on them and even taking care of the health and even children's education. Hundreds of Children from the camps appeared in the board exams. Government's timely efforts save a year of those children from going waste.

It's heartening to see the Truth having finally prevailed. Even the shadow of Godhra days is gone now, and what shines bright is a Garvi Gujarat. In the coming weeks, we'll be bringing articles to showcase this shining star of India, as we enter the Garvi Gujarat phase of our "Godhra to Garvi Gujarat series"