Many tears have been shed at Pratap Bhanu Mehta's resignation from a so-called Indian ivy-league university in the past week or so. This morning in his weekly column for the Dawn, Jawed Naqvi had eluded a survey in the Caravan magazine on the clique of so-called liberal Indo-US academics who smoothened the edges for Modi in his run-up to power in Delhi through their approbative indulgences on Modi in the waning days of the UPA government.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta was among those who thought that Modi's role in the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat was irrelevant to his natural place as the leader of the Indian nation. Then he was not alone in drooling at the prospect of Modi assuming the mantel. Shashi Tharoor, who couldn't do a day's proper job in the UPA government, would simply not shut up from singing paeans for Modi. Coming back to Pratap Bhanu Mehta and his brilliance, it is hard to think that he would be too small to remember Modi's role in creating and presiding over that mayhem in early spring of 2002.
Modi's then demeanor was best described by Arundhati Roy as “the then chief minister of Gujarat appeared on TV in a saffron Kurta with a slash of vermilion on his forehead, and with cold, dead eyes ordered the burnt bodies of Hindu pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were put on display for the general public to pay their respect.” Then there was that phone call where Ahsan Jaffri tried to plead for help before Modi's goons put an end to the life of Jaffri and those who had come to seek shelter considering his stature as a politician.
But for Pratap Bhanu Mehta and his liberal friends, it was time to consider Modi's past digressions as minor aberrations to be overlooked for the presumed good days ahead. Only if Pratap Bhanu Mehta had cared to listen to those chilling audios from the days of the 2002 riots with Modi taunting the hapless victims rendered homeless by his henchmen. Or, for that matter, didn't Modi run his government thereafter as an extortionist racket? Those murders of Ishrat Jahan, Hiren Pandya, or his henchman Amit Shah being charged and arrested as a home minister under Modi.
The world has had many times rulers that turned out to be dastardly murderous, but examples of murderers being promoted as rulers by so-called intelligentsia are not many. Don't shed tears for people who expedited the advent of Modi to power. They share the blame for the mayhem that has happened ever since. -Rajiv Kumar
