Godhra was simply an occasion, the excuse for what has been happening
in Gujarat for four months now, just as September 11 was not the
reason but the occasion for the launching of the 'international war
against terror'. Godhra was an excuse for a butchery binge against
Muslims just as faltering secular practices and the only partially
attained goals for education and democracy have become excuses in
recent years for launching into a slaughter of secularism, democracy
and education.

The only way we can begin to make sense of Gujarat is to look hard,
long and clearly at the RSS family. All other explanatory variables -
the long-term worldwide economic slowdown, the collapse of
Ahmedabad's 64 textile mills, disrupting 160,000 working lives, the
expansion in Gujarat of informal labouring practices with all its
attendant everyday insecurities, the class, caste and patriarchal
anxieties of the privileged (the Brahmins, Patidars and Banias, for
instance), the historical absence in modern Gujarat of strong
anti-caste movements, emancipatory women's movements, autonomous
labour movements - all these arguments are absolutely necessary, but
not sufficient for understanding what we are confronted with in
Gujarat today. It is not even enough to argue that Gujarat happened
the way it did because the State collapsed or allowed it to happen.

The dangerous singularity of Gujarat 2002 lies in the shameless
self-righteous abandon with which the anti-Muslim pogrom has been
unleashed and justified by the State, right to this day. This, to a
large extent, explains the scale and the extreme viciousness of the
continuing violence as also the cold terror that is gripping Muslims
in Gujarat and in other parts of the country. The State, not just
through the practice of its partisanship but through a
rationalisation of this practice, is saying more loudly and clearly
than ever since 1947, that everyone is not equal before the law. It
is saying openly that it is for the State - not for our republican
Constitution - to decide who shall live and how in this country.

Today it is the Muslims and other religious minorities who are at the
receiving end of the State's arbitrary brutality. Tomorrow it can be
anyone who is seen to be a thorn in the flesh of the wilful exercise
of power by the Indian State. The danger lurks not just for Muslims,
shameful and impoverishing as this itself is for all of us. The
terror that Muslims are living with today, their deep, everyday
fears, can become the terror that all of us may face tomorrow, a
threat to our collective democratic existence as citizens of this
land.

This dangerous singularity of Gujarat, with all its grave
implications, may not have come to pass had the RSS not been in
command politically and ideologically. No other organised force in
this country hates Muslims as deeply and pathologically as the RSS.
No other force could have demonised Muslims, projected them as being
less than human and deserving of unimagined cruelties - the 'enemy'
that must be exorcised from 'our' midst if 'we' are to live in peace
and harmony - as effectively as the RSS. No other force could have so
shamelessly raided our past, abused and twisted it beyond
recognition, played, untiringly over many years on popular prejudices
about 'minorityism' and shaken up all this and more into a potent,
anti-Muslim potion.

No other force could have revelled in offering up this poison as a
simple 'solution' for all kinds of problems facing all manner of
people in these times of multiple crises. Only the RSS with its
single-minded hatred of Muslims could plunge itself into the lives of
Adivasis and Dalits, OBCs and Brahmins, Patidars and Banias, scratch
their multi-sourced and differentially complex insecurities and get
them to come together as the Hindutva god's army straining to go to
war. Only the RSS with its relentless vilification of the Muslim as
enemy could have forged this alliance between the dispossessed and
the propertied, hurling them in a violent offensive against the
imagined 'other', looting, plundering, and in the process subverting
challenges to existing social hierarchies, steering minds and
energies away from battles concerned with making our earth a better
place to live on for all.

Gujarat 2002 comes straight out of the RSS's 'heart of darkness', as
clear a warning as we may want about what it means to 'Hinduise India
and militarise Hinduism' - the foundational and still the core desire
of the RSS.

Take the RSS family away and the Gujarat carnage, the Ayodhya
movement, Pokhran II and the rapid downward slide in relations with
Pakistan may have all remained far away dreams and not our immediate
nightmares.