Democracy as an open work¹: Modern democracy demands a theatre for perpetual re-enactments. As a political system, it has to continually restate, reassert, reinvent itself. This process involves an entire collection of spaces and institutions which are not exhausted by the electoral process. When elections end, protest movements, courts, civil rights groups, commissions of enquiry, investigations, media groups take over the public sphere tenaciously reciting the mythemes of democracy. As performance, as theatre, democracy realizes that beyond the politician and the voter it needs the services of the bureaucrat, the dissenter, the protester, the whistleblower to provide fluidity to the system. One saw the politics of this most clearly in Gujarat after the Godhra riots.

Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister, might have won the elections but he quickly realized that his claim to legitimacy was threatened by the riot victim, the witness, the survivor, the courage of the protester and the ruthless interrogation of the lawyer. Each, through his/her performance, transformed the Modi regime into a mosaic of unsettled and unsettling questions. Each of these encounters with a Zahira Sheikh, Teesta Setalvad, Cedric Prakash, Mukul Sinha was stark, public and commanded huge audiences. Modi, master of the media, managed to contain virtually all of them.

Compared to these enactments, any statement by a bureaucrat as dissenter might seem peripheral, especially if that bureaucrat is still in uniform, still functioning as part of the system. His official note as affidavit is not a scream, a challenge, a human rights protest that catches you by the scruff of your collar and says ‘listen’. It appears as something more banal, as a policeman performing his duty, expressing it not in the poetics of rights but in the everyday prose of duty.

The Sreekumar case has lapsed into the sidelines, emerging occasionally for some attention. As one man struggling in the system and against it, he appears a lost cause, standing alone, marginal and defeated. He commands little sympathy unlike a victim or a survivor. Yet I think that the Sreekumar episode is one of the most morally significant events in the post Godhra period. His evidence is sociologically devastating as his answers are based on a reading of Gujarat under Modi. I believe he deserves to be treated as a prisoner of conscience in a Gujarat full of prisons of the mind. Who is Sreekumar?

Raman Pillai Bhaskaran Nair Sreekumar appears to be an unlikely hero. Son of a Havaldar clerk, he passed his M.A. in history with a first class first. He joined the 1971 batch of the IPS (Indian Police Service) in the Gujarat cadre. A long professional career with the usual medals for distinguished service, Sreekumar is a standard cop who believes a lathi charge is a lathi charge like an orange is an orange. In many senses, he is the uniform on the other side. He is not just a cop, he is head of state intelligence who also served as member of the committee to look into the reform of the State Intelligence Unit.

 

A normal man in a normal man’s clothing. His daughter complains that her parents fight over which television channel to see in the evening. Normal, ascetic lives lived according to middle class values – hard work, honesty, duty, loyalty, integrity.

An unheroic hero, he dyes his hair so ineptly that there is a strange honesty about it. In fact he does not see himself as a dissenter but only as an officer performing his duty.

At the invitation of the Nanavati Commission to inquire into the Gujarat riots of 2002, he filed four affidavits as an act of duty following every protocol.² To his formal statements, Sreekumar added a fascinating set of addendums. A set of eclectic texts, a diary but not in the strict sense of the term. A speech of the Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Taped conservations with two bureaucrats who ask him not to offer testimony before the Commission. A mosaic of texts which trace a backstage space transforming it into a drama that threatens the CM.

 

Between normalcy and normalization: Gujarat, after Godhra and the Modi election juggernaut, was a demagogic state. Chief Minister Modi had won his battle of rhetoric with the secularists. All those who condemned the violence were thrown across the divide, the dualistic world that Modi had created: between Gujarati and non-Gujarati, regional vs national, vernacular vs English, religious vs secular, swadesi vs foreign, us against them. The divide was obvious, the loyalties clear. Populism, demagoguery and communalism had sealed a powerful electoral victory. Yet even demagogues and pracharaks need a sense of a rule of law, if only as seasoning. Even the BJP needed a ‘Modi is in power and all’s right with the heaven feeling.’ The regime thought it was a mere question of fixing a few things.

The initial spanner in the works came from civil rights groups, relatives of survivors abroad, a few people in the media. But eventually what defines normalcy in a democratic society is the rule of law. As mechanism, as ritual, as procedure, law creates an expectation of normalcy. Normalcy is what makes investors return after a calamity or victims feel there is a possibility of healing. Normalcy is the process of recovering everydayness. It demands a return to routines, clichés and ordinariness. Normalcy offers the possibility of the moral repair³ of institutions and of societies healing themselves.

It was this powerful sense of repair that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) created in South Africa, public confessions of violence that set the space for rituals of healing. It did not erase memory or pain; it placed them within the ritual cycle of grief, mourning and return. Normalcy is what election commission’s look for as an ambience for democratic ritual. A refugee camp sulking in the middle of a city was a symptomatic denial of normalcy.

Narendra Modi’s plan for electoral legitimation was incomplete without certificates of normalcy. Magazines like India Today hailed him as the best Chief Minister. But this was not enough. Impatiently and cynically, Modi converted normalcy into normalization. Unlike normalcy, normalization could be a forced process. It could demand erasure, displacement and forced acceptance of the reigning paradigm. Victims denied their victimhood and the survivor, any possibility of justice.

 

What converts victory into normalization is the bureaucracy. Through file, diktat, resolution, transfer, grants, the bureaucracy seeks to restore normalcy. When a people resist, a demagogue looks for normalization adding new rituals of violence to the ones he has already perpetuated. This process has been already mapped and commented upon by observers, visitors, press committees. Teesta Setalvad and Harsh Mander, as activists, were at their best in these moments. But their impact was weakened by the fact that they were, to use Modi’s shrewd terminology, outsiders. There was yet no visible act of whistleblowing, no moment of bureaucratic defiance.

 

The aftermath of riots: Sreekumar realized that a policeman is a bit like an ethnographer. Both have to go beyond data to process it as information. But information is a generalized commodity, while intelligence is a particularized one. Information, to Sreekumar, is a collection of nouns, while intelligence is more tactical. Intelligence is all verb, a prelude to and a demand for decision and action. Information can be diffuse but intelligence is selective and focused. Information can be neutral but intelligence is strategic. It demands attention and action. It is crucial for governance, functioning as an early warning system. Subsequently, it could serve as a heuristic exercise to help evaluate the adequacy of political and administrative action.

Sreekumar attempted to answer two questions before the Commission. First, whether information available with various agencies could have prevented the ghastly carnage at Godhra. Second, whether conditions existed in the Godhra aftermath of the riot to allow for the possibility of normalcy.

In answering the second question about normalcy, Sreekumar built a model of an obstacle course. He asked that if a minority victim after a riot wished to return to normalcy what collective institutional obstacles would he face?⁴ In answering this question through his numerous official notes and affidavits, Sreekumar creates a formidable list of the material and psychic conditions for return. He sensed that the nature of the riot and the changes it had brought about were far more radical than assumed.

 

He begins with a basic fact. What characterizes the Muslim community is a sense of belligerence. Sreekumar realized that to talk of the Muslim community in isolation was inadequate because the roots of its belligerence lie in a growing zero sum situation with the majority community. One can witness this in the high rate of casualties and in property lost. In fact, it is the ratios that are distressing whether measured for property or casualties. Normalcy, Sreekumar realized is a question of ratios. Between 27/02/02 and 23/04/02, 636 Muslims were killed (inclusive of 91 in police firing) as against 181 Hindus (76 in police firing). Nearly 329 Muslims sustained injuries in arson as against 74 Hindus. Muslims loss of property was approximately 600 crore as against 40 crore of property lost by Hindus.⁵ The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also adds that out of the 302 dargahs, 209 mosques and 30 madrasas that were damaged, only a handful were repaired or restored.⁶

The ratios become much more intense if we visualize the problem of a Muslim victim who works to return to normalcy. The return to normalcy is always a forensic exercise and the first thing the Muslim victim realizes is that it is difficult to record an FIR. He confronts police officers who are unfair in the recording of complaints. In fact, they are unwilling to record FIRs, strongly dissuading the victim from registering complaints, or doing so only when the victim minimizes the complaint or avoids naming the perpetrators. There are other tactics also used to vitiate an FIR. Many crimes which have occurred at different times or places are clubbed together and registered as a single FIR, thus affecting the reliability and evidentiary value of the complaints. Needless to add, the merger of so many complaints in the one FIR also affects the process of insurance claims.⁷

The futility increases the victim’s sense of injustice. He discovers that investigating officers avoid arresting Hindu leaders even when their names figure in the FIR. In fact, wherever Hindu leaders are released on bail, local leaders of the ruling party arrange a hero’s welcome for them.

 

To the trauma of ratios and the fragility of justice, Sreekumar adds the bullying attitude of local VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders. He notes wryly that extortion is fairly secular with VHP/Bajrang Dal bullies extracting protection money from merchants of both communities. The asymmetry begins immediately after in the everydayness of employment. Sreekumar reports that, ‘Whenever members of the minority community look for any type of a job in Hindu dominated areas, they are threatened by VHP/Bajrang Dal activists and driven back to minority inhabited localities.’⁸ Wherever a minority community member attempts to restart his business on the original site, he is driven out. Muslim minorities are prevented from resuming their business or rebuilding their shops and establishments destroyed by the riots. Worse, commercial interests close to the VHP were trying to enter this economic vacuum.

Sreekumar shows the ghettoization is a psychological, economic, and physically coercive process that involves more than the homogenization of the two communities. It also involves an equally worrying process of migration. Considering the 13 districts for which data was available, the Sreekumar affidavit notes that 75,000 people have chosen not to return to their original residences.⁹ Accompanying this is the fact that during the communal riots, 12588 shops, 10472 house, 2724 larry/galas were damaged or destroyed leading to people losing their documents of identity.¹⁰ Sreekumar insists on the tragedy of this disenfranchisement. These people will not only be unable to vote but in the moral anomie of the time, ‘mischievous elements will impersonate these voters.’¹¹

 

There is a final point that the affidavit makes. The freedom with which the vernacular press and VHP indulged in communal slander triggers an overall insecurity. The inability of the police to control violence creates a ‘sense of moral permissiveness where even ladies belonging to respectable upper middle class indulged in looting articles of their choice from shopping centres like Pantaloon.’¹² There was an erosion of the image of the police as effective law enforcement machinery, particularly among the lumpen and underworld segments. There was a frantic acquisition of weapons on both sides and in the near absence of civil interaction, or civil society counterforce, what emerges is a sense of competitive communalism, bringing out the worst in each group. To talk of normalcy in such circumstances bordered on the sociologically ridiculous.

For Sreekumar, what marked this government was not only the nature of atrocity perpetrated but the structure of compliance, in fact complicity, that kept it alive. This question of complicity is elaborated indirectly in the Sreekumar affidavits. During his tenure as head of intelligence, Sreekumar was invited to attend meetings where major functionaries like the Chief Secretary or even the Chief Minister were present. In each of these crucial meetings Sreekumar was requested to do something illegal or unethical. No minutes were ever kept of these meetings and all directives were issued verbally.¹³

As a bureaucrat and intelligence officer, Sreekumar was in a quandary. As a bureaucrat, he believed in the sanctity of records open to examination. As an intelligence officer, he realized he needed to understand the logic of what was being asked of him. It was not just that these orders were unethical but that they had potent political consequences. Sreekumar realized that his skill as an intelligence officer must come to his rescue. He decided to keep a ‘record of trends, inclinations, developments.’¹⁴

 

An intelligence officer collects data from various sources which he records as a matter of prudence, a part of the craft of intelligence. Sreekumar decided to systematically record the unethical, illegal, improper, verbal directives of higher officers as an aide memoire for future reference. It was a register kept at his own initiative, not on the basis of an administrative directive as many junior officers were compelled to. It was not a diary in the strict sense of term. It was not done as a part of official directives but served as a marker of what was seen as official in the Modi regime.

Every riot produces a keyword, which Alibaba-like opens out a particular grid of violence. The Nazis had the ‘final solution’, the Argentinian juntas gave new life to the word ‘disappear’; for the Gujarat riots, the keyword was ‘normalcy’. Normalcy is scientific, it demands measurement. Normalcy eludes the pathological and the toxic. Normalcy specifies certain limits to behaviour. It has its own signals – work, transport, festivals, and investment. If things are normal, then power is potent. If you say a place is normal, it means you are in control. Normalcy immediately signals investment and tourists. But in Gujarat normalcy acquired a certain obscenity, a threat factor. Narendra Modi loved the word normalcy.

 

Sreekumar would have added one more word to it, complicity. One felt that for Sreekumar, Narendra Modi the communalist was not as significant as Modi the fascist. How do you create the fascism of the everyday after an atrocity? In fascism, it is the rite of passage between atrocity and normalcy that we must understand. What links atrocity and normalcy is complicity. The fascist machine compelled to ordinariness, needs this triangle of terms. It is not the simple ‘the trains ran on time approach’ – that is a mechanical notion of normalcy in dictatorial times. Complicity is more linguistic and ritualistic. It is a weave where each man must contribute to the lie. Complicity is deeply communitarian, thankfully anonymous, and reassuring. There is none of the insecurity of aloneness. Complicity is always a web, a uniform and uniformity, a uniformness. What complicity cannot allow is the trace of doubt, the nagging question mark. Complicity hates to be interrogated.

Sreekumar’s register consisted of three columns. The first recorded date and time; the second recorded the nature and source of instructions; the third the nature of action taken. The register is stark but its very conciseness reveals the mind of the Modi regime from 16 April 2002 to 19 September 2002.

The records reveal once again that the danger in a tyranny stems not only from the leader but from an enthusiastic and inventive compliance with his real and imaginary orders. The bureaucracy mimics, amplifies, reinforces the diktats of the leader and thereby compounds his evil. It is this invisible compliance in an everyday sense that Sreekumar captures. The 30 page extract that Sreekumar provides will be dealt with only to capture a vignette or two of how top officers behaved in the aftermath of the riot.

 

The Sreekumar diary represents the craft of intelligence confronting the pathology of statecraft. What Sreekumar helps to evaluate are the three tiers of authoritarianism. The primary authoritarianism is that of the Chief Minister Modi, bent on de-institutionalizing structures. At the other end is the tertiary authoritarianism of the crowd or mob during a riot. Between the two stands the bureaucrat. His is the authoritarianism woven within a texture of silence, complicity and indifference. Sreekumar argues that the Gujarat violence could not be possible without this secondary authoritarianism. The bureaucracy did not merely take orders, it passed out a few of its own. The mindset of this upper bureaucrat needs to be chronicled and understood. Sreekumar’s diary is a personal record, an official aide-memoire and a testimony of witness. The diary is a terse description of meetings.

Sreekumar notes that on 16 April 2002, the Chief Minister called a meeting of the DGP, himself, and P.K. Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister. Modi argued that certain Congress leaders were responsible for the continuing communal incidents in Ahmedabad. Sreekumar, as head of SIB, responded that he did not have any information to this effect. Modi asked him to immediately start tapping Shankarsinh Waghela’s phone.¹⁵ Sreekumar replied that this was not legal or ethical for as yet there was no information regarding Waghela’s involvement in crime. P.K. Mishra, Principal Secretary also tried to persuade Sreekumar to do so. Sreekumar’s column on ‘further action’ has this terse sentence: ‘The Chief Minister’s instruction being illegal and immoral not complied with.’¹⁶

The Chief Secretary (CS) G. Subba Rao convened a meeting to discuss normalization measures. Ashok Narayan, ACS (Home) and the Municipal Commissioner (MC), were also present. Sreekumar raised the problem of the Muslim community not having faith in the state administration and suggested that the police should arrest those Hindu leaders involved in inhuman crimes. The Chief Secretary said such action was not possible immediately as it was against government policy.

 

On 30 April, the DGP informed him that CM had instructed him to book Congress leaders for their alleged involvement in instigating Muslims to boycott and obstruct the ongoing examination and that he had told the CM that action could be taken only on the basis of specific complaints. On 1 May, in a person to person meeting, the DGP informed Sreekumar that the Chief Secretary was being persuaded to ‘eliminate’ Muslim extremists disturbing communal peace in Ahmedabad.¹⁷ Sreekumar replied that this would be cold-blooded, premeditated murder and the DGP concurred. What begins emerging is a picture with the CS, ACS ready to script illegal violence, and the DGP struggling for some notion of civility with Sreekumar’s help. But the battle lines deepen with the visit of Gill and Lyngdoh to Ahmedabad.

 

On 2 May 2002, K.P.S. Gill, former DGP, was appointed advisor to the CM Gujarat. On 4 May, Gill summoned senior police offers for a meeting. Here Maniram, ADGP (Law and Order), Ahmedabad stated that the police force was highly demoralized and argued for a change of police officers from Commissioner of Police (CP) downwards. Maniram noted that police officers had become subservient to political leaders in matters of law and order and criminal investigation because these political leaders arranged their posting. Maniram pleaded for a restoration of sanity and professionalism in policing. Sreekumar endorsed this, adding that the BJP government had been pursuing a policy of saffronization, deprofessionalization and a subversion of the system over the last few years.

On 7 May 2002, the CM summoned Sreekumar for a meeting at 12.30 p.m. and asked him for his assessment of the continuing violence in Ahmedabad.¹⁸ Sreekumar referred to his note on communal violence. The CM replied that he had read the note but believed Sreekumar had drawn the wrong conclusions. The Chief Minister argued that the Gujarat violence did not need such an elaborate sociology because it was a natural, uncontrollable reaction after Godhra. He then asked Sreekumar to concentrate on Muslim militants. Sreekumar asked him to generate confidence in the Muslim community but Modi was annoyed at Sreekumar’s response arguing that Muslims were not on the offensive.

 

Quoting statistics of heavy casualties among Muslims due to police firing, Sreekumar appealed to him to see reason and accept that Hindus were on the offensive. The CM instructed him not to concentrate on the Sangh Parivar as they were not doing anything illegal. Sreekumar replied that it was his duty to report any situation and ‘provide actionable, preventive, real time intelligence, having a bearing on the order, unity and integrity of India.’ As he himself quickly explained, that meant he had to watch the Sangh Parivar.

On 25 June, the CM convened a meeting of senior officers to enforce law according to the situation.¹⁹ It was a tactic of adjustability and normalization. Sreekumar realized that this was illegal as a police officer had to work as per the law and not according to the prevailing political atmosphere. The Chief Minister warned that the police should not be influenced by the JNU brand of secularism.²⁰ The battle lines were being drawn between a Chief Minister tone deaf to dissent and some police officer(s) committed to the rule of law. Mediating between them were the higher participants from the IAS.

The diary notes that the Chief Secretary convened a meeting of officers to review the situation in Ahmedabad prior to the proposed rath yatra. During the discussion Sreekumar proposed cancelling the rath yatra given the prevailing tension. The CP Ahmedabad endorsed the view while a few others proposed a change of route. The Chief Secretary informed the group that there was no question of cancellation or even a change of route. After the formal meeting, the Chief Secretary drew Sreekumar aside and suggested that anyone trying to disturb the rath yatra should ‘be eliminated’. He added that this was ‘the well considered decision of the CM.’²¹

Sreekumar responded that such an action was totally illegal and unethical. The Chief Secretary added that it could be justified in terms of situational logic. Sreekumar replied that the police was the creature of the law. The Chief Secretary immediately watered down his request by asking Sreekumar to keep an eye on the plans of anti-social elements.

 

On 5/8/2002 Ashok Narayan, the Additional Chief Secretary (ACS) expressed his annoyance and displeasure at the SIB’s presentation of communal data.²² He noted that it was not in conformity with L.K. Advani’s reply in Parliament! The ACS felt that every incident was being labelled a communal one, thus presenting a misleading picture of the law and order situation in Gujarat, especially to the Election Commission. Sreekumar asked the ACS to define the yard-stick for assessing affected areas but received no satisfactory response. The same afternoon the Home Secretary informed the office of the ADGP not to send any data on communal incidents. The next day the ACS was still unhappy with the data provided on communal incidents. Sreekumar informed him that the data could not be manipulated to serve the interests of the Modi government. By that time it was evident that with elections around the corner, the higher bureaucracy was apprehensive about any data that could cause embarrassment to the government.

 

The bureaucracy planned two presentations before the Election Commission, one by the Home Secretary and another by C.K. Koshy, Relief Commissioner. In an informal chat with his officers on 09/08/2002 the Chief Secretary mentioned that his men should present a picture of normalcy so that the Election Commission would not have reasons for postponing the Gujarat elections.²³ The Election Commission met the higher bureaucracy the same day.

The Chief Election Commissioner intervened at the start, noting that he was not interested in presentations. The Chief Secretary (CS) responded by contending that ‘total normalcy was restored in the entire state and no tension was prevailing anywhere.’²⁴

Lyngdoh was annoyed and incredulous, observing that the Commission had just visited affected areas where the victims had made numerous complaints. He cited the report of a recently constructed wall barring right of passage to minority members in one locality. The Chief Secretary replied that rehabilitation was virtually complete and that most riot victims had returned home.

The Election Commissioner was visibly angry and asked the CS how he had the ‘temerity to claim normalcy’²⁵ given this wave of complaints. Lyngdoh insisted that the Gujarat government provide data along standard lines of the number of FIRs filed, perpetrators arrested, the number of accused released on bail, the number of displaced persons, compensation paid and so on. These were standard questions of governance.

 

With a sheer absence of irony, the DGP switched the discussion to the need for extra-paramilitary forces required during the forthcoming rath yatra. Sreekumar, in an additional note, reiterated this point. The CEC interjected pointing to the contradiction between the claims to normalcy made by the CS and demands for additional forces. The officers tried to paper over the contradictions between ‘apparent normalcy’ and ‘communal tension’.

The CEC requested Sreekumar to elaborate his argument for more forces. Sreekumar argued that tension still prevailed in 993 villages and 151 towns which had witnessed riots in the period from 27 February to 31 July. The affected area, he said, covered 284 police stations and 154 out 182 assembly constituencies.²⁶ On being asked to estimate the quantum of additional forces, the DGP replied that they would need at least 202 companies. Sreekumar outlined his previous scenario of displacement and disenfranchisement, noting that only an actual physical verification would bring out a clearer picture.

The meeting ended soon after. When all the other officers had left, the Chief Secretary summoned Sreekumar and shouted, ‘You have let us down badly. What was the need for you to project all those statistics about displaced people?’²⁷ Sreekumar replied he had presented the facts. Later, while he was waiting for another meeting, Ashok Narayan accompanied by the DGP came to the room asking, ‘Why did you make a statement contrary to government’s perception?’²⁸ Narayan also asked whether Sreekumar as a disciplined officer accepted the authority of the DGP. Sreekumar replied that it was for the DGP to answer. The DGP, possibly attempting to avoid a confrontation, suggested that it was not necessary to pursue the discussion. Later, he told Sreekumar that his assessment, particularly of manpower requirements, was correct.

 

The mind of Modi: On 10 September 2002, the National Commission on Minorities faxed a message to the Home Department requesting a verbatim copy of the CM’s speech at Bahucharjee, a temple town in Mehsana.²⁹ Modi’s speech was part of the overall message of the Gaurav Yatra. The Home Department was keen to block such information and it got an endorsement from the DGP that Sreekumar’s department was not required to send such a report. However, Sreekumar felt that officially he had to comply with the request. Risking the ire of his superiors, Sreekumar obtained a copy of the speech.

For Sreekumar, Modi’s speech was not just cynical and inflammatory. What worried him was its logic, its particular use of symbols. The speech was a triptych of appropriations where in frame one, Gujarat becomes the centre of a sacred geography. Within this context, BJP is a constructor of sacred complexes and others of unholy edifices. In frame two, the speech creates a different pedigree for nationalism. Delhi becomes the residence of the Nehrus, the Congress and Sonia Gandhi, while Gujarat becomes the home of Gandhi and Sardar Patel. Yet Gujarat’s contribution to nationalism and contemporary politics remains unrecognized. Modi complained that there is a samadhi for Sanjay Gandhi in Delhi but none for the Sardar who guaranteed the unity of India and saved Kashmir. He added ominously that five crore Gujarati’s are witness to this injustice and warned, ‘We are here to sacrifice our lives to keep the flag of Sardar on a high pedestal.’³⁰

In Modi’s speech, the nation state and sacred geography are contoured to suit a certain regional mind. Delhi is now conceived of as being ‘outside’, the domain of outsiders like Sonia and a ragtag of ex-prime ministers issuing fatwas that ‘the Jagannath Yatra should not be taken out in Gujarat as it would lead to the massacre of Muslims.’³¹ Modi comments wryly that when Congressmen rushed to Sonia with this news, she naively asked them to which party Jagannath belonged! Modi asks whether it is a sin to release the Narmada waters during Shravan so that women could have the holy bath and adds with a generous dose of rhetoric that had the Congress brought the water, it would have released it during Ramzaan.

 

Once the opposition between Gujarat and Delhi has been reinforced, Modi addresses what could be called his Muslim question. The logic of levels is conflated. As synecdoches of Sardar, Modi and the BJP are projected as paragons of sincerity and authenticity; the Congress and the Communists are pictured as mere outgrowths of foreignness and deceit. The grammar of the appeal and its demagogic power is clear. The BJP is presented as appealing to citizenship, universalism and progress and the Muslims as backward, problematic and parochial. The latter are presented as resisting the logic of development.

 

Modi locates the logic of camps and madrasas within this discourse. He asks, ‘Should we run relief camps? Should I start child producing centres? We want to achieve progress by pursuing the policy of family planning. If some people go on producing children, the children will do cycle repair only…. If we object to the explosion of population they feel bad. Can somebody tell me, is there any nation like ours? Is China ruled by the BJP? Still China has enacted a law to curb population explosion...’³² He goes on to address the question of madrasas.

‘In Gujarat, madrasas are coming up in large numbers. The children have right to primary education. But the madrasa going child is deprived of any primary education. What will such a child do when he grows up? We are scrutinizing madrasas from Kutch onwards. Now these people may say we are communalists. If the West Bengal government puts restrictions on madrasas, it is secular, but when it is done in Gujarat, how do we become communal?’³³ The speech flows on and Modi successfully triangulates camps, madrasas and gangs like Dawood Ibrahim’s as three reprehensible institutions. He hints that the secularism of the Congress operates through an Orwellian ‘some are more equal than others’ logic, where if the BJP acts it is communal and if the Congress mimes it, it is lawful. Modi suggests that the unfairness of the Congress to BJP only echoed and continued its unfairness to Sardar Patel.

Sreekumar’s act of sending a copy of Modi’s speech was the last straw on the official camel’s back. He was immediately transferred from the post of Additional DGP and made Additional DGP (PR), a position empty of content.

Following protocol, Sreekumar called on the Chief Secretary. The CS observed that he should not have spoken in contravention of state policy. Sreekumar responded that his oath as a government functionary was to the Constitution and added that, ‘If the CM’s policies are in contravention of the letter, spirit and ethos of the Constitution of India, no government officer is bound to follow such policies.’³⁴ Annoyed, the Chief Secretary abruptly ended the meeting. The diary ends with this episode.

 

Between complicity and compliance: Sreekumar repeatedly points to and deconstructs the web of silence around Modi. Why did those who should have spoken out not do so? To reduce their behaviour to indifference or cowardice appears inadequate. What one needs is the ethnology of tactics brought in to play in order to ensure silence.

Probably the most stunning piece of evidence that Sreekumar encloses with his affidavits is his tape recorded conversation with Dinesh Kapadia, Under Secretary of Government of Gujarat and an equally delectable set of persuasions from G.C. Murmu (Secretary, Law & Order).³⁵

After a few preliminaries, Kapadia observed that there was an impression on the basis of newspaper reports that Sreekumar was pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu. Sreekumar replied that he stood for the Indian Constitution and the ideals of citizenship. Kapadia dodges that to switch angles, accusing him of being biased against the government and the ruling party. Sreekumar replied it was not a question of community, party, office, or regime. As a police officer, he failed to see the difference between majoritarian or minoritarian communalism.³⁶ He insisted that he made no distinction between Hindu, Muslim and Christian communalism as they all constituted challenges to Indian integrity.

He observed that it is not easy to organize riots in a peaceful Saurashtra village. ‘The mind or the material is not there. Communally minded youngsters are not available. Yet people acted like robots during the violence.’³⁷ For Sreekumar, it was not a question of accusing the RSS. One had to understand why people had reached a state of mind where they wished to kill innocent people. One can presuppose some kind of organization behind the riots, but how does one explains such horrendous acts of killing?

 

He makes a distinction between the infrastructure of hate and the infrastructure of violence, citing a case of a colleague investigating communalism in the Dahod district. ‘Two boys of four or five years of age, were thrown in the fire. They came out, were caught and thrown back again.’³⁸ The police had suppressed the entire incident. The forensic department had reported the presence of human bones. It was a clear case of murder and yet the entire police response was reduced to a ‘janvajog entry’³⁹ (a calling attention entry in the station diary). For Sreekumar, violence didn’t end with an act of atrocity but continued with the web of complicity around an atrocity.

The Under Secretary hears quietly. Turning over the papers of the affidavit, he approaches Sreekumar tangentially, asking him to ‘moderate his position’, requesting that ‘some circumspection be shown’. He suggests that Sreekumar be ‘totally objective’ by ‘withholding ideology’.⁴⁰ Sreekumar responds to this sociologically, explaining it as the need to understand why violence took place only in certain places. The question is why was violence controlled in Bhavnagar and Jamnagar? Kapadia hints it’s a question of levels, particularly of policy at the national level. He states that at the national level, it is not the Gujarat Police that is the target of criticism but ‘a particular person, Narendra Modi’.

 

He hints that the discussion is not about understanding violence but the need to confront the fact that Modi is being personally targeted. It was a question of politics and Sreekumar nods to its existence. Kapadia adds rhetorically, ‘What if… Narendra Modi is removed? This Supreme Court, media, all elements making hue and cry, will become silent.’ He underlines it.⁴¹ ‘You may place this on record. If Narendra Modi is removed, all these elements, self-proclaimed champions of secularism will be totally silent. The main target is Modi.’⁴² Kapadia suggests that the main issue around the riots was not normative, but involved an instrumental targeting of Modi.

While recognizing Sreekumar’s honesty and integrity, he suggests that the Commission is not the forum for such a performance. He implies that Sreekumar’s candidness could be a source of misunderstanding and that his approach should ‘be totally objective, based on factual position only.’ He further adds that though many police officers were quite critical of the government but that this had not appeared in public. He held out Police Commissioner, P.C. Pande as an alternative exemplar of officialdom. Pande had told the Commission that, ‘He did not recollect, remember and recall many relevant things.’⁴³

Kapadia asks him to avoid telling truth to the Commission. Truth, he argues, is a relative term, ‘a question of perception and perspective.’ Sreekumar turns more abrupt, suggesting that to prevaricate is a napunsak (hijda) attitude.⁴⁴ He insists on his loyalty to the Constitution and his inability to play a double role. Kapadia replies that simply telling truth to the commission would be futile… ‘These Commissions are paper tigers.’ Sreekumar retaliates that ‘truth is truth’ to which Kapadia equating Modi to the state, replies, ‘It is against the public interest.’⁴⁵

 

Kapadia then switches tactics asking him to answer baldly, advising that if they ask to say, ‘I don’t know. It is not my period.’⁴⁶ He suggests that answers should be short as they go on record and acquire fixity. He hints at circumspection as a ritual condition, that nothing extra be told to the Commission, insisting that to be vocal before the Commission was unnecessary. Kapadia suggests that a minimum answer or a cryptic answer would be more true to form. He hints again that talking truth to power is a futile exercise.

The discussion with Kapadia is a gentle one. It is more an attempt to hint and persuade but not to coerce. Sreekumar himself underlines the fact that the first visit is a conversation of hints and nuances, but yet an attempt to influence interest before the Commission. If Kapadia’s effort was a mere visit, Murmu’s meeting was a summons. If Kapadia’s was an attempt to persuade, Murmu behaves more like a chief whip, clear about whose diktats he is delivering. The two together reveal the cynical face of the Modi government towards the Nanavati Commission.

 

Murmu is held up by traffic and so Arvind Pandya, the Government Pleader, begins the conversation. He is surprised by the attention that Sreekumar’s affidavits have attracted. When Sreekumar forwarded his affidavit no one noticed it. It was one of 5000 such depositions. In fact Sreekumar explains that he had appended a letter to the Commission requesting that all records be treated as official secrets. The Nanavati Commission, however, declared all affidavits open to examination. Pandya ruefully recognizes that no document is a secret document before the commission.⁴⁷

Pandya asks him how long he has been in service. Sreekumar replied that he belonged to the 1971 batch and had served two deputations elsewhere. On being probed about his knowledge of Gujarati, Sreekumar claims it is adequate, outlining in Gujarati his initial appointment as an ASP in Valsad to his appointment as ADGP in April 2002.

It is clear by now that Pandya was simulating the conditions of the court, attempting to show how Mukul Sinha, the lawyer would conduct his cross-examination. At this moment, Murmu enters. Murmu shows no embarrassment about tutoring witnesses. He asks without preliminaries. ‘What all questions will come up?’ Pandya states that the Commission will ask about the functioning of the IB. Sreekumar maintains that he will play by the book, the Police Manual. Murmu cautions that ‘it is not so simple’, warning him that the Commission lawyer, Mukul Sinha will always lead with a compound question. ‘In every question there will be other questions.’ He, therefore, tells him ‘not to be very quick or very hasty in answering them.’⁴⁸

Compounding of questions to Murmu and Pandya is worse than compounding felonies. Murmu suggests a set of standardized strategies. First, Sreekumar should open out the questions and answer each question specifically. ‘One should stall and say I don’t understand the question, let me understand it first and I will answer.’⁴⁹ Sreekumar is wryly amused by the proceedings. An IAS officer, in fact, a relatively junior one, is tutoring an intelligence officer with 30 years experience before two commissions and 20 sessions courts on how to depose before the Nanavati Commission. Murmu is almost didactic. ‘If they ask you when did you join the IPS, you say 1971. He will ask you what did you do earlier.’ Murmu emphasized that no answer should create a spillover of questions otherwise ‘something not known will become well known to the Commission.’⁵⁰

 

The style is clear. Murmu’s is not a didactic exercise in simplicity, it is a direct demand for complicity. An officer in the home department is asking a police officer not to unravel the truth before the Commission. He does this not just by asking him to lie but by showing him the many faces of a lie. What earlier began as an exercise in English speaking becomes one in legalistic and bureaucratic deceit. Murmu suggests that Sreekumar take refuge in the division of labour by emphasizing that decisions were made by his superiors. A superior in bureaucratic parlance is not only a higher authority but a substitute for conscience. He asks him to emphasize that the final decision was the CM’s and also hints that Sreekumar’s loyalty is to an electorally elected CM rather than the rule of law.

Pandya begins a different kind of rehearsal by asking Sreekumar to give leading information by emphasizing that Godhra was a conspiracy, to hold that the fire in the train was planned. Sreekumar points out that there is no such intelligence. What intrigues him is not conspiracy but the sheer absence of information. The government is pushing for a conspiracy model; what Sreekumar sees is the sheer absence of connectivity across states.

 

Murmu’s target is simple. He realizes Sreekumar’s report is a Pandora’s box and wants it turned into a black-box and devalued. He tells Sreekumar that there are a hundred expectations from his report. Together, they ask him to avoid leading answers. For example, information about one police station may lead to questions about all other police stations, and ask him to answer cleverly by not harming government interests, by not saying anything critical about the government in action. Pandya is clear. He asks Sreekumar to tell the Commission that it is difficult to improve upon the steps taken by the government. Murmu tells him to say specifically that Sreekumar’s task is ‘to disseminate information, not verify it or comment on it.’ As Murmu suggests, ‘Intelligence reports are not defence reports; one should not feel there is a treasure of information in it.’⁵¹ Pandya keeps assuming he is a state witness even when Sreekumar points out he is a general witness, neither one for state or prosecution.

Both Murmu and Pandya emphasize that whatever brief they are giving him is being given to every witness, including Ashok Narayan, ACS. Sreekumar is struck by the blatant nature of the statement, an admission that the government is subverting the function of the Nanavati Commission as a fact finding body by tutoring its officers about their presentations.

 

Between duty and dissent: On 6 September 2005, the state government issued a set of nine charges against Sreekumar, simultaneously initiating a departmental enquiry against him. The charges for misconduct mainly related to his depositions before the Nanavati Commission. The charges included the fact that he kept a private diary of official behaviour which he elevated into an official diary, a conduct unbecoming of an officer. Second, that he had not obtained permission for it. Third, that the unofficial diary contained secret information which had been clandestinely released to the press. Finally, that he had failed to obtain permission for certain documents released before the Nanavati Commission.⁵²

Sreekumar replied forcefully to these charges, contending that an officer’s loyalty was to the Constitution and not an elected government. He argued that the rule of law encompassed the activities of an elected CM. He added that personal whim or party ideology cannot be equated to law. He argued that the official is not always true, nor always ethical or legal. Therefore, an officer disobeying a verbal order secretly demanding illegal action might be doing his duty. Sreekumar also held that as a professional, as head of the State Bureau of Intelligence, he was only following the rules of his craft in prudently and confidentially recording illegal orders for future reference. For Sreekumar, duty followed the book as long as the book followed a code of ethics. To dissent from or disobey an illegal order might be an act of duty.

 

Sreekumar argued this at three levels. First, in terms of modern law, second, in terms of current models of governance, and third, in terms of Vedic and Puranic norms which specify the ideal of a ruler. Constitutional law, the Aristotelian quote and the Sanskrit sloka play an equivalent role in his affidavits. Within this perspective, Modi becomes a travesty of constitutionality, civics, and civilization. Sreekumar’s appeal that he was being harassed for following the Constitution and dissenting within the rule of law was admitted before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT). His case was professionally argued by his lawyer. The Sreekumar episode is far from over as it raises many fundamental questions about dissent and dissenters.

Sreekumar did not project himself as a dissenter. As one of the journalists observed, ‘Actually none of us noticed him at the beginning. He was a quiet man working silently, dutifully filing affidavits. His was not the noisy activism of a Teesta [Setalvad] or the quick intelligence of Mukul Sinha. In fact he evoked no resonance. He was just another bureaucrat.’⁵³ Another provided a different perspective. ‘When 1 first met him 1 realized he had a peculiar notion of duty. He evoked a discourse of duty in different terms, an idea emerging from his prolific reading of Gita, Tirukural and Buddha.’⁵⁴

 

Present in Sreekumar’s frame is a distinction which sees a complementarity between duty and discipline. Within a disciplinary framework, one follows orders. Duty provides an ethical matrix for following orders. In a Deleuzian sense discipline is a tracing. It reproduces the hierarchy of the system. Duty is a map that reinvents the norms of the system again and again. Duty follows norms, while discipline adheres to rules and procedures. Sreekumar saw himself as a disciplined officer performing his duty.

Duty is such an old fashioned word; it marks a premodern fixation with virtues. Sreekumar merely did his duty by following the letter and spirit of the law. He took the establishment of the Nanavati Commission seriously and filed affidavits as required. By insisting on doing his duty rather than following orders, Sreekumar became a dissenter. He became a form of life that could not be tolerated.

The dissenter is not a survivor, observer, and spectator. He is a different kind of witness. He is half-participant and disapproves of what is happening. As dissenter, he violates his official frame of action in order to capture what has happened in inviolate terms. The dissenter is by definition suspect. He is the most Sisyphean of witnesses. He has to map out what he can before the system attempts to digest him. In a strange sense, dissent is a double battle to survive and to serve as witness, when in the original sense you are neither survivor nor witness.

There is an essential secondariness to the dissenter which marginalizes him. A dissenter by definition is a tertiary figure. The ostracism, the suspicion, the retaliation, the degradation rituals he undergoes tends to devalue him as a person, a professional and witness. His is a precious kind of agency which needs to be protected from the sheer entropy of the bureaucratic process. Once the dissenter questions the system, it is he who becomes the prime suspect. He becomes the object of interrogation. The question one inevitably asks is what about the silence of others? Why is it not treated as problematic?

 

This results in what one can call the phenomenon of dissent as a photographic negative. It is a world where white and black gets reversed. Black hair appears albino in a photographic negative. Negatives are a reversal of actual states and this is precisely how one should confront a dissenter, a whistleblower by following his definition of reality. Suddenly signs get reversed and contexts change. The sole voice of dissent suddenly challenges the structure of silence. Sreekumar is not the accused. He is that anomaly, a dutiful man who becomes an accusing finger.

Sreekumar’s testimony is not just a policeman’s statement. It cannot be subject merely to bureaucratic rules, norms, procedures, the career rules of an administrative tribunal. He cannot be evaluated as a technical response to a technical question. He is both the professional and citizen as witness, who knows that truth and law are based on different templates of perception. As witness, as dissenter, as whistleblower, he becomes liminal, almost untouchable, caught between the normalcy of professionalism, bureaucracy and career and the atrocities that he has seen. Reporting and recording then becomes an act of exorcism. Fortunately, it was an invitation to truth telling permitted by the law. What the Nanavati Commission has to ask is not why Sreekumar spoke but why so few others did? Its real challenge lies in opening up the structures of complicity and silence around the riots.

 

There is a more personal, almost idiosyncratic, issue we need to examine. Sreekumar is not a politically correct dissenter. Unfortunately dissent itself becomes stereotyped. Anyone objecting to communal violence is expected to be a secularist. But Sreekumar, as a former Tehelka correspondent confessed, ‘looks like a VHP type. He is a practising Hindu, speaks Sanskrit. As a result he does not appeal to secular or even Left media.’

Sreekumar lives his Hinduism. He insists that Modi threatens him both as a policeman and a Hindu. Modi appears not as a communalist but a classic fascist, as an atheist who cynically or rhetorically uses Hindu symbols for propaganda. What drives Sreekumar is his sense of religion, his idea of the Constitution and his sense of professionalism. The first two are connected. He evaluates governance in terms of the wisdom of the Vedas, examines action in terms of Buddha’s ideals and sees Hinduism as a uniquely syncretic, pluralistic religion based on a logic of a different kind.

Sreekumar becomes a practising Hindu that secularists feel puzzled by or irritated with. A sloka spouting intelligence officer can be quite problematic in terms of standard categories both to secularism and to Modi. It took the shrewdness of Modi to smell out an opponent who uses the language of the Vedas to challenge him, while also telling him that his allegiance is to the Constitution and not a Chief Minister. Suddenly Modi is confronted by a different idiom. He is challenged not in the standard ideas of electoral politics, anti-authoritarian regimes or secular activism. It is a different vocabulary that can easily challenge the CM’s political rhetoric.

Sreekumar is realistic enough to understand that Modi is what Gujarat currently wants. Modi is a leader in two senses of the term. He is a democratically elected leader and he is also currently the leader Gujarat wants to be represented by at the national level. If Modi is larger than life there is an everydayness to Sreekumar lounging in his rubber slippers. Yet his conscience is the answer to Modi. The Modi regime can dismiss him. He will lose his lifetime savings for a moment of dissent.

 

Politics can be generously wide but service laws are narrow and technical. Should the Sreekumar case be read only in terms of administrative manuals or should it be read at many levels? Does election and governance exhaust the democratic imagination or is democracy also about the absence of fear, humiliation and terror in decent society? The case of Sreekumar is ironic. He becomes an insistent mnemonic for what the powers demand that we erase or forget. For Sreekumar, fascism is now the terror of forgetting.

Sreekumar is today still an outcaste. The fact that Modi has resoundingly won the panchayat and municipal corporation elections adds to the sense of futility. Why protest alone against a juggernaut? A case of conscience remains marked off consigned to File X or Memo Y. Every protest demands an immediate echo from the community as an assurance of its own being. Silence emasculates it. Meanwhile Sreekumar waits for justice, realizing with other victims and survivors that a prolonged waiting is a form of injustice.

 

Footnotes:

* This paper is based on affidavits on the files of the Nanavati Commission which are in the public domain.

It draws on long conversations with a wide array of people in Gujarat. I would like to thank Chandrika Parmar in particular. One also owes a debt to Shyam Parikh, Leena Mishra and Mahesh Llanga, journalists who courageously pursued the story. Finally, I must acknowledge that Sreekumar was gracious to let me follow my own lines of enquiry and assessment.

1. My use of the concept of openwork is different from Umberto Eco’s, The Open Work (Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989). Eco’s idea of open work refers to the flexibility and innovation in formalized linguistic or musical systems. My idea of openness also emphasizes surprise but as it emerges from a multiplicity of sites in a society, each site a theatre for democratic performance, especially dissent.

2. Sreekumar submitted four major affidavits before the Justice G.T. Nanavati and K.G. Shah Commissions enquiring into the communal disturbance after the Godhra incident. Most of the basic references are to these documents and the variety of addendums contained therein. The first affidavit was submitted on 15/7/2002, the second on 6/10/2004, the third affidavit on 13/4/2005 and the fourth on 27/10/2004.

3. See Margaret Urban Walker, ‘Moral Repair and its Limits’, in Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (ed.) Mapping the Ethical Turn. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2001.

4. See ‘Current Communal Scenario in Ahmedabad City’, 24/4/2002, pp. 17-21.

5. Ibid., p. 18.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Ibid., p. 19.

8. See Report on Current Law and Order Situation (RCLOS) in Affidavit of 21/09/2004, p. 27. See also p. 19.

9. Ibid., p. 28.

10. Ibid., p. 28.

11. Ibid., p. 28.

12. See (RCLOS), p. 19.

13. Affidavit 27/10/2005, p. 16.

14. Ibid., p. 19.

15. Affidavit 13/4/2005 (Annexure F) Cumulative, p. 109.

16. Ibid., p. 109.

17. Ibid., p. 111.

18. Ibid., p. 112.

19. Ibid., p. 115, see also p. 116.

20. Ibid., p. 115.

21. Ibid., p. 116.

22. Ibid., p. 117.

23. Ibid., p. 120.

24. Ibid., p. 121.

25. Ibid., p. 121.

26. Ibid., p. 123.

27. Ibid., p. 123.

28. Ibid., p. 123.

29. The text of Modi’s speech is in Annexure E of Affidavit submitted on 13/4/2005.

30. Annexure E, p. 105.

31. Ibid., p. 106.

32. Ibid., p. 103.

33. Ibid., p. 104.

34. Affidavit 13/4/2005 (Annexure F), p. 128.

35. This conversation with Dinesh Kapadia is based on the verbatim transcript of the tape recorded conversation printed in Affidavit 13/4/2005, Annexure A.

36. Ibid., p. 33.

37. Ibid., p. 34.

38. Ibid., p. 34.

39. Ibid., p. 35.

40. Ibid., p. 36.

41. Ibid., p. 37.

42. Ibid., p. 37.

43. Ibid., p. 34.

44. Annexure B, p. 42.

45. Ibid., p. 42.

46. Ibid., p. 43.

47. Ibid., p. 49.

48. Ibid., p. 52.

49. Ibid., p. 52.

50. See Annexure B, p. 65-69.

51. Ibid., p. 64.

52. See Affidavit 27/10/2004.

53. Interview with Shyam Parikh.

54. Interviews with Leena Misra and Mahesh Llanga.