Don't forget Gujarat-2002 or Delhi-1984

AFTER President Pranab Mukherjee's address to Parliament, many people believe Prime Minister Narendra Modi is turning to “moderation”; some predict he'll evolve into a liberal “Modi 2.0.”
They point to Mukherjee's announcement of a “national plan” to control communal violence, and emphasise that Modi regretted the lynching of a Muslim professional in Pune by a Hindutva mob.
Many plead that Modi must be treated leniently. He has put the 2002 butchery of Gujarat's Muslims behind; 12 years on, that “one-off” error must be forgiven; Indians must learn to live with him -- like millions of Gujaratis.
But announcing plans to control communal violence isn't new. In 2005, the government adopted a 15-Point Programme for minorities, including “prevention” of communal violence, speedy prosecution, and victims' rehabilitation.
Modi hasn't spelt out his own plan. So we shouldn't be lured into believing that his attitude to communalism has radically changed. He refuses to express remorse for the carnage. He's yet to get a clean legal chit. Zakia Jaffri's appeal hasn't yet been decided even by the Gujarat High Court.
The Supreme Court indicted Modi in 2003-04: “The Neros… fiddled as Gujarat burned.” It transferred some Gujarat cases to Maharashtra for trial. The conviction rate in these was eight times higher.
So while it's churlish to deny that Modi won a basically free and fair election, it doesn't follow that we should abandon the perfectly lawful and reasonable demand for bringing Gujarat's culprits to justice.
The Gujarat violence falls under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including killing, or causing serious bodily/mental harm.
Gen. Pinochet was indicted by a Spanish magistrate 25 years after perpetrating human rights violations in Chile. He was eventually sent home for trial, but died before being convicted. There's no time-bar for mass-murder trials.
Forty Indian and international citizens' enquiries have shown that the post-Godhra violence was conducted with the Modi government's complicity. Mass killings and rapes occurred as the police refused to intervene -- under instructions. The Gujarat High Court convicted minister Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi for the Naroda-Patiya genocide.
In a “sting,” Bajrangi later confessed: “I am telling you if Narendra-bhai had not been there, we would have never come out… If I did not have the support of Narendra-bhai, we would not have been able to avenge Godhra… He] posted a judge [who] neither saw the file or anything….. He just said granted…. We were free…”
Communal killings occurred under Congress rule too: the 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, and anti-Muslim violence in Bhagalpur, Bhiwandi and Mumbai. These must be condemned and their culprits punished.
The 1984 violence was the worst of these. Yet, as scholar-activist Jairus Banaji argues, no “genocidal consensus” got consolidated in Delhi. The city suffered a shock, and the violence soon stopped.
In Gujarat, a “genocidal consensus” stabilised; the killing went on for many weeks. To this day, there isn't the slightest trace of remorse for this among millions of Gujaratis.
There's a lesson here from Italy and Germany, where millions worshipped Mussolini and Hitler and delighted in their terrible crimes. In post-War Germany, these Hitler supporters refused to express remorse for this complicity.
Psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich explored this in their 1975 classic, The Inability to Mourn, using Freud's ideas to explain Germany's extended melancholia after the Holocaust.  Germany, they concluded, was unable/unwilling to mourn. There was no release of emotion.
As psychologist Robert Jay Lifton put in the book's Preface, “to be unable to mourn is to be unable to enter into the great human cycle of death and birth -- to be unable, that is, to 'live again'.” Hitler's former admirers blamed the Fuehrer for everything (just as they had earlier blamed the Jews) while erasing segments of their own life from memory.
It took decades before the deliberate forgetting began to abate. A watershed came in 1970 when Chancellor Willy Brandt fell on his knees in Warsaw to accept guilt for the suffering Germany had imposed on Poland. Central to the process were public intellectuals like novelist Heinrich Boell.
In Gujarat, the process hasn't even begun; nor are there many public intellectuals. Large numbers of gullible Gujaratis, under the influence of communalism and regional chauvinism, remain in a state of self-delusion and support Modi.
Modi has spread that delusion nationwide through his massively corporate- and media-backed propaganda about Gujarat's “development” claims which hide its middling-to-poor social indicators. Crucial here is his managerial “great-doer” style.
Delusions cannot last. Modi will soon find that his promise to provide jobs to the 12 million who enter the labour market annually cannot be delivered -- not through his ultra-capital-intensive Big Business-subservient model.
Nor will be easy to restore economic dynamism and balance. Modi's test will come as the mega-projects he's pushing fail to fructify and ecological devastation grows.
Whatever happens to Modi's government, justice for Gujarat is imperative if India is to become a society based on the rule-of-law, accountability and compassion.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.