Remembering Gujarat Carnage of 2002: Professor Hiren Mukerjee’s letter to President K.R. Narayanan and the President’s Anguish

On the tenth anniversary of the Gujarat carnage, we reproduce here page 5 of Mainstream (May 4, 2002).

Save the Conscience and Honour of Our India

PROFESSOR HIREN MUKERJEE’S FERVENT APPEAL TO THE PRESIDENT

Following is the text of Professor Hiren Mukerjee’s letter to President K.R. Narayanan dated April 21, 2002.

Dear Mr President,

I write this to you not so much as a dear friend and young brother but, with a certain solemnity, as President of our Republic of India. The horrendous recent happenings in Gujarat have stunned numberless people wondering how man could do such things to man. In public life since 1936, I feel broken, shattered, desolate, not knowing where to turn.

I cannot write to Atal for whom I have had much affection because as Prime Minister he has chosen to condone and explain away cruelties that almost out-Hitler Hitler often inflicted with proven connivance of the State administration. I can share my agony with you because you are Head of the Republic, the symbol of the sovereignty of our people, personifying the General Will of our societal life. It is for you to step in with all dignity when government goes gaga, as in Gujarat, and the Union Government connives. I find just insufferable that the Prime Minister shields such scums as Gujarat’s Chief Minister whose name I better not utter.
Newspapers like “Time†, coolly overlooking what the US and its ‘Western’ allies have been doing throughout their history and especially from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) till today in the Middle East and elsewhere, have used this opportunity by damning “Bloody India†and we ‘bloody’ well deserve the taunt. Who but you can perhaps repair the damage to the honour of India when the Prime Minister and the company he keeps fail unrepentantly in their duty?

Even if Atal has failed in his duty to keep you fully informed about the grim and ghastly goings-on in Gujarat, you must have known enough to be sure that the patently repulsive Chief Minister’s proven laches more than deserve the sack which Parliament has demanded? I do not know if you have summoned and reprimanded your direct appointee, the State Governor, whose name luckily I do not even know. Must the country and our future be besmirched and imperilled by the Centre’s dereliction?

In Baroda, normally peaceful, the vandals sneaked in, during curfew hours, that is, with official protection, to desecrate the grave of hallo-wed maestro Ustad Fayyaz Khan Sahib. Their masters may not know but you and I know that music, “greatest of the arts†(Na Vidya Sangeetat Para), the joint Sadhana, no less, of Muslim and Hindu, is our pride and glory. Atal and his team who now seem bent on their ‘belief’ that Muslims are no more than “only territorially Indian†, which explains the current pogrom and near-genocide (which our people so far have not permitted to steal across to the rest of India), and who but you can step in, with every Constitutional decorum, to save the conscience and honour of our India?
Gentle, generous Gujarat, the home for more than two thousand years ago of wonderful saints and philosophers of Jainism, Gujarat where the Bhakti movement, led by glorious people like Meera Bai,—to cut it short, Gujarat of Gandhiji, who lived and died for the “heart unity†of Hindus and Muslims—bleeds today in a thousand wounds. We cannot keep away from salvaging the destruction and moving over to tasks of building a real, new, secular, human “temple†on our soil.

Best wishes, as always,

Yours,

Hiren Mukerjee

President’s Anguish

I have been deeply anguished and pained at the violent incidents and killings that have disturbed the peace and communal harmony in Gujarat and elsewhere. Many people have sent me representations about the distressing situation of the victims. I appeal to all my fellow citizens to restore communal harmony and do everything to end the communal violence that has devastated the State and continues to occur even after two months, and to harness all our resources to provide relief and rehabilitation to all the affected people. It is the duty of every Indian, political, social and religious leaders, and the common men and women to strive their best to restore peace so that the foundations of our state and tradition of tolerance are preserved and strengthened in this crisis of our state and society.

New Delhi

April 29, 2002 K.R. Narayanan