Amit Sengupta New Delhi

WHENEVER Shabnam Hashmi of Anhad used to visit Gujarat with her friends and youngsters in 2002, working in the relief camps where thousands of survivors of the genocide took shelter with the fear of another murderous mob arriving every night, we used to wonder whether she would ever come back. The same narrative would unfold week after week in the many traumatic months of the terror that stalked the denizens of the camps –- and others exiled, condemned and internally displaced in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat.

But she, along with Ram Puniyani, Harsh Mander, Zakia Jowher, Gagan Sethi and countless others staked their lives and compassion in this struggle against state-sponsored communalism. They entered the bylanes of terror and took the hands of the survivors across communities and religion and helped them restore their own courage and self-reliance in thousands of study circles across Gujarat and the rest of the country.Hundreds of NGOs, civil society groups, students and teachers were trained by eminent historians, journalists, feminists and sociologists on how to preserve the original map of India after the freedom movement and how to redesign the vitiated inner soul of a battered society.

“This was a struggle against barbarism,” says Shabnam Hashmi. “And I was not the only one involved. The country’s basic foundations of democracy and secularism were at stake with the BJP at the helm and Narendra Modi going berserk. Every institution was being threatened by the BJPled regime. There was no option but to fight it out till the last.”

That is why let us not forget that the surprising margin of victory of the Congress and the Left in the 2004 general elections was, in many parts of the country, made possible by a spectrum of civil society groups who worked against the ideological propaganda of the fascists. This is one dimension which has been ignored by the political class.

Indeed, it was not the Congress or the ‘official’ Left that fought in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. They were bankrupt, discredited and without imagination or social committment. It was not they who brought the number of Lok Sabha seats of Modi’s party down to almost half in that memorable election. It was women like Shabnam, Malini Ghosh, Farah Naqvi, Teesta Setelvad and their esteemed companions such as Mukul Sinha, who stood tall among many pygmies in those turbulent times.

They were the ones who were fighting legal cases, extending help in the transit camps and outside, writing and distributing pamphlets in tens of thousands, holding street plays, rock concerts, youth campaigns, even cricket matches. The ‘victory’ in the Bilkis Bano case and the scathing observations of the Supreme Court in the Best Bakery case as much as the current investigations by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) are the result of these efforts. And Shabnam Hashmi and Ram Puniyani were the roots of this struggle.

This is the thread which moves beyond the terror attack which killed innocents in Mumbai; 26/11. The book reminds us of the many octopi which are floating, entrenched in the political, bureaucratic and security establishment even now. They continue to block the secular current using insidious and organised forms of ideological actions.

This compilation analyses the terror attacks on 26/11 in Mumbai from various angles, based on the understanding that deeper issues are hidden behind every such tragedy. It discusses terrorism, law, Indo-Pak relations and the deceptive role of the Indian State. Most of the chapters have been written in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai carnage and they tangentially and tangibly move around, before and after the complex patterns of terrorism and investigations.

The broad contours of the analysis include the killing of non-combatants, the political motive or the secret planning of such attacks where the actors are even willing or keen to lay down their lives for bringing about such devastation.

“I can name top officers who are completely anti-secular and who are at the helm in important investigating agencies even now. Look at the number of encounters in Gujarat: not only Sohrabuddin and his wife’s murder by top cops close to Modi, even Ishrat Jahan’s murder seems a clear case of this conspiracy,” says Hashmi.

“ The Hyderabad public tribunal is a pointer how innocent Muslims are being picked up and tortured with no evidence. The Batla House case clearly seems a fake encounter but the ‘secular’ UPA regime is not even ready to institute a judicial inquiry. Why have they gone so slow on the Hindutva terrorist cases including their clear hand in the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid Hyderabad and Malegaon blasts, including the latest Hindutva terror networks discovered in Goa? We have serious doubts about the stated facts behind the killing of Hemant Karkare and other officers. We want an independent investigation into their murders and we don’t believe in the official version,” she says.

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