This was the year India won a total of 36 medals – including 11 golds – at the Asian games. A creditable performance for
a nation with no tradition in athletics. It was also the year when the Delhi Metro (that is being built at a projected cost of over ten thousand crores) became reality.
Unfortunately, it was also the year of the attack on the Akshardham Temple – where devotees (some of them children) were killed in cold blood by terrorists.
It was the year when fifty-nine kar sevaks or volunteers who were returning from Ayodhya were horribly burned alive – and the state of Gujarat (which has a history of communal violence) erupted in flames. The incident – and its aftermath – sent shock waves throughout the country.
Though the breakdown in law and order was widely condemned at that time, the ambiguity of the situation was revealed when the state of Gujarat went to the polls later that year. The chief minister secured the people’s mandate, and was returned with a majority to the state assembly.
Stoked by divisive politics, the communal riots (a legacy of the bloody partition of the nation, but also a function of the divide between rich and poor) of 1984 and 2002 were among the last major communal riots the nation has witnessed. Both the frequency and intensity of communal riots seems to be dying down, as the horrors of partition become a distant memory; and as the communities involved appear to have evolved more civilized means of resolving their differences. More and more people are speaking out – whether it is against Islamic terror or against communal riots – which must be a good thing.
What exactly are communal riots? Communal riots are a form of low intensity civil war...
I have deliberately included Islamic terror and communal riots under the same breath; for they are a manifestation of the same phenomenon.
It is important to understand that communal riots (in this country) are not the cause of the communal divide - communal riots take place because of the communal divide that exists between the Hindu and muslim communities. Hindus and muslims view the same issues from a different perspective. It was this communal divide that led to the partition of the country; and its aftermath. The irony of the situation is that Gujarat - Mahatma Gandhi’s home state - is otherwise one of the nation’s most progressive states...