I had great faith in the judiciary. Alas, I have lost it. Like other institutions, the media in particular, it has caved in or is in the process of doing so. I did not expect the court to swim against the tide and hold our powerful PM complicit in the attack on Zakia Jafri’s husband, but no sensible Indian expected the topmost judicial authority to make extremely disparaging remarks against Teesta Setalvad and RB Sreekumar and accuse them of a pre-planned conspiracy to harm PM Modi!

The Gujarat Police’s swift action against their own one-time senior, RB Sreekumar, was surprising.

These remarks were immediately picked up by BJP stalwarts and a politicised Gujarat Police to register an FIR against these two for conspiracy to harm an innocent man, who incidentally had not received the clean chit from his own senior at that time — PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a man of principles.

Perhaps the steady support of the courts had made her believe that she would succeed again but this time the target was one that even the most intrepid of today’s judges would hesitate to touch. But to pass those unnecessary strictures that an eager leadership was bound to pounce on to extract revenge was not expected.

The allegation that the Congress was pampering the Muslim minority for electoral gain was now firmly embedded in the Hindu mind. The Congress only conceded the demands of the mullahs on religious matters. That was not the designated role of government, any government in power. It should keep religion out of its purview. The charge of pampering for electoral consideration could hold only in the party’s dealings with the Islamic clergy. The party could have helped a poor minority if it had diverted attention to education and health instead.

At a gathering of Muslim leaders, I voiced this opinion and I was promptly berated. Only Javed Anand supported me. He, too, was shouted down. That experience made me aware that a common meeting ground to ensure communal harmony was not going to be easy.

When the Godhra train burning took place, Sreekumar was on leave. Otherwise, as a senior officer in charge of Intelligence gathering and analysis, he would have been present at the meeting called by Modi at the CM’s residence that night. His assistant, Sanjeev Bhat, was too junior to be given access and had to wait in another room till the instructions were handed down to him by the DGP. A contingent of the Army requisitioned in aid of civil power, led by a Lt General, was kept twiddling its thumb on the tarmac as no instructions for deployment were given to the General, despite his personal call on Modi at his residence.

I learnt that the instructions were to go slow for a day. This piece of information was enforced by the non-deployment of the Army contingent. Any expectation that riots will stop at a given signal is misplaced. Once the mob assumes an identity of its own, separate from that of the individuals that compose the mob, there is no way to control the insanity till, like the eye of a storm, it dissipates.

Another development that will follow Teesta into police custody is the reluctance of activists to cross swords with the powerful force that has taken over the governance of the country. I remember the words of NSA Doval in his address to IPS probationers at the last passing-out parade in Hyderabad. He told them that the next big enemy to be combated was ‘civil society’!

We now know what he meant. NGO activism should stop at the Laxmanrekha. It should not touch the PM, as Teesta tried unsuccessfully to do. India is not the same type of democracy like the US or the UK. Our PM is too sacred a figure! In a recent statement, he even mentioned that Indian democracy preceded that of the British! I had not heard that one before. Even the unemployed youth, too numerous to count, can do nothing to shake the public perception of him as a messiah sent to save the country from perdition.