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Gujarat polarisation panel under fire

Manas Dasgupta

AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat government’s move to appoint a commission of inquiry to survey the “migration and polarisation of population” on religious grounds, has drawn flak from many quarters, with human rights activists viewing it as Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s “communal agenda” for the 2012 Assembly elections.

According to a Legal Department notification, the commission has been set up to study the changes in the demographic pattern in the State since independence and identify the “reasons behind the polarisation and migration” of populations belonging to different religions.

The commission will be headed by a retired judge of the Gujarat High Court, B. J. Sethna, who was involved in a tiff with a fellow judge a couple of years ago, and who earlier upheld a Vadodara fast track court judgment acquitting all the accused in the Best Bakery massacre case (during the 2002 Gujarat pogrom).

The commission has been asked to assess the total area occupied by people of different religions on August 15, 1947, and the pattern of changes in polarisation and migration of the population every 10 years since then. It will identify the areas and their sizes where people of different religious groups have shifted since then.

The commission, which has been given time till January 2011 to submit its report, has also been asked to recommend policy guidelines for “stopping polarisation of population” on religious grounds.

The notification said the survey was commissioned in response to the allegations, made in various courts and a section of the media, that the State government was forcing “ghettoisation” of the minorities. “Such allegations and unscientific conclusions create heart burning and distance among various citizens,” it said.

The government was of the view that the “development of [the] population as a whole should take place in the context of law and order and social and economic development as well,” the notification said.

Mr. Modi’s critics say that notwithstanding the time frame for the commission, submission of its report will be timed to influence the outcome of the 2012 Assembly elections.

For, they say, the Modi administration has realised the diminishing impact of the 2002 communal riots on the 2007 Assembly elections and virtually no impact in the recent Lok Sabha polls.

The human rights activists, while demanding the immediate scrapping of the commission, said it apparently was aimed at “targeting” the minority communities and adding to their fear complex.

Father Cedric Prakash, director of Prashant, a voluntary organisation working for human rights, said the survey was bound to polarise the minorities even more and make them sitting ducks for hate propaganda “with the patronage of the State government,” as was “evident” during the anti-Christian attacks in 1998-99 and the communal riots of 2002. He said the minorities continued to remain victims of overt and subtle intimidation, harassment and attacks.

Pointing out that a similar survey of the minority population in 1999 was scrapped by the State government under orders of the High Court, which held that any survey on religious grounds was ultra vires the Constitution, Fr. Prakash said it was well known that the minorities in Gujarat lived in a highly polarised situation. No one needed a “scientific study” and a commission of inquiry to prove or disprove it, he said.

Demanding implementation of the Sachar Committee recommendations on Muslims, Fr. Prakash said: “What the State government is required to do is to ensure that every single citizen of the State is treated with dignity and respect, and allow them the freedom guaranteed under the Constitution.”

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