My Father is Paying a Heavy Price for Not Bowing to Prime Minister Modi says Aakashi Bhatt
Aakashi Bhatt, a surgeon. Photo on Twitter.
February 3, 2023*
“My father is paying a heavy price” for not bowing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Aakashi Bhatt said via Zoom today. She spoke at a screening of the BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question, organized by Columbia University’s School of Journalism, New York.
Aakashi’s father, Sanjiv Bhatt, she added, was jailed for life for “a crime he did not commit…he spoke the truth.” He was a top police official in the state of Gujarat, in February 2002, when “About 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, are killed. Some 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses and 360 places of worship are destroyed, and roughly 150,000 people are displaced,…Mothers are skewered, children set afire and fathers hacked to pieces,” according to The New York Times.
Sanjiv Bhatt alleged that Modi, who was then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, instructed senior bureaucrats and police officials, during a meeting, to not intervene when Hindu mobs attack Muslims. Earlier that day, 59 Hindu pilgrims died in a fire, while traveling on a train in the state. While some reports said the fire was arson by Muslim extremists, others said it was an accident.
In 2019, Bhatt was jailed for life because one of the more than 150 people he arrested, during a riot in 1989, later died in hospital after being released. In August 2002, Haren Pandya, a minister in Modi’s Gujarat government, also made similar allegations against Modi, while speaking to Outlook India. In 2003, Pandya, who feared for his life, was killed in mysterious circumstances and the murder case is yet to be solved. "My son's death was a planned, political murder...it must be reinvestigated" his father Vithal Pandya told Outlook India. In 2007. Pandya was a Hindu and so is Bhatt.
Aakashi Bhatt is a surgeon who has conducted research including at Oxford University. In December, on Sanjiv Bhatt’s 59th birthday, she and her brother Shantanu, wrote on Facebook, “Dearest Dad, As I sit down to pen a birthday message for you, I find myself at a loss of words, because to even try to articulate in mere words how much we love you, how proud and honoured we feel to be your children and what you mean to us, is an impossible feat.” A tweet of the post has gotten over 240,000 views.
The stories of Sanjiv Bhatt and Haren Pandya are in the BBC documentary. Two weeks ago, on January 21, soon after the first of two episodes was broadcast, the Indian government used emergency powers to ban YouTube, Twitter, and other media platforms from sharing links to the documentary. A government spokesperson described it as a “hateful propaganda” video.
The media platforms, which view India as their largest potential business market, obliged and deleted links not just in India but all over the world. Owner Elon Musk says Twitter is a public playground, noted Salil Tripathi, a journalist, at the Columbia event. Musk, he added, also owns Tesla which makes cars which he wants to sell or have made in India, so he wants very good relations.
The BBC defended the Modi documentary stating it was "rigorously researched" and "a wide range of voices, witnesses and experts were approached, and we have featured a range of opinions, including responses from people in the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)."
Audrey Truschke at Columbia Journalism School. Photo: Mary Leer.
Not much is new in the documentary, said Audrey Truschke, another panelist and an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Yet Modi suppressed access to it in India because the killing of innocent people in 2002 is not widely known in India, especially among the large portion of the population who were born since then. Also, Truschke added, there is widespread censorship of facts about such issues in India.
Every year, in a course she teaches, Truschke discusses the 2002 Gujarat riots. In the 1920’s, she added, the founders of the Rashtriya Sewak Sangh, the secretive, hierarchical, militant organization which is said to control the ruling BJP, were inspired by the Nazis and fascists of Europe, not by some ancient concept of Bharat Mata (Mother India). So, her course starts with a study of the Nazis and ends with Modi, she added.
“It’s not pleasant to be hated by Hindu nationalists,” said Truschke. She and her family have faced death threats. Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. have lobbied Rutgers to dismiss her from her job. In May 2021, The Hindu American Foundation, based in Washington DC, sued her and four others for “alleged defamation” in a U.S. court. The foundation reportedly spent $200,000 on the case till December 2021. In December 2022, Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the lawsuit against all five defendants.
Some Hindu nationalist media outlets attacked the Columbia event before it was held, including labelling it as “anti-India” and “propaganda against the Indian PM Modi.”
Apparently due to this, there was tight security at the event. “We are only able to host speakers, pre-designated guests of speakers and those with a CUID (Columbia University ID) who submitted an RSVP,” stated an email from Melanie Huff, a dean of the Columbia Journalism School. Others who had signed up were told, “I regret to inform you that it is not possible for you to attend this event in person this evening.” They received a link to the Zoom broadcast though only of the panel discussion.
The violence and other atrocities against the Muslims is “happening in our name,” said Sunita Viswanath of the Hindus for Human Rights, at the Columbia event. Muslims will not have a right to vote, according to a draft constitution prepared by a group of Hindu religious leaders, she added. There is fear in the West that the carnage in Gujarat will be repeated, given the mix of rising Hindu nationalism, Modi and his ruling BJP, said Truschke
Thousands of Indians, who suffered during the genocide in Gujarat in 2002, face a haunting truth, said Aakashi Bhatt. They see that the crimes have gone “unpunished for twenty-one years” while defenders of the victims’ face persecution.
(*Story updated February 4, 2023.)
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