By
Md. Zeyaul Haque, Special to IslamOnline
NEW
DELHI, August 14 (IslamOnline)- Former President of India KR Narayanan
admitted, according to a newspaper report published Wednesday, August
14, that he felt helpless during the on-going anti-Muslim pogrom in the
western state of Gujarat which occurred during the last months of his
presidency.
“As
a president, I have often felt helpless when so many delegations come to
me and tell their woes and I can' t do anything about it. Gujarat was a
major example of the helplessness,” Narayanan said.
Gujarat
troubled him a lot because "it affects the future of the nation,
unity of the nation, and I was most affected by events like that,"
Narayanan said. Gujarat made him feel "sad, agonized and
ashamed," he added.
Something
like Gujarat and the related communal issues have troubled him the most
"because it had larger implications," said India’s former
president.
Raising
the same point in the southern city of Bangalore last week at a
symposium on media coverage of the Gujarat carnage, former Chief Justice
of India, Justice AM Ahmadi said he had made an appeal to then president
of India KR Naraynan to do something to stop the carnage and bring
succor to victims.
Narayanan
did act on the plea and approached the executive authority, the prime
minister, to act on the SOS. However, no tangible action was taken by
the prime minister and his government at the Center, the former Chief
Justice said.
In
his infamous Goa speech April 12, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
went as far as blaming the victims when he said: "Wherever there
were Muslims there was trouble." The Center even defended Gujarat
chief minister Narendra Modi, accused by human rights groups as the
mastermind of the massacres.
Presidential
helplessness was quite evident during current President Kalam‘s August
12-13 visit to Gujarat. As he was going round pogrom-affected places in
Ahmedabad, a bomb exploded in one part of the city and a riot broke out
in another. The president went wherever he was taken by the local
authority, which meant not going to places the local administration did
not want him to see.
President
Kalam could not do anything substantial and meaningful to bring succor
to the survivors of the pogrom which human rights groups and victims say
was State-sponsored. President Kalam could only tell the victims he
would pray to Allah for them.
The
president’s helplessness in India sharply contradicts with other
countries where presidents wield much and real power.
U.S.
President Franklin D Roosevelt, to site but one example, used much power
to build the elaborate edifice of New Deal and hold it in place.
When
the U.S. Supreme Court opposed some provisions of the New Deal,
Roosevelt thundered, ”I will close down the Supreme Court and send the
judges packing home.” It was that kind of power which finally pulled
America out of the abyss of self-pity brought in by the Depression of
the 1930s.
John
F Kennedy was another example of a powerful president. When he faced the
white supremacists opposing his desegregation move in schools, he did
not succumb to majoritarian tyranny and saw to it that America was
desegregated and the movement for black civil rights met with success.
That
conviction and that power are missing in India's president. The result:
marauding mobs on streets, State-backed murderers, collapse of the rule
of law. Incidentally, “collapse of rule of law” was exactly that
which took place in Gujarat, said former Chief Justice of India, AM
Ahmadi
