Whether politics is a circus or not could be a debate, but it is no exaggeration to say that there certainly are some clowns in it. Despite having their political career ended, and relevance lost, some retired politicians have a penchant for making random and outrageous statements to remain hog attention in the media and social media. There is no evidence that any special census has been conducted to know the number of clowns in Gujarat, but Shankarsinh Vaghela seems to have been trying to get his name included for a long time.
Former Chief Minister Shankarsinh has been largely disengaged from mainstream politics since he broke away from the Congress a few years ago. Vaghela no longer contests the election. It is a different story that before every election, he comes up with a new party, only to make a lot of noise and then calm down after the results.
After staying out of media headlines for a long time, Shankarsinh Vaghela has made a comeback, though a disastrous one. His social media has become more active than it was. If you look at Shankarsinh’s Facebook wall now, you will see two to five reels posted every day. Most of the clips have been taken from interviews he has given to various channels.
In most of his interviews, Shankarsinh Vaghela always targets the BJP, Modi-Shah, and the Gujarat government on different issues, and there is no objection to it. As the leader of the opposition, that is his job; however, now he has changed direction and taken a dangerous path. He has brought up the Godhra Hindu massacre in the middle to accuse the BJP, Modi, of polarising Hindu-Muslim communalism.
A clip of an interview with Shankarsinh on the Godhra Hindu massacre was posted four days ago (January 8) and contains extremely derogatory, factually incorrect, and absurd remarks.
Shankarsinh Vaghela said that the Sabarmati Express coach in Godhra was set on fire from the inside, not the outside, and the local Muslims did not even know what time the train was due to arrive and who was in which coach.
Not only this, Shankarsinh further argued that someone inside had set the box on fire. He further said that this was done so that the BJP could benefit in the elections by creating enmity between Hindus and Muslims.
Shankarsinh Vaghela said,
โPolarize Hindus, polarize Muslims, divide people religiously. What if you want to divide people religiously? There was a plan to do that, a conspiracy I would say, in this conspiracy, the coach of the kar sevaks was burnt in Godhraโฆ It was not the time for these kar sevaks to return but to go to Ayodhya to do kar seva.โ
โWho knew that they were going to return? Only an insider would knowโฆ How did the Muslims of Godhra know who was where? On which coach was it written that there were karsevaks in it? That coach was set on fire from the inside as a conspiracy. All of them were Hindus. Not only this, the plan was to wrap the dead body in white cloth and take it on a procession in Ahmedabad. What a monstrous plan this must have been. The coach was set on fire in Godhra because of the BJP’s coming to Gujarat. Not only this, the guards became eaters,โ he added.
Even after two decades of independent investigation into what happened in Godhra, after the country’s Supreme Court gave its verdict, and after many Muslim criminals were punished, such reckless talk still happens. However, here the seriousness is even greater because it was not made by a common man but by the former Chief Minister of the state where this horrific crime unfolded two decades back.
Is Shankarsinh so stupid that he doesn’t know what really happened on February 27? Doesn’t he know what the Supreme Court’s verdict says about this incident? Doesn’t he know that the local Muslims, having planned and plotted the day before, had gathered stones and petrol and, the next day, when the Sabarmati Express arrived at the station, had locked two of its coaches from the outside and set them on fire? The answer is, of course, no.
Can a politician, a former Chief Minister, go to such lengths to insult the 59 Hindu Karsevaks who were killed in the massacre? To say that the coach was set on fire from inside isn’t that an insult to the Kar Sevaks, their sacrifices, their relatives, their families? Is Vaghela suggesting that the Hindu karsevaks decided to burn themselves to death to frame Muslims and spark a riot?
Who knew that the train would arrive at this time? โ Such childish arguments have been made by Shankarsinh; however, doesnโt he know that the conspiracy was already hatched, and a meeting was also held in a guest house the previous day? ‘How did the Muslims know when the train would arrive and who was sitting in which compartment?’ Shankarsinh, who asked this question, does not know that these same Muslim criminals had already stored petrol, and all this has been proven in court. The court has already sentenced the criminals and rejected their bail.
The 59 Hindus who were killed in the burning of the Sabarmati Express coaches on February 27 were Kar Sevaks. Among them were 27 women and 10 children. Their ‘crime’ was that they were returning from the birthplace of their beloved after doing Kar Seva. They had to pay the price of their lives for demonstrating their faith. So that even after that, for years, they would continue to be accused of burning the coaches from within, or that some politician would just put the blame on these same Kar Sevaks to shine his politics and to gain the love of a particular community.
This reel of Shankarsingh has crossed 1 million views so far. It is our collective misfortune that people in the comment box are taking Shankarsingh’s words as truth and promoting them. Let us pray that Shankarsingh gets good sense and may Shankarsingh never meet the families of those 59 karsevaks in his life. Because we do not want a senior politician who has crossed eighty-one to face the same difficulties that he will have in facing these families.
