The saddest message that comes to us from Gujarat's sickening, shaming violence is that we have learned nothing from the terrible pogroms of 1984 that caused more than 3,000 innocent Sikhs to be killed on the streets of Delhi in less than three days. We have not even learnt to distinguish between a communal riot and a pogrom. In 1984 what we saw were organised pogroms against Sikhs and in Gujarat what we have just seen are organised pogroms against Muslims. Riots are a different thing altogether and it is important that we make a distinction. In 1984, not a single Hindu lost his life, the dead were all Sikhs, and when we get down to counting the dead in Gujarat, we will probably find that the list has only Muslim names. This makes it a pogrom not a riot, and as in 1984, a pogrom that appears to have had the tacit approval of the state.

The anti-Sikh pogroms inspired inquiry commissions, internal inquiries by departments of the police and the administration, judicial proceedings and more inquiry commissions, and what a lot of time and taxpayers' money we have wasted since clearly no lessons were learnt.

Had we learnt only Lesson 1, the administration of the pathetically incompetent Narendra Modi would have anticipated violence on the day that Hindutva activists were burnt alive by a Muslim mob in Godhra. Had even the simplest preventive measures like curfew in major
cities and towns and a ban on public gatherings been taken, there would have been no pogroms. Assuming that the violence was sudden, spontaneous and widespread-as the chief minister would have us believe-it could still have been controlled if the administration wanted it controlled. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi's assassination inspired violence in Delhi on a larger scale than in Gujarat, it was checked as soon as police officers were ordered to shoot at mobs. Mobs are made up not of valiant warriors but of the worst, most contemptible cowards and a gun needs only be pointed in the right direction for the mob to melt away as if it never was.

If this did not happen in Gujarat, it can only mean that either the chief minister, or his patrons in Delhi, did not want the mobs to be reined in too quickly. It must also mean that they wanted revenge and blood-letting instead of justice. Had they wanted justice, the arrests that were made later in Godhra would have been made on Day 1 and they would have been made in the full glare of the media so that ordinary Hindus could have been assured that justice would be done. We are told that those who instigated the violence in Godhra were members of the Congress. If this is so, it would have helped contain public anger if these details were made known instantly. Instead, we had various ministers in the Vajpayee Government hinting darkly at an ISI plot without providing an iota of evidence. Why should we believe them now when they tell us that it was not the ISI but the Congress?

Gujarat's chief minister now tells us that his policemen were possibly biased in their reaction to the communal violence because they are members of the community and would be as affected by public sentiment as the next man. Well, had we learnt any lessons from the past we would by now have a police force trained to treat rioters as rioters and not as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.

There are other unlearnt lessons from the past, like the need to punish policemen and officials who fail to protect ordinary citizens from violent mobs. Not only have they never been punished, but even the killers themselves usually melt -unidentified and unpunished-into ordinary lives as soon as the violence abates. If in the past 50 years, we had been able to punish even a handful of negligent officials, convict just two or three rioters, there would be less likelihood of us having to suffer the shame of what we have just seen in Gujarat.

We like to think of ourselves as a civilised country. We like to sneer at Pakistan for being unable to match our high standards of civilisation and yet beneath the veneer of our "democracy and tolerance" lies a dark, barbarous side that politicians find easy to bring to the surface. We need to ask ourselves why. We need to ask ourselves how it can be controlled. We need to ask ourselves how America's leaders managed to keep their people from taking the law into their own hands despite the terrible provocation of 9/11.

We need for a start to ask the prime minister why he finds it so hard to control the Hindutva fanatics his own party has bred and nurtured. Why can they not be ordered instantly to stop their temple building activities in Ayodhya? If they need work to do, let them go to Gujarat and rebuild the mosques and Muslim shrines that the mobs destroyed. Let them do penance by helping the victims rebuild their ravaged lives. It might go some way in easing the shame of Gujarat.