So they were not Muslims. That little boy who loved cricket and who vanished in that post-Godhra carnage, belonging to a perfectly hardworking, reasonably honest middle class locality, was not a Muslim. So don’t create perverse noises of protest. Let him be. Let him be. He was a little Parsi kid who disappeared. You killed them. They killed him. You should ask why you killed him and why they killed him and still defend it till this day and why his body was not found, despite the red T-Shirt he was wearing? Why did you kill him, that’s the first question you must ask? And why do you still dare to hang around with that high moral ground, when you are basically a xenophobic criminal who supports the mob murderers? The murderers? Also because you support the BJP/VHP/Bajrang Dal mob which has so clinically executed the massacre in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat with Atal Behari Vajpayee as prime minister and LK Advani as home minister and George Fernandes as defence minister and Nitish Kumar as railway minister who didn’t utter a word, not one word, on the post-Godhra massacre, least of all finding the reasons behind that S-6 burnt coach?
So let’s not talk about the massacre. Let’s talk about individual killings.
The fact is that the Gujarat carnage was State-sponsored, and no shouting and heckling can stop it. No authentic filmmaker will run away from it
Did he at all die? I saw his father looking for him among the dead bodies, he found a red-T-shirt-dead body of a child, it’s not the same child, it’s not the same dead post-portemed body, there was no post-mortem, so how can you explain to the father and the mother that his child is alive and this child is dead?
It’s a conjecture of history that the supporters of mass murders can defend it in all open spaces, especially in Goa in a film festival. And that we have to accept it. There have been 42 independent reports meticulously documenting the genocide, including by former Supreme Court and high court justices and there are tangible questions raised by the nhrc which still remain unanswered. The fact is that it was a State-sponsored genocide, meticulously planned and executed, and no shouting and heckling can stop it, and there’s no authentic filmmaker who will run away from the truth.
And that Om Puri has to stand up and say, between you and us, Hindus and Muslims, we all carry fundamentalists in our own gutters, but it is still possible to tell the truth as it was in Tamas; that they are not imagined truths, that it is possible that we killed him, you killed him, that he is alive, that Parsi child, of a beautiful Parsi mother and an honest Parsi father, trapped in your Perverse Hindu Rashtra of mindless blood revenge, who kill children and put kerosene in their mouths with a lighted matchstick, as they did in Gujarat, to prove that they believe in Ram. And then they can still write it on the wall and celebrate it?
And then they have the guts to oppose the truth on public platforms? Do they believe in Ram? Or Sita? Or faith? Or humanity? Or humanism? What’s the difference between them and the Taliban? Watch Parzania (previewed in Tehelka, September 24, 2005) in the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa. And wherever you can get a chance. Because they will block it. Because that’s the truth about the Gujarat.