Any Simon Wiesenthal for Gujarat?

Binu Alex

Delhi, Mumbai, Bhagalpur, Gujarat. No, these are not the investment destinations but down the memory places as we read the death of Simon Wiesenthal

A number of movies all over the world depict how one man can change the system or the world. Well, that is not as easy task as depicted in movies. You cannot have a screen Arnold Schwarzenegger in real life. But there are people who try and try till they live. Simon Wiesenthal was one of those fighters who died at the age of 96.

He lived and died for a cause. He was a holocaust survivor turned Nazi-hunter. He brought to book many Nazi war criminals who would have otherwise got unpunished. But on the sidelines, it is also true that many of the survivors or their generations were least bothered about the pain and agony their forefathers have gone through. A few of the concentration camp survivors followed Wiesenthal in his mission. Though there will be hardly any Nazi war criminals left to be punished, the fact that many of them went without any punishment is itself a blot in the history of justice.

That was during World War II. Information age was yet to catch up during those times. But today at this modern age where religion, caste, nationality ceased to exist in a competitive world, we still have Adolf Eichmann and Franz Stangl types around us, alas we don’t have a Wiesenthal to enact a rewind.

If Eichmann and Stangl were some of the architects of the Holocaust we have far too many today.

Take the case of Sikh Massacres in 1984 or the Gujarat genocide of 2002. Those who perpetuated the crime have gone without a trace. The government in power helped them to get away by putting up commissions after commissions that never gave a true picture of our indigenous holocaust. The best way to get away from justice is to set up a judicial commission. The commission is nothing but Employment Guarantee Scheme for retired judges.

If anyone had the chance to visit any commission hearings, they will agree to this. The latest hearing is in the Nanavati-Shah commission where there are thousands of affidavits to be heard and cross examined. Prosecutors, one after the other, put up questions as if they are conducting an interview for a civil services examination. Many witnesses are dummies created by the government and those survivors who muster courage to come up for the examination cannot withstand the onslaught. Days, weeks and months and perhaps years, the commission drags on and gradually people forget what had happened to them and life gets back to normal until one day the commission presents its reports, mostly decades after the incident, and it becomes a tool for the opposition parties to play with for a short period of time.

That is democracy at its best. A democracy cannot provide justice to victims of such holocaust. What it can do at the best is to give the country people like Justice B N Srikrishna but at the same time trash his report on the riots in Bombay.

It is sad for Gujarat that it could not produce a Wiesenthal. The state has so many bonsai models but no body could come near to his stature or commitment to justice.

Public memory is short. That is the reason that the victims of holocaust forgot that they endured the worst crime ever possible to humanity. But Wiesenthal did not. He slogged and slogged to bring the war criminals to justice.

But then how come the victims of Indian holocausts, whether it is Delhi, Bhagalpur or Gujarat, forget so easily. The main culprit is our political class. As long as the vote bank politics continue in India, there cannot be any justice to mass murders.

“You can forgive crimes committed against you personally, but in my opinion you are not authorized to forgive for others.”

These are the famous quotes credited to Simon Wiesenthal and how true it plays in today’s world is evident from the fact that we have forgiven – knowingly or unknowingly- all our criminals. So much so that some of them have contested and won elections. More than 89 of Wiesenthal’s’ family members - including his mother, stepfather, stepbrother and his wife - died in the Holocaust and perhaps this gave him the inner courage to fight. But compare that to the Indian scenario. It is not the survivors or the victims who are fighting for justice but rather people who have not lost anything in the mindless violence. Perhaps the survivors may not endure to fight in the melee of a huge number of NGOs who look for such opportunities to make name, fame and money. In the deluge of such unscrupulous organizations, genuine NGOs sink with no trace to know which one is genuine and which one is not.

Wiesenthal’s efforts bore fruit. Jewish Documentation Center was established in Vienna with the aim to track down war criminals. In 1960 Eichmann was caught tried, convicted and executed in Israel and Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany in 1967 and died in prison. But we may not be able to replicate it in our lifetime.

If we can produce a Wiesenthal, then we may perhaps avoid producing Eichmann and Stangl type of villains or else we need to produce a Schindler on whom we have to depend heavily to prepare a long list.

© Binu Alex