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CounterPunch
March 7,
2003
Heading Toward
a Religio-Fascist Purgatory?
Riding the Tiger
in India
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
With war in Iraq seeming closer each day, the
trickle of North Korean nuclear revelations growing to a gush,
and all the trouble with the economy, Americans can be forgiven
for not noticing an event of huge portent in far-away Gujarat
state in India.
Last December, in a stunning election
result, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), aided by a
host of extreme Hindu organizations, won a thumping two-thirds
majority in state assembly elections. Its state chief minister
(like a governor in the US, the highest elected state official)
had conducted an openly communal campaign, concentrating his
ire on the Muslim and Christian minorities, whom he castigated
as anti-national, and labeling anyone emphasizing India's secular
traditions as virtual traitors.
This same chief minister, Narendra Modi,
presided over the state government earlier this year when there
was a huge pogrom of muslims in his state. All impartial accounts
are agreed that the state government's role in the communal
riots was at best one of benign neglect, and at worst one of
active connivance, abetment and encouragement.
Several hundred people died in the riots,
which lasted for days across the state, and property worth hundreds
of millions of dollars was destroyed. Several thousand people
whose homes were burnt down are still living in refugee camps,
with scarce drinking water and toilet facilities.
If he had heard the BJP's election propaganda,
an American might be led to wonder what all the fuss was over
Trent Lott. The hapless Lott was hauled over the coals and had
to resign for a statement which could likely be construed as
racist. In India, by contrast, Mr. Modi's party, and Mr. Modi
himself, spared nothing in their open and sharp communal appeals.
Painting a stark picture of Pakistani agents everywhere, hinting
at their links within India's muslim community, and making good
use of the various terrorist incidents which happen periodically
in India, Mr. Modi succeeded splendidly in uniting the Hindu
vote, thus delivering a two-thirds majority for his party.
With results like these, India's national
leaders could care less about the means. The Prime Minister,
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also of the BJP, has blown hot and cold
over the issue of the Gujarat riots. The immediate provocation
for the riots was the burning down of a train compartment in
Godhra, Gujarat, by a muslim mob, ending the death of scores
of Hindu activists. The latter were returning from demonstrations
to rebuild a temple over the site of a mosque, a dispute that
has been simmering over the last decade. That Godhra tragedy
was then compounded by retaliatory strikes by hindu mobs for
several days. Mr. Modi who saw nothing more in all this than
the working out of the natural law of "action and reaction",
was scarcely reprimanded by the national leadership, which did
not even see fit to seek a different leader for the state.
And then, in an act of astounding insensitivity,
Mr. Vajpayee, in celebrating his party's Gujarat victory, added
that muslims had not 'sufficiently regretted' the Godhra incident.
Instead of binding the wounds, Mr. Vajpayee, under increasing
pressure from his party to adopt a more 'pro-Hindu' stance,
chose to placate the extremists.
Individuals leaders apart, communal extremism
is on the rise in India. A large section of the middle class,
including a goodly number of Indians outside India, has been
successfully convinced that India's future lies in a resurgent
Hinduism, with muslims 'being taught a lesson'. In this the
BJP and its cohorts have successfully made common cause with
the post 9-11 sentiments in the US.
The founding fathers of India, including
Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel, chose to
enshrine the secular principle because they saw their people
as Indians, not Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or Christians. One of
the battle cries of the BJP its fellow extremists, the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, is the undoing of this consensus
in order to make India a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu state). One of
the VHP leaders vowed, in the aftermath of the Gujarat victory,
that India would become a Hindu state in two years, and that
the status of Muslims in India would be only marginally better
than that of Hindus in Pakistan. This is no different from the
sentiments which led the Taliban to making Hindus and Buddhists
wear yellow flags.
With 10 Indian states up for elections
in a year, Indians have a giant task ahead--not to let their
country become a Hindu Pakistan, a hotbed of fanaticism, intolerance
and obscurantism. Americans, too, have a stake--should the
world's largest democracy head towards a religio-fascist purgatory,
the whole world, not just India, will poorer for the loss.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan lives in Tigard, Oregon. He can be reached at:
niranjan@pantheon.com
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