goanet-digest Tuesday, April 30 2002 Volume 01 : Number 3909
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In this issue:
[Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part II
[Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part III
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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:45:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: George Pinto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part II
Madrassas, the Muslim equivalent of hothouses cultivating religious hatred, try and
make up in
frenzy and foreign funding, what they lack in State support. They provide the perfect
foil for
Hindu communalists to dance their dance of mass paranoia and hatred. (In fact they
serve that
purpose so perfectly, they might just as well be working as a team.)
Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is that the majority of
the Muslim
community will resign itself to living in ghettos as second-class citizens, in
constant fear, with
no civil rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily life be like for them? Any
little
thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic light, could turn
lethal. So they
will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the edges of the
society in
which they live. Their fear will transmit itself to other minorities. Many,
particularly the
young, will probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society
will be called
upon to condemn them. Then President Bush's canon will come back to us: "Either you're
with us or
with the terrorists."
Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For years to come, butchers and
genocidists will fit
their grisly mouths around them ('lip-synch', filmmakers call it) in order to justify
their
butchery.
Mr Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, who has lately been feeling a little upstaged by Mr
Modi, has
the lasting solution. He's called for civil war. Isn't that just perfect? Then
Pakistan won't need
to bomb us, we can bomb ourselves. Let's turn all of India into Kashmir. Or Bosnia. Or
Palestine.
Or Rwanda. Let's all suffer forever. Let's buy expensive guns and explosives to kill
each other
with. Let the British arms dealers and the American weapons manufacturers grow fat on
our spilled
blood. We could ask the Carlyle group —of which the Bush and Bin Laden families are
both
shareholders— for a bulk discount. Maybe if things go really well, we'll become like
Afghanistan.
(And look at the publicity they've gone and got themselves.) When all our farm lands
are mined,
our buildings destroyed, our infrastructure reduced to rubble, our children physically
maimed and
mentally wrecked, when we've nearly wiped ourselves out with self-manufactured hatred,
maybe we
can appeal to the Americans to help us out. Airdropped airline meals, anyone?
How close we have come to self-destruction. Another step and we'll be in free-fall.
And yet the
government presses on. At the Goa meeting of the BJP's national executive, the Prime
Minister of
Secular, Democratic India, Mr A.B. Vajpayee, made history. He became the first Indian
Prime
Minister to cross the threshold and publicly unveil an unconscionable bigotry against
Muslims,
which even George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld would be embarrassed to own up to.
"Wherever Muslims
are," he said, "they do not want to live peacefully."
Shame on him. But if only it were just him: in the immediate aftermath of the Gujarat
holocaust,
confident of the success of its 'experiment', the BJP wants a snap poll. "The gentlest
of people,"
my friend from Baroda said to me, "the gentlest of people, in the gentlest of voices,
says 'Modi
is our hero.'"
Some of us nurtured the naive hope that the magnitude of the horror of the last few
weeks would
make the Secular Parties, however self-serving, unite in sheer outrage. On its own,
the BJP does
not have the mandate of the people of India. It does not have the mandate to push
through the
Hindutva project. We hoped that the 27 allies that make up the BJP-led coalition at
the Centre
would withdraw their support. We thought, quite stupidly, that they would see that
there could be
no bigger test of their moral fibre, of their commitment to their avowed principles of
secularism.
It's a sign of the times that not a single one of the BJP's allies has withdrawn
support. In every
shifty eye you see that faraway look of someone doing mental maths to calculate which
constituencies and portfolios they'll retain and which ones they'll lose if they pull
out. Except
for Deepak Parekh of hdfc, not a single ceo of India's Corporate Community has
condemned what
happened. Farooq Abdullah, Chief Minister of Kashmir and the only prominent Muslim
politician left
in India, is currying favour with the government by supporting Modi because he's
nursing the dim
hope that he may become Vice-President of India very soon.And worst of all, Mayawati,
leader of
the BSP, the great hope of the lower castes, is on the verge of forging an alliance
with the BJP
in UP.
The Congress and the Left parties have launched a public agitation asking for Modi's
resignation.
Resignation? Have we lost all sense of proportion? Criminals are not meant to resign.
They're
meant to be charged, tried and convicted. As those who burned the train in Godhra
should be. As
the mobs, and those members of the police force and the administration who planned and
participated in the pogrom in the rest of Gujarat should be. As those responsible for
raising the
pitch of the frenzy to boiling point must be. The Supreme Court has the option of
acting against
Modi and the Bajrang Dal and the VHP suo motu (when the Court itself files charges).
There are
hundreds of testimonies. There's masses of evidence.
But in India if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a politician, you
have every
reason to be optimistic.No one even expects politicians to be prosecuted. To demand
that Modi and
his henchmen be arraigned and put away, would make other politicians vulnerable to
their own
unsavoury pasts; so instead they disrupt Parliament, shout a lot, eventually those in
power set up
commissions of inquiry, ignore the findings and between themselves make sure the
juggernaut chugs
on.
Already the issue has begun to morph. Should elections be allowed or not? Should the
Election
Commission decide that? Or the Supreme Court? Either way, whether elections are held
or deferred,
by allowing Modi to walk free, by allowing him to continue with his career as a
politician, the
fundamental, governing principles of democracy are not just being subverted, but
deliberately
sabotaged. This kind of democracy is the problem, not the solution. Our society's
greatest
strength is being turned into her deadliest enemy. What's the point of us all going on
about
'deepening democracy', when it's being bent and twisted into something unrecognisable?
What if the BJP does win the elections? (The buzz is that engineering a war against
Pakistan is
going to be the BJP's strategy to swing the vote.) After all, George Bush had an 80
per cent
rating in his War Against Terror, and Ariel Sharon has a similar mandate for his
bestial invasion
of Palestine. Does that make everything all right? Why not dispense with the legal
system, the
Constitution, the press - the whole shebang - morality itself, why not chuck it and
put everything
up for a vote? Genocides can become the subject of opinion polls and massacres can
have marketing
campaigns.
Fascism's firm footprint has appeared in India. Let's mark the date: Spring, 2002.
While we can
thank the American President and the Coalition Against Terror for creating a congenial
international atmosphere for its ghastly debut, we cannot credit them for the years it
has been
brewing in our public and private lives.
It breezed in in the wake of the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. From then onwards, the
massed
energy of bloodthirsty patriotism became openly acceptable political currency. The
'weapons of
peace' trapped India and Pakistan in a spiral of brinkmanship - threat and
counter-threat, taunt
and counter-taunt. And now, one war and hundreds of dead later, more than a million
soldiers from
both armies are massed at the border, eyeball to eyeball, locked in a pointless
nuclear standoff.
The escalating belligerence against Pakistan has ricocheted off the border and entered
our own
body politic, like a sharp blade slicing through the vestiges of communal harmony and
tolerance
between the Hindu and Muslim communities. In no time at all, the godsquadders from
hell have
colonised the public imagination. And we allowed them in. Each time the hostility
between India
and Pakistan is cranked up, within India there's a corresponding increase in the
hostility towards
the Muslims. With each battle cry against Pakistan, we inflict a wound on ourselves,
on our way of
life, on our spectacularly diverse and ancient civilisation, on everything that makes
India
different from Pakistan. Increasingly, Indian Nationalism has come to mean Hindu
Nationalism,
which defines itself not through a respect or regard for itself, but through a hatred
of the
Other. And the Other, for the moment, is not just Pakistan, it's Muslim. It's
disturbing to see
how neatly nationalism dovetails into fascism. While we must not allow the fascists to
define what
the nation is, or who it belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind that nationalism, in
all its many
avatars - socialist, capitalist and fascist - has been at the root of almost all the
genocides of
the twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it's wise to proceed with caution.
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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:46:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: George Pinto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part III
Can we not find it in ourselves to belong to an ancient civilisation instead of to
just a recent
nation? To love a land instead of just patrolling a territory? The Sangh Parivar
understands
nothing of what civilisation means.It seeks to limit, reduce, define, dismember and
desecrate the
memory of what we were, our understanding of what we are, and our dreams of who we
want to be.
What kind of India do they want? A limbless, headless, soulless torso, left bleeding
under the
butchers' cleaver with a flag driven deep into her mutilated heart? Can we let that
happen? Have
we let it happen?
The incipient, creeping fascism of the past few years has been groomed by many of our
'democratic'
institutions. Everyone has flirted with it - Parliament, the press, the police, the
administration, the public. Even 'secularists' have been guilty of helping to create
the right
climate. Each time you defend the right of an institution, any institution (including
the Supreme
Court), to exercise unfettered, unaccountable powers that must never be challenged,
you move
towards fascism. To be fair, perhaps not everyone recognised the early signs for what
they were.
The national press has been startlingly courageous in its denunciation of the events
of the last
few weeks. Many of the BJP's fellow travellers who have journeyed with it to the brink
are now
looking down the abyss into the hell that was once Gujarat, and turning away in
genuine dismay.
But how hard and for how long will they fight? This is not going to be like a
publicity campaign
for an upcoming cricket season.And there will not always be spectacular carnage to
report on.
Fascism is also about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of State
power. It's
about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular day-to-day injustices.
Fighting it
means fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean
asking for
RSS shakhas and the madrassas to be banned, it means working towards the day when
they're
voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas.It means keeping an eagle eye on public
institutions and
demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the
whispering
of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds
of
resistance movements across the country who are speaking about real things - about
bonded labour,
marital rape, sexual preferences, women's wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable
mining, weavers'
woes, farmers' worries. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the
relentless,
everyday violence of abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your
newspaper columns
and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged
theatrics,
which are designed to divert attention from everything else.
While most people in India have been horrified by what happened in Gujarat, many
thousands of the
indoctrinated are preparing to journey deeper into the heart of the horror. Look
around you and
you'll see in little parks, in big maidans, in empty lots, in village commons, the RSS
is
marching, hoisting its saffron flag. Suddenly they're everywhere, grown men in khaki
shorts
marching, marching, marching. To where? For what? Their disregard for history shields
them from
the knowledge that fascism will thrive for a short while and then self-annihilate
because of its
inherent stupidity. But unfortunately, like the radioactive fallout of a nuclear
strike, it has a
half-life that will cripple generations to come.
These levels of rage and hatred cannot be contained, cannot be expected to subside,
with public
censure and denunciation. Hymns of brotherhood and love are great, but not enough.
Historically, fascist movements have been fuelled by feelings of national
disillusionment. Fascism
has come to India after the dreams that fuelled the Freedom Struggle have been
frittered away like
so much loose change.
Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a 'wooden loaf' - a
notional freedom
tainted by the blood of the thousands who died during Partition.For more than half a
century now,
the hatred and mutual distrust has been exacerbated, toyed with and never allowed to
heal by
politicians, led from the front by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Every political party has tilled
the marrow
of our secular parliamentary democracy, mining it for electoral advantage. Like
termites
excavating a mound, they've made tunnels and underground passages, undermining the
meaning of
'secular', until it has just become an empty shell that's about to implode. Their
tilling has
weakened the foundations of the structure that connects the Constitution, Parliament
and the
courts of law - the configuration of checks and balances that forms the backbone of a
parliamentary democracy. Under the circumstances, it's futile to go on blaming
politicians and
demanding from them a morality they're incapable of. There's something pitiable about
a people
that constantly bemoans its leaders. If they've let us down, it's only because we've
allowed them
to. It could be argued that civil society has failed its leaders as much as leaders
have failed
civil society. We have to accept that there is a dangerous, systemic flaw in our
parliamentary
democracy that politicians will exploit. And that's what results in the kind of
conflagration that
we have witnessed in Gujarat. There's fire in the ducts. We have to address this issue
and come up
with a systemic solution.
But politicians' exploitation of communal divides is by no means the only reason that
fascism has
arrived on our shores.
Over the past fifty years, ordinary citizens' modest hopes for lives of dignity,
security and
relief from abject poverty have been systematically snuffed out. Every 'democratic'
institution in
this country has shown itself to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the ordinary
citizen, and
either unwilling, or incapable of acting, in the interests of genuine social justice.
Every
strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable
distribution of natural resources, the implementation of positive discrimination - has
been
cleverly, cunningly and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes
and that
class of people who have a stranglehold on the political process. And now corporate
globalisation
is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an essentially feudal society,
tearing through
its complex, tiered, social fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.
There is very real grievance here. And the fascists didn't create it. But they have
seized upon
it, upturned it and forged from it a hideous, bogus sense of pride. They have
mobilised human
beings using the lowest common denominator - religion. People who have lost control
over their
lives, people who have been uprooted from their homes and communities, who have lost
their culture
and their language, are being made to feel proud of something. Not something they have
striven for
and achieved, not something they can count as a personal accomplishment, but something
they just
happen to be. Or, more accurately, something they happen not to be. And the falseness,
the
emptiness of that pride, is fuelling a gladiatorial anger that is then directed
towards a
simulated target that has been wheeled into the amphitheatre.
How else can you explain the project of trying to disenfranchise, drive out or
exterminate the
second-poorest community in this country, using as your footsoldiers the very poorest
(Dalits and
Adivasis)? How else can you explain why Dalits in Gujarat, who have been despised,
oppressed and
treated worse than refuse by the upper castes for thousands of years, have joined
hands with their
oppressors to turn on those who are only marginally less unfortunate than they
themselves? Are
they just wage slaves, mercenaries for hire? Is it all right to patronise them and
absolve them of
responsibility for their own actions? Or am I being obtuse? Perhaps it's common
practice for the
unfortunate to vent their rage and hatred on the next most unfortunate, because their
real
adversaries are inaccessible, seemingly invincible and completely out of range?
Because their own
leaders have cut loose and are feasting at the high table, leaving them to wander
rudderless in
the wilderness, spouting nonsense about returning to the Hindu fold. (The first step,
presumably,
towards founding a Global Hindu Empire, as realistic a goal as Fascism's previously
failed
projects - the restoration of Roman Glory, the purification of the German race or the
establishment of an Islamic Sultanate.)
One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India. Hindu fascists regard them as
legitimate
prey. Do people like Modi and Bal Thackeray think that the world will stand by and
watch while
they're liquidated in a 'civil war?' Press reports say that the European Union and
several other
countries have condemned what happened in Gujarat and likened it to Nazi rule. The
Indian
government's portentous response is that foreigners should not use the Indian media to
comment on
what is an 'internal matter' (like the chilling goings-on in Kashmir?). What next?
Censorship?
Closing down the Internet? Blocking international calls? Killing the wrong
'terrorists' and
fudging the DNA samples? There is no terrorism like State terrorism.
But who will take them on? Their fascist cant can perhaps be dented by some blood and
thunder from
the Opposition. So far only Laloo Yadav of Bihar has shown himself to be truly
passionate: "Kaun
mai ka lal kehta hai ki yeh Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do, chhati phad
doonga!" (Which
mother's son says this is a Hindu Nation? Send him here, I'll tear his chest open.)
Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can only be turned away if all
those who are
outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their
indignation.
Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of us, to
rally not just
on the streets, but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every decision we
take, and every
choice we make?
Or not just yet...
If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should),
like the
ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will learn to recognise revulsion in the
gaze of our
fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the
eye, for
the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.
This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.
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End of goanet-digest V1 #3909
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