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Assalamu'alaikum,
Peter Popham: The myth of Ram's temple has become a licence to kill in
India
'Muslim equals terrorist, Hindu nationalists tell each other; we have 140
million terrorists in our midst'
05 March 2002
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=270940
India is a big country, and it is usually big-hearted enough not to betray
signs of being bothered by what we Delhi-based foreign correspondents
write. So it was a rare event when, nearly a year ago, I was politely
summoned to the office of Raminder Singh Jassal, then Chief Secretary for
External Publicity in the Ministry of External Affairs, and given a sound
ticking off.
The main complaint was that I had written at some length about
Hindu-Muslim clashes that had broken out in several towns and cities
across India following the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
The Indian officials didn't question the veracity of my report, but they
made it plain that they regarded it as "unfriendly" of me to have written
on the topic of communal disturbances at all. "Relations between majority
and minority communities have been far better under this government than
they were before," Mr Jassal told me. "So when there is some little
incident, why focus on it?"
I expect no such call from the ministry this week. The deaths of at least
450, and probably more than 1,000, Gujaratis, nearly all Muslims, in four
days of communal bestiality have exploded for ever the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) claim to have presided over an era of
communal peace.
And now, riding the crest of that particular wave, the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP, or "World Hindu Council"), an extremist group within the
same Hindu nationalist family as the BJP, is pressing ahead with its plans
to begin construction of the long dreamed-of temple to the god Ram in
Ayodhya, on the ruins of the mosque torn down by a mob of the same people
in December 1992. These two events, the Gujarat bloodbath and the Ayodhya
temple, are intimately connected. Taken together they throw into urgent
focus the question: what sort of people are ruling the world's biggest
democracy today? Where are they headed?
The first man on earth was an Indian, and a Hindu. Hinduism was the
primeval religion, not just of India but of the world. There was no Aryan
invasion of India, no enslavement of the southern Dravidians. Hindus were
here from day one. Other people arrived on these shores, but eventually
they bent the knee to Bharat Mata, Mother India, and were knitted into the
Hindu fabric. Only the Muslims (and to a lesser extent the Christians)
stood out. They smashed temples and erected mosques on the rubble, with
sword and fire they tore millions of Hindus from the breast of Mother
India and brought them forcibly over to Islam. It is the duty of patriotic
Hindus to reverse that historic wrong.
That, reduced to its crude essentials, is the Hindu nationalist creed, and
it helps to explain why the primary goal of the most powerful political
party in this vast, impoverished country, with all its desperate problems,
should be the construction of a temple in a squalid little town in Uttar
Pradesh. Ayodhya, goes the mythology, is "Ramjanambhoomi", the birth place
of Ram, an avatar of Vishnu. The Muslim invader Babur (and this, too, is
myth) tore down the great temple that stood here and built the Babri
Masjid mosque, demolished by the mob in 1992. "Hindu Rashtra", the true
Hindu nation, cannot come into being until the temple is rebuilt.
The men who have been ruling India for nearly four years, including the
Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and his powerful second-in-command
Lal Krishna Advani, the Home Minister, are true believers in this, India's
exotic variety of neo-fascism. But the world at large has gradually lost
sight of that fact. The nuclear tests conducted in May 1998, immediately
after they came to power, gave due warning that they meant business. But
the need to keep a squabbling and disparate coalition intact forced
Ayodhya off the government's agenda. Mr Vajpayee's became the first Indian
government to develop cordial relations with the US. Last September, India
became a front-line ally in the war against terrorism.
But while India's stature grew abroad, at home Mr Vajpayee was often
described by critics on the left as the "mask" of the BJP, the acceptable
face of a neo-fascist movement that was only biding its time.
Mr Vajpayee, increasingly doddery at the age of 78, remains in place; but
in the past week the party's mask has been ripped away. The war on
terrorism and India's long military stand-off with Pakistan, which
continues undiminished, have given a new licence to the Hindu
nationalists. Muslim equals terrorist, they tell each other: we have it on
American authority; we have 140 million terrorists in our midst. At the
same time, recent BJP losses in state elections both in Gujarat and Uttar
Pradesh have given the hardliners a new urgency and and a new
determination. Strike, they have been told, while the BJP still holds
power. Strike to maintain and increase that power. Now is the moment for
dramatic, decisive action.
Mr Vajpayee has fostered the illusion of being a truly national leader,
but in Gujarat there is no such pretence: the BJP state government is
starkly partisan. After the killing of 58 Hindus in a train last
Wednesday, the event that ignited the violence, Gujarat's Chief Minister,
Narendra Modi, quickly announced compensation of 200,000 rupees, about
3,000, to the bereaved families. Hundreds of Muslims have died since, but
there is no word of compensation for them. Mr Modi endorsed the VHP's call
for a strike last Friday, his official nod to the ensuing bloodbath. The
police have stood idly by while the mob did its work; sometimes, victims
allege, they actively led the violence.
The BJP rose to power, as fascists do, through violence and the threat of
more: the Ayodhya demolition signalled its rapid rise from obscurity, the
vision of a state where Hindus rule supreme continues to excite its
ideologues. In this amazing but horrifyingly immature democracy, muscle
power and that includes the mass burning alive of women and children can
yield political power. The liberal, English-language papers here have
tut-tutted in a worried way, but encouraging communal carnage has done Mr
Modi's government no harm at all. With the parliamentary opposition still
weak and divided, India has set off down a nightmare road.
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