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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
The Struggle
for India's Soul [Go to interactive discussion forum]
— Pledge distributed in Gujarat by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad1
My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal Democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism. This is not as unusual as one might think. According to one of the central tenets of the Hindu far-right ideology known as Hindutva, India is not only the fatherland, pitribhumi, of Hindus, Jains and—more problematically—Sikhs, it is also their punyabhumi, their holy land.2 Because the birth-places of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism are outside India, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews—no matter how many hundreds or thousands of years they may have lived in the country—are seen by Hindu extremists as aliens. My father, a Jain, identifies completely with this view. I grew up in a home where Martin Luther King was venerated, the civil rights movement championed, the Kennedys (Jack and Bobby) worshiped, and a "McGovern for President" sign picked up from where it had been knocked down the previous night and reimplanted on our front lawn every October morning in 1972. We children learned early on to view racism as a disease that could be eliminated, if only the same zeal were applied to it as had been applied to the eradication of smallpox. Even our parents’ "mixed marriage"—my mother is Danish American—was to be understood not so much as a love affair as a salvo in the war on racism. The personal was consciously political in my childhood home. My father never hesitated to express his outrage at racial injustice, whether in the exalted form of British imperialism or in the more everyday, American redneck, good ol’ boy tradition. Whenever anyone challenged him about something he wanted to do, he was fond of retorting, "Why not? I’m free, white, and over 21 aren’t I?" daring you to question his whiteness. More boldly, and more rarely, he would allude to the Nazis’ linkage of Indians with Germans in one vast Aryan family. I always took these remarks to be tongue-in-cheek observations that no one, least of all my father, really believed, remarks designed more to provoke than to express his true views. So it has been a great and sad shock to me to realize that my father, who loved Martin Luther King, hates Muslims. He hates them blindly, viscerally, categorically. In most other respects, my father is a rational man: gifted in mathematics, and a highly trained aeronautical engineer who worked, among other things, on the Apollo missions. Yet, in any discussion where Muslims, the Middle East, Bosnia (not to mention Pakistan) comes up, he is wont to fly into an apoplectic rage, turn red in the face, shout until spit begins to pool at the sides of his mouth, shake his fists. The culmination of these fits is always the same. He bends over, seizes the cuff of the right leg of his pants, and pulls it up to show off a series of diagonal dents marching up his shin, scars from a back-alley encounter decades ago with a gang of bicycle-chain-wielding Muslim youths. "This is what Muslims did to me! This is what Muslims do!" My father is a heart patient who recently underwent a quadruple bypass operation. "Dad! Dad! Calm down," we soothe, and move the conversation into safer waters. Until quite recently, I believed my father’s hatred of Muslims to be a particular affliction, the result of an attack whose emotional scars go far deeper than the physical ones. I realized in 1992–93, when Hindu-Muslim riots raged throughout India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya by Hindu militants, that my father’s views were, if not a universal plague, at least a widespread distemper. A decade later in 2002, it has become chillingly clear that Hindu-Muslim conflict in India is no longer—if it ever was—a natural malady, the unfortunate inheritance of an ancient people beset by too much history and too many conquerors: it has become a weapon of political engineering wielded by Hindu militant leaders bent on transforming India from the secular democracy its founders envisioned 55 years ago into a Hindu religious state, sanitized of Muslims and other minority groups. This, grossly stated, is the core ideology of Hindutva: to unify India’s Hindus—otherwise divided by caste, class, region, language, and sect—into a dominant political force that can restore modern India to an essentially Hindu past from which it has been severed. Hindutva is the ideology of the Sangh Parivar, an amalgam of groups which includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, now India’s ruling party; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS; the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or VHP; and the Bajrang Dal. The BJP plays the role of the moderate, mainstream entity, friendly to multinational capital and mature enough to lead India onto the global stage of the great powers, against the RSS’s frankly fascist youth corps activities, the VHP’s worldwide propaganda machine, and the Bajrang Dal’s street-level enforcement and terror gangs. State-Sponsored
Terror in Gujarat For about 24 hours, there was calm. And then, almost simultaneously, in different localities, in both urban and rural areas across Gujarat, a systematic wave of terror against the Muslim population began. Truckloads of Hindus, mostly young men— many sporting headbands in saffron, the Hindu sacred color—headed for Muslim neighborhoods. They were armed not only with homemade gasoline bombs, trishurs (the trident-shaped weapon associated with the god Shiva), and knives but also, in some cases, with printouts from government computer databases listing the names and addresses of Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses. Some of the young Hindus even had cell phones—the better to keep in touch with their handlers—and bottles of water. They embarked on a rampage of looting, arson, rape, torture, and murder that left thousands dead and many more thousands homeless.3 Muslim homes and businesses were looted, and then the buildings and often the dismembered bodies of the former occupants were set on fire. Neighboring Hindu homes and businesses were spared. In many localities, the police, when they didn’t simply turn a blind eye to the attacks, were seen helping the attackers identify their targets. With few exceptions, no protection was offered to those terrified Muslims who, in desperation, begged the police for help. According to Human Rights Watch, the general response of the police was: "We have no orders to save you." The savagery of the attacks— which routinely included dismemberment, gang rape, beheadings, dousing bodies with petrol and burning them so as to render them unrecognizable, liquidating entire families, including women, children, babies, and fetuses ripped from the womb— was all the more shocking for their well-organized and premeditated execution. It was evident that state and local authorities not only did nothing to stop the violence but were actually complicit in orchestrating the attacks.4 Clearly, the violence that wracked Gujarat earlier this year was not of the same variety as in past Hindu-Muslim riots in India. This was no spontaneous eruption of Hindu righteous outrage too deep to be suppressed, as the VHP would have it. Neither was it simply a settling of scores by rival gangs, nor an isolated bid by a rogue politician to garner favors and intimidate foes. This was ethnic cleansing, designed by Hindu extremists to purge Gujarat of Muslims. "Go back to Pakistan!" was a common taunt hurled at Muslims who have lived in India for generations. The attacks in Gujarat recalled quite starkly the state-facilitated, retributive attacks on Sikhs in New Delhi following the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Scores of Muslim monuments were razed and, in some cases, the sites were paved over within 24 hours so as to insure that they would not be rebuilt. Another chilling aspect was the participation in the violence of large numbers of white-collar, educated men, and the presence of middle-class women, who screamed filthy insults at the Muslims and cheered on male attackers as they targeted members of the Muslim elite: business owners, academics, lawyers, former legislators. In Vadodara, the highly respected Muslim physics professor J. S. Bandukwala’s home was ransacked and burned, and the famous contemporary artists Gulam Muhammed and Nilima Sheikh had to flee their home in Pratapgunj, the pleasant, tree-lined housing complex for professors at Maharajah Sayajirao University. Never in previous riots had such enclaves been threatened. In Ahmedabad, Ehsan Jafri, a poet and former Congress Party MP, was burned alive at his home, along with several members of his family, despite a series of desperate cell phone calls to the authorities for help. For the first time as well, large numbers of Adivasi tribals participated in the attacks. (India terms indigenous ethnic groups who do not traditionally practice Hinduism or any other of the country’s main religions and who have no place in the Hindu caste hierarchy "tribals.") They were trucked into target areas and plied with liquor to put them in the right ransacking mood. For some years, the VHP and other allied groups of the Sangh Parivar have been working to convert the tribals, who have their own animistic beliefs, to Hinduism and enlist them in anti-Muslim efforts. In Gujarat, Adivasis were reportedly used against the Muslim moneylenders to whom they were indebted, in order to eliminate the competition for local Hindu moneylenders.5 The threat of the violation of women is a reliable way to fire up Hindu-Muslim passions. One of the reasons given for the Muslim mob attacking the train at Godhra was the rumor of the "‘molestation’ and ‘abduction’ of a girl" by Hindus on board.6 Following the attack on the train, the vernacular press in Gujarat ran incendiary headlines, one of which accused Muslims of lopping off Hindu women’s breasts. All the reports on Gujarat detail the savagery with which Muslim women and girls were gang-raped, dismembered, made to parade naked in front of their families, had fetuses ripped out of their bellies, were impaled on iron rods, and more. Hindu women have certainly not been immune from violation by enraged Muslim gangs, nor are lower-caste Hindu women safe from upper-caste Hindu men, for that matter. At the time of partition, in 1947, women were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by both sides. Many were even killed by their own families lest they be vulnerable to violation by men from another religious group.7 Clearly, in the context of communal violence, violating women is seen as the best way to outrage the enemy community, that is, to insult its men. Still, the extreme brutality of the attacks on women during the Gujarat pogrom was shocking. "I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent barbarity in Gujarat," wrote Harsh Mander, a senior Indian Civil Service Officer who resigned his post in disgust.8 Once the violence got underway, there were retaliatory attacks by Muslims on Hindus. Many of these were against isolated, and therefore vulnerable, individuals. Hindu property and Hindu families were largely spared, though as many as 10,000 Hindus were made homeless in the aftermath of February 27. Certainly, the Hindu victims in the train at Godhra and those who perished or lost their homes in the subsequent violence suffered no less horrible fates than Muslim victims. These attacks are as indefensible as any other, and are to be condemned. The critical difference, however, is that there was no state complicity in Muslim attacks on Hindus. To save lives and property, the authorities should have acted immediately to defuse passions and prevent violence. Some officials tried to act, but they were overruled, overwhelmed, or simply "promoted" away to another posting. The general response of the state apparatus was to lend support to well-organized, systematic attacks against the entire Muslim population of Gujarat. This serious charge is confirmed by the reports issued by Human Rights Watch, the European Union, the British High Commission, the Citizens’ Initiative of Ahmedabad, the Editor’s Guild of India, Communalism Combat, Amnesty International, and India’s own National Human Rights Commission, among others. Most people expected the violence to rage for a few days. It continued for weeks and then months. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed and over 100,000 made homeless; more than 600,000 may have left Gujarat.9 Camps for "internally displaced persons" that were set up by a few nongovernmental organizations came under considerable pressure from the government of Gujarat to close within weeks. Conditions were miserable. Children stopped going to school and had to skip final examinations. While Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, quickly offered compensation to victims of the violence, Hindus were to receive twice as much as Muslims. And India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did pay a visit to Gujarat once the initial fury had passed, expressing his distress at the level of the violence. This gesture was canceled out, however, by remarks he made shortly afterward: "Wherever there are Muslims they do not want to live with others. Instead of living peacefully, they want to preach and propagate their religion by fear and terror...." 10 Many of the several thousand mostly Muslim refugees still in the camps as of this writing have nowhere to go. All remain terrified and traumatized. Many children have been orphaned. The VHP has circulated pamphlets urging Hindus to boycott all Muslim businesses and to shun Muslims wherever they may meet them.11 Located on the Arabian Sea above Bombay and bordering Pakistan to the west, Gujarat has been called home by many different peoples. It is one of the richest states in India, with a strong industrial base and a large middle class. Prosperous, entrepreneurial, with a large, successful diaspora population, Gujarat is the last place fanaticism and fascism would be expected to take hold if only we all lived in the same world as the author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who believes that the best recipe for democracy and tolerance is education and the opportunities provided by entrepreneurial capitalism.12 Alas, in Gujarat, success at home and abroad has only contributed to the rise of Hindu fascism through increased financial support for Hindu militant groups and causes.13 Gujarat is also the birthplace of Mohandas Gandhi, the father of independent India and the founder of a powerful political movement based on ahimsa, or nonviolence. My own grandfather—like the grandfathers of many of the young men who participated in the killing and looting in Gujarat, no doubt—was a devoted follower of Gandhi. Gandhi stood resolutely for a secular India and for tolerance—even love—for upper-caste Hindu society’s outcasts: untouchables, Muslims, landless peasants, dispossessed factory workers. His murder by a Hindu extremist discredited the RSS and the Hindu militant movement for decades. But, like the phoenix, the Hindu right has risen from the ashes of Hindu-Muslim conflict in Gujarat stronger than ever. A Recipe
for Hindu-Muslim Harmony? Varshney argues that informal and especially formal civic activities and organizations that link Hindus and Muslims or, conversely, divide upper-caste Hindus from lower-caste Hindus or Sunni from Shia Muslims are the main brakes to full-blown Hindu- Muslim conflict. He goes to painstaking lengths to document the highly localized conditions that encourage or prevent Hindu- Muslim conflict. Varshney pairs cities in different regions of India that exemplify certain variations on civic interaction between Hindus and Muslims that he has identified as either contributing to or militating against communal conflict between the two groups. The paired cities are Aligarh and Calicut; Hyderabad and Lucknow; and, in Gujarat, Ahmedabad and Surat. In each of these pairs, Hindu-Muslim conflict is rife in one city and minimal in the other, but the reasons are different. In Surat, Hindu and Muslim merchants had strong business relationships. Each community depended on the other in a symbiotic economic relationship whose end would have spelled financial disaster on both sides. In Ahmedabad, on the otherhand, the labor unions, which had united working-class Hindus and Muslims in a common class struggle, and the young Congress Party’s vigorous grass-roots political organization, which had also brought together Hindus and Muslims, gave way as the twentieth century progressed. The textile mills that had formed the core business of Ahmedabad for several decades and employed thousands of workers gradually closed as the industry modernized. With their closure, the unions that had fostered Hindu-Muslim solidarity fell apart. The Congress Party similarly lost its role as an intercommunal social organizer after Indira Gandhi undercut the power base of local party leaders to insure their subservience to central party authority. As a result, the strong grass-roots political organizing machine that was the Congress Party in Gujarat until as late as the 1960s fell apart. Varshney argues that it was in the political vacuum left by the disintegration of the Congress Party and in the civic vacuum created by the breakup of the labor unions that the parties of the Hindu right began —slowly at first, and then more and more efficiently—to nurture a popular base in Ahmedabad. Varshney’s analysis of localized Hindu-Muslim conflict is convincing. His book, a decade in the making, is exhaustively researched, meticulously documented, persuasively argued. It is also uncanny that the worst of the violence that occurred after February 27 happened just where he would have predicted. Clearly, he is onto something. However, I do not share his faith that India is safe from a Hindu right takeover. Varshney presents, almost sotto voce, a secondary line of argument where, I believe, he more accurately nails the beast of Hindutva to the wall. While his analysis of civic engagement, civil society, and intercommunal linkages is very fine, there is another, more ominous story in the role played by the underworld, criminal gangs, and, especially, corrupt politicians in India’s communal strife. India is a country where a hit man may be hired for a couple of hundred dollars. It is a country where the rich protect themselves with guards at the gates of their walled residential compounds and, often, with payoffs to criminal gangs working hand-in-glove with local political bosses. Varshney is fully aware of this hard social and political reality and of the threat it poses to civic engagement between communal groups: "If politicians insist on polarizing Hindus and Muslims for the sake of electoral advantage, they can tear the fabric of everyday engagement apart through the organized might of criminals and gangs. In all violent cities in the project, a nexus of politicians and criminals was in evidence." It is this nexus of the criminal class with the political class, a phenomenon Indians call a "goonda raj," or a reign of goons, that most threatens communal harmony in India. At this writing, no senior government official has been charged with any crime in connection with the massacres that began last February. Even most of the members of the street gangs that actually carried out the lootings, arson, and killings went scot-free. The few policemen who spoke up were transferred. Repeated calls for Gujarat’s chief minister to be fired and charged with crimes against humanity fell on deaf ears. In an attempt to force India’s Election Commission to authorize early elections in Gujarat, Modi has resigned and dissolved his government, automatically putting it into "caretaker" status. Far from harming his political future, the pogrom he allowed to occur in Gujarat is expected to earn him a landslide victory in the next state elections, which the Election Commission, to its credit, has refused to reschedule. Meanwhile, the government has rounded up hundreds of Muslims under the Prevention of Terrorism Act who are being held without charge; in some cases, minors are being held as adults without their parents having been told where they are being detained or on what charges. The message is clear: the state in Gujarat is above the law; the only law is the law of power and power is in the hands of the BJP and its allies in the Sangh Parivar. Not that it should be construed that only the state and only Hindus are involved in criminal activities. There are also powerful Muslim gangs in India. In fact, the VHP has accused the infamous Muslim gang leader Dawood Ibrahim—widely held to have been responsible for the bomb blasts that ripped through Bombay in 1993, killing hundreds— of being behind the train attack at Godhra. The Hindu right further indicts Pakistan as being behind Ibrahim. There is no doubt that he has found sanctuary and support in Pakistan and that Muslim gangs participated in the violence that wracked Gujarat last spring. But the claim that Pakistan ordered the attack at Godhra is unproved and, in my view, has little credibility. It is more likely that, as Muslims have lost their jobs in the textile factories and other legitimate means of making a living have dried up, they have become increasingly frustrated. And as they have been marginalized politically, they have turned for protection from an increasingly criminalized state to gangs and criminal leaders of their own. Conspiracy theories aside, when a trainload of Hindu militants stops in a Muslim area, when taunts and insults begin to fly, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the situation can get badly out of control. Silence
of the Moderates Just as anything can be acquired in India by knowing the right person or paying the right bribe—from a residential telephone line to a building permit—anything can be taken away by the powers that be if you cause trouble for them. People are afraid they will lose their home or their business, that they will be audited by the tax authorities or arrested under trumped-up charges. Days after Mallika Sarabhai dared to speak out, government agents came around asking whether she had permits for the structures on her property and giving her 24 hours to produce them or see the buildings torn down. There is much to lose for speaking out. Unless, of course, you are a member of the Gujarati vernacular press, which is by andlarge in the pocket of the Hindu far-right in Gujarat. The reports that readers of the Times of India or the Indian Express, both nationally distributed English-language newspapers, or the New York Times, for that matter, read about the carnage in Gujarat last spring painted a very different picture from that vividly depicted in the Gujarati-language press. The Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh are the largest Gujarati-language newspapers. They compete ferociously with each other. Each tried, as the violence spread, to outdo the other in sensationalizing what was happening and in taking a harder right-wing Hindu line than the other. For its wild claims in banner headlines that Muslims were cutting the breasts off Hindu women and other sensational coverage, Sandesh received a congratulatory letter from Chief Minister Modi. At the same time, members of the press who printed information embarrassing to the government were physically attacked and otherwise intimidated.14 The press is not the only communications medium used by the Hindu right to incite anti-Muslim passions. A variety of pamphlets, including how-to manuals on torture and assault have been produced by member groups of the Sangh Parivar and circulated widely. The VHP exhorts Hindu citizens of Gujarat to boycott all Muslim businesses and shun Muslims in every way possible, in order to make their lives intolerable and encourage them to emigrate to Pakistan.15 The shaping of young minds is something the Sangh Parivar takes very seriously. Murli Manohar Joshi, an old RSS hand and India’s minister for human resources, wants to "saffronize" education in India by rewriting history textbooks to reflect Hindutva’s version of India’s history.16 Joshi has announced that all new school books will have to be cleared by religious leaders before publication.17 In Gujarat, the textbooks have already been rewritten to teach a Hindu-right worldview. Students in Gujarat were asked on this spring’s final examination to join the following five phrases in a sentence: "There are two solutions. One of them is Nazi solution.[sic] If you do not like people, kill them, segregate them. Then strut up and down. Proclaim that you are the salt of the earth." Others were asked: "What is the basic difference between miyans [Muslims] and others?18 Textbooks in Gujarat refer to Muslims, Christians, and Parsis as "foreigners." American
Support for the Hindu Right According to Ainslee T. Embree, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and an eminent India expert, "Right-wing Hindus in this country...have the ear of many people in the U.S. Congress, because they are a wealthy, powerful group. They are skilled if crude propagandists." 20 One Indian diplomat has been heard to brag, "I can count only on the BJP and RSS types to deliver on the Hill when we need support concerning some of our issues." 21 These organizations, which have branches across the United States, woo immigrant Indians nostalgic for their homeland and lure young American-born ethnic Indians searching for a connection to their heritage into embracing the Hindutva worldview. And they raise money to fund Sangh Parivar causes in India. Vijay Prashad, who teaches international studies at Trinity College in Connecticut, calls the Hindu right’s American recruitment and fundraising efforts "Yankee Hindutva." He maintains that the Hindu right has flourished in the United States in the context of an ill-informed multiculturalism that cannot distinguish between the Hindu religion and Hindu fascism.22 (Not that Americans are necessarily any more adept at distinguishing between Islam and Muslim extremists.) In the wake of September 11, Hindutva forces have tried to hitch themselves to the coattails of the U.S. anti-terrorism effort. The Muslim focus of the war on terror is a gift from heaven for members of the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the VHPA, and the HSC. They have moved to ally themselves in the United States with the Christian right, and with such members of the Zionist right as the followers of Meir Kahane, who share a deep suspicion of Muslims. "Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam," asserts Rohit Vyasmaan, a resident of Queens, New York, who runs the website Hindu Unity.org.23 But since Hindutva looks upon Christians and Jews living in India in the same light as Muslims (India is not their holy land), and given the nasty, concerted attacks on Christians in Gujarat and elsewhere in India by Hindu right-wingers, this is the height of hypocrisy. 24 The Sangh Parivar derives significant revenue for its propaganda and ethnic cleansing initiatives from its overseas affiliates and supporters. As the population of Indian emigrants settled in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere has grown, especially during the last decade, so has the flow of money to Hindu extremist causes in India. 25 A journalist who visited scenes of the carnage in the immediate aftermath of the violence in Gujarat earlier this year reported seeing flyers spread outside the looted and burned home of a jailed relief- camp organizer. "Hindus Arise! Muslims have AK-47s! Islamic jihad means killing all Hindus!" they proclaimed. "I don’t know what bothered me more," he said, "seeing the unfathomable level of hatred or knowing that the very flyer in my hand may have been paid for from well-heeled Indians in the UK, US, and Canada." 26 According to Gautam Appa of the London School of Economics, the two main right-wing Hindu "charities" in England, the VHP(UK) and the HSS (the RSS’s foreign organization) "collected nearly one million pounds in the last financial year. It is common knowledge that a large chunk of the overt and covert collection ends up in India in the hands of the Sangh Parivar." 27 In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Kanwal Rekhi, global chairman of IndUS Entrepreneurs, an organization of high-tech entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley, warned overseas Hindus that "some recipients of their money are out to destroy minorities (Christians as well as Muslims) and their places of worship." 28 The journalist Ashish Sen, in a recent article in India’s respected Outlook magazine, accuses the U.S.-based Indian Development and Relief Fund of transferring $250,000 over the last four years to the Sewa Bharati Madhyakshetra, an RSS affiliate involved in conscripting tribals into the Hindutva cause. It is not difficult to connect these efforts withthe participation of Adivasi tribals in the recent violence in Gujarat. 29 Meanwhile, the official U.S. reaction to the slaughter in Gujarat has been muted. The American ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, waited nearly two months before speaking publicly about the carnage in Gujarat, and all he could muster was, "All our hearts go out to the people who were affected by this tragedy. I don’t have anything more to say than that." 30 Assistant Secretary of State Christine Rocca, describing the riots as "really horrible," said, "We are deeply saddened by them. We hope peace and stability soon returns to the state." 31 But she assigned no blame for the slaughter and said nothing about state complicity. Secretary of State Colin Powell made no public mention whatsoever of the carnage in Gujarat when he visited New Delhi in July, expressing rather his desire to deepen America’s "friendship with a thriving, peaceful and democratic India." The Bush administration does not want to confront the Indian government with this issue so long as its efforts to root out al-Qaeda require the United States to remain engaged in the region. Washington is working hard to offset Indian anger over its alliance with Pakistan, among other things by acknowledging India’s aspirations to great-power status. During the extremely tense confrontation between India and Pakistan at the beginning of the year over continued incursions into India by Islamic terrorist groups based in Pakistan and the dramatic attack by one of these groups on India’s parliament building in New Delhi in December 2001, many feared the two states were on the verge of nuclear war. Washington appealed to India to behave like the great power it aspires to be by showing restraint. The United States can ill afford an all-out war between India and Pakistan, and it needs and desires India’s cooperation in the war on terror. Though the BJP-led government has enthusiastically embraced the U.S. war on terror, it has not succeeded, to its great frustration, in persuading the United States to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Incursions into Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistani-supported Muslim extremists have intensified in recent years. In October 2001, Pakistani-based terrorists bombed the Kashmiri state assembly building, and last December they staged a bold attack against India’s parliament in New Delhi. India blames Pakistan for these attacks, and has demanded that the Pakistani government reign in the Islamic terrorist groups that use Pakistan as a staging ground for incursions into India. While Washington would like nothing better than to see the terrorist groups in Pakistan put out of business, it does not serve immediate U.S. interests in the region to demonize Pakistan’s leadership. So, for the time being, the United States will have to continue performing a delicate balancing act in its bilateral relationships with India and Pakistan. Kashmir:
The Bone of Contention India will never cede any of its territory in Kashmir to Pakistan. Indeed, it is the ultimate goal of some extremists on the Hindu right to restore Pakistan-held Kashmir to India, even—among the most fanatical—to create a greater India. This entity would include not only all of India before partition but all the territory where Hinduism once thrived. (In theory, this would mean that all of Southeast Asia up to and including Vietnam would be "restored" to India!) This is hardly realistic, and it is a view held only by the most extreme fringe of the Hindu right. But the belief that Pakistan, or at least Pakistan-held Kashmir, is an integral part of India is widespread. The great wound of partition still bleeds. This accounts for much of the rhetoric of emasculation and, conversely, hypervirility that accompanies the rantings of the Hindu right as well as the more mainstream discourses of both Indian and Pakistani nationalists. The best refutation India possessed against the existence of Pakistan, however, was not the ideology of the Hindu right or a vision of a Hindu India cleansed of Muslims. It was the birth, in 1947, of a secular, multi-religious India where minorities could live as full citizens. As the political scientist Sumit Ganguly points out in his excellent book, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947, the main point of contention between India and Pakistan has always been that of a "secular state based on civic nationalism" (India) versus "primordial conceptions of identity as a viable basis for state-building" (Pakistan). Ganguly suggests that this differing notion of statehood is at the core of the unresolvable conflict over Kashmir. Pakistan only needs to exist if Muslims cannot live in India. Ganguly cites a speech given by the former president of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, when he was foreign minister, in which he declares of Kashmir: "If a Muslim majority can remain a part of India, then the raison d’être of Pakistan collapses."32 Ironically, by attempting to change the foundation of the state in India from civic institutions and ideals to Hindu identity, the forces of the Hindu right legitimize the existence of Pakistan— the very thing they cannot abide. Points of
Resistance Varshney reassures his readers that India has repeatedly come back from the brink of the worst communal violence and that a "Rwanda, a Burundi, a Yugoslavia are not possible in India unless the state, for an exogenous reason such as a protracted war, kills all autonomous spaces of citizen activity and organization." By the latter, I think Varshney means opportunities for citizens to organize independently of the state. I hope he’s right. But I fear that he could be proved wrong. Even a brief war between India and Pakistan, or just the perpetual threat of war between the two, could provide the sort of "exogenous reason" the Hindu right could exploit to advance its agenda. India’s draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act gives the government strong means to silence any opposition, including summary arrest and the right to detain those arrested indefinitely. Under the threat of war, the BJP and its allies in the Sangh Parivar could use the powers granted under the act to try to do just what Varshney finds so unlikely— to "kill" any organization whose activities are viewed as a threat to the BJP’s hold on power or to the interests of the Hindu right. Admittedly, this would be a daunting task in a country as large and as heterogeneous as India. Still, would it really be necessary to "kill" all of this activity? Could not the Hindu right succeed simply by killing most of it or enough of it to maintain and expand its hold on power? The BJP undertook a major reshuffling of cabinet positions this past July. Most notably, Lal Kishenchand Advani, an unrepentant RSS heavyweight who personally led the effort to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992—which ignited bloody Hindu-Muslim riots across India—has been promoted to deputy prime minister. It appears that he is being groomed to take over as prime minister when Vajpayee steps down. The BJP is under extreme pressure from the RSS to radicalize its agenda. The Sangh Parivar argues that the BJP’s losses in state elections last February were due to the fact that the party had lost touch with its roots in the RSS and the Sangh, and because it had failed to support Hindutva and the reconstruction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. As Pravin Togadia, the powerful VHP leader in charge of getting the Ram temple in Ayodhya built at any cost, put it: "The BJP lost because Hindus felt betrayed on the temple front." He accused Vajpayee and Advani of having stooped "to kneel down before the politics of the Muslim vote. This is a dangerous trend and was solely responsible for bringing terrorism from the confines of Kashmir to the doors of the Indian parliament." 33 The pogrom in Gujarat, the national government’s limp response to the crimes of Gujarat’s BJP government, and the subsequent reshuffling of the cabinet that put individuals who began their political careers in the RSS or are sympathetic toward it into more powerful positions point ominously in the direction of a fresh radicalism on the part of the Hindu right, which sees the upcoming elections in Gujarat as crucial. "We will ensure the victory of those who respect Hindu sentiments and expose others," warns Togadia. 34 And he has 500,000 VHP cadres and 10,000 village committees spread out across Gujarat ready to drive his point home. 35 Two other points of resistance to the triumph of the Hindu right are international opinion and the Indian business community. The BJP showed its sensitivity to international opinion in the wake of the Gujarat massacres. Expressing his dismay that the world might look askance at what had happened in Gujarat, Prime Minister Vajpayee declared, "Let no one use this tragedy to make such sweeping generalizations about the happenings in India that they demoralize Indians and present a wrong picture of India abroad." 36 No small part of this concern stems from the potential adverse effect of such occurrences as the Gujarat massacres on foreign direct investment and other capital investment essential to India’s economic well-being. Most of India’s own business community was shocked and dismayed by the carnage in Gujarat, and what it may bode for business. In the aftermath of the violence, eminent Bombay businessman Cyrus Gazder made an impassioned plea to India’s business community: "When there is such a failure of government leading to disruption in civil life; the striking of terror among labourers, shopkeepers, teachers, judges; the closure of markets; an exodus of people who are consumers...then is it sensible, indeed even ethical, for business to say: ‘our business is only business...’ and then to bury their heads in the sand and debris of the rubble created by almost four weeks of unlawful and barbaric behavior?" 37 Under pressure from domestic and international opinion, the BJP made an inspired public relations move in nominating Abdul Kalam for the largely ornamental post of president of India. True enough, Kalam is a Muslim, but he’s the Hindu right’s dream Muslim. A vegetarian who plays the veena (the musical instrument associated with the Hindu goddess Saraswati), he is fond of reciting passages from Hindu scripture. A photo accompanying him in a profile in India Today magazine shows a bronze of the dancing god Shiva next to his bed. Kalam, whose mother had to hawk her meager jewelry to send him to college, has a rags-to-riches background with great populist appeal. A brilliant scientist, he is the father of India’s nuclear weapons program. As such, he is the man India can credit for endowing it with the ultimate argument for international acknowledgment and respect. When India successfully tested the nuclear devices Kalam had been instrumental in creating in 1998, ushering India into the family of nuclear nations, it was a moment of immense national pride. The majority of Indian Americans, in direct opposition to Washington’s swift condemnation of this development, also enthusiastically cheered India on its nuclear triumph. The bomb instantly restored for many the pride and potency that had been stolen by the paternalism of imperial rule. It is this sense of offended pride avenged that animates most of the hatred vented against Muslims in India. "Finally Muslims got what they deserved." "Hindus can only take so much." "Gujarat has had the courage to do what should be done to Muslims everywhere." What the
United States Should Do Varshney’s prescription for strengthening the ties of civil society across communal boundaries in India should be applied with equal zeal among the Indian diaspora here in the United States, both to forestall any development of communal conflict in this country and because of the community’s strong ties with India. Fortunately, there are thousands of immigrants from India in America who were appalled by the massacres in Gujarat and who support a secular democracy in India in which minority faiths are protected. Many civic organizations here circulated petitions and staged demonstrations against the complicity of the government of Gujarat in the violence and the agenda of the Sangh Parivar in general. There is a new-found urgency among such groups to expand awareness in the United States about the agenda of the Hindu rightand to educate people—of Indian and non-Indian origin alike—to the important difference between the Hindu religion and Hindu fascism. The U.S. government must not hesitate to condemn officially the threat of genocide in Gujarat and to support the many civic, business, and religious organizations working hard to stem the rise of the Hindu right and to preserve India’s historic commitment to secularism, democracy, and religious tolerance. During Colin Powell’s July visit to New Delhi, Prime Minister Vajpayee reiterated his invitation to President Bush to come to India, and both sides are reportedly "working on dates for an early visit."39 Given the important role India must play in the war on terrorism, the need to calm tensions between India and Pakistan, the growing military cooperation between India and the United States, and the expanding role of India in Central Asia, the president ought to make this trip. 40 The administration surely has not overlooked the growing political clout of the Indian-American community and the important support it has lavished on the Democratic Party, especially following former president Bill Clinton’s trip to India in 2000. One can only hope that it will not seek political gain by hinting to conservative elements in the Indian-American community that it in any way supports an anti-Muslim, Hindu-right agenda. This would be a grave error. The president should condemn strongly the genocide in Gujarat and attacks elsewhere against India’s Muslims, and see a visit to India as an opportunity to express U.S. support for democratic values, including religious tolerance and freedom. The United States Commission on Religious Freedom has lamented the fact that Washington has "not spoken out forcefully against the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat." 41 This is more than a moral question. As Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars argues, "Important American interests, including the global war against terrorism, can be directly impacted by what the U.S. says—and fails to say—about Gujarat. At this particular moment in history, the U.S. cannot allow the impression to take hold that Americans somehow value a Muslim life less than the life of a person of another religion." 42 Part of an appropriate response by the U.S. government should be to crack down on Hindu-right organizations operating in America that funnel money to the Sangh Parivar. According to Hathaway, "Credible reports have recently suggested that substantial sums of money are sent from Indians resident in the U.S., and from American citizens of Indian origin, to groups and organizations… that are directly linked to the violence in Gujarat." Testifying before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Hathaway urged the commission to initiate "an official enquiry into financial transactions of this nature, to ensure that U.S. laws are not being violated." 43 These groups may also be guilty of fraud, since many donors believe they are making purely charitable contributions and have no idea how the money is being used. Under the Bush administration, the United States has pursued an increasingly unilateralist foreign policy. Our overwhelming military force and our ability to project it at will anywhere around the globe have convinced certain "realist" members of the administration that other states have no option but to accept and support any action taken to defend America’s interests. On the domestic front, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, the administration asked the American people to make a considerable sacrifice of their basic civil rights in order to purchase security from future terrorist attacks. Similarly, the BJP-led government in New Delhi has made it clear that India’s military strength and its possession of nuclear weapons are the ultimate argument for advancing its interests—and for deflecting any criticism of its conduct on "internalmatters." And it has also asked its citizens to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to support its own domestic anti-terror efforts under the Protection of Terrorism Act. In this, both the United States and India— countries admired for their democratic values—are risking their greatest asset. By following this route, they will squander their considerable stock of "soft power" in the eyes of the global community and betray the trust of their own citizens. As Joseph S. Nye, Jr., dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, so eloquently puts it, "American power is not eternal. If we squander our soft power through a combination of arrogance and indifference, we will increase our vulnerability, sell our values short, and hasten the erosion of our preeminence." 44 The damage done to the rule of law and to the core values of civic nationalism in India by the triumph of Hindu extremism in Gujarat has badly cracked the foundation of Indian democracy. Having succeeded in its mission in Gujarat, there is no doubt that the Sangh Parivar will now turn its attention with redoubled zeal to the rest of the country. This is a struggle for India’s soul. • * Mira Kamdar is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, and the author of Motiba’s Tattoos: A Granddaughter’s Journey from America into Her Indian Family’s Past (Plume, 2001).
1. Widely circulated and cited but most movingly so in Shabana Azmi’s impassioned speech to India’s upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, following the genocide in Gujarat this past spring. I thank Ms. Azmi’s office for sending me a copy of her speech. 2. The pitribhumi-punyabhumi distinction comes from one of the founding tracts of Hindutva, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? by V. D. Savarkar, 1923. See also Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), p. 8. 3. For a detailed account of the attacks, see Human Rights Watch, "We Have No Orders to Save You": State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, 2002. 4. Ibid. 5. See Somini Sengupta, "Hindu Nationalists Are Enrolling and Enlisting India’s Poor," New York Times, May 13, 2002. See also Bela Bhatia, "A Step Back in Sabarkantha," Seminar, no. 513 (May 2002), special issue on Gujarat, "Society Under Siege," pp. 35–38; and Ganesh Devy, "Tribal Voice and Violence," in the same issue, pp. 39–48. 6. Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar, and B. G. Verghese, Rights and Wrongs: Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Editors Guild Fact-Finding Report, New Delhi, May 3, 2002. 7. For a heartwrenching account of the violence to which women were subjected at the time of partition, see Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 8. Harsh Mander, "Cry the Beloved Country: Reflections on the Gujarat Massacres," South Asia Citizens Web, March 13, 2002, at www.mnet.fr/ aiindex/Harshmandar2002.html. 9. The Indian government placed the number of victims at 850. Human Rights Watch put the number at 2,000, while observers sympathetic to the Muslim victims put it as high as 5,000. Zahir Sajad Janmohamed, a Service Corps Volunteer for the AIF (American India Foundation), cites testimony to the U.S. Congress by Father Cedric Prakash of the organization Prashant for the number of Muslims who have fled Gujarat. His article, "The Sangh Parivar in Our Backyard," July 22, 2002, was circulated on the Internet by SAWC (South Asian Citizens Wire) and is available at www.humanrightskerala.com. 10. This and other like remarks by Prime Minister Vajpayee about India’s Muslims were widely quoted and disseminated by the press. See, for example, A. J. Noorani, "The Real Vajpayee," Hindustan Times, April 30, 2002. 11. This has been consistently reported. See in particular the excellent Editors Guild report, Rights and Wrongs. I thank Shashi Tharoor for sending me this report. His novel Riot: A Love Story (New York: Arcade, 2001) brings the tragic dynamics of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to life and bears reading for a deeper understanding of its historical and social dimensions. 12. See Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000). 13. See Ashutosh Varshney, "Doomed From Within," Newsweek, March 18, 2002. Varshney writes: "The fact that Gujarat is, economically, the fastest-growing state in India while the Gujarati diaspora in the United States, Britain and Africa is fabulously wealthy has only exacerbated this process. A lot of the new Gujarat wealth, at home and abroad, has gone to Hindu-nationalist organizations.... Wealth, in this case, has not led to political moderation." 14. See Editors Guild, Rights and Wrongs. 15. Ibid. 16. "Genocide," Communalism Combat, March-April, 2002. On the VHP’s 40-point agenda for India is the following gem: "The distorted presentation of modern, social and cultural history of (India) will be rewritten by honest, patriotic and learned historians and archaeologists. The teaching syllabus will be accordingly reformed" (quoted in Shankar Vedantam, "India Is... A Culture Struggles With All That Defines It," Washington Post, "Outlook" section, March 17, 2000). The Hindu right’s agenda on education has been well documented. For a chilling account of Hindu religious schools akin to the Islamic madrassas the United States would like to see shut down in Pakistan, see Somini Sengupta, "Hindu Nationalists Are Enrolling and Enlisting India’s Poor," New York Times, May 13, 2002. As noted above, Sengupta also underlines the financial support these schools receive from Hindu organizations in the United States. 17. John Elliott, "India Moves to ‘Talibanise’ History," New Statesman, December 17, 2001. 18. Monobina Gupta, "In Gujarat, Adolf Catches Them in the Schools, The Telegraph (Calcutta), April 29, 2002. 19. "Modi to Use Gujarati Diaspora for Propaganda," Times of India, June 9, 2002. 20. From an e-mail correspondence conducted by Religion and Ethics Newsweekly with Professor Embree, concurrent with a report on May 29, 2002, by Fred de Sam Lazaro on the violence in Gujarat for the PBS program, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and another for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. The transcript of the Newshour segment on the violence in Gujarat, the report for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and the e-mail correspondence were disseminated by SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, on June 3, 2002. 21. Quoted in Sanjay Suri and Narayan D. Keshavan, "Saffron Across the Seven Seas," Outlook, March 16, 1998. 22. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 133–56. See also Vijay Prashad and Biju Matthew, "Deceit of the Right," Himal, vol. 12 (December 1999). 23. Dean E. Murphy, "Anti-Muslim Groups Unite Through the Internet," New York Times, June 3, 2001. 24. Human Rights Watch, Politics By Other Means: Attacks Against Christians in India, September 1999. There have been no attacks that I know of on Jews in India, a community with a wonderful history in that country going back centuries. This is probably because there are very few Jews left in India in the wake of substantial emigration to Israel. The Jewish community in India has no political clout and no presence as a voting bloc. 25. A. K. Sen, "Deflections to the Right," Outlook, July 18, 2002. 26. Janmohamed, "Sangh Parivar in Our Backyard." 27. Ibid. 28. Kanwal Rekhi and Henry S. Rowen, "India Confronts Its Own Intolerance," Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2002. 29. Sengupta, "Hindu Nationalists Are Enrolling and Enlisting India’s Poor." 30. Quoted in Celia Dugger, "Discord Over Killing of India Muslims Deepens," New York Times, April 29, 2002. 31. Quoted in Sultan Shahin, "Gujarat Returns to the Deadly Past," Asia Times, April 26, 2002. 32. Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 5, 32. 33. From an interview published on March 4, 2002, on the Internet, at www.rediff.com/news/2002/ mar/04inter.htm. 34. "VHP Gets into Election Mode, To Launch Massive Campaign in Gujarat," August 5, 2002, at www.rediff.com/news/2002/aug/05guj1.htm. 35. Ibid. 36. Dugger, "Discord Over Killing of India Muslims Deepens." 37. Cyrus Guzder, "Is Secularism Good for Business?" Seminar, no. 513 (May 2002), 68–72. 38. There is no better analysis I know of the psychology of Indian immigrants to the United States in this regard than Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk. 39. Cited in "Bush to Visit India," Hindustan Times, July 29, 2002. 40. See "India Stepping Up Diplomacy in Central Asia," August 9, 2002, at www.stratfor.com/ standard/analysis_view.php?ID=205685. 41. Sridhar Krishnaswami, "U.S. Panel Faults Central, Gujarat Govts," The Hindu (Chennai), June 12, 2002. 42. Robert M. Hathaway, "Charity...Or Terrorism?" The Hindu, August 8, 2002. 43. Ibid. 44. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xvi. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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