surreal_ravi
2004-11-25 23:44:41 UTC
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
ARTICLE: Volume XIX, No 3, Fall 2002
The Struggle for India's Soul
Mira Kamdar *
I will not buy anything from any Muslim shopkeeper
I will not use those traitors' hotels or their garages
Boycott movies casting Muslim heroes heroines
Never work in Muslims' offices and do not employ Muslims
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 andmore problematicallySikhs, 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 Jewsno matter how many hundreds or thousands
of years they may have lived in the countryare 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 Americanwas 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 199293, 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 longerif it ever wasa 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 Hindusotherwise divided by caste, class,
region, language, and sectinto 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
The extent to which these parties have succeeded in hijacking India's
pluralistic democracy was made abundantly clear earlier this year. On
February 27, a train carrying Hindu militants back from a trip to
Ayodhya, where they had gone to press anew for the construction of a
temple on the site of the razed Babri mosque, stopped in the small
town of Godhra, near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. What happened next is not
entirely clear, except for the fact that a Muslim mob set fire to the
train, killing 58 people, mostly women and children. Everyone expected
some kind of act of revenge. Attacks and counterattacks between Hindus
and Muslims are nothing new in Gujarat. No one doubted that some
Muslims were going to pay with their lives for the Hindu lives lost.
But few anticipated what happened next.
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 colorheaded 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 phonesthe better
to keep in touch with their handlersand 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
ARTICLE: Volume XIX, No 3, Fall 2002
The Struggle for India's Soul
Mira Kamdar *
I will not buy anything from any Muslim shopkeeper
I will not use those traitors' hotels or their garages
Boycott movies casting Muslim heroes heroines
Never work in Muslims' offices and do not employ Muslims
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 andmore problematicallySikhs, 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 Jewsno matter how many hundreds or thousands
of years they may have lived in the countryare 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 Americanwas 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 199293, 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 longerif it ever wasa 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 Hindusotherwise divided by caste, class,
region, language, and sectinto 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
The extent to which these parties have succeeded in hijacking India's
pluralistic democracy was made abundantly clear earlier this year. On
February 27, a train carrying Hindu militants back from a trip to
Ayodhya, where they had gone to press anew for the construction of a
temple on the site of the razed Babri mosque, stopped in the small
town of Godhra, near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. What happened next is not
entirely clear, except for the fact that a Muslim mob set fire to the
train, killing 58 people, mostly women and children. Everyone expected
some kind of act of revenge. Attacks and counterattacks between Hindus
and Muslims are nothing new in Gujarat. No one doubted that some
Muslims were going to pay with their lives for the Hindu lives lost.
But few anticipated what happened next.
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 colorheaded 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 phonesthe better
to keep in touch with their handlersand 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