Indias Hindu totalitarianism baring its ugly face
What is certain is that more than half-a-million people are affected and 65,000 people, mostly Muslims, have become refugees in a state ruled by the pro-Hindu, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
India's most industrialised and urbanised state will remain gripped by extreme insecurity and maniacal violence so long as it is ruled by chief minister Narendra Modi, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) or National Self-help Organisation, which provides muscle and ideology to the BJP.
There is every reason to believe that Modi is primarily responsible for the violence that has shaken Gujarat since Feb 28, a day after 58 Hindus belonging to another extremist BJP affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, were torched to death in railway coaches at Godhra town.
The victims were on their way back from fiery demonstrations in Ayodhya, where they threaten to build a temple to the Hindu deity Ram communal or intra-religious riot or sectarian clash, of which there have been many in India in 55 years. Rather, it is a pogrom, a targeted massacre of Muslims, with the full complicity of the state.
The Feb 27 incident was probably a largely spontaneous Natural reaction
What is not in doubt is that the reprisals that followed were planned and organised.
Every report, whether from citizens' groups, academics, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory body, or the media, suggests that the mobs that went marauding, looting and killing from Feb 28 on were tacitly encouraged by Modi, his key ministers, and the bureaucracy.
In Parliament, currently in session, the secular opposition led by the Congress party has called for the sacking of Modi but his partymates have rallied around him. So much so that Modi has been emboldened to blame the continuing violence in his state on the discussions of it in Parliament.
The police failed at the critical, early stage to take follow well-established procedures specified in 100 year-old riot-control manuals.
Modi expressed his "full satisfaction" with the law and order situation, even as 200 people were being butchered.
Muslims' homes and shops were identified through electoral rolls and police maps, and systematically targeted, especially in Ahmedabad, the state's commercial capital. This could not have been done by mobs as large as 10,000-strong, without state complicity or collusion.
"It is simply impossible for a few thousand people to rampage with kerosene cans, trishuls (VHP-trademark metal tridents), or swords, without state collusion,'' says Vibhuti Narain Rai, an outstanding police officer-scholar who has studied the nature and dynamics of sectarian violence in India.
Modi repeatedly justified this butchery of Muslims as a "spontaneous and natural reaction" to Godhra, even citing Newton's Third Law.
It now emerges that two of his ministers took over police control rooms on the first day of the carnage, issuing directions not to rescue Muslims in danger of being killed.
The pogrom involved reports of extraordinary bestiality, savagery, and sexual violence — people were burned or electrocuted to death with high-tension wires, pregnant women's bellies were slit open and their foetuses chopped into bits. Two year-old children were knifed and tortured.
There is a total breakdown of all constitutional order in Gujarat. The government has comprehensively failed to defend the citizen's elementary right — to life.
Fear prevails
Each day Modi stays on in power aggravates the situation. As NHRC chairman J S Verma put it after a three-day visit to Gujarat: "People are insecure" and a "fear psychosis" prevails.
The magnitude and ferocity of the violence has shocked the world and millions of Indians. Yet, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has not had the decency to acknowledge the horror, or visit Gujarat to console the victims. When he spoke on television within a week of the carnage, he was expressionless.
India's hawkish home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, has been repeatedly elected to Parliament from Gujarat. He only thought fit to visit his "home state" for a few hours.
Both Advani and Vajpayee are proud card-holding members of the RSS, which was banned in 1948 for complicity in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a native of Gujarat.
The RSS was banned by Congress party governments on two other occasions — in 1995 after the promulgation of a national emergency and then in 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya triggered riots in which more than 3,000 people died.
With the BJP in power at the centre, although in reality only leading a multi-party coalition, the RSS, along with the VHP, has freely and aggressively revived plans to build a temple where the mosque once stood, utterly disregarding the sentiments of minority Muslims.
At a convention this month in the southern city of Bangalore, the RSS called on Muslims in India to ''understand that their safety lies in the goodwill of the majority''.
At work here is not just monumental callousness. BJP leaders are ardent believers in Hindu totalitarianism. They deny India's pluralist, strongly multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural character. Implicitly or explicitly, they rationalise violence against the minorities.
They and their mentors believe the Hindus are fully justified in "getting even" with, and "correcting", history's wrongs "invasions" by "outsiders", especially Muslims. They are bent upon exterminating all signs of a Muslim presence in India.
They want Hindu pre-eminence established through the disenfranchisement of other communities.
The energies they have put into the Ayodhya campaign even after 1992 can only be explained by this hate-driven agenda. So too can Vajpayee's description of that campaign as a "national movement", not a parochial-sectarian one.
Privileged place
Hindu-sectarian politics enjoys a privileged place in Gujarat. Gujarat is India's sole state where the BJP rules on its own. It has long been termed a laboratory for pro-Hindu ideas. What is under contest there is what kind of society and state India should be.
Gujarat is among India's most developed states, with a highly regarded entrepreneurial class. Its Muslims are among India's most assimilated. They all speak Gujarati. Most of their 130 sub-castes and sects have culturally more in common with Hindus than Muslims elsewhere.
A major factor that explains the strength of pro-Hindu forces in Gujarat is not religious, but class-and caste-related. The state's elite — Brahmins, rich traders (banias) and prosperous farmers (Patels) — has been reluctant to share power with the increasingly assertive lower castes, which mounted a challenge to it in the 1980s.
The elite answered the challenge through caste riots in 1980 and 1985-86, led by Modi. who, along with Advani, played a major role in the Ayodhya campaign.
This unique upper-caste Hindu combination gave the elite a potent weapon to preserve its power.
With this, say Ahmedabad-based social scientists Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, "the myth of Gandhi's Gujarat — peaceful, tolerant and non-violent — exploded." As pro-Hindu forces gained ground, moderate voices got "weaker and more inaudible".
Gandhi was reviled by in Gujarat as much for his secularism as for his championship of the rights of India's historically downtrodden Hindu castes.
What Gujarat has witnessed since Feb 28 could well be the future of many other parts of India — unless the pro-Hindu forces led by Vajpayee are countered.
This can only happen if there is a frontal domestic challenge to the BJP, and the world recognises its true ideological moorings and the unique threat it poses. (IPS)
