The Indulgences Of Hindutva

Opportunism is the name of the game. Israel takes advantage of the world's focus on Afghanistan to pummel the Palestinians, to drive tanks into a moth-eaten Palestine, to paint opposition as terrorism and beget terrorism itself. Tony Blair dons the robes of headmaster to a boy's school in decline and decides to cane the Afghans to make up for a Great Game gone sour. And India, never far behind, led by a rapacious and unscrupulous government of the Hindu Right, begs for entry into the impatient coalition, pleads for permission to be the Gunga Din of the oily New World Order, to sow terror among its own people as it shows its democratic teeth to the world.

Twenty thousand take over the streets of London, fifty thousand across a united Germany, a hundred thousand in Italy (land that produced the first aerial bomber), and at least fifty thousand, despite a heavy downpour, in Red Calcutta. An opportune time to be on the streets, to force the global media to recognize that decent people dissent from the madness.

Somewhere, someone gathers the figures of those dead. Two hundred dead in Nigeria during an anti-war protest turned riot; a dozen or so dead in South Asia, primarily in Pakistan where the regime's future is as bleak as that of those who live in Afghan cities; and finally, those who live in those Afghan valleys, a few hundred by a stray bomb, a few more by shrapnel from ammunition dumps, and eventually many more from the starvation and desolation produced by war. Even if the numbers do not match Dresden or Hiroshima (100,000 in each case), whatever remains of the productive capacity of Afghanistan will be destroyed, and a new generation of children who have suffered the indignity of a guerrilla war will carry in their ears the shrill sound of precision bombing, and the sight of those tracers, like firecrackers, moving toward their homesteads. Many will be dead even if their hearts continues to faintly beat.

South of the War, in India, the Hindu Right is gleeful.

Right after 9/11, the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, considered a moderate in his party, but nevertheless far right of reason, sent off a letter to George W. Bush to mark the condolences of the Indian people. But further, he pointed out like the Israeli government, that India has lived with terror for some time now, and that terror, he intimated, has an Islamic face.

The message was set: India has lived with terrorism for years, and the government and military would be ready to put any means at the disposal of the US government and military to thwart it. Vajpayee sent his External Affairs and Defense Minster, Jaswant Singh, to meet with the Bush administration on 1-2 October, but also to turn over two urns to Mayor Guiliani. The urns, one with waters from nine of India's rivers, and the other with the soil of India, are to be interned in the memorial to the fallen.

Mr. Singh continued Vajpayee's message with a string of banal words: "India's commitment to values that we share with the United States of America to democracy, to free speech, to freedom of individuals to a certain way of life, of which terrorism is the very antithesis, and our commitment to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States of America for these values, in this fight against terrorism, is in no fashion less than anyone else's."

Not two decades ago, no major Indian leader promised such fealty, indeed most Indian leaders, even the pro-US Rajiv Gandhi, tried to maintain some distance from the State Department and the Pentagon. US interests in South Asia rarely matched those of the Indian state, and furthermore, most Indian leaders recognized that the canard of democracy did not do justice to the truth of US foreign policy. The US, for almost four decades, preferred to sit with the Pakistani generals than with the incomplete democracy of India. Things have now changed, even as Chief Executive Musharraf sits on a tightrope stretched out by the Bush administration, the Hindu Right hopes to ingratiate itself with the powers that be.

The military centrality of Pakistan to this assault meant that India, once again, was to be relegated to the sidelines of the US war and diplomatic plans. But the Hindu Right dominated government was nonplussed. It almost immediately banned the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a group formed in 1977 to represent the abysmal educational opportunities for Muslim youth in India, but which has in an environment poisoned by Hindutva or Brahmin supremacy, turned to a defensive and outrageous sectarianism of its own. It arrested six students from a socialist group in eastern Delhi as they distributed pamphlets against the war - the charges amount to sedition, not against India, but against the US! It invoked the specter of Islamic terrorism within India to scare the people of Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the republic, to vote for Brahmin supremacy at all costs in the upcoming state elections. And much of the latter was accomplished by the flourish of a single date: 12 May 1993.

On 12 May 1993 explosions rocked the city of Mumbai (once Bombay) and over two hundred people died. These Mumbai blasts are the symbol now of India's 9/11, of India's claim to being a victim of terrorism.

But what are the Mumbai blasts and are they sui generis? By all indications the underworld of criminals, movie financiers and Dubai-based 'businessmen' set explosives in several buildings in Mumbai as a ghastly and senseless retaliation for the Hindutva engineered massacre of Muslims and others during the Mumbai riots of December 1992-January 1993, an event that shattered Mumbai's cosmopolitanism.

A look at the Srikrishna Commission documents and to the three volumes of documentation turned in by the government of Maharashtra to the Justice Liberhan Commission (and studied ably by Praveen Swami and Anupama Katakam in Frontline magazine) make it clear that the organized Hindu Right bears responsibility for the riots and, crucially, should be found guilty of premeditated violence. There was nothing spontaneous about this riot, and even the word 'riot' does the organized violence an injustice. Intelligence officials collected data on Hindutva's armed brigands ("some of the activists are likely to carry lathis and daggers") and noted that all anti-Muslim sectarian activity "should be nipped in the bud". Nothing was done because a senior official felt that these are "purely religious activities".

"For five days in December 1992 (December 6 to 10) and fifteen days in January 1993 (January 6 to 20), Bombay, prima urbs of this country, was rocked by riots and violence unprecedented in magnitude and ferocity, as though the forces of Satan were let loose, destroying human values and civilised behaviour": so wrote the High Court Justice B. N. Srikrishna at the start of his official report on the massacre (delivered on 16 February 1998, and already gathering dust). The report, for all its flaws, shows us that the riots came as a result of Hindutva's demolition of the historical mosque at Ayodhya in northern India and as a result of an emboldened Hindutva activist base wanting to participate in some way in that insult to Indian Muslims.

"From January 9, 1993, at least," the Srikrishna Commission reports, "there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena [the organized arm of Hindu militancy in the region] and Shiva Sainiks took the lead in organising the attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several leaders of the Shiv Sena's Mr. Bal Thackery, who, like a veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims." If you doubt the pogrom, the report shows us that of the nine hundred or so killed in the riots, five hundred and seventy five (or almost two thirds) were Muslims. For the past fifteen years, at least, Indian civil society has taken a beating from these very theocratic organizations, now in power in India. The Hindu Right, as well as the gerontocratic Congress Party, has engineered anti-Muslim and anti-oppressed caste riots, as well as marginalized all those who do not fit into its narrow mold of Indianness.

Two days after the outrageous blasts of May, the right-wing Home Minister, L. K. Advani denied that the RDX blasts had any connection to the engineered pogrom. Tragedy brings forth its own kind of political amnesia. And now, the Hindu Right brings up May 1993 without any consideration of January 1993, simply to show its fealty to the US in what it sees as a war against Islamic terrorism, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere. All this would have been inconceivable prior to 1991, when the Indian government (then run by the tired Congress party) turned to a full-fledged neoliberal agenda. The US, under Clinton, sensed that the size of the Indian market (the size of France, salivated Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton's first Treasury Secretary: "within India lies an upper middle class economy the size of France, and the challenge is to unlock that potential and spread that prosperity," October 1993). An immediate impact of neoliberalism for India was that six million workers won their pink slips in 1992-93 and eight million more joined them the following year. The "potential" is in the profits, not in the well being of the population. 

Clinton's visit to India, the military links between the Indian and US army, the tie-ins with Israel, the further 'liberalisation' of the economy, the creation of the Bill Gates (Seattle)-Chandrababu Naidu (Hyderabad) virtual axis, the employment of External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh as practically a mouthpiece for the US State Department (as my friend journalist P. Sainath put it so clearly), the anti-China rhetoric of the Hindu Right and the nuclear tests to ensure that the US has a second front against China - all this amounts to the catalogue of India-US relations, a marked change from the Nehruvian Third Way.

But the rate of return for servility is very low. India's economy remains in the doldrums (with an increase in inequality with each budget), its military has not been invited to be the junior partner in Afghanistan (indeed it seems likely that, for the near future, Pakistan will come back in US favor - if Musharraf survives), the Kashmir question will not be solved as per Hindutva's specifications, and furthermore the collapse of the Nasdaq and of the tech-world means that one of India's new exports (IT workers and software) will be sharply hit.

The indulgence of Hindutva is not in any of this, because its reason, driven by its own astrological forecasts, is this: to make Islam the global enemy and to wait for the day when Delhi-Tel Aviv-Washington (and London, somewhere on the axis) becomes the new global cities that count. These cities, the Hindu Right hopes, will be the centerpieces of the Communities of Democracy envisaged by Madeleine Albright, the harbingers of US-driven free market policies the world over; and, like any good middle-man, Hindutva hopes to get a few percent cut on the global takings. The indulgence of Hindutva-Zionism-Manifest Destinyism is this: the crazy and unjustifiable attacks forgive their own acts of commission and allow them freehand to produce the world in their image.

I'm in awe of those who stood in Calcutta's downpour and cried out for a better world.

(Vijay Prashad is Associate Professor and Director, International Studies Program, Trinity College,Hartford, CT, USA )