[sacw] SACW Dispatch #2 | 25 Aug. 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2.
25 August 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

#1. US/ Bangaldesh: The Solarz Correspondence: A Congressional Inquiry
Deliberately
Derailed? (Part 3)
#2. India/ Pak.: 'There Is No Incentive For A War' (Stephen Cohen interview
/ Rediff.com)
#3. Pakistan: Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report: What does it really say?
#4. Book Review: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism By John Zavos

_____________________

#1.

The Daily Star
24 August 2000
Op-Ed.

THE SOLARZ CORRESPONDENCE: A CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY DELIBERATELY
DERAILED?
Third and Concluding Part

by Lawrence Lifschultz

The possibility of ultimately getting to the bottom of what had happened
in Bangladesh in the 1974-1975 period required that CIA documents not be
altered or tampered with in any way. Cherry had been the CIA's Station
Chief in Dhaka at the time of the Bangladesh coup. A simple question
posed itself. With Cherryworking as a member of the "historical review
staff" had any documents related to Bangladesh been tampered with or
simply made to "disappear"?

(Continued from yesterday)

IN April 1979, Kai Bird and I wrote Henry Kissinger a detailed letter
asking him to reply to specific questions regarding the 1971 contacts
with the Mustaque group in Calcutta. We also posed several questions
regarding the 1975 coup against Mujib. US Embassy sources had wondered
out loud to us whether the CIA Station in Dhaka had disregarded
Ambassador Boster's instructions to break contact with the Mustaque
group on their own initiative or whether they had instructions to do so
from Washington. We asked Kissinger this question. We asked him if he
had "Prior knowledge" of the coup d'etat against Mujib. We posed seven
specific questions. Four questions concerned 1971 contacts with the
Mustaque group. Three questions concerned the 1975 coup. We asked
Kissinger to reply promptly since we were intending to publish an
article in June in The Nation magazine in New York.

Kissinger replied in May. "I have read your astonishing letter of April
23" wrote Kissinger in his dismissive, one paragraph reply. "It reached
me while I was traveling in Asia, and, therefore, your-two-week deadline
has already passed. In any event, I cannot deal with the extraordinary
mixture of allegations and innuendo contained in your letter, except to
say that in substance they are so far from the truth that I am impelled
to question the motives of your informants."

In June we replied to Kissinger. "The purpose of our April 23
correspondence setting out detailed queries concerning US-Bangladesh
relations in the crucial periods of 1971 and 1974-75 was precisely to
abolish any dimension of allegation or innuendo," we wrote. "We do not
believe this can be done without direct answers to specific questions.
We do not consider the questions we have put to be, as you say, 'far
from the truth.' Indeed, as questions they are designed precisely to get
at the truth. We know of no other method, but to ask with as much
precision as possible... In our view, to be astonished is not to be
specific in response."

When the Carter Administration came to power in 1976, a new director,
Admiral Stansfield Turner, took over the Central Intelligence Agency.
Turner began an intensive review of past covert actions involving
possible illegal actions by Agency officials. This internal review
ultimately led to the early retirement of several hundred CIA employees.
There were reports circulating in State Department circles that the
Bangladesh case was also under review. However, according to one State
Department source the Bangladesh case wasn't "bit enough" to garner the
kind of attention Turner was giving to actions that had led to
unambiguous violations of the law. Still it appears there was some form
of inquiry. Little is known how extensively the case was investigate
within the Agency during the short lived period when Turner sought to
"clean house."

In the summer of 1992 a curious article appeared in The Washington Post.
At the time, the trial of a senior CIA official, Claire George, was then
under way for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. George had
served as the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA. In September
1991, George was indicted and charged with ten felonies, including
obstructing justice, obstructing a congressional investigation, making
false statements, and perjuring himself before congressional committees.

According to Lawrence Walsh, the retired judge, who served as prosecutor
in the case, "Claire George's indictment mobilized the intelligence
community. Support came not only from officials in active service, but
also from the CIA's alumni, who were steeped in the agency's traditions
and proud of its accomplishments. They keenly felt the irony of the fact
that a career officer, who had been trained to protect the secrets of
the agency with lies if necessary, was now being indicted for lying to
congressional committees."

Claire George's trial lasted four weeks. After eleven days of
deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. George was found guilty of
lying to Congress. He had lied to both the House and Senate intelligence
committees. After the trial, Craig Gillen, the lead prosecutor in the
George case, stated, "This marks the first time that a senior CIA
official was convicted of felony offences for crimes committee while he
was in his position at the CIA. Congress expects and deserves full and
truthful answers from the intelligence agencies." Gillen concluded,
"Make no mistake about it, we are pleased with this verdict. Word has
gone out to senior officials in the intelligence agencies that they
cannot use the secrets of our nation to hide." As one of his last acts
of his Presidency, George Bush, a former CIA Director, pardoned Claire
George and other senior officials, convicted of lying to Congress.

After the pardon, Lawrence Walsh, the Independent Prosecutor and a
retired judge with Republican Party credentials, denounced the pardon.
"There was no excuse for pardoning these persons," declared Walsh. "They
were prosecuted for covering up a crime, for lying to Congress, to keep
Congress from finding out what had happened... They were deliberate
lies."

A decade before George was indicted, the CIA Director in the Reagan
Administration, William Casey had appointed Claire George to be the
CIA's "liaison with Congress." This was the time when William Barnds, a
"retired" CIA officer, was "supervising" the Bangla-desh file at the
Congressional Subcommittee on Asia chaired by Stephen Solarz. According
to a statement Robert Gates made to Joseph Persico, William Casey's
biographer," once Claire [George] got there [i.e. up to Congress], he
reinforced all of Casy's worst instincts. Their attitude was 'don't tell
Congress anything unless you are driven to the wall.'" Gates was CIA
Director under George Bush.

The Post article of 5 August 1992 described how a member of George's
legal team named Phil Cherry, a retired CIA officer, had been discovered
visiting the CIA's archives during the trial. "In a development outside
the courtroom, Philip Cherry, a retired CIA covert operations officer
who has appeared in court as an unpaid members of [Claire] George's
legal defence team, was seen last Friday afternoon leaving CIA
headquarters," reported The Post. "He was using a pass normally
possessed by agency employees."

"Asked Monday what he was doing at the agency [CIA]," The Post article
stated, "Cherry, a lawyer, said that it had nothing to do with the case.
Asked why he had a CIA pass, he responded, 'No comment.' In response to
further questions from The Post's reporter, a CIA spokesman declared
that "Cherry had applied earlier for a contract position with the CIA's
newly expanded historical review staff and had been offered a post." The
CIA spokes-man, Peter Earnest, stated that Phil Cherry had simply "come
in to see his contract and pick up his badge."

The CIA acknowledged that Cherry's role on Claire George's legal team
and his access to secret CIA archives might be deemed to be improper.
"We don't want a conflict or the appearance of a conflict," the CIA told
The Post. The speculation was that documents might be removed, lost or
tampered with by CIA "insiders" to protect one of their own. Upon
reading the Post article my concern instantly focused on Bangladesh, not
the Iran-Contra affair. Phil Cherry, working as a member of a CIA's
"historical review staff," sent shivers down my spine. It was absolutely
farcical. Given the issues that Stephen Solarz had raised in his letter
to Les Aspin of the House Intelligence Committee regarding "allegations
about CIA involvement in the 1975 coup," Cherry's presence in the
archives represented a clear "conflict of interest."

The possibility of ultimately getting to the bottom of what had happened
in Bangladesh in the 1974-1975 period required that CIA documents not be
altered or tampered with in any way. Cherry had been the CIA's Station
Chief in Dhaka at the time of the Bangladesh coup. A simple question
posed itself. With Cherry working as a member of the "historical review
staff" had any documents related to Bangladesh been tampered with or
simply made to "disappear"?

In the 1990's a historical commission with responsibility for
declassifying CIA documents concerned with Guatemala discovered that
almost the entire archive had been destroyed. Detailed documentation
from within CIA archives of the coup against Arbenz that the Agency had
masterminded had been purged from the records. This had involved the
destruction of thousands of documents. The enduring expectation of
American historian that ultimately documentation would be available for
historical research had been frustrated by an act of "historical
cleansing" by the US Government itself.

Shortly after Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution was published in
1979 a reviewer made the following observation: "One could sympathize
with Lifschultz's agony that without the power of subpoena, truth could
never be discovered. But could it be revealed even with that power?
Lifschultz still hopes that he can, given the opportunity and a fair
chance, find the truth. But the deviousness and capacity of intelligence
agencies to kill the truth, at all stages, of any legitimate
investigation would, however, seem adequate for making Lifschultz's task
a difficult one. In these dangerous shoals, the great service Lifschultz
offers to the ordinary man is simply to impress upon him the oppressive
apparatus of today's state... If, in such conditions, the Bangladesh Re
volution is unfinished, so is Lifschultz's search for the truth. He
would be the first to admit that.... The best of this book is the
author's abiding faith in eventually finding the truth by pursuing it
relentlessly." These were kind words. But, the truth is this pursuit is
not the task of one individual alone.

The writer is working as a Research Associate at the Yale Centre for
International and Area Studies, Yale University. He was recently named a
Fulbright Scholar for South Asia.

******

Solarz's letter to Lifschultz, dated June 3, 1980

Dear Mr. Lifschultz:

As I indicated to you in my previous letter, I have tried to pursue with
the State Department several of the allegations raised in the materials
you sent to me

The State Department readily admits that it had contacts in 1971 with
several Bengali officials who were interested in discussing arrangements
that would have allowed Bangladesh to remain part of Pakistan.
Considering that the dismemberment of Pakistan, a traditional US ally,
was not in the US interest, the State Department contends that there is
nothing either surprising or disturbing about the United States trying
to negotiate an arrangement with Bengali officials to prevent this
outcome from occurring.

With respect to the Embassy meetings in the November 1974 - January 1975
period with opponents of the Rahman regime, the State Department once
again does not deny that the meetings took place. However, the
Department does claim that it notified Rahman about the meetings,
including the possibility of a coup. This would seem to put these
meetings in a less conspiratorial light.

On the crucial question of CIA involvement in the post-January 1975
period, I have not been able to unearth any hard evidence in either
direction. I find your allegations sufficiently disturbing to believe
that they merit further investigation. However, I believe that such an
investigation can really only be carried out by the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, which has the best chance of obtaining access
both to CIA cable traffic and to the relevant figures in the
intelligence community. I have therefore referred the materials you sent
to me to Congressman Aspin, along with a letter urging him to look into
the matter. (copy attached).

I thank you for bringing this matter to my attention, and I hope that
you will keep me informed about any new information that you may obtain
on this subject.

Sincerely,

Stephen Solarz
Member of Congress, House of Representatives,
Washington D.C.

Solarz's letter to Les Aspin, dated June 3, 1980

Dear Les: I am forwarding to you materials recently sent to me by a
reputable journalist, Lawrence Lifschultz, which contain disturbing
allegations about CIA involvement in the 1975 coup which deposed Sheik
Mujibar Rahman in Bangladesh.

Although I have made formal inquiries about Lifschultz's various charges
with the State Department, I am not fully satisfied with all of the
answers I received. In particular, on the crucial question of CIA
contacts with the coup perpetrators in the January 1975 through August
1975 period, I have been unable to unearth any hard evidence either to
confirm or refute the allegations.

I quite agree with Lifschultz' statement that "whether or not the United
States had prior knowledge of these plans cannot be conclusively settled
without Congressional subpoena power." Since a thorough investigation of
CIA activities in Bangladesh is clearly within the jurisdiction of the
Permanent Select Committee, I am turning over Lifschultz's material to
you, in the hope that you will take appropriate action.

I thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Stephen J. Solarz
Member of Congress, House of Representatives,
Washington D.C.

______

#2.

Rediff on the Net
Broadband Special
August 2000

'THERE IS NO INCENTIVE FOR A WAR'
'The factors compelling India and Pakistan to have more normal relations
than they have had in the past nine years are very powerful. There are
big economic incentives. There are big political incentives in both
countries.' South Asia expert Professor Stephen Cohen, in a Real Audio
interview.

What future do you see for Indo-US relations?
Click here :
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve01.rm&proto=3Dpnm
Do you believe the current euphoria about Indo-US relations is
misplaced?
Click here:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve02.rm&proto=3Dpnm
Dyou think South Asia is a sufficiently large blip on US diplomacy's
radar screen? There is Russia, there is China...
Click here :
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve03.rm&proto=3Dpnm
Do you think the threat of a war -- or a nuclear conflict -- is real
in South Asia?
Click here :
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve04.rm&proto=3Dpnm
So you endorse the State Department's view that South Asia is the most
dangerous place in the world?
Click here :
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve05.rm&proto=3Dpnm
At the current moment of time people are deeply pessimistic about any
possibility of peace between India and Pakistan. Do you share that
feeling?
Click here:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=3Drediff/rediff/g2demand/steve06.rm&proto=3Dpnm

______

#3.

The Friday Times
August 25, 2000

HAMOODUR RAHMAN COMMISSION REPORT: WHAT DOES IT REALLY SAY?

Ejaz Haider says even today we are not drawing the right lessons from
the East Pakistan debacle

The publication of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report by an Indian
magazine, and its subsequent publication by Pakistan media has
inevitably drawn many, and varied, responses. The publication of the
report also caught the government by surprise. Islamabad's response
varied from creating suspicion about the authenticity and veracity of
the report to statements about the need to find out how the report was
leaked to an Indian magazine and by whom. Clearly, the latter response
only served to authenticate the publication.

Predictably, also, some officers against whom the report recommended
court martial proceedings have trashed it variously as bogus, an attack
on the institution of the army, motivated by political considerations
and so on. However, the authenticity of the report seems beyond doubt
for various reasons. In a recent interview, General AAK Niazi
substantiated the report when he described it as reflective of the bias
of Justice Hamoodur Rahman, a Bengali himself, who played into the hands
of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Another officer, Major General (Retd) Fazal
Muqeem Khan, former secretary defence in Mr Butto's government has also
described the report as authentic. General Khan in fact further
authenticated the findings of the report by saying that the Aftab
Committee Report, which was commissioned by the GHQ, had also reached
the same conclusions as the Hamood Report, recommending action against
the same set of officers. He has demanded that the GHQ make public the
Aftab Report.

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the debate has failed largely to
involve the public or even the intelligentsia. Moreover, the points that
are being debated - incidentally, that is also the problem with the
treatment of the subject-matter by the report itself - involve primarily
the issue of why and how the Pakistan army lost the war against the
Indian army. The published report itself looks at the situation as it
then existed primarily in military terms, though it does indicate that
it made an in-depth study into the historical background, the two
martial laws and the run-up to Bengali discontent in the Main Report.
The moot point is whether it also appreciated the West Pakistani
chauvinism, the question of civil-military relations, the very
conception of the state, and the formulation and implementation of the
national security policy.

Unfortunately, the same situation persists even today. In the ensuing
debate, very little attention is being paid to the important issues.
East Pakistan is gone. The report that was kept hidden has finally made
its way into the public arena. What is important now is not so much the
debate about the conduct of the war, which was slipshod beyond doubt
despite what the generals might now say, but the causes that led to such
large-scale discontent in the eastern wing. The inability of the ruling
elite to stem the tide towards secession; the inadequacy of an ideology
based on some abstract conception of religion to keep disparate people
together in the absence of viable socioeconomic and political structures
through which a people can express themselves and feel a sense of
participation in the process of governance, and the inability of the
state to understand that its coercive apparatus has inherent
limitations.

Any debate on these lines would have to deconstruct the very conception
of the state. It would have to address the issue of the formulation and
implementation of the national security policy and who runs it. It would
also have to address the question of whether the national security
policy has been formulated as a corollary of a certain conception of the
state or whether the state's identity itself has been tailored to suit a
certain conception, formulation, and implementation of a national
security policy with the military being at its cutting edge. This would
inevitably lead to the issue of civil-military relations, a domain that
should have enticed experts in Pakistan no end, but hasn't. While the
published parts of the report do not go into the details of the
civil-military equation, they do shed some significant light on that
equation within the context of that period. That issue is as relevant
today as it was then. Therefore, it needs to be debated at various
levels.

Last, but not least is the question of why the then East Pakistan's
Bengali population reached a point of no return. It is a matter of
historical record that the West Pakistani elite and intelligentsia
treated the Bengalis with contempt. Far from what General Niazi is
reported to have said about Hamoodur Rahman's "bias" as a Bengali, the
fact is that the report reflects the same prejudices against the
Bengalis that in large part led to the creation of Bangladesh.

For instance, where the report seeks to look into the causes of
"Provocation of the army", it says: "We mention these facts [crimes by
the Bengalis] not in justification of the atrocities or other crimes
alleged to have been committed by the Pakistani Army during its
operations in East Pakistan, but only to put the record straight and to
enable the allegations to be judged in their correct perspective. The
crimes committed [note the certainty as opposed to the relative
ambiguity in the case of the army] by the Awami League miscreants were
bound to arouse anger and bitterness in the minds of the troops..."
(emphasis added).

Consider another example from the report regarding Sheikh Mujeeb's
allegation that 200,000 Bangali women were raped by the Pakistan army
personnel: "The falsity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's repeated allegation
that Pakistani troops had raped 200,000 Bengali girls in 1971 was borne
out when the abortion team he had commissioned from Britain in early
1972 found that its workload involved the termination of only a hundred
or more pregnancies." Cruel, to say the least. The statement is
obnoxious not only because it treats hundred or more pregnancies as a
consequence of rape as less bestial, or more human (take your pick) than
200,000, but also because number of pregnancies alone can hardly be an
indicator of the number of girls raped.

Moreover, the issue does not concern the veracity or falsity of Mujib's
statement. It relates to the moral breakdown in the army's ranks about
which the report, despite its bias against the Bengalis, has been unable
to find extenuating grounds. That bias persists and the debate does not
seem to address it. A mature response would have been to appreciate the
nature of a state, which, between the end of World War II and the end of
the Cold War, was the only one that lost territory to a secessionist
movement. However, instead of learning the appropriate lesson and
rethinking the "ideology" discourse on which Pakistan had decided to
rest its nationalism, arguments were trotted out that the ideology of
Pakistan had withstood the trauma because Bangladesh did not opt to join
with India. Therefore, it was time to feed the nation more of the same.

The nature of the state and a candid discussion of it should be the most
important fallout of the report. Nation-states do not disintegrate;
state-nations can, and do. Similarly, states based on democratic
institutions, rule of law and constitutional liberalism are extremely
difficult to fall apart; states based merely on ideologies can, and do.
Nation-states have evolved through a long process of evolution and
assimilation. Yet, even they face problems and tendencies that threaten
to alienate certain groups on the basis of ethnicity, religion, language
and even dialect. Usually, however, they can obviate the possibility of
violence by creating legal, constitutional, social and political spaces
not only for the expression of discontent but also for fighting off such
discrimination. The discourse is essentially constructed to highlight
pluralism.

State-nations construct the discourse around unity. The state becomes
sacrosanct; the discourse therefore seeks to construct a nation around
the state. Pluralism becomes the first casualty. This was the reason for
the moronic one-unit scheme and the declaration of Urdu as the official
language of Pakistan despite the numerical superiority of the Bengalis.
But having gotten rid of the Bengalis Pakistan persisted with the
ideology, cementing it further with religion, to undermine the pluralism
that exists in rump Pakistan. The state remains obsessed with creating a
uniform conception of the nation and its place in the world. It brooks
no dissent. That is what needs to be debated.

The role of the army in the polity and its conception of the national
security policy are other areas for a frank debate. While East
Pakistan's secession cannot be ascribed only to the army, the military
has to take the lion's share for the blame. From 1958 until 1971, it was
in the saddle. Even before that, it had developed a certain mindset
regarding its role within the polity. As Brig (Retd) A R Siddiqi wrote
in his insightful book, The Military in Pakistan: Image and Reality:
"The ascendance of military image in Pakistan...preceded the birth of
the national image and dominated it." Consequently, writes Siddiqi, "A
sort of prussianism [was] born to produce an army with a nation in place
of a nation with an army." It is difficult to debate this for various re
asons not least the army's image of itself and the pusillanimity shown
by corrupt politicians and a morally bankrupt intelligentsia vis-=E0-vis
the army which forces them into "highly adulatory publicity" of the
army. But the need to debate these issues can hardly be overemphasised.
Some commentators have sought to limit the damage by arguing that the
events of three decades ago cannot be made the basis for army-bashing
now. This line of reasoning eschews many obvious truths, not least the
still very relevant issue of civil-military relations and the tendency
by the army to trust only its own wisdom. As for the backing of the
politicians for its actions then, the army has no dearth of such
loyalists even now.

Moreover, free debate cannot, and should not, be construed to mean an
exercise in bashing. People "bash" the politicians routinely, but that
does not mean they seek either to get rid of them entirely or that they
evince a desire to undermine the political process. By the same token
any debate on the army and its role in the polity must not be construed
as an attempt to undermine the military, though it may end up
undermining the military's interests, the two issues being essentially
different in nature and character.

Any debate would therefore have to question the larger-than-the-nation
image the army seems to have acquired and to which Brigadier Siddiqi
points in his book. This image is the problem; this is the very image
that informs the military's ideas of the self and the state. If a debate
can shoot this image down, the nation would be rid of one of its
perennial problems.

Finally, it is appropriate to end with a quote from Siddiqi: "Seizure of
political power by the military furthers the process of the
institutional decay that the attainment of political freedom initiates
within. The larger the area and the span of political power the greater
is the damage done to the professional character and discipline of the
military...". Is it surprising that the Hamoodur Rahman Commission
Report, too, should point to the same institutional decay as a major
cause of East Pakistan debacle?
______

#4.

The Telegraph
25 August 2000

CHARGE OF THE SAFFRON BRIGADE/BOOK REVIEW=20
=20=20=09=20
BY HARSHITA KALYAN
=20
The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism
By John Zavos, Oxford, Rs 450

The Hindutva brigade has never had it so good. The Bharatiya Janata
Party is firmly in the saddle in New Delhi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh has emerged from the shadows, into which it had disappeared
following the assassination of M.K. Gandhi, to occupy centre-stage on
the national scene. In the recent past, its many front outfits - the
Bajrang Dal, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
among others - have been seen and heard more often than in the early
years of independent India

The Indian National Congress's repeated poll defeats at the Centre and
the Bharatiya Janata Party's victories are symptomatic of the larger
picture, where Indian nationalism appears to be fighting a losing battle
against Hindu nationalism. This is as good a time as any, therefore, to
ask how and why the saffron ideology emerged and became integrated into
the Indian political discourse.

John Zavos attempts to do precisely this in his book, The Emergence of
Hindu Nationalism in India. But unlike other similar works, he does not
start with 1925 - the year the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was formed.
Instead, Zavos uses this historic year as the culmination of his
examination of the movements of the late 19th and early 20th century
that led to the creation of the RSS.

The author argues that the colonial state had a significant role to play
in the consolidation of Hinduism as a religion, which was thus far an
amorphous rubric for a broad philosophy. He particularly points out the
role that the census played, first by raising questions about who
qualifies to be a Hindu and then by classifying a large section of the
populace, mainly belonging to the lower castes, as non-Hindus because
they were not allowed into Hindu temples and did not worship Hindu gods.

The dialectic between the Hindu and the Indian nationalisms comes under
scrutiny, with Zavos pointing out that many of the early leaders of the
RSS -including its founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar - were at one time
or the other associated with the Congress movement. The two even came
from a similar social milieu: the educated, upper caste, middle class.

The objectives were similar as well. The RSS aimed to transform the
"consciousness of the Hindu society in the same way as the
counter-hegemonic pretensions of the Congress aimed to transform the
consciousness of the Indian people."Often, the two movements used
identical vehicles of expression".

But though the movements merged at times, on the whole they differed
violently. Zavos argues that Hindu nationalism was a political - not a
religious - movement and that the RSS considered Congress's brand of
nationalism to be its biggest threat, rather than any rival religion.

"The representation of the constituency of Hindus, an idea which
underpinned the Sabha movement from the outset, was directly related to
struggles within the Congress over how precisely the Indian nation was
to be represented," he writes.

Zavos underscores that the RSS was formed to articulate an alternative
view of nationalism. This is especially relevant in the present
political context. Though the RSS's view of nationalism lost out to that
of the contending Congress nationalism, at the time of independence in
1947, it has diligently persisted in its efforts to "transform the
consciousness of Hindu society". After all these years, these efforts
finally appear to be bearing fruit.

The development of Hindu nationalism is a complex phenomenon which
obviously does not lend itself to any simplistic explanations. But Zavos
has examined several factors that shaped the movement and has offered a
valuable insight into the dynamics of Hindu nationalism.

Coming at the time it does, the book takes on enormous significance. It
could easily have been a widely read book had Zavos not targeted only
historians, political analysts and social scientists. The general reader
might find large sections of the book tedious.=20=20=20

______________________________
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