[sacw] SACW | 30 July 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 30 July 2002

>From South Asia Citizens Web:
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

__________________________

#1. Poetry in Kashmir (Muzamil Jaleel)
#2. Murder in India (Pankaj Mishra)
#3. Gujarat Elections: An exercise in callousness (Muchkund Dubey)

__________________________

#1.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/kashmir/Story/0,2763,765169,00.html

Poetry in commotion

Ordinary Kashmiris are using the ambiguity of verse to speak out=20
safely about the violence that surrounds them - and the result is a=20
startling metamorphosis in the genre, writes Muzamil Jaleel

Monday July 29, 2002

As violence and fear dominate life in Kashmir, expression through=20
prose has become dangerous. Instead, people are resorting to poetry=20
as the only way to reveal their pain, reflect their anguish and=20
document the trauma of hidden tragedies.

In the process, the contours of Kashmir's poetry have changed. The=20
stories of romance have been replaced by tales of bloodshed.

Irises, a token of grief and mourning that are traditionally grown in=20
Kashmir's graveyards, are now the central metaphor rather than an=20
idyllic image of the cold peaceful breeze on Dal lake - an emblem of=20
Kashmir's natural beauty and once a favourite honeymoon destination.

In the couplets that portray feminine characters, the beautiful face=20
of a beloved is replaced by the gloom and distrust of Kashmiri women.=20
Kashmir no longer symbolises paradise, but a heaven on fire.

Literature has always prospered in conditions of turmoil. Here the=20
tragedies have compelled ordinary young men, college students and=20
farmers, to try their pen, as poetry becomes one of the safer tools=20
of expression.

"I cannot consider myself a poet even as I write. It is a complete=20
art form which is either a gifted talent or something you have=20
attained through training. I don't have either of the two. The=20
provocation of the circumstances has made me a poet," says Shakeel=20
Shan, a 30-year old Kashmiri singer.

"What do I write? These are amateur poems which reveal whatever I=20
see. I have no other means to tell my story. Well, prose can be=20
simpler and easier, but it is dangerous too. You have to be=20
politically correct in your every line because your life is at stake."

Shan's poem is about his friend, missing after being taken by=20
unidentified gunmen from his home.

"It was really a dark night. Nobody knows what happened to him and he=20
literally vanished into thin air. This uncertainty followed me and if=20
I had not written it down and sung it regularly, my heart would have=20
exploded like a bomb," he says. Shan writes:

"Who knows where my friend is?
Who knows where my friend is hiding?
Who knows whether he is scared in the dark night?
Who knows whether he is hungry and unable to stand on his feet?
Who knows if the place where he sits is damp?"

His questions remain unanswered as the couplets carry on and the poem=20
concludes. Shan explains: "There are dozens of such poems and the=20
theme is always the reaction of a sensitive Kashmiri youngster, who=20
craves to tell his story but fear fails him to be open. It gives me=20
some solace. I manage to tell the story yet do not endanger my life".

Another youngster writes anonymous poems. Scared to identify his=20
work, he talks about the taste of blood in the waters of Kashmir's=20
streams.

"I cannot drink water
It is mingled with the blood of young men who have died up in the mountains=
.
I cannot look at the sky
It is no longer blue; but painted red.
I cannot listen to the roar of the gushing stream
It reminds me of a wailing mother next to the bullet-ridden body of=20
her only son.
I cannot listen to the thunder of the clouds
It reminds me of a bomb blast.
I feel the green of my garden has faded
Perhaps it too mourns.
I feel the sparrow and cuckoo are silent
Perhaps they too are sad."

Kashmir's older generation of poets also cannot escape the trauma and=20
the tragedies around them.

Much of this poetry revolves around Kashmir's yearning for peace, its=20
politics of hatred, the censorship of free thought and even the=20
exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, besides the daily uncertainties of life in=20
Kashmir.

Farooq Nazki has won a Sahitiya Academy award (India's top literary=20
prize) for his moving and sad collection, Naar Hutun Kazil Wanus [The=20
Forests of Soot are on Fire].

"Poetry to me is not merely the articulation of truth or the=20
verification of ideas. It is my intimate response to events", he says.

The pain he feels at the sight of the blood-drenched dress of a=20
bridegroom finds this expression:

"The blood dappled apparel of bridegrooms
Is washed at the river by mothers
And the dress of brides is set ablaze
The milky mothers pine
And quiet flows the Vitasta".

The character that emerges from contemporary Kashmiri poetry is a=20
self-destructive person, says Nazki. "This character passionately=20
leads himself to the death-well and then turns into a mourner. His=20
heart is seething with anger, full of commotion," Nazki says.

"The protagonist of my poetry is sauntering through a dense forest=20
trying to catch a rare sun drop. Each sun drop is like a moment in=20
time that turns into a milestone in the treatise of my poetry".

Explaining this change, Nazki says that green, indigo and yellow,=20
which exhibit tranquillity, no longer dominate the spectrum of=20
Kashmiri poetry.

"Instead black, white and red and most importantly tinges of blue=20
find expression. The blue symbolises eternal hope in goodness and=20
faith in one's cultural moorings." Nazki's poetry emerges from the=20
image of marauders ravaging the chastity of Himal, the Kashmiri=20
Juliet. "My verses emanate from the umpteen agony-filled faces of the=20
ordinary Kashmiris I meet everyday," he explains.

"I fear
They will come
Whose eyes pierce like spears
And bruise over hearts
Those faceless people do talk
Doors of wine houses have been bolted
Guards have been stationed
On the temples of beauty
The city has been vandalised
Wailing bleak evenings seem to be descending."

Nazki mourns the fear that led to the mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus,=20
forced to leave their homes as the fundamentalists took over=20
Kashmir's separatist movement, by talking about the tragedy of his=20
childhood Hindu friend and neighbour:

"A dedication once more,
Somnath Sadhu, for you ...
You Know?
Your mother Kamli has run away from Kashmir,
She took along with her silver plate,
that you and I ate from,
the food that she laid,
She fled Kashmir, fearing me,
You Know?"

The sarcastic advice of another poet, Bashir Manzar, to the prose=20
writers vividly explains the dangers of free expression:

"Hssssssssss......
Break the pen, spill the ink, burn the paper
Lock your lips, be silent, Hsssh......
Say, I saw nothing even if you do
or else, have your eyes gouged, be silent, Hsssh......
Make all discerning
Gouge out the eyes that discern,
Keep humming eulogies, be silent, Hsssh.....
It is now the season of burying the truth, Manzar
Seal your lips, be silent, Hsssh....."

Another well-known Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, became a true=20
emissary of Kashmir's pain after he published his acclaimed=20
collection, Country Without A Post Office. His poems expose the=20
uncertainty of life and the unease in the streets of Kashmir:

"I am writing to you from your far-off country.
Far even from us who live here
Where you no longer are.
Everyone carries his address in his pocket
At least his body will reach home."

Shahid lived and taught in United States and even on his death bed=20
last year, he continued giving expression to the trauma of his native=20
land:

"You must have heard Rizwan was killed.
Guardian of the Gates of Paradise.
Only eighteen years old.
Yesterday at Hideout Cafe (everyone there asked about you),
A doctor - who had just treated a sixteen-year old boy released from=20
an interrogation centre - said:
I want to ask the fortune tellers
Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands=20
would be cut with a knife?".

And he portrayed the strife:

"Don't tell my father I have died, he says, and I follow him
Through blood on the road and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners=20
left behind,
As they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing.
>From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us, like =
ash.
Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods,
The homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.
Kashmir is burning."

Shahid's love for Kashmir's lost composite culture, its traditions=20
and ethos, is the theme of his poem Farewell, a plaintive love letter=20
from a Kashmiri Muslim to a Kashmiri Pandit.

"At a certain point I lost track of you
They make a desolation and call it peace.
When you left even the stones were buried -
The defenceless would have no weapons."

Shahid's poetry talks of the relations, the bonds, that were broken=20
in the flood of events:

"I'm everything you lost - You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history -
There is nothing to forgive.
You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself -=20
There is everything to forgive.
You can't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine, what would not have been=20
possible in the world?"

But there is optimism as well. In another poem, Pastoral, that he=20
dedicated to his Kashmiri Hindu friend Suvir Kaul, Shahid talked of=20
reunion:

"We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
By the gates of the Villa of Peace,
Our hands blossoming into fists
Until the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we'll enter our last world, the first that vanished
In our absence from the broken city."

=B7 Muzamil Jaleel is a Srinagar-based journalist working with The Indian E=
xpress

_____

The New York Review of Books
August 15, 2002

Murder in India
By Pankaj Mishra

1.
In January this year, I was in Ayodhya, the north Indian pilgrimage town
where in December 1992 an uncontrollable crowd of Hindus demolished a
sixteenth-century mosque that they claimed was built by the Moghul emperor
Babar over the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. I went to see Ramchandra
Paramhans, the ninety-year-old abbot who heads both a militant sect of
sadhus (Hindu mendicants) and the cash-rich trust that is in charge of
building a Rama temple over the site of the demolished mosque. I found him
tending his cows near the site. Born in the neighboring poverty-blighted
state of Bihar, Paramhans has done rather well for himself in Ayodhya, wher=
e
the richest people are Hindu abbots. With his dense white beard and matted
locks, he came across as the irascible ascetic of Hindu legend, with
apparently much to be angry about. The Hindu nationalists he thought he had
helped elect to power in New Delhi hadn't done enough to meet their promise
of constructing the temple, even if they hadn't stopped it from being
prefabricated in a vast workshop not far from the site of the mosque.

That same morning, Paramhans told me, he had scolded L.K. Advani, the
present home minister and one of the senior leaders of the ruling party, th=
e
BJP, who had witnessed the demolition in 1992. When I mentioned the
constraints on Advani-the Supreme Court's ban on construction, Muslim
opposition-Paramhans became angry. "There are only two places Muslims can g=
o
to," he shouted, echoing a popular Hindu nationalist slogan of the Eighties
and early Nineties, "Pakistan or Kabristan [graveyard]."

Paramhans was expecting up to a million kar sevaks (Hindu activists) to
visit Ayodhya in the days leading up to March 15, when he planned to shift
the prefab gateway and pillars of the Rama temple to the site of the
demolished mosque. His resolve appeared to be shared by some Hindu leaders =
I
met at the large exposed field close to the temple workshop, where tents
were being set up to host the tens of thousands of activists expected to
visit Ayodhya during the next few weeks.

Thousands of Hindu activists from across India traveled to Ayodhya during
the first few weeks of February. Many of them were from the prosperous
western state of Gujarat, whose entrepreneurial Hindus, often found living
in Europe and the United States, have been forming a loyal constituency of
the Hindu nationalists since the 1980s. On February 27, some of these
activists were returning on a train from Ayodhya when a crowd of Muslims
attacked and set fire to one of the cars just outside the town of Godhra in
Gujarat.

Gujarat has known several severe anti-Muslim riots in the last decade and a
half. But Godhra, whose impoverished population is evenly divided between
Muslims and Hindus, has an even longer history of organized crime and
violence. Many of the local Hindus came over from Pakistan as refugees
during the brutal partition of India in 1947. The Muslims, many of whom liv=
e
in ghettos around the railway tracks, are known for their aggressiveness: i=
n
a riot in 1980 they burned alive five Hindus.

But it is still not clear whether the February attack on Hindu activists wa=
s
planned. The Hindu nationalist government accused Pakistan of provoking the
attack, but has produced little evidence of this. According to the recent
Human Rights Watch report, 'We Have No Orders to Save You,' local police
investigations have concluded that it was more likely the result of "a
sudden provocative incident." Articles published in a few north Indian Hind=
i
newspapers a few days before the attack had referred to the provocative
behavior of the Hindu activists traveling on trains to Ayodhya: at
unscheduled stops outside railway stations, they had allegedly abused, even
attacked, Muslims living in the slums close to the tracks, and in turn had
been stoned.

On the morning of February 27, Hindu activists at the railway station
reportedly refused to pay a Muslim vendor for the tea they had drunk until
he said "Jai Shri Ram" ("Hail Lord Ram"). A fight erupted between Muslim
vendors and Hindu activists. In the confusion, Hindu activists were said to
have tried to kidnap a Muslim girl and take her into their carriage.[1]
Three minutes after the train pulled out of Godhra, a crowd of Muslim men,
women, and children stopped it, and started stoning the car carrying the
Hindu activists. The activists retaliated, but then retreated into their
carriages and locked the doors when the number of Muslims outside grew
quickly. The Muslims then reportedly set fire to the car using rags soaked
with gasoline taken from the Muslim-owned auto-repair shops and garages nea=
r
the railway station. Fifty-eight Hindus, many of them women and children,
were burned alive.[2]

Murderous crowds of Hindu nationalists seeking to avenge the attack in
Godhra rampaged across Gujarat for the next few weeks. According to the
Human Rights Watch report, which mostly covers the massacres of Muslims in
the capital city of Ahmedabad,

Between February 28 and March 2 the attackers descended with militia-like
precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in
saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu
nationalist-Hindutva-groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they
came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hind=
u
mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided b=
y
computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their
properties, information [they] obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal
corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage
confident that the police [were] with them. In many cases, the police led
the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs' way. A key
BJP state minister is reported to have taken over police control rooms in
Ahmedabad on the first day of the carnage, issuing orders to disregard plea=
s
for assistance from Muslims. Portions of the Gujarati- language press
meanwhile printed fabricated stories and statements openly calling on Hindu=
s
to avenge the Godhra attacks.

As I write, organized violence of the kind the HRW report describes seems t=
o
have ended in Gujarat, although stray killings still go on. The Indian
government has acknowledged that more than 850 people, mostly Muslims, have
died; other reports, including those of British diplomats, put the number o=
f
the dead at around two thousand. About 230 mosques and shrines, including a
four-hundred-year-old mosque, have been razed; some of them have been
replaced with Hindu temples. Close to 100,000 Muslims are in relief camps.
The HRW report also describes how retaliatory attacks by Muslim mobs across
Gujarat have left 10,000 Hindus homeless.

The scale of the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, which the HRW report
alleges was "planned well in advance of the Godhra incident," seems to be
matched by its brutality. According to the HRW report,

The bodies have been buried in mass gravesites throughout Ahmedabad.
Gravediggers testified that most bodies that had arrived -many were still
missing-were burned and butchered beyond recognition. Many were missing bod=
y
parts-arms, legs, and even heads. The elderly and the handicapped were not
spared. In some cases, pregnant women had their bellies cut open and their
fetuses pulled out and hacked or burned before the women were killed.
The killings were mostly confined to Gujarat. In north and central India,
there had been lately little anti-Muslim rioting of the kind the nationalis=
t
politicians organized in the early Nineties in order to unify a hopelessly
fragmented Hindu electorate against a common Muslim enemy. But while south
India, where relatively few Muslims live and where the Hindu nationalists
have limited support, has been largely peaceful, Hindu-Muslim relations hav=
e
remained tense in north and central India, where the Hindu nationalists hav=
e
most of their urban upper-caste voters.

Human Rights Watch has followed reports by Indian human rights organization=
s
in calling attention to "state sponsorship of the attacks" as well as the
Gujarat government's later attempt to protect Hindu nationalist leaders
accused of murder and arson. According to the report, police officials in
Gujarat have often omitted the names of senior leaders involved in the
attacks from reports filed by Muslim victims. The state government has
transferred police officials who have tried to prevent attacks on Muslims o=
r
confronted the attackers. It has detained and arrested Muslims across the
state on false charges. In recent weeks, the government has arrested some
local BJP workers accused of rape, murder, and arson, but has not moved
against the more prominent Hindu nationalists charged with committing
similar crimes.

The chief minister of Gujarat, a young, up-and-coming leader of the Hindu
nationalists called Narendra Modi, quoted Isaac Newton to explain the
killings of Muslims: "Every action," he said, "has an equal and opposite
reaction." The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who visited the
site of the massacres a whole month after they began, expressed shame and
lamented that India's image had been spoiled. "What face will I now show to
the world?" he said, referring to his forthcoming trip to Singapore. Later,
at a BJP meeting, he rejected the demands from the opposition and the press
that Modi be sacked and proposed early elections in Gujarat. They are likel=
y
to be held soon and the BJP is expected to retain power.

In a public speech, Vajpayee seemed to blame Muslims. "Wherever they are,"
he said, "they don't want to live in peace." "We have allowed them," he
added, referring to Muslims and Christians, "to do their prayers and follow
their religion. No one should teach us about secularism." A resolution
passed by the RSS, or National Volunteers Organization, whose mission is to
create a Hindu state, described the retaliatory killings as "spontaneous":
"The entire Hindu society had reacted.... Muslims understand," the RSS said=
,
"that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority." Both the
Indian prime minister and his most senior colleague, L.K. Advani, are
members of the RSS, which was involved in the assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi in 1948.

2.
When the ancient Persians and Arabs first used the word "Hindu" to refer to
the then obscure people living beyond the river Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit),
they probably did not realize that their convenient shorthand would still b=
e
around centuries later. Much is known about the diverse castes, religious
sects, folk and elite cultures, philosophical traditions, and languages tha=
t
exist, or have existed, on the Indian subcontinent. But India remains for
most people outside it a country of "Hindus." It even seems cohesive enough
to represent "Hindu civilization" in Samuel Huntington's millenarian vision
of a "clash of civilizations."

The description, which is not unwelcome to the Hindu nationalists who often
despair at the lack of unity among Indians, suppresses not only the
diversity of what is called "Hinduism"-a category invented by the British i=
n
the nineteenth century-but also the presence among the one billion peoples
of India of over 130 million Muslims, the third-largest Muslim population i=
n
the world. It also denies history: that Muslims from Persia and Central Asi=
a
and their descendants ruled a variety of Indian states for much of the last
eight centuries, and that India once was, as part of the Moghul Empire in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cultural center of the Islamic
world.

"Were the arguments of those who advocated the partition of India right?
Were they right to realize that Muslims will have to live in India as
subjects of Hindus? That they cannot enjoy equal rights? These questions
entered my life a bit too early."

This is the beginning of an anguished confession and polemic that appeared
in a collection of essays about Indian Muslims, published soon after the
demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992.[3] The author, Suhail
Waheed, who writes for Urdu and Hindi newspapers in north India, offers an
experience that is seldom found in India's English-language media, which is
dominated by the concerns of middle-class upper-caste Hindus. As a young
Muslim in a small town, Waheed saw himself as entering the secular world of
new India, where he would be free to remake himself. But, as he describes
it, he was always reminded of the fact that he was once born a Muslim in
India. As a minor government official, he invited the hostility of a pro-BJ=
P
newspaper editor and was summarily reprimanded by his superior; when he
asked what he had done, he was reprimanded once again. He eventually
resigned after his Hindu bosses made him stay at work during official
holidays for the Hindu festival Diwali. As a journalist on a Hindi newspape=
r
he was confined to reporting on "Muslim issues," which enabled him to
observe how anti-Muslim violence in north India made even affluent Muslims
seek shelter in ghettos.

Waheed's essay seemed slightly overwrought when I first read it, and it too=
k
me some time to realize that it was describing the lower-middle-class world
of stereotype and prejudice that I myself had known in my childhood in the
small towns of north and central India during the late Seventies and
Eighties. I experienced this world from the very different perspective of a=
n
upper-caste Hindu, who feared and distrusted both Muslims and low-caste
Hindus, an attitude I was reminded of early this year when an old friend in
Benares casually pointed out a distant relative of his, a retired police
officer, who liked to boast of how he had himself shot dead fourteen Muslim=
s
during a riot in the city of Meerut. I remembered then how Hindu police
officers charged by the English-language press or human rights groups with
committing atrocities against Muslims often became heroes among upper-caste
Hindus.

Waheed blames the BJP for creating much of the recent anti-Muslim hatred
among upper-caste Hindus during the Eighties, particularly its disseminatio=
n
of propaganda that accuses successive Indian governments of appeasing
Muslims by allowing a special status to Kashmir in the Indian constitution
and allowing Muslims to follow Sharia-based laws in matters of divorce and
inheritance. This seems true to some extent. The Human Rights Watch report
on Gujarat quotes from a much less subtle Hindu nationalist pamphlet which
accuses Muslims of "destroying Hindu Community by slaughter houses,
slaughtering cows and making Hindu girls elope" and asserts that "crime,
drugs, terrorism are Muslims' empire."

Writing in 1993, Waheed couldn't have anticipated how Pakistan's support of
the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir would help the rise of anti-Muslim
sentiments among upper-caste Hindus. Nor does he explain the relatively
recent roots of Hindu-Muslim antagonism, or why what strikes anyone
examining South Asia before the nineteenth century-before the arrival of th=
e
British and the rise of modern nationalist ideologies-is the relative
absence of Hindu-Muslim violence.

Such large-scale persecutions of religious minorities as took place in
Europe in the Middle Ages were unknown in the Muslim-ruled empires and
kingdoms of India, many of which-Akbar's Moghul Empire, Bijapur under the
Adil Shahi dynasty, Zainal Abidin's Kashmir-offer, even in a more democrati=
c
age, models of an innovative multiculturalism. Many of the Muslims who
invaded or ruled India then were zealots, but the majority of Indians did
not convert to Islam, a significant fact not much discussed by the
self-serving if influential early British historians of India, such as Jame=
s
Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, who presented Hindus as backward and
apathetic, Muslims as tyrants and fanatics, and British colonialists as
preparing India's way to a high stage of civilization. In fact, over five
centuries Islam in India gradually lost its Arabian and Persian identity; i=
t
mingled with folk traditions and became another Indian faith. The influence=
s
from Persia and Central Asia now coexist with indigenous traditions in the
distinctive languages, styles of dress, music, and cuisines of South Asia.

The Hindu nationalists of today follow nineteenth-century British historian=
s
in describing Muslim rulers as alien violators of national honor. Their
icons are such militant leaders as Shivaji, who in the seventeenth century
led an allegedly "Hindu revolt" in western India against one of the most
intolerant Muslim rulers in India, the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb. But they
tend to ignore how the rewards of conquest and plunder, rather than
anti-Muslim zeal, mostly inspired Shivaji, who was ruthless toward his Hind=
u
opponents, and was often eager to strike mutually convenient deals with
Aurangzeb as well as with Muslim rulers in south India who were then
fighting to remain independent of the Moghul Empire.

The Hindu nationalist account of "Muslim fanaticism" suffers from a similar
lack of historical context. Aurangzeb's relatively harsh attitude toward hi=
s
non-Muslim subjects grew out of his attempt to reverse the-for their
time-audaciously secular policies instituted by his great-grandfather,
Akbar. Akbar's policies were embraced by Aurangzeb's brother and the Mo-ghu=
l
heir apparent, Dara Shikoh, who inclined toward mysticism and translated th=
e
Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads into Persian. But Aurangzeb, along with
other insecure Muslim practitioners of realpolitik, saw these policies as
undermining minority Muslim control of the Moghul Empire (Aurang-zeb later
executed Dara Shikoh after winning the battle of succession). The broad
vision of the clash of religions also ignores the many complex, practical
ways in which even the most devout Muslim rulers had to accommodate the
religious sentiments of the vast majority of their subjects. In Ayodhya, a
pilgrimage center the Hindu nationalists present as eternally Hindu, many o=
f
the temples and sects devoted to Rama were originally sponsored by the Shia
Muslims who in the early eighteenth century had begun to rule Awadh, the
region that is now part of Uttar Pradesh.

In any case, to speak as BJP ideologues do of a glorious Hindu nation
defiled by Muslims is to retrospectively create a nation and an awareness o=
f
nationality at a time when there were, and could have been, no such things.
And perhaps it's wrong even to use the words "Hindus" and "Muslims" to
describe the Indians of the medieval era, and burden them with collective
identities that emerged only in our own time. For a majority of the peoples
living in South Asia then defined themselves not through such large and
politically expedient categories as "Hindus" and "Muslims" but through thei=
r
overlapping allegiances to family, caste, linguistic group, region, and
religious sect.

3.
The nineteenth century changed everything in South Asia, as it did in
Europe. Western-style education under the auspices of British colonialism
created a middle-class intelligentsia in India for the first time in its
history. This elite of educated upper-caste Hindus eventually found popular
support for itself among India's destitute masses through Mahatma Gandhi,
and they fought the British for the right to rule India. This intelligentsi=
a
was also the first to embrace the modern idea of nationalism: the idea,
essentially, of a community that claims to possess a common history,
culture, and values, that defines itself as a nation and aspires to form a
state.

Imported from Europe, this idea struck many other colonized peoples as a wa=
y
of duplicating the success of powerful, all-conquering Western nations. But
it wasn't just an intellectual fad for Westernizing Indians: imagining a
nation seemed a requisite for the anti-colonial struggle. The British had
imposed political unity upon India and created a state with administrative
structures. But politically ambitious Hindus found little in the anarchic
diversity of India's population that resembled a nation-a respectably large
and cohesive community that they could claim to represent and lead against
the British. For many leading Hindu intellectuals and leaders, the answer
lay in reforming Hinduism. This meant cleansing Hinduism of its polytheisti=
c
excess of gods and practices, taming it into a monotheistic faith like Isla=
m
and Christianity, with one god (Rama or Krishna) and one book (usually, the
Bhagavad-Gita), and then organizing it into a political force -a project
that remains unfinished and therefore relevant to the Hindu nationalists of
today, making them seem less an extreme aberration than a part of the
mainstream of modern Indian nationalism.

As it turned out, many of the members of the much smaller Muslim
intelligentsia in the early twentieth century saw little place for
themselves in the nation advocated by a Hindu elite which demanded total
loyalty from Muslims even as it tried to unify Hindus by pointing to the
dangers of Muslim "fanaticism." The poet and philosopher Mohammed Iqbal was
among the Muslim intellectuals who began to think of Indian Muslims as
constituting a nation distinct and separate from the Hindus. Such classic
British colonialist strategies of divide and rule as the partition of Benga=
l
along religious lines in 1905 and the decision to have separate elections
for Muslims further reinforced the sense among many upwardly mobile Hindus
and Muslims that they belonged to irreconcilable religious communities. The
modern sense of nationhood came to many Indians as the consciousness of
being Hindus and Muslims, members of large communities defined exclusively
by religion.[4]

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was among the few Indians who thought
that Western-style nationalism was dangerously ill-suited to India; he
warned Gandhi in the early 1920s that even the latter's nonviolent
nationalist politics were going to divide Hindus and Muslims. It is also
true that Gandhi and Nehru worked hard to attract low-caste Hindus and
Muslims in order to give a wider legitimacy to the political movement for
self-rule which intensified in the early twentieth century under the
leadership of the Congress Party. Nehru, a self-confessed agnostic, was
impatient with divisions based on religion, which he called "communalism."
He saw economic development on socialist lines as the need of the hour,
which he hoped would diminish the political appeal of religion and turn all
Hindus and Muslims into equal citizens of a secular and democratic
nation-state.

But both Gandhi and Nehru failed eventually to allay the suspicions of the
leaders of the Muslim League, such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who saw, not
entirely unjustly, the all-inclusive nationalism and high-minded secularism
of the Congress as consisting merely of slogans that concealed the ambition
of an upper-caste Hindu elite to wholly supplant the British.

The Muslim League feared that Indian Muslims would be reduced to a
perpetually powerless minority in an India ruled by the Hindu-dominated
Congress. Muslim leaders wished for more autonomy for the Muslim-majority
provinces in the east and the west, which they hoped would also guarantee
the rights of the Muslims living in Hindu-majority provinces. But the
leaders of the Congress were unwilling to weaken the centralized power of
the colonial state that they saw as their great inheritance from the
British. They opposed creating two separate states just as strongly.
Hindu-Muslim relations deteriorated fast across India as Muslim leaders
became more aggressive. As the British grew increasingly keen to leave Indi=
a
and abandon the mess they had helped to create, the Congress finally chose
to partition off the Muslim-majority provinces. This gave the Congress a
smaller India, but one with a bigger Hindu majority and a strong center, an=
d
left Muslim leaders with what Jinnah during previous negotiations with the
Congress had denounced as a "maimed, mutilated, and moth-eaten Pakistan."

The violent uprooting of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims across
hastily drawn artificial borders only hardened sectarian feelings. The
existence of a hostile Muslim-majority state next door made even more
untenable the position of the mostly poor Muslims who chose, for sentimenta=
l
or practical reasons, to remain in India. Politically, they are significant
only during elections, when they form a solid "vote bank" for Hindu
politicians promising to protect them against discrimination and violence.
They lack effective leaders, despite, or perhaps because of, the token, and
now diminishing, presence of Muslims at the highest levels of the
government-their position is unlikely to be improved much by A.P.J. Abdul
Kalam, the vegetarian Muslim missile scientist who fervently supports
India's nuclear buildup, and who has been chosen recently by Hindu
nationalists to be the next president of India. The language a majority of
Muslims still use-Urdu, which is barely distinguishable from spoken
Hindi-fell into decline as right-wing Hindu politicians intensified their
attempts after independence to impose a Sanskrit-laden Hindi as the officia=
l
language of India. Muslim representation in government jobs has steadily
declined-it now stands at less than 2 percent.

Writing with his usual bluntness in 1966, the Anglo-Bengali scholar and
polemicist Nirad Chaudhuri claimed to notice a "certain demure reserve"
among the Muslims whom he thought were previously obstreperous. "It clearly
shows," he wrote, "that they know their place in an India ruled by the
Hindus." He described the Hindu attitude toward Indian Muslims as a "mixtur=
e
of indifference, tinged with contempt and an absurd fear." Chaudhuri though=
t
that the fear became "much less pronounced" once riots in north India
demonstrated "the ease with which the Muslims could be slaughtered."[5]

4.
Anti-Muslim feeling doesn't seem confined any more to upper-caste Hindus in
straitened small-town circumstances, or to the perennially volatile slum
dwellers, Hindu as well as Muslim, who often appeared to be both the
aggressors and victims of Hindu-Muslim riots; and poverty and ignorance no
longer adequately explain religious fanaticism in India. What's disturbing,
and unique, about the recent killings in Gujarat is not so much the
complicity of the Indian state in violence against minorities as the
involvement of large numbers of educated, affluent Hindus.

The recent images of Hindu nationalist leaders in jeans, T-shirts, and Nike=
s
leading mobs of low-caste Dalits, or of middle-class Hindus carting off in
their Japanese cars the DVD players they had looted from Muslim-owned shops=
,
speak of the immense changes that have occurred in India since its economy
was liberalized in the early Nineties, particularly in Gujarat, the
birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the setting of his earliest political
battles, which is now referred to as the "laboratory" of Hindu nationalisms=
.
Much of the new wealth produced by a freer market in Gujarat is distributed
narrowly along caste lines, which has further sharpened the divide between
an acquisitive middle class and a frustrated underclass of mostly low-caste
Hindus and Muslims. The BJP has also managed to attract many tribals and
Dalits, primarily through a hate campaign against Muslim and Christian
minorities.[6]

BJP leaders in Delhi have refused to sack the chief minister of Gujarat,
even though he seems unwilling to arrest the more prominent Hindu
nationalist perpetrators of the recent violence, or to compensate adequatel=
y
the tens of thousands of Muslims in refugee camps. This suggests they are
not much deterred by the very real possibility of a militant backlash from
Indian Muslims-the kind of terrorist attacks that young Sikh separatists
mounted in north India through the late Eighties and early Nineties, after
Hindu mobs killed more than five thousand Sikhs following the assassination
of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. While they may hope to
further the cause of Hindu unity in a civil war-like situation, for the
moment the Hindu nationalists find it safer to channel their anti-Muslim
passions into anti-Pakistan rhetoric. Hindu nationalist members of the
Indian government called for a final showdown with Pakistan soon after Indi=
a
conducted nuclear tests in 1998. But the government's recent threat to
attack Pakistan was a much more shrewdly timed and successful strategy. Its
public rhetoric, articulated best by the hard-line Hindu nationalist L.K.
Advani, who was recently made deputy prime minister of India, has been in
line with the doctrine underpinning the current "war on terrorism": that
nations or governments that encourage or harbor terrorists expose themselve=
s
to violent retaliation.

By accusing Pakistan of being the prime sponsor of terrorists in Kashmir,
the government hoped to expose the contradictions in General Musharraf's
current standing as America's trusted ally in the "war on terrorism." The
government is likely to have anticipated that war in South Asia would appea=
r
to the US government as endangering its so far only partially successful
hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Hind=
u
nationalists, who are frustrated by their failure to build a Rama temple in
Ayodhya, also hope that aggressive posturing against Pakistan would help th=
e
BJP overcome its losses in state elections earlier this year, and revitaliz=
e
itself in time for the national elections in 2004.

General Musharraf's recent efforts to prevent the infiltration of militants
into Kashmir may be good news not only for Hindu nationalists, but also for
Kashmiri Muslims, most of whom have traditionally followed a heterodox Sufi
version of Islam, and have grown to dislike the fanatical Pakistan-based
militant groups that have targeted civilians, tried to impose restrictions
of dress and movement on women, and often assassinated Kashmiris fighting
for independence from both India and Pakistan. The Hindu nationalists may
well be right to claim that it was Pakistan-based militants who attacked th=
e
Indian parliament in December, and killed thirty-four civilians at an army
camp south of the Kashmir Valley in May. But peace won't automatically
return to Kashmir if Musharraf manages to rein in these militants along wit=
h
their sponsors in the Pakistani army and intelligence services.

More than 2,500 militants are reportedly already present in Kashmir. Local
militants, who have always outnumbered the ones arriving from Pakistan, are
unlikely to give up their struggle against Indian rule, which for them is
largely and provocatively represented by the hundreds of thousands of India=
n
soldiers who have made the valley of Kashmir the most heavily militarized
place in the world. The anti-India insurgency in Kashmir is likely to
continue, despite diminished support from across the border. It is not clea=
r
how the Hindu nationalist government will respond. It plans to hold
elections in Kashmir in October of this year. But, as with the previous
election in 1996, the government may find it hard to persuade most Kashmiri
Muslims to participate in them.

In mid-July the Hindu nationalist government again blamed
"Pakistan-inspired" militants for the massacre of twenty-eight civilians in
Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir. But it chose not to renew its threat
of attacking Pakistan, thereby acknowledging, it appeared, the diminishing
usefulness of its recent "war diplomacy." However its saber rattling has
already managed to partially drown out domestic and international criticism
of its role in the killings in Gujarat. In any case, international
disapproval of their actions will doubtless be only limited and fleeting.
Unlike most Islamists, Hindu nationalists do not challenge the power of the
West. In fact, they long for closer economic and military links with Americ=
a
and Europe, where many of them live, as India's best-known and most
successful entrepreneurs.

It is revealing, if initially confusing, to see how their recent swift rise
is partly due to the kind of globalization that creates wealth without
ensuring what Amartya Sen has called "human development." A small but
well-placed Hindu minority that experienced both prosperity and high
political status in the last two decades has brought Hinduism closer to
being organized into a modern nationalist ideology than at any other time
since the nineteenth century. It will be even harder now to resurrect
Nehru's hopes for expelling religion from politics and creating a secular
Indian citizenry through more equitable economic development-the noble
vision that seems mocked by the many Hindus who, recently enriched, and
emboldened by political power, flaunt their new religious identity.

-July 17, 2002

Notes
[1] See "Investigating Godhra," The Hindu, March 15, 2002, and "Godhra
Revisited," The Hindu, April 15, 2002.

[2] A recent report prepared by the Forensic Science Library which forms
part of the police indictment against sixty-two Muslims for the attack in
Godhra seems to contradict earlier reports by suggesting that the fire was
started from inside the train. (See The Hindu, July 4, 2002.)

[3] "Bharat mein Musalman hona" ("To Be a Muslim in India"), Bharatiya
Musalman: Mithak aur Yathartha (Indian Muslims: Myth and Reality), edited b=
y
Rajkishore (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 1993), pp. 14-23. Translations from
the Hindi are mine.

[4] Colonial rule created new religious, ethnic, and political identities
everywhere in Asia and Africa. In Rwanda under Belgian rule, official polic=
y
was to encourage the sense of ethnic differences between the Hutus and
Tutsis.

[5] See The Continent of Circe: Being an Essay on the Peoples of India
(Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 246-247.

[6] See "Politics by other Means: Attacks against Christians in India," a
report by Human Rights Watch, Vol. 11, No. 6 (September 1999). Also see
Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedy, Shail Mayaram, and Achyut Yagnik, Creating a
Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995), pp. 101-123.

_____

#3.

The Hindu
Tuesday, Jul 30, 2002
Opinion - Leader Page Articles
=20=20
An exercise in callousness
By Muchkund Dubey

It is a cruel joke to ask those still homeless and jobless after the=20
Gujarat carnage to exercise their voting rights.
http://www.hindu.com/stories/2002073000371000.htm

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