[sacw] SACW #2 | 28 April. 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire Dispatch #2 | 28 April 2002
http://www.mnet.fr

PUNISH THE GUILTY OF GUJARAT GENOCIDE
Call for a National Campaign For Defence of the Indian Constitution
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ptggg/petition.html

__________________________

#1. Democracy - Who's she when she's at home? (Arundhati Roy)
#2. In the shadow of Gujarat (Rahul Bajaj)
#3. India for Indians (Shashi Tharoor)

__________________________

1.

(http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=3D20020506&fname=3DRoy+%28F%2=
9&sid=3D1)
OUTLOOK INDIA, Magazine | May 06, 2002 ESSAY

Democracy
Who's she when she's at home?
ARUNDHATI ROY

Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minute=
s
to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated. Only that
Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach
had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she
died, someone carved 'OM' on her forehead.

Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches this?

Our Prime Minister justified this as part of the retaliation by outraged
Hindus against Muslim 'terrorists' who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on
the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. Each of those who died that hideous death
was someone's brother, someone's mother, someone's child. Of course they we=
re.

Which particular verse in the Quran required that they be roasted alive?

The more the two sides try and call attention to their religious difference=
s
by slaughtering each other, the less there is to distinguish them from one
another. They worship at the same altar. They're both apostles of the same
murderous god, whoever he is.
In an atmosphere so vitiated, for anybody, and in particular the Prime
Minister, to arbitrarily decree exactly where the cycle started is
malevolent and irresponsible.

Right now we're sipping from a poisoned chalice=97a flawed democracy laced
with religious fascism. Pure arsenic.

What shall we do? What can we do?

We have a ruling party that's haemorrhaging. Its rhetoric against Terrorism=
,
the passing of pota, the sabre-rattling against Pakistan (with the
underlying nuclear threat), the massing of almost a million soldiers on the
border on hair-trigger alert, and most dangerous of all, the attempt to
communalise and falsify school history text-books=97none of this has preven=
ted
it from being humiliated in election after election. Even its old party
trick=97the revival of the Ram mandir plans in Ayodhya=97didn't quite work =
out.
Desperate now, it has turned for succour to the state of Gujarat.

Gujarat, the only major state in India to have a bjp government has, for
some years, been the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting a=
n
elaborate political experiment. Last month, the initial results were put on
public display.

Within hours of the Godhra outrage, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (vhp) and the
Bajrang Dal put into motion a meticulously planned pogrom against the Musli=
m
community. Officially the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put th=
e
figure at well over 2,000. More than a hundred and fifty thousand people,
driven from their homes, now live in refugee camps. Women were stripped,
gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. Tw=
o
hundred and forty dargahs and 180 masjids were destroyed=97in Ahmedabad the
tomb of Wali Gujarati, the founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished
and paved over in the course of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad
Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated and wreathed in burning tyres. Arsonists
burned and looted shops, homes, hotels, textiles mills, buses and private
cars. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs.

A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His
phone calls to the Director-General of Police, the Police Commissioner, the
Chief Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were ignored. The
mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into
the house. They stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then they
beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of course it's only a coincidenc=
e
that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi=
,
during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly by-election in February.

Across Gujarat, thousands of people made up the mobs. They were armed with
petrol bombs, guns, knives, swords and tridents.Apart from the vhp and
Bajrang Dal's usual lumpen constituency, Dalits and Adivasis took part in
the orgy. Middle-class people participated in the looting. (On one memorabl=
e
occasion a family arrived in a Mitsubishi Lancer.) The leaders of the mob
had computer-generated cadastral lists marking out Muslim homes, shops,
businesses and even partnerships. They had mobile phones to coordinate the
action. They had trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded
weeks in advance, which they used to blow up Muslim commercial
establishments. They had not just police protection and police connivance,
but also covering fire.

While Gujarat burned, our Prime Minister was on mtv promoting his new poems=
.
(Reports say cassettes have sold a hundred thousand copies.) It took him
more than a month=97and two vacations in the hills=97to make it to Gujarat.
When he did, shadowed by the chilling Mr Modi, he gave a speech at the Shah
Alam refugee camp. His mouth moved, he tried to express concern, but no rea=
l
sound emerged except the mocking of the wind whistling through a burned,
bloodied, broken world. Next we knew, he was bobbing around in a golf-cart,
striking business deals in Singapore.

The killers still stalk Gujarat's streets. The lynch mob continues to be th=
e
arbiter of the routine affairs of daily life: who can live where, who can
say what, who can meet who, and where and when. Its mandate is expanding
quickly. From religious affairs, it now extends to property disputes, famil=
y
altercations, the planning and allocation of water resources... (which is
why Medha Patkar of the nba was assaulted). Muslim businesses have been shu=
t
down. Muslim people are not served in restaurants. Muslim children are not
welcome in schools. Muslim students are too terrified to sit for their
exams. Muslim parents live in dread that their infants might forget what
they've been told and give themselves away by saying 'Ammi!' or 'Abba!' in
public and invite sudden and violent death.

Notice has been given: this is just the beginning.

There have been hundreds of outraged letters to journals and newspapers
asking why the "pseudo-secularists" do not condemn the burning of the
Sabarmati Express in Godhra with the same degree of outrage with which they
condemn the killings in the rest of Gujarat.What they don't seem to
understand is that there is a fundamental difference between a pogrom such
as the one taking place in Gujarat now, and the burning of the Sabarmati
Express in Godhra. We still don't know who exactly was responsible for the
carnage in Godhra. The government says (without a shred of evidence) it was
an isi plot. Independent reports say the train was set on fire by an enrage=
d
mob.Either way, it was a criminal act. But every independent report says th=
e
pogrom against the Muslim community in Gujarat=97billed by the government a=
s
spontaneous 'retaliation'=97has at best been conducted under the benign gaz=
e
of the State and, at worst, with active State collusion. Either way the
State is criminally culpable.

And the State acts in the name of its citizens. So as a citizen, I am force=
d
to acknowledge that I am somehow made complicit in the Gujarat pogrom. It i=
s
this that outrages me. And it is this that puts a completely different
complexion on the two massacres.

After the Gujarat Massacres, at its convention in Bangalore, the rss, the
moral and cultural guild of the bjp, of which the Prime Minister, the Home
Minister and Chief Minister Modi himself are all members, called upon
Muslims to earn the 'goodwill' of the majority community. At the meeting of
the national executive of the bjp in Goa, Narendra Modi was greeted as a
hero. His smirking offer to resign from the chief minister's post was
unanimously turned down. In a recent public speech he compared the events o=
f
the last few weeks in Gujarat to Gandhi's Dandi March=97both, according to
him, significant moments in the Struggle for Freedom.

While the parallels between contemporary India and pre-war Germany are
chilling, they're not surprising. (The founders of the rss have, in their
writings, been frank in their admiration for Hitler and his methods.) One
difference is that here in India we don't have a Hitler. We have instead, a
travelling extravaganza, a mobile symphonic orchestra. The hydra-headed,
many-armed Sangh Parivar=97with the bjp, the rss, the vhp and the Bajrang D=
al,
each playing a different instrument. Its utter genius lies in its apparent
ability to be all things to all people at all times.

The Parivar has an appropriate head for every occasion. An old versifier
with rhetoric for every season. A rabble-rousing hardliner for Home Affairs=
,
a suave one for Foreign Affairs, a smooth, English-speaking lawyer to handl=
e
TV debates, a cold-blooded creature for a Chief Minister and the Bajrang Da=
l
and the vhp, grassroots workers in charge of the physical labour that goes
into the business of genocide. Finally, this many-headed extravaganza has a
lizard's tail which drops off when it's in trouble, and grows back again: a
specious socialist dressed up as Defence Minister, who it sends on its
damage-limitation missions=97wars, cyclones, genocides. They trust him to
press the right buttons, hit the right note.

The Sangh Parivar speaks in as many tongues as a whole corsage of trishuls.

Is this the Hindu rashtra that we've all been asked to look forward to? Onc=
e
the Muslims have been "shown their place", will milk and Coca-Cola flow
across the land? Once the Ram mandir is built, will there be a shirt on
every back and a roti in every belly? Will every tear be wiped from every
eye? Can we expect an anniversary celebration next year? Or will there be
someone else to hate by then? Alphabetically=97Adivasis, Buddhists,
Christians, Dalits, Parsis, Sikhs? Those who wear jeans, or speak English,
or those who have thick lips, or curly hair? We won't have to wait long.
It's started already. Will the established rituals continue? Will people be
beheaded, dismembered and urinated upon? Will foetuses be ripped from their
mothers' wombs and slaughtered? (What kind of depraved vision can even
imagine India without the range and beauty and spectacular anarchy of all
these cultures? India would become a tomb and smell like a crematorium.)

No matter who they were, or how they were killed, each person who died in
Gujarat in the weeks gone by deserves to be mourned.

It can say several contradictory things simultaneously.While one of its
heads (the vhp) exhorts millions of its cadres to prepare for the Final
Solution, its titular head (the Prime Minister) assures the nation that all
citizens, regardless of their religion, will be treated equally. It can ban
books and films and burn paintings for 'insulting Indian culture'.
Simultaneously, it can mortgage the equivalent of 60 per cent of the entire
country's rural development budget as profit to Enron. It contains within
itself the full spectrum of political opinion, so what would normally be a
public fight between two adversarial political parties, is now just a Famil=
y
Matter. However acrimonious the quarrel, it's always conducted in public,
always resolved amicably, and the audience always goes away satisfied it's
got value for money=97anger, action, revenge, intrigue, remorse, poetry and
plenty of gore. It's our own vernacular version of Full Spectrum Dominance.

But when the chips are down, really down, the squabbling heads quieten, and
it becomes chillingly apparent that underneath all the clamour and the
noise, a single heart beats. And an unforgiving mind with saffron-saturated
tunnel vision works overtime.

There have been pogroms in India before, every kind of pogrom=97directed at
particular castes, tribes, religious faiths. In 1984, following the
assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party presided over the
massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi, every bit as macabre as the one
in Gujarat. At the time, Rajiv Gandhi, never known for an elegant turn of
phrase, said, "When a big tree falls, the ground shakes". In 1985 the
Congress swept the polls. On a sympathy wave! Eighteen years have gone by.
Nobody has been punished.

Take any politically volatile issue=97the nuclear tests, the Babri Masjid, =
the
Tehelka scam, the stirring of the communal cauldron for electoral
advantage=97and you'll see the Congress Party has been there before. In eve=
ry
case, the Congress sowed the seed and the bjp has swept in to reap the
hideous harvest. So in the event that we're called upon to vote, is there a
difference between the two? The answer is a faltering but distinct 'yes'.
Here's why: It's true that the Congress Party has sinned, and grievously,
and for decades together. But it has done by night what the bjp does by day=
.
It has done covertly, stealthily, hypocritically, shamefacedly, what the bj=
p
does with pride. And this is an important difference.

Whipping up communal hatred is part of the mandate of the Sangh Parivar. It
has been planned for years. It has been injecting a slow-release poison
directly into civil society's bloodstream. Hundreds of rss shakhas and
Saraswati shishu mandirs across the country have been indoctrinating
thousands of children and young people, stunting their minds with religious
hatred and falsified history. They're no different from, and no less
dangerous than, the madrassas all over Pakistan and Afghanistan which
spawned the Taliban. In states like Gujarat, the police, the administration=
,
and the political cadres at every level have been systematically penetrated=
.
It has huge popular appeal, which it would be foolish to underestimate or
misunderstand. The whole enterprise has a formidable religious, ideological=
,
political, and administrative underpinning. This kind of power, this kind o=
f
reach, can only be achieved with State backing.

Madrassas, the Muslim equivalent of hothouses cultivating religious hatred,
try and make up in frenzy and foreign funding, what they lack in State
support. They provide the perfect foil for Hindu communalists to dance thei=
r
dance of mass paranoia and hatred. (In fact they serve that purpose so
perfectly, they might just as well be working as a team.)

Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is that the
majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to living in ghettos as
second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil rights and no
recourse to justice. What will daily life be like for them? Any little
thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic light,
could turn lethal. So they will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their
lot, to creep around the edges of the society in which they live. Their fea=
r
will transmit itself to other minorities. Many, particularly the young, wil=
l
probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society wil=
l
be called upon to condemn them. Then President Bush's canon will come back
to us: "Either you're with us or with the terrorists."

Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For years to come, butchers
and genocidists will fit their grisly mouths around them ('lip-synch',
filmmakers call it) in order to justify their butchery.

Mr Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, who has lately been feeling a little
upstaged by Mr Modi, has the lasting solution. He's called for civil war.
Isn't that just perfect? Then Pakistan won't need to bomb us, we can bomb
ourselves.Let's turn all of India into Kashmir. Or Bosnia. Or Palestine. Or
Rwanda. Let's all suffer forever. Let's buy expensive guns and explosives t=
o
kill each other with. Let the British arms dealers and the American weapons
manufacturers grow fat on our spilled blood. We could ask the Carlyle
group=97of which the Bush and Bin Laden families are both shareholders=97fo=
r a
bulk discount. Maybe if things go really well, we'll become like
Afghanistan. (And look at the publicity they've gone and got themselves.)
When all our farm lands are mined, our buildings destroyed, our
infrastructure reduced to rubble, our children physically maimed and
mentally wrecked, when we've nearly wiped ourselves out with
self-manufactured hatred, maybe we can appeal to the Americans to help us
out. Airdropped airline meals, anyone?

How close we have come to self-destruction. Another step and we'll be in
free-fall. And yet the government presses on. At the Goa meeting of the
bjp's national executive, the Prime Minister of Secular, Democratic India,
Mr A.B. Vajpayee, made history. He became the first Indian Prime Minister t=
o
cross the threshold and publicly unveil an unconscionable bigotry against
Muslims, which even George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld would be embarrassed t=
o
own up to. "Wherever Muslims are," he said, "they do not want to live
peacefully."

Shame on him. But if only it were just him: in the immediate aftermath of
the Gujarat holocaust, confident of the success of its 'experiment', the bj=
p
wants a snap poll. "The gentlest of people," my friend from Baroda said to
me, "the gentlest of people, in the gentlest of voices, says 'Modi is our
hero.'"

Some of us nurtured the naive hope that the magnitude of the horror of the
last few weeks would make the Secular Parties, however self-serving, unite
in sheer outrage. On its own, the bjp does not have the mandate of the
people of India. It does not have the mandate to push through the Hindutva
project. We hoped that the 27 allies that make up the bjp-led coalition at
the Centre would withdraw their support. We thought, quite stupidly, that
they would see that there could be no bigger test of their moral fibre, of
their commitment to their avowed principles of secularism.

It's a sign of the times that not a single one of the bjp's allies has
withdrawn support. In every shifty eye you see that faraway look of someone
doing mental maths to calculate which constituencies and portfolios they'll
retain and which ones they'll lose if they pull out. Except for Deepak
Parekh of hdfc, not a single ceo of India's Corporate Community has
condemned what happened. Farooq Abdullah, Chief Minister of Kashmir and the
only prominent Muslim politician left in India, is currying favour with the
government by supporting Modi because he's nursing the dim hope that he may
become Vice-President of India very soon.And worst of all=97Mayawati, leade=
r
of the bsp=97the great hope of the lower castes, is on the verge of forging=
an
alliance with the bjp in UP.

The Congress and the Left parties have launched a public agitation asking
for Modi's resignation. Resignation? Have we lost all sense of proportion?
Criminals are not meant to resign. They're meant to be charged, tried and
convicted.
As those who burned the train in Godhra should be. As the mobs, and those
members of the police force and the administration who planned and
participated in the pogrom in the rest of Gujarat should be. As those
responsible for raising the pitch of the frenzy to boiling point must be.
The Supreme Court has the option of acting against Modi and the Bajrang Dal
and the vhp suo motu (when the Court itself files charges). There are
hundreds of testimonies. There's masses of evidence.

But in India if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a
politician, you have every reason to be optimistic.No one even expects
politicians to be prosecuted. To demand that Modi and his henchmen be
arraigned and put away, would make other politicians vulnerable to their ow=
n
unsavoury pasts=97so instead they disrupt Parliament, shout a lot, eventual=
ly
those in power set up commissions of inquiry, ignore the findings and
between themselves make sure the juggernaut chugs on.

Already the issue has begun to morph. Should elections be allowed or not?
Should the Election Commission decide that? Or the Supreme Court? Either
way, whether elections are held or deferred, by allowing Modi to walk free,
by allowing him to continue with his career as a politician, the
fundamental, governing principles of democracy are not just being subverted=
,
but deliberately sabotaged. This kind of democracy is the problem, not the
solution. Our society's greatest strength is being turned into her deadlies=
t
enemy. What's the point of us all going on about 'deepening democracy', whe=
n
it's being bent and twisted into something unrecognisable?

What if the bjp does win the elections? (The buzz is that engineering a war
against Pakistan is going to be the bjp's strategy to swing the vote.) Afte=
r
all, George Bush had an 80 per cent rating in his War Against Terror, and
Ariel Sharon has a similar mandate for his bestial invasion of Palestine.
Does that make everything all right? Why not dispense with the legal system=
,
the Constitution, the press=97the whole shebang=97morality itself, why not =
chuck
it and put everything up for a vote? Genocides can become the subject of
opinion polls and massacres can have marketing campaigns.

Fascism's firm footprint has appeared in India. Let's mark the date: Spring=
,
2002. While we can thank the American President and the Coalition Against
Terror for creating a congenial international atmosphere for its ghastly
debut, we cannot credit them for the years it has been brewing in our publi=
c
and private lives.

It breezed in in the wake of the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. From then
onwards, the massed energy of bloodthirsty patriotism became openly
acceptable political currency. The 'weapons of peace' trapped India and
Pakistan in a spiral of brinkmanship=97threat and counter-threat, taunt and
counter-taunt. And now, one war and hundreds of dead later, more than a
million soldiers from both armies are massed at the border, eyeball to
eyeball, locked in a pointless nuclear standoff.The escalating belligerence
against Pakistan has ricocheted off the border and entered our own body
politic, like a sharp blade slicing through the vestiges of communal harmon=
y
and tolerance between the Hindu and Muslim communities. In no time at all,
the godsquadders from hell have colonised the public imagination. And we
allowed them in. Each time the hostility between India and Pakistan is
cranked up, within India there's a corresponding increase in the hostility
towards the Muslims. With each battle cry against Pakistan, we inflict a
wound on ourselves, on our way of life, on our spectacularly diverse and
ancient civilisation, on everything that makes India different from
Pakistan. Increasingly, Indian Nationalism has come to mean Hindu
Nationalism, which defines itself not through a respect or regard for
itself, but through a hatred of the Other. And the Other, for the moment, i=
s
not just Pakistan, it's Muslim. It's disturbing to see how neatly
nationalism dovetails into fascism. While we must not allow the fascists to
define what the nation is, or who it belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind
that nationalism, in all its many avatars=97socialist, capitalist and
fascist=97has been at the root of almost all the genocides of the twentieth
century. On the issue of nationalism, it's wise to proceed with caution.

And there will not always be spectacular carnage to report on. Fascism is
also about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of State
power. It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular
day-to-day injustices. Fighting it means fighting to win back the minds and
hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean asking for rss shakhas and the
madrassas to be banned, it means working towards the day when they're
voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas.It means keeping an eagle eye on public
institutions and demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the
ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless. It means
giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance
movements across the country who are speaking about real things=97about bon=
ded
labour, marital rape, sexual preferences, women's wages, uranium dumping,
unsustainable mining, weavers' woes, farmers' worries. It means fighting
displacement and dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of
abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your newspaper columns
and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their
staged theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from everything el=
se.

While most people in India have been horrified by what happened in Gujarat,
many thousands of the indoctrinated are preparing to journey deeper into th=
e
heart of the horror. Look around you and you'll see in little parks, in big
maidans, in empty lots, in village commons, the rss is marching, hoisting
its saffron flag. Suddenly they're everywhere, grown men in khaki shorts
marching, marching, marching. To where? For what? Their disregard for
history shields them from the knowledge that fascism will thrive for a shor=
t
while and then self-annihilate because of its inherent stupidity. But
unfortunately, like the radioactive fallout of a nuclear strike, it has a
half-life that will cripple generations to come.

These levels of rage and hatred cannot be contained, cannot be expected to
subside, with public censure and denunciation. Hymns of brotherhood and lov=
e
are great, but not enough.

Historically, fascist movements have been fuelled by feelings of national
disillusionment. Fascism has come to India after the dreams that fuelled th=
e
Freedom Struggle have been frittered away like so much loose change.

Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a 'wooden
loaf'=97a notional freedom tainted by the blood of the thousands who died
during Partition.For more than half a century now, the hatred and mutual
distrust has been exacerbated, toyed with and never allowed to heal by
politicians, led from the front by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Every political party
has tilled the marrow of our secular parliamentary democracy, mining it for
electoral advantage. Like termites excavating a mound, they've made tunnels
and underground passages, undermining the meaning of 'secular', until it ha=
s
just become an empty shell that's about to implode. Their tilling has
weakened the foundations of the structure that connects the Constitution,
Parliament and the courts of law=97the configuration of checks and balances
that forms the backbone of a parliamentary democracy. Under the
circumstances, it's futile to go on blaming politicians and demanding from
them a morality they're incapable of. There's something pitiable about a
people that constantly bemoans its leaders. If they've let us down, it's
only because we've allowed them to. It could be argued that civil society
has failed its leaders as much as leaders have failed civil society. We hav=
e
to accept that there is a dangerous, systemic flaw in our parliamentary
democracy that politicians will exploit. And that's what results in the kin=
d
of conflagration that we have witnessed in Gujarat. There's fire in the
ducts. We have to address this issue and come up with a systemic solution.

Can we not find it in ourselves to belong to an ancient civilisation instea=
d
of to just a recent nation? To love a land instead of just patrolling a
territory? The Sangh Parivar understands nothing of what civilisation
means.It seeks to limit, reduce, define, dismember and desecrate the memory
of what we were, our understanding of what we are, and our dreams of who we
want to be. What kind of India do they want? A limbless, headless, soulless
torso, left bleeding under the butchers' cleaver with a flag driven deep
into her mutilated heart? Can we let that happen? Have we let it happen?

The incipient, creeping fascism of the past few years has been groomed by
many of our 'democratic' institutions. Everyone has flirted with
it=97Parliament, the press, the police, the administration, the public. Eve=
n
'secularists' have been guilty of helping to create the right climate. Each
time you defend the right of an institution, any institution (including the
Supreme Court), to exercise unfettered, unaccountable powers that must neve=
r
be challenged, you move towards fascism. To be fair, perhaps not everyone
recognised the early signs for what they were.

The national press has been startlingly courageous in its denunciation of
the events of the last few weeks. Many of the bjp's fellow travellers who
have journeyed with it to the brink are now looking down the abyss into the
hell that was once Gujarat, and turning away in genuine dismay. But how har=
d
and for how long will they fight? This is not going to be like a publicity
campaign for an upcoming cricket season.

But politicians' exploitation of communal divides is by no means the only
reason that fascism has arrived on our shores.

Over the past fifty years, ordinary citizens' modest hopes for lives of
dignity, security and relief from abject poverty have been systematically
snuffed out. Every 'democratic' institution in this country has shown itsel=
f
to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the ordinary citizen, and either
unwilling, or incapable of acting, in the interests of genuine social
justice. Every strategy for real social change=97land reform, education,
public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources, the
implementation of positive discrimination=97has been cleverly, cunningly an=
d
consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that
class of people who have a stranglehold on the political process. And now
corporate globalisation is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an
essentially feudal society, tearing through its complex, tiered, social
fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.

There is very real grievance here. And the fascists didn't create it. But
they have seized upon it, upturned it and forged from it a hideous, bogus
sense of pride. They have mobilised human beings using the lowest common
denominator=97religion. People who have lost control over their lives, peop=
le
who have been uprooted from their homes and communities who have lost their
culture and their language, are being made to feel proud of something. Not
something they have striven for and achieved, not something they can count
as a personal accomplishment, but something they just happen to be. Or, mor=
e
accurately, something they happen not to be. And the falseness, the
emptiness of that pride, is fuelling a gladiatorial anger that is then
directed towards a simulated target that has been wheeled into the
amphitheatre.

How else can you explain the project of trying to disenfranchise, drive out
or exterminate the second-poorest community in this country, using as your
footsoldiers the very poorest (Dalits and Adivasis)? How else can you
explain why Dalits in Gujarat, who have been despised, oppressed and treate=
d
worse than refuse by the upper castes for thousands of years, have joined
hands with their oppressors to turn on those who are only marginally less
unfortunate than they themselves? Are they just wage slaves, mercenaries fo=
r
hire? Is it all right to patronise them and absolve them of responsibility
for their own actions? Or am I being obtuse? Perhaps it's common practice
for the unfortunate to vent their rage and hatred on the next most
unfortunate, because their real adversaries are inaccessible, seemingly
invincible and completely out of range? Because their own leaders have cut
loose and are feasting at the high table, leaving them to wander rudderless
in the wilderness, spouting nonsense about returning to the Hindu fold. (Th=
e
first step, presumably, towards founding a Global Hindu Empire, as realisti=
c
a goal as Fascism's previously failed projects=97the restoration of Roman
Glory, the purification of the German race or the establishment of an
Islamic Sultanate.)

One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India. Hindu fascists regard
them as legitimate prey. Do people like Modi and Bal Thackeray think that
the world will stand by and watch while they're liquidated in a 'civil war?=
'
Press reports say that the European Union and several other countries have
condemned what happened in Gujarat and likened it to Nazi rule. The Indian
government's portentous response is that foreigners should not use the
Indian media to comment on what is an 'internal matter' (like the chilling
goings-on in Kashmir?). What next? Censorship? Closing down the Internet?
Blocking international calls? Killing the wrong 'terrorists' and fudging th=
e
dna samples? There is no terrorism like State terrorism.

But who will take them on? Their fascist cant can perhaps be dented by some
blood and thunder from the Opposition. So far only Laloo Yadav of Bihar has
shown himself to be truly passionate: "Kaun mai ka lal kehta hai ki yeh
Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do, chhati phad doonga!" (Which mother's
son says this is a Hindu Nation? Send him here, I'll tear his chest open.)

Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can only be turned away
if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice tha=
t
equals the intensity of their indignation.

Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of
us, to rally not just on the streets, but at work and in schools and in our
homes, in every decision we take, and every choice we make?

Or not just yet...

If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as
it should), like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will
learn to recognise revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human beings. We too
will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the
shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to
happen.

This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.

_____

#2

The Hindustan Times
Sunday, April 28, 2002

In the shadow of Gujarat
by Rahul Bajaj
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/280402/detFEA03.asp

_____

#3.

The Hindu
Sunday, Apr 28, 2002
Magazine
The Shashi Tharoor Column

India for Indians

Both saffron and green `belong' to the flag.

THE inevitable backlash to my column about the Gujarat horrors (and=20
the version of it that was published in the New York Times) has come=20
in, and a fair bit of it has taken the form of belligerent e-mails=20
and assorted Internet fulminations from the less reflective of the=20
Hindutva brigade. I have been excoriated as "anti-Hindu" and=20
described by several as a "well-known leftist", which will no doubt=20
amuse those of my friends who knew me in college 30 years ago as=20
perhaps the sole supporter of Rajaji's Swatantra Party in those=20
consensually socialist times.

One anguished member of the Parivar tried to whip up support for a=20
full-page ad in the New York Times denouncing me, but fortunately his=20
potential sponsors seem to have found the idea as risible as I did.=20
And at least one correspondent, reminding me of the religion that has=20
been mine from birth, succumbed to the temptation to urge me=20
predictably to heed that well-worn slogan: "garv se kahon ki hum=20
Hindu hain - Say with pride that we are Hindu".

All right, let us take him up on that. I am indeed proud that I am a=20
Hindu. But of what is it that I am, and am not, proud? [...]

Full text at :=20
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2002042800260300.htm

______

#6.

--=20
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