[sacw] SACW | 2 Feb. 03

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | February 2, 2003

#1. More weapons, less peace
A militarised South Asia will be insecure, unhappy (Praful Bidwai)
#2. A Degenerating Nuclear Logic (Achin Vanaik)
#3. The Other Face of Fanaticism (Pankaj Mishra)

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#1.

Communalism Combat (Bombay)
January 2003 , Year 9 No.83
Cover Story

More weapons, less peace
A militarised South Asia will be insecure, unhappy
BY PRAFUL BIDWAI

South Asia, home to the largest number of the world's poor people, is 
poised to burn more and more money on acquiring lethal weapons and 
building military forces. The region, with a population of 1.3 
billion, has some of the lowest social and human development 
indicators in the world.

Barring Sri Lanka (much like India's Kerala), all South Asian states 
fall within the bottom one-fourth of the Human Development Index 
charts compiled by the United Nations Development Programme. They 
perform even worse in respect of indices for literacy and health for 
children. In the 2002 HDI, India ranks a shameful 124 (among 173 
countries). Pakistan is even lower (138). Nepal ranks 142 and 
Bangladesh 145. Sri Lanka is at a more respectable 89.

Yet, South Asia is the second largest importer of weapons from the 
global arms bazaar. It is expected to spend upwards of $130 billion 
over the next 15 years on buying armaments-a sum that is about a 
third of India's entire annual gross domestic product (GDP).

South Asia is getting rapidly militarised - thanks to internal 
conflicts within its member-states' borders, external rivalries, 
largely between states, and above all, because of its rulers' 
preference for military solutions to social and political problems. 
As the South Asian states look for security through military means, 
their societies and peoples become more and more insecure, in the 
real sense of the term, related to food security, income security, 
security of employment, gender security and personal security.

Militarisation in South Asia has many aspects: sharply rising 
military expenditures, the expanding role of the military and 
military-related institutions in public life, and the regimentation 
and militarisation of society and of daily life itself. Here we look 
mainly at the first issue.

Militarisation is steadily growing in all respects in all South Asian 
states. Not one of them can boast, like Costa Rica in Latin America, 
or Austria in Europe, that they have reduced defence spending, and 
cut or dismantled their armies, and yet gained in security.

India is South Asia's biggest spender, given its sheer size. It is 
also the world's second biggest importer of arms, next only to China. 
India's military expenditure this year is officially Rs. 76,600 
crore. But if other hidden spending - such as subsidies to defence 
production companies and classified imports - is added, the military 
budget will probably go up to Rs. 85,000 crore. Contrast this with 
the entire expenditure on primary education of Rs. 35,000 crore, in 
the public, private, municipal and panchayat sectors put together.

India's defence spending has doubled over the past five years - the 
highest such increase in any five-year period since Independence. 
This did not happen even after the China war. As India builds its 
nuclear arsenal, the expenditure will skyrocket.

The Indian government spends roughly 3.5 percent of GDP on the 
military, and yet another 0.5 or so on the Central paramilitary 
forces. But in contrast to this total of four percent of GDP, its 
expenditure on health is a mere 1.3 percent of GDP.

In many developed countries, public expenditure on health is 5 to 7 
percent of GDP. And even in developing countries like Malaysia, 
Mexico, Thailand, Egypt, Peru or Zimbabwe, the figure is double or 
triple the Indian ratio. India's spending on education, which the 
government promises to raise to 6 percent of GDP, has now fallen to 
under 3 percent of GDP.

Military expenditure is certain to sharply exceed the budgeted figure 
this year because of the unbudgeted mobilisation of 7 lakh troops at 
the border for 10 long months. This is officially stated to have cost 
Rs. 7,200 crore, but the real figure may be Rs. 10,000 crore or so 
(i.e., 13 percent higher than the budget). The Rs. 10,000 crore is 
four times higher than the Central health budget and exceeds the 
Centre's entire budget for education! Yet, there has been no debate 
on whether such mobilisation should have taken place following the 
December 2001 Parliament House attack, what its objectives should 
have been, and how much should have been spent on it.

India has just signed a huge $3 billion contract with Russia to lease 
four Tu22 M3 long-range aircraft - capable of dropping nuclear bombs 
on China - and two Akula class submarines which are nuclear-propelled 
and can deliver nuclear warheads at long distances. Nuclear 
submarines can hide underwater for months at a time and can 
devastatingly deliver a surprise strike. The Russian deal alone 
raises India's military expenditure by 25 percent. The money will 
come out of social sector programmes.

Pakistan has always spent a larger proportion (5 or 6 percent) of its 
GDP on the military than India. Although its population is seven 
times smaller than India's, its armed forces are only about one-half 
of India's size. Pakistan overtly crossed the nuclear threshold, 
following India, in May 1998 - and immediately went into financial 
insolvency. Besides an ambitious programme to stockpile nuclear 
material for bombs, it has spent huge amounts on ballistic missiles 
like the Hatf and Ghauri. This drove the government deeper into the 
red, inviting the term "failing" or "failed" state - until the 
September 11, 2001 attack brought the US into the region, on to 
Pakistan's soil and revived the economy of this "strategic partner" 
against "terrorism".

Defence spending, which had fallen for two years, has since been 
raised. Pakistan is now charging the US $60 million a month for the 
use of its bases. The state of public services in Pakistan is even 
more appalling than in India. But that has not prevented the 
government from committing more funds to the military. Pakistan's 
sole nuclear adversary, India, is furiously assembling its nuclear 
arsenal and readying it for deployment and use. This is drawing 
Pakistan into a potentially runaway arms race with India.

Already, the 10-month-long border mobilisation has hurt Pakistan 
economically. There is a strong likelihood that increased spending on 
nuclear and missile programmes will soon raise Pakistan's military 
budget upwards of 6 percent of GDP, which could prove ruinous to the 
economy and to the people.

Besides the two major South Asian rivals, Bangladesh has also 
witnessed a sharp rise in military spending, at an average annual 
rate of 4 percent since the mid-1980s. The nuclear tests of 1998 by 
India and Pakistan generally strengthened the pressure for greater 
military preparedness and spending in the neighbourhood. Bangladesh 
bought eight MiG-29 fighters in 1999, whose need and utility have 
been strongly questioned. The successor government (led by Khaleda 
Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party) now wants to sell these off. 
The new government however has close ties both with the military and 
Right-wing Islamists. In fact, it has recently used the military 
largely for civilian purposes - e.g. traffic management - and to 
harass its political opponents. This has created huge strife in 
Bangladesh.

Nepal has now become a deeply crisis-ridden country, thanks to the 
Maoist insurgency, the Royal family's assassination, and the recent 
dismissal of an elected government by King Gyanendra. The King has 
all but directly usurped power and substantially undermined the gains 
of the democratisation process from 1990 onwards. Nepal is considered 
to be a "failing", if not a "failed" state, even as the monarchy 
intrudes into political life and arbitrarily doubles its allowances 
drawn from the state exchequer. The Royal Nepal Army's budget has 
been doubled this year even as its anti-insurgency activity has 
increased. But its writ does not run in 45 to 50 out of Nepal's 75 
districts. Twenty-two districts have no communication with Kathmandu. 
India has pursued a confused and inconsistent policy on Nepal. The 
King is inviting foreign powers, especially the United States and 
Britain, to play a major role in Nepal. There is extensive training 
by US troops of the Nepali military. The US supports this role in the 
name of fighting "terrorism".

Sri Lanka has suffered the worst ravages of militarism in South Asia 
through the "war" with the Tamil separatists since 1983. Once the 
best model for human development in the entire Third World - and the 
first country to have a universal social welfare and food guarantee 
system - Sri Lanka has over the past two decades become a highly 
militarised society, with bunkers and barbed-wire fences dotting the 
entire country. Today, the welfare schemes for which the country was 
rightly famous, stand dismantled.

In 1985, Sri Lanka's military spending was 2.6 percent of GDP. By the 
mid-1990s, it doubled. It has since reached a horrifying 10 percent 
of GDP. The size of the armed forces has increased six-fold over 
these years. Today, Sri Lanka has about 7 soldiers per 1,000 
population (India has 1.2 and Pakistan 4.6).

There is some good news however: the peace process being brokered by 
Norway. There have been three rounds of talks between the government 
and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and some progress towards 
demilitarisation in the North. But there are misgivings on all sides. 
It is not clear if the LTTLE has fully given up the separate state 
demand. It is trying to establish despotic one-party rule in 
whichever area the army vacates. The Muslim minority is not happy. 
And the government too is divided. If the peace process is fully 
democratised, with assurances of political pluralism, and if it wins 
consensual support, Sri Lanka could get out of the mess. But that is 
not yet assured.

Bhutan, the tiny Buddhist kingdom, remains a totally authoritarian 
monarchy, with little separation between the army, the police and the 
civil authorities, all controlled by the Palace.

A significant aspect of militarisation in South Asia is the growing 
role of militarist thinking, which promotes the use of force to 
resolve disputes and differences. This trend has grown in the whole 
region. The US' extremely negative example in declaring an unending, 
prolonged, global "war" on terrorism after September 11, 2001, has 
had a disastrous impact on South Asia. It has strengthened Right-wing 
militarist tendencies and rationalised brutal force in the name of 
fighting anything that can be branded "terrorism".

Parallel to this, and supplementing it, is the advance of 
ethnic-religious political movements and parties like the BJP-RSS in 
India, the MMA in Pakistan, and the extreme Right Islamic alliance 
with which the BNP shares power in Bangladesh's ruling coalition.

Ultimately, security has to do with justice, equality and freedom, as 
well as people's empowerment. These are all under threat in South 
Asia.

As economic growth falters, as income and regional disparities 
sharply increase, and as human securitydecreases, South Asia's elites 
rely more and more on force to regain "security". This is happening 
increasingly at the level of daily life. As crime rises, along with 
joblessness, displacement and destitution, the rich build higher and 
higher walls around themselves, the police become increasingly 
brutal, and the polity less and less accommodative and consensual - 
and society more and more insecure.

The search for security through military means is counterproductive. 

(The writer is a widely-read columnist and peace activist).

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#2.

The Hindu, 23 January 2003

A DEGENERATING NUCLEAR LOGIC
By Achin Vanaik

Are our memories so short? Doesn't anyone remember that veritable 
deluge of voices in Summer 1998 from the ranks of our 'strategic 
establishment' who assured us that regional stability would be 
enhanced by first India and then Pakistan going openly nuclear? The 
wondrous workings of deterrence would usher in greater nuclear 
security for both countries as well as reduce the likelihood of 
conventional military conflict and tensions. There were those in the 
anti-nuclear camp who pointed out that this was inverted logic. That 
militarization-nuclearization are the symptoms and expressions of 
political hostility and cannot themselves undo or lessen that 
hostility since they can never address the deeper causes sustaining 
those hostilities. Indeed, that such nuclearization would only 
exacerbate tensions. But their voices were simply ignored or 
dismissed.

Four-and-a-half years down the line who was right? Can anybody doubt 
or deny that relations between India and Pakistan are more embittered 
than in decades? That the presence of nuclear weapons, far from being 
the soothing balm they were purported to be, have simply added a 
dangerous, and new, layer of tensions to a situation of already 
abiding unease? The easy way out to explain this is to assign all the 
blame to Pakistan - its perfidiousness, abetment of terrorists, 
initiation of Kargil, and so on. Even if one accepts such a one-sided 
assessment that effectively exculpates India from all responsibility 
for the deterioration in mutual relations, it still exposes the lack 
of foresight by the pro-bomb lobby in India that was earlier so keen 
to claim all kinds of healing powers for the nuclearization of the 
region, which incidentally, was initiated by India not Pakistan?

Remember, too, the oft-repeated claim that there would be no 
competitive arms race between India and Pakistan! Yet both countries 
test, accumulate more weapons-grade material to make more and better 
warheads, expand the range of their missiles, put in place nuclear 
command and control systems which they assure us will work and make 
matters safer, even as both governments spew venom at each other and 
indulge in a language of irresponsible nuclear arrogance and 
brinkmanship that was rarely ever witnessed between the US and the 
former USSR even at the height of the Cold War. The reason for this 
contrast in styles and patterns of political behaviour is obvious. 
The conflict between the US and the USSR was primarily ideological 
yet abstract - a clash between two systems upon which the passage of 
time would be left to pronounce comparative judgement. The conflict 
between India and Pakistan has long been directly 
political-territorial, repeatedly involving military engagement 
(conventional wars), and now with the rise of religious extremism in 
both countries (and the hatreds inspired by such extremism) far more 
dangerous even in its ideological dimension.

This is the context in which we have to view the latest developments 
of the setting up of a Nuclear Command Authority in India with its 
claim of institutionalizing alternative chains of command (should the 
'enemy' launch a pre-emptive 'decapitating' strike), and the dilution 
of its previous No Use commitment to non-nuclear states that are now 
warned that they can face nuclear attack even if they use chemical or 
biological weapons, though a huge chasm in terms of consequences 
still separates nuclear weapons from even these weapons. The 
degenerative logic of seeking security through nuclear weapons has 
now taken hold. The Musharraf government in the typical fashion of 
nuclear bomb buffs has to claim various virtues for Pakistan's 
nuclear arsenal. So he declares that but for its nuclear power India 
would have launched a conventional attack on Pakistan. Moreover, he 
warns, Pakistan will reply 'unconventionally' to any future 
conventional Indian assault.

The obvious follows. An India that has already claimed various 
virtues for its nuclear arsenal and keen to disabuse Pakistan of its 
belief that it can hide behind a nuclear shield, had already in the 
past through the figure of the defense minister, George Fernandes, 
(and others) declared that India was not deterred by the Pakistan 
'bluff' and fully prepared to teach it a lesson, if need be. Not 
surprisingly, the same George Fernandes (again not alone by any 
means) now seeks to 'reassure' the Indian public that even if a 
couple of Indian cities are bombed, India will devastate Pakistan in 
reply. What an extraordinary state of affairs! Not one 'expert' is 
prepared to inform the Indian public that actually carrying out a 
second strike can never be an act of security retrieval or 
enhancement (once a first strike has taken place one's security has 
gone) but can only be an act of revenge. Moreover, it is a senseless 
act of revenge because it only initiates a further action-reaction 
chain of nuclear exchanges. Nor is anyone prepared to point out that 
if today India has the capacity to inflict more damage on Pakistan 
than vice versa, in due course (some years down the line) Pakistan 
will acquire the missile range and stocks of warheads capable of 
effectively wiping out all of India, and that it is little 
'consolation' for India to be able then to wipe out Pakistan several 
times over!

For all the current talk of being able to inflict "unacceptable 
damage" on the other side, the honest truth is that no can know for 
sure that after a significant or substantial or massive enemy first 
strike whether enough would be left over to inflict unacceptable 
damage in a retaliatory second-strike, besides the fact that such an 
act is merely irrational revenge. It was the constant search for the 
always elusive 'credible' second-strike capacity that drove the US 
and USSR to an arms race that reached truly insane levels, and that 
will drive India and Pakistan to emulate them on a much lower but 
still constantly escalating scale. Fear of a decapitating first 
strike has pushed India into developing "alternative" chains of 
command. No doubt Pakistan with much less strategic-territorial depth 
has done the same. Shorn of its euphemistic tone what this means is 
that both countries are committed to a certain level of dispersion 
and delegation of authority to use nuclear weapons away from the 
Prime Minister or even the very topmost layer of political control, 
since decapitation can itself be very substantial. This 
dispersion-decentralisation of authority is itself a risk, and 
furthermore, there is still never going to be any guarantee that such 
alternative chains of command will not be deeply disrupted or 
adequately survive a massive first strike.

One should, therefore, expect a new kind of 'infighting' to now 
emerge within the Indian pro-nuclear lobby itself. There are going to 
be a number of voices now calling for abandoning the No First Use 
posture since this might be read by Pakistan as an invitation to 
launch a massive first strike sometime in the future. Over time one 
can also expect more voices to be raised about the need to move 
towards very high levels of preparedness such as provided by a 
"launch-on-warning" posture. It will then be argued that to make 
deterrence truly effective it is necessary to do this because only 
then is a massive second-strike attack against Pakistan virtually 
guaranteed so that it cannot hope to destroy India's retaliatory 
capacities through a huge first-strike no matter how decapitating or 
destructive this might be. So Pakistan will never strike first. 
Deterrence through a launch-on-warning posture is, of course, yet 
another level of madness in nuclear strategic thinking but that does 
not mean it won't come about. From 1982 to 1992 Russia made a No 
First Use pledge but like the US, it nonetheless in the eighties 
adopted a launch-on-warning posture.

Even as regional nuclear disarmament is the only genuine assurance 
against use of nuclear weapons in South Asia, there is also the need 
for promoting nuclear risk-reduction measures as a transitional 
measure. It is a striking indication of the deep irresponsibility of 
the two governments of India and Pakistan and of their respective 
pro-nuclear strategic establishments that to this date, the only 
serious efforts at drawing up, publishing and publicly distributing 
such risk reduction proposals have come from the ranks of the 
anti-nuclear disarmament movement.

o o o

[ For related material visit
South Asians Against Nukes:
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/NoNukes.html

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#3.

The New York Times
February 2, 2003
Magazine

The Other Face of Fanaticism

By PANKAJ MISHRA

On the evening of Jan. 30, 1948, five months after the independence 
and partition of India, Mohandas Gandhi was walking to a prayer 
meeting on the grounds of his temporary home in New Delhi when he was 
shot three times in the chest and abdomen. Gandhi was then 78 and a 
forlorn figure. He had been unable to prevent the bloody creation of 
Pakistan as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims. The violent 
uprooting of millions of Hindus and Muslims across the hastily drawn 
borders of India and Pakistan had tainted the freedom from colonial 
rule that he had so arduously worked toward. The fasts he had 
undertaken in order to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing one 
another had weakened him, and when the bullets from an automatic 
pistol hit his frail body at point-blank range, he collapsed and died 
instantly. His assassin made no attempt to escape and, as he himself 
would later admit, even shouted for the police.

Millions of shocked Indians waited for more news that night. They 
feared unspeakable violence if Gandhi's murderer turned out to be a 
Muslim. There was much relief, also some puzzlement, when the 
assassin was revealed as Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western 
India, a region relatively untouched by the brutal passions of the 
partition.

Godse had been an activist in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 
(National Volunteers Association, or R.S.S.), which was founded in 
the central Indian city of Nagpur in 1925 and was devoted to the 
creation of a militant Hindu state. During his trial, Godse made a 
long and eloquent speech claiming that Gandhi's ''constant and 
consistent pandering to the Muslims'' had left him with no choice. He 
blamed Gandhi for the ''vivisection of the country, our motherland'' 
and said that he hoped with Gandhi dead ''the nation would be saved 
from the inroads of Pakistan.'' Godse requested that no mercy be 
shown him at his trial and went cheerfully to the gallows in November 
1949, singing paeans to the ''living Motherland, the land of the 
Hindus.''

Now, more than half a century later, many Indians feel that the 
R.S.S. has never been closer to fulfilling its dream. Its political 
wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, B.J.P.), the 
most important among the ''Sangh Parivar'' -- the ''family'' of 
various Hindu nationalist groups supervised by the R.S.S. -- has 
dominated the coalition government in New Delhi since 1998. Both Atal 
Bihari Vajpayee, India's prime minister, and his hard-line deputy and 
likely heir, L.K. Advani, belong to the R.S.S., and neither has ever 
repudiated its militant ideology.

In the last five years, the Hindu nationalists have conducted nuclear 
tests and challenged Pakistan to a fourth and final war with India. 
They have taken a much harsher line than previous governments with 
the decadelong insurgency in the Muslim majority state of Kashmir, 
which is backed by radical Islamists in Pakistan. After a terrorist 
attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, they mobilized 
hundreds of thousands of troops on India's border with Pakistan. The 
troops were partly withdrawn last October, but a war with Pakistan -- 
one involving nuclear weapons -- remains a terrifying possibility and 
is in fact supported by powerful, pro-Hindu nationalist sections of 
the Indian intelligentsia.

The Hindu nationalists' attempts to stoke Hindu fears about Muslims 
also appear to be succeeding among many of India's disaffected 
voters. In December, the B.J.P. won elections in the western state of 
Gujarat, despite being blamed by many journalists and human rights 
organizations for the vicious killings of more than 2,000 Muslims in 
Gujarat early last year.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the worst violence 
occurred in the commercial city of Ahmedabad: ''Between Feb. 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 Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives and gas cylinders. 
They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of 
Muslim families and their properties . . . and embarked on a 
murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many 
cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who 
got in the mobs' way.''

The scale of the violence was matched only by its brutality. Women 
were gang-raped before being killed. Children were burned alive. 
Gravediggers at mass burial sites told investigators ''that most 
bodies that had arrived . . . were burned and butchered beyond 
recognition. Many were missing body 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.''

Narenda Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, who is also a member of 
the R.S.S., explained the killings as an ''equal and opposite 
reaction'' (a statement he later denied) to the murder in late 
February of almost 60 people, most of whom were Hindu activists, by a 
mob of Muslims. The Human Rights Watch report disputed this defense, 
charging that the Hindu nationalists had planned the Gujarat killings 
well in advance of the attack on the Hindu activists. It cited 
widespread reports in the Indian media that suggest that a senior 
Hindu nationalist minister sat in the police control room in 
Ahmedabad issuing orders not to rescue Muslims from murder, rape and 
arson.

Many secular Indians saw the ghost of Nathuram Godse presiding over 
the killings in Gujarat. In an article in the prestigious monthly 
Seminar, Ashis Nandy, India's leading social scientist, lamented that 
the ''state's political soul has been won over by [Gandhi's] 
killers.'' This seems truer after Hindu nationalists implicated in 
India's worst pogrom won state elections held in Gujarat in December 
-- a fact that Praful Bidwai, a widely syndicated Indian columnist, 
described to me as ''profoundly shameful and disturbing.''

Not much is known about the R.S.S. in the West. After Sept. 11, the 
Hindu nationalists have presented themselves as reliable allies in 
the fight against Muslim fundamentalists. But in India their 
resemblance to the European Fascist movements of the 1930's has never 
been less than clear. In his manifesto ''We, or Our Nationhood 
Defined'' (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, supreme director of the 
R.S.S. from 1940 to 1973, said that Hindus could ''profit'' from the 
example of the Nazis, who had manifested ''race pride at its 
highest'' by purging Germany of the Jews. According to him, India was 
Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis were ''guests'' and 
Muslims and Christians ''invaders.''

Golwalkar was clear about what he expected the guests and invaders to 
do: ''The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu 
culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence 
Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of 
the Hindu race and culture . . . or may stay in the country, wholly 
subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no 
privileges.''

Fears about the rise of militant Hindu nationalism, present since the 
day Godse killed Gandhi, have been particularly intense since the 
late 1980's, when the Congress -- the party of Gandhi and Nehru that 
had ruled India for much of the previous four decades -- was damaged 
by a series of corruption scandals and allegations of misrule. The 
B.J.P., which began under another name in 1951, saw an opportunity in 
the decay of the Congress Party.

In 1989, it officially began a campaign to build a temple over the 
birthplace of the Hindu god Rama in the northern town of Ayodhya. 
(The Hindu activists whose train was attacked last February had been 
assisting in the construction of the temple.) Hindu nationalists have 
long claimed that the mosque that stood over the site was built in 
the 16th century by the first Mogul emperor, Babur, as an act of 
contempt toward Hinduism. The mosque was a symbol of slavery and 
shame, B.J.P. leaders declared, and removing it and building a grand 
temple in its place was a point of honor for all Hindus.

In December 1992, senior B.J.P. politicians watched as an 
uncontrollable crowd of Hindus, armed with shovels, pickaxes and 
crowbars and shouting ''Death to Muslims,'' demolished the mosque. It 
is estimated that at least 1,700 people, most of them Muslim, died 
during the riots that followed. In March 1993, Muslim gangsters, 
reportedly aided by the Pakistani intelligence agency, retaliated 
with simultaneous bomb attacks that killed more than 300 civilians.

The struggle over the construction of a Rama temple on the site 
continued throughout the 90's, inflaming both sides. Muslims (who 
form 12 percent of India's population of more than one billion) and 
secular Indians protested the Hindu nationalist attempt to rewrite 
history. But the nationalists fed on a growing dissatisfaction among 
upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. In March 1998, facing a 
fragmented opposition, the B.J.P. emerged as the single strongest 
party in the Indian Parliament, and Vajpayee and Advani took the top 
two jobs in the federal government.

After the massacres in Gujarat last year, the Hindu nationalist 
response was shockingly blunt. ''Let Muslims understand,'' an 
official R.S.S. resolution said in March, ''that their safety lies in 
the goodwill of the majority.'' Speaking at a public rally in April, 
Prime Minister Vajpayee seemed to blame Muslims for the recent 
violence. ''Wherever Muslims live,'' he said, ''they don't want to 
live in peace.'' Replying to international criticism of the killings 
in Gujarat, he said, ''No one should teach us about secularism.''

Vajpayee has worked hard to build close ties with the United States. 
Recent joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean and frequent visits 
by Colin Powell seem to confirm Washington's view of India as a 
long-term ally against radical Islamism and China. But Vajpayee's 
efforts can also be seen as part of R.S.S.'s millenarian vision of 
India as a great superpower -- and not just in Asia. A clearer sense 
of his worldview can be had from a long discourse K.S. Sudarshan, the 
present supreme director of the R.S.S. and an adviser to Vajpayee and 
Advani, delivered to R.S.S. members in 1999.

In the address, he described how a new epic war was about to commence 
between the demonic and divine powers that forever contended for 
supremacy in the world. Sudarshan identified the United States as the 
biggest example of the ''rise of inhumanity'' in the contemporary 
world.

He claimed that India exercised the ''greatest terror'' over America, 
a theme he had touched on in his praise of India's nuclear tests in 
1998 when he said that ''our history has proved that we are a heroic, 
intelligent race capable of becoming world leaders, but the one 
deficiency that we had was of weapons, good weapons.'' He ended his 
speech by predicting the ''final victory'' of Hindu nationalism.

"The Hindu nationalists are especially cautious at present,'' an 
Indian journalist told me this fall. ''Their fascistic nature has 
been obscured so far in the West by the fact that India is a 
democracy and a potentially large consumer market. They have managed 
to speak with two voices, one for foreign consumption and the other 
for local. But they know that religious extremists are under closer 
scrutiny worldwide after 9/11, and they know that they don't look too 
good after the killings of 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat.''

When I arrived at the R.S.S.'s media office in Delhi, I was told by 
the brusque young man in charge, ''The R.S.S. is not interested in 
publicity.'' Sudarshan declined my request for an interview. Deputy 
Prime Minister Advani also declined to be interviewed on his 
connection with the R.S.S. Other members bluntly refused to talk to 
what they described as an ''anti-Hindu'' foreign newspaper.

One person who would talk was Tarun Vijay, the young editor of an 
R.S.S. weekly who was described as the ''modern face of Hindu 
nationalism.'' Vijay shows up frequently on STAR News, India's most 
prominent news channel, and speaks both Hindi and English fluently. 
He is known as one of Advani's closest confidants.

When I ask Vijay about the R.S.S.'s role in the killings in Gujarat, 
his normally suave manner falters. ''Westerners don't understand,'' 
he says agitatedly, ''that the R.S.S. is a patriotic organization 
working for the welfare of all Indians.''

It must be said that his own career seems to prove this. He was so 
impressed by the ''selflessness'' and ''patriotism'' of the R.S.S. 
members he met as a young man, he says, that he left his home and 
went to work in western India protecting tribal peoples from 
discrimination. ''Some of my best friends are Muslims,'' he says. 
''My wife wears jeans, and she wears her hair short. We eat at Muslim 
homes. There are reasonable people among Muslims, but they are afraid 
to speak out their minds. We are trying to have a dialogue with them. 
We are trying to talk with Christians also. After all, Jesus Christ 
is my greatest hero. But the left-wing and secular people are always 
portraying us as anti-Muslim and anti-Christian fanatics.''

'The superior organization of the R.S.S., which now reaches up to the 
highest levels of the Indian government, is its strength in a chaotic 
country like India. Christophe Jaffrelot, a French scholar and the 
leading authority on Hindu nationalism, says he believes that the 
mission of the R.S.S. is to ''fashion society, to sustain it, improve 
it and finally merge with it when the point [is] reached where 
society and the organization [are] co-extensive.'' Bharat Bhushan, a 
prominent Indian journalist, agrees. The R.S.S., he says, is ''the 
only organization which has consistently geared itself to micro-level 
politics.'' Its members run not just the biggest political party in 
India but also educational institutions, trade unions, literary 
societies and religious sects; they work to indoctrinate low-caste 
groups as well as affluent Indians living in the West.

The scale and diversity of this essentially evangelical effort is 
remarkable. Highly placed members of the R.S.S. conduct nuclear 
tests, strike a belligerent attitude toward Muslims and Pakistan and 
push India's claims to superpower status, while other members are 
involved in almost absurd small-time social engineering.

I was startled, for instance, when Vijay triumphantly showed me the 
headline in his magazine about the patenting of cow urine in the 
United States. Western science, he said, had validated an ancient 
Hindu belief in the holiness of the cow -- yet further proof of how 
the Hindu way of life anticipated and indeed was superior to the 
discoveries of modern science.

This was more than rhetoric. Forty miles out of Nagpur, at a clearing 
in a teak forest, I came across an R.S.S.-run laboratory devoted to 
showcasing the multifarious benefits of cow urine. Most of the cows 
were out grazing, but there were a few calves in a large shed that, 
according to the lab's supervisor, had been ''rescued'' recently from 
nearby Muslim butchers. In one room, its whitewashed walls spattered 
with saffron-hued posters of Lord Rama, devout young Hindus stood 
before test tubes and beakers full of cow urine, distilling the holy 
liquid to get rid of the foul-smelling ammonia and make it drinkable. 
In another room, tribal women in garishly colored saris sat on the 
floor before a small hill of white powder -- dental powder made from 
cow urine.

The nearest, and probably unwilling, consumers of the various 
products made from cow urine were the poor tribal students in the 
primary school next to the lab, one of 13,000 educational 
institutions run by Hindu nationalists. In gloomy rooms, where 
students studied and slept and where their frayed laundry hung from 
the iron bars of the windows, there were large gleaming portraits of 
militant Hindu freedom fighters.

I sat in the small office of the headmaster, a thin excitable young 
man. From the window, above which hung a large fantastical map of 
undivided India, I could see tribal women who had walked from their 
homes and now sat on the porch examining the sores and calluses on 
their bare feet, waiting to meet their children during recess. The 
principal explained to me how the R.S.S. member in charge of the 
federal government's education department was making sure that the 
new history textbooks carried the important message of Hindu pride 
and Muslim cruelty to every school and child in the country. His own 
work was to make the students aware of the glorious Hindu culture 
from which tribal living had sundered them. The message of the 
R.S.S., he said, was egalitarian and modern; it believed in raising 
low-caste people and tribals to a higher level of culture.

According to John Dayal, the vice president of the All India Catholic 
Union, the R.S.S. has spent millions of dollars trying to convert 
tribal people to Hindu nationalism. Dayal, who monitors the 
missionary activities of the R.S.S. very closely, claimed that in 
less than one year the R.S.S. distributed one million trishuls, or 
tridents, in three tribal districts in central India.

B.L. Bhole, a political scientist at Nagpur University, saw a 
Brahminical ploy in these attempts. ''The R.S.S. can't attract young 
middle-class people anymore, so they hope for better luck among the 
poor,'' he said. ''But the basic values the R.S.S. promotes are drawn 
from the high Sanskritic culture of Hinduism, which seeks to maintain 
a social hierarchy with Brahmins at the very top. The united Hindu 
nation they keep talking about is one where basically low-caste 
Hindus and Muslims and Christians don't complain much while accepting 
the dominance of a Brahmin minority.

''The R.S.S. has been most successful in Gujarat, where low-caste 
Hindus and tribals were indoctrinated at the kind of schools you went 
to. They were in the mobs led by upper-caste Hindu nationalists that 
attacked Muslims and Christians. But the R.S.S. still doesn't have 
much support outside Gujarat. This is a serious setback for them, and 
the only thing they can do to increase their mass base is keep 
stoking anti-Muslim and anti-Christian passions and hope they can get 
enough Hindus, both upper caste and low caste, behind them.''

The consistent demonizing of Muslims and Christians by Hindu 
nationalists may seem gratuitous -- Christians in India are a tiny 
and scattered minority, and the Muslims are too poor, disorganized 
and fearful to pose any kind of threat to Hindus -- but it is 
indispensable to the project of a Hindu nation. The attempt to unite 
low- and upper-caste Hindus in a united front against Muslims and 
Christians has certainly worked in the state of Gujarat. Ashok 
Singhal, the president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu 
Council, V.H.P.), yet another R.S.S. affiliate, seemed to accept 
proudly the charge of inciting anti-Muslim hatred when he described 
last year's pogrom in Gujarat as a ''victory for Hindu society.'' 
Whole villages, he said, had been ''emptied of Islam.'' ''We were 
successful,'' he said, ''in our experiment of raising Hindu 
consciousness, which will be repeated all over the country now.''

This sounds like an empty threat, but the B.J.P.'s gains in the 
recent elections in Gujarat, where it did best in riot-affected 
areas, may have encouraged hard-liners to think that they can win 
Hindu votes by whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria elsewhere in India. 
Narendra Modi is to be the star campaigner for the B.J.P. in the 
local elections later this month in the north Indian state of 
Himachal Pradesh, an area with almost no Hindu-Muslim tensions to 
date. Virbhadra Singh, a senior opposition leader from the Congress, 
wonders if the Hindu nationalists have hatched an ''ill-conceived 
plan to stage-manage some terrorist incident in the state.''

John Dayal fears that Hindu nationalists may also target Christians. 
''They have never been more afraid,'' he told me. ''I have been 
expecting the very worst since the B.J.P. came to power, and the 
worst, I think, may still be in the future.''

The worst possibility at present is of a militant backlash by 
Muslims. In the villages and towns near Ayodhya, I found Muslims full 
of anxiety. They spoke of the insidious and frequent threats and 
beatings they received from local Hindu politicians and policemen. At 
one mosque in the countryside, a young man loudly asserted that 
Muslims were not going to suffer injustice anymore, that they were 
going to retaliate. His elders shouted him down, and then a mullah 
gently led me out of the madrasa with one arm around my shoulders, 
assuring me that the Muslims were loyal to India, their homeland, 
where they had long lived in peace with their Hindu brothers.

Saghir Ahmad Ansari, a Muslim social activist in Nagpur, told me that 
the Muslims he knew felt ''that the Hindu nationalists, who were 
implacably opposed to their existence in India, now controlled 
everything, the government, our rights, our future.'' He said he 
worried about the Muslim response to Gujarat. ''When the government 
itself supervises the killing of 2,000 Muslims, when Hindu mobs rape 
Muslim girls with impunity and force 100,000 Muslims into refugee 
camps, you can't hope that the victims won't dream of revenge,'' he 
said. ''I fear, although I don't like saying or thinking about this, 
that the ideology of jihad and terrorist violence will find new 
takers among the 130 million Muslims of India. This will greatly 
please the Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Afghanistan.''

His fears about vengeful Muslims were proved right in September, when 
terrorists reportedly from Pakistan murdered more than 30 Hindus at 
the famous Akshardham temple in Gujarat in ostensible retaliation for 
the massacres last winter. It was the biggest attack in recent years 
by Muslim terrorists outside of Kashmir, and the Hindu rage it 
provoked further ensured the victory of Hindu nationalist hard-liners 
in December's elections.

The growth of religious militancy in South Asia is likely to excite 
many Hindus. As they see it, Gujarat proved to be a successful 
''laboratory'' of Hindu nationalism in which carefully stoked 
anti-Muslim sentiments eventually brought about a pogrom, and a 
Muslim backlash seemed to lead to even greater Hindu unity. A few 
months ago, I met Nathuram Godse's younger brother, Gopal Godse, who 
spent 16 years in prison for conspiring with his brother and a few 
other Brahmins to murder Gandhi. He lives in Pune, a western city 
known now for its computer software engineers. In his tiny two-room 
apartment, where the dust from the busy street thickly powders a mess 
of files and books and the framed garlanded photographs of Gandhi's 
murderer, Godse, a frail man of 83, at first seems like someone 
abandoned by history.

But recent events seem to Godse to have vindicated his Hindu 
nationalist cause. Gujarat proved that the Hindus were growing more 
militant and patriotic and that the Muslims were on the run not just 
in India but everywhere in the world. India had nuclear bombs; it was 
growing richer and stronger while Pakistan was slowly imploding. Only 
recently, Godse reminds me, Advani advocated the dismemberment of 
Pakistan.

India has turned its back on Gandhi, Godse claims, and has come close 
to embracing his brother's vision. Nathuram did not die in vain. He 
asked for his ashes to be immersed in the Indus, the holy river of 
India that flows through Pakistan, only when the Mother India was 
whole again. For over half a century, Godse has waited for the day 
when he could travel to the Indus with the urn containing his 
brother's ashes. Now, he says, he won't have to wait much longer.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of ''The Romantics,'' a novel, and is at 
work on a book about Buddha.

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