goanet-digest Tuesday, April 30 2002 Volume 01 : Number 3908
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In this issue:
[Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part I
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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:39:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: George Pinto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Goanet] Arundhati Roy - Part I
Tim mentioned Arundhati Roy's name in a post yesterday. At the same time I recd. this
forward
from retired Prof. of Sociology Hari Sharma (Canada). I am forwarding this article in
three parts
without comment. George
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OUTLOOK India, Magazine, May 06, 2002
Democracy
Who's she when she's at home?
Arundhati Roy
Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes 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 were.
Which particular verse in the Quran required that they be roasted alive? The more the
two sides
try and call attention to their religious differences 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�a 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�none of this has prevented it from
being
humiliated in election after election. Even its old party trick�the revival of the Ram
mandir
plans in Ayodhya�didn'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 an 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 Muslim community. Officially the
number of dead
is 800. Independent reports put the 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. Two hundred
and forty
dargahs and 180 masjids were destroyed�in 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 coincidence 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
memorable 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 �and two
vacations
in the hills� to 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 real
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 the 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, family altercations, the planning and allocation of water resources...
(which is why
Medha Patkar of the nba was assaulted). Muslim businesses have been shut 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. Is this the Hindu rashtra that
we've all been
asked to look forward to? Once 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�Adivasis,
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.
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
enraged mob.
Either way, it was a criminal act. But every independent report says the pogrom
against the Muslim
community in Gujarat �billed by the government as spontaneous 'retaliation'� has at
best been
conducted under the benign gaze 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 forced to acknowledge that I am somehow made complicit in the Gujarat
pogrom. It is
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 of the last few weeks in Gujarat to Gandhi's Dandi March�both,
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 �with the BJP, the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, 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 handle TV debates, a cold-blooded creature for a Chief
Minister and the
Bajrang Dal 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: wars, 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.
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 Family
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: anger, 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: directed 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 - the nuclear tests, the Babri Masjid, the Tehelka
scam, the
stirring of the communal cauldron for electoral advantage - and you'll see the
Congress Party has
been there before. In every 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 BJP
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 of reach, can only be achieved with State backing.
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End of goanet-digest V1 #3908
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