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 their 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 fear will transmit itself to other minorities. Many,
particularly the
young, will probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society
will 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 to 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 �of which the Bush and Bin Laden families are
both
shareholders� for 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 to cross the threshold and publicly unveil an unconscionable bigotry against
Muslims,
which even George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld would be embarrassed to 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 BJP 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, Mayawati,
leader of
the BSP, the 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 own
unsavoury pasts; so instead they disrupt Parliament, shout a lot, eventually 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 deadliest enemy. What's the point of us all going on
about
'deepening democracy', when 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.) After 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 - the whole shebang - morality 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 public 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 - threat 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 harmony 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, is 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 - socialist, capitalist and fascist - has 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.
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