March 15, 2002	Friday	Zilhaj 30, 1422

LONDON: Belief in the absolute is difficult to argue against. That which is considered fundamental to a culture cannot be easily challenged. So how did Hinduism - a creed with no holy book, day, leader, heresy or single omnipotent deity and which is recognizable only by its plurality - manage to become such a powerful tool for chauvinists in India? The question may be posed innocuously now but with the passage of time it may receive a bloody answer.

Today (March 15) thousands of young men and women of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Council, will descend on Ayodhya in northern India to perform religious rites in a place where two ancient civilizations meet. They do so in order to provoke India’s 140 million Muslims and little will dissuade them, certainly not pleas of restraint from government ministers or the Supreme Court who ordered the ceremony to be banned. Certainly not the appalling images of Gujarati neighbourhoods set alight, mothers and children burnt, trains attacked and passengers slaughtered in the intra-religious violence of the past few weeks. Certainly not the army or the police who are charged with preventing violence in Ayodhya but did too little, too late in Gujarat. And certainly not the notion that India’s democracy is in danger from extremism.

For these fundamentalists, Ayodhya is the birthplace of Lord Ram, a Hindu heroic warrior-god. Unfortunately, it was also the spot of another Indian religious symbol - the Babri Masjid, a mosque supposedly built by Moghul emperor Babar in the 16th century.

“Minority rule” is a powerful, deadly image in modern-day India, where the issue was first propagated and then exploited by Hindu nationalist politicians. It is enough to drive well-educated, well-off people in the fastest growing state in India, Gujarat, to kill their neighbours. Gujarat has a 70 per cent literacy rate - well above the national average, it has twice the per capita GDP of India and with just six per cent of the country’s population it accounts for 16 per cent of its total exports. But as police commissioner Prashant Chandra Pande, in Gujarat’s capital Ahmedabad, admitted after the carnage: “The people responsible for all this come from the better sections of society. Many of them are educated. They are ostensibly honest and decent. But this did not stop them.”

But how did this madness grip the Hindu middle class? The roots of rage stem from their feelings of powerlessness. They thought no one was representing the interests of the rich. They became increasingly disillusioned with the Congress party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahathma Gandhi, which saw India as socialist, secular and multicultural. But Congress’s economic policies failed to deliver, and corruption stifled the country. India produced a dynasty, not a democracy. Indira Gandhi flirted with dictatorship in the 1970s - a time which people recall, without irony, as memorable because the trains ran on time.

Real politics returned with a vengeance in the 1980s. Anyone visiting India would have felt the gusts of wind that eventually became a Hindu hurricane. India’s supposedly secular politicians overturned a court decision regarding an elderly Muslim woman who won a divorce case, for fear of antagonizing Islam. Is she a citizen of a theocratic state, wondered Hindus? The dreadful reply was the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya which thrust the nationalist Bharatiya Janata party into the mainstream of politics.

But the BJP has had an uneasy relationship with power and had to pay a high price for building a coalition government with secular political partners. Now the VHP thinks politics has marginalized religion - despite the detonation of a “Hindu” nuclear bomb and the agitation by BJP ministers to rewrite history books from a Hindu viewpoint.

If fundamentalism gets its way in Ayodhya, the VHP might want to tear down the mosques in Mathura (said to be the birthplace of Hindu deity Krishna) or Kashi (in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi). The VHP does not seem to care if the BJP-led government falls in the process. The two squabbling siblings, born of an even darker, militaristic body that produced Gandhi’s assassin, are engaged in a fight for the right to represent Hinduism. But India itself is proving too big a place for any single religion, however pervasive, to dominate. The BJP has lost its regional power bases and smaller parties, mostly based on ethnicity, language and geography, are exerting themselves. India needs a unifying political project. But as the recent violence shows, Hinduism alone will not provide salvation for India.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.