THE Indian state of Gujarat continues to be rocked by communal trouble, as the rioting in the town of Lonavada last week indicated. Curfew had to be imposed after incidents of arson and looting affecting Muslims.

The re-election of the known Muslim-baiter, Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, as chief minister of the state has apparently been a source of encouragement to militant Hindutva elements who had gone on a rampage against the Muslims in Godhra, Ahmadabad and other towns of Gujarat early last year. An estimated 2,000 persons, mostly Muslim, were killed and hundreds of families were driven out of their homes to seek shelter elsewhere. With the recrudescence of trouble, it is difficult to see the large numbers of Muslims who have been living in make-shift refugee camps since then being able to return to their homes in the foreseeable future.

It is now established beyond doubt that the anti-Muslim violence which had erupted at the end of February and in early March last year was state-sponsored. Official security agencies were directly involved in the acts of brutality inflicted on members of the minority religious community. The Indian deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, who also holds the home portfolio and arrived on the scene of rioting within hours of its break-out, added fuel to fire with his vituperative pronouncements against so-called Muslim fundamentalists. Pakistan was openly blamed for the trouble. Contrary to some forecasts of the BJP losing its majority on account of its involvement in the anti-Muslim violence, the party won a landslide victory.

There have been comments in some Indian news media suggesting that Narendra Modi’s own popularity has now “narrowly exceeded” that of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and that emotive slogans such as those condemning terrorism and cross-border infiltration are now more effective than issues such as the quality of governance.

There have been chilling one-line verdicts in a section of the Indian media following the election, such as that “Hindutva is an unstoppable torrent.” There is even a view that the election may have thrown up a new model for future polls: ignore local issues, play up the emotive, and focus on a leadership cult.

Until the recent developments in Gujarat, there was general speculation in India that Hindu fundamentalism might be on retreat. However, comments and political analyses appearing in leading Indian news magazines suggest that the movement may now have been reversed. India Today published a commentary on December 30, expressing the view that “the defeated have no credible explanation for their pathetic state... (and) rarely has a state election caused such a nationwide tremor.”

Earlier, because of the setback that the BJP had suffered in elections in certain other states, there was speculation that the party would suffer a similar fate in the nine states where elections are due this year. However, after Gujarat, Indian political pundits no longer appear to be so sure. One analyst believes that “the BJP’s... victory over the Congress in Gujarat has set the tone for future electoral battles in the country... The juggernaut has already been flagged off.” He also suggests that the future election campaigns will not rest on claims of past performance.

Instead, there will be “only loud and scary announcements of the threat against India: for the next 18 months the nation will be reminded of the number of terrorists killed in police encounters [and] a new rage will sweep across the nation — revenge against Pakistan.” The prospect cannot be regarded with any sense of equanimity.

What may come as a surprise to many in Pakistan are the details of a report originating from the US which contends that a group of Indians and others living in America had set up in 1989 what they call an India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) which is being used as “the key fund raiser for the Sangh Parivar.” The IDRF, operating as a charity organization from Maryland, has been funding a number of RSS projects in India.

A report appearing under the heading ‘A foreign hand’ in the prestigious news weekly Frontline (December 20) has said that the recipients of funds from IDRF include the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA) “linked with anti-minority violence in India. Many other Hindu fundamentalist organizations all over India have also been regularly receiving funds from the IDRF. Between 1994 and 2,000 it reportedly disbursed close to four million dollars to Sangh Parivar organizations in India.

The scandal has been exposed by a group of Indian-origin professionals, students, workers, artists and intellectuals (SFH) also based in the US. According to Frontline, SFH has launched a campaign to end such activities. On November 20, it released a 91-page report in New Delhi titled ‘A Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American funding of Hate.’ The report gives details of the IDRF operation, maintaining that the organization obtained considerable amounts from a number of leading US technology companies, 83 per cent of which went to the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and other Sangh Parivar organizations. What is of course of concern to Pakistan is the prospect that Hindutva militancy appears to be on the rise in India and is now also being supported by individuals and organizations that have come into prominence only lately.

Moreover, the rise in communal violence in various parts of India in which religious minorities inevitably suffer means a significant setback to secular forces. For instance, a Congress spokesman has claimed that communal rioting contributes to the communal divide and “the reverses that the Congress suffered (in Gujarat election)... are in exact proportion to the intensity or spread of rioting.”

The outlook for the future politics of India can in no way be regarded as hopeful. However, a former prime minister of India, V.P. Singh, widely respected for his sane and secular views, has in a signed article (India Today, Dec. 30) bravely claimed that in his opinion the BJP will not succeed and ultimately the Hindutva forces will be “forced on the backfoot.” He believes that the BJP sustains itself on slogans and emotional issues but ultimately what influences the people are real bread-and-butter issues, which are not part of BJP or Hindutva strategy. One only hopes he is right.

The past year has been dominated by a US obsession with Iraq which, remarkably, only seized the Bush administration three long months after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September, 2001.

In my year-end survey twelve months ago, just after the US occupation of Afghanistan, I simply wrote that Middle Eastern Muslims were waiting to learn “which of their countries the United States would hit next: Iraq, Somalia or Sudan.” Washington was clearly looking for a fresh target, but nobody had a clue which way it was going to jump.

Whatever the original motives for the choice of Iraq, the project now has an almost unstoppable momentum within the introverted world of Washington politics, and the Bush administration almost certainly will attack Iraq, probably in the next few months. But the weird thing about 2002 is that the international news has been virtually monopolised by a non-event.

There has been no fighting in the Middle East apart from the familiar cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and no regimes have toppled. Indeed, nothing tangible has yet changed in the region, apart from a gradual increase in the usual pace of US and British bombing in Iraq’s ‘no-fly zones’.

Almost unnoticed amidst all the media hype about coming events, there was dramatic progress in closing down the real wars that have been ravaging whole regions and killing huge numbers of people. First came the 27-year-old Angolan civil war, which suddenly ended in April after the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, was caught in an ambush and killed. Next, in July, there was a breakthrough in peace negotiations in Africa’s oldest war, between the Arabized Muslim northerners and southern, mostly Christian Africans of Sudan.

There is not yet a definitive ceasefire in Sudan, but a war that has killed two million people over 33 years finally seems to be subsiding. Then, still in July, a peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) ended what has been called ‘Africa’s First World War’. Most of the six foreign armies have already gone home, and the fighting that caused over two million Congolese deaths in four years has subsided to sporadic outbreaks of banditry.

The miracles then moved east, to the two longest-running wars in Asia. In September the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam dropped their demand for a separate state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, opening the way for negotiations to end the 19-year war that has devastated the island nation. In December, Indonesia signed a peace deal with the separatist rebels of Aceh in northern Sumatra, ending a 26-year war by granting the provincial governments of the region a 70 percent share in Aceh’s oil and gas revenues. Also in December, the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi signed a power-sharing agreement with the largest of the Hutu opposition groups which offers gives the Central African country its best chance for peace since 1963.

There was bad news, too: a new civil war broke out in once-stable Ivory Coast in September, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, gaining strength by the month, threatens to produce a new Year Zero in that impoverished and misgoverned country. But from fifteen wars only five years ago, Africa is now down to only three or four (depending on whether Sudan is really over), and Asia is down to just three (in Nepal, Kashmir and the southern Philippines). Even allowing for one civil war in the Arab world (Algeria) and one in Latin America (Colombia), the world is a more peaceful place this month than it has been at any time since September, 1939.

More peaceful, but far from out of the woods. The most terrifying confrontation of the past year was the summer stand-off between India and Pakistan, two newly fledged nuclear powers that have fought each other three times already. If they were to do so again, using their new weapons, the death toll would exceed the total losses in all the other wars of the past ten years in a matter of days. New Delhi and Islamabad have stepped back from the crisis for the moment, but huge armies still face each other across the border and the Kashmir dispute is a permanent irritant.

Similar anxieties haunted the Korean peninsula, where North Korea’s desperately poor and isolated communist regime began talking up its nuclear weapons programme, probably in the hope of shaking some extra aid loose. Paradoxically, that may have helped Roh Moo-hyun to win the December presidential election in South Korea on a platform of reconciliation with the North, which will make for difficult relations between Seoul and Washington. But in the main, Asia just got on about its business.

After almost a year’s hesitation, China’s 76-year-old ruler, Jiang Zemin, decided to hand the presidency on to his designated successor Hu Jintao at the Party Congress in November, but behind the scenes he remains very much in control. Earlier in the year, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, also 76, told his party congress that he, too, would be retiring soon (after more than 20 years in power).

The main difference was that Dr. Mahathir may actually mean it. And the release from house arrest in May of Burma’s democratic icon, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, suggested that the military regime that has devoted the past forty years to plundering the country may finally be ready to make a deal.

The principal theme in Europe this year was expansion — of NATO, to take in most of the former Warsaw Pact countries that escaped from Soviet control in 1989, but above all of the European Union. After months of cliff-hanging negotiations and a second referendum in Ireland, the 15 EU countries showed up at the Copenhagen summit in December and promised to take in ten new members in 2004.— Cpyright

I PREFERRED the air route to the much-vaunted motorcade to travel to Islamabad from Lahore. It was four times costlier but three hours quicker.

Silhouetted against hills, Islamabad city sits pretty in the midst of thick, green vegetation. The many-lane roads and supermarkets make it look modern and unclogged. Government buildings are too opulent. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif wanted to sell the building housing his secretariat because it was unwieldy and costly. Like most capitals, the city is devoid of soul. Authority resides here, not popular will.

Cut off from the people in Lahore and Karachi on one side and from Peshawar and Quetta on the other, Islamabad has weaved itself in the cocoon of its own authoritarian ways.

I felt this all the more after meeting the prime minister, the foreign minister and a string of bureaucrats, past and present. Riaz Khokhar, once the Pakistan high commissioner in Delhi, is foreign secretary. Another former high commissioner, Abdus Sattar is leading a retired life but recording some past events, for example, the Agra summit where he accompanied President General Pervez Musharraf as his foreign minister.

Both bureaucrats and government leaders accepted the primacy of the military and its ‘essential role’ for the country’s integrity. People, on the other hand, would like the army to go back to barracks sooner than later. Although they do not see the end of the tunnel but they have developed over the years the type of tenacity which may give them one day the democratic structure they pine for. They envy India on this point despite the dark spots they pick up in its governance. The Gujarat carnage is one.