THE Indian prime minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, is known to be a poet and a humanist who, until recently, was regarded as a force for moderation in the extremist BJP. This side of his personality was especially noticeable in his musings at the start of the year 2001. Writing from a holiday resort in South India, he signalled a softening of the stance adopted by India in the aftermath of the Kargil conflict of 1999. Striking a statesmanlike note in his reflections, he admitted the existence of a problem over Kashmir, and wrote about his quest for an innovative solution.

There were no musings at the start of 2002, since the global situation had been transformed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Though Mr Vajpayee had planned to resume the dialogue initiated at Agra, during the UN General Assembly session in September, the 9/11 events that shifted the world’s focus onto terrorism were seen in India as a golden opportunity to put the heat on Pakistan. As India concentrated its forces along the border with Pakistan following the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, Mr Vajpayee saw no need to philosophize when arm-twisting of Pakistan was going on for alleged sponsorship of terror. The year 2002 saw Mr Vajpayee’s moderate image dissolve as hardliners in the ruling party took command.

At the start of 2003, he has again made public his musings, this time from his holiday retreat in Goa, but, predictably, he has struck a different note altogether. Barely weeks after BJP’s election victory in Gujarat, with the president of Vishwa Hindu Parishad declaring that secularism had been discredited and buried, Mr Vajpayee has accused Pakistan of having fomented communalism. He tells Pakistan to “forget” Kashmir, which is a symbol of Indian secularism. He has even sought to defend Hindutva, calling it liberal and liberating, that “brooks no ill-will, hatred or violence among different communities”.

With international relations radically changed by Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption against any state challenging its pre-eminence as the champion of anti-terrorism, India feels free to frame its own rules and set its own agenda. Just as the extremist branches of the Sangh parivar proclaim their intention of using the communalist approach to win future elections, Mr Vajpayee insists that it is Pakistan that rejects the reality of “secular India”. Kashmir is claimed to be an integral part of India, and Pakistan blamed for maintaining a permanent state of confrontation with that country.

Mr Vajpayee would like the world to believe that Pakistan is responsible for introducing communalism in the subcontinent, whereas India has impeccable secular credentials. A survey of the history of politics in South Asia during the 20th century proves that his view does not conform to facts. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah started his political career in the second decade of that century as the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity”. The Fourteen-Point agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League in 1914 is a testimony to his role, and the fact remains that both communities agitated jointly against British colonial rule after the end of the First World War. The Muslims launched the Khilafat Movement while the Congress under Mahatma Gandhi was pursuing the struggle for greater autonomy.

By the mid-twenties, the Hindu-Muslim joint front collapsed, as a result of an upsurge of religious sentiments among the Hindus. This period, roughly between 1925 and 1930, saw a number of developments that raised serious concerns among the Muslims about their future. The Hindu revivalists launched two movements that affected the Muslims directly. One was Shuddhi, a movement to reconvert ethnic Indians, who had converted over several centuries of Muslim and British rule to Islam or Christianity, to Hinduism.

The other was Sanghatan, a militant movement to re-establish Hindu cultural superiority. Another major development was the Nehru Report, prepared in response to the Simon Commission in 1929. The Congress, which enjoyed a dominant position in the political field, called for the abolition of separate electorates, a hard-won concession that had provided some measure of reassurance to the Muslim minority in British India.

These were the developments that led Allama Iqbal to call for a separate homeland for the Muslims in his Allahabad address in 1930, while presiding over the Muslim League session. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah became so disenchanted with the political outlook around that time that he left India and settled in Britain. He was persuaded to return by Allama Iqbal and others. The Congress formed governments in eleven provinces following elections in 1937, which proceeded to pass legislation that reflected a Hindu agenda, without any regard for Muslim sensitivities or rights. This was the background against which the movement for Pakistan was launched three years later.

Coming to more recent times, the BJP has articulated Hindu extremist aspirations that were adopted by the Rashtrya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founded in 1925, with the goal of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra. Top leaders of the BJP are Karsevaks, (devotees of the RSS), who are committed to the goal of making Hindu culture and traditions the dominant creed in India. It was a Hindu fanatic belonging to the RSS who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

L.K. Advani, who migrated from Sindh after partition, has stood for Hindu militancy, and for Hindutva. He spearheaded the movement that culminated in the demolition of the historic Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992. The Hindu militants have a long list of mosques that are claimed to have been built on sites of temples allegedly demolished during the 800 years of Muslim rule, which are to suffer the same fate as the Babri Masjid if they have their way.

Though Mr Advani is facing charges for his role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid, his extremist line has prevailed within the councils of the ruling party after 9/11, as a result of which targeting the Muslims in becoming common. Mr Vajpayee himself appears to tailor his public utterances to suit his audiences and does not appear to have strong convictions.

In September 2000, when he had gone to New York for the Millennium Summit of the UN, he was invited to address a gathering of Hindu religious leaders. They complained that the BJP government was not showing enough interest in the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. He was reported to have assured them that he was a life-long Karsevak, but was handicapped by the fact that the BJP lacked its own majority in the Indian parliament.

Moderate Hindu leaders and human rights activists have been critical of the Hindutva agenda of the extremist groups which currently appear to have the upper hand, as evident from their strategy in Gujarat. Narendra Modi, the chief minister of that state, was deeply involved in a conspiracy to arouse communal passions against the Muslims. The Godhra incident of February 2001, in which Muslims were accused of setting fire to a train carrying Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya, resulting in 58 of them being burnt to death, was proved to be false. A technical inquiry has established that the fire resulted from an internal mishap in the train and was not caused from outside. The whole episode was deliberately created to arouse a violent reaction among the Hindus, who then proceeded to attack Muslim areas and businesses with the active connivance of the state authorities.

In the aftermath of the worst anti-Muslim riots in India since the killings that accompanied the demolition of the Babri Masjid, two contrary tendencies were in evidence. The BJP leadership tried to reassure their coalition partners that the demand for the enforcement of the policy of Hindutva, that would extinguish the cultural identity of the minorities, was confined to the extremist Hindu elements.

However, moderate Indian intellectuals were pointing out that the Hindutva agenda lay at the core of the BJP’s long-term strategy. Muchkund Dubey, a former foreign secretary of India, wrote in the daily Hindu on March 20, 2002, that there was “complete synergy and identity of purpose between the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, the RSS, the BJP and its leaders in the central government” on plans to enforce Hindutva. He warned that “the 140 million minorities simply will not accept a subservient status. They will fight hard to remain equal citizens and will not allow India to be turned into a Hindu Rashtra”.

The disenchantment felt by the Hindutva crowd with the reluctance of the Vajpayee government to go all out to enforce the concept was manifest from the statements of such leaders as Dattopant Thengadi, leader of the labour wing of the RSS, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, in April last year. With the passage of time, Mr Vajpayee has responded to this impulse, arising out of his life-long adherence to the RSS creed.

The success of the pro-Hindutva strategy has been demonstrated in Gujarat, where anti-Muslim feeling was first fanned, and then exploited, together with a hate-Pakistan approach, to win a two-thirds majority for the BJP. With elections ahead in another nine states before the national elections in 2004, militant Hindu groups have already announced that the BJP will ensure its success by following the same strategy.

Taking into account the experience of the Gujarat elections, that have partly halted the ruling party’s declining fortunes, many prominent leaders of the Hindu parties included in the BJP have said openly that the same strategy of arousing anti-Muslim sentiments and anti-Pakistan fears would be pursued in the coming elections. This will be the reality on the ground. However, the myth of secularism will also be exploited, when needed, to protect India’s democratic credentials, as the principle finds mention in the Indian constitution, regardless of its total neglect in practice.

TELL us Mr Deputy Prime Minister, how does a planned, pre- meditated killing and looting of members of a particular community become an aberration? This is the second time you have used the phrase for the Gujarat carnage.

You said the same thing about the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the wake of which thousands of Muslims lost their lives.

The CBI charge-sheeted you regarding the Masjid. But UP Chief Minister Mayawati helped you by not reissuing the notification for reviving the special court.

We have seen through this facade of words. The exercise of soft line, hard line and again soft line has gone for too long to be taken seriously. It does not impress even the most gullible any more. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has proclaimed that Hindutva represents secularism. So there is nothing which can be considered an aberration now. What all the fanatics and the fundamentalists are doing is part of “secularism.”

You, Mr L.K. Advani, proclaimed at the NRI convention, which turned out to be a BJP show at the expense of taxpayers’ money, that a “theocratic state is not acceptable to us.” But you said, after playing the anti-Muslim card in the Gujarat polls, that you would replicate the formula at other places. What was the formula except inciting the Hindus in the name of religion and then pouncing upon the Muslims with the assistance of the police?

Words do not carry conviction. But if the deeds of the BJP were to be judged, the party too would come a cropper. From the day it parted company with the Janata in 1979, the BJP has nothing to its credit except a campaign of hatred against the minorities, buttressed by riots. Advani, an architect of the BJP, has concentrated only on the Hindutva thesis from the party’s very inception. His achievement, which he proudly recalls, is the rath yatra that sparked off riots and created a wedge between Hindus and Muslims living together for centuries. He has the audacity to say that his yatra was like that of Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi salt march. This is comparing the ridiculous with the sublime.

Whatever words Advani may use to defend Hindutva, the Indians have to hang their head in shame. They would claim that in the past their country was a secular, democratic polity. Even the demolition of the Babri Masjid, after the supreme court’s order to the government to maintain the status quo, did not give them such a bad name as the Gujarat carnage has. Not long ago, in Denmark, scholars told me to my face that the real India was beginning to show itself.

The Pakistan establishment is the happiest. “Your mask has come off” was the burden of comments that the people there made — the people whom I had told in the past that secularism like democracy had come to stay in India. The BJP is trying its best to justify the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was founded. The party, which was nowhere near the national movement, is undoing with a vengeance the sacrifices of thousands of freedom fighters under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

I do not think that Advani was able to allay the fears of Lady Naipaul, a well-known human rights champion before marriage. She said that the Vajpayee government was concerned only about Hindus, not Muslims. Advani vehemently denied it. Yet this is the impression that the five-year-old government led by the BJP has created in every field of activity, more so in education and information.

The invitation to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi at the NRI convention was equivalent to rubbing salt into the wounds of Muslims. He made no secret of wearing Hindutva on his sleeve. How could New Delhi invite him when his conduct as chief minister was under scrutiny by a commission under the chairmanship of a retired supreme court judge? Modi is not even a bit ruffled by the horror and the disgust he has evoked throughout India and abroad. Any visitor to the state will tell you how most Muslims even after 10 months of Godhra are undergoing economic boycott and how the uprooted among them cannot return to their homes if they do not give an undertaking not to pursue the FIR they have filed against those whom they saw killing or raping.

Is Modi an aberration, Advani saheb? He represents what the BJP really is. I was in Mumbai when he visited the city to attend his electoral victory celebrations. It was no surprise to find his photo all over the city. But what was surprising was that the pictures of Vajpayee and even Advani were conspicuous by their absence.

He is the party’s new mascot, what the other two used to be at one time. It is a pity that the allies of the BJP in the ruling National Democratic Alliance are blind to the saffronization of politics. Probably, they never had anything to do with liberalism. They just wanted ministership and they have got it.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu believes that his Telugu Desam cannot get a majority in the state without the support of the BJP. The question of dissociating themselves from the BJP does not even strike the likes of George Fernandes, Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav. Their ideology is now confined to staying in power.

Still the BJP is far from satisfied. It wants the state governors — the party appointed every Tom, Dick and Harry from the RSS to the exalted position — to play a “pro-active” role. What the party probably has in view is the Rajasthan governor’s example, that of conducting the Ram katha at Raj Bhavan. Ram is part of our culture and there is nothing wrong with the katha. But should Raj Bhavan be used for such a purpose? Suppose the Maharashtra governor, a Muslim, were to have a public recitation of the Quran at Raj Bhavan, how would the BJP or, for that matter, the Shiv Sena react?

A secular system has certain norms. Religion cannot be mixed with the state. When Advani says that India “has been a secular state and will remain so,” he is bluffing the people. He does not believe in secularism. Neither does his party. They are wedded to Hindutva and they have said so at the post-Gujarat meeting of their national executive.

Then why is Advani “advocating” secularism? As home minister, he realizes that any departure from secularism will come into conflict with the basic structure of the constitution. After the supreme court has upheld that the basic structure of the constitution cannot be changed, the BJP has to fall in line.

The BJP has unleashed forces that want to obliterate even the name of Mahatma Gandhi who had made Hindu-Muslim unity a plank for the independence struggle. One Gujarat does not mean that the BJP and other members of the Sangh parivar can destroy India’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural identity. It means that those who believe in pluralism will have to fight harder against fanaticism that may destroy the ethos of our open society and our country’s unity.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

(Friday, January 17, marked the 12th anniversary of the Gulf war.)

ON THE eve of Gulf war in 1991, 540,000 American troops and 150,000 from other countries got ready to invade a small third world country already ravaged by a long war and months of total blockade. At 2.30 am on January 17, the bombs began to fall and for 42 days US aircraft attacked Iraq on an average of once every 30 seconds.

In the words of former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark, “American technology smashed the cradle of civilization, leaving it crippled, and George Bush called it liberation.” Before the year was over, more than 250,000 Iraqis, mostly civilian men, women and children had died as a direct result of the murderous assault. Deliberate and methodical destruction of the entire infrastructure was meant to destroy civilian life, and continuing sanctions ensured that it would not be resurrected any time soon.

When, during his recent visit to Cairo to attend an anti-war international conference, Denis Halliday was asked if he thought sanctions were ever meant as a method of bringing Iraq back into the international fold, the former UN official who resigned in protest of sanctions against Iraq, told al-Ahram: “No, I think the Gulf War, the invasion of Kuwait — which was supported by the United States and encouraged by the United States — was all part of a plan to crush Saddam Hussein, and crush Iraq — perhaps the only country showing leadership potential in the Arab world”.

Sanctions, he argued, were part of this. “They built on the destruction of the war — the use of depleted uranium, the bombing of civilian targets, the destruction of water systems and electrical power.” It was “horrific” back in 1991, “and, I think, we have all deliberately been genocidal in our endeavours since then until today”.

Over the period of 1990-1998, according to UN and other humanitarian agencies, sanctions had killed an estimated 600,000 children under five, and the death have since continued despite the implementation of oil-for-food programme in 1996. Thanks to US manipulation of UN committees, out of the $60 billion in oil sales, Iraq has so far received less than $20 billion, while the other $40 of its money has been “embezzled” to pay compensation to Kuwait and western firms and to finance UN inspections and other operations. Iraq is allowed to spend about 49 cent per day on sustaining the life of its citizens for one year, less than half the daily per capita income of Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and far below the amount the UN spends on food for dogs used in de-mining operations in northern Iraq.

To date, the US has placed “on hold” nearly seven billion dollar worth of humanitarian goods that should have gone to Iraq. All the goods were approved by the UN and financed from the sale of Iraqi oil and included flour, medicines, medical, milk production and fire fighting equipment and water-tankers.

Key confidential document concerning administration of Iraqi sanctions recently unearthed by Professor Joy Gordon show that “the United States has fought aggressively throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country. And it has done so in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics.”

There is another aspect of sanctions that is even less known to the public, the accompanying intellectual genocide of the Iraqi people. Observing that Palestine and Iraq have the highest number of Ph.Ds in the Middle East, Felicity Arbuthnot, British journalist and activist, writes: “As the West crows of restoring education in Afghanistan, it is silent on decimating it in a part of the world where writing, algebra, mathematics, domestic law and record keeping began. Iraq, prior to the embargo, was awarded, two years running, a unique accolade from Unesco. The education system was globally unparalleled in that a child could be born into abject poverty, of illiterate parents and emerge from this free, high quality system (including university) as anything he or she wished to be. Western graduate courses were paid for by the Iraqi government, resulting in rounded east-west expertise.

“With the onset of the UN embargo on Hiroshima Day 1990, all educational materials to Iraq were halted. Blackboards, pencils, pens, course books, medical journals, computers, even paper.... When the UN weapons inspectors (UNSCOM) raided the science laboratory of Baghdad’s famous, formerly resplendently equipped university, the Inspectors laughed at its sorry state — then threw out the few remaining books.”

And it is this physically and mentally starved and crippled people, more than half of them children, whom Bush and Blair are planning to decimate with the full might of their terrible arsenal of the latest in weapons of mass destruction, once the UN inspectors have outlived their usefulness. Not that the war had ever stopped. In the last three years, Anglo-American pilots have routinely killed some 1,500 civilians, shepherds, fishermen and truck drivers over Iraq in raids over the so-called no-fly zones. A confidential UN contingency planning report,”Likely Humanitarian Scenarios”, paints a dire picture of Iraq after possible extensive bombing by allied forces and ground fighting. The report predicts that the warfare will be much more damaging to the civilian population than it was in the Gulf War, evolving beyond a bombing campaign with narrow targets to “potentially a large-scale and protracted ground offensive” which would involve far greater loss of lives than the campaign conducted in 1991.

The report warns that in the early stages half a million people “could require treatment to a greater or lesser degree as a result of direct or indirect injuries”. It further estimates that three million people across the country will face dire malnutrition and require “ therapeutic feeding”. It paints a picture of a crippled nation with its roads, bridges, railroads shattered, its electricity gird badly damaged, and its oil industry battered and paralyzed. The report warns that outbreak of diseases in epidemic proportions is very likely, citing the risk of cholera and dysentery.

Another report prepared by the Nobel prize-winner, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, predicts that an invasion of Iraq could lead to a “human catastrophe” of casualties as high as 250,000 within the first three months of an invasion. A spokesman for the organization in Massachusetts, Bob Schaeffer, said that the study also looks at the impact of an invasion on the public health system and such necessities as agriculture, water and energy. “We’re saying that there’ll be a very short-term impact and an even more profound longer-term impact”, Schaeffer said. “The report uses the term human catastrophe, even if it does not escalate to the level of poison gas, civil war or nuclear weapons.”

Addressing the Cairo international conference, Halliday denounced the US administration’s war plans as “obscene.” “ It’s criminal,” he said, “and I believe it’s indictable.” Asked if US policy was solely determined by oil, he said: “Well, it’s certainly not about weapons, because there is no threat from Iraq. We know that in this neighbourhood, and the Americans know it perfectly well. It’s a game being played by Mr Bush, a very dangerous, nasty game... So it’s about oil. But it is also about oil and Israel, Israel’s position, Israel’s representation of American interests in the Middle East... it’s also about this desire for influence and power and presence throughout the world, including the Middle East... And it gets back again and again to the need to control oil reserves, which are of such importance to the survival of the economy of the United States.

“And I think that Washington is very insecure in its relationship with Saudi Arabia; they are not at all sure what’s going to happen in the years ahead, and they want a reserve tank. And the reserve tank, unfortunately, is called Iraq. It’s sitting on a 120 billion barrels, its cheap and easy to obtain, and all it needs is a friendly regime in Baghdad that will kow-tow to American interests and American demands, and I think that’s the name of the game of the attack, the war, the bombing, the invasion (and) the occupation of Iraq that Mr Bush clearly has in mind. It’s part of a strategy to dominate world globalization that is designed to support and enhance the lifestyle of Americans.”

These views were apparently shared by more than 400 distinguished Arab and non-Arab delegates from around the world (including Ahmed Ben Bella, Ramsey Clark, Dr. Von Sponeck, George Galloway and Scott Ritter) who gathered for the Cairo conference (December 18-19) to launch an international movement to stop war and support self-determination for the Iraqi and Palestinian people.

The Cairo Declaration placed the two issues in the context of US monopoly of political, economic and military power within the framework of the capitalist globalization, to the detriment of the lives of the majority of the world’s peoples, calling the Cairo moot an extension of a protracted international struggle against imperialism from Seattle to Genoa, to Lisbon and Florence, to Cordoba and Cairo.

But even when the international campaign to stall the annihilation of Iraq gains momentum, it devolves on the Muslim-Arab peoples, first and foremost, to take immediate and collective initiative. They must clearly and unequivocally refuse to collaborate with the United States in its war to crush the people of Iraq. None of us can afford to sit back and say it is ‘them’ not ‘us’. It was Afghanistan some months ago. It is Iraq today. Yet who is next and where?

With every step of imposed destruction and passive submission, our world is brought closer to a global disaster. A collective answer to the drumbeat of war is a must — we no longer have a choice, or the luxury of time.