WRESTLERS may appear to have little to do with India`s strategy to fight terror attacks, but a closer scrutiny of history reveals a fairly close link. On the face of it, we claim to be involved in a global alliance against terror. The fact is that India`s problems with what it calls terrorism are largely rooted in more than a hundred years of communal mistrust between Hindus and Muslims. The global war on terrorism is just seven years old.

The current Indian strategy can be best understood by grasping a variant of competitive communalism that has grown between the country`s two main political parties, the Congress and the BJP. Last week, cornered by a spurt in deadly blasts carried out by suspected Muslim extremists, for example, a Congress party leader diverted the issue by claiming that there was neither support within his party for convicted Kashmiri Afzal Guru nor opposition to his hanging. To an average mind linking the two issues would look absurd. For the Congress the clubbing together reflects desperation, motivated perhaps by an urge to keep up with the main opposition BJP that has built its election campaign over the demand for Guru to be executed without further delay for involvement in the 2001 attack on India`s parliament.

The comment also indicates the Congress party`s proclivity to join the BJP in offering absurdly simplistic middle class notions of terrorism, aware that a definition thus arrived at would enable both to better sell a spurious strategy to combat the scourge. An example of the bankruptcy is the Guru debate. There is of course no logical nexus between hanging Guru or keeping him in jail, and any strategy to fight those who spread terror by detonating devastating bombs in public squares. A bit of the strategy to counter terror was in evidence in a shootout last week in a populous Muslim locality in Delhi, which saw two suspected extremists and a police officer getting killed. However, the strategy of killing extremists to find elusive peace is oblivious of the romance of dying that these men and women often harbour. The person who drove an explosives laden truck into the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad couldn`t be deterred by death. He was enthused by it. In Guru`s case too, media reports say he is keen to be executed. So much for deterrence voiced by the BJP and now also by the Congress. So what is to be done?

To begin with, the middle classes need to be disabused of their notions of terrorists and the easy panacea to tackle them. They need to be aware that Indian concept of terrorism is rooted in a communal history, which goes back to the colonial era. That was also when communalism became deeply aligned with the culture of akhadas, or wrestling arenas that were shored up as a means to prepare a Hindu spearhead to confront the assertive Muslim revivalist challenge. (I am not sure if the legend of Gama and Bholu pehelwans or wrestlers from Pakistan defeating some Indian counterparts, spread by my Pakistani cousins was part of the mythology.) Several respected historians have analysed the phenomenon over a period of time. Manu Bhagavan of the history faculty at the City University of New York has now explored the subject from the angle of Congress support to Hindu nationalist upsurge, this despite Gandhi`s stiff opposition. Of these apologists of early Hindutva, Bhagavan dwells on the little-known support that a seemingly open-minded K. M. Munshi gave from within the Congress leadership.

Understanding Munshi, a Gujarati Brahmin known for his erudition and a seemingly agreeable worldview, may explain the Congress Party`s willingness to mutate today into a softer BJP. For this we have to encapsulate history. A Muslim peasant revolt in South India and Gandhi`s support for the Khilafat Movement had set the stage for a confrontation by organised Hindutva forces with Muslims. Over the years, these “defenders of faith” organised and marshalled their forces, re-investing the dormant Hindu Mahasabha in 1922 as a first step, says Bhagavan. In 1923, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar published his seminal polemic, Hindutva or Who Is a Hindu? In1925, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar established the RSS.

“One of the central goals of this new brotherhood of saffron was to train Hindu men in various forms of physical fitness and martial arts and so `akhadas`, or gymnasia, began to sprout all over the region for this purpose. Almost immediately upon its inception, the movement to create and run these akhadas was led in the Bombay presidency in part by a fairly well-known if low-key political figure by the name of K. M. Munshi,” wrote Bhagavan in a recent issue of Economic and Political Weekly.

The general secretary of the Bengal Hindu Students` Federation (the Students` Front of the Hindu Mahasabha) wrote to Munshi after a meeting in the 1940s “I shall always try to keep you in touch with our activities. With regard to the aims and ideals of the Hindu Students Federation we had a long discussion with you and your sympathy and encouragement has also strengthened our activities...The aim of the Hindu Students` Federation is...promotion of...Hindu culture and Hindu nationalism...A great danger threatens the Hindu nation at present and that is the menace of Pakistan. You are doing an incalculable service to the country by rousing us to action in this time.”

The akhada movement, according to Bhagavan, was so clearly affiliated with the Hindu nationalist cause that even Munshi`s “otherwise silver tongue” could not persuasively defend the gymnasia as benign institutions. This finally brought him at loggerheads in 1941 with the Congress high command, most notably Gandhi, who was seemingly outraged by any Congress-Hindutva nexus.

Munshi`s reply to Gandhi was telling. “Since Pakistan has been in action at Dacca, Ahmedabad, Bombay and other places, it is clear that...riots are going to be a normal feature of our life for some years. If...the British machinery of maintaining order weakens, they will perhaps grow more frequent and intense if a division of India is sought to be enforced by internal or external agencies through organised violence.... Do you include `akhadas` in the gymnasiums where training in violent resistance is given? I may inform you that for the last over 15 years I have been associated with the `akhada` movement in the presidency both directly and indirectly. I have still unofficial connection with several `akhadas`. I deem them an essential machinery for training our race in the art of self-defence. During the last many years they have played a great part in giving us some self-confidence to resist goondaism.”

Munshi saw Hindus blindly as one, homogeneous `race`, as doe-eyed innocents who had been victimised by `goondas`, gangsters and thugs out to steal and pillage. As Bhagavan observes, `goondas` is used euphemistically but un-subtly to refer to Muslims, and to depict them as thieves and plunderers after India itself, to take pieces of it for Pakistan. It is this lingering mistrust between the two communities that nobody from the two main parties seems keen to address today. Of course there is space for hope, which can yet be gainfully used by willing Indian parties, between the akhadas of yore and the country`s Quixote-like preparation to wage a wider war on terrorism. The alternative looks tragic.

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