GUJARAT: At the elegantly simple home of Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad, the bustling capital of Gujarat, a museum eulogizes his contribution to the founding of India. Gandhi’s clothes, books, journals and photographs line the walls. Outside in the freshly watered gardens the mango trees are in full bloom. One journal contains Gandhi’s simple denunciation of violence: “The science of war leads one to dictatorship. The science of non-violence alone can lead one to a pure democracy.”

More than 50 years after his death at the hands of a nationalist militant, Gandhi would find India unrecognizable. In the past five months his home state has been stunned by religious violence that shows few signs of fading.

India’s worst religious violence since the 1947 partition was sparked at the end of February that lead to killing of thousands of Muslims.

Since then, massacres by Hindu gangs have become commonplace. In five months, more than 2,000 Muslims have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced, congregating in squalid camps around Gujarat.

The state is in turmoil. On Friday, only hours after the state’s top elected official, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, resigned and dissolved the legislative assembly to seek a fresh mandate, at least two people were killed and eight others injured when police opened fire to disperse rioting mobs.

In recent months Modi had come under attack for his delayed response to the killings. His resignation was eclipsed, however, on Thursday when 70-year-old Muslim scientist Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, an unrepentant nationalist and the father of India’s nuclear missile programme, was elected to the largely ceremonial role of President.

The violence has been linked to the rise of extremist Hindu groups such as the Association of National Volunteers, or the RSS — a khaki-clad nationalist paramilitary sect formed in the 1920s — and its offspring, the World Hindu Council, or the VHP.

Gujarat is one of the few states in India controlled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The state has been described as a ‘laboratory for Hindu fascism’. Since rising to power in the mid-Nineties, the BJP has aggressively pursued a pro-Hindu agenda.

It has also backed the construction of a temple in Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in 1992. Several members of the present Cabinet, including the Indian Deputy Prime Minister, L.K Advani, were present at the demolition.

The RSS and the World Hindu Council, described locally as ‘Saffron Warriors’, have one clear aim: Hindu expansion by mass conversion. The militants believe that India was once an empire of 75 countries stretching from Cambodia to Iran.

They have introduced textbooks that convey former Hindu glories, and they propagate the myth of an India under siege from native Islamic militants. The RSS also lobbies to reintroduce the traditional names of cities like Mumbai, until recently Bombay.

“The situation is getting out of control,” says Arvind Sisodia, vice-president of the VHP in Gujarat. A passionate advocate of the Hindutva or ‘global Hindu consciousness’, Sisodia is a middle-class worker at the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

In the days after the first killings in Gujarat, the VHP distributed leaflets asking Hindus to pledge a boycott of Muslims.

“It is up to all Hindus to make sure that we restore India to dominance,” says Sisodia. “Hinduism was once the dominant faith. Muslims have to learn to adapt. Otherwise, it will be dangerous for them. We don’t want them here.”

A few days after the deaths at Godhra, on a humid morning in an inner-city enclave of Ahmedabad, around 20 men marched up to the Indian flag and offered the Nazi salute. This was a training camp, or a shakha, run by the RSS. There are about 40,000 camps scattered throughout India and similar informal camps abroad for expatriates.

The men, many of them in their thirties, are middle-class professionals — employees of Ahmedabad’s bustling industrial community. India’s middle classes are the keenest recruits to the RSS — drawn by fears of Islamization and of Westernization amid a crumbling national economy.

In a fashionable Ahmedabad gated community lives Vijay Chauthaiwale, a microbiologist. Over lunch, with the World Cup playing on a satellite channel behind him, he explained his attraction to the RSS: “We are a very modern family,” he said, “but I feel that the more we move towards the West, the more likely we are to lose our Hindu values. Gandhi would not have understood,” he said. “He was an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned ideas. No one believes those things any more. The world has changed. And for Hindus to survive, we have to protect our culture and our way of life.”

For middle-class families like Chauthaiwale’s, the Indian secular experiment has proved disastrous. The country’s Muslim population — now 11 per cent — is seen as a primary threat. “Where do the allegiances of the Muslims lie?” asked Kaushik Mehta, general secretary of the VHP in Gujarat.

For the 100,000 Muslims in squalid camps around Gujarat there is no such escape. And now the Muslim camps are being shut down, casting their occupants into the streets and into the hands of Hindu extremists.

Former chief minister Modi, however, is unconvinced. In the early days of the rioting, as the body count escalated, Modi said Gujarat’s Hindus had shown ‘remarkable restraint’. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.