India’s moment of reckoning

COMMUNAL violence and killings have been the bane of India during the past fifty-five years. But what sets the Gujarat carnage apart is the state government’s complicity in the mass killing and arson and the Central government’s studied abdication of resolve to intervene and bring the situation under control.

There seemed to be a design to cleanse entire villages and urban suburbs of the minority community, cripple them economically by destroying their property and business establishments and to hurt their religious feelings by systematically demolishing a number of mosques, darghas and tombs. According to Daily “The Hindu”, “those involved had planned the whole thing in advance and were waiting for an excuse to put it into effect. The Godhra massacre provided that excuse.”

Mr Vajpayee has described the Gujarat carnage as “a blot on the face of India.” But what he has omitted to say is that Gujarat has undermined India’s social cohesion, its national unity and its chances of survival as a pluralistic society.

The Indian Muslims had just started recovering from the shock of the Babri mosque demolition and the communal riots that followed. But the carnage and the destruction in Gujarat have sent shock waves amongst the minority community throughout India and sprinkled salt on the wounds that were just beginning to heal. The Indian Muslims have nowhere to go and have, therefore, no alternative but to fight for their survival, which may, in turn, trigger more communal violence.

The pronouncements, from time to time, of Sangh Pariwar — the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal — have made it clear that their long-term agenda is to establish Hindu Rashtra, keep the minorities in a frightened state and reduce them to second class citizens unless they change their identity. After the ‘Daan’ ceremony at Ayodhya on March 15, VHP chief Ashok Singhal said that his party would not rest until Ram Mandir was constructed on the site of Babri mosque and the temples at Mathura and Varansi were “liberated”. What he meant to convey was that the VHP would tear down the mosques in Mathura (said to be the birthplace of Hindu deity Lord Krishna) and the Hindu holy city of Kashi and build temples on their sites.

The Sangh Pariwar has not made any attempt to conceal its intent that it wants to make religion as the focal point of politics and governance in India. The RSS, after its general council session at Bangalore, issued a call on March 17 to “Hindutva-devoted workers” to get a Ram temple constructed on the site of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya. But even more alarming was the RSS warning that the Muslims’ safety in India “depends on their earning goodwill of the majority” and that winning goodwill means “respecting, tolerating and cooperating with the majority community”.

One of the most astonishing developments that has taken place in India after 1947 is the transformation of Hinduism, traditionally more of a culture than a religious creed, into a chauvinistic faith. Hinduism has been without any omnipotent deity or any dogma or even a revealed book and has been recognizable only by its pluralism and tolerance. Gandhiji, a staunch practising Hindu and Jawaharlal Nehru, a confirmed agnostic, were both acceptable to Hinduism.

But Hindu fundamentalists are now trying to turn Hinduism into an inflexible and belligerent creed, motivated by divisiveness and hatred. Hindu identity, thanks to the RSS, is now coming to rest more and more on hatred against minorities, especially the Indian Muslims.

The most alarming aspect of Hindu chauvinism is that it is the middle class, economically and socially the most important group in India, that is being attracted to fundamentalism and extremism. It were the well-educated and well-off middle class Hindus in Gujarat who killed their neighbours because they belonged to a different religion. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that Gujarat, the state that produced India’s most illustrious son, Gandhiji, the apostle of non-violence, is today a stronghold of the VHP and the RSS.

Gujarat, the fastest growing state in India, has 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 percent of its total exports. But economic prosperity and high level of literacy have not prevented madness from gripping the Hindu middle class in Gujarat. “The people responsible for all this,” admitted Ahmedabad Police Commissioner Prashant Chandra Pande after the carnage, “come from the better sections of society. They are ostensibly honest and decent. But this did not stop them”.

The above picture of Indian fundamentalism contrasts sharply with that of Pakistan. Religious extremism has primarily attracted those in Pakistan who regard it as a short-cut out of their miserable social and economic conditions. Unlike India, it is not the educated and affluent middle-class but the poorly educated or uneducated, unemployed and economically-deprived sections of the population that have primarily come under the spell of Islamic fundamentalism or jihadi culture. With the alleviation of poverty and the spread of education, religious fundamentalism and chauvinism will die a natural death in Pakistan. But the situation in India is far more complicated and difficult to tackle.

The ambivalent policies followed by the BJP government on the Ram Mandir issue have brought the communal question to the centre stage of Indian politics. And Mr. Vajpayee has been no less responsible for this. While he is unequivocal in his condemnation of the Babri mosque demolition, he also says than the construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya “is a matter of national sentiments”.

While he believes that churches and dargahs are as much a symbol “of our culture as temples”, he finds time out of his busy schedule during his 2000 American visit to go to Staten Island for a gathering of VHP type soul-mates and declares himself to be a life-long ‘swayamsevak’ (RSS member). While Mr. Vajpayee says he believes in India’s secularism (and probably he does), he sends a high official to Ayodhya to receive from Hindu fundamentalists a carved pillar meant for constructing the Ram temple at the disputed site while the case is still subjudice. The Commissioner of Faizabad had refused to accept the pillar and he has been transferred. It is significant that the karsevaks, during the Ram Mandir agitation, were not chanting the praise of Lord Rama but were shouting anti-Muslim slogans.

Mr. Vajpayee’s policy of mollifying the VHP-RSS combine to keep them under check has not paid off. As a matter of fact it has only encouraged the mediaeval throwbacks to roll over their campaign of divisiveness and hatred more openly.

The time for equivocation is over as India’s moment of reckoning has come. The Indian prime minister has to make up his mind whether he wants to lead his country to secularism and modernity or towards obscurantism of Hindu Rashtra. As India’s most illustrious strategic analyst, Mr. K. Subrahmanyam, has stated in his article in “Times of India” of March 26, “the first problem this country has to face is to recognize that India is nowhere near being a secular republic in concept, in practice and in its political institutions”.

The ruling BJP coalition at the centre as well as the opposition parties have to realize the gravity of the situation. In India, except for the left, like the Communist Party, no other political party, including the Congress (I), has been above board in respect of communalism. The Babri mosque was demolished when India had a Congress prime minister (Narasimha Rao). It was again a Congress prime minister (Rajiv Gandhi) who set the communal ball rolling in 1989 by allowing the symbolic ‘puja’ near the Babri mosque which gave birth to the Sangh Pariwar’s campaign to demolish the mosque. Mr. Vajpayee’s real test lies in mustering up the political will to put the genie back into the bottle before the Frankenstein of communalism devours the concept of secular India. That can only be done if Mr. Vajpayee decides to cut off BJP’s links with the RSS as he was advised to do by Mr. Jayaprakash Narain in 1979. But at that time Mr. Vajpaee and his colleagues chose to go out of the Janta Party government rather than sever their bonds with the RSS. However, at that time the communal genie had not come out of the bottle.

In a strange quirk of history, the similarity in the situation prevailing today in India and Pakistan is too striking to escape notice. The spectre of religious fundamentalism threatens to undermine the very foundations of civil society in both the countries. In Pakistan General Musharraf is trying to rein in Islamic fundamentalists and extremists. In India, Mr. Vajpayee is also facing a similar challenge from another set of fundamentalists represented by the RSS-VHP combine. But while the Pakistan government has banned some extremist outfits Mr. Vajpayee seems to be hesitant (or powerless) to take similar action against Hindu chauvinists, despite calls from his NDA colleagues and opposition parties. If Mr. Vajpayee’s government can impose a ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), why is it hesitant to ban the VHP, responsible for the Gujarat carnage and the assault on the Orissa Assembly?

Since there has been a co-relationship between anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim feelings in India, continuing tension with Pakistan has made the task of defusing communal tension all the more difficult. The vicious propaganda against Pakistan launched since December 13 has also played a role in rousing anti-Muslim sentiments in India. For their part, the decision makers in Pakistan should keep in mind the effect of their policies on hapless Indian Muslims who continue to pay the price for the crucial role their elders played in the partitioning of India and the establishment of Pakistan.

Since both Musharraf and Vajpayee are facing a similar challenge they should join hands rather than confront each other. They ought to be able to do business together because both are liberals in their private lives and represent the moderate face of their hardline constituencies. The opportunity to turn the tide comes once in a while. Will they be able to grab it? The well-wishers of both the countries hope and pray for it.

Darkness at noon

I HAVE returned from Gujarat with a pile of memoranda. It always happens whenever I visit a riot-affected area. I got loads of them when I was in Bhagalpur, Biwandi, Meerut, Mumbai and many other places.

I have lost count. The victims feel that once they have given something in writing, they will get justice. They know it is a futile hope, but they continue to cling to it. How helpless they are!

The refugees in the camps I have visited in Ahmedabad are no different. Despondency more than the loss is what is writ large on their faces. They want to be heard — a door to knock at, a shoulder to cry on.

They have every reason to feel this way. Even after four weeks, no FIR has been registered, no official taken to task, not even a policeman suspended. On the other hand, the few who did a conscientious job have been summarily transferred. This has further jolted the confidence of the victims. I have never seen so many people so much bereft of hope.

I just listened to their harrowing tales, of murder, rape, people burnt alive, the looting and what not. After some time, I felt I could not take it any more. Sorrow beyond a point dulls your sensitivity. I had got so used to pain that I began to be part of it. State chief minister Narendra Modi was away to Rajkot. But

I gave a bit of my mind to the chief secretary and the home secretary. Why didn’t any official in Gujarat resign? Was there nothing called conscience, not even in the land of Mahatma Gandhi? Why none of them had even gone round to the refugee camps? The state machinery was conspicuous by its inaction. Must a BJP-run government be saved from dismissal because the Centre is led by the BJP?

What happened to New Delhi? Should home minister LK Advani have defended the state chief minister when his failure was palpable? Would successive rulers follow these parameters of governance?

I found the answer at a gathering of NGOs, human rights activists, Gandhians and all those who were working for relief and rehabilitation in the state. They told me how the entire city of Ahmedabad had been mapped out locality- wise within a few hours of the Godhara incident. Areas, houses, shops and factories of Muslims were marked and the specific task of killing, looting and burning was assigned to different groups. They were in touch with “their bosses” who directed them on mobile phones. A pamphlet was distributed to urge the Hindus to boycott the Muslims economically — not to buy anything from their shops and not to have any transaction with them.

The police behaved as if the force had been given instructions “not to interfere.” During the Mumbai riots, the New York Times had got hold of the transcripts of conversations between the police control room and the officers on the streets. The advice was to allow Muslim houses to burn and to prevent aid from reaching the victims. In Gujarat, it was worse. The police instigated the rioters.

The day of partition came back before my eyes. At that time also, the police were hand in glove with rioters or, for that matter, the killers. What was perceived as “the call of religion” had turned thousands of ordinary people into a crowd of criminals indulging in the types of atrocities that hard core criminals would do.

Even then there was little remorse in the society as in Gujarat today. But I felt spontaneous kinship with the refugees. They too had left behind their hearths and homes, friends and hopes as I did when I left my hometown Sialkot. Like the refugees, I too had seen murder and worse. But their plight was more harrowing: they were refugees in their own country: Like the Kashmiri pundits. It also reminded me of the 1984 riots in Delhi where 3,000 Sikhs were butchered in broad daylight.

I went to the spot where the Godhara incident happened. Reconstructing the tragedy, I found that the train left Godhara station at 7.50 a.m. on February 27. Some karsevaks were still on the platform washing their faces or teasing some vendors. One karseveak pulled the chain to stop the train. It left five minutes later. The chain was pulled again at 7.58 a.m., this time from three compartments. The authorities are yet to identify who did it. When the train halted, at a distance of 800 metres from the station, the train was stoned and the S-6 bogie was set on fire. I have no doubt that the attack was a well-planned one. Otherwise, it is not possible for a mob of 500 carrying petrol and kerosene to assemble in three minutes in an area that can only be reached by running through prickly bushes.

But Godhara pales into insignificance when it is compared with the retaliation in Ahmedabad, Baroda and some other cities, and even in the countryside. Ten districts out of 23 in Gujarat have been affected. The official figures of killed is put at 800. Nearly one lakh, men, women and children are living in inhuman conditions in what are called the refugee camps. NGOs are managing them but even the wheat or atta (flour) provided by the government is bad. Why the Centre merely hemmed and hawed and did nothing is understandable if the infighting within the BJP is understood. It is a confrontation between the hawks and the doves. That also explains why the PM did not go to Gujarat immediately.

Many in the party believe that such happenings as the one in Gujarat will consolidate Hindus on its side. A few like the PM and foreign minister Jaswant Singh believe otherwise. But they are quiet. They are afraid of the RSS hardliners who have initiated the thesis of Hindu consolidation and have found no fault with Modi, an RSS pracharak.

In my letter to the prime minister, I said that the riots in the state were not Hindu-Muslim clashes in the sense that one community fought against the other. “It was really a pogrom, a well-planned and executed scheme... I find that the bureaucracy and the police have been communalised. There are umpteen instances to show that the government machinery was biased as if there were unwritten instructions not to act against the rioters. Chief Minister Narendra Modi should have been asked to quit long ago.” I have made a suggestion to expand the one-man commission to a three-member panel to be presided over by a Supreme Court judge. The CBI and not the state inquiry set-up should be in charge of the investigation.

The government has not yet done even a survey, let alone compensating and rehabilitating them. Voluntary assistance is coming and some people are adopting families to help them restart their lives. Still it is too inadequate and too tentative.

There is a larger question. Do we go from one riot to another? How do we stop people who are trying to establish a Hindu Rashtra and demolish the secular ethos of the country? The example of Pakistan is before us, how a theocratic state is trying to be pluralistic after fanning the wind of fundamentalism and jihad. Can the genie thus released go back into the bottle? Democracy is not the only institution which the nation loses. The climate also becomes ripe for dictatorship and fascism and all that goes with them.

There is no option except to fight against the forces of reaction and bigots. India’s pluralistic society cannot be saved by staying quiet. Martin Luther King was right when he said: “The day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”

Stakes in Afghanistan

AN upsurge of murders in villages across northern Afghanistan is ethnically based; the alleged perpetrators are associated with the Northern Alliance, which in turn is America’s ally in the war on terrorism.

It offers a worrisome glimpse of what might happen if the United States and its western allies walk away from the job of reconstruction, as they did a decade ago. And were Afghanistan to implode or deteriorate again into chaotic, warlord-based violence, it’s hard to imagine why anyone elsewhere in the world would join with the United States in the next stages of the war against terrorism.

Administration officials have been reluctant to commit the United States to “nation-building” in Afghanistan, and for some sound and understandable reasons. U.S. forces are still fighting a hot war in pursuit of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders; it’s hard to think about peacekeeping when there is as yet no peace to keep.

The United States took the lead in waging war against the Taliban, and will have to lead again in other parts of the world; the notion that other countries should take up the slack once the hard fighting is over has some logical appeal. The longer U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, the greater the danger they will become targets. And Afghanistan, after decades of war, is a wreck, politically, economically, socially; rebuilding will be expensive and time-consuming and wretchedly complex. Those are, as we say, sound arguments for caution. But none of them outweighs the danger on the other side. —The Washington Post

What price Oslo accord?

THE television images on al-Jazeera have been burningly clear. There is a kind of Palestinian heroism in evidence there that this is the story of our time. An entire army, navy, and air force supplied munificently and unconditionally by the United States have been wreaking destruction on the 18% of the West Bank and 60% of Gaza afforded Palestinians after ten years of negotiations with Israel and the US.

Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps, civilian residences have been at the receiving end of a merciless, criminal assault by Israeli troops huddled inside their helicopter gun-ships, F-16’s and Merkavas, and still the poorly armed resistance fighters take on this preposterously more powerful force undaunted and unyielding. In the US, the CNN and newspapers like The New York Times to their discredit fail ever to mention that “the violence” is uneven and that there aren’t two sides involved here, but only one state turning all its great power against a stateless, and repeatedly dispossessed people, bereft of arms and real leadership, with the aim of destroying them, “dealing them a terrible blow” as the war criminal who leads Israel has put it shamelessly.

As an index of how deranged Sharon has become, I might quote here what he said to Ha’aretz on March 5: “The PA is behind the terror, it’s all terror. Arafat is behind the terror. Our pressure is aimed at ending the terror. Don’t expect Arafat to act against the terror. We have to cause them heavy casualties and then they’ll know they can’t keep using terror and win political achievements.”

Besides symptomatically revealing the workings of an obsessed mind bent on destruction and sheer unadulterated hatred, Sharon’s words indicate the failures of reason and criticism since last September. Yes there was a terrorist outrage, but there’s more to the world than terror. There is politics, and struggle, and history, and injustice, and resistance and yes, state terror as well. With scarcely a peep from the American professorate or intelligentsia, we have all succumbed entirely to the promiscuous misuse of language and sense, by which everything we don’t like has become terror and what we do is pure and simple good, to fight terror, no matter how much wealth, and lives, and destruction is involved. Swept away are all the enlightenment precepts by which we attempt to educate our students and our-fellow citizens, replaced by a disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and self-righteous wrath of the kind that only the wealthy and the powerful, it would seem, have the right to use and act upon.

No wonder then that a thug like Sharon feels entitled to do what he does when in the greatest democracy on earth, laws, constitutional rights, writs of habeas corpus and reason itself are consigned to the rubbish bin in the pursuit of terror and terrorism. As educators and as citizens, we have failed in our mission by allowing ourselves to be bamboozled in this way, without so much as an organized public discussion about a defence budget that has shot up to 400 billion dollars and 40 million people remain without health insurance.

Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told that love of country requires such expenditures and such destruction because a good cause is at stake. Nonsense. What is at stake are material interests that keep rulers in power, corporations making profits, people in a state of manufactured consent, just so long as they don’t get up one morning and start to think about where, in this mad technologized rush to bomb and kill, we are going.

Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the US. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony!

The picture you get here is that Israelis are battling for their lives instead of for their settlements and military bases on the occupied lands of Palestine. No maps have been run for months in the American media. On March 8, hitherto the bloodiest day for the Palestinians of the sixteen month intifada, the CNN’s main evening news specified the death of 40 “people” and failed even to mention the death of several Red Crescent workers killed while their ambulances were prevented callously by Israeli tanks from getting to the wounded. Just “people,” and no pictures of the hell they’ve been living in the 35th year of military occupation.

Tul Karm, undergoing a siege of sieges with 24-hour curfews, electricity and water cut-off, systematic round-ups and removal of 800 young men, the wanton smashing of refugee houses, immense destruction of property (and I’m not speaking of night clubs or sports facilities but of shacks that have furnished twice displaced with hovels for bare subsistence) limitless cases of unexampled sadistic cruelty to unarmed and undefended civilians who are pushed and beaten and left to bleed to death, women allowed to give birth to stillborn babies while they needlessly wait at Israeli road-blocks, old men made to strip and take off their shoes and walk barefoot for a gum-chewing 18 year old waving around an M-16 that my taxes have paid for.

Today, in the biggest attack of all, Ramallah has been invaded and is being ravaged by 140 Israeli tanks, thus completing Israel’s re-conquest of the already-occupied Palestinian territories.

The Palestinian people are paying the heavy, heavy unconscionable price of Oslo, which after ten years of negotiating left them with bits of land lacking coherence and continuity, security institutions designed to assure their subservience to Israel, and a life that impoverished them so that the Jewish state could thrive and prosper. In vain during those ten years did some of us warn that the distance between the US-Israeli language of peace and the appalling realities on the ground was never bridged, never even intended to be bridged. Words and phrases like “peace process” and “terrorism” took hold without reference to any real referent.

Land confiscations were either overlooked or referred to “bilateral negotiations” that were taking place between a state consolidating its hold on territory it wanted at all costs, and a mediocre set of uninformed negotiators whom it took four years to acquire, much less use, a reliable map of the land they were negotiating over.

The worst misrepresentation of all is that in the 54 years since 1948, never has a narrative of Palestinian heroism and suffering ever been allowed to emerge. We are all depicted as basically violent fanatic extremists who are little more than the terrorists that George Bush and his cabal have imposed on the consciousness of a stunned and systematically misinformed population, aided and uncritically abetted by an entire army of commentators and media stars - the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers, Brokaws, Russerts, and their ilk. The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed with such faithful disciples trailing happily in its ranks.

But now that the Saudi peace proposal has become the point of discussion and of hope, it is necessary, I think, to put it in its real, as opposed to its supposed, context. First of all, this is the re-cycled Reagan plan of 1982, the Fahd Plan of 1983, the Madrid plan of 1991, and so on: in other words, it follows a series of plans many times put forward which in the end both Israel and the US have not only refused to implement, but have actively torpedoed.

The way I see it, the only negotiations worth having should be on the phases of a total Israeli withdrawal and not, as was the case with Oslo, bargaining over what pieces of land Israel was willing very grudgingly to give up. There’s been too much Palestinian blood spilled, too much Israeli contempt and racist violence dispensed for any serious return to Oslo-style negotiations brokered by that most biased of honest brokers, the United States.

Everyone is aware, however, that the old Palestinian negotiators haven’t given up on their dreams and illusions, and that meetings have been occurring throughout the raids and bombings. But I would argue that due weight be given to decades of Palestinian suffering and the real human costs of Israel’s destructive policies before any negotiations accord undue status to Israeli governments that have trampled on Palestinian rights the way they have demolished our houses and killed our people.

Any Arab-Israeli negotiations that do not factor in history — and for this task a team of historians, economists, and geographers with a conscience are needed — are not worth having, just as the Palestinians must now elect a new set of negotiators and representatives in the hope of salvaging something from the present calamity.

In short, in whatever meetings that now occur between Israeli and Palestinian representatives, the gravity of Israeli depredations against our people has to be given attention and not simply brushed aside as so much past history. Oslo, in effect, pardoned the occupation, excusing it for all the buildings and lives destroyed over the first twenty five years of occupation.

After so much further suffering, Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from the table with not even a rhetorical demand that it needs to atone for what it did.

I will be told that politics is about what is possible, not about what is desired, and that we should be grateful to get even a small Israeli pullback. I disagree strongly. Negotiations can only be about when the total withdrawal will take place, not how may percentages Israel is willing to concede. A conqueror and a vandal cannot concede anything: he must simply return what he’s taken and pay for the abuses that are his responsibility to bear, just as Saddam Hussein should and did pay for his occupation of Kuwait. —Copyright, Edward W. Said 2002