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The Nation magazine, September 30, 2002
Fascism's Firm Footprint in India
by Arundhati Roy
Gujarat, the only major state in India with a government headed
by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has for some years been the
petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate
political experiment. In spring 2002, the initial results were
put on public display.
It began within hours of the Godhra outrage-in
which fifty-eight Hindus were killed when a train returning from
the disputed site of Ayodhya on February 27 was set alight as it
pulled out of a station in Godhra, in Gujarat. Even now, months
later, nobody knows who was responsible for the crime. The
Forensic Department report clearly says that the fire was started
inside the coach. This raises a huge question mark over the
theory that the train was set alight by a Muslim mob that had
gathered outside the train. However, the then-Home Minister (now
elevated to the post of Deputy Prime Minister), L.K. Advani,
immediately announced-with no evidence to back his statement-that
the attack was a Pakistani plot.
On the evening of February 27, Hindu nationalists in the Vishva
Hindu Parishad (VHP, the World Hindu Council) and the Bajrang Dal
movement put into motion a meticulously planned pogrom against
the Muslim community. Press reports put the number of dead at
just over 800. Human rights organizations have said it is closer
to 2,000. As many as 100,000 people, driven from their homes, now
live in refugee camps. Women were stripped and gang-raped, and
parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. In
Ahmedabad, the former capital of Gujarat and the second-largest
industrial city in the state, the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the
founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in
the course of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Khan
was desecrated. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, hotels,
textile mills, buses and cars. Hundreds of thousands have lost
their jobs.
Across Gujarat, thousands of people made up the mobs. They were
armed with petrol bombs, guns, knives and swords. Apart from the
VHP and Bajrang Dal's usual lumpen constituency, there were
Dalits (untouchables) and Adivasis (indigenous peoples), who were
brought in on buses and trucks. Middle-class people participated
in the looting. (On one memorable occasion, a family arrived in a
Mitsubishi Lancer.) The leaders of the mob had computer-generated
lists marking out Muslim homes, shops and businesses. They used
mobile phones to coordinate the action. They had not just police
protection and police connivance, but also covering fire. The
cooking-gas cylinders they used to burn Muslim homes and
establishments had been hoarded weeks in advance, causing a
severe gas shortage in Ahmedabad.
While Gujarat burned, our prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
was on MTV promoting his new poems. (Reports say cassettes have
sold l00,000 copies. It took him more than a month-and two
vacations in the hills-to make it to Gujarat.
When he did, he gave a speech at the Shah Alam refugee camp.
His mouth moved, he tried to express concern, but no real sound
emerged except the mocking of the wind whistling through a
burned, bloodied, broken world. Next we knew, he was bobbing
around in a golf cart, striking business deals in Singapore.
One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India. Hindu
fascists regard them as legitimate prey. The Iynch mob continues
to be the arbiter of the routine affairs of daily life: who can
live where, who can say what, who can meet whom and where and
when. Its mandate is expanding quickly. From religious affairs,
it now extends to property disputes, family altercations, the
planning and allocation of water resources. Muslim businesses
have been shut down. Muslim people are not served in restaurants.
Muslim children are not welcome in schools. Muslim parents live
in dread that their infants might forget what they've been told
and give themselves away by saying "Amrni!" or
"Abba!" in public and invite sudden and violent death.
Notice has been given: This is just the beginning.
No matter who they were, or how they were killed, each person who
died in Gujarat deserves to be mourned. There have been hundreds
of outraged letters to journals and newspapers asking why the
"pseudo-secularists" do not condemn the burning of the
Sabarmati Express in Godhra with the same degree of outrage with
which they condemn the killings in the rest of Gujarat. What they
don't seem to understand is that there is a fundamental
difference between a pogrom and the burning of the train in
Godhra. We still don't know who exactly was responsible for the
carnage in Godhra. But every independent report says the pogrom
against the Muslim community in Gujarat has at best been
conducted under the benign gaze of the state and, at worst, with
active state collusion. Either way, the state is criminally
culpable.
While the parallels between contemporary India and prewar Germany
are chilling, they're not surprising. (The founders of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS], the National Volunteer Force
that is the moral and cultural guild of the BJP, have in their
writings been frank in their admiration for Hitler and his
methods.) One difference is that here in India we don't have a
Hitler. We have instead the hydra-headed, many-armed Sangh
Parivar-the "joint family" of Hindu political and
cultural organizations, with the BJP, the RSS, the VHP and the
Bajrang Dal each playing a different instrument. Its utter genius
lies in its apparent ability to be all things to all people at
all times. The Sangh Parivar speaks in as many tongues. It can
say several contradictory things simultaneously. While one of its
heads (the VHP) exhorts millions of its cadres to prepare for the
Final Solution, its titular head (the prime minister) assures the
nation bat all citizens, regardless of their religion, will be
treated equally. It can ban books and films and burn paintings
for "insulting Indian culture."
Simultaneously, it can mortgage the equivalent
of 60 percent of the entire country's rural development budget as
profit to Enron. But underneath all the clamor and the noise, a
single heart beats. And an unforgiving mind with
saffron-saturated tunnel vision works overtime.
Whipping up communal hatred is part of the mandate of the Sangh
Parivar. It has been planned for years. Hundreds of RSS shakhas
across the country (shakha literally means "branch,"
and RSS shakhas are "educational" cells) have been
indoctrinating thousands of children and young people, stunting
their minds with religious hatred and falsified history,
including unfactual or wildly exaggerated accounts of the rape
and pillaging of Hindu women and Hindu temples by Muslim rulers
in the precolonial period. In states like Gujarat, the police,
the administration and the political cadres at every level have
been systematically penetrated. It has huge popular appeal, which
it would be foolish to underestimate or misunderstand. The whole
enterprise has a formidable religious, ideological, political and
administrative underpinning. This kind of power, this kind of
reach, can only be achieved with state backing.
Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is
that the majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to
living in ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear,
with no civil rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily
life be like for them? Any little thing, an altercation at a
cinema or a fracas at a traffic light, could turn lethal. So they
will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep
around the edges of the society in which they live. Their fear
will transmit itself to other minorities. Many, particularly the
young, will probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible
things. Civil society will be called upon to condemn them. Then
President Bush's canon will come back to us: "You're either
with us or with the terrorists."
Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For years to come,
butchers and genocidists will fit their grisly mouths around them
("lip-sync," filmmakers call it) to justify their
butchery.
Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena-the
right-wing Hindu fundamentalist political party in the state of
Maharashtra, responsible for a pogrom in which hundreds of
Muslims were massacred in the city of Bombay in 1992-93-has the
lasting solution. He's called for civil war. Isn't that just
perfect? Then Pakistan won't need to bomb us, we can bomb
ourselves. Let's turn all of India into Kashmir. When all our
farmlands are mined, our buildings destroyed, our infrastructure
reduced to rubble, our children physically maimed and mentally
wrecked, maybe we can appeal to the Americans to help us out.
Air-dropped airline meals, anyone?
Fascism's firm footprint has appeared in India. Let's mark the
date. While we can thank the American President and the
"Coalition Against Terror" for creating a congenial
international atmosphere for its ghastly debut, we cannot credit
them for the years it has been brewing in our public and private
lives. The massed energy of bloodthirsty patriotism became openly
acceptable political currency after India's nuclear tests in
1998. The "weapons of peace" have trapped India and
Pakistan in a spiral of brinkmanship-threat and counter-threat,
taunt and counter-taunt.
Fascism is about the slow, steady infiltration of all the
instruments of state power. It's about the slow erosion of civil
liberties, about unspectacular, day-to-day injustices. Fighting
it does not mean asking for RSS shakhas and madrassahs that are
overtly communal to be banned. It means working toward the day
when they're voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas. It means keeping
an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability.
It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the
whispering of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the
myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across
the country that are speaking about real issues-about mining,
about bonded labor, marital rape, sexual preferences, women's
wages, uranium dumping, weavers' woes, farmers' worries. It means
fighting displacement and dispossession and the relentless,
everyday violence of abject poverty.
While most people in India have been horrified by what happened
in Gujarat, many thousands of the indoctrinated are preparing to
journey deeper into the heart of the horror. Look around you and
you'll see in little parks, in empty lots, in village commons,
the RSS is marching, hoisting its saffron flag. Suddenly they're
everywhere, grown men in khaki shorts marching, marching,
marching.
Historically, fascist movements have been fueled by feelings of
national disillusionment. Fascism has come to India after the
dreams that fueled the freedom struggle have been frittered away
like so much loose change. Independence itself came to us as what
Gandhi famously called a "wooden loaf"-a notional
freedom tainted by the blood of the hundreds of thousands who
died during Partition. For more than half a century now, that
heritage of hatred and mutual distrust has been exacerbated,
toyed with and never allowed to heal by politicians. Over the
past fifty years ordinary citizens' modest hopes for lives of
dignity, security and relief from abject poverty have been
systematically snuffed out. Every "democratic"
institution in this country has shown itself to be unaccountable,
inaccessible to the ordinary citizen and either unwilling or
incapable of acting in the interests of genuine social justice.
And now corporate globalization is being relentlessly and
arbitrarily imposed on India, ripping it apart culturally and
economically.
There is very real grievance here. The fascists didn't create it.
But they have seized upon it, upturned it and forged from it a
hideous, bogus sense of pride. They have mobilized human beings
using the lowest common denominator-religion. People who have
lost control over the* lives, people who have been uprooted from
the* homes and communities, who have lost their culture and their
language, are being made to feel proud of something. Not
something they have striven for and achieved, but something they
just happen to be. Or, more accurately, something they happen not
to be.
Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can only be
turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment
to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.
Are we ready, many millions of us, to rally not just on the
streets but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every
decision we take, and every choice we make?
Or not just yet. . .
If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has
shunned us, as it should, like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's
Germany, we too will learn to recognize revulsion in the gaze of
our fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to
look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did
and didn't do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.