I am Ashamed and I Apologize The enemy within

The terror in Gujarat is a South Asian calamity. It is also a reminder of the calamities of the past and a forewarning of manmade disasters ahead. The restraints of civilisation are sometimes all too thin. The targeted mass killings of Muslim children, women and men is an expression of the violent urge that can be stimulated in a mass of people who have been systematically reared to think of others as less than human.

Everywhere in South Asia, there are people who nurture the desire to conduct pogroms and wipe out of existence those who are supposedly different. The energies and urges of such forces are generally kept in check by the weight of law and social sanction. But every now and then, they spring out through the cracks and contradictions of civil and political society. That is when the lives of others are consumed to settle imaginary scores with history. When the beasts prowl among citizens, communal riots and sectarian killings happen – be it in Nellie, Surat, Bhiwandi, Bhagalpur or Bombay.

It is possible to douse the communal flames quickly when the state is willing. The worst conflagrations occur when the exclusivist ideology takes control of a government – as has happened in Ahmedabad – and the state then becomes a killing machine.

South Asia condemns the car-nage on the Sabarmati. No barrier of nationality and citizenship can keep us from denouncing the killing of innocents on the basis of religion. In humanitarian empathy, the citizens of Karachi, Calcutta, Colombo, Madras, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Guwahati, equally abhor what has happened in Godhra, Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of a billion-plus souls, said before the Muslim refugees that Gujarat had shamed India before the world. Before his tears were dry, he went to Goa and shamed India and South Asia before the world. “Wherever they are, Muslims do not want to stay peacefully,” was among the ideas he shared with an apparently appreciative audience of his ruling party.

This was the moment of heart-stopping realisation. Not that it showed Mr Vajpayee for what he apparently is, but that he speaks the mind of a good portion of India’s population by generically lumping all Muslims (of India, of the world) into one malevolent category. In the psyche that is emerging, are all Muslims to be merged into one monolithic community that acts with singular purpose?

“Why did they carry out that massacre in Godhra?” is the refrain in the households and bazaars across north India, as if the torching of the train bogey full of Hindu devotees was a design of all Indian Muslims. It is this mindset – this forced ascription of a unitary agenda to all the Islamic faithful – that one encounters again and again, in railway sleeper-cars, family dinners or neighbourhood cafes. This mindset can rip India apart, with unfathomable consequences for the whole Subcontinent.

To repeat, everywhere in South Asia there are individuals capable of the slaughter that in this instance overtook Gujarat. All our communities have, at different times and under dissimilar circumstances, come under threat from the inner barbarism that does not flinch from clenching its fists, thrusting the dagger, or hurling the bomb. Everywhere in the Subcontinent, there are killings underway, Gujarat’s distinction being a government’s macabre acts of omission and commission against innocents.

While the elite establishments in each of the other countries of South Asia wear their anti-Indianism on the sleeve, there is unstated confidence in Indian democracy and secularism as a role model. If New Delhi begins to let go of the credo that has been the glue for India, then the repercussions will buffet not only its own regions, but all South Asia. Reactionary elements – of all hues and not just ‘Hindu’ – will take advantage of the message that is emanating from Ahmedabad and New Delhi and crawl out of the woodwork to continue with what Gujarat has started.

When the Sangh combine screams its exclusionist ideology in the north and west of India, it gives fillip to reactionaries in the far corners of the Republic and across the expanse of the Subcontinent. When the checks and balances are off the Indian state, extremists everywhere in South Asia feel free to exploit the primal emotions churned up by the appeal to religion and nationalism.

It is for South Asia’s largest and most populous country to rediscover the traditions of tolerance it has officially nurtured over the last many decades. India’s plurality is too vast to be contained in the restrictive formulas of sectarian politics. The peril to India lies within, but not in the places they are looking to find it.



http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/editorial.htm

I am Ashamed and I Apologize Essay

The social engineering of Gujarat

The ongoing violence and its broadening social and geographical base in the state is a consequence of the political recasting of social identities.

by Hemant Babu

The winter moon had already risen over the Taranga hills, when a group of men and women stopped our vehicle on the road from Ambaji to Baroda in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The women were dressed in brightly coloured half sarees, worn in the typically western Indian tribal style. A man in the front was carrying a photograph of Hanuman, the monkey god and lieutenant of the Hindu deity Ram. The light of the full moon bathed the hills on both sides of the road, and the exchange that followed was as pleasant as the surroundings.

“Donate some money,” said a woman from the group. In the tribal districts of Gujarat it is customary to stop passing vehicles and collect money around the time of Holi and other festivals that western Indian tribals celebrate. Only, this was not the month of Holi, or of any other festivity. Queried about the purpose of the collection they replied, “We are collecting money for the bhajan mandali” (the collective singing of hymns celebrating deities). The bright red image of Hanuman that they carried was most certainly not native to their original spiritual repertoire. Neither was the idea of the bhajan mandali, which is a characteristically Hindu institution. The image and the ritual had come from somewhere else. This was in early 1993 when several parts of India, including Gujarat, were burning in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. But, the violence had not yet touched the tribal belts of Gujarat.

A month ago, in the aftermath of the Godhra incident and the subsequent riots, a friend, who sports a vandyke beard, was accosted on the same road by a group of men who live on the gentle slopes of the Taranga hills. But, there was nothing gentle about these men. Armed to the teeth, they snatched his wallet and then grilled him about his religion. He was allowed to proceed unmolested only after he furnished proof of his Hindu bona fides. Newspapers the next morning reported the killing of Muslim highway travellers, who were perhaps fleeing the riots.

An end to the violence of the last two months is not in sight, and, the end of it will not be the last of it either. The first incident of 1993 was not the starting point of a process that culminated in this second incident, almost a decade later. Both events and all that happened in the interim are merely stages in the acceleration and amplification of a process that has been in the making for some decades. In Gujarat, where it is today imprudent to wear a beard and a misfortune to be a Muslim, a pervasive communalisation has been cultivated even among communities marginalised by Hindu society. The participation of tribals in the brutal enterprise of Hindutva is an index of this communalisation. The collection for the bhajan mandali was only the more benign aspect of a development whose logical intent was the killings on the road from Ambaji to Baroda and elsewhere.

The arrival of Hanuman in the Gujarat hills has a cultural and political significance. It is also a mytho-logical metaphor for the arrival of tribals in the militia of Hindutva. The military prominence of Hanuman and his army in the epic, Ramayan, has been understood to signify the martial services rendered by some forest dwellers for a Hindu purpose of the remote past. Likewise, the adoption of Hindu symbols and rituals by the tribals of Gujarat suggests their subordinated absorption, as a regiment of foot soldiers detailed by the Hinduised polity to kill on command its ‘enemy’ of the moment. And as in the mythology, all they get in real terms is an honourable mention for services rendered. In both the myth and the current reality (a distinction that often has no meaning in the recent politics of India), the labours of the aboriginal under-class are directed towards the almost exclusive benefit of the caste-Hindu leadership that commandeers it.

‘Normalcy’ in a normal state

Both the violence and its expanding social base have been commented on at length. What is forgotten in all the rhetoric for and against the politics that engineered it is the historical-political context in which this engineering took place. The context may not be the direct cause of the psyche that produces such extreme forms of violence but it nevertheless merits description, if only because it may help identify and explain the direct cause, besides dispelling misconceptions about both Gujarat and the riots that seem to have found purchase in the media.

Ever since the outbreak of violence, there have been frequent expressions of surprise that such events could ever happen in the “land of Gandhi”, in a state that is the most industrialised after Maharashtra, in a society with such a “strong mercantile mentality”, and in a polity that has seen such “stable governments”. These vaunted attributes are not a necessary impediment to organised violence and in any case this is not the first, worst or longest riot recorded in the state. In fact, any or all of these factors could cohabit with or even produce such violence. Perhaps the idea of riots in Gujarat will be less bewildering if it is kept in mind that during a riot organised under an extremely stable government with resources garnered from industrial and mercantile sources among others, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, no less, shut its gates and turned its back on Muslims fleeing certain death. If the political process can so easily erode the historical legacy of ahimsa in the ashram in which the concept was elaborated, optimistic assumptions about the restraining influence of Gandhi, commerce and industry do not place Gujarat under a special compulsion to be less violent than any other state in India’s degenerating polity. As Achyut Yagnik, the well-known social worker and researcher from Ahmedabad, notes: “Gujarat is as normal as any other state.”

A sign of this normalcy is the number of incidents of communal violence in the state as recorded officially. Judicial commissions of inquiry, the Justice Reddy Commission and the Justice VS Dave Commission, were instituted after two major riots, of 1969 and 1985 respectively. Both commissions referred in some detail to Gujarat’s history of communal violence. The Justice Dave Commission traced the history of communal violence in Ahmedabad as far back as 1714 when a bloody riot was sparked off during the Holi celebrations. The city then was still under Mughal control. Subsequent riots broke out in 1715, 1716 and 1750. The Marathas, who succeeded the Mughals in Gujarat, were described by the Commission as being “instrumental in creating a riot in Ahmedabad” after the city was occupied by them.

Hindu-Muslim violence continued in the centuries that followed, with the pace and intensity picking up in the second half of the twentieth century. When communal riots broke out in 1941, curfew had to be imposed for over two-and-a-half months. The Justice Reddy Commission identified as many as 2938 instances of communal violence in the state between 1960 and 1969, that is, an average of approximately three riots every four days during this ten-year period. It is perhaps more than just a coincidence that this was the period when the Jan Sangh, the first overtly political front of the Rashtrya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and the organisational precursor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which by all accounts is responsible for sustaining the current riots, became active in the state. During this period, riots began to spread over a much wider geographical area of the sate, affecting towns like Veraval, Junagadh, Patan, Godhra, Palanpur, Anjar, Dalkhania, Kodinar and Deesa, all of which have been hit by the ongoing violence.

Immunity of social conscience

Violence of the communal variety staged in urban and semi-urban venues, besides rural violence directed against agricultural labourers, particularly dalits, was thus as routine an aspect of Gujarat as it is of most other states in the country. But violence of a different, more systematic and sustained order was inaugurated in 1969. The Hindu-Muslim riots of that year mark a major break with the hitherto prevalent pattern of steady if unspectacular social conflict. More than two years of hectic Muslim and Hindu fundamentalist activity preceded the outbreak of these riots. Communal violence in the state acquired a more organised form against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan war of 1965. The Jana Sangh stepped up the level of patriotic mobilisation and secured a toe-hold among the urban middle class. This mobilisation cashed in on the shelling of the area near the Dwarka temple in Gujarat by the Pakistan Navy, and the death of the incumbent Congress chief minister of the state, Balwantrai Mehta, when his plane was brought down by the Pakistan air force.

Muslim mobilisation too was simultaneously taking place. The Jamiyet-Ulema-e-Hind tried to rally Muslim support, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Congress Party, which was then going through a phase of organisational and political crisis. In June 1968, the national convention of the Jamiyet was organised in Ahmedabad. Though it professed to be a nationalist organisation which supported the Congress, the convention showed very clearly that the Jamiyet was drifting towards communal politics. Its firebrand leaders, Maulana Asad Maad and Yunus Salim delivered provocative speeches. A booklet called The communal riots and the harm that they have done to the country and Hindu religion, authored by the president of the Jamiyet, Maulana Aqualak Husain, was circulated during the convention. The booklet gave grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities on Muslims in communal riots elsewhere in the country. This spurt of Islamic activity prompted the Jan Sangh to found the Hindu Dharma Raksha Samiti. It also brought the RSS chief MS Golwalkar to the city. At a rally in Ahmedabad in December 1968 Golwalkar attacked Muslims as invaders who the country could not tolerate for too long. The idea of Muslims as invaders has been repeatedly used by Hindu fundamentalists to a point where it has become the received wisdom, all cogent arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. The riots that ensued in 1969 left some 1500 people dead.

A riot of this magnitude, unprecedented in both scale and duration, had a foundational significance for the politics of the state and the techniques of mobilisation and orchestration that increasingly came into use. The discrete and scattered violence of the preceding period can be presumed to be manifestations of everyday class, caste and community struggles arising from socio-economic conflicts of a more or less local nature. To that extent, their individual histories and repercussions were confined to the respective localities of incidence. The 1969 riots had the critical mass that lent it state- and nation-wide visibility and gave it a prominent place in the historical inventory of community grievances. This riot could now be invoked at will, not just in Gujarat but wherever else tension had to be engineered. In effect, this was the first explicit politicisation of both communalism and public violence in the state.

Most importantly, the riots of 1969 took Gujarati society past the psychological threshold of normally tolerable public violence, and this not just of the communal variety. Once the barrier to the use of violence in inter-party conflicts was crossed, its repeated use acquired a tacit legitimacy as the social conscience became gradually more immune to the incremental doses of it that the polity administered. The two instances of extended public ferocity that Gujarat witnessed after these riots, the 1974 Nav Nirman movement, launched by the opposition parties to oust the Congress state government, and the 1981 riots against public policy designed to benefit lower castes, involved a high level of violence, including in the latter instance, the burning alive of dalits. Both these instances of extra-parliamentary ‘politics’ were remarkably successful in their objectives. Violent street politics had made an impressive debut in Gujarat and presented itself as a model worth investing in and emulating.

Making of a pattern

There were two aspects to these agitations that had long-term social and institutional consequences. One was the induction of middle class youths into a form of politics not normally associated with them. The other was the emergence of the incipient social and financial networks that sustain prolonged violence. The issues involved in both the 1974 movement and the 1981 riots, though they affected a much larger segment of the population, were articulated most vigorously by the middle class through its traditional channels. But the urgency of the objective, particularly in reversing affirmative state action in favour of the lower castes, caused dissent to spill out of the traditional channels. Middle class, upper caste youths played a leading role in the anti-reservation riots, and the focus of conflict here belonged solely to the matrix of Hindu social relations and its hierarchies of caste. A middle class, consisting predominantly of caste Hindus who saw themselves as the true repositories of merit, was defending its privileged access to professional education and government service. The high level of violence was justified as a legitimate expression of thwarted merit and one more barrier to muscular Hindu middle class street politics was crossed. The BJP was active in the 1981 riots as were its professional front organisations, notably the university and secondary school teachers associations. The classroom, the family and many other institutions which crucially shape social and political values had succumbed to the pressures of protecting the elite monopoly of state privileges and public resources.

The 1981 riots were replayed in a more drastic form in the 1985 anti-reservation movement. In many ways, this sequel marked the beginning of a new phase. Although it partook of features of all the antecedent riots, it also had a novel dimension. The roots of Gujarat’s radical communalism can be detected here. Methodical violence from now on became a more regular instrument and expression of electoral politics, recurring with increasing frequency and refinement of technique and exhibiting remarkable similarities of character. Soon after it commenced, the riot of 1985 was annexed to the exigencies of the BJP’s political constituency-building drill. The seemingly undirected ‘riot from below’ was given a purposeful leadership by the present dispensation in the state, notably the current Chief Minister Narendra Modi, acting then in his capacity as a senior functionary of the RSS. By 1985, the Hindutva cadres had acquired considerable experience in disruptive politics, many of its leaders having participated in the ’81 agitation.

The BJP’s active influence on the 1985 agitation explains many of its more curious features. The riots began on 19 March, the day after the newly-elected Congress government assumed office, and was directed against a policy measure declared more than two months prior. In January, the Congress government had announced an increase in the quota of jobs in government and seats in public educational institutions reserved for backward castes. The riots lasted six months, much after the policy had been revoked by the government. The fact that a riot could start two months after the cause that provoked it, and end as suddenly as it started, points to a high level of coordination by an existing command structure. It cannot be a mere accident that the violence extended beyond Ahmedabad to smaller towns and villages, particularly in those areas where the BJP had acquired influence, notably in central Gujarat and some tribal belts. South Gujarat, which had previously been unaffected, now found itself on the riot map of the state. The social base of the violence expanded to include gangsters, bootleggers and professional killers. Various reports of the period quote doctors who described the stab wounds they attended to as the work of trained hands. The agitation finally degenerated to a point where sections of the state constabulary abandoned their uniforms and relin-quished their responsibilities to join the riots.

The beginnings of social engineering

But there is another compelling aspect of this riot that overshadows all others. The 1981 riots sharpened the conflict within the ‘Hindu’ community, between the upper and lower castes, the victims being primarily dalits. By contrast the 1985 agitation, though initially directed against caste-based affirmative action, transformed itself very quickly into a gratuitous attack on the Muslim community, which had nothing to do with the reservation policy of the government. In the final reckoning, an extended riot led by upper caste Hindus that succeeded in revoking a policy that benefited lower caste Hindus eventually managed to inscribe itself into the social memory as one more gory episode in the deteriorating history of Hindu-Muslim relations. Perhaps the danger to a conceptual and potential ‘Hindu’ unity from a conflict internal to the community was being minimised by quietly diverting the focus of the agitation. If its similarities with the Sangh Parivar’s current modus operandi are anything to go by, then the 1985 riot was the real crucible of Hindutva politics in Gujarat. A kingpin of that agitation is the kingpin of the current spate of pogroms; the only difference is that today he officially rules the political roost with a popular mandate of 55 percent.

There are many crude calculations in the social engineering formulas of the RSS, but the last 15 years have proved that, given a polity degenerating in the appropriate manner, these calculations can yield the desired outcome. From 1990 on, Gujarat has witnessed riot after riot, varied in scale, but similar in character and equal in significance for the BJP’s rise to political power. The late 1980s witnessed an escalation in the tempo of the Ayodhya movement and this furnished the climate for the orchestration of events that would culminate in the party’s emphatic electoral victory in 1995.

The pattern of the first riot of 1990 is interesting, though not necessarily symptomatic. LK Advani’s rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh came in the immediate aftermath of widespread and violent upper caste agitations across north India against the affirmative action principles in favour of backward castes, adopted at the national level by the United Front in New Delhi. These agitations had intensified socio-economic conflict between upper and lower castes at a time when the plural constituency of a potential Hindutva was being assembled through the politicisation of Hindu symbols and myths. This was the period when imagined grievances, culled from an imagined history, were being assiduously broadcast, accompanied by the shrill denigration of parties which allegedly indulged Muslim treachery. The rath yatra did manage to rally large numbers, particularly from the lower castes, and the arrest of Advani en route to Ayodhya provoked riots in many states, including Gujarat.

Gujarat again witnessed riots in 1992 when the disputed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was razed to the ground a few hours after kar sevaks stormed the monument. Surat experienced intermittent disturbances over a six-month period. In 1993, more riots followed, after the blasts in Bombay, allegedly masterminded by the Muslim underworld. Perhaps these riots were attempts at forging a Hindu unity that, on the face of it, seemed impossible. Whatever the intention, there is no denying that the rath yatra precipitated a political crisis in which the existing intra- and inter-party equations began to break down. And, there is no getting away from the fact that, though not uniformly successful across India, the BJP from the 1991 general elections has secured more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the state. Remarkably, for three years following its assumption of office in Gujarat in 1995, the state was free from communal riots. The BJP was clearly living up to its boast of ensuring a riot-free administration, prompting critics to cite this as proof of the party’s monopoly of organised public violence. At any rate, this peaceful interim was part of the established pattern of violence erupting and subsiding according to the clearly discernable designs of politics. The inference, therefore, that violence had become a crucial raw material of electoral politics controlled by a cartel is unavoidable.

New tribe of kar sevaks

The brief interlude of social peace came to an end in 1998, with the attacks on Christian missionaries and establishments in the Dangs, a forested tribal belt on the southern edge of Gujarat bordering Maharashtra. This was a new theatre of conflict in terms of both the region and community involved. This was the first instance of organised violence after the BJP came to power and the context once again is instructive. Cracks had developed in the carefully crafted socio-economic balance in the BJP soon after it came to power in the state. Hindutva once again confronted a crisis of caste. An influential segment of backward castes in the BJP legislature party had revolted against its upper caste leadership, on the lines of what was subsequently to happen in the Uttar Pradesh unit too. Social engineering had failed in the face of an old caste conflict and a substitute social group had to be found to take the place of the departing backward castes. Tribals make up 14 percent of the states population. Christians, who are largely concentrated in the tribal districts, add up to less than 1 percent of Gujarat’s population. Even in the Dangs, they do not exceed 5 percent.

On the night of 25 December, under the auspices of an RSS front organisation called the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), churches, educational institutions and houses were attacked in Ahwa, Subir, Jamlapada, Gadvi, Divan Temrun, Madagkhadi and Padalkhadi. Over the next four days attacks spread to other tribal areas in Bharuch, Surat and Vyara districts of south Gujarat. This orchestration of violence by the HJM had been preceded by a decade-and-a-half of patient mobilisation by another RSS front organisation, the Samajik Samrasta Manch, founded in 1983 to assimilate those segments of society marginalised by Brahmanic Hinduism. Whatever else the RSS fronts have been doing, it is clear that within four years of those attacks, tribals from both north and south Gujarat have been recruited in large numbers as kar sevaks for both the construction of the Ram temple and the destruction of the Muslim community.

The similarities between the broad context of the riots is striking. Any crisis internal to Hindutva inevitably leads to violence against well-defined ‘enemies’. If the 1998 violence was necessitated by the social crisis of Gujarati Hindutva, the present and continuing violence comes on the heels of a comprehensive political rout of the BJP across several states in India. Gujarat is its last bastion, and reports and analysis in the media indicated that defeat stared the party in the forthcoming elections in the state. The prominence of tribal participation is the common element between 1998 and the ongoing violence. Perhaps, in the social engineering calculus of the RSS, a fresh massacre of the old enemy by new recruits will add to the prowess of Hindutva, enrich its folklore, expand its social base and thereby forestall a defeat in the nursery of its politics. A tribal population of 14 percent is electorally significant enough to justify the slaughter of several hundred Muslims.

Secularism and silence

Clearly then, from the mid-1980s political violence in Gujarat had become more organised and more numer-ous, had increasingly begun to manufacture its own provocations, and was directed at minorities, particularly Muslims. This last development coincided with the BJP’s Hindutva agendas in a period when the party was systematically cultivating overarching Hindu nationalist sentiments. In 1985, the Congress party was at the peak of its electoral strength, enjoying the support of 55 percent of the electorate. By the 1991 general elections, the BJP had secured 55 percent of the vote and in 1995 rode to power in the state with an overwhelming majority. In this violent ten-year period the Congress Party, which ruled the state for most of the past four decades, had crumbled and out of the ruins of the existing polity the BJP had emerged triumphant.

There seems to be a prima facie correlation between the violent politics of the state and the BJP’s rise to power. Numerous studies, by the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, by the sociologist Ghanshyam Shah, the historian Jan Breman, the political scientist Atul Kohli and many others, have chronicled some of the micro-level processes in the party’s rise to power. But there has not been any real synthesis of explanation, based on these studies, that describes the precise mechanics at a state-wide level. Perhaps, that exercise is precluded by a lack of uniformity, and even an organic unity, in the strategies of the RSS and its offspring. The intricacies of refabricating a complex socio-economic demography may well require multiple, even mutually contradictory, local strategies within an overall climate of communal strife.

But even if there are not too many identifiable and overt statewide strategies, barring of course the assault on minorities, the BJP’s success has been statewide and not all of it can be attributed to just the ingenuity of the party’s political techniques. After all, identical experiments by the BJP in other states have not fetched the same dividends. It would seem therefore that conditions specific to Gujarat’s history, society and politics have facilitated the cultivation of Hindutva politics. These specific circumstances may help penetrate the air of inscrutability that surrounds the BJP’s covert strategies and successes, if only by questioning many well-meaning but untenable secular-ist assumptions about Gujarat and the riots, which actually impede an understanding of Hindutva’s politics in the state.

In the secular intelligentsia’s description of the gory events of the last two months, communal violence is the handiwork of a violent minority of fundamentalists. In this view, the secular majority is silent and can only watch helplessly as the state administration actively abets the Hindutva lumpens. This is not an entirely accurate description of the reality. True, there are many who have actually gone to the aid of the victims and prevented more unspeakable brutalities than have been committed. It is also true that there are many localities where irreproachable community relations, fostered by shared concerns of a more fundamental and material variety, have ensured that provocateurs have been unable to incite murderous passions. But it is equally true that there are many others who silently approve of the carnage. The violent minority and silent majority of Gujarat do not constitute separate and distinct social fragments. The silence of a sizeable part of the silent majority is not the speechless shock of numbed bystanders. It is the conspiratorial silence of willing spectators, remote witnesses to a Roman holiday, whose public silence is a private roar of approval that is clearly audible to the architects of the violence. There are those who cannot speak and those who will not speak.

How else are we to explain the seeming paradoxes of the riots in Ahmedabad? We have seen educated girls and boys from middle and upper middle class families who do not actually participate in the killings but follow in the wake to loot Muslim establishments. We have seen couples on two wheelers bring home consumer durables scavenged from the debris of retail outlets. The cell-phone wielding rioters are not isolated elements who have taken control in a social vacuum. They roam about so brazenly because they know they have a silent social mandate. This is the clear conspiracy of silence among many of the so-called silent majority and it has many manifestations – the son of a bureaucrat who gets away with murder, a government official who demands bribe, the worker who looks at unions as an instrument of personal gain, the trader who cheats at one go the marginal producer and the small consumer. We have seen the faces of this silent majority at various places. Sometimes they are at a safe distance behind the rioting mob, sometimes they are in the air-conditioned cabins of newspaper offices. They are always there where it matters and they are always silent when it matters. We have seen them outside Gujarat too, in 1984 in Delhi when Sikhs were being butchered, in the 1992 Bombay riots, in the Dangs, in Orissa, in Madhya Pradesh, in Uttar Pradesh and many other places too numerous to be listed. And now we are told that the VHP in Ahmedabad has a team of 50 lawyers who will, without payment, legally defend the Hindutva rioters. Secular optimism should not blind us to the reality of communalism’s expanded social base.

Anatomy of a Hindu state

Gujarat is a visibly Hinduised state today, and not just because of the 55 percent that voted the BJP. Even if that 55 percent were to vote in other ways, the ideology of Hindutva that has sunk roots will continue to pervade society. What this means in effect is that even if the Congress were to return to power, it will have to mould itself more openly to the agendas of Hindu politics. In fact, it is more than likely that the state Congress unit has itself already been Hinduised. Reportedly, Congress-run municipalities have extended infrastruc-tural and other assistance to the rioters, particularly in destroying evidence of demolitions. Even casual observers of politics have noted that the Gujarat Congress has been less than tepid in its response to the riots, being more keen to defend Sonia Gandhi’s credentials than to protect Muslim lives. The state administration has been so extensively contaminated that even if a Congress government were to allow some residual secular instinct to surface, it is unlikely to get much support from the bureaucracy. This is the most impressive achievement of fundamentalist politics – that it has recast even the opposition in its own image.

Some traces of how a caste-divided state can achieve an overarching Hindu unity, even if only briefly and at extraordinary moments of stress, are to be found in aspects of the state’s social, political and demographic history. Gujarat came into existence in 1960 after the States Reorganisation Act of 1957, which carved out states on a linguistic basis. Two broad regions – mainland and peninsular Gujarat – make up the territory of the state. Peninsular Gujarat consists of Kutch and Kathiawad, now known as Saurashtra. Prior to Indian independence, numerous kingdoms, principalities, and jagirs dotted the territorial landscape of present-day Gujarat. Saurashtra alone had 499 political units. Kutch was a princely state while parts of mainland Gujarat were directly administered British territory incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. In 1948, all these units were consolidated and Kutch, Saurashtra and the mainland were added to Bombay state in 1956, where they stayed until 1960 when, through linguistic division, the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were created.

This territorial consolidation gave the future politics of Gujarat several institutions, forms, values and characteristics that made it easier for Hindutva to take hold. Among the more useful heritages was the myth of the Somnath Temple. The temple complex is located in the port town of Veraval on the southern coast of Saurashtra just a little below Porbandar, were Gandhi was born. The myth of Somnath left Gandhi untouched. But it excited many others who formed the cream of the Congress leadership in Gujarat, mainly because in AD 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan) raided the temple of Somnath and broke the idol. The temple was situated inside a fortress in which wealth accumulated from the brisk maritime trade of ancient and medieval Saurashtra was stored. Before Mahmud’s raid, this amassed wealth had attracted the notice of many other rulers, some of whom, like the Chudasama, Ahiras and Yadhavas, had attempted to make off with it. But the attack of the Mahmud from Ghazni has been singled out for special attention and presented as proof of Muslim insolence.

Eminent historians like Romila Thapar have argued very eloquently against simplified narratives of the Somnath raid. But the matter long ago passed from the hands of professional historians and into the arsenal of practised politicians such as Rajendra Prasad, the president of India in the 1950s, Vallabhai Patel, the first union home minister, and KM Munshi, a senior minister in successive union cabinets. Among the Congress leadership, Somnath was a Gujarati preoccupation. It was only the objections of Jawaharlal Nehru and some of his secular colleagues that prevented the repair of the temple under state auspices, but that did not stop the president of India from participating in the ceremonies of the privately funded restoration.

Somnath was the Gujarat Congress Party’s gift to Hindutva and is an early example of the politicisation of temple related trauma. Such is the pedigree of the Somnath myth, and the extent of its popularity in Gujarat, that it was absorbed and given prominence in the politics of the Ayodhya myth. Thus it was that the rath yatra that symbolised the spiritual conquest of India by vaishnavite Hinduism began its journey from this shaivite monument.

Shackles of faith and caste

The appeal of such religious themes is not difficult to understand in a society permeated with strong orthodox vaishnavite traditions. The absence of a serious bhakti movement in Gujarat’s history is perhaps a reflection of and reason for this potent institutional vaishnavism. Mythological religiosity has been an integral part of Gujarat society and continues to be fostered by bardic performances. Kathakars, who recite stories from the Ramayan, have an important role in collective social life and in recent years have been active in the BJP’s political cause. According to Ghanshyam Shah, in the 1991 elections kathakars like Morari Bapu were involved in the party’s campaign and “attracted a cross-section of society both in urban and rural areas”.

Mass politics right from the Gandhian phase has been unable or unwilling to break the shackles of this public religiosity. In fact, as the historian David Hardiman points out, Gandhi and his followers were themselves not above using the idioms of caste and religion in political mobilisation. As early as 1920, Gandhi was to appeal to fellow members of his bania caste to, as good ‘vaishnavites’, abstain from courts and schools run by the British government, whose rule he likened to ravanraj. Patel, likewise, played on caste traditions, and laid stress on themes like kshatriya martial virtues. It is not surprising at all that Gandhi should have harped on ramrajya as a political ideal. Vaishnav, kshatriya, ravanraj, ramrajya, all popular currency in the BJP’s rhetoric, have a long and respectable history in the mass politics of Gujarat. The state did not really witness the emergence of a politics that seriously tried to purge the public arena of its religious inflections.

As is to be expected, orthodox faith and values were nurtured within the bounds of an entrenched caste system. The mass politics that emerged in Gujarat could not escape the dynamics of caste and so chose by and large to be confined within it. Although caste divisions did not fully coincide with class divisions in the state, socio-economic power was predominantly in the hands of a few castes, i.e. patidars, brahmins and baniyas – and to a much lesser extent the kshatriyas. Caste associations, some of them active in party politics, are a common feature of Gujarat’s public life. They include the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha and the Gujarat Kshatriya Sangh, the Patidar Yuvak Mandal, the Khedut Sangh and the Khedut Samaj, which are basically patidar organi-sations, the Prajapati Mandal and numerous others. These caste associations, besides undertaking welfare measures, function also as lobby groups seeking to influence politics in addition to manoeuvring for control of resources. Of these organised castes, the most powerful are the patidars, who in much of the state practically control the rural economy. Brahmins and baniyas, though insignificant as a proportion of the population, are economically and politically powerful by virtue of their dominance in professional services, industry and trade.

The politics of Gujarat has been based on the alliance between castes. The Congress party’s near monopoly of power was based on a patidar-brahmin-baniya leadership that brought together under a broad umbrella the dalit, tribal and Muslim electorate. The weak opposition in the state in the early period, the Swatantra Party, was primarily a kshatriya enterprise, allied to the leadership of dissenting patidar groups. Through the 1960s, the state legislature was dominated by a highly organised Congress party well-versed in the practice of an accommodative politics that did not fundamentally affect the socio-economic structure. As an efficient organisation that functioned both as a civic institution and a political machine, it perfected the technique of herding a large electoral constituency without altering the overall status quo. The patidars, brahmins and baniyas continued to dominate the economy while the dalits, tribals and Muslims continued to vote the Congress.

The moment of accommodation

In 1969, by the time the Swatantra Party was beginning to make inroads into the state legislature, the Indian National Congress experienced a nationwide split. The two groups that emerged were the Congress (Organisation), which inherited the party’s organisation, and Congress (Requisition), which had Indira Gandhi and a large part of the influential ‘left-lean-ing’ leadership of the parent party. A new political alli-ance slowly emerged, with the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O), both with orthodox social and economic programmes, align-ing with the Jan Sangh, which had no real policy to offer other than Hindu Rashtra. The split in the Congress is that moment when the public accommodation of Hindutva politics by the larger polity begins. The existing caste-political equations also began to break down. The two numeri-cally significant castes that were politically influential, the patidars and the kshatriyas became internally divided along political lines.

Over time, both the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O) disappeared, having merged, along with the Jan Sangh, into the Janata Party during the period of unstable politics that followed the split in the Congress. With the political opposition uniting against it and itself lacking any real organisation to combat the trend, the Congress, under Indira Gandhi, adopted a populist economic and political course. While that helped secure a wide base for the party at the electoral level, the lack of an organisation meant that the Congress was unable to deal with the growing forms of extra-parliamentary agitations that commenced with the Nav Nirman Movement of 1974. That movement unseated the Congress government and brought the combined opposition, including the Jan Sangh, to power. Hindu politics had tasted office for the first time in the country in the company of like-minded organisations.

The Congress returned to power after the Emergency of Indira Gandhi, once again without any real organisational structure, but with an infusion of new lumpen cadres. The caste-leadership of the post-Emergency Congress changed hands as the kshatriyas became more dominant. A peculiar aspect of kshatriya politics in Gujarat is that in the course of political mobilisation it redefined itself to include a large backward caste component, notably the kolis. This was to be of some significance in the nature of Congress politics, which in turn influenced to some extent the rise of Hindu politics. By the 1980s the Congress social alliance was based on what has come to be called the KHAM formula, ie an alliance of kshatriyas, harijans (dalits), adivasis (tribals) and Muslims. (see page 24) Through the period that the Congress held power this was the combination that gave Gujarat its gov-ernments. And through the period that these gov-ernments were in power the patidars, baniyas and brahmins continued to control the economy and some crucial nodes of the public sphere, such as the various levels of the state administration. And when the Congress, as part of its ‘welfare populism’ went through the motions of announ-cing measures that would benefit its socially and economically mar-ginalised constituency, the real managers of the economy and the public arena drifted towards an opposition that was gradually being dominated by

the BJP.

This was the period that the agitational politics mounted by social groups increasingly backed by the BJP, left the Congress governments in a state of political crisis. Organisational weakness obstructed substantive civic response on the part of the Congress to these agitations against benefits directed towards backward castes. As a consequence, the government simply retracted its policy measures. Welfare populism antagonised the elite. Its retraction and failure disillusioned the dispossessed. The Congress could not herd its own constituency. That constituency was now available to be politically recruited, at a time when the flavour of Hindutva was being systematically imparted to the society and polity by the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar, through its numerous organisations.

The Gujarat polity had been in an organisational vacuum from the time of the Congress split till the rise of the BJP. The seeming stability of Gujarati politics was to a large measure based on a stable sub-stratum of caste networks. That stable network which enabled the Congress Party to recruit its caste base also enabled the BJP to recruit its constituency. Welfare populism had given way to spiritual populism, the crucial difference being the latter’s level of organisational capacity. The BJP, through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, had created a dense complex of agitprop organisations that could engage in sectional caste-specific propoganda and simultaneously season it with the larger Hindutva ideology of the caste-Hindu leadership of the RSS and the BJP. The process by which a tribal population of 14 percent is conscripted into Hindutva’s ranks also renders an 8 percent Muslim population completely dis-pensable to an electoral politics many of whose rules have been redrafted by a vaishnavite orthodoxy. When reluctant Hindus become majoritarian enthusiasts, minorities too large to be ignored and too small to make a difference have no place under the protective umbrella of competitive politics.

In the 50 years after Indian independence, Gujarat has been transformed. It has been the laboratory of Gandhian politics, of civic institutions, the cooperative movement and the Hindutva campaign. It has become more urbanised, more industrial, has seen more social mobil-ity, and become more prosperous. It has also seen the re-emergence of an organised mass politics. The earlier phase of that organised politics, under the Congress, consciously divided the polity of the state along caste lines. The second phase, under the BJP, consciously divided the polity along communal lines. A state predominantly of Hindus had become a state predominantly of Hindutva. In 50 years a ‘Hindu unity’ had been engineered in a caste-divided state, and Muslim life had become as dispensable as the Muslim vote. The map of Gujarat in 1947 and the map in 1991 tell a chilling story. The price, paid and yet to be paid, cannot be counted.



http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/essay.htm

I am Ashamed and I Apologize Divided Indian-Pakistani families suffer on both sides of border under threat of war

Wed Jun 5, 8:06 PM ET

By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - When her Pakistani husband died in December, none of Nargas Begum`s relatives from India could come to his funeral in his hometown Multan.



Her parents consoled her by phone, telling Begum that relations between the two countries would be normal soon and promising to come then. But three months later, as her brother lay dying in India, Begum still was not allowed to travel across the border to see him.

With India and Pakistan trading hostile words and intense shelling across the confrontation line in Kashmir (news - web sites), her family must now contend with the threat of war. ``Things are only getting worse and worse,`` said the 47-year-old New Delhi native.

Separated from family members since New Delhi and Islamabad cut off transportation links at the end of last year, thousands of Indians and Pakistanis are suffering doubly because of their cross-border connections — now even more difficult with war looming.

New Delhi severed all train, bus and air connections with Islamabad at the end of December, following an attack on the Indian parliament that it blamed on Pakistani-based Islamic extremists. Pakistan denied the charges and retaliated by halting the links on its side.

Tensions have spiraled since last month`s attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir that New Delhi again blamed on Pakistani-backed extremists. On a war footing since December, Pakistan and India have now massed hundreds of thousands of troops along the 2,912-kilometer (1,800-mile) border that separates the countries.

The threat of nuclear conflict has prompted the United States, Britain and other countries to urge their nationals to leave India and Pakistan.

Caught in the middle are thousands of families like Begum`s, who have ties on both sides of the border. Many families ended up with members in both countries after the two were carved out of British India in 1947.

``There was darkness everywhere when my husband died,`` she said. ``I am in Pakistan with only a few relatives. Ninety percent of my family live in India. My heart is still there.``

Then in March, ``my brother wrote that he was on his death bed, but I could not go to see him in the hospital,`` Begum said, remembering how she wept at his letter.

From the southern port city of Karachi, Khurshid Ahmad, 43, worries about his 23-year-old daughter, who married a cousin in Bombay, India, last year. His three sisters and dozens of close relatives also live in India.

``My daughter is pregnant, but I can`t go to India,`` Ahmad said. ``We never thought that the two countries would come so close to war.``

Ahmad said he continues to pray for peace even as he fears a war that could kill countless numbers of people on both sides of the border.

In Lahore, Begum Mujtaba, 48, talked of how she used to travel to India two months out of the year to visit relatives. This year, she had to cancel plans. She also worries over her daughter, who married a cousin in New Delhi five years ago.

``I pray every day that there will be no war,`` she said.

Residents of Bhano Chak village on Lahore province`s eastern frontier with India say they have relatives living just across the border, yet they cannot meet with them.

``My elder sister lives in Indian Punjab province and I am worried about her family because they will be the first to face casualties because they live near the border towns like us,`` said Begum Munshi Khan, 62.

It is in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where the fear of war seems most intense and the familial ties with India are deepest.

``Eighty percent of our relatives live in Indian-part of Kashmir and we know they will be suffering most of the casualties if war starts,`` said Jamil Mir, 29, who lives in a refugee camp after crossing into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir two years ago with his wife and son. ``We are against war.``



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020606/ap_wo_en_po/pakistan_divided_families_1

I am Ashamed and I Apologize In the name of God, stop it!

Was Gujarat a mere aberration or was it a powderkeg waiting to flare? How does the average

Muslim react? There is a sense of betrayal, anger and above all, insecurity. But amidst

all this there is hope in the Constitution, in the country’s secular tradition. DECCAN

HERALD spoke to a cross-section of the community across the country

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious and Merciful,

Say Oh ye that rejects faith

I worship not that which ye worship

Nor will ye worship that which I worship

And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship

Nor will ye worship that which I worship

To you be your way, and to me, mine.

- A Sura in Chapter 109 ``Al Kafirun`` of The Holy Book of Quran

‘5000-strong mob burns 65 alive in Ahmedabad’ - screams a headline; ‘Gujarat burns, innocents die’ - announces another. It’s three months now since communal violence started rocking Gujarat, claiming over 300 lives, and yet there is no sign of a let-up. Gujarat today means no more a land of entrepreneurs, of ambitious and pioneering businessmen, and hard-working traders who have for long personified the the spirit of free enterprise. The state today conjures visions of violence, mayhem and demonic hatred that transformed an ordinary human being into a beast on the rampage. Where has this endless communal conflagration left the Muslims of the nation? How do they feel?

Says Navaid Hamid, Secretary, AI Muslim Majlise Mushawarat, Delhi: “Why are you asking this question to a ‘Muslim’ and not to an Indian? This is not a problem for Muslims alone. It is a problem of the entire civil society to deal with the Fascist forces. I have visited the rural areas of Gujarat and I felt that common people for the first time had become hostile to the Muslims. Particularly the youth seem to be more biased in this regard. Even Muslim youth are talking about taking revenge, but they should restrain themselves and should not allow themselves to be instigated.”

The Gujarat issue can no longer be considered an Indian issue because India is a signatory to several UN conventions, he feels.

Such is the agony of an average Indian Muslim in post-Gujarat times that s/he is unable to even express it. A shocked silence has enveloped the Muslims in Hyderabad as they double lock their doors at night, carefully scrutinise every Hindu face they see, and make discreet enquiries or discuss or mull over the alternatives they have.

Unsafe at home

It is sad but true that religion has started dictating terms, inducing a feeling of insecurity among the Muslims, forcing them to think twice before stating their religion. Perhaps Yousuf, a trader in Bangalore, is right when he says, “Till a few days ago I respected my forefathers’ decision of not having left the country during partition. But now, I don’t. The violence against our brethren in Gujarat we hear about almost everyday is sickening. We don’t feel safe anymore. Today it’s Gujarat. Tomorrow it may be Bangalore. Everyday when I leave home for work I say a silent prayer that I should be back home safe in the evening. It is not at all a nice feeling because all the time you’re worrying whether your family is safe.”

As the feeling of insecurity grips Muslims in Bangalore, many of them have even started thinking on the lines of abandoning their home and hearth to emigrate to a foreign land. “I loved everything associated with this country. But, it hurts to realise that we are not wanted here any more. I will give this tension a few more months. If it still continues, then I will pack my bags and leave to a foreign land. Even there I’m sure I will not be accepted but it is any day better to be a foreigner in a foreign land than in your own home,” says a Muslim on conditions of anonymity.

Many in the community seem hurt by the silence of their Hindu friends. Some even feel cheated. When we have made the conscious decision of accepting India as our motherland, why can’t we be accepted by the people wholeheartedly? Why do they treat us like we don’t belong here anymore? Who are they to decide our fate, our future, they cry out.

Mr M A Hakeem who held several important positions in the Central government and has represented India in international bodies admits to ruing the fact that he consciously chose remaining in his motherland rather than emigrate to a foreign country. Not too long ago he tried desperately to convince his son to keep his Indian citizenship and managed to put it off for six months. Now he wonders if his son was right after all. In the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition, he personally faxed or mailed dozens of copies of articles written against the demolition, those written in support of Muslims, to friends of his abroad as an affirmation of his faith in India. ``We are born out of this soil and will live here and die here... we were prepared for any sacrifice for this land. If anybody told us we had no right to live here we are prepared to take them on,`` he says. So is it different in the post-Gujarat times? His Hindu friends avoid discussing the carnage, they are either embarrassed by it or support it in the deep recesses of their heart. This hurts even more than the Gujarat carnage.

Mazher Hussain of Confederation of Voluntary Agencies, Hyderabad who has been working for communal peace and harmony for several years now is worried at this silence. The Hindu community should speak up and act against the evil that has gripped Gujarat. ``Where is the secular Indian? Why is he taking so long to react? They seem to have been infected by the if-Godhra-did-not-happen-Gujarat-would-not-have burned justification for the massacre of Muslims. This is the time for Hindus to prove their patriotism. They have to decide what kind of India they want : a land of peace or a country bleeding from all its pores.`` This is the time for every right thinking Hindu, the onus being on the middle and upper middle class, to be proactive, to prevent a reaction from the Muslim community, he says.

Ms J Jameel says nobody among Muslims thought the state would turn against them as it did in Gujarat. ``We are all feeling insecure``, she confesses, especially since rumours are rife in the community that the next Gujarat could well be Hyderabad. Dr Tasneem Ahmed a professional doctor decades in Mysore traces back the virus to 1992, ``For the first time in my life I was made aware of being a Muslim... it was an accusation, as if it is a sin to be a Muslim,`` she says.

Shabnam Hashmi, Delhi-based social activist says, ” I do not consider myself to be a Muslim, I am a non-believer. Gujarat could not be a reaction to Godhra as it was pre-planned. People were trained for a long time. Economic blockade of the Muslims started as early as 1992. The fanatics are using Gujarat as a laboratory, it is fascism at its peak. The only solution is united pressure by secular parties. “

Where next?

“I feel outraged and helpless by the happenings in Gujarat. It is unfortunate that the government we elected is doing nothing to put an end to it. Throughout my growing up years in Bombay I believed Bombay was the safest place to be in. But, the bomb blast in 1992 shattered my belief. In fact the Bombay blast must have served as a wake up call to the government, but the government slept through it. Going by this experience how can I be sure that Bangalore won’t be the next target?” questions Dr Zulfia Sheikh, director, Bangalore School of Speech and Drama, who goes on to say, “But, even today I proudly say that India is where I belong. It is my home, my soil and I have as much right over it as anybody else. Come what may, I will not leave the country.” Dr Zulfia further says that she refuses to believe that the country lacks the expertise and the manpower to control the Gujarat carnage. “What the country lacks is the will power to do it,” she declares, even as she admits that the people of her community are gripped by a fear psychosis, not knowing what to expect. “Things have changed, and definitely for the worse,” she rues, relating how they are now forced to think, much against their secular ideas, that they have to be in a Muslim-dominated area just to feel secure.

Syeda Hamid, Social Activist, Muslim Women’s Forum in Delhi is concerned with this “ghettoisation” of the Muslims. “As a common Muslim I would prefer to live in an area where the Muslims are in majority. This feeling of insecurity is spreading among the Muslims in other parts of the country. But why can’t they live in whichever place they like to stay? Why there should be separate Hindu and Muslim localities? Why can’t we live together? “

It is no exaggeration but many Muslim women have now discarded their burqas, not egged on by the women’s lib movements, but simply because they don’t want to be identified as Muslims in a public place. Says a forward-looking Muslim woman who is also a freelance journalist, “Wearing a hijab is a clear indication that you are a Muslim and that is reason enough for a fanatic mob to target me. Where is the Right to Religion as stated in our democracy when you can’t practise it without any fear? ” The young mother, also the wife of a high ranking officer, confesses to feeling insecure even in the cozy comforts of her home. “We chose to stay back in India during partition because this, we felt, was our home. But now we are not sure whether it was a prudent decision. It is all the more exasperating to note that the nation has no trust in us Muslims as we are not given positions of importance in any defence related organisations. How can they doubt our integrity when we are toiling for our homeland?” she wonders.

Not all feel hopeless. Most have hope, in the centuries old Indian tradition of peaceful co-existence of diverse and even opposing schools of thought, religions, cultures and traditions. A refrain of this school of hope is that the carnage of Gujarat was not replicated nor did it trigger off retaliation in other parts of the country. ``We need to keep the faith, in each other, in India`s heritage of secularism, in Indian Constitution,`` said Justice Sardar Ali Khan, former chairman of the Minorities Commission of India. ``Secularism is the lifeblood of India.. I have fundamental faith in this tradition of India..I am sure secularism and democracy will prevail. Gujarat can only be termed as an aberration,`` he says.

Anwar Moazzam, a retired professor of Islamic Studies in Osmania University, believes that religion-based political parties or agenda or even identity will not succeed in India. ``Hindus have already given their verdict against communal politics including the people of Uttar Pradesh, the land of Ayodhya. They will once again speak up for secularism through democratic means.``

It is reassuring to note that there are a few like Mohammad Moienuddin, chairman, Tipu Sultan Research Institute & Museum, Bangalore who strongly feel this dark phase will end soon. Moienuddin however is shocked by the fact that the ruling party in Gujarat is not trying enough to contain the violence. Quoting the Koran Mr Moienuddin says, “God says - ‘I’ve created religions. If I had willed I would’ve created only one. Now I expect you all to live peacefully’. We have to follow God’s dictates and live amicably. Some day things will settle down, because India is famed for its unity in diversity.”

Ahmed-bin-Sayeed (not his real name) a high-ranking officer who retired from the Army has not so far experienced any discrimination, faced hatred or made to feel that he was anything but Indian. ``I cannot fathom it... I only read about it,`` he confesses. ``The virus of hatred has not touched the Armed Forces; their tradition is too strong to be shaken by such things... in any case, we have been living together and in harmony for 1000s of years... why has it become so difficult now?``

Jeelani Bano, a well-known writer in Urdu, whose works have been translated into several Indian languages, says in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual society like India rather than religion, it is caste, language and regional loyalties that are more divisive. The bonds between Hindus and Muslims are natural and have been forged by a shared history, geography, culture and traditions. ``These are far more powerful than those of religion. Neither Muslim invaders nor colonial rulers could break them. Today`s politicians too will fail,`` she predicts.

Blame it on the politicians

A major section of the community are most angry with the politicians. According to Sayyad Noori, general secretary of Raza Academy, Mumbai, what happened in Gujarat was not just violence, but genocide of the Muslim community. Muslims have lost faith in secularism, which has remained only on paper. However, there is no feeling among the Muslims that they did a mistake in staying back in India after partition.

Talking of politicians, asks former union minister Arif Mohammed Khan, “do you think my reaction as a Muslim will be different from that of a Hindu who has seen innocent people being roasted alive? What happened in Godhra is not different from what happened in Gujarat. In both cases innocent people were butchered and thus both deserve equal condemnation.”

A leading Muslim activist and lawyer in Mumbai Yusoof Muchawala talks of a sense of anger and desperation. Secularism has completely failed, he says.

With people beginning to wear religion on their sleeves, some are even scared to express themselves. “Please excuse me just this once. I am too hurt to even think about Gujarat, forget expressing my reactions,” says one otherwise articulate writer who was hitherto well known for his boldness in expressing his ideas on communalism! Perhaps this sums up the outrage and anger experienced by the Muslims of today.

Waiting to happen?

Gujarat or no Gujarat, has India been sitting on a communal powerderkeg ready to flare up any moment? Answer to the question is as varied as ever; but a majority of the people veer round to the overriding fact that despite the ‘Gujarat` and its aftermath, India is still a secular country where the minority communities specially Muslims, can still live safely and peacefully. Even while tending to overwhelmingly term the Gujarat happenings a genocide, the Muslim intelligentsia has not lost sight of a crucial fact - the Indian Constitution and a free Press - which have consistently been working as a major check to mindless killings and mob violence. Only if the self-styled conservators-cum-faithfuls of Hindutva could have realised this, India need not have to hang its head in shame to the international community over the ‘affairs` of this prosperous state.

Says Prof Hossenur Rahman, 68, a former fellow in the India Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla,`` ..now the question is whether we want God and His Kingdom or secular democracy, the world and its goods. The decision must be made radically.``

A majority of the progressive people in the minority community feels that there must have been a deep-rooted conspiracy behind the Godhra incident and the government must be more prompt to unravel the mystery beyond the involvement of the Muslim goons. ``India had seen conflicts in the past and to shift responsibility only to one, is in itself biased and discriminatory. The Godhra killings were no doubt, pre-planned as the manner in which the bogies were selected for torching alive 58 people, mostly women and children, could not happen without prior conspiracy,`` contends Syed Muztafa Siraj; but in the same breath, he rues:`` What followed thereafter, is both shocking and appalling.``

Siraj, 73, a Sahitya Academy award winner, echoes Rehman when he accuses the Sangh Parivar of waging a kind of war for annihilating the Muslims from this great land.

Has the Partition played a role in the current escalation in tensions and contributed to the Hindu-Muslim divide? A substantial section of the minority community feels that it has done more harm than good to India. Says Syed Siraj:``Lord Macaulay had quietly included the seeds of division in the syllabi introduced by him and the intention was to spread the message of mutual hatred and mistrust among the two communities down to the grassroot. Unfortunately, in the subsequent years, no concrete measure was taken to correct that situation.``

Partition or no Partition, Prof Rahman points out, “we never wanted to solve our outstanding social problems; we rather always shelved it` despite being aware that it would cause the wound all th`` What we need today is de-sacrilisation - we looked upon it (communal clashes) as a political problem; but it is absolutely on the contrary. Ethics and not religion, will save us from unprincipled and unregulated conduct. What we need today is a wide, awake social conscience rather than negative religious susceptibility,`` explains Prof. Rehman who has authored several books including ‘Vivekanda,Vedanta & Islam`.

While it is a widely acknowledged fact that as a majority community, Hindus ought to have a moral and legal obligation not to take the law unto their own hands, questions are also being raised about the Muslims and how they practise their religion. ``Islam does not teach violence or intolerance,`` answers Md Hamid, a rich and respectable businessman in Kolkata, for whom offering namaz daily at a fixed time is more than a habit. He is not the least hesitant to disclose his glorious Hindu background as a few hundred years ago, his ancestors belonging to Kshatriya Pandit family, were deeply impressed by high morals and righteous living of a Muslim fakir and got themselves converted to Islam.

But the fact which pains Hamidbhai most (also shared by others in the community) is the tendency by the communal parties like the VHP and RSS to label a large majority of people in the minority community to be actively in league with terrorists or treat them with suspicion. ``It is dangerous; if this continues, consequences will be serious. In the end, there`ll be one terrorist each from every family. Will the Government be able to control the situation then?`` Hamidji seriously asks.

However, both Prof Rehman and Syed Siraj, an eminent literatteur himself, have a slightly different view on this score. The famed Indian tradition of tolerance and secular institutions, they rue, have gone to the winds and instead, sectarian institutions and views have seized power where healthy educational and democratic traits have become defunct and a ‘course` on hawkish fundamentalism is being actively pursued. While condemning orgy of violence and ugly face of the Hindutva activists in Gujarat, Prof Rehman has not spared the people in his community either. Muslims flaunt the fact that they are Muslims and this tendency is equally dangerous for the secular health of the country, he says.

Time for reform

At the same time, this nearly-septuagenarian writer does not hesitate to highlight some of the other dark areas of the Muslim community that require immediate correction. Citing an example, he notes how Muslims tend to be ghettoised and do not avail of the opportunities given to them. Not only that, Madrasas where the Muslim children are sent for basic primary education, again lack healthy educational environment; `` they (madrasas) can`t bring the children at par with the modern educated world,`` he firmly maintains and feels that an attitudinal change has to take place in the community in this regard.

The founding fathers of the Indian Constitution, points out Prof Rehman, have gifted the country a very solid foundation for secularism; ``the Constitution demands you be less and less Hindu and be less and less Muslim, but more and more citizen of the country and this citizen has a citizen`s religion. Why can`t we observe that to achieve peace among all the communities ?``

The consequences of a divisive agenda would be harrowing not just for the Hindus or Muslims but for the nation as a whole, as we all know. ``These divisions will once again be a cause of colonisation.. this time it will be economic colonisation,`` warns Ahmed-bin-Sayeed. ``We owe it to our children and future generations to bequeath them a prosperous and peaceful country, not a hate-filled, divided country.``

Perhaps as the saying goes there is light at the end of the tunnel. For, young Akram, an engineering student at a reputed college in the outskirts of Bangalore city, is all hopes of a better day, a better tomorrow. “Tension has always been there. Every now and then it flares up. But I am sure it will settle down soon and things will be back to normal. We just have to wait,” he says.

Perhaps he’s right. Maybe it’s just a long wait before the dawn of a bright morrow.

R Akhileshwari,

Chethana Dinesh,

Prasanta Paul,

Parag Rabade,

Shruba Mukherjee

Deccan Herald, Bangalore

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun02/sh1.htm

The Perfect Murder http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0606/p01s03-uspo.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/monitortalk/events/pastevents/060502chatwrapper.html

The Perfect Murder http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0606/p01s03-uspo.html



Mideast pattern, now in Kashmir

Struggles in the two regions share many parallels. Like Israel, India seeks to don mantle of US-led war on terror.

By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – Bitter disputes over territory. Suicide bombings. Threats of retaliation. International attempts to calm roiled passions.

The Middle East? Yes – and South Asia. Although there are important differences between the Israeli–Palestinian struggle and the standoff between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the similarities between the situations are striking.



And perhaps the most important similarity is this: In both cases, the stronger party has had some success in defining its aim as the defeat of terrorists.

That has complicated the US war on terrorism, drawing the Bush administration more deeply into crises that are flaring on the periphery of its fight against Al Qaeda.

It may also have brought the stronger parties – India and Israel – more US support than they might otherwise have received.

``Both India and Israel have turned 9/11 to their advantage,`` says Dennis Kux, a retired State Department South Asia specialist and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

In both the Middle East and South Asia, the basic confrontation is the same: a regional power is struggling with a smaller, determined foe over land issues.

In both cases, militants from the smaller power have resorted to unconventional means – suicide bombings and other random attacks on civilian targets – to try to counter their foe`s larger conventional strength.

In both, the leaders of the smaller powers – Palestinian chief Yasser Arafat and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf – have disavowed their militants` actions. Yet questions remain about the leaders` desire and ability to control radical elements.

And in both, the stronger power in the standoff possesses a distinct advantage in conventional force. Israel and India have used tanks in the past to invade their foe`s territory in an attempt to preempt bombing attacks. They threaten to do so again, if necessary, and now liken their military efforts to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

``In each case the justification for taking action and the kind of actions are very similar,`` says Rahul Mahajan, author of ``The New Crusade: America`s War Against Terrorism``.

That said, there remain significant differences between the Middle East and the Kashmiri crisis.

Pakistan is not Palestine, for one. It has been a sovereign nation for over half a century and possesses both nuclear weapons and conventional forces that are significant, if smaller than India`s. Pakistani troops have held their own in two of the three wars that have erupted over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The border between Israel and Palestinian territory is relatively short. The territory is flat and arid. The border between Indian and Pakistani-held territory is long, and the geography mountainous – making it a much more difficult region to pacify.

Furthermore, there is arguably more support for suicide bombings and other militant action in the Palestinian population than among residents of Kashmir. Moderate Kashmiris themselves have been targets of assassination.

``The Indians think there are substantial numbers of Kashmiris ready to agree to an Indian administration in some form,`` says Andrew Hess, a South Asia expert at Tufts University. ``I think they`re right.``

Finally, unlike the Palestinians, Pakistan does not have a legitimate, internationally accepted claim over the territory in dispute, says Sujit Dutta, a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis in New Delhi.

The 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution that called on India to hold a plebiscite in the region also demanded that Pakistan withdraw its troops from the area of Kashmir it controlled – something it has still not done.

``Despite apparent similarities, there is a large difference between the history of Israeli–Arab relations on one hand and the Indian–Pakistani relationship on the other,`` says Mr. Dutta.

Whatever the differences, though, in Washington today there is far less tolerance for tactics that can be equated with terrorism. To Palestinian and Kashmiri militants, suicide bombers may be freedom fighters. To the US, they are analogous to Al Qaeda, thus to be condemned.

Witness the political and rhetorical pressure the US has exerted on Mr. Arafat to control terror attacks, to the point where the White House has begun to openly question whether the Palestinian leader remains a fit negotiation partner.

``In the president`s eyes, Yasser Arafat has never played the role of someone who can be trusted or effective,`` said Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer in the wake of Wednesday`s car bombing near the Israeli town of Megiddo.

India, for its part, quickly offered the US full support in the wake of last September`s events, and has since been rewarded with a rapprochement that has produced its closest ties with Washington in decades. One result: The US has placed two militant Pakistani Islamic groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-i-Taiba, on its list of terrorists. That`s a move Washington resisted in the past.

``I have been surprised we have leaned as heavily and publicly as we have on Pakistan,`` says Mr. Kux of the Wilson Center.

All this doesn`t mean the US has become completely one-sided in either crisis. The US continues to insist that Israel accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state – and it continues to view Pakistan as a staunch ally in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.

• Staff writer Scott Baldauf contributed to this story from New Delhi.

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death Divided Indian-Pakistani families suffer on both sides of border under threat of war

Wed Jun 5, 8:06 PM ET

By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - When her Pakistani husband died in December, none of Nargas Begum`s relatives from India could come to his funeral in his hometown Multan.



Her parents consoled her by phone, telling Begum that relations between the two countries would be normal soon and promising to come then. But three months later, as her brother lay dying in India, Begum still was not allowed to travel across the border to see him.

With India and Pakistan trading hostile words and intense shelling across the confrontation line in Kashmir (news - web sites), her family must now contend with the threat of war. ``Things are only getting worse and worse,`` said the 47-year-old New Delhi native.

Separated from family members since New Delhi and Islamabad cut off transportation links at the end of last year, thousands of Indians and Pakistanis are suffering doubly because of their cross-border connections — now even more difficult with war looming.

New Delhi severed all train, bus and air connections with Islamabad at the end of December, following an attack on the Indian parliament that it blamed on Pakistani-based Islamic extremists. Pakistan denied the charges and retaliated by halting the links on its side.

Tensions have spiraled since last month`s attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir that New Delhi again blamed on Pakistani-backed extremists. On a war footing since December, Pakistan and India have now massed hundreds of thousands of troops along the 2,912-kilometer (1,800-mile) border that separates the countries.

The threat of nuclear conflict has prompted the United States, Britain and other countries to urge their nationals to leave India and Pakistan.

Caught in the middle are thousands of families like Begum`s, who have ties on both sides of the border. Many families ended up with members in both countries after the two were carved out of British India in 1947.

``There was darkness everywhere when my husband died,`` she said. ``I am in Pakistan with only a few relatives. Ninety percent of my family live in India. My heart is still there.``

Then in March, ``my brother wrote that he was on his death bed, but I could not go to see him in the hospital,`` Begum said, remembering how she wept at his letter.

From the southern port city of Karachi, Khurshid Ahmad, 43, worries about his 23-year-old daughter, who married a cousin in Bombay, India, last year. His three sisters and dozens of close relatives also live in India.

``My daughter is pregnant, but I can`t go to India,`` Ahmad said. ``We never thought that the two countries would come so close to war.``

Ahmad said he continues to pray for peace even as he fears a war that could kill countless numbers of people on both sides of the border.

In Lahore, Begum Mujtaba, 48, talked of how she used to travel to India two months out of the year to visit relatives. This year, she had to cancel plans. She also worries over her daughter, who married a cousin in New Delhi five years ago.

``I pray every day that there will be no war,`` she said.

Residents of Bhano Chak village on Lahore province`s eastern frontier with India say they have relatives living just across the border, yet they cannot meet with them.

``My elder sister lives in Indian Punjab province and I am worried about her family because they will be the first to face casualties because they live near the border towns like us,`` said Begum Munshi Khan, 62.

It is in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where the fear of war seems most intense and the familial ties with India are deepest.

``Eighty percent of our relatives live in Indian-part of Kashmir and we know they will be suffering most of the casualties if war starts,`` said Jamil Mir, 29, who lives in a refugee camp after crossing into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir two years ago with his wife and son. ``We are against war.``



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020606/ap_wo_en_po/pakistan_divided_families_1

The Perfect Murder Kashmir: Whose dispute is it anyway?

By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI - The newly released results of an independent opinion poll indicating that less than 6 percent of the people in Indian Kashmir would, given a choice, opt to join Pakistan is good news for India, which plans to hold elections there in September.

Political commentators say that the poll, commissioned by a group of British parliamentarians and conducted in the last week of April by MORI, a London-based agency, should be an eye-opener for Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, who is convinced that Kashmiris would overwhelmingly vote to join his country if India allowed them to decide the issue at a referendum.

On Tuesday, Musharraf, under pressure from the international community to stop cross-border terrorism in Kashmir, aired his view of the dispute at a televised session of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building in Asia (CICA) summit, now underway in Almaty, capital of the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Musharraf told delegates that while terrorism had to be stamped out, ``We cannot condone for any reason the rapacious polices of certain states that forcibly occupy territories and deny freedom to people for decades on end with total disdain for charter principles and decisions of the United Nations``.

The reference was to India, whose Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee could be seen by television viewers sitting across from Musharraf at the session. Vajpayee reiterated the Indian position that there could be no dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir until terrorism in the territory first ended.

``Global peace has remained hostage to the expansionist ambitions of such states and their ruthless campaign to suppress, through brutal force, the legitimate struggles of people to gain their internationally recognized fundamental right to freedom and self-determination,`` Musharraf continued.

While Musharraf claims to be supporting a freedom struggle in Kashmir, the fact is that Pakistan has fought three wars with India to gain complete possession of the former princely state which stands divided between the two countries by the Line of Control (LoC) marking the point where their armies fought each other to a standstill more than 50 years ago.

India has refused to budge from the position that Kashmir, though Muslim-dominated, is integral to its secular polity. On the other hand, Pakistan, which was carved out of British India as a homeland for Muslims, believes that Pakistan is incomplete without the Muslim-dominated territory.

When the British handed over power to Pakistan and India in 1947, the princely states were given the choice of merging with either one or the other of the successor states and Kashmir`s Hindu ruler, after holding out for some months, formally acceded to India.

Pakistan, which failed to secure Kashmir from India through warfare, also lost the Muslim-majority argument in 1971 when its eastern province broke away and became Bangladesh with military support from India. The 1971 war which ended disastrously for Pakistan also paved the way for the Shimla Agreement between New Delhi and Islamabad the following year whereby the two countries agreed to respect the LoC in Kashmir and also settle all outstanding issues peacefully and bilaterally.

By 1990, a movement for independence from Indian rule by Kashmiri groups turned militant and was taken advantage of by Pakistan`s powerful and omnipresent military, which was believed to have supported the secessionist groups with arms, training and later men.

India reacted by moving in the army, brutally repressing dissent of any kind. It was accused of helping to rig the last elections held five years ago which resulted in the pro-India, National Conference party of chief minister Farook Abdullah coming to power.

Before long, Kashmiri groups fighting for independence found themselves sidelined by pro-Pakistan groups who unleashed a ``reign of terror`` in the Valley and did not hesitate to eliminate moderate leaders seeking a political settlement, their most recent victim being Abdul Ghani Lone, assassinated by masked gunmen at a rally in Srinagar, last month.

It is little wonder that the MORI survey showed little support for any merger of Kashmir with Pakistan and actually showed 65 percent of people preferring that the state continues to stay within India.

Predictably, pro-Pakistani political leaders in Kashmir reacted strongly to the poll results. ``This poll has been conducted by a particular agency with male fide [bad] intentions to discredit our movement,`` said Abdul Ghani Bhat, chairman of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), umbrella organization for more than a score of political parties in the state

Bhat said that if 61 percent of the people in the state preferred that Kashmir stayed on with India, then it was all the more reason for New Delhi to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir according to a United Nations resolution of 1947. The demand for a plebiscite does not have uniform support in the Indian part of Kashmir, which is not a homogenous ethnic or religious unit, and Pakistani rule would never be accepted in the Buddhist-dominated Ladakh region or in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region.

Meanwhile, Asia Times Online correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad spoke in Karachi to a former senior Pakistani diplomat, Shaharyar M Khan. Khan retired from the Pakistani Foreign Office in the mid-1990s as foreign secretary. Soon after this he worked for the United Nations, as well as the Commonwealth secretariat.

Khan comes from a prominent family with ties on both sides of the Indian-Pakistan divide. He is the grandson of Nawab Hamidullah Khan, a ruler of Bhopal state in India, and his mother was the only one in the family to migrate to Pakistan, with all other relatives still in India.

Khan believes that no world or regional power can help in the final settlement of the Kashmir dispute. ``At present, all regional and global powers are concerned about defusing the tension. They are least bothered about the final settlement of the dispute,`` said Khan, who believes that only India and Pakistan can resolve the issue.

When asked why there should be hope for the future when the countries have been unable to resolve the issue for more than 50 years, Khan replied, ``Every time India and Pakistan have held talks, some results have emerged, though a final settlement is yet to come. There were eight rounds of talks when Mr [Zulfikar Ali ] Bhutto was premier. Although both parties came up with contradictory points of view in the declaration, in the process of dialogue many new aspects of this issue were explored.

``Had dialogue continued between the two countries they would have reached a conclusive settlement. We have an example of the Oslo declaration in the background of Palestine. If talks could have continued, this sort of solution would have been carved out for Kashmir also.``

Khan agreed with this correspondent that after 1989 perspectives on the Kashmir question changed. ``Now there are extremist elements on both sides of the divide. Extremist elements in India have influenced public opinion that Pakistan is involved in cross-border terrorism and should be punished. Extremist elements in Pakistan believe that over 50 years of diplomatic endeavors have failed to deliver results. As 60,000 Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian army, they would not give up their struggle and would force India to surrender.``

He says that the new scenario has created a deadlock between the two countries. ``Tension has mounted between both in the past, but not for as long as it has at present, and the chances exist of a limited war.``

Khan agreed that most countries, even Muslim ones, blame Pakistan for cross-border terrorism. ``Even the statements of the OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference] secretary general are shocking to me. Remember, the OIC has passed many resolutions in favor of Kashmir, and now they are treating India and Pakistan at an equal level. In the present situation, I find Pakistan has no friends and it seems that we have lost many of our old friends.

``After September 11, our foreign policy took a 180 degree turn. However, the world community saw that still hundreds of youths went to Afghanistan. Right or wrong, but they were found there. Similarly, recently, a citizen of Xingyang [western China] was caught in Pakistan and handed over to China. He was believed to be involved in terrorism. All these instances forced the world community to think that Pakistan is in fact a breeding point for these sort of people who are involved in terrorism.``

Khan believes that Pakistan does not need to send any diplomatic missions abroad. All senior officials of the G-8 countries, of the UK, the US and so on are in this region and Pakistan needs to come up with cogent arguments to convince them of its case that there is a genuine, indigenous freedom struggle in Kashmir, he maintained.

(Asia Times Online/Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/DF06Df03.html

Lighting The Nuclear Fire Cover story

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C7-2002013426%2C00.html

The Times, UK

A state of war

BY TREVOR FISHLOCK

The dispute over Kashmir has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. But why has this beautiful state become the subcontinent`s powder keg?

Poets hymned it as a land of love and languor. In 1627 the dying emperor Jahangir, who shaped its blissful gardens, was asked to name his last desire. “Only Kashmir,” he murmured. “Only Kashmir.”

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised melodramatically that its name was written upon his heart. Today, millions make the same emotive claim.

Passions for Kashmir run hot and bitter, the bayonets almost touch and the urge for war is strong. Two rivals, two ideas, two faiths stand nose to nose in one of the world’s most dangerous places. One mistake or misjudgment and the spark falls on the fuse.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. The great bulk of their armies are based along the frontier that runs through Punjab and Kashmir. The border is always tense.

In Kashmir there has been an almost permanent grumbling small war of artillery bombardment. Apart from the all-out conflicts, India and Pakistan have two or three times pulled back from the brink, and now the assessments of their military power have to include their nuclear capability. There was a particularly dangerous stand-off in 1990.

It was inevitable that the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 would bring India and Pakistan once more to the edge of the abyss. It was an echo of the October suicide bomb attack on the Kashmir assembly. The Parliament in Delhi is the heart and emblem of what India stands for. Now India is raging.

Poor Kashmir. It lies in the Himalayan ramparts where the borders of India, Pakistan and China rub together. Reality mocks its beauty. There is no escaping the permeating melancholy of a land that lies under the gun. It is as if malevolent gods, jealous of its loveliness, placed a curse upon it.

The poison entered the garden in 1947 when the war-weary British quit their Indian empire and partitioned it. They had no wish to cut it up: one of their imperial achievements, they said, was to have united India and made it secure. They divided it to meet the demands of Muslim leaders who said that Hindus and Muslims could not live together in one country, that the communities formed two separate nations. Pakistan was therefore created as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Britain ruled India with the co-operation of more than 500 Indian princes, a galaxy of maharajahs, rajahs, ranas, raos, khans, mirs, jams, nizams and nawabs, loyal to the British crown, well-oiled with flattery, some fantastically rich and a few of them barmy. In the summer of 1947, these rulers had to choose whether to take their states into India or Pakistan. It was a personal decision, without referendum.

Public opinion hardly came into it. Most princes joined India. Most knew that they would be extinguishing themselves as a ruling class, but it was clear to all but a few that the game was up. On the eve of independence, all the princes had made up their minds except four.

The Maharajah of Kashmir, Sir Hari Singh, was one of the ditherers. He was vain, pompous and addicted to hunting bears and shooting ducks. As a young man he had an unfortunate scrape in London, being found in bed with a woman at the Savoy Hotel and milked for a lot of money by a blackmailer pretending to be the woman’s husband.

At Partition, Kashmir, more fully known as Jammu and Kashmir, was in a key position: a prize because it was a large state and famously beautiful, a honeymooners’ resort of lakes and cool alpine meadows.

Given its place on the map, it could have swung either to India or to Pakistan. Because of its overwhelming Muslim majority, Pakistan’s new leaders expected that it would join their Islamic entity. But the maharajah had to decide — and he was a Hindu. This was not unusual. In princely India, Muslims often ruled Hindus and vice versa. But Hari Singh dithered. He could not believe that the British would really go home. He did not want to join Pakistan because he could not bear the thought of his state being subsumed. He dreamt that Kashmir could somehow be an independent country and he could keep his power.

India and Pakistan became independent in August. Hari Singh was still dithering in October. As he fiddled, the storm broke. Thousands of Pathan warriors from the North-West Frontier, bordering Afghanistan, rushed into Kashmir, vowing to seize it for Pakistan. Although they were a rabble, they might have succeeded. They were close to Srinagar, the capital, when they were delayed by their lust for loot and women. While they pillaged towns and raped girls and nuns, the hapless Hari Singh gathered up his diamonds and Purdey shotguns and fled his palace in a motorcade.

India acted fast and decisively. In a flurry of action the maharajah agreed to join India, and Indian forces flew to save Srinagar. This was the first Kashmir war, not an all-out confrontation but a series of fights and communal conflicts. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of Pakistan, wanted to send the new Pakistan regular Army into action, but did not do so when the absurdity of the situation was pointed out to him: the forces of India and Pakistan shared a commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, while many officers on both sides were British.

Kashmir was left divided along the line where fighting stopped in 1948. A United Nations ceasefire came into force on January 1, 1949. In 1965 Pakistan tried and failed to annexe Kashmir and was defeated in brief and bitter fighting. At one stage Indian forces were almost at the gates of Lahore and could easily have taken it. Pakistan’s leaders believed that Kashmiris would welcome Pakistani troops as liberators. It was a shock that they did not. In 1971 India and Pakistan went to war again, India assisting the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. Pakistan was left truncated and humiliated.

Yet the story of a vacillating maharajah and the ensuing bloody quarrel over territory is only the half of it.

Kashmir is a tragedy for its divided people and a continuing source of danger in a subcontinent inhabited by a fifth of the world’s population. The tragedy has deep roots. Kashmir is the offspring of bitterly divorced parents. Pakistan aches for it but will never possess it. India will never let it go: it is not negotiable. The trouble is that both sides define themselves by this feud.

Their mutual suspicions date from the 8th-century Muslim conquest of western India and the many hundreds of years of Mogul rule that were brought to an end by the British Raj. For India’s Hindu majority, independence in 1947 was a reclamation of their vast land, the end of centuries of foreign domination. Nehru and others believed passionately that this new India would be a daring concept, an embracing of all its religious, linguistic and regional diversity, a magnificent secular state.

The steely and intractable Jinnah did not believe it. His new country of Pakistan grew out of that scepticism, the belief that Muslims in India would be vulnerable, second-class citizens.

Pakistan was an invented state, a by-product of the great Indian struggle for independence. It evolved in the last few years of British rule among people who wanted to escape religious and political discrimination in the new order. Landowners especially thought they would lose out in India. Democracy barely made the journey to Pakistan.

In a sense Pakistan remains stranded in 1947. Its great debate has centred for half a century on what it is for and what it should be. Jinnah mused that it could be a secular country. But in that case, what was the point of Partition? Some of his successors said that Pakistan was nothing if not Islamic and determined to make it more so, a military theocracy.

Yet Islam proved an unreliable glue. It did not cement Pakistan and East Pakistan. Bangladesh erupted as the assertion of Bengali language and culture. Nor did it cement the disparate parts of Pakistan itself — Punjab, Baluchistan, Sindh and the North- West Frontier — or, indeed, the many shades of Islamic belief. Thus Kashmir is useful, the “unfinished business of Partition”. However much Pakistanis disagree about the nature of their society, they find common cause in Kashmir, the belief that they were robbed in 1947. This is the unifying insult. It is why Pakistan has supported Kashmiri insurgents. India’s treatment of Kashmiris during the long years of internal strife are held as proof that Jinnah was right, that Muslims needed their homeland.

It is true that India could have managed Kashmir more wisely, less roughly. But Pakistan has to live with the fact that there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world: evidently Hindus and Muslims do live together in a secular society, Nehru’s idea of India, even if it is not always easy. And Kashmir, the only Indian state with a Muslim majority, is in Indian minds the shining fact of secular India. Its existence throws the question to Pakistan again: what was Partition for? India has a powerful idea of its identity. It is the giant of South Asia, its Armed Forces are huge and it is proud of its democracy, even if this is somewhat battered. Pakistan, on the other hand, does not enjoy such a positive identity. It thinks of itself in terms of its neighbour and endures the negative of being Not India.

It means that even if the impossible were to happen, that Kashmir should somehow become part of Pakistan, the anxieties and insecurities of Pakistan would endure. There would have to be another issue by which Pakistan could seek to establish its identity and purpose.

In the meantime the two nations face each other again — and judging from what we see and hear, there are many on both sides desperate to fight. Centuries of prejudice are poured into the funnel of Kashmir.

People on both sides treasure the slights of history. There is an endless misunderstanding of each other’s beliefs and opinions. Estrangement is total. Trivial matters become huge. Hindu nationalists complain that Muslims cheer for Pakistan during Test matches. In both India and Pakistan, keen teams of monitors comb through guide books and encyclopaedias searching for maps that might contain instances of “cartographic aggression” — inaccuracies that seem to favour one side or the other.

Words are traps, and there is a sense that a comma could cause a crisis. But the opinions of outsiders are not welcome. For this is a feud between cousins, a quarrel in the family. It could hardly be more acrid and perilous.

Of Violent Birth and Peaceful Death Cover story

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C7-2002013426%2C00.html

The Times, UK

A state of war

BY TREVOR FISHLOCK

The dispute over Kashmir has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. But why has this beautiful state become the subcontinent`s powder keg?

Poets hymned it as a land of love and languor. In 1627 the dying emperor Jahangir, who shaped its blissful gardens, was asked to name his last desire. “Only Kashmir,” he murmured. “Only Kashmir.”

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised melodramatically that its name was written upon his heart. Today, millions make the same emotive claim.

Passions for Kashmir run hot and bitter, the bayonets almost touch and the urge for war is strong. Two rivals, two ideas, two faiths stand nose to nose in one of the world’s most dangerous places. One mistake or misjudgment and the spark falls on the fuse.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. The great bulk of their armies are based along the frontier that runs through Punjab and Kashmir. The border is always tense.

In Kashmir there has been an almost permanent grumbling small war of artillery bombardment. Apart from the all-out conflicts, India and Pakistan have two or three times pulled back from the brink, and now the assessments of their military power have to include their nuclear capability. There was a particularly dangerous stand-off in 1990.

It was inevitable that the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 would bring India and Pakistan once more to the edge of the abyss. It was an echo of the October suicide bomb attack on the Kashmir assembly. The Parliament in Delhi is the heart and emblem of what India stands for. Now India is raging.

Poor Kashmir. It lies in the Himalayan ramparts where the borders of India, Pakistan and China rub together. Reality mocks its beauty. There is no escaping the permeating melancholy of a land that lies under the gun. It is as if malevolent gods, jealous of its loveliness, placed a curse upon it.

The poison entered the garden in 1947 when the war-weary British quit their Indian empire and partitioned it. They had no wish to cut it up: one of their imperial achievements, they said, was to have united India and made it secure. They divided it to meet the demands of Muslim leaders who said that Hindus and Muslims could not live together in one country, that the communities formed two separate nations. Pakistan was therefore created as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Britain ruled India with the co-operation of more than 500 Indian princes, a galaxy of maharajahs, rajahs, ranas, raos, khans, mirs, jams, nizams and nawabs, loyal to the British crown, well-oiled with flattery, some fantastically rich and a few of them barmy. In the summer of 1947, these rulers had to choose whether to take their states into India or Pakistan. It was a personal decision, without referendum.

Public opinion hardly came into it. Most princes joined India. Most knew that they would be extinguishing themselves as a ruling class, but it was clear to all but a few that the game was up. On the eve of independence, all the princes had made up their minds except four.

The Maharajah of Kashmir, Sir Hari Singh, was one of the ditherers. He was vain, pompous and addicted to hunting bears and shooting ducks. As a young man he had an unfortunate scrape in London, being found in bed with a woman at the Savoy Hotel and milked for a lot of money by a blackmailer pretending to be the woman’s husband.

At Partition, Kashmir, more fully known as Jammu and Kashmir, was in a key position: a prize because it was a large state and famously beautiful, a honeymooners’ resort of lakes and cool alpine meadows.

Given its place on the map, it could have swung either to India or to Pakistan. Because of its overwhelming Muslim majority, Pakistan’s new leaders expected that it would join their Islamic entity. But the maharajah had to decide — and he was a Hindu. This was not unusual. In princely India, Muslims often ruled Hindus and vice versa. But Hari Singh dithered. He could not believe that the British would really go home. He did not want to join Pakistan because he could not bear the thought of his state being subsumed. He dreamt that Kashmir could somehow be an independent country and he could keep his power.

India and Pakistan became independent in August. Hari Singh was still dithering in October. As he fiddled, the storm broke. Thousands of Pathan warriors from the North-West Frontier, bordering Afghanistan, rushed into Kashmir, vowing to seize it for Pakistan. Although they were a rabble, they might have succeeded. They were close to Srinagar, the capital, when they were delayed by their lust for loot and women. While they pillaged towns and raped girls and nuns, the hapless Hari Singh gathered up his diamonds and Purdey shotguns and fled his palace in a motorcade.

India acted fast and decisively. In a flurry of action the maharajah agreed to join India, and Indian forces flew to save Srinagar. This was the first Kashmir war, not an all-out confrontation but a series of fights and communal conflicts. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of Pakistan, wanted to send the new Pakistan regular Army into action, but did not do so when the absurdity of the situation was pointed out to him: the forces of India and Pakistan shared a commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, while many officers on both sides were British.

Kashmir was left divided along the line where fighting stopped in 1948. A United Nations ceasefire came into force on January 1, 1949. In 1965 Pakistan tried and failed to annexe Kashmir and was defeated in brief and bitter fighting. At one stage Indian forces were almost at the gates of Lahore and could easily have taken it. Pakistan’s leaders believed that Kashmiris would welcome Pakistani troops as liberators. It was a shock that they did not. In 1971 India and Pakistan went to war again, India assisting the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. Pakistan was left truncated and humiliated.

Yet the story of a vacillating maharajah and the ensuing bloody quarrel over territory is only the half of it.

Kashmir is a tragedy for its divided people and a continuing source of danger in a subcontinent inhabited by a fifth of the world’s population. The tragedy has deep roots. Kashmir is the offspring of bitterly divorced parents. Pakistan aches for it but will never possess it. India will never let it go: it is not negotiable. The trouble is that both sides define themselves by this feud.

Their mutual suspicions date from the 8th-century Muslim conquest of western India and the many hundreds of years of Mogul rule that were brought to an end by the British Raj. For India’s Hindu majority, independence in 1947 was a reclamation of their vast land, the end of centuries of foreign domination. Nehru and others believed passionately that this new India would be a daring concept, an embracing of all its religious, linguistic and regional diversity, a magnificent secular state.

The steely and intractable Jinnah did not believe it. His new country of Pakistan grew out of that scepticism, the belief that Muslims in India would be vulnerable, second-class citizens.

Pakistan was an invented state, a by-product of the great Indian struggle for independence. It evolved in the last few years of British rule among people who wanted to escape religious and political discrimination in the new order. Landowners especially thought they would lose out in India. Democracy barely made the journey to Pakistan.

In a sense Pakistan remains stranded in 1947. Its great debate has centred for half a century on what it is for and what it should be. Jinnah mused that it could be a secular country. But in that case, what was the point of Partition? Some of his successors said that Pakistan was nothing if not Islamic and determined to make it more so, a military theocracy.

Yet Islam proved an unreliable glue. It did not cement Pakistan and East Pakistan. Bangladesh erupted as the assertion of Bengali language and culture. Nor did it cement the disparate parts of Pakistan itself — Punjab, Baluchistan, Sindh and the North- West Frontier — or, indeed, the many shades of Islamic belief. Thus Kashmir is useful, the “unfinished business of Partition”. However much Pakistanis disagree about the nature of their society, they find common cause in Kashmir, the belief that they were robbed in 1947. This is the unifying insult. It is why Pakistan has supported Kashmiri insurgents. India’s treatment of Kashmiris during the long years of internal strife are held as proof that Jinnah was right, that Muslims needed their homeland.

It is true that India could have managed Kashmir more wisely, less roughly. But Pakistan has to live with the fact that there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world: evidently Hindus and Muslims do live together in a secular society, Nehru’s idea of India, even if it is not always easy. And Kashmir, the only Indian state with a Muslim majority, is in Indian minds the shining fact of secular India. Its existence throws the question to Pakistan again: what was Partition for? India has a powerful idea of its identity. It is the giant of South Asia, its Armed Forces are huge and it is proud of its democracy, even if this is somewhat battered. Pakistan, on the other hand, does not enjoy such a positive identity. It thinks of itself in terms of its neighbour and endures the negative of being Not India.

It means that even if the impossible were to happen, that Kashmir should somehow become part of Pakistan, the anxieties and insecurities of Pakistan would endure. There would have to be another issue by which Pakistan could seek to establish its identity and purpose.

In the meantime the two nations face each other again — and judging from what we see and hear, there are many on both sides desperate to fight. Centuries of prejudice are poured into the funnel of Kashmir.

People on both sides treasure the slights of history. There is an endless misunderstanding of each other’s beliefs and opinions. Estrangement is total. Trivial matters become huge. Hindu nationalists complain that Muslims cheer for Pakistan during Test matches. In both India and Pakistan, keen teams of monitors comb through guide books and encyclopaedias searching for maps that might contain instances of “cartographic aggression” — inaccuracies that seem to favour one side or the other.

Words are traps, and there is a sense that a comma could cause a crisis. But the opinions of outsiders are not welcome. For this is a feud between cousins, a quarrel in the family. It could hardly be more acrid and perilous.

The Perfect Murder Cover story

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C7-2002013426%2C00.html

The Times, UK

A state of war

BY TREVOR FISHLOCK

The dispute over Kashmir has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. But why has this beautiful state become the subcontinent`s powder keg?

Poets hymned it as a land of love and languor. In 1627 the dying emperor Jahangir, who shaped its blissful gardens, was asked to name his last desire. “Only Kashmir,” he murmured. “Only Kashmir.”

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised melodramatically that its name was written upon his heart. Today, millions make the same emotive claim.

Passions for Kashmir run hot and bitter, the bayonets almost touch and the urge for war is strong. Two rivals, two ideas, two faiths stand nose to nose in one of the world’s most dangerous places. One mistake or misjudgment and the spark falls on the fuse.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. The great bulk of their armies are based along the frontier that runs through Punjab and Kashmir. The border is always tense.

In Kashmir there has been an almost permanent grumbling small war of artillery bombardment. Apart from the all-out conflicts, India and Pakistan have two or three times pulled back from the brink, and now the assessments of their military power have to include their nuclear capability. There was a particularly dangerous stand-off in 1990.

It was inevitable that the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 would bring India and Pakistan once more to the edge of the abyss. It was an echo of the October suicide bomb attack on the Kashmir assembly. The Parliament in Delhi is the heart and emblem of what India stands for. Now India is raging.

Poor Kashmir. It lies in the Himalayan ramparts where the borders of India, Pakistan and China rub together. Reality mocks its beauty. There is no escaping the permeating melancholy of a land that lies under the gun. It is as if malevolent god