In fear of the saffron mob

Mian Ridge


Since partition, India has developed as a secular state. On the eve of the country’s general election, Hindu fundamentalists have put religious tolerance at risk.


THE Sabarmati river winds its way through the heart of Ahmedabad, the main city in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat. On the western side of the river, Ahmedabad is built high, with office blocks, multiplexes and shopping malls. This is what you would expect of the commercial hub of one of India’s richest states: its well-paved streets teem with Japanese cars and shiny four-wheel drives. But crossing the bridge over the river into the eastern part of Ahmedabad feels eerily like walking into another city and century. Here, more people get about by bicycle. The alleyways are narrow, grimy and congested. But perhaps the most striking difference is in the way people dress: in the new city, men are clean-shaven and dressed in jeans and trainers; across the river most wear beards and white topi caps. The few women out on the streets are in burkas.

So uniformly Muslim is this eastern part of Ahmedabad that it comes as a nasty shock, wending one’s way though the roads near the river, suddenly to come across a huge orange sign, stuck in the middle of the road, proclaiming, in Gujarati: “This is a Hindu kingdom”. Hundreds of Muslims have to make their way past this sign every day.

There have always been Muslim areas in Ahmedabad, which is 87 per cent Hindu, just as there are in many Indian cities. But until recently, there were also a number of neighbourhoods in which Muslims and Hindus lived side by side. Since the riots of two years ago, however, Muslims have been almost entirely confined to ghettos in the east, or rare pockets in the west of the city.

The violence broke out in February 2002 after a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing 58. The Hindus were returning from Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu fundamentalists claim the first Moghul emperor Babur had destroyed a Hindu temple to build the Babri Mosque; the plan to rebuild the temple – the mosque was torn down in 1992 – has become a central plank of India’s Hindu nationalist movement and of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that leads the coalition federal government. After the attack on the train, Hindu mobs, known locally as Saffron Warriors, turned on Gujarat’s Muslim community. Up to 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed, hundreds of women raped and uncounted homes and businesses destroyed. The New York-based Human Rights Watch spoke for most impartial observers when it said Gujarat state officials – ruled then, as now, by the BJP – “were directly involved in the killing of hundreds of Muslims…and are now engineering a massive cover-up of the State’s role in the violence”.

Two years on, more than 4,250 cases relating to the riots have been registered with the police, but only 15 Hindus have been convicted. The fear and paranoia that exist between the two communities are as strong as ever.

“My friends would never cross the bridge to the new city at night,” says Rafi Malek, a Muslim. He says he will never forget driving into Ahmedabad on one of the worst days of rioting. When his car was stopped by police, he hastily put a tilak on his forehead and told the police he was a Hindu. Now he and his Hindu wife Meera, both social workers, run a project that tries to bring the communities together. “It is very difficult,” he says. “Muslims are still very scared. I know men who are putting a quarter of their salaries aside to arm themselves – for defence.”

Muslims have been a depressed minority in India since partition in 1947, lacking any effective political leaders or spokesmen, but this is particularly evident in Gujarat where the Hindu nationalist agenda is furthest advanced. Rafi says he knows of a number of Muslims who are switching their political allegiance from the opposition Congress party to the BJP for the country’s forthcoming general elections, out of sheer fear. “They are scared that if they don’t vote BJP they will be arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act),” he said.

As India’s fourteenth general election since independence approaches at the end of April, human rights groups are working to inform India’s more vulnerable groups – religious minorities and the disempowered majority that is the poor – of their voting rights. One such organisation, Prashant, which is at the centre of the human rights movement in Gujarat, is run by a Jesuit, Fr Cedric Prakash. One of India’s most outspoken defenders of secularism, his work earns him regular death threats; in 1992 he was badly beaten up for opposing the destruction of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid.

“Grim and highly explosive” is how Fr Prakash describes the situation in Ahmedabad. “At the moment, the line with Muslims is, we can tolerate you as long as you are far away. No one wants a Muslim as a neighbour. No Muslim can either buy or rent a house in the new city; it’s an unwritten law.”

The carnage of 2002, he says, was designed to break the back of the Muslim economy – and to a large extent it has. “If you’re a Muslim and you are going for a competitive job, you won’t get it,” he says. “You won’t be able to buy a business in the new city. Nobody will buy from a Muslim shop if there is a Hindu shop nearby, even if the Hindu shop is more expensive.” There are no longer any Muslim shops in Paldi, the smartest part of town, while sales at the city’s oldest and largest cloth market, Dhalgarwad, where most of the stall-holders are Muslim, have fallen 80 per cent.

In the months after the riots, Fr Prakash arranged meetings with some 300 Hindus. “We need to do something, I need your help,” he told them. He describes the people he spoke to as “mainly upper caste, articulate English speakers, educated in America or the UK, charming, very hospitable people”. But what he heard from them horrified him.

“Out of these 300, 285 said something like, ‘Father, they deserve it; they should have known what was coming; look what they have done to the World Trade Centre; they are going to overrun us’ – all tantamount to approval for what happened. I was shocked. I didn’t expect such blatant racism. Ten agreed that it was terrible and were sympathetic. Five said, ‘we would like to support you in your work, tell us what we can do’.”

Fr Prakash’s account of the view of many of Gujarat’s Hindus is borne out by what happened later that year. Months after the carnage, the BJP won a landslide victory in state elections. During the campaign, the chief minister Narendra Modi, who had famously said in the early days of the riots that Gujarat’s Hindus had shown “remarkable restraint”, fought the election on an openly anti-Muslim platform.

It had already been shown that communal tension could translate into votes for the BJP. The party emerged as a rival to the Congress – which traditionally saw India as secular and multicultural –- in the 1980s when the economy was failing and a chance was seen to find support among upper-caste Hindus who felt no one was representing their interests. In Ahmedabad, the introduction of a policy of public-sector job quotas for lower-caste voters led to violence in which many Muslims – who have traditionally voted Congress – were killed.

It was in 1990, when the reservation system was extended, that L.K. Advani, then leader of the BJP and now India’s Deputy Prime Minister, embarked on a Rath Yatra, a symbolic chariot procession to Ayodhya, which left a trail of anti-Muslim violence wherever it went. The campaign to rebuild the temple at Ayodhya had been launched in 1984; in 1992, Hindus tore down the mosque, and six years later, the BJP became the dominant party in the ruling National Democratic Alliance in Delhi. It was also in Ayodhya that the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, kicked off his election campaign in February, stating that he had “unfinished work” to do. The BJP is expected to regain power in the elections, although Congress could spring a surprise if it makes strategic alliances with regional parties.

Although the BJP only rose to prominence in the 1980s, there is nothing new about the Hindu nationalist agenda it peddled to get into power. The umbrella group from which the BJP sprang, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or Association of National Volunteers – which has been described as the largest paramilitary organisation in the world – was formed in 1925 with the avowed objective of making India a Hindu state. Since then, it has been working away – barring a temporary ban after one of its Brahmin members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi – setting up training camps and schools throughout India. Its keenest recruits are India’s growing middle class, drawn by fears of Islamic terrorism that have only been fuelled by 11 September. Vajpayee and Advani have been members of the RSS since they were young men.

The nationalist Hindutva ideology is hard to define because Hinduism itself defies easy definition. But, broadly speaking, it is political rather than religious Hinduism, a resurgence of Brahminism with its strong, self-interested belief in the caste system. In this vision, India was a sacred indigenous nation of Hindus that was weakened by the Muslim invaders of the eleventh century – that will only be restored by purification from minority foreign elements, or at least a subjugation of minorities to Hindu superiority.

The hold that this kind of thinking has in Gujarat is evident in the state’s school books. “Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set-up,” 14-year-olds are told by the textbook for social studies published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks. The first sub-heading under “Problems of the Country” in a book for children a year younger, meanwhile, is “The Minority Community”.

This kind of noise is not made by the BJP in Delhi, of course. As the election approaches, the BJP has been distancing itself from its extremist supporters. This year’s election is being fought on the issue of the economy, which is booming, rather than caste; although the issue of the Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origin features heavily in the BJP campaign. The party has embarked on a campaign to woo Muslims, and when Advani took off on his “Bharat Uday Yatra” or “India Shining Journey” around India in March, he was pictured being waved off by Muslim, as well as Hindu, supporters.

It is not only in Gujarat that the BJP’s new policy of inclusion rings hollow. The rabid leaflet that I came across in Delhi – “Christianity and Islam are enemies of the human race. Wipe them out for your own survival and dignity” – is not a million miles away from the kind of anti-Muslim comments routinely made by amiable Delhi-ites. Although it may seem rather charming on first arrival in India, it is common to see statues of Hindu gods in secular institutions such as banks, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Alongside this, India has a new, aggressive middle class, created by the Government’s pro-globalisation policies, that has little time for the old vision of India created by Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.

Shabnam Hashmi runs ANHAD (Act now for Harmony and Democracy), a Delhi-based organisation that campaigns to uphold India’s secular tradition. She comes from a Muslim family, but she and her family are non-believers.

“There is prejudice everywhere now – far more than there was five years ago,” she says. “It feels like we are living in Germany in the 1930s. A slow communalisation of society has taken place, unchallenged. The BJP has penetrated every secular institution and I am worried that we are waking up too late.”

She says this is evident in daily life in Delhi, a well-policed city that has not seen the kind of communal violence associated with Gujarat. “We live in an apartment block of scientists, where you would expect people to be educated,” she says. “My eight-year-old daughter came to me a few months ago and said, ‘Ma, are we Muslims?’ I said ‘No, who told you that? We don’t believe in any religion’, and she said, ‘My friends said, I am a Muslim and should go to Afghanistan’. My son, who is 17, has been called a terrorist at school.”

She goes on: “I never felt any discrimination when I was young, but if today this is happening to a privileged child – and one who has never entered a mosque in his life – what can life be like for an ordinary Muslim in India?”

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This is the first of two special reports. Next week Mian Ridge will report on the difficulties faced by Christians in India.
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Földrajzi hely (amirol szól): India

Kirol szól (személyek): Prakash, Cedric SJ

Kikrol szól (csoport): Prashant

Keletkezés ill. kiadás dátuma: 2004. 04. 17.