Overview of communalist threats to Muslims in India today Dr.

Ali White, April 2002 The Hindu political right a movement comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena, and other allied groups seeks to establish the theocratic rule of its own leaders over the entire subcontinent and beyond. Comprising sectarian Hindu rightist groups that are organised at both the local and national levels, this movement is perceived by Muslims throughout India as a grave threat to their very existence. The Hindu political rights program for religious minorities is summed up in the popular slogan: There are only two places for a Muslim to go Pakistan or kabristan (the graveyard). They fight for Hindutva, or Hindu supremacy. The Hindu rights electoral front, the BJP, led Indias ruling coalition from 19 March 1998 to 22 May 2004. This movement has been around since the beginning of the Independence struggle. Until the mid-1980s, however, it had always been marginal. Its rise as a national movement is a product of economic changes in the past two and a half decades, which have resulted in the poor becoming even poorer, overall. Much of the BJPs explosive support has come from the growing middle class, which lives in terror of the prospect of sinking back into utter destitution. At the other end of the economic spectrum, even the severely disadvantaged Dalits are drawn into racist Hindutva attacks, reportedly on the basis of promises that they will share in the property of the Muslim victims of Hindutva sectarian cleansing (AI, 2005: 3 & 16-21). This insecurity is being channelled into anti-Muslim communalism. The Hindu-right was first launched into the political mainstream through its provocative anti-Muslim campaign to tear down the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Local legend claims that Muslim rulers had built this mosque on top of the birthplace of the Hindu hero-god Ram. Agitation for its demolition in 1989-1990 sparked widespread attacks on Muslims and bloody reprisals in which several thousand persons were killed. Several thousand more as many as two thousand of them, mostly Muslims, in Bombay alone were killed in orchestrated riots, after hard core Hindu-rightists finally turned the structure into rubble in 1992. The dangerous campaign to start building a temple to Ram on the site continues to this day. Jabalpur experienced communal riots in 1961, Ahmedabad in 1969, and BhivandiJalgaon in 1970. The end of the 1970s and early 1980s also witnessed a number of major communal riots. Official figures compiled from several sources, including the Home Ministry, indicate the total number of incidents of communal violence between 1954 and 1982 as 6,933. Between 1982 and 1985, the army was called out as many as 353 times to maintain law and order in different parts of the country. Between 1980 and 1989, India witnessed close to 4,500 communal incidents, in which over 7,000 people lost their lives, almost four times as many deaths of this type as in the 1970s. There has also been a marked increase in the number of districts affected by communal riots, from 61 in 1960 to 250 in 1986-87, out of a total of 403 districts. In 1988 alone, 611 communal incidents occurred, of which some 55% were in rural areas. More and more incidents in the country have been categorised by the Indian

officialdom as communally hyper-sensitive (as opposed to merely communally sensitive), rising from 89 in 1971 to 213 in 1988. In 1988 alone, the number of hyper-sensitive districts rose from 82 to well over one hundred (Upadhyaya, 1992). Nor are the Hindutva rightist parties solely to blame. Even the mainstream Congress Party cannot resist jumping on the communalist bandwagon, when this is politically convenient. Thus, the exploitation of the Ayodhya-Babri Masjid controversy by Hindu nationalist parties was effective because the leaders of the Congress Party were also engaged in similar manipulation on the same issue. In 1989, for example, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made a campaign speech near Ayodhya, the site of the disputed Babri mosque, where he called for Ram Rajya (the rule of the Hindu god Ram) in India. The Congress manifesto for the elections, the judiciary, the government, as well as other parties such as the Janata Dal all reflected similar ambivalence. It is useful to contrast the action of the government regarding the Babri Masjid issue in 1949, when it was able to defuse the tension, with its (arguably deliberate) failure to do so in 1984. Rape is very frequently a weapon of choice of the Hindutva anti-Muslim gangs. In December 1992, Hindu mobs gang-raped at least a dozen Muslim women in Surat. Only a month later: at least three cases of communally-driven rapes of Muslim women were reported in Bombay. See Justice B.N. Krishna, Commission of Inquiry; see also the Reddy Commission of Inquiry for the 1969 communal riots in Gujarat (AI, 2005: 5n4). By far the most extensive and most horrific incident of this type were the mass acts of murder, sectarian cleansing and gang-rape that occurred in the State of Gujarat in February 2002. It has been estimated by human rights groups that between 2,000 to 2,500 Muslims were killed. Homes, places of livelihood and worship were also destroyed (AI, 2003: 1). Female Muslims of all ages bore the brunt of this attack. Chanting, extremely well organised Hindutva extremists gang-raped and burned alive both women and young girls. New-born babies were burned alive. Women were gang-raped, then had their wombs slashed open. The gang-rapes were frequently committed with sticks, iron bars and even knives. This was a brutal, Nazi-style assault carefully calculated in advance to generate absolute horror in the hearts of Indias Muslims and continue to have that effect, with due cause.1 And the Federal and local State authorities were complicit in these atrocities if not active participants AI, 2005: 16-21). Amnesty International appropriately comments: Letting the perpetrators of such serious crimes get away with them sends the message to other Muslims that the state does not take their protection seriously and sends the message to Muslim women that the state is indifferent to their plight. Muslim women almost three years after the largescale violence in Gujarat, continue to fear for their lives (AI, 2005: 5). The horrendous Gujarat events were no mere communalist flare-up, which might be prevented from recurring by public campaigns of education in tolerance for the other. Several observers have exposed the complicity of state actors at both the State of Gujarat and Federal level in these events. One report found:

The events in Ahmedabad do not fit into any conceivable definition of a communal riot. All evidence suggests that what happened there was a completely one-sided and targeted carnage of innocent Muslims, something much closer to a pogrom. Moreover, selective violence was done with remarkable precision, suggesting meticulous planning over a protracted period, rather than the spontaneous mob frenzy characteristic of communal riot (Sahmat, 2002). Chenoy et als fact-finding mission concluded: the events in Gujarat do not constitute a communal riot the bulk of the violence was state-backed and one-sided violence against the Muslims tantamount to a deliberate pogrom (Chenoy et al, 2002). The Concerned Citizens Tribunal headed by a former Supreme Court of India Judge and including other prominent retired judges speak of the ominous overwhelming and sinister similarity of the Gujarat atrocities, underlining that this indicates careful preplanning by the protagonists (Concerned Citizens Tribunal, 2002: vol II: 23). Amnesty Internationals major study of these events in Gujarat repeatedly stresses the same points: the complicity of not simply Gujarat State politicians, officials and even police, but also Federal authorities (AI, 2005: 4; 6; 7; 9-10; 11ff & 96). And the Gujarat mass media prepared the way, by publishing salacious hate articles months before the attacks (AI, 2005: 18n42). It should also be stressed that, although Gujarat is clearly to State within India in which Muslims of any sect are most likely to suffer rape, murder or sectarian cleansing at the hands of Hindu sectarians, it is not the only place in India where Muslim face these grave dangers. It has already been shown that similar incidents have occurred in recent times in other parts of the country; a violent, very dangerous anti-Muslim atmosphere clearly exists. There is every danger that this atmosphere will be the harbinger of repeated such incidents, in other States containing identifiable pockets of Muslim population. And, has already been stated above, the Indian Federal Government has repeatedly proven itself either unable or unwilling to fulfil this fundamental responsibility with respect to its Muslim citizens. And even female Muslims are not spared by the Hindutva pogromists especially those of child-bearing age. There is every indication that anti-Muslim pogromists in Gujarat knew precisely what they wanted to do and coldly planned to achieve this. They carefully set the scene months before the violence stated, openly calling upon Hindus to rape Muslim girls and women (AI, 2005: 18). A VHP leaflet signed by the Gujarat State Secretary of the VHP gloated, after the events: The volcano which was inactive has erupted, it has burned the arse of miyas [Muslim men] and made them dance nude. We have untied the penises which were tied till now. We have widened the tighty vaginas of the bibis [women] (AI, 2005: 18). Scholarly experts in Genocide Studies define a pogrom as a consciously orchestrated, violent attack by a majority against a minority, aiming to drastically escalate tensions

against the group being targeted, while simultaneously terrorising the subordinate group and putting in its place. This was certainly the case in the Gujarat events, which are without any parallel in Indias recent history. These deliberately coordinated atrocities represent a conscious and very conscious escalation of anti-Muslim feeling in India: from resentment of Muslim to utter hatred on a wide and very alarming scale, virtually overnight. The complicity of authorities at both the State and Federal levels in these events, together with the Hindutva pogromists declared program of escalating such activism to a national (all-India) level they are, after all, nationalists, striving to rouse the Hindu population on a national scale must indicate that there is every possibility that other Gujarat-style pogroms of Indias Muslims can occur in other Indian States.

Endnote 1. It is worth noting here that the Gujarat State Higher Secondary Board, author of some 98% of school textbooks in that State, requires the use of certain textbooks in which Nazism is condoned and Nazi extermination policies not mentioned The Standard 9 social studies textbook implies that Muslims, Christians, Parsees, and Jews are foreigners (Committee on Foreign Relations of the US Senate, 2004: 637).

References AI (Amnesty International) (2005) Justice, the Victim: Gujarat State fails to Protect Women from Violence, at the following URL: http://www.amnesty.org. Chenoy, Kamal Mitra et al (2002) Gujarat Carnage: A Report to the Nation, Citizens. Forum, New Delhi. Concerned Citizens Tribunal (2002) Crime Against Humanity: An Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat, 3 volumes: vol II. Sahmat, (2002) Ethnic Cleansing in Ahmedabad: Preliminary Report. Upadhyaya, Prakash Chandra (1992) The Politics of Indian Secularism, in Modern Asian Studies, No. 26: 815-53.