| A Muslim in Ahmadabad pleads for his life from murderous Hindu gangs |
| ARKO DATTA/REUTERS |
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Killing Thy Neighbor
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The sight of India devouring itself is depressing precisely because the scenes are so familiar from the past. More troubling, though, is what last week's mayhem says about the country's future. Even after partition, India ended up with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, now numbering 150 million. Friction with the Hindu majority is inescapable. But the long-term solution for national harmony believed in by hundreds of millions for decades—a purely secular state that respects all religions equally—is looking increasingly like some hoary fantasy. Vajpayee and his BJP claim to believe in secularism, but they came to power by banging the drum of Hindu pride—and fanning hatred of the Muslim minority—by stirring things up in Ayodhya, where a revered Hindu deity was supposedly born. The party has been in power in Delhi twice for a total of four years, and there hadn't been a single communal riot, giving widespread hope that the BJP had gone centrist and wouldn't allow its chauvinistic urges to disrupt a country discovering itself economically—or, at the very least, that the supposedly moderate Vajpayee could rein in the wilder elements of his group. But last week's violence was sparked by more Hindu chest thumping in Ayodhya, where militant Hindus want to build a grand temple on the site of a mosque destroyed by mobs in 1992, which was virtually guaranteed to set off trouble.
The main fear is that a secular India, with equal rights for all, will evolve into a tyranny of the majority Hindus—a calamitous idea in a country where the main minority group makes up almost 15% of the population. And if that tyranny ever arises, its soldiers are already identifiable and organized in groups allied with the BJP. They bear a frightening similarity to the fundamentalist Muslims who have declared war on the West. The Hindus wield tridents and sticks and talk of protecting the Hindu nation while the latter carry assault rifles and promote an Islamic state. Both feel their holy sites have been besmirched by outsiders. Both may be minorities within their faiths—the vast majority of Hindus are satisfied with their rituals and customs and the great land that nourishes them—but have supporters in positions of power. Yet, since 1992, the Hindu fundamentalists have kept a low profile and India has been calm.
Last week they came back with a vengeance. Just as each marauding mob in Gujarat had leadership, almost always a local pol, their inspiration (if not their directives) come right down from people within the party now ruling India. The big question: Which train is Vajpayee pulling? That of a modern India trying to get away from its blood-drenched past—or one heading off in a new and different direction?
ayodhya is a name mostly associated with conflict, like Beirut or Belfast. But in reality it's a charming temple town on the banks of the Saryu River just south of the Himalayas. It has plenty of places of worship, mostly Hindu but also Muslim. Its renown is based on the fact that Rama, hero of the eponymous epic Ramayana, is believed to have been born there.
In the 16th century, the fiery invader Babur swooped down from present-day Afghanistan to begin his conquest of Hindu India, which started three centuries of foreign rule known as the Mogul period. In 1528, one of his noblemen built a mosque in Ayodhya. History suggests the Muslim invaders dismantled a Hindu temple to do so. That's the building and the site that is provenance of the current conflict: some Hindus say the temple, and then the mosque, sat on the actual birthplace of Rama. For a century-and-a-half, Hindus and Muslims squabbled over the mosque. For Hindus, reclaiming the site is more about punishing the Muslims for the Islamic invasions and partioning of the subcontinent in 1947—in other words, a chance to reopen old wounds. For Muslims, the mosque was an ugly wreck, but it was a touchstone of the secular policy of postindependence India: Would the politicians treat them with respect, or succumb to Hindu sentiment to hold onto or gain political power?
That's exactly what the BJP did in the early 1990s. Sensing that the glory days were over for the Congress Party, which governed India for most of the years after independence, it started a rambunctious campaign to build a temple on the mosque's site. The campaign captured public imagination and the BJP did well in the general election of 1991. In 1992, it brought its masses to the mosque once again. As BJP leaders, including L.K. Advani, now the country's Home Minister, watched—professing to be shocked—trained kar sevaks (holy volunteers) broke down the mosque with iron rods and sledgehammers. That set off riots by Muslims across India, particularly in Bombay, its commercial capital. As usual, the Hindus followed. A month later in Bombay, three days of rioting killed nearly 500 Muslims. It was among the worst communal slaughters since partition.
Then came a nasty but surprisingly effective twist: on March 12, 1993, 10 bombs simultaneously exploded in Bombay, some of them near Hindu targets. At about 300, the body count was alarming and the message was clear: the Muslim community was telling the Hindus to cool it or real war would break out. The Hindus relented, but voted increasingly for the BJP. The party took power for 13 days in 1996 in a doomed coalition. After elections in 1998, it cobbled together a stronger alliance, which insisted that hard-line Advani—legally charged with being responsible for the mosque's destruction—be replaced with the more moderate Vajpayee as the prime ministerial candidate. Relations between Hindus and Muslims since the Bombay blasts have been calm, if not happy: neither group wanted to go back to the warfare of 1992.
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