Stepping Back from Extremism

If India and Pakistan are to make peace, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted a few days ago, people have to want it. An attack by six suspected Muslim militants on a contested religious site at Ayodhya in northern India triggered protests last week, as Hindus marched in New Delhi shouting "Down, down Pakistan!" and forced roads and shops to close across the country. Police used water cannons to disperse demonstrators and arrested some 3,000 people. "I have always maintained that we need to carry public opinion to make a success of the peace process," Singh warned as he appealed for calm. "Anything that comes in the way of public opinion—and certainly these incidents, if they get repeated—has the potential to disrupt the peace process."

The potential, yes. But not, as used to be the case, the probability. Despite the attack and ensuing protests—far from the worst India has seen—the mood on both sides of the border finally seems to be moving beyond a half-century of confrontation. Today, Indians and Pakistanis meet as friends in business, on movie screens and on the cricket pitch. And in contrast to the murderous outrage that used to follow suspected Islamic attacks on Indian soil, there were no reports of reprisals against Muslims in India last week.

Many ascribe this relative amity to the fading appeal of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party that won general elections in 1997 and 1998. It rose to prominence largely by encouraging Hindu extremism, most strikingly when its supporters destroyed a mosque at Ayodhya in 1992, claiming it had been built over a Hindu temple. But since last year's electoral defeat by the Congress Party, the Indian right has disintegrated into factionalism, split between those who continue to revile Pakistan and those, like BJP president Lal Krishna Advani, who think hatred as a political strategy has had its day. Last week a high court ordered Advani to stand trial for inciting violence in a speech before the Ayodhya mosque's destruction. Nowadays, however, he is more likely to exasperate his own party: on a visit to Pakistan last month, he praised its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Brahma Chellaney, strategic studies professor at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, says this broad change in the Hindu right has helped "mellow" relations between India and Pakistan. "Even if there is another major attack, there will be no major reaction in India," he says. Which is another way of saying: people want peace.