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Fascism in India

By PANKAJ MISHRA

The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003

"According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the worst violence occurred in the commercial city of Ahmedabad: 'Between Feb. 28 and Mar. 2 the attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist - Hindutva - groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives and gas cylinders. They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties . . . and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs' way.' "
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"Narenda Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, who is also a member of the R.S.S., explained the killings as an 'equal and opposite reaction' (a statement he later denied) to the murder in late Feb. of almost 60 people, most of whom were Hindu activists, by a mob of Muslims. The Human Rights Watch report disputed this defense, charging that the Hindu nationalists had planned the Gujarat killings well in advance of the attack on the Hindu activists. It cited widespread reports in the Indian media that suggest that a senior Hindu nationalist minister sat in the police control room in Ahmedabad issuing orders not to rescue Muslims from murder, rape and arson."
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"Many secular Indians saw the ghost of Nathuram Godse presiding over the killings in Gujarat. In an article in the prestigious monthly Seminar, Ashis Nandy, India's leading social scientist, lamented that the 'state's political soul has been won over by [Gandhi's] killers.' This seems truer after Hindu nationalists implicated in India's worst pogrom won state elections held in Gujarat in Dec. - a fact that Praful Bidwai, a widely syndicated Indian columnist, described to me as 'profoundly shameful and disturbing.' "
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"Not much is known about the R.S.S. in the West. After Sep. 11, the Hindu nationalists have presented themselves as reliable allies in the fight against Muslim fundamentalists. But in India their resemblance to the European Fascist movements of the 1930's has never been less than clear. In his manifesto We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, supreme director of the R.S.S. from 1940 to 1973, said that Hindus could 'profit' from the example of the Nazis, who had manifested 'race pride at its highest' by purging Germany of the Jews. According to him, India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis were 'guests' and Muslims and Christians 'invaders.' "
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"Golwalkar was clear about what he expected the guests and invaders to do: 'The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.' "
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"After the massacres in Gujarat last year, the Hindu nationalist response was shockingly blunt. 'Let Muslims understand,' an official R.S.S. resolution said in Mar., 'that their safety lies in the goodwill of the majority.' Speaking at a public rally in Apr., Prime Minister Vajpayee seemed to blame Muslims for the recent violence. 'Wherever Muslims live,' he said, 'they don't want to live in peace.' Replying to international criticism of the killings in Gujarat, he said, 'No one should teach us about secularism.' "
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"In [a long discourse K.S. Sudarshan, the present supreme director of the R.S.S. and an adviser to Vajpayee and Advani, delivered to R.S.S. members in 1999], he described how a new epic war was about to commence between the demonic and divine powers that forever contended for supremacy in the world. Sudarshan identified the United States as the biggest example of the 'rise of inhumanity' in the contemporary world. He claimed that India exercised the 'greatest terror' over America, a theme he had touched on in his praise of India's nuclear tests in 1998 when he said that 'our history has proved that we are a heroic, intelligent race capable of becoming world leaders, but the one deficiency that we had was of weapons, good weapons.' He ended his speech by predicting the 'final victory' of Hindu nationalism."
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"Christophe Jaffrelot, a French scholar and the leading authority on Hindu nationalism, says he believes that the mission of the R.S.S. is to 'fashion society, to sustain it, improve it and finally merge with it when the point [is] reached where society and the organization [are] co-extensive.' Bharat Bhushan, a prominent Indian journalist, agrees. The R.S.S., he says, is 'the only organization which has consistently geared itself to micro-level politics.' Its members run not just the biggest political party in India but also educational institutions, trade unions, literary societies and religious sects; they work to indoctrinate low-caste groups as well as affluent Indians living in the West."
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"The scale and diversity of this essentially evangelical effort is remarkable. Highly placed members of the R.S.S. conduct nuclear tests, strike a belligerent attitude toward Muslims and Pakistan and push India's claims to superpower status, while other members are involved in almost absurd small-time social engineering."
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"According to John Dayal, the vice president of the All India Catholic Union, the R.S.S. has spent millions of dollars trying to convert tribal people to Hindu nationalism. Dayal, who monitors the missionary activities of the R.S.S. very closely, claimed that in less than one year the R.S.S. distributed one million trishuls, or tridents, in three tribal districts in central India. B.L. Bhole, a political scientist at Nagpur University, saw a Brahminical ploy in these attempts. 'The R.S.S. can't attract young middle-class people anymore, so they hope for better luck among the poor,' he said. 'But the basic values the R.S.S. promotes are drawn from the high Sanskritic culture of Hinduism, which seeks to maintain a social hierarchy with Brahmins at the very top. The united Hindu nation they keep talking about is one where basically low-caste Hindus and Muslims and Christians don't complain much while accepting the dominance of a Brahmin minority.' "
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"[T]he B.J.P.'s gains in the recent elections in Gujarat, where it did best in riot-affected areas, may have encouraged hard-liners to think that they can win Hindu votes by whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria elsewhere in India. Narendra Modi is to be the star campaigner for the B.J.P. in the local elections later this month in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, an area with almost no Hindu-Muslim tensions to date. Virbhadra Singh, a senior opposition leader from the Congress, wonders if the Hindu nationalists have hatched an 'ill-conceived plan to stage-manage some terrorist incident in the state.' "
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"John Dayal fears that Hindu nationalists may also target Christians. 'They have never been more afraid,' he told me. 'I have been expecting the very worst since the B.J.P. came to power, and the worst, I think, may still be in the future.' The worst possibility at present is of a militant backlash by Muslims. In the villages and towns near Ayodhya, I found Muslims full of anxiety. They spoke of the insidious and frequent threats and beatings they received from local Hindu politicians and policemen. At one mosque in the countryside, a young man loudly asserted that Muslims were not going to suffer injustice anymore, that they were going to retaliate."
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"His fears about vengeful Muslims were proved right in Sep., when terrorists reportedly from Pakistan murdered more than 30 Hindus at the famous Akshardham temple in Gujarat in ostensible retaliation for the massacres last winter. It was the biggest attack in recent years by Muslim terrorists outside of Kashmir, and the Hindu rage it provoked further ensured the victory of Hindu nationalist hard-liners in Dec.'s elections."
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"A few months ago, I met Nathuram Godse's younger brother, Gopal Godse, who spent 16 years in prison for conspiring with his brother and a few other Brahmins to murder Gandhi. He lives in Pune, a western city known now for its computer software engineers. In his tiny two-room apartment, where the dust from the busy street thickly powders a mess of files and books and the framed garlanded photographs of Gandhi's murderer, Godse, a frail man of 83, at first seems like someone abandoned by history. But recent events seem to Godse to have vindicated his Hindu nationalist cause."
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"Only recently, Godse reminds me, Advani advocated the dismemberment of Pakistan. India has turned its back on Gandhi, Godse claims, and has come close to embracing his brother's vision. Nathuram did not die in vain. He asked for his ashes to be immersed in the Indus, the holy river of India that flows through Pakistan, only when the Mother India was whole again. For over half a century, Godse has waited for the day when he could travel to the Indus with the urn containing his brother's ashes. Now, he says, he won't have to wait much longer."
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