Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  This was more than rhetoric. Forty miles outside of Nagpur, at a clearing in a teak forest, I came across an RSS-run laboratory devoted to showcasing the multifarious benefits of cow urine. The supervisor, a middle-aged RSS member called Chandrashekhar Kundle, told me that this was a favorite project of Ashok Singhal, the president of the RSS affiliate VHP. Most of the cows were out grazing in the forest, but there were a few frightened-looking calves in a large shed, “rescued” recently, Mr. Kundle said, from some nearby Muslim butchers. In one room, its whitewashed walls spattered with saffron-hued posters of Lord Rama, devout young Hindus with vermilion marks on their forehead stood before test tubes and beakers full of cow urine; they were distilling the holy liquid, it turned out, to get rid of the foul-smelling ammonia and make it more palatable. In another room, tribal women in garishly colored saris sat on the floor, before a small hill of white powder—dental powder, Mr. Kundle explained, made from cow urine.

  The nearest, and probably unwilling, consumers of the dental powder and other products made from cow urine were the poor tribal students in the RSS-funded primary school next to the lab. In gloomily dark rooms, where students both studied and slept, and where their frayed laundry hung from the iron bars of the windows, there were gleamingly clean portraits of militant Hindu freedom fighters. We sat in the small office of the headmaster, a thin, excitable young man wearing polyester trousers. It was market day in the nearby town, and from the window, above which hung a large fantastical map of undivided India, I could see tribal women who had walked from their homes and now sat on the porch examining the sores and callouses on their bare feet, waiting to meet their children during recess.

  The principal explained to me how Joshi-ji, the RSS member in charge of the education department in the federal government, was making sure new history textbooks carried the important message of Hindu pride and Muslim cruelty to every school and child in the country. Meanwhile, the principal had his work cut out. His task was to make the students aware of the glorious Hindu culture from which tribal living had sundered them; he expected them to go home and educate their parents and relatives and alert them to the dangers of Christian missionaries, who were disturbingly active in the tribal areas that the students came from. The message of the RSS, the principal said, was egalitarian and modern; it believed in raising low-caste people and tribals to a higher level of culture.

  To prove this, he offered to summon a student, his brightest, and ask him to recite the Gayatri mantra, an invocation from Sanskrit scriptures, which for centuries only Brahmins could recite without fear of punishment. A boy in his early teens and wearing a vermilion mark on his forehead arrived. The headmaster looked on approvingly as the boy gave Mr. Kundle the RSS salute by placing his right arm parallel to the ground and close to his chest but grew nervous as he proceeded to stumble and bluff his way through the mantra.

  John Dayal, the vice president of the All India Catholic Union, told me that the RSS has spent millions of dollars in trying to convert tribal people to Hindu nationalism. Dayal, who monitors the missionary activities of the RSS very closely, claimed that in just over eighteen months the RSS distributed 350,000 trishuls, or tridents, in three contiguous tribal districts in Central India.

  Dr. B. L. Bhole, a political scientist I met at Nagpur University, saw a Brahminical ploy in these attempts. He told me that the RSS had tried to turn not just Gandhi but also Dr. Ambedkar, the greatest leader of the Dalits, into a Hindu nationalist icon. K. S. Sudarshan, the current supreme director of the RSS, had recently garlanded the statue of Dr. Ambedkar at the park in Nagpur where the latter rejected Hinduism and converted to Buddhism in 1956. Dr. Bhole thought this outrageous. He had joined local Dalit activists and intellectuals in ritually “purifying” the statue after Sudarshan’s visit.

  Dr. Bhole said, “The RSS can’t attract young middle-class people anymore, so they hope for better luck among the poorest, socially disadvantaged people. But the basic values the RSS promotes among low-caste people and tribals are drawn from the high Sanskritic culture of Hinduism, which considers the cow as holy et cetera and 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 and other communities don’t complain much while accepting the dominance of a Brahmin minority. But the problem for the RSS is that most of the low-caste Hindus and tribals don’t want to learn any Brahmin mantras. They form an increasingly independent political group within India today; they no longer want any kind of Brahmin paternalist leadership. Even such low-caste leaders of the BJP as Uma Bharti want to focus on tangible rights for their community; they won’t be fobbed off with nationalist ideology. Their assertiveness is really the greatest achievement of democratic politics in India, which has so far been dominated by upper-caste Hindus.”

  Dr. Bhole said, “The RSS has been most successful in Gujarat, where low-caste Hindus and tribals were indoctrinated at the kind of schools you went to; they were in the mobs led by upper-caste Hindu nationalists that attacked Muslims and Christians. But the RSS still doesn’t have much support among low-caste people outside Gujarat. For the RSS, this is a serious setback, and the only thing they can do to increase their mass base is keep stoking anti-Muslim and anti-Christian passions and hope they can get enough Hindus, both upper-caste and low-caste, behind them.”

  The consistent demonizing of Muslims and Christians by Hindu nationalists may seem gratuitous—Christians in India are a tiny and scattered minority, and the Muslims are too poor, disorganized, and fearful to pose any kind of threat to Hindus—but it is indispensable to the project of a Hindu nation. Hindu nationalists have always sought to redefine Hindu identity in opposition to a supposedly threatening “other.” They hope to unite Hindu society by constantly invoking such real and imagined threats as are posed by the evangelical Christians and militants Muslims.

  Visiting villages and towns across North India in the last few years, I found Muslims full of anxiety about their fate in India. They spoke to me of an insidious and regular violence, of the frequent threats and beatings they received from local Hindu politicians and policemen.

  At one mosque in the countryside near Ayodhya, a young man broke into a conversation about police harassment and loudly asserted that Muslims would not suffer injustice anymore, and they would retaliate. His elders shouted him down. An argument broke out—the young as usual accusing the old of suppressing the truth—and then a mullah gently led me out of the madrassa with one arm around my shoulders, assuring me that the Muslims were loyal to India, their homeland, where they had long lived in peace with their Hindu brothers.

  Professor Saghir Ahmad Ansari, a Muslim social activist in Nagpur told me that the Muslims he knew feel “that the Hindu nationalists, who were implacably opposed to their existence in India, now controlled everything, the government, our rights, our future.” He said he worried about the Muslim response to Gujarat. “When the government itself supervises the killing of two thousand Muslims when Hindu mobs rape Muslim girls with impunity and force one hundred thousand Muslims into refugee camps, you can’t hope that the victims won’t dream of reveoge. I fear’” he said, “although I don’t like saying or thinking about this, that the ideology of jihad and terrorist violence would find new takers among the one hundred thirty million Muslims of India. This will greatly please the Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Afghanistan who are presently very downcast after the defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

  Mr. Ansari’s fears about vengeful Muslims were proved right a month after I spoke to him. In September 2002, Muslim terrorists from Pakistan murdered thirty-five Hindus at the famous Akshardham Temple in Gujarat in ostensible retaliation for the mass killings of Muslims in the state earlier that year. It was the biggest attack by Muslim terrorists anywhere outside the Indian state of Kashmir, and the Hindu rage it provoked further insured the victory of Hindu nationalist hard-liners in elections held in Gu
jarat in December 2002.

  In August 2003, two bomb explosions in Bombay killed more than fifty people, the sixth and most lethal in a recent series of similar blasts across the city. Soon after visiting the site, L. K. Advani, the then deputy prime minister, blamed terrorists based in Pakistan. This was to be expected. Hindu nationalists routinely describe India as besieged by Muslim terrorists backed by or based in Pakistan, especially in the disputed valley of Kashmir. This time, however, Mr. Advani’s accusation was qualified swiftly by the Bombay police. It revealed that the four persons arrested in connection with the attacks were Indian Muslims, part of a new group called the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force. They may have received logistical support from a Pakistani militant outfit with links to Al Qaeda, but they were Indian citizens.

  The radical Islamist movements that spread quickly in the last decade in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan had until now left largely untouched India’s 140 million Muslims. Indian Muslims stayed away from the anti-India insurgency of their culturally distinct coreligionists in Kashmir. More remarkably, no Indian Muslim in the past seems to have heeded the many pied pipers of jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan who lured Muslims from all parts of the world and who managed to delude even a non-Muslim from California.

  It may be that most Indian Muslims were and are too poor and depressed to join radical causes elsewhere. It is also true that they have an advantage denied to most Muslims in the world: They can participate in regular elections and, since they constitute 13 to 14 percent of India’s population, choose their representatives, if not rulers.

  But this faith in democracy, which Indian Muslims have long expressed by voting tactically in large numbers, has been tested repeatedly in recent years. In 1996 an inquiry identified some of the Hindu police officers and politicians responsible for the killings of over a thousand Muslims in Bombay in 1992 and 1993. To date no one has been tried and convicted. The perpetrators of the very public massacres in Gujarat are mostly known, but they are unlikely to face justice.

  So the surprising issue, perhaps, is not that militant groups with international connections, such as the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force, are emerging in India, but rather that it has taken them this long to do so. The members of such organizations are educated, with degrees in business management, forensic science, chemical and aeronautical engineering. They have been radicalized in a geopolitical environment that has never been more highly fraught for the Muslim community at large. While the rage and resentment of these educated Muslims may have purely Indian origins—in Gujarat or Bombay—these emotions are also inspired by international events—the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the car bombs in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, and Baghdad—that probably still seem remote to an older, impoverished generation of Indian Muslims.

  The growth of religious militancy in South Asia is likely to enthuse many Hindus. As they see it, Gujarat proved to be a successful “laboratory” of Hindu nationalism, in which carefully stoked anti-Muslim sentiments eventually brought about a pogrom, and a Muslim backlash seemed to lead to even greater Hindu “unity.”

  The victory of the BJP in Gujarat indicated that this plan was going well. It hinted that well-to-do Indians were likely to support the Hindu nationalists, even the extremists among them, as long as they continued to liberalize the Indian economy and help create a consumer revolution. But neither the BJP nor their supporters had reckoned with the larger, neglected majority of India’s population, which expressed its skepticism about Hindu unity by voting out the BJP in the general elections in May 2004.

  Opinion pollsters, political pundits, and journalists had predicted an easy victory for the ruling NDA (National Democratic Alliance), the coalition of BJP and its allies, which claimed in its advertising campaign to have created an “India Shining” in the previous six years. But it was the opposition Congress that emerged as the single largest party in the 545-seat Indian Parliament. These results surprised most middle-class Indians, for it was during the BJP’s six years in power that India’s urban prosperity achieved by the economic reforms initiated in 1991 became most visible. The BJP had supported the reforms, which benefited greatly those who were best placed to take advantage of new opportunities in business and trade and the economy’s fast-growing service sector (information technology, jobs offshored by Europe and America), the educated middle class, the BJP’s primary constituency, which, despite growing fast in recent years, still makes up less than 20 percent of India’s population.

  The reforms also attracted a generation of rich Indians who live in the United States and the U.K. and were eager for cultural and economic links with their ancestral land, a desire that turned nonresident Indians into the BJP’s most devoted followers and sponsors and helped the BJP itself evolve rapidly, despite its Hindu nationalism, into a keen advocate of economic globalization. During its six years in power, new freeways, shopping malls brand-name boutiques, Starbucks-style coffee bars, and restaurants with exotic cuisine and London prices transformed the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, and Bombay. Newfound wealth created a heady mood among the middle class, what the leaders of the BJP called the “feel-good factor” (so important that in March 2004 the BJP was initially reluctant to send the Indian cricket team to Pakistan out of the fear that it might lose and make the cricket-obsessed nationalist middle class feel not so good anymore). Most English-language newspapers began to print entire daily supplements in order to cover film premieres fashion shows, champagne-tasting sessions in five-star hotels, and the lifestyles of beauty pageant winners, models, Bollywood actors, and other celebrities. The general air of celebration overwhelmed many formerly left-wing intellectuals, academics, and journalists. Conviced that the BJP would be in power for many years, they aligned themselves openly with the party and lobbied for political and diplomatic posts. Some of the most influential TV news channels, newspapers, and magazines, including India Today, once India’s best newsmagazine, were content to become an echo chamber for the BJP’s views.

  Not surprisingly, the BJP, and its supporters and advisers in the media, couldn’t see beyond the “India Shining” of the Hindu middle class and turn their attention to the 70 percent of Indians living in the countryside. They barely noticed the Indians who live in slums or in equally degrading conditions in the big cities, the fact that while high-tech hospitals in the big cities cater to rich Indians and foreigners, or medical tourists, public health facilities in small towns and villages decline rapidly; that communicable diseases such as malaria, dengue, and encephalitis have revived; that half of all Indian children are undernourished and more than half a million of them die each year from diarrhea; that an estimated five million Indians are infected with HIV/AIDS.

  A powerful ideology often shaped the reforms the BJP espoused: that the free market can usurp the role of the state. This meant that government often withdrew from precisely those areas where its presence was indispensable. Though India had more than sufficient food grains in stock, the government’s failure to distribute it effectively led in recent years to an unprecedented rise in the number of drought-affected villagers starving to death in many of the most populous states.

  In this new India, preoccupied with life-or-death economic issues, the temple in Ayodhya may appear a dead issue, but it stands ready to be ignited by the BJP as it struggles to broaden its constituency beyond the affluent middle class. You reach Ramjanmabhoomi (Rama’s birthplace), as it is now called, through a maze of narrow, barricaded paths. Armed men loom up abruptly with metal detectors and perform brisk body searches. These are members of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), which is notorious for its pogroms of Muslims in North Indian towns, and they are particularly on the lookout for cameras. Pictures of the site have not been allowed by the government for the last decade.

  A canvas canopy protects the platform built over the rubble of the mosque, on which stand the idols draped in garlands and sequined cloth. A priest in a silk kurta and with caste marks on his forehead si
ts below the platform briskly dispensing prasad (tiny sugary balls) and squirreling away the soiled and wrinkled rupee notes tentatively offered by peasant pilgrims.

  As I groped for some small change one afternoon in February 2003, a PAC inspector wandered over, asked me if I was a journalist from Delhi, and attempted a little history. He told me that Lord Rama had placed the idols inside the mosque in 1949; it was his wish that a temple be built on his birthplace. My companion a resident of Benares challenged this, saying that the idols had been placed there by a district official. The inspector did not defend his story; he only smiled and replied that this proved that the official was a true Hindu.

  Many such true Hindus looked the other way while the temple was prefabricated in Ayodhya and other cities across India. In a vast shed a short distance from the Ramjanmabhoomi lie stacks of carved stone pillars. Here you can buy promotional literature—The Blood-soaked History of Ayodhya and Ayodhya: An Answer to Terrorism and Fundamentalism are the best-selling tides—and also admire the miniature glass-cased model of the temple. The labor is cheap—two pounds a day for craftsmen—but the temple, whose architect previously designed the Swaminarayan Temple at Neasden, seems to have come out of a garish fantasy of marble and gold.

  Local abbots are impatient with the slow pace of the construction; it is easy to see why. The offerings at the temple are likely to run into millions of dollars annually. Much money has already arrived from generous donors in India and abroad. No one knows where most of it has gone; rumors point to the opulent new buildings in Ayodhya and elsewhere.

  As for the mosque, which appears now in memory as a melancholy symbol of a besieged secularism there seems little hope it will ever be rebuilt. It has fallen victim not just to the ideologues but to less perceptible changes in India’s general mood in the last decade. The talk of poverty and social justice; the official culture of frugality; the appeal, however rhetorical, to traditions of tolerance and dialogue—all these seem to belong to the past, to the early decades of idealism. A decade of proglobalization policies has created a new aggressive middle class, whose concerns dominate public life in India. This class is growing; the current numbers are between 150 and 200 million. There are also millions of rich Indians living outside India. In America, they constitute the richest minority. It is these affluent, upper-caste Indians in India and abroad who largely bankrolled the rise to power of Hindu nationalists. In the global context, middle-class Hindus are no less ambitious than those who in the Roman Empire embraced Christianity and made it an effective mechanism with which to secure worldly power. Hinduism in the hands of these Indians has never looked more like the Christianity and Islam of popes and mullahs and less like the multiplicity of unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for most Indians.