Fewer in numbers, and generally poorer in economic terms, the Muslims had more to lose from the souring of relations. In most riots more Muslims died than Hindus, more Muslim homes were burnt than Hindu ones. The whole community had become prey to a deep insecurity. The taunts of Hindu chauvinists that they should move to Pakistan made them feel vulnerable and victimized. The sentiments of the ordinary Indian Muslim, circa 1995, were movingly expressed by the Telugu poet Khadar Mohiuddin. On the one hand, he wrote, the Muslim is told by the Hindus to think that
My religion is a conspiracy
My prayer meetings are a conspiracy
My lying quiet is a conspiracy
My attempt to wake up is a conspiracy
My desire to have friends is a conspiracy
My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy.
On the other hand, said Khadar,
It’s no conspiracy
[for the Hindu] to make me a refugee
in the very country of my birth
It’s no conspiracy
to poison the air I breathe
and the space I live in
It’s certainly no conspiracy
to cut me to pieces
and then imagine an uncut Bharat.
The Muslim was being continually asked to prove his loyalty to India. As Khadar Mohiuddin found, ‘cricket matches weigh and measure my patriotism’ When India played Pakistan, it was demanded of Muslims that they display the national flag outside their homes, and that they loudly and publicly cheer for the national side. In the poet’s words: ‘Never mind my love for my motherland/ What’s important is how much I hate the other land’.28
The polarization of the two communities was a victory for the Sangh Parivar, the collective name by which the family of organizations built around the RSS and the BJP is known. Through the first five decades of Indian independence, the ideology of the Sangh Parivar had remained pretty much constant. To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows:
Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.29
Goyal adds that ‘without fear of contradiction it can be stated that nothing more than this has been said in the RSS shakhas during the past 74 years of its existence’.
While its ideology was unchanged, in time the organization of the RSS grew enormously in strength and influence. Once an all-male body, it opened a separate women’s wing which both schoolgirls and housewives were encouraged to join. Once limited to northern India, it setup active branches in states where it previously had no presence at all. Everywhere the core ideology of the Sangh was adapted to the local context. Thus, in Gujarat, the rebuilding of the ancient Somnath temple was celebrated as a manifestation of a united and assertive Hinduism. In Orissa the focus was on the great Jagannatha temple, used by the RSS to build bridges between the local and pan-Indian Hindu identities. There was a particular emphasis on work in tribal areas, on ‘reclaiming’ the adivasis and ‘returning’ them to the Hindu fold. Schools were opened where tribal youths were taught Sanskrit and acquainted with Hindu myths and legends. The RSS worked hard in times of natural calamity, bringing grain when the rains failed and rebuilding homes after an earthquake.30
As its organization grew, the RSS’s ideology found even fuller expression through a new campaign strategy .M.S. Golwalkar had thought that cow-slaughter was the issue on which the Sangh Parivar would launch a countrywide struggle. That failed, but then the egregious mistakes of the Congress delivered an even more emotive issue into their lap. When Rajiv Gandhi’s government appeased Muslim fanatics and overturned the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, the Hindu radicals could claim, more convincingly than ever, that (pace D. R. Goyal’s words above) the present rulers were ‘motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes’, that to counter this, ‘the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour’. That ‘non-Hindus are invaders or guests’ was further proven by the stubborn reluctance of Muslims to hand over the Babri Masjid. The monument itself was a standing insult to Hindu pride, a nasty reminder of the slavery of past times that had not yet been fully overcome. That they were not allowed to construct a shrine to their beloved Lord Ram was only because ‘the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies’; enemies within, as in the politicians who appeased Muslims, and enemies without, as in the malevolent Muslim nation (Pakistan) which had fought three wars against them. To build the Ram temple, but also to protect themselves more generally, the Hindus had to ‘develop the capacity for massive retaliation’ , to realize that ‘offence is the best defence’.
To the phrases already quoted from D. R. Goyal’s summation, let us now add the critical last line: ‘lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity’.
In the Ram movement, the RSS’s mission was furthered by its sister organizations, in particular the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had taken up the issue in the first place. Then there was the Bajrang Dal, named after Ram’s great monkey devotee Hanuman (who was also called Bajrang Bali). This was composed of angry youths, equipped not so much to ‘protect’ their idol (as Hanuman is supposed to have done) but to beat up anyone who stood in their way. Finally, there was the Shiv Sena, actually another party altogether, and whose ideas and methods were even more extreme than the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. They were prone to calling Muslims ‘poisonous snakes’ and ‘traitors’, and advising them to move to Pakistan.31
By the 1980s the RSS could no longer be called a male or north-Indian body; it had reached out to women and to other parts of the country. However, it was only through the Ram movement that it successfully overthrew the tag of being a ‘Brahmin-Bania’ organization, led and dominated by the elite, traditionally literate Hindu castes. For the first sixty years of its existence it had been guided by a Maharashtrian Brahmin – first K. B. Hedgewar, then M. S. Golwalkar, finally Balasaheb Deoras. Then in March 1994 a non-Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra Singh, was appointed head of the organization. This was a bow not only to the Mandal debate, but also an acknowledgement of the major role played by the backward castes in the Ayodhya movement. The cadres of the Shiv Sena and the VHP were mostly drawn from the middle castes, and there were a fair number of Dalits as well.
Through this broadening of the base – in terms of region, gender and, above all, caste – was created what might justly be called the ‘mother of all vote banks’. In the early days of the Ayodhya controversy, circa 1985-6, VHP leaders were liable to refer to the issue as one which affected the ‘sentiments of sixty crore [600 million] Hindus’. As time went on, and the issue remained unresolved, demographic change caused a natural inflation in numbers: ‘sixty crore’
became ‘seventy crore’, even ‘eighty crore’. This was, of course, a conceit. The VHP and the RSS did not speak for the majority of Hindus. But apparently they spoke for enough Hindus to allow their political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to emerge as the largest single party in the Indian Parliament.
In the 1990s the BJP came to define the political agenda in a way the Congress once did in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, a property dispute in a small north-Indian town came to enjoy an overwhelming importance in the life of the nation. Thus, the political discourse in general came to be obsessed with questions of religious identity rather than matters of economic development or social reform. Losing its hold on the government, winning ever fewer seats in Parliament, the Congress was now merely reacting to debates initiated by the BJP. In desperation, it called upon Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia, then living a reclusive life with her family in Delhi, to head the party. After she took charge as Congress president in 1998, Sonia Gandhi worked overtime to dispel the image of her party as ‘anti-Hindu’. She regularly visited temples, and even went so far as to participate in the great Kumbh Mela, a congregation held every twelve years in which tens of millions of Hindus take a dip in the Ganga at Allahabad.32
While the Ayodhya dispute remained its focus, the Sangh Parivar also took up other campaigns in the 1990s. More sites were identified where, it was alleged, Muslims had usurped a Hindu shrine – in Mathura, in Banaras, in the Madhya Pradesh town of Dhar, in the Baba Budan hills of Karnataka’s Chikmaglur district. Movements were launched, with varying success, to ‘reclaim’ these places from the ‘intruders’. Simultaneously a series of attacks were launched on Christian missionaries, particularly those working in tribal areas. Churches were burnt and priests beaten up in both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. An Australian missionary was burnt alive in Orissa, along with his two sons, the arsonist later identified as a member of the Bajrang Dal named Dara Singh.33 Hindus were a comfortable majority in India, yet the RSS insisted that their pre-eminence was threatened on the one hand by Christian proselytization and on the other by the larger family size of Muslims, this in turn attributed to the practice of polygamy.34
Occurring in different parts of India, sometimes led by the RSS, at other times initiated by the VHP or the Shiv Sena, there was nonetheless an underlying pattern to these campaigns. In every case, a religious minority – Muslim or Christian – was targeted and accused of having offended Hindu sentiment, or of being in the pay of a foreign power. The demonizing of the other was a necessary prelude to mobilizing one’s own forces, thus to foster a collective spirit of solidarity in along-divided Hindu community. Usually, there was much malice aforethought. Sometimes, however, the issue taken up was farcical rather than diabolical. In the summer of 2000, for example, the RSS journal Panchjanya complained that the three leading male actors in the Hindi film industry were all Muslim (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan). The journal saw in this coincidence a dark conspiracy, whose agents apparently were mafia dons who funded these actors’ films and multinational corporations whose products the actors endorsed. To thwart the conspiracy, Panchjanya called upon its readers to promote an up-and-coming actor named Hrithik Roshan, the lone ‘Hindu’ challenger to the monopoly of the Khans.35
VI
As a rule, the Muslims in India were poorer than the Hindus, as well as less educated. There were a few Muslim entrepreneurs, but no real Muslim middle class. They continued to be under-represented in the professions, and in government service. Forty per cent of Muslims in cities lived below the poverty line; the situation in the countryside was not much better. The literacy rate for Muslims was well below the national average, and the gap between them and the other communities was growing. Few Muslim girls were sent to school, while the boys were often placed in madrasas (religious schools) whose archaic curricula did not equip them for jobs in the modern economy. Meanwhile, the taunts of the Sangh Parivar had inculcated a defensive, almost siege mentality among the Muslim intelligentsia. The young men, especially, sought succour in religion, seeing in a renewed commitment to Islam an alternative to poverty and persecution in the world outside. Nor was this turn to faith always quietist. A Students Islamic Movement of India had arisen, whose leaders argued that threats from the rival religion could be met only through force of arms.36
The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s put an already vulnerable minority further on the defensive. In the border state of Jammu and Kashmir, however, the roles were reversed. Here, the Muslim majority was increasingly expressing its aspirations in religious terms, with the Hindu minority suffering as a consequence.
The popular revolt that broke out in the Valley in 1989 was at first led by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Within a year, however, the JKLF had ceded ground to the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, whose own commitment to a multireligious Kashmir was much less certain. The cry of azaadi (freedom) was being replaced by the call of jihad (holy war). As a popular slogan of the Hizb-ul cadres went: ‘Na guerrilla jang, na qaumi jang: al jihad, al jihad’. (This is neither a guerrilla war nor a national liberation struggle; this is jihad, jihad.)37
One consequence of this turn to religion was that the community of Kashmiri Pandits became suspect in the eyes of the militants. They were Hindus, but in other respects akin to their Muslim brethren, speaking the same language, eating the same kind of food, partaking of the same syncretic culture of the Valley. In the past there had been economic rivalry between Hindus and Muslims. Sheikh Abdullah, for example, had resented and then brought to an end Pandit control of cultivable land and of the state administration. But the social harmony was more or less complete. Even in the Partition riots of 1947 Kashmir was untouched, an oasis of peace lauded by Mahatma Gandhi himself.
In the winter of 1989/90, as the Hizb-ul supplanted the JKLF, the Pandits became a target of attack. Because they were Hindus, and for no other reason, they were seen as agents of a state that had for so long oppressed the Kashmiris. Several hundred Pandits were killed in 1989-90, and killed in ways that made the ones who survived deeply insecure. As a reporter who documented these murders later wrote:
These women and men were not killed in the cross-fire, accidentally, but were systematically and brutally targeted. Many of the women were gang-raped before they were killed. One woman was bisected by a mill saw. The bodies of the men bore marks of torture. Death by strangulation, hanging, amputations, the gouging out of eyes, were not uncommon. Often their bodies were dumped with notes forbidding anyone – on pain of death – to touch them.38
In panic, Pandit families began leaving the Valley for the Hindu-majority Jammu region. Others fled further a field, to Delhi and even to Bombay.
There were an estimated 200,000 Pandits living in the Kashmir Valley. By the summer of 1990, at least half had left. They lived in refugee camps, some run by the government, others by the RSS. At first the state’s hope, and their own, was that the migration was temporary, and that once peace returned to the Valley then so would they. In the event, they stayed on, and on.39
Throughout the 1990s there were further attacks on Pandits who had chosen to remain. Sometimes entire hamlets were set on fire. By the end of the decade, fewer than 4,000 Pandits were left in the Valley, a melancholy reminder of the centuries in which they had lived cheek-by-jowl with their compatriots.40
The growing militancy in Kashmir was actively aided by Pakistan. That country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ran camps where terrorists were trained in the use of arms and provided maps of the region. With the ISI’s help, Kashmiri activists moved freely across the border, into India to kill or bomb, then back to Pakistan for rest and replenishment. By now, indigenous militants had been joined by foreign mercenaries – Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks – who had cut their teeth in the war against the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan. When that war ended, and Russian troops had returned, defeated, to their homeland, these fighters found another holy cause in the liberation of Kashmir.
By the mid 1990s the Hizb-ul ha
d been joined by many hundreds of mehmani mujahideen (guest freedom-fighters).These owed allegiance to different groups, all of which were headquartered in Pakistan, and all of which practised the austere, fundamentalist version of Islam taught in that country’s many religious schools. Through the 1980s, the Islamicization of Pakistani society had proceeded apace. At the nation’s birth in 1947 it had a mere 136 madrasas; by 2000 it had as many as 30,000. These madrasas, writes Tariq Ali, were ‘indoctrination nurseries designed to produce fanatics’. Pakistan now boasted fifty-eight Islamic political parties and twenty-four armed religious militias, peopled in the main by the products of the madrasa system.41
The intensification of religious sentiment in Pakistan deepened its commitment to the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. Preachers in mosques and madrasas spoke repeatedly of Indian zulm (terror) in the Kashmir Valley, urging their followers to join the jihad there. Youths so swayed entered groups such as the Lashkar-i-Toiba, which was rapidly assuming a leading role in the armed struggle. The proximate aim was the uniting of Kashmir with the Pakistani nation, this ‘a religious duty binding not only on the people of Pakistan, but, in fact, on the entire Muslim ummat [brotherhood]’. A wider ambition was to catalyse a civil war in India. As the chief of the Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, boasted, they were aiming to ‘set up a mujahideen network across India’, which, when it was up and running, would spell ‘the start of the disintegration of India’42 ‘Revenge is our religious duty’, said Saeed to an American journalist. ‘We beat the Russian superpower in Afghanistan; we can beat the Indian forces too. We fight with the help of Allah, and once we start jehad, no force can withstand us.’ Speaking to a Pakistani reporter, the Lashkar chief claimed that ‘our struggle will continue even if Kashmir is liberated. We still have to take revenge [against India] for [the loss of] East Pakistan.’43
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