Militants seek Muslim-free India

Burhan Wazir reports from Gujarat on an explosion of
violence, nationalism and Nazi-style politics and its
result: 2,000 killed and 100,000 homeless

Observer Worldview

Sunday July 21, 2002
The Observer

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,759129,00.html

At the elegantly simple home of Mahatma Gandhi in
Ahmedabad, the bustling capital of Gujarat state, a
museum eulogises his contribution to the founding of
India. Gandhi's clothes, books, journals and
photographs line the walls. Outside in the freshly
watered gardens the mango trees are in full bloom. One
journal contains Gandhi's simple denunciation of
violence: 'The science of war leads one to
dictatorship. The science of non-violence alone can
lead one to a pure democracy.'

More than 50 years after his death at the hands of a
nationalist militant, Gandhi would find India
unrecognisable. In the past five months his home state
has been stunned by religious violence that shows few
signs of fading.

India's worst religious violence since the 1947
partition was sparked at the end of February when 57
Hindu pilgrims were killed in the alleged torching of
a train carriage by Muslim militants in Godhra. Hindu
militants sought a swift revenge.

Since then, massacres by Hindu gangs have become
commonplace. In five months, more than 2,000 Muslims
have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced,
congregating in squalid camps around Gujarat.

The state is in turmoil. On Friday, only hours after
the state's top elected official, Chief Minister
Narendra Modi, resigned and dissolved the legislative
assembly to seek a fresh mandate, at least two people
were killed and eight others injured when police
opened fire to disperse rioting mobs. In recent months
Mohdi had come under attack for his delayed response
to the killings. His resignation was eclipsed,
however, on Thursday when 70-year-old Muslim scientist
Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, an unrepentant nationalist and
the father of India's nuclear missile programme, was
elected to the largely ceremonial role of President.

The violence has been linked to the rise of extremist
Hindu groups such as the Association of National
Volunteers, or the RSS - a khaki-clad nationalist
paramilitary sect formed in the Twenties - and its
offspring, the World Hindu Council, or the VHP.

Gujarat is one of the few states in India controlled
by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The state has
been described as a 'laboratory for Hindu fascism'.
Since rising to power in the mid-Nineties, the BJP has
aggressively pursued a pro-Hindu agenda.

It has also backed the construction of a temple in
Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque
in 1992. Several members of the present Cabinet,
including the Indian Deputy Prime Minister, L.K.
Advani, were present at the demolition.

The RSS and the World Hindu Council, described locally
as 'Saffron Warriors', have one clear aim: Hindu
expansion by mass conversion. The militants believe
that India was once an empire of 75 countries
stretching from Cambodia to Iran.

They have introduced textbooks that convey former
Hindu glories, and they propagate the myth of an India
under siege from native Islamic militants. The RSS
also lobbies to reintroduce the traditional names of
cities like Mumbai, until recently Bombay.

'The situation is getting out of control,' says Arvind
Sisodia, vice-president of the VHP in Gujarat. A
passionate advocate of the Hindutva or 'global Hindu
conscious ness', Sisodia is a middle-class worker at
the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

'In Gujarat, the Muslims own all the shops; they are
involved in illegal trade,' says Sisodia. 'And Muslim
boys steal our Hindu girls and marry them. So the
situation is unbearable.'

In the days after the first killings in Gujarat, the
VHP distributed leaflets asking Hindus to pledge a
boycott of Muslims - including refusing to be taught
by Muslim teachers and ensuring sisters and daughters
did not fall into 'the love-trap of Muslim boys'.

'It is up to all Hindus to make sure that we restore
India to dominance,' says Sisodia. 'Hinduism was once
the dominant faith. Muslims have to learn to adapt.
Otherwise, it will be dangerous for them. We don't
want them here.'

A few days after the deaths at Godhra, on a humid
morning in an inner-city enclave of Ahmedabad, around
20 men marched up to the Indian flag and offered the
Nazi salute. This was a training camp, or shakha, run
by the RSS. There are about 40,000 camps scattered
throughout India and informal ones abroad for
expatriates.

The men, many of them in their thirties, are
middle-class professionals - employees of Ahmedabad's
bustling industrial community. India's middle classes
are the keenest recruits to the RSS - drawn by fears
of Islamic terrorism and of Westernisation amid a
crumbling national economy.

In a fashionable Ahmedabad gated community lives Vijay
Chauthaiwale, a microbiologist. Over lunch, with the
World Cup playing on a satellite channel behind him,
he explained his attraction to the RSS: 'We are a very
modern family,' he said, 'but I feel that the more we
move towards the West, the more likely we are to lose
our Hindu values.

'Gandhi would not have understood,' he said. 'He was
an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned ideas. No one
believes those things any more. The world has changed.
And for Hindus to survive, we have to protect our
culture and our way of life.'

For middle-class families such as Chauthaiwale's, the
Indian secular experiment has proved disastrous. The
country's Muslim population - now 11 per cent - is
seen as a primary threat. 'Where do the allegiances of
the Muslims lie?' asked Kaushik Mehta, general
secretary of the VHP in Gujarat.

He pointed to an enclave of Ahmedabad dubbed
'mini-Pakistan' for its madrassahs, or Islamic
schools. 'We can't allow such places to exist. They
train terrorists. Muslims have to integrate. If they
refuse to, we'll be forced to make them. Or they can
leave.'

For the 100,000 Muslims in squalid camps around
Gujarat there is no such escape. In nearby Pakistan,
India's Muslims are viewed as traitors who betrayed
Pakistan after partition. And now the Muslim camps are
being shut down, casting their occupants into the
streets and into the hands of Hindu extremists.

Most are fearful of returning to their villages. 'They
can't go back because they face death threats,' said
Father Cedric Prakash, director of Prashant, a human
rights group in Ahmedabad. 'The fanatics have all the
power.'

More violence seems inevitable. At the end of
February, Anjum Bana escaped her village in Panderwala
with her six-week-old daughter. As Hindu militants
torched the village, she hid in the forest. 'There was
nothing to eat or drink for three days,' she said. 'I
could hear people shouting RSS slogans all around me.
And my child was dying. I know I can't go back.'

The hawkish former Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narinder
Mohdi, however, is unconvinced. In the early days of
the rioting, as the body count escalated, Mohdi
famously said Gujarat's Hindus had shown 'remarkable
restraint'. Shortly before resigning on Friday, he
said: 'There is no problem with people returning back
home. If they don't want to go, they should be forced
back. They have to go back.'

In a shabby camp in a graveyard in Ahmedabad,
residents have taken to organising a night-time watch.
'They know that once we are on the streets we are
vulnerable. I can't understand it. I have lived with
Hindu neighbours for 40 years, and there have never
been any problems. Now those same neighbours have
turned on me. And no one will look after us.'

· Burhan Wazir presents 'Unreported World: Saffron
Warriors' on Channel 4 on Saturday at 7.40 pm.