Indias anti-minorities bias is so strong that it has failed to acknowledge the threat posed by Hindu radicalism... The Indian state has failed appallingly in its obligations to Muslim citizens. There are 150 million Muslims in India, but as the governments own figures show, only 4% are graduates, 5% have public employment, an overwhelming majority remain locked out of public institutions, and their access to government loans and education is severely restricted. For far too long, the enduring response of the Indian establishment to Hindu nationalists has rarely surpassed mild scorn. Their organised violent eruptions across the country – slaughtering Muslims and Christians, destroying their places of worship, cutting open pregnant wombs – never seemed sufficient enough to the state to cast them as a meaningful threat to Indias national security. But the recently leaked confession of a repentant Hindu priest, Swami Aseemanand, confirms what Indias security establishment should have uncovered: a series of blasts between 2006 and 2008 were carried out by Hindu outfits. The attacks targeted a predominantly Muslim town and places of Muslim worship elsewhere. Their victims were primarily Muslim. Yet the reflexive reaction of the police was to round up young Muslim men, torture them, extract confessions and declare the cases solved. Pundits now conduct cautious enquiries on television. Does this revelation mean India is now under attack by Hindu terrorism? But to treat this as a new phenomenon is to overlook the bulky corpus of terrorist violence in India that has its roots in explicitly Hindu-political grievances. Why is the attack on a Jewish centre in Mumbai by Pakistani gunmen an example of Islamic terrorism, but the slaughter of a thousand Muslims by sword-wielding Hindus in Gujarat in 2002 not proof of Hindu terrorism, particularly when the purpose of the violence was to establish an Hindu state in India? How do we describe attacks on churches, the kidnappings of pastors, the burning to death of a missionary? What do we make of the war-cry pehle kasai, phir isai: first the butchers (Muslims), then the Christians?
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 11:32:36 +0000
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