The writer is the editor and translator of Why I write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto, published by Westland in 2014. His book, India, Low Trust Society, will be published by Random House. He is Executive Director of Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own aakar.patel@tribune.com.pk
It is not easy being a television analyst in times, such as they are now, when India is at war with Pakistan.
Not a real war of course, because we can no longer have such a thing after the mindless fireworks of Pokhran and Chaghi. I mean this childish sparring over whether or not we should have talks. To me it is difficult to understand why we are stopping people from meeting in this day and age when they can communicate whatever they want to over Skype and telephone and email and the rest. But perhaps, I do not understand the subtleties of international diplomacy. What appears to me to be stupidity and stubbornness might well actually be some stroke of Chanakyan genius.
Anyway, what I was saying was that it is not easy to be an analyst in these times when one is independent-minded. It is not possible for me to take the party line or the national line as seems to come so easily to others in the studio. To me, fact and context are important. I was blindly nationalistic for a long time, but one matures as one reads and encounters the world.
One understands the nature of regional nationalism as being a zero-sum game. Meaning I can only win if you lose and are seen to lose, and any benefit to you necessarily comes at a loss to me.
What is the nature of our nationalism here in India? It is anti-Pakistan and anti-China. It does not allow for nuance or shade. We have to fully subscribe to it or be seen as defiant if not outright hostile. We always have to be anti-Pakistan even if there is damage to us or no benefit to India in such a position (and there is zero benefit to India in not allowing old Sartaj Aziz to meet the blowhards of the Hurriyat).
We belittle India — ‘the world’s largest democracy’ as we do not tire of reminding people — when we lock up our own citizens for fear that they will gossip with the enemy. We show ourselves as not a confident republic by such actions. This must be obvious to the most closed minded analyst. And yet to say this on television is to elicit gasps of astonishment and accusations of being anti-national.
The other thing is being labelled when one holds a particular view in a particular instance. This comes from our conviction that all of us are dyed in some sort of ideology that cannot be escaped through logic and reason. We loosely use terms like ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘right’ without properly understanding them. I suppose one reason is that we have categories that are based on hate, like Hindutva, which offers nothing positive to Hindus, only anger and bitterness against Muslims and Christians.
People who have this sort of hatred will find it difficult to separate their mindset and their emotion from the issue at hand, whatever it may be. But why must we all line up in agreement behind them? I do not and cannot.
One anchor said during the debate that “we all are agreed in the studio that Pakistan is to blame if the talks collapse”. But I did not agree. It was just assumed that because this was an India versus Pakistan issue, all Indians would or should back the government position.
The assumption is that the lines have been drawn and the two sides have gone to battle. All of us, whether analysts or politicians or citizens or cricketers or housewives, must see the other side as an enemy and must reject everything it says or does even if we gain nothing from it. I am no longer able to subscribe to this stupidity. This makes TV appearances difficult for me.
The clever ones will ask why I continue to do them if I hate them so much or at least find them unpleasant, which I do. The reason is, of course, that I am paid to do this work. And sometimes, not often, it is enjoyable. The other reason is that there are some who may also think in the same way as I do. It may not be a large number, but I would like to believe that there is a group of us who reject the madness and the pettiness.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 23rd, 2015.
After Maharashtra assembly polls success, Asaduddin Owaisi plans to expand his party into a pan-Indian outfit
By Sowmya Aji, ET Bureau | 21 Aug, 2015
BENGALURU: From the walled city of Hyderabad to Muslim-dominated areas across the country, All India Majlise-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi is seeking to expand his party into a pan-Indian outfit. The London-educated 46-year-old lawyer is wooing the minorities unabashedly in his attempt to fill the vacuum of a Muslim-only party in the country.
The party won two of the 25 seats it contested in the Maharashtra assembly polls in 2014. In the recently held municipal elections at Aurangabad in Maharashtra, his party emerged as the runner-up, winning half the seats it contested. Now, it is readying to contest 29 seats in the Bengaluru civic body polls on August 22.
"Expansion plans of any political party are very natural. Every political party would want to expand. In a democracy that is not something very surprising," Owaisi told ET in an exclusive interview.
Although the name of his party translates into All India Council of Union of Muslims, Owaisi said the Muslim-only perception is wrong. "Mine is not a Muslim party. That is completely wrong and a misinformation campaign. I have fielded non-Muslim candidates everywhere, including Dalits and OBCs," he said. Three of the party's mayors in Hyderabad were Hindu.
Owaisi rubbished the Congress' claim that his party was a BJP prop set up to cut into secular votes across the country.
The argument that his party has weakened secularism is pure arrogance on Congress' part, he said. "It is the Muslims who supported them (Congress) earlier. We lost our masjid, we lost our businesses and homes in communal riots... What are they talking about? Only if we fight under their umbrella can we fight the RSS and the BJP?" he said. "What have they done to stop the RSS and the BJP? How did Modi get 280 seats in 2014? They have lost every election since 2014. Where was Asaduddin Owaisi in all those elections?"
Owaisi, who has represented Hyderabad in Lok Sabha since 2004, has however not yet made up his mind on contesting the upcoming assembly elections in Bihar. "We have not taken a decision on Bihar, we will let you know as soon as we decide," he said.
He has taken the party from being just Hyderabad-based (the current Greater Hyderabad mayor is also from his party) to other municipalities in Telangana. His party candidates have even opened an account in Andhra Pradesh recently, by winning in the Adoni municipality of Kurnool district. The party currently has local body representatives in Karnataka's Bidar and Basavakalyan and Maharashtra's Nanded-Waghela and Aurangabad, and Owaisi is now eyeing Bengaluru. The Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka, however, has not allowed him to address any public meetings, conduct a padayatra or campaign for his candidates.
"In Bengaluru and Uttar Pradesh, I have been stopped. This shows the dictatorial attitude of the Siddaramaiah government. When assembly elections are held under the Election Commission of India, my party will contest in Bengaluru and wherever else in Karnataka we can contest. I challenge Siddaramaiah to stop me then. Only by taking my life, he can stop me," Owaisi said.
The Karnataka government has told the state high court that Owaisi will inflame communal passions and prevented him from addressing any public meeting since February. "From February to August, there is a communal problem in Bengaluru? Why are you holding elections then?" he asked.
He slammed the Congress as a party that did not believe in freedom of expression or in democracy.
"If Digvijaya Singh can hold a roadshow in Bengaluru, Asaduddin Owaisi cannot address a single public meeting? You (Congress) are calling Owaisi a Nizam, not a Tipu Sultan. If you put a tiger in the cage, won't people see him as a tiger?" he asked, alluding to Mysore kingdom's benign ruler Tipu Sultan, who is referred to as Tiger and to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who funded a riotous religious army called Razakars around 1947 that wrecked havoc in Hyderabad-Karnataka and wanted to join Pakistan.
Owaisi pointed to the 35 public meetings that he addressed in Maharashtra during the state assembly elections and the six meetings he held in Aurangabad. "I've addressed a meeting in (communally-sensitive) Kishanganj, Bihar.
There was no problem, nothing happened. Yes, I will provoke you. I will definitely hurt you, expose you. But the day I cross the line of sections 153 (wantonly provoke riots) or 297 (insulting religion) of the IPC, you can stop me. The state is bigger than Asaduddin Owaisi," he said.
The Indian rights activist Teesta Setalvad, center, with Rupa Mody, left, and Saira Sandhi, who both lost family members during riots in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people in Gujarat. Ms. Setalvad is campaigning to hold Prime Minister Narendra Modi criminally responsible for the riots. CreditManpreet Romana for The New York Times
MUMBAI — One of India’s best-known human rights activists, Teesta Setalvad, was brewing her morning tea on July 14 when she got a telephone call from her security guard.
“C.B.I. is at the gate, ma’am,” the guard said, referring to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the federal police.
Before long, 16 agents were searching her family’s compound on the shore of the Arabian Sea in Juhu, an upscale suburb of Mumbai. They searched all day, then all night, poring over Ms. Setalvad’s diaries, opening her jewelry boxes, digging through the linen closet. Not even the bedroom drawers of Ms. Setalvad’s daughter escaped scrutiny. The agents finally called it quits at sunrise, leaving with a haul of 3,179 documents.
Few critics have pursued the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, more doggedly than Ms. Setalvad, the driving force behind an unrelenting campaign to hold Mr. Modi criminally responsible for riots in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people in Gujarat, the state Mr. Modi ran before becoming prime minister.
But on the eve of court proceedings that could leave Mr. Modi facing criminal charges for the riots, it is Ms. Setalvad, who has spent months assembling evidence for the case, who is feeling the heat from Mr. Modi’s government. In the past few months, Ms. Setalvad has been discredited, financially drained and nearly overwhelmed by a merciless campaign of leaks and attacks emanating from entities controlled by Mr. Modi or his political allies.
First came the raid by the Central Bureau of Investigation, nicknamed “the caged parrot” for its history of doing the bidding of its political masters.
Days later, a prosecutor branded Ms. Setalvad a threat to India’s national security, so dangerous that she should be locked up while Mr. Modi’s government investigates whether it was legal for her to accept funding from the Ford Foundation.
Soon after, the state of Gujarat joined the rush to jail Ms. Setalvad, recipient of one of India’s highest honors, the Padma Shri Award. The state filed an affidavit in India’s Supreme Court accusing her and her husband, Javed Anand, of perpetrating a “colossal fraud” — to wit, raising $1.1 million “in the name of riot victims” only to siphon most of it to pay themselves exorbitant salaries and splurge on luxuries. The affidavit, while neglecting to mention that the Ford Foundation and other funders have found no evidence of financial wrongdoing, dwelled at length on the couple’s “conspicuous consumption,” noting, for example, that they had eaten at a Subway, and, in boldface type, describing the purchase of sanitary napkins.
To Ms. Setalvad and a growing chorus of supporters, the prosecutorial flurry is a pretext to humiliate and silence a prominent critic. Mihir S. Sharma, a columnist for The Business Standard, called it a vendetta that “looks like it’s being directed by Francis Ford Coppola.”
In news outlets sympathetic to Mr. Modi, however, the recent legal barrage is portrayed as an overdue comeuppance for an “anti-Hindu hatemonger” who uses foreign money to spread “antinational propaganda.” The public outcry, Mr. Modi’s allies argue, only proves that Ms. Setalvad is once again using her celebrity — in Indian newspaper headlines she is often simply “Teesta” — to shield herself from legitimate inquiries.
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“If she has nothing to hide, she has nothing to fear,” said Nalin S. Kohli, a spokesman for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
For now, thanks to favorable judicial rulings, Ms. Setalvad and her husband remain free. But the damage to their cause has been considerable, she acknowledged during an interview at her home. Their organizations’ bank accounts have been frozen, their passports have been seized, their family savings are dwindling and they cannot afford to pay their lawyers. Worst of all, she said, they are so busy defending themselves — they have turned over 25,000 pages of financial records — that they have been distracted from their pursuit of Mr. Modi.
“It is a very heavy cost,” she said. “But at the moment, I’m still not thinking of backing away. It is too far down the road to back down.”
The Ford Foundation has also paid a steep price for its association with Ms. Setalvad. Since 2004, it has given $540,000 to Ms. Setalvad’s organizations, a small fraction of the $500 million it has spread to hundreds of groups here over the past six decades. According to Ms. Setalvad and the Ford Foundation, the money supported specific projects, like building an online archive of human rights cases. None of the money was used to build legal cases against Mr. Modi and other Gujarat officials, a point Ms. Setalvad and foundation officials say they have repeatedly made to government investigators who suspect Ford money was improperly diverted to fund political activism.
Even so, the foundation suddenly found itself the subject of damaging leaks to Indian news organizations. Starting in March, and continuing into summer, foundation officials learned from news accounts that they were under investigation by the federal Ministry of Home Affairs; that the state of Gujarat was accusing them of “abetting communal disharmony”; that new restrictions were being placed on foundation bank accounts; and that the government would have to approve any new grants.
Previous Indian governments have taken steps to curb the influence of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations perceived as overly adversarial. But the Modi government’s actions were enough to provoke a rare public rebuke from Richard R. Verma, the United States ambassador to India, who said during a speech in New Delhi in May that he was worried about “the potentially chilling effects” of India’s crackdown on the Ford Foundation and other NGOs.
Ms. Setalvad, 53, comes from eight generations of lawyers. Her grandfather, M.C. Setalvad, was India’s first and longest-serving attorney general. Her father, Atul Setalvad, was a renowned lawyer in Mumbai. Ms. Setalvad said it was Watergate and “All the President’s Men” that inspired her to pursue journalism instead. “I still have the book,” she said.
In 1993, as a response to months of bloody Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, then called Bombay, Ms. Setalvad and her husband started a monthly magazine, Communalism Combat, dedicated to covering the manipulation of religion for political gain. (The magazine’s motto: “Hate Hurts. Harmony Works.”) More and more, their work blended journalism with activism, a transformation accelerated by the Gujarat riots of 2002. Mr. Modi had been chief minister of Gujarat for only a few months when the violence began. On Feb. 27, 2002, just before 8 a.m., a train carrying Hindu pilgrims pulled into Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population. A scuffle broke out, stones were hurled, and then one of the train cars caught fire. The charred remains of 59 people were then put on public display in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, inevitably stoking anti-Muslim fury.
For the next two months, as the Gujarat state police often sat idle, mobs of Hindus descended into savagery, hacking and burning Muslims to death, destroying Muslim homes by the thousands. The National Human Rights Commission, led by a retired chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court, called the state’s response to the riots “a serious failure of intelligence and action.” Mr. Modi’s government, the commission said, did not take basic steps to prevent violence and then failed to respond to specific pleas for protection. Mr. Modi, in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, said his only regret was not doing a better job of handling the news media.
Ms. Setalvad’s family is from Gujarat. The riots, she said, triggered in her a determination to break an age-old pattern in India: religious bloodletting followed by shoddy investigations that studiously avoid the leaders who stoke the rage in the first place. Two months after the riots began, Ms. Setalvad and her husband formed a new organization, Citizens for Peace and Justice, with the aim of shaming the authorities into doing a thorough investigation.
They began tracking down witnesses, demanding records and lining up lawyers for victims. They convened their own tribunal of retired judges to take public testimony and produce a scathing three-volume report. “Modi cynically tried to use the politics of division and violence to gain a fresh mandate from the people,” the report concluded.
The work of Ms. Setalvad’s network is widely credited with helping prosecutors win more than 100 convictions, the most notable resulting in a 28-year sentence for one of Mr. Modi’s former top lieutenants.
But the deeper they dug, the more vitriol and opposition they encountered. They were accused of taking “Arab money” and “brainwashing” riot victims. Death threats were as regular as the monsoon rains. It did not help when Ms. Setalvad promised with great fanfare to build a museum as a memorial to riot victims, only to cancel the project for lack of funds. Her penchant for overheated rhetoric also cost her support.
India’s Supreme Court has come to Ms. Setalvad’s rescue again and again.
When a witness in one of the riot cases accused Ms. Setalvad of kidnapping, the Supreme Court dismissed the witness as a “self-condemned liar.” When Ms. Setalvad was accused of coaching witnesses to make false allegations, Supreme Court justices repeatedly rejected the charge. In 2011, when the Gujarat government accused Ms. Setalvad of illegally arranging to have riot victims exhumed, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, calling it “100 percent spurious.”Indeed, after almost a decade of investigations, neither Ms. Setalvad nor her husband has ever been formally charged with anything. And as Ms. Setalvad is quick to note, she and her husband became the focus of a federal investigation only after Mr. Modi was elected prime minister, giving him control of India’s executive branch, including the Central Bureau of Investigation.
When agents from the bureau raided her home, Ms. Setalvad and her lawyers quickly noticed something odd about the search warrant. Almost every document sought in the warrant had already been turned over to the authorities. Ms. Setalvad offered to spare the agents the trouble of searching by simply producing duplicates, but the agents said no.
It was then that Ms. Setalvad began to wonder if the real purpose of the search was the Jafri case.
During the Gujarat riots, one of the worst massacres took place at the Gulbarg Society, a Muslim housing complex where women and children took refuge in the home of Ehsan Jafri, a former member of India’s Parliament. For hours, as attacks continued, Mr. Jafri repeatedly placed phone calls seeking help and police protection. No help came, and Mr. Jafri and 68 others were murdered.
In the eyes of Mr. Modi’s critics, the Jafri case has always presented the best opportunity to prove his criminal culpability. But an investigative panel appointed by the Supreme Court concluded in 2012 that there was not enough “prosecutable evidence” to charge him.
It is this ruling that Mr. Jafri’s widow, Zakia Jafri, is now trying to overturn on appeal with help from Ms. Setalvad. “If this appeal is upheld, the prime minister of India is liable to be tried on the charge of conspiracy for his handling of the 2002 carnage,” said Manoj Mitta, a senior editor at The Times of India who has written a book about the riots.
The appeal is scheduled to be heard over the coming weeks before Gujarat’s highest court. This, Ms. Setalvad said, may explain the timing of the agents’ raid at her home.
“What I’m not worried about is them finding anything incriminating against us,” she said. “I’m worried they’ll find things we have that incriminate them.”
Max Dugger Bearak and Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.
A large number of dalits still work as manual scavengers in India despite anti-discrimination laws. — AFP
With his rousing speech at Oxford Union, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has silenced his detractors. Ironically, his own party seeks his silence. Obviously, they don’t take his gift of gab and exceptional oratorical skills seriously. What a pity.
What a huge difference a single speech can make! Shashi Tharoor’s 15-minute stirring intervention at Oxford Union on July 14 was by far the most passionate, incisive and scathing critique in recent times of 200 years of British colonial rule in India. It has touched the right chord, both in India and abroad, cutting across generations. So, Tharoor, who has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons for the last two years, has suddenly become the darling of Indians, especially the Twitterati. Nearly a million Netizens “liked” his speech in less than 48 hours.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly applauded his oratory, as did many MPs from different political parties. With a huge sixer, Shashi has silenced his detractors. Ironically, his own party seeks his silence. Obviously they don’t take his exceptional oratorical skills seriously. What a pity.
He contended that the British should own up the wrong done in India during the colonial period and seek atonement by saying sorry, if not by paying reparation. Well, if the British government were to take his advice to its logical conclusion, it would take them quite a while to say sorry to three fourths of the world where the sun never set at the height of Empire.
If the British should own up to all the wrongs they committed during their 200-year-long rule, say sorry and seek atonement, what about the inhuman indignities, injustices and cruelties inflicted on the so-called low castes by the so-called higher castes of Hindu society for 2,000 years? Shouldn’t they own up to the social, economic, political, physical and psychological deprivation they deliberately and systematically caused to them? In fact, the wrongs committed by them were far graver and sinister. Their wrongs were similar, or a shade lighter than the wrongs of other colonisers, like the Portuguese and the Spanish. The white Americans treated the blacks unjustly and cruelly.
The high castes of Hindu society, on the other hand, treated their own brethren, their own countrymen, so inhumanely and for so long for no fault of theirs. Over the years they created numerous political, social and religious dictums to perpetuate the slavery and subjugation of the low castes forever. To tell a whole section of society that they had no right to property, no right to education, that their sole purpose in life was to serve the higher castes without protest, was to shut the door on any possible redemption.
Even at the peak of their hold in India, did the British colonial rulers of India tell the low castes (shudras) that molten lead would be poured in their ears if they ever tried to listen to anything akin to knowledge, aka Manu Smriti? Did they ever order that when the low caste Indians walked through streets they must use bamboo sticks with tiny bells tied to them so that the higher castes would be forewarned and lest they be polluted by the shadow of the lower caste, as was the strict law during the otherwise enlightened Gupta period?
The low castes were condemned to live on the outskirts of villages and cities; they were not allowed to draw water from common wells nor pray in the temples built by the higher castes. Some Hindu priests even ordained that when a low-caste man got married, the first right to have sex with the bride was that of the priest. Worse still, this exploitative system was made hereditary; generation after generation lives in these humiliating conditions on account of their birth in low-caste families. What kind of debilitating and degrading psychological inferiority complex might have been caused in the low castes by this? How can one forget the ruler of Travancore who imposed a barbaric and sadistic law by which low-caste women had to pay tax to cover their breasts and even to breast-feed their own children?
One shudders with shame at the treatment meted out to Dr B.R. Ambedkar on his return from Columbia University after obtaining a doctorate in law. Contrary to expectation, these injustices and cruelties, regrettably, didn’t cease after India became independent. Low-caste people have been killed at the slightest pretext, like a demand for higher wages by landless labourers in Bihar. Burning of their hutments, rape of their womenfolk and molestation of young girls has been known to occur with frightening frequency in the oppression of the low castes in independent India.
After the much publicised Nirbhaya rape case, the CJI had remarked that hundreds of dalit women were routinely raped daily across India but no demonstration were organised for them. Several dalit girls were raped and hanged from mango trees in UP last year.Affirmative action and various developmental schemes in rural India by successive governments have resulted in some improvement in economic and social conditions of the low castes, but a lot remains to be done. In flagrant violation of the law, untouchability is still alive and kicking in hundreds of villages; there are more than five million (unofficial figure) bonded labourers and child labour is used extensively.
Former home minister P. Chidambaram had once told Parliament that there were more than 13,500 registered cases of physical assault on dalits in India in a single year. As out of four cases hardly one gets registered, the actual number of assaults might be as high as 50,000. There has been a trail of brutal murders of low castes as in Dehuli, Sadupur, Belchi and others places with high-caste perpetrators seldom being punished.
Just a week ago some TV channels had shown some young low caste girls who were made to clean toilets in their schools in Delhi. It wasn’t an isolated case, it happens in many schools. So, who should say sorry for what has been done in India to the low castes in the last 2,000 years? Shouldn’t someone own the wrongs? Shouldn’t it be a 10 times louder “SORRY” than what Mr Tharoor was demanding of the British at Oxford University? Realistically, none will own up nor say sorry for what happened in India for centuries. Shouldn’t Parliament, which represents the whole country, pass a resolution offering an unconditional apology for all the injustices perpetrated on the low castes? That will at least be symbolic atonement.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh should have pondered deeply over the various types of violence his own ministry tackles before lecturing the Lok Sabha on the inappropriateness of coining the term “Hindu terror”.
This might have helped Singh to comprehend the logic underlying the process through which different forms of violence are tagged, not the least because of the belief that each of these warrants a special response to tackle and root it out.
Rajnath Singh in a file photo. AFP
It is because of this reason Singh can’t understand why a certain brand of terror should indeed be called Hindu terror.
To the Lok Sabha on 31 July, Singh said, "In this House in 2013, the then home minister (P Chidambaram) had coined the new terminology ‘Hindu terrorism’ in order to change the course of probe (into acts of terrorism). It weakened our fight.”
Singh’s statement makes a tacit assumption — not all forms of violence can be classified as terrorism. He is right in making this assumption. For instance, once upon a time the dreaded dacoit gangs of the Chambal Valley terrorised its villagers through random killings and depredations, but nobody ever dubbed them terrorists.
Nor does Singh’s Home Ministry, now or earlier, tag communal riots as terrorism, or their perpetrators as terrorists, even though this form of violence decidedly terrorises the society. Fear looms over places where communal rioting occurs, as it does every time a terror group brings a city or town into their crosshairs.
This brings us to the question: What is terrorism?
There is no unanimity on the definition of terrorism. A 2003 American Army study totted 108 such definitions, altogether identifying 23 separate elements which lead to the terming of a violent act as terrorism.
Nevertheless, quite broadly, most agree that an act of violence is classified terrorism in case it has these three attributes — it intimidates people and the state; it seeks to change state behaviour through coercion; its aim or mission is political in nature.
In India, though, we prefix an adjective to the word terror for further sub-classification. Thus, we have Red or Maoist terrorism, Islamist or Muslim terrorism, Kashmiri terrorism, Sikh Terrorism, secessionist terrorism, Northeast terrorism, etc. It was to this terrorism lexicon the term Hindu terror added, much to the anger and dismay of Singh and the Sangh Parivar to which he belongs.
Is Singh right in taking exception to the term Hindu terror? To answer this, ask another question: Why isn’t Red or Maoist terror also called Hindu terror? After all, judging from the names of the Maoists killed or those who periodically surrender or whom the state declares Most Wanted, it is obvious that they overwhelmingly belong to the Hindu community.
Yet, it isn’t called Hindu terror because those who spearhead or plan Maoist violence have political objectives not even remotely connected to their religion. Their goal is to capture the Indian state through an armed revolution to establish the people’s government. To put it simply, a just social order can be created by anchoring Indians in communist ideals and ethos, not in Hinduism. Their Hindu cultural identity has little salience in their imagining of the future.
Indeed, the choice of the adjective as a prefix to terror is influenced not by the religious identity of those who perpetrate it. It is largely determined by the goals they set out to achieve through their terror attacks. This tendency isn’t peculiar to India.
Thus, for instance, Kurdish rebels in Iraq or Turkey are not called Islamist terrorists because, even though they are predominantly Muslim, their goal is to establish an independent nation-state based on ethnicity, not religion. By contrast, Islamic State is dubbed an Islamist terror group because it seeks to establish an Islamic state, under which people would be compelled to subscribe to Islamic laws.
Or take the myriad Palestinian outfits. For decades, different groups affiliated to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) carried out terrorist attacks in an attempt to liberate Palestine from Israel. PLO members were predominantly Muslim, but nobody dubbed their violence as Islamic. Nor was its leader, Yasser Arafat, ever perceived to be pursuing an Islamic goal, largely because his mission had been to establish a secular state.
But the violent actions of Hamas have always been dubbed Islamic. That’s because its inspiration and ideology both have roots in Islam; the future it conceives has a distinctly Islamic hue.
Closer home, a clutch of movements in India has been clubbed under the category of secessionist, whether in the Northeast, Punjab or Kashmir. They are also perceived as terror movements because they engage in violent acts to achieve their political objective of independence.
However, the Punjab terrorism became Sikh terrorism as its leaders began to speak in the idiom of their religion; its paramount leader, Sant Bhindranwale, did not imagine a secular but a Sikh state. Likewise, Kashmiri terrorism became predominantly Islamic in nature in later years, as its secular outlook was gradually overshadowed, not the least because of Pakistan’s influence.
Many of its important ideologues and leaders began to define their future Kashmiri state as an Islamic one. This group was always present in the Kashmiri secessionist movement, but grew in strength over the years. In pursuance of their future goals, dress codes were informally introduced and enforced, cinema halls were shuttered, as were liquor vends, and Kashmiri Pandits targeted, which they now belatedly regret.
From this perspective, how are we to view the Malegaon and Ajmer Dargah blasts, the bombing of Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad and the Samjhauta Express, in which members of the militant Hindu group Abhinav Bharat, and individuals owing allegiance to the RSS, have been implicated? Were these violent acts merely retribution against Muslim terror? Or did its perpetrators have a larger political objective? The purpose of their mission is spelt out in the reams of court papers pertaining to the Malegaon blasts case, in which Rohini Salian was appointed as Special Public Prosecutor. Obviously, Salian has been through these papers with a fine toothcomb.
Salian recently went public saying she was under pressure from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to go soft on the case. In her disclosure to The Indian Express, Salian had said, “From those conversations we got to know the actual story, they wanted a central Hindu rashtra, they don’t recognise the Constitution of India, had their own constitution written, their own flag — even their Bharat Mata was an armed one.”
Salian’s statement clearly establishes that this group of accused had a well-defined political objective of establishing the Hindu state. Their inspiration was Hindu culture; they rejected the secular foundation of the Indian Constitution and the notion of equality of all before the law.
This is precisely why to label their terror as Hindu is right, a point Singh has failed to grasp in his rush to score brownie points and paint Congress as anti-Hindu.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores.
He may be bland and boring but in the fire and brimstone culture of Sangh Parivar swarming with rabble-rousers, Rajnath Singh comes across as a sober figure with a cool head. Calm, unruffled, civil. The sort of person who, even if someone were to plant a smouldering firecracker under his seat, is likely to continue to stand there pretending that he is only warming his feet— and drone on.
Unlike many of his colleagues,who can’t open their mouth without putting their foot into it, he is always extremely measured in his utterances and likes to avoid controversies. But how long can a chip of the old (Parivar) block, hold his horses? So, on Friday, the mask slipped.
Singh turned up in the Lok Sabha in an uncharacteristically confrontational mood — all fired up as if on instructions from HQ, prompting a Hindi TV channel to ask:Rajnathkogussakyonaaya?
Well, he was upset, to put it mildly, over the description of acts of terrorism allegedly involving Hindus as "Hindu terrorism". It was a term, he said, invented by the wily Congress to ingratiate itself with Muslims and give Hindus a bad name. It had damaged India’s image, "weakened" its fight against terror, and helped terrorists from across the border.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh. AFP
Wagging his finger at Congress benches, a visibly agitated Singh accused former home minister Sushil Kumar Shindeof "coining" the derogatory term which, he suggested, effectively tarred the entire Hindu community --indeed Hinduism itself. . “Terrorism has no religion , caste or colour.In this House in 2013, the then Home Minister had coined the new terminology ‘Hindu terrorism’ in order to change the direction of probe (into incidents of terrorism). It weakened our fight. As a consequence, Hafiz Sayeed (LeT founder) of Pakistan had congratulated the then Home Minister.Whatever is happening now is the result of the UPA’s policies. Our government will never allow such a shameful situation again,”he thundered as his party colleagues thumped their desks in approval.
Singh's outburst, which followed a statement he made on the Gurdaspur incident, was completely unprovoked as his statement had been heard with “rapt’’ attention by Congress members, as ANI news agency reported pointing out that its MPs who had been protesting earlier “suspended their protests and return to their seats” to hear the minister.
"We all welcomed, clapped (over Singh's statement)...because the country is one and there is no compromise on terrorism and unity and integrity of the country," MallikarjunKharge, leader of the Congress in the House, said expressing his surprise over Singh’s attack.
Lest anyone missed the point of Singh’s overblown rhetoric, here’s a deconstruction. It was a classic case of setting up a strawman argument and then striking it down in order to score cheap political points. Nobody had suggested that terrorism has religion, caste or colour; nor indeed was there any mention of Hindu terrorism on this particular occasion.
So, what was it all about? Clearly, he was trying to milk the occasion to politicise a sensitive issue by digging up an old comment and quoting it out of context. His ill-tempered speech came from that old, time-tested playbook of right-wing Hindu nationalism: namely portraying the BJP as the sole custodian of national interests(“Our government will never allow such a shameful situation again”) and dismissing its liberal critics—in this case the Congress-- as “anti-national” .
Singh's rant (for that's what it ultimately sounded like as he randomly brought in other issues like the Sharm-el-Sheikh statement on relations with Pakistan and the 1962 India-China war) was typical of the party's double standards, its self-righteousness and its divisive agenda portraying Hindus as "victims" in the same way that the Muslim Right remains permanently in a grievance mode.
Which tempts me to ask him a question. Assuming that he genuinely believes that terrorism should not be equated with religion, why has he or his party never protested that the mad acts of some followers of Islam shouldn't be called "Muslim" or " Islamic"'terrorism? Or that the sins of a few should not be visited on the entire community? How is that a party which gets so prickly at the mention of Hindu or saffron terrorism happily uses religious labels to describe acts of extremism committed by members of other communities?
Forget Muslims, what about Sikhs? Remember the Hindu Right’s angry denunciation of “Sikh terrorism” even though Sikhs themselves were suffering at the hands of Khalistani militants, just as Muslims are now suffering at the hands of Muslim extremists? And why didn’t the BJP object to LTTE’s violence being dubbed “Tamil terror” ?
Moreover, can Singh deny that Hindus –and individuals with RSS links—have been involved in terrorist activities? Their alleged role in the Samjhauta Express bomb blasts (initially pinned on Muslims as a default reaction) and terror incidents at Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid and the Malegaon mosque are a matter of record.
It was in the context of these incidents that while addressing an AICC session in 2013, Shinde referred to “Hindu terrorism’’ accusing Hindu extremist organisations of running terror training camps. Faced with the joint fury of the RSS and the BJP (RSS leader Manmohan Vaidya publicly accused the Congress of protecting Muslim terrorists while BJP’s Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi darkly warned of “serious consequences” if Sonia Gandhi did not apologise for her minister’s remarks!) Shinde said he meant to call it “saffron” terrorism.
I hold no brief for Shinde. He was an utterly incompetent home minister and like some of Singh’s mates he also can’t help putting his foot in his mouth. But were his remarks off the wall? No. Because however much the BJP might protest, it cannot get away from the charge of Hindu terrorism.
The biggest act of terrorism its supporters committed in the name of “protecting” Hinduism was what they did in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 when in full public view and in the presence of some of the party’s tallest leaders they brought down Babri Masjid after giving solemn assurance to the Supreme Court that it would not be touched.
Can Singh deny the bloody consequences and legacy of what self-avowed Hindu nationalists did that day in the name of their religion? Was it not a case of “Hindu terrorism” in the same way that acts of violence committed in the name of Islam are termed “Muslim terrorism”?
BJP’s eternal problem is that, for it, “hell is (always) other people”, as Sartre put it; and its sense of self-righteousness causes even otherwise sensible people like Rajnath Singhto protest too much. As he did on Friday.
