Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 59, 100

The Subcontinent

Under BJP Government, An Intolerant Face of Hindu India Emerging Unabashedly Into World View

By M.M. Ali

Expulsion from Bombay of Bengali-speaking Muslims is one sign among many that India’s governing coalition of BJP-VHP-Shiv Sena right-wing extremists and their sympathizers have embarked on their anti-Muslim policy. West Bengal’s Chief Minister Jyoti Basu has asked India’s central government to seek the resignation of Chief Minister Manohar Joshi for carrying out the illegal expulsions.

On the one hand, the right-wing Hindu organizations have launched physical attacks on minorities, particularly the Muslims, and on the other, a concerted effort is being made to denigrate the images of modern India’s founders, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawarharlal Nehru, by portraying Gandhi’s assassin as a hero. Anyone who still has illusions about India’s “secular democracy” (and many remain among my American friends) should see the reality that is unashamedly emerging at present in the land of Gandhi and Nehru.

The Maharashtra state government’s decision to allow the stage play eulogizing Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, to be performed was no idiosyncratic, uncoordinated local decision. Although that decision was later reversed at the federal level, it was part of the BJP political platform and a critical step toward its proclaimed objective of establishing Akhand Bharath, i.e., an undivided land of the Hindus.

Those who harbor doubts about the need for Pakistan as a separate sovereign state for the subcontinent’s Muslims would do well to realize that it has taken just 50 years for the real Hindu India to surface. Doubters should wake up and smell the coffee.

A whole new spin is now being put on the sordid episode that ended the tolerant influence of “Mahatma” Gandhi upon emerging India. The defense statement that Nathuram made at his 1950 trial is being interpreted as “a gospel truth and the only valid other side of the story.” The leading weekly news magazine, India Today, put Godes’s picture on its Aug. 3 cover and wrote: “Banning a play on the Mahatama’s killer drags political battles into the arts and points to a growing pattern of intolerance.”

The India Today story quoted veteran Hindu Mahasabha leader Vikram Savarkar as saying, “Those of us who were young and believed in the Hindu Mahasabha ideology did feel that Gandhi deserved to die for his anti-national activities.”

It is a tragic fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules India today, is an offshoot of the Hindu extremist movements Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Sewak Sangh (RSS). Every year Nov. 15 is observed as “martyrdom day” in memory of Godse in Pune (formerly Poona), Maharashtra state, and as noted above Gandhi now is even being described as “anti-national.”

Gandhi now is being described as “anti-national.”

Bal Thackeray, leader of BJP’s right-wing militarist Shiv Sena group, expressed his strong displeasure when the BJP was forced to intervene and ban the play “Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy” (I am Nathuram Godse speaking) which was being enacted before packed houses in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Thackeray’s alter ego, Lal Krishna Advani, who was instrumental in the destruction of the historic Babri mosque in 1992 and who now is the BJP cabinet’s home minister in Delhi, also expressed his unhappiness when he was forced to take action against the play.

In fact Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who subscribes to RSS thinking, would not have moved on the matter had BJP enjoyed a clear majority in the Lokh Sabha. But he is dependent on his coalition partners for his political survival, and had he not moved it would have become a national issue and might have brought down the government.

Perhaps only one more election is needed for such an eventuality to come to pass unless the Congress Party and the United Front wake up. Journalists Swapan Dasgupta and Smruti Koppikar wrote: “So powerful was the projection of Godse that the play almost seemed like a justification for a cold-blooded murder.” Even by agreeing to ban the play, the BJP government established grounds for reviewing art and literature and freedom of the press across the board, a power it has been seeking.

The play centers on Godse’s defense plea, which is a frontal attack on Gandhi’s willingness to accommodate minority interests—particularly those of the Muslims and the Achutes (untouchables). The principal actor voices dramatic attacks on Gandhi’s views on the Indian polity, the national anthem, the national language, the issue of cow slaughter and special provisions sought for the Achutes. Even a cursory analysis of the political agenda of the BJP reveals that it has faithfully adopted all of the objectives espoused by Godse.

Nathuram Godse and his cohorts vainly cried for an undivided (Akhand) India. His successors, Bal Thackeray, Manohar Joshi, L.K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, now are fervently seeking the establishment of Hindutva—a land of the Hindus and Hindus alone.

To this end the BJP has adopted a two-pronged strategy. Long-term policy includes a gradual religious cleansing to rid the land of all non-Hindu elements, either through conversions via material inducements or by force (carrots and sticks), with accompanying onslaughts on other religions, cultures and history.

The short-term policy is directed at ending the Muslim Personal Law, cow slaughter, demolition of over 2,000 mosques already marked for destruction all over the country, an end to parochial schools (including Christian and Islamic institutions), and an end to affirmative action for backward and scheduled classes. Some of the policies are already under way and others will be implemented as time and opportunity allow.

A Deep-Rooted Ethos

Therefore, the stage play “Godse Speaks” is not a mere Marathi drama. It symbolizes a deep-rooted ethos within the Hindu populace which had been submerged for a while under the ambivalence of Gandhi and the eloquent rhetoric of Nehru. The timing of the play was only meant to test the air and put the nation on notice. Next time around if BJP no longer needs to maintain a governing coalition, it may be released all over the country. Godse would then replace Gandhi as the most revered national hero.

Nevertheless, the BJP would still have difficulty bringing about a total transformation of Indian society because of the pressure of a large Muslim minority (India’s Muslim population is second largest in the world after Indonesia), more than a billion Muslims watching from outside, and a huge lower caste Hindu population holding its breath in mortal fear inside India.

It is instructive to recall that Buddhism was methodically driven out of India hundreds of years ago, and today it survives mostly in East and Southeast Asia. Today Hindu zealots, led by the saffron-clad BJP-VHP-Pariwar diehards, seek to deprive minorities of their rights, and even their faiths.

Pakistan’s founder, Mohamad Ali Jinnah, read the minds of many of the Hindu Brahmins correctly, which is why he demanded the partition of India and even agreed to a truncated Pakistan as a separate homeland for the Muslims. Muslims living in Pakistan and Bangladesh owe an eternal debt to the man who had the foresight to see so clearly the future plight of Muslims in the subcontinent. This fate is being enacted in Kashmir, which India wants to hold forcibly despite the fact that Kashmir’s Muslim majority seeks self-determination.

The Sept. 5 edition of the London Economist, a conservative weekly, observed: “Much less is heard these days from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party about its pro-Hindu policies. The survival of its coalition of unreliable allies is the BJP’s main aim. But away from Delhi the party continues to spread a culture of intolerance in states where it rules, aiming its darts at Muslims, India’s largest religious minority.”

In a scathing attack, the respected British magazine went on to state: “Schoolbooks are being rewritten in Uttar Pradesh to disparage Muslim historical figures, and in Gujarat, another BJP-ruled state, inter-religious marriages are officially discouraged. But the BJP’s Hindu-chauvinist face is particularly evident in Maharashtra.”

Meanwhile a government-appointed commission headed by Justice B.N. Srikrishna to investigate the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992 in Bombay has held Shiv Sena, a cohort of BJP, largely responsible for widespread killings. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray and the former Bombay police commissioner, R.D. Tyagi, who joined the BJP after his retirement, were charged by name with inciting the riots.

The commission report said: “Thackeray commanded the attacks on Muslims like a veteran general.” Ironically, VHP-Shiv Sena Chief Minister Manohar Joshi dismissed the commission’s findings as “anti-Hindu,” although the judge himself is a Hindu. India’s largest circulated weekly magazine, India Today, also published a series of articles on “arrests,” “physical tortures” and “murders carried out by police” of Muslims from various parts of the country to portray the BJP’s total Hinduization program for India.