OPED | Saturday, November 1, 2008 | Email | Print | 
Terrorism or just hate crimes?
Lookback : Udayan Namboodiri
"Hindu terror" is an oxymoron and the tendency to mainstream radical cousins of Hindu organisations is part of every khofia policeman's training course since colonial times.
The ‘involvement of Hindus in the Malegaon bomb blast of September 2006 and some other explosions, including one in a manufactory of alleged perpetrators, seems to have provided the Congress-led UPA a last-minute lifeline. Electoral dividends are waiting to be reaped by resurrecting the saffron-clad, hairy Hindu hordes, trident and all, rushing down the hill to overwhelm Muslims, Christians and all those whose holy lands lie beyond Akhand Bharat. And, make no mistake, there is a big harvest goldening out there, thanks to Khandamal, Mangalore and now Sadhvi Pragya.
The tenuous link between terrorism and religion had featured in several Saturday Specials over the past four years. As recently as October 11, we had Arif Mohammad Khan highlight the significance of LK Advani's late September remarks which signaled a clear end to the equivocation that his critics often accused him of in the context of Islam and terrorism. Advani had even gone to the extent of saying that if certain passages in the Holy Quran are singled out as proof of Islam's 'abettal' of terror, then, equally, some Hindu texts are blameworthy.
This week, as pictures of the Sadhvi with BJP President Rajnath Singh splashed across newspapers, it practically gave birth to a new, somewhat oxymoronish lexicon, the Hindu terrorist -- something like "militant pacifism" or "liberal fundamentalism" or, better still, "objective journalism". However, viewed in the context of history, there is no reason for feeling either surprise or shame. The premise that Hindus were ahimsa-ites at all times is a Gandhian fabrication based on an ideal which worked quite well to India's advantage in a century marked by gulags, holocausts and atom bombs. It's true that pacificism is a general Hindu tendency. But, time and again, a degree of masculinity was sought to be injected into the Hindu vocabulary of protest by remote extensions of essentially non-combative movements. Rakesh Sinha (Main Story) goes into considerable detail on this. But linking these groups to established institutions and personalities was nothing more than the result of some overzealous intelligence officials, a tribe that persists to the present times. In the 1970s and 80s, much public money was spent in tainting the Ananda Marg as a rogue outfit. But not one of the dozens of cases, including a death sentence on its founder, held in higher courts.
In the early 1940s, a large number of volunteer groups proliferated in Hindu-dominated parts of Calcutta in reaction to the oppressive regime of HS Shurawardy, the Prime Minister of the province under the 1935 Act. They had names like "Hindu Shakti Sangha", "Bhowanipore Yuva Sampraday", "Baghbazar Tarun Bayam Samity" and "Arya Bir Dal". Some had famous people as patrons, but most were very neighbourhood (para) in their scope. They organised trainings in Bratachari or dagger play for young boys and girls and dramatics based on the lives of Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Banda Bahadur. The Intelligence Branch followed the careers of all these groups and never failed to add that they were linked with either the RSS or Hindu Mahasabha or Anushilan Samity. By the time of the Great Calcutta Killings that followed Jinnah's Direct Action call, there were hundreds of these groups, many of them fitted out with veritable armouries. They gave the Muslim League's marauding squads eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As for the role of overground parties, nothing was ever substantiated. But the tendency to make music to please political masters remained a constant with future generation of intelligence sleuths.
So, you have propaganda linking Graham Staines murderer Dara Singh to the Bajrang Dal. It flopped in court, but so what? The stigma remains. The Nehru administration deployed its best policemen and legal luminaries to establish that Veer Savarkar motivated Nathuram Godse, the killer of Gandhi -- in vain. But propagandists are seldom distracted by facts. Indira Gandhi's government, which vetted the script for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, took care to insert a scene in which a bearded sadhu bearing strong resemblance to Savarkar, was shown inciting Godse as he blocked Gandhi's path in a pre-assassination scene.
Sometimes, in the absence of Anglo-Saxon film directors, the Congress uses rags like Tehelka, which published a story recently with the following intro: "Individuals associated with Hindutva outfits like the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal are developing terror networks in north Maharashtra targeting the region's Muslim population. This has been revealed by the accused in the Nanded blast, which occurred on April 6, during their narco-analysis and brain-mapping tests."
Now, even though a conviction or two has been acquired through brain mapping, the verdicts are on appeal before the Supreme Court which is expected to pay heed to the outcry that has broken out in international jurisprudence over India's fixation with such strange scientific techniques.
Be it as it may, hate crimes are different from terrorism. So, the tendency to slap Hindus with the same charge as Muslims is a little misplaced. Let's not forget that till the other day, very few Indian Muslims disowned their imagined ilk in Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere for bombing western cities. Irfan Ali Engineer (The Other Voice), states that the idiom of religion comes in handy for terrorists to"sell" a cause. And it was a concoction that did brisk business in ghetto communities in India. The Babri Masjid incident of December 1992 became a caus celebre that the Pakistani ISI exploited to the hilt. The intensive and extensive propaganda about Islam in danger in Hindu India dovetailed well with flotsam secularism. Result: Vote bank response to terrorism and rising Hindu helplessness.
The point to be noted is that in the first decade of jihad in its Indian theatre, the linkage between Islam and terrorism was not a very big issue. In fact, a lot of Indian Muslims openly empathised with the butcher of Munich, Yasser Arafat, and other monsters.But things changed after 9/11. The personality of George W. Bush caused the springboarding of dormant passions (read rage) in the general direction of Islam and everything associated with it. Islamophobia, a subject dealt with by Saturday Specialin the early days of the trend, has now compelled Muslims to introspect. It took the Jamiat Ulama-i- Hind 18 years since the first shot was fired in Srinagar by Afghanistan-returned jihadisto condemn terrorism as un-Islamic.
Why? Because, by then, there were detectable signs of consolidation of anti-Muslim feelings that could, even in the medium term, lead to the engendering of hate crimes against Muslims comparable to the anti-Semitic pogroms of the 19 th Century and, who knows, even the marginalisation of Islam?
Hinduism, despite a few aberrant sadhvis, naga babas and chimta babas, faces no such risk. So, this controversy too shall pass. And the onus of mainstreaming would still lie on the Muslim.What was that adage about people living in glass houses?
-- The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer
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