[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy on Gujarat

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all at Rearder-List

apropos of the discussion on nationalism and fascism here on this list, here 
is the text of an essay by Arundhati Roy (Democracy : Who's she when she's at 
home?) on the events in  Gujarat and Fascism in India, published this week in 
Outlook, a weekly newsmagazine from India. The article is available at the
Outlook Magazine website - www.outlookindia.com

To give you a sense of what Arundhati is arguing about nationalism and 
fascism (among other things)  in this long essay I want to give you just one 
excerpt - 

"It's disturbing to see how neatly nationalism dovetails into fascism. While 
we must not allow the fascists to define what the nation is, or who it 
belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind that nationalism, in all its many 
avatars—socialist, capitalist and fascist—has been at the root of almost all 
the genocides of the twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it's 
wise to proceed with caution."

But for the rest, read on

best

Shuddha
_____________________________
Democracy : Who's she when she's at home?
Arundhati Roy

Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen
minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated.
Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only
that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags.
Only that after she died, someone carved 'OM' on her forehead.

Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches this?

Our Prime Minister justified this as part of the retaliation by
outraged Hindus against Muslim 'terrorists' who burned alive 58 Hindu
passengers on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. Each of those who died
that hideous
death was someone's brother, someone's mother, someone's child. Of
course they were.

Which particular verse in the Quran required that they be roasted alive?

The more the two sides try and call attention to their religious
differences by slaughtering each other, the less there is to
distinguish them from one another. They worship at the same altar.
They're both apostles of the same murderous god, whoever he is. In an
atmosphere so vitiated, for anybody, and in particular the Prime
Minister, to
arbitrarily decree exactly where the cycle started is malevolent and
irresponsible.

Right now we're sipping from a poisoned chalice—a flawed democracy
laced with religious fascism. Pure arsenic.

What shall we do? What can we do?

We have a ruling party that's haemorrhaging. Its rhetoric against
Terrorism, the passing of POTA, the sabre-rattling against Pakistan
(with the underlying nuclear threat), the massing of almost a million
soldiers on the border on hair-trigger alert, and most dangerous of
all, the attempt to communalise and falsify school history
text-books—none of this has prevented it from being humiliated in
election after election.
Even its old party trick—the revival of the Ram mandir plans in
Ayodhya—didn't quite work out. Desperate now, it has turned for
succour to the state of Gujarat.

Gujarat, the only major state in India to have a bjp government has,
for some years, been the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been
fomenting an elaborate political experiment. Last month, the initial
results were put on public display.

Within hours of the Godhra outrage, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (vhp)
and the Bajrang Dal put into motion a meticulously planned pogrom
against the Muslim community. Officially the number of dead is 800.
Independent
reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More than a hundred and
fifty thousand people, driven from their homes, now live in refugee
camps. Women were stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to
death in
front of their children. Two hundred and forty dargahs and 180
masjids were destroyed—in Ahmedabad the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the
founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in the
course of a
night. The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated
and wreathed in burning tyres. Arsonists burned and looted shops,
homes, hotels, textiles mills, buses and private cars. Hundreds of
thousands
have lost their jobs.

A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri.
His phone calls to the Director-General of Police, the Police
Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary
(Home) were ignored.
The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob
broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burned them
alive. Then they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of course
it's only a
coincidence that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat Chief
Minister, Narendra Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly
by-election in February.

Across Gujarat, thousands of people made up the mobs. They were armed
with petrol bombs, guns, knives, swords and tridents.Apart from the
vhp and Bajrang Dal's usual lumpen constituency, Dalits and Adivasis
took
part in the orgy. Middle-class people participated in the looting.
(On one memorable occasion a family arrived in a Mitsubishi Lancer.)
The leaders of the mob had computer-generated cadastral lists marking
out Muslim homes, shops, businesses and even partnerships. They had
mobile phones to coordinate the action. They had trucks loaded with
thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance, which they used
to blow up Muslim commercial establishments. They had not just police
protection and police connivance, but also covering fire.

While Gujarat burned, our Prime Minister was on mtv promoting his new
poems. (Reports say cassettes have sold a hundred thousand copies.)
It took him more than a month—and two vacations in the hills—to make
it to
Gujarat. When he did, shadowed by the chilling Mr Modi, he gave a
speech at the Shah Alam refugee camp. His mouth moved, he tried to
express concern, but no real sound emerged except the mocking of the
wind whistling through a burned, bloodied, broken world. Next we
knew, he was bobbing around in a golf-cart, striking business deals
in Singapore.

The killers still stalk Gujarat's streets. The lynch mob continues to
be the arbiter of the routine affairs of daily life: who can live
where, who can say what, who can meet who, and where and when. Its
mandate is expanding quickly. From religious affairs, it now extends
to property disputes, family altercations, the planning and
allocation of water resources... (which is why Medha Patkar of the
nba was assaulted). Muslim businesses have been shut down. Muslim
people are not served in restaurants. Muslim children are not welcome
in schools. Muslim students are too terrified to sit for their exams.
Muslim parents live in dread that their infants might forget what
they've been told and give themselves away by saying 'Ammi!' or
'Abba!' in public and invite sudden
and violent death.

Notice has been given: this is just the beginning.

Is this the Hindu rashtra that we've all been asked to look forward
to? Once the Muslims have been "shown their place", will milk and
Coca-Cola flow across the land? Once the Ram mandir is built, will
there be a shirt on every back and a roti in every belly? Will every
tear be wiped from every eye? Can we expect an anniversary
celebration next year? Or will there be someone else to hate by then?
Alphabetically—Adivasis, Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Parsis,
Sikhs? Those who wear jeans, or speak English, or those who have
thick lips, or curly hair? We won't have to wait long. It's started
already. Will the established rituals continue? Will people be
beheaded, dismembered and urinated upon? Will foetuses be ripped from
their mothers' wombs and slaughtered? (What kind of depraved vision
can even imagine India without the range and beauty and spectacular
anarchy of all these cultures? India would become a tomb and smell
like a crematorium.)

No matter who they were, or how they were killed, each person who
died in Gujarat in the weeks gone by deserves to be mourned.

There have been hundreds of outraged letters to journals and
newspapers asking why the "pseudo-secularists" do not condemn the
burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra with the same degree of
outrage with which
they condemn the killings in the rest of Gujarat.What they don't seem
to understand is that there is a fundamental difference between a
pogrom such as the one taking place in Gujarat now, and the burning
of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. We still don't know who exactly
was responsible for the carnage in Godhra. The government says
(without a shred of evidence) it was an isi plot. Independent reports
say the train was set on fire by an enraged mob.Either way, it was a
criminal act. But every independent report says the pogrom against
the Muslim community in Gujarat—billed by the government as
spontaneous 'retaliation'—has at best been conducted under the benign
gaze of the State and, at worst, with active State collusion. Either
way the State is criminally culpable. And the State acts in the name
of its citizens. So as a citizen, I am forced to acknowledge that I
am somehow made complicit in the Gujarat pogrom. It is this that
outrages me. And it is this that puts a completely different
complexion on the two massacres.

After the Gujarat Massacres, at its convention in Bangalore, the rss,
the moral and cultural guild of the bjp, of which the Prime Minister,
the Home Minister and Chief Minister Modi himself are all members,
called upon Muslims to earn the 'goodwill' of the majority community.
At the meeting of the national executive of the bjp in Goa, Narendra
Modi was greeted as a hero. His smirking offer to resign from the
chief minister's post was unanimously turned down. In a recent public
speech he compared the events of the last few weeks in Gujarat to
Gandhi's Dandi March—both, according to him, significant moments in
the Struggle for Freedom.

While the parallels between contemporary India and pre-war Germany
are chilling, they're not surprising. (The founders of the rss have,
in their writings, been frank in their admiration for Hitler and his
methods.) One difference is that here in India we don't have a
Hitler. We have instead, a travelling extravaganza, a mobile
symphonic orchestra. The hydra-headed, many-armed Sangh Parivar—with
the bjp, the rss, the vhp and the Bajrang Dal, each playing a
different instrument. Its utter genius lies in its apparent ability
to be all things to all
people at all times.

The Parivar has an appropriate head for every occasion. An old
versifier with rhetoric for every season. A rabble-rousing hardliner
for Home Affairs, a suave one for Foreign Affairs, a smooth,
English-speaking
lawyer to handle TV debates, a cold-blooded creature for a Chief
Minister and the Bajrang Dal and the vhp, grassroots workers in
charge of the physical labour that goes into the business of
genocide. Finally, this many-headed extravaganza has a lizard's tail
which drops off when it's in trouble, and grows back again: a
specious socialist dressed up as Defence Minister, who it sends on
its damage-limitation missions—wars, cyclones, genocides. They trust
him to press the right buttons, hit the right note.

The Sangh Parivar speaks in as many tongues as a whole corsage of trishuls.

It can say several contradictory things simultaneously.While one of
its heads (the vhp) exhorts millions of its cadres to prepare for the
Final Solution, its titular head (the Prime Minister) assures the
nation that all citizens, regardless of their religion, will be
treated equally. It can ban books and films and burn paintings for
'insulting Indian culture'. Simultaneously, it can mortgage the
equivalent of 60 per cent of the entire country's rural development
budget as profit to Enron. It contains within itself the full
spectrum of political opinion, so what
would normally be a public fight between two adversarial political
parties, is now just a Family Matter. However acrimonious the
quarrel, it's always conducted in public, always resolved amicably,
and the audience always goes away satisfied it's got value for
money—anger, action, revenge, intrigue, remorse, poetry and plenty of
gore. It's our own vernacular version of Full Spectrum Dominance.

But when the chips are down, really down, the squabbling heads
quieten, and it becomes chillingly apparent that underneath all the
clamour and the noise, a single heart beats. And an unforgiving mind
with saffron-saturated tunnel vision works overtime.

There have been pogroms in India before, every kind of
pogrom—directed at particular castes, tribes, religious faiths. In
1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress
Party presided over the massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi,
every bit as macabre as the one in Gujarat. At the time, Rajiv
Gandhi, never known for an elegant turn of phrase, said, "When a big
tree falls, the ground shakes". In 1985 the Congress swept the polls.
On a sympathy wave! Eighteen years have gone by. Nobody has been
punished.

Take any politically volatile issue—the nuclear tests, the Babri
Masjid, the Tehelka scam, the stirring of the communal cauldron for
electoral advantage—and you'll see the Congress Party has been there
before. In
every case, the Congress sowed the seed and the bjp has swept in to
reap the hideous harvest. So in the event that we're called upon to
vote, is there a difference between the two? The answer is a
faltering but distinct 'yes'. Here's why: It's true that the Congress
Party has sinned, and grievously, and for decades together. But it
has done by
night what the bjp does by day. It has done covertly, stealthily,
hypocritically, shamefacedly, what the bjp does with pride. And this
is an important difference.

Whipping up communal hatred is part of the mandate of the Sangh
Parivar. It has been planned for years. It has been injecting a
slow-release poison directly into civil society's bloodstream.
Hundreds of rss shakhas and Saraswati shishu mandirs across the
country have been indoctrinating thousands of children and young
people, stunting their minds with religious hatred and falsified
history. They're no different from, and no less dangerous than, the
madrassas all over Pakistan and Afghanistan which spawned the
Taliban. In states like Gujarat, the
police, the administration, and the political cadres at every level
have been systematically penetrated. It has huge popular appeal,
which it would be foolish to underestimate or misunderstand. The
whole enterprise has a formidable religious, ideological, political,
and administrative underpinning. This kind of power, this kind of
reach, can only be achieved with State backing.

Madrassas, the Muslim equivalent of hothouses cultivating religious
hatred, try and make up in frenzy and foreign funding, what they lack
in State support. They provide the perfect foil for Hindu
communalists to dance their dance of mass paranoia and hatred. (In
fact they serve that purpose so perfectly, they might just as well be
working as a team.)

  Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is that
the majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to living in
ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil
rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily life be like for
them? Any little thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas
at a traffic light, could turn lethal. So they will learn to keep
very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the edges of the
society in which they live. Their fear will transmit itself to other
minorities. Many, particularly the young, will probably turn to
militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society will be called
upon to condemn them. Then President Bush's canon will come back to
us: "Either you're with us or with the terrorists."

Those words hang frozen in time like icicles. For years to come,
butchers and genocidists will fit their grisly mouths around them
('lip-synch', filmmakers call it) in order to justify their butchery.

Mr Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, who has lately been feeling a
little upstaged by Mr Modi, has the lasting solution. He's called for
civil war. Isn't that just perfect? Then Pakistan won't need to bomb
us, we can bomb ourselves.Let's turn all of India into Kashmir. Or
Bosnia. Or Palestine. Or Rwanda. Let's all suffer forever. Let's buy
expensive guns and explosives to kill each other with. Let the
British arms dealers and the American weapons manufacturers grow fat
on our spilled blood. We could ask the Carlyle group—of which the
Bush and Bin Laden families are both shareholders—for a bulk
discount. Maybe if things go really well, we'll become like
Afghanistan. (And look at the publicity they've gone and got
themselves.) When all our farm lands are mined, our buildings
destroyed, our infrastructure reduced to rubble, our children
physically maimed and mentally wrecked, when we've nearly wiped
ourselves out with self-manufactured hatred, maybe we can appeal to
the Americans to help
us out. Airdropped airline meals, anyone?

How close we have come to self-destruction. Another step and we'll be
in free-fall. And yet the government presses on. At the Goa meeting
of the bjp's national executive, the Prime Minister of Secular,
Democratic India, Mr A.B. Vajpayee, made history. He became the first
Indian Prime Minister to cross the threshold and publicly unveil an
unconscionable bigotry against Muslims, which even George Bush, and
Donald Rumsfeld would be embarrassed to own up to. "Wherever Muslims
are," he said, "they do not want to live peacefully."

Shame on him. But if only it were just him: in the immediate
aftermath of the Gujarat holocaust, confident of the success of its
'experiment', the bjp wants a snap poll. "The gentlest of people," my
friend from Baroda said to me, "the gentlest of people, in the
gentlest of voices, says 'Modi is our hero.'"

Some of us nurtured the naive hope that the magnitude of the horror
of the last few weeks would make the Secular Parties, however
self-serving, unite in sheer outrage. On its own, the bjp does not
have the mandate of the people of India. It does not have the mandate
to push through the Hindutva project. We hoped that the 27 allies
that make up the bjp-led coalition at the Centre would withdraw their
support. We thought, quite stupidly, that they would see that there
could be no bigger test of their moral fibre, of their commitment to
their avowed principles of
secularism.

It's a sign of the times that not a single one of the bjp's allies
has withdrawn support. In every shifty eye you see that faraway look
of someone doing mental maths to calculate which constituencies and
portfolios they'll retain and which ones they'll lose if they pull
out. Except for Deepak Parekh of hdfc, not a single ceo of India's
Corporate
Community has condemned what happened. Farooq Abdullah, Chief
Minister of Kashmir and the only prominent Muslim politician left in
India, is currying favour with the government by supporting Modi
because he's
nursing the dim hope that he may become Vice-President of India very
soon.And worst of all—Mayawati, leader of the bsp—the great hope of
the lower castes, is on the verge of forging an alliance with the bjp
in UP.

The Congress and the Left parties have launched a public agitation
asking for Modi's resignation. Resignation? Have we lost all sense of
proportion? Criminals are not meant to resign. They're meant to be
charged, tried and convicted. As those who burned the train in Godhra
should be. As the mobs, and those members of the police force and the
administration who planned and participated in the pogrom in the rest
of Gujarat should be. As those responsible for raising the pitch of
the frenzy to boiling point must be. The Supreme Court has the option
of
acting against Modi and the Bajrang Dal and the vhp suo motu (when
the Court itself files charges). There are hundreds of testimonies.
There's masses of evidence.

But in India if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a
politician, you have every reason to be optimistic.No one even
expects politicians to be prosecuted. To demand that Modi and his
henchmen be arraigned and put away, would make other politicians
vulnerable to their own unsavoury pasts—so instead they disrupt
parliament, shout a lot, eventually those in power set up commissions
of inquiry, ignore the findings and between themselves make sure the
juggernaut chugs on.

Already the issue has begun to morph. Should elections be allowed or
not? Should the Election Commission decide that? Or the Supreme
Court? Either way, whether elections are held or deferred, by
allowing Modi to walk free, by allowing him to continue with his
career as a politician, the fundamental, governing principles of
democracy are not just being subverted, but deliberately sabotaged.
This kind of democracy is the problem, not the solution. Our
society's greatest strength is being turned into her deadliest enemy.
What's the point of us all going on about 'deepening democracy', when
it's being bent and twisted into something unrecognisable?

What if the bjp does win the elections? (The buzz is that engineering
a war against Pakistan is going to be the bjp's strategy to swing the
vote.) After all, George Bush had an 80 per cent rating in his War
Against Terror, and Ariel Sharon has a similar mandate for his
bestial invasion of Palestine. Does that make everything all right?
Why not
dispense with the legal system, the Constitution, the press—the whole
shebang—morality itself, why not chuck it and put everything up for a
vote? Genocides can become the subject of opinion polls and massacres
can have marketing campaigns.

Fascism's firm footprint has appeared in India. Let's mark the date:
Spring, 2002. While we can thank the American President and the
Coalition Against Terror for creating a congenial international
atmosphere for its ghastly debut, we cannot credit them for the years
it has been brewing in our public and private lives.

It breezed in in the wake of the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. From
then onwards, the massed energy of bloodthirsty patriotism became
openly acceptable political currency. The 'weapons of peace' trapped
India and
Pakistan in a spiral of brinkmanship—threat and counter-threat, taunt
and counter-taunt. And now, one war and hundreds of dead later, more
than a million soldiers from both armies are massed at the border,
eyeball to eyeball, locked in a pointless nuclear standoff. The
escalating belligerence against Pakistan has ricocheted off the border
and entered our own body politic, like a sharp blade slicing through
the vestiges of communal harmony and tolerance between the Hindu and
Muslim communities. In no time at all, the godsquadders from hell have
colonised the public imagination. And we allowed them in. Each time
the hostility between India and Pakistan is cranked up, within India
there's a corresponding increase in the hostility towards the
Muslims. With each
battle cry against Pakistan, we inflict a wound on ourselves, on our
way of life, on our spectacularly diverse and ancient civilisation,
on everything that makes India different from Pakistan. Increasingly,
Indian Nationalism has come to mean Hindu Nationalism, which defines
itself not through a respect or regard for itself, but through a
hatred of the Other. And the Other, for the moment, is not just
Pakistan, it's Muslim. It's disturbing to see how neatly nationalism
dovetails into fascism. While we must not allow the fascists to
define what the nation
is, or who it belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind that
nationalism, in all its many avatars—socialist, capitalist and
fascist—has been at the root of almost all the genocides of the
twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it's wise to proceed
with caution.

Can we not find it in ourselves to belong to an ancient civilisation
instead of to just a recent nation? To love a land instead of just
patrolling a territory? The Sangh Parivar understands nothing of what
civilisation means.It seeks to limit, reduce, define, dismember and
desecrate the memory of what we were, our understanding of what we
are,
and our dreams of who we want to be. What kind of India do they want?
A limbless, headless, soulless torso, left bleeding under the
butchers' cleaver with a flag driven deep into her mutilated heart?
Can we let that happen? Have we let it happen?

The incipient, creeping fascism of the past few years has been
groomed by many of our 'democratic' institutions. Everyone has
flirted with it—Parliament, the press, the police, the
administration, the public. Even 'secularists' have been guilty of
helping to create the right climate. Each time you defend the right
of an institution, any institution (including the Supreme Court), to
exercise unfettered, unaccountable powers that must never be
challenged, you move towards fascism. To be fair, perhaps not
everyone recognised the early signs for what they were.

The national press has been startlingly courageous in its
denunciation of the events of the last few weeks. Many of the bjp's
fellow travellers who have journeyed with it to the brink are now
looking down the abyss into the hell that was once Gujarat, and
turning away in genuine dismay. But how hard and for how long will
they fight? This is not going to be like a publicity campaign for an
upcoming cricket season.And there will not always be spectacular
carnage to report on. Fascism is also about the slow, steady
infiltration of all the instruments of State power.
It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular
day-to-day injustices. Fighting it means fighting to win back the
minds and hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean asking for rss
shakhas and the madrassas to be banned, it means working towards the
day when they're voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas.It means keeping
an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability. It
means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering
of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the myriad voices
from the hundreds of resistance movements across the country who are
speaking about real things—about bonded labour, marital rape, sexual
preferences, women's wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable mining,
weavers' woes, farmers' worries. It means fighting displacement and
dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of abject
poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your newspaper columns
and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and
their staged theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from
everything else.

While most people in India have been horrified by what happened in
Gujarat, many thousands of the indoctrinated are preparing to journey
deeper into the heart of the horror. Look around you and you'll see
in little parks, in big maidans, in empty lots, in village commons,
the rss is marching, hoisting its saffron flag. Suddenly they're
everywhere, grown men in khaki shorts marching, marching, marching.
To where? For what? Their disregard for history shields them from the
knowledge that fascism will thrive for a short while and then
self-annihilate because of its inherent stupidity. But unfortunately,
like the radioactive fallout of a nuclear strike, it has a half-life
that will cripple generations to come.

These levels of rage and hatred cannot be contained, cannot be
expected to subside, with public censure and denunciation. Hymns of
brotherhood and love are great, but not enough.

Historically, fascist movements have been fuelled by feelings of
national disillusionment. Fascism has come to India after the dreams
that fuelled the Freedom Struggle have been frittered away like so
much loose change.

Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a
'wooden loaf'—a notional freedom tainted by the blood of the
thousands who died during Partition.For more than half a century now,
the hatred and mutual distrust has been exacerbated, toyed with and
never allowed to heal by politicians, led from the front by Mrs
Indira Gandhi. Every political party has tilled the marrow of our
secular parliamentary democracy, mining it for electoral advantage.
Like termites excavating a mound, they've made tunnels and
underground passages, undermining the meaning of 'secular', until it
has just become an empty shell that's about to implode. Their tilling
has weakened the foundations of the structure that connects the
Constitution, Parliament and the courts of law—the configuration of
checks and balances that forms the backbone of a parliamentary
democracy. Under the circumstances, it's futile to go on blaming
politicians and demanding from them a morality they're incapable of.
There's something pitiable about a people that constantly bemoans its
leaders. If they've let us down, it's only because we've allowed them
to. It could be argued that civil society has failed its leaders as
much as leaders have failed civil society. We have to accept that
there is a dangerous, systemic flaw in our parliamentary democracy
that politicians will exploit. And that's what results in the kind of
conflagration that we have witnessed in Gujarat. There's fire in the
ducts. We have to address this issue and come up with a systemic
solution.

But politicians' exploitation of communal divides is by no means the
only reason that fascism has arrived on our shores.

Over the past fifty years, ordinary citizens' modest hopes for lives
of dignity, security and relief from abject poverty have been
systematically snuffed out. Every 'democratic' institution in this
country has shown itself to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the
ordinary citizen, and either unwilling, or incapable of acting, in the
interests of genuine social justice. Every strategy for real social
change—land reform, education, public health, the equitable
distribution of natural resources, the implementation of positive
discrimination—has been cleverly, cunningly and consistently scuttled
and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people who
have a stranglehold on the political process. And now corporate
globalisation is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an
essentially feudal society, tearing through its complex, tiered,
social fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.

There is very real grievance here. And the fascists didn't create it.
But they have seized upon it, upturned it and forged from it a
hideous, bogus sense of pride. They have mobilised human beings using
the lowest common denominator—religion. People who have lost control
over their lives, people who have been uprooted from their homes and
communities who have lost their culture and their language, are being
made to feel proud of something. Not something they have striven for
and achieved, not something they can count as a personal
accomplishment, but something they just happen to be. Or, more
accurately, something they happen not to be. And the falseness, the
emptiness of that pride, is fuelling a gladiatorial anger that is
then directed towards a simulated target that
has been wheeled into the amphitheatre.

How else can you explain the project of trying to disenfranchise,
drive out or exterminate the second-poorest community in this
country, using as your footsoldiers the very poorest (Dalits and
Adivasis)? How else
can you explain why Dalits in Gujarat, who have been despised,
oppressed and treated worse than refuse by the upper castes for
thousands of years, have joined hands with their oppressors to turn
on those who are only marginally less unfortunate than they
themselves? Are they just wage slaves, mercenaries for hire? Is it
all right to patronise them and absolve them of responsibility for
their own actions? Or am I being obtuse? Perhaps it's common practice
for the unfortunate to vent their rage and hatred on the next most
unfortunate, because their real
adversaries are inaccessible, seemingly invincible and completely out
of range? Because their own leaders have cut loose and are feasting
at the high table, leaving them to wander rudderless in the
wilderness, spouting nonsense about returning to the Hindu fold. (The
first step, presumably, towards founding a Global Hindu Empire, as
realistic a goal as Fascism's previously failed projects—the
restoration of Roman Glory, the purification of the German race or
the establishment of an Islamic Sultanate.)

One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India. Hindu fascists
regard them as legitimate prey. Do people like Modi and Bal Thackeray
think that the world will stand by and watch while they're liquidated
in a 'civil war?' Press reports say that the European Union and
several other countries have condemned what happened in Gujarat and
likened it to Nazi rule. The Indian government's portentous response
is that foreigners should not use the Indian media to comment on what
is an 'internal matter' (like the chilling goings-on in Kashmir?).
What next? Censorship? Closing down the Internet? Blocking
international calls? Killing the wrong 'terrorists' and fudging the
dna samples? There is no terrorism like State terrorism.

But who will take them on? Their fascist cant can perhaps be dented
by some blood and thunder from the Opposition. So far only Laloo
Yadav of Bihar has shown himself to be truly passionate: "Kaun mai ka
lal kehta
hai ki yeh Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do, chhati phad
doonga!" (Which mother's son says this is a Hindu Nation? Send him
here, I'll tear his chest open.)

Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can only be turned
away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social
justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.

Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many
millions of us, to rally not just on the streets, but at work and in
schools and in our homes, in every decision we take, and every choice
we make?

Or not just yet...

If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned
us (as it should), like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we
too will learn to recognise revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human
beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in
the eye, for the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of
what we allowed to happen.

This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.
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