(Around the world there has been a rise in the dangers of fundamentalism ranging from the christian-capitalist fundamentalism of the Bush regime, to Islamic fundamentalism of various forms, to Hindu fundamentalism in India which has attempted ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population. In this article HIMANI BANNERJI explores the dynamics of Hindu fundamentalism and raises crucial questions about the relation between state and civil society, the construction of ethnic notions of citizenship, and the relation of ethnic and religious fundamentalism to emerging forms of fascism.)

In February, 2002, and in the following months, something momentous happened, not just for India, but for the soul of the world. It needs to be spoken about, understood, redressed. Terrible crimes against humanity face us with the question of social justice and its interface with law and state. I write this with sorrow and outrage, using for its title an old Bengali proverb expressing despair and hope. When governments perpetrate injustice then the wind speaks in the voices of ordinary people and their organizations. They bear witness, call for redress, search for truth, without which justice is blind. But for them the oppressors would sleep in peace.

THE CARNAGE

Muslims constitute about 12.5 per cent of the Indian population, and their socio-economic situation was best in Gujarat, a northern Indian state bordering on Pakistan. On February 27, 2002, a train bringing back volunteers of hindu fundamentalist groups from Ayodhya, where they had gone to agitate for the building of a Ram temple on the site of a 16th century mosque razed by the same groups in 1992, was torched. This resulted in the deaths of 58 hindu persons, including 26 women and 12 children. Though a government inquiry stated that this fire started inside the train, rather than being set from outside, muslims were immediately blamed. On February 28th, a huge carnage, orchestrated by the hindu nationalist party BJP (Indian People’s Party). and other hindu fundamentalists, started against muslims. Total terror happened at a cyclonic speed.

By government count 850-1000 people were killed while the unofficial estimate is 2000. Some 10,204 homes and 10,429 shops were burnt. More than 150,000 people were displaced. Many were hacked and burned. There were numerous reports of women being gang-raped, objects inserted into their vaginas and wombs, uteruses slashed, fetuses extracted and burnt. Rape and foeticide were major instruments for the subjugation of the muslim community. Hundreds of mosques, tombs and other holy sites, and madrasas (religious schools) were destroyed. Attacking mobs numbering from 2000 to 15,000 were armed with deadly agricultural implements, swords, trishuls/tridents, guns and rifles. Some carried mobile phones to coordinate the attacks.

The state government of Gujarat, and its ruling party the BJP, as well as the central BJP government, contributed to this violence. Both the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and the prime minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, justified it. BJP top brass and their allies had a thesis of pre-planned attacks by muslims and immediately alleged the evil hand of Pakistan. Encouraged and orchestrated by the state of Gujarat, armed squads launched their kristall nacht [the night in 1938 when Nazi thugs in Germany launched a reign of terror by smashing the windows of Jewish homes and businesses—editors]. Eyewitness and survivors and enquiries have named BJP ministers, and other state officials and politicians as mob leaders. Left parties, women’s groups, civil liberty groups and investigative journalists have concurred that the BJP and fundamentalist groups had been planning this carnage since they came to power in 1998, when they declared Gujarat to be a laboratory of hindutva (the essence of hinduism).

The Gujarat police were deeply condemned. Their conduct has been one of complicity with the hindu attackers, of perpetration of crime as well as criminal negligence in failing to protect the life, property and livelihood of muslims. Furthermore, there are reports that police conducted search and destroy operations of muslim homes, arresting muslim males indiscriminately, including under-age boys, employing the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) to detain and torture them.

The carnage brings us face to face with key questions about the state, justice, the limits of law and national as well as nationalist politics. A crucial one is about the convergence of the state and cultural/civil society groups in bringing about this ethnic cleansing. Is it an aberration or is it intrinsic to the relationship between state and civil society? How is one to think about law when the state, its promulgator and guardian, can hold it in such contempt or use it for victimization? What are the options and opportunities for resistance?

STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY: THE HINDU RIGHT

We need to challenge the convention of seeing state and civil society as two separate spaces — as promoted by the World Bank, various Non Governmental Organizations and theorists of new social movements.

Their integral relationship becomes clear when we look at the organizations of the hindu fundamentalists and nationalists, that is, the hindu right. They stretch from social, cultural, religious, and recreational organizations to electoral parties, from the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] to the BJP. This integrity between state and civil society is revealed in their self- identification as an organically related group, the Sangh Parivar, that is, the holy family. Its founding father is the RSS, created in 1925 by V.S. Hedgewar. The stated aim of the RSS was to develop a hindu nation — but at the level of culture, disputing the Indian National Congress’ aim of “territorial nationalism.” Modeled consciously on Hitler’s Nazi Party, the RSS “national” culture was to be “hindu” culture, as understood in high caste brahminical terms, and through the orientalist myth of Aryan nation (see glossary at end). The defining other for this hindutva or hinduness were not the colonizing British, but rather the muslims, who were to be treated as “foreigners” and if possible eliminated. The RSS eventually proliferated into the World Hindu Council (VHP) in 1964, with extensive international outreach in the UK, the US and Canada. In the right historical juncture it took on a direct political expression in the BJP. This combine expressed itself through the metaphor of the high caste family, invoking moral regulations about women and children and spreading moral panic regarding muslims. It represented India as a `hindu’ nation and interpreted hinduism according to its political ideology.

These cultural and political groups of the hindu right speak about a oneness in each other. With activities ranging from reciting of epics to arms training, they provide recruiters, ideologues and foot soldiers for riot and ethnic cleansing. The Sangh Parivar’s hinduness has successfully politicized religion, drawing into its fold the community of north Indian (especially) holy men and organizations, thus attempting to build, as all fascist projects aim, a totalizing socio-political environment. It has sought to produce from a polymorphous hinduism, with multiple sets of dieties, and practices, through a brahminical interpretation, an essential or fundamental hinduism or hindutva. It has sought to be at once state and society, encompassing morality and spirituality in the process. But as with all fascist projects, it needs a primary enemy – as the Nazis did – and found it in muslims. But humanists, secularists, feminists and communists are also on its hate list and targeted within its discourse of pseudo-anti-colonialism in the rhetoric of authentic history and faith. Even though India as a whole is not in the thrall of hindu fundamentalism, in Gujarat the space for opposition has shrunk considerably, and civil liberty for muslims is non-existent. If the BJP becomes an absolute majority in the Indian parliament it will certainly change the current Indian secular democratic constitution and establish a hindu rashtra/state and ethnicize citizenship, thus minoritizing muslims. It is as likely in India, as it was for the Nazis, that a fascist party may come to full state power through democratic means by reducing democracy into mere electoral form. Law will be used to outlaw a democratic rule of law. Already the process has begun since September 11, 2001 by the promulgation of an anti-terrorism law (POTO) mirroring those in North America. Targets are all muslims depicted as “terrorists” and “Pakistani spies.” A discourse of `patriots and traitors’, similar to that in the U.S. and Canada since September 11th, has been worked up. The BJP and its civil society groups and allies have been performing dress rehearsals for genocide for the last decade. In Gujarat, the `laboratory’ of hindutva, a poisonous cauldron is bubbling over.

ETHNIC CLEANSING AND PURIFICATION

What happened in Gujarat fits the classic picture of genocide or ethnic cleansing. This ethnic cleansing is not an aberration but rather a necessity of this fascist project. The present Indian constitution, as in all liberal democracies, ascribes citizenship and rights on an individual basis, irrespective of religion, caste, gender and class, and also mandates state protection for life, dignity, property and livelihood for all people living within its jurisdiction. The BJP in Gujarat has blatantly violated this, as would the BJP at the center if it could. As ethnicity constitutes the basis of polity in this vision, it is also the mode of access to socio-economic and cultural power and resources. Its discourse has shifted the notion of individual citizenship to one of communal collectivities, of majority and minority, and thus away from formal political equality and secularism. Minority options consist of submission, expulsion or elimination at this point.

This project of hinduization is not new for the BJP or the Sangh Parivar, nor is the notion and method of cleansing. Just as the RSS’s project in 1925 was to create this hindu nation and cleanse it of any muslim presence, recently Jaideep Patel of the VHP has boasted how in parts of Gujarat there are no traces of muslims. In this context we should reflect on the very notion of cleansing or purification, and on rituals of sacrifice as its specific mode. The RSS has always wanted to socio-politically actualize the orientalist invention of an aryan brahminical civilization. Then and now this remains its ideological core, its chief legitimation. In order to perform this task of purification the notion of hindutva was invented. Made from north Indian practices and religious texts, this hindutva is an elite brahminical hegemony, obsessed with purification and cleansing – of the body and the body politic.

This purity, as to be expected, is hard to come by in the real world. In a complex and changing world “others” , such as muslims, women, untouchables/dalits, low caste and christians constantly introduce impurity and pollution. Cultural, physical and spiritual essences are constantly sullied and must be cleansed. Thus purification or ethnic cleansing is an imperative for building the nation and its state. From the 1920s, then, shuddhi or ritual purification as scripted by brahminism has been performed in order to create a hindu nation. From time to time low castes and dalits, buddhists and christian converts, have been “purified” through forcible re-conversion in order to be brought into the lowest rung of the hindu fold.

Muslims, mostly converted from local populations, as the second largest religious group in India, have proved to be an intractable problem for the hindu fundamentalist nationalists. As the major “other” social group they are the hated co-heirs of India, of what hindus claim to be their patrimony. They are the “natural others” of the hindutva mongers. To make a hindu state/nation, then, they must be eliminated in every sense. As fire is the ultimate ritual purifier for hindus it is not surprising that it is to this fire that muslims of Gujarat were sacrificed. Though arson is used in carnages in other places, the use of it in this high caste hindu context cannot but resonate with a vedic brahminical, nazi-aryan ethos. A hindu India must rise from fire and ashes, bathed in the blood of ritual sacrifices conducted with Shaivite tridents, kshatrya swords and other killing implements described in hindu epics. And most importantly, muslims must be stopped from re-generating or reproducing. This is where gang rapes of women and girls, other acts of physical and sexual violence against women, and the killing of muslim children come in.

Violence against women and children, then, is not only a matter of humiliating the (male) enemy. It is the ultimate aspect of ethnic cleansing. This is signaled by constant and long-standing Sangh Parivar propaganda of excess in muslim fertility. The reproduction of muslims, they feel, must be stopped. These atrocities, then, are means to that end, both at a physical and a symbolic level. Bodies of women, girls, children and fetuses have been treated as war zones. The use of violence to stop the reproduction of the enemy group is the physical equivalent of the use of agent orange, napalm, land mines or scorched earth activities.

Ethnic cleansing ranges from Europe through Africa. The European colonization of the Americas exhibited some of the most violent and earliest examples of it. So, hindu fundamentalist nationalists are part of this tradition of colonizing bodies, lands and cultures. But in different contexts this “cleansing” takes different ideological and symbolic forms. In this high caste hindu version it combines the modern eugenicist notion of “race” with the brahminical notion of physical “blood” purity and lineage and the nazi aryan myth. This is its own way of constructing and legitimating a purification in both social and religious ritual terms.

PATHS OF RESISTANCE BEYOND ETHNICITY

We are, then, faced with the question of resistance. Do civil liberties groups or civil disobedience, in fact any sort of “civil” action, stand any chance in this situation where the state, with a monopoly of violence, and in conjunction with civil society groups, is the oppressor? Relatedly, how feasible or moral is it to ask for non-violence from those who are harmed, systematically oppressed with no legitimate armed forces or a state on their side? These questions go beyond India to other spaces. On what international strength, with whose support, are these ethnic cleansings carried out and who do they mimic?

In the case of India, the United States plays a big part in making the BJP government feel invulnerable. Just as with the islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan during the Cold War, now this BJP government and its holy family have become the most allied of allies to the US. The BJP has offered unconditional support to US policies in the Middle East and Central Asia, and shares its rhetoric of “islamic terror.” This government has also built close military and intelligence ties with Israel, and uses Sharon’s rhetoric and the prededents of America and Israel as the justification of carnage in Gujarat for the pacification of terrorism. Citing the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it engages in extermination. No substantial exposé or condemnation of this ethnic cleansing or carnage has followed in the Western media. This makes evident the hypocrisy of Western governments regarding the Taliban or islamic fundamentalism in general. A hindu version of the Taliban which destroys a whole population in a province in India passes as a legitimate national government.

In India itself the picture is more hopeful. In spite of its capacity for producing horror, in many states of India the BJP has been losing elections and by-elections, and massive popular condemnation combined with media exposure have appeared through these months in Gujarat. Secular political parties and social groups — communist parties and rights activists — have produced extensive reports and demanded inquiries and redress. Even the central state machinery is divided, the Election Commission of India and Supreme Court judges have introduced strong brakes in the hindutva march. Active opposition in India is neither impossible nor absent, and it is not restricted within the parameter of civil liberties and civil disobedience. The agents of opposition and their goals extend to the unseating of this hindutva combine electorally and in retrieving spaces in the state machinery from them. Human rights organizations, left and democratic parties, all know that this project threatens nothing less than an absolute loss of democracy in India with terrible consequences for all.

The hegemony of the BJP at all levels of state, polity and civil society is far from complete, and all these spheres are scored with contradictions and, therefore, contestation.