Terrorism, Islamaphobia and Hindutva

[Dr. John Dayal]

Any lessons from Norway on internal threat from xenophobic fanaticism
of the Majority?

JOHN DAYAL

‎"The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not "Islamo-fascism" --
that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that
it will one day strike a meaning -- but plain old fascism. The kind
whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize
minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority,”
Prof Dilip Simeon wrote to me in a message on my Facebook profile.
This was after I wrote that zealots and terrorists of all sorts live
in a zone where it becomes difficult to tell them apart. Dilip is a
younger contemporary from our days at St Stephen’s college. He faced a
murderous assault in Ramjas College, Delhi, where he taught, and
emerged as a major human rights voice after the anti Sikh violence in
Delhi in 1984.

The Norway massacre of July 2011 is indeed Fascism with thick overlays
of Racism and Xenophobia.
Islamophobia was common on the World Wide Web. So was Islamic
intolerance of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and Sikh minorities
in West and South Asia.

Islamic terror is well documented, more so since the bombing of the
World Trade Towers in New York and the rise of Al Qaida. Despite Osama
bin Laden’s assassination, it remains under the hawks-eye of the US
and West Europe intelligence, who share their information on a real-
time basis. It is also well documented in India where not only
government agencies but also the common people – driven by the
ceaseless propaganda by the Bharatiya Janata party and the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, lapped up eagerly by our Hindi and English language
TV Channels -- keep track of all things “suspicious” in their
neighborhood.

Analysis of majority terrorism have, for now, overwhelmed WWW portals
in the wake of the Norway bombing-and-massacre by Christian gunman and
bomber Anders Behring Breivik who singlehandedly killed 76 youth in
his twin acts of violence. There is some emerging evidence that the
killer, a drug user, may have himself largely used the Internet to
keep abreast of, if not actually in personal touch with, political
allies as far away as in the United Kingdom. He was also in touch with
the WebPages, if not some webmasters, of the Sangh Parivar in India.
In another chilling parallel, he too used large quantities of
phosphorous and nitrogenous fertilizers in his car bomb, the same
ingredients used by the perpetrators on the recent serial bombings in
Mumbai, and in earlier bombings traced both to Islamic and Sangh
groups.

This reporter has some experience of Xenophobia, both at the academic
level and at personal level when he was living abroad as a journalist
in the late 1980s, and saw Britani’s skinheads wreck havoc on lonely
passers on the underground railways late at night both in London and
in Germany, or desecrate Jewish graveyards. Recent visits show that
neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism remains an issue in West Europe. Even in
Poland, a devout Catholic country, the authorities are looking deeply
at signs of emerging anti-Semitism and fascist youth groups who in a
unified Europe can travel across borders with ease. The fact that
Poland is where the Nazi Germans set up the notorious mass murder
camps of Auschwitz makes the task of containing these groups so much
more urgent. Poland, current President of the European Union, is
however, taking transparent measures to check this political trend.

However, some other countries have apparently started going the
xenophobic way in the wake of the economic meltdown, particularly in
Germany, Ireland, even Greece, Spain and Portugal. At a recent
international seminar in Holland, this correspondent came face to face
with how governmetns can take wrong decisions when pressured by
populist moves from opposition or ruling political groups and their
cohorts in the masses. Holland itself has a not very clean image on
racial issues despite the large number of descendants of migrants from
former African and Indonesian Dutch colonies. But it is now
monitoring, in a scientific way, hate speeches and hate documents. The
lawmakers are also waking up to face right wing politicians who work
on the people’s insecurities, economic or personal. Demanding cultural
assimilation, specially from Muslim migrants, but also for instance
from Sikhs, is the tip of the iceberg. Majoritarian xenophobia is
dangerous, and Europe has long been Islamophobic, one can all the way
back to the first Crusades to wrest Christian Holy Lands from Muslim
control.
The examples that were cited from Ireland however took the xenophobic
cake. Ireland – south or Republic of Ireland – has had good relations
with India for more than a century, sharing an anti-colonial and anti
imperialist history opposing British domination. Ireland also has a
wonderful history of trade Unions. Former Indian President VV Giri was
a respected trade unionist in Ireland before he came back to Indian
politics. Irish freedom fighters borrowed the weapon of the peaceful
hunger strike from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and many Irish youth
dies in jail while on fasts-unto-death. Irish men and women themselves
suffered anti-Celtic racism when they came down to England looking for
work.

And yet, Ireland is now in the midst of installing a system to stop
“birthing tourism”. Ireland has a policy like some other countries,
which grant automatic citizenship to a child born in the land.
Apparently, leveraging this law, many pregnant women from poorer
countries would take a flight to Ireland in the last month of their
pregnancy, deliver a child in Ireland, and then stay back as a family
of the newborn “citizen of Ireland”. Efforts are now on to plug this
“loophole”. Birth Tourism will be soon a memory. {For Indian
Catholics, it may be salutary to remember that Ireland has hit out
sharply at the Vatican, attacking the Pope on issues of protecting
children from sexual violence.

What should ring alarm bells in New Delhi, indeed in the whole of
India, is the real or make-believe environment in which the Norwegian
young man of the unpronounceable name reached his delusional but fatal
conclusions. His personal manifesto hails Hindutva, noting that the
goals of the Sanatana Dharma nationalists were identical to Justiciar
Knights, a future group, and therefore it could be key ally in a
global struggle to bring down democratic regimes across the world.
That future campaign would wage a campaign that will graduate from
acts of terrorism to a global war involving weapons of mass
destruction — aimed at bringing down the “cultural Marxist” order.
Breivik acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of “cultural
conservatives” not just across Europe but North America, Australia,
South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-
Muslim groups far beyond Europe.

Western media noted that India figured in a “remarkable” 102 pages of
the 1,518-page manifesto. “Hindu nationalists are suffering from the
same persecution by the Indian cultural Marxists as their European
cousins,” he noted, condemning the Dr Manmohan Singh government of
“appeasing Muslims and, very sadly, proselytising Christian
missionaries who illegally convert low caste Hindus with lies and
fear, alongside Communists who want total destruction of the Hindu
faith and culture.”

An interesting sweep, as he goes on to applaud groups who “do not
tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when
things get out of control.” His advice is that the Indian groups
“instead of attacking the Muslims, should target the category A and B
traitors in India and consolidate military cells and actively seek the
overthrow of the cultural Marxist government. It is essential that the
European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and
cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical.”
Organisations figuring in that deadly manifesto include the BJP,
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. They will have some explaining to do as the
manifesto pledges military support “to the nationalists in the Indian
civil war and in the deportation of all Muslims from India.”

Americans newspaper Christian Science Monitor’s Delhi based columnist
Anders Behring notes that in the case of India, “there is significant
overlap between Breivik’s rhetoric and strains of Hindu nationalism –
or Hindutva – on the question of coexistence with Muslims.” Behrings
records that Human rights activists have long decried such rhetoric in
India for creating a milieu for communal violence, “and the Norway
incidents are prompting calls here to confront the issue.”

The Hindu’s correspondent Praveen Swami, derided often for his
apparent toeing of the line of the Indian Intelligence Bureau in his
reportage, strikes a similar note saying “Like Europe’s mainstream
right-wing parties, the BJP has condemned the terrorism of the right –
but not the thought system which drives it. Its refusal to engage in
serious introspection, or even to unequivocally condemn Hindutva
violence, has been nothing short of disgraceful. Liberal parties,
including the Congress, have been equally evasive in their critique of
both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism,” he adds.

Human rights activists second the view that there are important
lessons for India in the murderous violence in Norway: lessons it can
ignore only at risk to its own survival.

It was left not to an Indian newspaper but to the Christian Science
Monitor to recall that former East Delhi‘s BJP Member of Parliament
Baikunth Lal Sharma ‘Prem' held a secret meeting with key members of a
terrorist group responsible for a nationwide bombing campaign
targeting Muslims. He has been quoted as saying “It has been a year
since I sent some three lakh letters, distributed 20,000 maps of
Akhand Bharat but these Brahmins and Banias have not done anything and
neither will they do anything. It is not that physical power is the
only way to make a difference, but to awaken people mentally, I
believe that you have to set fire to society.”

In recent weeks, we have seen a sharp rhetoric coming from the BJP
opposing the drat Communal and Targetted Violence Prevention Bill
written by the civil society members of the National Advisory Council
of the government of India. The BJP rhetoric seeks to rouse the common
Hindu population by falsely trying to create ear among them from
religious minorities. The BJP and RSS leadership, which targets
individual activists as much as the NAC as a body, says the Bill
crimeless the Hindu community while empowering the Muslims and
Christians. This is a blatant lie. The draft bill – which has not yet
been presented to the Union Cabinet and is still far away from the
final shape that will be visible when it comes up before the Rajya
Sabha -- merely ensures that a government response is triggered at the
first indication of communal violence, and that the authorities are
held responsible because it is their lethargy and complicity that has
aggravated riots in the past.

Not surprisingly, mainstream political parties, among them the
Congress, the Marxists and the socialist or Dravidian parties, have so
far not challenged the BJP rhetoric. No senior leader has come before
the media to denounce this blatant effort to whip up passions.

It has been left to the two persons outside the official power
structure – Mani Shankar Aiyar and former Madhya Pradesh Chief
minister Digvijay Singh – to come down to brass tacks and identify the
Sangh Parivar for threatening Indian secularism and unity, and for
itself being a purveyor of terror, including terror bombings.
Digvijay Singh is on record for saying repeatedly that bombings take
place when the BJP is “politically cornered over something or the
other. The timing of the bomb blasts is quite uncanny. Why does it
always happen when the BJP is in trouble? That needs investigation”

Digvijay, an archetypal politician, speaks of the coincidences. “When
the Tehelka issue was to be discussed in Parliament, the House was
adjourned for three days. Then when the expose was to be discussed,
the Parliament attack took place. When the Godhra incident took place,
Congress was doing exceedingly well in the local body elections and
Narendra Modi had won by only 6,000 votes as a chief minister and that
too with great difficulty. During the recent Karnataka election, there
was a bomb blast in Hubli on the very first day of polling. Similarly,
two days before the polling in the second phase in Karnataka
elections, there was a bomb blast in Jaipur. It really needs an
investigation.”

Whatever investigations have taken place have unearthed a pretty large
and well oiled ring whose nodes and modules involve Army officers,
Sadhus and Sadhvi and men at the top of the RSS, the Vanvasi Kalyan
Ashram and other groups. The national Intelligence Agency’s charge
sheets in court make for chilling reading.
Digvijay Singh adds to the charge sheets by way of background, ”In
1992 there was a bomb blast in the VHP office in Madhya Pradesh, where
one VHP member died and two were injured while making bombs. Then in
2002, there was a bomb blast in a temple in Mhow. When the police
arrested the VHP activists after investigation, they confessed that
they were even given training to manufacture bombs. I have a
videocassette of that confession. Again, in 2006, in Nanded, there was
a bomb blast in the house of a RSS activist where two RSS activists
died. After that in March 2008, there were bomb blasts at two places
in Tamil Nadu. Then too VHP activists were arrested by the Tamil Nadu
police who confessed that they were involved. And how did the Gujarat
police suddenly find eighteen bombs planted on trees in Surat. RSS,
VHP activists have been caught making bombs, material for preparing
bombs have been found at their office and there are three-four clear
cases where they have been arrested and a case has been registered.
Why is not anyone looking into this?

It remains a moot question why there has not been a real investigation
into rightwing majority extremism in India. Intelligence agencies are
looking to the political leadership to show some willpower in decision-
making. The central government is so beset with its own problems of
shrugging off charges of corruption against half the Union cabinet –a
crisis that also afflicts the BJP in Karnataka and other states – it
has little energy and less time to devote to deeper threats to the
Indian Union.

As far as the Church is concerned, it may support media-driven anti
corruption campaigns, but is far too timid to either research or speak
about issues as grave as racism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism,
and majority communalism.