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An Islam-obsessed world ignoring India’s Hindu extremism

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Threat to human rights have been tied to Islam alone, while the

disturbing political trends in India fueled by Hindu extremists and their allies in the BJP-led Indian government have largely been ignored, according to an analysis appearing in Washington Times Wednesday.

Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House’s Centre for Religious Freedom who recently published a book on the rise of Hindu extremism in India, writes that a country once personified by Mahatma Gandhi is fast becoming known for religious hatred and violence. While India remains the world’s largest democracy, the ruling BJP is linked to Hindu extremist groups like the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which mount hate campaigns and sometimes-violent attacks against religious minorities and demand that Hinduism dominate society and politics. The RSS was founded by admirers of fascism and Nazism, produced Gandhi’s murderers and is now perhaps the world’s largest paramilitary organisation, with millions of members, he adds.

Marshall writes that the BJP functions as Hindu nationalism’s political wing. Prime Minister Vajpayee publicly praises the RSS and, in August, shared a podium and sang songs with RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan. Other top officials, including Home Affairs Minister Advani, are RSS associates. The main target of the “Hindutva” or Hinduization campaign are the Muslim and Christian communities. Some 2,000 Muslims were massacred in the state of Gujarat in 2002, after Muslim mobs were reported to have set fire to a train carrying Hindu nationalists, killing 58 persons. Attacks against Christians have also escalated, he points out.

He writes that while condemning violence, BJP officials often excuse or provoke it, arguing that incidents are isolated, the work of foreigners, or have no relation to radical Hindu organisations, while, after the Gujarat massacres, the state’s chief minister, and BJP member, Narendra Modi, asked supporters to “teach a lesson” to the Muslim community. The BJP’s extremist allies are even more threatening, he adds. The VHP international president described the Gujarat carnage as a “successful experiment” that could be repeated all over India, and its general-secretary declared that the “VHP will take the Gujarat experiment to every nook and corner of the country.”

According to Marshall, “To expand its support and hold its political coalition together, the national BJP moderates its stance, but then it courts extremists to appeal to its base. Meanwhile, it is Hinduising the school curriculum, undercutting minority rights and supporting laws forbidding lower castes to change their religion to escape their low status under Hinduism.

India continues to have proud democratic institutions, but the growth of often-violent Hindu nationalism threatens its tolerant traditions and pluralistic democracy. If religious extremism continues to grow, it will, as we have learned elsewhere, drag India’s democracy, economy and foreign policy down with it. We cannot afford to be silent against that threat, even when the country is an important partner and ally of the United States in the war against terrorism.”

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