The Hatreds of India;
Hindu Memory Scarred by Centuries
Of Sometimes Despotic Islamic Rule
By Edward A. Gargan, Special to the New York Times
The New York Times, December 11, 1992
Dateline: New Delhi, Dec. 10
When Hindus destroyed a 16th-century mosque in a remote northern town on Sunday, they
touched off four days of rioting in which hundreds were killed as Muslims protested against what
they saw as persecution.
Hindu leaders said the militants were trying to sweep away deep feelings of inferiority and were
asserting the dominance of Hinduism in Indian society, culture and politics.
The paradox is that Hindus are not a persecuted minority. They are, in fact, the vast majority of a
country that regards itself as heir to an ancient civilization. Hindus account for 83 percent of the
882 million Indians.
The deep-rooted cause of India's crisis is that despite their history, Hindus as well as Muslims act
out of a sense of persecution.
Centuries of Brutality
The Hindus' sense of inadequacy and the passionate emotions it breeds are rooted in a history of
brutal occupations by Islamic rulers over the past 1,000 years.
But these long memories have also been inflamed by a series of what Hindus see as injustices
that began with the creation of the country in 1947, when Pakistan was severed from India and
set up as an Islamic state. (East Pakistan became Bangladesh.)
Since 1947, Hindus have seen Muslims rise up in the Kashmir Valley and again threaten the
unity of India. Hindus have seen the Sikhs of the Punjab take up arms to press their claim for a
separate state. Hindus have seen the Supreme Court allow Muslim men to divorce their wives
without paying alimony, as Muslim tradition allows. (The court ruled that Sharia, or Muslim law,
held precedence for Muslims over Indian civil law.)
In all of this, India's Hindus are resentful and angry, and many are determined to wrest what they
see as their country back from the discriminatory bonds of secularism.
Accusations of Appeasement
For many Hindus, India should become a Hindu state, a nation run by and for Hindus. This is
why the mosque was destroyed.
"It has a whole history," Jipendra Kumar Tyagi, a physician at a government hospital here, said
of the mosque's destruction. "Here in this country, the majority people are so much harassed. The
policies of the Government are to appease the Muslims for petty political gain."
The tension was reflected in the reaction to Mr. Tyagi's comments during a conversation with
several Hindus. Many joined in approvingly but a young man, Hari Kumar, a sociology graduate
student at Delhi University, dissented.
"This is the most disastrous incident for our country," he said. "I feel our country has been
pushed back 20 years. You are believing this propaganda. You are not being rational people."
An Instinct for Prejudice
As the talk skittered back and forth, emotions ran high, and one man accused Mr. Kumar of
being "commissioned from the other side," an allusion to Pakistan, thus baring the instinctual
prejudices, the tendrils of real and imagined history that collude in dividing many of the 732
million Hindus from the 97 million Muslims.
Many Hindus, probably a vast majority, think of themselves as somehow second-class citizens in
their own land, somehow shunted aside as the Muslims are granted special privileges. It is a
sentiment that is sometimes viscerally held, a sentiment that has become the fuel for a new type
of Indian politics, the politics of divisiveness, mistrust, religious chauvinism.
India's Hindus, historically, have not enjoyed an always comfortable relationship with Islam. Ten
centuries ago, Mahmud of Ghazni, an Afghan ruler, spent a good deal of time touring India with
his armies, leaving a trail of looted towns and wrecked Hindu temples. This was India's first
experience with the Muslim world.
After a respite of 200 years another Afghan, Muhammad of Ghor, led his armies to what is now
Delhi, where he defeated King Prithvi Raj III and captured the region.
A Mogul's Disdain
For centuries after, Muslim invaders ruled large chunks of India, allying themselves with Hindus
when convenient, obliterating Hindu influence when necessary. Babur, the first of the Mogul
kings, who marched into India in the early 16th century, saw opportunities for booty but
remained singularly unimpressed by his conquest.
"Hindustan," he wrote dismissively, "is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The
people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing
together, of familiar intercourse.
"They have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or
fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft
works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no
grapes or musk melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their
bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candlestick."
Mogul rule gave way to the British, and the British to the new nations of Pakistan and India in
1947. But nationhood, achieved over the bodies of half a million Muslims and Hindus
slaughtered in the partition, did not bring with it a sense of renewal, a sense of confidence, a
sense of marching into the modern world.
To the Hindu ear, Babur's words still stung like a fresh slap.
India's history is not, for most Hindus, a record of earlier civilizations, of distant wars, religions,
economies, societies, the stuff of dusty tomes. Instead history, or at least the version retold by
Hindu ideologues, is evidence of an enduring Islamic hostility to Hinduism, of the repression of
Hindus at the hands of an alien religion.
"So many temples have been destroyed by Babur," explained Dr. Tyagi. "We have had this
sentimental feeling for centuries. I think the Ram temple should be there."
A Hindu's Grievances
As a matter of faith, Hindu fundamentalists believe fervently that the mosque built by Babur in
Ayodhya was on the precise site where their god Ram was born 5,000 years ago, a mosque that
was erected after a Hindu temple was leveled. The destruction of the mosque, which was praised
by Dr. Tyagi and many members of India's solid middle class, was revenge for that insult 464
years ago.
But what fuels Hindu passions even more than the abuse of history is the perception, deeply and
immovably held, that Muslims continue to enjoy special privileges endowed by the ruling
Congress Party to preserve itself in power over most of the past 45 years.
Dr. Tyagi willingly provides a litany of grievances.
"Thousands of temples in Kashmir have been demolished," he said. "Hindus have been forced
out. There is Shah Bano," which allows Muslims to invoke Sharia rather than civil law in divorce
cases. "This was a decision to appease the Muslims. If there is any sports event and Pakistan wins
over India, this particular community cheers. It has been going on for 40 years. This should be checked."
Mr. Kumar, the graduate student, regards people like Dr. Tyagi as easy prey for Hindu
ideologues. "The propaganda war by the Hindu fundamentalists," he said, "has been in such a
systematic manner that they are quite convincing. This propaganda war deals with Hindus killed
in the Punjab, Hindus forced to leave Kashmir, hundreds of temples destroyed in Kashmir,
privileges under the law."
For the Muslims, the events of the past week augur ill, for them and for India's secular
credentials. Indeed, Tahir Mahmood, the head of Islamic and Comparative Studies at the Indian
Institute of Islamic Studies, likens the events at Ayodhya to the actions of Germany's skinheads
and to the behavior of the Nazis.
Standards Have Changed
"It is exactly the kind of thing that is happening in Germany," Mr. Mahmood said. "In practice,
these Hindus have been the opposite of tolerance and nonviolence." He said that most Muslims
were baffled by the anguish expressed by Hindus over Babur's mosque in Ayodhya.
"For the average Muslim in the street, it is quite logical," he explained. "This was done 500 years
ago and this was done according to thoughts then. The kings did it their own way. These things
happening now in 1992 seem to be no excuse. It seems inexplicable to Muslims. There was no
case for demolishing the mosque, even if Babur demolished a temple 500 years ago."
A 'Bewildered' Community
Rasheeduddin Khan, the director of the Indian Institute of Federal Studies and a former member
of the upper house of Parliament, says the persistent antipathy between the two communities is a
direct consequence of sundering Pakistan from India in 1947.
"Partition has left a scar on everyone," he said. "The partition of a country on religious grounds is
irrational. It is not acceptable as part of modern statecraft."
The Bharatiya Janata Party, the political party of Hindu fundamentalists, "has been systematically
propagating that Muslims are not to be trusted," Mr. Khan continued.
" 'Look at these Muslims when they ruled India'," he quoted Hindus as saying. " 'They built
mosques on our temples. The role of the Muslim has been to oppress you and destroy your
dignity.' Nobody questions that. This has reached even the rational strata of people, doctors, engineers."
The Muslims, who are bearing the brunt of the sectarian violence that is sweeping over dozens of
cities and towns, have become visibly cowed by the assertion of Hindu might demonstrated in
Ayodhya, "bewildered and benumbed," in Mr. Khan's words.
"When you have B.J.P.-like parties who openly speak of building a new Hindu ethos, as opposed
to a new composite Indian ethos, you allow communal polarization, allow intolerance," Mr. Khan
concluded.
Mr. Mahmood wonders whether there is any way to bridge the gap.
"There is a very fundamental difference between Hindus and Muslims," he said. "If we go by
religious beliefs, what is most abhorrent in Islam is idol worship. For our religion it is so
abhorrent. For the other it is normal practice. For followers of Islam, they cannot compromise on
that. That seems to be the main reason these communities cannot reconcile."
For Mr. Mahmood, however, India's salvation can only lie in the preservation of secularism, the
Government's neutrality in matters of faith.
"India must try and retain its secularism," he said. "Whether it will, we will see." And if it fails,
"we are going back into the medieval ages."
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Hindu Rage Against Muslims Transforming Indian Politics
By Edward A. Gargan, Special to the New York Times
The New York Times, September 17, 1993
Dateline: New Delhi, Sept. 16
Slowly, gradually, but with the relentlessness of floodwaters, a growing Hindu rage toward
India's Muslim minority has been spreading among India's solid middle class Hindus -- its
merchants and accountants, its lawyers and engineers -- creating uncertainty about the future
ability of adherents of the two religions to get along.
Along with their hostility toward Muslims, Hindus are gripped by more and more anxiety about
who they are, where they are going and what is going to be there in the end.
One result of the unease is that in the last four years, India's political landscape has shifted
profoundly. The Congress Party, which led the country to freedom from the British, is
disintegrating amid charges of corruption, incompetence and the collapse of its grass-roots organization.
A Major Political Force
And in its place is rising a party of revivalist Hinduism, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
Hindu nationalism has surged and ebbed through this century, but never before has it manifested
itself as a major political party.
The party has grown, from a handful of seats in Parliament just a few years ago, to become the
country's largest opposition party, one that many people believe could end the long rule of the
Congress Party.
If an election were held today, according to a recent poll by India Today, the country's foremost
news magazine, the B.J.P. would come within 32 seats of Congress Party in Parliament; today
that gap is 130 seats. Only two years ago, the party held only two seats in Parliament.
An Appeal to Prejudices
But it has grown not merely by pointing to the weaknesses of the Congress Party, but more
important, and more effectively, by pitting Hindus against Muslims, by appealing to widespread
and deeply seated Hindu prejudices.
Deep in the sprawling suburbs of southern New Delhi, for example, where jumbles of cement-walled houses crowd into one another like a clutter of wooden blocks spilled from a bag,
Dhirendra Kumar Bhatia settled himself behind a scarred metal desk in his television shop. An
overhead fan futilely stirred the city's baking air.
"I am a Hindu," he declared "When you are a Hindu, people should not be ashamed to call
themselves Hindu. They were not so assertive about being Hindus."
"Hindus were a majority," he said, resorting to the past tense typical of much of Indian spoken
English, "but they were not given their rights." Echoing the comments of others, he said the
Congress Party had appeased and catered to Muslims.
He acknowledged that India's 105 million Muslims pose no real threat to the dominance of
India's more than 700 million Hindus, but insisted they are the root of many of India's problems.
'An Indian First'
"Yes, they're a minority," he said. "But even a small thing can disturb a large thing. A dirty fish
in a big pond can dirty the water. They must know they are an Indian first, and a Muslim later.
They must be taught to be loyal to India. The B.J.P. can help them do this."
B.J.P. leaders have never discussed in detail what policies they would pursue if they came to
power. But in public statements and conversations, certain of their policies are clear.
At the top of the B.J.P. agenda is to declare India a nuclear-weapons state, a decision they say
would enhance the country's international stature. The party would also sharply restrict foreign
investment, particularly in consumer goods and services. Instead, party leaders profess, only
high-tech investments would be permitted.
Fast-Rising Population
The party appears unconcerned about India's growing population, now 880 million and increasing
by 2.1 percent annually. A poll of B.J.P. legislators found that only 2 percent regarded population
control as necessary.
Even India's high illiteracy rate -- more than half the population cannot read -- is not a dominant
concern of the party. On the other hand, party leaders have promised that they would subject
Muslims to a common civil code.
Since independence and partition with Pakistan in 1947, India's Government has professed an
allegiance to a broad secular idea, one that at least formally did not favor Hindus over Muslims.
But for many Hindus, the B.J.P. represents both an assertion of Hindu identity and a revival of a
culture that they believe has been trampled by modernity and corrupt politics.
The Rule of Hindus
For them, this idea is embodied in the idea of the Hindu raj, the rule of Hindus -- sometimes
called the Ram raj after the Hindu deity named Ram. It is a reign in which Hindus would control
Indian life and Government, where Hindu religious customs and practice would suffuse society
and where Islam would be in retreat.
"I am not a religious person myself," said Lal Krishna Advani, the party president. "But at the
same time, talking about Ram, talking about Ram raj, that makes any person, whether he
subscribes to ritual or not, whether he subscribes to a swami or not, whether he belongs to a cult
or not, feel that it is something elevating."
For many Hindus, the onset of the Ram raj began in December in the north Indian town of
Ayodhya, when hundreds of young men, part of a crowd of more than 100,000, clambered over
steel pipe and barbed wire fences and, with sledge hammers, crow bars and their bare hands,
began destroying an undistinguished 16th century mosque. In a matter of hours, the three-domed
structure was reduced to a pile of rubble.
The mosque was erected during the reign of the first Mogul emperor, Babur, whose conquest of
India is regarded by Hindu militants as a period of repression.
Conversion to Islam
After centuries of Mogul rule, Muslims -- descendants of both conquerors or converts -- were
scattered throughout the subcontinent, in cities, towns and villages, mingling easily with the
majority Hindu population. Over the course of hundreds of years, many lower-caste and outcast
Hindus converted to Islam to escape virulent social discrimination.
Today, although Muslims can be found in all walks of life, from Cabinet ministers to bankers,
farmers and washermen, in general Muslims are poorer and less educated than Hindus.
Following the destruction of the mosque in December, thousands of Muslims and Hindus died
violently across northern India. For Muslims, the destruction of the mosque seemed to
demonstrate the precariousness of their situation, whereas many Hindus viewed the demolition as
a reassertion of Hindu pride.
'A Product of Frustration'
"It's a product of disillusionment with the Congress Party, a product of frustration, a product of
despair, of those who have nothing but their Hindu identity," said Karan Thapar, a leading
television producer in New Delhi.
India escaped British colonial rule, not in peace as Mohandas K. Gandhi, the independence
leader, had wished, but in a sea of blood when Hindus massacred Muslims and Muslims
massacred Hindus.
For virtually all of India's 46-year post-colonial history, it has been the political, and genetic,
descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, who have governed the country in the
cloak of the Congress Party.
But India's agglomeration of castes, linguistic groups and most importantly its Hindu-Muslim
divide, required a political strategy that would assure support from the disparate sectors of Indian
society.
A turning point came in 1986, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the grandson of Nehru, moved
to shore up his party's weakening support among restless Muslims by pressing Parliament into
canceling a Supreme Court decision that ordered a Muslim man to pay alimony to his ex-wife.
Under some interpretations of Islamic law, Muslim men are not permitted to provide financial
support for an ex-wife after a divorce. In 1978 a Muslim named Shah Bano sued her husband for
support after their divorce. Eight years later, the case percolated to the Supreme Court, which
ruled that Indian law required alimony, superseding Muslim custom.
Hundreds of thousands of angry Muslims quickly protested what they saw as a violation of
promises given over the years that their religious law would not be curbed by the state. Worried
about Muslim support, Rajiv Gandhi had the Parliament change the law to void the court's ruling.
If there was a single moment that ignited the fortunes of Hindu politics and politicians, they point
to this. Until then, despite persistent tension between Hindus and Muslims, often leading to
rioting, the B.J.P. (organized in 1980) and its predecessor parties, had not been successful.
Growth of Hindu Party
Indeed, in 1986, the B.J.P. held only two seats in Parliament. In the elections of 1991, they won
119, about 20 percent of the house's seats.
"Since then there has been a very perceptible change in the mood of the people," said Mr.
Advani. "His decision to amend the law, to undo the Shah Bano decision of the Supreme Court --
which seemed very logical to everybody -- it was a shock."
The B.J.P. also castigated Rajiv Gandhi for banning Salman Rushdie's book "The Satanic
Verses," and attacked Muslims' insistence on Islamic schools for their children.
Among the B.J.P.'s supporters, for example, is Dr. Jipendra Kumar Tyagi, who works in a
government hospital, struggles on an inadequate salary, and is convinced the party is the
country's only salvation. He lives not in the leafy enclaves of New Delhi's overseas-educated
elite, but across the Jumna River in a small apartment carved from a concrete block, of a type
that makes up much of middle class housing. What irks him is his perception of Muslims as privileged.
"There should be a uniform civil code, not like Shah Bano," he said. "That was done by Rajiv
Gandhi just to appease the Muslims."
Hindu nationalism did not spring from nowhere, having risen and fallen many times over the
years. In 1925, a group of Hindu nationalists disillusioned with the secularist approach of Indian
leaders formed an organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteer
Corps, known as the R.S.S.
The corps stressed physical training, discipline and anti-Muslim attitudes. Its ideological
godfather, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, spoke of Muslims as "foreign elements" who should be
absorbed or driven out, adding that Nazi Germany offered "a good lesson for us in Hindustan to
learn and profit by."
The R.S.S. spawned many organizations, including the B.J.P.
India's Muslims, not surprisingly, see themselves as the potential victims of the resurgent
Hinduism. Tahir Mahmood, who heads the department of Islamic and Comparative Studies at the
Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, articulated a widely held view.
"I think there is a very large group of citizens in India who say that if there can be two Muslim-dominated states in the subcontinent" -- Pakistan and Bangladesh -- "then this third country
should be dominated by another religion. Unfortunately, a majority believe this.
Destruction of Mosque
"I wouldn't call the gap between Muslims and Hindus absolutely unbridgeable," added Mr.
Mahmood. "But we are centuries behind what the U.S. and the U.K. have achieved." Of the
destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, he said: "It seems to be a reintroduction of might is right."
Less educated, but equally alarmed members of India's Muslim community, are increasingly
apprehensive. But they seem to adhere, much as fervent supporters of the B.J.P. maintain, to their
independent lives, to an existence deliberately distinct from the Hindu society around them.
Sayed Azgar Ali runs a small fabric store in a largely Muslim area of Bombay. He wears the
skull cap of the devout, as well as a long, black beard.
"The main aim of the B.J.P. is a special hatred against Muslims," he said. "If they come to power,
there will be fewer services for Muslims." He said that the sharia, or Muslim law, used by
Muslims to settle disputes among themselves, will be endangered.
For Dhirendra Kumar Bhatia, the New Delhi television dealer, the problem is that Muslims are different.
"Unless someone is there to make them see what is wrong, they will not see," he said of
Muslims. "The B.J.P. can provide that understanding. They can become the big brother to help
people understand. And then this problem will be permanently solved."