Title: Gujarat carnage: The genesis
Author: Hiranmay Karlekar
Publication: Daily Pioneer
Date: Mar 22, 2002 
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/archives1/secon3.asp?cat=\edit3&d=EDITS&fdnam=mar2202

The organised carnage in Gujarat is one of the most shameful events to have happened in the country in recent history. To be able to devise a strategy to prevent such carnages one must understand the genesis of what happened. The immediate cause, of course, was the attack on the Sabarmati Express outside Godhra station which led to the burning alive of 57 Ramsewaks returning from Ayodhya after participating in a religious function organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). The attack as well as its consequences, however, was ultimately the result of the bitterness that characterise Hindu-Muslim relations in most parts of the country.

The causes of this in turn go back a long way in history to the arrival of the first Islamic invaders. Apart from the Aryans, other invaders like the Huns and the Scythians did not have an evolved religion and an entrenched priesthood. Islam, a proselytising religion, had both. Its followers who had their own well-defined theology and rituals did not lose their distinct religious identity and practices and become a part of India's predominantly Hindu ocean of humanity. This, as well as the animosity caused by the conflicts that occurred during the invasion and its consolidation spread over several centuries, created emotional faultiness prone to becoming active easily. <E:\dailypioneer\archives1\mar2202\IMAGES1\\edit3.jpg>


By the time the British established their rule, however, Hindus and Muslims had learnt, despite rulers like Aurangzeb, to live in peace, and often in amity, thanks to the compulsions of co-existence, the basic tolerance of the Hindu ethos and wise policies of Muslim rulers like Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar, one of the greatest monarchs India and the world has seen. He not only reached out to Hindus and put them in key positions but also sought to establish a new religion-Din-I-Ilahi-which combined elements of both Hinduism and Islam and had strong Sufi overtones.

British rule, however, disturbed Indian history's integrative flow. Muslims, who had earlier ruled most parts of the country, went into a sulk over being displaced. While they stayed away from the system of education that the new rulers set up, Hindus, particularly in Bengal, where the British first established their sway, took to it eagerly. As a result they began filling up the subordinate positions open to Indians in the administrative and other institutions that the British created and that expanded with the spread of their rule. Also, contact with western thought sparked a intellectual renaissance in Bengal, where the process has retrospectively come to be known as the Bengal Renaissance. A generation profoundly impressed by the West's material progress and its rich intellectual heritage, used the latter's analytical tools to examine India's past to understand the causes of its decline and loss of intellectual vigour.

The quest led to a rediscovery of India's glorious spiritual and cultural heritage that had been obscured by ignorant interpretations and overlays of superstitious practices. The findings of western scholars like James Princep, Monier Williams, William Jones, and Max Mueller further reinforced their pride in the past. This as well as their own intellectual achievements, and economic strength provided by landed, professional and bureaucratic incomes, produced a social formation that included people from the lower middle to upper classes, who were proud of their literate culture, confident about their capabilities and who took the promise of equal opportunity in Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858, following the imposition of the British crown's direct rule over India, seriously.

One of its first ventures was reformation of Indian society which was attempted respectively by the Arya Samaj, which stood for a total rejection of the West and which was intensely anti-Islam, and the Brahmo Samaj, which sought a synthesis between the values of the East and the West and was modern and cosmopolitan in character. The second was the national struggle, which began as a movement for equality and against discrimination in employment, relentless economic exploitation and racist humiliation that characterised British rule, and emerged as a full-fledged fight for freedom in the 20th century. Since the Bengal Renaissance led both to the rediscovery of Hinduism's spiritual wealth and the national struggle, the extremist strand of the latter was deeply steeped in the Hindu idiom.

This disturbed the Muslims who were already apprehensive over the loss of their hold over state power that exposed them to the feeling of insecurity that minorities suffer from in all societies, and their distance from the British whose misgivings over the spread of Wahabi influence among them was sharply increased following the murder of the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, by a member of the movement in 1872. It was at this time that Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan urged Muslims to take to English education and build bridges with the British. The result was the establishment of the Aligarh Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College in 1875 and the cultivation of British rulers by Muslim elites. They gradually succeeded in their efforts as the British, increasingly apprehensive over the involvement of educated Hindus in the national struggle, sought allies. The Partition of Bengal (1905) was an attempt both to break the political and economic back of educated Bengali Hindus and please the Muslims. The latter was repealed in 1911 but not before it had left a legacy of bitterness. More lasting was the damage done by the provision of communal electorates by the Indian Councils Act of 1909 and perpetuated by the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935. With Hindus and Muslims appealing to constituencies exclusively comprising their co-religionists and in increasingly extreme rhetoric in a communally vitiated atmosphere, the first step was taken towards Partition in 1947.

Partition did not lead to communal amity. Tense India-Pakistan relations-particularly Islamabad's efforts to dismember India through cross-border terrorism--cast their shadow on Hindu-Muslim ties with a section of Hindus most unfairly branding Muslims as Islamabad's fifth column. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in West Asia and its spread to India aggravated matters. Agitation by Muslims against the Supreme Court's verdict in the Shah Bano case and Rajiv Gandhi's nullification of its consequences through legislation, produced a Hindu backlash which was further reinforced by the banning of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in India following agitation by a section of Muslims. Attempts to placate Hindus by the telecasting of Ramayana over Doordarshan and the permission to perform the Shilanyas (foundation stone laying) ceremony for the proposed Ram temple at Ayodhya gave a further fillip to the temple movement that had been gathering momentum since the early 1980s. It received another fillip from the then Prime Minister VP Singh's announcement on August 7, 1990, of his government's decision to implement the Mandal Commission's recommendations for the reservation of government and quasi-government jobs for the Other Backward Classes. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which thought that Mr Singh was seeking to dismember Hindus as a political constituency by dividing it along caste lines, stepped up the movement to unite all Hindus on the emotive issue of the Ram Temple. The consequences, including the unpardonable demolition of the Babri Masjid, require no elaboration.

A complex set of circumstances, historical as well as contemporary, thus accounts for the current tense Hindu-Muslim relations. It will take a great deal of effort to restore trust and friendship. Coping with the contemporary challenges is difficult enough. Raking up historical issues can only make things worse-as the movement for the Ram temple has done. Having done immense damage to the Indian polity, the least the VHP and the Bajrang Dal can do now is not to precipitate further crises over the issue but wait patiently for the Allahabad High Court, which has provided for day to day recording of evidence in the Ayodhya case, to pronounce a verdict or a negotiated settlement to emerge in the interim.