It is now official. India no longer wants to be a secular republic. An overwhelming majority of Hindus in Gujarat have just rewritten the country’s constitution by returning to power a mass murderer called Narendra Modi. It took the Hindu supremacists 55 long years of terrible carnage, and the slaughter of countless Muslims, to gut the secular philosophy of the country’s founder, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Those behind the recent genocide of Muslims in Gujarat always insisted on going to the people’s court. They wanted elections even before the fires were extinguished and the charred bodies laid to rest. They knew full well that their heinous crimes against humanity had almost total support from the majority community. They also knew that their depraved actions would invite serious consequences from any court of law. The election results have merely confirmed the writing on the wall: That India is a theocratic state and that the average Hindu hates Indian Muslims to the point of wishing them out of existence.
The extremist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, and the party’s other political affiliates, will no longer have to come out with election manifestos promising development. They can just publish report cards stating the number of Muslims they killed or helped kill. The higher the number of casualties, the greater will be the party’s prospects. The top job will go to the person who is most adept at organizing massacres on a large scale in an instant.
Gujarat’s election results are a complete legitimization of the violence perpetrated by the ruling party. There will now be a general amnesty for all those who indulged in slaughter, rape and arson. We can expect this successful experiment to be repeated throughout India.
What a tragedy! There was a general belief in the country that after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 India would return to the path of sanity. There was hope that everybody — Muslims and Hindus — would realize the folly of mixing religion with politics. There was optimism that the BJP in power would be more responsible than the BJP in opposition. That belief was betrayed, that hope was killed, that optimism was shattered by the party’s continued indulgence in minority bashing. Thousands of Indian Muslims have died to prove that the BJP is bent on genocide.
For political parties, it is the end that matters: The BJP succeeded at the cost of the country’s priceless image. So the BJP has won and, unfortunately, India has lost. One feels sorry for the courageous Hindu academics, journalists, lawyers and judges who did their best to save the country from falling into the clutches of fundamentalists. They and other peace-loving Indians, who are now in the minority, will recall what Jawaharlal Nehru wrote years ago — that majority communalism is more dangerous than minority communalism. But in the country of Vajpayee, Advani, Modi, Vinay Katiyar and Praveen Togadia, who will pay heed to the words of a sage and the misery of a minority?
