WHEN I showed Holy Warriors to a colleague of mine, he asked me what the book was about. “It talks about Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Christian fundamentalism,” I answered. “You have all that in India?” he asked, placing an emphasis on ‘all that’.
I am sure hundreds of thousands of other people experience similar disbelief. Fernandes has done the yeoman service of bringing fundamentalism in the world’s largest democracy out into the open boldly and broadly.
“Home to all the major religions, India is also, inevitably, host to virtually every type of religious fanatic,” writes Fernandes at the very outset without mincing words, something that is clearly visible in her book as she journeys across India talking to leaders and the people.
“The old and the new have shaped militant movements in Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity,” she writes, and adds, “India’s fundamentalists were radicalized by anger over the past and fear for the future.”
In Kashmir, Jammu, Delhi, Deoband the seat of one of the largest Islamic madrasas in the subcontinent, Goa, Nagaland, Punjab, Bombay, Gujarat, and Ayodhya, leader after leader and common men enumerate alienation, a sense of marginalization, unemployment, economic starvation, and identity crisis as the major reasons leading to extremism and fundamentalism.
“The Western world after 9/11 was obsessed with extreme Islam. But here in India was evidence that every major religion can be hijacked by the forces of fundamentalism,” writes Fernandes.
Interestingly Fernandes quotes the Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid as saying, “The international community has placed the Muslim inside the frame of terrorism. This has to end.”
It needs to be said that those who have given currency to the word ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘fundamentalists’ have not only done a disservice to those particular religions, but have also pushed back the process of peace and reconciliation between peoples of those different religions.
All the religions are based on simple and sound fundamentals. None advocates violence, and terror. A person following the fundamentals of his or her religion cannot be an extremist.
Those who are extremists and terrorists are in fact the true anti-fundamentalists. To call them ‘fundamentalists’ — Islamic, Hindu, Christian, or Sikh — is to target religion itself, whereas the need is to target those who have not understood the essence and fundamental principles of their religion. The distinction has to be made.
There is no ‘extreme’ Islam or extreme any religion. As K.P.S. Gill, former director general of police of Punjab, credited with crushing the Khalistan secessionist movement, told Fernandes, “Obviously, any religion can have its words twisted by zealots.”
We never tire of saying that all religions preach peace, but in the same breath untiringly we use the words coined by the West that give currency to serve their end of hitting religion at the roots. The medium is the message, and the more we use their terminology, not only do we help further spread their message, but also help grind their axes, which cut the branches we are comfortably sitting on.
Since in a Pavlovian way ‘Islam’ comes up in the West’s conditioned way, when ‘terrorism’ is mentioned, it is worth mentioning what Deepak Chopra, author of 42 books, including Peace is the Way, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen recently.
“If you look closely at Islam, it embraces every aspect of life. To be educated around the Qur’an, which is all that madrasas (religious schools) teach, is part of basing your family life, social customs, courts, government and almost everything else around the Qur’an,” wrote Chopra.
“This isn’t evil, it’s the way of Islamic culture, which has had great peaks and valleys, just like Christian culture,” he added.
According to Chopra, believing every dire news item without looking into them is the same as fostering ignorance. So is the acceptance of blanket generalizations about foreigners one hasn’t even met.
“I could make the radical suggestion that each of us go out and make friends with a Muslim family. That idea may be too shocking, but if we replaced ignorance with good feeling on both sides, the sad, familiar story would start to change. Removing our own ignorance is a unilateral way of dispelling terror that’s completely positive,” he explained.
This is reminiscent of what BJP leader Sushma Swaraj said quite a while ago that Hindu and Muslims should exchange food on festivals.
The Introduction to the book under review says it well. The first 17 of the 24 chapters seem to be a warmup for what seems to be the crux of the matter dealt with in the last seven chapters.
Fernandes journeyed to the heart of Hindu nationalism, watching “the twilight assignations of Hindutva’s saffron warriors, goosestepping into the sunrise...”
According to her, the unmasked face of Hindu (anti-) fundamentalism was shown to the world in spring 2002 when the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) state government in Gujarat “appeared to be complicit in Hindu riots against Muslims in which thousands of Muslims were systematically targeted and killed”.
The world has seen, and the BJP has suffered the consequences of raking up the past to reconstruct the future. Except for minor slips like using the word ‘ulema’ (religious scholar), when she means Ummah (the Muslim Nation), and misspelling names, the subject is dealt with understanding, professional integrity, frankness and boldness.
As one finished the book, one has the feeling that the problem is not with the religions but with the fact that (anti-) fundamentalism has been turned into a political factor.
“There is evidence to suggest that some form of national introspection can be cathartic,” she says and adds that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s examination of horrors of apartheid in forensic detail proved to be a healing process in itself.
Unfortunately, as she says, people like Thackeray are not interested in the politics of integration.
“We alone cannot fight the Islam,’ he boomed the word out loud, much as a father would shout the word monster or dragon to scare his children while telling bedtime stories,” Fernandes writes of her interview with the Shiv Sena chief.
“His delivery continued unabated: a breathless torrent of rhetoric now, streams of consciousness detached from reasoning,” she adds.
In a few words she sums up the real SS and its founder and gives a lot to think about for India and Bombay’s ‘peacewallahs’.
While leaving, Thackeray presented her with a basket of fuchsia orchids, a moment that was recorded on camera. “I left the house consumed with thoughts on the best way to dump the flowers,” she writes.