It was early this year. Our information technology expert was in India to cover a prestigious information technology exhibition in Hyderabad. It was her first visit to India. Even so, she was a journalist on assignment, not a tourist on a stroll. I make this distinction with deliberate intent. For a tourist, by the nature of things, everything looks rosy and romantic. A journalist, by the nature of his job, finds everything newsy and report worthy.
Our journalist had a horrible time listening to a litany of complaints that local Hindus voiced against India’s Muslims. Of course, all this complaining and whining was during private conversations at dinners and cultural displays. Still she was surprised. Our journalist had not expected this tirade against India’s largest minority on the sidelines of an international computer show. She thought they would prefer to discuss with an outsider how they were marching ahead in the world of technology and how Indians were earning important places in the world’s best technology firms.
She came back a thoroughly disappointed person but chose to ignore the backbiting and file her report on the official activities of the exhibition during which she had seen no anti-Muslim bias. She pointed out that the event had been organized in large part by a company from a GCC country and she felt that she should support such international efforts whenever possible.
What our IT specialist experienced in India three months ago was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. I was in India recently and I witnessed the orgy of anti-Muslim violence and the dance of death in which Hindus of all castes participated in Gujarat. Without fear of contradiction, I can state that across the length and breadth of the country, Muslims are living under a shadow of fear, not knowing which Hindu neighbor will betray them and when. They have been made to realize that they are a disposable commodity to be torched at the first opportunity and on the smallest of pretexts. Worse still, they have nobody to turn to in this hour of tragedy. They have absolutely no faith in the police, the respective state governments or the fascist Bharatiya Janata Party-led federal government. Muslim judges, police officers, teachers, intellectuals, journalists, businessmen, poets and politicians seem unable to do anything except wring their hands in despair.
Until recently these people were stressing the need for Muslims to educate themselves. For what? Brute strength, not intellectual might, is the only thing capable of quelling Hindu mobs screaming for Muslim blood. It is a question of survival now. This is not what they thought would become of India.
“Slowly but surely Muslims have been made to realize what life can be like in a ‘Hindu rashtra’ as defined by a mass murderer called Narendra Modi, a Muslim basher called L.K. Advani and a Hindu terrorist called Vinay Katiyar,” wrote Teesta Setalvad, a prominent journalist and activist, in her newspaper “Communalism Combat.” Secular Hindus have been relegated to writing opinion pieces in the country’s leading English dailies. Their effort is ineffectual and more for the consumption and comfort of international observers. Any voice of reason is now overwhelmed by the militant Hindus who think they are doing a national service by burning Muslim men, women and children alive.
Here is a classic case of how helpless the tiny minority of secular Hindus has become in India today. A Muslim judge of the Gujarat High Court, Justice M.H. Quadri, was told in not so many words by his secular Hindu colleagues to vacate his official residence. They felt they would be unable to save his life from rampaging Hindu mobs. He had to move, along with his ailing 80-year-old mother, to an area with a predominantly Muslim population. This is exactly what is happening all over India. Muslims in large numbers are moving bag and baggage into areas of Muslim majorities. The ghettoization, which Muslim academics have long feared, is now complete and irreversible.
When I covered the 1992-93 Bombay riots for Mid-Day, a prominent Bombay evening paper, we feared that the biggest casualty of communal riots would be the ghettoization of communities. That, we thought, would be the final nail in the country’s coffin. That is what happened in Bombay and what is now happening all over India. Militant Hindus will now find “mini-Pakistan,” as that fascist Bal Thackeray loves to call all Muslim localities, in every state and every city. Ghettoization indeed is the last sign of the death of secularism.
That mini-Pakistan reference reminds me of one more thing: Indian Muslims in the past took exception to being labeled Pakistanis. Now they have become indifferent to such taunts since they know only too well that it means nothing and so they prefer to keep quiet.
But when a whole community keeps quiet, even while seething with anger, the result is a volcanic eruption. Who will blame hundreds and thousands of Muslim youth who saw their mothers and sisters raped and torched by rampaging Hindus in the streets of Gujarat? Even Narendra Modi will have no complaints because he has learned Newton’s third law of motion too well: To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. India is now sitting on a powder keg, lit by people who, ironically, refer to themselves as Hindu nationalists.
From my first-hand experience and from encounters with state officials and Jamaat-e-Islami volunteers in Ahmedabad, the number of Muslim casualties is not less than 5,000. Dozens of mosques have been razed and converted into makeshift temples. The mass murderers roam free, threatening those who dare to collect whatever remains of their homes. The police continue to brutalize the already terrorized Muslims. As the B.N. Srikrishna Commission on the Bombay riots of 1992-93 wrote, “The response of the police to appeals from desperate victims, particularly Muslims, was cynical and utterly indifferent. On occasion the attitude was that one Muslim killed was one Muslim less.”
Of course, Muslims, especially some of their self-styled leaders, have also played a major part in worsening the country’s communal situation. But that needs a separate article. The atmosphere has become so poisonous that an average Hindu with absolutely no party affiliation has now turned against the Muslim community. He feels that economically backward Muslims have become a drain on the country’s meager resources. He believes that all of them are terrorists and criminals. He fears that all madrassas are breeding grounds for hate and therefore they need to be obliterated. He has been led to believe that Hindus have been too lenient toward Muslims. The time has come, not only to teach them a lesson but to tell them that this is a Hindu nation with absolutely no room for any other community, especially Muslims.
“Have we not given them Pakistan?” is the oft-repeated question. This Hindu blames Muslims for the attack on Parliament. He blames Muslims for the Kashmir problem. He blames Muslims for not allowing the temple to be built in Ayodhya. He blames Muslims for the killing of “kar sevaks” in Godhra... In fact, he blames Muslims for all the country’s ills. He is firm in his belief that once the country’s Muslims are eliminated, India will emerge as a superpower. The votaries of Hindutva have sadly succeeded in making India what it is: one large crematorium.
I can still smell the stench of the burned bodies in the streets of Gujarat. I can still see in my mind’s eye smoke billowing from what were once sprawling Muslim mohallas. I can still recall how a 60-year-old Muslim, drafting a letter in tears to the UN secretary-general, kept pleading with me for Kofi Annan’s address. I can still hear the cries of those Muslim women in the makeshift relief camp in Ahmedabad. “Why do they hate us so much? What have we done to them? I know those people very well. Yes, those who chopped my husband to pieces and made a bonfire of his torso, hands and legs and then threw my 12-year-old son into it. And then raped me in full public view? Why? And then why did they leave me alive?”
Then I remembered another horrible account of another tragedy. “We were betrayed by the very people whom we used to call our uncles. I saw my neighbors raping my niece and setting my mother on fire. Our residential quarters were surrounded by different communities, but we always had faith in our neighbors. In fact, upon learning that a mob of outsiders had come to hunt down Muslims, all of us sought shelter in the neighboring area. About 150 of us sat there for over five hours, hidden, without making any noise. Then our neighbors told us that it was safe to go out. But when we came out, we saw that all the escape routes were sealed. Our neighbors threw kerosene on us and set us on fire. In the mad rush I hid under a tin sheet from a phone booth and managed to escape the frenzy.”
This is the state of India today. A country that has shamelessly prided itself on being a secular nation, all the while crushing its minority population. A country whose prime minister admits to the whole world that the riots were a blot on the country’s image and then does nothing to bring the murderers to justice. A country whose home minister, with a straight face, defends what is clearly state terrorism.
Riots are nothing new to India. They have been happening since 1947. Ask my mother what happened to her and her family in the former Hyderabad state. “In the name of so-called Police Action on Hyderabad, the invading Indian Army and the Hindus in their wake perpetrated untold atrocities on the Muslims. Many women jumped into wells to save their honor from lustful Hindus. Others were raped and some were forced to live in Hindu homes. They are still living with Hindus as they could not be reclaimed by the Muslims.”
Muslims of my generation never thought such things could ever again happen in modern India. We kept mouthing delusional platitudes about Hindu and Muslim coexistence. Even in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, when communal riots raged across the country, Muslims were optimistic that the majority community would see sense and that things would eventually turn out for the better.
The Gujarat pogrom has extinguished even that flicker of hope. There is now such despair that you can safely conclude that India as a nation will never prosper. It will continue to find itself mired in the quagmire of communal conflagration for another 50 years. It will not be able to douse the fires that have been stoked by the parochial leaders. For decades we have been told that the greatest enemy to India’s future security is Pakistan. That is a lie. India needs no Pakistan to do what it is doing swiftly and effortlessly: destroying itself.
