The assurance given by Lal Krishna Advani, India’s deputy prime minister, to Parliament that his Hindu nationalist government would not allow religious bloodletting to disrupt elections next month in Gujarat state, where recent Hindu-Muslim riots claimed more than 2,000 lives, will not calm the fears of the Muslim community. The announcement came as Parliament opened its five-week winter session amid a bitter debate on the western state where radical Hindus on Sunday tried to defy a ban imposed by the Election Commission on communally explosive marches.
Sixty years ago, Ahmedabad, the commercial heart of the state of Gujarat in Western India, was also the center of peace when Mahatma Gandhi made the city his headquarters. Now however, Gujarat and its commercial capital have become one of India’s centers of violence. There are extremists on both sides and the roots of the conflict go right back to the 1947 British partition of the subcontinent and indeed beyond. India is by no means alone in having ancient scars which a single incident or unscrupulous rabble-rousers can scrape open again. But unfortunately the problems in Gujarat, and elsewhere where India’s Muslims — 12 percent of the population — live with their Hindu neighbors, are directly the result of policies pursued by the present Bharatiya Janata Party government, when it was seeking power.
Anxious to break the dominance of the Congress party, the BJP cast around for a different political base that would gather opposition to Congress around it. The solution it chose was to use rabidly communal organizations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as rabble-rousers. These elements would whip up extremist protests at the head of which the BJP leaders would place themselves, albeit temporarily, before withdrawing when encountering the forces of law and order.
If decent Indians blamed the BJP for being associated with such violence, the stock answer was that though they could not approve of mob rule, people had to understand that it was a manifestation of a long-nurtured sense of injustice by Hindus. If criticism of the BJP still came too close to the mark, party leaders then played their second card which was that the violence had been caused by extremists from the VHP, with whom BJP would have nothing to do. All of this was political cant behind which the BJP leaders oversaw the destruction of an ancient mosque at Ayodhya. Once the BJP came to power at the center, there was little attempt to prosecute the leaders of internecine violence on the Hindu side. This has allowed extremist groups to behave as if they were above the law.
While the BJP has become the respectable party of power, its dark child the VHP has never sought the approval of moderates. The arrest of Hindu militants at an inflammatory march this week may be a sign that the state government is trying to move against and control the VHP in advance of the elections. Unfortunately, it will probably take a lot more than a few high-profile arrests to calm tempers, and indeed, will probably only make matters worse. This, given the heartless cynicism of so many of the politicians involved, might even have been what was supposed to happen in the first place.
