Mainstream, Independence Day issue, 14 August 2004
The Civilised Family
Mukul Dube
In a recent lecture, the historian K.N. Panikkar said that what had kept the Hindu Right busy during the past five years was nothing less than an attack on Indian civilisation. If indeed Indian civilisation was so attacked, and I for one agree that it was, then the attack on it came from those who had arrogated to themselves the right to interpret it–which always involved a radical re-moulding to make it fit concocted untruths–to defend it, and to propagate the holy tripe which they called its values as a means of making themselves the leaders of the entire world, which presumably would be expressed through their continued sucking up to several wealthy nations and of course to the most powerful one. This mauling of a child by its guardian has to have been among the staggering ironies of our times.
I shall not attempt to discuss what is a civilisation, because I am not qualified to do that. I also dread a shrieking attack from those tens of thousands of semi-literate *lathi* wielders in khaki shorts and saffron head-bands who are convinced that they alone know all about this and all about every other subject under the sun–and that this blindly ingested “knowledge” gives them the right to vandalise libraries and threaten writers. I shall speak here only of how these fellows–and I use this word to include members of parliament and former ministers–are daily showing us what they mean by civilisation: specifically, that Indian civilisation is built on a foundation of personal rowdiness.
When, after the recent general election, the rout of the BJP and its allies rapidly became clear, the country went into a state of shocked euphoria. Many people told me that their reaction, like mine, was relief at being able to breathe again, relief at not feeling a constant hostile gaze upon the back, relief at not living in fear of yet another mindless attack on someone’s personal or intellectual freedom somewhere in the country. Too soon, though, the euphoria wore off and we began to see the harsh reality.
The thought that simultaneously struck nearly all of us was that the National Democratic Alliance–a singularly inapt name for an assortment of undemocratic, power-hungry people to whom the nation meant nothing–would no longer pervert democracy as it had done because it had lost the power to do that. But it would do something almost as bad–quite simply, it would keep Indian democracy from functioning. Evidence from the past pointed clearly to the future. During the Vajpayee years, non-issues had dominated parliament. Both the luminaries and the rough-necks of the NDA had behaved throughout like badly brought up, uncouth, rowdy adolescents who used only their voices and their muscles. Finger-pointing and name-calling became the order of the day. Possibly the most revolting feature of that long phase was the unspeakable pettiness which drove those whose numbers shored up the Vajpayee government and who were, nominally, representatives of the people and the makers of the nation’s laws.
Somnath Chatterjee, who through his efforts to be impartial had not only antagonised MPs of the party of which he had been a member for decades but had gone out of his way to make concessions to the Opposition, specially to its leader L.K. Advani, seems to have been reduced virtually to tears by the outrageous accusations that were made against him. He appealed, he explained, and quite unnecessarily he even defended himself. There was not a whisper of an apology for the wrong which had been done to him personally, to the institution of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and to the very dignity of that house.
But then it is foolish to expect those who incite their faithful goons to divinely ordained vandalism, rape and murder to understand what is meant by good manners, decency, principles and dignity. The only form of social organisation they understand is that which has at its head a divine or semi-divine king. The mythical Ayodhya and the tragically very real Nagpur are the chief examples of such kingdoms. The king must be blindly obeyed. The king may not be questioned. The king, or god-king, is absolute. We cannot expect people who have never been permitted to speak their minds–if those organs, rigidly conditioned not to think for themselves, can be called minds–to understand what is meant by democracy or to respect any institution that is based on that idea.
As we had anticipated, the non-issues have been coming thick and fast. The “tainted ministers” business has been much written about and I shall not repeat all that here. Nor will I re- tell the story of the change of governors. Let us look, instead, at certain later absurdities.
Arun Jaitley, who speaks with so many tongues that no one has yet been able to count them, said that the removal of the pictures of A.B. Vajpayee from the sky boards on the national highways that are being built made it clear that the government was on “a confrontationist path”. Those whose thinking is low take it for granted that the thinking of all others must also be as low. Jaitley, so fine a lawyer that he is miles above such mundane matters as evidence and reasoning, took it for granted that Vajpayee’s pictures were to be replaced by pictures of Manmohan Singh. He must have had in his mind the excellent example of Sushma Swaraj, who turned the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting inside out and upside down immediately on getting her hands on it. Her being seen so often with film stars probably indicated no more than a star-struck girl’s desire to be associated with fame and beauty: but in her zeal to leave her mark on history she even changed the names of AIR’s radio channels; and, of course, she declared advertisements for condoms *verboten*, presumably because none of the characters in the *Ramayana* was known to be afflicted with AIDS–although, like everything else in the modern world, AIDS too must have been a creation of the genius of Vedic India.
Poor Jaitley was made to fall silent when the Prime Minister’s Office rapidly and unambiguously made it known that Manmohan Singh had given strict instructions that no picture of his would be put up anywhere, not even in a government office. It becomes clear that Jaitley was incensed at the sheer waste which the decision would cause. The NDA government had spent an estimated Rs.48 crores on putting up the pictures of Vajpayee (*Hindu*, 27 July 2004). To remove so much beauty with a stroke of the pen, to throw into the gutter the priceless works of art which the NDA government had given to the nation at the expense of its own blood, sweat and tears, must have seemed obscene to him. How, he must have worried, would people survive the now colourless road journey from Dwarka to Faizabad?
In a classic instance of “should we laugh or should we cry”, parliament was the scene of pandemonium on account of something that had never existed and words that had never been uttered. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram spoke of brushing the dust off a 1991 scheme named after Rajiv Gandhi. The BJP, most ably led by L.K. Advani, promptly accused him of insulting their icon, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, by calling him dust. Chidambaram’s statement that he had not taken Upadhyaya’s name had no effect. Later, neither Advani nor the voluble V.K. Malhotra could identify any scheme which was named after Upadhyaya. But a terrific din had been made, a walk-out had been staged, the press had been rendered unable to figure out what on Earth had gone wrong–in short, the BJP had achieved its noble objectives. Chidambaram will have learnt that figures of speech are sometimes not so harmless as they might seem to be. Perhaps India will show the world what is meant by clear speech: there will be nothing more complicated than the “louse ate mouse” type of construction, in which the role of the BJP will be pre-eminent.
Central to the functioning of parliament are its several standing committees. For no rationally comprehensible reason, the BJP-led Opposition has chosen to boycott these committees–although the redoubtable Jaitley will conjure up a dozen reasons why this does not represent the adoption of a “confrontationist path” by his team, even when the whole of that team is figuratively off side. Efforts are now on to somehow coax the petulant and contrary child to eat its food so that the household can get on with its business. This is the new domestic reality of India’s politics. One component of today’s child is of course yesterday’s paterfamilias. Gone are the prawns, on is the bib streaked with saffron egg yolk–and barely has one tantrum ended before the nation is deafened by the next. Just after their electoral defeat, these people had promised to function as a vigilant but responsible opposition. What happened? First they fell from grace, then even the pretence of grace fell from them.
In parliament, the leaders of those who claim to represent Indian civilisation are L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee. The Muslims of the country are said to have been “appeased” over the decades, but they have gained nothing from that–indeed, they have fallen lower in terms of nearly every socio-economic indicator. Advani, who in parliament has been favoured by the Speaker far more than he needed to be, has not only kicked his appeaser in the teeth but has kept on making more demands. And what of the poet-statesman Vajpayee? He just sits there, in the House of the People, benignly looking on as his followers–if indeed they are still his followers–show themselves to be hooligans of the purest pedigree. But is he silent everywhere or only in the Lok Sabha?
To return to the point with which I started. Indian civilisation as it was known for centuries has been badly battered. We now see, every day, in parliament and in the media, the deformed and malignant version sought to be imposed on us by the Hindu Right and its allies. It can be simply expressed thus: Indian Civilisation Equals Hooliganism. This is in a way fitting. When the world is dominated by a bully not inclined to listen to reason and unwilling to accept that other nations and other peoples too have rights, why should India not be overwhelmed by hooligans? After all, it is only political power that these hooligans have lost.
|
August 14, 2004
August 12, 2004
Sectarian tension in India: It still hurts (The Economist)
The Economist
Aug 12 2004
SECTARIAN TENSION IN INDIA
It still hurts
AHMEDABAD
Truth and justice, like reconciliation, prove elusive in Gujarat
THE scar left by the pogrom directed at the Muslim minority in the Indian state of Gujarat in February and March 2002 has yet to heal. That is partly because not a single murderer has been convicted, although perhaps 2,000 people died. The state government is under pressure from local activists, human-rights groups and India's staunchly interventionist Supreme Court to see that justice is at last done. But it continues to act less like a scourge of illegal violence than its sponsor.
This week, the Supreme Court rebuked the state government's prosecutor for his failure to secure the arrest of ten of 21 Hindus accused in an infamous court case arising from the violence: the burning to death of 14 Muslims in a bakery. The accused have already been acquitted once, after witnesses withdrew their evidence. Prosecutors appealed, but in April the Supreme Court ruled that a fair retrial was impossible in Gujarat and moved the case to the neighbouring state of Maharashtra.
The state government may have reasons for subverting the judicial process. Led by Narendra Modi, a charismatic but demagogic hardliner from the Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is accused of having done little to prevent the slaughter. Many think it was complicit.
The government has, however, acted against those accused of the horrific “crime” that sparked the carnage. Using the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), it has charged 123 Muslims and detained nearly 100 over a fire in a train compartment, which took place in the town of Godhra. Of the 58 people asphyxiated or burned to death, many were Hindu devotees, returning from a gathering at the contested site of a temple in the holy town of Ayodhya. A Muslim mob was alleged to have doused the carriage with petrol, ignited it and locked the doors.
Revenge for this massacre was the BJP's explanation for the slaughter that followed. Even Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP's leader and, at the time, prime minister, seen as a moderate, asked “Who lit the fire first?”. That foreigners and the liberal English-language press in Delhi largely ignored the Godhra massacre, concentrating on the killings of Muslims—some 9-10% of Gujarat's 50m population—heightened the sense of grievance. It helped Mr Modi lead the BJP to a landslide victory in state elections in December 2002.
Yet forensic analysis and eyewitnesses have cast doubt on the government's theory of a preplanned arson attack. A hideous accident seems more likely. Last month, the railway minister in the government that came to power in Delhi in May, Laloo Prasad Yadav, announced an enquiry into the Godhra incident.
Mr Modi's critics were encouraged by the BJP's surprise defeat in the general elections and by its relatively poor showing in Gujarat itself, which they like to interpret as a repudiation of the BJP's communal politics. Local human-rights and social-welfare groups have had a renewed burst of energy, compiling lists of demands of the new central government led by the Congress party. The government this week agreed to one, revoking POTA, but not, as petitioners had hoped, with retrospective effect.
Harsh Mander, an activist and writer, says that if the government fails to do more it risks “missing a moment in history”, when it has a chance “to make amends for past injustices”. It may already be too late, however, to rebuild trust between Hindus and Muslims. The killing accelerated their segregation—a process, says Hanif Lakdawala, a prominent social worker, that is now 90% complete.
An example is the expanding ghetto behind the Bombay Hotel in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city. A warren of crude redbrick houses—much of it, during the present monsoon, under water—it is now home to some 4,000 Muslim families, mostly fugitives from the 2002 violence.
One of them, Yusuf, drives an autorickshaw, a three-wheel taxi. He is still too scared to return to his old home. Just last month, depositing passengers in a Hindu district, he was recognised as a Muslim and locals threw stones at him. Two weeks ago, fresh clashes erupted in Veraval, 320km (200 miles) south-west of Ahmedabad. But in the Bombay Hotel settlement, surrounded by 4km in either direction of exclusively Muslim slum, he feels safe. Muslims complain of a tacit economic boycott; employers put job applications bearing Muslim names to one side. In response, conservative Muslim organisations are gaining influence.
Communal relations in Gujarat raise concerns far beyond the state. This month, India's film censors refused a certificate to “Final Solution”, a documentary on the 2002 pogrom and its aftermath, which has won prizes at film festivals from Berlin to Zanzibar. The censors accused the film of promoting “communal disharmony”. Its maker, Rakesh Sharma, says they have become politically partisan.
The BJP itself has been in some disarray since its election defeat. Some members partly blame the setback on the stigma of the Gujarat pogrom. But the BJP's more fervent supporters—who idolise Mr Modi—accuse the party of having compromised its core “Hindu” principles to court moderate support. In Gujarat itself, Mr Modi has survived, for now, a rebellion from within the local party. His job was in jeopardy not because of his hardline views but because his high-handed manner has alienated many state legislators. For this reason, many in Ahmedabad still expect him to go later this year. The debate in the BJP over how to assess his rule, however, will go on much longer. So, sadly, will its effects on Gujarat's communal relations.
Aug 12 2004
SECTARIAN TENSION IN INDIA
It still hurts
AHMEDABAD
Truth and justice, like reconciliation, prove elusive in Gujarat
THE scar left by the pogrom directed at the Muslim minority in the Indian state of Gujarat in February and March 2002 has yet to heal. That is partly because not a single murderer has been convicted, although perhaps 2,000 people died. The state government is under pressure from local activists, human-rights groups and India's staunchly interventionist Supreme Court to see that justice is at last done. But it continues to act less like a scourge of illegal violence than its sponsor.
This week, the Supreme Court rebuked the state government's prosecutor for his failure to secure the arrest of ten of 21 Hindus accused in an infamous court case arising from the violence: the burning to death of 14 Muslims in a bakery. The accused have already been acquitted once, after witnesses withdrew their evidence. Prosecutors appealed, but in April the Supreme Court ruled that a fair retrial was impossible in Gujarat and moved the case to the neighbouring state of Maharashtra.
The state government may have reasons for subverting the judicial process. Led by Narendra Modi, a charismatic but demagogic hardliner from the Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is accused of having done little to prevent the slaughter. Many think it was complicit.
The government has, however, acted against those accused of the horrific “crime” that sparked the carnage. Using the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), it has charged 123 Muslims and detained nearly 100 over a fire in a train compartment, which took place in the town of Godhra. Of the 58 people asphyxiated or burned to death, many were Hindu devotees, returning from a gathering at the contested site of a temple in the holy town of Ayodhya. A Muslim mob was alleged to have doused the carriage with petrol, ignited it and locked the doors.
Revenge for this massacre was the BJP's explanation for the slaughter that followed. Even Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP's leader and, at the time, prime minister, seen as a moderate, asked “Who lit the fire first?”. That foreigners and the liberal English-language press in Delhi largely ignored the Godhra massacre, concentrating on the killings of Muslims—some 9-10% of Gujarat's 50m population—heightened the sense of grievance. It helped Mr Modi lead the BJP to a landslide victory in state elections in December 2002.
Yet forensic analysis and eyewitnesses have cast doubt on the government's theory of a preplanned arson attack. A hideous accident seems more likely. Last month, the railway minister in the government that came to power in Delhi in May, Laloo Prasad Yadav, announced an enquiry into the Godhra incident.
Mr Modi's critics were encouraged by the BJP's surprise defeat in the general elections and by its relatively poor showing in Gujarat itself, which they like to interpret as a repudiation of the BJP's communal politics. Local human-rights and social-welfare groups have had a renewed burst of energy, compiling lists of demands of the new central government led by the Congress party. The government this week agreed to one, revoking POTA, but not, as petitioners had hoped, with retrospective effect.
Harsh Mander, an activist and writer, says that if the government fails to do more it risks “missing a moment in history”, when it has a chance “to make amends for past injustices”. It may already be too late, however, to rebuild trust between Hindus and Muslims. The killing accelerated their segregation—a process, says Hanif Lakdawala, a prominent social worker, that is now 90% complete.
An example is the expanding ghetto behind the Bombay Hotel in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city. A warren of crude redbrick houses—much of it, during the present monsoon, under water—it is now home to some 4,000 Muslim families, mostly fugitives from the 2002 violence.
One of them, Yusuf, drives an autorickshaw, a three-wheel taxi. He is still too scared to return to his old home. Just last month, depositing passengers in a Hindu district, he was recognised as a Muslim and locals threw stones at him. Two weeks ago, fresh clashes erupted in Veraval, 320km (200 miles) south-west of Ahmedabad. But in the Bombay Hotel settlement, surrounded by 4km in either direction of exclusively Muslim slum, he feels safe. Muslims complain of a tacit economic boycott; employers put job applications bearing Muslim names to one side. In response, conservative Muslim organisations are gaining influence.
Communal relations in Gujarat raise concerns far beyond the state. This month, India's film censors refused a certificate to “Final Solution”, a documentary on the 2002 pogrom and its aftermath, which has won prizes at film festivals from Berlin to Zanzibar. The censors accused the film of promoting “communal disharmony”. Its maker, Rakesh Sharma, says they have become politically partisan.
The BJP itself has been in some disarray since its election defeat. Some members partly blame the setback on the stigma of the Gujarat pogrom. But the BJP's more fervent supporters—who idolise Mr Modi—accuse the party of having compromised its core “Hindu” principles to court moderate support. In Gujarat itself, Mr Modi has survived, for now, a rebellion from within the local party. His job was in jeopardy not because of his hardline views but because his high-handed manner has alienated many state legislators. For this reason, many in Ahmedabad still expect him to go later this year. The debate in the BJP over how to assess his rule, however, will go on much longer. So, sadly, will its effects on Gujarat's communal relations.
August 11, 2004
Hindutva in Rajasthan [ 3 stories]
[Three Stories from The Hindu]
[1]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106960500.htm
Muslim forum sees Gujarat pattern
By Our Special Correspondent
JAIPUR, AUG. 10. The Rajasthan Muslim Forum today accused the State Government of showing communal bias in handling the situation in the violence-hit Sarada village in Udaipur district, from where most of the Muslim families have migrated following an attack by tribals. It alleged that the violence was planned and executed on the “Gujarat pattern”.
A six-member delegation of the Forum, which visited the tribal belt from August 6 to 9, found that Muslims had been terrorised by both police and tribals and police had launched a crackdown on the Muslim residents of Sarada after a visit of the Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, in the last week of July.
The members of the Forum — an apex body of Muslim organisations and institutions — said at a Press conference here that the majority of the 200 Muslim families had shifted to Udaipur, Salumbar, Khairwada and Dungarpur fearing for their safety, as the tribals in the region were “still being provoked” to launch a fresh offensive against the Muslim minority. “Police got an explicit message from the Government on the line of action to be taken after the Udaipur Superintendent of Police, Ravi Prakash Meherda, was removed,” Mohammed Salim, a member of the Forum and president of the State unit of Jamat-e-Islami Hind, said. He alleged that Muslims were harassed by raids on their houses.
Mujahid Ali Naqvi — one of the members of the delegation that visited Sarada — said the 5,000-strong mob of tribals, which had attacked two Muslim localities in the village on July 30, was controlled by police and a bloodshed was prevented. “Yet, it was a successful experiment of communal forces to incite tribals against Muslims on the Gujarat pattern,” he said.
----------
[2]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106970500.htm
Minister's visit fuelled unrest: Gehlot
By Our Special Correspondent
JAIPUR, AUG. 10.The former Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, has expressed concern over the sense of insecurity among the minorities in Udaipur district’s Sarada town after the recent clashes between tribals and the minorities. There were visible signs of disquiet among the public, which got only aggravated with the visit of the Rajasthan Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, Mr.Gehlot said.
Mr.Gehlot told The Hindu , after a visit to Sarada this weekend, that the partisan behaviour of Mr.Kataria during his trip to the affected areas had led to the local minority population leaving their home and hearth for fear of their safety.
“Mr. Kataria’s visit failed to instil any confidence among the local people. In fact it proved counter-productive,” he pointed out.
Mr.Gehlot expressed his dismay over the way the vested interests could transform a quarrel between two individuals of poor reputation belonging to two different communities into a strife between tribals and Muslims. “One has reasons to fear that the Gujarat pattern is being attempted in these parts of Rajasthan which is adjoining that State,” he observed.
“It is still a mystery who had set fire to a shop initially triggering off the incidents. It is also not clear who beat the drums to collect the crowd of Adivasis who proceeded to attack the minority localities in Sarada town,” Mr.Gehlot pointed out.
Only timely action by the police which opened fire to disperse the frenzied mobs saved many lives on July 27, he said.
However the decision to transfer the Superintendent of Police in the wake of firing not only led to the demoralization of the administration but also deprived the minorities of their confidence in the system, Mr.Gehlot said.
----------
[3]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106841100.htm
Parivar activists stop bus carrying tribal Christians
By Sunny Sebastian
JAIPUR, AUG.10. A group of Sangh Parivar activists on Monday forcibly stopped a Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation bus taking tribal Christians from Banswara to Ajmer near the Chittorgarh railway station alleging that they were being led to a conversion ceremony.
The bus, carrying a group of 28, comprising 10 women, six extension workers and regular passengers on their way to Ajmer, was stopped at Chittorgarh around 2.15 p.m. by the activists. The roadways bus stand at Chittorgarh came virtually under the siege as Sangh workers reached there in large numbers following a call by their leaders.
VHP and the Bajrang Dal men got into the bus and manhandled the passengers, including a tribal priest, Stephen Rawat, who is the director of the Banswara unit of the Udaipur-based Sampoorna Jeevan Vikas Samiti.
Later, following police intervention, the tribals escaped the fury of slogan-shouting men, but had to return to Banswara.
“This is tragic. A bogey of conversion was created to thwart even a no-religious activity. The attempt is to harass and intimidate the minorities so that they are deprived of their place under the sun,” the Bishop of Udaipur Catholic Diocese, Joseph Pathalil, told this correspondent over telephone. It seemed it was all planned in advance, he added.
The scheduled camp at Ajmer was organised by the NGO, Catholic Relief Society (CRS) from August 9–13.
[1]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106960500.htm
Muslim forum sees Gujarat pattern
By Our Special Correspondent
JAIPUR, AUG. 10. The Rajasthan Muslim Forum today accused the State Government of showing communal bias in handling the situation in the violence-hit Sarada village in Udaipur district, from where most of the Muslim families have migrated following an attack by tribals. It alleged that the violence was planned and executed on the “Gujarat pattern”.
A six-member delegation of the Forum, which visited the tribal belt from August 6 to 9, found that Muslims had been terrorised by both police and tribals and police had launched a crackdown on the Muslim residents of Sarada after a visit of the Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, in the last week of July.
The members of the Forum — an apex body of Muslim organisations and institutions — said at a Press conference here that the majority of the 200 Muslim families had shifted to Udaipur, Salumbar, Khairwada and Dungarpur fearing for their safety, as the tribals in the region were “still being provoked” to launch a fresh offensive against the Muslim minority. “Police got an explicit message from the Government on the line of action to be taken after the Udaipur Superintendent of Police, Ravi Prakash Meherda, was removed,” Mohammed Salim, a member of the Forum and president of the State unit of Jamat-e-Islami Hind, said. He alleged that Muslims were harassed by raids on their houses.
Mujahid Ali Naqvi — one of the members of the delegation that visited Sarada — said the 5,000-strong mob of tribals, which had attacked two Muslim localities in the village on July 30, was controlled by police and a bloodshed was prevented. “Yet, it was a successful experiment of communal forces to incite tribals against Muslims on the Gujarat pattern,” he said.
----------
[2]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106970500.htm
Minister's visit fuelled unrest: Gehlot
By Our Special Correspondent
JAIPUR, AUG. 10.The former Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, has expressed concern over the sense of insecurity among the minorities in Udaipur district’s Sarada town after the recent clashes between tribals and the minorities. There were visible signs of disquiet among the public, which got only aggravated with the visit of the Rajasthan Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, Mr.Gehlot said.
Mr.Gehlot told The Hindu , after a visit to Sarada this weekend, that the partisan behaviour of Mr.Kataria during his trip to the affected areas had led to the local minority population leaving their home and hearth for fear of their safety.
“Mr. Kataria’s visit failed to instil any confidence among the local people. In fact it proved counter-productive,” he pointed out.
Mr.Gehlot expressed his dismay over the way the vested interests could transform a quarrel between two individuals of poor reputation belonging to two different communities into a strife between tribals and Muslims. “One has reasons to fear that the Gujarat pattern is being attempted in these parts of Rajasthan which is adjoining that State,” he observed.
“It is still a mystery who had set fire to a shop initially triggering off the incidents. It is also not clear who beat the drums to collect the crowd of Adivasis who proceeded to attack the minority localities in Sarada town,” Mr.Gehlot pointed out.
Only timely action by the police which opened fire to disperse the frenzied mobs saved many lives on July 27, he said.
However the decision to transfer the Superintendent of Police in the wake of firing not only led to the demoralization of the administration but also deprived the minorities of their confidence in the system, Mr.Gehlot said.
----------
[3]
http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/11/stories/2004081106841100.htm
Parivar activists stop bus carrying tribal Christians
By Sunny Sebastian
JAIPUR, AUG.10. A group of Sangh Parivar activists on Monday forcibly stopped a Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation bus taking tribal Christians from Banswara to Ajmer near the Chittorgarh railway station alleging that they were being led to a conversion ceremony.
The bus, carrying a group of 28, comprising 10 women, six extension workers and regular passengers on their way to Ajmer, was stopped at Chittorgarh around 2.15 p.m. by the activists. The roadways bus stand at Chittorgarh came virtually under the siege as Sangh workers reached there in large numbers following a call by their leaders.
VHP and the Bajrang Dal men got into the bus and manhandled the passengers, including a tribal priest, Stephen Rawat, who is the director of the Banswara unit of the Udaipur-based Sampoorna Jeevan Vikas Samiti.
Later, following police intervention, the tribals escaped the fury of slogan-shouting men, but had to return to Banswara.
“This is tragic. A bogey of conversion was created to thwart even a no-religious activity. The attempt is to harass and intimidate the minorities so that they are deprived of their place under the sun,” the Bishop of Udaipur Catholic Diocese, Joseph Pathalil, told this correspondent over telephone. It seemed it was all planned in advance, he added.
The scheduled camp at Ajmer was organised by the NGO, Catholic Relief Society (CRS) from August 9–13.
August 10, 2004
Book Review: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics
The Hindu - August 10, 2004 | Book Review
The phenomenon of Hindutva
HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN POLITICS — An Omnibus comprising The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India: John Zavos; The Saffron Wave: Thomas Blom Hansen; The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India: Christophe Jaffrelot and Thomas Blom Hansen — Editors; with an introduction by Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001.
Rs. 695.
THE PHILOSOPHER, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy introduces his magnificent long essay on Hinduism with one affirmation and a set of five denials. He calls Hinduism the oldest of the metaphysical disciplines, with an unbroken tradition that is comprehensible to the learned as well as to the toiling peasant.
Having enumerated the essentially democratic character of Hinduism, he goes on to list five elements that have been misunderstood in relation to it— the Vedic doctrine was neither pantheistic nor polytheistic; Karma is not fate; Maya is not illusion; the idea of reincarnation is merely a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity, transmigration and regeneration; and the six schools of Indian philosophy were not mutually exclusive systems but six points of view that were hardly contradictory.
Hinduism universal
Having listed the five denials, Coomaraswamy comes to a conclusion that might startle contemporary votaries of Hindutva and the theorists who seek to make sense of Hindutva. He denies that there was anything unique and peculiar to Hinduism apart from the local colouring.
Hinduism, argues Coomaraswamy, contained universal truths that no one set of people, ethnically or racially determined, could claim as exclusively their own. He goes a step further and suggests that other faiths might see the truths of Hinduism as "intrinsic and probable proofs" of the truth inherent in their own faiths.
There is no knowing whether the Hindi critic, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi who is quoted by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his introduction to the Omnibus edition of writings under review, had ever read Coomaraswamy.
Even if he had, there would be little in common between the philosopher and the Hindi writer, since Coomaraswamy would be perplexed by the language of "anxiety" and about Hindu "identity" as much as he would have little to do with tracing the roots of this anxiety to the ideas of "victimhood" and "uncertainty".
Situating Hindutva
In this sense, the Hindutva Omnibus is, in fact, two separate texts. The first one is represented by Mehta's introduction and the second is a collection of works already published in the past by John Zavos, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot.
The second set of texts have been pioneering attempts in the recent past to unravel the emergence of Hindutva as a phenomenon in India and have illuminated many dark corners in our attempt to understand Hindutva. The introduction does attempt to justify the inclusion of these texts in the Omnibus and does so elegantly.
There are, however, two separate sets of assumptions that run through these texts and the introduction. The first is to do with finding causal connections to explain the rise of Hindutva.
Nationalism, colonialism, quest for identity, Hindu anxiety, victimhood, resentment and history are some of the factors marshalled to account for the recent visibility of Hindutva. This is where the problem lies.
To perceive Hindutva as representing a set of ideas that were a reaction to modernity, colonialism and nationalism is to miss the point altogether. Hindutva is only a visible manifestation of the sickness within Hinduism. This sickness was, in turn, generated by the denial of a political role that the faith played since the time of the rise of Buddhism.
It failed to play the role well, both in the metaphysical realm as well as in the material world, and sought to cover its disgrace by painting itself into a tolerant, inward-looking and amorphous faith. Each failure to confront the "Other" led to an increasing ambiguity within Hinduism about its relation to power, especially political power.
Critique
Methodologically, therefore, the prudent step is to deny any exclusive claims to superiority on the part of Hinduism in the manner of Coomaraswamy. Existing claims to superiority are not merely a result of India's subjugation or Hinduism's contentious relationship with modernity. Rather, it lies in the failure to produce new knowledge and creatively confront the "Other".
If one were to use words like "anxiety", "uncertainty" and "resentment", all part of the once-fashionable theoretical universe of excitable French philosophers of the 20th Century, then, in the context of Hinduism, these psychological disorders were born out of its inability to come to terms with the Buddha's metaphysics and the failure to turn the conversation with Buddhism in its favour.
Hindu nationalism
The second set of assumptions has to do with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party as representing a form of Hindu nationalism. Mehta describes it as a powerful political force, a veritable social movement and a widespread cultural phenomenon that has the ability to redefine India. Even a scholar of Jaffrelot's dexterity claims that Hindutva has been "able to progressively integrate itself into the Indian political discourse."
The truth is that Hindutva never had a politics, much less a theory of government or even a model for economics. The burden of Hindutva lies in attempting to forge a romantic pre-social, pre-political unity on the assumption that there are certain ties that bind all Hindus together.
What masquerades as politics is its ability to integrate itself into the electoral and democratic process effectively. If Hindutva resounds louder than any other political ideology today, it is because of the fragility of the liberal discourse, the limited salience of the radical alternative and the use of culturally salient metaphors by the Sangh Parivar.
To describe it as a political force or even a movement is to make the Owl of Minerva crash-land before reality has concretised.
JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
The phenomenon of Hindutva
HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN POLITICS — An Omnibus comprising The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India: John Zavos; The Saffron Wave: Thomas Blom Hansen; The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India: Christophe Jaffrelot and Thomas Blom Hansen — Editors; with an introduction by Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001.
Rs. 695.
THE PHILOSOPHER, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy introduces his magnificent long essay on Hinduism with one affirmation and a set of five denials. He calls Hinduism the oldest of the metaphysical disciplines, with an unbroken tradition that is comprehensible to the learned as well as to the toiling peasant.
Having enumerated the essentially democratic character of Hinduism, he goes on to list five elements that have been misunderstood in relation to it— the Vedic doctrine was neither pantheistic nor polytheistic; Karma is not fate; Maya is not illusion; the idea of reincarnation is merely a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity, transmigration and regeneration; and the six schools of Indian philosophy were not mutually exclusive systems but six points of view that were hardly contradictory.
Hinduism universal
Having listed the five denials, Coomaraswamy comes to a conclusion that might startle contemporary votaries of Hindutva and the theorists who seek to make sense of Hindutva. He denies that there was anything unique and peculiar to Hinduism apart from the local colouring.
Hinduism, argues Coomaraswamy, contained universal truths that no one set of people, ethnically or racially determined, could claim as exclusively their own. He goes a step further and suggests that other faiths might see the truths of Hinduism as "intrinsic and probable proofs" of the truth inherent in their own faiths.
There is no knowing whether the Hindi critic, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi who is quoted by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his introduction to the Omnibus edition of writings under review, had ever read Coomaraswamy.
Even if he had, there would be little in common between the philosopher and the Hindi writer, since Coomaraswamy would be perplexed by the language of "anxiety" and about Hindu "identity" as much as he would have little to do with tracing the roots of this anxiety to the ideas of "victimhood" and "uncertainty".
Situating Hindutva
In this sense, the Hindutva Omnibus is, in fact, two separate texts. The first one is represented by Mehta's introduction and the second is a collection of works already published in the past by John Zavos, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot.
The second set of texts have been pioneering attempts in the recent past to unravel the emergence of Hindutva as a phenomenon in India and have illuminated many dark corners in our attempt to understand Hindutva. The introduction does attempt to justify the inclusion of these texts in the Omnibus and does so elegantly.
There are, however, two separate sets of assumptions that run through these texts and the introduction. The first is to do with finding causal connections to explain the rise of Hindutva.
Nationalism, colonialism, quest for identity, Hindu anxiety, victimhood, resentment and history are some of the factors marshalled to account for the recent visibility of Hindutva. This is where the problem lies.
To perceive Hindutva as representing a set of ideas that were a reaction to modernity, colonialism and nationalism is to miss the point altogether. Hindutva is only a visible manifestation of the sickness within Hinduism. This sickness was, in turn, generated by the denial of a political role that the faith played since the time of the rise of Buddhism.
It failed to play the role well, both in the metaphysical realm as well as in the material world, and sought to cover its disgrace by painting itself into a tolerant, inward-looking and amorphous faith. Each failure to confront the "Other" led to an increasing ambiguity within Hinduism about its relation to power, especially political power.
Critique
Methodologically, therefore, the prudent step is to deny any exclusive claims to superiority on the part of Hinduism in the manner of Coomaraswamy. Existing claims to superiority are not merely a result of India's subjugation or Hinduism's contentious relationship with modernity. Rather, it lies in the failure to produce new knowledge and creatively confront the "Other".
If one were to use words like "anxiety", "uncertainty" and "resentment", all part of the once-fashionable theoretical universe of excitable French philosophers of the 20th Century, then, in the context of Hinduism, these psychological disorders were born out of its inability to come to terms with the Buddha's metaphysics and the failure to turn the conversation with Buddhism in its favour.
Hindu nationalism
The second set of assumptions has to do with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party as representing a form of Hindu nationalism. Mehta describes it as a powerful political force, a veritable social movement and a widespread cultural phenomenon that has the ability to redefine India. Even a scholar of Jaffrelot's dexterity claims that Hindutva has been "able to progressively integrate itself into the Indian political discourse."
The truth is that Hindutva never had a politics, much less a theory of government or even a model for economics. The burden of Hindutva lies in attempting to forge a romantic pre-social, pre-political unity on the assumption that there are certain ties that bind all Hindus together.
What masquerades as politics is its ability to integrate itself into the electoral and democratic process effectively. If Hindutva resounds louder than any other political ideology today, it is because of the fragility of the liberal discourse, the limited salience of the radical alternative and the use of culturally salient metaphors by the Sangh Parivar.
To describe it as a political force or even a movement is to make the Owl of Minerva crash-land before reality has concretised.
JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
August 07, 2004
RSS 'pracharaks' made BJP regional secretaries
The Hindu - August 07, 2004
RSS 'pracharaks' made BJP regional secretaries
By Neena Vyas
NEW DELHI, AUG. 6. In a significant move indicating a revamp of the Bharatiya Janata Party's organisation machinery, the party president, Venkaiah Naidu, has appointed full-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh `pracharaks' as regional organisation secretaries, with each `pracharak' to head a cluster of States to take care of all organisation issues in that region.
Some of these `pracharaks' have only recently been given to the party by the RSS, a senior party leader said. One of them was till recently more active in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the RSS spokesperson, Ram Madhav said. It seems that the decision to place the `pracharaks' in these newly- created "regional" positions is a signal of the new synergy between the RSS, the larger Sangh Parivar and the BJP. The six regional organisation secretaries are: Venugopal Reddy for Pondicherry and Andaman and Lakshadweep; V. Satish for Assam and the northeast; Mukundan for Tamil Nadu and Kerala; Saudan Singh for Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh and Prassan Mishra for Orissa and West Bengal. This list is expected to be expanded later.
Mr. Naidu also appointed `prabharis' who will in charge of political affairs in the States. The former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Kalyan Singh, has been given charge of U.P. while the party general secretary, Pramod Mahajan, will continue as the `prabhari' (in-charge) for Maharashtra.
Although Mr. Naidu had reconstituted the national executive committee and revamped the party's list of office-bearers after the Lok Sabha election, the appointment of `prabharis', except those in five States going to the polls in the next seven months, was pending.
A balancing act
Mr. Kalyan Singh's appointment comes as a balancing act close on the heels of the change of party president in the State. Earlier, Mr. Naidu had dropped the backward caste State unit president, Vinay Katiyar, and replaced him with a brahmin leader, Kesrinath Tripathi. Today, he gave the job of `prabhari' to Kalyan Singh, a backward caste leader, when earlier the job was held by brahmin leader Kalraj Mishra. Mr. Mishra has been given the job of `prabhari' for the important States of Delhi and Rajasthan.
The party general secretary, Arun Jaitley, who had already been given charge of Bihar, a crucial State going to the polls early next year, has also been asked to look after Madhya Pradesh. Another former U.P. Chief Minister, Rajnath Singh, already in charge of Jharkhand, where polling will take place along with Bihar, has also been given additional charge of Chhattisgarh. The BJP general secretary, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, retains charge of Haryana while the party vice-president, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, has been asked to look after Himachal Pradesh. Swami Chinmayanand will continue to be in charge of Arunachal Pradesh.
The other `prabharis' are as follows: Padmanabha Acharya (Tamil Nadu); Bal Apte (Andhra Pradesh); Ved Prakash Goyal (Karnataka); L. Ganesan (Kerala and Lakshadweep); Om Mathur (Gujarat); Seshadirichari (Uttaranchal); Shahnawaj Hussain (Orissa); Sushil Modi (West Bengal); Arun Sathe (Assam); Jaskaur Meena (Punjab); Manohar Lal (Jammu and Kashmir); Sadanand Gowda (Goa); Aseem Ghosh (Tripura); Bharot Singh (Meghalaya); Rajen Gohain (Mizoram); Tapir Gao (Manipur); N.C. Borkataky (Nagaland); Tawarchand Gehlot (overall north-eastern States excluding Arunachal and Assam); Anadaman and Pondicherry (S Thirunavakarassar); and Chandigarh (Kiran Maheshwari).
RSS 'pracharaks' made BJP regional secretaries
By Neena Vyas
NEW DELHI, AUG. 6. In a significant move indicating a revamp of the Bharatiya Janata Party's organisation machinery, the party president, Venkaiah Naidu, has appointed full-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh `pracharaks' as regional organisation secretaries, with each `pracharak' to head a cluster of States to take care of all organisation issues in that region.
Some of these `pracharaks' have only recently been given to the party by the RSS, a senior party leader said. One of them was till recently more active in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the RSS spokesperson, Ram Madhav said. It seems that the decision to place the `pracharaks' in these newly- created "regional" positions is a signal of the new synergy between the RSS, the larger Sangh Parivar and the BJP. The six regional organisation secretaries are: Venugopal Reddy for Pondicherry and Andaman and Lakshadweep; V. Satish for Assam and the northeast; Mukundan for Tamil Nadu and Kerala; Saudan Singh for Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh and Prassan Mishra for Orissa and West Bengal. This list is expected to be expanded later.
Mr. Naidu also appointed `prabharis' who will in charge of political affairs in the States. The former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Kalyan Singh, has been given charge of U.P. while the party general secretary, Pramod Mahajan, will continue as the `prabhari' (in-charge) for Maharashtra.
Although Mr. Naidu had reconstituted the national executive committee and revamped the party's list of office-bearers after the Lok Sabha election, the appointment of `prabharis', except those in five States going to the polls in the next seven months, was pending.
A balancing act
Mr. Kalyan Singh's appointment comes as a balancing act close on the heels of the change of party president in the State. Earlier, Mr. Naidu had dropped the backward caste State unit president, Vinay Katiyar, and replaced him with a brahmin leader, Kesrinath Tripathi. Today, he gave the job of `prabhari' to Kalyan Singh, a backward caste leader, when earlier the job was held by brahmin leader Kalraj Mishra. Mr. Mishra has been given the job of `prabhari' for the important States of Delhi and Rajasthan.
The party general secretary, Arun Jaitley, who had already been given charge of Bihar, a crucial State going to the polls early next year, has also been asked to look after Madhya Pradesh. Another former U.P. Chief Minister, Rajnath Singh, already in charge of Jharkhand, where polling will take place along with Bihar, has also been given additional charge of Chhattisgarh. The BJP general secretary, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, retains charge of Haryana while the party vice-president, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, has been asked to look after Himachal Pradesh. Swami Chinmayanand will continue to be in charge of Arunachal Pradesh.
The other `prabharis' are as follows: Padmanabha Acharya (Tamil Nadu); Bal Apte (Andhra Pradesh); Ved Prakash Goyal (Karnataka); L. Ganesan (Kerala and Lakshadweep); Om Mathur (Gujarat); Seshadirichari (Uttaranchal); Shahnawaj Hussain (Orissa); Sushil Modi (West Bengal); Arun Sathe (Assam); Jaskaur Meena (Punjab); Manohar Lal (Jammu and Kashmir); Sadanand Gowda (Goa); Aseem Ghosh (Tripura); Bharot Singh (Meghalaya); Rajen Gohain (Mizoram); Tapir Gao (Manipur); N.C. Borkataky (Nagaland); Tawarchand Gehlot (overall north-eastern States excluding Arunachal and Assam); Anadaman and Pondicherry (S Thirunavakarassar); and Chandigarh (Kiran Maheshwari).
Confrontation just won't do
Dawn - August 7, 2004 | Op-Ed.
Confrontation just won't do
By Kuldip Nayar
It is official. The RSS is now guiding the BJP in formulating its political moves. The uncompromising line that the BJP has been adopting in parliament cannot but be the thinking of a fanatic group which is reckless in its approach and destructive in action.
Otherwise, it is beyond the realm of conjecture that a political party should be bent on destroying the parliamentary democracy of which it is an integral part. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a gathering of editors in Delhi recently that the harm the stalling of parliament was doing to the polity was "serious" and could harm the institution.
The RSS is not, however, worried over the criticism. It has no faith in parliamentary democracy and considers it a western concept. D.P. Thengadi, one of RSS's leading lights, has said: "The constituent assembly imposed British-type institutions on the people." He criticised also the foreign inspiration of parliamentary democracy.
The BJP's behaviour after the polls has been all the more disappointing. Some had begun to believe that the party had changed a bit because of its compulsions in a pluralistic society.
Despite being a member of the Sangh parivar, the party looked less rigid and more open to talks and interaction. The leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee gave the BJP an image which was at times mistaken for liberalism. The manner in which he led the 24-party coalition created the impression as if the party had come to appreciate the value of consensus.
That the tainted ministers should have quit the Manmohan Singh government goes without saying. Probably left to him, he would have seen their back long ago. But the Congress party he heads in parliament would not stay in power if the Rashtriya Janata Dal of railway minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his tainted colleagues were to withdraw the support. Its strength of 23 members is crucial.
Manmohan Sing was frank enough before editors to admit that the choice before him was either to have the tainted ministers in his cabinet to save the coalition or to hand over power to the BJP. He said he even rang up Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh to request them to allow the parliament to function. They did not agree.
In fact, the BJP seems to have declared a war against not only the Congress-led government but parliamentary democracy itself. Otherwise, how do you explain that the two sessions of the parliament held so far after the election were practically disturbed on all days. The party's spokesmen have indulged in polemics, accusing the government of "negative and confrontationist approach towards the opposition."
I wish the BJP had spelt out what it meant by "negative and confrontationist attitude." Its own role in the last parliament - I was a witness to it in the Rajya Sabha - was worse. So far, the party has given vent to its frustration, making it obvious that it cannot remain without power.
The BJP has no face to speak about the tainted ministers. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi from the BJP and George Fernandes, convener of the National Democratic Alliance, are no less tainted. They never resigned from the Vajpayee government.
The first two were responsible for the killing of hundreds of people following the demolition of the Babri masjid. Against Fernandes, there is a regular inquiry commission sitting and examining his deals at the defence ministry.
To say that the charges against Advani and Joshi are of a different nature is to challenge the jurisprudence that makes no distinction between crimes.
I cannot understand why the BJP continues to behave like an aggrieved party when it comes to the dismissal of governors. The party acted in the same way as the Congress did and dismissed the governors appointed by the governments headed by Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral.
In fact, both the Congress and the BJP have reduced the institution to a pinjrapole where the aged and discarded animals are kept till their death. What is required is a serious debate on the utility of the institution which the ruling parties are misusing.
The display of Vajpayee's photograph on the highways, built during the BJP-led government, was a wrong thing to do to begin with. The allocation was from the public exchequer, not the party's coffers.
Why should the BJP leader be given credit for the money spent by the government? In fact, the party did something unforgivable: it removed Mahatma Gandhi's portraits from government offices and airports. Gandhi is the father of the nation. How does one interpret the BJP's bias against Gandhi?
Everything else can probably be pardoned, but not the saffronization of the system. Congress was bad enough in appointing its favourites here and there - and it has not learnt any lesson from the past - but the BJP eat all the records by handing over to the RSS nominees such institutions as were connected with education, information, social welfare and the like.
Yet, one of the BJP spokesmen had the temerity to say: "Unless we fought back this onslaught (ideological intolerance) from the very start, the pseudo-secularists will only intensify their campaign against."
The nation has not yet recovered from the BJP's role of "intolerance" in Gujarat. The Supreme Court is still trying to retrieve justice from the debris of death and destruction. How can a few secularists match the din of fundamentalism that the BJP, the Bajrang Dal, the Hindu Vishwa Parishad and the likes have raised?
After having injected communalism into the system, the BJP is now after parliament which still represents pluralism and democracy. The Congress did its best to destroy its ethos during the emergency (1975-77). People asserted themselves to save democracy and the parliamentary system was restored.
The BJP is trying to hit at the very roots of parliament. Its NDA has declared that it will not join the parliament's standing committees that scrutinize budget proposals and legislative business at length. This is an obligation which the electorate put on the members they return.
The boycott is a betrayal of their trust. In the committees, I can say from my experience, members do rise above the party line and make substantial contribution to improve the draft bills placed before them.
The debate in the committees is bound to suffer because it will be a one-sided affair. The real loss will be that of the polity which is enriched by the different points of view. Since most of the opposition leaders chair the standing committees, the absence of the BJP and its allies may reduce the exercise to a farce.
It is apparent that the ruling United Progressive Alliance and the NDA in the opposition have still to come to terms with each other. The ideological differences are known to everyone and elections showed that. But their resolve to rise above party considerations for the country's good is yet to be proved.
The real problem is not about the views of political parties but how they are held. In a democratic system, there can be no room for imposition. The prime minister rightly said at the farewell of the retired Rajya Sabha members that the country needed "a cooperative democracy." Both the Congress and the BJP, particularly the latter, have a long way to go in imbibing that spirit.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Confrontation just won't do
By Kuldip Nayar
It is official. The RSS is now guiding the BJP in formulating its political moves. The uncompromising line that the BJP has been adopting in parliament cannot but be the thinking of a fanatic group which is reckless in its approach and destructive in action.
Otherwise, it is beyond the realm of conjecture that a political party should be bent on destroying the parliamentary democracy of which it is an integral part. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a gathering of editors in Delhi recently that the harm the stalling of parliament was doing to the polity was "serious" and could harm the institution.
The RSS is not, however, worried over the criticism. It has no faith in parliamentary democracy and considers it a western concept. D.P. Thengadi, one of RSS's leading lights, has said: "The constituent assembly imposed British-type institutions on the people." He criticised also the foreign inspiration of parliamentary democracy.
The BJP's behaviour after the polls has been all the more disappointing. Some had begun to believe that the party had changed a bit because of its compulsions in a pluralistic society.
Despite being a member of the Sangh parivar, the party looked less rigid and more open to talks and interaction. The leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee gave the BJP an image which was at times mistaken for liberalism. The manner in which he led the 24-party coalition created the impression as if the party had come to appreciate the value of consensus.
That the tainted ministers should have quit the Manmohan Singh government goes without saying. Probably left to him, he would have seen their back long ago. But the Congress party he heads in parliament would not stay in power if the Rashtriya Janata Dal of railway minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his tainted colleagues were to withdraw the support. Its strength of 23 members is crucial.
Manmohan Sing was frank enough before editors to admit that the choice before him was either to have the tainted ministers in his cabinet to save the coalition or to hand over power to the BJP. He said he even rang up Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh to request them to allow the parliament to function. They did not agree.
In fact, the BJP seems to have declared a war against not only the Congress-led government but parliamentary democracy itself. Otherwise, how do you explain that the two sessions of the parliament held so far after the election were practically disturbed on all days. The party's spokesmen have indulged in polemics, accusing the government of "negative and confrontationist approach towards the opposition."
I wish the BJP had spelt out what it meant by "negative and confrontationist attitude." Its own role in the last parliament - I was a witness to it in the Rajya Sabha - was worse. So far, the party has given vent to its frustration, making it obvious that it cannot remain without power.
The BJP has no face to speak about the tainted ministers. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi from the BJP and George Fernandes, convener of the National Democratic Alliance, are no less tainted. They never resigned from the Vajpayee government.
The first two were responsible for the killing of hundreds of people following the demolition of the Babri masjid. Against Fernandes, there is a regular inquiry commission sitting and examining his deals at the defence ministry.
To say that the charges against Advani and Joshi are of a different nature is to challenge the jurisprudence that makes no distinction between crimes.
I cannot understand why the BJP continues to behave like an aggrieved party when it comes to the dismissal of governors. The party acted in the same way as the Congress did and dismissed the governors appointed by the governments headed by Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral.
In fact, both the Congress and the BJP have reduced the institution to a pinjrapole where the aged and discarded animals are kept till their death. What is required is a serious debate on the utility of the institution which the ruling parties are misusing.
The display of Vajpayee's photograph on the highways, built during the BJP-led government, was a wrong thing to do to begin with. The allocation was from the public exchequer, not the party's coffers.
Why should the BJP leader be given credit for the money spent by the government? In fact, the party did something unforgivable: it removed Mahatma Gandhi's portraits from government offices and airports. Gandhi is the father of the nation. How does one interpret the BJP's bias against Gandhi?
Everything else can probably be pardoned, but not the saffronization of the system. Congress was bad enough in appointing its favourites here and there - and it has not learnt any lesson from the past - but the BJP eat all the records by handing over to the RSS nominees such institutions as were connected with education, information, social welfare and the like.
Yet, one of the BJP spokesmen had the temerity to say: "Unless we fought back this onslaught (ideological intolerance) from the very start, the pseudo-secularists will only intensify their campaign against."
The nation has not yet recovered from the BJP's role of "intolerance" in Gujarat. The Supreme Court is still trying to retrieve justice from the debris of death and destruction. How can a few secularists match the din of fundamentalism that the BJP, the Bajrang Dal, the Hindu Vishwa Parishad and the likes have raised?
After having injected communalism into the system, the BJP is now after parliament which still represents pluralism and democracy. The Congress did its best to destroy its ethos during the emergency (1975-77). People asserted themselves to save democracy and the parliamentary system was restored.
The BJP is trying to hit at the very roots of parliament. Its NDA has declared that it will not join the parliament's standing committees that scrutinize budget proposals and legislative business at length. This is an obligation which the electorate put on the members they return.
The boycott is a betrayal of their trust. In the committees, I can say from my experience, members do rise above the party line and make substantial contribution to improve the draft bills placed before them.
The debate in the committees is bound to suffer because it will be a one-sided affair. The real loss will be that of the polity which is enriched by the different points of view. Since most of the opposition leaders chair the standing committees, the absence of the BJP and its allies may reduce the exercise to a farce.
It is apparent that the ruling United Progressive Alliance and the NDA in the opposition have still to come to terms with each other. The ideological differences are known to everyone and elections showed that. But their resolve to rise above party considerations for the country's good is yet to be proved.
The real problem is not about the views of political parties but how they are held. In a democratic system, there can be no room for imposition. The prime minister rightly said at the farewell of the retired Rajya Sabha members that the country needed "a cooperative democracy." Both the Congress and the BJP, particularly the latter, have a long way to go in imbibing that spirit.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Body of the Nation - Why women were mutilated in Gujarat
Boston Review - Summer 2004
URL: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/contents.html
Body of the Nation
Why women were mutilated in Gujarat
Martha C. Nussbaum
I. What Happened
8 On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, packed with Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya. Ayodhya, as the alleged birthplace of the god Rama, has been a focal point of Hindu anti-Muslim feeling for several decades. In 1992, Hindu zealots destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque there, claiming that it covered the remains of a Hindu temple. The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, stymied by the government and the courts, was angry. When the train stopped at the station, passengers got into arguments with Muslim vendors and passengers. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say “Jai Sri Ram” (“Hail Ram”), and a young Muslim girl narrowly escaped forcible abduction. As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the dead were Hindus. Attempts to determine what really happened by reconstructing the event have shown only that a large amount of a flammable substance must have been thrown from inside the train. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was an area of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the vicinity to protest the incident on the train platform, blame was immediately put on Muslims. (Later, a number of public figures argued that the blaze was set by Hindu nationalists attempting to provoke a rampage.)
In the days that followed, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting Hindu-right slogans, such as “Hail Ram” (a religious invocation wrenched from its original devotional and peaceful meaning) and “Hail Hanuman” (a monkey god traditionally celebrated for loyalty, but portrayed by the Hindu right as highly aggressive), along with “Kill!,” “Destroy!,” “Slaughter!” There is copious evidence that the violence was planned before the precipitating event. The victims were almost all Muslims, with an occasional Christian or Parsi thrown in. There was no connection between the identity of the victims and the identity of alleged perpetrators: attacks took place, for the most part, far from the original site. In fact, many families of the original dead implored the mobs to stop. Nonetheless, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed in a few days, many by being burned alive in or near their homes. No one was spared: young children were burned along with their families.
Particularly striking were the mass rapes and mutilations of women. The typical tactic was first to rape or gang-rape the woman, then to torture her, and then to set her on fire and kill her. Although the fact that most of the dead were incinerated makes a precise sex count of the bodies impossible, one mass grave that was discovered contained more than half female bodies. Many victims of rape and torture are also among the survivors who have testified. The historian Tanika Sarkar, who played a leading role in investigating the events and interviewing witnesses, has argued in an important article that the evident preoccupation with destroying women’s sexual organs reveals “a dark sexual obsession about allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and overfertile Muslim female ones, that inspire[s] and sustain[s] the figures of paranoia and revenge.”1 This sexual obsession is evident in the hate literature circulated during the carnage, of which the following “poem” is a typical example:
Narendra Modi [Chief Minister of Gujarat] you have fucked the mother of [Muslims]
The volcano which was inactive for years has erupted
It has burnt the arse of [Muslims] and made them dance nude
We have untied the penises which were tied till now
Without castor oil in the arse we have made them cry. . .
Wake up Hindus, there are still [Muslims] alive around you
Learn from Panvad village where their mother was fucked
She was fucked standing while she kept shouting
She enjoyed the uncircumcised penis
With a Hindu government the Hindus have the power to annihilate [Muslims]
Kick them in the arse to drive them out of not only villages and cities but also the country.
[The word rendered “Muslims” (“miyas”) is a word meaning “mister” that is standardly used to refer to Muslims.]
As Sarkar says, the incitement to violence is suffused with anxiety about male sexuality, and the treatment of women that resulted seems to enact a fantasy of sexual sadism far darker than mere revenge. In an affidavit submitted to the Commission of Enquiry in June 2002, the leading feminist legal activist Flavia Agnes testified that although sexual crime is a common part of communal violence, the “scale and extent of atrocities perpetrated upon innocent Muslim women during the recent violence, far exceeds any reported sexual crime during any previous riots in the country in the post-independence period.”2
The events in Gujarat in 2002 are of immense importance to anyone thinking about the future of democracy.3 In a companion piece to the present essay, published in Dissent,4 I have written about the breakdown of the rule of law in Gujarat, the active abetting of genocide by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at both the state and national levels, and the evidence that elements in the U.S. Indian community are funding religious violence. I have also argued that the construction of Hinduism put forward by the Hindu right is not traditional or indigenous, but is in most respects borrowed from European fascism, which the founders of the Hindu right greatly admired. My aim in this article is to follow Sarkar’s lead, focusing on Gujarat’s gruesome sexual violence and asking how it might be further illuminated with the aid of ideas drawn from feminist thought.
First, with the aid of Sarkar’s important scholarship, I shall describe a history of connecting women’s bodies to the idea of the Indian nation. This connection, I believe, is implicit in the events of Gujarat. But Sarkar’s analysis can be taken even further if we connect her account of home-as-nation to the feminist analysis of objectification. Not even this analysis suffices, however, to explain the extreme gruesomeness of the sexual tortures in Gujarat. We can go further with the help of an account of misogynistic disgust that was originally sketched in Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse.5 The events of Gujarat will thus be seen to involve psychological dynamics that are widespread in gender relations; they took a particularly anxious and aggressive form in this concrete political context.
II. Women as Nation
During the period of colonial rule the British needed to establish secure control over national political processes and criminal and commercial law. They achieved this control in part by establishing a uniform legal code for these aspects of the law. But they left family law in the hands of the different religious communities. Christians, Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims: each group had its own laws for marriage, divorce, inheritance, and succession.6 In the case of the Hindu system, the British actively aided its codification, building a single system out of many systems of local jurisdiction. This separation of family law from other legal arenas was all the more easily accepted because it tracked a distinction between the “public realm” and the “private realm” that was traditional not only in Western political philosophy but also in Indian legal and philosophical traditions.7
In Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, a study of the construction of gender and national identity in 19th- and early 20th-century Hindu India, Sarkar argues that this separation of domains served the purposes of empire well. While establishing secure domination in the most important matters, it also quieted dissent by allowing the males of the subject population a sphere of rule: the household, where a man who had few rights in the outer world could be a king. Control over women’s bodies was thus substituted for control over other aspects of daily life. And self-respect that was injured in the daily encounter with the racial hierarchy of the outer world could be built up again by the experience of secure kingly rule in the sphere of the family.
As time went on, this control increasingly mimicked its source: the violence of colonial domination displaced itself onto the domination of women, which had never been all that benign, but which was permitted increasingly to express itself in violent ways. In the face of a complaint involving the rape and death of a 12-year-old child wife and mother, for example, British judges resisted indigenous Indian demands for the reform of laws governing marital age and consent. They argued that local traditions required deference, and that judges were not entitled to go against them.8 Such maneuvers had the effect of insulating domestic violence, even of this appalling and fatal sort, from criticism and change. At the same time, given that self-respect and manly status were increasingly defined around the control of women’s bodies, reform met with increasing internal resistance: for who would want to give up the one area of manly pride and honor? The female body simply is the nation: by controlling it, men control India, even if they don’t.
This widespread image of the female body as the nation helps to explain why, during the waves of communal violence at the time of independence, possession of women was such an important issue to the contending sides, as Muslims established Pakistan, and as Hindus and Muslims killed one another in large numbers during the mass migrations surrounding the separation of the two nations. Women were raped in huge numbers; often they were abducted as well and forced to bear the children of the Muslim or Hindu who had abducted them.9 The rationale of these rapes and abductions is easy to connect with the earlier history: if the female body symbolizes the nation, then in the struggle of two emerging nations the possession and impregnation of women is a potent weapon in consolidating power. Even when women were not abducted but were raped and then brutally murdered, this too was an act symbolizing the power of one group to damage the domain of rule of the other group, dishonoring the group in the process.
To move from the time of Sarkar’s book into the present day, the legal separation that helped to produce this situation was permitted to survive untouched in India at independence, with the result that reform in family law is extremely slow and cumbersome. Christian women in India, for example, won the right to divorce on grounds of cruelty only in 2001. All four religious systems of personal law contain significant inequalities between the sexes; the control over women’s bodies continues to be a rhetorically and politically potent issue that can block change. Each group continues to some extent to see the female body as a symbol of the nation, which its men must control in order to preserve manly honor. The struggle of the men within each group not to cede to women any sphere of rule that might weaken them in relation to the men of any other group is a major impediment to feminist reform.10
This history goes some distance toward explaining the events in Gujarat, with their insistent focus on the violation of the female body. If the Muslim female body is a part of the nation that is currently dominated by one’s adversary, then one must possess it to possess secure control over the nation. Murder, and hence destruction of the source of offspring, is one sure way of depriving the adversary of control over his “kingdom.” If in the process one dishonors the adversary, all the better.
III. Objectification
The identification of the female body with the nation takes us some way into the grim darkness of Gujarat, but questions remain. If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated? To be sure, many people were murdered at partition, and in the general violence many women were used simply as objects of the desire to maim and kill. On the other hand, the logic of colonial possession was also amply evident in that case, since men really did want to take these women to their country and force them to bear their children. And in large numbers, they did so. In Gujarat, we hear nothing of this sort. Women were simply tortured and killed. So we wonder how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence, what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain. Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men had lost the connection between woman and nation that they were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it and then, usually, burning it to cinders?
In short, how can one maim, burn, and torture the venerated body of the nation?
The feminist concept of “objectification” provides essential insight here.11 Objectification is treating as a mere thing what is really not a thing. It has multiple aspects, including the denial of autonomy and subjectivity and the ideas of ownership, fungibility (one is just like the others), and violability (it’s all right to break the thing up or abuse it). Not all forms of objectification possess all these features: for example, one may treat a fine painting as an object, thus denying it autonomy and subjectivity, without holding it to be fungible with other paintings and without holding that it is all right to break it up. In the domain of human relations, however, sinister connections begin to be woven among these different aspects. At the heart of all of them, I would argue, is the idea of instrumentality: a thing, unlike a person, is an instrument or means to the ends of persons; it is not an end in itself. The objectification of women is primarily a denial that women are ends in themselves. It is because one has already made that denial, at some level of one’s awareness, that it becomes so easy to deny women autonomy, to deny that their subjective experience matters, and, even, to begin to ignore qualitative differences between one and another, as pornography so easily does.
What is relevant here is that the logic of instrumentality also leads powerfully in the direction of seeing women as violable. What you have already conceived of as a mere tool of your own ends, not an end in herself, can so easily be understood as something that you may beat, abuse, burn, even break up at will: it is yours to use, and to abuse. Even a precious painting has legal rights against such abuses only in virtue of its connection with a human maker: the “moral rights” of artworks under contemporary European law are not rights of the painting as such, but rights of the artist in the painting. So too, once women are understood as mere instruments of men’s desires (for power, for pleasure), there would seem to be no principled limit on the ways one might use them. A means is a means to an end.
To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women as the nation, while apparently honorific, is already a form of objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization. Under colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify their desires for control and honor. By being exalted into a symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject, someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the expression of male desire. Thus, although much of the time the male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using her brutally if that is what suits his desires. We see that connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence narrated by Sarkar.
And we see it clearly, I believe, in Gujarat. Muslim female bodies symbolize a recalcitrant part of the nation, one as yet undominated by Hindu male power. One reaction to that situation might have been to abduct the woman and to place her in one’s own household. But if women are things, instruments, objects, then their bodies may also be used in gruesome ways—if that is what will best satisfy one’s desires for power, honor, and security. Once the status of end-in-itself is denied, everything else follows on a whim.
In short, it is not simply because the logic of the domestic sphere became the logic of kingly rule, but because of the particular form this kingly rule took, involving the conception of women as means rather than ends, that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing. Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’ relations toward their very young children—do not involve instrumentalization, and do not lead to violence of the sort we see in Gujarat. But the particular way in which kingly rule over women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved instrumentalization. So the woman was reduced from a person to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently honorific, was a mere tool of male ends. The road from that point to violation is short and relatively direct.
IV. Disgust
We have gone a little further toward understanding the logic of these tortures, but not far enough. For the logic of colonial objectification, as I have sketched it, might be satisfied, indeed seems best satisfied, with abduction, rape as impregnation, and other well-known devices through which men at war establish their domination over the subject nation. But as Sarkar says, there is something dark and unusual about the Gujarat tortures, something suggesting obsession with the female body and especially its genital organs. Torture and abuse, particularly the insertion of large metal objects into the vagina and other forms of genital torture, play a dramatic and unusual role in these events. The feminist analysis of objectification shows why there would be no large barrier to using women’s bodies in these ways. But why would men inflict such tortures? The account of objectification does not help us answer this question. This Muslim woman–hating involves something more than mere doing as one wants with an instrumental object, more even than the desire to colonize the enemy’s domain and thus to inflict dishonor upon it. Although Defence Minister George Fernandes treated the rapes dismissively, as if they were nothing new, most witnesses disagreed.12 As one commentator writes, “The violence in Gujarat was different from earlier incidents of communal violence, both for the scale of the assaults and for the sheer sadism and brutality with which women and girls were victimized.”13 This new something, I would argue, is connected to the operations of disgust, an emotion that plays a key role not only in misogyny but in many types of racial hatred.14
Disgust plays a powerful role in human life. Through our strong aversive reactions to substances such as feces, decaying meat, corpses, and other bodily waste, we police the boundaries of our body from contamination every day. Disgust is distinct from distaste: the very same smell arouses different disgust reactions depending on the person’s conception of the object she is smelling. It is also distinct from the sense of danger, for many things are disgusting long after all danger is removed. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Its objects are reminders of our animality and mortality, either because they are in fact corpses or waste products or because they come through a process of association to symbolize waste, excrement, and mortality. Disgust works by shielding human beings from too much daily contact with aspects of their own humanity that are difficult to live with. Thus if we don’t touch corpses or oozy, decaying, smelly things, we may be able to ignore our own mortality. If we neatly dispose of our bodily waste products, we more easily forget that we are made of stuffs that end up on the dungheap.
It is not enough for human beings to protect themselves from contamination by the primary objects of disgust, such as feces and corpses. Humans also typically need a group of humans to bound themselves against, who come to symbolize the disgusting and who, therefore, insulate the community even further from its own animality. Thus, every society ascribes disgust properties—bad smell, stickiness, sliminess, foulness, decay—to some group of persons, who are therefore found disgusting and shunned, and who in this way further insulate the dominant group from what they fear facing in themselves. In many European societies Jews have played that role: they have been characterized as disgusting in those physical ways, and they have been represented symbolically as vermin who had those same properties. In the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, dalits, formerly called “untouchables,” played a related role: through their contact with waste products they were regarded as themselves contaminated, thus not to be touched by the pure person; their very existence in the community shielded the pure from the decay and stench of their own animality. (But not from danger: Gandhi points out in his autobiography that during a cholera epidemic the lower castes, who defecated in the fields far from their dwellings, were less at risk of disease than the upper castes, who used the gutters outside their windows to dispose of waste.)
Projecting disgust onto another group subordinates the group. The group to whom disgust properties are ascribed exemplifies animality and thereby (in the eyes of the dominant group) lowness in contrast to the allegedly pure dominant ones. But because the subordination is inspired at root by anxiety and denial, it is not a peaceable subordination. Disgust minorities are not treated like nice household pets. Instead, the rage that people feel against their own mortality and animality is often enacted toward them, whether by humiliation or, in addition, by physical violence. At its extreme point the anxiety issues in projects of ethnic cleansing: if only we could completely rid ourselves of this group, the thinking goes, we would be free of our own death.
In virtually all cultures, women are among the groups to whom disgust properties are imputed. Portrayed as hyperanimal beings, receptacles of male bodily emissions as well as the fluids associated with menstruation and birth, women are portrayed as sticky, smelly, dirty, repellent. Taboos associated with menstruation and birth are but one sign of this ubiquitous construction. But there is a subtle difference between disgust toward Jews, say, and disgust toward women, for women are, to dominant males, sexually alluring as well as disgusting, and one of the alluring things about them is the fact that they exemplify the forbidden terrain of the hyperphysical, which is the disgusting.15 Men are revolted by the idea of their semen inside a woman’s vagina, and yet they can’t keep from wanting to put it there.16
In a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata,17 Andrea Dworkin argues that this fact about disgust toward women—that men can’t keep from wanting them and then feeling sullied and disgusted by them—undergirds objectification: as Tolstoy’s narrator says, he can’t see his wife as a person and an end as long as he sees her as this alluring disgusting thing that he needs to use for his pleasure. But this objectification takes a particularly violent turn. For the very understanding of dominant masculinity that makes all reminders of animality disgusting is deeply threatened by sexual desire for women. The man sees, in his desire, that he is not who he pretends to be: he is an animal wanting to exercise animal functions. This deep wound to his ego can only be salved by destroying the cause of his desire. Thus Tolstoy’s narrator has murdered his wife. Only after she is dead, he tells us, can he see her as a human being—because then he no longer desires her. Similarly, according to Dworkin, Tolstoy himself records in his diary violent repulsion and antagonism toward the young wife who tempts him out of his purity. Dworkin suggests that male desire is often, if not always, mingled in this way with the desire to violate and destroy.
Dworkin’s analysis of disgust misogyny would have been even stronger had she grounded it in a more general analysis of human disgust, but at any rate it is clear that she has identified a feature of misogynistic disgust that makes it (even) more violent than many other instances of disgust. My more general analysis suggests that disgust toward women of minorities already marked as animal is likely to be even more intense: thus Jewish women, in Nazi-era literature, were represented as hyperanimal and hypersexual beings, who exercised a fascinating allure but who must all the more resolutely be resisted by the pure German male, as he attempted to establish his purity and domination. [...].
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URL: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/contents.html
Body of the Nation
Why women were mutilated in Gujarat
Martha C. Nussbaum
I. What Happened
8 On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, packed with Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya. Ayodhya, as the alleged birthplace of the god Rama, has been a focal point of Hindu anti-Muslim feeling for several decades. In 1992, Hindu zealots destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque there, claiming that it covered the remains of a Hindu temple. The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, stymied by the government and the courts, was angry. When the train stopped at the station, passengers got into arguments with Muslim vendors and passengers. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say “Jai Sri Ram” (“Hail Ram”), and a young Muslim girl narrowly escaped forcible abduction. As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the dead were Hindus. Attempts to determine what really happened by reconstructing the event have shown only that a large amount of a flammable substance must have been thrown from inside the train. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was an area of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the vicinity to protest the incident on the train platform, blame was immediately put on Muslims. (Later, a number of public figures argued that the blaze was set by Hindu nationalists attempting to provoke a rampage.)
In the days that followed, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting Hindu-right slogans, such as “Hail Ram” (a religious invocation wrenched from its original devotional and peaceful meaning) and “Hail Hanuman” (a monkey god traditionally celebrated for loyalty, but portrayed by the Hindu right as highly aggressive), along with “Kill!,” “Destroy!,” “Slaughter!” There is copious evidence that the violence was planned before the precipitating event. The victims were almost all Muslims, with an occasional Christian or Parsi thrown in. There was no connection between the identity of the victims and the identity of alleged perpetrators: attacks took place, for the most part, far from the original site. In fact, many families of the original dead implored the mobs to stop. Nonetheless, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed in a few days, many by being burned alive in or near their homes. No one was spared: young children were burned along with their families.
Particularly striking were the mass rapes and mutilations of women. The typical tactic was first to rape or gang-rape the woman, then to torture her, and then to set her on fire and kill her. Although the fact that most of the dead were incinerated makes a precise sex count of the bodies impossible, one mass grave that was discovered contained more than half female bodies. Many victims of rape and torture are also among the survivors who have testified. The historian Tanika Sarkar, who played a leading role in investigating the events and interviewing witnesses, has argued in an important article that the evident preoccupation with destroying women’s sexual organs reveals “a dark sexual obsession about allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and overfertile Muslim female ones, that inspire[s] and sustain[s] the figures of paranoia and revenge.”1 This sexual obsession is evident in the hate literature circulated during the carnage, of which the following “poem” is a typical example:
Narendra Modi [Chief Minister of Gujarat] you have fucked the mother of [Muslims]
The volcano which was inactive for years has erupted
It has burnt the arse of [Muslims] and made them dance nude
We have untied the penises which were tied till now
Without castor oil in the arse we have made them cry. . .
Wake up Hindus, there are still [Muslims] alive around you
Learn from Panvad village where their mother was fucked
She was fucked standing while she kept shouting
She enjoyed the uncircumcised penis
With a Hindu government the Hindus have the power to annihilate [Muslims]
Kick them in the arse to drive them out of not only villages and cities but also the country.
[The word rendered “Muslims” (“miyas”) is a word meaning “mister” that is standardly used to refer to Muslims.]
As Sarkar says, the incitement to violence is suffused with anxiety about male sexuality, and the treatment of women that resulted seems to enact a fantasy of sexual sadism far darker than mere revenge. In an affidavit submitted to the Commission of Enquiry in June 2002, the leading feminist legal activist Flavia Agnes testified that although sexual crime is a common part of communal violence, the “scale and extent of atrocities perpetrated upon innocent Muslim women during the recent violence, far exceeds any reported sexual crime during any previous riots in the country in the post-independence period.”2
The events in Gujarat in 2002 are of immense importance to anyone thinking about the future of democracy.3 In a companion piece to the present essay, published in Dissent,4 I have written about the breakdown of the rule of law in Gujarat, the active abetting of genocide by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at both the state and national levels, and the evidence that elements in the U.S. Indian community are funding religious violence. I have also argued that the construction of Hinduism put forward by the Hindu right is not traditional or indigenous, but is in most respects borrowed from European fascism, which the founders of the Hindu right greatly admired. My aim in this article is to follow Sarkar’s lead, focusing on Gujarat’s gruesome sexual violence and asking how it might be further illuminated with the aid of ideas drawn from feminist thought.
First, with the aid of Sarkar’s important scholarship, I shall describe a history of connecting women’s bodies to the idea of the Indian nation. This connection, I believe, is implicit in the events of Gujarat. But Sarkar’s analysis can be taken even further if we connect her account of home-as-nation to the feminist analysis of objectification. Not even this analysis suffices, however, to explain the extreme gruesomeness of the sexual tortures in Gujarat. We can go further with the help of an account of misogynistic disgust that was originally sketched in Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse.5 The events of Gujarat will thus be seen to involve psychological dynamics that are widespread in gender relations; they took a particularly anxious and aggressive form in this concrete political context.
II. Women as Nation
During the period of colonial rule the British needed to establish secure control over national political processes and criminal and commercial law. They achieved this control in part by establishing a uniform legal code for these aspects of the law. But they left family law in the hands of the different religious communities. Christians, Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims: each group had its own laws for marriage, divorce, inheritance, and succession.6 In the case of the Hindu system, the British actively aided its codification, building a single system out of many systems of local jurisdiction. This separation of family law from other legal arenas was all the more easily accepted because it tracked a distinction between the “public realm” and the “private realm” that was traditional not only in Western political philosophy but also in Indian legal and philosophical traditions.7
In Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, a study of the construction of gender and national identity in 19th- and early 20th-century Hindu India, Sarkar argues that this separation of domains served the purposes of empire well. While establishing secure domination in the most important matters, it also quieted dissent by allowing the males of the subject population a sphere of rule: the household, where a man who had few rights in the outer world could be a king. Control over women’s bodies was thus substituted for control over other aspects of daily life. And self-respect that was injured in the daily encounter with the racial hierarchy of the outer world could be built up again by the experience of secure kingly rule in the sphere of the family.
As time went on, this control increasingly mimicked its source: the violence of colonial domination displaced itself onto the domination of women, which had never been all that benign, but which was permitted increasingly to express itself in violent ways. In the face of a complaint involving the rape and death of a 12-year-old child wife and mother, for example, British judges resisted indigenous Indian demands for the reform of laws governing marital age and consent. They argued that local traditions required deference, and that judges were not entitled to go against them.8 Such maneuvers had the effect of insulating domestic violence, even of this appalling and fatal sort, from criticism and change. At the same time, given that self-respect and manly status were increasingly defined around the control of women’s bodies, reform met with increasing internal resistance: for who would want to give up the one area of manly pride and honor? The female body simply is the nation: by controlling it, men control India, even if they don’t.
This widespread image of the female body as the nation helps to explain why, during the waves of communal violence at the time of independence, possession of women was such an important issue to the contending sides, as Muslims established Pakistan, and as Hindus and Muslims killed one another in large numbers during the mass migrations surrounding the separation of the two nations. Women were raped in huge numbers; often they were abducted as well and forced to bear the children of the Muslim or Hindu who had abducted them.9 The rationale of these rapes and abductions is easy to connect with the earlier history: if the female body symbolizes the nation, then in the struggle of two emerging nations the possession and impregnation of women is a potent weapon in consolidating power. Even when women were not abducted but were raped and then brutally murdered, this too was an act symbolizing the power of one group to damage the domain of rule of the other group, dishonoring the group in the process.
To move from the time of Sarkar’s book into the present day, the legal separation that helped to produce this situation was permitted to survive untouched in India at independence, with the result that reform in family law is extremely slow and cumbersome. Christian women in India, for example, won the right to divorce on grounds of cruelty only in 2001. All four religious systems of personal law contain significant inequalities between the sexes; the control over women’s bodies continues to be a rhetorically and politically potent issue that can block change. Each group continues to some extent to see the female body as a symbol of the nation, which its men must control in order to preserve manly honor. The struggle of the men within each group not to cede to women any sphere of rule that might weaken them in relation to the men of any other group is a major impediment to feminist reform.10
This history goes some distance toward explaining the events in Gujarat, with their insistent focus on the violation of the female body. If the Muslim female body is a part of the nation that is currently dominated by one’s adversary, then one must possess it to possess secure control over the nation. Murder, and hence destruction of the source of offspring, is one sure way of depriving the adversary of control over his “kingdom.” If in the process one dishonors the adversary, all the better.
III. Objectification
The identification of the female body with the nation takes us some way into the grim darkness of Gujarat, but questions remain. If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated? To be sure, many people were murdered at partition, and in the general violence many women were used simply as objects of the desire to maim and kill. On the other hand, the logic of colonial possession was also amply evident in that case, since men really did want to take these women to their country and force them to bear their children. And in large numbers, they did so. In Gujarat, we hear nothing of this sort. Women were simply tortured and killed. So we wonder how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence, what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain. Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men had lost the connection between woman and nation that they were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it and then, usually, burning it to cinders?
In short, how can one maim, burn, and torture the venerated body of the nation?
The feminist concept of “objectification” provides essential insight here.11 Objectification is treating as a mere thing what is really not a thing. It has multiple aspects, including the denial of autonomy and subjectivity and the ideas of ownership, fungibility (one is just like the others), and violability (it’s all right to break the thing up or abuse it). Not all forms of objectification possess all these features: for example, one may treat a fine painting as an object, thus denying it autonomy and subjectivity, without holding it to be fungible with other paintings and without holding that it is all right to break it up. In the domain of human relations, however, sinister connections begin to be woven among these different aspects. At the heart of all of them, I would argue, is the idea of instrumentality: a thing, unlike a person, is an instrument or means to the ends of persons; it is not an end in itself. The objectification of women is primarily a denial that women are ends in themselves. It is because one has already made that denial, at some level of one’s awareness, that it becomes so easy to deny women autonomy, to deny that their subjective experience matters, and, even, to begin to ignore qualitative differences between one and another, as pornography so easily does.
What is relevant here is that the logic of instrumentality also leads powerfully in the direction of seeing women as violable. What you have already conceived of as a mere tool of your own ends, not an end in herself, can so easily be understood as something that you may beat, abuse, burn, even break up at will: it is yours to use, and to abuse. Even a precious painting has legal rights against such abuses only in virtue of its connection with a human maker: the “moral rights” of artworks under contemporary European law are not rights of the painting as such, but rights of the artist in the painting. So too, once women are understood as mere instruments of men’s desires (for power, for pleasure), there would seem to be no principled limit on the ways one might use them. A means is a means to an end.
To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women as the nation, while apparently honorific, is already a form of objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization. Under colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify their desires for control and honor. By being exalted into a symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject, someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the expression of male desire. Thus, although much of the time the male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using her brutally if that is what suits his desires. We see that connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence narrated by Sarkar.
And we see it clearly, I believe, in Gujarat. Muslim female bodies symbolize a recalcitrant part of the nation, one as yet undominated by Hindu male power. One reaction to that situation might have been to abduct the woman and to place her in one’s own household. But if women are things, instruments, objects, then their bodies may also be used in gruesome ways—if that is what will best satisfy one’s desires for power, honor, and security. Once the status of end-in-itself is denied, everything else follows on a whim.
In short, it is not simply because the logic of the domestic sphere became the logic of kingly rule, but because of the particular form this kingly rule took, involving the conception of women as means rather than ends, that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing. Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’ relations toward their very young children—do not involve instrumentalization, and do not lead to violence of the sort we see in Gujarat. But the particular way in which kingly rule over women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved instrumentalization. So the woman was reduced from a person to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently honorific, was a mere tool of male ends. The road from that point to violation is short and relatively direct.
IV. Disgust
We have gone a little further toward understanding the logic of these tortures, but not far enough. For the logic of colonial objectification, as I have sketched it, might be satisfied, indeed seems best satisfied, with abduction, rape as impregnation, and other well-known devices through which men at war establish their domination over the subject nation. But as Sarkar says, there is something dark and unusual about the Gujarat tortures, something suggesting obsession with the female body and especially its genital organs. Torture and abuse, particularly the insertion of large metal objects into the vagina and other forms of genital torture, play a dramatic and unusual role in these events. The feminist analysis of objectification shows why there would be no large barrier to using women’s bodies in these ways. But why would men inflict such tortures? The account of objectification does not help us answer this question. This Muslim woman–hating involves something more than mere doing as one wants with an instrumental object, more even than the desire to colonize the enemy’s domain and thus to inflict dishonor upon it. Although Defence Minister George Fernandes treated the rapes dismissively, as if they were nothing new, most witnesses disagreed.12 As one commentator writes, “The violence in Gujarat was different from earlier incidents of communal violence, both for the scale of the assaults and for the sheer sadism and brutality with which women and girls were victimized.”13 This new something, I would argue, is connected to the operations of disgust, an emotion that plays a key role not only in misogyny but in many types of racial hatred.14
Disgust plays a powerful role in human life. Through our strong aversive reactions to substances such as feces, decaying meat, corpses, and other bodily waste, we police the boundaries of our body from contamination every day. Disgust is distinct from distaste: the very same smell arouses different disgust reactions depending on the person’s conception of the object she is smelling. It is also distinct from the sense of danger, for many things are disgusting long after all danger is removed. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Its objects are reminders of our animality and mortality, either because they are in fact corpses or waste products or because they come through a process of association to symbolize waste, excrement, and mortality. Disgust works by shielding human beings from too much daily contact with aspects of their own humanity that are difficult to live with. Thus if we don’t touch corpses or oozy, decaying, smelly things, we may be able to ignore our own mortality. If we neatly dispose of our bodily waste products, we more easily forget that we are made of stuffs that end up on the dungheap.
It is not enough for human beings to protect themselves from contamination by the primary objects of disgust, such as feces and corpses. Humans also typically need a group of humans to bound themselves against, who come to symbolize the disgusting and who, therefore, insulate the community even further from its own animality. Thus, every society ascribes disgust properties—bad smell, stickiness, sliminess, foulness, decay—to some group of persons, who are therefore found disgusting and shunned, and who in this way further insulate the dominant group from what they fear facing in themselves. In many European societies Jews have played that role: they have been characterized as disgusting in those physical ways, and they have been represented symbolically as vermin who had those same properties. In the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, dalits, formerly called “untouchables,” played a related role: through their contact with waste products they were regarded as themselves contaminated, thus not to be touched by the pure person; their very existence in the community shielded the pure from the decay and stench of their own animality. (But not from danger: Gandhi points out in his autobiography that during a cholera epidemic the lower castes, who defecated in the fields far from their dwellings, were less at risk of disease than the upper castes, who used the gutters outside their windows to dispose of waste.)
Projecting disgust onto another group subordinates the group. The group to whom disgust properties are ascribed exemplifies animality and thereby (in the eyes of the dominant group) lowness in contrast to the allegedly pure dominant ones. But because the subordination is inspired at root by anxiety and denial, it is not a peaceable subordination. Disgust minorities are not treated like nice household pets. Instead, the rage that people feel against their own mortality and animality is often enacted toward them, whether by humiliation or, in addition, by physical violence. At its extreme point the anxiety issues in projects of ethnic cleansing: if only we could completely rid ourselves of this group, the thinking goes, we would be free of our own death.
In virtually all cultures, women are among the groups to whom disgust properties are imputed. Portrayed as hyperanimal beings, receptacles of male bodily emissions as well as the fluids associated with menstruation and birth, women are portrayed as sticky, smelly, dirty, repellent. Taboos associated with menstruation and birth are but one sign of this ubiquitous construction. But there is a subtle difference between disgust toward Jews, say, and disgust toward women, for women are, to dominant males, sexually alluring as well as disgusting, and one of the alluring things about them is the fact that they exemplify the forbidden terrain of the hyperphysical, which is the disgusting.15 Men are revolted by the idea of their semen inside a woman’s vagina, and yet they can’t keep from wanting to put it there.16
In a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata,17 Andrea Dworkin argues that this fact about disgust toward women—that men can’t keep from wanting them and then feeling sullied and disgusted by them—undergirds objectification: as Tolstoy’s narrator says, he can’t see his wife as a person and an end as long as he sees her as this alluring disgusting thing that he needs to use for his pleasure. But this objectification takes a particularly violent turn. For the very understanding of dominant masculinity that makes all reminders of animality disgusting is deeply threatened by sexual desire for women. The man sees, in his desire, that he is not who he pretends to be: he is an animal wanting to exercise animal functions. This deep wound to his ego can only be salved by destroying the cause of his desire. Thus Tolstoy’s narrator has murdered his wife. Only after she is dead, he tells us, can he see her as a human being—because then he no longer desires her. Similarly, according to Dworkin, Tolstoy himself records in his diary violent repulsion and antagonism toward the young wife who tempts him out of his purity. Dworkin suggests that male desire is often, if not always, mingled in this way with the desire to violate and destroy.
Dworkin’s analysis of disgust misogyny would have been even stronger had she grounded it in a more general analysis of human disgust, but at any rate it is clear that she has identified a feature of misogynistic disgust that makes it (even) more violent than many other instances of disgust. My more general analysis suggests that disgust toward women of minorities already marked as animal is likely to be even more intense: thus Jewish women, in Nazi-era literature, were represented as hyperanimal and hypersexual beings, who exercised a fascinating allure but who must all the more resolutely be resisted by the pure German male, as he attempted to establish his purity and domination. [...].
SEE FULL TEXT AT:
http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/nussbaum.html
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