The defining image of the week, for me, is of a small child's burned
and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from
the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, in India. The murder
of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily
killings of unwanted girl babies . . . the massacre of innocents in
Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s when village turned against neighboring
village . . . the massacre of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying
reprisal murders that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination: They bear
witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at
times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and
setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them or just
clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood.
I say "our" because I write as an Indian man, born and bred, who loves
India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is
potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India's
strengths, then India's sins must be mine as well. Do I sound angry? Good.
Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India undergoes
its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in more than a decade, many
people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed or disgusted
enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men's unwillingness to
defend the citizens of India, without regard to religion, by saying that
these men have feelings too and are subject to the same sentiments as the
nation in general.
Meanwhile, India's political masters have been tut-tutting and offering
the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control.
(It has escaped nobody's notice that the ruling party, the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People's Party, and the Hindu extremists of
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, are sister
organizations and offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some
international commentators, such as Britain's Independent newspaper, urge
us to "beware excess pessimism."
The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're used
to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how life is,
folks. Most of the time India is the world's largest secular democracy;
and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy religious steam, we
mustn't let that distort the picture.
Of course, there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992,
when a VHP mob demolished a 400-year-old Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, which
they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu
fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some
Muslims were ready to give it to them. Their murderous attack on the
train-load of VHP activists at Godhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes of
the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the train-load during the partition
riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists' hands.
The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and
insufficient radicalism of India's BJP government. Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a coalition
government and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP's more extreme
Hindu nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together. But it isn't
working anymore. In state elections across the country, the BJP is being
trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP firebrands. Why
put up with the government's betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that
betrayal doesn't even result in electoral success?
The electoral failure of the BJP is thus, in all probability, the spark
that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the
site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque -- that's where the Godhra dead were
coming from -- and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically, tragically,
Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee has insisted
that the slow Indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the
Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait.
The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to India's
president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP
hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing "too little too
late." She pins the blame firmly on the "motivated, well-planned out and
provocative actions" of the Hindu nationalists. But another writer, the
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the
violence erupted, denounced India's Muslims en masse and praised the
nationalist movement.
The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in
her letter demands "stern legal action" against them. But the VHP is
determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such
public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting
them, Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism and disgraces the
Nobel award.
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's
something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face: namely,
that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison
in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet
we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the
fashionable language of "respect." What is there to respect in any of
this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the
world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results,
religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when
we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it
easier to do it again.
So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened
in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
Salman Rushdie is a novelist and author of the forthcoming essay
collection "Step Across This Line."
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