Hindutva: The dangers of Religious Fanaticism: Dec 11, 2007

Articles

"They were Muslims. They had to die. They are dead." | "At a time when a progressive patina is being painted over the rule of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a reporter visiting Gujarat four years and six months after the pogroms finds a state where Muslims are being thrust forcibly into ghettos. The trauma of the butchery is as raw as ever. The active participation of the Hindu middle class in Modi’s agenda, and the silence of the few who think otherwise, will guarantee the social and moral poverty of all Gujarat, even as it secedes from the rest of Indian society. Meanwhile, the wilful turn of the communal wheel will deliver radicalised militants and, thereby, a further marginalisation of Muslims. The Gujarat of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has become unrecognisable. Nothing short of a massive social movement is required to cleanse the state of Gujarat."

"The more subtle would say there is a problem among Muslims. Others argue that Muslims themselves are the problem. They look back fondly at the ‘Toofan’, the 2002 riots, and their reminiscences have a striking thematic unity. The Muslims deserved it. They are all bloody Pakistanis and criminals. If we had more time, we would have wiped them out. See, they are crushed and scared. We taught them a lesson. And now, the world should learn from Gujarat about how to deal with the miyas. The one sentiment that is almost wholly absent is remorse. What remains, 54 months after the pogrom, is an all-pervading sense of arrogance among Hindus in the public sphere. Those who think differently possibly keep silent.

The story of Gujarat as a whole, then, is a tale of pride and prejudice on the one side, victimhood and alienation on the other. In control of this divisive agenda is the fascist government of Narendra Modi, who happily builds on this evolving social reality, and reinforces it. The everyday tragedy of Gujarat, often invisible, is in many ways more telling than the state-sponsored pogroms of 2002. The high degree of alienation among Muslims, the stereotypes and discrimination they face, the fact that a substantial section of society is committed to the Hindutva agenda, the absence of justice and accountability, and the continued secession of the state from its basic constitutional obligations – these are all elements that go into making Gujarat, in the very words of the Hindu Right, its laboratory."

"Sitting in his second-floor office in the Ahmedabad suburb of Naroda, Bajrangi talks about his NGO, Navchetan, which ‘rescues’ Hindu women who have been ‘lured’ into relationships with Muslim men. “In every house today there is a bomb, and that bomb is the woman, who forms the basis of Hindu culture and tradition,” Bajrangi begins. “Parents allow her to go to college, and they start having love affairs, often with Muslims. Women should just be kept at home to save them from the terrible fate of Hindu-Muslim marriages.”

"Bajrangi’s Navchetan works to prevent inter-religious love marriages, and if such a wedding has already taken place, it works to break the union. When a marriage between a Hindu woman and Muslim man gets registered in a court, within a few days the marriage documents generally end up on Bajrangi’s desk, ferreted out by functionaries in the lower judiciary. The girl is subsequently kidnapped and sent back home; the boy is taught a lesson. “We beat him in a way that no Muslim will dare to look at Hindu women again. Only last week, we made a Muslim eat his own waste – thrice, in a spoon,” he reveals with barely concealed pride. All this is illegal, Bajrangi concedes, but it is moral. “And anyway, the government is ours,” he continues, turning to look at the clock. “See, I am meeting Modi in a while today.”

One might dismiss Babu Bajrangi as a bombast when he claims proximity to the chief minister, or describes the beating of Muslim boys. But for a man of obvious stature in society he is also accused of burning Muslims alive. As the chief accused in the infamous Naroda Patiya case, one of the worst instances of brutality during the 2002 violence, he is alleged to have led the mob that killed 89 people in the area. It is a burden that rests lightly on Bajrangi’s shoulders. “People say I killed 123 people,” he says. Did you? Bajrangi laughs, “How does it matter? They were Muslims. They had to die. They are dead.”

Evidence of Bajrangi’s complicity was so overwhelming that even a pliable state administration could not save him from an eight-month stint in prison. “They cannot reduce my hatred for Muslims with that, can they? While in jail, I demolished a small mosque that was located in there,” he says with a sly, childlike grin. Bajrangi’s views on what is wrong with Muslims are unabashedly straightforward. “They are all terrorists. Refuse to sing even the national song. Why don’t they just go to Pakistan? Now, our aim is to create a society where we have as little to do with them as possible.”"

"After there was fire in a train compartment carrying Hindutva activists on the morning of 27 February 2002 at the Godhra railway station, killing 59 people, Narendra Modi decided to unleash a reign of terror against the state’s Muslims as a ‘reaction’. The cause of the fire is still not certain, though a central government enquiry committee has reported that it was accidental, and not the result of a conspiracy. In a vulnerable political position, and unsure of future electoral prospects, Modi felt this was the right spark to ignite communal passions through the state, and blamed the incident on ‘Muslims’. He instructed senior officers to let the Hindus express their anger – he was essentially asking for the rioters to be allowed a free hand. Modi’s state machinery and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) jointly planned the attacks, with the police themselves in many places firing on the victims rather than the rioters.

The state’s support to the perpetrators of the pogrom has continued through the four-and-a-half-years since the carnage. Out of the 4252 cases registered in connection with the violence that gripped Gujarat in February, March and April of 2002, the files for more than 2100 were closed without the filing of chargesheets. A few senior police officers have revealed the manner in which the state subverted justice at every stage – by distorting and manipulating complaints at the police station, assigning investigations to the very officers accused of assisting in massacres, and allowing the accused free rein to coerce witnesses into changing statements. With several public prosecutors simultaneously in the ranks – or even the leadership – of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates, the prosecution itself silently assisted in getting approval for bail applications. 345 cases have been decided so far, with convictions in only 13 of those cases.

After a severe indictment of the Gandhinagar state government by the National Human Rights Commission, the Supreme Court of India passed a landmark decision in 2004, ordering re-examination by a high-level, state-appointed committee of the decision to close more than 2000 cases. The court also ordered the transfer of investigation from the state police to the Central Bureau of Investigation in select cases, and moved two cases out of Gujarat entirely. Muslims and secular groups are clinging on to these small victories as their last hopes for justice.

And what of the social and economic condition of the victims? The state government’s own conservative figures put the total loss of property at INR 6.9 billion. The government has distributed INR 563 million to the affected persons, which makes up about nine percent of the calculated damage. At the peak of the riots, more than 150,000 people were in relief camps, which were summarily shut down by the government after four months. With the state washing its hands of any rehabilitation for the affected, those who could not return home have had to live in resettled colonies constructed by community organisations. Almost 10,000 families are said to remain internally displaced in Gujarat." New

Speak Out Against the Hindutva Assault on California's History Textbooks | "We in California are facing a Hindutva assault on school history textbooks of the kind that went on a few years ago in India. This is an issue of rising concern in the California community, and we at Friends of South Asia, as a group of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, atheists, agnostics, and others with roots in South Asia, are alarmed by these attempts to misrepresent the history of India and South Asia, as well as the history of Hinduism.

Please join us in speaking out against these attempts to distort history texts with propaganda, and make your voice heard in favor of our children having an opportunity to learn our history as it should be - unbiased, developed using scientific methods, based on historical evidence from multiple sources of scholarship that has been subjected to stringent standards of peer-review, and is widely accepted by historians and scholars worldwide." New

Israel to protest Hitler praise in Gujarat’s school textbooks | "NEW DELHI — Israel is planning to protest Gujarat’s move to include references in school books that glorify Adolf Hitler, a news report said yesterday. The Israeli Embassy is planning to communicate its displeasure to Gujarat state, appalled that the school textbooks ‘sing praises’ of Hitler, the Indian Express reported. The state is ruled by the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Israel’s Consul-General in Mumbai, Daniel Zonshine said the representation of Hitler in Gujarat’s textbooks was ‘misleading’. “Personally, I feel offended, and publicly, the representation has caused anger and unhappiness at the twisting of facts,” Zonshine was quoted by the paper as saying." What is happening in India at the monent is known as the "saffronisation of education". It is a process by which followers of Hindutva, a facsist Hindu movement modeled on the facist ideology of Hitler and Mussolini, are currently infiltrating all parts of Indian society (indeed, they ruled India as the NDA upto 2004) and trying to disseminate and brainwash ordinary Hindus into believing a concocted Hindu history and brainwashing them into seeing non-Hindus in India, especially Muslims and Christians, as the enemy. This situation is acute in the schools in areas of India where the BNP (the mother party of Hindutva) retain control. They are rewriting history to portray Muslims and Christians in a bad light. Their ultimate goal being the creation of a "Hindu Rashtra" (Hindu theocracy) in India. This has resulted in widespread discrimination and pogroms against these minorities, especially Muslims. New

Fury in India over call for more Hindu babies | "NEW DELHI: A leading Hindu hardliner has angered women and Muslims by pressing Hindus to have as many children as they can to avoid being swamped by Muslims. KS Sudarshan, who heads the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party which led India until last year, said a higher Hindu birth rate was vital to check a “population imbalance”. “Whenever new people come to me for blessings, I tell them: ‘Not less than three (children)’. The more you can, the better,” he said at a function broadcast on television recently. Women’s groups in Asia’s third-largest economy, with a billion-plus people, said they were insulted and one group labelled Sudarshan’s stand an “agenda of hatred”. “It is implied in his statement that a woman’s reproductive faculties are to be employed solely to fulfil the agenda of a Hindu nationalist state - like a reproductive machine,” said Malini Bhattacharya, a leading activist." New

Muslims facing social boycott in India | "NEW DELHI: A high-level committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to study the economic, educational and social status of Indian Muslims revealed that most public and private banks were declining loans to Muslims. Moreover, it said Muslims were facing social boycott at some places and it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to sell and purchase residential properties." New

Muslim Refugees in India Live in Fear | "Like thousands of Muslim settlers in India's northeastern state of Assam, Sarifa Begum is living in fear of deportation or even death. "We are the targets of ethnic Assamese. They will kill us if they get a chance," said Begum, Reuters reported Friday, July 29."..."As the national register of citizenship has not been updated since 1970, many Muslim migrants fear that whatever documents they possess will not be recognized, a matter compounding the plight of the Muslim migrants in the Indian state. Begum, herself, has an Indian birth certificate but some Assamese groups have dismissed it as a forgery, a common complaint among legal Muslim migrants, many of whom are now calling for identity cards. In response to the Indian authorities' failure to get to grips with the problem, ethnic Assamese groups began in May a new campaign to oust illegal Muslim migrants. The campaign has seen thousands of Muslims flee their homes and threatened to snare millions of legal Muslim migrants like Begum. Matters have become worse for Muslim migrants after India's highest court issued a ruling this month scrapping a law that made deportation difficult because it put the onus of proving a suspect migrant's citizenship on the complainant. The law was mainly framed in 1983 to prevent a witch-hunt against legal Muslim migrants in the Indian state, but ethnic Assamese claim that the law ended up protecting illegal Muslim migrants. The court ruling has left the Muslim migrants more apprehensive, according to Reuters. "We are afraid, today or tomorrow, we will be kicked out of Assam," Nasiruddin Ahmed, a 90-year-old retired college principal whose family came to Assam from East Bengal, now Bangladesh, more than a century ago, told Reuters. New

Assam's Muslims being ethnically cleansed | "The victims of the Chiring's eviction drive are Muslims who migrated to Northern Assam from the state's western districts. Most Muslims evicted from Northern Assam allege the police have actively backed the Chiring supporters in the pogrom. The police deny the charges. But the stories told by the Muslim community paint a very different picture. "The policemen broke into our house. We produced our citizenship certificates and voter's identity cards, but they insisted we are Bangladeshis. They would listen to nothing," said Mohammed Jehangir, who worked as a mason in Dibrugarh. Abu Miah, a scrap metal dealer, has a similar tale. "The police snatched my papers and said they were not good enough to prove my Indian citizenship . When I pleaded, they asked for money. When I refused the bribe, I was beaten up. Finally, I had to pay the police 200 rupees ($4.5) to get my papers back." In Howli and Bijni, small towns in western Assam's Barpeta district, I met more than 200 Muslims who have been evicted from Northern Assam districts like Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Golaghat." New

'Nazi' row over Indian textbooks | "Human rights campaigners in India's Gujarat state have condemned school textbooks which they say praise Hitler. The books are issued by the Hindu nationalist state government. One includes a chapter on the "internal achievements of Nazism"." New

In the Shadow of Shiva | [Although HIndutva parties are no longer in power in India, having been voted out of power in the 2004 elections, they are the largest single party in India and they are the current opposition. They control a few states like Gujarat and ot's followers have penetrated all parts of Indian society, from education, judiciary, politics, media etc. They present an ever-present danger to the fabric of Indian society, hence this article is quite appropriate as it describes the nature of Hindutva and the danger it presents to it's neighbours.] The rise of Hindu fundamentalism as a political force in India catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party to power and sought to expunge the Gandhian pacifism of the old militantly secular Congress Party tradition, replacing it with a new martial spirit. The idea of Hindutva, which energizes the Hindu activists, sees India not only as a Hindu state, but as a militantly revanchist force in the region, a nation determined to recapture its old empire...Marquand cites Francine Frankel, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, as saying that India's ruling party "has reinterpreted Hinduism to include a manly assertiveness." This is confirmed by the exclamation of one Hindu leader who, averring his support for India's nuclear program, declared "We are no longer eunuchs!"...As professors John T. Rourke and Mark A. Boyer, both of the University of Connecticut - Storrs, point out, the ideologists of Hindutva hold up the idea of a Greater India as a key foreign policy objective: "The BJP's platform advocates not only the return of India to its traditional Hindu culture, but also the resurrection the India that was once a great power. Many Hindu nationalists have maps depicting the ideal of Akhund Bharat, 'Old India,' with territory encompassing Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan."The psycho-religious symbolism of India's nuclear exhibitionism may have eluded our political leaders, but it wasn't lost on the scholarly community. Marquand cites Sanskrit scholar Surendra Gamphir, who says militarism is so "deeply embedded [a] concept in Hindu culture that you hold scripture in one hand and a weapon in the other." New

India train fire 'not mob attack' | [New information is now emerging as to what really happened when the train caught fire. There was no Muslim mob at the scene, documented evidence shows that much of the pogrom was pre-planned [1], leading to the conclusion that Hindu fanatics themselves started the fire or used the fire as an excuse to murder Muslims. An Indian train fire that killed 59 Hindus and provoked deadly religious riots in 2002 was started by accident, a government inquiry has said. Evidence suggests the fire began inside the train, not that it was fire-bombed, an investigating judge decided...Retired Supreme Court judge Umesh Chandra Banerjee, who is leading the government inquiry, dismissed suggestions that inflammable liquid could have been thrown at the train from outside. "There has been a preponderance of evidence that the fire in coach number S6 originated in the coach itself without any external input," he said. "The possibility of an inflammable liquid having been used is completely ruled out as there was first a smell of burning, followed by then smoke and flames thereafter." Justice Banerjee said that according to eyewitness accounts people had been cooking in the carriage at the time it caught fire. He said the railway authorities had "pre-judged" the incident, and criticised them for not conducting a thorough inquiry. New

Modi 'orchestrated' Godhra riots: Vithal Pandya | Ahmedabad: Vithal Pandya, father of slain former Minister Haren Pandya, today (Feb 03, 2005) told the Godhra inquiry Commission, probing the Sabarmati Express train carnage, that his son had told him that the communal riots were 'State sponsored' and was "orchestrated by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi." Deposing before the Commission, comprising Justice (retd) G T Nanavati and Justice (retd) K G Shah, Pandya said that his son, a Revenue Minister then, had information that Modi had presided over a high-level meeting of BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) party workers at Panchmahals district on the night of February 27, 2002 and told 55 workers to spread across the State. Pandya said, "Haren also told me that police had got instructions to take revenge for the Godhra incident and to go soft on Kar Sevaks." New

Genocide in Gujarat: The Sangh Parivar, Narendra Modi, and the Government of Gujarat | Under Narendra Modi’s leadership, between February 28 and March 02, 2002, more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims,
were killed in Gujarat, aided and abetted by the state, following which 200,000 were internally displaced. The National Human Rights Commission of India held that Narendra Modi, as the chief executive of the state of Gujarat, had complete command over the police and other law enforcement machinery, and is such responsible for the role of the Government of Gujarat in providing leadership and material support in the politically motivated attacks on minorities in Gujarat. Former President of India, K. R. Narayanan, stated that there was a “conspiracy” between the Bharatiya Janata Party governments at the Centre and in the State of Gujarat behind the riots of 2002. According to independent human rights observers, the events in Gujarat meet the legal definition of genocide. Narendra Modi was a functionary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization. Nazi and fascistic ideologies motivated founding ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization. Modi has incorporated the teachings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in his governance of Gujarat. Following the events of February 27-March 02, 2002, the Government of Gujarat was grossly and willfully negligent in providing necessary support, security, relief, resettlement and rehabilitation measures to the victims. Narendra Modi ordered that all relief camps be shut down as of October 30, 2002. Under Narendra Modi's leadership, more than 2,000 of the 4,000 and more cases filed by the victims of the violence were never investigated or dismissed, leading the Supreme Court of India to rebuke both the Gujarat judiciary and the Gujarat State Government for its handling of the cases, and transfer several cases out of the state for trial. There are two civil suits against Narendra Modi for crimes against humanity and genocide. There has been widespread anti-Christian violence in Gujarat. Narendra Modi’s actions have adversely impacted adivasis (tribals) and dalits (erstwhile ‘untouchable’ castes). In Gujarat, after 2002, 240 people were held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 239 Muslims and one Sikh. The Citizens Tribunal recorded that Hindu nationalist organizations undertook a series of preparatory actions in Gujarat prior to 2002. On February 14, 1999, a Hindu Nationalist-controlled "religious parliament" in Ahmedabad, the city where some of the most extreme anti-Muslim violence took place in 2002, declared "Christianity and Islam as alien religions and therefore against Indian ethos."...In 2003 and 2004, the Commission on International Religious Freedom of the United States State Department has recommended that India be designated a Country of Particular Concern. New

'There Was No Waiting Mob' | It has been two-and-a-half years since that ill-fated day when a torched train at Godhra sparked off a communal wildfire that consumed much of Gujarat and scorched the conscience of an entire nation. The burning of the two coaches of the Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002, in which 58 people including kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya were killed, has been repeatedly described by the Gujarat government as a premeditated effort by local Muslims who worked in connivance with other members of the minority community in Godhra. The state railway police chargesheet, filed after the incident, went along much the same track. Eyewitnesses saw no waiting mob; people gathered only later in groups of 10 or 15...The police chargesheet claims eight jerrycans of petrol were poured on the floor of the S-6 compartment by as many as seven people. It says the petrol was stocked in the Muslim-dominated Signal Falia area, a little outside the Godhra station, and used to torch the train. However, depositions before the commission say there was no fire on the floor, nobody saw anyone entering the coach or pouring petrol. Significantly, burn injuries suffered by surviving passengers were all above the waist. This could not have happened if the fire was on the floor of the compartment. New

In Modi’s Gujarat, Hitler is a textbook hero | AHMEDABAD: Gandhi is not so great, but Hitler is. Welcome to high school education in Narendra Modi's Gujarat, where authors of social studies textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks have found faults with the freedom movement and glorified Fascism and Nazism. While a Class VIII student is taught 'negative aspects' of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, the Class X social studies textbook has chapters on 'Hitler, the Supremo' and 'Internal Achievements of Nazism'. New

India: After Gujarat Riots, Witnesses Face Intimidation | (Bombay, September 24, 2004) -- As the courts hear cases stemming from the anti-Muslim riots of March 2002, the authorities in Gujarat are intimidating rather than protecting witnesses who seek to bring the perpetrators of the violence to justice, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The central government in New Delhi must take immediate steps to ensure the protection of the victims and witnesses of the riots and their advocates. The 30-page report, Discouraging Dissent: Intimidation and Harassment of Witnesses, Human Rights Activists and Lawyers, documents how Hindu extremists have threatened and intimidated victims, witnesses and rights defenders who are fighting for the prosecution of those responsible for the killing and injury of Muslims during the riots. Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of violence, the state government—formed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Chief Minister Narandra Modi—has nurtured a climate of fear. Officials have targeted those seeking justice with selective investigations by state tax authorities or the police. New

Somanatha and Mahmud | [Part of the Hindutva antagonism towards Islam and Muslims is their belief that they are victims of "Islamic oppression" during the period of Muslim rule which spanned about 800 years. An example of this so-called "Islamic oppression" centres around the event of the destruction of the Somnath temple by Mahmud Ghaznavi. To the Hindu fundamentalist, this supposed action of "religious iconoclasm" epitomises the belligerent and barbaric nature of Islam and Muslims, thus perversely leading to justifications for persecuting Muslims in modern times, as we witnessed during the Babri Mosque riots, the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat and the anti-Islamic/Muslim rhetoric/discourse espoused by Indian politicians and Hindu fundamentalists in India. However, much of their beliefs are indeed based on distortions of history or even outright fabrications. This is so because the Hindu fundamentalist needs an enemy, and if the enemy is not apparent, they invent the enemy by fabricating history. Knowing this, the following article will prove useful in understanding the false sense of grievance the Hindu extremist holds against Muslims]. Mahmud of Ghazni's raid on the Somanatha temple in 1026 did not create a Hindu-Muslim dichotomy. Indeed a rigorous historical analysis of five different narratives or representations of what happened yields surprising new insights....MAHMUD'S raid on the temple of Somanatha and the destruction of the idol has become an event of immense significance in the writing of Indian history since the last couple of centuries. According to some writers, it has been seminal to antagonistic Hindu-Muslim relations over the last thousand years. Yet a careful investigation of the representation of this event and related matters in various sources of this thousand year period suggests that this conventional view is in itself a misrepresentation of the reading of the event in terms of Hindu-Muslim relations. New

Historical pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar | [The article describes the attempts by Hindutva organisations to rewrite Indian history so that it conforms with their own ideological beliefs regarding the superiority of Hindus and Hinduism, the supposed odious nature of Muslims and how the Hindu community, despite being the absolute majority, is supposedly engaged in a struggle for survival against the Muslim enemy who is out to destroy the Hindu. It is because ofthis false reading of history that we see many of the religious tensions in India exist. It is based on the fundamentalist Hindu's deluded belief that the Muslim is the enemy. As described by the article, they are also trying to include this fabricated and communal history in the national Indian educational textbooks, whereas currently it is mostly confined to textbooks issued in Hindu fundamentalist-run schools (Vidya Bharati schools). This process is often termed "the saffronisation of education".] If pedagogy is crucial, within it history commands a very special distinction. Almost all of the Sangh’s present politics uses images of the past as both referent and justification: that is, most recommendations for present-day activity are projected as responses, reactions to the past. Elements of the past need to be recovered and applied, other elements need to be replaced, while past events need to be revenged continuously...The past that is constructed out of present interests and needs of the Sangh, the past which is an instrument in its present politics must, therefore, be an usable past rather than a real one, in so far as it is knowable through serious investigative methods. In order to be usable, it needs to reorient much of the knowledge of our past, as well as the epistemological and methodological bases for the construction of knowledge. No wonder that research organisations and teaching material are now controlled by Sangh-related teachers and historians, sometimes by Sangh pracharaks...The Sangh is deeply uncomfortable with the entire exercise, since the only operation of power that it tries to identify is that of non-Hindus over Hindus – an identification that becomes untenable in the Indian situation where the Hindu majority is overwhelming and the religious minorities vulnerable in terms of material and political resources. The Sangh’s relationship with history is therefore particularly fraught. It needs to possess the past, yet the accepted methods of representation are anathema to it...The Hindu rashtra presupposes great excisions in collective memory as well as the production of counterfeit historical memories: experiences of poverty and exploitation to be overwritten by narratives of foreign conquests, military defeats and the ills that rulers of a different faith had allegedly done to Hindu temples, women and cows. Beyond a point, actual historical evidence for all this is thin, patchy or absent...The Sangh not only aspires to fill popular commonsense with its own reading of history, it also desires to fill up academic historical productions with methods and meanings that it generates...The message that it teaches to its cadres, and to members of other fronts, is entirely a historical narration which features only its own preferred version of ancient Hindu glories, Muslim atrocities and Hindu suffering in later periods...How does the Sangh propose the simultaneous demolition of accepted historical knowledge and construct its own version as authentic scholarship? Above all, the Sangh has founded schools...In 1977, Vidya Bharati was institutionalised to coordinate schools at the all-India level. By the early 1990s, it was running the second largest chain of schools in the country, controlling about 4,000 schools, 40 colleges, a total of 36,000 teachers and about ten lakh students...However, their schools left their own distinctive inscription on education in a variety of subtle ways. Significantly, an entire apparatus of audio-visual and pedagogical operations was developed to intervene in remaking historical understanding in opposition to older textbooks. First, the walls displayed maps of undivided India as the true shape of the nation, imparting in students a refusal of the historical reality of the Partition and visualising the country as inclusive of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. The refiguring of the map, moreover, requires explanations that inevitably provide an opening for accounts of the Muslim League plan for partition, of tales of Hindu sufferings in the holocaust, the mutilation of the land – all of which inculcate the desire for revenge...The walls are also festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like Shivaji and Rana Pratap, visually invoking legends of Muslim tyranny and Hindu royal-heroic resistance. A continuous narrative of Muslim wrongdoing is immediately and imaginatively disseminated while the idea of resistance is ineffably associated with royal figures rather than with common people. Distinctive notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, enemies and defenders of faith and nation are produced and instantaneously conjoined. In this Manichaean world, Hindu princes appear noble saviours while Muslims defile country and religion and this provides the only possible history of the country. New

The scars of Nationalism | "Now, reportedly 10,000 circled Jafri's home, chanting his name. When repeated calls to the police brought no help, some who survived said, Jafri decided to sacrifice himself in the hope others would be spared. He walked onto his doorstep. The mob demanded he say "Jai Shri Ram," or "Victory to Lord Ram," one of the gods in the Hindu pantheon. When he refused, they cut off his hands. Survivors said the attackers wore saffron bandanas, the signature orange color of Hindu nationalism, which holds that because most Indians are Hindu, India should be a Hindu nation. They carried tridents, the three-pronged weapon of Shiva, the god of destruction. The mob asked Jafri again to honor their god. Again he refused, and they cut off his legs. When he declined a third time, the mob cut him down his middle and dragged his body into the street....Meanwhile, scholars and non-nationalist Hindus in the United States increasingly are concerned about the proliferation of RSS branches in this country, known here as the HSS, called shakhas. In 1991, there were just three shakhas in the United States; now, there are more than 50, according to the HSS web site. There is no evidence that connects the nationalist movement in the United States with the violence in Gujarat. But scholars, many of them Hindu, say local nationalists help support an atmosphere of hate - both ideologically and financially - in the mother country." New

The Hindu : Case for `the genocide' | This article makes a case for the Gujarat pogroms to be tried under internation jurisdiction as a genocide, it clearly defines what genocide is and then systematically shows that what happened in India was genocide. "The nature of the [Hindutva] philosophy emerges with icy clarity in an extract in which Golwalker refers to Nazi Germany, "To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." Thus it is clear that the "other" will have to be subject to the constant threat of extermination if one goes by the understanding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's founders. In such a context what is the legal response, which is possible?" "In the facts of this case, there is no doubt that it was violence, which was systematically perpetuated against the Muslim community. It was Muslim women who were subjected to rape, Muslims who were killed, Muslims who had to flee from their homes in both villages, cities and towns, Muslim establishments which were systematically targeted and it was Muslims against whom pamphlets calling for annihilation, rape and economic boycott were issued. The scale of atrocities covered 17 districts in Gujarat and, as mentioned before, the violence resulted in over 1,00,000 lakh people fleeing their homes and the deaths of over 2,000 people. Property worth over Rs. 3,000 crores belonging to Muslims was destroyed. The scale was of such a nature as to draw the inference of an intention to destroy an entire religious group. The deliberate and systematic targeting of the Muslim community is seen in the fact that in both villages and Ahmedabad it was Muslim establishments, which were destroyed." New

The other face of fanaticism | An extremely informative article about Hindutva and it's effects on Indian society. It is on New York Times and requires registration (free) before viewing but is well worth the read. "Now, more than half a century later, many Indians feel that the R.S.S. has never been closer to fulfilling its dream. Its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, B.J.P.), the most important among the ''Sangh Parivar'' -- the ''family'' of various Hindu nationalist groups supervised by the R.S.S. -- has dominated the coalition government in New Delhi since 1998. Both Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India's prime minister, and his hard-line deputy and likely heir, L.K. Advani, belong to the R.S.S., and neither has ever repudiated its militant ideology." "Not much is known about the R.S.S. in the West. After Sept. 11, the Hindu nationalists have presented themselves as reliable allies in the fight against Muslim fundamentalists. But in India their resemblance to the European Fascist movements of the 1930's has never been less than clear. In his manifesto ''We, or Our Nationhood Defined'' (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, supreme director of the R.S.S. from 1940 to 1973, said that Hindus could ''profit'' from the example of the Nazis, who had manifested ''race pride at its highest'' by purging Germany of the Jews. According to him, India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis were ''guests'' and Muslims and Christians ''invaders.''" ""The Hindu nationalists are especially cautious at present,'' an Indian journalist told me this fall. ''Their fascistic nature has been obscured so far in the West by the fact that India is a democracy and a potentially large consumer market. They have managed to speak with two voices, one for foreign consumption and the other for local. But they know that religious extremists are under closer scrutiny worldwide after 9/11, and they know that they don't look too good after the killings of 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat.''"

Saffronisation of Indian history elicits deafening silence | "Anyone following the developments in India would have at least heard of the attempts to rewrite history, but not many are fully aware of the magnitude and scope of the endeavor." "Did you know that Jesus Christ wandered the Himalayas and drew his inspiration from Hinduism? That a Hindu named Samundragupta built the Qutb Minar, originally known as Vishnu Sthambha? That the Taj Mahal was really a Hindu Temple known as Tejo-Mahalaya (Shiva's Palace)? That the Red Fort in Delhi was a Brahmin palace? Or that the largest Holocaust in history was perpetrated by Muslims against Hindus in India? This is news to me. Probably is to most people. No, these are not extracts from a child's fable nor the impression of a lunatic few. These "historical truths" have been taught for many years at more than 22,000 Vidya Bharati schools operated by the Hindutva movement composed of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) also known as the World Hindu Council, Shiv Sena (Shiva's army) and the Bajrang Dal (brigade of the monkey god). Now thanks to a recent decision, these distortions and falsifications are not only being disseminated by these right wing Hindu-chauvinists organizations but by leading educational bodies in the India."

IDRF and the American funding of Hindutva | This link looks at the many channels of funding for Hindu extremism coming from the Western nations, mostly from extremist Hindus residing in Western nations.

The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid-Rama Janmabhumi Dispute | Quite self-explanatory, but provides numerous pieces of evidence which prove beyond doubt that the claim to the Ram Janmabhumi by Hindu extremists is based upon lies, deceptions and revisionism of history to further a communal agenda.

Gujarat 2002: An inquiry into the carnage in Gujarat | This explains the Gujarat and Indian central governments role in organising the anti-Muslim pogroms which were planned months in advance by the Hindu fundamentalists. Documented evidence is presented implicating the Indian government in collusion with Hindu religious groups in these pogroms. "An independent panel investigating the religious violence that broke out in the western Indian state of Gujarat earlier this year, has strongly criticised the state authorities for what it calls their alleged complicity in inciting the clashes. In their final report, the non-governmental group, which is comprised of former Indian judges and leading activists, alleges that hardline Hindu organisations had planned the riots months before they occurred. - BBC News"

In rumour of cows death, Hindu fundamentalists find a reason to murder | This article is about an event in India where a rumour was spread that five Hindu Dalits had killed a cow to eat, this being offensive to Hindu extremists, it led to the lynching of these Dalits by Hindu fanatics. They killed five humans in the name of a cow. "The debate echoes a larger battle over the identity of this vast and ethnically diverse nation of a billion people, pitting the guardians of India's secular pluralistic traditions against ascendant Hindu nationalists who see themselves as protectors of India's dominant faith and culture. While authorities have promised a full investigation of the Oct. 15 lynchings, which occurred in the presence of several dozen policemen and a local magistrate, so far the only charges in the case have been lodged against the five dead men, for "cow slaughter." Investigators, meanwhile, have received the results of an autopsy -- on the cow. And for many members of India's powerful Hindu nationalist movement, the killing of the five dalits -- or untouchables, who occupy the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system -- was an understandable, perhaps even justified, response to an even more serious offense.... "We consider the cow to be the mother of the world, of humanity, so if you've murdered a cow, then you've murdered a mother," said Pitambar Gaur, 35, who heads the local chapter of the World Hindu Council, a prominent Hindu nationalist group." "Such statements have infuriated secular liberals, who see the case as the latest example of how Hindu extremists and their political allies -- including the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads India's coalition government -- are undermining the rule of law and deepening the fissures in Indian society." ""These are good Hindus, and as good Hindus it would be right that they got angry and killed them," said Kuldip Singh, the owner of a brick kiln about a mile from the police station. Besides, he asked, "If the villagers did it, why would they point a finger at themselves?""

India denies Amnesty visas (BBC News) | "The Indian Government has refused visas to a team from the human rights group Amnesty International to investigate communal killings in Gujarat." "Amnesty's spokesperson said visas were refused, despite the fact that the application was made before an agreed deadline. "This refusal damages the image of both the Indian and the Gujarati governments before their citizens and the international community," added the spokesperson." See the Amnesty International statement here.

Doubts over Gujarat train attack (BBC News) | "Forensic investigators in India have raised questions over an attack which killed almost 60 Hindus and led to widespread anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat. Hindu pilgrims travelling by train were said to have been attacked by a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra which forced the train to stop and set fire to one of the carriages. But a report by forensic scientists in Gujarat says it does not appear that the fire on the train was started from outside." "Now, conclusions reached by official forensic investigators contradict earlier accounts of the incident. They say the evidence suggests the fire was started inside a carriage, not by a mob outside. Their findings will form part of police evidence and have not yet been made public." This helps support the theory, which is backed up by evidence anyway that this whole thing was pre-planned by the Hindu leaders of these fundamentalist groups. See more about this on these links: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Rising threat of Hindu extremism | "WHILE THE Western World worries about Islam, the specter of Hindu nationalism carries the potential of threatening the stability of the Indian subcontinent and the world beyond." "Like their Muslim extremist counterparts, Hindu nationalists seek to expel Western secularism from their midst, persecuting non-Hindus, trashing hotels that celebrate Valentine's Day or Christmas, and demanding that cities with Islamic names, such as Allahabad, be changed. Other religions - and there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan - are considered offshoots of a basic Hindu entity that should submit to Hindutva. Hindu nationalists rant that Hindi should be the national language, even though millions of Indians speak other native languages. The crowning moment of Advani's brand of Hindutva came exactly 10 years ago when an ancient mosque believed to have been built on a Hindu site was torn down by a howling Hindu mob egged on by BJP leaders including Advani. Militants shouting ''Hindustan is for the Hindus'' and ''Death to Muslims'' rioted, and more than 1,000 people were slaughtered, most of them Muslims. The recent rioting in Gujarat, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed while the police looked on, came as result of the controversy surrounding the Hindu nationalist demand that a Hindu temple be built where the mosque stood." This article is an op-ed piece about the threat of Hindu fundamentalism in India, we have seen from all the articles below how these fanatics have infiltrated to the highest echelons of the Indian administration. The threat they pose warrants action from the international community to stop this threat. Will we see any action? After all, it is the Indian government, not just the Gujarat government which has been implicated in the active collaboration and support of the Hindu fundamentalists who started a pogrom against Muslims not only in Gujarat 2002, but the pogrom against Muslims after Hindu fanatics destroyed the Babri Masjid in 1992 (see the Sri-Krishna report), it has actively supported these and has made Hindu fundamentalism a part of the national education curriculum, will we see any action in spite of this?

Is India going the way of 1930s Germany? | "The recent rounds of violence between religious groups in India do more than reveal the fragility of India's secular state. They highlight the inability of Indian democracy to combat what is essentially a fascist onslaught." "At first glance what happened in India appears to be another--if extreme--case of religious passion gone awry. A train carrying Hindu activists to the disputed religious site of Ayodhya was firebombed by a mob, killing 58 of the activists. Several days of revenge attacks by Hindus against Muslims followed in the state of Gujarat, killing over 700. However, India's Hindu Nationalists have always resembled 1930s European fascists more than they do contemporary "fundamentalists." Members of the core organization of Hindu nationalism, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in the 1920s, are given paramilitary instruction, not religious, and wear khaki uniforms reminiscent of Mussolini's brownshirts. While the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), founded in the 1960s, is mainly concerned with religion, it still does not prescribe how Hindus should worship or behave--an impossible task given the diversity of Hindu religious practice. Instead, like all Hindu nationalists, it is bent on characterizing Muslims as alien and hostile while seeking to unify Hindus around a romantic nationalism, in which military prowess plays a central role. Hindu nationalists' emphasis on international prestige has won them the support of the westernized middle class, typically the target of Islamic fundamentalism. Their focus on demonizing Muslims rather than promoting Hinduism is illustrated even by the dispute over Ayodhya, where extremist Hindu groups destroyed a 16th century Muslim mosque in 1992, sparking nationwide sectarian riots in which more than 2,000 people died." "Hindu nationalists claim that a temple on the same site honoring the birthplace of the Hindu deity, Rama, was torn down to make way for the mosque. For Hindu extremist groups the claim that a temple was torn down to build a mosque--for which there is no concrete evidence--was at least as important as the claim that Rama was born at the site. The destruction of the mosque was commonly spoken of in terms of retaking territory that had been lost to invaders. Hindu nationalists have identified other mosques they wish to destroy, claiming that these too were built on temple sites. For none do they claim the sanctity associated with the birthplace of Rama. Indeed, the purpose of claiming a particular site as Rama's birthplace--for which there is no basis in theology or tradition--was to justify tearing down the existing mosque. It is this fascist ideology, and the fact that a party espousing it is at the head of the national government, that makes the recent anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat so much more disturbing than earlier rounds of riots. As horrific as the recent violence was, more died in 1992. But the political establishment's response this time has been ambivalent and feeble. The paralysis in the political system is emboldening the Hindu extremist organizations responsible for the Gujarat "riots" to press their agenda more forcefully. There are times when India seems to resemble Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s." This is a very good article explaining the penetration into the echelons of power Hindu fundamentalists have made recently, and their resultant influence of national policy which in effect repeal India's status as a "secular democracy". It explains how from grass roots level in education, to government policy, how Hindu fundamentalists are steadily controlling and influencing Hindu Indian's in a way which is compared by the author to 1930's Germany (the rise of Nazi fascism and the influence it had on German's before the Holocaust).

No temple beneath Babri, says archeologist. | "Lucknow: ‘There has not been any temple beneath Babri Masjid,’ said world-renowned historian and archaeologist, Professor Shirin F. Ratnagar deposing before Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court hearing Babri Masjid Ram Janam Bhoomi case." "Deposing before the bench Professor Shirin asserted that historians all over the world are of the firm opinion that there has not been any temple beneath the Babri Masjid .Expressing her personal opinion she said that she too had studied all the documents and examined the land after excavation and came to the conclusion that Babri Masjid was constructed on a plain land and there has never been any temple on the masjid land." "Professor Shirin further claimed that the items obtained from the ruins of demolished Babri Masjid have no archaeological value and they could not be accepted as a witness of existence of any temple beneath the demolished Masjid by the court." This shows that this claim by these Hindu fundamentalists is not a strong claim. But this issue is exploited by the Hindu religious fundamentalists for their own purpose of Hindu Rashtra (Hindu theocracy) in India.

Analysis: Gujarat's siege mentality | "India's western state of Gujarat should be a model of Hindu-Muslim integration. For centuries, the two communities co-existed in apparent harmony. Muslims were among the first traders to settle and prosper in what became one of the country's most entrepreneurial states. They are said to have assimilated with ease and adopted a strong Gujarati identity. Yet it is their very success that has made them so vulnerable to the mob carnage that has engulfed the state since February." "Hindus have been encouraged to believe that Muslims are taking them for a ride in their own land." They are taught false history trying to portray any outsider as enemy, this has lead to the progressive demonisation of certain groups, Muslims and Christians in particular. This is all part of the Hindu fundamentalist agenda outlined in the articles below.

Rights group censures Gujarat (BBC News) | "A New York-based human rights group has launched a strong attack on the government of India's western state of Gujarat, alleging that state officials were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims. Human Rights Watch, which carried out its own investigations, says the violence was pre-planned and the state government was now involved in a massive cover-up of its role in the rioting. It says at the height of the riots between 28 February and 2 March, thousands of attackers descended on Muslim neighbourhoods, clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts - the uniform of Hindu right-wing groups. The report said they were guided by voter lists and print-outs giving addresses of Muslim-owned properties, information they obtained from the local municipality. The police were directly implicated in nearly all the attacks against Muslims that were documented in the 75-page report. In some cases, they were merely passive observers - but in many instances they led the mobs, aiming and firing at Muslims who got in the way, the report said." Why do the Western nations have cordial ties with Hindu fundamentalist- ruled theocratic India? We have seen with the reports so far that it is the Indian BJP (Hindu fundamentalists; Bharatiya Janata Party) government , not just the Gujarati state government which has allowed this sectarianism to flourish in India. Indeed, it is this party which carried out the campaign to destroy the Babri Mosque in order to build a temple, and they are still seen as a friendly government by Western leaders, no sanctions imposed upon them, no political action as well. See the article below for more on India's supposed secularism.

DAWN Special Report On South Asian Century; | "Hindu revivalism went beyond regeneration and consolidation. It took on a communal character. The secular territorial concept of nationalism is also under siege. It is sought to be replaced by an exclusionist notion of religious cultural nationalism. The politics of religious identity has gained unprecedented influence in India in recent times, as evident from the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power. It reflects a qualitative change in the state of consciousness in civil society and a departure from the political culture so far practised in independent India." "If the Hindus had such a creditable past their contemporary condition called for some explanation. The Hindu ideologues did not consider colonial domination as a possible reason. Instead, they traced the decline of the Hindus to the mediaeval times "when the tyranny perpetrated by the Muslim rulers", adversely affected the social and political fortunes of the Hindus. The Muslim rule, it was held, meant for the Hindus the loss of political power, forcible conversion to Islam, desecration and destruction of the places of worship and the stagnation of knowledge systems like Ayurved and astrology. If the Hindus had lost their past glory, it was essentially because of the Muslim aggression and logically a prerequisite for the revival of the Hindu nation was a clear demarcation from, and consolidation against, the Muslims. The Hindu revivalism, therefore, went beyond regeneration and internal consolidation; it took on a clearly communal character by stigmatizing the Muslims as enemies. A series of developments like the Hindi-Urdu controversy, the cow protection movement, the use of religious symbols for political mobilization and, above all, sporadic communal riots reinforced such a perspective."

India: Gujarat Officials Took Part in Anti-Muslim Violence (Human Rights Watch) | (New York, April 30, 2002) - State officials of Gujarat, India were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims since February 27 [Gujurat massacres of 2002] and are now engineering a massive cover-up of the state's role in the violence, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. Proving once again that the Hindu fundamentalists ruling India are a danger to India as a whole. This should in effect give India the status of a pariah-state, yet what we see is the Western governments simply condemn the massacres but not the Indian government, even though the Indian government is made up of Hindu fundamentalists known as the BJP, whose ideological backbone, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal groups are the ones known to have committed massacres of Muslims in Gujurat 2002. We also know now with all these reports issued by Human Rights groups, independent media and even from a secret British government memo that these massacres were instigated by the Indian government and the Gujurat government. All this complicity and yet we see no official condemnation of the Indian government whereas we see threats of military intervention when a non-ally to the West does it. This is the danger of Hindutva, a virulently fascistic ideology which has resulted in the massacres of thousands of religious minorities in India, not to mention low and non-castes. Why no condemnation? This shows that justice is only subjective when it comes to Western allies doing things wrong. Please see all the information in this page and come to your own conclusion about Hindutva.

Indian government hand in Godhra massacres | "British officials in India say the recent widespread violence in the Indian state of Gujarat was pre-planned and carried out with the support of the state government. In a damning internal report obtained by the BBC, British officials say the violence had all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing and that reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims is impossible while the chief minister remains in power. It says the violence, far from being spontaneous, was planned, possibly months in advance, carried out by an extremist Hindu organisation with the support of the state government. The aim, it says, was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas, and it says at least 2,000 people died." This is testimony to the fact that India's government state-sponsors terrorism, we don't see any form of international action taken against them though. India claims to be a secular democracy yet sponsors such religions pogroms in the name of Hinduism. It is startling to know that no action is taken against India.

Saffron terror by Praveen Swami | "Images of charred bodies and burned homes have gone off television screens, and a more terrible truth is starting to reveal itself. No riots took place in Gujarat. What the State witnessed was a fascist pogrom, conducted by organised death squads of the Hindu Right with the entire State apparatus at their disposal. The pogrom was initiated with two objectives. The first was to ensure that the State's Muslim population remained confined to its ghettos, and the second to ensure that the authority of the Hindu Right remained stamped forever on Gujarat's political landscape. The scale of the violence was not the worst the country has seen, but its significance is unmistakable: if Hindu fascists ever wield unchecked power, Gujarat is what India might look like." "The police now stepped in to allow the VHP squads free access. Four Muslim men were killed in firing, forcing those defending the neighbourhood to retreat. The local Noorani mosque was set on fire, and a saffron flag hoisted on its dome."""The police pushed us out of there," she says, "saying it was our night to die. The people who lived in the colony were giving the mob tyres and petrol to burn people with. While Fatima Bi found a place to hide, others were less lucky. She watched as her pregnant friend Saliya Behn had her belly slit, and was then set on fire along with her children, three-year-old Muskan and six-month-old Subhan. Her badly injured son Khwaja Husain now sits in the Shah Alam refugee camp, unable to talk. Witnesses who can speak describe scenes of rape and torture. Many say they wish they were among the 110 believed killed." It has thus been shown how the authorities take part in mass-killings of religious minorities in India, killing in the name of Hinduism. This has solidified the case for these Hindu fundamentalist groups to be termed terrorist, if not by the Indian government then at least the world community. One has to wonder why the world community is indifferent to this slaughter even though it was sponsored by elements in the coalition Indian government. Is all of this in the name of Hinduism worth it for the Indian government when it seeks to become a modern state and justify it's title of "the world's largest democracy"? Even it's own people want a ban on the fanatical Hindu fundamentalist groups.

Victims of Hindu fundamentalists | A picture gallery of some of the fatalities in the massacres of March 2002 by Hindu fundamentalists in the name of Hinduism.

Temple desecration in pre-modern India by Richard M. Eaton (part 1) | "For it has been through selective translations of pre-modern Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic data, that Hindu nationalists have sought to find the sort of irrefutable evidence that would demonstrate a persistent pattern of villainy and fanaticism on the part of pre-modern Indo-Muslim conquerors and rulers." The evidence presented here shows the scholarly view of the events and conflicts in India of the past and present, a subject which Hindu fundamentalists like to capitalise on and distort to suit their agenda, eventually leading to the type of massacres (based on a false sense of history, as these two articles show) perpetrated by Hindu fundamentalists in India (such as the Godhra massacres of March 2002). These actions casually swept aside by Hindu fundamentalists who, when asked about massacres such as this reply with "this is in response to Muslim theology inspired massacres of the past thousand years". These two articles show the dangers of the Hindutva ideological proponents and the lies which they spread which results in communal hate and eventually riots and massacres.

Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states by Richard M. Eaton (part 2) | "One often hears that between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Indo-Muslim states, driven by a Judeo-Islamic "theology of iconoclasm," by fanaticism, or by sheer lust for plunder, wantonly and indiscriminately indulged in the desecration of Hindu temples. Such a picture cannot, however, be sustained by evidence from original sources for the period after 1192. Had instances of temple desecration been driven by a "theology of iconoclasm," as some have claimed, such a theology would have committed Muslims in India to destroying all temples everywhere, including ordinary village temples, as opposed to the highly selective operation that seems actually to have taken place. Rather, contemporary evidence associates instances of temple desecration with the annexation of newly conquered territories held by enemy kings whose domains lay on the path of moving military frontiers. Temple desecrations also occurred when Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of treason or disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed normally as protected state property, were left unmolested."..."The fundamentally non-religious nature of these actions is reflected in the fact that contemporary inscriptions in Sanskrit or in regional languages never identified Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims, but generally in terms of their linguistic affiliation (most typically as Turk, "turushka"). That is, they were construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others."..."In sum, by placing known instances of temple desecration in the larger contexts of Indo-Muslim state-building and state-maintenance, one can find patterns suggesting a rational basis for something commonly dismissed as irrational, or worse. These patterns also suggest points of continuity with Indian practices that had become customary well before the thirteenth century. Such points of continuity in turn call into serious question the sort of civilisational divide between India's "Hindu" and "Muslim" periods first postulated in British colonial historiography and later reproduced in both Pakistani and Hindu nationalist schools." These two articles should be read in order to avoid believing the same hate-inspiring rhetoric as propounded by Hindu fundamentalists.

Ancient Hate Has India on Edge of Chaos | "There is no archaeological or historical evidence that a temple existed on the site or that Ram was born on the spot," says Richard Eaton, a renowned South Asia historian at the University of Arizona. "These things are like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus — they have no substance to them." All of this murder and hatred based on a claim which was not heard of until 220 years ago. The very nature of these fanatical groups necessitate the prohibition of such groups in India. The world community remains passive in the face of the state supported terrorism of India and urgent action should be taken now before the Hindu fundamentalist groups fulfil their agenda of making India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu theocratic state), and as we know from their current actions as partial rulers of India, the religious minorities will suffer. They have already stated that one of the Dharmasutras, the Manu Smriti will be the constitution of India. This book is the codification of caste and societal laws which gave rise to the Hindu caste system and therefore the low-castes will also suffer too.

Hindus ready for temple battle | "While most parties in India, including the avowedly secular Congress Party, have dabbled in religious favoritism, the current temple dispute was largely set in motion by Hindu-right parties that now control India's national government. In 1990, the now Home Minister L.K. Advani, along with other supporters of Hindu identity called Hindutva, organized marches to the Babri Mosque. Two years later, Hindu fanatics with picks and hammers reduced the three-domed mosque to rubble."

This is the real danger of Hindu religious fundamentalism in India, in spite of the death toll (in this massacre and throughout India's independence) in the thousands, the result of years of Hindu fundamentalism in India, we still see the world fail to condemn such groups as terrorist groups. This allows them to run rampage in India, as they are currently doing, and oppress the minorities. It is already documented that the ruling Hindu fundamentalist BJP had a large part to play in the instigating and maintaining of the March 2002 massacres, yet we see no action taken against them by the world community.

"In Gujarat especially, the evidence of favoritism has been striking. Originally, state chief minister Narendra Modi, a BJP member, said that police would only investigate the Feb. 27 Muslim train attack in Godhra, and not Hindu revenge attacks in Ahmadabad and other Gujarati cities and villages. Mr. Modi later changed this decision under heavy criticism. But his decision to compensate the families of each Hindu victim with 2 million rupees, compared with only 1 million rupees for Muslim victims, still stands."

These actions clearly speak for themselves, India is ruled by Hindu fundamentalists and represent a clear danger. These actions mentioned above are only the tip of the iceberg, it is indeed worrying for the minorities in India when even the Indian PM Vajpayee once spoke of "the Muslim problem". The fact that he even thought there was such a problem demonstrates the fanaticism of these people. We know from their actions, not just the March 2002 massacres, that the Indian government is itself giving support to these fanatics, so the question is, why does not the world take any form of action against India?

The hate train by Peter Popham | "The woman seized by the karsevaks was dragged into compartment S/6, and word of what had happened began to spread. "The girl began screaming for help," said Ahmed, a wood dealer who was waiting for a train going the other way. "Muslims who were travelling on the train got off. People began pouring on to the platform to try to rescue her. I ran home – I could see trouble was brewing...". "People in the vicinity... started to gather near the train," says one witness. "The mob... requested that the karsevaks return the girl. But instead of returning the girl, they started closing their windows. This infuriated the mob...". This article analyses the events leading up to, and the causes of the Hindu-Muslim clashes in Gujarat (March 2002) which left over a thousand dead. The conclusion is that it was the work of Hindu religious fanatics. It was also shown in other articles below that the state authorities were complicit in this crime as well, and as we know, India and the state of Gujarat are ruled by Hindu fundamentalists. This article shows the danger of the as yet unrecognised (by world media and politicians) menace Hindu fundamentalism plays in India. The sheer scale of the operations these fanatics carry out and the amount of zealots that they have (the Bajrang Dal alone has about 3 million armed cadres) and the atrocities these people carry out against religious minorities is, though immense, at the same time unrecognised by the world media.

Hindutva's fascist heritage | "In the 1930s Hindu nationalism borrowed from European fascism to transform ‘different’ people into ‘enemies’. Leaders of militant Hinduism repeatedly expressed their admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler and for the fascist model of society." It is remarkable that these terrorist groups have not been banned by the Indian government, but knowing that India itself is ruled by the BJP, a pro-Hindutva religious political group, it is not surprising. Where is the world to condemn India for it's support of these terrorists? This site is an excellent resource on Indian Hindu fundamentalism.

Historicising myth and mythologising history: The Ram temple drama by S. P. Udayakumar (University of Minnesota) | This is an excellent summing up of the Babri Mosque/Ram Janmabhoomi issue. I recommend this for all to read up and find out about what really is the core issue here, namely, Hindu fanaticism based on a false history and resultant pride cultivated by their religious leaders. The source of this article and more good articles on South Asian relations can be found here (very useful).

State-Sponsored Terrorism in the Republic of India - Communal Violence by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed | An analysis of the riots in the Indian state of Gujurat in March 2002. It documents the genesis of the riots and the principal issue(s) which allowed this to happen in the first place, namely the Hindu fundamentalist controlled government of India.

Outsider as enemy: The politics of rewriting history in India by K. N. Panikkar | This article explains the reasons why Hindutva nationalists like to rewrite Indian history to suit their chauvinistic and bigoted agendas and the effects that it produces.

Against cultural hegemonism by Sukumar Muralidharan | This is another critique of Hindutva, this time concerning the supposed secular nature of India and the challenge posed by the forces of Hindutva who enjoy the patronage of government officials.

Horseplay in Harappa by Micheal Witzel and Steve farmer | A major example of the lies propounded by Hindutva revisionist historians. In this case, N.S. Rajaram, one of Hindutva's premier "scholars" is caught and exposed in front of the whole world forging evidence to suit the popular Hindutva lie that the Aryan emigration did not happen in India.

The Muslim Rule in India: Aurangzeb & Tipu Sultan | This article dispels many myths that Hindutva fundamentalists believe which they use in an attempt to distort history and suit their political/religious agenda.

PADF: Indian Vishwa Hindu Parishad is a terror group | This is the same fanatical Hindu group which regularly kills religious minorities in India.

Hindutva fanatics started the communal riots of February/March 2002 | Showing again how the Hindu fundamentalist fanatics are a danger to India.

Hindus justify mass killings of Muslims (New York Times, need to register first) | The threat of Hindutva and it's virulent fanatical ideology has permeated all spheres of Indian life, Hindutva fanatics have gained so much influence that India itself is ruled by Hindutva fundamentalist fanatics, such as the Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Home Minister, L.K. Advani. Their fanatical fundamentalist priests have gained an enormous following where they have repeatedly massacred religious minorities over the years, they represent a clear danger to other religious minorities in India and to the secular nature of the so-called "world's largest democracy". It is a wonder why these Hindutva fanatical groups do not get declared as terrorist groups, though it is understandable once one knows that their leaders are also Hindu fundamentalist fanatics who incite this type of murder. Click here for information on the Indian governments stance towards these terrorists.

The Hindutva fundamentalist fanatics represent a real threat to India and it's minorities, their leaders are the ones who instigate riots, especially the recent riots of March 2002 and the killing of minorities at most other times, we all must ask ourselves why India is not pressured by the world community to ban these fanatical groups. The type of atrocities these fanatics do is unbelievable, an example would be this.

Police took part in slaughter (riots of March 2002) | Further proving that India most definitely is not the "world's biggest democracy", since it's rulers are Hindutva fanatics, it is more of a theocracy. I don't have a problem with theocracies per se as long as it harms no one unjustly and steals away rights for certain groups, but the Hindutva ideology most definately does harm minorities and steal away rights of the minorities.

Babri Masjid and Ram-Janmabhoomi | This part deals with the claims of the Hindutva fundamentalists who say that the spot where the Babri Mosque was is where Lord Rama was born.

The Ram myth | A very good critique of the issues behind the Ram Janmabhoomi and the false evidence that it is based on.

Dateline
Who was Babar?
Who was Rama?

Before destruction

Babri Masjid - Temple Dispute: Where Was Rama Born?
Ayodhya: Questions of History
Who Is Law Abiding on the Issue of Babri Masjid
Babri Masjid: Historical Facts vs. VHP's Claims
Sri Rama's Name But Babar's Game!

After destruction