INDIA: The cause of the Bombay attacks may be domestic Indian extremism, writes Rahul Bedi in New Delhi
The continuing spiral of violence that rocked India's financial capital, Bombay (also known as Mumbai), yesterday claiming 46 lives has its roots in communal tensions that have escalated after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led federal coalition assumed power five years ago.
Security agencies have long feared such an attack following last year's three-month pogrom in neighbouring Gujarat state in which over 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed by Hindu mobs. And although the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr L.K. Advani, has hinted that a banned Muslim youth organisation might be responsible for the twin explosions, senior counterterrorism officials, politicians and analysts can, for the moment, offer no credible clues about its perpetrators.
All they can deduce is that the attacks might just be retaliatory attacks for Gujarat's massacres.
"In the Byzantine and cynical world of Indian politics an insidious and often violent Hindu extremist movement that is virulently anti-Islamic is menacingly building up across India, forcing Muslims into a corner," one analyst said, declining to be named on such a sensitive issue.
Attacks like yesterday's in Bombay, he added, merely end up reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiments for the majority Hindus, even though the actual culprits behind the attacks may never be caught, he added. No arrests have been made for recent blasts in Bombay on crowded trains and buses in which dozens died.
Muslims constitute 12 per cent of India's population of more than one billion, while Hindus form over 82 per cent.
The BJP's campaign gathered momentum after it won a landslide victory in Gujarat last December by campaigning for Hindutva (Hindu hegemony). And the Hindutva juggernaut now threatens to roll across five states that go to the polls this year followed by general elections in 2004, turning the country's communal situation incendiary.
"India will become a Hindu republic within two years " said Mr Praveen Togadia, Hinduism's most vocal warrior from the World Hindu Council that is a close BJP ally.
Confidently predicting a "storm ahead" by Hindu nationalists that was not going to be limited to Gujarat, Mr Togadia warned all those who opposed their agenda: "All opponents to Hindutva will get the death sentence, and we will leave it to the people to carry this out."
The council that is part of the broader "Hindu family " of which the BJP is the political wing has, in the recent past, talked chillingly of a "final settlement" of India's Muslim problem after Gujarat's riots last year that had frightening echoes of ethnic cleansing campaigns in other parts of the world.
"Now is the time for direct action to assert the Hindu identity in word and deed," Mr Togadia, a distinguished cancer surgeon from Gujarat, declared at that time.
The BJP's spectacular Gujarat victory followed three months of rioting that ended last May, after over 1,000 people had died. Rioting broke out after a suspected Muslim mob burnt a trainload of 58 Hindu activists at Gujarat's wayside station of Godhra last February.
The victims were returning from the northern town of Ayodhya where extremist Hindus have been leading a campaign to build a temple to the warrior god Lord Ram on the site of a 16th-century mosque they demolished in 1992.
In his election speeches the state's chief minister, Mr Narendra Modi, claimed that only he could protect Gujarat's 50 million people from neighbouring Islamic Pakistan and radical Muslim militants. He portrayed Muslims as the enemy and a bulwark against prosperity and Gujarati enterprise.
Under his administration high school textbooks declare that Hitler lent "dignity and prestige to the German government by establishing a strong administrative set-up".
The Class 10 social studies book that is compulsory reading for 15-year-olds also declares tamely that Hitler "adopted a policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated supremacy of the German race".
Hundreds of World Hindu Council activists, meanwhile, are moving surreptitiously into villages in western Rajasthan state, organising religious meetings and making fiery speeches with renewed vigour to "awaken the Hindu spirit" ahead of provincial elections scheduled around October or November.
Political control of states in India's federal polity largely determines the central government's future. Consequently, all political parties strive hard to win state elections.
"We want to unite all Hindus, just like in Gujarat. We want a similar Hindu enlightenment in Rajasthan," a state council spokesman, Mr Mahavir Prasad Parikh, said.
Beginning its "awareness" campaign earlier this year, the council distributed tridents, the symbol of militant Hinduism, and hundreds of supporters were made to take an oath of allegiance to the concept of a Hindu state.
Meanwhile, Mr Bal Thackeray, another BJP ally from the extremist Shiv Sena Party of Maharashtra, bordering Gujarat, of which Bombay is the capital, recently advocated raising Hindu suicide squads to fight Muslim terrorists to make the country more secure.
"Terrorists must be born amongst you [HINDU'S )], too, but they must be suicide squads ready to die for the cause of making this [INDIA )]a Hindu rashtra [HOMELAND )]. Otherwise it will be a lost cause," declared Mr Thackeray, who openly professes admiration for Adolf Hitler.
At a public rally in Bombay on the Hindu religious festival of Dushera last October, which celebrates the victory of Lord Rama over the evil king Ravana, Mr Thackeray expressed his willingness to help "wipe out" trouble-making Muslims.
He also wanted the supine federal government to "kick out" over 40 million Bangladeshi Muslims who had entered India as economic refugees.
Soon after, a former colonel, Mr Jayant Chitale, formed the Hindustan Suicide Squad in Pune, 190km south-east of Bombay, to train Hindu recruits.
For a fee of 1,500 rupees (€30) he enrolled unsuspecting youngsters from poor and lower middle homes for a 15-day course where they were for a few weeks trained with dummy swords and .22 air guns.
And while Col Chitale's arrest has dealt a severe blow to his efforts at raising a suicide squad, burgeoning Hindu nationalism threatens to negatively engulf India at a juncture when there is little or no credible political or social obstacle to restrain its expansion.