WORLD VIEW: The twin car bomb explosions that ripped through India's financial capital, Bombay, earlier this week, killing 52 people, resulted not only in igniting simmering tensions between the country's majority Hindu and minority Muslim community, but also in adversely impinging on the fledgling peace process with nuclear rival Pakistan, writes Rahul Bedi
India blamed a Pakistan-backed insurgent group for Monday's consecutive bomb blasts in Bombay that also injured 150 people. And yesterday Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee ruled out any "consequential" talks with Islamabad till it ended "sponsoring" cross-border terrorism inside the country, especially in the northern, disputed Kashmir state that is divided between the neighbours but claimed by both.
The two sides came close to war last year after their armies were deployed along the common frontier, following the attack by suicide gunmen on India's parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan.
India withdrew its high commissioner following the December 2001 strike, halved its diplomatic staff in Islamabad and severed road, rail and air links to its neighbour. Pakistan followed suit while denying any involvement in the attack.
The two armies were withdrawn last November and peace moves initiated by India earlier this summer have, so far, resulted in the installation of the respective high commissioners and the resumption of the bus service between Delhi and the Pakistani border city of Lahore. Air and rail links are yet to be restored, following a breakdown of negotiations while more substantive talks have to be kick-started.
Vajpayee's beleaguered Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) heads the federal coalition but appears to be having second thoughts as it faces polls in five crucial states later this year and general elections in 2004. Having achieved little of worth over the past five years in social, economic and political matters or in settling the innumerable security issues and insurgencies afflicting India, the BJP seems to be resorting to its customary fall-back option of exploiting communal fault lines and consolidating the Hindu vote on an anti-Muslim platform.
And in the complex and disdainful maze of Indian politics the issue of Hindu-Muslim relations are linked closely to the complicated web of Delhi-Islamabad relations, a symbiosis the BJP cleverly exploits. Internally, BJP leaders project India's large Muslim population, second only to Indonesia's, as the enemy; and by stressing Pakistan's role in fomenting terrorism it enforces the laager syndrome amongst Hindus.
Muslims constitute around 13 per cent of India's population of over one billion while Hindus form around 83 per cent.
The BJP's rise from relative obscurity in the late 1980s to heading the federal coalition in 1998 and again in 1999 has principally been on an anti-Muslim campaign. Its leaders, like Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, launched a nationwide crusade to build a temple in place of the 16th century Babri mosque in northern Ayodhya to commemorate the exact birth-spot of the Hindu god Rama, a movement that struck a sympathetic chord amongst the majority community.
In 1992 BJP supporters and their allies demolished the mosque built by the first Mughal emperor Babar and named after him, triggering off countrywide communal rioting. In Bombay over 1,500 died. Six years later the BJP was in power and ever since has raised the temple construction issue whenever faced with elections.
Last year, BJP politics hit its nadir after it swept the polls in western Gujarat state following the three-month long pogrom of Muslims that left over 1,000 of them dead. The National Human Rights Commission, the opposition and independent activists have blamed the BJP-led state government for aiding rioters who killed Muslims and ravaged their homes and business establishments unchecked in an orgy of looting and pillage. But it had the desired result - the BJP swept Gujarat last December.
Many BJP leaders privately admit that Gujarat was the "laboratory" where the communal experiment was tested before it is transported across the country. "The BJP is set on an election campaign that will play on the fears of the Hindus," declared a columnist in the widely circulated Indian Express newspaper. Events like the blasts in Bombay and peace overtures to Pakistan merely muddy the political climate for the Hindu nationalists, an independent MP said.
Security officials, meanwhile, fear that Pakistan is fully exploiting the volatile communal situation brought about by the BJP's electoral politics and blind desire to remain in office much to India's detriment. "If militant Muslim groups decide to strike back in any significant and co-ordinated manner then India faces a grave, almost apocalyptic situation," a senior security official said, declining to be identified. The only saving grace, for the moment, is that India's Muslims lack any coherent leadership but that ability might just be provided from outside, he added ominously.
Other intelligence officers concede that Muslim killings in Gujarat had created hundreds if not thousands of potential terrorists which India simply does not have the ability to cope with. They said the civil law enforcement structure like the police and the paramilitary was either too weak, "aligned" with the majority Hindu community or too battle-fatigued. And frequent army deployment, like in Gujarat, to quell civil unrest simply diluted its authority, corrupted ranks and compromised national security through reduced training. "The army's primary role is to fight wars and undergo training during peace," an army officer said. It (the army) cannot be the substitute for civil administration that it has become, he added.
But analysts and even police officers admit that if justification were indeed needed for the Muslims to hit back, then last year's events in Gujarat had provided it. In a parliamentary debate on the riots, former prime minister Chandra Shekhar compared the government's defence on Gujarat to Nazi statements. "One should remember how in Germany Hitler had used parliament," Shekhar said. The speeches of the BJP leaders show that Hindu hegemony is ingrained in their minds, he added.
But the BJP is unlikely to change its tactics, "controlled" as it is by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Volunteer Corps, that provides it with its spiritual guidance. The founding principle of the 78-year old RSS, an organisation likened to Italy's Fascist Party and similarly fashioned, is to defend Hinduism by keeping it "pure" from outside influences like Islam and Christianity. Vajpayee, Advani, and at least 15 cabinet ministers are RSS members.
The RSS daily imparts basic military drill to its cadres and involves them in ideological discussions in hundreds of Indian neighbourhoods. The assassins of Mahatma Gandhi were educated in such a school and murdered him because of his secular outlook and policy of appeasement to Muslims and for opposing the partition of the country into an Islamic Pakistan and a secular India.
At a recent conclave the RSS declared that the Muslims needed to earn Hindu "goodwill" in order to exist, a stratagem that not only forebodes internal communal turbulence, but also a bulwark against improving relations with Pakistan and lowering tensions in a region that is a proliferating nuclear flashpoint.