Legacy of Hatred: The Campaign To Stop Gujarat's Chief Minister From Coming to the U.S.
On an October 1947 morning, a few months after the partition of British India and the creation of independent nation states of India and Pakistan, Nathu Ram Godse, an activist of the Hindu supremacist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, (National Volunteers Group), which draws inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini and aspires to the creation of a Hindu India “purified of Muslims and Christians”, assassinated the greatest Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was preached harmony between the Hindus and Muslims of India. Gandhi’s murderer was arrested and sentenced but the group he belonged to worked in silence, ran indoctrination schools throughout India, strengthened its cadre base and waited for its moment.
In 1992, as India was opening its socialist economy to global markets, LK Advani, a leader of Bhartiya Janata Party, the electoral wing of RSS, came up with a plan to engineer the rise of his Hindu nationalist party. Throughout the late eighties, Indian state television had been airing an immensely successful series based on the Hindu epic, Ramayana, which tells the tale of Hindu God and Prince Rama’s exile from his city of Ayodhya and his battle against the demon king Ravana of Lanka, who kidnapped Rama’s wife Sita.
Advani sought to raise support for building a temple in honour of Ram in the northen Indian town of Ayodhya, which many Hindus believe corresponds to the mythical Ayodhya of Ramayana. Advani and other leaders of the Hindu right argued that a general of the medieval Muslim ruler of India, Babar, had destroyed the original temple of Ram and built a mosque known as Babri Mosque in its place. Volunteers of the RSS and the BJP went door to door throughout India seeking cash donation and bricks to rebuilt the Ram temple. Advani rode a chariot--- like old Hindu kings did—from the western Indian state of Gujarat to the small town of Ayodhya in the northern state of Utter Pradesh, urging people enroute to assemble in Ayodhya to “rebuilt” the Ram temple.
On 6th December 1992, after many clashes with the local police, activists of the RSS and the BJP cheered by many leaders including LK Advani, charged at the medieval Babri mosque and demolished it. Most secularists saw it as the darkest day for a secular, democratic India. Sectarian violence throughout the towns and cities of India followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque. Hundreds of Muslims were killed and their houses burnt in Bombay, where the Hindu right had gained strength. Reprisals followed when a Muslim underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim organized “revenge attack” and a series of bomb blasts ripped the city killing hundreds in 1993.
Religious tensions continued, the Hindu supremacist and nationalist groups, RSS and the BJP grew in strength. The BJP rose from two representatives in the India parliament to lead a coalition government in 1996. It further fueled the “Hindu pride” by conducting nuclear test in 1998 and propelling the arch-rival Pakistan to conduct its own tests. RSS and BJP members took parcels of the nuke-blasted sand from the test site in Pokhran desert and worshiped it at temples. BJP, which had risen to power on the promise of building the temple for Ram at Ayodhya had yet to fulfill that promise.
In February 2002, as various Indian states were going for elections (which were bound to impact the forthcoming 2004 national elections), volunteers of the RSS and the BJP gathered again at Ayodhaya, demanding they be allowed to set a foundation for the Ram Temple. India feared sectarian violence for the two weeks the Hindu right activists, known as "karsevaks," negotiated with the federal government. They were allowed to place a token stone at the site. Hundreds of the karsevaks were from the states of Gujarat, where the Hindu right is the strongest and also the neighboring state of Maharashtra.
After the token ceremony at Ayodhaya, the karsevaks, took the trains back to Gujarat. When one of those trains stopped at a small town in Godhra, the karsevaks got into an argument with the Muslim tea-vendors at the platform. As the train left the platform, a mob of Muslims from a neighbouring slum attacked it. The train caught fire and 57 people were killed. Most believed the Muslim mob had set the running train on fire though a federal inquiry later determined that the fire had started inside the train only.
Hours after the burning train reached Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, volunteers of the RSS and the BJP armed with computer print outs of the Muslim houses and business spread out throughout Gujarat, murdering Muslim men, raping women, and setting Muslim-owned establishments to fire. Narendra Modi, the chief minister (highest elected official) of Gujarat, allowed the rioters proceed with the carnage and directed the police to do nothing. More than a 1,000 Muslims were killed in a few days and thousands were displaced from their homes. Modi told the press, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” The dead included a distinguished former member of Indian Parliament, Ahsan Jafri, a Muslim, who lived in Gulbarga Housing Estate, a sort of gated community surrounded by Hindu houses. Before a mob hacked him to death and burnt Gulabarga Hosuing Estate, Jafri had made several phone calls to Narendra Modi and the police chief of Gujarat. Modi did not take his call. Luke Harding, the Guardian’s India correspondent, who reached Jafri’s house a few hours after his death wrote, “At the bottom of his stairs I discovered a pyre of human remains - hair and the tiny blackened arm of a child, its fist clenched. Two police officers in khaki told us the situation was dangerous, and that we should leave; they seemed resigned or indifferent to the horror around them.” Apart from Jafri, the dead included scores of pregnant women, stabbed by tridents in their wombs.
After the rioting stopped, thousands of Gujarat’s Muslims were forced to leave their homes and move to slum-like refugee camps on the outskirts of various cities and towns. India’s liberal English-language media and non-governmental organizations pressed hard for prosecution of the rioters. Nothing happened. Trials held in Gujarat were more like farces; eye-witnesses to murder, like a woman Zaheera Sheikh, who watched twenty-two people being murdered in a bakery called Best Bakery, were intimidated and offered millions of rupees to turn hostile in the court, by legislators of Modi’s party. Modi was only emboldened when he won the Gujarat state elections with an overwhelming majority a few months after the pogrom.
Gujarat’s Muslims continue to live in the refugee camps in a fear-filled world, very far from the democratic that exists elsewhere. Modi continues to rule Gujarat, appear in newspaper pictures and on television talking about making Gujarat India’s most investor friendly state and inviting American and European companies to set up offices there. He remains a despised man, a slur for the liberal India, who has faced continued protests at most high-profile functions he attended in India. But for the Hindu right in the Indian-American community, Modi is a hero.
In March 2005, the mostly Gujarati Asian American Hotel Owners' Association (AAHOA), whose 7,000 members own over businesses worth $ 40 billion but lack any influence invited Modi to be the chief guest at its annual function and he agreed. Earlier invitees to the functions of this cash-rich, prestige-seeking group have been Indian-origin US congressman, Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Louisiana. MP Rama, the AAHOA President described the invitation to Modi as a “cultural boost” and “opportunity to talk about business potential in Gujarat.”
But the other invitation for Narendra Modi was to deliver a lecture at Madison Square Garden. It came from Association of Indian Americans for North America, a group formed by the members of American chapters of the various Hindu right wings groups like Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the overseas RSS, and the Overseas Friends of the BJP. They described Narendra Modi as the "Lion of Gujarat" and a "Visionary and Dynamic Young Leader of India".
After a group of Indian-American left/liberal activists led by Biju Mathew of Coalition Against Genocide, led an intensive web campaign and ensured the US State Department deny a visa to Narendra Modi, the main organizers of his Madison Square Garden lecture, Mahesh Mehta, the founder of VHP (US), Suresh Jain, Sudhakar Reddy and Mukund Mody of the Overseas Friends of BJP, broadcast Modi’s lecture via satellite to a crowd of the Hindu-right Indian Americans at Madison Square Garden.
Listen to Biju Mathew talk about organizing against Modi's visit to the U.S.
Read profiles of the Hindu Right
Posted by VVG 10:35 AM
Labels: Basharat, Gujarat, history, Modi
