Modi showed a fondness for the Hindu right wing group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a child. The RSS was started in 1925 as a Hindu nationalist movement and reached infamy in 1948 when one of its members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi. It was declared a terrorist group immediately after by the Indian government and banned for two years. But today it remains as strong—and hardline—as ever.
There are an estimated 40,000 RSS camps, or shakhas, across the country where Hindu men and young boys gather each morning to chant slogans and perform a series of exercises, often using a long stick. In the landmark report on the 2002 Gujarat riots, “We Have No Orders to Save You,” Human Rights Watch said it was the RSS that was responsible for passing out lists of Muslim-owned business and homes to mobs at the start of the violence.
It was at these camps that Modi’s ideas about the world were formed. His childhood friend, who like almost everyone in this book choses not to be identified, tells Mukhopadhyay that “[Modi] was always greatly impressed by the fact that only one person gave all the orders in the [RSS camp] and everyone followed the command.”
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In 1985, Hindu-Muslim violence erupted in Gujarat in response to agitations among Hindus that the Congress party was appeasing Muslims to win votes. Modi saw a chance to mobilize Hindu voters and for the first time, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), often called the political wing of the RSS, came to power in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s most populous city, after the 1986 municipal elections.
Modi was given credit as the man who delivered the BJP its first victory in Gujarat, but he also earned a reputation as someone unwilling to take orders from his nominal superiors. Mukhopadhyay says Modi failed to understand that the RSS—not the individual—is the priority in the hierarchy of Hindu nationalist groups. One person who did not share this view of Modi wasLK Advani, then the president of the BJP. It was Advani who articulated the ideology ofHindutva, the idea that India is and should always be a nation that places Hindus and Hinduism first. As Mukhopadhyay writes, “The secondary position of Muslims in Gujarat stems from the campaign that there is a need to restore to Hindu past glory that was taken away by Muslim invaders and their supporters.”
In the early 1990s, Advani mounted a chariot and rode across India rallying support to destroy the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which supporters of the right wing Hindutva movement argued was built over the birthplace of Hindu deity Lord Ram. Advani’s rath yatra, or procession, began in the Gujarat city of Somnath, where a Hindu temple was destroyed by Muslim raiders in the 11th century. Advani selected a then-nationally unknown young man named Narendra Modi to ride next to him, as sort of his Arjun, the person who was disciple to Lord Krishna in the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. On December 6, 1992, tens of thousands of Hindu extremists, many from the RSS, razed the mosque—built in the 16th century by Babur, India’s first Mughal emperor—sparking riots across India, including in Gujarat. It was Advani’s and Modi’s way of evening out the balance sheet—of saying, Muslims destroyed our temple, we will destroy theirs.
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One Hindu nationalist in Gujarat told the authors, “Muslims will never dare to raise their heads in Surat now. They will have to learn to live in an inferior position as befits a minority.” This, Mukhopadhyay argues, is how Modi defines the Hindutva ideology that is still the core of his worldview. It is not that non-Hindus cannot and should not live in India. But if non-Hindus want to live in peace, they should adhere to Hindu traditions.
The 1992 riots catapulted the BJP to national power for the first in India’s history. Brown University Professor Ashutosh Varshney, one of the world’s leading experts on Hindu-Muslim violence, wrote in a recent op-ed that, “The Ayodhya movement, led by Advani … brought the BJP to India’s centerstage. In 1989, the BJP got 11.5 per cent of the national vote; in 1991, 20.1 per cent; in 1996, 20.3 per cent; and in 1998, garnering 25.6 per cent of the national vote, it nearly equaled the vote share of the Congress party, something entirely inconceivable even in the late 1980s.”
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Riots are, however, not new to Gujarat and Modi’s supporters are fond of saying that more riots have occurred under Congress’ rule than the BJP’s. But the 2002 violence, as Human Rights Watch reported, appeared to be pre-planned. Meticulous lists of Muslim business and homes were passed out, dozens of Muslim religious sites were destroyed, and many Muslim women have spoken about being gang raped during the riots.
It was not the failure of the state to intervene that makes Gujarat’s violence so unusual. It was that there is evidence to suggest the Gujarat state government encouraged the violence. As Varshney writes, “Unless later research disconfirms the proposition, the existing press reports give us every reason to conclude that the riots in Gujarat were the first full-blooded pogrom in independent India.”
Sanjiv Bhatt, a Gujarat police officer, filed an affidavit in India’s Supreme Court stating that on the evening of February 27, 2002, Modi summoned his top police officers and told them not to intervene to save the lives of Muslims during the violence. In his affidavit, Bhatt claimed that Modi told them to let “Hindus to vent out their anger against Muslims.”
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Ashis Nandy, one of the leading academics in India, met Modi in the 1980s, before Modi was known nationally. In a moving essay, he writes of meeting Modi: “I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.”
(Source: southasiajournal.net, via jahanzebjz-deactivated20200414)