[Reader-list] India: Slaughter in the Name of God (Salman Rushdie)

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Washington Post
Friday, March 8, 2002; Page A33

Slaughter in the Name of God

By Salman Rushdie

The defining image of the week, for me, is of a small child's burned 
and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding 
from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, in India. 
The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The 
routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies . . . the massacre of 
innocents in Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s when village turned against 
neighboring village . . . the massacre of Sikh children in Delhi 
during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Indira Gandhi's 
assassination: They bear witness to our particular gift, always most 
dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our 
children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their 
throats, or smothering them or just clubbing them to death with a 
good strong length of wood.

I say "our" because I write as an Indian man, born and bred, who 
loves India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of 
us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in 
India's strengths, then India's sins must be mine as well. Do I sound 
angry? Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as 
India undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in more 
than a decade, many people have not been sounding anything like 
angry, ashamed or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing 
their men's unwillingness to defend the citizens of India, without 
regard to religion, by saying that these men have feelings too and 
are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general.

Meanwhile, India's political masters have been tut-tutting and 
offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought 
under control. (It has escaped nobody's notice that the ruling party, 
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People's Party, and the 
Hindu extremists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu 
Council, are sister organizations and offshoots of the same parent 
body.) Even some international commentators, such as Britain's 
Independent newspaper, urge us to "beware excess pessimism."

The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're 
used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how 
life is, folks. Most of the time India is the world's largest secular 
democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy 
religious steam, we mustn't let that distort the picture.

Of course, there are political explanations. Ever since December 
1992, when a VHP mob demolished a 400-year-old Muslim mosque in 
Ayodhya, which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the 
god Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of 
it is that some Muslims were ready to give it to them. Their 
murderous attack on the train-load of VHP activists at Godhra (with 
its awful, atavistic echoes of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by 
the train-load during the partition riots of 1947) played right into 
the Hindu extremists' hands.

The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and 
insufficient radicalism of India's BJP government. Prime Minister 
Atal Bihari Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a 
coalition government and has been obliged to abandon much of the 
BJP's more extreme Hindu nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition 
together. But it isn't working anymore. In state elections across the 
country, the BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw 
for the VHP firebrands. Why put up with the government's betrayal of 
their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn't even result in 
electoral success?

The electoral failure of the BJP is thus, in all probability, the 
spark that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu 
temple on the site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque -- that's where 
the Godhra dead were coming from -- and there are, reprehensibly, 
idiotically, tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to 
resist them. Vajpayee has insisted that the slow Indian courts must 
decide the rights and wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no 
longer prepared to wait.

The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to 
India's president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government 
(led by a BJP hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing 
"too little too late." She pins the blame firmly on the "motivated, 
well-planned out and provocative actions" of the Hindu nationalists. 
But another writer, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in 
India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India's 
Muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement.

The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi 
in her letter demands "stern legal action" against them. But the VHP 
is determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes 
such public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by 
supporting them, Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism 
and disgraces the Nobel award.

The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But 
there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the 
face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, 
religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere 
innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, 
speaking of religion in the fashionable language of "respect." What 
is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being 
committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? 
How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how 
willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, 
the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.

So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened 
in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.

Salman Rushdie is a novelist and author of the forthcoming essay 
collection "Step Across This Line."