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Subject: Slaughter in the Name of God
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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 21:22:52 -0400

An old Indian friend forwarded this to me a while ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A58173-2002Mar7&notFound=true

Slaughter in the Name of God
By Salman Rushdie
Friday, March 8, 2002; Page A33 Washington Post

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."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company


sdw

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