Mosque Breakers

Defeating or containing the parivar’s extended joint family in the battle of the hustings will be a formidable task. It has 45,000 shakhas spread across the country with an army of lakhs of lathi-wielding swayamsevaks at its beck and call. No other political party or combination of parties can make up so large an army to take them on. They are a united force motivated by a single purpose: of converting secular India into a Hindu state. Other parties are not united under a single command nor share a common aim. The parivar is active on many fronts: educational, social, cultural, trade unions, women’s organisations, the bureaucracy, police and the army. They have begun to re-write the history of India, falsifying or distorting facts to suit their purpose. The most powerful weapons in their armoury are ambiguous phraseology and outright falsehood.

Many of our top leaders like Sardar Patel, Morarji Desai and Jayprakash Narayan were taken in by assurances given by leaders of the rss that theirs was a social and cultural organisation with no political ambitions. Even Mahatma Gandhi was for a while willing to listen to their protestations of being a non-violent organisation till he came to the conclusion that it was impossible to rely upon their word. Nehru alone saw through the facade of social service put up by the parivar and warned: The danger to India, mark you, is not Communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism. While not overlooking communal forces at work among other communalists, he said: Communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than communalism of the minority... when the minority communities are communal, you can see that and understand it. But the communalism of the majority community is apt to be taken for nationalism.Nehru had studied and written on the history of his country and had uncanny foresight to see the perils of equating Hindu communalism, or Hindutva as Savarkar named it, with freedom for other communities inhabiting India. Hindutva had a momentum of its own. From the time the British took the governance of the country out of the hands of the Mughals, a feeling began to grow that it was time for the Hindus who formed an overwhelming majority of the population to reclaim its legacy: the British had deprived them of it for over two centuries, the Muslims for a thousand years before the British. The stream of Hindu nationalism began to flow under the ground like the pataal Ganga and burst into the open when both British and Muslim domination ceased to exist. It was time to settle old scores. Everything that went wrong with the administration was ascribed to the colonial mentality; all the evils that had corrupted India socially were ascribed to Muslims or Christian missions which operated under the benign patronage of the English. Men like Gandhi and Nehru stood against this narrow-minded interpretation of Indian history. Gandhi paid for his stand against bigotry with his life. His martyrdom helped Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi to keep the forces of Hindu chauvinism at bay as long as they lived. Prime ministers who followed them were men of lesser substance. Bastions of secularism fell one after another. And now we have as prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, a swayamsevak of the rss who swears by its ideology but tempers his words in order to appease partners in his coalition and keep his government going. Right from 1925 when the rss was founded by Dr Hedgewar in Nagpur primarily to combat Muslim hooligans during communal riots, through the tenures of Golwalkar, Deoras, Rajju Bhaiya to the present day, the rss, and following its instructions the many political parties it has spawned, have looked down upon Muslims and Christians as unwanted mlechhas (untouchables) to be tolerated only if they Hinduise themselves. Golwalkar put it quite bluntly: Ever since the evil day, when Muslims just landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu nation has been gallantly fighting on to shake off the despoilers.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, was the logical consequence of anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by members of the Sangh parivar. It was carefully planned and rehearsed to ensure that nothing went wrong. It was executed with diabolical indifference to the consequences. Persecution of Christians started two years ago. Missionaries and priests were murdered, nuns raped; churches and Bibles set on fire. A few men were arrested. No one has been convicted.

The scenario painted by Noorani is uniquely depressing. But accurate. Indians owe it to themselves to fight the forces of evil to the finish. If they fail, India will not remain a country for civilised people to live in.