The Veiled Threat

RSS 'advice' to Muslims to behave is a veiled threat of sorts. Especially,coming in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat it is sure to send the chills down the spine of this hapless community. It is being said that 'they' are responsible for the Godhra crime and the Gujarat violence is a spontaneous reaction to that.

It must be made clear that perpetrators of Godhra incident do not in any way 'represent' the Muslim community. The false propaganda that Muslims did not condemn Godhra is again a blatant lie as all those who matter from that communitycondemned it in no uncertain terms. It is another matter that all such condemnations are either ignored or not considered on purpose. To say that Muslims should win the goodwill of the Hindu Majority is another way of saying that Muslims must 'obey' the RSS,or else...

Surely, Hindus as such have no ill will against the Muslim community.Despite the bloody history of riots and the attempts to drive a wedge between the Hindus and Muslim by RSS in particular, duly provoked byMuslim fundamentalists, the large section of Hindu community does not view the Muslims with animosity. It is the Sangh Parivar, which has been projecting Muslims as the incarnation of evil, agents of ISI and theones responsible for all the evil in this society. It is in keeping with its
fascist politics that RSS has adopted this stance a la Hitler who targeted first Jews, then Communists, then trade unionists andso on.

In RSS ideology Muslims are the first to be nailed, Christians the next, followed by Communists and than the list can beexpanded depending on the contingencies of Hindutva politics.

At one level, RSS must have realized that Ram Lalla will not be able to collect the votes for its political offspring, the BJP. Now the search is on fora new symbol around which emotive appeals can be triggered back in to action to reap thedividends in the forthcoming Gujarat elections and to sustain the power at the center, courtesy the alliance with power-hungry opportunist politicians likeFernandes and Mamta Bannerjee.

Now, while realizing the limitations of the Ram Lalla campaign, one of the efforts is to see whether the anti-Muslim violence can keep its (RSS clan's) spirits going. Also realizing that the proposed Ram Temple is not going to come by easily and some of the gullible, who came around to support it on that issue, have to be givenan explanation for the inability to build Ram
temple. Having failed to accomplish that by brute force, and mainly because any such force would have destabilized the Govt. at center, now the word is going around that Muslims are suffering because they have failed to earn the goodwill of themajority community.

So, to win this goodwill, they should voluntarily give up their claimsto the Babri mosque and hand it over to the Sangh Parivar affiliate, the VHP. One knows they just cannot get this site as easily through courts as they could demolish it with thecomplicity of the state and central govt. So the new strategy is to ask the battered community to 'win' the 'goodwill' of its tormentors by giving up its claims. It is likely that after facing the violence, nay genocide, some from that community may be willing to surrender anything to buy peace and the so called goodwill.

But, surely, even if Babri is surrendered, Kashi, Mathura and the 3000 or so Mosques will be demanded in due course, as one knows the issue is not the temple or more temples but to keep the communal cauldronboiling to reverse the process of
social transformation, which took place in the first three decades of the republic.The issue is to ensure that in the perennial production of a hysterical atmosphere around the non-issues RSS can serve its agenda, the agenda of maintaining status quo, the agenda of suppressing the quest for social economic and political justice.

(The author teaches at IIT Mumbai and works with EKTA, Committee forCommunal Amity, Mumbai)