| The Rise of Anti-Muslim Communalism Muslims are the main targets of the Hindu right. This movement--made up of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena, and other allied groups--seeks to establish the theocratic rule of its own leaders over the entire subcontinent and beyond. Their program for religious minorities is summed up in the popular slogan: �There are only two places for a Muslim to go--Pakistan or kabristan (the graveyard).� They fight for Hindutva--Hindu supremacy. The Hindu right�s electoral front, the BJP, led India�s ruling coalition from 1998 to May of 2004. This movement has been around since the beginning of the Independence struggle (Gandhi�s assassin was an RSS man), but until the mid-eighties it had always been marginal. Its rise as a national movement is a product of the economic liberalization of the last two and a half decades, which has created a new, fragile middle-class layer and further immiserated the broad masses. As Workers Vanguard wrote in 1990, �Much of [the BJP�s] explosive support has come from the growing middle class spawned by [Indira] Gandhi�s economic �liberalisation� in the 1980s, who live in terror of the prospect of sinking back into utter destitution.� The frenzy into which this insecurity drives the movement�s base is today being channeled mainly into anti-Muslim and anti-Christian communalism; tomorrow, when the class struggle heats up, the left and the workers movement will be the prime targets. The Hindu-right was first launched into the political mainstream through its provocative anti-Muslim campaign to tear down the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Local legend claims that Muslim rulers had built this mosque on top of the birthplace of the Hindu hero-god Ram. Agitation for its demolition in 1989-90 sparked widespread attacks on Muslims and bloody reprisals in which several thousand Muslims and Hindus were killed. Several thousand more--as many as two thousand of them, mostly Muslims, in Bombay alone--were killed in orchestrated riots after Hindu-right cadre finally turned the structure into rubble in 1992. The dangerous campaign to start building a temple to Ram on the site continues to this day. |
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| from Workers Hammer, January-February 1993: India: Hindu Fascists Whip Up Religious Slaughter |