| 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 |