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The imminent arrival of religious fascism in India?

by Jawed Naqvi, 3 October 2008

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Dawn, September 29, 2008

The real fight is between secular and communal Hindus

“SO This has set up a Hindu-Muslim confrontation, then?†The TV anchor from a Pakistani news channel was clear in her mind as she lobbed her anxious question from across the border. As far as she knew the Nanavati Commission report had indicted Muslims for deliberately setting fire to a railway coach in Godhra that killed 59 Hindu passengers in February 2002. Muslims naturally opposed the report as biased. For Hindus it was a vindication of their claim that Muslims were terrorists.

I tried to disabuse the lady of her simplistic notions of India’s political faultiness. The Nanavati Commission report was meant to whitewash Muslim blood on the hands of the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat, I told the anchor. This was not the argument of Muslim groups. This is what the Tehelka magazine’s sting operation, comprising Hindu and Sikh journalists, if it is necessary to see journalists by their religion, had shown last year.

Moreover, the myriad groups who have been meeting to offer moral and political support to Muslims (and Christians for the attacks on their churches) since the string of mysterious blasts killed scores of innocent people, are all led by Hindus, if left and liberal Indians should ever feel comfortable with this description.My friend Teesta Setalvad is gritty woman. She has been fighting Bal Thackeray and BJP’s Hindutva hordes in their den in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. But she was crying uncontrollably this (Sunday) morning in sheer helplessness that Chief Minister Narendra Modi had put up the Nanavati Commission report on the Gujarat government’s official website. She thought it was dangerous for the courts to have decreed that the Justice U. C. Banerjee commission report, which had found the fire to be accidental, should not be made official. Teesta is a Hindu. She is the one who has led the campaign for legal protection for Muslim victims of Modi’s neo-fascism.

If Shabnam Hashmi’s name should figure alongside Teesta’s, it would be because Shabnam is a tough communist activist, which is somewhat different from being a Muslim campaigner. She is just as concerned about the plight of Dalits, Sikhs and Christians. But let’s count her out of the discussion to avoid getting involved in a typically distracting argument. Teesta fears that the Nanavati report on the official website was meant to mobilise organised groups to stage more bloodbath against Gujarat’s frightened and systematically ghettoised Muslims.

Railway Minister Laloo Yadav, a Hindu, set up the Banerjee commission. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Mayawati, Chandrababu Naidu, for goodness sake the entire left movement that has periodically, if sometimes too slowly, risen to protect Muslims from fascist onslaught of the state are all men, women or groups that are Hindus, but unlike the Hindutva hordes of the BJP and the RSS, they are all secular Hindus. Had the question been one of Muslim versus Hindu then numerically, politically, ideologically, in every which way Muslims would have been shown their place as second class citizens. In a parliament of 525, the BJP, which seriously represents Hindutva, is just about 140. Add a few more for the Shiv Sena. That’s all. The rest are avowedly secular parties, comprising more than 90 per cent Hindus. So that’s the equation.

A legitimate question that can be asked is why this being so is there so much fear being expressed about the imminent arrival of religious fascism in India? The answer to that is complex, but it partly lies in history, more specifically, in the history of Germany in 1930s. How the minority National Socialists outflanked the centrists and the leftists with their anti-Semitic rhetoric is the lesson that few in the parliament of the socialist secular democratic republic of India seem to pay heed to. That is the tragedy staring us in the face, not a looming Hindu-Muslim confrontation. Coming back to the Nanavati report. It was convincingly debunked months before it was made public last week. The Tehelka expose showed with interviews how the Nanavati Commission relied on “manufactured evidence†to conclude that the Godhra train burning tragedy was pre-planned. Showing the footage of the sting operation, from last year, part of the sensational expose in November carried out by an undercover journalist, Tehelka editor Tarun Tajpal, explained last week how witnesses were caught on camera saying that they were bribed by the Gujarat police to make false statements before the investigative commission.

“We forwarded the footage of the sting to the Nanavati Commission last year, but unfortunately we have not heard anything from them,†Tejpal (not sure if he is a Sikh or a Hindu) said. The first part of the panel report tabled in the Gujarat legislative assembly on Thursday concludes that the train-burning at Godhra town was a premeditated crime and not an accident.

“Based on our investigation, we appeal to the panel to re-look at all evidence submitted by the Gujarat police as it can have dangerous consequences on society,†Tejpal said.

The commission said it found that 140 litres of petrol was procured from a petrol pump in Godhra town the day before the burning of a coach of the Sabarmati Express on Feb 27, 2002. But according to the Tehelka sting, nobody had bought so much petrol. The commission report rests on the testimonies of two witnesses, petrol pump salesmen Ranjitsinh Patel and Prabhatsinh Patel, who said they had sold 140 litres of petrol to Salim Panwala.“Shockingly, Tehelka caught Ranjitsinh Patel on camera saying chief investigating officer Noel Parmar had paid both of them Rs50,000 each to change their (earlier) statement and identify some Muslims as conspirators,†Tejpal said.

The other pieces of evidence presented by the police before the commission were manufactured to present the train burning accident as a conspiracy, Tejpal said.

The Tehelka expose showed prominent Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal leaders admitting in their conversations with the undercover reporter that Modi sanctioned the killings in the wake of the train burning in Godhra, in which 59 Hindu passengers were killed. The Nanavati report has to be seen against the backdrop of a judicial system becoming complicit in the erosion of democratic rights of citizens.

To that extent the laws and legal policies of the Third Reich didn’t appear out of nowhere, they almost all had strong precedents in the statutes of the Weimar Republic and earlier. Many even had close analogues in other nations, like America (for example, the sterilisation laws). Ingo Muller in Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. Muller’s has recorded the perfidy of the legal system that preceded Hitler and continued with him.

How and why these developments occurred — and, more importantly, what sorts of awful precedents, policies, and injustices the jurists in Nazi Germany created — are all recounted in terrible detail by Muller, whose basic thesis is simple: lawyers, judges, law professors, and others involved in the criminal justice system were not innocent victims co-opted by a criminal regime; instead, they are morally and intellectually responsible for being willing participants in mass murder, terror, and the creation of a dictatorial state. They helped make the Third Reich possible because they were willing to set aside the principles of justice, fairness, and law, which should have hindered the Nazi agenda. That’s the real issue India’s secular Hindus and Pakistan’s TV anchor ought to be looking at.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com