Long-term fall-out of the Mahatma murder

(FirstPost, 27 May 2022) + The +topic of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 still comes up regularly for discussion. Mostly this is +to embarrass the RSS and the party associated with it, the BJP, which was actually founded in 1980, that too as reincarnation of the Jan Sangh, wh+ich had equally been founded after the murder, in 1951. This then is the best-known long-term effect: the unrelenting allegation that anything s+melling of Hindu nationalism, and certainly the RSS, necessarily leads to such crimes. But are we missing something? + Chitpavan massacre The first conseque+nce of the murder was immediate: Godse’s own community, the Chitpavan Brahmins, was targeted for mass murder. The comparison with the mass kil+ling of Sikhs by Congress secularists after Indira Gandhi’s murder in 1984 is fairly exact, except that that massacre is well-known (even ecli+psing the memory of the larger number of Panjabi Hindus murdered by Sikh separatists in the preceding years) whereas this one has been hushed up.+ The New York Times first drew attention to it, reporting 15 killings for the first day and only for the city of Mumbai. In fact the killing we+nt on for a week and all over Maharashtra, with VD Savarkar’s younger brother as best-known victim. Arti Agarwal,+ who leads the research in “Hindu genocide”, estimates the death toll at ca. 8,000. On mass murders, estimates are often overdramatiz+ed, but here we must count with a countervailing factor: the Government’s active suppression of these data, as they would throw a negative li+ght on Gandhism. But research on this painful episode has now started in earnest, and those presently trying to get at the real figures include Sa+varkar biographer Vikram Sampath. Crackdown+ The secon+d consequence came right after: the Government’s crackdown on the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Their offices were closed down, their office-b+earers imprisoned for a year or so, their stocks of literature impounded. It clipped their wings for years to come. The Hindu Mahasabha lost it+s president Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, who went on to found the Jana Sangh. The HMS would never recover from this blow. Its last MP was to be Mahant+ Avaidyanath, best known as a leader of the Rama Janmabhumi movement and as Guru of present UP CM Yogi Adityanath, defected to the BJP in 1991.+ By cont+rast, the RSS did survive quite well, and even generated a whole “family” of like-minded organizations, including a new political party. In a nume+rical sense, it was to thrive; but in two other senses, it paid a high price. The t+hird consequence was a drastic change in the political landscape. After Partition, the Hindutva movement had the wind in the sails. All Cong+ressite assurances that warnings against Islamic separatism were mere British-engineered paranoia, had been refuted by reality. Gandhi’s pro+mise that Partition would only come over his dead body, had proven false. The new-fangled ideology of secularism stood discredited at its bi+rth. And yet, overnight, the Hindutva current was marginalized and Nehruvian secularism started its triumphant march. By his murder, Godse had s+mashed the window of opportunity of his own political movement. + Amputated backbone Finally, the fo+urth consequence would only materialize over the long term: the Hindu movement began to lose its defining convictions. Rather than continuing to +see India as an essentially Hindu nation, it bought into the secularist notion of a mere “Hindu community” juxtaposed to “minority communities” +that were endowed with equal rights and increasingly with privileges vis-à-vis the Hindus. When Jawahar+lal Nehru was widely criticized for having facilitated the Chinese invasion, the RSS halted the publication of a Nehru-critical serial by Sita Ram+ Goel in Organiser: Rather than clamouring that its guest author’s judgment of Nehru stood vindicated, it feared that if anything were to happen +to Nehru, the RSS would again get the blame. As the Gandhi murder had shown, it wasn’t necessary to be actually guilty to still incur the punis+hment, viz. by “having created the atmosphere” for the crime. The RSS bought into the secularist narrative that the Hindu ideology had caused t+he murder and started amputating its own ideological backbone. When in+ 1980 the BJP was founded, the party flag it adopted was significantly divided in orange and green, in the communal sense (no, not green for gr+eenery). Not only the nation was to be partly Islamic, but even the Hindu party itself. This prefigured Mohan Bhagwat’s 2018 statement that a Hindu Rasthra is not complete without Islam. The RSS founded within its ranks a Muslim Morcha, abandoning its founding belief in national unity for c+ommunal appeasement. It became the RSS family’s most successful member, not by spreading the national idea in the Muslim community but by serv+ing the latter’s sectional interests. Ind+eed, under Narendra Modi, minorityism, once the BJP’s bogeyman, became the party’s principle of governance. All kinds of schemes of state la+rgesse favour the minorities; no, not real minorities like Parsis and Jews, but the India chapters of the Christian and Muslim multinationals. I+n its publicity campaigns, the party boasts that it has done more for the minorities than Congress ever has. The 1990s’ eminently secular BJP slogan “Justice for all, appeasement of none” has been given up in favour of: “I am better at appeasement than you!” If Nathuram Godse had foreseen these consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it. +
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Mahatma Gandhi demystified

(Written on request for the Mumbai daily DNA, sent in on 17 Feb. 2018, heard nothing about it after that.)

On 30 January 1948, after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder, India’s political landscape changed dramatically. In the preceding year, the Hindu Nationalist movement had received a strong boost due to Congress’s confused stand on Partition. But then, Nathuram Godse’s bullets squandered its newly-gained political capital in one go. It would need decades to recover.

Prelude to Partition

Until the end of 1945, Partition had seemed to be a mirage existing only in the minds of some Muslim League diehards. With the British, the Congress and even, as per the 1937 elections, most Muslim voters lined up against the Muslim League’s plan, India’s unity seemed assured. But the League understood the essence of politics: “making the inevitable possible”. By fully using the possibilities created by the British need for friends during World War 2, it changed the power equation. The elections of that winter threw up an unexpectedly large majority in favour of the creation of Pakistan among the Muslim electorate. Now, Partition became the central question of Indian politics.

The British began to waver in their resolve to keep India united. Contrary to the Congress propaganda that most Indians swallow till today, the British had not imposed the Partition on India, on the contrary: they wanted to keep their empire in one piece even if they had to abandon it. But like Congress, they were sensitive to changing circumstances. The dawning Cold War made them see the advantages of a divided Subcontinent, with one part joining the Western camp. And after the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946, they understood that opposing the Muslim League would come at a cost for which they did not have the stomach anymore. When Louis Mountbatten became Viceroy in March 1947, it was with the single purpose of transferring power to a bifurcated India.

Fortunately for the Hindus in West Panjab, Sindh and East Bengal, there was at least the Indian National Congress you could count on; or so they thought. But one after another, top Congress leaders were crossing the floor to a hesitating acceptance of Partition. Yet even then, Mahatma Gandhi stood firm. Had he not promised that India would only be vivisected over his dead body? And with his record of fasts unto death, was this not a solid assurance?

Karmic price

However, by June 1947, the Mahatma too gave up. He justified this broken promise with a weasel explanation: if one of the shareholders withdraws from the joint account that is India, no Mahatma could coerce him to do otherwise. Pray, what had all his other fasts been but successful attempts to coerce the other party into doing what it would otherwise have refused to do? Now that numerous lives were at stake, he refused to stake his own because his tender conscience suddenly had discovered how evil it is to pressurize people.

With that, Gandhi conceded defeat to Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It was a karmic come-uppance: in 1920, he had humiliated Jinnah on the dais of a Congress meeting where the still-moderate Muslim leader had opposed the plan to involve Congress in the Khilafat movement. Jinnah had pleaded against mass politics and especially against mixing religion with politics, warning that this would bring disaster. Gandhi’s cheering crowds had sent him packing, and when he returned to politics years later, he had learned his lesson. 

Mind you, the Partition plan could have been reasonable, as in the version thought up by Dr. BR Ambedkar immediately after the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution of 1940. He had worked out a peaceful exchange of population, with all Muslims resettling in Pakistan and all non-Muslims in India. That lucid scheme would have avoided the massacres of 1947 and also those of 1971 and of all the smaller-scale communal riots. But some decision-makers seem to prefer bloodbaths clothed in high principles to this modest and pragmatic accommodation of the inevitable.

Godse’s achievements

There had been lots of criticism of Gandhi during his lifetime, now obscured and tabooed by his halo of martyrdom. For a single example, it was clear to all that he himself became the killer of Gandhism as a political vision when he dictatorially foisted Jawaharlal Nehru on the Congress, and therefore as national leader, as if he didn’t know what this “last Viceroy” stood for. The democratic alternative would have been to nominate Sardar Patel, Congress’s own preference. Later developments confirmed that Gandhi’s choice had been a Himalayan blunder, giving India the Kashmir problem and the proverbial poverty resulting from Nehru’s option for socialism.

When you read Godse’s speech delivered during his trial, you will notice that many of his criticisms were widely shared. In many respects he had been a Gandhian himself, such as activism against untouchability. In others, he simply agreed with many observers, e.g. in frowning on Gandhi’s irrationality. He was an extremist not because of his views, but because he tied the consequence of murder to his views.

That act was indeed unforgivable. Perhaps Godse could not have been dissuaded by its inherent moral evil. But at least he could have retreated before its formidable strategic foolishness. It spectacularly smashed the windows of his own movement for decades to come. But it also achieved something else he would not have wanted: it turned a fallible politician into an immortal saint elevated above normal human judgment.

Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian scholar of India’s ancient as well as contemporary history, presently working at the Indus University in Ahmedabad. Rupa has freshly published a new edition of his detailed review of Nathuram Godse’s stated motives.

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Answering the VHP's questions to Swapan Dasgupta

(VHP top official Ashok Chowgule has reacted to a recent column by Swapan Dasgupta, effectively a representative of the dominant wing in the BJP, viz. the economic rightists. Many of them regularly pooh-pooh the other wing of the BJP, viz. the cultural nationalists. It might be useful, for those interested, if I give my viewpoint to the same questions as put to Swapan Dasgupta, posed after his
NDTV column of 22 December 2014: "Some in RSS Have Profound Distaste for PM". Here goes: )

 

1.     How many in the BJP have a profound distaste for the RSS?

 

It is not for me to give numbers here, but after the Rama Janmabhumi agitation, which the BJP tried to shake off after reaping the dividends in the 1991 elections, my impression was of a constant growth in  the number of BJP men who wanted to distance themselves and the party from the RSS and from any Hindu ideology. The hegemonic ideology of secularism made ever deeper inroads among the members of a party started for the sake of Hindu interests. It reached a symbolic culmination when LK Advani, the face of the Ayodhya movement, called the demolition on 6  Dec. 1992 "the blackest day" of his life. The present government and its dependencies are full of time-servers and opportunists who don't want to be bothered with ideology and just want to make hay while Modi's sun shines. Those who cared for Hinduism were not always the most sophisticated either. I remember a conversation with BL Sharma Prem, BJP MP from Delhi, where he talked loosely about "teaching Muslims a lessen" and all that. Many Hindu activists confuse toughness and ideological commitment with a willingness to use unprovoked violence. They are the best allies of the secularist propaganda equating Hindu activism with violence against the minorities.

 

2.     Given that the BJP seeks and gets the support of the total Sangh parivar at the time of the elections, should not their concerns be addressed by the BJP? 

 

The argument used by the economy-wallahs is precisely that the BJP should do its voters' bidding, and that it won the elections on a development platform. No, it won the election because numerous Hindu voters finally believed there was a pro-Hindu among the serious candidates, namely Narendra Modi, and that is why exceptionally they bothered to go cast their votes. They never would have done that just for the BJP. Baba Ramdev is but the most famous of the numerous people who assured me that they voted for Modi, not for the BJP.

 

3.     You say that Narendraji made the VHP irrelevant in Gujarat.  Apart from being factually wrong, and assuming that the effort was made, was it the right thing to do in terms of the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

 

It is truly bad for a BJP man to treat the VHP as an enemy, on a par with the Nehru dynasty or the Naxalites. Indeed it is they who should and do treat the VHP as an enemy whom they mean to destroy. That the VHP was virtually destroyed in Gujarat, I heard in tempore non suspecto from a Gujarat BJP man, so I guess it may well be true. The infighting inside the Sangh Parivar escapes most secularist "studies" as these are meant to uphold the image of a "fascist" monolith, but we know that it is there. 

 

4.     Suppose the attempt was indeed made, and had it been successful, would not an important part of the Sangh parivar been organisationally destroyed?  And would this have benefited the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

 

Destroying a part of the Sangh Parivar is bad for the Sangh Parivar, but I would con,done it if it was somehow beneficial to the Hindu cause. But nothing indicates such an outcome, nor such a concern. If the present BJP acts against the most ideologically committed member of the Sangh Parivar, viz. the VHP, it is invariably an attempt to shake off ideology.

 

5.     You have talked about the Hindu Mahasabha.  Is this a member of the Sangh parivar? 

 

Originally, the difference was that it was a political party, while the RSS was not. It is on this ground that Nathuram Godse crossed over from the RSS to the HMS. After the founding of the Jan Sangh in 1952, then the BJP in 1980, this distinction has become irrelevant. The only difference in discourse is that the Hindu Mahasabha openly supports Nathuram Godse and the Mahatma murder, while the Sangh Parivar condemns them, in vain. The secularists are correct in pointing out that Godse has had his ideological education in the RSS, but the RSS is correct in stating that its strategy does not include targeted murders. In that sense, Godse acted on his own and made a very individual applicatio of the Hindu nationalism he had learnt. 

 

6.     You say: “There is also a media environment that is conducive to the fringe. It simply requires some 50 individuals, a controversial cause and a few TV cameras to give otherwise irrelevant people notoriety, publicity and even secure political impact.”  Is this not a bad reflection of the profession that you are associated with – namely journalism?

 

Is this a reference to my talk at the India Ideas Conclave, much filmed and talked about, especially to highlight the anti-Islamic element in circles associated with the Modi government? It is at any rate true that I am "irrelevant". None of my books or opinions personally communicated to Hindutva bigwigs during interviews or on group occasions has made any impact, and secularists have taken even less notice. If Swapan knows of a journalistic way to transmute this irrelevance into "political impact", he is welcome me tell me about it.

 

7.     During NDA 1, you had said that there are many in the BJP that are seeking a certificate of secularism from the very people whom they have labelled as pseudo-secular.  I wonder if this malice has not already become prominent in NDA 2.

 

BJP people seeking secularist certificates is still a problem now that they have an absolute majority. They have never elaborated an analysis of their own, so they are still dependent on the worldview furnished by the secularists.

 

8.     You say: “There is a feeling in government circles that the present controversies that led to the disruption of Parliament were wilfully triggered by VHP's Dr Pravin Togadia, an individual who has an acrimonious relationship with Modi.”  I really hope you are not serious.

 

I have no idea of personal relationships. I do notice, however, that the people who triggered the ideological controversies which Modi put down, have not done their homework. Rather than achieving pro-Hindu reforms, they merely ruffle feathers and create commotion by talking about them. Where is the strategy for pro-Hindu reform?

 

9.     Let me ask your personal opinion.  Should Ghar Vapasi programme be undertaken or no?

 

Ghar Wapasi is the only solution for the Dying Race. It should not be stopped or postponed for any other political goal. Any other strategy to stop the aggressive onward march of the minorities is doomed to failure, e.g. "teaching Muslims a lesson" or demographic mobilization. It follows, however, that there is no ground for an anti-conversion bill, which doesn't work anyway (cfr. China), antagonizes world opinion, and belongs to the mindless repressive policies (cfr. book-banning) with which Hindu activism is already too associated. 

 

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Hindu terrorism, how to prevent it

 

The UPA Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, is but the umpteenth to repeat in public the notion of “Hindu terrorism” and to apply it to the RSS and BJP. Predictably, the RSS and BJP react furiously. They say they have nothing to do with Hindu terrorism, and that the lone Hindu terrorist Nathuram Godse, the  assassin of Mahatma Gandhi and hanged 63 years ago, was not a member.

 

Nathuram Godse

To start with the last point: ideologically, Nathuram Godse had remained an RSS man, singing an RSS hymn to Mother India on his way to the gallows. His brother Gopal Godse testified in several interviews, including to myself, that Nathuram had emphasized his quitting the non-political RSS (for the political party Hindu Mahasabha) in order to provide the RSS some breathing distance to his own inevitably demonized person. His non-membership was an organizational technicality, but ideologically, he had remained with the RSS. That way, at least, Gopal liked to pull the leg of the “soft” RSS and its even softer political party, the BJP. However, I think Nathuram’s non-membership was essential in the one respect that is crucial here: if he had been a full RSS man, his superiors would have told him not to commit the assassination.

No matter what its ideological position, the RSS was first and foremost an organization. It had a purpose, and considered itself important to the realization of that purpose. So, it wanted to safeguard itself. Now, the crackdown on the RSS and other Hindu organizations after the Gandhi assassination in 1948 was perfectly foreseeable. On the other hand, Gandhi was discredited by his non-resistance against the Partition and its attendant calamities. The Hindu movement had been proven right and had the wind in the sails. The assassination changed all that completely: the grip on society by Jawaharlal Nehru and his secularism was enormously strengthened while the Hindu movement was marginalized and thrown back for decades. It is unlikely that the RSS felt suicidal and would want to bring this setback on itself. An RSS member would have thought of the consequences to the organization and the  wider Hindu movement.  Only a non-member, ideologically on the same wavelength as the Hindu nationalists but organizationally a lone wolf, could commit this murder. In the RSS, the widespread anti-Gandhi sentiment was suppressed by the even higher consideration of the Sangh’s own welfare. But Godse made himself the instrument of this much wider sentiment, shared by many suffering Hindus who had never been near the RSS. That is why leftists who blame the RSS for the murder of Gandhi are wrong.   

For the same reason, they are wrong in associating the RSS or the BJP with terrorism. More than any other organizations in India, the RSS and its allies know that if anything happens, they will get the blame. Even they are not stupid enough to smash their own windows by engaging in terrorism. But numerous Hindus are on the same Hindu nationalist wavelength without being members, and some of them may be tempted  by hit-and-run alternatives rather than by the characteristic discipline of the RSS. I have already remarked that many Hindu initiatives are seeing the light of day without any RSS affiliation. That counts for those disappointed with the weak-kneed policies of the RSS, or with its anti-intellectual inclination, or with its appeasement of the non-Hindus; but it may also take the form of nuclei of militants who want “direct action”.

 

Suspicion

Now fast forward to the present. Does it exist at all, Hindu terrorism?

On the scale and the level of organization of Muslim terrorism, it of course does not exist. It is a figment of the secular imagination. Not even of Hinduphobia, because the secularists have no genuine “fear of Hindus”. They fear the Muslims (which makes them, in their own terminology, “Islamophobes”), not the Hindus. Indeed it is because they have a real fear of the Muslims but only pretend to fear the Hindus that they bend over backwards to please the Muslims and not the Hindus. Yes, the Hindus are capable of rioting in the streets, generally when provoked, but willful violence against persons, groups or property by purposely prepared groups is rare, if existent at all.  It has so far not been their favourite modus operandi.

Smaller-scale acts of terror, such as arson of Muslim religious buildings (or of the jeep of the Australian missionary Graham Staines, with three people inside) or the targeted assassination of religious leaders, have been alleged. Some famous court cases have led to nothing, but other incidents have been reported that seem genuine cases of “Hindu terrorism”. Thus, in Panjab, the so-called Shiv Sena has been accused of targeting some Khalistani leaders. The Azad Sangathan has been mentioned as targeting Muslims in Haryana, and likewise the Sanatan Sanstha in Maharashtra. Church burnings in Manipur have been blamed on Hindus. The Bengal revolutionary movement against the British, the Abhinava Bharat society, has been refounded. Those who take this trend seriously, fear that though small now, it might signal a wave of the future, when “Hindu terrorism” will be a large and endemic problem. It is therefore important to address it at the root.

There may be reasons not to believe the allegations by the biased media, but when Hindus I know testify from their personal contacts that “Hindu terrorism does exist”, I tend to believe them. It is but the factual tip of a verbal iceberg: the pro-violence messages I receive all the time on the internet, often from Gujarati businessmen raised on a diet of Gandhian non-violence but wizened up by real-life experiences with Islam. Hindus who make the move from this mouse-clicking violence to actual terrorism are very rare, but more than zero.

The one thing that can be said in defence of Hindu terror is that it proves Hindus are not dead yet. Like the Sangh Parivar, where numerous people are dedicating themselves to making a success of projects and policies that may of may not be rightly-inspired, the as yet little-studied Hindu terrorists are sacrificing for the Hindu cause. As it happens, they are mindlessly sacrificing other people’s lives thinking this will further the interests of Hindu society. There are better ways, requiring more intelligence and a more persistent sense of direction, so one hopes that their primitive enthusiasm can be transmuted in a more constructive direction.

 

Logic behind terrorism

Supposing it exists, what is the logic behind Hindu terrorism? What makes a Hindu conclude that terror is the solution? Several factors combine.

Firstly, Islam is comfortable with violence, has no scruples about it, and uses it on a large scale. This is being confirmed every day, from Nigeria and Mali through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Xinjiang and southern Thailand. Some hot-blooded Hindus conclude very logically that, at any rate, violence is a language Muslims understand.

Secondly, the government is not protecting Hindus. In West Bengal, it sides with the illegal Muslim immigrants against the Hindu Samhati. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindus are permanently exposed to petty acts of terror, from eve-teasing through abduction and forced marriages to Muslim to torture and murder; the Indian government fails to raise its voice, let alone use its influence. Bangladesh owes its very existence to India and is an indigent country dependent on foreign aid; it should be easy to get its government to prevent anti-Hindu terror; yet this is not happening. Hindus are increasingly desperate.

Thirdly, whenever Islam commits acts of terror, the secular elite (in India like in the West) is superficially making “religion” in general guilty, thus allotting guilt to Hinduism when judging crimes committed in the name of Islam, with Hindus as the victims. In reality, there are occasional terrorists in other religions, from Guy Fawkes in Catholicism and Yigal Amir in Judaism to Nathuram Godse in Hinduism, but Islam is violence-prone and terror-minded with an unprecedented systematicity and therefore on a much larger scale. Unlike Hinduism, Islam was founded by and looks up to a man who committed murder, abduction for ransom, rape, slave-taking and slave-trading.

More importantly here, the secular elite implicitly but unmistakably expresses a fascination with violence. When Communism was going strong, numerous intellectuals were Communist or were defending Communist regimes. Politicians were introducing policies inspired by Communism, such as India’s stifling licence-permit raj. As I remember, left-wing “city guerrilla” in Europe in the 70s and 80s was considered an object of fun, perhaps a bit misguided but fundamentally well-inspired. It never delegitimized the  use of its language of “class struggle” in mainstream politics. The trendy intellectuals have blood on their tender hands.

When Islam replaced Communism as the most popular justification of violence, intellectuals and politicians started defending Islam. And the more it made headlines with acts of terrorism, the more they defended it. At no time were more mosques visited by politicians than after the attacks of 11 September 2001, in order to ensure Muslim communities that in the eyes of the ruling class, they had no connection with what “a few extremists” had done in their name. In India too, Muslims prove that violence works. Thus, against the departing British colonizers’ and the Hindu majority’s opposition, the Muslim minority managed to force the Partition of India on all others by unleashing violence and making clear that the refusal of their demand would lead to even more violence. Incipient violence and the threat of more violence achieved the Shah Bano law, the banning of The Satanic Verses, and other small but symbolic gains for the Muslim community. More importantly, this creates an atmosphere where a confrontation with Muslim opinion on more consequential issues is avoided. Thus, the secular Congress Party does not dare to implement a Common Civil Code, an eminently secular reform enjoined by the Constitution and by the Supreme Court. Even the BJP, which had all along promised the enactment of a Common Civil Code, refrained from raising the issue when it was in power. The assurance that the BJP regretted the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the assumption of an ideological low profile by the supposed Hindu nationalist party, not to say its “appeasement policies”, are all remote consequences of the fear of Muslim violence.

So, Hindus conclude that violence works. Secularists prove it to them.

 

Moral objections

I would raise the objection that violence remains morally problematic. First of all, violence overrules the compassion you should feel for its innocent victims. Even victims guilty as hell could be prosecuted in a court of law rather than murdered, that is the way of a society under the rule of law.

Secondly, the Just War Theory, formulated by Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, but enunciated and practiced much earlier in the Dhanurveda and the Mahabharata, lays down as one of the conditions of a Just War that all non-violent means of achieving your end should be exhausted. India as a democracy offers plenty of possibilities, of which the Hindu majority could make use if well organized. Unfortunately, the party that collects Hindu votes with promises of pro-Hindu policies has never delivered. But what have the terrorists done to change that party, or to come into the legislature through another party, or to apply any other instrument provided for in the Indian system?

Thirdly, another condition for the Just War is that there is a chance of victory. There is no point in shedding blood for nothing. But the people concerned have never to my knowledge devised a strategy and surveyed the field to see where the highest probability of victory lies. It is very unlikely that stray acts of violence will lead to any other result than needless bloodshed of innocents, the perpetrators on the gallows, and Hindu nationalism discredited even more. In my experience, very few Hindus are into Hindu activism for the sake of victory. Most of them do it to vent their emotions or get a kick of self-justification, and to hell with victory.

 

Strategic objections

Moral problems apart, this pro-violence philosophy suffers from a strategic shortcoming, viz. it evokes very different reactions depending on the elite’s pre-existing ideological bias. Thus, the passive approval of left-wing terrorism was not matched by an equal approval of right-wing acts of terror, e.g. the recent murders of Turkish immigrants in Germany were sternly condemned. The reason is that public opinion has been conditioned to judge left-wing violence in a supposedly commendable cause differently than real or alleged violence from the real or alleged right wing, committed in the service of a disapproved cause. Che Guevara is on posters and T-shirts worldwide in spite of being a torturer and mass-murderer, because he was associated with a cause approved by the intelligentsia; any ideologically disapproved activist in his position would be treated as a proverbial criminal.  Similarly, a show of sympathy for Muslim causes does not predict an equal sympathy for Hindu causes, regardless of whether Hindus take to terror or not.   

As Herbert Marcuse, the New Left professor at Berkeley whom the leftist terrorists of the German Rote Armee Fraktion invoked, commented on their acts: terror (assuming in his Marxist philosophy that it is justifiable) can only be justified in a revolutionary situation, as a trigger for a general uprising. As an unpremeditated spontaneous act, it can only jeopardize the strategy of the revolutionary forces and play into the hand of the repressive authorities. Such a situation did not exist in the Germany of the 70s, and nor it exist in India today. In the present circumstances, stray acts of violence will not bring Hindu liberation closer.

 

Conclusion

                So, what to do? If Hindu terrorism doesn’t exist or is still marginal, it may become an acute problem. The reason is that Hindus are desperate, the number and aggressiveness of enemies is increasing, the callousness of the government is impressive, the ineffectiveness of the supposed pro-Hindu organizations has left them disappointed. So, by addressing these root causes of Hindu unrest, the threat of Hindu terrorism can be taken away.

Secularists could abandon their buffoonery and suddenly become even-handed. They could work with the Hindu nationalists for the eminently secular Common Civil Code, they could abolish the legal privileges of non-Hindu-majority states, they could apply Karl Marx’s dictum that “all criticism starts with criticism of religion” to Islam or Christianity for once. The Hindu organizations, while not committing Hindu terrorism themselves, are co-guilty of it by failing to provide the Hindu population with successes and hope for the future. They could defuse the threat of Hindu violence by suddenly turning effective and really pro-Hindu.

 

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