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Religion and Politics
Violence Against Religious Minorities in India: Are the Barbarians at the Gates?
Dr. Bruce Carlisle Robertson
Johns Hopkins University
The countries situated beyond the limits of the civilized lands...
are declared to have been chiefly inhabited by Mlecchas, or barbarians,
and were called barbarous countries. - Raja Rammohan Ray
Introduction
I would like to focus my remarks on India for several reasons.
First, while Pakistan's record of violence against Ahmadis (considered apostate), Christians and the small population of Hindus in Sindh is anything but exemplary this record has been widely publicized. The recent sentencing of an 18 year-old girl to gang rape by a tribal panchayat (court of five elders) in Meerwala, Pakistan, to punish her family for allegedly permitting her pre-adolescent brother to be seen walking with a girl from a higher caste, is horrifying. It should be noted that there has been widespread outrage in Pakistan over this. The rapists and members of the panchayat have been arrested. (NYTimes, 7/17/02, A3) Again, the controversy over Pakistan's top tennis star's teaming up with an Israeli Jew in doubles competition at Wimbledon is disturbing. The infamous blasphemy law has not yet been repealed. These illustrate how deeply divided Pakistani society is.
Second, India's minority rights record is less well publicized though it is little, if any, better than its neighbor's reputation.
For example, human rights abuses (Hindu vs. Muslim) in Kashmir are sometimes disguised as counter-terrorist action and so the cycle of retaliatory violence (terrorism) continues, according to the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture (www.state. gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/sa/8230. html).
The recent violence against Muslims by members of the Hindu Sangh Parivar (RSS family) and their sympathizers in Gujarat has not only seriously undermined the credibility of the present Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) government at home and abroad but it has created a constitutional crisis for the world’s largest secular democracy. The eyes of the world are focussed upon India, a presumptive world leader, to see
whether it can sustain a truly 21st century civil society not unlike the way the world watched as our own country struggled through the civil rights crisis of the 60s.
The recent U.S., British and German advisories against travel to India undeservedly tarnish India’s image as a civilized state.
At a time when the BJP government is hanging tough with Pakistan for
sponsoring “cross border” terrorism in Kashmir and along the Line Of Control (LOC), Human Rights Watch [April 2002, vol.14, no.3 (C)] has documented that the BJP, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) Bajrang Dal,
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Shiv Sena were not just sponsors but active participants in the retaliatory rampage against Muslims after the February 28th attack by Muslim villagers on the train full of
kar sevaks (Hindu social workers) at Godhra train station. Whatever the provocation it did not justify the violent Muslim attack. But the Hindu Sangh Parivar response has been off the charts. Thousands
killed, tens of thousands of families destroyed, children orphaned, hundreds of thousands left homeless, schools closed, local economies in shambles and a bitter legacy of hatred and distrust unleashed for
generations to come.
Religious violence is not just an academic subject for me.
Growing up in India, the son of Christian missionaries, I have memories of isolated threats, of a few random acts of violence against our Christian community in U.P. I remember the hushed table talk, the warnings not go to such and such a bazaar on a certain day. I remember being jostled, pushed by the invisible hand in the jeering crowd. I remember being spat upon, our car rocked back and forth by a menacing mob. Fortunately, these were rare incidents in an otherwise happy childhood and adolescence in India, my janmabhumi (birth place). But there was a recurring vague sense of insecurity.
Religious Freedom vs. Righteous Indignation
According to Human Rights Watch (hrw.org/press/2002/04/gujarat.htm), Amnesty International (web.amnesty.org/web/ar2002.nsf/asa/india!Open
06/10/02), Christian Solidarity Worldwide - Latest News (www.csw.org.uk/Latestnews.asp?Item=281 06/10/02), and US Department of State, India, International Religious Freedom Report
(www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2001/5685.htm) violent attacks were not confined to Muslims but rapidly spread to women in general, dalits (former so-called untouchables), adivasis (tribals) and Christians, any group
against which there was a perceived grievance.
This is the pattern of violence against religious minorities. As "righteous indignation" escalates it metastasizes into indiscriminate hatred,
indiscriminately latching on to any proximate group or idea against which there is perceived conflict.
Preventing this rogue process from taking root by guaranteeing freedom of religion is the most
fundamental exercise of sovereignty.
The will to believe is the most basic human need said William James. Freedom of religion preserves the inviolability of this the most subjective expression of
individuality.
It guarantees the right of an individual to speak and live freely with dignity and belong or not to belong to any assembly. It protects the right of dissent. The detention of His Holiness, the Jagadguru Shankaracarya of Puri by state officials sympathetic to the Sangh Parivar casts a shadow on the otherwise good record of Indian democracy. We are grateful that Your Holiness was released and that you are with us today.
Freedom of religion values the individual above the group. It both places ultimate value upon the individual as a rational, decision-making being and holds the
person responsible for the consequences.
Gujarat, The Last Stand of Hindu Civilization?
An RSS pracharak (volunteer), the BJP Chief Minister Narendra Moti's active support with members
of his own state government of the Hindu anti-Muslim rampages in the Naroda Patia and Gulmarg Society suburbs of Ahmedabad would have constituted instantly impeachable and further criminal action in this country and
those of other members of the UN Security Council.
Not so in India. The BJP government's resistance to attempts to remove him from office (Christian Solidarity Worldwide - Latest News (06/10/02) was as blatant an example of condoning state sponsored terrorism as was the egregious refusal of the British government to court martial General Dyer after the infamous Jalianwalla Bagh massacre and its aftermath in 1919, "...the blackest stain on its (British Government) record." (Majmudar, Raychaudhuri and Datta, An Advanced History of India, 1967, p. 981). Yet unlike the British example intense public pressure has since forced Moti's resignation.
The irony is that the violence in Gujarat was at the hands of mobs who claimed to be the guardians of sacred Hindu tradition, the champions of Hindu high culture, sanskriti.
Raja Rammohan Ray,
the great 19th century Father of Modern India, identified Gujarat as the last frontier of ancient Hindu high culture, the spawning ground of sanatana dharma, the eternal religion. Gujarat, he explained in testimony
before the House of Commons marked the final outpost of civilized society in the ancient world.
Here was the ideal Hindu society where priests, rulers, merchants and farmers lived in harmony pursuing their
respective vocations (dharma), where the arts and learning flourished, where the social services (karseva) performed by the prosperous provided the conditions for the fulfillment of the four aims of human existence
(purusha artha), material comfort, security, happiness and spiritual realization.
This was the ideal that the British must live up to, Rammohan Ray admonished the British Parliament.
Across the borders of Gujarat lay mleccha desh, the land of the barbarians where there was no organized society, no law and order, no arts, a Babel of tongues, where the powerful lived off the spoils of the weak,
big fish preying upon little fish (“A Brief Preliminary Sketch of the Ancient and Modern Boundaries and History of India” from The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray, ed. Bruce Carlisle Robertson, Oxford, 1999.
pp. 176 -177).
Hindu Conversion
The reconversion of Muslims and Christians (considered lapsed Hindus) to Hinduism has been one of the hottest issues in India today. This is
truly an oddity. The very idea of conversion at all in the Hindu tradition is perhaps the most striking example of the colonial legacy. There may be no clearer example of the foreign colonization of
Hindu culture in India than the importation of the notion of conversion to or from any religious group.
The contemporary idea of "lapsed Hindu" first appeared during the sati (widow burning)
agitation in the early 19th century.
Raja Rammohan Ray had convinced the British government that sati was not a religious rite and so did not qualify for protection under the British policy of non-interference in local religious customs. The resulting Sati Act of 1829 outlawing the practice touched off a furious protest by the conservative Hindu establishment. Rammohan Ray and his “modernizing” supporters became the target of angry conservative Hindu retaliation. The Dharma Sabha was formed to staunch the spread of this dangerous new form of freethinking. Their agenda was to bring their misguided, fallen Hindu brethren back into the "traditional" Hindu-fold. Their slogan was “Hindu dharma in danger.” A public shuddhi (cleansing) initiation back into Hindu society ceremony was discussed, modeled after Christian baptism and traditional purification (prayascit) rituals, for example to bring one back into a state of ritual purity after traveling outside of India.
The original idea was to bring fallen brethren back into the fold, a counter-reformation movement of sorts within the Hindu community. By the early 20th century this idea had expanded to that of
reconversion of Christians and Muslims. In 1923 Veer Savarkar's Hindutva called for a return to the Hindu-fold of all Indian Christians and Muslims whom he labeled forced "converts."
Responding to this conservative Hindu campaign, Rammohan Ray provoked public debate by arguing that mobility from one religious community to another has always been an option within the Hindu tradition.
He argued that the freedom to choose one's means of worship was one of the most distinctive elements of the classical Hindu tradition. Movement from one community to another, from one spiritual mentor to another, was the natural flow of spiritual evolutionary process. The Buddha’s quest for enlightenment was the model of the spiritual journey.
A change in spiritual mentor, a guru or a community did not entail a “conversion experience”, rather it was a normal step in a natural spiritual evolutionary process.
Raja Rammohan Ray’s own mother was raised in a Sakta household and became a Vaisnav. She spent the last years of her life as a sweeper in the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, where she died.
There could
therefore be no such thing as "conversion" in William James' (Varieties of Religious Experience) sense, since Hindu tradition recognizes no boundaries other than samsara (transmigration) in individual
spiritual evolution, not even varna (caste) and ashrama (station in life).
Within these terms even Indian Muslims and Christians were accepted by the great Hindu tradition as being within the larger fold as spiritual seekers. He read the Bible and was still a Hindu, Rammohan told his pandit critics.
Savarkar however was never interested in ritual pollution.
Languishing in an Andaman Island prison under nearly inhumane conditions it had become an issue of cultural-political survival. His legacy, saffron Hinduism emerged as a reactionary invented, hybrid colonial institution. To borrow from Raja Rammohan Ray's own message, a truly swadeshi (national) Hinduism would seek a return to the fundamental Hindu tenet of the concordance (samanvaya) between all paths (sadhana) to individual spiritual and cultural fulfillment that the classical Hindu writers invoked.
Violence Against Religious Minorities As An Excuse for Violence Against Women and Other Disadvantaged Groups:
India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the National Commission for Minorities
(NCM) and the National Commission for Women (NCW) blamed the state government and the local press for the violence in Gujarat. Many see a systematic pattern of hate and institutional discrimination all across India.
Two recent bills before Parliament give credence to this allegation.
The first prohibiting conversion was introduced by a Shiv Sena MP. The second seeks to give teeth to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act prohibiting foreign financial support of non-Hindu religious institutions. The banning of Deendar Anjuman, a Muslim group accused of being behind the Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh church bombings in 2000 has been criticized first, as a ploy to shift attention from Sangh Parivar supporters considered the real culprits, and second as heavy-handed in comparison with lenient treatment of Hindu suspects.
Anti-Sikh feeling has fortunately subsided in recent years. Attacks upon dalits and adivasis continue.
While violence against Christians has escalated alarmingly since 1998 ("Politics By Other Means: Attacks Against Christians in India", A Human Rights Watch Report, vol. II, no.6, September 1999, Chapter III) Muslims and women have born the brunt of upper-class Hindu militancy.
I was in Mumbai in August, 1993, barely six months after the Ramjanmabhumi Babri Masjid attack (led by Shiv Sena gangs according to Newstrack, the now defunct TV news channel of India Today) and was taken on
a tour of the burned out Muslim areas by a Muslim taxi driver. There was little evidence of reconstruction. There was construction in other non-Muslim sections damaged in the rioting.
Human Rights Watch
notes that violence against women is "Tragically consistent with the longstanding pattern of attacks on minorities and Dalits (or so-called untouchables) in India" ("Broken People: Caste Violence
Against 'Untouchables'" New York, 1999).
The pattern of violence against women is that it is not only savage but seeks to degrade them as persons before the coup de grace. Whenever women are violated children are also victims.
The U.S. Report
on Human Rights Practices-2001 (www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/sa/ 8210.htm) surveyed 10,000 women over half of which said that domestic violence was a normal part of their lives.
An Indian Health Ministry survey polled 90,000 women half of whom again said they were battered at home. But the most telling report is the International Institute of Population Studies poll revealing that 56 percent of Indian women believe that domestic violence is justified. Acceptance of domestic violence as a normal state of affairs suggests that radical change is necessary before internationally accepted norms of social justice will be enforce for citizens of India.
Conclusions
Raja Rammohan Ray said that a society may be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.
He was referring to the treatment of women as the true litmus test of civility. Today, he might well also include minorities in the test.
Several conclusions may be drawn from this discussion.
First, in this era of fragile political coalitions the ballot box is a very significant way for religious minorities and women to force change. Second, faith-based and women-run NGOs will have to take more of the burden of community services that local governments are not providing. Religious communities must be pro-active agents of change. Third, religious minorities cannot afford to protest only violence against their own group. They will gain credibility and empowerment when they speak out against all violence and continue to risk coming to the aid of other minorities under attack.
Lastly, the Indian and Pakistani-American communities are not only a model American minority but a growing economic, political and cultural force in this country and in South Asia. This experience as
successful minorities in the U.S. can be a model for minorities and disadvantaged groups in India and Pakistan. A joint effort of Indian and Pakistani-Americans, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs working
together as one American community can put significant pressure defining leadership in Pakistan and India to resolve the crisis in South Asia today.
On Connecticut Avenue a couple of years ago I saw a
T-shirt which read "Oh God! Save us from your followers!"
Anand Patwardhan’s famous documentary, Ram Ke Nam, “In the name of God,” on the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya states the proposition bluntly. There can be little hope for civil society if our religious, political and spiritual leaders behave like thugs and felons. The barbarians will get in only if ordinary people, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, let them in.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Bruce C. Robertson was born, raised and educated through high school in India. The son of missionaries, he is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and has a PhD in South
Asian-US Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Robertson is a Faculty Associate in the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Chair\man of South Asia Area Studies at the Foreign
Service Institute, NFATC, US Department of State. Author of several books and numerous articles on religious and political violence, he currently hosts “Today’s World” on Image-in-Asian Television (Channel 56).
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