Angana Chatterji

Dr Angana Chatterji has integrated scholarship, research, and activism in linking the roles of citizen and intellectual. A rigorous and passionate advocate for social justice, she has been working with postcolonial social movements in India and internationally, since 1984, toward enabling participatory democracy for social and ecological justice.

She hails from Calcutta, West Bengal and currently is an associate professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her work focuses on issues of globalization, development and cultural survival; land rights, community governance and public policy; identity politics, nationalism and gendered violence; and social movements. Professor Chatterji serves on the board of directors of the International Rivers Network and Earth Island Institute, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Peace and Democracy in South Asia. Her publications include "Community Forest Management in Arabari: Understanding Socioeconomic and Subsistence Issues", and three forthcoming books, "Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival", "Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present", and a co-edited volume, "Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia. Notes on the Postcolonial Present." She was recently a guest coeditor for Cultural Dynamics, a Sage Journal, for a special issue entitled, Gendered Violence in South Asia: Nation and Community in The Postcolonial Present (2004, Volume 16, 2/3).

Angana Chatterji's Essays

They stood there, the guards, and ordered me to tear down my home. It felt like my bones were breaking...
Sunder Bai, Harsud, 2004

Long ago, in a time of hope, on September 28, 1989, I was in Harsud at a rally of 30,000. "Kohi nahin hate ga, bandh nahin banega (no one will move, the dam will not be built)" had reverberated across the Narmada Valley as village upon village committed to resistance against destructive development promulgated by large dams. Almost 15 years later, I travelled to Harsud to witness the rape of cultures and histories, memories and futures, as people are forced into destitution. On August 3 and 4, hundreds from 10 villages, a town and seven resettlement colonies registered their grievances at public hearings. Chenera, Harsud, Bhavarali, Chikli, Jhinghad, Ambakhal, Barud, Kala Patha, Balladi, Khudia Mal, Purni, Bangarda, Jhabgaon, Jalwa, Dabri, Borkhedakala, Bedani, Borkheda. And, those from Gulas, Abhera, Jabgaon, Nagpur, places that are no more, chronicled in the register of dead settlements from which the Narmada Sagar dam draws its life force.

The Narmada Sagar (formally the Indira Sagar Pariyojana), a multipurpose project, has been in construction for decades. It is one of the 30 large dams on the Narmada River as it passes through the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Narmada watershed is home to 20 million peasants and adivasi [tribal] people whose subsistence is critically linked to land, forests and water. At 262.19 metres, the Narmada Sagar is located in east Nimar in Madhya Pradesh. It will submerge 249 villages, displace 30,739 families, 91,348 hectares of land, 41,444 of which are forests, to yield 1,000 MW of electricity and irrigate 123,000 hectares of land, a third of which is already irrigated. The resettlement and rehabilitation policy, shaped especially by the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award, includes a land for land clause. In its present and inadequate form, resettlement and rehabilitation provisions are being violated systematically.

Over the last few months, bulldozers razed homes across Khandwa as belongings were dragged out and mangled. State apparatuses are precise in their execution of forcible displacement. Adivasi and peasant lives are under siege in the Narmada Valley, their annexation into maldevelopment justified as necessary to national advancement. "We are like waste to the government. You do not rehabilitate waste, you bury it. Our town and souls are being buried. We have appealed to the government, to the courts, to the country. Our pleas are thrown away. We are left to decay," says Atma Ram. "If we protest, the police beat us. They threaten us, our families," states a youth activist.

Harsud, the 700-year-old town, was broken on July 1, 2004. Yet, all its citizens refuse to leave. Some believe that the town will not submerge for another year or two. "Where will we go?" asks Laloo Bhai. "We have lived here for generations. Here I am somebody. When something happens, people come and stand by us. Elsewhere, we are nothing." The town is partly vacated, partly living.

Chanera, a resettlement site, orders rows of houses amidst desolation, a prison complex, a place of exile. No water, electricity, roads, sewers, bazaars. A temporary school with absent teachers. A swing stands in a hollowed out yard in front. Children play, seeking to forget. A home has imploded into itself, crumbling under the leaden skies. A makeshift shelter of a few rectangular tin sheets and saris stretched into fragile walls threatens to collapse at the hint of rain. "I was divorced through talaq," says Chhoti Bibi, "but authorities have refused me compensation." We met a young woman, her husband died caught in the electrical wires outside their home. The authorities have refused to accept responsibility for his death.

In "new Harsud" there is no employment. The wealthy have moved away to Indore, Bhopal, Udaipur. The resettlement camp is populated by the economically disenfranchised, making it easy for the authorities to dismiss their concerns. "What shall I do? I received Rs 25,000 and no land. I was forced out of Harsud. My adult sons were listed as minors. I showed authorities ration cards, voter identification. They ignored us. I was a mazdoor. In Harsud I paid Rs 300 rent. Here I pay Rs 700. I have been using the compensation money to live. It will run out very soon. After that?" asks a mother of three.

A Hindutva [Hindu extremist] organisation has posted a sign, promising relief. The Sangh Parivar seeks to repeat their performance in Gujarat (after the earthquake in 2001) and Orissa (post cyclone in 1999). There, relief work undertaken in a sectarian manner by Parivar organisations provided the soldiers of Hindutva with a foothold through which to exploit disaster to foster a politics of hate.

The violence of the everyday experienced by people defies comprehension. Brutality infiltrates into the imagination of the acceptable, as oppression lives through the state's mistreatment of the poor, made intense by hierarchies of caste, tribe, religion and gender. Beyond Harsud, surrounding villages are devastated. In Jhinghad, people were informed that the village would partially submerge. Half its residents were ordered out. In the other half, hand pumps were wrecked, even as residents were told that they are not going to drown. Why then were public services destroyed and disrupted? We stop at Bangarda. "I am landless, so they said they are not responsible," says a Gond adivasi elder, his body taut with despair. "My sons are far away, I am old and very poor. My wife passed away. They have given me nothing." Faces etched with anger and sadness. Who bears responsibility for the multitudes a nation renders invisible?

In the absence of a movement that unifies resistance, people are wary of each other. Chittaroopa Palit and Alok Agarwal of the Narmada Bachao Andolan [Save the Narmada Movement] travel from village through devastated village, day after long day, seeking to collectivise the struggle. "Hum sabh ek hein (we are all one)" echoes as we leave Kala Patha. "The struggle for justice is about the right to life," Chittaroopa says. The right to life here is linked intimately to the right to land. Relations to land shape knowledge, dignity, income, ways of being. Land is critical to the capacity of these cultures to endure.

Authorities celebrate that the Narmada Sagar will be completed ahead of schedule, in 2004 rather than 2005, even as the conditions prescribed for resettlement and rehabilitation have been dishonoured, along with the prerequisite that the state provide a minimum of 2 hectares of irrigated land to those landed. Cash compensation - Rs 40,000 for non-irrigated, Rs 60,000 for irrigated land - is inadequate. Women are not listed as co-title holders. The landless are not provided land as displacement leaves them bereft of livelihood resources. Seasonal migrants are often excluded. Submerged land owned by the government has not been assessed for livelihood resources that it provided the disenfranchised. Terror inflicted through deracination.

"The Narmada gave us life. They have turned her against us," grieves Parbati Bai. Rehabilitation for the 85 villages partially and fully submerged, and the 32 scheduled for submergence in 2004, the people charge, must ensure that the displaced are provided compensation in accordance with the Land Acquisition Act and the Narmada Award. The remaining 132 villages must be rehabilitated prior to the completion of the dam, even if it requires halting construction.

Beyond Purni the land is engulfed by the reservoir, an infinite stretch of gloomy water beneath which lies the Atlantis of the Narmada Valley. Daunting questions of cultural survival and self-determination of adivasi and peasant peoples persist. Narmada Sagar exemplifies the violence of nation-making in India today. Unnecessary social suffering dispensed by national dreams and global capital distributed among peoples, cultures, flora, fauna, birds, trees, animals. One thousand more dams are promised us, even as freedom remains distant for 350 million of India's poorest citizens. Shall we ask them what this means to their lives?

Published in: Communalism Combat, Human Rights Magazine, India, February-March 2004; Issue No. 96 [Special Report]

In October 2003 Angana Chatterji wrote a report on Orissa for Communalism Combat about the political economy of Hindutva in the state. In this article, she continues to map the entrenchment of the Sangh Parivar. Information used in this article is derived from multiple sources, including interviews with persons affiliated with Sangh organisations. As relevant, quotations are anonymous or pseudonyms have been used, and place names changed, listed or omitted, at the request of the contributor. Insertion(s) within [ ... ] in the quotations are the author's.

"Your god has no eyes. He cannot have a soul. Your god is violent, just like you are." A Hindu neighbour charges Hasina Begum. With her technician husband, Hasina's is the only Muslim family in a housing society in a small town in Orissa. They relocated in 2003. Hasina and her husband are isolated with few acquaintances in the area. Geeta, a Hindu woman, befriended Hasina only to be confronted by others about such association with Muslims. Geeta slowly withdrew, saying. "We like you but we have to live in society here, do we carry you with us, or carry them? What choice do we have?" Geeta and Hasina do not speak any more.

Hasina Begum tells me, "We know that many Hindus hate Muslims and I know that Hindus are in power. I am afraid for my daughter. I want her to stay at home with me. She does not listen. So many times I am afraid for her, I beat her to make her stay at home. She has marks on her back from my beating her. I am ashamed. I feel isolated. If something happens to us, if someone attacks us, robs us, who will be with us? We are asked, "You have no idols, so who is your god? Are you godless?" I know that we are not welcome here. There are stories about us 'Pathans' that circulate in the market place. We have heard about Gujarat." People tell Hasina that nothing has really happened, that she has not been attacked, that she is overreacting. She replies, "Fear is attacking me. I feel that they are watching me."

Subash Chouhan, state convenor for the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary wing of Hindutva, claims, "In the country, Orissa is the second Hindu rajya [state]. Today, Sai [Christian] missionary and Islam, they both want to convert the entire pradesh [state] into Sai and Islam. In the tribal belt they have been planning to convert the people into Christians and Harijans into Muslims. This work is moving with force in Orissa. This is the reason the Bajrang Dal and VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad] have taken up the task of consolidating Hindu shakti in Orissa. In the entire state we have selected some [key] districts, such as Sai based Sundargarh district, Gajapati zilla, Phulbani, Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Koraput, Nabarangpur districts -- we are undertaking seva [service] work here, hospitals, one teacher schools, Hari Katha Yojana, orphanage, these types of jojona and seva work are being undertaken all over the state."

A secular activist responds, "The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] and Sangh Parivar sailed in with the cyclone [in 1999], we are now drowning in their midst. They are too many and everywhere. They are kind and giving to people who abide by them, even as they are watchful and intolerant of people who disobey them. They do more than the government, they work hard and say that they are against corruption. But at what price? They are for a 'clean' Orissa, they are cleaning out the filth, and Christians and Muslims are the filth they want to sweep out."

Citizen's groups have formed various campaigns to combat communalism in the state. Since 2002, secular meetings and marches have taken place in Beherampur, Cuttack, Balesore, Bhadrak, Bhubaneswar, Sambalpur. Community and citizen's leaders speak of alliance building. They warn about the futility of partnerships with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Sangh Parivar vigilantes, cautioning that alliance building requires shared commitments. They urge for rallying progressive, democratic forces across the state.

Throughout Orissa, lands reform movements, adivasi and dalit organisation for self determination, and resistance movements confronting the devastation of dominant development and globalisation, act as a bulwark against the escalation of the Sangh Parivar. Adivasi and dalit self determination exists in opposition to the state. Adivasis and dalits, within politicised contexts, do not identify as Hindus and resist their incorporation into the Brahminical (and elite) social order. In a Hindu majority state in India, Brahminism enforces the supremacy of 'Hinduness', and defines norms, values, ethics and morality. Ethnic, minority and marginalised groups are subject to the political and economic violence of Brahminism via which they are forced to frame their political and cultural aspirations.

The secular activist continues, "[In retaliation] the Sangh Parivar is consolidating its position in the mining belt and in all sensitive and tribal areas in Orissa, where there are popular dalit or adivasi struggles for self determination, trying to undercut them. Several developments are taking place on the mining front, where the Sangh divides poor people, who, driven out by corporations, are organising to resist." In Nayagarh district, dalit communities watch Hindutva's voracious march. They speak of malignant fictions circulated by the Hindutvadis that Christian missionary activity is placing Hinduism at risk. Dalits, adivasis, Christians, Hindus and Muslims speak of how their villages and watersheds intertwine, and how crops are dependent on the run-off water from each other's lands. They say that they cannot afford to hate each other.

In a massive mobilisation drive in the mid 1980's the Jaganath Rath Yatra passed through Hindu, Christian, dalit and adivasi villages across Orissa. The Yatra traversed a thousand sites between March 1986 and May 1988, drawing 3-4,000 people in each place. Local people met expenses totalling 2-4 million rupees. As an outcome of this process, 1,600 permanent mobilisation units managed by 500 committees were set up. The VHP and Vanavasi Kalyan Ashrams run these units, carrying out their mission via Kirtan Mandals, Satsangs and Yuvak Kendras.

Today, the annual Jaganath Yatra and other Hindutva organised religio-nationalist spectacles continue across the state. Muslims, and adivasi and dalit groups connected to self determination movements in dissent to the Sangh Parivar, are afraid as thundering mobs engulf their villages. On April 11, 2003, communal tensions spiralled in Rajgangapur, an industrial town 400 kilometres from Bhubaneswar, during a procession for Hanuman on Ramnavmi. Two people were killed in police firing.

Over the last decade, the Sangh has amassed 30 major organisations including political, charitable, militant and educational groups, trade and students unions, women's groups, with a massive base of a few million, the largest volunteer enlistment in the state. The Prakalpa Samanvaya Samiti is a pivotal Sangh organisation synchronising the activities of various faith and welfare outfits. The Prakalpa Samiti operates a school at Chakapad, 3 student hostels, 20 weekly balwadis, and 300 night schools. It attends to 20,000 patients each month through medicine distribution centres and three mobile vans. The Prakalpa Samiti acts to drive Christians to Hinduism.

In Orissa, the RSS charges that hostile Hinduisation is a 'rational' and necessary response to, among other factors, the growth of missionary activity leading to an increase in the Christian population. Numerous groups are conflicted about the need to direct 'equal' energy in assessing Hindutva, Christian missionisation and Islamic fundamentalism in India. Violent Islamic fundamentalism certainly requires deep scrutiny in South Asia, even as Hindutva must command particular emphasis in India. Hindu nationalism is linked to a state that authorises Hindutva's actions, lending it dangerous legitimacy.

Fundamentalist Christianity, linked to the United States, is endorsed by the current Bush administration. Evidence suggests (American) evangelist participation in intelligence operations in Latin America and elsewhere. Such activity and its relationship to India should concern us only as it actually takes place. Christians constitute less than 3 percent of the population in Orissa, with a one percent increase since 1981. Neither does the Christian population in India record any appreciable increase from 2.6 percent in 1971, to 2.43 in 1981, 2.34 in 1991, and 2.6 in 2001.

The Sangh Parivar converts minorities to dominant Hinduism without distinguishing between forcible conversions and the right to proselytise, and uses the converted for sadistic ends. The Sangh does not acknowledge that tribal and dalit conversions to Christianity are rarely coercive and occur in response to oppressive and entrenched caste inequities, gender violence, and chronic poverty. The Sangh's claim that Christians in India are anti national facilitates violence against them. Dalit Christian activists seek empowerment and understand 'decastification' as necessary to fighting Hindutva. They also speak of challenging inherent inequities that are often reproduced through the church, where, they say, pews are filled on Sunday mornings with compliant people sitting in rows ordered along caste hierarchies.

The Sangh's voracious assault organises the disenfranchised into a vicious political economy structured by the caste system. RSS cadres working in Sambhalpur district stress how critical it is that adivasis and dalits be converted into Hinduism. They organise adivasi rallies where 'Garbh se kaho hum Hindu hai' (say with pride that I am a Hindu) pierces the air. Badal Satpaty, an RSS office bearer, stresses the importance of adivasi conversions for Orissa. "Vanavasis [derogatory term for adivasis] are given land by the government. If vanavasis see themselves as outside Hinduism, then their lands too are non Hindu lands that are anti development and cannot be used for the betterment of the nation. Bharat is a Hindu nation, and these people and their lands are anti national."

Whose nation? Adivasis are 8.01 percent of the nation's inhabitants, yet 40 percent of the displaced population. The Transfer of Immovable Property (by Scheduled Tribes) Regulation of 1956 provides against land transfers in Scheduled Areas. Outside Scheduled Areas, the Orissa Land Reforms Act of 1960 and subsequent amendments, guard against tribal land alienation. In practise, an extensive 'land grab' has resulted from debt bondage and indenturement related to land leasing and mortgage of adivasi and dalit lands to large farmers and moneylenders, consolidation of land holdings, strategic marriage alliances and corruption.

Adivasis living in forest villages are often evicted, their right to land dismissed by the state's insistence on 'evidence' of ownership and residency. Such demands evince the betrayal of old claims with new boundaries, maps, roads, checkposts that insert violence into the everyday life of the adivasi. Tribal testimonies are converted into 'lies' by the apparatus of the state. A Gond adivasi elder testifies, "We live in the village in the forest. We have lived here for generations. Our houses are made of local mud, our roofs from local leaves from the forests. Our diet, our thoughts, our language tells you that we have been living here. You can see the shadows of our ancestors reflected in the pond, our songs mimic the birds, they tell stories of the forest, our feet walk these lands over and over. These [imprints] are our land records. The forester does not believe us. Our lives are lies to them."

In India today, about 86 percent of dalit families are landless or marginal landholders, and 63 percent subsist on incomes from daily wage labour. Social violence against dalits remains institutionalised. Legitimation of adivasi and dalit rights has been a process laden with inequities, and the notification and denotification of tribes is often used as a political tool to undermine adivasi self determination by not recognising their status, claims and rights vis-Ã -vis the state. The amputation of adivasi tenure on forest lands has contributed to cultural genocide in Orissa that supports the consolidation of national territory, corporate liberalisation and the ethic of conservation inherent to modern nation states.

In July 2003, the Orissa government permitted the unconstitutional transfer of lands in Schedule V areas for mining and industrial use. Orissa's decision contradicts the 1997 Samata versus Andhra Pradesh judgement, where the Apex Court had ruled against the government's lease of tribal forest and other lands in Scheduled Areas to non tribals for mining and industrial operations.

Beginning January 23, 2004, four adivasi villages, Borobhota, Kinari, Kothduar, Sindhabahili, and their agricultural fields, in south east Kalahandi district, have been razed by Sterlite industries, a multinational corporation building an aluminium refinery near Lanjigarh, adjacent to Kashipur. Sterlite's finances are generated from its partner company, Vedanta Resources. Non resident Indians operate Sterlite and Vedanta, launched in London in December 2003. Sterlite has a controversial history. Company chairperson and managing director, Anil Agarwal, has denied knowledge of the Samata judgement in the past. The Lanjigarh project will mine bauxite at 4,000 feet from the north west rim of the Niyamgiri mountains. The villagers, forcibly evicted, without requisite compensation or rehabilitation, are living in camps under police 'guard', their right to life placed on hold.

State sponsored development in Orissa forces the incorporation of the poor into the dominant order. The Sangh Parivar conspires with the Biju Janata Dal-BJP coalition government in Bhubaneswar to enable this inequitable amalgamation. Sangh activists have infiltrated deep into state run development agencies such as the Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), an autonomous institution that works to create rural development partnerships between voluntary organisations and the government. CAPART supports numerous RSS activities in Orissa diverting funds for Hindutva.

Badal Satpaty of the RSS says, "It is because these people [dalits, adivasis] refuse to integrate that all these problems arise. Why do they ask for special rights? The motherland is good to us all. These people are lazy, they live in filth, they are illiterate. How can we take them seriously without civilising them? The RSS seeks to help in this mission, for the betterment of the poor. The RSS is working with, first, the Hindu dalits to mobilise them and tell them about the dangers of defection. Then, we are bringing Christian dalits and adivasis back to the Hindu fold through education and reconversion. We are also helping them economically."

Where conversions to Hinduism are acquiescent and occur with the complicity of non Hindus, acquiescence is produced by its intimacy with the dominant. For non dominant groups, the landscape of Hindu supremacy shapes fear (of the dominant), desire (to acquire privileges), hope (for 'acquittal', to 'pass' as non other) and internalised oppression. These complex forces create agency on the part of the marginalised. Such agency is manufactured in relation and response to Hindu ascendancy.

I spoke with a dalit RSS worker who said: "The RSS is helping us build a Hindu samaj. We are poor, we have no assistance, we are fighting Christians and Muslims for development money. The Christians, they have foreign missionary money, what do we Hindu dalits have? The Sai [Christians] are also converting our people to their religion. They eat meat, they touch leather, they have bad morals. I am scared for my children. We are thankful that the RSS has sworn to protect us." AC: "Have you seen these Christian missionaries?" Dalit RSS worker: "No, but I have heard that they are nearby." AC: "How many Hindus have been converted in your village, or in any of the neighbouring villages." Dalit RSS worker: "Nobody yet, but the RSS tells us that they [the missionaries] might come soon. That is why we go to the RSS meetings, to become informed about the troubles facing us, and how we can be strong and protect ourselves, to become an army against these foreigners." Dalits continue to suffer social ostracization and economic deprivation. They are manipulated into joining the very Hindutva forces that have historically deprived dalits of equity in order to use them against other mistreated communities.

At a 15,000 strong Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram organised rally in Bhubaneswar in December 2003, Dilip Singh Bhuria, Chairperson, National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, commended the BJP for its pro-adivasi policies. Adivasis have historically voted for the Congress Party in Orissa and have not benefited from this loyalty. Mr. Bhuria said, "We are passing through a governance similar to Ram rajya," posing Ram as the god, and BJP as the party, of adivasis. Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram President Jagadev Ram Oram insisted that adivasis converting to Christianity should not be allowed to access the benefits of reservation. Through espousing another religion, he said, adivasis no longer retain their tribal status. Speakers condemned Christian conversions declaring 'all tribals are Hindus'.

Adivasis are taught by Ekal Vidyalayas about the 'origins' of Jaganath in Hinduism, as Jaganath, the famed tribal god of Orissa, is Hinduised. Since the inception of Saraswati Sishu Mandirs, the Janata Dal, Congress, and other political parties have endorsed the Sangh Parivar's network of educational organisations, interpreting Hindutva education as secular. Consecutive governments have abdicated state responsibility in building a quality education system in the state. High levels of illiteracy among dalits and adivasis proliferate simultaneous to the denigration of non Hindu traditions and cultures.

In the absence of viable educational institutions, Hindutva education offers a free, widely available and rigorous curriculum. Students from these schools succeed in state board examinations. Hindutva schools, runs primarily by RSS organisations, are complemented by institutions that facilitate cultural regimentation. The facticity of hate in this curriculum, the dismissal of minorities, the assertion of Hindu supremacy is overlooked by many Hindus.

In the current climate, numerous Muslims retreat to madrasas. These institutions often teach orthodoxy, deliberately mischaracterised by the majority community as uniformly 'fundamentalist'. Hasina Begum offers, "My daughter is in a good school but with those other children who do not like her. She wants to play with the neighbours but they curse at her. They physically push her around. Now we think we should find a madrasa for her. The madrasa is orthodox, but they will protect us. The education is better in the school but what if something happens to her?"

The adverse affects of the Sangh Parivar on the social and economic health of Muslim communities are apparent. Samshul Amin, a Muslim man from Bhadrak says, "We trade in leather. We always have. The RSS and Bajrang Dal tell lies about how we slaughter cows to shame Hindus. That we kill and send the cows to Muslims in Bangladesh." A Muslim businessman in Jagatsinghpur town confirms, "They threaten and at times beat Muslims on the road, starting from Bhadrak, from Balesore, onwards up to Calcutta, where the Bajrang Dal has a strong presence, there they are violent. They stop cow transportations on Jajpur road."

Subash Chouhan, Bajrang Dal State Convenor, indicts, "There is so much cow slaughter, for example in Sundargarh, Bhadrak, thousands of cows. Every day about 200 trucks leave with cows for Bangladesh. We believe that the cow is our mother, but they want to kill the cow. Also, if the cow stays it is a financial security for the home. So, if necessary we will use a suicide squad. To save the country and its sanskriti [culture], we will do whatever is necessary."

In Pitaipura village, in Jagatsinghpur district, a disturbing event occurred in the winter of 2001 after Muslim graveyard lands were placed in dispute. According to Hakim Bhai, a resident of the village, "The land record for the village divides the 25 acres into two plots, one listed as a kabarstan [graveyard] and another as 'gorostan' [also graveyard]. But [Hindu] villagers insist that 'gorostan is 'gaochar' [grazing land] not a kabarstan. We were harassed when funeral processions arrived or we read Namaz during Id. We sat down together to resolve the dispute without any success. Then we filed a case in court. The court did not resolve the case for the longest time. The court then began mediating and declared a part of the land as a graveyard, and held the rest as disputed. Once, the night before the official was coming to measure the land, Hindus from the village stole into the graveyard and placed a murti [idol] to mark it as their land. We found out and went inside and took it out. The next morning when the official arrived Hindus were angry that we had taken the murti out. They threw stones at us, we threw stones back at them. The crowd ran from the graveyard pelting each other. We were near the Ma Durga temple. The Hindus started accusing us of throwing stones at the temple. Then it began. "

Another resident inserts, "Perhaps our stones had fallen on the temple compound. But we were not destroying the temple, we were responding to each other. Once the word spread that we were destroying the temple, RSS youth arrived from Bhubaneswar and mobilised people from surrounding villages. They went around with loudspeakers to 20-30 Hindu villages accusing us of destroying the temple. Our basti [hamlet] is in the middle of the village, between Hindu hamlets. Five Muslim homes were burnt in our basti and men were beaten. The police could not do anything. For three days during that time we were very afraid, some hid in the forests. A peace rally came to our village. They have not returned. The case is pending. No resolution has happened. If we are left alone things might escalate. Then what?" Hakim Bhai responds, "The RSS continues its meetings in the Hindu hamlets regularly since the incident. These meetings are not publicised, they spread through word of mouth. We Muslims have now made our own shops in the basti, we have retreated to ourselves. Our women are afraid and they do not want to go out of the basti. When we go out Hindus call us names. Call us 'Pathans'. We are becoming isolated." Shazia, a woman, adds, "Even our dead cannot rest in peace."

The extent to which violence is inscribed disproportionately on women's bodies and memories is rarely named or languaged. A Muslim woman in another district requests anonymity. She says, "We came from Chhota Nagpur, displaced from a mining town. Our village is surrounded by the RSS. We live like moles, I teach my children to be unseen. If we are quiet people will leave us alone. The men, it is not easy for them. Last month there was violence in our village. Bajrang Bali's called us names, they threatened we would never work again. Said we were dirty, that when we kill cows, we do violence to Hinduism. They said they were watching us. My husband came back, shaken. He brought fear with him into the house. He forced me to have intercourse. It was not about intimacy, it is about power, about feeling helpless and wanting control. So, here it is, in our kitchen, in our bedroom, in our home. Even as we wait for it to strike, it already has."

The violence that accompanies Hinduism is not new. Hindutva is its variant. It is not about groups and peoples, but about the country, who belongs and who doesn't. The imbrication of state disregard for adivasi and dalit human rights with the grassroots mobilisation of Hindutva make Muslims, Christians, dalits, adivasis, women's rights volatile in Orissa.

Hindutva corroborates the impairment of women's rights that are already structurally limited in the state, together with women's access to land, livelihood and well being resources. A host of xenophobic women's organisation are in place, including the BJP Mohila Morcha and the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti. Established in 1936, the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti has been active in the crusade against cow slaughter in Orissa. The Samiti organises state and district level meeting, as well as daily and weekly sakha and prayer meets in villages, towns and cities "to encourage physical education, intellectual development, mental acumen".

Bidyut Lata Raja, leader of Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, says that the Parivar helps discipline the mind and wean people from 'pointless' activity. She says that the Parivar functions as a family, each taking care of the other. "The Parivar seeks to create unity. Dalits and adivasis say that Hindus are outsiders. How can that be? We must create consciousness that we are all one." The Samiti seeks to complement economic development with building moral character to unite India through shared nationalism. The Samiti supervises Balmandirs and Udyog Mandirs, celebrates the anniversaries of influential Sangh leaders and religious festivals, hosts classes on culture and ethics, organises Bhajan and Kirtan recitals, and runs women's schools and hostels. The Samiti concentrates its volunteer based social work services in adivasi areas, seeking to bring 'enlightenment'.

The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti seeks to organise and train women in self defense, "to increase their physical and mental capacity to encourage them to protect their nation, dharma and culture." Stringently heterosexist and mired in sexism, the Samiti is dedicated to supporting women in their youth, in marriage and motherhood, work, and leadership, indoctrinating the practise of Hindutva as patriotic, the saffron flag as the national emblem, insisting on the loyalty of its followers to their husbands, families and the Hindutva leadership.

The Sangh Parivar asserts that relations between higher caste, dalit and adivasi groups have improved in rural Orissa. It ignores that lower class and caste and adivasi people are seldom acknowledged as social equals. In an interesting display, while all residents of a particular village, including adivasis, may contribute financially to the major annual Hindu pujas (prayers), higher caste people control the preparations and ceremony. It may be appropriate for a member of the dalit or Muslim community, if invited, to eat at a general caste home usually seated in a demarcated space, and internalise the invitation as demonstrative of the 'charity' and 'tolerance' of the upper caste toward 'lower caste' people. The reverse is nearly impossible. Inter-caste alliances, marriage between non comparable social castes, are more evident even while often socially ostracised.

Associations among Hindus and non Hindus remain strained in the state and frequently prohibited. In upper caste rural Orissa, poor Muslim communities are as socially unacceptable as adivasis, and constitute a 'lower' social strata than dalits. Gender and ethnicity are central to how resources and power are allocated and rights disbursed, both nationally and locally, and are salient to the organisation of legal, cultural, economic and political infrastructure and institutions. The imposition of Brahminical language, ritual and memory seeks to incorporate the marginal into the dominant polity simultaneous to segregationist arrangements for water use, food and forest resource sharing.

BJP and Sangh Parivar organisations have a significant strategy of manoeuvring Muslims in middle class neighbourhoods and villages by forming alliances with the local leadership. In Banamalipur and Jadupur village, neighbouring Bhubaneswar in Khurda district, Muslims leaders spoke of their alliance with the BJP. Poor communities in these villages say this allows local Muslim politicians access to electoral seats leaving the disenfranchised without trustworthy representation. Minority resistance is frail with few options, progressive Muslims say. A Muslim activist from Bhubaneswar states, "We are isolated. We do not want to identify with the madrasas and we do not have a mass movement that accepts us."

The actions of Sangh organisations are often triangulated, with parallel components for edification, mobilisation and service. For example, Vidya Bharati (known as Shiksha Vikas Samiti) directs 391 Saraswati Shishu Mandir schools in Orissa. Sangh students are inducted into the cadre via a formal curriculum that emphasises Hindu nationalism, along with informal training in cultural values and defense. In addition, these students and their families are expected to volunteer in mobilisation and developmental work, in local fundraising. They are even expected to participate in temple inaugurations.

Religion, development, polity and education are used by Sangh Parivar organisations to facilitate recruitment into Hindu extremism. An army of Parivar organisations fundraise abroad as registered charities to support sectarian development in India. Funds from the US and UK amounting to millions of dollars were raised by Sangh organisations during the Gujarat earthquake and Orissa cyclone, substantially aiding the expansion of Sangh networks in both states.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom recently designated India as a 'country of particular concern', asking for US investigations into RSS organisations registered as charities in the US. India Development Relief Fund is one such organisation that, post cyclone, raised $90,660 for Sookruti, $23,255 for Orissa Cyclone Rehabilitation Foundation, and $37,560 for Utkal Bipanna Sahayata Samiti, as documented in the report 'Foreign Exchange of Hate' in 2002.

In the United Kingdom, the Seva International UK (fundraising wing of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS equivalent in UK and US) sent a majority of the £260,000 raised for cyclone relief to Utkal Bipannya Sahayata Samiti, an RSS organisation in Orissa, detailed in the report, 'In Bad Faith? British Charity and Hindu Extremism' by Awaaz, 2004. Currently, Utkal Bipannya Sahayata Samiti undertakes sectarian disaster relief work, and has been working with approximately 50,000 beneficiaries after the floods of 2001, funded by RSS organisations abroad.

RSS cadre mobilise sakhas around minority villages in Orissa. Each sakha begins with an organiser and a few members who meticulously monitor the area, teaching people to describe themselves as 'communal’, a new identity that denotes Hindu cultural pride. Minorities worry as, under the watchful eye of the RSS, cricket conflicts, harmless fracas between children's winning and losing teams, turn into communal skirmishes. Green flags of stars and crescent used by madrasas are depicted as adhering to Pakistan, linked to terrorism and the Inter Services Intelligence.

VHP, RSS and Bajrang Dal leaders and their cadre in Orissa reiterate that charges of fundamentalism cannot apply to Hindutva. It is not an ideology, they say, but integral practise, a lifestyle for nationhood. Hindutva functions as a meta narrative in manufacturing foundational truths to build and govern the nation. Hindutva assimilates the plural traditions within Hinduism to create a narrow centralized code that promises to unite Hindus. These principles are universalistic, in action segregationist. This strategy thwarts the complex search for cultural identity that confronts the vast diversity of peoples in India living at the pre and post modern intersections of nation making and globalism.

Hindutva justifies practices of domination in ways that ignore the power dynamics of its discourse. There is no pluralism in its agenda -- Hindutva is the only 'right' way to be human within its specified territory, any other must be annihilated. Hindutva invokes difference and plurality in the name of domination. What are the effects of Hindutva's practise? Hate. Cruelty. Terror. To realize its mission, Hindutva, anathema to democracy, defines minority interests as oppositional to Hindu, and therefore national, interest. The struggles for justice of marginal groups organized around ethnicity, religion, class, caste, tribe, gender, or culture become hostile to national unity.

Elite aspirations in nation making, the annexation of territory and resources from the disempowered, the imposition of violent ideologies and alienating identities, and subaltern resistance, have produced contested meanings and practices of democracy. Through the amassment of identity politics, reinvention of history, the normalisation of difference, the extension of its power into private and social life, Hindu majoritarianism exhibits scorn for those its finds unincorporable and inassimilable into its governing imaginary. Hindu nationalism is aided by the state as it operates as legatee to its imperial coloniser, inheriting and modifying its biopolitics.

What are the reasons for Hindutva's conquest in rural and urban Orissa? What prevents a resonant secular counter-response? Praveen Togadia, International Secretary of the VHP, visited Jajpur on February 16 and Beherampur on February 29 continuing his seditious campaign for Hindutva, amidst rousing protests from local groups. Since the assembly elections the BJP has gained in strength. As Orissa gears up for the next round, the BJP is using the 'jal, jungle, zameen' (water, forest, land) platform, appropriated from land reform movements, to persuade adivasis in Orissa. The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram is the key strategist and organiser for the BJP in the tribal belt. Having won Chhattisgarh, the BJP is confident. Tribal culture is being glorified as artefact, objectified, made distant from its political reality while the relentless decimation of these very cultures continues.

Subash Chouhan of the Bajrang Dal resumes, "We in the VHP believe that this country belongs to the Hindu's. It is not a dharamsala [guesthouse] and people cannot just come here and settle down and do whatever they want. That is not going to happen. We will not let that happen. Whatever happens here will happen with the consent of the Hindu's. If you come to another's house and live as a guest and then start doing what you please, that is not going to happen. What ever happens here, say politics happen, it will have to be Hindutva politics, with Hindutva's consent. India is a world power, what is in India is nowhere else, and we want to create India nicely in the image of Ram Rajya."

Hindutva's production of culture and nation escalates, celebrated by breakdown, rupture, violence. As I write this, the second year closes on Gujarat. Justice remains beyond reach for Muslim minorities in the complex duplicity of state negligence, judicial oversight, and the deep fragmentation of political community in India. Gujarat represents an end and a beginning, a marker in Hindutva's malevolent reach for a Hindu state. The end of lives, the culmination of brutality. I am reminded of a dalit boy, age 8, in a decimated colony in Ahmedabad, in June 2002, who said, "I am not afraid of death. I am frightened by life. Look what happens in life," as Muslim and dalit women stared each other into silence across a boundary wall.

In Gujarat, Hindu extremists killed 2,000 people in February-March of 2002. Muslims live in fear there, victims of pathological violence.

Raped, lynched, torched, ghettoised. A year and half later, Muslims in Gujarat are afraid to return to their villages, many still flee from town to town. Ghosts haunted by history. Country, community, police, courts — institutions of betrayal that broker their destitution. This is India today.

The National Human Rights Commission recognised the impossibility of achieving justice in Gujarat. The Best Bakery murder trial flaunted dangerous liaisons between government, judiciary and law enforcement. Those who speak out are vulnerable. Outcry against the consolidation of Hindu rightwing forces in India is subdued. In a world intent on placing Islam and Muslims at the centre of ‘evil’, Hindu nationalism escapes the global imagination.

Orissa is Hindutva’s next laboratory. This July, in a small room on Janpath in Bhubaneswar, workers diligently fashioned saffron armbands. Subash Chouhan, state convenor for the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary wing of Hindutva, spoke with zeal of current hopes for ‘turning’ Orissa. Christian missionaries and ‘Islam fanatics’ are vigorously converting Adivasis (tribals) to Christianity and Dalits (erstwhile ‘untouchable’ castes) to Islam, Chouhan emphasised. He stressed the imperative to consolidate ‘Hindutva shakti’ to educate, purify and strengthen the state.

Western Orissa, dominated by upper caste landholders and traders, is a hotbed for the promulgation of Hindu militancy, while Adivasi areas are besieged with aggressive Hinduisation through conversion. Praveen Togadia, international general secretary of the VHP, visited Orissa in January and August 2003 to rally Hindu extremists. He advocated that Orissa join Hindutva in its movement for a Hindu state in India. ‘Ram Rajya’, he promised, would come.

In Orissa, the sangh parivar is targeting Christians, Adivasis, Muslims, Dalits and other marginalised peoples. The network divides its energies between charitable, political and recruitment work. It aims at men, women and youth through religious and popular institutions. The sangh has set up various trusts in Orissa to enable fund raising, such as the Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Yasodha Sadan, and Odisha International Centre.

There are around 30 dominant sangh organisations in Orissa. This formidable mobilisation is the largest base of organised volunteers in the state. The RSS, responsible for Gandhi’s death, was founded in 1925 as the cultural umbrella. It operates 2,500 shakhas in Orissa with a 1,00,000 strong cadre. The VHP, created in 1964, has a membership of 60,000 in the state. Born in 1984, at the onset of the Ramjamanbhoomi movement, banned and reinstated since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Bajrang Dal has 20,000 members working in 200 akharas in the state.

Membership of the BJP stands at 4,50,000. The Bharatiya Mazdoor sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000. The 30,000 strong Bharatiya Kisan sangh functions in 100 blocks. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an RSS inspired student body, functions in 299 colleges with 20,000 members. The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, the RSS women’s wing, has 80 centres. The Durga Vahini, with centres for women’s training and empowerment, has 7,000 outfits in 117 sites in Orissa.

Intent on constructing the ‘ideal’ woman who decries the ‘loose morals’ of feminism, the sangh seeks to train Hindu women to confront the ‘undesirable’ sexual behaviour "endemic" to Muslims and Christians. Such training endorses ‘masculanisation’ of the Hindu male looking to protect the fictively threatened Hindu woman.

In October 2002, a Shiv Sena unit in Balasore district in Orissa declared that it had formed the first Hindu ‘suicide squad’. Responding to Bal Thackeray’s call, over 100 young men and women signed up to fight ‘Islamic terrorism’. The Shiv Sena appealed to every Hindu family in the state to contribute to its cadre. Squad members, it is speculated, will receive training at Shiv Sena nerve centres in Mumbai and elsewhere.

Why Orissa? The state is in disarray, the leadership labours to sustain a coalition government headed by the Biju Janata Dal and the BJP. The government is shrouded in saffron. As the sangh infiltrates into civic and political institutions seeking to ‘repeat’ Gujarat not many are paying attention. For the 36.7 million who reside in Orissa, Hindutva’s predatory advance aggravates and capitalises on social panic in a land haunted by inequity.

Orissa houses 5,77,775 Muslims and 6,20,000 Christians, 5.1 million Dalits from 93 caste groups, and over 7 million Adivasis from 62 tribes. Around 87 percent of Orissa’s population live in villages. Nearly half the population (47.15 percent) lives in poverty, with a very large mass of rural poor. Almost a quarter of the state’s population (24 percent) is Adivasi, of which 68.9 percent is impoverished, 66 percent illiterate and only 2 percent have completed a college education. 54.9 percent of the Dalits live in poverty. Concentrated in Cuttack, Jagasinhapur and Puri districts, 70 percent of the Muslims are poor. In March 2002, Orissa’s debt amounted to 24,000 crore rupees, more than 61 percent of the gross domestic product of the state.

In 2001-2002, the government of Orissa signed a memorandum of understanding with New Delhi to secure a structural adjustment loan of Rs. 3,000 crore from the World Bank and an aid package of Rs. 200 crore from the department for international development, the overseas development branch of the government of the United Kingdom. This is conditional assistance, laden with extensive and hazardous consequences. People’s movements protested this agreement for tied aid that supports irresponsible corporatisation and works against the self-determination of the poor.

Consecutive governments, including the present coalition, have failed to address entrenched gender and class oppressions as exploitative relations endure between the poverty-stricken and a coterie of moneylenders, government officials, police and politicians in Orissa, perpetuating displacement, land alienation, and untouchability. Floods have affected three million in 2003. Agricultural labourers are faced with serious food shortages with no alternative means for income generation. Scarcity has led to starvation deaths and people have committed suicide. Infant mortality, 236 in 1000, is the highest in the Union.

In the recent past, Rayagada district has witnessed despairing efforts to survive — the sale of children by families. In Jajpur district, a mother, a daily wage earner in a stone quarry, sold her 45-day-old child for Rs. 60 this July. These measures have not evoked reflection and commitment on the part of the State. Rather, unconscionable attempts have been made to show that such action is emblematic of Adivasi and Dalit cultures.

Systematic disregard for the human rights of ‘lower’ caste, Adivasi and Dalit peoples is a social and structural predicament. In December 2000, Rayagada witnessed state repression of Adivasi communities protesting bauxite mining by a consortium of industries in Kashipur that is detrimental to their livelihood. The industries were in breach of constitutional provisions barring the sale or lease of tribal lands without Adivasi consent. In response, state police fired on non-violent dissent, killing Abhilas Jhodia, Raghu Jhodia and Damodar Jhodia.

The absence of adequate social reform, the disasters of dominant development, economic liberalisation and corporate globalisation further antagonise already overburdened minority and disenfranchised groups, pitting them against each other. Hindutva targets the religion and culture of the disempowered as globalisation abuses their labour and livelihood resources. Such conditions produce the contexts in which marginalised peoples embrace identity-based oppositional movements.

The sangh exploits the fabric of inequity and poverty deviously to weave solidarity built on tales of a mythic Hindu past. Hindutva defames history, speaking of Muslims as the ‘fallen traitors’ among Hindus who converted to Islam. This revisionist history obfuscates the severity of inequity within Hindu society that led to conversions historically. Alternatively, Hindutva misrepresents Muslims as ‘terrorists’ and ‘foreigners’, Christians as ‘polluted’. Adivasis are falsely presented as Hindus who must be ‘reconnected’ to Hinduism through Hindutva. Dalit and lower caste people are raw material for manufacturing foot soldiers of dissension.

At the same time, caste oppression prevails in the sangh parivar’s mistreatment of Dalits in Orissa, who have been assaulted for participating in Hindu religious ceremonies. In April 2001, a Dalit community member was fined Rs. 4,000 and beaten for entering a Hindu temple in Bargarh.

Poor Muslim communities are often socially ostracised in Orissa. Cultural and religious differences are diagnosed as abnormal. A Muslim community member from Dhenkanal said, "When Hindus celebrate a puja we are expected to pay our respects and even offer contributions. For them this is an example of goodwill, of how we are accepted into their society, indeed we are no different as long as we do not act differently."

A Muslim woman added, "Women face double discrimination, from men of our own community as well as from the outside". Women fear the sangh will perpetrate violence on their bodies to attack the social group to which they belong.

In witch hunting for the ‘enemy within’ to blame for India’s befallen present, the sangh demands absolute loyalty to its tyranny, requiring an unequivocal display of obedience. The sangh dictates the rightful gods to worship, prayers to recite, legacies to remember. Hindutva imagines its actions above the law. It makes the unification of Hindus central to its mission. To do so, it organises Hindus to fulfil their ‘manifest destiny’, fabricating Hinduism as monolithic across the immense diversity of India.

Grassroots movements in resistance to the debacle of nation making are combating the sangh. Where Dalits, Adivasis and others are allied in subaltern struggles for land rights and sustenance, Hindutva intervenes, seeking to divide them. Grassroots democracy threatens upper-caste Hindu dominance and contradicts elite aspirations. To domesticate dissent, the sangh invigorates militant nationalism. In village Orissa, emulating Gujarat, the sangh works to create enmity between Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians. Progressive citizen’s groups have initiated opposition, including the ‘Campaign Against Communalism’ in Bhubaneswar. Their capacity to contest despotic religiosity is linked to redressing political oppression, redistributing economic resources and overcoming injustice.

Fear of the sangh parivar runs deep in Orissa, producing acquiescence. The sangh’s methods are sadistic, contributing to violations of life and livelihood. In January 1999, as the vehicle with Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, Philip and Timothy, was torched in Keonjhar district, the mob’s homage to ‘Jai Bajrang Bali!’ pierced the state. Then followed the murder of Catholic priest Arul Das and the destruction of churches in Phulbani district. After much delay, last month, the Orissa district and sessions court delivered a verdict on the Staines’ murder case, sentencing Dara Singh, the primary accused, to death, and 12 others to life imprisonment.

The Bajrang Dal continues its virulent onslaught in Orissa. In June 2003, the Dal announced that it would organise ‘trishul diksha’ (trident distribution), despite chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s ban. Praveen Togadia planned on launching the trishul distribution campaign in Banamalipur in Korda district to provoke an area with a significant Muslim population. The Bajrang Dal plans to present trishuls to 5,000 as part of the Janasampark Abhiyan (mass contact programme) that anticipates reaching 100 million people in 2,00,000 villages throughout India.

The objective? To spread aggression. Between July and September 2003, the Bajrang Dal organised intensive programs in Bhubaneswar, Sundergarh and Jajpur. Aimed at securing a 1,50,000 membership in Orissa, this is part of a larger campaign that targets Gajapati, Phulbani, Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Koraput, and Nabarangpur districts.

In Orissa today, the sangh mobilises for a Ram temple among people for whom Ayodhya is a tale from afar. By 2006, the birth centenary of RSS architect Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, sangh organisations promise that Orissa will be a poster state for Hindutva. The sangh’s considerable advance in rural and urban Orissa has helped the BJP consolidate its position in the state, reflected in its gains in the state Assembly from one seat in 1985 to 41 presently. In return for its support, the sangh expects the government to tolerate its excesses. In March 2002, a few hundred VHP and Bajrang Dal activists burst into the Orissa Assembly and ransacked the complex, objecting to alleged remarks made against the two organisations by house members.

Development and education are key vehicles through which conscription into Hindu extremism is taking place. After the cyclone of 1999, relief work undertaken in a sectarian manner by RSS organisations granted the sangh a foothold through which to strengthen enrolment. Today, the Utkal Bipannya Sahayata Samiti works on disaster mitigation with facilities in 32 villages. The Dhayantari Shasthya Pratisthan manages four hospitals and six mobile centres.

In offering social services and carrying out rural development work, the sangh makes itself indispensable to its cadre as a pseudo-moral and reformist force. This continues the sangh parivar’s long history of implementing sectarian development. Targeting the livelihood of the ‘other’ is a technique of saffronisation. The Bajrang Dal has been strident in stopping cow slaughter in Orissa, an important source of income for poor Muslims who trade in meat and leather. Muslims have been beaten and threatened by Hindutva mobs. In India, amid the staggering poverty in which 350 million live, the participation of government agencies in debating a ban on cow slaughter is contemptible. This debate is not about animal rights. It arrogantly contravenes the separation of religion and state. It is anti-Muslim, anti-Dalit, anti-Christian and anti-poor.

In Orissa, egregious infringements of human rights are taking place with the disintegration of Adivasi and other non-Hindu cultures through their hostile incorporation into dominant Hinduism. Sectarian education campaigns undertaken by RSS organisations demonise minorities through the teaching of fundamentalist curricula. There are 391 Shishu Mandir schools with 111,000 students in the state, preparing for future leadership. Training camps in Bhadrak and Berhampur aim at Adivasi youth.

Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram runs 1,534 projects and schools in 21 Adivasi districts. The sangh has initiated 730 Ekal Vidyalayas in 10 districts in Orissa, one teacher schools that target Adivasis. The primary purpose of the schools is to indoctrinate villages into Hindutva. The teachers are offered Rs. 150-200 per month as honoraria, no salaries. The schools are free, supported through donations from organisations like the India Development Relief Fund. For Adivasi peoples, this facilitates cultural genocide that imperils self-determination movements struggling against a violent history of assimilation. The sangh asserts Adivasi political emancipation is a process of ‘tribalism’ that jeopardises the nation.

The sangh drives spiritual centres that use religious scriptures to incite sectarianism among Hindus. Vivekananda Kendras and Hindu Jagran Manch are active in Orissa together with Harikatha Yojana centres in 780 villages and 1,940 Satsang Kendras. There are 1,700 Bhagabat Tungis in Orissa, cultural reform centres run by the sangh that aim at Hindus and Christians. Another line of attack is to forcibly convert Christians into Hinduism. Churches and members of the Christian clergy are apprehensive. In Gajapati and Koraput, Christians have sought state protection in the past.

In Gajapati district, RSS and BJP workers torched 150 homes and the village church in October 1999. A Dalit Christian activist said, "RSS workers tell me that Christianity brought colonialism to India, and I am responsible for that legacy. How am I responsible? Feudalism, imperialism, post-colonial betrayal. That is written across our bodies. How am I responsible?" In June 2002, the VHP coerced 143 tribal Christians into converting to Hinduism in Sundargarh district. The Dharma Prasar Bibhag claims to have converted 5,000 people to Hinduism in 2002.

Orissa passed a Freedom of Religion Act in 1967 protecting against coercive conversions. The law, open to problematic interpretations, was overturned in 1973 and returned in 1977. In 1989, the state government activated requirements for religious conversion. In 1999, Orissa enacted a state order prohibiting religious conversions without prior permission of local police and district magistrates. Hindu fundamentalists diligently manipulate these provisions to intimidate religious minorities. Sangh organisations work with sympathetic police cadre to ensure that Hindu’s do not convert.

The sangh purposefully confuses the distinction between the right to proselytise and the use of religion to cultivate hate. Hindutva propaganda accuses Christian communities of the former and labels it a crime. The sangh justifies its use of the latter in the interests of a higher truth, the ‘righteous’ action of reuniting Hindus. ‘Reconversion’ is working well among the Christian community in Orissa, Subash Chouhan says, but not with Muslims. "Muslim reconversions are going slowly because mullahs, maulvis have created mosques and madrassas in village after village, and guard their children like chickens. That is the kind of people they are and that it why it is not so easy to get them back." For Muslims, the Bajrang Dal anticipates a different approach. Mr. Chouhan said that the Dal would engage in militancy if needed to "get the job done".

Hindutva stampedes across Orissa, inciting tyranny to establish itself. As power, culture and history shape the imagination of a nation, genocide is emerging as India’s brutal legacy. In denial, in silent and active complicity, we allow Hindu extremists to march to the guttural call of hate. Hindutva hijacks the nation’s aspirations. Its doctrine of ‘blood, soil and race’ rewrites the circumstances and complex histories that produced India. While the separation of religion and State in India is attempted at the constitutional level, Hindu militancy derives consent from Hindu cultural dominance.

Hindu ascendancy is assisted by the degree to which the authority of religion and the enabling cultural and gender hierarchies are enshrined deep within the popular psyche of the nation. This dominance assumes that to restrict religion to the private realm would deny India its historical ‘consciousness’.

India, a land of 1.2 billion, a profusion of peoples, is bound to the promise of a different destiny. In the flux between yesterday and tomorrow, dreams and desires, inequities and intimacies collide to infuse the hybridity that is India. Her survival is contingent upon the Hindu majority’s commitment to an inclusive, plural, secular democracy. The idea of a Hindu state in India is filled with discontent, held together by force. It must never come to pass.

(Note: Information used in this article is derived from multiple sources, including interviews with persons affiliated with sangh organisations).

After Iraq what next? In its self-ascribed role as global cop, the United States is scrutinizing "the arc of instability", focusing its Orwellian gaze across North Korea, South and Central Asia, Africa and the Caribbean Basin. At home, the United States Supreme Court recently reversed a ruling made 17 years ago that allowed states to target homosexuality through punishing the practice of sodomy. The Court also preserved affirmative action in college admissions while narrowing the parameters of such action.

The Supreme Court's ruling limits the power of government to regulate private life and social action. In contradiction, the current administration continues to juxtapose civil liberties and national security, acting to increase its powers of surveillance and interrogation, and expand provisions of arbitrary detention of non-citizens. Government policies have diminished the civil rights landscape in the United States. Such policies have acted to weaken the independence of non-governmental organizations, demanding uniform obedience to the government's war on terror. This administration has insisted on secret deportation hearings, authorized military commissions to try non-citizen terrorists, and confined US citizens classified as 'enemy combatants' without charges or access to counsel. These actions suggest the failure of government to defend human rights and international law. While Americans persist in practicing freedoms sacrosanct to the foundation of this country, powerful anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and repressive currents continue to swirl.

An ominous indication of this government's callousness toward civil liberties is the Patriot Act. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA-PATRIOT) Act was proposed less than a week after September 11, 2001, and received by the United States Senate on October 24. President Bush signed the USA-PATRIOT Act into law on October 26, 2001. Given the expeditious timeframe within which this legislation was proposed and adopted, one must ask when and why the work on the 132-page document actually began.

The Act passed with little discussion. Without a House, Senate or conference report it lacks the legislative history essential to offering retrospective guidance in statutory interpretation. Injecting a profusion of legislative changes, the Act is in violation of the First, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Act extensively increases the government's capacity to police and investigate. It fails to instate checks and balances necessary to protect civil liberties.

Russ Feingold was the only senator to oppose the Act, concerned about its implications on the rights of immigrants, particularly from Muslim, Arab and South Asian countries. Confirming Senator Feingold's apprehension, 1200 men of Middle Eastern descent were imprisoned, their identity and location undisclosed, and denied due process rights. Eight thousand men were questioned selectively. Entry and exit registration and fingerprinting systems were imposed.

The USA-PATRIOT Act erodes public scrutiny and accountability, and compromises judicial oversight. It makes serious amendments to 15 significant statutes, including the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Immigration and Nationality Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Right to Financial Privacy Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, and Bank Secrecy Act. The Patriot Act amplifies the disclosure of information acquired in criminal investigations related to foreign intelligence or counterintelligence. It impacts the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Patriot Act does not restrict dissemination of information related to investigations of terrorist activities. It adds to the powers of law enforcement agencies and empowers them to conduct searches without a warrant. It expands the subpoena of records of electronic communications.

The powers consecrated to the state via the Patriot Act can have egregious consequences on the social and political life of the people of the United States. Section 802 of the Patriot Act enlarges the definition of terrorism to cover domestic acts of terror. The American Civil Liberties Union has charged that the scope of the definition itself is unlimited. By enveloping domestic terrorism as all acts dangerous to human life, the government may overreach its authority to include property damage or domestic violence as acts of domestic terrorism!

As people in the United States struggle to grasp the impact of the first Patriot Act, this administration is proposing a second and more invasive ˜Domestic Security Enhancement Act." 'Patriot II' is premised on the inherently precarious assumption that the United States will be made safer by rescinding basic checks and balances on governmental power. Reproducing the unprecedented power already sanctioned to government via the first Act, Patriot II will permit the government to spy on activities protected by the First Amendment. This new legislation will remove necessary constraints on government power, undercut personal privacy, and the need for government transparency. It will assail the heart of democracy and impact the access of the press to information. It will scapegoat ordinary people, and undermine the function of the courts and Congress in restricting executive power. Such government excess supersedes the imagination of McCarthyism.

In the United States there has been little effort to assess whether the inadequacies of existing surveillance systems enabled the attacks of September 11, or if the unprecedented changes made by Patriot I and proposed by Patriot II will actually help prevent another attack. The American Civil Liberties Union and other campaigns are insistent that before endorsing Patriot II, Congress must analyze the terms of Patriot I to ensure that it conforms to fundamental constitutional principles.

National security is critical to our times and a commitment to strengthening the nation must include reflection on the part of the state and civil society. On September 11, 2001, four planes were turned into weapons of terror, leaving around 3,000 dead. The attack violated the very premise of humanitarian law and the lives of civilians in the United States. Following September 11, the United Nations Security Council, the G8 Group of Industrialized Nations, and numerous regional alliances implemented fiscal and other controls over political groups resolved to violence. Yet, in so many instances, this determination on the part of nations and coalitions to fight terror has ironically witnessed the revenging of innocent lives, the undermining of human rights and the corrosion of international law.

As the political spectrum narrows, we must energise a different script for citizenship. Ethical citizenship must dissent the use of violence on the part of states and groups. It must be critical of a corporate, military state and its unilateralism. Freedom must come with formidable responsibilities. To be for America, the yearning must be for democracy over empire.

Op-ed, Daily Times, Lahore, July 10, 2003

Op-ed, Asian Age, Daily Newspaper, New Delhi, August 20, 2003

Villages on the Narmada river are frontlines in the struggle for cultural survival. In May 2003, a controversial decision was taken to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam from 95 to 100 meters. Waters swirl around Dhankhedi, Anjanwada, Bharad, Kevadia, Nimgavan, Mokhdi, Dhanale, Manibeli. The police assault those facing submergence, destroying homes, forcibly evicting people, harassing activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. On July 28, 2003, 74 people, including women and children, were arrested in Chimalkhedi village in Maharasthra for protesting displacement.

Sardar Sarovar is the largest dam on the Narmada, one of 30 large, 135 medium and 3,000 small dams planned on the river, whose watershed is home to about 20 million peasants and adivasis. The reservoir will displace 200,000 people. Canals, colonies and afforestation will affect another 200,000.

The river comes unannounced into their fields bringing the stench of rotting crops. Siltation levels are dangerous, captive crocodiles have killed people. In front of Domkedi village, a red flag flutters. Shobha Wagh died on May 22, 2003, trapped in the silt. The very river where people bathed, fished, where children played, their greatest ally, has turned into their most intimate enemy.

The Maharasthra government claims that it has resettled all project affected persons at 100 meters. Untrue. 1,500 families in Maharashtra and 12,000 families in Madhya Pradesh are yet to be rehabilitated at the 100 meter level. The submergence is devastating the lives of people, wildlife and precious ecosystems. The people, treated with contempt and disregard by the state, have nowhere to go.

This state of affairs diverges from the conditions of the Narmada Project Rehabilitation Policy mapped by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. It violates provisions of tribal self-determination directed by Schedule V and VI of the Indian Constitution. Such callousness defies Convention 107 (and 169 to which India is not a signatory) of the International Labour Organisation mandating against the arbitrary separation of indigenous peoples from their traditional survival resources. It contravenes the conditions of the United Nations Charter of Rights for Indigenous Peoples, and disobeys the guidelines drafted by the World Commission on Dams.

The response of the state to people affected by the Sardar Sarovar dam is a crime against humanity that particularly targets women, children, adivasis, dalits and other minorities. This dam is a fearsome testimonial to 'progress' in postcolonial India, where the voices of the marginalised are drowned out in development planning. Their lands and livelihoods are collateral that enable the dreams of the privileged, their cultures and practices seen as a hindrance to the process of modernisation, insufficiently 'productive', lacking in value.

India is intent on building non-viable large dams even as many nations are decommissioning them. As water and electricity pulsates to Ahmedabad, the Narmada people are left without basic amenities, without shelter, clean water, electricity, schools. Where resettlement has been attempted, it is flawed. The rehabilitation process is deceptive and the people's demand for a written Government Resolution (Maharashtra) on Rehabilitation is yet to be met. The Daud Committee of 2001 directs land for land rehabilitation, implying habitable and cultivable land. Repeatedly, the government's resettlement package offers neither. Often the same land is allocated to multiple stakeholders.

Last week, on a solidarity visit to the Narmada Valley, colleagues and I met with members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the prolific and ethical movement whose commitments since 1985 demand our solidarity. We witnessed intensifying resistance as the Satyagraha gains momentum. We met Medha Patkar midstream near Jalsindhi. As our boats paused next to each other, she smiled and spoke in that inimitable way of the struggle ahead that has inspired a generation.

Leaving the Valley we got off the boat near Kadipani, four hours from Baroda, and were stopped and interrogated by the Gujarat police. We were asked to explain our association with Medha Patkar, and accused of coming to the Valley to create disturbances. We were informed that in Narendra Modi's state there are new rules and those deemed suspicious would be detained. Our visit, we were told, would be reported to the government. Another indication of mistreatment in 'Modi's Gujarat', where the state participates in the intimidation of the innocent, in violence against minorities. The very state that was an accomplice in the recent murder of Muslims and obstructs justice today, continues to abuse the rights of the people of the Narmada Valley.

Umesh Patidar, an Andolan activist, was waiting outside the police station. As we said goodbye, Umesh Bhai handed us some food, saying that we had a long road to travel and should have sustenance. Amid all he has to do, amid the horror of his reality, he is caring. It is humbling to witness the strength of the Andolan, its refusal to be made inhuman. A clash of worlds. One where integrity and relationships matter. Another where alienation and greed dominate, where there is no comprehension, or tolerance, of difference.

Proponents see the dam as a leap in science and technology. They assert that the quality of life will significantly improve because of the political and economic decisions made in support of the Sardar Sarovar. Treacherous fictions. Struggles over the shape of the Indian nation in the Narmada Valley, narrate the irrevocable depletion of the country's natural resource base and the brutalisation of the disenfranchised. Sardar Sarovar tells a disparaging story of the destitution of communities, of persistent and invasive inequities. It symbolizes the incapacity of the state to honour lives and aspirations that dare to challenge the inequities of globalization and the tyranny of dominant development.

Who is accountable? The World Bank withdrew in 1993 without redressing the consequences of its involvement. The Governments of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat have failed to abide by legal norms, the Supreme Court to deliver juridical justice. How little democracy functions for the disempowered in India.

The bereaved river rages in despair. Cultural genocide is never justifiable regardless of how much 'economic prosperity' results. The injustices in the Narmada Valley must be scrutinized by international human rights organizations. The government must comply with the rule of law. If history chronicles that the people of the Narmada were indeed drowned out, with them will die ways of being precious to preserving our world, languages, values, spiritualities, imagination and memory. And, if we do not speak up we will have been complicit in this massacre.

In the Narmada Valley, the government is seeking to wrench control over land and livelihood from its poorest citizens. Thirty large, 135 medium and 3,000 small dams are planned on the Narmada river as she journeys through Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The bad news is, over a million lives will be decimated if the project is carried out. About 50 per cent of the affected will be adivasi (tribal) people. Familiar victims of ‘progress’. Adivasi lives and histories are under siege in India, their annexation into maldevelopment a necessary cost of national advancement. It is a war by the state on its people.

The residents of the Narmada Valley are expected to vanish, like vermin, into the crevices of city slums or resettlement colonies. Become a statistic. Join the 350 million Indians living in poverty. In the Narmada Valley, people are policed and brutalised. Stranded, eliminated. Unable to raise crops, families or livestock, build homes, send children to school. Unable to dream any other life but that of righteous resistance. People whose burden is to be the conscience abdicated by the state.

The Narmada Project has made contentious claims that it will bring water to areas where the need for water is immense. The plan is to store and divert the water of the Narmada. All 1312 kilometres of her will be controlled and managed, exemplifying the power of technology and government. The people of the Valley have protested the construction of these dams since the mid-1980’s. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) has advocated the rights of local communities to sustainable development. The Andolan has charged that the Narmada Development Project prioritises the electricity, irrigation, and drinking water needs of the privileged at grave cost to the marginalised.

The Sardar Sarovar multipurpose hydroelectric project is one of the mega dams on the Narmada, expected to produce 1,450 megawatts of power, furnish 30 million people with water, and provide employment for 600,000. The reservoir will flood 91,000 acres of forest and agricultural land. The canal network will mangle another 200,000 acres. The dam will displace 200,000 people. Calculations of costs and benefits are based on assumptions that tribal lives have no value. Small-scale, affordable technologies respectful of local knowledge or the participation of affected people in decision-making escapes the dominant imagination of nation, progress, democracy.

The height of the Sardar Sarovar is directly proportional to the submergence of villages. Following a writ petition by the Narmada Bachao Andolan in 1995, the Supreme Court of India limited the construction of the dam to 80.3 meters. In an interim order in February 1999, the Court sanctioned an increase, raising the height to 85 meters. In October 2000, the Supreme Court allowed another jump to 90 meters. The Supreme Court also upheld the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award mandating land-for-land rehabilitation of all impacted families six months prior to any increase in dam height.

In 2001, the Daud Committee report insisted that any extension in height not be entertained until outstanding rehabilitation issues were addressed. Yet, in May 2002, the Sardar Sarovar dam was expanded from 90 to 95 meters at the insistence of the Narmada Control Authority. Followed by forcible displacement and submergence. Reciprocal rehabilitation was never undertaken.

On May 14, 2003, the Indian government decided to further increase the height of the Sardar Sarovar Project to 100 meters. The Madhya Pradesh government has moved to offer cash compensation claiming that there is no land on which to resettle the displaced.

Five more feet. Medha Patkar, whose dedication has galvanised the Andolan, protested this decision and was arrested on May 20. Most of us barely notice, intent on escaping the inconvenience of insight, while around us lives, held distant and insignificant, fall apart. One hundred villages will be buried in Madhya Pradesh and twenty-six in Maharashtra, with no provisions for just rehabilitation. Over 12,000 families will be drowned out. Where will the people go? For adivasis and small farmers, the colossal dam stands as a grotesque vessel of modernity enraging the river that gives them life.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, complicitious in the carnage against Muslim minorities in 2002, and Congress Chief Ministers, Sushil Kumar Shinde of Maharashtra and Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh, are silent about the implications of this decision. Perhaps the plan is to erect the dam to the original height of 138 meters?

Fifty years of dam building. Over thirty-three million displaced. Is this development? What of the accountability of a nation to its people? What is development but a commitment to rethink the inequities of history through ethical growth? In the imagination of India, the disenfranchised are a liability. They hold the nation back. They do not find legitimacy in the model of combative and centralised development that the state embraces.

The misadventures of modernisation in India have generated intense conflicts over environmental management, cultural survival and the cartography of development. It has made necessary oppositional struggles in response to the chronic failures of human rights. Land alienation, large dams, fishing trawlers, mining, loss of common property, caste, gender and religious violence, state violence, water privatisation, pollution, soil erosion, forest evictions, displacement, irresponsible corporatisation. On and on. The list of national `accomplishments'. Testimony to the enormity of social rupture.

What will it take? During the submergence in Domkhedi and Jalsindhi last year, people in the Narmada Valley protested in neck deep water. They went on a hunger strike, stood in front of bulldozers. The Narmada Andolan has profoundly expanded the script of non-violent resistance in the present. In refusing to be made docile, thousands and thousands of people have enacted steadfast dissent for almost two decades. International solidarity, the World Commission on Dams, horizontal alliances, research, advocacy. These actions of democratic practice are dependent upon the nations capacity to listen. What more will it take?

The tyranny of dogmatic Hinduism and Islam promotes and sustains cycles of violence in South Asia. The crusade of Islamic fundamentalism in the region is a recognized fact in response to which there is an increasing, and often strategically ineffectual, assemblage of force and political will. Hindu militancy in India is yet to receive similar scrutiny. Its rampage on secular India has been growing, with devastating consequences. The current elections in Gujarat are testimony to this.

In Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 127 of 181 seats. The BJP, compliant in the post-Godhra slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat, has been exonerated. The judge and jury have been the electorate, organized and delivered by the Hindu supremacist movement. In Gujarat, the party has rewarded the Hindutva movement's use of hate and terror to divide and conquer. In return the BJP has been repaid with votes. What does this mean for India?

The BJP heads a 20 party coalition at the center. It has instigated and utilized Ayodhya and Gujarat for considerable electoral gains. It is aided by, among others, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). The VHP (World Hindu Council) is Hindutva's ideological platform, intent on consolidating its singular and violent mission to pulverize India into a Hindu extremist state. It is rallying to slay the opponents of Hindutva, and those committed to a secular India tolerant of the faithful and irreligious that inhabit its reality. Hindutva is well mobilized, well funded and well armed. Its ideology is venomous, its propaganda effective. Most Indians are watching their ascent in horror. The international community is silent. The conditions for a Kristallnacht are in place.

In a recent press conference, the VHP has declared that Muslims and other minorities will be subordinate citizens in India. In a democracy, the majority community has an ethical responsibility to enable affirmative action so disenfranchised minority class and ethnic groups can overcome institutionalized injustices. While the disbursement of affirmative action has been less than ideal, the Hindutva movement interprets its very existence as an absurd "accommodation" of minority demands.

Indian nationalism has been built at the prerogative of the Hindu elite, even while the Indian state confers rights to diverse individuals and communities within its borders. This has made India a vibrant democracy and a difficult country to govern. The disempowered have organized to demand that the state grant them their rights. India is a nation where 350 million live in conditions of poverty. Poor rural women labor 1.5 workdays. The police are often complicit in perpetrating social violence. Gay, lesbian and transgender communities, the elderly and disabled, have few rights. Educational opportunities for adivasis (tribals) are appalling. Irresponsible development displaces the poor without any refuge. Sikhs have faced persecution, Muslims, dalits and other minorities are often ostracized, and Christians have been forcibly converted to Hinduism. The response by the state and its citizens has been inadequate, at best.

Forces of resistance continue to challenge the dominance of the Hindu elite and middle class. In response, Hindutva revivalism seeks to consolidate the power of the majority through militant reform that defines Hindu majoritarianism as Indian nationalism. This majoritarianism makes secularism subservient to Hindu nationalism. Such an agenda requires that Hindutva assimilate the plural traditions within Hinduism to create a narrow centralized code that promises to unite Hindus. These principles are philosophically Brahmanical and universalistic, in action segregationist. This strategy thwarts the complex search for cultural identity that confronts the vast diversity of Indians living at the intersections of pre and post modernity, inequitable modernization and globalism. To realize its mission, Hindutva defines minority interests as oppositional to Hindu, and therefore national, interest. The struggles for justice of groups organized around ethnicity, religion, class, caste, tribe, gender, or culture become hostile to national unity. Hindutva is anathema to democracy.

Hindu militancy is on the rise, and minority groups are the major victims of this sectarian violence. Delhi, 1984, Gujarat, 2002, Ahmedabad, 1969. Hyderabad, 1981, Bhiwandi, 1984, Moradabad, 1980, Assam, 1983, Aligarh, 1978, Ayodhya, 1992. On and on. Muslim minorities in India are a primary target of Hindutva's wrath, whose master narrative de-emphasizes Hindu-Muslim coexistence, and creates grievous misrepresentations of Indian Muslims as monolithic, anti-national, violent, and without exception allied with Islamic fundamentalism. In the Hindutva imagination, the village Muslim whose identity is shaped by kinship, region, language, and culture becomes synonymous with the Taliban.

It is terrifying that so many have responded with such vigor to the call of Hindutva. What counter movements, what capacity building, are necessary to disrupt this campaign of hate and genocide? How can the agenda for a tolerant and democratic India be made central to all action at the grassroots level, within institutions, political parties, trade unions, social movements, schools and universities, non governmental organizations, families and neighborhoods, public and private life?

Secularism in India has been fraught with contention. Secularism as a strategy to oppose communalism is increasingly defunct. Critics of the modern nation state and purists dispute secularism as impossible and imposed. Hindutva argues that secularism will destroy Hindu India. With increased communalization, secularism has become a bargaining tool in national politics, used to deceitful advantage by most political parties, a pretense useful in appeasing minority groups. Secular reform with a conscience has been marginalized within the Indian polity to accommodate Hindu hegemony. It limits necessary conversations regarding religious reform or a meaningful role for faith in our times.

If India is to endure, it is crucial that we conceive a nation where a profusion of cultures and histories coexist with equal rights, weaving a script for citizenship and change that is multicultural, hopeful, and pregnant with possibility. Inclusive and respectful of all.

[Kristallnacht, or "the Night of Broken Glass" is the pogrom carried out against the Jewish people in Germany and in the acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland in 1938. The Nazi Regime orchestrated the pogrom.]

Op-ed, Daily Times, Lahore, July 21, 2002

Dissident Voice, US, July 2002

America's war with Iraq is about deception, control, and the violation of local and international will. This war is not about freedom. It is about a superpower asserting itself in a unilateral world. Iraq, a repository of oil reserves, the second largest after Saudi Arabia, must be disciplined and punished. At the announcement of war, the Dow rallied over 282 points. The Bush administration prepares to bestow 900 million dollars to domestic firms in post war contracts for rebuilding Iraq. Who benefits from this war economy?

The impenetrable Bush coalition is ready. Foreign missions have been evacuated, armies mobilised, and body bags ordered. The call for war has been given. Ships roll in rough seas ready to parachute bombs which to wipe out evil must murder the innocent. President Bush, defining this as a war of "liberation", says that the United Nations has not lived up to its responsibilities. Are his actions responsible?

Information available betrays this administration's logic for war. The United States claimed to have destroyed 80 percent of Iraq's military capacity in 1991. Since then, the United States and the United Kingdom have administered air strikes and deluged Iraq with explosives. So, what is this war about? Is it to protect the Kurds or Jews in Iraq, perhaps, given Saddam Hussein's animosity toward minorities and alliance with Palestine? But Kurds were betrayed in the last war and Iraqi Jews have chosen to remain in Iraq, in a society where frayed remnants of secularism endure. Osama Bin Laden? There is no evidence that links Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. Truth refuses alliance with this war. In the minds of many Americans this war is retribution for September 11. A vengeful war that desecrates the memory of those who died on that fatal day. Is it about nuclear weapons? Iraq has none. The United States possesses 10,729 nuclear warheads and is the only country to have used atomic weapons in a war. There is no evidence to imply that Saddam Hussein will use chemical and biological weapons against America, weapons Iraq developed in the 1980s, ironically, with the knowledge and support of the United States. Regional security? Does America care if Iraq violates its "lesser" neighbours? The United States did not castigate Iraq when Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 in the Kurdish town of Halabja. Let us remember as well that the United States used 19 million gallons of Agent Orange in Vietnam. How does a nation with blood on its hands attempt to hijack the moral high ground?

Iraq, the land of ancient civilisation, heritage to all, drawn from the memories of Mesopotamia. A culture which connects us from prehistory to history. The triumphs and tribulations of Assyrians, Chaldeans, Akkadians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Israelites, Lydians, Phoenicians, Persians have birthed its imagination. A multitude of religions, tribes and ethnicities has produced a profusion of art, music, religion, mythology, architecture, literature, and history. A land desecrated by corrupt regimes and untold horrors. Long forgotten is the Baath Party's commitment to a socialist revolution, to equity and freedom. And now, a crusade led by America that only promises torment and adds to Iraq's grief. This war will reinforce Islamic fundamentalists, marginalise progressive Muslims and strengthen the religious right. This war will escalate a thousand-fold the terrorist threat that terrifies people the world over. How shall we make President Bush understand? Millions have marched, people and governments have pleaded their dissent. They have failed to produce conscience and reason in the Bush presidency, or a commitment to international coalition building and bilateral relations. Should the world impose sanctions on America?

The Iraqi people want to be free of torture and fear, of the despot Saddam Hussein. At what cost? By whose will? They have not asked the United States to intervene. What of the retaliation, as Iraq signals the war, firing at three Kurdish villages north of Kirkuk? Eight hundred thousand Iraqi civilians died from the environmental and infrastructural impact of America's first war with Iraq. Since 1991, there has been a 600 percent increase in cancers. Infant mortality rates have increased by 260 percent. It is over 12 years since the United Nations introduced Resolution 661, imposing ruinous sanctions against Iraq. Sanctions that have killed 1,684,850 since 1991, 704,162 of them children under five. Has all this made peace? A full-fledged war will induce 500,000 casualties in Iraq, leave 50 percent of the population without access to water, displace 2 million people, and create 600,000 refugees. Insolent actions of Empire. They portend dangerous consequences. Attending to the post war crisis will force UN agencies to redirect emergency funds from war torn Africa or refugees returning to Afghanistan. Will our world be safer?

Iraq possesses 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, of grave concern for regional and international security. In the first Gulf War, 700 oil wells burned for nine months, discharging toxic clouds that blinded the sun. Sixty million gallons of crude oil were unleashed into the environment, wounding the desert with 246 craters of congealed oil, damaging the coast for 1,500 miles. Eight hundred tons of depleted uranium were used in Iraq during the Gulf War, 300 tons of it scattered across Kuwait and southern Iraq. The beautiful marshes, the rivers, the skies, the seas rage in mourning. The desert is filled with trepidation. Where is our compassion?

Justice is not lucrative in the world order to which we acquiesce. Do we want to feed the hungry and shelter the displaced? Because we can. The world spends 800+ billion dollars each year in military outlays. In 2002, the United States alone spent 518.9 billion in military and related expenditure. Ninety-seven ships, attack helicopters, smart bombs, a 1000 fighter jets, and 250,000 soldiers march into Iraq. Each day at war will cost American taxpayers 517 million dollars. In contrast, the United Nations estimates that an annual allocation of 80 billion dollars would make available fundamental necessities and mitigate poverty for the underprivileged across the globe. Where is the will for ethical change?

The drums roll for combat. I think about women and men in Iraq, about children afraid in the shadows, about dreams in which they struggle to rest. What a mess we have made of this world. In San Francisco, opposition to this war is prodigious, as I write, in dissent and with all the failings of hope. When will we be heard?

The mobilisation of Hindutva across the United States has damaging effects on the business community, academy, and society at large. It impacts how culture is shaped and community built in diaspora. It affects how decisions connected to India are made, collapsing Indian issues into Hindu issues. It influences how funding is allocated at universities, curriculum developed, temple organisation undertaken, development aid disbursed, and hate campaigns mounted against minority and progressive groups.

In the United States, funding for Hindu extremism is lavish and contentious. Amidst the recent exposure of the India Development and Relief Fund's collection of hate money for harmful development in India, the Indian community is divided on the issue of supporting development through Hindutva affiliated organisations. Development is increasingly a vehicle through which the conscription for Hindu rightwing extremism takes place. The actions of Ekal Vidyalaya, Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, Vivekananda Kendra, Sewa Bharati and other groups offer incriminating evidence of this. As Hindu nationalism infects the grassroots across India, Indians in the United States are questioning the consequences of financing Hindutva.

As we watch, L. K. Advani, Praveen Togadia and Narendra Modi continue their outrageous crusade, building support for an authoritarian Hindu nationalist movement. Intent on demonstrating the incompatibility of according minorities equal citizenship in India, the Sangh Parivar is popularising the contemptible idea of India as a Hindu nation that "tolerates minorities even better" than democratically challenged Pakistan or Bangladesh. In the nightmare of India's present, secularism is fast becoming a commitment that the nation is willing to betray. It is prevalent to claim India as a Hindu nation, at least a nation of "soft Hindutva". Hindutva, soft Hindutva, moderate Hindutva, ideologies soft on genocide. India is a secular republic, inclusive of diverse faith and non-faith groups. How can an India no longer committed to secularism remain committed to democracy?

The acceptability of a Hindu nation is predicated on the infidelity of non-Hindus, and assumptions of Muslim and Christian betrayal are imperative to legitimating Hindutva. The Sangh is assembling the political, social and economic conditions in which to be non-Hindu in India is no longer tenable, offering genocide as a "rational" response to the untruth of betrayal. What does loyalty look like when you are disempowered, afraid, discriminated against? Have we asked ourselves that as a nation?

Diaspora Indians must acknowledge the ascent of authoritarianism and tyranny in India and stop Sangh apologists in the United States from justifying hatred in the name of cultural nationalism. Organisations in the United States supporting India's development must recognise the necessity of secularising development, and be vigilantly critical of development administered by sectarian organisations. Development implemented by institutions affiliated with the Sangh Parivar only lays the groundwork for hate and civil polarisation. It fundamentally violates the terms on which disenfranchised communities wish to determine their right to life and livelihood. Dalits, adivasis, Christians, Hindus and Muslims across India speak of how their villages and watersheds intertwine, how crops are dependent on the run-off water from each other's lands, and how they cannot afford to hate each other. In the guise of implementing development, Hindutva promotes malignant fictions that Christian missionary activity is placing Hinduism at risk, that Muslims are reproducing at a rate that threatens the Hindu majority of India.

Among adivasi communities, such "development" inflicts their forcible incorporation into Hinduism. This is unacceptable even if adivasis materially benefit from development because it facilitates cultural genocide. Adivasi self-determination movements have been struggling to rewrite the history of assimilation to which they have been subjected. The interpretation that they are an "underclass" of Hindus, who, with necessary evolution, may return to the fold is blatant ethnocentrism. Hinduisation is a ruinous process of colonisation. Such practice is unethical regardless of who undertakes it and how much economic development results.

Indians in America working for India's development must prioritise the self-determination of local communities, and struggle against the institutionalised inequities of caste, religion, tribe, class and gender. They cannot base their aspirations for India's future on the absurdly unsustainable development modelled by the United States or support the frameworks of cultural annihilation through which development is imagined and modernisation attempted by the Sangh. It is not a matter of building wells or developing roads, it is also a matter of deciding how needs and priorities are determined, access and decision making is enabled, how cultural difference is affirmed and identity politics supported. Development is the construction of political will toward rethinking inequitable relations of power. It is a mechanism expected to produce equity and ensure the human rights of the poor. This is possible only if we work with local movements to develop secular frameworks for change.

Those affiliated with Hindutva in the United States must be contested as they fashion an India of their imagination. The intensity and power of becoming in this new world, amidst vast differences, racism, assimilation, forces of homogenisation, is compounded by a hollow disconnection from what is most meaningful -- culture, home, identity, history. The greater the alienation, the greater the desire to grasp at fiction. In this abyss of diaspora, myths originate of an India that never was or should be. These myths nurture dreams where the Hindu prabashi (ex-patriot) can return to purge the motherland from impurities, to cleanse what is polluted, to restore honour and claim victory.

In the United States, the fervour of long distance Hindutva nationalism is intense. Dangerous stories circulate. Muslims are polygamous terrorists whose deliberate identification and massacre in Gujarat is justifiable, even necessary. The campaign for trifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir is logical. Ayodhya is a defensible expression of cultural pride. In this unreflective chasm of proxy nationalism, a substantial community is supportive of Hindutva or unconcerned with its wretchedness. Others misrepresent that support for a Hindu India is not support for Hindutva, only pride in the glory of India's past, so from it one might craft India's future. To rail, as so many do, against the persistence of structural inequities, of the horrors of history, of the politics of caste and cows in the present, is only to bear incriminating evidence of one's own bastardisation, loss of purity, lack of faith and pride in "Indianness". What is this Indianness? Indic culture, chaste, beautiful, Hindu, despoiled by conquest and colonisation. How is it manifest, fortified? A return to its origins, a proclamation of its sanctity. What is left out? The reality of India.

Last updated: October 2004