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173 lines
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From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 16 10:42:56 2002
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Message-Id: <3D85326C.7010801@lig.net>
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From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net>
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Subject: Slaughter in the Name of God
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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 21:22:52 -0400
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An old Indian friend forwarded this to me a while ago.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A58173-2002Mar7¬Found=true
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Slaughter in the Name of God
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By Salman Rushdie
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Friday, March 8, 2002; Page A33 Washington Post
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The defining image of the week, for me, is of a small child's burned and
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blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the
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remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, in India. The murder
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of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily
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killings of unwanted girl babies . . . the massacre of innocents in
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Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s when village turned against neighboring
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village . . . the massacre of Sikh children in Delhi during the
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horrifying reprisal murders that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination:
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They bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in
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evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in
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kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or
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smothering them or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length
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of wood.
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I say "our" because I write as an Indian man, born and bred, who loves
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India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is
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potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India's
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strengths, then India's sins must be mine as well. Do I sound angry?
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Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India
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undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in more than a
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decade, many people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed
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or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men's
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unwillingness to defend the citizens of India, without regard to
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religion, by saying that these men have feelings too and are subject to
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the same sentiments as the nation in general.
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Meanwhile, India's political masters have been tut-tutting and offering
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the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control.
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(It has escaped nobody's notice that the ruling party, the Bharatiya
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Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People's Party, and the Hindu extremists
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of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, are sister
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organizations and offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some
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international commentators, such as Britain's Independent newspaper,
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urge us to "beware excess pessimism."
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The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're used
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to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how life is,
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folks. Most of the time India is the world's largest secular democracy;
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and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy religious steam, we
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mustn't let that distort the picture.
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Of course, there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992,
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when a VHP mob demolished a 400-year-old Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, which
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they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu
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fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some
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Muslims were ready to give it to them. Their murderous attack on the
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train-load of VHP activists at Godhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes
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of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the train-load during the
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partition riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists' hands.
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The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and
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insufficient radicalism of India's BJP government. Prime Minister Atal
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Bihari Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a
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coalition government and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP's
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more extreme Hindu nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together.
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But it isn't working anymore. In state elections across the country, the
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BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP
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firebrands. Why put up with the government's betrayal of their fascistic
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agenda when that betrayal doesn't even result in electoral success?
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The electoral failure of the BJP is thus, in all probability, the spark
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that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the
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site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque -- that's where the Godhra dead
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were coming from -- and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically,
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tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee
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has insisted that the slow Indian courts must decide the rights and
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wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait.
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The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to India's
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president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP
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hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing "too little too
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late." She pins the blame firmly on the "motivated, well-planned out and
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provocative actions" of the Hindu nationalists. But another writer, the
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Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the
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violence erupted, denounced India's Muslims en masse and praised the
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nationalist movement.
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The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in
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her letter demands "stern legal action" against them. But the VHP is
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determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such
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public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting
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them, Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism and disgraces
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the Nobel award.
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The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's
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something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face:
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namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is
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the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no
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excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in
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the fashionable language of "respect." What is there to respect in any
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of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around
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the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results,
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religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And
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when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results
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makes it easier to do it again.
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So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in
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India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
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Salman Rushdie is a novelist and author of the forthcoming essay
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collection "Step Across This Line."
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<EFBFBD> 2002 The Washington Post Company
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sdw
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--
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sdw@lig.net http://sdw.st
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Stephen D. Williams 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622
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703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Dec2001
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