Hard-line pro-Hindu rhetoric colors Indian elections

Ten years ago last week, Hindu rioters tore down a 600-year-old Muslim mosque in India's most populous state. At the time, most Indian politicians decried it - and the subsequent riots that claimed the lives of 6,000 nationwide - as acts of Hindu chauvinism.

Today, many of those same Indian politicians have taken up that chauvinism as the driving force of Indian politics.

Just how far Hindutva, or Hindu-ness, can continue as a national political force will be seen in a series of state elections starting today in the western state of Gujarat. Even after Hindu-Muslim riots this past spring killed 1,000 Gujaratis - mostly Muslims - the two main parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are unapologetically trying to out-Hindu each other, fielding candidates who pledge to protect the Hindu way of life.

The Gujarat campaign concluded Tuesday with incendiary speeches by two local BJP officials. "Muslims and the police will kill the Hindus," if the BJP is not reelected, Jaydeep Barot told a large crowd of Hindu farmers. Another BJP official in Gujarat called the political campaign a religious war.

"There is no doubt that if the BJP wins big, there will be BJP functionaries who will try out the same thing in other states," says Kanti Bajpai, political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "But now in addition to communal riots, the politicians will also see terrorism as a permanent communal divide, so that the majority Hindus feel constantly under threat."

Sharp divisions among India's five or six major religions, dozens of major languages, and thousands of castes tend to be muted in day-to-day life. This, many historians argue, is the real genius of India's 5,000-year-old civilization. Lacking armies that could repel invaders - from Aryan nomads to Mughal princes to the British - India has survived by raising the white flag of defeat, and then absorbing the invaders with hardly a ripple.

But since independence, Indian politicians have used these communal divides as a form of power, unifying members of a common religion, race, or caste against a perceived enemy within the country. These internal divisions have brought India as much bloodshed as any external enemy ever could. The technique is so pervasive for most Indians that "communal" is a negative term.

The case study for communal politics is Gujarat, birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and a key industrial state. There, leaders of the BJP, including chief minister Narendra Modi, have promised to protect the Hindu majority against any Muslim agitation.

This strategy has worked wonders for the BJP, especially after a horrifying February attack, when apparently Muslim thugs torched a train full of Hindu pilgrims in the town of Godhra, killing 50. The attack led to three months of unfettered riots.

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