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| Activists in the Hindu-nationalist group Shiv Sena burned photos of major Congress Party officials during a rally in New Delhi
on Sunday. Rajeshkumar Singh/AP |
India canal plan runs into Hindu god
A government-led effort to dredge a canal through a holy Hindu waterway caused riots two weeks ago that left two people dead.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the September 26, 2007 edition
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New Delhi - When Swami Vigyananand speaks of the canal-dredging project in the narrow strait between India and Sri Lanka, his voice rises in anger.
He is not an environmentalist or local fisherman. He sits in his Delhi office in the orange robes of a Hindu pilgrim. And this faith feeds his frustration. Making a canal for freighters though the shoals near Sri Lanka will destroy the remains of a land bridge built by the god Rama, Swami Vigyananand and other Hindu fundamentalists say.
Worse, perhaps, is the argument the government made in favor of the project in a recent court affidavit: there is no proof that Rama ever existed.
Two weeks ago, the ensuing furor killed two people – burned alive in a bus doused with fuel. The affidavit has been withdrawn, and the minister whose office wrote it has offered to resign. But its assertions and their attendant violence hint at India's struggle to reconcile its increasing modernity and diversity with an ancient religion practiced by 80 percent of its citizens.
For Vigyananand, it was confirmation of his worst fears – that the government of India has lost its Hindu soul, mortgaging the site one of Hinduism's most treasured stories for a 30-hour shipping shortcut.
"India is acting as the enemy of Hindus," says Vigyananand, who is an official for the World Hindu Council, a strident pro-Hindu organization.
Vigyananand adheres to Hindutva, the Hindus-first ideology that peaked a decade ago and is most often turned against Muslims and Christians. The controversy over Ram's Bridge, however, is a reminder that Hindutva is still woven through Indian politics like a saffron thread.
That it should be turned against a new shipping lane is not surprising, say some experts. The left-center alliance that governs India is weak, damaged by its insistence on pushing through the nuclear deal with America without legislative tinkering. Ram's Bridge is merely another issue with which right-wing opposition might poke the government, prodding it toward early elections, perhaps.
It is typical Indian politics, say experts. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government pursued the project when they were in power from 1999 to 2004. Now it is to their advantage to attack it.
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