Topic started by Ayesha Ahmad (@ cache1-2.ruh.isu.net.sa) on Sat Jul 20 09:37:31 .
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Militant Attacks Against Muslims Do Not Represent Hinduism: Experts
By Ayesha Ahmad, Washington Correspondent
http://www.islamonline.org/english/news/2002-07/20/article01.shtml
WASHINGTON, July 20 (IslamOnline) - The growing Hindu militant movement in India is not only responsible for the recent violence against religious minorities, especially Muslims in Gujarat, but also reflects badly on the Hindu religion, according to a panel of experts in Washington.
"The irony [is] that the violence in Gujarat is at the hands of those who claim to be protectors of Hindu… high culture," said panelist Bruce Robertson, chairman of South Asia Area Studies at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.
For the vast majority of Hindus, "This is not the Gujarat that they know."
Robertson was referring to the recent and ongoing bloodshed of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat, perpetrated by organized mobs of Hindu militants following a brutal ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu primacy.
Their promotion of the conversion of what they consider "lapsed Hindus" - Indians who converted to Islam or Christianity - back to Hinduism, is not part of Hindu tradition at all, Robertson said, calling it "completely out of sync with the tenor of Hindu dharma."
Robertson was part of a panel on religion and politics in India during a day-long symposium on South Asia on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Policy Institute for Religion and State, held Thursday, July 18, 2002.
The panel on religion and politics was moderated by Nina Shea of the Commission on International Religious Freedom, who began the session by expressing her disappointment that "the world's largest democracy" has been placed on watch lists for religious violence.
Another speaker, Dr. Lise McKean, deputy director of the Center for Impact Research, insisted that the militant Hindu movement is a minority group claiming to represent Hinduism.
Sangh Parivar's Nazism-influenced ideology centers around "purging their holy land of non-Hindus," she said.
She warned U.S. officials of the pervasiveness of militant Hindu nationalists, or Sangh Parivar, saying they have espoused anti-democratic and anti-secular ideals before and after India's independence from Britain in 1947.
McKean pointed out that the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Atal Behari Vajpayee, attended his first officer's training meeting with the militant party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1940.
The attacks in Gujarat, she said, were carried out only when the militants were certain they could count on political and police support.
Panelist John Dayal, general secretary of the All India Christian Council, said that this state support was part of the legacy of India and Pakistan's brutal birthing pains in 1947, when more than a million people were killed on both sides.
"The state has become an accomplice," he said of Gujarat, explaining that the failure of the government to set up truth-seeking commissions to investigate acts of bloodshed during partition paved the way for further abuses of government.
"Until this ghost [of partition] is exorcised, we will never be able to exorcise Gujarat," he said.
Dayal explained what he called the "meta-experience" of one act of violence in Gujarat - the rape and brutal murder of a pregnant Muslim woman and her unborn child - which has become the story of every Muslim woman there, as though each actually experiences it herself.
The level of horror reaches every part of the state, so that not only are individuals affected by the violence, but all of "civil society has been jolted by the meta-experience of Gujarat."
He had a message for the U.S. as well - to see Hindutva for what it really is, and to focus the war on terrorism on cutting off terrorism at its roots.
"The U.S. is waging war on terrorism - more power to it," he said. "But I think this war will succeed if we stop the birth of terrorists."
Other panel discussions during the day-long symposium focused on nuclear issues and economic development.
The panel on religion and politics was initiated by a speech from an Indian Hindu religious leader, Shri Jagadguru Shankaracharya, who spoke in Hindi while a translator rendered his speech in English for the audience.
Shankaracharya insisted that politicians in India were trying to use religion to further their own ends because they know that they can incite religious sentiments among the people. He condemned the Hindu violence against other religious minorities in India, saying that such acts went against the teachings of all religions.
He said such people were not human, and if they were not human, they could not be Hindu, Muslim or Christian.
Echoing some of the other panelists, he also warned the U.S. to be aware of elements within India's ruling system that aided terrorist activities, but he did not specify which elements or levels of government.
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