The Hindu Right’s contemporary targeting of Muslim and Christian religious minorities may be traced to the 1990s. The Muslim community in Bhadrak was targeted through massified violence in March 1991. In January 1999, Graham Staines, 58, Australian missionary, and his 10 and 6-year-old sons were murdered in Keonjhar district. In August 1999, Shiekh Rahman, a Muslim clothes merchant, was mutilated and burned to death in a public execution at the weekly market in Mayurbhanj. In September 1999, Catholic priest Arul Das was murdered in Mayurbhanj, followed by the destruction of churches in Kandhamal.

Hindutva activists amalgamated their position and established crucial networks within the state government through relief work in the aftermath of the cyclone that left approximately 10,000 dead in Odisha in October-November of 1999.

In 2005, I had the privilege of convening the Indian People’s Tribunal on Communalism in Orissa (name changed to Odisha in 2011) with valued colleagues. Leading up to this, in February 2004, seven Dalit Christian women and a male pastor were tonsured by upper caste and Hindu-identified Dalit neighbours, against their will, signifying their ‘return’ to Hinduism. This event took place in Jagatsinghpur district, in Kilipal village. In August 2004, Our Lady of Charity Catholic Church was vandalised in Raikia and eight Christian homes torched. The Raikia incident led to broad-based economic and social ghettoization of the Christian community.

The report of our people’s tribunal, published in September 2006, detailed mobilisations by Hindutva (ideology and political aspiration of the Hindu Right)-affiliated organisations, including in Kandhamal, and highlighted those in incubation, making recommendations in a preventive and injunctive capacity. Despite the scope of its findings, the report did not summon reflection or action on part of the state or central government.

The mass atrocities of December 2007 and August 2008 in Kandhamal, Odisha, devastated the Christian community and sent shock waves through the  body politic. These episodes of violence primarily impacted economically marginalised Adivasi and Dalit Christian communities.

In 2007, the attacks began on December 25 (Christmas) and continued for several days. Mobs destroyed dozens of Christian churches and hundreds of Christian homes. Following the violence of 2007, majoritarian discourse named Christians as “conversion terrorists,” and numbers and rates of conversion to Christianity were inflated. That Adivasis and Dalits elect to convert to Christianity in India to escape the malignant stronghold of caste oppression, is suppressed. In January 2008, majoritarian activists reportedly claimed that they had succeeded in (forcibly) converting more than ten thousand Christians to Hinduism in Odisha in 2007.

The next episode of Hindu nationalist violence targeting the Christian community took place in Kandhamal district during August 24-26 and continued through October 28. Predominantly middle-class and middle-caste Hindu crowds participated in the violence, perpetrating rape, mutilation, and murder, and engaged in looting and the destruction and torching of property with rods, tridents, swords, kerosene, crude bombs, and guns.

It is approximated that 75 to 123 people were killed and more than 18,000 persons were injured. Approximately 4,901 homes were partly or wholly destroyed. More than 264 churches were decimated. Approximately 25,000 to 40,000 persons were displaced from around 450 villag­es. Thousands sought refuge in near­by forests and makeshift relief camps.

The political actions and inactions of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) Government facilitated the reach of Hindu nationalists during the violence. The delayed and inadequate response of the Government of Odisha and Government of India enabled the violence to continue for as long as it did. The extent of the violence and coordination of attacks across the mountainous terrain of Kandhamal corroborated that the violence was planned, premeditated, and that, in various instances, the police had prior knowledge of Hindutva groups’ operational plan.

The Government of Odisha carried out misinformation campaigns and ethnicised the violence, failing to hold Hindu nationalists accountable. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and BJD coalition government at the state level aided in cementing institutional support for Hindutva. Odisha 2007 and 2008 rendered visible how Christians, many of Adivasi and Dalit descent, and majoritar­ian Hindus have been divided by the very social and historical proximities that have shaped them.

Justice Denied

In response to widespread targeting during instances of massified violence, the Indian government has routinely utilised ad hoc commissions of inquiry with recommendatory powers. Affected communities have been excluded from conversations regarding accountability, negating the possibility of configuring durable mechanisms to interrupt the climate of impunity, abuse, and mistrust.

In Odisha, the 2007-Justice Panigrahi commission submitted its report in 2015. The report of the Justice Mohapatra commission, following 2008, was submitted by Justice Naidu in December 2015, after the passing of Justice Mohapatra in 2012.

The Commissions following the violence of Delhi 1984, Gujarat 2002, and Odisha 2007 and 2008 have been reportedly compro­mised by alleged political interference and inefficiency. They failed to assess liability, “who did what to whom,” and expose systemic and collective vulnerabilities and their pernicious effects for minority communities and victimised-survivors of sexualised violence.

These recommendatory bodies were not truth com­missions, and differed sharply in form and consequence from transitional and transformative justice approaches. These commissions were not concerned with estab­lishing the legitimacy and ethics of the state system itself or the obligation to secure justice through implementing the right to effective remedy. (Conflicted Democracies, P 106-107.)

The four substantive components of the right to a remedy; the right to justice, right to truth, right to reparations, and guarantee of non-recurrence, affirm the obligations of states to prevent violations and respond to violations when they do occur, through investigations, prosecutions, appropriate punishment, and reparations and psychosocial restitution for victims.

The failures of the state following 2007 and 2008 contributed significantly to the expansion of the Hindu Right in Odisha and beyond, and to the precariousness of vulnerable and minority communities today.

The unchecked spread of majoritarianism in India through the decades during which Hindu nationalists were not in elected office created political and legal contexts whereby the project of Hinduising India can now occupy centre stage in government.

Majoritarian State

The Hindu Right’s popular victory in the 2014 and 2019 elections expanded the power captured by the  Narendra Modi-led BJP.

Inherently Brahmanical, hetero-patriarchal, the government led by Modi incorporates four features: populism, nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism. This illiberal dispensation evidences a disregard for social facts, democratic debate and reasoned dissent, secular institutions, and the rule of law. Asser­tions that internal and external enemies are an imminent danger to the nation, the targeting of dissent as ‘anti-national,’ and minoritisation and Islamophobia fracture the fault lines of an already conflicted democracy.

Seizing land rights of the targeted-Other, occupying spaces significant to them, intensifying social and economic boycott of minorities, and effectuating violence and social death are practices utilised by majoritarian nationalists. Corresponding actions inflicted on minority/marginalised communities, enacted by government, judiciary, state forces and mobs fracture identity and community, material culture, psychosocial well-being, livelihood, and belonging.

Impunity laws, exemplified by the Odisha Freedom of Religion Act (1967) and the Odisha Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act (1960), assisted in criminalising Christian and Muslim peoples in Odisha. Prohibiting cow and cattle slaughter and forcible conversion to Hinduism continue as prevalent strategies used by the Hindu Right. As of 2011, Odisha’s population numbered 39.9 million. Odisha Christians numbered 1,161,708 per the Census of 2011, 2.8 percent of the state’s population (2.4 percent in 2001). Odisha Muslims numbered 9,11,670, 2.2 percent of the state’s population (2.1 percent in 2001). These figures indicate marginal growth since 2001, contradicting the discourse popularised by Hindu nationalists.

“Citizenship” laws today aim to determine who may be accorded  political and civil rights, and target minority communities, especially Muslims. They are akin to the Nuremberg Laws instituted in September 1935 in Nazi Germany. Correspondingly, the Indian government commenced a siege on Kashmir in August 2019, countermanding it’s autonomy. The partisan state unfolds in varying registers, constitutive of states of exception without-end. The rage and arrogance that fuels the Hindu Right draws lifeblood from the heinous annals of history, weaponising religion and demonising difference.

Following the 2014 elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh reportedly witnessed “the highest growth since 1925,” with 56,859 shakhas (branches) reportedly operational across India in 2016. In February 2018, RSS leader Mohan Bhagat stated that, if called upon, the organisation was positioned to mobilize an army within three days.

In Odisha, the BJP secured 10 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections. In 2017, there were 91 incidents of recorded communal violence in Odisha. In 2019, the BJP secured 23 seats in the Odisha Assembly elections.

In October 2019, the policy-making unit of the RSS announced that its  annual meeting would be held in Odisha, to further cement the BJP’s position in the state. The same year, the RSS recorded 2,000 shakhas in Odisha and 5,130 Ekal Vidyalaya schools with 125,107 students.

The Hindu Right’s anti-minority rhetoric and violence are matched by the popularisation of revisionist history. The legacy of prolific dissent persists across India, challenging the abject and unconstitutional actions of the majoritarian state and the Hindu Right that target minorities and their allies.

Mourning

What does it mean to be a woman, minority, Other, and marginalised in India today? Are these states of being inevitably consonant with structural and pervasive subjugation? How do affected communities, especially victim-survivors among them, negotiate a life of dignity after events of acute violence and dispossession and navigate seemingly inscrutable processes to secure justice? How do they submit to and heal from an inheritance of suffering?

It is twelve years since the violence of 2008 in Odisha. I honour women survivors of 2008 whom I met in January 2009. Their testimony reveals the depth of their wounds. Words overflow onto each other, describing lucidly the incomprehensible. Speech bears witness to the brutality of the upheaval, and the perverted violence it imposed. Their words haunt and call for remembrance. (Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present, Pp 357-358):

“In the first days of the riots about 60 people surrounded the body. About 80 people surrounded the body. Five hundred people surrounded the body. His body was aflame. They [Hindutva workers] asked I become Hindu. The body took a long time to die. Some Hindus aided our escape. He was marked from before. They say they must kill us, so we cannot tell what they have done. They killed Christians, buried them, then placed stones over the bodies to stop ‘resurrection.’ At night, I can still hear – become Hindu, become Hindu, become Hindu. They beat him with a crowbar. Another hacked him. People were afraid to give us shelter but still did. They asked him to become Hindu. They hit me. My husband was axed. Torched. I saw him buried. They desecrated his body. After this what life is possible? I have seen his killers. His … was decapitated. They torched her. They were neighbours. Blood everywhere. The police do not arrest the people. Bits of bone. It is hard to get the medical report. We cannot live at home. They killed his mother. We have lost our identity, our ration cards, identification papers, our bodies, our selves. Who are we now?”

Angana P. Chatterji focuses her work on issues of political conflict, majoritarian nationalism, religion in the public sphere, and reparatory justice and cultural survival. Dr. Chatterji’s publications include: Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019, co-editor); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016, lead author); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011, co-author); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present (2009); and the report, BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009, lead author).

Related:

Kandhamal: Brotherhood of victims
Kandhamal 2020: We live with the national shame of impunity in perpetuity

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Paramilitary soldiers walk past Rapid Action Force (RAF) soldiers standing guard during security lockdown in Jammu, India, Aug. 9, 2019. The restrictions on public movement throughout Kashmir have forced people to stay indoors. All communications and the internet have been cut off. (AP Photo/Channi Anand)

On Aug. 8, Prime Minister Modi, in a speech to the nation, described the new era that has dawned. He said with the abolition of special status, all citizens of India were now equal. He said the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir could now see enhanced economic and social development, previously hampered by its special status. A new era, he said — a “New India” — has been ushered in.

But this is an era of ethnic majoritarianism that erases differences, dissent and the rights of minorities. Uniformity has become the defining feature of the Indian state, replacing the carefully constructed federal asymmetry and multicultural democracy.

Modi introduced his presidential order to Indian Parliament, where his Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has an overwhelming majority. The two resolutions passed.

The first revoked Article 370 and the second demoted the state by splitting it into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir (with a legislature) and Ladakh (without a legislature). All this was done without any prior consultation, either with the elected representatives of the Indian Parliament or the people of Jammu and Kashmir. More than 35,000 additional central forces personnel were deployed in the Kashmir Valley.

Hindu pilgrims, tourists and non-Kashmiri students were asked to return home. All educational institutions have been closed. Some 300 local leaders and all major political figures (including former chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti) have been either put under house arrest or held in government jails. The valley remains under a drastic curfew and with no internet connectivity.

In correcting what it considers the mistakes of Indian post-partition history, Modi’s government has undermined India’s democracy. It has erased the innovative federal constitutional design that had brought forward a reconciliation of differences and similarities in one nation.

This August 2016 photo shows Indian policemen during a curfew in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Background of the current Kashmir crisis

The genesis of the special status goes back to 1947 when, after Indian independence, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was integrated into the Indian state. As a result of the tribal invasion from Pakistan, the maharaja of Kashmir signed a Treaty of Accession with India.

India stipulated that, once the state had been freed of tribal invaders, its people would decide their future political association.

This set in motion a whole train of events that have fuelled the seemingly unending turmoil in the Kashmir Valley, namely: the arrival of the Indian army in the state.

This led to the state’s partition into the India-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Kashmir (called Azad Kashmir). In January 1948, India complained to the United Nations Security Council about Pakistani aggression and the following year, in January 1949, the UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) passed a resolution asserting the disputed nature of the state and confirming the right of self-determination — which remains unfilled till this day.

The result of this complex history are the irreconcilable positions taken by India (Kashmir as an integral part of India) and Pakistan (Kashmir as a disputed territory); and Articles 370 and 35A which legally establish the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir’s asymmetric constitutional relationship with India.

For the last seven decades, Articles 370 and 35A have determined Jammu and Kashmir’s unique political relationship with the Indian state. It is the only state in India to have its own constitution. It kept its internal autonomy intact except for defence, communication and foreign affairs.

Its cultural identity was to be maintained by restricting the right to property and employment to only Kashmiri permanent residents. Over the years, there has been an incremental abrogation of the special status. But what had remained intact were the citizenship rights regarding property ownership and public employment.

For more than 20 years, the predominately Muslim Kashmir Valley has been engulfed in a secessionist movement to demand azadi (freedom) from the Indian state. Pakistan supports the movement, and homegrown militancy has been steadily on the rise.

The essence of Kashmiri Muslims’ discontent can be captured under three headings: a perceived threat to their agency over the control of their territory (apprehensions within certain quarters about the State’s accession to India); fear and anxiety of losing their religious identity; and disappointment with the governance agenda.

Minority rights have shrunk

The Modi government, in ushering a new era of “one nation (read Hindu), one India,” has completely misunderstood the original intent of the special provisions for Jammu and Kashmir. Through Articles 370 and 35A, the Indian state-recognized differences in the cultural and political identity of the Kashmiri population, while the similarities between Kashmir and the Indian state rested on democratic rights and principles.

No doubt this historical entente has seen ruptures over the last seven decades. Yet multicultural democratic India was to remain the national symbol. Sadly, recent government actions have replaced it with Hindu majoritarianism.

In this April 2019 photo, Modi, left, is seen with Amit Shah, considered the architect of the Hindu nationalist-led government’s aggressive agenda to convert India from a secular, multicultural democracy into a distinctly Hindu, culturally and politically homogenous state. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

The space for minorities, particularly Muslims and the tribal population in northeast India, has shrunk. Outside Jammu and Kashmir, Article 371, which gives constitutional and legal status and powers to those tribal communities in acknowledgment of their distinct culture and practices, also appears to be in jeopardy.

If the BJP can undo a complex set of legal and constitutional mechanisms, the same can be done to the northeast’s special powers, but with greater ease.

The Kashmir Valley, although at present under complete lockdown, is quiet.

But its resistance is deep. It’s a place where past events and collective memory play significant roles, never quite effacing what came before.

The events of Aug. 5, 2019, will be added to the memory of Kashmir Muslims. It will join other dates:
 

• July 13 Martyrs Day (21 Kashmiris killed in 1931 outside the Srinagar Central jail by the troops of the Dogra Maharaja);
• Oct. 27 Occupation Day (the signing of the Accession Treaty);
• Feb. 11, Feb. 19 and July 6 Martyrdom Anniversaries of all those who have openly challenged the India state;
• Feb. 11 in 1984, Maqbool Butt hanged; (founder of the Kashmir liberation movement in 1964);
• Feb. 9, 2013 Afzal Guru hanged; (convicted of his role in the bombing of Indian Parliament in 2001);
• July 2016; Burhan Wani killing (22-year-old homegrown militant and commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen).

Kashmiri Muslims have, for more than seven decades, been proactive in seeking to guard their special status and their collective identity. The consequences of all this cannot be anything but the increasing alienation of the valley’s Muslims and their deepening distrust of the Indian democracy, further reinforcing Hindu/Muslim fault lines and Kashmiri demand for azadi.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Before we even look at their motives in California, let’s look at the strange sense of deja vu hanging in the air.  When the Hindu right came to power in India, in 1998, the first thing they did was establish an organization called the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). The NCF was a government-funded organization whose purpose was a total rewriting of the contents of Indian textbooks. What began from there, was a broad revisionist project that began to axe away the factual historical depictions of the subcontinent, and replace it with a fundamentalist political framing.

Pretend you’re a Hindu ethnonationalist. Where would you start if you were looking to create a Hindu hegemonist history? At the veritable origin of subcontinental civilization: The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). As expected, IVC history is now succumbing to a whole series of strategies, set up to enact Hindu mythology, as history.

The Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Valley Civilization’s very existence is unwieldy to this undertaking.
 

• A large portion of the IVC lies not in modern-day India – but in modern day Pakistan. This is already a big predicament for the hyper-patriotic, Indian, Hindu nationalist.
• The archeological evidence from IVC sites does not provide evidence to support it as a civilization that was linguistically, culturally, or religiously continuous with Vedic civilizations.
• IVC is dated to more than a millennia and a half, preceding Vedic people.
• The unearthed geography of the IVC is in contradiction to Vedic geographies.

The ethnonationalist vision for itself is Hindu ownership of the entire subcontinent of South Asia. This is the “reclaim your glorious (imagined) past-owned territory” portion of their fascism. Consider that parts of that imagined past are now trapped in a totally foreign nation – a largely Muslim one at that. This is no doubt, unthinkably disruptive to the vision.

Existing distinctions between the IVC and the Vedic period points to aspects of Vedic life as either having arrived from “outside” the subcontinent or as a civilization that was infused with “outside” ideas and/or people. This means that modern-day Hindu ethnonationalist cannot draw this straight line:  People of the IVC (proto-proto Hindus)—->Vedic People (proto-Hindu)—–>Modern Hindus. It means the modern day upper-Caste Hindu cannot claim indigeneity to the subcontinent. This severely weakens the nativist portion of their fascism.

To “correct” the course of history accordingly, many new projects were undertaken.

The first of these is to force a link between the Vedas and the IVC. But this thrust, results in an anachrony in the dating of the Vedas which now has to be reestablished at over 1500 years before its scholarly verified existence. The artifacts of the IVC were then actively “Hinduized” with overeager interpretations. So images of an IVC person in a meditative pose were labeled the image Hindu God, “Shiva”. Engravings of cows, an animal reared by the people of IVC, were seen as evidence for cow worship and so on. Flimsy evidence, flashy conclusions.

When loose interpretation did not suffice, fraudulent evidence was actively placed. One such controversial event occurred when horse seals were planted at the site by Hindu ethnonationalist “archeologists”.  Historians like Prof. Michael Weitzel and others were quick to spot these as frauds and publicize the occurrence of these insidious attempts to circumvent scholarship.

The idea behind the placing of the horse seals was to fill a gap. No horses have been recorded in IVC archeology, but it is well known that the Vedic civilizations revered and centered horses in their culture. A planted horse seal was meant to bridge this.

Bringing mythological rivers to”life”
The placing of Saraswati river in the IVC period, a mythological river named in the Rig Veda, is the amongst the latest series of attempts to “indigenize Hindus” to the region.

Frantic government-funded archaeological projects began, desperate to find evidence of the Sarasvati not only existed, but having existed 1500 years before the first time it was alluded to in the Vedas. When efforts failed, a modern-day attempt to “recreate” the mythological river began. The Hindu right-ruled government of the state of Haryana began a massive project, using taxpayers money, to “reconstruct” the Saraswati. When no source for the reconstructed river could be conveniently located, they hesitated, then connected it to a local drain. A move that was no doubt, severely minimizing to the river’s mythological grandeur, said to have a source in no less than the mighty Himalaya.

Legitimate scholars who have contested the historical veracity of these actions or called these efforts propaganda have been severely attacked.  They have been intimidated, their lives threatened, public calls for their heads have been issued, and the Hindu ethnonationalists have used their political apparatus to attack both their scholarly work and physical being. Eminent historians, including Romila Thapar, D. Jha, Wendy Doniger, Michael Weitzel, and others with a commitment to truth and process, have persisted regardless. A National Commission of concerned historians condemned these myth-makings as “not different from the periods in time when Nazi Germany attempted to rewrite European history”.

Mythology in History Books
In comparison to peer-reviewed research, false narrativizing is much easier in the textbook processes and especially so when the government is run by your own fundamentalist machine. The same myths of the “Saraswati” are now the proud feature of textbooks in many states, including Gujarat, Prime Minister Modi’s former stronghold state.

These revisionists projects are underway, not only in India but in the diasporas, where they have gained much traction in the last ten years.  In particular, in California where in the past decade, there has been a strengthening of an American Hindu ethnonationalist diasporic base vis-a-vis the American mirror organisation arms of the RSS (HSS) and VHP (VHP-A). Organizations like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) are an offshoot of these organizations. They feature the same leaders, the same founders, and the same ideology as their more radical arms. But they soften the thrust. They are a muted saffron. They front fascist organizing with performances of pluralism, LGBTQ-friendliness, and feign concern for Bangladeshi Hindus (while expressing no concern for Muslims and Dalits being lynched and killed in India every day).

They co-opt the language of social justice, the borrow victimization performances from Zionist playbooks and front to the California Board of Education as if they were a group whose religious sentiments are being severely wounded. They bring droves of their children to testify. Children who can’t even pronounce words like “Caste” (some even pronouncing it “Keh-ste”) or “Saraswati” and who are handed pre-written testimonies and asked to read. They tell us that their children’s feelings being hurt is sufficient reason to erase history.

But behind their posturing is the truth of their intentions. To erase the rich, diverse, flawed, and fascinating history of the sub-continent, and rewrite it instead with a Hindu fascist plot.
 
Unfortunately, the California Board of Education has given into the guise of neoliberal pluralism to support the creation of alternative facts. We will be resisting.

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

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