From: budaraju@cae.wisc.edu (Srinivas Budaraju)
Subject: India at Crossroads - Nation Magazine Article
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 12 Jan 93 17:35:28 CST

Excerpts from "Democracy at Risk in India - Bringing Down the Temple"
by Praful Bidwai, Nation Magazine, January 25, 1993, pp 84-88. Praful
Bidwai, a senior editor of The Times of India in New Delhi, is currently
a visiting professor at Amherst College.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
...Actually, the mosque was attacked so as to humiliate Muslims (an eighth
of the population), to challenge the secular foundations of the Constitu-
tion and to destroy a symbol of India's cultural, ethnic and religious
diversity...

From a larger point of view, the BJP's recent success -- its vote in national
elections jumped from under 8 % in the mid-1980s to 12 % in 1989 to
21 % last year -- is attributable to four factors. First, there is a 
rapid decline of the ruling Congress party and the unstable and often
fractious nature of centrist alternatives to it... Second, the party
has gained immensely from the reaction of the upper-caste Hindus in the
past few years to recent affirmative action and job reservation policies...

Third, in response to the separatist movements in Punjab and Kashmir,
sections of the Indian elite have increasingly moved toward military
solutions...The BJP has the most consistently hawkish, hard-line position
on these issues, as well as on nuclear weapons -- it is the sole party
to espouse overt nuclearization... And finally, the party's social and
economic conservatism, deriving from its narrow upper-class base and
its profoundly backward-looking ideology, has served it well during
India's shift to the right, both domestically and internationally,
since the late 1980s...

The BJP has played up the appeasement metaphor in numerous ways, exploiting
growing discontent in Hindu society by claiming that the Hindus, a
majority in "their own country," have been reduced to "second-class
citizens."...

The Rao regime beat retreat after ignominious retreat, temporizing when it
should have acted, conceding ground to the BJP and even more intransigently
militant nonparliamentary groups allied with the party and acting in concert
with it, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), which is
the official sponsor of the temple agitation and which has raised huge
sums of money from its supporters in North America and Britain...

Even after the shocking event, the Rao government failed to take adequate
remedial or preventive action. It delayed sending troops to clear the
site until after the BJP supporters had already built a makeshift
platform and a five-foot-high wall, which they claim *is* the temple...
Having first announced that it would rebuild the destroyed mosque, New
Delhi has taken no steps to that end. On the contrary, it seems all set
to renege on that promise in the face of the BJP-VHP threat to oppose the
plan...

Even before December 6, opinion polls and other measures of the popular
mood had shown that the vast majority of Hindus were in opposition to the
sacking of the mosque. The BJP's base remains narrow, largely confined
to upper-caste Hindus in the north and the center-west. Its hatred-
driven, jingoistic version of Indian nationalism is not acceptable to
most Hindus. And its version of Hinduism - malign, intolerant, bellicose,
obsessively North Indian, male supremacist, "Aryan," social Darwinist
and casteist -  is seriously at odds with the inclusive, syncretic
and pluralist character of popular Hinduism. The BJP's project is to
force Hinduism into a rigid mold, one derived from the prophetic
religions, and give it a militant face; it is to convince Hindus that
they are the chosen people whose time has come...

Additional help has been provided by the BJP's Muslim counterparts
in Bangladesh and Pakistan, who have razed Hindu temples, and by
government leaders and clerics in Saudi Arabia and Iran who claim to
speak in the name of the so-called world community of Islam, thereby
reinforcing the fraudulent Hindu communal argument about the uncertain
loyalty of the Muslims...

India now stands at crossroads. There are two possible paths before it.
In one, state indecisiveness, Congress's leadership paralysis and the
secular opposition's fractiousness continue; timely, effective action
against communalism is delayed; public confidence in the country's
Constitution is undermined; small currents of "Islamic terrorism"
(and much bigger Hindu ones) emerge; India moves toward more chaos,
sectarian strife, authoritarianism and virtual disintegration.

In the alternative, there is a regrouping of secular forces within the
Congress and other political parties. which leads to firm administrative
and legal action against the BJP as well as to its political isolation
as a result of joint public education and anticommunal campaigns; this
in turn presages a return to secular sanity and to the agenda of a 
balanced development with social justice, genuinely participatory
democracy and popular empowerment...It is far from clear that India
will choose the second way.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Srinivas				budaraju@cae.wisc.edu

Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian