an old indian friend forwarded this to me a while ago URL slaughter in the name of god by salman rushdie friday march NUMBER NUMBER page aNUMBER washington post the defining image of the week for me is of a small child s burned and blackened arm its tiny fingers curled into a fist protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in ahmadabad gujarat in india the murder of children is something of an indian specialty the routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies the massacre of innocents in nellie assam in the NUMBERs when village turned against neighboring village the massacre of sikh children in delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed indira gandhi s assassination they bear witness to our particular gift always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight or cutting their throats or smothering them or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood i say our because i write as an indian man born and bred who loves india deeply and knows that what one of us does today any of us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow if i take pride in india s strengths then india s sins must be mine as well do i sound angry good ashamed and disgusted i certainly hope so because as india undergoes its worst bout of hindu muslim bloodletting in more than a decade many people have not been sounding anything like angry ashamed or disgusted enough police chiefs have been excusing their men s unwillingness to defend the citizens of india without regard to religion by saying that these men have feelings too and are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general meanwhile india s political masters have been tut tutting and offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control it has escaped nobody s notice that the ruling party the bharatiya janata party bjp or indian people s party and the hindu extremists of the vishwa hindu parishad vhp or world hindu council are sister organizations and offshoots of the same parent body even some international commentators such as britain s independent newspaper urge us to beware excess pessimism the horrible truth about communal slaughter in india is that we re used to it it happens every so often then it dies down that s how life is folks most of the time india is the world s largest secular democracy and if once in a while it lets off a little crazy religious steam we mustn t let that distort the picture of course there are political explanations ever since december NUMBER when a vhp mob demolished a NUMBER year old muslim mosque in ayodhya which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god ram hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight the pity of it is that some muslims were ready to give it to them their murderous attack on the train load of vhp activists at godhra with its awful atavistic echoes of the killings of hindus and muslims by the train load during the partition riots of NUMBER played right into the hindu extremists hands the vhp has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and insufficient radicalism of india s bjp government prime minister atal bihari vajpayee is more moderate than his party he also heads a coalition government and has been obliged to abandon much of the bjp s more extreme hindu nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together but it isn t working anymore in state elections across the country the bjp is being trounced this may have been the last straw for the vhp firebrands why put up with the government s betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn t even result in electoral success the electoral failure of the bjp is thus in all probability the spark that lit the fire the vhp is determined to build a hindu temple on the site of the demolished ayodhya mosque that s where the godhra dead were coming from and there are reprehensibly idiotically tragically muslims in india equally determined to resist them vajpayee has insisted that the slow indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the ayodhya issue the vhp is no longer prepared to wait the distinguished indian writer mahasveta devi in a letter to india s president k r narayanan blames the gujarat government led by a bjp hard liner as well as the central government for doing too little too late she pins the blame firmly on the motivated well planned out and provocative actions of the hindu nationalists but another writer the nobel laureate v s naipaul speaking in india just a week before the violence erupted denounced india s muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement the murderers of godhra must indeed be denounced and mahasveta devi in her letter demands stern legal action against them but the vhp is determined to destroy that secular democracy in which india takes such public pride and which it does so little to protect and by supporting them naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism and disgraces the nobel award the political discourse matters and explains a good deal but there s something beneath it something we don t want to look in the face namely that in india as elsewhere in our darkening world religion is the poison in the blood where religion intervenes mere innocence is no excuse yet we go on skating around this issue speaking of religion in the fashionable language of respect what is there to respect in any of this or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion s dreaded name how well with what fatal results religion erects totems and how willing we are to kill for them and when we ve done it often enough the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again so india s problem turns out to be the world s problem what happened in india has happened in god s name the problem s name is god salman rushdie is a novelist and author of the forthcoming essay collection step across this line NUMBER the washington post company sdw sdw URL URL stephen d williams NUMBER wayside cir ashburn va NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERw NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERfax decNUMBER 