Posted on 07/21/2002 8:23:28 AM PDT by knighthawk
AHMEDABAD, July 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A report in the U.K. daily newspaper, the Observer, outlined Sunday, July 21, the explosion of Hindu violence, nationalism and “Nazi-style politics” which has so far resulted in the killing of at least 2,000 Muslims and the displacement of 250,000 within the past five months.
India’s worst religious violence since the 1947 partition was sparked at the end of February when 57 Hindu pilgrims were killed in the alleged torching of a train carriage in Godhra, which was quickly blamed on Muslims, the Observer reported.
Since then, massacres by Hindu gangs have become commonplace.
In five months, more than 2,000 Muslims have been killed and more than 100,000 – some human rights groups place the number at 250,000 - displaced, congregating in squalid refugee camps around Gujarat.
On Friday, July 19, only hours after the state’s top elected official, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, resigned and dissolved the legislative assembly to seek a fresh mandate, at least two people were killed and eight others injured when police opened fire to disperse rioting mobs, the Observer said.
In recent months Modi had come under attack for his delayed response to the killings.
The violence has been linked to the rise of extremist Hindu groups such as the Association of National Volunteers, or the RSS - a khaki-clad nationalist paramilitary sect formed in the Twenties - and its offspring, the World Hindu Council, or the VHP.
Gujarat is one of the few states in India controlled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The state has been described as a “laboratory for Hindu fascism.”
It also backed the construction of a temple in Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in 1992. Several members of the present Cabinet, including the Indian Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, were present at the demolition, the Observer said.
The RSS and the World Hindu Council, described locally as “Saffron Warriors”, have one clear aim: Hindu expansion by mass conversion.
They have introduced textbooks that convey former Hindu glories. The RSS also lobbies to reintroduce the traditional names of cities like Mumbai, until recently Bombay.
“The situation is getting out of control,” Arvind Sisodia, vice-president of the VHP in Gujarat told the Observer. A passionate advocate of the Hindutva or “global Hindu conscious ness”, Sisodia is a middle-class worker at the Life Insurance Corporation of India.
“In Gujarat, the Muslims own all the shops; they are involved in illegal trade,” says Sisodia. “And Muslim boys steal our Hindu girls and marry them. So the situation is unbearable.”
In the days after the first killings in Gujarat, the VHP distributed leaflets asking Hindus to pledge a boycott of Muslims - including refusing to be taught by Muslim teachers and ensuring sisters and daughters did not fall into “the love-trap of Muslim boys.”
“It is up to all Hindus to make sure that we restore India to dominance,” says Sisodia. “Hinduism was once the dominant faith. Muslims have to learn to adapt. Otherwise, it will be dangerous for them. We don’t want them here.”
A few days after the deaths at Godhra, on a humid morning in an inner-city enclave of Ahmedabad, around 20 men marched up to the Indian flag and offered the Nazi salute, the Observer reported. This was a training camp, or shakha, run by the RSS. There are about 40,000 camps scattered throughout India and informal ones abroad for expatriates.
The men, many of them in their thirties, are middle-class professionals - employees of Ahmedabad’s bustling industrial community.
In a fashionable Ahmedabad gated community lives Vijay Chauthaiwale, a microbiologist. Over lunch, with the World Cup playing on a satellite channel behind him, he explained his attraction to the RSS: “We are a very modern family,” he said, “but I feel that the more we move towards the West, the more likely we are to lose our Hindu values.
“[Mahatma] Gandhi would not have understood,” he said. “He was an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned ideas. No one believes those things any more. The world has changed. And for Hindus to survive, we have to protect our culture and our way of life.”
Most of the thousands of Muslims living in camps around Gujarat are fearful of returning to their villages. “They can’t go back because they face death threats,” said Father Cedric Prakash, director of Prashant, a human rights group in Ahmedabad. “The fanatics have all the power.”
More violence seems inevitable. At the end of February, Anjum Bana escaped her village in Panderwala with her six-week-old daughter. As Hindu militants torched the village, she hid in the forest. “There was nothing to eat or drink for three days,” she told the Observer. “I could hear people shouting RSS slogans all around me. And my child was dying. I know I can’t go back.”
The hawkish Modi, however, is unconvinced. In the early days of the rioting, as the body count escalated, Modi famously said Gujarat’s Hindus had shown “remarkable restraint.” Shortly before resigning on Friday, he said: “There is no problem with people returning back home. If they don’t want to go, they should be forced back. They have to go back.”
In a shabby camp in a graveyard in Ahmedabad, residents have taken to organizing a night-time watch, the Observer said. “They know that once we are on the streets we are vulnerable. I can’t understand it. I have lived with Hindu neighbors for 40 years, and there have never been any problems. Now those same neighbors have turned on me. And no one will look after us.”
Not to worry; the Islamists are working on that...
"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant, " he said. "The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
--Omar M. Ahmad, chairman of the board of the Council on American-Islamic relations
I suppose you have firsthand knowledge of this, having close personal friendships with the majority of muslims in India. Either that, or your statement was mindless sentimental drivel.
The Nazis slaughtered the Jews simply because they were Jewish.
When muslims face the consequences of insurgency, assassinations, terrorism, and the rest of the usual muslim mayhem, that's a far different thing.
Using your "reasoning", you could just as easily call the Allies of WWII nazis for attacking all of Germany and Japan - when surely most Germans and Japanese were nice people who just wanted us all to get along.
Let the religions fight for the minds of potential believers. It's always been that way. As long as the battle is not physical, and the government ensures the rights of believers of all faiths, go for it. Islam will lose because it's a backward religion. I'm not afraid of that battle.
Do you always argue this stupidly?
Bump! (Big Grin!)
Pack 'em off to Pakistan, maybe?
Great comeback. Not very imformative, of course, but that's to be expected from someone who makes up facts to suit his argument, like this:
The overwhelming majority of muslims in India are good citizens whose first allegiance is to India
Okay smart guy. Explain how you came to this conclusion. Show me that it's something more that sappy sentemental wishful thinking. Let's see the research.
I'll take another insult as proof that you don't know what you're talking about.
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