When the Mahatma's cowards erupt in fury, it
hurts. It isn't terror.
By Francois Gautier
Is
there such a thing as 'Hindu terrorism', as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh
Thakur for the recent Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was
asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign
correspondents—a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and
non-Hindu, I do hope I'll be given some credit for my opinions, which are not
the product of my parents' ideas, my education or my atavism, but garnered from
25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le
Journal de Geneve and Le Figaro).
In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo
features on kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly
realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the true
spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million villages
possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your diversity, whether you
are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or Chinese. It is this Hinduness
that makes the Indian Christian different from, say, a French Christian, or the
Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim. I also learnt that Hindus not only
believed that the divine could manifest itself at different times, under
different names, using different scriptures (not to mention the wonderful
avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st century religious strife) but that
they had also given refuge to persecuted minorities from across the
world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, and today, Tibetans. In 3,500
years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never
tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions.
You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it
saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups
like SIMI, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus who
burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that most of these communal
incidents often involve persons from the same groups—often Dalits and
tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity and others not.
However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no Muslim was killed in
the process; compare this to the 'vengeance' bombings of 1993 in Bombay, which
wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet the Babri Masjid
destruction is often described by journalists as the more horrible act of the
two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister of
Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed to have gone off in a
Muslim locality of Bombay.
I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have
discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this so-called
Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at the
receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus
in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which crucified
Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there were one million
Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest
having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus
all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority
community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are deprived of
the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath
while their government heavily sponsors the Haj. They see their brothers and
sisters converted to Christianity through inducements and financial traps, see
a harmless 84-year-old swami and a sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are
blasphemed.
So sometimes, enough is enough. At some point, after years or even centuries of
submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called
cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat.
It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen
again elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous
revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the
political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed, should
not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices be heard.
There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet. They
form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities in the
world today. Can you call them terrorists?
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