Over the past several months, the country has woken up to the sobering realisation that a domestic, Islamist terror network has taken root, and that some of the bomb blasts aimed at soft targets like shoppers in crowded markets have a purely or substantially domestic origin. But even that (nightmarish as it is) is nothing when compared to the even more awful realisation that some of the terrorist outrages of recent years have been sourced by the police to Hindu groups, some of whom seem to have links with the ‘Sangh parivar’. The anti-terrorist squad of the Maharashtra police has been on the trail of people in both Maharashtra and Gujarat, including one or more people from the army, who the police say are the guilty parties in the Malegaon and other blasts.
What makes matters significantly worse is the attitude of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations that belong to the parivar. After the initial confusion and contradictory statements (seeking, among other things, to distance the BJP and allied organisations from the suspects), followed by some re-thinking, the BJP president has finally come out in defence of those accused of having perpetrated Malegaon. The party of Hindutva finds it impossible to accept that Hindus can be terrorists, just as it will not accept that the Bajrang Dal can be as anti-national as the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi)—because the Dal is a ‘nationalist’ force. In short, the case is pre-judged by religious identity, not on the basis of the facts.
Everyone is innocent until found guilty, but it is striking how different the BJP stance is when the boot is on the other foot. Till the other day, when the party saw most terrorists as Muslims, it saw a law that gave due emphasis to the rights of the individual as a drawback, and so the BJP was in favour of a strong anti-terrorist law that would, among other things, make confessions extracted by the police (using methods that need no elaboration) admissible as evidence in court. Now, the party is rising to the defence of those accused of terrorism, merely because they happen to be Hindus and not Muslims; indeed, if a Pota-like law were used in this context, the BJP’s attitude can be easily imagined.
The party that accused the Congress of pseudo-secularism because it had one approach to Hindu demands or grievances and quite another when it came to Muslims (as with different approaches to personal law), needs to explain how it is now not hoist on its own petard. After all, its position is no different from (say) the Akalis arguing that no Sikh youngster could have been a terrorist at the height of the Punjab troubles, because Sikhs are the first to join the army and fight in the nation’s defence. The simple point is that some people of any community can be misguided enough to put themselves outside the pale of the law.
It is a regrettable fact that there is widespread prejudice against Muslims. However, this stops well short of active dislike in the overwhelming majority of cases, and people are therefore generally prepared to live peaceably together. But mobilisation along community lines usually helps only in arousing passions, and people then do things that they would not otherwise find it in themselves to do—like middle-class Gujaratis looting shops at the height of the riots in Ahmedabad. The BJP should have the good sense to see the dangerous road on which the country has been set.
It does not help to compete in victimhood, like arguing that those accused of preparing or planting bombs were merely responding to repeated outrages by Muslims, as they might well have been. Because, in the game of cause and effect, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992 stand out as having provoked many Muslim youngsters to take to the path of extremist violence. If the BJP and ‘Sangh parivar’ stand for sensible nationalism, and not as expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment or for mobilising votes on an anti-Muslim platform, then as a party that hopes to lead the next government the BJP should do some re-thinking, and display good sense when responding to the facts as they emerge.