ByPamela
Constable
Once upon a
time, I lived in the world’s largest democracy. India
It was also
a foreign correspondent’s dream, with a panoply of topics, some exotic and
others troubling, to cover — Bollywood premieres and village dowry burnings,
deadly religious riots and mass festivals where millions of barefoot pilgrims
crammed sacred riverbanks, lost in spiritual rapture.
Poverty and
desperation were in full view. At traffic circles near my office, children with
deformed limbs begged until long after dark. At construction sites, migrant
laborers carried pans of dirt on their heads and slept on pieces of cardboard.
In villages, people used the fields as their toilets, and some were so indebted
to landlords that they had to rent out their children as servants.
When I
think back on the contentious but secular mosaic of India
At that time, Hinduism was dominant but not
overbearing. With colorful rituals and beloved gods including an elephant and a
monkey, it offered entertainment and escape, solace and hope for the masses.
One of my most moving experiences was accompanying a modest Hindu family on a
long train journey to the Ganges , where they
waded in at dawn and baptized their shrieking baby boy in the frigid waters,
certain that he was now blessed for life.
Promotion
of the “Hindutva” ideology, an all-encompassing guide for life, often took the
form of public services, carried out by disciplined youth cadres. I once
watched a squad of these young, uniformed activists collect bloated corpses
after a cyclone in Orissa state, while residents watched, grateful but
horrified.
But
religious tensions remained close to the surface, especially between Hindus and
Muslims, whose differences had festered since the chaotic partition of India
My first
encounter with such “communal” hostility occurred in my kitchen, where the
Hindu manager angrily upbraided the Muslim watchman for drinking from his
teacup. In public, far uglier clashes erupted periodically: In 1992, militant
Hindu groups invaded and demolished the historic Babri Mosque; a decade later,
Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat state left more
than 1,000 dead.
In a dozen
reporting trips over a decade to the Kashmir Valley, a bucolic alpine region on
the Indian-controlled side of the Himalayan territory claimed by both India and
Pakistan, I saw how the historic dispute had created a permanently open wound
and a vicious cycle of protest and repression, often sparked by insurgent
attacks.The valley
looked like Switzerland Dal Lake
Yet
somehow, something held India
I caught
glimpses of this spirit during independence day celebrations and at peaceful
demonstrations by striking teachers or railroad workers in a site in the
capital reserved for protests. I saw it at election campaigns in crowded slums,
and at village meetings where people spoke their minds and the statue of a man
holding a book — the social reformer B.R. Ambedkar — stood nearby.
But I
didn’t really understand it until I had also spent considerable time in Pakistan India
In
practice, Pakistan
What made
Hindu-majority India more
successful than Muslim-majority Pakistan
Today,
though, India
The
governing Bharatiya Janata Party is the same Hindu nationalist group that
dominated power during the years I lived there. But its once-inclusive message
— then tempered by the opposition Congress party — has been replaced by an
aggressive agenda of Hindu hegemony. And the prime minister is now Narendra
Modi, a religious hard-liner who was once accused of abetting the anti-Muslim
rioters in Gujarat as the state’s chief
minister.
Modi’s
election in 2014 was largely based on his record as a champion of economic
growth. But his reelection in May was stoked by a wave of patriotic and
religious emotion after an especially deadly suicide bombing in Kashmir — which
triggered an aerial skirmish between Indian and Pakistani warplanes — brought
the nuclear-armed rivals dangerously close to war.
In August,
Modi’s government abruptly revoked the semiautonomous rights for Kashmir that India
Across the
country, authorities have also used force, legal measures and harsh rhetoric to
intimidate Muslims, branding them as potential terrorists. Police have stood by
as mobs lynched Muslims for selling cows, which are venerated in Hinduism. Last
month, a law was enacted that eases the path for illegal immigrants of six
faiths to become Indian citizens — but specifically excludes Muslims.
Modi’s
supporters praise such measures as necessary to quash the lingering menace of
Islamic terrorism and restore India
But there
still may be reason to hope that India
In recent
weeks, the new citizenship rules have provoked spontaneous and widening
protests by a cross-section of Indians, including students at the country’s
leading university, in defense of both Muslim minority rights and India
Last week,
news reports showed a young woman, her arm in a cast and her head bandaged
after a beating by Hindu nationalists, defiantly addressing a crowd in New Delhi
Maybe the India
(Courtesy:
The Washington Post)