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Hindu Fundamentalists Really Run India
By Omer bin Abdullah
06/08/2001
The news that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee offered to resign because of differences within his governing alliance did not come as a surprise. In making the offer, the prime minister expressed his desire to quit the office in view of his inability to have the alliance function in a coherent and disciplined manner, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pramod Mahajan told reporters.
The ruling National Democratic Alliance, dominated by the Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Parishad (BJP), comprises a score of parties that Vajpayee gathered to form a government in October 1999.
Vajpayee, 76, made the resignation offer to party members a day after a key ally - the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party - accused members of the prime minister's office of being involved in the collapse of India's largest mutual fund. Shiv Sena was also among the frontline critics of Vajpayee for inviting Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to a summit in India in order to discuss the dispute in Kashmir. The summit ended with no agreements, reportedly largely due to hardliner disagreements in the right-wing coalition.
The mutual fund losses of $7 million notwithstanding, the Shiv Sena has found a genuine political arrow to point at the prime minister, who in a moment of weakness, trying to enter the international arena as a "respected" player, was ready to talk about Kashmir - reportedly at the goading of Western backers. The soil of India being "sacrosanct" - even minus Pakistan and Bangladesh - extreme right-wingers are not ready to lose their illegally occupied "integral part" of Indian-Occupied Kashmir.
J. N. Dixit, a former Indian bureaucrat, writing in an article published in the Free Press Journal ("Agra Summit: breakdown or a beginning?") has tried to serve as an apologist for the extreme right wing of the coalition, saying that it would have been better if first contact between Vajpayee and Musharraf was made on the margins of the next South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting, or of the U.N. General Assembly session.
Dixit claims: "I have fairly reliable information that Vajpayee was originally inclined towards this approach but that the decision to invite Musharraf in May was on the basis of the collective advice given to him by his senior colleagues, including [the harshly anti-Pakistan] Home [Interior] Minister L.K. Advani, who felt that India should show its reasonableness and willingness to negotiate with Pakistan by a 'dramatic gesture.'"
The Indians are certainly working overtime to prove that the ailing prime minister, propped up by a diverse fundamentalist coalition, is still in charge. However, contrary to Dixit's claim, it was Advani who introduced a new element into the dialogue - the alleged "cross-border terrorism" issue - in an attempt to sideline the core Kashmir issue. The world knows that there is no border in Kashmir, except the ceasefire line, known as the Line of Control (LoC).
The behind-the-scenes meddling of ultra-rightists has placed Vajpayee in a corner, but at the same time helped to soften his image as a "softer" fundamentalist than others - a sort of lesser evil.
An attempt at damage control was apparent during the summit. Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, as early as July 17th, asserted that there was no division in the Vajpayee cabinet on proceedings of the summit. However, he needs to explain why the typed version of the joint declaration differed from agreed texts.
This internal tussle has fizzled out Vajpayee's effort to project India as a reasonable country, committed to peaceful means, even when its unity and territorial integrity was threatened by the continued "adversarial" attitude of Pakistan.
The BJP coalition's entire policy towards Pakistan made its first misstep when it exploded a series of nuclear devices in 1998, boasting that bombs had altered South Asia's chemistry. However, Pakistan soon displayed its teeth, reducing India to the level of just another Asian country with nuclear capability.
The ultra-right wing alliance, which pushed for the nuclear device testing, is a coalition of elements that abhors the existence of Pakistan, and such leveling has denuded them of hopes of reducing Pakistan to a state cowering under their protection. Now, India has only one alternative, which is to ride Western coattails to a U.N. Security Council seat. Considering the make-up of the Council, where at least four of the five members are viciously Islamophobic - the U.S., U.K., France, and Russia, with China maintaining ties with Pakistan for its own ends - India has a better chance of being accepted, while even the entire Muslim world cannot even get a combined seat.
India is a violator of Security Council's resolutions on Kashmir, and for it to find legitimacy, it needs some sort of mechanism to get those resolutions voided. The direction of talks India desires over Kashmir will be solely directed at creating a semblance of reality, and such an arrangement can only be affected by excluding the Kashmiris.
Indian enthusiasm to create such an impression was so urgent that India's Information Minister, Sushma Swaraj, briefed the press about items discussed at the summit in a manner that seemed an exercise stressing that it was successful in structuring the meeting's agenda. Of course, she omitted mentioning Pakistan's insistence on discussing Kashmir.
Ironically enough, the information chief did not consider the ground reality that the global community was not diverted away from what Pakistan wanted to discuss. The writing on the wall was reflected in the composition of the Indian and Pakistan delegations. Home Minister Advani, Foreign Minister Singh, Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran and Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha accompanied Vajpayee, while Musharraf, in conformity with his one-point agenda of "Kashmir only" brought Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, his personal staff and foreign office officials. The question is: who was Swaraj trying to fool - the world, or her meddlesome right-wing constituency?
Vajpayee faces many dilemmas. Nuclear posturing has already failed to register, and U.S. pressure on Pakistan to give up its nuclear capability has not worked. However, the U.S., and its partner, the Zionist entity in Occupied Palestine, cannot accept the reality of a Muslim nuclear power, and want India to compromise with Pakistan on Kashmir, placing Pakistan is a situation where it can be pressured to sign off its nuclear option. In order for it to take a strong and united stand on the issue of Pakistan and Kashmir - the carrot of a Security Council seat notwithstanding - Vajpayee's coalition government is not only subject to internal factional pressures, but also the support of opposition political parties as well.
Considering rising Hindu fundamentalist power in India, how can the U.S. justify gifting a Security Council seat to a country where right-wingers call the shots, especially when the U.S. is continuously insinuating that it is concerned about rising "fundamentalism" in a nuclear Pakistan? Perhaps, the U.S. finds harmony with Hindu fundamentalism, but not with what it calls Islamic "fundamentalism".
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