Who Milks This Cow?

Nearly two thousand people died in the Bhagalpur riots. Many more were rendered homeless. Although Muslims were less than 20 per cent of the population, they constituted more than 70 per cent of those who had been killed or displaced. We visited a once-flourishing village of Muslim weavers, or julahas, whose homes and looms had been totally destroyed by a mob of Hindus. The survivors were being taken care of by a prosperous Muslim weaver in Bhagalpur town, who had laid out tents in his garden. Other refugees were being provided food and shelter by a Muslim religious organisation. Of government work in the resettlement and rehabilitation of the refugees there was not a sign.

I was shaken to see that my fellow Hindus would willingly partake of such savagery, and that my government would take no responsibility for the victims. Till then, the politics of religion had no place in my scholarly work or writing. My principal field of research was the environment. I had just published a book on the social history of the Himalayan forests, and had written scholarly essays on environmental conflicts in Asia and North America. However, I was now provoked to write an essay on the Bhagalpur riots for the Sunday Observer.

Ramachandra Guha in Outlook Here

India's 'silent' Prime Minister becomes a tragic figure

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's image has slowly given way to a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government.

The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation has played out in parallel with his country’s decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and as its reputation for rampant corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the country was on an inexorable road to becoming a global power has increasingly come into question.

“More and more, he has become a tragic figure in our history,” said political historian Ramachandra Guha, describing a man fatally handicapped by his “timidity, complacency and intellectual dishonesty.”

Damaging to his reputation is the accusation that he looked the other way and remained silent as his cabinet colleagues filled their own pockets.

In the process, he transformed himself from an object of respect to one of ridicule and endured the worst period in his life, said Sanjaya Baru, Singh’s media adviser during his first term.

Attendees at meetings and conferences were jokingly urged to put their phones into “Manmohan Singh mode,” while one joke cited a dentist urging the seated prime minister, “At least in my clinic, please open your mouth.”

Simon Denyer in The Washington Post. Here

The Rise and fall of Manmohan Singh

The leader of a party allied with the Congress described to me a meeting with Manmohan Singh in December 2005, two months after the release of the UN report investigating abuses in the Iraq Oil-for-Food programme. The report had implicated Natwar Singh, then the minister of external affairs, and he was forced to resign as a result, but it had also named Reliance Petroleum Limited as a beneficiary in the oil-for-food scam. The party leader said he had raised the issue with the prime minister, saying, “Sir, the report mentions not just Natwar, it also prominently mentions Reliance. Why are you not taking any action against Reliance?”

“With a sigh,” the party leader recounted, “Manmohan Singh said to us, ‘After all, what can I do? It is India’s largest corporate.’”  

Vinod K Jose in The Caravan Here and Here 

Narendra Modi, Manmohan Singh and Sheikh Saadi

 

It is related that, whilst some game was being roasted for Nushirvan the just during a hunting party, no salt could be found. Accordingly a boy was sent to an adjoining village to bring some. Nushirvan said: 'Pay for the salt lest it should become a custom and the village be ruined.' Having been asked what harm could arise from such a trifling demand, Nushirvan replied: 'The foundation of oppression was small in the world but whoever came augmented it so that it reached its present magnitude.'  
If the king eats one apple from the garden of a subject
His slaves will pull him up the tree from the roots.

For five eggs which the sultan allows to be taken by force
The people belonging to his army will put a thousand
fowls on the spit.

A tyrant does not remain in the world
But the curse on him abides for ever.

Sheikh Sa'di in The Gulistan of Sa'adi. More Here and Here

India may never be a super power : LSE Study

Despite India’s "impressive" rise, its ambition to be a super power may remain just that—an ambition, according to an authoritative new study by the London School of Economics to which several Indian scholars have contributed.

It pointedly dismisses what it calls the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s "unequivocal verdict" during her India visit in 2009 that "India is not just a regional power, but a global power’.

The study, India: the Next Superpower? acknowledges India’s "formidable achievements" in fostering democracy, growth and cultural dynamism but concludes that these are nullified by its structural weaknesses, widespread corruption, poor leadership, extreme social divisions, religious extremism and internal security threats.

India, it argues, still faces too many "developmental challenges" to qualify for "super power" status, or to be considered a serious "counterweight" to China, a role sought to be thrust on it by some in the West. Some of the report’s authors wonder whether India should even aspire to be a super power given its institutional weaknesses and social and economic divisions.

Historian Ramachandra Guha, currently the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE, suggests that rather than being seduced by the bright lights of great power diplomacy, India should instead focus on reforming its institutions and repairing the social fabric that seems to be coming off its seams.

“We need to repair, one by one, the institutions that have safeguarded our unity amidst diversity, and to forge the new institutions that can help us. It will be hard, patient, slow work,” he writes.

Hasan Suroor in The Hindu. Here

Baba Ramdev and hunger for publicity : Ramachandra Guha

A hunger for publicity is the hallmark of some of the best-known spiritual leaders of contemporary India. They spend as much time on making themselves known, and praised, as on seeking the truth. Consider a guru in my home town, Bangalore, who, like Ramana, is a Tamil, indeed from the same Iyer sub-caste. In other ways he is emphatically different; in his careful attention to his dress and appearance, for example, or in his not-so-careful cultivation of the rich, the powerful, and the influential.

Or consider the holy man who, these past days and weeks, has been much in the news. Those who heard, in part or in full, Baba Ramdev’s recent day-long discourse at the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, would have heard the words ‘kala dhanda’ and ‘bhrashtachaar’ (black money and corruption) as well as the words ‘dharm’ and ‘imandaari’ (morality and honesty). I heard them too, but I also heard words that were more telling. These were ‘mein apne media ke bhaiyyon se kehna chahta hoon’, a phrase that recurred often, perhaps half-a-dozen times an hour. It was characteristic that Ramdev sought to address the media above all (and characteristic also that his social imagination excluded the possibility of women reporters).

Solitude and spirituality — the link between them is intimate and indissoluble. In between satyagrahas, Gandhi spent months at a stretch in Sabarmati or Sevagram, thinking, searching, spinning. Ramana and Aurobindo did not leave their ashrams for decades on end. Yet our contemporary gurus can’t be by themselves for a single day. When the police forced him out of Delhi, Ramdev said he would resume his ‘satyagraha’ (sic) at his ashram in Haridwar. But within 24 hours he left Haridwar, in search of closer proximity to his brothers in the media. Externed from Delhi, Ramdev knew that many television channels were headquartered in Noida. So he would go to them, since he knew that, despite their national pretensions, these channels would not send their reporters, still less their anchors, to the benighted state of Uttarakhand. He set off for Noida but was stopped en route at Muzaffarnagar on the orders of the UP chief minister.

The desire to leave his ashram for the arc lights was entirely in character. For Ramdev occupies an important place in the history of publicity, rather than in the history of spirituality. To be fair, this can also be said of the other babas and gurus whom one meets nowadays in newspapers or on television, the Dalai Lama only excepted.

Ramachandra Guha in Hindustan Times. Here

The tale of two locks and the healthy, wealthy and globalised Godmen of India

Long before the Washington Consensus, and long before the empire began to write back, Indian globalization was first and truly effected by India’s  “godmen.”

The writing back, indeed, was preceded by the preaching back.   Where, however,  Swami Vivekananda was a freak one-timer in the  Chicago conference of world religions in 1892,  the efflorescence  has been a recent phenomenon, coterminous, significantly, with  the leaps made by a “liberated” world economy.

Quite rightly has Arundhati Roy said that  two locks were opened by the Indian ruling elites at one and the same time—the lock to the market, and the lock to the Babri mosque, yielding together that deadly mix of religious and developmental totalitarianism which has since informed the life of the nation as a dominant theme.

And  mutually reinforcing in a fatal sort of way.

II

The subject came up on  a TV talk show debate just the other night, and what follows may be read as a gloss occasioned by the coordinates that emerged. Indeed as regurgitations of cogitations that this scribe has experienced for a good many year  (the epigraph, which comes from a nasty written more than two decades ago,  being testimony).

Broadly, two  sharply articulated positions defined that debate, with the sedate and  subtle  historian, Ramchandra Guha on one side, and the feisty advocate, Rani Jethmalani on the other.

Guha made the point that since most of India’s frontline “godmen” seemed always to be chasing money and the media, they could hardly be regarded exemplars of the spiritual life.  This in stark contrast to a Gandhi who “democratized” spirituality, first by questioning his own fallibilities and then by sharing the totality of experiences with  vox populi.  Or, a Raman Maharishi who never stirred from his abode in south India. And, indeed, fed his mongrels even as he ate himself, he might have added.

Jethmalani, a highly successful scion of the legal fraternity, countered robustly to say that there was nothing wrong with so doing.  It was her grateful view that these  gurus of India were infact bringing succour and release for a whole lot of people who are otherwise too caught up in the deracinated rough and tumble of activity.  Yoga and meditation were  the way to bring fraught individuals in touch with their inner lives.

III

Now in recent years, “godman” after canny “godman” has been found to be complicit in some shenanigan or the other—land grab, hawala transactions (i.e. the illicit and clandestine transfer of unaccounted wealth from place to place), rape, sex orgies, and murder—all exposed by the very media, sections of which never tire of lauding their contributions to the “national image” as a haven of spirituality.

But there are a few currently who remain as yet clean to the visible public eye, although questions have been raised about dubious medical and labour practices of one, and shots heard recently at a conclave  addressed by the other.  Both hugely endowed with all that money may do, including exclusive TV channels for propagation.

So why then do the high and mighty continue to patronize these sorts of “godmen” whose so-called spiritual splutterings never seem to amount to anything more than platitudinous common sense (Guha), often readily available at the street corner paan shop?

I would like to suggest that the answer lies in the epigraph to this piece.

A whole new class of Indians spawned by the berserk possibilities of market fundamentalism know two things: one, that their ancestors never had it “so good,” and, two, that come what may, the last thing they wish to happen is to lose what they have accumulated, and may continue to accumulate.

Any spirituality, therefore, that enjoins turning away from  money-making and consumerism is passé and  infra dig.  So that the time-honoured  pieties of renunciation (tyag) and  the simple life centred around the common good and  search for truth beyond  possessions are  decrepitly medieval.  Utterly unsuited to a class whose burden now is to  see India at the top of the comity of puissant nations.

More heinously, such a course seems  a sinister device to reject capitalism and a dirty trick to bring back socialist ideas.

The agenda of this class, thus, is to see that capitalism goes hand-in-hand with painless placebos, that not only bring momentary relief but recharge entrepreneurial energies for further leaps in profit-making.

And the first of the “godmen” to understand this agenda to perfection was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who fathered Transcendental Meditation world-wide.  It was his explicit boast that fifteen minutes of TM at work place could not only steady the nerve and stem the blood pressure, but, in so doing, make enhanced leaps in productivity possible. Maximum result at minimum inconvenience--never a better corporate commercial than that.

So, there you had it—you could eat the cake and have it too.

Just as any clever movie-maker fashions his cinema to articulate the desired underside of things, the classy Yogi sets out to become a “spiritual” collaborator in the  compulsive drive to the “good life.”

IV

None of this can happen if the “godman”  is seen to be a “beggarly” derelict himself.

In the new world that he seeks to skim, it is imperative that all the accoutrement appropriate to the zeitgeist are his in the first place, ranging from  palatial ashrams, to limousines, to fabulous and famous hangers-on, to in-favour politicians, to private jets.

For him these are tools that substitute the old relic, hairshirt, and frankincense.

And his unique selling point has to be, as the epigraph claims, that he brings spirituality not as painful questioning of what is, or of frustrating skepticism towards the preferred social and economic environment of his clientale, but, indeed, as an enhancement of the pleasure principle.

And in order that he sell, he must primarily be seen to be master of that principle himself.  Hey, you can’t give what you do not have.

No wonder then that you do not see such “godmen” trudging among the riff raff of the nation, or taking on injustices, or lining up on the side of  equity, or bringing  hope and  ministry to the  wretched of the earth.

Thus a spirituality that is adorned with diamonds and plaited with gold can ill afford to be bogged down in ethical concerns, except as vacuous and abstract gurgitations, uttered with tact and  a sense of timing.  Or upon catching an isolated raised eyebrow in the audience on any given day.

The whole point and purpose of this variety of “spiritual” intervention is to bolster and  justify the “good life”, and, all-importantly, to neutralize and hush the least stirring of the conscience  and of guilt.

Inorder to keep its hold on the Elect, it needs always to appear resplendent in a canny mix of the flowing beard, the loosely worn robe, the ever-smiling visage, the arty enunciation of clichés, and always always next to visuals that betoken wealth and intimations of hidden pleasures.

Truly, the art not just of living, but of living to the hilt.

It is thus that a deadly mix of the Freudian and the  Lockean  inform this “spiritual” enterprise, inviting the subject in  mystifying suggestiveness to look inward to the navel but seated in surroundings that ravish the physical eye, item after opulent item.

What more could the rich and famous ask for?

As for all the rest, their fate it  is to labour to keep the opulence in place.  Lucky rabble they.

V

For a contrast now, consider this other saffron –clad  Arya Samaji mendicant, name of Swani Agnivesh.

On a state television channel  he comperes a weekly interactive programme, titled  Vichaar Manthan (literally, “Churning Thoughts”).

Invariably his audiences are drawn from people readily available on any street, government school, slum NGO, relegated women, minorities, low-castes and suchlike, with a noted authority or two sitting among their midst.

And here is his route to the spiritual life: 

--what can we do collectively to redress  horrendous social and systemic wrongs, be it  sanitation, slum schooling, local health and nutritive care, honour killings and other caste oppressions, inter-communal mayhems, corruption in offices, in politics, among teachers, contractors, shopkeepers, police personnel, godmen, and so on?

--what mechanisms of redressal does the present system make available to  the ordinary citizen, be it RTI or any other?  How can we educate ourselves and others to use them?

--what new laws, legislations should we ask for?

--what pernicious influences does a  money-driven and complicit media perpetrate?  What kinds of advertisements bring shame to the ordinary Indian?

Who makes the money?

--what can be done about children in labour, anaemic lactating mothers, goons on the street whose lack of employment encourages crime against others?

--can injustices cohabit with a religious life?  Can any religion be true if it contravenes our fundamental humanity?

And so on.  These but some that I readily recall from his programmings.

Therefore, do not be surprised that the Rani Jethmalanis of India  would not see Swami Agnivesh as a “godman” one bit, but indeed something of  an irritating,   corrupted and radical rabble rouser—mendicant in himself and inviting to a mendicant life.  And suspiciously partial to the Left.  Could it get worse?

What is a “godman” who dwells perpetually on the externals, and  miserable ones at that, and never rolls his eye upward to the “transcendant” truths?

Nothing more, indeed, than a  proletarian Jesus or a troublesome Gandhi.

Would you marry into a family that has no BMW? No.  And if you did, it would be your problem if you lost your club membership.

Would you enter a  corporate house that offered you less than  X plus plus plus? Forget it; what would your peers think?

Would you be seen next to a “godman” who rode a bicycle?  For god’s sake, you must have lost your so-spiritual beans.

From Badri Raina's excellent article in Znet. More Here.

Badri Raina could be contacted at badri.raina@gmail.com       

'Sri Ram Sene-like elements are there within the Congress and the CPM too', says Ramachandra Guha

Tehelka's extraordinary exposé of the Sri Ram Sene demonstrates how 'popular and religious sentiment' is cynically manufactured -- for a price. It should lead to serious introspection among all our political parties, who -- as the cases of Salman Rushdie, MF Husain, Taslima Nasreen and James Laine all show -- have so often stifled or suppressed artistic freedom in the name of protecting this alleged sentiment. 

The Tehelka exposé should provoke not self-satisfaction but shame, for there are Sri Ram Sene-like elements within the Congress, the CPM, and the BJP as well. 

Ramachandra Guha's reaction to the Tehelka expose on Shri Rama Sene

I would like to congratulate Tehelka for a brilliant exposé on the ugly face of fundamentalism in India. People like Pramod Muthalik and organisations like the Sri Ram Sene are a threat to India and strict legal action should be taken against them based on what they have said in the tapes. 

Everyone has a right to follow one's religion, but no one has the right to instigate the public and create communal tension in the name of religion. This is precisely what the Sene and the other parties like the RSS are doing. 

Also, the onus should not be on the Sri Ram Sene as much as it should be on the BJP and the VHP. Muthalik is just an off-shoot of the fundamentalist agenda of the VHP and the RSS, which receive patronage from the BJP. 

The exposé has brought into public conscience what these parties can do to spread communal tension in the country.

Sanjay Nirupam's reaction to the Tehelka expose on Pramod Mutalik and Shri Rama Sene

To read the reaction of H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh and others click here.

IPL = League of Priviliged Indians!!

IPL is not Indian Primier League. It is League of Priviliged Indians. Veteran writer, scholar and historian Ramachandra Guha writes in The Telegraph.

The promoters of the IPL claim to be speaking on behalf of Indian cricket. However, the polarizing instincts of their tournament run counter to — and threaten to defeat —the inclusive and democratizing trends that were inaugurated by the victory of the Indian cricket team in the 1983 World Cup and the boom in satellite television that followed. 

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Indian cricket was dominated by a handful of large cities — such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Bangalore. But from the 1980s onwards, smaller and previously more obscure centres started sending players to the national side.

Cricketers from towns in Bihar, Orissa, UP, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, from Vadodara, even Jharkhand, began winning India caps. Simultaneously, international matches, once held only in the big metros, now began being hosted by Guwahati, Cuttack, Gwalior, Jamshedpur, and the like.

The Indian Premier League may be more appropriately renamed the League of Privileged Indians. For this tournament both reflects and further intensifies a deep divide between the India of wealth and entitlement and the India — or Bharat — of poverty and disenfranchisement. 

Writing about the dangerous growth of inequality in India, the economist, Amartya Sen, warned some years ago that if present trends continued, half of India would look like the American state of California, the other half like sub-Saharan Africa. Since he made this comment, California has been beset with an acute — and apparently irreversible — fiscal crisis. Perhaps we might then substitute the state of Massachusetts for it. 

But the point remains; there are indeed two Indias, the one which is awarded IPL franchises, and the other which is not.

To read the full article click here.

India's dangerous divide!! by Ramachandra Guha

A day after I heard a BJP leader denounce the Congress for making the Muslims into a "pampered and privileged minority," I found myself making a turn into the busiest road in my home town, Bangalore. Just ahead of me was a Muslim gentleman, who was attempting to do likewise. Except that he was making the turn not behind the wheel of a powerful Korean-made car but with a hand-cart on which were piled some bananas.

That the fruit seller was Muslim was made clear by his headgear, a white cap with perforations. He was an elderly man, about 60, short and slightly-built. The turn was made hard by his age and infirmity, and harder by the fact that the road sloped steeply downward, and by the further fact that making the turn with him were very many motor vehicles. Had he gone too slow he would have been bunched in against the cars; had he gone too fast he might have lost control altogether. Placed right behind the fruit seller, I saw him visibly relax his shoulders as the turn was successfully made, with cart and bananas both intact.

One should not read too much into a single image, but it does seem to be that that perilous turn was symptomatic of an entire life -- a life lived at the edge of subsistence, a life taken one day at a time and from one turn to the next. In this respect the fruit seller was quite representative of Indian Muslims in general. Far from being pampered or privileged, most Muslims are poor farmers, laborers, artisans and traders, says Ramachandra Guha, noted historian and writer.

Excerpts from his article :

In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence from British rule, the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the Chief Ministers of the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within India,

"a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State."

In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class. Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan. The models held up here are Israel and the United States; if they can "take out" individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some Indians, why not we?

Other commentators have called for a more measured response. They note that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of the army, the army not in control of the notorious Inter Services Intelligence agency, the ISI not in control of the extremists it has funded. They point out that Pakistan has itself been a victim of massive terror attacks. India, they say, should make its disapproval manifest in other ways, such as canceling sporting tours and recalling diplomats. At the same time, the United States should be asked to demand of Pakistan, its erratically reliable ally, that it act more decisively against the terrorists who operate from its soil.

One short-term consequence of the terror in Mumbai is a sharpening of hostility between India and Pakistan. And, as is always the case when relations between these two countries deteriorate, right-wing Hindus have begun to scapegoat those Muslims who live in India. They have begun to speculate as to whether the attackers were aided by their Indian co-religionists, and to demand oaths of loyalty from Muslim clerics and political leaders.

There are 150 million Muslims in India. They have gained particular prominence in one area: Bollywood. Several top directors and composers are Muslim, as well as some of India's biggest movie stars. One, Aamir Khan, was a star and producer in "Lagaan," a song-and-dance epic about a game of cricket that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002.

But Muslims are massively underrepresented in the professions -- few of India's top lawyers, judges, doctors and professors are Muslim. Many Indian Muslims are poor, and a few are angry.

Pakistan was carved out of the eastern and western portions of British India. To this new nation flocked Muslims from the Indian heartland. Leading the migration were the lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs who hoped that in a state reserved for people of their faith, they would be free of competition from the more populous (and better educated) Hindus.

Pakistan was created to give a sense of security to the Muslims of the sub-continent. In fact, it only made them more insecure. Nehru's letter of October 1947 was written in response to a surge of Hindu militancy, which called for retribution against the millions of Muslims who stayed behind in India. Three months later, Mahatma Gandhi, who was both Father of the Indian Nation as well as Nehru's mentor, was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic. That act shamed the religious right, who retreated into the shadows. There they stayed until the 1970s, when, through a combination of factors elaborated upon below, they came to occupy center-stage in Indian politics.

From the 1980s, the dominance of the Congress party has been challenged by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP seeks to make India a "Hindu" nation, by basing the nation's political culture on the religious traditions (and prejudices) of the dominant community. Charging the Congress with "minority appeasement," with corruption and with dynastic rule, the BJP came to power in many states, and eventually in New Delhi. However, its commitment to the secular ideals of the Indian Constitution is somewhat uncertain. For the party's members and fellow travelers, only Indians of the Hindu faith are to be considered full or first-class citizens. Of the others, the Parsis are to be tolerated, the Christians distrusted, and the Muslims detested. One form this detestation takes is verbal -- the circulation of innuendos based on lies and half-truths (as in the claim that Muslims outbreed Hindus and will soon outnumber them).

Another form is physical -- thus, the hand of the BJP lies behind some of the worst communal riots in independent India, for example Bhagalpur in 1989, Mumbai in 1992, and Gujarat in 2002; in all cases, an overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims.

In its activities BJP is helped by a series of allied groups. Known also by their abbreviations -- RSS, VHP, etc. -- these were in the forefront of the religious violence of the 1980s and beyond. Roaming the streets of small- (and big-) town India, they addressed their Muslim prey with the slogan "Pakistan or Kabristan!" (Flee to Pakistan, or we will send you straight to your graves). Meanwhile, their ideologues in the press -- some with degrees from the best British universities -- make the argument that Muslims are inherently violent, or unpatriotic, or both.

In fact, the ordinary Muslim is much like any other ordinary Indian -- honest, hard-working and just about scraping a living.

A day after I heard a BJP leader denounce the Congress for making the Muslims into a "pampered and privileged minority," I found myself making a turn into the busiest road in my home town, Bangalore. Just ahead of me was a Muslim gentleman, who was attempting to do likewise. Except that he was making the turn not behind the wheel of a powerful Korean-made car but with a hand-cart on which were piled some bananas.

That the fruit seller was Muslim was made clear by his headgear, a white cap with perforations. He was an elderly man, about 60, short and slightly-built. The turn was made hard by his age and infirmity, and harder by the fact that the road sloped steeply downward, and by the further fact that making the turn with him were very many motor vehicles. Had he gone too slow he would have been bunched in against the cars; had he gone too fast he might have lost control altogether. Placed right behind the fruit seller, I saw him visibly relax his shoulders as the turn was successfully made, with cart and bananas both intact.

One should not read too much into a single image, but it does seem to be that that perilous turn was symptomatic of an entire life -- a life lived at the edge of subsistence, a life taken one day at a time and from one turn to the next. In this respect the fruit seller was quite representative of Indian Muslims in general. Far from being pampered or privileged, most Muslims are poor farmers, laborers, artisans and traders.

The failure to punish the perpetrators of successive pogroms has thrown some young men into the arms of fundamentalist groups. But the number is not, as yet, very large. And it is counterbalanced by other trends, for instance, the growing hunger for modern education among the youth. The desire to learn English is ubiquitous, as is the fascination for computers.

Even in the disgruntled valley of Kashmir, a press survey found that the iconic founder of India's most respected software company, Infosys Technologies, a Hindu named N. R. Narayana Murthy, was a greater hero among Muslim students than the founder of Al Qaeda.

Since the reasons for the poverty (and the anger) are so complex, a successful compact between Indian Muslims and modernity will require patient and many-sided work.

And the BJP must recognize, in word and in deed, that the 150 million Muslims in India have to be dealt with in a civilized manner, and given the security and the rights due them as equal citizens in a democratic and non-denominational State.

Writing in 1957, the historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that Indian Muslims were unique in that they shared their citizenship "with an immense number of people. They constitute the only sizable body of Muslims in the world of which this is, or ever has been true."

True no longer, for in many countries of Western Europe and even in the United States, the Muslims are now a sizeable but not dominant component of the national population. This makes this particular case even more special. For if, notwithstanding the poisonous residues of history and the competitive chauvinisms of politicians, Indians of different faiths were to live in peace, dignity and (even a moderate) prosperity, they might set an example for the world.

To read the full story click here

Read : "Mumbai attack is not 9/11" by Arundhati Roy

Read : As the Fires Die: The Terror of the Aftermath