Election victory marks start of a scary trend
The Columbus Dispatch
Letter to the Editor
January 1, 2003

The Dec. 16 Associated Press article in The Dispatch "Hindu Party takes victory in state vote'' highlighted the success of a fascist Hindu nationalist party in securing an electoral victory in Gujarat, the home state of Mahatma Gandhi in India.

What is most revealing in the resounding success of the Hindu nationalist party is that it won on an open platform of Muslim hatred. This electoral harvest of hate resulted in the most electoral gains in areas where Muslims were effectively massacred earlier in 2002.

In February, that violence, with the collaboration of state authorities, had left more than 2,000 Muslims dead, 150,000 displaced, more than 800 women and girls raped, and 132 mosques and religious tombs destroyed by Hindu mobs after the burning of 59 Hindus on a train.

Already, the voices of electoral victory in India are proudly proclaiming that the "Gujarat experiment'' will be "repeated all over India.''

A leader of the World Hindu Council, Praveen Bhai Togadia, was reported Dec. 15 in The Hindustan Times newspaper that the council now "plans to make the whole country a laboratory to establish Hindu supremacy'' in India. Another leader, Archarya Dharmendra remarked, "Just as it was done in India in 1947 and in Germany before that.''

The historical founders of the Hindu nationalist ideology, including Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, have praised Hitler and Nazism in their published writings. Many Hindu nationalists in India today praise Adolf Hitler's extermination of Jews. They now assert that India is a Hindu holy land and belongs only to the Hindu race with others not even being worthy of citizen rights.

This harvest of hatred is threatening the very soul of India and its constitutional morality. The burden falls on Hindus so that they may step forward and put a stop to the hijacking by fascist nationalists of the peaceful and loving Hindu faith, and on minority faiths to work with Hindus in promoting peace with justice in south Asia.

Tarunjit Singh Butalia
Dublin