In search of Gandhi and Godse
HARSH MANDER

The communalisation process under way in India clearly
has an impact on people of Indian origin around the
world.


DURING a hectic schedule of speaking engagements that
recently buffeted me across the length and breadth of
the United States, I witnessed a diaspora in tumult,
even more polarised, divided and wounded, than the
middle classes in India today. With battle lines drawn
everywhere, courageous, secular and progressive
elements sometimes seemed under siege. Muslims of
Indian origin were in the throes of anguish, often
internalising their anger as an intensely personal
sense of hurt and loss. I saw recurring signs, during
my travels, of the heart-breaking near death of faith
and hope.

The Gujarat carnage - the stunning brutality of the
mass violence, the impunity of the state authorities,
the depths of the social divide, the success of the
economic boycott and above all the electoral
endorsement of the massacre - has convinced many
living in the prosperity of their adopted country, of
the threat of the imminent death of Gandhi's India;
and of the fact that minorities in the India of the
future will have to come to terms with second-class
citizenship. Their dark sense of despair and
alienation is clouded further by the post-9/11
scenario in the U.S., with the swirling winds of
public prejudice, militarisation, brutal and unethical
wars and racial profiling of all Asian Muslims by the
government.

Zahir Janmohammed, a 25-year-old graduate and
third-generation expatriate from India, poignantly
evoked this sense of bewildered loss: "I have been
searching for Gandhi for several years. But after
spending months in Gandhi's homeland, Gujarat, I fear
he may be dead".

His grandparents migrated from Gujarat to East Africa
in the 1920s. His father, expelled by Idi Amin's
regime in Uganda in 1971, made a fresh start in
California, where Zahir was born. He was a vegetarian
and revered Gandhi. It was natural that he encouraged
Zahir to return for a year to Gujarat to reclaim his
legacy. Zahir volunteered to work with a
non-governmental organisation (NGO) in a slum in
Ahmedabad. Weeks after his arrival, the city and much
of Gujarat was convulsed by the most brutal sectarian
blood-letting after Partition, following the torching
of a railway compartment in Godhra.

Zahir volunteered to work in the relief camps for the
battered survivors of the pogrom, where he tried to
share with them a little of their agony. But he
encountered bigotry everywhere, even among friends. No
one restrained the members of the NGO with which he
worked, when they openly taunted minorities. The
mother of his host family, a hospitable and
affectionate Hindu, said to him: "Well you know beta,
those Muslims go to the relief camps because they get
free food there". His stomach heaved at the memories
of the relief camps, with their pervading stench of
human excreta, urine and crowded tents.

Returning months later to his home in California, a
shaken Zahir found himself frozen when a shop-keeper
asked him his name. A year afterwards, he joked
bitterly when he saw me off at the airport, "Be
careful, your air ticket has been booked on the
Internet by a Muslim."

Zahir, a sensitive, reflective young man still
struggling with the unhealed wounds of his trauma in
Gujarat told me: "The Gujarat carnage has changed my
life" - a refrain I heard echoed over and over again
in many parts of the U.S. Among those whose lives were
altered irrevocably were a large number of deeply
idealistic young American Indian Muslim men and women,
trying to come to terms with the situation in which
their community finds itself. Many were trying to
contribute by raising money for relief and
rehabilitation, or lobbying with both the U.S. and
Indian governments, or building networks with secular,
progressive groups. I was touched by the way they
dealt with their intense internalised sense of
personal tribulation and privation, by constructively
working with resolutely preserved resources of faith
and hope, for reclaiming and defending pluralism and
democracy both in India and the U.S.

In New York, Ubaid Shaik, a neurophysician with gentle
manners and a passion for justice, was engaged for
many years after he migrated to the U.S. in the
African American civil rights movement. He was so
wrenched by the Gujarat massacre that he launched the
Indian Muslim Council to promote values of pluralism
and tolerance with particular focus on the Indian
diaspora in the U.S. He barely sleeps a few hours each
night, so that he can find time for this work even
after a punishing schedule in the hospital besides
commuting for four hours daily, and taking care of a
large and loved family. He has been joined in this
enterprise by young professionals from cities across
the U.S.

In Seattle, I was drawn to Javed, a software engineer
who, after Gujarat, tirelessly collects money for
relief as a volunteer for the Indian Muslim Relief
Committee, which was formed in 1983 following the
Nellie massacre by a compassioned and energetic
biochemist Manzoor Ghauri. After Gujarat, an energetic
elderly nuclear engineer in Chicago, Imtiaz Uddin,
pulled himself out of retirement to establish a forum
for the defence of secularism.

A number of committed secular academics in
universities across North America, including Biju
Mathew, Shalini Gera, Vinay Lal, Angana Chatterjee,
Abha Singhal and many others came together in the wake
of the Gujarat massacre, to put together the Stop
Funding Hate Campaign, which painstakingly collected
extremely damaging evidence on the funding of
organisations belonging to the Sangh Parivar by Indian
Americans.

In many universities I also met young members of
secular development organisations such as Asha
(founded by Sandeep Pandey) and the Association for
India's Development. Many of them shared the grave
disquiet about the assaults on pluralism in India, and
wanted to contribute to efforts to defend secularism.
But among some members, I also did find ideological
confusion, reflected in their sympathy to parts of the
Hindutva ideology or claims that many NGOs in India
were `neutral' to the turbulent communal divide.

For Jayashree and Ashok, a young couple in Seattle, a
major segment of their daily life is devoted to
volunteer work for Asha. Ashok spends many evenings
and week-ends away from his work in a computer
company, singing old Kishore Kumar songs in a band
cobbled together to raise funds for development work
in India. Stirred by accounts of the continuing
distress of families in rural Gujarat, the couple has
resolved to raise funds for them. Both dream of
abandoning their well-paid positions and returning
soon to India, to work for advancing the cause of
education. In most cities, mainly first-generation
young Indian Americans, many of them engineers,
attempt to engage constructively with development
organisations and social movements in India.

MEETING these two groups of young people of Indian
origin, those belonging to the Muslim organisations
and those with organisations like AID and Asha, I was
struck by how similar many of them were - idealistic,
impassioned and sincere. They were also of the same
professional profile - software professionals,
university students, social science researchers, and
so on. Yet, they rarely met and worked together. The
claims by AID and Asha that they never consciously
kept youth from the minority communities out and that
it just happened, mirrored arguments a few years ago
about why most development groups `just happened' to
have mainly men.

Also, with both sets of groups of socially committed
young Indians of American origin, I observed their
remarkable insularity from social justice movements in
the U.S. Except for Ubaid, the remarkable doctor who
founded the Indian Muslim Council and a young physics
teacher in Detroit, I rarely encountered any young
people of Indian origin - first or second generation -
who were involved in civil rights causes of African
Americans, or those who volunteered to work for causes
of deprivation and injustice in the U.S. like
homelessness. For Ubaid, it was only the state
complicity in the Gujarat bloodbath that persuaded him
to pull back from his work in the cause of human
rights in the U.S., and, instead involve himself in
efforts to safeguard these rights in the deeply loved
country of his birth.

Many Indian Americans involve themselves in political
events in India with an immediacy and passion, to an
extent that it is sometimes difficult to remember that
one is not in India, but on the other side of the
planet. During my visit, for instance, people followed
and analysed every reported word of hate speeches by
Praveen Togadia and the confused, unsteady responses
to these by state authorities in India, with greater
concern than in many bylanes of India itself. A
multiplicity of deep emotional chords continue to bind
millions of people of Indian origin who choose to live
and work in the most powerful nation in the world, to
the ancient land in which they and their parents were
born.

Many Indian Americans spoke about how precious the
pluralism of the Indian tradition and their identity
as Indian Muslims were to them. Quaid Saifee, a young
computer executive in Detroit, spoke of his days in an
engineering college in Indore. "I was the only Muslim
in my entire class. My friends always used to adjust
their plans, when we went out to see films, or for
dinner, so that I could offer namaz at the prescribed
hours. When any vegetarian friends came home for food,
my mother would wash out the entire kitchen in
advance, so that their food could not be touched by
meat. There was so much love between us. Where has all
of this gone?"

The visit confirmed to me how closely the turbulent
recent history of the dramatic rise of right-wing
religious fundamentalism and the politics of hatred in
India, is related to and nourished by the Indian
diaspora in the U.S. An influential segment of this
diaspora is ideologically committed to the politics of
Hindutva, and shares its irrational malevolent
hostility towards minorities, and uncompromising
opposition to the vision of a pluralistic, democratic
India with genuinely equal citizenship for people of
all faiths, caste and gender.

Going beyond its enormous financial support, exposed
by the Stop Funding Hate Campaign, is its ideological
nourishment from the U.S., in the form of minority
bashing literature, web sites and propaganda. The
temples are one of the only spaces where the majority
of Hindu Indian Americans meet on a regular basis, and
these are reportedly increasingly controlled by
Hindutva elements that actively promote their divisive
ideology. Youth summer camps to assist second
generation Indians to learn about their `culture' are
also used as powerful vehicles to propagate their
intensely partisan vision of Indian culture, history,
society and politics. There were many Indian Americans
who believe that the U.S. is growing into the most
influential fortress for the rallying of the forces of
Hindutva after the Indian state of Gujarat.

There is also evidence of influential political
alliances with powerful sections of the U.S. ruling
political establishment. Especially in the aftermath
of 9/11, and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq,
the U.S. government and major segments of the media
and public opinion are actively engaged in the
demonisation of the Islamic world. This has led to a
growing opportunistic alliance between the domestic
and global policies of the U.S. government and the
domestic politics of the Indian government. Hardline
Israeli elements and the government of Israel are also
joining this axis.

The impact of all of this on the Indian diaspora is to
create an uncompromising, unprecedented divide between
people of Indian origin who are born into the Hindu
and Muslim faiths. This spills into even second and
third generation Indian Americans, and increasingly
characterises social relations even in universities,
with increasingly strident organisations of students
owing open allegiance to Hindutva playing an active
role in most U.S. universities.

People I met in many cities recognised, especially,
the need to work with young people of Indian origin in
the U.S., including those of second and third
generation, in order to strengthen their commitment to
pluralism, peace and justice. Spaces like places of
worship need to be reclaimed from fundamentalist
elements; young people need authentic humanistic
teachings of their respective faiths. Secular avenues
also need to be built to enable them to acquire an
undistorted picture of what constitutes Indian
culture, its syncretic, pluralist, tolerant character,
but also its traditional injustices of caste and
gender. They also need to be brought in touch with the
social justice issues of the adopted country, which is
now home for them and their children.

Everywhere, there was great enthusiasm for building an
Aman Parivar, or family of peace, as an alternative to
the Sangh Parivar. This is envisaged as a very loose
and broad platform of people and organisations that
are committed to join hands to fight the mounting
poison of communal hatred and divide, and to defend to
reclaim and to strengthen pluralism, secularism,
justice, humanism and democracy. It would bring
together anti-communal religious, cultural and
professional organisations with a range of liberal,
left, democratic and development organisations.

ON May 19, 2003, the day I returned to India, a call
was given by Hindu Unity, the U.S.-based wing of the
Bajrang Dal, which is the youth front of the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP), and by the Hindu Mahasabha to
celebrate Nathuram Godse's birth on May 19 "to send a
message to the enemies of humanity that we will fight
and even die to protect the basic principle of
Hinduism". It further denigrated Gandhi by saying:
"Gandhi was a downright pacifist, without guts and
scruples. His constant preaching to his fellow Hindus,
to be non-violent at all times, even in the face of
aggression, paralysed the manhood of India, mentally
and physically..'

The undisguised poison of this appeal, and the outrage
of many groups of Indian Americans that followed,
symbolises the struggle that convulses the Indian
diaspora in the U.S. The struggle is to find its soul,
whether in the message of love and tolerance of
Mahatma Gandhi, or in the twisted legacy of his
assassin Nathuram Godse.

In the dark storms of bigotry, of wars of collective
vengeance that sweep our world today, does anyone in
the U.S. or India have an answer to the question that
young Zahir Janmohammed asks each of us, both as a
challenge and a plea:

"Could Gandhi still be alive? Somewhere, in someone?"