SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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”30 January Should Be South Asian Brotherhood Day Against Fascism”

Proposal made by the Internet discussion group Asiapeace, Januray 2003

On 30 January 1948 Nathuram Godse, a Mahrastrian Brahman, shot dead Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the lawns of  Birla House in New Delhi. The execution had been planned by Hindu communalists who had unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Gandhi at least five times earlier.  The first occasion was 25 June 1934 when a bomb was detonated at a meeting in Pune, which was to commemorate his struggle for the uplift of the Untouchables. Gandhi escaped because he travelled in a different car. The bomb grievously injured the Chief Officer of the Municipal Corporation, two policemen and seven others. The last attempt was a success.
55 years later one wonders why he was so implacably hated by some members of his own community! The extremists nurtured two main grievances against him. The first was his alleged policy of appeasement of inherently disloyal Muslims. The second was his relentless struggle to reform the caste system. For diehard Hindu fundamentalists both such acts were unpardonable crimes against their cherished vision of an indivisible Akhand Bharat faithful to the Laws of Manu.

Gandhi’s political struggle primarily was directed at achieving the freedom of India from colonial rule. He initially approached politics from an orthodox religious standpoint, ‘God is truth’, but found that it divided people, each community claiming to represent the one and exclusive divine truth. He began to recast his mission in a different language and with great moral courage and perseverance altered it fundamentally to mean ‘Truth is God’. In this new form, truth was divine itself and it realisation required an innovative and dynamic understanding of religions. Proceeding along such lines, he accepted the fact of multiplicity of religions but insisted that all of them represented the same truth. His daily prayers comprised verses, devotional songs and readings from different scriptures. All people, irrespective of their religious affiliations, attended those meetings. Till his dying day Gandhi held the view that the religious beliefs of an individual should not in any way affect his rights as a citizen. Thus future India was going to be a democratic, tolerant state of all Indians irrespective of their religious allegiances. He created an entirely new concept of sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions) which did not have any direct sanction in orthodox Hinduism; historically Hinduism accepted pluralism by closing its boundaries; those outside it were mlecchas or unclean people.
The next thing to achieve was equality within Hindu society While not categorically rejecting the caste system he wanted to correct its inherent iniquity by emphasising the dignity of work and calling the Untouchables, ‘Harijans’ or Children of God (the Untouchables prefer to call themselves Dalits). His inspiration for such reform came from the influence of Kabir and Nanak and the Islamic heritage to which he had been exposed from his childhood. He advocated and actively encouraged inter-caste marriages, and blessed only those marriages wherein one of the partners belonged to the untouchable castes.

All such efforts however failed to keep India united when it won freedom in 1947. The two main elite parties, the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League, failed to agree to a formula of power-sharing in a united India and that made Partition inevitable. It unleashed the forces of reaction on a scale hitherto unknown in the history of communal tension and conflict in South Asia. The British were no longer interested in maintaining law and order and their writ began to be flouted openly. As the law and order situation deteriorated criminal gangs, religious fanatics, political psychopaths and biased functionaries of the administration, especially the police, began to terrorise people from the opposite groups. By the end of 1947 at least 12-15 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had been forcibly made to cross the border in search of safe haven. Although nobody knows the exact figures of those who died the figure of more than one million seems to be the most credible. The number of women raped exceeded 70,000 and many children were abducted and never returned to their parents.
What happened in 1947 were genocide and the only political label that can be put on those activities is fascism. The more important point to keep in mind is that fascism did not end with the division of India. In India it continued to fester for a long time but was marginalised while Jawaharlal Nehru was at the helm of affairs. It claimed victims now and then from amongst Muslims and Dalits, but it moved centre stage with the Ram Mandir movement, which culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid.  At present almost all minorities and the Dalits are facing its fury.

Pakistan apparently started its career as a more cohesive Muslim nation-state but in 1953 the anti-Ahmadiyya riots in Punjab signalled a revival of the same fundamentalist dimension which in 1947 had deeply frightened non-Muslims and made them flee from Pakistan. In 1971 Pakistan carried out a military operation in what was then East Pakistan. This time the victims were mainly fellow Bengali Muslims. More than a million people lost their lives as the Pakistan army sought to establish its authority over a people who had lost all faith in it. The loss of East Pakistan renewed the old slogan of ‘Islam in danger’ in the truncated Pakistan.
Gradually such a perception resulted in the Shia minority being targeted by Sunni zealots. The Shias hit back with great fury but proved no match to the superior numbers of the Sunnis. Meanwhile Ahmadis, Christians and the tiny Hindu minority of Sindh began to figure increasingly in arson attacks and shooting incidences besides cases of forced conversion to Islam. Bangladesh which had emerged as a consolidated Bengali Muslim nation could not desist victimising its hills tribes or the Hindu minority.

At the beginning of 2003, the moral superiority of Gandhi’s message of brotherhood and the indivisibility of humanity can no longer be doubted. South Asia needs to go back to the high standards of non-violence and communal harmony that he established. On behalf of Asiapeace, I therefore urge the peace-loving peoples of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to close ranks and together demand from their governments that 30 January be declared ‘The South Asian Brotherhood Day Against Fascism’.

Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed
Moderator Asiapeace
An international internet discussion group