Is this the BJP I campaigned for?

The first claim we repeatedly hear is that 8216;8216;Ahmedabad was a reaction to Godhra8217;8217;. Where have we heard this before? Every case of murder of innocents whether in Kashmir or the World Trade Center is linked by the jihadis to an earlier atrocity by someone else. At a seminar last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the VHP general secretary of the US eloquently quoted from the Gita and claimed to the audience that Godhra mein adharam hua, and said that he was surprised that there wasn8217;t greater violence across the country.

Yes, Godhra was an outrage, and the perpetrators need to be swiftly tried and given the maximum legal punishment. But nowhere in its 18 chapters does the Gita talk about killing innocents in blind retribution. Blaming a collective for the actions of a few individuals, and unleashing mindless violence against them is the first attribute of terrorism.

Another common 8216;explanation8217; which should be quickly debunked is the idea that the violence was a spontaneous reaction of frustrated, unemployed youth. These youth need to be mobilised, and the biggest danger of the VHP/Bajrang Dal is their explicit hate-based mobilisation, which in turn gives them a street power with tremendous destructive capacity. By directing the frustrations of youth towards an imaginary 8216;enemy8217;, the Bajrang Dal creates a Molotov cocktail that is waiting to explode. Again the parallels with how suicide bombers are recruited and how Hitler mobilised his young battalions against the Jews are for all to see.

The most dangerous aspect of the Hindutva brigade is the extent to which its cadre are indoctrinated, to the point of being incapable of individual rational thought. While this has been apparent in some of my discussions with the 8216;faithful8217;, the biggest evidence is the various peace fasts, sit-ins and marches that have been attacked in the name of Hinduism. The intolerance in these people is shocking when one encounters them the first time, but on reflection it is probably no different from a conversation with a fidayeen, or a young lieutenant in the Gestapo who has been convinced that 8216;8216;Germany will be great once we get rid of the Jews8217;8217;8217;.

People often wonder how ordinary Germans allowed the holocaust to happen, and the answer is that they either chose not to believe it was true or let themselves be scared at the thought of individually opposing the forces at hand. The parallel with the silent majority of Hindus in India today is quite apparent. Given the sheer numbers in India, the VHP/Bajrang Dal are able to cause havoc even by mobilising a very small fraction of the population, and it is easy to get overwhelmed by the mistaken perception that they enjoy 8216;popular8217; support, when in fact all they have is a few thousand hooligans.

We are fighting a battle for the soul of India here. An important contributor to peace, as studies on communal conflict have shown, is the prevalence of institutions that allow people from different communities to interact with each other on a daily basis that prevents the dehumanising of the 8216;other8217; that happens in a riot. What this means is that we need to reach out to our Muslim friends and neighbours and feel their pain and insecurity and, in our own limited ways, assure them that nothing will happen to them while we are around. This will be difficult, and will take moral and physical courage 8212; after all Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an intolerant Jew and Mahatma Gandhi by a fanatical Hindu. Like a friend told me, 8216;8216;We may have allowed ourselves to forget all of Gandhi8217;s teachings, but we should never have allowed ourselves to forget who killed him.8217;8217;

The writer is a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University with a focus on political economy and development