MACKINNON: How did you feel when you saw Gujarat burning? ROY: The worst thing was that BJP governments in New Delhi and Gujarat tried to say it was an administration problem: how to get the police and Army in. But they’ve been assiduously working up this feeling for years, stoking these ugly passions. If it was an uncontrolled communal frenzy, why wasn’t it repeated in other states? It’s because Gujarat’s the only state where the BJP’s in power. Any Indian citizen who’s had a run-in with police or the state knows that if the authorities want to control the situation they can do so in one hour flat. There’s no excuse for what happened.
Surely communal tensions existed there before? The people who burned that train in Godhra [when 58 Hindu activists died] and the people who are burning people alive in Gujarat all worship [God]. To present it as communal violence is very wrong. The seeds of hatred were sown.
How? This government indulges in political brinkmanship with the voters. You raise the specter of “Hindutva” [Hindu price]; you come to Ayodhya and gather mobs. You bring the pot to the boil then hold up your hands in horror and say it’s boiling over. In Gujarat the communal temperature has always been high–the fascism is just below the skin. It’s chilling. There’s a letter being circulated saying people should boycott Muslim businesses. It’s like what the Nazis did against the Jews. It must be terrifying to be a Muslim in this country today. And the farther down the social scale you go, the more terrifying it must be. But it’s not a class thing. The literate, educated middle classes, the people in power, are complicit.
Is India on a slippery slope? The BJP, before it came to power, was much more rabid. It needed to control that to win power because the mass of Indian people isn’t crazy. Today if there’s any hope it’s that a huge section of the people is repulsed by the violence and has pulled back from the edge. I hope these last few weeks were the death knell for the BJP. I think people were repelled by the way it reacted.
Are there wider roots to the violence? There’s a link between the massive corporate globalization, the privatization of state industries that lead to dispossession and the howling nationalism in this country. People are being dispossessed and losing their livelihoods–displaced in a sudden and brutal way. When you have lost everything it’s easy to turn to religion to vent your frustration. Often the sources of that are distant and you’re so full of anger. There’s a connection between deepening poverty and dispossession and the frustration that’s growing in the country. It’s nothing to do with religion but can be “channelized” into it.
Don’t cross-border tensions play a role? This whole thing also ties in with the rhetoric over Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan have used border tensions for their own internal ends. Gen. Pervez Musharraf–the military dictator–is, at least officially, controlling his fundamentalists. Whereas India’s encouraging them. It’s frightening. By demonizing Pakistan the government achieves national unity and legitimizes hostility to Muslims. India must understand that, if not territorially, in our heart and our souls Muslims are part of us and must be loved.
Is there any connection between the violence and the situation you found yourself in last week? There’s a retreat from democracy taking place. There’s generally a fearfulness in the air. The Supreme Court made its judgment in that atmosphere. I believe the communal frenzy is linked to the huge levels of dispossession. The whole business of privatizing infrastructure is about selling off public assets held in trust for the people. It’s about disengaging politics from the market. It’s about the poor man losing the last weapon he has–his vote.
