The destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya on Sunday December 6th by Hindu extremists has raised the spectre of fundamentalism in a sub-continent armed with nuclear weapons. If India is reeling from the killing fields of communal passion, so too is Pakistan where violent anti-Hindu outrage threatens to rupture ties between the two countries.
Relations between India and Pakistan have never been good. Since the communal partition of the Indian sub- continent, there have been three wars between them, two over Kashmir and one in which India abetted the secession of Bangla Desh in 1971. For several years, armed conflict over Siachin has claimed scores of lives on both sides. The two came precipitously close to another major war in April 1990 after India accused Pakistan of fueling the insurgency in Kashmir.
Since then, there have been periodic beatings and expulsions of each other’s diplomats by both sides. Last month, Islamabad accused New Delhi of killing two Pakistani tourists and demanded that their bodies be returned to Pakistan. The Indians refused. Islamabad protested and enforced visa restrictions. New Delhi responded by roughing up a Pakistani diplomat and expelling him.
Religious fury has now exacted a terrible revenge from the opportunist governments in both countries. Certainly, the many confidence-building measures launched in recent years to diminish tensions between the two countries have been reduced to nought overnight. And the people-to-people contacts so favoured by liberals on both sides have probably been buried for a long time to come.
Pakistanis believe that the Congress government of prime minister Narasimha Rao has succumbed to the politics of expediency before the rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism. They’re convinced that Rao is shedding crocodile tears after giving the Babri Masjid a stormy burial, that the besieged Muslims of India may now be forced to consider their fate as being no different from that of the Sikhs.
The fear on this side of the border is that if Indian secularism has finally capitulated to Hindu fundamentalism, how will Pakistan stem the retaliatory wave of Islamic extremism which threatens to engulf it. There is much anger too at the West’s discriminatory attitude towards the two countries. While Pakistan has been roundly ticked off for hiding “seven Islamic bombs” in its basement and is accused of being a “terrorist” regime for supporting the cause of Kashmir, India has escaped censure despite possessing “seventy Hindu bombs” and killing thousands of Kashmiris. Is the West so blinkered and hypocritical that it can only see a secular, democratic profile of India while it rages about the fundamentalist and authoritarian side of Pakistan?
Even so, tens of thousands of Pakistani Muslims need to seriously reflect upon their own savage behaviour last week. In mindless retaliation against the outrage at Ayodhya, hysterical, rampaging gangs have destroyed scores of Hindu temples and shrines in Pakistan. While the fanatics were targeting innocent lives and gutting property, the government of Nawaz Sharif stood by and twiddled its thumbs. On a number of occasions, it actually seemed to fuel the carnage against the Hindu minority. For example, Raja Nadir Pervez, a federal minister, led the shameful onslaught against a temple in Faisalabad. In Lahore, the Municipal Corporation lent its bulldozer to the crazed swarms who razed a temple in Shahalam market. Elsewhere, the omnipotent police and security forces, who are given to ferocious enforcement of Section 144 against the opposition periodically, didn’t raise a finger to stop the marauding mobs.
Like his counterpart in India, Mr Sharif’s behaviour last week was pathetic, if not downright appalling. If the PM’s cynical attempt to dialogue with the opposition was transparent, his promise to rebuild the temples was so hollow that it doesn’t merit a second thought. This IJI government doesn’t give a damn about our minorities. All its actions — enforcing the “blasphemy” laws or insisting upon the inclusion of religion in the ID cards — confirm that it is pandering to the worst prejudices of the lowest denominators in Pakistan.
The Babri Masjid episode and its fallout in Pakistan may be fated to stick out as two bloody, accusing fingers in the contemporary history of the sub-continent. The people of both countries have verified their worst fears, suspicions and prejudices of each other. Where the scars of the Partition have barely healed, new horrors have been brutally carved into their communal memories. For this tragic denouement, both Narasimha Rao and Nawaz Sharif, no less than the minority, fanatical hordes on both side, are culpable.
There are compelling reasons why the horror of Ayodhya should now force the West not to mistake illusion for reality. Fundamentalism, Hindu or Muslim, feeds on itself. There can be no greater boon for a fundamentalist than another fundamentalist implacably opposed to himself. All the signs say that militant Hinduism will push Pakistani Islam towards fundamentalism in the same way that Zionism has provoked Arab Islam to extremism. If the Western powers are once again taken in by more glib talk from India’s “secularists”, surely much more than the future of the 1 billion people of India and Pakistan is at stake.