The View From Jantar Mantar (Page 3)

"They do not move to Chicago, they move to South Side; they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem," James Baldwin wrote in "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" of the final destinations of blacks migrating to New York City from the Deep South. When Muslims leave India's small towns and villages for New Delhi, they move to Okhla. New Delhi's largest Muslim ghetto, Okhla lies half an hour from Jantar Mantar, past shopping malls, international chain boutiques, banks, advertising offices and television studios. Life in Okhla is precarious, but after the destruction of the medieval Babri mosque by an extremist Hindu mob in December 1992 and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western Indian state of Gujarat, it's one of the few places in New Delhi where Muslims feel safe.

In The Clash Within, a passionate look at the crisis of democracy and religious violence in India, Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed reconstruction of the genocide she says occurred in Gujarat. She shows that the violence had been planned well in advance, and she chronicles the failures of the state to prosecute the accused Hindu-right activists or their mentors in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which continues to control Gujarat under the rule of chief minister Narendra Modi. Religious tensions and the riots between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority are a sad, old story in India. But the mass murder of Sikhs in New Delhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination and the Gujarat genocide are among the starkest examples of organized violence against any minority in India, events that have also been supported by politicians in the ruling parties.

Nussbaum says the main purpose of her book is to inform European and American readers about a "complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." She does that well. She describes the Hindu right's admiration of Nazism and Fascism, noting the insertion in high school textbooks in Gujarat of passages like "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time, establishing a strong administrative set-up." Apart from the lack of critical thinking in schools, she also sees "the lack of political organization along class and economic lines," the "effective grassroots organization throughout the state by the Hindu right," the sense that Gujarat's relatively better-off Muslims were "seen to take positions that Hindus might otherwise hold" as factors behind the violence. Nussbaum does take care to differentiate the Hindu right from Hinduism; she writes that "it was violence done by people who have hijacked a noble tradition for their own political and cultural ends." Such attention to context and Nussbaum's knowledge of Indian history and culture protects her account of religious violence in Gujarat from a "clash of civilizations" alarmism.

Nussbaum argues that for all its sectarian qualities, the violence of the Hindu right has some secular roots. Nehru's disdain of religion in public life backfired, she claims, and inadvertently helped the Hindu nationalists consolidate their power: "Nehru's feeling that religion was an embarrassment led him to devote too little attention to molding the aspects of human life that he associated with religion--emotion, rhetoric, the imaginative undergirding of a pluralistic civic culture--in such a way that civic culture could become a grassroots force for pluralism and respect rather than for fear and hatred."

Nussbaum, like many other commentators, sees hope in the resounding defeat of the right-wing BJP in the 2004 elections, a verdict she describes as "repudiation of Hindu homogeneity." In fact, she admits that the foremost reason for the BJP's defeat was economics. BJP's pre-election proclamation of economic optimism--"India Shining"--had angered the rural and urban poor, and they voted the BJP out. But despite the BJP's replacement by an officially secular Congress Party, economic discontent continues to simmer, especially in the large parts of central and western India where Maoist guerrillas have found support from landless peasants, and also in the information-technology hub of Andhra Pradesh, where thousands of farmers have committed suicide after failing to pay their debts. Fault lines created by caste and development endure, and the troubling questions of Kashmir and India's northeastern states continue to affect millions of lives every day.

It is these troubles, some signs of which are often visible at Jantar Mantar, that make Guha temper his final verdict on Indian democracy. "Is India a proper or a sham democracy?" he asks. For an answer he borrows the response that the Bollywood comedian Johnny Walker offers again and again to many reel-life questions: Phipty-phipty. Yes, fifty-fifty.

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