With the top Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader, Mohan Bhagwat, now acknowledging that some members of the outfit had radical views but were asked to leave as extremism wouldn’t do, the doors have opened for the Hindutva-inclined to accept — even if only for analytical purposes — that in India a Hindu can be a terrorist. When
the first hint appeared some two years ago of Pragya Thakur and her associates, who included a former Army officer, being involved with terrorist activities such as bomb blasts and were linked with the Malegaon detonation, senior RSS functionaries, leading BJP figures such as L.K. Advani (who are, of course, very much RSS), and many in the so-called Sangh Parivar had sought to be strident in their defence. Their argument was that a Hindu, by definition, cannot be a terrorist. This sounded absurd to anyone who did not look upon individuals or perpetrators of crimes in terms of their religion. Come to think of it, was the logic bizarre?
Hindutva suggests that only members of a faith that did not originate in India (Christianity and Islam in our context) can engage in traitorous activity such as terrorism, and that a Hindu is a patriot, a priori. Since the Malegaon blast, investigators’ clues in a series of incidents — at the Ajmer Sharif dargah, the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, and the Samjhauta Express bombing — resting heavily on statements of accused persons, point to a network of Hindu fanatics which aims at extracting revenge from ordinary, innocent Muslims for acts of “jihadi terrorism” emanating and inspired mostly from Pakistan. These so-called “Hindu terror” — as blind a description as “Islamic terrorism” — cases are in the investigation or trial process. Nevertheless, the apparent involvement of Hindus (without exception each having done a stint in an outfit of the Hindutva fold) in event after terrorist event has worn thin the defence of these criminals on the basis of first principles. Thus, Hindutva proponents are now no longer adopting the path of outright denial. They now say that the accused belong to “fringe” outfits and are not connected with the RSS and organisations associated with it. We shall know the plausibility of this only when the criminal cases against Indresh Kumar, a member of the RSS central committee, and Swami Aseemanand, also a prominent Hindutva figure, are settled in court.
Not surprisingly, Hindutva votaries had no difficulty jubilating when names of scores of Muslim individuals were splashed in the media in countless terrorist cases. This even gave rise to the mindless notion that only Muslims can be terrorists. Media reports were invariably based on official sources and can be called leaks. But today the RSS and top shots in the BJP are crying foul because the confessional statement of Aseemanand has been leaked to the media. This is being touted as the government’s way to hound “nationalist forces” (in this reading only Hindus and their extremist outfits answer to that description) under a “political conspiracy”. It is interesting to see that leaks by the government are being sought to be made the focus of attention, not the terrorist acts of likely Hindu perpetrators. It is time we paid serious attention to the fact that the crime of terrorism — especially when executed in communal identity terms — is a crime against our democracy, and the integral elements of our entity. Any patriotic Indian would be happy if the perpetrators are exposed and brought to book, not shed tears or be happy depending on the faith of the criminal. “Nationalist forces” in particular should be watchful about this if they are serious about being counted as “democratic forces” as well. Nationalism and democracy should be elements of a continuum, not constitutive pieces of disparate and mutually hostile tracks.