Muslim Violence in Pakistan

In Pakistan, successive political leaders increasingly found religion to be a useful rallying point for national unity. It also provided a built-in network of support from Muslim religious authorities and activists.

One legacy of the Zia regime has been the covert Pakistani support for extremist Muslim political movements in Afghanistan. First the Mujahadeen and then the Taliban movements have been secretly supported by elements of the Pakistan military and intelligence services. The ideas of the Taliban are related to the Deoband Muslim reform movement in South Asia that attempted to purify and standardise the teachings and practices of Islam. Groups such as the Taliban interpreted this reform movement in a rigid and uncompromising way. The movement was not only an agent of religious standardisation, however; it became the political wing of the Pashtun tribal community, large numbers of which were within Pakistan's own western borders. Mollifying the Taliban, then, was a way of currying favour with the critical Pashtun community.

In the twenty-first century, religious violence has persisted in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and in some regions of Pakistan the extremism of Muslim political groups led to violent confrontations and acts of terrorism.

Hindu Nationalist Violence in India

At the same time that Pakistan was developing a more strident Muslim political posture, religious nationalism was also surfacing within India, as we have seen with the rise of a Sikh separatist movement in the 1980s. But violence has accompanied the religious nationalism of Hindus as well. In some ways, the emergence of the Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP) was the re-emergence of a religious strand of Indian nationalism that extended back to the early part of the twentieth century. One of the early voices for Indian independence came from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who founded the Hindu Mahasabha, and advocated a concept of Hindu culture which he called Hindutva as being the basis of Indian national identity. He once entered into a debate with Mohandas Gandhi over the efficacy of using violence in the struggle for India's freedom.^[164] Despite Savarkar's efforts, Hindu nationalism was not a major element in India's nationalist movement. After indepen­dence, several political parties took up the banner of support for Hindu causes, notably the Jan Sangh, but it was not until the 1990s that a new movement of religious consciousness led to spectacular political successes for the BJP.

The BJP was officially launched in 1980 out of the remnants of previous Hindu-oriented political parties.^[165] It did not gain strength, however, until the 1990s with the events that led up to the violent attack on a Muslim mosque said to be located on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram in the town of Ayodhya. Religious activists associated with the sectarian Hindu organisations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, championed the destruction of the mosque in order to liberate the grounds from Muslim associations. Though archaeologists questioned the authenticity of the assertion, and many questioned whether a spiritual entity such as a god actually had a birthplace, the site became a matter of religious contention, fuelled by political rhetoric. It was the secular Congress Party, after all, that allowed the mosque to continue to exist on that spot. Though the Indian government said that it was protecting the site in the name of secularism - which in India meant the equal protection of all religious communities - the BJP political response was that the Congress's position was ‘pseudo-secularism' that in fact masked the privileging of minority communities such as Muslims over the interests of Hindus. (Even after the creation of Pakistan, the numbers of Muslims remaining in India were 15 per cent of the population, enough to constitute a significant electoral base of votes, and a reason for politicians to curry the Muslims' favour.)

In 1992 a mob of over 100,000 angry Hindus convened in Ayodhya, attacked the mosque with improvised tools, and rendered it to dust. The BJP capitalised on this sentiment of Hindu nationalism, and employing Savarkar's concept of Hindutva as the bedrock of Hindu nationalist culture, launched a series of political campaigns. The elections brought the BJP into positions of power in the legislatures of several states, and from 1998 to 2004 it was the dominant party in a national coalition that ruled India, and the BJP leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became India's prime minister.

A violent past also clouds the leadership role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When he was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, Modi is said to have encouraged Hindu mobs to kill over a thousand innocent Muslims in neighborhoods at the edge of the city of Ahmedabad. Thousands more were injured, and tens of thousands fled the city in fear. Though official investigations and judicial proceedings cleared Modi of any direct involve­ment in the massacre, accounts of Modi's encouragement that were included in reports by Human Rights Watch and other non-governmental organisa­tions were sufficient for the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States to ban Modi from entering their countries until he became elected prime minister in 2014, when he was greeted as a head of state.

One of his political allies, however, did not get off so easily. Seven years after the 2002 massacre, Maya Kodnani was convicted for what the judge in the specially designated court described as her role as being the ‘kingpin' and ‘one of the principal conspirators' of the assault; he then sentenced her to twenty-eight years in prison.^[166] Like Modi, she had been raised in a household dominated by the ideology of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, the ‘national volunteer organisation'), and at the time of the 2002 massacre she was a legislator in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly and a member of Modi's political party, the BJP. Though rumours of her role in the massacre persisted after 2002, five years later Modi named her to his cabinet as minister for women and child development, a role appropriate to her profession as a gynaecologist.

Whether the 2002 Gujarat massacre was an act of terrorism, and whether government officials - including possibly Modi himself - can be described as terrorists, are contested issues. There is no doubt about the basic facts of the case, however: perhaps as many as 2,500 innocent Muslim men, women and children were hacked to death, stabbed, raped and burned alive by angry Hindu mobs. It has often been referred to as a ‘riot', but this implies an equal amount of violence from both religious communities, and in this case the Muslims were almost entirely the victims of angry Hindus. Some scholars have called it a ‘pogrom', implying that Hindu political leaders deliberately planned and conducted the act.^[167] Still others have described it as ‘religious violence', or a ‘massacre'. Martha Nussbaum has called it ‘ethnic cleansing', adding that it was ‘premeditated' and ‘carried out with the complicity of the state government and officers of the law'.^[168] Whatever it was called, however, it was one of the most horrifying events in India's recent political history.