The End of Imagination Read Free

this far. Most of us know the story, but given the amnesia that is being pressed upon us, it might serve to put down a chronology of the recent present. Who knows, things that appeared unconnected may, when viewed in retrospect, actually be connected. And vice versa. So forgive me if, in an attempt to decipher a pattern, I go over some familiar territory.
    The journey to power began with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In 1990, L. K. Advani, BJP leader and a member of the RSS, traveled the length and breadth of the country in an air-conditioned rath —chariot—exhorting “Hindus” to rise up and build a temple on the hallowed birthplace of Lord Ram. The birthplace, people were told, was the exact same spot on which a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood, in the town of Ayodhya. In 1992, just two years after his rath yatra  (chariot procession), Advani stood by and watched as an organized mob reduced the Babri Masjid to rubble. Riots, massacres, and serial bombings followed. The country was polarized in a way it had not been since Partition. By 1998, the BJP (which had only two seats in Parliament in 1984) had formed a coalition government at the center.
    The first thing the BJP did was to realize a long-standing desire of the RSS by conducting a series of nuclear tests. From being an organization that had been banned three times (after the assassination of Gandhi, during the Emergency, and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid), the RSS was finally in a position to dictate government policy. We can call it the Year of the Ascension.
    It wasn’t the first time India had conducted nuclear tests, but the exhibitionism of the 1998 ones was different. It was like a rite of passage. The “Hindu bomb” was meant to announce the imminent arrival of the Hindu Rashtra. Within days, Pakistan (already ahead of the curve, having declared itself an Islamic republic in 1956) showed off its “Muslim bomb.” And now we’re stuck with these two strutting, nuclear-armed roosters, who are trained to hate each other, who hold their minority populations hostage as they mimic each other in a competing horror show of majoritarianism and religious chauvinism. And they have Kashmir to fight over.
    The nuclear tests altered the tone of public discourse in India. They coarsened and, you could say, weaponized it. In the months that followed, we were force-fed Hindu nationalism. Then, like now, articles circulated, predicting that a mighty, all-conquering Hindu Rashtra was about to emerge—that a resurgent India would “burst forth upon its former oppressors and destroy them completely.” Absurd as it all was, having nuclear weapons made thoughts like these seem feasible. It created thoughts like these.
    You didn’t have to be a visionary to see what was coming.
    The Year of the Ascension, 1998, witnessed gruesome attacks on Christians (essentially Dalits and Adivasis), Hindutva’s most vulnerable foes. Swami Aseemanand, the head of the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram’s religious wing (who would make national news as the main accused in the 2007 Samjhauta Express train bombing), was sent to the remote, forested Dangs district in western Gujarat to set up a headquarters. The violence began on Christmas Eve. Within a week, more than twenty churches in the region were burned down or otherwise destroyed by mobs of thousands led by the Hindu Dharma Jagran Manch, an organization affiliated to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. Soon, Dangs district became a major center of ghar wapsi . Tens of thousands of Adivasis were “returned” to Hinduism. The violence spread to other states. In Keonjhar district in Odisha, an Australian Christian missionary, Graham Staines, who had been working in India for thirty-five years, was burned alive along with his two sons, ages six and ten. The man who led the attack was Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist.
    In April 2000, the US president Bill Clinton was on an official visit to