commentary
Confronting the Reality
of Hindutva Terrorism
Praful Bidwai
The exposure of a Hindutva
terrorist network behind the
bombings in Malegaon and
elsewhere should put paid to the
widely prevalent assumption –
shared by the police in numerous
states and by the national security
establishment – that terrorism
in India is an enterprise run
mainly, if not exclusively, by
Islamic extremists. The rise of
Hindutva terrorism cannot be
seen in isolation from the climate
of divisiveness and the culture
of hate that the Bharatiya Janata
Party has consciously promoted in
its cynical pursuit of power.
Praful Bidwai (prafulbidwai@gmail.com) is a
well-known columnist and writer on current
affairs.
10
T
he Maharashtra police have
unearthed what has all the mak-
ings of an organised, well-ramified,
ideologically driven and politically evolved
network of fanatical Hindutva activists cut-
ting across different Sangh parivar group-
ings, which allegedly planned and executed
a series of recent bomb blasts targeted at
mosques, whose victims were primarily
Muslims. These include bombings this past
29 September in Malegaon in Maharashtra,
in which six people were killed.
The attacks go all the way back to
November 2003 when a bomb was planted
at a mosque in Parbhani in Maharashtra’s
Marathwada region, and include blasts in
August 2004 at mosques at Jalna and
Purna, all in the same region.
The most alarming feature of the net-
work or ring is the allegedly pivotal role
played in it by a serving officer of the
Indian Army, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit,
and by some other alumni of the Bhonsala
Military School in Nashik and Nagpur in
Maharashtra, which has long served as a
preparatory school for recruitment into
the National Defence Academy and the
Indian Military Academy, where armed
forces personnel are trained.
This is the first time that a serving officer
of the army has been directly implicated
in a terrorist or extremist network of any
religious-political affiliation.
Various state and central-level police
agencies are also looking for the network’s
possible involvement in other instances of
terrorism, including the 29 September
bomb explosions at Modasa in Gujarat, the
February 2007 bombings on the Delhi-
Attari-Lahore Samjhauta Express train,
the May 2007 bombings at the Mecca
masjid in Hyderabad, and the October
2007 blasts in the Ajmer Sharif dargah. At
least 149 people were killed in these blasts.
Strong connections have emerged
between Sangh parivar organisations and
november 22, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
individual activists operating out of many
states, including Madhya Pradesh, Mahar-
ashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, and
belonging to numerous Hindutva outfits,
including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal,
Durga Vahini and Akhil Bharatiya Vid-
yarthi Parishad (ABVP), all fired by intense
anti-Muslim hatred.
Four Categories of Activists
The dramatis personae fall into four cate-
gories: serving and retired army officers;
sadhus, sadhvis and mahants affiliated to
parivar groupings and akharas; activists
especially of the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal;
and members of what might be called small
niche organisations like the Rashtriya
Jagaran Manch, Abhinav Bharat, Akhand
Bharat and Bhonsala Military School. Some
of their organisational affiliations overlap.
Thus, Purohit and a retired major,
Ramesh Upadhye, belong to the first group.
Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, Mahant Amritanand
alias Dayanand Pandey alias Sudhakar
Dwivedi, and some other swamis under the
scanner, fall in the second category.
Several others, like Naresh Rajkondwar
and Himanshu Phanse, who were killed
during an accidental blast while fabricat-
ing bombs in Nanded in Maharashtra in
April 2006, and who according to the
police were part of the same network,
were Bajrang Dal members. As were oth-
ers who played a supporting role.
Sameer Kulkarni belongs to Abhinav
Bharat, while Thakur set up the Rashtriya
Jagaran Manch. Former two-term BJP MP
B L Sharma “Prem”, who quit the party in
1997 after accusing it of “playing the com-
petitive game of Muslim appeasement”
and joined the VHP, set up Akhand Bharat.
Some of them have been linked to Pandey
and Purohit.
In addition, numerous cases of activists
of Bajrang Dal-sponsored and other
Hindutva networks involved in bomb-
making have come to light owing to acci-
dental explosions from places as varied as
Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, Tenkasi in Tamil
Nadu and most recently, near Kannur in
Kerala, besides a second time in Nanded
in February 2007.

According to the Maharashtra police’s
Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), some of the
bomb-making operations (for instance, in
Nanded) were part of a larger criminal
conspiracy to target Muslims and create the
impression that they would not hesitate to
kill other Muslims. The motive was to sow
disaffection, widen the communal divide and
help the Hindutva forces to blame Muslims
for all acts of terrorism, including diabolical
ones directed at Muslims themselves –
thus discrediting Muslims and diverting
attention from their own activities.
The September 2006 bombings in Male-
gaon outside a crowded mosque after the
Friday prayers fit this pattern like a “T”.
Thus, the police arrested Muslims alone
for the blasts – although the victims were
all Muslims observing Shab-e-Barat, or
remembrance of the dead, in an adjoining
graveyard. The bicycles on which the
bombs were placed bore Hindu names.
The local police not only ignored vital
material evidence concerning the Malegaon
blasts. They tried to cover up Bajrang Dal-
VHP involvement in the earlier bomb-
fabrication operation in Nanded by plant-
ing fire-crackers in the house belonging to
Rajkondwar’s father – to suggest that the
explosion was not caused by bombs. They
also ignored the fact that the conspirators
had put on false beards to suggest that the
bomb-makers were Muslims. They also
played down the recovery of a second
bomb in the house.
After the 2006 Nanded explosion, civil
society groups – including Secular Citi-
zens’ Forum and People’s Union of Civil
Liberties, Nagpur – produced a scathing
critique of the police version with photo-
graphic evidence to expose the Bajrang
Dal’s bomb-fabrication operation. They
specifically warned of an imminent attack
by Hindutva militants, but were ignored.
State Indulgence
The exposure of this Hindutva terrorist
network should put paid to the widely
prevalent assumption, shared by the police
in numerous states and by the national
security establishment, that terrorism in
India is an enterprise run mainly, if not
exclusively, by Islamic extremists: “all
Muslims may not be terrorists, but all
terrorists are Muslims”. This view has
been openly aired innumerable times in
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   november 22, 2008
newspapers and on TV channels, for
instance, by former minister of state for
home affairs I D Swamy and by other
Hindutva leaders.
Extremism or terrorism of the saffron
variety is treated with remarkable indul-
gence by the state – witness the kid gloves
handling of the Bajrang Dal, VHP and the
Shiv Sena despite their owning up to hate
speech and hate crimes for decades. The
assumption seems to be that Hindutva
extremists are basically nationalists and
patriots, even if misguided ones. Their
violence and killing of unarmed civilians
must be treated differently from the insen-
sate killing of civilians by Muslim extrem-
ists. Violence is contingent to Hindutva,
but essential to Islamic fanatics.
Challenge to Secularism
In reality, Hindutva seeks to radically
reshape society by violent means by over-
throwing secularism. Its Hindu-supremacist
ideology challenges India’s quintessential
character as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual,
multi-religious society to which plural-
ism is central. It wants to militarise Indian
society. It sees this as the key to creating a
strong sense of national identity – in oppo-
sition to non-Hindus, and in keeping with
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s location of
the true Hindu in a combination of pitrabhu
(fatherland) and punyabhu (holy land).
Crass militarism and violence directed
at non-Hindus have long been at the heart
of the “cultural nationalism” project –
d­ecades before the Ram Janmabhoomi
mobilisation beginning in the mid-1980s.
The principal difference between Hin-
dutva extremism and other forms of reli-
gious extremism is that the former tries to
pass itself off as nationalist by virtue of
claiming to speak for a majority of the
population, which by definition cannot
be separatist or anti-national. This view
is dangerously majoritarian and exclu­
sivist, and hence profoundly anti-­
democratic. Another difference is that
majoritarian extremism is more wide-
spread and enjoys a degree of state
patronage and indulgence.
Links to Original Project
A noteworthy, if somewhat bizarre, fea-
ture of the new revelations about the
Hindutva extremist network is that its
commentary
members hark back to the original Hindutva
project, formulated more than eight decades
ago. It is as if all the project’s architects,
long dead, had suddenly come alive as the
main actors in the drama being enacted
today through the shadowy institutions
they established and the individuals they
inspired. Thakur, Kulkarni, Upadhye and
Purohit are in a sense representations of
the spirits of the founders of the Hindu
Rashtra ideology.
Thus, Abhinav Bharat, created a century
ago by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the
inventor-author of Hindutva (1923), has
been resurrected through Kulkarni and
others who want to settle scores with the
Muslims who apparently continue to “per-
petrate atrocities” upon Hindus – by creat-
ing an “armed” India and burying Hindu
sahishnuvad (tolerance) through aggres-
sive ethno-religious nationalism.
The Abhinav Bharat president is Himani
Savarkar, daughter-in-law of V D Savarkar’s
brother Babarao, and daughter of Gopal
Godse, brother of none other than Gandhiji’s
assassin Nathuram. Babarao was one of
the five founding members of the RSS
and a crucial link between it and the
Hindu Mahasabha, of which Balkrishna
Shivramji Moonje, like the older Savarkar,
was a long-standing president.
However, Moonje was more than just
the Mahasabha president. He was an
admirer of contemporary fascism, and
personally met Mussolini in 1931, of whom
he spoke in glowing terms, impressed as
he was by the fasci or militant ultra-­
nationalist bands Mussolini had set up.
More important, he was the political
guru  of RSS founder K B Hedgewar, and
pivotal in sending him to Kolkata to
study   medicine.
The three original Hindutva icons,
Savarkar, Moonje and Hedgewar, all saw
“Yavana snakes” as a source of domination
of the Hindus. They regarded Muslims as
greater enemies than the British coloni-
alists. They believed in militarising
Hindu   society, which had been rendered
“effeminate” by masculine “Islamic con-
querors”. The obsessive emphasis on
p­hysical exercise, the martial arts, parades
and the akhara culture long found in
H­indutva organisations derives from
this,  as do khaki shorts, then worn by the
colonial police.
11
commentary

This militarism duly translated itself
into the establishment by Moonje of the
Central Hindu Military Education Society at
Nashik, which created the Bhonsala
M­ilitary School in 1937, named after
Chhatrapati Shivaji’s clan. The school’s
explicit aim is to “to inculcate military vir-
tues” in “Bharatiya” youth. It trained its
students in guerrilla warfare early on. BMS
teachers are known for their Hindu-­
communal views. BMS has prepared
h­undreds for entry into the National
Defence Academy and the armed forces.
Purohit, an Intelligence Corps officer, is an
alumnus of both the School and the NDA.
Hindutva militarism is also reflected in
the numerous camps that the VHP and
Bajrang Dal organise for their cadres,
which impart training in the use of
arms   and close combat, and include gory
rituals based on trishuls and swords.
There have been any number of instances
of Bajrang Dal activists distributing trishuls
– as many as four million according to
former chief minister Ashok Gehlot in
Rajasthan alone – and forming anti-­
Muslim suicide squads.
Shift in BJP Stance
It is remarkable that the BJP, to its abiding
disgrace, has moved from embarrassment
over the disclosures about the Hindutva
terrorist network to a defiant posture
which brazenly defends it. The “moderate”-
sounding view advanced by the party’s
prime ministerial hopeful L K Advani, that
“terrorism has no religion” and that “the
law must be allowed to take its course” no
matter what the offenders’ religion, has
effectively yielded place to the line of
party president Rajnath Singh, itself
strongly backed by the RSS, which holds
that those arrested by the ATS are inno-
cent and are being victimised for political
reasons. This says a great deal about the
party’s ideological-political evolution, and
much that is disturbing, indeed alarming.
This argument has several components
or versions. First, the BJP denies that the
detainees are Sangh parivar members or
were actively associated with it – although
Thakur was a national office-bearer of the
ABVP and Durga Vahini for many years
and has a strong RSS background, and the
others too have undeniable parivar links.
Second, it claims that their arrest is part of
the Congress Party’s conspiracy to malign
the parivar and the BJP in particular. The
charges levelled against the suspects, it holds,
are baseless and unsupported by evidence.
Third, the BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal contend
that the suspects are being framed on
trumped charges because the votaries of
Hindutva and “cultural nationalism” can
never be terrorists. They are by definition
nationalists and worthy citizens. Fourth,
some craven BJP apologists advance the
devious argument that they are vigilantes,
exasperated by the allegedly supine
response of the state to terrorism. They
decided to take matters into their own
hands and teach Islamic terrorists a lesson.
Their means may be questionable, but their
intentions and ends are understandable
and deserving of sympathy, if not just.

The Kerala State Higher Education Council

Science and Technology Museum Campus, Vikas Bhavan PO, Thiruvananthapuram-33, Kerala.
Email:heckerala@gmail.com Tel: 0471-2301290/92/93 Fax: 0471-2301290
No.58/KSHEC/Prjcts/08/dtd.18/11/2008
INVITATION FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN KERALA
The Kerala State Higher Education Council (KSHEC) invites research proposals from research experts/teachers, working in universities/
colleges/reputed research organisations for empirical, theoretical, and feasibility studies on various aspects of higher education that
have strong relevance in policymaking. The proposals are required to focus on Kerala.
Proposed Areas of Study
The following broad areas related to Kerala’s higher education are identified as being of special interest for funding:
1. Educational opportunities for the SC/ST/OBC/Minorities/Women/Physically Challenged.
2. Implementation of Information and Communications Technology in higher education.
3. Autonomy and accountability in higher education.
4. Commercialisation of higher education: issues and solutions.
5. Internationalisation of higher education.
6. Decentralisation of academic governance.
7. Changing student enrolment patterns in higher and technical education.
8. Public and private financing of higher education.
9. Social accountability of higher educational institutions.
10. Gender disparities in academic opportunities.
11. Social implications of student loan schemes.
Who may apply?
Applicants eligible for this call should be:
• Regular teachers or research experts working in universities/colleges/reputed research institutions in India.
or
• A team of regular teachers/experts, working in universities/colleges/reputed research institutions in India.
or
• Research experts attached to reputed research oriented non-governmental organisations.
Duration and funding
Up to 6 months Maximum Rs. 1 lakh
Up to 12 months Maximum Rs. 2 lakhs
Submission deadline: January 10, 2009
For submission guidelines and further details, please visit: kshec.kerala.gov.in
DR.K.N.PANIKAR
VICE-CHAIRMAN

12 november 22, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly


And finally, some BJP-RSS-VHP ideologues
hold that the ATS is playing with fire by
gratuitously dragging the name of a serv-
ing army officer into the network. This is
tantamount to assimilating the secular
Indian Army to the Pakistan Army, which
is influenced by jehadi extremism. This
can only demoralise the army and weaken
its will to fight Islamic terrorism, the prin-
cipal threat to India’s unity and security.
Specious Arguments
All these arguments are specious. It
stretches credulity to hold that the Mahar-
ashtra ATS would have acted on such a
“sensitive” and politically explosive issue
and arrested relatively high-profile parivar
activists like Thakur and Purohit without
substantial evidence. What has been pub-
licly disclosed so far suggests the opposite.
Going by decades-long experience, the
Congress Party errs on the side of abun-
dant, usually excessive, caution while
dealing with the parivar. Or else, the Babri
demolition would not have happened, nor
thousands of Muslims butchered since
then by culprits who continue to enjoy
impunity. Nor would Narendra Modi
have stayed in power instead of being dis-
missed after the pogrom of 2002.
As for “vigilantism”, the argument cuts
both ways – unless Hindu extremists are
illegitimately privileged and granted
immunity in advance for acts of senseless
revenge and retribution against real or
imagined by Muslims and their collective
punishment, itself an obnoxious idea. It
would be ludicrous to argue that the
Muslims of Gujarat, who have suffered mass
killings, rapes, humiliation and continued
denial of justice, would be justified in
resorting to terrorism. The history of
“c­ultural nationalism” is nothing if not
one of assassinations, bloody riots and
pogroms targeting the religious minori-
ties, increasingly with state complicity
or   collusion.
Lessons for Army
The Indian Army needs to draw some les-
sons from the Purohit case – but the oppo-
site of what the parivar recommends. It
must periodically screen its personnel,
ban recruitment from communal institu-
tions like the Bhonsala Military School,
and insist on a strict separation between
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   november 22, 2008
religion and professional functions. Toler-
ating religious extremists is not an option.
It simply cannot afford to be seen as
shielding them.
BJP Responsibility
Three other points are in order. The rise
and growth of Hindutva terrorism and
rabid militarism cannot be seen in isola-
tion from the climate of divisiveness,
parochialism and chauvinist nationalism
and the culture of hate that the BJP has
consciously promoted in its cynical pur-
suit of power. Violence is integral to this
culture. Indeed, it is part of the party’s
strategy of political mobilisation.
This culture has percolated over the
years into countless institutions of the
state, including the police and the national
security apparatus, which views terrorism
through the prism of Islamophobia. All
governments, irrespective of political
complexion, are affected by this to some
extent or other. As hate speech and acts
are increasingly granted impunity, and
prejudice and ethnic hatred become part
of normal public discourse, civil servants
and the police no longer feel constrained
not to air their jaundiced and communal
views, or worse, to act on them without fear
of anything more than a transfer of posting.
It is a telling comment on the crass com-
munalisation of the Maharashtra police
that they moved a remand application in a
Dhule court in the 5 October case of com-
munal rioting, which brazenly stated: “It
is an established fact that Muslims are the
masterminds behind all terrorist activities
across India.” They also exonerated the
Hindu Rakshak Samiti, which participated
in the violence, in which seven of the 10
people killed were Muslims, by saying its
activities were “mere retaliation to what
has been happening in the country for the
past few years”. Whether and how the
state government acts against those
responsible for this despicably communal
statement remains an issue.
Second, the BJP is poised to harden its
rabid Hindutva posture. If the Rajnath
Singh line prevails, and if the BJP does
relatively well in the assembly elections in
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh
and Delhi, it will see its victory as a vindi-
cation of its defence of the saffron terror
accused. This will encourage it to opt for a
commentary
grossly communal and divisive campaign
in the Lok Sabha election, the like of which
India has not seen, with potentially terrible
consequences for this society and polity.
Already, there are disturbing signs of
the direction in which the BJP is evolving.
Modi, legitimised by Tata Motors’ decision
to shift the Nano car project to Gujarat,
and lionised by big business, has emerged
as the undisputed successor to Advani.
The RSS has tightened its grip on the party.
After the 16 November Panipat con­
clave   of the parivar, in which Rajnath
Singh joined hands with viciously anti-
secular sadhus to declare the Malegaon
blasts investigation a “political conspir-
acy”, and to launch a mass campaign
against the United Progressive Alliance
for its “vilification of Hindu saints and
Army officers”, the party’s stance can
only   harden.
Wishful Thinking
This demolishes the wishful argument
that its incumbency in power would impel
the BJP towards “moderation”, sobriety and
responsibility. The BJP, quite simply, is not
that kind of party. It will always occupy
the dark region between parliamentary
politics as an instrument of power, and its
foundational loyalty to the Sangh parivar
and its hate-driven ideology and violent
politics. Yes, the BJP can get worse.
Third, it is imperative that the police
get to the bottom of the saffron terror
operation and investigate it impartially
and with thorough professionalism. They
must refrain from making premature state-
ments to the media before the investiga-
tions are completed and solid evidence is
obtained. The government must pursue
the case seriously and urgently act to ban
the Bajrang Dal and the RSS, and to prose-
cute BJP members connected with these
organisations. Nothing less can reaffirm
the secular spirit of this society and the
Indian Constitution.
EPW Index 2006
Readers can download the complete author
and article index (PDF files) for 2006 from the
EPW web site.
The index for 2005 is also available on the
same page.
13