A state-sponsored Hindu fundamentalist movement is afoot across secular India, seriously threatening its minority Muslim and Christian communities. Encouraged by senior cabinet members of the coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, it aims to impose Hindutva or Hindu hegemony on the country.
This point was driven home firmly when the federal Home Minister, Mr Lal Krishan Advani, recently joined thousands of Hindus from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or the National Volunteer Corps, committed to racial intolerance, in saluting their flag, which for decades has spelt terror to millions of Muslims and Christians.
Mr Advani, who is also the prime minister-in-waiting, graced the RSS's show of strength at its 75th anniversary in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal near Delhi, and was photographed with his hand across his chest in the traditional RSS salute to the flag symbolising a Hindu state. Paying glowing tributes to the RSS he described it as the Bharati Janata Party's (BJP) spiritual and moral guide.
Mr Advani's presence at the RSS meeting is comparable to the British Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, attending a meeting of the National Front or the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeline Albright, gracing a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan.
"The RSS exercises a moral influence on the government, and Prime Minister Vajpayee and I share a historical bonding with it, and there is no question of dissociating from it," Mr Advani declared at Agra.
This declaration came after the RSS leader, Mr K. Sudershan, had stated that the new millennium would witness an explosion of Hindu hegemony and demanded that India's 17 million Christians (about 2.5 per cent of the country's one billion population) be brought under a state-controlled indigenous church, as in China.
He accused the Vatican of intolerance towards other religions and demanded that all foreign churches and their organisations be banned. "Today Christianity [in India] is more of politics and less of religion," Mr Sudershan said. It was therefore advisable, he added, to have a totally Indian church like the one in China, and all foreign churches and missionaries should be asked by the government to pack up and go.
"When England, Scotland and Ireland can have their own churches, it is necessary for Indian Christians to sever ties with such an intolerant viewpoint [of the Vatican; that all religions are not equal] and accept that there are other ways to salvation," he declared.
The RSS leader alleged that the Baptist church in the north-eastern states bordering Burma (Myanmar) was responsible for fostering a civil war for an independent Christian homeland and preventing local Hindus from celebrating their religious festivals.
Jesuit priests established missions in the area around the end of the 19th century, and the government blames the 50-year-old separatist movement in Nagaland state for independence on these missionaries.
Claiming to be culturally, ethnically and religiously different from the rest of India, several Naga factions, of which the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah or NSCN (IM) is the best armed and trained, founded their armed separatist movement in the later 1940s.
Most Naga rebels were influenced by the church and American missionaries, many of whom preached secession, which led to the federal government imposing a ban on all foreigners visiting Nagaland and neighbouring states in the 1960s.
Even now, a foreigner wishing to visit this region needs a special permit from the federal authorities.
And, though the insurgency was contained around the mid-1980s and partial peace brought about by state elections, NSCN-IM guerrillas resurfaced two years ago, killing scores of soldiers in well-planned ambushes in the hilly regions north of the state capital, Kohima, once again plunging the state into civil war.
The RSS chief, meanwhile, also called on India's 130 million Muslims to publicly acknowledge Hinduism's mythical gods, Rama and Krishna, as national heroes and to "join the mainstream", a euphemism for knuckling under to Hindu control.
The RSS, which provides ideological guidance to the BJP government and lists Mr Advani and several senior cabinet colleagues as members, was founded in 1925 as a "religious militia" for the Hindu community to protect it from being "defiled" by outside influences such as Islam and Christianity.
It is organised along lines similar to the Italian Fascist party, daily imparting basic military drill to its cadres and involving them in ideological discussions in hundreds of neighbourhoods across India. The assassins of Mahatma Gandhi were educated in such a school and murdered him because of his secular outlook and policy of appeasement to the Muslims in the struggle for independence from colonial rule.
Although the RSS was banned for some years following Gandhi's murder in 1948, it was never outlawed. In the early 1950s it founded its political wing, the right-wing Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which later became the BJP, with RSS activists occupying top positions.
Rahul Bedi is a journalist in New Delhi and a regular Irish Times contributor
