A bully on the block is acting as a veritable bull in the nuclear China shop of the sub-continent, threatening regional as well as global peace. The Indian hubris springs from visceral hatred and base instincts of misanthropy and megalomania, born out of centuries of perceived bondage to foreigners, who, according to the Hindu puritans, came from outside to defile the mythical purity of an EL dorado that India was before the foreign conquest. The East India Company was the last slave master that kept Hindus in bondage before the putatively despotic rule of the Muslims.
An Indian economy on the upswing and concomitant predilection for strategic autonomy has given rise to a hyper nationalism rooted in religio-cultural ideology of Hindutva, which espouses total exclusion of all foreign religious and cultural identities in order to homogenise India in the spirit and form of an intolerant version of Hindu faith. This version is embedded in the thoughts and teachings of Hindu puritans like Savarkar, Golwalkar, and Hedgewar. This religiously grounded version has displaced secular and syncretic versions of religion and politics, preached and practiced by India’s founding fathers like Gandhi and Nehru.
The extremist variant of the Hindu faith harkens to a mythical past and phantasmagorical symbols of that past glory, like flying gods, nuclear-propelled apparitions, atomic blasts, and Vimanas (flying machines) as per myths based on ancient texts like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The historical revisionism and bowdlerization of history by the rabidly extremist Hindutva votaries leave no space for diversity and equity in India. Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, and animists have been the target of Hindutva militant brigades ever since the Hindutva-supported BJP assumed the reins of power in India.
This party is driven by hatred and bases its religious and political identity on a mythical past of Hindu glory and Akhand Bharat, which geographically extended to present-day Afghanistan, Iran, parts of Central Asia, and South Asia like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and China (Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh). The hate driven BJP politics is supported through myths, legends and selective presentation of historical facts by committed religious apparatchiks of RSS which is what the Nazis were to National Socialist Party in Germany before Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, riding on the hatred and frustration of the masses. RSS is a religiously motivated organisation led by its ideologue Mohan Bhagwat and is a parallel power hierarchy to its political face, i.e BJP.
Since India is in perpetual election mode with state elections happening regularly, the BJP-RSS playbook of gaining electoral benefit through anti Muslim and anti-Pakistan vote needs to be changed
RSS comprises a militant cadre of extremist Hindus with 58000 branches called Shakas throughout the length and breadth of the country that regularly conduct military training as well as religious indoctrination for its members. It is this militant cadre that exports Hindutva ideology abroad through its foreign chapters like HSS. The fractured Indian opposition and the weak local parties are vulnerable to the political blandishments and coercive tactics of the militant RSS cadres in the service of the BJP. The exclusionary means, like the Civil Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), are adopted to target minorities, especially Muslims, to sanitise the mother India of the polluting influence of minorities without any moral compunction.
India is in the grip of an authoritarian government run through the fiat of a religious bureaucracy of RSS and the corporate greed of business tycoons allied to the Modi government, who are buying off the media and emasculating institutions like the judiciary and the Election Commission by removing safeguards and packing these with pliable loyalists. As a result, despite polling more popular votes in the last two general elections, the Indian opposition alliance INDIA could not win a majority in parliament. The potential rivals, like the head of Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, Mamta Bannerjee, are coerced by threats of exposing financial misdemeanours of her party in order to deny her alliance with the Congress party. A similar story is being repeated in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
This Nazi like RSS structure is being run from the shadows by Mohan Bhagwat who believes in extirpation of all vestiges of cultural and religious identity of minorities. He is the force behind the BJP, which has won the elections against the grain of popular demand for jobs, inflation control, and elimination of poverty. Small wonder this hate-peddling, medieval thinking, political cabal of BJP-RSS is trying to recreate a mythical past of Hindu glory by devaluing the minorities, which is a tactic, as per some psychology experts (Staub,2005), to normalise violence.
It is that myth and hate-based ideology that normalises violence and conducts unspeakable horrors like Samjotha train burning, Chattisinghpora massacre, and Pulwama attacks, which now have been exposed by interviews by conscientious Indians like Lt General K.S Gill (retd) and former Governor of IIOJK Satya Pal Malik. Gill states unequivocally that the Chattisinghpura massacre of innocent Sikhs was the handiwork of the Indian government that wanted to paint Pakistan as the villain of the piece in front of visiting US President Bill Clinton. The same playbook is being followed by India in the Pehalgam incident, where the US Vice President was visiting Delhi, and India wanted to vilify Pakistan.
In this present standoff, India has failed to convince the international community of Pakistan’s involvement in the incident and therefore has failed to marshal the desired support for any punitive strike against Pakistan. It, however, has achieved its objectives partially, in the shape of walking illegally away from the Indus Basin Treaty and letting loose another reign of terror on Kashmiris. The overall aim is to snatch the property of Kashmiris and consolidate its illegal annexation of the disputed state to irrevocably change its demographics. The attempt, however, to seek space for conventional conflict under a nuclear overhang has come a cropper due to Pakistani alertness and the high state of preparedness of its armed forces.
Pakistan needs to take India to the UN Security Council for imperiling the regional peace by withdrawing from the IWT and threatening rhetoric bordering on insanity. The World Bank, as the facilitator of the treaty, needs to be persuaded to seek the advisory opinion of the ICJ on the issue, besides convening the usual Court of Arbitration proceedings despite India’s noncooperation. At present, India lacks the ability to divert its water flows since most of its dams on Western rivers are run-of-the-river due to geographical constraints. We, however, need to be wary of the future where the river flow could be disturbed.
This river flow disturbance, however, will come at a very heavy cost to India due to the engineering and topographical limitations of constructing water storage and diversion structures in mountainous terrain unsuited to reservoirs. For sustainable peace, the roots of Indian hubris vis-à-vis Pakistan need to be addressed. Since India is in perpetual election mode with state elections happening regularly, the BJP-RSS playbook of gaining electoral benefit through anti Muslim and anti-Pakistan vote needs to be changed. Minus the resolution of the Kashmir dispute and a fundamental change in the BJP-RSS outlook, the above looks like a lost cause.