Are the communal crimes being perpetrated in nearby Gujarat (Communalism Combat, October 1998, December 1998 and January 1999) not of a magnitude serious enough to justify similar judicial scrutiny? Especially when the political forces committing the crimes with impunity and escaping the law are ideological brothers of the main party in the central government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The tally of individual incidents in Gujarat in 1998 which crossed 60 by November included violence, intimidation, assault, arson, destruction of religious and personal property, hate–mongering. With the brazen incidents in the Dangs district in December, the total number of ugly incidents crossed the hundred mark. Thanks to the callousness and indifference of the executive and the law and order machinery, the violence still continues.

But even by Gujarat’s abysmal standards, recent administrative measures initiated by the BJP–run state government and implemented by its police have crossed all limits. They are blatantly violative of Article 14 (Equality before the Law) and Article 15 (Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth). Yet, the Centre remains a mute spectator. A circular has been issued by the state’s director general of police (intelligence) to his men to conduct a census selectively (and therefore discriminatingly) of the state’s Christians. The questions contained in the circular are clearly biased against a community that is being selectively targeted by the state. Intimidatory tactics have also begun to be used by certain forces in New Delhi against the capital’s Christians, seeking to identify their place of residence and professional addresses. In two of recent India’s most ghastly pogroms against it’s minorities — the anti–Sikh carnage in the capital in 1984 and the anti–Muslim pogrom in January 1993 — census and electoral lists were used by avenging mobs to pinpoint their location and wreck mayhem against Sikhs and Muslims respectively.

In September last year, the same Gujarat police department set up a police cell for monitoring all inter–religious marriages — another administrative measure that is blatantly un–constitutional. This, too, remains unchallenged with the Central government ruled by the same party looking on.

Unable or unwilling to cope with the ignominies at home, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has opted for bus diplomacy which hopefully will fetch some results. The Union government would have been entitled to some credit for showing courage in granting a visa to Salman Rushdie except that here, too, its motives for doing so are, to many, suspect. The action has raised the ire of the hotheads among Indian Muslims, with the more sobre–minded apparently choosing to remain silent. Slogans like ‘Death for Rushdie’ are far more muted than a decade ago, but sadly, nowhere does the situation reflect a calm acceptance of dissenting, even heretical voices by our largest minority.

Limits to any form of intellectual inquiry set by the politics of hate and venom have seeped into the mind–set in the Indian sub–continent and also, wider South Asia. Much that we in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangla Desh have shared in common in the past has been lost to our coming generations. History teaching, influenced by state interference in the discipline has resulted in dry, inaccurate text books, at best, vicious take–offs against each other, at worst.

KHOJ, an education programme for a plural India, organised the first–ever ‘South Asia Historian’s Workshop — An Exploration’, in Mumbai on Jan 26, 27 and 28 to examine just these possibilities. Luminaries from the field of history, Romila Thapar, K.N. Panikkar, Leslie Gunawardana (Sri Lanka), and Mubarak Ali (Pakistan) along with two dozen others deliberated extensively on the issue. We present a gist of the proceedings for our readers as the cover story for the month.