Remember the Razakars, those violent fanatics who composed the powerful militia raised by the Nizam of Hyderabad to prevent the state's accession to the Union of India?...

Today, 42 years after the Hyderabad police action which vanquished them, the Razakars have reappeared all over the country- this time in a saffron garb. The BJP-RSS-VHP-Bajrang Dal represents the Razakar's new avatar, the most potent challenge to the secular order since Independence....

As the frightening rash of communal riots in the wake of the Ram Janambhoomi campaign shows, the BJP and its cohorts have already inflicted serious damage upon India's secular fibre. They are now doing their damnest to hack away at the foundations of the secular-democratic-constitutional State. Simply put, their method is to terrorise not just the minorities but the majority which is not with them, and to seek to suborn the State.

So successful has this method been that the political establishment has been shaken to its very bones. Party after party has started looking for 'compromise', however unprincipled. Leaders have sought 'solutions', however dishonourable, so as to 'defuse' the situation, that is, to concede the VHP's demand for building a temple where the mosque stands today.

Appeasement has emerged as a policy option. And principled stand against the VHP... can now be labelled 'extreme', as distinct from the middle or 'reasonable' position. Meanwhile, there is no sign that the VHP has either changed its basic stand on the issue or that it intends to make even a minor concession....

... Having earlier successfully suborned sections of the police at Ayodhya... on October 30: the Razakars have now managed to instil such fear among the public that even the CRPF, the BSF and the army can no longer be trusted to play a neutral, restraining and fair role in communally charged situations.

... Give an inch to the religious-extremist groups and they grab a yard. They grow on appeasement. Their growth further strengthens appeasement's logic. The liberal State becomes weaker and weaker and yields not yards but miles in appeasement-in the false hope that it will satisfy the extremist who always comes back for more.

The religious extremists' slogans are identical... the Hindus are in danger of being reduced to insignificance... the Hindus must be made to feel proud of being Hindus... anti-Muslim violence is... legitimate... the mandir must be built if Hindu self-respect is to be restored.

Unpleasant as it may sound, this is the inexorable, anti-national logic of... Khalistan, Hindu Rashtra, nationhood based on religion or religious culture, and the ideas of community, unity, closed groups (that punish disloyalty and reward total obedience) these all form a continuum. Recall the obsessive stress on... unity, organisation and discipline, recall... campaign for purity.

... Khalistani terrorists and modern-day Hindu Razakars... share some basic premises:

The fundamental task is to break the hold of secular ideas over society, and to reestablish a powerful, unbreakable nexus between politics and religion.

Religious faith and adherence to religious sects are prior to all else; therefore religion must prevail over the law of the land. (Hence the BJP's confirmed view that the question of settling the mandir is not adjudicative at all). In any conflict between the two, there can be no mediator.

Membership of a religious order is a precondition for, and coterminous with, membership... of the state....

Four conclusions follow... First, the temple dispute has gone miles beyond the contention over a particular site; indeed it now has only a token connection with disputes over some 3,000 mosques cited by the VHP.

Secondly, in the larger view, the VHP campaign is calculated to negate the very nature of Indian society as a multi-ethnic, pluralistic, multi-religious, variegated, heterogeneous entity. This society has always resisted homogenisation, regimented discipline, uniform codes and undifferentiated practices. Centralisation, over concentration of authority and narrow pyramidal structures of power are not values to be cherished. But the Razakars want precisely this kind of regimentation and militarised homogeneity.

Thirdly, those who seek to impose this... sectarian and claustrophobic version of 'Hinduism' upon the Hindus, are themselves the most impoverished and perverse of ideologies. They represent the current of counter-reformism, which stands for all that is putrid, iniquitous and disgraceful in society - from brideburning to sati and from untouchability to bonded labour.

And, fourthly, the Hindu communalist's claim to being patriotic... is wholly suspect. The RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha have a shameful history of collaboration with the British, especially in 1942... It came from utterly despicable, crass and base motives....

... What sort of vision of society do they stand for?... (To) quote V.D. Savarkar, who has always been thought of as a 'thinker' an enlightened and sophisticated protagonist of the Hindu rashtra, a leader who, it was said, was even a rationalist. In an important commentary on the 'version of (Indian or Hindu) virtues', Savarkar severely rebukes Shivaji for having been decent towards Muslim women, in keeping with the ideas of religious tolerance, respect for 'other (men's) women' and the protection of women belonging to the enemy.

Thus, he chides Shivaji for having turned a deaf ear to the cries of Hindu women captured and molested by Muslim warriors, and then reprimands him for having failed to order the molestation and rape of Muslim women, both as a deterrent and as a punishment. 'Had such terror been inflicted upon the (community of) Muslim women in the first two or three centuries of Muslim conquest, then lakhs of Hindu mothers, sisters and daughters would not have had to suffer the humiliation that became their lot for hundreds of years.' Besides says Savarkar, this would have helped limit the enemy' Muslim population.

If this is the kind of morality advocated by the most enlightened of Hindu rashtravadis, then the nature of the Hindu rashtra can only be imagined. Further comment is unnecessary.

(Source: The Illustrated Weekly of India, Bombay, 22-23, December, 1990)