The rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the world’s largest democracy and home to the world’s second largest Muslim population, endangers not only the Muslim community there but democratic values as well. Asghar Ali Engineer of the Center for the Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, India, and Paul R. Brass of the University of Washington examined the roots and unfortunate consequences of this phenomenon at the January 20 EPPC seminar "India's Muslims: Their Prospects in Hindu Nationalist India."

While "communal violence is nothing new in post-independence India," Engineer observed, it has been increasing in intensity since the 1980s and reached the level of "communal carnage" against Muslims in 2002 in Gujurat, where the provincial government is fully controlled by the radical Hindu nationalist Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP). Engineer sharply criticized the anti-Muslim ideology and propaganda of the BJP, which is thriving amid the current disarray of the moderate, secularist Congress Party. On the national level, the BJP is constrained by its position in a coalition government and is cleverly disguising its agenda, but it reveals its true colors in Gujurat, where "fascism is knocking on the door." Indians need to work aggressively to reinvigorate the secularist ideology that has long served to protect their democracy and minorities. Engineer noted that the country’s "immense diversity" of ethnic groups and Hindu castes fortunately creates a barrier against the homogenization of opinion that allows fascism to flourish.

Brass analyzed the specific steps the BJP followed to "produce" the Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujurat. Collective violence everywhere is "a process that takes place in specific localities but within a broader framework of communal discourse." Only careful preparations create the conditions in which violence erupts, he argued. In Gujurat, Hindu nationalists cultivated a sense of grievance against Muslims by demonizing them as bloodthirsty and malevolent invaders whose "separatism" is a sign of their disloyalty to the Indian state. A riot triggered in such an environment is not a spontaneous expression of mob fury and mass hatred, as so many social scientists contend, Brass said. It is, rather, a "planned event" akin to a "theatrical drama" involving three stages: the rehearsal, during which the perpetrators work to fuel tension; the action, which is consciously sparked by a specific speech or event; and the critical assessment, in which blame is deflected from the actual perpetrators and wrongly assigned to general hostilities.

What can be done to ameliorate this situation was the focus of much of the ensuing discussion, which was moderated by Timothy Samuel Shah, director of EPPC’s South Asian Studies program. Participants included Diana Barnes of the State Department, Jonah Blank of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl Gershman and Brian Joseph of the National Endowment for Democracy, Wajahat Habibullah of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Sunil Khilnani of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.