On June 10, 2002, the Ethics and Public Policy Center sponsored a conference in which six experts on South Asia discussed the impact of increasing religious militancy—Hindu as well as Islamic—on geopolitical stability and religious freedom in the subcontinent. Co-sponsoring the conference was INFEMIT, a network of Third World theologians and activists led by Dr. Vinay Samuel. In the edited transcript that follows, each of the six experts makes brief remarks. Then other conference participants join them in a lively discussion. Moderator Timothy Samuel Shah is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center specializing in South Asia.

Timothy Shah: At the heart of the current conflict between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan is religious militancy. If South Asia is a nuclear powder keg, religious militancy is the match that threatens to set it off. As is widely known, militant Islamic groups that Pakistan has long supported and is only now beginning to restrain attacked India’s Parliament in December 2001 and attacked a Christian church in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, in March 2002. Then in May 2002 Islamic militants slaughtered more than thirty Indians, most of them women and children, in the disputed state of Kashmir, precipitating a renewal of severe tensions between these two nuclear powers and longtime rivals.

What is less often noted is that India has its own homegrown brand of religious militancy—Hindu—which also enjoys close government ties. This militancy threatens to undermine the religious impartiality (commonly known in India as "secularism") upon which India’s democratic constitution is based. The Hindu-nationalist right has grown increasingly powerful since the 1990s, at least in part because of concern over Islamist assaults such as those in Kashmir. The political wing of the Hindunationalist movement is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or "Indian People’s Party," and it heads the coalition government that rules from New Delhi.

The Hindu-nationalist movement is also home to militant groups such as those involved in atrocities in the western state of Gujarat in February and March 2002. On February 27, militant Muslims had attacked a trainload of Hindus who had been agitating for the construction of a temple to the god Ram over his birthplace in the town of Ayodhya. (A decade earlier, Hindus had demolished the mosque that a Mogul emperor had built on the site in the sixteenth century.) In retaliation, militant Hindu-nationalist groups helped to organize the brutal murder of more than a thousand Muslims in Gujarat during the last day of February and the first ten days of March. The horror was heightened by the fact that the BJP-dominated government of Gujarat state demonstrably failed to restrain this deadly, days-long pogrom. And even as the killings continued, India’s central government pledged its wholehearted support for the Hindunationalist agenda.

[UPDATE: Despite widespread criticism of its conduct in relation to the anti-Muslim violence, Gujarat’s Hindunationalist state government, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, has seen its popularity increase. By positioning themselves as the defenders of Gujarat against Muslim terrorism, the Hindu nationalists won a landslide victory in the state’s elections in mid-December 2002, and national leaders of the Hindu-nationalist political party have pledged to "replicate" this recipe for political "success" in other states.]

Because the dangers of Islamic militancy are well known and widely discussed—especially in the wake of 9/11—the main though not exclusive focus of the conversation that follows will be Hindu militancy, whose dangers have received inadequate discussion in this country. Among the questions on the table for discussion are: What present and future dangers does Hindu militancy pose to India’s fragile democracy and the region’s even more fragile stability? Will Hindu extremism drive India’s mostly moderate Muslim population—at 140 million people one of the world’s largest—toward an extremist reaction of its own? What steps must India take to blunt the threat posed by Hindu militancy? And what constructive role, if any, can the United States play in its policy towards the region? In what follows, the first three speakers will discuss Hindu militancy and its consequences within the national context of India and the local context of Gujarat state. The next three will then comment on the larger regional dynamics of religious militancy within South Asia as a whole and will weigh possible U.S. policy responses.

Speaking first is Cedric Prakash Prakash, a Jesuit priest based in the Gujarat capital of Ahmedabad, site of most of the killings. Father Prakash served there as state coordinator of the United Christian Forum on Human Rights. Twice beaten—once almost fatally—by Hindu extremists in the 1990s, he has received India’s highest civilian prize for the promotion of intercommunal peace and harmony.

Cedric Prakash

Ahmedabad is a city of 4.5 million people. At its heart stands a 500-year-old mosque that boasts a magnificent stonework trellis depicting a "tree of life." This exquisite artwork has long symbolized the harmonious complexity that Ahmedabad, at its best, stands for: Hindus and Muslims living together, rich and poor, high caste and low caste, amid civic and economic vibrancy. While signs of trouble have been evident for fifty years or more, the ten years since the BJP first triumphed at the polls and began running the state government (eventually gaining a twothirds majority in the state parliament) have been a time of dramatic erosion in intercommunal harmony.

Why? To start with the basics, the BJP in Gujarat has a fascist mindset. Intolerance is rampant. History texts used in the state’s public schools have been rewritten so that they glorify the forcible submission of women and praise Adolf Hitler—while saying nothing about the Holocaust. One culture, one race, one language, and one religion are promoted to the exclusion of all others. Minorities are targets of systematic hatred. Christian churches have been destroyed, Bibles burned, Christians beaten up. Subtler forms of harassment are common as well.

But the carnage and suffering that our Muslim brothers and sisters have undergone since February 28 is so barbaric that it drives me to use terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide." Today [June 10, 2002], a hundred days after the violence began, more than 150,000 people still languish in refugee camps within the state, and around 600,000 more who fled Gujarat to seek shelter in other parts of India or abroad have not yet returned home. The toll of those burned alive or murdered in other way may top 2,000. There is evidence that hundreds of women were raped.

This violence, some of which I witnessed with my own eyes, was not spontaneous. It was not merely an unplanned adjunct to the rioting that broke out in response to the terrible February 27 assault in which Muslim extremists burned a train full of Hindu pilgrims. While any unjust use of force is evil, what happened in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat state has an added note of horror because it showed clear signs of premeditation and seemed to be part of a methodical effort to demonize and ghettoize Muslims (and eventually other minorities as well), destroy their homes and businesses, and drive them out of the state altogether.

Aiding this fascist plan, I am sad to say, is the silence of those who should be protesting. Almost without exception, Gujarat’s civil-society groups and its intellectuals, even its so-called liberals, just watched quietly as their neighbors were attacked. Some even took part in the pogrom. Many local NGOs stood by because they were on the state’s (and hence the BJP’s) payroll. Donor agencies and foreign governments have also said and done far less than they should have. The European Union and the United Kingdom have produced reports strongly condemning the violence, but the U.S. government is still silent, despite having sent representatives to the relief camps. This is a matter of serious concern, for if the world ignores their deeds, the violent will feel emboldened.

We are not talking about an isolated danger here. Gujarat is only a laboratory, a testing ground. If the forces of fascism and intolerance succeed in "cleansing" Gujarat of its "undesirables," you can rest assured that the "Gujarat solution" will be attempted elsewhere across the vast subcontinent. The axe wielded against the roots of the tree of life in Ahmedabad is a weapon meant for use against the pluralism and rich cultural heritage of India as a whole.

Timothy Shah: Thank you, Father Prakash. The next speaker is Teesta eesta Setalvad Setalvad, a dedicated human rights activist based in Mumbai (Bombay) who is head of the organization Communalism Combat. Ms. Setalvad spent about two and a half months in Gujarat immediately following the worst of the violence. She is co-author of the first major report on the tragedy, entitled Genocide, which was published in India in April.

Teesta Setalvad

In the West, events such as the killings in Gujarat are often spoken of as instances of "religious" intolerance or fanaticism. The term that I think is historically and contextually more accurate is "communal conflict." The communalist ideology of the BJP, as formulated by its intellectual affiliate the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), explicitly rejects the whole concept of equal citizenship upon which the Indian constitution is premised, claiming instead that Hindu citizens deserve a privileged place in the state and society. This is the heart of the matter, and from it the rest follows. The ideal state must be a Hindu state, and not just a Hindu state but an authoritarian and undemocratic state. One of the intellectual

architects of this ideology, M. S. Golwalkar, published a book that speaks favorably of Hitler’s ideas concerning the superiority of the German nation and says that a similar notion of Hindu supremacy should rule in India, with Muslims, Christians, and other minorities given the choice of living as second-class citizens or else. L. K. Advani, the home minister in the BJP government at New Delhi [he subsequently became deputy prime minister] and a man who may well become prime minister, has expressed great admiration for Golwalkar, calling him guru, or "teacher." In a sense this ideology is not new. Nathuram Godse, the young man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, was a Hindu supremacist who hated Gandhi for teaching that Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others should live together as equal citizens. So the roots of Hindu-supremacist militancy go back to modern India’s earliest days as an independent country.

Today these roots have spread well beyond India’s borders. The World Hindu Council or Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), another affiliate of the BJP, has branches abroad. In particular, my group and others like it believe that much of the funding for Hindu militancy in South Asia comes from Indian expatriates in the United States and Britain. This is something that the British and American governments need to investigate.

In the fall of 1990 Advani led a rathyatra, or pilgrimage, from state to state across a large swath of India, a pilgrimage accompanied by violence wherever it went that culminated in the destruction, on December 6, 1992, of the Babri Masjid mosque in the central Indian city of Ayodhya. I bring this up to give some sense of the background of communal tensions against which we must see everything from doctored schoolbooks to riots. In the case of Gujarat, we are dealing with an ideologically motivated set of organizations with a high aptitude for systematic planning. What makes Gujarat a "laboratory," as Father Prakash calls it, is that it is the only state in India where the BJP alone has overwhelming control over the government. Gujarat, in other words, is a place where the BJP and its affiliates can test how far they can go. To a large degree they have succeeded in doing whatever they want and getting away with it. There was serious public outrage, especially outside Gujarat, but when the fresh carnage occurred in Kashmir in May, Gujarat dropped rather suddenly out of the news. How and why that happened is an interesting question.

The BJP, I think, is just the parliamentary emanation of the ideology represented by the RSS, which is not (as it likes to pretend) a mere cultural organization. The RSS is a political group with a clear agenda: it wants to take over the Indian state and subject India to the rule of a totalitarian Hindu-supremacist regime. What happened in Gujarat was unquestionably genocide. The violence was horrific beyond words. A 76-year-old Muslim member of parliament was butchered alive before the very eyes of people who had taken refuge in his house. A woman who was nine months pregnant was cut into quarters and her unborn child was cast into the flames. Many of the assaults bore the earmarks of training, and indeed there is evidence that the World Hindu Council (VHP)—possibly using some of the funding from the Indian diaspora that I mentioned— has raised and trained a militia of perhaps as many as 40,000 people in the state.

The evidence of state complicity in the violence is also strong. We know of at least five senior cabinet members from the state government whom victims have identified as having been involved in the violence, but whose names the local police have refused to include in their reports. It appears that official tax records and companyownership records were used in the targeting of Muslim-owned businesses, a sign that other wings of the state beside the police were involved in orchestrating the violence.

Moreover, with about 150,000 people homeless and living in relief camps, the chief minister has declared that the government will not help them relocate or build new houses. So this again makes Gujarat ominously different. In Bombay in 1992 we had terrible communal violence, and the state responded—not quickly, alas, but it did respond—because that is what a democratic secular state is supposed to do. In Gujarat, the BJP government has quite openly said that it will do nothing to help Muslim citizens who have lost their homes, and BJP officials clearly think they can get away with this.

That the BJP and the forces it represents can come to power through elections represents a failure of democracy. That there is so little that the institutions of governance can do to check their abuses represents another failure of democracy. I think we need to take seriously the possibility that the key institutions of Indian democracy are in a process of collapse, or were never really functioning adequately to begin with. While it is true, for instance, that the police in Gujarat have been failing to file proper reports, it’s also true that even at their best the Indian police are woefully inefficient and mistake-prone. The Indian Supreme Court itself has estimated that nearly half of all persons in jails in India should not be there.

As far as outside intervention and Western reaction are concerned, I am worried not only about Gujarat but about places such as Bangladesh, where since last September there have been systematic attacks on Hindus with no reaction from the West. I believe that there should be public condemnation from outside, that it should be consistent, and that it should be immediately forthcoming whenever and wherever rights are violated, be it in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka. We need to look at South Asia as a whole while not diluting our response to Gujarat itself.

Timothy Shah: Our third speaker on the Indian situation is Kamal Chenoy, a professor at India’s premier institution of higher learning, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Professor Chenoy is a noted expert on Indian and comparative politics and also over the last several years has looked closely at religious militancy in India. He co-authored a public report entitled Gujarat Carnage 2002: Report to the Nation.

Kamal Chenoy

First I’d like to make a few comments on state complicity in the genocide in Gujarat. The burning of the train, which killed close to sixty Hindu passengers, took place in the city of Godhra, Gujarat, on the morning of February 27. Almost immediately, senior BJP politicians began pandering to the stereotype that Indian Muslims are agents of Pakistan. The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, claimed that the attack had been carried out at the behest of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. L. K. Advani, who is not only the federal home minister but also an MP from Gujarat, repeated the same charge several days later. Gujarat’s health minister, Ashok Bhatt, told the media that "Godhra has a notorious reputation. We suspect that many Pakistanis live here illegally." On February 27, Gujarat state home minister Gordhan Zadaphia, who is a senior VHP activist, made a terrible threat: "We will teach a lesson to those who have done this. No one will be spared, and we will make sure that the forces behind this act will never dare to repeat it."

The chief minister insisted that the remains of all victims of the train-burning who were not residents of the Godhra area be carried back to Ahmedabad. State radio broadcast the time of arrival, and there was a frenzied reception. Before February 27 was over, the VHP called for a bandh, meaning a total strike in which even vehicular traffic ceases. The BJP supported this, and on the same day Chief Minister Modi met with police officials, telling them, "Do not do anything tomorrow that will hurt Hindu sentiment. Do not intervene." Witness after witness, victim after victim, has testified that policemen answered pleas for protection from Muslim citizens with replies such as, "We have no orders to save you," or even, "Today is your day of reckoning."

To casual outside observers, the violence that began on February 28 may have seemed a spontaneous reprisal by Hindus. This impression is false. On that day, activists from the VHP and other Hindu militant groups were actively calling people out, using sound trucks. Thousands were loaded into trucks and buses and driven around at the direction of leaders carrying mobile phones. Liquor flowed freely, even though Gujarat is a dry state. Not only Muslim-owned businesses but also businesses in which Muslims held a minority share were targeted for destruction. Muslim businesses that had adopted Hindu names after earlier riots were ransacked. The mobs went into residential neighborhoods, attacking even the homes of Muslims who had recently moved from elsewhere. The rioters had thousands of cooking-gas cylinders—items that had been scarce for weeks in Ahmedabad—and even tanker trucks full of kerosene and petroleum, all of which they used to incinerate people and buildings. Clearly, the detailed research and planning that all this implies were not the work of a day. This was no spur-of-the-moment riot but a systematic rampage prepared well in advance by people who had considerable organizational resources at their disposal.

Having said that, I would like to talk briefly about how political discourse in India has changed, and what this might mean for the survival of Indian democracy and for the subcontinent as a whole. A half-century ago, Pakistani nationalists said that Muslims would always be oppressed in a polity where Hindus predominated. Have the events in Gujarat borne out this gloomy prediction? The BJP argues that the Hindus are the majority

community, implying that because people are co-religionists they must have identical political, social, economic, and cultural interests. This implication is false, of course: all one has to do is to think for a moment about the contentious issue of "reservations" for members of the socalled backward castes in order to see how divided Hindus are among themselves. The truth is that Indian society is so diverse and variegated—religiously, culturally, linguistically, and otherwise—that it has no communal majority; it is really more like a collection of thousands of minorities, some of which are quite restive. Thus there are communal tensions and strife not only in Gujarat and Kashmir but also in such far-flung parts of the country as Assam and Nagaland in the northeast. The BJP’s ideology is a fundamentalism not of Hindus as such (functionally speaking there are no such people) but of certain upper-caste Hindus who see the agenda of "one people, one nation, one language, and one culture" as serving their interests. This ideology is a threat to peace, not only in India but throughout this tensionwracked and nuclear-armed region.

Under international covenants and instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no government has the sovereign right to oppress its own people. In India this is really our day of reckoning. India in a sense has been a great experiment in secular democracy. The situation is not hopeless. The vast majority of Indians were aghast at what happened in Gujarat, and the statements of the European Union and the British High Commission have been helpful in drawing attention to these outrages. But it is high time that the United States of America made its voice heard, for the BJP militants can construe American silence as American acquiescence. So I end with this appeal. We are in a serious crisis. If the world community does not speak out now there will be more Gujarats, and the consequences will be incalculable.

Timothy Shah: Professor Chenoy has widened our focus beyond Gujarat to the subcontinent as a whole. Now Sumit Ganguly will talk about the wider implications of the sort of religious militancy that we saw in Gujarat. He is a professor of Asian studies and government at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Crisis Unending: Indo-Pakistani Tensions Since 1947.

Sumit Ganguly

Lest anyone be left with the impression that I take an anodyne view of what is transpiring in India, let me add that, like my friend Professor Chenoy, I am an unreconstructed Nehruvian secularist and proud of it, even though we are a dying breed whose very name has become, quite lamentably, an object of scorn throughout much of India today.

Why this deplorable contempt for the secular ideal of equal citizenship under law? Why the rise of a chauvinism that, as Professor Chenoy has rightly noted, peddles an utterly chimerical notion of a monolithic "Hindu" identity—an identity that never was and never can be, given the tremendous internal diversity of belief, practice, custom, and ritual that is gathered under the wide umbrella of the term "Hinduism"? On its face, this situation is deeply ironic: the self-proclaimed champions of Hinduism in the BJP don’t understand Hinduism at all, since only someone who does not know Hindu traditions in their highly localized variety can pretend that Hinduism constitutes a single, solid monolithic bloc.

What explains the rise of this kind of chauvinism, and how has the BJP managed to capitalize on it so successfully? Let me point out first that in fact the BJP is not gaining ground electorally. Indeed, it has probably reached more or less the upper limit of its popularity in national elections. The results of future votes will show whether I am right about this or not. If I’m right, this could mean that the kind of repulsive tactics on display in Gujarat are a token not of success but of desperation.

This leads me to point out another irony. To a large degree, the rise of the BJP is a product of the recent deepening of Indian democracy. Over the last few decades, the poor, the minorities, and the disenfranchised have been standing up for their own interests and going to the polls as never before. A social order that enshrined the dominance of certain privileged social groups has at last come under serious challenge. The BJP and its affiliates represent the backlash against that challenge. This is not unlike what other democracies have experienced, although in India the process is occurring on a large scale and taking an extremely ugly form.

Moreover, I must note that on occasion politicians from the Congress Party—the BJP’s only rival on the national stage—have for political reasons made unprincipled concessions to group rights, thereby opening themselves up to BJP charges of practicing "pseudo-secularism."

Instead of making those concessions, officials from the Congress Party should have taken a stand and said, in effect, "This is a secular country where every individual has the same rights as every other one. These rights know no group or creed. They are enshrined in the constitution and defended by the supreme court, and that’s that." So it isn’t just the BJP that’s to blame for the undermining of secularism. Other parties played the "group rights" game too, and so helped to open the door to the retrograde notion that some citizens are more equal than others. These parties must bear a share of the responsibility for creating the political space within which the BJP could practice its politics of scapegoating and chauvinism.

So what is to be done? Any response to communal or religious violence and intolerance must begin by unequivocally condemning these evils, which simply have no place in a civilized society. More generally, Indians must be led to recognize that democracy and secularism are interdependent. You cannot have one without the other. Otherwise you are consigning entire segments of your population to second-class status. Of course, the promise of equal citizenship has nowhere been perfectly realized, but there are differences of degree, and what we saw on display in Gujarat is horrifying. On a positive note, it will be helpful, I think, to bolster those groups and organizations that defend the ideal of fair treatment for all under the law. Bodies such as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) are the saving grace of Indian democracy. When the NHRC was first created, I dismissed it as toothless, but I’m happy to say that I’ve been proven mostly wrong. The Commission’s recent report on the atrocities in Godhra is excellent, and shows that an organization meant to be a lapdog can become a watchdog if its staff and supporters pursue its mission with zeal and independence.

I will close with some words of cautious hopefulness. It’s too easy to say that Indian democracy is on the verge of collapse. We’ve been hearing rumors of its demise for the past fifty years. Like stories of Mark Twain’s death, these rumors are greatly exaggerated. There are countervailing forces to chauvinism and militancy; there are organizations like the NHRC and Teesta Setalvad’s group; there are people like Teesta Setalvad and Father Prakash and the others on this panel who have courageously taken a stand and in some cases have risked their own lives to bear witness against the evils that besiege their country. It is these people we need to support, and it is these people we need to give voice to.

Timothy Shah: Speaking next is Sunil Khilnani, who is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. [He subsequently became director of of South Asian studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.] He is the author of The Idea of India, an outstanding book first published in 1997.

Sunil Khilnani

I had been invited to give a talk about Mahatma Gandhi, who also, as it happens, was a Gujarati. Indeed, he was the most extraordinary Gujarati, if not the most extraordinary Indian, ever to have lived. He was extraordinary because, among other things, he was willing to defy the deepest prejudices of his society in order to fight the evils of caste and promote the virtues of tolerance and brotherhood. And as Teesta Setalvad said earlier, he gave his life for these virtues, striving to the end to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims.

As I sat waiting for my turn to speak, I saw that few were actually interested in Gandhi or his message. Instead, speaker after speaker worked the audience in a kind of televangelist style, exhorting the youngsters to stand up for their Hindu religion, to defend their caste identities, and to face down other religions that might intimidate them, especially Muslims. What I was witnessing in this London suburb was the very force that is ripping apart the India that Gandhi and his heirs, including Nehru, had worked to build. Between Gandhi and the speakers at that Hindu youth rally lies a chasm. On one side is a vision of India that refuses to follow the general tendency of modern nationalism to see diversity as a form of weakness or impurity. The all-India patriotism of Gandhi, Nehru, and their generation thought of India’s multiplicity as a source of strength. Hence they had the confidence to undertake the striking, original, and remarkably bold experiment of asking all of India’s diverse groups to live together within a single framework of free self-government.

Gandhi’s generation was practicing multiculturalism fifty years before the term even existed. They did it on the fly, while they were drawing up a constitution and founding the key institutions of their new state. Their legacy lives on, but it is under grave threat from the communalist vision of India as a nation purged of differences, homogeneous, monolithic—like the ideal nation as conceived by classical nineteenth-century European nationalism. The BJP’s version of this goes by the name of Hindutva, which literally means "Hindu-ness." Simply put, the BJP’s goal is to create the Hindu equivalent of Pakistan, a nation formed around a single dominant religion. That’s what’s at stake in Indian politics today. The classical- nationalist challenge has always been there, but it has a sharper edge today than ever before, and is making itself felt at a number of different levels. In everyday life, those who see themselves as defenders of the Hindu faith are attempting to impose their own definitions of what they think is the Hindu moral or cultural code. This can involve everything from getting Valentine’s Day cards out of stores and female newscasters into long-sleeved and high-necked blouses, to burning churches and committing violence against citizens who don’t subscribe to Hindutva. In Ahmedabad, for example, BJP militants and their allies destroyed an exhibition of works by M. F. Hussein, a Muslim who is India’s leading painter. When a government sympathetic to them is in power, those who carry out this kind of everyday intimidation will naturally tend to take heart.

The other level at which the Hindu-nationalist challenge is making itself felt is that of the constitution and the legal order. The RSS, an organization to which India’s federal prime minister and home minister have belonged for years, is committed to redefining the Indian state according to its own idea of Hindutva, a cultural identity that is closely derived from religion. The RSS and the BJP have long time horizons. The RSS was formed in the mid-1920s. It was modeled on the Brown Shirts and indeed had contacts with Mussolini and other fascist groups in the West. Its goal is not just to win the next election but to change the way society thinks and to remodel the country’s legal and constitutional order.

A few years ago, the BJP-led government set up a national commission to review the constitution. There was a lot of controversy, and in the end a commission somewhat sympathetic to the BJP put out a report that was not as threatening as some critics had feared it would be. But this is a long-term project. That one report may not have amounted to much, but BJP leaders are patient. They are trying to get issues on the agenda and slowly change the terms of debate. The next commission they set up might have more teeth and come up with more forceful proposals. Apart from the Congress Party, the BJP is India’s only serious national-level party, the only other party conversant in the complicated language of Indian constitutional law and theory. None of the regional parties that round out the BJP’s governing coalition really knows or cares about that language. The BJP has experienced lawyers in its ranks. It knows the game, and it has a plan for the long haul, which means that those who oppose its goals had better remain vigilant.

As is implied by the BJP’s habit of hurling the charge of "pseudo-secularism" at its opponents, on a certain level secularism has triumphed. No one in national politics can take a stand on religious identity alone. Instead you have to attack your opponents for being partial or hypocritical in their adherence to secularism. The terms laid down in 1950 remain powerful, and cannot be assaulted very directly. So maybe what we have is less a crisis of secularism per se than a failure to find a way for religious ideas and interests to express themselves within the current political architecture without threatening to undermine the whole edifice. When the BJP first entered mainstream electoral politics some years ago, many observers hoped it would develop into something like a Hindu version of a European Christian Democratic party. But that has not happened. Religious or communal interests haven’t been modulated to fit readily within the existing structure. The BJP has not been able to do that, and as a result is suffering serious internal fissures between "normalizing" and "purist" (or "ideological") factions within its own ranks.

Perhaps what we are seeing is a crisis of sorts within organized religion. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and for many years thereafter there was a strong tradition of Hindu social-reform movements, often with progressive goals on issues related to the status of women, marriage, dowries, caste, and so on. These movements once influenced political parties. But the movements as well as the reform impulse behind them have withered over the last several decades. Hindu energies now seem to be going not into efforts to reform society but into attempts to win political power. Muslim reform movements have run into a similar dead end, and the energy in that community seems to have passed to those whose overriding concern is with defending orthodoxy.

According to conventional wisdom, economic development and the rise of a middle class should lead to political moderation and a more liberal democracy. The case of Gujarat poses a problem for this view. Gujarat is one of India’s wealthiest states, with many ties to the global economy and the outside world. Yet it is a bastion of the Hindu-chauvinist BJP—indeed the only state wholly run by that party. Even more disturbingly, the police commissioner of Ahmedabad has said that the anti-Muslim mobs there were being led by rich and educated people, including lawyers and doctors. Whatever is going wrong in Gujarat does not seem to be a result of poverty and deprivation. What kind of piety is on the rise among India’s middle classes? We urgently need to know.

Let me add a point about the BJP’s vote share. While the BJP may indeed be topping out its support at about 25 percent of the electorate, it is also true that this makes it the single most popular party in India, and that coalition politics is probably here to stay. The era of one-party dominance by Congress is over. Since coalition politics brings with it investor nervousness, fears of instability, and so on, the BJP’s relative strength would seem to make it a bulwark of stability. But the strife in BJP-dominated Gujarat indicates that a stronger BJP may actually make for a less stable India. Coalition politics—provided, of course, that the BJP’s regional-party coalition partners don’t get ideologically converted—may be the best bet for stability.

But I’m not complacent about any of this because the BJP is not complacent. Although the only government it controls outright is the state government of Gujarat, it has been the leading party in the government of India for the last four years, and it is still trying to establish a stable social coalition that will carry it to consistent electoral success. It hasn’t quite been able to swing that; it remains very much a party of the urban upper castes. But it is trying to draw in lower- and middle-caste Hindus as well and is making some gains among them. It’s also picking up support in rural areas, which it was not able to do previously. So the question as to whether the BJP can build a winning electoral bloc remains open.

Timothy Shah: Our last speaker is Jonah Blank, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard, is the author of two books on South Asia, and serves as a policy advisor for South and Central Asian issues on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Jonah Blank

The name "Ethics and Public Policy Center" got me thinking about what those two things, ethics and public policy, have to do with each other. Some might say nothing, but I think that the combination is important, and it is one that I would like to see firmly implanted both in this nation and in South Asia. Before I say anything further, I should make it clear that while I work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I’m not here to speak for the Senate or the U.S. government; I’m speaking only for myself. I come to this topic as both an anthropologist and someone concerned with public policy. In my academic research I have studied and written about both the Hindutva movement and a traditionalist community of Gujarati Muslims, so I have some familiarity with people and ideas on both sides of the communal divide. The speakers who have preceded me have given an excellent analysis of what is going on within India, so I will focus my own reflections on the outlines of a possible U.S. response to this situation.

Above all, I think we have to speak truth to power. As a matter of both morality and policy, we have to be clear about what is going on. We should not dismiss these events as just the latest outburst in an opaque, centuries-old feud in a faraway country of which we know little. The RSS came into being in 1925, and the whole Hindutva movement is more a modern than a traditional phenomenon. For the sake of all the innocents in Kashmir, Gujarat, and elsewhere, we should put polite but steady and forceful official pressure on both the BJP and the authorities in Pakistan.

I agree with Professor Ganguly that we should do this quietly and behind the scenes whenever possible. Public hectoring is likely to backfire, especially given our own far from perfect history when it comes to protecting the rights of minorities. We should act not like a judge passing sentence but like a friend giving advice. There may come a time when we need a sharper edge, but right now we need to recognize that L. K. Advani is not Slobodan Milosevic, and our goal should be to prevent him from becoming Slobodan Milosevic.

We must encourage activists such as Teesta Setalvad, Father Prakash, and all the other brave people in the human rights community and also in the journalistic community who are bearing witness, often at the risk of their very lives. They are serving their country and indeed the whole world, and we must never forget this.

Finally, we have to stay engaged and not put the problem on a back burner just because the immediate crisis has calmed down. We have to realize that when we let these things go by without comment—particularly when there is evidence of direct complicity by government officials, as there was not only in Gujarat but also in the Delhi riots of 1984 and the Bombay riots of 1993—our silence abets this entire cycle of violence, typically in ways that sooner or later will harm our own national interest. So I feel that we must be deeply engaged both because it is in the U.S. national interest and because it’s the right thing to do.

Discussion

Timothy Shah: Thanks to our six speakers for their illuminating comments. Now we invite everyone else to join in the conversation. [All participants will be identified at the end.]

Paul Marshall: We’ve heard both that it would be unwise for the United States publicly to berate the Indian government on these issues, and also that the British and the EU did well to speak out, since the BJP interprets America’s official public silence as tacit support. What does the panel make of that?

Kamal Chenoy: As the world’s only superpower, the United States is in a class by itself when it comes to influence. A public intervention need not take the form of hectoring; it could just calmly cite international human rights law, or even the Indian constitution. I think that this would have a salutary effect.

Sumit Ganguly: After a long and painful history, U.S.-Indian relations are finally at a point of breakthrough. A public upbraiding could easily cause the Indians to circle the wagons against what they would all see as "inappropriate" foreign criticism. Did the EU statement accomplish anything? The point is to get results, not to take high-profile stands that make one feel good. I think that the EU statement had little or no good effect. It may even have been counterproductive, because it’s so easy to conjure the bogey of "unwarranted interference" in India’s "internal" affairs.

Kamal Chenoy points to new international norms, but these are quite novel and hardly cast in stone. Moreover, the U.S. government is in a tenuous position when it makes these kinds of public pronouncements, since it is dealing rather quietly with a number of regimes around the world whose human rights records are anything but exemplary.

Teesta Setalvad: I see this problem from the perspective of an activist who works on the ground. I think that the issue is not whether we should condemn human rights abuses this time or that time. We should condemn these kinds of things whenever and wherever they happen. If the U.S. policy was to respond consistently across the whole of South Asia, this type of "shouldwe-or-shouldn’t-we" debate would be moot.

Sunil Khilnani: In India, there’s a great sensitivity—not altogether illfounded—to hypocrisy on the part of other countries. I am one with Teesta and Jonah in thinking that America needs to engage itself much more deeply. This presupposes expending the time and effort to become well informed, as well as getting better coverage from the news media. Looking at the way U.S. politicians and officials have embraced the BJP, I have to wonder if they understand the larger political project the BJP represents. The kind of engagement we are calling for is something much deeper than issuing the occasional one-line condemnation that will not be welcomed in India, certainly not by the government and probably not even by other Indians who observe what America does internationally.

Jonah Blank: Yes, I quite agree. I think there should be greater clarity from the Administration on this. Silence can be deafening. Congress has less of a constructive role to play because Congress is really a blunt instrument and a place where politics tends to trump issues of statesmanship. It tends to split into automatic critics and automatic defenders of India. And I don’t want to see India cast alongside Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and other brutal dictatorships.

If we ask why Britain and the EU have raised the issue of Gujarat in a way that the U.S. government has not, we must consider that there is a significant voting bloc of Gujarati Muslims in Britain, and that many EU countries have politically active Muslim communities. In the United States, by contrast, Muslims in general and Gujarati Muslims in particular are not a politically potent force, certainly not since 9/11, while the Indian-American groups tend toward a BJP mindset. Last year I had a very easy time working for the passage of a sense-of-the-Senate resolution expressing sympathy for the victims of the Gujarat earthquake. This year I tried to push the idea of a sense-of-the-Senate resolution condemning the violence in Gujarat and got few takers because few senators were feeling any pressure to speak out on this issue.

I think that we should address these problems in the kind of quiet, concerned, but firm manner that a wise person will use when dealing with a good friend who has a serious personal failing. You don’t look the other way or take refuge in denial, but you show consideration for your friend’s feelings and you keep your eye on the main goal, which is to promote change for the better. It may be that some day we’ll have to become more public about this, but for right now I think the quiet but firm and consistent approach is the most likely to bear fruit.

Stephen Cohen: I want to make two comments, first on the Pakistani response and then on the American one. First, for Pakistani liberals and moderates there was a paradox. They knew that what happened in Gujarat—the state looking the other way while communal violence took place—was not much different from what had been going on in their own country. For the Pakistani hardliners, of course, it confirmed their belief that India truly was a state that was coming apart at the seams and that India’s Muslims could be used some day, if not now, to crack open the Indian state. I think this is a debate going on privately in Pakistan—it could lead them to greater and greater risk-taking and precipitate a major crisis between India and Pakistan.

As for the United States and the question of addressing the issue publicly, while we don’t know what our government is saying privately to the Indian government, I am not aware of anything that would indicate that the U.S. ambassador to India, Ambassador Blackwill, or any other American official has said anything. In any case, I think it is important that we be as direct with India as we were with Pakistan. When Clinton made his trip to Islamabad in March 2000, he laid it on the line to them; he was forthright, although in a way that one would expect from a friend. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk; they also don’t let them engage in genocide.

Charles Fairbanks: After the horror in Gujarat, the reaction within India that everyone would have wanted to see, I think, would have involved a strengthening of the secularist Gandhi-Nehru tradition, a tradition that is at least roughly cognate to Kemalism in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party in Turkey represents a salutary attempt to craft out of the religious (in this case, Islamic) revivalist elements of the country a moderate religious party that accepts the secular basis of the Kemalist state and rejects the imposition of Islamic religious law. So I wonder if someone could address whether the waning of the Gandhi-Nehru tradition in India is inevitable (just as the waning of the Iqbal-Jinnah tradition in Pakistan seems inevitable), and if so, whether it would be a good thing to have some kind of responsible and fairly moderate expression of Hindu traditionalism that acknowledged, for instance, the real diversity of Hinduism. Islamic traditions are diverse, too, but as has often been observed, the coming of secular modernity tends to drive neo-traditional or neoreligious forces to fall back on rigid interpretations of what they believe and what they require politically.

Sumit Ganguly: That argument plays into the hands of the BJP by setting up secularism for dismissal as an import. But if secularism is a modern import, so is wearing pants, so is Western medicine, so is democracy itself. How do we tell the organic and pristine from the imported, and why should we privilege the former anyway? And if a Hindu state is your goal, which Hinduism is going to inform it? Will it be a North Indian, Sanskritic version that insists upon the worship of certain gods and goddesses and casts the rest aside? There is no single Hinduism that one can enshrine. There are multiple Hindu traditions, and secularism offers the best hope for allowing these to flourish in the private sphere.

Sunil Khilnani: If I may clarify Nehru’s own position, he actually saw himself as being less for something called "secularism" than being against something he called "communalism." "Secularism" was not a word he used often. Its popularity began later. It was only written into the Indian constitution in the mid-1970s. But Nehru’s view was not like Kemalism at all. Unlike Kemal Atatürk, Nehru had no plan or desire to purge society of religion or religious influence. His idea was that Indians need a secular state precisely because as a people they have so many deeply held religious beliefs. This is what is distinctive about Indian secularism. There’s no question here of any Western import. Nehru’s ideas came from a deep understanding of the relationship, over millennia, between political power and culture in Indian civilization.

It’s probably worth adding that every large-scale political enterprise in the history of the subcontinent—from the early empires to the Moguls to the British Raj—has made it a rule to interfere as little as possible with the beliefs and practices of groups across the society. Nehru didn’t have to import any Western ideological insights; he knew Indian history well and reflected on it deeply. And he was firmly in line with Indian traditions. It’s the BJP model, with its attempt to impose an artificially homogenized culture and religion, that represents novelty and divergence from tradition. The BJP is the product of a modernist impulse. Its model is nineteenth-century Western nationalism. That’s the real innovation. The social phenomenon that we see behind it is the emergence of selectively Westernized middle classes who are pious, who are religious, and who feel resentful and excluded from the political process. So they turn to the BJP.

Sumit Ganguly: These attacks on plurality mean that the BJP is in a sense anti-Hindu. It’s not really about religion at all. Rather it’s about the use of religious symbols to underwrite a particular kind of authoritarian politics.

Jonah Blank: From an anthropological perspective there is no such thing as a pristine culture that has never been affected by any others. Search out the most remote cultures anywhere in the world and you always find that at some time they have experienced some sort of external influences. It would be difficult to make a case that there has ever been a pristine, untouched Indian culture, whatever that would mean. At the

same time, to sound a slightly contrarian note, I think the so-called anti-secularist works of people like T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy raise important issues that those of us committed to the idea of secularism have to confront.

Khalid Hassan: Professor Ganguly, I think I heard you say that when India’s National Human Rights Commission was formed, you didn’t think much of it. You thought it was one of those organizations that bark, so am I to deduce from that that you believe there have been no human rights violations in Kashmir, regardless of massive evidence to the contrary? And second, are you calling such universally respected organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch a pack of barking dogs?

Sumit Ganguly: Let me clarify what I meant. To begin with, I thought, when the NHRC was first formed, that it was really no more than an attempt to appease Western public opinion. Consequently, I thought it was going to be a toothless body. I don’t know how or why you would infer that I’ve ever said there have been no human rights violations in Kashmir, but I can tell you that any such inference is palpably false. In

fact, I have written a book in which an entire chapter is devoted to documenting human rights violations in Kashmir in nauseating detail: The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace. One would have to be colossally ignorant or worse if one did not acknowledge the reality of human rights violations in Kashmir. Lastly, "barking dogs" is your phrase, not mine. I never used it, so please don’t attribute it to me.

David Abramson: What role might a religious-freedom policy on the part of the United States play vis-àvis this ongoing conflict?

Cedric Prakash: This is not simply a Hindu-Muslim conflict. There’s clear proof of political manipulation. More than three hundred Muslim shrines have been desecrated or destroyed. Is this not something for a commission on religious freedom to address? When citizens are denied their fundamental constitutional rights to practice, preach, and propagate according to their religious convictions, should not the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom have something to say about the situation? The EU and Britain have issued public reports describing and denouncing the violence. The United States has not done so, even though substantial funding for Hindu extremists in Gujarat is coming from donors who live in the United States. An American delegation did come from Bombay to study events in Gujarat, but they made no public statement.

The fact that America lives in a glass house, so to speak, should not be a reason for silence. Speak out, please. Be consistent, be humble, look at the whole South Asian scene—Kashmir, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and so on—and speak out. After the Gujarat earthquake of January 26, 2001, which killed almost 14,000 people, relief supplies arrived from the United States within five days. Now three months have passed since the violence in Gujarat, and no help has arrived. Why?

Teesta Setalvad: Publicly the government of Gujarat is refusing to rehabilitate the victims, even though the brutal Indian monsoon season is approaching. That’s three months of very heavy rain with 150,000 people living in camps. So the U.S. government could raise the issue in terms of the need to bring humanitarian relief to the victims, without touching the issue of religion per se. That’s why Kamal Chenoy is in favor of citing international humanitarian law. You can frame it noncontroversially as a matter of bringing relief to victims without focusing on how and why they were victimized in the first place.

Kamal Chenoy: The fact is that the Muslims in Gujarat were attacked because they belonged to a particular religion. Attacks on Christians in Gujarat and elsewhere have come at least in part because they were seeking voluntary conversions, which is their right under the constitution. Yet the prime minister of India went so far as to say that there should be a national debate on whether conversions should be permitted. There, certainly, is something for the Commission on International Religious Freedom to look at.

John Wilson:: The panel has raised the question of how healthy democracy in India is now. What does violence of this sort mean for democracy’s prospects?

Sumit Ganguly: The duly elected Communist government that runs Bengal, the state of which I am a native, is a failure in many ways, especially when it comes to attracting investment and fostering economic development. But in one area it has been exemplary: it prosecutes any and all rioters to the full extent of the law. The tragedy of Gujarat could have been avoided if the state authorities there had swooped in as soon as the train was attacked, made arrests, and said, We will prosecute, convict, and punish any and all lawbreakers—the original attackers of the train plus anyone out looking to take revenge. Instead of doing that, the state shirked its responsibility. What counts ultimately, I believe, is impartial state power that will impartially crack heads. One of the things I noted in Calcutta during the post-Ayodhya troubles was that when the authorities deployed the heavy antiriot squads in force, all the muscular and virile young hotheads from every community disappeared within twenty-four hours. At the first whiff of cordite, they abandoned the streets and things became quiet.

Sunil Khilnani: I agree with Sumit’s point. What we saw in Gujarat was what happens when the rule of law is allowed to lapse. As for democracy’s prospects, I think that these are pretty good if you take electoral participation as your measure. More people, especially among the least privileged classes, are participating. Lower-caste Hindus, remember, have been the hardest for Hindu nationalists to recruit. And so far at least, the BJP has not been able to polarize the national electorate.

The BJP does, however, continue to press for the adoption of proportional representation, which would be a disaster. One of the great advantages of the current system is that political groupings and coalitions have a certain fluidity. Proportional representation would freeze them and create dangerous polarities within the political system. Regional votes and regional parties—which for years now have been the

vital makeweights in national governing coalitions—also serve by their presence to place a check on the growth of monolithic nationalism. So there are both dynamic trends and structural factors that are keeping Indian democracy strong and impeding the expansion of the BJP.

Gautam Adhikari: It would probably be an exaggeration to say that secularism itself is in decline in India. My view is that Gujarat is an exception. Across the rest of the country, the BJP and its ideology have not really taken off. They’re losing elections now, and their power at the center depends on a large and rather disparate governing coalition composed mostly of regional parties.

I have a feeling that in Gujarat’s case we should also consider another factor. Intercommunal riots have been breaking out there almost every other year since the late 1960s. Why is that? A relative of Mahatma Gandhi whom I happen to know blames the disturbances on the decline of old-style Congress Party politics and the utter corruption of the political system in Gujarat. That corruption is one of the things that led to the BJP’s popularity there, since it allowed the BJP to campaign as the party of reform.

Teesta Setalvad: I think I detect an overemphasis on electoral politics among my academic friends. The electoral system is successful, yes, but our judicial system and other key elements of governance are on the verge of collapse. Democracy is about more than elections and widening

the base of support for one’s party. It’s also a problem for democracy when an ordinary case of criminal murder—let alone a case that is connected to a state-sponsored pogrom—takes about ten years to resolve. A civil property case can take twenty-five years. The international general secretary of the VHP, Pravin Togadia, led the pogrom that murdered Muslims; yet he is a free man and still visits America to raise money. When and how is he going to be brought to justice?

Sunil Khilnani: I agree that we shouldn’t narrow the definition of democracy to mean just elections. I’ve written about this at some length. Democracy has to do with more than just winning power through votes; it has to do with the norms that must govern the actual exercise of power.

Kamal Chenoy: In Bombay and Gujarat and other places in India that have been seared by intercommunal strife, there have been commissions of inquiry that produced excellent reports culminating in wise recommendations, none of which has ever resulted in any serious reforms. The National Police Commission has offered various suggestions for insulating the police from political pressure, but nothing has been done on that front, either. All this points to serious problems in the functioning of our democratic institutions.

P. D. John: A question for Jonah Blank: Did I understand correctly when I heard you say that you and your colleagues and bosses in the U.S. Congress don’t hear very often from Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, or at least not nearly so often as you hear from the predominantly Hindu element of the Indian-American community?

Jonah Blank: Well, I hear from a very small number of Indian Christians and Indian Muslims. I also hear from Pakistani Christians. I hear from all these folks quite frequently, but what matters in terms of generating action by the U.S. Congress is not how many times two or three people call me. What matters is how many hundreds of people call my boss and the other folks in Congress. It can have an impact. As far as I’m concerned, I will keep trying to bring these issues to the senators’ attention simply because it’s the right thing to do; I am personally committed to doing what I can to help. But getting action requires a lot more than a few people calling a few staffers. You need a wide base of people calling a lot of people in a lot of offices on the Hill, many of whom may not be very committed to these issues at all.

P. D. John: Thank you. I’ll explain that to my organization. Another question: What do you make of the connections between the BJP and fascist or Nazi organizations such as the Brown Shirts?

Jonah Blank: It is true that the RSS, especially in its early days, was clearly modeled on a Nazi and fascist framework. However, that was also true of the Indian National Army organized by Subhas Chandra Bose. I think that in today’s context the parallel holds more for Shiv Sena than for the entire Hindutva family. But one doesn’t need to reach back far into history to make the case that the radical side of the Hindutva movement is often a very violent and dangerous thing.

Zahid Bukhari: I’d like to ask the proponents of quiet, constructive engagement, Professor Ganguly and Dr. Blank, whether we have any indication that the United States or anyone else is pursuing this type of course with India. Also, what specific actions would they advise the U.S. government and other international actors to take regarding this type of genocide?

Sumit Ganguly: I stand by my position on quiet diplomacy. I think it’s much more effective. History shows that it works far better than political grandstanding, which makes us feel better but tends to have no effect on the ground or even to backfire. I think Indian political discourse yields evidence for my view.

Jonah Blank: I don’t know exactly what has been said behind the scenes. But I have not been informed of Gujarat really being on the agenda, and although that doesn’t mean I know for sure that it’s not on the agenda, I would be very surprised if it has been raised. At any rate, quiet diplomacy does not have to be silent diplomacy. Speaking purely for myself, my feeling is that the Administration has been far too quiet.

Teesta Setalvad: One of the problems that we haven’t discussed much is the systematic destruction of Muslim businesses and other property in Gujarat. It has been huge, by any measure. It would be wonderful if the U.S. government, perhaps as an aspect of its close partnership with India, made special efforts to encourage U.S. investment in the reconstruction of these Muslim-owned enterprises.

Lynn Robinson: Do any of the BJP elements that are somewhat more centrist show any signs of trying to move their party away from extremism and toward a kind of moderation that would leave the BJP a religious party but respect the secular character of the state?

Sumit Ganguly: I agree with Sunil Khilnani that there is a real debate within the BJP about what kind of party it should be, and about how far it should be beholden to the VHP and the RSS. And one of the reasons for this debate, I hasten to add, is the weight of India’s much maligned electoral politics. We can downplay the importance of elections all we want, but imagine the alternative. Think of what India would be like then.

Let’s not forget that it is minority and lower-caste voters who have so far checked the rise of the BJP—a check they exercise by means of the ballot box. In my undergraduate days I used to think that only bread mattered. The Indian poor convinced me that they cared about much more than bread, that the ballot was just as important to them.

Let me mention a couple of other strong points of democracy in India. One is the National Election Commission, which was once a completely somnolent body but is now a powerful, well-institutionalized watchdog that fiercely guards the integrity of the political process through which self-government takes place. We’ve talked about the decline of the rule of law, which is all too real. But we should also take into account the growth of publicinterest litigation in India. I see a salutary prospect there that cannot be dismissed. There are important straws in the wind that suggest there are possibilities for institutional renewal. Finally, the Indian media, and especially elements of the Englishlanguage press, have done yeoman work in reporting on the crimes that unfolded in Gujarat.

These are all countervailing forces to communalist extremism, and their influence is helping to fuel some of the splits within the BJP that may one day contribute to moderating the party’s ugliest features.
 

Participants

Jonah Blank, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Kamal Chenoy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; Sumit Ganguly, University of Texas, Austin; Sunil Khilnani, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); Cedric Prakash, Jesuit priest, Ahmedebad; Teesta Setalvad, Communalism Combat, Mumbai (Bombay); Timothy Samuel Shah, Ethics and Public Policy Center; David Abramson, Office of International Religious Freedom, U. S. State Department; Gautam Adhikari, National Endowment for Democracy; Zahid Bukhari, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University; Stephen Cohen, Brookings Institution; Charles Fairbanks, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Khalid Hassan, Daily Times of Lahore, Pakistan; P. D. John, Federation of Indian-American Christian Organizations of North America; Paul Marshall, Freedom House; Lynn Robinson, Pew Charitable Trusts; and John Wilson, Books and Culture.