Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
Murder in India
By Pankaj Mishra
'We Have No Orders to Save You': State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat
a report by Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch, 68 pp., $7.00
The report is available on line at www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/gujarat.pdf.
In January this year, I was in Ayodhya, the north Indian pilgrimage town where in December 1992 an uncontrollable crowd of Hindus demolished a sixteenth-century mosque that they claimed was built by the Moghul emperor Babar over the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. I went to see Ramchandra Paramhans, the ninety-year-old abbot who heads both a militant sect of sadhus (Hindu mendicants) and the cash-rich trust that is in charge of building a Rama temple over the site of the demolished mosque. I found him tending his cows near the site. Born in the neighboring poverty-blighted state of Bihar, Paramhans has done rather well for himself in Ayodhya, where the richest people are Hindu abbots. With his dense white beard and matted locks, he came across as the irascible ascetic of Hindu legend, with apparently much to be angry about. The Hindu nationalists he thought he had helped elect to power in New Delhi hadn't done enough to meet their promise of constructing the temple, even if they hadn't stopped it from being prefabricated in a vast workshop not far from the site of the mosque.
Review, 5187 words
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