What exactly is your definition of Hindutva? As you have observed, some equate Hindutva with fascism or Nazism. How do you defend Hindutva against this perception?

Hindutva may be defined as the nationalistic movement that insists that the geography of India is connected to Hinduism and Hindu culture in a fundamental way, and that every resident of India is a Hindu, regardless of what their actual religious practices may be. In my opinion, this concept of, for example, "Mohammadi Hindu", has some intellectual problems: it is not the case that only foreigners were anti-Hindu. It is true that Babar, an Afghan, was keen on massacring Hindus; but then so was Malik Kafur, a converted Indian Hindu. There is a clash, I think, between a secular, geographical definition and a religious definition.

It has become fashionable to equate anything you want to demonize with Nazism or fascism. In a strictly technical way, Hindutva could not be either fascism or Nazism, because they were completely identified with Mussolini and Hitler. Indeed, during World War II, Savarkar called on Hindus to fight against the evils of fascism and Nazism. In a broader sense too, two pillars of fascism are the absolute power of the state and lack of respect for democracy. Neither is true for the Hindutva forces. They certainly are
neither totalitarian nor autocratic. There is some historic reason for this fundamental acceptance of democracy--going back to the village panchayat system--a deep-rooted acceptance of popular participation in government.

Hindutva is perceived by many as an exclusionary force: something dominated by caste Hindu North Indians. For example, the equation of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan is not likely to make a lot of Indians comfortable. Yet they persist in making this sort of claim. Why?

Perhaps there is some truth to this, but on the other hand, the most celebrated or perhaps I should say vilifed Hindutva-vaadis are the Shiv Sena. They are certainly not northern, nor necessarily high caste. Their
attitude is typical of Hindutva forces--"Maharashtra for Maharashtrians"--a secular identification with geography overlaid with a Hindu veneer. It is true that the BJP is dominated by north Indian upper caste leaders, but then so is the Congress, and even the Communists. This is a historical accident arising out of the social situation of the last few decades. I believe there is a genuine attempt now on the part of the BJP to reach out to broader sections of the population.

Hindutva is portrayed as a response to Islamic fundamentalism. However, it has in itself what might be called Islamic elements--for example, dogma. Is Hindutva "a disguised Islam"? Remember that Sankara was called a prachhanna-Bauddha--a "crypto-Buddhist"--by his critics.

Interesting question. There have been allegations, for example by Romila Thapar, that there is a deliberate cultus of Rama in the North, and that there is an attempt to elevate the Ramayana to the status of "The Book", the one and only; and that no deviation will be tolerated. I disagree with this analysis. It is too naive. While it is an inevitable process that you learn from what I might loosely call "the opposition", there is no real attempt to create a new, semiticized, institutionalized Hinduism with congregations and so forth. Or to change the fundamental, eclectic nature of Hinduism.

What is your definition of negationism in India? Why do you believe this has become so popular? Do you believe this has to do with a colonial mentality?

The idea of negationism is that there were no atrocities perpetrated on Hindus by others, especially Muslims. This is ludicrous. We don't know exactly what the numbers were--but surely millions of Hindus were severely hurt by invading Muslims. Killed, forcibly converted, enslaved. Attempted genocide, perhaps. It is quite legitimate to compare this to the Jewish Holocaust. Perhaps it was not as intense because it was stretched out over a long period, but clearly the impact of Islam on India was extraordinary, and extraordinarily negative. It is absurd to deny this.

I am not sure I would ascribe the widely-held negationism solely to colonial hangovers. I think it is partly the result of a secular education and upbringing, and perhaps a naive hope that by ignoring the unpleasantness of the past, we could wish them away.

There is a large group of people in India, perhaps even a majority, who profess either secular or agnostic or atheistic lifestyles. They certainly do not identify themselves as Hindus, although they are Hindu origin. What is the reason for this indifference? Is it in fact a strength, that has allowed Hinduism to fend off the more aggressive semitic religions? It is actually a rather hypocritical stance that many of these self-proclaimed secularists have. In general, they claim they are not Hindu because they disavow the attitudes of the Hindutva-vaadis. But then, they also claim that they are Hindus and should therefore be consulted in how Hinduism is to be reformed. It's hard to see how they can justify having the cake and eating it too.

As to why there is a large number of such secular Hindus, as I mentioned before, there is a global disenchantment with organized religion; furthermore, Hindu intellectuals have been forced to defend themselves under the rules of the secularists' game, and therefore have largely been ineffective in putting forth their views strongly. Thus it becomes the norm for the young to adopt a secular perspective.

In response to the allegations about Islamic atrocities in medieval India, a number of secularists have raised the issue of the "bloody sword of Hinduism". In particular, they allege that Hindus were equally brutal in suppressing Buddhism. For example, in my home state of Kerala there is circumstantial evidence that a fairly egalitarian Buddhist culture was replaced with a brutally casteist Hindu culture after the time of Sankara. What is you view on this?

I think this is an absurd suggestion. On the one hand, even if Hinduism were indeed bloody, that does not by any means justify the well-documented bloodiness of Islamic aggression. And, even more importantly, it is absolutely clear that it was Islam that decimated Buddhism in India, just as it had in Afghanistan and Central Asia. By destroying the monasteries and massacring the monks, Muslims eradicated Buddhism. If you analyse the historical records carefully, you will see that it has almost never been the case that Hindus plunder places of worship, others' or their own. A Kashmiri historian wrote, for example, that a Hindu ruler sacked a number of Hindu temples. On closer scrutiny, it turned out the king had been instigated by the Muslim Turkish mercenaries under him into this sort of vandalism. Of course, that is entirely normal in Islam. I am not familiar with the exact situation in Kerala.

Buddhism seems altogether a more benign form of Hinduism, in effect, a "kinder, gentler" Hinduism, with the same philosophical breadth, but a more benign and egalitarian bent. Why shouldn't we revive Buddhism in the land of its birth? We could get rid of caste altogether.

That is an interesting suggestion. However, Buddhism suffers, one might say, from its negation of the spiritual side of things, and its abstract a-theism. It is, as you say, an incredibly attractive philosophical tradition; however, it has been content to overlay itself on an existing social structure, as it did in Japan or China or Thailand. Whereas it is possible to change the system under Hinduism.

Speaking of changing the system, there is the raging debate in India about the justification for caste-based reservations. What is your view on this?

I believe that there is and continues to be a lack of a level playing field in India--the lowest of the low, the Harijans and the Scheduled Tribes, are severely disadvantaged. I don't think anybody is opposed to giving them preferential treatment. It is in the case of the middle castes that there is controversy. Interestingly, the middle castes were themselves often the worst perpetrators of casteism against the lowest castes. Of course, most people, even those who are theoretically for reservations, only take this seriously if it affects their own prospects negatively.

The Hindutva movement seems to concentrate on castigating Islam. In many ways, however, isn't Christianity more of a threat to Hinduism? In the recent past, Christians have made much headway in converting large numbers of Hindus. They are well-funded, have excellent marketing skills, and are implacable--withness Pat Robertson in the US.

Islam is more visible, more visceral, more crude, perhaps. Christianity is much more subtle and better-packaged; but it is a major threat to Hinduism nevertheless. Hindu intellectuals, as I said, have utterly failed to respond to missionary misinformation. They have been on the defensive and have not been able to challenge the rules of the game. The missionaries, on the other hand, have several centuries of thought put into converting "the heathen", and are able to articulate themselves well. Hindus need to go on the offensive, intellectually, morally and spiritually.

Christianity is a tremendous threat, and few have woken up to that fact. India has become perhaps the biggest focal point for Christians--you may be surprised to know that the largest number of Jesuit brothers entering the fold are from India now. There are several reasons for this Christian interest in India and Hindus. First, it is about the only major country where they can freely practise their evangelism. It is clearly out of the question in the Islamic countries around India, and of course, has been so in the Communist nations. The missionaries wish to use India as their foothold and home base to expand elsewhere in Asia. Second, the relatively spiritual Hindu tradition makes it easy for a person to justify celibacy, and becoming a monk, thus supplying the next generation of evangelist feet on the street for the missionaries.

The depredations of Christians against Native Americans was finally recognized a few years ago by the Pope himself. He apologized to them in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the Americas. Now we have another anniversary coming up: 1998, commemorating the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India, and the arrival of the Portuguese--not a very pleasant story, I am afraid. I am not holding my breath for a papal apology.

You wrote a paper on the myth of St. Thomas in India. What exactly did you have in mind?

The story that St. Thomas was murdered by Brahmins in India is accepted widely without question. However, the original story in Aramaic (?) is merely that Thomas went to the Indies--which meant anything from Afghanistan to Japan in those days; furthermore, the actual words about his death are that he was killed with a spear. The missionaries took the word, and chose to state that he had been killed by a Brahmin. And that has become a fait accompli: this justified in the minds of the Portuguese Catholics the fact that they found an established Syrian Christian community in India. The use of a myth like this for political purposes in widespread in Christianity. For instance, the location of the spot where Christ was supposedly crucified was not known in the early years of the Common Era. Then the Emperor Jusitinian's mother had a dream in which she saw the site of the crucifixion. Interestingly, this was on the site of a temple of Athena, which was of course torn down.

The possibility of an Aryan invasion into India seems to get a number of people very excited. Why should we care so much if indeed there was no such invasion, and the culture is indigenous?

Well, one of the things I find causes a great deal of tension in India is the idea of the original inhabitant: Dravidians vs. Aryans, harijan vs. upper caste, tribal vs. non-tribal. Everyone is trying to claim they were the first inhabitants of the land and thereby somehow more deserving. I have the theory that around 4-5000 BCE, Proto-Indo-European speakers from the northwest of India spread out, intermingled with the local tribes, and created almost all the languages and cultures of Europe. The so-called Dravidians probably were immigrants circa 2000 BCE from some part of Iran via Baluchistan. We will see how the research turns out.

What is your message to US Hindus?

That you should forget your fractured animosities back in India, and try to recognize each others' best qualities; and try to present to your fellow-Americans the good that your religion has. Hinduism has global relevance, and it should not be confined to a geography-centric vision--we can all learn from it.

(Excerpts from Interview by Rajeev Srinivasan, source : India Currents, Feb., 1996)

The communal conflagration in Gujarat has been claiming the attention throughout the past months. Was the attack on Hindu pilgrims in Godhra pre-planned?  What kind of consequences did the planners expect?

Let me say first of all that I am winding up my work as an observer of Indian communalism. I think the patterns are clear, and filling in more details may be an interesting job for other people, but I want to move to more fundamental issues. Dealing with communal confrontations at face value has never solved the problem. Most secularist writings on the Gujarat riots manage to leave madrassa education unmentioned. How serious are you about weeding out Hindu-Muslim riots if you don't want to address the permanent source of religious hatred among Muslims, the very cause of Partition, of jihad? But more fundamental than the identification of sources of irrational hatred in the core texts of Islam is the question: how Islam came into being, which defects of human consciousness made it possible? The problem of Islam is rooted in a universal problem of human inadequacy.

Secondly, Gujarat has not been “claiming” attention all by itself. An intensive effort by the usual suspects has kept attention, as much as possible, away from other scenes of communal violence. In the past months, how many people have been killed by Christian separatists in the Northeast, by Communists in Kerala or Nepal, by Muslims in Bangladesh or Jammu? As for Gujarat itself, how many Hindus have been killed by Muslims even after Godhra? The secularists have been acting as if attacks on Muslims in Gujarat are the only communal flashpoint. This is typical of hate discourse: apart from pure lies, the main technique consists in exclusively highlighting the -- sometimes admittedly real -- crimes of the targeted group and keeping instances of its innocent victimization out of view.

As for Godhra, I have no privileged access to the police investigation. But if you care for my speculations, I consider it merely possible that a group of Muslim hotheads recklessly vented their hatred of Hindus. They must have known that in a Hindu-majority area, they couldn't get away with more than small-scale violence. There is plenty of petty Muslim terror in Gujarat, which is how Hindus were cleansed out of entire neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad, but the trick is to apply it in small doses. At any rate, whether large or small, any initiative to violence refutes the image of the Muslims as a poor, helpless minority. After all, defenceless minorities, such as the Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh, simply don't dare to commit even the most feeble violence against the majority. A massive strike like the one in Godhra, courting Hindu retaliation, either was the work of foolish hotheads, or it was prepared in advance and calculated to provoke a backlash. Before Partition, the Muslim League would deliberately provoke Hindu violence against Muslims in order to drive home the point that co-existence with Hindus was impossible. But today, I don't see such a motive among any section of the Indian Muslims. Only Pakistan would have an interest in fomenting this kind of trouble in India, a new front in the proxy war.

Was the Hindu backlash spontaneous?  What role do you think the VHP played in the aftermath of Godhra?

Again, I'll mistrust the press and wait for the official findings. Home Minister, L.K. Advani claims that two hundred policemen were killed, and we know of the old antagonism between Muslims and the police -- not only in India, even Muslim rioters in France typically target the police. Clearly the violence was not one-sided. I just read a follow-up report about Muslim women who had allegedly been raped. Many of the women interviewed deny that rapes took place at least in their own neighborhoods, and the only woman to maintain the allegation of mass rape was obviously tutored and her story fell through upon being questioned more closely. To be sure, that Hindu follow-up report may be just as partisan as the secularists' reports aimed at exploitation of the riots. I cannot judge either version from my armchair.

But I will agree in general terms that this was mostly a Hindu retaliation for the Godhra massacre, and for all the earlier occasions of Muslim aggression. Gujarat and especially Ahmedabad have witnessed a sustained low-level terror campaign against the Hindus. With their Gandhian tradition of fleeing and turning the other cheek, the Gujaratis have amassed considerable resentment against the Muslims, and after Godhra it all came out.

Are you saying that the Gandhian mentality has paradoxically contributed to the eruption of Hindu anger?

Yes. I know quite a few people of Gujarati Bania background, and I am rather uncomfortable with their tough talk. As children, these yuppies were brought up on Gandhi's extreme non-violence but they are now talking very loosely about the need to “give the Muslims a good beating”, things like that. The psychology behind their evolution is that they have experienced how Gandhian attitudes of appeasing the aggressor and turning the other cheek simply don't work, and then they have moved to the other extreme. In dealing with aggression, one should neither appease nor overreact.

Was the English media reaction to Godhra predictable? If so, how? If there are cases of balanced reporting/analyses, from whom?

By all means, preserve the Godhra articles and columns in a special folder, one day they will be the object of a spectacular case study in the human capacity for doublethink. Though disgusting, it was at the same time quite funny to watch the extreme inventiveness of the secularists in blaming the victims. They were very annoyed that the Gujarat carnage was so unambiguously started by Muslims with their massacre of Hindu pilgrims, mostly women and children. So, they falsely started describing the victims as “extremists” and inventing stories of how these Hindu children had kidnapped a Muslim woman into their riding train. That canard was borrowed from an Islamist website. There is never much difference between secularist reporting and Islamist propaganda anyway, which is why Indian theocratic Islamists call themselves “secularists”. The latest is their “report” claiming that the Hindus in the train had themselves lit the fire, in a gigantic mass suicide. Well, I suppose free speech includes the right to spread nonsense.

On the bright side, I noticed Vir Sanghvi's article pointing out the crass double standards of his colleagues in their Godhra reporting. When a white missionary is murdered by tribals in Orissa, we are expected to recoil in indignation, but when Hindus are murdered by the dozens for the umpteenth time, we are expected to agree that they had it coming. Even the wave of media hate against the Hindus and the BJP has a bright side. It eloquently disproves any suspicion that the BJP is in any way a “fascist” party. Under a fascist regime, such anti-government writing would have provoked a severe punishment. But in reality, writing against the BJP is still a good career move.

Kanwal Rekhi and Henry Rowen have proposed that the recipients of donations from American Hindus, meaning especially the VHP, are out to “destroy minorities”, and that the Indian government should “deal a severe blow to such covert causes by labelling them simply as terrorists”.

Even entrepreneurs like Rekhi display the typically secularist nostalgia for Soviet methods when it comes to dealing with Hindu activism. A democratic government doesn't “simply label” an organization as terrorist, it must establish proof that will stand up in court. And when it comes to proof, there is a long list of cases where much-touted secularist proof fell apart under scrutiny. What happened to the evidence for the VHP's involvement in the murder of the missionary Graham Staines? It is increasingly clear that acts of anti-Muslim or anti-Christian violence are often the handiwork of desperate but unorganised locals. Membership of an organization like the VHP, by contrast, offers them the hope of participating in a larger countersubversive strategy and thereby keeps acts of desperation in check.

Do you see any major changes in the RSS strategy for dealing with minority issues in India? Any hopeful outcomes from RSS leaders who have been meeting with minority leaders?

My criticism of the Sangh's position regarding the minorities remains the same since more than a decade: it is both too hard and too soft. Ideologically, it is too soft. It deflects any serious criticism of Islam or Christianity into a matter of national versus anti-national loyalties: “Islam is OK, but it must be Indianized”. On universal grounds of truth and morality, Islam is not OK, not even in Arabia where it is cent per cent patriotic. Recently, awareness of the hate-mongering impact of the Quran has become so widespread that VHP spokesman, Giriraj Kishore felt compelled to address the issue. But instead of being logical and asking Muslims to renounce the Quran, he requested them to “amend the Quran”. How can you change the Quran and still call it the Quran? And what blasphemy to change the supposed word of God Himself! The Hindu attitude to Islam, from Gandhiji to Giriraj Kishore, is one of total confusion. Meanwhile, the Sangh may well be too hard on the minorities in practice. To say, as several Sangh leaders have done, that “the Muslims' best guarantee of safety lies in winning the trust of the Hindus”, implies that they would be endangered if Hindus have cause to mistrust them. I can understand if Muslims read that as a threat. The correct position is that Muslims are people quite like the rest of us, and that they should be treated equally with Hindus; but that Islam as an ideology should be subjected to inexorable criticism.

Teesta Setalvad, Kamal Mitra Chenory and others testified before the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom accusing the Modi government and the VHP of conducting a “pogrom” against the Muslims. Should Indian citizens testify before commissions of inquiry set up by foreign governments? 

You mean the commission which swallowed John Dayal's long-refuted allegation of a gang-rape of four nuns in Jhabua by “Hindu activists”, who turned out to be Christian themselves? And which still believes that Hindus committed a series of bomb attacks on churches, though the culprits have been caught and identified as members of the Pak-based Deendar Anjuman? Genuine social activists like Swami Agnivesh have refused to appear before that commission on the correct plea that India is a sovereign and democratic nation that needs no lessons from the U.S.

Democracy has brought the BJP to power, and the enemies of democracy try to overrule the voters' verdict by appealing to higher powers such as the U.S. The term “pogrom” applies neatly to what Muslims did to Hindus in Godhra. A retaliation, by contrast, is not normally called a pogrom, unless you want to imply that the Jews who suffered in the Russian pogroms had asked for it. But there is no doubt that Hindus have massacred Muslims in Gujarat. I for one don't need a U.S. commission to prove that to me. What remains unproven, though, and in my opinion most unlikely, is that the VHP would have organized it. The only ones with a vested interest in preventing riots are the Hindu nationalists, for they invariably get the blame. That is why in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress and Samajwadi governments have seen a much higher incidence of communal violence than BJP governments. Conversely, riots are the very life-blood of secularist politics.

How so?

The secularists had made all these shrill predictions that a BJP government would open gas chambers for Muslims, throw them in the ocean, etc. But for four years, in spite of numerous massacres of Hindus by Muslim terrorists, the Indian Muslims were left alone. Islamic terrorists killed forty BJP activists, allegedly “Hindu Nazis”, in Coimbatore. What would real Nazis do in that case? Well, in November 1938 a young Jew killed a German diplomat in Paris, and the Nazis reacted by attacking all the Jewish shops in Germany and killing nearly a hundred innocent Jews. So that's Nazism for you. By contrast, the BJP did not retaliate at all. Hindus were being killed with great frequency in Jammu, even the parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi were attacked, yet the Muslims remained unharmed. So, the secularists were losing credibility day by day. They needed the Gujarat carnage, they thanked Allah when it finally materialized. They were suddenly back in business, getting invited all the way to Washington to tell their scare stories.

You have avoided the theoretical framing of issues. Why? Modern scholars, including all the talked about Indian academics, use a lot of the Marxist, post-modern, and feminist theory to argue their cases. You don't. 

What real knowledge of the religio-political situation have those theories ever added? Read those books and you will see that “constructs” and “conceptual tools” fill the pages that should have contained real information instead. Such scholars collect just enough primary information to prove that they did get in touch with their topic, or more often they borrow even that minimum of information from like-minded publications, and then they put these raw data through the theory machine, yielding a theory sausage peppered with a few data selected for their fitting into the theory's expectations. Most of them borrow not just data, but also opinions and judgements without critically examining them. At the same time, they manage to disregard pertinent data that stare every normal observer in the face. Thus, practically every Hindu activist whom I have interviewed between 1990 and 1998 brought up the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, murdered or expelled from their homeland, as a telling illustration of the true religio-political power equation in India. But most publications purportedly analysing Hindu nationalism in the 1990s manage to overlook this expulsion of Hindus from a part of India. They have to if they want to uphold the image of India as dominated by an overbearing Hindu majority threatening a hapless Muslim minority.

What is your basic criticism of India's so-called secularism?

That it isn't secular. As a political framework, secularism requires that all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their religious affiliation. That is a definitional minimum. An Indian secularist would therefore first of all be found on the barricades in the struggle for a common civil code, against the existing legal apartheid between Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. But the only major party to demand the enactment of a common civil code, as mandated by the Constitution, happens to be the BJP. On election eve, the others run to the Shahi Imam to pledge their firm commitment to the preservation of the Shari'a for Muslims. In the West and in the Muslim world, the upholding of religion-based communal legislation is rightly called anti-secularist.

I have often discussed this point with Indian secularists. Their usual argument is that, you see, India is a peculiar case, the uniform civil code issue has been “hijacked” by the Hindus, and for now the country needs these separate civil codes. I am not convinced, but even if we concede that India is better off with the present system, that still doesn't make it secular. The opponents of the common civil code, the upholders of discrimination against the Hindus in education and temple management, the defenders of a special status for states with non-Hindu majorities -- they should have the courage of their conviction and call themselves “anti-secular”. Incidentally, this is one thing you have to concede to Ashis Nandy: he has criticized the very notion of secularism.

Don't you think that secularism is more than just an institutional arrangement, that it is also an intellectual attitude?

All right, as an intellectual movement, secularism means that religion is treated as a human construct rather than the product of a divine revelation. It implies a frank and critical investigation of the claims of religion. In this respect, the failure and dishonesty of Indian secularism is even more complete. Its discourse on religion is extremely and willfully superficial. It shields from criticism even the most obscurantist religious beliefs or institutions, provided they are non-Hindu. For instance, almost every self-styled secularist, from the former president to the editors of the newspapers, has sworn by the story that Christianity was brought to India by the apostle Thomas. In the West, not just secularists but even Catholic universities like the one where I studied have dropped this myth. But in India, the secularists are its most determined upholders.

Indian secularism is systematically dishonest in its assessment of the religions hostile to Hinduism. Thus, after the Staines murder, which apparently resulted from the well-attested resentment of the tribals against the divisive effect of conversion on their communities, the secularists massively denied that the Christian missionaries are in India for purposes of conversion. In reality, the project of converting all mankind is intrinsic to the Christian religion. In Catholic school, I always learned that the missionaries provide medical and educational services primarily in order to make the targeted communities receptive to conversion. Staines' own bulletin to his Australian sponsors proved he was doing conversion work. The Southern Baptists reconfirmed in 1999 that Hindus are doomed unless they become Christians. The Pope himself came to Delhi to say in so many words that the Church intends to “reap a harvest of faith” in India. Yet this self-evident fact is still dismissed by vocal secularists as a figment of Hindutva paranoia. [Since my critics are fond of misquoting me, let me say explicitly that I disapprove of murder as a way of protesting against the nuisance of conversion campaigns.]

Or take a more fundamental item, the core belief of Islam: that Mohammed is God's prophet. Suppose one of your colleagues told you one day that henceforth you have to obey his every word, as he has become God's spokesman receiving exclusive messages from above. Presumably, you would guess he had developed a serious mental problem. Well, that's exactly what Mohammed's contemporaries thought, as the Quran itself testifies a dozen times. It is also what modern psychologists have said: Mohammed suffered a classic case of paranoia, a grand delusion about himself nurtured with audio-visual hallucinations. A real secularist is sceptical of the defining belief of Islam and feels sorry for all those Muslims trapped in it. So there you have a properly secularist point to take up with the Muslims: do you want to continue regulating your lives after the injunctions of a seventh-century Arab businessman who heard voices? Do you want to base wars, states and laws on the non-secular belief in Mohammed's deluded claims? Instead, the only thing the secularists ever discuss with Muslims is a joint strategy against the Hindus.

Is that your view of Islam: that Muslims had better be talked out of it?

Here I agree with V.S. Naipaul: the non-Arab Muslims suffer from the conflict between their ancestral cultural roots and their imposed religion. Every Muslim is an abductee from the civilization in which he once belonged. Where I differ with the Nobel-winning author is that I would apply the same diagnosis to the Arabs. Though they did not have to adopt foreign customs and language, which made the transition to Islam less disruptive, they too were cut off from their original culture. Either way, Muslims would do well to take a critical look at the basics of their religion. I don't think anyone else can do it for them, and I expect little from VHP conversion campaigns among them. I expect more from state policies ensuring that Muslim children are exposed to a wide spectrum of ideas rather than being locked up in the Madrassas which have produced the Taliban. But ultimately, the Muslims have to come out of the mistaken belief system of Islam themselves. They will then enter the same vacuum where post-Christians like myself are struggling to see the light. But that uncertainty is quite all right. I can personally testify that there is life after apostasy.

You yourself said that conversion has a divisive effect in tribal villages. Do you imagine the conflict in the Muslim world, nearly 1.5 billion people, if a good number among them turned against Islam?

The proper comparison is not with the Christian conversion campaigns, nor with Communist campaigns against religion, but with the spontaneous secularization which has taken place in ex-Christian Europe. I can see the beginnings of de-Islamization already. Think of writers like Anwar Sheikh, Ibn Warraq or Taslima Nasrin, who are showing the Muslims the way out towards Enlightenment. Of course, many such writers have been murdered, but their voice is penetrating ever deeper. The information revolution has a big role to play here. Even in the harems in the remotest parts of Arabia, TV and the Internet are breaking open the narrow horizon of Islam.

Many Hindus take an alarmist view about the numerical growth of Islam through high birth rates and migration. In support of that doomsday scenario, some of them cite your 1998 booklet 'The Demographic Siege'. What are your views about that now?

This alarmist view is even stronger in Europe, with its low birth rates, than in India. The impressively higher Muslim birth rate is a plain fact, which is why the secularists are so zealous in denying it. Admittedly, birth control is now catching on in countries like Iran and Turkey (not in Pakistan), but Iran's population is still expected to double before reaching zero growth. If you extrapolate present trends, it is certain that Islam will take over Europe in fifty years, India and the US in a hundred at most. And yet, it is even more certain that the threat of Islam will disappear even faster. Firstly, there is the intellectual effort of the school of writers just mentioned. Secondly, Muslims are increasingly aware that Islam is a factor of failure. Look at Malaysia, where the Chinese and Hindu minorities have achieved an economic breakthrough which the Muslim majority can only skim off with forced redistribution.

The recent UN report on the Arab world has confirmed what any visitor there can see for himself: a stifling atmosphere and a lack of dynamism. Secularists always blame Muslim backwardness in India on some kind of invisible Hindu conspiracy, though the Muslims actually enjoy a number of privileges tending to reinforce their Islamic identity. The Arab case, with Muslims in a majority and in power, and with an immense affluence to support any policy they may choose to pursue, shows that Muslim backwardness is due to Islam itself. In the oil monarchies, most of the labour is done by Western and Asian guest workers, and the available capital is not used to build self-reliant industries. The day oil loses its value, they will have to go back to tending camels, unless they shake off their religious obscurantism. I am confident that the Arabs and other Muslims will understand this in time. It will probably happen in two phases: a vanguard disowns Islam entirely, and the masses follow at a distance with attempts to reform Islam and water it down to conform to modern values.

Am I too optimistic? I admit that in 1920 already, Bertrand Russell and others diagnosed the young Soviet Union as bound to fail, yet it took a whole human lifetime before it actually collapsed, and the Russian born in 1920 is now an old man suffering the lingering after-effects of the Soviet experiment. So likewise, the mathematical certainty that Islam too will implode need not exclude that it can still cause serious problems. But I have a hunch that Islam will end the way it began: with a bang.

What is the view in Europe about Islam?

Let's scan the political spectrum. The extreme Right cherishes fantasies of a Euro-Islamic alliance against the American-Zionist world hegemony. The fast-growing populist Right, by contrast, takes an alarmist view of Islam, though in many cases this is only a rhetorical cover for an anti-immigration drive regardless of the religion of the immigrants. The declining Old Left with its militant secularist tradition is in no mood to make concessions to Islam, witness the recent anti-Islamic statements by Leftist journalist, Oriana Fallaci. In the extreme Left, some see Muslim immigrants as a substitute for the proletariat as a force capable of destroying the system. But the important factor is the centre, the business Right and the fashionable multiculturalist Left. In the 1990s, they blocked all criticism of Islam. Career-wise, the rare active critics of Islam, including myself, paid a heavy price. In Amsterdam, the Pakistani Islam critic, the Muslim-born Mohamed Rasoel, was even sentenced to a heavy fine for “anti-Muslim racism”, whatever that may mean. In the last two years, the mood has changed considerably; witness the open dismissal of Islam as backward and inferior by Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and postmodernist writer, Michel Houellebecq. September 11 confirmed that change of mood. Recently, the Syrian-born German professor, Bassam Tibi spoke for most Europeans when he stated that he didn't want to see Europe Islamized.

How do you rate the American government's reaction to September 11, particularly regarding South Asia?

After that event, General Perwez Musharraf seriously counted with an Indo-Israeli attack on its nuclear capability, even with the destruction of the Pakistani state. So he saw no way out but to offer his services to the US. But he made it clear, in a speech in Urdu to his people, that he was not becoming America's friend. He related how the Prophet Mohammed had used alliances as stratagems in order to eliminate other allies: using the Jews to eliminate the Pagans of Medina, than befriending the Pagans of Mecca to eliminate the Jews, and finally breaking his treaty with the Meccans to defeat them. But since the CIA has explained that none of its employees know Arabic, I guess they didn't pick up those Urdu hints either. Imagine, in the war on terrorism they don't care to learn the two languages most commonly used by terrorists. Musharraf is taking the Americans for a ride. I understand that president Bush wants to keep the Muslim world divided by enlisting some Muslim regimes in his own crusade, but I doubt he will outwit them. I think he is in for a serious humiliation. I admit this sounds like the old European armchair scepticism of American interventionism. But let's face it: American foreign policy is utterly confused, and mere muscle-flexing cannot be a substitute for a coherent vision.

Abdul Kalam is now India's president. Rafiq Zakaria wrote an op-ed piece in the Asian Age arguing that Kalam is not a “true” or “real” Muslim. Will Kalam help in liberating the Indian Muslim from the mental-ghettoes constructed by the likes of Zakaria?

Along with the secularists, I used to laugh at the BJP notion that Indian Muslims should see themselves as “Mohammedi Hindus”. But I was wrong: the BJP has at long last discovered its Mohammedi Hindu. And because he is such a rarity, they have at once given him the top post. I certainly hope he serves as a guide for the Indian Muslims out of their ghettoes and into the bright daylight of India and the modern world.

How do you compare Atal Behari Vajpayee with other Prime Ministers?

My favourite among Indian Prime Ministers is definitely Narasimha Rao. He undid the Nehruvian legacy and stemmed the rising tide of the fateful consequences of Nehru's follies. He actually implemented the BJP programme, just as Atal Behari Vajpayee is now implementing the Congress programme. Rao started liberalizing the economy, lifting the stifling socialist controls. He opened diplomatic relations with Israel. He defeated the Khalistani terrorists, nipped the beginnings of Tamil Tiger separatism on Indian soil in the bud, and pushed back Kashmiri terrorism to the point where the Kasmiri people stopped supporting it so that it is now manned entirely by foreign mercenaries. And he allowed the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Are you saying that the demolition was a good thing?

At the level of historic justice, I consider it perfectly normal that a Hindu sacred site is adorned with a Hindu temple. Hindus shouldn't overemphasize the history of Islamic destruction, the current victimhood culture is quite foreign to the Hindu spirit, but for once this focus on a temple forcibly replaced with a mosque has been instructive. At a more pragmatic level, from the viewpoint of saving lives, certainly a more pressing concern than the rights and wrongs of history, the demolition was a good thing, on balance. In the preceding years, India was tormented by communal riots over all kinds of issues, most of them unrelated to Ayodhya. The demolition led to a brief round of Muslim revenge actions plus the Shiv Sena retaliation in Mumbai, but then rioting stopped for nine long years. The demolition clearly had a cathartic effect on the rioters. To be sure, Islamic terrorism has continued, but Hindus refused to be provoked. They did not take out their anger on their Muslim neighbours after the Mumbai blasts of March 1993, nor after any of the numerous massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir, nor after the bomb attack in Coimbatore, nor after the attacks on the parliament buildings. Hindus have shown remarkable restraint.

At the most fundamental level, however, I am not too enthusiastic about the whole idea of campaigning for the liberation of historical temples sites from Muslim occupation. It is a well-attested fact that most historical mosques were built on the site of non-Muslim places of worship. This is true of thousands of mosques in India, but also of the Ummayad mosque in Damascus, the Aya Sophia in Istanbul, and even the Kaaba itself, where Mohammed smashed 360 idols venerated by the sanctuary's rightful owners, the Arab polytheists. But trying to pull these sites out of the hands of the Muslims is the wrong approach. The Ayodhya campaign had the merit of drawing attention to this historic injustice, but henceforth the energy spent on it had better be redirected to a more fundamental objective. We should help the Muslims in freeing themselves from Islam, and then they themselves will release these places of worship. Every Muslim is a Sita, an abductee who must be liberated from Ravana's prison.

In hostile writings, you are routinely classified among the Hindu nationalists.

I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. And I don't need to belong to those or to any specific ideological categories in order to use my eyes and ears. So I noticed for myself that the legitimate Hindu nationalists are thoroughly misrepresented in the journalistic and academic literature about them. I never planned to. The anomaly between their image and the reality on the ground struck me by surprise when I was in India to study philosophy. As I said, I am phasing out my involvement with communalism studies. The subject is really very simple, the problem as well as the solution. It isn't all that challenging and interesting, it only seemed that way because of the artificial obstacles thrown up by the secularists.

(Excerpts from Interview by Ramesh N.Rao, source : www.sulekha.com)

Why do you think Islam has turned increasingly militant?

I think Islam has been militant from the beginning. Later on, its degree of militancy fluctuated with a number of factors, one of them being the power equation with its rivals. Today, Islam lives in the shadow of Western (and locally in South Asia, Hindu) economic and cultural supremacy, which gives it an incentive for militant opposition to the West. At the same time, its demographic strength and access to specific military (guerrilla) instruments give it the self-confidence to transform its dissatisfaction into action. So, we are seeing a peak in Islamic militancy.

There is a view that many of the militant groups are a reaction to the decay in their own societies and that this is because Muslims have turned away from their religion.

I disagree. There has been plenty of decadence in many periods and areas of Muslim history, some of them provoking militant "purification" within the community, others coinciding with aggression against non-Muslims, and others not accompanied by a vigorous Islamic action in any sense. Also, what Islamic militants call "decadence", and to which they would react e.g. by killing "apostates", may be something entirely different from what outsiders would call decadence, e.g. peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims can already qualify as treason to Islam, witness the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel.

Why is the Quran invoked by the militants for their violent brand of politics?

Because the Quran does contain ample injunctions to hostility and war against the unbelievers.

Can the violence also be attributed to suppression of dissent in large parts of the Muslim world?

That suppression of dissent is a tradition instituted by the Prophet himself, who had a number of his critics murdered or executed. It is true that this suppression of dissent often remained in force when Muslim regimes turned secular and then turned against the Islamists themselves, witness Syria's president Assad sr.'s bloody oppression of Islamic militancy, or Turkey's outlawing the Islamist party.

Why is the Muslim ire directed particularly against the US? Is it because the US has propped up authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world to secure its business interests?

That is part of the reason. There is just no end to the brutality and stupidity of American foreign policy. But note that NATO's bombing of Serbia has not led to any similar revenge operation by Serbs, only Islam was willing as well as able to do it.

To what extent has the Palestine Question added to the anti-US sentiment?

We cannot blame the US for failing to impose the perfect solution on the Middle East, for unfortunately, there is no solution which will be just and satisfying to everyone concerned. But it is obvious that American one-sided support to Israel is perhaps the biggest source of Muslim anger.

There is a popular perception that Islam is resistant to change? Do you agree and why?

By definition, Islam wants to perpetuate the policies and beliefs followed by the Prophet and his companions. To be sure, all religions have deep respect for their founder and their ancestral traditions, they all resist change to some extent. But I must add that Christianity has come a long way e.g. in shedding its anti-Semitism, and the Hinduism has made great strides in diminishing gender and caste inequality. Islam is more resistant to change because it is so closely linked to the literal Quran and Hadith, like a self- described "seamless garment": change one rule and the whole fabric of Islam will unravel. 

Does this resistance to change stem from the immutability of Quran, as well as because Islam makes no distinction between personal and public domain?

Well, Christianity and Hinduism are more broad-based, having a very composite body of scripture. This allows reformers to play off one chapter against another, to trump traditionalist injunctions with more progressive ones without explicitly going against scripture. Islam is also a political religion to a far greater extent, explicitly aiming at the creation of an Islamic state which should ultimately encompass the whole world. Islam is a political religion to a far greater extent, explicitly aiming at the creation of an Islamic state which should ultimately encompass the whole world.

What do you think are the reasons why democracy is absent in large parts of Muslim society? Why have most Muslim states been unable to separate the Church from the State?

Democracy is not given in Quran and Hadith. Even where parliaments are set up, they are allowed only to take decisions within the boundaries laid down by scripture. Islam is intrinsically theocratic.

Why is the condition of women in Muslim societies subservient to men? Considering Quranic injunctions -- and their very narrow interpretations--about polygamy, divorce, dress code, etc., what are the ways out for women?

The royal way out is collective apostasy from Islam. Meanwhile, in practical terms, efforts to emancipate women all while paying lip service to Islam should be encouraged. We cannot expect women to wait until the final religious revolution flushes out Islam itself from people's minds. So, in the meantime, I don't mind if they try to get their way by means of white lies such as: "if read properly, the Quran is against polygamy". But ultimately, there is no reason why people should go on believing in the prophetic claims of Mohammed. To be sure, I am convinced that religion will remain relevant. But it cannot remain a dogmatic religion based on irrational beliefs. It is time for a religiosity that is in tune with science and mental freedom. That will take care of current problems of obscurantist laws and violent fanaticism.

(Interview by Sundeep Dougal, source : Outlook, Oct.13, 2001)