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Gujarat and the Islamic world

By C. Raja Mohan

If violence continues in Gujarat, the anguish in the Islamic world will turn into anger in the not-too-distant future.

DURING A week-long visit to Saudi Arabia where we had the opportunity to interact with a cross-section of the elite in the capital Riyadh and the port city of Jeddah, few Saudis mentioned the word Gujarat. For, the Saudis are too sophisticated and courteous to directly bring up the question of the communal carnage in Gujarat with their Indian guests. They have not raised the issue formally either with the Indian Embassy in Riyadh or with the visiting group of journalists. But there is no doubt about the anguish in Saudi Arabia, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, on what the continuing trouble in Gujarat means for the future of India.

At a meeting with the members of the Majlis-e-Shoora, the Saudi Parliament in the making, the conversation was extraordinarily warm and friendly. As we took leave, after formal goodbyes, one of the Saudi members of the Majlis walked up to us and said he wanted us to take back a message. "You have a lot of friends here who want to see India prosper and become a major power... but for God's sake bring the communities together and don't let the politicians stir up more violence." The word Gujarat was still not mentioned... but the message was quite clear.

The protracted communal violence in Gujarat is beginning to shake the confidence of the Islamic world in an India they have known for so long and been comfortable with. It is an India that is "a congenial home to all religions and cultures". None of the Islamic countries might practice religious freedom or pursue the notion of secularism that India had been known for. But India will be judged by its own standards, and rightly so. The image of India teetering at the abyss of an extended communal conflict is causing profound unease in the Islamic world. At this moment, the growing concerns remain unstated at the formal level. But, if violence continues in Gujarat, the anguish in the Islamic world will turn into anger in the not-too-distant future. At that moment, the current criticism from the Europeans will look a minor episode in the unfolding diplomatic fallout from Gujarat.

As official India responds to the mounting international criticism of the inability of the Narendra Modi Government in Ahmedabad to control the violence and restore a semblance of order to return the State to the rule of law, one can only feel sorry for the Foreign Office. For nearly four years, India had an unbelievably positive run on the external affairs front. Since the nuclear tests of May 1998, Indian diplomacy had transformed New Delhi's standing in world affairs, reconfigured its relations with all the major powers and expanded its influence in its neighbourhood both to the East and the West. But it will have to count the diplomatic costs of Gujarat and the first serious possibility of the unravelling of India's post-Pokhran foreign policy.

Forced on to the diplomatic back foot for the first time in four years, the Foreign Office will look and sound miserable in defending the indefensible in Gujarat. All the usual diplomatic tricks of the trade — the emphasis on sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs and the questioning of the record of those who speak up — will sound hollow so long as the violence continues in Gujarat. Diplomacy can at best contain damage from negative internal developments and it can enhance the external effect of the positive internal change. It cannot turn what is black at home into white abroad. The Europeans had waited for weeks to see if there was a political will in New Delhi to bring the situation under quick control. But as the forces of Hindutva revel in their communalism, the BJP strategists talk of riding back to power through politics of hate, and the Prime Minister and Home Minister bury their heads in sand it is inevitable that the world will speak up.

The decent interval is over; and the world will begin to point fingers at India. The United States, usually the first one to speak up in such circumstances, has held its peace, thanks to the dramatic improvement of Indo-U.S. relations in the past year. But not even the U.S. Ambassador, Robert Blackwill, will be able to hold Washington back for too long from going public with its criticism of the BJP Government's handling of the situation in Gujarat. But nothing will hurt India more than the protests from its friends from the Islamic world.

For now, most Saudis want to believe that what is happening in Gujarat is an "aberration", an unfortunate departure from the general rule of peace and harmony between Hindus and Muslims in India. But the Narendra Modi Government in Gujarat and the BJP-led Government at the Centre are making it difficult to even pretend that Gujarat is an aberration. A leading Saudi businessman suggested to the Indian journalists that Riyadh would prefer not to be dragged into the internal controversies afflicting India. But if the communal hatred continues in Gujarat, and the rest of the world starts protesting against it, it will be increasingly difficult for the Governments of the Islamic world to keep quiet in the hope that Gujarat will just disappear.

Ironically, one of the main achievements of the Vajpayee Government has been its unprecedented success in engaging the Islamic world. Despite their initial suspicions of the BJP's reputation as a Hindu chauvinist party, most countries of the Islamic world found that they could continue to do business with India under the leadership of Mr. Vajpayee. Notwithstanding the expanding links between India and Israel in recent years, the Islamic world found India a valuable partner. When the External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, visited Saudi Arabia in January 2001, he told a local newspaper in an interview that there was no aspect of Indian life that had not been influenced by Islam. And when Mr. Vajpayee spoke to the Majlis in Tehran exactly a year ago, he declared that Islam was an integral part of Indian society. The absence of communal tensions in India until recently convinced the Islamic world that India would retain its secular principles under the BJP.

As a result India successfully laid the foundations for new strategic partnerships with key Islamic countries such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, all of whom had enjoyed special relations with Pakistan in the past. For the first time in decades, India was poised until Ayodhya and Gujarat, to pull itself up and away from Pakistan in the eyes of most Islamic nations. New Delhi had begun to neutralise the Islamic world in its conflicts with Pakistan and increase its own weight in the calculations of key nations in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

But if the communal violence in Gujarat is allowed to persist, and India is seen as making a fundamental departure from its traditional path of secularism, New Delhi would begin to squander the strategic advantages it had built up in recent years. More fundamentally, the national strategic objectives of managing the tensions with Pakistan and carving out a larger role for itself in the region and the world would become elusive. An India that actively foments a civil war between Hindus and Muslims at home will count for nothing abroad.

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