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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081129.DOUG29/TPStory
[...] India does have a problem with terrorism and extremism, one that threatens to destabilize the amazing humanitarian and economic progress it has made in recent years. But it isn't one of Islamic extremists trying to take over the state. Quite the contrary.
The most prominent Indian killed in the terrorist attacks on Wednesday was Harmant Karkare, the head of Mumbai's anti-terrorism squad, who was assassinated in the city's central train station along with several of his deputies.
The day before, he had received a death threat. That didn't surprise him, he told reporters, as it came just days after he had filed charges against 10 men in India's recent major terrorist attack, the Sept. 29 bombings in the city of Malegaon that killed nine and injured 80.
The accused are Hindu nationalist activists, young women and men associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr. Karkare also linked BJP-tied Hindus with the much deadlier bomb attacks in Malegaon two years ago, which killed 37 and injured 125 and had been blamed by local police on Muslim groups - an odd accusation, since the targets in both attacks were mosques.
EPIDEMIC OF TERRORISM
These were not lone attacks. In the past decade, India has seen an epidemic of Hindu terrorism that reached its nadir - I hope - in 2002, when almost 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the state of Gujarat. That massacre, like so many others, had been whipped up by Hindu-nationalist parties, in response to an earlier, smaller instance of Muslim violence.
There are certainly extremists from both religions. But there's a difference: One side has formed a government and is trying to do so again. [...]
The BJP ruled India from 1998 to 2004, and its politics are those of racial nationalism - it was born of Hindutva movements that get their ideas directly from German national socialism.
That's right: The movement that has overtaken and politicized sections of this traditionally peaceful religion believes India should be an "Aryan" nation, and, in the same confusion of linguistic and racial identities that made Adolf Hitler's movement possible, it believes that only Hindus (and sometimes only Hindus from the central state of Maharashtra) are legitimate citizens. [...]
- - GLOBE AND MAIL
