The New York Times Sunday Magazine carries an excellent article today on Hindu fanaticism in India. Read it now. It discusses, among other things, the violence against Muslims in Gujarat a little while back. Two thousand dead and 100,000 displaced: this is the kind of violence that led the U.S. to bomb Belgrade for Serb treatment of Kosovars.
Anil Dash, super-blogger and Indo-American, has been beating a drum of alarm on this subject for some time. And I’ve been aware that the BJP — the party in power in India — is Hindu-chauvanist ever since college. But I wasn’t aware of the systematic, organized quality of the problem until I read this article. And the scale of the problem is potentially so vast that the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict — so prominent in American news and such a focal point of international affairs — will look like the Hatfields and McCoys by comparison.
After I read the article, Gwen pointed out that our friend Ish, an Indian Muslim, has family in Gujarat.
Yeah, I saw that article yesterday. The situation is frightening!