By GWYNNE DYER

THE slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat has now died down to only a couple of incidents a day, and the police are even opening fire on the mobs occasionally. But after this month of horror, how can anybody say that the real problem in India is not Hindu-Muslim relations?

Late last month a band of Muslim fanatics at Godhra in Gujarat attacked and burned a train carrying Hindu fanatics home from Ayodhya, where a 16th-century Muslim temple was destroyed by Hindus in 1992.

Fifty-eight people died on the train, including 14 children—and then Hindu mobs in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city, slaughtered at least 500 Muslims while the police refused to intervene. As many more Muslims may have been killed in other parts of Gujarat.

This is alarmingly reminiscent of the "mindless ethnic hatred" that devastated former Yugoslavia—except, of course, that it was not ancient, ineradicable hatred that destroyed Yugoslavia. Everybody got along tolerably well there until power-hungry hate-mongers—above all Slobodan Milosevic's faction in Serbia, but the Croatian nationalists were not far behind—began to instil fear, incite hatred, and massacre people. From start to finish, the killing was done mainly to preserve or expand some political group's power. The situation in India today is much the same.

India is a secular state. Over 800 million Indians are Hindus, but the country's 130 million Muslims and smaller numbers of Sikhs, Christians, and others enjoy equal protection before the law. And though many Hindus feel bitter about the past—Muslim conquerors ruled most of India for centuries, and then Britain ruled it for two centuries more—India has actually been fairly good about protecting its minorities until recently.

Eight thousand Muslims and 3,000 Sikhs killed in riots and pogroms in India since independence sounds horrifying, but spread over 55 years among a population that now exceeds one billion people, the victims add up to only one in every 20,000 people among the non-Hindu communities. No cause for pride, certainly, but not total failure either.

However, the current governments both in Gujarat and at the centre are led by a neo-fascist party that wants to purge India of non-Hindus.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is ostensibly about Hindu nationalism, but it's really about saving the power of the privileged. It has grown powerful as a counter-weight to the democratisation that has swept India in the last couple of decades, with poor and low-caste people ceasing to vote as their betters told them and instead forming their own parties and alliances. Somehow they had to be lured back into a party that served the interests of the less numerous higher castes—and the answer was the BJP.

It's the classic fascist solution: whip up people's fear and hatred of minority groups and foreign enemies—the BJP is anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, anti-Christian, anti-Western, and rabidly anti-Pakistan—in order to consolidate a massive, paranoid "Hindu" vote. For the past four years, India has been ruled by men like Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, who believe that the presence of Muslims and other non-Hindus in India is an historical wrong that must be righted. Their less inhibited colleagues in the paramilitary movements that surround the BJP, and in state governments like Gujarat's, are now starting to put those beliefs into practice.

Fifteen years ago, when the BJP was just getting off the ground, Hindu nationalists used to parade through the Muslim quarters of Indian cities chanting: "Pakistan or Kabristan (the graveyard)". Since there are as many Muslims in India as there are people in Pakistan, that is no choice at all—and besides, India is their home. But when Home Minister LK Advani visited Gujarat on March 3 and promised that the Muslims who carried out the attack on the train at Godhra would be tracked down and punished, he said not a word about arresting the Hindus who killed far larger numbers of Muslims in the succeeding days.

Comparisons with "Kristallnacht", when the Nazis first unleashed an organised, state-backed attack on Jews in Germany in 1938, may sound overheated, but the Gujarat massacres are the first time since the BJP won power in New Delhi in 1998 (and immediately tested nuclear weapons) that it has launched such an open and shameless pogrom against the Muslim minority.

Why now? Because the BJP is losing votes in key states, and stands to lose them nationally as well at the next election. It has never managed to attract more than 20 per cent of the vote nationally (to the credit of Indian voters), and has relied on coalition-building to gain and hold power. Now it is slipping, and it must stoke the fever of Hindu extremism in order to avoid political marginalisation.

India is, therefore, entering a period when its own rulers will seek to spread hatred and unleash violence throughout the country, and only the decency and common-sense of ordinary people can stop them. Two generations ago, ordinary Germans failed that test. Whether Indians will do better remains to be seen.