Peshawar massacre best argument against Hindu Rashtra

Celebrated filmmaker Anand Patwardhan was not way off the mark in his poignant film on India-Pakistan rivalry, War And Peace. In one of the most memorable scenes from the documentary, schoolgirls in a Pakistani school are debating their country's nuclear test days after India did a similar test. There is usual jingoism and mutual mistrust when the girls are asked to debate the topic. But when the formal setting of a school debate is over and the mood gets sombre, a young girl, who had spoken passionately against India, says in what was perhaps the most telling comment on what ails the two arch enemies, "Hum maafi chahte hain." Patwardhan makes her comfortable, smiles with her and says, "Hindustan aur Pakistan ek doosre ka aaina hain. (India and Pakistan are mirror images of each other.)"

The massacre of more than a 100 children in a school in Peshawar is perhaps the worst terrorist attack on Pakistan's soil. The Tehreek-e-Taliban, which promptly took responsibility for the dastardly massacre, believes in an idea of Islam which has been highly contested by Muslims across the world. Yet, they insist they are fighting in their name and in the name of a God with a capital G. What is worse is the way the Pakistani politicians have dithered in naming Taliban as the perpetrators of the attack. While Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf's Imran Khan got the most brickbats for his refusal to name Taliban while condemning the killing, even Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif sounded evasive in his remarks that his country is resolute in its fight against terror. Not Taliban, mind you.

The Pakistani establishment has always been ambiguous when it came to dealing with religious extremism. That the Taliban or Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Daawa enjoy widespread public support, not to mention state impunity, is not a secret.

And that is where Pakistan and India become mirror images of each other. Religious extremism is not strange to India either. It is absolutely impossible to brand Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar it leads in any other terms. If Taliban thinks everybody is, or should be a Muslim, they have an ally in the Sangh which believes everybody in India is a Hindu. If violence and terror is their modus operandi, it is the same with these groups.

Worse for India, there is now a more amplified feeling of resurgence and vigour following Narendra Modi's spectacular rise to power. The man accused of, if not inciting, then looking the other way in 2002 while more than a thousand Muslims were killed, hundreds of women raped and thousands of families displaced across Gujarat in what was effectively a pogrom against India's largest minority.

Modi's ascent to the top leadership of the country has only emboldened the Sangh Parivar, which, from its earliest days, has enjoyed massive clout among India's politicians, bureaucracy and security apparatus. That the RSS, despite being accused of killing "Father of the Nation" Mahatma Gandhi, continues to exist is perhaps the biggest testimony of the kind of muscle the Sangh has. In a poignant reminder of where we are headed, even an orphaned nation since 1948 has not been able to marginalise and defeat the organisation which is India's ruling party's chief mentor.

And now they are in Parliament and have unleashed their design with an unprecedented vengeance. There is a daily bullying of liberal thought and education, denial of India's composite existence and coercion to convert and establish a theocratic Hindu Rashtra. All under the benevolent watch of state patronage.

Which is where we must stop and wonder if Pakistan is currently reaping what India has now begun to aggressively sow.