> uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>
> >BJP essentially racist: Rushdie
>
> Is this a controversial point of view?
>
> Doug
Well, the Bush White House and the U.S. foreign policy establishment seem to love the BJP, so it's good to have Rushdie make this statement, even though he's simply stating the obvious.
On his blog Empire Notes, Rahul Mahajan has a wonderfully sarcastic little posting on how the Washington Post white-washed the BJP. See below, Jeet
May 14, 5:10 pm EST. Check out the Washington Post's political eulogy for outgoing Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. In what purports to be a summing up of his tenure, the Post says IN 1998, WHEN Atal Bihari Vajpayee took the helm of the world's largest democracy, nobody predicted the extent of his success or his alignment with U.S. interests. His Hindu nationalist party seemed likely to exacerbate tensions with India's non-Hindu minorities, inflame relations with Muslim Pakistan and generally make India an awkward international partner -- a prospect that appeared to come true a few months into Mr. Vajpayee's tenure, when his government defied the world by detonating five nuclear bombs. Six years later, however, Mr. Vajpayee has improved relations with Pakistan, gone out of his way to forge an alliance with the United States and advanced the remarkable program of liberalization that has turned India into a star economy. But if all that was unexpected, so was yesterday's news. Having called an early election to capitalize on his apparently robust popularity, Mr. Vajpayee lost. In the midst of that encomium, where, of course, the key point is the "forge an alliance with the United States" part, the Post somehow omits to mention that his party, the BJP, instigated a carefully planned and executed pogrom in Gujarat that claimed the lives of 3000 Muslims (supposedly in retaliation for the killing of 59 Hindus by a Muslim mob). And then it had the gall to run for re-election (in the local Gujarat elections) on the strength of that massacre. The BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the massacre, Narendra Modi, is still a member in good standing of the party.
But all of that isn't relevant. Vajpayee did his best to ally with the empire, so he must be a great guy: The sharpest discontinuity is likely to come in relations with the United States and possibly with U.S. allies such as Israel. India has become a leading customer for Israeli weapons technology. With Mr. Vajpayee in office, the Bush administration hoped that India might be persuaded to send peacekeepers to Iraq -- a remarkable shift from the Cold War, when India proudly led the Non-Aligned Movement and seized every opportunity to tweak American leadership. Though it is not likely to indulge in massacres of Muslims, the coalition that replaces the BJP will be much worse because The Congress Party-led coalition is expected to swing back to traditional anti-Americanism, sounding off against the United States at the United Nations and perhaps challenging U.S. influence in the Middle East by launching its own peace initiative. Not that! Anything but a new peace initiative!
The editorial is not just ignorant drivel that focuses on U.S. imperial hegemony as the criterion by which everything is to be judged, however. It has its humorous side; the launching of such a peace initiative, the Post says, "would test the Bush administration's reserves of forbearance and tact."