The confessional statement of Swami Asseemanand – a self-styled godman, originally Jatin Chatterji from Hooghly district in West Bengal – has finally put to rest lingering doubts, if any credible ones remained, over the involvement of extremist elements from within the Hindutva fold in acts of terror and extremism in India. The swami's leaked confession has implicated a group of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharaks (motivator activists) and other Hindutva adherents in the bomb blasts in Malegaon in 2006 and 2008, on the Samjhauta Express in 2007, in Ajmer Sharif in 2007 and Mecca Masjid in 2007. All these had earlier been blamed on Muslims.
Even the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has long presented itself as the defender of 'Hindu values', and persistently and strenuously denied that any Hindu could ever be involved in such activity, now finds itself on the back foot. The Congress party, of course, is quietly gloating – the leak, almost certainly engineered by the party itself, has come as a blessing to the beleaguered ruling party, reeling under rising prices, scams at the highest levels and old ghosts (in the shape of the Bofors corruption scandal of the 1980s) coming back to haunt it. However, it is wary of making too much of the new turn of events, anxious over appearing anti-Hindu, a fear that has led it to soft-pedal the issue in the past.
Beyond the political gamesmanship and irrespective of the motives behind the leak, it is high time that the political class, going beyond political divides, recognises the growing phenomenon of Hindutva terror. Notwithstanding the fact that one of the first of such acts in modern India – the assassination of Mohandas K Gandhi – was committed by a Hindu fanatic, it is only in recent years that there has been public recognition of the increasing evidence supporting Hindutva extremism. The modus operandi has been typical: engineer a bomb blast, and wait for the blame to be cast on Islamist elements. Given the stereotyping of Muslims as extremists, such blame tends to stick – the Indian security apparatus in particular seems to believe that any terrorist act is automatically the handiwork of Islamist elements, and wholesale arrests of Muslims inevitably follow, often without credible evidence.
This is not to deny that radical Islam continues to be a problem in India and the region as a whole, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But cases of Indian Muslims being involved in such acts have been sporadic, and cannot be termed a rising trend. While the more dramatic instances of violence in recent years – such as the attacks of 26 November 2008 in Mumbai – have been more or less conclusively traced to Pakistan, Indian Muslims as a group nevertheless continue to live under suspicion for that heinous event. Even if most non-Muslims do not see India's Muslims as terrorists themselves, the latter remain under suspicion for harbouring sympathies with radical Islam.