Purification rites - Pankaj Mishra

Reverence for Adolf Hitler – who is hailed as a hero in textbooks in the Hindu nationalist-ruled state of Gujarat, while Mein Kampf remains popular at bookstores – is one of the many sinister aspects of “rising” India today. This cult of Hitler as a great “patriot” and “strategist” grew early among middle-class Hindus. MS Golwalkar, the much-revered Hindu leader and ideologue, wrote in 1938 that Nazi Germany had manifested “race pride at its highest” by purging itself of the “Semitic races” – and yet Golwalkar was also an admirer of Zionism.This simultaneous veneration of Hitler and Israel may appear a monstrous moral contradiction to Europeans or Americans who see Israel as the homeland of Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. However, such distinctions are lost on the Hindu nationalists, who esteem Nazi Germany and Israel for their patriotic effort to cleanse their states of alien and potentially disloyal elements, and for their militaristic ethos. Many Indians and other colonised peoples hoped for Nazi Germany and Japan to at least undermine, if not defeat, the British Empire. My grandfather was among the Indians with a misplaced faith in Germany’s military capacity. He would have been horrified by the facts of the Holocaust if he had encountered them. But like so many Hindu nationalists, his main political anxiety during those years after the Second World War was whether Mother India would be partitioned into two countries; the subsequent creation of Pakistan as a separate state for Indian Muslims pushed all other historical traumas, especially those of distant Europe, out of view.

Pakistan’s incapacity to create a just and stable state has become glaringly obvious, largely because its disarray now affects even distant countries in the West. Islam was never likely to bind Pakistan’s disparate ethnic and linguistic communities with a national identity and mission; in 1971, Bengali-speaking Muslims seceded to form Bangladesh. And, despite a series of secular-minded rulers, Islam inescapably haunted the nation’s unresolved identity, so that the state has remained perpetually hostage to Islamic radicals who claim it is not “pure” enough.

By comparison, India seems a successful secular democracy – the largest in the world – and now an economic powerhouse. But this image, given a fierce PR gloss in recent years, hides the fact that India is one of the most violent and unequal countries in the world. Insurgencies have raged in Kashmir for two decades, and for much longer in North-East India, claiming tens of thousands of lives; led by Maoists, they have now erupted in central India. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has called the Maoist insurgency the biggest internal security threat to India since independence. In the last decade alone, more than 100,000 farmers vulnerable to debt, drought and international competition have killed themselves.