India: Why a peaceful river must run through it

India: Why a peaceful river must run through it

With Advani's about-face, for a few moments a ray of hope hovered over the Ganges

By Tom Plate
Pacific Perspectives Columnist

Los Angeles --- For many souls across the subcontinent of South Asia and indeed all over the world -- especially for many Muslims -- he is nothing less than the face of evil. A hardliner among hardliners, a supporter of India's nuclear arsenal, a fiery anti-Muslim orator, the cagey and opportunistic L.K. Advani (the former deputy prime minister of India) has, for decades, been one of the most powerful subterranean political figures in South Asia.

On the whole he has been deemed anything but a force for the moral good, even by the judgment of neutral international observers.

The highlight as well as the low-point of his career may well have been in 1992. That's when a Hindu mob supporting Advani's political wing destroyed a sacred, centuries-old, though then-unused Muslim mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. In the ensuing mayhem, thousands of Muslims were slaughtered; the entire country went on Hindu-Muslim high alert (hundreds of thousands of Muslims live inside gigantic India), and relations with neighboring, Muslim Pakistan (never exactly relaxed and cheerful) grew more tense.

"Ayodhya has remained ever since a focus of Hindu-versus-Muslim tension," notes former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, now president of the famed Brookings Institution, in his Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, an especially lucid insider's account of recent US-India relations. Ayodhya, even today, remains an international symbol of the one most troubling aspects of any of our world religions: intolerance of other faiths and creeds.

Just the other day, the godfather, as it were, of Ayodhya dropped a political bomb of his own. Now out of power but still a figure of considerable influence, Advani, at the age of 77, returned to his birthplace in Pakistan. This sentimental journey was apparently a deeply moving experience. In a spirit of reverence, he paid honor to Pakistan's legendary founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah and described current Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf as trustworthy. This was something else. For many Hindu Indians, you see, Musharraf, a career military officer who engineered military operations against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, is regarded…well, as a kind of Pakistani version of Advani. And, amazingly, he said that the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya was "the saddest day of my life."

Advani's astonishing admissions -- which shocked his own political party -- did not get much attention in the Western news media either because few editors have any idea of how consequential and symbolic an Asian figure he has been and remains, or because they do not (understandably) put much credence in such political conversions.

In this case, however, Advani, in good health, is still sharp as a knife and knows exactly what he is doing. Not long ago as featured guest speaker at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, he left no doubt in the hotel banquet hall that he was a power player with which to be reckoned. 

Sure, Advani's soul-searching about-face may be as insincere as any still-ambitious politician's calculated effort at political re-positioning: On the whole, polls in India show a growing consensus for better relations with Pakistan. The path to peace and prosperity is much like a long winding river that must navigate through the moral minefields of hatred and revenge. India is the fabled land of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Ganges River, a source of Hindu spirituality and solace. "The Ganga … is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats," wrote Nehru, India's first prime minister, who was born in a village on the river's banks, "She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga." 

India's Hindus revere their river as perhaps many of us in the rest of the world might wish to regard India itself: as a very special place where great ideas of tolerance and non-violence transcend the bitter bickering of the mundane. Is Advani's alleged conversion a potentially epochal portent? Or is it simply too good to be true? His party and his backers are furious, and have begun casting doubt on Advani's apparent change of heart. Who knows -- before long Advani may retreat to his old fiery nationalist public persona. But for a few moments anyway, a ray of hope hovered over the Ganges.

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Tom Plate is a professor of Communication and Policy Studies at UCLA. He is a syndicated columnist whose work appears in Mainichi Shimbun in Japan, The Japan Times, The China Times in Taiwan, The Seattle Times, The San Diego Business Journal, The Korea Times in Seoul and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The author of five books, he has worked has worked as an editor and writer at several major publications including TIME and the Los Angeles Times. He established the Asia Pacific Media Network in 1998 and was its director until 2003. He is now founder and director of UCLA's Media Center.

For publication and reprint rights, contact the Media Institute at platecolumn@hotmail.com -- or Tom Plate directly at tplate@ucla.edu.

The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.

Date Posted: 6/10/2005