Malegaon: The Israeli Connection

By Mustafa Khan


Countercurrents.org

It is grim reading how Lt Col Srikant Purohit and others wanted to establish a Hindu Rashtra with the help of Israel. The RSS and Jan Sangh did not whole heartedly join the national juggernaut that Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had started for the foundation of a democratic liberal state of India in which all could live. The same could be said of the neighbouring Pakistan whose founder Jinnah had created his country for all the people irrespective of their religion but this was systematically undermined and then President Ziaul Haq hijacked it in the name of Sharia. The grudge Purohit and his ilk was that the British did not leave India as a Hindu Rashtra while they took Pakistan as a theocratic state based on Islam. The only state established on theocracy was, of course, Israel. The recent Gaza incursion of the Israeli army is the most recent and vivid murderous effort in the long history of establishing a theocratic state of Israel. Its birth in 1948 was catastrophic for the native Palestinians of the erstwhile Palestine. Such a visualized state has been the cherished dream of the right wing groups of the RSS and its offshoots who have never been content with the democratic, secular republic of India.

There have been many occasions when extreme Hindutva leaders like Bal Thackeray and the leaders of the sangh parivar have expressed their desire for a Hindu Rashtra, nay they have de facto lived and worked as though India is already one. Their angst is that there are many in India, overwhelmingly Hindus, who do not want India to be just that. The right wing organizations have used every opportunity to divide the people on religious lines and have craftily created situations which could virtually subvert the whole system of governance into what their cherished dream has been.

It is in this context that Purohit made the bold attempt albeit with a difference after 9/11, camouflaging his plan by joining what the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband calls "the mistaken war on terror". Believing all acts of terrorism in the country as Islamic terrorism he designed his own terrorism to fight terrorism. The Samjhauta express attack and the attacks in Mecca mosque of Hyderabad and the one in Ajmer shrine fall in line with this design. He picked up the thread where VD Savarkar had left it and so revived the organization that Savarkar had disbanded and took the name of the newspaper which Nathuram had started, "Hindu Rashtra". The Jewish connection cannot be stretched any further although Aston David was principal of Wadia college where the two professors taught their subjects and also taught making bombs to Rakesh Dhawde and others. Aston's being a Jew cannot be taken to mean that he too is involved as are two of his professors. But that does not dispel suspicion that "the safe houses in Israel" Purohit had arranged for could not be there waiting for any eventuality that he had in mind. Inquiry is still on...