Edna Fernandes - Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism

August 15, 1947 is a date etched upon the soul of every Indian. It is the day India won its freedom from the British Empire. Yet it is also the date of Partition, an act which carved up India along religious lines to create the Islamic state of Pakistan, igniting violence which killed more than a million people. 2007 sees the 60 th anniversary of these events, unifying the jubilation of Independence with the grief of a nations division.

The horror of Partition lives on in the psyche of the Indian people to this day, a dark reminder of how the country was forced to pass through the communal fires in order to be reborn as a new nation. Partition has until now remained the defining act in Indias post-Independence history: establishing the basis for relations with Pakistan as well as relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs within India. In the days that followed August 15, 1947, India witnessed a kind of collective madness that saw its communities poisoned by the politics of the religious fanatic.

The seeds of this book were sown by reading reportage and fictionalized accounts of the events of 1947. I remember being particularly struck by a slim volume of short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto called Kingdoms End , in which the small lives of ordinary men were used to reflect the great issue of the time: Partition and how religion had come to define a persons identity.

These brief, sparely written tales of how communal division destroyed lives across religious boundaries drew me into a subject which resonates in India to this day. Manto was a Muslim Kashmiri who grew up in Punjab and moved to Bombay. Yet he did not write as a Muslim, or indeed as a Kashmiri, nor even an Indian. Instead, his was the humane voice of detached reason that chronicled the societal breakdown that followed Indias division.

The most moving story of all is that of Toba Tek Singh, a man from an asylum who cannot comprehend the dismemberment of his country and so flees to a no-mans-land between India and Pakistan, where he stands in protest until collapsing into the dust with grief: There, behind barbed wire, on one side lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.

Sixty years after Partition, India and the post-9/11 world at large remain fixated by the dangers of religious division and fundamentalism. While the Western world is newly alert to the threat posed by extreme Islam, India as the worlds largest secular democracy has decades of experience of how every strand of religion can be hijacked by the politics of the fanatic and the lessons of Indias battles against holy warriors from Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and even Christianity are more relevant than ever today on a global scale. The de-humanizing effect on the Toba Tek Singhs of this world is now evident, from London to New York, and from Baghdad to Jerusalem. The anniversary of Partition seemed an opportune moment to revisit the issue in India, to discover how the religious divisions in the country have shaped the political and cultural landscape over the last sixty years, and to try to understand what turns a believer into a holy warrior.

Since Holy Warriors was first published in India in 2006, there have been a few developments, some positive, some less so. The Congress-led national government has persisted with its policy of seeking to rehabilitate religious minorities back into the Indian family through economic engagement and dialogue in a bid to quell religious unrest. It has continued to pursue peace talks with Pakistan, exploring growing trade, travel and intellectual links as steps towards normalized relations.

That policy has yielded results, with Pakistan hinting that it may consider giving up its longstanding claim to Indian-held Kashmir in return for certain concessions; a sign that realpolitik may yet prevail over dogma, as both sides recognize that economic re-generation of the region has become the real issue of the day.