<a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/SouthAsia/roy-gujarat-democracy.cfm">Democracy - Who is she when she's at home?</a> on <a href="http://www.zmag.org/">ZNet</a> by Arundhati Roy from April 28 is a long article about recent racist riots in India's state of Gujarat between Hindus and Muslims. Ever since <iq>Muslim 'terrorists' who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra...</iq>, though no claim to the terror has been laid or evidence shown, Muslims have been persecuted in the Gujarat. <bq>Officially the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More than a hundred and fifty thousand people, driven from their homes, now live in refugee camps. Women were stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. Two hundred and forty dargahs and 180 masjids were destroyed ... Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, hotels, textiles mills, buses and private cars. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs.</bq> The violence is aimed solely at Muslims and perpetrated with the full complicity of the Prime Minister, the police and, in fact, the government. Early last century, similar events stirred Europe in Germany: <bq>While the parallels between contemporary India and pre-war Germany are chilling, they're not surprising. (The founders of the rss have, in their writings, been frank in their admiration for Hitler and his methods.) One difference is that here in India we don't have a Hitler. We have instead, a travelling extravaganza, a mobile symphonic orchestra. The hydra-headed, many-armed Sangh Parivar—with the bjp, the rss, the vhp and the Bajrang Dal, each playing a different instrument. Its utter genius lies in its apparent ability to be all things to all people at all times.</bq> What can be done to combat this fascism (for that is all it can be called)? Is it possible to fight this tooth and nail? Level punishments against those in power. Depose the government. Proscribe the ordinary citizens who have alienated their fellow human beings on a whim like religion. All of these things will not work. People have to change in their hearts. Exacting retribution does no good in preventing future eruptions of the same feeling and actions. <bq>... Fighting it means fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean asking for rss shakhas and the madrassas to be banned, it means working towards the day when they're voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas.</bq> Do not think this sage advice is reserved for the Hindu pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat today. It means in any issue there is no way to fight violence with violence and win. The only way to win is to truly convince the enemy that they don't want to fight anymore. It's a call for education, such as the one most Americans sorely need in their own history and in the shadowy movements of its own government as it lumbers about the world.