Introduction
If you are a Brahman, born from a Brahman woman
Then why did you not arrive by another orifice?
If you are a Muslim, born from a Muslim woman
Then why were you not circumcised in the womb?
KabirAs the 1998 parliamentary election results were trickling in in early March
of that year, it was clear that the next government would be led by the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I, for one, feared that the Indian state and
society were braced for serious policy reversals and felt strongly that con-
cerned Indians had to keep a watchful eye by establishing the BJP Gov-
ernment Watch, a loose intellectual collective to monitor the commissions
and the omissions of the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. Though the
initiative attracted a lot of media attention both in India and in the United
States, only a few intellectuals, such as N. Ram, then the editor of Frontline,
welcomed and supported it.
Thus Minneapolis, where I was based, emerged as the hub of hosting
a resourceful Web site (http://www.bjpgovernmentwatch.com) and dis-
tributing daily e-mail digests with analytical articles, activist news, and the
like. Our fledgling group's forebodings became true in just a few weeks'
time, when the jingoistic BJP-led government tested nuclear bombs and
embarked upon a course of dangerous nuclear adventurism. Following
the expected compulsive response from Pakistan, the BJP-led govern-
ment in New Delhi and the Muslim League-led government in Islamabad