null In the world of Hindustani music, a musician speaking of a guru always raises a hand to pinch an earlobe. This is a mark of something between respect and worship.

So hallowed is the name of the teacher that it may not be uttered without taking this precaution. When a Muslim takes the name of Mohammed the Prophet, it is necessary to utter ‘on whom be peace’. The name alone may not be spoken, as that would amount to being disrespectful.

The votaries of Hindutva react in a fashion by coming up with well-rehearsed responses. Their handlers have done their work well. One cannot speak of the infinitely more serious Gujarat events of 2002 without first making a dozen bows in the direction of Godhra.

The gesture will be devoid of meaning, true, it will be just a ritual; but it has been made essential by the howls that arise every time the Gujarat carnage is recalled: ‘‘But what about Godhra?’’

It appears that to the Hindutva mind (though many would argue that that phrase is a contradiction in terms), any attempt to describe the horrors of Gujarat is automatically a defence of what was done in Godhra.

In the same way, no one may speak of Gujarat without being asked, in a practised routine, why there was no condemnation of the forces that forced thousands of innocent Hindus to flee Kashmir?

The innocence of those Hindus is neatly twisted to suggest that the Muslims who were burnt, raped and cut up in Gujarat were essentially wicked beings.

Hindutva holds that any critic of anything in the present time must preface his remarks with an intoned litany of all the evils that have befallen humankind since the beginning of time.

‘Pseudo-secularist’ is the term of opprobrium applied again as an automatic action, by the intellectuals of Hindutva to any Hindu who is dishonest enough intellectually to grant that other religions have a right to exist.

To my knowledge no one has so far explained the prefix ‘pseudo’ in the phrase. Are we to take it that the only ‘real’ secularists are the Hindutva types because although they recognise no religion other than Hinduism, they are willing to tolerate all manner of subdivisions within that paradoxically unitary whole?

Another term which comes out like a gunshot from every Hindutva votary is ‘appeasement’. The Hindu Rashtra ideology holds that non-Hindus, if they must be tolerated, can be tolerated only as sub-human non-citizens with no rights whatsoever. Anyone who is willing to grant them any rights is therefore an ‘appeaser’. Just what is this appeasement? The dictionary definition is not helpful because the word has a distinctly positive connotation.

Can there be any harm in making peace, in making friends, in mollifying, in causing someone to be friendly in return? For Hindutva, clearly there is.