The Great Indian Political Debate - 2

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The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 03-25-2006

QUOTE("Arun_S")March 23, 2006
OPINION - SRINAGAR TO VARANASI
Overriding Need To Move Towards National Consensus
JAGMOHAN

It has happened, and it goes on happening, and will happen again. These were opening lines of my book, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, published in 1990-91. I had penned them because I had come to the conclusion that India had acquired political and administrative ethos which were terrorism-conducive and not terrorism-repelling. The state had become too soft and its institutions too soulless. Disruption and demagogy had penetrated too deep into the texture of its democracy. And narrow ends of personal and political power had attained total ascendancy.

Spiritual capital
In this environment, I was left with no doubt in my mind that terrorism-related incidents will continue, be they in the form of kidnapping of a Union home minister's daughter, Dr Rubaiya Sayeed, as happened at Srinagar in December 1989, or in the form of bomb blasts that subsequently occurred in the administrative capital of India, Delhi; the financial capital Mumbai; and the technological capital, Bangalore. And if any further confirmation of my proposition was needed, it was provided, on 7 March, by the terrorist attack on Varanasi, the spiritual capital of the country, where the Trinity the Ganges, Siva and KashiÂ have ever been watchful.

Having seen the past through the spectacle of history, I knew that no one could escape the tragic consequences of being blind to the negative forces that determined the mind and motivation of those who held the levers of power-structure of the state in their hands.

Contrast the terrorism-related situation in India with that arising from the pro-democracy movement centred around Tiananmen Square, in China. Once the Chinese state came to believe that what was happening would imperil the stability of the country, cause large-scale public disorder and divert the attention and resources of the nation from development to internal conflicts, which could be further fanned by external forces, it moved with great clarity and vision, keeping at bay the cacophony of the human rights bodies and armchair intellectuals and hand wringers. After a few days, China was wholly out of the woods. Today, it is a powerful and peaceful state, attaining unprecedented pace in economic development, earning applause and prestige all around the world.

On the other hand, India remains engulfed not only in bloody terrorism but also in a number of internal and external fallouts. The inherent disinclination of the state and its governing machinery to take the bull by the horns and adopt a strong, sustained and focused approach, has cost the nation dearly.

China's consistency
What I am commending here, I must clarify, is not the Chinese methodology of dealing with the problem but the clarity and consistency of its approach and the overwhelming importance it accords to the need for maintaining national integrity and stability. Incidentally, even if figures of fatal casualties of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, between 1000 and 5000, as given by Europa World Year Book, are accepted, they look insignificant when compared to about 100,000 killings that have occurred in India in the wake of terrorism that has been menacing the country since the 1980s.

In fact, terrorism has been with us in one form or the other for the last five decades or so. Soon after Independence, Telengana became red hot, and insurgency started showing its bloody fangs in the north-east. The Naxalite's spring thunder over West Bengal and Bihar was not far behind. In the late sixties, the horizon of these two states remained clouded by those who sought power through the barrel of the gun. Assam, Punjab and Kashmir had also their long dates with one of the most savage and ruthless forms of terrorism. Its bullets and bombs consumed two of our Prime Ministers, a chief minister and a retired Chief of Army Staff. Even those leaders who were not occupying any position in the government, like Sant Harchand Singh Longowal were not spared.

In Kashmir, about 44,000 persons fell victims to terrorism. A number of eminent leaders of the Pandit community were gunned down in broad daylight. A dreadful atmosphere was created, forcing virtually the entire community to flee the valley. Even Charar-e-Sharief, the famous 550-year old Dargah of Kashmir's patron-saint, Sheikh Nuruddin Noorani, was burnt down. The Kashmir Legislative Assembly and the Indian Parliament, too, were attacked. In the meanwhile, about 40 per cent of the geographical area, involving about 200 districts in 13 states, came to be menaced by Naxal terrorism. On account of this brand of terrorism, 892 persons lost their lives in 2005.

Despite the spread of terrorism, in different hues and colours, over a large part of the country and also over a long span of time, the Bourbons of the political establishment are refusing to rise above petty considerations of politics and power. On the other hand, negative and nihilist forces are getting stronger. The recent happenings in connection with the Danish cartoons issue provide a striking example of the extent to which exploitative attitudes could be adopted to secure petty political gains. The adverse effect of fanning the forces of fanaticism and fundamentalism were totally ignored. Similarly, those political elements who resorted to bellicosity in the wake of the Varanasi bomb blasts showed little understanding of the overriding need to move towards a national consensus and put up a united front against the forces of disruption.

Gradual drift
It should be clear to all of us that for too long the nation has been bled by terrorists; for too long the Indian state has exposed its soft under-belly to saboteurs; for too long political parties have resorted to petty manipulation; and for too long the overall ethos of governance has been allowed to deteriorate.

It is time that the leadership of the political parties scans the past with the seriousness and sensitivity that is required, draws the right kind of lessons from it and works out a unified strategy to reorient the country's polity to revitalise its institutions, to invest its democracy with a new meaning and purpose and to combat subversion and terrorism with unwavering determination. A foreign hand is undoubtedly there; but it is our disjointed approach that helps it to extend its reach far and wide.

If correctives are not applied immediately, terrorism will continue to bedevil us, and the country will soon be sucked into the cockpit of democratic anarchy, notwithstanding its current encouraging rate of economic growth , its strides in science and technology, its high status as a knowledge power and its recent nuclear deal with the United States.

The writer is a former Governor of the State of Jammu & Kashmir in India.

Courtesy : The Statesman

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 03-26-2006

Karat for strengthening secular democracy

Thrissur, March 25 (PTI): CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat today said communal mobilisation on the basis of religion and `Hindutva' theory were the greatest challenges to secular democracy in the country.

Delivering the eighth lecture in memory of Bishop Poulose Mar Poulose on `challenges facing secular democracy' here, he stressed the need for strengthening the concept of secular democracy.

He said in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country like India, a democratic system alone was not sufficient to bring about development.

There was urgent need to maintain `secular democracy' which would accord all citizens equal religious, cultural and other freedom of their choice, Karat said.

Secular democracy was set as a goal in the Constitution with a view to building up a just and equitable society.

Karat said the secular fabric and foundation of the country were being mauled and marred for the last two decades with the growth of the `Hindutva' forces in the form of `majority communalism.'

Majority as a principle of democracy was welcome, but on communal lines it would be dangerous for the country, he said, calling upon everyone to unite to resist the growth of communal and `Hindutva' forces.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 04-05-2006

Rajasthan move to enact anti-conversion law opposed

Special Correspondent

`An attempt to undermine the Constitution '

JAIPUR: The Communist parties have opposed the move by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to enact an anti-conversion law in Rajasthan. The move was a conspiracy to harass the minorities and curtail their Constitutional rights, the parties said.

In a joint statement, the leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India said the Rajasthan Religious Freedom Bill 2006, introduced in the Rajasthan Assembly the previous week, was an attempt to undermine the Constitution of the country which ensured religious freedom and right to practice one's faith.

The Bill was the culmination of the hate campaign the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar had been spearheading in the State against the minorities during the past two and a half years, the party leaders said after a joint meeting on Monday. CPI (M) State secretary Vasudev, party leaders Ravindra Shukla, Duli Chand and the CPI leaders Dushyant Ojha, Tara Singh Sidhu and D.K.Changani attended the meeting.

"The anti-minority campaign, aimed at madrasas initially now is targeting Chrisitan communities living peacefully in the State. There is a reign of terror as far as Christians are concerned as the schools and other institutions run by the community are attacked by the Sangh Parivar activists and are later closed making use of the Government machinery," the statement said.

The Communist leaders said the new legislation would create "a sense of insecurity among the minorities in the State and also would make them more vulnerable to the attacks of the fanatic religious groups".

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 04-06-2006

Advani's yatra will fail'

Sheela Bhatt in Ahmedabad | April 05, 2006 20:49 IST
Last Updated: April 06, 2006 01:46 IST

"The Suraksha Yatra of 2006 is different from L K Advani's previous rath yatras because this time he is dependent on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for its success," said Achyut Yagnik, political analyst and co-author of the book Creating a Nationality: Ramjanambhoomi Movement and the Fear of the Self.

Yagnik, Left-leaning thinker and writer, told rediff.com that in 1990 when Advani embarked upon a yatra over the Ram Janmabhoomi temple issue Modi and Pramod Mahajan were the architects behind the yatra. They needed Advani to carve out their political careers out of the event and out of his towering leadership.

Complete Coverage: The BJP Yatra

The situation is reversed in 16 years. Advani's future now depends on Modi, feels Yagnik.

Yagnik says that Advani's first yatra was successful because in 1990, the Sangh Pariwar was with him. Today the pariwar is fractured. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Kisan Sangh and Bajrang Dal toiled for BJP's success then while today all three are against Advani.

The BJP's organisational capabilities have suffered due to the Sangh Pariwar's infighting making Advani's task difficult. "Advani wants to resurrect himself through this yatra. He wants to gain back credibility he lost within the party," claims Yagnik.

He said, "In 1990, the objective was clear and many Hindus because many were ready to support the idea of constructing a temple in Ayodhya. The 1990 yatra was culmination of something that started in form of Bharat Ekatma yatra in 1983 when gangajal was made the symbol of unity of India's Hindus."

Such symbolism to unite all shades of Hindus is missing this time. Yagnik argues that Shaktas (believers in Mother Goddesses), Shaiviites (followers of Lord Shiva) and Viashnavites (followers of Lord Vishnu) got united in favour of Ram temple movement but this yatra has no unifying theme.

On the charge that the Congress also doesn't enjoy credibility when it played communal politics after the Shah Banu judgment and that the charge of Muslim appeasement does stuck on it occasionally, Yagnik said, "Since 1970s the Congress have Muslims in their electoral politics formula, they are one of the pillars of Congress along with Dalits and tribals, just like the Hindus are for the BJP.

Yagnik says, "The so called appeasement of Muslims by the Congress or the issue of national security are issues worth taking up in Parliament or the press club. You can't communicate "security" of country meaningfully on the streets. And how are Muslims connected to problem of security?"

Advani said that he got the idea for a yatra after the news of the Muslims headcount in Indian Army by the Sachchar Committee were published.

Yagnik said that the facts of the Sachchar Committee and its terms of reference are distorted by the BJP. Yagnik defends the attempt by saying, "In many states, Muslims are part of Other Backward Communities."

Yagnik concluded, "This yatra will not be successful."

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Bharatvarsh - 04-30-2006

Another phony secularvadi (his beliefs are more like that of a fascist) exposed here:

QUOTERadha Rajan: You donât have to use un-parliamentary words in order to hurt the feelings of others. I am very perturbed by your way of arguing, of belittling and dismissing everyone, and of sarcastically laughing at the faith and feelings of the people.

But, sir, let me turn to a more specific question. You came down rather heavily on Arun Shourie and Jaswant Singh. You have interpreted them according to your reasons and your convictions. In the same way I take the liberty of interpreting what you and the âsecular clubâ have been saying. The club asks, âWhy is the sangha parivar worried about issues like Shah Bano and Salman Rushdie? Is the sangha parivar shedding tears for Shah Bano or for Salman Rushdie?â

Of course, there are always intellectuals who are clever at raising arguments and diverting attention. But the questions you and the âsecular clubâ raise are irrelevant. One need not shed tears for Salman Rushdie, but can still question the ban. One does not have to be a sympathiser of Mr. Rushdie in order to ask, âWhy are we being denied the right to read a book? Why this ban on religious grounds? Why this eagerness to spare the sentiments of one particular religious community, while a vast body of literature inimical to and abusive of the Hindu religion is not only tolerated, but also is often positively encouraged? Why doesnât anyone think of banning that?â One can ask all these questions, without at the same time having to shed tears for Salman Rushdie.

Similarly, shedding or not shedding tears for Shah Bano is also not the issue. Without being sentimental about that courageous lady, one can still ask, âWhy is it that when a person comes to our courts of justice, and when religious fundamentalist protest against the relief provided by the courts, we make it into a major political issue and bring in legislation to overrule the supreme court?â This weak-kneed response to the fundamentalist pressures is the issue. The matter of shedding tears or not shedding tears for Shah Bano or anyone else does not come into the picture.

Guhan: Let me first respond to your question about the banning of that book by Salman Rushdie. You say that you have been denied the opportunity to read the book, just because the Muslims said that it contains heretical reflections on the Prophet. You say that this is not fair. I on the other hand would defend the banning of that book for this simple reason: Just as the parivar says, and Jaswant Singh has said it very clearly, that there has been a monumental faith among the Hindus about the Janmasthana of Srirama, similarly, whether you like it or not, the 80 million Muslims of India have a certain feeling for their Prophet. And if the introduction of this book was going to lead to large scale riots and a breakdown of law and order, then it was perfectly legitimate to ban the book. You know what happened in Iran over this book.

I have been in the government for 35 years. And I know that any civil servant or politician or anyone else entrusted the task of running this country, would have to weigh the availability of this book for some people to read, on one pan of the scale, and the fact that there may be extensive rioting, wide-spread breakdown of law and order, and tension between the communities, on the other. What judgement a sensible person will come to? I shall leave it to you to form your own judgement. I donât want to say anything more.

Radha Rajan: But, sir, when there is so much of literature condemning Hinduism, how is it that only this book gets banned?

Guhan: By all means let people protest against the books that condemn Hinduism. Is there any example involving a text which brought Hindu religion or gods into disrepute, and the people protested against it, and the government refused to ban it? Periyar was banned. If you find a book that hurts the Hindu sensibilities, make a demand for banning it!
http://www.cpsindia.org/ayodhya_chap3.html
These people want to take India back into the dark ages of Muslim rule when any criticism of Islam was enough for people to be put to death, b*stards like Khushwant Singh scream "Hindu communalism" but have beliefs similar to fascists when it comes to curtailing freedom of speech.

Another arguement that exposes the intellectual capabilities of these morons is:

QUOTERavi: Sir, in your presentation you mentioned that Swami Tulasidas does not mention the demolition of the temple at Ayodhya in the Ramacharitamanas, and this you said is one of the most important proofs that there was no temple there. But, all of us in Tamilnadu know that Malik Kafur entered and desecrated the Madurai Meenakshi Temple and the Srirangam Temple. But I have not heard of any Tamil saints, savants or poets having written songs about those events. We also know that Belur and Halebeedu were ravaged around the same time. To my knowledge there are no songs in Kannada about that. Have you, sir, heard of any songs or of any great poetry in Tamil or Kannada literature describing the desecrations and ravages of that period?

Guhan: All I am saying is that if somebody claims that something was there, he has to produce evidence. Logically it is impossible to prove the negative. If somebody says that there was a temple in Ayodhya, he has to produce the evidence for its existence. He cannot say, âI cannot produce any evidence, but you produce evidence to show that there was no temple.â I refuse to take the onus of proving the non-existence of the temple. Logically it is impossible to prove the negative. One cannot function according to such demands and rules.

http://www.cpsindia.org/ayodhya_chap3.html
The moron does not seem to realise that something not being mentioned in a certain writing does not mean that it did not exist, as against this moron's ranting, the following refutation has been done by A.R Khan:
QUOTE"Now let us take the fact that Tulsidas has not mentioned the demolition of temple. It may be pointed out that even Emperor Akbar, who was a contemporary of Tulsi, does not find any mention in Tulsi's work despite the fact that Tulsi gave a thought to the subject of rulership and has expressed his notions of sovereignty. For Tulsi who was disturbed at the varnasankar of his times and who advocated a dharmadhur in ruler who could apply nisi, even Akbar did not exist either as an ideal ruler or as a mleccha who opposed sati subscribed to by Tulsi. Therefore, to look for evidence regarding the destruction of a temple and the construction of a mosque by the order of Akbar's grandfather in a work written by the order of Akbar, much less in the Ain-i-Akbari or in Tulsi's Bhakti poetry, amounts to looking for penguins in the Sahara and camels in the Antarctic. Besides, the quotation from Ain-i-Akbari referring to Ayodhya as the residence of Rama has been cleverly lifted from a languish passage bearing references to Ayodhya, being "a populous site" in 'ancient times' and 'one of the largest cities of India'. (of Akbar's time) as well as Abul Fazal's assertion that "it is esteemed one of the holiest places of the antiquity". 
QUOTERegarding Tulsidas not mentioning the demolition of Rama temple Prof. Khan replies, "the argument (BMAC historians) that 'surely in his description of Ayodhya he (Tulsi) would have mentioned the Rama Janmabhumi.........." is nothing but a fallacy. "Surely, Tulsi was not composing his poetry to furnish evidence to future historians or to the wishes of the Bhaktas of Rama"

It may, however, be mentioned here that Tulsidas, the devotee of Rama, did mention it in his Kavitavali (u. 106 B) albeit indirectly. He writes "Tulsi sarnam gulam hai Rama ko............. many ke khaibo, masid me soibo" i.e. "I am in the service of Rama like a slave, I beg my food and sleep in the mosque." At the time of writing this he was living at Ayodhya. The scenario is clear, since he was the devotee of Lord Rama he spent his nights in the place of his Master who then 'lived' in the mosque which had replaced the original Hindu temple. One should look at the situation in the contemporary political scenario - Ayodhya was ruled by Muslims. Otherwise why would a devout Hindu keep on sleeping in the mosque ? Structure or no structure, temple or mosque, Rama or his master was born there, hence lives there, bodily or otherwise.

http://www.wac.uct.ac.za/croatia/gupta.htm

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Bharatvarsh - 05-01-2006

QUOTE(24) Bhai Mani Singh's (Diwan of Guru Gobind Singh, late 17th/early 18th century) Pothi-Janm Sakhi vide edition V.S. 1947/1890 AD, Lahore, p. 213) provides clear testimony to this pilgrimage. Another important Janm Sakhi entitled Guru Nanak Bansh Prakash by Baba Sukh Wasi Ram Bedi written in 1886 VS/1829 AD offers details (vide Chhand # 1000-1001) about Guru Nanak's visit to Ayodhya in the company of Mardana, a bath in the Sarayu river and finally, homage to Rama (Darshan Ram Nihar). Similarly, Janm Sakhi, known as Bhai Bala Wali Janm Sakhi edited in 1940 VS/1883 AD accounts for Guru Nanak Dev's pilgrimage to Awadhpuri (Ayodhya) on the ground that Guru Nanak identified this city (Nagri) with Sri Ramachandraji, the Avtar. Also Rajendra Singh, Sikh Itihas Mein Sri Ram Janmabhoomi.

http://www.wac.uct.ac.za/croatia/grover.htm
There is even a Gurudwara in Ayodhya commemorating his visit to Ayodhya, I think its called "Brahmakund Gurudwara".
QUOTEThe historian Harsh Narain in his book The Ayodhya Temple Mosque Dispute: Focus on Muslim Sources, writes: "Guru Nanak, according to Bhai Man Singh's Pothi Janam Sakhi, said to have been composed in 1787 Anno Vikrami/1730 A.D., visited Ayodhya and said to his Muslim disciple Mardana: 'Mardania! eh Ajudhia nagari Sri Ramachandraji ki hai. So, chal, iska darsan kari'e. Translation: 'Mardana! this Ayodhya city belongs to Sri Ramachandra Ji. So let us have its darsana.' "

This indicates that Nanak visited Ayodhya shortly before the destruction of the Rama temple by Babar. Another work by Baba Sukhbasi Ram gives a similar account, again suggesting that Nanak visited Ayodyha before the temple was destroyed by his contemporary, the Mughal invader Babar. Muslim sources also give a similar account.

http://www.hvk.org/articles/0403/188.html
Bhai Mani Singh was a direct disciple of the 10th Guru and wrote his Janam Sakhi about 22 years after Guru Govind Singh's death, Bhai Mani Singh himself was later tortured to death by the Mughal rulers for refusing to convert to Islam.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 05-09-2006

QUOTESecularism of convenience 
Pioneer.com
A 'dargah' where 'puja' is held can be termed Islamic only in Gujarat because it's convenient, says Tarun VijayÂ

When the deluge comes, it comes the way it did in Iraq. There is turmoil in Nepal. And Moscow has openly accused Washington for having begun the Cold War. In such times, when Dhaka, Kathmandu, Moscow and Washington affect our domestic issues, we are busy partying. Today, elections are contested and won not on issues but through exchange of expensive gifts and shows of nautch girls.

While dead bodies of Indians butchered abroad are shipped back home, those who are slaughtered within are cremated unsung - and a "brave" Home Minister returns without seeing them fearing any unkind reaction. We lost battle in safeguarding our interests in Nepal; we are ready to vacate Siachen despite protests by the Army brass; we signed a nuclear deal to cap our own future strategic options; and, we have allowed Bangladeshis to vote and elect a State Government. Worse, we feel happy to welcome separatist leaders in the Prime Minister's Office to get favourable headlines. It seems India has vanished from the lexicon of our politicians. They just live and think of their immediate vote avenues.

Like Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar's last days, the UPA regime has its area of influence shrunk to Connaught place-Gurg-aon region: The NCR of Delhi. The Government is brave enough to show the card of law and order to the weaker sections. For the rest, the law is bent and changed at will.

Thirty-five Indians were killed in Doda and 42 temples were demolished in Vadodara (by local authorities). Nothing moved the Central Government and media, but the demolition of a non-descript dargah. The Supreme Court was petitioned and a stay obtained immediately. On TV channels, it was Vadodara and not Doda. It seems we have beco-me immune to Hindu killings and temple demolitions.

Vadodara news was used in the most provocative manner to instill hate and fear among Muslims. The "principled" correspondents didn't find time to speak to Doda victims, but expressed sorrow at the sight of closed shops and burnt cars in Vadodara - and, of course, the demolished dargah.

A couple of months earlier, newspapers in Muslim countries, especially Pak-istan, published angry pro-tests over the demolition of a site allegedly related to the life of Prophet Mohammad by Saudi authorities. It's interesting to note that our "secular" media kept a studied silence on it. The demolitions were carried out to make space for various purposes, including luxury apartments.

In 1998, the grave of Mohammed's mother was bulldozed. Mr Tarek Fatah, a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim activist, wrote, "What makes this demolition worse is the fact that the home of the Prophet is to make way for a parking lot, two 50-storey hotel towers and seven 35-storey apartment blocks; a project known as the Jabal Omar Scheme, all within a stone's throw of the Grand Mosque. Yet, despite this outrage, not a single Muslim country, no ayatollah, no mufti, no king, not even a Muslim Canadian imam has dared utter a word in protest.''

Are dargahs Islamic? Do they have any sanction in Islam? Dargah worship literally means puja of the grave. Ironically, these dargahs are mostly visited by Hindus, who mostly believe in jadoo-tona. There are dhoop, agarbattis, music, songs and people with various problems come to get rid of "ghosts" and take back tabeez. These rituals are not Islamic.

While Hindus are told to respect the law of the land and follow the court's verdict on Ayodhya, the administration and law is expected to respect the sentiments of Islamist rioters. In Kashmir, when 70 temples were demolished, nobody questioned the State authority.

Thousand of shops and houses were bulldozed in Delhi amid protests of citizens, who had lost all they had earned in a lifetime. The Government stonewalled them saying nothing could be done, as it was carrying the orders of the court. Similarly, in Vadodara, all was well till Hindu temples were being demolished. The moment a dargah was touched, Delhi was shaken and a stay obtained from the Supreme Court. What a secular state we are!

With governance like this, and the Opposition busy raising trivial issues, we must not expect better than this.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 05-12-2006

Insight into Minoritism 
By Muzaffer Hussain
155pp, Delhi: India First Foundation, Price Rs.250

In almost all countries in the world, a certain segment -ethnic, religious
linguistic or ideological would be in the majority and some others would be in
a minority. That is inevitable. A multi-cultural national like the United
States has its majority and minorities as well, but one seldom talks about
them. The biggest minority would be the Blacks, but whoever would think of
providing reservation for them in the Senate or Congress or in government
service?

Indeed in older textbooks on political science there would hardly be any
reference to majoritarianism and minoritarianism. These are recently-coined
words. But India is different. Here we constantly talk of minorities as if
they are a plague and we even have a Minority Commission! It is a carry over from British colonialism. 

Nobody in India talked of a majority or a minority in
the days of Tipu Sultan or during hayed of Mogul rule. Hindus were even
then in a majority but they were often treated as if they were non-existent.
Hindus were made aware of their majority status during the time of the British,
as were Muslims of their minority place in society.

That may have been a display - and a distorted one at that - of British
sense of Justice, but the consequences were severe, resulting, for one thing, in
partition of the country. Reference has been made to this in Muzaffer
Hussain's well-argued book Insight into Minoritism, which goes into the subject
in different contexts and in some detail. Minorities have been dealt with very
poorly in Pakistan and Bangladesh, India's immediate neighbours. Hussain
draws pointed attention to that.

Says Hussain: "There is a sizeable population of Hindus in the Gulf
countries but those countries are not ready to give any facility to them in the
name of minority or Human Rights. The Hindus are not allowed there to cremate
their kith and kin as per their belief. They can't construct places for
worship nor can they celebrate their festivals at public places. During the Ramzan, non-Muslims can't eat anything at daytime in public places. The Muslims
expect to get everything as minorities in the countries of Hindus, Buddhists
and Christians but in Islamic countries the minorities don't have such
privilege.."

We have to blame history for that. In India, minorities like Jews, Parsis
and Christians have full freedom. No Christian missionary dare try in an
Islamic country, but in India every citizen, especially if he is a tribal or
one from the lower caste, is fair game to Christian missionaries. In India
propagation of religion is not a crime. The freedom given is often interpreted
to mean that one can resort to conversion, which is frequently resorted to in
tribal areas. It started under the British when missionaries flooded the
northeast and converted large number of tribals to Christianity. Unconsciously
this has caused problems for free India. 

Hussain damns minoritism as a "menace" which it has indeed become. Hussain
maintains that Christians and Muslims in India can't be dubbed as minorities
because they are very much Indian. As he puts it: When all are born and
brought up in the Indian context, the question of 'alien' and 'indigenous'
people don't arise". Hussain's argument is that all over the world, a minority
status is granted only to those classes, which have migrated from abroad. So
he says: "Hence it is not proper to designate Muslims and Christians (of India)
as aliens since they, too are very much Indian".

All are one in this country where there is one citizenship for all and
everyone is a part of this nation. The word 'minority' Hussain asserts,
weakens the unity of the country and draws a dividing line between individuals".

How right he is. Hussain is critical of Muslims in India who, he says, haven't
accepted democracy. Inevitably the Islamic world has been gripped by
fanaticism and narrow thinking. The point indeed was well made by Justice
Chandrashekhar Dharmadhikari in his preface. Writes Mr Dharmadhikari: "India
as a nation has suffered continuous tussles between the religious and orthodox
religious fanaticism even after the creation of Pakistan. How many Muslim
mohallas or Madarassas hoist the national flag and sing the national anthem
collectively on the occasion of Independence Day!"

How many indeed. The former Justice adds: "To accept special rights for any
community along with the provisions of equal human rights are mutually
contradictory principles. This creates a controversy and the majority class
begins to feel unprotected and adopts a defensive mechanism".

Hussain in his treatise goes into this subject in a special and separate
chapter entitled "How to tackle minoritism", He notes that there are three distinct approaches in handling minoritism". In the Arab world minorities like Christians and Hindus have no political or religious rights. The second category belongs to western countries where religion is recognized but the country comes first. Religion has no role in framing laws and rule. National interest alone is taken into
account. In the US, 18 per cent of the people are blacks but they are not
given any minority status. Britain and France solved the problem by enforcing
a uniform civil code. What should India do in the circumstances?

Hussain has his answer ready. He says: A uniform civil code is the only
answer." He points out that the Fundamental Rights as enumerated in the
Constitution ensure religious freedom for all. As Hussain sees it, minorities
will continue to exist in one from or another anywhere in the world. That is only
but natural. The term 'Minority' Hussain concedes, is not in itself bad, but
problems arise when it is used by vested interests, As he sees it,
minoritism is a 'deception' practiced on human civilization of which one should
be aware of. And majority communalism is a myth. 

In a democracy, Hussain insists, it is essential to respect the opinion of
the majority in day-today life. There haven't been many treatises on this
subject and Muzaffer Hussain's attempt, almost the first of its kind, is highly
praiseworthy. He has no hesitation in asking inconvenient questions.

For example he asks: "How can Muslims who form between 15 to 20 per cent of India's population consider themselves a minority?" Not many have dared to raise this question. Hussain has. All praise to him. This is a book that our
policy-makers and politicians would do well to read. It may not necessarily
have all the right answers, but it certainly raises all the right questions. And
isn't that what a good study should be all about?

-- Book review by M. V. Kamath, Free Press Journal

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 05-20-2006

QUOTEhttp://www.hindubooks.org/david_frawley/ar...is_it/page1.htm
Hindu Fundamentalism:Â What Is It?
- David FrawleyÂ Â

Fundamentalism is an easily discernible phenomenon in belief-oriented religions like Christianity and IslamÂ which have a simple and exclusive pattern to their faith. They generally insist that there is only One God, who has only one Son or final Prophet, and only one true scripture, which is literally God's word.

They hold that belief in this One God and his chief representative brings salvation in an eternal heaven and disbelief causes condemnation to an eternal hell.

Muslims daily chant "there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his (last) prophet". Most Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, regard belief in Christ as one's personal savior as the only true way to salvation.

Fundamentalists are literalists in these traditions who hold rigidly to their beliefs and insist that since their religion alone is true the other religions should not be tolerated, particularly in the lands where members of their religion are in a majority.

Fundamentalists generally hold to their religion's older social customs and refuse to integrate into the broader stream of modern society which recognizes freedom of religious belief.

Fundamentalism can usually be discriminated from orthodoxy in these traditions, but tends to overlap with it, particularly in the case of Islam. Most orthodox Christians and many orthodox Muslims tolerate those of other religious belief, though they may not agree with them, and are not involved in the militancy and social backwardness of fundamentalist group.Â

They usually have little trouble functioning in modern society, though they may keep to themselves in matters of religion and still regard that theirs is the only true religion. The strictly orthodox in these religions, however, may not be very different than the fundamentalists and often support them.

While the news media of the Western World, and of India itself, speaks of Hindu fundamentalism, no one appears to have really defined what it is. Is there a Hindu fundamentalism comparable to Islamic or Christian fundamentalism? Using such a term merely assumes that there is, but what is the evidence for it? Are there Hindu beliefs of the same order as the absolute beliefs of fundamentalists Christianity and Islam? It is questionable that, whatever problems might exist in Hinduism, whether fundamentalism like that found in Christianity or Islam can exist at all in its more open and diverse tradition which has many names and forms for God, many great teachers and Divine incarnations, many scares books, and a pursuit of self-realization that does not recognize the existence of any eternal heaven or hell. There is no monolithic faith called Hinduism with a set system of beliefs that all Hindus must follow which can be turned into such fundamentalism.

Fundamentalists groups insist that theirs is the only true God and that all other Gods or names for God are wrong. Islamic fundamentalists insist that the only God is Allah, even though these also refer to a Supreme Being and Ultimate Spiritual Reality such as Allah is supposed to be. Christian fundamentalists will not accept Allah or Brahman a names for God as they conceive Him to be.Â

Hindus with their many names and forms for God don't mind accepting the Christian name God or even Islamic Allah's referring to the same reality, though they may not use these names in the same strict or exclusive sense as Christians or Muslims. A belief in God is not even necessary to be a Hindu, as such non-theistic Hindu systems as Sankhya reveal.

Fundamentalists groups insist that theirs is the only true God and that all other Gods or names for God are wrong. Islamic fundamentalists insist that the only God is Allah, even though these also refer to a Supreme Being and Ultimate Spiritual Reality such as Allah is supposed to be.

Christian fundamentalists will not accept Allah or Brahman a names for God as they conceive Him to be. Hindus with their many names and forms for God don't mind accepting the Christian name God or even Islamic Allah s referring to the same reality, though they may not use these names in the same strict or exclusive
sense as Christians or Muslims.Â

A belief in God is not even necessary to be a Hindu, as such non-theistic Hindu systems as Sankhya reveal. For those who speak of Hindu fundamentalism, we must ask the question: What One God do Hindu fundamentalists groups insist upon is the only true God and which Gods are they claiming are false except for Him? If Hindus are not insisting upon the sole reality of the One Hindu God can they be called fundamentalists like the Christians and Muslims?

Islamic fundamentalists consider that Islam is the only true religion, that no true new faith can be established after Islam and that with the advent of Islam all previous faiths, even if they were valid up to that time, became outdated. Christian fundamentalists hold that Christianity alone is true, and that Islam and Hinduism are religions of the devil. Even orthodox people in these traditions may hold these views.

Hindus are not of one faith only. They are divided into Shaivites (those who worship Shiva), Vaishnavas (those who worship Vishnu), Shaktas (those who worship the Goddess), Ganapatas (those who worship Ganesh), Smartas and a number of other groups which are constantly being revised relative to modern reachers around whom new movements may be founded (like the Swami Narayan movement, the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda groups or the followers of Sri Aurobindo).Â

Those called Hindu fundamentalists are similarly divided up into these different sets. What common belief can be found in all these groups which constitutes Hindu fundamentalism? What common Hindu fundamentalist platform do the different sets of Hinduism shares? is it a Shaivite, Vaishnava or other type fundamentalism? How do such diverse groups maintain their harmony and identity under the Hindu fundamentalist banner? While one can make a code of belief for Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, what code of belief applies to Hindu fundamentalism of all different sets?

No Hindus-including so called Hindu fundamentalists insist that there is only one true faith called Hinduism and that all other faith are false. Hinduism contains too much plurality to allow for that. Its tendency is not to coalesce into a fanatic into a fanatic unit like the fundamentalists of other religions, but to disperse into various diverse sets and fail to arrive at any common action, historically even one of self-defense against foreign invaders.

Fundamentalist groups insist upon belief in the literal truth of one book as the Word of God, which they base their behavior on. Muslim fundamentalists insist that the Koran is the Word of God and that all necessary knowledge is contained in it. Christian fundamentalists say the same thing of the Bible. Again even orthodox or ordinary Muslims and Christians often believe this.Â

Hindus have many holy books like the Vedas, Agamas, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana and so on, which contain a great variety of teaching and many different points of view and no one of these books is required reading for all Hindus. Hindus generally respect the holy books of other religions as well. What single holy book do Hindu fundamentalists hold literally to be the word of God, which they base their behavior upon? Christian and Islamic fundamentalists flaunt their holy book and are ever quoting from it to justify their actions.

What Hindu Bible are the Hindu fundamentalists all crying, quoting and preaching from and finding justification in? Fundamentalist groups are often involved in conversion activity to get other people to adopt their beliefs. They frequently promote missionary efforts throughout the world to bring the entire world to their views. This again is true of ordinary or orthodox Muslims and Christians.

Fundamentalists are merely more vehement in their practices. What missionary activities are Hindu fundamentalists promoting throughout the world? What missions in other countries have Hindu fundamentalists set up to convert Christians, Muslims or those of order beliefs to the only true religion called Hinduism? What Hindus are motivated by a missionary spirit to discredit people of other religious beliefs in order to convert and save them?

Fundamentalist groups not only condemn those of other beliefs to an eternal hell, they may even make death threats against those who criticize their beliefs. The fatwa of the Ayatollah Khomeni against Salman Rushdie and of some others against Anwar Shaikh (a name not so well known but not untypical) are examples of this, which many Muslim groups throughput the world, perhaps the majority, have accepted.

What Hindu has ever condemned non-Hindus to an eternal hell, or issued declarations asking for the death of anyone for merely criticizing Hindu belief? Where have Hindus ever stated that it is punishable by death to criticize Krishna, Rama or any other great Hindu leader? There are certainly plenty of book, including many by Christians and Muslims, which portray Hinduism in a negative light.Â

How many of such books are Hindu fundamentalists trying to ban, and how many of their authors are they threatening?Â Fundamentalists are usually seeking to return to the social order and customers of some ideal religious era of a previous age.Â Fundamentalists often insist upon returning to some traditional law code like the Islamic Shariat or Biblical of justice and humanitarianism.

What law code are Hindu fundamentalists seeking to reestablish? Which Hindu groups are agitating for the return of the law code of the Manu Samhita, for example (which incidentally has a far more liberal and spiritual law code than the Shariat or the Bible)?

Fundamentalists are usually opposed to modern science. Many Christian and Islamic fundamentalists reject the theory of evolution and insist that the world was created by God some 6000 years age. Even in America Christian fundamentalists are typing to have the evolution theory taken out. What scientific theories are Hindu fundamentalists opposed to and trying to prevent being taught in schools today?

Fundamentalism creates various political parties limited to members of that religion only, which aim at setting up religions dictatorships. What exclusively Hindu religious party exists in India or elsewhere in the world, and what is its common Hindu fundamentalist platform? Who is asking for a Hindu state that forbids the practice of other religions, allows only Hindu religious centers to be built and requires a Hindu religious figures as the head o the country? This is what other fundamentalist groups are asking for in terms of their religions and what they have instituted in a number of countries that they have taken power, like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Fundamentalism is often involved with militancy and sometimes with terrorism. What Hindu minorities in the world are violently agitating for their separate state? What planes have Hindu fundamentalists hijacked, what hostages have they taken, what bombs have they planted? What terrorist activities are Hindu fundamentalists promoting throughout the world? What countries are stalking down Hindu fundamentalist terrorists who are plotting against them? The Ayatollah Khomeni is regarded in the Western World as a typical example of an Islamic fundamentalist militant leader.

Many Western people consider him to be a terrorist as well. What Hindu fundamentalist leader has a similar record?Â Saudi Arabia is usually regarded as a pious or orthodox Islamic country, and is usually not called fundamentalist even by the news media of India. No non-Islamic places of worship are allowed to be built there. No non-Islamic worship is allowed in public. American troops in the Gulf War had to hide their religious practices so as not to offend the Saudis.

Traditional Islamic law, including mutilation for various offences, is strictly enforced by a special religious police force. If we apply any standard definition of fundamentalism, Saudi Arabia is a super-fundamentalist country.

What Hindu community is insisting upon the same domination of one religious belief, law and social practices like that of Saudi Arabia? Which Hindus are more fundamentalist in their beliefs and practices than the Saudis, whom few are calling fundamentalists?

Hence we must ask: What are Hindus being accused as fundamentalists for doing? Is it belief in the unique superiority of their religion, the sole claim of their scripture as the Word of God, their savior or prophet as ultimate for all humanity, that those who believe in their religion go to an eternal heaven and those who don't go to an eternal hell, the need to convert the world to their beliefs? These views are found not only in Christian and Islamic fundamentalism but even among the orthodox .

There are no Hindu fundamentalist statements of such nature. Can we imagine any Hindu swearing that there is no God but Rama and Tulsidas is his only prophet, that the Ramayana is the only true scripture, that those who believe differently will be condemned by Rama to eternal damnation and those who criticize Tulsidas should be killed?

Hindus are called fundamentalists for wanting to retake a few of their old holy places, like Ayodhya, of the many thousands destroyed during centuries of foreign domination. Several Hindu groups are united around this cause. This, however, is an issue oriented movement, not the manifestation of a monolithic fundamentalism. It is a unification of diverse groups to achieve a common end, not the product of a uniform belief system.Â

Even the different groups involved have often been divided as to how to proceed and have not spoken with any single voice. Whether one considers the action to be right or wrong, it is not the assertion of any single or exclusive religious ideology.

If it is fundamentalism, what is the fundamentalist ideology, belief and practice behind it? Hindus, along of all people, have failed to take back their holy sites after the end of the colonial era. If they are fundamentalists for seeking to do so, then what should we call Pakistan or Bangladesh, who have destroyed many Hindu holy sites and were not simply taking back Islamic sites that the Hindus had previously usurped?

Hindus are called fundamentalists for organizing themselves politically. Yet members of all other religions have done this, while Hinduism is by all accounts the most disorganized of all religions. There are many Christian and Islamic parties throughout the world, and in all countries where these religions are in a majority they make sure to exert whatever political influence they can.

Why shouldn't Hindus have a political voice even in India? The Muslims in India have their own Muslim party and no can id calling them fundamentalists for organizing themselves politically. There are many Islamic states throughout the world and in these Hindus, if they exist at all, are oppressed. What Hindu groups are asking for India to be a more strictly Hindu state than Muslims are doing in Islamic state?

There are those who warn that Hindu rule would mean the creation of a Hindu theocratic state? Yet what standard Hindu theology is there, and what Hindu
theocratic state has ever existed? Will it be a Shaivite, Vaishnava, or Vedantic theocracy?Â What Hindu theocratic model will it be based upon? Is there a model of Hindu kings like the Caliphs of early Islam to go back to, or like the Christian emperors of the Middle Ages?

What famous Hindu king was a fundamentalist who tried to eliminate all other beliefs from the land or tried to spread Hinduism throughout the world by the sword? Does Rama or Krishna provide such a model? Does Shivaji provide such a model? If no such model exist what is the fear of a militant Hindu theocratic rule based upon?

Traditional Hindus do exist. There are Hindus who are caught in conservative or regressive social customs, like untouchability or mistreatment of women, which should not be underestimated. There are serious problems in Hindu society that must be addressed, but these should be examined as per their nature and cause, which is not some uniform Hindu fundamentalism but wrong practices that are often contrary to real Hindu through.Â

To lump them together as problems of Hindu fundamentalism fails to examine them adequately but, rather, uses them as a scare tactic to discredit Hinduism as a whole. There are some Hindus who may believe that their religion is superior and want to keep it separate from other religions. In this regard they are no different than orthodox Christians and Muslims.

The fact is that there is no monolithic fundamentalism possible among Hindus who have no uniform belief structure. A charge of social backwardness and discriminatory attitudes can be made against a number of Hindus but this is not the same as the blanket charge of fundamentalism, which misinterprets Hinduism as a religion of militancy which it nowhere is.Â

The charge of fundamentalism is usually made against various Hindu groups like the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), who do not support the caste system and other such backward customs anyway.Â Â What is called Hindu fundamentalism is in fact generally a reaction to Islamic, Christian and Communist fundamentalism, which are all organized according to an exclusive belief system and a strategy to take over the world.

These three fundamentalisms are attacking India from within, as well as threatening it from without. Islamic terrorist activity continues in India, particularly in Kashmir. India is now surrounded by self-proclaimed Islamic states where Hindus have become second class citizens. Under this circumstance why should it be so wrong for Hindus in India to consider creating a state that rights or traditions of Hindus? Christian and Islamic missionary activity continues strongly in many parts of India.

Do these missionary groups portray Hinduism as a valid religion in its own right? They are sometimes not even teaching respect for India as a nation as the separatist agitation they create once their members become a majority in a region reveals.Â Hinduism is a super tolerant religion. No other religion in the world accepts such a diversity of beliefs and practices or is so ready to acknowledge the validity of other religions.Â

The idea of the unity of all religions was practically invented by modern Hindus like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Gandhi. As Hinduism is a super tolerant religion, even a little intolerance among Hindus is regarded as Hindu fundamentalism. And the charge of intolerance can be used to discredit Hindu groups, who are extremely sensitive to such a negative portrayal.

Throughout history Islam and Christianity, owing to the exclusive nature of their beliefs, have been generally intolerant religions (though there have been notable exceptions). They have not accepted the validity of other religious practices, and contain in themselves little diversity as compared to Hinduism.

What Christian or Muslim leaders proclaim that all religions are one or that Hindus and Buddhists have as valid a religion as they do (and therefore do not need to be converted)? As these religions are generally intolerant, their members have to be super intolerant to be called fundamentalist.Â Hindus often have a double standard in religion that works against them.Â

They try to tolerate, accept or even appreciate exclusivism, intolerance and fundamentalism when practiced by those of other religious beliefs.Â For example, which Hindus are criticizing the far more obvious fundamentalism and exclusivism among Christians and Muslims? Meanwhile any criticism by Hindus of other religions, even when justified, may be regarded by other Hindus as intolerance.

In addition, many Hindus, particularly of the modern socialist-communist variety, brand even pride in Hinduism as fundamentalism.Â Another related term that we meet with in the Indian press today is that of "Hindu chauvinism," though terms such as "Christian chauvinism" or "Islamic chauvinism" do not occur in either the Indian or the Western press. Chauvinists believe in the special superiority of their particular group.

This term is used mainly relative to white chauvinists, those who think that whites are generally better than dark-skinned people, or in the case of male chauvinists or those who think that men are inherently better than women. Hindus may praise their religion, and Hindus often use flowery and exaggerated language to praise things, but few if any Hindus are claiming that Hindus own the truth and that those of other backgrounds or beliefs cannot find it.

Christians and Muslims routinely believe that only members of their religion go to heaven and everyone else, particularly idol worshiping people like Hindus, go to hell. Which Hindus chauvinists have similar ideas? The Vatican recently toad its monks and nuns not to experiment with Yoga and Eastern forms of religious practice, which it branded as selfish, false and misleading.

Should we not therefore call the Pope a Christian chauvinist religious leader? Yet Hindus who are more tolerant than this may be designated in such a manner. Hindus are not only not chauvinistic they are generally suffering from a lack of self-esteem and an inferiority complex by which they are afraid to really express themselves or their religion.

They have been beaten down by centuries of foreign rule and ongoing attempts to convert them. The British treated them as racially inferior and both Christians and Muslims treated them as religiously perverted. That some Hindus may express pride in their religion is a good sign and shows a Hindu awakening. Unfortunately the groups who may be challenged by this awakening have labeled this pride chauvinistic.

Naturally some Hindu groups may express this pride in an excessive way, just as happened with the Black pride idea in America during the civil rights movement, but this is only an attempt to counter a lack of pride and self-respect, it is hardly the assertion of any enduring cultural militancy and does not have the history like the fundamentalism of Christianity and Islam, which goes back to the early eras of these faiths.

Such terms as "fundamentalist" and "chauvinist" are much less applicable to Hinduism than to other religions and generally a great exaggeration. They are a form of name calling, and do not represent any clearly thought out understanding. It is also interesting to note that many of the people who brand Hindus in this light are often themselves members of more exclusivist ideologies, which have an agenda to gain world-domination and to take over India.

This does not mean that Hindus should not be criticized. Certainly they can be criticized for many things. They have to really look at who they are and what they are doing because in most cause they are not living up to their inner potential or their heritage. On a social level many Hindus are trapped in backward social customs, but those who are not backward are usually caught in the corruption or materialism of modern society.Â

On an inner level Hindus suffer from lack of creativity, initiative, and original thinking. They want to imitate either their own older thinkers, whose teachings May be entirely relevant today, or, if modern, they imitate the trends of Western culture which are unspiritual.

As a group Hindus mainly suffer from passivity, disunity, and a lack of organization, and they are very poor at communicating who they main problem is that they fail to study, practice or support it, or to defend it if Hindu teachings are misrepresented or if Hindus are oppressed. These are not the problems of an aggressive or militant fundamentalism but the opposite, that of people who lack faith and dedication to themselves and their traditions.

Hindus are not in danger of being overly active and militant but of remaining so passive, resigned, and apologetic that they are unable to function as a coherent group or speak with a common voice about any issue. They have been very slow even to defend themselves against unwarranted attack, much less to assert themselves or attack others. There is no danger of a monolithic or dictatorial fundamentalism in India, like in Iran or Saudi Arabia.Â

The danger is of a divided and passive religion that leaves itself prey to external forces and thereby gradually disintegrates. A little more activity among Hindus, almost whatever it might be, would be a good sign as it shows that they are not entirely asleep! To brand such activity, which is bound to be agitated at first, as fundamentalist because it causes this sleep to be questioned is a mistake.

In this regard Sri Aurobindo's insight may be helpful (Indian's Rebirth, p. 177).Â He said," The Christians brought darkness rather than light. That has always been the case with aggressive religions-they tend to overrun the Earth. Hinduism on the other hand is passive, and therein lies its danger.Â Â It is time Hindus stopped accepting wrong designations and negative stereotypes of their wonderful religion.

Certainly aspects of Hinduism need to be reformed, and accept any set religious dogma, but there is very little in this beautiful religion that warrants such debasing terms as fundamentalism and chauvinism. If we look at the aspects which are commonly ascribed to religious fundamentalism we find little of them even among so-called Hindu fundamentalists.

Hindus who accuse other Hindus of being fundamentalists should really question what they are saying. What is the fundamentalism they see, or is it merely a reaction to the oppression that Hindus have passively suffered for so long?Â

Are the people making the charge of fundamentalism themselves following any religious or spiritual path, or is it a political statement of nonreligious people against religion? If Hindus are becoming intolerant and narrow-minded they should be criticized for being poor Hindus, not for being fundamentalist Hindus, as true Hinduism has a universal spirit.

As long Hinduism is devalued and misrepresented we must except some Hindus to take a stand against this in one way or another. Other Hindus should not simply criticize them if the stand they take may be one-sided. Hindus must try to defend Hinduism in a real way, not simply condemn those who may not be defending it in a way that they think is not correct.

This requires projecting a positive Hindu spirit, the yogic spirit, that can attract all Hindus and turn their support of the tradition in a spiritual direction. It requires not condemning other Hindus who are struggling to uphold the tradition as they understand it to be, but arousing them to the true spirit of the religion.

To routinely raise such negative stereotypes as fundamentalist or even fascist relative to Hindu groups, who may only be trying to bring some sense of unity or common cause among wake up and unit, to recognize their common spiritual heritage and work together to manifest it in the world today, just as modern teachers did not speak of Hindu fundamentalism.

They recognized Hindu backwardness but sought to remedy it by going to the core of Hindu spirituality, the spirit of unity in recognition of the Divine in all, not by trying to cast a shadow on Hinduism as a whole.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 05-21-2006

QUOTEhttp://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?m...t&counter_img=1
Minority as moral majority
Swapan Dasgupta |
May 21, 2006

In his compelling critique of majoritarianism and the impending "clash ofÂ civilisations", Amartya Sen has argued that each individual embraces a multiplicity of identities and not merely a religious one. In short, we are all, in some way or the other, a minority.Â

Sen's argument has been enthusiastically endorsed by India's politically correct community. The mere invocation of the term "minority" is enough to make them mushy and infuriatingly sanctimonious. Minority rights, we are repeatedly told, must be preserved at all costs, even if it involves making hideous compromises with the principles of equity and modernity.

Last week, we had a grotesque assertion of minorityism when Information and Broadcasting Minister P R Das Munshi chose to obliterate the crucial distinction between accuser and judge. A clutch of people, said to be the custodians of Roman Catholicism in India, were called upon to judge the universal suitability of the celluloid version of The Da Vinci Code.

It does not matter that the collective wisdom of the group was limited to issuing a faith warning. What is significant is that the Government deemed it necessary to consult and respect "minority" sentiments.

I am not going to address the issue of whether the Minister would have displayed similar interest had the offence been caused to people who call themselves Hindus. A privileged status for minorities has become the Great IndianÂ Consensus. There is no outrage when a Minister in the Uttar Pradesh GovernmentÂ sets a handsome reward for the murder of some Danish cartoonists. Nor do we turn collectively incandescent when Pope Benedict XVI presumes to lecture us on domestic legislation. When it comes to minority interests, democracy and sovereignty are deemed to be negotiable.

It has taken India's most recent Nobel Prize winner to point out that identity should not be circumscribed by religion only. It must, he insists, be secularised. Minority rights in terms of gender, sexual preferences, aesthetics, food and dress preferences and quirky flights of whimsy must be institutionally accommodated if we are rise above mobocracy.
Â
This is why it is odd that the widespread protests by medical and other students in professional courses against Arjun Singh's infamous quotas hasn't propelled politicians into defending minority rights. Let's be quite clear, the affected students and those likely to be affected are in a woeful minority. They are the best and brightest of our youth, those who can hold their own in any internationally competitive environment. They have precious little need for either affirmative action or grace marks. They are India's undisputed crÃ¨me de la crÃ¨me.
Â
For this precise reason, those who marched on the streets of Delhi on Saturday are in a minuscule minority. In theory, that should lead to a clamour among politicians to be photographed with them. Yet, for the past seven days, not one politician of consequence from any of the mainstream parties has dared to be associated with this minority movement.

Manmohan Singh had breakfast on Friday with a bearded friend of the Taliban, Das Munshi hobnobbed with the Catholic clergy on Thursday and Comrade Sitaram Yechuri, after spiritedly giving the bear cartel on Dalal Street a generous leg up, rubbished all flirtations with knowledge at a Sahmat meeting on Friday. No one, not even BJP leaders who are privately in sympathy with everything the students stand for, dared to either show solidarity or at least lend them a sympathetic ear. 
Â
Remember that only two MPs, and none from the Lok Sabha, mustered the courage to oppose the infamous 104th Amendment Bill. I don't believe this strategic abstention is occasioned by the allegedly upper caste composition of theÂ protesters. To equate merit with genetics is grotesque and an assertion worthy of race supremacists. The real reason is a little more complex.

At the very heart of protests against the new quotas is a frighteningly modern demand. The students are asserting their right to be treated first and foremost as Indians - overriding all class, caste and creed. That's a majoritarian argument no self-respecting minority-ist will ever countenance.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 06-05-2006

Secularism and the Hindu
By Kosla Vepa Ph.D

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Bharatvarsh - 06-07-2006

QUOTEMarxist Inquisition: Beyond Apologists the Truth

S. Aravindan Neelakandan
June 1, 2006

Based on the principle of falsification Karl Popper has evaluated Marxism as a pseudoscience like astrology1. But Marxist pseudoscience goes far beyond astrology, for Marxism forms the basis of a power structure that has expansionist tendencies and it is a closed ideological system.

When the discoveries of sciences disturb the theses that form an integral part of their power structures, such closed ideological systems that form the bedrock of power structures, react with ruthless violence which commences passively in suppression which goes on to attain orgasmic peak in inquisitions. The behavior of Marxist state towards the scientists, (whose disciplines Marxist theoreticians came to regard as heresies against Marxism), has been tone of he most vividly documented yet not very well discussed inquisition that happened in the modern era.

Usually the apologists belonging to different Marxist Parties all over the world tend to explain the Marxist inquisition as the result of Stalinism, which according to them is a deviation from the Marxist Leninist course of scientific socialism. Particularly Marxist apologists of Trotsky school market this line of explanation. However at the extreme end of the spectrum there still exist many Marxist groups that firmly believe Marxist inquisition itself to be a capitalist/imperialist propaganda myth. This is particularly true in many parts of the developing countries where questioning the 'scientific nature' of Stalinism can be as dangerous as apostasy in Islamic countries. The purpose of this article is to show how Marxism in its very theoretical structure contains an exclusive and closed approach to studying the universe, an approach, which it shares with the dogmatic mindset attributed to medieval church. This approach when integrated itself with the state power naturally evolves into an inquisition.

Ideological prelude:

Karl Marx himself proclaimed that "Natural sciences will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science, there will be one science."2 The 'science of man' Marx talks about is of course Marxism. A rule has thus been set here that would dictate how the natural sciences should travel so that they can 'incorporate into themselves' Marxism, 'the science of manâ. This in itself is not much different from the medieval church stand on natural sciences wherein the goal of natural sciences is to show by studying the physical universe the glory of its Creator. In Marxism the Creator is replaced by equally unscientific and mystical historical dialectics.

The paradigm shift in physics that happened with the evolution of Quantum Mechanics is of more fundamental nature than that of Copernican revolution that happened centuries ago. Science historian Helge Kragh says,

"The new physics that arose in the early years of the twentieth century was not a revolt against a petrified Newtonian worldview, something analogous to the revolt of Galileo against Aristotelianism. By 1905, the mechanical worldview had been under attack for more than a decade, and for this reason alone, there never was much of a clash between Einstein and Newton." 3

But that was in the fast secularizing western world where the reigning powers had no vested interest in the Newtonian worldview, as say, the medieval church had in the geocentric worldview. Not so for the theoreticians of Marxism then and for the Marxist state that would subsequently become a reality in 1917. Marxist State had a strong vested interest in the Newtonian worldview and the way they reacted to some of the paradigm shifts in modern science matches exactly the way medieval church reacted to the Galilean revolution.

This would also explain why V.I.Lenin the chief exponent of Marxist revelation took such an active interest in the developments of natural sciences, carefully monitoring their impacts on his Marxist dogma. Lenin viewed with contempt the paradigm shift that was happening then in physics. In fact, he gives his 'valued' opinion on those scientists and philosophers of science like Bogdanov, Wilhelm Ostwald, PoincarÃ©, Le Rey and Berman. While philosopher of science, Berman is "absurd", physicist PoincarÃ© is "full of fancy", and Duhem's Theory of Physics contains "falsity". Perhaps physicists world over consider the period of the exposition of theory of relativity and the analysis of paradoxes that lead to the development of Quantum physics as a period of great renaissance but for Lenin this period is one of, "a temporary deflection, a transitory period of sickness in the history of science, an ailment of growth."

More importantly, Lenin gave specific instructions as to in which direction science should progress. He says, "...One school of natural scientists in one branch of natural science has slid into a reactionary philosophy, being unable to rise directly and at once from metaphysical materialism to dialectical materialism. This step is being made, and will be made, by modern physics; but it is making for the only true method and the only true philosophy of natural science not directly, but by zigzags, not consciously but instinctively, not clearly perceiving its 'final goal', but drawing closer to it gropingly, hesitatingly, and sometimes even with its back turned to it." 4 (Italics added)

Fortunately for Lenin, he did not live to see the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics but unfortunately for Soviet physicists and biologists the Party and its theoreticians did see the flowering of Quantum Mechanics and Neo Darwinism. And thus started an ordeal, which packed in decades, the horrors of centuries long medieval inquisition.

The Purges: Lenin already made it clear that intellectuals who stood in the way of the implementation of the Marxist theory would be killed mercilessly whoever they might be. When Maxim Gorky complained of persecution of the intellectuals, Lenin wrote back to him wryly,

"Really and truly you will die if you don't break away from this situation with the bourgeois intelligentsia." 5

The so-called Stalinist purges had actually started thus during Lenin's times and had their roots strongly embedded in the fertile soil of Marxist dogma. Even during the Second World War eminent Soviet scientists like V.I.Vernadsky had asked for closer cooperation with the Western scientists and many hoped that intellectual life would become liberal and more decent after the war.

However it was not to be so. Already in 1936 the dean of the physics faculty of Moscow University was arrested and physicists who used Political authority to settle academic problems increasingly filled the faculty. In 1947, an article on the epistemological problems in quantum mechanics (by Moisei A. Markov of the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences) was published by a Soviet journal. Marxist philosopher A. A. Maksimov attacked it because the article was based on Bohr's complementarity principle. Subsequently in 1948, the editor of the journal was removed and the Copenhagen school's interpretation of quantum mechanics was decreed as anathema to the Marxist dialectical materialism and banned from the Soviet physics curriculum for the next one decade.6

The 1948 conference on biological sciences saw the triumph of Lysenko the notorious pseudo-scientist. Soon a conference on physics too was to be organized by the Party and physicists panicked that their field too might soon be the victim of ideological cleansing. Surely enough Sergei Kaftanov, the minister of higher education in the Stalin's regime, had complained in a letter to Deputy Premier Klimenti Voroshilov that, "Physics is taught in many educational establishments without any regard to dialectical materialism. . . . Instead of decisively unmasking trends, which are inimical to Marxism-Leninism, some of our scientists frequently adopt idealist positions, which are making their way into higher educational establishments through physics. . . . The modern achievements of physics do not receive consistent exposition on the basis of dialectical materialism in Soviet physics textbooks. . . . The role of Russian and Soviet scientists in the development of physics is treated in a completely inadequate way in textbooks; the books abound in the names of foreign scientists." 7

'Shoot them later'

The organizing committee for the conference saw physicist being accused of spreading cosmopolitanism and idealism. Iakov Frenkel was vehemently attacked for his explicit position on the irrelevance of dialectical materialism to the problems of physics. The draft resolution talked of as the duty of Soviet Physics to destroy "mercilessly every hint of cosmopolitanism, which is Anglo-American imperialism's ideological weapon of diversion." 8The draft resolution accused the leading physicists thus; Lev Landau of "groveling before the West"; Peter Kapitsa of advocating "open cosmopolitanism"; Iakov Frenkel of "uncritically receiving Western physical theories and propagandizing them in our country." Fortunately, however the aforesaid conference never took place. The reason was the stiff resistance from a team of physicists working in secrecy to build the Soviet nuclear weapon. According to the independent and highly agreeing accounts of the event by Lev Artsimovich a high ranking Soviet official and Gen. V.A. Makhnev, head of the secretariat of the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, it was on account of the bitter reaction from these physicists, (Kurchatov among them), that Stalin grudgingly cancelled the conference resolving that he could 'shoot the physicists later' when they had finished their work . 9 It is indeed an irony of history that the power lust of a dictator saved Soviet physics from the purges designed for other sciences in the dogmatic realm of Marxist Holy Empire.

Haunting continuities:

â¢ Chaos theory, a capitalist degeneration

â¢ Secular humanism, conspiracy to protect

US imperialism

Today too, Marxism sees in the emerging trends of science capitalist decadence and conspiracy. To the ideological proponents of Marxism the primary function of science has to be to confirm the dogmas of Marxism. Lest science fails to do this it summarily gets labeled as mathematical fantasy or capitalist reactionism. 'Living Marxism' is the monthly review journal of Revolutionary Communist Party (UK), which also has a 'Marxist review of books' section. Reviewers of science books in this column John Gibson and Manjit Singh make a scathing attack on Stephen Hawking's 'A brief history of time' as ending with 'speculation replacing anything that could be described as science.' They go on to give the readers a grave warning that, in popular science books like 'A Brief History of Time' distinction between " philosophical view and what is a scientific thesis is muddled." and more importantly, according to the Marxist reviewers, "And even more dangerously, particular philosophical views are masquerading as scientific propositions through the applications of particular mathematical models to nature." 10

Or in other words the problem is that Penrose and Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking are dangerous, because they are presenting particular philosophical views as scientific propositions to gullible readers. What a cultural degeneration from the good old days of Stalin and Lenin when we could have disciplined physics from straying into reactionary falsehoods and bourgeois mathematical fantasies and could have made it walk the path of 'only true philosophy of natural sciences gropingly, hesitatingly, and sometimes even with its back turned to it.'! The science of Chaos may be a fast developing scientific discipline for many. Yet it is not so, as per the Marxist blue print for the evolution of sciences. John Gibson and Manjit Singh make it clear that Chaos theory is 'a lot of speculative mathematical model building' and why has this science become very popular now? It is because of the socio-economic determinism that rules the evolution of capitalist societies.

"The stagnation of modern society imposes limits on the practical challenges facing science and the potential for carrying out experiments. This is turning much of today's scientific inquiry into mathematical model-building." 11

Applying chaos theory to study the problems in economics is thus "unscientific nonsense" and "a symptom of capitalist desperation". For a leap from this ideological reaction to purging the scientists studying chaos, the only thing needed is state power.

Har Dayal Bens a leading intellectual and author belonging to Communist Party of Canada (Marxist Leninist) has the choicest of swear words for the secular humanists. In their official book on the problems of India (published in five Indian languages and also in English,) 'secular humanism' is identified as the most dangerous protector of American imperialism and the right wing forces of USA aiming at de-stabilizing the developing countries.12

Conclusion:

Not everyone accepts the Copenhagen school interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Not everyone accepts natural selection as the sole mechanism for evolution. Not everyone agrees the extent to which chaos theory should be applied in the realm of social sciences. But these are areas where debates and free inquiry are needed and they have to be academic and scientific in their spirit and nature. They can happen only in a democratic atmosphere. The problem with Marxism, just like other Abrahamic religions, is that it has a rigid stand on many defining open-ended problems of science. And when science deviates from the Marxist worldview science is termed as 'speculation', 'fantasy' and worse, motives of vested class interests are attributed to scientists. It is similar to creationists attributing conspiracy motives to teaching evolution. But unlike creationists Marxist fundamentalists have perfected the art of using specialized academic jargons and a newspeech. And in many developing countries they being close to political power, their capacity for devastating science and progress of human knowledge is as grave as, if not far greater than that of creationist fundamentalists.

__________

References:

â¢ 1. See for example, Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963, pp. 33-39

â¢ 2. Karl Marx, "Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", Marx, Engels Collected works, Vol 3. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975.

â¢ 3. Helge Helge, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 1999, Chapter 1

â¢ 4. V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976. Vol.14 [All quotes of Lenin are taken from this work. Particularly relevant is Chapter 5.]

â¢ 5. Letter from Lenin to Gorky dated Sep.15.1919, from the Library of congress archives on the net.

â¢ 6. Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p79.

â¢ 7. A. S. Sonin, "Soveshchanie, kotoroe ne sostoialos," Priroda, 1990, no. 3, p. 99.

â¢ 8. Ibid. p. 91.

â¢ 9. Letter from I. Zorich, Priroda, 1990, no. 9, p. 106.

â¢ 10. John Gibson & Manjit Singh,â Science or speculationâ, The Marxist review of books, Living Marxism, November 1991.

â¢ 11. John Gibson & Manjit Singh, 'Chaos Theory, The science of despairâ, Living Marxism, December 1989.

â¢ 12. Har Dayal Bens, "The manifesto of brave martyrs", 1985, Peoples Canada Publishing house, pp. 157-163 (Trans. from Tamil)

â¢ Web resource: David Holloway quotes the references 6,7 & 8 in his article 'How the bomb saved Soviet Physics.â The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov-Dec 1994. It is available online at the URL: http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1994/nd9...94Holloway.html

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/...articleID=10532

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 06-08-2006

QUOTE
Hello, I have read the last few articles and the comments on them. Those comments sounded very anti-India. Well, I wonder whether the peole posting them know anything about India? I am a Muslim, born and brought up in India. Let me first confess that though I am a Muslim, I am a very proud Indian. Though, my religion is in the minority, I have never felt left out from the society. Two of my best friends are Hindus and one is a Christian. Never ever I felt that I was not a part of this country or its culture. We have equal rights in the country. We are allowed to vote and can choose our leaders.

My elder brother fought in the Kargil war shoulder to shoulder with our Hindu brothers against Pakistan. And, my community is proud of him. Why? Because, this is our motherland. So what, we are not the majority religion? Where will we go if we leave this beautiful country??? Will Pakistan accept us ????? They have labled all the Muslims who migrated to Pakistan as Muhajirs. The Muhajirs were never able to assimilite in Pakistan. They were and will always be discriminated. In India, which is a secular country, you are a free will. The soicitey at large always accepts you. There are plenty of examples ... many Bollywood star (Amir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Fardeen Khan, Diya Mirza, Katrina Kaif, A.R. Rehman, Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, etc) are Muslims. Indians have looked at their talent and many people worship these actors, inspite of them being Muslims. Pakistani artists such as Adnam Sami, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, etc., have made it bigger in India than in Pakistan.

Pakistan does not even allow Indian artists to perform in Pakistan. Why? Pick up any field, Muslims have done as well as any other Indian citizen. In Cricket, the most popular sport, Irfan Khan, Mohammed Kaif, Zaheer Khan, Wasim Zafer, all are Muslims and yet they are considered as stars in this country. Why? Because, every one has been given equal rights by the Indian constitution. Even industry salwarts such as billionoire Azim Premzi who heads the IT giant Wipro, is a Muslim. To top it all, the President of this country Abdul Kalam, is a Muslim. Why is this? Why even after being a Muslim, why are we given equal opportunity? This is the beauty of this country. It does not matter what religion you are, you have right of expression, you have right to travel anywhere, you have the right to be yourself - a complete freedom in the largest democracy of the world. Every society has its problems.

India has its own share of problems. Even the US has problems such as whites vs blacks, Mexicans vs Americans. Does that mean that the US will give a separate country for the blacks or to the Mexicans (Hispanics) in the US, just because their culture and language are simliar to that of South America???? Pakistanis argue that majority of the people in Kashmir are Muslims, so Kashmir must be a part of Pakistan. Well, get your facts right. India has the largest number of Muslims only after Indonesia. So, if you want to argue on that issue, then, Kashmir should be a part of India. And, what does Pakistan plan to give the Kashmiris? An extremist government that is the mother of all the terrorism around the world? At least in India, they can breathe free. In Pakistan, they will be suffocated to death. Remember, what Pak did to Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan)? Due to all the suffocation, Bangladesh had to fight for its independence from Pak. I as a Muslim, feel ashamed of this extremist nation. Because of them, every non-Muslim suspects our community as terrorists or Jihadis. We are looked upon suspicion. Why are they doing this to us? This is the 21st century and why are they creating an image that Islam is intolerant towards other??? We don't want to be called as barbarians. Islam is a very peaceful religion. Even the Prophet has said that killing another human is a crime against humanity.

I feel pained by the killings of innocents on the name of Islam. If only, in India and in the world, we had an able leader for our community who would let know our feelings to the world as well as fellow Indians. We, Muslims of India, love our fellow Indian brothers and sisters. We don't have any hatred towards Hindus, Christians or any other religion. As in any community, we are currently ill represented by our leaders who are spreading hatred for their own benefit. I sincerely pray that we all leave peacefully practicing our individual faiths. This is the only country in the world, where though the majority is Hindu, the President is a Muslim, the Prime Minister is a Sikh and the strongest political person is a Christian. To conclude ... ' dil diya hai, jaan bhi denge, yeh watan tere liye ' Jai Hind !!! --- Abdul Raheem

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 06-14-2006

The vote for India 
Vandita Mishra Posted online: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 0000 hrs Print
India prides itself on having made democracy distinctively Indian. Can it now isolate and package its features for export? 
Vandita Mishra
It was a disorienting start to a conference on India. Deliberations on âThe State of Indiaâs Democracyâ at Indiana University in the small US town of Bloomington recently were kicked off by a lecture on democracy-building in Iraq. The lecture was delivered by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and founding co-editor of the âJournal of Democracyâ, Washington D.C. In 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser of governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad; last year he published his sharp critique of âthe American occupation and the bungled effort to bring democracy to Iraqâ.

The question Diamond squarely placed at the conference door was this: What lessons can India provide to the project to ââbringââ democracy to Iraq? In other words, even as India grapples with its many internal challenges, can it offer an ââIndian modelââ to the world? Does it have portable lessons in democracy?

In retrospect, those were not stray questions in Bloomington. They increasingly resonate in Washington, within its democracy-promotion community and outside it.

Within the sprawling and well-resourced democracy-promotion community in Washington, both among groups allied with the Bush administration as well as those who claim to chart an independent mission, there is loud thinking, becoming louder, about Indiaâs possible fit in their project in Iraq and across the world. Now that India openly proclaims its growing economic-strategic-nuclear intimacies with the US, will it also shed its reluctance to become its partner in democracy-promotion?

Outside the democracy-promotion community, in seminars and scholarly papers, there is a newly fraught discussion about the âIndian model.â Here, however, the question is framed differently: At a time when the currency of international power is being redefined, why must India not leverage a unique resourceânot its rising economic power, but its proven ability to nourish internal diversity and pluralism through the structures of liberal constitutional democracy? India must now realise that its ââdemocratic capitalââ built up over five-and-a-half decades also has enormous instrumental value in a world in which the battle of ideas and images just became more fierce.

What bolsters Indiaâs claim to global eminence of this kind, this argument goes on, is not just the manner in which it has won its moral and political legitimacy in the past, but also the ways in which it negotiates its future. As India hosts debates on growth and social justice and gender equality, and most of all, as it wrestles with the continuing challenge of providing a safe house to its minorities, particularly its Muslims, within the framework of a liberal democracy, the world cannot afford to take its eyes off India. Because, suddenly Indiaâs questions are also the worldâs questions. In âThe Idea of Indiaâ, Sunil Khilnani wrote ââThe future of western political theory will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom largeââ. There appears to be a growing acknowledgement of the force of that observation in seminar rooms in Washington.

So, can we speak of an ââIndian modelââ for the world? If so, does it hold out exportable lessons in democracy, a lâAmericaine? Or must India make use of the ââdemocracy dividendââ by some alternative method, given that US democracy-promotion is mired in Iraq, its legitimacy so deeply in question?

The search for answers must first tackle some other questions. To begin with, what exactly does it mean, call it âdemocracy promotionâ or âdemocracy assistanceâ, or the âbuilding of democratic statesâ from outside?

Formally, of course, democracy-promotion need not be tied to American foreign policy goals â other governments, transnational organisations and international networks are also in the game. But it also remains true that the agenda of the worldâs lone superpower weighs heavy on any act of dividing up the field between the good guys and the bad guys by cheerleaders outside a country.

On paper, all democracy-promotion is non-partisan. But the lines between the use of foreign resources to ââaid democracyââ and to engineer political change have long been disputed on the ground. In Ukraine, for instance, ever since it became clear that an Orange-tinted fairytale may not be headed to its scripted happy endingâdivisions surfaced within the Orange bloc and pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovichâs party fared well in the last parliamentary electionâan old suspicion has reared its head anew: in the end, where it mattered, whose script was it, anyway?

But the question, more fundamentally for India, is this: Is there a standard checklist of democracy? After all, till not so long ago, India itself seemed to be a democracy in defiance of the reigning checklist which prescribed these preconditions â economic prosperity, limited inequality, a strong middle class, high levels of literacy, a productive market economy and a vigorous civil society. Democracy came to India in a unique mix of circumstances and improvisations. India prides itself on having made democracy distinctively Indian. Can it now isolate and package its features for export?

And then, what happens to the democracy deficit within the state that is promoting democracy abroad? In the US, amid new media revelations of the unsuspected magnitude of Bushâs warrant-less domestic surveillance programme, some have complained of an ââoutrage fatigueââ. The list of excesses and cover-ups by an ââimperial presidencyââ that has systematically chipped away at the powers of Congressional oversight is very long indeed: it includes cooked-up intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib. It also includes what recent reports in the media have hinted might soon blow up to be the worst such scandal so far â the cold-blooded massacre by US marines of defenceless and innocent civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha. In India, the renewed violence in Vadodara underlined democracyâs work not yet done in large pockets of continuing fear and insecurity. As reports in this paper have described, Muslims are also being systematically discriminated against in the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in the districts of Gujarat.

At the bottom, perhaps, lies this question: Is democracy a method, a training, an enclosed certitude? Or is democracy, in India as in the US, a politically-contested and ever-vulnerable claim, constantly seeking to democratize itself?

The US faces the brunt of these questions as it presses on in Iraq. At some point in the foreseeable future, India may have to choose whether and in what manner it wants to take them on.

The writer, a senior assistant editor with The Indian Express, is currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington. The views expressed are her own.

vandita.mishra@expressindia.com

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 06-15-2006

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Hindu Rightâs Attempt to Appropriate History

Subhoranjan Dasgupta

I. Introduction

I am aware of the provocative emphasis implicit in the title âHindu Rightâs Attempt to Appropriate Historyâ. This title might prompt a few or many to think that only the Hindu Right, none else, has attempted the wrongful appropriation of history till date. Obviously, that is not the case. The truth of the matter is essentially simple: all political forces ranging from the secular-democratic to the state-rooted socialistâ there are so many shades in betweenâwielding hegemonic power have tried to disseminate their particular versions and interpretations of history. We might choose to describe these attempts as acts of influence or appropriation, which in specific contexts could turn out to be downright false, dangerously divisive and, therefore, socially pernicious. In fact, when these three elements combine, the very act of appropriation imbibes a fascistic trait. But before associating the Hindu Right with this act of calculated appropriation, let me provide four specific examples of other manipulations, two from our subcontinent and two from beyond. These instances will not only substantiate Irfan Habibâs candid observation, âWell, history by being history, based on analysis and evaluation, has to be influenced by some sort of an ideological bias. Always there has been, there is, and there will be mainstream history, Rightwing history, Leftwing history etc.â1 but would also compare well with the programmatic praxis of the Sangh Parivarâs ahistorical historiography.
I offer first, two examples from the subcontinent. Those who have read Yvette Claire Rosserâs two monographsââIslamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooksâ2 and âIndoctrinating MindsâA Case Study of Bangladeshâ3âwill instantly recall that these two instances of appropriation are offered by Pakistan and Bangladesh. Whereas, in Pakistan, since its birth, military as well as civilian governments have wrongly used history to sustain the basic project of Islamic nation-building; in Bangladesh, ironically, political forces opposed to the secular principle of the liberation war have deftly used the collective loss of memory of the new generation to promote the same spirit of majoritarian communalism, which often borders on blatant fundamentalism. In point of fact, this influence has accelerated at present with the Jamat-i-Islami sharing power with Khaleda Ziaâs Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Needless to add, there are striking similarities between the ways and methods adopted by the radical Islamists on our west and east and those adopted by our very own Hindu Right. This similarity, binary in character, is pithily summed up in the following phrase of Yvette Claire Rosser, âHegemonic Hindustan: Pakistanâs Significant Otherâ.3 Not surprisingly, both these âhegemonic Hindustan and Pakistanâ are in one single voice quite dismissive of Akbar. Almost echoing Vinayak Damodor Savarkarâs vilificatory assessment of Akbar in Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History,4 Pakistanâs statist historians inspired by I.H. Quereshi5 dismiss Akbar as dubiously Islamic and, accordingly, dangerous. To cut it short, histories such as these are based and thrive on plain distortion of facts leading to maliciously distorted analysis and interpretation.
I offer now, two examples from the Western world, highlighted not by historians but by two creative personalities, Heiner Mueller and Guenter Grass. The most important and controversial dramatist and theatre director of Germany, after Bertolt Brecht, and an avant garde Leftist, Heiner Mueller, in an interview given in September 1992, titled Auschwitz Kein Ende / Auschwitz No End,6 said:
There are infallible documents in Washington which prove that the USA knew of the existence of concentration camps long before the Russians liberated Auschwitz. Churchill knew since 1941. Even more explosive is the fact that German producers of the killer-gas, I G Farben, conducted their experiments in close cooperation with American concerns.7
Without exonerating the Nazi criminals in any way, one still feels like asking a crucial question: did the textbooks in Germany, USA, England record this information, this fore-knowledge? I put this question to academics who are busy recording the re-writing of history in Europe since the fall of state socialism. Their answer was: âNot as yet.â This is an instance of appropriation by erasure.
This example of not fabrication, but duplicitous silence, is no monopoly of the West. Germanyâs most well-known living novelist, Guenter Grass, whose opposition to Nazism and Neo-Nazism needs no repetition, in his latest documentary novel Crabwalk,8

tragedy of the war years, the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945 in the Baltic Sea. Struck by Soviet torpedoes, the ship went down with 9000 people, mostly women and childrenâGerman refugeesâtrying to escape towards Germany. Without going into the problem of ethics related to this disaster, without trying to judge, the question that is now being asked is elementary: why did Soviet and East German textbooks of the former GDR treat this incident as taboo? Why this deafening silence? Of course Grass was asked: âDonât you think that this novel will add to the arsenal of the Neo-Nazis?â His answer was quite categorical:
This question is both mischievous and stupid. Should one present the dark spots to the Neo-Nazis on a platter so that they may exploit these to the hilt and claim that Wilhelm Gustloff is the only truth and Auschwitz is a lie? Is our ideology so weak and fragile? We shall face the past full and square and then condemn Fascism for what it is.9

II. Hindu Rightâs Appropriation

The Hindu Right, since the days of Acharya Ramdev, author of the fanciful Bharatvarsh ka Itihas (1910-1914 in two volumes),10 implemented the following measures to appropriate history wrongfully. But this entire enterprise was given a new, frightening dimension since the wresting of political power by the BJP. The limited ahistoric progamme of the past then turned into a fullscale national venture.

Measure 1: Imposition of Silence
Those events and processes that have occurred in the past, which question and oppose the ideology and worldview of Hindutva as well as expose the condemnable acts of the votaries of Hindutva or their icons, will be suppressed. This is the measure of imposing silence, and, as we know, it could prove to be quite fruitful. Why? Because if you succeed in imposing this silence over and over again for a sufficient stretch of time, you manage to produce a tabula rasa where the unpleasant truth fails to appear. The most flagrant example of this kind of suppression occurred when Murli Manohar Joshi was the Minister of HRD. He saw to it that the relevant volume of the series âTowards Freedomâ (1946) edited by Sumit Sarkar did not see the light of the day because he feared that this too would expose the loyalist and servile character of the Hindu Right in the 1940s with documentary evidence, as the preceding volume edited by Parthsarathy Gupta had done. When I interviewed Professsor Amartya Sen on the follies and fallacies of the Hindutva-inspired history, he gave another less flagrant but revealing example of this well-directed silence. He said:
The introduction of European scholars to Hindu scriptures, in particular the Upanishads, was to a great extent based on the Persian translation of the Upanishads done by Dara Shikoh, the first-born son of Shah Jahan . Dara Shikoh was not a great Sanskrit scholar but he did work hard with the help of Hindu Pandits to learn Sanskrit and he translated parts of Upanishads into Persian. But I have not seen any mention in the Hindutva literature of the contribution of this Mughal prince to the spread of understanding of Hinduism at home and abroad.11
Even the ghastly murder of Dara at the direct command of Hindutvaâs bete noire Aurangzeb did not result in any recognition of his role.

Measure 2: Choice of Half-truths
Instead of placing the entire Gestalt of Truth with its several layers and currents that could be wellnigh anomalous, the Radical Hindu Rightâs history-writing has indulged in arbitrary and deceitful âpick and chooseâ in order to focus on what they would like to and to eliminate what they consider unpleasant. Compared to total silence and suppression, which has been labelled Measure 1, this second method promotes a selective manipulation of facts as well as a selective silence. The result is a proliferation of half- truths which are, at times, even more dangerous than unadulterated lies. The most blatant example of this meticulously planned âscissoredâ history where one part of the page remains and the other part is rejected is the current deification of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar by the Sangh Parivar. Any comprehensive and reliable assessment of Savarkar will have to take into account his early phase as a freedom-fighter and his authoring The First Indian War of Independence (1857) as well as his later and decisive phase of politics steadfastly affixed to Hindutva, based on religious antagonism, peppered with repeated declarations of loyalty to the British Raj and his undisputed role in encouraging the assassination of Gandhi. All the present-day acolytes of Savarkar do not mention this second phase at all. They harp ceaselessly on his âbrave exploitsâ as a selfless freedom-fighter, uncompromising patriot etc etc. Even archival evidence pointing directly to the contrary (available in the National Archives) and the impartial assessments of A. G. Noorani and Ranjan Gupta in their respective books Savarkar and Hindutva12 and Beer Savarkar, Itihaser Aloi13 have failed to move the appropriators. Precisely because they refuse to see. For, if they dare open their eyes, the entire edifice that they have built around this man will crumble. After all, the Sangh Parivar cannot boast of many Savarkars who at one point of time did something laudatory. As a result, we are given a truncated version which attempts to invest âloyalist Hindutvaâ with the deceptive glow of anti-colonial resistance. Wherein lies the limitless danger of such misappropriation? The answer to this question becomes clear when you recall what the poet-statesman of Hindutva, our former Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had to say on his hero. He, without blinking his eyes this time, said: âSavarkar, like Bhagat Singh, will be forever revered as an uncompromising fighter.â To students of history, who are well aware of the lives of these two figures, I need not outline the unbridgeable difference between the two. When, however, one tries to erase this difference, backed as that one is by the formidable power of the state, history is taken for a shameless ride.

Measure 3: Frenzy of Fantasy
By comparison, this is much simpler. It indulges in ceaseless production of plain lies which are presented as truths of the aggrieved heart and emotional verities. Once this Pandoraâs Box is opened myths, fairy tales, suitable fragments of epics, fancies, dreams, nightmaresâall rush into the terrain of history to convert it into an ever-expanding forcefield of fantasy where appropriation is fomented by sheer, unbridled imagination. A pathetic sense of glorificatory wish-fulfilment, communitarian to the core, accompanies this flourish of history gone awry. It began with pioneers like Ramdev who tried to sell the idea that the North Indian Aryas had their resplendent Aryan Air Force. Harald Fischer Tineâs expose of Ramdevâs fantasy is suitably titled âInventing a National Pastâ.14 This tradition has continuedâwhen not in power, surely and steadilyâand when in power with sound and fury. As a result, we have to challenge today the following myths or heartâs desires parading as history:
1) There, in that particular place, Ma Sita cooked. Hence, we have Sita ki Rasoi, which has to be purified and recovered.
2) Lord Krishna himself prohibited the killing of cows in Brindaban.
3) Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey under the direct influence of Indian epics.
4) The Vedas declared that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its own axis
Such examples can be piled up. In fact, the state-directed propagation of this accumulated garbage almost threatened the very progress of genuine historiography. For the first time, we crossed the Rubicon to confront another enterprise which was simply another discipline or lack of it, call it creative extravaganza if you choose, but not history.
Now that the process of appropriation has been described, let me underline the essence of this appropriation and its radical difference from the essence of history. The essence of this appropriation rejects historyâto use the use the words of Amartya Senâas âcapacious heterodoxyâ. When asked to explain what he meant by âcapacious heterodoxyâ, he said:
In order to study history, we have to have a sense of space-that there could be different ways of looking at past events, and in case there are differences, we should be able to argue it out. Heterodoxy is important because understanding history requires different approaches. Furthermore, heterodoxy is itself sometimes among the most interesting things to study in the history of a civilisation or a culture.15
In place of this enquiring and invigorating heterodoxy, the axis of Hindutvaâs history revolves around the narrow and confined antagonism between the Hindu and its âOtherâ, specifically Muslim and Christian. Sumit Sarkar condemns this self-devouring myopia because it bolts the door on the flowering of âmany historiesâ revolving around so many other axesâlike gender, class, social movement, environ-ment, creative texts etc etc.16
We now phrase the final question: what constitutes the fundamental difference between a wrongful appropriation and an acceptable text which does incorporate a specific point of view, or even an ideological stress? Explaining the difference Irfan Habib argued:
You, as a historian, no matter what point of view you hold, have to deal with facts, and not fiction. As to how you arrange, select, place, that is your concern, but you cannot brandish fiction and fantasy as history. Nor can you select in a manner that impairs the multiple sides of an event or a figure. As opposed to this, what we confront today is the propagation of lies, half truths or fiction garbed as history. Secular politics and honest historians are opposed to this motivated, unprofessional propagation.17

III. Romila Thapar on Somanatha

In conclusion, I would like to evaluate a recent example of remarkable resistance to this kind of propagation. This short evaluation, of Romila Thaparâs book SomanathaâThe Many Voices of a History18 honours an abiding example of that historiography, which is opposed in every possible way to Hindutvaâs attempted appropriation of history.
A vicious slander campaign was launched by the hardcore Hindu Right against Romila Thapar when she was offered the prestigious âKluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the Southâ at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. last year. Supporters

Tell this commie, anti-Hindu woman to get lost because she dares to question the fact that Mahmud of Ghazni plundered and destroyed the Somnath temple.
But Romila Thapar, who describes herself as a âgood liberal historianâ, has never challenged facts, no matter how unpalatable they are. Her book SomanathaâThe Many Voices of a Historyâa remarkable example of assiduous and open-ended historiographyâbegins with the sentence:
In 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni raided the temple of Somanatha, plundered its wealth and broke the idol.
From the very second sentence, however, this eminent historian questions the Saffron interpretation of the event, which has been carefully constructed to serve the sectarian agenda of Savarkar-Hedgewar-Golwalkar and the rest. The basis of this RSS version was provided by colonial historiography framed by the British who depended solely on Turko-Persian chronicles. Indeed, the latter acquired a hegemonic status and the British imperialists utilised this source to âunderline the theory of a permanent confrontation between Hindu and Muslimâ¦since the raid could neither be forgiven nor forgotten.â (pages 12-13) It is not at all surprising that those who swear full-throated by nationalism and their foreign masters stuck to the same thesis. For, while the British fanned the Hindu-Muslim hostility to strengthen their rule, the votaries of Hindutva inflamed it further after 1947 to sustain their march towards a Hindu Rashtra.
Romila Thapar has not ignored chronicler-historians like Ferishta whose âTurko-Persianâ reading of the event had its own political agenda to fulfil. In one solid chapter running to 40 pages, she has dissected this one-sided, simplistic version penned by fawning court-poets who eulogised Mahmud as the torchbearer of Islam inflicting severe humiliation on infidels and their idols. In order to drive their point home, they repeated the ravage over and over again. But this repetition simply did not occur. Exposing the element of fiction ingrained in this cyclic exaggeration, the author says:
â¦after the first raid, the claim ceases to be history and becomes rhetoric.
What is really baffling is that the Hindu-nationalist historians like K.M. Munshi (he took the lead in rebuilding the temple after 1947, much to the annoyance of Nehru) did not bother to examine the âotherâ crucial sources. These are Sanskrit inscriptions claiming that the âdesecrated but not destroyedâ temple revived as a place of pilgrimage soon after the raid; biographies and chronicles of Jaina scholars which indicate that the raid of Mahmud did not disturb Chalukya power; biographies by Rajput poets which do not reduce the Turk-Rajput hostility to the single cause of a vertical religious divide; and, above all, stories and legends inspired by popular imagination attesting to a vibrant syncretic attachment to religion even after Mahmudâs depredation.
All these other sources were excluded or consigned to amnesia so that the dangerously selective âmemory of trauma and devastationâ could be nurtured for centuries. This module of trauma had no place for the spirit of amity that bound Arab traders and people of Gujarat in the eleventh century together, no mention of the mosque which was allowed to be built near Somnath and no reference to Mahmudâs nephew Gazi Miyan who
was disillusioned by his uncleâs plunder and decided to spend his life in the service of humanity. (page 55)
By juxtaposing all these varied sources for the first time, which question the one-dimensional Turko-Persian narrative by cross-evaluating one with the other, by being inclusive in the proper sense of the term, Romila Thapar has underlined the difference between enlightened historiography and dubious memory parading as history. No wonder, her opponents fumed:
Itâs a shame to the US and the Indian Government that a Communist like Romila Thapar is having a free run.
Describing Romila Thapar as a Communist is a wrongful appropriation of identity, and identity is an intrinsic part of history. Her book sets the records straight. It recovers the past in the way genuine historiography should. n

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Interview with Irfan Habib, by the author. âFor Truthâs Sakeâ, The Statesman, January 19, 2004.
2. Islamisation of PakistanâSocial Studies Textbooks by Yvette Claire Rosser, Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2003, in association with Observer Research Foundation.
3. Indoctrinating MindsâA Case Study of Bangladesh by Yvette Claire Rosser, Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2004, in association with Observer Research Foundation.
4. Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History by V D Savarkar, Rajdhani Granthagar, New Delhi, 1970. Savarkarâs assessment of Akbar is in the fifth section of the book.
5. Islamisation of Pakistan, page 42.
6. Drucksache 16, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, pages 603-614.
7. Ibid., page 607.
8. Crabwalk by Guenter Grass, Faber and Faber, London, 2002.
9. Guenter Grass in conversation with journalists, 2002. From Radio Broadcast, Deutsche Welle.
10. Bharatvarsh ka Itihas (in two volumes) by Acharya Ramdev, Swami Sraddhanand Anusandhan Prakash Kendra, Hardwar, 1910-1914. Harald Fischer Tineâs excellent article on Ramdevâs history âInventing a National Pastâ is included in Hinduism in Public and Private edited by Anton Copley (OUP, 2003).
11. Interview with Amartya Sen by the author, âHindutva and Historyâ, Outlook, January 21, 2002.
12. Savarkar and Hindutva by A. G. Noorani, Left Word, New Delhi, 2002.
13. Beer Savarkar, Itihaser Aloy/Veer Savarkar, In the Light of History, Deyâs Publishing, Kolkata, 2004.
14. See 10.
15. See 11.
16. Interview with Sumit Sarkar by the author, Ananda Bazar Patrika, June 6, 2004.
17. See 1.
18. SomanathaâThe Many Voices of a History by Romila Thapar, Viking, New

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 06-15-2006

Unplugging Gandhi and his relationship with dissenters

By V.B.Rawat
Saturday, June 03, 2006
http://www.freeindiamedia.com/guest_column/12_june_06.html

QUOTE
Gandhi and Fascism

Often in the struggle against Fascism, many people often quote Gandhi. One does not know whether Gandhi could be a really useful to struggle against dictatorship and fascism. His Ramrajya was the concept of a brahmanical order based on patriarchical values of his time. His regimentation of volunteers wearing Khadi was no lesser than the arms wielding soldiers of the Hitlerâs army who developed a superiority complex about German race. Moreover, Gandhi enjoyed being a â Messiahâ, a spiritual leader of the masses more than a political leader. In fact, he used both these identities to strengthen his base.

Indian Fascism will be cultural, it will be cultural reaction. Therefore violence may not be such a very outstanding feature of Indian fascism. It has been said that Fascism is violence, violent suppression of minorities, of freedom. It is not just that. In India Fascism may be non-violent........Congress party has secured the advantage from the backwardness of the masses. The cultural backwardness makes the Indian masses superstitious, religiously inclined and given to blind faith. The Congress with its Mahatma has made political capital out of that factor to secure the support of the masses... by exploiting its Mahatma cult; the congress has won the support of the masses...

The highest ambition of any German is to put on a uniform. When Hitler put all of them in uniforms, they believed they were all superman, and followed by him. Similarly in our country also, the people are being put in a uniform: Khaddar is a political uniform, and they also think that by donning the Mahatmic uniform, and a particular kind of headgear, they become superman. The Indian people can be more easily regimented spiritually, because thanks to our cultural tradition they are predisposed that way. â Ramdhunâ will cast the hypnotic spell. Blind faith is the characteristic of religious mentality. The Mahatma and his army of propagandists will fully exploit that asset, and persuade the gullible people that every act of the national government is for their good, they must only be submissive and obey.â

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - acharya - 06-15-2006

Why India survives

http://www.freeindiamedia.com/guest_column/index.htm

Contrary to many predictions a unified and democratic India still survives. Why? Ramachandra Guha continues his rememberance of the great patriots.

October 2004 - Ever since India became independent, there have been sceptics who have predicted its imminent demise. Some have claimed that it would soon become a basket-case, marked by mass famines; others that it would break up into many competing nation-states; still others that general elections would give way to rule by unelected generals. Indiaâs survival as a united and (largely) independent democracy is a standing rebuke to these prophets of doom. It is also a rebuff to orthodox theories of political science, which hold that countries which are poor and culturally heterogeneous cannot be democratic.

Why hasnât India, then, gone the way of sub-Saharan Africa? Or of Yugoslavia? Or of neighbouring Pakistan? Why does a united and (mostly) democratic India survive?

There are, I think, eight main reasons why there is still an India, eight factors or processes that serve to keep this motley crew somewhat together. Of these, four are the bequest of the British: the game of cricket, the railways, the civil service and the English language. Four others are of (so to say) âindigenousâ origin. The first of these is the Hindi film, which has provided a shared pantheon of heroes and a shared vocabulary in which to speak of them. A second are the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which have given us a shared moral (and sometimes immoral) universe. A third is the sense of territorial boundedness given us by the Himalaya and the oceans. A fourth, and to my mind the most significant of all, is the integrative idea of India embodied in the Constitution.

As I have argued in previous columns, this idea of India was the work above all of four men. Thus Gandhi and Tagore gave us a non-destructive, open-minded nationalism, its windows open to the world. Gandhi and Ambedkar, working in parallel and sometimes in opposition, together fatally undermined the legitimacy of caste prejudice. Gandhi and Nehru, working together, insisted that neither state nor civil society should favour one religion over another.

I have seen these men as forming part of a single, complementary, even unified quartet. That, of course, is not how the partisans and party men see them â nor, admittedly, is it how it was in their own lifetimes. Tagore and Gandhi greatly respected one another; yet they had frequent and sometimes quite heated debates. Likewise Gandhi and Nehru. And Ambedkar certainly saw Gandhi (and sometimes Nehru too) as a political rival. However, from the detached perspective of the historian, it is more fruitful to see them not as rivals, but as allies in the building of a shared idea of India. There might be, indeed were, disagreements on the most suitable methods to achieve these ends, but no serious disagreement on the ends themselves: namely, representative democracy, religious harmony, gender and caste equality, and cultural ecumenism.

One of the finest tributes to the Tagore-Gandhi-Nehru-Ambedkar idea of India was offered by the scientist and polymath, J.B.S. Haldane. In 1956, Haldane moved to Calcutta to join the Indian Statistical Institute, at the same time putting in his papers for Indian nationality. A few years later, an American science writer described Haldane as a âcitizen of the worldâ. The Englishman-turned-Indian replied: âNo doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do thisâ¦On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organization. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India.â

Haldane once called India âthe closest approximation to the Free Worldâ. A scientist friend from New York protested, saying his impression was that âIndia has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractiveâ. To this Haldane responded: âPerhaps one is freer to be a scoundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould [i.e., the nineteen twenties], when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The âdisgusting subservienceâ of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I donât think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue.â

The people of Calcutta still riot and upset trams, and the government of India (as I know from experience) still responds to criticism, very slowly. And there still are fears that India might break up, these caused by the rising force of threats to the idea of India which has, for some sixty years, held this nation together. Of these threats I myself hold three to be most dangerous; those of Hindu chauvinism, of assorted caste chauvinisms, and of the corruption and degradation of public institutions.

The press and public opinion are quite alert to the dangers posed by these threats. Less attention, perhaps, has been paid to what lies behind them. I would like to suggest that behind the rise of religious and caste chauvinism, and of public immorality, lies an alternate quartet of ideological figures. Where the original idea of India rested on the work of Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, the degradation of the idea of India has been inspired by the work and example of, among others, M.S. Golwalkar, V.D. Savarkar, Indira Gandhi and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

It is tempting to consider these figures head-to-head, pair by contrasting pair. Thus, Tagore was a pluralist, deeply engaged with his own cultural traditions yet willing to celebrate any lamp lit anywhere in the world; Golwalkar a cultural xenophobe, fearful and suspicious of cricket, the English language, trousers, skirts and all other things âforeignâ. Then again, Gandhi and Savarkar gave us alternate visions of the nation-state; the Mahatmaâs based upon the idea that it must be respectful of the sentiments and beliefs of all its citizens; Savarkarâs on the notion that one religious group must aggressively direct and dictate public policy. Third, we have Nehru and Indira âthe father nurturing a multi-party system, a free press, an autonomous bureaucracy and an independent judiciary; the daughter instead imposing single-party rule and favouring journalists, judges and civil servants who were subservient to her and her party. Finally, we have, in rivalry, two professed spokesmen for the underclass: one, Ambedkar, who used the law and public institutions to deepen the processes of democracy; the other, Laloo, for whom âsocial justiceâ in effect means the perversion of public institutions for the aggrandizement of oneâs family and, at a pinch, oneâs caste.

I must confess that to think of these figures as contrasting pairs is an idea that is not entirely original. Recall that when Savarkarâs portrait was hung in parliament, it was placed directly opposite a portrait of Mahatma Gandhiâs. Perhaps parliament should now take this further, by putting a portrait of Golwalkar opposite one of Tagore, a portrait of Indira Gandhi opposite one of Jawaharlal Nehru, a portrait of Laloo Prasad Yadav opposite one of B.R. Ambedkar. Then we shall openly have before us the real, true, ultimate choices facing India, and Indians. â

Ramachandra Guha
October 2004

Ramachandra Guha is a historian, and a regular columnist with The Telegraph of Calcutta. This is the third of a multi-part series of articles on the nation's great patriots.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 06-18-2006

QUOTE
Dangerous Signals

M V KAMATH

It is painful to say so, but it has to be said before it is too late. The
Congress-led UPA government is leading the country into a mess from which, if
immediate action is not taken, it may become very hard to extricate ourselves.

This is stated more in sadness than in anger. To the ordinary citizen it is not
which party is in power but which party is exerting to keep the people together
in the pursuit of peace, prosperity and national unity above all.

In this regard the Congress failure is writ all over it face. And the
reaction is, to state it in plain terms, frightening. National unity is not
achieved through dividing society into castes ? forward, backward or scheduled.

It is not achieved by insisting on reservations to particular castes or
communities not only in educational institutions but even in private
enterprises. That is not government. That is plain dictatorship. It only spurs
deep resentment and discontent among people to no one's advantage. To openly
talk about increased appointment of Muslims in the Armed Forces is to make
Muslims more conscious of their religious attachments and create a sense of
unwantedness in their minds. Alienation among Muslims is growing to the point
that in Uttar Pradesh, a group of Muslim outfits have launched their own
Islamic political party misleadingly called Peoples' Democratic Front. Their
charge is that all these years Muslims have been treated as a vote bank by
various political parties and they will not stand it any longer.

Muslim separatism is raising its ugly head all over again. It may be worth remembering that the last time the Leftists were in power in Kerala they helped redraw district boundaries so that within the State there will be at least one
district which has a Muslim majority. Now a section of Muslims in Andhra
Pradesh is demanding that should the State be further divided with the creation
of Telangana, then Hyderabad city must be given the status of a City State,
presumably with a Muslim majority.

People have stopped thinking of themselves as Indians. They are coming to think of themselves as Muslims or members of this or that community.

Even as the proposed Peoples' Democratic Front was getting organised, its self-appointed chairman, Maulana Kalbe Jawwad, a prominent Shia cleric was talking of how the Uttar Pradesh government of Mulayam Singh Yadav was biased. As Jawwad saw the situation, in recent times as many as 1,800 constables were recruited by the State of whom nearly 1,000 were Yadavs and only 30 (thirty) Muslims. Jawwad is reported as saying: 'If the 7 per cent Yadavs in the State and 12 per cent Dalits can occupy power in Uttar Pradesh, why can't the 22 per cent Muslims do so?'

This exclusiveness is spreading and is getting the support of important
Muslim leaders like the Shahi Imam of Delhi's Jama Masjid, Ahmed Bukhari who
has been named as the PDF's patron. At this rate we will soon have parties not based on economic ideologies, but on caste, creed and religion.

The move to form a separate Islamic political party should not be treated lightly. The message will spread fast. Attending the meeting held to establish the PDF were
some important Muslim leaders like the Imam of Masjid Teela Shah, president of
the Jamat-e-Islami, president of the Majlis-e-Mashawarat, president of the
All-India Muslim Forum, president of Parcham Party and president of the Indian
National Muslim League.

The original Muslim League led by M A Jinnah went about
systematically to destroy the unity of India that eventually led to partition,
wholesale bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in what became Pakistan and that
decades-old hatred has still not died out. What the PDF will do is anybody's
guess. But the nation is warned. The Muslim League did poorly in the 1937
elections to the Legislative Assemblies. It is also true that in the late
thirties and early forties it was the British Raj that was in power which
encouraged Islamic separatism. But when Muslims continue to think of themselves
as a neglected minority and apply themselves to the task of demanding all sorts
of benefits, rightly or wrongly, the nation will be forced to pay a heavy
price. Minoritism is an evil that should under no circumstances be tolerated.
Caste or religion-based political parties should be immediately banned. They
are a menace to the unity of India. 

The UPA government has stooped to such a low level of politicising
religion that the Union Minister for Minority Affairs, A R Antulay seems
determined to impart - or impose - minority status on Jains, who have not even
asked for it. As recently as August 2005, a Supreme Court Bench comprising of then Chief Justice R C Lahoti and Justices D M Dharmadhikari and P K
Balasubramanyam had directed the national and State-level Minority Commissions
to find ways of first reducing and ultimately ending the listing of notified
minorities, rather than increasing them.

In India there are no minorities. There are only Indians. And any political party based on religious grounds must be immediately banned, no matter under what misleading title it is formed. The trouble is that the Congress appears to have lost all sense of direction. Knowing what led to partition, the Congress should have been the first to discourage minoritism under any guise. Even to have a Minority Ministry is itself symbolic of a mindset out to divide people. The PDF wants to know how come so few Muslims were chosen as constables in Uttar Pradesh. It should have first checked out how many Muslims did, in fact, apply for the jobs in the constabulary and of them how many were eligible. It is sixty years since India
became free.

In these sixty years what did the Muslim leadership do to create
jobs for Muslims? Was it necessary to set up madrassahs in every town and
village when the demand is increasingly not for knowing how many passages from
the Quran one can recite but how good is the youngster at Mathematics? When
will Muslims understand that to get on in life one must get on with modernity?

The UPA government must spend lavishly on setting up primary schools and
encourage every low-income family to send its sons and daughters to get higher
education by providing financial incentives. In due course ? say, a couple of
decades ? minority students, so-called, will be able to gain self-confidence
and get seats in institutes of higher learning in their own rights.

For a nation some 10,000 years old, a couple of decades count for nothing. An earnest prayer to the UPA is: Kindly stop dividing people. It is unbecoming of you.

The British in their time did it and we know with what consequences. Let it not be
said that like the Bourbons, the Congress has learnt nothing and forgotten
nothing. This is not a party matter. It deals with the very essence of national
unity and concerns all of us determined to stop further divisions of the
country.

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 07-10-2006

Pioneer on the raked-up sabarimala 'controversy'

The Great Indian Political Debate - 2 - Guest - 07-15-2006

Came in via email.

QUOTEOn 6th of JulyÂ Indian representative inÂ Â newly formed United Nations human right council not onlyÂ voted along with OIC(organisation of Islamic conference ) against Israel it condemned Israel as offensiveÂ in ongoing conflict in Gaza strip started after abduction of one Israeli soldier by Palestinian terrorist group to insure the release of more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners. This was another big development in foreign policy matters. In less than one monthÂ this is second time when Indian government has indicated about its intention to revert its foreign policy.

Â Â Â Â Â Earlier inÂ an unusual and extraordinary declaration inÂ middle of June Prime Minister announced he is not going to take part in United nations summit scheduled in September instead he will attend Non Aligned summit to beÂ held in Cuba at the same time. In one of my earlier article I tried to analyseÂ this trend.

Â Â Â Â Indian vote in human right council along with Arab nations against IsraelÂ could be taken asÂ an effort to undo its earlierÂ mistake to goÂ against Iran in IAEA to appease Muslim constituency at home to get better result in next upcoming assembly elections in UP. But it would beÂ very generic assessment.

Â Â Â Â It is not merely a politics of Muslim vote bank it is pregnant with some other possibilities also. Now it has become very important to find out those elements that are responsible for this policy reversal.Â

Â Â Â Â Â On the one hand Congress party herself is behaving like opposition with his Prime minister on the issue of economic reform and the other hand he is being compelled to eat the crow on front of foreign policy also. Picture is very much clear PM facing resistance from his own people but this resistance is not confined to change of leadership only it also implied with paradigm shift of Indian stand on international issues. This battle of Congress inspire us to understand the role and psyche of its president.Â

Â So called queen of sacrifice when rejected the offer of Prime minister shiptwo years backÂ lot of questioned were roaming around Rashtrapati Bhavan and PMO but none ofÂ them were able to get satisfactory answers andÂ those questions are still relevant and unanswered . Congress president Mrs. Sonia Gandhi who was unanimously elected as leader of UPA and went Rashtrapati Bhavan to stake her claim to form new government mysteriously appointed other personÂ on this post. What happened at Rashtrapati Bhavan and what was discussed between president and Congress president is still a secret between three persons Dr Manmohan singh , Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and President himself. Although at that time Rashtrapati Bhavan clarified its position and killed all rumors but new shift in foreign policy and alignment of UPA in general and Congress in particularÂ with radical Islam has made the role ofÂ Congress presidentÂ suspicious.

Â Before Congress led government was formed at center Congress president was known for her proximity with one Islamic front, which is headed by a brother of International Islamic terrorist. She once made speech in one of seminars of this organization. Involvement ofÂ congress in some international suspicious syndicate came under scanner of international agencies when few years back a senior and influential leader of this party was detained on one of American airport by its security agencies under suspicion of being drug peddler.

Â Â In last November when volker committee report reveled strong bondage of Congress with Middle eastern Arab nations this controversy was resolved and Natwar singh was made scapegoat. On volker report see my article.Before disclosure of this report foreign minister Natwar singh was blue eyed boy of Congress president who left no stone unturned in embarrassing prime minister with his Anti-American and pro Non-allignmnetÂ statements. Natwar singh lobbied hard to insure Indian vote in favour of Iran but in that high volatile situation Prime minister himself took the command and talked with Russia, Britain, France and Germany to go along with these nations. At that time it was really astonishing to witness how a member of cabinet can disown its prime minister, but it was not merely a case of cabinet minister's disagreement with his prime minister it was some other forces within Congress with its left leaning were trying to push their agenda.

Â Â Since India voted against Iran in IAEA in October Congress looked totally divided on this issue. One of close aid to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi Mani shanker ayyerÂ repeatedly talked about Indo-Pak- Iran gas pipeline and was much eager and enthuse to get it done knowing well that Iran has become a contentious issue for prime minister .Â

Â Â Â Â After Indian vote in IAEAÂ Congress tried everything to get back its Muslim support and in this process lot of announcements were made to appease Muslims. Human resource development minister Arjun singh one of loyal of Congress president( who earlier have proved his loyalty during regime of Narsimha Rao by dividing congress as congress-Tiwari) took the job to implement the policies of Muslim appeasement with one other confident of Sonia Gandhi Samaual Rajshekher Reddy . In this process both of them not only taken some extra constitutional decisions, Arjun singh went too far to visit Saudi Arabia to pat the back of Al-Azhar university the most notorious and radical IslamicÂ institute.
Â Â Â
Â Â In this background it is easy to analyse the reason and intentionÂ behind Arjun singh 's visit to Saudi Arab. He was there not as representative of Indian cabinet but as an envoy of Congress president to express her solidarity with Arab nations.

Â Â Â Â Â But million-dollar question is still unanswered why Congress president want to dislodge her own nominee. Is center of power in national capitalÂ is under shadow of international cold war politics with each of them want to push the agenda ofÂ its left or right leanings.Â

Â Â Policies of prime minister itself indicate from where it gets inspiration. His foreign policy or economic policy is nothing than continuation ofÂ process started from the regime ofÂ late Narsimha rao. Prime minister is only forwarding those policies which had consensus in every governemnt right from Narsimha rao to Atal Bihari vajapee even short term governments of third frontÂ didÂ notÂ revertÂ them but what extraordinary situatuon has arise that some forces in congress want to reverse evenÂ those policies which areÂ of paramount national interest.

Â Â OIC is an organisation, which not only supported the stand of Pakistan in Kashmir, issues in its every summit it always-embarrassed India by raising the issue of Human rights violation in Kashmir valley. Indian decision to condemn Israel along with Arab nations was not compelled with vote bank politics itÂ smells some international conspiracy.

Â Conflict of Israel-Palestine has become pivotal to Islamic terrorism. Those forces want to destroy Israel sooner or later going to destroy every non-Islamic nation.Â In this situation national interest demands to support those forces which can prove to be a front against these Islamic forces.

Â Â Â As far as rationality or humanity of Indian stand in human rights council is concerned it is also not up to the mark. It was Palestinian terrorist organisation which fuelled this strife by kidnapping one of Israeli soldier and what ever step Israel taken was in accordance to its fundamental rights to protect its citizens from the clutches of enemy. How come Indian representative snatch this basic right of Israel particularly when India herself is under threat of Islamic terrorism.

Â Now left-right division of Congress is visible which is not limited to internal policies alone it is spreading its tentacles to external policies also. It will be interesting to see how long this battle of cold war goes on in power center and finally who emerge as victorious.Â