12-10-2004, 01:12 AM
This probably belongs to multiple threads and needs to be x-posted in other threads..
Academic Researchers Versus Hindu Civilisation - Gautam Sen
We got another Bengali Samurai.. <!--emo&:rocker--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rocker.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='rocker.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The collaborationist Indian left and the West</b>
Allied to the designs of US Cold War politics and its academics an overwhelming majority of India's English speaking scholars has been mobilised in a veritable campaign against the alleged dangers of a Hindu awakening in India. These native scholars and their assorted domestic allies wield influence disproportionate to their numbers, a counterpart of the Anglicised consumer, who, despite numerical paucity, generates vast advertising revenues for India's English newspapers, though this too is changing as the pockets of the 'untutored' bulge with cash. What are their motives? The uncharitable view is that the current political dispensation is a source of deep anxiety for the English-speaking cosmopolitans because the untutored (and unwashed?) traditional denizens of India's provincial towns have wrested political control of mainstream politics from them. All sorts of political alliances are therefore afoot, not least with sectarian Islam, the only reliable bloc vote in India unequivocally against the growing voice of the Hindu majority in Indian politics as well. The disadvantaged marginal Hindu groups are proving unreliable because they are insufficiently exercised by the equity of religious stake holders in Indian politics to wish to disrupt India Inc itself; their leaders merely want to supplant others to usurp a larger share of the spoils for themselves.
A more charitable interpretation is that if you believe in the class struggle and seek revolutionary change to liberate the masses, horizontal societal, as opposed to vertical class, divisions among toiling Indians of different religious communities have to be opposed, by whatever means necessary. The Chinese Communists have been undermining this already improbable reverie of late by unleashing the full force of the coercive apparatus of their State on unpaid workers who dare to strike and even commit suicide, in public displays of despair. That apparently embarrasses the workers' government, which begins to look increasingly familiar as a classic example of fascism, ruthlessly directing a corporate society and all the apparatuses of State power through a political party, without any apology or hint of public accountability.
Be that as it may, a few lies, subterfuges and resort to the help of international sympathisers for such a noble cause, which is permitted by revolutionary theory anyway, is hardly criminal. The idea that some of these international academic sympathisers might enjoy cordial ties with governmental agencies hostile to Indian national interests, as many clearly do, is deemed an invention of the despicable Indian State, which represents the oppressor classes. Never mind who the infinitely more powerful US State and its imperial collaborators represent. Once these certainties are established, the burden of accepting financial rewards and prestigious appointments from abroad is a cross that has to be borne courageously, for the sake of the eventual liberation of the masses from fascist oppression. The struggle stretches way back, beyond the Sangh Parivar to Indira Gandhi, nay her father. Indeed, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru faced a more hostile international press than his daughter or the redoubtable Atal Behari Vajpayee. India's English speaking 'leftist' elites had a more ambiguous relationship vis-Ã -vis the Indian State under Jawaharlal Nehru, since the Indian social order was more consonant with their own conception of their place within it and dissent was choreographed accordingly. Atal Behari Vajpayee's really serious infraction in the eyes of the 'world community', the highest court of appeal in the admiring perception of the Indian left, was the nuclear tests of May 1998 that ensured India a position of virtual impregnability in a potential conventional military engagement on two fronts.
<b>Conclusion</b>
The social and political churning that has been unfolding in contemporary India is, first and foremost, a nationalist phenomenon. It has occurred in the backdrop of a profound awakening in the nineteenth century that was primarily religious in character. The former exhibits many of the defects of intolerance and exclusivism intrinsic to nationalism, but such shortcomings are neither unique nor necessarily fatal. Indeed nationalism remains an unfortunate necessity in a jealous world of predatory nation states, ever ready to extinguish the weak. The progressive sapping of the earlier religious renaissance, in the last remaining repository of a uniquely open-ended spiritual and philosophical quest, must nevertheless be a source of regret, although that need not be permanent. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Academic Researchers Versus Hindu Civilisation - Gautam Sen
We got another Bengali Samurai.. <!--emo&:rocker--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rocker.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='rocker.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The collaborationist Indian left and the West</b>
Allied to the designs of US Cold War politics and its academics an overwhelming majority of India's English speaking scholars has been mobilised in a veritable campaign against the alleged dangers of a Hindu awakening in India. These native scholars and their assorted domestic allies wield influence disproportionate to their numbers, a counterpart of the Anglicised consumer, who, despite numerical paucity, generates vast advertising revenues for India's English newspapers, though this too is changing as the pockets of the 'untutored' bulge with cash. What are their motives? The uncharitable view is that the current political dispensation is a source of deep anxiety for the English-speaking cosmopolitans because the untutored (and unwashed?) traditional denizens of India's provincial towns have wrested political control of mainstream politics from them. All sorts of political alliances are therefore afoot, not least with sectarian Islam, the only reliable bloc vote in India unequivocally against the growing voice of the Hindu majority in Indian politics as well. The disadvantaged marginal Hindu groups are proving unreliable because they are insufficiently exercised by the equity of religious stake holders in Indian politics to wish to disrupt India Inc itself; their leaders merely want to supplant others to usurp a larger share of the spoils for themselves.
A more charitable interpretation is that if you believe in the class struggle and seek revolutionary change to liberate the masses, horizontal societal, as opposed to vertical class, divisions among toiling Indians of different religious communities have to be opposed, by whatever means necessary. The Chinese Communists have been undermining this already improbable reverie of late by unleashing the full force of the coercive apparatus of their State on unpaid workers who dare to strike and even commit suicide, in public displays of despair. That apparently embarrasses the workers' government, which begins to look increasingly familiar as a classic example of fascism, ruthlessly directing a corporate society and all the apparatuses of State power through a political party, without any apology or hint of public accountability.
Be that as it may, a few lies, subterfuges and resort to the help of international sympathisers for such a noble cause, which is permitted by revolutionary theory anyway, is hardly criminal. The idea that some of these international academic sympathisers might enjoy cordial ties with governmental agencies hostile to Indian national interests, as many clearly do, is deemed an invention of the despicable Indian State, which represents the oppressor classes. Never mind who the infinitely more powerful US State and its imperial collaborators represent. Once these certainties are established, the burden of accepting financial rewards and prestigious appointments from abroad is a cross that has to be borne courageously, for the sake of the eventual liberation of the masses from fascist oppression. The struggle stretches way back, beyond the Sangh Parivar to Indira Gandhi, nay her father. Indeed, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru faced a more hostile international press than his daughter or the redoubtable Atal Behari Vajpayee. India's English speaking 'leftist' elites had a more ambiguous relationship vis-Ã -vis the Indian State under Jawaharlal Nehru, since the Indian social order was more consonant with their own conception of their place within it and dissent was choreographed accordingly. Atal Behari Vajpayee's really serious infraction in the eyes of the 'world community', the highest court of appeal in the admiring perception of the Indian left, was the nuclear tests of May 1998 that ensured India a position of virtual impregnability in a potential conventional military engagement on two fronts.
<b>Conclusion</b>
The social and political churning that has been unfolding in contemporary India is, first and foremost, a nationalist phenomenon. It has occurred in the backdrop of a profound awakening in the nineteenth century that was primarily religious in character. The former exhibits many of the defects of intolerance and exclusivism intrinsic to nationalism, but such shortcomings are neither unique nor necessarily fatal. Indeed nationalism remains an unfortunate necessity in a jealous world of predatory nation states, ever ready to extinguish the weak. The progressive sapping of the earlier religious renaissance, in the last remaining repository of a uniquely open-ended spiritual and philosophical quest, must nevertheless be a source of regret, although that need not be permanent. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->