The Great Indian Political Debate - 3

[Guest]

While ravish is raving feverish with the 'success' of the Congress here is a witty yet soberish assesment of the election outcome.
<b>
Good, bad and ugly</b>

By: T R Jawahar

Sunday, 24 May, 2009 , 12:01 PM
A momentous week indeed, with many moments of truth, or at least versions of it. The tidings were mixed, and also varied with the point of view; what was good for one was not so for another, but that’s always the case. The greater truth is that what is seemingly good has ugly undertones, set tosurface in time if not already, while what looks bad at present has the seeds for future good embedded in it. Really, every event and occurrence has the three shades built in it.

Sri Lanka tops the global charts in terms of sheer importance. This tiny idyllic nation has scored the first victory in the war on terror when even the mighty America is still fiddling in Af-Pak-Iraq. The complete decimation of the LTTE is no doubt good news for those yearning for peace and having regard for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nation-states. The bad news is that the LTTE has taken the entire cause with its legitimate trappings too down with it, leaving the hapless Tamils totally at the mercy of known oppressors. Displaced and disgraced, the Tamil population now faces a humanitarian crisis of such magnitude that things like democratic devolution and self-determination would barely register in their ear-drums deafened by bombs and numbed by hunger. The ugly face of war as usual unfolds only after the war, when it is too late.

While some fringe elements would still love to keep the myth of Prabakaran alive, Tiger politics which peaked at poll time would now vanish from the TN mainstream. And that is good news. But India can never wipe the bad blood off its hands. Prabakaran was a creature of India’s creation and typically went on to bite the ‘hand’ that nurtured him. The plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils was never in India’s scheme of things. While in the eighties they were pawns in the geo-political games of the region wherein Indian leadership used the Tigers and other Tamil militant groups as a check on Jayawardhane, from the nineties till now the Tamils’ issue was a mere propoganda prop for politicians here. The ease with which first J and then K ‘declared’ Eelam in the last week of campaign was ugly to boot and exposed the utter flippancy with which they treated a life and death cause. But uglier was the morbid end and the murky way in which Prabakaran’s nemesis came to be, and I am not just referring to those haunting visuals. What coincidence that P should ‘die’ so conveniently, just after polls here!

None were more surprised by the poll outcome than the Congmen themselves. In the interregnum between polling and results, the Cong was busy apologising and entreating prospective allies like the SP and Left, but the moment the Grand Old Party scented success, it took no time to rediscover its genetically ingrained hubris and humiliate erstwhile and would-be ‘friends’. Not that the likes of Lalu and Amar deserved anything better, either. A relatively stable Centre sans the sinister shadow of such professional power-brokers and blackmailers is truly good news. A greater cause for celebration, though, is the near total eclipse of the Left, at a time when the economy is tottering owing to global recession and can do without self-styled speed breakers committed to stall any and everything! Instability, nevertheless, is still a prospect with many more bad eggs remaining in the basket. M Singh has already had a rocky start, but we will come to that shortly.

To the flip side of UPA’s good show, now. How has only a marginal rise in national vote-share given a manifold yield of seats to the Cong and UPA? While anti-incumbency helped Cong in Kerala and Bengal, arithmetic aided it no end in states like TN, Maharashtra and AP where parties like DMDK, MNS and Praja Rajyam respectively ensured the defeat of Cong’s arch opponents. Rajasthan and Delhi were the true success stories. While there is a genuine upswing in Cong’s fortunes in UP, courtesy Rahul, the clinching factor however has been the consolidation of Muslim votes in that party’s favour. Varun may have did his bit in pushing that vote bank into Cong’s hands, but the minority card of Sachar combined with Cong’s ‘complete’ respect for Muslim sentiments displayed in one too many ways has reaped rich electoral dividends. Expect appeasement politics to rear its ugly head more often from now on. Long live Afzal Guru!

Was Sonia a factor? All good Congmen would like to believe it was she who came to the aid of the party. Here is a Devil’s argument, not least to wipe the mud on my moustache: The rise in Cong vote-share, albeit marginal, is precisely because Sonia is no longer a contender to the PM post and the party therefore seeming a lot more acceptable! And if indeed, it is ‘clean’ MSingh as a PM prospect who brought in the middle-class votes, is it not fair on the part of Sonia to ease her grip and let him function independently, with due respect to the mandate? Aah, move over, optimists! Here are the real ratings. Good: The puppet is strong, having got himself stuffed a bit more. Bad: The puppeteer is stronger, with less checks and even lesser need to balance allies. Ugly: Another puppeteer in the form of an emboldened Rahul has entered the scene. Henceforth, it would be a two-string puppet show. Incidentally, the nation can kiss all those lakhs of crores of Swiss money goodbye, like it did with the Bofors booty. On the contrary Swiss Banks can turn bullish on India. For, absolute power corrupts absolutely and such cross-border corruption has always been good for the balance sheets of Swiss banks!

Cut to TN. The PMK’s washout is good news beyond compare. The poll is worth it if only for this. The rise of V’Kanth as a sure alternative to J & K too is good news. The bad news is that cinema’s sway over TN looks more or less permanent. But K & family have made a clean sweep of all that is ugly. TN’s self-respect was flying high in the Capital as its sole Thalaivar wheeled around its lanes and by-lanes, alternately begging, bargaining and blackmailing for ministerial morsels for his kith and kin, with nary a semblance of shame inhibiting him. And there was open talk of plum portfolios! Now what can that mean other than the posts yielding copious harvest for the holder? No doubt, the TN polls had turned out to be a costly affair for the DMK and there has to be a recouping, but is it rational to be so brazen? Again, why not seek External affairs so that the DMK can solve the Eelam issue? Or the Ministry of Family Welfare, which would suit K’s fatal obsession? But then outside support too is fair enough for now: the Kalaignar can always invent some smart slogans to convert the sour grapes into a juicy political cocktail.

So is the nation in for some good times? Let’s hope so, despite the many bad omens. And pray things dont take a U-turn. I don’t have to say what ‘U’ means.

http://newstodaynet.com/col.php?section=20&catid=30

[ravish]

Yes Savithri ji,

The assessment of Shri Jawahar is quite balanced. I have already reflected upon the behaviour of the voters this time at length under another trend today, so no point in repeating.
Let us hope the BJP can select a new Leader of Opposition at the earliest and get ready for the next round, in perhaps five years time.

In a parliamentary system there are always ups and downs , so the unexpected good performance of the Congress need not make anyone sad.let us look at the future with new hopes and aspirations.

Jai Hind

[Guest]

x-post
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Andhi Janta-
Slave mentality, they still don't question authority and those who promotes. For them it doesn't matter; they are suffering from slave mentality or corrupt Babu padding mentality.
Why people don't question how Netas had made so much money on MP salary? In US IRS returns are open for public to see. That is why Indian democracy is flawed. It is supported by corrupt bureaucracy.
Why Indians accept appointed Prime Minister? Why they go for election to elect dummy babu who works for 10 Janpath?
Why people are not questioning misuse of Indian Embassies worldwide by 10 Janpath?
Why people working in Indian Embassies, CBI, IAS are not exposing or whistle blower? In fact they are part of corruption. One idiot pops up other. Damn these people are corrupt to core, both rub each other back and looting India.
Why no investigation for Oil for food? Why blind public is not asking these questions?
Don't suggest me public are very good in judging, Oh ya till it keeps corrupt people in power, its okay.
Why during BJP rule there were so many sting operations targeting NDA only, for five year why no sting operation against UPA, don't suggest me they are clean bastards.
Why no sting operation against Babu Cadre during UPA rule, but it was so common during NDA rule? Don’t tell Babus are suddenly had Ganga Sanan.

Oh ya !!! Electorates are suddenly became intelligent and knows better than others.

Andhi Janta , Kana Raja can deliver only corrupt rule degradation of society. That is why India was under foreign rule because or corrupts people who were traitors and sold India to biggest bidder. It is no different now.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Target should be, educate voters to ask for their Rights and challenge corrupt Netas and bureaucracy.
How to start this effort?
RTI is one way, internet is another way, exposing them is more important to have well informed public to make right decision otherwise electorates will be uninformed and will pick wrong candidates.
Push should be open tax-returns of every Neta and whoever on Government salary.

[acharya]

<b>THE RIGHT VIEW
Who falls if India rises?</b>
20 May 2009, 1101 hrs IST, Tarun Vijay


If Team Rahul gets so much support — and with radiant faces like Jyotiraditya, Sachin and Jitendra Singh — it is able to deliver in national
interest, should we remain adamant and say: Hey, you are bad till you join our party? They are Indians and have been voted to power by an Indian electorate.

Think what India needed at a time when external security was under strain and internally terrorism of various varieties continued unabated. Recession has put off lights in a hundred million homes and diplomacy has to show its best with confidence when China makes ADB stop an aid to Arunachal, Tamils are severely brutalized and Swat remains a difficult zone for Delhi, though Kathmandu has given signs of relief, which needs further restrengthening of the non-violent democratic forces.

We wanted a stable government, led by a party with a national outlook, which is necessarily free in taking decisions and without any dependence on the Left and other fringe elements. And an opposition that’s pan-national in its policies, and strong enough to stop any wrong by the treasury benches.

We got it.

Should it make us sad, unhappy and remorseful?

In any case the young, vibrant faces we see peopling parliament, with less caste consciousness and stronger on the merit lines, will do better than their predecessors and please don’t count if they make mistakes-they will shine even if they make some, which are bound to be there in the land of ‘angels’ who have nothing else to do except criticize and belittle others.

India is passing through an ideological and programmatic transformation and the youth in the lead is bound to change the parliament’s body language and paradigms of behaviour. They are there in every party, though more glamorous and the powered will hog the headlines, thanks to the class conscious and politically correct media, the lesser souls will still be relevant and make their mark.

An India, which is strong militarily, sound economically and leads the comity of nations for a peaceful coexistence, needs only one brand "Indian", and definitely not a religious or partisan identity.

Those who couldn’t make it will have enough time to ponder and analyze why they got the drubbing. But those who have an unflinching faith in their ideology and are committed to their path of bliss will carry on working with a renewed vigour and confidence. If the conveyor belts are weak, you can’t blame the luggage for a failed delivery.

Let them think and come to any conclusion that they find appropriate.

To say that the issues raised by those who are otherwise known world over as Hindu nationalist group were wrong, will be unfair to India.

After all, was the raising of the issue of Kashmiri Hindus wrong?

Or demanding revocation of POTA and stringent measures against terrorists?

Or the agitation for the Amarnath land and preservation of the unique world heritage and a symbol of faith like Ram Sethu?

The nationalists opposed the divisive politics of Raj Thakcrey, who was propped up by the Congress to counter Shiv Sena. Was opposing Raj wrong?

The nationalists did Pokaran 2 and were committed to preserve rights for Pokaran 3 if needed. Was that against national interest?

On the eve of polls some said forget 1984 but remember Gujarat. What mentality did it show?

The nationalists wanted Article 370 to go and Kashmir fully integrated with the rest of India. Was that against national integration?

Should India be governed on religious fragmentation and parochial chauvinism or on the basis of egalitarianism, equal rights and privileges to all rising above communal lines?

Let everyone ponder: Hindus have been continuously assaulted for the last twelve hundred years. Do they have a right to preserve their heritage and way of life after a partitioned independence or not?

These are the existential questions before the nation and not the other way round.

True that most of the opposition was fragmented, filled up front pages of the newspapers with internal brick batting (Rampur, Lalu-Nitish-Paswan-Congress). But that doesn’t make a stark fact diminish that many of the media houses were seen to be working against a particular section of Indian polity. Some becoming an instrument to oppose Hindu assertions maligning them with celebrative enthusiasm for irrelevant happenings like we saw at Mangalore pub. Their (‘fair, objective and independent torch bearers of freedom of expression’) controllers, writing in newspaper columns and on their blogs, had nothing but a decisive opposition and acidic hate for a particular section of the Indians who asserted their dharma. These Hindus were demonized for their civil assertions and all the media space was given to the one-sided attacks on them like the Taliban did in Swat. How the owners of the channels, writing politically partisan columns in papers that blatantly support a particular political party, would allow a debate that can be closer to objectivity and does justice to the other viewpoint?

So what?

They could do what they did, not because they were too overpowering, but because the other side miss-stepped their plans. In the last eight decades, when did Hindutva get applause by this politically correct press and if their steps were strong, when was it able to stop the march?

Prudence demands perseverance and a rational faith in what we have believed in to come up with new idioms and an inclusive appeal that does justice to the cause so dear to the followers.

That’s the cause of India.

Mother India needs the ideology that reflects the glory of our civilisational contours.

The ideology that has been fortified by the martyrdoms and dedication of thousands of unknown and unsung foot soldiers led by Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya. Both the great stalwarts were murdered mysteriously in their early fifties. They became leaders of a mass party when they were in their forties. And remember they initiated Bharatiya Janasangh, and not Hindu Janasangh, hence their vision was essentially all-inclusive.

Trust in the ideology that is the only reason of organization’s birth and survival and don’t get besieged by the flood of assaults in this time of low tide is the message of this mandate for the vanquished. Hindutva is a way of life and not a political instrument like water supply and reservations. Its wrong, completely a falsehood if someone says it spreads hatred. It’s the only ideology that guarantees pluralism on equality. In fact the most hateful ideologies are those which stifle the other voices defining secularism as anything anti-Hindutva.

Suresh Rao (Bhaiyyaji) Joshi, the sarkaryavah (Gen Secy.) of the RSS said in an interview with me that Hindutva is not a political subject or a parameter but a way of life. So don’t politicize it. Hindutva encompasses essentially good education, rural development and urban infrastructure. There is no alternative to good governance and a lifestyle that rhymes with the ideals that are espoused. Ram symbolizes material happiness too based on the righteous approach for all. Wherever they could show it, they won.

The fact that the nationalist groups are running largest number of service projects, hospitals, blood banks, Thalasaemia care centres, cerebral palsy treatment centres and hundreds of thousands of schools, is overshadowed by political ups and downs. India still produces young, bright, meritorious people who work in remote areas of this land for the socio-economic development without ever caring whether they are mentioned in media reports or not. Five thousand bare foot doctors’ centres in the villages are being run. That’s the real core of Hindu organizational work. With undiluted love and amity for all. If India rises, who falls, is the touchstone of all their actions and utterances.

Nationalism means India first without getting embarrassed or apologetic for our Hinduness. The situation demands a better solidarity and not further divisions. It requires an intellectual commitment to India as envisioned by Sri Aurobindo.

We must prove ourselves worthy of it.

(The author is director of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation)

[ravish]

Acharyaji

The article reproduced by you gives much food for thought. The election results have been on the most unexpected lines and as such the political parties that have not done well are at a loss to understand what has gone wrong. Each of the parties and each of the important Netas are giving their own expert opinion on the issue. Added to this, is the Corps of journalists, both in the print and electronic media.

If we observe and try to digest the vast amount of opinions and theories put forward by the learned experts, it transpires that the voters by and large have followed certain principles while exercising their franchise:-

1. They have voted for stability.
2. They have voted for economic development, particularly the rural voters.
3. They have considered the regional outfits as impediments on stability and progress.
4. A section of the young and not so young voters have preferred the UPA over the NDA , considering the Age factor of the major players of the two political formations and the programs that have been put forward by both of them.

However, this does not mean that the voters have all divorced themselves from religion and caste factor. They remain as religious and as caste conscious as before, but have not allowed these factors to determine their voting pattern. This trend amongst the voters was totally unexpected by many of the political parties and as such the outcome of the voting has been totally different from their expectations.

What has happened in the past has happened. The NDA partners should look to the future with a new vision. If they continue with their old line of political maneuvers , in the next general election then will get more wiped out provided the performance of the UPA remains within the expectations of the electorate. If the UPA fails to fulfill the aspirations of the voters then also good showing by the BJP with its current dormant policy is almost impossible. Therefore, the need of the hour is to reorient its political ideology and program and go to the electorate with a new face,

It is easier said then done. There will be many inherent contradictions and ideological differences within the party. A strong section will continue to ask for maintenance of status quo and face the electorate once again with Ram Mandir on the top of its agenda. How far this can bring success in the year 2014 is an open question.

[Guest]

Ravish, hold that same line of thought and explain Karnataka results to me.

[ravish]

Virenji,

An analysis of the election results will indicate that the general trend has been pro UPA almost right across the country .However; it will be incorrect to say that this trend has been uniform. That is the reason that BJP has won 118 seats. This is not a poor performance as a national party, but it was not expected of the party that was aspiring to rule the nation for the next five years. The winning of the 118 seats by the BJP is proof of some support it still enjoys in different constituencies in almost all of the States. This trend has been more prominent in Karnataka as well as in Chatisgarh .The reason for this can be interpreted both ways. Either the majority of the people in these two States are happy with the program and performance of the respective State Governments or the opponents have not been able to influence the voters by their performance in the Centre during the last five years or their future program was not found to be attractive enough by the voters.

While analyzing the results on a national level , you need to take the national level trend. This has undoubtedly gone against the BJP and its associates in rest of the States except Kerala and West Bengal where it has gone against the Left. Therefore, to have a revival of the BJPs fortunes on the national scale, I still hold the view that it has to revamp its policies as indicated in my previous article. We should not cite examples to justify BJPs performance, as it will be self defeating and disastrous for the future of the party. The most glaring example of its policy is the results that we got from Orissa. Here the performance of BJP which made so much noise against conversion is a clear indicator that religion cannot influence voting pattern to a decisive level.

[Guest]

Ravishji,

It's easy to pick and choose what one wants to fit the results we want to look at.
BJP still is leader of opposition and not much has changed in that regard. It's problem in vaccum in leadership which will be created post LKA. By and large the bigger loosers in this election are the sundries like Lalloo, Maya, Paswan, Jaya, Naidu, Karat, Yechury, Mulayam etc who have played king-maker in past.

On your assessment of Orissa, if BJD-BJP rift wasn't there, things would have been different. Talking religious issues - check out the infamous Malegoan case where majority muslims sent Shiv Sena guy to LS.

[ravish]

Virenji,

I endorse your view that it is not the end of the road for BJP, nor the result is total destruction as in the case of some of the regional outfits. It can again regain its past glory, provided the old horses make way for the younger generation leaders. Let us hope for the best, not because I am a great supporter of the BJP but for the fact that its strong presence is necessary for the democratic institutions of the nation to function properly.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.medhajournal.com/index.php?opti...airs&Itemid=278

Conclusions

The Hindu in India is faced with a unique situation. While he is theoretically part of a majority, he is so fractured ideologically speaking into various ideological groups that he is virtually powerless to influence the politics of the country. His adversaries know this. The entire burden of maintaining a secular state is placed on the hapless Hindu, when the real perpetrators of anti secular behavior lie elsewhere in the electorate. The minority consistently appeal to their minority status to ask for special privileges, knowing full  well that the Hindu is powerless and is in reality has no more powers than the Muslim and is for all practical purposes a minority . The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that no political party including the Bharatiya Janata Party will fashion an electoral platform to appeal solely to Hindutva sentiments. The Hindutva vote while considerable, is stuck currently at 23% and shows little signs of increasing, despite the palpable effects of the Hindu renaissance. In numerical terms this is the single largest ideological grouping in the country. However, little attempt is made by the strategic thinkers to coalesce other groups around this admittedly largest single group. In contrast the attempt to garner Muslim votes is unabashedly anti-secular in tone and most of the parties fall over each other trying to appease this second largest group in India. The remainder of the Hindu population appears to be content to be reduced to second class status in the land of their forefathers. Of course the simple answer to this is that the Hindu should adopt a unified stand at least on those key issues that affect the exercise of their faith. However, one constant characteristic of the Hindu, throughout the ages, has been his inability to stay unified even when confronted by blatantly disruptive forces and there seems to be little hope that he will change his behavior anytime soon.

I do not see a practical way out of this impasse. This is evident in the increasing frustration of the 20% of the electorate that regards itself as  Hindutva. They see themselves as increasingly embattled and under siege. It is dangerous for the future health of the republic that such a large constituency, even though it may not be a majority, sees itself as helpless to influence the politics sufficiently to advance Hindu causes. Till now the Hindus have eschewed by and large violence as a means of achieving their ends, as the Muslims have done repeatedly using riots as a means of expression in most of the country and using ethic cleansing in Jammu and Kashmir to drive out the Hindu population. The question facing the Hindu is stark. Will he go the way of the Buddhist in India and disappear into the sunset or will he resort to means that he has hitherto been reluctant to use. There is no clear cut answer to these questions and we do not have the ability to prognosticate the future.


[1] Starting around 1880, the French state gradually took over the running of most hospitals, banned catechism from state schools, legalized divorce, removed crucifixes from public offices and required civil weddings at the local town hall before a couple could wed in church.
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[ramana]

Timely book review in The Telegraph, 26 June 2009



Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History: 1890-1950

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
HISTORY WITHOUT AN END 


Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890-1950 By Shabnum Tejani, Permanent Black, Rs 695

<b>This is a serious book on a very important subject which does not quite live up to the promise of its subtitle. Despite this, what it does achieve is significant.</b>

Secularism in the Indian context has become a contentious and an ambiguous subject. The author does not attempt to support any of the existing definitions or to arrive at a new one of her own. She argues that secularism in India can be understood in particular historical contexts. She defines her own project thus: “This book reconstructs such a history [of secularism] as a series of acts, focusing on six historical moments from 1890 to 1950. I argue that each moment represents both possibility and closure, marking a point when the meaning of a certain political concept crystallized. These concepts include Hindu community, patriotism, communal, communalism, the democratic majority, and secular citizenship.’’

<b>Of the six moments she chooses, three are popular movements located in Maharashtra and Sind: cow protection, Swadeshi and Khilafat; the other three are related to the constitutional debates in 1909, 1932 and 1950.</b> In western India, in the period 1893-1911, movements that were self-consciously political claimed the mantle of “nationalism’’. Shabnum Tejani argues that “the cultural and political idioms of this period became integral to formulations of Indian nationalism in later years.’’ The term, ‘communalism’, acquired its Indian connotation between 1906 and 1909, and the distinction between nationalism and communalism sharpened during the Khilafat movement and its aftermath. The beginnings of democracy in India in the 1930s witnessed the separation between majority and minority communities and their appropriation by different political formations. This process defined minorities not just in terms of religion but also in terms of castes.

Apart from its thematic importance, there is another aspect of this monograph that should be noted. Each chapter and the sections to which they belong follow a chronological framework. The chapters are also written as narratives. But the book as a whole does not follow an obvious narrative line. It also does not chase an overarching question or hypothesis that it seeks to answer. On the contrary, the author, in a series of nuanced and open-ended arguments, tries to show how words and concepts changed and shifted their meanings and definitions in particular political contexts. These shifts in meaning — and the author acknowledges her debt to the work of Quentin Skinner in this regard — do not suggest that critical concepts like nationalism, communalism and secularism always moved in one clearly defined direction. She is emphatic that her concerns are anti-teleological for “the end of the story was neither obvious nor inevitable.’’ Her stated project is to reconstruct the genealogies of secularism and of communalism. Those genealogies are still incomplete and open. In a very vital sense, we still live within the history of Indian secularism.

The book is theoretically informed but the theory never dominates the histories that the author tries to set out. It is good to have a history book that revels in the open-endedness of its argument and its mode of writing. The author deserves to be congratulated for having the courage to choose for her first book an extremely complex subject and for having written about it with exemplary courage.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE
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[Capt M Kumar]

<!--emo&kull--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/aaskull.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='aaskull.gif' /><!--endemo--> The Liberhan Commission report on the circumstances leading to the Babri Masjid demolition has reportedly gone soft on BJP leader L.K. Advani but taken a stern view of the role of the then Narasimha Rao government at the Centre.

Sources told Headlines Today that the report has refrained from directly blaming Advani for the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. It has blamed the Rao government for not doing enough to prevent the demolition.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/index.php?opt...d=1&issueid=112

[ramana]

Pioneer Op-Ed 7 July 2009

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->EDITS | Tuesday, July 7, 2009 | Email | Print |


Rock and a hard place

Sandhya Jain

By a curious coincidence, the Justice SC Mohapatra Commission probing the Kandhamal riots of 2008 submitted its interim report almost simultaneously with the final report of the Justice Liberhan Commission on the post-1992 violence following demolition of the Babri structure in Ayodhya.

The reasons for which the respective commissions were set up, viz, tensions between Hindus and Christians in one case, between Hindus and Muslims in another, sum up the psycho-political existential crisis faced by India’s native Hindu community since independence.

<b>Hindus are caught between a rock and a hard place, squeezed between Muslim obduracy and Christian belligerence, both funded and backed by external powers, while the Indian state refuses to support the legitimate needs of its Hindu populace, and even denies Hindu religio-cultural identity in its pursuit of secularism. We thus have the bizarre asymmetry of minority rights vis-à-vis an undefined majority that is denied form and name, but blamed for resisting its own negation.</b>

<b>Justice Mohapatra’s interim report on the Kandhamal violence following the murder of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati on Janmasthami, 23 August 2008, endorses the popular view that conversions were a major factor for the riots. </b>It upholds tribal grievances that land disputes and issuance of fake caste certificates by the local administration triggered the unrest which took 40-odd lives. The judge said there was deep anguish among the Scheduled Tribes that Scheduled Caste Pano Dalits were “capturing their land through fraudulent means.”

Fake certificates which enabled the Christian Panos to corner jobs from quotas meant for backward tribals were a festering sore. The judge urged the State Government to end this fraud and ensure quick release of tribal land possessed by non-tribals. He recommended vigilance in the matter of conversions and re-conversions — a secular balancing act, as if the deliberate alienation of people from their natal religion and cultural traditions through questionable means is at par with the dawning of wisdom and return to ancestral paths.

<b>Meanwhile, the UPA’s decision to defer tabling of the Liberhan Commission report, finally submitted after 48 extensions spanning 16-and-a-half years, suggests it may not yield any political mileage. </b>While the Rs 9 crore commission reinforced public cynicism about the farcical nature of inquiry panels, the Liberhan Commission was no ordinary body. It was tasked with arriving at the truth behind the events leading to frenzied demolition of the disputed Babri mosque at the birthplace of Sri Ram, exemplary prince and king of Hindu tradition, and an incarnation of Vishnu.

Justice Liberhan failed to comprehend the enormity of this civilisational mandate, this magnificent opportunity to sift through history and tradition, to differentiate between the rights of natal communities and claims of latter-day iconoclasts, to wade through the debris of political negation and arrive at cultural affirmation. The Liberhan Commission’s endless extensions exhausted public interest in its conclusions. But in my view, in sharp contrast to political rhetoric following UPA’s second victory, the report has arrived at a moment when identity politics is making an honourable and spontaneous comeback.

Some immutable principles are behind this reality. <b>First, no Abrahamic faith is prepared to mitigate its traditional creedal intolerance of other religions. The old truce whereby they refrained from poaching each other’s flock has given way to sustained Christian attempts to convert Muslims, particularly in occupied and semi-occupied lands like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pope Benedict XVI’s May 2009 Jerusalem pact, wherein he promised not to convert Jews, has reportedly been denied by the Vatican to devout Catholics who complained, so the last word has not been said on this issue. Jews are converting poor Christian Mizos — ostensibly a ‘lost’ tribe — for cheap labour in Israel.</b>

Second, the rhetoric of secularism (for non-Christians only) is no longer useful in checking native assertion in former colonial or semi-colonial lands; hence a more naked religious imperialism is being unveiled.

New forms of minority encroachments in Indian private and public life have long been perceived by the public, but are now gaining political acknowledgement. <b>The most recent case pertains to ‘communal’ violence that flared in Mysore soon after Mr Hansraj Bhardwaj was sworn in as Governor of BJP-ruled Karnataka.</b>

Press reports suggest that two years ago, local Muslims tried to build an illegal mosque on public land in the vicinity of the Huliyamman Temple; the Temple trust to obtain a stay from the court. The Muslims did not face this legal challenge, but suddenly resumed construction, which led to a rise in tensions. Thereafter, we are told, pig flesh was found inside the disputed construction and riots broke out.

<b>It is now openly acknowledged that Muslims and Christians wantonly encroach public spaces in the vicinity of Hindu Temples; an audacious attempt to build a church on Tirupathi Hills some years ago was sharply resisted by locals, prompting Chief Minister Samuel Reddy to declare the seven hills as the body of Sri Balaji and ban other religions from the site. Moreover, these new mosques and churches are totally disproportionate to the minority population in the said districts, and are clearly an instance of externally-funded drives to boost conversions in those areas.</b>

Another issue causing heart-burning among Hindus, which the Congress-ruled Maharashtra Government has been forced to admit, is <b>the rising graph of love affairs resulting in marriages between Hindu girls and Muslim boys. Popularly, this has been labelled ‘love jihad’; targets include rich families whose wealth can be used to serve the monotheistic agenda.</b> The State CID has been asked to look into the matter.

Any honest appraisal of reality would show that faith plays a critical role in the self-image and identity of a people. This is particularly true of monotheistic creeds whose very raison d’être is the denial of the religious merit of other faith communities and their gods.

<b>Secularism was Christianity’s mask to continue operating in the post-Holocaust era when Jews seized the moral high ground. It proved useful in fooling Third World elites like India’s that religion had no place in public life, while quietly making inroads in the guise of education, social service, and outright intimidation in remote areas.</b> The unrest at Amarnath and Kandhamal shows that regardless of electoral outcomes, Hindus can face both the rock and the hard place simultaneously, and will not allow monotheists to walk all over them.
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[acharya]

<b>Welcome, the age of fear

ASHIS NANDY
</b>
back to issue

WHEN the likes of W.H. Auden and Erich Fromm announced the age of anxiety a few years after World War II, it was obvious that their point of reference was the modern West, with its full-blown middle-class culture, increasingly unfettered individualism, and its triumphant vision of an urban-industrial future for humankind. In such a world there was place for fear, but for only those fears that were adjuncts to modern society and its anxieties – the fears of loneliness, anomie, alienation and other such lofty states of mind. Anxiety, after all, was a modern disease. Even psychoanalytic theory seemed to endorse that modern connection; it proclaimed that anxiety did not usually have a fantasy behind it; fear did, particularly if it was unrealistic.

Hence, many who wrote on such issues knew, but did not take seriously the less respectable fears that stalked the Southern hemisphere – the fear of starvation, loss of livelihood and vocation, humiliation, the fears of loss of self and loss of agency and, above all, insecurity about personal and collective survival. These were seen as correlates of underdevelopment and, thus, by-products of an earlier stage of history, anachronistically surviving in the contemporary world due to the irrationality and cussedness of ignorant, change-resistant societies at the peripheries of the world. Implicitly, progress was redefined as the journey from the age of fear to the age of anxiety.



It took time for small groups of intellectuals to recognize that even in the modern West, in the interstices of anxiety lurked more primitive fears – fears of annihilation that some of the great discoveries of science such as nuclear weaponry and biological warfare threatened, fears of totalitarianism and machine violence that had outlived Auschwitz but not the Gulags, and the fear of dissent that made censorship and surveillance a matter of life and death in a large number of polities that still constituted the other West. Fears about survival, freedom, self-expression and identity were not the monopoly of the Southern world. Italian sociologist and futurist Eleonora Masini’s work, for example, showed that the fear of nuclear annihilation, banished from the public sphere, did enter the psychological world of European children.

Now, just when some intellectuals have begun to assure us of the end of history and the idea of democracy has become triumphant enough to force even recalcitrant police states to claim that they are moving towards liberal-democratic ideals, just when there seems to be a global consensus on the beauties of capitalism, mass culture and knowledge society, a new age of fear has begun to unfold before our unbelieving eyes, this time at the very centre of the globalizing world. The coming decades may belong to a form of terror that threatens to change our public life by setting the pace of all debates on individual and collective security.



Yet, terror was always there, though often invisible and unacknowledged, in the political cultures of liberal democracy and capitalism; it has always constituted the underside of western modernity, especially its Jacobin variations. It is the terror without which, Robespierre believed, virtue was impotent. Indeed, all ideas of progress that have dominated the world since the eighteenth century, including the ideas and ideologies that legitimized the two early attempts at globalization – the Atlantic slave trade and modern colonialism – have believed in the emancipatory potentials of terror.

The concept of the revolutionary role of vanguards in radical theory and the use of the idea of revolutionary violence to transubstantiate cruelty and mass violence, as S.N. Balagangadhara might put it, are merely extensions of the same tradition. When in the first half of the twentieth century an effort was made to set up an alternative path to globalization by the socialist countries, the first thing each one of them did, whatever else they did or did not, was to set up a terror machine to serve the causes of ‘liberation’ and ‘progress’.

That European belief in the socially creative role of terror has now come home to roost. There is some poetic justice in the efforts of others, who have often been at the receiving end of a world system of which the idea of legitimate terror has been an inalienable part, now trying to dismantle the system using the same technology. Terror as a means of actualizing values such as justice, liberty and equality now faces terror that invokes the same values and defines itself as counter-terror.



For some reason, anguish, the third constituent of the triad that includes anxiety and fear, seems to be in short supply today, despite growing belief that we have to combat anguish the way we fight anxiety and fear. As I grow old, I notice lesser anguish and decreasing sensitivity to anguish around me. I also see, in media and in public discourse, consistent and systematic efforts to marginalize intellectuals and thinkers who think that there are reasons to be anguished about things such as the environment, the growing violence acquiring nihilistic tones, threats to life support systems of smaller cultures and communities at the peripheries of the modern political economy, the impunity with which genocidal projects are implemented, the way cruelty and torture have made their way into the reigning culture of politics, and the pockets of utter destitution within a culture of consumerism that is obscene in the way it flaunts itself.

Anguish is in short supply today. Yet, the anguished are seen as spoilsports, impractical romantics or doomsday prophets, not in tune with the contemporary liberal-capitalist vision of a good society. The tacit assumption is that technology and managerial expertise will take care of every problem we face today, including the ethical ones.

As a result, the happiness industry is thriving. So are the instant vendors of bliss – from the gurus that India now routinely exports to the agony aunts in Sunday newspaper columns, from the expanding domain of virtual reality to the flourishing guidebooks on how to conquer happiness. Happiness is now something like a medal in an athletic meet, to be won after hard work under expert guidance. And one of the hurdles you have to learn to cross while reaching the goal of happiness is anguish.

Anguish is no longer the prerogative of the socially sensitive and the ontologically alert, confronting the human predicament. It is part of an unnecessary baggage called unhappiness. The new stage of capitalism we have entered also has a cultivated festive style. It has proscribed unhappiness by making it unfashionable. Unhappiness is now seen as an intermediate state between mental health and ill-health. And like the poor, who are held responsible for their poverty in the mainstream culture of capitalism, the unhappy are held culpable for their unhappiness.



Unhappiness is now permissible only in literature, art and cinema. At one time, in some police states psychiatrists diagnosed the unhappy and the anguished as mentally ill, for daring to be unhappy in a utopia. Now anguish has been included in the syndrome of unhappiness. Only its suppression has become more subtle; anguish on the state of the world is called return to a bucolic past, for we have now reportedly arrived at the end of history. Anguish is now defined as a form of self-indulgence and puritanical self-mortification.

It is sporadically said, with a dramatic flourish, that we have nothing to fear except fear itself. Does that aphorism admit a concept of courage that includes the courage to be anguished about the state of the world? Does that courage acknowledge the despair that lies behind the psychopathic, nihilistic terror that haunts large part of the world today? Where does fear end and anguish begin? Towards the end of the Mahabharata, after the ungodly have been defeated in a fratricidal war, and after the five brothers who fought for justice and virtue have won and the eldest of them has been crowned king, the new king, Yudhisthira, instead of being elated, is anguished.

He says, ‘Alas, having defeated the enemy, we ourselves have been defeated… The defeated have become victorious… This, our victory is twined into defeat.’ This anguish is not something Oriental, esoteric and defeatist. Nor is it a by-product of a tragic vision of life. It is an admission that there is a continuity between the self and its others that is only temporarily interrupted by the responsibility to confront evil. It is at the same time a courageous defiance of the conventional idea of victory and defeat as a zero-sum game.

Elsewhere, I have told the story of how the ominous date 9/11 marks two beginnings bridged by a strange coincidence. On that day in 2001, the power and the presence of terror captured the imagination of the ordinary citizens the world over and initiated a new age of fear. And the Pathans, the main ethnic community in Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan, soon became associated with the tragedy as the ultimate symbols of Islamic terror for having produced the Taliban and hosting Osama bin Laden.



However, another 9/11 took place, unheralded and unsung, in 1906 at Johannesburg in South Africa, at the time a proudly authoritarian, racist, police state. That day satyagraha or militant nonviolence was born. Though the theory and the strategy was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s, the first person to proclaim the principle from a public platform at Johannesburg was Abdul Gani, a Muslim merchant, and their closest associate was Haji Habib, another Muslim. It has also been said that one source of Gandhi’s nonviolence was his mother’s religious beliefs. She belonged to a small Hindu sect, the Pranamis, known for their uncompromising pacifism and the deep impress of Islam on their religious life.



Do the coincidence of dates and the Islamic connection have something to tell us? One clue to an answer is that, later on, when satyagraha became a major movement in colonial India, the Pathans led by Abdul Gaffar Khan played a stellar role in it. Gandhi himself called them the finest practitioners of art of militant nonviolence and he traced this to the valorous, martial past of the Pathans. At the height of their movement, there were 100, 000 participants in it called Khudai Khidmatgars, God’s servants, and they faced every form of police atrocity from a colonial regime that had only a few years ago fought three bitter wars in Afghanistan against the Pathans. But there was not one instance when a Pathan faltered in his or her commitment to nonviolence.

Does this odd attempt to flout global common sense by blending religion and politics something to tell us today? One answer is that the two models of self-sacrificial intervention, one violent and the other nonviolent, struggle for dominance as traits or potentialities in each Pathan or, for that matter, each person or community. Global forces outside the control of a person and the geopolitics of national interests converging on a community determine which potentiality is unleashed. If Gandhi helped unleash one kind of potentiality, Soviet occupation, superpower rivalry and Pakistan’s politically ambitious army released potentialities of another kind.

It is absolutely essential in the latter form of thought engineering to create large-scale meaninglessness and despondency and, then, offer an emulsion of a closed mind and a closed ideology as a cure-all. Physicist and social activist Pervez Hoodbhoy may be correct in his diagnosis of drone-like killing machines, the suicide bombers produced by fanatics, but the focus, I insist, must be on the assembly line, not the product. In some ways the polities of South Asia have failed to capture the imagination of their youth; sizeable sections of them are in search of a cause and are willing to be shot for it like mad dogs in at least five of the seven countries in the region. I shamefully admit being anguished that we have not seriously explored how the powerful of the world may have helped to set up their feared private and public ghosts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.



This essay is not an invitation to anguish. Its goals are mundane and less than heroic; it reiterates what we mostly know but try hard not to know. It suggests that the fears now stalking the upper rungs of global politics are the fears with which large parts of the world, including sections of Indian society, have lived for decades and, in some cases, centuries. Unable to take control of their lives, increasingly victimized by forces that they do not understand and often cannot even identify, if they in their desperation have flayed their hands and struck out at random, even normal political pragmatism demands that we scan the sources of their desperation. We must spot the reasons that have prompted them to sometimes knowingly sacrifice their lives for causes that give meaning in an otherwise meaningless life.

If realism and self-interest mean more than mere petty profiteering and bureaucratic quibbling, they should push us to admit that we can survive the new age of fear only by lifting the siege on communities caught in the hinges of time for the sake of causes that make little sense to them and enter their lives as natural calamities – national security, development, progress, state-building and nation-formation.

I am not trying to complicate a simple act of terror that targets ordinary citizens living ordinary lives. I know that a growing proportion of the victims of modern terrorism are children, women and the elderly. But we also battle terrorism at a time when the continuities between victims and perpetrators are becoming clearer and all efforts to design neat solutions to human problems are turning out to be inhuman and self-defeating. To steal Tarun Tejpal’s evocative metaphor, the untold story of our assassins is gradually turning out to be a story about us, for their fears and ours are not so radically different.



This indivisibility of terror we have learnt to deny. Worse, the more blatant the indivisibility, the more aggressive and strident our denials become. We love to talk of jihadi terrorism without mentioning Kashmir and Gujarat 2002, and we love to believe that the militancy in Punjab in the late 1980s and 1990s had nothing to do with the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi. The furious arguments on the menace of Maoist violence in India never mention the way we have treated our tribal communities, the mainstay of Indian Maoism today. Nor have official histories and historians documented our gory record in Nagaland and Manipur. The culture of the Indian state is what it is today because of our dedicated efforts to ignore its criminalization. One of the great paradoxes of Indian politics is that the police, the bureaucrats and the politicians enjoy the least respect and trust of the citizens according to every opinion poll, but they become more trustworthy when it comes to terrorism, national security and international relations.



At the centre of that process of criminalization is the use of ruthless, often extra-legal force in the name of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, applauded by much of the media and intelligentsia, backed by the much-heralded Indian middle class. We fear sections of our citizens because we know what we have done to them. And we see all of our neighbours embroiled in a similar exercise. The Sri Lankan state tries hard to dissociate the problem of Tamil terrorism from its consistent record of discrimination against the Tamils and the Colombo riots of 1983; Pakistan’s civil establishment hopes to resist army rule without confronting the army’s role in the Bangladesh genocide. Bangladesh in turn grudges Chakmas the rights that it claimed from Pakistan.

Security in any polity is indivisible; unlike wealth, memories are not that easy to lock up. Terror today is the fear that defines the age of fear and each day it becomes more anomic. However woolly-headed and impractical I may sound, I insist that such terror cannot be fought only through an efficient use of arms. Otherwise, after fighting terror so ruthlessly for more than six decades, Israel would not have been so insecure. Indeed, known all over the world for its brutal anti-terrorist measures, the Israeli state itself has become, in the words of a retired officer of its own army, a gangster state. If I may revert to my own cliché, you can afford to choose your friends carelessly but need to be careful when choosing an enemy because, in the long run, you begin to resemble, perhaps not your enemy, but certainly as you imagine him to be.



* Sections of this essay draw upon presentations made at the World Social Summit at Rome on ‘Fearless: Discussion on How to Combat Global Anguish’, 24-26 September 2008; Forum 2000 at Prague on ‘Openness and Fundamentalism in the 21st Century’, 12-14 October 2008; and the Jaipur Literary Festival, 22-25 January 2009. Work on this essay was done when the author was an Open Society Fellow at the Central European University at Budapest during September-December 2008. The essay has been written for a forthcoming festschrift for Swami Agnivesh.

[ramana]

I have been thinking about the kind of secularism practised in India. I think the ref to the word crept in to sort of assure the minorites against percieved majoritarian tyranny which could develop later as the republic aged. So its reverse millat point of view. In practise it included shoring up minorities and browbeating majority. This was termed pseudo-secularism as it does not really mean the Western sense of the state not allowing religion to guide it.

On reflection I think it really is crony secualrism where particular cronies (from minorities and modern Hindus(Ramachandra Guha types)) are given privileges and propped up to hold the discourse.

By calling it pseudo-secularism the adherents get away as they do believe in what they are doing. However crony secularism has a negative connotation and is the right description for what passes as secularsim in Indian politics. This way the practioners and non-practioners are both the same except the practioners award privlileges to their cronies and browbeat the non-practioners.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Persistence of Ideology
Grand ideas still drive history.</b>
Ideological politics: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem salutes Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS in 1943.
Corbis
Ideological politics: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem salutes Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS in 1943.

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in the West, and in the United States in particular. A combination of democracy and mass prosperity had “solved” the political question that had agitated humanity since the time of Plato. There were to be no more grand and transformative, if woefully erroneous, ideas; all that remained was public administration, with, at most, squabbles over small details of policy. The new version of the old saw, mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body, was a capitalist economy in a liberal democratic polity. That was the lesson of history.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were reforming—indeed collapsing—so rapidly that it became clear that Communism could not long survive anywhere in Europe, Francis Fukuyama went one step beyond Bell and wrote an essay for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” In this soon-to-be-famous article, later expanded into a book, Fukuyama suggested that the end of ideology that Bell saw in the West was now global. By “the end of history,” he did not mean the end of events, of course; one team or another would continue to win the Super Bowl, and there might yet be wars between national rivals. But broadly, history had given its lesson and mankind had taken it. Henceforth, those who resisted the march of liberal democracy were like the Luddites, those English workers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution who smashed machines, blaming them for destroying the independent livelihoods of workers at home.

At the end of his essay, however, Fukuyama—more concerned to understand the world than to change it, by contrast with Marx—implicitly raised the question of the role of ideology in the world’s moral economy. With no ideological struggles to occupy their minds, what will intellectuals have to do or think about? Virtually by definition, they like to address themselves to large and general questions, not small and particular ones: as Isaiah Berlin would say, by temperament, they are hedgehogs, who know one large thing, not foxes, who know many small things. Fukuyama admitted that he would miss ideology, if only as something to oppose. “I have ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its North Atlantic and Asian offshoots,” he wrote. “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

As it turned out, of course, we did not have long (let alone centuries) to suffer existential boredom. Our dogmatic slumbers—to use Kant’s phrase for the philosophic state from which reading David Hume roused him—had barely begun when a group of young fanatics flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, thus demonstrating that pronouncements of the death of both ideology and history were somewhat premature.

In truth, we should have known it, or at least guessed it, without needing to be reminded. Fukuyama’s concluding sentences contain a hint of the psychological function that ideology plays. It is not just disgruntlement with the state of the world that stimulates the development and adoption of ideologies. After all, disgruntlement with society there has always been and always will be. Dissatisfaction is the permanent state of mankind, at least of civilized mankind. Not every dissatisfied man is an ideologist, however: for if he were, there would hardly be anyone who was not. Yet ideology, at least as a mass phenomenon, is a comparatively recent development in human history.

Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.

If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be.

One of the first to notice the politicization of intellectuals was the French writer Julien Benda, whose 1927 La trahison des clercs—“the treason of the clerks,” with “clerk” understood in its medieval sense as an educated person distinct from the uneducated laity—gave a phrase to educated discourse. Today, people most frequently use the phrase to signify the allegiance that intellectuals gave to Communism, despite the evident fact that the establishment of Communist regimes led everywhere and always to a decrease in the kind of intellectual freedom and respect for individual rights that intellectuals claimed to defend.

Benda meant something much wider by it, though support for Communism would have come under his rubric: the increasing tendency of intellectuals to pursue lines of thought not for the sake of truth, or for guiding humanity sub specie aeternitatis, but for the sake of attaining power by adopting, justifying, and manipulating the current political passions of sections of humanity, whether national, racial, religious, or economic. The political passions that Benda most feared when he wrote his book were nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, which then had plenty of intellectual apologists, and which indeed soon proved cataclysmic in their effects; but really he was defending the autonomy of intellectual and artistic life from political imperatives.

That ideological ways of thinking have survived the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would not have surprised Benda. The collapse did severely reduce Marxism’s attractiveness, and despite decades of attempts by intellectuals to dissociate the doctrine’s supposed merits from the horrors of the Soviet system, it was only natural that many people believed that the death of Marxism meant the death of ideology itself. But as Benda might have predicted, what resulted instead was the balkanization of ideology—the emergence of a wider choice of ideologies for adoption by those so inclined.

The most obvious example of an ideology that came into prominence—or better, prominently into our consciousness—after Communism’s fall was Islamism. Because of its emphasis on returning to Islamic purity, and its apparent—indeed noisy—rejection of modernity, most people failed to notice how modern a phenomenon Islamism was, not just in time but in spirit. This is evident from reading just one of Islamism’s foundational texts: Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, first published in 1964. The imprint of Marxism-Leninism is deep upon it, especially the Leninist component.

Qutb starts with cultural criticism that some might find eerily prescient. “The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak,” he writes. “The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.” Since, according to Qutb, those “life-giving values” cannot come from the Eastern Bloc, he thinks (like Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentinean dictator, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister) that a Third Way must exist: which, he says, can only be Islam.

Just as in Marx only the proletariat bears the whole of humanity’s interests, so in Qutb only Muslims (true ones, that is) do. Everyone else is a factionalist. In Qutb’s conception, the state withers away under Islam, just as it does—according to Marx—under Communism, once the true form is established. In Marx, the withering away comes about because there are no sectional material interests left that require a state to enforce them; in Qutb, there is no sectional interest left once true Islam is established because everyone obeys God’s law without the need for interpretation and therefore for interpreters. And when all obey God’s law, no conflict can arise because the law is perfect; therefore there is no need for a state apparatus.

One finds a unity of theory and praxis in both Qutb’s Islamism and Marxism-Leninism. “Philosophy and revolution are inseparable,” said Raya Dunayevskaya, once Trotsky’s secretary and a prominent American Marxist (insofar as such can be said to have existed). And here is Qutb: “Thus these two—preaching and the movement—united, confront ‘the human situation’ with all the necessary methods. For the achievement of freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth—it is necessary that these methods should work side by side.”

Like Lenin, Qutb thought that violence would be necessary against the ruling class (of bourgeois in Lenin’s case, unbelievers in Qutb’s): “Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching.” Again like Lenin, Qutb believed that until human authority disappeared, the leader’s authority must be complete. Referring to “the Arab” of the Meccan period—an age whose moral qualities he wants to restore—Qutb says: “He was to be trained to follow the discipline of a community which is under the direction of a leader, and to refer to this leader in every matter and to obey his injunctions, even though they might be against his habit or taste.” Not much there with which Lenin could have disagreed. The British Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote of himself: “The Party had the first, or more precisely, the only real claim on our lives. . . . Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed.”

Qutb is as explicit as Lenin that his party should be a vanguard and not a mass party, for only a vanguard will prove sufficiently dedicated to bring about the revolution. And like Leninism, Qutb’s Islamism is dialectical:

    [Islam] does not face practical problems with abstract theories, nor does it confront various stages with unchangeable means. Those who talk about Jihaad in Islam and quote Qur’anic verses do not take into account this aspect, nor do they understand the nature of the various stages through which the movement develops, or the relationship of the verses revealed at various occasions with each stage.

Compare this with Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder:

    Right doctrinairism persisted in recognizing only the old forms, and became utterly bankrupt, for it did not notice the new content. Left doctrinairism persists in the unconditional repudiation of certain old forms, failing to see that the new content is forcing its way through all and sundry forms, that it is our duty as Communists to master all forms, to learn how, with the maximum rapidity, to supplement one form with another, to substitute one for another, and to adapt our tactics to any such change that does not come from our class or from our efforts.

There are many other parallels between Leninism and Qutb’s Islamism, among them the incompatibility of each with anything else, entailing a fight to the finish supposedly followed by permanent bliss for the whole of mankind; a tension between complete determinism (by history and by God, respectively) and the call to intense activism; and the view that only with the installation of their systems does Man become truly himself. For Qutb’s worldview, therefore, the term Islamo-Leninism would be a more accurate description than Islamofascism.

Qutb was a strange man: he never married, for example, because (so he claimed) he found no woman of sufficient purity for him. You wouldn’t need to be Freud to find the explanation suspect, or to find his reaction to Greeley, Colorado, in 1950, where he spent time on a scholarship—he saw it as a hotbed of unrestrained vice—somewhat hysterical, a cover for something seething deeply and disturbingly inside him. Devotion to an ideology can provide an answer of sorts to personal problems, and since personal problems are common, it isn’t surprising that a number of people choose ideology as the solution.

Ideological thinking is not confined to the Islamists in our midst. The need for a simplifying lens that can screen out the intractabilities of life, and of our own lives in particular, springs eternal; and with the demise of Marxism in the West, at least in its most economistic form, a variety of substitute ideologies have arisen from which the disgruntled may choose.

Most started life as legitimate complaints, but as political reforms dealt with reasonable demands, the demands transformed themselves into ideologies, thus illustrating a fact of human psychology: rage is not always proportionate to its occasion but can be a powerful reward in itself. Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation.

How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity! At all costs, one must keep at bay the realization that came early in life to John Stuart Mill, as he described it in his Autobiography. He asked himself:

    “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

This is the question that all ideologists fear, and it explains why reform, far from delighting them, only increases their anxiety and rage. It also explains why traditional religious belief is not an ideology in the sense in which I am using the term, for unlike ideology, it explicitly recognizes the limitations of earthly existence, what we can expect of it, and what we can do by our own unaided efforts. Some ideologies have the flavor of religion; but the absolute certainty of, say, the Anabaptists of Münster, or of today’s Islamists, is ultimately irreligious, since they claimed or claim to know in the very last detail what God requires of us.

The most popular and widest-ranging ideology in the West today is environmentalism, replacing not only Marxism but all the nationalist and xenophobic ideologies that Benda accused intellectuals of espousing in the 1920s. Now, no one who has suffered respiratory difficulties because of smog, or seen the effects of unrestrained industrial pollution, can be indifferent to the environmental consequences of man’s activities; pure laissez-faire will not do. But it isn’t difficult to spot in environmentalists’ work something more than mere concern with a practical problem. Their writings often show themselves akin to the calls to repentance of seventeenth-century divines in the face of plague epidemics, but with the patina of rationality that every ideology needs to disguise its true source in existential angst.

For example, a recent column in the Guardian, by the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, carried the headline the planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us. Monbiot, it is true, does not offer us heaven on earth if we follow his prescriptions; only the bare—and by no means certain, for “we might have left it too late”—avoidance of total biological annihilation. But behind Monbiot’s urgency, even hysteria, one senses a deep lust for power. He cannot really believe what he says, for starters. “Do we want to be remembered,” he asks rhetorically, “as the generation that saved the banks but let the biosphere collapse?” If it is really true that we must either have “total energy renewal” or die, however, we cannot be remembered as the generation that let the biosphere collapse, for if we let it collapse, ex hypothesi no one will be around to remember us. This reminds me of patients I used to see who would threaten suicide, in the clear expectation of a long life ahead, unless someone did what they wanted. And though Monbiot says that it is uncertain that anything we do now will make any difference, he nevertheless proposes that every human being on the earth follow his prescriptions.

The environmentalist ideology threatens to make serious inroads into the rule of law in Britain. This past September, six environmentalists were acquitted of having caused $50,000 worth of damage to a power station—not because they did not do it but because four witnesses, including a Greenlander, testified to the reality of global warming.

One recalls the disastrous 1878 jury acquittal in St. Petersburg of Vera Zasulich for the attempted assassination of General Trepov, on the grounds of the supposed purity of her motives. The acquittal destroyed all hope of establishing the rule of law in Russia and ushered in an age of terrorism that led directly to one of the greatest catastrophes in human history.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.
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[Capt M Kumar]

<!--emo&:ind--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/india.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='india.gif' /><!--endemo--> With Venkaiah Naidu (BJP) having already called for division, government made a hasty retreat agreeing to defer the bill. It was the high point of the new Left-Right synergy in the House of Elders. BJP members alongwith other opposition members could be seen congratulating Sitaram Yechury (CPM) who kept on insisting that the bill could be introduced only after deleting a controversial clause.

Leader of opposition Arun Jaitley had passed the baton of objection to the bill to Left leaders Brinda Karat, D Raja, Yechury and others who successfully nailed the government, leaving it with absolutely no choice.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/in...how/4869712.cms

[acharya]

RSS and Minorities
Submitted by admin3 on 7 October 2009 - 12:27pm.
Articles Indian Muslim
By Ram Puniyani,

The new RSS Sarsanghchalak, Mr. Mohan Bhagawat told Minorities (Sept 20, 2009) that they should join RSS and see that ‘our intentions are clear and our behavior is good’. As per him all Muslims in India were Hindus in the past. They have only changed their way of worship, and if they accept this fact there will be no clashes. He told Christians that they should not convert people, as that creates communal violence.

Mr. Bhagwat is partly correct in saying that Muslims have Hindu ancestry. Islam spread in India, by various ways, major being the attempt of Shudras to escape the tyranny of Landlord Brahmin, to quote Swami Vivekananda, "Why amongst the poor of India so many are Mohammedans? It is nonsense to say that they were converted by the sword. It was to gain liberty from Zamindars and Priests..." (Collected Works-Vol 8-Page330). These conversions took place as dalits were not permitted to enter temples so they were visiting the shrines of Sufi saints and under the influence of the Humanistic aspect of Islam they took to Islam. There were other reasons like, anticipation of reward, interaction with Muslims, the least important factor being fear of Muslim kings. So he is partly right that most Muslims have local ancestry.

http://twocircles.net/2009oct06/rss_and_minorities.html

[ramana]

Seminar India Issue 602, Oct., 2009

http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html

[acharya]

Ethno-nationalism: theory and practice

M. S. PRABHAKARA

Exclusionary theories of sovereignty and self-determination have never matched their practice. Rather, they are animated more by the fear and hatred of the ‘Other.’

In the beginning it was Indian nationalism, an idea that took birth from the very forces in opposition to which it was mobilised: the European powers, principally England, that rapaciously colonised this land, and their more progressive ideological aspect, European Enlightenment, integral and causally linked to this colonial rapacity and cruelty to which, when necessary, it also provided rationalisations.

It is true that some ideologues of Indian nationalism maintain that the idea of an Indian nation, indeed the reality of a complexly structured and administered Indian state, goes back deep into history, to historical figures like Mauryan king Ashoka, if not to pre-historic figures of myth and legend like Ramachandra of Ayodhya. Gandhiji evoked Ramarajya as the ideal state for which a free India should aspire. While such nationalist mythology had its uses in the mobilisation of the anti-colonial struggle, in independent India the nationalist discourse has followed a far more complex path, especially in Assam and other borderlands in its neighbourhood where nationalism as an idea, and theory and practice, has sometimes been mobilised to advance what received ideas of nationalism in mainstream political thinking would consider distortions.

For instance, the very term ‘nation’ which, in much of the rest of the country, stands for the Indian nation state, the structure inherited from the British even if in a substantially curtailed form and zealously guarded by the post-1947 Indian state, has a rather different meaning and connotation in Assam where the expression, ‘Assamese nation’ ( asomiya jati), exists in an ambivalent relation with ‘Indian nation.’ Jati, in Assamese, stands for ‘nation’ while its cognate, jat, is used to denote caste (and in some contexts, ‘nationality’) though standard Assamese dictionaries define the two terms to mean both ‘nation’ and ‘caste.’ The collection of several jatis, representing the numerous nationalities of India, constitutes the mahajati, the greater Indian nation, that is merely a sum of its parts without which it would be less than nothing.

Two of the most famous and popular songs of Assamese lyricist and singer Bhupen Hazarika, whose central metaphors are the river Brahmaputra and Bohag Bihu, the mid-April spring festival, both having profound spiritual and nationalist resonances for the Assamese, have contributed to an ideological construct of what Professor Sanjib Baruah in his book, India against Itself (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), terms ‘Assamese national imagination’ correlating ‘Assamese nationalism’ and ‘Indian nationalism,’ whose bottom line is that one cannot exist without the other. However, this idealised interdependent correlation between Mother Assam and Mother India has other nuances, affirming or challenging the ‘Indian’ identity at different points of time, reflecting the constant tensions, inevitable in the unequal relationship between the Indian state and its component parts that animate this relationship.

These tensions are not new, nor even unique to Assam and the borderlands of northeast. The assertion of distinct, even unique, regional identities by a people that have a continuous record of history and literature going further back in time to those of ‘Aryavarta’ was viewed in the early years of independence as not much different from separatism with the potential to become secessionist. Regional assertions were seen as reflecting merely ‘fissiparous tendencies,’ one of the greatest challenges facing the strong, centralised unitary state that the early leaders of independent India wanted to craft. Only this explains the resistance to the popular and democratic demand for the linguistic reorganisation of India, despite the fact that the Congress structured itself on a linguistic basis.

The reorganisation of States on a linguistic basis took the edge off strident regional assertions. However, regionalism has since taken other, more complicated, forms — some deriving and, in turn, contributing to other ideological and theoretical formulations. In Assam and its environs, regionalism as an idea almost inevitably evolved into demands for political autonomy and, in course of time, more militant forms of nationalist assertion.

The reasons for such evolution are rooted in both geography and history. Historical factors like late entry into British India through a prolonged incremental process involving both conquest and annexation (1826-95), and the realities of geographical isolation from the rest of India have influenced this trajectory. However, this too is a pan-Indian phenomenon, subdued in some cases, strident in some others, of which the Dravidian movements are not the only instance.

The debate in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly in the early 1980s on the character of the anti-foreigner agitation in Assam brought in the concept of ‘little nationalism’ and ‘great nationalism,’ the ‘little nationalism’ of Assam seen in the context of the anti-foreigner agitation as turning ‘chauvinist.’ The unspoken sub-text of this reading was that ‘great nationalism’ of India would by definition not turn chauvinist, a formulation with which few ‘little nationalists’ or, for that matter, ‘great nationalists’ would agree.

Contributing to and, in turn, further amplifying this formulation was the reading that ‘little nationalisms’ were really little more than ‘sub-nationalism’ or, in a more learned language, part of a ‘sub-nationalist narrative’ that was only reclaiming the history of a people that had been subsumed by the ‘great nationalist narrative.’ The ‘sub-nationalist narrative’ evolved in due course as assertions of ‘ethnic identity,’ the reclaimed history now serving a political end. This is now being situated within a framework of ‘ethno-nationalism’ that is bound to evolve into ‘ethno-nationalist’ narratives.

These terms have evolved, or been created, to explain the past and provide a theoretical framework for future action, that is to mobilise popular discontent and press political demands. The demands vary greatly, from the modest and attainable through negotiations to those that are perhaps not even intended to be attained but are nevertheless pressed to advance other objectives. The attainable objectives include greater autonomy, modification of the existing identities of caste or tribe, protective discrimination, re-denomination of nomenclatures of historically recognised communities, creation of exclusive political spaces, extension of constitutional provisions like the Sixth Schedule applicable at present only to the tribal people inhabiting and indigenous to the two Hill districts of Assam, demands from some non-tribal communities for recognition as a tribe… one can go on. All such demands for varying degrees of autonomy, expansion of the existing territorial and political space, and reclassification of denomination and nomenclature can be, and in some cases are being, negotiated within the framework of the Indian state and the Constitution. One such instance is the compromise made on the demand during the agitation for the creation of Bodoland that the Bodo Kachari of Karbi Anglong be recognised as a Scheduled Tribe. Karbi political opinion was utterly opposed to the demand. Similarly, there is resistance from the existing tribal communities to extending what are perceived as privileges to non-tribal communities.

However, such compromise seems impossible in instances of sovereignty assertion, based on the ‘inalienable right of a people for self-determination,’ which in practice exclude the ‘Other.’ No wonder, the three major sovereignty movements based in Nagaland, Manipur and Assam are all split, some into several factions. That they are split has, however, not in the least mitigated the passion for, or virulence of, the sovereignty assertion. The splits reflect the reality of divisions within the people these structures claim to represent, the inherent flaws of such exclusionary nationalist assertions that by definition cannot be inclusive of all people in that territorial space, as well as efforts of the state to control the virulence, canalise the passion.

The dilemma facing these movements is that such exclusionary theories of sovereignty and self-determination have never matched their practice. Rather, these are animated more by the fear and hatred of the ‘Other,’ especially those that are part of the territorial and political space they claim as their own, than by any genuine democratic commitment to the theory and practice of self-determination. In essence, these movements of ethno-nationalism are no different from Hindutva movements that too are animated by fear and hatred of the ‘Other.’ Hence, too, the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing that is as much an integral part of such ethno-nationalist assertion as of the Hindutva movements.
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However, while the murderous manifestations of Hindutva assertion are rightly condemned, corresponding manifestations of other exclusionary tribal or ‘ethnic’ nationalism do not evoke the same kind of sharp criticism.
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