The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

[BanglaBhoot]

Impasse in India

By Pankaj Mishra

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

by Martha C. Nussbaum

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 403 pp., $29.95

The New York Review of Books - Volume 54, Number 11 • June 28, 2007

Last summer Foreign Affairs, Time, Newsweek, and The Economist highlighted a major shift in American perceptions of India when, in cover stories that appeared almost simultaneously, they described the country as a rising economic power and a likely "strategic ally" of the United States. In 1991, India partly opened its protectionist economy to foreign trade and investment. Since then agriculture, which employs more than 60 percent of the country's population, has stagnated, but the services sector has grown as corporate demand has increased in Europe and America for India's software engineers and English-speaking back-office workers.[1] In 2006, India's economy grew at a remarkable 9.2 percent.

Dominated by modern office buildings, cafés, and gyms, and swarming with Blackberry-wielding executives of financial and software companies, parts of Indian cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon resemble European and American downtowns. Regular elections and increasingly free markets make India appear to be a more convincing exemplar of economic globalization than China, which has adopted capitalism without embracing liberal democracy.

However, many other aspects of India today make Foreign Affairs' description of the country—"a roaring capitalist success-story"—appear a bit optimistic. More than half of the children under the age of five in India are malnourished; failed crops and debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade.[2] Uneven economic growth and resulting inequalities have thrown up formidable new challenges to India's democracy and political stability. A recent report in the International Herald Tribune warned:
Crime rates are rising in the major cities, a band of Maoist-inspired rebels is bombing and pillaging its way across a wide swath of central India, and violent protests against industrialization projects are popping up from coast to coast.[3]

Militant Communist movements are only the most recent instance of the political extremism that has been on the rise since the early Nineties when India began to integrate into the global economy. Until 2004 the central government as well as many state governments in India were, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it in her new book,increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condone and in some cases actively support violence against minorities, especially the Muslim minority. Many seek fundamental changes in India's pluralistic democracy.

In 1992, the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party) gave early warning of its intentions when its members demolished the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in North India, leading to the deaths of thousands in Hindu–Muslim riots across the country. In May 1998, just two months after it came to power, the BJP broke India's self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing by exploding five atomic bombs in the desert of Rajasthan. Pakistan responded with five nuclear tests of its own.

The starkest evidence of Hindu extremism came in late February and March 2002 in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat. In a region internationally famous for its business communities, Hindu mobs lynched over two thousand Muslims and left more than two hundred thousand homeless. The violence was ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in which a car was set on fire, killing fifty-eight people. Nussbaum, who is engaged in a passionate attempt to end "American ignorance of India's history and current situation," makes the "genocidal violence" against Muslims in Gujarat the "focal point" of her troubled reflections on democracy in India. She points to forensic evidence which indicates that the fire in the train was most likely caused by a kerosene cooking stove carried by one of the Hindu pilgrims. In any case, as Nussbaum points out, there is "copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned by Hindu extremist organizations before the precipitating event."

Low-caste Dalits joined affluent upper-caste Hindus in killing Muslims, who in Gujarat as well as in the rest of India tend to be poor. "Approximately half of the victims," Nussbaum writes, "were women, many of whom were raped and tortured before being killed and burned. Children were killed with their parents; fetuses were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women to be tossed into the fire."

Gujarat's pro-business chief minister, Narendra Modi, an important leader of the BJP, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. The police were explicitly ordered not to stop the violence. The prime minister of India at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seemed to condone the killings when he declared that "wherever Muslims are, they don't want to live in peace." In public statements Hindu nationalists tried to make their campaign against Muslims seem part of the US-led war on terror, and, as Nussbaum writes, "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier for them to use this ploy."

A widespread fear and distrust of Muslims among Gujarat's middle-class Hindus helped the BJP win the state elections held in December 2002 by a landslide. Tens of thousands of Muslims displaced by the riots still live in conditions of extreme squalor in refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Hindu extremists involved in the killings of Muslims move freely. Though denied a visa to the US by the State Department, Narendra Modi continues to be courted by India's biggest businessmen, who are attracted by the low taxes, high profits, and flexible labor laws offered by Gujarat.[4]

Describing the BJP's quest for a culturally homogeneous Hindu nation-state, Nussbaum wishes to introduce her Western readers to "a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." Nussbaum claims that "most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter." She hints that at least part of this myopia must be blamed on Samuel Huntington's hugely influential "clash of civilizations" argument, which led many to believe that the world is "currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America."

Nussbaum points out that India, a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, doesn't fit Huntington's theory of a clash between civilizations. The real clash exists
within virtually all modern nations —between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the... domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.

She describes how Indian voters angered by the BJP's pro-rich economic policies and anti-Muslim violence voted it out of power in general elections in 2004. Detailing the general Indian revulsion against the violence in Gujarat and the search for justice by its victims, she highlights the "ability of well-informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality." Insisting on the practical utility of philosophy, Nussbaum has often attacked the theory-driven feminism of American academia. "India's women's movement," she claims, "has a great deal to teach America's rather academicized women's movement." She is convinced that from India "we Americans can learn a good deal about democracy and its future as we try to act responsibly in a dangerous world."

Nussbaum thus casts India's experience of democracy in an unfamiliar role: as a source of important lessons for Americans. Such brisk overturning of conventional perspective has distinguished Nussbaum's varied writings, which move easily from the ideas of Stoic philosophers to international development. Few contemporary philosophers in the West have reckoned with India's complex experience of democracy; and even fewer have engaged with it as vigorously as she does in The Clash Within.

Nussbaum, who has frequently visited India to research how gender relations shape social justice, is particularly concerned about the situation of women in contemporary India. She sensitively explores the colonial-era laws that, upheld by the Indian constitution, discriminate against Muslim women. She describes how Gujarat, which has had economic growth but has made little progress in education and health care, became a hospitable home to Hindu nationalists. She details, too, tensions within the Indian diaspora, many of whom are Gujarati, whose richest members support the BJP. She reveals how the BJP initiated India's own culture wars by revising history textbooks, inserting in them, among other things, praise for the "achievements" of Nazism.

Her interviews with prominent right-wing Hindus yield some shrewd psychological insights, particularly into Arun Shourie, an economist and investigative journalist who, famous initially for his intrepid exposés of corruption, became a cabinet minister and close adviser to BJP prime minister Vajpayee. She suggests that the anti-Muslim views of Shourie, who is otherwise capable of intelligent commentary, may owe to "something volatile and emotionally violent in his character...something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it might not be a threat."

In a chapter that forms the core of the book, she examines the ideas and legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, founding fathers of India's democracy. Her admiration for Tagore and Gandhi is deep. However, she offers only qualified praise for Nehru, India's resolutely rationalist first prime minister. Nussbaum laments that Nehru neglected "the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society"—a failure that she thinks left the opportunity wide open for the BJP's "public culture of exclusion and hate."

According to Nussbaum, Nehru may have been good at building formal institutions, but it was Gandhi who gave a spiritual and philosophical basis to democracy in India by calling "all Indians to a higher vision of themselves, getting people to perceive the dignity of each human being." She approves of Gandhi's view that only individuals who are critically conscious of their own conflicts and passions can build a real democracy. In fact, much of Nussbaum's own rather unconventional view of democracy in this book derives from the Gandhian idea of Swaraj (self-rule), in which control of one's inner life and respect for other people create self-aware and engaged rather than passive citizens. The "thesis of this book," she writes in her preface, is the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality.

However, Nussbaum's strongly felt and stimulating book deepens rather than answers the question: How did India's democracy, commonly described as the biggest in the world, become so vulnerable to religious extremism?

Ideological fanaticism stemming from personal inadequacies, such as the one Nussbaum identifies in Arun Shourie, is certainly to blame. But as Nussbaum herself outlines in her chapter on Gujarat, religious violence in India today cannot be separated from the recent dramatic changes in the country's economy and politics. The individual defects of Indian politicians only partly explain the great and probably insuperable social and economic conflicts that give India's democracy its particular momentum and anarchic vitality.

Richard Nixon once said that those who think that India is governed badly should marvel at the fact that it is governed at all. In a similar vein, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha asks in his forthcoming book India After Gandhi, "Why is there an India at all?"[5] For centuries India was not a nation in any conventional sense of the word. Not only did it not possess the shared language, culture, and national identity that have defined many nations; it had more social and cultural variety than even the continent of Europe. At the time of independence in 1950, much of its population was very poor and largely illiterate. India's multiple languages—the Indian constitution recognizes twenty-two—and religions, together with great inequalities of caste and class, ensured a wide potential for conflict.

Given this intractable complexity, democracy in India was an extraordinarily ambitious political experiment. By declaring India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, the makers of the Indian constitution seemed to take the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity more seriously than even their European and American counterparts. African-Americans got voting rights only in 1870, almost a century after the framing of the American Constitution, and American women only in 1920. But all Indian adults, irrespective of their class, sex, and caste, enjoyed the right to vote from 1950, when India formally became a republic.

What was also remarkable about the Indian Republic was that it came about with a minimum of political agitation. The Indian political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out that democracy in India came as a gift to the Indian masses from the largely middle-class and upper-caste leaders of the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. It was a byproduct rather than the natural consequence of the anti-colonial movement.[6]
Modern India's founding fathers, who preferred a secular democratic system, appear to have been great political idealists and visionaries. However, they were also pragmatists, and they couldn't have failed to see how democracy, which was viewed in India as inseparable from the promise of social and economic justice, and the official ideology of secular nationalism were necessary means to contain the country's many sectarian divisions. A former prime minister of India once defined his job as "managing contradictions"; this onerous task, as much moral as political, has remained the responsibility of ruling elites in democratic India.

From the very beginning, India's leaders faced the problem of instituting a secular and democratic state before the conditions for it—an adequately large secular and egalitarian-minded citizenry, and impartial legal institutions—had been met. A secular political culture couldn't be created overnight, and in the meantime citizens with political demands could only organize themselves in overtly religious, linguistic, and ethnic communities. As the experience of Iraq most recently shows, when citizens have few opportunities of participation in political life, a concept of democracy based on elections and the rule of the majority can deepen preexisting ethnic and religious divisions.

Sectarian tensions had opened up even in the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. Muslims suspicious that the secular nationalism of the Congress was a disguise for Hindu majoritarian rule demanded and eventually received a separate state, Pakistan. The promise of democracy also didn't prove sufficient in Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority and where one of Nehru's closest friends, Sheikh Abdullah, grew disillusioned with what he perceived as Hindu dominance over the province. On the whole, however, the Congress, helped greatly by the moral prestige of Gandhi and Nehru, succeeded in becoming a truly pan-Indian party in the first two decades after independence, able to appease the potentially conflicting interests of Muslims and low-caste Dalits as well as upper-caste Brahmins.

Nehru's suspicion of businessmen— shaped as much by the European distrust of capitalism between the wars as by India's forced deindustrialization by the British East India Company— committed him to state control of prices, wages, and production, and to strict limits on foreign investment and trade. These measures, which were aimed at both protecting the Indian poor from exploitation and creating India's industrial infrastructure, checked economic inequality, even if, as Nehru's critics allege, they distributed poverty more than they shared wealth.
As democratic ideals and beliefs took root among the Indian masses, the extraordinary consensus Nehru had created around his own charismatic figure and the Congress Party was always likely to fracture. Nehru's successor, Indira Gandhi, veered between populist and authoritarian measures, such as the "Emergency" she declared in 1975; but she failed to stem the decline of the Congress as a pan-Indian party. Powerful regional and caste-based politicians were no longer content to broker votes for an upper-class elite within the Congress, and wanted their own share of state power; during the Eighties many hitherto imperceptible political assertions became louder, turning into what V.S. Naipaul in a book published in 1990 termed "a million mutinies now."

The decade saw the rise of new caste- and region-based political coalitions. Fundamentally unstable, they emerged and collapsed just as quickly. In 1989, the attempt by one of these coalition governments to placate low-caste discontent through affirmative action—for example, reserving a portion of government jobs for members of these castes—angered and alienated many upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. Already disillusioned by the Congress, they turned to supporting the upper-caste-dominated BJP, which until the late Eighties had been a negligible force in Indian politics.

Hoping to replace the discredited Congress as India's ruling elite, the BJP realized that it would have to create another kind of moral and ideological authority. And so, claiming that secular nationalism was a failure, it offered Hindu nationalism, arguing that just as Europe and America, though officially secular, were rooted in Christian culture, so India should revive its traditional Hindu ethos that Muslim invaders had allegedly defiled.

Remarkably, the BJP, while doing away with one plank of Indian democracy, couldn't abandon the rhetoric of political equality. Aware that the party couldn't achieve a parliamentary majority without low-caste votes, its leaders were at pains throughout their anti-Muslim campaigns to present Hindu nationalism to low-caste Hindus as an egalitarian ideology. (The presence of Dalits in Gujarat's lynch mobs attests to their success.)

The liberalization of the economy under Congress's leadership in 1991— through such measures as eliminating tariffs and restrictions on private business—created a new constituency for the traditionally pro-business BJP: the rising middle class in urban centers. Declaring that it would restore India to its long-lost international eminence, the BJP also acquired what Nussbaum calls "a powerful and wealthy US arm": a generation of rich Indians who while living abroad seek to affirm their identities through the achievements of their ancestral land. It was largely owing to the support of the Hindu middle class—the BJP has rarely done well in rural areas—that Hindu nationalists managed, after a string of successes throughout the Nineties in provincial elections, to gain power within a coalition government in New Delhi in 1998.

Six years of the BJP's rule brought about deep shifts in Indian politics and the economy. There was accelerated economic growth, especially in information technology and business-processing services such as call centers. It was also around this time that the faith—first popularized in America and Britain during the Reagan and Thatcher years—that free markets can take over the functions of the state spread among many Indian journalists and intellectuals.

Ideology-driven globalization of the kind the BJP supported, which reduced even the government's basic responsibility for health care and education, further complicated the promise of political equality in India. The world economy had its own particular demands—for example for software engineers and back-office workers—that India could fulfill. And while the country's comparative advantage in technically adept manpower has benefited a small minority, it has excluded hundreds of millions of Indians who neither have nor can easily acquire the special skills needed to enter the country's booming services sector. Many of these Indians live in India's poorest and most populous states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh in the north, Orissa in the East, and Andhra Pradesh in the south. Their poor infrastructure—bad roads and erratic power supply—as well as high crime levels make them a daunting investment prospect.

Thus, even as the economy grew in urban areas, preexisting inequalities of resources, access to information, skills, and status came to be further entrenched within India. The country's prestigious engineering and management colleges now seek to set up branches outside India, but, according to a survey in 2004, only half of the paid teachers in Indian primary schools were actually teaching during official hours.[7] Europeans and Americans head to India for high-quality and inexpensive medical care while the Indian poor struggle with the most privatized health system in the world.

Nevertheless, the BJP campaigned in the 2004 elections on the slogan "India Shining." Its success was predicted by almost all of the English-language press and television. As expected, urban middle-class Hindus, who had been best-placed to embrace new opportunities in business and trade, preferred the BJP. However, the majority of Indians, who had been left behind by recent economic growth, voted against incumbent governments, unseating, among others, many strongly pro-business ruling politicians in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (of which Bangalore is the capital city).

In the elections of 2004, Indian Communist parties performed better than ever before. The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, had built its election campaign around the travails of the ordinary Indian in the age of globalization. Much to its own surprise, the party found itself in power, with Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, as prime minister.

Singh and his Harvard-educated finance minister P. Chidambaram were among the technocrats who initiated India's economic reforms in 1991. Their second stint in power has disappointed international business periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times as well as much of the English-language press in India, which complains periodically that economic reform in India has more or less stalled since 2004. But given the mandate it received from the electorate, Singh's government has little choice but to appear cautious. The rise in inflation that accompanies high economic growth proved fatal for many governments in India in the previous decade, most recently in the state of Punjab where the ruling Congress lost to a coalition, prompting Sonia Gandhi to publicly ask the central government to show greater sensitivity to the plight of poor Indians.

The government's hands are already tied by rules of free trade inspired by such international institutions as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Thousands of cotton farmers in central India have killed themselves, escaping a plight that Oxfam in a report last year claimed had been worsened by their "indiscriminate and forced integration" into an "unfair global system" in which the agricultural products of heavily subsidized farmers in the US and Europe depress prices globally. Unable to persuade the United States to cut its subsidies to American farmers, the Indian commerce minister spent much of his time at the WTO's Doha Round of talks in July 2006 watching the soccer World Cup.

Unlike China, India can only go so far in creating a "business-friendly climate"—the very limited ambition of many politicians today. In China, lack of democratic accountability has helped the nominally Communist regime to give generous subsidies and tax breaks to exporters and foreign investors. The swift and largely unpublicized suppression of protesting peasants has also made it easier for real estate speculators acting in tandem with corrupt Party bosses to seize agricultural land.[8]

In India, however, the government's efforts to court businessmen are provoking a highly visible backlash from poorer Indians who feel themselves excluded from the benefits of globalization. Plans to relax India's labor laws —in other words, to import the hire-and-fire practices of American companies—have provoked strong protests from trade unions. In recent weeks, the government has been forced to reconsider its plan to set up Chinese-style Special Economic Zones for foreign companies after the project ran into violent opposition from farmers facing eviction from their lands.[9]

Such intense mass agitations in India have helped magnify the growing contradictions of economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu nationalism.

The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless peasants, is what has led to militant Communist movements of unprecedented vigor and scale—Prime Minister Singh recently described them as the greatest internal security threat faced by India since independence in 1947.[10] These Mao-inspired Communists, who have their own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa.

Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of the country they live in. Affluent Indians are helped in this relocation—as much psychological as geographical—by the English-language press and television, which, as a report in the International Herald Tribune put it, "has concocted a world —all statistical evidence to the contrary—in which you are a minority if not fabulously rich."[11]

Nussbaum is right to say that the "level of debate and reporting in the major newspapers and at least some of the television networks is impressively high." In fact, India is one of the few countries where print newspapers and magazines, especially in regional languages, continue to flourish. But the most influential part of the Indian press not only makes little use of its freedom; it helps diminish the space for public discussion, which partly accounts for what the philosopher Pratap Mehta calls the "extraordinary non-deliberative nature of Indian politics."

On any given day, the front pages of such mainstream Indian newspapers as The Hindustan Times and the Times of India veer between celebrity-mongering—Britney Spears's new hair-style—and what appears to be "consumer nationalism"—reports on Indian tycoons, beauty queens, fashion designers, filmmakers, and other achievers in the West. Excited accounts of Tata, India's biggest private-sector company, buying the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus make it seem that something like what The Economic Times, India's leading business paper, calls "The Global Indian Take-over" is underway. Largely reduced to an echo chamber, where an elite minority seems increasingly to hear mainly its own voice, the urban press is partly responsible for a new privileged generation of Indians lacking, as Nussbaum points out, any "identification with the poor."

The stultification of large parts of the Indian mass media is accompanied by the growing presence of a new kind of special interest in Indian politics: that of large corporations. Close links between businessmen and politicians have existed for a long time. But unlike in the United States, the electoral process in India was not primarily shaped by the candidates' ability to raise corporate money. Compared to the US Congress, the Indian parliament was relatively free of lobbyists for large companies. This began to change during the rule of the Hindu nationalists, who proved themselves as adept in working with big businessmen as in holding on to its older constituency of small merchants and traders. A recent opinion poll in the newsmagazine Outlook reveals that growing public distaste for politics feeds on the intimacy between politicians and businessmen.

Nussbaum terms "surreal" the "mixture of probusiness politics and violence that characterizes the BJP." But this doesn't seem so surreal if, briefly reversing Nussbaum's gaze, we look at "democracy and its future" in the United States. Many of Nussbaum's American readers would be familiar with the alliance between right-wing politics and religion, or with how powerful business elites advance their interests under the cover of ultranationalism and religious faith.

Unlike the situation in India, democracy in America has not been largely perceived as a means to social and economic egalitarianism. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party's victory in midterm elections in November 2006 suggests widespread disquiet over inequality in America, which has grown rapidly against a backdrop of corporate scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, extravagant executive pay, dwindling pensions and health insurance, and increased outsourcing of jobs—including to India—by American companies looking for cheap labor and high profits.[12]

Examining the state of American democracy in his new book, Is Democracy Possible Here?, Ronald Dworkin asserts that "the level of indifference the nation now shows to the fate of its poor calls into question not only the justice of its fiscal policies but also their legitimacy."[13] The challenge before India's political system is not much different: how to ensure a minimum of equality in an age of globalization as international business and financial institutions deprive governments of some of their old sovereignty, empower elites with transnational loyalties, and cause ordinary citizens to grow indifferent to politics.

In a recent book, the distinguished American political scientist Robert A. Dahl offers an optimistic vision in which "an increasing awareness that the dominant culture of competitive consumerism does not lead to greater happiness gives way to a culture of citizenship that strongly encourages movement toward greater political equality among American citizens." Dahl points out that "once people have achieved a rather modest level of consumption, further increases in income and consumption no longer produce an increase in their sense of well-being or happiness."[14]

This awareness is not easily achieved in a culture of capitalism that thrives on ceaselessly promoting and multiplying desire. But it may be imperative for Indians, who, arriving late in the modern world, are confronted with the possibility that economic growth on the model of Western consumer capitalism is no longer environmentally sustainable. One billion Indians, not to mention another billion Chinese, embracing Western modes of work and consumption will cause irrevocable damage to the global environment, which is strained enough at having to provide resources for the lifestyles of a few hundred million Americans and Europeans.

Fortunately, a large majority of poor and religious Indians do not live within the modern culture of materialism; they are invulnerable to the glamour of the CEO, the investment banker, the PR executive, the copywriter, and other gurus of the West's fully organized consumer societies. Traditional attitudes toward the natural environment make Indians, like the Japanese, more disposed than Americans to pursue happiness modestly.[15] And almost six decades after his assassination, Gandhi's traditionalist emphasis on austerity and self-abnegation remains a powerful part of Indian identity.

Gandhi saw clearly how organizing human societies around endless economic growth would promote inequality and conflict within as well as between nations. He knew that for democracy to flourish, it "must learn," as Martha Nussbaum puts it, "to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others."

Gandhi's ethical vision of democracy seems more persuasive as the social costs of the obsession with economic growth become intolerable. Responding to another wave of mass suicides of farmers in July 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made it clear that only a small minority in India can and will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption." Singh exhorted his countrymen to abandon the "wasteful" Western model of consumerism and learn from the frugal ways of Gandhi, which he claimed were a "necessity" in India.[16] The invocation of Gandhi by a Western-style technocrat sounds rhetorical. But it may also be an acknowledgment that there are no easy ways out of the impasse—the danger of intensified violence and environmental destruction —to which globalization has brought the biggest democracy in the world.

Notes
[1] Though the service sector employs only 23 percent of the population, it accounts for 54 percent of India's GDP.
[2] Somini Sengupta, "On India's Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide," The New York Times, September 19, 2006.
[3] Anand Giridharadas, "Rising Prosperity Brings New Fears to India," International Herald Tribune, January 26, 2007.
[4] See Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "Gujarat's Guru," Outlook, January 29, 2007.
[5] Ramachandra Guha, India After Gan-dhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (to be published by Ecco in August 2007), p. 15.
[6] Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. 5.
[7] Jo Johnson, "Poor Turn to Private Schools," Financial Times, January 13, 2007.
[8] Dramatically increasing investment in education and health care and withdrawing tax breaks to foreign businessmen in their latest budget proposals, China's new leaders seem to be trying to check growing inequalities and social unrest in their country. See "Getting Rich," London Review of Books, November 30, 2006.
[9] Somini Sengupta, "Indian Police Kill 11 at Protest Over Economic Zone" The New York Times, March 15, 2007.
[10] Jo Johnson, "Leftist Insurgents Kill 50 Indian Policemen," Financial Times, March 15, 2007.
[11] See also Siddhartha Deb, "The 'Feel-Good': Letter from Delhi," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2005.
[12] For a vigorous assertion of growing economic populism in America, see James Webb, "Class Struggle: American Workers Have a Chance to Be Heard," The Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2006.
[13] Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 118.
[14] Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. x, 106.
[15] Renée Loth, "Japan's Energy Wisdom," International Herald Tribune, March 26, 2007.
[16] "Refarmer Manmohan," The Economic Times, July 3, 2006.


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20339

 

[niaz]

An excellent article. Couldnt have put in a better way myself. My personal observations are no different. In fact I have a higher esteem for the Mahatma and Nehru than implied by the writer. I have the bad habit of aknowledging merit in my enemies and to me Nehru; regardless of his anti Pakistan and anti Kashmir policies, was truly a secular person therefore to be admired. Mahatma Gandhi wanted a United India and even offered to make the great Quaid prime minister to achieve his aim. Besides, Gandhiji is admired by the geat personalities such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; this is enough to show his stature and thus no need to count his virtues.

Writer's observations about BJP are very poignant and it is a pity that they have a very large vote bank. One of the draw backs of democracy is that it counts the heads without weighing them ( translation of one the verses of Iqbal). So if BJP is what majority of the Indian voters want, outsiders have to put up with it. I would have personally preferred if BJP govt was not in power in Gujrat though. Gujrat is the land of the Mahatma! and Narender Modi stands for everything that Mahatma fought all his life to eliminate.

Nussbaum is obviously a Jewish name. It goes to show that a Jew and a Muslim ( myself) can think alike on some subjects. Yes, I can be very presumptuous !!

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Fears for Democracy in India

By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

The Chronicle Review – May 18, 2007

On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed was on top of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, frustrated in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily emotional. When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers got into arguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail Rama"). As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.

Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the dead were Hindus. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was made up of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the region to protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform, blame was immediately put on Muslims. Many people were arrested, and some of those are still in detention without charge — despite the fact that two independent inquiries have established through careful sifting of the forensic evidence that the fire was most probably a tragic accident, caused by combustion from cookstoves carried on by the passengers and stored under the seats of the train.

In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with "Kill! Destroy!" and "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned before the precipitating event by Hindu extremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion. No one was spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with their families, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women. Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped, mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and then set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims were killed.

Most alarming was the total breakdown in the rule of law — not only at the local level but also at that of the state and national governments. Police were ordered not to stop the violence. Some egged it on. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. He was later re-elected on a platform that focused on religious hatred. Meanwhile the national government showed a culpable indifference. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested that religious riots were inevitable wherever Muslims lived alongside Hindus, and that troublemaking Muslims were to blame.

While Americans have focused on President Bush's "war on terror," Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.

What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism.

In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers. Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the future is unclear.

The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations," made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's India, where, I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right are imports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other inequalities.

The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the West," but instead within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition. At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I've called the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination. Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to today's conflicts.

A ccording to the Huntington thesis, each "civilization" has its own distinctive view of life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct "civilization." If we investigate the history of the Hindu right, however, we will see a very different story. Traditional Hinduism was decentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision of a unitary, "pure" Hinduism that could provide the new nation, following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressive ideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders of the Hindu right had to import it from Europe.

The Hindu right's view of history is a simple one. Like all simple tales, it is largely a fabrication, but its importance to the movement may be seen by the intensity with which its members go after scholars who present a more nuanced and accurate view: not only by strident public critiques, but by organized campaigns of threat and intimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence. Here's how the story goes:

Once there lived in the Indus Valley a pure and peaceful people. They spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the gods. They had a rich material culture and a peaceful temper, although they were prepared for war. Their realm was vast, stretching from Kashmir in the north to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet they saw unity and solidarity in their shared ways of life, calling themselves Hindus and their land Hindustan. No class divisions troubled them, nor was caste a painful source of division. The condition of women was excellent.

That peaceful condition went on for centuries. Although from time to time marauders made their appearance (for example, the Huns), they were quickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely, unprovoked, invading Muslims put an end to all that. Early in the 16th century, Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, swept through the north of Hindustan, vandalizing Hindu temples, stealing sacred objects, building mosques over temple ruins. For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy of the marauders, until the Maharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored the Hindu kingdom. His success was all too brief. Soon the British took up where Babur and his progeny had left off, imposing tyranny upon Hindustan and her people. They can recover their pride only by concerted aggression against alien elements in their midst.

What is wrong with that picture? Well, for a start, the people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims. Second, it leaves out problems in Hindu society: the problem of caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore took to be the central social issue facing India, and obvious problems of class and gender inequality. (When historians point to evidence of these things, the Hindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself, invalidated their arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regional differences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimes associated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peaceful coexistence and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good deal of the Mughal Empire, including the well-known policies of religious pluralism of Akbar (1542-1605).

In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that of humiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries, and their masculinity insulted, in part because they have not been aggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideologues of the Hindu right responded to the call for a warlike Hindu masculinity in different ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was a freedom fighter who spent years in a British prison in the Andaman Islands, and who may have been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in the independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization known as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers Association), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right. Savarkar's "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923, undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his definition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the need to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.

Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in 1939. Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his task as describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked to Western political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what he called "race pride" helped bring "under one sway the whole of the territory" that was originally held by the Germani. By purging itself of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

In the end, Golwalkar's vision of national unity was not exactly that of Nazi Germany. He was not very concerned with purity of blood, but rather with whether Muslim and Christian groups were willing to "abandon their differences, and completely merge themselves in the National Race." He was firmly against the civic equality of any people who retained their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.

At the time of independence, such ideas of Hindu supremacy did not prevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted not only on equal rights for all citizens, but also on stringent protections for religious freedom of expression in the new Constitution. Gandhi always pointedly included Muslims at the very heart of his movement. He felt that respect for human equality lay at the heart of all genuine religions, and provided Hindus with strong reasons both for repudiating the caste hierarchy and for seeking relationships of respect and harmony with Christians and Muslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, was one of his and Nehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him that Gandhi turned to accept food when he broke his fast unto death, a very pointed assault on sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's pluralistic ideas, however, were always contested.

On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu political party Mahasabha and former member of the RSS, who had long had a close, reverential relationship with Savarkar. At his sentencing on November 8, 1949, Godse read a book-length statement of self-explanation. Although it was not permitted publication at the time, it gradually leaked out. Today it is widely available on the Internet, where Godse is revered as a hero on Hindu-right Web sites.

Godse's self-justification, like the historical accounts of both Savarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary events against the backdrop of centuries of "Muslim tyranny" in India, punctuated by the heroic resistance of Shivaji in the 18th century. Like Savarkar, Godse described his goal as that of creating a strong, proud India that could throw off the centuries of domination. He was appalled by Gandhi's rejection of the warlike heroes of classical Hindu epics and his inclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation, and argued that Gandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation. Nehru believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly widespread conspiracy" on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist takeovers. And he believed that the RSS was the power behind this conspiracy.

Fast-forward now to recent years. Although illegal for a time, the RSS eventually re-emerged and quietly went to work building a vast social network, consisting largely of groups for young boyscalled shakha, or "branches"which, through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinate the young into the confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology of the organization. The idea of total obedience and the abnegation of critical faculties is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Each day, as members raise the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji, which the movement prefers to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation (with its Buddhist wheel of law reminding citizens of the emperor Ashoka's devotion to religious toleration), they recite a pledge that begins: "I take the oath that I will always protect the purity of Hindu religion, and the purity of Hindu culture, for the supreme progress of the Hindu nation." The organization also makes clever use of modern media: A nationally televised serial version of the classic epic Ramayana in the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with its concocted tale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the single-minded worship of the god Rama. In 1992 Hindu mobs, with the evident connivance of the modern political wing of the RSS, the party known as the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or National People's Party), destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya that they say covers the remains of a Hindu temple marking Rama's birthplace.

Politically, the BJP began to gather strength in the late 1980s, drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic policies of the post-Nehru Congress Party (although it was actually Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms), and playing, always, the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its ascendancy, in a coalition government that prevented it from carrying out all its goals, that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took place. The violence in Gujarat was the culmination of a series of increasingly angry pilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu right has attempted to construct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but has been frustrated by the courts. Although the elections of 2004 gave a negative verdict on the BJP government, it remains the major opposition party and controls governments in some key states, including Gujarat.

For several years, I have studied the Gujarat violence, its basis and its aftermath, looking for implications for how we should view religious violence around the world. One obvious conclusion is that each case must be studied on its own merits, with close attention to specific historical and regional factors. The idea that all conflicts are explained by a simple hypothesis of the "clash of civilizations" proves utterly inadequate in Gujarat, where European ideas were borrowed to address a perceived humiliation and to create an ideology that has led to a great deal of violence against peaceful Muslims. Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis is the best friend of the perpetrators because it shields them and their ideology from scrutiny. Repeatedly in interviews with leading members of the Hindu right, I was informed that no doubt, as an American, I was already on their side, knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever they are.

What we see in Gujarat is not a simplistic, comforting thesis, but something more disturbing: the fact that in a thriving democracy, many individuals are unable to live with others who are different, on terms of mutual respect and amity. They seek total domination as the only road to security and pride. That is a phenomenon well known in democracies around the world, and it has nothing to do with an alleged Muslim monolith, and, really, very little to do with religion as such.

This case, then, informs us that we must look within, asking whether in our own society similar forces are at work, and, if so, how we may counteract them. Beyond that general insight, my study of the riots has suggested four very specific lessons.

The rule of law: One of the most appalling aspects of the events in Gujarat was the complicity of officers of the law. The police sat on their hands, the highest officials of state government egged on the killing, and the national government gave aid and comfort to the state government.

However, the institutional and legal structure of the Indian democracy ultimately proved robust, playing a key role in securing justice for the victims. The Supreme Court and the Election Commission of India played constructive roles in postponing new elections while Muslims were encouraged to return home, and in ordering changes of venue in key trials arising out of the violence. Above all, free national elections were held in 2004, and those elections, in which the participation of poor rural voters was decisive, delivered a strongly negative verdict on the policies of fear and hate, as well as on the BJP's economic policies. The current government, headed by Manmohan Singha Sikh and India's first minority prime ministerhas announced a firm commitment to end sectarian violence and has done a great deal to focus attention on the unequal economic and political situation of Muslims in the nation, as well as appointing Muslims to key offices. On balance, then, the pluralistic democracy envisaged by Gandhi and Nehru seems to be winning, in part because the framers of the Indian state bequeathed to India a wise institutional and constitutional structure, and traditions of commitment to the key political values that structure embodies.

It should be mentioned that one of the key aspects of the founders' commitments, which so far has survived the Hindu-right challenge, is the general conception of the nation as a uni-ty around political ideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement, rather than around ethnic or religious or linguistic identity. India, like the United States, but unlike most of the nations of Europe, has rejected such exclusionary ways of characterizing the nation, adopting in its Constitution, in public ceremonies, and in key public symbols the political conception of its unity. Political structure is not ev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times of stress.

The news media and the role of intellectuals: One of the heartening aspects of the Gujarat events was the performance of the national news media and of the community of intellectuals. Both print media and television kept up unceasing pressure to document and investigate events. At the same time, many scholars, lawyers, and leaders of nongovernnmental organizations converged on Gujarat to take down the testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints, and prepare a public record that would stand up in court. The only reason I felt the need to write about these events further is that their analyses have, by and large, not reached the American audience.

We can see here documentation of something long ago observed by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the context of famines: the crucial role of a free press in supporting democratic institutions. (Sen pointed out that there has not been a famine in recent times in a nation where a free press brings essential information to the public; in China, by contrast, in the late 1950s and early 60s, famine was allowed to continue unabated, because news of what was happening in rural areas did not leak out.) And we can study here what a free press really means: I would argue that it requires a certain absence of top-down corporate control and an easy access to the major news media for intellectual voices from a wide range of backgrounds.

Education and the importance of critical thinking and imagination: So far I have mentioned factors that have helped the Indian democracy survive the threat of quasi-fascist takeover. But there are warning signs for the future. The public schools in Gujarat are famous for their complete lack of critical thinking, their exclusive emphasis on rote learning and the uncritical learning of marketable skills, and the elements of fascist propaganda that easily creep in when critical thinking is not cultivated. It is well known that Hitler is presented as a hero in history textbooks in the state, and nationwide public protest has not yet led to any change. To some extent, the rest of the nation is better off: National-level textbooks have been rewritten to take out the Hindu right's false ideological view of history and to substitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless, the emphasis on rote learning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations is distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with the immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.

The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices, such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills in the world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a cultivated imagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices have now been silenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the global market. Parents want their children to learn marketable skills, and their great pride is the admission of a child to the Indian Institutes of Technology or the India Institutes of Management. They have contempt for the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy down the road, when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile engineers in the Gujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of politicians and unable to imagine the pain of another human being.

In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent of Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong to the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis on uncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of the sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why this ceiling glows the way it does?" I said I didn't, and I confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. "Fiber-optic cables," he told me. "We are the first ones to put this technology into a temple." There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.

The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such hold in India? Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism, and daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds encounter one another. But as I've noted, the traditions contain a wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated masculinity. For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were subordinated by a sequence of conquerors, and Hindus have come to identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions, scorned by the masters of the Raj, with their own weakness and subjection. So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection. One reason why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of masculine failure.

At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots level with great discipline and selflessness. The RSS is not just about fascist ideology; it also provides needed social services, and it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that has both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world of government schools.

S o what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a public culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization, and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu right. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash within each person, in which the ability to live with others on terms of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of being humiliated.

Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focused attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynous maternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashing others; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts to aggression and standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient to address it.

In a quite different way, Tagore also created a counterimage of the Indian self, an image that was more sensuous, more joyful than that of Gandhi, but equally bent on renouncing the domination that Tagore saw as inherent in European traditions. In works such as Nationalism and The Religion of Man, Tagore described a type of joyful cosmopolitanism, underwritten by poetry and the arts, that he also made real in his pioneering progressive school in Santiniketan.

After Gandhi, however, that part of the pluralist program has languished. Though he much loved and admired both Gandhi and Tagore, Nehru had contempt for religion, and out of his contempt he neglected the cultivation of what the radical religions of both men had supplied: images of who we are as citizens, symbolic connections to the roots of human vulnerability and openness, and the creation of a grass-roots public culture around those symbols. Nehru was a great institution builder, but in thinking about the public culture of the new nation, his focus was always on economic, not cultural, issues. Because he firmly expected that raising the economic level of the poor would cause them to lose the need for religion and, in general, for emotional nourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce to the powerful emotional propaganda of the Hindu right.

Today's young people in India, therefore, tend to think of religion, and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are in their very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what they have seen in their experience. When one tells them the story of the American civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religion and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civic culture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the RSS goes to work unopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking the strings of hate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that a mistake was made in leaving grass-roots organization to the right, but it is very difficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient exception has been the women's movement, which has built at the grass roots very skillfully.

It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations. That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience of domination and humiliation.

The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, need to examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of critical capacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devising effective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeper level, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in their different ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in the human personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were pure and free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that the resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to bad behavior.

Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in the philosophy department, law school, divinity school, and the college at the University of Chicago. Her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future will be published this week by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t15b1l92nf46jb6sq8b82dpsct9f9003

 

[Contrarian]

Yes, i agree.

Democracy will not survive in India for long.
Probably we need a military backed govt now to achieve the miraculous economic growth and prosperity of Bangladesh!!

 

[joey]

An excellent article. Couldnt have put in a better way myself. My personal observations are no different. In fact I have a higher esteem for the Mahatma and Nehru than implied by the writer. I have the bad habit of aknowledging merit in my enemies and to me Nehru; regardless of his anti Pakistan and anti Kashmir policies, was truly a secular person therefore to be admired. Mahatma Gandhi wanted a United India and even offered to make the great Quaid prime minister to achieve his aim. Besides, Gandhiji is admired by the geat personalities such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; this is enough to show his stature and thus no need to count his virtues.

Writer's observations about BJP are very poignant and it is a pity that they have a very large vote bank. One of the draw backs of democracy is that it counts the heads without weighing them ( translation of one the verses of Iqbal). So if BJP is what majority of the Indian voters want, outsiders have to put up with it. I would have personally preferred if BJP govt was not in power in Gujrat though. Gujrat is the land of the Mahatma! and Narender Modi stands for everything that Mahatma fought all his life to eliminate.

Nussbaum is obviously a Jewish name. It goes to show that a Jew and a Muslim ( myself) can think alike on some subjects. Yes, I can be very presumptuous !!

Are you sure the article is a excellent one? I personally dont think so and definitely can debate on the issue.

BJP is not extremist and I repeat that again, the small groups sucking under the vote banks of BJP are extremists, while I'll ask you one thing dont they exist under Congress as well? If you say no Do you want me to show what Gandhiji thought about the missionaries since your post dwells upon his greatness? or do you want me to show when and how Congress has also utilized the extremist vote bank for their interest?

If BJP were nationalistic they would not exploit nationalism for the cause of their party and drain it, if they were extremist they would not initiate the peace process in Kashmir.

Outsiders have to put up with What India wants how?
You do lack bulls eye to judge articles, our democracy has serious issues but almost NONE OF THOSE ISSUES has been touched in this article and I'll wait for you to prove it.

Modi in Gujrat is a matter of politics, while his staying there has nothing to do with democracy within. Modis time is nearing anyway.

Chandrababu Naidu the CM of Andhra pradesh mordernised AP but cared too hoot about farmers while made 8 way expressways in hyderabad, he was thrown off the government due to increasing farmer suicides.

In west bengal Communism recently has claimedf the life of over 100 in cold blooded manner, nandigram and singur SEZ issue.


lets have a look, I'll be glad if you can prove things wrong in light of her novel,

Lucifer vs. Martha Nussbaum
Lila Rajiva, June 4, 2007
TAGS: BJP Fundamentalism India Martha Nussbaum Politics Samuel Huntington

Lila Rajiva is the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, and the co-author with Bill Bonner of the forthcoming Mobs, Messiahs and Markets. This is her first contribution to the Daily Shvitz.

In an earlier Shvitz post, Rohit Gupta criticized Martha Nussbaum’s latest piece in The Chronicle for Higher Education, in which Nussbaum positions herself as liberal by taking on Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis of clashing civilizations.

Rohit enumerated some of Nussbaum's specific errors, but I would like to dissect her theoretical position, which I think is what enables her to make those errors.


Her entire article is marred by such omissions and errors. She presents her account of the origins of Hindu culture as cold fact, whereas it is quite controversial. She mentions the Muslim emperor’s Akbar’s syncretism in contrast to Shivaji’s Hindu chauvinism without mentioning Shivaji’s foe, the fanatic and murderous Aurangzeb. She fails to mention decades of Pakistan- sponsored terrorism in India that was not only downplayed by the US but abetted by it. It was a useful trade-off to support a Muslim country in one place where its claim was weak but oppose another in the Middle East where its claim was strong. Nor does she mention the ethnic cleansing of former East Pakistan’s Hindu population nor of Kashmir’s, nor Muslim Caliphate claims, nor reports of CIA involvement with some (not all) Western human rights, missionary and aid organizations in India. She dismisses the Hindu right version of history as simplistic but hers is more so. Neither secularism nor liberalism need such selectivity.

More importantly, as Rohit points out, she ignores the state’s role in the years after independence in the creation of entitlements -- quotas and reservations in jobs and universities. Originally meant to rectify gross inequities under law they have now become instruments of social engineering that are widely resented in India, as they are here in the US. Quotas in multiethnic states have generally had broad adverse effects but they continue to be pursued. Why? Because they satisfy what’s been called the new trans-national progressive regime that calls for human rights, environmental and social justice laws that bind nation states to trans-national standards.

http://www.jewcy.com/daily_shvitz/lucifer_vs_martha_nussbaum#comment-7516

Lets get into a deep detail shall we?

She writes,

A nationally televised serial version of the classic epic Ramayana in the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with its concocted tale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the single-minded worship of the god Rama.

My minds wonder have she seen A SINGLE EPISODE OF IT? niaz have you? Can you dwell upon the truthfullness of her this understanding? Or I can send you a pack of CD of the episodes? now ofcourse if I find one..

Why not dwell upon a bit more?

When one tells them the story of the American civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religion and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civic culture

So basically, Hinduism/buddhism/jainism which has lived alongside each other in India for 1000s of years is "fascist" in nature, but the very christianism that justified slave trade and motivated the Ku Klux Klan to fight the civil rights movement is a "liberal religion". How....ummm....objective, "professor" Nussbaum, Can you explain niaz?

And how about, Hitler? Who was inspired by the religion and only later by the German race theory?


Read this and tell me what you find right,

Deconstructing Martha Nussbaum: The Hindu Right Revisited
May 24, 2007
Cynical Nerd

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Chicago launches her book this week titled The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future. The Harvard University Press published this. She had a preview published at The Chronicle for Higher Education on May 18, 2007. Here are my preliminary impressions on the latter.

I give her the benefit of the doubt. Nussbaum appears to be a genuine liberal, a well wisher and broad minded. Her criticisms of the Hindu right are not without reason and she makes some valid points. The 2002 Gujarat riots deserved criticism. This said, she makes huge leaps of argument without substantiating them, provides zero context and stands accused of several factual inaccuracies. This makes me query her credentials as a lawyer-academic. Nussbaum lacks the rigor one would have expected of a senior academic. Let me illustrate.

Hers is a foreign policy prescription directed at a liberal democrat audience. She argues that democratic institutions are vulnerable to the challenge posed by religious nationalism. In India, this is epitomized by the Hindu right as witnessed in the Gujarat riots. The phenomenon was largely unnoticed in the United States preoccupied with Islamic fundamentalism. She iterates that such threats need to be confronted.

Nussbaum is not entirely incorrect. The RSS represents an insular atavistic world view that is often coarse. The rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal exemplifies this. But Hinduism and the BJP-led National Development Alliance (NDA) can not be equated with the RSS. The NDA when in power included Dalit activists such as Ram Vilas Paswan, the Kashmir-based National Conference, anti-Brahmanic "Dravidian" parties and veteran socialists like George Fernandez! It cut across regions and the social divide. She needs to temper her strident critique with a more nuanced and accurate view.

History

Nussbaum distorts history with her slipshod analysis and facile methodology. At one point she describes "traditional Hinduism" as "decentralized, plural and highly tolerant". She contrasts that with the Hindu right and proceeds to outline what she thinks to be their version of history. She concludes that "Hindus are no more indigenous [to India] than Muslims" in light of the Aryan invasion. Her history needs to be corrected.

The colonial-era hypothesis of "a people who spoke Sanskrit migrating into the Indian subcontinent finding indigenous, probably Dravidian peoples there" needs to be revised in its chronology and sequence . The Indo-European speaking peoples purportedly migrated at a much earlier time period, were far fewer in number and certainly did not speak Sanskrit which evolved later. I refer to archeologists such as Colin Renfrew, J.N. Kenoyer and Marija Gimbutas and to the geneticist Cavalli-Sforza. Whether the purported indigenes were "Dravidian" is uncertain as well. It is more likely that the introduction of iron and improved technology facilitated the spread of civilizational ideas associated with those speaking Indo-European dialects. Hinduism had evolved over the centuries in the Indian subcontinent drawing from multiple sources be they Aryan or Dravidian by the time the earlier verses of the Rig Veda were first uttered in the Punjab circa 1,500 BCE. Hinduism had its origins in the region!

Political Context

Nussbaum views events in isolation. She repeatedly fails to provide political context. She relies on V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar to illustrate the Hindu right emphasizing their alleged Nazi German ideological antecedents. I do not intend to defend either except to add that the German and Japanese defiance of the West during World War II found resonance not just in India but in Latin America, the Middle East and South East Asia. Mohammed Iqbal, the intellectual forerunner of Pakistan, found inspiration in Germany. Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian left was another example. Many were attracted by the discipline, defiance and success on the battlefront. This fascination across continents had little to do with the Nazi treatment of European Jewry though Nussbaum would understandably be aghast given her adopted Jewish heritage.

It is indeed correct that Golwalkar extolled Germany in 1939. The Muslim League had upped the campaign for partition the previous year by accusing the Congress under Mohandas K. Gandhi and Nehru of sidelining Muslim interests. Religious riots had assumed a new ferocity, the seeds for partition had been sowed and a program of religious polarization initiated. This was exemplified in the Muslim League's Pirpur report of 1938. Nussbaum is unaware of context. She should therefore not arrogate the right to comment on issues that she knows little about.

She asks "how did fascism take such a hold in India?" Context is key once again. India is surrounded by neighbors that epitomize raw aggression and violence. The recent history of Afghanistan hardly needs reiteration. Bangladesh, the erstwhile East Bengal, had a Hindu population of 29% in 1947. This fell to 10% in 2001 due to the eviction, intimidation and land grab over the decades. Bhutan expelled 1/7th of its population because they spoke Nepalese. 30 million people might have died in the great Chinese famine in the late 1950s. China's treatment of Tibet in the late 1960s had elements of genocide. Hindus and Sikhs comprised 19% of what is today Pakistan in 1947. This declined to 1% where the rest were subject to sectarian ethnic cleansing. Pakistan unleashed terror in East Bengal in 1970 that led to the death of 1.5 million Bengalis. India stands out by its commitment to pluralism and democracy despite setbacks.

The RSS became influential in a political vortex fueled by multiple actors. A credible analysis needs to factor this in and not view things in isolation. India's only Muslim majority state i.e . Kashmir expelled its centuries old Hindu minority from the valley in 1989. Nussbaum fails to cover the rise of fundamentalism in Kashmir while she zeroes in on it in Gujarat! Rather than condemn the Hindu right alone, one needs to contextualize the competing religious fundamentalisms, each of which fed upon the other to cause mayhem. Islamic fundamentalism has had a vigorous presence in India as witnessed in efforts to stall the reform of Muslim Personal Law, the rights of Muslim women, bomb attacks and riots triggered by reported attacks on Islam in the West etc. The international campaign against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses had its origins in India.

Social Service

Nussbaum draws inspiration from Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas K. Gandhi. She fails to mention that both were profoundly influenced by the Hindu ethos of inclusivism, tolerance and restraint. M.K. Gandhi, a devout Hindu, turned to the Bhagavad Gita each day to seek spiritual strength to fight injustice. He termed this Satyagraha or the power of truth. Rabindranath Tagore was leader of the Hindu reformist Brahmo Samaj having established Vishwa Bharati as a center of learning and culture. If one were to meaningfully counter the Hindu right, one has to incorporate the wellsprings of the 20th century Hindu enlightenment rather than rely on a flawed Nehruvian secularism.

This said, the Gandhian movement to alleviate poverty known as Sarvodaya (the awakening of all) and Bhudan (land to the landless), and the Brahmo Samaj failed to sustain the empowerment of the marginalized. The Brahmo Samaj and Sarvodaya are no longer active. The RSS affiliates conversely strengthened their grass roots presence. The Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram provides service to the scheduled tribes. The Seva Bharati works with the largely scheduled caste urban poor. Vidya Bharati works on education in remote rural India.

While the intelligentsia may condemn the rhetoric of the Hindu right, they lack a similar calling to serve the poor and downtrodden. So rather than decry political Hinduism, Nussbaum should perhaps assess why the tolerant Hindu ethos as represented by Tagore and Gandhi failed to retain a social service ethos. The two movements lost their civilizational moorings and relevance in their embrace of "Nehruvian secularism". The decline was therefore inevitable despite the real needs on the ground.

Conclusion

Nussbaum makes sweeping statements , each of which can be critiqued. Her hypothesis of the "wounded masculinity" of India partakes of an unsubstantiated pop psychology. She refers to the "rote learning" and the "lack of critical thinking" reportedly pervasive in Indian public schools. I would stay free of such facile generalizations. I am not sure how nuanced the average American student is or whether "rote learning" is a phenomenon confined to India. Her narrative of events be it with regards to the Gujarat riots, the Indian general elections or the fractured poll verdict is wrong. More importantly, she fails to illustrate the threats to Indian liberalism in a meaningful, nuanced and factually accurate manner.

Nussbaum is not alone in her critique of the Hindu right in American circles. The American conservative has sought to cultivate good ties with a resurgent India only to stymie it. This is witnessed in the provisions of the proposed Indo-American nuclear deal. This is a barely disguised attempt to coerce India to throw open its nuclear reactors to international inspections, halt fissile material production and commit to a nuclear test ban, all under the garb of a purported energy deal!

The American Atlanticist on the other hand flaunts his commitment to liberalism and uses that to urge greater scrutiny of China, India, Iran and Russia. The pro-Israel lobby, of which I count Nussbaum as one, is alarmed by the Islamic resurgence that threatens Israel's existence. It attempts to divert Islamist attention away from Israel to other instances of alleged persecution of Muslims be it in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Indian subcontinent. Nussbaum is not all that kosher after all given the wider effort to "deconstruct" potential geo-strategic competitors. In this, she has the powerful backing of academics like Frykenburg and Witzel, of newspapers like the New York Times with its former editor Rosenthal and one time correspondent Barbara Crossett, not to mention Indian journalists of the ilk of Pankaj Mishra who writes to the Atlantic Magazine!

Authored by Jaffna

http://desicritics.org/2007/05/24/024708.php

Your welcome to put your comments there.

You do have lots of flaws in your points niaz, nehrivuan secularism DID has huge faults in it which you termed as ahem truly oh well.

I'll wait for you to dwell in the matters presented, and present in the lights of the points constructed how the article is an excellent one, and which part of it is excellent one.


MBI Munshi you have posted the article from same book. An author who writes for countercurrents with steeping generalization is hardly the one to be taken for as an 'excellent' article.

IMHO.

 

[niaz]

Joey,

I respect Nehru because he was a scholar and secular person. India is officially a secular country and as a Pakistani I would want to see secularism prosper in India as it would safeguard lives and properties of minorities including Muslims. I admire Gandhi ji because he practiced what he believed in and was recognised as a great man on the international level.


My firm belief is that BJP is a fascist Hinduvta party. It created a facade of respectability to gain popular votes but in essence it remains the party of Nathoo Ram Godse who assassinated the greatest Indian in two thousand years.

I have heard that durring the riots in Gujrat, Narender Modi's thugs known as kar saivaks, dug up the grave of the urdu poet "Wali Deccani" and filled it with coal tar. This is what BJP and their allies really stand for. BJP represents nothing but a bunch of hypocrites who outwardly praise the Mahatma but in reality do exactly opposite of what he worked all his life for. Regrettably, BJP is not alone in this. In Pakistan we have MMA which is really JI and JUI ( all other parties are very small thus have no say) . JI's founder Maulana Maudoodi labelled Quaid -e - Azam as Kafir - e - Azam and Jamiat Ulema -e - Hind ( pre partition JUI) was very anti partition to the very last; once Pakistan was made they are out to grab power in the name of Islam. Think they trying to copy Advani's rath yatra and demolishing of Babari mosque in defiance of the court order, by ordering their so called million men marches on Islamabad.

I said oustsiders have to put up with it is because as someone who believes in democarcy, will of the people must prevail regardless what you and I think. Thus when Indian voters elect BJP there isnt much I can do about it except lament.

Finally, no point of view is "LAST WORD" on any subject. What little I read by Martha Nussbaum I liked, because she is looking at the Indian politics with the same eye glass as I am and people generally like other like minded people. You as an Indian, obviosly feel differently about it. This is not a court law and hence doesnot require proof. Most politics and voting is based on personal view point and value judgements, you have every right to believe what you would.

Regardless of whether article of Martha Nussbaum is factually accurate or not is not going to make an iota of difference on the ground realities of the Indian politics.

 

[joey]

Joey,

I respect Nehru because he was a scholar and secular person. India is officially a secular country and as a Pakistani I would want to see secularism prosper in India as it would safeguard lives and properties of minorities including Muslims. I admire Gandhi ji because he practiced what he believed in and was recognised as a great man on the international level.

Agreed, Personally I'm I'm fond of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Do you know Gandhi asked for dissolving INC after independence? IIRC ( have to check if this is right or not).

Nehrivian secularism has some selective issues in it, other than overall fine.

My firm belief is that BJP is a fascist Hinduvta party.

You believe that because of Gujrat riot, surely fair enough because you can believe what you want but I wanted a rational interpratation of it, Can you explain me and prove me that Congress is not a fascist party compared to BJP?

Creation of LTTE ?
Evangelicm through missionaries in India?
Do you want me to continue?

It created a facade of respectability to gain popular votes but in essence it remains the party of Nathoo Ram Godse who assassinated the greatest Indian in two thousand years.

No party other than communism follows single leaneage of vision thats wrong.

I have heard that durring the riots in Gujrat, Narender Modi's thugs known as kar saivaks, dug up the grave of the urdu poet "Wali Deccani" and filled it with coal tar.

And where did you heard that? I never did.
Are you sure that you have not heard of any such issue relating to congress led government?

Do you know that the peopels arrested in Gujrat riot were mostly Congress workers, arrested by CBI from centre IIRC.

I said oustsiders have to put up with it is because as someone who believes in democarcy, will of the people must prevail regardless what you and I think. Thus when Indian voters elect BJP there isnt much I can do about it except lament.

To me BJP has lost all its minds and they are clueless over what to do. btw I dont vote for BJP in my place.

Finally, no point of view is "LAST WORD" on any subject. What little I read by Martha Nussbaum I liked, because she is looking at the Indian politics with the same eye glass as I am and people generally like other like minded people. You as an Indian, obviosly feel differently about it. This is not a court law and hence doesnot require proof. Most politics and voting is based on personal view point and value judgements, you have every right to believe what you would.

I do, I merely asked you what is the legitimacy of the so called 'likened thoughts' that you believe in, She did gross generalizations, I have pointed you out where, factual mistake on Indian history, I have pointed you out that, you seem not to touch them, selective interpration is never good.

Calling taliban terrorists does not rules out to some extent Americas hand and USSR's hands behind many mess in middle east.

Regardless of whether article of Martha Nussbaum is factually accurate or not is not going to make an iota of difference on the ground realities of the Indian politics.

Okay so a article which isnt accurate is resembling Indian politics per se?
I pointed you out the gross generalization of someone who writes for countercurrents , and it is very clearly evident.

I was hoping you to put in light of the like minded thought that you and naussbaum reflect with that of the article I presented you, but nevermind your free to think I have presented my proof of the gtoss generalization of her.

If you want read the desicritics article again and compare it to naussbaums generalization, If Gujrat riots has threatened Indian democracy through Ram shown as marx-a-la type in 90's, What has expulsion of Pundits from Kashmir done? communism in India done? oh wait they have been threatning democracy right from when they exists.

Rather than dwelling upon Gujrat you failed to look in the larger context, which the author mentions mainly by drawing a parallel comparison with that of dmoecracy and a riot, surely not withstanding the factual, political mistakes that she did in generalizing democracy in India.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

SAN-Feature Service

SOUTH ASIAN NEWS-FEATURE SERVICE

July 15,2007

COMMUNALISM : Treason and terrorism soak saffronazis

I.K.Shukla

Even in the states where Congress or other political combines rule, the spread of the feral and obscene cult, Hindutva, is becoming a major threat to the national stability and social peace.

SAN-Feature Service : Historically, national treason has been the ID, as communal terrorism the signature, of Hindutva. No one without avowing treason as his creed can be a votary of Hindutva. No one without pledging life-long commitment to terrorism can be trusted by the Black Caps as a genuine fascist.

In this, Hndutva has been steadfast since inception. Sworn to secrecy and criminality that the cult stands for, it keeps its recruits ever "disciplined" , that is, morally decrepit, mentally robotic.

Why it creates a soup of acronyms (various organizations) , and why it never maintains a register of its membership, are no mysteries, but inextricably tied to its vile agenda.

Since it remains so tied, it creates a fictive history of its own - phantasmagoria of wishful invention which omits its lack of patriotism, its innately destructive impulse, and its atavistic strain, but which also conjures up monsters and midgets as its heroes.

It also revels in the game of makebelieve for self-gratification by ascribing to itself the attributes and virtues that it conspicuously lacks, that it would never aspire for in deference to its inhuman project, and that it is inherently incapable of ever acquiring.

Beset by a crushingly nagging sense of imbecility and impotency it reconciles itself to its innate inferiority not by accomplishment or exertion for excellence, of which it has proved incapable, but by brutal and wanton violence against innocents who in their culture of elegance and achievements seem to remind it of its generic idiocy and deeply ingrained inhumanity.

This would explain why UP, the largest state of India , kept as the most backward in all indices, has had 2000 communal riots since 1947 (Ritambhara and Nana Deshmukh have huge estates there given them for a song by ex-BJP government to run saffronazi outfits; Atal- Lucknow, Raju Bhaiya- Allahabad, MM Joshi-Allahabad, Rajnath-Mirzapur, Katiyar-Faizabad, belong there).

This would shine light on Modi's Gujarat as the death-dealing laboratory of a cult steeped in barbarism and soaked in blood. Gujarat will become the graveyard of Indian democracy and its secular credentials if Modi is not removed. Pussyfooting in the matter can only exacerbate the intolerable situation. Congress having decided not to save its own MP Jafri in Ahmedabad in 2002 boosted Modi's machine of administrative mayhem and mass murder. Its own MLAs participated in the rape, robbery, and murders of Muslims that Modi had instigated and inspired.

Even in the states where Congress or other political combines rule, the spread of the feral and obscene cult, Hindutva, is becoming a major threat to the national stability and social peace. Not to arrest Hindutva ogres -Thackeray, Togadia, Modi, Katiyar, and their ilk, implies tacit consent to and state encouragement of the saffrofascists. How else to understand the apathy vi-a-vis continual and horrendous atrocities against minorities be
they Muslim, Christian, tribal, Dalit? The police has the gall to refuse to register the FIR if the criminals are Hindu. It is happening all over India unremittingly and unchecked.

This is the hallmark of a failed state. Why are criminals of Maharashtra and Gujarat , Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh getting away scot-free as a rule? If they go unpunished the state will remain impaired and its viability untenable.

A Sanskrit scholar in Varanasi , Mrs. Naheed Abdi, failing to get a permanent job in her specialty, is not just a personal tragedy for a Muslim, and a highly educated woman, it is symptomatic of the rot that the Indian democracy signifies. (Milli Gazettee/July 1-15,07, Delhi , p.20). This under Mayawati, the saviour of minorities in U.P., next to Mulayam sngh. She also deprived hundreds of Urdu teachers of employment ( above, p.19) . Great Dalit leader.

For a V.Shekhar, the commander of a criminal outfit of Hyderabad , to threaten bomb blasts against minorities seeking reservation, not to be slammed behind bars indefinitely, highlights the conspiracy of the state against Muslims. (above, p.1)

For the Indian state tacitly to join the fascistic saffronazis as collaborators, is not just a roaring scandal and a blazing shame, but also its repudiation of India as a nation state, its Constitution, its founding fathers, its hoary heritage, and as a civilizational idea, uniquely
all-embracing, and gloriously proud of its plenitude of diversity.

It is to all this that the crooks and kleptocrats - the ruling class of India - has bidden adieu.---SAN-Feature Service