Posts Tagged ‘Badri Raina’

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The Liberhan Report – What Should It Mean?

December 1, 2009

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Nov 30, 2009
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

On  December 6,1992, hordes of  right-wing Hindutva extremists (called karsevaks)  took the town of Ayodhya hostage with the full and willing connivance of the then state government of Uttar Pradesh and in physical presence of most of the  top leaders of the Sangh Parivar (the RSS and its affiliates/fronts like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, and the Bhartiya Janata Party).

By evening of that fateful day, the 460 year old mosque built there by one of Babar’s lieutenants, Mir Baqi, was razed to a heap of rubble on the grounds that the mosque was built over a temple which enclosed the birthplace  of the god, Ram.

To this day, there is no evidence of any kind that a temple of any sort pre-existed at the site of the demolished mosque.

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Posted in Commentary, crime, Human rights, India, Muslims, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Does Ideology Matter?

November 18, 2009

Yes it does!

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Nov. 17, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

“There has been a systematic failure in giving tribals a stake in the modern economic system—the alienation built over decades is taking a dangerous toll”. . .

“The systemic exploitation of our tribal communities. . .can no longer be tolerated.”

(Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, Hindustan Times, 14/11/09, p.10)

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A government report just released on the situation of India’s tribals blames the government itself and companies like the Tatas and Essar for the disquiet in the tribal “hinterlands.”  As you would expect, the latter have righteously washed their distinguished hands of the insinuation.

Brought out by the Ministry of Rural Development, the report (some tribute to aspects of Indian democracy) in a chapter titled “State-connived land alienation” speaks forthrightly of how land grabs in India’s mineral rich states—Orissa, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand—happen with “direct and indirect participation of revenue officials.”  To those must be added the more notorious segments of the political class, now most strikingly represented by the erstwhile chief minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda, who, by all accounts, is alleged to have made a pile of some Rs.4000/-crores over a span of five or six years of ‘rule.’ That Mr. Koda is himself a tribal leader must suggest how enticing and promising  the dominant paradigms of ‘development’ are.

That the debate around the issue has penetrated the solid bastions of  capitalist theorists is rather hearteningly evidenced by the following sub-heading in the editorial of Hindustan Times of Nov.,16:  “‘Tribal land grabs’ aren’t just an ‘NGO’ theory.”

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The infirmity of noble minds

October 26, 2009

Badri Raina, The Hindu/India, October 25, 2009

When George W. Bush lost the American Presidency to Barack Hussein Obama the better part of the world breathed again. Something had actually happened that reversed many dearly-held political and Biblical myths. Christian red-necks had lost out to a very young man with a Muslim lineage and middle name. And a white knight on a white horse (house) had been bested by a dark knight on a dark steed. Racist warmongers were flabbergasted to see that in the land of the brave and the free, a dark man need not anymore be a Prince of Darkness but a source of light. And that those who had peddled themselves as the torch-bearers of light were pronounced the sources of darkness at home and abroad. This writer was sufficiently enthused to write a long poem which found its way to the Obama website. Not a panegyric, but one that celebrated but cautioned even as it celebrated.

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Raina: India’s Left-Wing Extremism

October 15, 2009

What Came First, Chicken or Egg?

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Oct 14, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

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Even as the Indian state ponders the situation along its international borders with Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Nepal, it is increasingly challenged by the spread of left-wing armed extremism at home.

The strongholds of Indian Maoists are, not surprisingly, in the forested hinterlands of central states, such as Chattisgarh and Jharkhand, where the Adivasis (originary tribals) have  through six decades of independent India remained almost wholly outside the consideration of the state, except  often as brutal victims of influential land-grabbers and aspiring mining and other corporates,  backed by the state in collaboration with multinational companies.

Extremist violence, popularly referred to as Naxalism or Maoism, indeed straddles as many as some 180 of India’s 600 or so districts in lesser or greater intensity, along an north-eastern arc stretching from Bihar through West Bengal to parts of Orissa, down to Andhra and Gadchirolli in Marharashtra that touches the Andhra border.  With Jharkhand and Chattisgarh as the heartlands.

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India’s Ugly Underbelly

September 19, 2009

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Sep 19, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

“He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dare not reason is a slave.”

(H. Drummond)

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India’s Tamilians have always considered themselves a distinct race. Distinct from the Aryans who, history tells us, displaced their Dravidian ancestors after the conquest of the Indus-Valley civilizations. The Tamil language and script are perhaps of greater antiquity than Sanskrit and have remained largely free of its influence. Not to speak of Tamil literature which may be the richest India has to offer, both in depth and scope.

Which is why Tamilians break into passionate protest when any Tamilian anywhere be perceived as being under siege. Sri Lanka offering a prime example, as well as the situation of Tamilians in Malysia.

So, would it be right to infer that Tamilian civilizational homogeneity brooks no breach?

Wrong.

In the Peraiyur taluk of Madurai district in Chennai is a place called Uthapuram. And there, for the last two decades a ten foot high wall segregates Tamilians from other Tamilians, namely, caste Tamils from those without caste (“untouchabes”).

This wall was built to deny access to casteless Tamils of Uthapuram to public places and facilities frequented by caste Tamils on the other side.

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Something Rotten in the State of Gujarat

September 12, 2009

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Sep 12, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

I have supped full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.
(Macbeth Modi)

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Indeed, great is the temptation to write this account wholly in Shakespearean quotation.

Four new skeletons now rattle for justice in the Modi cupboard. And well might he be saying to himself:

the time has been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end; but now they rise again,

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns;

A judicial magistrate in Ahmedabad, one good man Tamang, has held that the killing of the nineteen year old college girl, Ishrat Jahan, and four others in June, 2004 was , after all, yet another “fake encounter” executed by high-ranked police Modi loyalists to curry favour with him and obtain preferment.

This on the heels of the earlier murder of one Sohrabuddin and his wife, Kausar Bi, acknowledged in court by the Modi government to have been “fake encounters.” And by the very same police personnel as well, two of whom are now in the slammer for that killing. At least for now.

Speculation is rife as to how many official murders may have been effected by the Gujarat state since 2002, when the Gujarat massacre took place.

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Yet He Could Not Equivocate to Heaven

September 2, 2009

By Badri Raina, ZNet, September 1, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Pag

“That you may smile and smile and be a villain”

(Hamlet)

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His great contribution to politics: pulling his party, the BJP, from two to some one hundred and eighty seats in parliament—all on the back of a hate-filled, anti-Muslim pogrom.

Hitler did as much.

His great contribution to “thought”: coining the phrase “pseudo-secularism,”—defined as any activity on behalf of the state to ameliorate the abysmal social and economic situation of India’s Muslims.

The Constitution be damned

This lean and hungry man, unctuous in speech, guilt-ridden finger-tips gingerly touching across his chest, watched over by foxy moustache, affecting gravitas with tentative stoop and bended head within which breed impulses of self-serving small-mindedness—this undeserving man who would be India’s prime minister has finally been found out.

And, like the priest who forged the gun-powder plot (and justified, during his interrogation, equivocation as sanctioned religious practice), he no longer can equivocate either to the nation or to god. Perhaps to himself as well. Although that must be in doubt.

Four members out of five that constituted the Cabinet Committee on Security during the Vajpayee regime in 1999 have made public averment that he was always present in the meetings that deliberated the hijack of the IC-814 by terrorists, and, contrary to his denials, was wholly in the know of and in agreement with the decision to let the then foreign minister accompany three high-value terrorists to Kandhar.

Thus, the Lauh Purush (iron man) has been found to be an abject equivocator merely, and a cowardly one at that.

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Raina: The Democracy Flu

August 26, 2009

Breaches in the Bastions

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Aug 26, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

Things fall apart,
The centre cannot hold;

Delicious democracy is loosed upon India.

(With apologies to W.B. Yeats for the distorted third line.)

I.

Ah, how often in human history have bastions of one kind or another sought to thwart the march of the rational, always without success.

And what more rational than democracy.

Recall that after the leveling tendencies of the Reform Bill of 1832, and the ominous mass assertions that accompanied that zeitgeist, some famous Oxford dons got together to demand that English Christianity return to its Roman roots.

Ostensibly directed against liberalizing movements in theology, Newmanism and Puseyism were at bottom terrified responses to those mass democratic assertions for full realizations of the principle of equality.

The mutely stated assumption was that the Protestant Reformation had broken the embankments of the infallibly centralized authority of the Pontiff, and thereby let loose the demons of anarchy. Thus their call (1833-1845) to reintroduce medieval liturgies into Church doctrine, and to return to Rome. Which Newman did in 1845.

History, nonetheless, carried on, consigning the Tractarians and their many Tracts to a residual past that could have no future.

Same with the Arnoldian prescription that only the classical “best” ( “Culture,” he called it) could salvage the depredations wrought by undeserving little men seeking parity with the elect. Thankfully, over the last century and a half, Culture has been inundated by cultures, and men and women everywhere in the world express themselves severally, freed from the diktats of self-appointed elites.

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Aung San Suu Kyi stands for her people and democracy

August 16, 2009

A single slender woman who terrifies an army of generals

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Aug 16, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

In Burma resides a dame,
Terra Firma is her name;
They lock her indoors,
But her pitying smile soars,
And the Generals are rendered lame.

Thomas Carlyle, that prophetic voice of the 19C, delineated in Heroes And Hero Worship (1841) what he thought were types of world-historical individuals.

Among them he projected Cromwell as a type of hero whose strength lay in a species of obdurate conviction that had no need of any flamboyant oratorical skills.

Two other figures from the 20C/21C spring to mind as further exemplars of the type, namely, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi.

No more true metaphor for them than the grass, which Whitman called the “handkerchief of the Lord,” fusing in a magnificently visionary way god with democracy.

The grass, it grows everywhere, however you trample on it. In its fecund unendingness, it symbolizes and manifests the will-to-life itself, and in its undefeatably cussed humility, it is the spirit of universal freedom and common democracy that refuse to be quelled.

And, as any good gardener knows, the more you cut the more it grows.

Which may be why the sensible British did not heed Hitler’s counsel in 1938: When Chamberlain went to reason with him, he mentioned Gandhi and how troubled the empire was by him.

Uncomprehending, the Fuhrer asked, “why don’t you shoot him?”

And had they done so, nothing might have brought about so early a collapse of the empire—and in predictably brutal ways.

Clearly, the two-penny tyrants in Burma who strut about in a prison of their own making—if Suu Kyi cannot leave her house, the Generals may not leave Burma, for they are reviled everywhere, including in those parts of the world who have shabby deals with them—have understood that much.

Thus, for their own wretched safety, they desist from doing that Hitler on her. So, we ask, are they winning or losing Burma? Losing, we think. And over that knowledge, Suu Kyi’s smile arches like that of angels, seeing far far beyond the events of any single day, beyond even her own life.

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Raina: Commemorating T.K. Ramachandran

August 1, 2009

Some notes from my visit to Kozhikode

By Badri Raina | ZNet, July 31, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]

As everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin–history—which however is for him a known history, and being as an act of origin, is a conscious self-transcending act of origin.”

(Marx, Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, EPM)

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessarily an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution. . .it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages, and become fitted to found society anew.”

(Marx, German Ideology.)

Teekay, who was professor of English at Calicut university in Kerala, was more importantly one of the relentless critics of stultifying orthodoxy, including, most of all, with respect to India’s  Left parties and politics. Besides being erudite in Marxist theory well into its frontier extensions and amplifications upto his day.

Never one to compromise the integrity of his perceptions, he knew both the opprobrium of dogmatists, and the inside of an Indian jail.

He died at the age of 57, but left behind him a committed following, both among Kerala intellectuals and intelligentsia alike.

It was a great honour, thus, to be asked to deliver the first Teekay memorial lecture on the 21st of july, 2009 at Kozhikode on “the State of Left politics: Theory and Practice.”

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