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India’s right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party: searching a new subterfuge?

June 30, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, June 30, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

I

Wasn’t there a playwright who penned Six Characters in Search of an Author?

Well, India has a “major” political party that seems forever in search of a programme.

It is called the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).

But, hang on; unlike the famous play cited above, the BJP’s interminable project is, in fact, not to find the author/programme but to constantly hide the one and only it has.

That author of its unreal being is the RSS, the so-called cultural organization that was established by India’s right-wing, Brahmanism in 1924 in order to direct the anti-colonial freedom movement towards the formulation of a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra, in opposition to the secular and pluralist ideals of the then Congress-led national movement.

Staunch adherent to that time-tested instrument of social and every other oppression in India, the caste hierarchy or varna vyavastha,  three dominant principles have constituted its raison d’ etre:

–an unrelenting hegemony of the upper castes over Hindu thought and practice;

–an unrelenting crusade against the Muslims whom it regards as alien to the land, and chief enemies of India’s “cultural essence”;

–a close embrace with militarist imperialism and with the systemic economic underpinnings that make such militarism and imperialism possible and necessary.

Not till 1949 did this organization declare its allegiance to the Indian Tricolour as comprising the undisputed icon of the new nation, and then too under duress and as a quid pro quo to the Nehru government’s willingness to release from prison its big chief or sarsangchalak who had been locked up as a consequence of the banning of the RSS after the Gandhi murder in 1948.

Only then was the RSS literally coerced into framing its constitution and putting on record its allegiance to the flag.

The fact that it still remains unreconciled to the Indian Constitution was borne out when the Vajpayee-led NDA regime (1999-2004) constituted a Constitution Review Committee, designed to alter some of the basic features of the Republic.

Continued >>

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Lalgarh: Poor Relations that the Left left out?

June 25, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, June 24, 2009

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I

For some two decades now one fancy area of academic study in the Humanities has been that which is called “Postcolonial Studies.”

The initial assumption here with regard to the Indian subcontinent would be that colonialism ended here in 1947 with the formal transfer of power.

That over the last six decades colonial oppression has indeed come to an end with regard to some  20% or so Indians—or, indeed, has taken on more subtle and seductive incarnations, often leading to voluntary consent—is true enough.

Alas, however, barring the right to exercise franchise, some 70% or more Indians remain at the receiving end of a homegrown colonial instinct.

And in every sense of the term as well:  the “developers” say to the “hinterlanders”, give us your land, your forests, your waterways, and we shall give to you our culture and religion. As to your livelihood, there is wage labour if and when you are competitive enough to get it.

Thus it is that the oral histories and folklore of India’s “adivasis”, dalits and other relegated communities continue to be imbued with a longing for freedom, often conceived as the right to make life-choices for themselves without the imminent threat of ruling class violence.

Continued >>

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Indian Elections 2009: Peoples’ Verdict

May 22, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, May 21, 2009

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Do I contradict myself?
What if I do;

I contain multitudes. . . (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)

I

Were India to speak of herself, she might pretty much say what Whitman famously said of himself.

Which is the reason why so many are repeatedly hard put to make some final sense of Indian social and political realities. And which is why the democratic experiment in India is so very sexy.

Can it be said, though, that Indian democracy is a work-in-progress which, even when it seems to coil upon itself, is always pointing to where it wishes to get?

I hold that such indeed is the case, and the verdict in the just-concluded elections to Parliament is an unmistakeable reminder of the sanities that inform the acumen of the citizen across state and region, community and caste, ethnicity and gender, sometimes even the high and the low.

Always remembering that whatever conclusions we extrapolate from our sea of contradictions must remain mindful both of the contingent here-and-now, and the macro-historical dynamics of the becoming of Indian democracy.

It does seem, for example, that after sixty odd years of independence and some fifteen general elections, the historical sense of the Indian voter has hardened sufficiently not to be hoodwinked anymore by emotive invocations of one kind or another. Fingers always crossed, Whitman would say.

II

You would have read and been told that hardly, but hardly anyone, the Congress party included, would have anticipated the results that came, especially that the party would reach a double hundred score; 206 was to be the eventual tally of the Congress which the infamous Modi had at one point in the campaign called a woebegone hag of 125 years!

And, yet, I could forward you a mail I sent to a friend on the 23rd of April—some three weeks before counting day—which read: “congress inching towards 200.” Trust me.

Sleight-of-hand? Voodoo? Nothing of the sort.

Let me just share with you a little secret: when you do not find me at home, I am most likely chatting up a rickshaw puller, listening to paan-shop babble, prying out the ordinary Indian around a roadside vendor, catching up with a machine-shop worker returning to his hovel, even smoking out the odd policeman at cross-roads or recharging at a sugarcane squeezer, or conversing with the man in the taxi next to my car at the red traffic light, or borrowing a Bidi —the most plebeian form of rolled-leaf smoke—from a construction worker on site as an overture to some authentic interaction.

Wonderful to go from all that to the piece of paper and make one’s computations—a resource far more dependable than wasting time with corporate electronic channels, although I listen to those as well and draw my canny conclusions.

It was that sort of joyful legwork that had brought me to the conclusion in 2004 that the numbers then would be Congress 145, BJP 138 etc., (again a claim still on record) when them channels were blaring with the certitude that the then National Democratic Alliance was set to cross the 300 mark, since India was said to be “shining.”

Wherever you listened, two sentiments invariably came to the fore: one, that the UPA government led by, most would tell you Sonia Gandhi, was thinking of poor Indians in town and country; and, two, that there had better be an end to the politics of communalism. And that “terrorism” was something that showed no one political group in any good or bad light. I recall accosting an auto-driver and a Beldar (Mason’s helper) who had taken recourse to the Right To Information Act passed by the Manmohan Singh government! Not to speak of the middle classes.

Other things followed: opportunistic alliances, nepotisms, corrupt and criminal practices, the tendency to take social groups for granted, and so on.

In the main, the desire to encourage social-welfarist governance and to return to secular citizenship seemed decisive. Eloquent proof that the country was poised to go forward by returning to the much-maligned first prime minister of independent India, Jawahar Lal Nehru, who had understood with searing clarity that India could not be held together unless secular citizenship and governance was considered a sine-qua-non of its being, and unless its economic programmes were calculated to benefit most of all poor and dispossessed Indians. An agenda that required the state to remain firmly in control, rather than abdicate to oligarchies that rule the market, homegrown and foreign equally.

Pretty much what Obama seeks to do now in a beleaguered America—reinsert the state in the economic life of that nation, and attend first to those Americans who have been the most mauled by the insatiable greed of corporate America.

Continued >>

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Religion and Pakistan Problem

April 25, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, April 25, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

“Without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

—Steven Weinberg

I

Nowhere is the truth of Weinberg’s insight more commonly and more globally apparent than during times of inter-community violence in one part of the world or another.

Routinely during India’s routine “communal riots,” it is seen that there are those who weapon in hand, set out to kill in the name of their religion, and, others who, despite belonging to the same religion, seek to save the hapless victims because they happen to be just good-natured human beings first.

The argument is not that individuals may not practice the tenets of a religion, but that it is only when common humanity sets religion aside that anything good gets done.

If I am writing this, it is because when the first tribal attack happened on Kashmir in 1947, it was our own Kashmiri Muslims who saved so many of us Hindus from the depredations of their co-religionist attackers.

Just as in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, many desperate Muslims found safety in Gujarati Hindu homes.

On a larger scale, often good people in great office are known to pursue vicious ends with the self-righteous sanction of some self-defined religious impulse.

Voices come to them which decree that this country or that be assaulted forthwith if the world is to be saved for some “noble” end. That those so-called “noble” ends often turn out to be crassly ignoble of course remains a truism of organized histories.

Millions, we are tutored by god’s own leaders, must die so that other millions be saved for the good life. Or else why would Hiroshima have happened? And, soon after Nagasaki, without a hint of remorse at or recognition of the meaning of the first catastrophe.

It is for such reasons that the accreted experiences of collective life and strife were to persuade humanist theorists that whereas human beings are free to have and practice religions, the one thing that the State must never have is religion. It would be so much nicer if it also had no armaments. But that is another, though a closely related, story.

That after all was the idea that was to translate into the notion of human beings as secular citizens, subject to secular laws which were made by common consent and with universal applicability.

And made by institutions which embodied the “general will” rather than some sectarian interest over which only some self-appointed closet Authority had the first and last say.

Pandit, Pope, or Mullah. Or the Dictator blessed by them, blessing them in turn.

Authority which drew its sanction from some permanently unverifiable intimacy with god. For in that scheme of things that which remains forever absent must come to be seen as having absolute sway over everything that is present or available to human determination. And through the unchallengeable agency of god’s self-appointed interlocutors.

The pity of it all is that this notion of Authority tends repeatedly to find favour with the high and mighty who fear the consequences of democracy.

And in many ivy league academies it is not unusual to find high-priests of culture who hold, breathtakingly, the view that whereas poetry must be deeply personal and private, or that literary texts ought to be read principally as coded offerings with transcendent meanings, or as inconsequentially dull or pleasurable distractions, religion we require to suffuse our collective social and political lives, and indeed, when the time comes, to kill and pillage without suffering guilt or shame. Or, indeed, doubt.

That such worthies have often been discovered, finally, to have been on the side of the fascists should be no surprise.

Which is not to say that there have not been godless atheists who have not wrought mayhem upon the world. That they did not do so under the cloak of religious sanction, or at god’s command, however, left them rather more naked to scrutiny and opprobrium than those who have killed and who kill in the name of god and religion.

How often and how conveniently they have pleaded that they may not be held responsible, since they had no axe of their own to grind, being mere agents of some divine command. Command that never is susceptible to interception, however evolved the snooping technologies of the world. No satellite thus far that could bring us the gleam in god’s hinting eye.

II

Even now there are those in the “Christian” world who believe that the State should essentially be driven by Biblical injunctions. Meaning of course only those injunctions which suit their class purposes: “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” but never “it is as difficult for a rich man to go to heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,” or “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” or “blessed are the meek, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven,” and “lay not thy treasure upon the earth,” etc.,

Thus many in America still hold to the view that the “American Dream” has had behind it a divine sanction, especially as deriving from such exegeses of the business of Christianity as provided in the work of the theologian, John Calvin. After all, it must have seemed providential to the Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe to find a whole “empty” continent ready and waiting for them.

As to the natives who had been there over millennia, their time had clearly come to yield the continent to god’s chosen people!

With an acumen marvelously apposite to Capitalism, Calvin was to argue that human beings could not be saved on the day of Judgement either by the “good works” they had done, or because of the “faith” they had felt, however intensely, be it. Such matters, he argued, were all “pre-determined” by god.

And, thus, whereas the homo sapien could never have any free will in matters spiritual, he was totally his own man in matters temporal. From thence you can see how Manhattan came to be.

And that, therefore, like the ‘divine right of kings’ of pre-capitalist times in Europe, the American State has a similar divine right to make or break all the laws that must govern the fallen world elsewhere.

Yet, the salutary fact remains that over some two hundred years of practicing democracy, it is hardly imaginable that America will be allowed by the American “general will” to become a theocracy. Thank god for that one certainty.

The Zionists in Israel have of course an even more ancient divine claim to make to the land of Palestine, don’t we know.

But even there, all the calumnies notwithstanding, there are enough fissures and fractures and dissensions that may not be stilled violently within the democracy they practice.

That such democracy is most of the time not to be made available to Arab Israelis is of course another matter. What is to the point here is that the critiques of official dogmas which exist in that State among the Jewish media and intelligentsia, extending sometimes to bold, radical opposition, is not subject to the fear of the loss of limb and life on behalf of the state.

In India, likewise, there are those who wish still to convert the secular nation-state into a Hindu Rashtra. Never a day passes when in some part or the other of the country we do not hear from them, in lesser or greater degree of barbarism. Now vandalizing churches, now demolishing mosques, now chasing and roughing up women in pubs, or art galleries and inimical cultural activists, now going for wholesale loot, burn, and kill pogroms.

Yet, the fact remains that the organized political force which represents that view fails to get the electoral endorsement of some 70% of Hindus. And more especially, thanks to a secular Constitution and to secular institutions of State, their’s remains an unrealizable project, because unauthorized by state ideology for now.

And thanks in large measure also to the fact that the armed forces in India have no religious axes to grind.

The fact of India’s secular Constitution always puts the Hindutva brigade in the wrong, and lends legitimacy to the exertions of those who seek to foil the totalitarian-racist agenda of Hindutva.

III

In an earlier column on the issue (The Pakistan Problem, ZNet, April 08, 2009) I had argued that, after all the micro-level analyses of the situation in that embroiled country, the fundamental source of what is happening there resides in the Pakistani State’s ambiguity about itself. An ambiguity, for example, which does not bedevil Saudi Arabia or Iran who remain full-bloodedly Islamic.

To wit, does the legitimacy of the State in Pakistan derive from secular and egalitarian principles of citizenship and a secular regime of laws and institutions, or must it in turn still seek legitimation from a theocratic idea which supersedes what mere legislators decree?

It should be obvious that the victory of secular parties in recent Pakistani general elections notwithstanding, the question remains a moot one. Or else why would the world be witness to the extraordinary occurrence of a whole swathe of territory being officially allowed to practice Islamic Sharia dispensations rather than the systems of justice available in metropolitan Pakistan?

It is to be doubted whether even a majority, single-party BJP government at the centre in Delhi would formally say to Narendra Modi in Gujarat, “go, you are now free to institute a Hindu Rashtra in Gujarat, delinked from the secular Constitution of India,” although such may remain its nefarious, subterranean goal. But that is in large measure due to the fact that the Constitution of the Indian Republic is unambiguously secular in the first place.

Just to recall that in Pakistan the Hudood laws brought on the books during the Zia-ul-Haq regime, chiefly to render women disenfranchised chattel, have not exactly disappeared from those books.

And, having tasted blood in the Swat valley of the North West Frontier Province, the Taliban cleric, Sufi Mohammed, has gone on to make a more fundamental proposition—one that informs the anxiety of this column and the earlier column I wrote.

Succintly, the Sufi has postulated that democracy is an un-Islamic system (HT, April, 20).

And thereby hangs the tale to which I think attention requires to be drawn with more honesty and rigour than seems either available or palatable.

Put simply, it was my argument in the previous column that this is precisely the postulation that all those in and out of governance in Pakistan who stand by democracy need to confront.

To put the matter sharply: having successfully defeated a dictatorship, are they now willing to lose out to theocracy?

It was also another part of the same argument that this confrontation cannot be engaged in or won if the battle is joined on the turf laid out by those who hold that Pakistan being an “Islamic Republic” must self-evidently abide by Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) rather than by such tenets of law and citizenship that derive from the Enlightenment.

And the fact that Pakistan does formally continue to be an “Islamic Republic” only must lend strength and legitimacy to the Taliban argument rather than to the exertions of those among Pakistan’s rights groups and westernized elites who seek a destiny of “modernity” for their country. Not just in technological terms, but as principles of social and legal behaviour, and of State policy.

Needless to say, the attempt to meet the Taliban argument half-way, as it were, bears as little logic or promise of success in Pakistan as for us in India to grant with any modicum of compromise the perception that India is essentially a Hindu nation.

The difference is that Pakistan seemingly teeters on the edge of a paradigm shift. Sooner than later, that shift will have to happen, one way or another. It may not be able to linger too long in the area of ambiguity.

Depending on what option it chooses, there cannot but be consequences. Should it choose to go over with full scope and honesty to Islamic statehood, we may have losers of one kind. But should it choose to strive for a secular statehood, the losers may be of another kind.

And, depending on who loses and who wins, the consequences for Pakistan, the sub-continent, and the world in general will not but be also suitably momentous.

As things are shaping, it seems less and less likely that Pakistan can procrastinate forever, or find answers merely in a discourse of accommodation, however adroitly articulated. Or, indeed, deflect the problematic by foregrounding its enmity with India as its primary antagonism.

In the final analysis, Islamism and democracy may indeed find themselves at irreconcilable loggerheads, as the good Sufi Mohammed suggests. Religion, we submit may bring solace to the individual soul; it only brings disaster to nations and states when it is made their chief informing principle.

badri.raina@gmail.com

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India’s Democracy Challenged

March 29, 2009

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

By Badri Raina |ZNet, March 28, 2009

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THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA

Preamble

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens

JUSTICE, social, economic, political;

LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship;

EQUALITY of status and opportunity;

and to promote among them all

FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation,

IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”

I

It is once again Hustings time.

The fifteenth Lok Sabha (House of the People) is due to be elected, and the 16th of May, 2009—counting day—will tell us what it looks like.

Even as the Indian Republic as duly constituted justly takes some satisfaction at its continuance, transcending a plethora of adverse circumstance, some challenges there are that qualitatively spell more than an ordinary hiccup.

Let me allude to just three.

First, the good challenge:

This comes from none other than “we the people.”

And they make a simple but incontestable point: namely, that some sixty years to the good, it is clear that they have been at the receiving end of the bad old ruling class trick.

To wit, legitimize the Constitution in the name of “we the people” but ensure that the state thereof in truth serves the interests of the very few.

This is achieved by enshrining “Socialist” as the defining USP of the Constitution of India but merrily practicing Capitalism of the cronyist and crassest kind.

No wonder therefore that billionaires burgeon on one end, and paupers on the other; that the Republic breaks world records in the numbers of children who suffer malnutrition, preventable diseases, exploitation at home and in the labour market, and untold abuse everywhere; that women have next to no representation in the highest echelons of democratic policy and decision making, and remain unsafe both in the home, in the work place, and on the street; that unconscionable violence and humiliation is routinely meted out to India’s Dalits by social “superiors” and members of the state apparatus alike, and often in tandem; that just resistance to excesses of diverse description in vast parts of the Republic is put down by draconian laws, such as the Disturbed Areas Act and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which empower the least man with an authorized gun to shoot to kill without any questions asked.

No wonder that the requirements of Capitalism this day yield a culture of perceptions which enjoins on us to think that those whose assets on the stock market climb down some notches are greater sufferers than those who eat grass or leather or carrion for want of food. Or, failing that as well, kill their families and then commit suicide.

And that the “growth” of the economy is crucial so that some 77% of “we the people” can spend at least 45 cents a day!

As to redress of the legal kind, tell me about it. Try going to court against a fatso adversary and soon you will wish you had rather gone to the burial ground.

So much—and indeed the very much more that can and needs to be said—for “socialism,” “liberty,” and “justice”—social, economic, and political.

Yet, as Indians in their millions in one place or another remind the custodians of the state of these facts, theirs must be considered a salutary and good challenge.

After all, they only wish the Constitution to be made a universal reality, rather than to be abrogated. And they say: remember, we are “we the people.”

And many still believe, or wish to, that the ruling interests can be pressed to do so through democratic means.

Not for long, though.

II

The bad challenge:

This comes from very sophisticated quarters who fervently hold that auctioning cricket players to the full regalia of prime-time media,– a spectacle far more engaging than the wretched business of Gandhi’s spectacles and the hullaballoo thereof, or of camels and bullocks in the famous event at Pushkar in Rajasthan–and conducting the Indian Premier League (of Cricket, that is) is of far greater consequence to the Republic than holding elections to the House of the People.

And, no more significant fact here than that wide sections of the elite media, often called the fourth estate of the Republic and its chief watchdog and guarantor, concur with these sophiscates to the hilt. As does the right-wing, Hindu party, the BJP, believing that not holding the tournament along with the elections only shows how “weak” the UPA government is against the possibility of terror attacks.

Thus, the government of the day is pilloried for its old-fashioned preference of ensuring free and fair elections to the Lok Sabha over supplying troupes to the IPL so that billions can be made and “we the people” entertained as a corollary.

And, just to remind you, the IPL is a private enterprise solely!

They ask in consternation: what has the Republic come to that it should seriously consider elections to the House of the People more important than cricket and the moneys thereof. After all, if the state cannot furnish food to “we the people” let them at least eat cricket. And if the government cannot govern the country, let it at least help the IPL honchos govern cricket. After all, what matters more—cricket or the legitimacy of the state?

To wit, this challenge to the republic comes from a new set of Indians who, having thoroughly milked its offers, now feel chagrined that its continuance should so obstruct the hedonisms that they have so earned through smart practices and sharp dealings.

These are chosen ones who pooh pooh the primitive formulations of the Preamble, namely that “liberty,” “equality,” or “justice” either can be or indeed ought to be made available to “we the people.”

They hold that human beings are not differently able or differently circumstanced but, plainly and simply, unequal and undeserving of equal consideration by the state.

The IPL patrons, wherever they be, simply believe that democracy is a nuisance, the Preamble a joke, and the state their handmaiden. And the electoral process a massive redundance that merely disrupts the smooth flow of money-making and other collateral pursuits. Far more exciting to have the IPL gladiators fight to the kill while they watch and smooch on the grapes.

Which is why they do not bother to dirty their finger nails with electoral ink: after all, when either tweedledum or tweedledee come to power, they only need to make that phone call to get the job done. Indeed, their idea of democracy is to have the same set of people in power, even if under differently-coloured fig leaves.

III

Now the ugly challenge:

This comes from a set of butchers who question the notion of “we the people” in the first place.

They hold that only some are “people” (namely, the Hindus) and the rest are “enemies” (chiefly the Muslims and Christians).

And they are everyday willing to kill for that belief.

A century and a half ago, an English poet wrote of the Lotus Land (where Odysseus’s mariners halted during their return home to Ithaca after the Trojan war) thus:

“in the afternoon they came unto a land

where it seemed always afternoon.”

And of the music there thus:

“music that gentlier on the spirit lies

than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.” (Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters).

Nothing so sleepy or gentle, though, about India’s Lotus valaas.

Here is what Varun Gandhi said of the matter the other day in Pilibhit:

“This is not the ‘hand’ (of the Congress party); this is the hand of the Lotus. It will cut the throat of Muslims after the elections.”

Ever knew the lotus to be so bloodthirsty?

And in saying that with crude directness, he only gave full voice to the teachings of the scions of the RSS.

Those teachings teach that Muslims are “incomplete, uncultured, demonic.” Further, they are scary like rakshasas (evil demons) and have no loyalty to India because they do not accept their kula dharma, (ancestral duty), towards Hinduism. They are outsiders who must be assimilated to the point where they no longer call themselves Ali, Hassan, John, or Thomas.

And if they will not, here is what needs to be done:

“Parshuram avenged his father’s humiliation by offering him libations of blood of those who had insulted him.” “Likewise, the only way to worship the motherland after she had been defiled” (that is to say by centuries of “Muslim” rule) would be “to wash it with the blood of those who dared commit such an act.”

(See Jyotirmaya Sharma, Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS, and India; see also Siddharth Varadarajan’s “A Stench That is All Too Familiar,” The Hindu, March 24, 2009.)

This, then, continues to constitute a challenge to the Republic of a very different sort, albeit one which often conveniently overlaps with the class preferences of the challengers mentioned in the second canto of this write-up.

Put succinctly, these are people who wish to overthrow all the Preambular postulates of the Constitution of the Republic of India: in their scheme of things, only those who are both born in India and have their chief icons of worship in India (rather than in Mecca or Jerusalem) can be considered “citizens’; Indian democracy and the nation cannot be “secular” but one based on Hindu-racial principles, and “Socialism” as much an excrescence to them as to the IPL fraternity of India’s social, political, and economic elites.

And the bad and the ugly together remain opposed to the challengers in the first part who take the egalitarian provisions of the Preamble so much to heart, or seek to cause ruckus on their behalf and behest.

All said and done, not a pretty picture.

But one thing seems for sure: neither the IPL nor “cultural nationalism” of the ugly holds any promise of redress.

For all that, “we the people” will need to intensify their humanist struggles, and maybe look to Chavez and the rest of Latin America for inspiration. Not to speak first of Gandhi, Nehru, and the struggles of the Communists and Socialists within India.

If indeed the rational alone can be the right, then those struggles cannot but bear desirable fruit.

“It is patience I need,” said Lear.

_______________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

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Germany, 1933 / Gujarat, 2009

January 23, 2009

the Triumph of Positivism

By Badri Raina, ZNet, January 23, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

Epigraph:

“what matters today is to preserve and disseminate freedom rather than to accelerate . . . the advance towards the administered world”

(Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment)

I

Just the other day, at the “Vibrant Gujarat” conclave in Ahmedabad, two of India’s leading industrialists, Anil Ambani and Mittal, speculated from public platform what a radiantly developed country India could become were Narendra Modi to be made the “next leader of India” (read Prime Minister).

At which memories of a similar conjuncture in the Germany of 1933 came rather rushingly to the fore.

Jackson J. Spielvogel tells us how Hitler “knew that to fulfill his foreign policy goals he needed the technological skills of the industrialists and capitalist industry itself.”

Thus he was to appoint Reichsbank Schacht as the new president of the Reischbank, “staunch defender of capitalism, which certainly reassured business and industrial leaders about Hitler’s economic direction. Fortunately for Hitler, Schacht was also an astute financier willing to use his many talents to benefit the Nazis” (Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, Prentice Hall, 1988).

Sure enough, the Krupp family and a bevy of other industrialists were drafted to set Germany on the autobahn course, leading eventually within a year to a massive attention to rearming the Reich, and everything that followed, as Jews came to be seen to constitute the sinister fifth column of the Bolsheviks, threatening to capture the German economy and the state.

II

In our own Gujarat, it is not so much foreign policy that Modi has in mind as the domestic ascendance of a Fascist pattern of development that might in course of time yield him the position of the chief CEO of the country.

And, although such thinking has come to permeate the whole Indian state, what makes Gujarat stand out for the captains of industry is the social ground that Modi has prepared since the pogrom of 2002.

Briefly, a graveyard of peace where Modi’s administration faces no opposition from any quarter—other political parties, labour organizations, tribals, what-have-you; and where the least voice of dissent from within his own party, the BJP, is put down with no-nonsense repression. Add to that a totalitarian control over investigative agencies, state apparatus, and large sections of the judicial apparatus—the sort of objective conditions that have led the Supreme Court of India repeatedly to intervene in their maladroit operations and to refer both the investigation and juridical determination of cases related especially to the Muslim Gujaratis to agencies outside the state, or to special task forces directly under its own aegis.

As to the media, Gujarat is one place where the most puissant of them can be put into the doghouse: for example, when recently the Times of India did an expose on the Police Commissioner of Ahmedabad, charges of sedition—no less—were slapped on the those who ran the local edition of the newspaper.

State agencies like the Collectorate of Police, the Charity Commissioner, not to speak of party fascios, are used to terrorise individuals and groups who show the gumption to work on behalf of the poor, the minorities, or the other marginalized sections. Not to speak of the intimidation meted out with full state support to artists, film-makers, other cultural practitioners whose work is seen to transgress or question the preferences of a traditional, high-caste Hindu order of things.

Modi’s satraps routinely take recourse to the argument that having won elections, Modi has proved his legitimacy—an argument that is denied to the repeated and impressive victories scored by the Left in West Bengal, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, Shiela Dixit in Delhi, and so on, victories that have not had the underpinnings of a fascicised, majoritarian produce of hate to propel them. Yet the world knows that Modi’s electoral victories have resulted from a Hitlerite polarization of the majority Hindus against, not the Jews but the Muslims?

Nowhere in India, for these reasons, does the road to “development” and profit-maximisation seem as smooth to the industrialists as it does in Gujarat. As to the living indices of common Gujaratis, and of the relegated sections and victims of communal pogroms especially, how are they material to the story of “vibrant Gujarat”?

III

Adorno and Horkheimer, seeking in 1944 to understand what could explain the transmogrification of Europe from Enlightenment reason to Fascism, were to theorise how a “tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity” had taken place—a process calculated to to turn “thought into commodity” and “language into a celebration of the commodity.”

Indeed, in a whole section devoted to the media. A&H were to show brilliantly, long before Marshall McLulan, how that decline of Enlightenment humanism into reified class interest was to turn the message into the substance, thus scoring a mythical and fraudulent triumph of “communicative reason” to which such votaries of that reason as Habermas have remained cruelly oblivious.

Given that the Indian bourgeoisie that supported the anti-colonial freedom movement, far from producing any European-Enlightenment moment of opposition, not to speak of sustained opposition, to the social/mythical weltanshuuang of the old feudal classes, simply incorporated the past into both their own lives and into the political manipulations of the anti-colonial movement, the Gujarat variety of fascism could the more easily marry instrumentalist positivism with social stasis and rootedness.

A structure of inherited prejudices and organized corporate religion have, thus, been brought to buttress commodified reason rather than thwart its virulently benumbing operations.

A & H were to point out that “if enlightenment does not assimilate reflection in this repressive moment, it seals its own fate,” as “motorized history” furthers the “oblivious instrumentalization of science.”

And, with uncanny pertinence to the contemporary Indian situation: “in the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia. . . the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident.”

This decline of the Enlightenment into an unreflective and despotic positivism ensures that “the flood of precise information and brand new amusements make people smarter and more stupid atonce.” Brilliant formulation if ever there was one.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944,1947,1969,2002, the last in Edmund Jephcott’s excellent translation) was thus intended as a “critique of enlightenment…to prepare a positive (rather than “positivist”) concept of enlightenment which liberates it from entanglement in blind domination.”

Put another way, this project was to liberate the enlightenment from the extensions it was to find in the work of Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche—all of that leading to Fascism and Nazism.

In our own case, the event in Gujarat suggests the long road still to be taken first to arrive at the Enlightenment moment, and then to disabuse that moment of its instrumentalist, anti-democratic hegemony, both tasks ominously coterminous rather than sequential. And all that almost exclusively the onus of a weak organized Left and civil society organizations that often find both the state and the classes that kow-tow to it in concerted antagonism.

IV

Imagine that even as India’s leading industrialists think it mouth=wateringly desirable that Modi be set-up as the Prime Minister (by which term they intend really the CEO of the state reconceived as a Corporation), here are some facts about common life in Gujarat:

–one of the lowest gender ratios in demography in terms of females to males;

–one of the highest rates of female infanticide;

–girls raped by teachers for better grades, and in govt., hostels;

–boys mysteriously murdered in religious ashrams;

–vigilante violence against young people wishing to cohabit or marry across communities or castes, all duly ignored by state agencies;

–a “freedom of religion” law that infact punishes change of religion;

–denial of ordinary civic rights to Muslims who are denied both trade rights and housing in up-market areas dominated by Hindus;

–organised lying about developmental indices: e.g concealment of the fact that it is one of the most indebted states in the country; that industrialists are attracted by government subsidies given to them; that no more than some 23% of MOUs signed with them since 2003 are actually in the pipeline; that the waters of the Narmada still do not reach the most needy regions of the state; that thousands have been displaced from the banks of the Sabarmati river to make way for the Sabarmati River Front Development Project; that fisher folk find themselves ruthlessly dispossessed without alternative recourse;

–that Dalits continue to live in inhuman conditions;

–that massive numbers of children remain enslaved in the labour force;

–that official school text books continue to be full of distortions of history and other myths and inaccuracies;

–that in contrast to a national average of 66%, only some 59% of rural children can read;

–that right-wing Hindutva groups may put up bill-boards anywhere proclaiming “Hindu Rashtra”;

And so on.

(see “Vibrant” Gujarat: Lies, Half-Truths and Illusions, The Gujarat Reality Today,” by Fr.Cedric Prakash, Director of Prashant, Ahmedabad based Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace.)

Yet none of this figures in the calculations of the big-wigs who celebrate “vibrant” Gujarat.

V

True to this pattern of cutting-edge technological development nestling next to areas of abysmal social darkeness are neighbourhoods like Noida and Gurgaon in the National Capital Region.

These are areas that have some of the highest crime rates in the country, such as include daylight abductions, rapes, robberies, road-rage killings, honour killings of young women—and men—who dare defy the traditions laid down by caste groups and panchayats, and other forms of violence engendered by a culture of new affluence married to the prejudices of a feudal world-order.

A pattern entirely to the convenience of investors and industrialists who wish for great leaps in technological development but think any application of the scientific ways of thinking about social and cultural issues first a nuisance and then a potential threat to the flow of their operations.

As Marx had foreseen, the bourgeoisie may have, in Europe especially, made ruthless use of science in dethroning the regressive weltanshuuang of the feudal classes, but once in power, the last thing they desired was to see science carried further forward to scrutinize the weltanshuuang of their own class.

From about the end of the eighteenth century, science had to have but one use: the exploitation and mastering of natural resources for the ploughing of surpluses at whatever social cost. And the chief source of surplus being wage labour.

Gujarat under the Narendra Modi dispensation offers just about the most perfect scenario for so doing. It also boasts one of the lowest rates of wage labour!

What fitter candidate for India’s Prime Ministership?

________________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

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Palestine Yet Again

January 5, 2009

Palestine Yet Again

Badri Raina, January 5, 2008

You bleed again as the world watches

In civilized wisdom;

As you take little babies for burial,

With fresh bombs bursting behind

Before and on you,

The Zionists feel threatened by your resolve.

Such is your prowess:

No lion is thought quite dead till dead.

And you are not about to die either,

Take it from me.

The Zionist barbarians have had good teachers;

They did not suffer

At the hands of the Nazis for nothing.

Admiring their dour beastliness,

They said the Nazis are dead,

Let us be the Nazis.

And the yanks said

These are our Nazis, so beware.

For now we can only sing of your ideals,

Your courage, your history

And write poems;

But no reckoning is forever delayed.

Even now there are ears that hear,

Eyes that see,

And minds that are made.

We cannot save your babies,

Your women,

Your home and hearth,

Such as they are,

But be sure there will be that reckoning.

It is in the making.

Who knows how, when, or where

It will bring the beasts to book.

Who knows when the light of justice

Will shine,

But shine it will.

We know you have no doubt of that.

So let your wounds water afresh

The tree-trunk of your immutable soul.

The new leaves will have more blood

And the new branches more muscle.

The sight of that perennial growth alone

Will strike terror to the terroriser

Driving him to madness and self-destruction.

Palestine, you are the earth itself;

What have you not borne, seen, suffered,

And, like the earth’s, the victory will be yours.

badri.raina@gmail.com

www.zcommunications.org/zspace/badriraina

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Badri Raina: Mumbai Attacks, Some Questions

November 30, 2008

Enough is Enough

Says who to whom?

By Badri Raina | ZNet, Nov 30, 2008

The Light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

(Gospel, Matthew, 6:22)

I

My skimpy acquaintance with the Taj hotel in what was then Bombay goes back to 1962.

I had been selected as a rookie sales executive by the then world’s largest corporate house, Standard Oil, whose Asia division was called ESSO.

Our offices, also then the only air-conditioned building in Bombay, was at Nariman point.

Such was the nature of my job that on two or three occasions I had to be inside the Taj, full of smiles and business.

Some three years later I decided I wasn’t going to sell oil for the next forty years, and I quit cold turkey to return happily to an academic life, liberally enlivened with activist involvements.

In short, the Taj hotel is truly a magnificent structure, although those days it made me happier to look at its magnificence from the outside than wheeling-dealing inside.

Like every other Indian, therefore, I am deeply saddened both by the insane loss of life, notable and ordinary, and by the damage done to this edifice. Especially when I recall that the Taj was the result of a laudable anti-colonial impulse, since Jamshedji had been refused entrance to another hotel reserved exclusively for the British.

II

My thoughts are here occasioned by a programme that one premier English-language electronic channel has been running since last night.

It is captioned “enough is enough.”

As I have listened to the outrage pouring out from a diverse assortment of some celebrity Mumbai citizens whose haunts habitually remain restricted to the affluent South Mumbai—a zone of peace and prosperity that has had its first rite of passage to the ugliness that afflicts the rest of the city, indeed the rest of India, and rest of the world—I find myself asking the question “who is it saying ‘enough is enough’, to whom, and why now”?

And how credible is the slogan of unity-at-any-cost that now so invigorates the fortunate classes in the wake of this traumatic experience?

And why should these imperious syllables calculated to shut off debate be received with unquestioning compliance when the mind is wracked by instances when South Mumbai-India has failed to employ the same “single eye” to pronounce on other murderous and murderously divisive events?

Today, thanks to the exemplary courage and discipline of India’s security forces, the Taj may have been disfigured and damaged, however brutally, but not demolished—something that seemed to have been the intent of the terrorist attack.

But, alas, some sixteen years ago a four-hundred year old iconic mosque was axed and hatcheted out of existence while the forces stood and watched, as did the whole nation on television.

Neither that fateful day, nor once in the last sixteen years, has the cry gone up “enough is enough” on behalf of those that are now so outraged. Educated noises have been made, which is not the same thing as saying never again should this country countenance social forces that brought that watershed calamity about.

Only conscientious citizens have struggled since to bring succour and justice to the victims, often suffering opprobrium from elite India that sees them as busybodies.

Indeed, the worthies that were visibly culpable in inflicting that blood-thirsty catastrophe on the nation continue to remain in good favour with influential sections of the corporate media which may have carried on a debate on the issue but never admonished “enough is enough.”

Some two hundred lives have been lost to the terrorist attack in Mumbai. Yet when, following the demolition of the Babri mosque, our own people killed a thousand or so of our own people in the very same Mumbai, the debate never ceased, and has not to this day.

Nor has the same terminal urgency that is now in evidence informed elite comment as to why those found guilty in that massacre (1992-93) by a high-powered Commission of Enquiry have not been given their due deserts

And what of the Gujarat massacres of 2002? No terrorists from outside there too, but our own good citizens, secure in the knowledge that they had the blessings of the top man in the job. The very top man who continues to be the darling of many elites who do not fight shy of drooling over what a wonderful chief executive he would make for the whole country, full of “development” and profit maximization.

No wonder that Mr. Modi should have been the first to hold a press briefing outside “ground zero” (am I sick of that copy-cat phrase) even while the bullets were flying, making it an occasion to deride no less than the Prime Minister.

The same Mr. Modi who until the other day publicly vented his strongest barbs at the ATS (Anti-Terrorism Squad) for daring to enquire into cases of Hindutva terrorism.

Narry an “enough is enough” there; only a shamefaced disapproval barely audible on the channels.

Indeed, should you ask me, I might say that the most heroic vignette during the current imbroglio has been the refusal of the widow of the slain Karkare, erstwhile head of the ATS, to accept Modi’s devious offer of money.

As also an SMS doing the rounds, asking where Raj Thackeray, the great divisive champion of Marathi interests, has been while Mumbai was being butchered? And did he know that it was security personnel drawn from all over the country, including overwhelmingly from the north and the south, who were dying to save his Marathi manoos as much as anyone else in the city?

The same Thackeray clan to whom South Mumbai never seems to say “enough is enough,” cannily remembering that in time of trouble they may after all have no recourse but to their lumpen mercy.

And how ironic that we should then lament how the spirit of a grand unity so eludes us ?

In one brief word, why do we not ever hear an unequivocal “enough is enough” in relation to the politics of fascist communalism? Or an unequivocal recognition of its intimate bearing on terrorism? Why do these realities remain subjects of TV debates from endless week to endless week wherein the culprits are afforded more than equal time?

Continued >>

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The Quest for Purity

November 25, 2008

Another Name for Fascism

By Badri Raina  |  ZNet, Nov 25, 2008


Epigraph:

I am not a fascist only when

I decimate all other kind;

I am a fascist when first I think

It is purity I have in mind.

(Badri Raina, Modest Proposal & Other Rhymes for the Times, Sahmat pub., Delhi, 2000)

I

These are confused times for India’s political Hinduism.

As the hours go by, the proverbial cunning of its leaderships across its many falanges experiences an exhaustion that surprises most of all the Sangh itself.

Having fooled millions over a century, it is astonished to find that it may at bottom have been the most fooled.

Adroit as it has been at double-speaking its way out of double-speak, the alleged involvement of its scions now in acts of terror renders it the mirror-image of those it never ceases to construct and condemn as its “other.”

Worse still, it is abjectly reduced to proffering in defence every single argument routinely proferred by its “opposite” number. And its self-righteous bluster that no Hindu can, by definition, ever be a terrorist rings hollow even among its loyal constituency, rebuke as such bluster does even the lowest form of common intelligence.

How much dent all that will or will not make in its electoral base must depend on some collateral factors, chiefly the further successes of investigative agencies, the fate of the cases in courts of law, and the quality of exertion on behalf of secular civil and political agencies to bring home the facts to the nation at large.

II

My ruminations here are occasioned by a statement made by the spokesperson of the All India Hindu Mahasabha (that most ontological of theoretical Hindutva over which Savarkar presided as the chief ideologue), Pravin Sharma to Times of India, online on 22nd Nov.,2008.

This statement characterizes the BJP as “an opportunist political party playing politics over terrorism”: clearly, neither the Congress nor the Left could have said more.

It then goes on to say: “Please ask the BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS and Abhinav Bharat as to what contribution they have made for Hindus and Hindutva so far.” Fascinating stuff.

Taken together with media reports of confirmation of the truth of the allegation that the Sangh scions now in custody, alongwith an endocrinologist who works at a reputed private hospital in Delhi, were indeed plotting to murder two leaders of the RSS (see The Hindu, 23rd, Nov., p.10), the Congress seems well-placed in saying that there is currently a “civil war” under way within the Sangh Parivar.

But to return to the disillusionment expressed by the Hindu Mahasabha with all other falanges of the Hindutva brigade.

Just within a year of the framing of India’s secular-democratic Constitution, the RSS (Vatican of the Parivar) decided that it was not enough merely to engage Hindus in acts of “cultural” transformation towards hard-core Brahminical practices.

Such work needed to be done politically as well through the party-political system and electoral participation.

Thus was floated the Jana Sangh in 1951.

Sadly, the Hindu “purity” of its programmes (read anti-Muslim agenda) failed to yield any more than two seats to the Indian Parliament up until the end of the 1980s.

A declension from “purity” was thus indicated; and with that realization the BJP was born.

The BJP in turn was to discover that it did not have a constituency large enough even among India’s Hindus to reward it with an absolute ruling majority in the House of the People.

Indeed, it remains a significant pointer to the secular heart of India that this pro-Hindu party has never yet managed more than some 29% popular vote in any general election. And given that not more than some 3-5% non-Hindu voters are ever attracted to it, the conclusion is that some 65 or more percent of the Hindu electorate do not vote for the BJP.

Despite every species of public and ideological manoeuvre that the BJP and its individual leaders have attempted since the infamous Rath Yatra led by L.K.Advani, an aggressive Hindutva putsch that was to culminate in the watershed demolition of the four-hundred year old Babri mosque in 1992, the BJP has been unable to achieve state power in Delhi except in alliance with a plethora of other parties who hold no allegiance to the Hindutva telos.

Thus, if successful political intervention in transforming the Republic into a saffron hue has entailed a mitigation of its sectarian agenda, it has simultaneously found itself at the receiving end of purist injunctions from the RSS -Vatican in Nagpur, reminding it with frustrating insistence that its existence in the first place was to Hinduise the procedures and genius of the institutions of Indian democracy.

III

Imagine then the enormity of a situation where a still higher custodian, however self-assumed, of Hindutva “purity,” namely the Hindu Mahasabha, now feels impelled to find even the RSS fallen into impurity. And to a point where the alleged culprits now in custody felt warranted to do away with two of its leaders for doing little on behalf of Hindutva.

Another way of conceptualizing the dynamic of this narrative—the ruthless impulse to return to “purity”—is to say that it maps out vividly how democracies are sought to be shrunk from the expanded base of the political pyramid to its fascist point at the top.

And, European history of the last century teaches us how such impulses are sought to be validated by the “self-evident” and “transcedant” claims of some legend/myth of past glory, or some past wrong-doing, or, some self-assumed supremacy of race or religion, even biological purity, all peddled as unimpeachably pure “nationalism.” A whole package of “purity” that in turn warrants without proven mandate violent voluntary vigilantism, and triumphalist war once the state is captured.

What matters is that the illusory victimhood of the majority is first established, and then ascribed to the sinister scheming of the “other” who is seen to “pollute” the “purity” of the “real” nation’s life at every point.

That history also teaches us that these coercive shrinkages of democracy and the concomitant centralization of political power then go hand in hand with the centralization of Capital into a handful of monopolies.

And as the state and its economic arrangements defeat plurality and competition, the Dionysian “purity” of self-justifying authority is born.

In our time, this package of “purity” has been in evidence as the marriage between the pre-emptive claims of neocon imperialism and neo-liberal market fundamentalism, internationally. Christened “globalization,” its beneficiaries have been those at the top of the pyramid, and its victims spread over a base as wide as the world.

How much of that may change now remains to be seen. It is no small tribute to the American people that the consequences of that marriage should have disgusted them decisively enough to have joyfully elected as their President a talented young man from among the “other.”

IV

To return to India.

A remarkable dynamic counter to the re-centralizing, purity-oriented turmoil within the Sangh Parivar is currently at work among India’s Muslims. A dynamic that I venture bears the promise of defeating the renewed fascistic call of the Parivar more conclusively than anything else in view.

Ever since the Partition of India which still left this country with the world’s second largest population of Muslims (and yet a “minority”), India’s Muslims—with most of the elite gone over to the new country of Pakistan—bereft largely of secular leadership internally, have been at the receiving end of three sources of oppression: the animosity of the Sangh, the clout of Muslim clerical authorities, and the neglect by the state.

Invariably they have answered these oppressions in two principle ways: one, to band together qua Muslims, and to vote for political parties that could at the least ensure their physical safety.

With the coming to age of a new generation of Indian Muslims unburdened by personally experienced happenings of the Partition, the failure of the state to be wholly secular, especially in the wake of pogroms against them, and the rise of their aspirations as citizens to be equal partners in the productive processes of an improved national economy, the two habitual recourses noted above have come to be seen as wanting, even as the way ahead has seemed unclear and unconvincing.

It was with those contexts in mind that this writer had, as far back as 1990, made the following suggestion:

“Indian Muslims must. . .resist constructing their identities along a trans-Indian Islam. For one thing, it is only when this begins to happen that Hindutva can lose both its twisted rationale and its retrograde mass appeal. Muslims must, instead, join in with whatever democratic forces and movements are in operation in the regions in which they are located as parts of specific civil societies. Just as the critique of and opposition to majority communalist politics come increasingly from within the Hindu community itself, an invigorated Muslim democratic opinion must take on that role, not just in relation to Hindu communalists but Muslim as well.”

(”Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Democratic Agenda, “The Statesman, 6th May, 1990)

Recent trends have shown that this is increasingly becoming the praxis that Indian Muslims seek now to follow:

–Muslims now seek secular education up to the highest levels;

–Many young Muslim men and women are beginning to question social practices supposedly ordained by one clerical authority or the other;

–Muslims are increasingly and in great numbers part of civil rights activities that seek to deepen the values and stipulations enshrined in the Constitution, and to reinforce the non-discriminatory exercise of the rule of law;

–everyday, one influential Muslim social/cultural organization or the other, including clerical forums, publicly decry the resort to violence in any form, condemning the killing of innocents especially as “un-Islamic”;

–a joyful increase of Muslim faces is in evidence in the public arena, in the media, and in inter-community life generally;

–Indian Muslims, most of all, are beginning to recognize that it is in pluralist democracy rather than some loyalty to denominational “purity” that progressive prospects reside both for them and for the nation-state generally.

As should be obvious, all that subverts the fascist construction of Indian Muslims that has through the last six decades so suited the Sangh Parivar.

This particularly so because the new forward-looking, secular orientation among Muslims draws approval from large sections of ordinary Hindus who remain wedded to the principles on which the Indian state bases itself.

Just as the state as well feels impelled to look more honestly at the specific areas of neglect suffered by Muslims and formulates policies to redress them.

V

Sadly, the response of the Sangh Parivar to these developments seems to be to recede further into “purity” (emulating Muslim instincts up until now), rather than to say “how good that these changes are underway.”

And this is not hard to understand.

Whatever its rhetoric about Muslim exclusivity, the Sangh has never at bottom desired Indian Muslims to be incorporated into the full life of the nation-state.

Indeed such a prospect fills it with the apprehension that its pristine project of transforming India into a “pure” Hindu nation (much like the erstwhile Nepal, now so sadly fallen into secular republicanism) may indeed suffer conclusive rejection. If anything, its private anguish is caused by a sense of betrayal: despite the two-nation theory which led to the Partition of India, why should so many Muslims have chosen to stay back?

The BJP, however, to the extent that it is unlikely now to abandon its participation in Indian electoral democracy, wind up, and return to some cloistered Hindutva “purity,” has some far-reaching thinking to do.

Does it have the will to match the paradigmatic shift in Muslim attitudes and resolves?

Does it have the wisdom to finally own the foundational principles of the Indian Republic as much in conviction as it does in tactics, accepting or rejecting its operations only to the extent that these suit or do not suit its sectarian purposes?

In short, does the BJP have the courage to jettison the fascist “purity” enjoined upon it by its mentors, some among them now alleged to be terrorists, and rejoice in the tainted but humane, inventive, and inter-communitarian exertions of democratic creativity?

As things are, it may be idle of the BJP to think that the dynamics of an increasingly secular polity will forever keep a constituency of “purity” ready and available to it.

Consider that this is what was once stipulated in the Katha- Upanishad:

“Hope and expectation, good company and pleasant discourse, the fruits of sacrifices and good deeds, sons and cattle—all are taken away from that person of little understanding in whose home a Brahmin remains without food.”

(D.S.Sharma, The Upanishads: An Anthology, Bharti Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1975, p.43)

Today, many foodless Brahmins are happy to be alongside a Dalit Mayawati.

A History worth emulating in many ways.

________________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

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Badri Raina: Hindu Terrorism

November 18, 2008

The Shock of Recognition

By Badri Raina | ZNet, Nov 17, 2008

Epigraph:

“underlying these religions were a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself but also for the greater good”

(Obama in his interview about Religion given to Cathleen Falsani, March,27,2004; cf. to his mother’s teaching about the validity of diverse faiths and the value of tolerance.)

I

So, now, India is home to “Hindu” terrorism.

Departing from the more usual banner-appelation, “Saffron Terror”, I wish the fact to be registered that saffron is drawn from the stamin of a delicate and indescribably pretty mauve flower grown exclusively in my home valley of Kashmir, and exclusively by Muslims. My inherited memories of it are thereby sweet and secular to the core.

Also, saffron when used to grace milk products, Biryani, or to brew the heavenly Kehwa is a thing of the gods truly.

It is only when it is coerced against the use of nature to colour politics that it rages against the sin. Then, don’t we know, what gruesome consequences begin.

I think it proper, therefore, to stick with the more direct and honest description “Hindu” terrorism, since, much against their grain, even India’s premier TV channels are now bringing us news of “Hindu” terrorism, so compelling the materials gathered by the investigating agencies thus far.

This despite the fact that in my view the term “Hindu” trerrorism is as erroneous as the term “Muslim” terrorism. Even though not a religious man myself, I am able to see that being Hindu or Muslim by accident of birth has no necessary connect with how one’s politics turn out to be in adult life. A plethora of specific contexts and shaping histories are here provenly more to the point.

II

It was way back in 1923 that Savarkar, never a practicing Hindu (indeed a self-confessed atheist) had first understood that from this benign term, “Hindu,” could be drawn the toxic racial concept Hindutva, and made to serve a forthrightly fascist purpose. That Brahminism had always been a socially toxic form of Hinduism was of course an enabling prehistory to the new project.

He it was who established Abhinav Bharat in Pune (1904), that theoretical hotbed of twice-born Brahminical casteism against which low-caste social reformers such as Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar were to struggle their whole lives long.

Such casteism was made the instrument of communalist politics to serve two major objectives: one, to overwhelm and negate the specific cultural and material oppressions of the low-caste within the Hindu Varna system , and two, to elevate the low-caste as a warrior of a common “Hindutva” army against the chief common “enemy,” the Muslim.

Such an army has been seen to be needed to salvage the “real” nation from this so-called common enemy who continues to be represented to this day by the RSS and its hydra-headed “educational” front organizations as an “invader” still bent on seeking to convert India into an Islamic theocratic state.

Aided in these mythical fears and constructions by the British during the crucial decades leading upto Independence, India’s majoritarian fascists continue thus to keep at bay all consideration of secular oppressions based entirely in the brutal social order of Capitalist expropriation.

Savarkar thus counseled how a resurgent nation could result only if “Hinduism was militarized, and the military Hinduised.”

Clearly enough, the serving army Colonel, S.P. Purohit and the other retired Major, one Upadhyay, who the Mumbai ATS (Anti-Terrorist Squad) tells us, are at the centre of the Malegaon terrorist blasts of September 29, 2008, alongwith Sadhvi Pragya and the rogue-sadhu, Amreetanand—and very possibly complicit in half a dozen other blasts as well—seem to have heeded Savarkar’s advice to the hilt.

Indeed, in his Narco-test confessions, Colonel Purohit, sources have told some TV channels (Times Now), admits to his guilt and justifies his actions as retribution for what he thinks SIMI (Student’s Islamic Movement of India) have been doing. He is understood to have further indicated that the rogue sadhu, Amreetanand, nee Dayanand etc., has been the kingpin and chief coordinator and devisor of several other blasts carried out by this cell, including the blasts at the revered Ajmer Dargah (Mausoleum of the 12th century Sufi saint, Chisti, which to this day draws devotees across faiths the world-over), and at Kanpur.

The ATS are now busy exploring the routes through which huge sums of money have been brought into the country for such terrorist activity as Hawala transactions, and whether the RDX, suspected to be used in the Malegaon blast, was procured by Colonel Purohit through army connections. It is to be noted that Purohit has been in Military Intelligence, and serving in Jammu & Kashmir, where it is thought he made contact with the rogue sadhu, Amreetanand.

(Indeed, as I write, news comes of the ATS claiming that Purohit actually stole some 60 kilos of RDX which was in his custody while doing duty at Deolali, and that in his Narco-test confession he admits to passing it on to one “Bhagwan” for use in the blast on the Samjhauta Express train in Feb.,2007.)

Needless to say, that alongwith the courts, we will also require that the ATS is actually able to obtain convictions rather than merely pile on evidence which may not be admissible in law.

To return to the argument:

As I suggested in my last column, “Notions of the Nation” (Znet, Nov.,4), Hindutva militarism since the establishment of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS has been inspired by the desire to emulate and then better Muslim “aggressiveness” seen as a racial characteristic that defined “Muslim” rule in India, and rendered Hindus “limp” and “cowardly.”

Thus, if Savarkar established Ahninav Bharat, Dr.Moonje, an avowed Mussolini admirer who in turn inspired Dr.Hedgewar to establish the RSS on Vijay Dashmi of 1924 (victory day, denoting the liquidation of the Dravidian Ravana by the Aryan Kshatriya warrior, Ram) established the Bhondsala Military Academy at Indore (1937). It now transpires that this academy has been playing host to the Bajrang Dal for militarist training routines etc., and its director, one Raikar, has put in his papers.

Unsurprisingly enough, both these institutions are now under the scanner.

III

Over the last decade, terrorist blasts have occurred in India across a wide variety of sites and in major cities and towns.

Many of these blasts have taken place outside mosques and known Muslim- majority locations, as well outside cinema halls that were thought to be showing movies inimical to Hindu glory.

Briefly, these sites are: cinemas in Thane and Vashi in Maharashtra, Jalna, Purna, Parbhani, and Malegaon towns, again all in Maharashtra—and all areas of high Muslim density, in Hyderabad outside a famous old mosque, and in Ahmedabad and Surat in Gujarat.

Curiously, in the Surat episode, some sixteen odd bombs were found placed along the main thoroughfare in tree branches, on house-tops, on electric poles and so forth. Not one of them however exploded. This was thought to be the result of defective switches. Curious circumstance that; besides the wonder that Ahmedabad’s Muslims could find such sprawling access to such strategic locations without Modi knowing a thing.

Yet, regardless of where the blasts have taken place, almost without exception the Pavlovian response of state agencies as well as, sad to say, media channels has been invariably to point fingers of suspicion and culpability towards one or the other “Islamic” outfit.

Often, young Muslims men have been rounded up in the scores and held for days of brutal questioning without the least prima facie evidence. Nearly in all such cases, however reluctantly, they have had to be let off.

The most recent case is that of some fifteen young Muslims picked up after the Hyderabad blasts. Tortured with electric shocks, they have nevertheless been found to be innocent and let go.

Indeed, after the gruesome blasts in the Samjhauta Express—a train service of reconciliation and confidence-building between India and Pakistan—in which some 68 people were burnt to cinders, 45 of them Pakistani citizens, fingers were immediately pointed towards the SIMI.

Yet, the ATS of Mumbai now suspects that this may also be the doing of the “Hindu” terrorists in custody. These speculations have been raised by the circumstance that the suitcases that held the bombs had Indore labels on them.

Just as the ATS now suspects that more than half a dozen blasts (the two at Malegaon, in 2006 and 2008, at the cinemas in Thane and Vashi, at Jalna, at Purna, at Parbhani, provenly at Nanded and Kanpur) have all been the handiwork of “Hindu” terror groups.

Continued  >>

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