Information Clearing House, Dec 26, 2009
By Noam Chomsky
America is not a democracy, nor was it intended to be.
Posts Tagged ‘democracy’
Chomsky: America is not a Democracy
December 26, 2009Kashmiris’ revolt against Indian occupation and military terror
October 2, 2009The Socialist Worker, October 2, 2009
Arundhati Roy is the renowned author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997. But Roy is equally well known as a determined social movement activist and leading voice of the global justice movement.
Roy’s new collection of essays, titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, examines the dark side of democracy in her native India. It looks at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just beneath the surface in a country that projects itself as the world’s largest democracy.
Here, we republish an essay from the book that provides a brilliant account of the summer 2008 uprising against Indian occupation by the people of Kashmir–a disputed region partitioned between India and Pakistan, and subject to Indian military rule in the section it controls.
FOR THE past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarized zone in the world.
Roy: What Have We Done to Democracy?
September 28, 2009Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
Arundhati Roy, tomdispatch.com, Sep 27, 2009
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia… is that what you would prefer?”
Raina: The Democracy Flu
August 26, 2009Breaches in the Bastions
By Badri Raina, ZNet, Aug 26, 2009
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.
Aung San Suu Kyi stands for her people and democracy
August 16, 2009A single slender woman who terrifies an army of generals
By Badri Raina, ZNet, Aug 16, 2009
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.
Indian Elections 2009: Peoples’ Verdict
May 22, 2009By Badri Raina | ZNet, May 21, 2009
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 >>
The Pakistan Problem
April 8, 2009
By Badri Raina | ZNet April 8, 2009
I
Now suppose that the post-Independence Indian State had been constituted as Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha, Gowalkar and the RSS had wished it to be constituted—a theocratic Hindu one.
Clearly, secularism would not have been enshrined as one of its “basic principles”; nor would cultural pluralism have been its endorsed social feature.
Indeed, as had been stipulated by these Hindutva ideologues, Muslims and Christians may have been granted citizenship only if they first abandoned their allegiance to Mecca and Jerusalem, accepting Hinduism as the “national” faith.
Concomitantly, and crucially, Hindu rituals and “time-honoured” religious practices would verily have received the sanction of the State.
Sati (widow burning after the death of the husband), child marriages in many parts of India, tantric sacrifices and other forms of voodoo, Hindu religious ceremonies mandated at official functions and in educational institutions, atrocities against Dalits (christened the “untouchables”, or those without caste) and much more could all have found an endorsed place within the theocratic Constitution, deriving their legitimacy from a diverse slew of Hindu-religious texts. The killing of a cow may have been inscribed as a more heinous crime than the killing of a Dalit (as per, for example, the injunctions of the Manusmriti).
And much more, especially in the matter of the entitlement to property as between the genders.
In such an eventuality, however secularists and rationalists might have argued, the “cultural nationalists” would have pointed them to the nature of the state and the provisions of the theorcratic Constitution as by law established, and put them in the dock as being subversive of the ordained features of the new nation-state.
As it is, if the secularists and rationalists in India have any chance of beating back the Hindutva fascists, it is because they have behind them the authority of the secular state and India’s secular-democratic Constitution.
Which is far from saying that the state in India has practiced the stipulations of that Constitution with any great conviction. It is saying, though, that the legitimacy of any governmental dispensation has had to reside in the secular Constitution as upheld by law and the courts.
II
Here is the problem with Pakistan, and it is just as well to face the fact as that unfortunate country is poised to come apart, having already lost its erstwhile eastern wing, now Bangladesh. A stark example that states based on religious principles need not be the most cohesive or lasting ones.
Carved on the grounds of religion, and christened The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the legitimacy of the argument lies with those who insist that the Republic is not sufficiently Islamic.
That Jinnah, secularist par-excellence, who fathered the theocratic nation had foreseen this possibility and wanted to alter the grounds on which he had successfully persuaded the British to partition India was to become apparent in the very first speech he made to the Assembly of the new nation.
Alas, he died soon after. And Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, who might have effected that sort of transformation was duly assassinated.
So that, ever since, the feudals who were the material force behind the creation of Pakistan, aided by Hindutva “nationalists” and the British alike, and who have since also included the bulk of its military top brass, were to find in the marriage of theocracy and feudalism an instrument perfectly suited to their purposes.
Even as they did not turn away from the hedonisms that western life-styles had to offer, or from running business establishments and commercial ventures in city and hinterland. A unique army indeed.
Over the last sixty years, a miniscule, English-using middle class has indeed emerged—one that seeks to liberalise the state and polity. And those of them who are now in the forefront of battling obscurantism and orthodoxy are the most grievously trapped. Perhaps even dangerously so. Notice the sacrifices already made by many of Pakistan’s enlightened media hands, and the opprobrium suffered by some outstanding human rights activists.
The problem remains that not many are also able to say that so long as the Republic remains “Islamic” their strivings for a rational modernity stand constantly to lose for want of any endorsed legitimacy on behalf of the state.
And the hope that sections like the Taliban can be brought around to some middle course of a soft-Islamism regardless of the logic of Pakistan’s birth as a new nation constantly flounders in the face of their insistence that the “Islamic” Republic fulfil the full promise of its originations.
After all, they argue, you cannot have a theocracy run on the principles of modern jurisprudence or egalitarian social ideas. Doing any such thing seems to them to make Pakistan indistinguishable from the arch-enemy, India, obliterating the very coordinates of the Partition.
Precisely as would have been the case had the new Indian state become a theocratic Hindu Rashtra.
III
When one considers what an uphill task it still is in India to ensure the unfettered implementation of secular laws and other ” basic features” of the Constitution in the face of centuries of accumulated habits of inegalitarian thought which permeate the lawmaker and the administrator as much as they do elements in society, all despite the authority and the injunctions of state ideology, the task that faces secular-democratic civil society groups in Pakistan must seem stupendously daunting, since their efforts run counter not merely to the order of society but to the stipulations of the theocratic state as well.
The harsh question that democratic Pakistanis, individuals, groups, and political parties alike, must ask themselves is whether it will do simply to defeat obscurantist forces in democratic elections.
Or, whether, however devoted Pakistanis be to Islam, the principles of state ideology require to be rethought and reconstituted. And faith returned to its proper sphere, namely the private spaces of personal and social existence.
Indeed, the landmark elections there wherein the obscurantists were by and large defeated in all four provinces might be construed to offer the opportune moment to remodel the state along lines that the founder, Jinnah, had voiced in that speech to the first session of the new Assembly.
Can liberal and modernizing sections of Pakistanis hope to win the war against the “Islamists” by simply continuing to fight it within the terms both they and the state stipulate, or is a paradigm shift now an imperative? Do they now need a state ideology that can lend formal legitimacy to the resistance they seek to put up?
To many worldwide, especially to those who wish Pakistan well, it does seem that soon things could go so out of hand that any such retrieval becomes foreclosed.
Is Pakistan’s current parliament upto such a task? And does its army have the will to back the shift from “Islamic Republic” to “Republic”?
It seems obvious that Pakistan’s democracy, such as it is, cannot hope to put the Taliban in the wrong so long as Pakistan’s state ideology remains on their side.
And the current effort to marry Republican citizenship and the broad order of things to a continued adherence to theocratic nationhood seems destined to come a cropper.
IV
It would be dishonest not to allude to what seems to remain a profounder problem, one that may be called an intellectual closure.
As has been seen in recent years in India, especially since the demolition of the Babri mosque, a new species of intolerance in matters of debate about religion has come to afflict many Hindus. Violently so.
Yet, if this occurrence remains less than lethal (although the Malegaon event was lethal enough), or this side of overtaking the state, it must be due to the fact that traditions of “higher criticism” with respect to religious texts in Hinduism have a long history, and can be adduced in support of refutation and critique. Many social movements that have taken place in India, and are taking place now, could not be thought of without those traditions having existed, priestly oppressions notwithstanding.
This seems equally true of Christianity. Consider, after all, that there are Christian denominations that do not still accept the divinity of Christ, but rather see in him “man -made- divine” The Methodists, for example. Just as some denominations accept the authenticity of the Book of Revelation, and others consider the same as apocryphal. Not to speak of controversies as radical as those that concern the Gnostic gospels (Da Vinci Code).
All of those things without fear of losing life or limb, primarily because from the times of Wycliff, Copernicus, Galileo, Luther, and others, a heavy enough price was paid centuries ago to breach intellectual closure.
Perhaps those impulses are now beginning to stir within the world of Islam, but scantily and at great peril. Salman Rushdi and Tasleema Nasreen will know something of what is said here, no doubt.
Considering that Islam within the Indian subcontinent has had an extraordinary preponderance of the Sufi, the sceptic, the downright irreverent, including kings and princes, and fine traditions of Ijtihad (religious argumentation) it should not be such a task to plough those traditions back into the contemporary moment in Pakistan as well, and to put the reconstituted “Republic” on the footing of a new humanist renaissance.
After all, it is education of the widest sort of latitude that alone, in the end, ensures the deepening of democratic traditions and practices and the strength to meet bigotry with resolve and informed intellectual toughness.
The lesson needs to be imbibed that religious and scriptural texts have always been as much open and subject to interpretation and controversy as any other. And the least demur from “received” readings or official diktats need not be seen to constitute apostasy punishable with the chopping of limbs, lashing of backsides, or stoning to the death. Current day Swat in Pakistan is a telling example of what can happen when the state’s ambiguity about itself becomes its dominant feature.
This writer knows from personal experience with learned Muslim friends that various Suras of the Islamic holy book can be occasions for as much debate and disagreement as any ordinary literary work, even as the Gita and the Bible. Which is why, after all, that such a number of commentaries on the Qu’ran are in existence.
In Pakistan of now, it would seem that an old nation is in death throes, and a new too afraid to be born.
Pakistan is too pretty a place, and its people too intelligent and endowed for that birth to be allowed to be thwarted.
Speaking of which, one must also say that the success of that venture will depend a great deal on whether or not Pakistan learns to forego its claim to Kashmir– a claim that it bases on the ground that it is a Muslim-majority state. As well as to cease to view India as an adversary because it is a Hindu-majority country.
If Pakistan is to make the transition to a secular-democratic state, those grounds cannot hold. What can result from such a transition is its own lasting viability and progress as a nation-state, and the possibility that it can make crucial contributions to the stability and prosperity not only of South Asia but other regions where Muslims face similar conundrums.
___________________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com
India’s Democracy Challenged
March 29, 2009The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
By Badri Raina |ZNet, March 28, 2009
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.
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badri.raina@gmail.com
Peace and Justice Post 
Accepting peace prize, Obama makes case for unending war
December 11, 2009David Walsh, wsws.org, Dec 11, 2009
In the most bellicose Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech within living memory, President Barack Obama made an argument Thursday in Oslo for ever-widening war and neo-colonial occupation, putting the world on notice that the American ruling elite intends to push ahead with its drive for global domination.
Continues >>
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