‘Can you identify Bangladeshi by looking at face’: Karnataka HC slams state

The News Minute

‘Can you identify Bangladeshi by looking at face’: Karnataka HC slams state

The BBMP demolished many huts in a settlement in Bengaluru over suspicions that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants stayed there.

news Court Monday, February 03, 2020 - 19:47

Haripriya Suresh Follow @haripriyas_

"By looking at the face of a person, can one be identified as being a Bangladeshi national?” questioned Karnataka High Court Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka, slamming the state over the demolition of settlements in Bengaluru over suspicions that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants stayed there. 

The High Court bench comprising Chief Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Hemant Chandangoudar told that state that it will have to rehabilitate those affected by the demolitions.
The court was hearing the plea filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties which challenged the demolition of migrant settlements in Bellandur and Whitefield in the city on January 18 and 19.
In a previous hearing, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) distanced itself from the demolitions. On Monday, the state, which was represented by Advocate-General Prabhuling K Navadgi also maintained that it did not have anything to do with the demolition.
Further, he questioned the misuse of power at multiple levels during the process through which the demolition was carried out — the police officer who wrote to the landowners, as well as the BBMP carrying out the demolition. “On the suspicion that they are Bangladeshi, will the police take law into its own hands and write to the owner, and the BBMP act?” he asked.It had turned out that many residents in the migrant settlement were from states like Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and even Karnataka.
CJ Oka also questioned why the police officer is still in service. “The fact that the state has protected the officer shows that all is not well,” he quipped.
He stated that since the problem began with the state, it must take measures to rehabilitate them — either monetarily or otherwise.
He also tore into the authorities, questioning them as to on what basis the people were declared to be Bangladeshi. He stated that nothing seemed to indicate that the police officer visited the site to identify Bangladeshi immigrants.
“Door-to-door survey by a competent authority must be done. Proper verification needs to be carried out,” he said.
“No date was set by the BBMP for demolition. The stand of the state government is that they have not done it. Prima facie, it is impossible to accept that the occupants vacated on their own,” the CJ said.
Lawyers representing the owners of the land where the shanties were razed maintained that those who were squatting on the property left after they “politely requested” them. “Who will believe that people left because they were politely requested to?” the CJ quipped.
The court will pass its final order in the case on February 7.
Read: Who demolished migrant huts claiming Bangladeshi infiltration? BBMP says it didn't
After video claims 'Bangladeshi immigrant' settlement in Bengaluru, BBMP razes 100 huts

India Has One of the Longest Running Fascist Movements | Interview in The Wire

'India Has The Longest Running Fascist Movement in the World – The RSS'

In conversation with historian Benjamin Zachariah on what it means to call today's India 'fascist', the history of the Sangh parivar, the protests India is seeing today and more. [ . . . ]

https://thewire.in/politics/benjamin-zachariah-fascism-sangh-parivar

India - A Base Map on Eating Habits

Bharat Mata is only a little more than 100 years old | DN Jha (2016 article in scroll)

scroll.in, April 05, 2016

Opinion
Far from being eternal, Bharat Mata is only a little more than 100 years old

It's only from the late 19th century that Bharatvarsha to refer to the subcontinent and Bharat as mother found their way into the popular vocabulary.
Far from being eternal, Bharat Mata is only a little more than 100 years old

DN Jha


At a time when India is being projected as eternal, when the chanting of Bharat Mata ki jai has become a testimony to patriotism and refusal to do so invites the wrath of Hindutva outfits and political parties, it is pertinent to look at the history of the country known as Bharat whose antiquity cannot be pushed too far back in time.

The earliest references

The geographical horizon of the Aryans was limited to the north western part of the Indian subcontinent known as Saptasindhava. The Vedic texts do not mention the word Bharata in the sense of a country though they refer to the tribe of Bharatas at several places in different contexts. In Panini’s Ashtadhyayi (500 BC) we find a reference to Prachya Bharata in the sense of a territory (janapada) which lay between udichya (north) and prachya (east). It must have been a small region occupied by the Bharata tribe and cannot be equated with the Akhanda ­Bharata or Bharata of the Hindutva brigade.

The earliest reference to Bharatavarsha (Prakrit Bharadhavasa) is found in the inscription of the Orissan king Kharavela (first century BC), who lists it among the territories he invaded: but it did not include Magadha, which is mentioned sepa­rately in the record. The word here may therefore refer in a general way to northern India, its precise territorial connotation remaining vague. A much larger geographical region is visualised by the use of the word in the Mahabharata (200 BC to AD 300), which provides a good deal of geographical information about the subcontinent, but a large part of the Deccan and the far south does not find any place in it. Banabhatta’s Kadambari (seventh century), at one place describes Bharatavarsha as being ruled by Tarapida, who “set his seal on the four oceans”. But since it is referred to as excluding Ujjaini from it, the location and boundaries of Bharat are far from clear.

Bharatavarsha figures prominently in the Puranas, but they describe its shape variously. In some passages it is likened to a half-moon, in others it is said to resemble a triangle; in yet others it appears as a rhomboid or an unequal quadrilateral or a drawn bow. The Markandeya Purana compares the shape of the country with that of a tortoise floating on water and facing east. Most of the Puranas describe Bharatavarsha as being divided into nine dvipas or khandas, separated by seas and mutually inac­cessible.

The Puranic conception of Bharatavarsha has similarity with the ideas of ancient Indian astronomers like Varahamihira (sixth century AD) and Bhaskaracharya (11th century), though in their perception it does not seem to have included southern India. Although a 14th-century record mentions Bharata as extending from the Himalayas to the southern sea, by and large, the available textual and epigraphic references to it do not indicate that the term stood for India as we know it today.
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A part of Jambudvipa

In many texts Bharata is said to have been a part of Jambudvipa, which itself had an uncertain geographical connotation. The Vedic texts do not mention it; nor does Panini, though he refers to the jambu (rose apple) tree. The early Buddhist canonical works provide the earliest reference to the continent called Jambudvipa (Pali, Jambudipa), its name being derived from the jambu tree which grew there. Juxtaposed with Sihaladipa (Sans. Simhaladvipa=Sri Lanka), of the inscriptions of Ashoka, Jambudipa stands for the whole of his empire, which covered nearly the entire Indian subcontinent excluding its far southern part. He unified the major part of the Indian subcontinent and called it Jambudipa. But he did not use the word Bharat to denote this vast land mass.

Despite the use of the word Jambudipa for the whole of his empire, the ambiguity about its territorial connotation is borne out by both epigraphic and literary sources during the subsequent centuries. In a sixth-century inscription of Toramana, for instance, Jambudvipa occurs without any precise territorial connotation, and in the Puranic cosmological schema, it appears more as a mythical region than as a geographical entity. According to the Puranas the world consists of “seven concentric dvipas or islands, each of which is encircled by a sea, the central island called Jambu­dvipa…”. This is similar to the cosmological imaginings of the Jains who, however, placed Jambudvipa at the centre of the central land (madhyaloka) of the three-tiered structure of the universe. According to another Puranic conception, which has much in common with the Buddhist cosmological ideas, the earth is divided into four mahadvipas, Jambudvipa being larger than the others. In both these conceptions of the world, Bharatavarsha is at some places said to be a part of Jambudvipa but at others the two are treated as identical. The geographical conception of both Bharat and Jambudvipa are thus factitious and of questionable value.

Abanindranath Tagore/ ‘Banga Mata’ water colour that he later decided to title 'Bharat Mata'. 1905.

Bharat as Mother

It was only from the late 19th century that Bharatvarsha in the sense of the whole subcontinent, and Bharat as Mother found their way into the popular vocabulary. The anonymous work Unabimsapurana (1866), KC Bandyopadhyaya’s play called Bharat Mata (1873) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandmath (1880) were among the earliest works to popularise the notion of Bharatmata. Its visual evocation came perhaps not earlier than 1905 in a painting by Abanindranath Tagore, who conceived of the image as one of Bangamata but later, “almost as an act of generosity towards the larger cause of Indian nationalism, decided to title it ‘Bharatmata’”.
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Far from being eternal, Bharat mata is thus little more than a 100 years old. Insistence on her inhabitants forming a nation in ancient times is sophistry. It legitimatises the Hindutva perception of Indian national identity as located in remote antiquity, accords centrality to the supposed primordiality of Hinduism and spawns Hindu cultu­ral nationalism which prompts the saffron brigade to bully the Indian people into chanting of Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

DN Jha is former Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Delhi

Rashtrya Swayamsevak Sangh by D R Goyal [PDF version]

The final 2000 edition of a much acclaimed 1979 book by Dr. R. Goyal, the well known campaigner against communalism in India is now available for all at: http://www.sacw.net/article14044.html

Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice

Business Standard, November 23, 2018

Modi and the cultural reframing of India
Aakar Patel


Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice


About 15 years or so ago, it became clear to me and many other observers that the chief minister of Gujarat was bringing something new and fresh to Indian politics. What he was communicating to his audience and how he was connecting was a departure from the past. What I mean is this: At the national level, India’s leaders had played down majoritarianism even when they indulged in it. The Congress said it adhered to or pretended to adhere to a Nehruvian secularism which saw India in civilisational terms but not necessarily through the prism of a particular faith. For the first few decades after 1947, this kept capped the sentiment against minorities that was rampant in the rest of newly independent South Asia.

The Bharatiya Janata Party abused religion more openly but professed horror and shock when confronted with the result of their mischief. Having led the mob to Ayodhya, L K Advani was surprised that it pulled down that mosque he campaigned against, and announced it was the “saddest day of my life” (2,000 Indians died in the violence that ensued). Mr Advani’s partner Atal Bihari Vajpayee also spoke in reasonable and measured tones while building a party and political movement on the corpses of his fellow citizens.

Narendra Modi was different. He was not defensive about his posture and there was no quarter offered, even as lip service, to minorities. He put forward his contempt and lack of sympathy without ambiguity in the face of the greatest horrors visited on his fellow Gujaratis on his watch. This is the material he was communicating. What was new also was how he was doing it.

He recognised and appreciated the fact that Indians like charisma in their leaders and we like heroism and bombast. What would frighten the voter in another part of the world as something too authoritarian, extreme and nationalistic would be quite appealing in our parts. What the few would see as comical exaggeration and reduction, the many would find attractive.


All of this interested me a great deal. I began to focus much of my column writing on him, also translating his poetry and his essays and biographies. However, I thought, and I have also written this somewhere, that he was a man before his time.

My logic was as follows: In the United States, it is the blue collar or working class that is the base of Donald Trump and his reductionist nationalism. In India it is actually the thinking middle class that is given to rabidity more than the poor or the working class.

The tolerance of the average Indian, who was forced in everyday life to engage with a Muslim, and who was not affected by a debate on 9/11 and global jihad and such things, was not reflected in the middle class. It was the middle class that would gravitate towards Mr Modi’s siren call but they were insufficient in number at that point (that is, 15 years ago) in our economic history and therefore unlikely to make a difference. And so while he was unique and significant, he had perhaps come a few decades early because the ground wasn’t ready.

Of course, I had made some mistakes in my assessment. For one, I ignored his other qualities and his attractiveness outside of his majoritarian appeal. The bombast and the heroism would indeed find takers. And second, that a plurality would do the job and a majority wasn’t really needed. The third thing that I hadn’t foreseen was how quickly he would yank the polity from the clutches of namby-pamby secularism and take it towards what is called the “right” (but is actually just simple majoritarianism), producing a constant emphasis on identity and a targeting of minorities.

A decade ago it would not have been particularly easy for the side defending “Brahminical patriarchy”, a term of everyday use in academia and caste debates, to win, as it so comprehensively has done now. And it owes everything to Mr Modi and the success of his cultural reframing of India as it sees itself.

I have had the unfortunate experience of engaging with a lot of mid-level officers of various enforcement agencies in the last few weeks. I am a pessimist by nature but even I have been taken aback by how crude their representations are and how lacking in any nuance their arguments in favour of nationalism and majoritarianism are.

All around us, we are seeing the signs of this awakening produced by a new confidence — the result of the Modi era. Business Standard reported this month that corporates were giving their mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility allocations to gaushalas. This is illustrative and, once again, is not something one would have encountered just a decade ago without some resistance from media and civil society. But today, it is normal and we are going to have to live with this sort of a thing for a long time now.

It is difficult for India to replicate exactly what Pakistan did to its minorities because Islam is more regulated and easier to reduce to a set of precepts than Hinduism. Doctrinal Islam also has less that is in conflict with modern principles of equality and rights than doctrinal (Sanatan) Hinduism. The danger is not that we will become a Hindu Rashtra by law, but that we are becoming, if we have not already become, a Hindu Rashtra in practice.

India: Show of Force by Far Right Nationalists of the RSS at New Delhi's elite gated residential complexes

A short video recording of the RSS March (in uniform carrying lathi's and marching to the tune of a band) on 28 October 2018 in New Delhi's East End apartments premises in New Delhi. This kind of RSS show of force in now on display in many urban locations across India.

also a still photo:

SEE ALSO:

To expand its urban reach, RSS to send out ‘apartment pramukhs’:
In Delhi alone, the RSS has identified at least 50 societies, particularly in areas like Saket and Rohini, where apartment pramukhs will fan out.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/to-expand-its-urban-reach-rss-to-send-out-apartment-pramukhs-5155621/

If Pakistan shuns the term ‘Ancient India’ in its history books, is it entirely to blame? Haroon Khalid

The Katas Raj temple complex in Pakistan is just one example of the shared history of India and Pakistan. | Faisal Saeed 

 

scroll.in, Aug 31, 2018 

Across the border

If Pakistan shuns the term ‘Ancient India’ in its history books, is it entirely to blame?

Modern India’s exclusive use of the name ‘India’ has helped spread the perception that it is the only rightful inheritor of the subcontinent’s ancient legacy.

Aug 31, 2018 · 06:30 pm

Haroon Khalid

A few months ago, I visited a newly-opened museum in Lahore that, along with sections on Partition and the contemporary history of Pakistan, also included an exhibit on its ancient and pre-colonial history. It was titled “Ancient Pakistan” and included references to the Indus Valley civilisation, the Mauryan Empire, the Kushan dynasty and even the Khalsa Empire of Ranjit Singh. While there were certain conscious inclusions and exclusions in the exhibit, possibly to align with the current nationalist discourse in the country, the title of the section stood out as a little odd. It felt like a modern category had been imposed on the ancient, a trend increasingly on the rise across South Asia. The generally used term “Ancient India” perhaps would have not evoked a similar reaction.
The overarching nationalistic tilt of the museum might explain why its curators were reluctant to use the term “Ancient India” for its exhibits. In such a nationalistic framework, there is only one India – the Republic of India. In this narrative, the nuance of the term “Ancient India” – which, in addition to including parts of contemporary India, also includes areas of Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh – is lost. In this simplistic framework, contemporary India becomes the modern-day incarnation of the ancient civilisation that is India.

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However, this phenomenon is not unique to Pakistan and its nationalist discourse. The Republic of India, which emerged after the Partition of British India, embraced its ancient Indian heritage, becoming the visible successor of Ancient India. What helped its cause was the continuity in the names – India. While on one hand, the contemporary Indian state drew historical continuity from its ancient past, on the other hand, its exclusive use of the name “India”, also helped spread the perception globally that it was the only rightful inheritor of the legacy of Ancient India.

India vs Hindustan

A couple of weeks ago Shoaib Daniyal wrote an incisive piece on Scroll.in in which he pointed out that for a brief moment in the history of South Asia, Muhammad Ali Jinnah objected to the use of the name “India” by the new country, arguing that it should be referred to as Hindustan. Nothing came of that conflict, but there are contesting theories as to why Jinnah raised the issue in the first place. Perhaps he saw both India and Pakistan as the successors of historical British India.
As opposed to being a universal name for the entire Indian subcontinent, the name “India” was picked by the British after the formation of their Empire. It has Greek roots. The Greeks referred to the land across the Indus as India. Once the name took root, the history of the land began to be referred to as Indian history. In all academic discourse, the pre-Partition history of Pakistan and Bangladesh continue to be referred to as “Indian history”. Maybe Jinnah anticipated that the Republic of India’s use of the name “India” might gradually exclude Pakistan from this collective Indian heritage.
What also did not help was the subsequent attitude of the Pakistani state toward its Indian heritage. Slowly, as relations between the two neighbours began deteriorating, in Pakistan, the term “India” stopped being associated with a larger peninsular identity, but was solely identified with the modern state. Pakistan began distancing itself from its own history, allowing its antagonistic relationship with India to shape its attitude and perception of its Indian heritage. Pakistan’s history came to be defined in opposition to India’s history. A celebration of Muslim rulers ensued – divorced from the political realities that dictated their actions – while all other history and heritage of the Indian subcontinent began to be ignored.

Mohenjodaro now lies in Sindh, Pakistan.

Where’s Pakistan in the big picture?

A fairly complicated situation exists today. In global academia, the term “Indian history” encapsulates the history of the entire region. But in the popular imagination, Ancient India ends up being reduced to relating to the past of Independent India. For example, the demand that the British return the Kohinoor diamond to modern-day India shows how historical India and contemporary India are seen as an extension of each other, with Pakistan and Bangladesh completely sidelined.

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On the other hand, within Pakistan, there has increasingly been some acknowledgement of this past. The bone of contention, however, has been how to refer to it and package it.
While calling Pakistan part of the broader Ancient India is bound to have political repercussions, referring to it as “Ancient Pakistan” also has the potential to mislead.
However, even if Pakistan today decides to change its attitude towards its Indian heritage and chooses to accommodate it in its identity, it would find it difficult to shape the global narrative that it is indeed one of the successors of Ancient India, along with Bangladesh and India. The situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and it seems the term “Ancient India” will continue to be associated with contemporary India exclusively.
Haroon Khalid is the author of four books. His latest book, Imagining Lahore: The City That Is, The City That Was, was released by Penguin Random House in August.

Davis on Veluthat Essays on Indian History

Kesavan Veluthat. Notes of Dissent: Essays on Indian History. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2018. 214 pp. $54.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-93-8655270-9.

Reviewed by Donald Davis (University of Texas at Austin)
Published on H-Asia (August, 2018)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)

Davis on Veluthat Essays on Indian History

The great philosopher Susanne Langer (Philosophy in a New Key [1957]) taught us long ago that it is the formulation of new questions that moves knowledge forward, and less the answers to those questions. Kesavan Veluthat’s Notes of Dissent: Essays on Indian History exemplifies this principle in its challenges to old assumptions and frameworks and in its formulation of productive new questions about early Indian history. Veluthat is a leading historian of South India, especially Kerala. In recent years, he has published a spate of new books and collected works both in English and in Malayalam. The book under review is a collection of previously published articles reworked around the theme of intellectual and social dissent.

Dissent in Veluthat’s approach is both a critical element in refining historical understanding and a theme that characterizes cultural and social history in India itself. The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book by identifying a pattern in Indian religious history in which dissent turns to norm and eventually to tradition. The examples given include rejections of Vedic ritual discernible within the Upaniṣads themselves; invocations of the Kali Age to reject formalism in religious practice in favor of easier, cheaper religious acts; and the later rejection of Vedic ritual during the “Bhakti movement” and the formation of South Indian Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva temple cultures. The wide scope of interest and the rather sparse evidence presented in this chapter likely derives from its origins as a conference paper. While the examples given are tantalizing (two are elaborated elsewhere in this volume), too many questions are easily raised against the central argument that are not fully refuted. Is there anything distinctively Indian about certain dissenting movements and ideas successfully becoming normative traditions? The Protestant Reformation, Reformed Judaism, and the Ash’arite victory over Mu‘tazalite rationalism come to mind. Also, what about dissenting ideas that failed? Veluthat acknowledges such failures but does not ask whether more dissenting movements were silenced or integrated in Indian history.

The next chapter argues cogently that the “Mauryan political presence in south India is overdrawn” (p. 28). Emphasizing a lack of reliable evidence of political or material culture connections between the Mauryan state and South India, Veluthat further breaks down the still prevalent image of the Mauryan dynasty as a uniform and all-controlling state structure.[1] A thorough analysis of the positive images of the Kali Age follows in the succeeding chapter. Veluthat brilliantly shows how the ideology of bhakti turns the dreaded Dark Age into a period of relaxed religious demand. New forms of worship and an “illusion of equality ... yields easier and more immediate results in that [Kali] age” (p. 39). In this way, Veluthat casts the rhetorical openness of the Purāṇas and their often positive depiction of the Kali Age as an ideological ploy to placate despised and excluded social groups, such as women and Śūdras. Next, Veluthat takes on casual impressions that India lacked traditions of political criticism through a close study of the Mahiṣaśatakam (A hundred verses for the buffalo), an eighteenth-century collection of poetic verses that skewers both royal and social decadence through a careful allegory in praise of the buffalo. Veluthat has published a complete translation of the work (Mahiṣaśatakam of Vāñceśvara Dīkṣita [2011]), and his reading shows that intellectuals in difficult times had the capacity to express their disdain and criticism of political rulers of many kinds.

The remaining chapters in this volume are linked through a focus on the “region” as an object of study in Indian historiography, focusing on Kerala. Veluthat begins with a fascinating essay that asks the simple questions: “a region is a part of what” and how is a region historically constituted (p. 64)? Drawing on literature, inscriptions, and foreign accounts of Kerala in the period from roughly the twelfth to seventeenth century, he reveals the active efforts to construct an image of Kerala from various social locations and bases. The question of region returns in this next chapter about the extensive corpus of literature in Maṇipravāḷam, a conscious hybrid of Sanskrit and Malayalam. Contrary to the usual depictions of Maṇipravāḷam as proto-Malayalam and part of the origins of Malayalam literature, Veluthat demonstrates that the poetics of this corpus align closely with Sanskrit and that we would be better served by reading Maṇipravāḷam texts “as a continuation of the kāvya tradition in Sanskrit” (p. 89). This chapter is an excellent introduction to the Maṇipravāḷam corpus and includes summaries of its major texts. From literature, we turn to land relations and the way in which relationships to land structure social relationships and stratification generally. Correcting some mistakes of the great Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, Veluthat examines a number of epigraphs from Kerala (ninth to thirteenth century) to confirm the unusual dominance of Brahmins as landholders in this and subsequent periods. Other social groups possessed rights to land that corresponded to their social position, though in ways that distinguished land tenure in Kerala from neighboring Tamilnadu. Social differentiation is further explored in a chapter titled “Congealing of Castes” in Kerala. Here as elsewhere in the volume, Veluthat relies on the Kēraḷōtpatti, a legendary history of the origins of Kerala. Using this framework, he investigates the process by which contemporary castes in Kerala developed through their affiliation with and work within the emerging temple culture of Kerala beginning in the tenth century. Though not meant to be exhaustive, Veluthat’s account provides a compelling explanation for the formation of several major caste groups in Kerala based on their position in the hierarchy of temple work. A last chapter on the regional use of “Hindu” idioms among Kerala Christians recounts the many conceptual and ritual connections between Hindu and Christian communities both before and after the Synod of Diamper in 1599 condemned heretical Christian practices in Kerala. Explicit citation of Hindu texts, pūjā elements in worship, and literary imitation of Hindu texts all distinguish the old presence of Christian communities in Kerala from other regions. In this context, Roberto de Nobili’s adoption of Hindu styles in Tamilnadu is exceptional for that region, but normative for Kerala.

The final appendix reprints a classic essay by Veluthat and M. G. S. Narayanan on the development of bhakti in South India. Their important argument was perhaps the first to note that bhakti ideas and institutions worked to legitimate emerging political structures and reinforce social stratification: “Both slavery and serfdom in India were sublimated by this equation with the divine order.... Nevertheless, the brāhmaṇa remained the brāhmaṇa, and the pāṇa or paṟaiya remained the pāṇa or paṟaiya” (pp. 170-171).

These chapter summaries reveal the incredible breadth of Veluthat’s academic prowess. To move so deftly from religion to literature to economics to social stratification across multiple languages (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Maṇipravāḷam, Tamil, and Malayalam) and two millennia is an impressive and humbling feat. It is clear throughout that Veluthat knows more than he explicitly states. The notes often contain long passages of original text to which the author just refers, rather than explicating the passages systematically. For that reason, the adage to “always leave them wanting more” applies well to this collection. Each essay is wonderfully provocative and accomplishes the stated goal to highlight the constant need to question previous assumptions in historical work. However, several of the essays left me wanting more in terms of evidentiary proof for the arguments and in terms of the anticipation of counterarguments. For the most part, I don’t care, because the point of the volume is to ask fresh questions with prima facie justification—mission accomplished. One can only hope that Veluthat will continue to publish further studies of Kerala and South Indian history, because the early history of this area sorely needs competent theoretically informed investigation of the sort found in this volume.

Note

[1]. Gérard Fussman, “Pouvoir central et régions dans l'Inde ancienne: Le problème de l'empire maurya,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 37, no. 4 (1982): 621-647; translated as “Central and Provincial Administration in Ancient India: The Problem of the Mauryan Empire,” Indian Historical Review 14 (1987-88): 43-72.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-asia.

Citation: Donald Davis. Review of Veluthat, Kesavan, Notes of Dissent: Essays on Indian History. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. August, 2018.

The trouble with Nehru’s country | Jawed Naqvi

Dawn, August 21st, 2018


ALMOST all my friends have praised Mulk (country) as a bold movie. I am still debating its purpose. The youngest nephew of Muslim patriarch Murad Ali Mohammed of a Benares neighbourhood gets involved in a bomb blast massacre. Friendly Hindu neighbours turn against the family, which has to prove they are not anti-nationals.

Deep-seated communalism precedes terrorism by centuries though. Sample Bhushan Kavi’s poisonous poetry. In more current times, a Muslim actress has reported being denied a house she wanted to buy in Mumbai because of her name. The phenomenon is widespread.

Nehru wrote an angry letter to chief minister Govind Ballabh Pant on April 17, 1950: “… the reports I get of a general atmosphere and of petty happenings reveal the true state of affairs even more than major incidents. A Muslim is walking along the street in a city. He is spat upon and told to go to Pakistan or he is given a slap on the face or his beard is pulled. Muslim women have vulgar remarks passed against them in the streets and always there is a taunting remark, ‘go to Pakistan’. Only a few individuals may do these, but we have tolerated the growth of an atmosphere which permits this kind of thing being done and look on and approve.”

On the face of it, the movie would seem to be about Hindu-Muslim trust in an Indian neighbourhood. On the other hand, the story could be about a dormant pre-existing bias that Nehru refers to, but which erroneously passes for trust because of facile bonhomie in the neighbourhood.

The act of terror destroys the happy accord when the boy blows up a bus and TV takes over the narrative. A Muslim police officer shoots the boy when he could have arrested him, and charges his father for complicity. This angle of a Muslim police officer trying to be more loyal than the king is an interesting perspective that bears resemblance to an unacknowledged reality. So, which one is it? Has trust gone bust, as sought to be portrayed in the movie, or is it lingering mistrust flaring up, as revealed by the easily ruptured wafer-thin pleasantries indulged in by the Hindu neighbours?

Another interesting departure from usual fare is that a Hindu daughter-in-law in the Muslim family, a lawyer, defends the boy’s innocent father, accused as a conspirator. The audience in the courtroom applauds every time the markedly communal public prosecutor makes a barb loaded with anti-Muslim innuendo.

Go back to Nehru’s missive here. The accusations are too insulting for the father who dies in custody. In the end, however, the dead father is declared innocent by the judge, due largely to the impressive court craft of the Hindu daughter-in-law. The court audience is slammed for their blinkered view about Muslims. The neighbours look apologetic at the sound of the judge’s gavel.

There have been brilliant movies about the Muslim quandary in a tentatively free India. The ones one can remember are Garam Hawa by M.S. Sathyu, Mammo by Shyam Benegal, Naseem by Saeed Mirza and Shahid by Hansal Mehta. There could be others but the four mentioned here were delicate movies with their unmistakably powerful, secular message, and they had a very clear context each to set their stories in.

It was the trauma of partition in Garam Hawa and a variation on it in Mammo. It was the destruction of the Babri Masjid that was suggested in Naseem as the unmaking of Nehruvian Indian. And it was the murder of a Muslim lawyer by Hindu fanatics, who defends innocent men jailed falsely for terrorism in Shahid, which, like Mulk, was based on a true story.

There was one more. Perhaps a truly seminal film on the Muslim mess in India was Dharmaputra with a frontal and unapologetic assault on Hindutva and its deeply worrying mindset as early as 1961. The B.R. Chopra movie was safely released in Nehru’s times, and quite likely would incur a risk if shown today. It was the most damning critique in any feature film of the Sangh’s bigotry and their anti-Muslim fanaticism. Shashi Kapoor, uncle of Rishi Kapoor (who plays the lead role of the Muslim patriarch in Mulk), acted the role of the unwanted son of a Muslim couple separated by Partition and raised by their Hindu doctor friend and his wife. Kapoor ends up as a Muslim-hating Hindutva bigot.

The brilliant movie, which is kept away from public discussion for obvious reasons, was directed by Yash Chopra. Both the Chopra brothers were refugees from Lahore and they have contributed hugely to the survival of secularism in the cultural ethos of India.

The problem with Mulk is that it sends out a misleading message — that had it not been for a deviant act of terrorism, any Muslim family could live peacefully in the protection of their idyllic Hindu neighbours. Why is there no reference to the fascist state the country is becoming? Why did the boy become a terrorist? Why was the young man, the young terrorist, angry? No jobs? Police atrocities? Ayodhya? Gujarat? Kashmir? Or did he have messianic visions of leading his imagined people to impossible victory? Or was it to win brownie points in the next life?

Each one of those questions can be turned into a movie. Hamlet-like Haider, for example, in the Kashmiri context was a bold and honest story. The director of Mulk, too has his heart in the right place, as do a surfeit of well-meaning intellectuals and laymen analysing the problems dogging the mulk called India. However, one such well-meaning person had said: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why the people were hungry, they branded me a communist.” Asking the second question could have made Mulk a more agreeable movie.

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2018

Rumour Republic: Weaponising mobs for political gain haunts today's India | Bharat Bhushan

Business Standard


by Bharat Bhushan

The adage that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on” has been proven in India once again as social media rumours about child-lifting have led to 27 incidents of mob-lynching across nine states of India. They can hardly be pinned down to local issues as the attacks have occurred in states as far apart geographically as Tripura, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

About a year ago, rumours of braid-chopping had spread from Nagaur in Rajasthan, travelling across the North through Uttar Pradesh and Delhi to Jammu and Kashmir. Then they suddenly died out just as the rumours about child-lifters may do.

The rapidity with which the rumours were disseminated and the readiness with which people were willing to act on them point to high public anxiety levels.

Such a volatile public mood in the run-up to the impending general election suggests nightmarish scenarios. An anxious polity is a fair game for demagogues who can play on its uncertainties, biases and prejudices to capture political power.

Rumours have always come in handy for canny political forces. They are efficient instruments to channel an anarchic public mood to further their political agendas. They also have the added advantage of being nearly untraceable.

Social networking platforms are available on every other mobile, offering anonymity to agent provocateurs like never before. Research in the United States shows that a false story or a “fake news” report took roughly 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users compared to the 60 hours for a factual story. The influence of a rumour is directly linked to how far and quickly it spreads.

Yet, one must not confuse the medium for the message. Under criticism, the government has asked social media platforms to monitor their content and states have been directed to check mob lynching. But social media platforms are only instruments for spreading messages. The problem is the message itself.

When the political party in power at the Centre encourages the use of social media to spread fractious ideas, what can state governments do? Days after his Cabinet colleague Sushma Swaraj was viciously trolled on social media, Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised it fulsomely, crediting it with “democratising” public discourse and described it as “endearing”. There was not one word of caution about its misuse. Everyone is aware of the paid trolls that target people critical of the Prime Minister or his party. They exist because they have their political uses. Under these circumstances, one has to be very very afraid of the possible political consequences of rumours in an election year.

No one knows for sure who begins the rumours which start communal riots -- rumours about conspiracies of an impending attack by one religious community on the other, or the desecration of holy books and icons, mosques, churches and temples and so on. However, everybody has a fair idea of who benefits in a surcharged communal atmosphere and the aftermath of violence.

No one knows who started the ‘love jihad’ rumours or the rumour of sexual harassment that triggered the deadly Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. However, everyone knows that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) benefited electorally from the riots and that some of the riot-accused became members of Parliament and even ministers.

No one knows for sure who was behind the rumour that the unfortunate Akhlaq’s family had slaughtered a cow in Dadri, but everyone knows that the local BJP MP and Union minister, Mahesh Sharma, turned up to pay homage to one of the murder accused who died in jail. Press photos showed the murder accused’s body wrapped in the national flag as the minister stood before it in reverence.

Similarly, no one knows who started the rumour that Alimuddin Ansari, a coal trader in Jharkhand, was transporting beef, resulting in his lynching by a mob of cow vigilantes. However, everyone has seen the video footage of Union Minister Jayant Sinha garlanding the eight accused convicted of the murder when they secured bail. Politicians will not pay homage to murderers or honour them unless they benefited from their action or supported it.

This has been witnessed in riots across the country whether they are in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh or Maharashtra. Asghar Ali Engineer’s studies provide ample evidence of this as do reports of various commissions of inquiries. No one knows who triggers the rumours leading to communal violence but the Hindu right-wing moves in to reap the benefits electorally.

Since the Narendra Modi government came into power in 2014, India has witnessed much more starkly than ever before how rumours can be used to channelise public anxiety and anger against imaginary threats and enemies -- beef eaters, leather workers, cattle traders, Christian missionaries, kurta-pyjama and skull-cap wearing students of madrasahs and ‘anti-nationals’ or ‘Urban Naxalites’ those who question state policy.

What the child-lifter and braid-cutting rumours indicate is that there is a social eagerness to believe rumours because of high levels of anxiety prevailing in contemporary Indian society. The sources of such anxiety are many -- youngsters are anxious about jobs which are non-existent; farmers are caught in a cycle of debt; unorganised workers who lost their jobs during demonetisation are still in a state of shock and unemployment; the minorities feel that they are being relegated as second-class citizens and even the majority which should have been confident in its sheer number, the Hindus, feels that it is threatened by a demographic transition which could reduce them to a minority.

The ‘Pathalgadi’ (literally, inscribed in stone) movement shows that tribals whose land and forests are being taken over by industry feel so helpless that they think that stone inscriptions claiming sovereignty will keep them safe. Others who are equally naïve support the Maoists who take up guns on their behalf. These are all signs of an anxious and helpless population. The uncertainty in their lives is not becoming less with time. In fact, their social, economic, political and even religious insecurities have tended to increase.

Politicians in democratic societies pry on these insecurities. They can be been used intentionally during election campaigns to influence voters. When much is at stake politically, rumours to exacerbate the voters’ insecurities can become a means to tangible electoral gains.

Rumours have become a weapon in the armoury of powerful political parties in India because while they can exacerbate social anxieties, they also offer easy electoral ‘solutions’. The intentional use of rumours helps political parties to extend their influence beyond the converted, by creating a large penumbra of the susceptible around their core support base. These are the ambivalent voters, anxious and uncertain, and waiting to be herded.

The deliberate use of rumours allows those seeking public office to follow a dual strategy. An overt strategy that allows them to occupy the high moral ground promising development, employment, higher incomes, honesty and accountability in governance, and selfless public service above individual gain – ‘achche din’ in short. However, the use of rumours also allows for a covert political strategy -- one of attacking rivals by sullying their reputation or consolidating and expanding their voter base by generating fear and hatred among communities.

While one allows them to pose as change agents – knights on white chargers, as it were, the other permits them to make allegations that would not stand legal scrutiny but damage the reputation of their challengers and rivals by creating doubts in the public mind about their suitability for public office. The covert political strategy using rumours can also be used to vitiate the political atmosphere without taking responsibility but enjoying the fallout. This is most evident in those rumours that divide a wedge between communities – e. g. between Hindus and Muslims and between natives and outsiders. A criminal act or a perceived misdemeanour by an individual is projected as aggression by an entire community or a group to justify retaliation.

The unquestioned master of the dark art of perception management has been the Hindu right-wing in India. Their prime target has been secularism and liberalism. They see the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family as the prime culprits for promoting such values and therefore their private and public lives are routinely painted black and horrendous allegations levied against them. They also use rumours to target the minorities, especially Muslims. Social media networks have allowed them as never before to weaponise ordinary folk into deadly mobs willing to do what may be individually unthinkable.

These mobs have become weapons of social destruction --identifying a ‘public enemy’ and prompting people to cast aside logic, reason, and compassion in favour of violence; to deliver retribution and justice. Vigilante delivery of summary justice suits the masters of the rumours. They can manage and harvest public anger for political purposes while continuing to play innocent. What’s more, they can even deliver pious sermons about why the public should not take the law into their own hands while reaping the political benefits of mob action.

The writer is a journalist based in Delhi.

Indian History and the destruction of ancient Buddhist sites [Nalanda was severely damaged in a fire set by Hindu fanatics]

The Caravan

Monumental Absence
The destruction of ancient Buddhist sites
By DN Jha | 1 June 2018

Over his decorated career as a historian, DN Jha has devoted himself to examining flawed views of India’s ancient and medieval past—many of them produced by colonial thinkers—that sustain the Hindu nationalist project. One of his most notable books, The Myth of the Holy Cow, documents the widespread prevalence of beef-eating in ancient India. Another, Rethinking Hindu Identity, argues that the notion of Hinduism as a religion is a colonial construct.

Jha’s new book, Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History, is a collection of essays that, as he writes, “are addressed to the people vulnerable to the balderdash peddled by the Hindu Right.” In this essay, excerpted from the volume, he applies his characteristic combination of polemic and rigour to a greatly disregarded part of Indian history, and points to evidence that shatters the Hindutva notion of a pre-Islamic idyll on the subcontinent. [ . . . ]

FULL TEXT HERE http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-and-essays/dn-jha-destruction-buddhist-sites

Vikash Singh on neoliberal precariousness and religion - Kanwarias in India

This article first appeared on Stanford University Press blog April 11, 2017

The Not-So-Secular Age

In times of neoliberal precariousness, religion helps master everyday dread and ignominy.

Vikash Singh


In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernised. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance.

Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernisation as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophies of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth – one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

Growing influence

I spent about a year studying the Kanwar, a religious movement in India in which millions of people carry water from the river Ganga to local Śiva shrines. This used to be a modest event, involving a few thousand people, but the pilgrimage has grown explosively over the last couple of decades. We are wont to approach such resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. And considering the rapid political ascendancy of the Hindu right over the same period of time, there may be some justification for such a reading. But one must be careful, because that is precisely the trap of abstraction.

As soon as I approached these subjects in their situated material and moral circumstances, I found not “fanatics,” but poor young men and women coming of age in conditions of hopeless uncertainty. These were people trying to find a meaning for their lives and find a path to life, livelihoods, and honor, in a sea of traumatic misfortunes and deprivation.

In an exclusive global economy, premised on seducing and ingesting people as consumers while violently rejecting them as workers, religion becomes an alternate field for performed existence as well as social and self-recognition. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, and the prospects of a stable livelihood and respectable future are faint if not illusory, the often painful journey repeats, performs, and prepares for a daunting transition to an elusive adulthood. It is an open and freely accessible, yet formidable and valued stage for people to practice and demonstrate their talents, resolve, and moral worth.

To practice and prepare, however, is only one aspect of these repetitions. As Freud has taught us, “repetition” also involves the drive to master and accomplish, with death and destruction at hand. In identifying with Śiva, the destroying master of the world and a pathetic drunkard, as expressed in their own aggressiveness, participants seek to demonstrate their own sovereignty and desirability despite their often abject, stigmatised status.

The religious event thus is also a means to contest the symbolic violence, and social, sexual, and economic inequities of a hierarchical society now dominated by a neoliberal social ethic as imposing as it is exclusive. Beyond any reaction against modern changes, I saw young adults and teenagers anxious to make something out of their lives, and to deliver on the hopes and expectations of their loved ones, and agitated by the dead end futures they saw ahead of them.
Solace of religion

The force of religion, we see, comes not primarily from what is called “fear,” or desire for “rational knowledge,” but from the very real consolation and hope that it gives to the suffering, the poor, and desperate. It offers solace and divine recognition for one’s ordeals, and promises miracles in an uncaring and ruthless world, in which there is no chance. For most of human history, we (the masses) have suffered.

Poverty, disease, death, hunger, wars, and famine have been the rule. There have been few if any institutional recourses to address this widespread suffering, or care for our blood, tears, moral pangs, and helpless cries on seeing our loved ones dying, beyond religion. In such hopeless circumstances, religion –for all its limitations – promised hope, even miracles, a meeting beyond death, hearings in the other world, a true day of judgment. For many, religion still holds this promise.

Berger would eventually amend his position. Rather than seeing religion as a phenomenon that was gradually and inevitably being displaced by the modernising forces of science and technology, he began to argue instead that the resurgence of religion was a reaction against secularisation; that is, desecularisation.

Drawing on my research on religious practice in India, however, it was obvious that this celebrated sociologist was wrong then… and wrong now.

Uprising of the Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within global neoliberalism.

Religion is implicated in a slew of politico-economic circumstances, psycho-moral concerns, and social conflicts that are as immediate and local as they are historical and global – the case of the Kanwar pilgrimage is just one brief snippet of lived social existence that demonstrates this. These complex determinants of social and religious practices, however, are repressed when religion is habitually seen as atavistic and irrational, while the excesses of neoliberal capitalism pass as rational and meritocratic.

Ignoring the practical rationality and ethic of religious and cultural practices, these habits of thought legitimate all kinds of physical and symbolic violence against ordinary social actors while keeping us tied in arcane debates about the oppositions between modernity and tradition, reason and religion, or secularisation and desecularisation.
Religion as hope

It would be reasonable to expect that modernity would diminish the importance of religion insofar as it would alleviate human suffering. That is, to the extent that we would have real institutions providing healthcare, livelihood security, freedom from war and strife, and thereby a healthy life, moral education, accessible doctors, and more social certainty, we wouldn’t need many miracles. If our grief was bounded, predictable, and everyday life not as tormenting, and institutional recourses were available, we wouldn’t have to desperately seek magical solutions. The idea of secularisation would be spot on if this was what modernity meant, as long as it delivered on this sublime, awesome promise.

But that’s precisely where we have failed, tragically. In a world where half the world’s population lives on less than $2.5 a day, where suffering and despair, hunger and famine, war and strife are as relentless as they have ever been, and there is no ground for faith in institutional help and secular justice, we have none but God, this supreme judge, the great Witness to plead. There is nothing “irrational” about faith in God, in miracles, in the temptation of magical thinking, when that is the only, if illusionary, glimmer of hope that makes it worthwhile to look forward to another day.

Vikash Singh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University and author of Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporay India.

joint statement on cooperation between India and Canada on terrorism remains silent over Hindutva extremism

Sabrang India

Framework for cooperation between India and Canada on terrorism remains silent over Hindutva extremism
Written by Gurpreet Singh | Published on: February 26, 2018


If the joint statement on cooperation between India and Canada on terrorism and violent extremism is any indication, it is the pro-India Hindutva lobby and not the Khalistanis who enjoy any influence over Canadian politics.



The statement is not only silent on the growth of Hindutva extremism, it squarely blames the Islamic and Sikh militant groups for violence and terror. In other words the joint statement mimics the narrative of the Indian state on terrorism and there is hardly any acknowledgement of the threat Hindutva forces pose to peace and diversity.

The statement is based on an understanding between the law enforcement and security agencies of both countries that “resolved to step up their bilateral cooperation under the supervision of the National Security Advisor’s Dialogue, the Joint Working Group on Counter-terrorism and its Experts' Sub-Group”.

However, as one proceeds further it only establishes this as one sided policy document that perceives this threat coming from the minority terror organizations alone, and not a single reference is made to the Hindu terror groups involved in large scale violence against minorities and political critics in India under the Modi government.

The statement goes on to name these groups specifically. “They (law and enforcement and security agencies) are committed to work together to neutralize the threats emanating from terrorist groups such as Al Qaida, ISIS, the Haqqani Network, LeT, JeM, Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation”.

From the announcement one can conclude that it benefits India more than Canada considering the bad press Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got as soon as he started his weeklong visit to Indian accusing him of being soft on the Sikh separatists in Canada.

After all, the conspiracy of the Air India bombing that left 329 people dead on June 23, 1985 was hatched on the Canadian soil. The crime was blamed on the Babbar Khalsa which is a banned Sikh terror group in Canada. The security agencies continue to claim that this was done in retaliation to the repression of Sikhs in India in 1984. The armed insurgency for separate Sikh homeland had a big support in Canada. Although the movement is long dead in Punjab, the Indian politicians have tried to keep its fear alive to polarize Hindu majority votes. They still believe that Khalistanis have a complete influence over political parties in Canada. Though Khalistan supporters have a strong presence in many South Asian ridings, their activities are mostly confined to propaganda in the absence of any popular support in Punjab, where people have moved on.

Under an intense attack coming from the Indian leadership and media, Trudeau was forced to say that he supports “United India” – a slogan that remains popular with the mainstream Indian political parties, including the ruling Hindu right wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) that aspires to transform India into Hindu theocracy. The ideology of Hindutva based on the belief that India belongs to the Hindu majority where minorities should not enjoy special treatment is at the heart of the political philosophy of the BJP. For the record, it is important to clarify that Hindutva is different from Hinduism and the two terms should never be confused. It is more like a political brand of Hindu identity being practiced by the BJP and its apologists.
It is pertinent to mention that ever since the BJP government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power with brute majority in 2014, the Hindu right wing groups have intensified violent activities. Not only are minority communities like Muslims and Christians potential targets, political critics of the BJP and its policies in the Hindu community, are also threatened, intimidated and sometimes killed.

Some of these groups have also been involved in bomb blasts targeting Muslim localities and their places of worship. One such group was complicit in the bombing of Samjhauta rail that connects India and Pakistan on February 18, 2007. That attack had left 68 people dead, mostly Pakistani Muslims. There are indications that the BJP government is using its influence to save the conspirators and shift the blame on Islamic extremists. Incidentally, Trudeau was in India on the 11th anniversary of the tragedy that was completely forgotten and overlooked even by the Indian media that was more obsessed with the issue of Khalistan and its relationship with Canada.

Notably, the world renowned leader of the passive resistance movement Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by the Hindu extremists in 1948. Gandhi was killed for standing up against violence against Muslims during the Indo Pak partition in 1947. That was a first high profile act of terrorism in the post British India by the Hindu extremists. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) – an ultra-Hindu nationalist organization, of which the BJP is a political wing, was briefly banned after the assassination. The assassin of Gandhi belonged to this group. Although RSS denies its involvement in the murder, some BJP leaders have created controversies by attacking Gandhi and glorifying his assassin, Nathuram Godse, as “a patriot”. It is pertinent to mention that Modi is an RSS member.
The Hindutva groups that are involved in bombings owe allegiance to the ideology of Godse.

Ironically, Trudeau visited the spiritual center of Gandhi in Gujarat and yet, he never stated anything in relation to the growing extremism and violence in India by those who see Godse, and not Gandhi, as their hero. This is despite the fact that Canada claims to be a human rights leader in the world.
On the contrary, Narendra Modi strongly condemned the separatist forces (read Sikh extremists) active in Canada. He categorically stated that their designs to disintegrate India will not be tolerated. Likewise, when Trudeau met Punjab Chief Minister Amrinder Singh, who has been openly accusing Trudeau government of patronizing Khalistanis, he couldn't raise any concern over human rights abuse and state violence in Punjab. It was Amrinder Singh who controlled the conversation in which he also gave Trudeau a list of nine Canadians who the Punjab government claims are conspiring to disturb peace in his state. Trudeau missed an opportunity to counter him about the recent arrest and torture of a Sikh activist Jagtar Johal from U.K. Johal has been campaigning for justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre engineered by Amrinder Singh's Congress Party. The Canadian Sikh MPs had made statements in support of Johal, who many believe is being framed by the Punjabi police for series of isolated political killings in the recent months.

The Modi government in particular and the Indian government in general, have always been critical of Islamic and Sikh extremists and blamed them for threatening the peace and unity. But we rarely hear them saying anything like that in terms of Hindutva terror. The list of the banned terror groups of National Investigation Agency (NIA) in India too does not include a single Hindutva organization even though the NIA has been investigating some of the crimes committed by them.

Trudeau, therefore, has failed to achieve anything when it comes to challenging the threat of Hindutva extremism which has sympathizers even in Canada and US and has done everything that suits the Indian interests for the sake of free trade relations. Respecting India’s sovereignty and trade relations is one thing, but to completely turn a blind eye to what is happening in that part of the world for pragmatic reasons is a bad leadership. By doing so, Trudeau has given a cold shoulder to those in Canada who have been writing letters to him through their MPs to raise the issue of growing attacks on minorities in that country. Apparently, in today’s world, it’s the majoritarianism that works which only weakens the case for a real and inclusive model of democracy. Hope someone listens.

Like the Rohingya, Indians too were once driven out of Myanmar | Shoaib Daniyal

Dhaka Tribune - September 12, 2017

Forgotten history: Like the Rohingya, Indians too were once driven out of Myanmar

• Shoaib Daniyal

For most of Burmese history, Indians suffered bigotry for their ethnicity. Yet, India is now abandoning the persecuted Rohingyas.

In 1855, as the British were annexing parts of Burma to add to the Indian Empire, Henry Yule, an English civil servant, wrote of his travels in the South East Asian country. In this fascinating account of Burma, Yule also described the racial superiority the Burmese felt with respect to their dark-skinned, eastern neighbours:

“By a curious self-delusion, the Burmans would seem to claim that in theory at least they are white people. And what is still more curious, the Bengalees appear indirectly to admit the claim; for our servants in speaking of themselves and their countrymen, as distinguished from the Burmans, constantly made use of the term ‘kala admi’ – black man, as the representative of the Burmese Kola, a foreigner.”

This is probably one of the first written references to the Burmese racial slur “kala”. Later, as the Raj annexed all of Burma and made it a part of British India, Indians streamed into the region, where the local Burmese would often refer to them as “kala”.
Today there are very few Indians – defined as tracing their origin to British India – in Burma. But the term “kala” survives. It is used to racially target the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority living on the western coast of Burma who have been described as the most persecuted community in the world. But Rohingyas and Indians in Burma have more in common than a shared racial slur. Like the Rohingya today, Indians in Burma were also the target of racial discrimination and driven out in large numbers in the country between 1930 and the 1960s, a process that continues today with the forced expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, who are considered foreigners in the country.

Browns in Burma

In 1826, the First Anglo-Burmese War was won by the British, giving the Raj control over much of what is now Northeast India as well as parts of the modern Burma. With it, Indians started to stream into Burma, a process that greatly accelerated with the complete annexation of the country into the British Indian Empire in 1885.
Indians had a significant presence in Burma and dominated commerce in what was then a province of British India. This included big merchants from the Chettiar, Marwari and Gujarati communities. Then, there were the Bengali babus. Like they spread West from Bengal under the aegis of the British Empire, they also spread East (Myanmar borders the Bengal delta). Among the more famous Burmese Bengalis, writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, the author of Devdas, worked as a government clerk in the South East Asian country. The third and largest group consisted of labourers – Indians working as coolies, servants and mistries. In George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, for example, memsahibs in Burma rarely knew Burmese, but did need to speak “kitchen Urdu” in order to direct their mostly Indian domestic staff.
By 1931, Indians made up 7% of Burma’s population. They were also extremely prosperous and controlled large parts of the economy. Indians owned so much property that, for example, during the 1930s, they paid 55% of the municipal taxes in Rangoon – the capital of British Burma. The local Burmese, on the other hand, paid only 11%.
This same migration also brought at least a part of the Rohingya population into Burma from Bengal’s eastern-most district, Chittagong. Currently, this fact is fiercely contested politically since it is being used by Myanmar’s administration to paint the Rohingya as Bengali and hence non-Burmese, given that their citizenship laws – absurdly – are based not on birth but on race.

Anti-Indian sentiment

The racial animus that is driving the mass killings of Rohingyas today rose first against Indians in general in 1930, as Telugu and Burman dockworkers clashed in Rangoon, sparking widespread anti-Indian violence. Much larger anti-Indian riots followed in 1938, a year after Burma was separated from British India (but still remained under British rule). Like with the Rohingya violence today, 1938 was simultaneously religious as well as racial – it was sparked off by a book written by a Muslim which was said to be critical of the Buddha, but almost immediately exploded into racial violence directed at all Indians in Burma.
In 1941, there was more violence as the Japanese attacked Burma during World War II. As the Japanese advanced into the country, the British began to withdraw. Without the protection of the British Indian Army, Indians feared attacks from both the Japanese as well as the local Burmese. This resulted in the first major exodus of Indians from Burma. Many Indians, in fact, trekked all the way from Burma to India, with thousands dying in the tropical forests on the way.

Institutionalised racism

In 1948, as Burma gained independence from the British, Indians had to face even more xenophobia as the new state defined itself in racial terms. The population of Burmese Indians had numbered more than a million before World War II – a number that dropped to around 700,000 in the mid 1950s. Between 1949 and 1961, out of 1,50,000 applications for Burmese citizenship by persons of Indian origin, less than a fifth were accepted.
In 1962, Burma saw a military takeover of its government. The dictator Ne Win followed an aggressive racial policy which affected every minority group. All property was nationalised, severely affecting rich persons of Indian origin. White collar Indians were expelled from the country. Between 1962 and 1964, more than 300,000 Indians were forced out of Burma.
In 1982, Burma passed a new citizenship law that created a strict racial definition of citizenship. This rendered the Rohingya and most persons of Indian origin stateless. While the plight of the Rohingya has – deservedly – caught the attention of the world due to the genocide they face, these laws mean even people of Indian origin in Myanmar are discriminated against heavily even though they have lived there for generations. One estimate holds that 500,000 people of Indian origin living in Myanmar are stateless.

Forced Burmanisation

Since then, faced with a Hobsons’ choice, persons of Indian origin have Burmanised – several government policies are aimed at making non-indigenous communities adopt Burmese norms, including language, religion and culture – rapidly in order to reduce the hostility that they faced. The Burmese language has replaced the various languages people of Indian origin spoke and even names have been Burmanised. Yet, this hasn’t entirely solved matters. Hindus and Muslims of Indian origin are not allowed any public celebration of religion and face racism.
In the 1960s, the Indian government was criticised for not helping its diaspora in Burma as they faced bigotry and were being expelled. In sharp contrast, China came to the aid of its Burmese diaspora (who were also targeted racially).
Little has changed today. The Rohingya are the victim of the same structural racism in Burma that persons of Indian origin faced. In the latest surge of violence between the state and Rohingya people who took up arms last year, more than 3,00,000 Rohingyas have fled the Rakhine state in Myanmar where they stay, most of them seeking refuge in Bangladesh.
However, the Indian government, rather than take up the cause of the disposed, is talking of pushing the few Rohingya migrants that have taken shelter in in India back to Myanmar – where they would face genocide.
This article was first published on Scroll.in

Has India become “Lynchistan”? | Rupa Subramanya

• Observer Research Foundation, July 01 2017

• Rupa Subramanya

The Modi government needs to urgently revisit the opaque and draconian cattle trade rules.

Photo: R. Senthil Kumar/PTI

In the wake of a number of well-publicised incidents of lynching and mob violence, most of them related to issues surrounding cattle trade or beef consumption, a narrative — Lynchistan — has taken hold that there’s been a spike in the incidents of lynchings and mob violence. In one telling, such violence has increased after the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the center in May 2014.
Pushing back against such narratives emanating from the mainstream media establishment, a counter-narrative put forward by elements of the online right wing, many of whom are BJP partisans, asserts, there’s been no such uptick in lynchings and mob violence and that this is a really a concoction by the Lutyens establishment to defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP, and the image of India both at home and abroad.
Unfortunately, both narrative and counter-narrative are remarkably data and analysis free, and based on assertions and opinions, sometimes masquerading as data analysis.
To rectify this glaring gap in what has become an astonishingly ill-informed and partisan debate, I bring to bear a dataset I have been assembling for a while on the number of incidents of lynching and mob violence in India, starting in January 2011 and going up to June 2017. As there is no official data which classifies the data by incident type, I have assembled a new dataset through an exhaustive search of news reports. I vet specific incidents by comparing across alternative reports, where possible.
By definition, all data come from publicly available news sources and therefore can be reconstructed should anyone wish to. Lynching refers to incidents in which individuals have been killed as a result of mob violence. Public Disorder refers to incidents of violence perpetrated by groups or individuals. Both include incidents which may or may not have a communal motivation. Incidents are coded as falling into one or the other category — not both.
Chart 1 is a line chart of total incidents of mob violence (Lynching plus Public Disorder) by month from January 2011 to June 2017. The chart also adds a linear trendline through the data points.

It’s clear from eyeballing the chart and confirmed by the trendline that the number of incidents per month is rising over the time period. At one fell swoop this demolishes the counter-narrative that the number of incidents hasn’t changed from the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to the BJP.

Lynching refers to incidents in which individuals have been killed as a result of mob violence. Public Disorder refers to incidents of violence perpetrated by groups or individuals.

Superficially, the chart appears to show that mob violence has been rising steadily over time both under the UPA and then under the BJP. This would seem to potentially let both governments off-the-hook as one could perhaps argue that there are some underlying societal changes leading to increasing violence over time, irrespective of which party is in power.
But crucially, the overall rising trend may mask important changes in the data from January 2011 to June 2017. In other words, it’s possible, say, that mob violence was rising under the UPA, but that this trend accelerated after the BJP came to power. A trendline over the whole time period can’t tell us if this is true or not.
In the language of statistics, what we’re looking for is a “structural break” in the time series and further whether this structural break, if it exists, corresponds to the BJP’s election victory.
Suppose we conjecture that a structural break might have occurred after the BJP’s general election victory in May 2014. One simple way to test this possibility is to reproduce the data in Chart 1 but break the data into two sub-groups, first from January 2011 to May 2014 (Chart 2) and then from June 2014 to June 2017 (Chart 3).
The two charts along with linear trendlines are in Charts 2 and 3.


The story these tell is striking. Chart 2 shows a downward sloping trendline, which means that mob violence was actually trending downward during the latter days of the UPA. Chart 3 shows an upward sloping trendline for the latter period, which means mob violence has been trending upward since the BJP came to power in the middle of 2014.
Furthermore, we know that the overall upward sloping trend in the full dataset as shown in Chart 1 must be driven by what’s happening from June 2014 and beyond, simply as a matter of mathematics.
It’s possible to formalise this intuition through a rigorous statistical test known as the Chow test, which determines whether a structural break exists. Running this test confirms there is indeed a statistically significant structural break between May and June 2014, exactly as charts 2 and 3 tell us visually.
What is more, it’s possible to perform a related test, Quant-Andrews, which in effect is a meta-test to find the most statistically significant breakpoint in the data among all possible alternatives. The Quant-Andrews test unequivocally throws up June 2014 as the breakpoint. To reiterate, this date for the structural break is not imposed by the researcher, but identified by the test. The statistics make it clear that there has indeed been a change in the underlying forces driving trends in mob violence between May and June 2014.

The upshot of this statistical analysis conclusively refutes the counter-narrative put forward by the online right wing. While calling India a Lynchistan is a loaded and charged term, if by this is meant that mob violence has been ticking upward since the BJP came to power in 2014, the data unequivocally bear this out.

An important and necessary caveat is that the dataset, and therefore the statistical analysis based upon it, is constructed from media reports, not from official data. It’s therefore at least a logical possibility that the uptick in mob violence is driven entirely by increased reportage after the BJP’s victory, although it is questionable how plausible such a claim might be. To be true, it would require a very high level of coordination and collusion among major media houses, who further would literally have had to jump into high gear within days of the BJP victory: a conspiracy theory, in short.
Given the well known antipathy of the mainstream media toward Prime Minister Modi and the BJP, it’s certainly plausible that some reporting bias has come into play after May 2014. But that leaves at least some, perhaps a large, portion of the uptick in mob violence as a genuine phenomenon, although it’s impossible to parse this further with the data available.
The data by itself can’t answer these questions, but Prime Minister Modi has himself provided an answer recently, by forcefully speaking out against violence, including cow related vigilantism.
The Prime Minister appears to understand better than many that cow related vigilantism, and perhaps communal violence, is a growing problem in India. Chart 4 shows the share of cow related and separately of communal violence in total mob violence from January 2012 to June 2017. Communal violence is steady around 20% of the total for the first few years and then actually dips in 2015, before rising again in 2016, and dipping in 2017 to date. There is no obvious pattern here.
By contrast, and startlingly, from a very low share of less than 5%, cow related violence (falling into either Lynching or Public Disorder) has been rising sharply as a percentage of the total, reaching over 20% by the end of June 2017. It would be hard to deny that there is a trend here.

It is imperative that in the remainder of their term in office, Prime Minister Modi and the BJP give top priority to governance reform, especially of a broken criminal justice system. At a minimum, the Modi government urgently needs to revisit the opaque and draconian new cattle trade rules, which are only likely to increase the incidents of cow related violence. It is in the context of poor governance and limited state capacity that crimes such as cow related vigilantism thrive.

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Datasets in the analysis are the author’s own findings. She can be reached on Twitter @rupasubramanya.

How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king (Excerpt from Audrey Truschke's Blog)

Stanford University Press Blog - May 23, 2017

Modern Politics in Premodern History

How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king.

by AUDREY TRUSCHKE

This portrait of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb mounted on a horse, and ready for battle, was originally produced circa 1660.

In 1700, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was arguably the richest, most powerful man in the world. He ruled for nearly fifty years, from 1658 until 1707, over a vast empire in South Asia that boasted a population exceeding the entirety of contemporary Europe. Today, he has been forgotten in the West.

The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. Reproduced with permission from Juggernaut Books.

In modern-day India, however, Aurangzeb is alive in public debates, national politics, and people’s imaginations. From Mumbai to Delhi to Hyderabad, Indians debate his legacy and, overwhelmingly, condemn him as the cruelest king in Indian history. The list of charges against Aurangzeb is severe and, if they were all true, shocking. Aurangzeb, a Muslim, is widely thought to have destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. As I am reminded daily on Twitter, many Indians sincerely believe that Aurangzeb was Hitler and ISIS rolled into one with a single objective: To eradicate Hindus and Hinduism.
My narrative of Aurangzeb in Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King—based on extensive research and relying on primary source documents—does not match his current reputation. Accordingly, much of the response to Aurangzeb in India, published in February 2017 under the title Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, has been fierce. I am the target of daily, sometimes hourly, hate speech on social media. I am regularly attacked on the basis of my gender, nationality, race, and perceived religion. I have even faced (so far, limited) calls to ban Aurangzeb and even to ban me from India. In this blog post, I explore the roots of the controversy over Aurangzeb, my role therein as a historian, and the harsh realities of producing historical analysis in a world where many privilege politically expedient falsehoods. [. . .].

FULL TEXT AT: http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/modern-politics-in-premodern-history.html