Why the slow drip of anti-Muslim poison in India is now a flood | Samar Halarnkar (10 April 2020)

From: Scroll.in, April 10, 2020

Why the slow drip of anti-Muslim poison in India is now a flood
For vast swathes of Hindu society, the pandemic is a convenient staging point on the route to the marginalisation of Muslim India.

[10 April 2020]

Samar Halarnkar

This week, I exited a family WhatsApp group after listening to a particularly inaccurate, agitated and rambling rant – falsely attributed to the steel baron Laxmi Mittal (debunked last year) – about how Hindus have been “humiliated, subjugated and massacred”; how Narendra Modi is relentlessly criticised because he stands up for Hindus; absurd arguments about how secularism isn’t for India (“who the f*** cares if you are a secular state or not, Britain is not a secular state, it is a developed country”); and how we were ruled by “marauders” for 1,000 years.
I used to point out inaccuracies, flag fake news and gently say what I believed about the rule of law, the Constitution and – what I have always considered – India’s compassionate, accommodative way of life. It made no difference to some family bigots. My efforts appear so quaint, naive and archaic today.

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Angry Hindus are everywhere. I am clearly not one. If I am angry, it is at my fellow Hindus for becoming what they have: insecure, hateful and hypocritical, willing to eagerly receive the slow drip of anti-Muslim poison. That slow drip is becoming a flood, unhindered even by the life-and-death crisis upon us, indeed even encouraged by it.
It is difficult, these days, to keep up with and feel outrage against the verbal and physical attacks, boycotts and other forms of prejudice to which Indian Muslims are subject. The overwhelming feeling is despair and disquiet.

Embracing Islamophobia

At the urging of its ruling party, with the acquiescence of its Supreme Court – which is failing to act as a bulwark against majoritarianism – and the primacy accorded by Hindus to rabble-rousing media, India is eagerly embracing its Islamophobia.
The feeling among most Muslims and those of us who have not joined the tide of Islamophobia washing over Hindu India is that worse may be coming when the coronavirus pandemic abates. As the gleeful demonisation of Muslims because of the boost given to the virus after an ill-advised global meet of the orthodox Tablighi Jamaat sect in Delhi indicates, no opportunity is lost, however grim the circumstances.

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In the daily pandemic briefings in Delhi, an otherwise-evasive government spokesman spared no details about the Tablighis, even though the World Health Organisation’s Emergency Programme director disapproved of India’s religious profiling.
“Since the Tablighi Jamat story broke, Health & Home ministry has spent more time blaming Muslims than addressing kit shortages, migrant crisis, & free treatment,” tweeted health reporter Vidya Krishnan, who faces a barrage of criticism and abuse from fellow Hindus whenever she points out government shortcomings.
It does not matter that even the Uttar Pradesh police – not exactly a force known for its adherence to non-discriminatory justice – this week debunked a stream of fake news that used the Tabhlighi outbreak to mock, abuse and urge a boycott of Muslims. It does not matter that so many Tabhlighis tested positive because so many were tested: India simply isn’t testing enough, and once it does, the Tabhlighi outbreak will likely fade to inconsequence. It does not matter what the facts are because the Tabhlighi issue is only the latest that Hindu India and Modi’s government are happy to seize upon to push Muslims into second-class citizenship.

“All people are not equal,” the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Subramanian Swamy told Vice News in a documentary released this week. “They [Muslims] are not in an equal category.” That Muslims are not, or should not be, equals is not an uncommon sentiment. Swamy may have been kept out of Modi’s government, but the thoughts of a man once representing the Hindu fringe are now fairly mainstream. His views – similar beliefs leak out almost every day – accurately represent his party’s approach to India’s 200 million Muslims: that they are too large to be a minority; they have oppressed us for hundreds of years; they should have gone to Pakistan in 1947; they must be shown their place.

Anti-Muslim bias

Ever since it came to power in 2014, Modi’s government has revealed an anti-Muslim bias, stated expressly and repeatedly by members of ministers and other members of the ruling party and expressed through discriminatory legislation and strategic silences whenever Muslims are attacked. India’s anti-Muslim bias is encouraged, empowered and given life by fake news and febrile imagination, both of which are available in ample measure in Hindu society.
That is why there has been no widespread disapproval over lynchings related to theft or slaughter –
imagined or real – of cows, the criminalisation of triple talaq, the legally tenuous revocation of article 370 in Kashmir, the withholding of full internet even with a pandemic raging, the clearance to a Ram temple in Ayodhya through dubious means, and police brutalities and legal action against Muslims protesting a law aimed at creating the second-class citizenship that Swamy indicates may be on its way. The coronavirus is just another staging point on the route to the marginalization of Muslim India.
Samar Halarnkar is the editor of Article-14.com, a project that tracks misuse of the law and the hope it offers.

India: Inventing history to inculcate hatred | Irfan Habib

Frontline - 1 September 2017

Inventing history to inculcate hatred

As secularism and reason are driven out, prejudice and ignorance extend their sway with disconcerting rapidity. A serious task awaits parties that are committed to a different future for the country, envisaging a truly secular democratic India, where reason and science might serve to sustain a welfare state. By IRFAN HABIB

When 70 years ago India obtained freedom it also got divided on religious grounds. It was a momentous decision on the part of the leadership of the major political party in India at that time—the Congress “High Command”—to keep the Indian Union free of any religious or sectarian colour. The phrase “democratic and secular” was commonly used for the state that was now envisaged. (I find it used, for example, in the Presidential Address at the Indian History Congress, Bombay, on December 26, 1947.) It is true that the word “secular” did not occur in connection with the nature of the prospective republic either in the Objectives Resolution passed by the Constituent Assembly in December 1946 or in the Constitution that came into effect on January 26, 1950. Yet, one finds Jawaharlal Nehru specifically saying in 1961 (and possibly also on earlier occasions) that “our Constitution lays down that we are a secular state”. It was, however, only in 1976 that the words “Socialist, Secular” were inserted in the Preamble to the Constitution so as to define India as a “Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic”. In formal terms, too, therefore, “secularism” obtained the status of a principle which should exercise a determining influence on interpretations of the detailed provisions of the Constitution. 

Now, the word “secular” has a specific meaning, which needs to be carefully preserved. The word comes from the Late Latin word speculum, meaning “world”; and so “secular” literally means “worldly”, and, therefore, something that is non-spiritual or non-religious. Its more specific sense of a system of ethics is due to the ideas of J. Holyoake (1817-1906), who is supposed to have brought the word into the English language in 1851. In the words of the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, the word now referred to “the doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life to the exclusion of all consideration drawn from belief in God or in a future state”, the words “future state” here doing duty for “afterlife”. The total exclusion of religion—no particular religion, but all religions—was emphasised by Holyoake himself when, in 1854, he said that he had chosen the word “secularism” as “expressing a certain positive and ethical element which the terms ‘Infidel’, ‘Sceptic’, ‘Atheist’ do not express”. When the term “secular” began to be applied also to the mode of education and then to a particular form of the state, it carried the same strict sense of totally excluding the influence of any religious belief or ritual in determining the content of a state’s laws or the nature of its executive action. It may here be mentioned that much before the term “secularism” came into use, the United States Constitution of 1787 and, particularly, the French Revolution of 1789-94, by barring religious influences from all conduct of state affairs, had already produced fair models of a secular state, the French being clearly the more radical one than the American. 

Whenever the word “secular” is today used outside India in respect of the state it does not, therefore, mean just the pursuit of neutrality among religions, or dharm-nirpekshitaas secularism is officially rendered in Hindi, but invokes a more positive notion of rational conduct, uninfluenced by the requirements of any religion or set of religions. 

Yet, what is taken as the meaning of secularism worldwide was expressly rejected by Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and India’s second President, in his book Recovery of Faith (1956), page 202, in a passage that is now apparently a standard quotation in Indian legal commentaries: 

“When India is said to be a secular state, it does not mean that we reject the reality of an Unseen Spirit or the relevance of religion to life or that we exalt irreligion…. We hold that not one religion should be given preferential status or unique distinction.” 

It is clear that Radhakrishnan here offers a definition of secularism which has no sanction and divests it of all significance. As we have seen, secularism all over the world is invoked to ensure that religious beliefs are excluded from affecting the policies and laws of the state, while Radhakrishnan insists that “religion” still remains a “relevant” source. 

Supreme Court judgment on ‘religious instruction’

It is not the international sense of secularism but the one asserted by Radhakrishnan that has been accepted by the Indian judiciary to the extent that even explicit provisions of the Constitution have been set aside in its light, while his warning that not one religion should be given a unique position has been increasingly overlooked. This is illustrated by the Supreme Court’s judgment of 2003 in respect of the imparting of “religious instruction”, on which the Constitution in its Article 28 imposes clear restrictions. Educational institutions maintained by state funds are, by this article, absolutely barred from providing any “religious instruction” and even state-recognised or aided institutions cannot make such instruction compulsory for students. Yet, despite the clear language of the constitutional provisions, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2003 claimed (quite unhistorically!) that most of our essential values have come from the mouths of “sanths and saints” and so held as if it was the duty of the state to provide “instruction in religion” in its schools. From the court’s own specific references it could be assumed that Hinduism was the main faith to turn to, with some space given half-heartedly to other religions. The judgment has sounded the death knell of secular education wherever the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come to hold the reins of power. 

Radhakrishnan’s redefinition of “secularism” thus opened the way to its increasing subversion which has taken place with the growth in the power of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its political front, the Jana Sangh, now renamed the BJP. From its foundation in 1925 until 1947, the RSS worked as a Hindu communal organisation with an openly fascist ideology, with no intention to take part in the national movement. Before and after Independence it conducted bitter propaganda against Muslims and against Gandhiji, with its slogans of “Hindu Rashtra” and “Hindutva”, the latter term borrowed from V.D. Savarkar. Its hand in the communal massacres of 1947-48 was officially recognised as well as the fact that its members celebrated Gandhiji’s murder on January 30, 1948. At the elections of 1952 and afterwards it bitterly opposed the proposal for the Hindu Code, which was finally legislated in 1955-56, giving women rights that had been denied to them for millennia. To this body Radhakrishnan’s definition of secularism is probably quite acceptable, and for the past 20 years, if not more, we have heard spokesmen of the RSS and the BJP loudly denouncing “pseudo-secularism” by which they obviously mean secularism in the proper sense of the word. 

It will, however, be inaccurate to attribute the growth of communalism in India solely to the work of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. After Independence there was much bitterness within Congress ranks (which by 1947 had few Muslims left in them) over Partition and the subsequent treatment of Hindus in Pakistan (especially East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). Not only were riots frequent, but there was much official discrimination practised against Muslims in recruitment and promotions to official posts. Nehru himself in a letter to the United Provinces Chief Minister, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, in April 1950 recognised the seriousness of the situation prevailing there, but his acute expression of distress had little immediate consequence. Credit should be given to the Communists, the main opposition party at the time, for their stout opposition to the communal forces. In actual fact, however, the bulk of the defenders, as well as opponents, of secularism were still to be found within the Congress itself. 

Winds of change

It has been argued by Professor Bipan Chandra and his colleagues that it was the Jayaprakash Narayan-led mass movement of 1975, the subsequent Emergency (1975-77) and the opposition it aroused that made the RSS a respectable part of India’s political establishment. The Congress, however, recovered, though the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 in Delhi under its stewardship greatly tarnished its own anti-communal image. It is yet possible that the real change in the RSS’s favour came still later. We ought to remind ourselves of the transformation that took place all over the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Congress had, since its Avadi resolution of 1955, adopted “socialism” as its ultimate objective, and the construction of the public sector and, later, the nationalisation of a large part of the financial sector (banks, insurance) and coal mines under Indira Gandhi were seen as measures leading to socialism. As we have seen, words expressing the aspiration to make India a socialist republic were inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution in 1976. In 1980, even the new incarnation of the RSS-led Jana Sangh, the BJP, declared its adherence to the cause of “Gandhian socialism”. But the wind sharply changed direction in the closing years of the ensuing decade. 

Around 1989-90, socialist regimes in Eastern Europe began to collapse, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself was dissolved and the socialist system rapidly demolished there. The Indian economy received a great jolt through India’s loss of ties with the Soviet bloc, and there was therefore a total shift (“liberalisation”) in India’s economic policy. “Socialism”, of whatever kind, was now off the table for all parties, even those named “Samajvadi”, except for the two Communist parties. This sudden destruction of a widely held ideal provided rich ground for the spread of the RSS’s communal ideology posing as ultra-nationalism. The shift was marked by the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in December 1992, loudly proclaimed as a great national achievement. The synchronisation of this event with the worldwide shift to the Right is surely remarkable. 

That event also established the sheer electoral value of communalism. Without any economic programme worth the name, except for the dismantling of the public sector and removal of constraints on Big Business, the BJP governed India from 1999 to 2004. The Gujarat massacre of Muslims in 2002 established Narendra Modi’s credentials as Chief Minister to govern Gujarat and then to become India’s Prime Minister 12 years later. Unburdened by the legacy of any ideological “socialist” baggage, the BJP can give all the possible concessions that Big Business may seek. The bland slogan “Make in India” is a happy replacement of the work of the Planning Commission whose demolition was one of the first acts of Modi’s government in 2014. In return, the BJP’s coffers, one supposes, are being duly filled. Devices such as “electoral bonds” are surely directed towards easing the process of corporate donations. The combination of communalism and collaboration from Big Business imparts to the present regime a seeming invincibility. 

Elimination of reasoned thought in education

That invincibility is being further strengthened by the steady elimination of secular and reasoned thought in our educational system. The Prime Minister’s seat was once occupied by Jawaharlal Nehru, who argued constantly in favour of science and the scientific spirit and who laid the foundations of India’s large apparatus of scientific research. Modi, who has occupied Nehru’s seat fully 50 years after Nehru passed away, invokes the god Ganesha to sustain a claim of ancient Indians’ knowledge of plastic surgery and puts forth Karna as proof of Indians’ knowledge of genetic engineering in some distant age! To the shame of this country not a single eminent scientist in India took him to task for such claims, which may now well enter our textbooks in Central schools and the schools in most States. Already schemes are afoot to invent a new kind of mythical history to inculcate hatred of Muslims along with a virulent form of racial chauvinism. 

Needless to say, India, except in some corners here and there, can now hardly be called a secular state. As I pick up the Sunday edition of a leading newspaper, I read in a piece by a supporter of the regime that there are leaders who look forward to the next lynching of Muslims after the hue and cry on the present one dies down. Perhaps, such acts will soon turn into cold statistics, so frequent that details would hardly bear reporting. All possible positions in governmental organisations and all the administrative and academic posts that the Central government can fill are being occupied by the RSS’s nominees, often with laughable qualifications. Even right-wing professionals and academics are not considered reliable enough (though an element of personal favouritism may also be involved here). By controlling grants and favours the BJP regime is manifestly enforcing silence and consent to a degree undreamt of under previous regimes, including even the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)-I. 

As secularism and reason are driven out, prejudice and ignorance extend their sway with disconcerting rapidity. At one level, we appear to be following in Pakistan’s footsteps, what we had refused to do in 1947. But we are not simply a country of four provinces like Pakistan, we are the second most populous country in the world. What happens here will be a disaster on a corresponding scale. One cannot help thinking of Germany, a country with such advanced culture, at the time the Nazis took possession of it 84 years ago. The same claims for the “Aryan” race, the same bitter prejudice against a minority (in Germany, the Jews), and the same collaboration with Big Business. The Nazis were successful not because they ever obtained support from the majority of the German people in elections, but because their opponents were divided, with some being won over by the Nazis, to be suppressed later. That process, too, we can now see coming to pass in India, the Bihar example being the latest instance, immediately celebrated by the beating up of three men because they were allegedly transporting meat: “We are in power now,” the mobsters are reported to have said. 

A serious task awaits parties that are committed to a different future for the country, envisaging a truly secular democratic India, where reason and science might serve to sustain a welfare state. Perhaps the conflict over whether such a state would be socialist or a free market one can be postponed until the present crisis is over. Those in the Congress and other liberal parties may remember how Gandhiji, a firm opponent of socialism, could combine with Nehru, an avowed socialist, to fight British imperialism. The Left parties may recall how Popular Fronts were formed in Europe in the mid-1930s to block the path of Fascism. Surely, anyone with any foresight can see that unless a broad unity of all secular forces is now forged in India, the country’s present slide into darkness will doubtless continue.

India: A year after Dadri, its lessons remain unlearnt and the murky role of Union minister for culture and tourism, Mahesh Sharma

livemint.com - October 11, 2016

[EDITORIAL]

A year after Dadri, its lessons remain unlearnt

Muslims have served India in many different fields with distinction and honour. But the real tragedy is that this even needs to be said

The story of Maricha is very popular because of the pivotal role the character plays in the Ramayan. Maricha helps Ravana lay a trap to kidnap Sita. It is in the story of Maricha that the idea of the Lakshman rekha is created. The story of Maricha as well as the importance of the Lakshman rekha returned last week in a different guise.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui, one of the best actors in contemporary Hindi cinema, was forced to pull out of the customary Ramlila play in his native village Budhana. Siddiqui was preparing to play the role of Maricha. His “childhood dream” of performing in Ramlila will now have to wait as a group of Shiv Sena workers objected to a Muslim man taking part. Siddiqui withdrew in the interest of maintaining peace. But he is upbeat about his chances next year.

What is indeed disturbing is that a group of self-appointed custodians of Hindu traditions can now decide the eligibility of Ramlila performers based on religious affiliation. While Shiv Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray has distanced the party from the threats by his party workers in Uttar Pradesh, this is a bit convenient coming days after Siddiqui withdrew. The only leverage the workers of political parties have is their ability to engage in violence. It is especially chilling that this can happen with a top-rated, nationally recognized artiste like Siddiqui.

While it is the state’s law and order apparatus that has to stay firm in these matters and maintain a complete monopoly on violence, political parties like the Shiv Sena too need to draw a Lakshman rekha for their workers. In the past, Narendra Modi has done well to speak against such hoodlums. But it appears that he too needs to redraw the Lakshman rekha, not just for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers but also for ministers in the Union government.

The Union minister for culture and tourism, Mahesh Sharma, recently visited and consoled the family of Ravin Sisodia, the man from Bisara village who died in police custody. Reports indicate that Sisodia died of chikungunya but the family alleges foul play. Sisodia was one of the 18 accused in the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq, who was killed by a mob after a rumour about consuming and storing beef, last year.

Sharma and Sangeet Som, a BJP legislator, helped broker an agreement between those protesting on behalf of Sisodia and the district administration. According to the agreement, as reported by The Indian Express, Sisodia’s family will receive a compensation of Rs25 lakh—Rs5 lakh of which will be borne by Sharma and Som—and the police investigation into charges of cow slaughter against Akhlaq’s family will be monitored by an 11-member committee of residents and legislators from the area. More shockingly, Sisodia’s body was kept in a coffin draped with the Indian tricolour while the terms of the agreement were being worked out.

Sisodia’s death should indeed be investigated. And if any foul play emerges, the culprits should be booked. But a Union minister taking sides in Akhlaq’s murder case, which shook the conscience of the entire nation, is unacceptable. Any argument that Sharma as a local member of Parliament was merely intervening in a situation which could have spiralled out of control simply does not wash. There is a pattern to Sharma’s conduct. Last year, he had termed Akhlaq’s murder an “accident”. In another abominable statement, Sharma had said that the former president, the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, was a great nationalist and humanist despite being a Muslim (emphasis added). His prejudices are apparent for everyone to see. If there is a Lakshman rekha for the conduct of public servants, Sharma clearly stands on the wrong side of it. Modi should recognize this and show Sharma the exit.

Muslims have served India in many different fields with distinction and honour. But the real tragedy is that this even needs to be said. At a time when Siddiqui is denied a role in the Ramlila, one would do well to remember the late Rahi Masoom Raza, the great Urdu poet. Raza would become famous for writing the powerful script and dialogues for B.R. Chopra’s superhit television series Mahabharat on the Indian epic.

He too faced threats from another set of self-appointed custodians of Hindu religion for daring to write the script for Mahabharat. But Raza did not budge. He believed that the Mahabharat does not belong to Hindus alone, but to all Indians. Raza’s poem Ganga Aur Mahadev would be a fitting note to end on. The translation goes as follows (the Hindustani version in Devanagari script can be found at goo.gl/uiN1v7):

My name resembles that of a Muslim
Murder me and set my house ablaze
Plunder my room where my words are still awake
And where after whispering to Tulsi’s Ramayana
I say to Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta:
I too have a message.

My name resembles that of a Muslim
Murder me and set my house ablaze
But the holy Ganga is flowing in my veins
Take a fistful of my blood and throw it on Shiva
And tell the hermit: Hey Shiva!
Take the Ganga back
Because it is flowing warm and thick
In the bodies of disreputable Turks.

Should Mahesh Sharma be sacked from the council of ministers? Tell us at views@livemint.com

India: ‘Our society now openly displays its prejudices’ - interview with Romila Thapar (23 oct 2015, The Hindu)

The Hindu - 23 October 2015

‘Our society now openly displays its prejudices’

Ziya Us Salam

THE HINDU
Various organisations and social activists shout slogans during a protest against two dalit children killed in Faridabad, at Haryana Bhawan in New Delhi on October 21, 2015. Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar


In an interview following the release of her latest book, historian Romila Thapar speaks of rediscovering the intellectual voice.

“What frightens me the most is the thought of what will happen to the generation growing up. A government can effectively dismantle an institution in a rush to assert power, but putting such an institution back in place to perform its legitimate function, is a long haul. It takes a generation at least. The habit of independent thinking and questioning disappears. For example, the moment I make even a brief critical comment about the ancient past, immediately abusive emails start pouring in from the expected quarters. The right to discuss and dissent is objected to. Writers are being threatened with violence. We are now a society that openly displays its prejudices. Until recently, the extent of these prejudices was kept relatively hidden but now they are visible. These are prejudices that we will have to counter if we want a reasonably safe society that accommodates the freedom to speak.”

Historian Romila Thapar expressed her dismay and shock at the murder of Kannada writer and scholar M. M. Kalburgi and the lynching incidents in Dadri, Hamirpur and Himachal Pradesh. She was speaking following the release of her new book, “The Public Intellectual in India” where she talks of the role of public intellectuals in giving an alternative voice to the nation.

The Public Intellectual could not have been timed better…

We planned the book a year ago. It was certainly not planned for these times. But it has come to have a particular resonance at this time with all the recent outrageous events.

Prominent authors have either returned their Sahitya Akademi awards or dissociated themselves from the Akademi. This protest follows a period when some intellectuals were happy to play courtier to Narendra Modi.

This rediscovery of the voice should continue irrespective of which party is in power or who is the Prime Minister. Intellectuals have a role to play that goes beyond political parties, in or out of power. In the past also, many intellectuals have raised their voice. Today, we could be helped by the rise and spread of mass media. It could become an effective agency of public debate. Although it is not that as yet, nevertheless it has in recent weeks shown that it has the potential to be so.

The same mass media insists on calling some of the affiliated members of the RSS as mere fringe groups...

You can no longer call them fringe groups. Their activities are front page news and are motivated by a political ideology. They use the violence of terrorist groups. There are degrees of terrorism, from threats to actual physical harm that finally ends up in the killing of people. Where there is the deliberate creation of fear and its taking a violent form such as assassination and lynching, it has to be called terrorism. There is no other word for it. We are now a country that has to contend with terrorists claiming loyalty to Islam, terrorists claiming to defend Hindu values and sentiments, terrorists claiming to defend caste status by burning Dalits, and Maoists claiming to give a better quality of life to tribals. Shiv Sena has a segment that has a terrorist potential. A political party has to be careful that it does not become a party conducive to terrorism.

Isn’t it time for the BJP to introspect?

Yes, very much so. They should assess the behaviour and utterances of some of the members of the Sangh Parivar — not just in present times but over many years. It is inexcusable for a ruling party to be associated with groups that are characterised by acts of killing.

Even as we tackle the onslaughts on freedom of speech and even dietary habits, we discover that there have been attacks too on the way our history has been written. Now, attempts are being made to pass off mythology as history. Is history in danger?

History has, of course, been an item of confrontation with purveyors of non-history for some decades now. Attempts have been made to pass off fantasy as history. There is a deeper problem here. I keep quoting Eric Hobsbawm, who put it so succinctly when he wrote that history is to nationalism what the poppy is to an opium addict.

National identity is constructed in part by drawing on the interpretation of history. Historians in Pakistan, for instance, had to find a point of origin from where their history began. They had to go back before 1947. So would it be the coming of Mohammed bin Qasim, or should it the Harappan civilization? Then there were Buddhist and Hindu roots to be somehow integrated. In the 19th century, the British told us that the history of India was determined by the religion of the rulers. Thus, we had a Hindu period and nation, and a Muslim period and nation, and the two nations were said to be constantly in conflict. That was the 19th century colonial interpretation.

This was eagerly picked up by the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. History was drawn upon in the creation of Pakistan and the same is being done to support the creation of a Hindu Rashtra. This concept draws from colonial historiography but may also be seen as part of the unfinished business of Partition. So those who oppose the two-nation theory are said to be distorting history.

The 60s were landmark years for the growth of history as a discipline, as it moved away from Indology…

For historians, the interpretation of history no longer drew on the colonial construct. But for religious nationalists, history remains the colonial reading of the 19th century.

But there has been criticism of the writers returning their awards. While some question the motive and the timing of the decision, others argue that the awards are given by the state and not the government.

I don’t see a major distinction between the state and government since the institutions giving the awards are, in effect, controlled by the government. They are not autonomous and are not managed in entirety by the professionals concerned. I see no point in criticising intellectuals for speaking out now, and not in, say, 2002 or 1992 or 1984. Visible protest does not have to be a constant way of life. Protests take various forms, as one has to find different ways of making oneself heard at different times. Yes, there have been challenges to freedom of speech and expression earlier too, but now there is a difference. There is an attack on freedom of expression, it is part of a bigger movement in support of a communalism that incorporates violence, and the ideology it supports is such that it could destroy democracy. One expects people in positions of authority to be much more responsible in their reaction to those who ignore the law and kill innocent people. In the absence of such a response, protests have to take place. These are independent voices concerned about the future of democracy, social justice and the rights of the Indian citizen.

The same level of opposition has not been seen when it comes to attacks on Dalits in recent times…

The media has not fully recognised that brutality against Dalits is as obnoxious as brutality against minorities, whether religious minorities or free-thinking people. Within society, there is an acceptance of social hierarchy and the crimes against Dalits do not get registered so quickly.

Could the intellectuals have voiced themselves earlier?

When the UPA took over in 2004, quite a few of us wrote extensively in the press and to government bodies that all cultural and academic institutions which are government financed and controlled should be made autonomous institutions, run by professionals, as is the case in most countries. But there was no response to the idea. The awards one is talking of today may have been processed through a peer group, but essentially they are government awards. Ministers and bureaucrats have a big say in selections. You may argue that they are state awards but you look at the list of awardees, you can generally guess which party is in power!

ziya.salam@thehindu.co.in

India: Media - News Medium and the Stereotypes | Anil Chamadia

Mainstream, Vol LII, No 15, April 5, 2014

by Anil Chamadia

The Hindu, a leading English daily newspaper, carried a report on December 20, 2013 about the suicide of Dr Khurshid Anwar, an Executive Director of an NGO. He had committed suicide on December 18. In the report its correspondent mentioned that Dr Anwar was buried on December 19. As per the reporter, “Dr Anwar was buried here on Thursday after the post-mortem.”(http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities..., NEW DELHI, December 20, 2013) However, this information was wrong and the newspaper accepted its fault and carried a clarification on December 21 that Dr Anwar was not buried but cremated at Nigambodh Ghat.

This news report raises a number of questions, which are related to the bent of mind and preconceived notions of scribes. These notions are embedded in their mind, which they carry since their childhood. The question is: what made the reporter to assume that a person with a Muslim name can only be buried? Actually this fixed notion is not only embedded in the scribes’ mind as information, which they assume to be the absolute truth. As they do not have clear perceptions so whatever information they gather, they do not crosscheck it and apply their biased mind and file a report.

It turns into a dangerous phenomenon when a reporter/correspondent falls prey to obscuran-tism and is biased enough to accept the religious ritual. When the reporter/correspondent accepts this as an irrefutable truth then they are free from being accountable arising out of the conse-quences of its dissemination. It’s not merely a matter of incorrect or correct information pertaining to the burial or cremation of any Muslim. In fact, it draws our attention towards the process of gathering and dissemination of information with a prejudicial mind. Scribes simply relate a Muslim name with Islam. This mentality of being “very obvious” does not differentiate an ordinary man and a reporter/ correspondent. A reporter has the responsibility to inform the people. In the social milieu, an individual is identified by his/her religion or caste first. In the Indian society, religion and caste have a strong bondage with the political, social and economic structure. The reality is that an individual is named by family members carrying the caste and religion which they belong to. Although the individual has the right to adopt or follow any particular religion or can quit his/her religion, which he/she was born into. Dr Khurshid Anwar’s name might show that he is a follower of Islam but it’s not necessary that he must be a believer of Islam and abide by the Islamic tenets. Ultimately, this question is related to a citizen’s right. So, a reporter/correspondent, who is sensitive and conscious enough, should be free from such preconceived notions or prejudices. Citizen’s individual freedom should be uppermost in his/her mind.


There have been many studies in the entire world on the scribes’ prejudicial mindset, working for media houses with reference to religious, sex, caste, language, region and economic biases. The reason behind the constant prejudices or biases in mediapersons about society and its people is solely due to not crosschecking the information which is carried in the name of legacy. An institution or scribe must break this inertia and carry forward to the next generations. This depends on the scribe’s objectives because if the media houses feel that carrying forward the prejudice is in his/her interest, he/she would maintain the status quo. But if the scribes desire to create consciousness in the society, then they would certainly break this prejudice. The reporter/correspondent did not even feel the necessity to know that after his death Dr Khurshid Anwar might or might not have an individual will/desire. Then it should be understood that the scribe is not very conscious about the rights of individuals. This act itself shows the level of consciousness of a reporter/correspondent. Not giving recognition to the individual’s rights means not under-standing the individual’s political rights. Dr Khurshid Anwar was leading an NGO, which spearheaded anti-communalism campaigns and programmes and ideologically he considered himself to be a Leftist.

The reporter/correspondent might claim that Dr Khurshid Anwar’s desire to be cremated and not to be buried according to the tenets of Islam is an exception, so the reporter/correspondent did not feel the need to confirm this information, but in fact this cannot be true for all. Just like Dr Anwar, there may be many other people who wished their last rites to be done differently. Actually this example is not just limited to the study of a Muslim, where the last rites were performed in a different way. Rather, it is an example to understand the deep-rooted prejudice in the scribes and media houses’ mindset. A good example can be cited here of Khushwant Singh, a renowned journalist and writer. He is turbaned and a Sikh but after his death, he has wished to be buried within the minimum space. His wish is to be buried in a vertical posture instead of horizontally and a tree should be planted at his burial ground. Popular theatre personality and activist Safdar Hashmi was also not buried after his death. He desired that his body should be cremated, so it was done like that. I have directly experienced about such a desire wherein an old man was put in a box and immersed in a river and that box was tied to a stone. He was a Hindu and this was his desire for his last rites.

So, if a reporter/correspondent is not up to date or connected with the changes taking place in the society, the scribe’s prejudices will remain intact. A reporter/correspondent should also be connected with his/her history because it will equip them with a vision of understanding the current phenomenon. Prejudices of the news media create obstacle in the development of society if they do not keep pace with the changes taking place around them.

Complaint against Bhartiya Janta Party for circulating and flaunting banner inciting communal prejudice and ill-will against minorities

CITIZENS FOR DEMOCRACY(C.F.D.)
D-7/2 Vasant Vihar, New Delhi 110057
Gen. Secretary’s Office
E-mail:ndpancholi44@gmail.com) M: 9811099532
President : Kuldip Nayar
Gen.Secretary: N.D.Pancholi

To,
1. The Chief Election Commissioner,
Election Commission of India,
New Delhi-10001
(through e-mail: vs.sampath@eci.gov.in)

2. The Chief Electoral Officer,
IV Floor, Vikas Bhawan,
Hazratganj,
Lucknow-226001
(through:e-mail:eoup@nic.in)

Dear Sir,
I have seen a banner hosited at electric pillar in support of BJP party in which following slogan is written in Hindi :
“WO KAHTE HAIN KI DESH KE SANSADHANO PAR PEHLA HAQ
ALPSANKHYAKO KA,
MODI KAHTE HAIN PAHALA ADHIKAR DESH KE KISANO KA”
Meaning :
“They say that that the minorities have the first claim on the natural resources of the country,
Modi says that it is the farmers of the country whose claim is first”
The above slogan is clearly divisive and intends to cause hatred and ill-will against the minorities. It is an appeal on communal lines to secure votes.
The above banner was seen by me on an electric pillar in front of Khaitan Public school, Rajinder Nagar, Sahibabad, Ghaziabad. It has photos of Atal Bihari Bajpayee, Rajnath Singh, Narendra Modi, and V.K.Singh, the BJP candidate for Ghaziabad constituency.
Some photos of the said banner are attached.
It is clearly in violation of the model code of conduct.
You are requested to take appropriate action against the Bhartiya Janta Party.

N.D.Pancholi
Gen. Secretary
(M) 9811099532
Photos attached.

.

When police of single out Muslims for different treatment, their conduct should be treated as unconnected random acts based on prejudice?

The Hindu, April 11, 2013

Profiles of prejudice

by Jyoti Punwani

Is there a grand conspiracy among the country’s intelligence and police agencies to demonise the Muslim community and Islam as many allege? Or is it that when police of different States single out Muslims for different treatment, their conduct should be treated as unconnected random acts based on prejudice?

An apology

A senior officer of the Mumbai police had to apologise this week to the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, one of the country’s two largest Muslim bodies. A circular issued by the Special Branch to police stations across the city, asked them to keep an eye on the Girls’ Islamic Organisation (GIO), the female students’ wing of the Jamaat. The GIO, the Marathi circular noted, was “trying to motivate girls towards Islam and asking them to live in accordance with the Koran and the Hadees.” Its main aim, said the circular, was to “inspire students towards orthodox Islam, prepare them for jihad, propagate Islam, and through such propagation, work for Islamisation of the world.”

Threatened with defamation, the officer apologised to the Jamaat — for the “hurt” the allegations had caused, not for the allegations themselves, though the circular bore his signature. This was the input he had received from “some other agency,” he maintained, and he had had to forward it. What he regretted was the leak of the internal circular. He would seek out the person responsible for the leak and make sure he was convicted, he said. Such determination to convict other colleagues who have hurt Muslims in rather extreme ways, not just their feelings, has never been shown by Mumbai’s senior policemen. The officer was livid not because his colleagues had made unsubstantiated allegations against a mainstream Muslim organisation, but because he had been embarrassed publicly. Ironically, the man in question is regarded as one of the few secular officers of the Mumbai police.

Outside Maharashtra

Police in other States aren’t so concerned about keeping up appearances. The Delhi Police Special Cell is quite open about the message it wants to convey about Muslims to the country. In 2008, they had draped the three boys arrested after the mysterious Batla House encounter in the red-and-white scarves popularised by the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. The pictures of the boys, alleged to be members of the terror outfit, Indian Mujaheedin, wearing these scarves were flashed across the country. It turned out that the Delhi Police had bought these scarves in bulk, no doubt for the numerous Muslims they knew they would be arresting as “terrorists-who’d-slunk-into-the-capital-to-strike” (many of whom have since been honourably acquitted). Instead of the nondescript black hoods/coloured handkerchiefs/loose dupattas that detenus are made to wear in front of the camera, these scarves would leave an indelible, visual impression. Every time viewers saw these, they’d know some more Muslims with pan-Islamic terrorist links had been apprehended.

This long-term plan to stereotype terror accused was foiled by the furious response it evoked. But now, even more diabolic ways have been worked out by the police of other States to stamp Muslim terror suspects by marks of their faith. Yusuf Nalband was released in February after his name failed to feature in the National Investigation Agency (NIA) charge sheet in the Bangalore assassination case. He and four others, including Deccan Herald journalist Muthi-ur-Rahman Siddiqui and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) scientist Aijaz Ahmed Mirza, had been arrested from their shared apartment last August. The allegation against them was that they were part of an Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) plot to assassinate Hindutva leaders.

The 28-year-old commerce graduate, who held a regular job when he was arrested, didn’t say much when he and Siddiqui met the media after their release. He should have, for what he later told The Hindu reporter was shocking. The Hyderabad police who assisted the Bangalore Police during their arrests, he revealed, forced all of them to wear namaz caps while taking them out of their flat. “I don’t know why they did that,” he said.

Was the young man being polite? Or just unwilling to face the ugly conclusion?

Quick to learn these tricks (or was it their own brainwave?), the Delhi Police Special Cell went one step ahead last week by superimposing an oversized fez cap on the face-sketch of an alleged Hizbul Mujaheedin terrorist. This man, said the police, had left arms in a guesthouse for Liaqat Shah, the Kashmiri who returned to India to surrender and was arrested by the Special Cell as a terrorist. The man was identified on the basis of the CCTV footage of the guesthouse.

The footage (telecast by a news channel) shows a man, head down, climbing up the stairs. His face is not visible. So whose sketch was released by the Special Cell? More intriguingly, the footage shows the man wearing a Nike cap. Where did the fez come from?

The Special Cell’s attempt to project the suspected terrorist as a devout Muslim would have gone unnoticed some years back. Now, the police’s continuous targeting of Muslims has made them alert. The mischievous substitution was exposed by the Muslim Mirror, an online portal.

Making suspects display signs of their religious identity when presenting them before the world is not the police’s job. Surely, such religious profiling constitutes an offence.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, that threatened to sue the Mumbai Special Branch for defamation, may let the matter die with a written explanation, for the latter’s communal prejudice now stands exposed. But the Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi Police can’t be let off. Who will force them to explain?

(Jyoti Punwani is a Mumbai-based journalist and writer.)

Afzal Guru's Execution to ‘satisfy collective conscience of society’

Editorial, Kashmir Times - 9 Feb 2013

MARGINALIA: Execution to ‘satisfy collective conscience of society’
By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

February 9, 2013. Just two days before Kashmir was to observe the 29th anniversary of the hanging of Maqbool Butt and demand his mortal remains buried inside the premises of Tihar jail, it woke up to the gloomy reality of television channels blaring out: Afzal Guru hanged. In the same jail! By 7.30 a.m. all channels had begun revealing that he’d been hanged. The initial reports suggested he’s been hanged at 5.30 a.m. Before 8.00 a.m., they informed that he’d been hanged at 6.30 a.m. Much later, Home Secretary RK Singh, while talking to reporters, informed that Guru had been hanged at 8.00 a.m; the truth revealed before it happened. Singh told that recommendation to hang him had been sent to the President on January 23. The President gave it his assent on January 26. And while this entire mystery about the timing of his death with news flashes appearing before the execution probably took place remains unquestioned, the family and his lawyers are neither informed nor given the time to meet him or take recourse to judicial procedures to make a bid, as per the law, to save him from the gallows. He was entitled to a judicial review of his sentence but all this hush hush manner in which the presidential nod came for his execution and the secret execution point out to the systemic injustice that flourishes at the hands of the state in the world's largest democracy, a land of Gandhi, Tilak and Tagore.
That his family was not given a chance to meet him or that he was not given the last chance to challenge his verdict before the impossible façade of a system that treated him an ‘enemy’ is not the sheer injustice of his death. While capital punishment is morally unjust, Afzal Guru’s crime is far too less to deserve it. Guru’s guilt was never proved; he having been sacrificed only because there was circumstantial evidence against him, not of having killed people and attacked the parliament but of having been party to the conspiracy. In fact, Guru, who never got a lawyer to defend himself, was not even heard. Whatever he forwarded as part of the statement, revealing that he was a surrendered militant and was working at the behest of some officers of the Special Operations Group of Jammu and Kashmir police, was not even admitted by the court while deciding the case. Guru may have been lying through his hat but his statement was never verified or interrogated, not only amounting to injustice against him but also injustice with the public who had a right to know whether indeed their law keepers can manipulate the existence of lesser mortals like Afzal Guru, co-opt them into doing the dirty job of perpetuating violence and then sacrificing them at the altar of what would be construed as justice from a very state-ist point of view.
There are several gaps in the investigations and Guru’s guilt is based primarily on the police version of the story, which has been taken on its face value or his (Guru’s) confessional statement before media, selectively picked up and unquestioned by the court with his later statement not even treated permissible. The verdict itself is dictated more by the zeal to “to satisfy the collective conscience of the society” as observed by the judge rather than the lack of evidence. The judge interestingly also acquitted him of charges under POTA and observed that he did not belong to any terrorist organisation. The verdict says, ““The conviction under section 3 (5) of POTA is also set aside because there is no evidence that he is a member of a terrorist organisation, once the confessional statement is excluded.”
A news channel, earlier this week, began a debate about whether Hindutva terror was a reality or a myth, interestingly on the day after Narendra Modi visited the Delhi University amid heavy security, employed to brutally thwart all protests against him, a part of the story hidden from media glare. All it ended up doing was betraying the corporate-media nexus in backing the latest hero and brand name of the Sangh Parivar, with its conclusion that cases of those indicted in Mecca, Nanded, Samjhauta and Malegaon blasts were weak and there couldn’t be much headway because the evidence wasn’t concrete. There was only circumstantial evidence against Guru and his confession only pertained to the logistical support he offered to perpetrators of the crime without any knowledge of the exact designs. In striking contrast, Aseemanand indicted in Mecca blast, has confessed to having been part of the entire conspiracy and planning. But his confession is treated as weak. What more can one say of the bias of the legal justice system of a country that boasts to have a grand functional democracy. The 18th century Swiss mathematician and physicist, Leonhard Euler, said, “I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.” The State has proved the quote true, atleast, perhaps selectively for Kashmiris, in India. Guru, who was sentenced to satisfy the national conscience, we are now told, was hanged at the altar of electoral politics. And the concern thereafter is not whether or not this was mis-carriage of justice but of how post execution, law and order machinery can be handled in Kashmir, where every curfewed heart goes into mourning.
Guru was nailed without questioning either the glaring security lapses or looking for other abettors to the crime or its master-mind. If Afzal Guru is the sole abettor, how did the killers manage to get inside the highly fortified parliament premises, with greatest ease? These are questions that need to be addressed. He was a simple pawn in the game. Whose, we do not even know! Was it not important to know the truth about who attacked the parliament, who masterminded it and who were the people involved, especially the involvement at the official level, without which this attack could not have been executed. Apparently Afzal knew a lot. But his side of the story has been silenced forever. Truth has been sent to the gallows, all for satiating the conscience of some blood-thirsty chauvinists, happy with manufactured consent. All this in India of Gandhi, Tilak, Baghat Singh and Tagore, an India for which thousands laid down their precious lives and millions suffered.

Ashis Nandy's views on caste and corruption must be debated and challenged

From: Outlook Magazine, 11 February 2013

The Nandy Bully

The sorts of corruption that matter are a purview of privileged
S. Anand


“An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity, or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.”

—B.R. Ambedkar

“[The] racism of the intelligence...is specific to a dominant class whose reproduction depends, in part, on the transmission of cultural capital, an inherited capital that has the property of being an embodied capital and thus apparently natural and innate.”

—Pierre Bourdieu

Ashis Nandy is a reason-buster. That is his e-mail id, his raison d’etre. And when he makes totally unreasonable comments, his friends expect us to stand and applaud. His acolytes—who have predictably and unimaginatively started an online petition to save his right to free speech and have created a blog dedicated to him—tell us that the political psychologist (a term he uses to describe himself) likes to “illuminate through anecdote, aphorism and irony”. But apparently Dalits, adivasis and OBCs—he lumps together 70 per cent of the population—and those of us non-Dalits whose work requires us to actually know something about caste, cannot understand such nuances.

At the outset, let me state that I am not for Nandy’s arrest—though an absolute right to free speech should make us defend the Thackerays and Akbaruddin Owaisi as well—under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, for that would trivialise the realities of caste violence. Like my friends Chandra Bhan Prasad and Kancha Ilaiah have said with such grace and maturity, let us forgive Nandy and not drag him to court.

But first let us look at what exactly Nandy said in Jaipur. Here is a faithful, unedited transcript based on a YouTube video via ABP News. My comments figure in parenthesis, and these are necessary, for what transpired on stage was a performance with gestures, pauses and interruptions adding to the overall effect.

Nandy: How should I put it? Almost a vulgar statement on my part. [Raises his voice and speaks slowly, with deliberate emphasis on each word.] It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs, and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes. And as long as this is the case, [the] Indian Republic will survive... [some interruption, with moderator Urvashi Butalia saying “Alright” as if sensing the tension and wanting to move on; TV journalist Ashutosh is raising his hand in protest, but Nandy soldiers on]. Also, I’ll give an example. One of the states with the least amount of corruption is the state of West Bengal, that is when the CPI(M) was there. And I want to propose to you, draw your attention to the fact that in the last hundred years [pause] nobody from the opp... [opposition? oppressed?], nobody from the OBCs, the Backward Classes, and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes have come anywhere near power in West Bengal. It is an absolutely clean state. [Point made, Nandy wants to pass the mike.]

Ashutosh: Urvashi, sorry...

Urvashi Butalia: Wait...

Ashutosh: I know, I know...I have to respond to this.... I think, I think...this is the classical [sic] case of...

Butalia [again butts in]: Ashutosh, please, please, please...

Ashutosh: This is a classical case of how the elite in India...they perceive the downtrodden, the Dalits, the OBCs, and all...[huge, heartening round of loud applause from the audience]. I think this is the most bizarre statement I have ever heard in this country [more continuous applause].

It’s not just the dirty outsiders who failed to grasp what Nandy later assures us was the case: that he was being pro-Dalit. It was also the presumably elite audience at the ‘DSC’ Jaipur Literary Festival who clapped for Ashutosh. And all this was well before the CSDS/twice-born spin machine cranked into action.

The transcript is of words spoken in just 80 seconds. This is a rushed, media-driven world where people seem to first speak, and then think, if at all. Just when we are to hear Ashutosh say something about the ruling castes, the video feed is cut, and ABP decides to typically amplify only Nandy’s words. The media will do what they are paid to do. (A corporatised media that a 2006 CSDS statistical survey—irony, again!—proved had near-zero representation of Dalits, adivasis and OBCs. And by the way, why can’t CSDS—the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, which is apparently running as a jobs programme for politically connected academicians who failed to get tenure in the US—ever implement reservation?)

Nandy did not stop with this. He persisted with his efforts at reason-busting in an interview to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt (January 28), where he claimed: “Even in this particular presentation [in Jaipur], I was [being] aggressively pro-Dalit, pro-OBC and pro-adivasi...unless and until you tease out that one sentence, and say ‘you are factually wrong, because this has not been empirically demonstrated’, though I have a feeling that probably I’ll not be shown wrong if you count the number of ticketless travellers and so on and so forth who get away [here Barkha smiles mischievously, a finger on her lips] in the second-class compartments of trains or on the terraces [sic] of railway trains and so on and so forth. There are many such cases. If you take the young urchins who sell tickets in the black outside cinema halls....” When Dutt interjects, Nandy says of his Jaipur utterances: “It is not an accidental slip, it is a Freudian slip.”

The more Nandy tries to explain, the more he sounds rabidly casteist. Ticketless travellers, black-ticket marketers, rickshawwallahs and thelawallahs who have to bribe the police—all these are presumed by Nandy to belong to once-born communities, simply because they are preponderant in India’s population. According to Nandyian logic, then, whoever is in the majority must necessarily be the most corrupt. What he claims as a ‘fact’—that most petty lawbreakers are from the bloc BSP founder Kanshi Ram called ‘bahujan’—is not a fact at all but a tautology, a case of circular reasoning. Even the elite anti-corruption campaigns of Anna Hazare/Arvind Kejriwal had bigger fish in mind. Surely, the corruption that drains India is concentrated in fields like real estate development, arms deals, concessions to rural landowners and SEZs, preferential bids for government contracts, and yes, lit-fests (some of which I’m ashamed to say I’ve attended). The sorts of corruption that matter most are the purview of the privileged, and Dalits do not make up even one per cent of these lucrative fields. They are the victims of corruption, not its beneficiaries. Corruption is not a democratising force, but most fundamentally an extra-legal form of rent-seeking behaviour by elites, that systematically sucks wealth upward. And until Nandy grasps this most basic reality, he should consider refraining from speaking publicly on the topics he knows nothing about.

And yes, the man who triggered this all, Tarun Tejpal, creator of the ‘Essar Thinkfest’, has gotten away with arguing that corruption is a “levelling force” in society, an “equaliser”—why then did Tehelka con Bangaru Laxman, a Dalit, into accepting a paltry Rs 1 lakh “for the party fund” and ensure prison for him? This vulgar understanding of democracy was further turned into a joke by Nandy, who blustered along as if he were sharing a drink with buddy Tejpal in the IIC lawns. Later, Nandy clarified to Barkha: “As long as the poor can be corrupt, it will be like a safety valve for society...it will be better for the republic.... Corruption is about equality and redistributive justice.” Is this all India’s “finest intellect” has to offer?

Whatever the explanations, clarifications and defences, it is quite transparent what Nandy said and meant. Section 3.1.(x) of the PoA Act—invoked when someone “intentionally insults or intimidates with intent to humiliate a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe in any place within public view”—was meant to challenge the impunity with which the privileged castes routinely and habitually insult Dalits and adivasis. More than as a matter of freedom of expression, the twice-born have considered it their birthright—janma-siddha adhikaar—to be disparaging of all once-born folk. And Nandy’s words wound as much as the actions of khap panchayats and Ranvir Sena do.

However, it would be a sick irony if police who routinely refuse to file atrocities firs on even the most grossly violent attacks on Dalits were to file one against this completely non-violent pontiff of unreason. That Nandy has been threatened with arrest under this law is a red herring and a gift to him, which serves only to make him a martyr and a cause celebre for the Mandal-hating privileged-caste intellectual establishment. Worse, his arrest could bolster demands for the repeal of this important and seldom implemented law.

Nandy’s views on caste and corruption—quite like his qualified endorsement of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement that rapes happen in India, not Bharat (Tehelka, Jan 4, 2013)—must be debated and challenged. Nandy is a master at repackaging elite prejudice as counter-intuitive insight and paradoxical wisdom. But the best cure for these intellectual parlour games is simply to expose his ignorance to light of day.

Thus we should welcome Nandy’s comments as a brazen public expression of the “common sense” racism that the privileged in urban India routinely articulate in private conversations. The privileged who casually dismiss the policy of reservation in education and jobs (rarely implemented in earnest), and who refuse to acknowledge that they have availed of unstated reservation for millennia owing to their exclusive monopoly in various fields, including corruption (even if understood, according to Nandy’s reductive definition, as petty bribe-taking). The privileged who refuse to see caste itself as corruption, as moral depredation.

Before going further, let me pick some nits in what Nandy exactly said, especially since some of his most resourceful and powerful friends in the intellectual establishment—Nandy has at his disposal a large cache of what Bourdieu calls social and cultural capital—have rushed to his defence. These include the feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia, who helpfully parroted out his clarificatory statement (she moderated the Jaipur panel), and three of his former CSDS colleagues—Harsh Sethi (The Hindu, Jan 28, 2013), Yogendra Yadav (Indian Express, Jan 28, 2013) and Shiv Visvanathan (Firstpost, Jan 28, 2013)—who similarly constructed elaborate and contorted explanations to help the unnuanced masses understand that the emperor does have clothes after all.

His choice of words is surely not a result of any momentary lapse of reason. It is clear to anyone who cares to listen what Nandy in fact said and meant. Though it is fascinating to watch a man who scorns empiricism as vulgar western ideology gradually backtrack in a series of interviews, in which ‘a fact’ becomes ‘a hypothesis’, and finally an ‘expectation’. Equally fascinating is the spectacle of a man who has always resisted the idea of state-mandated bureaucratic rationality diligently sticking to state parlance when it comes to referring to Dalits or adivasis—steadfastly using ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ and ‘OBC’ as if he were a babu in a sarkari department.

When he offers an illustration to corroborate his conclusion (mind you, Nandy’s authority comes not from any actual research, but the certainty of his intuitions), he says West Bengal under the Communists was an “absolutely clean state” because the once-born never had a share in power there. Such a man is marketed as an intellectual “maverick”, but the views he endlessly espouses are just cleverly repackaged versions of the ones most privileged-caste Indians anyway hold. For we, after all, live in Kaliyug, a fallen era when people have moved away from varna-ordained stations in life and have wrested some power.

Much of this narrative fits snugly with—in fact, follows from—Nandy’s larger body of work that valorises pre-modern approaches to community and thought. Which is why his foundational work, The Intimate Enemy (1983), revolves around Gandhi and Tagore, but does not once mention figures like E.V. Ramasamy Periyar, Tarabai Shinde, Jyotirao Phule, Pandita Ramabai, Narayana Guru, the Aulchand-led Kartabhaja movement in early 19th century Bengal or B.R. Ambedkar. Even when writing controversially about Sati in 1987, Nandy invoked Tagore’s poem on Sati as an ideal, but did not engage with Ambedkar’s brilliant essay ‘Castes in India’ (1916) where he argues how Sati (besides child marriage and enforced widowhood) was among the building blocks of the caste system. This non-engagement is actually an estrangement; because Ambedkar’s project of fusing European Enlightenment thought with anti-metaphysical Buddhism does not suit Nandy’s indigenist longing for Gandhi’s revanchist Ram Rajya envisioned in the 1908 tract Hind Swaraj, whose critique of modernity, the West and industrialism comes with an abiding love for varnashrama and women’s enslavement. Nandy would happily cite Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, but never Ambedkar, Periyar or Phule who challenge his very hypotheses.

It is such a trajectory that leads Nandy to utter the ultimate racist slur when he condemns entire population groups, not just individuals like A. Raja or Madhu Koda who happen to be Dalit or adivasi. Such views are baked in the crucible of prejudice and ignorance. In the US today, even Republicans would not say something so derogatory of all Hispanics, Blacks or First Nation peoples. When they do, they pay a penalty (not necessarily legal) and are excoriated, not hailed as mavericks. Two examples given by two friends will suffice: from the world of entertainment and from the world of science (just to pique Nandy). In 2011, when America’s highest-paid TV actor Charlie Sheen made anti-Semitic remarks against producer Chuck Lorre, CBS dumped him and discontinued the production of Two and a Half Men, a hit show that had been running for a decade. In 2007, when Nobel-winning biologist James D. Watson, who worked on the Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent, the outcry led to the cancellation of his lectures and his eventually being sidelined at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island.

Nandy’s tendency to make gross generalisations stems from his penchant to essentialise. For him, the coloniser has necessarily been white British power. Internal colonialisms hardly matter. Nandy’s binaristic understanding of coloniser-colonised does not enable him to recognise the colonialism that is played out in almost every village in India where blatant caste-based segregation is practised. Last year, Nandy delivered the Ambedkar University Delhi’s annual lecture on April 14, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary (published in EPW, July 28, 2012). The topic was ‘Theories of Oppression and Another Dialogue of Cultures’. I had hoped the very topic would give Nandy an opportunity to engage with radical anti-caste thought in India. But he disappointingly stuck to familiar ground.

Nandy’s disengagement with issues of caste and anti-caste thought is symptomatic of the apathy of India’s intellectual classes to these issues. Which is why we see feckless intellectuals eager to be complicit in his crime—the slew of luminous signatories to the petition is a virtual who-is-who. One does not have to be a Dalit, adivasi or OBC to be outraged by Nandy’s pronouncements just like one need not be black to see why Watson was so very wrong. In being ashamed of Nandy, we merely have to reach out to our own humanity. But I suppose that would be an unnuanced, anomic, banal and secular expectation.

(Anand is the publisher of Navayana.)

Nandy’s Nadir - Editorial, The Telegraph (29 Jan 2013)

The Telegraph, January 29 , 2013

Editorial

NANDY’S NADIR

An ageing enfant terrible is not only a contradiction in terms but also someone who is somewhat ridiculous. Ashis Nandy, unfortunately, has cut himself out to be such a figure. His penchant to say something original and shocking got the better of him in Jaipur and has landed him in an unnecessary controversy. Mr Nandy’s statement about corruption among the Dalits and the other backward classes does not appear to be based on any empirical study. If it indeed is then Mr Nandy would have done well to have first presented his findings and conclusions to his academic peer group. Instead, he chose to air his views at a literary carnival. Mr Nandy is an experienced hand and he cannot be oblivious of the fact that a literary festival, where he can speak only for a few minutes, is not the best forum to put forward a nuanced argument. Not surprisingly, he now claims that he has been misunderstood. If this is truly the case, Mr Nandy has only himself to blame because he has behaved irresponsibly. Mr Nandy has exercised his right of free speech. But as he knows every right carries with it a responsibility. Liberty is not licence. Mr Nandy should have been aware that his statement would have hurt the sentiments of sections of the population. Mr Nandy has courted controversy in the wrong place and on the wrong subject. There is a distinction between an academic seminar and a public gathering.

If Mr Nandy behaved irresponsibly and rather exaggerated his propensity to shock and startle, the reactions to his pronouncements have also been overblown and out of proportion. His views deserve a strong rebuttal at the level of ideas and Mr Nandy’s prejudices should be exposed. There is no need at all to clamour for his arrest and for the filing of a first information report. Irresponsibility cannot be countered by intolerance for the simple reason that two wrongs do not make a right. Mr Nandy, to do him credit, once he realized that he had hurt the sentiments of some people, tendered an unqualified apology even though he believes that the grievances against him are the results of a misunderstanding of what he actually meant. Such an apology should bring the curtain down on the matter. The episode reveals how even one of the best minds in India is liable to misuse his freedom, and also how fast intolerance is breeding in India.