Showing posts with label imperial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imperial. Show all posts
Friday, 25 August 2023
Monday, 14 August 2023
A level Economics: Are Universal Values a form of Imperialism?
They argue that universal values are the new imperialism, imposed on people who want security and stability instead. Here is why they are wrong argues The Economist
Universal and valuable
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change, whether from global warming, artificial intelligence or the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. And that is where universal values come into their own. Tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry help harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than fourfold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it. But individual freedom and tolerance evolved differently. Many people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, canvassed almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Some places, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. At the same time, young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are barely more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. Countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is a crime look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this supports the campaign by China’s Communist Party to dismiss universal values as racist neo-imperialism. It argues that white Western elites are imposing their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. Contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety. China is right that people want security. The survey shows that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family and racial or national groups, while tradition and organised religion offer solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Amid lawlessness and upheaval, some people sought safety in their tribe or their sect. Hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar happened in Russia. After economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, gdp per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet that did not dispel their accumulated dread. President Vladimir Putin consistently played on their ethno-nationalist insecurities, especially when growth later faltered. That has culminated in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
Even in established democracies, polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit left-behind voters’ anxieties to mobilise support. So they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side.
Even allowing for this, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples where growing security really does seem to lead to tolerance and greater individual expression. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The real question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning—especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another.
A better answer comes from prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more resources to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than fourfold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it. But individual freedom and tolerance evolved differently. Many people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, canvassed almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Some places, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. At the same time, young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are barely more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. Countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is a crime look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this supports the campaign by China’s Communist Party to dismiss universal values as racist neo-imperialism. It argues that white Western elites are imposing their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. Contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety. China is right that people want security. The survey shows that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family and racial or national groups, while tradition and organised religion offer solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Amid lawlessness and upheaval, some people sought safety in their tribe or their sect. Hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar happened in Russia. After economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, gdp per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet that did not dispel their accumulated dread. President Vladimir Putin consistently played on their ethno-nationalist insecurities, especially when growth later faltered. That has culminated in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
Even in established democracies, polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit left-behind voters’ anxieties to mobilise support. So they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side.
Even allowing for this, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples where growing security really does seem to lead to tolerance and greater individual expression. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The real question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning—especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another.
A better answer comes from prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more resources to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
Universal and valuable
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change, whether from global warming, artificial intelligence or the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. And that is where universal values come into their own. Tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry help harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
Friday, 4 August 2023
Are Universal Human Rights a form of Imperialism? Is the Chinese Communist Party right?
From The Economist
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
Saturday, 13 November 2021
Monday, 13 September 2021
Friday, 5 January 2018
The Myth of Bhima Koregaon Reinforces the Identities It Seeks to Transcend
BY ANAND TELTUMBDE in The Wire
The resolve to fight Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, but the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive.
Bhima Koregaon victory pillar. Credit: Wikipedia
Anglo-Maratha war. Credit: Wikipedia
The resolve to fight Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, but the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive.
Bhima Koregaon victory pillar. Credit: Wikipedia
Two hundred years ago, the last battle of the Anglo-Maratha war was fought at Koregaon village on the banks of Bhima river near Pune. The battle marked the firm hold of the British Empire in India. The British erected an obelisk at the battle ground in the memory of the dead. It has 49 names, 22 of them are identified by their ‘nak’ suffix as Mahars. It was construed as the testimony to the gallantry of Mahar soldiers, and was rightly used by the first batch of Mahar leaders such as Gopal Baba Walangkar, Shivram Janba Kamble and even Ramji Ambedkar, B.R. Ambedkar’s father, when pleading the British for the restoration of Mahar recruitment in the British army when it was stopped in 1893. The stoppage of Mahar recruitment was a consequence of the Indian uprising of 1857, after which the British reassessed their recruiting strategies to include only those from ‘martial races’ in the army.
But when Babasaheb Ambedkar painted the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the battle of Mahar soldiers against their caste oppression in Peshwa rule, he was creating a pure myth. As myths are required to build movements, he perhaps saw its necessity then. But after a century, when it solidifies into a quasi-history and tends to push Dalits deeper into an identitarian marshland, it should become a worrisome matter. Many Dalit organisations recently formed a joint front to observe the 200th anniversary of this battle as a campaign to launch an attack on the new Peshwai, the rising Brahmanic rule of the Hindutva forces. Their long marches culminated into an Elgar Parishad (conference) at the Shaniwarwada at Pune on December 31. While the resolve to fight the Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive insofar as it reinforces identitarian tendencies whereas the necessity is to transcend them.
As regards history, it is a fact that when the East India Company developed its military aspirations, it recruited Dalits in disproportionately large numbers, perhaps for their unflinching loyalty and faithfulness and also because they were cheaply available. One finds disproportionate numbers of the Namshudras in Bengal, the Parayas in Madras and the Mahars in Maharashtra in its army. If the Dalits wanted to claim significant contribution to the establishment of the British Raj in India, it may not be as such incorrect. But to attribute motive of fighting caste oppression to their soldiery shall be far-fetched and unhistorical.
The East India Company fought and won several battles from the first one in Plassey in 1757 before the last battle of the Anglo-Maratha war. Obviously, all of them were not against the Peshwas. Most of them were not even against the Hindus. They were simply wars between the two ruling powers, which their soldiers fought just as their duty. To make them appear as anti-caste or anti-religion will not only be factually incorrect, but also an erroneous understanding of historical caste. Caste, until after the late 19th century when there was a substantial spread of education among the Dalits, has been the life-world of people. They took caste as a natural order and their oppression as the fate that they had to meekly endure. Therefore, there was no question of any resistance to caste, leave apart physical war against them. Contrary to such myths of bravery, there is no evidence of any militant resistance the Dalits ever posed against the Brahmanic oppression.
With regard to formation of warring armies, they were not purely composed on communal lines. While the Dalit soldiers may be relatively in large numbers in British army, it is not that they did not exist in Muslim or Maratha armies. As with communities, all castes existed in all the armies. In the Battle of Koregaon, one of the three wings of the Peshawa infantry was Arabs, which had reportedly fought most fiercely and had most casualties. What could be their motivation? Did they want the Peshwa’s Brahmanic rule to triumph? The fact is that they simply fought as soldiers for their masters, as the Dalits did for theirs. It would be grossly erroneous to attribute loftier motives to them than this.
But when Babasaheb Ambedkar painted the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the battle of Mahar soldiers against their caste oppression in Peshwa rule, he was creating a pure myth. As myths are required to build movements, he perhaps saw its necessity then. But after a century, when it solidifies into a quasi-history and tends to push Dalits deeper into an identitarian marshland, it should become a worrisome matter. Many Dalit organisations recently formed a joint front to observe the 200th anniversary of this battle as a campaign to launch an attack on the new Peshwai, the rising Brahmanic rule of the Hindutva forces. Their long marches culminated into an Elgar Parishad (conference) at the Shaniwarwada at Pune on December 31. While the resolve to fight the Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive insofar as it reinforces identitarian tendencies whereas the necessity is to transcend them.
As regards history, it is a fact that when the East India Company developed its military aspirations, it recruited Dalits in disproportionately large numbers, perhaps for their unflinching loyalty and faithfulness and also because they were cheaply available. One finds disproportionate numbers of the Namshudras in Bengal, the Parayas in Madras and the Mahars in Maharashtra in its army. If the Dalits wanted to claim significant contribution to the establishment of the British Raj in India, it may not be as such incorrect. But to attribute motive of fighting caste oppression to their soldiery shall be far-fetched and unhistorical.
The East India Company fought and won several battles from the first one in Plassey in 1757 before the last battle of the Anglo-Maratha war. Obviously, all of them were not against the Peshwas. Most of them were not even against the Hindus. They were simply wars between the two ruling powers, which their soldiers fought just as their duty. To make them appear as anti-caste or anti-religion will not only be factually incorrect, but also an erroneous understanding of historical caste. Caste, until after the late 19th century when there was a substantial spread of education among the Dalits, has been the life-world of people. They took caste as a natural order and their oppression as the fate that they had to meekly endure. Therefore, there was no question of any resistance to caste, leave apart physical war against them. Contrary to such myths of bravery, there is no evidence of any militant resistance the Dalits ever posed against the Brahmanic oppression.
With regard to formation of warring armies, they were not purely composed on communal lines. While the Dalit soldiers may be relatively in large numbers in British army, it is not that they did not exist in Muslim or Maratha armies. As with communities, all castes existed in all the armies. In the Battle of Koregaon, one of the three wings of the Peshawa infantry was Arabs, which had reportedly fought most fiercely and had most casualties. What could be their motivation? Did they want the Peshwa’s Brahmanic rule to triumph? The fact is that they simply fought as soldiers for their masters, as the Dalits did for theirs. It would be grossly erroneous to attribute loftier motives to them than this.
Anglo-Maratha war. Credit: Wikipedia
Before the battle of Koregaon on January 1, 1818, the Peshwas had been reduced to weaklings by the earlier two Anglo-Maratha wars. As a matter of fact, the Peshwa Bajirao II had fled Pune and was attempting to attack Pune from outside. Peshwa’s army comprised 20,000 cavalry and 8,000 infantry, out of which around 2,000 men, divided into three infantry parties each comprising 600 Arabs, Gosains and soldiers, mounted the attack. The majority of the attackers were Arabs, reputed to be the finest among the Peshwa soldiers. The Company troops comprised 834 men, including around 500 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which was manned predominantly by Mahar soldiers. Although there is no record of their exact number, it is obvious that all of them were not Mahars. Even going by the casualties, the majority of those died in the battle (27 out of 49) were not Mahars. The Peshwa army ultimately withdrew, fearing the arrival of a larger British force led by General Joseph Smith. In view of these factual details, it may be misleading to portray the battle as Mahars’ vengeance against the Peshwas’ Brahmanic rule.
There is no evidence that after the defeat of Peshwai, there was any relief that accrued to Mahars. As a matter of fact, their caste oppression continued unabated. Rather, as hinted earlier, the ungrateful British stopped their recruitment to the army, refusing to acknowledge their past bravery. They ignored their pleas to restore recruitment until threatened by the First World War, in the wake of which they restarted their recruitment. There is no dispute that the British colonial rule brought Dalits numerous benefits, to the extent that the very birth of the Dalit movement may be attributable to it. But it must simultaneously be understood that it was unintended and primarily dictated by their colonial logic. It is unfortunate that Dalits blind themselves to this reality with their identity blinkers.
It is equally incorrect to say that since the Peshwa forces belonged to the Maratha confederacy, they were the nationalist forces, and the defeating British forces were the imperialists. To see historical facts through the spectacles of a non-existent nation is equally condemnable. There was no concept of an Indian nation; as a matter of fact, this concept eludes us even to this day. Paradoxically, India itself is by and large a gift of British rule, having forged a political unity of vast landmass of the subcontinent. Those who have been driving it as a nation for their selfish gains are indeed debauched like Peshwas and are the biggest anti-nationals.
The Dalits do need to fight this new Peshwai recreated by the Hindutva marauders. For that, they better open their eyes to see the reality, rather than an ostrich-like look into the mythical past and imagine their greatness.
There is no evidence that after the defeat of Peshwai, there was any relief that accrued to Mahars. As a matter of fact, their caste oppression continued unabated. Rather, as hinted earlier, the ungrateful British stopped their recruitment to the army, refusing to acknowledge their past bravery. They ignored their pleas to restore recruitment until threatened by the First World War, in the wake of which they restarted their recruitment. There is no dispute that the British colonial rule brought Dalits numerous benefits, to the extent that the very birth of the Dalit movement may be attributable to it. But it must simultaneously be understood that it was unintended and primarily dictated by their colonial logic. It is unfortunate that Dalits blind themselves to this reality with their identity blinkers.
It is equally incorrect to say that since the Peshwa forces belonged to the Maratha confederacy, they were the nationalist forces, and the defeating British forces were the imperialists. To see historical facts through the spectacles of a non-existent nation is equally condemnable. There was no concept of an Indian nation; as a matter of fact, this concept eludes us even to this day. Paradoxically, India itself is by and large a gift of British rule, having forged a political unity of vast landmass of the subcontinent. Those who have been driving it as a nation for their selfish gains are indeed debauched like Peshwas and are the biggest anti-nationals.
The Dalits do need to fight this new Peshwai recreated by the Hindutva marauders. For that, they better open their eyes to see the reality, rather than an ostrich-like look into the mythical past and imagine their greatness.
Wednesday, 29 November 2017
Beware the Tory cult that’s steering Brexit
Simon Kuper in The FT
In South Africa in 1856, the spirits of three ancestors visited a 15-year-old Xhosa girl called Nongqawuse. According to her uncle, who spoke for her, the spirits wanted the Xhosa to destroy their crops and cattle. The tribe’s ancestors would then return and drive the white settlers into the ocean. New, beautiful cattle would appear. The sun would turn red. The Xhosa duly began killing cattle and burning crops. This type of self-destructive quest for riches and freedom is now known as a “cargo cult”. (The word “cargo” denotes the western goods the tribe hopes to obtain.)
In South Africa in 1856, the spirits of three ancestors visited a 15-year-old Xhosa girl called Nongqawuse. According to her uncle, who spoke for her, the spirits wanted the Xhosa to destroy their crops and cattle. The tribe’s ancestors would then return and drive the white settlers into the ocean. New, beautiful cattle would appear. The sun would turn red. The Xhosa duly began killing cattle and burning crops. This type of self-destructive quest for riches and freedom is now known as a “cargo cult”. (The word “cargo” denotes the western goods the tribe hopes to obtain.)
Brexit voters come in endless varieties. However, the particular sect now steering Brexit — the Europhobe wing of the Conservative party — is turning into a cargo cult.
At the heart of it is ancestor worship. There’s a widespread belief in Britain that “the past is the real us”, says Catherine Fieschi, head of the Counterpoint think-tank. Perhaps no other country has as happy a relationship with its chequered history. And the self-appointed guardian of this relationship is the Conservative party.
Hardly any of today’s Tories actually remember Britain’s golden age of ruling India and winning the second world war. Even the party’s ageing members are merely the children of the Dunkirk generation. Economically, they have been the luckiest cohort in British history. But they and many other Tory MPs feel the shame of late birth. They disdain the UK’s tame, vegetarian, low-stakes, Brussels-based, post-imperial incarnation, which in 70 years offered nothing more glorious than the Falklands war. Now they have their own heroic project: Brexit.
Cargo cults typically start when the tribe feels it is in decline, surpassed by foreigners. In Melanesia, the Pacific region with a tradition of cargo cults, locals came to feel like “rubbish men” (the phrase is pidgin English) in comparison with rich Europeans. “A recurring feature of these cults is a belief that Europeans in some past age tricked Melanesians and are withholding from them their rightful share of material goods,” writes Paul Sillitoe, an anthropologist at Durham University.
To get these goods, the tribe has to mimic modern rituals that seem to have made advanced societies rich. Melanesians built airfields to receive the ancestors’ cargo. The Brexiter flies around signing trade deals. Meanwhile, the inferior goods of today’s “rubbish men” must be destroyed. Hence the eagerness in this Tory sect (but not among the British population at large) to shut off trade with Europe. If the correct rituals are followed, the ancestors will return. The sect leader, Boris Johnson, in his biography of Winston Churchill, sometimes seems to cast himself as the reincarnation of the great “glory-chasing, goalmouth-hanging opportunist”.
But the cargo cult is threatened by non-believers. They can ruin things by angering the ancestors. For 15 months, Nongqawuse blamed the failure of her prophecy on the few Xhosa — amagogotya, or “stingy ones” — who refused to kill their cattle.
Now, leading Conservatives are hunting British amagogotya. Chris Heaton-Harris seeks to out Remainer university teachers, Jacob Rees-Mogg castigates the BBC and the Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney as “enemies of Brexit”, while John Redwood urges the Treasury “to have more realistic, optimistic forecasts”. The sect also suspects Theresa May and Brexit secretary David Davis of being closet amagogotya. That is probably accurate: as Britain’s point-people in the negotiations, these two sense that cattle-killing might not be a winning strategy.
Sillitoe says it’s wrong to dismiss cargo cultists as “irrational and deluded people”. In fact, he writes, “Cargo cults are a rational indigenous response to traumatic culture contact with western society.” Comical as the participants might seem, “they are neither illogical nor stupid”.
Certainly the Conservative cult follows its own logic. The aim isn’t simply to reduce immigration or boost the economy. Rather, Brexit reaffirms the tribe’s ancestral values against a disappointing modernity. The difficulty of Brexiting is part of the appeal: only a great tribe can renew itself through sacrifice. The stalling of talks with the EU is welcomed as a ritual re-enactment of Britain’s past glorious conflicts. Hence the ovations for any speaker at last month’s Conservative conference who urged walking out with no deal.
A recent blog by Pete North, a founder of the Leave Alliance, beautifully sums up many of these attitudes. North, who favoured staying in the European single market, predicts Brexit will send Britain into “a 10-year recession”. He writes: “After years of the left bleating about austerity, they are about to find out what it actually means.” And yet, he continues, “My gut instinct tells me that culturally it will be a vast improvement on the status quo.” He says modern Britons have become “spoiled and self-indulgent . . . in the absence of any real challenges or imperatives to grow as a people”. As the psychiatrist says of the TV character Basil Fawlty, there’s enough material here for an entire conference.
After the cattle-killing, many Xhosa starved to death, while flocks of vultures reportedly watched from above. Refugees who fled to the British Cape Colony were forced into serf-like labour contracts. But Nongqawuse lived on for another 40 years, albeit in exile, under a changed name.
Monday, 14 March 2016
Lecture on Nationalism at JNU #5 - Nivedita Menon
This attack on Nivedita Menon
Mary E John in The Hindu
A notable feature of the university protests that have rocked the nation in recent times is the prominent presence of women. Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula’s mother Radhika was hounded by the media, and her personal life vilified in the attempt to prove that Rohith was not a Dalit. The faculty members from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who came to the Patiala House courts for JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing and were attacked by irate ‘patriotic lawyers’ were mostly women. In Allahabad, the first woman president of the Allahabad University Students’ Union, Richa Singh, has faced physical intimidation from her political opponents who are now seeking other ways to oust her from the university. The latest in this series is JNU professor Nivedita Menon against whom a concerted campaign seems to have been launched, including media attacks and malicious police complaints.
One of the events that JNU teachers conducted in solidarity with students in the course of the campaign against JNU as a supposed den of anti-nationals was a series of lectures on nationalism. Professor Menon delivered a lecture in Hindi called “Nation, a daily plebiscite” (see video above) in which she made the argument that the formation of one nation does not automatically end all nationalist aspirations. Drawing attention to histories of nation formation as crucial to understanding present-day conflicts, she also discussed Kashmir’s complicated history of accession to India.
These lectures are available on YouTube, and some days afterwards, a TV channel started a campaign, continuously playing video clips taken out of context (including a clip from a speech at a political event in 2014), calling Prof. Menon anti-national, and creating an atmosphere of threat, intimidation and incitement to mob violence. In addition, according to media reports, two police complaints have been filed against her in Delhi by organisations linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a complaint lodged against her in a court in Kanpur. The complaints against her are, in effect, part of a right-wing offensive to lay claim to nationalism by attacking any mode of dissent as anti-national.
Does this mean that men are ‘patriots’ and women ‘dissenters’? Any such claim is immediately demolished, of course, by the powerful presence of militant right-wing women like Uma Bharti and generations of ‘sadhvis’ known for their incendiary demagoguery, from Rithambhara to Prachi. So there are plenty of women ‘patriots’. The real distinction is that it is those women who lay claim to the legacy of feminism who are being singled out as ‘dissenters’. Why is this happening? Why are feminist scholars like Prof. Menon being targeted? What exactly is Indian feminism and what are the forms of dissent that feminists in India have adopted? How have feminists become leaders in the present struggles over democracy in India and why is this being perceived as dangerous?
Feminism in India
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
Second, we as feminists have had to learn over and over again that our movements can only grow if we do not claim immunity from our own tools of critique and dissent. Some of the fiercest debates witnessed in the Indian women’s movement have therefore been internal ones, addressed to each other. Prominent examples of such debates include those over a uniform civil code; over the need and direction for reserved seats for women in Parliament and legislatures; and over how best to combat the scourge of female foeticide.
It is therefore particularly shameful, but also revealing, that sections of the electronic media and countless vicious trolls on social media have tried to instil fear by singling out Prof. Menon among other teachers as an alleged ‘anti-national’. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with her writings should know better. Prof. Menon has drawn from prior scholarship (both in India and abroad) to lay out why, in fact, simple universal theories of women’s subordination will not work in contexts like India. By tracing the effects of colonial rule and the many responses to it, she has demonstrated how both community rights and individual rights have played themselves out in our history, and continue to have a massive impact on women’s equality and freedom to this very day. Some of her finest work takes issue with other feminists in offering a dissenting interpretation of the problems women face. Will a blanket demand for one-third reservation of seats actually be the best strategy for the women’s movement, or should we ‘call the bluff’ of those who demanded a sub-quota? Equally provocatively, might the sheer demand to combat sexual violence against women rebound against the basic freedom from violence that the women’s movement seeks to protect? Such examples could be multiplied. Lest anyone be misled, these are all feminist arguments that work through a form of dissent that simultaneously upholds feminist ways of seeing and feminist forms of struggle.
Does this mean that everything that a scholar like Prof. Menon writes or believes should demand our assent? Not at all. I cannot think of anyone who is more open to disagreement and welcoming of constructive dissent, and who, in fact, encourages this attitude from students and colleagues alike.
An undemocratic mindset
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
Such campaigns are also revealing because they inadvertently recognise the transformational potential of feminism in India today. For feminism believes that genuine gender equality can only come about where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed for all, and where no other forms of oppression can flourish. This is the legacy that feminists in India have been striving for so long to bring to fruition, and which is therefore perceived as being so dangerous. This is also the tradition that Prof. Menon has embodied with integrity and force. And if there are those who would attack such a feminism, they should at least have the courage to attack us all.
Sunday, 22 November 2015
Don’t ignore the saner voices of moderate Muslims
SA Aiyar in The Times of India
There is much in common between those who hit Paris last week and Mumbai on 26/11. Let nobody pretend, like elements of the left, that Paris was just revenge against Western imperialism. ISIS aims to become the biggest imperialist of all, re-creating the ancient Islamic empire from Portugal to China. The Ottoman caliphate once came close to conquering the whole of Europe, and ISIS would like to finish the job. It claims a divine right to kill those who come in the way — Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans, Indians or anyone else.
UP home minister Azam Khan outraged many by making excuses for the Paris killings. He said this was a reaction to the actions of global superpowers like America and Russia. “History will decide who is the terrorist. Killing innocents whether in Syria or Paris is a highly deplorable act… But if you created such a situation, you have to face the backlash too.”
This determination to justify the attack, while grudgingly condemning it, is hypocritical communalism. It has parallels with the grudging criticism by BJP leaders of the lynching of the Dadri Muslim accused of eating beef. Tarun Vijay wrote that the lynching would indeed be terrible if it turned out that he had only eaten mutton. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma claims it was just “an accident.” Former MLA Nawab Singh Nagar said those who dared hurt the feelings of the dominant Thakurs should realize the consequences, and claimed that the murderous mob consisted of “innocent children” below 15 years of age. Srichand Sharma said violence was inevitable if Muslims disrespected Hindu sentiments.
The inability of these BJP leaders to condemn the lynching outright is matched by Azam Khan’s inability to condemn the Paris attackers outright. Communalists cherry-pick events from history to claim they are victims, with the right to vengeful retribution. Sorry, but groups across the world have been both attackers and victims. Through history, imperial conquest, killing and loot was considered great (hence Alexander the Great, or Peter the Great). Modern notions of civil rights, secularism and nationhood did not exist. Might was right, indeed greatness.
And so there were Muslims who conquered and plundered, and other Muslims who were at the receiving end. Christian conquerors created large empires by the sword, and were in turn subjugated by others. Hindu, Chinese, Mongol, Arab and African kings killed and looted for personal aggrandizement, and in turn were killed and looted.
Communalists harp on events in which they were victims, ignoring others where they were victimizers. ISIS and Azam Khan repeat the victimhood theme of Muslims in the 20th century, complaining of being bombed and dominated by the West, and claiming that revenge is both justifiable and inevitable. They are unable to see themselves also as victimizers who slaughtered and looted for centuries, from Portugal to China. Nor will they accept that victims from Portugal to China have a right to revenge.
Right message: Last week’s fatwa against ISIS signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis deserved more coverage
A sane, safe society is not possible if every community wants to avenge events of the past. Every community needs to accept that it has been both a victimizer and victim, and leave the past behind. Some communities have succeeded in doing this — notably Germany after World War II — and that has been the basis for civilized progress. The contrast with ISIS could not be greater.
While the media has rightly focused on Azam Khan, they have ignored the much saner response of moderate Muslims. It’s wrong to constantly highlight communal Muslims and downplay nationalist ones.
TOI last Wednesday reported “the biggest fatwa ever” against ISIS, signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis. The fatwa, which condemned ISIS categorically as “inhuman” and “un-lslamic”, has been forwarded by Abdur Rahman Anjaria of the Islamic Defence Cybercell to the UN, several foreign governments and the Prime Minister’s Office. Anjaria says the fatwa is the biggest ever initiative by Indian ulema to reject the dangerous ideology of ISIS, which “has disgraced the name of Allah and the Prophet….It is the duty of every Muslim to join the fight to defeat it.”
I think this news should have been on page one in every newspaper. Instead it was hidden in the inside pages of the Times of India. So was another small report on a protest meeting in Delhi by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to condemn the strikes in Paris, Turkey and Lebanon in the name of Islam. Without naming Azam Khan, its general secretary, Maulana Madani, said “We completely dismiss the action-reaction theory propounded by some persons.”
Prime Minister Modi needs to highlight and cite such moderate views. It’s not enough to say India needs social harmony. It’s also necessary to give kudos to those who promote that moderation.
There is much in common between those who hit Paris last week and Mumbai on 26/11. Let nobody pretend, like elements of the left, that Paris was just revenge against Western imperialism. ISIS aims to become the biggest imperialist of all, re-creating the ancient Islamic empire from Portugal to China. The Ottoman caliphate once came close to conquering the whole of Europe, and ISIS would like to finish the job. It claims a divine right to kill those who come in the way — Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans, Indians or anyone else.
UP home minister Azam Khan outraged many by making excuses for the Paris killings. He said this was a reaction to the actions of global superpowers like America and Russia. “History will decide who is the terrorist. Killing innocents whether in Syria or Paris is a highly deplorable act… But if you created such a situation, you have to face the backlash too.”
This determination to justify the attack, while grudgingly condemning it, is hypocritical communalism. It has parallels with the grudging criticism by BJP leaders of the lynching of the Dadri Muslim accused of eating beef. Tarun Vijay wrote that the lynching would indeed be terrible if it turned out that he had only eaten mutton. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma claims it was just “an accident.” Former MLA Nawab Singh Nagar said those who dared hurt the feelings of the dominant Thakurs should realize the consequences, and claimed that the murderous mob consisted of “innocent children” below 15 years of age. Srichand Sharma said violence was inevitable if Muslims disrespected Hindu sentiments.
The inability of these BJP leaders to condemn the lynching outright is matched by Azam Khan’s inability to condemn the Paris attackers outright. Communalists cherry-pick events from history to claim they are victims, with the right to vengeful retribution. Sorry, but groups across the world have been both attackers and victims. Through history, imperial conquest, killing and loot was considered great (hence Alexander the Great, or Peter the Great). Modern notions of civil rights, secularism and nationhood did not exist. Might was right, indeed greatness.
And so there were Muslims who conquered and plundered, and other Muslims who were at the receiving end. Christian conquerors created large empires by the sword, and were in turn subjugated by others. Hindu, Chinese, Mongol, Arab and African kings killed and looted for personal aggrandizement, and in turn were killed and looted.
Communalists harp on events in which they were victims, ignoring others where they were victimizers. ISIS and Azam Khan repeat the victimhood theme of Muslims in the 20th century, complaining of being bombed and dominated by the West, and claiming that revenge is both justifiable and inevitable. They are unable to see themselves also as victimizers who slaughtered and looted for centuries, from Portugal to China. Nor will they accept that victims from Portugal to China have a right to revenge.
Right message: Last week’s fatwa against ISIS signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis deserved more coverageA sane, safe society is not possible if every community wants to avenge events of the past. Every community needs to accept that it has been both a victimizer and victim, and leave the past behind. Some communities have succeeded in doing this — notably Germany after World War II — and that has been the basis for civilized progress. The contrast with ISIS could not be greater.
While the media has rightly focused on Azam Khan, they have ignored the much saner response of moderate Muslims. It’s wrong to constantly highlight communal Muslims and downplay nationalist ones.
TOI last Wednesday reported “the biggest fatwa ever” against ISIS, signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis. The fatwa, which condemned ISIS categorically as “inhuman” and “un-lslamic”, has been forwarded by Abdur Rahman Anjaria of the Islamic Defence Cybercell to the UN, several foreign governments and the Prime Minister’s Office. Anjaria says the fatwa is the biggest ever initiative by Indian ulema to reject the dangerous ideology of ISIS, which “has disgraced the name of Allah and the Prophet….It is the duty of every Muslim to join the fight to defeat it.”
I think this news should have been on page one in every newspaper. Instead it was hidden in the inside pages of the Times of India. So was another small report on a protest meeting in Delhi by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to condemn the strikes in Paris, Turkey and Lebanon in the name of Islam. Without naming Azam Khan, its general secretary, Maulana Madani, said “We completely dismiss the action-reaction theory propounded by some persons.”
Prime Minister Modi needs to highlight and cite such moderate views. It’s not enough to say India needs social harmony. It’s also necessary to give kudos to those who promote that moderation.
Sunday, 13 September 2015
Jeremy Corbyn's victory means Labour's living dead have been vanquished - and English politics has come to life again
Tariq Ali in The Independent
The ironies of history never fail to surprise. Measured by any criteria, Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader in the history of the Labour Party. He understands that those who do evil abroad are unlikely to do much good at home. He is the staunchest anti-imperialist Member of Parliament.
A contrast with his political forebears proves this assertion. Keir Hardie’s socialism floundered on the battlefields of the First World War. Clement Attlee was a great reformer domestically, but abroad his government approved the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harold Wilson redistributed wealth but supported the US in Vietnam; Michael Foot as Leader of the Opposition was a rabid supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s war to retrieve the Malvinas/Falklands.
The Thatcherite Blair/Brown twins agreed to share power thus creating two power-hungry factions with no political differences except that Tony Blair hungered for both power and money. He gave us the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, while Gordon Brown was oblivious to the vulnerabilities of financialised capitalism and spent billions of taxpayers’ money bailing out banks that might have (after paying the depositors) been best left to croak. Both bureaucratised the Labour Party by neutering the party conference, reducing it to a tacky version of the US Democrats. All show, no substance. They denuded constituency Labour parties of the right to select their own prospective parliamentary candidates. This was the only way they could transform a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) into a collection of over-promoted office boys and girls together with bandwagon careerists.
Three of them were on regular display in the campaign to succeed another of their number, Ed Miliband. What is ironic is that Miliband’s reform of the party’s electoral system was designed to appease the Blairites and their media chums by eliminating what was left of trade union power in the party and opening it up to outsiders in the lame hope that more congenial voters would ensure the domination of extreme centre politics.
So confident were they, that a few Blairites gave Corbyn the necessary parliamentary votes to stand as a token lefty and reveal the party’s generosity and attachment to diversity. Who would have thought that it would backfire so sensationally? Certainly not Corbyn. Nor anyone else. The Guardian came out for Yvette Cooper, its Blairite columnists denouncing the dinosaur from Islington, forgetting that, for younger folk, dinosaurs are a much loved and missed species. The Daily Mirror backed Andy Burnham.
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COMMENT: TODAY IS OUR DARKEST HOUR – WE HAVE BECOME UNELECTABLE
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No one who knows or sees and hears Corbyn can doubt his authenticity. I have shared numerous platforms with him over the past 40 years. On the key issues he has remained steadfast. What appealed to the young, who transformed the campaign into a social movement, was precisely what alienated the traditional political and media cliques. Corbyn was untutored, discursive, too left-wing, wanted to reverse the privatisations of the railways and utilities, etc. Many who registered to vote for him did so because of this and to break from the bland, unimaginative and visionless New Labour.
Corbyn had underestimated the changes in Scotland, but these actually helped his campaign. A Scottish National Party cohort in parliament that wanted to ditch the redundant and over-priced Trident; an electrifying maiden speech by 20-year-old Mhairi Black that took on the Tories. All this helped the Corbyn campaign. If Scotland, why not England?
As Labour members elect their most left-wing leader, the overwhelming majority of the PLP is in the death grip of the right. Anyone listening to Sadiq Khan’s speech after being elected as Labour’s choice for London mayor would have noticed the difference with the Corbyn campaign. Khan’s clichés were a reminder of how isolated Corbyn will be in the PLP. Corbyn will call on the party to unite behind him. But there is no getting away from the fact that the PLP majority is opposed to his policies. I guess they will try to tire him out and force compromise after compromise to discredit him (remember Alexis Tsipras in Greece), but I doubt they’ll succeed.
Corbyn understands the key issues on which no compromise is possible. He’s been campaigning for them long enough. His closeness to the Green agenda is not a secret, and the single Green MP now has a solid supporter in the new Labour leader. Taking back public transport from the profiteers is another element; cheap public housing for the young and the old will help rebuild communities. A robust tax regime that reverses the decades of privileges afforded the rich will unleash a fierce offensive by the City and its media and political acolytes, but it’s considered absolutely necessary.
Since the late Seventies, the redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich and the very rich has risen faster in Britain than in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Corbyn is not interested in power for its own sake or to amass personal wealth.
Within the party, Corbyn will undoubtedly move to restore democracy. It’s the only way for Labour supporters in the country to be properly represented in parliament. None of this is easy and that is why a powerful movement, a new model campaigning army outside Parliament remains essential. It is the only way to ensure that the Corbyn agenda is fulfilled. None of this will happen overnight, and supporters have to be patient and not scream from the sidelines.
Some Labour MPs will desert. After all, they happily supported austerity. But, whatever happens, it will no longer be possible for the self-censoring BBC to keep the views espoused by the new Labour leader off the screen. The living dead have been vanquished, if temporarily. English politics has come to life again.
The ironies of history never fail to surprise. Measured by any criteria, Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader in the history of the Labour Party. He understands that those who do evil abroad are unlikely to do much good at home. He is the staunchest anti-imperialist Member of Parliament.
A contrast with his political forebears proves this assertion. Keir Hardie’s socialism floundered on the battlefields of the First World War. Clement Attlee was a great reformer domestically, but abroad his government approved the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harold Wilson redistributed wealth but supported the US in Vietnam; Michael Foot as Leader of the Opposition was a rabid supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s war to retrieve the Malvinas/Falklands.
The Thatcherite Blair/Brown twins agreed to share power thus creating two power-hungry factions with no political differences except that Tony Blair hungered for both power and money. He gave us the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, while Gordon Brown was oblivious to the vulnerabilities of financialised capitalism and spent billions of taxpayers’ money bailing out banks that might have (after paying the depositors) been best left to croak. Both bureaucratised the Labour Party by neutering the party conference, reducing it to a tacky version of the US Democrats. All show, no substance. They denuded constituency Labour parties of the right to select their own prospective parliamentary candidates. This was the only way they could transform a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) into a collection of over-promoted office boys and girls together with bandwagon careerists.
Three of them were on regular display in the campaign to succeed another of their number, Ed Miliband. What is ironic is that Miliband’s reform of the party’s electoral system was designed to appease the Blairites and their media chums by eliminating what was left of trade union power in the party and opening it up to outsiders in the lame hope that more congenial voters would ensure the domination of extreme centre politics.
So confident were they, that a few Blairites gave Corbyn the necessary parliamentary votes to stand as a token lefty and reveal the party’s generosity and attachment to diversity. Who would have thought that it would backfire so sensationally? Certainly not Corbyn. Nor anyone else. The Guardian came out for Yvette Cooper, its Blairite columnists denouncing the dinosaur from Islington, forgetting that, for younger folk, dinosaurs are a much loved and missed species. The Daily Mirror backed Andy Burnham.
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READ MORE:
COMMENT: TODAY IS OUR DARKEST HOUR – WE HAVE BECOME UNELECTABLE
-----
No one who knows or sees and hears Corbyn can doubt his authenticity. I have shared numerous platforms with him over the past 40 years. On the key issues he has remained steadfast. What appealed to the young, who transformed the campaign into a social movement, was precisely what alienated the traditional political and media cliques. Corbyn was untutored, discursive, too left-wing, wanted to reverse the privatisations of the railways and utilities, etc. Many who registered to vote for him did so because of this and to break from the bland, unimaginative and visionless New Labour.
Corbyn had underestimated the changes in Scotland, but these actually helped his campaign. A Scottish National Party cohort in parliament that wanted to ditch the redundant and over-priced Trident; an electrifying maiden speech by 20-year-old Mhairi Black that took on the Tories. All this helped the Corbyn campaign. If Scotland, why not England?
As Labour members elect their most left-wing leader, the overwhelming majority of the PLP is in the death grip of the right. Anyone listening to Sadiq Khan’s speech after being elected as Labour’s choice for London mayor would have noticed the difference with the Corbyn campaign. Khan’s clichés were a reminder of how isolated Corbyn will be in the PLP. Corbyn will call on the party to unite behind him. But there is no getting away from the fact that the PLP majority is opposed to his policies. I guess they will try to tire him out and force compromise after compromise to discredit him (remember Alexis Tsipras in Greece), but I doubt they’ll succeed.
Corbyn understands the key issues on which no compromise is possible. He’s been campaigning for them long enough. His closeness to the Green agenda is not a secret, and the single Green MP now has a solid supporter in the new Labour leader. Taking back public transport from the profiteers is another element; cheap public housing for the young and the old will help rebuild communities. A robust tax regime that reverses the decades of privileges afforded the rich will unleash a fierce offensive by the City and its media and political acolytes, but it’s considered absolutely necessary.
Since the late Seventies, the redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich and the very rich has risen faster in Britain than in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Corbyn is not interested in power for its own sake or to amass personal wealth.
Within the party, Corbyn will undoubtedly move to restore democracy. It’s the only way for Labour supporters in the country to be properly represented in parliament. None of this is easy and that is why a powerful movement, a new model campaigning army outside Parliament remains essential. It is the only way to ensure that the Corbyn agenda is fulfilled. None of this will happen overnight, and supporters have to be patient and not scream from the sidelines.
Some Labour MPs will desert. After all, they happily supported austerity. But, whatever happens, it will no longer be possible for the self-censoring BBC to keep the views espoused by the new Labour leader off the screen. The living dead have been vanquished, if temporarily. English politics has come to life again.
Tuesday, 21 April 2015
Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody
Frankie Boyle in The Guardian
The anti-immigration election rhetoric is perverse – we fear the arrival of people that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them
‘Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents’
I sometimes wonder if satire has reached a nadir in Britain because British society has itself become a parody of itself. The Chipping Norton Set: the prime minister, a tabloid editor and a Roger Mellie-ish TV icon all conveniently living in the same little town and taking turns at being the centre of scandal, feels like a novel Martin Amis bashed out because his conservatory was leaking. Likewise there has been an element of tragic irony this week as the growing drumbeat of anti-immigration election rhetoric has been punctuated by the mass drowning of migrants.
The SNP’s growing popularity has prompted a little low-level press racism of the kilts-and-porridge variety, as an English electorate struggles with the idea that there will be Scottish people holding the reins of power for the first time since the last government. Nicola Sturgeon has been called “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, by someone who hasn’t met any other Scottish women. Of course, it’s difficult to explain to English people that we have always had their best interests at heart – if we hadn’t invented penicillin they would have all died in a Greek airport departure lounge. There have already been a couple of amusing moments in the campaign when leaders standing in front of union jacks expounding on the need for a £100bn missile system have taken time out to warn us about the dangers of nationalism. Personally, I think it might be invigorating to have a hung parliament where, before any law was passed, the government had to have an argument with a Scottish person.
“Gosh, you seem awfully good at this. Have you had some practice?”
“I’m not actually part of the Scottish negotiating team, I’m just here to take your drinks order …”
“Ah, right, could I have a cup of tea?”
“NO.”
Ed Miliband’s anti-immigration stance is odd: it’s hard to vote for a man who doesn’t have the confidence to defend his own existence. It seems that his main argument against immigrants is that his dad raised a befuddled fuckwit. Could you hand Labour’s “controls on immigration” mug to a guest? There’s nothing like jollying up a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning by making your neighbours feel like the pakoras were a little unwelcome. Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents. Unless you drink hot Tizer from a coffee cup, the drink inside that mug will be an immigrant. The logic of a receptacle for hot beverages provided by slavery and colonisation being anti-immigrant bears no more examination than a pair of homophobic Speedos.
Then there’s Ukip, like someone made a heavy-handed version of The Thick of It for ITV. They don’t want Britain to be ruled by foreigners – with the notable exception of the royal family. They want an Australian-style points system for immigration. Who knows what this will look like, but my suspicion is “being white” will be like catching the snitch in Quidditch. If we have become a self-satirising society, Ukip are just the broader end, the easy slapstick laughs. They even have a porn-star candidate. Of course, he isn’t the first MP to have filmed himself having sex. But he is the first to do so with an adult, whom he allowed to live.
Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.
In a further nod to satire, Comic Relief this year focused on Malawi and Uganda. I didn’t see any acknowledgement that Britain had been the colonial power in those countries. “Thanks for the gold, lads, thanks for the diamonds. We had a whip-round and got you a fishing rod.”
A lot of racism comes from projection. White Americans have a stereotype of black people being criminals purely because they can’t acknowledge that it was actually white people that stole them from Africa in the first place. Today, you have the spectacle of black men being gunned down by cops who, by way of mitigation, release footage to show that the victims were running away. This is what happens when you don’t understand or even acknowledge history. You end up in a situation where, when slavery is the elephant in the room in your relationship with African Americans, you think it’s OK to say that you killed one of them because he was trying to escape.
Britain is in a similar place with colonialism. We have streets named after slave owners. We profited from a vile crime and feel no shame. We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don’t understand. It is British people that don’t learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.
The anti-immigration election rhetoric is perverse – we fear the arrival of people that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them
‘Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents’
I sometimes wonder if satire has reached a nadir in Britain because British society has itself become a parody of itself. The Chipping Norton Set: the prime minister, a tabloid editor and a Roger Mellie-ish TV icon all conveniently living in the same little town and taking turns at being the centre of scandal, feels like a novel Martin Amis bashed out because his conservatory was leaking. Likewise there has been an element of tragic irony this week as the growing drumbeat of anti-immigration election rhetoric has been punctuated by the mass drowning of migrants.
The SNP’s growing popularity has prompted a little low-level press racism of the kilts-and-porridge variety, as an English electorate struggles with the idea that there will be Scottish people holding the reins of power for the first time since the last government. Nicola Sturgeon has been called “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, by someone who hasn’t met any other Scottish women. Of course, it’s difficult to explain to English people that we have always had their best interests at heart – if we hadn’t invented penicillin they would have all died in a Greek airport departure lounge. There have already been a couple of amusing moments in the campaign when leaders standing in front of union jacks expounding on the need for a £100bn missile system have taken time out to warn us about the dangers of nationalism. Personally, I think it might be invigorating to have a hung parliament where, before any law was passed, the government had to have an argument with a Scottish person.
“Gosh, you seem awfully good at this. Have you had some practice?”
“I’m not actually part of the Scottish negotiating team, I’m just here to take your drinks order …”
“Ah, right, could I have a cup of tea?”
“NO.”
Ed Miliband’s anti-immigration stance is odd: it’s hard to vote for a man who doesn’t have the confidence to defend his own existence. It seems that his main argument against immigrants is that his dad raised a befuddled fuckwit. Could you hand Labour’s “controls on immigration” mug to a guest? There’s nothing like jollying up a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning by making your neighbours feel like the pakoras were a little unwelcome. Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents. Unless you drink hot Tizer from a coffee cup, the drink inside that mug will be an immigrant. The logic of a receptacle for hot beverages provided by slavery and colonisation being anti-immigrant bears no more examination than a pair of homophobic Speedos.
Then there’s Ukip, like someone made a heavy-handed version of The Thick of It for ITV. They don’t want Britain to be ruled by foreigners – with the notable exception of the royal family. They want an Australian-style points system for immigration. Who knows what this will look like, but my suspicion is “being white” will be like catching the snitch in Quidditch. If we have become a self-satirising society, Ukip are just the broader end, the easy slapstick laughs. They even have a porn-star candidate. Of course, he isn’t the first MP to have filmed himself having sex. But he is the first to do so with an adult, whom he allowed to live.
Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.
In a further nod to satire, Comic Relief this year focused on Malawi and Uganda. I didn’t see any acknowledgement that Britain had been the colonial power in those countries. “Thanks for the gold, lads, thanks for the diamonds. We had a whip-round and got you a fishing rod.”
A lot of racism comes from projection. White Americans have a stereotype of black people being criminals purely because they can’t acknowledge that it was actually white people that stole them from Africa in the first place. Today, you have the spectacle of black men being gunned down by cops who, by way of mitigation, release footage to show that the victims were running away. This is what happens when you don’t understand or even acknowledge history. You end up in a situation where, when slavery is the elephant in the room in your relationship with African Americans, you think it’s OK to say that you killed one of them because he was trying to escape.
Britain is in a similar place with colonialism. We have streets named after slave owners. We profited from a vile crime and feel no shame. We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don’t understand. It is British people that don’t learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.
Thursday, 9 April 2015
On Yemen - The US isn’t winding down its wars – it’s just running them at arm’s length
Seumas Milne in The Guardian
So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the onslaught on impoverished Yemen by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships.
Barely two weeks into their bombardment from air and sea, more than 500 have been killed and the Red Cross is warning of a “catastrophe” in the port of Aden. Where half a century ago Yemenis were tortured and killed by British colonial troops, Houthi rebels from the north are now fighting Saudi-backed forces loyal to the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Up to 40 civilians sheltering at a UN refugee camp in the poorest country in the Arab world were killed in a single Saudi air attack last week.
But of course the US and Britain are standing shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi intervention. Already providing “logistical and intelligence” support via a “joint planning cell”, the US this week announced it is stepping up weapons deliveriesto the Saudis. Britain’s foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, has promised to “support the Saudi operation in every way we can”.
The pretext for the Saudi war is that Yemen’s Houthi fighters are supported by Iran and loyal to a Shia branch of Islam. Hadi, who was installed after a popular uprising as part of a Saudi-orchestrated deal and one-man election in 2012, is said to be the legitimate president with every right to call on international support.
In reality, Iran’s backing for the homegrown Houthis seems to be modest, and their Zaidi strand of Islam is a sort of halfway house between Sunni and Shia. Hadi’s term as transitional president expired last year, and he resigned in January before fleeing the country after the Houthi takeover of the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Compare Hadi’s treatment with the fully elected former president of Ukraine, whose flight from Kiev to another part of the country a year ago was considered by the western powers to have somehow legitimised his overthrow, and it’s clear how elastic these things can be.
But the clear danger of the Saudi attack on Yemen is that it will ignite a wider conflagration, intensifying the sectarian schism across the region and potentially bring Saudi Arabia and Iran into direct conflict. Already 150,000 troops are massed on the Yemeni border. Pakistan is under pressure to send troops to do Riyadh’s dirty work for it. The Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has said he will despatch troops to fight in Yemen “if necessary”.
The Houthi uprising, supported by parts of the army and Hadi’s predecessor as president, has its roots in poverty and discrimination, and dates back to the time of the US-British invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago. But Yemen, which has a strong al-Qaida presence, has also been the target of hundreds of murderous US drone attacks in recent years. And the combination of civil war and external intervention is giving al-Qaida a new lease of life.
The idea that the corrupt tyranny of Saudi Arabia, the sectarian heart of reaction in the Middle East since colonial times, and its fellow Gulf autocracies – backed by the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu – are going to bring stability, let alone freedom, to the people of Yemen is beyond fantasy. This is the state, after all, that crushed the popular uprising in Bahrain in 2011, that funded the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president in 2013, and has sponsored takfiri jihadi movements for years with disastrous consequences.
For the Saudis, the war in Yemen is about enforcing their control of the Arabian peninsula and their leadership of the Sunni world in the face of Shia and Iranian resurgence. For the western powers that arm them to the hilt, it’s about money, and the pivotal role that Saudi Arabia plays in protecting their interests in the oil and gas El Dorado that is the Middle East.
Since the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its allies are reluctant to risk boots on the ground. But their military interventions are multiplying. Barack Obama has bombed seven mainly Muslim countries since he became US president. There are now four full-scale wars raging in the Arab world (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen), and every one of them has involved US and wider western military intervention. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest British arms market; US weapons sales to the Gulf have exceeded those racked up by George Bush, and last week Obama resumed US military aid to Egypt.
What has changed is that, in true imperial fashion, the west’s alliances have become more contradictory, playing off one side against the other. In Yemen, it is supporting the Sunni powers against Iran’s Shia allies. In Iraq, it is the opposite: the US and its friends are giving air support to Iranian-backed Shia militias fighting the Sunni takfiri group Isis. In Syria, they are bombing one part of the armed opposition while arming and training another.
The nuclear deal with Iran – which the Obama administration pushed through in the teeth of opposition from Israel and the Gulf states – needs to be seen in that context. The US isn’t leaving the Middle East, as some imagine, but looking for a more effective way of controlling it at arm’s length: by rebalancing the region’s powers, as the former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke puts it, in an “equilibrium of antagonisms”.
So a tilt towards Iran can be offset with war in Yemen or Syria. Something similar can be seen in US policy in Latin America. Only a couple of months after Obama’s historic opening towards Cuba last December, he signed an order declaring Cuba’s closest ally, Venezuela, “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security” and imposed sanctions over alleged human rights abuses.
Those pale into insignificance next to many carried out by the US government itself, let alone by some of its staunchest allies such as Saudi Arabia. There’s no single route to regime change, and the US is clearly hoping to use the opportunity of Venezuela’s economic problems to ratchet up its longstanding destabilisation campaign.
But it’s a game that can also go badly wrong. When it comes to US support for Saudi aggression in Yemen, that risks not only breaking the country apart but destabilising Saudi Arabia itself. What’s needed is a UN-backed negotiation to end the Yemeni conflict, not another big power-fuelled sectarian proxy war. These calamitous interventions have to be brought to an end.
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
The World Today - VENEZUELA
Analysis of Obama's decision to label Venezuela a security threat to the USA
The Role of the IMF in the world
The Shock Doctrine - A documentary on the book by Naomi Klein
Saturday, 4 October 2014
What the British Raj can't be blamed for
Written by Khaled Ahmed in The Indian Express| Posted: October 4, 2014 12:00 am
On September 18, the Indo-British Heritage Trust held a discussion in London about “whether the Indian subcontinent benefited more than it lost from the experience of British colonisation”. Speakers who said the subcontinent lost were heavyweights like William Dalrymple and Shashi Tharoor, both of whom I have enjoyed listening to and whose books have given me great pleasure. From Pakistan, the speaker chosen on the other side was my colleague at Newsweek Pakistan, Nilofar Bakhtiar who, before leaving for London, agreed with me that we were better off under the British.
Is that surprising, after half a century of failing to fulfil the promises made twice to the people of India? Once when Muslims and Hindus were united in their struggle for freedom; and second when they fell apart, and Muslims promised to set up a utopian state where they would be “free to practise their religion”.
Under British Raj, we were not free, but we were also not slaves. The British were less brutal than the Belgians to their colonies in Africa. We claimed rightly that we had the right to be free, to decide our own destiny, to have the law we wanted and a government we were able to choose. Morally, we had the right to tell the Raj to go, to resist it and struggle against it. We’d had enough of serving the gora sahib and fighting his imperial wars.
We had a different vision of what kind of state we wanted. We wanted equality instead of inequality practised by exploiters, peace instead of the conflict of a developing bipolar world. After fighting the wars of the Raj, we thought of becoming neutral and nonaligned. We could achieve our visions only after becoming independent.
We have inequality today and we have fought many “just” wars to perpetuate it. And the index of unhappiness keeps on climbing.
By ousting the British we also wanted to purge ourselves of what we diagnosed as a “slave mentality”. We had had enough of local brown sahibs who spoke English and perpetuated the Raj of the mind. After Independence, we would revive our languages and learn to think “free” in them. But today, we are slaves to our narratives of exclusion.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have much to fall back on. The British had wrested India
from a dying ruling elite that didn’t even control it territorially. We had no political system we could emulate, except tyranny of one sort or another. Jawaharlal Nehru honestly thought the past was all rotten.
Keen to be born as a nation-state, we disagreed we were one nation. Under the British, India was united as one state. We should have become a nation, but we didn’t. One side suspected the Raj was dividing what was one nation; the other side thought we were not one nation in the first place.
Democracy, introduced by the British through limited franchise and devolved elections, was new to us and felt good. They forced us to respect democratic principles. We had a struggle ahead with the kind of society we were. To be truly democratic we had to remove the caste system, which the Raj couldn’t extirpate. We agreed to disapprove of it. But in 2014, certain communities in our region still feel left out.
The British enabled us to put the past behind us. But after 1947, becoming free, we revived the past we should have buried and got nothing out of it. Muslims thought faith had made them a nation but soon discovered that language divided more than religion united. Muslims rejected the biggest gift of the Raj: secular governance. The British taught us modern commerce, growing out of stock exchanges we had known nothing about. Bombay converted the mostly Gujarati merchant community into India’s wisest class — Hindu, Parsi, Ismaili, etc — who deserved to rule India and thought, rightly, that it was not yet time for independence. Nobody listened.
The Muslims of India got a raw deal. Religion didn’t bind in 1947; and Bangladesh was created in 1971. Further, rejecting the lessons of the Raj, they set up an Islamic state in Pakistan that immediately led to the reduction of the non-Muslims to second-class citizens. Pakistan as a revisionist state fought wars with India. The Muslims of India too became discriminated against. Today, India is ashamed of its Muslim-killing communal riots. South Asia has suffered ethnic cleansing to shame the Balkans.
If we are bad today, it doesn’t mean the British Raj was bad. The bad in us is a kind of return to being us. If India has communal riots, Pakistan is brutal to Hindus in Sindh, joined with Muslim Sindhis through language. Their daughters are kidnapped and forcibly married to Muslim boys after forced conversion, driving Hindu families into exile in India. In “secular” Bangladesh, Hindus should have fared better, but there too, their “bleeding” back into India is unending.
Under the British Raj, Muslims’ sectarianism was effectively suppressed. The Shia and the Sunni began to feel like one community under secular administration and it was no surprise that Pakistan was created by a Shia leader. Today, he would have been bumped off by a “target-killer” of Karachi. The late Papiya Ghosh — yes, there are such great “colonised” people in the subcontinent — in her classic Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (2007) tells us how self-determination went wrong in India.
Biharis were the first workers in a peasant India, after iron ore was discovered in Bihar and the steel industry came up there together with the railways. After 1947, Bihari Muslims were most unfairly driven out of India into East Pakistan, but there the self-determining principle was language, not religion. So they were killed and pushed out again. We are still “self-determining” after 67 years, and most of it is just killing. Did the British teach us to kill to achieve self-determination? What Dalrymple does to the Brits through his books is tonic for them.
There were things done in India that should make them squeal with guilt. But “freedom” shouldn’t make us forget how we have fallen short after 1947. What happened to the good things we learned from the European Enlightenment the British carried with them?
I unabashedly admire Raja Rammohan Roy and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan because they borrowed from the Enlightenment and tried to pull us out of the abyss that still attracts us. In Pakistan, “Khan” is not the password to acceptance you thought he would be. Borrowing values made them “unoriginal” for us.
Tagore actually told the Brits what was really wrong with them. He didn’t want the disease of nationalism creeping into “free” India. But we had strong “single” identity ingredients that “excluded” the manifold “other”. Toxic textbooks distort history today to make us feel proud of unworthy things that would’ve made Tagore wince.
I don’t know about India but in Pakistan, all the infrastructure that serves us today is a Raj bequest — the roads, bridges, railroad and the world’s largest canal system — without which the state of Pakistan couldn’t have survived. After 67 years, all that is now quite rundown. Unkindly, the world calls us a “failing” state. Did the Raj cause us to fail?
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