New Data on the History of Kashmir

Fatah ka Fatwa - Episode 8

Attack on Tarek Fatah - Intolerance? 

Islam is not a religion of peace

Taslima Nasreen

India and Intolerance - Free that Pigeon

Irfan Hussain in The Dawn

INDIA has a population of over a billion, a thriving economy, a respected voice, a powerful military and an ancient civilisation. Its scientists have put a satellite into orbit around Mars.

So how does it proclaim its position in the world? By detaining a pigeon allegedly carrying a warning note to Prime Minister Modi. And for good measure, it has expelled a Pakistan High Commission staffer, Mahmood Akhtar, for espionage.

According to The Hindu, Akhtar had recruited two Indians to spy for Pakistan. One of them is Maulana Ramzan Khan, a preacher entrusted with the maintenance of a village mosque. The other is Subhash Jangir, the owner of a small grocery. So clearly no James Bond, either one of them.

The truth is that despite its rapid progress and its size, India is a deeply insecure country. While my columns critical of Pakistan have been met with praise and approval from Indian readers, I have been flooded with furious emails whenever I have said anything negative about their country.

It is almost as though Pakistani journalists were not permitted to talk about their neighbour. And not just Pakistanis: a few years ago, I met the Economist correspondent based in New Delhi who was visiting Lahore to cover the general elections.

Half-jokingly, I said to him that it must be a drag to be in Pakistan during the party season in Delhi. He assured me he loved to visit Pakistan because while in India, readers reviled him whenever he wrote a critical piece for his weekly. But when he wrote a negative article about Pakistan, his Pakistani readers immediately agreed with him.

About 15 years ago, I was in New Delhi, and was invited by the Times of India to speak to their editorial staff. In that informal discussion, I pointed out that despite all of Pakistan’s military interventions, a small group of us writing for the mainstream press still opposed core state policies on Afghanistan, Kashmir and the nuclear programme. The Indian media, on the other hand, were almost unanimous in rallying around the national (and nationalistic) agenda.

None of the journalists present challenged my view. However, one editorial writer pointed out that the ownership pattern of the mainstream press meant that businessmen relying on official contacts did not want to rock the boat.

But the reaction I get to negative articles from Indian readers suggests that the problem goes far deeper. Take the case of Arundhati Roy. Here is a hugely talented writer and a gutsy campaigner who has won international fame for her fiction, as well as for her reporting about the most vulnerable and persecuted segments of Indian society.

On the couple of occasions, I have cited her work in my columns, I have been inundated with emails from Indian readers denouncing her, and insisting that I had lost credibility by quoting Roy.

Clearly, her gritty exposure of the excesses committed by Indian security forces as well as by corporate groups against the marginalised has exposed a raw nerve running through the elites and the expanding middle class.

The current ban prohibiting Pakistani movie stars as well as musicians from acting and performing in India provides another example of the chauvinism that has gripped the country. True, this took place against the backdrop of the bloody attack on an army camp in Uri. But are cultural links to be forever hostage to acts of militancy?

To our shame, we retaliated by imposing a similar ban on Indian movies and TV channels. Had our leaders an ounce of common sense, they could have underlined the crassness of the Indian move by continuing with the previous laissez-faire policy. But sadly, common sense is in short supply on both sides of the border.

So why do so many Indians carry such large chips on their shoulders? Obviously, there is much to admire in the country, ranging from the vibrancy of its arts to its colourful traditions and fascinating history and geography. Then why are they so defensive about the occasional criticism? After all, they cannot hope to bask constantly in international adulation.

While I don’t have any empirical research to back me, I suspect that this touchy reaction to adverse comments derives from India’s history of domination by foreigners. Muslim invaders from Afghanistan and Central Asia ruled much of the subcontinent for the first 800 years or so. They were then displaced by the British who proceeded to govern India for the next couple of centuries.

South India, by contrast, remained largely independent of Muslim rule, and its people are much more self-confident as a result. On a visit to the region several years ago, I was repeatedly told that if it hadn’t been yoked to New Delhi, South India would have made far greater progress.
I realise I am sticking my neck out, and expect the usual flood of angry emails. But would the Indian authorities please set the poor captive pigeon free?

India is more sensitive now, not more intolerant

Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyer in the Times of India

Narendra Modi said in London that “India will not tolerate intolerance”. Secular critics jeered, since the BJP had raised the communal temperature during the Bihar election. Over 50 writers have returned national awards in protest against intolerance. They cite the Dadri beef lynching, murder of three prominent writers, and the ink attack on Sudheendra Kulkarni.

But it’s fiction to pretend that India used to be tolerant and has turned intolerant today. Intolerance has actually diminished substantially. Nothing can compare with the communal killings at Partition in 1947. Communal riots have continued with sickening regularity since then, but diminished in recent years, with the notable exception of 2002.

Ambedkar said violence against dalits was the worst of all. The Indian Constitution banned caste discrimination, yet caste violence remained embedded in society. Dalits could be attacked, raped, killed and humiliated at will, with impunity, by upper castes. This was also true, to a lesser extent, of other backward castes. Villages did not have riots, yet their very ethos was based on the most oppressive threat of caste violence. Fortunately, caste discrimination has fallen gradually, though it remains a harsh reality. The last two decades have seen the rise of almost 4,000 dalit millionaire businessmen, something unthinkable in the past.

Modi will never be forgiven by many for the 2002 Gujarat riots. But JS Bandukwala, the Muslim professor who barely escaped mob murder, told me that the 1969 Gujarat riots were worse. Yet the then Congress chief minister did not resign or become a social pariah. Regional newspapers relegated many of the 1969 incidents to inside pages.

Why? What has changed? The answer is the rise of private TV. This has brought the awfulness of communal violence into every household in every language. In 1969, there was no TV. All India Radio had a radio monopoly. The government deliberately played down the riots, to try and reduce communal tension. Newspapers those days had shoestring budgets. Reporters did not rush from all corners of India to Gujarat, or go into every affected town. Most newspapers depended on briefings from the home ministry, and co-operated with government pleas to play down killings, to douse communal tensions. No photos were published of the blood and gore. Newspapers avoided saying “Hindu” or “Muslim,” and just said “people of another community”.

Media reportage was stronger during the Babri Masjid agitation. But there was no private TV in 1992 to expose the gore and violence of the masjid destruction, or the horrific post-masjid riots.

By the 2002 riots in Gujarat, a media revolution had occurred. Private TV channels with ample resources sent reporters to every riot site. They competed in exposing communal hate and gore. Far from hiding the identity of communities, TV highlighted the Hindu-Muslim divide starkly. Far from trying to douse tension, TV competed in highlighting horrific events, including even fictions like the supposed pregnant woman whose womb was slit by Hindu fanatics.

Did the aggressive media in 2002 increase communal tensions and violence compared with 1969? Quite possibly. Yet the media were right to pull no punches. By conveying the horror of 2002 all over India, they created a revulsion that Modi himself heeded in his next 12 years in Gujarat. Subsequently too, media competition greatly increased coverage of all sorts of discrimination and violence. Events once buried in the inside pages of newspapers became prime time TV news. This improved public sensitivity to discrimination and thuggery, and hence government accountability.

The BJP says it is being treated unfairly today, since there have been a few stray communal incidents but no riots. The BJP was not behind the Dadri or Jammu lynchings, or the killing of rationalist writers, and was actually a victim in the ink-throwing incident. However, BJP spokesmen have found it almost impossible to condemn these incidents outright, and sought to convert the cow into a vote-gaining tactic in Bihar. This BJP hypocrisy has rightly been condemned. Yet its current sins are absolutely nothing compared with 1992 or 2002.

Intolerance has not worsened. Rather, our civic standards have improved, and we are quicker to get disgusted. Competitive TV has made us much more easily horrified, terrified, alarmed, disgusted, and angry. That’s an excellent development. Private TV has not just improved entertainment and variety, but also hugely increased our sensitivity to all that’s wrong in society, to all its horrors and atrocities.

This is a major gain of economic liberalization. In 1991, leftists opposed private TV channels, saying these would be tools in the hands of big business. What rubbish. Private TV has empowered the citizen to view the horrors that government channels had always downplayed and sanitized. That has raised our civic standards, lowering our thresholds for anger and revulsion. Hurrah!

Intolerance has always existed in India: Niti Aayog’s Bibek Debroy

Niti Aayog's member Bibek Debroy is a renowned economist who is known for speaking his mind. In an interview to TOI, Debroy reflects on the issue of intolerance and cites examples to show the need for multiple views. Excerpts:

Q: A debate has been raging on the issue of intolerance in the country. What has been your experience?

A: What is generally not known is that Jagdish Bhagwati was essentially made to leave Delhi School of Economics and had to go abroad because his life was made very uncomfortable. He left DSE because there is a certain prevailing climate of opinion and if you buck that, your life is made uncomfortable.

In the course of the second five-year plan, a committee of economists was set up to examine it. Dr B.R. Shenoy was the only one who opposed it. Do you find Dr Shenoy's name mentioned in the history of union policymaking? No. He was completely ostracized. He could not get a job in India and he ended up in Ceylon.

The third is a book called 'Heart of India', written by Alexander Campbell who was a journalist. A patronizing book for that day and time but it is still banned in India because it says frivolous things about Jawaharlal Nehru, socialism in India, and the Planning Commission. People who say there should not be bans, why don't they ever mention 'Heart of India'.

I cited these three examples to drive home the point that intolerance has always existed and we will be stupid if we haven't recognized it.

Q: At a personal level, did you ever experience intolerance in the academic arena?

A: I studied at Presidency College in Kolkata and in a real sense my first job was there at its Centre for Research. Then it was time for me to apply for a proper job, meaning Department of Economics. The head of the department was Dipak Banerjee, who told me you are not going to get a job, just forget it. Remember it was the Left. All the experts are Left-wing. So, I went off to Pune.

Q: How do you view the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, which you once headed, holding this conference on the issue of intolerance?

A: I was there for eight years and during that period we consciously distanced ourselves from the Congress. In 2002, I decided to organize a conference on what India was supposed to be, what its society be like, what the idea of India would be? I invited Seshadri Chari who was the editor of Organiser. Several people from the Left also came.

On the day of the seminar, a paper front-paged a report 'Congress think tank invites editor of Organiser." I get a phone call from 10, Janpath. Not Mrs Gandhi. "Madam has asked me to speak to you. Please withdraw this invitation to Seshadri Chari." I said I have issued the invitation and if Madam wants to talk to me, let her talk to me. Ten minutes later the phone rings again. "Will you please ask Seshadri Chari to give in writing what he is going to speak?" I said I am not going to do that. "No, Madam wants to see it."

Again the phone rings. "What happens if Seshadri Chari goes ahead and speaks about Godhra?" Meanwhile, all hell broke loose and some noted Congress people dropped out because Seshadri Chari was invited. I held the conference.

In 2004, Loveesh Bhandari and I did a study on economic freedom rating of states. Gujarat was number one. In 2005, municipal elections were being held in Gujarat and a newspaper carried a front page story, 'Congress think tank ranks Modi's Gujarat as number one', and all hell broke loose. I got a note from Mrs Gandhi saying anything that the Rajiv Gandhi Institute publishes henceforth be politically vetted. I said this is not acceptable to me. I resigned.




There was an Arjun Sengupta Commission. Next day, I was thrown out of there. I was on two task forces of Planning Commission, I was thrown out of there. Did anyone complain? I only remember two people. One is Loveesh, he was biased because he was the co-author, and the other was a journalist, Seetha Parthasarathy. All these people who are complaining about different points of view, none of them raised their voices.

The intellectual discourse has been captured by a certain kind of people, with certain kinds of views. It is a bit like a monopoly and that monopoly does not like outsiders and that monopoly survives on the basis of networks.

Q: A section of academics has raised the issue of growing intolerance. Do you think they have a point or is it because they are politically aligned?

A: If you tell me intolerance is increasing, it is purely anecdotal and is purely a subjective perception, there is no point in arguing with you because you will say it is increasing and I will say there is no evidence of it increasing. The only way I can measure something is that if I have got some quantitative indicator. If I look at any quantitative indictor, communal violence incidents, internet freedom, these are objective indicators, and I don't think it is increasing. In the intellectual circuit there has always been that intolerance. Let's not pretend otherwise.

'Do you love your country?' is a trick question

Alan Rusbridger was asked by the home affairs select commitee if he loved his country, but national pride is a slippery concept

• 
• • Anne Perkins
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 December 2013 11.42 GMT

'Nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism.' Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

Do you love your country? When Keith Vaz, the MP who chairs the home affairs committee put the question to the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, midway through yesterday's evidence session on the NSA leaks, it was, almost certainly, meant helpfully. It was that lawyerly thing of getting out into the open the answer to the opposition's charge (the rather hefty one of treason) before the opposition had a chance to put it themselves. Cue unqualified affirmation!

But do you love your country? Well do you? Quite right, it's a trick question. The answer's not what you say, or even the way that you say it. The answer is in the pause between the end of the question and the start of the answer. If you need to stop and think about it, then you might just as well say no. You almost certainly don't love your country in the way that the person who asked the question meant.

All the same, it's a question that needs answering. Because the more nebulous the idea of country becomes – the more multi-layered national identity and the less certain national boundaries – the more important it is to understand how you identify yourself, if only to see off the people who want the answer to be an unqualified yes, delivered with all the plausibility of a besotted suitor. Just see the Mail's attack on Ed Miliband's father to see how potent it can be. The question can't be avoided, so it has to be reframed.

People have been making communities probably at least since they discovered two people could hunt down a bison better than one. That's what got us where we are. But all sorts of things happen once you begin creating communities. For a start, it has some implication of exclusion. Probably early hunting tribes weren't all that kind to people who were a bit rubbish with a bow and arrow. Recognising people we think are like us is not just about self-definition, it's about self-protection.

In time, an evolutionary convenience developed, the way these things do, into a handy way of keeping people in line. That's why Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel (leaving Boswell to explain that he meant the kind of patriotism that was really a mask for self-interest). But Johnson had already spotted its capacity to be a lethal political idea. Sure enough it became the deadly force that moulded 19th and 20th-century Europe into warring factions, the glue to empire and a straitjacket for the social order. Feel free to add in your own particular grudge. Patriotism has a long history as the weapon of the establishment against the challenger.

But it has also, from time to time, been a way of defending what matters against an establishment with other ideas. When John of Gaunt first defined England as a sceptred isle, he was despairing of Richard II who was going to leave it "bound in with shame". Alex Salmond is running the referendum campaign on similar lines. He's framing it in the context of how the union is stopping Scotland being the country that destiny intended. He's suggesting it's impossible to be truly Scottish if you also think of yourself as British.

For nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism. National pride means imagining that your country has something unique and irreplaceable about it. It becomes all too easily an intolerant concept. I love my country, in so far as I love inanimate objects at all. But I love my country, and quite likely it's different from yours.

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Patriotism is not the same as spineless adoration of the Establishment

Owen Jones in The Independent

I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power

“Do you love your country?” The smirking phantom of the pinko-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy hovered over Labour’s Keith Vaz as he uttered those words. Who knows if they were intended to menace or support the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who was being interrogated by the home affairs committee over the Edward Snowden leaks. But the phrase is creepy nonetheless, not least in the febrile atmosphere over the National Security Agency revelations. Newspapers that have wailed over Leveson as a mortal threat to press freedom have indulged Government threats over the leaks. There is talk of journalists being locked away: and indeed, if the state begins prosecuting those who hold power to account, Britons interested in protecting our freedoms must surely take to the streets.

But patriotism is often subverted and manipulated by those with wealth and power. Loving your country means being subservient to the Establishment, or so goes their logic. Make the ruling class and the country interchangeable concepts, then those challenging the powerful can simply be swept aside as near-treasonous fifth columnists. To engage in a debate with those who question the ruling elite means legitimising their criticisms, treating them as reasonable criticisms, however wrong they may be. Far easier to discredit them instead, as those who despise the nation and whose motives are to do it harm.

The “Do you love your country” card is probably most notoriously used at times of war. It is patriotic to send young men and women to foreign countries to be slaughtered and maimed, but it is unpatriotic to bring them home to safety. It is used to strip civil liberties away, too, in the name of national security. Stripping away freedoms that our ancestors fought for becomes patriotic; defending our hard-won liberties becomes unpatriotic. It is used to oppress minorities. The rights of gay Britons becomes an insult to British “family values”. Immigrants may have helped build this country, but they are posed as a threat to national identity.

Questioning patriotism is a long-standing technique to crush dissent, not least from the left. Margaret Thatcher smeared the miners and their allies as “the enemy within” who, she claimed, were more of a threat than “the enemy without”. The Daily Mail recently, and infamously, smeared the socialist Ralph Miliband as “the man who hated Britain”. The absurdity of a newspaper that backed Hitler’s genocidal regime smearing a Jewish immigrant who fought the Nazis has been widely ridiculed. But actually the entire episode underlined how the very concept of patriotism is like a Rorschach inkblot test, where we all look at “the nation” and see what we want to see: we love aspects, and dislike, or even loathe, other features of it.

When defending the Mail’s smear that Miliband despised his country, the paper’s deputy editor reeled off a list of “great British institutions” that the left-wing academic had criticised: the likes of the Royal Family, the Church, the military and “our great newspapers” (don’t all choke at once). But of course, it is possible to reel off “great British institutions” that those on the right froth about: like the NHS (once described by the Tory Nigel Lawson as “the closest the English have to a religion”), the BBC, the public sector, and trade unions (once championed by Winston Churchill as “pillars of our British Society”).

Our history inspires pride and regret in different people, too. Some might champion monarchs and governments of centuries gone by, where I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power and injustice: like the Chartists, the suffragettes or anti-racist activists who were ridiculed, attacked and persecuted in their time. Some may relish the traditions of Empire, out of jingoism or ignorance or a combination of both, while I would regard it as a shameful and murderous stain on our nation’s past.

I love living in London partly because of its diversity, a feature of modern British life that others despise. Some prefer the tranquility of the open English countryside; others find it dull and claustrophobic, opting for the chaotic excitement of urban life instead. There are those of us who spend Sundays in Church, while others regard all incarnations of religion as a toxic blight on humanity. Some, like myself, hold that free-market capitalism is the engine of a profoundly unjust distribution of wealth and power; others devoutly believe that it is the catalyst for growth, prosperity and progress.

Not a single living Brit can honestly claim to love everything about something as complex and contradictory as Britain. But whatever Britain is, it certainly is not synonymous with those who rule it. And those who attempt to hold power to account as somehow un-British need to be faced down. We owe it our British ancestors who, in the teeth of opposition of other privileged and often tyrannical Brits, built this democracy, at such cost and with such sacrifice.

I despair as I watch the erosion of the liberal views I hold dear

Unless we take a more robust view of liberalism, tolerance ends up as not caring. Anything goes

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 9 June 2013

Ronald Dworkin – a great liberal thinker. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Last Wednesday, there was a memorial service for one of the doyens of American liberalism – Professor Ronnie Dworkin – who died in London, his adopted home, earlier this year. A succession of some of Britain's best-known liberal writers and thinkers took to the rostrum to pay tribute to a man who continued to honour Roosevelt's New Deal, insisted law and morality were indivisible and argued that to live well and with dignity was every human being's aim – one that law and government should support.

It was a moving occasion, but, as his wife, Irene Brendl, wrote in the service notes, this great liberal tradition is increasingly beleaguered. She is right. We live in rightwing times. Law and justice, which Ronnie Dworkin cherished so much, are depicted as burdens on the taxpayer whose costs must be minimised. If you want justice, you must pay for it yourself and have no embedded civic right to expect others to contribute. The good society and moral individuals are those who do without the state. The public sphere is derided and positive public action to promote the common or international good is acceptable only if it involves less, rather than more, government. Instead, what we are invited to hold in common is nationhood, national identity and hostility to foreigners and immigrants. The open society is in retreat.

This may seem an odd commentary in a week in which gay marriage has been agreed by the House of Lords and where companies are increasingly hounded for avoiding their tax. Both are surely liberal rather than conservative preoccupations. In an idiosyncratic leader recently, the Economist proclaimed the strange rebirth of liberal England, arguing that young people's tolerance of ethnic and sexual differences, along with growing distrust of the state and welfare, was proof positive of the emergence of a new liberalism. Ronnie Dworkin should have been happy.

He would have turned in his grave. Such a view of liberalism does not go to the heart of what it means to live well. Tolerance of other people's differences is a core element of a liberal order, but a good society is one where we go beyond just shrugging our shoulders at someone's sexual preferences, religious beliefs or ethnicity. It is one in which we engage with each other, create law and justice as a moral system enshrining human dignity and accept mutual responsibilities. The aim is to live with dignity, to be able to make the best of one's capabilities and to expect that the consequences of undeserved bad luck – what Dworkin called brute bad luck – would be compensated by society in a mutual compact. This is a million miles from the Economist's arid conception of liberalism.

Nor are these disputes just airy-fairy differences between intellectuals – they go to the heart of how we live, what we do and say. Unless we take a much more robust and rounded view of liberalism, tolerance ends up as indifference, disengagement and refusal to respect other people's ambition to live with dignity. Anything goes. One alarming dimension of value-free tolerance is the new licence it gives for men publicly to say noxiously sexist, demeaning or plain wrong things about women. If a woman dresses to appear attractive, that does not mean, as Nick Ross argues in his new book, Crime, that if they succeed they are partly responsible if they get raped. Rape is not gradable to the extent of a woman's dress or character: it is a crime and is the responsibility of – and problem for – men and women alike. To define it in any other way is to make any woman both apart and demeaned, a reversal of the century-long fight for genuine equality between the sexes.

In successive areas of public policy – "reform" of criminal justice and legal aid, the health service, climate change, employment law, social security – the debate is similarly defined wholly in terms of the need to assert individual rights and choice, to minimise social and public responsibilities and, above all, to roll back taxes. If the facts or scientific evidence do not support this drive, then the facts are changed or the science ignored.

The most breathtaking example is climate change. What fires the sceptics' passionate opposition is that preventing global warming will become the rationale for an extension of public initiative and government action, which by definition must be bad. Therefore, the science must be wrong. It is the wholesale inversion of a liberal society. The importance of limiting the state, reducing the scope of law and maximising individual choice with no compensating responsibilities defines how science should become interpreted and understood, even if it indubitably proves that global weather patterns are changing.

Even gay marriage and the quest to end tax avoidance are part of this wider trend. Gay marriage is a crucial and socially legitimate enlargement of gay people's ambitions to live with dignity. Yet the case is rarely made in those positive liberal terms: rather, gay marriage is portrayed as a harmless extension of an unobjectionable entitlement. Faith communities feel that in those terms the proposition is frivolous: their sensibilities are not respected. They feel harmed – and outraged. The row became much more intense than it should.

Equally, David Cameron and George Osborne's quest to limit the now rampant corporate abuse of tax havens is not because they believe that the state is a force for good whose services everyone must legitimately pay for – that taxation is a badge of citizenship. It is because they are against cheating and if big companies don't pay their taxes then taxes are higher for everyone else. You may think the difference is irrelevant, but crucially it offers the tax cheats a perfect line of defence – and one exploited by Eric Schmidt, chair of tax-minimising Google. Companies have no moral responsibility to respect the spirit of the law, he says; if Google can lower its taxes though obscure if legal loopholes, then it is government's responsibility to change the law. The law is not a moral proposition, as in Dworkin's conception: it is simply something to be endlessly gamed by clever tax lawyers.

Schmidt's vision is as arid as the Economist's. But if the right is dominant, a rounded liberalism has one advantage. The right's world leads to economic stagnation, social atomisation and a destructive nationalism. Nor, ultimately, is there happiness and dignity to be found by living as a tax-avoiding, climate-change-denying anti-feminist while mouthing how tolerant you are. There is a quiet and mounting crisis in conservatism. Liberalism, in its best sense, could capitalise on the opportunity. It is a pity Ronnie Dworkin won't be around to be part of the fight back. We'll just have to do it by ourselves.

Will Western Liberal Values Hold Up During Difficult Times?

Millions of Asians - including Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis - and others from different corners of the world have made the West their home. What are the likely social and psychological consequences for us "others" in these hard times?

One of the defining features of Western democracies is said to be its liberal values. What it essentially means for people like us is that our presence is for the most part not considered a big deal. If the economist Benjamin Friedman is right, however, liberal values thrive and indeed depend on continued economic growth and prosperity of citizens.

"Economic growth - meaning a rising standard of living for a clear majority of citizens - more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy." In contrast, when there is economic decline, the "moral character" of citizens takes a hit.

They become less tolerant, less open and less generous towards the have-nots. Friedman contends that "merely being rich is no bar to a society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead".

In other words, a society's values are fickle. The future prospect of citizens largely determines the values they hold at any point of time. Economic growth matters more for a society's ‘moral character' than the country's overall wealth.

Clearly, the truth is more complex than what the stylized version of Friedman's thesis suggests. Any values that we hold do not change quickly. We let go of our old values and acquire new ones only over time.

But what if some kinds of values - in this case liberal values - are prone to easy abandonment because they never developed deep roots in ways we thought they did?

With no end to bad economic news, how many Europeans and Americans will retain or abandon liberal values? If more of the latter, which members of society are likely to become victims of growing intolerance and injustice?

The so-called "undeserving poor" certainly. Additionally, the victims are also likely to be from among what Canadians label as "visible minorities".

From this perspective, for the millions of visible minorities who live in the West, the hard times of today may be the beginning of worse to come. They face the prospect of greater discrimination in the economic and social spheres or more.

Are we then headed for an era of growing illiberalism in the liberal democracies of the West so far as "others" - whether the poor or visible minorities - are concerned? Are the foundations of liberal democracies really so shallow?

Some of us may recall Fareed Zakaria's seminal article in Foreign Affairs (1997) in which he drew attention to growing illiberalism in new democracies - countries which held reasonably free and fair elections without subscribing to constitutional liberalism. For Zakaria, "liberal constitutionalism" - that "tradition, deep in Western history that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source - state, church or society" - separates Western democracies from the rest.

The larger issue may well be whether the celebrated liberal values of Western societies - which together with constitutional and other legal provisions, provide the bedrock of liberal democracy - are really dependent on the continued prosperity of a majority of its citizens or whether they have replaced or compete with older traditions.

Perhaps Zakaria is right about the part where the "tradition" to protect individual autonomy and dignity - by which one should understand the referent to be all individuals irrespective of class or race - against coercion has developed deep roots among a large majority. If that is true, then liberal values may well hold their own in hard times.

What if, however, we overestimated the nature and extent to which liberal values have penetrated these societies without sufficient consideration to ethnic or other differences so that we became blind to its fragile bases?

If Friedman is right, then Western democracies face a challenge from within where "tradition" may not be of much help. Economic stagnation and decline will likely have immoral consequences because the same countries have other traditions too. The laundry list of these other traditions is long and well-known - racism, colonialism, slavery et cetera - and their existence shows up in the public spaces of "civilized" countries in the form of anti-immigrant rallies and demonstrations.

Under current conditions, the social fabric of many Western societies is strained to an extent not experienced at least since the times of the Great Depression. In Europe, as high rates of unemployment become endemic, a shrinking base of taxpayers is expected to support welfare handouts to not only the fair sons and daughters of the soil but dark-skinned others as well. Both in the US and Europe, there has been broad resentment against welfare for the undeserving poor (read African-Americans and Latinos) at least since the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher years.

The news about "others" from Europe - whether in Germany, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom - is not pretty. It remains to be seen how many American states will follow Alabama's lead in pushing for harsh anti-immigrant laws, invoking uncertainty, fear and worse.

I don't know about other liberal folks but I do wonder about my "moral character" holding up in hard times.

Pushkar is a Montreal-based researcher affiliated with the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID), McGill University.