There’s a fascinating set of Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards from the 1990s over at Tasveer Ghar, with an accompanying essay. All of the cards were made for New Years, and intended to be used used on Diwali and Vikram Samvath. My favorite two are below.
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The card on the left is a Diwali card celebrating the first Indian nuclear bomb explosion, and yes, that is a lingam in the center of the explosion.
The poem at the back of the card tells the reader that “Today, the nation’s sleeping pride has woken up …. Shiva’s third eye has opened, and the World-destroyer has woken. … The nation’s sleeping pride has woken up.” [link]
The card on the right depicts “Mother India calling her sons to fight against capitalism, Islam and Christian missionary activities” [link]:
The primary dangers represented in this New Year card are cultural domination (Westernisation); the alleged threat to Indianness from ‘alien’ religious practices of Christianity and Islam (conversion and separatism), and the politics of economic globalisation (capitalism as colonising practice) [link]
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p>You can imagine what they must think of Bobby Jindal. 
These cards and other images by the same artist are used throughout Sangh Parivar institutions, including their schools. The message they bring is that Christianity, Islam and Capitalism are foreign colonizers on Indian soil, which must be rejected and the foreigners either driven out or assimilated:
“Whenever Shakas and Huns bared their bloody claws and terror struck the masses, and evil people troubled us, bringing bloodshed and rape, seeing that every day the Hindus were threatened, Vikramaditya once again would reveal his brave masculinity and courage by slaughtering and beating them up or making them Hindu. So we commemorate that with the Vikram-Year.” [link]
This message is the reason why I find the VHP’s educational activities problematic, because it teaches that India belongs to Hindus alone, and that all others must either convert or leave. They do have cool iconography though
What is south asian american about it?
Please ignore the troll.
Really? From the 1990’s? Could’nt you pick something recent? What are you trying to influence the indian elections in your own little way? Anyway…
After arguing myself hoarse with those folks about capitalism and free markets, I’ve come to the realisation that they are clueless about these concepts. In their narrow vision, Wise will bring in their chips and nachos and put the local chakri makers out of business! That’s capitalism and it is, hence, dangerous.
But then again, very few really understand capitalism or free markets. Not even those at Harvard. So I’m inclined to give the VHP a pass on this one.
M. Nam
My sister studied in a Christian convent school in India. Before we knew it, she was saying prayers before dinner , it was kinda cute initially . But a few months later the parents found out how the school was organizing church visits where they got some vague insinuation about how all the non christians will not end up in this lovel place called heaven and its not too late to get a ticket to that amusement park.
Evidently it was overzealous teacher, the school corrected the problem and went back to more subtle measure after parents complained.
Overall schools should not be a place for religious indoctrination whether it is a convent school, madarsa or the Sangh parivar school. All of them are equally guilty.
For the record, my father studied at a Hindu school and my mother at a (Catholic) convent school. So I’m not trying to criticize either one in a blanket fashion.
MoorNam:
The article I link to claims that the iconography was set by this particular artist in the 1990s and has not evolved much since. Whether that is true, I don’t know. A (Hindu) friend sent me the link, and I shared the images I thought were the most interesting.
interesting. with the global recession/depression, i’ve been thinking about fascist economics, protectionism, economic nationalism, scapegoating and so on. i was wondering if there were tensions between the liberalisation wing of the hindu right and the more nationaistic/collectivist. i’ve seen some stuff connecting hinduism to economics but this is the first time I’ve seen a direct shot aimed at capitalism and globalization.
That bit about fighting capitalism is strictly for the birds; outside some of the older generation of pracharaks no one on the Hindu Right took this seriously. The BJP on the whole has been even more keen to abase itself before the altar of global capitalism than the post-Nehruvian Congress.
There are many other problems about the VHP’s educational doctrine; it denies other groups like adivasis their own history and brushes under the carpet the social stratification and dehumanisation that lower castes have had to endure for centuries and are still enduring. Their views on gender roles and expectations are what one would expect of a conservative religious movement. It is based on a very selective interpretation of history and religion that really is the persepctive of a segment of society and not the whole.
Really? It is pretty sub-par iconography. Even mainstream Hindu imagery has better quality and more imaginative images, imo, never mind the more advanced nationalist stuff.
Any contact with foreigners anywhere in the world brings problems and opportunities. Many times, opportunities far outweigh the problems unless the foreigner is barbaric. The native and the foreigner gains through the exchange of ideas. Humanity grew that way. Offcourse, there are barbaric foreigners. So a good defense is a great thing. But a closed society is even more dangerous, because we will face more barbaric inside the country( I am not talking about Billu!)
It is kind of convenient to forget what India gained from foreigners. It would be worthwhile for people to realize the very “chillies”, that everybody think is there from the vedic ages, came to India through trade about only ~200 years back. Most of the staple vegetables, that we think are Indian, came to India through trade, capitalism and exchange of ideas. That would be a good message to use to get people open to more ideas.
I am shocked. SHOCKED to find controversy in this thread.
I figure capitalism is just shorthand for unfettered consumerism these days. At least in America it’s more of a cultural “You are not your fucking khakis” thing rather than a “Let us nationalize the means of production comrade!” thing.
There is demand driven consumption and marketing driven consumption. People like chilis because they’re good and suppliers make more because it’s what they want is legitimate demand.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to condition people into suddenly wanting things that they never really wanted before, on the other hand, that’s the kind of consumerism that it is wholly appropriate to reject. People have a right to determine which direction they want their culture to move in. Just because culture changes doesn’t mean you should just throw up your hands and revoke your responsibility to cultivate a just culture rather than fostering the reckless consumerism of society’s collective id.
i’m not familiar with all the education types available in india… what’s a hindu school?
and do convent schools promise to parents not to try to indoctrinate their children? i.e. do parents know what they’re getting into?
I think that is correct; there were some attempts to formulate a more coherent response to globalisation. Some BJP ideologues tried to develop a ‘swadeshi nationalism’ that relied on a combination of economic autonomy together with state capitalism and then you has elements like the SJM and the ‘computer chips, not potato chips’ brigade. None of which were all that popular or successful since large parts of the middle class and the aspiring classes were all too keen to enter mass consumer nirvana that global capitalism seemed to offer and Indian industry was keen to remove trade and regulatory barriers as well.
12 · Conrad Barwa said
Personally I’d rather worry about keeping things stable so we can get rich first and worry about reclaiming our souls later. If we can set up bulwarks along the way to make reclaiming our souls easier later on so much the better. But the mission of this generation of Indians should be to get GDP per capita up to $20,000 and maybe creating a model for renewable energy and tolerant secular politics in a plural society. It’s a lot easier to worry about that sort of thing once we’ve dealt with hunger and illiteracy. It’s all about priorities.
100% agree with you here!
Koenraad Elst has a nice treatment of this sort of issue in “BJP vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence“–see especially chapter 12, “Vulgar Nationalism.” He argues that “the Sangh is not able to discern objective allies and enemies on the world stage, so that it is unable to make friends”–that seems to be true! They at least need a better PR department!
Well, as one notable politician has said’ you can put lipstick on a pir, its still a pig’ 😛
I am fascinated by the idea of Bharat Mata. It is a relatively newly evolved deity in the Indic pantheon, though a perfectly legitimate manifestation of shakti. What could be more emotionally evocative than an amalgamation of God(ess), Mother and the Nation? I like Abanindranath Tagore’s 1905 ‘Bharat Mata’ for it’s mystical, serene grace (it was also one of the first named visual depiction of this deity) and a 1947 painting by Shobha Singh showing the lion pushing the imperial crown into an abyss. There was also a version depictiong Bharat Mata in the Chhinmasta avatar that I have been unable to locate on the web. There is an excellent book on the evolution of the mythology of Bharat Mata by Neumayer and Schelberger (Oxford Publication), especially good for it’s collection of obscure, often wildly imaginative, almost surreal depictions, specially ones with martyrdom themes. It would be sad if this glorious deity is hijacked by any one organisation or religion, because by her very nature she was conceived to be a secular and inclusive entity, a unifying mother earth. It would be sadder if she is rejected for being identified by a particular religion. She belongs to all.
Bharat Mata will put the rashtra in your rashtrabhakti.
Christian European nations are the ones who invented the practice of personifying the nation. That woman at the beginning of every Columbia/Tri-Star picture is the personification of America. Her name is Columbia. For some reason we have since replaced her with Uncle Sam which is a damn shame. There is a whole list of them.
As for her belonging to everyone, it’s not really the Hindutva guys who are associating it solely with themselves. There was even a temple to her built in Varanasi that was open to people of all religions and yet it is almost all Hindus. Muslims and Christians aren’t going to bow their heads to such a figure. Vande Mataram was supposed to be the national anthem instead of that milquetoast Jana Gana Mana. It was rejected because Muslim and Christian groups opposed the idea of having to sing paeans to a mother goddess. Sometimes it really seems like Hindus can never win. Even when they reach out their hands they are spurned and what ends up happening? The symbols, once again, end up feeding the right wing because the lefties are too busy seeking rents and being purity trolls to bother building bridges or fostering understanding.
Yoga, I am aware of that, but I feel that the tradition of Shakti worship gives the concept of Bharat Mata added deapth and perspective over western depictions. I completely agree that Vande Mataram should have been our national anthem. It has a much stronger historical and emotional association with our nationhood and freedom struggle. The politics that went about in selecting Jana Gana Mana over it is despicable.
I was more worried about how impossible it seems for Hindus to win in this PR game. If you are inclusive and open you either get accused of pushing your beliefs on Muslims and Christians (as with Bharat Mata) or your openness is exploited to send in a trojan horse full of missionaries. If you’re exclusive and insular you get accused of being a chauvanist or trying to kick non-Hindus out of the country.
I genuinely get the feeling that as far as the Indian political and intellectual elites are concerned, the only way to be a good Hindu is to not care at all.
I don’t think Christian groups opposed this when the issue was being debated and I think few would bother now. The problem came up with BankimChandra’s novel which was altered in a way to deflect hostility away from the British colonialists towards past Muslim aggressors. The issue has become poisoned now with communalism and it would be difficult to reclaim it now. Unfortunately, many of the early literary figures and thinkers had an anti-Islamist stance which is often overlooked today.
I don’t think anybody would really object to these visualisations of the nation; as long as mutual respect is shown to other communities. More important are the actual policies and practises that are followed and it is here that most versions of Hindu nationalism collapse; but this is an old story, you can see it critiqued in Premchand and Tagore.
Wish it were true
And what would that entail?
Oh yeah, the boat on Vande Mantaram has long since sailed; it will be a mammoth task to convince conservative Muslims that it can be accepted as an expression of inclusive nationalism. But lets face it, this isn’t how it has been used anyway or how it is perceived these days in the context of inter-communal relations.
Easier said than done I know; but I think if a genuine attempt is made to listen and understand the views of other communities I don’t see how a problem can occur. Using symbols that are intended to exclude or somehow target a specific community would be against the spirit here imo. A lot obviously depends on context. The important thing to remember with minorities is that they are obviously fearful of being forced to give up their identities and replace it with a majoritarian one they don’t want. I think if they aren’t forced but can see what they are being asked to do is to contribute to a greater national identity that includes them; then common symbolism can be easily found.
The quote :“Arise, let’s confront the challenge” announces this card, urging the people to fight against foreign elements such as Muslims, Christians, MNCs, corruption, cow-slaughter and so on. is from here . The poster says “”Arise, let’s confront the challenge”.Rest is author’s imagination.
The problem is it’s not really about communication between communities. Leave them to their devices and they will be fine. The problem comes when you have mullahs that derive their political power from being able to stir things up. So any innocuous or innocent action becomes an “affront to Islam.” They don’t have to care about the well being of Muslims, they just need to care about the political power they have personally by making sure there are a lot of Muslims and that those Muslims will follow them. A government that dispenses rents to confessional communities based on religious identification is only going to further exacerbate these sorts of cleavages.
24 · mastervk said
Is Pakistan represented as a Shiva-Lingam covered by a burkha?
@ Yoga Fire – I would agree that there are political entrepreneurs who would lose out amongst the Muslim community if there should be a change but these exisrt on both sides of the religious divide and are hardly unique to Muslims. I do think there needs to be more communication on the matter and I don’t see why we always fall into the trap of letting some conservative clerics speak for an entire community; partly this is the fault of the state and successive govts which for one reason or another have pandered to extremist sentiment at the cost of social integration and pluralism. I do think the Muslim community is much more variated and diverse than is given credit for and more needs to be done to consciously woo opinion within it away from inward narcisstic trends.
26 · Yoga Fire said
LOL ..Only burkha..Other interesting stuff :West Bengal (Lenin??) Kerala (Pepsi) Rajasthan (Hunger)Punjab/Haryana(female infanticide/crying girls)and so on
15 · rob said
well, their acts of terrorism and pogroms keep getting called riots, so they’re doing really well on this count.
16 · Conrad Barwa said
it was an insult to pigs then. it is an insult to pigs in this context too.
LOL, yes, nobody but those awful Hindoos have ever started a riot in India. . . .
It’s easy to say that, but I think it’s just too easy to jump on the bandwagon in hitting Hindutva while glossing over the stuff other groups do that is as bad if not worse with “I don’t like it when anyone does it.” There are times for communication and all that happy stuff, but there are other times when things are just so profoundly skewed that a dialogue with a mutually beneficial resolution just isn’t possible. That doesn’t mean things should get violent, but there needs to be a lawful way to say “I don’t care about your feelings, this is the right thing to do.”
When you’re doing negotiations you have this concept called a ‘BATNA,’ that is “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” If you negotiation doesn’t have a deal, what are you left with? The more tilted the status quo is in your favor the less you need care about negotiating, communicating, or fostering productive dialogue.
And let’s face it, the deck is pretty strongly stacked against practicing Hindus and moderate religious people of all stripes alike. Even the media narrative is stacked against them. Ennis finds the VHP’s education disquieting because . . ., but the reason the VHP has the sympathy it does is because this is exactly the attitude that expansionist Muslim groups and missionary Christians have towards Hindus. (In fact, by maintaining the stance that you can’t convert into Hinduism from outside they’re actually being more charitable to Christians and Muslims than vice-versa.) And they are not trivial forces. People find it easy to justify the tilted coverage because “Hindus are a numerical majority” but that’s irrelevant since that’s not how political power is distributed in India. I mean, when decrying the presence of the Jerusalem cross on India’s coinage or protesting the seizure of temple lands is considered “Hindu chauvanism” how far into bizzarro-world have we gone?
They’ve even lost the effort to frame issues in the media. On this very site while the Kerela nun thing was all over Time magazine and the NYT we were discussing Pink Chaddis. The “Oppressive Hindu Right” story has legs in a way that “minorities trying to undermine the Indian state by seeking ever-increasing rents at the expense of the whole” doesn’t. I respect the bloggers on this site and don’t think they have any sort of agenda, but it’s easy to fall into this trap of focusing on one tree and ignoring the rest of the forest.
On top of that you have guys this ranting their heads off about the imperative of raising the green flag over India again.
I love that India isn’t purely people with tilakas on their heads. I think it’s cool that India is a diverse country. But decrying Hindu chauvanism while being completely silent on all the ways in which Hindus are actually being harmed by government policies actually makes the situation worse. Rather than bringing Indians together it undermines India as a plural society by making Hindus retrench themselves and making Muslims and Christians define themselves as being distinct and separate from Hindus rather than as fellow Indians.
So when a Hindu sees the state itself facilitating this sort of thing how is he supposed to claw his civil liberties back without “threatening” the religious minority groups? Remember their BATNA, they have no incentive to cooperate with fostering a reconciliation. The government already inflates their power far beyond their numbers and in the rush to privilege them has ended up establishing a precedent of all Indians not being equal under the law. So unless someone comes up and sets things in an actual secular direction then all you’re going to have is a continual erosion of a Hindu sense of security and with it a deterioration of the country’s cultural landscape.
From the 1990s???? It is 2009. There are plenty of current events to talk about in this new century. Why not also bring up the fact that Pakistan was happy to be the one to have the “Islamic” nuclear bomb, if you want to bring up the past: http://www.paktoday.com/islamic.htm “…In 70s when Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto launched his campaign to win funds for the nuclearization, he sold the idea to Libya, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Iran as an Islamic project. All these Muslim countries supported the project whole heartedly. Pakistan never faced any shortage of funds as far as her nuclear ambitions were concerned. And therefore it feels obliged to share the technology with other Muslim countries.
There has always been a tacit understanding that Pakistan’s bomb will be used to regain the glory of Islam and defend the “rights” of the Muslims wherever they are persecuted by infidel powers. This was truly an Islamic bomb. On the one hand it strengthened the autocratic hands of the oligarchy and allowed Pakistan’s armed forces to rehabilitate themselves after the humiliating defeat in 1971 and on the other hand it allowed Pakistan to gain a very profitable position within the Muslim world. It was felt that Pakistan’s nuclear capability served as a morale booster for the entire Islamic world. Foreign Minister of Iran expressed his joy and pride and said that the nuclear test by Pakistan has strengthened the confidence of the Muslim world in the face of the nuclear threat from Israel.
Other Muslim nations were equally proud of Pakistan’s achievement. “No more shall the West humiliate Muslims,” thundered the Imam of Al-Aqsa mosque who saw in the explosion of the Pakistani bomb “the beginning of the resurgence of Islamic power.” Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the leader of the Hamas thought that the Pakistan nuclear bomb was a shot in the arms of the Arabs who had failed to produce even a single tank. The Saudi King Fahd and the Crown Prince Abdullah also expressed their satisfaction over Pakistani detonation of nuclear device and thereby strengthening the defense of the Islamic world. The UAE president too described the Pakistani nuclear response fully justified in the face of serious threats to its security. The Egyptian Mufti called upon the Muslims to rally support for the nuclear blast by Pakistan…” Friday, December 26, 2003
Here is something that is happening currently thanks to Taliban Islamic supremacists – look up what a “dhimmi” is in an Islamic state and requirement to wear distinctive clothing to be easily identified as dhimmis and not Muslims:
No more safe at home, Pak Hindus flee to India March 16, 2009 “…Though there were no direct threats, the Hindu families were never left in any doubt about their minority status. Sometimes it would be a warning not to stare at Muslim women for long, at other times, it would be the subtle coercion of the local administrators to sell their land when the situation was still normal. The families were weighing their options until October when they were asked to wear a red patch in their pagadis (turban).
“We were told Hindus are not supposed to wish a Muslim even inadvertently and that is why, in order to make it obvious for a passing Muslim that we were Hindus, we ought to have some element of red in our headgear,” Hardwari Lal, who is now in Amritsar with his family of 13, says….”
33 was from this link:http://specials.rediff.com/news/2009/mar/18sld1-hindu-families-face-the-heat.htm
See the similarity of the dhimmi’s fate in Afghanistan:
Sikhs struggle in Afghanistan Thursday, 25 September, 2003
“…Things got worse during Taleban rule. In a controversial move, the Taleban forced Hindus and Sikhs to wear distinctive yellow tags and ordered Hindu and Sikh women to be veiled. Inder Singh Majboor, who owns a small shop outside the temple, remembers it as a difficult time. “We were frightened by the order. Even though we were allowed to continue praying and holding ceremonies, we were made painfully aware of the fact that we were minorities,” Mr Majboor says….” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3138282.stm
31 · Yoga Fire said
yes! yes!
31 · Yoga Fire said
unlike the balanced summary above, for example.
36 · varun said
Yes Varun. All Hindu’s are genocidal and made from straw. We’ve all heard the Marxist History 101 story thank you.
They’ve even lost the effort to frame issues in the media. On this very site while the Kerela nun thing was all over Time magazine and the NYT we were discussing Pink Chaddis.
The fact that the Rome-based Catholic Church is screwed up and abuses its nuns all over the world, including in Kerala, clearly is a more important story for a South Asian blog to cover than a grassroots movement among Indian women to push back humorously against the forces of social oppression.
/sarcasm
Seriously, why would the “Kerala nun thing” be something Hindus should be framing in the media? No Hindus were quoted in the TIME article (and I couldn’t find a mention of Jesme Raphael when I searched the NYT). Is the idea among right-wing Hindus now that religion is a zero-sum game in which a deprecation of one religion is a win for another religion? When the Catholics look bad, the Hindus look better?
Sorry to disabuse you, but I think we’re seeing an accumulated win for the agnostics. People who become disgusted with the Catholic Church, or with Hinduism or Islam, are less likely to turn to another major religion than they are to become vaguely “spiritual” or agnostic or even downright atheist.
38 · Yoga Fire said
i am a fan of all who are sensitive about kneejerk characterization and proof by example.
by knee jerk characterization, i mean marxist history 101 of course. can jnu, doniger acolyte, prashad-lite, and other carefully thought out descriptions be far behind?
I think you missed the point. It’s a matter of what is considered “worthy of discussion” under the umbrella of South Asian people. The Kerela nun debacle was a major story that broke into the international press. It’s rare for something going on in India to manage that and it was deemed to be not worth discussing. But Hindu nationalist greeting cards from the early 1990s, totally worth talking about. It’s not that the bloggers are pushing an agenda, it’s that there is a cultural understanding about what we consider a South Asian issue and what we don’t. So despite all the entreaties saying that India is not just a Hindu nation, the only religious group whose foibles get discussed in any detail are, not surprisingly, those of the Hindus.
Even in your admittedly sarcastic reply you were choosing to frame the issue in such a way. The Catholic church is an international force so the fact that this abuse happened in Kerela makes it not an Indian issue. But male privilege and chauvinism isn’t international and doesn’t happen around the world? Why do we discuss Indian norms without comparing it against norms regarding machisimo in Latin America?
Oh varun/I didn’t call you a marxist sir. I said we’ve all heard the marxist line before. It’s a tried and true strategy. Someone makes a point criticizing the shortcomings of the policies of the Indian government and someone else, rather than actually addressing the point, decides to distract from it by making some noise about someone who said something offensive which is completely unrelated to the point. It’s a red (in more ways than one) herring.
6 · Manju said
I have spoken about exactly this in the past, and this chapter of BJP/Sangh parivar politics is rarely mentioned now, even in India. I am amazed at the party discipline BJP/Hindu right has shown in this regard — the complete retraction of swadeshi economics (except indigenous manufacture of certain beverages) and aggressive alignment (both rhetoric and actual) with development/modernization/free markers. Splinter orgs in the Hindutva movement, affiliated or sympathetic to BJP, earlier concerned with protectionism morphed/gave way to outfits more concerned with cultural protectionism.
A new article in the Atlantic by Robert Kaplan provides an overview of this curious mix of aggressive economic liberalization and cultural protectionism in Gujarat.
Yes, I like the way things are moving in that direction. It’s all good. 🙂
30 · rob said
Rob, I don’t see how your comment is an appropriate response to OP. pee r does not say that nobody else in India ever started a riot’; merely, that the VHP has gotten away with more than it should.
If I say your dog peed in my backyard, and you say, “Well, X and Y’s dogs have peed in your backyard too.” That answer doesn’t magically grant reprieve to you and your dog. All the offending dogs and their owners deserve the appropriate sanctions — which include cleaning my backyard and compensating me ( and harsher penalties for repeat offenses).
Actually “cultural protectionism” can be effective if you focus it on subtly skewing people’s preferences rather than using the power of the state as a kudgel.
For example, I was recently doing some research on the economic development of Turkey and I noticed that during the reform era the Ottoman Sultanate established various factories by importing European technology and business administrators. Despite their best efforts, however none of the civilian oriented factories were ever able to produce at the level or the price that their European competitors were. Due to pressure from the British they couldn’t protect the industries with tariffs so they just had to focus the factories on producing stuff for the military. The only factories that were ever successful without the patronage of the military were those that produced fezzes. I thought about this for a while before it hit me. Nobody else wore fezzes but the people in the Ottoman Empire. They had no real competition and they had indigenous expertise in fez-making available. It’s like all the benefits of protectionism without having to get the state involved. You also still have some incentive to innovate since if your factory falls too far behind then others will jump in to fill the market.
The British did the same thing. Part of the rationale behind cultivating British tastes and mannerisms among Indians was not only to make them more pliant subjects, but also to expand the market for British goods. If you can convince a typically shirtless South Indian that wool business suits in a tropical climate are a good idea then you suddenly have tens, if not hundreds, of millions of new customers!
I mentioned before that it’s easy to say that, but what you do matters as well. If X, Y, and Z are all relieving themselves in your back yard, but you only ever seem to raise a fuss when Y does it does that not imply some favoritism towards X and Z?
Here’s the thing. Nobody here is denying that the bad stuff that is being done by Hindu groups is bad. The point is that the single-minded focus on all the bad stuff done by Hindu groups without the same focus on bad stuff done by other groups (and cast in the appropriate scale) besides the occasional one-off story paints an inaccurate picture of reality and feeds extremists and grievance-mongers on all sides.
Keep in mind, when we’re talking about countries it’s not just your back-yard, it’s every citizen’s back yard. So if everyone’s dog is peeing on our yard so that we can’t use it, but people only get really mad when my dog does it, then not only do I have to deal with the trouble of controlling the dog but the damn yard is still covered in pee.
I think you are expecting too much. Everyone is biased and they report on things that suit their point of view. The only thing that we can argue is that there should be freedom to publish your own biases.
But the way these folks deny the freedom is by calling others who attack X and Z as “communal” / Hindutvadi fascist” etc while terming themselves as some kind of a “secular progressive liberal” champions.
That’s why we see cases like the arrest of an editor for publishing an article by an agnostic / atheist for hurting Muslim sentiments in India and that goes unnoticed..
Even here you see some so called “secular liberal progressives” repeatedly calling for banning commenters / closing threads if they find some unpalatable truths. 🙂
46 · Yoga Fire said
yes, very effective.
Meanwhile, read more on the cultural icon Maharana Pratap here.
Whatever its ends and advantages, cultural protectionism should still be lawful and not violate constitutional norms (perhaps naive). Which is why I am also against granting too much political currency to organized Muslim social organizations that block legal reforms.
Today Sharad Pawar’s acolytes, drunk on the support that Marathi cultural chauvinism gets, can openly declare on TV that a Marathi Manush will be the ‘King of Delhi.’ Perverted Cultural protectionism is proving to be very costly to the Indian democracy. Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Gulaal’ deals with this subject in a deft manner. Highly recommended. It is a very cynical movie, and shows why a combination cultural chauvinism, violence, and corruption is necessary to gain political power in contemporary India.
That was an illustration of the principle, not a metaphor.
Yoga Fire – I just completely disagree with you here. I can’t see how anybody can argue that political power is distributed against Hindus or that things are somehow ‘stacked’ against them; this is absurd imo. Political power has to a great degree been dominated by elites that have come from the upper echelons of Hindu society in India for a long time; only now is it being slowly challenged. The Hindu Right would have been powerful but the problem is for them they will never be able to overcome the internal divides created by caste and other ethnic boundaries; the sharp polarisation in the countryside, particularly in northern India means that this will increasingly be the main axis of conflict. This is actually going to be the same problem for Pakistan, where Islamism isn’t going to be enough to mediate over social conflict.
How exactly is the state ‘harming’ Indians as Hindus? The state does many harmful things to its citizens in India, it certainly doesn’t do them because of their religion. Generally speaking the lower down the socio-economic hierarchy you are the more you will be penalised one way or another. You can just look at police behaviour to verify this. In places like UP, it is just basically a marauding force that has been criminalised and has for years targeted minoirty groups for dperedations.
And I am sorry but in a democracy, numbers do matter as does who gets to define the majoritarian culture and the ‘rules of the game’. None of which minority groups can do. Even groups like Sikhs which would be regarded as part of the established order can suddenly be cast an “anti-national” and be visibly isolated and targeted; the majority community can do this, no minority community can.
Remember their BATNA, they have no incentive to cooperate with fostering a reconciliation. The government already inflates their power far beyond their numbers and in the rush to privilege them has ended up establishing a precedent of all Indians not being equal under the law.
Who are the “their” here. You take the word of some conservative leaders as representing the whole community? Many of these communities aren’t even unified internally. There are huge conflicts and divides within the Church over issues like caste and there is a similar divide between Muslims between their own elite and the non-ashraf classes. I agree with you that their leaders haven’t done a good job of representing the interests of their community as a whole and the state has unncessarily pandered to a conservative section of this leadership but this has been extremely detrimental to these communities more than anything else. You can see from looking at NSS data and other statistics produced by the state itself on how far behind economically and socially most of these groups are with regards to mainstream society. They have paid a high cost. So I don’t know what “priveleges” they are supposed to enjoy here.
I think this is partially true; though I don’t see the erosion of a “Hindu sense of security” that you claim exists. There is a sense of loss of power amongst traditional elites, especially at a national level but I don’t think that is the same thing as conflating it with a decline in ‘Hindu security’ (whatever this means). I am all for secularism but it is time we admitted that this was only an elite project that wasn’t really popularised for the masses; for decades this existed mainly on paper and within upper middle class circles; while actual politics on the ground was always suffused with religious politics. I think the major difference was that this only started taking a darker turn over the last few decades as various groups saw they could exploit it for electoral gain (which they did successfully). I don’t think a top-down imposition of secularism will work anymore – not that there is even much will to try it these days.
The main problem for religious nationalism IMO, at least in India, whether Muslim or Hindu is that it will increasingly be faced with serious social and economic contradictions which I don’t think they can offer satisfactory solutions to. At the grassroots level from what I have seen, while they can serve as a way of mobilsing voter blocs in the short-term; they are just failing to meet peoples’ aspirations and blaming some other group or the state is only going to work for so long.
Of course this is a huge issue with a lot of complications and I am excessively simplyfying it here; but this is the aspect of the problem that seems most significant to me.