Myths and Dreams: Hindutva Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora

FerozeK:

``I have generally noticed that Indians are averse to criticism; even if it is constructive and tend to react defensively to any criticsm directed towards them or towards India. ``

I would disagree for the following reasons...

Every society and its sub group has its icons and inspirations. For post independence Iindia, it was Nnehru. And yet Nehru is crtiticized roundly by siginificant numbers of people today. This was an example of personalities being open to criticism.

From its inception, socialism was the Mantra of independent India. Yet socialism is criticized roundly as well. OTOH, There are still plenty of critics who give gaalis to Indians who are capitalist free marketeers. This was an example of Iindians criticizing the choices made in the past as well as in the present by India.

India also has been a secular nation. Yet, there are large numbers of Indians who criticize the way secularism has turned out. They want changes. OTOH, there are plenty of Indians who criticize those Indians who are critical of secularism. Again, all Indians, criticizing choices that have been made and will be made.

I agree that there is one ideological blindspot. Indians cannot listen to criticism from Pakistan when it comes to treatment of minorities. That point is valid. A Urstruly or a Romair advising Indians about treatment of minorities is simply wasting bandwidth.

My long winded point is that India is a complex country. Every fact you state about India, the opposite is equally true.

Scott#116
`` Problem is Muslims outside India refuse to accept people like police joint commissioner Ahmad Javed as representative of Indian Muslims, for the simple fact that the lies that they live with would come crumbling down. Far better to think of them in terms of Umer - keeps the myths and falsehood intact.``
Do you seriously doubt that there are many more Umars to any Javed in India? By Umars, I do not mean members of SIMI but the youth who is discriminated, disaffected, alienated and insecure, unsafe, unwanted and unloved in his own country?

ferozk#117
``I have generally noticed that Indians are averse to criticism; even if it is constructive and tend to react defensively to any criticsm directed towards them or towards India.``

I have seen as much crticism of Modis/Togadias/Advanis and even Nehru and Gandhis as I see of the faujis and mullas by my Pakistani friends. But if one doesn`t react to what one believes is faulty and unbalanced analysis, what the heck is one doing here?

Alephnull#118
Do you know if this Mary Roy is the mother of Arundhati Roy?

Seeing some of the excerpts from Ms. Nussbaum, it seems that the standards of academia in the US Asian Studies deptt. has gone down considerably. Prof. Elder of the University of Wisconsin in my time would have never shown such ignorance of his subject matter. Gosh, he even knew how to do a proper Wah, Wah in a Mushaayra!

Aleph Null Sahib,

I will post the appropriate paragraphs of Nussbaum essay- although we are again in the position of having to defend an academic`s reputation of a situation that as you admitted, has no immediate bearing on the issue of this piece.

Secondly, I encourage you to revel in your elephantine condition, to be grateful in the knowledge that someone who is not you or your race is more of an expert on you, your communities, your issues than you are. This state of being is something women on Chowk are well acquainted with. Enjoy!

PS that previous post should read `beat around the bush` and `close to his heart`...

Dear Harimau,

``The time has come to ban all conversions and start a re-conversion movement in India``

I like that about you Harimau. You don`t beat about the bush do you? Unlike your buddy P-mishra2 who tries to project himself as a liberal humanist... eventhough I suspect the dream of `reconversion` of Muslims and Christians is close his heart too...

-Manto

What absolute crap!

So it is all right for Jubilee Christian Fellowship of San Jose, California to raise money to convert the ``heathen nation`` of Hindus. It is okay for Saudi Arabia to offer a house in India and a job in Saudi Arabia to converts to Islam. But is NOT okay for Hindus to contribute money to social service organizations because they might be affiliated to ``Hindutva`` elements.

I am sorry if this doesn`t cut the mustard with me. I walk down the streets of Chennai and all of a sudden in the most expensive suburbs I find buildings for the Seventh Day Adventists, Assembly of God, Church of South India (a Protestant denomination), etc. Compared to this, the Catholic diocese doesn`t seem to have any funds from the Vatican for expansion and the Mar Thoma Church, the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Malankara Church -- all native to India and have been in existence for about 1950 years -- are all stuck in Kerala with no possibility of expanding their flocks. Obviously, something is in the works.... and just because I am paranoid doesn`t mean people aren`t after me.

I think people like Angana Chatterji ought to convert to The True Faith and move to Kabul. And take FarceAnna Versey with her.

The time has come to ban all conversions and start a re-conversion movement in India.

Nazarhayat Khan 63

Dude, that is neither my position nor Ayesha Jalal`s. It helps if people like you who claim to be talking on the `academic level` etc should atleast research before you take irrevocable positions.

The Ayesha Jalal view is that Jinnah and the League were fighting for effective political safeguards within the Indian Union. To do this however they had to prove their representative status. In order to create the representative status, they had to rally the Muslim Majority provinces behind them, and in order to rally the Muslim Majority provinces they had to give them a vague idea and slogan, and that slogan was Pakistan. Hence 1947 the Muslim League`s strategy was defeated, and the British called Jinnah`s bluff, by giving him Pakistan. Now Pakistan exists and it will never be undone.This is also my view.

You say you are interested academic debates. I doubt it, because other than repeating one side of the story, and making overt generalizations about what people like me say, and an unfounded confidence in your own analysis, you haven`t contributed to the academic debate.

-Manto

#113 Samina Shah

{{ It would seem that not having read an essay in its entirety and yet commenting negatively on it is an academically dubious accomplishment. Nussbaum has written quite a bit on these cases in the essay, unfor.}}

Samina ji,

You may have spoken too soon.

Professor Nussbaum does indeed seem to have held forth quite a bit on the three cases listed. A lengthy version of her argument (delivered as an endowed annual lecture at the University of Notre Dame), can be found below (the link takes you a a PDF document):

Religion And Sex Equality

I gather on perusing the learned Frau Doktor’s essay that she has developed a theoretical framework in which to weigh the dilemma mentioned in the title. I am quite ready to read the entire essay closely and without prejudice in my copious spare time.

I have however looked in detail at the specific references in the paper to the legal case of Mrs. Mary Roy v. State of Kerala and Others, to the surrounding events, and to its societal ramifications (they may be found on pp. 2-3, p. 23 and pp. 44-45 of the lecture). I regret to have to inform you that the Professor Nussbaum has seriously misrepresented the reason for community opposition to specific features of the judgement. Most egregiously, what might charitably be called unfounded speculation on p. 3 has been used on pp. 44-45 as the non-existent pivot on which hinges Nussbaum’s application of her framework to this case. I will be quite happy to explain all this at length if you so desire (I desist from doing so immediately only becasue it may not be of general interest). For now, let if suffice to say that this was absolutely not a case of conflict between the fundamental rights of an individuals and the customary privileges of a religious community.

This may not invalidate Nussbaum’s theoretical arguments, but it makes their application to Syrian Christians completely moot. Perhaps Nussbaum was misled by her native informants - I have a pretty good idea who one of them might have been. I also note in passing some other obvious howlers in Nussbaum’s paper – such as dating the Mughals to the thirteenth century! This in addition to the other risible description of the Kama Sutra as a religious text. It may well be that Professor Nussbaum spreads her talents too thin.

As to academic reputations, I have enough of the academic in me to know how misleading those can be in regard to competence in specific situations. I most certainly am not prepared to defer to the Distinguished Professor’s factual misrepresentation of events and practices involving my ancestral community. That would be as ridiculous as requiring the elephant to attend lectures by the Professor of Zoology, taking diligent notes, in order to learn what his dietary, migratory and mating habits should be!

re: Stuka

I have no disagreements with you said. I am not interested in judging the worth of the article nor am I interested in judging the the replies, which the Indian interactors have posted in response to that article. My question was simple. I have generally noticed that Indians are averse to criticism; even if it is constructive and tend to react defensively to any criticsm directed towards them or towards India.

If, on the other hand, most Indians think of themselves and of India as being infalliable, then I can understand your, meaning Indian, reaction to any criticism.

Ciao

Problem is Muslims outside India refuse to accept people like police joint commissioner Ahmad Javed as representative of Indian Muslims, for the simple fact that the lies that they live with would come crumbling down. Far better to think of them in terms of Umer - keeps the myths and falsehood intact.

re:#112 by Saminasha
I felt sad reading that article. India is a geopolitical reality that came into being due to colonial rule. India as an idea preceded it. That India encompasses everyone regardless of religion, caste etc. If muslims do not feel part of that India, already the idea of India is under threat. India may cease to exist the day it ceases to be a secular country. I see it happening slowly.
Sridhar

I fail to understand the point of cutting and pasting articles on a Hindu Muslim divide in India. Nobody is denying that this gulf exists. Neither is the author of the above article being blamed for talking about communalism where none exists.

The author is being blamed by most Indian interactors for not giving the complete version of India`s communal problem and for being biased in her depiction of Hindu grassroot movements. To address any other issue would be a digression from the thrust of the criticism and would have no validity.

Aleph Null Sahib,

It would seem that not having read an essay in its entirety and yet commenting negatively on it is an academically dubious accomplishment. Nussbaum has written quite a bit on these cases in the essay, unfor. I have a bit of work to do and dont feel like typing an essay onto this board. There is this called a ``library`` however....

Great Divide
Mounting fury over religious discrimination by the Hindu majority is triggering an increasingly violent Muslim backlash
BY ALEX PERRY | BOMBAY

Surveying the sunset over Bombay`s southern coastline from the calm of his palatial first-floor office, police joint commissioner Ahmad Javed could scarcely look less like an outsider. His uniform is stiff with starch, his shoes impeccably shined, and when the 45-year-old smoothes his neatly clipped moustache, he does so with perfectly manicured fingers. On his polished wood desk, an In tray bulges with the responsibilities of the second-most-senior policeman in India`s biggest metropolis; meanwhile, outside a nervous line of saluting adjutants waits for signatures, permissions and orders in triplicate. When Javed speaks, it is with the erudite polish and faintly Victorian manner of India`s finest private school, St. Stephen`s College in New Delhi. The consummate insider, Javed is a man whose instincts and hopes—whose entire being—are governed by the system he serves. ``We have a saying in the service,`` he says. ``Once you don your khakis, they become your religion.``
Looking down at the same shoreline from the top floor of a nearby hotel, 44-year-old ``Umar`` is reflecting on a life spent almost entirely outside the Indian mainstream. Affable, neatly bearded and smartly dressed, Umar (a pseudonym given to him by TIME) holds the senior rank of ansar, or guide, in India`s loosely knit Muslim militant movement. In that capacity, he told Time, he has played a central role in a string of deadly bomb blasts that have rocked Bombay in the past eight months. Just last week, a bus was blown apart as it drove through eastern Bombay, killing three people and injuring 42. The police blame the attack on Umar`s organization, an unnamed fundamentalist group made up primarily of former members of the outlawed Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

Umar and Javed, both Indian Muslims, began their careers simultaneously in the mid-`70s. But they could hardly have chosen more different paths. While the policeman was taking his civil-service exams, Umar was being admitted as a full-time activist in SIMI, a fundamentalist group formed in the late 1970s and banned by New Delhi after 9/11. Umar spends his life on the run, changing his appearance, identity and address every few months. But as a member of the ultra-orthodox Al-e-Hadeez Sunni sect, he maintains a semblance of a traditional Muslim family life with a wife and two children at a house in northern India. For most of his 28 years` service as an Indian jihadi, Umar`s specialty has been as a facilitator for foreign Islamic guerrillas from Pakistan, Afghanistan and even western China, providing them with safe houses, weapons and identities. (Among those he helped, claims Umar, were Muslim militants who attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi on Dec. 13, 2001, killing 14 people.) Like Javed, Umar defines himself through his work. But as befits the man at the top of Javed`s most wanted list, in every other respect he is the policeman`s antithesis. ``This country doesn`t work for Muslims any more,`` he says. ``You can`t get a proper education. You can`t get a job. You`re not even safe.``
Here we have two Indian Muslims with two very different experiences of their homeland. But the truth is that Javed and Umar share a fundamental burden: in the eyes of many Hindus, no Muslim can ever truly belong in India. The origins of this antagonism are centuries old. In essence, hard-line Hindus regard as a national humiliation the Islamic influence that pervades India`s history, starting with the Mughal Renaissance in the 16th century, continuing with the birth of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia at Deoband in northern India in the 1860s (the same creed followed by the Taliban) and enduring even today in India`s national symbol, the Mughal mausoleum of the Taj Mahal. This distrust of Islam has only increased since independence in 1947: modern India was founded in the Muslim-Hindu bloodletting of partition of the subcontinent, in which a million people died, and since then tensions have boiled over into three wars against Islamic neighbor Pakistan. Today, much of the religious tension in the region stems from India`s rule over Muslim-dominated Kashmir in the face of strident Pakistani opposition. The war on terror and the 1998 election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on a Hindu-nationalist agenda, which focused debate on physically undoing the Mughal invasion by razing mosques built over Hindu temples, have lent a veil of legitimacy to India`s lurking anti-Muslim prejudice. ``Muslims are a despised minority, disliked by a large section of the majority,`` wrote Muslim commentator Firoz Bakht Ahmed in the Hindu newspaper last month.
Indian Muslims do have their high achievers: President Abdul Kalam; Wipro chairman and India`s richest man, Azim Premji, and a host of Bollywood stars (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Saif Ali Khan). But for every President or Muslim tech entrepreneur or movie star or policeman, there are 1,000 others with tales of discrimination in the workplace or the education system, harassment by wayward police officers or segregation into ghettos by Hindu landlords. Whatever the causes, there is no disputing the fact that Indian Muslims today are less educated, poorer and live shorter, less secure and less healthy lives than their Hindu counterparts. Census figures paint a bleak picture of their plight. In rural India, 29% of Muslims earn less than $6 a month, compared with 26% of Hindus; in the cities (where a third of all Muslims live) the gap rises to 40% vs. 22%. Some 13% of India`s population is Muslim, yet Muslims account for just 3% of government employees, and an even smaller percentage are employed by private Hindu businesses. Meanwhile, in the cities, 30% of Muslims are illiterate, vs. 19% of Hindus. Nor are any of these indices improving.
India`s Muslims are also far more likely than Hindus to be victims of violent attacks. In all the communal riots since independence, official police records reveal that three-quarters of the lives lost and properties destroyed were Muslim, a figure that climbed to 85% during last year`s riots in Gujarat. The Gujarat authorities even went so far as to price Muslim lives below those of Hindus, offering $2,050 in state compensation for Muslims killed but double that for the riots` 58 Hindu victims. ``There is often a tendency in India to treat Muslims as them rather than us,`` says K.C. Tyagi, former leader of the moderate Hindu Samajwadi Party. ``And this tendency does have terrible manifestations. Even today, by and large, Muslims have not been admitted to what we call the Indian mainstream.`` The portion of the population affected by this systemic discrimination is staggering: India`s Muslim ``minority`` numbers 150 million people (vs. 850 million Hindus)—after Indonesia, the second-largest Islamic community in the world.
It`s little wonder that these inequalities have fueled a profound sense of alienation and resentment among many Muslims. In their eyes, what happened in Gujarat to people like Zaheera Sheikh was a brutal, watershed illustration of just how inhospitable India has become to Muslims. As Hindu mobs rampaged across the state in an orgy of violence that was to cost 2,000 Muslim lives, Sheikh hid on a rooftop in her hometown of Baroda, Gujarat, and watched a crowd of 100 pelting her family`s home and attached bakery with bricks and bags of gasoline. After an hour of this, she recalls, a Hindu police sergeant addressed the mob: ``He said, `You have to finish this tonight, to finish everyone off. This has to be over with by the morning.` And then he got back into his jeep and left.``
Nine people were burned alive or clubbed to death at the Sheikh family`s house and bakery that night, including her uncle Kauser Ali and her sister Sabira, as well as three Muslim neighbors and their four children who believed they would be safe inside the Sheikhs` concrete walls. When the rioters coaxed the survivors down from the roof the following morning with promises of safety, Sheikh and the others agreed. But the mob killed two Muslim men as they ran away and beat three Hindu bakery workers to the ground before disemboweling them, piling wood on top of them and setting them alight.
Sheikh`s experience of what University of Washington political scientist Paul Brass calls militant Hindus` ``institutionalized riot systems`` was all too common in Gujarat. But it is her tale of what followed that is now forcing the nation to examine how deeply anti-Muslim prejudice permeates the state. In the riots` aftermath, what set Sheikh apart from other victims was her steadfast refusal to recant her police statement identifying her attackers. ``My brother received threats on his mobile phone from politicians. They would say, `Do you value your life? Your family`s life? Tell your sister to change her testimony or we`ll kill you all.``` But Sheikh refused, exhorting her brother to remember the sight of their sister Sabira perishing in the flames. Finally, on May 17, Sheikh`s day in court came.
When she arrived at the courthouse steps, Sheikh says, local BJP leader Madhu Srivastava intercepted her and said ``you are not going to get justice.`` In addition, she claims, ``He asked me, `Is your life or the lives of your family not precious to you?``` (Confronted with Sheikh`s allegations, Srivastava told TIME, ``These Muslim women are lying. I have never threatened them. They have entered into a conspiracy with [the opposition] Congress Party to defame me and the nationalistic BJP. I am the most popular leader in my constituency. Otherwise I would not have been elected. The Congress [Party] is provoking Muslims to make false statements for its own political gains.``)
As Sheikh recalls it, the courtroom was packed with militant Hindus, staring at her and making threatening gestures. At this last moment, Sheikh`s nerve failed her. She told prosecutor Raghuvir Pandya that she hadn`t been able to see her attackers in the dark and smoke. Pandya, a BJP member who Sheikh says had not met his star witness before her court appearance, questioned her briefly, then let her go. ``I had two choices: to speak for my dead relatives or to keep quiet for my living ones,`` she says. ``I chose the latter.`` She was one of 41 witnesses who had changed their statements; soon afterwards, the case collapsed and all 21 accused walked free.
Moreover, Sheikh`s case is not even particularly unusual. Hindu riots in India over the past two decades have cost the lives of more than 6,000 people, yet only a handful of Hindus have been convicted. Justice is even rarer in a state where some public prosecutors owe their jobs to the BJP`s hard-line icon Narendra Modi, who did little to control the riots and was re-elected last December on a wave of Hindu nationalism, and where Pravin Togadia, the extremist general secretary of the BJP-allied Vishwa Hindu Parishad, has his main support base. (Togadia once informed TIME that a third of Indian Muslims were ``jihadis`` and that all jihadis—50 million people, by his math—should be ``executed.``) Indeed, an indication of which way the courts are leaning in three other Gujarat massacre cases—in which the death tolls were 89, 42 and 38—can be found in the release on bail of all but 10 of the 114 alleged murderers, rapists and arsonists.
Nonetheless, Sheikh says she retains her faith in the Indian justice system and in the humanity of most Hindus. ``I don`t believe Hindus everywhere are like this,`` she says, mentioning several Hindu friends and neighbors and even policemen who encouraged her to go to court. ``If there`s a divide here, it is between those who want to see justice done and those who don`t.``
But for terrorist Umar, Gujarat and the unabashed prejudice that followed was a breaking point. ``If the government continues on this path, we will go to any extreme,`` he warns. ``As they reach their peak, so will we.``
Indian politicians blamed Pakistan for last Monday`s Bombay bus explosion that killed 3 and injured 42 (bringing the toll from five blasts since December to 17 dead and hundreds injured). But the police in Bombay have little doubt that Umar`s organization was the real culprit. Javed notes that the attack occurred in Ghatkopar, an area of eastern Bombay that`s home to many migrant Gujaratis and that was also the place where Umar initiated his Bombay bombing campaign on Dec. 2, when an almost identical bus bomb killed two and hurt 28 others. Issuing a high alert across the city last week , Javed said the ``element of continuity`` from the previous blasts was undeniable. A senior officer from India`s intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), confirms that a hard core of fundamentalists drawn from SIMI`s ranks has switched from backroom support to frontline terror in the past few months; he also says they were responsible for the assassination of former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya on March 26. The officer from raw adds, ``Let`s not have any doubts as to what caused this [Muslim backlash]. If I was a Muslim and people from my community were mowed down like they were in Gujarat, do you think I would stand by and do nothing?``
Umar, for one, has no intention of standing by and doing nothing. ``We will continue,`` he vows. ``There is no limit on our actions ... Even to kill children is good—you stop the generation there, at the beginning.``
For law enforcers like Javed, the worry is not so much the ruthless fury of an extremist like Umar as the extent to which such rage has spread within more respectable parts of the Muslim community. When Bombay suffered a series of Islamist bomb attacks in 1993, they were carried out by the city`s Muslim-dominated underworld, men who had long departed the mainstream and for whom violence was already a way of life. But Javed`s right-hand man, deputy police commissioner (and Hindu) Pradip Sawant, is finding today that even some whom he`d expect to be India`s least marginalized Muslims are heeding the call to jihad. ``Of the 21 we`ve caught and charged [over the recent Bombay bombings],`` says Sawant, ``two are doctors, six are computer specialists and two or three more are university graduates in other disciplines.`` Outside Bombay, too, the police have broken up terrorist cells in places like Bangalore, Kerala and New Delhi over the past six months and have been shocked to find that a high proportion of cell members were university graduates and professionals. ``It is a matter of serious concern,`` says Javed, ``when people who are so qualified choose a path which means throwing everything away. It tells us that there is a new sort of thinking circulating in the community.``
That new thinking was evident when Javed`s men descended upon the prosperous Muslim suburb of Borivili in April to arrest former SIMI national head Saqib Nachan, 44, as the suspected ground commander for the Bombay bombings. Javed`s officers were forced to withdraw by a crowd of 300 local residents who assembled outside their stucco mansions and barred the way. Later, after Nachan surrendered and confessed his role as a terrorist commander, the police announced the discovery of two AK-56s, four pistols, four revolvers and 250 homemade bombs hidden in the village well. Nasir Mullah, whose 26-year-old bank-manager son is a former SIMI member and was also arrested, says the weapons were to protect Borivili from a Hindu-dominated police force that has since been censured in an official state report for conducting ``ad hoc arrests of the innocent, torture and forced confessions`` there. ``Nachan and the other SIMI people are role models here,`` says the 55-year-old timber trader. ``People need to defend themselves.``
Although he, too, is angry about Gujarat, Javed refuses to concede any common bond with Umar. To Javed, there is no contradiction between his dismay over Gujarat and his job, which requires him to hunt down self-styled Muslim avengers. ``There`s a world of difference between being upset by Gujarat and being a committed militant,`` he says. Wrath is not the only emotion sweeping India`s Muslim community, he adds. Progressive Muslims like Javed are increasingly expressing alarm at the dangers of radicalization among both Hindus and Muslims. And in the past year, a growing number of such moderates have called for Muslims to modernize and show the flexibility needed to begin bridging India`s bitter division. In her steadfast refusal to see Hindus as the enemy, Sheikh personifies this progressive outlook. ``I just don`t understand these old hatreds,`` she says. ``I could never live like that.``
But with the rhetoric of intolerance likely to drown out moderation in the run-up to a general election as little as six months away, Javed and his officers see more bloodshed coming. ``I fear this is only the beginning,`` says deputy commissioner Sawant. Indeed, flushed with success, Umar has no intention of renouncing his terror campaign. ``We regret nothing,`` he says. ``We enjoy this work.``
Javed, meanwhile, scans the cityscape`s middle distance, as if for signs of his quarry. ``We will have more strife, and the situation will get more difficult,`` he predicts. He pauses. ``But there is hope for Muslims in India. There has to be. If Muslims lose hope, then what?`` Then Umar and his Hindu enemies will have won.

With reporting by S. Hussain Zaidi/Bombay and Sankarshan Thakur/New Delhi

Time Magazine (August 11, 2003)