Monday, June 6, 2022
Long-term fall-out of the Mahatma murder
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Friday, May 13, 2022
Does India really need a Uniform Civil Code?
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Monday, April 18, 2022
Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind
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“I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”
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Why ISIS targeted Brussels
(DailyO, .26 March 2016; Courtesy of Mail Today.)
March 22 is henceforth an iconic date in Belgian history. Bomb attacks in the departure hall of the Brussels Airport and at the Maalbeek underground station near the European Parliament building killed dozens of people. I have been hundreds of times at these locations, and must count myself fortunate that I was’t there at the wrong time.
History
Is there a reason why Brussels was singled out for bomb attacks claimed by the Islamic State? Yes, there was, and we in Belgium felt it was only a matter of time before such a thing would happen — though the actual event still came as a shock. In fact, several reasons.
Militants of the Islamic State, the self-styled caliphate, are acutely aware of Islamic history, and that contains one reason, dim to us but very vivid to them. ISIS statements about the attacks identify the victims as "crusaders", 0and Belgium is indeed strongly identified with the crusades. The First Crusade was led by the proto-Belgian earl Godfrey of Bouillon, who became the first king of Jerusalem in 1099; his equestrian statue adorns the highest place of Brussels, next to the Royal Palace.
The Crusader elite corps of the Knights Templar had a tactical alliance with the Assassins, a Shia militia dedicated to fighting the (Sunni) Caliphate. Today, the neo-caliphate (ISIS) is continuing that thousand-year-old struggle against both Shia and Crusaders.
The second reason is the symbolic value of Brussels as containing the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, incarnations of armed infidelism. The caliphate is at war with these entities, and Belgium is among the Western nations bombing the Iraqi part of the caliphate.
Many Leftists have transferred their old sympathy for Cuba and Vietnam to the Islamic challengers of Western imperialism. Therefore, they tend to minimise the seriousness of terrorism by alleging, not incorrectly, that even a small country like Belgium has already killed more Arab civilians (apart from caliphate fighters) than have died in any of the terrorist attacks on Madrid, London, Paris or now Brussels. Being killed on the way to work by a sudden bomb explosion is exactly as bad in Mosul as it is in Brussels, so "Belgians shouldn’t complain."
The third reason is the relative laxity of the Belgian authorities. Within Belgium itself, when compared to the second city, Antwerp, the administration of Brussels counts as undisciplined, chaotic and corrupt. The over-all Belgian standard is not so good either, as the security forces are badly underfunded. For decades, whenever budget cuts have been considered, the Army has served as a milch-cow. Soldiers are not expected to complain, but the result is that today they are ill-equipped to deal with the terror threat.
Adapt
Within the calculations of the ISIS strategists, the fourth reason, at least explaining why it happened now, is that it had to happen fast. Last week, Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the cell that carried out the Paris attacks in November, was arrested in Brussels. The Belgian government was triumphant and expected to extract important information from the terrorist.
For the very same reason, ISIS feared that its plans for further actions would become known, so it preponed the bomb attacks that have now taken place. That explains why they targeted easily accessible places: ISIS showed that it could fast adapt to the constraints of the new situation and still achieve a very tangible and sensational result.
But the most controversial and politically charged, is the fifth reason. Using Brussels as a staging-ground for preparing attacks in Madrid, Paris or Brussels itself is fairly easy, because the militants can always count on a large population of sympathisers.
Anti-system
As Ernesto Ché Guevara wrote, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In the Muslim neighbourhoods of Brussels, there is a strong anti-system feeling, and even moderates will never betray a member of their own community.
Take the case of Salah Abdeslam, whom it took four months to catch. He had not been roaming as a fugitive, but lived in hiding with an extremist family in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. His brother, who lived nearby, had told the police he hadn’t heard of Salah and feared he was dead. Yet, he and many in the neighbourhood knew Salah’s whereabouts, but nobody spilled the beans.
The Belgian population frowned when it learned of this display of disloyalty. This formed part of a long-running and far-reaching debate on immigration, ethnic relations, religious pluralism and the secular state. At any rate, in a realistic assessment, Brussels had it coming. Belgium’s home minister, Jan Jambon, had warned last week that the latest catch of a terrorist did not mean that the terror threat had died down. He was proven right sooner than he expected.
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Wednesday, March 16, 2022
A "union of states"
A "union of states"
(First Post, 12 Feb 2022)
According to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, “India is described in the Indian
Constitution as a union of states and not a nation. One cannot rule over the
people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed.
It is a partnership, not a kingdom.” Let’s see about that.
The terms “union” and “state” (in the Hindi text: rājyon kā saṅgh) are
quite vague, especially for a juridical document: both can have several
interpretations. A "union" can mean a federation, which is a
sovereign state dividing itself in autonomous provinces; or a confederacy, a
permanent alliance of sovereign states; and everything in between, with history
often showing an evolution from the one to the other. Thus, Switzerland is
effectively a federation but called itself at its founding Confederatio
Helvetica. An effective confederacy at present is the political structure
of the Eurasian landmass's western subcontinent, the European Union. As the
Brexit has demonstrated, though to much surprise, a member state of the EU
retains its sovereignty, including the defining right to secede. By contrast,
the Indian Republic does not confer on its lower political units this right of
secession.
A "state" usually means a sovereign country, but it can also
mean a province within a country. It is very common for this class of words not
to have a fixed meaning in regard of its dimension of
sovereignty, e.g. "land" in German means a province, in
Dutch a sovereign country, and in English it has no political meaning, merely
signifying any non-maritime region. When appearing in a legal text, such words
first require a definition. From the wording in India's Constitution, one
can deduce that here the word “state” (rājya) means the political level
below full sovereignty.
Trivially, today's Indian Republic is geographically the sum total of its
states. Yet historically it is not correct to imply that India has come about
by uniting pre-existing states, as "union of states" might suggest.
It came into being as a successor-state to British India. Yes, much of its
present territory consisted of theoretically independent states before the
Transfer of Power in 1947, the Princely States. But these did not
negotiate with British India as equal partners who then decided to merge. Instead,
by signing the Instrument of Accession, they gave up their (already
theoretical) sovereignty to be absorbed into the Republic.
For better understanding, consider the contrast with the European Union.
The EU consists of sovereign member states with their own political history,
mostly with active nationalist movements that went as far as to foment war
against each other. It took the horrors of two World Wars and the common fear
of the Soviet Bloc to make them water down their sovereignty step by negotiated
step in a common ever-closer union. Each state retained the right to veto
common decisions, so that these required a consensus. In India, by contrast, in
vital matters the centre can overrule the states.
A great advantage of having a united federation of semi-autonomous
states rather than a conglomerate of sovereign states is that it dedramatizes
what would otherwise become a cause for war: the redrawing of boundaries
between the states. The reorganization of the Northeast into the "Seven Sisters",
the creation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s or the Panjabi Suba in the 1960s,
or the more recent bifurcation of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and
Andhra Pradesh, are the stuff that elsewhere wars are fought over. Yet under
the umbrella of India, they became
mere administrative procedures. Though pooh-poohed by Rahul
Gandhi, the existence of a national level above the affected states is highly beneficial.
One thing Eurasia's southern and western subcontinents have in common is
that in their founding statements they avoid the term "nation" to
refer to themselves. In Europe this would be a denial of history, where
nationalist passions and considerable blood-letting were needed for the
unification of Italy and Germany, the independence and unification of the
Yugoslav states followed later by this federation's disintegration, etc. The
project of countering these old nationalisms with a new EU nationalism has
only lived in a small Rightist fringe; the “nation” counts as but a relic from
history. In India, by contrast, the idea of defining the Subcontinent's
population as a nation has been alive in the Freedom movement, which was
influenced by the contemporaneous European nationalisms, most explicitly
through VD Savarkar's translation of Italian nationalist thinker Giuseppe
Mazzini.
Indians have debated whether they form a nation, and if so, what kind of
nation. The Nehruvians claimed India was a new nation, with Mahatma Gandhi as
"father of the nation", and in need of "nation-building". This
is in complete denial of history, when a sense of Indianness existed for
millennia. So Gandhi himself had considered India an ancient nation with
himself as its grateful son. The Muslim League applied the Ottoman division
into millets, "nations", meaning religious communities treated
as political units. The Left mostly preferred a fragmented India and invoked
the European equation of nation with national language, e.g. the Bengali
nation. Prakash Ambedkar thought that the attributes of nationhood apply
to the castes: "Every caste a nation."
The present Sangh Parivar effectively espouses Gandhi's view (the asli
Gandhi, not the naqli Gandhi who triggered this debate) that India is an
ancient nation which includes every Indian. Nowadays it downplays its original
Hindu identity and emphatically calls itself nationalist, forever intoning the
mantra “unity”. But in an earlier stage, under MS Golwalkar, it taught that
only Hindus (in the broad sense) form the nation, while the Muslims and
Christians are mere guests. The reason was that only Hindus could boast of a
civilizational continuity, whereas Christians and Muslims had historically
rejected the culture they found here, or from which they converted, explicitly
wanting to replace it with their own.
The main problem with asserting an Indian nationhood, as per Rahul Gandhi,
is its diversity. This is a false problem, merely a higher magnitude of what
every country has to deal with. Moreover, it is part of the genius of Hindu
civilization that it can deal exceptionnally well with diversity. While there
is always room for improvement, the present federal structure takes care rather
well of the needs of its diverse demographics. All the way
from Brussels, I dare say that in terms of a political structure doing justice
to its own motto of "Unity in diversity", the European Union had
better learn some lessons from the Indian Republic.
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Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Questioning the Equality Statue
Questioning the Equality Statue
(First Post, mid-January 2022)
On 5 February 2022, the revered Prime Minister, Sri Narendra Modi, unveils
a giant five-metal statue of the 11th-century founder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita
Vedānta (“qualified-non-dualist conclusion-of-the-Veda”) philosophy and Ācārya
of its concomitant Bhakti (“devotion”) practice, Śrī Ramānuja. Though
the preceding philosopher Śaṅkara with his Advaita Vedānta
(“non-dualist conclusion-of-the-Veda”) is better known internationally among
intellectuals, in India he is more revered for his path-breaking organizational
work in monasticism and temple worship, while it is Ramanuja whose devotional
theism is far more entrenched in Hinduism’s religious orders and popular
culture, including its variations in sects like the Nanak Panth (Sikhi) or the
Swaminarayan community. In living Hinduism, which has many leading figures, he
may not be such a household name as Shankara or Swami Vivekananda, but arguably
his influence reaches the deepest.
This is a joyous occasion, we have no reason to minimize it. But, as is my
wont, I leave it to others to applaud this event; I would rather offer a few
critical observations.
1. Gigantism
The Ramanuja statue is one of
the largest in India, reportedly 216 feet high, standing on top of a 54-feet pedestal.
It follows the trend set by Sardar Patel's statue in Gujarat, to which even
overflying airplane pilots draw the attention of their passengers. But what
purpose is served by this?
In the case of a political figure, one can
understand that the public square is where he belongs. So, a century and more
ago, national authorities strengthened their self-justification in the public's
mind by visually commemorating those who had been pillars of their
establishment. For a philosopher and religious leader, this overwhelming
physical presence is less appropriate.
Secondly, making a statement
about your ideological sympathies by means of a statue towering over the street
view is rather obsolete, since our visual life has mostly gone into cyberspace.
Statues belong to a past century, nowadays you can produce far more impressive
images online.
Thirdly, why the gigantism? The best Hindu
temples have an intimacy about them (as struck me especially in Ujjain’s
HarSiddhi temple or in the present Kashi Vishvanath), and even the biggest ones
are divided in compartments that reproduce this intimacy. They are meant for
visits by families at times convenient to them, not for congregational worship
fixed on Friday or Sunday. And they are meant for pilgrims, not the mass
tourism that giant statues aim for.
A few years back, I was in Haridwar and
Rishikesh, where a flood of the Ganga river had wrought some destruction,
washing human constructions away. This included a recent giant statue of Shiva.
The locals told me that this was Ma Ganga's way of showing her disapproval for
this gigantism. A god doesn't need this kind of emphasis on his intrinsic
greatness. In a way, it is disrespectful to his divine character. If you must,
then make a giant statue of Patel, who after all cemented the Indian state, the
ultimate authority sanctioning all these monuments. But Shiva can do without
this, and so can Ramanujacharya.
2. Trinkets
Whenever anything is done for religion, Leftists
sourly object that the money had better been spent on prosperity-enhancing
initiatives for the masses. Dharma-oriented people can take a leaf from the
Leftists’ book and wonder whether the money spent on the statue (and to be
spent on its upkeep in the future) could not have served a better purpose. Thus,
local temples or Dharmic associations connected with those temples could have
deployed more activity in the field of education, a field where Hindus are
painfully absent compared to the Christian missionaries.
Since Modi came to power, many people have
noticed with increasing consternation that several consequential legal
anti-Hindu discriminations which could finally have been abolished by the BJP’s
comfortable majority in Parliament, are on the contrary being perpetuated. The
BJP not only left the existing inequality between Hindus and the minorities (who
are given privileged autonomy by the Constitution, esp. Art.26-30) in school
and temple management intact, it has actively thwarted attempts to correct this
glaring inequality. When in 2018 BJP MP Satyapal Singh tabled a Private Bill to
abolish these discriminations, it was not just cold-shouldered by his party; he
was given a minor Minister’s post (bought off?) and nothing was heard of his
proposal again.
Hindu places of worship are not autonomous, they
are subject to or constantly threatened by nationalization and the siphoning
off of their funds towards secular or even anti-Hindu purposes. This is
highlighted by the race to the exit of the Hindu community by sects that want
to invest in education and fear such government take-overs, such as the Arya
Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission or the Lingayats. Similarly, Scheduled Tribe
communities who have a status in a grey zone part Hindu part separate, are
embracing the non-Hindu side, affirming their local identities as Donyi-Polo
(Arunachal Pradesh) or Sarna (Jharkhand), because they gain from a cool
“aboriginal” identity and have everything to lose with a demonized and
discriminated-against Hindu identity. The alternative to leaving the sinking
ship of Hinduism is to remain loyal, but of such loyal Hindu temple
associations I hear from local primary sources that they sometimes contemplate initiatives
in education but call these off because of this same fear of a hostile
take-over. Instead of glittering statues, they could use extra funds to finance
their juridical defence under the present power equation; or better still, a BJP-piloted
abolition of these discriminations so as to lift this fear.
Instead, apart from giving privileges to the
minorities in the vain hope of catching their votes (or in the equally vain hope
of a pat on the back from his revered secularists), Modi has merely made a number of
empty Hindu gestures. These include highly televised temple visits, conspicuous
public works in Ayodhya and Kashi, or the recent unveiling of a Shankara statue
in Kedarnath. But the legislative jobs for remedying the second-class status of
the Hindus in India, which only his government is in a position to do, he has
left undone. As a former confidante of Modi’s told me, the BJP merely wants to “keep
the pot boiling”, throw Hindu-looking crumbs to the Hindus to earn their votes,
yet give them nothing substantial.
The highly mediagenic unveiling of the Ramanuja
statue follows the same pattern. Hindus love all the pomp and circumstance,
regardless of whom it is dedicated to (hence no eyebrows were raised when Modi
recently gave glittering presents to the dargah of the anti-Hindu ideologue and
invasion-facilitating spy Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer). Short of a high-powered
campaign to raise their awareness of the discrimination they suffer, they won’t
be up in arms about the disappointingly superficial performance of their Hindu
government. Even if the BJP itself can’t convince the Hindu voters of any
pro-Hindu commitment, it can count on the media: they will seize on any
appearance by Modi in a religious setting to clamour indignantly that he is
pursuing a Hindu Rashtra, an unearned reputation that only makes him more
popular. It merely confirms him as the Hindu Hrdaya Samrat (“emperor of the
Hindu heart”). Hindu jubilation after receiving yet another trinket only proves
that a child’s hand is easy to fill.
3. Egalitarianism
When honouring Ramanuja, the
Government has taken care to give an ideologically useful name to the new
monument: it will go by the name “equality statue”. In the 1960s the Jan Sangh,
earlier incarnation of the BJP, veered into Socialist territory, rather
explicitly in the case of leaders like Nana Deshmukh (whose slogan vikās/“development”
is still central in Modi’s speeches), AB Vajpayee and trade-union leader
Dattopant Thengadi, and even after the liberalization of the economy since the
1990s it hasn’t really vanished. In all three, this Nehruvian economic view
went hand in hand with a choice for secularism: in both realms they simply
followed the dominant ideology.
This is still the case today:
the BJP, portrayed worldwide as fanatically Hindu, is in fact ideologically weak
and ever-weaker. It has no ideological backbone and therefore turns with the
reigning wind, or even dances to the tune played by its declared enemies. It
has no self-respect but is a dedicated follower of fashion. Now, an
international ideological fashion that even India can’t escape, is absolute
egalitarianism.
So the great Sri Ramanuja is
instrumentalized in the BJP’s egalitarian re-profiling. It emphasizes that Ramanuja
assured everyone regardless of caste that he could achieve Liberation. Anyone
can develop and cultivate devotion (Bhakti) to a God and intone His name as a
Mantra.
This insight wasn’t all that
revolutionary: none of the classics on Yoga (Katha Upanishad, Bhagavad Gita,
Yoga Sutra, Yoga Vasishtha, Shiva Sutra etc.), demanding though they may be in
terms of Sadhana discipline, excludes anyone from the spiritual path. Thus, one
of the most constant inequalities in society is that between men and woman, yet
already in the Mahabharata the nun Sulabha defeats king Janaka in debate with
her argument that “the Self (Ātman) is not gendered”, so that women are
equally fit for yogic achievement.
It is claimed that some
Brahmin circles did transpose the inequalities in society to the spiritual
realm. If so, it was but an intermezzo in Hindu Dharma’s long history, always counterbalanced
by the view that the Self is nirguna (“without qualities”) and neti-neti
(“neither this nor that”). Indeed, that the worldly inequalities do not apply
to the yogic sphere is the more orthodox, more Vedic position. Whatever else
may be up for criticism in the Arya Samaj, its endeavour to root its
egalitarian reformism in the Vedas has a basis in fact.
And yet, though this same
age-old position was expressed by Sri Ramanuja, the modern-sounding name
“equality statue” is infelicitous. It is unlikely that he had ever heard of
egalitarianism, and it certainly wasn’t what occupied his mind. He concentrated
on the Supreme, as did the many Bhakti sects centred around variations on his
worldview. I suspect that his assuring all men of Liberation provided they do
the right Sadhana made no difference to their societal status.
The Leftists, whom Modi has
been imitating in his zeal for secular social justice, won’t be impressed. When
Karl Marx and the first trade-unionists took their stand in then-Christian
Europe, they faced a similar ideological obstacle: the Church instilled in its
flock the sense that vis-à-vis God they were all equal. They all had an eternal
soul, tainted by eternal sin, but capable of faith and of receiving God’s
grace, regardless of their status in society. That was what Marx called the
“opium of the people”: the belief in some higher realm endowed with equality
which made socio-economic inequality bearable. As St Paul wrote: there is
neither freeman nor slave, for all have been freed in Christ – but this was a
poor consolation for the slaves, for it made no end to worldly slavery.
For the present purpose, the
situation in Vedanta is not substantially different from that in Christianity.
Yes, in a yogic perspective, all are equally endowed: man and woman, rich and
poor, master and servant. But their spiritual progress doesn’t make them leave
the class they belong to. It may Liberate them from their limitations, but not
from their societal category. It doesn’t make them equal in any worldly sense.
Conclusion
The statue of Sardar Patel,
who like Otto von Bismarck in Germany was the “iron man” and the unifier of his
country, is sensibly called the “Unity Statue”: his main legacy is indeed India’s
unity. In Ramanujacharya’s life, equality is only an incidental aspect of his
prescriptions for spiritual progress. Commentaries and papers have been written
about him in the intervening nine centuries without dilating on equality. The
pursuit of equality is a typically modern phenomenon, alien to Jesus and Paul,
and just as alien to Ramanuja.
We've often seen Hindus make
flattered claims to modern equality, only to collapse when critically
questioned by outsiders. They may find themselves very clever in projecting
this contemporary value onto their ancient tradition, but others see through
this ploy. That's why we warn them to think twice before making such claims. Neither
the Buddha, another much-acclaimed purported egalitarian, nor Ramanujacharya had
the power to change lay society. They could influence their followers’ minds
and organize their monastic orders, but that was the extent of their reach.
From a modern perspective, a certain amount of equality was incidental to their
real purpose, but this purpose was not equality. Contrary to what Ramanuja’s
statue’s name might suggest, his goal was not equality but Liberation.
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