Why Brussels?

(Daily O, Delhi, 25 March 2016: "Why ISIS targeted Brussels")

 

22 March is henceforth an iconic date in Belgian history. Bomb attacks in the departure hall of 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.

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. IS statements about the attacks identify the victims as “crusaders”, and 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 Shiite militia dedicated to fighting the (Sunni) Caliphate. Today, the neo-Caliphate (IS) is continuing that thousand-year-old struggle against both Shiites 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 minimize 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.

Within the calculations of the IS 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, IS 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: IS 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 sympathizers. 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 form 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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The wheel of the world ruler

Bovenkant formulier

Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective, this is the subject and subtitle of a much-needed project: classifying what in history Belgium had to do with the emerging superpower India. As this book is unlikely to be translated, I take it upon myself to summarize some of its salient findings. Compiler of the book is the Slavicist and historian, Professor Idesbald Goddeeris, whose focus is the history of colonization and now, increasingly, of modern India. Previously he wrote a standard work on the history of India together with Prof.Em. Winand Callewaert.

The title, The Wheel of Ashoka, is a reference to La Roue d' Açoka, title of the memoirs of Prince Eugène de Ligne (1959), the first Belgian ambassador in independent India (1947-51). Although an admirer of his class peer Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not quite believe in the latter’s identification of this symbol of Emperor Ashoka . Rightly, he wrote that this was an older symbol of empire, the ideal of the Cakravarti or " wheel turner ", the emperor who is in the centre of administration and receives tribute from all the vassal states. The ideal of the universal ruler existed for centuries, though Ashoka (not Queen Victoria, as too many Westerners still think) was the first who realized it by uniting most of the subcontinent under one scepter.

Belgians in India, politically

In strictly political terms, Belgium and India have had little to do with each other. Some Belgian seamen were employed by the Portuguese fleet and thus were among the first to colonize some peripheral regions of India, especially Sri Lanka and Goa. In 1498 Vasco da Gama landed in the southwestern coastal city of Kozhikode (Calicut). That area, cocopalmwaving Kerala and neighboring Sri Lanka, were regarded as the earthly paradise. An Antwerp imprint of Thomas More's book Utopia therefore contains a poem by the humanist Pieter Gillis which is partly in the local language, Malayalam.

In 1500 the Portuguese trading posts became the Estado da India, the base of some Flemish travellers, including diamond traders and missionaries who tried to win souls, on site or farther inland. For example, while in prison awaiting his execution, Moghul prince and throne pretender Dara Shikoh reported profound discussions with the Flemish Jesuit Father Busée. In 1602, the Netherlands founded the United East India Company (VOC), also an employer of a lot of Flemish adventurers. Christophe Vielle (Louvain-la-Neuve) and Michael Limberger (Ghent) present an overview of these early contacts, from antiquity to about 1700. The following contributions deal with the next stages of colonization , which include the momentary Ostend counterpart of the Dutch East India Company in ca. 1720.

The Kingdom of Belgium (1830-) had no structural links with India, only a lot of personal and business contacts, with the diamond trade as its crown jewel, and only in the last twenty years, the fast-growing Indian investments in the Belgian industry. When still a prince, Leopold II paid a visit to India in 1865, and Albert I, his successor as king, did so in 1925. It was especially his wife Elizabeth who conceived a lifelong fascination with India . She took up practising yoga and received some well-known yoga masters. Brussels became one of the main centres for introducing yoga to the West.

 

In 1943, the Flemish collaboration leader Hendrik Elias received his Indian counterpart Subhas Chandra Bose, or so history has come to call them, but both saw themselves more as freedom fighters. Bose was killed in 1945 in Taiwan, but his country was independent two years thereafter, while Flanders is still waiting. In the reserved atmosphere of the Cold War, King Baudouin (r.1951-1993) waited until 1970 before paying this Soviet ally a state visit.

At a slightly lower protocol level, however, there had been a major contact between Belgium and the fledgling Indian republic concerning the Kashmir issue. In 1947, this principality had not joined the newly independent India nor the tear-away state of Pakistan. When irregular forces from Pakistan invaded the area, it acceded to India and was narrowly saved by Indian troops, who began the reconquest of the state. This would have been completed in 1948, were it not that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had already referred the matter to the nascent UN. Precisely that month, Belgium presided over the Security Council, and so it was up to the Belgian diplomacy to resolve this conflict. A thankless chore, and we cannot say it was really  "resolved" : for we hear frequently in the news that as late as in 2014, there is still a Kashmir question, with the same line of control as in 1948, an effective boundary between the recaptured territory and the third of Kashmir that is still under Pakistani occupation. In that area in 1947-48, Pakistan has wiped out all non –Muslims, and it has refused to vacate the conquered territory, a condition imposed by the UN for a plebiscite. In 1965 and 1999 there were more wars over Kashmir, and it became a sde flashpoint in the 1971 Bangladesh war. In 1948-49, the Belgian diplomats acquired the reputation of being very pro-Pakistan, and so the Kashmir issue has continued to fester. At this point, this review adds the information that one of the best sources of information on Kashmir is the bulletin issued by the former professional soldier Paul Beersmans, who stayed in the area for long as a UN observer and revisits it frequently.

"Oriënt"

The book reports correctly that there has been a shift from the study of the classics ("Indology") to the sociological approach ("South Asian Studies") within the Orientalist departments. The authors, like most intellectuals involved, seem to find this good and normal, but we have our doubts. The “natives” concerned are still very focused on their classics. Islam’s Western advocates strongly support "studying not Islam but Muslims", but the Muslims themselves faithfully keep to their source texts. Their Islam is in essence, following the scripturally recorded example of the Prophet, but what postmodern Islamologists choose to study is precisely the non-Islamic element in the lives of Muslims. In Hindus, the role of the scriptural corpus is less pronounced but still stronger than the trendy neglect of the classics presupposes. This shift takes place both in India itself, where Sanskrit comes increasingly under pressure, and in the entire West, where not only Orientalist chairs be abolished, but in parallel also Latin and Greek, along with history. The classics and any reference to the past are wilfully side-tracked by socialist policy-makers ideologically driven to capture the population under a dome of contemporaneity. On this, they make common cause with the liberals, who shut down chairs of Latin or Sanskrit in pursuance of the Thatcherite principle of abolishing everything that is not immediately self-supporting or lucrative, “to invest less in chicken and more in eggs".

Consubstantial with the rejection of classical studies is the use of "Orientalist" as a term of abuse. Orientalists were eccentric scholars of Asian cultures to the extent that they devoted a lifetime to studying them. They and their perfectly venerable discipline, Oriental studies, were vilified by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian who claimed that they had only been water-carriers of the colonial or imperialist project by purposely devising a contempt -laden characterization of Oriental man. In his famous book Orientalism (1978), Said only defended Islam by denouncing its Western analysers, though his approach has been applied to other fields within Oriental Studies. He painted Islam as a pathetic victim, although the British in India persisted in honouring and maintaining the Moghul empire until 1857, and made ​​common cause with the Muslim League against a freedom movement identified as Hindu. Among the colonial powers it was only Portugal that had attacked Islam as such. It is somewhat understandable that Muslims still flaunt Said’s thesis: after all, he served their interests. But for others it is quite ridiculous, partly because his book is teeming with factual errors, partly because of its over-all nature of what should be called a conspiracy theory: the so-called scholars across countries and centuries actually were all agents of imperialism, and their seemingly scientific theories were only coded weapons to belittle the Asian civilizations and put them in manageable boxes.

Since about 1990, all students of Political Science and Oriental Studies are given large doses of Said’s worldview, a trend that will no doubt be studied one day as a textbook example of a politically motivated aberration In the present book, different contributions show its influence. Thus, we find an example of this “Orientalism” discourse in an otherwise very informative chapter of this book, "shapes of the spirit" by Patrick Pasture and Elwin Hofman (both historians from Leuven), about the history of yoga. This is hardly a reproach to the authors: they only apply a theory which, although wrong, happens to be the prevalent paradigm. In any case, their trendy proposition that yoga is but a Western-inspired recent phenomenon is factually incorrect. The yoga tradition has existed since at least three thousand years. The very popular Bhagavad-Gita exhorted its hero Arjuna two thousand years ago to “become a yogi”, the Yoga Sutra was commented by many ancient and more recent philosophers, the postures of hatha yoga are the subject of written instruction recorded since a thousand years.

At most, some foreign elements have been included: around 400 AD the Chinese notion of the "microcosmic orbit" (a guided tour of attention along the spine up to the crown and along the front back down) had a formative influence on the so-called kundalini yoga and the chakra system; and around 1900, some elements of Western gymnastics crept into Hatha Yoga, especially the headstand and the concatenation of 12 ancient postures into a dynamic sequence, the " salute to the sun”. The approach to the postures, which requires total relaxation and slow performance, however, is unknown in the West, except precisely in recent disciplines that draw on Hatha Yoga in this regard. Conversely, the western pelvic floor muscle exercises that every pregnant woman nowadays, are actually inspired on the yogic mula bandha ("root lock"), not to mention the numerous neuro- and psychological techniques that are based on ancient Indian meditation exercises. A recent example is Mindfulness, a velvet version of Vipassana meditation which was, among others, already practiced by the Buddha.

Jesuits

The topic of a playful chapter illustrates the Zeitgeist before and after independence quite well: Belgian comic-strips. We see the gradual elimination of the existing stereotypes and prejudices. The recent economic and demographic history is also discussed, including the experiences of the now numerous Indian students in Belgium, and a description of the newly built Jain temple in Antwerp by museum curator Chris De Lauwer, who regularly guides visitors there.

An important aspect, especially for the historically very Catholic territory of Flanders, is mission history. After the Congo, India was the destination of most of the missionaries from our region. In Kerala, Panjab and especially Chotanagpur (today Jharkhand and a part of West Bengal), they could leave their mark. The Jesuit mission expanded from Kolkata to the tribal area west of the city, and there the mission of Constant Lievens s.j. played an important role. The naive tribals understood nothing of the property laws the British imposed, and lost their mineral-rich lands to urban investors; so Lievens offered them legal support. "Fire must burn", was his motto. Another important figure was Herman Rasschaert s.j, who tried to intervene in religious riots and was slain by his own tribals on March 24, 1964 (exactly 50 years ago). Recently, the pastoral responsibility was transferred to indigenous priests .

Typical of the Flemish priests, unlike for example the American missionaries, was their attention for the vernacular languages. Camille Bulcke s.j. wrote a Hindi dictionary that is still authoritative. The tribal languages ​​in Chotanagpur were written down for the first time, provided with modern terminology, and introduced as medium for primary education. In 2000, the Hindu nationalist government added some languages to the list of official languages​​, including the tribal language Santali. That these tribal language were upgraded is the merit of the Government, to be sure, but that they had become mature vehicles of culture and therefore came to be considered for official status at all, was mainly the work of the Flemish Jesuits .

Belgian research into India is the subject of a contribution by Winand Callewaert (Leuven). Important scholars include Charles de Harlez (Louvain), Louis de la Vallée-Poussin (Ghent) and Etienne Lamotte (Louvain) . A well-known name in the Flemish movement is Walter Couvreur, co-founder of the Flemish nationalist party in the 1950s, but here mainly the Sanskritist who also taught Hittite and Tocharian (Ghent) . Then comes the more recent research, including my own professors Pierre Eggermont and Gilbert Pollet (Leuven). The latest generation includes among others Christophe Vielle (Louvain) and Eva De Clercq (Ghent). I should add that Callewaert himself is no doubt the most famous Belgian scholar in modern India, writer of a vast Hindi-English dictionary of the devotional movement and editor of many works by or about popular devotional saints (Dadu, Ravidas and others), whose followers deeply venerate him. Foremost in this category is his editing the Guru Granth, the holy book of Sikhism.

Since completeness is not of this world ("only Allah is perfect"), we cannot summarize the whole book. But we can warmly recommend it, there was a real need for a work that presents all this information.

Idesbald Goddeeris , ed : Het Wiel van Ashoka. Belgisch-Indiase Contacten in Historisch Perspectief (Dutch: “The wheel of Ashoka, Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective”), Lipsius , Leuven 2013 , 243 pp. , € 29.50 , ISBN 978 90 5867 954 3 .

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The municipal elections in Belgium 2012

                Nothing is beneath the dignity of our attention, so even the municipal elections of Belgium, last Sunday 14 October 2012, can be deemed to have their importance. I cannot discuss every trend that came out of the results, but a few stand out.

                On the Walloon side, little remarkable happened. All four established parties (Socialists, Liberals, Christian-Democrats secularized as “Humanists”, and Ecologists) held their own, the Socialists even strengthening their dominant position. Some personal issues are of some interest, e.g. how a coalition managed to oust the 20-year mayor of Molenbeek, Philippe Moureaux; this coalition was engineered by the Christian-Democrats in revenge for their own ousting from the coalition in the city of Brussels, where the Socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans strengthened his position.

On the Flemish side, however, something of a revolution took place. The papers were most vocal about the giant victory of the N-VA (“New-Flemish Alliance”). From a marginal alliance partner of the Christian-Democrats in one go to the status of biggest party of the country with more than a quarter of the vote in its own right, it is indeed impressive. Partly, this was a reaction of indignation by the electorate against the latest government formation, in which the classical parties sold out the Flemish nation’s rights badly. Partly, it was because the N-VA has placed itself on the map as a decent conservative party. But it remains to be seen whether they will live up to this new image: the party is as  yet a bit inconsistent and ideologically amateurish. The rightward slant is at any rate undeniable: its rather leftist mayoral candidate in Ghent with a Socialist past, Siegfried Bracke, won comparatively little, whereas their candidates with a right-wing image or past, like Bruno Stevenheydens in Beveren, Karim Van Overmeire in Aalst and party president Bruno De Wever in Antwerp, won hugely.

Not that they can enjoy their newfound power in many places, for the traditional parties have mostly ganged up to keep the N-VA out of power, even if it is the biggest party. In the city of Halle, for instance, the mayoral candidate Mark Demesmaeker ended first but was unexpectedly bypassed by a coalition of the losers. But the N-VA knows how to play the same game: in Bilzen, MEP Frieda Brepoels will be the mayor, replacing her meritorious ex-party comrade (now Christian-Democrat), mayor Johan Sauwens. And in Kortrijk, N-VA supported the coup de théatre by Vincent van Quickenborne, who leaves his ministership in the central government to oust the sitting mayor, former minister De Clerck. For the first time in 150 years, Kortrijk will have a Liberal mayor instead of a Christian.

The Green Party gained somewhat, though a big progress in votes could not save their mayor Ingrid Pira of Mortsel, where yours truly happens to live; the N-VA was bigger there, as in most towns around Antwerp, where they will have a number of mayors. The far-left Partij van de Arbeid (“Labour Party”) put itself back on the map in Antwerp and a few other  towns. The traditional parties all lost somewhat. The victories of the Socialists (at least seemingly, for the real winner was their Green alliance partner) in Ghent and of the Liberals in Tongeren and Mechelen are the opposite of the general picture. But the big loser was the Christian-Democratic Party CD&V.

                In terms of votes, they held out fairly well, slightly better than the Socialists and Liberals. But given their deep implantation in Flemish society, their loss of ground is definitive and a major contrast to their past omnipresence. The decline of the Christian-Democratic party is another step in a long-term decline, combining the structural evolution of people becoming less religious and at any rate less Christian, with the conjunctural disappointment at the party’s selling out the rights of the Flemish people in the latest government formation. Its proverbially incompetent president Wouter Beke tried to put a brave face on his defeat, lying that his party was still the greatest at the municipal level. It is still the dominant party in some rural area, but with the loss of the cities of Aalst, Bruges and Kortrijk, it has very little power in the centres anymore.

This can be compared to that political family’s fortunes in the neighbouring countries. In the Netherlands, the CDA (“Christian-Democratic appeal”) was reduced in the last few years to one-third of its strength, marginalized into irrelevance from what till recently was the natural party of government which mostly furnished the Prime Minister. Its line was centre-left, its tradition and voters centre-right, and once they were presented with an alternative (including Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam party), they left the party in droves. The problem here, as in many parties, is that the voters have their private opinions at ease, while the public figures who sit in parliament are influenced by leftist fashions: either because they really believe these, or because they play to the gallery out of fear that centre-right opinions will be punished by the leftist opinion hegemons. In Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana, for decades in government and the natural partner of the Americans in containing the Communist threat, simply collapsed and disappeared. In Germany  by contrast, the Christian-Democrats profiled themselves as a mildly but consistently conservative party, where Christians and secularized people feel equally at home, so that it survived the secularization of the population unharmed.

                The other big news of these elections was the huge defeat of the Vlaams Belang (VB, “Flemish Interest”, formerly Vlaams Blok, “Flemish Bloc”), also a Flemish nationalist and resolutely separatist party, but known mostly for its anti-immigrant stance. Well, the party spokesmen will say they are not anti-immigrant per se, that they welcome people who are willing to throw in their lot with the natives and become Fleming with the Flemings. But they are perceived as so anti-immigrant that they are shunned by all other parties including the N-VA and kept locked in a cordon sanitaire, i.e. an agreement to boycott them. While increasing its share of the vote constantly, it never took part in exercising power at any level. All kinds of things were tried to counter its influence, including a trial which outlawed the party and forced it to refound itself.

Its presence became counterproductive, as the other parties felt compelled to take the opposite view or at any rate carry out the opposite policies. Thus, the Vlaams Belang was at its strongest around 2004, when the other parties agreed to the Fast-Belgian Act, the most liberal nationality law in the world. More restrictive immigration policies in the European countries have been enacted by the mainstream parties, and all the more so if they had no sizable anti-immigrant parties to define themselves against.

In the nineties, as the Vlaams Blok was going from strength to strength, Prof. Johan Leman, appointed as director of a government centre to combat “racism”, meaning this party, remarked that the answer to the Vlaams Blok was a decent centre-right party which could attract its voters. At the time, there was no such alternative. The parties which the left (and hence the media) likes to describe as centre-right, namely the Christian-Democrats, the Liberals and also the Volksunie (= an earlier incarnation of the N-VA), all rejected that label and pursued centre-left policies. So, they failed to attract VB voters. But now, the new leader of the N-VA, Bart De Wever, managed to give the party a centre-right image at last. He lauds Theodore Dalrymple and Roger Scruton, makes deals with David Cameron, and writes his own conservative column in a leading newspaper. So, his party at long last gave the electorate their decent centre-right alternative. This was just what the voters had been waiting for. Now they want the party to be true to its promises.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (7) Hindu and Flemish nationalism

Meera Nanda, the slanderer, says I have one foot in Flemish nationalism and one foot in Hindu nationalism (2009). And of course I have written in Flemish nationalist magazines, both to praise and to criticize. But what I have written does not follow some party-line. In particular, I am anything but a “nationalist”. One of the chapter titles in my book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind was “Nationalism as a misstatement of Hindu concerns”. (p.474) I wrote quite a few articles against Flemish and Belgian nationalism and a whole book against Hindu nationalism: BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence, published by the fabled Voice of India, Delhi 1997. Indeed, I already expressed my scepticism of all nationalisms as far back as 1991, in my book Ayodhya and After.

It is especially my articles against Belgian nationalism which have endeared me to the Flemish nationalist media and opened  their columns for me. In my youth, I had little notion of Flemish nationalism, and Belgian nationalism was an object of fun. As Flemish emancipation gained ground, Belgian nationalism acquired teeth and became worthy of opposing once more. If Flemish nationalism were in the ascendant and had a state at its disposal, I would probably oppose it formally, but that is not the case. So I vocally oppose Belgian nationalism instead. But I speak decent French (certainly better than their Dutch), have friendly relations with many Walloons and deplore  it when the Flemings of my children's generation speak English with their Walloon peers. The borders in this part of the world have run every which way, so I have no attachment to any borders nor to any nationalism.

What Meera Nanda writes about my Flemish nationalism is of one kind with so much that she writes, viz. vicious nonsense. It also has nothing to do with Voice of India, which she seeks to slander with anything she can find. I discovered Flemish nationalism only after discovering Hindu nationalism, and I never spoke nor wrote about it in India. But in spite of herself, she does have a point: there is a similarity between the Hindu and the Flemish situation.    

The Hindus are a religiously defined society, the Flemish are a linguistically defined society, and both form the majority in their respective countries, India c.q. in Belgium. Both are non-racial societies and have lost many members: racially theirs, but effectively part of the enemy camp. Their enemies are partly taken out of their own flesh. They are moreover proud of their conversion and look down on their ancestors. (That is why it was misplaced of Guru Golwalkar in his famous quote from We, 1939, and of Subramaniam Swamy in “How to wipe out Islamic terror”, DNA, 16 July 2011, to insist that the Indian Muslims must remember their Hindu forebears: as if all Muslims in the world don’t know that their ancestors were non-Muslims. Mohammed even located his own mother in hell because she was inevitably a Pagan, and that is also where all Hindus are or will be according to the Indian Muslims.)

They are decried for being the majority when in fact they turn over backwards to please the minority community. Both have in common that they are denounced abroad by ignorant people as an overbearing majority when in reality they are badly on the defensive. Their opponents are naturally nationalistic, every one of them, whereas they themselves have an opposition inside their own ranks. It took a Flemish author, viz. myself, to appreciate how the Hindus in India can be a majority numerically but a minority politically.


The Flemish also pay for the Walloons just as the Hindus pay for the Muslims. Even when Flanders was poorer than Wallonia, the first 130 years or so of Belgium (founded in 1830) there was a stream of money from Flanders to Wallonia. And now it has become a torrent, proportionately bigger than the stream of money from West to East Germany. Similarly, Hindus are on average more industrious and hence richer than Muslims. About the intrinsic poverty of Indian Muslims, falsely implied by Nehruvian secularists to be because of their oppression, it was observed: “It is curious how markedly for evil is the influence which conversion to even the most impure form of Mahomedanism has upon the character of the Panjab villager; how invariably it fills him with false pride and conceit (…) and renders him less well-to-do than his Hindu neighbour (…) When we move through a tract inhibited by Hindus and Musalmans belonging to the same tribe, descended from the same ancestor, and living under the same conditions, we can tell the religion of its owner by the greater idleness, poverty, and pretension, which marked the Musalman, it is difficult to suggest any explanation of the fact.” [Census Report 1881, Province of Punjab vol. I (p.103-4), quoted from A History of Sikhs by Hari Ram Gupta, and by Sarvesh Tiwari on his blog.]

Another similarity is that both the Flemish and the Hindus opted for multiculturalism whereas the Walloons and the Indian Muslims sought a territorial “solution” and followed the Brezhnev doctrine: what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is up for grabs. When a lot of Flemings went to the Walloon industrial areas, the Flemish movement advocated a generalized bilingualism: one Belgium with two official languages everywhere. The Walloons however blocked it and imposed the linguistic frontier in 1932,with the understanding that South of it would be unilingually French and North of it, French would also remain the elite language. Thhe many Flemings remaining in Walloon territory were forced to become Walloon, and some of their descendants are now the worst enemies of their ancestral community. The Muslim electorate massively voted for Partition in 1945, drove most Hindus from West Pakistan in 1945 and the same more gradually in East Pakistan or Bangladesh, but kept India as a joint account where Muslims were not only welcome but even enjoyed certain privileges.

Similar is also the way the French-speaking Belgians and the Indian Muslims have managed to confirm their privileges through legislation and the creation of institutions. Thus, the bolts in the Belgian Constitution to “protect” the numerical minority and prevent the majority from ever acting like a majority, or the notion of “secularism” and the Article 30 protecting only minority institutions in the Indian Constitution. For the majority, there are institutions rewarding pro-minority opinions, such as the King Baudouin Foundation c.q. the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.  

A difference is of course the nature of the opponent: we can think of the French in different terms from anti-Flemish imperialism (indeed, when the French are on the defensive, as in Québec, the Flemish sympathize with them), whereas Islam is intrinsically anti-Pagan and hence anti-Hindu. The Indian Muslims have killed a few million Hindus within living memory, whereas the occasion when the French killed a handful of Flemish lies centuries in the past. Or to revert that: the Hindus are being tested a lot harder than the Flemish for their patience with the other community. Whenever the Hindus kill Muslims, it is highlighted and much is made of it, but what is truly remarkable is the many occasions when they don’t react. They are, in India as much as in Pakistan and Bangladesh, frequently subject to Islamic petty terror, but only react in kind after several occasions when Islamic violence really gets out of hand.

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The Far Right and the dissolution of Belgium

Foreign press correspondents in Brussels are telling their readers and viewers in the home country that the Flemish Far Right is clamouring for the divorce between Flanders and Wallonia. This is true in itself, but by obscuring the non-Right support for this demand and the non-Flemish Far-Right support for Belgian unity, it falsely suggests a natural and intrinsic connection between separatism and the Far Right.



Foreign press correspondents posted in Brussels to cover EU affairs, are once again showing how clueless they are about the internal politics of the federal Kingdom of Belgium. Faithfully copying the anti-Flemish hate daily Le Soir, they claim that the divorce between Flanders and Wallonia, once more on the horizon after the ignominious demise of the Prime Minister Yves Leterme's Federal Government, is a demand of the Flemish Far Right. In fact, the demand has far wider support, and conversely a part of the Belgian Far Right is the most militant supporter of Belgian unity.

The title in today's French News, "Far-right party calls for dissolution of Belgium", could easily be read as suggesting that there is something far-right about wanting the dissolution of Belgium. The party intended, the Vlaams Belang ("Flemish Interest"), has had Flemish independence as its the central plank in its platform since its foundation (as Vlaams Blok, "Flemish Bloc") in 1978. In that sense, the article's message is not exactly "news". But there is also a centrist party, the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA, New-Flemish Alliance), that advocates Flemish independence, for which its president Bart De Wever is the best-known and most effective pleader. Till recently there was also a leftist party, the Vlaams-Progressieven ("Flemish-Progressives", now split, with the defectors joining the Socialist Parrty and the rump uniting with the Green Party) that wanted more radical Flemish autonomy though not outright independence. There still is a sizable non-party leftist movement, centred around the monthly Meervoud, that pulls no punches in advocating full independence.

Conversely, on the Walloon side, the Far Right is the most consistent in its opposition to the dissolution of Belgium. This is true of the main party, the Belgian Front National, as well as of its splinter parties and of non-party cores of far-rightist activism. There exists a separatist Walloon movement, with a highly fluctuating appeal among the general population, rarely aiming for independence and mostly for accession to France (rattachement, hence "rattachisme"), but this tendency is centrist or leftist. The Far Right strongly clings to the union with Flandres inside the Belgian Kingdom.

To put their position in perspective, it is necessary to understand the position of the Walloon or Belgian French-speaking mainstream. Belgium came about as an accident, a compromise imposed by Britain which opposed French expansion. The Belgian revolutionaries of 1830, some of whom were actually French, never wanted to create a separate new state, but wanted accession of all the wholly or partly or prospectively French-speaking parts of the Low Countries, since 1815 united in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, to France. On the Flemish side, only some Roman Catholic hard-liners wanted to break away from the Protestant-dominated Netherlands, the vast majority was satisfied enough with the status quo. So, nobody really wanted Belgium, it was only imposed by Britain (especially when Britain could arrange the choice of a king linked to the British monarchy) as the least harmful alternative to the break-away territory's accession to France, which the revolutionaries and their French allies were plotting.

A kind of Belgian identity was fostered by the second King, the notorious Leopold II, plunderer of the Congo. He not only gave the country a vast colony as a common project that could unite all entreprising Belgians, he also allowed some concessions to the oppressed Flemish because a Flemish component helped affirm the non-French identity of Belgium and hence its self-justification as a state separate from expansive France. The royal family had a genuine attachment to Belgium because it was their source of income, the Walloons were only won over by the enduring experience of being the dominant group in the new state, a position they wouldn't have held in France. Their love for Belgium was conditional on their privileges. That is why the calls for accession to France have become more outspoken as Wallonia became less dominant as a consequence of its economic decline.

At any rate, the mainstream Walloon parties take the option of accession to France into account even if it is not on their agenda right now. At present, they oppose the dissolution of Belgium because they want to extract all the profit they can get from the more successful Flemish economy through the Belgian state for as long as they can get away with it. At the same time, they are mentally fully prepared for Belgium's break-up and their own accession to their cultural motherland, France. Note that French TV stations are more popular among the Walloons than their own (let alone Flemish stations, which have nearly no Walloon viewer at all), and that French politics is followed and discussed with at least as much involvement as Belgian politics. Economically, the Walloon political class still prefer Belgium because it allows them to dole out goodies paid for with Flemish money, a lifestyle they would have to abandon under French rule. In the case of accession to France, the likely scenario is that France, eager enough to extend it territory and importance, would foot the bill for the Walloon share of the huge Belgian state debt, but only as a one-time bride-price, and that it would next enforce fiscal discipline, something unheard of among the present generation of Walloon politicians. So, they have monetary reasons to prefer Belgium, but otherwise wouldn't mind acceding to France.

The Walloon Far Right, by contrast, clings to the union with Flanders with a vengeance. One of the more intellectual reasons is that they care about history, and Wallonia has been united with the provinces to its north for centuries, under the Holy Roman and Habsburg empires, the Spanish and Dutch kingdoms, even under French revolutionary occupation, and of course in Belgium itself. Another historical factor is WW2, when Walloon collaborators with Nazi Germany joined the Waffen-SS with Belgian nationalist symbols including the Belgian flag and anthem, fighting side by side with Flemish volunteers who used Flemish nationalist symbols. The prime Belgian collaborator was of course the King, Leopold III, who was neither Flemish nor in favour of the country's break-up; even before German occupation, he had a very authoritarian view of politics and his own role in it. The number two was Léon Degrelle, leader of the Rex movement and of the Walloon unit in the Waffen-SS, again a non-Flemish pro-Belgian rightist.

So, rightist Belgian nationalism has a considerable historical pedigree. But the more pressing reason for Walloon opposition to the break-up of Belgium is immigration. Walloon rightists expect the Germanic nations to conduct a more realistic immigration policy. While the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are not exactly very strict against immigration, at least they have gradually adopted a more serious policy of immigration control. In Belgium, most Flemish parties favour a more restrictive immigration policy, whereas the mainstream Walloon parties all favour what amounts to an open-borders policy. Part of the reason is typically Belgian (immigrants as a demographic weapon against the Flemish majority), but part of it seems to be a wider French phenomenon. Among Walloon rightists, the impression exists that France is irredeemably lost to religious (Muslim) and racial (African) population replacement. A Flemish-majority Belgium seems to be a slightly better safeguard for Wallonia against the demographic flood of immigration.

Therefore, the French-speaking Far Right in Belgium is passionately attached to the preservation of Belgium's unity. They see a Flemish-majority Belgium as their historical homeland and as a bulwark against the tide of immigration, highly imperfect but nonetheless far preferable to France. While there is only an accidental connection between rightism and Flemish separatism, a platform shared between rightist and non-rightist Flemings, there is in the present circumstances a sound logical reasons for Walloon rightists to cling to Belgian unity and oppose separatism.





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