Arundhati's article in the Nation ostensibly attacks Modi's regime. Yet every point she makes has the opposite effect. Why? Reading her dreck, I formulate a plausible hypothesis.
While protest reverberates on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different.
So, India has a popular and effective Government. The street is being used for travel and transport not arson and stone pelting.
There was a time when dissent was India’s best export.
Rubbish! India never exported dissent. There is not a single example of a 'demonstration effect' such that a protest movement in India had imitators elsewhere.
India hasn't even exported any dissident intellectuals who fear to return home and a jail cell.
But now, even as protest swells in the West, our great anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against big dams, against the privatization and plunder of our rivers and forests, against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous peoples’ homelands—have largely fallen silent.
Why? Because they succeeded too well. Eugene Lim, of the World Bank, says of his spell in India- '
Activists can become famous and I am sorry to say, financially better off through contributions from international NGOs --·by having a case picked up by the Inspection Panel. I mean, that's a way to become famous in India- that you've got the Bank; you brought the Bank to the dock. To many activists, having the Inspection Panel of the World Bank accept a petition is like hitting the jackpot. Thus, many activists are going to try very hard to hit the jackpot. Thus, during my time, those of us working on India came to live with the reality that in all projects involving any forms of resettlement or environmental issues, we were going to have to defend what we were doing to the Inspection Panel. I don't really mind this, but it does divert resources and attention from other priorities.'
On September 17 this year Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted himself the filled-to-the-brim reservoir of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River for his 69th birthday, while thousands of villagers who had fought that dam for more than 30 years watched their homes disappear under the rising water. It was a moment of great symbolism.
For Modi- sure. For the people of Gujerat, no question. Medha Patkar, it is true, protested the filling of the dam but this had no effect. Why? One reason is given by Eugene Lim. The vast majority of claims for compensation were bogus and of a speculative nature. These people had to be paid to turn up to protests. The business model was unsustainable once the Government started to scrutinize foreign donations.
In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight.
Nonsense! The senile paranoia of the Left is dying out. Shadow worlds don't exist. Roy probably thinks Night is a sinister Neo Liberal conspiracy.
It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves.
WTF would Roy know about crises? She is as stupid as shit.
An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole.
Nonsense! Accurate descriptions feature well attested statistics. Hyperbole is what Roy does.
And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company.
No we don't. We shoot the rabid creature in the head or smash in its skull with a brick. Roy may think that etiquette requires her to turn up at cocktail parties with a well groomed dog firmly attached, by its slavering fangs, to her posterior. She is wrong. Even Maneka Gandhi isn't that crazy.
India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.
Right now, 7 million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world.
So what? That is just half a percentage of the population. The US has a larger proportion of people in actual prison. Compare the Kashmir Valley with the Swat Valley. Military operations there against a similar insurgency were far more intensive.
Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and risk being declared stateless.
The proportion of people of this sort is much higher in the USA.
The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could the lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.
Previously unknown? Nonsense! America has done it on a far larger scale since the Fifties. Eisenhower deported over a million Mexicans under Operation Wetback. Roy may think the rights of indigenous people don't matter and that they should be turned into a minority in their own homeland. The Law does not agree with her.
The rich in Western countries are making their own arrangements for the coming climate calamity. They’re building bunkers and stocking reservoirs of food and clean water.
Nonsense! There may be a few bug-eyed Survivalists stockpiling dried food for the Zombie Apocalypse but they aren't rich- they are surviving on disability checks.
In poor countries—India, despite being the fifth-largest economy in the world, is, shamefully, still a poor and hungry country—different kinds of arrangements are being made.
Really? Are the Indians constructing undersea cities and stockpiling reservoirs of Betamax Video Tapes?
The Indian government’s August 5, 2019, annexation of Kashmir has as much to do with the Indian government’s urgency to secure access to the five rivers that run through the state of Jammu and Kashmir as it does with anything else.
Kashmir was annexed in 1948. India has controlled the rivers, thanks to American aid, for five decades.
And the NRC, which will create a system of tiered citizenship in which some citizens have more rights than others, is also a preparation for a time when resources become scarce.
Muslim migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh have never automatically gained citizenship rights though, in practice, they got the vote and ration cards etc. Non-Muslims did gain citizenship because they were presumed to be refugees. But citizenship is not about water or food. Roy is a cretin if she thinks otherwise.
Citizenship, as Hannah Arendt famously said, is the right to have rights.
Arendt was wrong. Citizens of the Soviet Union didn't have rights. Stateless people in the UK and other countries under the Rule of Law did have rights.
The dismantling of the idea of liberty, fraternity, and equality will be—in fact already is—the first casualty of the climate crisis. I’m going to try to explain in some detail how this is happening.
Sheer nonsense! The idea of 'liberty, fraternity and equality' was dismantled by Napoleon because it was an utterly shite idea. Changes in the Climate won't change the political and legal regime in any country. Those which were totalitarian will remain so.
And how, in India, the modern management system that emerged to handle this very modern crisis has its roots in an odious, dangerous filament of our history.
Roy would not know a 'modern management system' if it came and bit her in the leg.
The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India—and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world.
If such violence can change India then it can change Pakistan and Bangladesh and every other similar country in the region. But this won't 'rearrange' their meaning or place in the world.
Our Constitution calls India a “socialist secular democratic republic.”
Why does it do so? The answer is that Indira Gandhi had suspended the Rule of Law and was toying with turning the country into a One Party State. Thus she amended the Constitution.
We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law.
This is not true. India distinguishes between Hinduism, as the majority Religion, and minority Religions like Christianity and Islam. Only a Hindu can be the 'karta' of a Hindu Undivided Family- which is highly beneficial for Tax and other reasons.
In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. It has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had.
Rubbish. The hypocrisy was wholly transparent. Nobody was fooled.
Without it, India will end.
Like Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Myanmar ended.
In his May 2019 victory speech, after his party won a second term, Modi boasted that no politicians from any political party had dared to use the word “secularism” in their campaigns. The tank of secularism, Modi said, was now empty. So, it’s official. India is running on empty.
The tank never existed. Why is Roy pretending that the Heavens will collapse on our heads just because 'sickularism' has become a universal target of ridicule?
And we are learning, too late, to cherish hypocrisy. Because with it comes a vestige, a pretense at least, of remembered decency.
What remembered decency? Indira Gandhi's Emergency? The Naxals running amok? The Partition riots?
India is not really a country.
Nor is the US or the UK or Germany- save in a legal, political, economic and common sense way.
It is a continent.
No. Australia is a continent. Undivided India was termed a 'sub-continent'.
More complex and diverse, with more languages—780 at last count, excluding dialects—more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe.
Papua New Guinea has 851 languages. So what?
Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu supremacist organization that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution.
Why imagine it? It happened in 1947. The Congress was a Hindu organization. It received less than 10 percent of the Muslim Vote in 1946.
I am speaking here of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925—the mothership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The RSS was set up by a Doctor in imitation of the Congress Seva Dal which had been set up by a Doctor two years earlier. The RSS was a weak and provincial sister of the CSD. Indeed, there was substantial dual membership between the Hindu Mahasabha and Congress.
Its founding fathers were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism.
But it was Subhas Chandra Bose who dressed up in a fake military uniform at Congress rallies. Govind Vallabh Pant described the Mahatma as the 'Il Duce and Fuherer of India. Gandhi was greatly impressed by Mussolini whom, he said, was aiming at something similar to himself.
The RSS was copying the Congress Seva Dal but was less militant which is why it didn't get banned. After Independence, the Government of West Bengal banned the CSD but this ban was reversed after Nehru, who had been a member, intervened.
They likened the Muslims of India to the “Jews of Germany,” and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India.
No. They said Muslims would have to play second fiddle in India- which is what actually happened. Why? Because Jinnah said the Muslims were a separate Nation and his party won 90 percent of the Muslim vote in 1946.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that Gandhi and the Congress party agreed with Indian Muslims that the Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were a dangerous element. Bose and Nambiar, both supposedly Socialists, actually went to Germany and allied with Hitler. They raised an Indian regiment for the S.A. The Mahatma's own attitude to the Jews was highly problematic. His descendant, Arun Gandhi, got into hot water recently for blaming “Israel and the Jews” for being the biggest players in creating “a culture of violence.”
The RSS today, in typical RSS chameleon-speak, distances itself from this view.
What 'chameleon speak' has the RSS ever indulged in? They have always said that Muslims will only be tolerated if they are Nationalistic and know their place. Nobody wants to ethnically cleanse Muslims because they are hardworking and sober. You can't exploit people if you kill them or they run away.
But its underlying ideology, in which Muslims are cast as treacherous permanent “outsiders,” is a constant refrain in the public speeches of BJP politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by rampaging mobs. For example: “Mussalman ka ek hi sthan—Kabristan ya Pakistan” (Only one place for the Muslim—the graveyard, or Pakistan). In October this year, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, “India is a Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu nation. “This is non-negotiable.”
How is this 'chameleon speak'? Other parties treat Muslims just as badly, but they compete in a hypocritical manner for their vote.
That idea turns everything that is beautiful about India into acid.
What did it do to Pakistan?
For the RSS to portray what it is engineering today as an epochal revolution, in which Hindus are finally wiping away centuries of oppression at the hands of India’s earlier Muslim rulers, is a part of its fake-history project. In truth, millions of India’s Muslims are the descendants of people who converted to Islam to escape Hinduism’s cruel practice of caste.
All Muslims are either converts or the descendants of converts. Caste can't be the reason for conversion because the Islamic caste system is just as cruel.
If Nazi Germany was a country seeking to impose its imagination onto a continent (and beyond), the impetus of an RSS-ruled India is, in a sense, the opposite.
Nazi Germany like the Kaiser's Germany was intent on conquest. The RSS has no similar agenda. There is no comparison between the two. By contrast, Islamists do export terror.
Here is a continent seeking to shrink itself into a country.
The subcontinent shrank into countries a long time ago.
Not even a country, but a province. A primitive, ethno-religious province. This is turning out to be an unimaginably violent process.
Rubbish! Roy's native Kerala is still going to alternate between Left Front and Congress led administrations. Delhi, where she lives, is under the Aam Aadmi Party. Regional parties remain dominant, or are reasserting themselves, everywhere you look. There has been no violence whatsoever.
None of the white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups that are on the rise in the world today can boast the infrastructure and manpower that the RSS commands.
But the RSS isn't a neo-Nazi group. Modi is not a skinhead. Why pretend otherwise?
It has 57,000 shakhas—branches—across the country, and an armed, dedicated militia of 600,000 “volunteers.”
Armed? Is this woman utterly mad? How many guns does the RSS possess? None at all. It is the Naxals who are fond of guns.
It runs schools in which millions of students are enrolled, and has its own medical missions, trade unions, farmers’ organizations, media outlets, and women’s groups.
So, it genuinely is a Social Service organization of a purely voluntary type. No wonder people respect it and vote for candidates with RSS backgrounds. Congress put up one RSS man- Shankarsinh Vagela- against another RSS man- Narendra Modi, in Gujarat precisely because the RSS is associated with financial and moral probity.
Recently, it announced that it was opening a training school for those who wish to join the Indian Army. Under its bhagwa dhwaj—its saffron pennant—a whole host of far-right organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar—the RSS’s “family”—have prospered and multiplied.
'Far-right'? Nonsense. They are mainstream nationalists. Congress, during the greater part of its history, was even more nationalistic.
These organizations, the political equivalents of shell companies, are responsible for shockingly violent attacks on minorities in which, over the years, uncounted thousands have been murdered.
No. Shockingly violent attacks are carried out by professional gangsters. The RSS understands that violence is a turn off for voters. That is why the BJP does badly in Roy's Kerala. Communists should kill and be killed by their own- the way Nature intended.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the RSS all his life. He is a creation of the RSS. Although not Brahmin, he, more than anyone else in its history, has been responsible for turning it into the most powerful organization in India, and for writing its most glorious chapter yet.
Nonsense! Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K Advani are responsible for turning the BJP into the default National Party.
It is exasperating to have to constantly repeat the story of Modi’s ascent to power, but the officially sanctioned amnesia around it makes reiteration almost a duty.
Roy is merely ignorant, not the victim of amnesia.
Modi’s political career was jump-started in October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, when the BJP removed its elected chief minister in the state of Gujarat and installed Modi in his place.
Keshubhai Patel resigned because of failing health. He had mismanaged the post Earthquake relief operation and there were allegations of corruption. Caste rivalries- e.g. between Kshatriyas and Patels- were a big problem in Gujerat. Modi was brought in because he comes from a very small caste and was good at organizational work.
He was not, at the time, even an elected member of the state’s legislative assembly.
Indeed. This was his great strength. He presented himself as a technocrat with clean hands- not a professional politician. Sonia Gandhi made Manmohan Singh Prime Minister for the same reason.
Three months into his first term, there was a heinous but mysterious act of arson in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train. As “revenge,” Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned rampage across the state. An estimated 2,500 people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad daylight. Women were gang-raped on city streets, and tens of thousands were driven from their homes.
Both the Home Ministry and the Ministry of Defense did not think there was any great mystery. After 9/11, the Americans had pointed a nuclear gun at Pakistan's head. General Musharraf played for time by organizing an attack on the Indian Parliament. This meant there was a risk of war with troops massing at the border. India expected the Pakistanis to attack in the Rann of Kutch sector as they had in 1965. The Pakistanis used their criminal network to get Ghanchis in Godhra, who were related to Ghanchi mobsters in Karachi- to attack Hindu pilgrims so as to set off a pogrom which would lead to displaced people clogging up transport networks thus causing logistical problems for the Indian Army.
The Defense Minister, George Fernandez, took personal charge. He was a great Hindi orator and was sure the Indian Army would obey orders- even if this meant firing on Hindus. The Home Minister sent in a top cop empowered to shift corrupt Station House Officers so as to break the nexus between the Land Shark, the Bootlegger, and the Police. Thus Modi was able to break the cycle of politically instrumentalized communal rioting which had begun in 1969. He was rewarded by getting re-elected with bigger and bigger majorities because he was also tackling other persistent problems- e.g. electricity supply etc.
Immediately after the pogrom, Modi called for elections.
Elections were due 8 months later. However Modi resigned because of criticism of his conduct- including criticism by his PM. He increased the party's majority because Gujerati voters knew he had done nothing wrong.
He won, not despite the massacre but because of it—and was reelected as chief minister for three consecutive terms.
Roy is being foolish. If killing people is the way to win elections, everyone would do it. Modi ended serious communal violence in Gujerat. That's one of the reasons it could prosper.
During Modi’s 2014 campaign as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP—which also featured the massacre of Muslims, this time in the district of Muzaffarnagar in the state of Uttar Pradesh—a Reuters journalist asked him whether he regretted the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. He replied that he would regret even the death of a dog if it accidentally came under the wheels of his car. This was pure, well-trained, RSS-speak.
Roy doesn't say that those Muslims were massacred in a State ruled by a Socialist party opposed to the BJP.
What Modi said is that if he were a passenger in a car which accidentally ran over a puppy, he would feel grief. This is perfectly reasonable. He was denying any responsibility for what happened because he was genuinely innocent . Had he said anything different, he would have been convicted by the Supreme Court and sentenced to death.
It seems 'well-trained, RSS-speak' is the same thing as 'sensible reply to a silly question'.
When Modi was sworn in as India’s 14th prime minister, he was celebrated not just by his support base of Hindu Nationalists but also by India’s major industrialists and businessmen, many Indian liberals, and the international media as the epitome of hope and progress, a savior in a saffron business suit, whose very person represented the confluence of the ancient and the modern—of Hindu nationalism and no-holds-barred free-market capitalism.
So everybody liked Modi. Why? It is because he wasn't a genocidal maniac. He was a smart and capable politician.
While Modi has delivered on Hindu Nationalism, he has stumbled badly on the free-market front. Through a series of blunders, he has brought India’s economy to its knees. In 2016, a little over a year into his first term, he announced on television that, from that moment on, all 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes—over 80 percent of the currency in circulation—had ceased to be legal tender. Nothing like it had ever been done on such a scale in the history of any country.
Roy is not an economist- nor, indeed, an Architect though that is what she studied. The truth is India had done demonetization on two previous occasions. Other countries have had far more dramatic demonetization events. The shift to the Euro was the largest such exercise.
Neither the finance minister nor the chief economic adviser seemed to have been taken into confidence.
The Wanchoo Committee's demonetization proposal leaked and thus demonetization had to be postponed. Modi's initiative was successfully kept under wraps- which is why the public response was very positive. Modi's candidates won Assembly elections as a result.
This “demonetization,” Modi said, was a “surgical strike” on corruption and terror funding. This was pure quack economics, a home remedy being tried on a nation of more than a billion people.
Says Roy who isn't even a quack economist.
It turned out to be nothing short of devastating.
Nonsense! It was a mere blip.
But there were no riots. No protests. People stood meekly in line outside banks for hours on end to deposit their old currency notes—the only way left to redeem them. No Chile, Catalonia, Lebanon, Hong Kong. Almost overnight, jobs disappeared, the construction industry ground to a halt, small businesses simply shut down.
Demonetization was a political victory. It took the wind out of the sails of the anti-corruption movement. However, India needs a far bigger shake-out.
Some of us foolishly believed that this act of unimaginable hubris would be the end of Modi.
Roy is foolish. Naturally, this means her beliefs are foolish.
How wrong we were. People rejoiced. They suffered—but rejoiced. It was as though pain had been spun into pleasure. As though their suffering was the labor pain that would soon birth a glorious, prosperous, Hindu India.
India is already Hindu. Roy may not like it, but it is a fact. It can't become prosperous unless it undergoes demographic transition.
Most economists agree that demonetization, along with the new Goods and Services Tax Modi announced soon after—promising “one nation, one tax”—was the policy equivalent of shooting out the tires of a speeding car.
Most economists are fools. GST, however, is considered a good thing. What we don't like is its manner of implementation.
Even the government admits that unemployment is at a 45-year high. The 2019 Global Hunger Index ranks India 102nd out of 117 countries. (Nepal comes in at 73rd, Bangladesh 88th, and Pakistan 94th).
Transition to middle income status means unemployment rises simply because people don't starve if they don't work.
But demonetization was never about economics alone. It was a loyalty test, a love exam that the Great Leader was putting us through. Would we follow him, would we always love him, no matter what? We emerged with flying colors. The moment we as a people accepted demonetization, we infantilized ourselves and surrendered to tinpot authoritarianism.
Roy infantilized herself long ago. The fact of the matter is that people only support Modi because every alternative is worse.
But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP. Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became the richest political party in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent, making it five times richer than its main rival, the Congress Party, whose income declined by 14 percent.
Why? Because Rahul Baba shat the bed.
Smaller political parties were virtually bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh, and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and a few old bicycles.
If the other parties could find a good PM candidate they'd be able to raise funds.
And since elections are increasingly about money, the chances of a free and fair election in the near future seen remote. So maybe demonetization was not a blunder after all.
Elections are about candidates. Money would not make Rahul Baba electable- save perhaps in Kerala where people can't understand what he is saying.
In Modi’s second term, the RSS has stepped up its game. No longer a shadow state or a parallel state, it is the state.
No it isn't. The RSS ethos would be completely destroyed if its cadres turned into corrupt power-brokers. It's fate would be the same as Congress Seva Dal under Jagdish Tytler.
Day by day, we see examples of its control over the media, the police, the intelligence agencies.
Unless we take the pills our Psychiatrist prescribed.
Worryingly, it appears to exercise considerable influence over the armed forces, too.
Also it influences the neighbor's cat which is using mind rays to control our dreams.
Foreign diplomats and ambassadors have been trooping to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur to pay their respects.
Like the German Ambassador. The reason they do so is because the RSS is a force for good.
In truth, things have reached a stage where overt control is no longer even necessary.
Because the neighbor's cat uses mind rays.
More than four hundred round-the-clock television news channels, millions of WhatsApp groups and TikTok videos keep the population on a drip feed of frenzied bigotry.
Which country has this woman been living in? Most Indians have tough lives. They aren't on any type of drip feed.
This November the Supreme Court of India ruled on what some have called “the most important case in the world.”
Which nobody outside India cares about.
On December 6, 1992, in the town of Ayodhya, a Hindu vigilante mob, organized by the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—the World Hindu Council—literally hammered a 450-year-old mosque into dust.
According to Islamic law, it was not a mosque because no Muslim worship had occurred there since 1949. By contrast a Hindu priest had been performing rituals in it every year. Rajiv Gandhi had thrown it open to Hindu worship and permitted the installation of a foundation stone for the new Temple.
They claimed that this mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple that had marked the birthplace of Lord Ram. More than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the communal violence that followed.
Some Muslim gangsters started the violence but, as Roy says, it was mainly Muslims who were massacred.
In its recent judgment, the court held that Muslims could not prove their exclusive and continuous possession of the site.
In other words, both Muslims and Hindus had worshiped there throughout its history.
Instead, it turned the site over to a trust—to be constituted by the BJP government—tasked with building a Hindu temple on it. There have been mass arrests of people who have criticized the judgment.
Nonsense! The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has criticized the judgement. Not a single one of them has been arrested.
The VHP has refused to back down on its past statements that it will turn its attention to other mosques. This can be an endless campaign—after all, everything is built over something.
The Government would have to repeal a 1992 law before this can happen. The thing is possible, but does not seem likely at present.
With the influence that immense wealth generates, the BJP has managed to co-opt, buy out, or simply crush its political rivals.
Roy's audience may believe her. But Roy herself lives in India. She must know she is lying.
The hardest blow has fallen on the parties with bases among the Dalit and other disadvantaged castes in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Many of their traditional voters have deserted these parties—the Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashriya Janata Dal, and Samajwadi Party—and migrated to the BJP. To achieve this feat—and it is nothing short of a feat—the BJP worked hard to exploit and expose the hierarchies within the Dalit and disadvantaged castes, which have their own internal universe of hegemony and marginalization. The BJP’s overflowing coffers, and its deep, cunning understanding of caste have completely altered the conventional electoral math.
This is Nitish Kumar's 'Maha-Dalit' strategy. But what has made it successful is the initiative taken by these communities themselves. The truth is these people have come up entirely by their own efforts. They are making a place for themselves at the table entirely by merit.
Having secured Dalit and disadvantaged-caste votes, the BJP’s policies of privatizing education and the public sector are rapidly reversing the gains made by affirmative action—known in India as “reservation”—pushing those who belong to disadvantaged castes out of jobs and educational institutions. Meanwhile, the National Crime Records Bureau shows a sharp increase of atrocities against Dalits, including lynchings and public floggings. This September, while Modi was being honored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for building toilets, two Dalit children, whose home was just the shelter of a plastic sheet, were beaten to death for shitting in the open. To honor a prime minister for his work on sanitation while tens of thousands of Dalits continue to work as manual scavengers—carrying human excreta on their heads—is grotesque.
To honor anybody is grotesque because Roy is carrying a lot of human excreta in her head. Why don't honorable people perform brain surgery on her so as to end this scandal?
Bill Gates realized he had backed the wrong horse by associating with Rahul Baba. NDTV would have a repeated loop of Gates saying 'in the villages, nobody knows me, but everybody knows Rahul.' Then he found it that in the villages everybody knew Rahul was a moon calf. So Gates needed to jump on the Modi bandwagon.
The fact is, Modi was given the award for helping people build toilets for themselves. The atrocity Roy mentions happened in a Congress ruled State. The father of the children says he had applied for money to build a toilet but had been denied by corrupt officials. This was the fault of the Congress Party, not the BJP.
What we are living through now, in addition to the overt attack on religious minorities, is an aggravated class and caste war
conducted by my neighbor's cat who uses mind rays.
In order to consolidate their political gains, the RSS and BJP’s main strategy is to generate long-lasting chaos on an industrial scale. They have stocked their kitchen with a set of simmering cauldrons that can, whenever necessary, be quickly brought to the boil.
The Left had only one cauldron in its kitchen- viz. pretending the RSS was actually the Nazi SS. But that cauldron cracked long ago. Now they have nothing. Why pretend India has changed in any fundamental way since the BJP took power? Governance has improved somewhat in BJP ruled States. But in many parts of the country we still have corrupt dynasts running amok.
On August 5, 2019, the Indian Parliament unilaterally breached the fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession by which the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir agreed to become part of India in 1947.
The Instrument of Accession was unconditional. Every Princely State joined the Union with the stipulation that Princes would continue to receive diplomatic and other privileges. This was unilaterally cancelled many decades ago by Indira Gandhi.
However, it was a Supreme Court decision in 2016, which held that J&K had 'no shred of sovereignty' which enabled its Statehood to be scrapped on the Governor's nod.
It stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood and its special status—which included its right to have its own constitution and its own flag.
This was perfectly legal. Only the Indian Union can decide what is or is not a State. Many States and Union Territories have been unilaterally created.
The dissolution of the legal entity of the state also meant the dissolution of Section 35A of the Indian Constitution, which secured the erstwhile state’s residents the rights and privileges that made them stewards of their own territory.
That Section came in by a Presidential Order and has left the same way.
In preparation for the move, the government flew in more than 50,000 troops to supplement the hundreds of thousands already stationed there. By the night of August 4, tourists and pilgrims had been evacuated from the Kashmir Valley. Schools and markets were shut down. More than 4,000 people were arrested: politicians, businessmen, lawyers, rights activists, local leaders, students, and three former chief ministers. Kashmir’s entire political class, including those who have been loyal to India, was incarcerated. By midnight, the Internet was cut and phones went dead.
What was the result? Bloodshed was minimized. Pakistan lost its network of agents.
The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of an all-India National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya—are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions, all they need to do is to pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war.
Yet, no war has resulted. Why? Dogs scared it away probably because of mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
There are several categories of villains—Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi “infiltrators,” or any one of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors
because of mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
Each of these “cards” is held hostage to the other,
coz that's how playing cards work.
and often made to stand in for the other
or anything else which pops into my mind because of mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
They have little to do with each other, and are often hostile to each other because their needs, desires, ideologies, and situations are not just inimical, but end up posing an existential threat to each other
as my neighbor's cat often remarks while appearing to say miaow to everybody else.
Simply because they are all Muslim, they each have to suffer the consequences of the others’ actions.
Muslims, like other Religious groups, do suffer if some members of their community go crazy and start killing people in the name of their common Faith.
In two national elections now, the BJP has shown that it can win a majority in parliament without the “Muslim vote.”
In 1946, Congress won in Hindu areas without the Muslim vote.
As a result, Indian Muslims have been effectively disenfranchised, and are becoming that most vulnerable of people—a community without political representation, without a voice.
Except in Kerala, Muslims were indeed marginalized after Partition.
Various forms of undeclared social boycott are pushing them down the economic ladder, and, for reasons of physical security, into ghettos.
This has been happening continually since Independence.
Indian Muslims have also lost their place in the mainstream media—
they never had much of a place
the only Muslim voices we hear on television shows are the absurd few who are constantly and deliberately invited to play the part of the primitive Islamist, to make things worse than they already are. Other than that, the only acceptable public speech for the Muslim community is to constantly reiterate and demonstrate its loyalty to the Indian flag.
Nonsense! Muslims are welcome to say sensible things- indeed, that is what they do because they
are sensible. Roy, a Christian, may talk bollocks but most Christians aren't like her.
So, while Kashmiris, brutalized as they are because of their history and, more importantly, their geography, still have a lifeboat—the dream of azadi, of freedom—Indian Muslims have to stay on deck to help fix the broken ship.
Kashmiris in the Valley don't have a life-boat. Like other Indian Muslims, they can only flourish if India flourishes.
(There is another category of “anti-national” villain—human rights activists, lawyers, students, academics, “urban Maoists”—who have been defamed, jailed, embroiled in legal cases, snooped on by Israeli spyware, and, in several instances, assassinated. But that’s a whole other deck of cards.)
again with the cards! Does this other deck also features mutual hostage taking?
The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how deep the rot.
Nonsense! This is a story about a guy accused of stealing a bike who was set upon by a mob in a backward, mainly Tribal, district.
Lynching, as you in the United States well know, is a public performance of ritualized murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police, the law, the government—as well as the good people in their homes, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families—are all friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned 22, he returned home to get married. The day after his wedding to 18-year-old Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram!
Hindu war cry? That would be 'Har Har Mahadev'. Which country has Roy been living in all these years?
The police eventually took Tabrez into custody but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead, they accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died there four days later.
So, it was a magistrate who fucked up- not the BJP.
In its latest report, released earlier this month, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder have been rewarded with public office and honored by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often.
113 deaths in a country with 1.39 billion people is statistically insignificant.
Here in the United States, on September 22 ,2019—five days after Modi’s birthday party at the Narmada dam site—60,000 Indian Americans gathered in the NRG Stadium in Houston. The “Howdy, Modi!” extravaganza there has already become the stuff of urban legend. President Donald Trump was gracious enough to allow a visiting prime minister to introduce him as a special guest in his own country, to his own citizens.
Trump
was a guest. If the Queen drops by for my birthday party, I will introduce her as my special guest. I won't let her blow out the candles on my cake.
Several members of the US Congress spoke, their smiles too wide, their bodies arranged in attitudes of ingratiation.
Roy thinks they should have been frowning heavily while constantly jumping into the air to fart in Modi's face.
Over a crescendo of drumrolls and wild cheering, the adoring crowd chanted, “Modi! Modi! Modi!” At the end of the show, Trump and Modi linked hands and did a victory lap. The stadium exploded. In India, the noise was amplified a thousand times over by carpet coverage on television channels. “Howdy” became a Hindi word. Meanwhile, news organizations ignored the thousands of people protesting outside the stadium.
They also ignored millions of people masturbating in other parts of the Texas.
Not all the roaring of the 60,000 in the Houston stadium could mask the deafening silence from Kashmir.
Roaring fucks over silence. Silence does not deafen anybody save by reason of mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
That day, September 22, marked the 48th day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley.
Equally remarkably, the previous day marked the 47th day of something or other.
Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale unheard of in modern times.
What did he do? Sodomize Trump's eye-sockets?
And, once again, it has endeared him further to his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill was passed in India’s parliament on August 6 there were celebrations across the political spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu Nation—was being celebrated.
The Pakistanis were defeated in 1948. Since then the Valley has been Indian.
Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two primeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP politicians, and patriotic pop videos that notched up millions of views, legitimized this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.”
What happened next? How many Kashmiri girls have been abducted? How much Kashmiri land has been alienated? The answer is none.
It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. Within days of the siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the diversion of forest land for other uses.
How much land was diverted? Just 271 hectares. What was the land used for? Tube wells and transmission lines- stuff that helps local people.
In the early days of the lockdown, little news came out of the valley. The Indian media told us what the government wanted us to hear. Kashmiri newspapers were completely censored. They carried pages and pages of news about cancelled weddings, the effects of climate change, the conservation of lakes and wildlife sanctuaries, tips on how to live with diabetes and front-page government advertisements about the benefits that Kashmir’s new, downgraded legal status would bring to the Kashmiri people. Those “benefits” are likely to include the building of big dams that control and commandeer the water from the rivers that flow through Kashmir. They will certainly include the erosion that results from deforestation, the destruction of the fragile Himalayan ecosystem, and the plunder of Kashmir’s bountiful natural wealth by Indian corporations.
So, Kashmir will begin to pay for itself. Thank you Ms. Roy for this piece of BJP propaganda.
Real reporting about ordinary peoples’ lives came mostly from the journalists and photographers working for the international media—Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The reporters, mostly Kashmiris, working in an information vacuum, with none of the tools usually available to modern-day reporters, traveled through their homeland at great risk to themselves, to bring us the news. And the news was of nighttime raids, of young men being rounded up and beaten for hours, their screams broadcast on public-address systems for their neighbors and families to hear, of soldiers entering villagers’ homes and mixing fertilizer and kerosene into their winter food stocks. The news was of teenagers with their bodies peppered with shotgun pellets being treated at home, because they would be arrested if they went to a hospital. The news was of hundreds of children being whisked away in the dead of night, of parents debilitated by desperation and anxiety. The news was of fear and anger, depression, confusion, steely resolve, and incandescent resistance.
This too is BJP propaganda. Roy is saying Modi is winning the war against the insurgents. 'Incandescent' stuff burns itself out quite quickly. That's how fire works.
But the home minister, Amit Shah, said that the siege only existed in peoples’ imaginations; the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Satya Pal Malik, said phone lines were not important for Kashmiris and were only used by terrorists; and the army chief, Bipin Rawat, said, “Normal life in Jammu and Kashmir has not been affected. People are doing their necessary work.… Those who feel that life has been affected are the ones whose survival depends on terrorism.” It isn’t hard to work out who exactly the government of India sees as terrorists.
It sees people who kill people so as to create terror as terrorists. This isn't rocket science.
Imagine if all of New York City were put under an information lockdown and a curfew managed by hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Why? Are New Yorkers killing other Americans and demanding to become part of Chairman Xi's China?
Imagine the streets of your city remapped by razor wire and torture centers
Where fanatical votaries of Xi spit venom at other Americans and dream of massacring every last one of them.
But why imagine anything so silly? Just look at what Xi is doing in Xinjiang. It seems China will have no Muslim problem going forward just as it has no Tibet problem.
Imagine if mini–Abu Ghraibs appeared in your neighborhoods.
First imagine that your neighborhood is over-run by crazy Islamists. Then imagine those fuckers being fucked over in Abu Ghraibs. The thought will warm the cockles of your heart.
Incidentally, Obama never actually shut down Guantanamo.
Imagine thousands of you being arrested and your families not knowing where you have been taken.
And also imagine all your terrorist pals having to put on their suicide vests by themselves coz you are safely incarcerated.
Imagine not being able to communicate with anybody—not your neighbor, not your loved ones outside the city, no one in the outside world—for weeks together.
Nor being able to blow yourself up.
Imagine banks and schools being closed, children locked into their homes.
Sounds like Christmas day.
Imagine your parent, sibling, partner, or child dying and your not knowing about it for weeks.
And then getting a massive insurance check.
Imagine the medical emergencies, the mental health emergencies, the legal emergencies, the shortages of food, money, gasoline. Imagine being a day laborer or a contract worker, earning nothing for weeks on end. And then imagine being told that all of this was for your own good.
The Kashmiris have managed to chase away migrant workers- mainly Muslims.
The horror that Kashmiris have endured over the last few months comes on top of the trauma of a 30-year-old armed conflict that has already taken 70,000 lives and covered their valley with graves. They have held out while everything was thrown at them—war, money, torture, mass disappearance, an army of more than a half million soldiers, and a smear campaign in which an entire population has been portrayed as murderous fundamentalists.
The only people who have been ethnically cleansed from the Valley are Hindu Pandits.
The siege has lasted for more than three months now. Kashmiri leaders are still in jail. The only condition under which they are offered release is the signing of an undertaking that they will not make public statements for a whole year. Most have refused.
This is the one popular aspect of the crackdown. The politicians of the Valley are universally reviled.
Now, the curfew has been eased, schools have been reopened and some phone lines have been restored. “Normalcy” has been declared. In Kashmir, normalcy is always a declaration —a fiat issued by the government or the army. It has little to do with people’s daily lives.
Because those lives are wholly controlled by mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
So far, Kashmiris have refused to accept this new normalcy. Classrooms are empty, streets are deserted and the valley’s bumper apple crop is rotting in the orchards. What could be harder for a parent or a farmer to endure? The imminent annihilation of their very identity, perhaps.
Why is this happening? The answer is Kashmiris are still terrified of the militants.
The new phase of the Kashmir conflict has already begun. Militants have warned that, from now on, all Indians will be considered legitimate targets.
But this time round, the militants will be slaughtered. That is why they are concentrating on threatening Muslim migrant workers and their own people.
More than ten people, mostly poor, non-Kashmiri migrant workers, have been shot already. (Yes, it’s the poor, almost always the poor, who get caught in the line of fire.)
Because militants don't like shooting people who will shoot back.
It is going to get ugly. Very ugly.
Not for the people of Jammu or Ladakh. The Valley is welcome to stew in its own juice.
Soon all this recent history will be forgotten, and once again there will be debates in television studios that create an equivalence between atrocities by Indian security forces and Kashmiri militants.
Nonsense! Those debates piss off the audience. Why? It is because Kashmiris are less than half a percentage of India's population.
Speak of Kashmir, and the Indian government and its media will immediately tell you about Pakistan, deliberately conflating the misdeeds of a hostile foreign state with the democratic aspirations of ordinary people living under a military occupation.
Democratic aspirations can be satisfied by participating in Democratic processes. What is off the cards for the Kashmiris of the Valley is their dream of dominion over non Muslims in the region. On the other hand, they are welcome to turn into a 'spite slum' living off remittances from the Gulf or elsewhere. Consider the British Sinn Fein party. It has 7 seats at Westminster but refuses to take them. Going forward, the Valley's Muslims may have 2 seats of a similar nature.
The Indian government has made it clear that the only option for Kashmiris is complete capitulation, that no form of resistance is acceptable—violent, nonviolent, spoken, written, or sung. Yet Kashmiris know that to exist, they must resist.
Or emigrate. Emigration is the better outcome because this part of India is going to get a lot poorer very quickly. The Center is going to pull its subsidies. Remittances will have to go towards buying food not financing militancy.
Why should they want to be a part of India? For what earthly reason?
What they want- on Roy's own account- does not matter in the slightest. The Kashmiri Muslim has alienated the Indian Muslim. Thus they have painted themselves into a corner. Consider Nitish Kumar's reversing his earlier opposition to the change in J&K's status. He saw that Bihar's Muslims welcomed the move. Kashmir's Muslim leadership took Indian Islam for granted and are now paying the price.
If freedom is what they want, freedom is what they should have.
Freedom has to be defended. Kashmir can't defend itself. It didn't want to defend its own Hindu minority and then pissed off the Hindu majority Jammu and the Buddhists in Ladakh. It failed as a State and has been downgraded to a Union Territory where the Police will be free to act against militants.
It’s what Indians should want, too. Not on behalf of Kashmiris, but for their own sake.
Roy thinks India should give up territory and permit ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Buddhists. That is why Indians consider her to be anti-national.
The atrocity being committed in their name involves a form of corrosion that India will not survive. Kashmir may not defeat India, but it will consume India. In many ways, it already has.
So Roy thinks India has already been 'consumed'. Why bother with it then?
This may not have mattered all that much to the 60,000 cheering in the Houston stadium, living out the ultimate Indian dream of having made it to America. For them, Kashmir may just be a tired old conundrum, for which they foolishly believe the BJP has found a lasting solution. Surely, however, as migrants themselves, their understanding of what is happening in Assam could be more nuanced. Or maybe it’s too much to ask of those who, in a world riven by refugee and migrant crises, are the most fortunate of migrants. Many of those in the Houston stadium, like people with an extra holiday home, probably hold US citizenship as well as Overseas Citizens of India certificates.
If they acquired such certificates legally, they have nothing to worry about. If not, they may have their naturalization stripped and be deported under Obama's Operation Janus initiative.
The “Howdy, Modi!” event marked the 22nd day since almost 2 million people in Assam found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens.
Why? Because they were not Assamese. They were Bangladeshi.
Like Kashmir, Assam is a border state with a history of multiple sovereignties, with centuries of migration, wars, invasion, continuously shifting borders, British colonialism, and more than 70 years of electoral democracy that has only deepened the fault lines in a dangerously combustible society.
Unlike Kashmir, Assam saw tribal populations being replaced by Bengali populations who illegally encroached on their land.
That an exercise like the NRC even took place has to do with Assam’s very particular cultural history.
The exercise took place because of a six year agitation by the Assamese. In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi's Government agreed to deport illegal migrants. What Congress promised, the BJP is delivering.
...Over the next several years, “infiltrators” detected by the border police, or those declared “Doubtful Voters”—D-Voters—by election officials, were tried under the Illegal Migrants (Detection by Tribunal) Act, passed in 1983 by a Congress government under Indira Gandhi. In order to protect minorities from harassment, the IMDT Act put the onus of disproving a person’s citizenship on the police or the accusing party—instead of burdening the accused with proving their citizenship. Since 1997, more than 300,000 D-voters and Declared Foreigners have been tried in Foreigners Tribunals. Several hundred are still locked up in detention centers, jails within jails where detainees don’t even have the rights that ordinary criminals do.
In 2005, the Supreme Court adjudicated a case that asked for the IMDT Act to be struck down on the grounds that it made the “detection and deportation of illegal immigrants nearly impossible.” In its judgment annulling the act, the court noted, “there can be no manner of doubt that the State of Assam is facing “external aggression and internal disturbance” on account of large scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals.” Now, it put the onus of proving citizenship on the citizen. This completely changed the paradigm, and set the stage for the new, updated NRC. The case had been filed by Sarbananda Sonowal, a former president of the All Assam Students’ Union who is now with the BJP, and is currently the chief minister of Assam.
In 2013, an NGO called Assam Public Works filed a case in the Supreme Court asking for illegal migrants’ names to be struck off electoral rolls. Eventually, the case was assigned to the court of Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who happens to be Assamese.
In December 2014, Justice Gogoi ordered that an updated list of the NRC be produced before his court within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the 5 million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped of citizenship?
Millions of villagers living in far-flung areas were expected to produce a specified set of documents—“legacy papers”—that proved direct and unbroken paternal lineage dating back to 1971. The Supreme Court’s deadline turned the exercise into a nightmare. Impoverished, illiterate villagers were delivered into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, legalese, documentation, court hearings, and all the ruthless skulduggery that goes with them.
Does Roy understand that everything she is saying proves that the NRC has nothing to do with Modi? It is simply a case of the Law of the Land being applied in the manner that the Supreme Court has laid down.
The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centers that have already started springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Then why bring up the subject?
But they are meant to remind us that only Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals, and don’t need those papers.
Hindus don't want to be considered 'aboriginals'. This is because everybody knows aboriginals get fucked over by wallabies who sound like Dame Edna Everage and own Fox News.
Even the 450-year-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?
None at all. That is why poor farmers are constantly being demolished. In Neasden, a Swami Narayan Temple has been constructed on what used to be a street vendor.
This is the wickedness that the 60,000 people in the Houston stadium were cheering.
Very true. Thousands of street vendors are being demolished so as to construct Hindu temples.
This is what the president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support.
Trump demolished hundreds of street vendors to construct Trump Towers all over the place.
It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to, and the Saudis want to fund.
Coz everybody knows Saudis are only happy when street vendors get demolished so as to construct Hindu Temples.
Perhaps the whole process of the all-India NRC can be privatized, including the data bank with our iris scans.
Visa services have been privatized to very good effect.
The employment opportunities and accompanying profits might revive our dying economy. The detention centers could be built by the Indian equivalents of Siemens, Bayer and IG Farben. It isn’t hard to guess what corporations those will be. Even if we don’t get to the Zyklon B stage, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Says failed Architecture student, Arundhati Roy.
We can only hope that someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realize that unless they make their move, the end is close.
Coz they will be demolished and Hindu Temples will be constructed on their bones.
If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these time
while under the influence of mind rays emanating from my neighbor's cat.
