Uttertosh Varshney & some PhD scholar at Brown have published a hysterical essay in some shitty Journal or other. Varshney is Hindu. He wants to convey the impression that Muslims in India were always greatly inferior to Hindus in culture, education, wealth and political power. Basically he is calling Indian Muslims the n-word. This is very funny but is it really the ideology that Brown University wants to promote?
Is India under Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014, beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow?
No. Unlike the US, which does not have an Election Commission, there is no voter suppression or gerrymandering in India.
The American South wasn't very different from the American North. Blacks and 'Injuns' were at the bottom of the pile. Still, it must be said, Jim Crow America didn't wage a war of revenge on Muslims killing 1.3 million of them and displacing tens of millions more. Since India stayed out of that horrible business, Americans like pretending that India, not America, is anti-Muslim.
The term refers, of course, to the politics of racial oppression that came to dominate in the eleven former Confederate states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
Those States had practiced slavery. India did not have slavery. However as in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc, religion can become the basis of ethnic violence as happened in parts of Northern India in 1947. One could compare Jim Crow to untouchability. One can't compare religious nationalism in India to anything in the US. The closest analogy would be Belfast wishing to stay out of a united Ireland on the grounds of religion.
From about 1880 to 1965, each of these states saw grave democratic backsliding as elected legislative bodies and executive authorities ignored or circumvented the citizenship, due-process, and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868); deprived African Americans of the voting rights they had been guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment (1870); and directly or indirectly supported extralegal vigilante violence against blacks, especially in the form of lynchings.
Plenty of Whites were lynched by other Whites. Incidentally many indigenous Americans only got citizenship in 1924.
Allowing for historical differences—India never had a system of racialized chattel slavery such as held sway in fifteen of the then-34 U.S. states plus several U.S. territories at the time the Civil War broke out in 1861—it remains fair to say that if Jim Crow was about the severe marginalization of black Americans on the ground of their race, then Hindu nationalism under Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is about the attempted marginalization of a minority, namely, Muslim Indians, on the ground of their religion.
This would not be a fair statement at all. Muslims were marginalized in 1947. They simply don't matter at all. Manmohan briefly pretended he would do something for them but he himself didn't have any power.
As Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen argue, the motives behind Jim Crow were not only economic (a desire to keep the minority’s labor cheap) but also political and social: fear of black political power in the South, where blacks continued to make up a large share of the populace, and fear of the social equality presaged by the end of slavery and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Where Muslims are the majority they can chase out kaffirs but they are a small minority in most parts of India and get stomped if they get up to mischief. America was a settler colony with Caucasians being explicitly given a higher status than Black, Chinese and East Indian origin people.
Here is where the parallels with Modi’s Hindu nationalism begin. Just as a key aim of Jim Crow was to blunt the Reconstruction Amendments and turn blacks into second-class citizens,
which the Northern States had no problem with
Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalized, less than fully equal citizens.
Can Uttertosh point to any voter suppression? No. It is a different matter that both the US and India band non-citizens from voting.
-White supremacy and Hindu supremacy are twins in that sense.
In which case they are related to Islamic supremacy and Buddhist supremacy and Marxist supremacy.
Their histories are different, but their political objectives and discourses are much the same.
Because Biden is lynching Hindus or forcing them to eat beef.
Similarity marks even the methods deployed: exclusionary laws, segregation, and vigilante violence.
Moreover Modi has a penis. Guess who else has a penis? That's right! It is Joe Biden who, along with his pal Obama, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
Just as in the Jim Crow South a combination of state-level election victories and extralegal methods was deployed to deprive blacks of their rights, Hindu nationalism is using both legislative power and extralegal methods to subdue Muslims.
No it isn't. There is no need.
Vigilante violence, condoned or supported by the state, has been on the rise since Modi and his party came to power.
Nope. There is no statistical evidence for this.
In short, elections are being used to create legislatures that pass anti-Muslim laws,
name one.
while street-level vigilantism supports the formal politics of exclusion. This was also how democracy worked in the American South after Reconstruction collapsed in the late 1870s.
No. The North never gave a fuck about niggers. Southerners were welcome to fuck over niggers, spics, Injuns- you name it.
Unlike Nazi Germany in its targeting of Jews, the Jim Crow project was not eliminationist. Hindu nationalists likewise seek not the physical elimination of Muslims, but rather their relegation to second-class citizenship.
Uttertosh doesn't give them enough credit. They would love to have a pure Hindu rashtra or Hindu Pakistan.
The Third Reich had concentration camps for Jews. The Jim Crow South did not have such camps, nor does India today.
The Bench opened detention centres in Assam.
To annihilate the equality that blacks were promised after the Civil War was the objective of Jim Crow.
This nutter thinks Blacks had equality in Chicago and New York!
Hindu nationalists also seek to abolish the equality granted to Muslims by India’s 1950 Constitution.
It took away affirmative action from Dalit Muslims! The Assembly had already banned the re-entry of Muslims who had crossed the border in panic.
Jim Crow was about white supremacy; Hindu nationalism is about Hindu supremacy.
Which was achieved in 1947.
Jim Crow lasted for the larger part of a century, not weakening until the 1950s and not ending until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
White Americans didn't and don't give a shit about darkies or Injuns or wetbacks.
The Hindu-nationalist project is in its early phases and can still be forestalled.
Nope. It triumphed in 1947 when hundreds of thousands of Muslims were slaughtered.
Before a Jim Crow–style Hindu-nationalist order is institutionalized via political and legislative processes, voters can remove the BJP from power via defeat at the polls. If voters do not turn back Hindu nationalism, it is our grim prediction that its similarities to Jim Crow will only grow. Parallels are already disturbingly in evidence.
To cretins. The good news is that Uttertosh is only writing this shite because he is a racist Hindutvadi who wants to pretend that Muslims in India were always as lowly as 'nigger' slaves.
Exclusionary Ideologies
Jim Crow was rooted in the idea of racial hierarchy
which was gladly embraced by almost all Whites
and Hindu nationalism is driven by belief in a religiously defined national community.
Congress was, as Gandhi put it in 1939, a Hindu party.
The notion of equality among groups is an anathema to both, and the presumption of group exclusion and hierarchy a defining feature of each.
Whites thought they were superior to Blacks. Most probably still do. This was not the case in India. There had been Muslim rulers and there was a large 'Ashraf' Muslim nobility.
In one case, the exclusion is racially formulated and in the other, the basis for exclusion is religious, or what one might call ethnicized religion. Moreover, both are governed by historically constructed notions of honor and ignominy and do not shy away from violence as a mode of restoring honor and avenging perceived humiliation.
All that is irrelevant. In South Asia, majority religions fucked over minorities unless the minorities behaved themselves and kept quiet.
While the United States has always had more than two races, Jim Crow focused on a racial binary. “The white people who settled this country . . . should alone govern it,” said Alfred Moore Waddell, the former Confederate officer who led a bloody 1898 white-supremacist coup against a duly elected, biracial city government in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Kill the Injuns but keep the Blacks around to pick cotton.
What race was to Jim Crow, religion has been to Hindu nationalism
and Pakistani and Burmese and Sri Lankan nationalism.
since that ideology’s founding a century ago.
After the formation of the Muslim League.
If white supremacy in the U.S. South meant rejection of racial equality, Hindu nationalism comes with the denial that Muslims and Hindus can be equal in India.
Muslims dominate Pakistan and Bangladesh and Kashmir Valley. They have to pipe small where they are the minority.
And if India’s postindependence constitution has made Hindus and Muslims legally equal,
Muslims were deprived of affirmative action previously awarded those of 'untouchable' caste. Many lost citizenship or property or were compelled to emigrate. They became a cowed and economically backward section of society.
Instead of punishing India’s remaining Muslims, however, the leaders of India’s freedom movement and its constitutional framers protected them.
There was a pact with Pakistan not to continue ethnic cleansing.
The 1950 Constitution was based on the idea of religious equality. It gave universal franchise to all adults, regardless of religious affiliation.
It got rid of reserved seats. Muslims were stripped of any concessions previously offered them.
Emerging Indian Laws
Soon after the BJP won reelection in 2019, having increased both its vote and seat share and remaining at the head of its ruling coalition, two of its biggest moves in Parliament were anti-Muslim. The first was a fundamental change in legal status of the disputed state of Kashmir. India is an asymmetric federation, meaning that not every state has the same rights. Kashmir, the only state with a Muslim majority, had greater autonomy within the national constitutional framework.
No. The Supreme Court, in 2016, said it had no 'shred' of sovereignty.
Only defense, foreign relations, and communication were under Delhi’s control; other realms of policy and governance were left to Kashmir’s own state government.
Nonsense! Nehru jailed the popular CM of Kashmir even though he was a close friend.
Some other states, especially in the Northeastern tribal areas, have roughly similar status. Yet Kashmir, in the eyes of Hindu nationalists, had a built-in religious defect: its Muslim majority.
It did ethnic cleansing of Hindus in the Nineties. For some reason, this does endear Kashmir to Hindus.
In August 2019, the BJP used its new majority to strip Kashmir of its special autonomy and make it the eighth of India’s “union territories.” These federal entities are run directly by the national government in Delhi, with no governments of their own. The implication was clear: A Muslim-majority state was being shown its proper place in Hindu-majority India.
No. The police was brought under the Union Government so that it could go after terrorists without interference by Kashmiri politicians. The Law & Order situation improved. Now, the worry is that Myanmar's internecine conflicts will spill over the border into the North East. God alone knows how Modi and Shan will resolve that sitution.
In December came passage of a change to the Citizenship Act of 1955. This law had imposed no religious criteria on aspiring citizens, but the new law (called the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA) opened a “fast track” to Indian citizenship for “persecuted minorities” from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Two things about this law were noteworthy. First, it specified only the Muslim-majority countries in India’s neighborhood as sites of persecution.
Because they persecuted non-Muslims.
It left out Sri Lanka, which is mostly Buddhist and has a Hindu (ethnically Tamil) minority that often complains of persecution and was on the losing side of a civil war.
So what? If the Tamils cared about this they could have asked for their inclusion.
Also unmentioned was Burma, where a small (4 percent) Muslim minority has been the target of violence often condoned or even assisted by the government.
Nobody wants those nutters- not Bangladesh, not Indonesia, nobody.
Not only did the CAA rest on the false premise that only Muslim-majority countries near India have religious persecution problems, but it also specified “persecuted minorities” in a way that conspicuously ignored Muslim victims of ill treatment.
Because Muslims want to kill kaffirs. Sadly kaffirs kill Muslims where they are the majority.
The text lists Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians but is silent about the Shia Hazaras in Afghanistan and the Ahmadis in Pakistan, for instance, though both these groups have long suffered at the hands of oppressive Sunni majorities.
Some Ahmadis do get asylum but must keep quiet about it or else the Sunnis will start baying for their blood. Hazaras are wanted by Iran for its war in Syria.
The plain fact is, when India gave asylum to Dr. Taslima Nasrin, the Mullahs started baying for her blood and she had to run away to Scandinavia.
The ideological nature of this was clear: In the BJP’s eyes, no Muslim groups deserved the status of persecuted minorities.
No. In the eyes of Indians, Muslims should not be given refuge in India because either they will kill kaffirs or else the Mullahs will bay for their blood.
Amit Shah, head of the Home Affairs Ministry under Modi, announced that the CAA would set in train the creation of a National Registry of Citizens (NRC). The need for proof-of-citizenship documents imposed by the NRC had the potential to strip millions of their citizenship.
If they are illegal migrants they don't have citizenship.
Hindus without papers could sidestep the threat, however, by citing their status in the eyes of Indian law as members of a minority persecuted elsewhere in the region (Nepal is the world’s only other Hindu-majority country). Muslims have no such recourse. Even if born in India, they could face expulsion for want of papers.
Not really. You'd have to prove they came from Bangladesh- which would be difficult to do.
Since voting depends on citizenship, even Muslims who manage to stay in India may find that their lack of papers will disenfranchise them.
That should be enough to appease the Assamese.
Hindus, again as a “persecuted minority,” are less likely to be affected. States not run by the BJP denounced the NRC and said that they would refuse to implement it, so the plan remains on hold. If the BJP and its allies do better at the polls, the scheme could return. There are tens of millions of Muslims who might fall afoul of it and be declared noncitizens, but their numbers are so large that concentration camps or expulsion to Muslim-majority neighboring states are unlikely. Their disenfranchisement, however, is highly feasible and appears to be the real point of the NRC anyway.
Certainly, in the North East, disenfranchisement of illegal migrants is the only way to avoid a blood bath. Recall the Nellie massacres of 1983 which forced Indira Gandhi to negotiate with the Assamese.
If the CAA and NRC resemble
American policy on asylum, citizenship and voting rights.
Jim Crow’s poll taxes and literacy tests
neither exist in India
in their intended effect of keeping a disfavored group from voting, the “anti–love jihad” ordinances of today’s India resemble the anti-miscegenation laws of the American South.
No they don't. All countries would regard a marriage entered into with an improper purpose- e.g. to extort money or to cause religious conversion- to be prima facie illegal and criminal in nature.
Hindu nationalists have long pushed a conspiracy theory that Muslim men are seeking to lure Hindu women into marriage in order to swell Muslim numbers. Interfaith marriages, it is said, must be outlawed lest Hindus find themselves reduced to a minority. The strangeness of the math here—Hindus currently outnumber Muslims in India by more than five to one—has not stopped BJP politicians and ideologues from insisting that the love jihad is a real threat and trying to spread fear that the far-fetched scenario will come to pass. Several BJP-ruled states have passed measures to prevent Muslim men from marrying Hindu women, even if the desire to marry is wholly voluntary on the part of two adults.
It may be voluntary but may still be fraudulent and criminal in even an American jurisdiction.
In India, the primary form of mob violence used to be the riot. Lately, however, riots have declined in frequency,22 and lynchings are taking their place. Riots and lynchings are different, and exploring how they differ will also clarify what the role of the state is in vigilante violence.
Figure 1 shows lynchings since 2009. Modi and the BJP entered government in May 2014, and after that time we see a distinct rise.23 Figure 2 breaks down lynchings by the victim’s religion. Muslim victims exceed Hindu victims several times over even though Muslims form a much smaller share of the population. The numbers leave no doubt that Muslims have been the main victims of lynching.
If the majority of criminals belong to a particular group, the majority of victims of vigilante justice will be from that group.
It can also be shown that a disproportionately large proportion of lynchings have taken place in states ruled by the BJP.
Because these are states being targeted by anti-BJP forces though, it must be admitted, this helps the BJP gain popularity amongst Hindus.
This is consistent with the comparative research on ethnic or racial lynchings mentioned above. BJP governments rarely condemn lynchings in anything like forthright terms, and BJP-affiliated groups tend to celebrate the ringleaders of such violence and present the lynching as justified. A common aim of lynchings is to prevent the eating of beef, the production and selling of cow meat, and the cattle trade.
Cow protection is a Directive Principle in the Constitution.
Because cows are sacred to Hinduism, say Hindu nationalists, these activities must be stopped. Other aims of lynchings include preventing or punishing conversions to Islam, and stopping young Muslim men from marrying Hindu women. These too are ideological projects for Hindu nationalists. So long as lynching is presented as serving a larger ideological cause, the BJP’s state administrations rarely take action.
says a guy who is anti-BJP
Indeed, something worse is now being done. In several BJP states, local officials or the police are increasingly bulldozing Muslim homes and businesses while claiming that Muslims of the vicinity took part in a protest, impeded the celebration of a Hindu festival, or committed a crime. Court orders for these demolitions of property are neither wanted nor sought. Thirteen states today have non-BJP governments, so these punitive administrative or police actions are not yet an all-India phenomenon. But in several BJP-run states, recent years have seen instances of Muslim properties disappearing under bulldozer blades.
This is hugely popular.
What makes Modi’s India and the Jim Crow United States comparable?
Nothing. India is like Pakistan or Sri Lanka. It is not a rich 'settler colony'.
It is the idea that electorally legitimated majoritarianism can be used to create an ensemble of laws and practices which seek to deprive a disfavored group of its rights, subject it to extralegal violence, and reduce it to second-class citizenship.
That idea has been flourishing in many Muslim states.
The emergence of the full-blown Jim Crow system in the post–Civil War United States took several decades. As an ideology, Hindu nationalism has been in power at the national level for only a single decade.
No. It came to power in 1947 and stayed in power. One might say that 2004-2014 was exceptional because Sonia- who is Roman Catholic- was in charge. But that was a flash in the pan.
The political order preferred by Hindu nationalism is not yet complete or firmly in place; only the first steps have been taken. If the BJP keeps winning elections, there can be no doubt that these steps will continue and the impetus behind them will be stronger. In the United States, Jim Crow went against the Constitution, but the courts for a long time would not apply that document.
Because the US Constitution was founded on White Racism just as the Indian constitution is founded on Hindu supremacy.
In India likewise, the judiciary is not playing its assigned role as guarantor of liberal constitutionalism against the trespasses of overweening executives and legislatures.
The Bench has been to the right of the Government.
Although it took them until the 1950s to fulfill their role, America’s courts eventually did so and began enforcing civil rights.
Because that was good for National Security.
Will India’s?
No.
Whatever the answer, friends of liberal, constitutional democracy will be wise not to count on judges to salvage the situation. In the end, only the voters can decide to stop Hindu nationalism, or else underwrite its final advance. The choice is theirs.
Uttertosh is saying to his fellow Hindus- vote for Modi otherwise you will be swamped by refugees from a sinking Pakistan. They will slit your throats. Be like Europe which is now electing right-wing leaders. Modi is a bit wishy-washy. Go for stronger meat- just not beef.
No comments:
Post a Comment