The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations," made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.
In Gujarat, as in Sindh ,there was a clash between Hindu and Islamic civilization. In Gujarat, Hindus prevailed because they were the majority. In Sindh, the reverse was the case. At one time some Socialists thought that religious differences would fade away because everybody would become an atheist. Nobody thinks that now.
His picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's India, where,
Muslims were butchered, expelled and stripped of any type of affirmative action by Pandit Nehru. On the other hand, Huntingdon does explain why the Godhra atrocity happened. On 9/11 Al Qaeda attacked targets in US. This caused the US to put a nuclear gun to General Musharraf's head. He had to support America against the Taliban (who were sheltering Osama). Musharraf ordered a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament so as to have the excuse of war with India to keep Pakistani troops on the Indian border rather than use them to seal the border with Afghanistan. It may be that Godhra's Muslims attacked Hindu pilgrims spontaneously but this was not the view of the Indian Army. The thing looked like a ploy to trigger a Muslim exodus in Gujarat which would cause road and rail connections to become clogged thus creating logistic problems for the Army which might need to reinforce the vulnerable Rann of Kutch area. The background was a clash between Islamic civilization, as represented by Osama & Al Qaeda (the Caliphate was a later offshoot), and non-Islamic civilizations. Huntingdon was proved right. Fukuyama was proved wrong. Over the next two decades, 'Ordoliberalism' retreated. With Trump's re-election, the pretence of a rules based world order was dropped. America is now telling Europe that it faces 'civilizational erasure'- i.e. might soon have too many Muslim and dark skinned immigrants- and thus is becoming an 'unreliable partner'.
I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right
whose inspiration was 'Jugantar' which reached its peak in Bengal circa 1905.
are imports from European fascism of the 1930s,
Fascism only appeared on the scene where there was a real and present danger of a Communist takeover.
and where the third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens,
unless they can kill kaffirs with impunity
despite severe poverty and other inequalities.
Where Muslims are in the majority- e.g. Kashmir Valley- they expel kaffirs. There are Muslim political dynasties just as there are Hindu dynasties. That isn't very democratic at all.
The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the West,"
It was a war between Islamists and kaffirs of any and every description. China 're-educated' its Uighurs and thus gained immunity. America wasted a lot of blood and treasure before admitting defeat and withdrawing.
India may see ethnic cleansing in particular districts but, speaking generally, the terror threat can be contained by vigorous extra-judicial killing.
but instead within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different,
like George W Bush? He wanted to live peacefully with Saddam Hussein. Indeed, he hoped they could get married and move to Vermont and open a B&B.
and those who seek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition.
This is irrelevant. Plenty of kaffirs live in Saudi Arabia. They are happy that criminals get short shrift there. On the other hand, it is no fun living in a very tolerant shithole where gangsters keep raping and beating you.
At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other
by shitting on their tits? This is not an urge most people have.
and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.
All we ask is that you obey the law and refrain from shitting on our tits.
This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality.
Neither picture matters. America is about productivity. If this fails to grow, it will fall behind its rivals. Smart people will emigrate.
At what I've called the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination.
America is highly productive. It is not interested in 'arguments about India'. True, you could make a little money, during the War on Terror, pretending that Modi, not Bush or Obama, was killing Muslims. But Muslims weren't taken in.
Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore
he renounced his knighthood
and Mohandas Gandhi,
who returned this kaiser-e-hind medal around the same time. The Americans should renounce titles given to them by the British King. Oh. They got rid of such titles in 1776.
whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to today's conflicts.
Both were afraid the Muslims (and the Punjabis) would take over the country if the Brits left without handing over the army to the Congress party.
The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such hold in India?
It didn't. What India succumbed to was Dynasticism.
Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism,
which is why Hindus of different sects don't kill each other
and daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds encounter one another.
Only in the cities.
But as I've noted, the traditions contain a wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated masculinity.
In which case Germans and Italians and members of the British Union of Fascists had suffered 'humiliated masculinity'.
For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were subordinated by a sequence of conquerors,
Not Hindu males who are Nepali.
and Hindus have come to identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions,
which English dudes like Sir John Woodroffe were greatly enthused by.
scorned by the masters of the Raj,
the Raj was cool with Indians having sex. It was Gandhi who wanted everybody to give up this filthy practice.
with their own weakness and subjection.
Gandhi believed that loss of semen made you weak. That's why you should give up sex.
So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection.
By contrast, the American Army insists that all soldiers get breast implants. General Eisenhower was promoted because he was the best Cancan dancer at West Point. Why do Indians not want their soldiers to train as female impersonators? It is because they are Fascist.
One reason why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of masculine failure.
In 1933, German men stopped getting erections. That's why they made Hitler Chancellor. By contrast, America remained Democratic because FDR wore stiletto heels and black fishnet stockings.
At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots level with great discipline and selflessness.
Dr. Hardikar and Dr. Hegdewar were medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. They were inspired by the Jugantar revolutionaries. After the War Hardikar took the lead in organizing the Congress Seva Dal to do crowd control at Congress events. But there was always the danger that the Dal- and Congress itself- would be banned. Thus, a few years later, Hegdewar set up the RSS as a 'non-political' copy of the Seva Dal. It turned out, doing social work raises your reputation and esprit de corps. Thus, while the Seva Dal degenerated into a bunch of corrupt gangsters, the RSS had a clean image.
The RSS is not just about fascist ideology;
its ideology is 'Hindutva'- i.e. ecumenical Hinduism cutting across sectarian, caste or regional divisions.
it also provides needed social services, and it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that has both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world of government schools.
The RSS run plenty of schools.
So what is needed is some counterforce,
This used to exist. There was a time when the Youth Congress involved doing social work. In the Fifties, there was some talk of creating a National Youth Leadership Training program. Even in the Seventies, some semblance of the thing existed.
which would supply a public culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization, and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu right.
Congress was the muscular Hindu party par excellence. It did ethnic cleansing on an industrial scale.
The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash within each person,
So it isn't a clash at all.
in which the ability to live with others on terms of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of being humiliated.
The author wants to live on equal terms with others. They keep shitting on her tits. This causes a clash within her.
Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable.
Stop having sex. It is disgusting.
He deliberately focused attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynous maternal persona.
by sleeping naked with young girls.
More significantly still, he showed his followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashing others; it is a matter of
sleeping naked with young girls while getting Birla and Bajaj to give you lots of money.
controlling one's own instincts to aggression
Gandhi was puny. The only person he could beat up was his wife. But he had sons. Sooner or later they would thrash the old man if he laid hands on their Mum.
and standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient to address it.
Very true. While he lived only 100,000 or so people were killed during the Partition riots.
The person who wrote the above was Martha Nussbaum who had dated Amartya Sen in the Eighties. I don't know what Sen did to her in bed, but what is clear is that Martha was highly traumatized. She wrote in the Boston Review
The identification of the female body with the nation
Sen used to confuse Martha's right nipple with Alaska.
takes us some way into the grim darkness of Gujarat,
Gujarat had periodic riots since 1969. The attack on Hindu pilgrims was bound to be avenged. Would there be an exodus of Muslims? No. The Central Government thought that the Pakistani ISI had orchestrated the Godhra atrocity with a view to causing panic and an exodus which would clog up the roads and thus hamper the Indian army in getting to the Rann of Kutch. This was because the Pakistani dictator had staged an attack on the Indian parliament in the hope of provoking military retaliation. This would get him off the hook with the Americans who wanted his Army to focus on fighting the Taleban (who were Pakistan's proteges) .
but questions remain. If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated?
Because the police would find such women and might punish you for rape.
To be sure, many people were murdered at partition, and in the general violence many women were used simply as objects of the desire to maim and kill. On the other hand, the logic of colonial possession was also amply evident in that case, since men really did want to take these women to their country and force them to bear their children.
Hindus already lived in their own country. They were afraid of Hindu policemen and Hindu judges.
And in large numbers, they did so. In Gujarat, we hear nothing of this sort.
For an obvious reason. You couldn't keep the woman you abducted. Someone in the neighbourhood would be bound to report the matter to the police.
Women were simply tortured and killed.
Like men.
So we wonder how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule
like the raped Belgian nuns who featured in British propaganda during the Great War
could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence,
How did this stupid idea enter Martha's head?
what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain.
Did Sen break up with Martha thus causing her a lot of pain?
Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men had lost the connection between woman and nation
Martha's left nipple is Alaska. Her right nipple is Arizona.
that they were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it and then, usually, burning it to cinders?
I suppose this destroys DNA evidence.
In short, how can one maim, burn, and torture the venerated body of the nation?
How can one shit on the tits of the US of A? Also, is there a video on this topic on Pornhub?
The feminist concept of “objectification” provides essential insight here.
Feminists are objectively as stupid as shit.
Objectification is treating as a mere thing what is really not a thing.
Many Feminists have been used as dining chairs. That's so not cool.
It has multiple aspects, including the denial of autonomy and subjectivity and the ideas of ownership, fungibility (one is just like the others), and violability (it’s all right to break the thing up or abuse it). Not all forms of objectification possess all these features: for example, one may treat a fine painting as an object,
because that is what it is.
thus denying it autonomy and subjectivity,
paintings aren't allowed to pursue successful careers in Cost & Management accountancy.
without holding it to be fungible with other paintings
This is only true of the original.
and without holding that it is all right to break it up. In the domain of human relations, however, sinister connections begin to be woven among these different aspects. At the heart of all of them, I would argue, is the idea of instrumentality: a thing, unlike a person, is an instrument or means to the ends of persons; it is not an end in itself.
So are people when they do a job for which they get paid. Lots of things aren't instruments at all because they are inaccessible or no use has been found for them. This also true of some people.
The objectification of women is primarily a denial that women are ends in themselves.
One can say 'women are not ends in themselves. They are instruments of God, the Creator.' This does not involve 'objectifying' women because they same thing can be said about unicorns.
It is because one has already made that denial, at some level of one’s awareness,
there is no evidence that the rapist or mugger makes some denial preparatory to carrying out a crime.
that it becomes so easy to deny women autonomy,
It is easy to deny anything whatsoever. Talk is cheap.
to deny that their subjective experience matters, and, even, to begin to ignore qualitative differences between one and another, as pornography so easily does.
Sadly, porn makes a qualitative difference between ugly dudes like me and beautiful people with great hair.
What is relevant here is that the logic of instrumentality also leads powerfully in the direction of seeing women as violable.
Homosexuals may see man as violable. Also goats.
What you have already conceived of as a mere tool of your own ends, not an end in herself, can so easily be understood as something that you may beat, abuse, burn, even break up at will: it is yours to use, and to abuse.
Nonsense! You hire a Nanny to look after your kid. She does the work and gets paid for it. Yes, she is an instrument, while at work, but this doesn't mean you can chop her up into little pieces.
Even a precious painting has legal rights against such abuses only in virtue of its connection with a human maker: the “moral rights” of artworks under contemporary European law are not rights of the painting as such, but rights of the artist in the painting.
The Government can intervene to protect such a painting in the public interest.
So too, once women are understood as mere instruments of men’s desires (for power, for pleasure), there would seem to be no principled limit on the ways one might use them.
It may seem so to Martha but that is because she is as stupid as shit.
A means is a means to an end.
Or to another means. There may be no 'end'.
To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women as the nation,
Indians don't do this. Even if Amartya told Martha her left nipple was Alaska, he wasn't treating her as the American nation. He was saying she was frigid.
while apparently honorific, is already a form of objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization.
So is treating a goat as the Andromeda galaxy. But nobody does this.
Under colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify their desires for control and honor.
No. Under colonialism, control of a territory is taken from pre-existing 'First' Nations and then a bunch of immigrants rule over it.
By being exalted into a symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject, someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the expression of male desire.
Only in the sense that Uncle Sam and John Bull were reduced to being mere grounds for the expression of homosexual desire.
Thus, although much of the time the male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using her brutally if that is what suits his desires.
Only in the sense that there is no principled barrier to his sticking his own head up his arse.
We see that connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence narrated by Tanika Sarkar.
She is Bengali and thus hates Gujaratis.
And we see it clearly, I believe, in Gujarat.
What we see in Gujarat is that Modi put an end to communal violence. At a time when the C.M of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, said that her own daughter was not safe after dark in Delhi, NDTV showed footage of young girls meeting their friends and having snacks on the streets of Ahmedabad at 11 o'clock at night.
Muslim female bodies symbolize a recalcitrant part of the nation, one as yet undominated by Hindu male power.
Also, many goats are not being sodomized by Hindu male power. Sheep are jelly.
One reaction to that situation might have been to abduct the woman and to place her in one’s own household. But if women are things, instruments, objects, then their bodies may also be used in gruesome ways—if that is what will best satisfy one’s desires for power, honor, and security. Once the status of end-in-itself is denied, everything else follows on a whim.
Why did Gujjus not eat the women? Was it because they are Vegetarian?
In short, it is not simply because the logic of the domestic sphere became the logic of kingly rule,
Domestic sphere has a big army and navy. That is why its logic became the logic of the kingly sphere.
but because of the particular form this kingly rule took, involving the conception of women as means rather than ends,
we notice that male babies frequently kill their Mummies after they are weaned.
that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing.
In 1776, George Washington & his chums slaughtered their wives and daughters. They also ate their Mummies and Aunties.
Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’ relations toward their very young children—
Baby is the King. Daddy is very obsequious to Baby. Kingly rule is about chopping the heads of treasonous vermin.
do not involve instrumentalization,
No. There has to be instrumentalization. The Doctor or Development Psychologist tells you how to upgrade your parenting skills so your kid will be smarter and healthier. You do spend some time cuddling baby, but you are also very careful to follow 'best practice' while performing particular functions- e.g. bathing or preparing food for the infant.
and do not lead to violence of the sort we see in Gujarat.
Why haven't we seen any major violence in Gujarat since 2002? Modi & the BJP won't permit it.
But the particular way in which kingly rule over women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved instrumentalization.
No. It involved rhetoric of a wholly metaphorical sort. Peeps love Mummy. Thus, when you want to evoke love of country, you speak of it as the Motherland.
So the woman was reduced from a person to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently honorific, was a mere tool of male ends.
Indira Gandhi had a penis. Mrs. Thatcher had a bigger penis. That's why they won wars.
The road from that point to violation is short and relatively direct
General Washington started raping, killing and eating women after helping establish the new American Nation.
This may not have been obvious in 2009 when an Italian journalist wrote the following-
Martha Nussbaum and the Indian laboratory
Mariella Gramaglia 9 September 2009
This article was published in No. 114 of the Reset magazine (July-August 2009)
After May 17th 2009 it became possible to draw a sigh of relief and forget the first fourteen pages of Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful recent essay entitled The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.
Martha does not seem to have understood that religious violence in India peaked when Nehru was PM. Her former boyfriend's family had to run away from their ancestral home in East Bengal for no other reason. The plain fact is, if the minority starts a riot, it gets stomped by the majority. But the majority may ethnically cleanse the minority even if it is meek. That's what happened to the Kashmiri Pundits.
In the introduction to the Italian edition, dated 2008, two years after her detailed book was published after lengthy studies and also a lot of research in the field both in India and the Indo-American Diaspora, the author warns readers. Pay attention – she more or less says – I am about to describe hell to you;
Hell was Partition presided over by Nehru
the abyss over which Indian democracy has hovered
Indira Gandhi first turned her party into dynastic property and then suspended the constitution and jailed her opponents
while led by the Hindu extremism of the BJP (Indian People’s Party)
It was Congress which was the muscular Hindu party. It killed not just Muslims, but also Sikhs. Rajiv Gandhi presided over a big blood letting in Delhi just as his grandfather had done.
and its satellite organisations between 1998 and 2004, as well as the risk of fascism
Fascism was a reaction to Communism. Which party has been most successful in crushing Communism? It is Mamta's TMC which used to be part of Congress.
and the danger of a war with Pakistan.
What danger? If Pakistan starts a war, they get stomped quite quickly.
In 2004 Sonia Gandhi saved us,
No. It was Rahul's return which saved Congress. The question was whether, aged 34, he would be willing to become PM or at least join the Cabinet. The theory was that he would first get married and then take over his Daddy's old job.
but I fear greatly that she will not manage to do so again and that hell will return.
Only Rahul mattered.
Hell did not return.
The BJP led government wasn't hell. There was rapid economic growth.
The Congress Party won 261 seats, only 11 fewer than those needed to govern and a number of seats easy to obtain through an alliance with just one regional political party.
Sadly, the coalition was corrupt. Manmohan pushed for more reform but Rahul cut him off at the legs.
The Hindu Right lost 30 seats, and, in true Anglo-Saxon tradition, paid homage to the winners. Aggressive populists, curry-styled league members and authoritarian communists guilty of pogroms against peasant farmers in Western Bengal, beat their retreat.
The Commies were physically beaten by Mamta's goons.
An honest Sikh wearing a blue turban returned to lead the government and a beautiful Italian lady (perhaps still a Roman Catholic as she was during the devout years of her youth) was now firmly in control of the relative majority party.
Hindus should be ruled by non-Hindus. Otherwise, India will become Hell. Sonia made sure her children and grandchildren would be Hindu. Her mistake was to listen to anti-Hindu Leftists. Rahul only came out of the closet as a sacred-thread wearing Brahmin around 2017. It was too little, too late.
This was more than enough to confuse the demons of extremism and perhaps to disperse them, at least to a certain extent, as well as lowering the level of war tensions with Pakistan.
Pakistan is smaller and poorer than India. It gets stomped if it wags its tail
In a cartoon published in the International Herald Tribune, an powerfully armed Taleban bows in the presence of a man presumed to be Osama Bin Laden:
living happily in Pakistan under the protection of the Army.
“Bad news, chief, Indian democracy is more stable now.”
Good news, chief. India is less democratic and more dynastic now.
Hence, knowing only too well that danger remains history’s profession, we navigate with greater calm through Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful reflective seas.
Nussbaum doesn't know History. Also, sleeping with an Indian doesn't make you an expert on India.
A Clash between or within Civilisations?
Between. That's why there is a Pakistan. Islamic civilization doesn't like kaffirs. The odd thing about Hinduism is that there is no sectarian violence within its fold.
The title itself is a theoretical and contentious answer to Samuel P. Huntington’s famous book about the conflict of civilisations. India is an almost insuperable laboratory in the battles between “two different civilisations” within one same nation.
No. It coheres because it is Hindu. Where Hindus aren't the majority, there is secessionism.
One appreciating multiple identities and people coming from various traditions, the other feeling safe only when those who are different are alienated.
India should not have demanded independence. Only White, non-Hindus, should rule.
One perceiving national unity as an ethos and a collection of rules; the other as a sacred pact involving blood and land.
These are complementary, not competing, ideas.
One holding out hands and minds to inclusion, the other considering inclusion as humiliating, not macho and a source of unbelievable insecurity.
Italy should invite in lots of nice African people. Why is an African not ruling Italy?
In India as it really is today, the problems of the world are far better expressed than in Huntington-styled analyses showing the West besieged by young Muslims, fuelled by religion, the poor’s new vitamin.
Nonsense! In India, there was dynastic rule. You could compare it to North Korea or a Gulf Emirate. Incidentally, religion has a high income elasticity of demand. America is rich. It is also very religious.
Are these not perhaps our problems too?
No. You don't have a brain dead dynast in charge of a National political party.
Do they not require additional “ethical imagination”, as Nussbaum suggests?
i.e. telling stupid lies so as to show how virtuous you are.
And what about a reappraisal of politics, a capability to practice “self-awareness”,
This is nonsense. Being 'self-aware' may have a psychological or spiritual benefit. But politics is about better solutions to collective action problems. This requires domain expertise.
because, to quote Gandhi, it is only by controlling our own aggressiveness
Gandhi was a hooligan. He kept beating and sodomizing Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Finally, Maulana Azad persuaded him to show some decency and control his own aggressiveness. Sadly, it was too late. Jinnah was so traumatized that he demanded the creation of a Muslim State where randy Hindus didn't keep buggering everybody.
that we will manage to become citizens who live respectfully with others
Fear of punishment does that. The reason Partition was so bloody was that the politicians didn't care about punishing the killers. Gandhi himself said he knew which members of his party had been killing Muslims. He took no action against them.
and perceive the humbleness of compassion,
and the compassion of humility
which is that vibration within us of a shared human fragility.
It isn't shared. Some people are very fragile and will die soon. Other's aren't. Thy can't share fragility any more than they can share their good health with others.
Report of a massacre. This dark civilisation, that of the demons of Gujarat, has a name and a date. Name: Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of Gujarat. Date: February 27th 2002, the day on which the “Sabarmati” train stopped at the station in Godhra and 50 pilgrims returning from the Temple of Rama in Ayodhya, died in a fire, said (but never proved) to have been started by Muslims.
It was actually started by Mormons from Utah.
During that same period there were massacres of 1.500 Muslims,
The Indian Government estimates that 3,300 Sikhs were killed when Rajiv took over.
horrifyingly ferocious rapes, all modern, metallic and sadistic even when compared to the unforgettable horrors of Partition,
Howling Hindu mobs cut open the bellies of pregnant Muslim women and extracted the foetus which was just quietly reading a book by Noam Chomsky and underlining passages and writing 'how true!' in the margin. The mob then slit open the belly of the foetus and extracted a still smaller foetus which was reading Gramsci in the original Italian. It said 'Vaffunculo!' and so the mob thought it was Mussolini whom Rahul's Grandad greatly worshipped.
and that Nussbaum portrays in great detail.
She repeats stupid lies.
She does not forget the past with the movement for the reconstruction of temples to replace mosques, the initial poison of this great intoxication dating back a decade.
Babri Masjid was closed to Muslim worship under Nehru. A building not used for Islamic prayer is not a mosque according to Islamic law. Sonia said she would build the temple once the Court gave permission.
She takes into account the global situation involving positive resistance and condemnation expressed by public opinion all over the world,
How many Muslims did America kill during the War on Terror? 1.3 million? More?
but also the political and economic complicity of the Indian diaspora
Hindus are evil. I hate them. My boyfriend may have been Indian but he was an atheist.
which seems to be an ethnic panorama in a foreign land rather than an ensemble of mature men and women capable of exercising control. She pays homage to the great women of Indian civil society who always stand out, and who in this case too stood by the victims, Teesta Setalvad
who feathered her own nest quite nicely
and Indira Jaising,
who was useless. The problem with telling stupid lies is that it makes you lazy. You don't bother doing any alethic research. The Supreme Court took suo moto cognizance of the issue. It expected the witnesses to give truthful testimony. There was a police officer who claimed he was in the room when Modi gave the order to kill Muslims. Sadly, cell phone records showed he was miles away. One Minister- a lady Doctor- was sent to jail. There were eye-witnesses who said she had been distributing swords. Then, it turned out, there was incontrovertible evidence that she was working in a hospital tending to the wounded.
among others (see also M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach). Above all she takes into account the Gujarat pogrom as the main setting for barbarisms,
Why not the anti-Sikh riots? They were bigger.
at a time when there was the risk of losing the India we know.
Modi put an end to the cycle of riots Gujarat had witnessed since 1969. He greatly improved governance. Incidentally, his rival from the Congress party was an RSS man. Ahmed Patel, Sonia's adviser warned against the demonization of Modi. It resulted in his gaining popularity with Hindus across the country. Patel's son is now praising Modi and has given up working for Congress.
Annihilating women. There is a national hymn that is apparently noble in its emphasis, but one that frightens Nussbaum.
So much so that she shits herself.
It is entitled Vande Mataram and the lyrics also say “Mother, Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands, When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?”.
Bankim, who wrote this, warned the Bengali Hindus about the Muslims. So did Tagore. Sen's family ran away from East Bengal when Bankim' and Tagore's prophesy came true. Interestingly, Hindu swords, at the command of Mrs. Gandhi, liberated East Bengal from Pakistani rape and genocide.
A mother-land, a feminine land, but also a violable land, a land to be re-conquered, torn from a contaminated enemy.
Our country should have a dick, not a vagina.
The warrior’s land is a land of conquering and rape.
No. It is one which isn't conquered and where people are not raped.
However, debates the author, sexuality is linked to patriotic chauvinism also in other ways.
What is Nussbaum's hatred of Hinduism linked to?
The insecurity and reactive interiorised shame experienced by some Indians following the mortifications of Victorian conformism,
This is nonsense. The Victorians left Indian customs and traditions alone unless lobbied to intervene in some matter by influential Indians.
has resulted in “projecting outside oneself, onto vulnerable people and bodies, the disgust experienced because of having an animal body.”
What is Nussbaum projecting? Whatever it is, it is stinky shit.
(see also M. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law).
Why are people not shitting themselves in public? They are animals, aren't they? I wish Sen had shat on my tits. Sadly, Victorian morality had brainwashed him. He preferred to do his business in the toilet.
Hence, extremisms are co-essential to hatred and contempt for women,
Nobody hates women more than Feminists.
while apparently more innocuous politics have for some time prepared the ground for this perverse connection. As already practised by the British Raj, this consists in removing family law from the universal sphere.
You can't remove a thing from a place where it never was. Incidentally, it is the BJP which wants a uniform Civil Code. So do some Muslim women. However, in practice, if a community doesn't want it enforced, it won't be enforced.
Divorce, inheritance, polygamy, the status of widows, alimony, are all the juridical prerogative of the various religious authorities,
Nonsense! Parliament has legislated for Hindus, Jains, Buddhists & Sikhs. Christians were already covered. Islam stands out.
often coinciding with ethnicity
No. In India if you wanted a second wife, you pretended to convert to Islam.
and are also effectively an extra-constitutional subject. The tribal shadow falls over women and increases the worst ghosts of dominations.
Not for non-Muslims.
Inventing so as to dominate. Domination, however, is a mental exercise.
Nope. You need to kick ass to dominate.
The devaluation of the humanistic culture is the result of modernity;
No. Useless shit gets devalued because it useless and is shit.
the risk of making India a country of docile engineers with no compassion.
Engineers aren't docile. Chairman Xi is an engineer. If you have useful skills, you don't have to be docile. If you study and hope to teach nonsense, you may have to let your supervisor molest you.
There is more, however, in the plans of the Hindu Right. There is the will to rewrite history,
which the Leftists had re-written
to intimidate free research,
i.e. telling stupid lies
to produce new disquieting text books.
Save in STEM subjects, text books don't matter.
Indigenous issues and the legend of the country’s origins categorically exclude any ancient contamination with the West.
Nobody gives a shit about such things.
The entire Mogul period, including the reign of the great Akbar, is catalogued as odious serfdom to Muslims.
Sen is totes gay for Akbar.
Subtle disputes on the appearance or not of horses in the bas-reliefs and fossil remains of the Indo valley proving an invasion of “Arians” from Afghanistan and early contamination” of Indian purity, or testimonies of the butchering of cows in the thousand years Before Christ, all become sources of hatred, threats and fatwas.
Hindus don't go in for fatwas. BTW, Nehru was PM when Cow Protection was made a Directive Principle in the Constitution.
The regime heralds and enthusiasts of roots triumph, and quite often serious scholars are threatened and ridiculed, in India as in the American and British diaspora.
This is true. I myself received rape threats when my twitter handle was 'Honeytits Cumbucket'.
All this, with gauche speed after the electoral triumphs at the end of the Nineties, became daily food for children in many schools, together with negation of the Holocaust and appreciation for the role Hitler played in Germany’s rebirth.
Zail Singh praised Hitler in the Indian parliament. Indira made him President. Incidentally, Nehru's ambassador to West Germany had recruited Indians for the Waffen SS.
It rains on wet muddy ground in forgotten and destitute schools, where the absenteeism of teachers is endemic, and pupils learn by heart dusty old ideas and 45% of families pay for illegal private lessons provided by the same teachers their children are entrusted to.
No. They go to private schools. Government school teachers are well paid but may be illiterate.
A tender homage to fathers. In one chapter, with filial devotion,
Nussbaum can't have any such thing towards India. She has no ancestors from there.
Nussbaum indulges in tender patriarchal viewpoints. In the political pantheon there is no Indira, the Durga warrior of the first nuclear experiments and emergency laws. There are instead Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru, each personifying one of the aspects of a great national archetype.
Gandhi demanded Congress control of the Army. Otherwise, he said, the Muslims & the Punjabis would overrun the country while the non-violent Hindu would have to trust to the Ahimsa fairy to protect their anal cherries. Tagore's book 'Home & Away' ends with Muslims slaughtering and robbing Hindus. That's why he didn't want the Brits to fuck off. His grandfather had felt the same way. Nehru pulled the trigger on Partition and presided over mass ethnic cleansing. Sadly, he had no understanding of economics and was suspicious of the Army. Thus the country became unable to feed or defend itself.
The first personifies devotion to categorical, moral and spiritual duty,
the duty to tell stupid lies
to national liberation to the extent of strictness addressed at oneself and the abolition of joy and the human body.
Nonsense! He was against sex but liked giving and receiving enemas.
The second incarnates grace, creativity, poetry drawing and dancing (Amita Sen, to whom the book is dedicated, Amartya’s mother, a magnificent dancer from the Tagore and Santiniketan school),
Tagore invented some new style of dancing. It was crap. Amita, as the daughter of a Professor at Shantiniketan, had to participate in that boring shite.
a taste for freedom and a critical spirit within the educational process.
She was a housewife. Her daddy married her off instead of sending her to College.
The third represents rationality, the scientific spirit, unease when faced with superstitious devotion and trust in progress.
He was a Socialist/Agnostic but did have a superstitious streak.
Nothing will nourish the new India better than an intelligent and well-educated mixture of these various ideal schools of thought.
No. They were useless. What can flourish is what raises productivity. Tagore & Gandhi presided over money-pit Ashrams. Nehru set up loss making Industries. A poor country can't afford to follow useless shitheads.
But will globalisation, with its paradoxical fusion of the most cynical secularisation and the most regressive identity rootedness, allow this? Let it be clear, this book does not speak only of India.
Few in America would have predicted that Trump would come to power. In India, most people thought Rahul would get married and then take charge of the Commonwealth Games (as his father took charge of the Asian Games) before shouldering aside Manmohan Singh to lead his party to victory in the 2014 election. Sadly, Rahul proved gun shy. Also, he was a dog in the manger. He wouldn't let someone else from his party to take the top job. Thus, in 2014 it was a case of Modi vs. Nobody. Now, it appears that seat redistribution will be implemented for the next General Election. This means the Hindi belt gains more representation. Who will they vote for? The BJP can't afford to be complacent in this matter.
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