Amartya Sen on 'divisiveness'

Amartya Sen comes from East Bengal. Because it had a Muslim majority it separated from the Hindu majority part of Bengal and joined what is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The proportion of the population which was non-Muslim plummeted decade after decade because of incessant violence and persectution. By contrast, Muslims who left Hindu majority West Bengal did so for economic reasons. At least that is the testimony of Bangladeshi writer, K.Anis Ahmed writing in the New York Times. 

Bengalis were in the majority in undivided Pakistan. Once free elections were held, a Bengali would have become Prime Minister. To avoid this outcome the Pakistani Army unleashed genocide. India assisted Bangladesh in becoming independent. However, it soon dropped any pretense of being 'Secular'. Islam is the state religion. The non-Muslim percentage of the population continues to drop.

What lesson would a Hindu from East Bengal draw from its history? Surely, it can only be that Democracy means majority rule. If that majority is Muslim then non-Muslims get short shrift. This is not necessarily the case if the majority is Hindu. The proportion of Muslims in India has tended to increase or remain stable. However, Pakistan uses religion to motivate terrorists to strike against India. This can be justified by the notion that a Muslim has a duty to side with Islamic countries even if he resides in 'Dar ul Harb'.
Thus, it makes sense for India to take a tough line with extremists and criminal elements in Muslim majority districts- more particularly if they are contiguous with a Muslim majority country.

Amartya Sen takes a different view. On the website 'Newsclick' Sandip Chakraborty reports-

Expressing concern over the current hegemonic politics of “divisiveness” in the country, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen on Wednesday said: “Democracy is not a majoritarian exercise”, adding that “winning one election does not guarantee that you can bulldoze all the pluralism in society.”

This flies in the face of facts. If Democracy were not a majoritarian exercise, East Bengal would never have separated from West Bengal nor would East Pakistan have separated from West Pakistan.

The outcomes of single elections determined both partitions of Sen's ancestral homeland. It is true that elections don't by themselves 'bulldoze pluralism'. Killing, raping and looting too is required so as to bring about genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Sen was delivering a lecture on “On Being a Bengali” to a packed auditorium at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, as part of the Foundation Day programme of the research institute.

Sen's audience knew very well that Hindus in East Bengal got short shrift. They could see with their own eyes that Hindus in West Bengal felt insecure because of changing demographics. The result was that the BJP had doubled its vote share to 40 percent in the National elections.

Ruing over the recent diminished influence of the Left, especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal, Sen attributed it as one of the reasons for the spurt in communal polarisation in the state.

Wonderful! If people got tired of Communist goons beating and raping them and grabbing their land, this was because of those nasty Hindus. But, if they got tired of Mamta Bannerjee's goons beating and raping them and swindling them of their money, that too was the fault of those nasty Hindu chauvinists.

He also attributed majoritarianism, as being practiced in current politics, be it in West Bengal by the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, as the cause of the “diminished space for people and pluralistic opinion of society”.

In a Democracy, the majority decides things. Majoritarianism is the result of the practice of holding Democratic elections. True, a politician could say one thing to the majority to get elected but then do something else altogether. However, that politician is likely to be turfed out next time round. Thus Democratic practice will, as a 'repeated game', yield Majoritarian outcomes. It seems, in the Indian subcontinent, if Muslims are in the majority, non-Muslims will get short shrift. That is why Hindus don't try to emigrate to Pakistan or Bangladesh even if their ancestral homes are in those countries.

Remarking on the weaning (I presume this should be 'waning') away of “reason” as one sign of the advent of fascist ideology, Sen implored everyone in the audience to watch a film called, Reason, by Anand Patawardhan, whom he referred to as an “able filmmaker from our Shantiniketan.

Why watch it? It is old hat. The stupid people who are supposed to buy into this stupid shite aren't so stupid as to change their vote on the basis of this nonsense.

He also attributed the “withering away of ‘reason’ “as the sole cause of the devastating communal riot during the 1940s in Bengal.”

How idiotic! The communal riots of the '40s in Bengal were highly rational and had an economic motivation. Shurawardy's 'Direct Action Day' was about determining whether Calcutta would go to Pakistan or stay with India. Non-Bengali Hindus, Marwaris, Biharis, Sikhs etc. defended their economic interests in the city by killing more Muslims than the Muslims were able to kill. Once it was clear who had won, Shurawardy joined hands with Mahatma Gandhi to put an end to the violence. Since nobody would get paid for knifing anybody, all the thugs gave up communal violence to concentrate on stuff that paid better. This was pure economic rationality- which is why Sen does not understand it.

The gathering was attended by the who’s who of art, science and culture, such as economists Amiyo Bagchi, Achin Chakraborty, Jean Dreze, actor Sharmila Tagore, former state finance minister Ashim Dasgupta, historian Atish Dasgupta, among others.

Sharmila Tagore was a great actress who converted to Islam. The rest are worthless.

Sounding a subtle warning on the advent of fascism in India, the Nobel Laureate spoke of his father-in-law who he said was killed by Italian fascists. He narrated a story of “a socialist in the 1930s in Italy, who was pestered to join the fascist party of Mussolini, by the Fascist Party members. When he refused to do so, saying that his father, grandfather had all been socialists, the Fascist Party leader asked as to what he would have done had his father and grandfather been murderers. To this, the committed socialist activist replied, that in that case, he would surely join the Fascist Party.”

How did the Fascist Party gain power? The answer is that the Anarchists and Commies and other such nutjobs were running amok. Mussolini was a Socialist who had supported the War. His 'black shirts'- many of them demobbed soldiers- were prepared to do what the Police and Army would not- viz. beat the shit out of the Commies in the streets the way the TMC goons beat the shit out of the Commies's goons in West Bengal.  Incidentally, the TMC morphed out of the Congress goons who used to fight Commie goons in the streets.

Fascism got into power by beating people and stayed in power the same way. Mussolini was considered a great man. He helped Franco kill and rape his way through Republican Spain. Unlike Franco, Mussolini lost a war and was hanged.

Sen said fascist forces take the garb of social work, like the Fascist Party in Italy did which claimed that they were fighting to eradicate malaria from Italy. Under this garb, they spread hatred in society, he added.

This is utterly foolish. The Italian Dept. of Health made the plan to drain the Pontine Marshes in 1922. It had nothing to do with the Black Shirts. Later, in 1928, Mussolini, who was firmly in power, backed it on the basis of a pilot project. He then took all the credit. Sen, senile old fool that he is, thinks that Mussolini first invented a story about malaria and then started draining the Pontine Marshes so as to spread hatred in society.

Tracing the route of the syncretic culture associated with Bengal, Sen said even after the Buddhist era in Bengal, there had been violence.

So, he believes his audience is foolish enough to believe that some Religion can banish violence.

Quoting from Sahajiya sect of Buddhism as present in the Charyapad , the oldest Bengali written literary work, and Chandimangal of Mukundadas , he explained how syncretism had always been the backbone of Bengal’s evolution.

Very true! That is why Bangladesh's official religion is a mixture of Shinto and Voodoo.

He also pointed out that Chandimangal, the famous Bengali epic, wholeheartedly welcomed the influx of Muslim populace from the West.

No doubt, it would also have welcomed the influx of British populace from the West and Japanese populace from the East. Why not simply offer up every bunghole in Bengal to influxes of sodomites from around the globe?

In lighter vein, Sen related a conversation that he heard from his maternal grandfather, Kshitimohan Sen, (a doyen of Bengali Literature and a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore), that in his village in Dhaka Bikrampur’s Sonagaon village, where he resided years ago, there was an open-hearted maulvi (Muslim cleric) who, upon seeing a prominent Hindu resident, invited him for a cup of tea. When both of them were drinking tea, a Hindu priest was passing by, who, when invited to join the duo, declined stating that he was a ‘pious Hindu priest’ (Chakraborty), and could not do so. The maulvi laughed and told him that “both are the same, as one fleeces innocent Muslim population in the name of Allah, and other does the same in the name of Bhagaban (God).”

Sen should know that back then orthodox Hindus avoided tea and coffee. Tagore makes frequent mention of this.
Hindu priests were very poor. Whatever swindling they were doing was on a very small scale. By contrast, the fleecing which the Communists did made their nephews very rich.

Sen also commented on the rise of identity politics in the name of religion, which was giving rise to the “cultivation of dissonance and hatred”. He traced the roots of the present Bengali calendar as the proof of Mughal emperor Akbar’s syncretic calendar that he introduced by taking inputs from the Hindu Solar calendar and the Muslim Hijli calendar. Though Akbar’s own court members did not accept this, Akbar’s calendar was successfully introduced in his newly acquired province of Bengal.

All this is nonsense. Akbar was a King. Kings need money- i.e. efficient tax collection. A lunar calendar is unhelpful in an agricultural country. Still, for religious reasons, it had to be retained. A Persian polymath figured out a way to reconcile solar and lunar calendars. As a matter of administrative convenience traditional names were retained. What was objectionable about this new calendar was its claim to be Godly. Thus it was abandoned for the same reason that 'sajda' to the throne was abandoned.

The Nobel Laureate also pointed out that the British rulers had given rise to communal feelings out of their own interest, and in the Permanent Settlement, they gave land to Hindu landholders though during the Sultanate Period and the Nawab era, they did not try do the same for the Muslim community.

This is brazen mendacity. The British rulers wanted to make as much money as possible. Zamindars who couldn't pay were deprived of their estates. If a Hindu was better able to squeeze the tenants while paying off the Brits, his Estate increased. No doubt, the Bengali Hindu- whom the Brits considered cowardly- was more trusted not to rebel. However, for that very reason, there was no reason to 'divide and rule' given that the conquest of Bengal had been so easy.

Perhaps Sen believes that the Brits also divided Pakistan or, maybe, he blames the Americans.

He also traced that the earliest works of translating the Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, into Bengali was commissioned by the then Muslim rulers in Bengal, adding that the last independent Nawab of Bengal, Sirajuddaulah’s core team consisted of four Hindus and two from his own religion.

What point is Sen making? The fact is the Muslim rulers of Bengal proved incompetent in fighting off Mughals, Marathas and even the tiny forces commanded by John Company. Clearly 'core teams' consisting of 'four Hindus and two Muslims' are utterly crap. What matters is having one good General and troops who won't run away from a numerically much inferior enemy.

“In fact, Qazi Nazrul Islam’s poems are the most popular Bengali verses after Tagore,” he said, adding that the renowned poet pioneered socialist thoughts and used to write for Langol, a mouthpiece of communists, and had also translated the biography of Karl Marx into to Bengali.

Once again, one wonders why Sen would make such a foolish point. Is he saying Bengali culture peaked before he was born and has been in decline ever since? Tagore is a boring and vacuous poet though, in translation, this is not always apparent. Nazrul is wholly provincial. A 'biography of Karl Marx' is difficult to write- one would need to know a great deal about German philosophy and French Revolutionary politics and English empirical economic history. There may be some biographies of Marx which score well in one or other of these areas. What is certain is that whatever it was that Nazrul translated into Bengali was puerile shite.

Sen is a highly divisive figure. When he became Chancellor of Nalanda, he said it would be 'firmly against divisiveness'. Yet he himself, by making absurd demands for 'diplomatic immunity' for its staff (including Indian nationals) completely divided the UPA Cabinet. Pranab Mukherjee, a fellow Bengali, felt he had to cut Sen down to size despite the strong support he got from the PMO after he appointed the PM's daughters' chums to lucrative posts.