Skip to main content

Whose India?



Salman Rushdie once mentioned a seminar organised in London on Indo-Anglian literature. It was attended by leading Indian English writers. On the first day an eminent novelist from India began his speech with a Sanskrit shloka which he refused to translate saying that every educated Indian was expected to understand the shloka without translation. There were Indian writers present there belonging to Muslim, Parsi, Christian and Sikh backgrounds, people with hardly any knowledge of Sanskrit. In one fell swoop the speaker had made all those writers outcasts, people who did not belong in India.

   That happened about three decades ago, much before Hindutva emerged as a dominant force in India. A few days back the Times of India reported that CBSE had decided to remove all languages except Hindi and Sanskrit from the list of options for Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET). The decision was revoked immediately because of strong protests from Tamil Nadu and the foresight of similar protests from many other states.


   
   Quite many institutions in the country have been populated with Hindutva supporters in the top positions, after Narendra Modi took charge in Delhi four years ago. The Modi-Shah combine has a devious plan to Hinduise the nation. The attacks on minority communities and their institutions including places of worship fall into that plan neatly. The lateral entry of bureaucrats planned recently is yet another step in the same direction.

   Probably the minority communities have chosen to remain silent or passive because there is just one more year left for the next general elections and they hope the elections will replace the government at the Centre. The new permutations and combinations emerging among the diverse political parties may indeed help the formation of a secular, liberal government.

   One cannot expect the Modi-Shah combine to be so naïve, however. They will come up with something unexpected to jettison all emerging alternative power structures. The political games they played recently in Karnataka alone (and continue to play still) show that they have no concern for any sort of ethics and power alone is their motive and goal.

   The question that will soon seek an answer is: Whose India is it?

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Kerala, my state, is now teaching Malayalam to 30 lack immigrants from North India!

      Delete
  2. But the question is except BJP which party can we expect in central govt. until the other parties reunite with each other but still the question is ....who will stand for the post of PM?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't believe in the 'There is no alternative' philosophy. The alternatives will appear as events turn out. A party that spews venom has to go; that's all. Let anyone else come; no one can be worse than this.

      Delete
    2. As i dont have much knowledge in politics but so far my poor knowledge asks is who can be that "anyone"? and yes its true that "the alternatives will appear as event turn out".

      Delete
  3. Sir, as said earlier too in certain of your posts, most of the people are not able to identify the real person hidden in the persona of the present Indian premier properly. Only Arun Shourie has not recognized him correctly but only when it's too late. First, let me clear the agenda of Amit Shah. It's nothing but grabbing power in the maximum territory of India either through winning elections or through manipulation without winning elections. He has nothing to do with Hinduism or Hinduising India or anything similar to that. That is the agenda of several associated people and outfits, not him. And as far as the person sitting on the chair of the prime minister is concerned, neither his supporters nor his opponents, neither his admirers nor his detractors have recognized him properly. He is a born dictator, a pure dictator, an absolute dictator sans any ideology or any attachment with Hinduism or Indian culture or the Hindu society or India or any ethics or the classes or the masses. His only and the only motive is to rule India for the longest period possible and give effect to all his whims and fancies (not any ideology because he does not believe in any ideology at all). For him all the individuals and institutions are nothing more than ladders which he has used and may have to use to climb the heights of power. And hope know, if after climbing, if one doesn't expect to come down, what's done with the ladder.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree with you to a large extent. It's a power game mostly. Mr Modi is a narcissist and a dictator. He loves to pamper himself with the best of everything he likes. He loves to travel round and show off himself, his royal robes and his retinue of chefs and stooges. Shah is the typical gamester, the kingmaker, the pawn killer.

      Having said that, we should not forget that Modi is quintessentially an RSS man with a racist agenda. Otherwise all this rewriting of history wouldn't take place. He is similar to Hitler in this regard. He has to eliminate a whole lot of people for his racist ambitions.

      Only those who are blinded by romantic nationalism and/or sentimental pietism will fail to see through the venality of Modi as well as Shah. But the number of such people in India is terrifyingly terrible.

      Delete
  4. I hope there is a good alternative to the current dispensation. Monopoly is bad, whichever be the party. It is very bad for democracy not to have a good and strong opposition.

    What is playing out now, is very similar to the time when Indira Gandhi was in her prime. There was no opposition worth its name. Remember how some people in those days were so frustrated that people are not able to see the extent of destruction Indira Gandhi is doing to this country. (In many ways, Modi actually reminds one of Indira Gandhi, except with regard to the communal and religious issues.) Remember, how in 1977 Indira Gandhi was voted out almost by the entire nation, and within two years, the same people brought her back. Then later, another round of anti-Indira experiment floundered.

    The big setback to the polity now is the decline of the Congress. (Look at the way, it was forced to concede so much ground to the JDS in Karnataka.) The rise of splinter regional parties, with no national view or development plan, will simply be disastrous. It is happening at the cost of Congress, that is big worry. Somehow Congress will have to gets its act together, quicker the better.

    For that Congress, especially Rahul, will have to start countering Modi at the same level. For example, when Modi is talking of development and empowering women and youth, or about GST, or the need to bolster indigenous manufacturing capabilities, or even Clean India, Rahul will have to come up with something equally strong that either effectively punctures Modi's arguments or has enough weight of its own to overshadow Modi's policy initiatives. There is neither. Rahul's speeches really lacks meat. Actually, some other veteran Congress leaders can take Modi on much more effectively.

    The opposition will also have to stop merely criticising Modi. (It sounds very similar to what the non-Congress parties did in the end of 1980s and mid-1990s, merely criticising Indira Gandhi, with no viable alternative in hand.) Congress will have to showcase the alternative it has to Modi. It will have to adopt a strategy in political articulation and management, very similar to what Vajpayee, and later, Modi did.

    It sounds ironic, doesn't it? The problem is not with the party, the problem is with what the party leaders are doing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...