Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Courtesy: The Indian Express Moving from Ghar Wapsi to Bharat Mata, Through Cow Protection and slaughter of men, The poet sought meaning Knowing rhyme there was none Rhythm there was none In spite of the umpteen slogans: Make in India Start-up India Digital India Democracy struggled for breath In the attenuated air in the Arunachal mountains, In the Devbhumi of the Garhwal Himalaya; And promised to die in Himachal and Manipur. “What is it that you want, Mother?” The poet asked Bharat Mata. And she said hiding the tears that welled up: “Azadi.  Azadi from my upholders.”

“We want to tell him (Rahul Gandhi) that we are honoured to be called followers of Savarkar…he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the British. He jumped into the sea, escaping from the clutches of British soldiers and swam for 10 km, and fought for Independence.”  Amit Shah thundered while addressing a farmer’s rally in a Surat village .   This is yet another instance of his party’s relentless efforts at rewriting the history of India.  What kind of a person was this ‘Veer’ Savarkar in reality? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was brought to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans in 1911 after his conviction for the murder of A.T.M. Jackson, Collector of Nashik district, who was "sympathetic towards Indian aspirations."  Within six months of his imprisonment, he submitted a petition for mercy to the British government in India.  In 1913, he submitted his second petition in which he wrote: " I am ready to serve the (British) Government in any capacity they like ... .

One of the most common responses of the BJP to criticism is to cite examples of similar deviation by the Congress.  For example, tell them that communal disharmony is on the rise after the party came to power and they will quickly cite the riots that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination or other similar instances.  Tell them now that the imposition of President’s rule in Uttarakhand just a day prior to the scheduled trust vote is a cynical subversion of democracy and they will point to the imposition of Emergency by Indira Gandhi.  The BJP came to power promising us DIFFERENCE.  It promised us DEVELOPMENT.  It gave us dreams about a country that will fly on the wings of science and technology.  It promised us cleanliness.  We dreamt about RS 15 lakh in the accounts of each one of us, the black money brought back from wherever that is stashed away. While we dreamt, Vijay Mallya escaped with Rs 9000 crore from our banks! Nothing has changed, in fact.  As Arun Shourie, a

No great leader emerges unless there is a crisis.  Mohandas Gandhi would have remained a mediocre lawyer had not the freedom struggle discovered the leadership qualities in him.  Abraham Lincoln would not have secured his present place in history without the crisis that challenged his potential in the form of the Civil War. Mr Narendra Modi has his historical opportunity now to prove his station in history.  India is faced with a crisis called nationalism. Nationalism, by definition, is excessive devotion to the interests of a particular nation-state.  It is valid when there is a threat to the autonomy of the nation-state.  India is not facing any such threat now.  Yet nationalism has become a craze among a sizeable section of the population.   When there is no threat to the nation, the only other reason for nationalist sentiments to breed and spread is a desire to dominate.  It is an urge to impose a certain culture or religion or some such thing over the others.  What

Source “I am happy dead than being alive,” said Rohith Vemula in his suicide note.  He “loved Science, Stars, Nature.”  His country gave him superstitions, communal hatred and hollow slogans.  He died feeling hollow in a country whose Prime Minister keeps mouthing beautiful slogans about development.  The other day, senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha compared Mr Modi to Indira Gandhi with respect to the dictatorial style that marked both.  Of course, he had to retract later for obvious reasons. Is Mr Modi converting India into Police Raj as Indira Gandhi did during Emergency?  The way the protesters in Delhi were attacked by Mr Modi’s police indicates that the Prime Minister is trying to re-create Gujarat in Delhi.  He probably hopes to extend it gradually to the entire country.  Or, maybe, it’s just the only way he knows to handle dissension with.  Senior leaders of the party were sidelined long ago by Mr Modi.  Not that those leaders would have worked wonders.  But

“Every Indian has a right over everything that India has.  From this, he or she is free to weave his or her dreams.  The India of tomorrow will have 125 crore such dreams, and will be built on the same.  We will not only empower our citizens with the ability to dream, we will enable them with the capacity to actualise their dreams.” The passage is quoted verbatim from the 2014 Election Manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party which went on to win the elections.  A year and a half is not a period long enough for materialising such a grand vision.  But it is a period long enough to move in the direction, at least a few steps.  Modi at Sivagiri math in Kerala recently Instead of empowering the dreams of the citizens, they are being driven deeper and deeper into a quagmire of rising prices of food and communal dis-ease, in addition to all the old problems of corruption in politics, unemployment, widening gap between the rich and the poor, and so on.  Worse, certain concepts

One BJP minister beefs about his chief minister of the same party in Karnataka and goes to the extent of threatening to behead him if he ate beef “and play football with his severed head.”  We have so many beef-heads in the country who have bizarre notions about games and their tribe is increasing especially since the cow migrated from its usual habitats on the city streets to the new lullabies with which our present leaders are trying to put the whole nation to an intoxicated sleep.  The lullabies are, however, beginning to sound like beef-hearts – at least to some of us. The BJP chief minister of Karnataka does not eat beef.  He was merely defending the people’s right to eat whatever they liked.  But the BJP does not believe in such magnanimity.  It is a party beefed up by religious and cultural ideologies.  Religion has its god-given truths which no beef-head can transmute into beef-hearts.  A plain truth is that beef is no delicacy.  It is hard and extremely fibrous. 

According to Chetan Bhagat, a liberal in India today is a person who was born in an upper class family, received English education, absorbed the world culture, carried hotdogs to school in their tiffin box, visited Disneyland, and ridiculed those who spoke English in India with a vernacular accent.  The popular writer said this and much more in his Times of India article yesterday.  He goes on to reduce the current communal disturbances and acts of intolerance to a mere class struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, the latter being the present-day nationalists whom the former refer to derogatorily as the right-wing, or sanghis, or bhakts, or chaddiwallahs.  “There is a reason why liberals are derogatorily referred to as pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-liberal,” claims Bhagat. “For their agenda is not to be liberal. Their agenda is to look down on the classes that don’t have the global culture advantage.”  He goes on to say that “If, for insta

O P Dhankar [Courtesy The Hindu ] Farmers are criminals and cowards, according to the BJP.   The party’s agricultural minister in Haryana, Mr O P Dhankar, explained the logic .   “Committing suicide is a crime , according to Indian law.   Any person who commits suicide escapes from his responsibilities and leaves the burden on his wife and innocent children and such people are cowards .”   Mr Dhankar was the former head of the BJP’s Kisan Cell. It is easy to dismiss Mr Dhankar’s view as a personal opinion.  Rahul Gandhi, who seems to have found some enlightenment after his long contemplation abroad, has started questioning the BJP’s anti-farmer policies eloquently if not effectively enough.  His lack of effectiveness stems from his lack of vision.  It is not enough to question a system; one has to suggest an alternative one.  Mr Gandhi is yet to rise to the stature of a leader with any practical vision in spite of rubbing shoulders with the aam aadmi for quite some time.

One of the few surviving intellectuals, Umberto Eco, described the following as the characteristics of fascism. ·         The cult of Tradition: Elevation of a particular culture as superior to all others, rejection of modernism ·         Anti-intellectualism, irrationalism ·         Belief that disagreement is treason ·         Fear of difference ·         Appeal to a frustrated middle class, the fears and aspirations of the lower social groups are highlighted in order to accentuate the fears of the middle class ·         Obsession with a ‘plot’ and hyping up of an enemy threat: e.g. hatred of certain sections of the society ·         Aversion to pacifism ·         Contempt for the weak ·         Selective populism ·         ‘Newspeak’ or doublespeak meant to restrict critical thinking ·         Distorting history, blatantly lying, copious use of propaganda The Right Wing in India has been making ample use of all of the above ever since Mr Narendra Modi

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 British ever set foot on the count

When Babur was conquering more territory in India, one of his formidable opponents was the Rajput king Rana Sangha of Mewar.  The news of the defeat of one of his battalions by Rana Sangha was accompanied by a soothsayer’s prediction of disaster and the desertion of the Indian mercenaries.  Babur’s soldiers were thoroughly demoralised.  A new strategy was required.  Thus came in religion.  “This is not just a war for territory,” declared the divinely inspired Babur.  “This is a jihad against infidels.”  With no other weapon than a few words, Babur converted a greedy and violent war into a holy jihad.  “Cowardice became apostasy while death assumed the welcome guise of martyrdom,” writes John Keay in his book, India: A History .  Keay goes on to quote from Babur-nama (Babur’s personal memoir-cum-diary), “The plan was perfect, it worked admirably...”  His soldiers took an oath on the Quran to fight till they fell.  What’s more, Babur enacted certain religious rituals too: abjuring al

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is being saffronised.  Two office bearers of RSS-backed Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) and a former professor who unsuccessfully contested Lok Sabha elections in Manipur last year on a BJP ticket find place in the reconstituted team of ICHR.  Maharashtra has become the ninth state in India to ban cow slaughter.  We can expect more additions to the list soon.  The past as well as the future of the country is being altered.  History is written by the victor, as they say.  The destiny is also written by the victor. The Deccan Chronicle says that the lives of about 20 lakh people will be adversely affected by the ban on beef in Maharashtra.  One assumes that is the ultimate purpose of the ban.  Hitler overtly killed his perceived enemies.  His counterparts in India do it without attracting the attention of other countries whose cooperation is required if the regime has to deliver its electoral promises.

  The last quarter of the 20 th century witnessed the emergence of the systems perspective in contrast to the reductionist approach that was followed earlier.   The reductionist approach viewed phenomena by their parts and treated them as such.   For example, if you have a headache you kill the pain with an Anacin ignoring the harms done to the body by the drug.   In the systems perspective, you look at the whole rather than the parts.   You use available knowledge and technology to find out the root cause of the headache and make the whole system healthy.   Any system such as the human body or a society is not just the sum of its parts.  A system is a complex and inter-related network of interacting components.  Relationships among the components are of vital importance in any system.  India is not just a sum of its states and union territories (Gujarata-Maratha-Dravida-Utkala) or a sum of the various religious communities (Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Isai).  Any nation is much mor

Dr Kiran Bedi has finally landed in the Emperor’s camp and that was expected.  It was clear from the days of India Against Corruption that her ultimate goal was political power.  When she understood that Arvind Kejriwal was not the kind who could sway the masses as effectively as Narendra Modi, she made the right choice.  Who can blame her?  Why blame at all? Was Kiran Bedi an epitome of moral values and any kind of principles at any time?  Yes, as a police officer she did make significant contributions particularly towards making the prison system in India more effective and productive.  She was a good police officer.  Was she above blame?  In 1992 she got her daughter admission for MBBS course in Delhi’s Hardinge College by manipulating the quota for the tribal students of the North-east.  Ms Bedi (not Dr at that time) offered many justifications for her act but nobody who knew the facts would have bought her explanations. Later her NGO came under the scanner for