The BBC published an article titled ‘Why are Indian women being attacked on Social Media?‘ It featured television anchor Sagarika Ghose, politician Kavita Krishnan of the CPI (ML), and poet/activist Meena Kandaswamy. Having interviewed them, it seemingly drew the conclusion (voiced by Ms.Ghose) that women abused on Twitter in India tended to be “liberal and secular”, while the abusers were mainly “right wing” males. The article was slammed in various quarters for being sub-standard, partisan and reliant on unverified opinion. Blogger Sunanda Vashishta was upset enough to write a rebuttal titled ‘When it comes to online abuse, some victims don’t matter to BBC!’ She argued that cyber stalking and bullying of women was a reality for women across the ideological spectrum, and that the bullies had no ideology. She gave many examples to prove her point.

The debate that ensued highlighted once again the problem of online abuse. As discussion on the issue continues, it may be worthwhile to briefly examine the concept of abuse, and understand why people choose to abuse online. The aforementioned BBC article vaguely pinned the blame on a view that a “patriarchal mindset has pervaded the internet space”. However, given that online abuse is not merely an Indian preserve, it stands to reason that there is more to the issue.

Let us begin by understanding the word abuse. The term has been variously defined as the use of something for a bad purpose, an attempt to control the behaviour of another person, and the misuse of power. It could include the use of offensive language, humiliation, intimidation, threats of violence, making of false accusations, defamation and harassment.

Psychological reasons for online abuse:

One major factor in the prevalence of abuse online is disinhibition. The term refers to a state where people online shed the restrictions, which they would normally apply in regular face-to-face interactions in the real world. There are many reasons why people are less inhibited online. Psychologist John Suler enumerated them in his paper, The Psychology of Cyberspace.

The internet allows people to be anonymous. We may interact daily with a lot of people, but they don’t really know us. The amount of information available to them is strictly controlled, and they usually have no way of reaching us. This is especially true for those who use anonymous identities.

There is also a sense of being invisible. One may see a person’s real photo, but that is a very small window into his or her real world. This allows people to have online avatars that are older, younger, brighter, bolder and someone completely different from their offline self.

Then there is an advantage of delay on social media. We have the ability to post something at will, but there is no corresponding need to respond immediately, or in fact reply at all. Hence, the ball is always in our court, which is unlike interactions in the real world, where one usually needs to respond and close conversations. This benefit often allows people to do an emotional equivalent of a hit and run.

Besides, the virtual world is one of make belief to a large extent. Hence, it is very easy for people to delude themselves by thinking “this is a different world; therefore the rules that apply in my real world don’t apply here”.

Finally, in the real world, we are usually polite and try not to offend others, even if that means playacting a role sometimes. Not doing so would have consequences. We could get into fights with our neighbors, family members, employers or co-workers, and create unpleasantness and complications in our daily life. In the virtual world, the consequences of bad behaviour are often negligible.

Practical reasons for online abuse

Apart from the psychological reasons, abuse can also be a part of a calculated strategy. Twitter for instance is a battleground for winning mind space and perception. This battle can be fought on many levels, through various ways. Some examples of kosher, non-abusive ways include:

(i) Expressing strong opinions

(ii) Sharing information or links that support ones point of view

(iii) Rebutting statements or allegations with facts

(iv) Using equivalence to state a view or dilute an issue.

(v) Using sarcasm to make a point

(vi) Embroiling opponent in pointless arguments so that main issue gets obfuscated

In addition to the abovementioned methods, there is a time-tested tactic of wearing down or repulsing the opposition by bullying though abuse. While this strategy is also used in the real world, due to disinhibition it is more potent & used more frequently online.

Common practices of abuse include use of derogatory language, making vicious personal statements, character assassinations, posting untrue information in order to damage credibility, persistent trolling, and making direct threats of violence to a person or their loved ones. Here are some examples of abuse:

(i). Derogatory personal statements:

(ii). Making baseless allegations or spreading malicious mis-information:

This is the type of reaction that came in as Sunil Tripathi’s name was mistakenly linked to the Boston bombing-

This is what emerged later-

(iii). Harassment & bullying through persistent trolling

(iv). Making threats of violence to a person

(v). Riling people by making insulting comments that hurt their religious sentiments

As it has been demonstrated in an earlier section, there are a lot of appropriate, aggressive strategies to counter people. It is therefore unfortunate when people choose abuse as a way to shut down opposing views. Mature arguments are about giving as well as one gets, in a smart, effective, incisive manner. When abuse creeps in to the discourse, it indicates frustration. For a sore loser, it is tempting to slide into a petulant, juvenile, name-calling mode, once his or her arguments have failed. In the end, abuse is a sad comment on the failure of the abuser and not the victim. However, it should be noted that this kind of behaviour is visible on all sides of the political spectrum. BBC’s article implying that it was the preserve of one side is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Review in one sentence: Right and also right, but some questions left out.

Review in short

The author casts a critical eye on the direction that British society and the nation took  that resulted in radicalization of the Islamic community in that country. Substantial documentation of the foibles of the British polity, intellectuals, and judiciary adds heft to the message. Book is an important, trenchant and somewhat disturbing critique. Many of the questions and context are eerily applicable in the Indian context too.

Longer Review

As Britain becomes more multi-cultural and more heterogeneous a society, it has also had to face a most unfortunate consequence of this intermingling. Immigrants who have turned against their motherland. The London terrorist attacks of 2005 brought this problem to the forefront – “The realization that British boys would want to murder their fellow citizens was bad enough.” What some have perceived as a lax and permissive attitude among the intelligentsia to the sprouting of Islamic fundamentalism has led to the coinage of a pejoration: “Londonistan” – “a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors of terrorism as Afghanistan”, and the despair that London itself has become “the major European center for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism.” This book – “Londonistan”, then, is a scathing look at the players that have led to, in the author’s view, surrender to the forces of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain.

In the author’s view, and backed by considerable data, such a pejoration – ‘Londonistan’ – may not be without merit, especially if one considers the vast numbers of Britons engaged in nefarious activities. “According to British officials, up to sixteen thousand British Muslims either are actively engaged in or support terrorist activity, while up to three thousand is estimated to have passed through al-Qaeda training camps, with several hundred thought to be primed to attack the United Kingdom.”

The author has tackled different aspects of this issue in separate chapters each. Therefore, in chapter two, she takes on the lax immigration system for the uncontrolled influx of people claiming persecution in their home countries, so much so that “many Islamist terrorists and extremists found Britain to be such a delightful and agreeable destination.” She harshly condemns “Ministers and officials in charge of the asylum system” as being “among the least likely to possess either the intellectual or the political clout to tackle the problem“. She also pillories the European Court of Human Rights for extending “the scope of the provision in the European Convention on Human Rights that prohibits torture or degrading treatment” as it became “impossible to deport illegal immigrants – including suspected terrorists – to any place where the judges thought such abuses might be practiced.” Worse was the British judiciary, while “independent of political control”, came to “see themselves, rather than the democratically elected politicians, as the true guardians of the country’s values.”

To take a more detailed look at some of the arguments put forth in the book, let us start with the evidence that points to a radicalization of Muslims in the UK itself. To that end there is an impressive array of facts the author marshals to argue the point that, to begin with, UK has played host to terrorists and organizations with terror-links, unequivocally.

“UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain and the United States.”

“And the number of terrorists who have come roaring out of these polluted British waters is startling. UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain and the United States. The roll call includes Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, killer of the journalist Daniel Pearl and disaffected, brilliant son of Pakistani immigrants; Dhiren Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi, British citizens and al-Qaeda members who plotted to attack major financial centers in the United States; Mohammad Bilal from Birmingham, who drove a truck loaded with explosives into a police barracks in Kashmir; the “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, who was converted to Islam at Brixton Mosque in south London; Sajid Badat from Gloucester, a putative second shoe-bomber but who was also caught and is now in jail; and Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British boys who helped bomb a Tel Aviv bar in 2003 and killed three Israeli civilians. And let’s not forget Azahari Husin or the “Demolition Man,” the Malaysian engineer who belonged to the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah ( JI). He had studied at Reading University in the 1980s, honed his bomb-making skills in Afghanistan in the 1990s, helped mastermind the terrorist attacks in Bali (twice) and finally blew himself up in a gun battle with Indonesian police in November 2005.”

“One of the world’s most radical Islamist organizations, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in many countries where it is considered a major threat, has its headquarters in Britain.”

 “Scarcely less significant is the European headquarters of the radical proselytizing movement Tablighi Jamaat at Dewsbury in Yorkshire.”

 “Al-Sunnah, the Islamist magazine that calls repeatedly for human-bomb terror operations against the United States, is published from London,”

 “Indeed, one could say that it was in Britain that al-Qaeda was actually formed as a movement.”

“Many of Osama bin Laden’s fatwas were first published in London.”

 “The foiled millennium plots of 1999 and 2000, when al-Qaeda planned a series of attacks in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, all led back to London.”

You know things were bad when Egypt “denounced Britain as a hotbed for radicals” after “Abu Hamza welcomed the massacre of fifty-eight European tourists at Luxor in October 1997“.  Abu Hamza was “an Egyptian-born former engineering student and nightclub bouncer, who had lost an eye and an arm in Afghanistan and sported a hook instead of a hand“, and was allowed to live and preach in Britain for several years, till he was finally jailed in “February 2006 for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred”

It is useful to describe the term Islamism itself as it is used extensively in the book. “Islamism is the term given to the extreme form of politicized Islam that has become dominant in much of the Muslim world and is the ideological source of global Islamic terrorism.” The author states “It derives from a number of radical organizations“, prominent among them being the Tablighi Jamaat in India/Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood (“which was founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna with Sayed Qutb its leading ideologue. Its creed is known as Salafism and is deeply antisemitic; this is virtually indistinguishable from Saudi Arabian Wahhabism”), and “the Jamaat al-Islami, founded by Sayed Abu’l Ala Maududi in India/Pakistan”

So how did such radicalization come to happen? And why wasn’t anything done about it? Were the Muslims residing in Britain, all 1.6 million out of a population of 60 million, siding with the terrorists? Were they sympathizing with these Islamists? No, not quite, argues the author, and there is nuance to the “no”.

“In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives” However, and this is where the nuance appears, in the author’s opinion, the majority of the pacifists need to be more vocal about their abhorrence for Islamist violence, and more disturbingly, moderation among them is relative, “considering their widespread hostility towards Israel and the Jews, for example, or the way in which the very concept of Islamic terrorism or other wrongdoing is automatically denied.”

More disturbingly, for Britain, there has also been this barely hidden desire within the British Islamic community to see more Islamization in society in general. Consider this:

“A poll conducted by the Guardian newspaper found that 61 percent of British Muslims wanted to be governed by Islamic law, operating on Sharia principles – “so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.” A clear majority wanted Islamic law introduced into Britain in civil cases relating to their own community. In addition, 88 percent wanted to see British schools and workplaces accommodating Muslim prayer times as part of their normal working day.”

This is perhaps by no means unsurprising – if a community wants more elements of its traditional jurisprudence to be integrated into their adopted country. Perhaps. But what about taking offence at the drop of a hat? What about self-censorship because of fear of causing offence to the easily-offended by vocal minority among Muslims?

“Novelty pig calendars and toys were banned from a council office in case they offended Muslim staff. Ice creams were withdrawn from the Burger King Chain after complaints from Muslims that a whorl design on the lid looked like the word “Allah.” Various councils banned the concept of Christmas, on the grounds that it was “too Christian” and therefore “offensive” to peoples of other faiths”

Or

“There are now more than 140 housing associations in England catering to ethnic minorities; one of them, the Aashyana in Bristol, provides special apartments for Muslims with the toilets facing away from Mecca.”

So, why not debate this issue? After all, these are fairly existential questions for British society, one would assume. But here one has to tread carefully. It is easy for such debates to get hijacked by extremists on both sides, and for stereotype-driven accusations to fly fast and furious.

“One of the reasons why people shy away from acknowledging the religious aspect of this problem is, first, the very proper respect that should be afforded to people’s beliefs and, second, the equally proper fear of demonizing an entire community. There is indeed a risk of such a discussion exposing innocent Muslims to attack.”

If the majority of Muslims in Britain do not agree with or subscribe to the extremist views of those within their community, then they need to be more vocal about it. Which they are not. “If “moderation” includes reasonableness, truthfulness and fairness, the reaction by British Muslims to the London bombings was not moderate at all. Yes, they condemned the atrocities. But in the next breath they denied that these had had anything to do with Islam. Thus they not only washed their hands of [sic] any communal responsibility but – in denying what was a patently obvious truth that these attacks were carried out by adherents of Islam in the name of Islam – also indicated that they would do nothing to address the roots of the problem so as to prevent such a thing from happening again.”

It is not as if there is no one speaking out against the Islamists from within the Muslim community. The most eloquent case for the Muslim community to speak against terrorism perhaps comes from Mansoor Ijaz, who wrote in the Financial Times, “It is hypocritical for Muslims living in western societies to demand civil rights enshrined by the state and then excuse their inaction against terrorists hiding among them on grounds of belonging to a borderless Islamic community. It is time to stand up and be counted as model citizens before the terror consumes us all.”

Dissenting voices are often either silenced or threatened into submission. “Reda Hussaine is an Algerian journalist who started inquiring into Algerian radicals in London after his Paris office, where he was trying to start up an independent Algerian newspaper, was ransacked in 1993. The French police told him that the attack had been organized from London, that the group responsible was sending money to terrorists in Algeria, and that Abu Qatada was behind it.”

What about representatives of the Muslims in Britain? You know you may have a problem of sorts when Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, “regarded by the British establishment as the most reliable mainstream voice of the Muslim community”, compares “Hamas suicide bombers to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi (sic).”

Or take the words of Tariq Ramadan, who, according to “researcher Caroline Fourest”, “speaks with two voices”. When “asked whether he approved of the killing of an eight-year-old Israeli child who would grow up to be a soldier, he replied: ‘That act in itself is morally condemnable but contextually explicable,’”

A piece in the middle of the book is very illuminating in shedding some light on the topic of Islamopobia. She quotes Kenan Malik, ““antiracist” Asian writer“, who suggests that “Islamophobia is a myth and is being exaggerated to suit politicians’ needs and silence the critics of Islam: The more the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more ordinary Muslims believe that they are under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, it stokes up anger and resentment, and it makes Muslims more inward looking and more open to religious extremism. It also creates a climate of censorship in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. The people who suffer most from such censorship are those struggling to defend basic rights within Muslim communities”

Islamic theologians are not to be left behind in strengthening the needle of suspicion that some harbor against Islam.

“In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States, which explained the Islamic Agenda in Europe. When Muslims lived as a minority, it said, they faced theological problems, because classical Islamic teaching always presupposed a context of Islamic dominance. The book told Muslims to organize themselves with the aim of establishing a viable Muslim community, to set up mosques, community centers and Islamic schools. The ultimate goal of this strategy was that the Muslims should become a majority and the entire nation be governed according to Islam.”

This is a deliberately and dangerously confrontationist approach to take, and its effects can be seen even in the beliefs slowly gaining ground among Muslims in Britain.

In all this, it would be awfully remiss to not take a look at politicians and politics. It is a universally acknowledged truth that an amoral politician in need of electoral safety will seek refuge in divisions in society. This has been true with Indian politicians for over half a century, and it should be of no surprise to people that Britain is no different.

“Labour was traditionally the party that appealed most to new immigrants, and Britain’s Muslims were no exception. Many Labour MPs, including the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, found themselves representing constituencies with significant Muslim populations. This had a number of consequences, one of which was that some Labour politicians allowed Pakistani politics to influence British politics.” And thus you come across the concept of “vote-banks” in Britain. ”

On the day of the 2005 British general election, Faisal Bodi wrote in the Guardian: “Labour politicians have cultivated the “community leader”, the modern-day equivalent of the village chief, whose unique selling point is that he can bring in the vote of the particular ethnic sub-category he belongs to, be it by fair means or rigged postal votes.” This seeking of votes goes beyond the shores of the island nation. “According to the bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, himself of Pakistani origin, a number of Labour MPs with large numbers of Muslim voters need the support of various Islamic leaders in Pakistan who tell their followers in Britain how to vote.”

It is a reasonable expectation that the media engender debate on topics that are of interest and of importance to society. In the author’s opinion, when it comes to discussing Islamism in Britain, the media has practiced self-censorship at best, if not outright intellectual dishonesty. Two incidents cited are the murder of “Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women“, or the protests “over the publication in Denmark of a batch of cartoons linking the Prophet Mohammed with violence“.

If Muslims, even those born and raised in Britain, were to take up terrorism, surely the fault could not be all laid at the door of either Islam, or radical Islam, or the Muslim community. That is only a very reasonable position to take. The author is also on board with this position. So the fault must be shared with Britain also, right? Yes, sort of. The author seizes upon the ‘liberal’ ethos and casts an accusatory finger upon it. Things get wider in scope from here. But let’s look at the author’s articulation.

The author believes that the process of radicalizing started more than three decades ago, in the 1970s, when Muslim immigrants arrived in large numbers from “Pakistan, Bangladesh and India” to “work in the cotton mills in England’s northern industrial towns such as Bradford and Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham.” These immigrants’ faith was “largely influenced by introspective, gentle Sufism and was thus passive and quiescent.” But all that changed in “in the space of a few years” and “it became an increasingly activist faith centered on the mosques, which were transmitting a highly radicalized ideology.”  ”Such young men, stranded between the mores of Mirpur village life on the one hand and the degraded nihilism of British “liberal” society on the other, are thus easy prey for the puppet-masters of terror.”

Ok, if she says so. And then there is a roadhouse punch at Islamic society itself:

“What makes these fragile egos yet more vulnerable still, moreover, is the pathological inferiority complex that afflicts Muslim society, the exaggerated notions of shame and honor which mean that every slight turns into a major grievance, disadvantage morphs into paranoia, and Islam itself is perceived to be under siege everywhere.”

One gets the impression that she really wanted to take a sledgehammer at all of Asian Third World, but perhaps thought it more politically correct, in a manner of speaking, to direct this broadside against Muslim society, obligatory refrains of avoiding stereotyping notwithstanding.

So why are liberals to blame for this? Well, if I understand the line of thinking taken by the author, and this is a simplification, it is because liberals hate capitalism and capitalists. The United States is the embodiment of capitalism. Preconceived notions and stereotypes of Jews mean that Jews are associated with capitalism; hence the liberal hatred of Jews. Fundamental Christians have, on their part, believed, and have been taught, that Jews murdered Jesus. Hence Jews are evil, and hence Jews need to be eliminated. There is an actual theological doctrine that exists to justify this. Known as ““replacement theology,” or “supercessionism,“, it goes like this: “going back to the early Church Fathers and stating that all God’s promises to the Jews – including the land of Israel – were forfeit because the Jews had denied the divinity of Christ. This doctrine lay behind centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred until the Holocaust drove it underground.” Islamists, on their part, have bought into the wholesale portrayal of Jews as evil – “Drawing on a theological animosity, it is based on the belief that the Jews are a Satanic force and a conspiracy to destroy Islam and rule the world; and that, since the Jews control Western society, it follows that Israel is the forward flank of the West’s attempt to subjugate Muslims everywhere … Fixating upon the early conflict between the Prophet Mohammed and the Jewish tribes of seventh-century Arabia, the Islamists became obsessed with the archetype of a universal Jew, treacherous by nature, whose perfidy threatened not only Islam but all humanity.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and hence the liberal’s chumminess with Islamists. One can see strong traces of this line of thinking on the part of liberals also manifest itself in India, where there is a strong aversion to criticism of Islamic terrorism, or to ask searching questions of Islamists in India who covertly or overtly broadcast messages of hate against non-believers.

Conclusion:

The book has what I would call a definite right-wing, nationalist, Christian conservative slant.  The author herself does not shy away from it. She argues that these are in fact required for the maintenance of peace in British society. If, however, it was just that, the book could have been easily dismissed. However, what elevates the book from the ranks of a xenophobic screed is the fact that it is well-researched, disturbing, and thought-provoking. Yes, there is a selective cherry-picking of facts and a selective interpretation too, but even taking both into account, this book still raises several questions about the direction the nation of Britain is taking, the culpability of its politicians, and whether its Muslim clergy and intellectuals wants their community to be held hostage to the philosophy of its fringe fundamentalists.

The other issue that people may find with the book is its sweeping pronouncements heralding the end of Britain and of Western society in general. Consider this, “What if, instead of holding the line for Western culture against the Islamic jihad, Britain is sleepwalking into the arms of the enemy?” Or “In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout.”

In some cases the flowery prose is outright bizarre. Like where she writes, “Helping sow the dragon’s teeth from which would spring the killers“. I stopped counting how many metaphors had been mixed and mangled.

For Indians this book should hold an added element of interest. The reason should not be difficult to find. Terrorism, especially terrorism inflicted in the name of and by radical Islamists, has been borne by India for over twenty years. Many of the topics that the book dwells upon are equally germane in India too. Any and all attempts to debate the theological basis for such radicalism are quickly shouted down by equally radicalized voices.

Lastly, it is somewhat ironic that Britain today stands at the junction of trying to assimilate heterogeneous cultures, religions, and identities, while still providing enough space for these identities to preserve their uniqueness. It is after all Britain that pursued a considered policy of racial and religious divisiveness in the Indian subcontinent for two centuries. Whether it was to make caste the sole differentiating factor among Hindus, or using a manufactured Aryan Invasion theory to divide North and South Indians, or pitting Hindus vs. Muslims, it was all part of what Lord Elphinstone called a “divide et impera” policy. One is tempted, almost, to use the phrase that the chickens have come home to roost, or the other phrase that stings even more – “as you sow, so shall you reap”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londonistan_(term)

www.melaniephillips.com/londonistan

Buying information: Amazon, Flipkart, Kindle, Powell’s

This review originally appeared here.

At Jijnasa, we have always endeavored and experimented with new ways of bringing the huge online intelligentsia into mainstream discourse. We also realize that there need to be opportunities for online activists to engage in the real world. Sangama is a result of such a thinking.

At Sangama, online nationalists will not only present their views on important issues but also network with others to act on common ideas.

Jijnasa’s first Sangama will take place on 1st June 2013, Saturday at CESS building in Nagarabhavi (full address and map enclosed below). This conference will deal with 5 topics:

1. Influence of main stream media on electoral outcome – Regional vs National ?
2. Analysis of BJP’s Karnataka Results
3. Is a Rights based Governance model failing us ?
4. Should the State control temple trusts ?
5. Can social media impact electoral outcomes ?

After 5th topic, house will be open for debate moderated by the chair.

We invite your interest to speak/present on the topics listed above. 
It would help the discourse and audience if the topic is something that you are passionate about.
If we have more than two people keen on presenting on a particular topic then the organizing committee will take the final call on the panel although in most cases we would like to restrict it to one speaker.
That in no way means you will not get an opportunity to articulate your views because after each presentation a vibrant Q&A will follow.

Interested participants are requested to choose one of the five topics and prepare a presentation.
Please send us a short abstract on the topic you wish to speak in word format (Times New Roman Font, 22 pts size) on jijnasaCESS@gmail.com NO later than 24May2013.
We will close the speakers for the topic on an ongoing basis.  

Speakers will be notified well in time so that they can prepare their presentations before the event, which need to be submitted by 30May2013.

Presentations should be in ppt format and should not be more than 12 slides, font size 20 pts in each slide.
Presentation shouldn’t exceed 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes of presentation, house will open for 15 minute Q&A. 
Chair will monitor the timing and 5 minute warning will be issued 10 minutes after start of the presentation. 

10 minute Q&A session will follow with both the speakers. 
Chair will monitor the timing and 2 minute warning will be issued 8 minutes after start of the each presentation.
Q&A will be monitored by Chair.

The conference schedule is as follows:

10:00 AM – Registration starts
10.30AM – 10.45AM – Saraswati Vandanam
10.45AM – 11.15AM – House introduction and welcome address by Chair
11:15 AM – 11:45 Noon – Topic 1
11:45 Noon – 12:15 PM – Topic 2
12:15 PM – 12:30 PM – Break
12:30 PM – 1:00 PM – Topic 3
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM – Topic 4
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM – Topic 5
3:00 PM – 3:15 PM – Tea break
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM – Open house debate
3:45 PM – 4:00 PM – Closing remarks by Chair
4:00 PM – 4:15 PM – Vandemataram

Lunch and Tea will be served. A small registration fee of 150/- will be charged.

Please register using the form

Venue address:
“PRAJNANAM”
CENTER FOR EDUCATION AND SOCIAL STUDIES
NO.6/6 BEHIND TELEPHONE EXCHANGE
OPP:SAINT SOFIA CONVENT
10TH BLOCK NAGARABHAVI
BANGALORE – 85

Google Map link

The registration form also contains a map view of the route to the venue from Central Silk Board, Hosur Road so you can get an idea of the location.

Please write to us at jijnasacess@gmail.com for any queries.

Note: We would like to know if any of the interested audience would be kind enough to pick up other participants in the area. The registration form has a field to indicate your interest.

For a party that straddled the electoral landscape of UP post Ramjanmabhoomi(Rama’s birth place) movement, the precipitous decline in fortunes over the past decade has been difficult to fathom. So steep has been the decline that BJP which ruled UP just a decade back is now a poor third force. This should be deeply worrying for the likes of Kamal Naath in Delhi, who after 2 successive electoral defeats know that for them to do business in Delhi a respectable tally from UP is a must. The party had a chance in form of 2012 elections when it could have put its house in order but it failed pathetically by resorting to the invisible election strategy which it hoped would fool the antagonistic Muslim vote and ensure a surprise Hindu polarization. Unfortunately this low key campaign strategy back fired and the strategists of the invisibility camping became invisible for days after the election results!

Not that BJP had not tried to somehow spring back in UP. But these efforts have largely failed to yield any dividends. The efforts to resurrect yesteryear Hindutva poster boy Kalyan Singh have backfired and one has lost the count of his numerous home-coming and subsequent outgoings. With the party lacking disha and dasha, it was Samajavadi Party (SP) which benefitted massively in 2012 assembly elections from the anti incumbency which was sweeping the state against Mayawati’s administration. It would be incorrect to say SP benefitted solely from the complete Yadav-Muslim polarization for Akhilesh Yadav the son of maverick Mulayam riding high on hopes was able to promise good governance if voted. Well articulated, although lacking any substantive base, it did resonate with large sections of electorate particularly youth and the results were there for all to see. One year on, SP hasn’t yet delivered anything which can be remotely called governance except the freebies which were promised in its manifesto.

With one year to go for 2014 General elections, the political situation is still fluid, although straws in the wind suggest some remarkable consolidation of views on some key issues. If one thing that is fairly conclusive to any serious UP watcher, it’s the seething anger against the Central government. The huge unpopularity of the central government has rubbed onto the fortunes of Congress. Coupled with anti Congress mood the miserable performance of several sitting Congress MPs could well ring death bell for Congress in 2014.

Rahul Gandhi who campaigned aggressively in 2012 hoping to reap dividends by posing as the angry young man needled by the inefficiencies of the system seems to have given up on UP preferring to enjoy the comforts of Delhi rather than slug it out in the dusty lanes of rural hinterland. The severe anti incumbency against Central government could see Congress ending up a poor third in constituencies like Moradabad, Keri, Farukkabad, and Maharajganj which it won in 2009. Indeed the talk in political circles and on ground is that it could be tough ride for Rahul Gandhi in Amethi where there is a great deal of voter discontent. The party was washed out in the key bastions of Amethi, Sultanpur and Rae Bareilly in 2012 Assembly elections

Samajwadi Party government, contrary to reports in Delhi media, continues to enjoy the honeymoon period and has largely held onto the Muslim-Yadav consolidation. Indeed if any lack of choices given the seething unpopularity of Congress has driven larger sections of Muslims into the firmer embrace of SP.

Brahmins, who have emerged the key swing group in UP, gravitated towards SP thus firming up their recently earned reputation of siding with the party in power. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) which is licking its wounds after its disastrous performance in 2012 has lost further ground among upper castes, Most Backward Castes(MBC) and sections of Dalit Muslims.

In this scenario an interesting realignment is taking place which has the potential to change the political landscape. The virtual domination by the money and muscled Yadavs and Muslims in Akhilesh’s reign has managed to rub sections of non Yadav Other Backward Class (OBC) on the wrong side. Thakurs smarting under their perceived negligence and sidelining post the Raja Bhaiyya fiasco are looking towards BJP as an option. Indeed the most remarkable aspect today is the sheer popularity of Gujarat strong man Narendra Modi. He has managed to morph into larger than life figure across the state and is voluminously talked and held in aw in urban and semi-urban parts from Lucknow to Allahabad. The readiness of OBC and non Brahmin upper caste sections to embrace Modi has not been lost on either the opposition parties or the BJP cadre. Indeed it would be understatement to say that Modi is a factor for he seems to be a phenomenon. Voters across the state are enamoured of Modi and his development tales in a state which has been starved of developmental activity.

Indeed there are fears among no BJP parties of the dent he is likely to cause among their base should he campaign in the state. A SP leader, who this author talked to while on a visit to Maharajganj, said only factor which could stall SP march in Poorvanchal is the Modi factor. Indeed the assessment across the board while traversing Poorvanchal was that Modi card could significantly alter the dynamics of the region and has the potential to even push BJP ahead in the race.

This overriding public sentiment seems to have been not lost by the BJP President Rajnath Singh who has deftly appointed Modi’s acolyte Amit Shah as in charge of UP. What’s interesting is that while other appointments didn’t even raise a whimper Shah’s appointment managed to raise eye brows across the political circles showing the extent of Modi factor at work.

BJP Delhi leadership should read the public mood and give the baton charge to Modi if it has to have any realistic chances of touching 30 seats in 2014. Should Modi’s PM candidacy be formalized 2014 could well turn out to be a no holds barred battle between Mulayam dreaming of ruling Delhi with the help of Third Front and the Hurricane from the West who has the potential to overturn the existing political order in badlands of UP.

This is not to say that no men support the cause of feminism; far from it. They exist, in individuals and in groups; but, their support has low visibility. Some have even rallied under a sub-classification: Pro-feminists. While that is heartening to know, its breaking-off from the main provokes the inevitable question – why do men need a separate definition for the same cause?

The problem might lie with the word, Feminism – an excluding and exclusive term that possessively holds woman alone in the embrace of its roots. It might also extend to disquiet with what feminism has come to represent; a reason too why many women themselves fight shy of the term. What began as equality has gradually shifted to embracing entitlement and to a more radical form that mistakes misandry for empowerment.

The entry of fringe radicalizations has done undue damage to mainstream debate of the real issues by muddying common purpose. Yet, most women are uncomfortable with publicly denouncing these positions. Their hesitation makes men uncomfortable with lending full throated support on the larger issues.

The women’s rights movement started as a struggle, in the West, for equality with men in the political, social and economic sphere. As expected, the political goals were relatively easy to achieve. It was political equality that was the threatening notion of its time. Once that took root and rapidly spread, suffrage automatically followed in its contrail. The other two fronts were slow to keep pace. Rather predictably too; since change herein directly threatens the social order as it exists.

Equal pay for equal work is a principle most men align with reasonably. It has not yet translated due to structural impediments created by vested interests and delays in governance reform. This should have been the focus of feminism’s next major thrust. Instead, it was side-tracked by the tumult in families wrought by the rapid devolution of the social order.

It was Carol Hanisch, a sixties-era feminist who popularized the phrase: The personal is political. While that indeed is true; its corollary is not. The political is not always personal. Not in an emotional or social sense. The political and economic facets of equality for women can deservedly target the ideal position. However, on the social and familial front, equality is a hard nut to crack.

Here, the chasm splits wide open between the ideal and the actual. Change at this micro-personal level will not happen with a single tectonic shift. It has multiple interwoven interests and will necessarily be in fits and bursts with revisions and edits. Unfortunately, frustration with its tardiness has transformed feminism into activism aimed at enforcement. This is rightly interpreted by many as the long arm of the State extending into the personal spaces of relationships and families.

At the level of the family; feminism is but one cause in many and a feminist is just one hat. It jostles with multiple kinships, competes for space, and is no longer an identity absolute. With this contextual shift, there are many hyphenated roads to its end-goal. Expectedly, the feminist label has split into a bewildering mélange of: liberal-feminists, conservative-feminists, cultural-feminists, eco-feminists, material-feminists, pro-feminists, etc. The cleaving is especially jagged on social issues. Irrespective of the reasons this fractured identity has fragmented the faith. No more does feminism reside in an unquestionable resplendent absolute; it now cowers in the shadows of an adjectivized state.

Indian feminism reflects the heterogeneity of its origins. Broadly it can be grouped into two categories: activism against oppression and activism for equality. This neat slotting, while diligent on paper, is confounding on the ground. Oppression of, and brute violence against, women violates the lowest bar of their fundamental rights. Curiously, it is not restricted to any one economic or educational stratum. Disagreement between the sexes on this issue is rare and is the exception to the norm.

It is on the matter of social/familial/work-life equality that gender divide raises its clunky head. The easy transmutation of what is really an equality debate into one of oppression and the latter’s over-use as a convenient, brook-no-opposition, fallback for all and any disagreement, alienates men and denies both sexes the opportunity of a more harmonious co-existence.

At this juncture, the women’s movement would do well to heed the models by which political equality gained success. Time and again, we are shown historical evidence of the patterns by which a collective end-goal was achieved. The most successful ones are homogenous in purpose, have a well-defined goal, have multiple players invested in it and importantly, have invariably had the support of breakaways from the privileged class. ‘Subordinate’ groups have easier gained a seat at the table when they’ve commissioned the active support of ‘insider breakaways’. Whether out of genuine or opportunistic belief insider involvement is critical to the process.

For women; this implies the active and tacit support of men. Every familial issue – whether that is education, marriage, children, work-life balance, elder care and support – necessitates the hands-on involvement of both sexes. A cooperative approach to and with men will not only hasten the fruition of feminism’s goals; it will also ensure a stable and sustainable change in the social order. An inclusive and participatory change has a better chance with longevity than enforced and regulated change.

Equality at home is best achieved by a balance of compromises. Fathers and grandfathers (along with their women) were feminists before we were. They and many others of their ilk from even older generations made great and bold sacrifices to enable the empowering reforms of the 20^th CE. Whether as proto-feminists or pro-feminists, both women and men have more control over challenges than we are willing to accept responsibility for. One way of exerting control is through a mature response, not a shrill one. Through assertion; not aggression. Our mutually cooperative response to the challenges of our times will set the agenda for the coming generations. Ideally, (having transcended these divisions) that should be to merge feminism into a more universal humanism.

In the immortal words of one of Tamil’s greatest poets, a 19^th-20^th CE Indian Nationalist and an Ur-feminist, Shri. Subramania Bharatiar: Kangal irandinil ondrai; kuthi Kaatchi keduthidalamo? Pengal arivai valarthal; vaiyyam Pedamaiyatridum kaaneer [Would it be reasonable to destroy the vision that two eyes contribute to, by intentionally destroying the sight of one? Will the world not be a better place if we encouraged the intellectual development and progress of women?]

(Sincere apologies to Tamil readers and scholars for my weak attempt at translation)

______________________________________________________________________

(Image Courtesy- chsaplitprideandprejudice.weebly.com )

One such tribal kingdom that faced the brunt of the Christian onslaught in 1947-48 was the kingdom of Jashpur. Raja Vijay Bhushan Singh of the Jashpur royal family was the leader of the “Hindu-reaction”. Since then, the services of the Jashpur royal family to the Hindu cause has been unwavering. The Jashpur royal palace, “Vijay Vihar” has been a resting place for itinerant sadhus, saints and various Hindu holy men for more than 6 decades now.

The tribals of Jashpur hold the royal family in high esteem for their sacrifices and services to the upliftment of the tribal populace. Dilip Singh Judeo, the scion of the Jashpur royalty and the sitting BJP MP of Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh is known as the “King of the Tribals” in this region. These Jashpur royals have given up almost all their wealth to the welfare of tribals. Yet, Dilip Singh Judeo was accused of corruption by creating a misleading sting operation under the guidance of Amit Jogi (the son of former Congress CM of Chhattisgarh). Thankfully, the voters of Chhattisgarh saw through the machinations of the Jogis and the Congress-friendly media. Chhattisgarh has never voted for a Congress government since that Amit Jogi fiasco of 2003.

Vikas Mantra from the tribal heartland

“Congress gave India a new slogan, ‘Garibi hatao’ (get rid of poverty) some 40 years ago, but India is still grappling with poverty after 4 decades” avers Narendra Modi amidst rapturous applause from the more than 75 thousand strong audience in Rajnandgaon. He then goes on to add, “give Raman Singh ji 5 more years and Chhattisgarh will grow beyond Gujarat, that is the achievement of BJP in a decade (what Congress couldn’t achieve in 6 decades)”.

Modi has a knack of invoking regional pride like no other leader India has seen in its democratic history, but his regional appeal is a message coated in staunch nationalism. Thus when he spoke in Chhattisgarh on Saturday, his appeal was to the state’s pride on the development agenda of BJP’s Dr Raman Singh government.

This is the difference that BJP in general and NaMo in particular have brought to Indian polity. Even in a state like Chhattisgarh, where there is a history of Christian-Hindu political divide represented by Congress and BJP respectively, the agenda is now driven almost exclusively on the development plank. At the same time, Congress party and Ajit Jogi are still stuck in a time-wrap – a decade ago, I had the (good) fortune of interacting with Ajit Jogi (the then CM of Chhattisgarh) and his ophthalmologist wife to only realize their zealous commitment to Christian missionaries and their efforts at religious conversions of the tribes, an ideology they still hold close to their heart as per media reports.

The path that the saffron party has traversed from the Dilip Singh Judeo territory to the Raman Singh terrain is a story that can potentially transform India. The ideological base of Hindutva now has development agenda at the core of its DNA. This is a fact the Dilli BJP has never come to terms with, while the state units (including even Karnataka) of the party are way ahead of the learning curve.

The transformation of Modi is complete

If Karnataka is used as a barometer, then the NaMo factor is now an exclusive construct of the development agenda with almost no baggage of religious appeal. Narendra bhai campaigned in three cities/districts of Karnataka; Bangalore, Belgaum and Mangalore. In the first two districts, BJP performed exceedingly well, winning about 21 seats, but in Mangalore the NaMo campaign failed miserably.

In Bangalore and Belgaum, the message was loud and clear on development and progress, so NaMo met with great success. Whereas in Mangalore, the attempt was to repolarize the Hindu voters in order to counter the minority consolidation in favour of the Congress party and the verdict was pretty clear to even the most superficial political observer. Thus Modi today has become almost an exclusive icon of development, with no religious baggage despite non-stop media hankering.

This is what the intellectual class of India has failed to understand, the transformation of NaMo as purely a phenomenon of development politics. While the intellectual-media complex is still stuck in expired definitions of quasi-religious faultlines, India has started to align itself to the politics of aspiration and development. This is not just a sub-regional anomaly limited to the western state of Gujarat, as the secular-intellectuals would want us to believe. Development politics is now a pan-India wave stretching from Chhattisgarh to Tamil Nadu and the biggest exponent of this new wave is Narendra bhai Damodardas Modi.

Epilogue:
Nitish Kumar, the Bihar CM, undertook a “Adhikar Yatra” last year across his state. What is scantly reported in the national media is the number of protests and the amount of opposition and rebellion against Mr Kumar wherever he travelled in Bihar. The flashpoint of that state-wide tour by the CM was in Khagaria district when there was large scale violence and the CM had to actually suspend his yatra midway.

“Raman Singh is a CM with the courage to re-visit the people of his state through Vikas Yatra to explain to them the welfare and development initiatives during his rule”, quipped Modi in his speech in Rajnandgaon yesterday. He then went on to take a dig at Nitish Kumar by adding, “There are few chief ministers, who had to suspend such an yatra following protests from the people”.

Development politics of India today is not just about courting media houses to get positive press, but it is to make real difference to the lives of the people. The sooner Nitish realises this, the better it would be for his political future. Sadly, Nitish Kumar is too enamoured by Dilli’s sophistry of secularism and is living in a fantasy land of the “Tilak” and the “Topi”.

The Right People podcast series initiated by Centre Right India to highlight people who are not politicians or involved closely with professional politics. CRI talks to those who identify with centre-right politics from across the vast Right framework – economic right-wingers, libertarians, traditionalists, Swadeshi right, etc.

Undoubtedly, these groups bicker much among themselves and are not part of any monolithic Right; however, they all have their place in national politics as long as they represent a community of interests and values within the state. CRI recognizes this diversity and welcomes it, and The Right People tries to talk to different people to better understand their views and aims.

In the tenth episode of The Right People, editor Amar Govindarajan talks  Kartikeya Tanna. Kartikeya Tanna  is a prolific columnist. You can read his posts at Firstpost, Desh Gujarat, Niti Central and of-course at our very own CRI as well. As a lawyer his interventions and writings are usually centered around legal issues and controversial cases of political importance. Kartikeya also writes current affairs commentary the best of which have been carried by this site.

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Vijay Chada

Utsav Mitra

Shailesh Pandey

Ritwik Priya

Sandeep Balakrishna

Jaymin Panchal

Mediacrooks

Sunanda Vashisht

Amit Malviya

The Supreme Court has also left the option of following the NEET result on the colleges. This means that the colleges who want to follow the NEET results for admissions can do the same and the colleges who want to admit students on the basis of their independent exams are free to do so. This makes NEET a voluntary admission process for colleges.

This is only a stop-gap arrangement for this year. The final verdict, I am sure, would be in favour of the common entrance. Instead of performing a SalyaPariksha on the verdict, I would like to elaborate why a common entrance is essential for India.

Why do we need a common entrance for Medicine?

1. The brightest engineers of the nation write and qualify through a common entrance test. The brightest Chartered Accountants write a common entrance. The best MBA colleges have a common entrance for their Institutes ( of course you need to exclude ponytail Arindam)

   Then why can’t the post graduate seats in the medical field have a common entrance. Doctors who would want to pursue a course in post graduate medical courses need to run from pillar to post and appear for the several different entrance exams (40 at the latest count).

   An entrance in Delhi for the AIIMS, an exam in the Chandigarh for PGI, an exam in Hyderabad for APPG, an entrance in Bangalore for Manipal, an entrance in Chennai for the JIPMER. And the list goes on and on. The poor doctors have to run around quite a while.

   A single entrance would certainly ease out all our problems and make it less complicated and cumbersome.

    

2. The single entrance would also help to streamline the testing pattern for undergraduate and post graduate entrances so that the entire nation follows a standardized testing model for MBBS and MD/MS entrances. This shall enable students to be judged with the same parameters and levels of difficulty, regardless the university they intend to join.

   A common entrance will give a chance for medical students to study in different colleges of the nation instead of forever being stuck in Himachal Pradesh or Tamil Nadu. This can increase your horizons. India is a vast nation with several diseases and complexes which are area specific. (Japanese Encephalitis in Uttar Pradesh, Leishmaniasis in Bihar, Complicated Malaria in the tribal belts, Goitre in the hilly tracts and the list goes on)

   I remember a conversation between Fenyman (an undergrad at MIT) and his professor from “Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Fenyman“. It goes on like this.

   Slater asked “Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?”
   

   “Because MIT is the best school for science in the country.
   

   “You think that?”
   

   “Yeah.”
   

   “That’s why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is”

   Fenyman goes to Princeton.

   Our doctors also deserve to go to some other college in some other state in India. Our engineers and our accountants are already doing it.

3. Minority institutions oppose the single entrance saying that they are run on certain principles. ( CMC Vellore claims that it is run on Christian values)

   I don’t understand where the issue of principles based upon faith has anything to do with medical education. The only principles that a doctor should be expected to follow are the holy commandments enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath.

   As long as we continue to try to divide the nation, even its esteemed and superior medical institutions (Remember CMC has given us Dr Mary Verghese, the angel in the wheelchair) through the narrow confines of religion and faith, we do India a grave injustice.

4. Private medical colleges will make a killing by selling the medical seats, Private medical colleges (barring a few which maintain standards of high professionalism) are usually understaffed, don’t have the adequate infrastructure facilities or teaching professors.

   A medical student learns more from the patient than from his textbooks and thus it is essential for a teaching hospital to have a good out-patient and in-patient turnover. The required hospital inpatients per medical student as per the guidelines is 5 in India ( i.e. if your medical college has 150 seats, it should have at least a 750 bedded hospital) and an outpatient turnover of 8 per patient ( So adds up to 900 outpatients per student)

   My teaching hospital, King George Hospital, Visakhapatnam has in-patient strength of 1500 for its sanctioned medical college strength of 150. We handle an outpatient turnover of over 4000-5000. So we are pretty happily cushioned. But there are is famous private medical college in Guntur district which records an Outpatient turnover of … hold your breath… of 3-4. (We could err on details. Some days may see a 100% increase in the OP to 6-8)

   Another medical college in East Godavari district had a rather unpleasant experience with the MCI when the patients who were lying down on the hospital beds casually told the visiting MCI officials who had come for an inspection that they had been paid for coming to the hospital. The recognition for the above mentioned college was temporarily suspended. But now they are fine. Its run by a politician (No guesses for that!)

    

   Another medical college in Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh usually has an inpatient turnover of 2 in their General Medicine wards in a month. That’s the number of patients my teaching hospital has per bed!!!!

   These are only instances that my colleagues have told me. I am sure the scene is the same in private colleges in Maharashtra or Karnataka or pretty much anywhere.

    

   You can imagine the standard of students who are bulk processed out of such colleges. Medicine is a science that is learnt by seeing, observing and performing. A surgeon will hone his skills with each surgery that he attends. A gynecologist becomes more of an expert with each delivery she conducts. With the abysmal conditions in private medical colleges, we shall end up being treated by doctors who have little or no hands-on experience. These will just be licensed quacks.

    

   In spite of all this, private medical colleges continue to make a killing out of the medical college entrances. Why?

    

   There are students who are willing to pay, pay big money to become doctors. If I paid 2 crores for a seat in MD General Medicine, would my priority be service to the patient or recovering my investment back? Ponder over this thought.

   Unlike Engineering or Business Management, the proliferation of private investment must be carefully controlled in the field of Medicine. This is because, unlike the other streams, the doctor’s first priority isn’t (and shouldn’t be) monetary benefit. It should be service to the patient. When a profession, which is revered and worshipped is brought down to the level of shady deals in dingy bars, I think it is time for us to introspect.

    

    

The MCI’s decision to push for a common entrance test is an attempt to clean the system and ensure that candidates who have passed the entrance alone are admitted into the medical stream and private medical colleges don’t sell seats, as if they were a cinema theatre.

Private Medical Colleges opposing NEET are opposing it for several “principles and institutionalized” reasons. But the fact is simple. They oppose it for only one reason. They can’t admit at will any longer. They can’t sell seats at will anymore. They can’t run fiefdoms anymore. Simple reasons. A kid can tell you this.

“AushadhamJahnaviThoyam. VaidyoNarayanoHarihi”

Medicine is equal to the water of the sacred Ganges and the physician is equal to Lord Vishnu.

During the discussion about religion and philosophy, he mentioned Thiruvalluvar. It took me the longest time to get the spelling of the name correct. And now I discover what a giant Thiruvalluvar was/is for Tamil philosophy, poetry, ethics, spirituality etc.

I consider myself a well-educated, relatively curious, widely read/travelled, politically active, philosophically interested Indian. Yet I know more about obscure Jewish, German, French, Russian,
American, even Arab personalities over the ages – than about giants back home.

Although I did my college abroad, but I did do my schooling in India -and I do not think Indian colleges in say Delhi University ever end up discussing Thiruvalluvar unless the discipline(s) is Tamil language etc itself/themselves.

I am very much deist/agnostic, and not much into religion – almost an atheist-hedonist who finds most religion to be much ado about nothing. But Thiruvalluvar is like Tamil Nadu’s and by extension India’s Confucius. This is so much more than religion.

We learn so little about India – or at least about parts of India from which we do not hail – and we are taught so little about our own heritage that it is absolutely criminal. I disagree with the Hindu right 9 out of 10 times when they shout “deracinated”, “anti-Hindu” etc, but for one moment yesterday I felt they were right.

There is a distinct lack of pride in being Indian, in being Hindu, in being Tamil/Bengali/Rajasthani/Haryanvi/whatever. To imagine that this is irrelevant and does not have very deep psychological consequences on a child growing up is to delude ourselves.

This was an email shared by the author with Centre Right India.