... in the mean time am instituting watch & brief on developing trend in india that could mesh well w/ whatever else may be happening in moderate pakistan, responsible persia, soon-to-be-allied syria, and tempered russia / ukraine, all relative to troublesome isis / isil
given that the msm had such high hopes for modi ala change etc, i think it is probably safe to assume events may go out of msm expectations
should the hindu nationalists be successful in radicalising their fellow country folks of other religious persuasion, and given that there are a fair number of such in india large enough to be considered sizeable minority, ... any ways, let us watch & brief
my rule of thumb is to be suspicious of anything cloaked w/i religious cover, because religion allows for few compromises
ft.com
Hindu nationalists flex muscles in Narendra Modi’s India
 ©AFP
Fears of a lurch to the right and the imposition of Hindu nationalist values on India’s multicultural society are morphing into reality just three months after Narendra Modi triumphed in this year’s election.
Members of the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the Organisation of National Volunteers that gave birth to the Bharatiya Janata party headed by Mr Modi – have been appointed to key posts in the governing party and cultural institutions.
Nationalists have railed in public against the introduction of “western” practices such as wearing bikinis on the beach, putting candles on birthday cakes and using English in schools – all to the chagrin of fretful liberals and leftwingers.
Mohan Bhagwat, RSS chief, appeared to dismiss followers of other religions, including India’s nearly 200m Muslims, when he said: “The cultural identity of all Indians is Hindutva [Hindu-ness].”
That prompted Digvijay Singh, general secretary of the secular Congress party ousted in the election, to liken Mr Bhagwat to Hitler, while Congress warned of “ominous signs of communal terror, violence and polarisation”.
Among those who have emerged as promoters of the Hindu agenda is Dinanath Batra, a retired schoolteacher who complains about Persian and English poetry in Hindi textbooks and has campaigned successfully for the banning of a book on Hinduism by American Indologist Wendy Doniger.
In an interview, Mr Batra denied direct links with Mr Modi’s government and described part of his work as protecting Hinduism from insults, whether by an Indian historian who had portrayed the god Hanuman as “a tiny monkey” and “a womaniser” or by Ms Doniger, whose main purpose, he said, was to bring out the sex in Hinduism and emphasise that the widely worshipped stone Shiva lingams were simply erect male organs.
The efforts of Mr Batra and other members of the so-called “Batra brigade” to influence curriculums in schools and universities have aroused a mixture of amusement and alarm among more liberal teachers and students of Indian history.
“To say that the lingam has nothing to do with the male organ – who are you kidding?” asks Romila Thapar, a respected historian of ancient India.
Opponents of the RSS mock the nationalists’ obsession with trying to prove that the world’s great inventions all arose in India – from mathematics and pre-industrial motor cars to intercontinental ballistic missiles (the arrows of the god Arjuna) and the use of stem cells. But they also fear that Hindu fundamentalism will fracture a society already prone to outbreaks of inter-communal violence, and damage the quality of education.
“It’s basically a dangerous situation,” says Ms Thapar, whose textbooks were censored under a previous BJP government because they mentioned the eating of beef in the Vedic era (cows are sacred to Hindus) and the mistreatment of low-caste people. “You’re just going to produce a nation of zombies.”
This ideology is absolutely fundamental to the RSS and the BJP. Therefore they have to have a version of history that legitimises this ideology,” says Ms Thapar.Liberals have two broad objections to the ideology of the RSS. First, it excludes Muslims, Christians and others (but not Buddhists, Sikhs or Jains) by limiting an Indian identity to those whose ancestry is Indian and whose religion is indigenous. Second, it tends to deny Hinduism’s extraordinary diversity and seeks to confine it within the narrow bounds of its own interpretation of texts, traditions and institutions.
She sees Mr Modi’s rise as only the most recent of three phases of Hindutva ascendancy in the past 50 years, starting in 1977 under the Morarji Desai government and continuing for the five years of BJP rule under Atal Behari Vajpayee from 1999.
Like Mr Vajpayee, however, Mr Modi has a complicated relationship with the RSS and kept its militants on a tight leash during his 13 years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat.
Mr Modi himself has been an RSS activist since his youth but he is intent on restoring rapid economic growth and does not want to be diverted by the more extreme demands of Hindu nationalists.
One theory is that Mr Modi will for as long as possible keep the hardliners out of inflammatory political disputes – they want, for example, to build a Hindu temple on the site of the famous Ayodhya mosque torn down by Hindu rioters in 1992 – to avoid destabilising his government. In return, he will give ground on their demands for influence over less prominent aspects of culture and education.
In his office above a primary school in Delhi, Mr Batra insists he is not dogmatic about religion – “a personal matter” – and that his aim is primarily for education to instil patriotism, social consciousness and spiritualism among the young.
But liberals such as Ms Thapar and Vinod Mehta, a leading political commentator, remain on their guard.
“Mr Dinanath Batra is slowly becoming the most prominent and the most powerful voice in the field of education and the way children should be taught Indian history,” says Mr Mehta.
Like Ms Thapar, Mr Mehta detects a bargain between Mr Modi and the RSS. “They cut him some slack on the political side but he pays back on the cultural side and they take over all the bodies which have to do with education, culture, art and he allows them to do that.”
Asked if the process is already under way, he replies: “It’s happening.” |
