Imran Khan's UNGA Speech on Hindutva, Islamophobia and Kashmir (Urdu)

How was Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's UN General Assembly speech received? Was he right to tell the audience that Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs to RSS, the right-wing Hindu Supremacist organization whose member killed Mahatma Gandhi? Does the world know that RSS founders were inspired by Nazism and Fascism? And the RSS members admire Gandhi's murderer Nathuram Godse? Is it hypocritical of Modi to exploit Gandhi's name in his UNGA speech and elsewhere in the West? Do Hindutva followers want to have it both ways? Benefit from Gandhi's name in the West while destroying Gandhi's legacy in India?

Why did Imran Khan talk about the connection between US war on terror after 911 and the rise of Islamophobia? How have countries like India exploited the war on terror to defame genuine Kashmiri resistance movement as terrorism?

What will happen when Modi lifts restrictions on 8 million Kashmiris living under total lock-down since August 5, 2019? Is Modi riding the tiger and afraid of getting off of it? Is Imran Khan right to fear a massacre by nearly million-strong Indian forces? Will India call it "cross-border terrorism" and blame it on Pakistan? Will Modi again try to pull a Balakot? Could it start India-Pakistan war? Would it escalate into a nuclear conflict killing billions around the world?

ALKS host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with Sabahat Ashraf (ifaqeer) and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)

https://youtu.be/Kz8S8z-ax1o

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Views: 378

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 3, 2019 at 10:17am

Militarized #Hindu Nationalism & #China-#Pakistan Options. Pakistan and China could jointly patrol the #LOC in #Kashmir sectors that are vulnerable to #Indian intrusions and where Indian sabotage of #CPEC projects is a certainty. #security http://pakistanpolitico.com/militarized-hindu-nationalism-sino-paki... via @PoliticoPak

Rabia Akhtar

Do ideas or beliefs play a role in state’s maneuvers in the international system? As a realist, I believe that states are inherently rational and are not guided by beliefs. However, after studying BJP’s ascent to power and the rapidly prevalent Hindutva culture, I have doubts that all states are functionally undifferentiated. The dormant constructivist in me surfaces. There certainly are differences that guide the behavior of a particular state in the international system, and these differences are rooted heavily in culture and belief system of the state’s ruling elite. Culture has a strategic impact and its role in shaping the Indian foreign policy especially is largely understudied.

Rita Manchanda, a writer and human rights activist, captures the essence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) philosophy which provides an insight on how BJP will deal with future confrontations. It is important to understand this philosophy since it has a direct bearing on how Modi-Shah BJP is handling its present crisis in Kashmir or will handle any future crisis between India and Pakistan.

The RSS discourse, Rita writes, “denounced as an aberration the Gandhi-Nehru version of Hinduism, which it described as humble and submissive, glorifying the strategy of passive resistance in which a Hindu bends to receive lathi blows. Such a version fostered defeatism, pseudo-secularism and internal divisions as innate Hindu tolerance was interpreted as weakness. For the RSS, Hinduism is militant: every Hindu God is armed. Indeed, the remaking of the figure of Ram as warrior-god is integral to the creation of the hegemonic discourse of the Hindu as militant. It is practically incorporated in the daily military training and exercise of the RSS cadre.” For example, “in building the case for attacking Pakistan, the vocabulary of the street nuclear discourse was couched in crude masculine terms.” For Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray [at that time], the tests were a testimony to the manhood of the state where he said, “We have to prove that we are not eunuchs”.

Rita further informs that, “in constructing this discourse of Hindu nationalist orthodoxy, the necessity and inevitability of an Indian security state is contingent on the existence of Pakistan, the enemy without, and its extension within – the Indian Muslim community, suspect for its alleged allegiance to a beyond-Bharat ummah identity, and thus incapable of authentic belonging on the criteria of pimyabhumi and pitrabhumi. The Partition legacy adds to this anxiety. Militarised nationalism, anti-democratic impulses and hate politics are integral aspects of the Indian national security state package, justified by the hostility of its neighbour. The dominant media frame projects an essentialist antagonism between Hindu India and Muslim India as the raison d’etre for militarised nationalism.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 11, 2019 at 9:46am

#India’s #Modi has had a free pass from the west for too long. #Trump admin’s failure to object to #humanrights abuses is more than strategic calculation. In fact, #Trump and #Modi are ideological soulmates. #Kashmir #Assam #Ayodhya
https://www.ft.com/content/a4fe1974-0461-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca?fbc... via @financialtimes


The world’s democracies are desperate to believe in India. From Washington to Tokyo, and from Canberra to London, the country is viewed as an indispensable counterbalance to China. The two Asian giants are the only countries in the world with populations of over 1bn people.

The world’s democracies are desperate to believe in India. From Washington to Tokyo, and from Canberra to London, the country is viewed as an indispensable counterbalance to China. The two Asian giants are the only countries in the world with populations of over 1bn people. Last year America’s Defense Department renamed its Pacific command the Indo-Pacific command — a reconception of the geopolitical map that is clearly intended to balance Chinese power by bringing India into the picture. In September, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, appeared alongside US president Donald Trump at a Texas rally. In Europe, India is lauded as the world’s largest democracy — a refreshing contrast to you-know-where. The west’s investment in India is now strategic, emotional, intellectual and financial. But the sunk costs of that investment mean that western countries are reluctant to acknowledge the dark side of Mr Modi’s India — in particular, threats to minority rights and the erosion of democratic norms. Since Mr Modi won a crushing re-election victory earlier this year, the alarming side to his government has come increasingly to the fore. On August 5, it abolished the special constitutional status of the majority-Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir — and followed up with a broad clampdown on civil liberties, including the detention-without-trial of leading Kashmiri politicians. Opposition politicians, human rights activists and Delhi-based foreign correspondents have been prevented from visiting the region. There is also rising anxiety about a citizenship-determination exercise in the state of Assam that has seen 2m of the state’s residents designated illegal immigrants, with no right to live in India. Mr Modi’s government says it carried out the exercise to comply with a Supreme Court order. But it is now building camps to hold those deemed illegal immigrants. It talks of extending the process across the country. The weight of this campaign will fall hard on India’s Muslim minority. The administration is expected to push through a new citizenship law that will give any Hindu deemed to be fleeing persecution in a neighbouring country, the automatic right to Indian citizenship. So only Muslims will be at risk of being deemed illegal residents. The sense that the political winds are moving against India’s Muslims will be strengthened by this week’s Supreme Court ruling that a Hindu temple can be built on a long-contested holy site in the city of Ayodhya. Hindu nationalists, whipped up on social media, are delighted by Mr Modi’s increasing boldness. But some of the country’s leading intellectuals are sounding the alarm. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist now resident in the US, told The New Yorker magazine that his friends are reluctant to criticise the government on the phone, adding, “People are afraid. I’ve never seen this before.” Alarmed by the increasingly compliant judiciary (and much of the media), Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an eminent Indian academic, has written that: “The noose is tightening around all independent institutions in India.” In its defence, the Modi administration can point to its undoubted popularity — confirmed in this year’s elections. The government still enjoys support from business, which appreciates the promise to cut red tape and a recent corporate tax cut. Mr Modi’s focus on the living conditions of the poor — in particular through the construction of more toilets to prevent “open defecation” — is also rightly praised. But the economy is now slowing. Delhi and other Indian cities are suffering a crisis over air-quality. Under these conditions, the argument that Mr Modi’s strongman style might be a price worth paying for economic progress is harder to make. WEEKLY PODCAST Sign up here to the new podcast from Gideon Rachman, the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist, and listen in on his conversations with the decision-makers and thinkers from all over the globe who are shaping world affairs The Trump administration’s failure to make a fuss about human rights reflects more than strategic and diplomatic calculation. In important respects, Mr Trump and Mr Modi are ideological soulmates. They are both assertive majoritarians, scornful of liberal concerns with minority rights. They have promised to crack down on illegal immigration and have stoked fears of Islamic extremism — partly as a way of consolidating their political base. Mr Modi’s many defenders argue that one of his great strengths is that, like Mr Trump, he is in touch with “the common man” — he cares little for the opinions of urban elites. The Indian government could also borrow a phrase from the Israelis, who like to remind foreign critics that they “live in a tough neighbourhood”. There is little doubt that religious and ethnic minorities have fared worse in many of India’s neighbours — including Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and China. But India used to take pride in its status as a tolerant, multifaith democracy. The Modi government’s increasingly strident Hindu nationalism is putting that achievement at risk. The west’s fear of China means that it is likely to continue to give Modi’s India a free pass for some time. But a failure to talk openly about the failings of the Modi model is not cost-free. The danger is that the west is embracing a comforting illusion — that democratic India will act as an ideological bulwark against authoritarian China. The reality is that India’s slide into illiberalism may actually be strengthening the global trend towards authoritarianism. gideon.rachman@ft.com

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 11, 2019 at 10:10am

#India’s journey to illiberal #democracy by Ed Luce: "During my session (in #Bangalore) I was asked about the biggest threat to the future of global liberal democracy. My answer was Narendra #Modi" #AyodhaVerdict #Kashmir #Assam https://www.ft.com/content/331677bc-03c5-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca?fbc... via @financialtimes


During my session I was asked about the biggest threat to the future of global liberal democracy. My answer was Narendra Modi. His abrupt decision in July to cancel the constitutional autonomy of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, cut off its communications and place its political leaders under house arrest has not been heard by the Supreme Court. India’s judiciary used to have clout. It is now as tame as the courts in Hungary. More ominous still is Modi’s decision to set up a national registry in Assam that will result in up to 2m Muslims being deprived of Indian citizenship. The move is seen as a dress rehearsal for a similar exercise on a national scale. Assam was home to many refugees from Bangladesh when it split from Pakistan in 1971. They, like tens of millions of Indians, lack proof of citizenship. Selectively applied, such a Muslim purge would make the voter suppression efforts in the US look like child’s play. India’s march to illiberal democracy under Modi is proceeding apace — and with alarming implications. India is home to 140m Muslims. None of them can feel confident about their future in the world’s largest democracy. But it is not just the quantity of people affected that made me choose Modi — it is also the quality of the movement behind him. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the “cultural” parent organisation to the BJP, has been working at remaking Indian society along Hindu majoritarian lines since before Modi was born. It will continue after he dies. Whatever one thinks of today’s Republican Party, or indeed of Donald Trump, they have got nothing on the RSS. The movement understands that politics is an offspring of culture. Give me the child, as Jesuits used to say, and I will give you the man. India is gradually but steadily turning into a Hindu Pakistan. This is a tragedy for all those, like Guha and Nilekani, and the country’s kaleidoscope of minorities, who understand that India’s greatness stems from its secular pluralism. Recommended reading Rana Foroohar and I have swapped places in the Swamp this week but I want to congratulate her on a great start to her book, Don’t Be Evil, by directing Swampians to the following stellar review in The Guardian. As a fellow author, I know the terror of the first few weeks after launch when one awaits the verdict of reviewers. Rana, I imagine you are now long past the point of exhaling. My most recent column was on the religious war that is taking hold of US politics: next year’s election will partly be about white grievance versus woke multiculturalism. I would far prefer to see economic debate but I fear that will be eclipsed by identity politics. I also wrote an FT profile about Adam Schiff, the Democrat who is spearheading the Trump impeachment process that goes public on Wednesday with the testimony of Bill Taylor, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine. “Lights. Camera. Schiff!” Finally, I strongly commend this essay by Constanze Stelzenmüeller, a Brookings Institution scholar, and FT contributor, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Oddly enough, I was there in Berlin when the wall fell 30 years ago with my own small pick axe, performing some historic vandalism along with thousands of Germans and other Europeans. As I recall we were all nicely victualled. My decision to skip university lectures for a few days was the best I’ve ever taken. I share Constanze’s maudlin perspective on how the world has changed since then. Do please read her. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 11, 2019 at 5:52pm

Transformation of #India Under #Modi Is Complete. #AyodhyaVerdict rewards criminality. #Muslims have lost faith in India. It's not the country #Sikhs had staked faith in. #Sikh sense of a distinct identity makes them deeply uncomfortable with #Hindutva https://nyti.ms/2qJMzew

The R.S.S. is set to celebrate its hundredth year in 2025, and the temple that is likely to be built in time is an appropriate marker of its rise from insignificance. A few years back, I traveled to Ayodhya. Since the demolition of the Babri mosque, a workshop run by an R.S.S. affiliate has been preparing for Rama’s temple. A model of the temple stands at the heart of the workshop. At one end of the workshop, rows of bricks marked “Shri Ram,” which were brought there by pilgrims from across the country, were piled up.

The ground where the mosque once stood was guarded by armed policemen. I walked with a crowd of Hindu pilgrims through a corridor covered with wire meshing. Several body searches later, we stopped in front of a makeshift temple to Rama, where a policeman played the part of a priest. The pilgrims were curious to know where the mosque had stood, but there was nothing to indicate that it had ever existed. The erasure had been complete.

Back at the temple workshop, I saw a wooden model for Rama’s temple, as envisioned by the R.S.S.: a two-storied structure, 268 feet 5 inches long, 140 feet wide and 128 feet high, with 106 pillars on each floor and 16 statues carved on each pillar. Behind me, the visitors raised slogans to Rama.

In the early years of Indian Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, spoke of steel factories and dams as the temples of modern India that would propel the country toward prosperity. Speaking after the court’s verdict, Mr. Modi said: “The Supreme Court verdict has brought a new dawn. Now the next generation will build a new India.” But this temple, the symbol of Mr. Modi’s India, is being born out of acts of criminality, embodying the Hindu nationalist vision of the subordination of others.

On a recent visit to the northern Indian state of Punjab, I spoke to friends and family — all from the Sikh minority — and I realized that something fundamental had changed. The Sikhs are not a minority threatened by the B.J.P., which claims them as their own, a part of the Hindu fold, but their clear sense of a distinct identity has left them deeply uncomfortable with the vision of a Hindu nation.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 12, 2019 at 2:13pm

#India’s Supreme Court endorses right-wing vision relegating #Muslims to 2nd class citizens. #AyodhyaVerdict was celebrated by #Hindu nationalists. #Indian Journalists and writers called it a welcome closure to a conflict that had lasted almost a century https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/11/indias-supreme-c...

By Rana Ayub

The court delivered a huge victory for the nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, by awarding the land at the heart of the clash to a Hindu litigant over Muslim objections. I watched the verdict in Washington with a Muslim family from India who had migrated to the United States in 1993. My host shut off the TV as news anchors called it a victory of Lord Ram. He looked at his 80-year-old mother and said, “I am glad we left when we left.”

Before and after the verdict, the government made calls for prudence and respect — and at the same time, many couldn’t help but gloat.

At the Supreme Court, lawyers chanted “Jai Shri Ram” (“Glory to Lord Ram”). Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who read the verdict, took his colleagues to dinner that night at the posh Taj Mansingh in Delhi.

A senior leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, L.K. Advani — who was one of the leaders of the mob that demolished the Babri mosque, which triggered one of the bloodiest anti-Muslim pogroms in the country — declared victory on television. “It is a moment of fulfillment for me because God almighty had given me an opportunity to make my own humble contribution to the mass movement, the biggest since India’s freedom movement, aimed at the outcome which the Supreme Court verdict today has made possible,” he said.

Like many Indian Muslims back home, I’ve struggled to make sense of the kind of “justice” that is being celebrated, this closure and relief many speak of. Whose closure? As a child of the 1992 anti-Muslim riots that followed the demolition of the holy mosque, I was made to revisit the traumatic decade, when a wake of communalism changed the narrative on secularism in the world’s largest democracy.

Muslims in the country are on edge. A relative called me after reading my comments on Twitter and Facebook lamenting the verdict. “Will you just shut up?” he screamed on the phone. “We have to live here. Your family and my family, don’t make it difficult for us; we cannot have another mob breaking into our house.”

Growing up in the ’90s, I remember my Muslim family was widely respected in our Mumbai neighborhood. My father, a public school teacher and a member of the Progressive Writers movement, did volunteer work. People used to tie a thread on his head on Guru Purnima, a festival that celebrates teachers. We had a social identity, never a religious one.

Everything changed on Dec. 6, 1992, as the Bharatiya Janta Party and other right-wing Hindu organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad marched toward the Babri Masjid with thousands of Kar Sevaks (devotees).

Advani, along with other BJP stalwarts including Uma Bharati, gave provocative speeches in favor of razing the Babri Masjid to the ground. That morning, as they demolished the historic 16th-century mosque, we sat in our one-room apartment watching the barbarity in fear.

And things only got worse from that point.

Our neighbor, a Sikh man, came knocking nervously at our door. He entered our house, sweat dripping from his forehead. He told my father that rioters were marching to our house to take me and my sister. I was 9, my elder sister was 14. Hundreds of Muslim women were raped during that time as part of anti-Muslim riots. Within minutes we were whisked away from the back door on our neighbor’s motorcycle with our heads covered. We were taken to a locality of Sikhs where my sister and I took refuge in a house for two months. We had no means of communicating with our family.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 12, 2019 at 2:21pm

Sacred thread of the soul. #SIKHS across the world are celebrating Guru #NanakDevji's 550th anniversary today, and the fervor is enhanced by the opening of a key road between #Pakistan and #India that leads to his shrine in Pakistan. #KartarpurCorridor https://www.dawn.com/news/1516221

Let’s put it this way. There would no Bhagat Singh without the message of fellowship and human bonding he imbibed from the saint-preacher from the late 15th century. Bhagat Singh who was hanged at the tender age of 23 wore the turban given by his religion but took it off without offending his community when he needed to disguise himself from his British pursuers to fight for India’s independence. He used Marxism to imagine a socially and politically enlightened post-colonial India at peace with itself. One of his last pieces of writings argued his case for dying as an atheist while still being proud of his Sikh heritage.

Open the mind’s apertures a little and you would find an utterly brilliant Sikh politician in Canada, one of several, actually. In 2017, the turbaned Jagmeet Singh, now 40, became the first non-white head of a major Canadian party. His New Democratic Party is as far left as any in a First World country. There are rumours that Singh could become deputy prime minister in Justin Trudeau’s minority government whose numbers he helped slash in general elections two weeks ago.

In any case, it is delightful to hear him switch from fluent English to more fluent French while explaining his stand on issues. They may range from support to gay rights to opposing the expansion of a pipeline that carries oil through Canada’s mountains to its west coast, without first getting cleared by the threatened indigenous people. Leave alone religion, could any Indian or Pakistani politician take a public stand on sexual orientation of their people or oppose a project because the people feared its adverse impact on environment?

Jagmeet was denied Indian visa for his stand on the 1984 massacre of Sikhs. But he sees himself as following Guru Nanak’s path of asking questions relentlessly, to help people fight inequality and ignorance imposed by Brahminical blind faith and superstition. That this follower of Nanak is a first class leader of a First World country says something of his heritage.

Jagmeet Singh’s unique style of turban helps project a stridently multicultural society he wants Canada to remain. He reminds one of liberal writer Khushwant Singh who opposed religious and caste bigotry in the footsteps of Nanak while remaining a self-confessed atheist. How many religious communities can accept the dichotomy?

Harkishen Singh Surjeet was an archetypal Sikh, sporting a turban and a steel kara while leading the largest communist party in India. The affable sardarji was among the last party leaders to promote the use of Urdu to attract the masses, a practice shunned by his successors to the detriment of their cause. If Sikh women are at the forefront of the fight for gender rights it is because Guru Nanak was himself an ardent advocate of gender equality.

There is an uplifting song by the mystical minstrel Lalon Fakir in 19th-century Bengal, which seems to have its origin in Nanak’s teachings. Nanak was on the same page as the weaver-poet Kabir and cobbler-thinker Ravidas, who are thought to have been his contemporaries. “We can tell a Brahmin by his thread. How do we recognise his womenfolk?” Lalon wondered mockingly.

The question may have been lifted from a defining moment in Guru Nanak’s life when he was nine years old. His father, a high-caste Hindu, had arranged for the son’s thread ceremony but Nanak took the issue to his elder sister Nanaki who he loved and looked up to for guidance. He wondered why she never wore the thread. Why was it prescribed for all Hindus but excluded low-caste Shudras?

Nanaki said the question be raised with the Brahmin priest. Nanak was a brilliant student with a deep knowledge of the cultures and religions of his time. He asked the priest to explain the basis for excluding Muslims, many of whom were his friends, and Shudras and women from the thread ceremony. The priest said it was so prescribed by religious texts.

It naturally didn’t wash with the young boy, and after a lon

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 27, 2019 at 7:15am

#Modi to #Netanyahu: “We share and value the same principles of democracy”. He also thanked Netanyahu, saying Israel is a cherished strategic partner. #India #Israel #Islamophobia #HumanRights #Palestine #Kashmir https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-israel-share-and-value...

Israel President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wished India on Constitution Day in tweets.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 26 thanked the Israeli leadership for their wishes on Constitution Day, saying the two countries share and value the same principles of democracy.

Israel President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wished India on Constitution Day in tweets.

On this day in 1949, the Constituent Assembly had adopted the Constitution. Till a few years ago, the day was observed as ‘Law Day’.

“Thank you for your warm greetings on India’s #ConstitutionDay. We remember your visit to India in 2016 with great fondness. We also take pride in our friendship with the vibrant democracy of Israel,” Mr. Modi wrote on Twitter in response to Mr. Rivlin’s greetings.


He also thanked Mr. Netanyahu, saying Israel is a cherished strategic partner.

“We share and value the same principles of democracy,” he said.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 27, 2019 at 10:19am

A video of #India’s consul general in #NewYork advocating #India follow the “Israeli model” in #Kashmir sends shockwaves across diplomatic community. PM #ImranKhan terms the top diplomat’s comments as an example of India’s “fascist mindset”

https://thewire.in/diplomacy/indian-diplomat-wants-israel-model-in-...

‘Kashmiri culture is Indian culture is Hindu culture … We have never used our strength as majority community, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul general in New York, said in video recording.

In a one-hour long video of an interaction with the “Kashmiri Hindu diaspora” in New York uploaded by filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri on his Facebook page, consul general Sandeep Chakravorty seems to be speaking as a representative of “Hindus” rather than “Indians” and appears to implicitly endorse Israel’s illegal policy – officially condemned by the Government of India – of blockading the Palestinians, placing restrictions on their movement and building Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

India had “made a strategic blunder of thinking that all of us think like us”, he added referring to a previous speaker who had mentioned that India takes along all religions.

“We should start thinking like the others. [That is] the only way we can beat them at their game… and that thinking is coming,” he added.

“We have never used our strength as majority community…. we have never [made] use of our Hindu culture… ancient civilisation in diplomacy. Now that we are using it, people are having problems”.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 2, 2019 at 8:11pm

Narendra Modi’s India
The Prime Minister’s Hindu-nationalist government has cast two hundred million Muslims as internal enemies.
By Dexter Filkins

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-nar...

“Modi was a fascist in every sense” - Ashis Nandy - a trained psychologist, wanting to study the mentality of Hindu nationalists, interviewed Modi when he was young.

In 1925, K. B. Hedgewar, a physician from central India, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization dedicated to the idea that India was a Hindu nation, and that Hinduism’s followers were entitled to reign over minorities. Members of the R.S.S. believed that many Muslims were descended from Hindus who had been converted by force, and so their faith was of questionable authenticity. (The same thinking applied to Christians, who make up about two per cent of India’s population. Other major religions, including Buddhism and Sikhism, were considered more authentically Indian.)

---
The R.S.S.’s original base was higher-caste men, but, in order to grow, it had to widen its membership. Among the lower-caste recruits was an eight-year-old named Narendra Modi, from Vadnagar, a town in the state of Gujarat. Modi belonged to the low-ranking Ghanchi caste, whose members traditionally sell vegetable oil; Modi’s father ran a small tea shop near the train station, where his young son helped. When Modi was thirteen, his parents arranged for him to marry a local girl, but they cohabited only briefly, and he did not publicly acknowledge the relationship for many years. Modi soon left the marriage entirely and dedicated himself to the R.S.S. As a pracharak—the group’s term for its young, chaste foot soldiers—Modi started by cleaning the living quarters of senior members, but he rose quickly. In 1987, he moved to the R.S.S.’s political branch, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.

When Modi joined, the Party had only two seats in parliament. It needed an issue to attract sympathizers, and it found one in an obscure religious dispute. In the northern city of Ayodhya was a mosque, called Babri Masjid, built by the Mughal emperor Babur in 1528. After independence, locals placed Hindu idols inside the mosque and became convinced that it had been built on the former site of a Hindu temple. A legend grew that the god Ram—an avatar of Vishnu, often depicted with blue skin—had been born there.

-----------------------

According to FactChecker, an organization that tracks communal violence by surveying media reports, there have been almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by religion in the past decade—almost all of them since Modi became Prime Minister. Hindu mobs have killed dozens of Muslim men. The murders, which are often instigated by Bajrang Dal members, have become known as “lynchings,” evoking the terror that swept the American South after Reconstruction. The lynchings take place against a backdrop of hysteria created by the R.S.S. and its allies—a paranoid narrative of a vast majority, nearly a billion strong, being victimized by a much smaller minority.

When Muslims are lynched, Modi typically says nothing, and, since he rarely holds press conferences, he is almost never asked about them. But his supporters often salute the killers. In June, 2017, a Muslim man named Alimuddin Ansari, who was accused of cow trafficking, was beaten to death in the village of Ramgarh. Eleven men, including a local leader of the B.J.P., were convicted of murder, but last July they were freed, pending appeal. On their release, eight of them were met by Jayant Sinha, the B.J.P. Minister for Civil Aviation. Sinha, a Harvard graduate and a former consultant for McKinsey & Company, draped the men in marigold garlands and presented them with sweets. “All I am doing is honoring the due process of law,” he said at the time.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 26, 2020 at 10:26pm

Chomsky: #India's Symptoms Of #Fascism: “Well, I mean, the whole institutional structure of India, plus the great mass of the Hindu population, is evidently very supportive of the undermining of Kashmiri autonomy and opening up to Indian settlement” #Modi https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/in-india-what-we-are-seeing-is-...

Chomsky: I don’t think its true that the middle-class (in India) has gained, its basically stagnating, the figures are pretty clear on that. As I say, in the United States, which is one of the most effective economies, its basically been no gains in 40 years for working people and petty bourgeouise. They are angry. And the anger can be exploited by somebody like Trump, who says its not your fault, it’s the fault of poor people, it’s the blacks, or Hispanics, or muslims. And Modi does the same thing. Turn the attention to extreme Hindu nationalism. They are taking our country away from us, get rid of these muslims.


Chomsky: "Yea, the support for what Modi did in Kashmir is overwhelming among the Hindu population."

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    Biden's Gaza Ceasefire Veto Defies American Public Opinion

    Aaron Bushnell, an active serviceman in the United States Air Force, burned himself to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in protest against the US policy in Gaza. Before setting himself on fire in what he called an "extreme act of protest", he said he would "no longer be complicit in genocide". Polls show that the vast majority (63%) of Americans want an immediate end to the carnage being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.  …

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    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 27, 2024 at 5:30pm

    Pakistan Elections: Imran Khan's Supporters Skillfully Used Tech to Defy Powerful Military

    Independent candidates backed by the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party emerged as the largest single block with 93 seats in the nation's parliament in the general elections held on February 8, 2024.  This feat was accomplished in spite of huge obstacles thrown in front of the PTI's top leader Imran Khan and his party leaders and supporters by Pakistan's powerful military…

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    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 16, 2024 at 9:22pm — 1 Comment

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