Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
January 21, 2019
explained voter behaviour exclusively in terms of caste, as if Indian voters cannot have other levels of group identification, other types of collective interests, or convictions rather than interests. Of course, Hindu revivalist positions regarding the caste system will be considered, but this aspect of the matter will be kept in proportion.
professional Hindutva-watchers to use only documentary information, often produced by the movement’s declared enemies, without ever having met a single human representative of the movement itself.
ideological statements of this movement are available in English, so that ignorance of Hindi (or Marathi etc.) is no excuse for the substandard coverage which it has been receiving at the hands of most journalistic India hands.
The more subtle challenge to the principle of objectivity is the “postmodern” form of Marxism (quite powerful in American universities) which denies the very notion of objective knowledge, which assumes that knowledge is conditioned by one’s social belonging, and which insists that “all research in the social sciences has a political agenda
In a large part of the academic publications, this position is implicit in their way of foregoing any serious evaluation of arguments formulated by Hindu revivalists, as if the identification of the propounder of the argument as a “Hindu fundamentalist” were sufficient to put it beyond the pale of rational discourse. Thus, the Hindu litany of grievances against the inequalities imposed on Hinduism by the Indian state (which makes up a very large part of this literature) is commonly only mentioned as an object of ridicule, never of proper investigation.
all modern-educated Hindus are acutely aware of the “evils of Hindu society” which hostile authors and a hostile syllabus have highlighted no end.
it is irresponsible to use the term as if it had its established Western meaning (which most India-watchers do). Just as the English word deception has a radically different meaning from its French look-alike déception (= disappointment), the British-English word secularism radically differs in meaning from its Indian-English look-alike secularism
When Socrates as a one-man minority was eliminated by Athenian democracy, that was certainly narrow-minded, intolerant and other deplorable things besides; but it was not undemocratic.
Athens passed the true test of a democracy by implementing the will of the majority, viz. to eliminate Socrates (the choice between exile and death was generously left to the philosopher himself).
en exchange of aggressor and victim, arguably the most hurtful form of misinformation.
the armed insurrection had started in autumn 1989 with the accession of the presumedly pro-Muslim government of V.P. Singh and his Kashmiri Muslim Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, months after the end of Jagmohan’s first term in office, and Jagmohan had been sent in again in January 1990 (by Home Minister Sayeed, who was to praise Jagmohan’s accomplishments in Parliament on 25 April 1990) to remedy the situation.
and Rajni Kothari, who had applauded the newly enacted reservations for Other Backward Castes
never did the reporters consider it necessary to approach insiders for a first-hand explanation.
At once, a group of vocal secularists including Syed Shahabuddin and Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma) announced that they withdrew their support to G.G. Swell. Congress and the Communists supported Sharma en bloc. Swell’s caste, religion or political programme had not changed, but his saying something nice about the BJP was enough to get him ostracized.
in general presentations of comparative religion, very common in our multiculturalist days, where the Jewish view of a given topic is presented by a Jew, the Islamic one by a Muslim, etc.,—and the Hindu one by an Indologist, mostly a Western Christian or agnostic.
Mark Juergensmeyer presents Sikh separatism and Lankan Buddhist nationalism through a number of contemporary spokesmen,
Brian K. Smith bases his account of the evidence debate wholly on an article from the Communist fortnightly Frontline, giving the game away by relaying some of the consensual canards circulating among secularist polemicists, for example that ASI director-general B.B. Lal had “found absolutely no evidence of any pre-existing temple at the site” (in fact, Lal had found the bases of a pillared building which either may or may not have been a Hindu temple, and later came out in support of the more recent and more decisive archaeological findings which Smith’s source prematurely, and till today
...more
the central question of the historical evidence, least of all the official presentation of evidence by the Vishva Hindu Parishad prepared during the government-sponsored scholars’ debate in December-January 1990-91.
The net outcome of the debate was that the pro-temple team of scholars had defeated the no-temple party fair and square, which the latter implicitly conceded by staying away after an embarrassingly uneven session (24 January 1991);
Pandey can get away with it because in Indian academe, this is the done thing.
N. Ram thundered at a conference in Delhi that the print media owed it to the nation as much as to itself to black out fully statements and activities of the Hindutva brigade.
When you want the Marxist viewpoint on a social conflict, you interview a party leader or quote from a study by some Marxist academic, rather than the trade-union militant on strike using foul language against the big fat capitalists. When you want the Muslim viewpoint on the Hindu-Muslim conflict, you get interviews with or invited contributions by articulate Muslim intellectuals like Rafiq Zakaria or Asghar Ali Engineer. By contrast, in writings about Hindu revivalism, the spotlights are as much as possible on the rumour mills (and of course, false rumours about girls being raped by members
...more
Christophe Jaffrelot, France’s most-quoted Hindutva-watcher, claims: “The BJP is hostile to the policy of quota in favour of the low castes.”227 In
Mani Shankar Aiyar, A.S. Abraham, Dileep Padgaonkar, M.N. Buch, Bipan Chandra et al
Continue with the current reservations policy for the Other Backward Classes till they are socially and educationally integrated with the rest of society.
Nobody, but strictly nobody who refers to his own pursuits as “spirituality”, will ever conceptualize it in the sense outlined by Lise McKean.
all BJP election manifestoes since 1980 have affirmed the principle of legal equality regardless of religion. Can France’s star BJP expert feign to ignore this?
After all there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned but a single race — the human race, kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift and only relatively true. Nature is constantly trying to overthrow the artificial barriers you raise between race and race. To try to prevent the commingling of blood is to build on sand. Sexual attraction has proved more powerful than all the commands of all the prophets put together. Even as it is, not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan
...more
presuppose a race theory, a theory which divides mankind in biological categories and then draws political conclusions from that division.
could Pandey and Jaffrelot have been so eager to stigmatize Hindu nationalism that they thought it worth their while to distort the meaning of the central term in their plea?
There are, of course, particularly ‘Indian’ twists to this story, and it is also true that ‘racism’, properly speaking, has social-Darwinist connotations and should not be conflated with ‘ethnicity’. Yet, for me, the popular word ‘racism’ has the advantage of not making India look ‘peculiar
deontology
Praful Bidwai, a Marxist scholar at the Nehru Memorial Library, whose assessment of Hindu revivalism is: “utterly despicable, base and crass
“the sect’s coercive and punitive powers”; “greed, guile and violence that secure their status as spiritual leaders
it is perfectly possible to produce real scholarship in the service of a crusade, and it is perhaps better that bias is explicitated than that a false pretence of neutrality is kept
For millennia, Hindu India had been the proverbially rich country, and for long, the wily money-making “Hindu bania” (merchant) had been a favourite enemy-image projected by the Indian Muslims and Leftists, and given new flesh more recently by the economic successes of the overseas Hindus; yet, when Nehru imposed stagnation on India’s economy with his Soviet-style five-year plans, the secularists called the disappointing economic results of this non-Hindu policy “the Hindu rate of growth
This presupposes the fallacious assumption that the most precious things are also the most robust, as if the brain were more robust than the bones. A precious heritage may not be able to compete under the rules of the downward-levelling free market.
Appeasement” was originally the term used by the HMS to describe Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of repeated unilateral concessions to the Muslim League in the hope of dissuading it from pursuing its Pakistan project. The implied reference to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” vis-à-vis Adolf Hitler is deliberate: at the time, the Muslim League openly compared its own position (that Muslims were part of the Muslim commonwealth and not of India, and that they should politically accede to the former and separate from the latter) with that of the Sudeten Germans who were “liberated” from
...more
Of all NGO activists dealing with Indian tribals or minorities susceptible to separatism, I have never heard or seen one defend the Indian viewpoint. Organizations like India-Werkgroep Vlaanderen and India-Werkgroep Nederland, not to speak of the India cells of the World Council of Churches, generally support every possible source of subversion and separatism in India. Thus, Wilco Brinkman, writing of Manipur (“Manipur, een mini-staat”, India Nu, bimonthly of the India-Werkgroep Nederland, Utrecht, Jan. 1997), speaks of an “Indian invasion”, of “Indian colonial oppression” and about rice being
...more
This anti-Brahminism was, moreover, cast in the mould of Protestant anti-Popism, i.e. it was conceived as a restoration of the original divinely revealed doctrine against the distortive accretions of “tradition” and its wily guardians, the institutionalized priesthood.
Though everything they teach and practise (at Auroville, his followers’ model town in Pondicherry, and elsewhere) is taken from Hindu sources, and though their Guru never renounced his commitment to Hindu tradition, his disciples shy away from the word “Hindu”.54 Rather than influencing their surroundings in a pro-Hindu sense, the Aurobindoites followed the spirit of the times in its post-Independence anti-Hindu drift.
in his inaugural address at the founding session of the Muslim League, Viqar-ul-Mulk had declared that the League would work for the Muslim community’s interest “without prejudice to the traditional loyalty of the Mussalmans to the Government
To promote and maintain among Indians feelings of loyalty towards the British Crown
The difference? in India were far greater than those between European countries and were of a vital and fundamental character. … The Muslims had a different conception of life from the Hindus. They admired different qualities in their heroes; they had a different culture based on Arabic and Persian instead of Sanskrit origins. Their social customs were entirely different. Hindu society and philosophy were the most exclusive in the world. Muslims and Hindus had been living side by side in India for a thousand years but if one went into any Indian city one would see separate Hindu and Muslim
...more
When the first census (1881) showed that the Muslims constituted the majority in Bengal, this came as a big surprise, because most of them didn’t look like Muslims outwardly
this All India Hindu Sabha was originally a forum of Congressmen, i.e. of men committed to the cause of India’s Freedom (then not necessarily understood as full independence outside the British Empire). This is in diametrical contrast with the Muslim League, which was started as a counter-weight against the freedom movement, an embodiment of Anglo-Muslim cooperation.
Hindu lethargy was a hard nut to crack
Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1926), undoubtedly a milestone in the history of Hindu revivalism.
one for whom India is both Fatherland and Holyland
It must have been one of those Vedic dawns indeed which inspired our seers with new truths that revealed to the author of Hindutva this Mantra, this definition of Hindutva.
