India at 70: Humans of Hindutva founder on ripping apart bigotry

By Humans of Hindutva
  
@DailyO | 2017-08-15 19:40:09

We need to remember that a truly independent country always has room for multiple voices.

People often message to ask me why I do what I do. And my reply to them is: "Because I live in a free country". Some of these people hold the misconception that because I satirise some politicians, I must hate India and everything about it.

It boggles my mind to think how some people have managed to create an environment in which any criticism of the government is tantamount to criticising the country. This is not a sign of progress; it’s a symptom of a deep malady.

I have always been enamoured with India’s diversity. I grew up in the north, south and east of this country and witnessing the cultural quirks of each region first-hand made an indelible mark on me. It is precisely because I was exposed to this diversity at an early age that I strive to preserve it now when I see it being attacked by an imposed uniformity.

If I had a penny for every time someone told me to go to Pakistan/Saudi Arabia/Iran, then I would be Gautam Singhania. For some reasons these people think that by bringing up these regressive countries, they are winning an argument that exists solely in their heads. They tell me to be glad that I live in India and not in these countries because none of them would allow me to say the things I say.

I find this reasoning hilarious; I love India precisely because it is a free and secular nation. Article 19 of the Indian Constitution promises all Indian citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression.

However, there is one important caveat in this arrangement: our freedom of speech is not absolute. There are restrictions on our freedom of speech it they affect the security of the state, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, incitement to offence and the sovereignty and integrity of India.

Our government, both past and present, have used this caveat to craft a sedition law that can be used to silence dissidents. 

I love India, but every now and then I ask myself if we’re truly independent. How did we arrive at a junction where the right to be offended trumps the right to offend?

On every street of India, there is someone ready to be offended at the drop of a hat. They are offended when you bring someone of the opposite sex to your housing complex.

They are offended when you eat something they don’t like. They are offended if you wear something they don’t like. They are offended if you watch something they don’t like. And most importantly, they are offended if you say something that they don’t want to hear.

Molly Ivins once said that "satire is traditionally a weapon of the powerless against the powerful". The problem with doing political satire in India is that the powerful use archaic laws to their advantage by painting any criticism as being detrimental to the national cause. It is telling that the people arrested under such laws are always whistle-blowers or activists or students while politicians and their affiliates make hate speech openly and without any fear of consequence.

This Independence Day I urge my fellow Indians to be more vigilant about the news they consume and share online.

I urge you to not fall for emotional blackmail and see things for what they are. We are a serious lot so I also urge my fellow Indians to lighten up a little.

On the 70th anniversary of our independence, we need to remember that a truly independent country always has room for multiple voices… even the ones that allegedly criticise her. Those who died fighting for our freedom did so because they envisioned a free country where Indians could speak their mind without fear.

Our freedom to express ourselves is perhaps our most important freedom. So, let’s not take it for granted.  

Source: dailyO

Much before the Partition, Prithviraj Kapoor was warning of its horrors in gut-wrenching plays

The thespian’s Partition Quartet received hostile responses from both the Muslim League as well as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

by  Malini Nair

"Artistic foresight

“The alacrity of this group to perform Partition-themed plays should compel us to rethink the notion that there was somehow a wariness in discussing or representing partition in the 1940s and early 1950s,” said Siddique. “Prithvi was important in interpreting for its audience what Partition would mean, at a time when it was only a possibility and not an eventuality. For a cultural historian, this pre-emptive treatment of Partition is immensely insightful.”

Deewar ran to packed houses across India, reducing leaders such as Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel to tears. At the end of each performance, Kapoor would give a passionate speech, asking the audience to seek unity and communal peace. According to Siddique, Deewar was not subtle in its allegorical references: Suresh’s feuding brother Ramesh was said to have resembled Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

Pathan, staged in April 1947, was a melodrama about a Frontier Muslim who saves his Hindu employer from a deadly assault. Years later, the Hindu’s son is chased by a vengeful Muslim bandit who is willing to let him go only if the Pathan sacrifices his own son – he does, leading to such a pathos-filled scene that veteran actor Zohra Sehgal once said: “…every time in the climax of Pathan, when Sher Khan [Prithviraj] handed over his young son [played by his real sons Raj Kapoor and later Shammi Kapoor] to the enemies honouring the creed of an eye for an eye, there was not a dry eye in the house.”.

Kapoor’s Ghaddar, staged after the Partition, told the story of a fervently nationalist Muslim reluctant to move to Pakistan, and finally done in by his own party for being a traitor. It led to a lot of teeth-gnashing in the Muslim League.

“What one can surmise and gather from these plays is a hope placed on long-existing ties and shared history, which could rescind the plan to define new national identities in terms of religious and regional demarcations,” said Siddique. “So the allegorical restoration of ‘Akhand Bharat/Undivided India’ within Deewar was a possibility that those closely associated with the Prithvi Theatres held dear and hoped that the ending of the play, the undoing of Partition, would also be part of the clairvoyance.”

Ahooti, Kapoor’s last play on India’s division, was about the multiple blows women suffered during Partition – abductions, rape and the worst, being branded as dishonoured once they were returned. A Hindu woman in Ahooti is turned away by her in-laws when she returns home, a victim of sexual violence."

.....

Prithvi, the theatre company, soon moved to other socially relevant plays. The Partition Quartet was performed only for a few more years, but the plays are significant in the cultural, political and social landscape of today. They provoked debate in drawing rooms, affected the political discourse, and of course, infuriated bigots. The films on Partition actually came later, after the plays. Chinnamul (1950), Ritwik Ghatak’s masterpieces Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1965) told the story of the partition of Bengal. In Hindi, Dharmputra came only in 1961, followed by the stunning Garm Hawa (1974).

Read full article: scrollin

India at 70, and the Passing of Another Illusion

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By PANKAJ MISHRAAUG. 11, 2017 

Credit Daniel Zender

August 15, 1947, deserved to be remembered, the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois argued, “as the greatest historical date” of modern history. It was the day India became independent from British rule, and Du Bois believed the event was of “greater significance” than even the establishment of democracy in Britain, the emancipation of slaves in the United States or the Russian Revolution. The time “when the white man, by reason of the color of his skin, can lord it over colored people” was finally drawing to a close.

It is barely remembered today that India’s freedom heralded the liberation, from Tuskegee to Jakarta, of a majority of the world’s population from the degradations of racist imperialism. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed that there had been nothing “more horrible” in human history than the days when millions of Africans “were carried away in galleys as slaves to America and elsewhere.” As he said in a resonant speech on Aug. 15, 1947, long ago India had made a “tryst with destiny,” and now, by opening up a broad horizon of human emancipation, “we shall redeem our pledge.”

But India, which turns 70 next week, seems to have missed its appointment with history. A country inaugurated by secular freedom fighters is presently ruled by religious-racial supremacists. More disturbing still than this mutation are the continuities between those early embodiments of postcolonial virtue and their apparent betrayers today.

Du Bois would have been heartbroken to read the joint statement that more than 40 African governments released in April, denouncing “xenophobic and racial” attacks on Africans in India and asking the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate. The rise in hate crimes against Africans is part of a sinister trend that has accelerated since the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.

Another of its bloodcurdling manifestations is the lynching of Muslims suspected of eating or storing beef. Others include assaults on couples who publicly display affection and threats of rape against women on social media by the Hindu supremacists’ troll army. Mob frenzy in India today is drummed up by jingoistic television anchors and vindicated, often on Twitter, by senior politicians, businessmen, army generals and Bollywood stars.

Hindu nationalists have also come together to justify India’s intensified military occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, as well as a nationwide hunt for enemies: an ever-shifting and growing category that includes writers, liberal intellectuals, filmmakers who work with Pakistani actors and ordinary citizens who don’t stand up when the national anthem is played in cinemas. The new world order — just, peaceful, equal — that India’s leaders promised at independence as they denounced their former Western masters’ violence, greed and hypocrisy is nowhere in sight.

Back in 1947, Du Bois had good reason to hope that India would offer a superior alternative to the West’s destructive modernity. His hero, Mohandas K. Gandhi, had lived on three continents by the time the first phase of globalization violently ended with World War I. Gandhi had intimately experienced how Western imperialists and capitalists blended economic inequalities with racial hierarchies, entrenching, as Du Bois wrote, “a new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia.” Gandhi was determined not to let postcolonial India replicate the injustices built into modern civilization or, as he put it, “English rule without the Englishman.”

From that perspective, Gandhi may seem to have chosen his protégé unwisely: Nehru was the scion of a family of rich Brahmin Anglophiles. But Nehru received his own education in global inequities through people he met in international left-wing networks. On a wide range of international issues, the two men shared a rhetoric that expressed a preference for solidarity, compassion and dialogue over violence.

Gandhi claimed to “understand the longing of a Jew to return to Palestine,” but warned Zionists against doing so “under the shadow of the British gun.” As early as 1946, Nehru, then prime-minister-in-waiting, sacrificed India’s lucrative trade links with South Africa in protest against apartheid. In 1947, India voted at the United Nations against the partition of Palestine because, Nehru explained to Albert Einstein, the Zionists had “failed to win the good will of the Arabs.” Distrustful of American motives, Nehru spurned a potentially rewarding partnership with the United States during the Cold War.

But Indian leaders very seldom practiced domestically what they preached internationally. Though committed to parliamentary procedures, Nehru never let go of the British-created colonial state and its well-oiled machinery of repression. The brute power of the Indian police and army was used in 1948 to corral the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. Up to 40,000 Muslims were killed, and the episode remains the single-largest massacre in the history of independent India.

Nehru shared with Hindu nationalists a mystical faith in the essential continuity of India from ancient civilization to modern nation. Determined to hold on to Kashmir, for example, he abandoned his promise of organizing a referendum to decide the contested region’s political status. In 1953, he deposed a popular Kashmiri politician (and friend) and had him sent to prison, inaugurating a long reign of puppet leaders who continue to enrich themselves under the long shadow of the Indian gun.

As early as 1958, Nehru’s regime introduced the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the forerunner of repressive legislation that today sanctions murder, torture and rape by Indian soldiers in central India and border provinces. It was under Nehru that Indian troops and paramilitaries were unleashed on indigenous peoples in India’s northeastern states in the 1950s and ’60s. It was Nehru who in 1961 made it a crime to question the territorial integrity of India, punishable with imprisonment.

Yet in the eyes of the world, India maintained its exceptional status for decades, as many promising postcolonial experiments with democracy degenerated into authoritarianism, if not military rule. The country’s democratic politics appeared stable. But they did so only because they were reduced to the rule of a single party, the Congress, which was itself dominated by a single family — Nehru’s. And far from being socialist or redistributionist, Nehru’s economic policies boosted India’s monopoly capitalists. His priorities were heavy industries and elite polytechnics, which precluded major investments in primary education, health and land reform.

The Congress’s reliance on reactionary upper-caste Hindus also prevented the very possibility of emancipatory politics for dalits until the early 1990s. (It was those upper-caste Hindus, incidentally, who were the first in the republic’s history to ban cow slaughter, in several states in the 1950s.) By the 1980s — after Nehru had been replaced by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, at the helm of both the Congress and the country — the party had chosen Hindu majoritarianism, and hostility to Muslims and Sikhs, as the low road to electoral success. It was a nasty and dangerous strategy, which emboldened extremists on all sides. Many more people died in the Congress-led anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 than in the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat that Modi is accused of supervising while he was the state’s chief minister.

India’s lynch mobs today represent the latest and most grisly expression of such cynical political ideologies. As the sheer brutishness of Mr. Modi’s populism becomes clear, the memory of the aristocratic Nehru becomes more sacred, especially among politicians and commentators from India’s English-speaking upper castes. But Mr. Modi has also turned that legacy of high-flown promises to his political advantage.

Nehru and his followers had articulated an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, claiming moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse democracy. Only many of those righteous notions also reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Mr. Modi has effectively mobilized those Indians who have long felt marginalized and humiliated by India’s self-serving Nehruvian elite into a large vote bank of ressentiment.

Virtuous talk of unity in diversity and secularism has been replaced by a barefaced Hindu nationalism: The tattered old masks, and the gloves, have come off. The state, colonized by an ideological movement, is emerging triumphant over society. With the media’s help, it is assuming extraordinary powers of control — telling people what they should eat at home and how they should behave in public, and whom to lynch.

Mr. Modi’s rule represents the most devastating, and perhaps final, defeat of India’s noble postcolonial ambition to create a moral world order. It turns out that the racist imperialism Du Bois despised can resurrect itself even among its former victims: There can be English rule without the Englishman. India’s claims to exceptionalism appear to have been as unfounded as America’s own.

And so one can, of course, mourn this Aug. 15 as marking the end of India’s tryst with destiny or, more accurately, the collapse of our exalted ideas about ourselves. But a sober reckoning with the deep malaise in India can be bracing, too. For it confirms that the world as we have known it, molded by the beneficiaries of both Western imperialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, is crumbling, and that in the East as well as the West, all of us are now called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

Source: nytimes

Lab notes: Marriages within castes may have harmed the health of many communities in India

Research Digest

Endogamous marriages over generations has led to genetic isolation leaving many groups vulnerable, a new study finds.

Wikimedia Commons

Jul 19, 2017

Dinesh C Sharma

The occurrence of genetic diseases in certain subpopulations in India and other countries in South Asia is well known. Indian scientists now suspect that this could be due to genetic isolation caused by endogamous marriages over generations.

Endogamous marriages - meaning people marrying within a subpopulation based on caste, gotra, language or culture - lead to reduced genetic variation. They are different from marriages among close relatives (consanguineous marriages) – a practice also prevalent in parts of South India.

In genetics, the phenomenon of a small number of ancestors giving rise to many descendants is known as “founder event” or a population bottleneck. A study of anthropologically different subpopulations in South Asia has revealed that many of them are a result of strong “founder events”. In each of such groups, large stretches of DNA originates from a common founder in the last about 100 generations.

There is less genetic variation because these subpopulations have lived in genetic isolation despite co-living with other groups for centuries due to various factors including caste. Such populations are vulnerable to recessive genetic diseases (in which an offspring gets disease-causing genes from both parents). This risk, researchers say, is very different from that due to marriages among close relatives.

The study, led by scientists at Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology , appeared in scientific journal Nature Genetics on Tuesday. Scientists analysed samples from over 2,800 individuals from over 275 distinct South Asian populations belonging to various social and linguistic groups from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. They developed an algorithm to quantify impact of “founder events” in each group based on stretches in DNA shared from a common founder over generations.

“We found that 81 out of 263 unique South Asian groups, including 14 groups with estimated census sizes of over a million, have a strong founder event,” said Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj, who led the study along with David Reich of Harvard Medical School. These large population groups with founder events include Gujjar (Jammu & Kashmir), Baniyas (UP), Pattapu kapu (AP), Vadde (AP), Yadav (Puducherry), Kashtriya Aqnikula (AP), Naga (Nagaland), Kumhar (UP), Reddy (Telangana), Kallar (TN), Brahmin Manipuri (Manipur), Arunthathiyar (TN) and Vysya (Telangana).

Researchers have highlighted the problem through example of Vysya population which has size of more than 3 million. The Vysyas have about 100-fold higher rate of a metabolic disorder called Butyrylcholinesterase deficiency compared to other groups. Such people are highly sensitive to anesthesia administered prior to surgery.

“The next step would be to identify specific recessive diseases among various subpopulations and identify genes responsible for them,” Thangaraj told India Science Wire. The research can have significant public health applications, as has been done with some population groups like Ashkenazi Jews, Finns, Amish, Hutterites, Sardinians, and French Canadians in the West. Once recessive genetic diseases specific to different groups are mapped, preventive steps like prenatal testing, premarital counseling and screening can help decrease burden of such diseases in communities.

The team of researchers came from Columbia University, Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Manipal University, Centre for Human Genetics in Bangalore, Mangalore University, Fetal Care Research Foundation in Chennai, Amity University in Noida, Genome Foundation in Hyderabad, Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata and Birbal Sahani Institute of Paliosciences in Lucknow. The research was funded by Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology and the Indian Council of Medical Research.

This article first appeared on India Science Wire.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters

Dunkirk

Opinion

Sunny Singh

Tuesday 1 August 2017 08.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 1 August 2017 12.19 BST

The blockbuster purports to be a historical portrayal, but in fact it’s a whitewash. And these decisions help corrode societal attitudes

• Sunny Singh is a British-based writer. Her latest novel is Hotel Arcadia

‘The French army deployed at Dunkirk included soldiers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and other colonies, and in substantial numbers. But we don’t see them.’ Photograph: Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

What a surprise that Nigel Farage has endorsed the new fantasy-disguised-as-historical war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s movie is an inadvertently timely, thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe. Most importantly, it pushes the narrative that it was Britain as it exists today – and not the one with a global empire – that stood alone against the “European peril”.

To do so, it erases the Royal Indian Army Services Corp companies, which were not only on the beach, but tasked with transporting supplies over terrain that was inaccessible for the British Expeditionary Force’s motorised transport companies. It also ignores the fact that by 1938, lascars – mostly from South Asia and East Africa – counted for one of four crewmen on British merchant vessels, and thus participated in large numbers in the evacuation.

But Nolan’s erasures are not limited to the British. The French army deployed at Dunkirk included soldiers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and other colonies, and in substantial numbers. Some non-white faces are visible in one crowd scene, but that’s it. The film forgets the racialised pecking order that determined life and death for both British and French colonial troops at Dunkirk and after it.

This is important, firstly, because it is a matter of factual accuracy in what purports to be an historical portrayal – and also because it was the colonial troops who were crucial in averting absolute catastrophe for the allies. It is also important because, more than history books and school lessons, popular culture shapes and informs our imagination not only of the past, but of our present and future.

The stories that we share among ourselves give us the vision of our individual and collective identities. When those stories consistently – and in a big budget, well-researched production like Dunkirk, one must assume, purposefully – erase the presence of those who are still considered “other” and less-than-equal, these narratives also decide who is seen as “us” as opposed to “them”. Does this removal of those deemed “foreign” and “other” from narratives of the past express a discomfort with the same people in the present? More chillingly, does it also contain a wish to excise the same people from a utopian, national future?

British soldiers fight a rearguard action during the evacuation at Dunkirk. Photograph: Grierson/Getty Images

A vast, all-white production such as Nolan’s Dunkirk is not an accident. Such a big budget film is a product of many hundreds of small and large decisions in casting, production, directing and editing. Perhaps Nolan chose to follow the example of the original allies in the second world war who staged a white-only liberation of Paris even though 65% of the Free French Army troops were from West Africa. Perhaps such a circumscribed, fact-free imagination is a product of rewriting British history over the past decades, not in the least by deliberate policies including Operation Legacy? Knowingly or not, Nolan walks in the footsteps of both film directors and politicians who have chosen to whitewash the past.

But why is it so important for Nolan, and for many others, that the film expunge all non-white presence on the beach and the ships? Why is it psychologically necessary that the heroic British troops be rescued only by white sailors? What would change if brave men fighting at Dunkirk wore turbans instead of helmets? What would alter if some of the soldiers offered namaaz on the sands before rising to face the advancing enemy for that one last time?

Why is it so important that the covering fire be provided by white French troops rather than North African and Middle Eastern ones? Those non-white faces I mentioned earlier – they were French troops scrabbling to board British boats to escape. The echoes of modern politics are easy to see in the British-first policy of the initial retreat that left French troops at the mercy of the Nazis. In reality, non-white troops were at the back of the queue for evacuation, and far more likely to be caught and murdered by Nazi soldiers than their white colleagues who were able to blend into the crowd.

Could we still see our neighbours as less than human if we also saw them fight shoulder-to-shoulder with “our boys” in the “good” war? Would we call those fleeing war “cockroaches” and demand gunboats to stop them from reaching our white cliffs if we knew they had died for the freedoms we hold so dear? More importantly, would anti-immigration sentiment be so easy to weaponise, even by the left – in the past and the present – if the decent, hardworking Britons knew and recognised how much of their lives, safety and prosperity are results of non-British sacrifices? In a deeply divided, fearful Britain, Nolan’s directorial choices succeed as a Brexiteer costume fantasy, but they fail to tell the story of Operation Dynamo, the war, and Britain. More importantly, they fail us all, as people and a nation.

All storytellers – and novelists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers are, ultimately, just that – know the power we hold. Stories can dehumanise, demonise and erase. Such stories are essential to pave the way for physical and material violence against those we learn to hate. But stories are also the only means of humanising those deemed inhuman; to create pity, compassion, sympathy, even love for those who are strange and strangers. Stories decide the difference between life and death. And that is why Dunkirk – and indeed any story – is never just a story.

Source: theguardian