The Indian government was forced to distance itself from the comments amid a diplomatic storm between New Delhi and several Muslim majority countries, including Iran and strategic partners in the Gulf. However, on the ground the damage had already been done, as popular anger gave way to demonstrations by India’s significant but marginalised Muslim minority.

Among those whose houses were razed to the ground was a young Muslim activist Afreen Fatima who is the daughter of Javed Mohammad, an activist himself associated with the Welfare Party of India, a political party launched by the Muslim organisation, Jamaat-e Islami Hind.

Indian police accuse her father of being one of the main organisers of the protests which erupted in the UP city of Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad but renamed in 2018 in line with Hindu nationalist sentiments) while many ended peacefully, some soon turned violent and tensions arose between Muslims and Hindus, spreading to other parts of the country. Hundreds have since been arrested and police forces shot dead at least two Muslim protestors in the eastern city of Ranchi in a bid to disperse the protestors

The decision to demolish homes of people associated with the protests was ordered by the chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, who justified the actions claiming the properties were illegal establishments. Since the order, three demolitions have taken place in two days – the properties of two people were razed after they were accused of stone throwing. The firebrand Hindu monk and politician who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party has since vowed to continue with “bulldozer action”.

As footage of the demolitions fast became viral on social media, observers and critics were quick to point out the stark parallels with long-standing policies implemented by Israeli occupation forces against the homes of Palestinians, ordinary citizens, protestors and resistance members alike. Just last year it was estimated that Israeli forces demolished 937 structures, displacing nearly 1,200 people.

Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor reacting to Afreen Fatima’s house being demolished yesterday questioned whether the local government had exempted itself from the country’s Constitution. The Thiruvananthapuram MP tweeted: “Due process of law is fundamental to democracy. Under what law and following what process has this been done? Has UP exempted itself from the Constitution of India?”

While a worrying development, razing people’s homes are expected as Israel and India forged strong ties in recent years, with both countries governed by religious-nationalist ideologies (Zionism and Hindutva, respectively) with both facing accusations of apartheid policies, in fact these charges date back as far as 2002, when Modi was chief minister for Gujarat, when the state witnessed some of the worst anti-Muslim violence in decades. These comparisons are all the more compelling when both countries pride themselves on their supposed trademarked democratic values – Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East” and India being “the largest democracy in the world”.

It has become evident that Modi’s government is taking a leaf out of Israel’s book when it comes to the practise of destroying homes, ironically citing “illegal settlements” and “security concerns”. India’s recent disproportionate activities over mere stone-throwing in two cases, is also reflective of similar Israeli actions. Only last week, an Israeli lawmaker drafted a draft law seeking to double the punishment for throwing stones to four years and last year the Israeli military’s rules of engagement were revised to formally permit the opening of fire against Palestinians who throw stones, even as they flee.

Even the case of bulldozing illegal settlements raises fundamental rights issues and concerns over due process. The Indian Express noted yesterday in a report that “In many cases, notices are issued but the demolition is timed with a protest and a particular section is targeted giving the subject no time to appeal.”

Former Allahabad High Court Chief Justice Govind Mathur was quoted in the report as saying: “This is totally illegal. Even if you assume for a moment that the construction was illegal, which by the way is how crores of Indians live, it is impermissible that you demolish a house on a Sunday when the residents are in custody. It is not a technical issue but a question of rule of law.”

The recent razing of houses belonging to India’s Muslim minority is a dangerous precedent and illustrative of the direction the country is heading, following Israel’s lead. However, the practise itself is not unprecedented, as in April authorities in New Delhi bulldozed a number of “illegal” Muslim-owned businesses, requiring the Supreme Court to step in and halt further destruction. Following this incident, Pranay Somayajula, an advocacy and outreach coordinator for the US-based Hindus for Human Rights, opined last month that “The fact that bulldozers have cropped up in both India and Israel as a chilling symbol of state repression is no coincidence.”

India’s continued adherence and emulation of Israel’s apartheid policies against a significant and politically-inconvenient minority, is further proof that neither country is the secular, value-based democracy it claims to be.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The fallout from two controversial changes to citizenship laws continues to rock India. At least 35 people have died in sectarian violence in New Delhi which began on February 23. Muslims homes and businesses have been attacked and mosques vandalised by mobs.

All schools in the capital were shut as clashes intensified between those for and against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The CAA, passed by India’s parliament in December 2019, means that “illegal migrants” of Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhists, Parsi or Christian faith from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh who escaped persecution and arrived in India before 2014 can be fast-tracked to citizenship. But not if they are Muslim.

Accompanying this is the adoption of the NRC, an attempt to draw up a register of Indian citizens. For those who can’t prove their citizenship through documentary evidence, it can lead to the loss of citizenship. The NRC has only been implemented in the state of Assam, but the government plans to extend it nationwide.

Together, the CAA and NRC mean that Muslims, and others who cannot provide the required documents, will be left with no recourse to citizenship, unlike those of other faiths.

Petitions filed before the Supreme Court of India allege that the CAA violates the right to equality in India’s constitution and is antithetical to the word “secular” in the preamble to the constitution. In late January, the court refused to stop the implementation of the act while giving the government time to respond to the allegations.

Ostensibly, changes in citizenship policy are being framed by the government as a way to target “illegal migrants” or “infiltrators”.

But a common explanation for the changes is that they have been driven by the Hindu nationalism of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the organisation that moulded the prime minister, Narendra Modi, as well as Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. This ideology promotes the idea of a Hindu Rashtra, which aims to formally entrench Hinduism in Indian politics while continuing an anti-Muslim agenda.

As a lawyer and social psychologist, we think there is more to the story. By looking at the way India’s constitution was written and putting the current crisis into the context of social psychological debates about migration, we argue that the government’s policies are constructing Muslims and other minorities as a problem for the country. By creating an “us” and “them” dynamic to Indian citizenship, the government is enabling private policing of people who it finds disagreeable – even if it has not explicitly sponsored sectarian violence.

What the constitution says

At the time of independence, India’s political arrangement was not constituted by ethnic status. Members of any religion, of various castes and sects, and speakers of different languages were all Indian. The historian Niraja Gopal Jayal has argued that the debates at the time the constitution was drafted in the late 1940s were influenced by pressing concerns about partition, mass migration, and the very real possibilities of communal violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.

These led to the adoption of ius soli, or citizenship by birth, as a key principle within the constitution. Despite polarised debates on citizenship, the decision was ultimately taken that anyone born in India would be Indian – a decision suitable to the historical moment.

For Indians, this has always meant that a person is a citizen of India because of its constitution rather than because of their religious, ethnic, or regional ties. Until now.

The CAA and NRC mark a fundamental transformation by emphasising the principle of ius sanguinis – or citizenship by descent or blood – over that of citizenship by birth. The CAA privileges the acquisition of citizenship on grounds of religion, and the NRC means a person’s name can be excluded from the register of citizens if they cannot prove their descent.

Us versus them

What’s going on in India is a clear example of “othering”, a term describing a group of people – “them” – as a problem, and distinct from “us” – the majority. Creating the distinction between “us” and “them” often closely involves references to nations and nationhood.

The social psychologist Michael Billig has argued that while nations are visible political entities, they make their presence felt in rather unnoticeable ways, which he terms “banal nationalism”. This means that we can readily draw on our and other’s national belonging to inform political projects, such as the citizenship policies in India.

Muslims have been simultaneously categorised as an internal and external other: both a “termite” and “infiltrator”. By being portrayed as potentially non-indigenous to India, all Muslims can be treated as “illegal immigrants” and then put in detention centres or deported. In contrast, those who can claim citizenship are included in the nation and can consequently claim nationhood.

India’s new citizenship policies enable people to doubt each others’ citizenship and national belonging, a particular problem for marginalised peoples. Nationalism that was once largely unnoticed can now become more overt. The recent widespread violence by pro-government mobs against “anti-national” protesters is a visible example of this. Less evident, but no less damning, are instances of insidious exclusion in which “doubtful” citizens are vulnerable to arbitrary police brutality or private harassment.

This combination of private citizens policing “doubtful” citizens, and the police abetting or standing by mob violence against any inconvenient identity (be it based on a person’s religion, gender or profession) is a lethal one. Take for instance the recent case of an Uber driver who drove a poet to a police station when he overheard a phone conversation on anti-CAA protests.

A consequence of this shift might well be that being an Indian citizen becomes synonymous with being a certain sort of Hindu. Hindu Rashtra then will not be imposed from the top down by the Modi government, but it will also become part of everyone’s lives.

Rahul Sambaraju, Assistant Professor, Psychology, Trinity College Dublin and Suryapratim Roy, Assistant Professor of Regulatory Law, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The Guardian: “Delhi protests: India’s worst religious violence in decades”

( Middle East Monitor ) – In their quest to refashion India as a Hindu state, Hindutva extremists have placed themselves on a collision course with the country’s secular constitution. Their goal is no less than the reformation of India as an ethno-religious state affording special rights and privileges to Hindus within a multi-tier system of citizenship. The model state that they aspire to replicate is Israel.

The Zionist state has become an aspiration as much as an inspiration for far-right nationalists around the world, India included. Founded to protect the exclusivity of one ethno-religious majority over everybody else — especially the indigenous population — Israel is looked upon with envy by the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer. The far-right extremist, who once described himself as a “white Zionist”, praised Israel gushingly following its adoption of the Nation-State Law last year, which declared Israel to be a state of the Jewish people only. The bill was criticised strongly for relegating non-Jews to secondary status in a move akin to the US or Britain declaring themselves to be “white, Christian” nations by law.

Israel has passed the Nation-State Law becoming officially an Apartheid State – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Israel’s ability to pass itself off as a democracy despite relegating minorities to second-class status has a special appeal for ultra-nationalists. Its strength as a highly militarised nation, able to maintain an apartheid system without suffering any consequences on the international stage, has a unique attraction. The success of the Zionist state has turned what were once ultra-nationalist fantasies — which many thought, mistakenly, had been relegated to the dustbin of history — into a realistic political vision in a world beset by fear and conflict.

In fact, far from being a democracy, Israel is unique in the way that it has created a multi-tier citizenship modal within the state for the purpose of maintaining its Jewish character. A number of laws have been enacted to build the state around institutionalised discrimination. The 1950 Law of Return, for example, incorporates the fundamental ideology of Zionism: all Jews, no matter where they were born, have the inalienable right to migrate to Israel. It’s easy to see why ethno-nationalists across the world would like to see this replicated elsewhere.

The 1952 Law of Citizenship (better known as the Nationality Law), meanwhile, gives all persons who are accorded Jewish nationality in the above Law of Return the right to claim Israeli citizenship automatically upon arriving at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, without any formal procedures. The same law, however, stipulates specific protocols for non-Jews who wish to have citizenship.

Right-wing nationalists find Israel’s extraterritorial notion of sovereignty appealing. In this form of political order, citizenship is granted to anyone sharing the same ethnicity or religion, regardless of where they live in the world. In Israel’s case, only Jews are granted nationality rights, while non-Jews residing in the same territory are deprived of such rights.

Unlike liberal democracies in the West, Israel upholds a constitutionally-imposed distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Only Jews are granted nationality and able to enjoy the full spectrum of rights granted by the state. An odious system of delivering state benefits is used in order to foster an impression that Israel is not discriminating against non-Jews.

The separation of services between “national” institution and “government” institution allows for the legal siphoning-off of resources to provide services for Jewish citizens only. For example, institutions financed by Zionist groups such as the Jewish National Fund can and do discriminate openly in favour of Jews without seeming to taint the apparently democratic government with the stench of racism.

This kind of Jew/non-Jew bifurcation of public services denies non-Jewish citizens of the state from accessing funds and services open to Jews only. With 92 per cent of the land of Israel “owned” by the JNF, much of it expropriated from Palestinians, non-Jewish Israeli citizens are deprived of access; they are unable by law to own, lease, live or work on it.

Israel is thus a model to imitate as far as Hindutva ideologues are concerned. Guided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalists seek to “Israelify” India into a racialised state. Their reasoning is simple: if Israel is accepted as the “only democracy in the Middle East” despite its many apartheid policies, then why can’t India continue to claim to be “the largest democracy in the world” while becoming an ethno-religious state?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) hold a joint press conference following their meeting in Jerusalem on 5 July 2017 [Haim Zach/GPO / Handout /Anadolu Agency]

Such a project is fraught with danger. The Hindutva vision for India is almost certain to stir up the demon of communal strife, the like of which led to the killing of millions during the country’s partition and independence in 1948.

Unlike Israel, which was founded on ethno-religious tribalism — rather like Pakistan — Hindutva ideologues have to abolish the country’s secular constitution to realise their vision. The conceptual shift made possible through propaganda and rhetoric has been underway for some time, with some of the worst dehumanising language being used to describe Indian Muslims now becoming socially and politically acceptable.

Indian ministers have fuelled anti-Muslim hostility by demanding the reduction of legal protection for minorities and suggesting that western standards of human rights are somehow not compatible with India. A similar argument was made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in defence of Israel’s right to continue its annexation policy by disregarding the human, civil and political rights of Palestinians and insisting that applying international law to the situation in Israel-Palestine simply isn’t feasible.

Of course, just as there are anti-Zionist Jews who challenge Israel with regard to its discriminatory policies, not all Hindus endorse Modi’s racist political project. Indeed, many denounce Hindutva’s ideology as a malign distortion of Hinduism itself.

However, as is often the case in such ideological battles for hearts and minds, moderate voices are drowned out by the roar of fanatics seeking to recreate what they envisage to be imagined past glories. Spurred on by the global paralysis of support for human rights and the growing disregard of international law, despots, autocrats and ideologues of all political and religious backgrounds are seizing this moment to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable.

Beyond the rhetoric, measures are underway to change the face of India. Amongst the inflammatory steps taken by Modi since his re-election in May is the push for new legislation, the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). This controversial move, which threatens to demote the status of the country’s two hundred million Muslim citizens, sparked protests across the country recently; at least 20 people have been killed in clashes with the security forces.

Netanyahu and Modi: Kashmir and Palestine are punchbags for their occupiers – Cartoon [CarlosLatuff]

The bill grants amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from three neighbouring countries, namely Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. While India’s federal government says that the law will protect religious minorities fleeing persecution, opponents say that by dividing alleged migrants into Muslims and non-Muslim categories, it explicitly and blatantly seeks to enshrine religious discrimination in the law, contrary to the country’s longstanding, secular constitution and ethos.

The CAB is only one of the initiatives threatening India’s constitution. Another is the pan-India citizen verification process known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Critics say that it has become weaponised by hard-line Hindus and that its true motive is to disenfranchise many of India’s Muslims. When it was trialled in the Indian State of Assam, 1.9 million mainly Muslim citizens were made stateless overnight.

By themselves, the CAB and NRC may appear harmless. Seen within the context of the rise of Hindutva and the march towards re-creating India as a Hindu state, though, these measures serve a hostile and divisive political agenda.

The international community must support all Indians in their resistance to the hard-line Hindu nationalists and not indulge Hindutva’s racist ideologues in the same way that it has indulged Zionism since 1948. Hindu nationalists are clearly seeking the Israelification of India; they must be stopped.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Quick Take by Bloomberg: “Activist Arundhati Roy Joins Students in a New Delhi, India Protest Opposing the New Citizenship Law”

Reprint edn. slightly revised.

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame (the secular nationalist Young Turks also committed genocide against the Armenians during an invasion of eastern Anatolia by Russia).

Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least.

Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then Marxist), European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and before and after, and looted of much of their wealth. Russia when it brutally conquered and ruled the Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!

I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).

Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?

Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

Through the President’s address to Parliament on June 9, 2014, the newly elected Indian Government has officially outlined its short and longer-term agenda. The emphasis, as expected, is on faster economic growth. Questions of welfare and security for the poor and disadvantaged are, however, very superficially addressed. This has to be cause for concern if sabka saath, sabka vikas is indeed the aim of the Government’s programme: All the more so, given the brutal violence the country continues to witness against women, religious minorities, and the lowest castes and classes.

The central slogan of the programme is ‘Development through good governance’. Development is an old idea, prescribed in the period after World War II by a triumphant capitalist, imperialist West for the colonised and ex-colonised nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. A different orthodoxy arose a few decades later, in the form of a strategy of economic liberalisation, encouragement of private investment, trickle-down theories of growth and technocratic solutions for social problems. This turn, too, was initiated in the West, most stridently by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It was adopted wholesale in the early 1990s, by a Congress government led by P.V. Narasimha Rao. And it has been followed by every Indian government since.

A BJP campaign hoarding ahead of the Lok Sabha elections

The BJP Government is set to continue these neo-liberal policies. The difference is that it describes the economic results- the spurt in investments and profits at the top, the growth of a large new consumerist middle class, mass disempowerment, and increasing disparities in wealth and income, security and welfare- as ‘development’.

The other vital term in the Government’s official agenda is ‘governance’. What this means is not so obvious. But any careful reading of the President’s speech, and of earlier statements and documents put out by the leaders of BJP, makes clear that it refers primarily to better coordination between different arms of Government and greater bureaucratic efficiency and speed, both to be realised through new technology as much as anything else. So we now have a promise of: ‘governance’, ‘e-governance’, a ‘Digital India’, a national e-library, a ‘national mission “e-Bhasha” that will develop digital vernacular content and disseminate our classic literature in different languages’, and ‘a National Multiskill Mission (to develop a) Skilled India’. In short, what human endeavour and political struggle have failed to deliver, science and technology are now going to do.

The BJP Government, like other governments across the world that feel they may need the people’s votes again at some point, declares it is dedicated to the poor. Two-thirds of India’s population still lives in rural areas, as the President’s speech notes, and vast numbers remain exceedingly poor. The rash of farmers’ suicides across the country over the last two decades is one indication of this. That half the population still defecates in the open is another. The Government therefore dutifully promises ‘poverty elimination’: a pucca (brick-built) house with water connection, toilet facilities, 24×7 electricity supply for every family, and accessible roads to every hamlet and village in the country.

Yet, it is hard to imagine what the tens of millions of India’s poor, who do not speak English or the language of ‘Hinglish’ television, will make of the Government’s baffling proposals: ‘5T’s: Tradition, Talent, Tourism, Trade and Technology;’ ‘3 Ds: Democracy, Demography and Demand’ (where the second and third terms refer, it seems, to nothing but the needs of consumer capitalism); ‘Rurban’ development; and ‘Micro-irrigation to ensure ‘per drop-more crop’.

To return to a basic point, what the new Government is retailing are exactly the same policies as those of its predecessor, and of every other government since the early 1990s. It is doing so only with a brasher, more decisive voice- which is what the Indian electorate, or large sections of it, seems to have liked-and the use of buzzwords popularised by Western governments and media as the antidote to our current social, economic and political ills.

Development, let me repeat, was a buzzword even in the 1950s and ’60s, especially designed by the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries of North America and western Europe to describe the needs of the ‘backward’ countries of the so-called Third World, although it was adopted by governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America primarily with a view to stave off colonial and neo-colonial pressures. This is something that recent Indian governments, including the present one, seem to be far less concerned with-the shriller nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding.

Now, at the inauguration of a widely heralded new regime . . . we’re being treated to a new buzzword of ‘governance’, borrowed this time from right-wing offerings of the American and European establishment and media. The slogan is accompanied by some notion of an abstract ‘science’ and, more emphatically, ‘technology’ that apparently requires little by way of human intervention to work its miracles.

The Modi Government’s declared mantra of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ is a central tenet of neo-liberal regimes throughout the world. Let us note that the drive for ‘minimum government’ in these regimes is above all else a drive for ‘minimum taxation of the rich’. It has led, in the USA, UK and elsewhere, to the gradual removal of all kinds of welfare policies and support systems- reasonable housing and schooling, public hospitals, affordable public transport, unemployment security- that enabled a half-way decent life for the poor and the aged, the disinherited aand the disabled.

BJP’s additional, nationalist twist, declaring that India’s development will be in conformity with ‘the core values of our great civilisation’, only serves to make the proposition more treacherous. For, the statement suggests that these core values are somehow uniform, uncontested, unchanging, and easily catalogued by a small body of (Hindu right-wing) ‘experts’.

Brashness and arrogance of this kind leaves little room for debate or disagreement, the willingness to listen to different points of view and to arrive at solutions serving the interests of diverse groups in a society. That brasher voice- ‘the core values of our great civilisation’, the ‘truth’ of our religion, the ‘hurt’ of the majority-led to damaging consequences in Gujarat, seen not only in the severe loss of life and property in 2002, but in the arrogance and impunity that attended the actions of the Hindu majority, and the atmosphere of fear and insecurity in which the minorities and the poor have had to live since.

Given some of the policies being advocated now, there is a real danger that the tendencies of Gujarat could be more widely replicated, even if not always in the same brutal manner. In Jammu & Kashmir and the North-east, for example, BJP has been far too quick to take sides against religious minorities (both Muslim and Christian) and to question the importance of constitutional guarantees such as Article 370, part of the original agreement that allowed Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to the Indian federation. A different kind of fallout has already been felt in other parts of the country in increased hooliganism and assaults on freedom of expression, on the ground of preserving ‘the core values of our civilisation’.

There have been legal challenges to academic publications and physical attacks on artistic exhibitions that allegedly denigrate Hindu sensibilities, threats against leading public figures and intellectuals who criticised Prime Minister Modi in the course of the election campaign (what are election campaigns for, if they do not include a free and open discussion of the merits and foibles of different policies and politicians?), and increased targeting of sexual minorities and their practices-again declared to be anti-national imports from the West. To say nothing about the continued rape and, recently, lynching of lowercaste girls and women accused of transgressing established social norms.

Talk of democracy and development will remain meaningless until the justice and dignity that Dr B.R. Ambedkar described as the essence of democracy begin to be made available to the poor; until women and lower castes and religious minorities are provided security against sexual and communal violence, poverty and disease; and until India’s ruling groups develop some respect for the ‘masses’. Such respect needs to be displayed in continuous, painstaking work and persevering effort on the ground, more than in the propaganda that the electors get in such huge doses every time they are called on to exercise their vote in provincial or national elections.

Given the absolute majority it has won in Parliament, the BJP Government can surely be bolder and more inclusive in its aims than it is in the agenda it has outlined. In that context, here is a more condensed, six-point agenda that the Government could consider:

Urbanise, but with caution Go ahead, if you must, with breakneck urbanisation, industrialisation and digitalisation-which have so signally failed to bring economic benefits or sense of community to the vast majority of people throughout the world, West or East. But do ensure that there is an attempt to balance the interests and concerns of different sections of the population (when it comes to the development of bauxite mining, huge dams, or gas pipelines, for instance, at the expense of poor people’s lands, habitations and communities).’ 100 world class cities’ (point 32 in the Government’s agenda) is also a prescription for a thousand ‘world class’ slums, unless the interests-and representatives-of the labouring poor, the poorly employed and the unemployed are made central to the discussion and planning from the beginning.

Ring in rural change with land reform Land reform, which does not appear anywhere in the 50-point programme of the government, is a long forgotten but critical element of any project to end feudal power and feudal behaviour-towards the poor, towards lower castes, and towards women. Note that at times of social or political conflict in the villages, one of the first manifestations of so-called social boycott by landowning castes is to prevent lower castes and classes from defecating in ‘their’ fields. It is good to hear the BJP leadership speaking of ‘toilets, not temples’. But the provision of houses and toilets and employment to all of the poor and marginalised is not possible without meaningful land reform and a fairer distribution of local economic resources.

Institute universal and free education As another part of the project to end feudal power and oppression, and move towards a more modern, democratic and prosperous India, there is need for a renewed campaign of universal education, free at the primary and secondary levels, with special safeguards and support for women, sexual minorities, religious minorities, and the lower castes and classes. This entails the maintenance and development of traditional schools, libraries, and a free press (academic and journalistic), as well as digital resources, to promote a culture of learning, criticism, experiment and innovation. It also requires a distancing from the all too easy and premature claims about the denigration of ‘our’ national culture and heritage, the most eloquent expression of which over the centuries has been found precisely in its plurality and recognition of human fallibility. It would help greatly if Muslims were recognised as a minority, and-given the poverty and deprivation in which the majority of Muslims live-if reservations were extended to them.

Zero tolerance for violence As another measure to prevent the reassertion of feudal and patriarchal authority, and protect sexual and religious minorities, the Government needs to act on the legislative front. ‘Zero tolerance for violence against women’ is an important and welcome statement. But it needs to be followed up quickly with comprehensive laws, and strict directives on implementation.

These laws should incorporate in full the recommendations of the committee headed by Justice Verma, which identified an important spectrum of women’s rights and sexuality rights. A ‘development’ regime in the 21st century must recognise marital rape as rape. It needs to speak out against the Delhi High Court’s overturning of an earlier interpretation of Article 377, regarding the freedom of choice and expression by sexual minorities, and even more strongly against the homophobic comments made by several senior religious and political leaders associated with BJP. And it needs to amend security laws in what are called ‘conflict’ zones, to enable prosecution of armed forces personnel for rape and other acts of violence against the civilian population in these regions.

End border conflicts It is time to put an end to the pointless arms race and border conflict with Pakistan (and with China, though the latter may seem more peripheral, and may take longer). An end to these conflicts and the selfserving politics that has perpetuated them would immediately save precious national resources, promote regional trade and people-to-people understanding, and help bring about more acceptable political arrangements for the long-suffering people of Jammu & Kashmir, as well as other border regions.

Protect the environment Finally, the Government must move urgently to protect the environment, through stricter control of industrial production and waste, and raising public awareness of the catastrophe we have brought upon ourselves. A once-renowned Garden City is now commonly described as Garbage City. Plastic waste is poisoning the remaining open spaces-along rivers, railways, through slums and in forests. Air pollution is said to be responsible for over half a million deaths a year in India, not to mention indirect and long-term costs. In the end, we still have to ask if such unfettered ‘development’ and unadulterated profit-seeking is good for any one.

Gyanendra Pandey is the author, most recently of A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States.

Reprinted with author’s permission

Mirrored from India Today

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Related video added by Juan Cole

NDTV: “PM Modi’s mantra for India’s economic revival”

Shalom Goldman

After weeks-long elections in India, the Hindu nationalist BJP party, with Narendra Modi as prime-minister elect, has emerged as the overwhelming victor in a hotly contested campaign. The election results were both an affirmation of the BJP’s policies and ideologies and a resounding defeat for the Congress Party, which has led India’s government for most of the nation’s modern history, and which is now perceived by the electorate as riddled with corruption and inefficiency.

Out of the 543 seats in the Indian parliament, the BJP won 282, but the Congress Party won only 44 —the lowest number ever for a party that had grown accustomed to power over many decades.

What might this seismic shift in Indian politics portend for Israel, a small state thousands of miles away whose population of seven million is one hundred and fiftieth of the size of India’s 1.2 billion ?

As it turns out, a lot.

One of the first heads of state to congratulate Modi after his triumph was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And in a statement about his call to Modi, Netanyahu noted that “the Prime Minister-designate has expressed his desire to deepen and develop ties with Israel.”

The ties that Netanyahu was referring to — primarily economic and military (linked areas, of course) — have been developing since 1992, when India and Israel established full diplomatic relations. But the real push for making the two countries primary partners came during the BJP years of 1998 to 2004.

Today, a decade on, Israel arms sales to India amount to close to ten billion dollars. In fact, India is now Israel’s largest defense market ; over half of its arm sales are to the Indian military. In addition to the arms deals, there is a 5 billion dollar bilateral trade relationship between the two countries that includes solar power, hi-tech research and agricultural development — areas in which Israel is a technical and economic force.

That said, Congress party leaders who succeeded the BJP government in 2004 were by no means averse to deepening ties with Israel. Just six months ago, the Indian government, under Congress control, concluded a ten billion dollar deal with the Israeli company Tower Electronics to build two semiconductor plants in India.

Narendra Modi
photo: Wikipedia via Narendra Modi Flickr

In addition to the military-industrial aspects of the budding Netanyahu-Modi bromance, there are the ideological factors that bind them together. For decades both leaders have been pushing an ethnic nationalist agenda in their respective countries, though India and Israel are democracies in which the Muslim minority (15% in India, and 17% in Israel) has the right to vote. And the liberal secular forces within both countries have attempted (though imperfectly) to stop this progression to an ethnic nationalist state. But those attempts are failing.

While in previous elections India’s 180 million Muslims always had to be taken into account, the Muslim electorate appears not to have mattered in the BJP’s latest victory. Exit polls showed that only 1 in 10 Muslim voters nationwide picked the BJP.

Muslim voters were wooed by the Congress Party and by parties on the Left, including the Communists, but the BJP basically by-passed them. The BJP put forward 482 candidates for parliamentary seats, only seven of which were Muslim, and none of those seven secured a seat in parliament. And the party won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state that has more Muslims than any other.

The present moment is not the BJP’s first taste of political power. A coalition headed by the BJP ruled India from 1998 to 2004. But at that point the party had not achieved the great popularity it now has, and its ability to change India’s neo-liberal social and economic policies was quite limited.

For the past twelve years Modi was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. In Gujarat he is perceived as being the architect of that state’s great economic success. And to make the picture even more complex, many Muslims in Gujarat also benefitted from Modi’s economic policies. And it is that success that India’s large middle class would like to see replicated throughout the whole country.

But it was because of a conflict in Gujarat, rather than an economic boom, that Modi gained his popularity among Hindu nationalists (Hindus are 80% of the population) and his notoriety among Muslims and secular liberals. In 2002, soon after Modi became Chief Minister, Hindu-Muslim riots broke out. Muslims were the primary victims of the riots (of pillage, murder and terror) and Modi was blamed by many for favoring Hindus and not protecting Muslims during the hostilities. Even as some members of his government are now facing trial, Modi was exonerated of any wrongdoing by the Supreme Court of India and has repeatedly refused to accept any responsibility.

In 2005 the US government, wanting to distance itself from the BJP’s role in the Gujarat riots, even turned down Modi’s request for a visa to visit the US.

More recently, an open letter from Salman Rushdie and other prominent Indian intellectuals, published a few weeks before the elections, sought to remind observers in the West of Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat riots.

Though the letter did get some attention in the West it did not have any effect on the outcome of the Indian elections. The Indian electorate was focused on promises of economic development, and on affirmations of the nation’s Hindu 0character.

A few days after the BJP’s electoral triumph Modi made a pilgrimage to the Hindu holy city of Varanasi (Benares). On the banks of the sacred river he paid tribute to “mother Ganges.” And at a prayer service in a Varanasi temple Modi joined worshippers of the god Shiva.

In an emotional speech to parliament yesterday Modi urged his colleagues to dedicate themselves to serving their nation of all 1.25 billion Indians whose “hopes and aspirations are embedded in this temple of democracy.”

It remains to be seen how far this dedication extends to serving the country’s Muslim minority, and you can be sure Israel will be watching.

The Likud party in Israel, from which Netanyahu emerged, a party that successfully challenged the Labor Party hegemony of the first three decades of Israeli statehood, has long made the case that Israel needs to be more ‘Jewish.’ To the uninitiated this might seem like a strange case to make. Considering that Israel already has a majority Jewish population, this would seem to make such a campaign redundant at best.

But for Netanyahu’s ideological forerunners, including his father, Cornell University Professor Benzion Netanyahu, Labor Party ideology was tainted with Western liberalism and moral relativism. And it was hostile to traditional Jewish religious practice. Likud leaders, foremost among them Menachem Begin, countered this liberalism with a synthesis of religion and politics that radically changed the Israeli political and physical landscape. The West Bank Settler movement, which flourished under the Begin government (1977-83), grew out of that powerful synthesis between religion and politics.

It was Begin’s protege Ariel Sharon, great champion of the Settlement project in the 1970s and 80s and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006 who saw the great potential of links to India and made a state visit there in 2003. The BJP, then in power, welcomed him enthusiastically. Leftist and Muslims were, of course, hostile to the visit and to the deepening of Indian ties to Israel. Sharon was perceived in the Muslim world as the devil incarnate, and was seen by Indian Leftists as the architect of an illegal occupation. Modi and other BJP leaders visited Israel during the early 2000s and were very warmly received.

In 2003, with the 9/11 attacks only two years in the background, both Sharon and his hosts invoked the scepter of “Islamic terrorism” as a force that both countries had to fight.

The Israeli Right and India’s Hindu right — in light of recent elections in both countries, now major forces in their respective countries — have much in common.

Soon after the BJP victory this past weekend, there were rumors in Delhi of a Modi trip to Tel Aviv. Denied a visa to the US and shunned during his Gujarat Chief Minister years by the Obama administration, Modi may be reluctant to visit the US. But just this week Obama extended an invitation, which the Prime Minister-designate will have to respond to.

Modi may be the first Indian head of state to visit Israel — where his brand of ethnic nationalism will find sympathetic ears.

Shalom Goldman is Professor of Religion and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, and core faculty of the Duke Islamic Studies Center. His most recent book is Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (UNC Press, January, 2010). He is also a regular contributor to ISLAMiCommentary. The above post was written for “Sacred Matters,” a web magazine of “religious currents in culture” based at Emory University.

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This article was made possible by the Transcultural Islam Project, an initiative launched in 2011 by the Duke Islamic Studies Center — in partnership with the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — aimed at deepening understanding of Islam and Muslim communities. See www.islamicommentary.org/about and www.tirnscholars.org/about for more information. The Transcultural Islam Project is funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Mirrored from IslamiCommentary

h/t Daily Bhaskar

The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s elections is being hailed in some Western media as a hopeful sign for US-Indian trade and for Indian business. But like the US Tea Party movement, it is rent by internal contradictions that could derail such aspirations. The BJP has many resemblances to the American Tea Party movement. It is xenophobic (especially disliking Muslims). It is imbued by religious fundamentalism and often anti-science. It is hawkish in foreign policy. It is an advocate for the business classes and critical of government programs. Despite the latter position, it may not be as good for the Indian business sector as many observers assume.

1. The Hindu Nationalism of the BJP is exclusivist and intolerant. Contemporary business requires a tolerant and cosmopolitan atmosphere. You want to maximize customers. American Tea Partiers hated Coca Cola’s Superbowl ad this year which showed “America the Beautiful” sung in Spanish as well as English. But Coca Cola walked off with more Latino customers. The Hindu Nationalists have conducted pogroms against Muslims (12 percent of the population) on several occasions, as well as against other religious minorities. What kind of business atmosphere is that creating– whether for investors or consumers? The new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, himself has been on a US travel ban because as governor of Gujerat State he was felt to have done too little to halt one such pogrom. Sociologists of India have already found that when they sent in resumes applying for advertised jobs with Muslim names on them the turn-down rate was much higher than for those with Hindu names. This sort of discrimination is likely to get worse now.

2. Contemporary business success requires investment in science. The BJP is militantly against scientific findings that contradict its fundamentalist orthodoxies. It supports an indigenous form of homeopathic medicine over scientific medicine. Although it talks a good game about scientific innovation, it makes no pledges of increased government investment in real science and technology, which India desperately needs. Its energy policy is favorable to renewables, but is really more an “all of the above” approach that is not good for fighting global warming. Its attitude will stultify critical thought of a sort on which robust science depends. It maintains that Sanskrit developed in India rather than spreading into it from the north. It opposes the academic study of religion and its findings. Already, the books of Chicago Sanskritologist Wendy Doniger have been banned in India, and this sort of thing will now get worse.

3. Economic prosperity is hurt by concentration of wealth at the top of society. Because of the Congress Party’s redistributive policies, India is a much less unequal society than the US, and over 100 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the past decade. The BJP favors Neoliberal policies that will privatize institutions and favor market mechanisms. But these policies have resulted in vastly increased inequality wherever they have been implemented, hurting working and middle class purchasing power and creating a rootless business class that often turns abroad for investment and profits, abandoning the home country to stagnation and inequality.

4. Economic prosperity benefits from peace. The US economic crises of 1975-82 and 2008-present had a great deal to do with wars (Vietnam & Iraq). The last time the BJP was in power, it almost went to war with Muslim-majority Pakistan, coming close twice in 2002 alone. Since India and Pakistan are both nuclear states, such a war would have been a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. Although the current leadership of the party is less hawkish in foreign affairs and more focused on the domestic economy, it remains to be seen if the rank and file of angry Hindu fundamentalists can pressure the government to take a hard line with Islamabad.

5. Contrary to what many pundits assume, it is not clear that a fundamentalist nationalist party such as the BJP will be very welcoming to foreign capital. Because of its nationalism and ties to Indian small businessmen, the BJP is unlikely to substantially increase foreign investment, especially in the retail sector, where its leaders are talking about retaining relatively strict rules for foreign direct investment.

Many outsiders are celebrating the BJP victory because they assume that it will lead to better trade and economic relations between India and e.g. the US. They don’t seem to realize that India has just elected the equivalent of a Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz. It seems to me that the only question is whether the party, now that it is in power, will become more pragmatic and less intolerant just in order to rule. One dark cloud on that horizon is that it attained an absolute majority in parliament and so does not need more moderate coalition partners.

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Related video:

Euronews: “Congress routed in Indian election as opposition BJP prepares to take office”