The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Politics is nothing but theology in action
– Ambedkar
Right-wing politics suffers from a common syndrome everywhere.
It never feels confident to project its own icons for the rest of the humanity, whatever might be their claims about their worldview, it knows that its own icons are detested by a wide spectrum of people.
The easiest way it finds to overcome this lacunae is to appropriate already established icons – who were even opposed to their world view as well and claim them their own. In fact, it does not have any qualms in utilising dates – bearing special significance for exploited and oppressed and marginalised of the world – to put their stamp on it.
The project of Hindutva Supremacism – which yearns / strives to transform a Secular, Socialist, Democratic and Sovereign Republic into a Hindu Rashtra has perhaps achieved near perfection in this kind of politics.
Prof Romila Thapar, great historian and public intellectual , will be delivering the 28 th Lecture in the Democracy Dialogues Series on Sunday 28 th January 2024 at 6 PM (IST).
Please reserve the time and date for the lecture. Details are given below
Democracy Dialogues – 28 th Lecture
Organised by
New Socialist Initiative (NSI)
Theme : Our History, Their History, Whose History?
The zoom invite will be shared closer to the date.
Abstract: My purpose in this talk would be to examine the link between history and particular kinds of nationalism. I hope to show that nationalism can be a process, bringing together and uniting all the communities that inhabit a particular territory in support of a change in society or opposing a target common to all. This earlier form is what I would like to call a unitary, integrative nationalism that cut across communities and drew them together in a particular country to support a single purpose. This I would differentiate from the latter forms in some countries which identified with units of society or communities according to certain common features, such as a particular religion or language, or caste or ethnicity. I would call it segregated nationalism, where each community is segregated and treated as having a distinctly different identity and its own separate goal. History is brought in when the community that gives an identity to its nationalism insists on tracing its origins to a historical past. This pattern of integrated and segregated nationalisms would seem to apply to India of the twentieth century. There was the all-inclusive national movement whose participants were from every community; its objectives were to maintain the unity of the Indian people and overthrow colonial rule. The other nationalism, segregated nationalism, was seeded in the 1920s and assumed the existence of two nations – the Hindu and the Muslim – which, it was argued, go back to earlier times. Integrated nationalism succeeded in 1947 in bringing about independence, but its foundations needed strengthening, for we are now witnessing the strong presence of religious nationalism in the attempt to inaugurate a Hindu Rashtra in India.
– Romila Thapar
About the Speaker:
Internationally renowned scholar of Ancient History, Prof Thapar was elected General President of the Indian History Congress in 1983 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize of the US Library of Congress which complements the Nobel, in honouring lifetime achievement in disciplines not covered by the latter. Prof Thapar has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, the University of Pennysylvania, and the College de France in Paris and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh (2004), the University of Calcutta and from the University of Hyderabad
Here is a select list of Prof Thapar’s publications Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 1961 ( Oxford University Press) ; A History of India : Volume 1, 1966 ( Penguin) ; The Past and Prejudice, NBT ( 1975) ; Ancient Indian Social History : Some Interpretations, 1978 ( Orient Blackswan) ; From Lineages to State 1985 : Social Formations of the Mid-First Millenium B.C. in the Ganges Valley, 1985 ( Oxford University Press) ; Interpreting Early India, 1992 ( Oxford University Press) ; Sakuntala : Text, Reading, Historie, 2002 ( Anthem) . Somanatha : The Many Voices of History, Verso ( 2005) ; The Aryan : Recasting Constructs, Three Essays ( 2008) ; The Past As Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History, (2014) ;Voices of Dissent: An Essay, (2020); The Future in the Past: Essay ( 2023)
Whether Modi will get a third term in 2024 or these elections can spring a surprise?
India at the beginning of the year stands at the cusp of a Momentous Change
The biggest question before everyone is whether the elections for the Parliament – the lower house – which will be over by end of May ( if they are not advanced by the ruling dispensation) would be able to disturb the stranglehold of the BJP-RSS over the levers of power at the Centre, whether it will lead to loosening of sorts of the grip it holds over the various institutions of Democracy ( critics even call that they have been subverted, weaponised) or it will slide the Indian Democracy further into the electoral autocracy mode much to the chagrin of well wishers of democracy everywhere.
यह पोस्ट सोशल मीडिया पर कई लोगों ने साझा की थी । बताया जा रहा था कि इसके लेखक सरोज मिश्र हैं। इस बीच इसके असल लेखक से हमारा संपर्क हुआ है जिनका नाम विवेक कुमार उर्फ़ विवेक असरी है। मूल लेख 2010 में छपा था जिसे यहाँ पढ़ा का सकता है।
अयोध्या का यह 300 साल पुराना जन्मस्थान मंदिर था जिसके लिए ज़मीन एक मुसलमान ज़मींदार के दान की थी। नए राम मंदिर के विस्तार के लिए अगस्त 2020 में इसे ढहा दिया गया। (छवि साभार द वायर)
कहते हैं अयोध्या में राम जन्मे, वहीं खेले-कूदे, बड़े हुए, बनवास भेजे गये, लौटकर आये तो वहाँ राज भी किया। उनकी ज़िंदगी के हर पल को याद करने के लिए एक मंदिर बनाया गया। जहाँ खेले, वहाँ गुलेला मंदिर है। जहाँ पढ़ाई की, वहाँ वशिष्ठ मंदिर हैं। जहाँ बैठकर राज किया, वहाँ मंदिर है। जहाँ खाना खाया, वहाँ सीता रसोई है। जहाँ भरत रहे, वहाँ मंदिर है। हनुमान मंदिर है, कोप भवन है। सुमित्रा मंदिर है, दशरथ भवन है। ऐसे बीसियों मंदिर हैं, और इन सबकी उम्र 400-500 साल है। यानी ये मंदिर तब बने, जब हिंदुस्तान पर मुगल या मुसलमानों का राज रहा।
(Translated by Nivedita Menon from a widely circulating post earlier attributed to Saroj Mishra, on social media, originally in Hindi.
UPDATE: We have since heard from the author himself. This post was written in 2010 by VIVEK KUMAR (Vivek Asri) and so we have made the necessary changes. Here is the link to VIVEK KUMAR’s original post.
This 300 year old Janmasthan temple in Ayodhya, built on land donated by a Muslim zamindar, was demolished in August 2020 to accommodate an expanded vision of the new Ram Mandir. Image courtesy The Wire
They say Ram was born in Ayodhya; in Ayodhya he played and roamed around as a youth, grew into adulthood, was sent from there into exile in the forest, and then returned to rule there. There are temples in Ayodhya to commemorate every moment of his life. Where he played, there is Gulela Mandir. Where he studied there is Vashishta Mandir. Where he sat and ruled, there is a mandir. Where he ate his meals, there is Sita Rasoi. Where Bharat stayed, there is a mandir. There’s Hanuman Mandir, Kop Bhavan. There’s Sumitra Mandir, Dashrath Bhavan. There are many many such temples and all of them are about 400 to 500 years old. That is to say, these temples were built when Hindustan was ruled by the Mughals, by Muslims.
Jorg Haider, a far-right Austrian politician who died in 2008, is largely forgotten. It is also forgotten that merely two decades ago, he was considered a very dangerous man in Europe, whose ascent to power had prompted rare European Union unity aimed to thwart his ambitions.
Twice elected as governor of the southern state of Carinthia, Haider—who opposed immigration and was critical of Islam and Muslims—once praised the Nazi regime’s “employment policies”.
His Freedom Party of Austria allied with another party, the OVP, which allowed Haider to become the country’s chancellor. But the possibility of a ‘right-wing extremist’ ruling a European Union member country prompted the other 14 members to join hands punitively against Australia, putting Haider out of the chancellorship race.
The European Union stuck by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam principles and emphasised that nobody would be allowed to “breach them”.
Many European countries threatened to recall envoys from Austria, and some said that Austria could be shunted out of the union if the need arose. The Belgian foreign minister at the time said, “Europe can very well do without Austria. We don’t need it.
After much water has flown down the Thames, the Rheins, the Danubes and all other rivers of Europe, the world has Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, a “political earthquake”, whom some consider more extreme and fanatical than Haider. But Wilders’ views on immigration and Islam cause no similar outrage in European capitals today.
Wilders’s party, which promised to ban mosques and compared the Quran with the infamous Mein Kampf, has won 37 seats in a 150-member Parliament. It is now the number one party in the country’s parliament.
As academics and other concerned persons, we, the undersigned, are outraged at the manner in which discussions on the ongoing war against Palestine are being silenced on Indian campuses, and in the public sphere more broadly. We are issuing this statement to call upon university administrators and the government to respect our academic freedom. We would also like to remind everyone of India’s own long history of anti-colonial struggle which has historically provided the lens through which the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, equality and human rights has been viewed in India.
We object to the way in which any discussion of the historical context of the occupation of Palestineand the barbaric Israeli assault on Gaza, along with the denial of food, fuel and water, since October 7th 2023, is being projected as support for the brutal terror attack on civilians in Israel by Hamas on October 7th.
Professor Mridula Mukherjee, Professor of Modern Indian History ( Retd), Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, will be delivering the 26 th Democracy Dialogues Series lecture on Sunday, 19 th November 2023 at 6 PM (IST).
Theme : Who’s Afraid of Jawaharlal Nehru? Time: Nov 19, 2023 06:00 PM India
Summary : In his lifetime, Jawaharlal Nehru was recognized the world over as a statesman and an Indian leader second only to Gandhiji. A foremost leader of the freedom struggle, who gave it a decided socialist orientation, he remained unrivaled as Prime Minister after independence and built the solid foundations of a sovereign, secular, democratic, and egalitarian republic. He evolved the concept of non-alignment which enabled many ex-colonial countries to avoid becoming a part of the two power blocs engaged in the Cold War.
However, he is today the favourite whipping boy of the establishment. We are told he was responsible for the partition, for the mess in Kashmir, for the death of Subhash Bose, for delaying the integration of Hyderabad, and of Goa, for the defeat at the hands of China in 1962, for neglecting agriculture, and primary education, and much else. The reason for the defamation is of course that he stood for the exact opposite of what is valued today. His life and work present a continuous question mark to the regressive trends in fashion.
This will become evident as we focus in the talk especially on two areas of great relevance today in which we are facing a grave crisis: Democracy and Civil liberties, and Communalism/Secularism. We will also focus attention on Nehru’s evolving understanding of Mahatma Gandhi’s vision and method of non-violent struggle, of which he became the most ardent advocate after his death.
Speaker :
Author of many books, Prof Mukherjee has been a visiting Scholar at Duke University, USA, and at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo and was also Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, ( NMML), New Delhi. She has published widely in the areas of agrarian history, peasant movements, social movements and the Indian national movement.
Here is a list of a few of her publications : Colonializing Agriculture, The Myth of Punjab Exceptionalism Sage (2005) ; Peasants in India’s Non Violent Revolution : Practice and Theory (Sage 2004).
This list also includes India’s Struggle for Independence (1999) and India After Independence 1947–2000 (2000), RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi The Hindu Communal Project (2008) co-authored with Prof Bipan Chandra and others.
The first week of the coming month of November will witness a huge public festival in Kerala organized by the ruling power through the government called ‘Keraleeyam‘. It begins on 1 November, celebrated every year as the ‘Kerala Piravi Dinam’ or the day of Kerala’s birth, marking the amalgamation of the three Malayalam-speaking regions into a single unit, a cherished dream of many in early twentieth century Kerala. The organizers of this celebration claim that this massive show seeks to highlight Kerala’s achievements which they hint, have an unbroken continuity from the twentieth century to the present. They claim to have furthered it, and not frittered it.
Democracy Dialogues Lecture Series (Online ) Organised by New Socialist Initiative
25th Lecture ( Sunday, 15 th October 2023)
Theme:India’s Democratic Longevity and its Hugely Troubled Trajectory
Speaker: Professor Ashutosh Varshney ( Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University )
Theme :India’s Democratic Longevity and its Hugely Troubled Trajectory
Summary
India celebrated 75 years of its independence last year with a lot of enthusiasm.
Celebrations did not hide the fact it is also one of the leading countries which is passing through what is popularly known as ‘democratic backsliding’.
A country which, like many others, is using democratic processes to secure undemocratic outcomes, where freely contested elections are being deployed for the purpose of expressing, cultivating, or enhancing majoritarian prejudices—to target minorities and turn them into lesser citizens.
In this scenario, there is an urgent need to unpack this journey of democratic India further , there is a need to make a distinction between India as an electoral democracy and India as a liberal democracy.
Background Reading for the talk :
# India’s Democratic Longevity and its Hugely Troubled Trajectory ( Attached with this mail)
#. How India’s Ruling Party Erodes Democracy
Ashutosh Varshney
Journal of Democracy, Volume 33, Number 4, October 2022, pp. 104-118 (Article)
Prof Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard (1989-98) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2001-2008).
His books include Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy (2013), Collective Violence in Indonesia (2009), Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (Yale 2002), India in the Era of Economic Reforms (1999), and Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge 1995)
[Democracy Dialogues Lecture by Professor Ashutosh Varshney scheduled for coming Sunday has to be rescheduled. New dates will be announced as soon as Professor Varshney is in a position to deliver the lecture. Apologies.]
Topic : India’s Democratic Longevity and its Hugely Troubled Trajectory
Speaker : Professor Ashutosh Varshney,
Theme :India’s Democratic Longevity and its Hugely Troubled Trajectory
I write this letter to you as a dissident feminist who leads a beleagured life under what can only be described in George Orwell’s words from 1984: the majoritarian post-socialist oligarchy that presently rules Kerala.
क्या बुद्धिजीवी वर्ग को पालतू बनाए रखने की सरकार की कोशिश या विश्वविद्यालयों में इंटेलिजेंस ब्यूरो को भेजने की उनकी हिमाक़त उसकी बढ़ती बदहवासी का सबूत है, या उसे यह एहसास हो गया है कि भारत एक व्यापक जनांदोलन की दहलीज़ पर बैठा है.
So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great (American) civil war’
( ‘‘‘तुम हो वह महिला जिसने उस किताब को रचा जिसने इस महान /अमेरिकी/ गृह युद्ध को मुमकिन बनाया)
[गुलामी प्रथा की समाप्ति के लिए छेड़े गए गृह युद्ध के खात्मे के बाद तत्कालीन अमेरिकी राष्टपति अब्राहम लिंकन द्वारा गुलामी प्रथा के खिलाफ लिखे गए उपन्यास ‘अंकल टाॅम्स केबिन’ / 1852/ की लेखिका हैरियट बीचर स्टोव Harriet Beecher Stowe से मिलने पर प्रगट उदगार]
लेखक, कलाकार, विद्वान आदि से हुक्मरान हमेशा ही चिंतित रहे हैं।
मिसाल के तौर पर क्रांतिपूर्व फ्रांस के बारे में यह बात मशहूर है कि वहां की राजशाही ने अपने पुलिस महकमे को अपने दौर के अहम लेखकों, कलाकारों की जासूसी करते रहने के निर्देश दिए थे। हम अठारहवीं सदी के पुलिस महकमे की मुलाजिमों की मुश्किलों को समझ सकते हैं जिन्हें ‘खंूखार अपराधियों और राजनीतिक व्यक्तियों’ के अलावा लेखकों, कलाकारों पर अपनी फाइल रखनी पड़ती थी। (द स्टेटसमैन, हिन्दुस्तान टाईम्स, नई दिल्ली, 26 सितम्बर 2006)
एक क्षेपक के तौर पर बता दें कि इस जासूसी का विधिवत विवरण जनाब ब्रूनो फुल्गिनी की किताब में मिलता है जिसका शीर्षक है ‘राइटर्स पुलिस’ – दरअसल फ्रेंच संसद के इस कर्मचारी को यह जिम्मेदारी मिली कि वह पार्लियामेंट लाइब्रेरी के पुराने दस्तावेजों को खंगाले और इस बेहद उबाउ काम के दौरान उसे यह ‘खजाना’ मिल गया था।
अगर हम अपने यहां निगाह दौड़ाएं तो मौजूदा हुक्मरानों का रूख इस मामले में कोई अलग नहीं दिखता, बल्कि वह ढाई सौ सदी पहले के फ्रांसिसी सम्राटों से कभी कभी एक कदम आगे ही दिखते हैं। ( Read the full text here)
Writers, scholars, artists have always worried the powers that be.
There was a time when the Parisian police had been given the onerous task of keeping the greatest writers of late 18 th Century who were living in Paris at that time under their watch. Poor fellows, one can imagine their difficulty in maintaining files on writers and artists and scholars ‘beyond criminals and political figures.’
The present dispensation at the centre is no different.
It could be said that it may be a step ahead.
The French Monarchs – who within few decades witnessed a mass upheaval which finally overthrew them – were wise enough to ask their minions to be rather discreet in their activities, not to offend the writers, scholars directly ; the harbingers of today’s ‘New India’ have even abandoned that discreetness for good.
Don’t ask for the meaning, ask what’s the point. (Ian Hacking).
Nizar Ahmed, Metaphysics and the Politics of Compassion: An Indian Perspective (Kozhikode, Kerala: InsightinPublica Printers and Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2023, pp.93, Rs.300/-). [ISBN – 978-93-5517-340-9]
1. Introduction
It is no easy task to resist such a forceful and persuasive intervention in a genuinely problematic area of metaphysics and the emotions, as it were, complicated furthermore by the fact that it strives to articulate ‘an Indian perspective’ on the same. The work, emanating from a reclusive philosopher from Kerala and published by a ‘small’ publishing house in the region, requires some attention, yet – and, I attempt to do so without coming across, hopefully, as condescending, or even paternalistic. I must confess, though, that the author Nizar Ahmed (henceforth, NA) is a dear friend for many years now, indeed from the time of his Ph.D. in Philosophy from IIT-Kanpur and taking up a faculty position in the School of Social Sciences at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam (from where he moved to the Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit at Kalady, Kerala, and retiring eventually from that posting). Dare I say it, NA remains a ‘legend’ in critical circles in Kerala, although he actively resists the attention that his work (both in English, and even more in Malayalam) commands.
How India is Slowly Emerging as a ‘World Teacher’ albeit of a different kind
( Illustration : coutesy CJP, Citizens for Justice and Peace)
France has moved towards normalcy some time back.
The anger and anguish of the still marginalised in the society, which spilled over into the streets, over the killing of a 17 year old Nahel – son of an Algerian single woman of Muslim origin – by the trigger happy traffic police, recorded on a camera, has long subsided.
No doubt the questions raised by it are not going to go away so easily.1
Experiences of two countries cannot be compared easily but perhaps one could easily see in the uproar shades of the ‘black lives matter moment’ for the French society. Not only in terms of the brutality of the police as witnessed in American society after the killing of George Floyd but the soul searching of sorts which seems to have begun afresh there, a churning has accelerated within the French people after this killing.
Background : A close friend of decades prodding you to read / listen to something and ask for your views is such a great moral incentive which nobody would refuse. The following note is an end product of similar undertaking which this pen pusher rather reluctantly took initially when one received a YouTube link of a conversation / debate between Congress M. P Shashi Tharoor and Supreme Court lawyer and commentator J Sai Deepak, held sometime back, where the focus of the programme was on Congress M.P. Shashi Tharoor’s book ‘Why I am a Hindu ?’
The book deals with how Mr Tharoor understands Hinduism, looks at its Great Souls, unpacks political Hinduism and dwells also at the violence committed by its followers and differentiates his Hinduism from that Hinduism practised by who can be called as ‘Bhakts’.
J Sai Deepak, a very popular commentator who has written a few books and also shared his views, dealt with Tharoor’s arguments.
As an aside it needs to be added that J Sai Deepak is one among the new crop of commentators , writers whose interventions very much resonate with what can be termed as ‘rightwing’ . There are few other names like Vikram Sampath, Sanjeev Sanyal, Anand Ranganathan etc of the same stream, whose arrival on the scene has been a moment of celebration among a section of the media (https://www.firstpost.com/politics/why-is-left-academia-so-rattled-by-vikram-sampath-sai-deepak-or-sanjeev-sanyal-10433791.html) which is critical of the left and its towering intellectuals.
In response to the LCI ‘s invitation to “stakeholders, including public and recognised religious organisations” to share their views on the Uniform Civil Code, some feminist groups and individuals came together in Delhi on July 4-5 2023 to draft a considered response. The UCC has been debated in feminist circles for decades, and a broad consensus has gradually emerged since the 1990s that gender justice and not uniformity should be the focus of reforms of laws pertaining to family, whether governed by Personal Laws (religious communities) or customary laws (Scheduled Tribes). The following response emerged on the basis of these discussions, which in turn drew on the long history of serious engagement with the issue in feminist circles for decades.
To,
The Hon’ble Chairperson and members,
Law Commission of India
14 July 2023
Sub: Response of feminist, queer and women’s rights groups and individual feministsto Public Notice of the Law Commission of India dated 14/06/2023, soliciting views on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC).
Respected Chairperson and members of the Law Commission of India,
We, the undersigned, write to you as representatives of feminist, queer and women’s rights groups, as well as concerned citizens, who have been working on issues related to gender justice and equality for women from diverse communities across the country. We draw upon our collective experience over many decades, as we respond to the current discussion on the proposed Uniform Civil Code.
Our submission is in three parts:
Concerns related to the procedure adopted to initiate these discussions by the Law Commission of India (LCI).
Comments on substantive issues of uniformity, equality and non-discrimination vis à vis gender justice.
Governing principles for any efforts towards gender justice for all
A sample of sections that have been deleted. This page on Gandhi has all the deletions encircled in the text. Image courtesy India Today
Recently, 33 political scientists wrote to the Director, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) asking for their names to be withdrawn from the Political Science textbooks. This letter followed an earlier one by Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar where they had similarly asked that their names be removed from the textbooks as chief advisors. Ours was actually a very simple and straightforward demand: since the changes have been made unilaterally without consultation with the authors whose names appear on the textbooks, we would like our names to be removed because both this arbitrary way and the substantive changes make the text books into something other than what a large community of political scientists had produced, through a prolonged collective process.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 