What a Child’s Death Tells Us
In her column for The Indian Express, Tavleen Singh feels ashamed because of the way some Hindutva hyper-nationalists have been speaking about the rape of a little girl in Kathua. When a child is raped and brutally murdered, you do not ask what her religion was. But some do, and it is this ‘nationalism’ that is so venomous, deranged and harmful for India. It is only cowards who need the safety of mobs to show their ‘valour’, and raping and murdering little girls is no act of bravery either.
The hyper-nationalists, for their part, wallow and seethe in a stew of memories of what Muslim invaders did to India centuries ago. They believe that Narendra Modi is the first real Hindu ruler in more than a thousand years, and that now is their time to take revenge against all Muslims. As the girl’s father told The Indian Express, she was too young to know what it meant to be Muslim or Hindu. “She couldn’t tell which hand was right and which left,” he said through his tears. But to hyper-nationalists, she was a Muslim girl, so what happened to her was revenge for what was done to Hindu women by Muslim invaders. I am not making this up. Trawl through the tweets of Hindutva hyper-nationalists and you will see.
Secular Hindu, Secular Muslim
Secularism need not mean being against religion or an acceptance of all religions, but a rejection of caste, gender hierarchies and religious extremism, writes Rajeev Bhargava in The Hindu. He feels that secularism allows people to be partial to their own religion and yet be opposed to any aspect of it that perpetuates intra-religious or inter-religious domination.
Consider the following: a woman is burnt at the stake on allegations of witchcraft; a man is stoned to death for heresy, for holding beliefs or opinions contrary to religious orthodoxy; a woman is not allowed to enter a temple because she is menstruating and hence considered ‘polluted’; a man believed to be an ‘untouchable’ is humiliated and killed for riding a horse, a privilege available only to the upper castes.Common to these outrageous real life instances is that (a) persons are prevented from doing what they want. He/she is excluded, marginalised, oppressed or humiliated on religious or religion-related grounds. And that (b) both the victim and the perpetrator are from the same religious community. Call this intra-religious domination.
Will the Government Wreck Federalism?
P Chidambaram, in his column Across The Aisle for The Indian Express, says that the fire that was lit by the Terms of Reference of the XV Finance Commission (FC) will not be doused by arguments pitting ‘populous and poorer states’ against ‘diligent and developed’ states. He poses a number of questions — can the Centre ask the FC to examine whether revenue grants should be provided when it is the right of the Parliament to provide those grants? How can the PM’s slogan ‘New India-2022’, which is not part of any approved development programme, be mentioned? Which states will benefit by considering the “efforts and progress made in moving towards replacement rate of population growth”?
Under Article 280, it is the constitutional right of the states, together, to get the states’ share of taxes; it is also the constitutional right of each state to get its fair share out of the total states’ share. The FC is no one’s servant; its master is the Constitution alone. The current share of the states (as per the XIV FC) is 42 percent. No one expects that number will be reduced by the XV FC.
India’s Political Parties Must Focus on North-South Convergence
In Hindustan Times, Chanakya looks at how an almost hegemonic party is in power at the Centre and in 21 states, but not in any of the five southern states or the biggest southern Union territory. The reason for this could be an absence of southern leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), thus missing the sensitivities of half the country.
India must remember that if the divide between the Centre and southern India, or between north and south India grows, it will have deep implications for the federal structure, the constitutional order, political stability, economic growth and national unity.
It is to the BJP’s credit that it has adapted and been flexible and broken its exclusivist image in the north. But the party’s emphasis on uniformity – as a key of nationalism – often clouds the respect for diversity. And southern states, with their distinct traditions, languages, political history, social movements, tend to react to this push for uniformity strongly. There is a history to it. States like Tamil Nadu have seen a strong secessionist movement; the politics of Andhra Pradesh changed with the rise of NT Rama Rao purely on the plank of Andhra pride. Do remember the fragile compact on the language policy that was arrived at after much unrest and agitation in the early decades after Independence. Any push at uniformity will draw a backlash.
Pulling a Fast One
G Sampath manages to tickle our funny bone while making a strong point. In a satirical piece for The Hindu, Sampath mulls over turning the mundane act of eating into a dangerous adventure by fasting against the people of Tamil Nadu. Taking a dig, he asks how could Chennaiites blow black balloons at PM Narendra Modi when he had come all the way from Delhi? It is not like he drank all of Cauvery!
When my father in Chennai called to say that people were planning to greet Modi ji with black flags, I told him to go and stand at the airport with a white flag. But which father listens to his son in this Kalyug? He called back to say he couldn’t do it. Apparently, my mother had hidden all the white clothes before leaving for a 10-day Vipassana course. I told him to look properly in the almirah. As usual he became Sivaji Ganesan. “Dei, all I have is a white Rupa Frontline banian. Should I wrap it around the broom in the bathroom and wave it? Will that make you happy?” I put the phone down in disgust.
There May Be a Price to Pay for Online Privacy
In his column in Hindustan Times, Anirudh Bhattacharyya argues that freeware is at the root cause of the Facebook data disaster. Users have become so accustomed to paying nothing for their pleasure, and the trade-off has been that personal details become the currency. The time has come to disrupt the data miners’ operations with willingness to pay for social media services as fair exchange for digitally sandboxing personal information.
Matters aren’t likely to improve immediately, regardless of Zuckerberg’s apologies and appeal for patience, for instance, with artificial intelligence tools being deployed to counter hate speech, in five to 10 years as they get into “the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems”. That statement ought to make plenty of people more nervous, not less, as AI has already been shown to exhibit prejudice, and will operate on how the system is trained. But the jitters shouldn’t stop there.
To Give Dalits Their Rights, BJP Will Have to Dump Sabka Saath and Take Sides
Aakar Patel, in his column Aakarvani published in The Times of India, talks about how ‘sabka saath’ cannot go hand-in-hand with Dalits’ rights. This government can side either with the urban upper castes (middle class) or with Dalits. The middle class is fundamentally anti-Dalit, and this can be put to test by asking oneself: “Do I support reservations?” Patel proposes that in order to empower the oppressed, the strong must be forced to give some way, which might sting but definitely will be a way forward.
But it is clear also that the BJP wants to reach out to and accommodate Dalits in some way, they being part of the Hindu fold. So what can it do? At the moment it is doing what it accuses others of: tokenism. It is putting up memorials and statues — though admittedly not quite at the same rate as its supporters are vandalising other Ambedkar statues across northern India. I was at a conference on how to respond to the Supreme Court order on the SC (POA) Act and the Communist member of Parliament D Raja said: “Ambedkar doesn’t need any honouring. What have you done for Dalits?” Quite so.
North India Deserves Credit for the Demographic Dividend
In his column Swaminomics in The Times of India, SA Aiyar explains how India’s population increase has suddenly turned from a curse to a global advantage. The working age proportion of its population is growing fast and boosting GDP growth, while other countries suffer from ageing populations that crimp growth. The south has long been congratulated for its fertility success, and the north slated for its failure. However, the north can now demand recognition for contributing the most to India’s demographic dividend. To maximise the dividend, argues Aiyar, India must improve its worker’s skills and female labour participation.
The Finance Commission should incentivise good performance by giving some weightage to efforts by states in fiscal effort, quick justice, environmental protection, education and health. That will benefit the high-performance states of the south and west, and alleviate their grievance about the use of 2011 population figures. But they must adjust to the fact that what was once called poor performance in fertility by the northern states can, ironically, now be called high performance in creating future workers.
This Thing Called Race – from America to Wakanda: Bouncing White Boys at a Movie Theatre Tell a New Story
In his column Graffiti in The Times Of India, Gautam Adhikari talks of how he got talking about race supremacy after watching the movie Wakanda — a fairytale about vibranium-powered black Africans. He points out that no great civilisation in history has ever stood on its own exclusive roots, but lies in exchange and migration. Diversity has to be tolerated, though people continue labelling groups into ‘we’ and ‘they,’ thus being prejudiced against evolving identities.
In race matters, assertion of racial differences is far more strident in the authoritarian mindset than in the liberal variety even though the rapid advance of genetic science reveals that while there are some differences in genetic structures of groups of people they are not necessarily based on the mere difference of skin colour or facial features. Any belief in a primordial white or black or brown ‘race’ therefore lacks scientific or historical evidence. The human race is genetically mixed and evolving. You might visit one of those websites that trace genealogy and ancestry to check your own origins.
From The Quint:
We Shouldn’t Politicise Rapes, Right? Wrong
Hey RSS, If Ambedkar Was a ‘True Hindu’, Why Did He Convert?
China’s Shadow Loomed Over Nepal PM Oli’s ‘Successful’ India Visit
What to Expect From PM Modi’s Upcoming Bilateral Visit to China
AAP Needs to Stop Playing Victim Card If It Wants to Stay Relevant
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