The recent episodes of lynching makes one worried about the rickety path an innocuous Hindu is following that is turning him and the larger community into an ossified and dare I say, a senile group.
Tag: hindutva
Again, some days ago, the controversial Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia came to Assam and created yet another hullabaloo in the state. He visited an arms training camp organized by the outfit in Hojai in central Assam
There was a charge made recently by BJP’s Swapan Dasgupta that the protest by people determinedly raising their voices under the banner of ‘Not in My Name’, against targeted lynching of Muslims was an extravagant display of rootless cosmopolitanism. The responses have been “we are not rootless cosmopolitans”. We are often quick to jump into defensive mode in this fashion, and then try to prove how we are more rooted than Baba Ramdev or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or Yogi Adityanath. In other words, we try to show how we are superior to these in being rooted. But we might need to ask whether rootless cosmopolitanism is necessarily the bad thing it is suggested to be.
It is fate of marginal groups everywhere to bear the burden of this ‘double-consciousness’ – one’s self-worth, one’s sense of self is never one’s own, but always refracted through the eyes of the powerful, who gazes at him with ‘contempt and pity’. As time goes by, one starts believing in the narrative of the dominant group, one internalizes others’ judgements about him.
Why Two Hundred Ordinary Hindus Did Not See A Dead Muslim Child On A Railway Platform In North India
The Hindus on the Asoti railway platform managed to collectively not see a 15 year old Muslim boy being stabbed to death. Then they collectively, but without prior agreement, continued to not see what they had seen after the event. This is the uniquely terrifying aspect of this incident on which this report reflects: the totalising force of an unspoken, but collectively binding, agreement between Hindus to not see the dead body of a Muslim child.
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
For years, a needless ideological battle has been fought in India. The root of the debate is a seemingly irrelevant question – Did the ancient Indian “Vedic” civilisation originate in India or did it come to India from outside?
Ha kine ki khyndiat bnai ka BJP ha Meghalaya ka sdang ban kop ba Kan jop suk ia ka ileksion 2018 ka ban sa long ha Meghalaya. Kawei na ki daw ba pynlong ia kane ka parti ban kren kob kumtei dei namar ba ka ong ba bun ki MLA/MDC jong ka Congress kin phet seng lut sha ka BJP. Ngi dei ban sngew khia ia kane ka jingkren ka BJP namar ka jingkiew sted ka BJP ha kylleng ka ri India bad khamtam shatei ka thain mihngi ka dei ka jingphet krad ki nongialam congress sha ka BJP naduh ba u Narendra Modi u jop suk ha ka ileksion 2014.
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Late Prof. G. G. Swell, MP from Shillong, speaking in the Indian Parliament on Beef eating North East and BJP’s divisive cow politics
There aren’t too many people (who aren’t BJP sympathizers) who would disagree that Goswami’s Republic is a menace to democracy. There will be fewer journalists who would disagree that Goswami’s Republic isn’t journalism even by the worst yardstick. In that scenario I believe that the best way to contain this scourge would be for all people who are for democracy and ethical journalism – including non-NDA political parties to boycott Goswami’s anti-democratic republic.
I am a Hindu and in these murderous Hindu times
I think they won’t kill me
But what would I do if spared
On 14th March, a local Assamese news channel – News Live, owned and managed by the wife of the most powerful Assam BJP minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, connected few dots with ‘creative journalism’ and went on a frenzy that a fatwa has been issued by 46 Muslim clerics against Nahid Afreen. Soon other local news channels jumped into the war of TRP. Soon came the two midnight tweets of Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal adding fuel to the fire.
On the 3rd of February, ABVP called a bandh in Jai Narain Vyas University (JNVU), Jodhpur, forcibly stopping classes and demanding suspension of the organizers of a conference and police action against them, as well as against myself. Police complaints have now been lodged, and perhaps FIRs, we hear. The charge? The conference, and my lecture in particular, was anti-national.
The government’s intention of amending the Citizenship Act via the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 has been met with anger, anxiety, and unrest across Assam. Faced with a strident opposition to the proposed amendments from across Assam in the last few weeks, the BJP—with the support of a number of Bengali organisations as well—has reoriented its strategy by calling on the Bengali-speaking community to identify themselves as Assamese-speakers. Key leaders such as Himanta Biswa Sarma have advocated the assimilation of the Bengali-speakers of Barak into Assamese linguistic and cultural identity. Others have suggested that they “become Assamese” while maintaining their linguistic identity, and yet others have called on them to return Assamese as their mother-tongue in the Census.
It’s a slim book with big fonts.
And you will be done reading it from cover to cover in less than two hours.
1. Do poor have 500 notes?
2. He/She was old. Could have died at home too. How can you blame demonetisation?
3. Things are difficult, but it is for the greater good of the nation.
4. Look how India is changing to digital transactions overnight…
5. Why are people not going to Govt Hospitals? They accept old notes.
6. Wait for a few months before you criticize the move.
7. Oh, how much black money did you have you anti-national, sickular, libtard, commie?
8. You can stand in queue for the tickets to 1st day 1st show of a movie but cannot for the bank?
9. Oh, so who do you want instead? Rahul aka Pappu or Kejri the Nautanki?
At a recent talk show by an international television channel, the former spokesperson of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and present general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Ram Madhav, firmly asserted that the ideology of the RSS was neither supremacist, nor dominant or aggressive. Leave alone fascist.
There are several objections to the use of the term “Fascism” to describe the contemporary Indian sociopolitical condition. A mere mention of the word seems to open a Pandora’s box.
As you will no doubt note, the recipes for beef have been ‘curated’ around the noble and upright theme of rejecting Hindutva as an intrinsically Indian way of looking at the world.
Blood pressure is rising across the country. It is caused by a new viral fever called patriotic nationalism. Here are a few images of mild and not so everyday symptoms of Patriotic Lovearia we are suffering from.
Last decade, from 2000-2010, was that of political ignorance. Except India Shining, Shahrukh Khan winning more Filmfare awards, a pogrom, Orkut being taken over by Facebook and landline phones being replaced by mobile phones, not much happened in the country. Bollywood, western food joints and discounted foreign clothing brands, easy access to job market and the dot com world kept the youth busy. Politics did not interest them.
Bastar today is witness to the most cynical mockery of constitutional values and civil liberties. Under cover of a war to ‘save Bastar from Maoism,’ or ‘make Bastar safe for democracy’, the Constitution is in fact being trampled to ‘make Bastar safe for corporations’ and ‘purify Bastar for the RSS.’ Every day, every week, there are horrific atrocities being unleashed on Bastar’s people – and the incidents outlined in this report should be seen, not as isolated aberrations but as the tip of the iceberg. Raiot is extracting the chilling testimonies of persecuted Christians in Bastar from AIPF report BASTAR-WHERE THE CONSTITUTION STANDS SUSPENDED.
In the recent decades right wing politics has appropriated not merely tribal historical figures like Rani Gaidinliu in Nagaland/Manipur but also many such tribal icons across the country. A similar story emerges within the context of the Indal offerings associated with the tribal Barela and Bhil tribal communities of Western Madhya Pradesh.
Modi’s contradictions and lies channel the confusions of his supporters perfectly. In a manner reminiscent of the vanguards of China’s Cultural Revolution or the nativists flocking to Donald Trump, they accuse the old elites of holding back the nation and the culture from true greatness. They attack those responsible for the ruined past, the uncertain future, and the endless present. They assail the “anti-nationals” who stand in their way, beating and molesting people while shouting, “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” They demand people say it to prove they are not traitors, emboldened by a meeting of the BJP in March, led by Modi, that declared a refusal to use the slogan as tantamount to disrespecting the Indian constitution. They hammer, with swords and guns and smartphones and double-digit growth, at the doors of the beef-eaters, the environmentalists, the university students, the feminists, the Dalits, the leftists, the dissenting writers, the skeptics, the “anti-nationals”—anyone who will not declare, both fists clenched, “Bharat Mata Ki Jai!”
The BJP has become known for its mass campaigns to mobilise Hindus. Days of rioting in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 saw the shared faith spaces such as the tomb of the poet Vali Gujarati razed in what has been called a “systematic attempt to wipe out an entire culture”. The morning after, a statue of the Hindu God Hanuman had been placed on top of the rubble. Maya Kodnani, a former BJP state minister, was convicted of murder and incitement to murder during the riots.
Would we speak of Muslim killings in Assam?
On 30 June 2017, almost two hundred protesters who had gathered together to draw attention of the Assam government towards the concerns of the citizens of the state in relation to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Doubtful voters (D-voters) issue at Kharbazaar in Assam’s Goalpara district were dispersed by the district police administration during which an youth named Yakub Ali was shot dead by the police.
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