Different Places, Same Patterns

Maybe the self-proclaimed liberal and secular folks should take a step back and see why India seems to be headed the RSS/Hindutva way (Actually, they should check whether that’s even true on the scale they believe it’s happening but that’s too much to ask).

Steven Emerson proclaimed on Fox News that there are “places where the governments — like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany — don’t exercise any sovereignty. . . . You basically have zones where sharia courts were set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where the police don’t go in, and where it’s basically a separate country almost, a country within a country”. (Note that Fox is a notoriously right-wing, Bush-supporting news channel in the US, but that doesn’t change the validity of the rest of this blog). As expected, this triggered a huge reaction including a threat to sue from the Paris officials. Emerson and Fox apologized.

Daniel Pipes, however, says that we should do a reality-check. Sure, he concedes, the authorities in those areas with “their overwhelming advantage in force — including military, intelligence, and police” have not entirely ceded control. But, and this is important:
“On the other hand, governments often choose not to impose their will on Muslim-majority areas, allowing them considerable autonomy, including in some cases the sharia courts that Emerson mentioned.”
Based on this weird situation, Pipes says that the English language needs a new term to describe what these areas really are:
“The English language lacks a readily available term for this. And for good reason: I know of no historical parallel, in which a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker immigrant community.”
A historic parallel does exist: it’s called India. But term or no term, this reality needs to be part of the discussion, argues Pipes. Many others in the West feel the same way.

Heard similar accusations and feelings in India? In India, we ban the Satanic Verses because it offends Muslims but allow PK to run even if some Hindus protest. The liberals and secular folks dismiss the latter as a fringe, crazy element but refuse to check whether the former was exactly the same (Or if they do check, they still cave in to their demands). When the Church in India wanted the Da Vinci Code movie banned, some states obliged. When the RSS wants PK banned, the UP state government made the movie tax free!

It’s time the liberals and secular folks realize that a lot of BJP supporters are not right-wing, frothing at the mouth RSS/Hindutva fanatics. Rather, they want the same, consistent course wrt all religions. As Vir Sanghvi points out, those people are just asking for the constitution to be followed!
“Yes, Islam has injunctions against visual representations of the Prophet but those are valid only within the faith – they can have no legal or Constitutional validity in a secular country.”
And with no real choices, they are just falling into the BJP’s lap.

So I say to the self-proclaimed liberal and secular folks, be consistent and demand that the constitution be followed and you would take away a big chunk of the BJP supporters overnight. And the rest of the blame for the increasing BJP support lies with the self-proclaimed moderate Muslim who keeps silent all the time. Because, then “it is the mullahs who will continue to speak for the community”. And every such action will have a reaction. Or if you don’t like Newton, it’s just karma at work. I guess the secular, liberal folks wouldn’t like that term either since they hate everything Hindu.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more