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Saffron lessons in patriotism

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Saffron lessons in patriotism


Aijaz Zaka Syed
Saturday, January 29, 2011


The writer is a Dubai-based writer who has written extensively on the Middle East and South Asia.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, warned Dr Samuel Johnson. I wonder what the celebrated English writer and lexicographer would have said about our friends from the Bharatiya Janata Party who love to wear their patriotism on their sleeve, ever ready to wave their flags and tridents at the drop of a hat. One wouldn’t mind their patriotic zeal so much if it weren’t for their tendency to offer condescending lessons in nationalism to the rest of the world, implying everyone except them is a traitor.

Every time it finds itself painted in a corner or gets that sinking feeling that it’s running out of issues to keep itself in the media spotlight, it dips into its deep bag of tricks. Like the Bedu’s camel, patriotism – or politics of patriotism rather – is the cure-all panacea for the Hindutva brigade. Combined with bigotry, ignorance and hatred, this competitive patriotism could be really lethal.

One has lost the count of hate-spewing yatras the party has organised over the past couple of decades to burnish its image not just as the champion of the Hindus but Bharat Mata (mother India) itself. And it always seems to work. Who cares if such marches to cuckoo land end up driving the nation of a billion people over the edge? How many innocents are consumed by its cauldron of hatred and bigotry matters little. What really counts is how many people are taken in by your rhetoric and end up voting for you. At the end of the day, it’s all about power.

This is not the first time the Hindutva brigade has given the call to hoist the Indian flag in Srinagar, the scenic capital of Jammu and Kashmir. We have been here before. Exactly a decade ago, Murli Manohar Joshi launched an Ekta (unity) yatra from Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India, to Kashmir. After much hand-wringing and sleepless nights in Delhi and Srinagar, Joshi was rescued by security forces from his own dangerous devices.

Joshi was of course trying to do a Lal Krishna Advani after stepping into his oversized shoes. India can never forget the terror and devastation sparked by Advani’s rath yatra in September 1990, which eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, not to mention the thousands of innocent lives lost in communal violence that followed.

India has yet to recover from that long winter of madness in the 1990s. However, it helped the BJP grow and mutate from a marginal player with two members in parliament into the ‘natural party of governance’, as it once lionized itself. No wonder the BJP and its numerous avatars are on an endless road trip, perpetually milking the golden cow called patriotism. Consequences for the country be damned!

This is what the party tried to do all over again this week with its campaign to hoist the tricolour at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. The stated objective of this yatra was to protect the nation’s unity and pride and honour. Is the pride and honour of this amazing democracy so fragile that it constantly needs the Hindutva forces to protect it? As someone said, a politician can drape himself in the flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine if he truly cares for the nation or not.

The truth is, this is nothing but old-fashioned politics of opportunism. It’s just another cheap, attention-grabbing tactic. Or should we say, attention-diverting tactic? There’s a distinct possibility that the BJP came up with the idea of Kashmir yatra to deflect the undesirable spotlight chasing the Hindu groups after the recent revelations of RSS leader Swami Aseemanand linking the saffron brotherhood to numerous terror attacks across the country.

Aseemanand’s stunning confessions implicating the Hindutva groups in terror strikes on the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer shrine and Malegaon mosque, blamed all these years on local Muslims, have caught the RSS and company with their pants (shorts?) down.

Whatever the reason, the BJP is out to extract maximum mileage out of a sensitive issue like Kashmir all over again, at a time when the governing Congress is finding the going tough. To the opposition’s glee, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is turning out to be a monumental disaster. The World Bank-trained economist with impeccable credentials has had the rare distinction of presiding over some of the biggest corruption scams in the nation’s history, squandering all the goodwill the Congress had generated under Sonia Gandhi.

Kashmir remains on Hindutva’s radar for the very same reasons that it has doggedly refused to acknowledge all these years. Even as the BJP and company refuse to acknowledge the special status of the Himalayan state and all the promises we made to the Kashmiris when they decided to join India after the Independence, they end up training the global spotlight on the K conundrum with these shenanigans.

Where were these patriots when Kashmir was burning until recently? Throughout last year, the state was rocked by fierce protests that were not just against governments in Srinagar and Delhi and security forces, they were a vote against all that has been visited on the state in the past six decades or so. In the last quarter century, Kashmir has lost nearly a hundred thousand people to this never ending siege within. Thousands of men, both young and old, have simply vanished. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri pandits have been living in refugee camps in Delhi and elsewhere for years.

In the recent protests demanding the withdrawal of omnipresent security forces, more than a hundred youths, some as young as 13, died in police firing. Even if those boys were hurling stones at the security forces, how do we justify such lethal use of force against civilians? Protests are not unusual in other parts of India. But nowhere else in the country do the troops open fire on a crowd of protesters. The reality is, even as we Indians proclaim Kashmir to be an “integral part” of India, we seldom view the Kashmiris as part of the mainstream.

For the Sangh fanatics and much of the establishment, Kashmir is merely a prized piece of territory that we must protect at any cost from the devious designs of Pakistan and the ISI. The Kashmiri people were never part of this scheme of things. As Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in The Hindu this week, this approach is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.

But I think this is less about Kashmir and more about the skewed worldview of the Hindutva clan, which wants to paint this melting pot of a nation with myriad identities and voices in its own colour. Now everyone is entitled to his/her views and beliefs and change the world according to them. The trouble arises only when you tend to accomplish this at gunpoint, as our Taliban comrades once did – and the Hindutva forces have been doing all these years. In this idea of India, there’s no place for nonconformity or cultural and ideological diversity.

This will not go on forever though. India is not the country it used to be, say when the Hindu extremists held the entire country to ransom with their temple-mosque politics. India and Indians as a nation have moved on. Today, they have little patience for those who not only remain handcuffed to history; they want the rest of the country to sleepwalk back into the past. Globalisation and the unprecedented economic empowerment of middle classes, and those trying to catch up fast, have transformed the country and its outlook. India has truly arrived and is enjoying its new exalted status. It will not tolerate anyone who tries to spoil the party by dividing Indians along narrow religious and sectarian lines.




Saffron lessons in patriotism
 
One has lost the count of hate-spewing yatras the party has organised over the past couple of decades to burnish its image not just as the champion of the Hindus but Bharat Mata (mother India) itself. And it always seems to work. Who cares if such marches to cuckoo land end up driving the nation of a billion people over the edge? How many innocents are consumed by its cauldron of hatred and bigotry matters little. What really counts is how many people are taken in by your rhetoric and end up voting for you. At the end of the day, it’s all about power.

Aseemanand’s stunning confessions implicating the Hindutva groups in terror strikes on the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer shrine and Malegaon mosque, blamed all these years on local Muslims, have caught the RSS and company with their pants (shorts?) down.
India is not the country it used to be, say when the Hindu extremists held the entire country to ransom with their temple-mosque politics. India and Indians as a nation have moved on. Today, they have little patience for those who not only remain handcuffed to history; they want the rest of the country to sleepwalk back into the past. Globalisation and the unprecedented economic empowerment of middle classes, and those trying to catch up fast, have transformed the country and its outlook. India has truly arrived and is enjoying its new exalted status. It will not tolerate anyone who tries to spoil the party by dividing Indians along narrow religious and sectarian lines.

Dear Mr. Aijaz Zaka Syed

people of all faiths are reacting to Islamic violence and are radicalizing. The destruction of Babri Mosque, for example, was in effect a reaction of Hindus to Islamic expansionism. They destroyed the mosque because it was built on the site where the temple of Ayodhaya that commemorated Rama’s birthplace had ones stood. That temple was destroyed by the Muslim governor Mir Baqi in 1527.
Everywhere you see a mosque is destroyed you can find a trail of blood that leads to Islamic violence and jihad. The Serbian war against the Kosovo and Bosnia was a reaction to centuries of abuse by Muslims. There is a tower made of human sculls built by Muslim invaders of Serbia. Finally the Serbs snapped. That is not to condone what they did, but to explain where this hatred originated. Let us be fair and look beyond the events and into their root causes. The root cause of most evil perpetrated in the world can be traced to Islam.
Today, Chinese are reacting to Muslims. On the surface this looks like another case of human rights abuses that the Chinese government is known for. But beneath that lies a history that needs to be taken into consideration.
Muslims in China n India(kashmir) demand autonomy and sessetion. But as far as Indians n Chinese are concerned these people are immigrants and invaders. It is normal for the Indians n Chinese to be defensive and protective or their country.
There are many parts of Europe that are no-go zones for non-Muslims. Muslim immigrants have taken these quarters and not even police is allowed to go there. The Europeans have become euphemized and are incapable of defending their countries, but Indians and Chinese are still patriotic. Hence, the harsh reaction.
However, let us be fair. Hindus were not originally violent and intolerant. Generally speaking hindus are the most tolerant people. If you see a group of Hindus are becoming radicalized it is because they are reacting to Islamic aggression. The violence and the intolerance that you see in some Hindus is not part of their religious teaching, it is their reaction to Islamic violence. In a sense, they are inspired by the violence of Islam.

Thoughts are viral. We humans influence each other’s thinking. Ideas pass from one person to another. They mutate in their new habitat and adapt to the circumstances.

So it is shortsighted to blame Hindus for for everything. This intolerance is not inspired by Hinduism. What you see is the reflection of the intolerance of Islam.
 
Just give a reply relevant to the topic that does not involve I hate you , you hate me to the Thread starter.
Disagree, give a fitting rebuttal...
 
Dear Mr. Aijaz Zaka Syed

people of all faiths are reacting to Islamic violence and are radicalizing. The destruction of Babri Mosque, for example, was in effect a reaction of Hindus to Islamic expansionism. They destroyed the mosque because it was built on the site where the temple of Ayodhaya that commemorated Rama’s birthplace had ones stood. That temple was destroyed by the Muslim governor Mir Baqi in 1527.
Everywhere you see a mosque is destroyed you can find a trail of blood that leads to Islamic violence and jihad. The Serbian war against the Kosovo and Bosnia was a reaction to centuries of abuse by Muslims. There is a tower made of human sculls built by Muslim invaders of Serbia. Finally the Serbs snapped. That is not to condone what they did, but to explain where this hatred originated. Let us be fair and look beyond the events and into their root causes. The root cause of most evil perpetrated in the world can be traced to Islam.
Today, Chinese are reacting to Muslims. On the surface this looks like another case of human rights abuses that the Chinese government is known for. But beneath that lies a history that needs to be taken into consideration.
Muslims in China n India(kashmir) demand autonomy and sessetion. But as far as Indians n Chinese are concerned these people are immigrants and invaders. It is normal for the Indians n Chinese to be defensive and protective or their country.
There are many parts of Europe that are no-go zones for non-Muslims. Muslim immigrants have taken these quarters and not even police is allowed to go there. The Europeans have become euphemized and are incapable of defending their countries, but Indians and Chinese are still patriotic. Hence, the harsh reaction.
However, let us be fair. Hindus were not originally violent and intolerant. Generally speaking hindus are the most tolerant people. If you see a group of Hindus are becoming radicalized it is because they are reacting to Islamic aggression. The violence and the intolerance that you see in some Hindus is not part of their religious teaching, it is their reaction to Islamic violence. In a sense, they are inspired by the violence of Islam.

Thoughts are viral. We humans influence each other’s thinking. Ideas pass from one person to another. They mutate in their new habitat and adapt to the circumstances.

So it is shortsighted to blame Hindus for for everything. This intolerance is not inspired by Hinduism. What you see is the reflection of the intolerance of Islam.

I respectfully diagree sir.How can u hold the people responsible 4 what was done by their ancestors way back in 1527.Thats just insane.How r we then ny different from those rulers??

Thoughts are viral. We humans influence each other’s thinking. Ideas pass from one person to another. They mutate in their new habitat and adapt to the circumstances.
Q-Y do u think it was different in case of the british??
 
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, warned Dr Samuel Johnson. I wonder what the celebrated English writer and lexicographer would have said about our friends from the Bharatiya Janata Party who love to wear their patriotism on their sleeve, ever ready to wave their flags and tridents at the drop of a hat. [/B]One wouldn’t mind their patriotic zeal so much if it weren’t for their tendency to offer condescending lessons in nationalism to the rest of the world, implying everyone except them is a traitor.

Every time it finds itself painted in a corner or gets that sinking feeling that it’s running out of issues to keep itself in the media spotlight, it dips into its deep bag of tricks. Like the Bedu’s camel, patriotism – or politics of patriotism rather – is the cure-all panacea for the Hindutva brigade. Combined with bigotry, ignorance and hatred, this competitive patriotism could be really lethal.

One has lost the count of hate-spewing yatras the party has organised over the past couple of decades to burnish its image not just as the champion of the Hindus but Bharat Mata (mother India) itself. And it always seems to work. Who cares if such marches to cuckoo land end up driving the nation of a billion people over the edge? How many innocents are consumed by its cauldron of hatred and bigotry matters little. What really counts is how many people are taken in by your rhetoric and end up voting for you. At the end of the day, it’s all about power.

This is not the first time the Hindutva brigade has given the call to hoist the Indian flag in Srinagar, the scenic capital of Jammu and Kashmir. We have been here before. Exactly a decade ago, Murli Manohar Joshi launched an Ekta (unity) yatra from Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India, to Kashmir. After much hand-wringing and sleepless nights in Delhi and Srinagar, Joshi was rescued by security forces from his own dangerous devices.

Joshi was of course trying to do a Lal Krishna Advani after stepping into his oversized shoes. India can never forget the terror and devastation sparked by Advani’s rath yatra in September 1990, which eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, not to mention the thousands of innocent lives lost in communal violence that followed.

India has yet to recover from that long winter of madness in the 1990s. However, it helped the BJP grow and mutate from a marginal player with two members in parliament into the ‘natural party of governance’, as it once lionized itself. No wonder the BJP and its numerous avatars are on an endless road trip, perpetually milking the golden cow called patriotism. Consequences for the country be damned!

This is what the party tried to do all over again this week with its campaign to hoist the tricolour at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. The stated objective of this yatra was to protect the nation’s unity and pride and honour. Is the pride and honour of this amazing democracy so fragile that it constantly needs the Hindutva forces to protect it? As someone said, a politician can drape himself in the flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine if he truly cares for the nation or not.

The truth is, this is nothing but old-fashioned politics of opportunism. It’s just another cheap, attention-grabbing tactic. Or should we say, attention-diverting tactic? There’s a distinct possibility that the BJP came up with the idea of Kashmir yatra to deflect the undesirable spotlight chasing the Hindu groups after the recent revelations of RSS leader Swami Aseemanand linking the saffron brotherhood to numerous terror attacks across the country.

Aseemanand’s stunning confessions implicating the Hindutva groups in terror strikes on the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer shrine and Malegaon mosque, blamed all these years on local Muslims, have caught the RSS and company with their pants (shorts?) down.

Whatever the reason, the BJP is out to extract maximum mileage out of a sensitive issue like Kashmir all over again, at a time when the governing Congress is finding the going tough. To the opposition’s glee, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is turning out to be a monumental disaster. The World Bank-trained economist with impeccable credentials has had the rare distinction of presiding over some of the biggest corruption scams in the nation’s history, squandering all the goodwill the Congress had generated under Sonia Gandhi

Kashmir remains on Hindutva’s radar for the very same reasons that it has doggedly refused to acknowledge all these years. Even as the BJP and company refuse to acknowledge the special status of the Himalayan state and all the promises we made to the Kashmiris when they decided to join India after the Independence, they end up training the global spotlight on the K conundrum with these shenanigans.

Where were these patriots when Kashmir was burning until recently? Throughout last year, the state was rocked by fierce protests that were not just against governments in Srinagar and Delhi and security forces, they were a vote against all that has been visited on the state in the past six decades or so. In the last quarter century, Kashmir has lost nearly a hundred thousand people to this never ending siege within. Thousands of men, both young and old, have simply vanished. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri pandits have been living in refugee camps in Delhi and elsewhere for years.

In the recent protests demanding the withdrawal of omnipresent security forces, more than a hundred youths, some as young as 13, died in police firing. Even if those boys were hurling stones at the security forces, how do we justify such lethal use of force against civilians? Protests are not unusual in other parts of India. But nowhere else in the country do the troops open fire on a crowd of protesters. The reality is, even as we Indians proclaim Kashmir to be an “integral part” of India, we seldom view the Kashmiris as part of the mainstream.

For the Sangh fanatics and much of the establishment, Kashmir is merely a prized piece of territory that we must protect at any cost from the devious designs of Pakistan and the ISI. The Kashmiri people were never part of this scheme of things. As Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in The Hindu this week, this approach is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.

But I think this is less about Kashmir and more about the skewed worldview of the Hindutva clan, which wants to paint this melting pot of a nation with myriad identities and voices in its own colour. Now everyone is entitled to his/her views and beliefs and change the world according to them. The trouble arises only when you tend to accomplish this at gunpoint, as our Taliban comrades once did – and the Hindutva forces have been doing all these years. In this idea of India, there’s no place for nonconformity or cultural and ideological diversity.

This will not go on forever though. India is not the country it used to be, say when the Hindu extremists held the entire country to ransom with their temple-mosque politics. India and Indians as a nation have moved on. Today, they have little patience for those who not only remain handcuffed to history; they want the rest of the country to sleepwalk back into the past. Globalisation and the unprecedented economic empowerment of middle classes, and those trying to catch up fast, have transformed the country and its outlook. India has truly arrived and is enjoying its new exalted status. It will not tolerate anyone who tries to spoil the party by dividing Indians along narrow religious and sectarian lines.




Saffron lessons in patriotism



Three quick points :

1) Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India guarentees a citizen of India to hoist the national flag in any part of India. So BJP is justified in its Yatra.

2)Secondly regarding Swami Aseemanand. We now have two sets of confessions on behalf of two groups, LeT (by Dawood Gilani) and Abhinav Bharat (by Swami Aseemanad) . And considering the bollywoodish plot of Swami Aseemanand whereby he reforms on seeing a benevolent Muslim,how they videotaped and stored all their secret bomb making sessions safely in a laptop for the police to utilise againt them and more important of them all how he wrote a letter to Zardari to give him a chance to reform Hafiz Sayed, one is more inclined to go along with the confession of Dawood Gilani .

So basically the article is a conglomerate of small small pieces of shyt into a larger,more stinking shyt.

3) The most suprising of all - the article speaks that MMS had squandered all the good will that the Congress go because of Sonia Gandhi. Seriously ?? :lol:

Congress got a second chance only because of a man called MMS.
 
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I respectfully diagree sir.How can u hold the people responsible 4 what was done by their ancestors way back in 1527.Thats just insane.How r we then ny different from those rulers??

People should not and were not held responsible for what outside invaders (Only 0.01% or less of Indian muslims can claim ancestry to the Central Asians) who happened to be of the same religion ,did.

But nothing wrong in asking for a site that is supposed to be one of your holiest and upon which a foreign invader forcefully imposed his culture that was alien to India/Bharat.
 
^^All that what Swami Asimananda says he heard Mr Sunil joshi,now dead,saying its he was involved in these blast.

In related news CBI refused the bail appeal of musim men in accused malegoan blast inspite of Swami Asimananda confession about hindu involvement.

some serious wrangling going on between CBI and NIA who holds the custody of Asimananda.
 
^^All that what Swami Asimananda says he heard Mr Sunil joshi,now dead,saying its he was involved in these blast.

In related news CBI refused the bail appeal of musim men in accused malegoan blast inspite of Swami Asimananda confession about hindu involvement.

some serious wrangling going on between CBI and NIA who holds the custody of Asimananda.

Its just that the Congress has started preparing for the next General election early and earnestly and we can expect more in the future.

The recent revelation of Mr.Digvijay Singh that it is not Jinnah, but Savarkar who was responsible for Pakistan was another move in the direction.

But anyway as a added bonus Pakistanis will from now on will start liking RSS for making possible Pakistan. :lol:
 
Three quick points :

1) Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India guarentees a citizen of India to hoist the national flag in any part of India. So BJP is justified in its Yatra.
So why only kashmir why not maoist affected area where black flags were raised on this republic day.BJP wanted to advance it communal agenda in the grab of hoisting flag at lal chowk.

2)Secondly regarding Swami Aseemanand. We now have two sets of confessions on behalf of two groups, LeT (by Dawood Gilani) and Abhinav Bharat (by Swami Aseemanad) . And considering the bollywoodish plot of Swami Aseemanand whereby he reforms on seeing a benevolent Muslim,how they videotaped and stored all their secret bomb making sessions safely in a laptop for the police to utilise againt them and more important of them all how he wrote a letter to Zardari to give him a chance to reform Hafiz Sayed, one is more inclined to go along with the confession of Dawood Gilani .

So basically the article is a conglomerate of small small pieces of shyt into a larger,more stinking shyt.
And both confession reports emerged from indian govt sources.Why blame reporter for stinking shyt created by GOI.

3) The most suprising of all - the article speaks that MMS had squandered all the good will that the Congress go because of Sonia Gandhi. Seriously ?? :lol:

Congress got a second chance only because of a man called MMS.
And how jurno is responsible for stinking indian shyt in domestic politics.
 
So why only kashmir why not maoist affected area where black flags were raised on this republic day.BJP wanted to advance it communal agenda in the grab of hoisting flag at lal chowk.

Whatever - Article 19 a is crystal clear that any citizen of India can hoist the Tricolor in any part of India. So BJP decided Kashmir.Simple.

And both confession reports emerged from indian govt sources.Why blame reporter for stinking shyt created by GOI.

Because the 'author' does not give both the sides of the coin and does not even mention about David Headley's claims. Instead he/she squarely puts the blame on Abhinav Bharat.

A biased article which wilfully potrays one community as wrong without telling the other part also is indeed stinking shyt.

And how jurno is responsible for stinking indian shyt in domestic politics.

Because he/she is a journo and is supposed to know the abcd of Indian politics.
 
Whatever - Article 19 a is crystal clear that any citizen of India can hoist the Tricolor in any part of India. So BJP decided Kashmir.Simple.
Then let BJP challenge his govt in court.period.



Because the 'author' does not give both the sides of the coin and does not even mention about David Headley's claims. Instead he/she squarely puts the blame on Abhinav Bharat.
confusion is created by GOI not him so y blame him for his conclusions.

A biased article which wilfully potrays one community as wrong without telling the other part also is indeed stinking shyt.
Ah...now true words came out.arent u too to blame for gross generalization of islamic terrorism or about pakistan.when the same shoe is other foot u squirm and complain.



Because he/she is a journo and is supposed to know the abcd of Indian politics.
its not incumbent on him to know about the nautanki of indian politics.he is writing article on hindu terror not on indian politics.
 
Then let BJP challenge his govt in court.period.

As it already has.

confusion is created by GOI not him so y blame him for his conclusions.

Because these are HIS conclusions. Is that so hard to understand?

Ah...now true words came out.arent u too to blame for gross generalization of islamic terrorism or about pakistan.when the same shoe is other foot u squirm and complain.

So let me get this straight. You ADMIT that this article is a gross generalization? And yet you posted it?

Two wrongs don't make a right my dear.

its not incumbent on him to know about the nautanki of indian politics.he is writing article on hindu terror not on indian politics.

Yes, it is, if it affects the topic of his article. This is what is called unresearched journalism, which is frowned upon in journalistic circles.
 

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