A story in The Times of India says activists of a right-wing Hindu outfit are parading the streets of Bhopal asking storekeepers to “tear down hoardings advertising lingerie and cover up mannequins showcasing women’s undergarments.” The storekeepers are being told ‘‘not to display lingerie in public.’’
‘‘Your mannequins should wear sarees, not underwear. From now on, keep all undergarments inside. Show it to the customer when he or she asks for it. Five days from now if undergarments are still hanging outside, we will light a bonfire of the lingerie,’’ threatened the leader of the group.
Bhopal is about 350 km (six-hour drive) from Khajuraho, the temple city famous for erotic sculptures.
Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena, has criticised cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar over his remarks that Mumbai belonged to all Indians. The right wing party champions the rights of local people, the Maharashtrians, often with violence and intimidation. Sena offshoot the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), run by Thackeray’s nephew Raj Thackeray, has also taken up the “Maharashtra for Maharashtrians” cause.
Sachin Tendulkar had said, “I am a Maharashtrian and I am extremely proud of that. But I am an Indian first. And Mumbai belongs to all Indians.”
Now, in an open letter addressed to the cricketer in the Sena mouthpiece Saamna, Thackeray has slammed Tendulkar for “hurting Marathi sentiments.”
The Indian Express has the full text of Thackeray’s ‘open letter’ translated from Marathi:
Dear Sachin,
You have played like a king on the playground. You have got international fame, lots of money. You have not only become a lakhpati or crorepati but also an abjopati (billionaire). But nobody is complaining about it. Instead, we are proud (of you)! On the playground you are shining with a new glow. But before the Marathi mind could come to terms with your straight drive, you made a statement — “Though I am proud of being a Marathi and a Maharashtrian, I am a Hindustani first” — at a press conference, leaving cricket and venturing into politics. You have said something more: “Mumbai is not the monopoly of anyone. All people of Hindustan have an equal right over Mumbai.”
Sachin, the Marathi mind was shattered after hearing this. Was it necessary to say this when everyone is poised to grab Mumbai? Why did you take this ‘cheeky-single’ while talking about your Marathi pride? Here you are ‘run out’ on the pitch of Marathi Manoos. We don’t understand why only the Marathi Manoos get such epileptic fits? (You don’t know) how Marathi Manoos secured Mumbai, as you were not even born then. Maneater Murderji Morarji Desai had gone on a rampage. This rampage resulted in Marathi Manoos bleeding on the streets. Hundred-and-five Marathi people sacrificed their lives for Mumbai. This Mumbai can’t belong to the father of any parprantiya (people belonging to another region). More:
The Sangh Parivar is too broad a term. It incorporates the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Sri Ram Sene, Stree Shakti, Vyapari Sangh, Vanvasi Kalyan outfits and several other front organisations. It is a vast network of dedicated activists, stretching from Arunachal to Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu to Tripura and Gujarat to Kashmir.
In the past 30 years however, these outfits, and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the original gene, have ceased to attract the young. The shakhas have either disappeared or are virtually deserted. The top leadership is all above 70, the second rank is in the age group of 50-65. The third rank is thin and hovers around the age of 40. Then it gets emptier and emptier except in organisations like Bajrang Dal or Sri Ram Sene, where the lumpen join, because they get some kind of activity and identity. At one level, it is a reflection of rural and urban unemployment; at another, it is a manifestation of cultural frustration. More:
With nationalist demagogues rising to power in both India and Israel, Pankaj Mishra examines the parallel histories of violent partition, ethnic cleansing and militant patriotism that have led both countries into a moral wilderness. From The National:
Narendra Modi
My grandfather had no interest in Judaism, or in any of India’s many faiths. Like many Hindu nationalists and Zionists, he was a secularist, impatient with religion’s unworldliness. He admired Israel for its proud and clear national identity – for the sharply defined religious and cultural ideology of Zionism and the patriotism it inculcated in Israel’s citizens. Israel, which was building a new nation in splendid isolation, surrounded by Arab enemies, knew what India did not: how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood, that of force and more force.
India, by comparison, was a pitiably incoherent and timid nation-state, its claims to democracy, socialism and secularism compromised by a corrupt government’s appeasement of minorities (mainly Muslim) and neglect of Hindu heritage.
Hindu nationalism was much less about venerating Hinduism – most nationalists were not religious – than about constructing a strong, culturally homogenous nation state of the kind that had begun to emerge in post-Enlightenment Europe in the 19th century. Like many Hindu nationalists, past and present, my grandfather was led by his obsession with national cohesion into an admiration for Nazi Germany.
Mayaben Kodnani, minister for women and child development in the Narendra Modi cabinet, has been arrested in connection with the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002 in which more than 1,000 people were killed. Kodnani is alleged to have led mobs that attacked Muslims in at least two areas where at least 106 people were killed.
Hindu mobs rampaged through Muslim neighbourhoods in Gujarat between February and May 2002 after Muslims were blamed for a fire on a train that killed 60 Hindu pilgrims.
A special investigating team appointed by the Supreme Court of India to investigate Gujarat riot cases in Gujarat says more than a dozen witnesses saw an armed Kodnani leading the rioters.
More here. And read her profile, The rise and fall of Maya Kodnani, in The Indian Express:
In response to the recent acts of moral policing by right-wing Hindu groups, a Bangalore-based group has launched a campaign to support India’s “Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women.”
[Last month, members of a self-styled pro-Hindu moral brigade forced their way into a pub in India's coastal city of Mangalore and assaulted some young girls for "violating traditional Indian norms" and behaving in an "obscene manner." The men belonged to a right wing group called Sri Rama Sene (Lord Ram's Army). Read that story here]
The “Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women” will collect pink underwear and send them to the men behind the pub attack on Valentine’s Day on Saturday.
The “Pink Chaddi” campaign started as a group on Facebook on February 5 by a young woman, has already enrolled more than 3,000 members – women and men — with many more circulating mails asking people to donate pink underwear to temporary offices set up in different cities, or to send the material directly to Sri Ram Sena office.
Says Nisha Sudan, a journalist working with a news portal who started “The “Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women” : “We had to respond in some way or the other because if we don’t then these guys will win. Pink chaddis are nothing but a metaphor to how disgusting they are.”
What can you do? Step 1: It does not matter that many of us have not thought about Valentine’s Day since we were 13. If ever. This year let us send the Sri Ram Sena some love. Let us send them some PINK CHADDIS.
Look in your closet or buy them cheap. Dirt-cheap. Make sure they are PINK. Send them off to the Sena.
The address to send the package is:
The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road
(opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka
The last date for collection is 11 February for Delhi and 12th for Bangalore.
Mangalore was perceived to be a cosmopolitan, progressive and enterprising city. In the last four years, there have been communal clashes, churches have been attacked, and now the assault by a right-wing Hindu group on young girls in a pub. In The Indian Express, Johnson TA on the city’s metamorphosis:
On January 24, a part of the moral police in Mangalore, the Right-wing Hindu outfit known as the Sri Rama Sene, with a sympathetic BJP Government in power, put fear in the hearts of pub-going students with a violent attack on girls at a relatively new lounge bar, Amnesia. Television images of the attack are still fresh in everybody’s mind.
Girls, aged between 19 and 20, were grabbed by their hair, thrown on the ground, molested, slapped and beaten by a group of young men, claiming allegiance to Hindu culture and accusing the girls of dancing with boys at the bar.
On a typical Saturday afternoon, Froth on Top would be teeming with college students – boys and girls. This week it’s almost empty – like other pubs in the area.
“On Saturdays, we are usually full. Since the attack last week, most pubs have emptied out. Our clientele is mostly students, but they have all stopped coming,” says an 18-year-old Hindu boy from rural Mangalore who is employed as a waiter at one of the pubs.
The Sri Rama Sene’s state convener, 28-year-old Prasad Attavar, who was arrested and later released on bail, claimed that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to the destruction of Hindu culture.
The recent attack on a pub in Mangalore by a little-known Hindu group points to the emergence of several such radical Hindu outfits. The Sunday Express profiles the outfits:
A few months ago, Delhi endocrinologist Dr R.P. Singh was faced with a huge problem. After having worked towards a “Hindu Nepal” along with various RSS outfits for years, Singh suddenly felt that the RSS-which still runs schools there, and has a dedicated pracharak for the region-was “reneging on its commitment to the Hindu cause”, when one of its senior members, looking after the region, “allowed the schools to be used by the Maoists”.
Worse, he felt that the recent instance of Nepal Prime Minister Prachanda calling on various BJP leaders during his recent visit to India “was at the instance of this particular RSS leader” and an organisation that he has floated. Singh thought that “over the last few years, the RSS had lost sight of the goals that it had set for itself”, something he took up with the organisation’s second-in-command, Mohan Bhagwat, when he met him sometime last year.
Ashok Gehlot joins the fray. Now he wants pub and mall culture banned.
Members of a self-styled pro-Hindu moral brigade forced their way into a pub in India’s coastal city of Mangalore on Saturday and assaulted some young girls for “violating traditional Indian norms” and behaving in an “obscene manner.”
The men belonging to the right wing group called Sri Rama Sene (Lord Ram’s army) beat up the boys and the girls who were dancing in the pub, Amnesia -- The Lounge. Mangalore is 350 km from Bangalore.
One of the victims of the attack, a young woman, told PTI that the activists called them “prostitutes”. “We were just having a good time and next you know people pulling your hair, hitting you and calling you names like prostitutes, whores…,” the victim told a news channel. “Those people (attackers) simply came in and started beating the girls. It was a bad scene. Our waiters tried to stop them but they did not listen and kept assaulting the girls,” the pub owner told reporters. The police has arrested ten suspected activists of the group.
“The entire scene has been playing out in my mind over and over again,” said a woman who was in the pub. She was sitting at the reception counter when the mob entered the compound and was witness to the incident from beginning to end. She said that before barging into the pub, the mob went into a huddle and prayed silently. They then began raising slogans ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai,’ ‘Jai Sri Ram,’ ‘Bajrang Dal ki Jai’ and ‘Sri Ram Sene ki Jai.’
Pramod Muthalik is the man who laid the foundation of the right-wing Hindu group called the Sri Ram Sena. “Whoever has done this has done a good job. Girls going to pubs is not acceptable. So, whatever the Sena members did was right. You are highlighting this small incident to malign the BJP government in the state,” said Pramod.
In The Times of India: We’re custodians of Indian culture, says Sri Ram Sena founder
Pramod Mutalik told TOI that women were being misused and misguided. “We oppose this. Women have to be protected as the law has failed. Parents are worried about their wards going astray in materialistic pursuits. We are the custodians of Indian culture,” he said. Mutalik is the national president of the right-wing political group, Rashtriya Hindu Sena. The SRS, founded in late 2007, is its militant outfit. When it was pointed out that several girls had been assaulted by the SRS activists, Mutalik said, “I apologize if such a thing has happened. The mode of execution was wrong. But there is no need to raise such a hue and cry about the incident.”
The Mangalore incident is not a one-off, writes Dhiraj Nayyar in The Indian Express
The self-appointed custodians of Indian culture and values raised their ugly head on Monday, when a bunch of hooligans called the Sri Rama Sene attacked young women in a pub in Mangalore. The women’s alleged wrongdoing: drinking and dancing, which the group sees to be a perversion of Indian culture and tradition.
We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11″. Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “Bad Guys” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.
But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
The controversy has been gathering steam in the Indian press and South Asian blogosphere for weeks now, but it went mainstream on Thursday when former GOP Senator Rick Santorum published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer questioning the appointment of Shah to the transition team — prompting a Lost In Transition post Friday.
Shah, a Google executive who previously worked for Goldman Sachs and served as a Treasury official in the Clinton years, was appointed to the Obama transition team in November and has since been tapped to be part of the three-person team to develop technology policy. She is also reportedly being considered for Secretary of Energy.
However, her appointment to the administration has drawn strong reactions from the South Asian community. While many prominent Indian-Americans have stood behind Shah, others have raised doubts about her past. Dr. Shaikh Ubaid is part of a group including several Muslim and Sikh associations and dozens of college professors that sent letters to both Shah and President-elect Obama, requesting further information on Shah’s past associations.
“When she was appointed, it was initially a proud moment for us, her being an Indian-American,” said Ubaid in an interview given before Shah’s latest statement. However, the reports regarding Shah’s past ties to the VHP gave Ubaid and others a cause for concern.
I should like to focus on a letter written by then-candidate Obama to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, dated September 23, 2008, and published in India Abroad, the October 10 issue. I address these remarks to my former University of Chicago Law School colleague in the spirit of the type of respectful yet searching criticism that I know he will recognize as a hallmark of our faculty workshops and discussions.
The Obama letter has three slightly disturbing characteristics.
First, the letter gives lengthy praise to the nuclear deal, without acknowledging the widespread debate about the wisdom of that deal in both nations. Perhaps, however, this silence simply reflects politeness: Obama is surely aware that Singh has been an enthusiastic backer of the deal, risking much political capital in the process.
Second, the letter speaks of future cooperation that will “tap the creativity and dynamism of our entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists,” particularly in the area of alternative energy sources, but never mentions a future partnership in the effort to eradicate poverty and illiteracy. This silence, unlike the first, cannot be explained by politeness, since Singh has devoted a great deal of attention to issues of rural poverty, and it is plausible to think that he could have gotten a lot further had he had more help from abroad.
But there is a less typical side to the Shah story. Born in Gujarat, India, Shah came to the United States as a two-year old. Her father, a chemical engineer, first worked in New York before moving to Houston, and then moving away from his education toward the stock market. The Shahs remain active in Houston’s Indian community, not only in the ecumenical Gujarati Samaj (a society for people from Gujarat), but also in the far more cruel organizations of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Overseas Friends of the BJP (the main political party of the Hindu Right) and the Ekal Vidyalaya. Shah’s parents, Ramesh and Kokila, not only work as volunteers for these outfits, but they also held positions of authority in them. Their daughter was not far behind. She was an active member of the VHPA, the U. S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP’s head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organization should “inculcate a fear psychosis among [India's] Muslim community.” This was Shah’s boss. Till 2001, Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHPA.
[Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.]
India is reeling from a rash of religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in the country to ask why their democracy tends to encourage intolerance. Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:
With national elections only months away, India is reeling from a rash of spiteful religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in this country to ask why their vibrant, pluralistic democracy tends to encourage, rather than avert, the cruelty of neighbor against neighbor.
Tensions are growing in several corners of the country. The latest dispute was set off in Mumbai last week, when an upstart nativist party claiming to represent Marathas, the dominant ethnic group in the state, pounced on Indians who had come from elsewhere to apply for jobs at Indian Railways.
Hiding her head and face behind a scarf, a Roman Catholic nun who accused a Hindu mob of raping and parading her half-naked through the streets in eastern India, appeared on television to appeal for justice. The Indian Express has the full text of her statament:
On August 24, around 4:30pm, hearing the shouting of a large crowd, at the gate of Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre, I ran out through the back door and escaped to the forest along with others. We saw our house going up in flames. Around 8:30 pm we came out of the forest and went to the house of a Hindu gentleman who gave us shelter.
On August 25, around1:30 pm, the mob entered the room where I was staying in that house, one of them slapped me on the face, caught my hair and pulled me out of the house. Two of them were holding my neck to cut off my head with an axe. Others told them to take me out to the road; I saw Fr. Chellan also being taken out and being beaten up. The mob consisting of 40-50 men was armed with lathis, axes, spades, crowbars, iron-rods, sickles etc.They took both of us to the main road. Then they led us to the burnt Janavikas building saying that they were going to throw us into the smouldering fire.
When we reached the Janavikas building, they threw me to the verandah on the way to the dining room which was full of ashes and broken glass pieces. One of them tore my blouse and others my undergarments.
35 Christians killed and 50,000 forced from their homes by Hindu mobs enraged at Swami’s murder. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:
A woman shows her grief at the religious violence in Orissa during a gospel hymn service. AP photo / The Independent
As she recalled her awful story, Puspanjali Panda made no attempt to halt the tears flooding down her face.
Holding her daughter close, she told how a baying Hindu mob dragged her husband – a Christian pastor – from his bed, beat him to death with stones and iron rods and then threw him into a river. She found his corpse two days later, washed up on the bank. When she went to the police, they told her to go away.
Mrs Panda and thousands of others like her are victims of the worst communal violence between Hindus and Christians that India has seen for decades.
A Christian girl whose face was burnt during the recent religious violence, sits in a shelter at Raikia village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa
When they came for Narmada Digal, she wasn’t there. She had fled, five children and mother-inlaw in tow, to the safety of the jungles a kilometre away. So, they set about what she left behind. A framed picture of Jesus, a Bible in Oriya, utensils in the kitchen, some clothes, and linen. By the time Narmada tiptoed back, her home was gone. What was left was still hot from the ashes, and smoking. The neighbours came to commiserate. Narmada took a good look, stood erect, and pulled her sari over her head. She began to pray.
“Lord, forgive us our sins. Jesus, you are the only one. Save us from our misfortune. Free us, Lord.” The words are tumbling out. Narmada’s children have joined her. She is weeping as she pleads for deliverance. So is everybody else. It’s a simple bond that no human wrath can sever, a woman and her God. “I will die. But I won’t stop being a Christian,” Narmada says.
This is in the heart of Kandhamal, a district at the geographical centre of Orissa, ravaged by probably the worst fighting in India between Hindus and Christians. Kandhamal is young, constituted as recently as 1994. It has 2,515 villages spread over 7,649 sq km. The terrain is inaccessible, full of hills and narrow lanes crisscrossing the villages. There isn’t a single industrial unit here. There are no railway lines, and so no trains come here. Buses are rare. It’s so far behind that even the official website of Kandhamal says, “Overall, the district is ranked as a backward district in the state of Orissa .”
Famously trenchant political psychologist Ashis Nandy is charged with criminal offence by the Gujarat police for “inflaming” communal hatred. His crime: an article he wrote in January blaming Gujarat’s middle-class Hindus for destroying communal harmony in the state. In Outlook, Sheela Reddy interviews Nandy:
Is the middle class more culpable than Modi in drawing the battleline between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat?
Modi does represent the class. Development authoritarianism like in Singapore and China today is a hidden dream of the Indian middle class too. Modi personifies that dream. However, there is a larger issue involved here. Indian democracy is fast degenerating into a psephocracy-a system totally dominated by electoral victories and defeats.The moment you enter office, you begin to think of the next election.
Leading historian Ramchandra Guha offers seven reasons why it will not. And then, to this objective judgement, he adds the subjective desires of a citizen – that it should not even attempt to become one. An exclusive essay in Outlook:
Who, now, are the Indians who shall hold the centre against the challenges from left and right? Here lies a fundamental difference between the India of 1948 and the India of 2008.
Then, the government was run by men and women of proven intelligence and integrity, who were deeply committed to the values and procedures of democracy, and wholly aware of the threats posed to these values and procedures by men such as M.S. Golwalkar and B.T. Ranadive. Now, the Government of India is run by men and women of limited intelligence and dubious integrity, who know little about and care less for the ideals on which the Republic was founded. (As the late Pramod Mahajan once candidly confessed, the first time most Members of Parliament see the Indian Constitution is when, after being elected, they are made to take an oath on it.)
A story in The Times of India says activists of a right-wing Hindu outfit are parading the streets of Bhopal asking storekeepers to “tear down hoardings advertising lingerie and cover up mannequins showcasing women’s undergarments.” The storekeepers are being told ‘‘not to display lingerie in public.’’
