Midnight's Children ... and Daytime Fascists

While I didn't intend to write a follow-up to the previous post, this post too is about the elimination of secular public space in India, and the religious remaking of its politics and government, all of which combine to essentially drastically reduce individual freedom.

I read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children when I was an undergraduate student who was looking for a clear direction in life.  It was a time that I read plenty of classic works--from Dickens and Dostoevsky in the old ... to Rushdie in contemporary times.  I am not sure if I understood whatever messages the authors had intended--there was nobody with whom I could even engage in discussions about what I had read--but, in many ways all those masterful sentences with weighty ideas helped me develop a plan that then took me to America and to be a university professor.

After the recent stabbing incident from which Rushdie is still recovering, I figured that I would re-read Midnight's Children.  Assuming that I read that in 1982, I was way too young an undergraduate student at that time.  I figured I might find the book a lot more interesting and involving, with the experiences of the 40 years behind me.

When reflecting on the first part of the book, I became curious about Rushdie in my blog posts.  I liked two of them more than the rest.  They are both from a decade ago--one I had blogged in January 2012, and the other in September of that year.

Excerpting from those posts, I want to bring your attention to the cancer in India's civil society and politics!

Sometime in the spring of 1989, I swung by Tridib Banerjee's office to chalk out my plans for the summer.  I was going to India, and was hoping to get a little bit of research done under his guidance.

As is always the case with such visits, the conversations were less about the scheduled agenda and more about everything else.  That particular meeting was all about Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. 

Stroking his beard, as he often did, Tridib asked me whether I wanted to take with me a copy to India--he had one to spare because both he and his wife had purchased a copy.  "It is banned in India, you know."

I didn't take up Tridib's offer.  In fact, to this day, I haven't read The Satanic Verses.  Not because of any religious faith, and not because I am worried that a fanatic will kill me for having read it.  I just wasn't interested in it. Plain and simple.  After all, there are many, many things all around me in which I have no interest whatsoever, and this happens to be one.

A couple of years ago, Rushdie was on BookTV's "In Depth" program and I recall watching it practically from the beginning till the end.  The lengthy interview was when I truly understood that the guy is brilliant.

In the excerpts from his memoir that was published in the New Yorker, Rushdie writes about the confluence of various events that led to his writing this controversial fiction, including this event:

In 1982, the actor Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star of the Bombay cinema, had suffered a near-fatal injury to his spleen while doing his own movie stunts in Bangalore. In the months that followed, his hospitalization was daily front-page news. As he lay close to death, the nation held its breath; when he rose again, the effect was almost Christlike. There were actors in southern India who had attained almost godlike status by portraying the gods in movies called mythologicals. Bachchan had become semi-divine even without such a career. But what if a god-actor, afflicted with a terrible injury, had called out to his god in his hour of need and heard no reply? What if, as a result of that appalling divine silence, such a man were to begin to question, or even to lose, the faith that had sustained him? Might he, in such a crisis of the soul, begin to lose his mind as well? And might he in his dementia flee halfway around the world, forgetting that when you run away you can’t leave yourself behind? What would such a falling star be called? The name came to him at once, as if it had been waiting for him to capture it. Gibreel. The Angel Gabriel, Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel and Chamcha: two lost souls in the roofless continuum of the unhoused. They would be his protagonists.

Most of us followed the news about Amitabh and went on with our lives. Rushdie found an inspiration for a novel!

Can one imagine something like The Satanic Verses being published in the contemporary world?  Even Rushdie thinks not:

The writer said the banning of his book in many countries and the subsequent threats on his life had created a "long-term chilling effect".
"A book which was critical of Islam would be difficult to be published now," he told the BBC's Will Gompertz.
He said the only way to solve the issue was for publishers to "be braver".
"The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff," he said.

In 2012, there was another controversy that involved Salman Rushdie.  It was over his visit to India, in order to attend the Jaipur Literary Festival. 

A few--by no means any majority--Muslim leaders, who continued to be upset with Rushdie for Satanic Verses, wanted the government to prevent him from entering India.  But, the federal law minister pointed out that  Rushdie had the paperwork that recognized him as a "person of Indian origin" and, therefore, he did not need a visa to visit India.  Rushdie can, legally, come and go as it pleases him.

The protesters won when Rushdie decided to stay away from the literary event.

A few writers, upset at the manner in which Rushdie was treated, decided to read a little bit from, yes, Satanic Verses.  A book, authored by a person who was born in India and recognized around the world as a talented writer, is banned in India, which proclaims itself as a democracy. 

An op-ed author wrote in this context:

Salman Rushdie's censoring-out from the ongoing literary festival in Jaipur will be remembered as a milestone that marked the slow motion disintegration of India's secular state. Islamist clerics first pressured the state to stop Mr. Rushdie from entering India; on realising he could not stop, he was scared off with a dubious assassination threat. Fear is an effective censor. ...

The betrayal of secular India in Jaipur, though, is just part of a far wider treason: one that doesn't have to do with Muslim clerics alone, but a state that has turned god into a public-sector undertaking.

I liked the argument that the op-ed author made, and the evidence he provided for how the state has made god a big time government activity, with large budgetary allocations too:

Few Indians understand the extent to which the state underwrites the practice of their faith. The case of the Maha Kumbh Mela, held every 12 years at Haridwar, Allahabad, Ujjain and Nashik, is a case in point. The 2001 Mela in Allahabad, activist John Dayal has noted in a stinging essay, involved state spending of over Rs.1.2 billion ...

There are no publicly available figures on precisely how much the government will spend on other infrastructure — but it is instructive to note that an encephalitis epidemic that has claimed over 500 children's lives this winter drew a Central aid of just Rs.0.28 billion.

The State's subsidies to the Kumbh Mela, sadly, aren't an exception. Muslims wishing to make the Haj pilgrimage receive state support; so, too, do Sikhs travelling to Gurdwaras of historic importance in Pakistan. Hindus receive identical kinds of largesse, in larger amounts. The state helps underwrite dozens of pilgrimages, from Amarnath to Kailash Mansarovar. Early in the last decade, higher education funds were committed to teaching pseudo-sciences like astrology; in 2001, the Gujarat government even began paying salaries to temple priests.

In 2006, the Delhi government provided a rare official acknowledgment that public funds are routinely spent on promoting god.

The op-ed's concluding sentences would not have found favor among India's politicians:

Dr. Nanda ably demonstrated the real costs of India's failure to secularise: among them, the perpetuation of caste and gender inequities, the stunting of reason and critical facilities needed for economic and social progress; the corrosive growth of religious nationalism.

India cannot undo this harm until god and god's will are ejected from our public life.

Will India ever be able to secularize its public sphere?

NEVER!  And that is one hell of a tragedy.

America dozes as India bulldozes

Fresh off the boat, I was shocked when I read in the news about violence against Indian-Americans:

One Jersey City Indian was beaten to death in Hoboken. Another remains in a coma after being discovered beaten unconscious on a busy street corner here earlier this month. And in a crudely handwritten letter, partially printed in The Jersey Journal, someone wrote, ''We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City.'' The note was signed ''The Dotbusters.''

That was in 1987.

Of course, that didn't stop planeloads of Indians immigrating to the US.

Unfortunately, many of those Indians brought with them, and new ones continue to bring with them, the baggage of caste and religious intolerance, of which there is plenty in the old country. 

A few days ago, intolerant, hateful, bigoted Hindu-Americans managed to publicly show their colors in another city in New Jersey; in Edison, in order to celebrate India's independence day, these godawful Indians included in their parade a bulldozer.

Why did the #IBA decide to bring #bulldozers, which are symbols of hate in #India, to #Edison, given the discrimination plaguing India's religious minorities especially #Muslims?https://t.co/SxVVaCATeR via @azadessa #modi

— Sriram K (@congoboy) August 27, 2022

I direct you to that news report to understand why those goddamn Muslim-hating people from India brought a bulldozer to the parade.  If you don't have the time to read that news report, but want to understand it, here's a comparison: Hindus politically using a bulldozer is like the Klan people burning crosses.  If only there was a way to deport those goddamn Hindu assholes!

The event in Edison, NJ, is an echo of the regression in India, where the Hindu majoritarian party is rapidly taking India away from democracy and making it an electoral theocracy.  The public space is becoming more and more Hindu in sights and sounds, and the public identities of other faiths are getting erased by the day.

I have been worried about all these for a long time.  And have blogged in plenty about it, like in the following unedited post from June 2014.

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I typically reach the park well before dawn breaks.  It is warm even at that hour, with an occasional breeze.

But, I am rarely ever the only person that early at the park.  I am even more amazed at the sight of women, walking alone by themselves, that early.  At least this part of the old country is far away from the rape news geography.

Slowly they come.  In ones and twos, and by the tens as the sunlight begins to stream in.  One of those I have seen every morning is an older gentleman who walks slowly with his right hand holding a cane.  Always clad in the same outfit--a white lungi, a white shirt, and a white Islamic skullcap.

When I see that older Muslim gent, I become all the more ticked off at the public address system.  Why?  Let me explain.

This is a public park.  A government owned and maintained park.  Yet, throughout the more than an hour that I am there, they blast--very loudly--Hindu religious music.  Only Hindu religious music.  Nothing but Hindu religious music.  As if it is not a park but the grounds at a Hindu temple.

The older Muslim's outfit made his religion obvious.  There could be, among the walkers, people of faiths other than Hinduism.  Perhaps even an atheist or two.  (I do not count for I am a citizen no more of this old country.)  Why should the government bombard Hindu religious music on people who do not care about Hinduism?

Of course, this is not the first time that I am blogging about this atrocious deluge of religion in a public space.  But, it is even more of a sore point given that the sociopolitical environment is now charged/changed with the election of the Hindu nationalist party to power at the federal level.

The attempt to make the public space secular was perhaps a non-winnable fight from the very beginning of an independent India.  As India started the process of becoming a republic, Jawaharlal Nehru strongly advocated for Rajaji to transition from the office of Governor General and become the country's first president.  Nehru opposed the rival candidate, Rajendra Prasad, who was backed by Vallabhai Patel:

Mr. Patel’s choice for president was Mr. Prasad, a teacher and lawyer who had just presided over the assembly that drafted India’s constitution. This frustrated Mr. Nehru, who tended to be annoyed by Mr. Prasad’s public religiosity – by, for instance, his stated dedication to renovating the Somnath temple in Gujarat.

It was not that Somnath was a Hindu temple, but the temple had a long history of tension between Hindus and Muslims.  After the bitter partition along Hindu/Muslim lines, after the tragedy of lives lost and displaced, and property destroyed, Nehru did not want to trigger more communal tension with a Hindu president inaugurating the renovated temple.  Nehru lost that fight.  I suspect that the fight to keep religion off the public space was also lost; I cannot imagine Rajaji, despite the religious scholar that he was, accepting the invitation to inaugurate the temple.

I suppose I am stuck with the loud Hindu religious music every morning at the park.  At least it is temporary for me, and I will soon return to my sanctuary--the public space by the river where no government, or private group, blasts any religious music.  But, that old Muslim gent has no choice, I guess.

This, too, is India for you.

Independence Day

On August 15th, India celebrates its independence from its European colonizer.  Many among the populace of the small little island in the northern latitudes, which is increasingly irrelevant in the world, are now perhaps horrified at the prospect of a grandson of one of the colonized brown people becoming their next Prime Minister.  (My hunch is that he will lose the race.)

August 15th was when I, too, was liberated from the old country.  So, I interrupt my vacation to bring you this:

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In 1987, the Singapore Airlines flight that I was on took off from Madras (as Chennai was known then) a little before the midnight that made made the transition from the 14th of August to the 15th--similar to India's birth at midnight.

I stepped into a "Jumbo Jet" for the first time in my life. Up until then, I had flown only twice--short domestic flights. The Jumbo Jet was something else. I felt like I had entered a huge hotel lobby. And there was a staircase, for the privileged travelers to get to their seats!

My seat was in the rear of the plane, only a couple of rows ahead of the "smoking section." The stress. The excitement. And everything new. I don't think I slept much. Not in the flight from Madras to Singapore, nor in the long haul from Singapore to Los Angeles with a stop in Tokyo.

After the plane landed in Los Angeles, the disembarking took forever.  I joined the long line snaking its way to the immigration counters for visitors. Finally, it was my turn. I gave the officer my papers and my passport. My life in America commenced with the official stamp on my passport.

One can, therefore, easily understand why I refer to August 15th as my personal independence day too!

My friend picked me up from the airport. It was a long drive to his home, mostly on freeways. I was excitedly looking all around. I was impressed with everything. I had never seen such an uninterrupted flow of traffic. In India, cows and goats and humans all claimed the road at the same time. But, not here.  Impressive it was that all the vehicles were speeding in one direction within well defined lanes, and across the barrier on the other side there were vehicles speeding in the other direction. Everybody stayed within their lanes too!

Though it took me a decade-plus to become an American citizen, there was no doubt in my mind that when I left India on the night of August 14th, I was leaving to make myself a new home. I looked forward to the new identity that would result. 

Coming to America took a whole lot of planning--from thinking about what I wanted to study to where I wanted to study.  Los Angeles was, thus, no simple accidental happening.  Of course, as much as we plan, life unfolds in its own cosmic way; there is not much for me to complain about at this stage in my life.

Summer vacation

After my former employer laid me off, it is up to me to take a break.  The days of the week and official holidays make no difference when I have been exiled to premature retirement.

It is now up to me to determine my own schedule.  I am going to take a short break from blogging, dammit!  ;)

(By this time, you know well where this cartoon came from, right?)

Do five different fingers not make a hand?

As much as I have been a fan of globalization, I have been equally supportive of people's fights to maintain their identities.  To me, it is not a contradiction by any means.  One can be fiercely Tamil or Kurd or Scot, or whatever, and be appreciative of globalization in all its facets--economic, political, cultural, ...

When nationalists complain about the loss of identity, I wish liberals would not be condescending towards that emotion.  Instead, it would be wonderful if liberal political leaders took the time and effort to explain why we can have our cake and eat it too.

Of course, I have even written commentaries that discuss this theme, like the following, which was published on December 12, 2006:

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To understand ethnic and religious tensions in faraway places such as Iraq, Lebanon or India, we need look no farther than our own northern neighbor – Canada. 

The Canadian parliament recently acted to formally recognize the Francophone province, Quebec, as a nation within Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced the motion, which passed overwhelmingly. 

The move explicitly recognizes the ethnic nationalism that has been the driving force behind two failed referenda that called for a formal separation of Quebec from Canada. 

For years Quebecers have maintained that their language, history and cultural traditions were being systematically ignored, put down and forgotten by Canada's English-speaking majority. It's like Rodney Dangerfield's complaint: "I don't get no respect." Quebecers felt so intensely about this that in 1980 and 1995, they voted on proposals to formally secede from Canada. The prime minister's hope is that this formal recognition of Quebecers as a nation within Canada will preclude further independence efforts. Recognition of Francophone Canadians as a nation within the country comes almost 140 years after the country was formed. 

This recent development is a reminder that humans value and cherish their respective identities – in this case as members of a group with its own shared language, history and cultural traditions. Once we grasp this, we can begin to understand why there is a great deal of commotion along ethnic and religious lines in many other parts of the world. 

Take the case of Iraq. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire supported Germany, and after the war the empire essentially was carved into territories, one of which was the territory of Iraq. 

Iraq was placed under British control, as per the agreement developed by the League of Nations – the forerunner to the United Nations. Iraq then went through different forms of government, many of which were externally imposed. The modern-day Iraqi republic was established in 1958 after a military coup. In 1979, Saddam Hussein emerged as the president; as they say, the rest is history. 

During all this time, the many "nations" within Iraq not only were ignored by the government, some were in fact systematically abused because of their culture, language and religious beliefs. 

The Kurds are one of Iraq's ethnic groups; as a people, they also are scattered across Iran and Turkey. They want to be recognized as a "nation" as much as Quebecers did. Saddam's government killed many Kurds simply because they were Kurds. 

Turkey does not want the Kurds in Iraq to gain independence because of the worry that Kurds in Turkey will demand recognition of their status or, worse, join hands with the Kurds in Iraq and form a greater Kurdistan. These "nation" issues are not unique to Iraq or Turkey. 

These are found all across the world. In Quebec, the struggle for recognition is nonviolent. Unfortunately, that is the not the case in a number of other struggles to establish national and state identities. 

And even if a people's nationality is well recognized, achieving formal statehood is not always an orderly or peaceful process. Take the case with Palestine, where violence has been endemic for decades. 

Even in Bhutan, regarded by outsiders as a Shangri-la, there are problems related to ethnicity and nationality. Ethnic Nepalese have left Bhutan in large numbers because the monarch's policies do not appear to recognize differences in the way the Nepalese look, the Hindu religion they practice and, of course, the language they speak. 

We have been so wrapped up with our fascination with globalization that maybe we assumed that ours is a homogenous world. On the contrary, we have different languages, religions, beliefs, histories. And sometimes, people want explicit recognition of those differences. 

It has taken Canada 140 years to formally recognize that Quebecers are a nation within their country. How long will it take for the Kurds, for instance, to be recognized as a nation within Turkey? 

So, let us use the opportunity that Quebecers have given us and understand not only the thirst for recognition, but the similar feelings that various "nations" have in all corners of the world. This recognition is a fundamental step in achieving peace and stability, particularly in the violent Middle East.