What happens in India ... doesn't stay in India!

Slightly over a month ago, I blogged about an anti-Muslim behavior in New Jersey.  Not the Republican Party anti-Muslim venom, which we have come to accept as one of their party platforms.  Nope.  This was from Indian immigrants!

I wrote there:

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.

That was a month ago about an incident in Edison, NJ.

Two weeks later, I was shocked about a news that I read; I tweeted about it:

In #Leicester, hundreds of men wearing masks and balaclavas chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, a #Hindu chant that has become synonymous with anti-#Muslim violence in #India.https://t.co/bIlochLFXp#Islamophobia #modi

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 19, 2022

It was in the UK.  Hindu-Muslim tension in Leicester.  A city that until now had shown the UK, and the world, that immigrants from the Subcontinent, and their children, had made Leicester a "largely a model city."  The South Asian immigrants were not only Hindus--they were Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians too--and coexisted with the white population, despite the initial protests from the far-right.

But that was then.

Writing about the British incident, The Economist summed it up well in its headline: "India’s government is exporting its Hindu nationalism | The communal clashes seen in India are now being replicated elsewhere."  And Leicester is a model city no more!

Leicester has seen many waves of migration, but this new violence between small sections of British South Asian communities is alarming. Such scenes between Hindus and Muslims is extremely rare in the UK - especially in Leicester. Many locals, including families who have now lived in the city for several generations, are shocked and disturbed by what they are witnessing on their streets.

Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) has established itself well in the US and the UK, thanks to the Hindu nationalistic Indian government.  The Economist underscores that the American and British incidents are consistent with the alarming trends in India:

This is all of a piece with the bjp’s majoritarian approach at home, where Hindus constitute four-fifths of the country’s 1.4bn people and Muslims about one-seventh. Islamophobia is rampant among bjp stalwarts (though Mr Modi usually carries a dog whistle). When Hindus and Muslims have clashed in Delhi or in bjp-ruled states, authorities have bulldozed Muslim homes in retribution. Mr Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 grants Indian citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries—so long as they are not Muslim.

This NY Times report also finds echoes of modi and his Hindu nationalism in the events outside India:

Experts say it is only the latest example of how the toxic politics that are roiling India — and leading to the persecution of Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities — have migrated to other parts of the globe.

In a world where liberal democracy is under a blistering attack, modi has found a way to present his country as a flourishing democracy to the West, which is only ready to overlook the Hindu nationalism because of the potential to sell goods and services to the growing demand there.

#Modi had been much more effective than #IndiraGandhi in combining India’s traditional democratic credentials and #autocratic controls, aided by an unparalleled #propaganda operation https://t.co/zHbCq2IyBf #HumanRights

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 25, 2022

Human Rights Watch argues well the point that India gets a free pass:

Western governments eye India as an attractive alternative market, especially with growing unhappiness with Beijing as a trade partner. 

But democratic governments should not repeat the same mistakes they made with the Chinese government by pursuing deeper trade engagement while sidelining human rights concerns. Today, China is not only an economic powerhouse, but the human rights situation has worsened and the government boldly wields its repression within and across national borders. 

Meanwhile, the escalating human rights crisis in India under the Modi administration receives inadequate attention.

I will wrap this up with the following excerpts from a commentary in India's rapidly shrinking independent media landscape:

Hindutva is now a major part of India’s foreign policy. This involves both the use of Hindu nationalist symbols and ideas while conducting foreign policy to even going so far as to support purported Hindu causes in foreign countries. ...

It also meant a vital role for the Indian diaspora in foreign policy. A stark feature of Modi’s first term was highly publicised interactions with foreign citizens of Indian origin, relayed back to India using wall-to-wall television coverage. Much of this flowed from already existing Hindutva networks with the Indian diaspora, especially in places such as the United States.

No peace for all?

I read in the news that TFG made a racist and misogynistic comment about Elaine Chao, who is married to the GOP's leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.  And, TFG essentially issued a death threat against McConnell.

Meanwhile, an uber-trumpy Congresswoman from Georgia takes violent rhetoric to a new low:

The term for this sort of rhetoric is “accusation in a mirror,” and scholars of genocide identify it as a major warning sign when political leaders start talking like this. https://t.co/t9aNNoIBQ9

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) October 2, 2022

We have diverged a long, long way from the nonviolence championed by MLK here and Gandhi in the old country.  I wrote in a column that was published on this day six years ago: "The political rhetoric during the past year seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent."  To refresh your memory, it was a year of TFG as a candidate, and my commentary appeared a month before the fateful election in which millions of my fellow Americans chose violence, racism, and plain indecency in their mad pursuit of power.

Of course, when I wrote that sentence, I--like the rest of the country and the world--could never have imagined that TFG would orchestrate violence against Congress that had assembled to certify the 2020 election results.  I suppose when one goes down the path of violence, there will only be escalation; the violent people are not going to have any Damascene conversion to nonviolence and peace.

I timed that column with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's birth anniversary.   He was born on October 2nd, 1869.  On this October 2nd, I am re-posting here my column from 2016.

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The United Nations marks Oct. 2 as the “International Day of Nonviolence” for a very good reason — it is the birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.

Albert Einstein summed it up best for all of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” On Gandhi’s birthday, it certainly will help us all to be reminded, as the U.N. puts it, of the human desire for “a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.”

In the contemporary United States, any talk in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out of a fear of being labeled a wimp. This has been especially the case since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the “tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove their toughness.

Of course, violence is more than merely engaging in war. The political rhetoric during the past year seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I, as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and rhetoric.

While words, unlike sticks and stones, do not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice these days is far from that interpretation of humanity.

When it comes to the terrible humanitarian crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the images of Aylan Kurdi — the toddler who was found dead, face down, on a beach — or the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, whose dust- and blood-covered face looked dazed and confused.

Meanwhile, all around the world, the number of people displaced from their homes continues to increase. The United Nations estimates that by the end of 2015, the number of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes reached 65.3 million. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, noted that “at sea, a frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem.”

As I write, peace and nonviolence seem to be evaporating even in Gandhi’s old lands of India and Pakistan. Tension between the two countries is at such high levels that commentators wonder, and worry, whether the neighbors are getting ready for yet another war. As often is the case with these sibling countries, this time, too, the fight is over Kashmir, but with plenty of nuclear bombs on both sides of the border.

We shall certainly overcome, in the long run. In the meanwhile, on the International Day of Nonviolence, like the stereotypical beauty pageant contestant, I, too, wish for world peace.

What it means to be a man in the 21st century

I don't recall the precise moment when I turned David Brooks off.  For a long time, like for many left-of-center people like me, Brooks was the go-to pundit who looked at America from a right-of-center perspective.  We liked to understand the other side and we thought he might be of use.

And then I shut him off.  

Though I don't know when it was, I know the two main reasons behind my decision.  One was that his columns were beginning to be filled with bromides and platitudes.  And the other was this: The guy talked up, and even wrote a book on morals and virtue, but then divorced his wife and later married his much younger research assistant!  A man dating/marrying a woman who is young enough to be his daughter is a puke-inducing turnoff for me, more so when he talks about virtues and morals.

Every once in a while, I make the mistake of reading Brooks' "punditry."  I am human and I make mistakes!  That's how I ended up reading his column on the crisis of men and boys.

Brooks is essentially doing a book report in that column.

Richard V. Reeves’s new book, “Of Boys and Men,” is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.

Brooks writes that he "learned a lot I didn’t know."  Good for him. About time!

Setting aside that pundit, let me tell you this: The crisis of men and boys is not an issue that I don't know a lot about.  In fact, I have been blogging about it for years.  I have been talking about it for decades.  Through the samples below, I want to impress on you the urgency of the issue.

In one post, I reminded readers about the "save the males" that I have been writing about.  For one, boys are getting lost all the way from middle school on.  They are falling behind.  We have not been able to articulate for them what it means to be a man in a changed and changing world. Right from the mid-1990s, I have been talking with people and cautiously writing in op-eds that we were not paying attention to the developing trends of boys being neglected.

It is not that we--parents and society--are systematically neglecting boys and young men like the malignant neglect of girls and young women in the fundamentalist Islamic societies of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.  But, we are failing to notice that boys are falling behind.

While we are systematically redefining, and rightfully so, what it means to be a girl in the changing world, we have not been doing the same with boys.  And boys are falling behind in schools.  Men are falling behind in colleges. Masculinity is being re-made and men are not readying themselves to be a part of a new world.  I wrote in another post that trying to get people--students, in particular--appreciate the urgency in understanding what masculinity means in the 21st century has been a frustrating failure for me, and yet I try again and again.

I complained about the sheer unwillingness to acknowledge the problem.  I did not, and do not, understand what it will take for American society to start talking about this.  But then we are the same people who don't talk about guns, about racism, about ...

Perhaps the only time we talk about the lost young men is when we want to be sympathetic towards a white young man who grabs a few assault rifles and goes on a shooting spree.  Otherwise, we continue on with our lives as if there is no crisis of boys and men.

At universities, like the one where I was a professor until I was laid off, "gender studies" programs do not address such issues, and they continue to operate as if the world has not changed in the last fifty years.  I do not mean to suggest that patriarchy has been destroyed.  It is alive and well, indeed.  But, to focus only the patriarchy while not addressing the changes is one hell of a professional failure.  For that matter, changes like how the continuing patriarchy leads boys to assume that pussies are theirs to be grabbed, only to find out that only their dear leader can get away with such crimes!

Only a couple of weeks ago, in early September, I hoped that mothers will convince their young boys that real men aren't afraid of the kitchen and the laundry room, and that real men know what bed skirts and duvets are. What it means to be a boy is not that different from the question of what it means to be a virtuous boy at home, right?

In talking about kitchen and laundry, I am merely re-telling Benjamin Franklin's take on what it means to be a man: "Drawing on the Latin word vir, or virtue, he characterized manliness as tranquillity, resolution and orderliness"

Tranquility. Resolution. Orderliness.

Teach your children well because world peace, which every Miss America contestant wishes for, depends on testosterone-filled boys and men not having crises!