jayasankar’s comments

Reporting on the National Social Watch Coalition's Kerala release of Citizen's report on Governance and Development 08-09

This has been one of the most disappointing threads in FEC. Instead of even trying to address and critique the article, shouts of ‘neo-liberal’, ‘neo-con’ (can one be both?, bleh!), ‘friedmanomist’ have been thrown at a very sane and measured article by Mr.T.P.Sreenivasan.

An attempt at humour was perhaps on the one lakh voters ready for intifada against the Zionists in Trivandrum. If not for the content, at least the attempt at making the joke was something which could be laughed at.

First, perhaps one needs to change the word ‘pragmatic’ that the author used to a phrase ‘dealing with the world as it is’ because pragmatic has come to be interpreted to be a way shorn of ideology and politics. Of course ideology and politics interfere and inform not just foreign policy decisions of nation states but the smallest things that we do every day, either consciously or unconsciously. But only by dealing with the existing world rather than one imagined in air through handed-down interpretations can one hope to change it in the way that one wants, else it becomes ‘I want that now’ screams from an eight year old. Far from being ideological, that speaks of an inability to deal with reality.

Second, one needs to examine the Israel-Palestinian question as a whole. Third what needs to be the relation of India with both Israel and Palestine.

Hate of the 'Rat faced christ killers' used to be a common factor ranging from the Orthodox Christians of Moscow right through mainland Europe to the forever fighting dominations throughout western europe. One doesn’t need to go through the whole chain of events but the events out of that cultural backdrop, some of which still exists, caused the Israel's formation, and it was a people in the Arab world which had to pay for European crimes.

Our inability to correct history though should make us look at the present state of the issue.

All the parties see themselves as aggrieved victims under siege. The Jews, as a brutalized and unwanted people who have ghettoized from around the world due to historical reasons, sees the need to stick together and to never give an inch and the Palestinians see themselves as victims of Zionist racism and anglo-american imperialism, in fact as the present world’s most wronged people, robbed of their own country. The latter are undoubtedly the victims in the dispute. But one should also observe that the Israelis see this in a broader struggle for their very survival and in an arab-israeli framework and not a Palestinian-Israeli one.

It is a good issue to apply game theory knowledge, with both sides behaving on very set patterns, unfortunately. If no 'black swan' like a Palestinian Gandhi emerges, most people in this forum will see this issue to their graves.

But whatever happens, broadly, one can’t see a big role for India in the dispute unlike say, the Tamil-Sinhalese dispute and the Indian foreign policy establishment will have to deal with the issue as it is, with support for the genuine aspirations for the Palestinian people. Is the best way one to express Palestinian solidarity, one in which one is limited to the passing resolutions and making speeches and passing votes in the United Nations? Why hasn’t anyone even bothered to respond that section in the article which points at increased Indian participation?

The South Africa comparison is not even apples to oranges. It is apples to table tennis rackets. And Fukuyama’s attempt to sell his lame book with a catchy title has been panned enough times for it to be super boring.

While questions should be raised at the burgeoning defense expenditure and also the abject failure of the much touted and over-hyped Indian scientific and technological establishment to make acceptable weapons for its military, the rabid frowning just at buying Israeli weapons stink of an exercise of unexamined hand-me-downs. The same people might be observed in another situation to be commenting on the impotence of the Indian state in protecting its civilians against ‘twenty year olds high on coke with AK 47s on hand’ (to use a disliked, but unfortunately true phrase). One can argue that Israel has been an even more unsafe place than our major cities and on the success of its methods, but when a government takes steps to acquire weaponry and help which it might deem necessary, critiquing the deal for just its supplier is a case of misplaced priorities and an inability to deal with the world as it is.

on a discussion at FEC about Tariq Ramadan

The question, if you remember, was whether there a source other than Hitchens that this futurist had talked of a 'moratorium on stoning of women'. I had just put in those links answering your question. The first link was the actual Transcript which proved that he had. From that you have decided what all I have read and gone on to extrapolate and even found the tint my eye rather than address the issue on hand. 

Coming back to Ramadan, I had read quite a few pieces by him during this search. Complex issues should not be dumbed down, but the pretension of  sophistication and contextualizing should not be used to obfuscate. Ramadan's writings scream that intend. Personally, I find it incredible that someone who primarily bases most of his arguments on 'scripture'/'words of god', which are always stuff written by men with their own intend and agenda which may be relevant or irrelevant for the times can be considered a 'futurist'. Would you give the same leeway to a fascist Paramahams, P.Parameshwaran  who have their own 'words of god' or to Protestant Pastors, who are impatiently waiting for Jesus to come back and fight Satan's troops at Jerusalem? Please remember, I am not saying you should - I am just raising a parallel. And also remember, all these affect policies and also the lives of flesh and blood people. Truth remains the only effective disinfectant. 

Coming back to his arguments this essay itself that you have pasted IMHO is a retrogressive, illogical, badly written piece which invents history and context and within that framework gives a completely irrelevant and pretentiously worded 'solution'. The whole essay falls flat on its first assumption itself - the implicit assumption that the Ulema has a right to decide on these issues and that too pan-globally. Theocracy, though nicely worded. He then reaches a completely antithetic conclusion - "It is urgent that Muslim throughout the world refuse the formalist legitimization of the teachings of their religion and reconcile themselves with the deep message that invites toward spirituality, demands education, justice and the respect of pluralism. " 

He is so bad, Arun Shourie is actually superior to him, in the seeming intend of what they try to do. 

Coming back at last to the issue on hand at last - stoning of women for adultery. 

Law evolves and solidifies based on that society's conception of justice. So as conceptions of justice evolves, law also has to change but the pace and implementation will depend on the context. Adultery may have been once, in tribal societies something which was so harmful to the general well being that laws were codified to punish it by stoning. I think that there can be a generic agreement that stoning women for adultery NOW is retrogressive. Considering any society to be retards which cannot understand reasoned arguments, who need to be 'enlightened' by suave middle men like Ramadan, who has seen the real truth and whose stand seems to depend on who his audience is, is inherently harmful.

something written for FEC

In Darfur in Sudan, the largest country in Africa, militias with verifiable ties to the government have killed tens of thousands of  people - probably a few hundreds of thousands based on latest  estimates, raped most of the women - both living and dead and have driven more than two million of them to live in desert refugee camps. It's president al-Bashir though has threatened to wage a jihad if peacekeepers enter Darfur,and is on record that the reports of massacres are “fictions” perpetrated by greedy NGOs and Zionists. In North Korea, the son of the 'eternal president' applies his dad's improved version of Marxist-Leninism, Juche aka Marxist-Leninism ++ and lords over a country where huge swathes of the population die periodically in famines. Burma, once a relatively prosperous country, is ruled by a Military Junta who uses rape and sexual abuse of civilian women as a method of state policy for control. And this is a government with whom India has 'improved' relations over successive governments. When the monks there started a civil disobedience movement last year, the pathetic pusillanimous response from our foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was "We have strategic and economic interests to protect in Burma. It is up to the Burmese people to struggle for democracy, it is their issue."

On a humanistic level, there is nothing special about the Palestinian cause compared to that of the Darfuris, the Koreans, the Burmese, the Kurds or for that matter that of the Kashmiris or the Manipuris. In other words, all of them are equally special and important. Planned killing of innocent civilians can, should, never be justified whether by the state or by ‘resistance groups’, whatever be the professed ideology, the ethnic origin of the perpetrators and the victims.

(Simultaneously, it should be observed that it is not a universal proposition. For BJP and most of the south delhi media, the plight of  the Kashmiri Pandits is seemingly more 'special' while for Jamaat-e-Islami and Madhyamam, the Palestinian cause is more 'special'. While not a reflection on the causes these do give an insight to these purveyors of opinion.) 

So, when a candidate for parliamentary elections is 'questioned' repeatedly about his Palestinian stand even after he has clarified it as much as it is humanly possible, when Palestine is a rallying cry in more than a few constituencies around Kerala, but say, not the cause of Irom Sharmila, a countrywoman who has been on a Gandhian hunger strike for years, the motivations, the biases and the context of it should be looked at much closer. Just the history of Indian-Palestinian relations do not in itself account for the attention given to this eons-old issue - and an insolvable one for the foreseeable future (irresolvable primarily due to a minority in all the three Abrahamic religions but that is another issue for another day). 

A few months ago, the DYFI had plastered most of the state with a Saddam Hussein poster. The illogicality of this was laughable if it were not sad. Saddam Hussein and his crazed family ruled over a proud civilizational country as if it was a family fiefdom and exhibited behavior which would have made some of the old Indian maharajas look progressive. It is also tough to imagine that this fact was unknown to the young comrades that using Saddam Hussein to show off their anti-american credentials would be laughed at by people who do know history. The answer is simple – it is an attempt to play identity politics with the Muslim community in Kerala, especially its youth, at a time when the community  is at a crossroads. A part of the Marxist intelligentsia has for decades considered that the way, perhaps the only way, to establish a permanent majority in Kerala a la Bengal is to get the Muslim vote and a lot of reasons, some economic, some cultural and even some mismanagement has caused that it has never happened. The elitism of and the dissatisfaction at the Muslim League leadership had given the comrades a whiff during the last elections and they want to take it further and they seem to see poor Tharoor, a Zionist spy  and an American agent (please!) as one of the ways to play identity politics. 

The Gujarat pogrom is going to be an issue which is going to affect the coming generations much more than any other issue in history. The staring-at-face injustice of it, the objectively verifiable facts of state collusion of raping and killing people and the perpetrators becoming politically more powerful because of the act, lest alone their getting punished is something that our society as a whole and generations to come is going to pay for. The increasing ghettoizing of the Muslim community even in the so called cosmopolitan cities, the rapid acceleration in the import of an alien purer Islam which is inherently retrogressive and which concentrates power in an uneducated and retrogressive priesthood, the increasing alienation from the state and conspiracy theories regarding all its actions while the increasing 'mainstreaming' of fundamentalist organizations etc are all pointers to this fact. 

This pent-up frustration and anger in the Muslim community in Kerala, which is perhaps the most empowered and forward looking Muslim community in India is being blatantly used to ghettoize and militarize the youth among them. Rather than even pretending to answer any of the real issues, they are being led to fight an intifada against Zionists and crusaders and their ‘agents’ in our small Kerala. 

(Wonders whether Antonio Gramsci would have approved it as a legitimate method to dislodge the class superstructure. Imagines poor Gramsci frantically writing an 'Idiot's Guide to my Prison Notebooks'. Sigh!) 

As someone whose dear one escaped death that night by a whisker, on whom neither the helplessness of that night nor the anger at the governing mechanisms of the Indian state which allows actions like these to happen with impunity, let me just state that I am also someone who feels his 'Israel Envy' or envy at the ability of the that state to at least try to protect its civilians against misguided twenty year olds high on Coke with AK-47s on hand. If that is what makes a Zionist anti-Islamic crusader/ American agent, then indeed guilty as alleged. 

The ways that the so called 'mainstream' Kerala society - including its political parties, media and intelligentsia and even its blogosphere has treated its most vulnerable section - the adivasis, is perhaps the most enlightening and a very important parallel in all this. First of all, the biggest disadvantage that the adivasi community has is that they are too tiny in number for the big political parties to spend their time on and they have also failed to organize themselves effectively to bargain as a collective. So when one examines history, even the most recent, one is not left wondering as to why no 'njangalkkariyanams' is being done about their plight, why Prabha Varma does not have an explanation of the issue accessible to everyone at peopletv.in. In fact, the Stalinism inside the communist party is revealed by their inability to understand the fact that even a Laha Gopalan who calls for its destruction has a right to expect justice from the state run by it. 

Coming back to Tharoor. Many of the fair questions being asked of Tharoor like his lack of grassroots political experience is seemingly applicable to Mr.Bhadrakumar, who seems to be the person giving the ‘diplomatic stamps’ on the allegations. It will indeed be interesting to note if he will be asked those by the same people when he makes his seemingly soon-to-be electoral jump. 

(I have been an ardent reader of FEC for a long time. Undoubtedly one of the best groups I have ever belonged to. The presence of people like RVG, a person people still used to talk about in campus, years after he left CET, though did make me more of a listener, aware of my own lack of knowledge. Anyway, the previous few weeks here have disturbed me enough to write this yesterday evening, regarding my concerns.)

As a response to a commenter on the British Foreign Secretary's Global Conversations Blog. Link

It is exactly the sort of moral relativism exhibited by Aethelbald which has made Britain one of the hotbeds of Islamic extremism in the world. As an Indian whose dear one was almost killed in Mumbai and whose anger has not left him, let me try to explain how fighting 'terrorism' is perfectly legitimate.

Someone who forfeits the fundamental right to live of a random civilian in the street including old women and children, is okay with killing them with an AK 47, forfeits any right for his hearing of his own grievance.

The world has, had, and will always have individuals, groups, nationalities with grievances. In fact, almost certain that we will never have a world in which there are no legitimate grievances. But that does not give any individual or groups the right to kill random civilians to get heard.

Period.

There is no compromise on this. It is a basic primate response and moral too. And yes, one is fighting the 'tactic'. I also advice you to read the literature of Muslim Brotherhood and Lashkar-e-Toiba. Maybe think of what Orwell would have written about them.

On Bill Kristol's Jihad's True Face at NYTimes

Mr.Kristol,

Thank you, sir. You don't know how deeply this piece is appreciated.

As an Indian, as someone who frequently travels to the US and who is an unapologetic admirer of her, as someone whose dear one escaped alive due to blind luck, my rage at the opinion pieces in American newspapers and metablogs cannot be quantified.

First of all, the biggest shock has been how little these people actually know, but they still consider themselves and are indeed considered 'experts'. I can picture them sitting in their new england enclaves and sneering at the lack of sophistication of the third world common folk while not realizing how their own words imply a complete inability to look beyond their own cultural cocoon and indeed to their lack of scholarship. It seems tenure is even easier nowadays.

Apologies if that sounded like a rant, though I mean every word of it.

Some points.

1. In Dallas airport, I once happened to be the only non-white face. The imposing brother standing there decided that the brown me should be the only one who walks through a spanking new body scanner from GE. I didn't even notice this fact till I saw a middle aged (and still strikingly pretty) white woman complaining as to why I was seemingly 'profiled'. The assumption that being asked to go through a scanner was offensive to me seemed laughable. Maybe I should do some research as to why I should have been offended and be prepared for it next time. Though maybe I'll just wear a t-shirt which says 'Agnostic - Don't care for God, can't kill for him'

2. There can no more be any compromise with confronting and defeating radical, political Islam in the ideological sphere. The ten kids who killed with blind rage were again victims as were the innocents who got killed. The best commentary, incidentally was by an Australian cricket writer and was capped off with a memorable phrase - 'killing with the blind rage that the sinister aged can so easily create in the idealistic young.'. What is so shocking is that easy as it is , I mean, it something more stupid that going back to Caliphate?, no one seems to want to do it for seeming to be politically incorrect.

regards,
Jay
s'thing I wrote - http://thinkndmuse.blogspot.com...

— Jay, Bangalore, India

On Paul Graham's Keep Your Identity Small

"To question history, to correct it, you need people who are not anyone's children." Anand, Indian Writer.

Oddly, this same thought has been on my mind for quite a few weeks now. To move forward, especially to look back at history and learn from it, we can't be anyone's children, however uninstinctive and bastardly it sounds.

Because if we are going to become someones lineage, rationally we should go back to that incestous tribe somewhere in southern Africa. And all of us too. It is undoubtedly our partial knowledge and living with the legacy of the few generations before us that many a time makes us unable to rationally and honestly analyze and learn and move forward.

There are two not-insignificant roadblocks to this. Perhaps more too.

The first one can best be illustrated by a 'lower-caste' friend of mine who once told me that his identity is something he didn't choose and can't escape from, most probably, till he dies.

The second is the weltanschauung question. What if you really do believe that you are part of the blessed tribe/religion/group/whatever. So it also requires a 'scientific worldview' for the lack of a better phrase.

In both, in different ways, the identity imposed or chosen becomes the lifelong prison.