jayasankar’s comments

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.)