I must admit that i am delighted to see Pankaj MIshra jump the shark. About bloody time. Of course its possible he is a CIA agent and this just means “the empire” has decided to dump the democracy facade. Either that or his wife was out of town and nobody told him he was going to expose himself badly with this. Well, time to plug my rolling review of Pankaj Bhaiya’s tendentious little book. (please do keep in mind, thats a rolling review, just random comments dashed off as i read the book. That is why its so repetitive and disjointed).
Or…who am I kidding. In all likelihood no one will notice. Good native informants are hard to find. He has reached the top of the heap. They wont dump him, they will find his op-ed brave and original. And they will say its being misunderstood by imperialist apologists.
But one can always hope.
Anyway, in my last post about Shia-killing in Pakistan I had taken a dig at left wing “native informants” in the following words:
It (LEJ) has a real presence (perhaps less visible to the super-elite and left wing “native informants” like Saadia Toor and Humeira Iqtidar?). (btw, Saadia has tweeted to object that Humeira is not leftist “by any stretch”, so I must add that the term leftist is used VERY loosely here)
A word about left wing native informants. I know there are native informants galore and I have been accused of being one myself, but I could not find (in a 2 minute google search) any article that sheds light on left wing native informants. Someone must have written something about the various Western educated member of the South Asian native elite who help to translate the affairs of the natives into the language of the modern Western Left. Can someone help find a good write-up?
A commentator took me to task with the following comment:
I do have a beef to pick with Omar. You are a little too consumed with some of these liberal Pakistani know nothings. The inability or unwillingness of South Asian academic scholars or other Pakistani liberals to understand the nature of these killers is not the reason Pakistan cannot protect its minorities. Yes, the liberal Pakistani blogger is more interested in fighting the ‘empire’ than the Taliban and this is something which is very annoying and a major nuisance. However, he is only a nuisance to people like us who actually read these fools and who debate with them. In the real world in Pakistan, the security agencies, conniving politicians and their enablers in the media are not really influenced by seminars on imperialism at NYU. So yes, it is very satisfying to mock these people – however, we also need to realize that they control nothing, influence nobody, and are completely irrelevant. Our focus on them, however small, is a little misplaced.
The fact is, I am genuinely confused on this issue. On the one hand, I agree with the commentator; who cares what Tariq Ali or his fans at the Lahore literary festival think about this? Not the killers nor their managers, not the American imperialists..no one really give a damn. Nobody who matters actually gives a damn.
But then I think about the fact that most of my social circle in Karachi and Lahore was probably out there clapping for George Galloway as closing speaker at the Karachi literary festival and Tariq Ali as keynote speaker at the Lahore one. And thats not just the 57 remaining Marxist rich people in Pakistan, that means lots of middle class types. Some of these people are very smart, they are rising stars in various modern fields, if they all get sucked into the PankajMIshra-ArundhatiRoy black hole then what? I dont mean that they all follow the full argument. But they seem to share a lot of the basic assumptions.
And then there’s the whole lot of Western journalists and think-tankers who use these native informants? dont they have any influence? Does that matter?
I mean, one expects a certain percentage of the elite to be Arundhati Roy fans. Thats probably healthy. But suppose you have an emerging society so many of the Western educated professional and intellectual types are drinking the Kool Aid. Is that healthy? Does that matter?
Besides, they supply the real jihadis with all their modern talking points. The jihadis copy and paste a lot from the internet. A lot of it is borrowed from White-power websites or other anti-Jewish sites. But they scan Chomsky and Monbiot and Fisk. For sure. Even Ayman Zawarhiri goes on about globalization because he read about it while reading some western left site for talking points. Does that matter?
What do you think?
Your informant rightly says: “we also need to realize that they control nothing, influence nobody, and are completely irrelevant.”
Nobody’s in charge. Pakistan is in a state of terminal decline. Nobody controls anything anymore. Ideologies and fantasies of conspiracy are all that remain. “aate hain ghaaib se ye mazaamein khyaal mien Ghalib”…
More like terminal madness
The left may not matter much in Pakistan. But it does in India. And while the articles in the Guardian and NYT are unlikely to stir things up in Western centers of power they – paradoxically – help shore up reputations in Delhi.
Right. One thing that I don’t really “get” anytime I read Indian publications (e.g., Outlook India, First Post, etc.) is the hold of the left on so many Anglophone Indian elites. Yeah, it’s there in Pakistan too but in a trivial sense and like the commenter said, not important. Is it post-colonialism? Yet if post-colonialism why do somany Indian elites seem to pretty much hate India? Weird to me. . .
LoL-I’m skeptical in general, but I am probably more pro-India than most of the leftist Indian elites-and I’m Pakistani!
I know what you mean. It’s equally baffling to me, and I’m Indian. ‘Brown sahib’ phenomenon perhaps? They think themselves quasi-english colonialists forced to live among the great brown unwashed?
Would explain a lot
_ India vs Bharat
_Preference for English vs push for a national language
_Borrowed intellectual hypotheses from the west
etc.
For a perfect example of this, read
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ZbkOzPmDCboEblctzy2aTM/Breaking-news-I-may-not-be-an-Indian.html
its sort of common for people of literary and artistic bent to despise the middle class. And in india, even more so the middle class spawn of middle india.
But there is no basis. Its like that Groucho Marx line, they would not like to be where they will be welcomed.
shah rukh khan, television dance shows, obsession with professional education, cricket, there are not so charming middle class concerns, but yeah i don’t get the wholesale disdain for a couple hundred million people..
+1
My personal opinion which might be right or wrong:
I think conspiracy theories or type of narratives (both the leftists or islamists) that blunt the opinion against the jihadis do have their part to play in the lack of will to take on the jihadis, so it does matter.
The plain fact is although the jihadis are hurting, the jihadis and possibly a part of the Pakistan military have the same perceived enemies – the govt. in Afghanistan, India, Israel (?) and possibly the U.S. (?). So they seem to find common cause with them even though it seems to only be resulting in the decline of the writ of law and order authorities. As long as the child was small, it’s parent could control it and indoctrinate it, now that it has grown up it is starting to have it’s own mind.
See the cat. Its fur is brown. It’s walking toward the door.
It’s starting to have its own mind.
Look enry iggins, eliza’s really learnt er lessons and won’t lego
I have taken up arms against the Great Apostrophe Crisis.
:’)
Serious question: Why all the hatred for Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy? Is it because you don’t agree with their worldview? If that is the case, does that necessarily mean that THEY are wrong and YOU are right?
I attended the first day of the Lahore Literary Festival and heard Tariq Ali as well as Ayesha Jalal on the panel “Pakistan: A Modern Country?”. All the panelists seemed to be saying sensible things. They all agreed that there is a need for the state to be secular. Interestingly, most of the audience applauded wildly at this point. I would think that this is something that Omar would agree with?
No one is saying that you have to buy all of Pankaj and Arundhati’s arguments, but why the visceral hatred?
(i) what does this word “secular” even mean anymore in south asia? having a separate twistable “south asian” definition just seems silly. india is not a secular state (hindutvas are logically correct on this point) nor is it forseeable that pakistan will be one in our lifetimes. Enlightenment or not people.
(ii) i’m not an indian national, but i assume many indians don’t like roy or mishra bc they seem to be reflexively anti-india. Roy hanging out with the rebels in the jungle in eastern india would be a good example. Those rebels have killed a lot of “normal” Indian police and soldiers, so it’s related to why I despise the Pak Taliban who kill our Frontier corps troops.
..and calling them ‘Gandhians with guns’ while they plant bombs inside of dead policemen.
What does secular mean in a country that has virtually no non-Muslims left? How sensible is it to talk about being secular in the face of the stark reality outside the pretend world of the Lahore Literary Festival? Look no further as to why all these Mercedes Benz leftists get no respect.
+1.
The irony of the left talking about Human rights.
What or where is the irony?
Pol Pot , Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Castro, Che, Hitler, Tito, Mussolini.
Retarded.
Let me be more specific: lumping together Che, Hitler, Tito and Mussolini betrays a total lack of sense: historical and the plain old common variety.
Non-Muslims are 3-4% of Pakistan’s population. 4% of 180 million is not a miniscule number of people (It’s 7,200,000). These people are also citizens of Pakistan. Thus, their rights should also be protected by the Pakistani state.
I think it is a good thing that people are discussing these ideas and proposing secularism as a solution, even if right now these ideas are only being discussed by the type of crowd that attends literary festivals.
…why the visceral hatred?
Perhaps it’s jealousy? Who knows, who cares. When pressed for a substantial critique – or a challenge to take them on in their own turfs, Tariq Ali or Mishra or Roy – all I’ve seen is continued bluster here.
Off course, the other post which willfully and ignorantly misrepresents PM’s column in Bloomberg doesn’t merit a response.
“Let me be more specific: lumping together Che, Hitler, Tito and Mussolini betrays a total lack of sense: historical and the plain old common variety.”
How? if you believe that fascism is different than communism than you are wrong. Without Marx fascism would have never arose. All of the names cited above had unifying characteristics.
propaganda for the working class, hatred of capitalism, hatred of freedom, a focus on west’s flaws. And above all justifying or abetting violence, even today the kneejerk support for everything Palestine.
if you believe that fascism is different than communism than you are wrong. Without Marx fascism would have never arose.
What complete idiots you right wingers are. The arch enemies of communism are communists themselves?
Yes, communists set up a paranoid killing machine in search of purity similar to that of muslims.
The couple of comments by “Sharda” were from my anima, btw.
What irks me the most about someone like Mishra or Roy is the ideas that they espouse always and always lead to misery yet they hang on to it for dear life. Most of it is just parroted. Neoliberalism, Colonialism, global capital etc. I don’t believe any one of them have even touched an economics book in their lives.
Think this for a moment, the likes of Mishra and his cohorts at JNU live in the most secure elite parts of their country. Their financial needs are taken care of at the expense of the taxpayer and what do they do in return. They organize campus orgies where they discuss about ‘Peoples movements’ such as the Maoists.
Secondly they are the most privileged ,pampered segment of the society. Yet they present themselves on behalf of the poor who will be the worst off if their favorite ideas are implemented. And some of it is just nutty, presenting Pakistan as an victim of colonialism, shouting orientalism at any criticism of Islam, an unreflexive support of every nut fringe rebels with an Islamic or Marxist tag.
@vitasta Jealousy maybe. Sure. That could be a factor. But what does it mean to say “challenge them on their own turfs”? My main issue is not with facts (which are sometimes accurate) but with the tendentious way in which they are presented..
But I am willing to accept that within the happy community its very hard to notice the tendentiousness. That is partly why i sometimes get snarky and use their terms (like “native informant”) because those terms can look very ironic to someone who does not live within their shared world. They are examples of how little self-awareness these people can display.
“these people” and “their shared world” are loosely defined terms here. But over time we can more or less figure out even our loosely used terms if we talk to each other frequently enough?
e.g. Pankaj and Tariq Ali and Arundhati probably have their own differences. But they will invariably “respect” each other even if they dont agree. They certainly won’t respect an equivalent right wing clown. So there is a grouping here, even if its hard to define or has not been exactly defined.
Pankaj Mishra has a problem. If he was a believer in conspiracy theories he could have peddled the standard line that US-Zion-Hindu axis is causing problems in Pakistan.
Instead his argument is more subtle. People are obsessed with Deep State, some Islamists are mere blowhards (while others are actually sagacious). The real fault lies with AAZ and NS. We can call this the Defense of Pak-Imran Khan line of thought. Indeed IK has been peddling the same AAZ-NS is bad, give me 90 days and I will clean up Pakistan speech for some time now.
PM’s problem is that the army in Pak (finally) has given up ambitions on “direct rule”. Islamists would love to be dictators but they are awfully poor rulers. My prediction is that Imran will not get enough seats because AAZ and NS has cut enough deals to shut him out. Poor Pankaj, he prefers to choose a new electorate or get a new dictator. Neither of his wishes will come to pass, Insha allah.
regards
Challenging them on their own turf means taking them head on in the places where they usually publish: The Guardian, LRB, CP, wherever, rather than taking by now tiresome potshots at them here; no need to hide your light under the BP or 3qd bushel.
My 2c to you.
Aah. I wish. If you know someone who will print a piece from me in one of those publications, please let me know. I promise to write it carefully, not just collect random thoughts in a blog post (which, btw, is OK for a blog post…I think)
Both the Guardian and the LRB have blogs – I have read Tariq Ali in the latter. Not really a big blog person so can’t say about other places.
I think you should just send in your piece(s).
@Omar: I do remember Vijay Prashad coming down quite hard on Arundhati Roy in CP for her tripping with the Naxalite grasshoppers at one time.
I will agree that Mishra and Roy do read at times as though they were channelling Naipaul and/or Zinn. One also does wish that Tariq Ali were a bit rigorous in a scholarly sort of way. These people are by no means your average fools and your suggesting that they are – and when challenged falling back on what must probably be your favourite word: “tendentious” – doesn’t do you or them much honour or justice.
Vitasta … Omar certainly doesn’t set out in every blog to rigorously prove Mishra et al wrong. You don’t agree with his take on said worthies, but most people frequenting this post do.
Try to keep context and scope in mind before talking about people’s ‘honour’.
Context and scope is precisely what you lack – Omar and I have jousted often on this blog much, much before you were a gleam in your parents’ eyes.
Unfortunately this blog has suffered some massive retrograde amnesia and so all that has been lost at least for you to profitably peruse. I am sure it’s all saved somewhere; just hasn’t gotten restored properly. I hope.
@vitasta, but tendentious IS the problem. “marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view : biased. — ten·den·tious·ly adverb. — ten·den·tious·ness noun”
It doesnt matter how many crimes are committed in the name of anti-imperialism or how badly it turns out. Its always to be preferred to imperialism. Everything else is secondary. e.g. secularism is good, but if religous nuts are anti-imperialist then that tends to save their ass. Human rights are good but if they are violated by anti-imperialists we can look the other way. And so on. Its not a blanket rule. Its a persistent tendency. The only way to see it is to see the trend and the little nuggets of trendy nonsense scattered through their writings to identify themselves as being on the side of the angels.
That doesnt mean the right words are never said. In fact they are always there, but after a while you start to notice the careful qualifications with which certain things are always hedged. In other cases the a case is made for the worst people but a weasely out is arranged by making sure to insert a little disclaimer (“of course no one can approve of crucifying gay teens but…”..that “but” will never be there for the imperialist (“of course no one can approve of Kalapani but..”)
My point is not that the imperialists are right. Or that Niall Ferguson is therefore the way to go. But there is a pattern here, and its victims are disproportionately what I would consider “good people”..they are also people who are disproportionately my friends and family. So the whole thing gets more attention.
Something like that.
But dont think i am blind to the innocent side of it. @shahidsaeed posted a link to the Stalin Society of Pakistan’s memorial meeting for comrade Stalin today
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.414252808664888.1073741825.396719620418207&type=1
https://www.facebook.com/StalinSociety.Pk
I can empathize with these people. I know some of these people. They are pretty cool. And most of them wouldnt hurt a fly. And they really really dont have any idea what Stalin did. Stalin to them is like Data Sahib was to my grandma. I am sure the Stalin mela was generally fun.
I realize that in India that may be a more serous affair. The Indian left is not as harmless as the Pakistani version. But my point is that I can do “nuance”…
@Vitasta – ah you sound like such a charming old codger
I think Omar has produced more than a substantial critique of Pankaj Mishra here and in his 3 earlier blog posts where he did a review of his latest book. Its highly detailed and no ‘bluster’.
BTW, why is it incumbent on Omar to take these worthies on ‘their own turfs’. This is usually the last retort of a beaten adversary and reminds me of bullies in school. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely wish a direct exhange of posts between Omar and Mishra/Roy/Ali would occur, but to suggest that Omar is preaching to the converted here on BP or 3QD is not really correct.
I wish rather than indulging in name-calling, you would produce a critique of Omar’s posts on Pankaj Mishra here so that we rookie bloggers might benefit from an exchange of titans.
@Vitasta/Sharda/Shatadru/Sindhu/ or whatever
Vitasta,
Yes, this is the feeling I get. Omar and other writers on BP just REALLY dislike Mishra’s and Roy’s politics. So they caricature their arguments instead of engaging with them seriously.
I agree that Omar etc should respond to Mishra et al in the appropriate forum. But of course, that would be much more difficult than just attacking them here.
Since you obviously love Roy and Mishra and I suppose read them religiously, can you let me know what exactly do they stand for? As in what kind of government and society would they be happy with? What kind of economic system would they prefer. I sincerely do not hate Roy and Mishra. Actually I am not at all sold to any idealogy and like to flatter myself of having cold reason as my sole guide.
Also tell me how exactly does Omar caricature Mishra and Roy. They in themselves are caricatures to begin with.
All Misra/Roy do is randomly criticize the present state of affairs in every possible manner and never provide any means of bettering the system. As an engineer, I know that you can never have a perfectly functioning system. Never 100% efficiency. You have to always chose between many different contraints and arrive at the best possible compromise.
I have read a a lot of Roy and Mishra and have never ever come across a workable alternative system which they support. The one time Roy vaguely mentioned something in that nature was in her long rambling essay on Naxalites where she said that humanity has a lot to learn from the forest tribes coz they live in-sinc with nature and don’t dominate it. Is that the feasible alternative system she proposees? A return to the hunter gatherer life?
Ambuj,
I am not an expert on Roy and Mishra, so I cannot tell you about their worldviews in detail. I do know that they are leftists and Omar tends to take potshots at them as such (“poco-pomo, leftist liberal etc”).
Many Indians don’t like Roy and Mishra because they take positions against the Indian state. Roy, in particular, has often spoken and written about how Kashmir is occupied by Delhi. This has led to some Indians arguing for her to be tried for “sedition”. She is also strongly against nuclear weapons and also against the dispossession of people in the name of “development” and “globalization”.
If you want to get a sense of Roy’s thinking, you can read her collection of essays entitled “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (Penguin Books, 2002).
i’m sure most on this forum read all or part of that essay. did you actually interpret that she was advocating a return to a hunter-gatherer society? she’s a writer trying to describe the harm the state routinely inflicts on people its obligated to protect. it was sympathetic to the naxalites whom we already know are outlaws and routinely shoot up national guards. many people read essays and other prose to appreciate nuance, not so they can close the volume with the certitude of 1s and 0s.
Kabir,
I do not need pointers to Roy’s works. Did I not say I have read nearly everything she ever wrote?
As I expected you too are clueless about what she stands for apart from the fact that what she says rings emotionally with your psyche.
She and Pankaj Mishra are yet to give any reasonable alternative to globalization/industrialization/development or Kashmir as a part of the Indian state. Merely railing against everything which is going on does not an intellectual make. The problem is not industrialization, it is muddled property rights and corrupt acquisition practices which to some degree happens everywhere. Similarly what do they really want for kashmir? A Taliban ruled, Pakistan proxy?
What I absolutely don’t get is how these two persoanlities can so ridicule the aspirational middle class when they themselves have become globe-trotting, party popping celebrities.
No one is saying that you have to buy all of Pankaj and Arundhati’s arguments, but why the visceral hatred?
The Indian hindutvadis are right wing haters so of course they hate the leftists, liberals, secularists, socialists, anti-casteists etc, along with the Muslims, Christians, abrahamics in general. They are the counterparts of the Taliban, Deobandis and Wahhabis of Pakistan.
What’s so strange to see is Omar acting like a hindutvadi. Sheer hypocrisy…
anti-casteists
what manner of beasts are these – very ugly-sounding at the very least.
I don’t read PM much but whenever I read an article of his, he never fails to mention Modi. Just as in the article above. He jumps from Sunni/Shia to Modi.
He and his cohorts have an unhealthy obsession with him.
@ Sam
“What does secular mean in a country that has virtually no non-Muslims left?”
There is a growing feeling amongst (many) Sunnis that Shias are not muslims (and vice versa). In Pakistan as our own esteemed HP has cited, this may be as large as 50% of the population (to the extent polling is reliable).
Again I could be wrong but if this feeling truly runs deep and wide then it is even worse for Shias than the (present-day) Hindus. When brothers fight, Kurukshetra (or the Mughal empire) is the logical end point (I hope it does not come to that).
regards
+ other Muslim populations who were declared non-Muslim a long time ago like the Ahmedis, and Ismailis who, though aren’t “officially” non-Muslim, are considered such by most people (often including themselves), which leads to some hostility towards them (I can attest to this myself having been to Pakistan and speaking to multiple Pakistani Ismailis). Sufis as well are sometimes might be a bit too heterodox for many Pakistanis. Pakistani secularism would mainly concern itself with these populations foremost.
Yes, even though 97% of Pakistan’s population is “Muslim”, state secularism is still necessary because of sectarian differences within Islam. Whose interpretation of Islam is the official one? Is it that of the Sunnis, simply because they are the majority? If so, than what of doctrinal differences between Sunnis?
For the record, Pakistan was supposed to be a secular Muslim-majority homeland, not a theocratic state. At least, this is what we are told was “Jinnah’s Pakistan”.
I also think the state should never have gotten into the business of defining who is “Muslim”. If Ahmedis want to call themselves Muslim, they should be allowed to do so–it’s between them and Allah and they are answerable to him on the Day of Judgement, there’s no reason for the State to get in the middle. Similarly, whatever people’s personal beliefs about Shia being “kafir”, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) the state’s issue.
So I am agreed with i-D that, even though the vast majority of Pakistan’s population is Muslim, secularism is still necessary in order for the state to be neutral among various Muslim groups as well as among the “non-muslim” minorities.
Kabir,
It would be good for the whole region if Pakistan turns secular. All the best to those who want it to be.
For this, I think it would have to stop defining itself as a homeland for Muslims. If someone would say that India is defined as a homeland for Hindus that would be the end of Indian secularism.
For secularism to exist Pakistan needs to shed it’s national identity based on religion. This is where I don’t understand what you have said here “For the record, Pakistan was supposed to be a secular Muslim-majority homeland, not a theocratic state. At least, this is what we are told was ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ ” You define politics in terms of competing religious groups, have separate electorates based on religion and still want to be secular. I don’t understand Jinnah. Perhaps he thought that he could change the story after winning the case.
The only way I see forward and the most pragmatic approach would be to say TNT is history, not the future and dump TNT into the Arabian sea. Why not? Bangladesh has been able to dump TNT into the Bay of Bengal and still have it’s own identity based on geography rather than religion.
You cannot have two categories, Muslim and non-Muslim in secularism so the Muslim identity as a state identity has to take a back seat and for that make TNT history and not base the future on it. This seems to be a grand task. Whether it is possible?
I think you might find my post offensive. But then how do you think secularism can come about in Pakistan? Since it directly affects you, it would be interesting to know from you how you think this might come about.
I think you are correct. Maybe change the name of Pakistan. Start all over. Good luck.
It’s =it is. Its = shows possession.
Adam,
I don’t find your post offensive at all.
Pakistan was defined as the “homeland for Indian Muslims” but it was not meant to be an Islamic State (i.e. one run on sharia law). The defining of politics in terms of competing religious groups occurred during the British period with the creation of the “Indian Muslim” as a political category. (This is Ayesha Jalal’s argument). The Muslim League believed that the rights of the Muslim minority needed to be safeguarded. When compromise could not be achieved on how to do this in United India, Pakistan was created.
TNT applied in a British India context. Now that Pakistan exists as a Muslim-majority state, there is no reason why the state cannot grant equal rights to all citizens. For Pakistan to be a secular state, there would have to be a few changes to the Constitution. We would have to drop the clause making Ahmedis “non-Muslim” as well as the clause that says that the President and PM of Pakistan must be Muslim.
Regardless of the context in which Pakistan came about (TNT), there is no reason why 65 years later, all Pakistani citizens cannot be treated equally.
So secularism in Pakistan means that all Muslim sects there should be accepted as Muslim. Next secularism will be defined as all Sunnis are Muslim regardless of the school that they belong to. SA leftists are like monkeys – as in monkey see, monkey do. Mimic Marxists. Mimic secularists.
You are quite correct, (IMO) finally the deobandis and the wahabis will be left standing (they already agree on most stuff anyway, including hatred for Shias).
There was the Munir commission report set-up in reaction to anti-ahmadi riots back in the “golden days” of 1950s which concluded that the concept of a Muslim differed for different sects and if the fatwas of the Ulema were relied upon to determine whether an individual is Muslim or Kafir, then no sect could be called Muslim because of the lack of a single, coherent and unanimous definition of a Muslim and an Islamic State.
The neo-secular muslim state will correct the above dilemma by permitting only the most rigid definition of Islam. Other folks will be the “protected” class who will have to pay a protection tax. That is where we are headed eventually.
regards
That’s good. Declare that no one is a muslim and all deserve protection.
“Declare that no one is a Muslim”
No, everyone who self-identifies as Muslim is Muslim. The truth or falsity of their claim is only for Allah to decide–it’s not the state’s responsibility.
At the rate Pakistan is “progressing,” I think that day mightn’t be too far off. But still, for the aforementioned groups the concept of Pakistani “secularism” isn’t something to scoff at. Of course, Tariq Ali + crew talking about it at a Book festival isn’t going to help endear the middle-class to the idea. Nor is advertising the distinction that Pakistan was “for Muslims” (“Jinnah’s Pakistan”) as opposed to “for Islam” something that would inspire mass change of values. It’s a nice idea to think about, unfortunately, I don’t see it happening (in the near future).
OTOH, minorities shouldn’t have tough it out till that distant day their co-citizens see the light. At the jamaat-khaana I was visiting there was an after-prayer talk about immigration to Canada/US and the jamaat helping facilitate that, etc. OFC, this is only feasible for well off communities leaving out many other groups (esp. low-caste non-Muslims), migrating to India would be the solution for them, but no way that’s going to happen in the current climate.
“The Muslim League believed that the rights of the Muslim minority needed to be safeguarded. ”
It could have been protected under a secular framework rather than defining political groups according to religion as was done under TNT. Anyway, history is history. It’s the past. One can choose to be burdened by the past or create a new future.
Adam,
Look, you fail to understand that it was the BRITISH who “defined political groups according to religion”. This was the context in which TNT arose.
But I agree with you that this is all academic now. That’s why I said that regardless of the context of Pakistan’s creation, there is no reason why we cannot have a secular state today.
Am under the impression that most muslim majority states treat minorities of any kind poorly. Genocidal/tribal ideology.
And if you pushed for a secular state, and a democracy, under what Urdu slogan might you promote this? “Pakistan ka matlab kya? La-deen, la-deen.” ??? There is no chance Pakistan will choose secularism.
Ken,
“Pakistan Ka Matlab Kya” is so last century!
Really, it’s not that difficult to argue that the state has the responsibility to treat all of its citizens equally regardless of their religion.
As usual, I’m not talking about what “should be” or what’s “responsible”, but about what’s possible. The state never has treated people equally, and it won’t now. It’s a bigot state and a bigot people.
@Omar: I am urging you to do nuance. Broad brush-strokes like the one you start out this reply with – re tendentiousness, imperialism, anti-imperialism, etc. – are not very likely to be convincing at least for those who can read closely and appraise critically as I think I can as can a host of others here and elsewhere.
Telling your family and friends that authors/speakers they admire are just being tendentious won’t get you very far. Forget where I read this recently but it went something like: you can’t reason someone out of something if they haven’t been reasoned into it in the first place. (Whether they are good or bad reasons is not the point, of course.)
Here are a couple of examples of the sort of thing you can do: Michael Neumann at CP – The WASP Penchant for Zionism and here he takes on Norman Finkelstein: The Stability and Value of Israel.
Take on your bête noires at CP!
@Ghataprabha.
“did you actually interpret that she was advocating a return to a hunter-gatherer society?”
I did not interpret anything which is not intended. As I said this was the ‘closest she ever came’ towards advocating a positive position on anything. I actually have read her articles very closely to find something in them other than laments and emotional bullshit and this is all that stuck in my sieve.
“many people read essays and other prose to appreciate nuance, not so they can close the volume with the certitude of 1s and 0s.”
All I have to say is that people who chose to read prose to appreciate nuance would do well to steer clear of Arundhati Roy. She is a self-described polemicist with very low attention towards ‘nuance’ and often facts.
Lol. This has to be the joke of the year.
BTW before you get yourself into a twist about the sorry state of humanities education in India which produces individuals like me who cannot appreciate “nuance” let me tell you that a political/economic/social commentary in a weekly magazine is not a platform for expressing only and only propoganda. Which great philosopher or thinker do you think only ever pointed out problems vilifying a class of people without advancing some methods towards remedy? I have read a lot of David Hume, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Naipaul etc and there is a hell lot of difference between them and Roy.
well no one seriously considers her a philosopher at all let alone a great philosopher. she’s a writer, a type of artist perhaps. she has a style, one knows what to expect when they read her, yet we still read her because of some dwindling literary powers she still retains and a bit of curiosity about how she’ll reflect on the subject she’s chosen. her nuance is not to be found in the way she weighs the scales of justice between the indian state and its dissenters perhaps, she’s plainly chosen a protagonist and antagonist for her piece. maybe its just in complete empathy she surrenders to or pure descriptive ability, haven’t considered it much. Needless to say, i’d be very impatient with a group of people that blindly took cues on political stances based on her writings, and of all the boho-artsy jholawala charminar smoking radicals one comes across, i thinks its rather rare for an adult of that species to naively stand behind her positions. One can value a piece she’s written as well as one of a conservative like naipaul on purely aesthetic merit, without grinding them through an evaluation of the analytical rigor employed.
Bravo.
I think what you just said should be added as a disclaimer to everything she writes in case someone might get his/her whole worldview based on her work.
“To sum it up what she writes should in no way affect govt. policy.”
+1
I think this is the essential issue. A badly educated politico or decision maker might think to make policy on this sort of work, the way in which Thomas Friedman is used in the West. There is serious scholarship to guide one, and that should be the metric.
Unfair on my part, but it’s the same problem I have with C. Christine Fair. She is busy chastising everyone else while she fails to examine how her own policy work aided some of the very people she blames for SA regional problems. She unwittingly gave intellectual aid and comfort to some very nasty actors because the people in DC reading her work are not educated enough on the issues to take the good and leave the bad.
I was in a pleasant haze induced by successfully completing some work only 1 week behind schedule. Since I am now emerging into the light, let me add that the problem with Pankaj and Roy (and comrade Tariq Ali) is not just that “anti-imperialism” trumps X or Y.
The “anti-imperialism” itself is mostly fashionable bullshit.
The love of the “oppressed” is mostly fashionable bullshit.
The solutions offered are entirely fashionable bullshit.
Why are they still being published and read? For “aesthetic merit”? I think it’s the fashionable politics that sells (while making much of their willingness to stand against fashionable/dominant opinion”, LOL, ROFLMAO), not the “aesthetic merit”. And thats mostly bullshit.
Ghataprabha, I am not picking on you. I think your comments make far more sense than anything Pankaj ever wrote, so why bother with Pankaj, just cut out the middleman and write …
Vitasta, i know, I am using broad brush strokes again in this comment. In fact, far broader than the ones I used before. Just sweeping statements with no reasoning and no evidence offered. More later, but probably not on this topic…I am going to try and stick to the one or two topics i really try to keep up with.
of course, Zakhm ke bharney talak nakhun na baRh aaen gey kya?
(by the time the scar heals, wont the nails have grown again?)
Fair enough. No skin off my nose. At least we will both agree that reasoned argument is not fashionable bullshit.
Omar ‘I think it’s the fashionable politics that sells (while making much of their willingness to stand against fashionable/dominant opinion”, LOL, ROFLMAO)’ says it all. Beautifully put sir!
Must get rid of all that hot air somehow, yeah
i get that making a fetish of opposing anything construed as oppression is problematic, as are the shallow aesthetic pleasures of revolutionary chic. One can easily accuse Roy of the former and PM of the latter. That said, one may actually find themselves espousing common cause with AR and PM through a somewhat different path of reason and experience. is it crazy to be have been opposed to the Narmada dam project? i appreciate that AR attempts to isolate the variable that is human dignity and then calculates it putative value to the state.
I agree it must be annoying to be living in the west and to hear their views naively parroted by non-desi radicals with little context about the issues. I’ve been in that situation, it must have been regarding kashmir and it bothered me that a false equivalence was being made with what the indian state was doing there and other much more brutal conflicts. But to live in india and to view the dialogue they are part of on the national and regional level, despite whatever discipline they may lack as thinkers, i think that any voice that shames the actions of the indian state in kashmir, assam, and the red corridor is welcome to be heard. the problem here is the fashionable bullshit of national integration, free trade and liberalization. There is much more danger from the management gurus who advocate FDI in retail and shill for Walmart, or try to convince the public that the country will never develop if it doesn’t extract enough iron ore from orissa, or that if someone opposes a nuclear reactor in their backyard then they are hopelessly backward.
As for “uneducated” indians being brainwashed by PM or AR, i think the perception of risk is misplaced. The pragmatism of people here cannot be underestimated, but the dwindling importance of the opinions of wall st and young US state dept functionaries is perhaps in play. They however seem to believe that the Economist’s reportage on south asia is very clever, but we don’t rant about those disingenuous banalities.
The fetishes and occasional distortions of PM or AR’s narrative journalism is much welcome over a style anchored in the use of econometric and demographic data but divested of any sense of human value. That may be a corny sentiment in the global anglophone milieu, but on the community level, facing the juggernaut of a state that has no purpose other than to extract and perpetuate and which increasingly demands devotion, you must stand together with imperfect, even distastefully ambitious (PM), allies.
@GP
AR lies shamelessly. Lies and lies and lies like there is no tomorrow. She bullshits about trade liberalization being colonialism. She bullshits about basic facts like India’s exports being all minerals when it hardly touches 4%. Lies and lies and lies.
http://www.outlookindia.com/story.aspx?sid=4&aid=280609
Here she is spouting utter rubbish(again):
http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-2/423/423_06_Roy.shtml
She is an extremist idealogue who should be a museum study piece at best, not a public intellectual. The fact that she is one tells you the rot at the top in India.
You must keep in mind that for many people this is a religious issue. Those who share our faith are saved, even if they sin. Those who refuse to accept our religion are damned even if they seem to have data or outcomes or anything else. Keep that in mind and all will become clearer (though not completely clear)
Beware the fervour of the non-believer!
@ghataprabha: Well said.
@Neelan(D): Your Outlook link seems to be lies as well – of a very pedestrian HTTP kind: 404.
first link had expired, but i must admit, i hardly found anything objectionable in the second one, the article from “the socialist worker”. Its a classic anti-globalist piece.. where was the factual distortion in it? i don’t even consider myself of the left, in fact i’d admit to being a bit socially conservative. everything she espouses sounds absolutely radical from the perspective of a westerner, but there is the often repeated wisdom in doing as westerners do rather than as they say. In the current situation wherein the economic conditions of india vs the industialized world are absolutely asymetrical, i would, in the conservative spirit of measured consideration of change, be very skeptical of loosening trade restrictions. not because i’ve abstracted the concept of the global and attributed evilness to it in the framework of some received ideology. likewise, i would like to see subnational polities negotiate better terms for themselves, with more robust municipal powers. Its one of the primary attractions of american republicanism. Its enlightened self interest even. I want my own people to prosper, and given that many of my own people are poor and uncompetitive, i advocate barriers until we get our act together (don’t hold your breath). if i had no attachments to the “losers” i’d probably be sooner to shed that stance. Whatever the delusional optimism of certain elite indians that any but a sliver of them could possibly compete globally in current conditions, i dont share it. I don’t think this instinct for self-preservation is much different than what one would find among middle class working families in N America and Europe who are in economically stagnant communities.
@GP @Sharda
Please try this one:
http://www.outlookindia.com/story.aspx?sid=4&aid=280609
Or alternatively, google Aakar Patel Arundhati Roy Outlook.
Regarding your other points, I would say they are a “naive libertarian” straw man. As I said earlier, for all his faults, I find Joseph Stiglitz the most convincing when he asks 3rd worlders to do what the West did and not what it says. The point being the kind of people who wants to bring forth Company Raj 2 exists only in people’s imagination. And denying obvious truths – like the prosperity of hundreds of millions of Chinese as a consequence of China’s rise and its repurcussions around the world, rising incomes in Africa due to Chinese mining boom and investment, increasing quality of life around the world(poverty has reduced by half) since globalisation started- is tatamount to being delusional.
@GP
You asked me about the factual distortions? Well, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Leaving aside globalisation and its consequences, now that U.S has left Iraq and It doesn’t have a oil with it, would he change her position? I doubt it. And as difficult as it is for people to understand, OIL COUNTRIES NEED THE REVENUE FROM SELLING OIL. They have a cartel(OPEC). They get the maximum amount possible for it. And the rest of the world buys it at their price. This is not considering the relative insignifance of ME when compared to Canada or Russia.
And when she says war for 50 years etc. She obviously has a HUGE BLINDSPOT to one country that has been the biggest aggressor in the world(probably historically too) for 4/5th(in 2002) of that time.
@neelan, vitatsta
at this point, in a comprehensive discussion about globalism, i’d rather unhitch my wagon from AR if it was ever really attached at all. I’m up to discuss “naive libertarianism”, the wealth of nations, and other political philosophies in the near term, but i hope someone with better economics chops than i stands in for the globalism skeptic in that discussion. i’ll just take pot shots from the sidelines.
@GP – commendable patience and even more commendable, clear prose. i personally don’t have much patience anymore with people who just mouth off – in this instance not even knowing the rudimentary of protectionist tariff and other similar measures in the history and growth of capitalist / industrial economies in the last hundred years, say.
(of course, newer commenters here will equally accuse me of mouthing off and justifiably so but omar and you at least know me from the past.)
@Vitasta
Agreed. But it would be nice to meet these people sometime.
“In this instance… not even”
Or you could continue to have that debate with those imaginary people in your head and the rest of us will ignore you.
This article seems relevant.
“Sometimes, if these were grudgingly admitted to be true, they were sought to be passed over in silence in order to ‘respect the sensibilities of the oppressed’ or as ‘minor contradictions’ that ought not to be addressed on the grounds that it would allegedly ‘divide’ the oppressed, ‘sabotage’ the struggle against ‘oppression’ and thereby ‘play into the hands of the real oppressors’. “
http://indianrealist.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/the-home-coming-of-a-jholawala/
Wow, thank you for linking to a blog that is full of hatred for non-Hindus. “Indian Realist” is really an objective source!
I actually didn’t read the blog. Just that one piece from google. Sorry about that.
It’s too funny to see you all getting all worked up over what Pankaj Mishra, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali et al have to say about current affairs….as if they are of any real consequence.
Frankly, most of you are out of touch with reality.
“Frankly, most of you are out of touch with reality.”
Says Baba who trolls innumerable websites with his anti-Hindu vitriol. Irony-challenged as well.