One of the most interesting things I have experienced over the past 15 years or so interacting with young Indian Americans, usually of Hindu background, is the disjunction between the scripts that they are inculcated with in their education in broader society, and the quite nationalistic/parochial perspectives that are imparted to them by their parents.
You can say many things about me, but there isn’t much of a disjunction in what I will say you to privately about controversial topics and what I will say in public about controversial topics (the main skeptics of this view are some Hindu nationalists and Zionists, who are convinced that I’m an Islamic supremacist sleeper agent).
So, I when I began to spend some time around Indian Americans one of the peculiar things I was a bit surprised by his how different their extremely social justice Left external presentation could be from what they might say privately over some drinks, or if they perceived you to be an intimate acquaintance. Since my views on Islam were well known many of them felt quite free to openly state their privately skeptical views on the religion of Islam and the practices of Muslims, which reflected what their parents had told them, while in public these people might still denounce Islamophobia. People who would criticize caste privilege in public forums might still be privately smugly proud of their family’s caste background. And, the same people who might perceive American patriotism as to be jingoistic and declasse would express Indian nationalism that they had absorbed with their mother’s milk in private in the crassest of terms.
But there does come a time when you leave your parents’ home, and their influence. And I don’t interact much with Indian Americans on a day to day basis, but I do wonder if many progressive Indian Americans are bringing their two aspects into alignment, and shedding their private chauvinistic reflexes?
An analogy here might be young American Jews, who until recently were quite liberal in the American context, but might align with more ethnonationalist views in relation to Israel (even if they supported the Left parties in Israel, those parties are still more nationalistic than similar parties in the United States). Today the two views are coming into coherence, as most younger American Jews who are not orthodox are starting to distance themselves from Israel.
They’re smart. Like most people they understand that one gets ahead by conforming to a fairly narrow set of opinions. This is probably particularly true in academia, healthcare and tech.
Most people who have normal jobs have little to gain and a lot to lose from voicing potentially unpopular opinions in public, so they don’t do it.
Will they abandon their private opinions over time? I don’t know
Well, most 2nd gen Indians don’t think very much about India in general, so they end up outsourcing their thinking to NYTimes and NPR, which are reflexively against the BJP (and India more generally, which can get quite comical and blatant at times…eg, the recent “explosion” headline, or shoving the Sri Lanka blasts into an article about purported religious extremism in India and Myanmar.)
Anyways, I don’t think it’s a battle between the Indo-American private and public world, I think it’s just the 2nd gens being apathetic about India and assimilating the views of their social circle.
(To clarify, I am not a Hindu nationalist, and I am quite cosmopolitan in my private life…my Spanish is much better than my Hindi hahaha. I’m definitely not a fan of the Indian “Left,” or how the American chattering classes treat India. I also respect and share some concerns with the nationalists and give *qualified* support to the BJP, but I feel many of the nationalist claims and fears are overblown, and I am disappointed with some figures in BJP taking up more virulent rhetoric.)
The BJP has chosen an actual terrorism accused person to be their candidate in Bhopal. How anyone can be “cosmopolitan” and still justify supporting such a party is beyond me.
Imagine the outrage on this blog if the incumbent party in Pakistan decided that Hafiz Saeed would make a great member of Parliament.
Modi himself stands accused of large scale genocide in the 2002 riots, and in fact that the US refused to issue him a Visa for that reason (while he was a Chief Minster).
What do you expect from a populace that elected such a man as their Prime Minster ?
I wouldn’t use the word “genocide” (I think it is extremely overused and rarely appropriately) but he certainly let some terrible pogroms occur on his watch.
However, in 2014 he tried to distance himself from that record with the “sab ka sath sab ka vikas” slogan. Many people voted BJP who don’t necessarily hate minorities. But this time, BJP is not even trying to cover up how anti-Muslim they are. Choosing Sadhvi Pragya as a candidate is a clear sign of that.
Kanhaiya Kumar offers a glimpse of hope. More power to him.
Kanhaiya Kumar (dig the handle! if only to troll some folks on here 😉
As much as I personally dislike the man for other reasons, I think you could do with a bit of renormalization re: Modi’s role post Godhra. Hear it from the horse’s mouth. Sir Rajdeep himself begrudgingly absolves him here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=S52spI8P72g
He instead squarely blames the VHP and Praveen Togadia, and admitted the media’s failures at the time.
I like how the Modi-haters always portray the American decision as a quasi-judicial one, when in fact it was a political one motivated largely by unilateral Evangelical support and the apathy of the pro-Modi side, as even the activists involved admit.
https://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/u-s-evangelicals-indian-expats-teamed-up-to-push-through-modi-visa-ban/
(Not going to get into the actual judicial details of the case here, it’s been over 17 years and we’ve all made up our minds one way or another. Let us agree to differ.)
That might be beyond you, but it’s the truth. 🙂
I also like how you assumed I was a Sadhvi fan (I’m not, but I haven’t and don’t care to go into claims and counterclaims wrt “terrorist.”)
You may not be a Sadhvi fan but you are OK with supporting a party that accepts such a person as a candidate for Parliament. I guess that comes under being “disappointed” with some people’s “virulent rhetoric”?
It’s perfectly OK to be a conservative and to support BJP because it is the only national alternative to Congress. But you can’t pretend that a party that has space for terrorism-accused extremists is about “vikas”.
Would the Republican Party in the US choose someone implicated in anti-minority violence to run for Congress? I highly doubt that.
Left-leaning outlets seem to see everything through the lens of class struggle and majority-bad/minority-virtuous dichotomies. So the resolution of the intersectional logic in India makes Hindus unworthy (and as a corollary, Muslims worthy) of empathy. This logic is not limited to American papers; Indian media is similar. The tragedy of this is that it results in a number of “cry wolf” situations, so that when there are portents of real danger, people don’t take notice.
“So the resolution of the intersectional logic in India makes Hindus unworthy (and as a corollary, Muslims worthy) of empathy.”
Well that, and there’s one group in India that engages in gratuitous lynching of the others, threats of genocide, and is heavily favored by the law while doing so. Hindus.
The left doesn’t unduly favor majorities over minorities, its favors those without power over those with it. Does this ever result in unfair sympathy for some group? Possibly, perhaps 1/100 instances. Hindus in India however are not the 1, they’re the other 99.
You may have missed this from my above comment, but there’s overlap between your concerns and mine. What’s been happening in recent years is indeed more sinister, and dangerous to our social fabric, but it’s probably not concerned middle India as much as it ought to because the media bias we were talking about has existed for much longer than that and inured people to such news.
The left doesn’t unduly favor majorities over minorities, its favors those without power over those with it.
I know it tries to do this, but it has not proven to be the best judge of who has meaningful power and who has not. It tends to use numbers as a short cut; a group that is smaller in size is automatically assumed to be oppressed by a group that is larger in size. Historical context is often discarded. Actions and beliefs are often ignored. And, once its mind is made up, it’s unwilling to look deeper into groups to figure out whether some subgroups may have less power than their larger group affiliation indicates. Because, once a label is attached, it can’t be unattached without unraveling the entire theory.
Its striking how similar various predatory groups sound when trying to shake off their (largely earned) reputations. The vague odes to, “numbers aren’t everything, historical context matters, look deeper into issues, shun labels”. This could have come right out of a neo-nazi blog. Or from an Israeli-apologist. Or even a radical Islamist.
Be specific if you really want to discuss this. Name one instance where the left clearly chose the wrong side, and they chose it due to their bias towards the few/powerless.
My focus was on the present when I made my earlier comment. I believe the left was often on the right side in the 20th century, notably during the Civil Rights movement in the US.
Today I believe the left is wrong to, for example, consider Muslims as a whole as oppressed, not just in India, but in various Western countries. (Knee-jerk support for hijabs and burqas are very illiberal as far as I am concerned. The left should be in favor of assimilation and equal treatment; not celebrations of distinctiveness and special privileges.) In India, Muslims have a lot of agency, and have risen to the top in various fields when they have tried to; religion has not been a bar. I have already acknowledged the caveats: the lynchings in the past few years, residential segregation, which should be combated.
The left also considers Christians in India to be oppressed, which is even more ludicrous.
FWIW, the left in the US is going overboard these days in portraying non-whites as being oppressed. There’ve been massive improvements in the status and condition of African-Americans, who are probably the only remaining minority there with a semblance of grievance. Support for reparations are batty.
Counter question: does the left ever express support for religious minorities in Muslim lands?
Why is support for hijab necessarily illiberal? People have a right to practice their religion the way they see fit. No one should be made to wear a hijab but neither should anyone be forced to take it off.
Indian Muslims are socially and economically disadvantaged as the Sachar Committee Report has shown. The number of Muslim parliamentarians is extremely low. A few Bollywood Khans don’t make up for this.
If someone acts consistently according to liberal principles then they should support minorities everywhere, including in “Muslim lands”.
Indian Muslims are socially and economically disadvantaged as the Sachar Committee Report has shown.
What do they say the reasons are?
“The Sachar Committee highlighted and presented its suggestions on how to remove impediments those preventing Indian Muslims from fully participating in the economic, political, and social mainstream of Indian life. The report was the first of its kind to reveal the “backwardness” (a term used in Indian academic and legal discourse for historically dispossessed or economically vulnerable communities, not meant to be pejorative) of Indian Muslims. An issue highlighted was that while Muslims constitute 14% of the Indian population, they only comprise 2.5% of the Indian bureaucracy.[9] The Sachar Committee concluded that the conditions facing Indian Muslims was below that of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.[10]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachar_Committee
The idea that states have a special responsibility to protect the rights of minorities is not an especially left-wing one. It should be common sense. It’s not about anyone being more worthy of empathy than anyone else.
It is the right-wing that believes that countries belong to the majority group, whether that is White people in the US, Hindus in India or Muslims in Pakistan. It really shouldn’t be that radical to argue that countries should belong to all their citizens.
I think real Americanization occurs when you totally distance yourself from your country of origin – like Schwarzegger repudiating his ties with his Austrian birthplace (Linz may be) when the local people criticized his death row policy
I was a bit surprised by his how different their extremely social justice Left external presentation could be from what they might say privately over some drinks, or if they perceived you to be an intimate acquaintance.
Upon the recommendation of someone on these forums (I don’t recall their handle, but thanks for the suggestion), I read Aatish Taseer’s recent book “The Twice Born”. That also got me watching a couple of YouTube videos of Taseer’s interviews. In one of these, he says that, given his unique background, different Indians could (in the right circumstances) relate to him as belonging to their respective in-groups (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh..), and when they did, they would pour out vile but heartfelt views they had of other Indian groups. Those views wouldn’t be expressed in public though.
Your experience with Indian Americans (do these include FOBs too?) sounds similar.
Good post on an interesting topic. I think that applies to immigrant groups generally , not only in the US. The hearts of the migrant gen definitely dances to the tunes of passions of the “home country” . It may take another gen or two or three before the identification with their resident country is total – that is in case of successful assimilation.
In the 1930 there were Nazi parades from German-Americans even 3rd gen ones
“Today the two views are coming into coherence, as most younger American Jews who are not orthodox are starting to distance themselves from Israel.”
This is true of India as well at least in N-India. As more and more the younger generation in India as well as the NRIs (of N-Indian descent) will have to choose b/w ethno-nationalism (Hindutva) or be liberal and distance themselves from Hinduism/India altogether.
That soft space of mild-Hinduism/liberalism is disappearing fast in N-India itself. So yeah liberal hindus will do what non-orthodox jews are doing vis-v Israel. Perhaps not exactly that, but you get my point.
to be clear, i’m talking about 1.5 & 2nd generation ppl. these are ppl without accents.
There is no Indian nationalist Interior in the children of the Indian immigrants. Since they are shaped by their schools (predominantly suburbs, or predominantly blue states), universities (predominantly top 100) and not by parents, the exterior is liberal, democratic and reflected by geography not parents.
Razib makes much ado of his difference with them, but I fail to see the difference. Socially liberal, irreligious and atheistic, and not bound by (mother country) nationalism and social mores, he is virtually the same as them, except that he does not spout all the SJW nonsense. All of these people will switch to middle of the road neoliberalism and democratic-republicanism when they get married and have kids. SJWness is a marker of high wealth and social class, and used as a quality to attract mates.
The definitions of conservatism and liberalism are broken today vis-a-vis10/20 years ago. In the US, conservatism (and republicanism) is now marked by geography, evangelism, anti-abortion, gun rights, and weird colorism. It no longer goes hand in hand with neo-liberalism, capitalism, free trade, free enterprise, and other features that formed the mark of conservatism in the US for the 1980-2000 period. It is not clear what is there in the present day conservatism for the next generation immigrant children who live in the coasts and cities.
The left and right of the US is not the left and right of India or the world. We should not use the same lens for US.
The Left/Right difference has broken many years back. Once Left meant influenced by Marx especially on economics i.e. asking for public distribution of wealth, public ownership of means of production, cradle to grave Social security for all . This was supposed to usher in Utopia or something close to it. The left was also more rationalistic , influenced by science , against any forms of social discrimination, against religious influence in politics and society , etc
The degeneration of the left is shown by the fact that there is now a de facto strategic alliance between Islamists and leftists and the leftists are prepared to let go all their traditional values for the sake of their dubious ally. Indian Marxists don’t want Rushdie or Taslima anywhere near them.
Socially liberal, irreligious and atheistic, and not bound by (mother country) nationalism and social mores, he is virtually the same as them, except that he does not spout all the SJW nonsense
oh shut the fuck up you blowhard. fucking jackass.
a lot of these people are moderately religious fwiw.
just like muslims would privately talk about ‘ummah” and spreading the religion of peace to the rest of the world and condemn others to hell or just like christians who would condemn non-christians to hell, in private?
muslim and christian ideas are well known, but not spoken about in public all the time in polite company.
i’m talking about posting anti-islamophobia memes on facebook, but privately telling me that islam is a fucked up religion (real case).
No religion or sect or ethnic group has a monopoly over hypocrisy!!
Is the Hindu Indian American younger generation different in this regard from its Muslim Pakistani American peer group ? I am genuinely curious.
My (probably very incomplete) observation is that similarly ‘parochial’ interior views are quite acceptable to and compatible with American SJW sensibilities provided they are held by a Muslim person. I see CNN-approved ‘leftwing’ Muslims defend Muslim identitarian positions openly – in a way no Neera Tanden, Kshama Sawant or Saikat Chakraborty would dream of doing (vis a vis a Hindu identitarian position). On this very website people with ‘liberal’ self-images spin attacks on poor Srilankan Christians as an expression of anti-West anti-colonial protest.
islam is the left-wing religion at prayer now.
“I see CNN-approved ‘leftwing’ Muslims defend Muslim identitarian positions openly – in a way no Neera Tanden, Kshama Sawant or Saikat Chakraborty would dream of doing (vis a vis a Hindu identitarian position).”
I think it also was similar in India as well. Where you could get away without espousing “Hindu identitarian position”. But as soon as the electorate started demanding that (mimicking their muslim/christian counterparts) , you could see middle of the road hindu politicians too starting to cave in .
I am not sure it would be possible in USA though, considering majority of Hindu-americans would rather have their “Hindu” politicians NOT talk about “Hindu identitarian position”, because it may put a bulls’ eye on their back. So as long as the electorate does not want it the politicians themselves are under no pressure to take one position or another on these issues. And only then we will know which individual politician will really take these positions or not.
P.S : Even though i sort of doubt that Chakraborti or Tanden would even take “Hindu identitarian position” even if push comes to shove
When a murderer shot many Muslims in NZ few months back, people like Hilary Clinton rushed to tweet and spoke against Islamophobia, standing shoulder to shoulder with Muslims and what not. She tweeted “My heart breaks for….. global muslim community .. fight Islamophobia..”
When even more Christians were killed in Srilanka in 8 separate suicide bombings on churches , all Hilary could say was to condemn ‘we stand against hatred and violence’ as if the bombers and victims had no particular religion, and there was no religious motivations behind bombings.
You are essentially accusing Indians of hypocrisy. I won’t contest that. But I will counter that with a counter-question. How do you know if Americans, (or for that matter Russians, Chinese or Pakistanis etc) are any different?
America remains a deeply racist, white men’s country. Blacks are still being shot in the streets as dogs by the police. Despite all the noise generate from the left leaning media, average american white remains nationalist to its core. Just note how Trump’s rating have remained intact despite his brutal immigration policies. Somebody must be silently supporting him after all.
If American core were truly liberal, they would be paying reparations to Black americans now, and without any debate over it.
I have noted this before, all around the world liberalism is in broad retreat. People are turning more or more tribal and nationalist. When it suits them they may sprout a few social justice truisms, but will balk if any one dares them to put their money where their mouth is.
Russians are trying to recreate the soviet empire by nibbling at the territories of forever soviet republics. China is going through the biggest Han-ification process in its history, and Pakistanis are dreaming of reviving a modern day Mughal empire in India. In this scheme of things, SJW talk comes as a handy tool to hide people’s real intentions. Only the gullible will take a bleeding heart liberal posture at its face value. SJW talk is continuation of policy through different means.
The only people who are genuinely liberal are probably (and I say probably because i haven’t interacted with them personally) are western Europeans. But I feel even there the general trend is that of Right advancing over Left.
White population (without Latinos) up to the age of 18 is already minority in US. In the following years, it is projected that it will extend to up to 30 and 45 years of age.
“America remains a deeply racist, white men’s country. Blacks are still being shot in the streets as dogs by the police.”
Tbh I think both this narrative and the “cow lynching” one are vastly overstated relative to their actual prevalence.
—
Pakistanis are dreaming of reviving a modern day Mughal empire in India.”
Tbh I don’t think they have this view, Ghazwa-e-Hind and Akhand Bharat (and Khalistan!) are just internet memes, nothing more.
You are essentially accusing Indians of hypocrisy. I won’t contest that. But I will counter that with a counter-question. How do you know if Americans, (or for that matter Russians, Chinese or Pakistanis etc) are any different?
are you talking to me? aren’t not accusing indians of hypocrisy. i’m accusing indian americans of hypocrisy. that’s very different.
if you aren’t talking to me i guess the comment will seem a lot less stupid.
(actually, a lot of the comment is moronic even without that context)
Razib, As far personal experience goes, 2nd gen Indian american hindus get fully absorbed into the American society mentally. You have to realize this segment is almost all white collar. When you get exposed to that highly competitive world, your focus completely changes. On NRIs, and some on the way to get their green cards, do we really have a right to pass judgment on how “brown” they should be? Its what it is. They sort of get fully integrated into the American society. The 70s generation and their progeny and the next gen are lost anyway. Its some of the new migrants (2000s and onwards) who have a thing for their roots.
one thing, not typical JUST of south asians only, but really evident on this thread is how many of you enjoy spouting off bombastic bullshit. i’ll probably close off the comments soon, but it’s interesting to see who enjoys lying and making shit up like it’s breathing. #newsYouCanUse
The illusion of many in the West that Muslims, to whom they open doors as migrants, can be ‘bribed’ with a better life and domesticate them is trampled what shows the example of the brothers Inzaf and Ilham – the sons of the rich spice trader Mohamed Jusuf Ibrahim. Both lived in the elite part of the city, in a family three-story villa, driving a BMW sports car … Inshaf also had his own company … And there is also a pregnant wife of the younger son Ilham, when the police came to her house for the search, she activated explosive killing herself, policemen and her own children.
To “Golden Youth” of Sri Lanka also belonged to Abdul Litif Jamil Mohammed, whose father is the “tea magnate”. Abdul studied aeronautics and graduated with good grades, but he did not work in the field. He did not work at all because he did not have to. They, Inshaf and Ilham, are the first Muslim kamikaze-millionaires.
you should know: your IP is automatically flagged by our anti-spam software. i think it’s cuz of your geography. that’s why your comments don’t automatically go through.
It seems that ASS is pretty bad at geography. I am not where it thinks that I am.
(Before this comments thread closes down)
Who is the lady in the picture?
just googled angry indian woman.
@Kabir
“It’s perfectly OK to be a conservative and to support BJP because it is the only national alternative to Congress.”
Right, that’s the gist of my position…Hindutva India is suboptimal, but Caste-and-Region India (what INC stands for) is worse.
“But you can’t pretend that a party that has space for terrorism-accused extremists is about “vikas.”
Right, India doesn’t have space for a “vikas”-minded neoliberal-technocrat party, everyone is into identity politics of some kind, be it religion, caste, or region.
As long as you’re not deceiving yourself about what BJP stands for, you are free to choose whatever you want. In 2014, a lot of people were sold on the “vikas” thing. However, when anti-Muslim terrorists are chosen as party candidates, it is pretty clear that Hindutva matters much more than any kind of economic development.
I don’t find it morally justifiable to support a party that doesn’t care about 14% of the country’s population ( to put it mildly). Whatever problems INC has, they at least believe in taking the whole country along.
I think the phenomenon Razib Khan illustrates can be generalized even further. He offers the examples of Hindus or Jews in America. But actually, I think it is even more pronounced among Muslims and especially Muslims in Europe, who overwhelmingly (when they are allowed to vote) vote left-wing although they are anything but “liberal” or libertine in their personal lives and there is some evidence that when they vote in home-country elections they vote even furhter to the right than their compatriots on site (the Turks in Germany were a notable example of this in the last Erdogan victory).
An interesting reversal of this phenomenon involved someone observing that a lot of Indian Christians seem to vote Congress but if they emigrated to the United States and are naturalized often voted Republican.
There are other examples, too. American blacks and Hispanics were until quite recently solidly socially conservative and even reactionary compared to the “center” for American whites, yet blacks in particular have been reliable Democrats for many decades.
What gives? I think it has to do with in-group out-group dynamics. Left-liberalism is all about uprooting established order and offering a more “atomic” society which is attractive to groups who perceive themselves rightly or wrongly to have little power, the “out-groups.” Conversely, conserving the established order – conservatism – is attractive to those who have a stake in it: the “in-groups.”
Note that this is not an argument for or against liberalism or conservatism, but rather an observational hypothesis about the psycho-mechanics of ideological appeal. Basically, what I’m saying is, 1. there is a clear divide on the question of interest-catering in most two-party systems; 2. it is presented (not necessarily correctly) in zero-sum terms; and 3. *most* of the time, people don’t *knowingly* act against their *perceived* self-interest.
As far as the cognitive dissonance goes, Razib I think says it all when he says “absorbed with their mother’s milk… in the crassest of terms.” Exactly. If humans were perfectly rational, we would be computers.
What gives? My conjectures below.
Personally, I think voting behavior is guided by self-preservation first, self-expression next (once preservation is assured.) People who feel insecure and vulnerable, or threatened by elements of the majority culture, will vote for the party that promises to protect them. But if they feel no threat, they’ll vote for the party that represents their identity and preferences better. (Hence Indian Christians vote for Republicans.)
I’ve always thought that if I had remained in the States and become a citizen, I would have held my nose and voted Democrat, regardless of the fact that my views on economics (and many other issues) are more in line with the Republicans, and I hate all that intersectional crap. Because the Republican Party seems committed to being a nativist Christian party, and that would make me feel perpetually insecure. The immigration issue would probably be my litmus test. (science/religion would be next.)
Tbh I used to vote straight GOP when it was a center-right party (not anymore now that it went full derp on Trump)…I’m still center-right in both the American and Indian contexts (mostly because of the intersectionality derp.)
@Numinous: yes, that’s pretty much what I was getting at.
@H.M. Brough: I’ve always been quite conservative, only rarely a huge fan of the Republicans. When I can be bothered to vote I usually vote for them anyway, though I wasted my vote on a third party in 2004 and I sat out 2008. My observation is the center-right in most Western countries seems more interested in trying to trick the P.C. press into not painting them as utterly evil at the same time they trick the “heartlands” into thinking a given politician is “one of them” than in actually getting stuff done.
The “reply” links are confusing here. so I’m going to tackle Kabir’s points here also. I agree to your comment here – “; I also respect and share some concerns with the nationalists and give *qualified* support to the BJP, but I feel many of the nationalist claims and fears are overblown”. Yeah, some virulent rhetoric is there, but that’s a negligible minority. But then there is virulent hate against hindus spewed on a regular basis in churches and mosques as well. These things will continue. Any indian who acts like he/she is not accustomed to this fact is a big liar.
Kabir lacks rigour in drawing in variables, and preparing them properly in order to present his view. A casual comparison between sadhvi and masood makes it clear and nullifies his point completely. Wasn’t the lady cleared of those accusations by the court? Now do we have to factor one person’s “opinion” against the court’s decision which in India is quite a big deal. Again, lack of rigour, cause Digvijay and that Karkare issue + congress narrative was another factor altogether that played into this in quite a big way.
Kanhaiya Kumar is a imbecile. A low IQ individual who is not fit to do anything. Hope? Gheeshhhhh. Give me a break
On similar line to the subject of muslims not being represented in the echelons of bureaucracy. Even if there is a chunk of quotas, it requires merit in order to qualify for these posts through exams and interviews. I don’t see why there has to be favourable treatment for individuals based on their religion. Absurd logic and a non-negotiable in discussions. Its a fact presented by the committee. Solutions for those are a completely different matter.
Sadhvi Pragya has not been “cleared” of any charges. She is out on bail.
“While a special National Investigative Agency court on December 27, 2017, dropped charges of criminal conspiracy – framed against Thakur and 11 others under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 – conspiracy and murder charges under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, and sections of the Indian Penal Code remain and were formally framed against Thakur in October 2018, court data shows.”
https://scroll.in/article/922173/fact-check-amit-shahs-claim-that-courts-cleared-pragya-thakur-in-malegaon-blasts-case-is-false
The optics of someone who has been implicated in violence against the minority being chosen as a parliamentary candidate are pretty damning. Hafiz Saeed has not been convicted by a Pakistani court, but I’m sure most of you would be appalled if PTI decided he should represent them in Parliament (As a Pakistani, I would be appalled too). Certainly, one cannot pretend that such a blatant move is anything but anti-minority.
As for the fact that 14% of the population is barely represented in the bureaucracy, it is hard to believe that structural discrimination doesn’t play a role. Unless, one thinks that Muslims are so incompetent that so few of them qualify on “merit”.