Why I find it difficult to debate Hinditvas + liberal Zionists

It gets tiring that I have to constantly abuse Islam & Pakistan simply to avoid the allegation that I’m a double agent. Kabir actually makes a valid point; if India and Indians want to crow about their secular liberal democracy then they have to live up to those values.

Pakistan is not a secular liberal democracy nor is Iran. They are both Islamic Republics, which to varying degrees, reject the values of the Enlightenment. Now I may disagree with that and may want otherwise but this is the constitutional fiber of both countries therefore judging them on a different set of liberal Western values is not even wrong.

Before discussing Shariah or liberal democracies in the case of Irano-Pak; we would have discuss the type of government that they have chosen to have. Britain is technically a theocratic monarchy with an aristocratic upper house so it’s not necessarily that such types of government are incompatible with liberalism or democracy for that matter.

Citizenship and Nationality are the basis of Enlightenment

Now back to India and Israel, which to varying degrees claim to be liberal democracies. The fact on the ground is that Israel is a Jewish state, which is different to France being the French state. Anyone can become a Frenchman not everyone can become a Jew unless they convert to it or are born into it.

Anyone can become a Briton or an American since these nationalities now transcend ethnicity and religion. So for liberal Zionists to argue that Israel is on the same moral plane as the US or UK or any other modern Western nation simply does not hold since some part of the population is disenfranchised. Furthermore in reality being Jewish in Israel is treated as an ethnicity not a religion since one is either Jewish or Arab, not Muslim, Jewish or Christian (according to identity cards though the Druze are segregated from it).

Back to India I feel Hinditvas are up to the same tricks; they deluge with facts since they are pretending that they have the Enlightened position.

Hyper-Liberal White SJWs

It is okay to be tribalistic in fact many of the problems with the post-modern West is that tribalism is discouraged among liberal white people so instead people channel that their tribal Asabiyah into LGBTQ+, PoC, SJWs. Incidentally I have noticed the inverse between good mental health and hyper jump the shark post modern liberalism. It’s as though being upset about every single injustice (either real or invented) isn’t very good for the mind and body.

Liberal White people are following their Puritan ancestors in attempting to build a Universal Culture and the first sacrifice in that are their own tribal identities. They have failed (courtesy of China’s rise) and jumped the shark (they are becoming a minority who must cede power according to their own ideological framework) but it will be decades before we collectively realise this (we are an brown blog who are a long way from mainstream).

Anecdotally Liberal white people tend to be the most snarkiest when it comes to race because there is an unconscious assumption that they will be on top in any counter cultural movement and when they see a real challenge from PoCs, rather than tokenism, they don’t understand how to deal with that threat.

I always imagine Trump to be a bit of a Julian the Apostate figure; the last gasp of White-Right America before it cedes ground forever and the Overton Window changes completely.

Group Pride

Everyone needs to belong and everyone needs to have a little (or large) group to love. If White people were allowed to feel pride in being white they would be more magnanimous and charitable. Rather than destroying privilege it’s about cultivating noblesse oblige.

But tribalism is not rationalism so there is no rationale for loving Hinduism and Judaism above Islam or any other culture. It is only by accepting that tribalism and rationalism are incompatible and that one has to always balance between the two forces.

I would prefer the Hinditva and the Zionist to be transparent and lay their biases beforehand. That they love their cultures because they were born into it and preserving their cultural heritage takes precedence to upholding the values of the *alien*  Western Enlightenment.

But then to acknowledge that makes them closer to their Muslim “enemies” than would ever want to believe.

Rebuilding Babri Masjid is true secularism

For instance true secularism means rebuilding Babri Masjid brick for brick. If tomorrow a mob of Orthodox Jews burnt down Al-Aqsa Mosque and it lay there in ruins (they did that to the Moroccan Quarter of Jerusalem immediately in the aftermath of the capture of East Jerusalem) then one could start bringing up the Temple.

What we have learnt from any medieval or ancient reconstruction; the outcome is always Garish. The Taj Mahal could be extensively renovated in the 19th century because the structure was intact and the plans could be followed. Somnath Temple is not an architectural wonder nor would the new Ram Temple be for that matter. What is lost cannot be regained; Hebrew doesn’t sound as pleasant or mellifluous as Arabic.

As a final point one could argue that I’m being hypocritical since I’m in favour of ressurecting Sabk-I-Hind. But that resurrection would be a piece of piss since the manuscripts are all there; we have Dari and Farsi as a base and contemporary Urdu poets would have pre-existing cultural and linguistic knowledge of Persian; there must be a continuous line of Persian speaking Poets in South Asia down to the present day.

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SP
SP
4 years ago

“Now back to India and Israel, which to varying degrees claim to be liberal democracies. ”

I’ve always puzzled over whether this label can ever be claimed for India. It has many liberal tendencies competing with illiberal ones. However I conceive of the latter as more recent deposits over a core that is more `liberal’ than not (scare quotes since the word has a mostly western valence). With regards to sexual mores for instance, I have fun imagining modern Thailand as a proxy for what India of yore might have been like. Xuanzang’s fictional complaints of Indian promiscuity must count for something, after all.

According to this ranking, India has more moral freedom than multiple European nations (shouldn’t be too surprising given it’s Dharmic foundation and the axes on which this ranking is based). Among Asian nations, only Cambodia ranks above it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Index_of_Moral_Freedom

Kabir
4 years ago

Thanks for acknowledging that I have valid points sometimes 🙂

“Liberal Zionist” is an oxymoron. One can either be a liberal or a Zionist. Liberal principles completely contradict supporting a state which is carrying out an Occupation of another people’s lands in contravention of all international law. Not to mention the second class status of non-Jews in “Israel proper”.

Hindutva supporters are the mirror image of Pakistani Islamists. Just as Islamists believe that Pakistan belongs to the Muslim community, Hindutva supporters believe that India belongs to Hindus and everyone else is there on sufferance. It is quite interesting how alike these “enemies” are in their thinking. Both oppose the idea that states should belong to all their citizens.

It’s natural to love your own culture but why does that necessarily have to mean denigrating someone else’s culture?

H. M. Brough
H. M. Brough
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Kabir, don’t take the Hindutva gang too seriously. Right now we’re in a larval stage of breaking down the archaic, feudal, patrimonal Indian political order. As we do so, the Indian political discourse is going to suck for a while, but we’ll eventually settle into a more…boring political scene.

In other words: the BJP’s future is more Fadnavis and Gadkari than Adityanath.

उद्ररुहैन्वीय

// I would prefer the Hinditva and the Zionist to be transparent and lay their biases beforehand //

Aapko hinditva sey itna dvesh kyun hai?

Hindi ek atyant sudriDh evam suras bhasha hai, jiska adhyayan pratyek bharatiya key liye anivaarya hona lagbhag sunishchit hai, modi ji ki kripa bani rahey to. aao ham sab hinditva upshelsh kareiN aur ek naye bharat ki aor agrasar hoN 🙂

Jai Ma Bharati!
[shankhnaad] Har Har Modidev Namo Namah [/shankhnaad] 🙂

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

I used to fail to understand the whole movie stars appeal in South Indian politics and cultural life . Now i get it after seeing the cult of Modi.

Prats
Prats
4 years ago
Reply to  Saurav

Modi is traversing the journey the other way round by becoming a movie star after entering politics.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Prats

LOL, true that, TBF to him we all have that small part of us who always wanted to be a actor. He just got his chance.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

jiska adhyayan pratyek bharatiya key liye anivaarya hona lagbhag sunishchit hai, modi ji ki kripa bani rahey to.

I like Hindi. Nice beautiful language, as long as we keep the tongue twister Sanskrit words at bay. However I don’t think Modi will be foolish enough to make it mandatory for every Indian and impose it over non-Hindi states. (he tried this early on in his stint as PM, and backtracked quickly. wise move).

Imposition of Hindi will invite backlash, and rightly so. As a boy growing up in small town India, it always amused me when provincial small town boys who always had difficulty with English, would angrily demand that English must be banned and Hindi must be made sole official language of India. Little did they realize that Tamil or Telugu village kids will find Hindi as foreign as English. For better or worse, English is there to stay in India.

Hindi should grow organically, thru movies and TV and such that. No issues with that.

Full disclosure – My mother tongue is not Hindi, though I am fully functional Hindi speaker.

H. M. Brough
H. M. Brough
4 years ago

I can understand Urdu on the street and layperson level (I have Pakistani professors who sometimes do clinical rounds in Urdu), but I have some difficulty with the High Urdu spoken on (for example) Pakistani television because it is quite aggressively Persianized. I can still get the gist of what they’re saying, but there’s always a few words whose meaning I have to guess or infer.

Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar
Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar
4 years ago

“Why I find it difficult to debate Hinditvas”

May be because you can’t spell it correctly. Hindi is the name of a language not a religion. The word is Hindutva which describes a philosophy not a people. The PEOPLE who subscribe to this philosophy are called Hindutvavadins. Hope this helps.

DM
DM
4 years ago

I think its a very convenient game of pin the tail on hindutva that is being played here. Pin hindutva tag on all Indians.
1. How many hinduvavadis have you spoken to at great length from all states in India.
2. Can we proceed after the banshee wailing stops after BJP’s win.

Lets proceed.

“Kabir actually makes a valid point; if India and Indians want to crow about their secular liberal democracy then they have to live up to those values.” – History doesn’t move linearly. As an example, remember the same historians of these mughals reported the rape and plunder in their texts (something many of the group members choose to slide it under the table), probably thinking the sun would never set upon their kingdom. The british empire also thought the same thing, until Hitler came along. So considering Babri Masjid knowing what its history is as the poster child for secularism is a bit silly for all India is naive and not intellectual. Its merely a blip in our timeline. India is one unit, sometimes up sometimes down, but mostly consistent.

While Pakistanis or muslims can bring up selectively the topic of minorities in India and sweep the issue of minorities in their own countries under the carpet is a bit biased don’t you think, and under the excuse of it being not secular. And can they restore hindu temples in Pakistan used as toilets or animal farms etc. I don’t think a Pakistani and an outsider has a say here. Its simply one of those topics that he has has to bury under him irrespective of what his feelings are.

Don’t try to crown India as a pinnacle of perfect democracy, and then put in selective clauses like secularism only for Babri masjid. Like it or not, its not perfect, full of people from all spectrum, but overall our system works. True secularism will come when there are no selective laws pandering to minorities; all religions irrespective of where you are, and under one umbrella of laws.

Why can’t Somnath temple or a ram temple be glorious? What architectural norm does it have to conform with – islamic? Considering that deities reside within temples and allah doesn’t reside in mosques. Which one is more important?

Plus update yourself with new info , BJP has done nothing specifically for Hindus in terms of laws/regulations that is highly controversial. In fact in certain cases, it has helped Muslim causes and pumped in money. Modi can very well ride the developmental plank for the next 5 yrs without touching hindu causes and still get away with it. And, yet he’s hindutva. Bull.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  DM

No one is claiming all Indians are “Hindutvavadis”. That label doesn’t apply to those who voted for Congress or any other of the opposition parties.

Pakistan must treat its minorities better. It should be a state for all its citizens. But its failure to do so doesn’t justify majoritarianism in India.

DM
DM
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Ah, congress and the other parties. Now ain’t a gold standard to conform to. Torchbearers of secularism apparently. This is what happens when people from outside try to analyze the Indian political ecosystem. First of all, there is a big time crunch. Invariably reading is restricted to only certain media outlets, unlike Indians who know how to navigate through information. These Non-BJP parties are some of the most vilest ever in the history of India. This is the general consensus and its true if you have tracked what each of them has done in the last twenty years.

Brown Pundits