Brown Pundits

I had a longish exchange on twitter with a Hindutvadi friend and then just ordered all the tweets by time into this storify story. It’s crude, but you get the drift. I am posting it here so that people can comment on it if they wish.
This is twitter, so one can only say so much in 140 characters. And much is assumed or taken for granted in the background. Please go easy 🙂

And of course, it is a discussion with some more or less Hindutvadi Indians. A discussion with postmarxist Indians would look very different.

The discussion started with reading this article , in which the writer tries to define Hinduism for a young man who is confused (and lives in South India, with it’s peculiar history of this question). He classifies Hinduism as an “aggregate religion”, hence my first tweet asking if “aggregate” will prevail or Christianity will?

Just in case you are wondering why the discussion starts with me asking whether Hinduism or Christianity will prevail (and not metioning Islam), I think the likely Abrahamic faith for most Hindus to convert to (if they convert) in this day and age is Christianity, not Islam. If you think differently, please comment.

And of course, Hindu and Secular are both in scare quotes, so all arguments about what IS Hinduism and what IS secularism are included in those quotes 🙂

Last but not the least, my comment about “those with superior asabiya and means will prevail” if the current system is wrecked is, of course, meant to hint that it’s collapse will not necessarily (or even likely) lead to Ram-Rajya. Muslim and Sikh Asabiya and means will dominate the Northwest (at least). Something like that.

Frank Furedi has a piece up in Spike. 

Excerpts:

Reports that three sisters from Bradford and their nine children are on their way to Syria show that British Muslims inspired to make the journey potentially to join the Islamic State are no longer unusual or unique individuals. Likewise, the response to the reports shows how bewildered and confused many now are when confronted with the so-called radicalisation of fellow members of society.
The very language used to discuss the sisters’ preference for life in Syria over life in Britain betrays a complete lack of comprehension of the social and cultural dynamics at work. Bradford West MP Naz Shah, who spoke with the families of the sisters, stated, ‘I asked them if there was any indication [as to what the sisters were planning to do], and they said, absolutely not – it was a shock to them, it came out of the blue’. That it always comes ‘out of the blue’ is testimony to a failure to understand the cultural chasm that separates the world of many young Muslims from mainstream society.
Others report that the women came from a ‘hardworking’ and ‘respectable’ family. Yet young people going to Syria invariably come from normal families. The fact that the parents’ respectability is remarked upon at all shows that commentators are fixated on a non-existent pathology…


..What Clarke identified was a symptom of a far more profound and difficult problem. Young people do not turn into suicide bombers overnight or ‘out of the blue’, unless they can draw on cultural and political resources that affirm their decision. They draw support for their conviction that theirs is a cause worth fighting for from their everyday experience.


..The myth of grooming
Anglo-American societies have become so obsessed with child protection that they often interpret a variety of social problems through the prism of paedophilia. The idea of online grooming, for instance, has mutated into a fantasy used to explain every disturbing example of homegrown jihadism. The model of perfidious groomers seducing otherwise innocent young Muslims turns what is a struggle of ideas, a battle between ways of life, into a malevolent act of deception.
No doubt there are some clever online jihadists who are good at attracting the attention of would-be supporters. However, no one is forcing people to go online or to enter chatrooms or visit jihadist websites. Most of the time, it is the so-called vulnerable youth who, in the process of searching for answers, actively look for the ‘groomers’.


…In reality, the term radicalisation captures only part of the story. The sentiments and behaviours associated with radicalisation are more accurately expressed through terms like ‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’. The sense of estrangement from, and resentment towards, society is logically prior to the radicalising message internalised by individuals. In Europe, the embrace of a radical Islamist ideology is preceded by a rejection of society’s Western culture. Invariably, such a rejection on the part of young jihadists also reflects a generational reaction against the behaviour and way of life of their parents.
This double alienation – from parent and society – is not unconnected to normal forms of generational estrangement. What we see here is a variant form of the generational gap, except that, in this instance, it has unusual and potentially very destructive consequences.


The embrace of radical Islam is underpinned by a twofold process: an attraction to new ideas and alternative ways of life, and a rejection of the status quo. The radicalisation thesis, however, one-sidedly emphasises the so-called groomers’ powers of attraction…

My own comment: They are not rejecting their parent’s values completely. They are embracing their “formal values”, while rejecting their “lived values”. The Islam their parents taught them almost certainly included Jihadist and anti-infidel elements that, taken literally and taken to their “logical conclusion”, lead to Jihad in Syria, if not in Britain itself. Their parents failed to teach them how they selectively follow this “ideal” and compromise with reality. And I do believe that Western education is also to blame in the sense that Western cultures emphasize authenticity and honesty and “being true to yourself” while rejecting the notion of saying one thing while doing another as undesirable. Sure, there are hypocrites in the West just as there are in the East, but some kids will take their education more seriously than others…this is a failure of hypocrisy … a crisis of hypocrisy is upon us.

This is Ajmal Kamal‘s brilliant review of Mumtaz Mufti’s autobiography “alakh nagri”. It was published in Adabi Duniya but I think it deserves publication in as many places as possible. Unfortunately, those who cannot read Urdu will not be able to enjoy it, but those who can should not miss it. The second half is even better than the first, so don’t stop halfway 🙂

for those who don’t know Urdu, it is impossible for me to translate this, but a little of what it is about and the background to the book:

Qudratullah Shahab was a senior Pakistani bureaucrat who also dabbled in literature (and in the management of literary figures on behalf of the Martial Law regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan). He later wrote a self-serving and intensely “Paknationalist” autobiography that remains a bestseller in Pakistan until today (the last time I was at Karachi Airport, it was near the top of the list of books the airport bookstall guy mentioned as “current bestsellers”). He cultivated (or was cultivated by) a group of “mystical-Islamist-Paknationalist” writers including Ashfaq Ahmed, Bano Qudsia and Mumtaz Mufti and over time these people all wrote books and articles that hinted (or outright claimed) that the other members of the cabal were spiritually enlightened and possessed some mysterious knowledge about the inner (real) workings of the universe…workings in which the creation of Pakistan and its rise as an Islamic power were the central issue of the age. The workings of this particular brand of Paknationalism are briefly reviewed here. For more, see here and here….. and some positive and “inside” views as well as a few skeptical reviews here.  (the skeptical reviews are rather far down the page).
Anyway, Alakh Nagri has a lot of stories about Qudratullah (and his disciples) and how they are moving the cause of Islam forward. Even when they act so strangely that observers claim “the bastard is dead drunk”. They are not drunk, they are being visited..

btw,  a less toxic and more pragmatic version of this “mystical babas of Pakistan” tradition is now in the hands of Professor Rafique Akhtar, who is, among other things, the spiritual mentor of General Kiyani and the hero of best-selling columnist Javed Choudhry. Professor Rafique is not as completely bananas as the Qudratullah Shahab party but even a relatively sane person has his quirks…he reportedly claimed to Javed Choudhry that he had the key that unlocks the 12 hard drives of the Quran and therefore had access to ALL spiritual AND temporal knowledge, from astrophysics to astral projection. I am not kidding..it’s in Javed Ch’s book.

Dr McHugh doesnt think so, and he has just said so in the WSJ.

Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

…
At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. “Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is the author of “Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind” (Dana Press, 2008).

What do you think?

I think some, very few, people have such severe gender dysphoria that they really should change their own gender identification to the opposite sex. i.e., I think there are (and have seen, though not managed) patients who, as children, are completely and totally unhappy about their gender. There are young boys who endlessly dream of being a girl and young girls who desperately want to be boys. I assume some of the same carries over into adult life. If gender dysphoria is powerful and persistent, why not allow them to live as the opposite gender?
But I also think any surgery is cosmetic and is not a medical necessity and should not be done to children. I realize that this is a bit of a muddled position. It’s a muddled topic. I am wary of surgery because it is so hard to reverse and is such a “physical” treatment for what is, after all, a psychological issue… a problem that the patient may think will be helped by surgery, but that the data (and the surgical procedures themselves) suggest is not cured by surgery in the sense of “no more problem”.

The SJW community is fully committed to this cause and it has mainstream liberal support. But I am not sure the SJW community has thought it through. Just as an example, the same community is committed to the belief that sex roles are social constructs, not biological. That leads to obvious difficulties with this topic.
Anyway, I think civil rights for people who do opt to live like the opposite gender is not a bad cause (everyone should be free to live as they please as long as they dont hurt others, etc), but surgery for children may be a step too far.
I am open to being converted, one way or the other 🙂

Many Ismaili families from Gujrat moved to Karachi after partition. They became part of a prosperous, hard-working community. They kept a low profile. As in any community, everyone could not be rich enough to buy large houses next to the Bhuttos and Zardaris in Clifton. Some of them therefore bought land on the outskirts of town, where it was cheap, and built a housing society there and called it Al-Azhar Gardens.

People moved in 8 years ago and as is the tradition in this particular community, they maintained their colony exceptionally well. Almost everything was available right there. Proud residents boasted about the well designed housing, the community facilities, the cleanliness, the security.
But you still have to get to town to work and go to school and so on. So they ran a shuttle bus service.

Today, the shuttle left Al-Azhar Gardens with 60 or so people on board. Someone else got on at Safoora Chowrangi. Armed men stopped the bus and using 9 mm pistols, systematically shot dead women and children, one by one, at close range. It is said that a few children were spared, or survived by hiding. Or something. The dead include women and the elderly.
Imagine the scene in the bus. The mind boggles, does it not?

Who did it? Jundullah (and/or the Islamic State, they are one and the same in any case and these days the name IS will sell better), a well known anti-shia group with a long history in Karachi (including a history of getting people out of police custody in mysteriously easy escapes) has claimed responsibility.

Not to be left behind, Mubasher Lucman, Pakistan’s most popular “paknationalist” anchor has blamed the Indian “Relatives and Wives Wing” (otherwise known as RAW) for the attack.

Most people seem to take Jundullah/IS at face value, with their history of dragging Shias off buses and shooting them in the head. But there are those who blame MQM (supposedly operating on the instructions of RAW and Mossad). But whoever did it (I tend to go with Jundullah, but cannot claim to know for sure, so we will leave it at that), someone stopped a bus at a major crossing, calmly shot 60 people (43 of them now dead) and walked away without getting caught (and without any fear of getting caught). That does not look good. Not good at all.

We may soon hear that this is Pakistan’s 9-11. Unlike Amrika, Pakistan is rich in 9-11s. It depends on how you count. Using the standard formula of 1 Sunni Punjabi=3 Shias= 5 FATA Pakhtoons there have been at least nineteen 9-11s till now (more if you start counting poor people as humans, but that would be just too much). Unfortunately, I am afraid there may be more in the days to come.

The Prime minister has condemned it. He has also “ordered the police to arrest the culprits”. I am not kidding. He actually ordered the police to arrest the culprits!

 More to the point, the army chief has called up the Aga Khan and said he will use his iron hand at the earliest opportunity. Coalitions support funds may have been mentioned. Life goes on.

Before I am accused of cynicism, let me paint two (fictional) scenarios. Which one is more likely?

1. General X has figured out that Pakistan’s policy of nurtuting Jihadist terrorists as force-multipliers against India has blown up in its face. He wants to change things root and branch. Not just the Kashmir Jihad and strategic depth (a direct consequence of that jihad), but the whole shebang. Mufti Naeem and his ilk will be terminated with maximum prejudice. All training camps will be shut down. All militants will be reformed or terminated (with the same maximum prejudice). India will be offered a deal: Lets both stop using this kind of terrorism for any reason and settle all future disputes via negotiation or all out war, like civilized countries. No more shooting of random people sleeping on the platform at Chatrapati Shivaji Railway terminus. But General X realizes that 50 years of Islamic-Paknationalist education has prepared a generation of morons who cannot be told the whole truth without having their heads explode. So General X is going to lie, deceive, dissimulate and detour his way to a future TNT-free Pakistan. Sometimes his public actions will appear contradictory. Sometimes he will have to make up all sorts of bullshit about RAW and Mossad to get his way. He will do what has to be done. But in the end, we will have a defanged Pakistan where every poor man’s son (or daughter) has the chance to become a toll-collector on the Pak-China-Economic-Corridor. Then, our problems will be no different from those of Thailand or Phillipines (both of whom have some Islamist terrorists, but the government are not in bed with them). And so on…

2. General Y has figured out nothing but even he can see that something has to be done. Ismailis have been killed in cold blood and the Aga Khan is on the phone. Next the damn American ambassador will call and before night falls he will even have to pretend to have a meeting with the prime minister. He is pissed off. He promises to deal with everyone with an iron hand. He sends general Z to see the big boss in the Pentagon and General Z reports that the Pentagon is pretty pissed off too. Block E/F F-16s will not be free. Loans will have to arranged and then paid back at 27% compound interest by fleecing the patriotic people of Pakistan. But all is not lost. Brigadier April Glaspie does seem to have hinted that a transfer of mujahideen into IOK would probably be OK with the US. Or at least, that is what General Z gathered from the conversation. He also met the Chinese ambassador, who served the best halal dimsum in Islamabad and nodded and smiled through most of the dinner. General Z reports that all seemed higher than Himalayas and deeper than the Indian ocean, though his excellency Sun Weidong did become a little stern after that last shot of Mai Tai and said something like “we hope the fraternal people of Pakistan will do whatever is necessary to establish good public order”. But mostly he smiled. Not for lack of language skills. The man speaks perfect English and Urdu (and our man in the embassy reports, also some Punjabi) but most of the time, he just doesn’t speak. One hopes for the best.
All the corpse commanders nod their heads at these words of wisdom from General Z. The bearer brings in the tea and Peak Freans biscuits. Iron hands are waved around. All will be well.

Which (fictional) scenario sounds more plausible?

It started with the Kashmir Jihad (which started back in 1947, so Zia is not the only culprit). That jihad is the gift that keeps on giving. Everytime one of the foot soldiers in these massacres is caught (sometimes, they are. In fact, we even had Malik Ishaq in custody for a while), it turns out that they either went to a Kashmir Jihad training camp or were trained by people who got their start in the glorious Kashmir Jihad. Strategic depth. Where would we be without it?

For more on Shia-killing in Pakistan, see here.

btw, here is something I wrote four years ago. See the halva story at the end to understand what the PPP government in Sindh is doing. In fact, since people don’t like to click through, I will paste that four year old article here too. Try to figure out what has changed and what has not.

Pakistan: The End Of The Affair (June 11 2011)

1. “The imperialists” are unlikely to leave as soon as imagined. This alone puts the whole strategy in question because as in Kargil, there seems to be no plan for the possibility that the “enemy” may not do what we expect it to do.
    
2. “Our side” is unlikely to win all of Afghanistan even if the Western imperialists leave according to our timetable.  Given the opposing interests of many regional powers, that struggle is likely to be even more prolonged and bloody than the last attempt to fill the Afghan vacuum.
    
3. “Blowback” from this war will be worse than the blowback from the current confused operation. The Taliban refused to cooperate with us against anti-Shia terrorists even in the good old days of the nineties. This time around, they will be much more difficult to control. We cannot even control the current (relatively small) Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. To imagine that we will control the much larger and more fractious Islamic emirate of the future seems to be a pipe dream.
    
4. Any exit of the imperialists and return of the Taliban will inevitably be followed by a house-cleaning of Western “fellow travellers” in Pakistan. That cleansing may not be on the army’s immediate agenda, but pressure to Islamize Pakistan will be hard to resist once the Islamists are winning. The establishment may then find it expedient to try and get rid of the ANP, Pakistani liberals and other riff-raff that the army has tolerated in the Sulah e Hudaybia phase. Naturally the Americans will respond with retaliatory measures of their own and a liberal efflux will have some modest but detectable negative impact on the economy and the state; the final outcome, in a weak and fractious state, may not even be up to North Korean standard.

An excellent and informative post by Ali Minai on 3quarksdaily.com

Worth a read.

“The world is full of Great Projects – tall buildings, long bridges, vast highway networks – but very seldom does a single project alter the geography of the world. The Suez Canal and the Panama Canal did this spectacularly, and now another great change in the connectivity of the world is beginning to take shape in Pakistan. The question is whether it will connect more or less than it will disconnect. “

My own first thought is that the logic of “economic geography” may reassert itself in the long run, but in the short term, many “obvious” beneficial connections can be lost in the face of ideological clashes (partition comes to mind), warfare and/or the breakdown of law and order. The “Silk Road” made sense as an economic project, but was intermittently shut down by wars and the collapse of order along it’s route. (Its loss of competitiveness to seaborne trade is a separate issue and does not explain various interruptions or the prolonged inability of “Silk Road” countries to take fuller advantage of railways as a way to compete with the sea at least to some extent, until recently). So the crucial question is to what extent the ruling elite in Pakistan (and in other regional hubs) prioritize economics over other things they also hold dear. Just to take two aspects as examples to illustrate what I mean:

1. Assume the Pakistani ruling elite has sufficient control WITHIN Pakistan. They could still risk the corridor because of adventurism abroad. For example, the project of taking Kashmir from India is a project that seems unlikely to succeed without triggering a “corridor-shattering” war; or the urge to dominate Afghanistan may not lead to Pax-Pakistania. What if it just means a violent quagmire with no end in sight. Can the corridor escape that distraction? ..I am not saying it is one or the other. But how much one gets pushed versus the other can still be an issue. The geniuses have been known to get it wrong before. …will they get it all correct this time (forget the moral issues, human rights etc. , I just mean “can they keep the peace”?) … I don’t think the answer is totally clear yet.

2. The basis on which nation-states are to be stabilized in the region West of the Radcliffe line is still up in the air. Islam? Ethnic solidarity? The mandate of heaven based on better trains and washing machines for all? I don’t think the matter is settled (except maybe in Iran, where Persian identity may have roots deep enough to stay upright through storms…but I notice that my pro-Israeli friends seem to have a very real (and very irrational?) animus towards Iran for some reason. Those are powerful enemies to have…so maybe even Iran is not home free. But you see what I mean: with identity so seriously contested (as opposed to non-seriously contested as in Texas versus the US Federal Govt) things may not settle down. Shit may hit fans. That sort of thing.

I remain optimistic 🙂

A very interesting look at the letters Indian soldiers wrote home in World War One.

– See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/what-indian-soldiers-first-world-war-wrote-home-about#sthash.VpsBK6SR.eq4m9bXn.dpuf