On Saturday, April 15, 2023 at 5:14:48 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
Does electoral democracy which necessitate a majority part of India's original sin? Moyukh Chatterjee seems to think so.
"Moyukh Chatterjee's book 'Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities' suggests that majoritarian violence is not a bug of democracy and may well be a feature.
If there is one thing we, citizens of self-described democratic republics, cling to, it is the notion that democracy is a public good and that its fundamental goodness is unquestionable. We believe that the will of the people ultimately bends the arc
of representation towards justice, that judicial institutions correct the course of democracy when it begins to fail. What we rarely pause to consider is that democracy is underwritten by majoritarian sentiments and values. It is, after all, known as “
majority rule” in popular parlance.
If a government is driven by the need to secure majority mandates, what incentives does it have to secure minority rights? In fact, if all institutions are ultimately answerable to majoritarian sentiments, if the creation of an unyielding majority is a
constant political necessity, it stands to reason that the re-creation of minorities is also essential. Moyukh Chatterjee’s Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities addresses this question in direct and rather unsettling
ways. "
https://thewire.in/books/book-review-majoritiarian-violence-moyak-chatterjee
On Friday, April 14, 2023 at 3:44:55 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
Modi is trying hard to make India great. Will he succeed? And at what cost?
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Why is Modi so scared of history textbooks?
The PM’s party is editing textbooks to create a fantasy of India as a Hindu-only nation that has always been loving and just. Truth be damned.
Apoorvanand
After nine years in power, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has finally defeated the long departed Mughal Empire and other Muslim rulers.
It has quietly pushed them to the margins in school textbooks, where they had occupied significant territory for the past seven decades, recent revelations show.
Several pages on the Mughal rulers and Delhi Sultanate have been deleted from the textbooks of different classes. The Mughals have not disappeared entirely, but students will no longer learn of the milestones and achievements of some of India’s
most important rulers even though their legacy lives on in the architecture and cultural landscape of India.
It’s shocking – how will students make sense of present-day India without understanding the role and contribution of Mughal and Muslim rulers?
Yet these edits aren’t surprising. They are in keeping with the ideological agenda of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which seeks to portray India as a historically Hindu-only land. Any other presence, especially of Muslims, is to be seen as
an intrusion and pollution – a distortion of the ideal original past that the BJP wants to persuade Indians was the reality.
School textbooks have made Indian Muslims an inalienable part of the national memory with their history long predating an invasion and their immense contributions an inescapable reality, so this legacy must be deleted. Mughals and Muslim rulers must
be referenced only as cruel invaders.
This approach is in sync with the renaming of Muslim-sounding towns and roads. The historic city of Allahabad is now Prayagraj. Aurangabad is Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, and Osmanabad is Dharashiv. The demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 in
Ayodhya was part of this great anti-Muslim cultural purge. The Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi and the Shahi Mosque in Mathura have been identified as next in line.
The marginalisation of Mughals and Muslims in textbooks mirrors what Muslims in Modi’s India are facing in real life. The recent textbook edits are part of a cultural genocide.
But this war against history has many more enemies. It isn’t enough that the past and the present be uniquely Hindu. They must also be harmoniously Hindu. Anything that shows conflict or tension in society must be eliminated. That’s why, in
addition to Muslim history, the truth about caste and its legacy of untouchability and exclusion are also being whitewashed by the textbook revisionists, who want future generations to believe in the fantasy of an India that was – and is – free of
conflict.
More recent history also makes the BJP uncomfortable, such as the Hindu extremist background of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Godse was part of a Hindu supremacist network led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
organisation, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP. He killed Gandhi because of Gandhi’s insistence on a secular India. The parts of history books that detailed these links have been deleted too, and Godse comes across as a lone wolf.
...
The BJP wants the world to believe that Indian society is Hindu and Hindu society has always been just, loving and absolutely non-discriminatory in its essence. But the obscene reality is just the opposite. Children reading these fantastic tales
about India live in conflict-ridden situations.
This approach is not only about controlling the past or painting it in Hindu colours. It is also about the future, a dark, undemocratic future into which the BJP is dragging India.
A strong state and obedient masses are central to the idea of an India that Modi’s BJP wants to build. It already portrays itself as synonymous with the Indian state. In keeping with this thinking, references to social and political protest
movements defending democratic rights have been removed from textbooks. Instead of citizens holding the state accountable, the BJP wants the people to be accountable to the state.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/13/why-is-modi-so-scared-of-history-textbooks
India is number one in population. But it is also broken according to Ashoka Mody, the author of
“India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today.”
The following from a review of Mody's book:
"India’s arrested development
“There’s been a narrative about India which has been prevalent at least since the early ’90s,”
says Ashoka. “India is a country ‘on the go,’ a competitor of China. People often used India
and China in the same breath for a long time. Then China raced ahead … [and there] was this
notion that India will become a counterweight to China.”
Although he acknowledges that he belongs to the “first-world” part of India, he sees a
disconnect between the upbeat narrative we hear from the Indian government (and the Western
elite) and the messier, more difficult truth.
He felt that “telling a contemporary story was not enough — because the history [of India] is
important … in the sense that once we started down a certain path, the choices increasingly
became limited.”
In his book, Ashoka explains that when India became independent in 1947, the country faced
three challenges: to increase agricultural productivity, to create good jobs in the cities for a
growing population and to compete internationally. To meet those challenges, India created
what he calls “an improbable democracy,” relying on the wisdom of poor and largely illiterate
citizens.
Three-quarters of a century later, those three challenges are still unmet. Some scholars say that
today, India is an elected autocracy, based on the erosion of press freedom and rising violence.
“That’s quite a different story than what we often hear in the Western press,” Kevin notes.
So where did India go wrong?
Slow growth under Nehru
East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and China took their economies from
agrarian to industrial in the 20th century, although they each did it in their own ways.
Development economics ... requires a dual effort: Raise productivity in the agriculture sector so it
requires fewer workers — and create manufacturing jobs for those who leave agricultural labor. India
“never really got around to doing that,” says Ashoka.
For the first 17 years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure as the first prime minister of India, agriculture (as a
share of the nation’s GNP) remained essentially the same before it “inevitably did decline,” he notes.
Because Indian farms tend to become subdivided and smaller with each generation, agricultural jobs
declined but there weren’t enough urban jobs to offset the shrinking rural workforce.
Women and children first
East Asian countries that developed faster emphasized universal primary education (including women),
and they were willing to allow the “aggressive devaluation” of their currencies to create demand for their
goods.
“India did not make those choices for the first 35 years after independence,” Ashoka says.
...
Once primary education is universal, a country can focus on secondary and tertiary education.
“That’s on the supply side if you will,” Ashoka says. “On the demand side, you want to create demand
through a currency that is relatively cheap.”
He notes that “all of these countries initially produced relatively shoddy goods.” But after a while, as they
become part of the global markets, countries with growing economies learn that the buyers they seek
demand higher quality — and “that demand forces them to upgrade,” says Ashoka.
“There is this tremendous infusion of knowledge that occurs slowly at the start and then it picks up, and
that’s the process of development that all these East Asian countries went through,” he says.
‘Temples’ and turmoil
For the most part, India didn’t take that path. Instead, it did what Ashoka calls “building temples.”
Instead of focusing on education and manufacturing, Prime Minister Nehru focused on heavy industry
and developing a few elite universities. The newly independent India’s development skewed more toward
industries like locomotives and fertilizers.
“But these were not job-creating [industries],” Ashoka says.
Meanwhile, the number of people seeking jobs kept increasing but the population’s skill base didn’t keep up.
And while Nehru’s administration built a strong tertiary education system, it didn’t address the larger issues
of income inequality and widespread unemployment.
...
Insulation of the elites
As he sees it, the longtime neglect of primary schools left a legacy of poor teaching quality and corruption in
the educational system. So fifth graders struggle to do second-grade-level tasks and a domino effect results.
The gap between curriculum standards and their abilities widens, and about 30% of students drop out by the
time they reach high school.
Those who finish secondary education are funneled to the “slew of tertiary education colleges, which are run
by politicians and notables almost as a racket.”
At the same time, a small group of Indians get an excellent education — but often decamp to the U.S. to work
in places like Silicon Valley and leading research hospitals. The vast majority of people in India are either
undereducated, underemployed or both. That’s what Ashoka means when he writes about the “two Indias.”
First-world Indians “send their kids to elite schools. Increasingly, they send their kids to colleges abroad because
the elite colleges [in India] have very few openings,” he says. Wealthy Indians have “insulated themselves” from
the rest of the country, from the “second” India.
...
Democracy in peril
Ashoka argues that India is neither a strong economy nor a strong democracy.
He points to a 2023 report by Swedish research institute V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) that categorizes India
as an electoral autocracy.
“I think that sounds very reasonable in terms of the nature of the state’s use of power, in terms of the [lack of]
freedom of the press and in terms of a broad lack of tolerance of dissent,” he says.
The solution, says Ashoka, lies in strong communities and local government: Tocqueville’s “civic consciousness”
or Robert Putnam’s concept of “social capital,” which relies on networks, norms and trust.
“My plea, my hope, my cry is that we begin there so that that process of rebuilding norms and trust occurs,”
Ashoka adds. “Hopefully, then it begins to filter up and across the country. That will be the basis for a renewed
commitment to health, to education, to a judiciary that is fair, an environmental policy that is considerate of the
next generation, to cities that function. Because without those, the economic and political prospects for India
remain very bleak.”
https://www.toptradersunplugged.com/the-dark-side-of-indias-emergence-as-a-global-superpower/
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