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mariacallous · 2 years

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It is not good for us to worship an individual. Only an ideal or a principle can be worshipped.—Mohandas Gandhi, addressing a meeting of his admirers in April 1937

India claims to be the largest democracy in the world, and its ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claims to be the largest political organization in the world (with a membership base even greater than that of the Chinese Communist Party). Since May 2014, both the BJP and the government have been in thrall to the wishes—and occasionally the whims—of a single individual, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An extraordinary personality cult has been constructed around Modi, its manifestations visible in state as well as party propaganda, in eulogies in the press, in adulatory invocations of his apparently transformative leadership by India’s leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, and sports stars.

This essay seeks to place the cult of Modi in comparative and cultural context. It will show how it arose, the hold it has over the Indian imagination, and its consequences for the country’s political and social future. It draws on my academic background as a historian of the Indian Republic, as well as on my personal experiences as an Indian citizen. However, since I am writing about a distinctively Indian variant of what is in fact a global phenomenon, what I say here may resonate with those who study or live under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world.

The term “cult of personality” was popularized, with regard to Joseph Stalin, by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his now famous speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. According to an English translation of Khruschev’s speech, he remarked that it was “impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.”

The case of Stalin was not singular or unique. In the decades following World War II, the communist world was awash with cults of personality—of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, of Fidel Castro in Cuba, of Enver Hoxha in Albania, of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Yet indisputably the greatest—not to say most deadly—of all the communist cults following Stalin’s was that of Mao Zedong in post-revolutionary China. Consider, for example, an editorial by Lt. Gen. Wu Faxian that appeared in the Liberation Army Daily on Aug. 13, 1967:

Chairman Mao is the most outstanding, greatest genius in the world, and his thought is the summing up of the experience of the proletarian struggles in China and abroad and is the unbreakable truth. In implementing Chairman Mao’s directives, we must absolutely not regard it as a prerequisite that we understand them. The experience of revolutionary struggles tells us that we do not understand many directives of Chairman Mao thoroughly or even partially at the beginning but gradually understand them in the course of implementation, after implementation, or after several years. Therefore, we should resolutely implement Chairman Mao’s directives that we understand as well as those that we temporarily do not understand.

I suppose this is what is called blind faith.

The cults of Stalin and Mao were preceded by the cults of Benito Mussolini in Italy and of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Notably, both emerged in settings that were not completely bereft of democratic features. Hitler’s National Socialists won the largest number of seats in the 1932 elections. Eight years previously, Mussolini had sought to win legitimacy through an election, though the voting itself was anything but free and fair. After they came to power, however, both leaders swiftly extinguished political and individual freedoms, seeking to consolidate power in themselves and their party.

A hundred years after the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the world is once again witnessing the rise of authoritarian leaders in countries with some sort of democratic history. A partial listing of these elected autocrats would include: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Modi, and, not least, the autocrat temporarily out of favor but longing for a return to power, former U.S. President Donald Trump.

These leaders have all personalized governance and admiration to a considerable degree. They all seek to present themselves as the savior or redeemer of their nation, uniquely placed to make it more prosperous, more powerful, more in tune with what they claim to be its cultural and historical heritage. In a word, they have all constructed, and been allowed to construct, personality cults around themselves.

While recognizing the existence and persistence of such cults of personality in other countries, this essay shall focus on the cult of Modi in India, for three reasons. First, and least important, it occurs in the country I know best and with whose democratic history I am professionally (as well as personally) engaged.

Second, India is soon to be the most populous nation in the world, surpassing China in this regard, and hence this cult will have deeper and possibly more portentous consequences than such cults erected elsewhere in the world.

Third, and perhaps most important, this personality cult has taken shape in a country that until recently had fairly robust and long-standing democratic traditions. Before Modi came to power in May 2014, India had in all respects a longer-lasting democracy than when Erdogan came to power in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, and Bolsonaro in Brazil. The 2014 general election was India’s 16th national vote, in a line extending almost unbroken from 1952. Regular, and likewise mostly free and fair, elections have also been held to form the legislatures of different Indian states. As the historian Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, many more people have voted in Indian elections than in older and professedly more advanced democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United States. India before 2014 also had an active culture of public debate, a moderately free press, and a reasonably independent judiciary. It was by no means a perfect democracy—but then no democracy is. (In my 2007 book, India After Gandhi, I myself had characterized India as a “50-50 democracy.” Perhaps some countries in Northern Europe might qualify as “70-30 democracies.”)

Before I come to the cult of Modi, I want to say something about the cult of a previous Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi. She was the daughter of the country’s first and longest-serving prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In March 1971, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress party won an emphatic victory in the general election; that December, India won an emphatic victory on the battlefield over Pakistan, in part because of Gandhi’s decisive leadership. She was hailed as a modern incarnation of Durga, the militant, all-conquering goddess of Hindu mythology. The idea that Gandhi embodied in her person the party, the government, and the state—and that she represented in herself the past, present, and future of the nation—was promoted by the prime minister’s political allies. Congress party leader D.K. Barooah proclaimed, “India is Indira, Indira is India.” Equally noteworthy is a Hindi couplet that Barooah composed in praise of Gandhi, which in English reads: “Indira, we salute your morning and your evening, too / We celebrate your name and your great work, too.”

Shortly after the Congress leader read those lines at a rally in June 1975 attended by a million people, Gandhi imposed a state of emergency, during which her regime arrested all major (and many minor) opposition politicians as well as trade unionists and student activists, imposed strict censorship on the press, and abrogated individual freedoms. A little under two years later, however, Gandhi’s democratic conscience compelled her to call fresh elections in which she and her party lost power.

Now compare Barooah’s short poem with an extended tribute, in prose, to Modi by BJP leader J.P. Nadda, offered on the occasion of the former’s 71st birthday. These words appeared in an article published in September 2021 in India’s most widely read English-language newspaper, the Times of India:

Modi has evolved into a reformer who passionately raises social issues plaguing India and then effectively addresses them through public discourse and participation. … [He] believes in the holistic development of our society and country through good moral and social values. He always leads from the front in addressing the nation’s most complex and difficult problems, and doesn’t rest till the goals are achieved. … Modi is the only leader who has an electrifying effect on the masses and on whose call the entire nation gets united. During the [COVID-19] pandemic, his appeals have been religiously followed by every citizen. … His stupendous success is the result of absolute dedication to people’s welfare and wellbeing. His only aim is to make India a Vishwaguru [teacher to the world].

Nadda’s piece is entirely representative. New Delhi’s newspapers are replete with op-ed pieces by cabinet ministers offering sycophantic praise of the prime minister. Indeed, “Modi is India, India is Modi” is the spoken or unspoken belief of everyone in the BJP, whether minister, member of Parliament, or humble party worker. As I was finishing a draft of this article in late September, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, told an audience in Washington that “the fact that our [India’s] opinions count, that our views matter, and we have actually today the ability to shape the big issues of our time” is because of Modi. The anti-colonial movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, the persistence (against the odds) of electoral democracy since independence, the dynamism of its entrepreneurs in recent decades, the contributions of its scholars, scientists, writers, and filmmakers—all this (and the legacy of past prime ministers, too) goes entirely erased in these assessments. India’s achievements (such as they are) are instead attributed to one man alone, Modi.

Meanwhile, a then-serving Supreme Court judge called Modi an “internationally acclaimed visionary” and a “versatile genius who thinks globally and acts locally.” And India’s richest and most successful industrialists compete with one another in publicly displaying their adoration of, and loyalty toward, the prime minister.

In February 2021, Modi joined the ranks of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussain in having a sports stadium named after him while he was alive (and in office). The cricket stadium in the city of Ahmedabad, previously named after the great nationalist stalwart Vallabhbhai Patel, was henceforth to be called the Narendra Modi Stadium, with the inauguration of the refurbished premises conducted by then-Indian President Ram Nath Kovind, no less, alongside Home Minister Amit Shah and other officials. Later that year, as Indian citizens received their first COVID-19 vaccines, they were given vaccination certificates with Modi’s photograph on them. As second and then booster doses were offered, the official certificates also had the prime minister’s photograph. I know of no other country in the world that has followed this practice. Indians asked to show their COVID-19 certificates when traveling overseas have since become accustomed to being greeted with either mirth or disgust, sometimes both.

Any egalitarian democrat would be dismayed by Modi’s extraordinary displays of public narcissism. However, the scholar’s job is as much to understand as to judge. The cold, hard fact is that, like Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s, Modi is unquestionably very popular. Why is this so? Let me offer six reasons.

First, Modi is genuinely self-made as well as extremely hardworking. Folklore has it that he once sold tea at a railway station—while some have questioned the veracity of this particular claim, there is no doubt that his family was disadvantaged in terms of caste as well as class. He takes no holidays and is devoted 24/7 to politics, which can be represented as being devoted 24/7 to the nation.

Second, Modi is a brilliant orator, with a gift for crisp one-liners and an even greater gift for mocking opponents. He is uncommonly effective as a speaker in the language most widely spoken in India, Hindi, and is even better in his native Gujarati.

Third, in terms of his background and achievements, Modi compares very favorably to his principal rival, Rahul Gandhi of the now much decayed Congress party. Gandhi has never held a proper job or exercised any sort of administrative responsibility. (On the other hand, Modi was chief minister of a large state, Gujarat, for more than a decade before he became prime minister.) Gandhi takes frequent holidays, and he is an indifferent public speaker. (English, spoken or understood by only 10 percent of the population, remains his first language.) He is a fifth-generation dynast. In all these respects, Modi shines by comparison.

Fourth, as Hindu majoritarianism increasingly takes hold in Indian politics and society, Modi is seen as the great redeemer of Hindus and Hinduism. Reared in the hard-line Hindu chauvinist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Modi frequently mocks the past rulers of India, both Muslim as well as British. He speaks of rescuing the country from “thousands of years of slavery” and of ushering in India’s much-delayed national and civilizational renaissance.

Fifth, Modi has at his command a massive propaganda machinery, sustained by the financial resources of his party and government and by 21st-century technology. An early and effective user of Twitter and Facebook, Modi has had his party use both as well as WhatsApp to build and enhance his image. (The prime minister also has his personalized, and widely subscribed-to, Narendra Modi App.) Modi’s face, and usually no other, appears on all posters, hoardings, advertisements, and websites issued by or under the aegis of the Indian government. He is thus able to use public resources to burnish his personality cult far more widely and effectively than elected autocrats elsewhere (even Putin).

Sixth, Modi is an exceptionally intelligent and crafty man. While mostly an autodidact, in 14 years as a party organizer and 13 as chief minister of Gujarat, he assimilated a huge amount of information on all sorts of subjects—economic, social, cultural, political. He can speak with apparent authority on the benefits of solar energy, the dangers of nuclear warfare, the situation of the girl child, developments in artificial intelligence, and much else. He is also extremely shrewd in manipulating the political discourse within his party, and the country at large, to favor himself and diminish his rivals or opponents. (The likes of Trump and Bolsonaro are mere demagogues in comparison.)

Having outlined the elements of the cult of Modi, let me speak of its consequences for democratic functioning. The cult of Modi has led to the weakening, if not evisceration, of five crucial institutions that, in a democracy, are meant to hold unbridled power to account and to prevent the personalization of political power and the growth of authoritarianism.

The first of these institutions is the political party. In part because so many of its leaders were jailed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, Modi’s party, the BJP, had previously stoutly opposed cults of personality. The BJP’s sister (some would say parent) organization, the RSS, has always insisted that it does not believe in vyakti puja (worship of an individual). Since 2014, however, Modi has established his total and complete authority over the BJP. Whether out of fear or adoration, all BJP leaders, even those senior to Modi in public life, have obediently fallen in line. There is not even a whiff of dissent within the world’s largest party in the world’s largest democracy; there is no Liz Cheney-like figure here at all.

The second institution that has prostrated itself before Modi is the Union Cabinet. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP’s first leader, was prime minister between 1998 and 2004, he governed as first among equals, giving his senior cabinet ministers considerable autonomy, this in keeping both with his party’s ethos and the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy that India had adopted. However, Modi does not consult cabinet ministers about important government decisions and makes sure that all credit for state welfare schemes accrues entirely to him. The government is run largely, if not entirely, from the Prime Minister’s Office, which is staffed by unelected officials personally loyal to Modi, several from his home state of Gujarat.

Unlike with previous prime ministers (from different parties), in India today there is no consultation within the Union Cabinet. What Modi says, goes. And there is little debate within Parliament either. Whereas prime ministers such as Nehru and Vajpayee spent a great deal of time in Parliament, often listening with attention to the speeches of opposition MPs, Modi uses it more as a platform to make his own speeches. Unfortunately, the country has no tradition of Prime Minister’s Questions, an aspect of the Westminster model that India did not incorporate. Bills on crucial subjects such as personal privacy and farm reforms, which affect hundreds of millions of Indians, are passed with little discussion and without being referred for assessment to a parliamentary select committee, as tradition demands. The speakers in both houses of Parliament are notoriously partisan, hastening the rapid conversion of an idea hatched in the Prime Minister’s Office into law, bypassing the cabinet and with no input from Parliament. During the 2021 monsoon session of Parliament, for example, it took an average of 34 minutes for a bill to be passed in the Lok Sabha, the lower house. Some were passed in less than 10 minutes.

The third democratic institution that has rapidly declined since 2014 is the press. In a democracy, the press is supposed to be independent; in India today, it is pliant and propagandist. In eight years as prime minister, Modi has not held a single press conference involving questions from the media. He conveys his views by way of a monthly monologue on state radio and by the occasional interview with a journalist known to be favorable to the regime, these conduced with a cloying deference to Modi. Furthermore, because most of the country’s leading newspapers and TV channels are owned by entrepreneurs with other business interests, they have quickly fallen into line, lest, for example, a chemical factory also owned by a media magnate does not get a license or an export permit. (Indian media also depend heavily on government advertising, another reason to support the ruling regime.) Prime-time TV exuberantly praises the prime minister and relentlessly attacks the opposition—so much so that a term has been coined for them, godi media. These two words require a longer translation in plain English—perhaps “the media that takes its instructions from and obediently parrots the line of the Modi government” would do. Many independent-minded journalists have been jailed on spurious charges related to their work; others have had the tax authorities set on them.

The fourth key institution that has become less autonomous and independent since May 2014 is the bureaucracy. In India, civil servants are supposed to work in accordance with the constitution and be strictly nonpartisan. Over the years, they have become steadily politicized, with many officials tending to side with a particular political party or even with a particular politician. However, since 2014, whatever independence and autonomy that remained have been completely sundered. In choosing his key officials, Modi places far greater emphasis on loyalty than on competence. Every ministry now has a minder, often an individual from the RSS, to make sure that, when a senior civil servant retires, his or her replacement will have the right vichardhara, or ideology. Furthermore, state agencies have been savagely let loose to intimidate and tame the political opposition. (According to a recent report by the Indian Express, 95 percent of all politicians raided or arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation since 2014 have been from opposition parties.) These raids are held out as a warning as well as an inducement, for a slew of opposition politicians have since joined the BJP and had cases against them withdrawn.

Finally, the judiciary has, in recent years, not fulfilled the role accorded it by the constitution. District and provincial courts have been very energetic in endorsing state actions that infringe on the rights and liberties of citizens. More disappointing perhaps has been the role of the highest court of the land. The legal scholar Anuj Bhuwania has gone so far as to speak of the “complete capitulation of the Supreme Court to the majoritarian rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” It has delayed the hearing of crucial cases; even when it does, it tends to favor the arbitrary use of state power over protecting individual freedoms. As Bhuwania writes in Scroll.in, “During the Modi period, not only has the court failed to perform its constitutional role as a check on governmental excesses, it has acted as a cheerleader for the Modi government’s agenda. Not only has it abdicated its supposed counter-democratic function as a shield for citizens against state lawlessness, but it has also actually acted as a powerful sword that can be wielded at the behest of the executive.” And furthermore, he writes, the Supreme Court “has placed its enormous arsenal at the government’s disposal in pursuit of its radical majoritarian agenda.”

As suggested by my earlier formulation of India as a 50-50 democracy, none of these institutions performed flawlessly in the past. They were occasionally (and sometimes more than occasionally) timid or subservient to the party in power. There was no golden age of Indian democracy. However, since May 2014 these institutions have lost even more—one might say far more—of their independence and autonomy and are now in thrall to Modi and his government.

It is important to note that the capture of these five institutions—the party, the legislature, the press, the civil service, and the judiciary—has been crucial to the consolidation of other personality cults, too. My analysis of what Modi has done to democracy in India would broadly hold for Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, and even to some extent Trump in the United States.

I should briefly note two additional features of personality cults in such partially democratic regimes. The first is that they tend to promote crony capitalism, with a few favored industrialists making windfall gains owing to their loyalty and proximity to the leader and his party. The second is that they tend to promote religious or ethnic majoritarianism. The majority ethnic or religious group is said to represent the true essence of the nation, and the leader is said to embody, with singular distinction and effectiveness, the essence of this majority group. On the other side, religious or ethnic minorities, such as Kurds in Turkey, Jews in Hungary, or Muslims in India, are said to be disloyal or antithetical to the nation. Majoritarian arguments singling out minorities for harassment or stigmatization are rife on social media, made often by ruling party legislators and, on occasions when he feels politically threatened, by the leader himself.

From July 2019 to January 2021, the world’s largest, oldest, and richest democracies were all led by charismatic populists with authoritarian tendencies. Boris Johnson and Trump are now both gone, yet Modi remains. Even while they were in office, it seemed to me that Modi was more dangerous to the interests of his country than Johnson and Trump were to theirs. The reasons for this are both structural as well as biographical. As the preceding discussion would have made clear, democratic institutions intended to act as a check on the abuse of power by politicians are far more compromised in India than in the United Kingdom or the United States. In the U.K., the press, Parliament, and the civil service all sought to thwart Johnson’s authoritarian tendencies. As for the United States, even if Trump sought to pack the Supreme Court, lower courts remained independent; so did the tax authorities and other regulatory institutions. Influential sections of the press did not capitulate to the cult of Trump; the universities remained crucibles of freedom and dissent. Even the person Trump chose as his vice president acted to endorse the results of the 2020 election, in consonance with the U.S. Constitution and in defiance of his boss.

Democratic institutions are far weaker in India than in the U.K. or the United States. And as an individual, too, Modi represents a far greater threat to his country’s democratic future than Johnson or Trump ever could. For one, he has been a full-time politician for far longer than they have been, with much greater experience in how to manipulate public institutions to serve his own purposes. Second, he is far more committed to his political beliefs than Johnson and Trump are to theirs. While Johnson and Trump are consumed almost wholly by vanity and personal glory, Modi is part narcissist but also part ideologue. He lives and embodies Hindu majoritarianism in a much thoroughgoing manner than Trump lives white supremacy or Johnson embodies xenophobic Little Englandism. Third, in the enactment and fulfillment of his ideological dream, Modi has as his instrument the RSS, whose organizational strength and capacity for resource mobilization far exceed any right-wing organization in the U.K. or the United States. Indeed, if it lasts much longer, the Modi regime may come to be remembered as much for its evisceration of Indian pluralism as for its dismantling of Indian democracy.

I have presented a qualitative narrative so far; allow me to append just a few figures that show how far India’s democratic standards have slipped in recent years. In Freedom House’s political and civil freedom rankings, India was among the countries with the largest declines in the last decade, dropping from “Free” to “Partly Free” in 2021. In the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, India fell from 75th in 2015 to 119th in 2021. In Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, India fell from 140th in 2013 to 150th in 2022. Finally, in the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Gender Gap Report, released in July, India ranked 135th out of 146 countries in overall score and lowest (146th) when it came to health and survival.

I’d like to end my essay with two past warnings by Indians against the unthinking submission to charismatic authority. The first warning is relatively well known. It is from B.R. Ambedkar’s last speech to the Constituent Assembly of India in November 1949. In the speech, Ambedkar quotes the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who cautioned citizens not “to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions.” This warning was even more pertinent in India than in England, for, as Ambedkar points out:

in India, bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, bhakti, or hero worship, is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

The cult of Modi the Superman, like the cult of Indira the Superwoman that preceded it, shows that Ambedkar was right to be worried about the dangers to Indian democracy of the religious practice of bhakti, or blind hero worship. The ruling party’s presentation of Modi as Hindu messiah-cum-avenging angel falls on fertile soil. One would not expect the population of a free country to be so cravenly worshipful of a living individual—but, tragically, they are.

The second quote is far more obscure but perhaps equally pertinent. It is from a letter written to Indira Gandhi in November 1969 by S. Nijalingappa, who was president of the Congress party when Gandhi split the party and made it an extension of herself. Born in 1902, Nijalingappa came of age in an era of imperialism and fascism while being part of a freedom struggle that stood for democracy, nonviolence, and pluralism. The Congress party in which he had spent all his adult life was a decentralized institution with vigorous state and district units. It had many leaders, never just one. Now, as Gandhi sought to reshape the party and the country in her own image, Nijalingappa warned her that the history of the 20th century “is replete with instances of the tragedy that overtakes democracy when a leader who has risen to power on the crest of a popular wave or with the support of a democratic organization becomes a victim of political narcissism and is egged on by a coterie of unscrupulous sycophants who use corruption and terror to silence opposition and attempt to make public opinion an echo of authority.”

History offers us a few lessons. One is that—as the cases of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and others all show—personality cults are always bad for the country that fosters and encourages them. Historians have passed their judgment on the damage that the cult of Indira Gandhi did to Indian democracy and nationhood. The day will come, though perhaps not in my lifetime, when historians will pass a similar judgment on the effects on India’s happiness and well-being of the cult of Modi.

This essay draws on the author’s George Herbert Walker Jr. lecture, “Personality Cults and Democratic Decline,” delivered at Yale University’s MacMillan Center on Oct. 6.

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momental · 4 months

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fulfilled a long-standing dream on Monday by presiding over the opening of the Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple in Ayodhya. He described it as the 'beginning of a new era' during the temple's inaugural ceremony. The temple's construction marks a decisive break with secularism in India, as it was built on the site where a four-hundred-year-old mosque, Babri Masjid, once stood before being destroyed by a mob in 1992.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization, were aligned with the mob that destroyed the mosque. Both the BJP and RSS envision India as a Hindu nation, despite its large Muslim population. In 2019, after a legal dispute, the Supreme Court of India allowed for the construction of the Hindu temple on the disputed site.

Modi's involvement in the temple goes back several decades when he was a young Hindu activist raising funds for its construction. Now, as the Prime Minister in his second consecutive term, the completion of the temple is likely to be a centerpiece of his future election campaigns.

In an interview with essayist and historian Mukul Kesavan, they discussed Modi's popularity, the violent history of the Ayodhya dispute, and what sets India apart from other countries experiencing right-wing political movements.

In 1925, the R.S.S. was founded as a nationalist organization with a Hindu majoritarianism focus. It aimed to create a unifying ideology for the diverse subcontinent of India. The R.S.S. felt alienated from the Congress Party and its anti-colonial nationalism. The Congress Party viewed India as a human jungle with diverse communities, while the R.S.S. and Hindu-majoritarian movements wanted a more homogenous nationalism. The Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple, played a significant role in the rise of the B.J.P. and the political mobilization of Indians. The R.S.S. has always had the ambition to reconstitute the Indian Republic and believes that the soul of India was suppressed between 1947 and 1950 when the constitution was written. The Ram-temple movement, which began in the 1980s, was led by organizations affiliated with the R.S.S. and the B.J.P. The movement argued for the right of Hindus to worship at the site believed to be the birthplace of Ram. The state often ignored provocations related to the temple, either considering them too sensitive or too troublesome to address.

In 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya shocked the country. The building was brought down by hand with crude tools, causing massive communal violence. The leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) claimed they didn't want this criminal act to happen, but the shock it caused was intense. Decades later, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of building a temple on the site. This ruling, while acknowledging the mosque's destruction as a criminal act, ultimately gave the land to the Hindu party. It is seen as a capitulation to Prime Minister Modi and the Hindu nationalist movement.

Source Link: How the Hindu Right Triumphed in India

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livesanskrit · 6 months

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Send from Sansgreet Android App. Sanskrit greetings app from team @livesanskrit .

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C Rajagopalachari.

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (10 December 1878 – 25 December 1972), informally called Rajaji or C.R., was an Indian politician, independence activist, lawyer, writer, historian and statesman. Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, as India soon became a Republic in 1950. Furthermore, he was the first Indian-born governor-general, since before him the posts were held by British nationals. He also served as leader of the Indian National Congress, Premier of the Madras Presidency, Governor of West Bengal, Minister for Home Affairs of the Indian Union and Chief Minister of Madras state. Rajagopalachari founded the Swatantra Party and was one of the first recipients of India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. He vehemently opposed the use of nuclear weapons and was a proponent of world peace and disarmament. During his lifetime, he also acquired the nickname 'Mango of Salem'.

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sharmilakumar8662 · 8 months

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K.Sharmila

2121E0186

B.A.History

Goverment arts college ooty

[email protected]

Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, a prominent figure in Indian history, was a statesman, visionary leader, and the first Prime Minister of India. His legacy extends beyond his political career, encompassing his role in the struggle for India's independence and his commitment to building a modern, democratic, and secular nation. In around 600 words, we can explore his life, political contributions, and his lasting impact on India.

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, into a wealthy and influential family. His father, Motilal Nehru, was a prominent lawyer, and his mother, Swarup Rani, came from a Kashmiri Brahmin family. Nehru's privileged upbringing exposed him to intellectual and political ideas from a young age. He was educated in prestigious institutions in India and later at Harrow and Cambridge in England.

Nehru's political awakening began in the early 20th century, when he was exposed to the nationalist fervor sweeping across India. Influenced by leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, he joined the Indian National Congress and soon emerged as a prominent leader in the struggle for independence from British colonial rule. He was deeply committed to the principles of nonviolence and civil disobedience advocated by Gandhi.

One of Nehru's defining moments came during the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Civil Disobedience Movement, where he faced imprisonment alongside other leaders. His eloquence, commitment, and leadership skills made him a respected figure within the Congress party and earned him the moniker "Pandit Nehru."

As India moved closer to independence, the question of its political future became paramount. Nehru was a staunch advocate of a democratic and secular India. He played a crucial role in shaping the vision of an independent India as a sovereign republic. When India finally gained independence on August 15, 1947, Nehru became the nation's first Prime Minister.

Nehru's leadership in the early years of independent India was marked by a focus on nation-building. He believed in a mixed economy, combining elements of socialism and capitalism, to reduce poverty and inequality. He also initiated significant land reforms and invested in education, science, and technology, setting the stage for India's future economic development.

One of Nehru's most significant contributions was his role in drafting the Indian Constitution. As the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly's drafting committee, he played a pivotal role in creating a modern, democratic, and secular constitution that guaranteed fundamental rights and freedoms to all citizens, regardless of their background.

Nehru's foreign policy was characterized by a commitment to non-alignment during the Cold War. He aimed to keep India free from the entanglements of superpower politics. His diplomatic efforts helped India gain international recognition and build relationships with countries around the world.

However, Nehru faced many challenges during his tenure as Prime Minister. The partition of India in 1947 had led to the violent and traumatic separation of India and Pakistan, a deeply painful chapter in the subcontinent's history. He also grappled with issues related to border conflicts, particularly with China.

Nehru's approach to these challenges was often criticized, but he remained dedicated to his vision of a united, democratic, and secular India. He emphasized the importance of social justice, women's rights, and inclusive development. His policies contributed to the development of key institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership and vision left an indelible mark on India. He was not just a political leader but also a prolific writer and thinker. His book "The Discovery of India" is a classic that explores the country's rich history and cultural diversity. His commitment to democracy and secularism set the tone for India's identity as a diverse and pluralistic nation.

Nehru's tenure as Prime Minister lasted until his death on May 27, 1964. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, would go on to become Prime Minister, continuing his family's legacy in Indian politics. The Nehru-Gandhi family remained influential in Indian politics for several decades.

In conclusion, Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy is deeply intertwined with India's modern history. His leadership during the struggle for independence, his commitment to democracy, and his role in shaping India's political, economic, and foreign policies have left an enduring impact. He is often remembered as the "architect of modern India," and his vision of a united, democratic, and inclusive nation continues to guide India's path in the 21st century

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brookstonalmanac · 8 months

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Events 10.12 (after 1950)

1959 – At the national congress of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance in Peru, a group of leftist radicals are expelled from the party who later form APRA Rebelde. 1960 – Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pounds his shoe on a desk at the United Nations to protest a Philippine assertion. 1962 – The Columbus Day Storm strikes the U.S. Pacific Northwest with record wind velocities. There was at least U.S. $230 million in damages and 46 people died. 1963 – After nearly 23 years of imprisonment, Reverend Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit missionary, was released from the Soviet Union. 1964 – The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew, and the first flight without pressure suits. 1967 – A bomb explodes on board Cyprus Airways Flight 284 while flying over the Mediterranean Sea, killing 66. 1968 – Equatorial Guinea becomes independent from Spain. 1970 – Vietnam War: Vietnamization continues as President Richard Nixon announces that the United States will withdraw 40,000 more troops before Christmas. 1971 – The 2,500 year celebration of the Persian Empire begins. 1973 – President Nixon nominates House Majority Leader Gerald R. Ford as the successor to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. 1976 – Indian Airlines Flight 171 crashes at Santacruz Airport in Bombay, India, killing 95. 1977 – Hua Guofeng succeeds Mao Zedong as paramount leader of China. 1979 – Typhoon Tip becomes the largest and most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded. 1983 – Japan's former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei is found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, and is sentenced to four years in jail. 1984 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army fail to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. The bomb kills five people and wounds 31. 1988 – Two officers of the Victoria Police are gunned down execution-style in the Walsh Street police shootings, Australia. 1992 – A 5.8 earthquake occurred in Cairo, Egypt. At least 510 died. 1994 – The Magellan spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere of Venus. 1994 – Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 746 crashes near Nantaz, Iran, killing all 66 people on board. 1996 – New Zealand holds its first general election under the new mixed-member proportional representation system, which led to Jim Bolger's National Party forming a coalition government with Winston Peters's New Zealand First. 1997 – The Sidi Daoud massacre in Algeria kills 43 people at a fake roadblock. 1998 – Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, dies five days after he was beaten outside of Laramie. 1999 – Pervez Musharraf takes power in Pakistan from Nawaz Sharif through a bloodless coup. 1999 – The former Autonomous Soviet Republic of Abkhazia declares its independence from Georgia. 2000 – The USS Cole, a US Navy destroyer, is badly damaged by two al-Qaeda suicide bombers, killing 17 crew members and wounding at least 39. 2002 – Terrorists detonate bombs in two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, Indonesia, killing 202 and wounding over 300. 2005 – The second Chinese human spaceflight, Shenzhou 6, is launched, carrying two cosmonauts in orbit for five days. 2010 – The Finnish Yle TV2 channel's Ajankohtainen kakkonen current affairs program airs controversial Homoilta episode (literally "gay night"), which leads to the resignation of almost 50,000 Finns from the Evangelical Lutheran Church. 2012 – The European Union wins the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. 2013 – Fifty-one people are killed after a truck veers off a cliff in Peru. 2017 – The United States announces its decision to withdraw from UNESCO. Israel immediately follows. 2018 – Princess Eugenie marries Jack Brooksbank at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. 2019 – Typhoon Hagibis makes landfall in Japan, killing 10 and forcing the evacuation of one million people. 2019 – Eliud Kipchoge from Kenya becomes the first person to run a marathon in less than two hours with a time of 1:59:40 in Vienna. 2019 – The Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans, which is under construction, collapses, killing two and injuring 20.

#Events

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xtruss · 1 year

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The Cult of Boak Bollocks Modi! How India’s Prime Minister (World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Terrorist, Hindu Extremist and Killer of Muslims, Minorities and Low Cast Hindus) Dismantled The World’s Largest Democratic Experiment.

�� November 4, 2022 | By Ramachandra Guha, a Historian and Biographer and the author of books including Environmentalism: A Global History and India After Gandhi. He lives in Bengaluru.

“It is not good for us to worship an individual. Only an ideal or a principle can be worshipped.—Mohandas Gandhi, addressing a meeting of his admirers in April 1937”

India claims to be the Largest Democracy in the World, and its ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claims to be the largest political organization in the world (with a membership base even greater than that of the Chinese Communist Party). Since May 2014, both the BJP and the government have been in thrall to the wishes—and occasionally the whims—of a single individual, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An extraordinary personality cult has been constructed around Modi, its manifestations visible in state as well as party propaganda, in eulogies in the press, in adulatory invocations of his apparently transformative leadership by India’s leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, and sports stars.

The term “cult of personality” was popularized, with regard to Joseph Stalin, by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his now famous speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. According to an English translation of Khrushchev’s speech, he remarked that it was “impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.”

I suppose this is what is called blind faith.

From left: Benito Mussolini in Rome in 1936; Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1938; a poster of Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1950; and Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1966. Getty Images

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi addresses a crowd in New Delhi on March 3, 1977. Bettmanne Archive/Getty Images

Modi has evolved into a reformer who passionately raises social issues plaguing India and then effectively addresses them through public discourse and participation.

… [He] believes in the holistic development of our society and country through good moral and social values. He always leads from the front in addressing the nation’s most complex and difficult problems, and doesn’t rest till the goals are achieved.

… Modi is the only leader who has an electrifying effect on the masses and on whose call the entire nation gets united. During the [COVID-19] pandemic, his appeals have been religiously followed by every citizen.

… His stupendous success is the result of absolute dedication to people’s welfare and wellbeing. His only aim is to make India a Vishwaguru [teacher to the world].

Nadda’s piece is entirely representative. New Delhi’s newspapers are replete with op-eds by cabinet ministers offering sycophantic praise of the prime minister. Indeed, “Modi is India, India is Modi” is the spoken or unspoken belief of everyone in the BJP, whether minister, member of Parliament, or humble party worker. As I was finishing a draft of this essay in late September, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, told an audience in Washington that “the fact that our [India’s] opinions count, that our views matter, and we have actually today the ability to shape the big issues of our time” is because of Modi. The anti-colonial movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, the persistence (against the odds) of electoral democracy since independence, the dynamism of its entrepreneurs in recent decades, the contributions of its scholars, scientists, writers, and filmmakers—all this (and the legacy of past prime ministers, too) goes entirely erased in these assessments. India’s achievements (such as they are) are instead attributed to one man alone, Modi.

Meanwhile, in February 2020, a then-serving Supreme Court judge called Modi an “internationally acclaimed visionary” and a “versatile genius who thinks globally and acts locally.” And India’s richest and most successful industrialists compete with one another in publicly displaying their adoration of, and loyalty toward, the prime minister.

“Any egalitarian democrat would be dismayed by Modi’s extraordinary displays of public narcissism. However, the scholar’s job is as much to understand as to judge.”

Third, in terms of his background and achievements, Modi compares very favorably to his principal rival, Rahul Gandhi of the now much-decayed Congress party. Gandhi has never held a proper job or exercised any sort of administrative responsibility. (On the other hand, Modi was chief minister of a large state, Gujarat, for more than a decade before he became prime minister.) Gandhi takes frequent holidays, and he is an indifferent public speaker. (English, spoken or understood by only 10 percent of the population, remains his first language.) He is a fifth-generation dynast. In all these respects, Modi shines by comparison.

MODI: The World’s Most Wanted Terrorist, Hindu Extremist, Criminal and Killer Hitler of Gujrat. Matthieu Bourel Illustration For Foreign Policy

The second institution that has prostrated itself before Modi is the Union Cabinet. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP’s first leader, was prime minister between 1998 and 2004, he governed as first among equals, giving his senior cabinet ministers considerable autonomy, this in keeping both with his party’s ethos and with the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy that India had adopted. However, Modi does not consult cabinet ministers about important government decisions and makes sure that all credit for state welfare schemes accrues entirely to him. The government is run largely, if not entirely, from the Prime Minister’s Office, which is staffed by unelected officials personally loyal to Modi, several from his home state of Gujarat.

“Unlike with previous prime ministers (from different parties), in India today there is no consultation within the Union Cabinet. What Modi says, goes.”

The third democratic institution that has rapidly declined since 2014 is the press. In a democracy, the press is supposed to be independent; in India today, it is pliant and propagandist. In eight years as prime minister, Modi has not held a single press conference involving questions from the media. He conveys his views by way of a monthly monologue on state radio and by the occasional interview with a journalist known to be favorable to the regime, these conduced with a cloying deference to Modi. Furthermore, because most of the country’s leading newspapers and TV channels are owned by entrepreneurs with other business interests, they have quickly fallen into line, lest, for example, a chemical factory also owned by a media magnate does not get a license or an export permit. (Indian media also depend heavily on government advertising, another reason to support the ruling regime.) Prime-time news channels exuberantly praise the prime minister and relentlessly attack the opposition—so much so that a term has been coined for them, godi media. These two words require a longer translation in plain English—perhaps “the media that takes its instructions from and obediently parrots the line of the Modi government” would do. Many independent-minded journalists have been jailed on spurious charges related to their work; others have had the tax authorities set on them.

From left: Viktor Orban in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul in 2017; Vladimir Putin in Moscow this year; and Donald Trump in Florida in 2021. Getty Images

“Even while they were in office, it seemed to me that Modi was more dangerous to the interests of his country than Johnson and Trump were to theirs.”

Democratic institutions are far weaker in India than in the U.K. or the United States. And as an individual, too, Modi represents a far greater threat to his country’s democratic future than Johnson or Trump ever could. For one, he has been a full-time politician for far longer than they have been, with much greater experience in how to manipulate public institutions to serve his own purposes. Second, he is far more committed to his political beliefs than Johnson and Trump are to theirs. While Johnson and Trump are consumed almost wholly by vanity and personal glory, Modi is part narcissist but also part ideologue. He lives and embodies Hindu majoritarianism in a much more thoroughgoing manner than Trump lives white supremacy or Johnson embodies xenophobic Little Englandism. Third, in the enactment and fulfillment of his ideological dream, Modi has as his instrument the RSS, whose organizational strength and capacity for resource mobilization far exceed any right-wing organization in the U.K. or the United States. Indeed, if it lasts much longer, the Modi regime may come to be remembered as much for its evisceration of Indian pluralism as for its dismantling of Indian democracy.

“The cult of Modi the Superman, like the cult of Indira the Superwoman that preceded it, shows that Ambedkar was right to be worried about the dangers to Indian democracy of the religious practice of bhakti, or blind hero worship.”

— This Essay draws on the author’s George Herbert Walker Jr. lecture, “Personality Cults and Democratic Decline,” delivered at Yale University’s MacMillan Center on Oct. 6.

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iffidel · 4 years

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Hitler And Narendra Modi

There are many similarities between modi and Hitler. There are also many similarities between RSS and the Nazi party as well. Here are the similarities.

Modi was born in a poor family with 6 children. Hitler was also born in a poor family with 6 children.both of then struggled for a good livelihood.

Modi received his values of nationalism by joining the RSS. Hitler received his nationalism from the German workers party. Both were against communism.

Both modi and Hitler have good oratory skills. Because of this they became very valuable to the BJP and Nazi party. Infact once Hitler threatened to leave the party bcoz of political infighting the party members were scared that it would destroy the party so they made him the leader. Similarly in the 2014 election BJP knew they cannot win without modi so they made him the center of the campaign. Both the parties became extremely dependent on them.

The schutzstaffel which was a paramilitary wing of the Nazi party helped the German soldiers in world war 2. Similarly the RSS which is considered BJPs paramilitary wing helped the Indian army in the 1962 war against China.

Both Hitler and the Nazi party believed in Lebensraum( greater Germany). They believed some parts of Germany have been occupied by neighbouring states. Similarly the RSS and BJP believes in akhand bhart(greater India) which includes territories from neighbouring countries.

Both modi and Hitler came to power when inflation in both India and Germany were high. The Weimar republic was considered to be corrupt and cowardly just like the Congress party.

Both are known to have hatred or scepticism for the minority religious and ethnic groups.

Some parts of Germany was occupied by France because of the non payment of debts.hitler thought of these as a weakness for gemany. Just like how modi thinks the occupation of some parts of Kashmir by Pakistan is a India's weakness.

The Nazi party tried to make a new breed of humans through genetic experiments and crossbreeding. The RSSs health wing also recently tried to make designer babies who would have certain characteristics like great height and fair skin.

When Hitler was in power he appointed many officers to the education department of Germany who believed in his ideas. History was being changed to suit his viewpoint. Similarly after modi became prime minister many history textbooks of CBSC Rajasthan and Maharashtra state board are getting changed as well to put more focus on Hindu and Sikh Kings and wiping out the Mughals and other Muslim rulers.

I am not saying modi is a bad guy as Hitler. I am just pointing out the similarities. There is no political opinion being expressed here.

#modi #narendramodi #hitler #modi atmanirbhar bharat #fascistmodi

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thevividgreenmoss · 5 years

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The RSS was founded ninety years ago, in 1925, on an uncannily Gramscian principle that enduring political power can arise only on the basis of a prior cultural transformation and consent, and this broad based cultural consent to the extreme right’s doctrines can only be built through a long historical process, from the bottom up. What follows from this ideological articulation of the long-term strategy is that if the RSS succeeds in constituting a certain sort of social subjectivity for the great majority of Hindus in India who are said to constitute some 80 per cent of the Indian population (we shall come later to this claim) and if they can all be unified, positively, in pursuit of a civilisational mission, and, negatively, in permanent opposition to a fancied enemy (Muslim and Christian minorities in the countries), as the Nazis sought to unite the German nation against the Jews, then the demographic majority can be turned into a permanent political majority. In that case, what the left might designate as the extreme right could rule comfortably through the institutions of liberal democracy in India that have already adjusted themselves to low-intensity but punctual use of violence against religious minorities.

...The RSS has also sought to address in practice a historic dilemma regarding the possibility of revolution in the liberal age, whether from the left or the right. Gramsci is, of course, the great thinker who addressed this dilemma at great length and with great intellectual splendour. However, he addresses it conceptually, never on the organisational level: how could he, organisationally, from inside a prison? The RSS has addressed the dilemma in its organisational practices, over decades, through trial and error, with remarkable success so far, even though it is unclear whether or not they will be entirely successful eventually. That dilemma has been posed to the Leninist tradition in the following terms: revolutions are made by cadre parties, the ones who are able to create something of a counter-state against a state seen by the people as illegitimate (Czarism; the colonial master), able to counter state violence with revolutionary violence, and, in a moment of ultimate revolutionary crisis, able to seize power through frontal attack, dismantle that state, erect a state of a new type. However, once a liberal democratic system of representative government in all its intricacies has been erected, universalising a bourgeois political subjectivity which believes in norms of liberal legality and the primacy of representative democracy, the revolutionaries face a situation in which they can either refuse to participate in this "bourgeois democracy" and get politically marginalised, or they can participate in the electoral world of liberal democracy, renouncing the ambition of creating a vanguard revolutionary party and committing themselves to socialist transformation through electoral means. This is a real, inescapable dilemma. In India, Maoism chose the path of revolutionary violence, condemning themselves thus far to political marginalisation and internal degeneration. The parliamentary left, as represented by both communist parties, CPI and CPI(M), chose the electoral way, effectively recognising the legitimacy of the liberal state and the specific form of Indian constitutionality, thus foreclosing the revolutionary option, rhetorical stances notwithstanding. There has been a blockage at both ends.

The RSS addressed that question from the extreme right, not theoretically but organisationally. Their documents are at best turgid and unreadable for the stupidity of their content. Their organisational practices, by contrast, have often been frighteningly brilliant.

...The RSS arose not as a unique expression of what came to be known as "Hindu nationalism" (as contrasted to the canonical "secular nationalism" of Gandhi, Nehru, etc.), but as one of many. Founded in 1913, some twelve years before the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha remained by far the larger organisation of that kind well into the 1950s when it began to decay and many of its members got assimilated into the RSS and its affiliates. Ironically, the Mahasabha continued to function from inside the professedly "secular" Indian National Congress until 1938; and after Independence, Shyama Prashad Mukherjee, one of its illustrious leaders, resurfaced as a minister in the cabinet of none other than Nehru himself. Certain strands of Hindu extremism and conservatism were thus not entirely alien to what I have called India’s canonical nationalism and which never tires of asserting its purportedly pristine secularism.

...Parenthetically, we should note that even today the RSS is by far the most important organisation of the Hindu right but by no means has any exclusive monopoly of it. There are many outside its own umbrella (or family — parivar — as its fronts like to be called). The most notable is the Shiv Sena, but countless small groups of the most violent sort keep cropping up all the time, and it is not always possible to know which of them are covertly RSS outfits and which are not.

Nor were the Mahasabha and the RSS the first originators of this outlook, or the first political expression of it. Certain upper caste clusters in late nineteenth century Bengal had provided a rather impressive nursery for the incubation of revivalist longing and nostalgia for a Hindu Golden Age in the classical past; some of these ideas had played a powerful role in the Swadeshi movement in early years of the twentieth century. At the other end of the country, highly influential political, social and educational movements were emerging already in late nineteenth century Maharashtra to combat the Brahminical caste order, for advancement of the untouchable castes and so on. This challenge to Brahminism served to unite much of the Brahmin elite to defend their caste privileges but, predictably, as defenders of "Hindus" as such. It was recalled that the Peshwai kingdom of the Maharashtrians was the last to have been defeated by the British in India; as such, the Maharashtrian elite had not just the duty but the right to devise and lead a new kind of nationalism, a "Hindu nationalism" that excluded the Muslim usurpers and that would resurrect the ancient glory of the Hindus, purifying the culture of the land. The majority of the founders and early leaders of the RSS turned out to be Maharashtrian Brahmins. ...In its formative phase, Hindu nationalist ideology had three distinctive components. First, there was the nationalism of "blood and soil" descended from right-wing Romanticisms of the European nineteenth century which got re-inscribed in terms of race and religion in many nationalisms of the twentieth century, including the cultural nationalism of the Hindu right. Second, right-wing nationalism also inherited a colonialist reading of India’s history, already canonised by James Mill in his iconic six-volume The History of British India that started appearing in 1817, as comprising three historical periods: that of the Hindu Golden Age; that of the defeat and fall of Hindu civilisation at the hands of Muslim tyranny; and the then-dawning phase for which the British were represented as liberators of Hindus from that tyranny. The latter element accounts for the great ambivalence of Hindu nationalism toward colonialism and imperialism. When Hindutva ideologues speak of the Hindus having suffered under "foreign rule", they routinely refer to the period of the Muslim dynasties, not to the British. And although they would like to claim some anti-colonial lineage, there is scant evidence of their actually having participated much in those struggles. Thanks to these powerful ideological legacies, their nationalism of today is remarkably devoid of any anti-imperialist positions and, thanks to the neoliberal consensus, devoid even of the sort of ideologies of self-reliance that Gandhian/Nehruvian variant of nationalism had envisioned for the development of Indian capitalism. ...The "blood-and-soil" nationalism and mythologies of Muslim tyranny were combined with something else as well: anxieties among large sections of the upper caste elites as they were pressed by the upsurge of the lower castes from one side, and the rise of a multi-religious, multi-caste nationalism that was fast becoming a veritable mass movement with Gandhi’s shepherding of the Congress, especially after 1919. Ideas of the Hindu Golden Age and Muslim tyranny were elements often imbibed from colonial education, hence widespread among the educated Hindu elites. In that respect, Hindu nationalism could appeal to them quite credibly. The intensities of Brahminical caste anxieties were a different matter, however, and those remained a major source for the isolation of the RSS in the heyday of the anti-colonial movement, 1919-47, and during the early decades of the Republic.

...The Anthropological Survey of India holds that the Indian population is comprised of thousands of distinct communities, sociologically so defined by custom, speech, location, cuisine, spiritual belief, caste, sub-caste, occupation, what have you. The RSS is the only organisation in India which has the ambition to have fronts for as many of these diversities as possible and does indeed go on creating more and more of them. In this sense, it is a spectacular missionary organisation, and the mission is religious, cultural, social, economic, educational and of course political. The heart of this problem for the RSS is that even though the word "Hindu" is used by all as if the word referred to some homogeneous religious community or a unified social category, the reality is that all these diversities even immense differences of custom and religious belief exist among precisely the 80 per cent of the Indians who are considered "Hindu". Contrary to this reality, the RSS has fairly precise ideas of what it means to be a Hindu, based on its own doctrine that being a Hindu is not merely a religious category, divorced from other kinds of subjectivity or conduct, but an entire way of life, from cradle to grave. It wants to make sure that the ideal type it has invented becomes the normative standard among that 80 per cent. Its commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both church and state simultaneously. That ambition is at the heart of its fight against secular civility and the specific content of its authoritarianism. That so comprehensive a civilizational project would wholly succeed appears implausible. The undertaking is audacious, however, and the success so far, although partial, is also undeniably impressive.

...In this situation the proper stance is not: watch out, Nazis are coming. The real question is the one that Kalecki posed at the time of Goldwater’s bid for the US presidency in the 1960s: what would fascism look like if it came to a democratic industrial country that had no powerful working-class movement to oppose it? That is the general question, and I think it applies with particular force to the India of today: the far right need not abolish the outer shell of the liberal democratic institutions because these institutions can be taken over by its own personnel altogether peacefully and because most others are quite willing to go along with it so long as acts of large-scale violence remain only sporadic and the more frequent low-intensity violence can be kept out of general view, by media monopoly combined with mutual agreement between liberalism and the far right. Meanwhile, the communists are now too small a force to be considered even for a ban. Of course, the question of fascism of the classical type may well resurface if a powerful socialist movement were to be re-founded, on whatever new premises and strategic perspectives that may now be necessary for that act of re-founding and reconstruction.

Aijaz Ahmad, India: Liberal Democracy and the Extreme Right

#*#aijaz ahmad

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popolitiko · 2 years

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From Xi Jinping to Nancy Pelosi, These 6 Leaders Shaped the World in 2019

By Charlie Campbell , Molly Ball , Brian Bennett , Billy Perrigo , Dan Stewart and Vivienne Walt - December 13, 2019

Through policies and power, leaders from New Zealand, France, India, China and the U.S. influenced the world more than any others in 2019. Here’s why these six were so important this year.

Xi Jinping, President of China

On Oct. 1, a parade of tanks, troops and nuclear missiles rolled through Beijing to mark 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic. Standing before the Forbidden City, abode of emperors, China’s Xi Jinping vowed, “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead.”

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

The temperature in Washington changed on Jan. 3 when Nancy Pelosi picked up the gavel and became Speaker of the House for a second time. President Donald Trump has yet to recover.

For two years, Trump had benefited from a subservient Republican Congress. Pelosi quickly made clear that divided government would be a different story. Taking the reins in the midst of the longest government shutdown in history, she refused to cave to Trump’s demand for a border wall, waiting him out—and canceling the State of the Union address—until he surrendered. Over the ensuing months, she served as the unorthodox President’s foil, using her mastery of the powers of the Legislative Branch to hold Trump in check.

For much of the year, Pelosi battled the left nearly as much as the right, frustrating progressive activists and far-left members by steering her party toward the center. Even as she’s overseen an unprecedented slate of investigations into the Executive Branch, she’s tried to find ways to work with Trump where possible. At the White House’s request, Pelosi passed a $4.6 billion border bill with funding for the immigration detention centers the left considers concentration camps, and later negotiated a two-year budget agreement that increases military funding. She’s kept trying to make deals with Trump on prescription-drug pricing and infrastructure, even as the President has repeatedly walked away from the table. Of the more than 300 bills the House has passed that sit on the Senate’s doorstep, more than 275 are bipartisan.

On Dec. 10, Pelosi announced the House’s articles of impeachment of Trump. An hour later, she unveiled an agreement on the President’s plan to update the North American Free Trade Agreement. The split screen epitomized her yearlong high-wire act. Pelosi resisted Democrats’ calls for impeachment until the Ukraine scandal forced her hand. As the year ends, the results-oriented leader finds herself in just the situation she’d tried to avoid: a partisan impeachment of a President unlikely to be chastened by it. The founders’ vision for checks and balances has forced her into a historic confrontation, with unforeseeable consequences. “If we had not done this,” she tells TIME, “just think of how low our democracy would have sunk.” —Molly Ball

Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

For decades after the British departed the Indian subcontinent, its history was one of painful cleavings. The 1947 Partition is a bland label for a division that produced two countries, 15 million refugees and at least a million deaths. When Pakistan, founded as a Muslim homeland opposite a secular India, itself split in two, the war that created Bangladesh in 1971 undid the assumption that a common faith alone could bind a nation. But in 2019, Narendra Modi began his second term in office having revived the premise in India.

In May, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a months-long election in a landslide that established Modi as the most powerful Prime Minister in more than a generation. But as Modi has consolidated power, India’s Muslims—who make up 14% of the country’s population—are questioning whether they count as Indian anymore. The BJP exalts Hindu nationalism, the identity politics of a religious majority that has been emergent for decades but for which Modi’s unprecedented majority marks a historical high watermark.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand

The gesture was simple, but the effect was profound. Less than 24 hours after a far-right extremist massacred 50 worshippers in two Christchurch mosques in March, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put on a black hijab to meet members of the Muslim community, hear their fears and share in their grief. In one photograph of the encounter, the young leader’s brow is lightly creased and her mouth turned down, an uncanny expression of empathy mixed with strength. The obscenity of the slaughters has been compounded by being livestreamed. But here was a still frame that, as it spread beyond the heartbroken island nation, would endure as an emblem of compassion, tolerance and resolve.

When Ardern took power in October 2017 at the age of 37, it was as the world’s youngest female leader. She advanced a range of progressive policies, with a particular focus on the environment. Under Ardern, New Zealand’s government banned single-use plastic bags, planted 140 million trees and passed a bill to set a net-zero target for CO emissions by 2050. She also extended paid parental leave and took six weeks off herself after giving birth while in office—a rare example of a head of state taking parental leave of any length.

https://time.com/5748983/2019-influential-leaders/

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livesanskrit · 1 year

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Send from Sansgreet Android App. Sanskrit greetings app from team @livesanskrit . It's the first Android app for sending @sanskrit greetings. Download app from https://livesanskrit.com/sansgreet C Rajagopalachari. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (10 December 1878 – 25 December 1972), informally called Rajaji or C.R., was an Indian politician, independence activist, lawyer, writer, historian and statesman. Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, as India soon became a Republic in 1950. Furthermore, he was the first Indian-born governor-general, since before him the posts were held by British nationals. He also served as leader of the Indian National Congress, Premier of the Madras Presidency, Governor of West Bengal, Minister for Home Affairs of the Indian Union and Chief Minister of Madras state. Rajagopalachari founded the Swatantra Party and was one of the first recipients of India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. He vehemently opposed the use of nuclear weapons and was a proponent of world peace and disarmament. During his lifetime, he also acquired the nickname 'Mango of Salem'. #sansgreet #sanskritgreetings #greetingsinsanskrit #sanskritquotes #sanskritthoughts #emergingsanskrit #sanskrittrends #trendsinsanskrit #livesanskrit #sanskritlanguage #sanskritlove #sanskritdailyquotes #sanskritdailythoughts #sanskrit #resanskrit #crajagopalachari #rajagopalachari #independance #governergeneral #indiannationalcongress #inc #madrasstate #madras #chennai #tamilnadu #tamil #bangaloreuniversity #presidencycollege #lawyer #celebratingsanskrit https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl_u-9wPZYL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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brookstonalmanac · 3 years

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Events 3.22

106 – Start of the Bostran era, the calendar of the province of Arabia Petraea. 238 – Gordian I and his son Gordian II are proclaimed Roman emperors. 871 – Æthelred of Wessex is defeated by a Danish invasion army at the Battle of Marton. 1508 – Ferdinand II of Aragon commissions Amerigo Vespucci chief navigator of the Spanish Empire. 1621 – The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags. 1622 – Jamestown massacre: Algonquians kill 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony's population, during the Second Anglo-Powhatan War. 1630 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlaws the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. 1638 – Anne Hutchinson is expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent. 1713 – The Tuscarora War comes to an end with the fall of Fort Neoheroka, effectively opening up the interior of North Carolina to European colonization. 1739 – Nader Shah occupies Delhi in India and sacks the city, stealing the jewels of the Peacock Throne. 1765 – The British Parliament passes the Stamp Act that introduces a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies. 1784 – The Emerald Buddha is moved with great ceremony to its current location in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand. 1794 – The Slave Trade Act of 1794 bans the export of slaves from the United States, and prohibits American citizens from outfitting a ship for the purpose of importing slaves. 1829 – In the London Protocol, the three protecting powers (United Kingdom, France and Russia) establish the borders of Greece. 1849 – The Austrians defeat the Piedmontese at the Battle of Novara. 1871 – In North Carolina, William Woods Holden becomes the first governor of a U.S. state to be removed from office by impeachment. 1873 – The Spanish National Assembly abolishes slavery in Puerto Rico. 1894 – The first playoff game for the Stanley Cup starts. 1895 – Before the Société pour L'Encouragement à l'Industrie, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrate movie film technology publicly for the first time. 1896 – Charilaos Vasilakos wins the first modern Olympic marathon race with a time of three hours and 18 minutes. 1906 – The first England vs France rugby union match is played at Parc des Princes in Paris. 1913 – Mystic Phan Xích Long, the self-proclaimed Emperor of Vietnam, is arrested for organising a revolt against the colonial rule of French Indochina, which was nevertheless carried out by his supporters the following day. 1920 – Azeri and Turkish army soldiers with participation of Kurdish gangs attack the Armenian inhabitants of Shushi (Nagorno Karabakh). 1933 – Cullen–Harrison Act: President Franklin Roosevelt signs an amendment to the Volstead Act, legalizing the manufacture and sale of "3.2 beer" (3.2% alcohol by weight, approximately 4% alcohol by volume) and light wines. 1939 – Germany takes Memel from Lithuania. 1942 – World War II: In the Mediterranean Sea, the Royal Navy confronts Italy's Regia Marina in the Second Battle of Sirte. 1943 – World War II: The entire village of Khatyn (in what is the present-day Republic of Belarus) is burnt alive by Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118. 1945 – World War II: The city of Hildesheim, Germany is heavily damaged in a British air raid, though it had little military significance and Germany was on the verge of final defeat. 1945 – The Arab League is founded when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt. 1960 – Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser. 1972 – The United States Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. 1972 – In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the United States Supreme Court decides that unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives. 1975 – A fire at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Decatur, Alabama causes a dangerous reduction in cooling water levels. 1978 – Karl Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas dies after falling off a tight-rope suspended between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 1982 – NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia is launched from the Kennedy Space Center on its third mission, STS-3. 1992 – USAir Flight 405 crashes shortly after takeoff from New York City's LaGuardia Airport, leading to a number of studies into the effect that ice has on aircraft. 1992 – Fall of communism in Albania: The Democratic Party of Albania wins a decisive majority in the parliamentary election. 1993 – The Intel Corporation ships the first Pentium chips (80586), featuring a 60 MHz clock speed, 100+ MIPS, and a 64 bit data path. 1995 – Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns to earth after setting a record of 438 days in space. 1997 – Tara Lipinski, aged 14 years and nine months, becomes the youngest women's World Figure Skating Champion. 2004 – Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, two bodyguards, and nine civilian bystanders are killed in the Gaza Strip when hit by Israeli Air Force Hellfire missiles. 2006 – Three Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) hostages are freed by British forces in Baghdad after 118 days of captivity and the murder of their colleague from the U.S., Tom Fox. 2013 – At least 37 people are killed and 200 are injured after a fire destroys a camp containing Burmese refugees near Ban Mae, Thailand. 2016 – Three suicide bombers kill 32 people and injure 316 in the 2016 Brussels bombings at the airport and at the Maelbeek/Maalbeek metro station. 2017 – A terrorist attack in London near the Houses of Parliament leaves four people dead and at least 20 injured. 2019 – The Mueller report on the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election is submitted to the United States Attorney General. 2019 – Two buses crashes in Kitampo, a town north of Ghana's capital Accra, killing at least 50 people. 2020 – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces the country's largest ever self-imposed curfew, in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19. 2020 – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announces the country's first ever self-imposed curfew, in an effort to fight the spread of COVID-19.

#Events

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kgdharan45 · 3 years

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A Life In Shadow

A Life in Shadow by Vappala Balachandran was released in 2017. It had received a lot of attention in the media. Then why this belated review? The book is the biography of a mysterious man, ACN Nambiar, who spent nearly 60 years of his life in various parts of Europe and involved in anything to do with India and its leaders visiting Europe, particularly during the Freedom Struggle. Nambiar’s close relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Netaji Subhas Bose is intriguing. He also throws new light on the ‘controversial’ Nehru-Bose relationship.

With the assembly elections in West Bengal is under way this issue is likely to become alive once again. This review is just a reminder for those who conveniently forgotten this book.

- Review by Krishnan Gangadharan, freelance journalist.

A LIFE IN SHADOW: The Secret Story of ACN Nambiar

By Vappala Balachandran

Roli Books, Rs 695

ACN Nambiar was a freedom fighter, spy and diplomat at various points in a life that was intricately connected to India’s history. He also played parts of European history. Nambiar, in fact, spent most of his active life in different parts of Europe—gathering support for the freedom struggle there, and later, as a diplomat. It could be said that this man had, more or less, single-handedly carried on his shoulders the responsibility of keeping alive the anti-colonial activities in Europe.

In A Life in Shadow, the author, Vappala Balachandran, brings together startling new material about Nambiar’s remarkable life, including how Netaji’s negotiations with the Nazi regime played out. Charismatic yet low profile Nambiar was witness to, and an active participant in, the history-making interactions between some of the prominent world leaders of the time in Europe. As the author says, ‘Nanu was no ordinary man. He was, quite truly, extraordinary.’ It is to Balachandran’s credit that this quality shines through in a book that never descends into hagiography despite the author’s obvious admiration for the subject of his research.

We learn of Nambiar’s youth, his impetuous nature and hasty decisions, qualities that seriously impact his life and work later. His personal relationship with Nehru and other members of the family, his advice and suggestions on various issues to Nehru and Indira, his interaction with the top-ranking political figures of different hues, his marriage to Suhasini Chattopadhyaya, the younger sister of Sarojini Naidu—all of these details add up brick by brick to a revealing portrait of an elusive man. But most fascinating of all is the tight-rope walk that was his relationship with Nehru and Bose.

The Nehru-Bose relationship has always remained a matter of high speculation and controversy among Indian politicians and the media. Right-wing politicians accuse Nehru of having pushed Bose out of the Congress Party, leading to the formation of his Forward Bloc. Now, with the West Bengal assembly elections under-way, the Nehru-Bose controversy is likely to get murkier. Nambiar categorically told Balachandran that those two towering personalities of the Indian political firmament maintained a close personal relationship. It is important that Nambiar, who was second-in-command to Bose and took control of his political outfit’s activities in Europe, particularly in Berlin, vouches for the cordial and affectionate relationship between Nehru and Bose. It is also evident from the letters the two exchanged, which are part of the secret papers declassified by the government in 2016. These papers, lying thus far in some chest of drawers in the Prime Minister’s Office, reveal that it was Mahatma Gandhi who was instrumental in Bose’s departure from the Congress in 1939. Nehru even wrote to Gandhi that he “should accept Subhas as president. To try and push him out seems to be an exceedingly wrong step.” But “the differences between the Mahatma and Bose could not be resolved.” He was under pressure from right-wing leaders in the party, led by Sardar Patel, who were determined to force Bose’s resignation from presidentship of the party.

Bose too reciprocated Nehru’s gestures. It is no secret that Netaji named one of the INA brigades the ‘Nehru Brigade’.

“As Nambiar saw it, Nehru and Bose differed not on the aim of independence but on the modalities. Nehru, although doubting certain assumptions and conclusions of Bose, never doubted his patriotism nor harboured any hatred. Bose on his part recognized Nehru’s importance and influence in India’s national struggle, although he felt that Nehru’s pro-British attitude could be a problem.”

Another speculation that was a favourite stick to beat Nehru with was that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Indian intelligence agencies spied on the Bose family at the instance of the prime minister. Balachandran cites this as a classic example of ‘inherited intelligence legacy.’ As a matter of fact, the surveillance on Bose was ordered by the British in 1924. The author, who was a senior intelligence officer, warns: ‘Unintended and wilful misreading of intelligence reports alike contribute to false, tendentious claims and opportunistic politicking.’

As second-in- command to Bose, Nambiar was also privy to Bose’s interactions with the Fuehrer in Berlin. Again, Nambiar was the one who negotiated with the Nazi regime after Bose left Europe for Southeast Asia in February 1943. There appears to be candour in his reminiscences, and Balachandran juxtaposes it with the mine of information that he had access to from official records and his own personal sources. However, one point remains unanswered: did Bose overestimate Hitler’s gestures of support or did the latter manipulate him. But Nambiar is categorical in his analysis of Bose and his interaction with Hitler: “Despite being totally dependent on Germany in carrying out his activities, Nambiar believed that Bose always resisted any attempts against Indian national interests. Mostly with great finesse and diplomacy but on occasions bluntly.”

According to Nambiar, “Bose was at times irritated and uneasy in Germany but maintained his composure and concentrated on his work without getting involved with the internal developments in Germany. He met Hitler and Ribbentrop but no other minister.

“The second meeting with Hitler was a formal one on the eve of his departure from Europe to South East Asia. Bose left for the Far East on 8th February 1943. At the first meeting, six months before his leaving Germany, Bose raised two issues: Germany announcing in a formal way, recognition of Indian Independence and removing the derogatory references about India in the new editions of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. Hitler replied that any announcement on India would carry sufficient weight only when German troops had sufficiently advanced in the direction of Asia. The second he dodged by saying that it would receive his ‘attention’ without giving any definite assurance.”

The question at the heart of Balachandran’s book, though, is this: What was Nambiar’s role in Indian history? The members of the first family in Independent India confided in Nambiar (ie. Nehru, Indira, Nehru’s sisters Vijayalaxmi Pandit and Krishna Hutheesing, and even Padmaja Naidu) and complained against each other directly or through letters, “but Nambiar steered clear of any controversy and remained impartial till he breathed his last”.

‘Deputy of Subhas Chandra Bose. An aide to Jawaharlal Nehru. A friend to Indira Gandhi. A left-wing contributor to The Hindu newspaper. The first Indian ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also ambassador to Sweden for a short period. And if recent reports are to be believed – a Soviet spy; lives, each more intriguing than the other, and yet, little of his story is truly known. The author who, at the instance of Indira Gandhi, was instrumental in bringing Nambiar back to India from Europe during his twilight years, relied on a wealth of sources, including confidential reports that have not been examined before. ‘With inputs and insights from Nambiar’s diaries and many interviews, the book is set to be a definitive account, not only of his life but also of the lives of Indians living in Europe between the two World Wars and how they contributed to the Indian Freedom Struggle.’

While Nambiar revealed to the author, orally and through dictated notes, how he came to be close to Bose and how he became part of the history of India’s Freedom Struggle, he reveals little about his close relationship with the Congress’ Nehru-Gandhi family. Much of this gap has been filled by the author through his meticulous research, seeking the details from several sources and corroborating them. He also had the special privilege, as a senior police officer in the Maharashtra cadre, and later as Special Secretary to the Cabinet Secretariate (R&AW) of scrutinizing the archived records of the State that provided a mine of information on Nambiar’s ex-wife Suhasini’s life in Bombay as also his life in Europe. While many aspects of his personal relationships remain a tightly guarded secret, it is clear that Nambiar was not happy about his life in New Delhi, away from Europe where he spent nearly sixty years of his life. Indira Gandhi’s assassination too was a great blow to him, one he never quite recovered from. Nambiar, Nanu to his friends and acquaintances, passed away in a hospital in New Delhi in January 1986 at the age of ninety.

The book sheds new light on an action-filled era of Indian history, and on the life of a ‘hero’ who chose to remain behind the stage, like a true spy?

#book review #nambiar #vappalabalachandran #review

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bbcbreakingnews · 3 years

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President Ram Nath Kovind to address parliament ahead of a stormy budget session: Highlights

Keeping with a long-standing tradition, the Budget session begins with the President’s address to the Parliament. President Ram Nath Kovind’s address will be followed by the Economic Survey.

NEW DELHI: This year’s budget session begins Friday with the President’s address which will be followed by the presentation of the economic survey. The Union Budget will be presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1. Both the houses will also debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address after the budget presentation. The session will be held in two parts—January 29 to February 15 and March 8 to April 8. The session will have a total of 33 sittings. It is after almost six months that the Parliament will be convened, as the winter session could not be held due to the Covid pandemic. Opposition boycotts President’s address over farm laws The crucial Budget session is set for a stormy start with as many as 18 opposition parties announcing their decision to boycott the President’s address in solidarity with the farmers agitating against the three contentious farm laws. The session is also likely to witness acrimonious scenes, with the opposition all set to corner the government on issues like recession, job losses, handling of Covid crisis, LAC stand-off with China and the WhatsApp chat leaks of Arnab Goswami. A total of 18 Opposition parties have announced to boycott the President’s address. There are over 20 opposition parties in Parliament. The parties boycotting the address are the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, National Conference, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Trinamool Congress, Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI, Indian Union Muslim League, RSP, Peoples Democratic Party, MDMK, Kerala Congress (M) and the All India United Democratic Front. The Shiromani Akali Dal and Aam Aadmi Party also separately announced their decision of boycotting the address. Speaker calls for an all-party meet To seek the cooperation of various parties for the smooth functioning of the Budget session, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla has convened a meeting of all political parties on Friday which is expected to be attended by PM Modi. With the session starting barely days after the national capital witnessed unprecedented violence on Republic Day during the farmers’ tractor parade, the issue is expected to echo in Parliament. Joshi has appealed to all the parties to reconsider their decision to boycott, saying the President is above party politics. He also claimed that the BJP has never boycotted the President’s address when it was in the opposition, and said the issues raised by the opposition parties can be raised during the debate on the motion of thanks. Sixteen opposition parties release joint statement in Rajya Sabha “The Prime Minister and the BJP government remain arrogant, adamant and undemocratic in their response. Shocked by this insensitivity of the government, the opposition political parties, reaffirming the collective demand for the repeal of the anti-farmer laws and in solidarity with the Indian farmers, have decided to boycott the President’s address…..,” a joint statement issued by 16 parties said on Thursday. The statement was released by Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad. Azad alleged that the Opposition is against the manner in which the three bills were passed in Parliament after rules and regulations were “thrown in the dustbin”. The parties have alleged that the farm bills were brought without any consultations with states and farmer unions, and lacked national consensus. Paperless budget With a view to have a paperless Budget, all the documents and the Economic Survey would be made available online soon after the authenticated copies are laid on the Table of the House, the Lok Sabha Secretariat has said. Covid protocols in place This session will be held as per Covid-19 protocols, with Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha meeting in shifts of five hours each — with the upper house meeting from 9 AM to 2 PM and the lower house in the evening from 3 PM to 8 PM. This is also the first time when the members of both the Houses will be seated in three different locations – chambers of both houses and the Central Hall. Question hour is back The Question Hour, which could not take place during the Monsoon session, has also made a comeback in this session. The Monsoon session also saw the two Houses working on Saturdays and Sundays. But this time, Parliament will not sit on weekends. Private members’ business to be part of budget session Private Members’ business, which usually takes place on Friday afternoons, will also be part of the Budget session, according to the Lok Sabha secretariat. In the previous session, the Private Members’ business was not taken up. Government to push for ordinances During the session, the government will also push to convert ordinances issued recently into laws. An ordinance has to be converted into law within 42 days of the beginning of the session, else it lapses. The ordinances issued recently include The Commission for Air Quality Management in National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas Ordinance 2020, The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 and The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Ordinance, 2021. (With inputs from PTI)

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source https://bbcbreakingnews.com/2021/01/29/president-ram-nath-kovind-to-address-parliament-ahead-of-a-stormy-budget-session-highlights/

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vivahsaubhagya · 4 years

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Introduction to Childrens Day

Children’s Day 2020 – Jawaharlal Nehru Jayanti Celebrations – Begetting children is considered as one of the greatest blessings of liveliness. It is even regarded as the principal strive for of marriage and family cartoon. While individuals regard their children as pretentious gifts who will carry tackle the lineage and intimates traditions, there is a much larger significance too, for them. Children are considered as the viewpoint for the days into the future, and it is as regards their fragile shoulders that the higher of the organization and the country rests. Childrens Day is an occasion that celebrates children. It acknowledges their value and recognizes their significance as the torchbearers for a aching and promising compound.

History of Childrens Day

Children’s Day There is a practice of earmarking a day of the year for exaltation those, who sham important roles in the lives of the people in the world. We in view of that have Mothers hours of day, Fathers Day, Siblings Day, Grandparents Day, etc. for showing worship to these associates members. Childrens Day occupies a place of self-importance together along in addition to these special occasions.

The records approximately the descent and proceed of the day is attractive. The obedience of Childrens Day as a formal occasion started from the second Sunday of June in 1856 by Dr. Charles Leonard, the priest of the church in Massachusetts, America, gone he held a prayer support dedicated for children. The daylight was first called as the Rose daylight, in addition to, as Flower Sunday and ultimately, as Childrens Day. However, it was Turkey, which first avowed the hours of daylight as a national holiday in 1929, character the date for its obedience as April 23. The daylight underwent auxiliary changes elsewhere in the world. An presidency called Womens International Democratic Federation set forth in the year 1949, The International Day for Protection of Children as Childrens Day, to be held more or less June 1 and this began to be observed by many countries previously 1950. Thus, though many nations allied in the bond of Childrens Day, vary nations started celebrating it on the order of the subject of various dates.

However, when, the United Nations recommended that Childrens Day to be observed upon November 20 and quite a few countries began behind this hours of daylight too. It was the United Kingdom, which stated in 1954 that Universal Childrens Day will be much-admired all year upon 20th of November and started observing it to freshen covenant together with world kids and to initiate doing for their welfare. Later, upon the linked date in 1959, the UN adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child and later in 1989, the Convention upon the Rights of the Child.

Childrens Day began developing gradually into a global movement as it started addressing various issues that were of situation to the kids at large, with poverty, slur, abuse, poorly-treatment, child labor, discrimination, disabilities, etc.

Significance of Childrens Day in India

Childrens Day holds a special significance in India. Here, it is the birthday of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of our country and the architect of attend to looking India that is much-admired as Childrens Day. He loved kids following all his heart and so, 14 November, his date of birth is observed as Bal Divas, the Childrens Day here.

Celebrations upon Childrens Day

Childrens morning is celebrated considering than big eagerness in India, during which various programs are held for the children, both by the Government and new organizations. Cultural and educative happenings are furthermore conducted involving children, and plays are staged, competitions are held, gifts are distributed, and picnics are organized for them. Parents too participate in this joyous occasion and enjoy themselves along behind than children.

When is Universal Childrens Day Celebrated?

In 1954, it was fixed that Universal Childrens Day would be commended vis–vis the 20th of November, each year. This as well as marks the anniversary of the date taking into account the verification and convention almost childrens rights were adopted by the UN General Assembly. Though Childrens Day is much-admired on the order of the 20th of November by most countries, some countries have adopted growth dates for the occasion. India celebrates Childrens Day upon the 14th of November, Australia celebrates the occasion upon the fourth Wednesday in October, and the United States holds a same occasion upon the first Sunday in June.

History of Universal Childrens Day

The UN General Assembly first announced the concept of Childrens Day in 1954 to bring children of all races, castes, and creeds together, and for the welfare of children across the world. UNICEF World Childrens Day celebrates the youngest minds of the world by encouraging brotherhood and fraternity and highlighting the importance of the quickly-physical of children. Over the years, Childrens Day on the subject of the world has promoted a number of causes, such as eradicating HIV/Aids, promoting the education of all children, and more. On November 20th 1989, the UN General Assembly signed a combination to guard the social, civil, economic, health, cultural, and embassy rights of children to friendship later than child-specific needs for children across borders and achievement in their best assimilation.

Jawaharlal Nehru Jayanti History and Celebrations of Children’s Day 2020

Jawaharlal Nehru (/neru, nru/;[1] Hindi: [darlal neru] (About this soundlisten); 14 November 1889 27 May 1964) was an Indian independence protester and, taking into account, the first Prime Minister of India, as expertly as a central figure in Indian politics both past and after independence. He emerged as an eminent leader of the Indian independence movement, serving India as Prime Minister from its commencement in 1947 as an independent nation, until his death in 1964. He was pen pronounce Pandit Nehru due to his roots gone than the Kashmiri Pandit community, even if Indian children knew him bigger as Chacha Nehru (Hindi: Uncle Nehru).[2][3]

The son of Swarup Rani and Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer and nationalist statesman, Nehru was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple, where he trained to be a barrister. Upon his reward to India, he enrolled at the Allahabad High Court and took an assimilation in national politics, which eventually replaced his real practice. A practicing nationalist to the front his juvenile years, he became a rising figure in Indian politics during the upheavals of the 1910s. He became the prominent leader of the left-wing factions of the Indian National Congress during the 1920s, and eventually of the entire Congress, once the tacit acclamation of his mentor, Gandhi. As Congress President in 1929, Nehru called for true independence from the British Raj and instigated the Congress’s decisive shift towards the left.

Nehru and the Congress dominated Indian politics during the 1930s as the country moved towards independence. His idea of a secular nation-impression was seemingly validated behind the Congress swept the 1937 provincial elections and formed the running in several provinces; in this area speaking the added hand, the separatist Muslim League fared much poorer. However, these achievements were very compromised in the aftermath of the Quit India Movement in 1942, which saw the British effectively destroy the Congress as a diplomatic organisation. Nehru, who had reluctantly heeded Gandhi’s call for rapid independence, for he had desired to verify the Allied engagement effort during World War II, came out of a lengthy prison term to a much altered embassy landscape. The Muslim League out cold his pass Congress associate and now opponent, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had comply to dominate Muslim politics in India. Negotiations in the midst of Congress and Muslim League for knack sharing failed and gave way to the independence and bloody partition of India in 1947.

Nehru was elected by the Congress to admit office as independent India’s first Prime Minister, although the ask of leadership had been approved as far away away plus as 1941, subsequent to Gandhi customary Nehru as his political receiver and successor. As Prime Minister, he set out to realise his vision of India. The Constitution of India was enacted in 1950, after which he embarked not quite an ambitious program of economic, social and political reforms. Chiefly, he oversaw India’s transition from a colony to a republic, though nurturing a plural, multi-party system. In foreign policy, he took a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement while projecting India as a regional hegemon in South Asia.

Children’s Day 2020 – Jawaharlal Nehru Jayanti Celebrations – Under Nehru’s leadership, the Congress emerged as a catch-all party, dominating national and keep-level politics and winning consecutive elections in 1951, 1957, and 1962. He remained ably-liked behind the people of India in bitterness of political troubles in his unmovable years and failure of leadership during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. In India, his birthday is highly praised as Bal Diwas (Children’s Day).

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#jawaharlal nehru jayanti history

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xtruss · 4 years

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Why India’s ‘Godi Media’ Spreads Hatred and Fake News

How the leading players in the Indian media, loyal to the governing BJP-RSS combine, have been openly peddling fake news, hate and bigotry targeting religious minorities, especially India’s marginalised and dispossessed Muslims and why they have been getting away with murder all these years

— April 24, 2020 | S K Husain | Clarion India

GODI (Lapdog), Bikau (Venal), Dalal (Agent) and Bharkau (Inflammatory). These are some of the labels with which a major section of India’s mainstream electronic media is identified by a majority of Indians, especially Muslims and low-caste Hindus, as well as the remaining section of the national media.

This chunk of the media, which consists of nearly a dozen 24-hour national and regional TV news channels, is infamous for biased reporting and fanning communal hatred in society. Their journalists and anchors routinely engage in spreading fake news and causing hatred towards the country’s 200 million Muslim community and Islam. They, in fact, nourish Islamophobia. As someone rightly remarked, “the Indian media is not doing journalism but waging a jihad (holy war) against Muslims. It acts like hyenas”.

On one hand, these channels demonstrate a clear bias against the country’s low-caste Hindus, the poor, and less privileged and weaker sections of society. On the other, they promote the agenda of the Hindutva forces including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its ruling political wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners in the government, as well as their leaders. They also favour the rich and powerful and promote their interests.

Prominent among these Pro-BJP/RSS news outlets are English television channels Republic TV, Times Now, India Today and CNN-News18, and Hindi TV channels Zee News, ABP News, Aaj Tak, India TV, Sudershan News, News Nation and News24 (India). All the above-mentioned titles fit these channels for one reason or the other.

The term “Godi media” was coined for these channels by Ramon Magsaysay award winner journalist Ravish Kumar of NDTV. He inherently spoke of the lap of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its lapdogs.

Besides these channels, there are many more news and at least 18 Hindu religious channels in regional languages across India that promote the agenda of the Hindutva forces to establish a Hindu Rashtra (nation) and impose Hindi as the national language all over the plural, multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-lingual country of 1.37 billion people.

Among the key reasons why these channels and their anchors so aggressively support the BJP, RSS and Modi, as well as the rich and powerful, are:

1) Absolute majority of the BJP-led NDA in Parliament and its government at the centre and in many states, and growing irrelevance and inconsequentiality of a largely obliterated opposition;

2) Hindu viewership by the BJP’s 100-million-plus primary members and their massive support for the party and government, and the cult-like following of a “monolithic” Modi;

3) A high TRP achieved because of the majority Hindu viewership. (TRP, or target rating point, is a metric used in marketing and advertising to indicate the percentage of the target audience reached by a campaign or advertisement through a communication medium);

4) Funding by big business houses, which might be chummy with a particular party which supports their growth and in return they support that party;

5) Ownership or stakes of certain BJP and RSS leaders, MPs and supporters in some of these TV channels;

6) Owners’ political connections or affiliations with the BJP and RSS;

7) A huge revenue earned from government advertisements which these channels receive in return for their pro-BJP/RSS/government policies;

8) Commercial interests of these channels as business entities rather than as social service non-governmental organisations;

9) Government advisories/directives and restrictions on news presentation;

10) Fear of being targeted by the government for failure to toe the line.

Let’s take a close look at what these Hindutva TV channels are, who owns or runs them and what are their policies.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE…Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami interviews Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Credit: narendramodi.in

English Networks

Republic TV — This news channel was co-founded and is majority-owned by a 47-year-old Assamese, Arnab Ranjan Goswami. He is also the channel’s editor and news anchor. Earlier, he was the editor-in-chief and a news anchor of Times Now and ET Now.

The channel is infamous for its brazen support for the BJP and RSS. Arnab is noted for his opinionated reporting in favour of the BJP and RSS and their Hindutva push across a wide spectrum of situations, including uncritically reproducing government narratives, avoiding criticism of BJP/RSS figures, and presenting their political opponents in a negative light. He very clearly, cleverly and shamelessly shows his bias. No one can beat him in spreading hatred and fake news.

Arnab is the son of Manoranjan Goswami, an army man who later joined the BJP, and a maternal nephew of Siddhartha Bhattacharya, who is a BJP MLA and minister in Assam’s state government.

Launched in 2017, Republic TV was partly funded by, among others, Asianet News (ARG Outlier Asianet News Private Limited), which was primarily funded by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, then an independent member of Rajya Sabha with intricate links with the BJP and vice-chairman of the NDA in Kerala.

Son of an air force officer, Chandrasekhar, however, resigned from the Asianet board after he officially joined the BJP in April 2018 and was elected as a BJP MP.

Republic TV has been accused of propagating fake news and running several news items based on the defamatory tweets posted by certain BJP leaders. It has also been convicted of breaching telecommunication regulatory and news broadcasting rules, leading to censures and subject to a high-profile defamation case by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.

The channel is described by experts as a “noisy, chaotic place where coherent debate without shouting, screaming and name-calling is impossible”. Its shows have been dubbed a “battle of babble”, judgmental, brash and hawkish.

It has even been compared to North Korean media for its extreme pro-government affinity and muzzling of dissent, and America’s Fox News which practises biased reporting in favour of the Republican Party.

Prominent among these pro-BJP/RSS news outlets are English television channels Republic TV, Times Now, India Today and CNN-News18, and Hindi TV channels Zee News, ABP News, Aaj Tak, India TV, Sudershan News, News Nation and News24 (India). The term “godi media” was coined for these channels by journalist Ravish Kumar of NDTV. He inherently spoke of the lap of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its lapdogs

Times Now – Owned and operated by The Times Group (Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited), this channel always wants to go with the winning horse. Previously generally neutral, it has turned pro-BJP since the election of the Modi government. Anchor and managing editor Navika Kumar froths and fumes each time someone is critical of the BJP, but loses her interrogating prowess whenever given the rare chance to interview Modi or Home Minister Amit Shah.

With Arnab, the channel was ultra-BJP and ultra-nationalist; after he left it, it has become a lot more ultra-nationalist and outright BJP supporter. One wonders if this change of stance is because its chairperson, Indu Jain, was awarded Padma Bhushan by the Modi government in 2016.

India Today — Owned by Living India Media Group (India Today Group), the channel was launched in 2003 as a sister channel of the Hindi news channel AajTak. It is one of the four news channels from the TV Today Network stable, the other two being Tez and Delhi AajTak. Aroon Purie is the group’s chairman.

Top journalists associated with India Today TV channel are Rajdeep Sardesai and Rahul Kanwal. While Rajdeep is anti-BJP, Rahul has tried to lean a lot to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Although India Today is a “fence-sitting” channel, in the last one or two years it has clearly tilted towards the BJP.

Rahul and his India Today team had severely lobbied against the BJP and its students wing Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP ) over the Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Millia Islamia shooting incidents. He was also quick to point fingers at BJP leader Anurag Thakur and claim that Delhi was sitting on a powder keg.

Narendra Modi with Mukesh Ambani at the convocation of Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University in 2013 when the former was chief minister of Gujarat (Photo – Website of Narendra Modi)

CNN News 18 is owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, considered close to PM Modi. The channel was originally owned by Network18 Group, which was taken over by Reliance Industries in 2014. The group owns as many as 65 channels

In an apparent punishment for his “biased” reporting in favour of AAP, Rahul was sent on a “sabbatical”. Since his return, he seems to have dropped his determination to follow in the footsteps of Rajdeep and joined the bandwagon of the godi media anchors.

CNN-News18 — This channel is owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, hence no words are required to explain its bias against Muslims and the less privileged Hindus. This channel was originally owned by Network18 Group, which was founded by businessman and investor Raghav Bahl in 2011 but was taken over by Reliance Industries in 2014.

The group owns as many as 65 channels: one national English news channel, one national Hindi news channel and 14 regional language news channels; three national and one regional business news channels, three Hindi entertainment channels, two Hindi movie channels, two youth channels, four English and Hindi music channels, four kids English and Hindi entertainment channels, four factual entertainment channels, two shopping channels, 14 regional entertainment channels, and 10 upcoming regional news and other channels.

Hindi Channels

Among the most biased and anti-Muslim and po-BJP/RSS Hindi TV news channels and their anchors are:

Zee News — This is one of the several Hindi, English and vernacular news channels owned by the Essel Group. The channel’s owner, Subhash Chandra, became a Rajya Sabha member with the BJP’s support. Hence, he definitely needs to give something back to the party by promoting its Hindutva agenda and launching an anti-Muslim tirade.

Sudhir Chaudhary is the channel’s editor-in-chief and the anchor of its prime time. He is the Hindi version of Republic TV’s Arnab as he openly supports the BJP, RSS and Modi. A few years ago, Sudhir was arrested for allegedly trying to extort one billion Indian rupees (approximately US$23 million) from the Jindal Group. Since then, some people call him Sudhir “Tihari” because he was lodged in Delhi’s maximum-security Tihar Jail in the extortion case.

Zee News has been involved in broadcasting fabricated news stories on multiple occasions. Most recently, it aired an unverified and false report on the coronavirus and linked it to Tablighi Jamaat, and later expressed regrets for running the false report.

India TV – This channel was launched by Rajat Sharma and his wife Ritu Dhawan in 2004 from a studio in FilmCity in Noida, near Delhi. Sharma is the chairman and editor-in-chief of India TV, a subsidiary of Independent News Service which was co-founded by the couple in 1997. During his college days, Sharma was a member of ABVP. He and the late finance minister Arun Jaitley were very close friends.

India TV is biased, too. It conceals plenty of news that would make headlines. It doesn’t show fake news but is selective in its presentation of news according to its political impact. When Sharma was asked a question about his channel’s integrity in the United States in view of his friendship with Jaitley, he got infuriated. An otherwise calm person, he was all irritated and critical of the person who asked it.

According to tech analyst Amol Raj Pandey, when Sharma “was ousted from his FilmCity office by Century Comm, his new office was completely funded by the BJP. India TV kept on working as BJP propaganda unit after that.” He further says the most important point to show this is — he was awarded Padma Bhushan for literature, although he never wrote a single literary piece. However, he wrote fiction for the BJP during its election campaign.

In 2015, Sharma was awarded Padma Bhushan by the BJP government for his contribution in the field of journalism. Last month, he was conferred with an honorary doctorate in of literature by the Nainital-based Kumaun University. All this explains his unstinted support for the BJP and RSS.

AajTak — Owned by Arun Purie’s India Today Group, AajTak has some of the most poisonous anchors — Anjana Om Kashyap, Rohit Sardana and Sweta Singh — known for their vitriolic attacks against Muslims and spreading communal hatred. The trio routinely indulge in Muslim-bashing, while showcasing a deferential surrender to anything the BJP does.

A former Zee News and News24 journalist, Anjana has been engaged in aggressively propagating Hindutva-centred ideologies and biased reporting in favour of the BJP across a variety of situations. She has spread fake news via her news shows on multiple occasions. A favourite of Modi, she was one of the few reporters who were allowed an interview by Modi in the run-up to the 2019 general election. Rohit Sardana tops the list of the worst journalists sponsored by the right wing.

ABP News — Owned by Bengali journalist Aveek Sarkar of the pro-BJP ABP Group, this channel is the reincarnation of Star News. Earlier, ABP News used to be neutral, but it turned pro-BJP a couple of years ago. This came after the Modi government objected to criticism of the BJP by some ABP News journalists including Punya Prasoon Vajpyee and Abhisar Sharma in their Master Stroke show. After the channel took action against these journalists, Rubika Liyaquat became the commander-in-chief of its news anchors. A former Zee New anchor, Rubika joined ABP News in 2018. A Muslim, she is disliked by many for her angry rhetoric against Muslim leaders called by the channel for debates on TV.

Sudarshan News — This channel disseminates anti-Muslim content and manufactures fake news with communal overtones, earning it tiltles such as “bigot” and “dangerous”.

Its chairman, Suresh Chavhanke, was a long-term RSS volunteer and associated with ABVP. He asserts practicing ideology-driven journalism and prefers that the news programmes over his channel be viewed as opinionated campaigns.

In April 2017, he was arrested for inciting communal hatred through multiple episodes of a flagship programme. Recently, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren ordered state police to take action against Chavhanke for his communal hate speeches.

News Nation — Owned by News Nation Network Pvt Ltd, this channel’s consulting editor Deepak Chaurasia has an inclination towards the BJP and is known as a puppet of Modi. Portuguese politician and political scientist Bruno Macaes compared Chaurasia’s journalism to Fox News, which has often been criticised for being extremely vocal in its support of the Republicans and President Donald Trump.

India 24 (India) — Owned by B.A.G. Films and Media Limited, this channel is promoted by Anuradha Prasad, sister of BJP minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, along with her husband, Congress politician Rajeev Shukla. Its anchor Amish Devgan has modelled himself on Republic TV’s Arnab and routinely indulges in Muslim-bashing.

All the above channels are Pro-BJP because they need government advertisments for revenue to operate. And most of their anchors and journalists are enamoured by Modi’s “superman image ” created by his online fans. As they aren’t bold enough to go against this fan club fearing trolling and reprisals, they find it easy to ride with the wind.

In this media environment, can Muslims expect to be heard and their case to be pleaded by these biased media houses? They have to either put up with this or mull over focusing on creating their own media giants. There’s no dearth of financial and other resources, technical expertise and journalistic talent in the community. All that is needed are sincerity, will and resolve to start own TV news channels.

— The writer is a senior journalist based in Singapore. He can be reached at [email protected].

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