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*On the "Kashmir" thread, we have debated that issue. In reality, though, what's really under debate is the rise of Hindu nationalism - "Hindutva" - in India. At its roots, Hindutva is little different from Zionism or any other religious fundamentalist nationalism. I find it shocking that somebody who evidently considers himself to be a Marxist would lend any support for this extremely dangerous tendency towards ethnic, religious, division that is developing around the world - and that is what whitewashing what Modi is doing in Kashmir amounts to. Here is an article from Foreign Affairs on the rise of Hindu nationalism and how Congress Party actually helped precipitate it:* India was established in 1947 as a pluralist nation, home to people of many religions, sects, and ethnicities. The country’s constitution provides no special claim over the state or its territory to any one of them—including the Hindus, who make up roughly 80 percent of the population. Moreover, Hindus themselves are hardly a monolith: they differ in the languages they speak, the beliefs they hold, the deities they worship, and the rituals and customs that shape their lives. As a result, Hindus have historically not thought of themselves as a single community or nation. But to judge from the results of the election <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2019-05-06/battle-indias-soul>, the pluralist idea of India is receding into the past. <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2018-11-23/triumph-hindu-majoritarianism> At the polls, 44 percent of Hindus—a larger proportion than ever before—voted for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which seeks to transform India into a Hindu nation. According to public opinion surveys conducted between 2016 and 2018 by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Azim Premji University, a majority of Hindus, including those who vote for other parties, now profess support for some of the BJP’s most important Hindu nationalist positions. This was also the first Indian election in which no major political party challenged the BJP’s position that India’s Hindu majority constitutes a single community that can rightfully claim ownership of the nation. Today, the basic struggle in Indian politics is not over whether Hindus and Hinduism should enjoy privileged status but over the precise legal and constitutional forms that privilege will take.... The transformation of India into a Hindu nation, however, was set in motion not by the BJP but by the other great force in Indian politics, the Congress party. That process began in 1969, with a nearly forgotten event in India’s political history: a major split in the Congress party that pushed the present-day Congress toward a Hindu majoritarian position and paved the way for the eventual success of BJP’s more extreme ideology five decades later. Nehru died in office in 1964, and, after two short-lived prime ministers, Indira Gandhi took power in 1966. She quickly found herself at odds with the party’s powerful regional bosses, known as the Syndicate, after she tried to wrest control over the party’s economic policy, political appointments, and choice of candidates to stand for elections. As a result of this conflict, Congress split into two blocs in 1969. The bloc led by Indira Gandhi evolved into the present-day Congress party, while the one controlled by the Syndicate disintegrated over time. The split destroyed the organization that had linked the party leadership to the grassroots. It left Gandhi with two plausible routes to political survival: she could find a galvanizing popular issue in order to forge such links temporarily, or she could avoid elections altogether. She tried both. In the parliamentary election of 1971, the first after the split, she won by campaigning on a populist antipoverty platform. Then, in 1975, she postponed elections by declaring a national emergency. After the emergency ended, in 1977, voters punished her party with a resounding defeat in the next parliamentary poll. So, ahead of the next elections, Gandhi returned to the tactic of finding a galvanizing issue. Fatefully, she found one in the politics of religion. At first, she tried to play all sides of the country’s religious divide. In the early 1980s, for example, she extended covert support to the militant Sikh preacher J. S. Bhindranwale, who called for an independent Sikh nation and who had been implicated in violence against Hindus in Punjab. By supporting Bhindranwale, Gandhi sought to weaken her main opposition in the populous state of Punjab, the Sikh-led Akali Dal party, as well as prop up her own power base at the expense of other regional leaders within the Punjab Congress. In 1984, she reversed herself and sent the Indian army into the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, to root out Bhindranwale and his militant supporters, who had set up base there. Gandhi hoped that the siege, codenamed Operation Blue Star, would send Hindus a strong signal ahead of a parliamentary election that her government was capable of protecting them as well as safeguarding India’s territorial integrity. The army succeeded in ousting and killing Bhindrandwale, but the move antagonized many of India’s Sikhs who did not support Bhindranwale or his ideology but viewed the army’s entry into the Golden Temple as sacrilege. Gandhi played for Hindu favor in Muslim-majority Kashmir, as well. In 1983, she aligned herself with the Hindu minority there during regional elections. But the Congress party lost, and a popular Muslim leader, Farooq Abdullah, was elected chief minister of Kashmir. A year later, Gandhi dismissed Abdullah and his elected government, to the fury of much of the state’s Muslim population. In the end, such machinations would be Gandhi’s undoing. In October 1984, two of her Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in retribution for Operation Blue Star. Hindu mobs retaliated by attacking thousands of Sikhs. Congress was complicit in the anti-Sikh violence: some of the party’s leaders even participated in it. When Gandhi’s son Rajiv took over as prime minister, he excused the violence by saying, “When a big tree falls, the ground will shake.” Read entire article here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2019-09-11/roots-hindu-nationalisms-triumph-india -- *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black Jacobins" by C. L. R. James Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
