Why Narendra Modi Is
Afraid Of Prof. Ashish Nandy ?
Prof. Ashish Nandy, India's leading intellectual acknowledged as the
founding fathers of postcolonial studies has recently got a new
'identity'. According to the Gujarat Police he is now an accused in a
criminal case supposedly for 'promoting enmity between different groups
on grounds of religion, race, place of birth and language.' Definitely
neither Prof Nandy nor many of his admirers would have ever imagined in
their wildest dreams that a day would arrive when he will face
prosecution for his writings. But as they rightly say it, in Gujarat
things happen bit differently.
According to media reports the Ahmedabad police have admitted a
petition filed by an advocate belonging to National Council for Civil
Liberties over Professor Nandy's leader page article in the Times of
India ( 8 th January) 'Blame The Middle Class'. It need be added that
this is the same council which had filed a few petitions against social
activist and leader of Naramda Bachao Aandolan Medha Patekar on some
frivolous charges which were later dismissed by the court.
To put it straight, the particular article had tried to analyse the
election results for the Gujarat assembly held in December 2007 which
had once again given a mandate to Mr Narendra Modi. The article in
question revolved around basically three points : One, it had tried to
delineate the plight of the Muslims who were condemned to live a second
class existence in the post 2002 phase. It had clearly stated that
Gujarati Muslims too are "adjusting" to their new station. Denied
justice and proper compensation, and as second-class citizens in their
home state, they have to depend on voluntary efforts and donor
agencies. The state's refusal to provide relief has been partly met by
voluntary groups having fundamentalist sympathies. They supply aid but
insist that the beneficiaries give up Gujarati and take to Urdu, adopt
veil, and send their children to madrassas.
Secondly, apart from the plight of Muslims it had also explained the
situation in which the political formations who espouse the cause of
secularism find themselves today. And he was unsparing in his criticism
of these formations/individuals.For him
The secularist dogma of many fighting the sangh
parivar has not helped matters. Even those who have benefited from
secular lawyers and activists relate to secular ideologies
instrumentally. They neither understand them nor respect them. The
victims still derive solace from their religions and, when under
attack, they cling more passionately to faith. Indeed, shallow
ideologies of secularism have simultaneously broken the back of
Gandhism and discouraged the emergence of figures like Ali Shariatis,
Desmond Tutus and the Dalai Lama - persons who can give suffering a new
voice audible to the poor and the powerless and make a creative
intervention possible from within worldviews accessible to the people.
Of course the focus of its attention was on the 'state's urbane middle
class' which has remained 'mired in its inane versions of communalism
and parochialism'.
The article had concluded with the observation that :
Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The
class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect
and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali
babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times
have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt
blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance
and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of
the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media
and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And
they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a
safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist,
bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.
While one may agree to differ with Professor Nandy's observations on
various counts, still any concerned reader can see that it did not
engage itself in any rhetoric and tried to delineate the challenges
which lie ahead. Question naturally arises why did the state government
felt pertrubed over this article and decided to give a green signal to
its police department to admit the said petition by the council and
file a a criminal case against him ?
At a general level one can say that targetting of individuals and
stigmatising them in very many ways is part of the modus operandi of
the Hindutva brigade. And this particular case does not seem to be
different. In fact it is a politics that seeks to silence critique, and
battles for a notion of the past that is homogeneously Hindu.
Last six year history of Gujarat is replete with many such examples
where they tried to silence all those voices who did not fall in line
with their agenda based on hate and exclusion. We have before us the
examples of the dansescue Sarabhai or for that matter social activist
Nafisa Ali or scholar-activist G.N. Devy who were targeted on different
occasions.
In Prof Nandy's case perhaps the powers that be did not like the manner
in which he tried to delineate the future prognosis of a movement like
RSS.
Events like the desecration of Wali Gujarati's grave have pushed
one of India's culturally richest, most diverse, vernacular Islamic
traditions to the wall. Future generations will as gratefully
acknowledge the sangh parivar's contribution to the growth of radical
Islam in India as this generation remembers with gratitude the handsome
contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts to Sikh militancy.
The criminal case filed against Prof Ashish Nandy reminds one of the
villification campaigns which were organised during BJP led regime at
centre.In fact with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) assumption of
power at the centre in 1998 and its ongoing attempts to remake the
educational curriculum in its own chauvinistic image gaining momentum,
intellectuals and academic positions at odds with the Sangh Parivar's
view of history came under attack under various pretexts. The BJP has
pursued a concerted effort to malign and delegitimise scholars and
intellectuals at odds with its view of India's past. After the stalling
of the Indian Council of Historical Research-sponsored 'Towards
Freedom' project edited by professors Sumit Sarkar of University of
Delhi (DU) and KN Panikkar of JNU, the National Council of Educational
Research and Training (NCERT) went all-out to weed out the influence
of, in the words of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief KS Sudarshan,
"anti-Hindu Euro-Indians" from the curriculum. In 2001, when the moves
by NCERT were underway to delete passages from school textbooks that
allegedly 'hurt' the sentiments of this religious sect or the other, a
delegation of Arya Samajis met Murli Manohar Joshi, the human resource
development minister, and demanded that Romila Thapar, the legendary
historian along with historians RS Sharma of DU and Arjun Dev of NCERT,
be arrested. Not to be outdone, Joshi had also reiterated time and
again his pet thesis that 'academic terrorists' are more dangerous than
armed ones.
Source
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-is-prof-ashis-nandy-under-attack-in.html
