I wonder how exactly one decides who the 'invader' is, because if you go back far enough in time it would seem that almost everyone on earth today is an invader in some way or the other. For example, the RSS today feels that the Muslims are invaders in Assam but this is simply a matter of temporal perspective. Just six hundred years ago someone living in Kamrupa would have referred to the Ahoms as invaders. Indeed, I would have to regard myself as an invader because not belonging to the Bodo-Karbi group I cannot regard myself as truly 'Assamese'. (That is, assuming that people belonging to the Bodo-Karbi group are the 'original inhabitants' of 'Assam'. How true this claim is not the point here : I simply accept this for the moment.)

In other words, it is simply one of those interesting historical *accidents* that the Ahoms invaded 'Assam' before the Mughals did. If it had been the other way round would the RSS perhaps have been fighting today not against the Muslims but against the Ahoms? (And would it have claimed in that case that we should break down the Rang-Ghar which symbolises Ahom supremacy, ban people from speaking Tai which stands for a foreign language and re-write Assamese history which has been distorted by the writers of the 'buranjis'?)

Indeed, if one were to take all of this in a wider context one simply has nothing else to do but to throw up one's hands in the air in despair. Shall the American Indians demand the expulsion of the White population from the USA? Or the South Americans of all people of direct European descent? Or the native Australians of all those of British descent?

In other words, if one were to apply the RSS principle consistently (the principle that whoever comes later in time is the 'invader'), one would come to the very brink of turning the world into a veritable war-zone.

Secondly, I have also been thinking for some years now what the reason could be behind the support given by Assamese (and more generally, Indian) ex-patriates living in the UK/USA to the RSS-BJP combine. I have a suspicion (how founded or unfounded is for you to say) that they see in the false sense of anxiety created by the RSS a reflection of their own anxiety of living in a Latin-Hispanic-Black-White multicultural society. That is, now as the next generation grows up in such an environment they are afraid that their own children shall lose their distinctive 'Assamese-ness', and hence the parallel RSS claim that Indians shall lose their 'Indian-ness' has a strong appealing force to them. Consequently, the fear that their own children shall mess up the 'Assamese' gene-pool through inter-racial-inter-religious relationships brings them into an unholy nexus with the RSS with its hyperbole of a similar mix-up back at home.

Now of course I wish to emphasise that much of this is largely conjecture : what I would really like to know is what exactly turns UK/USA ex-patriates, who of all people should have had sufficient experience by now of living in a multi-cultural White-Hispanic-Black society, into supporters of a group that challenges this very notion of multi-culturalism. I find this stance a very contradictory one : far away from home they demand equal rights with the Hispanic, Black and White sections of the population from a foreign government, but when it comes to voting back at home they support precisely a group that is hell-bent on denying such rights to a substantial proportion of the population.

Nor is it any use pointing to the case of 'Church-State' relations in the UK. It is indeed the case that the UK is officially a Christian state, but has Tony Blair ever declared that British Hindus pick up a middle Christian name?

In response to all of this it might be said that the RSS is not out to deny constitutional-electoral rights to the Muslims. However, there is at least one right that such ex-patriates would demand for themselves from the UK/USA government : the right to live without any threat, any interference, or any intimidation from other sections of the population (such as White supremacists, Black Islam-ists, right-wing Pentecostalists, Mormon evangelists) : and this is precisely the right that the RSS-BJP is flagrantly denying to the Muslims.

Therefore, such ex-patriates are taking an extremely self-deceiving stance when they demand (and enjoy) such a right far away at home but safe from the heat and the dust of the ground realities at home they send their support to a group that denies to others precisely that right that they cherish so much sitting smugly in UK/USA (and this is also precisely that right that they have seen an entire Civil Rights generation fight and die for).

Ankur

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