Pankaj Mishra writes in The Guardian, about Fareed Zakaria, the latest
intellectual empty suit of the talking heads circuit, his latest book,
and the vision of India as a neo-liberal capitalist success:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/07/terrorism.islam
In the past five years bomb attacks claimed by Islamist groups have
killed hundreds across the Indian cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur,
Varanasi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. An Indian Muslim was
even involved in the failed assault on Glasgow airport in July last
year. Yet George Bush reportedly introduced Manmohan Singh to his
wife, Laura, as "the prime minister of India, a democracy which does
not have a single al-Qaida member in a population of 150 million
Muslims".
To be fair to Bush, he was only repeating a cliche deployed by
Indian politicians and American pundits such as Thomas Friedman to
promote India as a squeaky-clean ally of the United States. However,
Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-born Muslim editor of Newsweek
International, ought to know better. In his new book, The Post-
American World, he describes India as a "powerful package" and
claims it has been "peaceful, stable, and prosperous" since 1997 - a
decade in which India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war, tens
of thousands of Indian farmers took their own lives, Maoist
insurgencies erupted across large parts of the country, and Hindu
nationalists in Gujarat murdered more than 2,000 Muslims.
Apparently, no inconvenient truths are allowed to mar what Foreign
Affairs, the foreign policy journal of America's elite, has declared
a "roaring capitalist success story". Add Bollywood's singing and
dancing stars, beauty queens and Booker prize-winning writers to the
Tatas, the Mittals and the IT tycoons, and the picture of Indian
confidence, vigour and felicity is complete.
The passive consumer of this image, already puzzled by recurring
reports of explosions in Indian cities, may be startled to learn
from the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) in Washington that
the death toll from terrorist attacks in India between January 2004
and March 2007 was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq. (In the same
period, 1,000 died as a result of such attacks in Pakistan, the
"most dangerous place on earth" according to the Economist, Newsweek
and other vendors of geopolitical insight.)
To put it in plain language - which the NCTC is unlikely to use -
India is host to some of the fiercest conflicts in the world. Since
1989 more than 80,000 have died in insurgencies in Kashmir and the
northeastern states.
<...>
The Indian elite's obsession with the "foreign hand" obscures the
fact that the roots of some of the violence lie in the previous two
decades of traumatic political and economic change, particularly the
rise of Hindu nationalism, and the related growth of ruthlessness
towards those left behind by India's expanding economy.
In 2006 a commission appointed by the government revealed that
Muslims in India are worse educated and less likely to find
employment than low-caste Hindus. Muslim isolation and despair is
compounded by what B Raman, a hawkish security analyst, was moved
after the most recent attacks to describe as the "inherent
unfairness of the Indian criminal justice system".
To take one example, the names of the politicians, businessmen,
officials and policemen who colluded in the anti-Muslim pogrom in
Gujarat in 2002 are widely known. Some of them were caught on video,
in a sting carried out last year by the weekly magazine Tehelka,
proudly recalling how they murdered and raped Muslims. But, as
Amnesty International pointed out in a recent report, justice
continues to evade most victims and survivors of the violence. Tens
of thousands still languish in refugee camps, too afraid to return
to their homes.
<...>
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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