Political Scientists From France

"Some commentators have drawn attention to the divergent courses of the fertility rates in the two parts of Bengal. In Indian West Bengal, which is three quarters Hindu, the fertility rate is 2.07, below the re- placement level. The contrast with Muslim Bangladesh, where the transition has been blocked, is striking. A shared language should have led to a convergence through cultural contagion, but a pietistic Islam seems to have frozen changes in patterns of thought in Bangladesh and, as a repercussion, provoked a halt to the transition. But a consideration of educational patterns leads to a rejection of the hypothesis of a direct effect of the religious variable on fertility."

"The Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end."

"The Pakistani fertility rate is slowly declining: In 1988 it was at 5.56 children, and since then it has lost only 0.9 percent annually. With 4.6 children in 2005, 6 the Pakistani fertility rate, the highest in this group, is far above that of the Arab world, except for Yemen. One cannot fail to be impressed by the alignment of the fertility of the Muslims of northern India with that of Pakistan: In 1998 –1999, it was 4.8 in Uttar Pradesh, 4.9 in Rajasthan, and 4 in Bihar. One might suggest a slight boost from the combined effect of minority status and the fact that Muslims in these states belong to the least privileged strata in social and educational terms. The minority effect must play the leading role, because elsewhere in India, in states where Muslims enjoy higher than average educational status, in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, they also have a higher fertility rate than their Hindu neighbors."

"In 1924 the Dalits of Vaikham in the state of Travancore launched a satyagraha to gain access to a local temple, or at least to use the road adjacent to the temple. Gandhi supported this mobilisation and went to Vaikham, but his dialogue with the local priests did not bear fruit. The latter rejected all his compromise proposals and their arguments prompted him to re-examine his position about Untouchability . . . He lost interest in the Vaikham movement and in various public meetings later declared himself to be a sanatanist, that is a follower of the Sanatana Dharma, the ‘eternal religion’ according to the orthodox Hindus."

"For Phule, Jesus Christ epitomises equality and fraternity. He also regards him as the spokesman for the poor. . . . Through the vernacularisation of Christian values and symbols, Phule endowed people with a new, positive identity."

"Jobless plebeians joined Bajrang Dal and other similar lumpen organisations and started to get a sense of identity by fighting for the cow."

"The Hindutva of Savarkar was conceived primarily as an ethnic community possessing a territory and sharing the same racial and cultural characteristics, three attributes which stemmed from the mythical reconstruction of the Vedic Golden Age."

"During that period, the French scholar Christophe Jafferlot was instrumental in providing significant amounts of atrocity literature about the 2002 Gujarat riots, which then flooded the Western media."

"The French researcher Christophe Jaffrelot, who is one of those experts who have uncritically swallowed quite a bit of secularist lore about the Hindu movement from their Indian guides, is very popular in Indian secularist circles. [...] Christophe Jaffrelot is also one of several French India-watchers who have exerted pressure on the French daily Le Figaro to fire its (allegedly pro-Hindu) India correspondent Francois Gautier.. This stamps him a fine member of the select club of opinion hegemons who prefer to enforce their hegemony by silencing dissidents rather than facing them in debate."

"Jaffrelot consistently portrays Hinduism and Hindu social leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, as caste-biased. Gandhi is portrayed as someone who compromised himself in his fight against untouchability and backtracked to an orthodox Hindu identity. .... Jaffrelot measures the positive qualities of any social reformer by how much he distanced himself from Hindu society. ...While Jaffrelot resorts to convoluted ways to invent racism in the Hindu polity, he develops a blind eye to the racism prevalent in the forging of Dravidian identity.. He eulogizes E.V. Ramasami as an ‘egalitarian in a western individualist vein’. Jaffrelot completely glosses over the fact that Kudi Arasu , the official journal of Ramasami's movement, praises Hitler explicitly and draws parallels between Jews and Brahmins.... He praises the racist Afro-Dravidianism of Periyar as ‘an explicitly ethnic conception of the low castes’ identity'. He compares their situation to that of the blacks in South Africa."

"In other words, Indian Muslims did not aim to blend into an Indian nation, but to fight within the Indian context alongside other communities to achieve the right to live freely, that is, following the rules of their religion and law (the sharia). Peter Hardy concluded from this, “In 1920–2 Abdul Kalam Azad and the Jamiyat were advocating the mental partition of India”."

"Spokesmen for the Muslim elite invited the British to weigh quantitative criteria against qualitative aspects that could only argue in favour of the heirs to the Mughal Empire. This rhetoric in defence of Muslims was coupled with a sort of thinly veiled threat: not only were the Muslims superior in quality and heirs to a rich history, but they also wielded an influence that they could use against the British if necessary."

"Violence broke out on 27 February in Godhra, a district headquarters in eastern Gujarat. Fifty-seven Hindus were killed, including 25 women and 14 children, who were burned alive aboard the Sabarmati Express... Those who were originally from Gujarat and were returning home aboard the Sabarmati Express had gathered together in a few coaches. They chanted Hindu nationalist songs and slogans throughout the entire voyage, all the while harassing Muslim passengers. One family was even made to get off the train for refusing to utter the kar sevaks' war cry: “Jai Shri Ram!” (Glory to Lord Ram!). More abuse occurred at the stop in Godhra: a Muslim shopkeeper was also ordered to shout “Jai Shri Ram!” He refused, and was assaulted until the kar sevaks turned on a Muslim woman with her two daughters. One of them was forced to board the train before it started going again... The anti-Hindu riot was thus a reaction to provocation from Hindu nationalist activists. The aftermath of the events clearly showed that the violence reached unprecedented proportions precisely because of the political strategy these Hindu nationalists employ."

"What strikes me as particularly undeniable is that the absence of the feeling of belonging to a class is characteristic of children of the bourgeoisie. People in a dominant class position do not notice that they are positioned, situated, within a specific world (just as someone who is white isn’t necessarily aware of being so, or someone heterosexual). Read in this light, Aron’s remark can be seen for what it is, the naive confession offered by a person of privilege who imagines he is writing sociology when all he is doing is describing his own social status. I only met him once in my life, and immediately felt a strong aversion towards him. The very moment I set eyes on him, I loathed his ingratiating smile, his soothing voice, his way of demonstrating how reasonable and rational he was, everything about him that displayed his bourgeois ethos of decorum and propriety, of ideological moderation. (In reality, his writings are filled with a violence that those at whom it is directed would not be able to avoid feeling were they ever to come across it. It suffices to read—but there are other choices too—the pages he wrote about the working-class strikes in the 1950s. People have praised his lucidity because he was anticommunist while others still blindly supported the Soviet Union. But this is wrong! He was anticommunist because of his hatred of the working class, and he set himself up as the political and ideological defender of the bourgeois establishment, defending against anything having to do with the aspirations or the political activities of the working class. Basically, his pen was for hire: he was a soldier in the service of those in power helping them to maintain their power. Sartre was right a thousand times over to insult him in May 1968. Aron had more than earned it. Let us salute the greatness of Sartre for daring to break with the conventions of polite academic “discussion”—which always works in favor of “orthodoxy,” and its reliance on “common sense” and what seems “self-evident” in its opposition to heterodoxy and to critical thought. Sartre did this at a moment when it had become important to “insult those who are the real insulters,” to recall a helpful reminder Genet offers us, a happy turn of phrase we should always be ready to take up as our motto.)"

"Like the Owl of Minerva, Aron brought wisdom to the French intellectual community in its twilight years; but the belated appreciation of his work and his long isolation have obscured the heroic scale of his contribution to French public life. Aron was no moralist. But his whole career constituted a bet on Reason against History, and to the extent that he has won he will in time be recognized as the greatest intellectual dissenter of his age and the man who laid the foundations for a fresh departure in French public debate."

"In short, Raymond Aron was a perfect bourgeois. I use the term invented by liberal democracy's critics and enemies to describe the kind of man typical of it. He was reasonable, immune to the great romantic longings in the light of which the present is denigrated and sensible calculation about the future is made to appear small-minded. Such a man is a reflective rather than a passionate patriot, a good husband and father whose attachment to the smaller community attaches him more securely to the larger one, and, above all, he believes in the liberating power of education."

"The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere."

"The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics."

"The optimism of the Left was created and maintained by a strong feeling: admiration for the power of reason, certainty that the application of science to industry would revolu­tionise the order of human society and the condition of its individual members. The ancestral aspiration towards human brotherhood was united with faith in practical science in order to inspire either nationalism or socialism or both."