Politics Of India

"Many factors prevented Nehruism from becoming a fully effective doctrine of action in Nehru's lifetime. Policy-making was so personalised that the meaning of policies was not easily radiated and not properly explained."

"Herein came Nehruism. It brought the knowledge of other lands, especially of the Soviet land, to the door of the nationalist and the common man. The kernel of Nehruism was faith in progress and faith in people. It put forth, despite its liberal language, the central thesis of Marxism and of the Soviet Union that capitalism, imperialism, fascism and militarism were decaying and organically connected phenomena and that the future belonged to the other organically connected phenomena representing the progressive forces of the world. These progressive forces included socialism, colonial nationalism and the Soviet Union. This world picture restored confidence to the nationalist camp."

"The attempts to emphasize communalism in the nationalist movement were countered by Gandhi and Nehru, each of whom in different ways sought to strengthen a comprehensive cultural policy. Gandhi pursued an inclusive strategy by seeking to incorporate religious symbol- ism relevant to Islam in his public rituals,Islamic linguistic forms in his definition of a national language, and Muslim political interests in his coalitions.Nehru's resolute rationalism and commitment to a "scientific temper"in effect denied the relevance of religion to a national political identity.The secular cultural policy which he fashioned for the Indian National Congress became the dominant political paradigm after independence."

"I believe in our country, Bengal has been ruined, Kolkata was once leading the economic growth, but is ruined by politics... Women are facing atrocities in the TMC rule. The events of Sandeshkhali have jolted the nation. People have the right to vote, and they will vent their anger in the process. So, the outburst is natural. You have seen the piles of banknotes seized. Have you ever seen such big stashes of money getting caught earlier? In recent years, you have seen stashes of Rs 50 crore, Rs 300 crore, Rs 250 crore, Rs 200 crore. The nation is shocked. No matter how much you try to hide it, the nation now understands that these people are looters."

"When 21-year-old Balram Majhi was killed in Purba Bardhman, Islamist goons had warned the family, "Will end your Hindutva if you go to police." Similar mobs killed Haradhan Roy in Coochbehar and Haran Adhikari in South 24 Pargana because of their Hindu identity. There are hundreds of such stories when the Muslim mobs attacked Hindu villages and localities in the aftermath of May 2nd. They targeted Hindu women and girls and abused Hindus for standing with the BJP. Still there are people who say, "Violence is a part of Bengal politics, don't make it Hindu-Muslim." If it is actually Hindu-Muslim on ground then what should we do, lie?"

"The manner in which Debabrata Maity was killed in Nandigram by a mob comprising of the son-in-law of Mamata Banerjee's election agent (Sheikh Sufian) speaks volumes about the kind of free hand Islamists enjoy in the state. Revelations about how the CM's loss was avenged by Muslims in Nandigram are indeed horrifying. It was heartrending to hear that in Uttar Dinajpur, cow slaughter on Eid has been permitted by the state government itself. And when Mithun Ghosh opposed the practice, he was killed post-election for being a 'staunch Hindu'."

"People might question this as this is from a BJP office-bearer. For such people, we bring this on record that this account has been corroborated by independent sources but since everyone else chose to remain anonymous, we have quoted a BJP office-bearer. After all, they have not come from Israel and they are also a part of this democracy as anyone else."

"District BJP President of Uttar Dinajpur told us something that is frightening. "Muslim voters are increasing in the ratio of 2:3 i.e. every three new Muslim voters get added in place of two Hindu voters. Infiltration is still there in Goalpokher, Karandighi and Chopra Block, and this is a cause for concern... In 95 per cent of the cases of violence, Muslims are directly and indirectly involved.""

"The phenomenon of silent persecution of Hindus in these areas has been hidden from the rest of the country. In fact, the strategy of occupying villages, compelling Hindus to move to district headquarters and Murshidabad, is a perfect example of this. The level of fear in the Hindus living in these areas is such that they could hardly gather the courage to make formal complaints and approach the institutions for action. Most of them have silently paid the 'settlement amounts' as a penalty for supporting and voting BJP to regularise their normal life. This is said but that's the truth!"

"From Parganas to Nadia and from there to Malda, Murshidabad and Dinajpur, we witnessed a different kind of 'Muslim minority'. If you get to travel in this area of West Bengal, you will find that what cabinet minister Firhad Hakim said about his Kolkata port constituency is not a local phenomenon, it's all over Bengal."

"What happened in Bengal in the aftermath of May 2nd is a clear signal as to where things are going in the state. There can be an argument over the scale at which this violence was executed, but the sheer Hindu hatred that we came across in the crimes committed on religious lines, especially rapes of Hindu women, indicates that the situation is more or less similar to pre-partition era."

"Murshidabad is a ticking time bomb. In Sundarbans, Hindus are now worshipping the Islamic folk deity Bonbibi, and Tablighi Jamaat is camping unchecked in sensitive regions."

"West Bengal is on the brink of becoming West Bangladesh. If we remain silent today, tomorrow’s Bengal may be unrecognizable.”"

"This is not merely a political contest. It is a struggle for identity, survival, and existence. Bengali Hindus are facing an existential crisis. The BJP is the only force standing in defence of Bengali Hindus’ existence and Bengal. We won’t allow the state to be turned into an Islamic Republic or West Bangladesh."

"In what seemed like perfect cue, late last evening we saw a report which has been amplified by a few sections with only one aim — to do whatever is possible and humiliate India at the world stage, peddle the same old narratives about our nation and derail India’s development trajectory."

"If more than 45 nations are using Pegasus, like NSO has said, why is only India being targeted? The NSO, which is the manufacturer of Pegasus, has clearly said that its clients are mostly Western nations. So why is India being targetted in this matter? What is the story behind this? What is the twist in the tale?"

"The PM has assaulted democratic institutions by using the weapons grade spyware against them. For me, this is not a matter of privacy, it is an anti-national act, treason. The weapon was used against me, SC, other leaders, journalists, activists. Then why should we not debate the issue in Parliament? What is the reason the discussion is not happening. This is the question."

"Pegasus is a non issue. The common man does not even know what it is. The Opposition has not allowed Parliament to run last week and we hope, they understand now."

"Mr Modi, don't mind. I am not attacking you personally. But you and may be the Home Minister -- you are deploying agencies against opposition leaders. You are misusing the agencies."

"The Hindus are so divided and so foolishly selfish that their majority does not count in actual politics. The atmosphere can clear only after a thunderstorm— after showers of blood."

"The political atmosphere in Bengal has been vitiated. Every death is unfortunate. But no one talks about the 140 plus BJP workers killed in Bengal. Not a day goes when our workers are not attacked. I am a star in Bengali films. But as a BJP worker, I fear for my life. I overcome that fear every day and step out to meet people as I want to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Sonar Bangla... They [artists and intellectuals] will not have to live in fear as they do currently under Mamata Banerjee’s reign."

"We, the Indians, as Guru of the Nations: yes, I believe in that. We can be—or once more become— the hope of mankind. But that requires efforts and courage to be ourselves culturally. Unfortunately, we live in an age of political dwarfs, political managers without vision or courage. But their time is running out."

"When I heard Aung San Suu Kyi's address to both houses of Britian's Parliament in Westminster hall last week, what impressed me was the clarity with which she spelt out her vision for her country. But, throughout her speech, something kept bothering me and by the time she finished, I discovered what it was. What bothered me was that I could not think of a single Indian leader who could make such a speech. The Indian political landscape today has become a desert in which only the stunted progeny of stunted political leaders bloom. We need our political parties to throw up real leaders and we need a political discourse in which real political problems are discussed."

"The BJP seeks to link up internationally with the democratic, non-racist Right. [...] the invention of a category of Third World mass identiarianism would be more pertinent than the never-ending references to fascism. [...] The communists ... reject 'Congress dictatorship' but would welcome a strong state which would crush the communalists, esp the Hindu ones... In the present configuration, the drift to authoritarianism can only come from the Congress apparatus."

"Historical powerful forces have attempted to restrict democracy to a set of strictly procedural routines for governance and legislation, but once in motion, democratic procedures have over time tended to remold the very form in which a society represents and imagines itself, its institutions and its history. It is my contention that the history of Indian democracy may be fruitfully interpreted in these terms as a gradual and circumscribed questioning of hierarchies and authority, spreading from the political field to other realms in society. As the political field acquired even more prominence due to the weight of the in all spheres of society in the 1970s, a new marked by "" emerged. This gave rise to a new construction of politics as an "amoral vocation," a construction that reflected a widespread discomfort with the proliferating populist techniques of political mobilization and governance, and a disapproval of the new breed of public figures from modest social backgrounds who used their language, manners, and social background to consolidate mass followings. In the face of this "eianization" of the political field, sections of the educated urban and upper-caste groups began to denounce the political vocation, question the legitimacy of the state and discard the principles of democracy and secularism. For decades democracy and secularism meant protection and extension of to the educated Hindu middle classes, and condescending vis-à-vis lower-caste groups and minorities. However, as it became clear that political democracy was slowly giving birth to this new and unfamiliar form of society, the "softness" of the became the target of the Hindu nationalist critique of a "" that was "pampering minorities." attitudes are today widespread in the same urban middle class in India that for years was regarded as the bedrock of political democracy in the country, and the backbone of the nation. Hindu nationalism emerged successfully in the political field in the 1980s as a kind of "" that mainly attracted more privileged groups who feared encroachment on their dominant positions, but also "plebeian" and impoverished groups seeking recognition around a rhetoric of cultural pride, order, and ."

"So let's get back to the more eventful Hindu-Muslim relationship. Having discussed the phenomena of street riots and mass terrorism sufficiently for now, let us focus on a third form of communal violence: targeted killings of specified individuals. Like with terrorism, the vast majority of victims in this category of violence have been Hindus. In the months and years after the Mumbai riots of January 1993, a number of Maharashtrian politicians belonging to the BJP and the Shiv Sena have been murdered, mostly by assailants who were never apprehended. In Kerala in the 1990s, dozens of ordinary Hindutva activists have been murdered by the Communists, the dominant party in that state. When I visited the Hindu Munnani office in Chennai in 1996, the building was really impressive, having just been rebuilt and redesigned after a bomb blast. Shortly after, it was destroyed once more in another bomb blast. In this series of attacks on the Hindu Munnani leadership, several activists were killed. And after the Gujarat carnage, the Gujarat Home Minister, Haren Pandya, was murdered by Muslims."

"People like him think an election is good if the person they want to see, wins and if the election throws up a different outcome then they will say it is a flawed democracy and the beauty is that all this is done under the pretence of advocacy of open society... Soros is an old, rich opinionated person sitting in New York who still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works."

"During the Khalistani separatist struggle in Punjab (1981–93), hundreds of RSS and BJP men were killed by the Khalistanis, yet this did not provoke a single act of retaliation, neither against the actual perpetrators nor against the Sikh community in general. On the contrary, when Congress secularists allegedly killed thousands of Sikhs in 1984, it was the Hindutva activists who went out of their way to save the Sikhs. When in the 1980s, and again from 1996 till the time of this writing, Communist militants started killing RSS men in Kerala, the RSS was very slow to react in kind. The bomb attacks on Hindutva centres in Chennai, the murders of BJP politicians in UP and Mumbai and elsewhere, have not provoked any counter-attacks. Anti-Hindu governments in Bihar and West Bengal have achieved some success in preventing the growth of sizable RSS chapters by means of ruthless intimidation and violence, all without having to fear any RSS retaliation. [...] The creation of Sindh and the NWFP as separate provinces meant that the small Hindu minorities there were left at the mercy of the Muslims. This had been a Muslim demand, and while Gandhi agreed to it, no one can tell what the Hindus got in return for it. Gandhi never claimed to represent the Hindus as such anyway: while the Muslims could press demands as Muslims, both through the Muslim League and through the intra-Congress Muslim lobby, the Hindus were only heard as nationalists. The only expressly Hindu lobby group, the HMS, was treated with indifference or hostility by the Congress leadership, much in contrast with the deferential treatment which the Muslim lobby and the Muslim League received... The grand finale of this trail of concessions was Partition amid bloodshed."

"The physical danger in writing against the temple is imaginary; by contrast, it is dangerous to uphold rather than oppose Hindu activist positions. It is a fact that throughout the 1990s, many office-bearers of the RSS, the BJP and their Tamil affiliate Hindu Munnani have been murdered; but that was more because of the demolition and other political matters than because of any statements on the historical background of the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. At one point, the publishinghouse Voice of India, which has published the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s statement and several other writings on the Ayodhya evidence, has had to seek police protection for a few days, but the threats had to do with “insults to the Prophet” and not with the Ayodhya evidence."

"If your vote becomes a cause of your death or property destruction, if it leads to arson, then that signals the end of democracy."

"The ’s verdict in the case of Indian Social Action Forum or challenging the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2011 on March 6, was one of the most decisive affirmations of civil society's role as a political actor in India. The judgement reaffirmed the legitimate and critical role civil society has to play to ensure that democracy in India thrives, including through political action. With far-reaching consequences, the judgement upholds the right of civil society to undertake political work and action. At the heart of this is the distinction between political action for political power on the one hand; and political action for furthering rights, development, human dignity, constitutional values, and democracy, on the other. The court has clearly pronounced that political work as defined for democracy and rights is legitimate."

"India has given the world neither community nor communalism. Our saints and sages (Rishis and Munis) and traditions have given the world spiritualism and not communalism."

"In some states, hundreds of our workers have been killed because of their political views. Political untouchability is gaining ground by the day. In some places, just the name of BJP is enough to create an atmosphere of untouchability.... Why are our workers killed or attacked in Kashmir, Kerala or Bengal? It is shameful and anti-democratic."

"India is the great democratic miracle of the world."

"By offering the Råjasæya he becomes Råjå and by the Våjapeya he becomes Samrå, and the office of Råjan is lower and that of Samraj the higher. A Råjå might indeed wish to become a Samrå, for the office of Råjan is lower and of Samråj the higher; but the Samrå would not wish to become a Råjå for the office of the Råjan is lower, and that of Samråj the higher."

"Chitra is King, and only kinglings are the rest."

"As the priest seeks the station rich in cattle, like a true king who goes to great assemblies, Soma hath sought the pitchers while they cleansed him, and like a wild buffalo, in the wood hath settled."

"Take the cases of Kerala or Kashmir, Bengal or Tripura, it will not come in the media. Some people have selective sensitivity. Hundreds of workers have been killed only for political ideology. In Tripura, workers were hanged. In Bengal, murders are still on. In Kerala too ... perhaps, in India only one political party has faced such killings. Violence has been given legitimacy. This is a danger before us."

"Their justification is that these books and films might hurt feelings and thus disturb communal harmony. Indian secularists declare that a critical or blasphemous book should be banned, because it may offend someone's feelings. Genuine secularists oppose bans because a ban offends our intelligence. And offended it is, by these inflated book-banners who claim the right to decide for us what we can read and what not."

"For half a century, all official statements of the BJP and its predecessor Jana Sangh have emphasized that the party does not want to "transform India from the secular democracy its founders envisioned 55 years ago into a Hindu religious state", but that, on the contrary, it wants genuine secularism. Rather than being a hollow slogan, this position is articulated in the form of precise proposals for reform of an impeccably and undeniably secularist nature. Thus, the proposed abolition of the special status of Kashmir (Art. 370 of the Constitution) is nothing but the abolition of a religion-based privilege: no Hindu-majority state enjoys the special privileges accorded to Muslim-majority Kashmir. Likewise, any genuine secularist would abolish the existing anti-Hindu legal discriminations in matters of temple and school management and the subsidizing or taxing of pilgrimages."

"When we want to understand a social problem, we need a language capable of expressing the data and underlying concepts describing the problem. In India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called "secularism". In practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists, Christian missionaries and americanized adepts of consumerism who share a hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West."

"Indian secularism is systematically dishonest in its assessment of the religions hostile to Hinduism."

"In India, however, "secularism" has acquired a wholly different meaning. Ever since the term was propagated by Jawaharlal Nehru, being an Indian secularist does not require you to reject theocracy and the intrusion of Religion into politics. On the contrary, every obscurantist in India swears by "secularism". The word's effective Meaning has shifted to a concern quite unknown to its European coiners, viz, the struggle against Hinduism."

"It is a different matter that the hollow and crassly superficial Ideology of Nehruvian secularism is secure in its power position because of the absence of credible challengers. With a political opposition claiming to be "positive secularists" and "genuine secularists", India's official "pseudo-secularism" has no one to fear."

"On the Hindu side then, at least the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, "National Volunteer Corps") could qualify as "communalist"? Certainly, it is called just that by all its numerous enemies. But then, when you look through any issue of its weekly Organiser, you will find it brandishing the notion of "positive" or "genuine secularism", and denouncing "pseudo-secularism", i.e. minority communalism."

"Anyway, his remark that my writing is “controversial” is a statement of a social fact, but is not an evaluation of my work. There is, for instance, nothing controversial about my perfectly logical and factual observation, repeated on many forums, that Indian “secularism” fails the very first test of secularism, viz. by adhering to separate law systems depending on religion. Of course I know that the Indian establishment and its parrots in Western academe swear by this hypocritical situation: treating citizens differently according to their religion yet calling it “secularism”. But what I say is just logic and would be approved by any candid and unforewarned outsider, while the prevalent claim of Indian “secularism” amounts to a defence of vested political interests."

"Most Western experts start their papers with the assertion: ”India’s secularism is threatened by Hindu nationalism.” That position is not socially controversial, it is the received wisdom, but it is logically controversial and implies the untrue description of the present system as “secular”. It is also logically controversial, in fact untenable, to describe as a “threat to secularism” the BJP, the only party whose manifesto promises the enactment of a Common Civil Code, that definitional cornerstone of secularism, taken for granted in most Western countries."

"India was declared a “secular, socialist republic” under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship, which many vocal secularists supported."

"Quite the contrary. Secularists when corred often resort to the argument that the word “secularism” happens to have different meanings in Europe and India. I however maintain that “secularism” has only one real meaning, that this meaning was already firmly established before the word came to be used in India, and that what prevails in India is therefore something else than secularism."

"One of the great surprises which Indian "secularism" offers to people familiar with genuine secularism, is that it totally shuns and even condemns the fundamental questioning of Christian (or Islamic) dogma. For ten years I have closely followed the Indian communalism debate, and not once have I seen a "secularist" mentioning the debunking of Christian beliefs, still the single most revolutionary achievement of the secular study of religions. Even non-essential Christian fairy-tales like the story of apostle Thomas's arrival and martyrdom in South India are repeated ad nauseam in "secularist" pieces on the current missionary crisis."