pass the roti on the left hand side

oops i mean dr DOT anonymous aaaaaaaaaaaat passtheroti DOT com. sorry about that.

So what position would Jindal get in a McCain cabinet? Secretary of Intolerance?

Never underestimate the passion of the converted. Piyush is not going to miss any opportunity to prove his fundamentalist creds. It won him a place in the GOP and has catapulted him to a governorship and has set him well on his way to the White House. While a Subodh Chandra, Ashwin Madia, Kumar Ketkar, Swati Dandekar, or Jay Goyal, will be lucky to ever make it to the Congress, Jindal has already surpassed them. I cannot understand why the Hindu hating and critical of India crowd in the US hasn't warmed up to him. Because this is the same sort that makes common cause with soul-harvesters in India.

So what position would Jindal get in a McCain cabinet? Secretary of Intolerance?

link

Yes, clearly there is no regional politics of communalism among India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh at minimum rooted in a common colonial and postcolonial lineage of the construction of identity and its political uses. ;) And on a day to day level, there just happened to be anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh the days after Babri Masjid was destroyed in India.

Are you trying to be sarcastic?

Quote #1

Mr. Gandhi has been very punctilious in the matter of condemning any and every act of violence and has forced the Congress, much against its will to condemn it. But Mr. Gandhi has never protested against such murders. Not only have the Musalmans not condemned/10/ these outrages but even Mr. Gandhi has never called upon the leading Muslims to condemn them. He has kept silent over them. Such an attitude can be explained only on the ground that Mr. Gandhi was anxious to preserve Hindu-Moslem unity and did not mind the murders of a few Hindus, if it could be achieved by sacrificing their lives.

This attitude to excuse the Muslims any wrong, lest it should injure the cause of unity, is well illustrated by what Mr. Gandhi had to say in the matter of the Mopla riots.

The blood-curdling atrocities committed by the Moplas in Malabar against the Hindus were indescribable. All over Southern India, a wave of horrified feeling had spread among the Hindus of every shade of opinion, which was intensified when certain Khilafat leaders were so misguided as to pass resolutions of "congratulations to the Moplas on the brave fight they were conducting for the sake of religion." Any person could have said that this was too heavy a price for Hindu-Moslem unity. But Mr. Gandhi was so much obsessed by the necessity of establishing Hindu-Moslem unity that he was prepared to make light of the doings of the Moplas and the Khilafats who were congratulating them. He spoke of the Moplas as the "brave God-fearing Moplas who were fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner which they consider as religious." Speaking of the Muslim silence over the Mopla atrocities Mr. Gandhi told the Hindus:

"The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion in spite of such fanatical eruptions. A verbal disapproval by the Mussalmans of Mopla madness is no test of Mussalman friendship. The Mussalmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Mopla conduct about forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such a thing might become impossible even on the part of the most fanatical among them. My belief is that the Hindus as a body have received the Mopla madness with equanimity and that the cultured Mussalmans are sincerely sorry of the Mopla's perversion of the teaching of the Prophet."

The Resolution/11/ passed by the Working Committee of the Congress on the Mopla atrocities shows how careful the Congress was not to hurt the feelings of the Musalmans.

"The Working Committee places on record its sense of deep regret over the deeds of violence done by Moplas in certain areas of Malbar, these deeds being evidence of the fact that there are still people in India who have not understood the message of the Congress and the Central Khilafat Committee, and calls upon every Congress and Khilafat worker to spread the said message of non-violence even under the gravest provocation throughout the length and breadth of India.

"Whilst, however, condemning violence on the part of the Moplas, the working Committee desires it to be known that the evidence in its possession shows that provocation beyond endurance was given to the Moplas and that the reports published by and on behalf of the Government have given a one-sided and highly exaggerated account of the wrongs done by the Moplas and an understatement of the needless destruction of life resorted to by the Government in the name of peace and order.

"The Working Committee regrets to find that there have been instances of so-called forcible conversion by some fanatics among Moplas, but warms the public against believing in the Government and inspired versions. The Report before the Committee says:

"'The families, which have been reported to have been forcibly converted into Mahomedanism, lived in the neighbourhood of Manjeri. It is clear that conversions were forced upon Hindus by a fanatic gang which was always opposed to the Khilafat and Non-co-operation Movement and there were only three cases so far as our information goes.'"

Quote #2
During my nine days' stay at Dacca, I visited most of the riot-affected areas of the city and suburbs. I visited Mirpur also under P.S. Tejgaon. The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock. On the second day of Dacca riot, I met the Chief Minister of East Bengal and requested him to issue immediate instructions to the District authorities to take all precautionary measures to prevent spreading of the riot in district towns and rural areas. On the 20th February 1950, I reached Barisal town and was astounded to know of the happenings in Barisal. In the District town, a number of Hindu houses were burnt and a large number of Hindus killed. I visited almost all riot-affected areas in the District. I was simply puzzled to find the havoc wrought by the Muslim rioters even at places like Kasipur, Madhabpasha and Lakutia which were within a radius of six miles from the District town and were connected with motorable roads. At the Madhabpasha Zamindar's house, about 200 people were killed and 40 injured. A place, called Muladi, witnessed a dreadful hell. At Muladi Bandar alone, the number killed would total more than three hundred, as was reported to me by the local Muslims including some officers. I visited Muladi village also, where I found skeletons of dead bodies at some places. I found dogs and vultures eating corpses on he river-side. I got the information there that after the whole-scale killing of all adult males, all the young girls were distributed among the ringleaders of the miscreants. At a place called Kaibartakhali under P.S. Rajapur, 63 persons were killed. Hindu houses within a stone's throw distance from the said thana office were looted, burnt and inmates killed. All Hindu shops of Babuganj Bazar were looted and then burnt and a large number of Hindus were killed. From detailed information received, the conservative estimate of casualties was placed at 2,500 killed in the District of Barisal alone. Total casualties of Dacca and East Bengal riot were estimated to be in the neighbourhood of 10,000 killed. The lamentation of women and children who had lost their all including near and dear ones melted my heart. I only asked myself "What was coming to Pakistan in the name of Islam."

Doc Anon, we are in the distant past of the last century and not yet discussing the politcs of Masjid-e-Janmasthan - as the Ram Janmabhumi-Babri Masjid was known as around the 1940s. It was a minor dispute then, when blood curdling atrocities were being committed in Bengal and Punjab. Things just don't happen. There is a long history of centuries behind them. It is never prudent to cover up the past and conjure up villains from our Western colonial period. As Balagagadhara rightly says, colonialism is in the mind. It changes our very mode of thinking.

I can’t understand why someone like an Akhila Raman (otherwise a real clueless jihadophile) or Raju Ramasamy, dislikes Piyush, or to put it another way, why do these people who write trash like “Brahminizing the Diaspora” not like Piyush.

I can't speak for the people you mentioned, I object on principle to the word "jihadophile" and I can state that there are two different majoritian oppressive philosophies at work - one is Hindutva, which impacts primarily South Asia (not just India) with the support of the diaspora and the other is American rightwing nuttery, which affects the U.S. and by implication the rest of the world. Jindal is critiqued here for the latter, not the former, though the two go hand in hand (along with Zionism and other forms of majoritarian oppression).

If you guys are serious about the Jindal blog we can set up a subdomain.

neetu, are you down? I can't spend much time on it, but if he makes your eyes hurt, i can lend some eyedrops and put up a post or whatever now and then :)

That’s interesting. I suppose Hindutva goons blow up schools, buses, and hospitals in Pakistan and Bangladesh? Arre, yaar, that would startle even Akhila Raman, although not Suzanna Roy, who would believe anything!

Hindutva --> anti-Muslim violence in India --> anti-Hindu violence in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Call it the chain rule of communalism ;) Or just read Lajja.

That should be Kumar Barve, not my friend Kumar Ketkar, from our watering hole by Azad Maidan!

I apologize for that. What I meant to say was, if Kumar Ketkar really if your friend, you need to take some lessons from him in understanding politics and religious extremism.

I dislike Jindal so intensely it makes my eyes hurt. What a f-ing tool.

Excellent idea. I could get on something like that. ESPECIALLY if he gets any kind of nod from McCain (which I doubt will happen).

Here's the facebook group for Indian's Against Bobby Jindal. Not very active, but it doesn't hurt to spread the word until someone takes it up a notch :)

Doc Anon, we are in the distant past of the last century and not yet discussing the politcs of Masjid-e-Janmasthan - as the Ram Janmabhumi-Babri Masjid was known as around the 1940s. It was a minor dispute then, when blood curdling atrocities were being committed in Bengal and Punjab. Things just don’t happen. There is a long history of centuries behind them. It is never prudent to cover up the past and conjure up villains from our Western colonial period. As Balagagadhara rightly says, colonialism is in the mind. It changes our very mode of thinking.

Your stylistic flourishes aside, long quotes about individual incidents without context are not going to convince me to change my opinions about general trends. And in fact, if you read what you wrote, it's actually sympathetic to what I always say:

Things just don’t happen.

The politics of communalism in South Asia is REGIONAL - it is not local, it is not the responsibility of "Hindus" "Muslims" "Shi'ites" "Sunnis" only. Moreover, it can be looked at in the modern era, or the colonial era, or the pre-colonial era - but the farther back you go and the less analytical rigour you apply, the more at the mercy of your sources you will be - who even if they have the best of intentions, will be speaking from a particular location.

So stop denying that Hindutva impacts Pakistan and Bangladesh in the same way that you don't deny that Jamaat-e-Islam in Bangladesh impacts events in India (though probably to a much lesser degree given the regional balance of power).

Otherwise, I'm going to have to go with raghu on this one ;)