TheJaggi

The damage that colonialism does lives long after it formally ends. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends up triggering a storm in Europe, one single book, written by a racist intellectual in faraway Britain about a people he does not know anything about and the land he has never seen with his own eyes can cause immense damage to an entire people for centuries. A path-breaking book by authors Kundan Singh and Krishna Maheshwari deserves high praise because it connects the dots from the mischief done in one book with the long-term damage it inflicted on colonised people. A few chapters in The History of British India , written by James Mill, father of the more famous John Stuart Mill, have influenced - and continue to influence - western misrepresentations of India, and more specifically Hindus and Hinduism. This misrepresentation endures even today, though in more politically correct form. The book , Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children: ...

The Supreme Court bench hearing the West Bengal government’s petition against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ list made a simple observation : “Whether the state is governed by A, B or C political party… Other than West Bengal, the SIR in every other state has happened smoothly. By and large, there is hardly any litigation.” This observation of the Chief Justice, who heads the bench, will not impact the final outcome of the West Bengal petition, where judicial officers are overseeing the SIR appeals process at a time when the election process is already underway. But it squarely seeks to throw the spotlight on how the state itself may have brought the SIR troubles on itself. The problem leads us back to the Chief Minister herself, who takes every decision that does not have her approval as a personal affront. She wades directly into any confrontation, as she did when she entered the IPAC (Indian Political Action Committee) offices just when the...

  There is an evocative Hindi phrase that best describes the Pakistani mindset on India. Hum to doobenge sanam, tumko bhi le dubenge . It means, I may drown, but I will take you down with me . The Pakistani establishment, especially its armed forces, gets its jollies not from improving the lot of its own people, but from hurting India any which way it can. In a war, it seeks not to win (which, given its relative size, cannot be a realistic goal), but to damage India as much as possible. This attitude was on display clearly recently when Abdul Basit, a former envoy to India, said that in a hypothetical situation where America tries to take down Pakistan’s nukes, Pakistan may not be able to take on Uncle Sam, but would hit India instead. He is quoted in The Times of India as saying to a Pakistani news channel: “If somebody casts an evil eye on us, we will attack Mumbai and Delhi in India without even thinking twice. We will see whatever happens later.” Quite clearly, this attitude m...

Mamata Banerjee’s most important strength is her street-fighting ability, not governance. She won West Bengal for the first time in 2011 by beating the Left Front, which earlier ruled the streets, by repeated physical confrontations with the law and order machinery and the left’s musclemen. As a woman, the Left Front found it difficult to take her on, given her willingness to risk life and limb on the streets, thus giving her a decisive psychological advantage in 2011 after several earlier electoral failures. In 2021, the BJP made the fatal mistake of targeting her personally and bringing in Hindi-belt bravado, thus giving her an easy victory based on a massive minority vote (close to 30 percent of the electorate) and a substantial Hindu vote that did not consolidate behind her challenger.  This time it could be different. Not that the BJP is home and dry - no such luck - but it is certainly building up momentum in its favour. One of the early pre-poll surveys, by IANS-Matriz e, gi...

This is the way the world ends  This is the way the world ends  This is the way the world ends  Not with a bang but a whimper. - TS Eliot in his poem, The Hollow Men The world may, at some point, end either in a bang or a whimper, or not end at all if wisdom prevails, but if one were to substitute the word “world” with “imperialism”, it would be perfect. All imperialisms, whether of the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Arab or Persian kinds, have always ended in a whimper for one simple reason: the imperial powers don’t understand the limits of their own power. They die not because they lacked power, but because they thought their powers were endless. And, of course, they also arrogantly presumed that they were too big to fail. What we have been seeing in slow motion, starting from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 to the 2008 global financial crisis to the ongoing Iran war, is the steady decline of America power (after a brief rise), thanks to imperial over...

The Ukraine and Iran wars have given military strategists everywhere reason to re-examine their war doctrines. The fact that Russia, despite being a military superpower, has not been able to get the Ukrainians to play dead, and the fact that Iran has not only held its own against the joint might of the US and Israel, but is now also fighting back effectively, tells us why. Before we discuss which doctrines might really have to change, let us first examine the primary reason why Israel and the US went to war with Iran for the second time in less than a year: to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Is the cost to the world from the resulting disruptions worth this attempt to set Iran back in its hunt for nuclear weapons? The assumption is that if Iran has nukes, it can focus on the obliteration of Israel. But history tells us that the proliferation of nuclear weapons does not automatically result in their deployment during wars. It has never been deployed since the Americans...

Is the Indian judiciary inadvertently supporting crypto-Christianity, where a convert to Christianity remains Hindu on paper in order to benefit from the various affirmative action programmes of the government? A recent judgment of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, comprising Justices Mukulika Jawalkar and Nandesh Deshpande, ruled that the mere presence of a Jesus statue or the symbol of the cross at someone’s home cannot be seen as proof of conversion to Christianity. In a sense this is true, since Hindus often have no objection to venerating the sacred symbols of other religions. But if the burden of proof of conversion to Christianity is going to be set higher, it implies that the authorities need to be more intrusive in their investigations. Since this is not possible in every instance of suspected conversion, crypto Christians can get a free ride and the best of both worlds: the benefits offered by their new faith, and the compensations offered by the faith they clai...