TheJaggi

The other day, at a party-organised Chhatron ki Goonj event in Pune, Rahul Gandhi fired a cheap shot to indirectly put Hindus on the defensive. His point was about women fighting patriarchy, but he chose a verse from the Manusmriti to make his point. The verse, number 9(3), says that a female must be subject to her father’s rule in childhood, in youth to her husband’s, and in old age to her sons”. It’s a cheap shot because he knows that no Hindu can easily defend this statement in the smriti , and if one does so, one can easily be labelled as upholding patriarchy. In the past, several anti-caste activists have burnt copies of Manusmriti without reading it, and one can bet that Rahul Gandhi too is unlikely to have read the smriti in any depth. Nobody has to defend what the Manusmriti claims as a moral code, but one does expect more nuance in criticism of the smriti , which was written in a different era, for a different set of circumstances. If Rahul Gandhi wanted to suggest th...

The signing of a mutual defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan, all Sunni Islamic countries, is a small signal that there is something to Samual Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis. The defence pact, while not clear on when one country will go to war if another is attacked, is probably driven by a sense of common threat from Shia Iran and the Jewish state of Israel – both mortal enemies to each other themselves. Sunni religious identity is the basis of this pact for none of the three shares any common enemy that is existential in nature for all of them. Each one has a different enemy – Iran for the Saudis, India for the Pakistanis, and possibly Greece and Armenia for Turkiye, though both are minnows compared to Turkiye. In 1993, Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilisations in Foreign Affairs magazine, where he hypothesised that future conflicts and wars would be fought not only between countries but on the edges of “civilisations”. Huntington, a pro...