South Asia Citizens Web

The entre civilized world felt outraged when a young Christian couple, daily wage labourers on a brick kiln at Kot Radha Kishan, 40 miles from Lahore were brutally murdered on November 4, 2014 on the mischievous and vicious unsubstantiated allegation plea of committing blasphemy. Ten months later a poor Muslim farm labourer at Dadri was bludgeoned to death and his young son, trying to save a middle aged father, equally brutally beaten up, two days after Baqrid festival, involving slaughter of goats. Dadri is closer to India’s national Capital than Kot Radha Kishan was from the Pakistani Punjab capital. In both cases no one felt the need to ascertain the truth behind the allegation.

For some time now, the votaries of the Hindu Right have maligned the approach of what they describe as Liberal-Left scholars, interchangeably described as anti-Indian, anti-national and anti-Hindu. Such historians are faulted for their focus on social and economic structures, for critical and evaluative rather than “pride-inducing” engagements with the past . . .

Today, higher education in India is faced with its gravest threat. Already in a state of crisis as a result of years of overload in conditions of financial and academic neglect, it is now being subjected to authoritarian functioning, loss of autonomy, sudden and frequent imposition of academic schemes and structural changes without due consideration and adequate debate among students and teachers, lack of facilities and an acute shortage of permanent faculty. The withdrawal of the state from its obligation to sustain this significant social sector has facilitated the trend to privatize and commercialize universities, colleges, and technical and professional courses has gathered momentum over the last two decades . . .

t is shocking that a helpless Muslim family in village Bisara in Dadri, NOIDA was brutally attacked and mercilessly beaten by miscreants in which Akhlaq was killed while others injured- one being critical. It is reported that an announcement was made around 9.30 PM on 28th Sept. 2015 by some people from the village temple that Muslims were consuming beef. Surprisingly hundreds of people gathered in few minutes and soon attacked the family of Akhlaq who was killed.

To put it in a somewhat clichéd manner, contemporary Hindutva operates in the Sawarkar-Golwalkar paradigm and whatever the apparent inconsistencies this paradigm may throw up, critics would be making a msitake if they take satisfaction from those inconsistencies instead of realizing that a clumsy compromise on questions of rituals and traditional understanding of society are only secondary to the idea of Hindu nation and its imagined enemies