The Indian race

The hysteria about “Racists attacks against Indians in Australia” has died down and pubs have restarted serving Fosters (Australian for beer). Of course, Australia is no longer the second-most favoured study destination for Indian students. That honour has now been restored to England.

The good ole deshpremis have roundly condemned the Oz government for not doing enough to protect Indian students. The liberals heaved a collective sighed and introspected on our own racist tendencies. All that can be said has been said and my views on the matter are not very different from those already expressed.

But one thing that just struck me is that if you pick apart the phrase “racist attack against Indians”, doesn’t it sound somewhat fuzzy? For us Indians are not a race per se.

Technically speaking, Indians from the North-East are not from the Aryan-Dravidian stock that the rest come from. On the other hand, a lot of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis do have the same racial roots as us.

Of course, if you leave technicalities and quibbles aside, the aforementioned phrase sounds perfectly natural because we Indians lack an explicitly racial identity. Indians who travel abroad do acquire a quasi-racial identity when they come in contact with other races. I say quasi-racial because that identity is Indian rather than brown or South Asian.

Why is that? Is it because we’ve never been able to get along with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis? Or is it pure Indian hegemony at work—the tendency to assume that anything or anyone from the subcontinent is Indian unless established otherwise.

I’m going to digress for a bit to narrate a conversation that might or might or not be relevant to this post.

As part of an assignment in journo school, a couple of us went to meet an ageing RSS functionary in his ashram. One would expect to see Hindu zealots to see jumping around, tridents held aloft, crying Death to Muslims etc. etc. Yes, the purport of what this guy was trying to say might have been the same but his arguments were much more refined. The first thing he told us that Hinduism wasn’t a religion but a nationality—anyone who is born in India is a Hindu. Which is why they had organized ‘homecoming’ campaigns as opposed to conversions to bring back to the fold Christians and Muslims who had ‘strayed’ from the flock.

I found the argument fascinating and ingenuous in a morbid way. With one swift brush stroke all inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent irrespective of the faith they practice can be branded as Hindus. Of course, this shared Hindu nationality doesn’t stop them from butchering Muslims by the hundreds in state-sponsored pogroms.

Can the same argument be extended to Hinduism as a race?

Is there a subtext to the phrase ‘Racist attack on Indians’ which reads ‘racist attack on Hindus’, or is this is a leap of judgement on my part?

But I do believe a majority of Hindus see Hinduism as being a religion, race and nationality all at once. To most Indians, the terms ‘race’, ‘religion’ and ‘nationality’ all mean the same things. The Indian racial identity is a Hindu identity.

Yawning in protest

What is the nightmare of every leftist? Having to listen to a speech by Narendra Modi and not being able to, rather not having the guts to, heckle him. At a recent conference in Mumbai, the aforesaid misfortune befell him.

The theme of the conference was sustainable development (how original!!) and Modi’s speech was supposed to be the crowning glory.

His speech was along predictable lines—describing Gujarat before him as a state floundering in the darkness and how he came in like a Messiah and lifted the state out of despair. I had heard him speak once in Chennai, before an audience of fanatical Tam-Brams (Tamil Brahmins). He was at his theatrical best then, cocky and eloquent. Here too he was boastful, but as he was speaking before a more genteel audience, his words were measured.

And I just sat there in a corner of that cavernous banquet hall trying to feel outraged.

This was after all the man who had presided over the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims and had turned Muslim localities into modern-day ghettos. But, try as I did, I couldn’t feel outraged. I was more annoyed by his personality, his manner of speaking, his crass boasts. Even if he hadn’t done any of those horrible things, I am sure I would have found him repulsive only if I was made to sit through one of his speeches.

I was still hoping that a less indifferent soul than myself would challenge him or, even better, send a rain-soaked shoe sailing through the air in his general direction (Ever since that blessed Egyptian journo hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, this form of protest has been most in vogue). However, aiming directly at Modi carried the risk of being peppered with bullets by those cussed National Security Group guys.

But no shoes were lobbed at him, no one heckled him and no one challenged him in the questions session. I was in one-sixteenth of a mind to shoe-bomb him but then it thought about what would happen next and put the idea out of my head. At worst, I would have been thrashed by the security guys and some zealous Modi fans, and sacked from my job. At best, I would only be sacked from my job. I had a feeling I wouldn’t go down in the annals of Indian journalism as a martyr to a lofty cause. On hearing news of my sacking, people wouldn’t say, “Oh, he had such a promising career ahead of him and he threw it all away in a moment of passion.” They would say, “I always knew he was weird and this just proves it.”

So, what was my grand gesture of dissent? A giant, albeit noiseless, yawn.

However, there was one moment when Modi really pissed me off and I almost reached for my shoe. In response to a question about what he had done for women in Gujarat, he began, “If I lived in the West, I would be known as a feminist.”

Now, what puts the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 in a league of its own, is the level of sexual violence unleashed against women. Accounts such as that of wombs ripped open and fetuses stuck on tridents and brandished about, of mass gang-rapes, 30, even 40, men taking their turns at one girl, are enough to make the blood curdle in anyone’s veins. And this man has the nerve to call himself a feminist.

Post script: Here is an argument that a lot of Gujaratis make which really gets my goat. They say, “Yes, what happened during 2002 was unfortunate but Modi is a good non-corrupt administrator and has done a lot for the good of Gujarat.” My standard response is, so did Hitler (Umm not for the good of Gujarat, for the good of pre-war Germany). He did start a hate campaign against the Jews which culminated in genocide but he was credited with pushing the German economy out of its post-first-world-war doldrums. The German economy was booming before the Second War broke out and Hitler was known as an effective administrator. The comparisons between the two are unmistakable. Modi is a textbook dictator if ever there was one. He is known to have scant regard for the opinion of any else, he has worked to hard establish something that can only be described as The Cult of Narendra Modi, and he is known to subvert the course of justice when it is seen to be working against him.

The main attraction of a dictatorship for the merchant classes is that they are hasslefree, pro-business and ruthless. So it is not surprising at all that Modi is held up by some as a hero of Gujarat.