Both the strength and weakness of Manu Joseph are in full display here in their extreme obscenity. He writes well, even when it is nonsense. To his rather predictable, not always reconcilable, impulses to be both the restorer of common sense and a provocateur purveying counterintuitive inversions here added are the temptation to join the bandwagon. He does it through a public indulgence of his private delusion. Manu Joseph draws from some studies on Islamic suicide bombers and terrorists. Even says something interesting, if dubiously simplistic: Criminals recruit the deluded to carry the Islamic terrorist activities (He doesnt say directly, but might as well have implied that unlike Islamic terrorists, the Hindu extremists are effeminate gentlemen, thus mean or can no harm, at least anymore!). However, For Manu Joseph, no such study is necessary when it comes to Hindu terrorism. He once met a group of Hindu terrorists. They were not serious. They were even funny. It was enough for him to conclude that the Hindu terrorism was benign (in comparison with Islamic terrorism). He would also assure us that Hindu extremism does not have to be more potent than it already is. He could write like this when we hardly wake up or walk out without learning something MORE shocking in the media or outside we thought was thinkable, in an ever sinking bar of our worst fears always getting outwitted by the outrages of the real world happenings! One can safely assume that the columnist never heard of Milgram, Zambardo, Collins, Gambetta and a host of many others who, unlike this fantasist, bothered to actually empirically search for reasons and causes. If he did, he would have noticed, among other things, that the vulnerability of the victims is the precondition for the atrocities and oppression not the ferocity or evil of the perpetrators. Well, Hindu extremists make improbable claims and announce impossible plans. But they are only their fantasies, he tells us. They dont mean them. We are not to begrudge them for their release. It is not difficult to notice that Manu Joseph considers Hindu fascists ever radicalizing announcements were something like rape fantasies of impotent men. Harmless, because they are private and ineffective. His political theory can be called Semenist. Principal tenet of which is, elect the bad guys than fight or punish them! They will behave. They are bound to. Well, many of us think of the Sanghs release actually less benign than that. For example, a mob of perfectly respectable Hindu people, both men and women, pierced a pregnant womans womb and threw the baby into fire. None protested, disowned nor anybody punished for it. The man and the party responsible for such things kept on getting elected with ever greater and intensifying fanfare. It somehow escapes this gentleman that a universally condemned sudden terrorist act carried out with guns doesnt have to be more frightening than the jubilant common people self-righteously perpetrating atrocities of unspeakable cruelty, justifying them. He sees no such danger coming. If there is anything striking about this opinion piece, it was his fantasy of a benign Hindu fascism and Manu Josephs release of his unsupported imagination. Like the case of Manu Josephs Guru Ashish Nandy, from whom he draws two main substantive yet typically unsubstantiated points, there is something about Christian apologists / denialists and even glorifiers, of Hindutva that requires a special study. This variation of the very old theme and the new hope that the political institutions and structures have resilience, inertia, unmanageable size that can withstand the Hindu fascist attacks and bely their manipulations, and the pressures of electoral imperatives and their attendant chaotic pulls work the magic, to turn even the most anarchist (this is what Joseph calls Modi, who was trained as full-timer in one of the most disciplined, ideological and hierarchical organization called RSS, in a gesture not dissimilar to a vulnerable woman tying rakhi to her tormenter with the hope that he would stop) into a regular guy, as if the Indian Fuehrer cant preside over atrocities without breaking away from his Head of the State lingo, misses even serious a glaring point. As great Hobsbawm had shown us long ago, it is not that the attempts at creating the kind of nations and polities fascists want will ever have a remote chance of being successful. Only that such attempts will cause enormous mass tragedies and cruelties, not least because they are unrealistic. I am sure Manu Joseph writes yet another fantastic piece for New York Times too, sooner or later, if he has not done already. Since the fantasy now can pass for political analysis, let me indulge in my own: those of us who would survive this dark period would pull out a saved copy of this piece in future for the only good use it can be put to: as indicting evidence to consign the author of this piece to firing squad for his intellectual Crimes Against Humanity and for misleading the world public.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 13:17:51 +0000
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