Category Archives: Politics

Failing States-by Pankaj Mishra

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‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan; strategies deployed by nations that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted after a visit to a hospital treating coronavirus patients: ‘I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.’

Narcissistic intellectual habits, which credit moral virtue and political wisdom to countries such as India because they appear to conform to Anglo-American notions of democracy and capitalism, will have to be abandoned. More attention must be paid to the specific historical experiences and political traditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea – countries once described (and dismissed) as authoritarian and protectionist – and the methods they have used to mitigate the suffering caused both by manmade change and sudden calamity. The idea of strategic state-building, historically alien to Britain and the US, will have to be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.

The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 people in the US, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, has now shown, far more explicitly than Katrina did in 2005 or the financial crisis in 2008, that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, Anglo-America’s main ideological export and the mainstay of its moral prestige, has never been what it was cracked up to be.

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My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children

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She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.

By Hilton Als

By the late summer of 1967, when I turned seven, we’d been living in the house for six years. By “we,” I mean my mother, two of my four older sisters, and my little brother. And although we shared the place with a rotating cast of other relatives, including my mother’s mother and an aunt and her two children, I always considered it my mother’s home. The house was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Like all the moves my mother engineered or helped to engineer for our family, this one was aspirational. Despite the fact that Brownsville had begun its slow decline into drugs, poverty, and ghettoization years before, my mother’s house—the only one in her life that, after years of work and planning, she would even partly own—symbolized a break with everything we had known before, including an apartment in Crown Heights, with a shared bathroom near the stairwell, where, on Sunday nights, my mother would line her daughters up with freshly laundered towels so that they could take their weekly bath.

Privacy was something my sisters had to get used to. Our new house had doors and a proper sitting room, which sometimes served as a makeshift bedroom for visiting Bajan relatives. (My mother’s family was from Barbados.) The sister I was closest to, a poetry-writing star who wore pencil skirts to play handball with the guys, composed her verse amid drifts and piles of clothes and kept her door closed. My brother and I shared a smaller room and a bed. My mother had her own room, where the door was always ajar; she didn’t so much sleep there as rest between walks up and down the hall to watch and listen for the safety of her children.

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Blind Spots (Muslims in India) By Shireen Azam

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Some excerpts;

“ON A DELHI PLAYGROUND in the late 2000s, five-year-old Azania was about to kick a football with her white canvas shoes, when a boy from the rival team screamed, “Get away from the ball, you Paki.” When the author Nazia Erum heard about this—one of several instances of Islamophobia in elite schools in the National Capital Region, she writes—she wondered whether she should give her own daughter a Muslim name. When did schools become like this? She remembered that her elder brother was called “Hamas” in the 1990s, but that had felt somewhat light-hearted by comparison.

A few years before the playground incident, another child in a different part of the city found that there was an unexpected problem with her new home. After moving near her workplace in a Muslim-dominated locality near Jamia Millia Islamia, the author Rakhshanda Jalil sent handmade cards to her daughter’s classmates to invite them home for her birthday. Most of her daughter’s friends declined the invitation. Over the phone, their mothers explained to Jalil what had changed. It was different when Jalil lived in Gulmohar Park, an elite outpost where Muslims are not conspicuous, they said, but “we have no idea about the Jamia side.”

In 2008, after night-time discounts for phone calls kicked in, the writer Neyaz Farooquee and his friends used to spend hours gossiping and mocking each other. They spoke about the women they were interested in, college life, and their friend Kafil’s obsession with trivia regarding guns and weapons. Days after the Batla House encounter in September that year, Farooquee deleted the numbers of his closest friends from his phone.”

“A good deal of Muslim autobiographical writing in India seems to hinge on two points: a remembered past, and a present that is worse and more difficult in myriad ways. The sense of an escalating decline is ubiquitous, but the patterns signifying that something has been lost are less linear than they may initially seem. All Muslims did not inhabit the same havens to begin with. 

There is a certain way in which ‘Muslim memoirs’ are written and reviewed. The years of a writer’s life are often charted against depleting levels of secularism in the country. A few themes make frequent appearances: the pain surrounding Partition and a sense of disbelief that the Congress let it happen; the ostensible glory of the Nehruvian era—the 1960s and 1970s—when Muslims could do their jobs without being made aware of their religion, and how this started changing; the ulemas of the 1980s, who stymied attempts to reform the community and change antiquated personal laws; and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But is there more to Muslim lives in India that this arc obfuscates? 

A wave of recent non-fiction books use the autobiographical form to tell the story of Muslims in India. Published in the last few years, faced with an escalating assault on Muslims under the Narendra Modi government, these writings provide an insight into Muslims’ minds as they witness these times. The writers contextualise their experiences against the broader history of independent India. In her book Mothering a Muslim, Nazia Erum, faced with bringing up her daughter in an Islamophobic world, describes her conversations with other Muslim parents. Neyaz Farooquee, in An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism, takes us into the petrified mind of a young Muslim man who fears being labelled as a ‘terrorist’ by a biased state and an unquestioning media. Rakshanda Jalil, in her collection of essays titled But You Don’t Look Like A Muslim, responds to the stereotypes she faces. Seema Mustafa’s Azadi’s Daughter: Being a Secular Muslim in India and Saeed Naqvi’s Being the Other: The Muslim in India compare the authors’ experiences of growing up in a secular, pluralist India to what they later witnessed as journalists reporting on events that reveal the erosion of the India they once knew.

The narrative of the steady disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Indian Muslims is important and urgent, and deserves to be told again and again. But there is another story that gets neglected in this telling. Indian Muslims are constantly talked about, yet the role of caste in the Muslim community remains almost entirely secret. Islamophobes, liberals and prominent Muslims in both religious and intellectual spheres have consistently overlooked the issue. The dominant discourse on Muslims—focussed on discrimination, backwardness, marginalisation of women, terrorism and communal violence—sees them solely within the confines of religious politics. The questions it asks of Muslim lives are limited to ones of secularism, communalism or fanaticism. One of the primary reasons for this is the caste identity of the writers, scholars and critics who have so far formed the Muslim intelligentsia. As the scholar Arshad Alam noted, most Muslims of India are lower-caste, whereas the people who represent them are upper-caste.”

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On Father’s Day, I want to tell my dad something I neglected to mention-Maureen Dowd in NYT

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I never told my father I was proud of him.

I grew up in the ’60s, another era filled with tears and tear gas and violent clashes about race and class.

I didn’t want to be a hippie, but I certainly didn’t want to be a fascist. I was sheltered in my demure blue school uniform and saddle shoes, watching the world burn.

The National Guard slaughtering students at Kent State. The Chicago police billy-clubbing yippies at the ’68 Democratic convention. Soldiers in Vietnam getting denounced as “baby killers,” and radicals vowing to “barbecue some pork” and spill the blood of “pigs.”

When our school newspaper published an anti-Vietnam War cartoon, the principal, a nun, dumped all the copies into the incinerator.

As a 16-year-old in 1968, I found it hard to balance hating the Vietnam War and wanting racial justice with being part of a family, baked in patriotism, taught to revere uniforms. As Bill Clinton wrote in that infamous 1969 letter, the cool kids were all about “loathing the military”; I was making pocket change by ironing my brothers’ Coast Guard uniforms, being careful to make sure the creases were sharp.

I never told classmates about my father’s long stretch as a police detective. I just talked about his second career, after retirement, as a special assistant to a senator and congressman.

When it was time for the father-daughter lunch at Immaculata, I didn’t sign up. As an Irish immigrant with little formal education, my father had worked terribly hard to afford that fancy girls’ school. But I didn’t tell him about the lunch. I don’t know if it was the cop thing or because he was older and didn’t seem that into raising a teenager. (The day I was born, the other cops at roll call teased him about becoming a new father at 61.)

As it turned out, one of my dad’s closest friends was the speaker at the lunch and called him to find out why he wasn’t there. My dad, hurt, asked my mom why I didn’t want to take him.

And that is something I’m ashamed of.

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