Monday, June 26, 2006

shashi tharoor

26th june 2006

of course, i support shashi tharoor's candidacy for the un secretary general's post because he's

a) indian
b) malayali
c) an acquaintance. his sister and brother-in-law are friends of mine and i have met him at their house; and he has quoted yours truly in one of his books. i also interviewed him on rediff some years ago. (rediff incidentally republishes that interview after carefully removing my name from it: one of the 'secularists' on their staff at work, no doubt).

anyway, this is my personal opinion that i support shashi's candidacy.

but on the other hand, i have seen several commentators being less than enthusiastic.

what do you guys think? is this a good thing for india? what are shashi's chances?

btw, i have heard that women have a soft corner for him, as they consider him good-looking.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I dont like Shashi Tharoor. This person is a secularist. He is supposedly a close friend of Mira Niar. This article below from NY Times actually gives us some info about his ultra secularist leanings. From my expreience, he has been biased in his writings against BJP.

Read below: Shashi Tharoor believes "Hindu Extremists" who Chanted insultingly triumphalist
slogans helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim
side, who set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple
campaigners.

So according to Tharoor, the burning of children and Women at Godhra was due to "insultingly triumphalist slogans".

Tharoor sounds more like a Mulayam Singh Yaday than a future UN Secretary General.
______________________________________________
India's Past Becomes a Weapon

March 6, 2002

By SHASHI THAROOR

I 'll tell you what your problem is in India," the American
businessman said. "You have too much history. Far more than
you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like
a battleaxe, against each other."

The businessman does not exist; I invented him for a novel,
"Riot," that came out last year and concerns a Hindu-Muslim
riot that erupts during a campaign to erect a Hindu temple
on the site occupied for four and a half centuries by a
mosque. Yet the views of this fictional character seem more
real each day as reports describe a renewed cycle of
killings and mob violence over plans to build a temple to
Ram above the ruins of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in
northern India. In a nonfiction afterword to "Riot," I
alerted readers to the threat by Hindu extremists to
commence construction in mid-March this year. I take no
solace whatever from prescience. The tragedy in India is
that even those who know history seem condemned to repeat
it.

It is one of the ironies of India's muddled march into the
21st century that it has a technologically inspired vision
of the future yet appears shackled to the dogmas of the
past. The temple town of Ayodhya, in India's most populous
state, Uttar Pradesh, has no software labs; it is devoted
to religion and old-fashioned industry. In 1992 a howling
mob of Hindu extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, which
occupied a prominent spot in a town otherwise overflowing
with temples. The mosque had been built in the 1520's by
India's first Mogul emperor, Babur; the Hindu zealots vowed
to replace it with a temple to Ram. In other words, they
want to avenge history by undoing the shame of half a
millennium ago.

India is a land where history, myth and legend often
overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the difference. Some
Hindus claim the Babri Masjid stood on the exact spot of
Ram's birth and had been placed there by Babur to remind a
conquered people of their subjugation. Historians - most of
them Hindus - reply that there is no proof that Ram ever
existed in human form, let alone that he was born where the
believers claim he was. More to the point, there is no
proof that Babur demolished a Ram temple to build his
mosque. To destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple
would not be righting an old wrong but perpetrating a new
one.

To most Indian Muslims, the dispute is not about a specific
mosque - Babri Masjid had lain unused for half a century
before its destruction, most of Ayodhya's Muslims having
emigrated to Pakistan upon Partition of British India in
1947 - but about their place in Indian society. For decades
after independence, Indian governments had guaranteed their
security in a secular state, permitting the retention of
Muslim "personal law" separate from the country's civil
code and even financing hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of
India's first five presidents were Muslim, as have been
innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and
Supreme Court justices. Until the early 1990's, India's
Muslim population was greater than that of Pakistan. The
destruction of the mosque felt like an utter betrayal of
the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a
vital part of India's pluralist democracy.

The Hindus who attacked the mosque had little faith in the
institutions of Indian democracy. They saw the state as
soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced and
Westernized secularism. To them, an independent India,
freed after nearly 1,000 years of alien rule (first Muslim,
then British) and rid of a sizable portion of its Muslim
population by Partition, had an obligation to assert an
identity that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu.
They are not fundamentalists in any common sense of the
term, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals:
there is no Hindu pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu
holy book and indeed no such thing as a Hindu heresy. Hindu
"fundamentalists" are, instead, chauvinists, who root their
Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or
spiritual underpinnings - and, unlike their Islamic
counterparts, not in the theology of their faith - but in
its role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the
name of Hinduism as badge, rather than of Hinduism as
doctrine.

In doing so they are profoundly disloyal to the religion
they claim to espouse, which stands out not only as an
eclectic embodiment of tolerance but as the only major
religion that does not claim to be the only true religion.
All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are valid, and
religion is an intensely personal matter related to the
individual's self-realization in relation to God. Such a
faith understands that belief is a matter of hearts and
minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu seeks no
revenge upon history, for he understands that history is
its own revenge.

The Hindu zealots who chanted insultingly triumphalist
slogans helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim
side, who set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple
campaigners; in turn, Hindu mobs have torched Muslim homes
and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a
solution to the Ayodhya dispute, the violence goes on,
spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future
generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We
live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory.
Memory and oblivion: one leads to the other, and back
again. And history is not a web woven by innocent hands.

------------------------------------------------------
Shashi Tharoor is the author of "India: From Midnight to
the Millennium" and, most recently, of the novel "Riot."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/06/opinion/06THAR.html?ex=1016448736&ei=1&en=
21617ff75432ee3c

zeus said...

ST may be a good candidate for UNSG, but it is a waste of resources for the Indian Govt at a time when the UN itself seems to be increasingly irrelevant.

daisies said...

I am surprised that the following would be reasons for supporting a UNSG candidate on this:

b) malayali
c) an acquaintance

Unless I am on a new blog called "Malayali Nationalist perspective".

Even Arundathi Roy might fit 2 out 3 in the a), b) and may have some
other c), but would that her make a good candidate for UNSG ?

About Shashi Tharoor, I feel the man is a diplomat to the core. And a good man too, evident from the peaceful aura around him (as I watched Barkha Dutt interview him).

And being mostly a diplomat, he cannot understand what a fight is all about :-)

About his candidature he said - "I am an Indian, and I come from the Indian civilisation. But I will not be India's man in this post. I will be serving the interests of 191 countries."

He has also welcomed any candidate who might be better than him. He is not greedy for this post and wants the best qualified person to be in it.

He also said if he doesnt get selected, he will have plenty of time to write books (and not otherwise). So take your pick folks - Shashi as UNSG, or more books like "Riot".

Sorry for responding even if I am not a guy and wasnt invited to.

_

nizhal yoddha said...

gosh, some strong words from many of you about poor shashi tharoor! yes, i did read swapan's editorial. well, shashi is a charming individual and a very clever person. he can write exceedingly well when he wants to.

what do you think his chances are? this time it is the 'reserved' asian turn, which is partly why shashi made his move, i suppose. he couldn't possibly wait another 15 years for another 'asian' slot. there are strong asian candidates, from thailand eg. and the pakistanis have of course said they will field a candidate since india fielded one. so i am not very sure of shashi's chances at all. is india conceding that it will never make it to the security council, as the secy genl is never from a SC member nation. this was the tack some commentators chose.

daisies said...

America is rooting for Tharoor.

America's loyal friends will vote
for him.

Who are they ? How many ?

That will decide the outcome.

_