i was startled and saddened to see this forward. there is a fair amount of unnecessary venom in this article. sigh. shashi is not so bad as the usual suspects.
but it's quite funny how so many people of the indian 'intelligentsia' are so excited over a darn building. they are far less concerned about people and lives.
except if the lives belong to certain types of people.
thanks to my good friend a for the forward.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: A
Below is an article that he wrote in 1993 for Washington Post.
Salient points:
VHP carried out a pogrom in Bombay
RSS killed Gandhi
Tharoor admits to being a pseudosecularist (he actually uses that term)
Tharoor calls Hindus in USA as expatriate fanatics
xxx
GROWING UP EXTREME; ON THE PECULIARLY VICIOUS FANATACISM OF EXPATRIATES
By Shashi Tharoor
Washington Post
ON AUG. 6, some 15,000 mostly Indian expatriates will assemble at the
Washington Hilton and the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a "global conference"
grandly titled "World Vision 2000." A glossy brochure promoting the
conference describes it as "a grand effort to bring (together) youths from
across the USA and around the world" to "deliberate on the Vision of
Wholeness for the future of life on our planet."
Under the blazing headline "Look Who Is Comming (sic) to the Global
Conference!" one finds, in bold, the names of President Clinton and the
Dalai Lama and, in more modest type, Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. Careful
scrutiny, however, reveals that these luminaries have not yet accepted
their invitations. And that those "dignitaries and spiritual leaders" who
have agreed to "guide the Global Conference" represent most of the pantheon
of India's Hindu extremist fringe.
The "Global Conference" is timed for the centenary of the appearance at
Chicago's World Parliament of Religions of the brilliant Hindu humanist
Swami Vivekananda, and its breathless blurbs seek to appropriate his
luster. But its organizers have no claim to the all-embracing tolerance and
wisdom of the late sage. They are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose "Vision"
extends most famously so far to the destruction of the Babri Mosque at
Ayodhya in northern India last December, an act that unleashed violence and
rioting on a scale not seen in India since independence.
The VHP, which enjoys the rare distinction of being considered more
extremist than the RSS, the party of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin, has made
something of a specialty of incitements to hatred. Under its auspices
during the recent Bombay programs, Muslims have been abused, attacked,
turned out of their homes, deprived of their livelihoods, butchered in the
streets. Its more articulate sympathizers have expressed admiration for
Hitler's way with inconvenient minorities. This is the happy crew of moral
and spiritual guides to whom 15,000 Indian emigre youngsters, some no doubt
inveigled by the prospect of hearing the Dalai Lama and the president, will
entrust their Washington weekend. When the brochure declares that "this
celebration will include a variety of high-quality programs to raise the
awareness of human beings about their future direction," one's natural
tendency to yawn is replaced by a shudder down a slowly chilling spine.
Washington seems an unlikely setting for a celebration of Hindu
fanaticism. And yet it is not such an improbable venue after all. For there
seems to be something about expatriation that breeds extremism.
The American ethnic mosaic is full of imported bigotry, from the Muslim
fundamentalists who have been trying with commendable ineptitude to blow up
New York to Miami's many Cuban votaries of vicious virtue. Indian Americans
have done their best to compete with these Fidelios of the foreign fringe.
A coven of well-heeled Hindu professionals from Southern California
recently swamped newspapers in India with a post-Ayodhya advertising
campaign designed to counteract the bleeding-heart "pseudosecularism" of
appalled liberals like myself who published denunciations of the
destruction of the mosque and its aftermath. The ads - a farrago of
ahistorical half-truths calling upon Indians in India to "awake," for
otherwise "India and Hindus are doomed" - were merely the latest evidence
that exile nurtures extremism. The "Global Conference" continues in this
tradition.
The strident chauvinism of these American Hindus is, after all, only one
more installment in a long saga of zeal abroad for radicalism at home. We
have already had expatriate Sikhs pouring money, weapons and organizational
skills into the cause of a "pure" (tobacco-free and barberless)
"Khalistan"; Irish Americans supporting, willfully or otherwise, IRA
terrorism in Northern Ireland; Jaffna Tamils in England financing the
murderous drive for Eelam in Sri Lanka; and lobbying groups of American
Jewry propounding positions on Palestinian issues that are far less
accommodating than those of the Israeli government itself.
The irony of political extremism being advocated from distant aeries of
bourgeois moderation is only the most obvious of the contradictions of this
phenomenon. The more visible Khalistanis of North America may have
carefully regroomed their beards and thrown away their cigarettes as
enjoined upon them by the Sikh scriptures, but they derive sustenance
almost entirely from clean-shaven expatriate co-religionists largely
unfamiliar with the prohibitions and injunctions of their faith. And the
Hindu chauvinists of Southern California flourish in a pluralist
melting-pot whose every quotidian experience is a direct contradiction of
the sectarianism they trumpet in the advertisement pages of newspapers in
India.
The explanation for this evident paradox may lie in the very nature of
expatriation. Most of the contemporary world's emigrants are people in
quest of material improvement, looking for financial security and
professional opportunities that, for one reason or another, they could not
attain in their own countries. Many of them left intending to return: A few
years abroad, a few more dollars in the bank, they told themselves, and
they would come back to their own hearths, triumphant over the adversity
that had led them to leave.
But the years kept stretching on, and the dollars were never quite
enough, or their needs mounted with their acquisitions, or they developed
new ties (career, wife, children, schooling) to their new land, and then
gradually the realization seeped in that they would never go back. And with
this realization, often only half-acknowledged, came a welter of emotions:
guilt, at the abandonment of the motherland, mixed with rage that the
motherland had somehow - through its own failings, political, economic,
social - forced them into this abandonment. The attitude of the expatriate
to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has
spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity.
That is why the support of extremism is doubly gratifying: It appeases
the expatriate's sense of guilt at not being involved in his homeland, and
it vindicates his decision to abandon it. (If the homeland he has left did
not have the faults he detests, he tells himself, he would not have had to
leave it.)
But that is not all. The expatriate also desperately needs to define
himself in his new society. He is reminded by his mirror, if not by the
nationals of his new land, that he is not entirely like them. In the midst
of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship and self-hatred, he
needs an identity to assert - a label of which he can be proud, yet which
does not undermine his choice of exile. He has rejected the reality of his
country but not, he declares fervently, the essential values he has derived
from his roots. As his children grow up "American" or "British," as they
slough off the assumptions, prejudices and fears of his own childhood, he
becomes even more assertive about them.
But his nostalgia is based on the selectiveness of memory; it is a
simplified, idealized recollection of his roots, often reduced to their
most elemental - family, caste, region, religion. In exile amongst
foreigners, he clings to a vision of what he really is that admits no
foreignness.
But the tragedy is that the culture he remembers, with both nostalgia
and rejection, has itself evolved - in interaction with others - on its
national soil. His perspective distorted by exile, the expatriate knows
nothing of this. His view of what used to be home is divorced from the
experience of home. Expatriates are no longer an organic part of the
culture, but severed digits that, in their yearning for the hand, can only
twist themselves into a clenched fist.
------------
Shashi Tharoor is the author of "The Great Indian Novel" and "Show
Business." His collection of short stories, "The Five-Dollar Smile," is
published by Arcade this month.
Salient points:
VHP carried out a pogrom in Bombay
RSS killed Gandhi
Tharoor admits to being a pseudosecularist (he actually uses that term)
Tharoor calls Hindus in USA as expatriate fanatics
xxx
GROWING UP EXTREME; ON THE PECULIARLY VICIOUS FANATACISM OF EXPATRIATES
By Shashi Tharoor
Washington Post
ON AUG. 6, some 15,000 mostly Indian expatriates will assemble at the
Washington Hilton and the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a "global conference"
grandly titled "World Vision 2000." A glossy brochure promoting the
conference describes it as "a grand effort to bring (together) youths from
across the USA and around the world" to "deliberate on the Vision of
Wholeness for the future of life on our planet."
Under the blazing headline "Look Who Is Comming (sic) to the Global
Conference!" one finds, in bold, the names of President Clinton and the
Dalai Lama and, in more modest type, Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. Careful
scrutiny, however, reveals that these luminaries have not yet accepted
their invitations. And that those "dignitaries and spiritual leaders" who
have agreed to "guide the Global Conference" represent most of the pantheon
of India's Hindu extremist fringe.
The "Global Conference" is timed for the centenary of the appearance at
Chicago's World Parliament of Religions of the brilliant Hindu humanist
Swami Vivekananda, and its breathless blurbs seek to appropriate his
luster. But its organizers have no claim to the all-embracing tolerance and
wisdom of the late sage. They are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose "Vision"
extends most famously so far to the destruction of the Babri Mosque at
Ayodhya in northern India last December, an act that unleashed violence and
rioting on a scale not seen in India since independence.
The VHP, which enjoys the rare distinction of being considered more
extremist than the RSS, the party of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin, has made
something of a specialty of incitements to hatred. Under its auspices
during the recent Bombay programs, Muslims have been abused, attacked,
turned out of their homes, deprived of their livelihoods, butchered in the
streets. Its more articulate sympathizers have expressed admiration for
Hitler's way with inconvenient minorities. This is the happy crew of moral
and spiritual guides to whom 15,000 Indian emigre youngsters, some no doubt
inveigled by the prospect of hearing the Dalai Lama and the president, will
entrust their Washington weekend. When the brochure declares that "this
celebration will include a variety of high-quality programs to raise the
awareness of human beings about their future direction," one's natural
tendency to yawn is replaced by a shudder down a slowly chilling spine.
Washington seems an unlikely setting for a celebration of Hindu
fanaticism. And yet it is not such an improbable venue after all. For there
seems to be something about expatriation that breeds extremism.
The American ethnic mosaic is full of imported bigotry, from the Muslim
fundamentalists who have been trying with commendable ineptitude to blow up
New York to Miami's many Cuban votaries of vicious virtue. Indian Americans
have done their best to compete with these Fidelios of the foreign fringe.
A coven of well-heeled Hindu professionals from Southern California
recently swamped newspapers in India with a post-Ayodhya advertising
campaign designed to counteract the bleeding-heart "pseudosecularism" of
appalled liberals like myself who published denunciations of the
destruction of the mosque and its aftermath. The ads - a farrago of
ahistorical half-truths calling upon Indians in India to "awake," for
otherwise "India and Hindus are doomed" - were merely the latest evidence
that exile nurtures extremism. The "Global Conference" continues in this
tradition.
The strident chauvinism of these American Hindus is, after all, only one
more installment in a long saga of zeal abroad for radicalism at home. We
have already had expatriate Sikhs pouring money, weapons and organizational
skills into the cause of a "pure" (tobacco-free and barberless)
"Khalistan"; Irish Americans supporting, willfully or otherwise, IRA
terrorism in Northern Ireland; Jaffna Tamils in England financing the
murderous drive for Eelam in Sri Lanka; and lobbying groups of American
Jewry propounding positions on Palestinian issues that are far less
accommodating than those of the Israeli government itself.
The irony of political extremism being advocated from distant aeries of
bourgeois moderation is only the most obvious of the contradictions of this
phenomenon. The more visible Khalistanis of North America may have
carefully regroomed their beards and thrown away their cigarettes as
enjoined upon them by the Sikh scriptures, but they derive sustenance
almost entirely from clean-shaven expatriate co-religionists largely
unfamiliar with the prohibitions and injunctions of their faith. And the
Hindu chauvinists of Southern California flourish in a pluralist
melting-pot whose every quotidian experience is a direct contradiction of
the sectarianism they trumpet in the advertisement pages of newspapers in
India.
The explanation for this evident paradox may lie in the very nature of
expatriation. Most of the contemporary world's emigrants are people in
quest of material improvement, looking for financial security and
professional opportunities that, for one reason or another, they could not
attain in their own countries. Many of them left intending to return: A few
years abroad, a few more dollars in the bank, they told themselves, and
they would come back to their own hearths, triumphant over the adversity
that had led them to leave.
But the years kept stretching on, and the dollars were never quite
enough, or their needs mounted with their acquisitions, or they developed
new ties (career, wife, children, schooling) to their new land, and then
gradually the realization seeped in that they would never go back. And with
this realization, often only half-acknowledged, came a welter of emotions:
guilt, at the abandonment of the motherland, mixed with rage that the
motherland had somehow - through its own failings, political, economic,
social - forced them into this abandonment. The attitude of the expatriate
to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has
spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity.
That is why the support of extremism is doubly gratifying: It appeases
the expatriate's sense of guilt at not being involved in his homeland, and
it vindicates his decision to abandon it. (If the homeland he has left did
not have the faults he detests, he tells himself, he would not have had to
leave it.)
But that is not all. The expatriate also desperately needs to define
himself in his new society. He is reminded by his mirror, if not by the
nationals of his new land, that he is not entirely like them. In the midst
of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship and self-hatred, he
needs an identity to assert - a label of which he can be proud, yet which
does not undermine his choice of exile. He has rejected the reality of his
country but not, he declares fervently, the essential values he has derived
from his roots. As his children grow up "American" or "British," as they
slough off the assumptions, prejudices and fears of his own childhood, he
becomes even more assertive about them.
But his nostalgia is based on the selectiveness of memory; it is a
simplified, idealized recollection of his roots, often reduced to their
most elemental - family, caste, region, religion. In exile amongst
foreigners, he clings to a vision of what he really is that admits no
foreignness.
But the tragedy is that the culture he remembers, with both nostalgia
and rejection, has itself evolved - in interaction with others - on its
national soil. His perspective distorted by exile, the expatriate knows
nothing of this. His view of what used to be home is divorced from the
experience of home. Expatriates are no longer an organic part of the
culture, but severed digits that, in their yearning for the hand, can only
twist themselves into a clenched fist.
------------
Shashi Tharoor is the author of "The Great Indian Novel" and "Show
Business." His collection of short stories, "The Five-Dollar Smile," is
published by Arcade this month.
4 comments:
"the RSS, the party of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin"
Similarly, does Shashi Tharoor have the guts to say "Islam, the religion of people who murder...". Secondly, does he belive that Islam is so ? No to both questions. Instead, he will say...just because a terrorist happens to be a Muslim, doesnt mean Islam is a religion of terrorists. And fair enough...but then please be consistent with your critique. But no, thats not what pseudo-secularists do. And Indian (read Hindu) psecs are worse than Whites. WHites may try to make Islam look good, but its only the Hindus who go a step further and blacken their own religion. Even the comparison of Hindus wanting to be united and strong (naturally, given their dismal record in teh past, which resulted in 1000 yrs of servitude) with the violent IRA, LTTE etc is ridiculous.
I hate to get personal, but seriously what shit do these Hindu men eat to feed their massive egos.
All,
Please indulge me in this rather lengthy reprisal to Mr. Tharoor ...
First of all of course, is the existential dilemma of the expatriate that Tharoor captures rather well. Everyone who is away from the motherland is in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Racism (discreet or otherwise), a lack of moorings, phone conversations with friends and family etc. all causing a yearning for home. And when you go home the corruption, the sheer physical discomfort that is India (Bangalore in any case), the impending sense of doom - all leading to foreign shores. It's a case of Buyer's Remorse - not once but twice over.
That is where truthfulness of Tharoor's analysis ends. Here is why
1- Babbar Khalsa for Sikhs, Eelam for Lanka Tamils, IRA for American Irish - but has any American Hindu funded killers or terrorists? Is there empirical, documented evidence of American Hindus providing cash to killers - if not then why cast us in the same mould?
2- I love it when they drop names like the "Hindu humanist Swami Vivekananda" - If Tharoor the Prized Idiot had actually read what Swamiji wrote he would have realised it was not all that different from what the "extremist expats" proclaim.
Swamiji was a "rabid communalist" - to use todays label for such thought. Incidentally his stance on Christian Missionaries hardened as he spent more time in America. First (15 Sep 1893) telling them that they were also as everyone else, merely Koop Mendakahas - but when the calumny of the Christist was raised to a shrill pitch (21 Feb 1894) it lead to the famous mud flinging exhortation. Such hardening in 5 months!!!
If even Swamiji is hardened in 5 months, why is Tharoor agitated if ordinary mortals are "extreme"?
But even that is not the point. can you imagine what would happen if Swamiji came back and uttered those same words in Detroit? What would the likes of Tharoor say? will they be scurrying around appearances on CNN defending him as a "Hindu humanist"? Or will they publicly refute the works of a brilliant scientist called Nikola Tesla for being influenced by Swamiji's "extremist" thought?
3- Brother Tharoor - the exile is no more "Self-hating" than you are. In fact I can attest from the example of my own life (raised as a typical middle class Delhi Brown Sahib) that cultural awareness about our past started only when I became an American Suburbanite.Greater assurance of economic affluence, expanded opportunities to learn, all lead to a greater need for self understanding. And through self-understanding comes self-repect.
True self-hatred is exibited only by those that turn away from their own inheritance so that they can "fit in" into the "global culture"....or "be accepted" as it were . And for what? A spotlighted seat on the world's greatest gravy train. This is the extent of this "moderates" contribution to the world. To become a leading light in a body or irrelevance..... Oh for the joy of a steady UN job....
if we are severed digits yearning for a hand - you my kind friend are a servile head, yearning for an ass so that it may be raised in an effort to kiss!
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