2
A Right too far
'Oh my love, it's a long way we've come
From the freckled hills to the steel and glass canyons
From the stony fields, to hanging steel from the sky
From digging in our pockets for a reason not to say goodbye'
U2 - The hands that built America
Noise is the hinge on which the doors of democracy open. It is the one characteristic that distinguishes it from any other alternative political system. Not for no reason was Eastern Europe referred to being under an ‘Iron Curtain’ during the years of the Cold War. And not for no reason do we see the rich and supposedly destined for greatness China going all out to block internet chat forums, Facebook and Twitter whenever civil disturbances raise their feeble head in the country. Noise denotes life, liveliness and interest. When combined with opinion it reflects participation. Democracies cannot run on mute and unlike our television channels, in our systems of governance we have to listen to all kinds of noises, wherever they emanate from and howsoever unpleasant they may be.
Developed and to some extent emerging democracies are increasing hearing new and perturbing voices. Voices they always believed the locomotives of their nations were far too superior to produce. Voices that are increasingly shrill and radical and are making those in the seat of power squirm uncomfortably. There is a direction that they are coming from. You only have to turn to your right and try and see far ahead, beyond the immediately obvious.
On 22nd of July, Anders Breivik single-handedly committed the deadliest armed attack in Scandinavia since the end of the Second World War. He blew up the façade of the Prime Minister’s office and then went on a shooting spree at the youth camp of the ruling party killing 69 and injuring many others. Before Breivik’s arrest the initial suspicion fell on Islamic terrorists and for good reason. Scandinavia has been under threat since the publication of the Prophet cartoon by a Danish daily a few years. It could have been entirely plausible that revenge had finally been sought for that perceived insult in the quiet of Oslo.
All convenient theories were however torn to shreds as Breivik laid down his automatic weapon and surrendered to the police on the island of Utoya where for more than hour he had emptied bullets on defenseless teenagers. Something that not just Norway but all of Europe and dare I say all of the developed West had overlooked or believed not to be of major consequence, had occurred right in their midst – Right wing home grown violence and terror.
Breivik’s action were an eventual culmination in practice of an ideology that has been spewing hate in theory (and internet chat rooms) across Europe over the last few years. As ‘indigenous’ population stagnated and migrants from poorer countries started entering the workforce, Western Europe’s much vaunted multiculturalism has increasingly felt the pressure coming from a Right that believes the ‘original’ nation is under siege. While till the turn of the century this debate was purely a fight for scarce resources and jobs and at one level even justifiably about illegal immigration, post 9/11 and the Afghan war, the toxic ingredient of Islamophobia has been added to the already unstable compound of frustrations.
These emotions are not confined to Europe alone. North America has also been experiencing a political divide that sharpens by the day. In the US, on the one side stands the Republican party that is shrill it is denouncement of everything that represents government. Ironically it cites the fiscally broke welfare states of Western Europe as examples of what US should not become and what its opponent, the Democratic party is hell bent on doing. The Republicans have never known to be anti-immigrant but their often harsh and illogical stance on illegal immigration (specially through Mexico) and perceived bias towards affluent and middle class suburban whites and Christian conservatives, has pushed the minority vote of blacks and Hispanics away from them. The Democrats meanwhile are ranged on the Left, resisting overt attachment to faith and counterbalancing the concerns of those who are ‘non-white’ in America. The political dialogue is mostly sharp, accusatory and bordering on the unpleasant. And it did not take long for a country where owning a gun is at times as easy as buying groceries from the nearest store, for violence to emanate from someone owning allegiance to the extreme right. In January of this year, Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives was shot at in an assassination attempt by a man who claimed that the government was ‘mind controlling’ the country and listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his influences. The shooting was clouded by what preceded it. Giffords had barely managed to get re-elected the previous November and during the campaign her office had been ransacked once and her constituency had been shown in the crosshairs of a gun in an election map put up on Sarah Palin’s website. As speculation over the cause of Gifford’s shooting continued, the political rhetoric only went up.
No society is free from violence and no society is completely open enough to accept everything and everyone it comes in touch with. But society itself is collection of individuals that have not always consented to living together with each and every one of them around. Unless we are ready to live in gated communities and by extension in gated colonies and gated nations, we will always have someone in every generation joining us as a new neighbor. Our fear of the outsider will only confine our world view, for the universe is large and our shells too small.
It is a question that we in India have grappled with as well. Our major metropolitan cities today are bursting at their seams and anti-migrant chants are not hard to hear. In Mumbai, self proclaimed cultural defenders have taken to attacking those they perceive as coming from outside and robbing locals of their jobs and draining the city of its resources. While the fight for our cities is a relatively new phenomenon, the tussle to own the heritage of the land and the country has been ongoing since the collapse of the Mughal Empire. Hindu nationalists have claimed the land as belonging to the nation’s largest faith on the basis of simple numbers and a view of history that begins only from 1000AD onwards when Muslim victories started resulting in permanent inhabitation of the conquered land. But India is much older than that and while Hinduism may have originated here, were the Aryans or the Indus Valley settlers the original squatters as far as history can logically see or did they too travel a distance before setting camp in the north-west of our subcontinent?
Within this debate are layered contexts of migration and movement? Both my father’s and mother’s family moved from comfortably settled and well to do households in Pakistan to the newly independent India during Partition. How much entitlement that does legacy bestow on people like me to call Delhi as ‘my city’ or more importantly to deny anyone else the right to enter its gates? And do I get that entitlement by virtue of birth or by ancestry? And how long does the bloodline have to run before the footprints of migration are erased forever and I become an accepted part of this city and the country?
Both Europe and the US, thus far, have experienced controlled and peaceful influx of outsiders, unlike India. Their engagement with multiple religions and cultures has been at the level and extent of their own choosing. Globalization has expanded boundaries of economies and nations while also expanding insecurities. The Indian sitting in far away Bangalore is no longer a mystic yogi for the average American but a potential job stealer. The turban wearing bearded man from the Middle East is not a carpet seller but a potential suicide bomber. The natural human response is to build walls, to appropriate resources, land and culture for those found ‘home grown’ enough. But every passing generation is layer upon one that came seeking a home. The blacks in the US came from Africa, the whites from England, Germany, Ireland, Russia and Eastern Europe. England was a Viking raiding territory before being conquered by Romans and then by the Anglo-Saxons. Germany was inhabited by fearful tribes before organized empires emerged in the middle ages.
The problem is not with nations defining boundaries or rules for admission, for that is how the modern civilized world must live. The problem lies in the politics of hate or more clearly the politics of the ‘other’. A strand of polity that solely focuses on the supposed negatives of the ‘other’ corrodes the moral correctness of the accuser. The need to banish the outsider and protect the native has now been combined with the need to protect the native culture and religion. This is the translation of the extreme right. The extreme left translated it as a battle between the earner and the seeker. Both demonized one against the other and both have not proven shy of pressing the trigger of a gunshot to make their voice heard. And while governments of the day have maintained that these mini-volcanoes of hate are too small and too dormant to release any harmful lava in the mainstream, incidents like those in Norway only reflect how day to day political speech is influencing those on the margins. It sounds uncomfortable but an Oslo bombed by an Al-Qeada trained Muslim would have been a terror attack but an Oslo shaken up by a Breviek becomes an act of a loony nutcase. As we never tire of saying, terror has no identity, religion or language. If it does not discriminate between the victims then why the discrimination between perpetrators?
The onus is on the center to balance the scale and push the hardliners to the margins. Both the Left and the Right have a place in polity but the language of political discourse needs to consider its message and those that interpret it on the outside. The shrillness and vitriol of words can soon be matched by deadly action as demonstrated in Oslo. Nations cannot open their gates with accepting arms to every outsiders, but they also cannot run around rubber stamping their citizens as owners and dependants. The creation of the planet preceded the creation of the species that now inhabits it. That should settle all disputes claiming ‘original ownership’ of land.
|
From the freckled hills to the steel and glass canyons
From the stony fields, to hanging steel from the sky
From digging in our pockets for a reason not to say goodbye'
U2 - The hands that built America
Noise is the hinge on which the doors of democracy open. It is the one characteristic that distinguishes it from any other alternative political system. Not for no reason was Eastern Europe referred to being under an ‘Iron Curtain’ during the years of the Cold War. And not for no reason do we see the rich and supposedly destined for greatness China going all out to block internet chat forums, Facebook and Twitter whenever civil disturbances raise their feeble head in the country. Noise denotes life, liveliness and interest. When combined with opinion it reflects participation. Democracies cannot run on mute and unlike our television channels, in our systems of governance we have to listen to all kinds of noises, wherever they emanate from and howsoever unpleasant they may be.
Developed and to some extent emerging democracies are increasing hearing new and perturbing voices. Voices they always believed the locomotives of their nations were far too superior to produce. Voices that are increasingly shrill and radical and are making those in the seat of power squirm uncomfortably. There is a direction that they are coming from. You only have to turn to your right and try and see far ahead, beyond the immediately obvious.
On 22nd of July, Anders Breivik single-handedly committed the deadliest armed attack in Scandinavia since the end of the Second World War. He blew up the façade of the Prime Minister’s office and then went on a shooting spree at the youth camp of the ruling party killing 69 and injuring many others. Before Breivik’s arrest the initial suspicion fell on Islamic terrorists and for good reason. Scandinavia has been under threat since the publication of the Prophet cartoon by a Danish daily a few years. It could have been entirely plausible that revenge had finally been sought for that perceived insult in the quiet of Oslo.
All convenient theories were however torn to shreds as Breivik laid down his automatic weapon and surrendered to the police on the island of Utoya where for more than hour he had emptied bullets on defenseless teenagers. Something that not just Norway but all of Europe and dare I say all of the developed West had overlooked or believed not to be of major consequence, had occurred right in their midst – Right wing home grown violence and terror.
Breivik’s action were an eventual culmination in practice of an ideology that has been spewing hate in theory (and internet chat rooms) across Europe over the last few years. As ‘indigenous’ population stagnated and migrants from poorer countries started entering the workforce, Western Europe’s much vaunted multiculturalism has increasingly felt the pressure coming from a Right that believes the ‘original’ nation is under siege. While till the turn of the century this debate was purely a fight for scarce resources and jobs and at one level even justifiably about illegal immigration, post 9/11 and the Afghan war, the toxic ingredient of Islamophobia has been added to the already unstable compound of frustrations.
These emotions are not confined to Europe alone. North America has also been experiencing a political divide that sharpens by the day. In the US, on the one side stands the Republican party that is shrill it is denouncement of everything that represents government. Ironically it cites the fiscally broke welfare states of Western Europe as examples of what US should not become and what its opponent, the Democratic party is hell bent on doing. The Republicans have never known to be anti-immigrant but their often harsh and illogical stance on illegal immigration (specially through Mexico) and perceived bias towards affluent and middle class suburban whites and Christian conservatives, has pushed the minority vote of blacks and Hispanics away from them. The Democrats meanwhile are ranged on the Left, resisting overt attachment to faith and counterbalancing the concerns of those who are ‘non-white’ in America. The political dialogue is mostly sharp, accusatory and bordering on the unpleasant. And it did not take long for a country where owning a gun is at times as easy as buying groceries from the nearest store, for violence to emanate from someone owning allegiance to the extreme right. In January of this year, Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives was shot at in an assassination attempt by a man who claimed that the government was ‘mind controlling’ the country and listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his influences. The shooting was clouded by what preceded it. Giffords had barely managed to get re-elected the previous November and during the campaign her office had been ransacked once and her constituency had been shown in the crosshairs of a gun in an election map put up on Sarah Palin’s website. As speculation over the cause of Gifford’s shooting continued, the political rhetoric only went up.
No society is free from violence and no society is completely open enough to accept everything and everyone it comes in touch with. But society itself is collection of individuals that have not always consented to living together with each and every one of them around. Unless we are ready to live in gated communities and by extension in gated colonies and gated nations, we will always have someone in every generation joining us as a new neighbor. Our fear of the outsider will only confine our world view, for the universe is large and our shells too small.
It is a question that we in India have grappled with as well. Our major metropolitan cities today are bursting at their seams and anti-migrant chants are not hard to hear. In Mumbai, self proclaimed cultural defenders have taken to attacking those they perceive as coming from outside and robbing locals of their jobs and draining the city of its resources. While the fight for our cities is a relatively new phenomenon, the tussle to own the heritage of the land and the country has been ongoing since the collapse of the Mughal Empire. Hindu nationalists have claimed the land as belonging to the nation’s largest faith on the basis of simple numbers and a view of history that begins only from 1000AD onwards when Muslim victories started resulting in permanent inhabitation of the conquered land. But India is much older than that and while Hinduism may have originated here, were the Aryans or the Indus Valley settlers the original squatters as far as history can logically see or did they too travel a distance before setting camp in the north-west of our subcontinent?
Within this debate are layered contexts of migration and movement? Both my father’s and mother’s family moved from comfortably settled and well to do households in Pakistan to the newly independent India during Partition. How much entitlement that does legacy bestow on people like me to call Delhi as ‘my city’ or more importantly to deny anyone else the right to enter its gates? And do I get that entitlement by virtue of birth or by ancestry? And how long does the bloodline have to run before the footprints of migration are erased forever and I become an accepted part of this city and the country?
Both Europe and the US, thus far, have experienced controlled and peaceful influx of outsiders, unlike India. Their engagement with multiple religions and cultures has been at the level and extent of their own choosing. Globalization has expanded boundaries of economies and nations while also expanding insecurities. The Indian sitting in far away Bangalore is no longer a mystic yogi for the average American but a potential job stealer. The turban wearing bearded man from the Middle East is not a carpet seller but a potential suicide bomber. The natural human response is to build walls, to appropriate resources, land and culture for those found ‘home grown’ enough. But every passing generation is layer upon one that came seeking a home. The blacks in the US came from Africa, the whites from England, Germany, Ireland, Russia and Eastern Europe. England was a Viking raiding territory before being conquered by Romans and then by the Anglo-Saxons. Germany was inhabited by fearful tribes before organized empires emerged in the middle ages.
The problem is not with nations defining boundaries or rules for admission, for that is how the modern civilized world must live. The problem lies in the politics of hate or more clearly the politics of the ‘other’. A strand of polity that solely focuses on the supposed negatives of the ‘other’ corrodes the moral correctness of the accuser. The need to banish the outsider and protect the native has now been combined with the need to protect the native culture and religion. This is the translation of the extreme right. The extreme left translated it as a battle between the earner and the seeker. Both demonized one against the other and both have not proven shy of pressing the trigger of a gunshot to make their voice heard. And while governments of the day have maintained that these mini-volcanoes of hate are too small and too dormant to release any harmful lava in the mainstream, incidents like those in Norway only reflect how day to day political speech is influencing those on the margins. It sounds uncomfortable but an Oslo bombed by an Al-Qeada trained Muslim would have been a terror attack but an Oslo shaken up by a Breviek becomes an act of a loony nutcase. As we never tire of saying, terror has no identity, religion or language. If it does not discriminate between the victims then why the discrimination between perpetrators?
The onus is on the center to balance the scale and push the hardliners to the margins. Both the Left and the Right have a place in polity but the language of political discourse needs to consider its message and those that interpret it on the outside. The shrillness and vitriol of words can soon be matched by deadly action as demonstrated in Oslo. Nations cannot open their gates with accepting arms to every outsiders, but they also cannot run around rubber stamping their citizens as owners and dependants. The creation of the planet preceded the creation of the species that now inhabits it. That should settle all disputes claiming ‘original ownership’ of land.
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