Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Women Sold Into Slavery in Haryana

    Selective abortion has made women scarce, so they are coerced and exploited.

  • Ishtiaq Ahmed on Apostasy

    Are we all then to be hanged because we question dogma?

  • Profile of Maryam Namazie

    She rejects attempts to silence all criticism of theocratic regimes as ‘racism’ or ‘Islamophobic.’

  • Falling

    However, despite Sutherland’s inexplicable resort to Islamophobiawatch as a source, it was pleasing to see Daniel Dennett reply to Bunting and Brown. I replied to them myself here and here but I was just filling in the time until Dennett got around to it.

    I find it amusing that two Brits – Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse – have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore. When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: “Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch!” – where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski writes tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it!

    Yes, well, Bunting isn’t famous for staying upright for these things – but what caused Ruse’s pratfall, is an interesting and puzzling question.

    A few evolutionists, such as Ruse and Eugenie Scott, the director of the national centre for science education, favour the tactic of insisting that evolutionary biology doesn’t deny the existence of a divine creator…Many others, such as Dawkins and myself, fear that the evasiveness of this gambit fuels suspicion and so contributes to ongoing confusion in the US.

    And anyway this whole notion that tactics and gambits and evasion are a good idea (or, in Ruse’s apparent view, more like mandatory) depends on the idea that whatever the tactic is supposed to further is more important than whatever the tactic puts second or last. But maybe it isn’t. Teaching science instead of religion in science class is very important, but it’s not automatically or self-evidently more important than, say, telling the truth, or resisting the general idea that atheism is shameful and something to be hidden or apologized for.

    Bunting says: “All protagonists in a debate have a moral responsibility to ensure that the hot air they are expending generates light, not just heat.” I agree, but Bunting goes on: “It’s a point that escapes Dawkins” – and I wonder how she cannot see that it is not Dawkins but Ruse, whom she justly describes as reckless, whose hot air ought to be allowed to vent harmlessly in the shadows, not featured in a major newspaper. I tried to do just that with my private reply, “I doubt you mean all the things you say”, to Ruse’s email. Bunting calls this “an opaque one line”. Could she not see that I was trying to bring Michael to his senses in private, before he made an ass of himself in public?

    No, clearly she couldn’t – because she was too busy making common cause with the brave atheist-challenger. She couldn’t be bothered to read carefully – hence the failure to remain upright. Splat. And note what Dennet said there, twice – ‘private’. You may remember (probably not, but you may) that I have always said ‘as far as I know’ he didn’t give Ruse permission to send their correspondence to Dembski – but that ‘in private’ seems like a pretty clear sign that he didn’t give permission and wouldn’t have if he’d been asked. Not that I had any doubt on the subject, but I didn’t want to claim to know when I didn’t.

    It didn’t work, but I’m glad I tried. I wish she, and Andrew Brown (When evolutionists attack, March 6), had followed my example, but I suppose that once Ruse went public, the spectacle of him calling Dawkins and me names was irresistible. It is not just the protagonists who have a moral responsibility; those who report on them have a moral responsibility to direct the public’s attention to real issues, and to avoid being complicit in publicity stunts by the likes of Dembski. If Bunting and Brown get emails from Dembski saying “Keep up the good work!”, they should search their souls.

    A hit, a very palpable hit.

  • Watch It

    John Sutherland is a little worried that Phyllis Chesler may have an Islamophobia problem. He cites a very weighty and authoritative source to back this up:

    The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled “the point of total dementia”.

    The blog Islamophobia Watch? Has he read it much? It equates any criticism of or dissent from Islam at all with ‘Islamophobia’ and (of course) it equates ‘Islamophobia’ with hatred of Muslims which it equates with or simply considers identical to racism – so, criticism of Islam (including of course by people from Iran, Pakistan, and other ‘brown’ countries) amounts to racism. That’s stupid, and it works to stifle criticism and dissent, and it works to stifle them in advance of consideration of the substance of the criticism or dissent – it stifles them sight unseen, as racism. This is not intelligent or thoughtful stuff, and it seems peculiar that someone as clever as Sutherland would refer to it in that breezily uncritical way.

  • Football, Race and ‘Identity’

    Leipzig fans spit and hoot at Nigerian footballer. There’s solidarity for you.

  • Christians in Afghanistan

    Persecution has turned Afghan converts into a closely knit underground organization.

  • Dude, I Bedazzled These Jeans

    Padma Lakshmi like talks to a Times reporter.

  • Phyllis Chesler Talks to John Sutherland

    Sutherland quotes the wisdom of Islamophobiawatch.

  • Dennett Replies to Bunting and Ruse

    Reporters should avoid being complicit in publicity stunts by the likes of Dembski.

  • Plaid

    Consider monism. The Ethics of Identity page 143-4.

    Many theorists – among them William Galston, John Gray, Bhikhu Parekh, and Uday Singh Meta – hold the great enemy to be monism, and, in particular, the philosophical monism they associate with the classic texts of liberalism, not excluding Mill himself. The monist tradition that Parekh has painstakingly traced, in his Rethinking Multiculturalism, starts with Plato and haunts us still; it is characterized by a belief in the universality of human nature…Raz is faulted for his bigoted insistence on autonomy; Kymlicka is faulted for the requirement that national minorities must, at least in some measure, respect liberal principles of individual liberty. The trail of the monist serpent is over them all.

    But the trail of the monist serpent is over a lot of things, including a lot of identity-thought. We’re never just one thing – and the things we are are never just identity. The categories we label ‘identity’ always have some sort of content or meaning (which is why they’re not just identities – if they were, they wouldn’t be, because who wants an empty identity?). The categories have some kind of aboutness, and they are always, because of this aboutness, multiple and in competition or conversation with others. We have more than one interest, more than one thought, more than one idea, more than one desire, even more than one project, so we can’t sum ourselves up in one word. We are women or men, American or Indian, Muslim or atheist – but we’re also poet, runner, walker, friend, knitter, hang-glider, cook, wit (Appiah says that’s not an available identity now, but I’m not so sure), gardener, movie buff, expert on sitcoms, musician, birder – and so on. We’re plaid, or paisley, not red or blue.

    And identity is both internal and external, which complicates it further. In that sense one could say that nearly everything, or everything that matters to us, is an identity claim of sorts. Take truth for instance. Truth matters to me – because it matters outside me. I take it to matter in the world, and therefore it matters to me: I don’t want to be the kind of person who assents to a lie. Internal and external are all mixed up in that thought. What we think matters in the world, what we think is good or bad, feeds into how we think of ourselves, and how we want to think of ourselves. Truth or compassion matter to us, we care about them, we think they matter – but that is because we do think they do matter externally, independent of us. The two are hooked up.

    So – identity matters, but it’s not a pure thing or a single thing or a clear unmixed uncontaminated limpid crystalline thing. It’s something like the back of a rug, with all the knots sticking out.

  • The Raven Itself is Hoarse

    Well there I was thinking the restored update thing was going just swimmingly, and then I had a horrible experience yesterday evening when I sent the third one. I got emails back saying it didn’t work: people clicked on the links and got nothing. All my hair stood on end, the glass shivered in the windows, the milk turned sour in the fridge, and the barometer fell. So I howled, and flung myself back and forth in a passion, and threw things, and then I sent a new update to myself and tested it and then sent it to the list, with an apology. But it’s very annoying. I have no idea why it didn’t work, and don’t like having it mysteriously pointlessly arbitrarily malfunction on me. I don’t like irritating the people on the mailing list by sending them big dud updates that don’t work.

    On the other hand, I like the side benefit of the group that it gives links to similar groups, which in turn (I finally realized when I finally bothered to look at one) link to B&W. It’s – erm – kind of like a Community. An Identity Group. I feel all warm and cozy and secure, and I’ll just wander around murmuring ‘there’s no place like home’ for the rest of my life and never think foolish thoughts about freedom or escape or adventure ever again. No but seriously, I do quite like that feature. I like Massimo Pigliucci’s work, for one thing.

    And I’ve had a lot of emails from people saying they’re glad the update is back and they think highly of B&W, so as long as I can manage not to send out a dud update every week (or in fact ever again), it still seems to be worth it.

  • Fumblings in the Dark

    A thought for the day or two.

    Sam Harris doing a spot of the ever-popular ‘religion-bashing’:

    It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

    Ben Goldacre getting cross with pseudoscientific burbling:

    I’m waiting to be very impressed by any kid who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage, but it’s going to involve dissection with the sharp scissors that only mummy can use…Children listen to what you tell them: that’s the point of being a child, that’s the reason why you don’t come out fully-formed, speaking English with a favourite album…I’ve just kicked the Brain Gym Teacher’s Edition around the room for two minutes and I’m feeling minty fresh.

    Ben Goldacre a week later getting cross with mindless reactions to his strictures on pseudoscientific burbling:

    Nothing prepared me for the outpouring of jaw-dropping stupidity that vomited forth from teachers when I wrote about Brain Gym last week. To recap: Brain Gym is an incredibly popular technique, in at least hundreds of British state schools, promoted all over government websites, and with a scientific explanatory framework that is barkingly out to lunch…So I attacked the stupid underlying science of Brain Gym – I even said I actively agree with exercise breaks – and in return I got a whole load of angry, abusive emails from teachers defending exercise breaks.

    And for dessert, one that Chris Whiley sent me last month:

    From Diderot, lifted from Philipp Blom’s ‘Encyclopedie’; “Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly’. This stranger is a theologian.”

    Blow out your candle, stimulate your carotid arteries by massaging your rib cage, and have a nice day.

  • Move over ID, here comes Bhartiya Creationism

    Even as the intelligent design controversy rages on, California recently
    witnessed a concerted push by a coalition of three Hindutva (Hindu
    supremacist) groups – Hindu Education Foundation, Vedic Foundation and
    the Hindu American Foundation – to doctor sixth grade social science
    textbooks. Their strong ideological and organizational links with the
    Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India makes them all the more
    dangerous, for any success here would provide a much-needed fillip to
    the RSS family of organizations in India [1]. Fortunately, interventions
    by a group of Indologists led by Professor Michael Witzel and strong
    mobilizations by the South Asian community resulted in a resounding
    defeat for the Hindutva groups.

    As repeatedly pointed out by groups at the forefront of the California
    struggle, the edits proposed by the Hindutva groups sought to negate
    the “great pluralism within Hindu practice, as well as the religious
    diversity within Indian society” [2]. For this purpose, the Hindutva
    forces hired the PR firm Ruder Finn which has a reputation of targeting
    liberals, feminists and Jews and mobilizing public opinion for American
    intervention in the Balkans [3]. However, “His Divinity, Dharm
    Chakrvarti” Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, the spiritual leader of the
    Texas-based Vedic Foundation has dug them such a deep hole that even
    Ruder Finn – with all its ruthlessness – would have a hard time
    salvaging any respectability for its clients. Saraswati’s magnum opus,
    “The true history and the religion of India”, reeks of megalomania from
    start to finish and is bound to be an embarrassment for any practicing
    Hindu [4].

    If Saraswati were one of those dime-a-dozen Swamis, his book could have
    been dismissed as a failed attempt at humor. However, as the Vedic
    Foundation’s aggressive posturing in California demonstrated, they are
    out to mythologize history and science. In the last few decades, the
    rationalist currents in Indian philosophy have gradually been supplanted
    by the ideology of Hindutva and the megalomania of the Vedic Foundation
    nicely dovetails into the Hindutva agenda [5]. What follows is a
    fictional account of a tête-à-tête between Prakashanand Saraswati and a
    Hindutva activist; except for questions #6 and #7, Saraswati’s responses
    are taken almost verbatim from his book.

    Q1: The Western mind seems incapable of comprehending the significance
    of our sacred places and rivers. Why would anyone want to take a dip in
    the dirty waters of say, the river Ganges, they ask [6].

    A: The holy rivers or places that come in the Puranas eternally exist
    as the Divine personalities, or the Divine existences in the Divine
    abode of the supreme God. Their representation in the from of rivers or
    places on the land of India is a kind of holy manifestation of the
    Divinity on the material plane for the devotional benefit of the
    devotees of God, just like the Vedas and the Puranas are in a book form
    in the material world and they are in their Divine form in the Divine
    world.

    Q2: How different are the western religions from our Bhartiya religion [7]?

    A: In no way could there be any comparison of the western religions
    (which are based on mythologies) with the Hindu Vedic religion which is
    eternal, universal and is directly revealed by the supreme God.

    Q3: The California textbooks refer to some of our sacred texts as myths…

    A: Divine writings cannot be analyzed in a material way. How could a
    worldly being, possessed with the vehemence of his own passions and
    desires, try to argue with the writings of Sages and Saints whose entire
    life was a divine benevolence for the souls of the world? You should
    know that all of our religious writings are Divine facts, and facts
    always remain facts, they cannot become myths. Using the word myth for
    our religious history is a serious spiritual transgression.

    Q4: In the California struggle, the anti-Hindu side has gotten a lot of
    support from scholars and academics specializing in South Asia. Is this
    of any consequence?

    A: It is a fact that in the world almost all the academic literature in
    English about Hinduism, even by Hindu writers, bears the western
    influence, and that, none of these books represent the correct view of
    total authentic Hinduism. Historians forget that one cannot determine
    the history of Bharatvarsh on meager archaeological findings of coins,
    toys and pots. Whereas the general history of Bharatvarsh is already
    written in its scriptures and the Puranas whose texts and the
    philosophical descriptions are the outcome of the Gracious and
    benevolent minds of eternal Saints.

    Also, arguing about the proven facts of the Bhartiya history (which are
    re-authenticated by our great Masters) by a worldly person (even if he
    is a higher degree holder) who is attached to his intellectual,
    emotional and sensual enjoyments of a pure worldly nature, is like a
    school going science student, who has read some science fiction stories,
    happens to visit NASA Research Institute and sneaks into the research
    chamber and starts telling the scientists how they are. But, this is the
    age of the freedom of speech, anyone could say anything; still the fact
    remains the fact and the fiction remains the fiction.

    Q5. But, Swamiji, some people dismiss such attitudes as
    anti-intellectualistic…

    A: Some people have a critical nature and a leaning towards
    non-Godliness which is the sign of the impiousness of their heart and
    the biased structure of their mind. It is the nature of such people that
    they cannot tolerate to read or hear about the authentic and eternal
    Divineness of Bhartiya religion and Bhartiya history which is described
    in the Puranas especially in the Bhagwatam. It is thus wise to leave
    them to live with their own beliefs and don’t try to unnecessarily argue
    with them to accept the right thing.

    Q6: Swamiji, you write in your book: “We find that the ancient society
    of Greece had adopted certain social customs that were prevailing in
    India. Such as: the husband headed the family and the wife ran the
    household affairs; parents arranged and decided their children’s
    marriage; a girl was controlled and protected by her parents before
    marriage and by her husband after marriage; and many more such customs.”
    The California textbooks say the same — that “men had many more rights
    than women” – but the Hindu Education Foundation has called this a
    distortion of truth and the Hindu American Foundation has threatened to
    sue the California State Board over this (and other things).

    A: I don’t take much interest in such worldly matters, puthra (son).

    Q7: In two years, Texas school textbooks (dealing with Indian history)
    will be up for review. “Anything is possible in Bush-land” your devotees
    say, and a friend has claimed that the “Hindu American community of
    Texas has already started gearing up for quite some time now, and has
    been historically very well organized for over a decade.” What are your
    thoughts on this fight closer home?

    A: Puthra, the whole brahmand (universe) is the creation of our Lord.
    Such geographical differences don’t matter to us Swamis; California or
    Texas or New Delhi, it’s all the same for us. And if we don’t succeed
    the first time, we won’t quit. As Swami Vivekanand said: “Arise, awake
    and stop not till the goal is reached.”

    Q8: Swamiji, could you comment on the Divinity of our scriptures?

    A: Bhartiya scriptures are the Divine powers eternally residing in
    the Divine abode of God. With the will of God they are introduced in the
    world through Brahma who transfers this knowledge to the Rishis (Sages).
    Later on those Rishis reproduce them in the form of scriptures; their
    very first manifestation was trillions of years ago when our Brahmand
    (universe) along with the planetary system was originally created by
    Brahma. Our scriptures also reveal the various sciences (Sanskrit
    grammar and language, astrology, sociology, defense and medicine etc.)
    for the good of the people of the world in general. It is an axiom that
    everything that is produced by God is eternal, because God is eternal.
    Thus, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the path to God are both
    eternal, and the scriptures containing those knowledges along with the
    Sanskrit language are also eternal. And the Vedas and the Upnishads
    themselves reveal their own eternity along with the other scriptures as
    well as the Sanskrit grammar also.

    Q9: Papal infallibility adds an aura to the Catholic Church. Are
    Bhartiya scriptures infallible too?

    A: Bhartiya must know that our scriptures were produced by God
    Himself Who is the creator of the entire universe, and they were
    introduced in the world by Brahma who is the creator of this very
    brahmand. Thus, they are the absolute truth and there could never be a
    mistake in their philosophy. Whatever theoretical discrepancies are
    found between Bhartiya scriptures and the modern science, they are only
    in the theories of the worldly scientists because they are the products
    of material minds.

    Q10: What can (potential) participants in the 4-week study course (based
    on your book) offered by the Vedic Foundation learn about Bhartiya
    scriptures?

    A: In the Bhartiya scriptures, sincere intellectuals find all the
    answers of their intellectual quest; pious scientists find the
    consolence of their heart and a guideline for their future research;
    truthful scholars find the philosophy of their liking that opens the
    path to God; and the selfless devotees of God find such a sure and
    simple path of devotion and adoration to their beloved God that fills
    their heart and mind with the sweetness of the devotional love. An
    impious mind does not accept the Divine truth.

    Q11: Thanks, Swamiji, for your concise definitions of sincerity, piety,
    truthfulness and selflessness. But why have the scientists ignored the
    wealth of knowledge in our scriptures, and instead propounded such
    fantastic theories as the Big Bang? Are they all impious?

    A: Hindu scriptures reveal the scientific axioms that are extremely
    helpful in the research and the development of science. But, the
    intelligentsia of the world as well as the researchers of the physical
    sciences, being skeptical of Hindu religion, never thought of using the
    scientific knowledge of the Upnishads and the Puranas to promote their
    study and researches in the right direction. Had they trusted the Divine
    greatness of our scriptures, the scientific achievements of the world
    would have been much more positive, productive and directed towards the
    right direction.

    Q12: Do our scriptures discuss the science of creation?

    A: Of course, they do! Our scriptures describe the origin, evolution
    and the creation of this universe which is apparently the manifestation
    of an endless, eternal and lifeless energy that works with the help of
    God and involves unlimited number of infinitesimal souls which remain
    under its bondage. They are the manifestations of the same Divine power
    which has created this universe and so they bear the true principles of
    the creation and the evolution science. According to the Bhagwatam,
    which represents the total knowledge of all the Bhartiya scriptures, our
    planetary system (along with all the celestial abodes) was originally
    created by Brahma 155.5219719616 trillion years ago.

    Q13: Thanks, Swamiji. Such accurate estimates of the age of the universe
    are indeed a tribute to Vedic astronomy and mathematics. However, when
    Christian theories of creation have failed in the west, how can we hope
    for acceptance of the Bhartiya theory of creation?

    A: One thing we must know is that most of the scientists,
    archaeologists and geologists, who directly deal with the natural
    phenomena all the time in their life, do not believe in God; because the
    dogmatic God of the Bible does not appeal to their intellect and they
    are mostly unaware of the universal Graciousness of the Hindu religion.
    So, they don’t want to bring God into their theory. However, I share Dr.
    Deendayal Khandelwal’s hope that “the facts brought to light in this
    book about creation and languages will lead to new research in the
    fields of anthropology and astronomy and will lead (both Indians and
    non-Indians) to search for new directions for research in the fields of
    physical sciences based on the Hindu scriptural statements.” I also hope
    that more people will echo the thoughts of Dr. Mahesh Mehta, founder of
    the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America: “The time has come that the
    scientific knowledges of the Upnishads in relation to the Creation
    should be considered as a guideline for further researches in cosmology.”

    Q14: Your thoughts on Sanskrit…

    A: Sanskrit is the language of the Divine abodes, which are inhabited
    with unlimited Saints who are always drowned in the felicity of the
    Bliss of their beloved God. Being the Divine language it is perfect by
    its own nature. The perfection of the pronunciation and the uniqueness
    of the grammar that stays the same in all the ages (from the very
    beginning of human civilization and up till today) are such features
    which themselves prove that Sanskrit is not man-made; it is a divine
    gift to the people of this world. Sanskrit language has never had any
    dialect, and in every age and in every corner of this brahmand (and the
    earth planet) it always remains the same. To understand the Divine
    greatness of the Sanskrit language, you have to know the origination and
    the shortcomings of the western languages.

    Q15: For the uninitiated, could you describe the salient features of our
    religion?

    A: The religion of Bharatvarsh is the direct descension of the Grace
    of God which is manifested in the form of our Divine scriptures. They
    reveal the total philosophy of each and every aspect of God and the
    creation of this universe, and, at the same time, they also reveal the
    process of God realization with all the necessary informations, whatever
    a devotee may need during his devotional period … The history and the
    religion of Bharatvarsh are not like the history and the religion of the
    western world which contains the accounts and the ideologies of the
    material beings; this is the description of the Divine personalities,
    Divine acts of our Sages and Saints, Divine descensions, and the
    knowledge of the Divine approach to God that enables a soul to receive
    God realization.

    Q16: Thanks, Swamiji, that was very enlightening! But why doesn’t the
    West appreciate the Divine Divinity of our Divine culture?

    A: This is the age of materialism called kaliyug that started 5,101
    years ago (3102 BC). The effects of kaliyug are to despise the Divine
    truth and to elevate the anti-God elements in the name of God. In the
    last 200 years such despisations were much greater when the English
    regime tried to destroy the culture and the religion of India by all
    means, and, during that time, they deliberately produced such derogatory
    literatures in huge quantities that confused and misguided the whole
    world. Trying to impose the worldliness of their own culture upon the
    Hindu faith, they introduced such fictitious theories and disparaging
    dogmas that produced a derogatory and demeaning view of Hinduism. These
    publications affected the minds of Hindu writers to such an extent that
    they also began to think and write on the same lines.

    Q17: Swamiji, you say: “Through its unbroken [1,900 million-years-old
    Ganges valley] civilization, India provides an unbroken Divine facility
    to obtain the Divine knowledge and to proceed on the path to God
    realization to the souls of the whole world.” How do we account for our
    current subordinate status?

    A: Our Divine teachings were restricted from reaching the souls of the
    world by extensively promulgating the adverse propagations about
    Bhartiya (Hindu) religion and culture by the Britishers of that time,
    and in this way the whole world remained bereft of the true knowledge of
    God realization. Thus, they deceived and misguided the whole world by
    such acts that damaged the spiritual growth of millions of people of the
    world. Its effects have gone so deep in the Hindu society that many of
    the followers of Hinduism are not bereft of its damaging effects and it
    shows up in their writings. All this has ruined the image of the Divine
    greatness of Bhartiya religion and history.

    Q18: In your 800-page masterpiece, you describe in copious detail the
    damage caused to Hindu society by British rule (and also due to the
    Muslim invasions). I am glad that there’s hardly any mention of caste in
    your book, all this noise about caste and caste-based discrimination is
    very unnerving and so anti-Hindu.

    The swami flashes a knowing smile and takes off on his Pushpak
    Vimana, “which could fly at the speed of thought” [8]

    Notes

    1) The California struggle’s significance for the Sangh Parivar is best
    illustrated by the Organiser’s (the RSS’s English mouthpiece) keen
    interest in this issue, the active participation of numerous Hindutva
    ideologues from India, and this premature proclamation of victory by an
    activist during a global RSS meeting held in Ahmedabad in December 2005:
    “Through the Hindu Education Foundation run by the RSS in California, we
    have succeeded in correcting the misleading information in text books
    for primary and secondary classes.” [The Times of India, Ahmedabad
    Edition, Dec 31, 2005] The political significance of this struggle was
    not lost on the other side as well, as numerous activist (including
    Dalit) groups and academics who had fought against the RSS’s
    saffronization project in India also wrote to the Board.

    2) See the letter here.
    This is an excellent resource page
    for the California struggle. For a concise overview of this issue,
    see “History Hungama: California Textbook Debate”.
    The South Asia Citizens Web is an excellent
    resource page for Hindutva attempts at writing history in India.

    3) Ruder Finn’s President James Harff once said, “We are not paid to be
    moral.” That he really meant what he said is evident from Ruder Finn’s
    activities in the past few years and their current support of Hindutva.
    For more on Ruder Finn, see PRWatch.org.

    4) Not surprisingly, the book has won laurels from senior Hindutva
    ideologues like Tarun Vijay [Editor of the RSS’s Hindi weekly,
    Panchjanya], Vishnu Hari Dalmia (President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad)
    and Mahesh Mehta (founder of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America).

    5) The invention of a distant Golden Age is one of the cornerstones of
    the Hindutva ideology. As Christopher Jaffrelot explains, upper caste
    Hindus sought to maintain the basic elements of the (hierarchical)
    traditional social order by simultaneously stigmatizing and emulating
    those who allegedly threatened Hindu society. “The tension between
    cultural preservation and modernization was solved through the invention
    of a distant Golden Age which was both indigenous and in accord with
    modern values.” Prakashanand Saraswati’s fulfils both objectives — it
    invents a Golden past whose accomplishments not only measure up well
    against the present, but were better in all respects!

    6) White America is often uncritical of its own practices while sneering
    at others’ irrationality, but that doesn’t make the latter any more
    respectable. Institutional racism cannot be fought by glorifying
    irrational practices and beliefs as minority rights, as the Hindutva
    forces unsuccessfully attempted in California. Hindutva’s cynical
    invocation of minority rights in California, even as their Indian
    buddies are celebrating one of their Nazi-loving leaders, is just one
    more example of their doublespeak. [Golwalkar, the second dictator of
    the RSS, endorsed the Nazi Holocaust and called it “a good lesson for
    us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”] More on Golwalkar.

    7) As Saraswati claims (and the RSS would gladly agree): “‘Bhartiya’
    and ‘Hindu’ terms are synonymous. But when an emphasis is needed to
    represent the spirituality of India we normally use the terms Bhartiya
    and Bharatvarsh. Bharatvarsh (and its short term Bharat) is the original
    Sanskrit term for India; and, that which is related to Bharatvarsh is
    called Bhartiya.”

    8) The Hindu Education Foundation’s “resources on Hinduism” page points
    to this website that seeks to historify the mythical Pushpak Vimana
    “which could fly at the speed of thought”!

  • Letter from No Man’s Land

    The ground on which a United Nations conference takes place is No Man’s Land, outside the legal jurisdiction of the surrounding country. Here, in a barren field on the outskirts of Tunis, it is No Man’s Land par excellence.

    Buses shuttle laptops -and their requisite laps- from tightly guarded hotels to a gigantic, tightly-guarded, white plastic tent here. Tunisians aren’t allowed anywhere near either the hotels or the tent. In fact, they’ve been sent on holiday. All schools and government offices are shut. The gigolos that normally press their services on female visitors must take a break or face jail. The streets are empty of traffic.

    Inside the tent, the laptops can put conference information on websites, so laptops across the globe can get it. But not laptops in Tunisia. Such internet sites are blocked by the Tunisian government.

    ‘This is not what the internet was supposed to be about,’ several laps bleated loudly at conference sessions.

    Supposed to be about? Duh, wasn’t the internet born as a US State Department project to hide information from the Soviets during the Cold War? I guess laps’ memory-banks only go back as far as the invention of Linux. The rest is prehistory, when homo-sapiens roamed the earth, not laptops.

    Tunisia’s President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who proposed this Summit, demonstrates the power of information technology. In Ben Ali’s hands, a simple fax machine is a thing of wonder. His face is everywhere, fluttering on pennants wreathing the city, leering at you from every hoarding, billboard and pillar. He seems to share a PR agent with Kim Jong Il, and a plastic surgeon with Berlosconi. Is it Botox, you wonder as you confront his pasty death-mask for the thousandth time, or cyber-mummification? Maybe he doesn’t even really exist; it was a hologram that spoke at the opening of the conference. The moment a foreign head-of-state referred to Ben Ali’s lack of devotion to freedom of information, the video feed conveniently stuttered and denied the world his words.

    Yes, in the Information Society, things are easier, more efficient and speedy. Take hunger strikes for instance. Tunisian democracy activists learnt from information technology that every UN summit requires some drama, a riot or two perhaps, to grab a couple seconds of television time. With a zillion police and secret police ranging around, riots aren’t really advisable. The activists mounted a hunger strike instead. The press duly hared off to laud them. Once their images were digitally transmitted to a laptops round the world and the conference began to wind down, the hunger strikers went to lunch. Who said a hunger strike is a joy forever? Missing breakfast for democracy counts too. Where’s the rule that says you have to die for your cause? That might put you in the same category as suicide bombers.

    The People Have no Bread? Let them Eat Gobble-de-Geek

    And the Information society is to end hunger, not prolong it. Techno-geeks from Microsoft, Ericcson, Nokia -all the usual suspects- have mounted dazzling exhibitions to show the UN how they will solve the 3rd world’s problems. As we know, UN bureaucrats’ main task is to pile jargon onto jargon until it becomes gobbledegook. Here it became gobbledegeek.

    Take the fact that African teachers are dying of AIDS or running off to Britain where they can earn a pittance. UNESCO has a cunning plan to end this. You know all those grandmothers and aunties left behind in places like Lesotho to care for the AIDS patients and AIDS-orphaned? Well, the geeks are going to turn them into teachers.

    Never mind the fact that AIDS has already turned them into nurses. Never mind that they themselves are illiterate, speak languages no laptop has ever heard, have no computers… or electricity to run computers. Never mind that they have to scrape a living to feed the orphans as well… and gather firewood… and spend 12 hours a day trudging uphill for water… and flee from rampaging soldiers… Never mind the fact that information technology hasn’t prevented a decline in basic skills like reading and arithmetic in the developed world.

    How are those 3rd world losers going to afford Microsoft’s services? Privatisation, of course. Sell the telecommunications companies they invested in during pre-history, when people used their heads to think, not their laps.

    The Jamaican government has a cunning plan to combat poverty, its minister revealed. Jamaica is going to sell its telecommunications company and invest in broadband. How will that combat poverty? Jamaica will still have no economic resources except cocaine-trafficking. Perhaps the traffickers will become more efficient. They are avid users of information technology; each of them carries around not one, but five, mobile phones. In any case, it’s only in prehistory that poverty was defined as a lack of food and shelter. The UN has added ‘information-poverty’ to the definition.

    If you have nothing to privatise, the World Bank will lend you money to pay Microsoft and the other usual suspects… and add to your debt burden.

    The World Bank also had a cunning plan. The World Bank also had a cunning plan. It flew in a woman from India to reveal how information technology was making the poor less poor. She came armed with a brilliantly-organised power-point presentation – but argued instead that food and shelter were the real priorities of the poor, not information technology. And she was backed up by the latest research.

    A very broad and systematic study, published by a British university two months ago, showed that only 2% of people in rural areas of developing countries are interested in the internet as a source of information. People prefer radio and television. But that’s prehistoric technology involving journalists. In the Information Society, bloggers are the heroes of the day. In the tower of babble that is the internet, ‘the moon in Aries is causing your poverty’ has equal weight to ‘government corruption is causing poverty’.

    The white men in suits purveyed their gobbledegeek using a prehistoric tool – the mouth. Guess whose words are carrying the day? It doesn’t matter what technology you use, here, or what hard information you have. It’s how much money, or how many guns, which amounts to the same thing: power.

    So the information society is going to be business – as usual. Let’s face it. Mobile phones are mainly used to tell your wife you’re going to be late for dinner. And the research shows that poor people want them for the same purpose, keeping in touch with their relatives. With markets in the developed world saturated, Nasdec shareholders are looking towards 3rd world. In Sri Lanka, people are willing to spend a whopping 15% of their incomes on phone services. Those who have incomes, that is.

    The Chinese are spectacularly absent from this Summit, apart from their official delegation. While we are fantasising about the society of the future, they are busy creating it.

    This article was written for a Dutch newsmagazine at the end of last year during the summit on the information society.

    Niala Maharaj is a writer based in Amsterdam. Her first novel, Like Heaven, will be published by Random House on June 1. Her website is here.

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