From: shankar@sgi.com (Shankar Unni)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Ayodhya: symptom, not malady.
Date: 13 Dec 1992 20:49:26 GMT
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Well said, Saad..

Saad Shafqat (shafqat@neuro.duke.edu) wrote:

> Ask instead for wealth and affluence and peace will follow.

Bingo. 

> Blame the Mughals - those idiot-kings that let the industrial revolution
> pass them by.

Well, the Mughals are not totally to blame. The earlier Mughals, at
least, were enlightened and extremely capable rulers, scholars all
(Babar, Humayun, Akbar).

To some extent, the rot (and the roots of the tension) go back to
Aurangzeb, who was a poor ruler and statesman to begin with, and
decided to go on a campaign of evangelistic Islamization of India
(most of the destruction of temples, and ruinous taxing of northern
hindu families happened during his almost 50-year reign).  He wasn't
too popular with the Muslim nawabs, either, for various reaons.

The rot really set in after his death. Subsequent Mughal rulers were
either dissolute, powerless, or both.  Anarchy and petty regional
rivalry (not necessarily based on religion) was rampant.  Witness how
easily Nadir Shah sacked Delhi (virtually unopposed), and how the
British made their laughably easy conquest by playing the regional
Nawabs against each other.

I am, however, not too familiar with the history of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, when the modern antagonisms between the Hindus
and Muslims took root. The formation of the Hindu Mahasabha and the
Muslim League (no doubt vigorously fomented by the British) are not
covered (probably for good reason) in the Indian classrooms, which
prefer to gloss over these ugly details in a haze of patriotic
flag-waving (the idealistic, pure, socialist revolution that chased
the bad British away - tiranga jhanda hamara and all that rot).

> Blame the desi intelligentsia - that unthinking elite
> coterie that advocates democracy as a universal elixir but has still
> not learned, centuries after the fact, that manufacturing generates
> wealth.

Bingo again.  Wealth and education, the keys to happiness.

In fact, in India, and probably in Pakistan, too, the ruling parties
have an active vested interest in keeping the populace uneducated and
poor. This way, they have absolute control over them - they can easily
buy votes during elections, and keep the populace under their control
most of the rest of the time by using various bogeymen (upper-class
hindus, lower-class hindus, muslims, sikhs, or any other handy ethnic
or regional category) as whipping boys for all their troubles.

The Fabian socialists of the formative years of the republic (Nehru,
Mahalanobis, and others) also did a major disservice by instituting
three different sets of civil laws in the constitution: common, hindu
undivided family and muslim.  Both the hindu and muslim laws were
enacted because the writers of the constitution wanted to pander to
the maximum number of factional groups.

A forceful introduction of a common, unified civil code would have
immediately taken away one of the most common bogeymen of the
religious parties (that of the "special privileges accorded to the
<other> group").

And so, instead of a truly secular society (one which is blind to
religious background of its citizens), we ended up with a society that
is only too sensitive to their religions, and ends up being pulled in
too many different directions and pissing everyone off uniformly..

Another must-go is the current form of the system of reservations, but
I'll reserve that soap-box for another occasion.  However, it's all
tied in.

--
Shankar Unni				E-Mail:	shankar@sgi.com
Silicon Graphics Inc.			Phone:	+1-415-390-2072
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian