SACW | 05 Oct. 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | 05 October,  2005


[1]  Bangladesh: The rise of Islamist extremism - 
Are mainstream Muslims blameless?
(Mahfuzur Rahman)
[2]  India - US : Obituary of an Indian 'Body Bag' (Sumanta Banerjee)
[3]  US:  So the Jains, They Have a Problem With 
Beef in the School Lunches. Who They Gonna Call?
(Suketu Mehta)
[4]  Book Review: 'Hindu Nationalism and the 
Language of Politics in Late Colonial India
by William Gould' (Francesca Orsini)


______

[1]

The Daily Star
October 05, 2005
  	 
THE RISE OF ISLAMIST EXTREMISM
ARE MAINSTREAM MUSLIMS BLAMELESS?
by Mahfuzur Rahman

The country [Bangladesh]  is finally awakening to 
the reality of Islamist extremism. To be sure we 
still hear a Government minister saying that the 
August 17, 2005 bombings were not "such a big 
deal". We also heard an "intellectual" saying the 
other day that the extremists who were behind the 
bomb attacks had as much right to extremism as 
those of our countrymen who fought for liberation 
of the country in 1971. One can never be sure 
that these statements can be dismissed merely as 
an expression of political expedience, in the 
first case, or crass idiosyncrasy, in the second. 
Nevertheless, after years of denial, the 
political establishment has finally acknowledged 
that that Islamist extremism existed in the 
country. Never before have we seen such an 
emergence of consensus on the threat the 
extremists pose.

This of course has not been followed by a 
consensus on what to do to meet the extremist 
threat. The differences of approach to the 
problem go beyond the existing political blame 
game that by itself can seriously weaken any 
resolve to fight Islamist extremism. It has been 
suggested, for example, that while the problem is 
real, it is fairly easily containable. For one 
thing, it has been argued, that the soil of 
Bangladesh is not fertile enough for a 
sustainable growth of extremism; the present 
spate of violence will die down. The argument 
amounts to little more than wishful thinking, but 
it has been made and I believe the view is fairly 
widely shared. Others recognize the problem but 
feel that strengthened law enforcement is all 
that is needed. Yet others have been less 
sanguine and have felt that the threat of 
extremists is serious enough to call for 
extraordinary anti-terrorist measures such as 
setting up of a "war council". In general, the 
present surge of extremism has so far been seen 
as a law and order problem. I think this is a 
grave error of judgment. To combat Islamist 
extremism, we need to look at the roots of the 
problem. Going to the roots may sound like a 
cliché, but we can do with this one.

Terrorism and violence, like just about anything 
else, do not grow out of thin air. They need an 
environment to thrive. I believe 'mainstream' 
Muslims themselves supply an important part of 
that environment. This would almost certainly 
raise a huge number of eyebrows. But it is time 
we talked about the issue.

First, I need a working definition of 
'mainstream' Muslim. While I accept that no 
definition can be fully satisfactory here, by a 
'mainstream' Muslim I mean someone who believes 
in one God, Koran and His Prophet (pbuh) even if 
he, or she, does not always abide by all that He 
has ordained. He prays daily, even if not five 
times a day, prescribed by the holy books. He 
normally goes to the mosque for the Friday 
congregation. He is expected to fast during the 
month of Ramadan. He spends for charity, even if 
what he spends may not add up to the proportion 
of his wealth that he is supposed to spend under 
the rules of zakat. He considers a once in a 
lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca an obligation, even 
though he often finds arguments to avoid it as 
long as he can. He is reverential to religious 
leaders and listens to their sermons as a matter 
of piety. He accepts the Koran as the word of 
God, and neither questions its edicts nor sees 
any contradiction in it. He knows at least the 
rudiments of the Koran by heart, sometimes 
recites them or hears them recited. He recites 
the Koran or hears the recitation, without 
understanding it, but has little difficulty in 
accepting a translation offered to him by 
traditional interpreters of the Book.

There is little in him to suggest that he is 
prone to violence and would certainly shudder at 
the thought of himself as an Islamist suicide 
bomber. He does not participate in terrorist 
acts. I take issue with those who claim that the 
terrorists are a 'tiny minority' among Muslims, 
if by this it is meant that there are only a 
handful of individuals who are engaged in acts of 
terrorism. The number of terrorists world-wide is 
not longer small. Nevertheless, in the Islamic 
world as a whole, mainstream Muslims, defined 
broadly as above, would vastly outnumber those 
whom we can call Islamist terrorists. They would 
certainly far outnumber terrorists in countries 
like Bangladesh where, till recently, Islamist 
terrorism had been at bay. Ordinary Muslims do 
not go about killing people.

Yet mainstream Muslims bear a large share of 
responsibility for the surge of Islamist 
terrorism. In many cases this may be unwitting, 
an act of omission rather than commission; the 
consequences, nevertheless, are the same. The 
culpability of mainstream Muslims derives largely 
from their lack of will or power to openly ask 
searching questions in matters of religion. This 
is perhaps the most important factor that creates 
an environment where Islamist extremism thrives. 
There surely are instances of exceptional 
individual heterodoxy. But a large majority of 
Muslims do not make searching inquiries in 
matters of religion or challenge dogma. Their 
equanimity and reticence have some major 
ramifications.

Take, for instance, the sermons he hears in the 
local mosque, at the Friday congregations, and 
elsewhere. In many cases, along with calls for 
piety, the sermons will call for solidarity of 
the Muslim /ummah/, as if it has been under 
attack all over the world. It is strange that 
over fourteen hundred years after it was born, 
after it long established itself as one of the 
major organized faiths, now with a billion 
adherents to it, Islam is still presented as a 
religion under threat from infidels. Often 
/imams/ in mosques still end their supplication 
to God with /Fa-ansurna ala al quaomil kaafereen/ 
-- "Help us against the community of 
non-believers"

And the mainstream Muslim never thinks it proper 
to ask why is it still necessary to call for 
divine protection for Islam and whether 
denunciation of the /kafirs/ is still called for. 
He probably does not also ask himself what the 
impact of the relentless anti-infidel rhetoric 
may be on young and excitable Muslim minds in the 
congregation. The example of Islam -in- danger 
sermons is an important one in the present 
context, because here is an issue where 
mainstream Muslims could ask pertinent questions. 
But there are many other examples of mainstream 
reticence.

It is important to examine some of the ways the 
critical spirit is thwarted, and fanaticism 
spread, and see where the mainstream Muslim 
stands. It has of late been recognised that 
/madrasas/, or religious schools, have been a 
potent breeding ground for religious hatred and 
intolerance. The Taliban in Afghanistan were 
actually the eponymous /madrasa/ students, mostly 
raised in Pakistan. This is an obvious example, 
an extreme one too. But tens of thousands of 
these /madrasas/ are scattered across the Islamic 
world and they certainly do not spread the 
message of tolerance to dissent or of universal 
brotherhood. Yet Muslims in general do not speak 
against the spread of /madrasa/ education, though 
there has been some criticism from them in recent 
times. It looks as if it is a matter of impiety 
to criticize /madrasa/ education

On the other hand, the role of the mosque in the 
spread of Islamic extremism has still to be 
adequately recognised by mainstream Muslims. It 
is only after the London suicide bombings of July 
2005 that their role came to public attention. An 
often repeated argument of apologists eager to 
dismiss any Islamic connection of some of the 
acts of terror in recent times has been that the 
terrorists were 'modern educated' and were not 
products of /madrasas/. But many of them were 
regular visitors to mosque and in all probability 
avid listeners of fiery sermons from their 
/imams/. This was true of the London bombers.

But fiery sermons are only one potential 
ingredient of extremism. Growing religious 
fundamentalism in general, through /madrasa/ 
education and other ways, has been a powerful 
contributing factor. In fact rousing calls for 
/jihad/ are relatively rare in the country and 
fanatical preachers like Omar Bakri or al-Masri 
of London probably have no counterpart in 
Bangladesh, though one can never rule this out. 
Fiery rhetoric is not absent though. It is only 
necessary to remember that the rout of the 
Taliban was followed by loud denunciations of the 
United States and call for /jihad/ from the 
mosques in many parts of the Muslim world, 
including Dhaka and elsewhere in the country. But 
the tilt to religious fundamentalism has 
continued in parallel with, if not independently 
of, loud rhetoric. It has been quietly achieving 
what rousing sermons may not always have been 
able to do: the closing of the mind to critical 
inquiry and rational thinking.

And the very same mosques attended by the 
extremists are also the ones that mainstream 
Muslims attend. Extremists do not have mosques of 
their own. They share the house of God with other 
Muslims. These Muslims do not protest fiery 
speeches and the prospective young fanatic does 
not hear the protest. They do not question the 
orthodoxy and Muslim youths do not hear the 
question. The passivity of mainstream Muslims is 
not born simply of fear of retribution, though 
such fear may be real enough in some cases. An 
important reason why they do not protest against 
extremist sermons in mosques is that it is not in 
their tradition and training to ask critical 
questions about the major precepts of Islam. They 
can discuss matters of religion as much as they 
like so long as the discussion strengthens their 
Faith and are in the nature of piety or devotion, 
but they may not ask probing questions that sound 
like criticism of Islam.

There are also areas where the stances of 
mainstream Muslims have the undesired effect of 
bolstering those of the Islamist extremists. Many 
mainstream Muslims are often, and rightly, 
sympathetic to causes that extremists also 
promote and are eager to die for. There are 
regions of the world where Muslims have suffered 
gross injustices at the hands of foreign powers. 
The Middle East is an obvious example. Many 
extremists have taken up the cause of the 
oppressed there and elsewhere. Mainstream Muslims 
have also voiced protest and frustration at these 
injustices. It is not, however, usual for them to 
make it abundantly clear that their support for 
the cause of the oppressed has nothing to do with 
religion, or that they would protest with equal 
vigour injustices to other communities around the 
world. If the extremist thinks in the 
circumstance that he has the support of the 
mainstream Muslim, the latter is not entirely 
without blame.

In his equanimity as a Muslim, the mainstream 
Muslim often ignores the danger signs which 
should have told him to stop, think and talk. It 
is hardly conceivable that the scores or so of 
the extremists who planted the 500 bombs 
throughout Bangladesh in August this year did not 
pray in the same local mosque where other Muslims 
prayed hours or days before the attacks. They may 
even have rubbed shoulders against each other as 
they stood in serried ranks before God the 
Merciful. The mainstream Muslims might not have 
known about extremist designs but they must have 
known the fundamentalist streak that the 
extremist proudly show. But they never talked to 
each other in any meaningful way. Mainstream 
Muslims never drew the fundamentalists into a 
debate about their ideas, ideologies, and the 
reasons for their rage.

Clandestine activities designed for violence and 
terror cannot long survive in open societies. And 
an open society is one where people ask question, 
inquire into things long taken for granted, and 
where sacred cows are few and far between. It is 
time mainstream Muslims left their reticence 
behind and worked towards creating a truly open 
society. The longer they postpone it, the more 
likely will it be that extremists will triumph.

This is not to suggest that a diehard core of 
Islamist extremists cannot create havoc in almost 
any society. The danger from terrorists who are 
willing to kill themselves in order to kill 
others for what they consider true Islam is all 
too real. The danger increases in a world where, 
like most other phenomena, extremism is 
globalised and local forces of terror can count 
on support from rich and powerful allies abroad. 
Neither should one underestimate the ability of a 
determined band of Islamist political activists 
to exploit people's religious susceptibilities to 
achieve their objective. Nonetheless, we can 
ignore only at our peril the responsibility of 
mainstream Muslims for the present upsurge of 
extremism in the country, and the role they can 
play in combating it.

/Mahfuzur Rahman, former United Nations 
economist, is currently researching in religious 
fundamentalism. An earlier and very different 
version of the article was recently published in 
Mukto-mona.com, a free- thinkers' website./


______



[2]

Economic and Political Weekly
September 24, 2005

OBITUARY OF AN INDIAN 'BODY BAG'

The story of Hatim Kathiria, the young Indian who 
enlisted in the US army only to be killed in 
Iraq, is the story of the US need for "outside 
labour" in its army, of twisted notions of jehadi 
and of middle-class India's obsession with the US.

by Sumanta Banerjee


At the end of August this year, Indian newspapers 
came up with headlines reporting the death of 
Hatim Kathiria, a 23-year old Indian who had 
joined the US army, and was sent to Iraq where he 
was killed in a rocket attack. He was the second 
US soldier of Indian origin to die in Iraq. In 
November 2003, Udai Singh, a sergeant in the US 
army, was killed in the battle zone. Commenting 
on their death, an Indian correspondent of a 
leading national daily based in Washington went 
gaga: "The death of Army Specialist Hatim 
Kathiria and Sergeant Uday Singh, has an 
important subtext. One was a Muslim and the other 
a Sikh, and together with Lt Neil Prakash, who 
recently returned from Iraq after winning a 
Silver Star for courage under fire, they 
represent the very best of India's secular 
traditions at a time when some countries 
specialise in exporting fundamentalist jihadis" 
(Chidanand Rajghatta in The Times of India, 
August 29, 2005).

But there are other subtexts to these events 
which escape the attention of the Indian 
correspondent, who seems to be totally 
indifferent to Washington's motives behind a 
dishonest and cruel war that is using young 
people as cannon fodders in Iraq. At around the 
same time when he was celebrating the heroism of 
the Indian soldiers in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, the 
mother of a 24-year old American soldier killed 
in Iraq was leading a sit-in near the Texas ranch 
of president Bush posing the poignant question: 
"Why did my son die ?" Hundreds joined her in 
candlelight vigils calling for an end to the war 
in Iraq. While here is a courageous mother giving 
voice to thousands of grieving American families 
who had lost their sons in an unnecessary war, 
our Indian journalist chooses to join the 
war-mongering chorus of the US mainstream media. 
To be fair to him however, in the course of the 
chest-pounding, he unwittingly provides us with 
some interesting figures. Quoting the 2000 US 
census, he says that there were some 450 
India-born people who were serving in the US 
armed forces. He guesses that the "number may 
have increased significantly as many recent 
immigrants are signing up at the prospect of a 
quick citizenship even as native-born Americans 
balk at enlisting".

There are at least three subtexts to this little 
piece of information. One, the manner in which 
the US is using recruits from India to carry out 
its dirty war in Iraq. Two, the motivations among 
certain sections of Indians which lead them to 
join the US army in its war of depredations 
against the Iraqi people. Three, by allowing our 
citizens to join a foreign army and serving its 
militarist goals in a war situation (where New 
Delhi purports to be neutral), is not the Indian 
government compromising its stated position (of 
not joining military operations) on the Iraq war?

To deal with the first, we must recall the past. 
The US had always been notorious for hiring 
mercenaries from outside its own forces to 
conduct its aggressive policy abroad - a military 
equivalent of what is being touted today as 
"outsourcing" in the economy of globalisation. In 
the 1960s, when engaged in a war in Vietnam, in 
order to lessen the mortality rates among its own 
soldiers it conscripted local Vietnamese to fight 
the National Liberation Front - in what the then 
American top military brass termed as "changing 
the colour of the corpses" to describe the 
casualties! In Iraq today, it is employing the 
same strategy by trying to recruit more policemen 
and soldiers from among the Iraqis. The 
insurgents - who, to register their rage, indulge 
in aimless bomb blasts resulting in the death of 
innocent citizens - occasionally display some 
sense by targeting these recruiting centres. But 
it is not only soldiers that the US needs in Iraq 
to carry out its military operations. There is a 
host of systems that require to be manned to 
sustain those operations - provision of supplies, 
running and maintaining technology, moving trash, 
etc. Manual labour from developing countries 
outside Iraq serve most of these purposes in the 
battle zone.

Indian labour in US army it is well known by now 
that Indian labourers had been working for US 
forces - as revealed sometime ago by the 
kidnapping of one such group by the insurgents, 
whose release was brought about through long 
drawn-out secret negotiations. The policy to 
recruit such labourers from the poor countries to 
serve the US soldiers in Iraq follows the 
colonial tradition of camp-followers - the 
non-military appendages (like cooks, barbers, 
washermen), who accompanied them in the battle 
zones. The Indian youth Hatim Kathiria who was 
killed in a rocket attack in Baghdad was another 
such unfortunate appendage. Although not an 
ordinary manual labourer (he had a degree in 
computer engineering), he was used by the US army 
in the same way to serve its operational 
interests. He was put in charge of a computer 
system that kept track of US army supplies.

Motivation

This brings us to the second subtext - what led a 
trained Indian engineer (who would not have 
remained unemployed in India, unlike the hundreds 
of unskilled labourers who migrate to west Asia 
every year in search of better pay) to emigrate 
to the US, and voluntarily join the army there? 
What is the psychology that makes a young 
educated Indian participate in a war that lacks 
any justification (as distinct from the anti-Nazi 
second world war), and that too against a people 
in a faraway land who do not threaten Indians? 
The newspaper reports about Hatim Kathiria's 
background give us interesting insights into the 
mentality of a new generation of ambitious 
professionals. Hatim came from a middle class 
Bohra Muslim family in Dahod in Gujarat. After 
doing a bachelor's degree in software, he went to 
the US to earn a master's degree. He worked for 
sometime as a gas station attendant at Fort 
Worth, near Dallas, and then decided to enlist 
into the US army - hoping that a stint in the 
armed forces would help fund a college 
scholarship. He signed up in 2004, and was soon 
assigned to a battalion in Iraq, where he met his 
death. While sincerely mourning his death and 
expressing sympathies for his family (which tried 
to dissuade their only son from joining the US 
army), we at the same time cannot but wonder how 
an educated middle class Indian youth can be so 
desperate to earn a degree from a US university 
as to take the extreme step of joining the US 
army and aid it in a war of plundering another 
nation.

The reactions of Hatim Kathiria's relatives - as 
reported in the newspapers - are quite revealing. 
His mother, who used to conduct tuition classes 
to collect money for his US trip, said: "His 
ambitions took him to the US and then to Iraq," 
and then added: "Šbut he died a martyr's death." 
Here we tumble into another confusing subtext - 
the concept of martyrdom ! This Muslim family 
considers their son as a "shaheed" according to 
the traditional Islamic concept. How do the Iraqi 
insurgents who killed this co-religionist of 
theirs describe him? To carry the argument 
further, the jehadi suicide bombers who have 
killed more innocent Iraqis than US soldiers, are 
hailed as martyrs by their patrons; but how do 
they depict these non-combatant victims of theirs 
in their jehadi phraseology? The Americans have 
invented the term "collateral damage" for such 
killings of innocent people. Have the Iraqi 
jehadis found an Islamic term?

To continue with the subtext - in the same 
newspaper report, a cousin of Hatim's said: "We 
are proud of Hatim who died for the US army" (The 
Indian Express, September 5, 2005). This gives 
another twist to the tragedy. It recalls the 
loyalist rhetoric of the parents of the Indian 
soldiers who died for "His Majesty" in the 
battlefields of Burma during the second world 
war. Do we find again among our middle classes 
today an urge to renew self-identification with 
the interests and values of the dominant world 
power - the power being the US now? If Hatim's 
cousin is proud of his sacrifice for the US army, 
there are thousands of other Indians who every 
day proudly flash their subservience to the US - 
the call-centre employees who cultivate American 
accent to please their clients, the executives in 
MNC firms who try desperately to imbibe the 
values and ape the habits of their American 
bosses, the media barons and their employees who 
have internalised the ethics and norms of the 
US-led neo-liberalisation.

This brings us to the third subtext - the role of 
the Indian state. It is caught up in a web of 
contradictions. While the present government is 
trying to put up an image of neutrality in 
conflict situations involving the US - in Iraq or 
Iran, it has no control over the choice of its 
citizens, who can emigrate abroad and operate in 
a way that totally negates the government's 
official policies. They can choose to be 
smugglers or freebooters abroad. It is the amoral 
norms of our society and erosion of ideological 
values inside our country that shape their 
motivations.

Hatim Kathiria was not a victim of the Iraq war, 
but of our own system which promotes greed, 
individualism, and a fierce rush for material 
success - all in the name of "upward mobility", 
"competitive spirit" and similar notions that are 
being perpetually hammered into the minds of the 
Indian youth by our political leaders and their 
kept media.

_____


[3]

New York Times Magazine
October 2, 2005

SO THE JAINS, THEY HAVE A PROBLEM WITH BEEF IN 
THE SCHOOL LUNCHES. WHO THEY GONNA CALL?
By Suketu Mehta

It was the night of this year's New York primary, 
and when a billionaire like Mayor Michael 
Bloomberg holds a party to celebrate his 
candidacy, it's no small affair. The spacious 
ballroom of the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn was 
overflowing with free beer and pigs-in-blankets, 
and a band revved up the throngs of supporters. 
"We love Mike! We love Mike!" they chanted. Among 
the supporters was Alex Martins, a goateed Indian 
lawyer in a business suit and a Hawaiian shirt. 
He was flanked by three fellow Indians in 
shirt-sleeves who looked a little lost. Martins 
waved a big blue Bloomberg poster 
enthusiastically and joined in the chant; his 
entourage stood around silently.
Martins's companions were wearing "Mike '05" 
buttons, but it was safe to assume that they had 
little clue what the mayor's political platform 
was. They were at the Marriott because, being 
relatively new immigrants, they wanted things 
"fixed" - visas, jobs, business permits - and 
Martins is a master at this. If Martins was 
attending the event, they would join him. They 
told me they don't have much trust in politicians 
because they had known the ones back home in 
India. ("Politicians are like creatures," one of 
them, a computer programmer from Mumbai, said. 
"They're like sharks.") But they were hoping that 
through their association with Martins, who is on 
the board of the New Era Democrats, a political 
club that has endorsed Bloomberg, they might see 
some results. Martins is a slim, dark man of 40 
who looks understandingly at you over the top of 
his glasses as he speaks. "Within this week I 
will solve your problem" is one of his favorite 
phrases.
When I first asked for his card, Martins gave me 
four. One identified him as an immigration and 
personal-injury lawyer affiliated with the firm 
Frenkel, Hershkowitz & Shafran. A second card 
testified to his role as C.E.O. of Ara Global 
Trading, "Importer and Distributor of Exclusive 
Wines." Two others actually belonged to his wife, 
Maureen Martins, D.D.S., of Bright Smile Dental 
Care in Flushing and Valley Stream, N.Y. ("We 
love to see you smile.") He frequently conducts 
business out of her offices.
Martins is not a high-profile mover and shaker in 
New York City politics. But he does play a role 
in helping to meet the needs of many of the 
city's residents - particularly South Asian 
immigrants. He is a fixer, an expediter: a link 
between the vast, anonymous, forbidding face of 
the system and the immigrant cabby or student or 
maid, perhaps without papers, fresh off a 
long-haul flight at J.F.K.
In the absence of powerful elected officials - 
there's not a single South Asian holding a major 
elected office in New York - the Indian community 
has to rely on other conduits to power. Martins 
fills that role by running a favor bank, 
brokering the barter of services - for instance, 
a largely Indian taxi company agrees to 
distribute campaign literature in return for his 
intervention with officials on the Taxi and 
Limousine Commission. Martins's fees are not made 
explicit, but the people who come to him are more 
or less aware of what they need to do to pay him 
back, because they come from countries where the 
trading of influence is necessary to survival.
Historically, every immigrant group that has come 
to New York has relied on people like Martins: a 
man of connections, a man you call when your son 
is caught shoplifting or your cousin needs a visa 
or your nephew needs a city job. He is not a 
politician - not yet, at least - but he is a 
political creature. He is the representative who 
helps new immigrants reach their elected 
representatives.
For the politicians whom Martins deals with, the 
benefits of helping a new immigrant are often not 
immediately apparent, because most of the 
immigrants are not citizens and can't vote. But 
some of these immigrants have money, and many of 
them will, eventually, become citizens and 
remember who came to their assistance when they 
were new to the country. The politicians are also 
keenly aware that New York's demographics are 
changing. This year, for the first time in 
history, non-Hispanic whites make up a minority 
of the city's voters. Which means that every New 
York politician seeking citywide office now has 
to form a coalition: no one can win on the basis 
of appealing to a single voting bloc, whether 
it's whites, blacks or Hispanics. Politicians 
will need the support of the Jains, the Catholics 
from Goa, the Sikhs - all the people who turn to 
Martins to get things fixed.

"How's the sick and the dying?" Marty Golden, a 
New York state senator, asked Dr. Narmesh Shah on 
a recent summer day, walking into a pizza parlor 
next to Golden's Brooklyn office in the 22nd 
District in Bay Ridge. Martins, who was sitting 
with Shah, had arranged this meeting between the 
senator and the doctor, a recent Indian immigrant 
seeking a fellowship in cardiology at a city 
hospital. Golden momentarily confused Shah with 
another doctor that Martins had taken to him for 
a favor. The senator freely confessed he couldn't 
keep track of all Martins's clients: "You bring 
me so many people, I don't know!"
Shah was not paying Martins anything for the 
contact with Golden, though Shah did arrange for 
a free checkup for a friend of Martins's - a 
priest from Goa who lacked health insurance. And 
Martins was offering nothing to Golden, though in 
the past Martins has organized registration 
drives to get Indian and other minority voters, 
who typically vote Democratic, to cast their 
ballot for Golden, who is a Republican. After the 
meeting, Golden wrote a recommendation for Shah 
to New York Methodist Hospital. Eventually, Shah 
may be called upon to return the favor that 
Martins did for him. The payouts in Martins's 
favor bank are immediate; the fees and deposits 
can be claimed long into the future.
Golden, it turned out, had recently returned from 
a trip to Israel, and Martins knew precisely when 
the senator left and when he came back. "Alex 
knows how to get a hold of me," Golden said. When 
a new immigrant faces problems, the senator 
explained, Martins is the man to call: "He knows 
the numbers to dial. There's nothing wrong with 
it - it has been part of the fabric of this 
country for 200 years." Immigrants learn about 
Martins through word of mouth, from family to 
family. As Golden put it, "They learn who are the 
can-do people."
Martins grew up in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the 
son of an officer in the merchant marine. He 
started running a catering business at age 14. 
Then he started manufacturing bakery equipment 
("kneaders, grinders and hollow waffle 
machines"). Later he ran a nightclub, and when 
his father, a devout Catholic, found out about 
the club, he threw Alex out of his house. "And 
that's why I left the country," Martins says. He 
had become friendly with the United States consul 
general in Mumbai, Harry Cahill, who introduced 
him around at the United States Chamber of 
Commerce and arranged for his American visa.
Martins immigrated to New York at 18 and enrolled 
for a bachelor's degree in finance and marketing 
at Baruch College. His nightclub experience in 
India was useful when he got a job as the 
headwaiter at Michael's Pub in Manhattan. He 
realized that the city was teeming with business 
opportunities for immigrants like himself, and he 
soon opened a Nathan's hot-dog franchise near 
City Hall.
But a couple of incidents made Martins realize 
that the place of immigrants in the city was 
still precarious. One day, as he recalled it to 
me, he was riding on the E train and the pages of 
the newspaper that he was reading brushed against 
the man seated next to him. The man launched into 
a diatribe against immigrants. "Go back to your 
own country!" he barked. Martins said that he 
felt intimidated but that he managed to speak up 
in his own defense; he said that America was a 
land of immigrants, and that his fellow passenger 
didn't have the right to tell Martins to get out. 
"Since that time I've wanted to be an immigration 
attorney," Martins said. He later got a law 
degree from N.Y.U.
Martins has a keen sense of the hurdles that 
Indian immigrants face, especially in finding 
work in city government. When it comes to jobs in 
administrative offices, Martins says that he has 
seen that "always someone else is given a chance. 
There is always discrimination in the high-level 
offices. It's how the British and the Portuguese 
ruled us" - that is, by denying Indians 
higher-level positions in government. Martins 
decided that he wouldn't be just a 
run-of-the-mill lawyer; he would help immigrants 
by aggressively cultivating politicians.
"In the Indian community," he says, "there was 
always a problem: people couldn't approach the 
politicians the right way. They're not 
confident." He would explain to the Indians he 
spoke with, "If they want our support, they need 
to get our work done." He also worked to educate 
the politicians about Indian culture: who is 
Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god? What is 
the Sikh religion? He often took politicians on 
visits to the Indian community's houses of 
worship.
Martins quickly figured out that to deal with 
what former Mayor David Dinkins once called New 
York's gorgeous mosaic, you have to wear a 
gorgeous tie. He showed me a photo from a 2004 
fund-raiser for the Congress of Italian-Americans 
Organization (CIAO), in which he appeared with 
one arm around Bloomberg and his other around a 
diminutive Italian grandmother named Mary 
Crisalli Sansone, the founder of the 
organization. Martins was sporting a particularly 
vivid tricolor tie. "It's not the Italian flag, 
in fact," he confessed, "but it's close." He has 
ties for his visits to every ethnic community, 
with an approximation of the colors of their 
national flags. When he went to meet Manmohan 
Singh, the Indian prime minister, he wore a tie 
that sported the green, white and saffron of the 
Indian flag.
Not long ago, New York's Jain community had a 
festival, and Martins arranged an appearance by 
Louis Gelormino, an attorney who has served in 
the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. The 
Jains are ideal New Yorkers: nonviolent and rich. 
They are largely made up of diamond merchants and 
other entrepreneurs from India, and they follow a 
religion that mandates extreme pacificism.
The Jains, though, had some highly specific 
demands, which they were not shy about expressing 
to Martins. "They want beef not to be served in 
the public schools that their children go to," he 
explained to me. The Jains are also opposed to 
the eating of eggs, as well as root vegetables 
like onions, garlic and potatoes, which cannot be 
uprooted without killing the entire plant. 
Martins was sympathetic but firm: "I said to the 
community leaders, 'This is not possible.' I 
said, 'It is very difficult to have an eggless 
cake for you.' " Martins often serves the 
function of gently explaining the limits of 
political power to the communities he works with 
- for instance, that New York City is not going 
to ban hamburgers in the schools any time in the 
foreseeable future. Still, he managed to restore 
the Jains' faith in the political system by 
arranging for city approval for parking outside 
their temple in Queens.
New York politicians, knowing Martins's links 
with the Indian community, often reach out to him 
with opportunities for his constituency. The 
Democratic state senator John Sabini was recently 
walking along the street in Jackson Heights when 
he saw a Pakistani cabby driving a taxi that was 
clearly from New Orleans. Sabini flagged down the 
driver and discovered that the cabby was an 
evacuee and had his wife and 20-month-old baby 
with him in the car. Sabini found the cabby hotel 
accommodations through the city's marketing 
agency and a job through the owner of a taxi 
fleet. The taxi-fleet owner has since offered a 
job to any driver from the Gulf Coast. Shams 
Tarek, a Bangladeshi immigrant and top aide to 
Sabini, explains that Sabini's office will 
actively seek out Martins and ask him "if he 
knows any Sikh cabbies, or anybody from the South 
who's impacted by the hurricane."
One of Martins's clients is a car service in 
Queens, whose drivers are mostly from the Indian 
subcontinent. He intervenes on their behalf with 
the Taxi and Limousine Commission, whose 
leadership Martins is well acquainted with. If 
you hired one of their cars on the day before the 
New York primary, you were handed, along with 
your receipt, a campaign flyer for Renee Lobo, 
one of the candidates for City Council that 
Martins is backing. It was a narrowly aimed form 
of campaign advertising, since the car service 
operates in her district.
Despite his deft political touch, Martins has 
also had some frustrations with the Indian 
community. Of the community's older, less 
aggressive leaders, he says: "They are losers. 
They come to me when they need work; after the 
work is done, they forget about me. They are 
short-term-goal people." Still, Martins says that 
he is hopeful that this situation is changing. He 
cites the example of Representative Bobby Jindal 
of Louisiana, an Indian-American who had a 
realistic chance of becoming governor in the last 
election. "We have to get the young people 
volunteering for political campaigns," Martins 
says. "I would like to see an Indian mayor of New 
York."
Some in the city are resistant to Martins's 
charms. "He's a great self-promoter," said a 
political aide to a state senator who spoke on 
condition of anonymity because his boss often 
works with Martins. "We think he's more talk than 
substance. He's a name-dropper. He loves to say 
he's got a direct line to our office. It makes 
him look good that he can tell someone, 'I can 
call the senator and it's done.' That's his 
shtick."
And is it indeed done, I asked, when Martins calls the senator's office?
"We try to help as many people as we can just for 
that rainy day when we might need help," the aide 
said. "We're just trying to build allies."
Is self-promotion a bad thing in politics? I asked.
"What kind of question is that?" the aide 
protested. "It's all about contacts, and your 
name getting out there. It's all about going to 
the dinner or the fund-raiser and someone seeing 
you across the room and recognizing your face."

Recently, in a booth at the Delhi Palace, a 
restaurant in Jackson Heights that he has been 
patronizing for years, Martins gathered with 
three acquaintances to find a job for one of them 
- a woman on the Taxi and Limousine Commission 
who was trying to find a new line of work as a 
photographer. One of the assembled diners, Terry 
Lewis, an African-American constituent liaison 
for Senator Sabini's office, began by noting that 
every month he gets the ABC Television postings 
for office jobs, which he offered to make 
available to the woman.
The other man at the booth was Sam Gandhi, a 
cigarette wholesaler who is considering going 
into the dialysis business with Martins. Lewis 
told Gandhi, who is always on the lookout for a 
good business deal, about some economic 
development areas possibly opening in Harlem and 
near the junkyards behind Shea Stadium. Gandhi 
had another business idea: an all-in-one wedding 
hall for Indians in Jackson Heights. Martins, 
though, steered him away from the idea of Jackson 
Heights as a locale, citing the difficulties in 
arranging for city approval for the parking.
Gandhi has experienced the benefits of being 
Martins's friend. He recently paid $100 to attend 
a fund-raiser for the New Era Democrats, 
organized by Martins, which was attended by 
Bloomberg and Raymond W. Kelly, the New York 
police commissioner. "I got my picture with Ray 
Kelly," Gandhi said. He put it up in his Queens 
office. "I think it works sometimes," he said. 
"If someone comes to rob me, it might help. If he 
knows Kelly, he might think, Let me get the hell 
out of here!"
Martins took out two bottles of red wine from a 
bag. Both of the wines were Indian, and one had a 
picture of an Indian classical dancer on the 
front. Lewis sampled a wine and pronounced it 
"palatable."
I asked Martins if he had ever considered 
entering politics himself. "If the time comes, I 
will take the challenge," he said. He said he 
could see himself running in a state or city 
contest, from neighborhoods like Richmond Hill, 
Ozone Park or Flushing, which have lots of South 
Asians.
Gandhi observed that Martins doesn't charge fees 
from the people for whom he arranges meetings and 
does favors. "He wants to be in public office," 
Gandhi said, "and this is the way to start, by 
letting people know he's there for them."
So this was the structure of Martins's life in 
the city: a little business, a little law, a 
little socializing, a little campaigning. "I am a 
wine drinker, and I love the concept of 
blending," Martins said. He brought out a bottle 
of his latest import, an Australian chardonnay. 
"In the day, I love to fight cases, and in the 
night I have my passionate business."
As the level in the wine bottle descended, the 
conversational range expanded, and the group 
began discussing topics of national and then 
international importance. "I could find bin 
Laden," Martins declared at one point. This would 
be done, he said, by "squeezing the bin Laden 
family." He put a hand up in the air and closed 
his palm. The opinion of the table was that the 
Bush administration probably knows where bin 
Laden is but has a vested interest in not 
capturing him. Martins, though, it was agreed, 
could find him. If anyone could do it, he could. 
He could fix it.

Suketu Mehta is the author of "Maximum City: 
Bombay Lost and Found," which was recently 
released in paperback by Vintage.

______


[4]


Economic and Political Weekly
September 17, 2005
Reviews

HETEROGENEOUS POLITICAL LANGUAGES

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India
by William Gould;
Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society 
11, Cambridge University Press and Foundation 
Books, New Delhi, 2005;
pp 275, Rs 695.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Francesca Orsini

Hindu nationalism has been the subject of much 
study in recent years, whether in its 19th 
century roots, or in the reformist religious 
movements like the Arya Samaj, or in the "hard" 
ideology of Savarkar and Golwalkar's Hindutva, or 
in the more diffuse form of public sphere 
discourse of early 20th century India. The two 
main perspectives from which scholars have 
approached the subject have been to look 
retrospectively either for the prehistory of the 
rise of the BJP in the 1980s or for the causes of 
"Muslim alienation", the Pakistan movement and 
Partition. William Gould's book is rooted firmly 
in the second perspective, though it suggests at 
the same time that to take solely Hindutva 
ideologues as the forefathers of latter-day Hindu 
nationalism may be too narrow a focus, for he 
argues that Hindu nationalism was more widespread 
than historians have supposed. Taking up cues 
scattered in the work of Gyan Pandey, Zoya Hasan 
and Mukul Kesavan, his book documents the 
pervasive presence of the idiom of Hindu 
nationalism among Congressmen in the United 
Provinces from 1930 to 1947.

The book revolves around one central argument - 
that the persistence of a widespread political 
language of Hindu nationalism within Congress 
worked powerfully against its explicit ideology 
of secularism. It alienated Muslim masses and, 
eventually, many of Congress's own Muslim 
supporters. Congress politicians employed 
"heterogeneous" political languages of 
secularism, civic nationalism and Hindu 
nationalism and appeared "deaf to the possible 
contradictions in their political language". 
Especially at the local level, they continued to 
work with the ideas and manpower of Hindu 
organisations even after the Congress high 
command had banned such overlap. Gould is alert 
to the peculiar circumstances and challenges that 
each phase presented - the boycott of foreign 
cloth during the campaign for civil disobedience, 
the campaign for "Harijan uplift" and against 
separate representation for the "depressed 
classes", the 1935 provincial elections and the 
first experience of running a provincial 
ministry, the difference between the riots of the 
early 1930s and those during Congress rule, and 
the Muslim mass contact campaign and the Pakistan 
movement. He is very keen not to suggest a linear 
history of inevitable descent into the 
polarisation and violence of Partition. Rather, 
he presents these two decades as a sequel of 
possibilities that were repeatedly missed due to 
the persistent "deafness" of Congress activists 
and leaders to the Hindu strain in their 
political discourse.

"Soft" Hindu Nationalism

The Congress version of Hindu nationalism was 
"softer" than that of the Arya Samaj or the Hindu 
Mahasabha or the RSS, though it revolved around a 
similar sense of cultural identity - familiarity 
with and affection for Hindu heroes, a view of 
the nation as mother, patriotism infused with 
devotional fervour and a strong spirit of 
self-sacrifice, the repeated use of Hindu 
symbols, rituals and images as a pool of 
metaphors, the ideal of a Vedic/Aryan golden age, 
etc. What distinguished Congress Hindu 
nationalism from the other, "harder", forms was 
its benevolent inclusiveness, the idea that 
Hinduism, like India, could and would 
effortlessly embrace and tolerate other 
communities and other religions. That this 
benevolent inclusivism would not appear so 
benevolent to other religious minorities seems 
hardly surprising now but, Gould shows, Congress 
activists and scribes in UP seemed never to worry 
about the fact that their strongly-held views 
about Indian/Hindu culture clashed with their 
ideology of secularism. Neither attitude was 
purely strategic or instrumental, this book 
argues, so theirs was not a case of 
hypocritically or mendaciously subscribing to a 
secular stance in public while being privately 
opposed to it. Rather, it seems to have been a 
case of genuine historical contradiction, surely 
a common enough occurrence, in which one holds 
two opposing desires and strives to attain both. 
The result is usually some sort of compromise or 
contradiction. The tragedy, in this case, was 
that although in this period Congress did 
successfully transform itself from an 
anti-colonial movement, with rhetoric and weapons 
aimed at the colonial state, into a ruling party, 
it was unable to find effective ways of changing 
its Hindu nationalist language and creating a 
political language that would attract and 
encourage Muslim masses. As Gyan Pandey has 
already pointed out, until the mid-1930s Congress 
avoided the question of Muslim separatism rather 
than developing a political strategy, and the 
Muslim mass contact campaign of 1938 and 1939 was 
a classic case of too little, too late.

Gould identifies four ways in which the 
ostensibly secular UP Congress - but the example 
could probably be extended to other regions - 
espoused the language of Hindu nationalism, 
especially at the local level. First, there were 
the activities of Hindu preachers and holy men 
who were not controlled or controllable and who 
mixed the language of nationalism with that of 
Hindu religion. Second, festivals and temples 
were used as meeting areas and points of 
mobilisation, useful for bypassing colonial 
censorship but hopelessly marked as Hindu. Third, 
the political rhetoric of Congressmen included a 
liberal use of religious figures and symbols, 
most famously that of "Ramrajya" but also, as the 
cover of the book shows, it imaginatively 
identified Gandhi with Shiva and mixed the 
bonfire at Holi with the burning of Ravana. 
Fourth, ideas of sin and pollution were evoked, 
for example in the case of the cow, in ways 
that stigmatised Muslims as brutal killers and 
enemies. While the use of religious symbols in 
nationalist rhetoric was not limited to Hindus 
and maulvis also used them as part of their 
political language, Gould records the objections 
of local Muslims to such wide and indiscriminate 
use of Hindu language and symbols and their 
resistance to Congress attempts at using their 
festivals and religious places for political 
mobilisation.

Communal Polarisation

Recently, the work of Charu Gupta and others has 
highlighted the 1920s as the decade in which 
communal polarisation started on a mass scale, 
while others have taken Congress' refusal to 
share power with the Muslim League in the 
provincial government of 1937 as a radical 
turning point in UP politics, Gould in this book 
suggests that the early 1930s also played an 
important role for political orientations later 
on. Though the boycott of foreign cloth and the 
campaign for harijan uplift and against the 
separate representation for scheduled castes did 
not involve Muslims directly, the aggressive 
picketing of Muslim cloth dealers who refused to 
submit and the reclaiming of untouchables as 
Hindus in ways that smacked of Arya Samaj 
"shuddhi" and "sangathan" worried local Muslims. 
The cloth boycott was the precipitating cause of 
the terrible Kanpur riot of 1931, which prompted 
the first extensive Congress report into the 
problem of Hindu-Muslim conflict, but the 
political language of this report Gould, 
strangely, does not quote or analyse. While the 
UP Congress ministry of 1937 did its best to 
ensure that it would not appear to represent only 
Hindu interests - starting a Muslim mass contact 
campaign and opening a publicity office that 
encouraged representations from Muslims - the 
press close to the Muslim League cried foul and 
called it a "Hindu Raj". Interestingly, Gould 
notes, complaints reaching the publicity office 
concerned "as much issues of symbolic 
significance as of material importance"- Muslims 
objected to the use of "Vande Mataram" as a 
nationalist anthem and complained that handbills 
and circulars from Congress offices were always 
in Hindi, and in "90 per cent Hindi Sanskrit" as 
one critic put it (p 227). It was this popular 
image of Congress as "Hindu Raj" that explains 
the "ambiguous and wavering nature" of popular 
Muslim support for Congress in the 1940s, Gould 
argues.

The final chapter of the book highlights the 
growth of a strong and vocal opposition to the 
demand for Pakistan which "helped to build up a 
momentum of "Hindu" opposition in the province", 
once again blurring the boundaries between 
Congress, the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha. 
While Congress was accused by the RSS and the 
Mahasabha of appeasing Muslims, locally militant 
youth organisations grew and prepared for a civil 
war. Gould also detects a shift in the writings 
of provincial Congress leaders like Sampurnanand 
and Purushottam Das Tandon at this time: Tandon 
for example, who was known as the "Gandhi of UP", 
rejected ahimsa in favour of a more militant 
stance, while calls for the "defence of Hindu 
culture" resonated with unmistakably political 
overtones. Rather than being something that hit 
the province from outside, Partition in UP 
appears in Gould's account as growing out of 
widespread and gruesome local clashes and an 
incandescent political climate. Once again, he is 
keen to draw attention to figures like Maheshwar 
Dayal Seth, who continued to provide a link 
between the Congress and Hindu Sabhas between 
1940 and 1945, at a time when political 
faultlines were ostensibly drawn.

Gould's account and his argument are compelling, 
especially because he so carefully avoids 
sweeping generalisations or linear causality. He 
uses the concept of "political language", not 
just in the sense of political rhetoric but also 
in Quentin Skinner's sense of "illocutionary 
force" (the "act in the utterance") to suggest 
that words and symbols did matter and were, seen 
in the context of the speaker's political 
actions, as effective as the actions themselves. 
The example he offers is that of Sampurnanand's 
statements on Hindi language and culture, which 
acquired a "communal" meaning from his being the 
provincial minister of education. Gould borrows 
Bakhtin's notion of "heteroglossia" as a 
methodology for understanding political ideas as 
espoused by individuals and groups, which "are 
best studied as something hybrid, or as a form of 
dialogue". Actually, heteroglossia for him both 
indicates the space between the meaning of an 
utterance as given by the speaker and that 
produced by the audience, but primarily 
highlights the fact that Congress' nationalist 
language was always heterogeneous "from top to 
bottom" (p 12).

Political language is also for Gould a way of 
showing the overlap between Congress and Hindu 
organisations, an overlap that clearly struck 
contemporary Muslims, even if direct links cannot 
be established. His primary sources are partly 
Hindi pamphlets and proscribed political 
literature, but predominantly the Police 
Abstracts of Intelligence and Native Newspaper 
Reports. These offer him a wealth of local 
evidence, but are perhaps not so amenable to an 
analysis of language, which would require longer 
and more articulated passages. Surprisingly, for 
a study of political language, even the writings 
of the "hybrid" UP Congress politicians that 
Gould focuses on, the Sampurnanands and 
Purushottam Das Tandons, on the left of the 
political spectrum but staunchly Hindu in their 
cultural orientation, are paraphrased rather than 
quoted. Nor is the question of Hindi political 
language(s) vs English political language even 
mentioned. Perhaps he found none in their 
writings, but that itself would have been worth 
mentioning. Similarly, "heterogeneity" as the 
space between the speaker and the audience is 
theorised rather than demonstrated. On the other 
hand, by holding fast to historical events and 
incidents, Gould is able to show that language 
mattered in ways unforeseen by those who used it.

Email: fo201 at cam.ac.uk

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=09&filename=9127&filetype=html


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