The columnist claims the rise of nationalist forces in India is similar to their growth across the world….reports Asian Lite News
Ishaan Tharoor, the son of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and columnist of The Washington Post, has said that since 2014, since the BJP came to power, Hindu nationalists have set about chipping away at the country’s pluralistic foundations.
In an article titled, ‘Right-wing nationalists failed during the pandemic’, Tharoor says Hindu nationalists have built a more politicised, chauvinistic Hindu identity in a nation defined by vast linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity. He said that the Right-wing has recast the story of India as fundamentally Hindu and view a millennium of Muslim rule as tantamount to an era of “slavery,” as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it.
He added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s loyalists have been dispatched to bring to heel leading state-run universities, while his party’s supporters hound prominent historians at home and abroad whose scholarship they deem anti-Hindu. Adding that a broader climate of hate flourishes, he claims that rights groups now even raise the specter of genocide stalking India’s increasingly marginalized and vilified Muslim minority.
“Just weeks before losing his bid for reelection, President Donald Trump went to the National Archives to launch his quixotic 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic” education. There, he styled himself as the defender of “centuries of tradition” that culminated in the US Constitution, which was “the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization.” That tradition was under assault, he said, by an all-pervasive radical left, including corporate boardrooms, statue-smashing “mobs” of protesters on the streets and insidious educators in classrooms who “try to make students ashamed of their own history,” wrote Taroor.
The columnist claims the rise of nationalist forces in India is similar to their growth across the world. He has likened the rise of these forces as part of a global movement in countries like United States, Turkey, France, Russia and China.
“History gnaws at France’s sense of itself in a volatile election year. It occupies the rhetoric of demagogues in Poland and Turkey, and strongmen in Russia and China. It fans the flames of religious bigotry in India, the world’s largest democracy. And it stretches the widening political divides in the world’s oldest one, where GOP politicians have been bashing critical race theory and passing state laws that restrict how teachers may discuss questions of historical interpretation, race and identity. One proposed law in Texas, for example, would suppress discussion of slavery in school history curriculums about the state’s fight for independence from Mexico,” he says.
