Britain is good at dealing with diversity

The UK copes with the issue of ethnic difference more maturely than its neighbours, whatever the BNP may want us to believe (Read this comment piece on the Independent)

If the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of domestic skirmishes is perspective. After last week’s furore over the far-right and immigration in Britain, doom and gloom stalked the headlines. It seemed that the BNP and its odious “politics” had truly arrived, that the country will be forced to face, one way or another, its mono- and multicultural demons. But missing among the outrage and pieties of the past few days was a modest, but necessary, concession to reality: things in Britain are really not that bad.

Serious problems certainly remain to be tackled. The threats of radicalism among alienated Muslims and far-right bigotry among the “white working class” are very real. So too are the social tensions generated by immigration and the economic downturn. But in general, British society has handled (and continues to handle) the cultural convulsions shaking Europe in the 21st century with no small amount of grace and reason.

This is made particularly evident by a brief tour of other Western European countries that wrestle with similar issues of diversity and immigration. Look at the Netherlands, a state with a far older tradition of tolerance than Britain. There, the bleach-blond, anti-immigrant demagogue Geert Wilders and his “Freedom Party” led Dutch polls as recently as this March. Could Nick Griffin and his politics win a plurality of British public support? Not now, and probably never.

The Italian fascist organisation Forza Nuova demonstrating on the streets of Rome. Britain’s racists are nowhere near as numerous or as vocal

Tracing the fissures in India’s society

The worlds of variation discovered within the Indian genome only emphasise the difference that divides our nation (Read this piece in the Guardian)

Despite our country’s much-vaunted pluralism, Indians harbour a keen sense of difference, be it of language, religion or complexion. We also often have exaggerated visions of history, or at least of myth, history’s livelier twin. For instance, many Chitpavan Brahmins, a caste group in the Indian state of Maharashtra, have been known to attest their relatively fair skin to a boatload of Vikings (apparently very, very lost) who washed up centuries ago on the western coast. So it comes as little surprise to Indians that scientific research increasingly traces the roots of our diverse society to the distant past.

The latest study of the genetic history of India (detailed by Adam Rutherford) unearths worlds of variation within the Indian genome. Indians could read this new DNA evidence in a reassuring light, as confirmation of that oft-repeated cliche of India’s “continental” diversity: not only do its billion-plus citizens belong to an astonishing array of linguistic and religious groups, but also India is four times more genetically diverse than Europe.

But beneath this cultural hubbub lies the persisting, uncomfortable reality of a stratified society. The study suggests that the traces of centuries of caste-based separation are visible in Indian DNA. Such is the historical tenacity of “endogamy” (marriage within a social group) that Indians of different groups are often more genetically distinct from each other than “a Scot from a German”. Admittedly, separating your McKenzies from your Metzgers can be tough, but such abiding differences, within the frame of neighbouring Indian villages, point to a deeply fissured history of social relations.

Caste is a difficult and thorny category, its origins and evolution still murky. Though tied to “indigenous” Hindu systems of belief, caste in practice cuts across all religions in India and is often inseparable from class. It is also easy to overstate caste’s current relevance. Many Indians of all backgrounds, notably the heroic BR Ambedkar, worked tirelessly in the last century to excise caste prejudice from Indian society. The modern Indian state outlaws caste-based discrimination, while requiring “positive discrimination” for members of marginalised groups. In India’s teeming cities and swelling provincial towns, the structures and limits of caste affiliation have begun to dissolve or have disappeared altogether.

On the edge of an empire

Image by Jen Paton

Kanishk Tharoor explores the curious English nostalgia for the days when Rome divided and conquered Britain. (Read this piece in The National)

The town of Haltwhistle sees itself at the middle of things, proudly claiming to be “the centre of Britain”. Its tiny central square – flanked by a pub, a betting shop and an Indian take-away restaurant, the basic amenities of any 21st-century British market town – boasts a ceremonial signpost pointing to the extremities of the country: 290 miles north to North Orkney, 290 miles south to Portland Bill, 36 miles west to Bowness-on-Solway and 36 miles east to Wallsend. Yet this geometry is deceiving. Haltwhistle may be the centre of modern Britain, but for much of its history it has been a place on the edge. The town sits in the historic border country between England and Scotland. In 1597, a woman was hanged for marrying a Scottish man, an event described by a plaque in the same square. The plaque recalls an uncompromising ancient decree: “It be treason for any Borderer, man or woman, to intermarry with a Scot.”

At the heart of Britain – and, some would argue, Britishness – lies division. Just a few kilometres north of Haltwhistle, that split manifests itself in the crumbling remains of a great boundary. In 122 AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian commissioned the construction of a 73-mile long fortification across the neck of Britain from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, marking the frontier of Rome’s expansion. My girlfriend and I came to Haltwhistle to hike the scenic, rugged trail that follows the path of Hadrian’s Wall. I was drawn to its ruin in part out of a desire to stretch my city legs and get muddy in the misty north, and in part by the wall’s allusive appeal. Though it ceased to be an effective border or defensive line after Rome abandoned Britain in 410 AD, the wall’s symbolic connotations are legion: it marked the ends of empire, the real and finite limits of imperial ambition, and it claimed to separate the realm of civilisation (Roman-ruled Britain) from that of the unconquerable barbarian, a distinction that has forever tinged relations with Wales and Scotland, which together with England comprise the increasingly unwieldy creature that is Great Britain. Haltwhistle’s fear of Scotch miscegenation had old roots.

I confess also a boyish yearning for the wall, nourished by the historical novels of the British writer Rosemary Sutcliff, whom I read religiously as a child. Immersed in her evocations of Roman Britain, I would imagine myself in the company of auxiliaries and legionaries drawn from across the empire (Syrians, Sarmatians from Central Asia, Dacians from Romania) as they manned the stone ramparts, watching along its line for beacon fires of their fellows miles away, all the while swallowed by the darkness before them, a vast implacable wilderness full of mystery and threat. There was something impossibly courageous about it, I thought, with misplaced romanticism that I still struggle to suppress.

Hadrian’s Wall today exists only in patches. Evidence has been excavated of many of its forts, numerous “milecastles” (smaller forts built into every mile of the wall) and even more frequent turrets. The wall remains visible in some places, though much diminished. No more than a metre high, its ruin runs along ridges, skirting green burns and lakes, diving through swampy farmland. In other places, it is overgrown, but one can make out the regular, rectangular stonework bumping through the earth, shuffling in mossy silence alongside the trail. Elsewhere, the wall is altogether invisible, cannibalised over the centuries by farmers for their own boundary walls, their little empires of sod. Walkers will find the wall a fickle companion as it vanishes with no warning or as it appears suddenly around a bend, like a lost friend pretending he never left you in the first place.

Hiking along Hadrian’s Wall is a revelation of that very British joy of walking. Even as the rain cuts to your skin and your shoes dissolve into squelching puddles, there are pleasures to be had. Here, the path wends through a copse of trees, and the crinkle-and-snap of your plastic poncho subsides, replaced by the rush of the wind through the leaves and the thick resiny smell of pine. Here, the wall clings to the bare edge of the ridge, and you can see its foundation stones jutting out of the hill-face like strange, watching totems. Here, you stumble to the lip of an escarpment, and below, sweeping to the horizon of cloud, roll rippling tides of bracken and heather. The wind flushes the hills and valleys shades of green and yellow, the way the sea breeze skims the white caps of waves. And you feel alone, so joyfully alone amidst the bleak immensity of it all, a silly kind of joy, perhaps only the joy of cloistered urbanites like me, naïve enough to want solitude in the wild.

“Bad Dalston fiction”

A small venture launched with friends in north London’s inimitable neighbourhood of Dalston. Read more about the blog here. Read my somewhat flippant post on it (rattled off quite late last night before bed) modeled on the Serbian oral epic poem, the Battle of Kosovo.

Rebiya Kadeer and India

*Note* After the writing of the piece, a Uyghur human rights organisation released a statement insisting that no visa application was made. I suspect, however, that feelers were sent out about a visit to India (and possibly even a meeting with the Dalai Lama) and that they were nipped in the bud before a formal visa application could be made. In either case, the argument of the piece still holds; India is tacking a much closer course to China for reasons that may be sufficient for some, but disappointing for those who feel that there’s scope in India’s foreign policy to better articulate its ideals.

Last weekend, it was reported that India had denied a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, the ostensible leader in exile of China’s minority Uighur community, who China accuses of masterminding recent unrest in its western province of Xinjiang. Many Indian strategists applauded the decision – only for the Uighur Human Rights Project to later deny the reports. New Delhi, the strategists argued, had little to gain from riling Beijing and even less to gain from adding to Kadeer’s travel itinerary, a global junket aimed at building sympathy for the plight of the Uighurs. The Turkic, predominantly Muslim Uighurs made headlines this summer after riots and state repression shook Xinjiang. India’s interests, some say, would be best served by staying out of the mess altogether.

After all, a visit from Kadeer would, it seems, only cause grief for her would-be hosts. Her impending attendance at the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia prompted Chinese directors to withdraw their films and Chinese hackers to attack the festival’s website. In a furious diplomatic spat, Beijing slammed Japan’s decision to grant her a visa. And Chinese officials threatened Ankara over the Turkish prime minister’s promise to allow Kadeer into Turkey.

This certainly isn’t the first (nor will it be the last) time a state has put pressure on other countries to curtail the movement of controversial individuals. But what we should find distressing is the extent to which countries have allowed their own affairs to be dictated by China’s propaganda campaign. Kadeer is supported by American money, but she is not a “terrorist” (as China insists on dubbing her and her allies), nor is she capable of orchestrating the unrest in Xinjiang (as China claims she did). Instead, China has turned this woman – who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly when she visited openDemocracy’s offices a few years ago – into a straw-man, directing domestic outrage against her while distracting attention from the real anger, real frustration and real grievances of the Uighurs.

Read the rest of the piece on the Guardian.

India’s media explosion

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in India over the weekend, she could be forgiven for feeling like all of the country’s eyes were upon her. India’s economic boom of the last two decades has won global attention and the committed engagement of Washington’s strategists, but Clinton will have come face to face with another boom much less noticed abroad: that of the lens, the notepad, and the ubiquitous journalist. Buoyed by rises in literacy and income across the country. India’s media — and particularly its newspaper industry — is growing prodigiously in a time of global shrinkage. As their bureaus close, editions collapse, and entire publications fold, journalists in the West have cause to look enviously eastward, where the Fourth Estate is flourishing.

The world got its first real taste of this astonishing growth during November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, when India last dominated international headlines. The atrocity will be remembered not just for the image of the smoking cupolas of the Taj hotel, its grand Victorian facade engulfed in flames, but for the sheer profusion of cameras, microphones, and frantic reporters covering the tragedy live. The attack was designed for the consumption of India’s media, now nearly as sprawling and varied as the country itself. A calculating, vicious assault of the scale of Mumbai’s “26/11″ would no doubt shake any country to its core. That it could so transfix a nation of such size and diversity is a testament to India’s changing media landscape — to how information in a blizzard of languages and forms is increasingly available to the billion-plus people who live in the world’s largest democracy.

Priyaranjan Das Munshi, India’s minister for information and broadcasting, has described the growth of Indian media as “a revolution.” In all sectors, the information landscape has been transformed radically over the last 20 years. Take television: Before India departed from decades of dense regulation in 1991 and embarked upon its wide-ranging project of market liberalization, Indians only had access to the grainy broadcasts of Doordarshan, the staid state-run network. With the subsequent arrival of international satellite television and the emergence of several India-based private broadcasters, entertainment and news alternatives developed rapidly. The last 10 years have witnessed a further expansion; there are now at least 300 channels available via cable, including 30 news channels broadcasting in almost all of India’s 22 official languages. Indian radio has seen a similar proliferation, with the number of FM stations soaring. The chatter of the Indian blogosphere grows more vigorous by the day. By any measure, India is a much noisier country than it once was.

But louder still — and perhaps more significant — than the blare of TV or the crackle of radio is the crinkle of newspaper. As the fortunes of the printed press have plummeted across Europe and the United States, rising literacy and robust advertising have ignited a boom in India. In 1976, when the country’s population was 775 million, one copy of a newspaper was published for every 80 Indians. By the turn of the 21st century, as the population passed 1 billion, there was one copy available for every 20 Indians. So extraordinary is the growth that it has been compared by some scholars to the heyday of the press in the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 20 dailies in New York City alone fought for the attention of a print-hungry readership. According to government statistics, there are 62,000 newspapers already in circulation in India, with more expected to emerge.

The newspaper owes its success not only to the growth of India’s city- and town-based middle classes, but to transformations in the vast rural hinterlands of the country. Rising literacy rates have illuminated the once seemingly dark and benighted countryside. In 1976, 35 percent of Indians could read; now almost double that percentage can, and rising youth literacy, now at 82 percent, guarantees that the ranks of readers will only swell. According to a 2006 study, literacy rates are climbing even faster in rural areas than in urban ones. So while a deep chasm still exists between rural and urban India, it is encouraging that at least half of all newspaper readers are found outside the cities.

The clearest sign of newspapers’ broadening appeal is the ascendance of the non-English press. Circulation of Hindi newspapers, for example, has risen from less than 8 million in the early 1990s to more than 25 million today. At least 3,200 newspapers are published in Hindi — more than three times the number published in English. The largest of these, Dainik Jagran, maintains a circulation of more than 17 million and claims a readership of 56 million, where “readership” numbers account for the Indian habit of sharing newspapers broadly with several friends or relatives. Many other regional languages — from Assamese in the country’s far east to the more established (in literary terms) Malayalam in the southwest — boast strong and growing newspaper industries.

Read the rest of this piece at Foreign Policy

This piece was originally published on 20 July 2009

India’s rape victims lost in political row

Indians have long grown used to tawdry eruptions and interruptions in their politics, when the contentious core of Indian political life surfaces in the most grisly, unflattering light. From corruption to sex to murder, the “world’s largest democracy” is no stranger to the dirty imbroglio.

But the latest scandal to sweep through newspapers is striking in the depths of cynicism and coarseness it reveals. Rita Bahugana Joshi – a politician in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, affiliated with India’s ruling Congress party – has been jailed after she made inflammatory comments regarding the state’s chief minister, Mayawati. Deriding the latter’s attempts to compensate victims of rape, Joshi tactlessly urged victims to “throw the money at Mayawati’s face and tell her ‘you should also be raped and I will give you 10m rupees’”.

The response was swift and emphatic. Political rivals and allies condemned her ill-chosen words. Uttar Pradesh’s authorities, with Mayawati’s urging, flung Joshi into jail under a raft of charges, notable among them the crime of “insulting a person of a lower caste” (Mayawati is a Dalit, a member of the marginalised Hindu caste formerly known as “untouchables”). Joshi apologised for her remarks, but at the time of writing had not yet been granted bail. Her mood is unlikely to have improved with the news that her house has been set on fire.

Trading in such cheap, demeaning jibes is certainly reprehensible. But did they warrant the intervention of police and the courts? Mayawati’s many opponents have added further fuel to the fire, claiming that her rule in Uttar Pradesh had ushered in the “law of the jungle”.

But amid all this fiery uproar, the real outrage is how easily a serious issue – violence against poor women – can get lost in the muck of political mudslinging.

Read the rest of this post at the Guardian

This piece was originally published on 18 July 2009

The secret pilgrim

Richard Burton travelled the globe, charted its cultures – and sometimes infiltrated them with disguises. Kanishk Tharoor reads a novelisation of the explorer’s life.

The Collector of Worlds
Iliya Troyanov
(translated from German by William Hobson)
Faber and Faber
Dh54

It’s almost impossible to build an empire without shape-shifters. In moulding a world full of differences, conquerors inevitably make some subjects into liminal figures with multiple roles: intermediaries, informants and spies. Few more illustrious servants of empire took on this burden than Richard Francis Burton, a 19th-century British agent, traveller and master of disguise. He most famously posed as Mirza Abdullah, an Indo-Persian dervish, to perform the haj in 1853 – surely the ultimate shape-shifting subterfuge for a European in the Middle East at the time. Burton’s account of the pilgrimage, along with those of voyages in the Indian subcontinent, east and west Africa, and South America, made him a celebrity back in Britain. For his contemporaries, Burton was a kind of “Renaissance explorer”, celebrated not only for his intrepid travels but also for his knowledge of the peoples he encountered, an understanding so seemingly encyclopaedic that he could masquerade as one of them.

It is the thrill of this possibility – of inhabiting a purely foreign persona – that animates Iliya Troyanov’s fascinating and frustrating recent novel, The Collector of Worlds, an exploration of Burton’s life. It is also the conceit that has tarnished the shape-shifter’s once-glowing reputation. His writings – as fluent and energetic as their author – are today infamous among postcolonial critics. According to the late Edward Said and others, Burton’s travelogues are insidious examples of the 19th century “Orientalist” project: in trying to explain the Orient to a western, increasingly imperial-minded audience, Burton participated in the casting of the Middle East as an “Other”, a composite of stereotypes and fantasies in opposition to which Europe moulded its ideologies of empire. Whether one broadly agrees with Said or not, it is undeniable that, when first published, Burton’s many writings on the Middle East suggested an intellectual conquest of Islam, charting with apparent authority and relentless detail the habits, mores and beliefs of the Muslim world. They told a western audience that the Orient was not an impenetrable murk, but rather an almost cartoonlike world populated by convenient, reassuring stereotypes – a place within the remit of European knowledge and control.

Burton was convinced that his work was not remotely insidious, but instead rather practical. “It would be difficult,” he wrote, “to supply a better illustration of that popular axiom, ‘Knowledge is power’, than the conduct of Orientals to those who understand them, compared with their contempt felt, if not expressed, for the ignorant.” But Burton was not a dispassionate observer of “Oriental” affairs. Instead he stars in each narrative of adventuring daring-do as the protagonist, the central figure in his own elaboration of the “East”. In the preface of Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah, his most famous travelogue, Burton recognises and refuses to apologise for the “egotistical semblance” of his work, even if some ungenerous critics may see his narrative as pieced-together “outpourings of a mind full of self”.

Read the rest of this essay at the Review of The National

This article was originally published on 9 July 2009

Obama’s speech in Cairo: live blog

**UPDATE** In summary — Obama began compellingly, but somewhere in the later half the speech began to drag, its thrust lost in rhetoric that was at best earnest, at worst hackneyed. There were other weaknesses: he asked Arabs and Muslims not to be imprisoned by history, but at the same time justified America’s support for Israel with evocations of the excesses of the past. Critics will also have expected sterner stuff on women’s issues and on democracy in the Arab world, both of which Obama treated swiftly.

Nevertheless, after eight years of arrogance and error, the speech should go some way in convincing many people around the world that Obama’s administration is serious about rehabilitating its role on the global stage. Melding ideas and detail with his typical fluency, Obama was the picture of a cool, informed leader. His systematic parsing of the issues also promised an energetic approach to policy-making. Of course, Obama will be judged by his accomplishments more than his words, but as he said early on, the goal of his speech was to shift perceptions. The audience of elite students in Cairo University gave him a resounding ovation; how his speech fared in dustier parts of the “Arab and Muslim world” will be the better measure of its success.

1303 in Cairo Less than ten minutes to go ahead of one of the most anticipated speeches in recent memory (Read Nader Hashemi’s build-up on openDemocracy). President Barack Obama has braved criticism from many fronts in his bid to speak directly to the “Muslim world”. How will he spin US involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Will he make a dig at his host, Hosni Mubarak, and other American-backed dictators? Will he apologise for the gross blunders of invasion and torture? Stay tuned for live updates and commentary.

Read the rest of this live blog on openDemocracy

http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/email/kanishk-tharoor/2009/06/04/obamas-speech-in-cairo-live-blog

India: the promise of stability

The Congress party returns to power with a clear mandate, a privilege it should not squander

Five years ago, Indian voters comprehensively shredded the predictions of their country’s chattering class, toppling the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and sweeping to power the centrist Congress party. Analysts, pollsters, and journalists at the time all expected a BJP triumph, believing too readily the hype surrounding the BJP’s promise of an “India Shining”. The country’s electorate – the largest in the world – proved them woefully wrong.

Once again, the Indian voter has upstaged the Indian commentator. While many predicted that the ruling Congress-led coalition would shade this year’s national elections, none foresaw the emphatic victory that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claimed this weekend. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) – comprising the Congress and its remaining regional allies – won 263 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament), a measly nine seats short of the required majority. Congress leaders need only cherry pick small, convenient parties to make up the deficit.

The Hindu nationalist BJP and its allies, under the umbrella of the New Democratic Alliance (NDA), return to the opposition after only mustering 158 seats, trailing by a yawning chasm of over one hundred MPs. They now look on morosely as Congress builds a coalition government likely to be the strongest and most stable in over two decades of fractious politics.

A false dusk for Congress

If one believed the ubiquitous media narrative ahead of this election, such an outcome would have been unimaginable. We were told that Congress – the 124-year old party that won independence from Britain in 1947, but held dynastic sway over India for over four decades thereafter – was in irreversible decline. We were told that regional and identity-based parties would continue to siphon away disillusioned voters, further splintering India’s vast political landscape. We were told that India was doomed to governments with increasingly weak mandates, governments dependent on anarchic, unreliable coalition allies to maintain their fitful hold on power.

The results disclosed on Saturday suggest otherwise. Nearly one out of three voters (28.5 percent) chose the Congress party, a substantial sum given that Indians had to find their way through a blizzard of 1,055 contesting parties. Its own tally of 206 seats is Congress’ highest since 1991, when it won 244. While Indian electoral politics can be intensely local and parochial (voters often cast their ballots with their religious, caste, ethnic or linguistic identities in mind), Congress’ success is being understood as a vote of approval for its last five years of leadership.

The UPA government allowed the lightning pace of economic growth in India to tick along, while ensuring the country remained in large part sheltered from the buffeting winds of global recession. In the face of criticism from free-marketeers and governance sceptics, it invested in the gargantuan National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a project of unprecedented size that begins to make up for India’s egregious lack of a social welfare net. And it demonstrated coolness in the wake the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, resisting hot-headed calls for military pressure and action against Pakistan.

If the elections of 2004 were a rejection of the hyperbole of the BJP, this year’s polls seem to have rewarded the UPA’s restrained, sober rule with an indisputable mandate. Some Congress leaders have spoken of the victory as ushering in a moment of “renewal”, but in truth it is one of triumphant reinforcement. In New Delhi today, elected Congress MPs joyously backed Manmohan Singh’s return as prime minister for a second term. They know that there will be much more scope in the next five years for their initiative, their strategy and their agenda.

Read the rest of this post on openDemocracy