Last month, this controversial seminar took place in the prestigious premises of MIT that grossly violated the sanctity of Indian hegemony.
Here is the link to the subject-matter of that conference:
http://www.twocircles.net/2010apr13/report_mit_workshop_challenges_secularism_and_rule_law_india.html
This is what I have to say:
Much of the past decade was about breaking walls and sowing seeds of homogeneity. As technology seeped through our societies, our eclectic minds exploded to embrace the new age: an age of cultural accord. Economic congruency. A strive to simulate the West into the East and vice versa.
Yet, today, the world is more fragmented than ever before. Identity in minutia has way surpassed the ethos of entirety. Factions based on caste, religion, ethnicity, ideology et all is marring the socio-political paradigm. Samuel P. Huntington points out in his book The Clash of Civilizations, “In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities.”
India, scaffolding years of cultural synthesis obviously served as a target for frequent civil disobedience in many façade. Historically the Indian diaspora is scarred time and again by many a bloody battle.
--Will Durant writes in his book "The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage" (page 459):
“ The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period”.
In modern times, the US Department of State reports that, according to the Indian National Human Rights Commission, the Kashmiri Pandit population in Jammu and Kashmir dropped from 15 percent in 1941 to 0.1 percent as of 2006 due to Muslim onslaught against Hindu Brahmins in that region.
Genocide for political gains even exceeded horrors of ethnic cleansing. In February 1979, thousands of impoverished refugees from East Bengal were massacred by the communist police in Marichjhapi near the Sunderbans, which serves as a classic case of vote-bank paying diminishing returns. Under the same ruling party hundreds of people are subjected to terror tactics, group violence and annihilation for the last three decades, culminating in brutal revolts recently in lieu of forfeiting agricultural lands by the government for establishing special economic zones.
Last week, on April 6th, seventy six Indian police men were killed by Maoist rebels in the state of Chhattisgarh. (As reported by Time magazine)
However, despite the ongoing mayhem, India exemplifies an underlying current of unity in diversity. The sluggish, yet buoyant, the nefarious, yet upright democracy harbors sentiments of allegiance and compassion. Ethnic minorities held highest offices in this nation. Various religious cults endlessly alleviated the downtrodden from ignorance and deficiency. Communities conspired for a better tomorrow. Perhaps, the challenge today is not just how to identify and analyze the various disintegrating forces in our society but to transcend idiosyncrasies, to establish a more connected, impervious sovereignty.
In the context of the recent conference at MIT, Subject: Group Violence, Terrorism, and Impunity–Challenges to Secularism and Rule of Law in India-- It is expected from an elite academic institution like MIT to propagate unbiased discourse of culture consciousness instead of hackneyed groupism based on petty politics. Focusing merely on one-sided version of a pogrom not only rendered injustice to the apocalypse in it’s entirety that innocent people of diverse religious affinity were subjected to, but, it dangerously infused faulty notion of our coveted cultural edifice, threatening the very existence of our age-old coexisting conscience. If not an all-embracing testimonial of our inclusive past, the great minds of the academic gentry could at least bypass the bigoted, esoteric views and offer a holistic approach to the fragmented narrative that they dealt with. The ever effervescent youth of today deserve to know the truth.
