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Saturday, April 30, 2005
Left, meet right
Are there any issues on which the left and the right are on the same side in India? Yes. Ramachandra Guha tells us where the extremes meet in a piece in the Telegraph titled "Where left meets right".
First, he tells us of how he went to that bastion of left-wing academia, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, to give a speech. When, over coffee, he asked who was the last speaker invited by his hosts, he was told that it was a "Marxist economist", who spoke on "how multinational outfits such as this one [Nescafe] should not be allowed to contaminate the purity of the JNU campus". Guha writes:
And so, Guha concludes: "Bitter enemies though they might be, the Marxist left and the saffron right are united by what can only be described as an irrational fear of the foreigner." Guha spends the rest of the article answering this question: "What explains this shared xenophobia of left and right?" Read the full thing.
First, he tells us of how he went to that bastion of left-wing academia, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, to give a speech. When, over coffee, he asked who was the last speaker invited by his hosts, he was told that it was a "Marxist economist", who spoke on "how multinational outfits such as this one [Nescafe] should not be allowed to contaminate the purity of the JNU campus". Guha writes:
“Why does your professor oppose this Nescafé outlet?” I asked. “Because she feels we should encourage indigenous initiatives,” they answered. “Do you know where her own doctoral degree is from?” I asked. They didn’t know, so I supplied the answer — the University of Cambridge. “When you next meet your professor,” I said sarcastically, “ask her one question on my behalf — when she travels by plane to international meetings, does she carry a south Indian filter and Coorg coffee powder with her, or does she quietly drink the beverage offered her on the flight?”
I returned to Bangalore, to find my home-town overtaken by a much larger epidemic of xenophobia, orchestrated this time from the right. An American preacher named Benny Hinn was due to come to deliver a series of open-air sermons. The sangh parivar had come out in force to oppose him. The agitation was being led by the state unit president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Ananth Kumar. Kumar described Benny Hinn’s visit as “an organized conspiracy to defame and destroy Hinduism”. The ring-leader of the conspiracy, he added, was the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. Unlike the JNU professor, however, the right-wing loonies were not content with making speeches. They tore down the posters advertising Hinn’s sermons, attacked government offices, held up traffic and generally harassed the residents of the city.
And so, Guha concludes: "Bitter enemies though they might be, the Marxist left and the saffron right are united by what can only be described as an irrational fear of the foreigner." Guha spends the rest of the article answering this question: "What explains this shared xenophobia of left and right?" Read the full thing.
