An outstanding Marxist scholar, historian and essayist, and editor of the New Left Review since 1962, Perry Anderson is known for a rich, incisive body of work spanning European history, the contemporary world, the Western Marxist tradition and intellectual history. The distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, now trains his lens on modern Indian history. His latest book, The Indian Ideology, just published by the Three Essays Collective, is a scathing critique of the dominant celebratory discourse of the Idea of India, or the lionising of the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a miracle. His three recent essays on the subject in the London Review of Books have already generated considerable debate. In an e-mail interview with columnist and writer Praful Bidwai, Anderson discusses his book at length
Tag - India
Britain’s odious rapprochement with Narendra Modi
About 1,000 Muslims died in the Gujarat riots, under Modi's watch. Without justice, there can be no reconciliation
Forging A National Security State: Brajesh Mishra in perspective
Glowing tributes have been lavished on Brajesh Mishra, the former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and National Security Adviser (NSA) who died last week, mourning him as a visionary and statesman. Any death is a human tragedy to be mourned. But amidst the deluge of eulogies about Mishra’s “steely determination”, conceptual clarity, and his “guile” coupled with “generosity”, it must not be forgotten that he was pivotal to bringing about far-reaching but questionable shifts in India’s security and foreign policy stances and forging a hard-line national security apparatus.
Suspend work at Koodankulam, talk to protesters, urge concerned citizens
The movement against the Koodankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu has entered a new phase with a Jal-satyagraha following the repressive police action of September 10. More than 120 eminent citizens from different walks of life have signed the following statement expressing solidarity with the protesters, and calling for serious engagement with them on vital issues of safety. The signatories include former Chief of Naval Staff L Ramdas, former Cabinet Secretary TSR Subramanian and former Planning Commission member SP Shukla, former Atomic Energy Regulatory Board chairman A Gopalakrishnan, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court AP Shah, former Ambassador to the United Nations Nirupam Sen, scientists PM Bhargava, D Balasubramaniam, Satyajit Rath, MV Ramana and Suvrat Raju, social scientists Romila Thapar, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Rajeev Bhargav, Amit Bhaduri, Manoranjan Mohanty, Gyanendra Pandey, Achin Vanaik and Zoya Hasan, writers Adil Jussawalla, Arundhati Roy and Arvind Krishna Mehrotraq, dancer Leela Samson, artists Ghulam Shaikh, SG Vasudev, Vivan Sundaram and Sheba Chhachhi, and many other scholars and social activists such as Vandana Shiva, Aruna Roy and Ashish Kothari.
Perils of promoting nuclear power
In an unusual move, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to halt construction of two nuclear reactors at Koodamkulam in Tirunelveli district, where more than 100 local residents have been on a hunger-strike against the project since September 11, supported by tens of thousands.
Missing A Historic Chance In Bangladesh : Teesta waters muddy relations
Did India snatch defeat from the jaws of victory during its Prime Minister’s first visit to Bangladesh in 12 long years? Did Manmohan Singh squander a historic chance to make a decisive break with the mutual suspicion and avoidable tension that mark India-Bangladesh relations?
Learning From The Fukushima Disaster: India must put nuclear power on hold
What do social scientists Romila Thapar, Ramachandra Guha and Jean Dreze, dancers Leela Samson and Malavika Sarukkai, former bureaucrats/diplomats SP Shukla, Nirupam Sen and EAS Sarma, retired Navy chief L Ramdas, writers Arundhati Roy and Nayantara Sahgal, scientists MV Ramana and PM Bhargava, artists Krishen Khanna and Vivan Sundaram, and former vice-chancellors Mushirul Hasan and Deepak Nayyar, have in common? The answer is, concern about the safety of nuclear power, highlighted by the still-unfolding disaster at Fukushima in Japan. This impelled these eminent individuals to sign a statement demanding a thorough and independent review of India’s nuclear power programme, and pending it, a moratorium on further nuclear projects.
Warning signals
As the global nuclear industry's fate hangs in the balance, India must rethink its nuclear power expansion plans and impose a moratorium on new reactors.
The panic of 1962
Nehru's letters to Kennedy requesting U.S. defence support do not show him, as alleged by some, as a ‘pragmatist' with a flimsy commitment to non-alignment.
US has an intrusive long-term economic agenda
President Barack Obama comes to India without a big “deliverable” even remotely comparable to the US-India nuclear deal which dazzled our elite largely because of the symbolic but unique exception it made for India in the global nuclear order. But that does not mean that Washington does not have a broad-based economic agenda to transform the India-US relationship to its own advantage. It does, and it is related to the global economic conjuncture.
India relishes its growing power—not debate over its purposes
When India got elected last week to the United Nations Security Council as one of its five temporary members for two years, Foreign Minister SM Krishna was ecstatic. He termed this a “big day for Indian diplomacy” and a “reflection of the expectations that the world has from us”. The media joined the chorus to celebrate this “monumental” victory, which will give India a chance to “showcase its eligibility to become a permanent member” of the Council. New Delhi has long nurtured this ambition and backed it indefatigably, while throwing its lot with the other G-4 aspirants (Japan, Germany, Brazil).
Superbug vs humbug
Disclosures about the ‘superbug' should jolt the government into paying attention to fast-spreading antibiotic resistance that could leave millions defenceless.
Plenty of Dogma, Little Rethinking: CPM’s crisis deepens
What the Communist Party of India (Marxist) dreaded the most in West Bengal, its bastion for 33 years, has happened. Ms Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress Party (TCP) held an extremely well-attended rally at Lalgarh in the Jangalmahal region bordering Jharkhand on August 9, enlisted the support of the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA), and threw down the gauntlet to the Left Front. She stridently read out an elaborate political chargesheet against the CPM and announced the end of Left “hegemony” and the beginning of “a new era” in West Bengal.
Brutalising A City, Unleashing Sleaze: The Games are India’s self-goal
The Cassandras have proved right. The Commonwealth Games have turned into a gigantic multi-billion rupee racket, under which Delhi’s landscape is recklessly ripped up, inappropriate and wasteful projects are shamelessly promoted, public funds massively looted, workers sadistically brutalised, the poor summarily evicted, and human rights egregiously violated—supposedly to enhance India’s global image in pursuit of hollow notions of prestige. The CWG, far grander than the Asian Games of 1982, will be monumentally irrelevant to the future of sports. But they will leave a toxic legacy of empty public coffers, disused stadia, and a battered mass of underprivileged people.
Wrong call on nuclear liability
The government is set to move the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, 2010 in the current session of Parliament after withdrawing its earlier draft on March 15 without explanation. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology headed by Congress MP T Subbirami Reddy has since heard various proponents and opponents of the Bill.
While the former mainly comprise Department of Atomic Energy officials, who stress the importance of moving the legislation quickly so as to encourage investment in the nuclear power programme, the objectors are a more plural group, including “official” experts such as former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) A Gopalakrishnan, and independent experts and activists from the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), Greenpeace India and the Delhi Science Forum, as well as political parties.
The opponents have raised a number of issues of vital public importance. The Standing Committee must faithfully and earnestly incorporate their suggestions and the government must pay heed to them if there is to be an informed and intelligent debate on the Bill. Any attempt to rush the Bill through would be thoroughly misguided.
To rebuild lives
The Group of Ministers' proposals fall short of recommending the minimum the victims of the Bhopal gas disaster deserve in reparation.
Terminal folly
Delhi's ecologically unsound new airport terminal does not represent progress; rather it marks the Indian elite's dependence on false symbols of grandeur.
Double standards on aid
Indian leaders trumpet their nation’s recent global ascendancy in a variety of ways. They: highlight the importance of India’s membership of the G-20, claim a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and demand India’s inclusion in what they for long, derisively, termed “cartels” like the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. Not least, they build gigantic, spectacular, exorbitantly expensive projects like Terminal-3 at Delhi airport. In line with this is their boastful aspiration to transform India from an aid recipient to a donor.
A perverse notion of modernity
The subcontinent’s leaders never learn from mistakes—their own, or one another’s. Nawaz Sharif’s White Elephant M-2 expressway was one of the greatest scandals in global infrastructure development history. Now, India is about to produce its match—in aviation, by building a $4 billion (Rs12,700 crore) new terminal at Delhi airport. Terminal-3, to be opened soon, is claimed to be the world’s fifth-largest airport terminal, and bigger than Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Singapore ’s Changi. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh euphorically described T-3 as signifying the “arrival of a new India , committed to join the ranks of modern, industrialised nations …”.
Hindutva politics in disarray and decline
THE Bharatiya Janata Party, once cohesive and disciplined, is now so faction-ridden that it often ends up damaging itself by pandering to particular leaders.
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