Tweet

More from @_Shams11

M.🦋

@_Shams11

15 Sep

Hindu bias elements in the Indian Constitution:

Article 1: Name and territory of the Union (1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States

The naming of India as Bharat reflected the power of the Hindutva-minded sections of the Constituent Assembly who wanted the name...

...to reflect the ancient pre-British and pre-Muslim era of a 'glorius' Hindu past.

The symbolic significance of 'Bharat' in the opening article was meant to suggest a sense of Hindu ownership of the new India- the India which was perceived to have achieved self-rule after...

...centuries of foreign rule.
The name Bharat signified the birth of a new India, with whose government and state the Hindus felt a sense of identification.

Read 23 tweets

M.🦋

@_Shams11

7 Sep

Communal killings in Hyderabad, 1983

On September 7, a mentally handicapped Muslim leaving a mosque threw a stone at a Hindu temple.
This incident of stone throwing at the temple created tension in the area and the man was arrested immediately.

On 8 September, as revenge, a mosque in the compound of Allwyn factory was desecrated by P.Narendra (BJP MLA) and his men.

An idol was installed inside and pictures of Hindu gods were put up. The fans were damaged and the copies of the Koran were thrown into an ablution tank.

Soon the news spread and the AIMIM gave a call for bandh.

When the Chief Minister Mr. N.T. Rama Rao came to know about the bandh call, he called a meeting of the Majlis leaders and requested them to withdraw the call.

Read 16 tweets

M.🦋

@_Shams11

6 Sep

However much we may disagree with the objectives and with the pompous and xenophobic style of the Hindu nationalist movement, we have to admit that the movement has grown and come to power largely by obeying the procedures of parliamentary democracy.

(1/4)

This opens the larger question of the forms that democratic discourse and practices have historically taken in India.

Was the political culture of the so-called liberal middle class, which provided the backbone to the independent nation-state, ever liberal and democratic?

(2/4)

Or was it rather dominated by a paternalist nationalist discourse within which ordinary Indians merely provided the necessary but uncomfortable numerical strength?

Is Hindu nationalism really revealing the dark side of the Hindu middle-class culture...

(3/4)

Read 4 tweets

M.🦋

@_Shams11

31 Aug

THREAD: Congress-RSS collaboration

The growth of the RSS has not been without the support of Congress.

In the 1950s, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant was not just the Chief Minister of the United Provinces but also a man close to Nehru.

The genesis of the mosque-temple controversy in Ayodhya is owed to Pant who, in 1949, did not take action when the idols of Lord Ram 'mysteriously' appeared beneath the central dome of the Babri.

Nehru directed Pant to have the idols removed but he expressed his helplessness.

The district magistrate of Ayodhya K.K. Nair, refused to remove the idols and resigned from the Indian Civil Service.

Now how does one explain Pant's sympathetic attitude towards the most important RSS leader to date- Guru Golwalkar?

Read 20 tweets

M.🦋

@_Shams11

7 Aug

The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II.

Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most...

...humane way possible.

However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.

The quarter million slained at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not killed to hasten the end of the war against Japan and thereby "save lives", as the subsequent myth has been spread.

The Japanese government was already seeking to surrender before the bomb was dropped.

Read 17 tweets

M.🦋

@_Shams11

5 Aug

August 5 now joins the list of anniversaries of colonial violence punctuating "post"-colonial time.

For a people who have witnessed mass killings, mass blindings, mass torturings, mass disappearances, mass incarceration, mass rapes and house demolitions, 5 August was another....

...story to commit to collective memory; not a beginning, not a diversion, not a rupture.

It was continuation of decades of illegitimate exercise of power and yet another totalitarian attack on Kashmiris per se, and this event marked the transition of Kashmir from militarized...

...territory to a proper settler colonial state.

As far as Article 370 is concerned, it was already rendered hollow by successive Indian governments ( Congress and BJP) and by Aug 2019 it was a mere shell and had only the symbolic element.

To put it mildly, its removal was....

Read 14 tweets

Share this page!

M.🦋

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @_Shams11

M.🦋

M.🦋

M.🦋

M.🦋

M.🦋

M.🦋

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?