Ashutosh Varshney Profile picture
Sol Goldman Professor, Political Science, and Director, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University | Columnist, The Indian Express |
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Jan 26, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
Not so fast @HindolSengupta|Romain Hayes, in BOSE IN NAZI GERMANY (Random House 2011), extensively documents Bose's activities | He met Hitler only once (May 1942), but arrived in Berlin in April 1941, and cultivated Ribbentrop, Goebbels & Himmler for months | @ShekharGupta (1/n) Hitler met Bose only once, but that is because heads of government don't meet foreign leaders all the time| Bose kept meeting the highest officials of Nazi regime for a year before he got an audience with Hitler| He systematically worked towards an alliance with the Nazis|(2/n)
Jan 24, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
Bose’s commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity is truly admirable| But why can’t so many Bengali intellectuals — not all luckily — see the damming flaws of this great man? Why can’t they acknowledge that there was no defense of Bose embracing Hitler, who killed 6 million Jews? (1/n) It is also clear that two other great leaders of the time — Gandhi and Nehru — never embraced Hitler, even though Hitler’s enemy was the same as their enemy: the British | They did not adopt Bose’s view that the enemy of the enemy was a friend, even if he was a mass killer| (2/b)
Feb 27, 2020 10 tweets 4 min read
#DelhiRiots | I have been in classes and seminars all day| The argument below appears to have led to some strong approvals and vigorous criticisms| I write a detailed response below, which i could not earlier| The term "semi-pogrom" is the crux of the matter| (1/n) #DelhiRiots| The term "pogrom" came in the social sciences from the anti-semitic mob violence against the Jews in Tsarist Russia| The Odessa pogrom is the most extensively studied pogrom of that period| Mobs aided, or overlooked, by the local police killed with abandon| (2/n)
Feb 26, 2020 6 tweets 3 min read
#DelhiRiots | I researched Hindu-Muslim riots for ten years in the 1990s, which led to my book “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life” (Yale & Oxford 2002)| On the whole, Delhi riots of this week are now beginning to look like a pogrom, a la Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 1984 | (1/n) #DelhiRiots| Pogroms constitute a special class of riots when state police, instead of acting neutrally to crush riots, (a) looks on while mobs go on a rampage, or (b) explicitly aids violent mobs | Enough evidence of (a) from Delhi this week, and some of (b) as well | (2/n)