Month: November 2013

History as a Site of Struggle encapsulates the righteous indignations of a sensitive activist of a historian who is unhappy with the way politics has been drifting into the narrow alleys of obscurantist jingoism and sectarian hatred. Panikkar has been an eminent academic, but, as the editor rightly puts it, “he has spent as much time teaching outside classrooms as inside; as much labour writing for popular media as in academic journals”. The essays on offer in the anthology may, at times, sound repetitive since they were written at different times in response to different provocations. But the views expressed there have a conviction, which is both consistent and uncompromising. They are politically positioned and they are not expressed with a please-all grin. Panikkar is sure that secularism is good for the country and communalism bad and that a progressive nation cannot be built except on this foundational belief. But there are many in the country who think otherwise, by conviction or for convenience.

By B. Surendra Rao
Full review here

India and Ideology: Why Western Thinkers Struggle With the Subcontinent

By Pankaj Mishra, Council on Foreign Relations

According to Perry Anderson’s new book, The Indian Ideology, India’s democracy — routinely celebrated as the world’s largest — is actually a sham.

An Interview With Perry Anderson on “The Indian Ideology”

Sentimentalizing Gandhi by Praful Bidwai, Conterpunch.org

‘The Indian Ideology’ is another way of describing what is more popularly known as ‘The Idea of India’, which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.

Respect Gandhi If You Will, Don’t Sentimentalise Him

Praful Bidwai interviews Perry Anderson, Outlook India

The principal catastrophe of 1947 lay in the Congress folly of not realising that it was, in composition and outlook, a Hindu party.

After Nehru

London Review of Books

Why then has the sheer pressure of the famished masses, who apparently hold an electoral whip-hand, not exploded in demands for social reparation incompatible with the capitalist framework of this – as of every other – liberal democracy?