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| India-Pakistan | |
| Demons against enlightenment | |
| 2007-11-30 | |
| by Premen Addy Shortly before he died in January 2003, aged a ripe 82, Roy Jenkins, Labour Home Secretary in the Wilson Government of the 1960s and reputedly the most liberal and compassionate holder of that office in the entire century, confessed to a reporter that if he had known then what he knew now, he would never have permitted the same scale of Muslim immigration into the United Kingdom. Born into a Welsh coal mining family, Jenkins won a scholarship to that most quintessential of Oxford colleges, Balliol, no less, where Jowett and Lindsay had once held sway as legendary Masters. Jenkins, with his clipped accent and love of claret, never allowed his humble origins to hobble him intellectually or cramp his style. He was an accomplished biographer, with eminently readable works on Asquith, Churchill and Roosevelt to his credit. In the Left's lean years, when Thatcherism's shrill tones and incessant clamour had drowned the liberal voice, with Old Labour too restrictively militant for his taste and New Labour yet to be born, Jenkins transferred his allegiance to a new dispensation, becoming one of the founders of the Liberal Democratic Party. A lover of the arts, at home in the republic of letters (he ended his days as Chancellor of Oxford University), Jenkins enjoyed good conversation which, as Johnson remarked some two centuries and more earlier, was the hallmark of the clubable gentleman. Jenkins had detected the first signs of disturbance in the sylvan setting, the mounting challenge to the values of the Enlightenment that had shaped modern Western civilisation which, through all manner of cultural contact, had done much to shape many an alien shore. The renaissance in 19th century Bengal, with its galaxy of great figures, comes readily to mind. The radiance that spread to most corners of India became a period of seed-time and remedy, a time to sow and a time to reap as the new body politic took shape. So began all that has been fruitful in the Indo-Western dialogue. Respect for diversity, the importance of doubt and the search for knowledge became the benchmarks of this civilisational encounter. Out of this surely has grown the common attachment to democracy and the rule of law. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's memorable Four Freedoms, enunciated during the darkest days of World War II, when Nazi barbarism seemed unstoppable, was the inspirational force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The recent mob violence that has so disfigured Kolkata and Paris tells of the demons and simulacra of this earth who seek to demolish enlightened order with its creative space, and replace it with mephitic substitutes. When Mrs Margaret Thatcher, as British Prime Minister, offered the Anglo-Pakistani novelist, Salman Rushdie, the full protection of the British state against his would-be Muslim assassins on the strength of his British citizenship, she assumed for me a near heroic dimension I never thought it was within me to give. Rushdie had been exhibiting his skills as a Muslim trapeze artiste, entertaining the faithful with gyrations against Britain - likened insultingly to apartheid South Africa - and 'Hindu' India and its supposed oppression of its Muslim and Sikh minorities. He went a step too far with The Satanic Verses and glimpsed, however briefly, the purgatory from which he had mercifully escaped when he shook off the barren dust of Pakistan for the hospitable dust of Britain. Taslima Nasreen fled the hell of Bangladesh for friendlier climes. Her wanderings brought her to Kolkata, where she felt at home and from where she has been expelled by the Marxist regime in thrall to Islamist fanatics whose relationship to India is best compared to that of a death-watch beetle to a tree. In this particular instance, religion far from being the opium of the masses is their nectar.
Viewing the spectacle of Nasreen's present travails and the contortions of India's myriad parties, one is reminded of an engagement between horse traders, horse thieves and cattle rustlers. India must reclaim its lost honour. As for the Roy Jenkins opening reflection on Muslim immigration, one must wonder whether something similar couldn't be said of the dilemma that faced India's liberal leaders at the time of their country's partition. If they knew then what we know now, they might have persuaded greater numbers of India's Muslim community to depart for Pakistan, which so many of them did so much to create. Historical threads link London and much of Britain to the sub-continent. Brick Lane in London's East End could well be in Sylhet, such are its sights, sounds and smells. An eponymous novel by Monica Ali received critical acclaim from reviewers and has recently been released as a film. Local Sylheti leaders organised a protest against the book on the ground that it maligned Sylhetis and Sylhet. Curiously, few of them read English, but the movement gathered momentum and a visiting film crew who desired nothing more than a few shots of ordinary street scenes were advised by the Brick Lane police station to leave for fear of provoking public disorder. The film's gala opening was to have had a royal presence in Prince Charles. His visit was called off out of fear of a hostile demonstration. Meanwhile, Mr Delwar Hussain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP at the time, on a speaking tour of London with the approval of the British Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, compared his country's Hindus to excrement (report by Richard Ford, Nicola Woodcock and Sean O'Neill in The Times, July 14, 2006). Now, a year-and-a-half later, Ms Gillian Gibbons, a British primary school teacher on assignment to Sudan, has been jailed for blaspheming Islam. Her class of Sudanese seven-year-olds in Khartoum had named a teddy Mohammed, for which crime their teacher has been sentenced to 15 days in jail. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. | |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #1 OOOOOOO, "mephitic". * "Compared his country's Hindus to excrement" - YOU JUST KNOW THATS A TASERIN'! |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-11-30 17:12 |