Is the act of supporting a national sports team necessarily a nationalistic endeavour? Can someone who supports the national team of another country be considered a foreigner? The #MeriDoosriCountry campaign, which promoted telecasts of the recently concluded FIFA World Cup by invoking Indian football fans’ affiliations to foreign teams, provokes several pertinent questions about the relationship between fandom and patriotism.
Netaji: Living Dangerously by Kingshuk Nag,published by Paranjoy, Authors UpFront, 2016, pp 184,₹295. The Bose Brothers and Indian Independence: An Insider's Account by Madhuri Bose,Sage Publishers, 2016, pp xxx + 264,₹750.
While the minority status issue of the Aligarh Muslim University is sub judice, the Government of India should not go with the narrow and sectarian outlook that deprives minorities of their fundamental rights. Establishing an institution involves a great deal of physical, emotional and financial burden and labour on the part of the founders and the community at large. The article recalls an array of Supreme Court cases which must not be lost sight of while interpreting the minorities' rights to "establish and administer educational institutions."
The Brexit referendum was called effectively to settle an inner-party struggle within the conservative Tory party. The struggle in the Tory party signifies deep divisions within the ruling elite and the state. The Brexit vote and the victory of the nationalist strand in Toryism present the spectre of disintegration of the United Kingdom.
Hundred years after the Irish declared a republic, the Easter Rising of 1916 remains a testament to both the feistiness and fallibility of the human spirit. This article recalls the emergence of a truly "rainbow coalition" from a fractious civic polity that would be emulated in other parts of the world with varying degrees of success.
A look at the various ideas of childhood that have been dominant in India over the past century or so, and what they mean for parenting, pedagogy and politics in the new century.
As violations of freedom of expression pile up, how productive is it to defend freedom on the ground of tolerance for dissent? Marking out an opinion as dissent paradoxically enables the consolidation of the mainstream consensus. There is a clear shift in the arguments deployed to curtail free expression of ideas from hurt sentiments to truth. Such a shift is taking place in a public culture which requires individuals to have opinions, but is incapable of sustaining critical dialogue.
The modern public university in a democracy faces the challenging task of producing and disseminating knowledge. Though the public character and universality of knowledge seem to be threatened today by both the state as well as the market forces, the university cannot afford to remain an apolitical institution in a democracy. There are lessons to be learnt in the debates surrounding the development of German universities and the idea of a university as the idealist philosophers have conceptualised.
With the resurgence of nationalism in this age of aggressive globalisation, the call to dream in English is often a demand for conformity with what are declared to be national mainstreams. The demand for unilingualism and conformity is complicated by the idea of dreaming in English as articulated by colonised and subordinated groups in other contexts. What should give us pause, however, is any easy equation of the English language, or Western democracy, with fixed notions of science, rationality, progress and modernity. How might we think through these conundrums and challenges?
If nationalist sentiments are the only and final prerogative to belong to an academic community, then it must also be reiterated, a university has no business to share these sentiments. The founding figures of JNU knew it and it is upon the entire community of students, teachers and concerned citizens to safeguard the university against such jingoistic versions of nationalism.
The dalit discourse in India presents a sharp contrast to the "derivative" and the "desi" discourses governing nationalist thought and the "idea of India". The dalit discourse goes "beyond" the two in offering an imagination that is based on a "negative" language which however transcends into a normative form of thinking. The dalit goes beyond both the derivative and desi inasmuch as it foregrounds itself in the local configuration of power, which is constitutive of the hegemonic orders of capitalism and brahminism.
This paper focuses on the shifting contours of the anti-Tehri dam movement in the past three decades. It examines the changing declarations of environmentalists, especially Sunderlal Bahuguna and other leaders of the movement on the one hand, and the involvement of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in the anti-dam politics on the other. Exploring the evocations of nature, religion and nation in different phases by these two groups of actors, it argues that through a regular use of certain mythical beliefs and simplified dichotomies, there was an inadvertent collaboration between green and saffron. The Tehri dam became a means of combining sacredness with impulse, gravity of high politics with solemnity of daily worship, and nature with nationalism.
