The Nobel laureate is walking straight into the trap set by Hindutvawadis and those wretched fascist BJPwallahs.
IS The Times of India getting saffronised? Surprise, surprise! On June 9 it carried an article by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen that said that India is really great! Fancy Sen Babu saying such a thing and getting published to boot! "There are" writes Amartya Sen, "reasons for us to take pride in India's role not as an imaginary culture in statics isolation, but as a dynamic civilisation interacting vigorously with the world." If Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi had said that, he would have been hounded as a Hindutvawadi trying to praise India. It is okay if Amartya Sen says that. He is a proper secularist.
Senbabu had other things to say about India - and, the Lord forgive him! - even about Sanskrit! "It is not often realised" writes Senbabu, "that even such a central term in Chinese culture as Mandarin is derived from a Sanskrit word, namely Mantri which went from India to China via Malaya."
Chinese translation
Furthermore, writes Senbabu, "the
first printed book in the world was the Chinese translation by Kumarajiva
(a half Indian half Turkish scholar) of a Buddhist Sanskrit text, Vajrachchedikaprajnyaparamita.
Those secularists in the English media who have been running down Sanskrit
might kindly please take note.
Senbabu says the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed, he adds, possibly in any language) namely Panini, was an Afghan. Senbabu, no doubt, also knows that in those times the Indian influence extended to Afghanistan and one might add that Afghanistan culturally was an extension of India as the Bamian Buddha should show. And one might as well also remind Senbabu that Gandhari of Mahabharata fame, hailed from Kandahar.
Senbabu reminds us that "Indian mathematics and astronomy actually flourished particularly in the first millennium after Christ and Arabic and Persian writers are extremely generous in acknowledging what was achieved in India then - a long list including development of the modern form of the decimal system, the emergence of trigonometry and Aryabhat's identification of the diurnal motion of the earth." This is truly scandalous. How can Senbabu praise India like that? He is walking straight into the trap set by Hindutvawadis and those wretched fascist BJPwallahs.
Next thing we know Senbabu will be asking Saraswavativandana to be sung. Where is Senbabu heading for? Importantly, where is The secular Times of India heading? It even carried a normal report on Narendra Modi's address at Shivaji Park on the December 12th without indulging in hysterics. Modi's address should have been front page news in every Mumbai paper but another secular paper The Asian Age thought it fit to dismiss it to page 3. Par for the course. How can a secular paper treat Modi as worthy of page 1 coverage? The paper said Modi was "gloating over his victory in the recent Assembly elections". Gloating, eh?
In this connection what India Today (Jan. 20) reveals is interesting. The Congress Working Committee apparently met some time ago and discussed the Gujarat elections. At that meeting AICC General Secretary is reported by India Today as saying: "We created a hype that we were winning to scare our rival and it worked. Without the hype we couldn't even have campaigned. But then we became a victim of our hype. We began to believe it." But how did the Congress create the "hype"? Did it by any chance have a hand in the poll taken by Outlook which said Congress will win the elections with a comfortable majority? Will editor Vinod Mehta kindly explain?
Incidentally, the General Secretary Kamal Nath might read an editorial in The Statesman (Jan. 9) that bluntly said that "under Sonia Gandhi, the Congress has lost any ideology it once had while Rajiv Gandhi's vulgarity and corruption and shameless cover-ups still rankle in the public mind more than a decade after his death".
Added the editorial: Far from distancing itself from its murky past, the Congress has seemed to adopt it as an act of faith... It clings to the discredited legacy."
The Statesman said that the image the Congress projects is not that of a national party but that "of a party of sycophants who think the same discredited family will bring them political victory". And for good measure it added: "The faster the Congress realises that it won't work, the better for its political fortunes. Genuine leaders are needed".
The message is clear. Sonia Gandhi had better quit. One may or may not agree with The Statesman but it has a habit of asking inconvenient questions. In an editorial on December 16, 2002 the paper said: "If the BJP shouldn't start dreaming on the basis of Gujarat, should the Congress, handed down a humiliating victory, dismiss it as a special case? No, for Gujarat has confronted the party with questions it must address". The paper did not believe that Gujarat will be repeated in other states because "the formula is hard to replicate and to assume it can is an insult to voters who threw out Indira Gandhi".
Meanwhile it may be worth pointing out that where news about Indo-American relations is concerned the NRI weekly India Abroad is hard to beat. It's January 3, issue had an excellent story on how the Nixon Administration favoured Pakistan in 1971 during the short Indo-Pakistan war over Bangladesh. It even published a photostat of a document signed by Nixon in which he wrote: "Don't squeeze Yahya at this time," addressing his exhortation to "all hands", obviously right down from the Secretary of State to the junior officer at the India-Pakistan desk.
The issue is: if India Abroad can
carry such an excellent story, why can't Indian papers? The news is there
for all to get. Papers like The Hindu, Hindustan Times and The Times of
India earn tons of money. What prevents them from having steady full-time
correspondents in Washington? The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas meetings could
have been fully covered. They deserved full-page coverage which practically
all dailies failed to do. Some newspapers gave the story inside page coverage,
while the Hindustan Times preferred, while giving front page coverage to
it to quote Nadira Naipaul, wife of V.S. Naipaul, as saying that being
now in India "Feels Like I Am Back in Pakistan", making that into a headline.
Clever, but cheap. Even the bitterly anti-BJP paper Deccan Chronicle (Jan.
12) reported that "Pravasis find hero in Modi."