Raj launched a vitriolic attack on Mumbai Joint Police Commissioner (Law and Order) K L Prasad for his alleged remarks that "Mumbai does not belong to any individual".i hope prasad learns from that warning, and so do other telugus living in mumbai, bangalore chennai, new jersey, canada, chicago, st.louis, dallas, san fransisco, atlanta, detroit, washington d.c and elsewhere in the world. especially those living in bangalore and in north america.
"Prasad should remove his police uniform, badge and chair and come onto the street and then he will realise to whom Mumbai belongs," he said.
The MNS chief said Prasad's comments were unwarranted and that he would ask the Congress-NCP government in the state to deal sternly with such officers.
11/09/08
kick the invidious telugus home
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7 comments:
Our instinctive reaction would be to project our normative view on to the situation. Here is a man challenging the liberal ethos. Prasad, Bachchan, or SRK could call his bluster and challenge him to make good on his threats. It would be down to the wire.
On the other hand, we could set aside our own subjectivities and ask: "What is going on here?"
Mumbai, like many other cities in the developing world (e.g., Rio De Janeiro Favelas), has been at the receiving end of the global project that is doing away with frontiers. This is leading to what Jürgen Habermas has rightly argued are two social trends: on the one hand the cognitive dissonances that lead to hardening of national identities as different cultural forms of life come into collision; on the other the hybrid differentiations that soften native cultures and comparatively homogeneous forms of life in the wake of assimilation into a single material world culture.
I belong to the latter social trend while the Thackerays are exploiting the former.
kishore,
thanks for that insight. speaking of frontiers, it's not just the thackerays, it's also the karnataka rakshana vedike and assorted organizations in tamil nadu and elsewhere which have spoken in support of local cultural interests.. we could/should also include several other groups fighting for freedom/independence. i've a feeling that the earlier national project (of building an homogeneous indian identity) has left regional cultures more insecure and unprepared now.
kuffir: QUOTE "i've a feeling that the earlier national project (of building an homogeneous indian identity) has left regional cultures more insecure and unprepared now." UNQUOTE
Absolutely. You have put it well. In fact, it speaks a lot about our own subjectivities that we dismiss the caste and linguistic nationalisms. As your readers would well know, linguistic nationalism is not a new phenomenon. Nehru expended all his energies trying to subsume the various sub-nationalisms into the project of nationalism. Unlike Europe, where the nation was first articulated and then the state was established on top of it, India is living the nightmares of most post-colonial countries, the establishment of the state followed by the nation building.
We, the elite, have benefited from the formation of the Indian state as there was a continuity for the bourgeoisie and we benefited (we can debate how much) from the national project.
We should stop assuming that the Thackeray's are crackpots. In the absence of social and economic justice, such demagogues will thrive. The real challenge for India is thinking beyond market reforms -- the trickle down approach will just not work. Why should anybody go hungry for years to await a trickle down justice. This to me is a deeply uncomfortable idea.
I said: Quote: India is living the nightmares of most post-colonial countries, the establishment of the state followed by the nation building. UNQUOTE
It should read ...nation building after first establishing the state.
Also when I say "We should stop assuming that the Thackeray's are crackpots." I mean to say that it serves no purpose by heaping scorn at such demagogues. We either challenge them and call their bluff, but that would mean the real possibility of defeating them and then taking on the burden of leadership, which we would like to conveniently abdicate.
Besides the usual (and what I consider intellectually lazy) response of stating that this is terrorising, we should consider the possibility that Bachchan offers the apology not out of fear for his security, but the fear of actually engaging with the reality of India, its obscene underbelly included. MNS, Shiv Sena and other such parties engage with the marginalised, whether we agree with the terms of agreement or not.
pardon the various errors in my comments! too late in the night
The core issue is imposition of Hindi which is spoken by just about 30% of population as a national issue warranting support with the taxes of all people of India.
I still do not know on what basis other state lingusitic groups have agreed to give this exalted status to the undeserving Hindi
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