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EDITORIALS
Passive Resistance
Recurring Doda and the absence of a national
security vision
 There
is a renewed bloodlust in Jammu, as if the failed romance of Agra has
to be followed up with a raw display of terror and fear. There is a chilling
method in the latest rounds of terror: the target is religiously specific-Hindus
only. And the volume is growing. Someone is really determined to make
the message as bloody as possible: this is jehad and you are as vulnerable
as ever. Cross-border votaries of "the Kashmir dispute" may
say the carnage in the Jammu region is the inevitable extension of the
"freedom struggle". Post-Agra, such a view from the losers is
quite possible. If you can't gain anything diplomatically, bleed the enemy
further to make Kashmir a bigger, more internationally recognisable "dispute".
This not only shows the commitment of Islamic terrorists pitted against
the Republic. It also brings out, once again, the absence of a national
security vision. Has India become rather stoic? Or is the blood in Jammu
and Kashmir too familiar a national fact to warrant drastic reaction?
Part of the problem is India's national character.
Security is more of a concept here, preserved mostly in committees and
documents. A nation on permanent vigil is certainly not an Indian trait.
After all, India is not Israel, though the two countries continue to have
something in common: the presence of a never-sleeping enemy. Israel has
the resolve and no remorse, India has only words, that too very incident-specific.
So after every Doda, there are wake-up calls and high-powered meetings.
After the initial bouts of anguish, it is back to the smugness-till the
next Doda, or something deadlier. Where is the long-term Kashmir policy,
a policy rooted in a genuine sense of national security? The danger is
clear and present and it is testing the national will, but the Indian
resistance is passive. India has weapons but no vision.
Now The Vedic Bogeyman
Desperate for a cause, the leftist agitationist goes
after astrology
 It
was not Stephen Hawking who was objecting. The Elvis Presley of astrophysics
would have taken a more charitable view and perhaps even come out with
a harmless one liner. For this storm about astrology, raging in a tiny
cup called the UGC curriculum, has only brought out the totally misplaced
priority of liberal cause and angst. How can Vedic astrology be a university
subject unless the uniform education code of the BJP Government is about
to paint the temples of knowledge saffron? Not that astrology is a gaping
lacuna in the Indian education system. The problem is with the tone of
the protest. And the organisation spearheading it is known for its obsession
with redundant causes. If you take its fear seriously, India of tomorrow
will be inhabited by star-gazing scholars with PhDs in subjects like "The
Influence of Saturn on the Stock Market". The end of science and
scientific temper.
Really, the protest industry has a habit of
institutionalising the peripheral. It has a way of finding communal conspiracies
in cultural traditions. And it is good at making the word fascism sound
so familiar. Hence Vande Mataram is a national imposition, Sanskrit is
a Hindu dialect with no cultural relevance ... True, part of the problem
lies with some culturally overconscious spokesmen of the right who overemphasise
things that need not be emphasised at all. Still, that doesn't vindicate
the "intellectual agitationists" of the Left who see the hidden
hand of "cultural fascism" in almost all cultural proposals
from this Government. Secularly modern doesn't mean that you have to repudiate
your cultural or civilisational heritage, that religious rhymes with communal.
And of Vedic astrology as a subject, it is perhaps as relevant and academically
rewarding as gender studies.
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