Ashis Nandy gave a talk on hate regimes. Without saying even a word on Indian politics https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/ashis-nandy-gave-a-talk-on-hate-regimes-without-saying-even-a-word-on-indian-politics/1682551/ Rama Lakshmi 24 July, 2023 Nandy has done groundbreaking scholarship and written dozens of books and essays on Partition violence, State and hate, memory and cinema. As a former head of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, he shaped much of critical political and cultural thinking in the 1980s and 1990s.
'Mobilising hate has become a game in large parts of the world,' Nandy said at Nelson Mandela's 105th birthday memorial lecture at New Delh's India International Centre.
Obituary of a culture https://www.india-seminar.com/2002/513/513%20ashis%20nandy.htm Seminar Issue 513 in 2002. In the early 1960s, when I first went to Gujarat as an adolescent student, it was difficult to believe that Gujarat could ever have a major riot. People talked of riots that had taken place in the past and the state did have a history of small riots and skirmishes. Many Ahmedabadi Hindus seemed afraid and suspicious of the Muslims, but they were afraid and suspicious mostly of non-Gujarati Muslims, many of them labourers in the huge textile industry of Ahmedabad. They took the Gujarati Muslims, a large proportion of them business castes, as a part of Gujarat’s landscape, though there was clear social distance.
The 1969 riots began to change the city radically, though at the time the changes were not that obvious.. The violence paid rich dividends. So did the imaginative hate campaigns unleashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS. Together they gave a kick-start to the process of ghettoisation of the Muslims and the growth in the power of Mafia-like bodies in both communities, always itching for a fight and acting like protectors of the Hindus and the Muslims at times of rioting...
. In the ongoing riots, women and children have not only been attacked but also often killed with a sadistic glee that will be inconceivable in a civilised society. Even in the attack on karsevaks at Godhra, the one that precipitated the riots, it now transpires that the main victims were women and children...Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer