Culture & Nationalism

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-uOxKhYi5r_XD8PPhoCXMA/videos

Dialogue, With Care  by  John Dayal  27 Jun 2022 https://www.indiancurrents.org/article-dialogue-with-care-john-dayal-1248.php

Bishop Dabre’s original statement was aggravated by Catholic media interviewers who recorded him saying “I am not an RSS spokesperson or its defender. In truth, I have demanded a dialogue between the Church and the RSS which Indian Bishops had proposed.” “The Christian Community accepts RSS ideology and principles. We need to establish communication and coordination between Christians and the (Rashtriya Swayamsewak) Sangh,” another interviewer wrote.
Dialogue is a great thing...  Coming back to dialogue and lexicons, alas, when the RSS says nationalism, it means a very militant and majoritarian nationalism. The RSS is not a religious body, and it is not a political party. It is a multi-headed and aggressive organisation whose political face, the Bhartiya Janata Party, has been ruling India since 2014 with Mr Modi as Prime Minister...

Also, the Church surely knows that the one thing the founding fathers of the RSS held even more vehemently than their supremacist Hindutva was their visceral hatred for followers of Christianity and Islam.

RSS documents are clear that people of these two communities have no place in Bharat, that is India. They would have to accept second class status if they want to live in this Bharat...Would the RSS want to have a dialogue on the damage such a doctrine of Hindu Rashtra, with no equity for Muslims and Christians, can do to India?

There is a right wing narrative that those speaking about caste discrimination are Hindu-phobic. In India the Right wing tries to portray it as attempt to divide Hindu Society and worse still the Hindu vote. However , prejudice against historically suppressed communities, who seek their liberation is the main issue.

In America, as in India, Talking Caste is not Hindu-Phobic https://www.newsclick.in/In-America-India-Talking-Caste-Hindu-Phobic Subhash Gatade 06 Jun 2022  https://www.newsclick.in/In-America-India-Talking-Caste-Hindu-Phobic

Recently, Google News cancelled a scheduled talk by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder and executive director of Equality Labs, after many Google employees (of Indian origin or Indians) opposed it.

Thenmozhi was subjected to an organised campaign led by a section of Google employees, who called her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu”. Thenmozhi and her organisation consistently raised a voice against the exclusion and discrimination of Dalits in the United States.

In 2005, there was a commotion over caste as petitions from human rights groups and counter-petitions from Hindutva supremacist groups struggled for its inclusion and exclusion (respectively). The rights groups won that debate, sort of, but by 2015, the discourse peddled by so-called spiritual-cultural organisations started to gain the upper hand. Conservative Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a non-profit with roots in the World Hindu Council America, pushed through the dilution or erasure of caste from syllabi. It also watered down the significant role caste plays in Hindu societies and erased Dalit, Muslim, Sikh and Christian histories in textbooks. However, earlier this year, caste was included in the entire California State system as a ground in its non-discrimination policy. This means that the biggest public university system in the United States, with 500,000-odd students on 23 campuses, now will address caste bias. Indeed, the California State school syllabus is not as egalitarian as it can be. It saniitises caste concerns, but such changes show that the resistance is also growing.

What is happening in the United States is a battle of ideas, where substantive issues of justice and equality are battling phoney notions of unity that push social fissures under the carpet. This battle is opening up new vistas to discuss and end caste discrimination decisively.

See the testimony of Tanuja Gupta http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/2513-testimony-of-tanuja-gupta-full-text-of-the-google-caste-issues-and-her-sacking