Identities – Part VI – The Politics of Identity

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Identity Politics is an attempt to empower a group of people that have a basic differentiation from the rest based on their race, colour, religion, caste, ethnicity, culture, region, sex, sexual orientation and a multitude of such other identifiers. Many of its practitioners are well intentioned highlighting the plight suffered by their group. For example, there have been multiple feminist movements across the world. These movements often run campaigns on issues like female infanticide, dowry harassment, sexual harassment, domestic violence, equal rights, honour killing etc. Another example is Gay Rights Activists, running campaigns on equal rights for Gays. Highlighting these Identity based issues plays in important role in a civil society that promises to give equal rights to all its members. It is an attempt to address a problem area that confines a particular group to the backwaters of a society.

The problem I have is that Identity based politics can get a lot uglier when the same practitioners look for political representation. I am not talking about feminism, gay rights, environmentalists and various such other groups. I am talking about Identity groups that seek to enter mainstream politics. Groups that cater exclusively to black or white, Christian, Muslim or Hindus, Yadavs or Dalits etc

Let's take a classic example. The British National Party is an exclusive whites-only political party in the United Kingdom. Party membership is limited to "Indigenous Caucasians". One of the objectives of the BNP is to see an all white nation. It wants to send all immigrants back to their home country. What about non-Caucasian people who are now naturalised British citizens or non-Caucasian people who were born in United Kingdom? Well, tough luck if you are one of them. They want to send you back "home" as well, never mind that you don't know of a home outside mother England. The BNP however does not have a problem with white immigrants. Those folks are fine and dandy. Thankfully the British public has so far denied the BNP any representation in the Parliament. They do however manage to win a handful of local council elections. Interestingly, the wards in which they do win are some of the most economically backward wards in the whole of Britain.

Alas, United Kingdom is not the only country that has to deal with far-right winged politics. Germany has National Democratic Party of Germany to contend with. This political setup is very similar to the BNP in its ideology. News about them reached even India when Obama was elected President of the United States. They apparently felt his presidency was the result of "the American alliance of Jews and Negroes". Like UK and Germany, almost every democratic country in the world has to tolerate such divisive and hate based politics.

You would want to elect a candidate based on a development platform, based on election promises that focus on improving our day to day lives. But instead we have to deal with candidates who don't have any focus of development. Their basic premise is to induce mass paranoia among the general public. It's almost like they are thinking – 'Let's scare them so much that development is no longer the most important issue. Let's make them insecure, unsure, hesitant and suspicious. They will have no choice but to vote for us'.

I cannot discuss Identity politics and not discuss India. It is like talking about flying reindeers and not talking about Santa Claus. India is a country with amazing diversity, diversity in its languages, regions, religions and caste permutations. It's the Promised Land for all Identity Politician wannabes. Unlike other countries, Identity politics can actually get you political mileage and the elusive seat of power. Interestingly many of the identity politicians in India are not far-right in their ideology. They are so self-serving that often their ideology is obscured and relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things.

I list below just three such interesting identity political parties.
Shiv Sena – Can claim to be one of India's first right wing political parties. This politic party was born out of perceived marginalization of Marathi people living in Maharashtra and a strong advocate of a pan-Indian Hindu identity. It was also vehemently anti-Muslim in the 1990s but these days its ire is concentrated on the immigration of North Indians to Bombay (Mumbai)

Bahujan Samaj Party – Stands for the rights of Dalits. The political setup is controlled in an authoritarian manner by Mayawati, U.P's current Chief Minister. Her net worth today runs into hundreds of millions of rupees. She has no ideological leaning worth talking about, having opportunistically aligned with BJP, Congress, SP and the Left during various elections in the last 15 years. It is her ambition to be the next Prime Minister of India. God have mercy on us.

DMK and AIADMK – Both political parties represent the Dravidian movement and have a strong presence in Tamil Nadu. So strong that since 1967 Tamil Nadu seen 16 Chief Ministers - all of whom are either from DMK or AIADMK. The Dravidian movement started out as an anti- Brahmanism, opposition to Hindi and even cessation from India much of which subsided in the 1960s.

The most encouraging factor of the 2009 Indian General Election has been the defeat of many of the identity based political parties. Caste and race permutations failed in this election. For instance, Shiv Sena lost in its stronghold of Bombay, BSP lost seats even in constituencies where the scheduled castes were in a majority. Is our electorate getting wiser? Only time will tell.

Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos
Part IV - Zeitgeist
Part V - The Fear of Small Numbers

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Identities – Part V – The Fear of Small Numbers

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Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos
Part IV - Zeitgeist

The title to this blog entry is inspired by a newspaper article I read a few months back on a book written by Arjun Appadurai called Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. For those of you who want a copy, it can found on any of the regular online book stores, like Amazon. I have never actually read the book, only the review in the newspaper. Still, I found the title of the book in itself is very fascinating. I have found no other book title so compelling in recent times. It made me pause, take a deep breath and contemplate on the meaning and its significance. When you spend time thinking about it, so much unravels. This blog entry is an attempt to pen down those thoughts. Mr. Appadurai apparently explains about globalization and co-relates the global unrest and terrorism to it. While his thoughts are those of a seasoned anthropologist and intellect, mine are from a layman's perspective and they have absolutely nothing to do with globalization.

'The fear of small numbers' makes me wonder why we fear small numbers in the first place. Why is it that minorities are viewed with so much indifference, suspicion and sometimes hate? In certain societies, minorities feel they don't have equal rights to the majority even if in the modern free democratic world we are all supposedly equal in the eyes of the law and we have the same rights granted to us by the constitution. While some minorities feel like second class citizens others feel oppressed and discriminated against, not to mention those hordes of people who lost their lives imply because they were not in the majority. Indo-Fijians constitute over 35% of the population of Fiji, yet their political representation has been scuttled over a series of coups since the 1980s. They represent a classic case of a community that feels at times as if they don't have the same rights as the rest of the country. The African American population and the civil rights movements to restore equal rights are well documented throughout American history. It's hardly surprising that over 90% of African Americans voted this time in Obama's historic election to the White House. This is the very same building where people of Obama's race were not allowed to enter in the early parts of the 19^th century unless they were part of the housekeeping staff. The African Americans are examples of a race that faced discrimination in the form of brutal slavery and blatant unequal rights.

We can go as far back in history as we want to look at how a dominant group over powers a minority. The indigenous Australians, Aboriginals today constitute less that 3% of the population on the land mass that once completely belonged to them. A majority of their culture, customs and languages are today considered endangered. Under the Australian law, children of mixed heritage were forcibly removed from their parents so that they could assimilate into the Australian culture. Their neighbors, the Maoris, suffered a similar fate of cultural and numerical decimation. In many ways, the natives of Australia and New Zealand fared much better than those of Latin and Central America – the Mayans, the Incas and the Aztecs. We can go back to biblical times, the times when the Hebrews were enslaved to the Egyptian Pharaohs and oppressed to such a degree that God sent to them a Prophet who liberated and took them to the Promised Land.

In modern times, there is no such thing as the Promised Land. There is no land free of occupation. The independence of countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania lead to a mass exodus of people of Asian (read Indian) origin from these countries to places like England. Zimbabwean land reforms in the last decade lead to the redistribution of land to the majority population as the government contended that the whites while numbering only a percent of the population held a majority of the land. This redistribution in turn has led the large scale displacement of the population and the collapse of the economy. Many of the displaced white minorities have now migrated to all parts of the world. The average life expectancy of a Zimbabwean is 36 years.

Slavery, cultural annihilation, displacement and racial/religious discrimination aren't the lowest levels we can stoop to. Our humanity is capable of falling off a cliff. We are a species that's capable of Ethnic Cleansing. The slaughter of 6 million Jews in World War II is not the only example in our history. As recently as 1994, saw the genocide of Tutsis by the Hutus majority in Rwanda that saw the death of over a million people. Around the same time, the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II was perpetuated in Bosnia by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims. This happened despite the area being declared a safe zone by the UN and despite UN peacekeeping forces deployed there. Further crimes against humanity were committed across Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia. In each and every case of genocide in our bloody history, victims were selected, separated, segregated, stripped, raped and brutally killed in unimaginable ways because of one and only one reason – their identity.

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Identities – Part IV – Zeitgeist

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Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos

My history teacher in high school had a very unique way to teach. It's probably on the reasons I enjoy history as a subject and why I am intrigued so much by socio-political issues. She once wrote down ZEITGEIST on the board and asked us to spend some time finding out what it meant. There were brownie points up for grabs. The only hint she was prepared to give was that it was not an English word. Now this was a pre-internet era where personal computers were just coming in. Only one of my classmates had a computer at home and he was the envy of the whole class. Google was almost a decade away. Our history book for the term, our curriculum and indeed those of our seniors contained no reference to Zeitgeist. What the heck did it mean anyway? And what was its relevance to our subject.

Zeitgeist as I was taught that year is a German word and refers to the way a group of people think, believe and behave during a specific time period. During the preceding or subsequent era people would have felt differently. Wikipedia defines Zeitgeist as - the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era and also notes that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events. In the previous week while studying World War II, the general consensus in our class was OK Hitler was this total nutcase; a gifted orator and all that but a nutcase nonetheless. He was responsible for the death of millions of people. The only fault of this people was that they had a different identity, they were Jewish, an identity that Hitler hated and he wanted to establish this pure Aryan race. OK Point accepted. But what about the rest of the Germany? Why did they go along? Can you bend an entire nation to do your bidding? Was there no one who felt they were doing any wrong? Yes, we had heard of the Gestapo and yes we knew how humiliated the Germans would have felt during the Treaty of Versailles. We learnt all of it but we could not reconcile to the idea of an entire nation being unable to stop the lunacies of one man. A society contains a variety of people; it contains its intellectual class, its artists, a judiciary, military and policing arm, a representation of people from all sections of society. That variety acts like a fail-safe mechanism. It protects a society and keeps it in line. In the Nazi era however, the fail-safe mechanism did not trigger. How else can one man manage alter the ideological beliefs of an entire nation? Zeitgeist was our teacher's way at offering an explanation. She said Hitler was able to influence the "spirit" of the "times". Zeit is time and Geist is spirit. He was able to channel the resent of the Germans into what he was convinced would become world dominance.

You just have to look behind in the past to see the number of ironies life throws back at us. Somehow we never learn from history. The Jewish community was persecuted for centuries in Europe culminating with the horrific events of World War II. They carved out a nation in the heart of the Middle East and today scores of Palestinians have become victims of a Ghettoized society, forced to live in refugee camps by the very group of people who were themselves victims and survivors of Ghettoism. How can the Jews, a group of people persecuted in the past, have no empathy towards another group? How can they disfranchise and displace the Palestinians and consign them to decades of misery. The irony is that if there is any community that should have understood the plight of the Palestinians, it should have been the Jews. No Arab can even come close to understanding it but a persecuted Jew should be able to understand, because his forefathers have faced much worse, because he has walked down that road before, and he knows the miseries that lie ahead.

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Identities – Part III - Ghettos

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Part I and Part II of the Identities series

It's hard to talk about Identity groups and not mention Ghettos. Although the origin of this term takes us back some 500 years, it's only the last century that the term has gained prominence when talking about social groups. In 1516, Jews in Venice were forced to stay in area called the 'Venetian Ghetto'. The same area, within which the Jews lived in, also contained iron foundries used for cooling slag. Slag in Venetian is "gheta". I read about Ghettos in history lessons about World War II for the first time. A majority group (Germans) rounded up a minority group (Jewish people) and forced them to live in a restricted neighborhood. This as we learnt in school was not the final destination. From here, they were sent to concentration camps.

The Ghettos of the Second World War were neighborhoods, districts even, where people of a community were segregated and forced to live. Seventy years later, the creation of modern day ghettos has not always been by force of law. Ghettos today are created primarily because of socio-economic reasons. You have black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in America. You have Muslim neighborhood in India. While one Ghetto has been formed because of the color of your skin, another Ghetto has been created because of the God you chose to worship. But race and religion are not alone when it comes to Ghettos. You have Chinatowns, Irish, Italian, Hispanic, Caribbean and many other nationalities that formed their own neighborhoods across urban America.

I lived in London for over 4 years. If there is any city in the world that can boast of having a true multi-national population then it must be dear old London. You can't strictly call them Ghettos but they represent broad groups of nationalities, races and religions; living across London in bunches. Wembly has a high population of Gujratis. East Ham has a high population of Tamilians. Southall has a large population of Punjabis. Imagine my surprise when the train stops in Southall station and I am greeted with a signboard that says SOUTHALL in three different languages English, Hindi and Urdu. Most Australians, South Africans and Kiwis living in London would be residing in West or South London. Brick Lane is thickly populated by Bangladeshis. Euston is another place with a lot of Bangladeshis. I was told that a few decades earlier Brick Lane was dominated by Jewish people. Today a large number of them can be found in North London. Ilford has a high Punjabi and Pakistani crowd. Where do the actual British people live? Well, they live all over the place but there are areas in and around London which have your average British population like Romford for example. Most of my work colleagues however preferred the quite life on the countryside and commuted long distances to work. I wonder if the term white flight is applicable here. According to Wikipedia - White flight is a term for the demographic trend in which white people move away from suburbs or urban neighborhoods that are becoming racially desegregated to white suburbs.

So why does the average Bangladeshi arriving in London (or Bengali for that matter) prefer to stay near Brick Lane. You could say that safety and familiarity play a role here. You could say that things like access to local food, language, music and culture play an influential role here. You could say that being surrounded by people of your own community fosters a feeling of home away from home. Since none of these conditions actually are a consequence of socio-economic pressures, it hard to call them Ghettos. The closest I can call them is "Ghetto like".

I have never strictly seen a black neighborhood. I have seen black dominated areas in London without really seeing the problems faced in such neighborhoods. What I have seen is Muslim neighborhoods in India living in abject poverty, epitomized by their narrow lanes, illegally constructed houses sticking wall to wall, in which an overcrowded and often illiterate population attempts to survive and beat the odds of life on a daily basis. One such example of a ghetto is the Sabarmati River in Ahmadabad that divides the city into two distinct parts. The division is not just geographical. It also divides the increasingly affluent Hindus on the West and the economically marginalized Muslims on the East side. This is equally true of other neighborhoods across India that houses the Dalit populations or any other socio-economically backward group. A village in the backdrop of rural India still living with the burden of a caste driven society has a segregated population of 'untouchables' living in one portion of the village.

One of challenges that a society faces and in my opinion often fails in; is to integrate all sections of society as it moves forward. One of India's biggest problems is that sections of our societies are divided not just on a single identity but in multiples. A progress that fails to include everybody is not really a progress. It's a recipe for disaster. What will happen to a society in which one section moves forward at the cost of another? Why does social unrest surprise us anymore? Can a society afford to marginalize some of its constituents? Social, economic and political tensions are direct fallouts of Ghettoized societies.

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Identities – Part II – Stereotypes

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Part I of the Identities series

Stereotyping of an identity occurs when we come in contact with an individual or a group of people belonging to one particular identity. Our perception of the identity is drawn from the experience we have had with one or more such people. Often it is not even our own experience but the experience of someone else that we know of, perhaps of someone who belongs to our own group. Regardless of whether these experiences are exaggerated, real or imagined, they represent a generalization of an identity. If the member of a particular group happened to be good or bad, it doesn't mean that everyone from his community is good or bad. The perception of an identity however lingers long in our mind and it makes us biased for or against it.

Stereotyping can be applied to any identity group. Think of any identity group and your impression of it. Here are some examples below of statements that I have heard in the past.

Women can't drive.

India is a land of snake and elephants.

Don't be such a Jew.

When I see a group of black people on the road, I normally cross over to the other side.

Lawyers are liars and manipulators that cannot be trusted.

Muslims are fanatical or Muslims are fundamentalists.

Now India is not really a country full of snake and elephants. I have lived more than two decades in India and I don't usually bump into either species. I have met women who drive very competently, thank you very much.

I had never actually heard the expression "Don't be such a Jew" in India though. I first heard it when I working in England. One evening I was in the company of a few friends, a British Asian, a Caucasian male and a Jewish colleague. The conversation was light hearted and my white friend blurted out, "Don't be such a Jew". I had an expression of puzzlement and my Jewish friend was visibility irritated but said nothing. My friend proceeded to apologize and said "Sorry, I didn't realize that you were also there". So would it have been OK to say it if there were no Jewish people around? Well, that was certainly the insinuation. While writing this particular piece, I googled anti Semitic expressions and came up with interesting results. "Eat like a Jew" (manger en en juif) is a French expression and it implies that you are eating alone. "jodenfooi" is a 'Jewish tip' in Holland which means tight fisted. These are expressions that have become part of our linguistic repertoire.

The accusation that Muslims are fanatical is quite common in the decade we live with. 9/11 did not create this perception; it merely cemented it in our living memory. There are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, an overwhelming majority of who don't even live in the Middle East or Pakistan where much of the fundamentalism originates from. Even within the Middle East and Pakistan the larger population is peace loving and in tune with this world. Muslim fundamentalism was a political creation to counter the growing influence of the Soviet Union in Central Asia in the 1980s. Yet the rest of the Muslim world is saddled with a perception that all of us are medieval in nature.

A man should be judged by who he is and not by the generalization of his identity. Sadly, all of us are guilty at some level of practicing stereotyping. Even Governments around the world follow it. It's called racial profiling. Stereotyping does more harm than good. It leads to disenchantment, it leads to resentment, in its severity, it leads to hate crimes.

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Identities – Part I – Groups and Affiliations

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No man is an island they say. Man has always been part of a pack. There is a sense of comfort, of safety, of belonging and of security being part of a pack. Birds of a feather do flock together after all. Being over 6 billion of us on this planet, there are bound to be an endless number of packs and each such pack assumes an identity of its own. Across the world, we identify ourselves on the basis of our color, race, sex, religion, caste, creed, region, country, language, social standing, monetary worth, education and an assortment of such identifiers. All of us belong to multiple identities. It defines us and makes us who we are for the better and unfortunately for the worse.

When we as human beings segregate ourselves in multiple complex groups we set ourselves up for an Us Vs Them Syndrome. Depending on the nature of the identity group this could be harmless or it could be brutal. Typically the more important the identity the more lethal it could be. The very social fabric of society is threatened when opposing identities clash.

Take India as an example, a country where we were taught about India's unique diversity and its unity despite the existence of multiple complex groups. Tamils and Kannadigas spill blood over river water, tensions on communal lines between Hindus and Muslims is bad enough, now Hindu and Christian issues have started to emerge. The Meenas and the Gujjars clashed in Rajasthan last year over reservation. The Telengana guys want a state carved out of Andhra Pradesh, the Gorkhas are not far being asking for Gorkhaland to be carved out of West Bengal. The Maharastrian Vs North Indian debate rages on in Mumbai making it an important election agenda for regional parties. Then there is the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits and the illegal migration of Bangaldeshis into India. The gulf between the rich and the poor only seems to get wider. The middle class in India is growing into a huge population with disposable income levels on the rise. At the same time, India's heart lies in its poor villages, with a majority of population staying there. You can take any number of large identity groups and you will see associated issues. The list can be exhaustingly long. With our fixation to cricketing stars, India by and large gives a step motherly treatment to its other sport stars and athletes. For a long period doctors and engineers were considered to be the only profession that parents wanted their kids to pursue. Sexual harassment, dowry cases, honor killing, infanticides are all issues that women as a group deal with.

Our ancestors were no exception to identity groups. They gained and lost through their various affiliations. They lived in a society where their social standing was determined by which house they had the fortune or misfortune of being born in. Life would be a lot easier if you were born to a Brahmin or a Kshatriya family instead of a Shudra. The migration to the subcontinent by the Aryan tribes saw the Dravidians being pushed south. India saw migrating social groups, either as invaders or conquerors and if you take the example of the colonial British, then even as traders. Somehow they all managed to co-exist for centuries, ruled successively by one dominant social group or the other. There are times when I think maybe our ancestors where better off because they knew a secret, a secret they perhaps didn't share with us. They have shown high levels of tolerance to each other, learnt to co-exist and even assimilate one another's rituals and habits. There seems to be a common ground somewhere despite all the problems.

However in today's world, tolerance is a word that is fast becoming obsolete. It has no relevance. There is no middle ground. It's our way or the highway.

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