Hitler, Hindutva and Indian elite

My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure they most admired.

To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”

In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a hero.

Still, why Hitler? “He was a fantastic orator,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles,” they said.

"And what about the millions he murdered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were traitors.”

Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years, 

Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of patriotism.

But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.

Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the journal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years. (Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Roadrunner, has sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these are significant numbers.

And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is available for sale on flipkart.com, India’s Amazon. As I write this, 51 customers have rated the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rating. What’s more, there’s a steady trickle of reports that say it has become a must-read for business-school students; a management guide much like Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. If this undistinguished artist could take an entire country with him, I imagine the reasoning goes, surely his book has some lessons for future captains of industry?

Much of Hitler’s Indian afterlife is the legacy of Bal Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena party who died on Nov. 17.

Thackeray freely, openly, and often admitted his admiration for Hitler, his book, the Nazis, and their methods. In 1993, for example, he gave an interview to Time magazine. “There is nothing wrong,” he said then, “if [Indian] Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.”

This interview came only months after the December 1992 and January 1993 riots in Mumbai, which left about a thousand Indians slaughtered, the majority of them Muslim. Thackeray was active right through those weeks, writing editorial after editorial in his party mouthpiece, “Saamna” (“Confrontation”) about how to “treat” Muslims.

On Dec. 9, 1992, for example, his editorial contained these lines: “Pakistan need not cross the borders and attack India. 250 million Muslims in India will stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Pakistan’s seven atomic bombs.”

A month later, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Muslims of Bhendi Bazar, Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas [of Mumbai] we call Mini Pakistan … must be shot on the spot.”

There was plenty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupted, Thackeray said this about the führer’s famous autobiography: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”

With rhetoric like that, it’s no wonder the streets of my city saw the slaughter of 1992-93. It’s no wonder kids come to admire a mass-murderer, to rationalize away his massacres. It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he “loved” his country.

In his acclaimed 1997 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen writes: “Hitler, in possession of great oratorical skills, was the [Nazi] Party’s most forceful public speaker. Like Hitler, the party from its earliest days was devoted to the destruction of … democracy [and to] most especially and relentlessly, anti-Semitism. … The Nazi Party became Hitler’s Party, obsessively anti-Semitic and apocalyptic in its rhetoric about its enemies.”

Do some substitutions in those sentences along the lines Thackeray wanted to do with Mein Kampf. Indeed, what you get is a more than adequate description of … no surprise, Thackeray himself.

Yes, it’s no wonder. Thackeray too was revered as an orator. Cremated, on Nov. 18, as a patriot.

Dilip D'Souza in The Daily Beast Here

Arvind Adiga: Why I have learned many languages?

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily. He spoke Tulu with his wife, Kannada with his daughters, Tamil with his patients, and English with his grandchildren. In my hometown of Mangalore, on India’s southern coast, it was common for a boy of my generation to speak one language at home, another on the way to school, and a third one in the classroom. These were not just dialects or variants, either. Kannada, which I spoke at home, and Hindi, which I had to learn in school, belong to different linguistic families and are as dissimilar as, say, Spanish and Russian.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. I remember the thrill of sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and working my way, over the course of a week, through an entire André Gide novel in the original French. In England, where I studied in the late 1990s, I took a class in German, having heard that its peculiar syntax and word structure posed not just a linguistic, but a cognitive, challenge: German speakers apparently thought about the world in an entirely different way.

By the time I returned to India in 2003, I had been speaking, reading, and writing almost exclusively in English for more than a decade. Nothing much changed after I moved back. The international success of novelists such as Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth meant that most younger Indians in the big cities wanted to read and write in English. There were novelists, such as Kiran Nagarkar, who worked in both English and an Indian language, but bilingual proficiency of this kind was increasingly rare. The glamour, acclaim, and money were in English; why read or write in anything else?

My life is now divided between the cities of Bangalore and Mumbai. About a year ago, I decided to read only in Kannada, the dominant local language, whenever I visited Bangalore. My reasoning was partly pragmatic. Regional-language newspapers in India have a richness of local detail that is often absent in the country’s English media. A friend tells me of the time he was on holiday in Nainital, a lake city in India’s north. He was about to take a walk around the lake when an article in a Hindi newspaper reported that a man-eating leopard was on the loose. The English dailies had not reported this. He now buys the Hindi paper whenever he visits Nainital. Some of India’s best writers, such as playwright Girish Karnad and novelist U.R. Ananthamurthy, work in Kannada, and I keep discovering excellent writers who will probably never be translated into English.

Arvind Adiga in The Daily Beast. Here

Obama Sold Israel Bunker-Buster Bombs

President Obama secretly agreed to sell Israel 55 bunker-busting bombs, according to a Newsweek report.

Israel's request for bunker-busters in 2005 was denied. At the time, the Defense Department had frozen most military sales to Israel because of concerns Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

Pentagon officials apparently had a change of heart.

Here's what Newsweek's Eli Lake reports:

Even some of the hawks from the George W. Bush administration grudgingly give Obama credit for behind-the-scenes progress. "If you say to the White House, 'Obama has been very unfriendly to Israel,' they say, 'What do you mean? It's the best military-to-military relationship ever.' And that part is true," says Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle East policy at the National Security Council. "If you look at the trajectory from Clinton to Bush to Obama, the military relationship has gotten steadily stronger. I don't think Obama changed the trajectory, but he certainly didn't interfere with it, and it continued under him."

The bunker busters were a significant breakthrough. The Israelis first requested the sale in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. At the time, the Pentagon had frozen almost all U.S.-Israeli joint defense projects out of concern that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

In 2007, Bush informed then prime minister Ehud Olmert that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010. The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the secret decision.

James Cartwright, who served until August as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Newsweek the military chiefs had no objections to the sale.

A report by Aamer Madhani in USA Today. Here and a report in The Daily Beast. Here

Pakistan is playing dumb

If everyone was so clever and the U.S. had been privy to bin Laden's not-so-secret location (Pakistan claims to be, as ever, the last to find out) since August 2010, how does one explain the ferocious drone campaign that took place from September to December of that year?

In the span of 102 days, an unprecedented 52 drone strikes were launched against Pakistan, none targeting Abbottabad or its environs. President Obama ratcheted up the drone war almost immediately upon entering the White House—ordering his first strike against Pakistan 72 hours after assuming the presidency.

Some 2,000 civilians have been killed, none of whom happened to be bin Laden or any of his dastardly lieutenants like Mullah Omar or Ayman al Zawahri, and yet the U.S. defense budget has called for a 75 percent increase in funds to continue and enhance drone operations. This is a frightening development.

Fathima Bhutto in The Daily Beast. More Here.