Friday November 12, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope that you and yours are healthy and safe – and can stay that way.
As part of being careful to stay safe, the “Friday Lunch,” a CWRU tradition since 1989, continues on Zoom. We work to present experts from campus and sometimes beyond to discuss important issues for the university, local community, nation or the international stage.
This Week’s Program
This week we look at “the world’s largest democracy” – and wonder how true that may be, for how long.
On February 25, 2020, President Donald Trump was visiting India, where Prime Minister Narenda Modi pulled out all the stops to provide a spectacular welcome, including a stadium rally of 100,000 people. But as he attended a ceremonial dinner with “gold crusted mandarin oranges, wild Himalayan morels, and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets,” a few miles away northeast Delhi “was convulsed with violence.” Since two days before, “mobs had been destroying the homes and shops of Muslims, vandalizing mosques, and assaulting Muslims on the streets.”
Sectarian violence was too common in India long before the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its position that India must be fundamentally Hindu, as the nation’s dominant political party. Hindu nationalism is not the only source of the BJP’s appeal. But the pogrom during the president’s visit, in which at least 43 people died, was clearly associated with the attitudes of Modi’s government and the BJP. The government did little to stop it, and it was promoted by political allies of the Prime Minister. Victories for Modi or his party have long been associated with greater sectarian violence: both more violence after BJP victories and more violence in districts in which BJP legislators won.
As Muslims worry about whether they have any future in India – which may be one of the points of pogroms — the Modi government has also begun to intimidate more secular or liberal citizens. It has cracked down on the part of the press that does not support it, and conducted “many apparently arbitrary, punitive investigations…against civil rights advocates.” It has even attacked India’s “Bollywood” film industry, one of the nation’s prides, apparently seeking to curtail both creative freedom and the significant role of Muslims in the industry. As with the press and civil rights lawyers, the government has used tax investigations and other prosecutions to intimidate or punish those who do not support its view of India as a Hindu nation above all else.
India is hardly the only important country in the world in which a religious party has taken power through elections and then worked to intimidate opponents. But unlike in countries where the division is between the secular and religious, India has a very large minority –almost 200 million Muslims – who could become victims of state-encouraged violence.
What, then, are the implications of the course of action followed so far by Modi and the BJP? What might happen next? What might be the countervailing forces? Join us as Professor DasGupta, a scholar of nationalism and religion in South Asia, discusses these questions.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpfuyrqT4pHNwuBWNnI_6pMVj6zF-uqGIO
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Ananya Dasgupta’s scholarly interests, broadly defined, cover colonialism, nationalism, religion and modernity in South Asia (with special emphasis on Islam), cultural histories of capitalism and popular resistance, and subaltern studies. She specializes in modern South Asian history spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Her teaching interests include modern and pre-modern South Asian history (focusing mainly on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), approaches in historiography, histories from below, and women’s histories in South Asia. She is getting increasingly interested in a developing course on connected histories, which explore various forms of cultural, material, and labor flows between the region of South Asia and other parts of the world.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
November 19: Hospital Boom and Busts. With J.B. Silvers, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Finance and Professor of Banking and Finance.
December 3: President Biden’s Trade Policy: Continuity and Change. With Juscelino Colares, J.D., Schott-van den Eynden Professor of Business Law. |
