This morning on Democracy Now!, Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, offered a capsule backstory of how it was that once ineffective appeals to religion-based politics have grown to the point threatening more and more of the world with senseless violence:
VIJAY PRASHAD: You know, there's a broad sociological story the starts in the 1970s. Until the 1970s, parties that identified themselves as religious parties pretty much had very, very low ability to pull people out to vote for them. In the 1970s, when the Indian government shifted its ability to provide social welfare, to provide agricultural credit to the vast bulk of the people, essentially, when it broke down the Nehruvian part of social development, at that point to gain legitimacy even the Congress Party, which was Nehru's party, started to bring in religious forms of mobilization to gain legitimacy, but they were outflanked on the right by the Hindu Party, particularly the Bharatiya Janata Party, which in the 1980s took off at an unimaginable pace. It created this family of organizations. In a way it outsourced its terror to groups such as the Bajrangdal and most recently to this group that committed, perhaps, the blast in Malegaon, a town northeast of Mumbai, in 2006. This group is called Abinhav Bharat.
VIJAY PRASHAD: [continued] So, these groups all across the country have been committing atrocities, mainly against Muslim populations, but not only, also against Christians, also against people who in India are known as tribals, and others. So, there's been this growth of the kind of Hindu politics, in a way, because the state has been incapable of providing an agenda for the social development, the complete development, of the Indian population.
And, of course, in reaction to this, you've seen the growth of Muslim politics, of resentment and anger. One of the groups that was formed in the 1970s was known as SIMI, the Student Islamic Movement of India. At that time, inspired by the Iranian revolution, by the Islamic revolution. But later, the resentment grows and many groups then would come out of there. Young people see no future, turning to hatred and bitterness. And what I find is, for them the politics of the present isn't often future looking, it's backward looking. They look to the past, to resentment, to revenge, to rage and there are Hindu forms of terror that have developed which are being met by groups that are, you know, Muslim forms, etc., and this is a soup that is very, very dangerous. And now, of course, the Hindu forms of terror have a political party, which is the one that is breathing fire into the ear of the current government saying, you know, we need a forward policy against Pakistan. So, you know, one mustn't narrow this down to the Mumbai event currently, but broaden the focus and see how there's been this sociological shift from a politics of, you might consider, social democracy to a politics of backward-looking hatred against other people, when you can't provide food, shelter, conviviality to them.
This is what we are up against, both here at home and around the world: either government helps people create a better future for themselves, or else it falls into the hands of people who keep themselves in power by mobilizing resentment, wave after wave, until everything is washed away before it.
For 40 years, from 1968 onwards, American politics, too, has been dominated by resentments. We have, at last, a chance to start turning away from all that, turning back to using government to help people make a better future. But that is easier said than done, particularly since so much foolishness of the past four decades has come to simply be accepted as fact.
Today, for eample, as Obama introduced his national security team, the fantasy was being advanced that force of arms could fight back the madness that a belief in force of arms had first given birth to, nurtured, and then blessed, until, inevitably it turned against us.
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