Customer Reviews

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is a difficult book to review because it is very bad in so many different ways. Its a book full of ignorance. Its a book where the author plays favorites based on her politics and her romantic daydreams about a place. Its a book where emotion and political biases take the place of fact. Finally the writing style of the book is so self-indulgant and amaturish that no editor should have accepted it and no publisher should have published it.

First, I am no particular fan of the BJP or their ideology. I'm not interested in defending India either. India has good and bad in it like every country. And it has problems like every country.

The problems in the book start in the introduction which is a useful window into the self-loathing of many in the American elite. She explains her hatred for herself and how through identifying with the cause of the downtrodden in America, she is somehow liberated from what she is. America was not a big enough stage for self-hate and so she decided to extend her ideas into another culture (India). But in the end for all her talk, she comes across in the book as a reborn Victorian Imperial woman come to India to wag her finger in displeasure and to set its injustices right.

She claims to have written this for Americans to show them the supposed voice of the "real india" that is being suppressed. Strange thing is, the only real voice in the book is her own. Its more her telling her friends in America what to think about India than telling them about India.

The second problem with her book is that she an absurd romantic attachment to all things she considers Bengali. She incessentaly promotes Tagore over and over in the pages of the book. She tells us how much India needs a Tagore. But her attraction and promotion of him seem tied up in her belief of the superiority of Bengali underdogs within India. She tries to transform him into something he never was in life. She seems in the end to want to teach Hindu India to hate itself in the same way she admits she hates her own American WASP background.

Finally, the book itself is terribly written. Its written in a rambling amaturish style with the author looking down from the judge's seat at the people of India. The many errors and misunderstandings about India in the book are easily attributable to the fact that she is less writing what she knows than writing what people are her are telling her. Aside from her romanic daydream superficial fasicnation with Bengal, I really wonder what she knows about India.

And then there are the interviews. The style of writing used for the interviews is absolutely despicable. If she likes the person, they are a radiant almost superhuman entity bringing the reader wisdom. But if she doesn't like the person, she is sure to tell you how sinister they look, how they are obviously troubled persons in need of a course of mental therapy. She almost wants us to feel sorry for them in the same way that a nurse or a teacher feels sorry for a child that fails.

In the end this book has nothing useful to say about India. It amounts to the disorganized ramblings of an American with almost no self knowledge of India. What it does have to say is fatally flawed by bias and the author's theories/biases. In the last few years there have been many decent books published on India. Find one of them and don't bother with this one.

Given the credentials of the author I expected something a bit more professional, objective, and informative--scholarly, if you will--especially since there is not much material on the subject of disturbing social and political reactionary trends in the Indian/Hindu world. I also expected much better writing.

Instead, this is an extremely subjective and overly personalized account characterized by inadequately worked out ideas and unconvincing psychological and anthropological speculations. This leads me to believe the author was frequently working outside of her areas of expertise. In an earlier attempt at a review of this book (it's hard to review something that has too many problems)I expressed the belief that she was viewing the non-Western world through the fog of the American Culture War, which is a peculiar and modern form of Eurocentrism. Her repeated attempts to suggest links between what is happening in India and what is happening in the United States are forced and, incredibly, even naive. They are also one-sided.

My sense is that the author is trapped in the cognitively dissonant political/intellectual world where the Progressive agenda is constantly battling with Multiculturalist program. She doesn't seem to understand that the Progressive agenda is often seen as the true Western Cultural Imperialism in socially conservative developing nations. She tries to resolve this by replacing the idea of Clash of Civilizations with, effectively internal Culture Wars. However, if the internal Culture War--the Clash Within--is between Progressives working largely with Western ideas of rights, and traditionalists of various extremes, then we're right back to a Clash of Civilizations. This is so obvious it's amazing the author didn't catch it. But the author's thinking is probably so compartmentalized and, again, Eurocentric, she probably has a very large blind spot.

All in all an extremely unsatisfying book. I learned more about the current problems with American academia than I did about modern India.

This extremely biased book has one message: THe Hindu BJP party of India is a threat to democracy, to women, to history, to Islam and to everything and it alone is responsible for all the ills of India today, for all the communal violence and even for causing Muslim terrorism.

It is interesting that the author does not include Pakistan in this study in a comparison, given the fact that Pakistan have historically so much in common and their partition was artificial in some ways. If Pakistan had been included the authors claim that Hindutva wishes to 'erase' the Muslim history of India would have an interesting parrellel in Pakistan where all history of its pre-Islamic past, its Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist past, have disappeared.

The 'Hindu nationalists' are blamed for causing many more deaths in communal violence than ever took place and in every case where Hindus have been murdered en masse in India, such as a train carrying Hindus to Ayodha that was burned by Muslim mobs, these crimes are ignored by the author and the book claims that these are 'Hindu propoganda' and that the 'fire was most likely caused by accident'. It is interesting this extreme bias, that when thousands of people die in riots, the Hindus die by 'accident' and the Muslims are killed by 'Hindu fascists'.

The claim that democracy is under 'threat' in India does not hold water at all. It was a Congress party leader, Indira Gandhi, who suspended democracy in the 1980s and slaughtered Sikhs, the Hindu party, when it was in power in the 1990s, always relinquished power democratically.

The truth is that this book is based on a western perception of India that has no understanding of Indian history of the 1000 year Mughal-Islamic colonialism that suppressed and enslaved Hinduism in India, and by ignoring this past it is easy to claim the BJP has 'erased' the Muslim history of India, simply because it refuses to glorify the enslavement and colonialism visited on India by outsiders. Oddly Pakistan is simply ignored.

Seth J. Frantzman

Having studied Indian history and the Hindutva movement for many years, I must disagree entirely with the first reviewer. Nussbaum's descriptions of the violence in Gujarat, and the state and national government's complicity in it, are well backed-up by official sources, interviews with prominent Indian public figures, and the Sangh Parivar's own texts. Moreover, the point of the book is not to provide a history of this dark incident in India's recent past -- though it does so ably -- but to understand what motivates people to inflict such violence on their own neighbors and countrymen. In doing so, Nussbaum displays a remarkable empathy for Hindutva activists and sympathizers without condoning actions and beliefs that she sees as deplorable. Believing (as did her heroes Tagore and Gandhi) that understanding and caring about one's fellow human beings is essential to a nations's political and ethical well-being, she argues that Gujarat represents "a failure of the moral imagination" that allows humans beings to recognize the humanity of others, and that the furious pace of economic development in India should be matched by the development of humanist ideals that have been abandoned in the last two decades.

I am a bit surprised by all of the misplaced animosity towards this book. I think Nussbaum is a very intelligent human being and I agree whole heartedly with most of her positions. I don't think she is portraying Hindus in any particular way. She clearly points out an intellectual trend that is on the rise (actually being revived) in India. I'm giving the book two stars only because I think the book is poorly written and seems to be a rehash of stuff other people have written before and written better. You can tell that her opinions are all second hand and I was truly convinced of this when she commented on the 600 hour Television series Ramayana which I am pretty sure she never watched (It seems unlikely to me that she would). Not to mention the series didn't seem at all full of any sort of propaganda (I unfortunately saw all of it). She could have done so much more such as looked more carefully at the rise of the movement, looked at it in a historical context, or many other ways. But then again I don't think she is exactly an expert on India and is perhaps poorly qualified to do so. The section on the constitution (her expertise) is very good however but certainly not worth the price of this book. I suggest one go elsewhere for infirmation on this subject.

At the stroke of midnight on August 14-15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru delivered the nation's independence speech that is as well-known among Indians as the Gettysburg Address is among Americans. Beginning with the famous opening: "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny", he went on to declare: "It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity."

It is indeed rare for a nation to choose as national symbols expressions of the idea that humanity is above nationality, and righteousness above aggression. Those are however the values proclaimed in the "tryst with destiny" speech as well as in the national anthem composed by the famous poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. In the same vein, Nehru stated that the national flag was a symbol of freedom not only for India, but for all peoples of the world. Like only a few other nations, India has based its nationhood on the political rather than the ethnic, cultural or territorial conception of national unity. What bring Indians together are principles and aspirations rather than land, tradition, and blood. This is why India stands as a beacon of hope and inspiration for all world citizens committed to democracy and human well-being.

According to Martha Nussbaum, this tradition of openness and universalism is now under attack. Drawing its inspiration from fascist movements in pre-war Europe, the Hindu right wants to revive notions of purity, manliness, and aggression, especially against the Muslim minority that is seen as foreign to the Hindu soil and menacing the vital interests of the nation. Nussbaum sees "a clash between two different conceptions of the Indian nation and two sorts of Indian patriots. One sort sees India as a pluralistic nation, built on ideas of respect for different regional, ethnic, and religious traditions, and united by a commitment to democratic and egalitarian norms. The other sort believes that this morally grounded unity is too fragile, that only the unity of ethnic homogeneity can really make a strong nation." In the end, this is a clash that occurs within each individual, as "the violent and dominating parts contend against the parts that are willing to live with human powerlessness and incompleteness."

As she herself confesses, Martha Nussbaum has her "own slant on events." She uses the words "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" to characterize the wave of communal violence that took place in Gujarat in March 2002, where the state government and law enforcement officers condoned the maiming and killings of Moslems. She describes the branches of the RSS, an Hindi youth organization, as proto-fascist organizations. But apart from some slippages her book is not intensely polemical. She draws her analyses from trusted sources and scholarly work, like Christophe Jaffrelot's The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, as well as testimonies from human rights activists and personal contacts with various political actors.

I think the most interesting part of the book is when the author applies her own scholarly work to practical issues of Indian democracy. As a proponent of a rights-based approach to development, she praises the way the Indian Constitution makes explicit the fundamental rights of citizens and their equality. Indeed, religious freedom and equality receive more detailed attention and protection in the Indian Constitution than they do in any other constitution known to the author, and this may explain why India's democracy has proven so resilient. The system also preserves the creative potential of federalism, with states acting as laboratories of social experiments, while setting thresholds beneath which they may not fall. More generally, the combination of local self-rule and state control makes it possible to see clearly which development policies work and which do not. In this way, Indian democracy has enormous epistemic value for social scientists that grapple with issues of institutional design.

Nussbaum is also interested in the way shame and disgust shape our human emotions and can motivate feelings of hatred against targeted groups. Shame and revulsion at the signs of one's bodily humanity have often been invoked in analyzing group violence, and the author mixes insights from her previous work with culturally specific factors to account for the horrifying cases of sexual violence that took place in Gujarat. More generally, she shows how images of masculinity and bodily comportment influenced the worldviews of great leaders of India's past. As she notes, "Gandhi linked the future of India to a suppression of bodily desire; Tagore linked it to an embrace of the sensuous delight of the body-not to undisciplined sensuality, but to the ordered sensuousness of dance."

Tagore is indeed the personal hero of the author, who places him above Gandhi and Nehru in her pantheon of Indian great men. Like Walt Whitman in America, he created a "public poetry" of nationhood that captures the imagination and exalts moral sentiments. He also founded a school in West Bengal based on critical thinking, creativity, and the empowerment of women through the arts. In line with her defense of liberal education in America, the author underscores that education nourishes the capacity to think for oneself and to become a dynamic participant in cultural and political choice rather than simply a follower of tradition. She therefore deplores the emphasis on rote learning, teaching to the test and the neglect of liberal arts that characterize the Indian education system. Emotions and the imagination are parts of a democratic public culture, and the liberal state needs public poetry, not just scientific rationality, to sustain itself.

The thesis, roughly, is that Samuel Huntington's emphasis on a clash between civilizations is misplaced; that the more important clash is within civilizations; that this, more important clash is ubiquitous in modern democracies; that the clash itself is between those citizens willing to embrace a diversity of people and backgrounds and those seeking to establish a nation in which citizens share similar (or the perceived same) backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs and the like; that India, with the possible exception of the United States, is exemplary among nations in its record of inclusiveness, and; that the Hindu right is threatening India's evident capacity for diversity through the Hindu right's efforts "to craft a public culture of exclusion and hate," a culture exemplified by the tragic events in the state of Gujarat in February of 2002.

Members of the Hindu right may well take exception to the way they are portrayed in "The Clash Within." For those, like myself, peering in from the outside, the lack of statistical data on the composition, size and beliefs of the Hindu right that might verify Ms. Nussbaum's depiction is somewhat frustrating. Perhaps reliable data do not exist.

Further, it is worth noting that Huntington was very much aware of the "clash within," and acknowledge as much in the opening pages of his book. Huntington was, however, focused on clashes likely to spark conflict on a global, or multi-national scale.

Finally, some of what Ms. Nussbaum says about the Hindu right and the motivations underlying it apparently draw upon a wealth of earlier research. To an outsider, some of this can be quite puzzling. She claims, for example, that "shame grew like a wound in the psyche of some Hindu males" and that "the female body came to symbolize the nation." As a result, Nussbaum notes, "one might suppose" that this "symbolic association" would lead to the "veneration of women and delicate treatment." Far from it. Partly because males of the Hindu right exhibit "an unusual degree of disgust anxiety," killing Muslim women in Gujarat while brutally defiling them was, in effect, tantamount to having intercourse with them. (Ms. Nussbaum's account is more graphic.) In light of the gravity of the incidents she describes it may seem like small beer to raise this point, but Nussbaum's premise - that "the female body came to symbolize the nation" - would seem to be valid in either of two widely diverging outcomes, (a) the female body is venerated or (b) the female body is defiled. That would lead me, a stranger in this terrain, to question the premise that "the female body," in India came to "symbolize the nation." Or at least ask: Did the males in Abu Ghraib symbolize Iraq to the soldiers, some female, who subjected them to denigrating poses?

Martha Nussbaum's text prompted at least as many questions as she purported to answer. Yet, it is this very capacity to raise questions, summon thoughts and overall expand the sensitivity of readers to events in India and elsewhere, that makes "The Clash Within" an essential book, one likely to remain so as the 21st century continues to unfold.

Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She worked for eight years (1985-93) with the Research Project of the UN World Institute for Development in Helsinki, focusing on the economic and cultural problems of India. She chose India when she wanted to write on human rights norms for women's development worldwide. She was a consultant with the UN Development Programme's New Delhi Office and in 2004 was a visiting Professor at the Centre for Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She lectured in various parts of India and wrote extensively on India's legal and constitutional traditions. She travelled so many times to India that it now feels like her second home.

Her relationship with India is intensely political, focussed on issues of social justice, and she has had close contacts with Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988. Three personalities in particular feature, namely, Nehru, Tagore and Gandhi. In her Preface she states: "This is a book about India for an American and European audience". But it is not only about India but also about the present clash between Islam and the West.

She writes: "... that the real clash is not a civilisational one between `Islam and the West', but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations - between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition".

At a deeper level the thesis of this book is the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual between the urge to dominate and defile the other, and to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

Nussbaum deals extensively with the ethnic/religious pogrom in Gujarat in February-March 2002 when approximately 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus. She analyses the Hindu nationalistic personality and finds sufficient hatred within to explain the Gujarat events. Her conclusion - based to a great extent on Gandhi's thinking - is worth quoting:

"The ability to accept differences - differences of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality - requires first, the ability to accept something about oneself: that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life, that others outside oneself have reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one's own power or threats to that power."

She argues, in this highly passionate study, that ultimately the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilisations, but from a clash within each of us.

Piet Dijkstra

This book is little more than an incitement to engage in the total genocide of Hindus. It contains gross oversimplifications, tactically designed and fabricated by Nussbaum with a clear intent to stereotype and scapegoat the Hindu minority in the United States. It is essentially the anti-Hindu version of the anti-Semitic forgery "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion". Hindus and Hindu organizations are easy targets for left-wing race haters like Nussbaum because they are not organized, there is enough internal dissension, and because the Hindu philosophy of "live and let live" enables committed ideologues to hound, harass, and demonize these heathen "idolators".

Nussbaum makes such a convincing case for an organized, pre-meditated campaign of terror and genocide, and about millions of dollars sent through one Indian-American charitable organization (IDRF -- India Development and Relief Fund) to fund terror in Gujarat that any reader unfamiliar with Indian events and history would have little doubt about the "extremism" of "Hindu nationalists," and the cold calculations of its supporters in the U.S.

Nussbaum takes her role of racist more seriously than her role as a professor of ethics. It is not the first time that she has stretched the truth to advance a hatemongering agenda. National Review recently described her as a "general-purpose academic celebrity...who lied under oath" during a Colorado court battle over gay rights some years ago. In a review of her book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1997), the libertarian philosopher David Gordon of the Ludwig von Mises Institute characterized her as "an unscrupulous propagandist, avid to defend her opinions by fair means or foul." Gayatri Spivak, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib, have denounced Nussbaum for "moralizing" and for her "rhetoric of overkill."

why does Nussbaum seek to inflate the horror? If not for the good sense and the goodwill of other Americans, including Bush administration officials, we would be overwhelmed by the litany of false accusations and complaints by the likes of Nussbaum.

Nussbaum claims that the Sabarmati Express train which was burned down by the Muslim mob carried "a large group of Hindu pilgrims who were returning from the alleged birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya." Babies charred to death in their mothers' arms, and five year-old children curled up in death become mere "Hindu pilgrims" for this professor of ethics, whose cold and calculated attempt at rationalizing the massacre of the "Hindu pilgrims" is far worse than the immediate reaction attributed to the Chief Minister of Gujarat, who allegedly said that the Newtonian law of action and reaction is applicable to societal events too.

Nussbaum asserts that the Ayodhya pilgrims -- men, women and children - were "angrily emotional", and that when the train stopped at Godhra, the "passengers got into arguments with Muslim vendors and passengers" and that at least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say "Jai Sri Ram" ("praise be to Lord Ram") and that a young Muslim girl narrowly escaped forcible abduction. Nussbaum's account of what happened at the Godhra station that morning parrots the version spread by the Indian Muslim Council through their website www.Imannet.org. Not one reporter has been able to confirm Nussbaum's account. The Imannet.Org website, which peddled the rumor initially, also contains such gems as the following: "September 15, 2001: Who would really stand to gain the most from such an attack (on the World Trade Center)? The country best enable to carry out such a humonguous (sic) feat is not an Arab or a Muslim one, but Israel". And, "September 28, 2001: Alex Diamandis, vice-president of sales and marketing, confirmed that workers in Odigo's...sales office in Israel received a warning from another Odigo user approximately two hours prior to the first attack (on the WTC)."

Nussbaum even alleges that the train may have been set on fire by the Hindus themselves traveling on the train! She ignores what newspapers have been reporting about the town of Godhra and the radical/fundamentalist Islamic schools proliferating in the region. Heading the list of Muslim religious orders in India is the ultra-orthodox Ahl-e-Hadis in Moradabad, North India, whose followers dominate the ranks of the LeT (Lashkar-e-Toiba), and following them is the Tabligh Jamaat whose followers in Godhra are the ones now arrested for plotting and carrying out the attack on the Sabarmati Express. Nussbaum's assertion that "no evidence has been found linking alleged Muslim perpetrators to any organized movement or group" therefore is not only an example of shoddy research but dangerous demagoguery. Intelligence reports also point out that the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) has collaborated with a number of Pakistani Muslim extremist organizations and the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan to destabilize India at that time.

Officials in Gujarat have identified at least 107 Islamic preachers from as far as Indonesia, Sudan and Saudi Arabia active in Gujarat. A medical doctor in Mumbai was said to be involved with the Lashkar-e-Toiba. Nussbaum, like her Left/Socialist informants in India and in the American academe, "willfully skirt(s) a grim phenomenon -- the expansion of Islamist terror networks into the heart of India" and that the terror networks has expanded from the underworld to embrace a section of the Muslim middle class.

Nussbaum claims that a Muslim mob had gathered to protest the treatment meted out by the Hindus on the train to Muslim vendors at the Godhra railway station. The train stops in Godhra for three minutes, at around 7:30 a.m. How could a mob of more than 1,500 (see Asian Age, February 28, 2002, for the estimated strength of the mob) gather so early in the morning and so quickly? Or, as she imputes, if the Hindus themselves had conspired to burn down the train, what could be the motive? Would it be to win an election? Elections in Gujarat were not scheduled till February 2003, a year from the day the train was set on fire. It was a BJP government in power in Gujarat with a novice Chief Minister who had been in office only five months. Why would they want to visit more horror on Gujarat which had just the previous year been devastated by a massive earthquake that killed nearly 20,000 people and left 600,000 homeless? Were they so deranged and obsessed that they would go the limit of burning their own children and women? Yes, implies Prof. Nussbaum.

What she deliberately ignores is that the U.S. had launched its campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Pakistan was under tremendous pressure to cooperate. Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan (see Bernard Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" in which he implicates the Pakistan government and its intelligence service for masterminding Pearl's dismemberment). Pakistani trained terrorists had attacked the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and India had massed up nearly a half million troops on the Pakistani border. India was willing to cooperate with the U.S. in hunting down terrorists in the region. There is little doubt that Pakistan-based agents decided that an effective strategy to ease the pressure on Pakistan would be to have the world's attention turn to India.

Women raped and murdered: In her litany of accusations against the BJP, and Hindu nationalist, Nussbaum says that Muslim women were raped and brutally murdered, and that these acts were indicative of Hindu men's anxiety about their virility. That she has to resort to pop psychology for understanding the Hindu-Muslim conflict that has spanned centuries is another indication of the crude and simplistic nature of Left/Marxist analyses. Freud serves the Left well, as we have all come to know by now.

No doubt, the perpetrators of ghastly crimes, whether Muslim or Hindu, should be identified and punished. In India, the courts are however slow, inept, inefficient or victims of political and criminal machinations. But one should also be careful about the spread of wild rumors about ghastly murders and rapes.

In a report submitted to the Gujarat government an investigation team visiting the Daryakhan Ghumat, the largest camp for Muslims displaced after the riots, claims that some of the women complainants seemed to be coached to say certain things. When they were quizzed more carefully they became evasive and were even chided by fellow Muslim women for lying. Arundhati Roy (the Left's poster girl worldwide) wrote an inflammatory essay in Outlook India claiming that two daughters of a Muslim Member of Parliament, Ehsan Jaffri, were raped and murdered. Roy had to recant later and apologize for spreading that rumor since Jaffri's daughters were not even in India at that time. In the same essay Roy wrote: "Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn't very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved `OM' on her forehead."

Police investigations revealed that no such case, involving someone called Sayeeda, had been reported either in urban or rural Baroda. Subsequently, the police sought Roy's help to identify the victim and seek access to witnesses who could lead them to those guilty of this crime. But the police got no cooperation. Instead, Roy, through her lawyer, replied that the police had no power to issue summons.

Finally, there is no need to accuse just Hindu men of ghastly crimes against women. The world over, in times of war and strife, men have abused women. There are daily reports of Hindu women being raped and brutalized in Bangladesh. Or we can also read Indian history, reaching back a thousand years to understand the ravages of medieval Muslim kings raiding India, slaughtering hundreds of thousands men and carting off even more women and children as slaves.

It is reported about the Mopla riots of 1921 in South India that "massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples, foul outrages upon women, such as ripping open pregnant women, pillage, arson and destruction - in short, all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the Moplas upon the Hindus until such time as troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order...." (Ambedkar, "Pakistan or the Partition of India," p. 163). Another describes the violence just before India was partitioned in 1947: "The `Noakhali Riot' followed the Calcutta carnage in October 1946. There, Hindus including Scheduled Castes were killed and hundreds were converted to Islam. Hindu women were raped and abducted. Members of my community also suffered loss of life and property. Immediately after these happenings, I visited Tipperah and Feni and saw some riot-affected areas. The terrible sufferings of Hindus overwhelmed me with grief, but still I continued the policy of co-operation with the Muslim League. (Excerpted from the resignation letter of J. N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan, October 8, 1950. Click here for the full text.)

It is therefore simplistic, if not ludicrous, for Nussbaum to invoke the ranting of shrill Marxist historians to understand the murderous attacks on Muslim women by Hindu men. It seems as if Nussbaum is not just content blaming "Hindu nationalists" of being anti-Muslim, but that she has also to make Hindus evil in every other way.

Thus, it is clear that Nussbaum is not a creditable academic but, instead, is a far-left Naxalite-Islamist shill who, after failing to whitewash Islamist terror and atrocities in the west, is desperate to find a new ethnic group to hate.

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers never advanced a theory of natural rights, notwithstanding their ubiquitous ethic of human virtue. Consequently, they associated democracy with mob rule, where the tyranny of the majority would ever so easily abuse the unfavored few. The execution of Socrates is a case in point. So too, the execution of Cicero came at the hands of a populist dictator. From Plato to Augustine, nearly all the Greco-Roman political philosophers derided democracy for its abuse and violence toward minority groups.

Martha Nussbaum takes up this same theme as she examines the 2002 Gujaret Riots in India, when Hindu nationalists brought about the deaths of thousands of Muslims. Nussbaum closely examines the history of Hindu religious riots in India with a view toward warning us all of the dangers of a democracy that does not at the very same time advance a universal commitment toward tangible human rights. Nussbaum sees India's liberal, rights-based democracy as under threat from Hindu religious extremists, especially.

Nussbaum's book has, of course, been vilified by Hindu nationalists. Yet her highly researched work affords lessons for all so-called democracies across the globe, where the rule of law is under threat from those who would subvert human rights (such as the rights of habeas corpus and due process), whether it be India or Pakistan, Israel or Palestine, Russia or the United States.

Nussbaum's case study is an admirable presentation of the perils facing political life when democracy is unchecked by human rights.