Nissim Mannathukkaren Quotes
Canada
Nissim Mannathukkaren is Associate Professor and Chair, International Development Studies Department, Dalhousie University, Canada.
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Random Nissim Mannathukkaren quote
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There is something deeply troubling about a culture which makes humans into gods, and which puts people on pedestals to be worshipped. For, it glosses over all blemishes in its quest for the godly.
The joke is not on Modi. The joke is on the "educated" elite/middle class supporters of Modi who have made idiocy and ignorance fashionable.
As examples from history show, when jokes start circulating about a powerful leader, cracks in political legitimacy begin to appear.
To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence.
Moral culpability is denied through false equivalence.
It is not that Hindutva supporters equate vastly different phenomena with vastly different consequences, but they also willfully gloss over facts.
The narrative of moral equivalence is persisted with regard to the Delhi violence, despite the overwhelming evidence of the police acting emphatically in favour of one side.
When the largest democracy in the world, and the oldest one in the Global South, displays authoritarian tendencies betraying the promise of its founding fathers, it has implications beyond India.
Rather than reduce this to the personality of Modi or his lack of knowledge, I am more interested in the fact how the Hindu Right has made a virtue of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and fake news/propaganda in the last five years, and how people have been asked to believe the most illogical, irrational, untruthful statements coming out, especially from the PM.