Image via WikipediaNew York Times: Pankaj Mishra: Games India Isn’t Ready to Play: “as hard as we try to build a new India ... old India still has the power to humiliate and embarrass us.” ...... Since June, a mass insurrection, resembling the Palestinian intifada, has raged in the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir. .... The contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in which the Chinese government largely overcame controversy and staked a claim to a dominant place in the world order, is all too depressingly clear..... Beijing faces no political problems as severe as the many insurgencies in central India and Kashmir, or tragedies as great as the waves of suicides of tens of thousands of overburdened farmers over the last two decades ..... the private wealth of the 49 Indians on the Forbes list is nearly 31 percent of India’s gross domestic product ..... there are more poor people in just eight Indian states than in all the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, with the large state of Madhya Pradesh comparable in intensity of deprivation to war-ravaged Congo. ..... the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who every day suffer the brutalities of what’s arguably the world’s largest military occupation ... a minority kept under perpetual siege by a paranoid nation-state.
America is the world's oldest democracy, India its largest, and so the two should see common gorund. Israel is the Middle East's lone democracy. And India is that other democracy across a few states in between, and so Israel and India should see common ground.
Those are valid lines of reasonings, except Israel fails miserably in Palestine as India does in Kashmir. And Israel and India are democracies. Palestine and Kashmir are fault lines that are important to understand and act upon if we are to make progress in terms of spreading democracy across the Arab world.
Muslims in India are like African Americans in America. They are that other people lagging in all socio-economic indicators. There are a few high profile Muslim Indians, but that does not change the fact that the Muslim masses in India lag behind, and often get demonized by the Hindu majority. The periodic Hindu-Muslim riots that flare up are not even fights. There are too many Hindus. They got too much. They control too much. They have too many allies. The Hindus are the state.
Democracies should be capable of introspection and frank debate. Democracies should be able to deal with social wrongs. In that both Israel and India stand challenged.
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