Cozmic Debris

* This is not about dumb blondes. This is about a child of the flower power generation who is now lecturing your children at the University of Sydney. Note the name: “Dr Sheleyah”-, can you smell the bong? Do the LSD flashbacks and the vibes in doctor Sheleyah’s writing creep you out? Here is doctor Sheleyah’s biography,  which includes “research in the holy city of Varanasi” (why holy? Holy to whom? The good doctor Shellellalyah won’t tell us that.)

 Along with a lot of gobbledegook, Shellelyah wants you to know that she is a quack for a pseudo science called Anthropology. (Marranci sends his regards!)  That’s all well and good, were it not for  the fact that  she tells us is that it was Hindu nationalism that caused the mass-murder in Mumbai.  Enough to make your skin crawl. But what if the helping hand of a friendly Muslim male with liquid brown eyes had more that his hand in it?  (in her writing of course, not what you think!)  Would you say she is way out of her league,  or she is just another dumb blonde or is she a victim of  creeping Islamization? Or, in light of the evidence of Islamic terror, by blaiming Hindus, is she just another dissimulating taqiyya spin-doctor for Muhammedan causes?

Mumbai: Temple of cinema the set for unprecedented terrorism

By Dr Sheleyah A. Courtney

Mumbai: Temple of cinema the set for unprecedented terrorism

The terrorist onslaught in Mumbai is unprecedented in India for its scale, horror and sophistication. Westerners think of Mumbai as the Bombay of Bollywood. But it is the also the stronghold of the conservative Hindu political right: Maharasthra state.

Maharashtra is the headquarters of the Hindu right from which its interests extend northwards to Gujerat and eastwards into Uttar Pradesh. Hindu piety, far from being laden with dreamy spirituality as it is often orientalised by westerners, is fiercely militant and reflects the traditional volatility of a region – the Deccan – and its people who did not submit easily to being colonised.

Correspondingly, Hindu citizenry should not be wrongly understood or misrepresented as weakened from excessive spirituality; rather, these people both guard and pursue their worldly interests with passion and sometimes ferocity.

Yet, in the past and still today, Hindu temples have been the wealthy power centres of Indian states and mosques were often raised over their razed ruins under the Moguls. These are sites where and over which rival groups dual and from which the victors, whether Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin or non-Brahmin, or sacred versus secular, reign.

The site of the former Babri mosque in Ayodhya North India was torn down by right wing Hindu fundamentalists amidst an orgy of violence in 1992. These militants were supporters of the VHP, the Shiv Sena party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) all which has headquarters in and strong links to Maharashtra and Gujerat states.

The attacks sparked nationwide riots killing more than 2,000 more people. The VHP was charged under India’s “Unlawful Activities Act” for condoning the attacks and was sentenced to a four-year ban of activities.

Mumbai is like a temple in this sense: the cinema as the new temple of the secular state and whoever either possesses or destroys may create an India of their own desires.

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, imagined a secular nation-state at its inception in 1947, but others since dream of many different kinds of Indias. In its numerous incarnations India itself is a site that has been highly contested in its tumultuous history of invasion and colonisation. It remains so now reflecting communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims that are operative at both local and international levels.

These tensions increasingly parallel in scale and violence fundamentalist and political contests in other parts of the world. India’s recent meteoric economic successes and accompanying rise to global importance now render its internal power struggles of import to the rest of the western world.

If India was to be able to take up an enduring position alongside such nation-states, the marginalisation of groups such as Muslims could be far more easily afforded by the stronger Hindu majority. Recent troubles in Mumbai have pertained to a black market labour force of Bangladeshi illegal immigrants who have been increasingly targeted in and hounded out of Mumbai by its “sons of the soil.” As such, the members of the newly identified but doubtless not really new at all “Deccan Mujahedeen” are also doubtlessly comprised of both such young marginialised dispossessed illegals, and also poor marginalized Indian Muslims.

Yet, police say they landed in Mumbai from the Arabian Sea that separated India and Pakistan and the Middle East, where also no doubt they had been taken and been trained up with Al Qaedaesque ideology and methods. Hence the terrorists’ motivation for the attack on Mumbai extends beyond the local – for the local is now global – and it is two-fold.

First: destroy confidence of and relations with the secular west: attack their privileged nationals on Indian soil. This also effectively undermines India’s own official secularity. Second: strike at the wealthy heart of the Hindu right-wing and weaken its project to achieve a Hindu nation-state that excludes Others.

In the wake of the many terrorist attacks of recent years, the population is losing confidence with the federal level of government that they feel is out of touch with local problems. One Hindu man recently quoted in the Times of India said: “We need a government that can tackle terror with an iron hand.” This kind of remark has frequently turned up in many recent Indian media reports on terrorist attacks.

Communal rivalries also now are further complicated by Pakistan’s fraught and perilous relations with Afghanistan and also exacerbated by the uneasy alliance that was beginning to develop between India and Pakistan that was brokered by America. In the light of these uneasy yet threatening alliances, various such Muslim Mujahedeen are violently attempting their destruction as we have seen in the last few days.

The easily foreseeable consequences (although not the goals) of the terrorists will be, as many times in the past on less provocation, targeting of and bloodshed in Muslim urban colonies. As worryingly, and very likely a goal of this well organised group is the destabilisation of the federal government and its international relations and strategic political alliances, if not the collapse of the Indian nation-state itself.

This will have the dual effect of undermining the economic strength of the Hindu right, so countering its attempt to create a Hindu nation and so protecting the rights – if not the lives, given the retaliations I predict – of the Indian Muslim citizenry.

Contact: Kath Kenny

Phone: 02 9351 2261 or 0434 606 100