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Written by Ashutosh Varshney | Updated: July 6, 2020 9:23:15 am Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different. (Source: AP)

Are Americas Blacks and Indias Muslims politically comparable? This question has acquired a new salience with the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, underway for weeks in the US, covering several hundred cities. Comparisons have been drawn with the anti-CAA protests in India, lasting three months after mid-December, rebelling against the attempted demotion of Indias Muslims to secondary citizenship. The mainstream Black argument that Blacks have been treated as inferior Americans, with Whites as the putative owners of the nation, is not altogether distinct.

In what ways, then, are Indias Muslims and Americas Blacks similar or different? And are such similarities and differences politically consequential? Blacks, of course, are not religiously distinct from Whites. They are predominantly Christian. In contrast, Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different.

Similarities emerge when we turn to demography and politics. Blacks are a little over 12 per cent of the US population, Muslims slightly over 14 per cent of Indias. Democracies tend to privilege numbers. In conditions of polarisation, racial or religious minorities can get swamped by racial or religious majorities. When a majority of Hindus or Whites vote communally or racially, the threat to minorities can become quite real.

Consider the political arithmetic underlying the proposition above. Hindus are roughly 80 per cent of India, and Whites about 73 per cent of Americas electorate. If 50 per cent of Hindus vote for the BJP, it would constitute 40 per cent of the national vote, which, given a certain geographic distribution, is enough for victory in a parliamentary system, if not in a presidential system. When it won 44 per cent of Hindu vote, the BJP approximated this possibility in 2019. Indeed, only 1.4 per cent of BJPs national vote last year was non-Hindu. That level of Hindu concentration, a voting novelty in India, allowed the Narendra Modi regime to embark on an anti-Muslim legislative frenzy between July and December, culminating in the CAA.

Analogously, if 70 per cent of Whites vote for a racist party in the US, it can easily win the presidential elections, assuming a certain distribution of that vote. Republicans, under Trump, were not too far from this target in 2016, when Trump received 64 per cent of White vote (and only six per cent of the Black vote). After victory, Trump has followed a White racist agenda, and the strategy for November 2020 is also clearly aimed at racial polarisation. He may not, of course, succeed. The BLM protests have been remarkably multi-racial, and polls show a substantial reduction in Trumps White support.

The greatest difference between the US Blacks and Indian Muslims is, of course, historical. The Blacks were brought to the US as slaves, starting 1619. Bought and sold as commodities with no rights, families often split and violence frequently inflicted, they bore the pain of slavery till 1864. After slavery ended, the suffering of the Jim Crow era began, when the recently won equality and voting rights were obliterated, segregation enforced, and lynchings and pogroms unleashed. Finally, after equality and voting rights returned in the mid-1960s, police violence emerged as a method of social control. The nine-minute police knee on George Floyds neck was the wrenching tip of a vast iceberg.

Though the parallel is not exact, untouchability in India came closest to slavery. That is why some social scientists have sought to compare Blacks and Dalits. Muslims were neither forced into slavery, nor untouchability. Between the 11th and 18th centuries, much of India was ruled by Muslim princes. There is no Black parallel in US history. Blacks have been at the bottom of American society for four centuries.

This historical contrast has been undeniably consequential. Muslim princely power has been used by Hindu nationalists to transform the conduct of some Muslim rulers, especially Babur and Aurangzeb, and before them, the invasion of Ghazni and Ghouri, into a larger anti-Muslim political narrative. M S Golwalkars formulation barah sau saal ki ghulami (1,200 years of servitude, thus colonisation starting before the British conquest), which Modi repeatedly articulated when he came to power in 2014, refers to the West and Central Asian invasions from 8th century onwards.

This narrative is very different from the anti-Black narrative of White racism. In the Hindu nationalist narrative, Muslims have always been disloyal to the Indian nation, which in turn is equated with the Hindu majority. Indias partition is presented as the latest proof of Muslim infidelity. It is their everlasting disloyalty which makes Muslims unworthy of equality with the Hindus. In the White supremacist narrative, Blacks are not disloyal to the US which is, of course, viewed as a White nation. But Blacks, for them, are irredeemably inferior, and therefore, entirely undeserving of equality and respect. The two narratives construct unworthiness differently.

Both narratives are fundamentally flawed. The Hindu nationalist narrative errs when it flattens the behavioural plurality of the Muslim princes. The proverbial comparison between Akbar and Aurangzeb the two biggest Mughal emperors belongs to this discursive realm. It is impossible to prove Akbars disloyalty to India, and as for Aurangzeb, even Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, in The Discovery of India, that Aurangzeb set the clock back. No serious historian finds an unbroken chain of Hindu-repression and India-hatred running across centuries of Muslim rule.

More fundamentally, how are Muslim masses implicated in the princely conduct? Why punish them? Historically, Muslim social structure has been bi-modal. A small court-based princely and aristocratic class coexisted with a vast mass of poor Muslims. And in 2005, the Sachar Committee conclusively demonstrated something already intuitively known: That, along with Dalits and Adivasis, Muslims are the poorest community of India.

This is where the Black-Muslim comparison begins to recover its validity. Like Blacks, Indias Muslims are mostly poor and deprived, and like them, they are a minority. After the mid 20th century, a democracy is not a proper democracy unless it safeguards minorities. And if the minorities are also poor, the protection becomes even more necessary. A poor minority deserves empathy and justice, not hatred and repression. It is a morally diminishedand normatively impoverishedsociety, which adopts the latter path..

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Brown University

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Hindu nationalism, White supremacism threaten to morally impoverish the two democracies - The Indian Express

The Wests normalisation of Sisi is a huge pillar of the stranglehold he has over the lives of every Egyptian.

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the military coup that brought an end to Egypts brief experiment with democracy. The July 3 coup is an area of modern history that is conveniently and woefully neglected by a world that has, with a few noble exceptions, normalised and bolstered the subsequent reign of terror of the triumphant tyrant Abdel Fattah El Sisi.

In a way, its absurd to talk of the coup in the past tense, given it has never really ended. To this day, one could take a brief dip into the modern political scene in Egypt and only witness another instance of the escalation of the perpetual violence that began on July 3, 2013.

Those who fail to see this do so almost entirely deliberately and maliciously. No more is this the case with the so-called democratic West. The tone, as ever, was set by Egypts biggest patron, the US.

It was Obama who refused to call the removal of the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi for what it was, namely a military a coup. Obama knew that if he did so it would mean that, under US law, hed have to stop funding the very military that had just carried out the coup.

Obama was briefly forced to pretend to care about human rights in post-coup Egypt, following the 14th of August, 2013 when Egyptian military and paramilitary forces, funded by the US and so ferociously utilising the military technologies it provides, carried out a massacre of over 1000 pro-democracy protesters at Cairos Rabaa and Nadha squares.

Though there was some handwringing within the Obama administration on the question of renewing military aid, the reality was that the US was simply biding its time, waiting for Sisi to stabilise the country so that normal service of funding Egypt as a key geopolitical ally regardless of the barbarity of the regime could resume.

Stability, no matter how one reads it, meant the violent, murderous destruction of the entire democratic opposition, paving the way for Sisi officially assuming the throne of the presidency.

For this unprecedented violence, the US praised and duly rewarded Sisi with uninterrupted military aid and diplomatic support.

But theres a more viscerally ideological aspect regarding the relation of the July 3 coup to the West. One of the major ways in which the coup was globally justified in its early stages was to depict the democratically elected government as anti-western.

Supporters of the coup had, since essentially the first moment Morsi elected, sought to depict his technocratic, transitional and incrementally reformist government as dangerous Islamists whose ultimate goal was to transform Egypt into an anti-western theocracy.

Egypt is becoming the new Iran, was a popular counter-revolutionary cry, while absurd stories of the Islamization of Egypt flooded the domestic and international media.

Morsi was depicted as being worse than Mubarak on TV stations owned by Mubarak loyalists (feloul).

To this end, figures who were popular in the West but marginal in Egypt, most notably Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mohamed ElBaradei, were recruited to the cause of subverting democracy in Egypt by poisoning the West against Morsi.

Joining him was a plethora of westernised leftists and liberals whose own conception of Egypt is based on the Egypt that Mubarak had surrendered for his own kleptocratic interests to aggressive Westernisation the Egypt of ultra-elite shopping malls, globetrotting between Cairo and Los Angeles, Dubai, London, New York etc. A place where the Egyptian experience is largely restricted to affluent gated communities in Cairo far from the Baladi alien masses with their decidedly un-western traditions, religiosity and cultures.

They advertised to the West a so-called corrective revolution a restricted Egyptian democracy that circumvented the Islamists who had won every single fair and free election since the January 25 revolution.

They knew they couldnt win power by contesting elections, since they had insignificant domestic support; hence why simply voting Morsi out of power was rejected by the so-called opposition. He had to be removed and what he represented, namely the democratic process that led to his presidency, had to be, at the very best, severely cut down to size.

Of course, it was when the bodies started dropping in Rabaa and Nadha that ELBaradei fled in the night away from Sisi and his bloodthirsty coupist comrades his subsequent mea culpas would be more believable if this wasnt a man who understood the ruthlessly anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary nature of the Egyptian Armed Forces before getting into bed with them.

Similarly, there was an exodus of previously pro-coup left-liberals who realised that their feloul and military allies had no inclination for sharing power.

But they had fleetingly served their purpose. Sisis entire selling point to the West has been shaped by the false but mutually expedient secularist-Islamist dichotomy.

Sisi has found almost no better an ally than the European Union, which helped legitimise his fake election, and which provides him with sweetheart trade and weapons deals under the guise of him fighting 'Islamist' terrorism in the Sinai, but which has more to do with his function as a merciless policeman of illegal immigrants trying to penetrate the walls of Fortress Europe.

None of this about making tired anti-Western arguments, but the July 3 coup against democracy and its perceived irrelevance in Western considerations of Egypt is something that is hugely relevant to the lives of Egyptians today.

To illustrate it in the most graphic terms when, last year, the Palacegate protests erupted, it was with German, French and American weaponry that the regime viciously repressed the protesters. When Sisi carries out war crimes in the Sinai, he does so with US and European weaponry.

The Wests normalisation of Sisi is a huge pillar of the stranglehold that he and the kleptocracy he represents has over the lives of every Egyptian.

The Sisi regime is a bastion of backwardness, having one of the worst human rights records on earth it is rapidly pulling Egypt deeper into a political and economic abyss.

Every totalitarian lunge backwards every killing, every execution, every act of torture, every indefinite detention without trial and every voice viciously censored is done so with the full and unwavering support of the democratic West.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

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The West's role in ending Egypt's short-lived democracy - TRT World

Published 6 July 2020

After more than 200 years, Thomas Muir of Huntershill has been restored to the roll of the Faculty of Advocates following a successful plea by Ross Macfarlane QC.

Muir was an advocate and political reformer in late eighteenth-century Scotland who, during an age of revolution, promoted democratic ideas including support for universal suffrage, which were seen by some as subversive.

Muir practised as an advocate from 1787 until being struck off in 1793 following his indictment by Lord Braxfield of the High Court of Justiciary on the charge of sedition. While he was facing trial, and was a fugitive from justice, the Faculty expelled him from membership. He was brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to transportation, before escaping to America and revolutionary France in pursuit of his political campaigns, where he died in 1799 at the age of 33.

Muirs sentencing sparked a controversy that has persisted until the present day. Soon after his trial, concerns were being expressed that the political climate of the times had resulted in an unacceptable erosion of civil liberties, and in the 1840s a monument was erected in Calton Cemetery in memory of Muir and the other political martyrs of the time. Muir has since become known as the father of Scottish democracy for his exploits.

Mr Macfarlanes submission to the former Dean of Faculty, Gordon Jackson QC, centred on his discovery of key documents that proved a decree of fugitation lodged against Muir had never held legal effect and so voided the grounds for his expulsion from Faculty.

Mr Macfarlane showed that the decree against Muir had been reponed by an interlocutor of the Court of Session six months after being issued due to Muirs inability to make the trial by the High Court, during which he was sentenced as a fugitive. As the only reason for Muirs expulsion from Faculty, Mr Macfarlane moved that the granting of this appeal should now enable his restoration.

In his letter reinstating Muir to Faculty, Mr Jackson said: On any view of it, the trial and conviction of Muir fell far short of any notions of fairness and the due processes of Scots law.

Mr Jackson described Mr Macfarlanes work as being in the proud traditions of the Faculty of Advocates in their quest for justice, their dogged and meticulous research methods and the persuasive quality of their argument.

Mr Macfarlane said: Muir was passionate, eloquent and charismatic, albeit perceived as anti-establishment in his own time.

And on the matter of his reinstatement to Faculty, I cant do better than leave the last word to Muir himself: I have dedicated myself to the cause of the people. It is a good cause. It shall ultimately prevail. It shall finally triumph.

SLN managing editor Graham Ogilvy said: Those with an interest in Thomas Muir might like to know that a plaque of the Scottish advocate adorns the walls of the Cuban embassy in London.

A copy of the plaque was given to me by the late sculptor Ian Swann after the original was presented to the Cuban ambassador to commemorate Muirs time as a prisoner of the Spanish in Havana after his rescue from Indians on the Yucatn peninsula, where he had been shipwrecked.

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'Father of Scottish democracy' Thomas Muir of Huntershill restored to roll of Faculty - Scottish Legal News

On June 28 Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) won the countrys presidential electoral rerun. He led a nine-party opposition coalition, the Tonse Alliance (Together Alliance). His running mate was the vibrant and popular Saulos Chilima, the leader of the United Transformation Movement (UTM).

The Tonse victory appears to have consolidated the countrys democracy, at the same revealing redefined roles of a new consensus built on the judiciary, the military and civil society organisations. At first glance, Malawians have voted for the party they rejected in 1994 as part of their transition towards constitutionalism through multiparty democratic elections after 31 years of death and darkness. (On achieving independence in 1964, the prime minister and later president, Hastings Banda, declared Malawi a one-party state under the MCP.)

Twenty-six years later, the MCP has benefited from the complex machinations and attempts to impose transitional leadership succession that have characterised Malawian politics for the past decade and a half. In 2004, president Bakili Muluzi of the United Democratic Front (UDF) acrimoniously ended his second tenure, after failing to amend the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term. After he left office, Muluzi foisted on his party and country the little-known former deputy governor of the Reserve bank of Malawi and later finance minister, Bingu wa Mutharika. This came at a time when the opposition was boycotting the electoral process.

Within months, Wa Mutharika and Muluzi had fallen out, with corruption and treason charges levelled against the former president by the incumbent. Mutharika proceeded to form his own political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), while sequestering legislators from the UDF. In April 2005, Muluzi went public, apologising to Malawians for having facilitated Wa Mutharikas ascension to office. He was then forced to flee the country and went into self-exile in the United Kingdom until May 2008.

Early in his second term, Mutharika began planning for his successor, requesting that his DDP deputy vice-president of the country, Joyce Banda, step aside for his younger brother, law professor Peter wa Mutharika, who was teaching in the United States at the time. Banda resisted and was unceremoniously removed from the party and government and forced to stay at home; she immediately formed her own party, the Peoples Party.

On April 5 2005, the unexpected happened. President Bingu wa Mutharika had a cardiac arrest and died. Thereafter, the DPP discovered that the Constitution provided for the vice-president, in this instance Joyce Banda, to take over, which she did. In the ensuing chaos, allegations emerged that key DPP officials had asked that either the attorney general or the commander of the defence forces, General Henry Odillo, take over the running of the country for a time to prevent Banda from assuming power.

In the presence of the police inspector general, Peter Mukhito, Odillo refused. Banda was able to succeed Bingu wa Mutharika and serve out the remaining term until the May 2014 elections. The DPP reorganised, with Peter Mutharika as the leader, and won the May 2014 poll. Meanwhile, an internal corruption case, the Cashgate scandal, had embroiled Joyce Bandas administration, resulting in the loss of public confidence and the possibility of arrest and detention. She fled the country into four years of self-imposed exile.

Peter Mutharika became president in May 2014 and, within weeks of his inauguration, Odillo was relieved of his duties. No explanation was provided, but it was clearly tied up with the recalcitrant position he took in 2012. In the run-up to and beyond the May 2019 elections, Mutharika continued attempting to retain the services of a discredited Malawi Electoral Commission, confronting and attempting to forcibly retire members of the judiciary and the military. Senior officers had to approach the courts to block the presidential decrees, and were successful in these efforts.

As the country prepared for the 2019 polls, Mutharika fell out with his deputy and vice-president, Chilima. As had become fashionable, Chilima also established his own party, the UTM, that is reported to have connected with the young people across the nation, particularly in urban areas.

The May 28 2019 election result, later criticised by the courts as The Tippex Election, had the DPP winning with 38.57%; the MCP and the UTM gained 35.41% and 20.24% of the vote, respectively. The two losing parties, the MCP and UTM together with the Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) approached the courts, citing irregularities. One of their criticisms was about the role played by the electoral commission director, Jane Ansaha, who was accused of being partisan and biased. The electoral commission and the governing DPP appealed against the injunction.

But the high court of Malawi, in its verdict of the May 2019 election, overturned the results.

It was clear that, to defeat the incumbent, the opposition parties had to reach an accommodation of sorts before the polls an elite pact. As the elections approached, it was evident that Chilima would be the kingmaker between the governing DPP and the old, established MCP.

The short history of the Tonse Alliance, whose main leaders marched on the streets on March 12 2020 and since been inaugurated in power by June, reflects an entity emerging from a shot-gun wedding whose lasting endurance remains to be tested. This is because the marriage of convenience emerged from a sober evaluation of the losing percentages in the May election against the narrow victory of the incumbent, Peter Mutharika. On this the sums were obvious; if the two combined then they would dislodge Mutharika. The losing parties were reacting to the 150 day cooling period before the presidential re-run opportunity offered by the court ruling succeeding to gain office as the logical outcome.

The question is: How deep is this relationship and will it combine the ideological idiosyncrasies and constituencies of the MCP and UTM?

Significantly, as part of his new appointments, including a vice-president, minister of economic planning and public sector reform, and minister of finance, Chakwera has also removed the partisan acting police inspector, Duncan Mwapasa, and installed George Kainja with instructions to clean up the battered image of the police.

What has the Malawi election delivered? An entity that comprises a complex elite sits in the political saddle, while providing an opportunity for the judiciary, the electoral commission and the military to act in concert towards consolidating democracy in the country.

As Malawians rush into the streets to celebrate, they must be aware of the implications of what the poll has delivered, and keep a watchful eye on the extent the actors remain true to their ideal of acting as servant leaders.

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Consolidating democracy in Malawi: A case of recycled elite pacts? - Mail and Guardian

Dear Editor,

I note that my friend and CARICOM Brother, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the new CARICOM Chairman, seems determined to throw stones towards Guyana.

Statements which are certainly premature.

As one of the most experienced leaders in the Region, and the longest serving Prime Minister, I remain disappointed that he has not taken a page out of the Book of many other CARICOM Heads of Government and Leaders of political and social groupings.

That is to maintain a level of cohesion and comradery within CARICOM.

When we behave this way, we earn the disrespect of outsiders and weaken the foundation pillars of CARICOM.

No sensible leader should contribute to the creation of this kind of environment.

I read a report by the Opposition Leader of St. Vincent. He certainly did not glorify democracy in St. Vincent.

Mr. Gonsalves and others use the term democracy with gay abandon. He must know that throughout modern history, democracy is a chameleon term used for a variety of reasons and those of us who ought to know better should be careful not to ply this term without providing detail and credible information.

The truth is democracy means different things to different people and experienced political figures ought to be careful when we apply the term without providing data. In a few hours, we will be celebrating the Independence anniversary of the United States of America.

A country and the people I believe the majority of Guyanese cherish. A place where Guyanese have a family-member, relative, or friend resident there and in the majority of cases, enjoying the American way of life with the many avenues for upward mobility and where we happily refer to as the land of opportunities.

There and elsewhere the struggle to define and refine democracy is ongoing.

I quote from the Book, The Challenge of Democracy written by Janda, Berry and Goldman which states in the first chapter of the second edition, as follows: Which is better: to live under a government that allows individuals freedom to do whatever they please or under one that enforces strict law and order? Which is better: to allow businesses and private clubs to discriminate in choosing their customers and members or to pass laws that enforce equality among races and sexes?

For many people, none of these alternatives is satisfactory. All of them pose difficult dilemmas of choice. The dilemmas are tied to opposing philosophies that place different values on freedom, order, and equality. End of quote.

Even before we cut the umbilical cord with Great Britain, Demerarians (as Guyanese were then called) looked to the US for guidance and succor.

We can be reminded, however, that the first twelve Presidents beginning with George Washington, James Maddison, James Munroe, Andrew Jackson and others were slave owners in that democracy prompting Martin Luther King (jnr), a century after the American Civil War to note and I quote I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal.

President David A. Granger has neither violated our Constitution nor broken our laws but yet we see so many throwing stones at him and the government he leads.

And I wonder, Dear Editor, if the underlying philosophy of these stone throwers is that they regard our erect and proper leader as being one of the other folks.

I wonder, for I can find no valid reasons for this relentless stone-throwing by a few people in the US, Guyana and the Caribbean. I wonder.

Yours faithfully,

Hamilton Green

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Mr. Gonsalves and others use the term 'democracy' with gay abandon - Stabroek News