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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 11:26 pm
From: bademiyansubhanallah

Beautiful People with Nitin Gadkari Part 1 - 20/3/10

Watch Video

http://vodpod.com/watch/3274755-beautiful-people-with-nitin-gadkari-part-1-20310

Beautiful People with Nitin Gadkari Part 2 - 20/3/10

Watch Video

http://vodpod.com/watch/3274756-beautiful-people-with-nitin-gadkari-part-2-20310

MS - Believe in IK OANKAAR Member since:May 12, 2006
Total points:12001 (Level 6)

Resolved Question

How is team Nitin Gadkari?

So far I did not pay attention on his team but after reading comments
from Shotgun, I started reading and critically analyzing this national
counsel.

Karuna Shukla : niece of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajapayee

Varun Gandhi, Of course benefited because of his family background and
his provocative and controversial speeches.

Vasundhara Raje Scindia, daughter of late smt Rajmata Vijayaraje
Scindia, who else can trouble party leadership more than her.

Thavarchand Ghahlod, Vijay Goel both lost parliamentary elections and
Dharmendra Pradhan lost assembly elections, and all three general
secretory, but Yashwant Sinha missing from the list and Bihar
elections are approaching.

No general secretory from UP, only one member from Karnataka in team
Gadkari where BJP is in power.

Of course, Mr. Advani and RSS are never ignored in BJP.

From parliament to team Gadkari every where one can see, Mr. Advani's
team more than Mr. Gadkari's team, may it be leader of opposition, or
leader of NDA, or leader of BJP in Rajyasabha, or in team Gadkari
Anant Kumar, and Vasundhara Raje though Arun Shourie and Yashavant
Sinha did not find place.

And for RSS, Narendra Singh Tomar, Ram Lal, Varun Gandhi, Vinay
Katiyar, Thavar Chand Gahlot.

Mr. Gadkari had to leave out the deserving candidate like Shahnavaz
Husein from being General Secretory and accommodated as spokes person,
though he is three times MP and more deserving than many others.

And by the way there are 3 general secretaries from Lok Sabha and 6
from Rajya Sabha, and I am emphasizing more on general secretaries
because that position is considered as most important in BJP.

Now according to media news the Yuva morcha president will be Anurag
Thaukur, HP CM Prem Kumar Dhumal's son.

Yes lot of Young faces and more than 33% females in the team. A
positive sign, but I don't see lot of people with grassroots and mass
support.

What is your opinion on Team Gadkari? Would this team take BJP to Mr.
Gadkari's target to increase vote base to +10%? Did he keep his
promise that "People who work will be rewarded in BJP?"
2 weeks ago

Additional Details

Mr. Bull, I don't my question was how is team Gadkari as compared to
team Congress because that is already proven. But to answer your
question.

For your kind information, these just few examples, more you want, I
can produce a long list but I don't think that is the question here:

Late Madhavrao Scindia joined politics with Bharatiya Jan Sangh and he
was son of Late Rajmata Scindia. So it goes like this:

Late Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia
=======================

Daughter: Yashodhara Raje Scindia
Son: Madhavrao Scindia
Daughter: Vasundhara Raje
Grandson: Dushyant Singh

I already mentioned about Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's family, now see
few more:

Rajnath Singh:
===========
Son: Pankaj Singh

Jaswant Singh
===========
Son: Manvendra Singh

B. S. Yeddyurappa
===============
Son: B. Y. Raghavendra

Madan Lal Khurana
===============

Son: Vimal Khurana
Daughter In law: Vandana Khurana
2 weeks ago

by Vijay D Member since:February 15, 2007Total points:9900 (Level 5)

Best answer 11%2613 answers
Member Since: February 15, 2007
Total Points: 9900 (Level 5)
Points earned this week: 54

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

This is team RSS with head quarters based in Nagpur. Full BJP has been
taken over by Marathi culture. The reason for fall of BJP in north
India is only because of the prevalent Marathi culture.
2 weeks ago

Asker's Rating:Asker's Comment:10/10

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100318173007AAvUPsH

A thought to ponder

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

"No true Muslim can kill a Hindu, no true Hindu can kill a Muslim.
Yet the pseudo-secularists insist on indentifying terrorists with
religion.
The state should be secular, the government should be secular but an
individual cannot be secular."

sd/Nitin Gadkari

http://www.nitingadkari.org/

Life Sketch

A Visionary Performer

A visionary with great ideas and an innovative approach, an able
administrator who believes in attaining results , an iconic leader for
the party workers, a Leader of Opposition who keeps the government on
its toes when in opposition; a performer par excellence as a Minister
are the words that best bring about the profile of Nitin Gadkari. In
other words, here is a leader who has the ability to make democracy,
deliver!

For him politics was never confined to gaining power. He always looked
at it as an instrument for bringing about all round development of the
people. He believes that "Seva and Vikas", (service and development)
lead the way for better public service, which in turn expands and
strengthens the base of the party, at the grass root level.

A Swayamsevak of the RSS to the core, for Mr Gadkari, social justice,
harmony and equality are matters of commitment. His skills in social
engineering , withstood the litmus test of electoral politics in the
recent Maharashtra assembly elections especially in the Nagpur
district.

His clear vision and perfect understanding of the needs of the masses,
has helped him to bring effective changes that have benefitted the
common man. In political as well as the social spheres Mr. Gadkari,
has always adopted an all encompassing approach. Antyodaya, (to reach
out to the last person on the social ladder) has always been the focus
of his development agenda. His willingness to accept suggestions and
implement the viable ones helped Mr. Gadkari to change the face and
functioning of the Public Works Department (PWD) of Maharashtra
Government during his very illustrious tenure as its Minister..

A Sincere Party Soldier

Mr. Gadkari began as a grass root level worker and has successfully
led from the front, several agitations and other programmes of the
BJP . He has worked in different capacities and has held varied
positions within the party, before taking up the post of Maharashtra
BJP President in 2004. As a true party soldier, he has all along
accepted whatever responsibility the party wanted him to shoulder and
has carried it out to the best of his abilities.

After taking over as Maharashtra BJP President in November 2004, Mr.
Gadkari visited almost every tehsil and knows countless party workers
by name. Due to his dynamism, development-oriented approach and
openness, the BJP has been able to bring various new sections of
society in its fold.

Early Days of Activism

Nitin Gadkari learned his initial lessons in nationalism and
patriotism at a very young age. He entered the political arena as a
student activist. He joined the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad
(ABVP) in 1976 and took active part in university elections. In 1979
he became the Secretary of Vidharbha region. Under his stewardship
ABVP won the elections for all positions in the Nagpur University
Students' Council. During his tenure he successfully organized the
28th National Convention of ABVP.
At the age of 24, he was elected as the Nagpur City President of
Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM). In 1985 he became secretary of BJP
Nagpur City and he worked relentlessly to strengthen the party
organization in urban and rural areas of the district.
At the age of 32, Nitin Gadkari successfully contested elections for
Maharashtra Legislative Council from Nagpur division Graduates
Constituency, spread over five districts, and became an M.L.C. He
repeated his successful performance four consecutive times in 1990,
1996, 2002 and 2008. Notably, he was elected unopposed in 2002.
Mr. Gadkari's success in the legislative politics runs parallel with
his organizational achievements in BJP. At the age of 35, he became
the General Secretary of BJP in Maharashtra. Under his leadership the
party organization spread its tentacles all over the state. The
party's spectacular victory in the Nagpur Municipal Corporation in
1992 elections, established his organization prowess beyond doubt. At
the age of 38, Mr. Gadkari was inducted in the Maharashtra Cabinet as
the Minister for Public Works. High level of result orientation and
performance marked his ministerial inning. He was Leader of Opposition
in Maharashtra Legislative Council at the age of 42. As a responsible
leader of opposition, he took up various important issues such as
farmer's suicides and made the government listen to. He also came out
with out-of-box suggestions and viable solutions to address these
issues.

In 2004, Mr. Gadkari at the age of 47, became the President of BJP
Maharashtra State.

Mark on Governance:

Gadkari's stint as Public Works Minister of Maharashtra (1995-99) made
him world-famous thanks to his resoluteness in swiftly completing mega
projects like the Mumbai-Pune Expressway or the network of 55 flyover
bridges in Mumbai at the costs way below the estimated expenditure.
During these four and a half years he left an indelible mark of his
style of governance on his department. He played a key role in shaping
the Prime Minister's Gram Sadak Yojana. During the NDA rule, the
Central PWD was revamped as per his suggestions. Mr. Gadkari
transformed Nagpur, making it one of the most beautiful cities of
India. His lasting contribution is his work for uplifting the poor and
the deprived.

His thrust area always has remained the economic and social upliftment
of the have-nots. A case in point is his work for the educated
unemployed. When he was Minister, he launched a scheme for qualified
unemployed civil engineers. They were allowed to register with the PWD
and undertake its assignments, estimated to cost up to Rs.15 lakh. Mr.
Gadkari provided work to around 30000 engineers through this bold
initiative. At the same time, Gadkari started a campaign to reward the
employees doing good work and penalise those shirking their
responsibilities. Every year since, the State Governor distributes
awards to outstanding PWD engineers on the birth anniversary of Sir M.
Visvesvaraya. Such pioneering efforts instilled a confidence among the
PWD personnel. Under Mr. Gadkari, they completed several prestigious
assignments in record time.

Mr. Gadkari's two achievements stand out in particular. He pioneered
the concept of Public-Private partnership (PPP) in infrastructure
development. The BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model has the basis of
this concept. It is now implemented widely in India, thanks to this
initiative large budgetary funds were made available for rural road
development. The other is the up-gradation of norms for the
construction industry. Completion of mega projects in a time bound
frame, too, is his initiative. Establishment of a Maharashtra State
Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) was one of his innovative
initiatives through which funds were raised from open market for
infrastructure projects for the first time in India
One of the first tasks Mr. Gadkari planned was to provide all-weather
road connectivity to the 13736 villages in Maharashtra. He noted that
they had remained unconnected even after 50 years of independence. He
remarked that it would take 350 years to complete the work through
annual budgets. As finances could not become available from government
coffers, he persuaded NABARD officials and obtained a soft loan of Rs.
700 crore for rural connectivity. Mr. Gadkari approached Naxalite-
infested areas where no road work was allowed by Naxalites. He secured
the assistance of the Border Road Organisation (BRO) to construct
roads and bridges, thus providing the tribals with easy and permanent
road access.

As Guardian Minister for Nagpur District, Mr. Gadkari changed the
complexion of Nagpur and the district. Low cost housing schemes for
economically weaker sections, Markets for hawkers. Development and
beautification of prominent places like Deekshabhoomi, where Dr.
B.R.Ambedkar embraced Buddhism, were some of his noteworthy
achievements.

Social Outlook, Professional Approach

A successful entrepreneur, Mr. Gadkari tops the list of progressive
leaders who have profound concerns for socio-economic development and
environmental protection. His personality is a perfect mix of
entrepreneurship and social leadership. This has helped him in
creating organisations with social outlook and professional approach.
He has successfully utilized urban resources for creating employment
opportunities in rural areas. His sincere and deep interest in tapping
the conventional and non-conventional energy sources, to their
optimum, is visible through the various projects he has launched,
through his Purti Group of companies, in the region.

A co-operative supermarket competing with private malls and mega
markets; successful implementation of first private sector composite
2500TPD sugar factory in an area where even stalwarts rejected the
idea of starting a sugar factory; Ethanol plant of 1,20,000 ltrs; 26
MWT of Power Generation unit and Bio-fertiliser with the country's
first biodiesel pump are all examples of his commitment to implement
social schemes in a professional manner. His business group is also
running a solvent extraction Soyabean plant and a cogeneration power
plant of 8 mw capacity. Being an agriculturist, Mr Gadkari is the
first facilitator of solar fencing. He firmly believes in improving
the financial status of the farmers by increasing their purchasing
power, to bring about their all round development.

Mr. Gadkari has a taste for everything that is modern. He initiated a
process of setting up Software Technology Park in Central India. The
project of reusing the sewage water for Power Generation and
industrial use thereby saving clean water, speaks of his practical and
modern approach.

An Empathic Communicator

A powerful orator from his college days winning several awards has
evolved into communicator where he presents issues in a very point
wise logical fashion. He is perhaps the only politician who enthralls
lakhs of youth telling them importance of entrepreneurship and
development. Gadkari has established a record by attracting lakhs of
young people to watch his presentations on the theme of development.
Stadiums were overflowing with thousands of teenagers and youngsters
when he made public presentations on the potential of MIHAN
(Multimodal international cargo hub and airport at Nagpur) complex at
various places. There was not a word of politics in any of the
speeches or any appeal to instigate passions. On the other hand when
he is handling all important issues like fair prices for farm produce
he is very fierce and takes laks of farmers with him. The ability to
address diverse issues concerning to urban youth to the farmers to the
forest dwellers with same empathy and passion makes him very effective
in bonding with people at large..

A firm believer in Antyodaya :

Gadkari firmly believes in the concepts of Antyodaya, Integral
Humanism and trusteeship. More importantly, he has established that he
can walk the talk and make his commitment to the cause of people's
welfare reflect through his governance. It was under his leadership
that Maharashtra BJP contributed in the Annadata Sukhi Bhava Yojana of
a Voluntary Organisation and reached out to the widows of those
farmers who have committed suicides. Mr. Gadkari gave top priority to
constructing roads to tackle the problem of tribal malnutrition in
Melghat - Dharni belt of Amaravati district and provided all- weather
connectivity to the 91 remote villages of the belt. This connectivity
has changed the socio-economic profile of this belt with the incidence
of malnutrition coming down dramatically. It is his conviction that
each position and authority must have only one objective: welfare of
the public.

His Social Activities include

Adoption of 500 orphans of farmers who committed suicides due to
agrarian crises in the region.

Support for over 2000 BPL families for heart operations

Providing low cost housing for workers and the poor

A Globe Trotter

As someone who believes in learning things first hand, Mr. Gadkari has
traversed the globe in his quest to gain latest knowledge in varied
fields in which he is active. From water utilization in Israel to
water management in France, to sugar production in Brazil, to
infrastructure development in China, he has visited different
countries to understand the developmental processes going on in
different parts of the world. He has so far visited Israel, Italy,
France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, China, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, United States, Canada, Brazil and Sri
Lanka.

Personal

A sports enthusiast, Mr. Gadkari has particular interest in Cricket.
Married to Kanchan, the couple has three children – Nikhil, Sarang and
Ketaki.

Born - 27 May 1957 Nagpur, India.

Educational Qualification: - M. Com., L.L.B., D.B.M.

Positions Held in Public Sphere In Organisation :

1976-77 :Active member of ABVP and active participation in ABVP's anti-
Emergency work

1977 :Coordinator for Purogami Lokashahi Aghdadi's Vidarbha region
after Emergency was lifted.

1979 :Elected as Vidarbha region secretary of ABVP

1980 :Re-elected as Vidarbha region secretary of ABVP

1981 :Nagpur city unit President of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha

1985-86 :Nagpur city unit Secretary of Bharatiya Janata Party

1988-89 :General Secretary of Bharatiya Janata Party's Nagpur city
unit

1989 :Elected to the Maharashtra Legislative Council from Nagpur
graduate constituency.

1992-94 :General Secretary of the state unit of BJP

2004 :President of the BJP Maharashtra State unit

1995-99 :Government Cabinet Minister for Public Works Department of
Maharashtra State.

1999-2004 :Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislature Council.

1995-99 :Member of the High Power Committee for Privatization,
Government of Maharashtra.

1995-99 :Founder Chairman, Maharashtra State Road Development
Corporation Ltd.

1995-99 :Guardian Minister for Nagpur District, Govt. of Maharashtra.

1995-99 :Chairman, Mining Policy Implementation Committee, Govt. of
Maharashtra.

1995-99 :Chairman National Rural Road Development Committee, Govt. of
India. Chairman, Review Committee of CPWD, Govt. of India.

1995-99 : Chairman, Metropolis Beautification Committee, Govt. of
Maharashtra.

http://nitingadkari.org/lifeskectch.html

Youth leader

Nitin Gadkari was inspired to join the students' movement by late
Dattaji Didolkar and Yashwantrao Kelkar, the two stalwarts who shaped
the avante garde students' organization called Akhil Bharatiya
Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). As a fiery and sensitive youth leader, he
showed a typical aversion to injustice –be it in the form of fee hikes
or increasing political interference in education. His distaste for
lowering of standards of education and inertia of the youth became
visible during the various movements and agitations that he led, In
the very early stages of his political career, Gadkari exhibited his
capabilities to shoulder the higher responsibilities, which he would
be entrusted with in the future.

The young firebrand student leader made his foray into active politics
in the post Emergency era. He became the President of BJP Yuva Morcha
at the age of 26, which marked his entry into active politics. He
became the member of Maharashtra State Legislative Council at age of
32. And from here on, there has been no looking back. From the first
stint as a member of the Council in 1989 till date, Gadkari has left
an indelible mark on the politics of Maharashtra, his home state.

http://nitingadkari.org/youthleader.html

Minister

Driven since childhood by the philosophy of nationalism, Antyodaya and
concern for the underprivileged, Nitin Gadkari led various agitations
as a student leader in ABVP. He entered active politics after the
Emergency, which was imposed in 1975. In 1983 he was made president of
BJP Yuva Morcha. His attempt to enter the Maharashtra state Assembly
in 1985 was unsuccessful. He became the Member of Legislative Council
in 1989 and since then there has been no looking back.

Since 1989 till today, Mr. Gadkari has continued to be member of
Maharashtra Legislative Council, getting elected 5 times in a row from
the Graduate Constituency, comprising of over 2 lac voters, spread
across 5 revenue districts. He has worked his way up the ladder of
progress as State Secretary, PWD Minister, leader of Opposition, and
the State BJP President.

As PWD Minister for Maharashtra, from 1995-99, Gadkari left an
indelible mark on the development map of India. He was instrumental in
introducing and effectively implementing PPP (Public Private
Partnership) popularly known as BOT, by completing many development
projects. This unique concept, popular in western countries, but
frowned upon by Indian politicians, not only made the major artery
roads connecting cities better and well maintained, but also helped to
release huge amount of budget funds earmarked for such roads, to be
utilised for rural road development. The concept grew into what we see
today as "Golden Quadrilateral" and many more projects by NHAI on one
side and "Pantpradhan Gram Sadak Yojana" on the other.

In a lighter vein a politician is described as a person who promises
to build bridges in his pre-election speech and is able to convince
the people after 5 years why they could not be built. Far from all
this the most remarkable and outstanding feature of the tenure of
Nitin Gadkari as Minister for Public Works Department, in the
Government of Maharashtra, was that he delivered even those things
which he had never promised or rather he delivered much more than what
he had promised. He completed development works worth Rs 6000 crores
and provided employment to 10 lakh educated jobless youths of the
State.

Today lots of flyovers and bridges in Maharashtra stand testimony to
what Nitin Gadkari delivered through his vision and confidence by
completing all the projects within the deadline, with utmost adherence
to quality and standards., And he could achieve all this in the most
cost efficient manner. In a span of four years nearly 98% of the total
population in Maharashtra got road connectivity and many districts
completed the target of 100% road connectivity. He raised loans for
rural connectivity also. This aimed to connect 13736 remote villages
of the state, which had remained unconnected by road since
independence.

He took up the target of completing the "Sagari Marg" which was a long
awaited dream of the people of Konkan region. During the four years of
his regime, this dream became true and Konkan got the link of "Sagari
Marg" barring two large bridges in the sea creek.

He wanted fast track projects to be completed in a time bound manner.
He established Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, (MSRDC)
a fully Govt. owned company. MSRDC went to the capital market and
raised Rs. 1180 crores. This was the first and the largest offering in
the capital market by any govt. owned corporation in those times. Thus
MSRDC could undertake large projects like constructing 55 flyovers in
Mumbai at a cost of Rs. 1500 crores, Mumbai Pune Expressway at a cost
of Rs.1500 crores and many other bridges, roads and bypass projects in
various parts of Maharashtra. The prestigious Worli-Bandra Sea Link
project, was initiated during his tenure as a minsiter,

Always open to and aggressive in adopting new technology, he undertook
complete computerisation programme for his department. P.W.D. was the
first governmental department to do so. Mr. Gadkari implemented a
scheme of self employment for the civil engineers. These unemployed
engineers were registered as contractors and PWD gave them work upto
Rs.15 lakh through tender along with an advance of Rs. 40,000/- .
Through this scheme 18000 civil engineers got the opportunity to work
independently. He promoted the concept of new technology in
construction field thereby, encouraging contractors to bring in state
of the art construction equipment, which improved the quality of work
as well as the economics.

http://nitingadkari.org/minister.html

Leader of Opposition

As a leader of Opposition in the Council, Nitin Gadkari was never
observed as lagging behind in raising the issues of public interest.
As a true democrat and fiery orator he made it a point to remain
present in the House and take part in the proceedings during the
business sessions. He was always proactive in exposing the lapses of
the government on various issues of public interest. He was corrective
and suggestive in his criticism and all his criticism was embedded in
profound concern for the welfare of the people. He raised as many as
over 5000 queries through starred and un-starred questions and call
attention motions in the House. He developed a style of taking all the
members of Opposition with him irrespective of party or ideological
affiliations in the House.

Nitin Gadkari has a magnetic personality. Even his adversaries on the
treasury benches appreciate his sincerity and commitment in a most
friendly manner. His book "Sabhapati Mahodaya" which depicts his
select speeches in the house reflects his concerns for issues cutting
across the wide spectrum of society.

A very alert and aggressive about injustice Mr. Gadkari keeps the
Government on his toes. He exposes number of irregularities and flows
in Government functioning and suggested practical solutions to rectify
it. Mr. Gadkari continues his zeal for infrastructure development
during his tenure of opposition leader. His tireless efforts for
getting development funds for needy and desirer areas are well
appreciated not only in Maharashtra but nearby states.

http://nitingadkari.org/oppositionleader.html

Party President - Maharashtra

Mr. Gadkari was elected as President of Maharashtra Pradesh Bharatiya
Janata Party in 2004 and was reelected in 2006, December. The faith,
which the party has reposed in him was due to his hard work and his
ability to keep the party workers spirited, active and united. He has
always guided the elected members effectively, so that they can act as
agents of change in their respective constituencies, by undertaking
SEWA (Service project) and VIKAS (development works).

He travels extensively to establish first hand contacts with the party
workers in the state. His personal touch to the relations, which he
has developed, has earned him the faith and goodwill of the party
workers all over Maharashtra.

In a span of thirteen days, Mr. Gadkari addressed 114 election
meetings in the nook and corner of the state, during the recently held
elections. This shows how much he was in demand to campaign for the
party candidates.. He is direct and straight forward in his approach
and never hesitates to launch a scathing attack on his opponents, but
his high level of maturity prevents him from launching personal
attacks. He is ruthless in exposing the divisive forces working within
the country. His oratory skills and clarity of purpose attract
students and youth.. His thorough understanding of public issues,
knowledge of facts and figures, and the skill of juxtaposing things in
an appealing manner, with humour and sarcasm laced in his election
speeches, make him a very popular leader of the masses.

During the Lok Sabha elections Nitin Gadkari addressed a total of 146
election meetings in Maharashtra and neighbouring states of Madhya
Pradesh and Chhatisgarh.

Nitin Gadkari was on Saturday, December 19th 2009, appointed the BJP
National president at a meeting of the Parliamentary Board of the
party.

http://nitingadkari.org/president.html

Links

Title Links

Bharatiya Janata Party - The Party with a Difference www.bjp.org

Friends of BJP www.friendsofbjp.org

Bharatiya Janata Party - BJP 25 Years RAJAT JAYANTI www.bjp25.org

BJP HISTORY : Its Birth and Early Growth

Bharatiya Janata Party is today the most prominent member of the
family of organisations known as the "Sangh Parivar". And RSS has
always been dubbed "communal", "reactionary" and what not by its
detractors. Sanghs of swayamsevaks have of course always shaken off
that criticism like so much water off a duck's back. They have never
had any doubt that the organisation is wedded to national unity,
national integrity, national identity and national strength through
individual character and national character. And today this
organisation is poised for a great leap forward. Even its long- time
detractors think and say that now BJP is "unstoppable".What is the
story of this national epic?

History is the philosophy of nations. And the Sangh Parivar has a very
clear and candid conception of Indian history. Here was a great
civilization whose glory spread from Sri Lanka to Java and Japan and
from Tibet and Mangolia to China and Siberia. While it weathered the
storms of Huns and Shakas and Greeks it wilted before the Islamic
storms of the Turks. However, a 1000-year resistance saw this country
bloodied but unbowed. Its civilization survived through the heroic
efforts of the Vijayanagar Empire and of Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru
Govind Singh and countless heroes and martyrs

In more recent times this torch was picked up by Swami Dayanand and
Swami Vivekanada. And in the present century the good work has been
carried on by Sri Aurobindo, Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and
others. The RSS, founded by Dr Hedgewar in 1925 and consolidated by
Shri Guruji after 1940, is the heir to this heroic, historic heritage.
It has nothing against Muslim Indians - as distinguished from Muslim
invaders. Its position on this issue has all along been: "Justice for
all and appeasement of none". But it has no doubt that we were and are
a Hindu nation; that change of faith cannot mean change of
nationality.

http://nitingadkari.org/bjpHistory.html

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The RSS entirely agrees with Gandhiji's formulations that "There is in
Hinduism room enough for Jesus, as there is for Mohammed, Zoroster and
Moses" and that "majority of the Muslims of India are converts to that
faith from Hinduism through force of circumstances. They are still
Hindu in many essential ways and, in a free, prosperous, progressive
India, they would find it the most natural thing in the world to
revert to their ancient faith and ways of life."

Due to the British policy of "Divide and Rule" and the politicians'
proclivity to compromise and temporise the country suffered the trauma
of the partition. But the Sangh Parivar has no doubt that before very
long the unities, the varieties and the strengths of our ancient
civilization will prevail. RSS has been continuing the task of nation
building since its inception. It did it through the tumultuous period
of 1930s and 40s. But it was rudely shaken by Gandhiji's killing and
the Government's political exploitation of that national tragedy.

The RSS, along with millions of people, did not approve of Gandhiji's
Muslim appeasement policy - starting with support of the Khilafat
movement - but it had the greatest respect for the Mahatma. Indeed,
Gandhiji had visited the RSS winter camp in Wardha in December 1934 -
and addressed the Delhi RSS workers in Bhangi colony, in Spetember
1947. He had deeply appreciated the "noble sentiments" and
"astonishing discipline" of the RSS. He had never spoken even one word
of criticism of the RSS. But after his killing, 17000 RSS workers -
including Shri Guruji - were accused of "conspiracy of murder" the
Mahatma Gandhi and the RSS workers offered Satyagraha. But during all
this time not one MLA or MP raised the issue in any legislature. For
the RSS, it was the moment of truth. And this truth, as enunciated by
Gokhale, was that "What cuts deep in politics cuts deep all round" and
that unless the RSS grew political teeth and wings, it would always be
at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians. This was the context in
which Shri Guruji blessed the birth of Bhartiya Jana Sangh under the
leadership of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee in 1951. And in the very
first General Elections the BJS emerged as one of the four nationally
recognised parties. The Party has never looked back since then.

http://nitingadkari.org/bjpHistory.html

The First Decade

The first decade was a period of steady growth organisationally and
policy evolution and elaboration ideologically. It took up the issues
of territorial integrity like Kashmir, Kutch and Berubari - and in the
process suffered the martyrdom of its founder-President Dr Mookerjee
in a Kashmir jail. It demanded cow protection as per Article 48 of the
Constitution and Gandhiji's declaration that "Cow protection is more
important than even Swarajya". It came out against Zamindari and
Jagirdari. It criticised permit- licence-quota Raj. And it came out
for the nuclear option to reinforce national defence. The 1962 China
war and 1965 Pakistan war put Sangh Parivar on the center-stage as the
conscience of the country. When the RSS Parivar was entrusted with
police duties in 1965, and it performed the same to the satisfaction
of all-even Muslims began to join Jana Sangh. Shri Guruji was
specially invited to the National Integration Council. General Kulwant
Singh said at the time: "Punjab is the sword arm of India and RSS is
the sword arm of Punjab."

In all countries, parties associated with the freedom movement enjoy
long years of power. So did the Congress - for 20 years. But the 1967
elections ended the Congress monopoly of power. From Punjab to Bengal
there were non-Congress coalitions everywhere. As a political wit put
it: "You could travel from Amritsar to Calcutta without setting foot
in Congress territory."

In most of the States Jana Sangh and the Communists worked together.
They seemed to be guided by the dictum: "We are all children of Bharat
mata and we are all products of the 20th century."

However, this was more than the monopolistic Congress could stand. It
used its vast money power and its capacity for intrigue to topple
government after state government.

But even so Jana Sangh did not lose heart. Under the leadership of Pt.
Deendayal Upadhyaya it held a tremendous session in Calicut. Here it
clarified its language policy of "All encouragement to all Indian
languages" to the delight of all linguistic groups. The Mathrubhumi,
leading Malayali daily, described the BJS session "the Ganga flowing
South."

However, within days of this historic session Deendayalji was found
murdered near Mugalsarai railway station. In good faith the BJS asked
for a CBI enquiry. But the way CBI drew blank made it clear that
Central Agency has been politicised and that it would never unravel
political crime.

Although the murder of Deendayalji was a stunning shock the BJS was
too big and too strong to be stopped in its tracks. Under the
leadership of Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee, it enthussiastically joined
the movement for the libera- tion of Bangladesh. Its agitation for a
higher procurement price for cereals gave the country food sufficiency
and food security. Its election manifesto for 1971 was titled "War on
Poverty". The Congress stole that slogan and hindi-ised it into
"Garibi hatao" and swept the 1971 and 1972 polls. But once again Jana
Sangh was too good and strong to be overwhelmed by the ebb and tide of
politics.

http://nitingadkari.org/bjpHistory.html

Nitin Gadkari + Fans
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Nitin Gadkari Watch the Live webcast of speech of BJP President Shri
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Press Statement issued by BJP President Shri Nitin Gadkari at his
first press conference as National President of the BJP in New Delhi
February 17 at 9:32pm

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February 9 at 11:58pm

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Shashwat and Pratik like this.

Pranav Gupta Congress sympathy towards Terrorists comes clear when
they supported J&K Chief Minster stand to WELCOME BACK the terrorists
from Pakistan or Pakistan Occupied Kashmir . Home Minister of India
Mr. Chidambram in a Press conference in Jammu extends full party
support towards the issue ignoring the facts that these elements are
responsible for the ...

killing of thousands of people in state & other parts of India.

I will ask Mr. Chidambram, that he must go and visit the home of
people died in bomb attacks, open firing by these elements. Also go to
the houses of our GREAT COPS & ARMY MEN who sacrificed their lives to
safe guard the country from such anti national elements. WHY CONGRESS
IS PLAYING WITH THE SECURITY OF COUNTRY.

March 5 at 4:03pm

RECENT ACTIVITY

Nitin Gadkari changed his Location.
Nitin Gadkari edited his Country, Currently Running For and Website.

Contact Info

Email:response@nitingadkari.org
Phone:(0712) 2727127Cell:9821080522
Location:Gadkari Wada Upadhye Road Mahal
Nagpur, India, 440002

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nitin-Gadkari/444312885552#!/pages/Nitin-Gadkari/444312885552?v=info&ref=mf#info_edit_sections

Nitin Gadkari indirectly targets Shatrughan Sinha

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari Friday asked
party leaders to raise any complaints about his choice of a new team
with him and not with the media.

"Those who have complaints about the new team should speak to me, not
the media," Gadkari told the NDTV news channel, a day after actor-
turned-party MP Shatrughan Sinha's remarks on the composition of the
new team of office-bearers announced Tuesday.

Sinha Thursday recited the lyrics of an old Hindi film song in answer
to a question about the new team. "Uff na karenge, lab see lenge,
aansu pee lenge (I will not sigh, will seal my lips and swallow my
tears)," he said, expressing disappointment that leaders like Yashwant
Sinha had been left out and the team had not been able to give a
message of dynamism.

"It's wrong to say that Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie were excluded
because they are Advani detractors... It's not possible to include
everyone on the team," Gadkari said.

The BJP president also justified the appointment of Nehru-Gandhi
family member Varun Gandhi as party secretary, saying: "Varun Gandhi
should be given a chance, why hold the past against him?"

The party had sought to distance itself from Varun Gandhi after he
allegedly made inflammatory remarks during the Lok Sabha election
campaign last year.

Date : 19/03/2010. News by Newsofap.com

http://www.newsofap.com/newsofap-9091-25-nitin-gadkari-indirectly-targets-shatrughan-sinha-newsofap.html

Volume 25 - Issue 10 :: May. 10-23, 2008
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE STATES

Brief revolt

LYLA BAVADAM

The truce worked out in the Maharashtra BJP following Gopinath Munde's
resignation drama may be temporary.

MANVENDER VASHIST/PTI

BJP president Rajnath Singh (second from left) with Nitin Gadkari,
Venkaiah Naidu and Gopinath Munde in a show of unity after a meeting
at his residence in New Delhi on April 22.

GOPINATH MUNDE took back his resignation as party general secretary.
The Mumbai unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has a new chief.
The Shiv Sena-BJP partnership remains intact. And so, all seems well
with the Maharashtra BJP after four days of turmoil. But the truth is
that this is only a lull. Political observers predict trouble in the
run-up to the forthcoming elections.

The hostility, now much publicised, between Munde and Nitin Gadkari,
the BJP's Maharashtra State unit chief, began four years ago when the
latter one-upped Munde to get to his present post. Since both were
leaders of some standing, the party never quite favoured one over the
other and the two men were left to sort out the rivalry on their own.

Over time, it grew worse and neither was prepared to give up. If Munde
could draw crowds in Marathwada, Gadkari could hold his own in
Vidarbha. If Munde could appeal to Other Backward Class (OBC) voters,
Gadkari could play on the regional pride of Vidarbha voters. It was
inevitable in this clash that factions would form, and faction-
fighting led to Munde's resignation.

The nomination of a chief for the party's Mumbai unit was pending for
a year. The outgoing chief, Prakash Mehta, should have stepped down
last year, but Munde was against the appointment of Madhu Chavan, who
was a nominee of Gadkari. Munde stood his ground despite the decision
of a committee comprising senior leaders Ram Naik, Ved Prakash Goyal
and Bal Apte favouring Chavan.

On April 19, the party's prime ministerial candidate and Leader of the
Opposition in the Lok Sabha, L.K. Advani, was in Mumbai and Gadkari
informed him about the stalemate. Advani gave the go-ahead for
Chavan's appointment. An enraged Munde submitted his resignation the
next day, saying he objected to the undemocratic manner in which the
appointment was carried out.

The post of the BJP's Mumbai unit chief is a prestigious one. With the
upcoming elections, it is also a crucial post for the party. A party
source said, "The Mumbai party chief has to be a man with the ability
to motivate and mobilise workers. He can only do this if he has gained
their respect and if he is known to them."

Munde's recommendations were Kirit Somaiya, a former Member of
Parliament, and Raj Purohit and Prakash Mehta, both Members of the
Legislative Assembly, on account of their proven track record. Mehta
was also the outgoing chief.

The BJP has strong support among traders and the business community,
and Munde believed that these candidates would be able to connect well
with this section. Gadkari, it seems, backed Chavan because he is a
Maharashtrian, a factor that he thought would help cement relations
not only with the Shiv Sena but also with party workers. A party
source said, "When Chavan was named chief, Munde resigned since he saw
this as a win for his rival Gadkari."

The first round in what surely is going to be an ongoing war has
definitely gone to Munde. Stunned by his resignation and the reaction
it provoked – 4,000 BJP workers reportedly quit their posts – the
party headquarters in Delhi moved immediately to repair the damage.

To win back a reportedly intractable Munde, the party offered him a
carte blanche with regard to nominations for key posts. The post of
the party's Mumbai chief went to Gopal Shetty, another Gadkari
nominee, but Munde seemed placated enough to take back his
resignation.

Why did the BJP capitulate to Munde? Much weighed in his favour.
Practically the entire legislative wing backed him. The party's major
city units in Mumbai, Pune, Nasik and Aurangabad stood by him.
Functionaries in the Latur, Beed and Sangli units also registered
their support for him. Munde, bolstered by the support he got, went
for the jugular.

It was a smart move on his part to go and meet Sena supremo Bal
Thackeray to "seek his blessings". The message for the BJP was that
Munde was ready to raise his own flag and take the coalition partner
with him.

Thackeray had his own reasons to entertain Munde. His son Uddhav lacks
his charisma and political acumen, and nephew Raj's breakaway party,
the Navnirman Sena, is eating into Sena territory by claiming the
Sena's agenda as its own.

A visibly weakened Sena was certainly going to give its "blessings" to
Munde. In any case Thackeray had reason to be wary of Gadkari who had
been calling for a severing of ties between the Sena and the BJP.
Gadkari felt that the Sena and its errant ways were holding the party
back in Maharashtra.

However, the single most important factor that made the BJP buckle was
probably Munde's status as an OBC leader. He has a wide mass base and
the party relies on him to mobilise the Bahujan votes.

One of the things that did not draw much comment during the fiasco was
Munde's assertion that it was the lack of "democracy" in the party
that had made him resign. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten
that his own rise from a district politician to being a State-level
player was partially fuelled by his late brother-in-law, Pramod
Mahajan.

A knowledgeable source said that Munde "always had a chip on his
shoulder because he was overshadowed by Mahajan. It is true that
Pramodji was responsible in large part for pushing Munde forward but
it is not as if Munde was a baby in politics. Don't forget he has had
his education in the [Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh] shakha. He knows
how to play the game and he would certainly have risen on his own. But
let us just say, he rose faster with Pramodji's help."

While Munde's abilities cannot be denied, there is no doubt about the
role Mahajan played in his grooming. When Mahajan died, Munde's career
was expected to "deflate", an expression used by a BJP functionary at
the time. Two years later, Munde has shown that he can get along on
his own.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2510/stories/20080523251011100.htm

olume 21 - Issue 20, Sept. 25 - Oct. 08, 2004
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU

Election-eve patriotism
LYLA BAVADAM
in Vidarbha

The Uma Bharati-led Tiranga Yatra's six-day-long journey through
Maharashtra raising emotive issues fails to strike a chord among the
people despite the flaunting of the tricolour.

K. BHAGYA PRAKASH

Uma Bharati garlanding the statue of freedom fighter Kittoor Rani
Chennamma before she started the Tiranga Yatra.

DESPITE affirmations to the contrary, the Uma Bharati-led Hubli to
Jallianwalla Bagh Tiranga Yatra evidently formed the vanguard of the
Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign for the Assembly elections in
Maharashtra. During her six-day tour of the State, Uma Bharati
repeatedly said that the yatra was meant only to express her personal
beliefs that one should have pride in one's country and its flag and
that "all other outcomes of the yatra are God's gift". Importantly,
the Idgah controversy itself was not about disrespect to the national
flag, but about Uma Bharati and others disobeying prohibitory orders
issued by the Hubili police. That was the legal reason for her arrest.
At no point was the right to raise the flag questioned. `Disrespect to
the flag' is a convenient pre-election political ploy.

However, the yatra itself - the way it was organised and the issues it
raised - left no room for doubt regarding the BJP's intentions. The
bus used for the yatra was decorated with portraits of an array of
important figures, past and present: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, M. Venkaiah
Naidu, Bhagat Singh, V.D. Savarkar, Chandrashekar Azad, L.K. Advani,
Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
Ashfaqullah Khan, Shivaji, the Rani of Jhansi and Kittur Rani
Chennamma, a freedom fighter. Interestingly, the BJP preferred to
refer to the Idgah Maidan in Hubli as the Chennamma Maidan. This has
sparked a controversy with allegations that the BJP's insistence on
calling it Chennamma Maidan was meant to provoke another conflict.

If, as Uma Bharati said on numerous public occasions, the yatra was
meant to "satisfy personal beliefs and feelings about the tricolour"
why was it an official yatra of the BJP? If it were a yatra to defend
her right to raise the tricolour then why did her public speeches
invariably turn to issues such as water scarcity, power shortages and
unemployment, all election campaign points that the Democratic Front
government in Maharashtra might find difficult to counter. There were
exhortations at every public meeting to "cast your vote to topple the
Congress and bring back the BJP". Equally noteworthy was the fact that
the Tiranga Yatra in the State was organised by State BJP president
Gopinath Munde, Legislative Council leader Nitin Gadkari and party
leader Eknath Kadse, who together formed the core of the campaign
committee for the Lok Sabha elections.

At a public meeting in Akola, Uma Bharati reaffirmed her commitment to
build the Ram mandir at Ayodhya. Significantly, Akola has a history of
communal strife and a minor communal riot had occurred a few days
before Uma Bharati's arrival. The Muslim voter was directly addressed,
first by a warning not to be fooled by the "vote bank politics" of the
Congress and then to be reminded about the old points of dissent
between the community and Hindu fundamentalist parties - Family
planning, education levels and the singing of Vande Mataram. Also
raised were issues relating to Sonia Gandhi's "foreign origins". Uma
Bharati said: "Why do we have this foreigner craze? Marxism may have
been a new idea for Europe but our philosophers have been speaking of
the same ideals from as far back as the 12th century. Why not follow
them instead of Marx? This foreigner craze has resulted in us being
ruled by the Italian Mafia mind. And the minds that thought of making
Sonia the head of the party are also minds that are leftovers of
foreign thinking." Karnataka BJP president H.N. Ananth Kumar, who was
travelling with the yatra, defended its aims: "Any campaign is the
bouquet of many issues. This is not an election campaign. It is a
national yatra to show how the Congress is degrading the flag. It is a
yatra for national detoxification of secularism."

The Tiranga Yatra was a manoeuvre to position Uma Bharati, the BJP,
the saffron flag and the tricolour on the same platform. Projected as
a simple emotional device meant to touch people's hearts it was
actually a political platform to harp on the party's pet issues. But,
apparently, the intended message of the yatra did not quite get across
to the masses. While Uma Bharati alleged that the Congress had an
"unethical advantage" since its party flag bore a striking resemblance
to the tricolour, there is no doubt that one of the expected outcomes
of the yatra was to blur the distinction between the tricolour and the
saffron flag. Numerous attempts were made to link the tricolour to the
Hindu fundamentalist parties. At a public meeting in Risod in
Vidarbha, a local BJP leader said: Hindutva ka josh rashtra ka
tiranga, Dono ko saath leke bhagwa vapas aayega (the tricolour
expresses the strength of Hindutva. If the two march together it will
ensure the return of the saffron flag). In the Varvat Bakaal village
in Buldhana district, Uma Bharati advised the people to keep the
saffron flag, strength of spirit and the tricolour as their
priorities. Her message was not lost on a small section. At a roadside
reception in Washim, a small crowd presented Uma Bharati with a five-
foot high brass trishul on which a saffron ribbon bound together two
crossed tricolours.

However, indications are that the response of most of the people who
attended her public meetings ranged from mild confusion to anger at
being told that the national flag had to be respected. At a public
meeting in Risod, a policeman on duty said he and his colleagues had
been discussing the yatra and concluded that the BJP was trying to
appropriate the flag. He asked: "What else can we think? We cannot
figure out what Umaji is trying to prove with this yatra. Is she
saying we don't respect the flag? Every school going child salutes the
flag."

In any event, Maharashtra formed a focal point of Uma Bharati's yatra.
On her way to Hubli to surrender before a court that issued a non-
bailable warrant against her in the Idgah maidan case, she travelled
through the State by train addressing people on station platforms at
strategic places such as Pune, Sangli, Miraj and Daund in western
Maharashtra, a Nationalist Congress Party stronghold. On her return,
she undertook the Tiranga Yatra. Thus, she effectively covered the
crucial areas of western Maharashtra, Marathwada and Vidarbha.
"Unprecedented response" was how Ananth Kumar described the reaction
of the people. However, the attendance was paltry when compared, for
example, to her earlier visit to Akola 15 years ago. In that sense,
the public's response was unprecedented, to the disappointment of the
BJP.

One reason for the poor turn out is the failure of a faction-ridden
State BJP to rally unitedly behind the yatra. At her point of entry
into Maharashtra Uma Bharati was met only by Gopinath Munde who
remained with her while she travelled in Marathwada. Then she was
accompanied by Nitin Gadkari, who has a strong support base in
Vidarbha, and later by Eknath Khadse. At no point was former Union
Minister and senior BJP leader Pramod Mahajan publicly involved with
the yatra. This is curious, considering his well-acknowledged
organisational abilities and his place in the party power structure.
The State BJP attributed the absence of many senior functionaries in
Uma Bharati's entourage to their preoccupation with the Assembly
elections. The explanation was unconvincing. The real reason,
according to some, was that it was too early to start the election
campaign and the party leaders were wary of overstepping the Election
Commission by bringing the national flag into the campaign.

Then why undertake the yatra when there is no consensus in the party
on the matter, especially in Maharashtra? The answer seems to lie
partially in the fact that Uma Bharati wishes to redeem herself with
the party's top leadership and regain her position in Madhya Pradesh.
When queried about this, she declined to reply saying: "I will not
answer anything pertaining to me, mine, myself. I am not important."

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2120/stories/20041008006200900.htm

Volume 26 - Issue 23 :: Nov. 07-20, 2009
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU

COVER STORY

Win by default
LYLA BAVADAM
in Mumbai

In Maharashtra, the Congress-NCP combine returns to power, thanks to a
weak and divided Opposition.

PTI

Chief Minister Ashok Chavan with Union Minister and former Chief
Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh (left) in Mumbai, on October 22.

AS Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan begins a new term in
office, one cannot help but contradict his claim that his government
returned to power on account of its achievements in the past year.
That the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine managed a
victory by default is something even staunch party supporters will
find difficult to dispute. The fact is that the victory was thanks to
a weak and divided Opposition.

The Congress-NCP coalition managed a hat-trick despite a strong anti-
incumbency sentiment brought on by a poor economy, staggering rise in
food prices, and absence of emphasis on strengthening security, a
drought-like situation, and various problems in the agricultural
sector including suicide by farmers.

Its main rival, the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was left
far behind; the latter conceded defeat even before the counting of
votes ended. The final results showed the Congress had come first with
82 seats, followed by the NCP with 62 seats. The BJP and the Shiv Sena
could manage only 46 and 44 seats respectively.

Noticeable features of the elections were the low-key campaign
compared with the robust electioneering that preceded earlier
elections, and the sidelining of major issues. It was as if the public
and the politicians were separate elements and the former was just
expected to be onlookers. Unmindful of the people they were to
represent, politicians haggled over seats and fitted the 'right'
candidate into the 'right' constituency.

This time around too, dynastic politics, cronyism and dissidence were
on open display. Some secure seats were lost to parties as a result of
the free-for-all that followed ticket allocation. One significant
example is that of four-time BJP legislator Dr Vinay Natu, who had to
forgo his Guhagar seat in the Konkan region. The BJP had agreed to
part with the seat in order to get two more seats allocated to it as
part of its seat-sharing deal (169-119) with the Shiv Sena. Natu was
forced to give it to Sena man and Leader of the Opposition Ramdas
Kadam, whose Khed seat was amalgamated into Guhagar during
delimitation.

The decision caused an uproar in the region, especially from Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) supporters. Before Natu, his father Shridhar
Natu of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh had held the seat since 1972. The BJP,
however, extracted the Ghatkopar West seat in north Mumbai from the
Sena for the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan's daughter Poonam. Natu
and his supporters refused to support Kadam, and the Guhagar seat
slipped away from the saffron combine to the NCP. In Ghatkopar, Poonam
Mahajan, a political novice, lost to Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena (MNS).

The issue also exposed the old feud between the BJP's State chief
Nitin Gadkari and national secretary Gopinath Munde. Gadkari wanted
Natu to retain the seat, whereas Munde wanted to make the sacrifice in
exchange for the party ticket for Poonam, his niece. The latter also
ensured that his daughter, Pankaja Palve, won the ticket for Parli in
his home district of Beed. Another relative of his was given a seat in
a neighbouring district.

The most interesting case study, however, in the State elections is
that of Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. He has once again emerged
unscathed and is riding a wave. When he was unceremoniously removed
from chief ministership last year after terrorists attacked Mumbai,
some observers said it was the end of his career. Others, who had seen
him bounce back from sticky situations earlier, predicted he would do
so again. Vilasrao is now ensconced in Delhi as a Rajya Sabha member.
He worked aggressively to destabilise the NCP and quell the influence
of his arch enemy and NCP chief Sharad Pawar. His own 'nest' is safe.
His son, Amit, who had managed his campaigns earlier, contested from
Latur City and won.

Dynastic politics

SANTOSH HIRLEKAR/PTI

Congress workers celebrate the party's victory in the Assembly
elections, in Mumbai.

Amit Deshmukh is a symbol of Maharashtra's new shift towards dynastic
politics. The others are Rajendrasingh Shekhawat, son of President
Pratibha Patil, who won on the Congress ticket from Amravati; Union
Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde's daughter Praniti, who won from Solapur
City Central; Pankaja Palve, Munde's daughter; and the Sena's Om Raje
Nimbalkar, son of murdered Congress leader Pawan Raje Nimbalkar.

The Maharashtra Assembly will have two father-son duos representing
the NCP – Chhagan Bhujbal and Pankaj Bhujbal, and Ganesh Naik and
Sandeep Naik. Pankaj, who won from Nandgaon, and Sandeep, who won from
Airoli, are both first-time MLAs, and they fought from constituencies
adjacent to their parents'. Interestingly, Chhagan Bhujbal and Ganesh
Naik started their political careers in the Shiv Sena.

All offspring were not so lucky. Ashish Deshmukh, son of former
Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee chief Ranjeet Deshmukh; Shekhar
Shende, son of outgoing Deputy Speaker Pramod Shende; and Rahul
Pugalia, son of Naresh Pugalia, the former MP from Chandrapur, all
lost the elections.

PTI

NCP chief Sharad Pawar at an election rally in Thane.

Among the prominent losers were 12 State Ministers. Former Textile
Minister Satish Chaturvedi, Textile Minister in the outgoing
government Anees Ahmad, Food and Civil Supplies Minister Ramesh Bang,
and former Minister of State Dharamrao Baba Atram were among the big
losers from Vidarbha. Other Ministers and former Ministers who were
among the losers are Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil, Digvijay Khanvilkar, Dr
Sunil Deshmukh, Surupsinh Naik, Siddharam Mhetre, Ranajagjitsinh
Patil, Shobha Bacchav and Dr Nitin Raut. In Ulhasnagar, sitting MLA
Pappu Kalani, a former detenu under the Terrorist and Disruptive
Activities (Prevention) Act, was defeated by the BJP's Uttamchand
Ailani. The gangster Arun Gawli, who contested from prison, also
lost.

The worst-affected party was Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena. Its seats
dropped from 62 in 2004 to 44 this time. The main reason for this was
the rise of the MNS. Headed by Bal Thackeray's nephew Raj Thackeray,
the MNS won 13 seats in its maiden attempt to the Assembly. Sena's
current chief and Bal Thackeray's son Uddhav Thackeray's lack of touch
with the grass roots also reportedly affected his party's performance.
A shakha (unit) leader in South Mumbai remarked, "If Uddhavji had
concentrated on grassroots work, we would have retained our lead. It
is good he is trying corporate-style management techniques in the
party, but the fact is that the cadre want their leader to have more
josh [being street-savvy] and mingle with them."

While Uddhav's leadership may not be openly questioned, he has
definitely lost ground to his more experienced cousin. The MNS won six
of Mumbai's 36 seats, and the party helped the Congress-NCP bag 20
seats in the city. The three-year-old MNS now has the largest number
of seats in Mumbai after the Congress and the NCP.

The Election Commission statistics showed that 23 per cent of Mumbai's
votes went to the MNS. The party spoilt the chances of the Sena in
more than a dozen seats – the most notable being Mahim, a Sena
stronghold, where MNS candidate Nitin Sardesai beat Sena candidate
Adesh Bandekar as well as Sena rebel-turned-Congress candidate Sada
Sarvankar. The Sena's mistake was in taking this seat away from
Sarvankar, who had held it. Bandekar, a novice in politics, was chosen
because he is a television personality.

The MNS seems to have expanded its support base in the six months
after the Lok Sabha elections. The difference was most visible in Pune
where the party got 1.5 lakh votes more than it polled in the Lok
Sabha elections. This is an indicator that the MNS may no longer be
just a spoiler; it has found its political niche. In Kasba Peth
constituency in Pune, a BJP stronghold, BJP candidate Girish Bapat
faced a stiff fight from the MNS candidate. Bapat, who had held the
seat for three terms, finally won by a margin of just 8,162 votes.

VIVEK BENDRE

Chhagan Bhujbal of the NCP, who became Deputy Chief Minister.

The results are bound to affect the Sena's partnership with the BJP.
After one term in power, from 1995 to 2000, the alliance has not had a
fruitful political relationship. And now the Sena, with a lower seat
tally than the BJP, has had to relinquish the Leader of the Opposition
post.

The BJP, too, does not seem to have recovered from the loss of Pramod
Mahajan. Neither Munde nor Gadkari seems capable of providing
inspirational leadership. They are known for squabbling over party
policies. The turmoil in the party at the Centre has also left its
mark on the State unit.

The latest election has exposed a new phase in Maharashtra politics,
one in which strategic – but fluid – partnerships, coalition
governments and creation of dynasties are more important than issues.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2623/stories/20091120262301100.htm

Volume 17 - Issue 08, Apr. 15 - 28, 2000
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU

Maharashtra manoeuvres

Politics in the State has been on the boil for some weeks now, and the
Democratic Front Government is very much on the defensive.

LYLA BAVADAM
PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Mumbai

LATE last month, Bal Thackeray proclaimed that the Shiv Sena would be
back in power on Gudi Padwa day, the Maharashtrian New Year. At least
one of Deputy Chief Minister Chaggan Bhujbal's staff did not seem too
concerned. As a group of journalists discuss ed the Shiv Sena-
Bharatiya Janata Party strategy to come back into office, the
secretary listened quietly. Then he walked away from his chair,
humming a popular Hindi film tune which made clear just what he
thought of the Sena-BJP's chances. 'Sapne me in milti hai' (you'll
only get it in your dreams) - the line resonated through the office
long enough for even the most film-illiterate to get the point.

Indeed, on Gudi Padwa day, Shiv Sena leader and former Chief Minister
Narayan Rane quietly withdrew a cut motion his party had introduced in
the Assembly on the State Government's budgetary demands for the Food
and Civil Supplies Department. The decision to withdraw the motion
marked the end of the fourth Sena-BJP attempt to bring down the
Democratic Front Government. After a week of hectic lobbying, it had
become clear to Sena-BJP strategists that they simply did not have the
numbers. But the month-lon g political theatre that preceded Gudi
Padwa made clear that the Democratic Front alliance will soon have to
make hard political choices if it wants to keep its six-month long
government going.

MUCH of the recent political skirmishing had been on the Sena-BJP's
chosen terrain. Both parties have been attacking the Nationalist
Congress Party-Congress(I) on communal grounds, arguing that the
government has been compromised by Islamic fundamentalis ts. One major
component of the campaign has been allegations that Mumbai's Samajwadi
Party (S.P.) chief Abu Asim Azmi had made an anti-national speech at
Mastan Talao on February 24. A tape handed over to the State
government by the Sena-BJP records Azmi as proclaiming that if Islam
were to be attacked, he would not be bothered if India broke into
pieces. The Sena has long charged Azmi with having connections with
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), although he was
acquitted by the Supreme Cou rt of his alleged role in the Mumbai
serial bombings of 1993.

When the Assembly session began on March 13, however, Sena-BJP MLAs
brought proceedings to a halt with demands for Azmi's arrest. As their
party colleagues shouted slogans, Shiv Sena members led by former
Ministers Home Prabhakar More and Bala Nandgaonka r occupied the
podium with banners condemning the S.P. leader. They were joined by
Dinaz Patrawala, recently elected on the Shiv Sena ticket after the
Congress(I) denied her the ticket after the death of her husband
Marzaban Patrawala. Two days later, Se na-BJP MLAs blockaded the
Vidhan Bhavan. Violence began when Democratic Front MLAs pushed their
way inside. Eyewitness accounts of the fighting suggest that, for
once, the Sena got as good as it gave.

Matters snowballed outside the Assembly as well. Women Shiv Sena
members of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation assaulted S.P.
corporator Waqarunissa Ansari on March 16, some stripping her and
others trying to strangle her. Ansari, whose crime was a s peech she
made against Thackeray, only escaped serious hurt because of the
intervention of her party colleagues. In this violently anti-Muslim
political climate, Azmi responded with some maturity, insisting that
he had been quoted out of context and that the thrust of his speech
had been misrepresented. Even as a jittery Democratic Front government
initiated criminal proceedings against the S.P. leader at the J.J.
Marg police station, he issued a statement apologising if he "had
inadvertently hurt the f eelings of my countrymen".

It was left to Bhujbal, however, to point out the obvious. The
Democratic Front, he said, had no intention of shielding Azmi, and the
tape made available by the Sena had been sent for tests to establish
its authenticity. But peddling hate, Bhujbal pointe d out, was not an
S.P. monopoly. "Cases against Bal Thackeray for inciting communal
hatred," he says, "were not registered for five years, even though he
was found guilty of having made inflammatory speeches and punished by
the Election Commission." Thac keray was last year stripped of his
right to vote by the Election Commission for speeches he made asking
for votes on religious grounds. "I have called for the files, and will
take action," the Deputy Chief Minister told Frontline.

POSSIBLE legal action against Thackeray forms a second element of the
Sena-BJP campaign. The State government is internally divided over the
consequences of pushing ahead with implementing the recommendations of
the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry into the Mumbai
riots of 1992-1993. Although both the Congress (I) and the NCP are
committed to implementing its findings, which could mean Thackeray's
arrest for his well-documented role in the riots, elements in both
parties believe that this c ould lead to violence. It is clear,
however, that should ongoing proceedings in the Supreme Court result
in directions to the Maharashtra Government to act on Justice
Srikrishna's findings, this would provide adequate cover to begin
criminal proceedings against the top leadership of the Sena.

PUNIT PARANJPE

Former Chief Minister Narayan Rane along with Shiv Sena-BJP members
blockading the Vidhan Bhavan during the Assembly session on March 23.

Anticipating this eventuality, the Sena has been charging the
Democratic Front in general, and Bhujbal in particular, with weakening
security for Thackeray and his family. Surplus police personnel posted
with Thackeray were withdrawn on the basis of reco mmendations made by
a review panel led by Chief Secretary Arun Bongirwar. Protected
persons in the 'Z+' category are to be guarded by 43 personnel. The
Shiv Sena-BJP Government in the State had assigned Thackeray 206
personnel, 11 vehicles, a closed circ uit television system at his
residence, and a further 103 guards for his extended family.
Bongirwar's recommendations lowered Thackeray's security cover to 115
personnel and seven vehicles, far in excess of the 43 personnel and
three vehicles prescribed in the security manual.

It is unlikely, given the facts, that Thackeray's security was what
concerned the Sena. The issue in fact presented a political
opportunity. Sena leaders began to charge Bhujbal with ISI and mafia
links, a smear campaign of obvious utility in the event o f
Thackeray's arrest. In early February, as the Srikrishna Commission
issue had begun to re-emerge in political discourse in Maharashtra,
Leader of the Opposition Nitin Gadkari had charged Bhujbal with
meeting at his residence two of those accused of a r ole in the 1993
serial bombings. The meeting, Gadkari said, had been arranged by Azmi.
Gadkari is himself involved in ongoing criminal proceedings relating
to murder.

Perhaps to Gadkari's surprise, Bhujbal promptly accepted that the
meeting had indeed taken place. Eminent lawyer and Azmi's deputy in
the city unit of S.P., Majeed Memon, then delivered the coup de grace.
Former Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Mund e, Memon said, had led a
delegation along with him and the blast accused to meet Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee and Minister Pramod Mahajan. The Prime Minister
had indeed met the accused, who complained about a series of attacks
by the Rajendra Nikh alje group which had left dead people who were
under trial for their role in the bombings. The two accused had
demanded official security, and also complained about prolonged delays
in their trial. Vajpayee, Memon said, had promised action. "Why didn't
t he Opposition protest when I took these men to meet the Prime
Minister," Memon asks.

If the Sena-BJP leadership had an answer, it was not made public. An
unembarrassed Rane simply pretended that his party's case had not
crumbled. On March 10, he asserted that the Thackeray family had been
made an easy target for the underworld. "The Chho ta Shakeel and
Dawood Ibrahim gangs," he said, "had directed their guns at several
Sena leaders to take revenge for the numerous encounters that took
place when we were in office." The government's decision to scale down
Thackeray's security, he said, "l ends credence to allegations that it
had deliberately made the move."

A fortnight later he insisted that the Mumbai Police had evidence to
link Azmi to Dawood Ibrahim, a claim which left open the question of
why he as Chief Minister had not taken action against the S.P.
leader.

A FURIOUS Bhujbal did what he could, initiating defamation proceedings
against Rane. The State Police too was asked to compel the former
Chief Minister to make available what evidence he had. Rane refused to
do so, perhaps because he had none. These lega l proceedings are
certain to punctuate Maharashtra politics in the months, perhaps even
years, to come. But the Sena has achieved one useful objective through
its campaign of agitation. The Democratic Front has been pushed into a
defensive posture, and h as been able to do little to address
Maharashtra's crippling financial problems, which have been provoking
widespread discontent, particularly in the rural areas.

PUNIT PARANJPE

Shiv Sena leader Bal Nandgaonkar bars the entry of Democratic Front
MLAs into the Vidhan Bhavan.

The government owes dues to cotton and onion farmers, among the
State's most important crops. Procurements in several areas are made
directly by the state, and the Democratic Front faced a major
embarrassment in February when news broke that cheques issu ed to
cotton farmers had been bouncing. Bhujbal now says that the nearly-
bankrupt government, reeling from massive borrowing by the previous
government, has taken loans to clear its dues to farmers. Payments of
some Rs.3,700 crores have already been made , he says, and all cotton
growers covered by the State's procurement scheme will be paid by
early April. Onion farmers' dues will be met by the third week of
April.

This in itself may not be enough to contain discontent in the
countryside, and farmers are not the only ones who are angry. Workers
in Mumbai are protesting against the plans of the Brihanmumbai
Municipal Corporation to sell mill land. Massive illegal tr ansfers of
land have taken place over the years, and funds raised from sales to
private developers have seldom been pumped back to revive factories.
Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has announced that the sale of land
would be allowed in order to set up software businesses, a move that
will do little to meet the needs of workers who have not been paid for
years. Twenty-three mills were closed down during Shiv Sena rule, even
while rules designed to revive them were flouted with official
connivance. The Democratic Front seems hardly interested in protecting
the interests of tens of thousands of workers.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Front's plans to make job cuts to reduce the
fiscal deficit could provoke further unrest. In his recent Budget
speech, Finance Minister Jayant Patil described how the revenue
deficit had risen over the last four years from Rs.1, 591 crores to Rs.
9,484 crores. Patil said he planned to make the revenue balance
positive over a five-year period by reducing the revenue deficit by 20
per cent each year for the next five years. Curbs have been placed on
salary expenditure, and plans ar e on in several government
departments to review staff strengths. Five per cent of the posts in
the Finance and Planning Departments have been abolished. But
sustained cuts in expenditure will mean less money for development and
jobs, which in turn could provoke a backlash.

In the months to come, the Democratic Front will have to define a
clear economic agenda to undo the damage caused through five years of
Shiv Sena-BJP rule. Formulating an alternative agenda that does not
alienate farmers and workers may prove a difficult task. More
important, the alliance will have to find ways to engage with the Sena-
BJP's renewed communal onslaught. With the NCP busy expanding its
cadre strength in Maharashtra, and the Congress(I) becoming a victim
of the conflicts in its central lead ership, neither grouping appears
to have any clear understanding of how to bring about mass
mobilisation to challenge the Opposition. Bhujbal is perhaps the sole
important figure in the State government arguing for a clear offensive
strategy. The failure to create one could mean serious trouble for the
alliance.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1708/17080410.htm

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Was Indian nationalism inclusive?
K.N. Panikkar

One of the weaknesses of the national movement was that it did not
have an effective programme to ensure the inclusion of the depressed
and socially excluded classes into the nation.

Inclusiveness is the catchword in the current political and economic
discourse, following the 11th Plan prescription to incorporate those
who have remained outside the margins into the mainstream of
development. This is a confession of the failure of democratic
governance, on the one hand, and of caste-class partisanship in the
process of nation building, on the other. It also testifies that a
substantial section has not yet come under the 'benevolent' umbrella
of the nation. In a highly differentiated society, inclusiveness is
indeed a process which takes place in three ways: politically through
common struggles, socially by overcoming internal social barriers and
culturally by identifying a common past by invoking indigenous
cultural consciousness.

The attempt at inclusiveness is riven with internal contradictions,
which account for the complexity, weaknesses and limitations of the
inclusive process and tensions within nationalism. The concept of
nationalism, in the Indian colonial context, becomes meaningful only
when looked at beyond the overarching relationship between colonialism
and the people, and the mutual relationship among different segments
of society is taken into account. Overcoming these differences was
integral to nationalism.

Inclusiveness, therefore, is a necessary strategy of nationalism, even
with contradictory interests finding a place in it. The attempts to
resolve the secondary contradiction within the umbrella of nationalism
do not overlook the primary contradiction with colonialism. In this
sense, the aim of nationalism was not limited to the attainment of
freedom but, as Gandhiji envisaged, had to lead to the creation of a
qualitatively different society, devoid of caste and religious
antagonism. To a deputation of students in 1934, Gandhiji said: "The
two things — the social reordering and the fight for political swaraj
— must go hand in hand. There can be no question of precedence or
division into watertight compartments here." Nationalism was thus
conceived as a combination of political freedom and social
emancipation.

What nationalism sought to achieve was togetherness. The very first
session of the Indian National Congress recognised it by identifying
its purpose as providing a platform for people to come together. What
brought people together were political struggles and public
agitations. The various streams within the movement with different
strategies and modes of struggles were efforts to ensure their
rightful inclusion in the nation. People, however, consisted of
diverse groups, castes, classes and religions with widely differing
interests. What was conceived as nationalism, therefore, was bringing
the people together, regardless of the differentiations. Although the
anti-colonial sentiment ironed out some of these differences and
interests, they were so diverse and sharp that the national movement,
functioning within a liberal framework, was not able to find an
effective solution. Therefore, India emerged not only impoverished due
to colonial exploitation but also socially divided.

That India was economically backward was not surprising, but the fact
that nationalism did not succeed in ushering in social and cultural
solidarity left a deep scar. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, architect of the
Constitution, underlined this failure in 1949: "We must make our
political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy
cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy… What
does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises
liberty, equality and fraternity as the principle of life … On the
26th of January 1950 we are going to enter into a life of
contradiction. In politics we will have equality and in social and
economic life, we will have inequality." While pointing out the
political success of the movement by which 'people' became members of
a nation-state with democratic rights, Dr. Ambedkar was conscious that
nationalism did not succeed in creating inclusiveness in the social,
cultural and economic domains.

The roots of this failure can be traced to the early phase of national
awakening, which suffered from a disjunction between political and
socio-cultural struggles. To begin with, the renaissance which
prepared the ground for the emergence of nationalism dissociated
itself from political problems and, therefore, was unable to provide a
critique of colonialism which warped the nature of Indian modernity.
Most of the early renaissance leaders idealised development in the
West. Hence, their ability to envision an alternative was limited.
Later on, the national movement attributed primacy to political
struggles, despite Gandhiji's constructive programme and
untouchability campaign. Although both he and Tagore advocated the
importance of cultural politics, the national movement concentrated
its energies on political mobilisation.

Despite these early limitations, the importance of incorporating the
marginalised sections and thus creating an inclusive society was on
the agenda of nationalism. The different political formations which
participated in anti-colonial struggles with different programmes and
different social base were engaged in incorporating different sections
into the mainstream of national life through participation in the anti-
colonial struggles. Even when contradictions existed among them, they
were struggling for inclusiveness in the nation. The social and
cultural inclusiveness was sought through socio-cultural emancipation,
economic inclusiveness through class struggles and political
inclusiveness through political mobilisation. These three engagements
of the national movement cover the history of the liberation struggle
which was not limited to a direct confrontation with colonialism, but
also aimed at the modernisation and democratisation of society
although with limited success.

A major concern of the national movement was social inclusiveness. The
divisive and oppressive character of the Indian caste system was
antithetical to the spirit of nationalism and it was quite natural
that only social awakening could address this question. Gandhiji gave
equal, if not greater, importance to social issues and cultural
struggles. In Gandhian programme, therefore, abolition of
untouchability occupied a central concern. The ashrams Gandhiji set up
and lived in became a symbol of social equality and also meant a
subversion of the traditional, unequal social system.

The national movement was quite conscious of the importance of
inclusion of the traditionally deprived groups for the actual
realisation of the nation and initiated steps in social, economic and
cultural fields to create conditions conducive for them to identify
their interest with the nation. In pursuance of that, a series of
struggles was conducted covering social, cultural and economic lives.
Each one of them had the effect of creating a community, eventually
forming a part of the nation. Although these struggles increased their
social consciousness, none of them was sufficiently effective to
transform the life conditions of the marginalised, possibly because
these efforts were bridled by the interests of the 'upper' castes and
classes. The marginalised sections, could not, therefore, identify
themselves with the nation. They were sceptical and distrustful.

The consequence of this marginality was the emergence of movements
among the traditionally subordinated groups fighting to gain their
rightful place in society. That happened in all parts of the country
and among all depressed communities. Satyasodak Samaj in Maharashtra
in the 19th century, the Dravida Kazhakam in Tamil Nadu, the Sadhu
Jana Paripalana Sabha in Kerala and, indeed, the movement led by Dr.
Ambedkar are some examples. Emerging out of the oppressed sections,
they did not subscribe to the 'upper' caste urge for reform, of either
caste or religion, but stood for abolishing caste and superstitions
based on religious sanction. In the vision of Dr. Ambedkar, the
annihilation of caste was a necessary pre-requisite for social
inclusiveness.

One of the weaknesses of the national movement was that it did not
have an effective programme to ensure the inclusion of the depressed
and socially excluded classes into the nation. Whatever was attempted
in this field was very superficial inasmuch as it did not frontally
contest the power of the 'upper' castes and classes, the legacy of
which continues even today. That anti-colonial Indian nationalism was
not sufficiently inclusive is possibly one of the reasons why a
substantial section of the population is still not a part of the
nation.

The making of the Indian nation, as Surendranath Banerji envisioned,
can be complete only when nationalism becomes inclusive on a
democratic, secular and socialist foundation. In post-independent
India, this has remained an unrealised dream. Given the capitalist
hegemony over society and middle-class control over administration,
the present urge for inclusion may yet end up as another popular
slogan.

(Based on the Foundation Day lecture delivered at Assam Central
University, Silchar. Author can be reached at knpanikkar@gmail.com)

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Feb 23, 2010

http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/23/stories/2010022355540800.htm

THe Lord's Army: The Shiv Sena
Posted March 30th 2010 at 5:36 pm by Harry

"A burning bus? Perhaps over there."

There exists in Mumbai a nearsighted and rather unpleasant bunch of
radicals who revile my very existence within their beautiful city.
They are the Shiv Sena – Lord Shiva's Army – a political group by
name, violently quarrelsome by nature.

It behooves a writer to remain apprised of the legal ramifications of
writing anything at all in India, because sedition laws are
arbitrarily enforced and rather ambiguously defined as anything that
"excites or attempts to excite hatred contempt or dissaffection"( -
Wikipedia)

If anyone reading this gets excited or feels a smidge of contempt,
then I'm going to jail for life – so please don't. Sedition, in my
opinion, is the most dangerous law in India – for exposure of real
wrongs often leads detention or expulsion, as was the case with my
friend who wrote of the Dalit murders in Gujarat and was summarily
deported.

Let's be mindful of that and carry on…

Bal Thackeray started the Shiv Sena and ran for a while a respectable
right-wing, religious political party concerned with supporting the
local Marathi people in whose state Mumbai stands. He was about
ensuring jobs, health systems, pensions and education exclusively to
Marathis, his 'Sons of the Soil'.

They have a hard-line Hindu and regional agenda, and dislike all
things non-Marathi – including shop signs spelled in English.

The Shiv Sena love whacking day

Bal's son Uddhav Thackeray took over the Shiv Sena which used to riot
against migrant workers from other states, bash North Indian rickshaw
drivers and the like, pelt stones at police headquarters, voice
support for accused Hindu terrorists, they've smashed shops and torn
down billboards and generally caused a ruckus in order to get in the
media, at which point they invariably react against the channel for
the negative coverage. It's a wonderful self-perpetuating cycle.

The Shiv Sena started going mainstream to gain support from a larger
nationwide Hindu party, the BJP – which meant they had to stop bashing
migrants (but not necessarily Muslisms). As a result, Bal's nephew Raj
Thackeray started a splinter organisation seeking more radical reforms
– they are called the 'Marathi Manoos' – the MNS.

So now there are two crews both seeking votes from the same people,
they attract attention to themselves by engaging in more and more
brazen public displays of brute power – often leading to in-fighting
between the two groups.

The BJP: Perhaps education should be higher on their agenda

Then the BJP lost a national election, probably because they were
corrupt and their policies were near-sighted and focused more on
oppressing Muslims than running the country…

So the BJP and the Shiv Sena rioted against Australians for being such
prejudiced and bigoted violent morons. They were helped along by the
Indian media, which much prefers to be spoon-fed its sensationalist
propaganda rather than doing real reporting.

Funny thing that only a few months before, the same group were beating
North Indians for migrating to Mumbai, and now they're upset because
North Indians are being beaten in Australia. The group that revile
outsiders and assault newcomers are also angry when degenerate,
disorganised, drunk youths in Australia do exactly the same thing. Are
they scared their jobs have been outsourced?

Now they're back to being racist: The Manoos want all us foreign
actors out of Bollywood – get this: Because we're stealing Indian
jobs. I have not yet met an Indian that can do my job, because my job
is to be not Indian. I'm not a particularly exceptional actor, I'm not
wildly attractive, I'm not even that skilled, I don't dance or sing.
I'm a single-threat: I'm just white. Who's job do I steal?

Make up your minds, which do you despise: Racism or foreigners?

Their current claim is against Hazel Crowney because they claim she's
dancing in a provocative way that Indian girls wouldn't, and tugging
at the threads of Indian moral fibre. It's clear that they know this
already, but you might not: Indian movies don't show sexy white girls
flouncing about because Indian girls won't do it, they show foreigners
because that's what Indians like to watch. The women watch it and
think: "Ugh, sluts" and the men pitch pants tents – behaviour neither
gender like to associate with good Indian girls.

Indian girls will do a multitude of things to get their beautiful,
sensual bodies onto the big screen – and dancing provocatively
definitely comes under that broad and intentionally ambiguous banner.
Rakhi Sawant started the protest, but clearly her interests aren't
value-based:

Hazel Crowney: They're calling for her head

Rakhi Sawant: Principled instigator

Tell me again – which Indian values were they protecting?

The Shiv Sena recently charged onto the set of a shoot for the film
'Crooked', and demanded to see employment visas from the 136
foreigners on the shoot. I know every Bollywood Gora that has a visa –
and there ain't 136 of us. Bollywood runs on making its scenes exotic
and foreign with cheap tourist labour extras. It can't run without
them.

These riots will serve to send more films overseas to shoot to avoid
them, taking money right out of the pockets of all Mumbaikars who
drive and light and serve chai and food to those who paint sets and
clothe Bollywood. Their campaign would be short-sighted and flawed, if
it were legitimately aimed at improving the lives of Marathis – but it
isn't, it's aimed at getting publicity – and it's working.

I love this country – but sometimes it gives me the shits (pun
intended).

Perhaps it is me.

Perhaps my desire to become a part of the Indian fabric is mislaid. I
had always seen India's best values were the welcoming and inclusive
nature of the people, how peaceful they are. I'd always felt that the
laid-back, near-enough's good enough, slow life seemed more ecological
than ours – far more interested in things like a good laugh, an
engaging (and intrusive) conversation or even silent company. They'll
stare, they'll care, they'll help even if they can't.

This country holds the greatest potential of all on this earth. With
some tweaks to turn the knowledge based education system to teach
skills, a good corruption enema and a bit of cultural progression (in
terms of womens rights and that stuff) – it will be the next
superpower. Indians almost always speak more languages than you do,
speak English better than you do, they wrap their agile brains around
new languages, new concepts and new ideas with envy-inspiring speed,
they have open hearts and kind minds, and there are a billion of them.

That was what I thought India was about, generosity, hospitality and
intelligence – but apparently these guys are the last word on what's
Indian and according to them it's all about the violence, stupidity
and racism.

Perhaps it's time for me to move on.

http://www.harrykey.com/blogs/the-lords-army-shiv-sena/

Congress and BJP in tussle over Big B as CWG brand ambassador

Congress too has started playing cheap political games. Amitabh
Bachchan is their target and all for the sin of getting some unasked
for BJP attention. Now Kalmadi has even dropped Amitabh as an option
for CWG brand ambassador.

CJ: Shubhra Prakash Tue, Mar 30, 2010 21:21:29 IST
Views: 13 Comments: 1Rate: 0.0 / 0 votes

KEEPING INTACT its posture of cold shouldering the Bachchans, the
Congress once again entered in a row with Amitabh Bachchan becoming a
brand ambassador of the up coming Common Wealth Games. Suresh Kalmadi,
Congress MP and the Chairman of Commonwealth Games Organizing
Committee said that they would need a young Brand Ambassador to
promote the game.

The decision came as a backlash when BJP leader and also the vice-
president of Indian Olympic Association suggested Bachchan's name as
an ambassador for the event in a letter to Kalmadi.
The 'Bachchan parivar' is under fire from Congress party leaders ever
since he came to inaugurate a lane on the Mumbai Sea Link. The matter
stretched up to a limit that on the Earth Hour Day in Delhi the video
carrying a message from Abhishek Bachchan was blacked out as also the
posters of the actor from the venue.

At both the events Congress party leaders like Ashok Chavan and Sheila
Dikshit were present maintaining a hush over the happenings. The state
of events has popped up in the backdrop of Amitabh Bachchan agreeing
to promote tourism for the BJP ruled Gujarat.

While the war of words is on between the Bachchan's led by BJP and
Congress. Manish Tiwari, a Congress MP has suggested that it is high
time that Amitabh Bachchan clears his stand on Modi and the Gujarat
government.

Posted comments (1) Mr. Kalmadi is absolutely right. Actually
government (Delhi/Center) needs to re-think about this, how an old man
could like Mr. Kalmadi/non-sports, declared as Commonwealth Games
Organizing Committee chairman. Not only in Commonwealth, but also we
don't need any oldies like Delhi's CM Mrs. Dixit, BCCI Chief Mr.
Power, and so on….

http://www.merinews.com/article/congress-and-bjp-in-tussle-over-big-b-as-cwg-brand-ambassador/15802591.shtml

Will Dawood's facing law be a favour? Congress asks BJP
By IANS
March 30th, 2010

NEW DELHI - The Congress Tuesday hit out at the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) for lauding Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's appearance
before the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the 2002 Gujarat
riots, and asked if underworld fugitive Dawood Ibrahim will be doing a
favour by facing the law.

"The BJP is projecting it (Modi's appearance before SIT) as if it is a
favour to the judicial system. If Dawood Ibrahim is brought before the
law, will he be doing a favour?" Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said
reporters here.

He said the BJP was talking in "an immature manner".

Tewari said that Modi had to face the SIT because he had not followed
"rajdharam (his duty as a ruler)".

On the BJP's criticism over party president Sonia Gandhi having been
again made National Advisory Council chairperson, Tewari said that she
could have become prime minister in 2004 and 2009 but chose not to
take the high office.

"Her entire public life is characterised by one principle, that of
sacrifice," he said.

Tewari noted that NAC had worked for some path-breaking legislations
during its previous term, among these the Right to Information Act,
the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Gram Nyayalaya
Act.

The BJP said Tuesday that Gandhi's appointment as chairperson of the
NAC had created a "psuedo-constitutional power centre" which would
lead to "redundancy" of the post of the prime minister

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/30/will-dawoods-facing-law-be-a-favour-congress-asks-bjp-26164/

Sonia to again head National Advisory Council (Second Lead)
By IANS
March 29th, 2010

NEW DELHI - Congress president Sonia Gandhi was Monday again named
chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC), four years after
she quit on being accused of holding an office of profit.

"She will hold the rank and status of union cabinet minister with
immediate effect. The salary, allowances and other terms and
conditions of the chairperson and members shall be such as the
government may specify from time to time," an official statement
said.

Her term will begin from the date she assumes charge, it said.

"It will be co-terminus with the term of the NAC or until further
orders whichever is earlier. The chairperson shall be entitled to the
same salary, pay, allowances and other facilities to which a member of
the union council of ministers is entitled."

According to the statement, the term of NAC members will be for one
year but this could be extended. They will draw salary and allowances
determined by the central government.

Gandhi had resigned from the NAC in March 2006 after the opposition
alleged that she had violated the office of profit principle requiring
MPs not to hold offices that carry wages, salaries or allowances
during their tenures. She had also resigned her Lok Sabha seat of Rae
Bareli but won it back in a re-election.

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government subsequently came up
with a bill seeking to exempt 56 posts, including the NAC chairperson,
from being considered as office of profit. The bill was approved in
May 2006 by parliament amid opposition by the Bharatiya Janata Party-
led opposition.

The NAC was first formed during the earlier tenure of UPA government
and had played a role in the enactment of Right to Information Act,
Forest Rights Act and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The reconstituted NAC is expected to take up the food security bill
over which there are differences between social activists and the
government. The activists, some of whom were part of the previous NAC,
have differed with the government on draft food security bill cleared
by the cabinet, saying its provisions were "minimalist".

The reconstituted NAC is also expected to keep a watch on the existing
flagship welfare schemes such as the rural employment guarantee
programme and scrutinise other proposed legislations dealing with
social sector.

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/29/sonia-to-again-head-national-advisory-council-second-lead-26044/

BJP says people will make Sonia Gandhi resign as NAC chief
By ANI
March 30th, 2010

NEW DELHI - The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has cried foul over
Congress President Sonia Gandhi again taking charge as the head of the
National Advisory Council (NAC).

BJP spokesperson Tarun Vijay said this time the people of the country
would make Gandhi resign from her post.

"It has been a history of the Congress party to hold an office of
profit while being an MP. Last time, it was a show by Sonia Gandhi of
'tyag', but the fact is that under the pressure of whole country, she
had to resign," said Vijay.

"This time also, the people of this country will make her resign from
this post," he added.

The Union Government on Monday constituted the National Advisory
Council (NAC), which will be headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi
as its Chairperson.

She will hold the rank and status of Union Cabinet Minister with
immediate effect.

The term of appointment of the Chairperson of the NAC will be with
effect from the date of assuming charge of the office as the
Chairperson.

It will be co-terminus with the term of the NAC or until further
orders which ever is earlier.

The term of the members of the NAC shall be for a period of one year
with effect from the date of their appointment, which may be extended.

The Chairperson of the NAC shall be entitled to the same salary, pay,
allowances and other facilities to which a member of the Union Council
of Minister is entitled.

Under the special provision for a Member of Parliament appointed as
the member of the NAC, it has been provided that the member shall not
be entitled to draw any remuneration, allowances or perks as such
member from the NAC other than the compensatory allowance as defined
in clause (a) of the section 2 of the Parliament (Prevention of
Disqualification) Act, 1959.

Sonia Gandhi quit the NAC in March 2006 after the BJP- led Opposition
alleged that she had violated the office of profit principle.

Gandhi had also resigned from her Lok Sabha seat. But later despite
winning the Rae Bareilly by poll, she kept herself away from the NAC.
(ANI)

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/30/bjp-says-people-will-make-sonia-gandhi-resign-as-nac-chief-26109/

BJP MLAs marshalled out of Delhi Assembly
By ANI
March 29th, 2010

NEW DELHI - Amidst high drama 22 Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs were
marshalled out of the Delhi Assembly on Monday, for trooping into the
Well and sloganeering against the price rise and demanding a roll back
of subsidy cut on LPG and increase in VAT on various items.

As soon as the House assembled, the Leader of Opposition V K Malhotra
raised the price rise issue.

He demanded a clarification from Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on the
use of water canons by police during a protest rally near the
Assembly.

Several BJP activists, including Municipal Council of Delhi (MCD)
members, were injured during the incident.

Soon, all the BJP MLAs started sloganeering and gathered before the
Speaker's podium.

Speaker Yoganand Shastri had to adjourn the House for 15 minutes when
he failed to convince opposition members to calm down and resume their
seats.

When the House met again after 15 minutes, all BJP MLAs trooped to the
Well and sloganeered again.

Speaker Shastri tried to pacify the members, but when they continued
their protests, he asked marshals to remove senior BJP members H S
Balli, Karan Singh Tanwar, Ravindra Bansal, Subhash Sachdeva and Harsh
Vardhan from the House.

After their removal, BJP MLAs continued with their sloganeering
forcing Shastri to name the BJP MLAs one by one and ask marshals to
remove them from the House.

After all the MLAs had left, Malhotra said he was the only opposition
legislator present and asked that he be thrown out also.

The BJP members continued their protests outside the Assembly and
courted arrest. (ANI)

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/29/bjp-mlas-marshalled-out-of-delhi-assembly-26024/

BJP warns against talks with Taliban
By IANSMarch 29th, 2010

NEW DELHI - The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Monday asked the
government to explain if India was planning to talk to the Taliban, as
suggested by some media reports, and warned against any compromise
with anti-India elements.

"If true, as the report suggests, the shift in Indias Afghan policy
must be explained to the people and the foreign minister must answer
the raison dtre of showing a willingness to have a dialogue with the
regressive elements, said Tarun Vijay, BJP spokesperson.

These elements, Vijay pointed out, have been working for Pakistan's
Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and their anti-India operations
"have bled us for the last two years".

Vijay was alluding to media reports which quoted government sources
saying that India wanted to reach out to Taliban leader Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami and keep its doors open in case of a
reconciliation effort by the Taliban.

Warning against the pitfalls of such a dialogue with blood thirsty
elements", Vijay stressed: Talking to Taliban reverses all that India
has stood for so far.

"They are Osamas men, they push their women behind veils and stop them
from going to schools, their world is a world of darkness, far removed
from that of democracy and pluralism, bringing the society to medieval
ages.

"Indian strategy, if there exists one for Afghanistan and Pakistan
must be primarily to safeguard Indian interests and to ensure
annihilation of anti-Indian terror groups, he said.

Accusing the government of failure in getting access to David Coleman
Headley, an American-Pakistani accused of plotting the Mumbai attacks,
and pursuing a "meaningless dialogue" with Pakistan under US pressure,
Vijay contended that engaging the Taliban comes as another shocking
feature of UPA's unending compromises with the anti-India elements".

India has refused to recognise any distinction between the good and
bad Taliban, but has indicated that it could support reintegration of
the Taliban in the Afghan mainstream provided they agree to renounce
violence and abide by the Afghan constitution.

The Indian government is, however, opposed to any reconciliation with
the Taliban to bring them into the political structure. India had
agreed to go along with the reintegration proposal endorsed at the Jan
28 London conference, but is wary of any deal that could reinstall a
medieval and anti-New Delhi regime in Kabul.

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/29/bjp-warns-against-talks-with-taliban-26014/

Modi's Taliban comments a frustrated outburst: Congress
By IANS
March 29th, 2010

NEW DELHI - The Congress Monday hit back at Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi for his "Taliban" comments, saying it was a "frustrated"
outburst after his long questioning by the Special Investigation Team
(SIT) over the 2002 riots.

"Modi is feeling very frustrated because for the first time, a chief
minister was made to stand before the Special Investigating Team for
about 10 hours in a question and answer session," Union Information
and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said on the sidelines of a
Congress Seva Dal function here.

Responding to questions about Modi describing those critical of
Amitabh Bachchan's decision to be brand ambassador of Gujarat as
Talibans of public life in his blog, Soni said Modi should not use the
word Taliban in a "light and flippant manner" as those who had lived
under the rule of the fundamentalists know what it is like. She said
Modi should make statements only after due deliberation.

Modi wrote in his blog that "a great artist with legendary humility
and even taller achievements" like Amitabh Bachchan has "chosen to
celebrate the glorious heritage of Gujarat while facing a lot of
criticisms".

"These people, while brandishing Mahatma Gandhi's name are busy
creating a new viciousness in the flow of our public life. These
'Talibans of Untouchability' have lost all their sensibilities in
their pursuit of anti-Gujarat attitudes," he said.

Congress leaders in Maharashtra had protested over the presence of
Bachchan at the inauguration of the Bandra-Worli seak link extension
function last week, saying they were upset over "his association with
Modi".

Bachchan had accepted Modi's offer to be the brand ambassador of the
state.

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/29/modis-taliban-comments-a-frustrated-outburst-congress-26009/

Chaos in Rajasthan Assembly over Rathore's expulsion
By ANI
March 19th, 2010

JAIPUR - Chaos took place inside the Rajasthan Assembly on Friday when
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs got into a brawl with marshals
inside the House over the expulsion of BJP leader Rajendra Rathore.

At least three BJP leaders were injured in the incident, when they
clashed with the marshals attempting to control the situation.

They were protesting against Rathore's expulsion. (ANI)

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/19/chaos-in-rajasthan-assembly-over-rathores-expulsion-24281/

Varun targets Maya, Rahul, calls cow slaughter crime
By Sarwar Kashani, IANSMarch 29th, 2010

SAHARANPUR - Bharatiya Janata Party MP Varun Gandhi delivered a fiery
speech here Monday, calling for a ban on cow slaughter. He also
targeted Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati and his cousin Rahul
Gandhi whom he called a "handsome face".

Hundreds of men, women and even children sweated it out to listen to
the 30-year-old Gandhi's 20-minute high voltage speech at Gandhi Park
- his first public rally after being appointed the BJP secretary this
month.

The MP from Pilibhit called for a "more intense war" against cow
slaughter. "It is a social crime. It is a legal crime. Why don't you
wake up and fight this more intense war against cow slaughter? It is
not for Hindus only, but for the nation's pride," he said.

"Jai shri ram" was his slogan. And the crowd of men, women and
children, some of whom had been waiting since 8 a.m., repeatedly
responded likewise.

"I know people in western Uttar Pradesh don't compromise with self-
esteem. I am asking you, don't stay calm, don't tolerate. Wake up and
fight. I want warriors in my troupe, who can fight for your self-
esteem."

Gandhi, who stirred a political storm with a communal speech during
the Lok Sabha election campaign last year, this time chose to weigh
his words carefully.

The young BJP leader thundered: "If somebody targets my mother, what
would I do? I will stand and save her, isn't it? Likewise, you should
get up, gather and save our mother cow."

He criticised Mayawati over her garlands of currency notes and said
the cash should have been used for the welfare of poor farmers and
unemployed youth of Uttar Pradesh instead.

"But don't worry, two more years to go," he said, pointing to the 2012
assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh which, he added, the BJP was
confident of winning.

"Then there is another party which has young handsome faces. They have
a mission, but don't worry, we will win," he said, referring clearly
to his estranged cousin Rahul Gandhi and the Congress.

"I know, I am also on this stage with my Gandhi surname. Had I been
Varun Chowdhury or Sharma, I would not have been here. But this name
comes with responsibility, responsibility towards the poor, towards
you," he said.

Fighting for the poor of the nation is a long struggle that people
from "well-off families" are not interested in, he said. "I want to
produce at least one lakh Varun Gandhis who will fight that war," he
said.

http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/29/varun-targets-maya-rahul-calls-cow-slaughter-crime-26003/

Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike elections: It's advantage BJP
Hemant Kumar / DNA
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 8:43 IST

Bangalore: The exit polls and the pre-poll surveys may have predicted
a hung house in the 198-seat BBMP council, but the BJP is not worried.

And they have a good reason to be happy. A tally of 96 seats is good
enough for the BJP to reach the magic figure of 125, while the
Congress, which is warming up to the JD(S), needs to score 108 to have
its man as the mayor.

With MLAs, MLCs and MPs from Bangalore being part of the BBMP council,
any aspirant for the mayor's post would need at least 125 votes.
Sitting MLAs, MLCs and MPs from constituencies falling under the BBMP
jurisdiction have the voting right to elect a mayor in the BBMP
council. The BJP already has 29 such captive votes in the form of its
city MLAs, MLCs and MPs. So all it needs is just 96 seats to reach the
magic figure of 125 to grab the mayor's post.

The JD(S) has just 4 captive votes. However, the Congress and JD(S)
together could spoil BJP's plans. But it is a tall order as the
combine would have to bag at least 104 of the 198 seats. "We are
comfortably placed. Even under the worst situation of BJP winning just
about 88 or 90 seats, we can have our way as all that we need is the
support of just a few independents," said BJP city unit spokesman S
Prakash.

http://www.dnaindia.com/bangalore/report_bruhat-bengaluru-mahanagara-palike-elections-it-s-advantage-bjp_1365549

Congress practising fascism: BJP
Special Correspondent

"Modi has proved his critics wrong"

"Congress only making half-hearted attempts to interrogate Headley"

NEW DELHI: The BJP on Sunday accused the Congress of practising
fascism by the kind of its attack against actor Amitabh Bachchan and
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The Congress was increasingly betraying signs of frustration with each
of its attempt to tarnish the Opposition parties and leaders going in
vain, the BJP said.

The Congress was unabashedly practising untouchability and targeting
the Bachchan family only because it had differences with "one Congress
family," BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman said. "The entire party
and even its State governments are keen not even to be seen on one
platform with him."

The the Bandra-Worli sea link belonged to people and not to "that
family" or the Congress. The withdrawal of invitation to Mr.
Bachchan's son by the Delhi Chief Minister and violence indulged by
Congressmen, tearing posters and banners, was condemnable, Ms.
Sitharaman said.

The country had not forgotten the way noted singer Kishore Kumar was
targeted during the Emergency when All India Radio banned his songs
for almost a whole year, she said.

Ms. Sitharaman charged the Congress with encouraging and rewarding Mr.
Modi's baiters in a bid to defame a duly elected Chief Minister. She
warned that this misplaced energies of the Congress would spell danger
to the country.

Mr. Modi had proved his critics wrong by displaying his responsibility
and cooperating with the SIT (Special Investigation Team) and
underlining his belief that the Constitution and the law of the land
were supreme, she said.

The Congress was only making half-hearted attempts to interrogate
Lashkar operative David Headley. No attempt was being made to
interrogate him and one attempt had even shamefully failed, she said.

The BJP accused the UPA of not showing any enthusiasm in implementing
the Supreme Court verdict on hanging Afzal Guru "though he is a proven
offender against India."

http://www.thehindu.com/2010/03/29/stories/2010032955371300.htm

BJP govt protected anti-socials: Dhariwal
TNN, Mar 31, 2010, 05.14am IST

JAIPUR: Discussion on crime in the city rocked the House on Tuesday
when home minister Shanti Dhariwal, while answering a question,
alleged that the erstwhile BJP government had given protection to anti-
socials.

BJP whip Rajendra Rathore immediately registered a protest and was was
joined by deputy leader of Opposition Ghanshyam Tiwari and former home
minister Gulab Chand Kataria.

Claiming personal responsibility in the event the former BJP
government had protected any criminal Kataria said, "I was the home
minister then and if anyone was protected then I am responsibile but
can the home minister cite any example to prove his allegation or give
the names of such criminals."

Tiwari, on the other hand, blamed Dhariwal personally for the rising
incidents of crime in the city.

The hullabaloo arose after BJP MLA Nirmal Kumawat had inquired on the
number of cases registered in the state between January 2009 and
December 2009. Kumawat also wanted to know how many such cases were
registered in Phulera and if Jaipur had registered a rise in the
crime.

"The state has registered 1,66,565 cases between January 2009 and
December 2009, out of which in 9,5397 cases challans have been filed
in court," the minister said.

He added that Jaipur South had registered the maximum rise in crime
rate with 686 cases amounting to 12.62%. The zone, as compared to
5,435 cases in 2008, has seen 6,121 cases till December 2009. Next
came Jaipur North for which the figures for 2009 stands at 3,905
compared to 3,517 in 2008 ---- an increase of 11.03% with 388 cases.

Jaipur East recorded 6,762 cases in 2009 compared to 6,455 in 2008, an
increase of 307 cases at 4.76% while Jaipur rural has seen the least
increase at 0.01% with figures of 9,052 in 2009 as compared to 9051 in
2008.

"Therefore on an average Jaipur has registered an increase of 5.65%
while Rajasthan has seen a increase of 10.10% which is well below the
average of other states at 15.7 %," the minister said.

However, Kumawat, who had asked the question, stated if the negligible
rise in Jaipur rural is taken into account then Jaipur city has seen
10% rise in the crime rate.

Dhariwal explained the increase in crime figures are due to reasons
like an increase population ,in powers of the land mafia, tourism
mafia, Lapkas, unemployment, horizontal growth of the city, the
linking of Jaipur with the broad gauge rail lines, increase in land
prices, increase in the number of vehicles, immigration from other
states etc.

"In fact, it is because of the fact that the previous government had
given protection to criminals that such a situation has arisen today,"
he said.

That was enough to incite the Opposition and the blame game began.
While the BJP wanted the minister to table the names of such
criminals, Dhariwal continued with his allegations.

In another question related to rising crime in Jaipur, Dhariwal
claimed in comparison to 2007 crime had plunged in 2008. However, in
2009 there has again been a rise in the crime rate specially in cases
like attempted murder, loot, theft though cases like dacoity and armed
robbery has seen a decline.

But the minister refused to acknowledge that on the whole there has
been an increase in crime in the city.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/BJP-govt-protected-anti-socials-Dhariwal/articleshow/5744879.cms

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/f9b738e079fef9fb/ab46d74ab84d4ea3

...and I am Sid Harth

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Thuggee (or tuggee, ठग्गी ṭhagī) (from Hindi ठग ṭhag 'thief', from
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Thuggery

The English word "thug" comes from the Hindi word "thag", meaning
"conman". It is one of many Indian words borrowed into English during
the British colonial period. The English connotation of 'thug' is
synonymous with terms like hoodlum and hooligan, indicating a person
(who may or may not be anti-social) who harasses others, usually for
hire.[citation needed] People regarded as thugs might commit assault
(or 'menace'), battery, even robbery and grievous bodily harm, but
they usually stop short of murder. Additionally, "thugs" usually
travel in pairs, though they can work alone or in groups of four to
six members, and are typically open about their presence (except to
law enforcement officials); while "Thuggee" were covert and operated
as members of a group, often called a "Thuggee cult" by the British.
Hence, the word "Thuggee" is capitalised while the word "thug" usually
is not; which enables distinction of a "Thug" (here, a short form of
"Thuggee") from a "thug".

In the heyday of Thuggee activity, travellers were typically part of a
travelling group, so the term Thuggee typically referred to killing of
a large number of people in a single operation. This aspect
distinguishes Thuggee from similar concept of dacoity, which means
simple armed robbery.

Dacoity has similarities with the terms brigand and bandit from
European and Latin American experience, but there appear to be no
exact Western parallels for Thuggee. Perhaps the closest concepts
would be the format of piracy, though this is solely maritime robbery
(usually with murder), and the earlier, but similar, format of raids
on coastal settlements by Viking seafarers. Some aspects, however, are
reminiscent of the Mafia group of organisations.

Between them, these classes of criminal activity illustrate some of
the mystique that attached to the Thugs and the complex mixture of
fear and dread of these murderous men that was felt by the ordinary
people who might well be their victims.

There is some question as to the extent of the religious dimension of
Thuggee. Most contemporary sources described Thuggee as being a
religious cult, but some modern sources feel it was merely a
specialized form of organized crime or paramilitary activity, with no
particular religious dimension beyond the normal piety of the
villagers from whom its members were recruited.

Time period

The concept of Thuggee is known from the 17th century, though the term
and/or activity possibly dates back as early as the 13th century.
Thuggee was actively practiced at least through the end of the 19th
century. If remnants of the Thuggee tradition survived into the 20th
and 21st centuries, they did so very covertly. The film Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom is based on the premise that Thuggee cults
survived covertly into the early 20th century.

Stern suppression by the British was important in reducing Thuggee
activity but more significant was the introduction of modern methods
of travel, in particular the displacement of travelling on foot or by
horse in groups by the railway, which effectively rendered Thuggee
obsolete.

The nature

The particular groups, as well as the general concept, were often
equally durable and would outlive the 'careers' of individual members
to develop into a crime family lasting generations. These groups
progressed from being simple gangs into becoming 'fraternities' or
even 'cults', featuring the initiation of new members, either through
the heredity of a criminal underclass, or through an apprenticeship,
such as normally associated with skilled or learned professions or the
training programs of elite military units. Other sources describe the
Thugs as a criminal 'tribe' or caste. Over the course of generations,
the secrets must be kept within the 'family'. The marriage of
offspring within the group both safeguards the secret knowledge,
allowing it to be imparted steadily to the children without the risk
of uninitiated neighbours overhearing, and reinforces the exclusive
and selective nature of the organisation. This preserves the mystique,
which is in itself part of the formula of success, and creates an
elite aura around it. At the moment of attack, the sudden revelation
of the identity of the assailants produces a shock that disables
defensive manoeuvres, at least for a few, vital moments, while the
reputation for invincibility engenders a defeatism that results in a
fait accompli.

The practice

Thugs were active all over the Bengal region of the Indian
subcontinent. Maps showing the possessions of the British East India
Company in 1765 and 1805Thuggee is described as a cult of people
engaged in the multiple murder and robbery of travelers. At the time,
most travelers in India would travel in caravan for mutual support and
security, since travel meant the crossing of difficult terrain before
the coming of metalled roads, the passing among different races,
religions and castes, at a period before police forces were formed. In
order to attempt the massacre of an entire caravan, the Thugs needed
to be numerous and well-coordinated. They also needed to be
sufficiently stealthy, at least in the early stages, to begin their
slaughter without rousing all at once. This required a high degree of
planning, organization – including props and patter – timing, teamwork
and discipline. With anything less than complete success a survivor
could escape to raise a hue and cry. These horrendous but
sophisticated operations lay somewhere between organized crime and
paramilitary activity and were far removed from the ordinary criminal
in the audacity, magnitude, and ruthlessness of the enterprise.

The modus operandi was to join a caravan and become accepted as bona-
fide travelers themselves. The Thugs would need to delay any attack
until their fellow travelers had dropped the initial wariness of the
newcomers and had been lulled into a false sense of security. The
Thugs first needed to befriend the travelers and win their trust. Once
the travelers had allowed the Thugs to join them and disperse amongst
them (a task which might sometimes, depending on the size of the
target group, require accompaniment for hundreds of miles), the Thugs
would wait for a suitable place and time before killing and robbing
them.

There were obviously variations on a theme. When tackling a large
group, a Thuggee band might disperse along a route and join a group in
stages, concealing their acquaintanceship, such that they could come
to outnumber their intended victims by small, non-threatening
increments. If the travelers had doubts about any one party, they
might confide their worries to another party of the same Thuggee band.
The trusted band would thus be the best placed to deal with these
members of the caravan at the appropriate time, but might also be able
to advise their colleagues to 'back off' or otherwise modify their
behavior, to allay suspicion.

The killing place would need to be remote from local observers and
suitable to prevent escape (e.g., backed against a river). Thugs
tended to develop favored places of execution, called beles. They knew
the geography of these places well—better than their victims. They
needed to, if they were to anticipate the likely escape routes and
hiding-places of the quicker-witted and more determined of the
travelers.

The timing might be at night or during a rest-break, when the
travelers would be busy with chores and when the background cries and
noise would mask any sounds of alarm. A quick and quiet method, which
left no stains and required no special weapons, was strangulation.
This method is particularly associated with Thuggee and led to the
Thugs also being referred to as the Phansigars, or "noose-operators",
and simply as "stranglers" by British troops. Usually two or three
Thugs would strangle one traveller. The Thugs would then need to
dispose of the bodies: they might bury them or might throw them into a
nearby well.[2].

The leader of a gang was called the 'jemadar': this is an ordinary
Indian word and is now used as the rank of an Army officer
(Lieutenant), who would command a similar number of men to a Thuggee
gang-leader. An English equivalent term might be 'the Boss' or 'the
Guv'nor' (Governor).

As with modern criminal gangs, each member of the group had his own
function: the equivalent of the 'hit-man,' 'the lookout,' and the
'getaway driver' would be those Thugs tasked with luring travelers
with charming words or acting as guardian to prevent escape of victims
while the killing took place.

They usually killed their victims in darkness while the thugs made
music or noise to escape discovery. If burying bodies close to a well-
traveled trade-route, they would need to disguise the 'earthworks' of
their graveyard as a camp-site, tamping down the covering mounds and
leaving some items of rubbish or remnants of a fire to 'explain' the
disturbances and obscure the burials.

One reason given for the Thuggee success in avoiding detection and
capture so often and over such long periods of time is a self-
discipline and restraint in avoiding groups of travelers on shorter
journeys, even if they seemed laden with suitable plunder. Choosing
only travelers far from home gave more time until the alarm was raised
and the distance made it less likely that colleagues would follow on
to investigate the disappearances. Another reason given is the high
degree of teamwork and co-ordination both during the infiltration
phase and at the moment of attack. This was a sophisticated criminal
elite that knew its business well and approached each 'operation' like
a military mission.

Use of garotte

The garotte is often depicted as the common weapon of the Thuggee. It
is sometimes described as a rumal (head covering or kerchief), or
translated as "yellow scarf". "Yellow" in this case may refer to a
natural cream or khaki colour rather than bright yellow. Most Indian
males in Central India or Hindustan would have a puggaree or head-
scarf, worn either as a turban or worn around a kullah and draped to
protect the back of the neck. Types of scarves were also worn as
cummerbunds, in place of a belt. Any of these items could have served
as strangling ligatures.

Religion and Thuggee

Thuggee groups might be Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, but Thuggee is
particularly associated with followers of the Hindu Goddess Kali (or
Durga), whom they often called Bhavani.[3][4][5] It was noted, even at
the time, that only a very small minority of the followers of Kali
were Thuggees. Many Thuggees worshipped Kali but most supporters of
Kali did not practise Thuggee.

Some Thuggee groups claimed descent from seven Muslim tribes[citation
needed], but the majority of Hindu followers only seem to be related
during the early periods of Islamic development through their
religious creed and staunch worship of Kali, one of the Hindu Tantric
Goddesses. At a time of political unrest, with changes from Hindu
Rajput rulers to Muslim Moghul emperors and viceroys, and possibly
back again, a wise group would display allegiance to both creeds, but
its ultimate loyalty was probably only to itself.

"There seem to have been very few Sikh Thugs. But Sahib Khan, the
Deccan strangler, 'knew Ram Sing Siek: he was a noted Thug leader - a
very shrewd man,' who also served with the Pindaris for a while and
was responsible for the assassination of the notorious Pindari leader
Sheikh Dulloo." Sleeman, Ramaseeana I, 239-40.

Some sources view the Thugs as a cult or sect. Given the extent of the
problem, in geographical scale and in the duration of time, it is
likely that many groups would wish to keep their secrets from betrayal
from within and from intrusion by outsiders and would have evolved
into secret criminal fraternities. It also follows that if they were
repeatedly successful, then they must have 'divine blessing' and would
wish to give thanks to, and worship, the deity to whom they ascribed
their support. In the West, as well, criminality and religious
observance are not always mutually incompatible.

Origin and recruitment

A group of thugs, ca. 1863The earliest recorded mention of the Thugs
as a special band or fraternity, rather than as ordinary thieves, is
found in the following passage of Ziau-d din Barni's History of Firoz
Shah (written about 1356):

In the reign of that sultan (about 1290), some Thugs were taken in
Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a
thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have
killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be
conveyed into the lower country, to the neighbourhood of Lakhnauti,
where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell
about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighbourhood of Delhi any
more." (Sir HM Elliot's History of India, iii. 141).

Membership was sometimes passed from father to son, in what would now
be termed a criminal underclass. The leaders of long-established Thug
groups tended to come from these hereditary lines, as the gang
developed into a criminal 'tribe'. Other men would get to know a Thug
band and would hope to be recruited, in the way that one might aspire
to join an elite regiment or university: they were the best operators
in "the business" and, like a regiment or college fraternity, once in
the group, there was a camaraderie of numbers and shared experience.
The robbery became less a question of solving problems of poverty and
more a profession, like soldiering.

Sometimes the young children of the travelers would be spared and
groomed to become Thugs themselves, as the presence of children would
help allay suspicion. A fourth way of becoming a Thug was by training
with a guru, similar to an apprenticeship for a guild or profession,
during which the candidate could be assessed for reliability, courage,
discretion and discipline.[2]

The magnitude of the problem

Estimates of the total number of victims vary widely, depending on the
author's idea of the length of existence of the Thugs (for which there
are no reliable sources). According to the Guinness Book of Records
the Thuggee cult was responsible for approximately 2,000,000 deaths,
while British historian Dr. Mike Dash estimates that they killed
50,000 persons in total, based on his assumption that they only
started to exist 150 years before their eradication in the 1830s.

Yearly figures for the early 19th century are better documented, but
even they are inaccurate estimates. For example, gang leader Behram
has often been considered the world's most prolific serial killer,
blamed for 931 killings between 1790 and 1830. Reference to
contemporary manuscript sources, however, shows that Behram actually
gave inconsistent statements regarding the number of murders he had
committed. While he did state that he had "been present at" 931
killings committed by his gang of 25 to 50 men, elsewhere he admitted
that he had personally strangled "only" around 125 people. Having
turned King's Evidence and agreed to inform on his former companions,
furthermore, Behram never stood trial for any of the killings
attributed to him, the total of which must thus remain a matter of
dispute.[6]

Suppression

The Thuggee cult was suppressed by the British rulers of India in the
1830s.[2] The arrival of the British and their development of a
methodology to tackle crime meant the techniques of the Thugs had met
their match. Suddenly, the mysterious disappearances were mysteries no
longer and it became clear how even large caravans could be
infiltrated by apparently small groups, that were in fact acting in
concert. Once the techniques were known to all travellers, the element
of surprise was gone and the attacks became botched, until the hunters
became the hunted.

Civil servant William Henry Sleeman, superintendent, 'Thuggee and
Dacoity Dept.' in 1835, and later its Commissioner in 1839.Reasons for
British success included:

the dissemination of reports regarding Thuggee developments across
territorial borders, so that each administrator was made aware of new
techniques as soon as they were put in practice, so that travellers
could be warned and advised on possible counter-measures.
the use of King's evidence programmes gave an incentive for gang
members to inform on their peers to save their own lives. This
undermined the code of silence that protected members.
at a time when, even in Britain, policing was in its infancy, the
British set up a dedicated police force, the Thuggee Department, and
special tribunals that prevented local influence from affecting
criminal proceedings.
the police force applied the new detective methodologies to record the
locations of attacks, the time of day or circumstances of the attack,
the size of group, the approach to the victims and the behaviours
after the attacks. In this way, a single informant, belonging to one
gang in one region, might yield details that would be applicable to
most, or all, gangs in a region or indeed across all India.
The initiative of suppression was due largely to the efforts of the
civil servant William Sleeman, who started an extensive campaign
involving profiling and intelligence. A police organisation known as
the 'Thuggee and Dacoity Department' was established within the
Government of India, with William Sleeman appointed Superintendent of
the department in 1835. Thousands of men were either put in prison,
executed, or expelled from British India.[2] The campaign was heavily
based on informants recruited from captured thugs who were offered
protection on the condition that they told everything that they knew.
By the 1870s, the Thug cult was extinct, but it led to the
promulgation of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Although it was
repealed upon independence of India, the concept of 'criminal tribes'
and 'criminal castes' is still prevalent in India.[7][8] The
Department remained in existence until 1904, when it was replaced by
the Central Criminal Intelligence Department (CID).

Possible misinterpretation by the British and scepticism about the
existence

In her book The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs
of India (2002), Martine van Woerkens suggests that evidence for the
existence of a Thuggee cult in the 19th century was in part the
product of "colonial imaginings" — British fear of the little-known
interior of India and limited understanding of the religious and
social practices of its inhabitants. For a comparison, see Juggernaut
and the Black Hole of Calcutta.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_of_Calcutta

Krishna Dutta, while reviewing the book Thug: the true story of
India's murderous cult by the British historian Dr. Mike Dash in The
Independent, argues:[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent

"In recent years, the revisionist view that thuggee was a British
invention, a means to tighten their hold in the country, has been
given credence in India, France and the US, but this well-researched
book objectively questions that assertion."
In his book, Dash rejects scepticism about the existence of a secret
network of groups with a modus operandi that was different from
highwaymen, such as dacoits. To prove his point Dash refers to the
excavated corpses in graves, of which the hidden locations were
revealed to Sleeman's team by thug informants. In addition, Dash
treats the extensive and thorough documentation that Sleeman made.
Dash rejects the colonial emphasis on the religious motivation for
robbing, but instead asserts that monetary gain was the main
motivation for Thuggee and that men sometimes became Thugs due to
extreme poverty. He further asserts that the Thugs were highly
superstitious and that they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, but
that their faith was not very different from their contemporary non-
thugs. He admits, though, that the thugs had certain group-specific
superstitions and rituals.

Aftermath

The discovery of the thuggee was one of the main reason why the
Criminal Tribes Act was created.

In popular culture

This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial
references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's
impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and
remove trivial references. (November 2009)

In literature

The story of Thuggee was popularised by books such as Philip Meadows
Taylor's novel Confessions of a Thug, 1839, leading to the word "thug"
entering the English language. Ameer Ali, the protagonist of
Confessions of a Thug was said to be based on a real Thug called Syeed
Amir Ali.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Meadows_Taylor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Thug_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagonist

John Masters' novel The Deceivers also deals with the subject. A more
recent book is George Bruce's The Stranglers: The cult of Thuggee and
its overthrow in British India (1968). Dan Simmons's Song of Kali,
1985, features a Thuggee cult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons

The 19th century American writer Mark Twain discusses the Thuggee
fairly extensively in chapters 9 and 10 of "Following the Equator:
Volume II", 1897, THE ECCO PRESS, ISBN 0-88001-519-5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

Christopher Moore's novel, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff,
Christ's Childhood Pal, describes a Thuggee ritual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb:_The_Gospel_According_to_Biff,_Christ%27s_Childhood_Pal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Moore_(author)

The 1976 science fiction novel Strangler's Moon by E.E. "Doc" Smith
and Stephen Goldin is based on the Thuggee (book #2 in the Family
D'Alembert series).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangler%27s_Moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Goldin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_D%27Alembert

Sci-Fi/Fantasy author Glen Cook uses an India-like setting and Thuggee
as a plot vehicle in his books Shadow Games (June 1989), and Dreams of
Steel (April 1990). The books and later ones that continue the
storyline form part of Cook's Black Company series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Cook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Steel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Company

The Serpent's Shadow by Mercedes Lackey has a Hindu villain, whose
minions are Thuggee, almost without exception.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes_Lackey
Author William T. Vollmann draws upon Sleeman in his story The Yellow
Sugar, which is one of two tales in his collection The Rainbow Stories
dealing with the colour yellow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Vollmann
In the pre-Holmes short story "The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy's
Household" (1887), Arthur Conan Doyle centres the narrative on a
beautiful female Thuggee in England who has "occasional fits of
fanaticism" and "horrible conceptions of religion".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle
Italian writer Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) wrote about thugs in I
Misteri della Jungla Nera (1895) and Le Due Tigri (1904) and other
short stories.
George Macdonald Fraser's novel Flashman in the Great Game (1975)
makes references to the "cult" of Thuggee, while the phrase: "pass the
tobacco" is used as a verbal signal for the killing to begin.
The DC Comics character Ravan is a Thuggee assassin who kills to delay
the return of Kali. He is the enemy of Kobra who seeks to bring about
her return.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravan_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobra_(comics)

In the novel The Thirteenth Manifestation: the Song of Kali Ma (2006)
by Josephine Dunne, thuggees appear as assassins who operate from an
ancient subterranean Kali temple under the mountains between the
Pakistan and Indian line of control in Kashmir.

In film

The two most popular depictions of the cult in film are the 1939 film,
Gunga Din, and the 1984 film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The Indiana Jones movie is notable for Amrish Puri's villain, who is
shown chanting lines such as "maaro maaro sooar ko, chamdi nocho pee
lo khoon" - literally "Kill, Kill the pig, flay his skin, drink his
blood". Temple of Doom was temporarily banned in India for an
allegedly racist portrayal of Indians. Both films have the heroes
fighting secret revivals of the cult to prevent them from resuming
their reigns of terror, although Temple of Doom included features that
were never part of the Thuggee, such as cardiectomy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom
In the 1956 film Around the World in Eighty Days, starring David
Niven, Passepartout rescues a princess captured by the Thuggee and
sentenced to burn to death in the funeral pyre with her deceased
husband. (In the original Jules Verne novel, Thuggee are mentioned
only briefly, and not directly in connection with this princess.)[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days_(1956_film)
In 1960 British horror studio Hammer Film Productions released The
Stranglers of Bombay. In the film, Guy Rolfe portrays an heroic
British officer battling institutional mismanagement by the British
East India Company, as well as Thuggee infiltration of Indian society,
in an attempt to bring the cultists to justice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_East_India_Company
The 1968 Bollywood film Sangharsh, based on a story by Jnanpith Award
winner, Mahasweta Devi, presented a fictionalised account of vendetta
within a Thuggee cult in the holy Indian town of Varanasi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunghursh_(1968_film)
The 1988 film version of The Deceivers, produced by Ismail Merchant
and starring Pierce Brosnan, is a fictionalised account of the initial
discovery and infiltration of the Thuggee sect by an imperial British
administrator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deceivers
The 1954 film I Misteri della Giungla Nera directed by Gian Paolo
Callegari and starring Lex Barker, where a group of religious fanatics
in India, the Thugs, prey upon European and natives alike by capturing
and offering them up in sacrifice to their frightful goddess, Kali
(from imdb.) Adapted from Emilio Salgari's book by the same name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilio_Salgari
The 1965 film Help! directed by Richard Lester and featuring The
Beatles parodies the thuggee as the cult that tries to steal Ringo's
sacrificial ring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help!_(film)

In television

In an episode of Highlander: The Series, "The Wrath of Kali", Duncan
MacLeod deals with immortal Kamir (played by Indian actor Kabir Bedi),
last of the Thuggee.
The fifth episode of the short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series
featured a plot twist where the Little League World Champions were
kidnapped by the Thuggee, where they were forced to chip rock away
from walls (much like the Thuggee in Temple of Doom).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_League
In the episode "The Yellow Scarf Affair" of the series The Man from
U.N.C.L.E., Agent Napoleon Solo uncovers a revival of the Thuggee cult
while investigating a plane crash in India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_U.N.C.L.E.
On It Ain't Half Hot Mum series 2, episode 8, "The Night of the
Thugs", the concert party take refuge from a rainstorm in a ruined
Thuggee temple. NB - Rare unscripted "giggle" from Captain Ashwood
when Colonel Reynolds discuss stealing the ruby from the statue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodes_of_Highlander_(season_4)#The_Wrath_of_Kali

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Ain%27t_Half_Hot_Mum
See also

Highwayman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highwayman

Notes and references

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/T/THU/thugs.html
^ Thugs 1902 Encyclopædia Britannica'.Pali-sthag.
^ a b c d Dash, Mike Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult
ISBN 1-86207-604-9, 2005
^ Dash, pp. 284-286 in the Dutch translation of the book
^ Dash, pp. 247 in the Dutch translation of the book
^ Dash, page 329 of the UK edition - notes to Chapter 16
^ James Paton, 'Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee', British Library
Add. Mss. 41300
^ "Thugs Traditional View" (shtml). BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/thugs.shtml.
Retrieved 2007-09-17.
^ Sinister sects: Thug, Mike Dash's investigation into the gangs who
preyed on travellers in 19th-century India by Kevin Rushby, The
Guardian, Saturday, June 11, 2005.
^ Dutta, Krishna (2005) The sacred slaughterers. Book review of Thug:
the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. In the
Independent (Published: 8 July 2005)text
^ Verne, Jules (August 18, 2005). Around The World in Eighty Days.
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=34998. See
page 38, where the Thuggee chief is mentioned, and page 46, where the
bride is referred to as a suttee.

Bibliography

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Eleventh_Edition
Dash, Mike Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult ISBN
1-86207-604-9, 2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dash
Dutta, Krishna (2005) The sacred slaughterers. Book review of Thug:
the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. In The
Independent (Published: 8 July 2005) text
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/thug-the-true-story-of-indias-murderous-cult-by-mike-dash-497902.html
Paton, James 'Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee', British Library
Add. Mss. 41300
Woerkens, Martine van The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and
the Thugs of India (2002),

External links

Acting in the "Theatre of Anarchy": 'The Anti-Thug Campaign' and
Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early-Nineteenth Century India by Tom
Lloyd (2006) in PDF file format
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/LLOYD.pdf
Parama Roy: Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee. In: idem, Indian
Traffic. Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India.
University of California Press 1998. (in html format)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee"

Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee
Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to the critical perspicacity and
generosity of friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutions, whom I
am grateful to be able to name and thank. These pages would have been
impossible to bring to fruition without the encouragement and
intellectual support of Sandhya Shetty and Carole-Anne Tyler, who
consistently asked the difficult questions and who taught me through
the inspiration of their own scholarship. I am also grateful to
Lalitha Gopalan, who so often told me what I was thinking before I
knew it myself. I am grateful too to the many other friends and
colleagues who read the manuscript, either in full or in part, or who
responded to my work at conferences: Katherine Kinney, Joe Childers,
R. Radhakrishnan, Inderpal Grewal, Vincent Cheng, Daniel Boyarin, Kim
Devlin, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Bette London, Ron Inden, Robert
Goldman, Aditya Behl, Gayatri Spivak, Jennifer Brody, George Haggerty,
Lawrence Cohen, Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Foster. I am
indebted to the readers for the University of California Press,
especially Caren Kaplan and Sangeeta Ray, for their meticulous,
constructive, and sympathetic evaluation of the project. My editor,
Doris Kretschmer, has been unfailingly helpful and patient. I am also
grateful to Dore Brown and Diane Jagusiak of the University of
California Press, and to Sarah Myers, for their scrupulous editing. I
am indebted above all to my parents, Amalendu and Ramola Roy, as well
as to Bharat Trehan for (among other things) his recall of a youth
productively spent watching Bombay films.
This project has been funded by a University of California President's
Research Fellowship in the Humanities in 1991–1992, a fellowship in
the University of California, Riverside's Center for Ideas and Society
in the spring of 1994, and by two pretenure faculty-development awards
from the University of California, Riverside. I am grateful for this
support.

2. Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee

I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have thugged
with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.
He had met hundreds of other Deceivers, and the notes were a complete
tale of all he had seen and heard and done; of all the Deceivers who
had engaged in any action, with their descriptions, habits, and homes;
of each murder, and how it had gone, and how it might have been
prevented—or improved upon. The words could be read for either
purpose, according to the spirit of the reader.

At the time that Burton was impersonating Mirza Abdullah in the
bazaars of Sind, another important narrative of disguise,
surveillance, and racial crossing was being written in the
subcontinent, this one under the auspices of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department of the East India Company's government. This was the
narrative of the exposure and extirpation of a form of hereditary
criminality called thuggee; it was to form a significant constitutive
component of the authoritarian and interventionary reform of the 1830s
and 1840s and to contribute to the still-emerging project of
"discovering India." "It was with the flourish of mystery unveiled and
mastered," writes a contemporary historian, "that a group of officers
of the Political Department had lobbied for special operations against
[a] 'murderous fraternity' and for special laws to deal with it." [1]
It is that tale of thuggee that this chapter will take up, at least in
part as a counterpoint to the Burtonian record of the Englishman as
native. It examines the phenomenon designated thuggee by colonial
authority in nineteenth-century India, a phenomenon whose emergence,
codification, and overthrow was to become perhaps the founding moment
for the study of indigenous criminality, as a problem of
impersonation, visibility, and the transactions of reading. I use the
example of thuggee to explore one of the various and often mutually
discontinuous kinds of identities that were created, fixed, or
rendered ambivalent for Indian colonial subjects. In approaching the
problematic of thuggee in the colonial context through the optic of
identity formation and subjection, I broach a nexus of concerns that
cohere around the epistemes of representation and knowledge: the
problematic of the formation of colonial knowledge, the contested,
changing, and uneven definitions of law, order, criminality, and
reform in early-nineteenth-century India, the theorization of colonial
identities (Indian and British), and the discursive problems
associated with generating the moral subject of the civilizing mission
of British colonialism.

This chapter has three sections, with significant amounts of overlap.
The first examines the official records of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department (first established in the 1830s), a cluster of documents
that I have perhaps rather arbitrarily designated the thuggee archive.
This includes first and foremost the files on thuggee and dacoity in
the India Office Library and the National Archives of India. Also
incorporated in this thuggee archive are the works (Ramaseeana, or a
Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs [1836]; Report
on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary
Profession [1849]; Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug
Gangs [1840]) of William Henry Sleeman of thuggee fame, as well as of
other officials associated directly or indirectly with the antithug
campaign: James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (1920); Charles
Hervey, Some Records of Crime (1892); Edward Thornton, Illustrations
of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1837); and the anonymously
authored The Thugs or Phansigars of India (1839), an abridged version
of the Ramaseeana for an American audience. This inventory of thuggee
materials also includes a number of biographies, fictionalizations,
and nonofficial accounts of the "discovery" of the phenomenon and its
eradication: James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits,
the Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (1857); A. J.
Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (1959); George Bruce, The
Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and Its Overthrow in British India
(1968); Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (1961); and Philip Meadows
Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (1839). These are collectively
designated the archive in this chapter, despite the incommensurability
in their generic status; this has been done because there appears to
be very little significant difference between one text and another in
this collection. Each seems to repeat the others in an uncanny
fashion; each narrates the same incidents in almost exactly the same
rhetorical mode; and each looks to W. H. Sleeman's productions as the
founding texts of the thuggee narrative. (Meadows Taylor's novel
differs from these only in its focus on a single thug and its
accumulation of additional [fictional] detail.)

The second section focuses on the special juridical procedures that
had to be instituted in order to deal with some of the most
intractable problems associated with a bizarre and enigmatic variety
of criminality. The final section provides a reading of the 1952 work
on the thugs by John Masters, The Deceivers, a novel that was
popularized in the 1980s in a film of that name by Merchant Ivory.
What sets this novel apart from the rest of the archive is the turn it
gives to the always already familiar narrative of thuggee through its
focus on the tensions of the investigating subject and its interest in
the English impersonation of Indianness and Englishness. It allows us
a way of (re)visiting and (re)inflecting the thuggee archive through
its stress on the colonizing male's desires and identifications, and
thus forms an apposite corollary to the accent on Indian impersonation
that informs the discourse of criminal law.

At this point I should add a note about the limits of the enterprise
undertaken in this chapter. In the first place, I do not wish to
furnish another account of thuggee or to enter the traffic in
competing narratives of what might have constituted a material thug
organization or practice. Nor am I interested in reinscribing the
practices of the thugs in the register of subaltern insurgency,
though, given that subalternity is most properly construed as a
relational rather than an essential category,[2] I am not unwilling to
grant the thugs' subaltern status. I am certainly sympathetic to
Ranajit Guha's model of reading subaltern insurgency (as a "turning
things upside down") through the texts of counterinsurgency.[3] But,
given the exclusions listed earlier in this paragraph, for me to read
thuggee as resistive, anticolonial, protonationalist, or even
antistate may be philosophically not discontinuous with the reading
practices that produced the thug as a demonized and completely
irrational entity. My object here is not to recuperate a subaltern
consciousness, even one that is acknowledged to be ineluctably
discursive, "a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of
reading," [4] though I concede that the question of "subaltern
consciousness" cannot be completely bypassed.

I shall confine myself instead to examining the performative
subjectivity of the thug, as it is constructed in the discourse of
thuggee, as a way of teasing out, extending, and transforming some of
the implications of representation, mimicry, and visibility in the
colonial context. What I will engage are the models of reading that
are provided by the thuggee archives—how they are formed,
consolidated, or (partially) interrupted. And what I do argue is that
the reading of the uncovering of thuggee as an enabling moment for the
colonial state in its quest for the consolidation of judicial power
needs to be, if not displaced, at least complicated, by the
acknowledgment that thuggee forms an especially intransigent moment
within the colonial construction of criminality; it is a moment that
confounds and unsettles the received wisdom about identity formation,
truth production, and meliorative possibilities in early-nineteenth-
century India. What I also argue is that the discourse on and around
thuggee can be instrumental in opening up our present understanding of
the theorization of colonial identity, especially as it engages
questions of familiarity, visibility, and reproducibility. The text of
thuggee provides, for instance, a point of entry into a wider range of
mimic desires, identifications, and positions than someone like Bhabha
explicitly engages[5]—for instance, the colonizer's fascination with
going native, the English miming of Englishness, or the indigenous
miming of indigenous subject positions—as well as foregrounding
questions of class, gender, and sexuality.

• • •

The Thug

The first thugs were not arrested by the British until 1799, after the
defeat at Seringapatam of Tipu Sultan, one of the most potent threats
to the expansionist ambitions of the East India Company; it was not
evident to the British at the time, though, that the stranglers were
thugs or hereditary killers. The first mention of the law-and-order
problem posed by thugs occurs in 1810, in the commander-in-chief's
instructions to sepoys proceeding on leave about the dangers of
traveling at night and carrying large sums of cash instead of bills of
exchange;[6] but thuggee as a significant social arrangement or
discursive formation does not feature in this caution to the sepoys.
Thornton reproduces some correspondence between British magistrates
and police officials of the Western Provinces in the years 1814–1816
on the subject of thugs; at this point knowledge about them appears
very fragmentary, with no reference to shared religious rituals or
language or an idiosyncratic form of murder. It appears that the
notion of thuggee as a system rather than a disarticulated set of
violent acts was first broached in 1816 by Dr. Richard Sherwood, who
wrote an essay detailing its genealogy, organization, and argot for
the Madras Literary Gazette.[7] It proved, however, enormously
difficult to compel belief in the existence of such a fraternity (this
was to remain a problem in the decades to come), even among British
political officers, magistrates, and law-enforcement officials.
Meadows Taylor describes the capture of large numbers of thugs in
Bundelkhand and Malwa in the 1820s, an event that failed to "[excite]
more than a passing share of public attention." [8] It was not until
Captain W. H. Sleeman undertook the exercise of decoding and exposing
thuggee in 1830, after the unexpected confession of the captured
bandit Feringheea, that a grand narrative of thuggee began to emerge.

Despite this relatively recent discovery, however, thuggee as praxis
and as identity was always represented as being of almost
inconceivable antiquity, conceived in the precolonial past and
sanctioned by long duration and popular Hindu mythology, if not
textual doctrine. A. J. Wightman, echoing his nineteenth-century
predecessors, asserts that though evidence of the existence of thuggee
is first found in records of the late thirteenth century, "it is
obvious that they must have been well-established at a much earlier
date." [9] Some writers, like Sherwood, traced its origins to the
Arab, Afghan, and Mughal conquests of India of several centuries
earlier; James Sleeman and others traced the thugs back to the times
of Herodotus. The thug Feringheea is said to have claimed that the
sculptures at Ellora, which included representations of all the
professions on earth, featured a depiction of a thug plying his deadly
trade.[10] All the reports without exception demonstrate a tenacious
need to generate a creation myth, to locate not just a point of
discovery but a point of origin, and to establish a precolonial
genealogy. But at the beginning, as Geoff Bennington has said about
national histories, is also the myth of a beginning; and the origins
of thuggee keep receding into a more and more distant historical/
mythological point of inauguration.[11] In fact, several of the
accounts end up locating its beginning in a Hindu myth of creation.

The thugs, as they are represented in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century colonial representations, were a cult of professional
stranglers who preyed on travelers—though never on Englishmen—as an
act of worship to the popular Hindu goddess Kali. They were
represented as hereditary killers drawn from all regions, religions,
classes, and castes, united by their devotion to Kali and the act of
strangulation, which was, in this reading, quite literally sacralized.
The thugs were bound to their calling—and to each other—by shared
signifying systems: a language, a belief in the divine origin of the
practice, and a dizzying array of minutely observed rituals,
prohibitions, and superstitions. The thuggee system functioned as a
quasi-religious fraternity that, paradoxically, would accommodate just
about every Indian. It was defined as a compelling and
characteristically Indian form of social (ir)rationality, and the
practice was represented as resting upon an interlocking network of
constitutive contradictions.

Though the thugs robbed their victims and the confessions usually
demonstrate a very lucid recall of the division of the plunder,
thuggee was not conceived as having any economic base, particularly
because those involved in it appeared to have fixed abodes, peaceful
occupations, and a respectable place in the social and caste
hierarchies during those times when they were not engaged in killing
and plunder. While Sherwood does speculate, albeit briefly and
unevenly, on the proximate material causes of thuggee, the question
becomes progressively leached out of subsequent, and more hegemonic,
exegeses of thuggee. All the writers on the subject are insistent, to
greater or lesser degrees, that the thugs must not be regarded as
exigent, dispossessed, or rebellious subjects; they are unlike the
bandits of folk myth in being devious, unmartial ("cowardly" is the
adjective most often used), and almost obscenely respectable.[12] They
are characterized instead as hereditary killers whose "joyous
occupation" was, paradoxically, not only a matter of caste duty and
therefore ontological necessity but also a prime instance of
unalienated labor. By the time we come to James Sleeman's hagiographic
account of his grandfather's exploits, the act of strangulation has
not only been uncoupled from the usual motives for murder but has
acquired a quasi-libidinal charge: "The taking of human life for the
sheer lust of killing was the Thugs' main object: the plunder, however
pleasant, being a secondary consideration.…Here was no body of amateur
assassins, driven to crime by force of circumstance, but men of
seeming respectability and high intelligence, often occupying
positions of importance and responsibility in their normal lives,
secretly trained from boyhood to the highest degree of skill in
strangulation." [13] Sleeman is not alone in this reading of the
combined erotic and religious investment in murder. Taylor, in
Confessions of a Thug, hints at the homoerotic subtext of a thug's
murder of a handsome lad; and George MacMunn explicitly couples the
left-hand Tantrism (including exorbitant and unauthorized sexual acts)
of Kali worshipers with behaviors like thuggee and nationalist
violence:

The murder trials that have followed on the sedition and secret murder
cult in Bengal, and indeed throughout India, show in their records how
the Hindu student depraved and often injured by too early eroticism,
turns to the suggestiveness of the murder-monger, and worships the
nitro-glycerine bomb as the apotheosis of his goddess [Kali].…The
student and the assistant editor of the rag, that but exists to
inflame students and pays its way by advertising the potent
aphrodisiacs among them, are the nidus of the bomb-cult.[14]

Katherine Mayo also locates the worship of Kali, premature and
excessive sexual activity, and acts of anticolonial terrorism within a
single perceptual grid.[15] This confluence of violence, illegitimacy,
and homoerotic desire is to resurface in The Deceivers.

Some twentieth-century scholars of colonial history have sought to
posit alternative, materialist histories of the phenomenon called
thuggee. Hiralal Gupta traces the development of thuggee or banditry
in the early nineteenth century to the success of the East India
Company's expansionist policy, speculating that a significant number
of people captured as thugs by the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in
the 1830s and 1840s were erstwhile soldiers or officials in the employ
of rulers whose states had recently come under British control. These
people were among those who had lost their employment or fallen from
favor as a result of the annexation or reconfiguration of the Indian
princely states.[16] Sandria Freitag on the other hand points to the
displacement of peripatetic groups as a result of the ousting of local
settled rulers who had traditionally provided some protection to such
groups and to the establishment of the land-revenue-based state as a
possible explanation for the instances of collective acts of violence.
She also glosses the violence of dacoits—as of similar groups—as bids
for power and upward social mobility that would have been acknowledged
as such and accommodated by precolonial Indian state formations.[17]
Stewart Gordon argues that the large number of marauding groups that
were jockeying for political power in Malwa (where most of the thugs
seemed to be based) in the late eighteenth century posed a threat to
the stable sources of revenue in the region and necessitated the
creation of external sources of revenue. Those designated thugs were
"locally recruited, locally based" marauders hired to plunder outside
the neighborhood, as it were, in order to make up for revenue that
might have been lost to larger marauding groups.[18]

As I have already mentioned, Englishmen were never targeted by the
thugs; a few of the written accounts attribute the unsolved murder of
a Lieutenant Maunsell (or Monsell) in 1812 to thugs (as does the film
version of The Deceivers [1987], which opens with that killing), but
most of the thuggee texts point to the fact that the British had no
personal investment in the problem. Almost unfailingly these accounts
point to the antithug campaigns as exemplary instances of the active
benevolence of British rule, so often unjustly maligned or compared
unfavorably with indigenous rule. James Sleeman, who is particularly
apoplectic on this issue, argues that twentieth-century Indian demands
for independence were in effect a call for a return to the days of
thuggee: "Had this small handful of British officials, scattered like
poppies in a corn-field, shown the slightest timidity in grappling
with this gigantic task, they would surely have fallen victims to the
Thugs at the outset, in which case millions of Indians alive to-day
would never have been born, including possibly those who now agitate
for a restoration of the conditions under which Thuggee thrived and
battened." [19]

Colonial accounts thus represent thuggee as outside a realm of
political and economic rationality (since it is religiously
sanctioned, grounded in caste, and linked to exorbitant pleasures).
Nonetheless, as the obsessive invocations of the Mutiny of 1857 and of
the Bengal revolutionaries of the twentieth century indicate, thuggee
was simultaneously addressed (even if not overtly acknowledged) as a
peculiarly potent threat to the authority and benevolence of the
empire in India. "To the colonial regime," writes David Arnold, "crime
and politics were almost inseparable: serious crime was an implicit
defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion;
political resistance was either a 'crime' or the likely occasion for
it." [20] Freitag points to the departures of British police action
from those of their Mughal predecessors; while the Mughals delegated
responsibility for containing collective crime to local functionaries,
the British felt such corporate criminal behaviors were nothing other
than a defiance of the state itself.[21] She points to the fundamental
distinctions, in terms of both the allocation of resources and the
formulation of legal procedures, that the Raj made between crimes
committed by individuals ("ordinary crime") and those committed by
collectivities ("extraordinary crime"):

Elaboration of legal codes and police establishments to deal with
individual crime conveyed the impression that "the rule of law" had
been introduced into British India; yet the annual compilation of
crime and police statistics makes clear the minimal state resources
committed to policing individual crime. Unless such crime grew
alarmingly in a short period, or its policing fell significantly short
of what came to be seen as the norms of efficiency (for an inefficient
force), the state did not reckon individual crime to be of great
importance. By contrast, however, the British perceived collectively
criminal actions to be either directed against, or weakening, the
authority of the state. As a consequence, the British repeatedly felt
the need to launch centralized police forces against "extraordinary"
crime and viewed their inefficacy as a measure of the Raj's impotence.
[22]

The thuggee records (including the confessions of thug approvers)
endeavor to provide—through the dominant tropes of ritualized,
religiously ratified, and libidinally charged slaughter—a tightly
knit, seamless, and self-validating account of an exceptional Indian
criminal practice. Yet, even as the record invokes the unvarying
trademarks of thug practice, it inescapably registers the
provisionality of its own categorization. The thug's signature—murder
by strangulation, using a (silk) handkerchief—does not appear in every
act labeled thuggee; swords and poison feature as agents of
destruction quite as much as the talismanic rumal (handkerchief). Such
wide variations along a continuum of criminal activity were to lead,
after the 1830s, to an expansion of the provenance of thuggee: the
term came to include all kinds of organized and corporate criminal
activity (including poisoning and the kidnapping of children) that was
understood to be hereditary and/or itinerant. The confessions also
seem to demonstrate that at least some thugs were initiated into
professional practice not in adolescence or early manhood by older
male family members but later in life, most typically in response to a
situation of financial exigency.

Not only was it difficult to isolate certain crimes as the acts of
thugs, it was never easy either to establish the exceptional and
profoundly aberrant character of thuggee. The common complaint in all
the thuggee accounts without exception is that the activity of the
thugs seemed to mesh with exasperating ease into existing indigenous
networks of wealth and power, since they were supported by zamindars
(landowners), Indian princes, law-enforcement officials, merchants,
and even ordinary people. As Freitag suggests, "among organized
criminals the thags may have been the group most thoroughly embedded
in local society." [23] The worship of Kali (also called Devi, or
Bhawani) could not easily be coded as an eccentric religious practice
either. Though some narratives do interpret the thugs' invocation of
the goddess on the scaffold as proof positive of guilt ("Their
invocation of Bhawani at the drop was a confession of their guilt, for
no one in such a situation invokes Bhawani but a Thug, and he invokes
no other deity in any situation, whatever may be his religion or sect")
[24], they also point to the widespread adoration of Kali across
regions and religions, among those identified as law-abiding as well
as those constituted as criminal.[25] Finally, while Thug beliefs and
rituals, especially those enacted at the start of an expedition, were
elaborately detailed, it was also asserted that in India expeditions
in quest of plunder were qualitatively no different from expeditions
undertaken for territorial aggrandizement; rulers and robbers alike
took the auspices after the Dasehra festival, before setting out on
their badshashi kam (kingly work).

Hence at least two contesting readings emerge: one defines the thugs
as a community apart, existing in enmity against law-abiding,
scrutable, and locally anchored subjects; the other identifies them as
natural to indigenous society, aided and abetted by all, and mirroring
and reproducing that society's values. The uneasy fit between the
contextualizing move and the essentializing one was productive of an
aporia, which could only be resolved by invoking that most powerful of
all Indological epistemes—that of caste.[26] All the contradictions
and the seemingly endless heterogeneity of the subject category of the
thug are subsumed within that category, which is reified as coherent
and inflexible and emptied of any possibility of subjective freedom.
Once thuggee as social alliance was taxonomized as homologous to, if
not identical with (and the slippage from homology to identity occurs
without any apparent discursive strain), a caste, the thug could
simultaneously inhabit what had earlier been discrepant subject
positions: he could simultaneously be an exceptional criminal and a
representative Hindu, or Indian, since in the colonial imaginary the
territory of Hinduism is often coextensive with that of India.[27]
Even this reconciliation was not without its tensions, of course,
since thuggee as a philosophical system and a social formation seemed
to work strongly against the grain of the received colonial view of
India as irrevocably fractured along the fault lines of caste and
religion.

Nor was the caste explanation completely adequate to the great and, as
it seemed, illogical hybridity of thuggee. As a socioreligious
formation thuggee seemed to colonial investigators to be aligned with
popular, indeed demotic, forms of Hinduism in its reverence for Kali,
except that it attracted a large number of Muslim adherents, who
seemed to pay homage quite unproblematically both to the goddess and
to the strictures of the Koran. Here it is important to point to the
varied, contingent, and often irreconcilable constructions of Hindu
tradition in colonial discourse; the representation of Hinduism in the
discourse of thuggee is, for instance, quite discontinuous with that
which is operative in the discourse on sati, which was formulated in a
roughly contemporaneous moment. In the case of sati, as Lata Mani has
argued, colonial officials made energetic and systematic attempts to
establish Hinduism as a religion of the book; and Brahmanical readings
and textual authorities were privileged over custom and local
religious and social practice.[28] But in the instance of thuggee,
Hinduism is defined entirely as and by custom. Moreover, at the
popular or subaltern level, Hindu and Muslim forms of worship and
systems of belief may well have been less distinct than they were to
become (especially for more elevated castes and classes) later in the
century. The whole question in fact of Hindu doctrine and praxis and
its relation to thug identity is notoriously murky and ill defined.

Further complicating this discursive construction of thuggee was the
fact that professional thugs cultivated the appearance of the most
civic-minded of citizens and were conscientious about the discharge of
familial, social, and religious obligations. The very characteristics
that made them successful con men—their polish, their social and
rhetorical skills, their extraordinary capacity for duplicating
identities—also ensured their immense respectability in civil society.
But what rendered thuggee particularly elusive and frustrating to
British observers was its relative invisibility, its skill at
camouflage, and the difficulty of establishing it as a pervasive yet
eccentric form of lawlessness. Thug murders were typically performed
without shedding blood and without using identifiable offensive
weapons of any kind: they were performed far from the victims' homes,
and the bodies were carefully buried. Because of the care exercised in
the killing and the disposal of the corpses (victims were buried with
great dispatch, and their graves were filled with rocks to keep out
any marauding animals) and the hazards attendant upon travel in
nineteenth-century India, these murders generally failed to register
as murders. Local landowners, rulers, and policemen connived at these
murders for their own benefit, or because they were prompted, it was
argued, by the heavy demands of superstition; and the peasantry, we
are told, simply ignored the bodies that occasionally appeared in
fields and wells. This raised the question of how far the circuit of
criminality actually extended: if local officials and the police
tolerated and even encouraged thuggee and ordinary folk made no
complaint about it, who could be said to remain unimplicated in it?
Under the circumstances, everything and everyone was liable to
suspicion, since the system of thuggee was both remarkably inclusive
and remarkably discreet in its operations. Hence British thuggee
inspectors were in the discomfiting position of focusing on crimes
that no one else acknowledged, certainly not (from the evidence of
these writers) most Indian princes or zamindars or even common folk
and generally not even the majority of the British magistracy or the
civil service. British scholars of thuggee were thus involved in a
detective project hobbled by an almost-fatal lack of empirical detail.
All natives were potentially thugs, since the system of thuggee was
remarkably inclusive; and the most seemingly innocent objects, like
handkerchiefs or gur (unrefined sugar, ritually consumed at the
commencement of an expedition), could participate in a diabolical
signifying system. And while British ignorance of thuggee (at least
until the 1830s) might contrast favorably with Indian knowledge—and
therefore complicity—it was susceptible of more objectionable
interpretations; in Masters's novel, there is the danger that British
"ignorance" of thuggee can be read by the natives in a particularly
unflattering light: "In the nine years of the English Company's rule
nothing had been done against the Deceivers. But William realized now
that most Indians knew at least of the existence of the Deceivers;
and, knowing, they could not believe the English did not also know;
therefore the English officials too were sharing in the spoils; so
what was the use of informing?" [29] (In the film version, the Indians
have good reason to be suspicious: George Angelsmith, the exemplary
servant of the East India Company, has full knowledge of the
activities of the thugs and profits from it.) Here it is not simply
the natives who are the object of investigation, codification, and
supervision; an alternative modality of interpretation is imaginable,
in which colonial authority is itself open to variant readings,
including those it has not authorized.

All these factors made the retrieval of information and the policing
of thuggee particularly vexing. And creating an archive and
standardizing reader response was not easy either. Though each thuggee
expedition and each act of thuggee was performed by the book, attended
by minutely detailed rituals and scrupulously observed omens, and was
immediately identifiable as such to those who could read the signs, it
was not immediately visible as such to those who could not or did not
see thuggee as a semiosis. Even in the 1860s, when knowledge about
thuggee had been codified, circulated, and reproduced and was
underwritten by wide-ranging institutional and legal support, Charles
Hervey complained that his subordinates were yet imperfect readers of
the complex and mysterious text of thuggee,

some correctly recognizing Thuggee in instances which were palpably
the deed of experts, although death should not have taken place;
others only doing so where death had resulted; some classing certain
murders as cases of "Thuggee" without reference to the means resorted
to in the perpetration thereof; others who wholly pass by cases of
poisoning whether followed by death or not, although they bore
evidence of being the acts of class criminals; some who restrict their
notice to selected cases only of its occurrence, passing by other
similar instances; some who endeavour to distinguish between different
degrees of poisoning, some calling "murder by poison" Thugee [sic],
others not doing so[;]…others who lump all such kindred offences under
round numbers without any narration of the attendant circumstances,
contented only with quoting against them the sections of the Penal
Code under which they were triable or were tried.[30]

With all the discrepant valences of this discourse, one factor
remained crucial in the determination of thuggee: the idea of
hereditary criminality. This was not a particularly novel reading of
corporate criminal activity in colonial India; as far back as 1772,
the dacoits of Bengal were strenuously and repeatedly characterized
not as individual or collective subjects responding to socioeconomic
transformations engendered by the sudden ascendancy of the East India
Company or indeed to any other material circumstance, or even to
chance, but as fulfilling a hereditary calling, if not a genetic
predisposition.[31] And, as Sanjay Nigam has convincingly
demonstrated, the colonial reification of caste as coherent and
inflexible, combined with the received notion of hereditary
criminality (most fully exemplified in the instance of thuggee), was
to have a long and ominous history in colonial and postcolonial India;
the Criminal Tribes and Castes Act of 1872 was to designate (without
any possibility of appeal) a number of vagrant and impoverished
"communities" as "criminal by birth" and thus subject to surveillance,
control, and attempted rehabilitation.[32] I am struck here by the
considerable (though not complete) overlap of this discourse with
Michel Foucault's description of the emergence of the homosexual as a
distinct ontological category in the nineteenth century:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case
history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life
form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and a mysterious
physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was
unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the
root of all his actions because it was their insidious and
indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body
because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was
cosubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular
nature.…The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual
was now a species.[33]

Because thuggee was such a slippery issue, a kind of legal,
disciplinary, and discursive apparatus was brought to bear on it that
did not occur in the case for instance of sati, another retrograde and
horrific practice apparently authorized by Hinduism. This is not of
course to assert that sati as a discursive formation was unproblematic
for colonial administrators and reformers; Lata Mani has pointed that
the abolition of sati in colonial India was preceded by its
legalization and has drawn attention to the valorization of the
"voluntary" sati in colonial and nationalist discourses. But thuggee
was not so much spectacular—as sati was (at least until 1829)—as
invisible. As a result it was much more difficult to discursively
track its trajectory and to determine the success of the pacification.
Sati was abolished in 1829, and there are no official records after
that date of the practice; it was presumed that it had simply been
legislated out of existence. But in the instance of thuggee, such
faith in the efficacy of legislative sanction is much more uncertain.

In the juridical domain, thuggee was defined as an "exceptional case"
in the name of a colonial contingency, since thuggee by definition was
exorbitant to standard law-and-order discourse and marked at all
points by immoderation.[34] This enabled the establishment of a
discursive and juridical system that was entirely self-referential and
self-validating, in which it was sufficient to be identified as a thug
or "hereditary criminal" through an approver's testimony, without
actually being convicted of a specific crime, to be liable to arrest,
trial, and, almost inevitably, conviction. I will return to this
shortly.

Knowledge of thuggee as an essence then had to be constructed,
crucially, around an absence; and all the confessions, all the subject
effects produced by the testimony of approvers, were a strenuous
effort to recover a "consciousness," a consciousness that would
provide the foundation for the revelations that ratified the antithug
campaign. But if thuggee was as far-reaching and as subtle as W. H.
Sleeman and his associates insisted, and if thug ontology and practice
was determined by birth, how could an Englishman ever hope to know the
whole truth and nothing but the truth? How could one verify the
confessions of the approvers and establish checks over their control
of the official record? Thornton registers exasperation at the
contaminated nature of the confessions: "Few things are more difficult
to a native of India than to tell the truth, under any circumstances;
and the confessions of criminals, in all countries, may be expected to
contain a mixture of truth and falsehood. The deposition of Moklal is
not consistent with the rest; nor even with another statement made by
himself, made in conversation with Captain Sleeman." [35] He also
cites (as do other accounts of thuggee) the instance of an approver
who functioned as a double agent, beguiling his English employer into
believing him committed to the capture of thugs while providing
information and English passes [documents authorizing unimpeded travel
within, and between, designated territories] to his criminal comrades.
[36]

While James Sleeman claims that W. H. Sleeman and his colleagues, in
the 1830s, "resolved that this trade of Thuggee should no longer be
any more a mystery than tailoring or carpentering, began to initiate
themselves into all the secrets of the craft, and were soon, in their
knowledge of the theory of the profession, little behind the
professors themselves," [37] the "secrecy" of thuggee never
disappeared as a threat. W. H. Sleeman—speaking of course with the
superior wisdom of his newfound knowledge—records a state preceding
revelation with combined horror and incredulity:

While I was in the Civil charge of the district of Nursingpore…no
ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my being
acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or a thief of the ordinary
kind in the district, with whose character I had not become acquainted
in the discharge of my duty as magistrate; and if any man had then
told me, that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village
of Kandelee, not four hundred yards from my court, and that [in the]
extensive groves of the village of Mandesur, only one stage from me…
was one of the largest Beles, or places of murder in all India; and
that large gangs from Hindustan and the Deccan used to rendezvous in
these groves, remain in them for many days altogether every year, and
carry their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by
and branch off them, with the knowledge and connivance of the two
landholders by whose ancestors these groves had been planted, I should
have thought him a fool or a mad man; and yet nothing could have been
more true.[38]

Indeed, the entire discourse of thuggee is troped by figures of
darkness, mystery, inscrutability, unpredictability, and unexpected
menace, even as W. H. Sleeman and his assistants are inserted into a
heroic narrative of battle against evil. "Secrecy is indispensable"
for thug ceremonies, and "[a]n impenetrable veil of darkness is thrown
over their atrocities";[39] "danger was everywhere, unseen and
unexpected" [40] for the Englishmen involved in the anti-thuggee
enterprise (even though Englishmen were known never to be attacked by
thugs); they were like "men isolated in the midst of a dangerous,
trackless and gloomy jungle, without map or compass";[41] and "[the]
old Thug Associations, which have been now effectually put down in all
parts of India,…would assuredly rise up again, and flourish under the
assurance of religious sanction,…were the strength of the special
police, employed in the suppression, hastily reduced, or its vigilance
relaxed." [42] Once again, Foucault on the discourse of sex and
sexuality is apropos: "What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact,
is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they
dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting
it as the secret." [43]

This very obscurity, this elusiveness that characterizes the thug as
discursive object, could and did function as an enabling moment for
the colonial law-and-order machine. Since it could never be decisively
established—given the terms of the discourse—that thuggee had been
extirpated, the need for endless vigilance was ratified. The moral
viability of the civilizing mission, indeed the very ground of its
possibility, is the never-satisfied, endlessly proliferating need for
reform. In the case of thuggee, colonial officials were confirmed in
their belief that the work of civilizing is never done. Thus many
writers warn repeatedly of the dangers of celebrating the demise of
thuggee prematurely; in 1893, Charles Hervey, successor to Colonel W.
H. Sleeman of thuggee fame, was still chasing after thugs. These
officers point not only to the hypnotic lure of thuggee for its
practitioners but also to the fact that native policemen and landlords
are only too anxious to conceal evidence of thug crimes from credulous
British officials overeager to congratulate themselves on the
cessation of this practice and overoptimistic about the all-
encompassing vigilance of colonial power. Thuggee never really goes
away as a present problem as sati might be said to do; it may almost
be said to function as a trope for all that is uncontrollable in the
law-and-order situation. In fact, the construction of hereditary,
pervasive, and socially or religiously sanctioned criminality
inaugurated in the discourse on thuggee reappears throughout the
nineteenth century in the discourse on dacoits, buddhuks, dhatoora
poisoners (all of whom came to occupy the same criminal category as
the thug), and specifically designated criminal tribes and castes.

How else might we understand this absence or unknowability that tropes
the discourse of thuggee? Certainly this simultaneous fear of and
pleasure in the duplicity and omnipresence of the thug deserves some
consideration, especially in light of the questions it raises about
the status of knowledge, subject positions, and representation in the
colonial state. Bhabha's model of the emergence of shifty civil
subject of the colonial polity through mimicry can be extended here,
it seems to me, to some of the other possibilities of mimicry in the
colonial theater.[44] The situation of the thug is analogous to but
certainly not identical to that of the not quite/not white native—the
thug after all is not mimicking colonial ontology—though his capacity
for traffic in identities and positions is staggering. The instance of
thuggee intimates, I think, that the colonized subject's mimicry need
not necessarily have the colonizer as its focus in order to function
as menace; mimicry, even if it is mimicry of indigenous subject
positions, frustrates the colonial desire for homogenized, duplicable,
and knowable native subjects in whom subalternity is sought to be
reproduced through the authorized version of mimicry. If there is one
thing that characterizes the thug of the archives, it is the
multiplicity and unpredictability of his manifestations. As we have
seen, it was what was perceived as this faculty for disguise and
invisibility that had to be criminalized by the laws designed to
convict thugs; theoretically there was no such entity as an honest
thug, and many so-called thugs were convicted who were, according to
the official records, engaged in "honest labour." There is an ongoing
and strenuous endeavor in the discourse of thuggee to interpellate the
thug as an essence, a move which attests to the anxiety of rupture
that subtends the totalizing epistemologies of colonialism. Yet the
thug as discursive object is strikingly resistant to such fixity; he
is all things to all people. If native identity can be staged, can be
plural, then what are the implications for colonial authority and
colonialism's project of information retrieval? Thuggee, I would
suggest, introduces a disturbance in the paradigm of information
retrieval that often seems dominant in texts like Kim and A Personal
Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, as well as the
notion of native authenticity and ontological purity that is a
governing trope of colonial discourse. The thug, through his capacity
for disguise and impersonation and his skill at negotiating multiple
and competing identities, usurps the colonizer's privilege of complex
subjectivity and of movement between subject positions and thus can be
read to assume some control over both the construction and flow of
colonial knowledge. So he never becomes fully naturalized as the
disciplinary subject or, in other words, the knowable subject, of the
colonial polity. And thuggee, later rewritten as dacoity, continues to
function within the law-and-order context in the colonial and
postcolonial state formations as a trope for the unruly and
unreformable energies that cannot easily be accommodated to the needs
of the civilizing mission.[45]

• • •

The Law

The writings and reports of W. H. Sleeman, which form the core texts
around which the tale of thuggee is orchestrated, represent a
concerted and monumental effort to illuminate and classify the
obscurity of thuggee. Sleeman emerges, in both nineteenth- and
twentieth-century accounts of thuggee, as the hero of his own story.
Even those works, like George Bruce's The Stranglers and James
Sleeman's Thug, or A Million Murders, that purport to be histories of
the thugs rather than biographies, present the account of thuggee as
coextensive with the life of Sleeman. Sleeman emerges from these texts
(and his own, of course) as an exemplary figure in nineteenth-century
criminal and judicial procedures, who undertakes a self-appointed
messianic task of uncovering and reading. Nothing in his story happens
by chance. The discovery of the scope of thuggee as a result of
Feringheea's confession is (re)written as an inevitability in the task
of reconstructing thuggee, and Sleeman's anti-thuggee efforts traced
back to the moment of his arrival in India in 1809. All of Sleeman's
life and work before 1830 is thus written as a prelude to the
climactic scenes of thug hunting and as a preparation for reading the
mysteries of this esoteric Indian cult. Sleeman above all is
transformed in this telling into an almost Saidean figure of
knowledge; he is the shikari (hunter) who, with his gift of languages,
long residence in India without being "Orientalized," and experience
in war and in settling newly conquered territories, can present an
ideal model of the exegete. Though a crime like thuggee is quite
literally inconceivable to those "living under an efficient
government," Sleeman is no Inspector Clouseau, no naive Englishman who
stumbles unaware upon a vast organized conspiracy. He knows what he is
looking for; indeed, Tuker's biography imagines Sleeman becoming the
butt of his colleagues' jokes during his early years in India because
of his eagerness to "discover" thuggee.[46] In this telling, thuggee
predates Sleeman; indeed, it is as old as India itself. Yet the text
of thuggee remains unread until Sleeman, the reader-as-savior,
provides the hermeneutic key to the mystery. He establishes the
exceptional quality of thuggee, distinguishing it from outlawry,
banditry, and other illegalities necessitated by privation; he
establishes the story of thuggee as a moral narrative and embeds it in
the culture of an Orientalist India.

The man whose ideal was, like that of a Sherlock Holmes, "to be
everywhere, and to see everything," [47] proved phenomenally successful
—in his own terms—at cracking the code of thuggee. He showed a
remarkable capacity—far greater than that of Sherwood or even that of
the few officers who had harassed the thugs in the early decades of
the century—to globalize and codify discrete accounts of crimes in
different times and places into a metanarrative of hereditary crime.
On the evidence of approvers, he created gigantic and detailed "family
trees" of captured and uncaptured thugs that provided copious details
of each man's crimes, place of origin, place in the caste hierarchy,
and personal and professional antecedents; he also mapped out all the
bhils (places of slaughter and burial) in central India. Every thug
could then be located on Sleeman's gigantic grid, and information and
operations were centralized. The local knowledge of the approvers now
became part of a giant signifying chain. For the thug, there was no
escape: his history and his nature were always already known to the
all-seeing eyes of the colonial bureaucracy and criminal-justice
system; his experience formed a narrative even before he made his
confession and was in no way dependent on it. As Ameer Ali says in
Confessions of a Thug, "The man unfolded a roll of paper written in
Persian, and read a catalogue of crime, of murders, every one of which
I knew to be true; a faithful record it was of my past life, with but
few omissions." [48] Sleeman also prepared a dictionary of Ramasee,
the secret language of the criminal fraternity, with a vocabulary made
up entirely of descriptions of criminal actions. This linguistic,
geographic, and genealogical grid left out little that was germane to
the needs of criminal justice in colonial India:

I have, I believe, entered in this vocabulary every thing to which
Thugs in any part of India have thought it necessary to assign a
peculiar term; and every term peculiar to their associations with
which I have yet become acquainted. I am satisfied that there is no
term, no rite, no ceremony, no opinion, no omen or usage that they
have intentionally concealed from me; and if any have been
accidentally omitted after the numerous narratives that I have had to
record, and cases to investigate, they can be but comparatively very
few and unimportant.[49]

The doctrine of thuggee was not simply a novel yet apposite way of
reading Indian criminality at a moment when the pressures to reform
the East India Company by reforming India were particularly marked.
The consequences of the discovery of thuggee were, in other words, not
simply a philosophical reconstellation of Indian criminality. Thuggee
also gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of policing and
surveillance techniques, as well as ethnographic documentation. Like
the system it purported to study, the discourse on thuggee was
totalizing in its scope. In the juridical domain, thuggee was defined
as an "exceptional case"; this enabled the establishment of a
radically new machinery of arrest, conviction, and punishment in thug
trials. The production of penal truth in thug trials proved, as we
have seen, notoriously difficult. Since thugs were peripatetic
operatives, who always committed their crimes far from home and
disposed of their plunder quickly, evidence was not only destroyed but
questions were raised about jurisdictional authority. Local
functionaries were not just uncooperative; many were allegedly bound
by a utilitarian calculus to thug gangs. In addition, the relatives of
the putative victims displayed no zeal in the punishment of crime or
the redress of wrongs; the vast majority refused to identify those
missing as murdered at all. This uncooperative behavior was attributed
to their fatalistic acceptance of all disasters (including,
apparently, cholera, poisonous snakes, and sudden death). Even when
thugs were captured, convicting them was rendered even more
troublesome by the fact that Muslim criminal law disallowed the
testimony of approvers.

The lack of independent witnesses, the unavailability in many cases of
both bodies and booty—the sheer paucity of positivist evidence, in
other words—could only be resolved in one way. The most important
criminal conspiracy of the century (of all time, some of the authors
claimed) could be adequately engaged only by a new conception of law.
Many of the tactics adopted by those spearheading the antithug drive
were not novel but had been pioneered earlier in Bengal; however, it
was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department's use of these tactics that
proved not only successful but replicable.[50] Since the law as
currently defined made the complicity of individuals in particular
crimes almost impossible to establish, specific criminal acts were no
longer punishable as such. Instead, it was a subject position, or
rather, an ontology, that was criminalized. It was enough to be a
thug, without actually being convicted of a specific act of thuggee,
to be liable to the exorbitant measures of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department. As Radhika Singha wrote, "The strangest feature of this
enactment was the use of a cant term 'Thugs' without explaining what
precisely the offence of 'Thuggee' was. That such a term was
acceptable at a time when a penal code upholding precision and
exactness was on the agenda is an indication of the success of a
publicist campaign in official circles." [51] Act XXX of 1836 directed
that any person who was convicted of "having belonged to a gang of
Thugs, [was] liable to the penalty of imprisonment for life; and
[that] any person, accused of the offence, made punishable by the Act,
[was] liable to be tried by any Court, which would have been competent
to try him, if his offence had been committed within the district
where that Court sits." [52] (Act XXIV of 1843 extended the punitive
sanctions of the thuggee laws to those found guilty of belonging to
dacoit gangs.) Act XXX also dispensed with the last vestiges of Muslim
criminal law (which is said to have provided greater protections for
the accused and greater clemency for the convicted than the Thuggee
and Dacoity Department thought advisable for those standing trial as
thugs) by doing away with the necessity for the fatwa (formal legal
opinion) of the Muslim law officer. It applied with retrospective
effect, and it established special courts for the trial of thugs—
including those captured outside company territory, within the
kingdoms of the Indian princes—often with special magistrates
appointed by the governor-general. It permitted the arrest of entire
families, including women and children, as legitimate means of
entrapping active (male) thugs; since thuggee was supposed to be a
family affair anyway, transmitted in the genes and passed on from
father to son, wives and children were also fit targets for the
colonial state's punitive and corrective measures. The act admitted
the testimony of approvers in lieu of the testimony of independent
witnesses (which had been disallowed under Islamic law), a move which
created a remarkable mechanics of truth production and conviction.
(Act XIX of 1837, under the direction of Macaulay, did away with this
"dual standard of evidence" in criminal law by making the testimony of
approvers admissible in all courts of law, not just those prosecuting
cases of thuggee.)[53] Yet it is by no means to be assumed that
empiricism and observation were peripheral to the process, though it
was observation of a very carefully demarcated kind; there is in the
colonial archive an overwhelming weight given to the experiential
dimension of the knowledge of such canonical figures as Sleeman. All
disagreements encountered on the British side are attributed to
inexperience, to the lack of a proper interpretive framework within
which to place certain kinds of discoveries, or to a willful
ingenuousness about the success of British rule.

The definition of thuggee as a form of hereditary, corporate, and
religiously sanctioned identity allowed for no appeal by a thug
convicted under its special decrees; in theory—and in practice—there
was no such entity as an innocent thug. All those identified as thugs
by approvers' testimony were automatically guilty, even if no specific
crimes could be proved against them and even if there was no (other)
evidence of their ever having associated with other thugs. Once the
thug hunts began, criminal activity was not always necessary for
arrest and conviction; even those "thugs" engaged in "honest
labour" (a theoretical impossibility, given the terms of the
discourse) were rounded up, tried, convicted, and imprisoned since the
compelling, hereditary lure of thuggee was always latent in the thug.
An overwhelmingly high proportion of those arrested were convicted, a
fact which validated, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department believed, the
thoroughness of its efforts and the justice of its cause.

Confessions were key to the discursive constitution of thuggee; not so
much at the actual thug trials as in the manifold accounts of thuggee
that were produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Meadows
Taylor's novel, as far as structural organization is concerned, reads
not very differently from the nonfictional official accounts of
thuggee: a brief introduction followed by hundreds of pages of
confession, interspersed more and more intermittently by the
narrator's moral commentary. The confessional mode lent itself nicely
to the narrative conventions and imperatives of the nineteenth-century
English novel, which encompassed both the Newgate novel and the
spiritual autobiography.

One of the best approvers, Bukhtawar, provided a confession (which I
quoted at the beginning of this chapter) that was a model for all thug
confessions: "I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I
have thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its
work." [54] The confessions serve not to elicit what is not already
known but to authenticate and authorize official knowledge of thuggee
in general and specific crimes in particular, as well as to produce
the thug as (colonial) criminal subject. For Foucault, the confession
"transcend[s] all other evidence; an element in the calculation of the
truth, it [is] also the act by which the accused accept[s] the charge
and recognize[s] its truth; it transform[s] an investigation carried
out without him into a voluntary affirmation. Through the confession,
the accused himself [takes] part in the ritual of producing penal
truth." [55] In the eyes of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, a
failure to confess was evidence less of innocence than of hardihood
and an acquaintance with the byzantine ramifications of Indian
criminal law.

And yet these confessions that dominate and drive all accounts of
thuggee are not confessions as such, but approver's testimonies; the
two, as Shahid Amin so appositely reminds us, are not identical. For
while the confession proper seeks to dilute the guilt of the
confessing subject, the approver's testimony, to be fully credible in
the eyes of the law, must implicate its speaker as fully as possible
in the illegality being described.[56]

The fact that approvers' testimony was "tainted" and that they might
either wittingly or unwittingly implicate the innocent was undeniably
an issue, though anxiety on the score was aired only to be promptly
shown up as unfounded. The thuggee records continually stress the ways
in which the truth of each approver's testimony was tested against all
the others. But even in these official accounts, it does not escape
remark that the approvers' testimony regarding dates and other details
do not always match,[57] though all discursive contradictions are
always sought to be smoothed away. Bruce, who is the only one to raise
overtly the possibility of the conviction of the innocent, blames not
the system but its most visible instruments, the approvers: "Were
innocent men convicted upon the evidence of revengeful informers?.…
Those Thugs who were no longer free to strangle on the roads may have
conspired together to send victims to the gallows instead, for by
killing in this way they could at once show Kali their continued
devotion and save their own lives." [58] These testimonies were not
required, under Act XXX, to be matched against the reports of
independent witnesses or against the weight of circumstantial
evidence; and none of the accused had the benefit of counsel, so the
approvers were never cross-examined by anyone other than the officers
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department.

Even though the approvers were indispensable for forming the text of
thuggee and for prosecuting thugs, their own status remained somewhat
nebulous. On making "a full and ingenuous confession," an approver
would be eligible to have his sentence of hanging or transportation
commuted. But an approver could never be released, since the lure of
the rumal made him irreclaimable for honest society. It was also
necessary that all approvers be convicted (not just arrested) thugs,
since it was contrary to the nature of British justice to hold its
subjects indefinitely without trial. How, though, could the government
convict approvers when it had no evidence except for what they
provided? The solution was to advise approvers to plead guilty to the
general charge of being thugs, under the provisions of Act XXX, rather
than to plead guilty to the charge of committing specific capital
crimes (which could result in the death penalty); this would ensure
their conviction, and then they could be held for life without
questioning the authority that held them.[59] It was easier and more
useful to hold approvers than to hang them; and they needed to be held
forever in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of truths
about thuggee. The above proceeding did away with the necessity of a
regular trial (that is to say, one conducted under the special courts
established by Act XXX) by having one whose outcome was known in
advance; and it guaranteed that there would be no escape from the
government's mercy.

Truth production and conviction was only part of the job of the
Thuggee and Dacoity Department. Rehabilitation was also part of the
program, though the official wisdom on rehabilitation was marked by
considerable ambivalence. To be a part of a moral narrative, the
antithug campaign could not be purely punitive in nature, especially
in the instance of those prisoners who had not been convicted of
particular capital crimes. At the same time, if thugs were hereditary
murderers who found the call to blood irresistible, they were not
reformable subjects. The government's response to the problem of
identity and rehabilitation was, even in its own terms, a markedly
uneven and patently hierarchized one. Some of the most distinguished
among the thugs were recruited into the police force. Some others were
rewarded by W. H. Sleeman by being allowed to live near him with their
families and followers in his compound, an arrangement about which
Freitag observes: "The similarity between the spatial and
psychological configurations of his compound and those of thag-
landlord relations in a village is not coincidental." [60] Other thug
approvers and prisoners and their families were settled in colonies
and put to manual labor; from being dishonest and itinerant, they were
compelled to be poor and settled. The focus of reform was the children
of the thugs: they were taught various skills, though not taught to
read and write (because it would make them dissatisfied with their
condition). The sexuality of the sons of the thugs was strictly
regulated; they were not allowed to marry and breed a new generation
of thugs. (A female thug was a rarity and was, presumably, a less
potent conduit of the genetic material of hereditary criminality than
was a male.)

Mature thugs, however, were less easily assimilable into a regime of
morality and normalcy. Even captured thugs and informers emerge in the
reports as notoriously impervious to all efforts at moral
transformation. They repudiate repentance and reform, ascribing their
cooperation entirely to pragmatic motives and describing their
activities in professional terms, without the obligatory change of
heart normally central to the confessional narrative. Not only that,
they understand their present circumstances in terms of their failure
to observe omens and follow proscriptions and to be fully professional
about their work; the official success against themselves is simply
the result of the East India Company's iqbal (good fortune), not its
moral or religious superiority or even its greater strategic skill.
They seem to refuse in other words to be drawn into the moral
narrative of the civilizing mission (though it must always be
remembered that the production of the thug as unreformable subject was
not necessarily contrary to the aims of the discourse on thuggee). The
following is a typical exchange; the questioner is presumably W. H.
Sleeman, the respondents thug informers:

Q:
If Davey's displeasure visits all who punish Thugs, how is it that you
all escape so well?

Moradun:
Davey's anger visited us when we were seized. That was the effect of
her resentment; she cast us off then and takes no notice of us now.

Q:
And if you were to return to Thuggee, she would still guide and
protect you?

Moradun:
Yes, but what gang would now receive us?

Q:
And are you not afraid to assist in suppressing Thuggee?

Moradun:
No; we see God is assisting you, and that Davey has withdrawn her
protection on account of our transgressions. We have sadly neglected
her worship. God knows in what it will all end.

Q:
True, God only knows; but we hope it will end in the entire
suppression of this wicked and foolish system; and in the conviction
on your part that Davey has really nothing to do with it.

Nasir:
That Davey instituted Thuggee, and supported it as long as we attended
to her omens, and observed the rules framed by the wisdom of our
ancestors, nothing in the world can ever make us doubt.[61]

• • •

The Englishman

This section, on The Deceivers, John Masters's novel about thuggee,
serves as a (deconstructive) supplement to the official narrative of
the thug, in taking up some of the questions and figures that occupy a
recessive status in that account. Here we see that if the thug of the
archive provides one (admittedly slippery and fixed at the same time)
model of staging identities, there is another model that is crucial
for a comprehension of the thug-English engagement. This model is the
obverse of the process that generates the mimic man of colonial
discourse; it is the lure of going native. The term here both
resonates with and fails to correspond to the mimetic model provided
by Burton in the last chapter.[62] The will to mimicry governs
(Indian) thug and Englishman alike, as we shall see in The Deceivers,
where the plot is driven—as is the thug archive—by a fascination with
the absent and never fully recuperable thug. In engaging this
scenario, the novel also recasts the paradigmatic narrative of
mimicry, in which the native may mimic the colonizer but without any
access to essential Englishness, while the colonizer can trade
identities freely, with no strings attached, without actually being
interpellated as a colonized subject. The Deceivers makes manifest the
precariousness of such self-possession.

The dialectical dependence of the fantasy of complete knowledge on the
paranoid fear of native inscrutability is staged in this novel, where
there is a suturing of the ostensibly antithetical figures of the
English policeman and the thug approver. This novel allows for an
examination of the tension between the received wisdom about thuggee
and some of the marginal issues located at the pressure points of the
official discourse. This novel tells the story of William Savage, a
mediocre and distinctly unheroic English magistrate. Wracked by sexual
and professional anxieties, an alienated subject of the British
colonial machine in India, and sneakingly sympathetic to such Indian
customs as sati, he transforms himself into the exemplary colonial
officer by taking on—albeit temporarily—the calling of the thug. At
the urging of his young wife, Mary, he initially takes on the persona
of the absent Gopal the weaver in order to save Gopal's wife from
sati; he, however, meets the renegade thug Hussein and decides to
continue as Gopal in order to track down the thugs. Once he assumes
the role, he finds himself powerfully drawn to the practice and goes
on to become a noted thug leader. He does not continue as a thug, of
course—even though at one point Hussein suggests to Savage that the
East India Company become a sponsor of thugs, like the other rulers of
the land; with a little help from his newly (re)constructed
Englishness and his friends, he returns to propriety at the end. (The
Merchant Ivory film production is even more skeptical than the novel
is of the progressivist teleology of the civilizing mission, as well
as of its "success": in the film, George Angelsmith is led off in
chains, but Savage, estranged from his wife and his Christian god and
unable to prevent the sati that he has actually made possible, is
destined to be perpetually haunted by Kali.)

The Deceivers considers the unspoken and unspeakable possibility that
subtends so much of colonial discourse: what if identity can be
unhinged from race and national origin? And if (racial/national)
identity is unstable and subject to negotiation with each crossing of
a frontier, then in the name of what telos or destiny does Englishness
speak? What if, as R. Radhakrishnan so compellingly asks, on the
subject of diasporic, transnational culture, "identities and
ethnicities are not a matter of fixed and stable selves but rather the
results and products of fortuitous travels and recontextualizations?…
Is ethnicity nothing but, to use the familiar formula, what ethnicity
does?" [63] In the more lurid enactments of this alternative history,
a Kurtz, representing the loftiest intellectual and ethical
possibilities of the Enlightenment, can "go native" in the Dark
Continent. But, closer to "home," there were, as Arnold has revealed,
more troubling English subjects—those poor white orphans and vagrants
(who were to have their own moment of glory in Kim) who lived lives
not often distinguishable from those of lower-class Indians.[64]
William Savage, the protagonist of The Deceivers, is located somewhere
between these two subject positions.

Despite the putative restoration to wholeness, Englishness, and
legality of William Savage at the close of the story, the narrative
nonetheless opens up a space for investigating the "double and split
subject" of the colonial enunciation, for what Bhabha calls—in the
context of the nation's fissured enunciation—"dissemi-nation": "a
space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the
heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic
authorities, and tense cultural locations." [65] As in the case of so
many other Englishmen, Savage will have to turn to Indianness in order
to return to or consolidate or improve his English self; in doing so,
he will come back as a new and more English Englishman, but he will
also, temporarily at least, be transformed into a border subject,
changed by his experience of Indianness, surrendering illusions of
full autonomy and Englishness in the crossing of boundaries. Here I
invoke Burton again as a point of reference. Burton had an
occasionally vexed relationship with national identity: his ancestry
was partly Irish and Welsh, and he grew up on the Continent, only
coming to live in England in his late teens. Yet for him identity,
whatever guises it might assume and however far it might roam, is
usually more persuasively anchored than is that of Masters's
protagonist in an imperial Englishness. Burton can be, at different
times, a West Asian merchant or a Muslim hajji, but his identities are
clearly hierarchized and more manipulable than Savage's. While the
success of his passing is always, in a sense, conditional upon his
being a man from elsewhere/nowhere, he can also claim nativeness as
his own production, wrenching an (imaginary) autonomy from the
dominion of necessity. Savage passes through Indianness en route to
Englishness, but, unlike Burton, he cannot pass in and out without
constraint. Indianness, while indispensable to Englishness, must also
be violently cast out if Englishness is to be secure(d). In The
Deceivers, identity is the locus of strain and contradiction. For
Savage, identity cannot be expansive, assimilationist, and pluralist;
each new identity competes with and displaces the last. That is why
Savage can at the end afford to take no prisoners or recruit any
approvers from among his erstwhile comrades; the thugs whom he has led
and who are now pursuing him must be wiped out in an act of punitive
and frenzied brutality that not only precludes the need for approvers
but also does away with any witnesses against, and rem(a)inders of,
his own thug self.

The Deceivers stages, indeed foregrounds, the positionality and
politics of that ordinarily self-effacing hero of thug narration, the
investigator, and the plurality of determinations that produces him.
In this context, Gayatri Spivak's cautionary reminders about the
urgent necessity of disallowing the neutrality of the intellectual or
investigator should be borne in mind. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
she proffers a critique of the sanctioned myopia of the Foucault and
Deleuze of "Intellectuals and Power," who are unable or unwilling to
acknowledge the complicity of the intellectual in the mechanisms that
produce representations of subaltern subjects and groups and who fail
to recognize that subaltern subjects are constrained to fashion
themselves in terms of already scripted epistemologies.[66] Her
introduction to Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" resonates with, and
provides another useful point of entry into, this problematic of
reading and engagement; the usefulness of deconstruction, she tells
us, lies in "the recognition,…of provisional and intractable starting
points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities
where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence
that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself
complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon 'history'
and upon the ethico-political as the 'trace' of that complicity—the
proof that we do not inhabit a clearly defined critical space free of
such traces." [67] Where in the archives the English scribe was
progressively effaced from the scene of the crime as well as the scene
of writing, no such modesty is permitted the protagonist of Masters's
novel. The novel accents above all his position of enunciation. He
cannot be, as in the normative thug account, the neutral conduit of
something clearly identified as a thug consciousness: the thug's voice
cannot but inscribe Savage as both subject and object of his own
discourse.

The central aspect of Savage's mission is not merely to bear witness;
he must above all produce a record, transform that irreducible
obscurity, that absence that is Indian corporate criminal activity,
into what Spivak terms an "interpretable text." This of course was the
primary gift of Sleeman and his associates to the criminal justice
system in colonial India—to synthesize various and discrepant
occurrences as a semiosis under centralized control; against thuggee—
conceived of as a vast, well-articulated, and centralized conspiracy—
could be opposed the concentrated power/knowledge of the state. What
is required is a text and a model of reading that is reproducible in
the different temporalities and contexts of the colonial polity in
India. However, the novel intimates the limitations and complexities
of authorial intention. Savage produces his account in a condition of
profound subjective instability, opening his text up to multiple and
mutually contentious readings: "He had met hundreds of other
Deceivers, and the notes were a complete tale of all he had seen and
heard and done; of all the Deceivers who had engaged in any action,
with their descriptions, habits, and homes; of each murder, and how it
had gone, and how it might have been prevented—or improved upon. The
words could be read for either purpose, according to the spirit of the
reader" (p. 223). Above all, Savage's account draws attention to the
transactional nature of reading. What ought to be a classic of
information retrieval and a master text on thuggee for colonial
authority is also a text for other thugs, a manual for reproducing
thug practice. Savage's text (within the text of the Masters novel),
even though cast in the model of strict representational realism, is
susceptible of an Other reading; its meanings are ambushed, deflected,
and augmented en route to a destination it can never reach. The
Thuggee and Dacoity Department strove to produce, in its extensive
records on thug affiliation and activity, a text without nuances or
fissures, something that was not susceptible of any misreadings or
contesting interpretations. It sought, in its meticulous record
keeping and its attempts to square all the approvers' testimonies with
each other and make them speak with one voice, to produce a record
that would have what was presumed to be the authority of material
fact. But for Savage, at least, it is impossible to engage in such an
enterprise without also inscribing his own complicity in his
testimonial. In this respect, he does approximate the classic approver
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, who cannot bear witness against
others without simultaneously bearing witness against himself.

While the novel insists that only impersonation can yield the truth,
it also illuminates the heterodox desires that underlie the exercise
of going native. Moreover, this impersonation is quite detached from
any agency on the part of William Savage and from any sense of
originary identity. Forced into the disguise of the Indian weaver
Gopal (by the patel [village headman] Chandra Sen) in an unwilling and
ultimately fruitless attempt to save a would-be sati, he is recognized
as an impostor by Hussein. Hussein is ideal material for an approver:
he has brains, courage, and resourcefulness, and he is remarkably
eager to undo the institution of thuggee, but his testimony alone is
not enough to compel belief in the practice. So he recruits an
Englishman to the anti-thuggee cause, knowing that only he can be
fully convincing as a figure of knowledge. And this knowledge can only
be acquired experientially, and by going outside the law as currently
constituted, as Savage learns when he follows the more conventional
methods of information retrieval. As Hussein says,

Several times some English official or other has got hold of
information about us. Then he has chased us out of his district, and
reported, I suppose. But they've never worked together, and it always
blew over. They'll never destroy us until one of them finds out
everything, and forces the Lat Sahib [the governor-general] to believe
everything, and plans a campaign to cover all India. And that one who
finds out must fear Kali, or he will not understand her. But he must
not love her. (p. 208)

Unable to ignore the thugs as the other English functionaries are
ready to do, eager to discard the Englishness he so uncomfortably
inhabits, and pressured by Hussein and Mary, Savage decides to
continue as Gopal the weaver, who, as it turns out, is also Gopal the
thug. For an unsuccessful and insecure man like Savage, wracked by
anxieties about (heterosexual) masculinity and Englishness, it is the
very abdication of authority involved in playing a thug that is
peculiarly attractive; inhabiting the subject position of the most
criminalized and most scrutinized indigenous subject holds out the
promise of psychic satisfactions not ordinarily available to colonial
authority.

The novel dallies with the idea (as many crime fictions often do,
though less explicitly) of the fragility of the barriers that separate
the custodian of law and morality from the criminal. It actually makes
available the proposition (though it has to drop it at the end) that
Savage is at heart a thug and that his initiation into thuggee by
Hussein is no accident. He takes naturally to the trade, is attended
by good omens, and enjoys a facility of thought, speech, and action
that is alien to his English self. The idea of mimicry itself is
transformed in his performance of it and begins to assume to assume
the contours of possession, if not those of originary identity. There
is no difference for him between the mimicry of an identity and the
identity itself.

In order to pass for an Indian or a thug (ultimately these two
categories are collapsed, as we have seen in the other narratives of
thuggee) Savage must slough off certain normative aspects of
Englishness in the tropics—the militant Christianity, the revulsion
against disease and cruelty, the reforming impulse. He must instead
embrace what is described as the nondualistic moral economy of
Hinduism that sees both creation and destruction as suffused with the
divine. Needless to say, the psychic territory of "India" is always
coextensive with Hinduism, despite the fact that Muslims as well as
other religious groups are shown to practice thuggee as much as do
Hindus; and this Hinduism is consistently and exclusively fetishized
as blood lust and hyperbolic sexuality. As an Indian, and Hindu, and
thug, Savage must participate in a series of paradoxes. He must be
Indian, and thug, to return more securely to Englishness, and
legitimacy; he must allow evil to be done in order to do good; and,
since the contexts of legality are always shifting and are
particularly in need of redefinition in India, he must go outside the
law in order to uphold the law. Always relatively indifferent to the
finer points of legal procedure and defendants' rights (here written
as an inaptitude for "paperwork"), the antithug drive allows him to
rethink the concepts of justice and legality in the colonial context,
where it is notoriously difficult to punish crime anyway:

"What does justice mean?"…"Fair trial, the rules of evidence, no
double hazard, no hearsay, and so on and so on? Or protection against
injustice, against violence? The means, or the end?.…Oh, I know we
have no evidence about them yet. That's just what I mean. I tell you,
sir, they cannot be run down within our rule of law. Indians aren't
English. "No man dies by the hand of man," they think, so they won't
give evidence because they are not angry with the murderers. They
think men who kill are driven by God to kill. And there are too many
jurisdictions, too far to go to give evidence, too long to wait. We've
got to go outside the law to catch them, to prevent more
murders." (pp. 128–29)

Caught between a colonial government and an Indian populace unwilling,
for different reasons, to do what is necessary to end thuggee and
pressured, moreover, by Hussein, Savage becomes Gopal again, only more
completely in earnest this time. In his new role Savage discovers that
passing for a thug involves a radical (re)contextualization of his
once and future Englishness. Moreover, as Gopal he has to inhabit a
role and a history that is already in place. Impersonation involves
not freedom but strict adherence to a scripted identity; he cannot
start afresh, or make himself up as he goes along. He discovers that
as Gopal, he is already an expert strangler and strategist, destined
to be "the greatest the Deceivers have ever known" (p. 218). And once
he participates in the sacramental ritual of gur-sharing and tastes
the transubstantiated body of the goddess, his allegiance and destiny
are fixed. Savage is born to thuggee, as his comfort in his role of
thug demonstrates; indeed, his story undoes the usual weighting of
"self" and "role" in the Englishman's subjectivity, since he is more
convincing (to himself, and apparently to Indians and Englishmen
alike) and comfortable as Indian and thug than as Englishman and
Christian. Hussein, who is more percipient than he about the
complexities of subject formation, reminds him that "free will" is an
adjunct (or an illusion) of Englishness alone. Savage must find out
that intentions guarantee nothing; not even the Englishman, once he
has decided to play the Indian, can escape the formulaic constraints
of Indian/thug ontology: "You are a Deceiver, from this dawn on for
ever. A strangler. Only stranglers may stand on the blanket: you stood
on it. Only stranglers may take the consecrated sugar of communion:
you took it. It doesn't matter what a man thinks he is. When he eats
consecrated sugar, on the blanket, in front of the pick-axe, he is a
strangler, because Kali enters into him." (p. 182)

Such a script also demands of course that he confront his double, the
original Gopal. In order to protect himself and in order to wrest some
autonomy for himself, Savage strangles Gopal and thus becomes Gopal
himself. But strangling the "real Gopal" only makes him more fully
Gopal, for he can now develop into his predestined role. From this
point on, all paradoxes are held in abeyance. From being complicit in
murder through inaction Savage proceeds to strangulation himself and
becomes, in an extraordinary take on the man-who-would-be-king vision
that tropes so much colonial discourse, a noted leader of thugs. Like
Burton the Muslim, Savage the thug is characterized not simply by
mastery but by an extraordinary surplus of subject effects. (Unlike
Burton, though, he is tempted, and he is corrupted—although not
irredeemably.)

The desire for Gopal, which is closely articulated with the desire to
be Gopal, is mediated, interestingly enough, through the figure of the
sati who frames the novel and who foregrounds the question of gender
that has been bypassed or placed under erasure in the thuggee
archives. I find the entry into thuggee through sati to be a
particularly productive conjuncture for the problematic of mimicry,
identity, and the colonizer's desire. The sati, most obviously,
provides an occasion for access to Gopal. The sati has to be set up in
the beginning so that Savage can play Gopal; and then it has to be
deferred so that he can continue to play Gopal and go in search of
Gopal. Her presence in the novel displaces homoerotic desire and
returns Savage to heterosexuality. It also ensures his successful
miming of Indianness and Englishness. But the consolidation of
heterosexuality, masculinity, and Englishness demands not simply her
presence but her death. She is insistently narrativized as a voluntary
sati; she is a romanticized figure, whose sacrifice Savage has no
desire to thwart. He desires her, and his desire for her takes the
form of wanting her to die for him, which he ensures by killing Gopal.
In this way, he can enjoy the satisfactions of Indian as well as
English masculinity. As an Indian, he can have the woman die for him
(and deliver him of his sexual anxieties); but being fully Indian also
means that he himself must die, for the sati requires a dead husband.
As an Englishman, therefore, he can distance himself from the violent
implications of Indianness. The sati's death releases him from the
exigent identity of the Indianness into which he had temporarily
descended and frees him to enact the rituals of Englishness with
greater plausibility. The most convincing Englishman—as indeed the
most expert thug—turns out to be the mimic man after all.

• • •

Afterword

Masters's novel serves in many ways as the most apt of epilogues to
the colonial accounts of thuggee, given its excavation of the erotic/
affective and metaphysical seductions of that institution—and of the
thug—for English masculinity in the tropics and given its suggestion
that the lure of the thug for the Englishman may be as compelling as
that of thuggee for the (Indian) thug. It charges the project of
unveiling and chastisement with a profusion of guilty, even delirious,
appetites and obsessions that call for continual incitement and
consummation. It does not, of course, fail to play upon the received
colonial narrative of thuggee as timeless Indian duplicity; but it
also reconfigures it as an erotic tale of the fraternal, closeted, and
homicidal desire that drives Indian and English impersonation. Perhaps
most remarkably, it showcases the seamless self-referentiality of the
discourse on thuggee (as evidenced in an archive composed of
biographies, histories, novels, legal records, and rumors) by
collapsing the thug and the thug hunter into a single figure; with a
literalism quite unprecedented in any of the other texts it confirms
that wherever there is an Englishman there is a thug.

Notes

1. Radhika Singha, "'Providential' Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign
of the 1830s and Legal Innovation," Modern Asian Studies 27 (February
1993): 83.

2. Guha, "Historiography of Colonial India."

3. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Subaltern
Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit
Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Also see Ranajit
Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Deconstructing Historiography," in In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987), 204.

5. This is not to suggest that Bhabha forecloses on any of these other
possibilities.

6. James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the
Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen,
1857), 90–91.

7. Reproduced in George Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and
Its Overthrow in British India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968), 13–26.

8. Philip Meadows Taylor, "Introduction," in Confessions of a Thug
(London: Richard Bentley, 1858 [1839]), 5.

9. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London: Robert Hale,
1959), 15.

10. See Francis C. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of
Thuggee Sleeman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), 197–98.

11. Geoff Bennington, "Postal Politics and the Institution of the
Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990).

12. Sandria Freitag argues that thugs were—in contrast to members of
criminal castes and tribes—regarded as "admirable and awesome
opponents." See her "Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North
India," Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61. While some of
this horrified admiration does inform Wightman and Meadows Taylor's
representations, such admiration is more usually carefully repressed;
there is, in fact, an interesting tension between the awe-inspiring
(if damnable) thug of these texts and the contemptible figure that the
other texts strenuously accentuate.

13. James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1933 [1920]), 5.

14. Sir George MacMunn, The Religions and Hidden Cults of India
(London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), 172–73. See, too, Meadows
Taylor, "Introduction," i:

At the present time it [the novel] may deserve a more attentive study;
recent events will have too well prepared the Reader's mind for
implicit belief in all the systematic atrocities narrated.…It will
scarcely fail to be remarked, with what consummate art such numerous
bodies of men were organized, and for a long time kept absolutely
unknown, while committing acts of cruelty and rapine hardly
conceivable;…Captain Taylor's Introduction…may…furnish some clue to
the successful concealment of a rebellion, in the existence of which
many of our oldest and most experienced officers, and men high in
authority, absolutely withheld belief, till too late and too cruelly
convinced of their fatal error.

15. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).

16. Hiralal Gupta, "A Critical Study of the Thugs and Their
Activities," Journal of Indian History, 37, part 2 (August 1959),
serial no. 110: 169–77.

17. Sandria B. Freitag, "Collective Crime and Authority in North
India," in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand Yang
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 158–61.

18. Stewart N. Gordon, "Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-
Formation in 18th Century Malwa," Indian Economic and Social History
Review 6 (December 1969): 403–29. It should be noted that Gordon does
not ascribe the activities of the marauding groups to "Oriental
anarchy" or oppose "marauders" to "states," arguing that both entities
had the same ends in view and were using the same methods of
legitimation, though with differing degrees of success.

19. J. Sleeman, Thug, 108.

20. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. He notes the transformation
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department into the Central Intelligence
Department in 1904; this body shifted its initial focus on wandering
gangs and criminals to "the collation of political intelligence,
relaying information about political leaders and organizations to the
various provinces concerned" (p. 187).

21. Freitag, "Collective Crime and Authority," 142.

22. Freitag, "Crime in the Social Order," 230.

23. Ibid., 234.

24. Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
(Karachi and London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1850]), 1: 153.

25. Kali became a figure of increasing respectability in the
nineteenth century; before this she was a deity adored (in Bengal at
least) largely though not exclusively by tribal and other subaltern
subjects, including thugs and dacoits. It is not clear if Kali was
identical with other female deities addressed as Devi or Bhawani.

26. See, for instance, Nicholas B. Dirks, "Castes of Mind,"
Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 59: "It is increasingly clear that
colonialism in India produced new forms of society that have been
taken to be traditional, and that caste itself as we now know it is
not a residual survival of ancient India but a specifically colonial
form of civil society. As such it both justifies and maintains the
colonial vision of an India where religion transcends politics,
society resists change, and the state awaits its virgin birth in the
postcolonial era."

27. This had not, of course, been entirely true for Burton, perhaps
because of his sojourn in Sind or his early studies in Arabic. As
might be expected, the particular discourse being engaged would
determine the Hinduness, or otherwise, of the territory designated
"India."

28. Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions," in The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).

29. John Masters, The Deceivers (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1952),
240. All further references to this novel will be incorporated
parenthetically into the text.

30. Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (Being the Diary of a Year,
Official and Particular, of an Officer of the Thuggee and Dacoitie
Police) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892), 1: 50–51.

31. Ranjit Sen, Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary
Resistance, 1757–1793 (Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1988), 2–3.

32. Sanjay Nigam, "Disciplining and Policing the 'Criminals by
Birth,'" Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, no. 2 (1990):
131–64; 27, no. 3 (1990): 259–87.

33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1: 43.

34. Radhika Singha argues that "the introduction of laws dealing with
ill-defined 'criminal communities' introduced certain fissures into
the ideology of the equal, abstract and universal legal
subject" ("'Providential' Circumstances," 86, n. 10).

35. Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the
Thugs (London: W. H. Allen, 1837), 145–46. This frankness is
relatively rare in the writings on thuggee; the issue of the
genuineness of the confessions, though, is an issue in all, judging
from the unfailing vehemence with which the method of conviction
through approvers' testimony is defended as just, if not
unexceptionable.

36. Ibid., 374.

37. J. Sleeman, Thug, 120.

38. William H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar
Language Used by the Thugs (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan
Press, 1836), 32–33.

39. Thornton, Illustrations, 70, 11.

40. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers, 112.

41. J. Sleeman, Thug, 106.

42. William H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and
Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession (Calcutta: J. C. Sherriff,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1849), 2–3.

43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 35.

44. Homi Bhabha, "Sly Civility" and "Of Mimicry and Man," in The
Location of Culture.

45. See Mala Sen, India's Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi
(New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1991) for an example of the way in
which the colonial discourse of thuggee (in this instance, Tukar's
Yellow Scarf) continues, in contemporary India, to frame the way in
which certain forms of collective violence are understood by the law-
and-order machinery of the state.

46. Tuker, Yellow Scarf, 38.

47. William H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian
Official, ed. Vincent A. Smith (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford
University Press, 1915), 555.

48. Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 330.

49. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 3.

50. Freitag, "Collective Crime and Authority," 146.

51. Singha, "'Providential' Circumstances," 84.

52. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 173. The thuggee act had the
following provisions:

1.Whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the
passing of this Act, to any gang of Thugs, either within or without
the Territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with
imprisonment for life, with hard labour.

2.And…every person accused of the offence…may be tried by any court,
which would have been competent to try him, if his offence had been
committed within the Zillah where that Court sits, any thing to the
contrary, in any Regulation contained, notwithstanding.

3.And…no Court shall, on a trial of any person accused of the offence…
require any Futwa from any Law Officer.

53. Singha, "'Providential' Circumstances," 136–37.

54. J. Sleeman, Thug, 117.

55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), 38.

56. Shahid Amin, "Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case
of Chauri Chaura," in Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1987).

57. William H. Sleeman, Report on the Depredations Committed by the
Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1840). [BACK]

58. Bruce, Stranglers, 154.

59. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 303–5.

60. Freitag, "Crime in the Social Order," 236. It is said that thugs
had routinely existed in a symbiotic relationship with landlords,
providing military protection and supplying booty from expeditions in
return for land and respectability. [BACK]

61. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 186–87.

62. I should add here that the phrase going native is vested in my
paper with a multiplicity of valences; for instance, it encompasses
both the colonialist desire to "pass for" the native and the condition
that signifies racial regression.

63. R. Radhakrishnan, "Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora," Transition 54
(1991): 106.

64. David Arnold, "European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the
Nineteenth Century," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7,
no. 2 (1979): 104–27.

65. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins
of the Modern Nations," in Nation and Narration, 299.

66. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" See Michel Foucault,
"Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and
Gilles Deleuze," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–
17.

67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Foreword to 'Draupadi,'
by Mahasweta Devi," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
(New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 180.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8s20097j&chunk.id=ch2

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8s20097j&chunk.id=ch3&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch3&brand=eschol

turn of the century, is a highly unusual diary of one disciple's
encounters with his guru and with other disciples over the last four
years (1882–1886) of Ramakrishna's life. In this text, which is
written in Bengali, Ramakrishna is referred to as thakur, which is
both a common way of designating a Brahman as well as a word meaning
god; "M," who was a schoolteacher, is called "master" in this work. In
the English translation of 1942 by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1973
[1942]), "the Master" is the standard appellation for Ramakrishna;
this usage may have been popularized by Vivekananda.

3. Partha Chatterjee, "A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri
Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class," Subaltern Studies VII:
Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and
Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65.

4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988),
219.

5. Quoted in ibid., 231. For further details, see Swami Saradananda,
Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda, 2 vols.
(Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1978 [1952]).

6. There were many references to the Paramhansa in Keshab's journal,
the New Dispensation, and in the late 1870s Keshab published
Paramhanser Ukti, a ten-page Bengali booklet of Ramakrishna's sayings.

7. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (London:
Methuen, 1965), 141. [BACK]

8. Quoted in ibid., 124.

9. Cited in Brian K. Smith, "How Not to Be a Hindu: The Case of the
Ramakrishna Mission," in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed.
Robert P. Baird (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 343–44.

10. Sumit Sarkar, "The Kathamrita as Text: Towards an Understanding of
Ramakrishna Paramhamsa," Occasional Paper 22 (New Delhi: Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, 1985), 21 and passim. Also, see Sumit
Sarkar, "'Kaliyuga,' 'Chakri' and 'Bhakti': Ramakrishna and His
Times," Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, 1543–66.
Ramakrishna's disciples claimed that he had gone through his "Muslim"
and "Christian" phases before he met Keshab; please note that all the
dates in Ramakrishna's life are culled from accounts by devotees and
admirers.

11. The term heterosexuality is here used catachrestically, since
Ramakrishna seems to be obviously outside the formations within which
we would situate "modern" Indian subjects, including Vivekananda. The
very terms homosexuality/heterosexuality (and, indeed, transsexuality,
which may also be said to resonate for Ramakrishna) are too western
and modern to be completely adequate to the task of analysis. I use
them very provisionally, in the absence of another vocabulary and
epistemology that might enable me to understand premodern, Indian/
Hindu conceptualizations of sexuality. In this context, I am reminded
of Diana Fuss's generous and sensitive reading of Fanon's claim (in
Black Skin, White Masks) that there is no (male) homosexuality in the
Antilles ("Interior Colonies," 33):

Fanon's insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may
convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if
by 'homosexuality' one understands the culturally specific social
formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West,
then they are indeed foreign to the Antilles.…Can one generalize from
the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to
sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such discursive
translations perform on 'other' traditions of sexual differences?

Such a caution must be borne in mind, even as one cannot but deploy,
however hesitantly, the idioms of modern western sexualities. See
Jeffrey Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life
and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1995) for a careful and fascinating reading of the
relationship of Ramakrishna's "homosexuality" to his mysticism. I
regret that I have not been able to make fuller use of the Kripal
text, which was published after this chapter was written.

12. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity", 60–61.

13. S. Sarkar, "Kathamrita as Text," 50–71.

14. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity", 45. Sumit Sarkar
claims, moreover, that the period of Ramakrishna's popularity
coincided with a "kind of hiatus in bhadralok history," when dreams of
social reform had been frustrated, official racism was marked, and
liberation through the overthrow of British rule not really
conceivable ("'Kaliyuga,' 'Chakri' and 'Bhakti,'" 1547).

15. It is interesting to note that the disciples of Ramakrishna,
notably Vivekananda, preferred the term kamkanchan, "lust-and-gold,"
over the Master's kaminikanchan and went to great lengths to explain
that the sage's "symbolic" use of the term did not imply any
misogyny.

16. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 701. All subsequent
references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text.

17. This insight derives in a general way from Carole-Anne Tyler's
reading of the ambivalent politics of gay drag ("Boys Will Be Girls:
The Politics of Gay Drag," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1990]) as well from
Kaja Silverman's account of the mastery permitted by T. E. Lawrence's
reflexive masochism ("White Skin, Brown Masks"). In The Inner World: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 103, Sudhir Kakar characterizes Hindu
transvestism thus: "Rituals such as these represent not only the boy's
attempt to identify with his mother but also the man's effort to free
himself from her domination. By trying to be like women—wearing their
clothes, acquiring their organs, giving birth—these men are also
saying that they do not need women (mothers) any longer." For a
sympathetic psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna's assumption of
femininity, see Kakar, "Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience," in
The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and
Mysticism (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 1–40.

18. Cited in S. Sarkar, "Kathamrita as Text," 9.

19. D. S. Sarma, Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Benares: Benares Hindu University,
1944), 237.

20. I am grateful to Gayatri Spivak for pointing out to me the
numerous, and discontinuous, ways in which the English term woman
translates into Bengali (and/or Sanskrit). Even so, it is interesting
to note how often other forms of femininity threaten for Ramakrishna
to collapse into the figure of the kamini. Hence his warning to one of
his young male disciples to beware of women who claim to be actuated
by maternal feelings towards him.

21. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 113.

22. I put this term in quotation marks to indicate that is placed
under erasure. One cannot assume that transvestism was inflected in
the same way for a nineteenth-century (straight?) Hindu male as it
might be for, say, a contemporary straight North American male. One
has to concede that his masculinity might have been constituted
differently, and in a different relationship to femininity, than might
be the case for our hypothetical North American male.

23. I am thinking here of N. T. Rama Rao's assumption of feminine
attire, makeup, and jewelry, on one-half of his body in the days of
his chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh, apparently in a bid to
consolidate his political/spiritual power. Philip Spratt also provides
detailed anthropological evidence of religious transvestic ceremonies
all over India (Hindu Culture and Personality [Bombay: Manaktalas,
1966]). See, too, Kathryn Hansen's splendid essay, "Making Women
Visible: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in
Silent Cinema" (unpublished manuscript).

24. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and
Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.

25. Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 319.

26. Ibid., 331.

27. Women could, on occasion, function as gurus; the Bhairavi
Brahmani, for instance, was Ramakrishna's first guru. Other historical
and contemporary figures like Andal, Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, and
Anandamoyi Ma come to mind as well. Sharada Devi (Ramakrishna's wife)
herself had several (female and male) disciples. I do not think,
however, that this militates against my understanding of the guru-
disciple relationship as functioning for the most part for and among
males nor against my reading of its gendered significance in early
nationalism.

28. I am obliged to Sandhya Shetty for pointing this out to me. The
gurudakshina (the gift to the guru) is situated outside (economic)
exchange and functions in a symbolic capacity only. The instance of
Drona the archer and his low-caste disciple Eklavya, who had to
sacrifice his thumb to ensure the superiority of the guru's favorite
pupil Arjuna, only demonstrates that in the guru-shishya configuration
what is offered by the disciple is incommensurable with what is given
by the guru.

29. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 296.

30. Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, ed.
Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953),
13.

31. There is no "secular," critical biography of Ramakrishna except
that by Max Mueller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899). While this inveighs against the
miraculizing tendencies of Ramakrishna's disciples, not excepting
Vivekananda, and refuses to take Ramakrishna's avatarhood seriously,
it is nonetheless entirely reverential about the man himself.

32. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, 117.

33. Ibid., 144–45.

34. Ibid., 294.

35. Swami Chetanananda, ed. Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis, Mo.:
Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 1990), 110.

36. Sumit Sarkar notes: "Girish Ghosh confessed that seeing
Ramakrishna 'playing' with a young disciple made him recall a
'terrible canard' that he had once heard about the saint" ("Kathamrita
as Text," 103).

37. Sister Nivedita [Margaret E. Noble], The Master as I Saw Him
(Calcutta: Udbodhan Office, 1910), 64.

38. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 204.

39. This is not, of course, to assert that the conflicts were unique
to Naren; as we have seen, in terms of class position and intellectual
training he appears to have been no different from the majority of the
disciples. The others, however, appear to have been less outspoken in
their skepticism than he was. I hardly need add that the memory and
the narrative of these conflicts is overdetermined; if Naren had not
become Vivekananda, we would probably have heard far less of his
interactions with his guru. As it is, in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
his iconoclasticism is not as evident as that of, say, Bankim or Dr.
Mahendralal Sarkar (neither of whom was a disciple). Nonetheless, he
does seem to have been the unequivocal favorite of Ramakrishna. And it
also seems clear that he was accorded a degree of freedom of speech
and behavior not permitted most of the other disciples. (Girish Ghosh,
who was notorious for his drinking, patronage of prostitutes, and
occasional foul-mouthed invectives against the guru, was one of the
very few others who was granted such a license.)

40. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity." Sumit Sarkar
emphasizes the saint's determined pursuit of bhadralok disciples as
well as his reticence about religious practices (of the Baul,
Kartabhaja, and vamachari Tantric varieties) that might have offended
their sensibilities ("The Kathamrita as Text," 36).

41. Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him, 385–90.

42. My thanks to Inderpal Grewal for suggesting this possibility to
me.

43. Hervey De Witt Griswold, Insights into Modern Hinduism (New York:
Henry Holt, 1934), 58.

44. Nationalism's dependence on colonialism has been extensively
documented, to some degree by Nandy, Intimate Enemy, but most notably
by Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Certainly nationalism-and-
colonialism seems to function as one category for Vivekananda.

45. Not all Brahmos were as skeptical as Shibnath Shastri, who, much
though he admired Ramakrishna, believed that the saint's austerities
at the beginning of his spiritual career had had deleterious effects
on his mental state; Keshab for one seems to have been less
incredulous of the spiritual nature of the saint's trances. Sumit
Sarkar points out, interestingly, that while Ramakrishna's family and
neighbors in Kamarpukur and Dakshineshwar attributed the trances to
madness or "possession," his bhadralok disciples and admirers
described them as the samadhi state extolled by high Hindu doctrine.

46. Ramakrishna himself made conflicting assertions about his own
avatarhood; at points he dismissed the possibility derisively, while
at other times he claimed to be an avatar of Krishna, Chaitanya, and/
or Kali.

47. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York:
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 42.

48. It is not possible to establish whether any of the swami's
supporters were simply admirers or actually disciples. It is not
inconceivable that they may have become disciples retroactively,
following Vivekananda's success in the west.

49. Sankari Prasad Basu and Sunil Bihari Ghosh, eds., Vivekananda in
Indian Newspapers 1893–1902 (Calcutta: Dineshchandra Basu
Bhattacharya, 1969), 9.

50. It should be noted that the swami's Indian reputation was—to some
degree, at least—induced by himself, as a defensive measure no doubt
against the criticisms he encountered not only from Christian
ministers in the United States but also from members of the Brahmo
Samaj and perhaps the Theosophical Society as well. His early letters
to his disciples in Madras were full of exhortations to them to hold a
meeting in his honor and to proclaim him to the west as a true
spokesperson of Hinduism. He was also careful to keep them informed
about favorable reviews in the U.S. press.

51. Rakhal Chandra Nath, The New Hindu Movement 1886–1911 (Calcutta:
Minerva, 1982), 126.

52. Ibid., 129.

53. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity."

54. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 115.

55. Vivekananda was rarely consistent in this view; this was typical
of him. At times he deployed the rhetoric of free trade to imply
mutual and equal advantage to east and west; at other times he
insisted that Indians were superior to the west in their indifference
to material things and that in fact the west called out for spiritual
conquest by an "aggressive Hinduism." In this vacillation Vivekananda
was not untypical of the bourgeois neo-Hindu nationalists of his time.
[BACK]

56. He also enjoined his brother monks in India not to insist on the
acceptance of Ramakrishna's avatarhood in would-be devotees and
disciples of the new order.

57. Harold W. French, The Swan's Wide Waters: Ramakrishna and Western
Culture (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), 58.

58. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 230.

59. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity."

60. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 114.

61. Ibid., 17. Note that Bankim's novel was undoubtedly the product of
a distinctly westward-looking nationalism. Nath describes Aurobindo's
"Bhawani Mandir" as derived from Anandmath (and remarkably similar to
Vivekananda's own cult of the warlike monk) in its emphasis on
manliness and in its devotion to Kali. [BACK]

62. Chatterjee, "Religion of Urban Domesticity," 61.

63. Vivekananda, Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, 151.

64. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's cult of physical fitness and
martial arts training has a great deal in common with Vivekananda's
endorsement of "beef, biceps, and Bhagavad-Gita."

65. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western
Admirers (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964 [1961]), 347.

66. At this point in Indian history, bourgeois and Hindu nationalisms—
the first represented by "moderates" in the Congress Party calling for
secular and constitutional reforms, the latter by Tilak, Bankim, and
others—have assumed the status of two distinct categories, though
quite often they function as one. I bear in mind also Sudipta
Kaviraj's important caveat against the conflation of distinct
nationalisms (his own concern is with "early" and "mature"
nationalisms), which must be seen as disjunct rather than articulated
phenomena in Indian history; see Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary
Institution of India," in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

67. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 27.

68. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 231.

69. Ibid., 388 (emphases in the original). [

70. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 252. The speaker in this
instance was a woman, Constance Towne.

71. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 16.

72. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 14.

73. Swami Vivekananda and His Guru (London and Madras: Christian
Literature Society for India, 1897), iv.

74. There is, to the uninstructed viewer, little if anything of the
disarrangement of limbs or clothing that normally marked the sage's
experience of samadhi.

75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern," in In Other Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1987),
264.

76. Nivedita functions here as a type of the western female disciple.

77. Mary Ann Doane, "Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and
Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," in Femmes
Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 244.

78. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda: His Second Visit to the
West; New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1973).

79. Kakar, Inner World, 160.

80. See, for instance, Romila Thapar: "[The ascetic] is celibate and
yet, at the same time, the most virile of men. The ascetic's
demonstration of sexual prowess is not a contradiction in terms: it is
in fact a demonstration of his complete control over body functions,
since ideally the emission of semen is prohibited to
him" ("Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?" in Ancient
Indian Social History: Some Interpretations [Delhi: n.p., 1978], 94).
Also see Joseph Alter: "The whole purpose of brahmacharya [celibacy]
is to build up a resilient store of semen so that the body—in a
holistic, psychosomatic sense—radiates an aura of vitality and
strength" ("Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into
Nationalism in North India," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1
[1994]: 51).

81. Steve Neale, "Masculinity as Spectacle," in The Sexual Subject: A
Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–
87.

82. Ibid., 286.

83. Swami Vivekananda, "The Future of India," in Lectures from Colombo
to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1956), 267.

84. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 196. Sister Christine
(Christine Greenstidel) goes on to remark on the companionship of
Sadananda and Vivekananda on their North Indian pilgrimage: "Both were
artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in
appearance. Artists raved about them."

Nivedita also confesses, though far more discreetly, that she was
drawn to the swami by his "personality" rather his philosophy, which
she initially found unoriginal. Her "biography" of him, The Master as
I Saw Him, is remarkable for its reticence about his corporeality.

85. That such a construction of femininity was not necessarily
exclusive to Hindu reformers/revivalists is borne out by Faisal
Fatehali Devji: "[Muslim] reformist literature replaces the aggressive
sexual woman with the pathetic or suffering woman-as-mother" ("Gender
and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's Reform in Muslim
India, 1857–1900," South Asia, 14, no. 1 [1991], 151).

86. Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's
Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed.
Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), 237.

87. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (London: William
Heinemann, 1904), 32–45.

88. See, among others, Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate
on Sati in Colonial India," in The Nature and Context of Minority
Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds.,
Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Chatterjee, Nation and Its
Fragments; and Madhu Kishwar, "Gandhi on Women," Economic and
Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, 1691–1702.

89. Monier Monier-Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (New
Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974 [1883]), 184–85. Also
see David R. Kinsley, "Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place," in Devi:
Goddesses of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1996); and Ajit Mookerjee,
Kali: The Feminine Force (New York: Destiny Books, 1988).

90. Sumanta Banerjee, "Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in
Nineteenth Century Bengal," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian
Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 158.

91. Ramakrishna was married at the age of twenty-three to Sharadamoni
Debi, a child-bride of five. According to custom, she remained in her
natal home, while Ramakrishna continued his spiritual disciplines at
Dakshineshwar, forgetful of her existence. At eighteen she sought him
out at Dakshineshwar and acceded to his request that their marriage
remain unconsummated. Over the remaining decade and a half of
Ramakrishna's life, she spent extended periods at Dakshineshwar, doing
his housekeeping and cooking and (usually) living in a separate
building in the temple complex. [BACK]

92. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 65.

93. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York
and London: Routledge, 1987), 244. [BACK]

94. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 83.

95. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 242.

96. Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita
Ashrama, 1964), 167–68.

97. Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922) was a notable scholar and a
Hindu widow who converted to Christianity during a visit to England
and dedicated her life to the uplift of young Hindu widows. Her book,
The High-Caste Hindu Woman (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), as
well as her travels in England and the United States, gained her
sympathy from feminists as well as Christian missionaries abroad and
censure from Hindu conservatives at home. Her shelter for widows, the
Sharda Sadan in Pune, was supported in large part by funds raised by
Ramabai Circles in the United States and England. Her travels in the
United States in the 1880s received extensive coverage in the U.S.
press.

98. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 421–68.

99. This is necessarily a simplification of Vivekananda's very
complicated responses to the issues of (gender and other) reform,
nationalism, and colonialism. The split was not simply between
"home" (where reform had to endorsed) and abroad (where Hinduism had
to be defended); even at "home" he had decidedly mixed responses to
reform and (religious and social) orthodoxy.

100. The phrase is Nivedita's (The Master as I Saw Him, 124). In an
interesting departure from the hagiographical tradition in which
accounts of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are produced (and in which
tradition Nivedita's own work uneasily belongs), she emphasizes not
the continuity of their respective "gospels" but their distinctness
from each other. She does this, besides, in a fashion that highlights
the swami's struggles and doubts: "Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the
Swami himself said once of him, 'like a flower,' living apart in the
garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old
time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought
to dismiss its very memory. It was at one the greatness and the
tragedy of my own Master's life that he was not of this type. His was
the modern mind in its completeness.…His hope could not pass by
unheeded,…the hope of men of the nineteenth century" (The Master as I
Saw Him, 124–25).

101. Chatterjee, "Nationalist Resolution," 237–38.

102. She was not, however, recognizably a nineteenth-century British
feminist—at least from the evidence of her early writings—even though
much has been made in the biographies of her feminism and other
"excesses." Apparently Vivekananda himself made fun of her putative
feminism.

103. Quoted in Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of
Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 32–33.

104. Quoted in Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and
History (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 121.

105. Sharada Devi seems to have been a figure who was not
unequivocally reverenced by the followers of Ramakrishna. Many
devotees visited her at Jayrambati and Kamarpukur, and she initiated
several people into discipleship. She was sometimes spoken of as an
avatar—like her husband—and the heiress to his spiritual kingdom. But
she was also often accused of being excessively worldly. Ramakrishna's
most prominent disciples visited her only rarely; Swami Nikhilananda
says that this was because they hesitated to "[make] a display of
their spiritual fervour." See his Holy Mother: Being the Life of Sri
Sarada Devi, Wife of Sri Ramakrishna and Helpmate in His Mission
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Spivak speaks of the way in
which her official biographer, Swami Gambhirananda, staged her as "a
counter-echo to what he perceived as the strong voice of the Western
Narcissus" ("Asked to Talk about Myself…," Third Text 19 [Summer
1992]: 17). I would argue that this could only happen retrospectively,
and at a later moment from the one that Vivekananda inhabits.

106. See, for instance, Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women
in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante:
Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshashi,
Bangladesh: Sahitya Samsad, 1983); and Kumar, History of Doing, esp.
chaps. 2 and 3.

107. The Indian woman was, obviously, recast in the nationalist moment—
as was the Indian man; but recast and fixed, with little room for
negotiation after the recasting had been effected. For an analysis of
a nationalist woman's struggles with gendered identities in
nationalism, see chapter 5.

108. Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel,
trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1947),
152, n. 2.

109. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 136–37.

110. Quoted in Pravrajika Atmaprana, Sister Nivedita of Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda (Calcutta: Sister Nivedita Girls' School, 1961), 30.

111. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 128.

112. Rakhal Nath maintains that the Ramakrishna Mission was the only
non-political body to come out of the "New Hindu" or Hindu revivalist
movement (Nath, New Hindu Movement). [BACK]

113. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 136.

114. Ibid., 150–51.

115. Barbara N. Ramusack, "Cultural Missionaries, Maternal
Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–
1945," in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance,
ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 130.

116. S. B. Mookherjee, "Nivedita and Indian Womanhood," in Nivedita
Commemoration Volume, ed. Amiya Kumar Majumdar (Calcutta: Dhiraj Basu,
1968), 244.

117. She met Gandhi briefly in Calcutta, in the early years of the
century. Gandhi (who in so many ways would grow to resemble the figure
of Ramakrishna) admired her Hindu partisanship but was unable to agree
with her on nationalist politics. The Congress Party under Gandhi had
a profoundly uneasy relationship with militant nationalist women like
Nivedita and the Rani of Jhansi.

118. Lizelle Reymond's The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (New
York: John Day, 1953) also helped disseminate this image, though its
factual claims have since been contested. Kumari Jayawardena's chapter
on Nivedita ("Irish Rebellion and 'Muscular Hinduism,'" in White
Woman's Other Burden) describes the contradictory ways in which the
disciple of Vivekananda is remembered.

119. My thanks to Carole-Anne Tyler for sensitizing me to this
possibility. [BACK]

120. Foxe's biography, Long Journey Home, is particularly derisive in
this regard. What had been admirable "manliness" in Vivekananda was
forwardness in the female disciple. [BACK]

121. Ibid., 205. [BACK]

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More to follow...

...and I am Sid Harth

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Date: Wed, Mar 31 2010 9:54 am
From: Sid Harth