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Shashi Tharoor For UN Secretary General
#6
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>TALES ABOUT PERSONAL EXPERIENCES ARE HIGHLIGHTS OF ANALYSIS OF INDIA</b>
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, WA); 8/20/1997


India is 50 years old as an independent nation, and, of course, it has for thousands of years been one of the great expressions of human civilization. But India is unlike any other country. It is a place made and unmade by British imperialism and populated by every racial type on the globe, people who speak 17 major languages and 22,000 dialects and engage in some of the most ferocious sectarian fighting - Hindus against Muslims, Sikhs against both - in the world these days.

Shashi Tharoor, a novelist who is also a senior official at the United Nations and living in New York, uses the half-centennial to question what is India, what makes it a country? In ``India: From Midnight to the Millennium,'' Tharoor is a thoughtful and well-informed observer.

Tharoor, <b>who was born in London but grew up in Bombay and Calcutta</b>, writes essays focusing India's terrible poverty and the rise of sectarian feeling powerful enough to threaten the common sense of nationhood. But he also writes at times too much as a politician himself. His ``India'' goes rather more deeply into local politics and politicians than most Americans would want.

Still, Tharoor makes no apologies for India's shortcomings, including those that stem from the mistakes the Indians made themselves. ``For most of the five decades since independence, India has pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and distributing poverty,'' Tharoor writes. ``We called this socialism.''

In 1986, he points out by way of example, the Steel Authority of India ``paid 247,000 people to produce some 6 million tons of finished steel, whereas 10,000 South Korean workers employed by the Pohan Steel Co. produced 14 million tons that same year.'' He is correspondingly supportive of the economic reforms begun in the early 1990s by former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.

Among <b>Tharoor's most compelling passages are those that deal with India's descent, after centuries of relative harmony, into sectarian violence. He repudiates the fundamentalist Hinduism </b>that brought about the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, which in turn led to the most horrific religious bloodletting in many years. <b>In explaining the rise of sectarianism, Tharoor does not hesitate to place the blame on Hindu fanaticism</b>, even if that fanaticism has been provoked by what he calls ``other chauvinisms,'' Muslim and Sikh. ``The rage of the Hindu mobs is the rage of those who feel themselves supplanted in this competition of identities, who think that they are taking their country back from usurpers of long ago.'' In this sense, Tharoor writes, ``the battle for India's soul'' will be waged between ``two Hinduisms, the secularist Indianism of the nationalist movement and the particularist fanaticism of the Ayodhya mob.'' He offers no cause for optimism that his brand of Hinduism will prevail.

His best story has to do with a man named Charlis from the author's ancestral homeland, Kerala. Charlis as a boy was repudiated by Tharoor's family because he belonged to an untouchable caste. With each visit that Tharoor makes to
Kerala, the situation changes incrementally, until Charlis has become an important local official and an honored guest in the household.

Tharoor's book would have been more rewarding had he dwelt more on people like Charlis. When the author deals with the more abstract, highly serious questions, his book has a familiar feel. When he gets down to India as a concrete personal experience, everything seems new and fresh.
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Shashi Tharoor For UN Secretary General - by Guest - 06-16-2006, 01:52 AM
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