By Ela Dutt
month before Prime
Minister Narendra
Modi is to arrive in the
United States and trav-
el to SiliconValley to
meet IT entrepreneurs and the
Indian-American community, a
petition critical of his “Digital
India” plan has set off an
Internet war between anti-Modi
pro-Modi factions in the U.S.
In an Aug. 27 letter, “Faculty
Statement on Narendra Modi
Visit to SiliconValley,” posted on
the blog of Academe Magazine,
123 U.S. academics, mostly of
Indian descent, cautioned U.S.
high tech industry leaders to fol-
low standards of freedom of
expression and right to privacy if
they strike any deals with India
on grounds that the Modi gov-
ernment was vitiating these
rights and freedoms. It also
chastised the Indian-American
community for what it
described as euphoria over the
Prime Minister’s Sept. 27 visit to
California.
Modi will be in NewYork for
the United Nations General
Assembly meetings Sept. 25,
and will make a one-day trip to
SiliconValley to meet with IT
leaders and the Indian-
American community Sept. 27,
before returning toWashington
for a one-on-one with President
Obama Sept. 28.
The anti-Modi petition
described the anticipation over
the Modi visit “uncritical fan-
fare” and said his national proj-
ect “Digital India” was threat-
ened by a lack of safeguards
about privacy of information,
“and the near certainty that
such digital systems will be used
to enhance surveillance and
repress the constitutionally-pro-
tected rights of citizen.”
Among the signatories were a
few non-Indian professors such
University of Chicago Divinity
School Professor of Religion
Wendy Doniger, whose book An
Alternative History of India, was
pulled off shelves by publishers
Penguin India when challenged
by a school teacher for hurting
religious sentiments. “Those
who live and work in Silicon
Valley have a particular respon-
sibility to demand that the gov-
ernment of India factor these
critical concerns into its plan-
ning for digital futures,” the let-
ter said. It also harked back to
the U.S. denial of a visa to Modi
from 2005-2014 over the Gujarat
violence of 2002 in which 1,000
people were killed.
In response, a petition drive
on Change.org, by Modi sup-
porters had garnered 1,133 sig-
natures as of Sept. 3, from “pro-
fessors, researchers, scientists,
scholars, students, and profes-
sionals with undergraduate,
graduate or doctoral degrees
from universities across North
America,” going beyond just the
liberal arts scholars and experts
on South Asia who sponsored
the anti-Modi petition.
Entitled “Oppose Prejudice
and Fear-mongering in the
“Faculty Statement on Narendra
Modi’s Visit” the change.org
petition accused the opposing
faction of straying “far” from the
scope of “sane discourse,” with-
out respect for facts and integri-
ty.
Their critique of Digital
India’s potential for increased
surveillance of citizens, “seems a
desperate ploy rather than any
genuine concern for India,” it
said, noting that digital initia-
tives were undertaken before
Modi came to power, “a fact that
never bothered them (South
Asia academics) when the UPA
government, with which several
U.S. based South Asian academ-
ics have had close ties of patron-
age and privilege, was in power.”
The United Progressive Alliance
was the Congress Party-led
coalition headed by Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh.
Bringing up the 2002 violence
in Gujarat, the pro-Modi peti-
tioners said, was a “deplorable
attempt to exhume ugly lies
about Modi’s attitude towards
Muslims.”
Modi’s massive victory at the
polls and in Indian courts, it
said, vindicated him, “and
unless the South Asia studies
faculty who have perpetuated
these charges so recklessly have
new evidence that they can
present before courts in India
and before the Indian people,
they must recognize that they
are running a campaign not for
justice but for destroying justice
and democracy.”
The pro-Modi letter claimed
there was a media conspiracy
against Modi. “There is growing
evidence of a systematic process
of defamation against India and
Narendra Modi in the interna-
tional press and in a large part
of the elite English-language
Indian media,” the letter said,
adding that, “No government
that seeks to restrict freedom of
speech would permit the
amount of calumny that passes
off as news in India.”
The letter accused anti-Modi
forces of silencing free speech,
noting that Modi had been pre-
vented from addressing a
Wharton Business School meet-
ing through a video-conference
by a similar confluence of aca-
demics a few years ago.
“It is an unspoken about real-
ity that the academic pseudo-
consensus on South Asia, with
its demonization campaign of
Modi at the center, sustains
itself entirely on a system of
exclusion, censure and silenc-
ing.”
5
News India Times September 11, 2015
– that’s all you need to know
U.S. Affairs
Battle Of Petitions On Eve Of Modi’s Visit To Silicon Valley
A
From News Dispatches
J
humpa Lahiri, 48, author
of several award-winning
books, has been awarded
the 2014 National
Humanities Medal, a rare
honor bestowed on leading
literati and artistes in the
country. She will be among
several National Medal of
Arts and National
Humanities recipients to be
recognized at aWhite House
ceremony Sept. 10.
The individ-
uals and organ-
izations getting
the awards are
selected by the
National
Endowment for
the Arts and the
National
Endowment for
the Humanities
which were established by
the Congress in 1965 as
independent agencies of the
Federal Government.
President Obama chose
Lahiri’s book, The Lowlands,
published in 2013, as his
Summer reading this year.
He also appointed her to the
President’s Committee on
Arts and Humanities in
2010.
Some of the others being
recognized at the ceremony
include author Stephen King
who is among the National
Medal of the Arts recipients,
and popular writers Alice
Waters, Annie Dillard, and
Larry McMurtry, all 2014
National Humanities Medal
winners.
The citation which will be
read out at theWhite House
ceremony says Lahiri is
being recognized for
“enlarging the human story.”
“Dr. Lahiri has illuminat-
ed the Indian-American
experience in beautifully
wrought narratives of
estrangement and belong-
ing,” the citation adds.
Lahiri won Pulitzer Prize
in 2000, for her debut collec-
tion of short stories,
Interpreter of Maladies. She
also received the
PEN/Hemingway Award and
The NewYorker Debut of the
Year prize for the
same book. Her
next novel, The
Namesake, which
like most of her
work, relate to the
immigrant experi-
ence, was made
into a popular film
of the same name.
Her novel The
Namesake was a NewYork
Times Notable Book, a Los
Angeles Times Book Prize
finalist and was selected as
one of the best books of the
year by USA Today and
EntertainmentWeekly. She
is the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
Born with the first names
Nilanjana Sudeshna, Lahiri
chooses to use her nick-
name Jhumpa. She was two
years old when her parents
moved from London to
Rhode Island where she was
brought up. Lahiri lives in
Brooklyn, NewYork and
Rome, Italy. She is married
to journalist Alberto
Vourvoulias-Bush, and the
couple has two children,
Octavio and Noor.
Renowned Author Gets
National Humanities Medal
Continued from page 4
Rather than entertain, let
alone respect, an opposing view,
leftists today conjure up the
concept of “microagressions” to
justify physically assaulting an
anti-abortion protestor, or, as
Arondekar’s colleague repented
in a recent retrospective of the
Berkeley Free Speech
Movement, liberals for too long
argued for freedom of thought
and expression without consid-
ering who wields “power.”
These freedoms of expression
and thought should be con-
trolled, abrogated and contested
everywhere the contemporary
leftist holds.
The avowed leftists signing
the Visweswaran letter do not
limit their activism to India
alone. Nearly a dozen of the sig-
natories of the anti-Modi letter
have supported aspects of the
anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment
and Sanction (BDS) movement
and happened to sign on a cam-
paign demanding an academic
and cultural boycott of Israel–
silent, of course, on daily atroci-
ties being committed against
atheists and Hindus, in say,
Bangladesh. Many of them also
joined the alarming rise in “dis-
invite” trends tracked by a
Philadelphia based watchdog,
FIRE.
It is this illiberal leftism –not
liberalism— that seems to
motivate so many of my col-
leagues in the Indian American
academy, and it is what is so
curious in the dichotomy
between the teaching of the
humanities and the sciences.
For a professor of surgery, my
classroom spans from lecture
halls to the operating suites, but
my teaching is rooted in the sci-
entific realities of anatomy,
embryology, pathophysiology
and surgical technique. An elec-
trical engineering professor at
Penn, Saswati Sarkar — hardly
diffident of her strong political
positions vis a vis India —will
likely mentor a PhD student in
empirical scholasticism, without
even knowing whether the
mentee is ideologically aligned.
The leftist academy perpetu-
ates then, because just as I
expect a surgeon I train to repli-
cate techniques I teach to
matriculate, can a Doniger pro-
tégé really see anything more
than a perverse, erotic symbol in
the Shiva linga, or can a
Arondekar student argue that
gender studies is an disingenu-
ous redoubt in the academy if
the students wish to secure that
PhD, or the all-important — and
evasive — tenure? Our lofty goal
as educators may be to teach
the student how to think, but for
the activist professor, clearly, the
aspiration is an insistence to
teach what to think.
It is a fascinating fever that
befalls the diaspora here in the
United States when Narendra
Modi comes calling. It was a
year ago that I sat in the rafters
as the stage was set at Madison
Square Garden for nearly twenty
thousand. The same fever rises
again on the opposite coast
even as an apposite debate
begins about liberalism versus
leftism and rights versus privi-
lege.
The Illiberal Left: An Anatomy Of The Petition
