Those who haven’t already done so should read Uday Dandavate’s insightful article on this site, “A Shared Destiny on Borrowed Land: Democracy at 250.”
One of Dandavate’s concluding sentences is this: “America’s next phase of democracy depends less on perfecting its laws than on deepening its culture of shared belonging.” Belonging, all of us know, has priceless reciprocity. You belong to your family and country, and your family and country belong to you.
Dandavate reminds us that belonging to the US is a tie shared with others. People with vastly different origins and histories belong to the US, which belongs to them. No matter their race or religion, no matter their blood or beliefs.
The sense of shared belonging in the US doesn’t have to be injected by anyone, says Dandavate. Already present in the country’s culture, the realization only needs to be “deepened.” As “deepening” proceeds, American democracy is enriched in ways that are beyond the capability of the finest laws.
When the US was founded, something special happened in world history. Uniquely, the founders wanted their nation to be grounded on an idea, not on a racial group, or a linguistic group, or a religious community. The idea’s core was expressed in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
This sentence contains not one but several bold thoughts, all of them presented as being self-evident, i.e. requiring no corroboration from any quarter, human or divine. One is that human beings are created equal. Another is that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are among the rights with which their Creator (who is not given any limiting name) has endowed them. A third is that these rights cannot be cut off.
Most if not all other nations grew essentially as racial, linguistic, or religious communities, or as a mix of such communities. In contrast, the US was raised, in principle at least, as a nation to which anyone could belong as an equal, with the right to be treated like anyone else, and the right to their own beliefs.
ONLY SOME RACES
In actuality, of course, the project had major defects. Above all, there were stark exclusions. “Inalienable” rights had been snatched from the land’s earlier residents -- and would not be recognized in those brought forcibly from Africa as slaves. Moreover, “all men” was a phrase that left out half of America.
Those harsh facts of history are undeniable. Also undeniable, though, is the truth that no other nation existing on this planet had resolved at its founding to grow without privileging family riches, ethnic blood, or religious belief.
Today, in a significant regression, influential US voices insist that only some race or races can be “authentic” or “legitimate” Americans. They often add that in places of power only some religious beliefs may be held. A “White Christian America” is a section’s avowed goal.
Directly or indirectly, the Dandavate article addresses interracial and interfaith equations within the US as also the US’s equations with the rest of the planet. How migrants are treated in the US inevitably affects America’s relations with some countries. Likewise, what happens in their countries of origin becomes a factor in how immigrants living in the US are viewed by Washington and by the US population.
What is obvious must at times be spelled out. Migrants ought to take the trouble to dip into US history. Migrating children will certainly learn a good deal at school, but what about those who arrive as adults? They too ought to familiarize themselves with America’s foundational idea – and learn what they can about the varied races and communities that constitute the US. And about extraordinary individuals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King Jr, to name just a few.
We may easily spend years in a new place without knowing our neighbors. Exceptions apart, India-origin communities in the US have not, broadly speaking, interacted closely enough with African Americans. Or with communities for whom Spanish or Portuguese is the first language. Or with other Asian Americans. This shortcoming should not be allowed to persist.
I have more than one reason to be glad that Uday Dandavate’s stimulating piece is on this site. Not only is Uday a provocative thinker with an independent mind, I had the good luck of knowing well his parents, the late Madhu Dandavate (1924-2005) and the late Pramila Dandavate (1928-2001), both courageous figures in the story of independent India.
IN THE WEST BANK
In a fresh sign of changing attitudes in the US, a story about the West Bank by Lisa Lerer, national political reporter for the New York Times, informs us of the declaration of Representative Ro Khanna, who has just visited the occupied region, that he “will go to every corner of America and tell the stories of what is happening” there.
Since Khanna is exploring a 2028 presidential run, these words of his carry meaning. The NYT report also states that on July 9 Israeli settlers had blocked the Congressman for about 90 minutes while he was looking at “the ruins of Khirbet Zanuta, a tiny Palestinian Bedouin village in the southern West Bank that was abandoned after escalating attacks from settlers and then demolished.”
Evidently “a car of men holding guns pulled up and blocked the narrow road out of the village.” The men started to taunt the Congressman and his team, “swearing at them in Hebrew and Arabic and kicking the tires of their minibus.” When two cars from the Israeli military pulled up, Mr. Khanna assumed “the soldiers were there to help him pass. Instead, the soldiers smoked cigarettes, chatted with the men and after the settlers left, moved a car to block the road.”
Mr. Khanna said he “felt powerless” during those 90 minutes, not a typical condition for a member of the US Congress. He was “eventually allowed to continue his journey after calls to the US embassy and Israeli police.”
RUDE AND ILLEGAL
Karan Thapar, one of his country’s fearless journalists, has written in Kolkata’s Telegraph (a rare major newspaper in India that still publishes articles critical of the government) about Danish Sheikh, an Indian citizen who happens to be Bengali-speaking and Muslim. Thirteen months ago, writes Thapar, Sheikh “was deported by the Delhi police on the ground that he’s an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. They refused to acknowledge his identity documents. He was pushed across the border into Bangladesh with his wife, Sunali, and their son, Sabir.”
“Not surprisingly,” says Thapar, “the government in Bangladesh arrested them as illegal immigrants, and they spent a hundred days in jail there. Last week, the terrible error made in Danish’s case was accepted and he was allowed to return to India.”
“Danish was innocent. Blameless, in fact... His only fault was that he was a Bengali Muslim working as a ragpicker in Delhi when the police branded him a Bangladeshi.”
Thapar points out that there has been no apology from the police nor any furor in the media. In Thapar’s view, what was done to Danish and his family wouldn’t “happen to a Hindu.” In a “credible democracy,” there would be “howls of protest and angry demands for a full apology from the authorities.”
The Modi government hasn’t been able to silence discussion around allegations of large-scale misappropriation of public money, and devotee donations, in respect of Ayodhya’s Ram Temple. Having played the central role at every stage of this temple’s story, including at its ostentatious 2024 inauguration, and having nominated the temple’s custodians, Narendra Modi is integral to the shocked discussion now taking place in India, most of it on YouTube videos. Primary TV channels are vulnerable and therefore prudent if not silent.
NO COMMENT FROM MODI
Meanwhile Modi refuses to offer any comment and appears to be waiting for events that will change the conversation.
Two lines of defense advanced in YouTube debates by Hindutva champions are worth looking at. One is this: “This unfortunate matter (theft of donations) is a question only for Hindus. Non-Hindus should stay out.” The second argument, directed at donors of money or jewels to the temple, goes something like this:
“Your gift was given unconditionally, as a duty. Curiosity about what happens is against the Gita’s teaching, which is to do your duty and not think of what happens thereafter.”
Others point out that the temple project has used taxpayer money too, and that accounts of greed in the temple’s running have hurt all Indians, not Hindus alone.
Abhishek Manu Singhvi, one of India’s ablest lawyers and a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha, has cited a preliminary official finding that the grand function held in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024, when Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the temple, cost Rs 113 crore or almost 12 million US dollars. That sum was spent, Singhvi underlined, not on infrastructure, not on construction, but just on the event.
With no international body empowered or permitted to intervene, the US-Iran stand-off over the Strait of Hormuz is giving the entire world a fresh round of suspense and difficulties. Scores of Iranian sites have again been bombed by the US; Iran has hit some oil-carrying ships and sites of American power in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East; and from July 14 the US is blockading all Iranian ports.
All countries importing oil from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or other Gulf lands, i.e. a lot of countries, must brace themselves for harsh possibilities.
Conspicuously mixed with fluctuating signals for war or peace are hints for making money on the stock market – and concrete schemes for making money by controlling or threatening to control sea-lanes.
Once upon a time there was statesmanship. Now, on one side, there is bluster, plus massive air and sea power and the ability to destroy, and, on the other side, numbers and home advantage – plus anger, which can seriously mislead.
