Anyone Leading Our World?

On a page titled “TO LINGER WITH,” this website reproduces lines that seem to merit reflection, including a verse written by the 19th-century American poet, James Russell Lowell: 

Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And ‘tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied. 

Though we’re nowhere near a time when being just would bring prosperity, the question may still be asked, “Of all our world’s just causes today, which one should get our first attention?” There will be a hundred or more suggestions. For consideration, I propose “Harvard’s battle to retain its autonomy.” 

When in 1993 I made my first visit to Russia, I was both surprised and relieved to find that Leo Tolstoy’s papers had survived Stalin’s terrifying decades. If the White House gets its way and succeeds in controlling Harvard, the cause of liberty, whether nursed in Mississippi, Mongolia, Manila or anywhere else in the world, will receive another serious hit. 

The comparison isn’t that clear-cut, of course. While Russia had only one Tolstoy (even though it had other great novelists), the U.S. has scores of fine universities. Nonetheless, Harvard has a unique standing. The destruction of its authenticity would matter to the world. 

A MALAYALI SPEAKS 

Harvard’s livestreamed commencement this year, marking its 374th (!!!) annual ceremony, was viewed by millions. The speaker, an inspired selection, was 70-year-old Abraham Verghese, the Ethiopia-born physician who currently holds a distinguished position at Stanford. Verghese is known and acclaimed even more as a novelist. By origin an Indian (a Malayali, to be specific, i.e. from the state of Kerala), by religion an Orthodox Christian, and by citizenship an American, he went to medical school in Ethiopia. 

To Harvard’s graduating students, Verghese first spoke of an Ethiopian classmate in his med school who in later years displayed the courage to stand up to an oppressive dictator in his country, a dictator who hated places “where truth and reason prevail.” Verghese then suggested that our character is shaped by the decisions we take, or do not take, when under pressure. Next, asking students to read novels, he said, paraphrasing Camus, that fiction was “the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.” “When a novel speaks to you, it’s because it rings true,” he added. Verghese then remarked, “Love trumps all bigotry.” 

That last statement was made in the context of AIDS and of Verghese’s joy in discovering, in the 1980s, that gay men who had left large cities because partners there had died, and they themselves had been infected, were warmly received by their families in America’s small cities. 

As I see it, all of us anywhere in the world have a stake in Harvard’s battle to retain its freedom to hire faculty, teach courses, and conduct research without governmental control or interference. 

Our world is swiftly and strongly interconnected. Harvard and the Middle East are not far apart. As everyone knows, moves to control American universities were the direct result of protests on American campuses against Israel’s assaults on Gaza, although the reason given was that some protesters had employed antisemitic language. 

AMERICA & PALESTINE

Will American opinion fight back and finally bring down the wall that has so far prevented America from recognizing that Palestinians too are human beings with feelings and rights? 

Or will sick or fanatical individuals claiming to be pro-Palestine but targeting Jews in American cities with violence or hatred persuade Americans that their country’s number one priority should be to protect citizens, that what happens elsewhere in the world is not relevant? 

Who knows? Our “one” world is also a world that’s very hard to read. We don’t know whether or not the U.S., Europe, China, India, and most of the world will silently watch the forcible removal of all Palestinians to the Sinai desert or to spaces in Libya or elsewhere in the Arab world. We cannot say whether the world will quietly witness this reenactment in the 21st century of the forcible relocation of human beings that occurred in earlier centuries in North America. Shame and regret were profusely expressed in the 20th century about that relocation, but can we be certain that it won’t be repeated? 

Other compelling events may capture and hold our world’s attention. Like, for example, a fresh or continuing war where drones or other contrivances replace pilots and tank commanders but destroy aircraft or stores of oil. Or even kill vast numbers of noncombatants. Today we cannot be certain that this will not happen. 

And can we rule out a new India-Pakistan conflict that inches towards the unthinkable? We are being told, no doubt, of a gigantic trade-and-tariff deal between the US and India. The report comes on the heels of Trump’s “repeatedly repeated” claim that he and his administration brought about the May 10 ceasefire between India and Pakistan. Sadly, rhetoric inside India and inside Pakistan does not indicate anything like a climate for durable peace. 

Within India, meanwhile, Muslim shrines remain under threat. The online portal, The Wire, has a story about demolitions that took place in September 2024 of centuries old Sufi shrines near Verawal on the Arabian Sea coast of Gujarat state, and about the unsuccessful attempts since then to obtain redress from courts. Hundreds of homes of humble Muslims living next to the shrines were also reduced to rubble. 

Hydraulic cranes, excavators, tractor trailers, dumpers, and 1,400 policemen were evidently used on September 28 to remove the offending structures. The Wire’s story is based on the testimony of Javed Husain Banva, a 12th-generation caretaker of one of the destroyed shrines, the Pir Salar Shah Dargah. 

PAINFUL ACCOUNTS 

Another online outlet, Scroll.in, carried a pathetic story on May 28 of an unmarried 80-year-old Kashmiri man named Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralyzed and unable to speak, who was asked to leave India after the Pahalgam attack of April 22. 

Why was he ordered to leave? Because decades back, when Kashmiris could travel between that region’s Indian-run and Pakistani-run portions, he had acquired a Pakistani passport while on a visit to the “wrong” Kashmir, and because after the Pahalgam attack the Indian government had ordered everyone with a Pakistani passport to leave India and go to Pakistan. 

His family’s pleas that Bhat, who had returned to India in 1980, be allowed to stay on were rejected, and he was ordered to leave. The fact that he had had strokes and a heart attack in recent years, all recorded in medical papers shown to the authorities, made no difference. 

Bhat died on the bus in which, against his and his relatives’ wish, he was sent to the India-Pakistan border. This “Pakistani” who had “no right” to be in India was therefore, in the end, buried in India. 

I will end with what perhaps is the most profoundly troubling of the stories emanating during the last week from India, which I take from a piece in The Wire written by Pamela Philipose. According to this story (which relies on another report published in the Indian Express), 38 Rohingya men, women and children were allegedly detained in early May by the Delhi police on the pretext of getting their biometrics done. Thereafter they were first herded into a holding center and then taken to Port Blair in the Andamans, where they were transferred to an Indian naval vessel, beaten, given life jackets, and then pushed into the sea fringing Myanmar, the nation from where the Rohingyas had first been expelled.