Reconceiving a nation
Smith, Brian K.
sciences. It spelled out something of the costliness of a certain form of discipleship, and pointed out correctly the Catholic understanding that all sexual acts, whether in private and...
...While over $t00 billion was spent on the effort--an eightfold monetary increase--a 1990 report of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Drug Enforcement Administration of the Department of Justice tells us that there are today 6 million hard-core, illegaldrug users, double the estimate in 1980...
...They come out of prison only to involve themselves again, and this in turn accounts for the system's high recidivism rates...
...This proposition has not gone over well with India's 100 million Muslims, who are also now blamed for the supposed antiHindu acts of Mughal emperors who ruled north India some four or five hundred years ago...
...PATRICK JORDAN REPORT ON INDIA RECONCEIVING A NATION WHO CONTROLS THE PAST...
...Ayodhya, it is claimed, is the actual nativity site of the Hindu god Rama, born, according to BJP historians, some time during or before the third millennium B.C...
...The recollection of history, by individuals and by nations, is constantly updated and revised by the everchanging needs of the present...
...If the war on drugs proves anything, it is that its emphasis on law enforcement---on the supply-side rather than the demandside-has been a colossal failure...
...I am constantly amazed that over half of the prisoners in the justice system are black and another third are Mexican or other minorities...
...India's present identity depends heavily on its image of its past...
...Hindu extremists, for their part, have broadened their efforts and distributed a list of 3,000 sites across the country where, they say, Muslim emperors usurped sacred Hindu ground...
...But over the last decade a growing and militant faction within the Hindu majority has challenged some of the basic assumptions of India' s self-identity...
...With a current population of 850 million people comprised of a bewildering variety of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups, modern India has been proud of its status as the largest pluralistic and secular democracy in the world...
...At present, treatment is available for only about 15 percent of the nation's drug addicts...
...The battle for India's history is also being fought in elementary and high schools...
...The conservative Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), riding this wave of Hindu resentment and religious nationalism, has moved in a few short years from the political fringe to its present position as the major opposition party to the ruling Congress party...
...Competing and clashing visions of history have played a crucial role in a sometimes deadly dispute about the present and future of the world's second most populous nation...
...It is legal, available, and there are many programs to deal with its negative effects...
...We remember what we want to, forget what we no longer find useful, and, often enough, fabricate what we wish had been...
...In commenting on the Orthodox Jewish observance of niddah-the traditional laws of family purity, which include a significant period each month of sexual abstinence on the part of married couples--Blu Greenberg (On Women and Judaism) writes that among Orthodox Jews the practice ofniddah remains relatively intact today...
...To reinvent the present, it helps to reinterpret the past...
...Hindus, many complain, have become disadvantaged in their own country...
...It was the BJP and its affiliated organizations who were responsible for stirring up the religious fervor that resulted in last December' s destruction of a sixteenth-century Muslim mosque in Ayodhya by a crowd of Hindu fanatics...
...The BJP has historians and archaeologists who provide official validation of its claims...
...Yet the appointment of Lee P. Brown to a cabinet-level position as the Clinton administration's first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy does not indicate a shift in emphasis...
...It was this structure that was pulled down in six hours, by hand, by thousands of Hindu nationalists on December 6, 1992...
...Professor B. B. Lal, the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, had conducted one such excavation in the '70s and found absolutely no evidence of any preexisting Hindu temple at the site...
...L. K. Advani, one of the principal leaders of the BJP, has suggested that Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs living in India be referred to as "Mohammadi Hindus," "Christian Hindus," and "Sikh Hindus" in order to emphasize the ancient and persisting Hindu character of the Indian nation-state...
...But traditional Jewish observance has endured--at least among a minority of Jews--becanse it has been able to adapt...
...BRIAN K. SMITH Brian K. Smith is professor of religious studies and history at the University of California at Riverside...
...6:16 July 1993 Commonweal...
...The funding is just not there...
...While the number of deaths and murders connected to illegal drugs has soared to some 21,000 a year (they account for the highest number of deaths among minorities under the age of thirty-five), the figure nonetheless remains smaller that the number of deaths each year which result from drunk driving (22,000...
...Especially critical were those who had worked for years on systematic archaeological excavations which had turned up nothing that remotely suggested that the site held such antiquarian wonders and indisputable proof for religious beliefs...
...For starters, we could cut the prison population by more than half, thereby raising vast sums of money for proper law enforcement and therapy for those addicted...
...The evidence--including pillars from the ancient Hindu temple which had, astonishingly, been left wholly intact and a perfectly preserved large buff sandstone slab bearing inscriptions in Sanskrit-confirmed all the main points of the BJP's version of Ayodhya's past...
...REPORT FROM THE FRONT LINES THE DRUG WAR IS A CRIME LET'S TRY DECRIMINALIZATION practice law in the criminal courts of Harris County, Texas...
...Looking back--and forward-we still hope that one day the church's pastors will learn some of the modesty and the flexibility of their rabbinic counterparts...
...Over the last several years, India's past has become a contested battleground in an ideological war which has produced very corporeal casualties...
...Brown' s background is in law enforcement (he has headed police departments in New York, Atlanta, and Houston), and the initial Clinton budget ($13 billion) seems to be a carryover of previous spending patterns: the bulk of the money is earmarked for law enforcement, surveillance, prison construction, and border patrols, rather than education and rehabilitation...
...But as a modern nationstate, it is not even half-a-century old--a mere infant among the members of the world community--and still very much in search of its own sense of self...
...are mostly crimes of poor people, and whites have the money to buy drugs (legal and illegal), to pay for good lawyers, or to afford rehab centers...
...Historians at the prestigious, left-leaning Jawaharlal Nehru University have also joined the fray, publishing pamphlets and newspaper articles in an attempt to discredit the BJP account of Ayodhya' s past...
...As a civilization, it can claim a past that stretches back thousands of years...
...It spelled out something of the costliness of a certain form of discipleship, and pointed out correctly the Catholic understanding that all sexual acts, whether in private and between whomever, have an effect on the whole community...
...And although we cannot understand it by means of logic, it [the discipline imposed by niddah] obviously serves a deep human need...
...However, statistics from the past twelve years on what came to be known as "the war on drugs" tell a grim tale...
...Yet we are now spending about $159 a day to house a prisoner in one of our overcrowded jails...
...It certainly doesn't rehabilitate them...
...But the past, it may also be noted, is never what it used to be...
...Textbooks in the states controlled by the BJP have been rewritten so as to glorify the "Hindu past," excoriate the policies of the "Muslim invaders," rename Indian cities and other geographical locales, and reenvision the relationship between the Hindu religion and Indian national identity and citizenship...
...Others have gone so far as to claim that the Taj Mahal itself was not built by a Mughal emperor to commemorate his wife but was, in fact, a pre-Islamic Hindu monument appropriated later by Muslim aggrandizers...
...They spend about $50 billion on marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, and hallucinogens...
...For our part, Kathleen and I are still wrestling with the "angel" Humanae vitae thrust into our lives...
...Critics say secularism has served as a sham for minority appeasement and fostered craven pandering by politicians to "vote banks" of grateful Muslims...
...One of the reasons rampant crime is associated with drugs is the drug trade's great profitability...
...India, insists the BJP, is a "Hindu nation" and always has been...
...The money involved is so ready, so substantial, that dealers can always find another recruit to take the place of someone who has just been caught...
...To place burdens too heavy on the shoulders of others, after all, has merited divine censure...
...All told, each year 14 million Americans use illegal drugs for one reason or another...
...Up to 1980, social programs in the cities were beginning to show some progress, but with the Reagan administration's singular emphasis on law and order, these were radically curtailed...
...One of these is secularism, a legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964...
...There are few whites in this group because drug crimes (possession, use, distribution, theft-robbery to get money for a habit, etc...
...All are poor...
...Some of these could well become the Ayodhyas of the future...
...5:8...
...Since gaining its independence in 1947, India has constitutionally defined itself as a "sovereign, democratic, and secular republic...
...There are deep social causes for illegal drug use which our present law-enforcement strategy does almost nothing to alleviate...
...ndia is simultaneously among the oldest and youngest of places...
...Some Hindu activists have been hard at work doing just that...
...A certain Sudha Malaiya, described in a press release as a "young and bright art historian," told the nation about the remarkable archaeological finds she personally uncovered in the rubble on the day the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed...
...The miraculous nature of these finds was immediately Commonweal 16 July 1993:5noted and their authenticity disputed by experts of a more secular bent...
...It has done so, in part, by offering a new interpretation of India's past...
...In the sixteenth century, or so the story goes, the Islamic ruler Babur destroyed the Hindu temple which had existed at Ayodhya since time immemorial, and erected on its ruins a mosque...
...India's self-identity pivots on how it understands its past, and that past is currently disputed...
...Moreover, the real drug of choice in the / white community is alcohol...
...For those imprisoned, for use or for dealing, incarceration does little more than harden them...
...Instead of seeking to build more jails at enormous costs, we should apply a fraction of that money to drug rehab centers, a proven method of helping people get off drugs...
...To me it is shameful and irrational that users of cocaine and heroin are labeled criminals and go to jail--with almost no hope of therapy or rehab--while the users of the powerful drug alcohol are considered sick (alcoholics) and given therapy...
...If we were to legalize and control the use of illegal drugs, we could make some significant progress...
...More than half of them are in prison because of drug-related crimes...
...How this young nation-state conceives of, or reconceives, its own history will determine whether India will survive as the world' s largest secular democracy, or enter the new millennium as the newest, and by far the most populous, of the world' s theocracies...
...According to Greenberg, Judaism has been able to do so because it "interprets and reflects reality, not just tradition...
...It said something necessary about chasteness, modesty, the ends of marriage, and the ability to "die to oneself," all of which bespeak genuine religion and have something to do with how we will come to see the face of God (Matt...
...Nations, like individuals, are defined by what they think they once were...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
