This preview from Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future has generated at least one passionate response in the burgeoning Indian blogosphere. Her essay is a paranoid summary of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and its relationship with 1930s European fascism. She tries to scale up the microcosm of Gujarat, as if it represents the whole mosaic of modern India, and fails miserably. While devoid of any new insights on our predicaments, the preview essay contains strangely amusing notions such as:

Well, for a start, the people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.

Even the most liberal Hindu would be offended. This image brings to my mind that great genetic journey we have all made, all the peoples of the world - branching out from the dark heart of Africa, the cradle of Man, the source and origin of all nomadic drift. By Nussbaum's logic the Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims because the Hindu identity as a coherent unit was only established after the arrival of Islam in as a force in the subcontinent, in the same way as the idea of India as a national entity was only conceivable after its assembly within the British Empire. It would be far too laborious to point out the historical errors and faulty assumptions in Nussbaum's story, which would have benefited from a little research.

For anyone looking for the most authoritative guide to post-1947 democratic India, please refer to historian Ramchandra Guha's awesome tome - India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy . The hyperlink will take you to a review of the book by Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian, who describes it thus:

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[Note: This the first in a five-part series of posts by Rohit Gupta on politics in India.]

If the late 19th century and early twentieth were shaped by the movement of railways, it stands to reason that aviation will shape the politics of our times, through it's unique expression of movement by flight. Last week, I noticed at least three curious incidents in Asia that pertained to aerial flight or airports. In all three cases, while we are aware that an event has occurred challenging a territory, the territorial line being violated is entirely virtual, a kind of Maginot Line in the clouds, as it were:

1. The Tamil Tigers rebel group (or LTTE) in Sri Lanka orchestrated an aerial attack on a Sri Lankan government airstrip. They now hold the distinction of being the world's first insurgent group to stage an air attack, or to possess any kind of airforce. This should have boosted the Tigers' fundraising operations abroad, apart from flaring up clashes between the old rivals in recent days. It wouldn't be surprising if LTTE conducted an operation in Indian territory by crossing the narrow strait between the two countries.

I should mention the mythological aspect of this event. In the Ramayana, the main Hindu epic, one incident describes the monkey-god Hanuman flying over the sea and going to Lanka from India's southernmost tip - Kanyakumari. He is insulted in the court of Ravana, the Lord of Lanka, who burns his tail. Hanuman escapes and with his magnificent tail in flames (in popular interpretation of the myth, the jet engine), the flying monkey-god torches down a major portion of the golden city of Lanka.     

2. In France, Pakistani tourism minister Ms. Nilofar Bakhtiar went on a paragliding session as a fundraiser event for the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. After the jump was successful, she hugged her French coach, a man. The photographs of this embrace were tagged as posing in an "obscene manner" by some extremist clerics in Pakistan who promptly issued a fatwa against the lady.  

In simple terms, the lady had "crossed a line", but which line was it? It is the surface of the lady's body, which belongs to an Islamic code according to the clerics – Islam owns her body. Ms. Bakhtiar replied to the fatwa saying that the event was for the benefit of Pakistani people, and she would "do it again" if needed. She didn't clarify whether "the event" in question was the flight or the hug, because ostensibly, the flight could not have been possible without the support of a trained instructor, and for her the flight would thus have been synonymous with the hug.

3. In another strange incident the US ambassador to India David Mulford and wife were found standing at the Mumbai airport taxiway for 30 minutes, after their pilot reported smoke in the cockpit of their US defense aircraft.  Ambassadors of foreign countries are exempt from security checks at Indian airports, but apparently the pilot argued and flouted the rules of conduct on the taxiway as dictated by the Air Traffic Control. According to the rules, he should not have asked them to disembark in the middle of the taxiway.

Airports are transit zones, you are in transit at each point whether in the taxi-bus or airplane. As long as you are escorted in a vehicle, you are in movement, and therefore within permissible territory. The transit zone, by definition – is neither here nor there, it is the zone between the source and the destination. To be static is read as a threatening gesture.