Warning note on Hindutva

Different images of Islam

In TIME, the predicament of India’s Muslims was the pivot of a story about Muslim minorities under siege across Asia. It said that the plight of Indian Muslims — ‘‘they have never felt more vulnerable and persecuted’’ — is shared in varying degrees by China’s Turkic-speaking Uighurs, the Rohingyas in Burma, Muslims of Sri Lanka’s Eastern province.

The look at Muslim minorities was part of an ambitious enterprise by the magazine to frame different images of Islam in Asia to show that Muslims cannot — and should not — be stereotyped. In a lively essay, novelist Mohsin Hamid proposed a new, ‘‘more useful’’ division of the world: between those who think that conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims is desirable and those who think it is not.

Of Gods and Presidents

Religion seemed uppermost in many minds as the drumbeats of war sounded louder. NEWSWEEK’s cover story attempted a ‘‘faith portrait’’ of George W. Bush. The man who rises ahead of dawn most days, to read a book of evangelical mini-sermons. In a White House suffused with an ‘‘aura of prayerfulness’’.

‘‘Never have we historians been busier making sense of presidential God talk than now,’’ wrote Martin E. Marty, professor emeritus at the university of Chicago. He said that after September 11 and the US President’s decision to attack Iraq, the talk that other nations may have found ‘‘mildly amusing or merely arrogant’’ has taken on an international and historical resonance.

Diplomatic failure, military might

In the run-up to the Security Council vote on Iraq, is an increasingly louder buzz in the US media about America’s isolation. Especially after the jolting refusal of Turkey’s Parliament to let US troops strike from that country despite the handsome bribe offered by the US. And the joint statement by France, Russia and Germany that they would block a resolution giving the go-ahead to military action.

There was some handwringing. And bristling calls to march on nevertheless. ‘‘The scale of the failure of US diplomacy … is staggering,’’ wrote columnist Jim Hoagland in THE WASHINGTON POST. But now, ‘‘soldiers must chart the path out of the clouded ‘context’ the politicians and diplomats have created…’’ Failed US diplomacy, he exhorted, must give way to a ‘‘clear war strategy’’.

Sen and sensibility on famines

Another bleak crisis swam briefly into focus when the NEW YORK TIMES locked horns with Amartya Sen’s assertion that famines do not occur in democracies.

What about those reports of starvation from Sen’s own site of research, asked Michael Massing in the NYT. He pointed to states like drought-ravaged Rajasthan and Orissa. Where thousands have died against a backdrop of endemic hunger and malnutrition and millions go hungry to bed every night while the government sits on a grain surplus of more than 50 million tonnes.

Sen protested that he was misunderstood: ‘‘We must distinguish between the role of democracy in preventing famine and the comparative ineffectiveness of democracy in preventing regular undernourishment’’. That didn’t deter his critics. They accused him of naivete about how democracies work. Others faulted him for being preoccupied with limited public works programmes and not taking on the big political questions. Yet others contended that political freedoms need to be complemented by economic liberalisation.

All the critics of Sen agreed that democracy is no cure-all — a view Sen himself concurs with. The last word in the debate belonged to Sen: ‘‘The key, he said, is not to jettison democracy but to find ways of making it work better for society’s underdogs.’’