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Mullah Omar and
Robespierre: Essays in the Politics of Ideas
Reviewing this volume presents a peculiar challenge: reviewing the review. The essays in this publication have been taken from the author’s books column in The New Sunday Express, published from Chennai that were written between end-2000 and the middle of 2004. Since Parsa had the freedom to choose the author or book from any period of history, he has used some well-known and some not so commented upon texts to discuss the contemporary trends in the world. The essays have been clubbed together under five broad sections—politics, history, philosophy, literature and science. Each chapter is a 1000-word piece which is both the strength and the weakness of this volume. Parsa argues that his intention is "to take the ideas and the debate to the general reader, who doesn’t have the patience to read a book on each of these subjects." The objective is full of good intent. However, the theorists, philosophers and writers Parsa has included in the volume are hardly familiar to the general readers and hence a 1000-word piece, howsoever well-written, can at best generate curiosity but may not enlighten them. It is like serving an eight-course meal in a McDonald’s outlet. Nevertheless, Parsa deserves to be complimented for introducing thinkers and philosophers and their seminal works to the newspaper readers. Most newspapers today avoid such scholars like plague dismissing them to be too serious. The essay titled "Mullah Omar and Robespierre" is fascinating which dispels the popular notion about the reign of terror let loose by the Taliban’s mediaeval beliefs. The frenzy, the fury and the murderous rage that characterised the Taliban regime was by no means a mediaeval but a modern phenomenon. The French Revolution of 1789, the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Khomeini Revolution of 1979 in Iran witnessed similar frenzy, if not worse, in their immediate aftermath like the Taliban’s. As Parsa rightly says, "Revolutionary terror has its own inexorable logic." Commenting on American historian Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution, Parsa says that the French Jacobins led by Robespierre, Lenin in Russia and Taliban leader Mullah Omar sought to impose the tyranny of virtue and that fanaticism has nothing to do with religion as such. Robespierre was a declared atheist whereas Omar is an orthodox Muslim but they acted in similar ways. Jean Baudrillard who once described the US as a land of "achieved utopia" describes 9/11 as a consequence of the unchallenged hegemony of globalisation. To many not familiar with the French philosopher, his views on terrorism and globalisation may sound weird : "Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Centre, this symbolic challenge is immoral and it answers a globalisation that is immoral." Parsa comes down heavily on the secularists as well for their inability to look at the "crimes committed against humanity in the name of secular ideologies. It is this intellectual dishonesty that makes it so difficult for the secularists to stand up to the religious fanatics." If Parsa is harsh on secularists, he is no less unsparing in his criticism of the Right-wing, majoritarian BJP which is not exactly known for intellectual tolerance. Some leaders are so blind to their weird ideas that they cannot distinguish between Marxists and liberals. No wonder the quality of debate has plummeted in the country. Parsa refutes the false notion about Karl Popper, author of the seminal The Open Society and Its Enemies. More than Marx, Popper considered Plato and Hegel as the "real enemies of a free society". By placing the state above individuals and rationalising iniquitous laws as a means of protecting freedom, Hegel was espousing "new tribalism", something which was spread by the BJP. It is this tribalism which bared its ugly teeth during the pogrom in Gujarat. |
AN ancient Greek sage once
said, "When you step into a river, you change the river and the
river changes you." The intellectual encounters between the East
and the West during the colonial period and afterwards produced a
similar result. India benefited from such ideational encounter, so did
great European and North American writers and thinkers. One of the
reasons for the success of democracy in India was the fact that it took
to heart Linus Pauling’s advice "The best way to have a good idea
is to have lots of ideas." However, this rich exposure to East and
West has not been sufficiently explored and analysed. The book under
review by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr has undertaken this daunting
exercise with a fair degree of success.