Conservative and Proud

The fabulous humanitarian gesture  on immigration from Germany has been heart-warming. Although domestic pressures have made Germany revisit this, the original gesture and scenes in German railway stations were wonderful to see. Angela Merkel's gesture has given the liberal media another tool to berate conservatives, and subtly shame them on the issue of immigration. This is wrong. The concerns raised by the conservatives are very real.

The simplified counter to the idea of mass-immigration would be this - Today's immigration could lead to tomorrow's segregation, to the day after's fundamentalism. The addendum would read - Immigrants live on welfare for a long time and are a net drag on fiscal resources.

But safety and welfare are but one small component of a list of concerns about immigration. It is an oversimplification to bring down immigration to only two issues - security or welfare. A Country could get in safe immigrants who are going to be net contributors to the state and the citizens might still be not comfortable with it. I can be instinctively against enforced multiculturalism without being a moron.

As a conservative, I am peeved at this subculture that looks at any opposition to multiculturalism as bigotry. It is unfortunate that the conservative concern is not articulated and discussed well enough credibly. On one hand, we have the conservative movement hijcked by extremists; on the other we have liberals who are hell bent on belittling conservative ideology.

If I have a second cousin who I know very little about who happens to visit my town, I am ok to grab a coffee with him post work. But even if I am not worried he is a thief I am not happy to have him park at my house for 2 weeks.

Before you get the idea that I oppose all humanitarian gestures and would rather see refugees die, let me clarify that I also think that the response from Germany has been immense and it has made me an even bigger fan of the Germans than I was (and I was a pretty big fan even before this). The way German society has reacted to the refugee crisis has been phenomenal. In the cynical world that we live it, it is very heart-warming to see so many people so willing to take in refugees and help them so much. If I were German, I would be insanely proud of this response from my Country.

As unequivocal as I would be in Germany's praise on this issue, it is important to note that it is not a crime to be wary of immigrants. Similar to slut-shaming, and fat-shaming, this German response has led to a wave of conservative-shaming that has been going on. David Cameron's response has been shameful, Italy has not done enough, the Hungarian Prime minister is bigoted, etc have been found on the web. Anyone who says he/she is worried about the scale of this immigration is painted as the second coming of Satan, or worse still Islamophobic.

Conservatives in Europe have been worried about immigration and multiculturalism for a while now. This is why UKIP got so many votes, this is why Marie Le Pen is gaining momentum. Conservatives in America have been so worried about immigration that they have made a candidate out of Donald Trump. They have been pilloried either for lacking empathy or for whining because they lost out. Although a border-less world with stunted nationalistic impulses would be fabulous for peace initiatives, it is as Utopian as a Marxist world where everyone worked for collective good. All this moralizing is creating fertile ground for a nationalistic backlash that is going to be fun to watch.

Immigration comes with a cost. It is very vital to debate and discuss this with key inputs from people who bear the cost. The left as ever is so eager to capture moral high-ground that there is a steadfast refusal to face facts. The gentlemen who shape immigration policies have probably never lost a job to an immigrant. Perhaps there is some value in listening to what the Hungary PM has got to say. 

The pace of immigration cannot be imposed by an elite that has nothing to lose from this. On both European integration and immigration from outside EU, the population has grown wary. It is irrational to ask the population to suspend all nationalistic feeling and substitute this either with a trans-national love-in (EU) or with a moral high ground.

The endless moralizing from the liberal media is frightfully annoying on this front. Worldwide, the left has fallen into the trap of believing that occupying moral high ground is in and of itself a solution to many problems. Liberals have a tendency to believe that they can push public opinion toward what it 'ought' to be by tweaking policy. Liberals' fetish for the morally correct humanitarian and environment-friendly gestures is often a load of sanctimonious tosh.

The refugee crisis in the middle East has no easy solution. A small young Syrian boy being washed up on the shore is gut-wrenching; it is so soul-crushing that you want to desperately do something about it. But this desire to do something does not entitle one to belittle anyone voicing caution. With all the moral high ground and pro-poor policies they have, left wingers should be ruling everywhere. Democracy is designed for the guy who speaks for the poor and helpless. The game is stacked so in favour of leftists. But they really struggle electorally because they cannot get over this instinct of being holier-than-thou.

My conservatism is not bigotry. I am not parochial and uncaring merely because I am anti-immigration. I can be anti-immigration, peace-loving, humanitarian and fiercely patriotic at the same time. This is an idea that liberals do not get. In their world, anyone saying - "Hey, we gotta be careful about how many we let into our Country?" is a bigot.  

I am a conservative/nationalist on a few other issues as well. As far as India is concerned, I am not a fan of trade with Pakistan, a pipeline running from the middle East through Afghanistan and Pakistan, or even on cricketing relations with Pakistan. I love the cricket team of our dear neighbours; I would be thrilled to see Amir bowl to Indian batsmen. But in some instances when Countries do not see eye to eye, I am of the view that we should not pretend to be friends. As individuals we try to avoid dealing with people who we do not get along with. As Countries, we should accept the fact that there is a huge trust-deficit and not hanker after foreign policy wins that just do not exist.

India's daughter - liberals miss the mark, conservatives continue to be blinkered

The recent banning of the documentary by Leslee Udwin has provided an excellent opportunity for India's chattering classes to get their K's into a T. Having run out of the usual banal routine within 2-3 days, the newscycle pressure has forced the gentlefolk of the media to up the ante to really wildly fantastically irrational territory.

Sample this from the liberal bastion, the Hindu. This is a classic

Some years ago, a friend confided in me that in a fit of rage her husband had shouted that he wished she would be gang raped because she deserved it. Then he paused and said, “No, I think I want something worse than that to happen to you. I want you to die.”

I watched India’s Daughter before the government banned it. As I listened to the rapist explain how he and the others thought about women, I realised there was little difference between them and this husband. But that’s where the similarity ended. He was an upper caste male, an IIT aristocrat living in Silicon Valley, studying at a top business school. The only other difference was that he never acted on his thoughts.

Our lady author friend is gagging with feminist rage and so she extrapolates extravagantly. The sentence "The only other difference was that he never acted on this thoughts" is so brilliant that I hurt myself when I fell from the chair laughing. It is a shame that no one in the editing team from the venerable Hindu told the author "But dear, that seems a pretty big difference to me". 

One one hand, a piqued husband probably says something in anger, on the other hand lies the most heinous crime India has seen (or at least heard of) in the 21st century. This kind of shabby equivalence argument is why Indian intellectual liberalism has not had a credible voice since Nehru.

Somewhere, the liberals have sought to draw a broad enough canvas so as to draw a link between a most gruesome crime and various shades of patriarchy that are present in our Country. This impulse from India's liberal media to simplify everything along pre-existing faultlines is ridiculous. A conversation on rape becomes about Patriarchy-is-the-root-cause vs. blame-the-victim schools of thought. That the rabid conservatives cannot go beyond the "India-is-great" koolaid is a given. That is no excuse for liberals to automatically occupy the diametrically opposite position. 

I am neither liberal nor conservative and if there is one thing that I want to scream out in this whole episode, it is this. I am saddened extremely that this crime against humanity has been perpetrated. I am shaken to the core that there exist people in this world who could commit crimes that are this gruesome. I am scared for women in our cities and our villages. This much is true. I must also say that I am not even a little bit ashamed . Sad, yes. Shamed, no. That my compatriot has committed this crime has not filled my whole being with shame. I feel as much connect with him as a present-day American would with the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. 

I concede that a feudal patriarchal upbringing has played a role in the way we view women. I also accept that I am posit somewhere on this patriarchal hierarchy (I would argue that I aint that bad, my wife believes I am more chauvinist than I would like to believe. Thats a debate for another day. Either way, I sit somewhere on this line). But no matter where I sit on that line, I refuse to be co-opted into this collective "I feel shamed by this" - this feeling that the liberals want me to feel and the conservatives are supposedly rebelling against. That the convict and I share the same nationality has no bearing. 

I even feel shamed by the Country's response, have a sense of helplessness about the state of our security, but I feel no shame in relation to the fact that an "Indian" committed the crime. 

All this talk of shame neatly brings us to the response from India's conservatives. This has been ridiculous. I could not even begin to wind my head around the ban. The policy response has been broadly "Throw a lot of mud. Some will probably stick". The primary issue has been with the producer's nationality. We still have this holier-than-thou attitude, which when mixed with colonial hangover results in "So, how are you any better?" as the built-in response to any issue.

On this front, the statistics on rape per 1000 people that has been doing the rounds has been very helpful to the conservative cause. The stats are wrong. They are absurdly, ridiculously, unspinnably wrong. The stats are all about "reported rapes" and these are miles apart from actual rape, especially for India. In the west they have come a long way on women's safety. Their rape cases are more a case of "pushing the boundaries" and date-rape. I would be shocked if any Indian woman who had lived in Delhi and New York claimed to feel safer in Delhi over NY. And we need to keep in mind that this is a very favourable sample point for India. If we had to compare, say, rural Bihar to Texas things might be far worse. 

Apparently more than two-thirds of rapes are committed by someone who the victim knows. About 0.1% of these will get reported in India. We must be wearing extraordinary truth-protection blinkers to believe that women are safer in India than they are in the west. I am appalled that so many of my friends shared links that showed these statistics. I would not accuse India's conservative media of Intellectual dishonesty (they can at best be called merely dishonest), but many who shared these links should have known better.

In the US, they are talking about the merits of a "No means no" vs. "Yes means Yes" legal framework. 80% of Indian women would not know where to go to complain if they were sexually assaulted, and this is from the educated class. If you are poor, illiterate and a woman, then God save you. One needs to watch only 2-3 episodes of "Savdhan India" to get a sense of the level to which poor in our Country are not guaranteed any of the freedoms that the middle-class is. 

I am bitterly disappointed that so many of my friends shared the statistics. I am ashamed that not one of them came and said these stats seem absurd. Far more ashamed of this than of being a compatriot of the guy committed the crime. 

We need to really stop this right-wing nonsense about how the west is out to malign us. Everything is not a conspiracy. If we did not view everything from the viewpoint of "Does this show my Country in bad light?", it would be that little bit better. We cannot look for any solutions if we continue to be in denial. 

There are many things to be proud of in India. Protection given to women, especially poorer and vulnerable women is not one of them. The sooner we come to accept that, the sooner we can try to improve our lot. 

Last time I re-posted an article on how women should take safety precautions, a group of my friends came down on me like a ton of bricks (Their peeve was that I was somehow blaming-the-victim). I am troubled by the fact even they have not called out this conservative statistic fudging.