The Hindu : New Delhi News : Shattering some fundamental myths

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 15, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Shattering some fundamental myths

By Our Special Correspondent

Lord Meghnad Desai

NEW DELHI, DEC. 14. The director of the Centre for Study of Global Governance, London, Meghnad Desai, today said fundamentalism of every kind -- be it Christian, Muslim or Hindu -- is a political movement. Delivering the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Memorial Lecture on `Globalisation and Culture' here, the economist said: "Each fundamentalism is a political and not a religious movement based on an agenda of creating an exclusive realm where they can control the citizenship.''

In his lecture organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Lord Desai also sought to dispel the myth that fundamentalism and globalisation were hostile to each other. "Fundamentalists of all religions are happy with modern technologies though not with modern science. They are happy to claim rights everywhere but not to grant them to those who they think do not belong to their community.''

Though globalisation and fundamentalism are in his opinion compatible, the India-born-London-based economist warned not just of a possible clash of fundamentalisms but a clash of all fundamentalisms with modernity. "In their mobility, their technical savvy and their ability to manipulate the idioms of modernity to subvert this spirit, these fundamentalisms are headed for a mutual clash.''

Another common myth that he sought to dispel pertained to Islam hindering development. Of the view that the underdevelopment of resource-rich Middle-East was a self-inflicted wound, he said in the absence of a secular progressive economic idea to unite them the people of the old Ottoman Empire have taken to religion as an "identifier for their unity''. "It is not that Islam hinders development. Malaysia is a ready refutation of that argument. It is just that Arab nationalism has lost every other basis for identity building.''

Stating that globalisation is not a new phenomenon and arguing that the current phase of globalisation is just a new incarnate of similar trends in the past, Lord Desai said: "Nationalism is in a way a European idea universalised as no other European idea was. It combined rationality and religion in various proportions in different territories. Thus nationalism is an ideology sometime fused with religion and at other times in conflict with it. Needless to say, Indian nationalism is a perfect example of this ambivalence.''

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