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Long years ago, at the conclusion of my doctoral work in America, pressure was put on me to stay and teach there. Twice, in fact. Each time I made excuses. Pressed hard to explain I had the following to say:
–admittedly, staying on there would yield me every facility to write half a dozen books, but once outside the confines of academe, what would I be a part of? By ‘what’ I meant what sort of active political involvement. It did seem to me that the “end of history” thesis justly applied to the United States. With few resistance movements on the ground, post-Vietnam, only centrist politics remained available. And who doesn’t know that the Republicans and the Democrats are, all said and done, tweedledum and tweedledee, espousing at bottom one and the same class interest. There has rarely been an occasion when American history in the contemporary moment seemed to offer any major openings beyond what has always obtained—individualism, market economics, puritan exceptionalism, a commitment to “just” warfare, and a near-universal abhorrence of socialist thought and of any skepticism with respect to god’s purposes.
Tags: anti-Muslim killings, Badri Raina, India, Jyoti Basu, Narendra Modi, Panchayati Raj system, United States
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