In the Cattle Class Now?

The recent racial attacks on three Indians in Melbourne by a mob of eighty again highlights the fact that the problem has not gone away.The repeated assaults indicate a mindset which refuses to see a human being as a human being.We have pointed out before that the problem is systemic. Clearly in this system the human body is being treated as a means to accomplish a racist end. Otherwise how do you explain this brutal physical assault degrading human beings?
At our end, in India, it could have been a matter of battling attitudes which lead up to the racial tensions.This is however not helped by the unseemly controversy in which our MOS for external affairs has got caught up in. Calling a large section of society 'cattle class' is hardly the way to build the right national and international attitudes.Being a former contender of the top United Nations job, he should have known that the majority of the nations in the U.N. are those who have fought these 'cattle class' attitudes to emerge out of war and colonialism and in to freedom. These 'cattle class' attitudes led to the racial segregation and the 'koi hai' culture of the British in India in the 19th century.This 'cattle class' culture also keeps a vast number of people today under 'techno-political' subjugation.Inherent in these 'cattle class' classifications are the attitudes of patriarchy, communalism and disdain for human life.In the last twenty odd years of India integrating with a globalized world, these were the issues to have been tackled by us. In tackling these we could have moved towards the right attitudes for tackling issues such as racism which seem to be emerging in Australia and as well as in the issue of health care reform in the U.S or attacks upon Muslims in Germany.
This is not to run down Mr. Tharoor whom we respect as a writer and a gentleman. However, his comments have given us an occasion to reflect upon the enormity of tasks ahead of us at a time when study processes have got caught up in racial and political tensions.Here we must stress to him that it is this historical and juridical positing of man to the animal nature by the German jurist, Gustav Hugo(1764-1844) which was criticised by a famous radical thinker in the 19th century as the German theory of the French ancien regime.The only conclusion which stems from this, as this radical points out, is "the right of arbitrary power". This ofcourse we must oppose.(SFC and PG IGNOU with Mr. Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)