No court or executive or politician or big business intervened to stop Swamy from teaching at Harvard. Instead, its faculty voted [0] to remove his course after he wrote this hateful diatribe [1].
[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/12/swamy-racism-di...
[1] https://janamejayan.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/how-to-wipe-out...
Edit: corrected minor typo
Well, yes, the probability that you will get sued into oblivion because the system of laws doesn't offer free speech protections could be seen as "commercial reasons". The article states as much.
A private institution censoring its own is very different than an outside entity forcing censorship via threats of lawsuits.
Violations of free speech by private institutions should be a crime, just like labour violations are. It should only take an amendment, there is no fundamental irony.
Notice that the state infringes on private parties anyway - the most obvious example is when the state decides to take away children from families if there's harassment of the child at home. I am not debating whether this is right or wrong, but I am just pointing out that the state is not so hands-off as it is generally made out to be.
The article itself refers to such treatment by naming Edward Said, for example. But then swoops in with personal judgements, calling Rajiv Malhotra's essay as a right-wingist parody and trying to link everything with rise of business-friendly nationalist Modi.
This is to be expected. Economical rise of any non-western country has historically correlated with doom-and-gloom about it in articles in western media, whether it is liberal or conservative. Even now it is hard for me to read an article about China in The Economist. Just today I saw an article about Chinese government cracking down on sex-racket, and how it is fomenting unrest and civil disobedience among Chinese.
Um... I am Hindu. I don't practice folk Hinduism too much but Hinduism and it's history are one of my areas of interest. I really want to discuss with some others who have read this book and find out what exactly put them off. Have you?
Why? Cause I doubt they would agree. To say unless you are X then you can't comment on X is foolish.
"Cause I doubt they would agree." That should tell the complexity of defining Hinduism and the amateurish level western 'Indologists' have achieved which they spread around, calling any criticism to their approach 'foolish'.
As a second book, The Hindus is pretty accessible if you're used to reading slightly technical books. Her style is good, and she's absorbed the Indian philosophical writing tradition of using far too many analogies :)
But on the other hand, the limits of free speech are ones that must be decided close to those affected. Brandenburg got off with calling for (and stating he wanted to be a part of!) genocide against African Americans at a KKK rally not because this speech contributed anything to the public discourse worth saving but because the US government had made a series of serious overreaches in prosecuting Communists. Since one couldn't draw a principled line between arguing for eventual genocide and arguing for eventual overthrow of the government, Brandenburg had to be set free.
In the end, I think, that communities have a right to make mistakes, and since free speech can't be unlimited (handing someone a gun and saying "I hope someone shoots so-and-so" isn't protected speech anywhere in the world), the peoples affected get to make this discussion.
One thing that bothers me though: there are a number of fields, like historical linguistics which are malaigned by some in India as colonial (and in fact historical Indo-European linguistics arose from the colonial experience historically) but are argued against as straw men (thinking that the Indo-European hypothesis means Europeans invading India, which it doesn't). I do have a concern that by moving towards a more insular culture in this regard, that it is harder and harder for Indian scholars to make their voices and perspectives heard internationally. It would be tragic if in the interest of protecting the Indian cultural experience, these sorts of things lead to the denial of an Indian perspective in these sorts of disciplines.
It really would get more Americans engaged in politics.
It's worth noting that not too long after that incident, there was a civil war...
* or worse - Read the Amazon reviews, specifically the ones by the author's fellow academics http://www.amazon.com/The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History/dp/1...
Don't let that distort your mental model of the country.
