TimEs

“The survival of Hindutva as an idea requires the unceasing repeti￾tion of this history: Hindutva may very well become hollowed out without it. All critiques of Savarkar’s history are necessarily meant to annihilate the epistemic conceptualisation of Hindutva. I am uncertain whether we are in a “state of emergency” – or that we will be in a “real state of emergency” as articulated by Walter Benjamin. But what is clear to me is that Hindutva cannot be ignored.30 And that being so, nor can Savarkar’s ideas about history. If Hindutva is of Being, then the very idea of the “Hindu,” as constructed by Savarkar, is at stake. To understand the fundamental thought that “Hindutva is not a word but a history” marks the continuation of this struggle.”
― Vinayak Chaturvedi, Hindutva and Violence: V. D. Savarkar and the Politics of History

“If a “colonialism bad” perspective cannot represent the full complexity of Hong Kong’s history, returnists also argue that a counterdiscourse describing Chinese rule as “colonial” makes the mistake of flattening distinct colonial regimes under a single descriptor. Returnists see the former remote metropole of London facilitating the expansion of freedom, rights, and rule of law in the city, while also taking an increasingly hands-off approach to the management of local affairs over the course of the colony’s history. Returnists then contrast this model of rule with that of another considerably more proximal metropole, joined by an assumed racial-cultural link, which has only ever taken an increasingly interventionist and controlling approach against the liberalizing trends fostered by the former. The point here is that the Chinese colonization of Hong Kong is not simply a “continuation” of the pre-1997 colonial situation, as a singular discourse of colonization would suggest. Rather, these are two vastly different colonial metropoles, and a significant part of the problem with Chinese colonization in the eyes of returnists is precisely that China has not continued the United Kingdom’s colonial style.”
― Kevin Carrico, Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong

“A comparative analysis of lived political experiences of colonization and ostensible noncolonization may then facilitate moving beyond simplistic labeling and attendant moralizing, or perhaps beyond simplistic moralizing and attendant labeling. If we consider Hong Kong’s history exclusively through its binary relationship with the United Kingdom, there were undoubtedly grave injustices in the colonial era that no reasonable person can deny: the ban on people of Chinese descent living on the Peak, or the long-standing failure to implement full democracy.201 Yet such a perspective fails to explain why people in China proactively chose to flee their homes to move to a colonial state and willingly become colonial subjects, nor does it explain the widespread feeling of anxiety about the end of British rule in the 1980s and 1990s.”
― Kevin Carrico, Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong

“I gave an example to a leader once during a conference on the role of governments. I asked him about the job of a traffic policeman standing in the middle of a busy intersection. He said the policeman was there to direct the traffic coming from all directions and make sure no accidents occurred. So I asked him what would happen if he prevented everyone from moving except his friends and relatives. He answered, “He would be a failure, a corrupt person who is not performing his duties.” Governments are the traffic police and their role is to facilitate the movement of life for the people who are driven to build their futures and their nations. Unfortunately our region suffers from an excess of failed traffic policemen.”
― Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, My Story