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Sep 11, 2026
Viren S Doshi

September 11: Vivekananda’s Tolerance vs. Jihadist Assault on Democratic Society

September 11 occupies a unique and jarring place in modern memory. For most people in the United States and the broader West, the date instantly evokes the brutal terrorist attacks of 2001 that killed nearly three thousand people and reshaped global politics. Yet more than a century earlier, on the same calendar day in 1893, another event unfolded in the same country that embodied the universal eternal spirit: an Indian Hindu monk stood before a large American audience and delivered a ringing endorsement of religious tolerance and mutual acceptance. These two September 11ths — one a celebration of pluralism in an open democratic forum, the other a calculated assault on the symbols and people of that same open society — offer a clarifying contrast. For the United States and societies of European descent that prize openness, free exchange, and democratic institutions, these two events provide a lasting, impactful lesson about the conditions under which openness can be sustained. The 1893 Gathering: An Invitation to Pluralism On September 11, 1893, the first Parliament of the World’s Religions opened in Chicago as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition. The gathering brought representatives of major religious traditions together in what organisers hoped would be a landmark interfaith dialogue. Among the speakers was a thirty-year-old Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda. He arrived in America with limited formal credentials yet quickly became one of the most magnetic figures of the assembly. Vivekananda began his address with the words “Sisters and Brothers of America.” The greeting, unusual for the formal oratory of the time, drew a standing ovation that lasted more than two minutes from an audience of several thousand. He went on to thank the hosts in the name of India’s ancient monastic orders, of Hinduism as the “mother of religions,” and of the millions of Hindus of every class and sect. He declared pride in belonging to a tradition that taught both tolerance and universal acceptance: “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” He spoke of India’s historical practice of sheltering persecuted peoples, including Jews who found refuge after the destruction of their temple by Roman forces. And he closed with a hope that the Parliament’s opening bell would serve as the “death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.” Contemporary American newspapers, including the New York Herald, hailed Vivekananda as the outstanding figure of the Parliament. His message introduced many Western listeners to Vedanta philosophy and aspects of Hindu thought. The event itself was made possible by the openness of late-nineteenth-century American society: a confident, expanding republic willing to host global discussion, to listen to an outsider, and to grant him a platform without demanding that he first abandon his own tradition. The exchange was reciprocal in spirit. Vivekananda offered a vision of harmony rather than conquest; the audience responded with applause and affection rather than suspicion. The 2001 Attacks: Exploitation of Openness One hundred and eight years later, on September 11, 2001, nineteen men affiliated with the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners. Two were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, one struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers intervened. Nearly three thousand people from dozens of nations died. The attacks targeted both the economic and military symbols of the United States and, more broadly, the confidence and security of an open democratic society. The perpetrators acted from a radical Islamist ideology that portrayed the United States and the West as enemies of Islam, rejected liberal democratic norms, and treated civilian populations as legitimate targets. They exploited the very freedoms that characterise open societies—relatively free movement, access to commercial aviation, and the ability of individuals to live and train inside the country for years while concealing their intentions. Where Vivekananda had arrived to persuade and to share ideas, the 2001 attackers arrived (or remained) to kill and to intimidate. Their project was not dialogue or mutual recognition; it was unilateral violence aimed at punishing and weakening a civilisation they regarded as fundamentally illegitimate. A Clear Contrast The two events share a date and a geographic stage—the United States as the leading open democratic society of the current era—yet they diverge sharply in character, intent, and consequence. In 1893, an Eastern visitor entered a free forum, offered a message of tolerance and shared humanity, and was received with curiosity and applause and adoration. The encounter expanded intellectual horizons and illustrated the productive potential of openness. In 2001, a network of terrorists and extremists used the same society’s openness as a weapon, producing mass death and long-term strategic disruption. Vivekananda’s speech rested on an assumption of reciprocity: different traditions could recognise one another’s partial truths and refrain from fanaticism. The ideology behind the 2001 attacks rejected reciprocity. It treated democratic institutions, individual rights, and the existence of non-Islamic societies as obstacles to be overcome by force. One event demonstrated how an open society can absorb and benefit from difference; the other demonstrated how that same openness can be turned against itself when certain ideologies refuse the terms of peaceful coexistence. Lessons for Open Democratic Societies The paired history of these two September 11ths yields several practical lessons for the United States and other open societies. First, openness is a strength only when paired with discernment. Democratic societies flourish when they welcome talent, ideas, and peaceful cultural exchange of the kind Vivekananda represented. They endanger themselves when they treat every ideology or network as equally compatible with constitutional order. Traditions and individuals who affirm pluralism, equal citizenship, free speech, and the legitimacy of the host society can enrich it. Those whose doctrines treat democratic institutions or non-believers as legitimate targets of violence or subjugation cannot be integrated on identical terms. Second, cultural and institutional self-confidence is indispensable. An open society that loses conviction in its own foundational norms—rule of law, individual liberty, free inquiry, and equal citizenship under a shared constitution—becomes unable to set coherent boundaries. Reciprocity is not optional. Vivekananda’s message presupposed mutual recognition; jihadist ideology did not. Societies that refuse to defend their core principles invite the very intolerance they claim to reject. Third, the physical and legal conditions of openness must be actively protected. Effective intelligence, careful screening of entrants for ideological compatibility with liberal democracy, refusal to grant safe haven to networks that preach violence, and consistent enforcement of law are not contradictions of openness. They are the prerequisites that allow genuine dialogue and voluntary exchange to continue. Naïve universalism that ignores patterns of recruitment, ideology, and violence is not moral sophistication; it is a failure of elementary self-preservation. Fourth, collective guilt and blanket suspicion are both errors. Large populations are not monolithic. Millions of individuals from every background live peacefully and productively within open societies. At the same time, observable patterns of ideology, organisational behaviour, and repeated violence cannot be dismissed by rhetoric about diversity alone. Evidence of genuine integration, loyalty to constitutional order, and explicit rejection of supremacist doctrines remains the relevant standard. Conclusion The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions showed what an open democratic society can achieve when it extends a platform to a voice of tolerance and receives that voice with seriousness. The attacks of 2001 showed the price of failing to recognise when some actors turn that same openness into vulnerability rather than invitation. The durable response is neither isolation nor unrestricted entry. It is the disciplined maintenance of the conditions that made Vivekananda’s welcome possible: freedom of inquiry, willingness to listen to those who accept reciprocity, and firm refusal to extend the privileges of openness to those who seek to destroy it. Open societies of the West remain among the most attractive and resilient arrangements human beings have devised. Their continued success depends on remembering that tolerance is a two-way street. The two September 11ths—one a day of mutual recognition, the other a day of dastardly destruction—make that truth difficult to ignore.

Sep 11, 2026
YagnaSri

The Terminal Decline: How the Indian National Congress Became a Non-Entity in Uttar Pradesh Part 22

The Indian National Congress, the party that governed Uttar Pradesh for the first two and a half decades of independence and claimed the moral authority of the freedom movement as its perpetual political inheritance, is today a political non-entity in the state. In the 2022 UP Assembly elections, the Congress won 2 seats out of 403, a result so catastrophic that it barely constitutes a rounding error in any analysis of UP's political landscape. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, despite a modest national recovery under the INDI Alliance framework, the Congress won only a handful of seats in UP, largely on the coattails of the Samajwadi Party's candidate-sharing arrangement. The party that once swept UP with 83 of 85 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 and that dominated state politics for twenty years has been reduced to a marginal footnote. Understanding how this happened is essential to understanding the political transformation that has made UP the BJP's most reliable state and to appreciating what the BJP's rise represents for democratic accountability. The 1984 Peak and the Beginning of the End The Congress's 1984 election in UP was both its greatest triumph and the moment that sealed its long-term decline. The sympathy wave following Indira Gandhi's assassination produced a mandate so large 83 of 85 Lok Sabha seats in UP that it bore no relationship to the party's actual organisational strength or governance credibility in the state. The Congress had not repaired the structural failures of its governance in UP; it had not rebuilt the organisational networks that Indira Gandhi's centralising politics had destroyed; it had not resolved the factional conflicts that had paralysed the state party for a decade. The 1984 mandate was emotional, not organisational, and its scale made the party more complacent than committed to reform. Rajiv Gandhi's government did not use the historic 1984 mandate to address UP's structural governance problems. The Shah Bano reversal of 1986, which showed the Congress's willingness to sacrifice constitutional principle for communal electoral calculation, alienated Hindu voters across UP without winning the durable loyalty of Muslim voters, who would always have reason to suspect that the next government might reverse the reversal. The opening of the Ram Janmabhoomi in 1986, a simultaneous gesture toward Hindu sentiment that satisfied no one, confirmed that the Congress's approach to managing religious politics was a series of perpetual balancing acts that produced neither principled governance nor genuine community trust. The Bofors scandal, which broke in 1987 and dogged Rajiv Gandhi's government for the rest of its term, resonated particularly in UP, where the culture of political corruption had already produced deep cynicism about Congress governance. A Prime Minister who had come to power on a platform of clean government and national modernisation was now linked to the most egregious defence procurement scandal in Indian history. For UP voters who had experienced decades of Congress corruption at the state level and had briefly hoped the centre might be different, Bofors confirmed that the Congress was irredeemably compromised. The 1989 Collapse and the Permanent Fragmentation of the Congress Vote Bank The 1989 Lok Sabha elections marked the Congress's first genuine electoral collapse in UP since independence. The party's seat count fell from 83 to 15, an 82 per cent decline in a single election. This was not a temporary setback the Congress would recover from in the next election; it reflected a structural realignment and the permanent fragmentation of the Congress's cross-caste coalition. The Congress had maintained its dominance in UP through a coalition that brought together upper castes (who provided organisational leadership and financial support), Muslims (who viewed the Congress as protection against Hindu nationalism), Dalits (who saw the Congress as the party of the Constitution and Ambedkar's legacy), and a portion of the OBC vote (managed through the patronage of OBC leaders within the Congress structure). This coalition had always been held together more by the absence of alternatives than by genuine shared interests, and the emergence of alternatives in the 1980s the BJP for upper castes and culturally nationalist Hindus, the SP for Yadavs and Muslims, the BSP for Dalits dissolved it with remarkable speed. The decisive factor in the Congress coalition's permanent dissolution was the BJP's cultural nationalist mobilisation. By offering upper castes and Hindu-identified voters a positive political identity a party that took Hindu civilisation seriously rather than treating it as an embarrassment to be managed the BJP made irrelevant the traditional Congress claim that there was no alternative for these communities. Once upper-caste voters moved to the BJP, the Congress's coalition fell apart, because the organisational and financial networks upper-caste supporters provided had been essential to managing the patronage distribution that kept other communities loyal. The 2009 Mirage: False Recovery, Structural Decline The Congress won 21 Lok Sabha seats in UP in 2009, a recovery from its nadir that appeared, for a brief moment, to suggest the party might be rebuilding. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's campaign presence in Rae Bareli and Amethi generated considerable media excitement; the Congress's performance in the state seemed to reflect broader anti-incumbency against the NDA government rather than any genuine organisational recovery. The BJP's analysis of the 2009 result, vindicated by subsequent electoral history, was that it was entirely attributable to the specific circumstances of 2009 rather than to any structural recovery by the Congress. The party had no organisational presence in most of UP's constituencies; it was not competitive in state assembly elections; and its 2009 Lok Sabha performance reflected the coattail effect of the national anti-NDA mood rather than any grassroots revival. The Congress won 21 seats with approximately 18 per cent vote share, a performance it could not repeat without the same favourable national circumstances. The 2012 UP Assembly elections confirmed this diagnosis: the Congress, despite deploying Rahul Gandhi as its principal campaign face and investing heavily in a 'Congress ki Sarkar, Rahul ki Soch' campaign, won just 28 seats and 11.6 per cent of the vote. The SP's landslide victory showed that the Congress had no independent organisational capacity in UP and that its 2009 Lok Sabha performance had been borrowed entirely from national sentiment rather than local organisational strength. The Rahul Gandhi Problem: A Leader Without Roots in UP's Political Reality Rahul Gandhi's political career has largely unfolded through the lens of Rae Bareli and Amethi, two parliamentary constituencies the Gandhi family has held as personal fiefdoms since the 1980s, and whose continued Congress allegiance reflects dynastic loyalty rather than organisational strength. This narrow, constituency-level perspective has consistently misread UP's political reality. Rahul Gandhi's 2012 UP campaign, built on the claim that Congress would 'change' UP, failed to engage with the state's specific structural political economy. The promise of change requires both a diagnosis of what needs to change and a credible organisational mechanism to deliver it. Rahul Gandhi offered neither: his diagnosis of UP's problems was generic (corruption, poverty, unemployment) in ways that applied to every Indian state; and the Congress's organisational capacity to deliver change in UP was essentially zero outside the two Gandhi family constituencies. The 2014 catastrophe: Congress won 2 Lok Sabha seats nationally from UP, both in the Gandhi family constituencies, exposed the depth of the organisational void. In 78 of 80 UP constituencies, the Congress was not a significant factor in the electoral outcome. The party that had governed UP for two decades had no presence, no credible candidates, and no governance record to defend or attack across most of the state's political geography. The Structural Reasons for Permanent Decline The Congress's decline in UP is structural rather than contingent on a charismatic new leader, a clever campaign, or a favourable national mood; it cannot be reversed. The reasons are rooted in the specific character of UP's political sociology and in the Congress's own historical choices. First, the Congress destroyed its own state-level leadership through decades of high-command centralisation. The party has no credible UP leaders with independent organisational bases, genuine mass connections, or administrative credibility. The state Congress is a collection of individuals who define themselves primarily by their relationship to the Gandhi family rather than by their standing in UP's communities. This cannot be corrected in an election cycle; building genuine state leadership requires decades of organisational work that the Congress has consistently refused to invest in. Second, regional parties have captured the Congress's secular identity in UP and can offer Muslim and Dalit voters more concrete, credible community advocacy than the Congress's generic secularism. The SP represents Muslim and Yadav interests more directly; the BSP represents Dalit interests more directly; UP's political market has no space for a party that offers a diluted version of both. Third, and most fundamentally, the BJP's cultural nationalist politics has successfully occupied the political space that the Congress vacated when it chose pseudo-secularism over genuine national integration. The hundreds of millions of UP voters who identify with Hindu cultural values, who believe that Ram's temple in Ayodhya is a legitimate aspiration, and who want a government that treats all communities equally under the rule of law have no reason to choose the Congress over the BJP. The BJP offers a complete political identity, civilisational pride, commitment to governance, and organisational discipline that the Congress cannot match. The Congress's only realistic path to relevance in UP passes through genuine organisational rebuilding, credible state-level leadership development, and an honest reckoning with why its governance model failed UP's citizens so comprehensively for so long. None of these requirements is being addressed. The party continues to campaign on the Gandhi family's national brand while investing nothing in UP's organisational infrastructure. The terminal decline will continue until the party is willing to confront the structural reasons for its failure a confrontation that its dynastic leadership structure makes constitutionally impossible. Delhi's Shadow over Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Under Ten Years of UPA Rule Part 21 https://myind.net/Home/viewArticle/delhis-shadow-over-lucknow-uttar-pradesh-under-ten-years-of-upa-rule-part-21