The Concerted Global Effort to Discredit Hindus and India : Tackling the Challenge
Dr Ramesh Rao is Professor of Communication Studies, Department of Communication, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA. He serves as the Chief Editor of ‘India Facts’.
He has presented numerous papers on Indian American identity, the coverage of India and Hinduism in Western media.
Introduction
‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ is not an Arab proverb but a Sanskrit one, Cordesman (2014) pointed out, reminding Indian students of the adage credited to Kautilya in Book VI of the Arthashastra (1915) : ‘The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy. The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror)’.
Unfortunately, at present, for India, it is not just the border States that may be inimical but others – Nations across the world, political ideologies and ideologues, faith groups, academics/scholars, the powerful Western media, and the institutions inspired by the so-called ‘great’ religions – who have conspired to plot, strategize, and enact various plans together or in tandem to discredit and destabilize India, if not ‘break India,’ through a variety of strategies, both short term and long term, and trap Hindus in pincer moves from which they cannot escape, or push them into corners from which they cannot emerge.
- This belief in such a conspiracy against India is unsupported, unverifiable, and paranoid, say those who seek to dilute the ‘Hindu’ in ‘Hindustan,’ or those who see Hindus and Hinduism as the primary threat to their ‘idea’ of India.
But these interests have conspired, we can surmise, because of the variety of smoking guns brandished in powerful capitals around the world by forces who are otherwise opposed to one another but are keen on winning their quantum of Indian spoils; or the amount of ink spilled on diatribes masquerading as ‘analyses,’ ‘opinion pieces,’ and ‘editorials’ in newspapers, magazines, think tank reports, and official Government reports; the number of books, dissertations, and journal articles published demonizing Hindus and decrying Hindutva; or the number of ‘conferences’ held and the number of papers presented at conferences that have targeted Hindus and Hindutva.
These numbers, starting as a trickle in the late 1970s, began to grow in the 1980s, emerged as a major stream in the 1990s, and over the past two decades have become a deluge. It should lead to the simple and obvious question : ‘Why ?’ A corollary to that question is this : ‘What makes these forces, otherwise aligned against each other elsewhere, join ranks to target Hindus and India ?’
The ‘New’ World
At present, we see a confluence of the political, religious, national, and technological dynamics that have spurred the old brigands to renew their quest to raid and weaken India, if not conquer it, break it, divide the spoils of war between them, or refashion it to their own ends. Added to the native population growth is the migration of people from neighboring countries into India.
There is legal migration and there is the illegal variety. While the reasons for illegal migration are many, how some of this illegal migration into India has been leveraged by anti-India forces to destabilize the country and queer its demographic profile is also a story rarely or fully told.
The ‘Coalition’ of the Willing, the Willful
We shall try to tell the story of how India sought to be discredited by forces outside the country using a variety of strategies : Informational, demographic, faith and religious proselytism, academic manipulation, and political destabilization. We will list and identify those agencies, faith groups, media establishments, political actors, and global movements that seek to undermine India by demonizing Hindus and Hinduism, and who claim deceptively that their target is not Hinduism or Hindus but ‘Hindtuva,’ and that it is not their intent to break India but to keep India ‘secular’.
At present, the war strategy to divide India and rob Hindus of their homeland includes splintering the Hindu vote, balkanizing India, deepening the divides in the Hindu communities based on jati / caste, and converting the poor or ignorant Hindu to Christianity or Islam, or the educated Hindu to become a ‘secularized’ and / or ‘left / liberal’ ‘Indian’.
Democracy, Liberalism, Fundamentalist Religions, and Egalitarianism
In this quest to remember, refashion, and reclaim the past the impulse of these new authoritarians will be to ‘politicize all academic disciplines,’ and ‘… snuff out dissent’. This connection of dots in the ideational world of the ‘left, liberal, progressives’ where Hindus are cast as ‘oppressors, racists, unfair,’ and where Muslims, Christians, secularists, Khalistanis, feminists, Dalits, or whatever other ‘non-Hindu’ ‘minority’ group are presented as ‘victims’ is important.
This task has not been undertaken in any depth or with any consistency because Hindus / others who wish to challenge this narrative are effectively shut out of all debate in the major, powerful academic institutions in the West as well as in India, and their voices are stifled or mocked in the influential, powerful media outlets around the world. That many diplomats in the US and in European capitals are also anti-Hindu is rumored but finding evidence for their chicanery and their antipathy would be a difficult task, unless we begin to see leaks from these establishments.
There have been some efforts in India to connect these dots, but they have focused on specific anti-India, anti-Hindu groups, like in the books by Shourie on ‘eminent historians’ (1999), on Christian proselytizers (2006), on sharia in India (1995), and the role of communists (1991) in Indian affairs.
Shourie was prescient and a keen observer. Writing about the communists and the Indian academic establishment that provided a haven for the communists, he says : “They have made India out to have been an empty land, filled by successive invaders. They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity – that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period. They have denounced ancient India’s social system as the epitomy (sic) of oppression, and made totalitarian ideologies out to be egalitarian and just. They have belittled our ancient culture and exaggerated syncretistic elements which survived and made them out to have been an entire ‘culture’, the ‘composite culture’ as they call it”.
Work done by some institutions affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, like the Hindu Vivek Kendra, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and others has ensured that there has been at least a continuous effort at informing the Indian public, the Indian Diaspora, and global actors about the threats that India and Hindus face, and how the word ‘Hindutva’ has been made a ‘devil term’. There have also been some systematic academic efforts, like by the ones initiated by Prof. Balagangadhara at Ghent University, to counter the strategic and long-term efforts by academics to ‘misread’ and ‘misinterpret’ India. Students of Prof. Balagangadhara have produced some impactful work on matters regarding history, caste, crimes against Dalits, etc.
There are interest groups started by the Indic Academy, to revive and revitalize research about India, about Hindus and Hinduism, and as a counter to the propaganda mills churning out hundreds of books each year seeking to disparage India and Hindus. But these are not enough, and the efforts to pull the anti-India / anti-Hindu threads together to present the ghastly picture of anti-India forces have not borne much quality fruit.
Given the billions of dollars poured into India for proselytism purposes, the billions of dollars that the oil-rich Middle Eastern kingdoms have poured into US and European academic institutions, and the deep roots that the ‘egalitarians’ have planted in academic and media institutions in India, the road to gaining relevance of the Hindu voice and for the Hindu presence has been both steep and a minefield. While there are common fears expressed about Islamism, left-Marxist extremism, religious fanaticism, and other matters that threaten the safety of the people and the foundational tenets of liberal Democracies around the world, what worries us is that the people who do express such concerns seem, paradoxically, in bed with the very same forces that are seeking to undermine India and demonize Hindus.
The left / progressive / liberal academics have been seriously at work in undermining liberal Western Democracies, and they are also the most often found in bed with Islamists, fundamentalist Christians, and the rabidly violent Sikh-Khalistan groups seeking their pounds of the Indian and Hindu flesh. At some point, however, these immoral and ‘strategic’ alliances must give way to a general malaise if not the destruction of civil society, the emergence of new extremist groups, or circular firing squads.
Tracking the Anti-India / Anti-Hindu Forces
Rauch says that if indeed the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, ‘then it is not so surprising that postmodern Marxists should make common cause with radical mullahs’. Thus, if the common enemy of fundamentalist Christians, Islamists / Muslims, and Marxists / progressives are Hindus, then they will work together to defeat Hindus, despite also being opposed to one another. ‘Although the radical-Islamic and radical-egalitarian senses of justice could hardly be more different, they are less opposites than counterparts in opposition to the dominance of individualism,’ writes Rauch, and what way of life and belief could be more individualistic than that of Hindus ?
This Article, we hope, offers a little insight into, and presents the big picture of the global efforts at demonizing Hindus and undermining India.
(Courtesy and excerpts of an Article from :
indiafacts.org.in, 23.12.2023)
| If the common enemy of fundamentalist Christians, Islamists and Marxists are Hindus, they will work together to defeat Hindus ! |