The Attacks on Hindus : The ‘Coalition’ of the Willing, the Wilful
| Dr Rao is Professor of Comm-unication 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. |
This essay, under a different title, was published in the book titled ‘Four Decades of Hindu Renaissance’ earlier last year. In the first part of the essay (which we presented in our 1-15 January 2024 Issue), we chiefly learnt that :
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.
In continuation to this essay …
We shall relate how India has been targeted and sought to be discredited by forces outside the country using a variety of strategies : informational, demographic, proselytism, academic manipulation, and political destabilization 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’.
What brings these otherwise and inherently violent, monopolistic, and supremacist groups and ideologies together ? And, why is it that those who label themselves ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ join forces with these ruthless squads of monopolists ? That their targets are India and Hindu/Hindutva is a story that has garnered little attention and found little traction.
Do not separate India, that is, Bharat, from Bharat that is Hindu
“Hindu nationalists want a Hindu majoritarian state,” say those who wish to balkanize India, and those seeking to protect India from division again must take care not to separate India, that is, Bharat, from Bharat that is Hindu, however threatening and demoralizing the headlines are in international media, however wanton the provocation by ideologues masquerading as academics, and howsoever clever the plots manufactured by activists masquerading as interfaith leaders and human rights advocates.
India is one of only two Hindu-majority countries in the world, whereas Muslims have a majority in forty-nine/fifty countries, including ten countries where they constitute more than a 98 percent majority. India is home to the second-largest number of Muslims, after Indonesia. It is estimated that by 2050 Muslims will make up about 30 percent of the world’s population as the fastest-growing religious group in the world, with India having the world’s largest Muslim population.
There are 57 member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the world body representing the collective voice of Muslims and the Muslim world. However, OIC does not include or allow India as a member – despite having the second largest Muslim population in the world. The 22 members of the Arab League play a dominant role in global politics, and given the enormous oil wealth that some Arab Nations have gathered, their power and influence are oversized.
Islam will change Europe, but Islam will not be assimilable in Europe
The increasing presence of Muslims in Europe and the US has led to a new dynamic in the region where Muslims have begun to claim that they are under threat. Islam will change Europe, but Islam will not be assimilable in Europe as Muslims pose a demographic challenge and Islam a philosophical challenge. Muslim countries or groups are either at war or in a hostile truce with every civilization that Islam abuts, from Nigeria to Xinjiang, just as how Muslims worldwide strategize and conspire to demonize and attack Hindus and India in the international arenas.
Christian Europe, now secularized in the west of the European continent, now faces a dilemma about Muslim immigrants they began inviting after World War II. After about 7 decades in Europe, Muslims have not just proved intractable about their claims to their religious and cultural exclusivity, their predisposition to resort to violence, their inclination to have large families, their intransigence about keeping their demanding faith ‘pure’, they pose an existential threat to the Christian/secular Europe.
Who is behind the attempts to discredit Hindus ?
While Christians are a majority in 119 countries of the world, with more than a 95 percent majority in 10 countries, and Christianity being the largest religion in the world practiced by almost one-third of the world’s population, the Christian/secular dilemma in Europe is about what to do with their recalcitrant and hostile Muslim residents. It is a problem, quixotically, which they wish to foist on the rest of the world, including India – the problems they confront with their Muslim citizens and residents include dual loyalty; lawless zones in many major cities and towns; violence, crime, and rioting; tribalism and extreme ideology; intimidation; resistance and jihad.
This detour into religious demography is funda-mental and foundational to the argument about who is behind the attempts to discredit Hindus and Hindutva, as the primary threat to Hindus and Hindutva/Hinduism comes through demographic changes. Demographic warfare waged in India is centuries old. While demography is fundamental, how people can be lured and divided based on faith, religion, ideology, and national identity, are other pieces of the puzzle in the division of the Indian spoils.
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 Hindus to Christianity or Islam, or the educated Hindu to become a ‘secularized’ and/or ‘left/liberal Indian’.
Democracy, Fundamentalist Religions, Liberalism and Egalitarianism
The challenge that liberal democracies face, in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, is a challenge that India has faced in the past and now is confronted with again, but in the context of a new world. While Europe is reeling from a demographic decline it is also weakened by a continuous dilution of moral order, a crisis of faith, and an obsession with neutrality in all matters of Government religious policy and imposing it on individual citizens as a requirement in their private utterances. This makes any criticism of Islam as a religious ideology and Muslim behavior and attitudes illegal.
Being wedded to multiculturalism that by its very definition would be inclusive of extremist, supremacist and monopolist ideologies, western European Nations are befuddled about what exactly their civilization values are, and what it is that they are defending in the name of secularism, multiculturalism, liberalism, and Democracy. The political leadership and the elites in France, Germany, England, Sweden, Spain, and Italy have failed by refusing to listen to the majority of voters who are wary of their Muslim neighbours, and of Islam. These very determined and small group of intellectuals, political elites, and deracinated group of Europeans want to Europeanize the rest of the world.
Ironically, this Europeanization will not lead to the creation of secular, liberal democracies, but the building of a New Caliphate, a violent, new Islamic world whose faithful will cling more firmly to unverifiable facts about their prophet, their faith, and their global ambitions, or an egalitarian world where, in the pursuit of equity, inclusion, and diversity, a new authoritarianism will play out, where all members of some groups will be labeled oppressors, racists, unfair, and all members of some other groups will all be considered victims.
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 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 are reports how some in the US State Department manipulated information about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Hindus.
(Courtesy : indiafacts.org.in/the-attacks-on-hindus-a-global-strategem, 10.9.2023)
(To be continued)
| The war strategy to divide India and rob Hindus of their homeland includes splintering the Hindu vote, balkanizing India ! |