A Polemic for Treating the Mental Illness that Afflicts the Left

Dhruv Ramnath, the Author of this Article, is a freelance journalist, filmmaker, and photo-grapher. He graduated with a degree in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Also read his other Articles on indiafacts.org.in :

• Stocktaking Faith
• The Hindu Right and the Hindu Liberal : Where They Meet

When I read or watch anything on what leftists think about Bharat I am reminded about our socialist past. Bharat has been caught under the jackboot of intellectual colonialism since 1947, with highly politicized social science and humanities departments dotting its universities. Menon’s idea that Bharat needs to be ‘a collection of minorities’ instead of a Hindu Nation where the pillar of Hinduism is seen as the raison d’être of this collection, is a result of a serious disability that must be addressed.

All leftists seem to have a sociopathic and sadistic streak, seek to destroy more than create, and demonstrate no understanding of how Dharma works. Their version of secularism is like Menon’s, which I shall explain.

While parts of Professor Nivedita Menon’s work, especially on gender justice, should be lauded, she takes a virulently anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat stance on every other matter. Not having read her latest book, which I do not intend to, I can say that her interview in The Wire with ‘nepo baby’ * Jahnavi Sen is a must-watch to understand what exactly is going on in the troubled minds of the Indian left-secular variety of activists, academics, and the party faithful.

Menon is a great feminist who has spoken for and about gender liberation in unique ways. She places women’s agency and empowerment at the top of her work. More than her articulation of feminist ideals, which is well-intended, is her flawed view of the Hindu Nation. It is to this idea that I turn.

While Menon shows a felicity with the English language and is not tiresome like her peers, her insistence that there is a multiplicity of Hindu practices that ought to corrode what she terms the “Brahmanical” takeover of Hinduism is both myopic and destructive. For example, she thinks the worshipping of Mahishasura in parts of the country enables the deepening of a variety of secularisms that cultivate a sophisticated spiritual temper that allows Bharat to exist as a land of minorities against an upper-caste, North Bharatiya, patrilineal Hindu state.

Nothing is said of the Hindu Nation being the very fount from which secularisms arise as though the secularism that underpins Hinduism’s plurality and openness does not allow minorities such as Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsees to exist and thrive in the first place, not to mention atheists, agnostics, and others. As a self-proclaimed paragon of probity, she ushers in caste and locates its discourses theoretically to persuade us of her need to protect Bharat’s minorities from Brahmins and make and keep Bharat that is India
a Westernized secularity.

But her take on the construction of a pernicious ‘Hindu state’ does not make sense because she fails to see Hinduism as not only the group of heterogeneous practices of which she speaks but also the singularity that binds its cultures of worship together through sacred creativity and imagination. Such is the nature of her argument that she simply misses the woods for the trees and sees the Hindutva project as a burden dragging down the Western secularism project.

Of course, she harks back to Bhimrao Ambedkar. Every leftist needs to do this to prove their point that Hinduism is the most hierarchical religion in the world. I have no issues with Babasaheb, the ‘Respected Father’, as he is considered the greatest intellectual of all time by some of my fellow citizens, but I take issue with those secularists who argue that Hinduism is Bharat’s weakness and that Hindus do not speak for nor protect Indigenous people and their histories.

This prejudice against the majority’s faith explains why the institutions that powerful people such as Menon occupy remain where they are through their repeated attempts at securing high positions and scratching each other’s backs. No wonder Jahnavi Sen, daughter of the economist Jayati Ghosh, is seen interviewing Menon in a posh Delhi newsroom.

I am guessing the air conditioner was on to keep this particular socialist and feminist cool under their collars.

But more seriously, I am reminded of my brief stint in advertising. A real creep of a man asked me what I was doing for a living. When I said I had been a copywriter in the media he looked flummoxed. I wanted to tell him copywriting applies to journalism as well because just as copywriters in advertising pander to clients, so do ‘media wallahs’ pander to political parties.

Menon is therefore happy that the Bharatiya Janata Party lost in Ayodhya. Everything is connected to politics in her system even the air we breathe. This is why it is important to note that there is something wrong with Bharatiya liberals akin to some form of mental illness.
We do know that ‘Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), also known as sociopathy, is a mental health condition that involves a long-term pattern of behavior that disregards the rights of others and shows no regard for right and wrong’, and we have enough evidence from history, including Bharatiya history, of the destructive nature of the socialists’ enterprise, both academic and political.

This mental illness takes the form of long-winded arguments, where a good idea is transmogrified into a jaded, complex, and convoluted argument for destruction, and where the sophistry of the left is nothing but a broken lens through which reality is comprehended. There are things the left has given us that we must protect gender justice is one of them. But the creation of identity and religious politics through opaque arguments is a reminder of the thought process that leads to both irrationality and subjectivity, both of which have ruined education in Bharat today.

The social sciences are about fuelling the heart and head, not just the head or not just the heart. Education is about learning the art of persuasion through carefully constructed arguments. However, in the social sciences today we see only an addled head or a wicked heart.

When Prime Minister Modi said God had sent him to become the Prime Minister of India, I was shocked that he would say such a thing, but I am still his fan – he is better than Rahul Gandhi. Modi’s idea of a Hindu Nation is all-embracing. Let us not forget that most Hindus are open-minded because our faith allows for opposing views to exist. Modi has capitalized on this idea, for it has been Bharat’s pillar of strength since before Adam was a boy or found an apple.

However, Menon fails to understand that the BJP project, while it has its problems, has contributed to Bharatiya society in ways that can only be described as beneficial to the middle classes. For prosperity to exist in our beloved Bharat we need to accept that despite internal differences, there is a need to let Hindutva do its own talking.

Understanding our historical context will provide us with the necessary toolkit to counter the scourge of leftism that has seeped through our communities over the past eight decades since India attained Independence in 1947. Menon simply dismisses the idea of Hindutva as a pluralist project and instead seeks to present it as a ‘fascist, majoritarian, Hindu supremacist’ project. What Menon and her ilk do is observe the entire gamut of accommodative Hinduism through their broken lenses. The contest between the two Hinduisms (Hindutva and segmented Hindu practices) therefore bolsters Menon’s claim that Hindu nationalism is born through Western/European midwifery. This is how an otherwise intelligent and caring feminist becomes a hitter below the Hindu belt.

True secularism is when a Bharatiya goes to Britain and accepts that it is a Christian country. International right-wing conservatism is about solidarity and has a rich history. Conservatives not only have the capacity to unite globally but can also put paid to the assumption that majority rule is dangerous in any Democracy. What is incomprehensible therefore is how the majority’s priorities get discarded in the left’s plan to enshrine equality, and nowadays also equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Leftism is antithetical to practical and real equality agendas. It can be likened to a teacher asking a class whether anyone has an objection to the syllabus. If only a few students put their hands up, they will be crushed by the majority who have no issues with it. To say the minority wins in such a case is foolish as it ignores the hands of other students who did not raise them.

Nivedita Menon and her fellow travellers therefore need to wake up and smell the coffee. Majoritarian policies will always work in Bharat as long as Hindus are in the majority because Hinduism embraces every single path to the Divine. We need to question Western secularism rather than say Hindutva is a result of Bharat’s contact with modernity. The fact is that our self-realized Saints and wise people have spoken about this land, this bhoomi as the place from which Sanatana Dharma emerged. Destroying or weakening Hinduism and its truly multifaceted practices will ruin not only Bharat but also the world.

If Bharat were to be like China and Pakistan, we would have non-BJP parties taking us away from the openness of a faith that unquestionably hugs all major wisdom traditions, into a pit of identity politics of the kind we witness in the West today where being ‘woke’ is being normalized and speaking up against it makes you a bigot. It is high time they and we change before we all turn asuric.

* Nepo baby – short for ‘nepotism baby’ – a person whose parents succeeded or profited in similar/related careers. Jahnavi Sen’s parents are Prof. Jayati Ghosh, who taught economics at JNU for 35 years before taking up a position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Abhijit Sen, who served on the Planning Commission between 2004 and 2014, during Dr Manmohan Singh’s (INC) Prime Ministership. Sen’s father, Samar Sen, also an economist, served on the World Bank.

(Courtesy : indiafacts.org, 27.8.2024)

All leftists seem to have a sociopathic and sadistic streak, and demonstrate no understanding of how Dharma works !