The Attacks on Hindus : A Global Stratagem

Dr 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.

This essay, under a different title, was published in the book titled ‘Four Decades of Hindu Renaissance’ earlier this year. In the few months following the publication, we have seen, among other things, the passing of the SB403 Bill in the California Assembly, which is now on the desk of Governor Newsom for his signature. There is no doubt that he will sign the Bill into Law. The Bill, crafted by a first-term Afghan-American legislator, with help from her left-extremist, Khalistani, Muslim and Christian enablers, purportedly protects Californians from being discriminated against based on their caste status. Nonsense ! It is just the latest fusillade in the coordinated global attacks targeting Hindus.

Alas, most Hindus either do not know about these matters or they do not care. Our task, therefore, is to inform those who do care and those who do want to know.

Introduction

‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ is not an Arab proverb but a Sanskrit one, Cordesman pointed out, reminding Indian students of the adage credited to Kautilya in Book VI of the Arthashastra : ‘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 ?’

We forget that the world had been conquered and divided for nearly two millennia between the two most violent, supremacist, exclusivist, Abrahamic religions : Christianity and Islam.

The consequences of their quarrels, their millennial ends, and their inherent violent tendencies led to the rise of the so-called ‘great religions’ that divided the world’s spoils between them till Communism emerged in the late nineteenth century, gained traction in the early twentieth century, and ensured for a few decades at least that there was a third ‘major player’ in the global arena : The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and their major spheres of influence.

With the ‘collapse’ of Communism and the Soviet Union, and the emergence of China as a crypto-communist-capitalist State, the world’s political, and religious playgrounds have changed.

However, to this day, we know that Islam and Christianity are the backroom representatives of about 170 of the 193 sovereign States that are members of the United Nations. While these countries claim that they are secular (at least the Christian Nations), we know that they are not.

The lone Jewish State in the mix – Israel; the United States is a Christian country with more than seventy percent of the population claiming a Christian identity, and every President and Vice President since the country was founded swearing their oath on the Bible and attending a local church nearby to show their Christian fealty, and Washington DC playing home to the largest number of Christian, faith-based, lobbying groups.

The Vatican has the status as a member of the United Nations. We know enough about the power and influence of Islam because Muslim States pay little heed to the idea of ‘equality’ and do little to hide the status of non-Muslims in their countries.

Despite their Islamic constitutions, they are members of the United Nations, and whatever their bloody quarrels with each other, they organize and plan their foreign policy through institutions such as the Arab League and the OIC. India is the lone Nation that has any clout in terms of the number of Hindus in the country, but it has hobbled itself, and tied one hand behind its back, by proclaiming to be a ‘secular’ State, inviting the world to come prey on Hindus and Hinduism as they had done over the past two millennia.

The nature of supremacist ideologies, faiths, and religions is to prevail, to use violence, and to claim monopolistic rights. Whereas, Indian thought, especially Hindu traditions, are based on ‘reason, logic, and experiential knowledge’.

As it is said in the Taittiriya Upanishad, ‘Brahma-vid apnoti param, tad eshabhyukta, satyam jnanam anantam brahma’ (Tait. 2.1.1), which means that the highest reality is not a white-bearded person sitting in heaven, or his ‘Prophet’ who claims he is speaking for ‘Allah’ who are offering the truth but Satyam, the Supreme is impersonal, the infinitely pervading consciousness which appears as this Universe.

Hindu Sages and Seers arrived at this Cosmic Truth not by unverifiable claims but through a rigorous logical process, by experiment, and by experience. This highest truth does not need vast armies to conquer lands and subdue people.

No imperial lords and bloodthirsty warriors, nor armies of believers thumping their books are needed to propagate Hinduism, like what the Abrahamic religions and Communist/Marxist faiths and political ideologies require. Truth does not need propaganda.

However, the paradox is that these three genocidal faiths and ideologies account for almost all of the genocides over the past two thousand years, whereas ‘the Indic civilization is the most pacific civilization with no instance of genocidal violence (despite the Bombay and Gujurat [sic] Riots in recent years). It is at the bottom of all tables, with only 7 instances of large-scale political violence, out of 321, and less than half a percentage of the total death toll’.

The ‘New World’

The world has changed this past century : Indus-trial development, population growth, environmental depredation, religious conflict and war, and galloping changes in how we communicate and travel, have brought changes, fast and furious. The colonized have become free people, in new Nations carved by old hands. Indians, unshackled from the British, but living in a land sliced in half by the British, have struggled to understand themselves and their colonial heritage, their history, and be good neighbours with suspicious, smaller neighbors, some of whom have waged an incessant battle to undermine Indian unity.

The ‘New World’ is stitched from old, some very old cloth : That of cultural, civilizational, linguistic, religious, economic, racial, and other divides which make our world a fractious place. Why this, now ? Well, human beings are an invasive species, and our population has grown from about 1.65 billion in 1900 to about eight billion as we write. We jostle for space, we try to protect what is ours, and we erect barriers to protect our borders.

India has always been the jewel that outsiders have sought to put in their crown. At the crossroads of world civilizations, a home to nature’s bounty, the place where the sage and the wise have constructed human spiritual and intellectual edifices that continue to beckon all, India that is Bharat, has attracted both the spiritual seekers and the brigands of the 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.

India has always been a people-rich place, given the comfortable range of climate, vast arable lands, and a rich and bounteous nature. It may have overtaken China on January 17, 2023, to become the world’s most populous Nation. Added to the native population growth is the migration of people from neighbouring countries into India. There is legal migration and there is the illegal variety. According to the United Nations, some 281 million people were living outside their country of origin in 2020. While India-born migrants number about 17.5 million around the world, the number of illegal immigrants in India is about 20 million, mostly from Bangladesh. 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.

(Courtesy : indiafacts.org.in/the-attacks-on-hindus-a-global-strategem, 10.9.2023)

(To be continued)

We forget that the world was divided between the two most violent Abrahamic religions : Christianity and Islam !