The Attacks on Hindus : The Challenges of reviving Hinduism

Dr Ramesh Rao is Professor of Communication Studies, Department of Communi-cation, 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 second part of the essay (which we presented in our 1-15 February 2024 Issue), we chiefly learnt that :

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 PM Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindus.

Continuing with this essay …

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 term 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.

Some new attempts to counter the propaganda mills that seek to disparage India and Hindus

There have been some new attempts at compiling information on and describing the strategies of these ‘breaking India’ forces but they have been too sparse, and quickly ignored by those whose gameplan is to vivisect India. Work supported by the Infinity Foundation has gone a long way in informing Indian audiences about the global forces working to undermine India and the Indian ethos. Work done by some institutions affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, like the Hindu Vivek Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and others, have ensured that there has been at least a continuous effort at informing the Indian public, 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 the ones initiated by Prof. Balagangadhara at Ghent University, Belgium, to counter the strategic and long-term efforts by academics to ‘misread’ and ‘misinterpret’ India. Prof. Balagangadhara’s students 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, 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.

The left/progressive/liberal academics have been at work in undermining liberal Western democracies

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 with 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.

Rauch, writing about the strange alliance of ‘Mullahs and the Postmodernists’, cites Prof. Wildavsky, who presciently wrote about ‘egalitarianism’ as the new left/liberal belief system and how in that scheme of things, American academics, like their counterparts in Europe, have used egalitarianism as a ‘belief in the moral virtue of diminishing differences among people of varying incomes, genders, races, sexual preferences, and (especially) power’, but ironically, strangely have brought and are bringing ‘seemingly opposed groups’ to fight the traditional West, with its ‘western’ and ‘Christian’ values.

‘The Marxists and the Mullahs are natural enemies, as Stalin and Hitler were, and their alliance, such as it is, will prove equally fleeting. But their convergence is as revelatory in today’s context as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in 1939, and for much the same reason : It brings two usually opposing pole stars into temporary conjunction, and reminds the rest of us where we stand’, writes Rauch, but he might not only have spoken too soon, he was also focusing on only the United States. After the events of 9/11, Rauch saw only Marxists in bed with Muslims, ignoring the various other ‘egalitarian’ bedfellows in the US and the West, including the most important egalitarian group – the Christians, close cousins of the Muslims who share similar monopolistic goals and supremacist worldviews, joining hands with Muslims to do to India what they have done to other Nations and regions of the world : Divide the spoils of their Abrahamic warfare. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, almost all folk/indigenous religions have vanished. Christians now make up about 63 percent of the population, and Muslims about 30 percent. By 2050, Christians would make up about 58.5 percent in this region, and Muslims about 35.2 percent.

The world did change after the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington DC and elsewhere on September 11, 2001, but not in the way many expected. Instead of a death struggle with Muslims, or instead of the US enabling the democratization of the Islamic world, what we now see is that the ties between the Marxists and the Mullahs have strengthened, so much so that every academic institution and every media house in the US, big and small, are concerned more with ‘Islamophobia’ rather than with the threat that Islamists pose – demographically, culturally, civilizationally, and in every other manner. Muslims have been embraced wholeheartedly by left/liberal forces in the US, and conditionally by Christians as they have been in Europe, as they all together seek to make the world ‘egalitarian’. These are the very same forces that are targeting Hindus and India.

Tracking the Anti-India / Anti-Hindu Forces

To return to our mention in the introduction about the adage that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’, 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 essay, we hope, offers a little insight into, and presents the big picture of the global efforts at demonizing Hindus and undermining India.

The next section of the essay is organized under the heading ‘Threats to Hindu interests from North American entities’ For a study of the global and international threats Indians and Hindus face, we could also do careful studies of threats to Hindu interests from European entities; threats to Hindu interests from Middle Eastern entities; threats to Hindu interests from Pacific Area entities; and threats to Hindu interests from African entities.

Given the limits of space and given the nature of the compendium that this essay appears in, the focus will be on the United States and Canada, and where the threats have emerged from, and continue to be presented.

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

(To be continued)

They have made present-day India, and Hinduism out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens !