Wharton and Modi
Dr Gautam Sen
THE gratuitous insult recently against Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi by some jumped students of the Wharton India Economic Forum, who possibly imagine they commune with the gods the moment the divine imprimatur of white certification brushes against them, raises some deeper questions. There is something irredeemably malicious and untenable about the role of an overwhelming majority of academics of Indian origin in the US and Europe, who repeatedly disparage all Hindu political aspirations.
The majority of these extraordinarily privileged members of Western academia have accorded themselves exclusivity in representing all the world’s purportedly oppressed. And their unbearably arrogant self-ascription insinuates inviolable righteousness because, once again, they have gained approval from within the heart of great imperialist power centres. Not for nothing did aspirants for fame and fortune in the ancient world of Rome feel obligated to seek endorsement in its imperial capital city.
Yet, as in most human activity, barring rare individual eccentricity, when recurrent social phenomena are evident mundane, self-interested reasons underlies it. Unsparing scrutiny is required of these morally bankrupt, but self-important mediocrities, harbouring hysterical animus against the unwashed Hindu masses, who dare question a hostile status quo. It would be quite erroneous to impute to these rascals, precisely what they are, motives of misguided, liberal sentimentality. Nor is it the case that these derisive, self-promoters are exhibiting a Gandhian counterpart of the Stockholm syndrome because they are victims of a civilisation accustomed to instinctive submission, as a result of the bitter historical experience of defeat.
Their derived personal authority from membership of Western academia, mercilessly wielded at any hint of Hindu self assertion, and tremendous affluence demands analysis of objective situational parameters. It is very difficult for individuals who seek to challenge the essential contours of power and interest to survive in such academic institutions, which are deeply implicated in the multifarious criminal activities, at home and abroad, of their government. Some dissidents are disingenuously tolerated to give an impression of liberal hauteur and tolerance. But that is also a cynical ploy to feign credibility. These academics of Indian origin in US academia are, ultimately, surrogates of US official policy though their servitude status is somewhat circuitous and indirect.
In order to comprehend their real motives for periodic hyperactivity against any Hindu protest it is necessary to recognise their unswervingly selective conscience and associated displays of contrived outrage. Apparently, two incidents have robbed India of its reputation for all time to come and Hindus of any vestige of their human rights. The moment some Hindus demolished the disused Babri structure, the slide down the slippery slope to moral oblivion apparently began unstoppably. Big deal is what common sense might have posited, the one commodity absent when determinedly framing Hindus is the name of the game.
When the grim episode of communal violence and the killing of innocents followed, in retaliation for burning to death of 59 Hindu pilgrims, mostly women and children, it ensured that hell fires would burn for any Hindu with the temerity to raise eyes in its aftermath. The mere demand for the prosecution of M F. Husain, the covert Jihadi, Hindu-baiter, for depicting Hindu goddesses engaged in bestiality, was the icing on the cake that implicitly prompted demands to inflict capital punishment for any Hindu dissent. The meek demand for legal sanction by Hindus has since been routinely compared to Islamist death threats against numerous authors and journalists considered to have insulted the Prophet.
No other episode causes such hysteria and fury, not even the killings of thousands of innocent Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, not even the chilling murder of their children, who had petrol poured into their throats and set alight. Shockingly, hardly anyone was punished, and the now anointed saint, Rajiv Gandhi, who, unlike Narendra Modi, gave virtual public approval to these horrendous crimes, is being reverentially celebrated, with innumerable government programmes and symbols named after him.
Yet, the exoneration of Narendra Modi by the Supreme Court, SIT cuts no ice and a mass of completely fabricated evidence continues to assert its Talmudic verity. As for communal riots, despite the efforts of Anglo-American, Cold War academics (e.g. Paul R. Brass) to discover a Hindu angle to every outbreak of communal violence in independent India, Congress governments were almost always in the saddle and cynically indifferent. But no disapprobation is aimed at them because they worship a demented circus animal called secularism, the vile clarion call for Islamic Jihad and Christian assault against everything sacred to Hindus.
These improbable, Left-leaning loonies, occupying hallowed chairs in supposedly august American universities, smugly sport their badges of imagined, timeless probity and high-mindedness. Yet almost no reputation survives passing sober scrutiny. One particularly perverse specimen from Chicago University, apt to flaunt friendship with India’s Congress President, wrote an extraordinary article in the Los Angeles Times, confessing to fears for the safety of all Indian Muslims in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai carnage. Not a word of sympathy was expressed for its victims or apology proffered when the retaliatory communal killings, across the length and breadth of Hindu fascist, India, she confidently predicted, failed to materialise. Significantly, a Maoist leader from Kolkata publicly applauded the Mumbai carnage, only regretting that any Muslims were killed.
China had brokered a deal between Indian Maoists and Pakistan once they became allies and its common interests converged with those of the US in that model of responsible nationhood, the fountainhead of the contemporary global terror business. Most of the Indian Left, China and the US had joined hands with Pakistan against an Indian State that refused to kowtow to the West. The redoubtable Iqbal Singh, editor of London’s India Weekly, termed this a second front in the Cold War. As a consequence, one of the greatest human rights violations since the holocaust in the former East Pakistan during 1970-71 enjoyed the public support of the Sino-American alliance, with the Indian Left also acquiescing. This is the same the Indian Left that migrated en masse to the very green pastures of the US, to universities across the country, from Harvard and a Madrassa called Columbia to Chicago, Penn and hundreds of others.
Their usefulness to US Cold War aims had arisen from their unrelenting hostility to the Indian State. It was palpably prompted in the case of the cadre of the dominant Bengali Left by the added instinct of pure ethnic parochialism, masquerading as deep thought and augmented by a smattering of Hegel, Marx, etc.! Others, usually from modest socio-economic backgrounds, were sodden in immediate enrichment on joining US faculties and rendered harmless for use as catamites as well. Their mission was to bait the Indian State and its entire evil works and excoriate all manifestations of Indian nationalism, which they rather exaggeratedly associated with contemporary Hindutva.
They remain in situ today, usually at the margins of intellectual life, like Ania Loomba and another member of the sisterhood in Columbia. They comprise the pitiable beneficiaries of affirmative action appointments to the professoriate of non white females. They pontificate sagely on race and gender issues rather than anything mainstream of universal significance in their subject areas. Others of this tribe are unequal to the task of rising to cosmopolitan intellectual life and become interlocutor coolies, interpreting perceived Hindu religious mumbo jumbo and of course caste oppression. All of it endeavours to make a passing show that justifies their handsome salaries. Unfortunately, for them, the US is somewhat less agitated of late by India now, which it had compared to Tojo’s Japan after WWII.
Narendra Modi is all they have left to get a rare high, while they manfully ignore human rights violations of their own adopted country that would have relegated Imperial Japan to a mere apprenticeship. They tolerate Islamic terrorism, fraternise with its ideologues, and have nothing to say about genital mutilation and the worst Islamic violations of women’s fundamental rights that could be conceived. Nor are they willing to even recognize that constant abductions, rapes and murders by Muslims in many parts of West Bengal and the brutal suppression of Hindus in contemporary Bangladesh. Once Modi is elected prime minister of India even US church lobbies, calculatedly approving of Islamic Jihad to keep Hindus off balance, will be unable to prompt the withholding of a visa though he might wish to give the country a wide berth. Some poor Hindu sod will have to put their reputation on the line to keep these pathetic, self-serving creatures in the business of irrelevant mischief.
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