The Withering Attack on Us: They Have Good Reasons Why They Wish Us Harm
There are too many incidents for them to be purely coincidental.
The first incident that caught my attention was the story of Rashmi Samant, a master’s student in engineering at the University of Oxford, considered one of the top universities in the world. There was a lot going on, but in sum, the patriarchy “canceled” a young, brown, religious minority Hindu woman through online bullying. The fact that she had been elected president of the students’ union there apparently did not sit well with some. A Hindu? How dare she?
Social justice, anyone? Here’s Rashmi in her own words explaining how she was defeated by the orchestrated and astroturfed assault:
I listened to a podcast with Pandit Satish Sharma, who explained that there is more than meets the eye at Oxford. It apparently is (much like our very own JNU) two universities in one, the first a rather good science and engineering school, the second the rather unfortunate social sciences school. No prizes for guessing which did the deplatforming of Rashmi Samant.
This is depressingly common: at IIT Madras, the good engineering departments are totally outclassed in random troublemaking by the social sciences departments. At Stanford too, the diligent STEM people produce world-class results, while the law school and other humanities departments indulge in SJW specialties.
Apparently, Oxford has a history of animosity towards, and canceling of Hindus: Pandit Sharma mentioned that Subramaniam Swamy and Rajiv Malhotra had both been de-platformed there, disinvited and prevented from speaking.
And the main culprit in the tejovadham of Rashmi is, unsurprisingly, a faculty member of Indian origin named Abhijit Sarkar, who, from his own words, has a pathological hatred for Hindus. Here is a post of his on the topic, verbatim.
It is not clear if this Abhijit person is a sepoy acting on behalf of shadowy forces, or a true believer in racism and bigotry. Possibly both. So, he has divined that the Oxford Student Union is not “ready for a Sanatani president”. Based on exactly what scientific evidence, we can only wonder. But substitute “Jewish” for “Sanatani” and you will see exactly where he is coming from.
I suspect Abhijit Sarkar will soon get a promotion for his pains. After all, that is exactly what happened when, over at Cambridge, Priyamvada Gopal spewed venom at Hindus. Similarly, Rutgers has just defended Audrey Truschke for her venomous attacks on Hindus and India, amid her hagiography of Aurangzeb. At Harvard, the majestically hirsute Suraj Yengde is a new star in the firmament of academic Hindu-hatred. Ashok Swain, somewhere in Sweden, can offer Suraj a few tips on how to be a lunatic-fringe anti-Hindu bigot.
Here is Rutgers’ apologia. Shockingly brazen, but par for the course. Academia is in the forefront of this new normal of demonizing defenseless Hindus.
To top it all, Twitter India deleted Rashmi Samant’s account on remarkably spurious grounds, and then reinstated it under duress based on user outrage, but with a twist. Wait, if young girls’ accounts are dicey, 18-year-old Greta, 23-year-old Malala, and 9-year-old Licypriya Kanjugam have verified Twitter accounts. So that is not the reason. We know what the reason is.
Here it is, in Rashmi’s own words:
Second, there was an article in Foreign Policy magazine by one James Traub, apparently one of their regular columnists. Says he, “I have been living in, visiting, and writing about India for 45 years, it is shocking to think that a country I always regarded as almost helplessly democratic, barely governable, avowedly secular, is now firmly under the thumb of a Hindu nationalist regime”.
I have news for Traub: “I have been living in, visiting and writing about the US for 43 years, and it is truly shocking to me that a country that I always regarded as a beacon of democracy turned into a banana republic, with a messy election in 2020, and a pathetically funny process for resolving disenfranchisement and voter-fraud issues, with free speech firmly canceled, riots at the drop of a hat, and now under the thumb of a leftist regime that capitulates to both Isamism and Chinese communism.”
Fix your own, what must be called a “democracy” for lack of a better term, first, Traub. Then pontificate on others.
This “liberal” has apparently been at it for long, reflecting the increasing demonization of India: I glanced through his oeuvre, here are some of his earlier opuses:
Is Modi’s India Safe for Muslims?
Why Narendra Modi’s new foreign policy will not make Washington happy…. Right, the sole objective of Indian foreign policy was to make Obama happy.
We need a dictator with a gun and a hoover…
And the piece de resistance: The End of the Gandhis: Can Rahul run India? Can anybody?
There you have the root cause of Traub’s dyspepsia. Apparently, if a Nehru dynasty scion cannot run the country, nobody should.
It is also interesting that Traub has such tenderness towards the fate of Muslims in India, but none whatsoever about the genocide of Hindus in Pakistan. On average, three underage girls are abducted, raped, converted, and married off to a Muslim every single day. There are frequent murder sprees as well. Hindu men regularly end up beaten to death, and their bodies hanged; some children were burnt alive. It is easy: there is no consequence to Hindu-hatred, and it is a dog-whistle to Islamists.
The third incident concerns the Orwellian “Freedom House”, possibly a US Government front entity (reminds me of the even more Orwellian US Commission on International Religious Freedom). It downgraded India from “free” to “partly free”. This, it was explained, was because (I quote from their tweet) of:
- Legislation and policies that undermine the political rights of Muslims.
- Increased government pressure on human rights organizations.
- Rising intimidation of academics and journalists (end quote).
In fact, none of these is true, as is obvious to anyone who knows anything about India. These are just convenient sticks to beat India with (no doubt as fed to these people via some “toolkit” talking points). The entire “political rights of Muslims being undermined” is a convenient excuse for Muslims opposing CAA, and pretending that ongoing genocide against Hindus and other religious minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. is not happening.
Let us also note that Freedom House removed all of Jammu and Kashmir in its entirety from India’s territory in its graphic. Let us also notice that those with Hindu names (whether or not they are pro-Hindu), such as a Neera Tanden, Vivek Moorthy, and Vinita Gupta, are facing a barrage of criticism as Biden appointees (and Tanden has been dropped), but his Muslim appointees sail through. There is a definite pattern when Democrats are in power.
Another entity has jumped into this fray. This time, from Sweden: V-dem Institute (no, I too have never heard of this thing) has also downgraded India’s “democracy” credentials. Several of India’s biggest windbags are associated with this entity. Not only that, Scandinavians (who have a benign image for unclear reasons, probably because they are blond and blue-eyed) are becoming the shady enforcers of Western mischief (e.g. their role in the Sri Lankan civil war).
The fourth incident is Indian-born American media maven Fareed Zakaria pronouncing loftily that “India fell short of democratic ideals before PM Modi, but rarely so far & fast”. That would be believable, were it not for the fact that Zakaria, an establishment insider, had not said earlier that China’s “liberal authoritarianism” was acceptable. Purists may see a contradiction in terms there.
Zakaria was also seen advocating in an old issue of Newsweek magazine that “radical Islam is a fact of life” and offering his advice on “how to live with it”. Thanks to Kanchan Gupta for digging this up. So, I guess, just like the Good Taliban and the Bad Taliban, there is Good Authoritarianism and Bad Authoritarianism? And the Chinese-Islamist axis is the Good Stuff?
The fifth incident is a report in the Wall Street Journal which is shocked, SHOCKED, that India might introduce new laws to jail those who are violating its national sovereignty.
Well, WSJ (or is it SJW?) folks, this is not new. There are laws on the statute books (they have been there since they were introduced in 1961 during Congress Party rule) that allow for jailing, on a non-bailable basis, for six months, anybody who depicts the borders of India incorrectly. Twitter, for instance, already violated this law by depicting Leh as part of Chinese-occupied Tibet.
There is also (again, note, Congress rule in 2000) section 69A of the IT Act, which allows the government to block anybody “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to above”.
That is to say, the laws already exist, and they should have been used already, and Twitter honchos should have been jailed for six months. I said as much on Twitter, and for my pains, the endemic shadow-banning and mass-blocking became even worse, and my personal timeline is regularly emptied (it now has a grand total of four tweets)! We in India have good reason to be peeved at the high-handedness and ideological metastasis of #BigTech.
It must be noted with regret that at least in one case, a blatant misrepresentation of the borders of Jammu & Kashmir, the laws were not used, probably because the culprit is a favorite of the judiciary. This person has been accused of embezzlement (and it has been pending judicial review for years), of diverting funds meant for riot victims, with which she allegedly bought fine wine, and bizarrely, tampons!
The funny thing is that all this fits into a pattern. On the one hand, as the WSJ report suggests, American BigTech needs to be in India, because their growth has saturated elsewhere, and of course China will not let them run riot there. This would normally suggest that India has “buyer power”, and that BigTech would need to pander to India’s whims and fancies.
But they have a different idea: bully India into submission; nip any competition in the bud, do plenty of social engineering and thought control. In other words, it is the East India Company all over again. Rajiv Malhotra, in a series of discussions with Madhu Kishwar on his new book Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power, has pointed out the serious (even existential) dangers of Indian personal data being vacuumed up by Chinese and Americans.
Short-term, Medium-term, and Long-term implications of the West’s plans for us
The short-term, medium-term, and long-term implications are dire, and they need to be analyzed in some detail.
In the short term they (the West) need India to (continue to) be a subservient supplier of labor and commodities. And possibly a supplier of souls, in the competition between Christians and Muslims. Christians are rapidly losing the numbers game in Europe and need to make it up. Where else but in India? Certainly not in China. Thus, the continuous hit jobs on Hindus like Rashmi. Also, they are pretty confident Hindus will not take 9/11 or Charlie Hebdo style revenge.
There are menial and low-level tasks to export to India: ship-breaking, garbage-recycling, etc. While wages in India are low, this is feasible, and they have done this in tech as well: evanescent jobs in medical transcription, call centers, low-level coding, and the latest, labeling images for Machine Learning. Ergo, Indian wages must be kept low, and India’s growth must be stymied.
China also did take on the donkey work of the West, but they had a plan. They built up their own R&D, begged, borrowed, and stole Intellectual Property, and have built up a formidable set of skills. Whereas we have managed very little by way of ‘dynamic capabilities’, in the sense used by UC Berkeley’s David Teece; so, we have to start at the bottom all the time.
The Nehru dynasty, bureaucracy, judiciary, media, academia, tycoons and the tyranny of English: all these in effect conspired to keep India as a pale shadow of the West; our elites as compradors thrived under the License Raj, and the result was the Nehruvian Penalty: 50 wasted years and a billion blighted lives.
There was also the fig leaf of “constitutionalism” to hoodwink the Indian population. Here is what a critic, Alasdair McIntyre, pointed out (Irish Conflicts and British Illusions, New Statesman, 1976): the British fed us a flawed document, which was never ratified by the public; and we have now turned this into a shibboleth, a religious artifact beyond criticism. Thanks to Ruchir Sharma for pointing this out in a tweet.
In a very small and tentative way, Narendra Modi has begun to put a dent in this colonial state, despite setbacks like an education minister proudly telling us that he had “not changed a word” in the obscenely biased textbooks whose main purpose is to perpetuate mental slavery. The possibility, however small, that India will escape, is too much for the West to countenance.
I am told there is a book, Brainwashed Republic, by Neeraj Atri, that outlines this wholesale mental colonization. Long ago, I read The Raj Syndrome by Suhash Chakravarty, about the grim reality of ruthless imperial tyranny, which was transmogrified into the allegedly benign mai-baap sarkar by propaganda sleight-of-hand, and which was perpetuated post-1947 by the Brown Sahibs.
As India prepares to jettison its colonial baggage, there will be every effort to convince us that we are part of the Anglosphere, “almost-white”, and that we should continue to be little performing monkeys waiting for pats on the back from Western masters.
In the medium term, there is an important allegory for India, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. In that dystopian version of the near future, rich people arrange for their biological clones to be brought up, who will then have their organs harvested for the benefit of their sponsors, whose lives will thus be extended despite disease and old age. The clones expect to be “completed”, that is, they die in their youth after their organs are removed one by one.
The metaphor suggests that the West can only sustain its lifestyle if there are subject people to exploit: given Britain’s precipitous decline post-empire, that seems logical. Ishiguro goes further in his latest book, Klara and the Sun, which is a parable about an artificial intelligence, Klara, who (or which?) provides companionship to a teenager suffering from a mysterious ailment.
That too would be a throwback to an old meme, that of Uncle Tom or Gunga Din (or even Dilsey, the black servant in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), where untermenschen non-whites willingly provide support and succor to whites, if necessary, dying for them — just as Ishiguro’s clones accept their fate of suffering and dying young as part of the natural order.
Ishiguro is perhaps the most penetrating observer today of the Anglosphere (his Remains of the Day is a masterpiece), and we should take his vision of their fantasies seriously.
The simplest and most literal version of Never Let Me Go would be to provide surrogate wombs for the clones, that is baby factories for the West, whose women will be spared the drudgery of going through pregnancy for mere clones (assuming Matrix-like test-tube assembly lines for humans are a long way off).
That would make Indian women’s wombs useful, but there is a question mark about the value of the lives of Indian men. They are surplus, superfluous. Off with their heads!
That, incidentally, gives us a conceptual leap to the long-term apocalyptic vision as well. With AI and ML taking over a lot of the drudgery and jobs currently done by people, there will be many surplus humans. Why should there be eight billion humans occupying the planet, destroying the environment, and causing climate change, if many are not productive or useful? Imagine how green the Earth would be without these uncouth people!
The simple answer would be depopulation. A very good Final Solution™.
We need not shrink from the history of depopulation of undesirables, by whatever means possible. Native Americans through smallpox, syphilis, wars, death marches, and the mass eradication of their staple food, the American buffalo. Tibetans, and maybe Uyghurs, through abortion and mass sterilization. Cambodians, Stalin’s kulaks and Mao’s bourgeois enemies through starvation and gulags. Gas chambers.
Indians through the 1880s’ famines (see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World) and the 1940’s Bengal Famine. Even that Sri Lankan gynecologist did his bit by sterilizing 4,000 women of certain communities without their knowledge or consent.
In case you think I just made up this doomsday scenario, here’s Martin Wolf of the Financial Times kindly saying in so many words that humans are undesirable; and what a lovely headline, “Humanity is a cuckoo in the planetary nest”! He does not come right out and say it, but you cannot miss the subtext that it is desirable to get rid of many humans. Of course, Wolf discreetly does not say which humans to wipe out. But we can guess, can’t we?
Once this direction is clear, why not figure out how to do it? What if (I agree this is a bit far-fetched, but not impossible) the Wuhan virus was a dress-rehearsal for global depopulation?
If you remember, things looked grim for India in the early days of that pandemic. There was an Indian-American “expert” who told fawning TV studios that there would be 300 to 500 million Indian cases by mid-2020; he left the impression that this, regrettably, would lead to many millions of dead Indians. In the event, casualties were only of the order of 150,000. (There were similar projections about an AIDS catastrophe in India a few years ago, too.)
So, dead Indians. Similarly, dead Africans and South Americans and Asians, that is, non-whites. Mission accomplished. Lower carbon emissions. Climate can stabilize at +1.5 degrees C. All good. With climate change fundamentalists now rampant in the Biden administration, this could well be iron-clad logic.
So, one could conjecture that there is a three-step plan. Keep us subservient, “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen”. Dump all the donkey work on us until the machines get really good through Big Data. Then they no longer need us, so go ahead and wipe us out. Any deviation from the “Plan” will be met with riots, blood-curdling threats, sanctions, military action; in fact, the works.
You don’t believe this? Fine. As Andy Grove said, memorably, “only the paranoid survive”.
What is even more alarming is that the Chinese also have plans for us. These are less subtle: land grab, water wars, conquest, balkanization, cultural annihilation. There is no good reason the West and China would not in effect collaborate in this new colonization, as Britain, France, Spain etc. did in the 19th century white Christian colonization spree. Oligopolies work. Witness the persistent suspicion that the Wuhan Virology lab and certain US individuals in high places have been thick as thieves, some even predicting the virus’s effects with astonishing accuracy. We may be in for a lot of pandemics.
Rashmi Sawant’s “canceling” is one of the indications, like those of canaries in a mine, to the systematic “poisoning” of India’s future by a variety of Hinduphobic and Indophobic forces. Let us not sleepwalk our way into their future.