Likewise: interchange “Hindu” and “Islam” and it could be , replace “Hindu and “Islam” with “Communism” and its Macarthy, replace “Communism” with “Capitalism” and its Stalin. I thought one-size fits all rhetoric was something self-respecting academics would shirk from, at least nuance the nonsense a little…clearly not.

Incidentally, I did a google search on this Gautam Sen, and it makes me wonder whether he even wrote this. There is an old article he wrote in EPW called: Neo-imperialism, the West and Islam (27th October 2001). I can’t access the whole text, but this is the abstract:

“The idea that the Koran and its contemporary interpretation primarily explain the social and political dynamics of diverse Islamic societies is unsupported by any theory or historical evidence. The apparently uniform and narrow theological convictions prevalent in a number of countries is really a product of the neo-imperialist attempt to control the fate of Islamic societies by specific acts of patronage and financial sponsorship. Escape from neo-imperialism is thus the first step, before socio-economic changes create the basis of new possibilities.”

Does anyone have access to EPW archives? Perhaps Dr. Sen would be as shocked as we are at what is being circulated under his name….

I’m unable to understand. Are you posting this as a position you adhere to, are you posting this to let us know what worthies like Dr. Gautam Sen are saying, is this meant as a rejoinder to subhash’s post, what?

A

India has not been Hindu in any meaningful sense since the Muslim conquests more than a thousand years ago. A few Hindu and Sikh kingdoms did exist through the medieval and early modern period, but they had long vanished by the time Indians were ready for independence in 1947. Under Muslim rule religious and personal freedom for Hindus were precarious, with abduction and slavery a constant threat even under the reputedly moderate Akbar. The British who seized India primarily preferred pillage and commercial exploitation to religious conversion because the latter was not imperative for the former. The freedom for Hindus, largely to be left alone to practice their social and religious customs, improved somewhat under British tutelage though they inflicted monstrous sufferings through their unbridled greed and racial contempt for Indians. The extent of Britain’s genocidal impact on India, marked by massive depopulation, has not been fully comprehended by many.

Independence led to the imposition of a fraudulent secularism inspired by the Congress, anxious to demonstrate it represented all the religious communities of India, an obsession only accentuated by the bitter communal harvest of partition. The bogus secularism adopted by the political and intellectual elites essentially amounted to pandering to sectarian Islam and has ended with a total surrender to minority sectarianism, accompanied by vicious State-sponsored assaults on Hindus. The imperative and painstaking task of nation building was sacrificed to Deoband and Wahabi sentiment that sullenly asserted its rejection of India in favour of the Ummah. As a result, the basis for mobilising India foundered on the determination that nothing of the Hindu past that might offend Muslim sensibility should be allowed validation. Islamic rule of India itself was presented as a golden age and the period that preceded it one of backward caste oppression. India’s catastrophic experience of Muslim conquest, though not British, was celebrated as the triumph of a new egalitarian order that freed downtrodden Hindus from the grievous insult to humanity of the philosophical counsel of the Vedas.

The shameful contortions to invent this paradisaic fantasy necessitated systematic erasing of the grim history of conquest and unfailing enslavement that Hindus experienced for centuries. Only a morally bankrupt and malevolent political and intellectual class could rise to the challenge of denying the poignant cries of despair of countless generations of their own ancestors. The British left behind exactly such a neuter political cabal, headed by the opinionated Jawaharlal Nehru and a whole generation of treasonous communists that regard Indian nationalism as the greatest constraint to their pipe dreams of dictatorial primacy over India. These seditious elites are wreaking havoc on India in collusion with Anglo-American cold warriors (as they did supporting Yahya Khan’s genocide in 1971). Until very recently America regarded Islam as a staunch ally against the Soviet Union and the prospect of a modernising Islam a threat to its cynical economic interests. And the havoc in India has all been funded by the Indian taxpayer, reeling from assault in city after city by mass murderers, with the terrorists enlisting the complicity of Indian State itself to prosecute their Jihad against Hinduism.

Nothing short of a root-and-branch guillotine of the nonsense peddled by India’s Islamic and Christian evangelical educational institutions like JNU, Aligarh and St. Stephens and a media corrupted by these selfsame imperialists as well as the Chinese, will suffice to reverse the precipitous decline of India. The dramatic policy options required are not for the faint-hearted and there is virtually no organised body in India capable of even contemplating them, leave alone formulating specific policies and programme to redress it. The RSS alone remains standing in this battlefield of the dead and dying that India has become. It must act decisively and purposively before it is too late and India fragments into fractious political entities as the Anglo-American co-conspirators and Islamo-Arab terrorists have long tried to accomplish. The British and their numerous spies in India, masquerading as journalists and their Hindu-baiting fellow travellers must be ruthlessly curbed. American church organisations in India, which are nothing but fronts of their national intelligence services, engaged in subversion must be summarily expelled en masse and all Arab funding for their Jihadi projects unceremoniously curtailed. Closing Jihadi training camps in Kerala will be costly because remittance income from the Middle East will dwindle and the payoffs to local political parties, which are effectively subcontractors of Saudi and Pakistani interests, will also be jeopardised.

A cursory wider appraisal suggests in outline a number of areas of urgent action that a serious patriotic government must embark upon. A radical new educational programme is necessary to infuse a sense of patriotism in Indians. An important dimension of the academic curriculum should be based firmly on the heroic struggles of Hindu and Sikh kingdoms to defend their way of life and sovereignty and reflection on the manifold ideas and practices of indigenous traditions. Every student must emerge knowledgeable about the divinity of Lord Ram, the Buddha, Guru Nanak and Ramakrishna, the transcendent significance of the Adi Shankara and the achievements of the many saints that succeeded him. Educational access must also be guaranteed and funded schools compelled to deliver a service under pain of criminal sanction since allocated budgets are stolen by criminal gangs in many parts of the country. Much greater freedom ought to be allowed to higher education institutions offering technical and scientific training, with a proviso that a fifth or more students from disadvantaged groups like Dalits and Muslim women must be educated free. A period of light regulation of short-term training, though with harsh penalties for criminal misconduct and a tax moratorium, would be useful in addressing the absurd paradox of a mismatch between supply and demand for skilled personnel in India. Preservation of the environment must also be an automatic mandatory requirement of all economic activity to preserve rivers, forests and animal life. Taxes on key vegetarian foods should be removed as an expression of a deep longing of the highest principles of the Hindu way of life.

On a macro level, the economy must be freed drastically to accelerate economic growth though foreign shareholdings in privatised state enterprises should be limited. A huge effort, on a war footing, should begin to accelerate infrastructure development, with the State restricting itself to a regulatory role that guarantees competition where feasible or ownership by consumers of the service purchased if it is not. Allied to augmentation of infrastructure provision is the need for sustained effort to conserve energy by, for example, adopting best practice in the construction industry and using alternative technologies on a scale that lowers costs. Visionary endeavours are imperative in sectors like urban transport to end the insanity of promoting private car ownership as the legitimate aspiration for anyone who can afford it. Similarly, effective primary health care remains the crying need of the masses of India though infrastructure provision in services like access to water and the availability of sanitation alone are likely to make a remarkable contribution in improving their lives. In general, the principle is for government to do less, do it well and facilitate private efforts, both personal and civil voluntary. The more functions the State usurps the greater the harm to the long-term social and moral health of society. The destruction of family life is the calamity haunting the West since the State has undermined family interdependence by arrogantly interposing itself within it and supplanting the need for mutual reliance.

Finally, the main problems of India’s defence and foreign policies are political and a culture that has implanted itself within them as a consequence of its malign influence. On foreign policy, assertiveness should combine with reticent wisdom, which means firmness when necessary and detachment when issues have no significant bearing on Indian interests. Those who wage war on India and its people should be given no quarter, which means that India should seek to isolate Pakistan and begin by breaking all ties, diplomatic, economic and political. This is the policy that countries adopt in wartime and Pakistan is undoubtedly waging war on India. Bangladesh should be made to realise that having unusual clout over the communist government of West Bengal and the Bengali intelligentsia will not insulate it from harsh measures for giving sanctuary to terrorists in their territory. Such a posture will have a salutary impact on most other neighbours, who will take note that undermining Indian interests is costly. China can only be disciplined by an unfailing tit-for-tat policy that means each hostile action by it should prompt a proportionate retaliatory response, backed by nuclear deterrence to contain escalation. The idea that reasonableness and the imperatives of justice will prevail is plainly stupid since it merely signals weakness and incites contempt and even greater hostility from adversaries.

Political power has eluded Hindus for time immemorial. Without self-conscious political power Hindus will not be able to address issues that arise within their own traditions directly, to conceive reform and achieve progress. This is the urgent task for Hindus if they are to survive as an authentic and autonomous culture. The alternative is continuing territorial rupture in successive waves and the transformation of Hindus themselves into the kind of frenzied mobs visible today on the streets of Srinagar, under the sway of a preposterous clergy and self-serving rulers, the hallmark of Islam throughout most of its history. If Christianity were to triumph, as it has done elsewhere, whether in medieval pagan Europe or, more recently, the Philippines, both converted by the sword or modern Korea, the victim of assiduous subterfuge, the memory of Krishna, Durga and all sacred Hindu symbols will be banished from our lives. At best they will survive as quaint memories in textbooks. In the name of all that is worthwhile Hindus must regain their sense of reason and wisdom since every vote for the contemporary UPA or similar political dispensations is a vote in favour of mass murder since terrorism is being almost openly incited by India’s incumbent rulers.

Dr. Gautam Sen

27th August 2008.

(Taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science for more than two decades. He is the co-author of Analyzing the Global Political Economy, Princeton University Press, 2008)