One can observe within and without social media how people vilify hindutva (for example by sharing such rot [insert link]). They will do everything they can to make 卍 look like 卐. One must ask oneself how much one’s welfare coincides with theirs.
The tactics a typical western politically active indologist (eg. Sheldon Pollock) uses are-
- He plays bad cop when it comes to an assertive and virile hindu civilization. Not even disguised under the thin veneer of smooth talk is the argument for Hindus not dominating India: So that what’s left may be lapped up by RoP and RoL. Eg. Trushcke16.
- He plays good cop and advocates for hindu (nay “South asian”, “ancient Indian” oh anything but “hindu”) civilization, as long as it is as a neutered pet subservient to his western (ie. abrahamistic / hebraic) ideals.
The guise of being “center”/ mainstream.
“Coming to contents, Truschke accuses “Hindu Right-wingers” of attacks on “academics”. I would have expected them to attack “anti-Hindu Left-wingers”, and indeed I learn that this is exactly how they see it,– and how they see her. If she doesn’t like being characterized this way, she is herewith invited to stop calling her adversaries similar names. The binary Left/Right is at least problematic here, yet for a quarter century I have seen this scheme used to explain matters. Except that the Left doesn’t call itself Left: it treats itself as the natural centre, and anything to its right is deemed politically coloured: “Right” or very easily “extreme Right”.” [KE16]
Sepoy hindus
“As the case of Malhotra has amply exemplified, it suffices to stand up as a Hindu, or to own up Hinduism, in order to be dubbed “Hindu Rightist”, “Hindutva ideologue”, as well as “fanatic”. “rookie” and all the fair names Hindus have been called by Prof. Truschke’s august school of thought. To them, the acceptable Hindu, or what Malhotra calls a “sepoy”, is one who never identifies as a Hindu, but rather as “Indian” (or better, “Bengali”, “Malayali” etc.), “low-caste”, and ideologically “secularist”. The exception is when countering criticism from self-identified Hindus, for then, he is expected to say: “But me too, I am a Hindu!” That way, he can fulfil his main task: as long as there are Hindus, he must deny them the right to speak on behalf of Hinduism and to give it a presence at the conversation between worldviews.”[KE16]
Revulsion towards dharmashAstra-s and dharma
- Sheldon Pollock - TW16.
Hindu-baiting in various forms
“The use of the term Hinduphobia is predicated upon the already existing acceptance and use of the term Islamophobia. If the UN, the governments of the US and EU etc., and the pan-Islamic pressure group OIC, were to give up this ugly and vicious term, then the Hinduphobia term so disliked by Truschke would lapse with it and get replaced again by the older and more accurate term Hindu-baiting.”[KE16]
Vilification of popular sanskrit vitalization
- “Apparently according to Dr. Stella Sandahl, Samskrita revivalists are interested in “cutting throats”, “raping nuns”, “destroying mosques”, etc. This preposterous and extremely offensive allegation was made in an academic e-list no less, eliciting a couple of muted protests. … we find one Dr. Maheswaran Nair positing that Samskrita speakers are wannabe mass-murderers. … Prof. Sheldon Pollock in an interview (available on youtube) also made some comments against the spoken Samskrita movement, though he was relatively subdued. His thesis being what I indicated earlier – spoken Samskrita doesn’t do justice to a language of high intellectual output.” [IN08, FB]
- Consider this excellent comment by Shreevatsa R in response to an article in the Economist, calling out statements such as: “Sanskrit has played an outsized role in India’s linguistic development”, “Sanskrit’s position of prestige also allowed it to infiltrate the vocabularies of unrelated languages” - displaying an “infiltration” of opinion (in this case value judgements about what size Sanskrit *ought* to have, whether it ought to enrich other languages) in the midst of facts.
De-hinduification and South-Asia-ification.
- The “South Asia Studies Faculty” has an obvious vested interested in promoting the increased use of the term “South Asia” (the brand their academic discipline goes by) at the cost of the more familiar and accurate references to the people and culture involved.
- Response to South Asianists
- “The term “South Asia” to describe the Indian subcontinent became current and began to be used widely after the US state department and some lawmakers instituted the “South Asia bureau” in 1991/ 1992, carving it out of the the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.”
- As shrI Arumuganathaswami said in response to South Asianist letter in the 2015 CA textbook hearings: “They even include deleting “India”—a name used for thousands of years in one form or another from Europe to China–in favor of “South Asia”, a modern geopolitical term, and effectively erasing one of the world’s great classical civilizations. It would be like renaming Greek studies, “South Balkan Peninsula Studies.””
- 1115.
- 1603.TOI16VJ_TOIchange16.
Other Pro-active anti-hindu campaigns
- 2015 Campaign against Narendra Modi wooing Silicon valley companies. [AC, Arch]
- Signatories include: Loomba, chatterjee, Doniger and Pollock.
- The nexus of Kamala Visweswaran, ISI, FOIL (Forum of Inquilabi Leftists) and the related FOSA (Forum of South Asia): self-described ‘radical activist’ organisations whose members support various violent insurgencies in India, including those by ultra-left ‘Maoists.’ [R16]