How the West Looks at India: Debating the Hindu Right

(published in The Pioneer, Delhi, 6 September 2015)

 

How does the West look at India? The Western public is completely, and the professional India-watchers largely, dependent on information filtered by a Delhi bottleneck under firm Nehruvian control. This is not a matter of “sepoy” intellectuals blackening India and Hinduism at the behest of an American conspiracy. It is a two-way influence, with Indians trying to live up to Western fashions and Westerners trying to align with Indian ideological norms.

An important new book exemplifies this American-Indian cooperation against any political mobilization in the name of Hinduism: Pluralism and Democracy in India. Debating the Hindu Right (OUP, New York 2015). It is a collection of twenty essays mostly based on updated versions of contributions to a 2005 conference in Chicago. The editors are religious historian Wendy Doniger and law scholar Martha Nussbaum, both from the top-ranking University of Chicago. Doniger’s name has gained some currency in India ever since her book The Hindus, an Alternative History, was withdrawn by the publisher under Hindu pressure. This way, a biased, flippant and error-ridden book, already exposed in detail in Vishal Agarwal’s counter-book, was given a false aura of martyrdom. The episode also confirmed her enmity for any Hindu self-assertion, as is obvious from the introduction she co-authored with Nussbaum.

About the outspokenly partisan perspective of the book, we can be brief because no attempt is made to hide it. Thus, if we are going to discuss "democracy in India", it should be hard to leave the Emergency and the Sangh Parivar's opposition to it unmentioned; yet these are carefully and completely hushed up. The year Zero of the book's time horizon is explicitly said to be 2002, because of the Gujarat riots. On these, the old progressive party-line is still strictly observed, assuming “Modi’s complicity in the riots” (p.14). Herewith, they consciously overrule the fact that “he has not been convicted in court” (p.1), though not for want of trying. But if riots are deemed so important, surely attention is paid to the far larger killing of the Sikhs in 1984 by Congress secularists; or to the East Bengali massacre of Hindus in 1971 that dwarfed all Indian communal killings since Independence combined? No, this book only notices killings when Hindus are (or can be portrayed as) the perpetrators.

The Ayodhya controversy is mentioned a number of times, but without the decisive information, quite new to the American target audience, that the temple claim has meanwhile proved historically correct. The whole lambasting of the centuries-old pro-temple consensus, challenged by the secularists in 1989 and rebaptized the “Hindu fundamentalist claim”, carried along all of American academe, yet it was wrong.  The paper specifically about “the road from Ayodhya” has 40 footnotes, all referring to partisan anti-Hindutva sources except for one in which BJP stalwart Ram Madhav provides some hard data. And that count is representative for most papers, but then Hindus should admit that they themselves have produced few intellectual works worth quoting.

The editors call Naredra Modi’s accession to power “ominous for India’s very future as a democracy” (p.1). In American academe, the demand of objectivity, on which scholarly authority is based, is suspended in works about Hindu politics.

The subtitle could suggest that a debate with the so-called Hindu Right is being envisaged. That is not the case. The debate is in fact between different sections of the secularist Left (with its American extension), as exemplified by Amartya Sen’s response to Ramachandra Guha’s review of his The Argumentative Indian. The Hindu Right is only an object. The token contribution from Ved Nanda as former head of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (US section of the RSS) has no argumentative thrust, it merely details all the historical and numerical facts about Hinduism in the US.
 

Yet, many of the separate papers in this book are certainly worth reading. Most papers require a review in themselves, but to settle for one example, Mushirul Hasan’s paper on the BJP’s textbook’s reforms provides interesting data on the BJP’s intellectual agenda as seen by the secularists. Once you have accepted that this is not a scholarly account but a veteran’s memoir giving the view of one of the warring camps, it becomes a very worthy read. Incidentally, on p.255, Hasan labels Hindu history-rewriting an “attempt to Talibanise India’s history”, thus holding up an Islamic movement as the level to which Hindus could stoop. Thereby, he implicitly admits that the ideologically streamlined textbooks which he fights in India are a routine fact of life in Pakistan.

A serious drawback of this book is that it narrows its focus to the Sangh Parivar, all while announcing a treatment of the “Hindu Right”. Perhaps this was still passable in 2005, but anyone moderately informed about the ideological scene should know that it is not in 2015. At the mass level, scholars ought to have noticed that the Hindu self-defence network in West Bengal, Hindu Samhati, has been set up by  a dissatisfied ex-Swayamsevak because the RSS was just not living up to its promises. The Sangh’s enemies, such as the editors of this book, portray it as a formidable Hindu force, but insiders know better. It might have number, and today it might even hold office, but its commitment to Hindu victory is wobbly and lackadaisical. More and more, Hindus are locally organizing outside the Sangh. They even continue to do so now that “their” side is in power in Delhi and proving to be no more than time-servers. Mostly they are happy that Modi is at the helm, but for an actual Hindu dimension to politics, more will be needed.

While this trend is still marginal, it is already very visible on the media front, where internet papers have become the arteries of new communities shedding the Sangh baggage and trying to serve the Hindu cause through new analyses: VijayVaani, India Facts, Hindu Human Rights, Swarajya, Bharat-Bharati, the India Inspires Foundation. These people have no power yet, but they do have ideas. More up-to-date and more aware of international trends in political thinking than the gerontocratic Sangh, their thought is far more interesting. It also is more rooted, more Hindu than the Hindutva current, which is stuck in the 1920s’ borrowed nationalist paradigm. If “debate” with the Hindu side is what you want, it is they who are the ones to talk to.

 

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The San José Global Hindu Conference 2014

 

On 26-27 April 2014, the Global Hindu Conference took place at the Wyndham hotel San José CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. It was far less luxurious than most academic conferences, but contentswise it was unusually rich and focused. Most participants were amazed at the quality of not one gem here or there, but of all the papers. It gathered people for work, not leisure: sessions from 8h till 22h, with breaks of only ten minutes.

I apologize for a very uneven overview, particularly to the speakers whom I mention only cursorily. Given time constraints, I write this report in a hurry, but a book with all the full papers will come out later this year.

 

History

Papers by Sumeet Saxena, Mrs. Kamlesh Kapur, Sandeep Balakrishna and Vishal Agarwal detailed the different modern schools of historiography: British, Indian nationalist (ca. 1920-70), Marxist etc. Balakrishna presented his recently published book about Tipu Sultan, countering the false and laughable propaganda of the secularists. Vinay Deolikar cut the so-called Muslim period to size: it declined sharply after 1707, and by 1750, most of India was under the Hindu Pad Padashahi (“Hindu sovereignty”) established by the Marathas. The decisive hero was Peshwa Baji Rao, who in ca. 1720 changed the power equation in India decisively. William Dalrymple and the secularists falsify history by pretending that the Moghuls handed over their power to the British, who in fact had to wrest it from the Hindu kings.

Niraj Mohanka explained the Wendy Doniger affair, where her “banned” book had erred, and how Hindus have reacted. About this affair, Vishal Agarwal authored a list of errors in Wendy Doniger’s controversial book The Hindus, an Alternative History, shortly after the book appeared in 2007. Because of the commotion, his list has finally appeared in print. He presented the book and discussed the classes of errors. The hundreds of factual mistakes reflect poorly on her scholarship, but they are not the reason why Hindus are up in arms against it. The classes she claims to champion, women and low-castes, are systematically denied their proud role in history and reduced to mere victims of patriarchy and upper-caste domination.

Prof. Narahari Achar detailed the history of Parikhit and Janamejaya, grandson and great-grandson of Arjuna, who presided over the first narration which was to expand into the Mahabharata. He applied modern software to the astronomical data in the epic.

The paper by Shrikant Talageri, who could not physically be there, was read out by the undersigned. Talageri described the difficult challenge that a real historian of India has to face. On the one hand, there are the gross and shameless biases imposed by the Marxists and secularists, parroted by the world media and even by India-watching academics. On the other, any legitimate criticism or just factual portrayal of negative practices by some Hindu or other will be shot down by the affected sectional interest groups or lambasted by Hindu activists as “anti-Hindu”.  

The undersigned spoke about the failure of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis and of the hyperfocus on the role of colonial historiography. I gave some feedback on the weaknesses and mistakes of the Hindu attempts at history-rewriting so far.

 

Christianity

Kandadai Rangachari and Kalavai Venkat discussed “Jesus in India”. This refers not just to Nicholas Notovich’s hoax, debunked more than a century ago, only years after it had been launched, but stlll widely believed by Ahmadiya Muslims, New-Agers, Ramakrishnaites and hundreds of millions of Hindus. It equally pertains to the equally mythical

Kalavai Venkat delivered the Sita Ram Goel memorial lecture, mercilessly pin-pricking the illusions about Christianity. He at once presented his new book, What Every Hindu Should Know about Christianity. The Sita Ram Goel memorial lecture was preceded by an overview of Goel’s life, with many rare pictures, by Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami, the head of the Hawaii-based Shaiva Siddhanta order.  

A debate on how to deal with the challenge of Christianity took place between Prof.  Madan Lal Goel and Kalavai Venkat, with yours truly as the moderator. I fear the whole thing doesn’t look good on camera, for I was plagued by pain and dryness in my right eye, and the material circumstances were not exactly fit for a panel discussion: each time they spoke, the two opponents had to get up and speak through the microphone at the rostrum.  The organizers should think of these things beforehand, or rather, I should have thought of these things. Still it worked out well, as the antagonists were correct and friendly and held nicely balanced viewpoints. Kalavai was in favour of a robust stance, openly treating Christians as enemies because their adopted doctrine is unequivocally hostile to Hinduism. He advocated the use of science-based scepticism and ridicule. Goel, by contrast, was in favour of a more diplomatic attitude, as many Christians were coming out of this antagonistic worldview. Niraj Mohanka commented that both are right, since their attitudes fit the two faces of Christianity: on the offensive in India and the other frontline states of the mission, on the retreat and giving way to a more open-minded “spirituality” in the West.

Sundarsh Vedapureeswaran discussed the fundamental flaw in the Abrahamic outlook. Myself, I gave an overview of what Christianity is not. Some Hindus imagine that Christians should live up to the Hindus’ own fantasies about what Christianity is, e.g. “Jesus would be angry if he saw the spread of missions”. In reality, the Christians are only bound by Christian texts, chiefly the Nicean creed.

The paper that was perhaps most urgently needed by the Hindu community, was by Prof. Laul Jadusingh, targeting “god-talk”. He reiterated that non-theism was fully a part of Hinduism until Shankara. “Ishwara” meant something else for Patañjali than “God”. But when today’s Hindus so profusely mention “God”, it is heavily tainted with Christian theology. It is imperative that Hindus go back to their roots in this respect, and understand that (1) “God” means something very different in Hinduism than in Christianity; and (2) Hinduism can very well exist without a notion of “God”. Buddhism has been less confused about this. (I might mention the commotion in 2005 in Cambodia when planned school textbooks turned out to include the notion of “God”. The Buddhist clergy intervened to remind everyone that this was a Christian notion adroitly promoted by the missionaries, and that for many centuries, the Cambodians had proven their ability to do without this notion.) At any rate, the focused Buddhist mobilization against Christian proselytization contrasts favourably with the naïve and lazy Hindu attitude so far.

 

Education

The subjects of historiography and the defence against Christianity were each given half a day, the other sessions were shorter, but at least a start was made.

Acharya Arumuganathaswami presented the educational situation in the US, including the textbook selection and editing process, against which his monastic order had brought out an introductory textbook on Hinduism. He also presented the film version, The History of Hindu India, which evoked general admiration. The only critical note was by a professor who liked the film but saw a tinge op imitative apologetics in it, of the type: “Christians say they worship God, but we too…” I think that was unfair, as the Hawaii Shaivite order just happens to be theistic and genuinely see Hinduism as theistic, a Shaiva attitude long predating the Christian domination in the colonial and present periods. On the other hand, an alertness for the Hindu tendency to mimic Christianity is commendable.

Schoolchildren and young adults, whose religious education was discussed in papers by Ashutosh Gupta, Mona Rawal, Easan Katir and Tushar Pandya, need to be approached in a different way because of the specific sensitivities of their age group. One thing they have in common is regular exposure to the barrage of the ambient anti-Hindu propaganda. Young adults in America, however, are in a generally anti-religious mood and atmosphere. By contrast, younger pupils often react by feeling shame or by wanting to disown Hinduism in order to be more acceptable to the ambient Christians.

Katir also gave his testimony about the edits process starting the California textbook affair. As the Acharya diagnosed, the California parents, none of them education bureaucrats nor historians, had been naïve in their understand of the textbook-editing process as well as about the state of the art in certain topics of history. This failure should be no big deal provided they have learned their lesson and improve their performance next times around.

 

Miscellaneous

Far from complete was the treatment of another sore point: the legal and factual treatment of the temples. But at least a start was made with the case of Andhra Pradesh, presented by Prasad Yalamanchi. Scientist Yadu Moharir, author of books on Ganesha and Laksmi, tried to explain the scientific basis of Hindu rituals, an ambitious project but for skeptics his treatment may not fully have met their standards of rigorousness. He did elucidate the logic behind rituals, though, useful knowledge for someone of a non-ritualist background like myself.

Rahul Chandra documented the situation of the Hindus in Pakistan, mostly Sindh, and why many feel compelled to flee to India. Especially the vulnerability of girls to abduction by and forced marriage to Muslims forces them to flee. In a few districts they still form a high percentage, helped by a high birthrate, and this explains why many also don’t feel a pressing need to flee yet. But if they are not helped from abroad, they too will come to feel the heat. A complement to this was Vishal Agarwal’s description of the peculiar history of Sindh. For the audience these were novel topics full of surprising information. Rahul Chandra also presented a paper about the development of alternative media, a remedy to the decades-long painful absence of the articulately Hindu voice from the public debate.

Dilip Amin reported on the challenge of interfaith marriages and described the typical and foreseeable conduct of the non-Hindu spouses and their families. Though he did not say so outright, he seemed to see dissuasion from the marriage as the most  desirable course. At any rate, he countered the naivety of the Hindu youngsters and the cluelessness of their parents.

Similarly, Kamlesh Kapur, also the author of a hefty textbook on Hindu dharma, reported on her experience with interreligious dialogue, gathered over several decades. The piucture is almost uniformly dismal. Hindus come totally unprepared, have not been mandated or somehow sought representativeness, and improvise widely different responses to the three questions that they invariably have to answer: (1) the name of our God?, (2) our basic belief?, and (3) the name of our holy book? “They fumble, they feel trapped and remain on the defensive, and they look like losers”: that sums up the general picture. She outlined the essence of a remedy, but before we can really speak of a remedy, much remains to be done. At any rate, she correctly diagnosed a glaring problem. Here too, the failure should have been obvious years ago, yet Hindus have never laid their finger on this gaping wound.

 

Evaluation

In material details, a few things could have been better. Lack of manpower among the organizers accounts for that, and probably it is unavoidable in a truly pioneering venture. But in contents, this was the best Hindu conference I have ever attended. It was packed full of real and new information. Elsewhere, papers are passively accepted from whoever volunteers one, and the more Hindu a conference, the greater the likelihood that some worthless or downright embarrassing papers have only been programmed because their contributors had sponsored the conference. Here, every single paper was of remarkable or really very high quality. Some topics were handled for the first time ever. All praise to the main organizer, Rajiv Varma.

 

The greatest merit of this conference was that it had finally started to strategize. Secularists and the missionary lobby like to portray the Hindu movement as a big and dangerous monster. Big, perhaps, but dangerous? Maybe a few activists are dangerous the way a mad dog is dangerous: it has the ability of barking and once or twice even biting, but then it is driven into a cage or otherwise taken care of -- it may look formidable but it is after all only an animal. What is completely lacking that could make the movement effective (or "dangerous"), is knowledge: knowledge of what dharma stands for, knowledge of the enemies, and knowledge of the field of action. This movement has tremendous potential, but in the real world it is only stumbling from defeat to defeat. Even the expected BJP victory in the Indian elections may only be a Pyrrhic victory if the disappointing experience of BJP rule in 1998-2004 is anything to go by. Jobs and other perks for the BJP time-servers, but nothing at all for the Hindu cause. This is a brainless dinosaur, and what this conference set out to do, was to infuse a brain into the dinosaur. In this regard, it made great strides. Whether it will be successful in the long run, only depends on the follow-up.

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A possibly good side to the Wendy Doniger affair

 

At first sight, the withdrawal of Prof. Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, an Alternative History by her publisher Penguin is an all-round disaster for the Hindus. The nit-picking by some Hindu activists that the book wasn’t really banned by a Court but only withdrawn by the publishers themselves won’t wash, for this withdrawal was made under threat of a judicial ban invoking Indian censorship legislation, including Art. 295A of the Indian Penal Code and Art. 153A of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code. So, Hindu activists set in motion the existing censorship legislation in order to obtain the suppression of the book, which in the event came about by the publisher’s own intervention in order to avert an impending judicial ban.

 

Results of the book’s withdrawal

What has been the result? First of all, the whole world has heard of the affair, for the ban on a book exposing and attacking Hinduism is much to the media’s liking. It had the right role division: obscurantists of an already despised religion as the villain, a weak and opportunistic entrepreneur as their accomplice, a liberal professor as the besieged hero. That it was a seriously flawed book with many factual errors and a less than academic approach, already detailed in a refutation by Vishal Agarwal in 2009, has barely been mentioned. Instead, the book has been covered with the halo of martyrdom, while the Hindu activists and to some extent Hindu society as a whole have been blackened as humourless touch-me-nots at best, or as dangerous fanatics in the more usual judgment. For those who only understand material results: the sales of the book have gone up. For those more sensitive to the information flow: the ban on the book’s content is a total failure, for it remains perfectly available through the internet. The erstwhile monopoly on publication exercised by establishment figures such as Wendy Doniger herself has been broken by the uncontrollable internet, yet now we find the internet’s beneficiaries, the Hindus, making an internet heroine of the same Wendy Doniger.

Further, all the commotion about this one book could make us lose sight of the hundreds of books likewise lambasting or lampooning Hindu practices and Hindu figures of veneration. Some 99% of the academic books on various aspects of Hinduism contain stray anti-Hindu statements or an over-all anti-Hindu message: too many to ban them all, and passing cleverly below the radar of this Wendy Doniger affair. Anyone who has followed the problem of anti-Hindu opinion-making will be surprised to see all this excitement about one book.

Also, global public opinion, in so far as it cares, has taken notice of the crass ignorance among the Hindu activists. Many pro-Hindu commentators have called Wendy Doniger a Christian who writes in the service of the missionary apparatus. In fact, she is secular and Jewish-born and has nothing to do with the missionary project. To be sure, the missionaries too have used the affair to indict Hindus, and they welcome her book as another nail in the coffin of the Hindu enemy. This is because American liberals and Christians find a common enemy in Hinduism, but among themselves they have their quarrels. It is no big deal for an Indian Hindu to be ignorant of the ongoing ideological debates in American society, but if at all you insist on singling out an American book for your attack, it is not too much to ask that you inform yourself about these. So, world opinion learns with amazement that Hindu activism is led by people who don’t know the field they have to operate in.

Finally, one more drawback of this Hindu “victory” is that it strengthens a very harmful tendency among Hindu activists: Indian chauvinism and paranoia about the “foreign hand”. This does not strengthen the enemy nor his anti-Hindu animus, but it weakens the Hindu side. Since nobody else will elaborate on this point, I will.

 

 

Nationalism as a misstatement of Hindu concerns

The impression is created that Wendy Doniger wrote an anti-Hindu book because she is American, in keeping with the American imperialist project. However, she is not known to work for the CIA or other strategic services, and has repeatedly expressed her opposition to power politics and war. This should be very well known to the Hindus, because they often cite her disparaging remarks on the pro-war passages in the Bhagavad-Gita. The Indian Communists must be laughing among themselves because the Hindu activists are venting their anger along the anti-American lines laid down by the Communists themselves.

In fact, there is no American policy of lambasting or belittling foreign cultures, e.g. Ruth Benedict’s anthropological classic The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, analysing the Japanese enemy in World War 2, left it to Hollywood to lampoon the Japs and instead gave a factual and respectful account. There is no such systematic lampooning or bad-mouthing Chinese or Islamic “enemies” of the US in present-day American academic publications as there is in Wendy’s book regarding Hinduism. Numerous Hindus imagine that Westerners (or what anachronistic Indians, even after the accession to the presidency by Barack Obama, call “whites”) impose an anti-Hindu policy, but the truth is that most Westerners don’t care one way or the other about Hinduism; even those involved with foreign policy might mention China or the Muslim world as areas of concern, but rarely India, let alone Hinduism.  Most anti-Hindu books are written by Indians, typically by born Hindus. Even the pressure at Western “Indian Studies” departments to profile oneself as anti-Hindu exists mostly in deference to the reigning ideology in India itself, viz. Nehruvian secularism.

The complex relation between pre-1947 British policies and the post-1947 Indian state ideology is an important topic for historians of ideas, but it is only of historical interest. Hindus falsely impute many evils to British influence when other factors account for them better. Thus, caste discrimination was indeed aggravated by British policies, but Hindu activists are plainly wrong to deny that caste is an indigenous institution existing since at least 25 centuries. The British did de-industrialize India and harm its economy, but it is Nehruvian socialism that made India a synonym of extreme poverty and corruption. The vast majority of the Indians, from left to right, blame the British for the Partition, a Muslim plan which was emphatically rejected by the British administrators, and only accepted by the last Viceroy just months before independence, after the overwhelming majority of the Indian Muslims had voted for it and several Congress leaders had seconded it. But it is so much cosier to blame the long-gone Britons than to face the historical truth and the enduring challenge of Islam, so all cowards prefer to blame the Britons (you can make up your own mind whether you are one of them). Anyway, those are historical matters, and we want to deal with the present.

Indians have had 66 years to eliminate British influences if they so wished, and anything that prevails in India today is the handiwork of Indians. Thus, the reservation policy which has recently revived and strengthened caste consciousness, is entirely the doing of Indians, under no British (or otherwise outside) pressure. The problem of terrorism has been the handiwork of South-Asian Muslims. Only paranoid minds (like those Hindu activists on vijayvaani.com) would impute this recurring problem, created by Muslims who are both anti-Hindu and anti-American, to American influence. For another example, the Constituent Assembly decided that the language of administration should be native, either Sanskrit or shuddh (pure) Hindi, and took a vote between those two. Everyone at the time took it for granted that an India independent from the British should eliminate the language of British colonial administration. And yet, the abolition of English, planned for 1965, did not take place. There had been no British or American pressure to stick to English, it was India’s own English-speaking elite (using the Dravidianist movement as cat’s paw) that had sabotaged the switch to a native language. That same elite enforces Western-style education and a Western way of life – but still it is Indians who do so, it does not happen under Western pressure. Hindu activists who refuse to see other enemies than whites, and who fantasize a white hand behind every brown-skinned action, are actually white supremacists: they think nothing meaningful can happen if there is no white hand behind it.

Lazy minds would like the enemy to be easily recognizable, especially by skin colour. It is so much easier for Hindus to oppose “whites” rather than to oppose Christians, or Muslims, or Marxists, who carry an ideology that forces you to actually think, and of whom the ones you have to deal with, are mostly brown-skinned. Let me tell you a little secret: most whites take no interest in Hinduism one way or the other. Perhaps most of them find it a bit weird, but if India chooses to be Hindu, then whites will adapt to that. It is not they who go out of their way to oppose “saffronization”.

So, the anti-Hindu discourse heard in all relevant places is now rarely the doing of white people, and when at all, these white people have mostly been relying on their Indian contacts. Some Hindus recently got worked up over the creation inside Berkeley University of an institute preparing for “human rights interventions” in India to protect the minorities in the event of violence against them. So far, so good: this is indeed a negative development and it is already good news that some Hindus are taking notice. However, Rajeev Srinivasan and other Hindus who broke the news, started fulminating against the Americans and their supposed anti-Hindu policies, making links with past American Cold War policies. In reality, most associates and all working group members of this centre have Indian roots or are Indians (e.g. Teesta Setalvad). They are Indian expatriates who have an Indian agenda and secondarily have managed to mobilize American institutes and money. An American intervention is dimly possible, the sacrifice of white soldiers’ lives is not impossible, but that will only come about because of the brainwashing of American foreign-policy makers by Indian secularists. This, of course, is a development that Hindu activists don’t understand, because of their own total failure to influence anyone anywhere. A limited number of Indian Marxists in the US have managed to mobilize American capitalists to fund an institute that will influence American foreign policy in the service of an Indian anti-Hindu policy. A far larger number of practising Hindu Indo-Americans have not even succeeded in preventing moneybag Narayan Murthy from donating his millions to American anti-Hindu Sanskritists rather than to Indian pro-Hindu scholars. (If you want to get an idea of the magnitude of the Hindu activists’ failure, just compare with the roaring success of a far smaller number of anti-Hindu secularists.) It is not that Indians are congenitally unable to use their brains: while Hindus are successful at making money, anti-Hindus are wildly successful at strategizing and convincing others, even making American policy-makers do their bidding.

One step towards solving this fixation on what Indira Gandhi (and her faithful Hindu activist sheep) called “the foreign hand”, is a moratorium on every mention of “whites”, “Orientalism”, “colonialism” or “American imperialism”. Yes, historians of the last few centuries have to deal with these issues, but activists in the present don’t. If you don’t close this door, Hindu activists will keep on clutching at straws and introduce their conspiracy theories through the back door. Today, the mention of the words cited invariably comes in the context of anachronistic reasonings (valiantly attacking the corpse of long-dead “colonialists” like Max Müller) and resourceful tricks to avoid facing the real challenges from native Muslims, native secularists and native Christian missionaries. To be sure, as a white person I can tell you that anti-white feelings in the former colonies are considered quite understandable, and that we’ve all heard anti-white talk hundreds of times, so that in most whites it only evokes a yawn. Yet, here I am going out of my way to dissuade Hindus from indulging in anti-white discourse because it is harmful to Hindus themselves. It only confirms them in their lazy thought habits: blaming others to shirk their own responsibility; living in the past (with that comfortable moral high ground of natives against colonialists), refusing to evolve with the changing times; and avoiding to face their present-day challengers.

 

The non-results

The only ones not to notice the many disadvantages generated by the Hindu activist initiative against Wendy Doniger’s book, are the Hindus themselves. After all, this negative fall-out took place in the real world, and among Hindu activists it is deemed virtuous to shun reality and live in a cosy fantasy world peopled only by the like-minded.  In such a world, clashes of opinion have no place, and banning any dissident voice is considered to be only right.

One thing that didn’t happen so far is that, enlightened by the commotion around the book, a Hindu moneybag decided to set up an institute manned by scholars who would give a fitting reply to these anti-Hindu tirades. Everyone of them (if there was an exception, I wouldn’t be writing this) thought either that censorship constituted the correct reply, or that free speech means secularist writers and their Western allies filling the market with anti-Hindu books. Hindus like to boast about how good they are at making money, how they are the richest immigrant community in the US, etc. Yet, when it comes to using this wealth, they are a dramatic failure. Basically, they spend their money on the powerful: on the gods by building temples, and on corrupt politicians by bribing them. If anything extra is available, it will be given to the enemy: intended Hindu think-tanks that end up manned by secularists, or US-based institutes for South-Asian Studies that flatter them by devoting attention to India while only being out to blacken India and Hinduism.

To be sure, it would be better if such scholarship could be provided by the state. But because the Hindu movement has not invested in scholarship, while the Marxists have devoted half a century to peopling all the history departments and other relevant institutions with their own agents, barring entry to whomever is suspected of pro-Hindu leanings, there is simply nothing. Education is largely a competence of the state, so BJP state governments could have set up centres for history manned by pro-Hindu scholars, but judging by the results, they must have had other things to do. When the BJP controlled the centre (1998-2004), it didn’t create such centres that would have made a difference in the long term, but banged its head against the wall with its failed textbook overhaul. The secularists cried “saffronization!” when the BJP Government created a chair for Indian Studies in Oxford, but instead of naming a pro-Hindu scholar to the new post, it tried to prove its secularism (another predictable failure) by nominating yet another known anti-Hindu pamphleteer.

So, for the time being, the Hindus’ best bet would be an individual who has the means and is willing to transmute these into pro-Hindu scholarship. But those businessmen who make such a resolve, end up either being ineffective or ultimately supporting the enemy camp. The Doniger riot could have awoken someone, but apparently it hasn’t.       

 

Silver lining

However, it is another bad habit to be pessimistic. While there is enough in the Hindu activists’ performance to make an observer despair, there is nonetheless enough potential, and even some successes in other fields than the intellectual struggle. So, let us consider the silver lining in the dark cloud on the Doniger affair.

Some few insights may have travelled to places because of the Doniger book withdrawal that they wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Firstly, while most Indian secularists and their Western dupes may now vaguely have heard about “Hindu fanatics” imposing a ban on a book they didn’t like (old hat, we already know such things since Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989), a few of them may also have gained the impression that Hindus are really fed up with the wave of anti-Hindu discourse that they are constantly bombarded with. After familiarizing themselves with the false notion of “Islamophobia”, they now discover that there is a thing which by the same logic should be called “Hinduphobia”.

Secondly, a few curious people may have clicked on the links to Vishal Agarwal’s paper listing the factual errors in Wendy Doniger’s book. More than its insulting passages, it is these numerous errors that made the book indefensible, and hence convinced the publishers not to go to court for it. It is significant that in the book’s successive reprints, the author has not decided to intervene and correct at least the most conspicuous and least debatable of her mistakes. They certainly detract from the book’s scholarly value, and these few readers may have wondered what it says about the American India-watchers that they all defended Wendy Doniger against her Indian critics.

Thirdly, some book-banners who had not carefully thought things through, may have heard the debates provoked by the book’s withdrawal and the several reasons why it was a bad idea for Hindus to strike this humourless and repressive pose. The big loser of this “successful” book ban has been the Hindu tradition of open debate, to which great debaters like Yajñavalkya and Shankara are witness, and this has been pointed out not just by the usual suspects (who are resourceful and bring out everything that can win over Hindus, including Hindu references) but also by Hindus and pro-Hindu writers like Michel Danino and myself. It is possible, and it should be hoped, that this perspective has reached the ears of some supporters of the ban and made them think again.

Fourthly, the commotion generated by this affair may retrospectively highlight the cases where confused Hindus have tried to prove their “secularism” (in vain) by supporting anti-secular book-banning policies, e.g. when the BJP in the Andhra Assembly supported a resolution against the Danish cartoons exposing Mohammed. Of all people, Hindu nationalists should support the freedom to criticize or lampoon Islam, along with other religions. Instead they have been singing the blockhead’s dirge that “freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to insult”. At least a few people may think again.

Fifthly, while several petitions have circulated denouncing the de facto ban, one that attracted many anti-Hindu academics nonetheless made a valid and ultimately pro-Hindu point. It demanded the abolition of book-banning legislation, viz. Art. 295A of the Indian Penal Code and Art. 153A of the Criminal Procedure Code. These articles were not enacted by Hindus or in the service of a Hindu cause; on the contrary, they were meant to muzzle Hindus and prevent them from holding Christianity or Islam against the light. It is one thing that these articles, now that they happen to exist, should be available to Hindus as much as to the non-Hindus meant to benefit from them (a point understood by the Hindu book-banners); and quite another that these articles are essentially both anti-democratic and anti-Hindu. They are anti-democratic because every democratic decision-making presupposes the right of all citizens to express and receive information and opinions. And they are anti-Hindu because Hinduism favours freedom and open debate while Christianity and Islam each pretend to already possess the truth and hence have no use for debate. While the Indian secularists and their foreign dupes, along with the Islamic militants, normally defend bans on “Islamophobia” (which is why some of them have come out in support of the banning of offending free speech under the Communal Violence Bill) and never made these law articles an issue when they were invoked to shield Islam, this Doniger affair made them oppose the articles. Which is where we want them: defend real secularism when it is violated by religious obscurantists, this time by Hindus but more usually by those who are not or don’t want to be Hindus.

Sixthly, and finally the point many Hindu readers have been waiting for: in some respects, this should still count as a Hindu victory. Not that the other side has been “smarting” under it, as some smug Hindus imagine: on the contrary, it enjoyed this episode for its potential to blacken Hindus and hurt Narendra Modi in his Prime-Ministerial ambitions. But at least Hindus went for something and got it. The judicial demands and ultimately the extra-judicial settlement were explicitly meant to be in favour of the cause of Hinduism. Not having scored a victory in a long time, this book withdrawal came as a boost to Hindu self-confidence.  

Now Hindus should take this boost and transmute it into a motivation for improving their performance.

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Banning Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus"

Numerous Hindus come across as jubilant and triumphant now that they, or some of them, have managed to pressure Penguin books into agreeing to withdraw Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: an Alternative History and destroy its stock. I am not that happy about it. And I agree with Wendy that the real villain of the piece is Art. 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits insulting religious communities and was successfully invoked by Dina Nath Batra to threaten the publishing-house with a judicial condemnation.




Art. 295A was never the doing of Hindu society. It was imposed by the British on the Hindus in order to shield Islam from criticism. The reason for its enactment was the murder of Pandit Lekhram in 1897 by a Muslim because Lekhram had written a book criticizing Islam. While the British authorities sentenced the murderer, they also sided with him by retro-actively and postumously punishing Lekhram.




Though originally and for a long time serving to shield Islam, Hindus gradually discovered that they too could use the religiously neutral language of this Article to their seeming advantage. Christians as well have invoked it, e.g. to ban Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. This creates a sickening atmosphere of a pervasive touch-me-not-ism, with every community outdoing the other in being more susceptible to having its sentiments hurt. 




American academics have a moral right to deplore this law, on condition that they have spoken out against it on the occasion of earlier conspicuous incidents of book-banning. Where was Wendy when Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was banned? Not knowing her entire record, I leave it to her to provide the answer. At any rate, many Indian secularists, who mostly enjoy the support of those American academics, supported the ban, which was decreed by a self-declared secular Prime Minister (Rajiv Gandhi) and ruling party (Congress).




I remember Vijay Prashad and Biju Mathew calling for a denial of any platform to myself, and big professors like Michael Witzel and Robert Zydenbos seconding this call; but I don't remember Wendy Doniger coming out in my support. I was thrown off the RISA list by Deepak Sharma in violation of the list's own charter, and where was prominent member Wendy Doniger then? In most cases, the people clamouring "freedom of expression" on this occasion are very selective in their love of freedom, which they would gladly throw overboard as soon as it concerns the expression of an opinion less dear to them. I have the impression that Wendy herself is in this category too, but she may convince us otherwise by showing off her earlier acts of solidarity with besieged writers.




For the Hindus, this is a Pyrrhic victory. The publicity they gain worldwide is entirely negative, and it corroborates their image as authoritarian and intolerant. They also admit that they are unable to fight back with arguments. To an extent this is simply true, there is no level playing field, and the American academics including Wendy herself have done their best never to give the Hindus a fair hearing. On the other hand, this power equation is the Hindus' own doing. They have never invested in scholarship, and so they have to take umbrage behind a threatened judicial verdict now that they have the chance.




Individual Hindus who don't enjoy their enemies' institutional support have indeed presented strong argumentative cases: Arun Shourie, Rajiv Malhotra, Meenakshi Jain. A list of the numerous errors in Wendy's book has been compiled by Vishal Agarwal, an Indo-American engineer writing in his spare time. Most of all, he has shown how her book's treatment of Hinduism is unconscientious and flippant to a degree that would never be accepted from a professor of her rank for more established religions. But this is only a small counterforce against the massive anti-Hindu propaganda put out under the guise of scholarship by "Wendy's children". Here, Hindus only pay the price for their self-proclaimed leaders' non-performance during the last decades.




Building a scholarly challenge to the present academic consensus is a long-term project that admits of no shortcuts. By going to court and twisting Penguin's arm, Hindus think they have scored a clever victory. I think they have only demeaned Hinduism.




But the taste of victory has become so unusual for Hindus that even many people who I thought knew better, have jubilated over this book withdrawal. And of course, Art. 295A may be a bad thing, but as long as it is on the statute books, it should count for Hindus as much as for Muslims and Christians. But American Indologists including Wendy Doniger have always condoned religious discrimination on condition that Hindus are at the receiving end, so they may not applaud this plea of mine for even-handedness.




Briefly: while I do not support this act of book-burning, I don't think American India-watchers are really entitled to their much-publicized indignation.

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The Huffington Post debate on A.K. Ramanujan

A.K. Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas has elicited a debate misstating the issues. The problem with the essay is not that it is blasphemous, but that it is flawed. It is just unscholarly.

 

A Hindu writing under the pen name Artboxone (5-12) and thinking he was being helpful referred to an article about past affairs of Hindu anger over Hinduism’s academic misrepresentation:

“An excellent summation contextualizing the RISA-L chronology has appeared in the academic forum (!!!), as described below: McComas Taylor: ‘Mythology Wars: The Indian Diaspora, ‘Wendy's Children’ and the Struggle for the Hindu Past’, Asian Studies Review [1035-7823] yr:2011 vol:35 iss:2 pg:149-168.”

Vishal Agarwal replied (5-12):

“The paper by McComas Taylor is another example of deception. For example, it completely omits to mention Swami Tyagananda's published book (by Motilal Banarsidass) on Jeffrey Kripal's work. Likewise, it totally misrepresents my own criticism of Paul Courtright's book on Ganesha calling it nitpicking and point to spelling errors. In fact, in our rebuttal extending over 80 pages, only half a page deals with spelling errors and so on. Now is this because Taylor did not understand our critique, or was he being dishonest? I leave it to the reader to decide.”

Vishal Agarwal added (2-12 to 5-12) more observations:

“Whether people like it or not, the fact is that there is no credible proof that Valmiki's Ramayana post-dates the Buddha. There is a complete absence of mention of Buddha or Mahavira or their followers or of Nandas, Mauryas or Shungas and so on. There is no mention of Pataliputra or Rajagriha. Rather, the latter's predecessor Girivraja is mentioned. Even if there were additions to the text in subsequent centuries, the data in the text itself is clear that it belongs to a much older era. In a country of 1.2 billion people, you will find all sorts of interpretations and retellings. The secularists and leftists like Ramanujan use this diversity as a weapon against Hinduism, and argue that there is no normative Dharma or no ‘highest common factor’. Ipso fact, Hinduism is a 'myth'. This is the subtext of Ramanujan's essay. And it is for this reason, it was prescribed by the leftist faculty of Delhi University. Otherwise, there is not much merit in the essay. Asuras can read the Mohashastras but there is no need to prescribe it in the DU reading list when there are dozens of better things to chose from.

“Where Ramanujan got it wrong, driven by his ideological agendas, is to to place all the diverse renderings of Ramayana at par with the Valmiki Ramayana. Let us get one thing VERY CLEAR - All these different versions of Ramayana (Dasharatha Jataka included) have the Ramayana of Valmiki as their basis and draw their storyline to it. It is another matter that they adapt it to their own purposes. Even Ashvaghosha, the author of Buddhacharita, salutes Valmiki as the Adikavi. The Shakya lineage was derided for having descended from a brother sister union. The Buddhists therefore created the Jataka in which Rama and Sita married, and linked the Shakyas with the Ikshavakus. So, their agenda was obvious. To claim, despite this obvious explanation, that in the 'most ancient version of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita are siblings' is to distort stuff with the deliberate intent of deriding Hindu beliefs. Likewise, the Paumicharyam clearly seeks to create an alternative Jain version. This phenomenon so rampant in Jainism that there is no need to detail it. The Jains created alternatives for everything Hindu (which pre-supposes the prior existence of Hindu originals).

“Ramanujan was 'mohita'. His agenda was Hinduphobic and Leftist. He may have done some good work but it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. In any case, let us not deviate from the issue. The question was whether it was appropriate for AKRs essay to be in the prescribed reading list in DU. And my answer is a firm no. It is academically flawed and ideologically driven and was prescribed precisely because of the Hinduphobic arguments that it inadvertently proposes. When even early Buddhist authors can claim (e.g., the Spitzer Manuscript, dated to 200 AD or earlier on palaeographic grounds) that the omniscience of Buddha is proven because he had studied the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the obvious conclusion is that these texts were considered pre-Buddha even by Buddhist writers at that time. Otherwise, they would not fool their readers. For that matter Jatakas etc. have their own versions of Krishna's life too. But it is obvious which one is older and which is a recast.

Artboxone added (2-12):

“AK Ramanujan was not a historian or mythologist. His scholarship was primarily in English literature with a smattering of Kannada and Tamil folklore. He didn’t have the kind of knowledge of Sanskrit that an essay, which dismisses the authorship of Ramayana, demands...

"The fact is that over 5000/6000 years, every single tradition, author, poet, or folktale takes Valmiki’s name with the utmost reverence as the original author of Ramayana. Not one other person is mentioned as the author. Yet, AK Ramanujan’s opium-filled pen includes Valmiki’s original as ‘one of the tellings’ on the basis of… absolutely no evidence. He simply assumes...

"The claim that this puerile essay provides ‘alternative viewpoints’ is absurd. Alternative viewpoints must be based on the original epic, on the original story and not on fantasy. You can’t alter the original dramatically — like making Ravana Sita’s father — and then claim that it’s an ‘alternative viewpoint’. That’s distortion, not an alternative viewpoint. And 300 Ramayanas does precisely that — it legitimizes such distortions...

"The behaviour and character of academic mullahs is once again consistent with their sorry record of misdeeds. The way — the civilized way to go about protesting an issue like this is to call for an academic debate. Call experts on both sides, have a debate and then come to a conclusion. But then that’s how academics do it...”

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US academics for and against censorship

The internet discussion list of the Religion In South Asia (RISA) section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) invites to its membership all scholars with a terminal degree related to the field of religion in South Asia and who are dues-paying AAR members. For several years, I was an active participant in the RISA conversation. I was merely tolerated, though, for the dominant circle there tended to dislike my position, deemed too pro-Hindu. And even that toleration came to an end shortly after the AAR meeting of November 2011.

In an attempt to comprehend listmaster Deepak Sarma’s lie that I had violated list rules, an allegation which he failed to specify both to me and to an enquiry by Prof. Francis Clooney s.j., I venture to link it to two incidents on the RISA list in the preceding months. One is an incident with prof. George Thompson, the other was an incident on the notion of interreligious dialogue, where my critics violated list rules but which will form the material for separate posts. For now, we will discuss the contradiction between the RISA scholars’ defence of freedom of speech elsewhere and their approval of censorship on their own platform.

Quite a few RISA (Religion in South Asia) scholars are inveterate enemies of freedom of speech. When I spoke on the Aryan Invasion Theory in Prof. Andrew Sihler’s Department at the University of Wisconsin in 1996, Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad of the Forum Of Inqilabi (= Revolutionary) Leftists distributed a leaflet demanding that I be denied a platform to speak at American Universities. This leaflet was subsequently condoned explicitly by Prof. Michael Witzel (7-2-2003) and Prof. Robert Zydenbos (10-2-2003) on the secretive Scholarly Services list. So we know where the enemies of liberty are.

Fortunately, some scholars are also in favour of freedom of speech. Or to put that more precisely, the very same scholars are in favour of or against freedom of speech depending on whether it is one of their friends or one of their enemies whose right to freedom of speech is being challenged. We don’t know exactly which ones are for freedom of speech in general and which ones want to limit freedom of speech to their friends, but we know that a lot of them want to safeguard the freedom of speech of the late A.K. Ramanujan.

Not that his freedom is really threatened by censorship, i.e. by a state’s intervention to have his books or articles censored. What happened is that his publisher, the private company Oxford University Press, refused to republish his essay Three Hundred Ramayanas in 2011. The Delhi University refused to include this essay among its mandatory reading. Immediately an online petition was started to protest against this act of “censorship”. I signed it too, because of course I don’t believe in hampering the spread of ideas, not even when it has the lofty goal of preventing the spread of a fundamentally flawed perception of the Ramayana. Hindus had better learn to hold their own in the marketplace of ideas; clamouring for censorship is a weakness bid. But that shouldn’t foster any illusions about the rightness of A.K. Ramanujan’s thesis, nor about the motives of the Professors who suddenly discovered the value of his freedom of speech.


Meanwhile, an act of censorship at RISA

On 27 November 2011, shortly after my return from the annual session of the American Academy of Religion (of which RISA is a subsection), I sent to listmaster Dr. Deepak Sarma the following mail: “Dear Deepak, “could you please change my RISA address from […] to koenraadelst@hotmail.com “Thanks, “KE”

This was because my old address did not match my RISA address anymore, so that for every intervention I had to trouble the listmaster to give me access. It was just a technical matter.

But much to my surprise, this is the reply I got on 28 November: “Subject: your RISA-L membership status

“Dr. Elst:

“The RISA-L Advisory Committee has decided not to renew your membership to RISA-L. The decision was made based on both the eligibility criteria as well as the list rules (http://www.montclair.edu/RISA/r-instruct.html). It was determined that you are not eligible and have violated list rules. Yours, Deepak”

I asked Deepak for the coordinates of the members of this mysterious “advisory committee”, not mentioned on the RISA instructions, so that I could contact them, but he didn’t reply.

So, cut off from the list archives and its addresses, I sent a mail to three scholars whose addresses I did have and who just made themselves remarkable by opposing the act of censorship in Delhi to A.K. Ramanujan’s disadvantage. It went like this:
  

“To: jkirk@spro.net, grimesj@msu.edu, lionda@stanford.edu “Subject: Fw: your RISA-L membership status."

“Dear Professors,

“During the AAR annual conference of 2006 in Washington DC, I attended a ‘debate’ on the Danish Mohammed cartoons, then the target of both a campaign of violence and another campaign in favour of censorship. Not a single one of the six or so panelists took a stand for unfettered freedom of expression as guaranteed in the US Constitution's First Amendment. Each one started out with: ‘Of course freedom of expression is important, BUT...’ Since the organizers must have known the invited panelists and their positions in the matter, it seemed to be AAR policy to support certain higher values against the secular value of freedom of expression. In question time too, not one of the religion scholars in the audience challenged this consensus. I concluded that freedom of expression doesn't count for much in the guild of religion scholars, not even in the Land of the Free.

“Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to see how last week, a clear stand for freedom of expression and opposing the ‘non-governmental censorship’ exercised by OUP-India against AK Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas was taken by you three on the RISA list. And by some others, but their posts are no longer in my inbox and I don't have access to the list archive for reasons discussed below, so I cannot address them here. But three voices for freedom should be enough to defeat the dark forces of censorship.

“Not every stand for freedom and against suppression of speech by state authority or by non-governmental agencies is equally demanding. Thus, it is easier to stand up against censorship exercised by a foreign body in distant Oxford and Delhi than against censorship exercised by a body of which one is a prominent and esteemed member oneself. And it is far more attractive to show solidarity with a censored author whose opinions one shares than with one whose positions one opposes. Yet, the latter instance is the true test of what side one is on in the struggle between liberty and oppression. Stalin and Hitler were all for the freedom of expression of those whose opinions they shared. What distinguishes democrats from those dictators is that they grant freedom to all without discrimination by status or opinion.

“Today, I am appealing to you to take a stand against censorship exercised by your own RISA list against someone whose opinions you may very well disapprove of, viz. myself.

“Shortly after returning home from the AAR conference in San Francisco, where I had read a paper on the Buddha's social conservatism (and another one on Buddhism's martial roots at the DANAM conference), to considerable acclaim, I found an e-mail in my inbox from the RISA listmaster, Prof. Deepak Sharma. After he had been conspicuously avoiding me at the conference as if held back by a troubled conscience, I considered it possible that he was at last sending me his apologies for his less than impartisan handling of several recent attacks against my person on the list. Instead, what I found was the following:

"From: Deepak Sarma to Dr. Elst:

"The RISA-L Advisory Committee has decided not to renew your membership to RISA-L. The decision was made based on both the eligibility criteria as well as the list rules (http://www.montclair.edu/RISA/r-instruct.html). It was determined that you are not eligible and have violated list rules. Yours, Deepak"

“From someone who hasn't even issued a mere reprimand against gross violations of list rules when these were targeted against Hindu list members or myself, this sudden concern for list rules seemed disingenuous. The step of excluding someone without first taking less extreme steps is also strange. Having served in a number of organizations myself, I was also surprised that there still exist organizations where such a step can be taken behind someone's back without even giving him a hearing. Finally, the stated reasons are obviously false. I satisfy the eligibility criteria just as much as (or even more than) the day when I was admitted to the list, being an AAR member with wide experience of teaching and research in the field of South-Asian religion and with a related terminal academic degree (actually three of them). And no, I have not violated list rules, on the contrary.

“When a list member, while stating his firm belief in the racialist interpretation of the ethnic data in the Rg-Veda and of the scriptural descriptions of Krishna, recently launched against me the grossest personal attack in the history of the list (if you know of a worse instance, I'd like to hear it, and also what punishment was administered to the offender), Deepak shot off a hurried request to me not to reply to it. Though my expectation that he would do the right thing and publicly reprimand the offender was in vain, I assured him that I would not make matters worse by reacting. Possibly that was poor judgment of mine, but it served the cause of relative peace on the list and a constructive atmosphere, already damaged badly enough by the offender. But now my cooperative attitude is rewarded with a consilium abeundi. It seems that this mysterious "advisory committee" cares less about the good atmosphere on the list than about ideological conformity.

“Fortunately, having witnessed your commitment to the cause of academic freedom and freedom of expression, I can be confident that at least one of you will take an initiative to remedy this injustice. I am looking forward to it.

“Yours sincerely, Dr. Koenraad Elst”

I received no reply to this mail. Since there is nothing that Gunga Dins like Deepak Sarma admire more than White Missionary Professors, I decided finally to ask Harvard Professor Francis Clooney S.J. for help. He asked Deepak for an explanation of his behavior, but all he got for a reply was the same mendacious affirmation that I had trespassed against list rules. The reality was that list rules had only been trespassed against when addressing me. But clearly, pressures on the listmaster from those conformists who wanted me out was stronger.


The Huffington Post debate on the censorship by Deepak Sarma

Under the title “Censoring Ramanujan's Essay On Ramayana: Intolerant Hindus And Confusing Texts”, Deepak Sarma pontificated in Huffington Post (30-11-2011) on freedom of speech in Hinduism. He argued that his mentor, Mâdhva, had nothing against adverse comments, which he qualified as Mohashâstra, “Deluded scripture”, and freely answered them. Among those who replied was Vishal Agarwal:

“But you can hardly expect Sarmas and Donigers to support lifting of these other bans, or the large scale censoring of History in India by 'secularist' historians in West Bengal, Kerala and so on. Their hatred is reserved for Hindus and Hinduism. The sarcasm in Sarma's email shows his pettiness. If he is serious and honest about free speech, he should reinstate dissenting scholars in the RISA-L list that he manages.”

My own reply was this (2-12):

“The ‘intolerant Hindus’ of your title may not be coterminous with the entire Hindu society, but they certainly include your esteemed self, Deepak. Your own record of partisan censorship as listmaster on the RISA-list is well-known to all insiders. In your case, the aim is not to humour any Hindu constituency but to please your American paymasters. And these tend to support your censorship, of course, because academics have ideological agendas too, and are more attached to those than to the First Amendment principle of freedom of expression. Approval of censorship exists also among those who, along with yourself and myself, have signed the petition against OUP's censoring Ramanujan. For many of them this is not a matter of principle, of standing up for freedom of expression. Instead, they are using Ramanujan as a tool in their own crusade against Hinduism in general (e.g. the Christian missionary lobby, a palpable presence in US Indology) or against specific schools of thought within Hinduism. The proof of being on the side of freedom of expression is defending it even and especially in the case of those you disagree with. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, ‘freedom is always the freedom of those who hold dissenting views’. You have failed that test.”

Deepak Sarma tried to justify his act of censorship as follows (4-12):

"In this connection, the rules for debate in the academic realm differ significantly from other realms, such as this virtual one. There are, for example, rules about evidence, and about how evidence is presented. If a participant violates these rules then s/he may be excluded from further conversations. In this sense, in the academic world, there is an intolerance of those who do not follow the rules for debate. These rules of rhetoric are themselves debatable. Lest there be an infinite regress of sorts (that is, how do we argue about how we argue?) they ought to be upheld stipulatively.”

But by the time I sent in my reply (5-12), Deepak Sarma’s allies at the Huffington Post had got into their usual act and censored it, i.e. it was not published. Still, here it is:

“Because most readers don't have access to the RISA list where Deepak exercises his censorship, he expects to get away with misrepresenting his own record there. His contentious interventions had nothing to do with ‘rules about evidence’ but with ideological conformity. Nobody has ever been muzzled or excluded there for being loose with evidence, nor for violating general rules of conduct (such as calling dissenting fellow list members ‘the scum of the earth’), as long as the offender belonged to the right ideological camp, i.e. the anti-Hindu side. And some contributions have been suppressed precisely because they did contain evidence, but of the ideologically unwelcome kind. However, we must welcome Deepak's honest admission that his own conduct is an instance of ‘intolerance’.

“That he adds an improvised justification for his intolerance of free debate, merely follows the pattern heard after every act of censorship. Hitler and Stalin were never short of reasons to deny freedom of speech to dissenters and other spoilsports of their utopian schemes. After the violent reactions to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the leading American editorialists and all members of an American Academy of Religion panel discussing the incident came up with a variation on: "Of course freedom of expression is dear to us, BUT..." No ifs and buts on such a fundamental principle, please.

“In this case, it is particularly misplaced for Deepak to invoke academic standards as justifying censorship. In the most conspicuous recent incidents involving book-banning and Hinduism, the impression of a hot-headed Hindu opposition against objective scholarship has been created in the media, when the objection against the contentious publications was precisely that they were unobjective and academically sub-standard. Courtright's Freudian claims about Ganesha betray gross ignorance about Ganesha's many literary appearances in roles different from the stereotype on which he bases his theory. Wendy Doniger's book is not malicious, as Hindu critics have alleged, but it is flippant and full of inaccuracies, apparently because the author just doesn't take her subject seriously. As Vishal has briefly argued here, Ramanujan's essay too is substandard because its central claim simply conflicts with the data. But that is no reason to ban it, of course. Demands for censorship allow partisan writers to deflect attention from the contents of their publications and to pose as martyrs. They allow the Deepak Sarmas of this world to misrepresent the debate as one between scholarship and fanaticism, when in fact it is one between partisan writing and proper scholarship. Instead of clamouring for censorship, Hindus should publish and publicize well-prepared rebuttals. Open debate, as Deepak has correctly affirmed, is the Hindu way.”

A certain Sandalwood reminded us of some Hindu American Foundation remarks on the previous RISA debate:

"In the early moments of the RISA debate, an earnest minority of scholars courageously posted opinions that compelled their fellow intellectuals to understand the dimensions of the debate beyond the clear damage to the Hindu psyche — they realized the need to begin a meta analysis of what Dr. Courtright had elicited. Behold the audacity of Antonio de Nicolas, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook (Stony Brook, New York, U.S.A), who resolutely declared, ‘A scholar who does not know how to present other cultures by their own criteria should not be allowed to teach those cultures. His freedom of speech is not guaranteed by his ignorance.’ Perhaps, most disturbing was the failure of the moderator of the RISA listserv, Deepak Sarma (Lecturer of Religious Studies at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.), to prevent such outrages while censuring Dr. de Nicolas for voicing his support for Hindu sensibilities."

In Vishal Agarwal’s posts on 2 to 5 December was also this comment on Deepak Sarma’s censorship:

“Deepak,

“In your articles, you have continuously harped on the diversity of Hinduism as if your critics do not celebrate the same. What you and your ilk do not understand is the fact that in most courses, the student population has zero or very little background in Hindu traditions. It makes zero pedagogical sense to start these classes on the note – ‘OK, you have taken a class on Hinduism. But let me tell you that Hinduism does not exist. It is just a modern construct. And its internal diversity makes it impossible to be even classified as a religion.’ The sentences within quotes are repeated ad-nauseum to us Hindus, nay, parroted by ignorant people posing as scholars. They reflect merely a lack of imagination or a lack of academic brilliance or a lack of above average intelligence - and are just a toeing of the party-line you and your ilk.

“The reader of these forums will recall that you have ridiculed the Sunday schools for teaching a fake version of Hinduism that is make believe because it does not capture a diversity. Now, I actually help run a Sunday school with 260 kids, and have taught in various other Sunday schools (in addition to teaching in elementary, middle and high schools, or addressing interfaith adult forums all over) for over six years. Perhaps, I have done like 250 or more lectures on Hinduism and India. We teach the Ramayana to grade II-III students. (contd...)

“Those who defend the prescription of his essay at DU should show their respect for the same in RISA-L, where dissenting scholars are summarily expelled without a chance to defend themselves. The archives are similarly hidden from public view, so much for open-mindedness.

“If you want to celebrate diversity, first practice what you preach on the RISA-L that you manage! Instead of protecting the old boys' club brigade, treat dissenters fairly. (…) Get out of your own Hinduphobia that has resulted in your congitive dissonance. Instead of relying upon leftist and Hinduphobic tropes of Indologists, use your own prajna.”

A certain Rao123 wrote in (3-12):

“It is good that Prof. Sarma has begun to write for the Huffington Post, and now that he is willing to share his thoughts about matters Hindu and Hinduism he should have the courage of his convictions to respond to readers who have challenged both his command over the Shâstras as well as his ability to think critically through modern political, social, and religious issues confronting India. That he has not bothered to respond to the comments by Mr. Vishal Agarwal and Dr. Koenraad Elst while taking the time to respond to some little asides shows that he has neither the courage of his convictions nor is he the expert that he claims to be. (…) With all his parroting about a single stanza from Madhwacharya, I wonder if Prof. Sarma is not snared by the paradox of that parroting: he is steadfastly refusing to engage Prof. Elst and Mr. Agarwal, and by doing so he is not doing what Madhwa did -- engage the critics and the ‘moha-shastra-vadins’!”

Deepak Sarma’s reputation for exercising censorship on behalf of the anti-Hindu brigade is well-established. I was at first warned about him but refused to believe my US-based contacts. I should have known better, and now I do.

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