Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (10) Every Muslim a Sita

Both in her 2009 (106) and in her 2011 article, Meera Nanda quotes me as saying: “Every Muslim is a Sita, who must be released from Ravana’s prison. We should help Muslims in freeing themselves from Islam.” But in spite of her bibliography and footnotes, she doesn’t mention the source; twice he conceals it. No source is given, but I will give it: The Problem with Secularism, Voice of India 2007, p.30.

That book, which contains a detailed refutation of Sanjay Subramaniam’s mendacious allegations, and Return of the Swastika, Voice of India 2006, which contains a detailed refutation of an earlier paper by Meera Nanda (ch.3, p.34-106), are carefully concealed. She gives in her bibliography a book of mine which is only generally pertinent to her issue, but hides two books that are particularly pertinent to the same issues and that she has used profusely. She is very well aware of this paper of mine about her, for before publishing it, I sent it to her asking whether it correctly reflected the current state of her views, which she confirmed. I noticed that, merely from getting in touch with her, though with no more than one e-mail exchange, I felt compelled to tone down my language and scrap some unnecessarily harsh words I had used. That’s what happens when you get to see your opponents as real human beings rather than comic types in your ideological pandemonium. In this case too, her own paper would have benefited from such an exchange; she has my e-address.

However, though she knows very well that I have been kinder to her than I originally wanted to be, she has gone on to slander Voice of India and myself a second and a third time. She knows very well that I have answered her libels but repeats them nonetheless. But she didn’t want her fans to find out about her lies and their refutation. We have it in cold print that Meera Nanda is a liar and slanderer, and that she is vain.

When Breivik appeared as a godsend to Meera Nanda, she used my quote again: “Their new consensus is that rather than ‘appease’ Muslims by pretending to respect their religion, Hindus need to debunk the claims of the ‘false’ and ‘monstrous’ doctrines of Islam. Indeed, Koenraad Elst has himself applauded this new war on Islam. In accordance with the VoI line on Islam being ‘asuric’, he has proclaimed that, ‘Every Muslim is a Sita who must be released from Ravana’s prison. We should help Muslims in freeing themselves from Islam.’ This is exactly the agenda of the Norway killer—to ‘educate’ Norwegian society, including Muslim immigrants—that ‘Islam is not a religion but a political ideology’. This is the ‘non-violent’ component of the ‘crusade’ against Islam in Europe: to create an environment so hostile that the practice of Islam becomes difficult and that Muslims have no choice but to either leave or give up their faith. Indeed, if there were any doubt about the shared ground between the VoI and European Islamophobes, Elst gives the same advice, in almost the same words, to the Norway killer as he does to his VoI admirers. The solution to the ‘Islam problem’ is not to use violence, ‘but to liberate Muslims from the mental prison-house of Islam’. This war against Islam is the thread that dubiously binds Extremist India with the Norway massacre.” (2011)

Whoever reads that and sees logical consistency there, will spare me the trouble of explaining why the Christian Anders Breivik came in the news for a reason that has never been in evidence in the anti-Christian Voice of India record, viz. violence. Breivik never had a “non-violent” agenda, he killed a great many non-Muslim youngsters bearing responsibility for nothing in order to avert the “Islamization of Europe”, an absurdity in the act only matched by the verbal absurdity displayed by Meera Nanda. She herself says that the Voice of India philosophy is: “The solution to the ‘Islam problem’ is not to use violence” – the very opposite of the Breivik approach. If the Norwegian Crusader had followed the Voice of India solution, viz. to “‘educate’ Norwegian society, including Muslim immigrants, that ‘Islam is not a religion but a political ideology’”, he would have done just the opposite of what he actually did. He would also not have made headlines, just like Voice of India, which led a marginal existence until after its protagonists died.

In Meera Nanda’s view, Elst peddles “the worst kind of Islamophobia imaginable”, no less. Proof: “In one of his essays, he advises his readers that the best way to criticise prophet Mohammed is to ‘question his sanity’, to show that he was mad.” Indeed, I stand by that non-violent position, and so would every scientist. Far from being “Islamophobic” and hence a sign of mental illness itself, it is simply the rational position. The emphasis which many Hindus lay on Muslim atrocities is truthful but misplaced, for these would have been somewhat justifiable if the basic beliefs of Islam were correct. The thing to do is to show that these basic beliefs are incorrect.

Nobody in his right mind would accept it if one day one of his colleagues announced: “I hear the voice of God. From now on you have to obey me, for it is God who speaks through me.” That was the situation in which the Meccan contemporaries of Mohammed found themselves. It is why the Quran reports more than ten times that they didn’t believe him, that they called him an imaginative poet, a ghost-possessed individual, or indeed mad. Were they “Islamophobes”? No, they only reacted to what they saw with their own eyes. From the Byzantine Christians to the modern sceptics, there have always been people who disbelieved Mohammed’s pious claims, including the secretary who wrote down his “revelations” and the Prophet’s favourite wife Aisha, who saw through the self-serving nature of his “divine” utterances. Meera Nanda can only stand on the other side, criminalizing fundamental criticism of Islam, because she is not a scientist at heart.

She claims that according to me “the divine revelations of the prophet of Islam were ‘born from a deluded consciousness’ fed by ‘sexual arousal’ provided by his wife Khadija – all products of the supposedly lower, animal-like centres of consciousness.” (2009:113) Maybe a prudish Arya Samaji has said that, but I have written just the reverse. In The Problem with Secularism, ch.9.2, I see a contradiction between the revelations to Mohammed and sexual intercourse with Khadija. It is when they were having intercourse that his trance state, in which he received his revelations, disappeared. By contrast, it was during an ascetic exercise that this “voice of God” first appeared. That is why some Hindus explain Mohammed’s condition through wrongly performed ascetic exercises, whereas modern psychologists think of a medical problem already present in his childhood. But all sane observers think there was something wrong with Mohammed’s prophetic trance, on which the whole religion of Islam is based. Only superstitious people like Meera Nanda reject this level-headed judgment and genuinely believe that he was hearing divine revelations.

Another false quote: she accuses me of calling Islam “monstrous”. (2009:110) It is she herself who uses such terms in describing Voice of India, whereas I tend to avoid such language. The page she quotes, Elst 2001:292, where I am supposed to have used the word “monstrous”, is the very page where I acknowledge most Indian Christians’ patriotism, but I don’t use the word “monstrous” there, nor anywhere else to my knowledge. It so happens that I am on record as having mocked the Hindutva use of swollen language including precisely the word “monstrous”, viz. the use of the expression “monstrous lies” by an AIT critic.

Finally, she credits me with having “brought in a number of other European Indophiles (...) sympathetic to the idea of India being the homeland of the Aryans”. (2009:113) I wonder who they are. She clearly overestimates my influence. In fact, her style is typically conspiratorial, vastly exaggerating our influence and importance.

But we know who Meera Nanda is. She is a troubled woman projecting her own obsessions on others. She is animated by hatred of Hinduism and can’t keep a story straight. But she can make her Marxist and Christian employers believe that she serves their purposes well.

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Reza Pirbhai and Voice of India

One article Meera Nanda quotes, and which she has also used as a source, is by Dr. Reza Pirbhai, Associate Professor of South-Asian Studies at Louisiana State University. Reza Pirbhai published his piece in a prestigious Cambridge (UK) periodical, Modern Intellectual History (vol.5.1, 2008, p.27-53). It is titled “Demons in Hindutva. Writing a Theology for Hindu Nationalism”. It exemplifies what is wrong with our university education.

The author has gone through a lot of Voice of India literature, at least those books that are on-line. (I(This paper cost him and his library little.) He is also less troubled by a personal anti-Hindu animus than Meera Nanda. For a non-Hindu, he displays the normal scepticism of Hinduism, whereas Meera Nanda as a born Hindu has the usual neurotic relation with her own hated religion. But he has the general Nehruvian hatred of Hinduism, and that is good enough to earn him a good post and publishing avenue.



Voice of India and Hinduism

In his depiction of Voice of India, Pirbhai gives many quotes and there is not much wrong with it, save for a persistent bias. Thus, he calls Voice of India “Hindutva” and claims that it wants to create “a theology for Hindu Nationalism”. I have never known Sita Ram Goel to espouse “Hindutva” and as early as 1964, when he turned down M.S. Golwalkar’s offer to lead the Vishva Hindu Parishad (after Golwalkar had replied in the negative to Goel’s question whether he would be allowed to make his own statements), he had formed a negative opinion about the Hindu Nationalist movement. Rather, it is correct to say that he offered an ideology to Hindu society as a whole, not to the Hindutva movement specifically. He was well aware how the Communists in spite of their limited numbers were able to transform a society by means of intellectual control, and he wanted an answer to that; the Hindutva movement did not.

Pirbhai is not too far off the mark when he writes: “Voice of India, in fact, was established to provide the Sangh Parivar ‘a full-blooded Hindu ideology of its own and process all events, movements, parties and public figures in terms of that ideology, rather than live on borrowed slogans or hand to mouth ideas invoked on the spur of the moment’.” (p.29, with reference to S.R. Goel: How I Became a Hindu.) The only correction needed is that he wanted to give this analysis to Hindu society as a whole rather than to the Sangh Parivar, which is determined to live on borrowed slogans or hand to mouth ideas.

Pirbhai uses postmodern categories like “the Self-Other dichotomy” and the “Orientalist construction of Hinduism”. He replaces facts with theories, e.g. German Orientalist Paul Deussen (d.1919), who visited British India in 1892-93 and saw Swami Vivekananda (p.35) is here turned into a major influence (“Thanks to the overarching influence of Deussen’s monistic positivism”, p.51) though most Voice of India authors never even mentioned him.

He doles out dismissive labels, e.g.: ”Perhaps most telling is [Kanayalal M.] Talreja’s lifting of a line from Paine’s Age of Reason, characteristically torn out of context, in which Paine describes the Bible as the ‘word of a demon’.” (p.46, with reference to Talreja’s non-Voice of India book Holy Vedas and Holy Bible) How so, torn out of context? It is a historical fact that Thomas Paine fell from great popularity to equally great marginality when in his last work he attacked Christianity.

He is very sure of himself and doesn’t need evidence: he is “reading between the lines” (p.29); he notices, when studying Vivekananda, that a certain idea is “clearly the fruit of his study with Deussen” (p.39); and he sees Ram Swarup “in an obvious capitulation” (p.49) to the BJP’s pro-Israeli line. According to Pirbhai, “Reading Voice of India’s theology, it is clear to see why the Sangh Parivar’s leadership distanced itself from Swarup and Goel, accusing them of ‘strong language’.” (p.49) Not so clear to him: the real reason has more to do with laziness and fear, viz. the fear that the Sangh leadership and its followers won’t be able to handle complex categories of ideology.

All well considered, this is not harsh at all: “Swarup puts it most succinctly in ‘A need to face the truth’, making what seems the most repeated statement in Voice of India writings, that ‘the problem is not Muslims but Islam’.” (p.45-46) The problem is not people, but the ideology that estranges these people from their fellow-men. But intellectuals are willing to sacrifice people to an idea, such as Islam.

The attitude towards the Jews takes a lot of his attention. According to Pirbhai, Voice of India recently changed its thinking about the Jews, and is now more sympathetic to the Zionist project than it used to be. In fact, if Hindutva has anything to do with Voice of India, the first utterances of Hindutva always sympathized with the Zionist project. The epoch-making books Hindutva by V.D. Savarkar (1924) and We by M.S. Golwalkar (1939) already expressed their support for Zionism. The Hindu movement has always evinced its admiration for the Jewish readiness to revive the ancient Hebrew language where Hindus were not successful at reviving Sanskrit even as their second language. There is no indication that Ram Swarup or Sita Ram Goel were ever more negative about Judaism. They did not believe in Biblical prophecy, but at least Judaism had never done any harm to Hindu society, much in contrast with Christianity and Islam. As Meera Nanda writes: “Judaism is exempted from this critique of monotheism because eventhough Jews believe in one god, their god is exclusively the god of Jews alone.” (2009:108)

The main Voice of India authors were quite aware of historicity, and how religions change: “As Swarup puts it, Islam is ‘the most malevolent of these residues’ of ‘Semitism’, and Muslims alone are sealed ‘off from every shade of empiricism, rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, the hallmarks of Hindu as well as of modern Western culture.” (p.50, with reference to Hindu Society under Siege, ch.2: “The residue of Islamism”; the author was in fact Sita Ram Goel, not Ram Swarup, but let that pass.) So, Judaism has changed, Christianity was forced to change, but Islam is most faithful to its source.

In passing, Pirbhai expresses his anger at earlier authors for espousing a similar Hindu chauvinism”: “Gandhi declared himself a ‘servant of Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews’ in the early twentieth century, but prized Hinduism ‘above all other religions’ for specifically doctrinal considerations (...) And finally, in 1908, Ghose sought to prove that Hinduism was the only ‘eternal’ and ‘universal religion which embraces all others (...) given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages’ by arguing that ‘Semitic’ religions are comparatively ‘narrow’, ‘sectarian’ and ‘of limited purpose’.” (p.38) Voice of India is part of a Hindu tradition.

Pirbhai is at his best when he sums up Voice of India thinking as devising an ideology “rationally akin to the Enlightenment without falling prey to materialism”. (p.52) For some reason he, along with the Sangh, he considers this a “staggeringly harsh theology”. (p.51) Maybe it is just “secular” in the real sense of the term.





Orientalists inventing Hinduism

Reza Pirbhai asks what is this ideology. And here he starts replacing the facts he is supposed to be analysing with the theory which he is espousing: “An answer is complicated by the fact that the cadre of contributors to Voice of India claim to follow directly in the footsteps of every major colonial-era intellectual. Further complicating matters, the perspectives such intellectuals uphold stem from a dialectical process initiated in the nineteenth century, involving Brahmanical traditionalism, European ‘Orientalism’, British colonial modes of authority, and the anticolonial pull of nationalism, not to mention the social and strucutural features of South Asia that offered them all fuel.” (p.30) So, “the crux of Voice of India’s theology is provided by the contents of fin de siècle German indology, carried forward in Vivekananda’s works and superimposed on [Aurobindo] Ghose’s and Gandhi’s deployment of precolonial Brahmanism’s ‘divine’ Self and ‘demonic’ Other.” (p.32)

I have never been aware of this: though Ram Swarup, S.R.Goel and their guest authors highly respected Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, their main source of inspiration was historical reality, stretching back much farther than the colonial era. For Hinduism, their main source was the Mahabharata and the other classical Sanskrit works.

But for Pirbhai, that doesn’t count, for he subscribes to the theory that Hinduism is not the most ancient religion but one of the youngest religions, not predating the 19th century: “The doctrines and practices presented as ‘Hinduism’ by colonial-era Hindu intellectuals and their postcolonial heirs did not exist prior to the British colonization of South Asia. Instead, a vast array of Sanskrit texts, supplemented by variegated vernacular and oral traditions, were the norm.” (p.32)

It doesn’t matter to him that Voice of India in fact opposes the tendency to embrace Western influences. As written by Goel in Hindu Society under Siege, 1981, ch.4: “The residue of Macaulaysm”: “Now it is English Utilitarianism, now German Idealism, now Russian Nihilism, now French Positivism or Existentialism, now American Consumerism – whatever be the dominant trend is the West, it immediately finds its flock among the educated Hindus.” But alright, it is possible that the very same people who oppose Western influences today have interiorized a Western influence from the 19th century, viz. the “Orientalist construction of Hinduism”. At least on one condition: that there was such a thing.

Eventhough the theory that Hinduism as a self-conscious religion is a colonial construct is popular with many academics, both in the West and in India, and now also including Reza Pirbhai, it has been firmly refuted by solidly secularist scholars such as David N. Lorenzen (Who Invented Hinduism? Essays on Religion in History, Yoda Press, Delhi 2006, esp. the essay “Who invented Hinduism?”, p.1-36) and Andrew J. Nicholson (Unifying Hinduism. Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, Columbia University Press, New York 2010). The latter shows that many Hindu thinkers in the Muslim period already sought a common denominator of the sects and schools that made up the Hindu commonwealth. But it is the former we will quote at some length.

David Lorenzen names Bipan Chandra, Gyanendra Pandey and Veena Das as some of the academics who teach or taught that Hindu identity does not predate the 19th century, along with a number of Americans. But he quotes a number of Hindu vernacular poets from well before the colonial era who show an awareness of Hindu identity. For instance, the 16th-century Maharashtrian poet Eknath gives a dialogue between a “Hindu” and a Muslim, Hindu-Turka-samvada, in which both sides affirm the strong points of their own religion and lambast the weak points of the other’s religion. Lorenzen fails to remark, in passing, that only Hindus have written such self-criticism, not Muslims. Also in the 16th century, the Ramanandi biographer Anantadas wrote a similar text about the 15th-century poet Kabir. In the Kabir-Bijak, this Kabir himself wrote another text confronting “Hindu” and “Turk” and their respective religions.

A hundred years before Kabir, the romance Kirtilata was written by the poet Vidyapati. Lorenzen observes: “Vidyapati’s description of the Muslim quarter of this city [Jonapur] is imbued with a sharp anti-Muslim bias.” No, Vidyapati was not prejudiced, he knew the Muslims at close quarters and when he wrote something negative about them, he just wrote what his eyes had seen. But Lorenzen himself has a secularist bias. Anyway, here is Vidyapati’s testimony: “The Hindus and Turks live close together. Each makes fun of the other’s religion. (dhamme) (...) The Turks coerce passers-by into doing forced labour. Grabbing hold of a Brahmin boy, they put a cow’s vagina on his head. They rub out his tilak and break his sacred thread. (...) They destroy temples and construct mosques.”

We have it from an eyewitness that Muslims in 1400 practised slave-taking, forced conversion and temple destruction, precisely the thing that everybody knows but that secularists try to deny. But more importantly, he proves that Hinduism as a religious category existed, a full four centuries before Pirbhai says that British Orientalists invented it. Lorenzen quotes an even earlier source to the same effect, viz. the Prithviraj Raso, a historical romance composed not long after the defeat of its hero, King Prithviraj, in 1192. Muslims sources from that period are even more unambiguous and numerous: they had no problem distinguishing between Muslims and Kafirs, and all Indian Kafirs (Pagans) were called Hindus.

As Lorenzen puts it in his conclusion, “one can see the family resemblance of beliefs and practices taking a recognizably Hindu shape in the early Puranas, roughly around the period 300-600.” But Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel went even further back. The Mahabharata does not contain the word Hindu, but it is the foremost Hindu scripture, and the main source of inspiration to Voice of India.



Falsifying history

What troubles Pirbhai most is Voice of India’s steadfast accusation that Islam meant nothing but harm to Hindu society, which he tries to minimize by calling it “Orientalist”: “Voice of India’s catalogue is most heavily laden with books and articles devoted to rehashing or reprinting Orientalist ahistories on the violence perpetrated by Muslims on Hindus (...) In such works, the writings of William Muir (d.1905), David Margoliouth (d.1940), Henry Elliot and other Orientalists are liberally employed, and Ram Swarup is even credited with forewords for reprints of Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1894) and Margoliouth’s Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (1905) – two works heavily criticized for their anti-Muslim biases from the moment of their publication. The gist of this strain of Voice of India works can be boiled down to the list of charges issued in the ‘preface’ of Hindu Temples:What Happened to Them? Echoing Orientalist ahistories exactly, that list includes ‘the destruction of Hindu temples’, ‘mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam emerged victorious’” etc. (p.42-43)

The interesting point is that Pirbhai dismisses the discoveries by Orientalists about Muslim atrocities against the Hindus as ahistorical. In reality, by far the most sources about these Muslim atrocities are contemporaneous and by Muslims themselves. Not for nothing, H.M. Elliot’s magnum opus (with John Dowson, London 1867-77) is called History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, and its 8 volumes consist of nothing but translations of mostly Persian chronicles. The Voice of India historians Harsh Narain and K.S. Lal used many other Muslim sources besides. In 1991, Voice of India has published a rare Hindu account of the same, V.S. Bhatnagar, tra.: Padmanabha’s Kanhadade Prabandha (India’s Greatest Patriotic Saga of Medieval Times). In 2009, it brought out a translation of the 15th-century Muslim source Tohfatu’l Ahbab, viz. Kashinath Pandit tra.: A Muslim Missionary in Mediaeval Kashmir, in which the protagonist demolishes more temples in inhospitable Gilgit and Baltistan during his lifetime than the secularists are willing to concede for the whole Subcontinent during a thousand years.

So, we can just enjoy Pirbhai’s frantic attempts to deny history, e.g.: “by the early nineteenth century, it was conventional to accuse Muslim ‘invaders’ of ending a Hindu ‘Golden Age’ by undermining Hindu political sovereignty, destroying Hindu religious institutions, eroding the Hindu character, and, as in the case of Henry Elliot’s (d.1853) works, even significantly reducing the Hindu population by means of ‘massacres and murders’.”(p.33-34) There was nothing Golden about the Gupta age, except that it was an age of sovereignty, and compared to foreign enslavement, any nation would come to consider that a Golden Age.

He is well aware that either he is right and Voice of India is wrong, or he is a member of the tribe of history-deniers: “Those who challenge the Orientalist perspective are merely labelled ‘negationists’ and equated with Holocaust deniers who ‘conceal’, ‘minimize’ or ‘whitewash’ facts.” (p.44) He lists the fine fleur of the Indian intellectuals among the negationists as if that constitutes proof of anything, but does not bother to refute the Voice of India vision of Islamic history.

Pirbhai, a closet White Supremacist, persists in his colonial fixation: “Of course, Orientalist tropes concerning Muslim ‘atrocities’ are nothing new among Hindu intellectuals (...) Nor is the persistence of Orientalist misrepresentations particular to Hindutva circles.” (p.43) With this, he also attacks their Western counterparts, naming specifically Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or and Ibn Warraq (of Lebanese, Egyptian and Pakistani provenance, respectively).

In his overestimation of Voice of India, he concludes: “Voice of India ideals have been successfully employed in rallying support for Sangh Parivar campaigns in India, extending from the Babri Mosque (Ayodhya campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s to the Gujarat ‘massacres’ of 2002, all of which have claimed thousands of mostly Muslim lives and played a part in bringing Sangh Parivar parties to the highest echelons of state power from the mid-1990s to 2004. They have also been responsive enough to globalization to successfully assimilate non-Indians like Franwley and Elst, attract diasporic Indians like Kak, and find common voice with ‘neoconservative Christians’ like Spencer, ‘rightist Jews’ like Ye’or and ‘secular humanists’ like Ibn Warraq.” (p.52-53)

Pirbhai does make a distinction, though: “Voice of India does not subscribe to the variety of anti-Islamic perspectives composed by the likes of Spencer and Ye’or, who imply that the Quranic message is inherently aggressive and therefore not divine. Nor is it accurate to consider Voice of India’s polemics a mere adoption of Jewish and Christian religious writings, past and present, that paint Mohammed’s claims (but not those of Biblical prophets) as ‘fraudulent’ revelations, perhaps even ‘Satanically’ inspired. Rather, Voice of India frames the concept of prophethood itself within a Vivekanandan approach to precolonial Brahmanism, rendering the revelations of all ‘Semitic’ prophets warped by delusions and demonic intervention. It is in recognition of this demonic source of inspiration that Goel ultimately declares that “it is a sin to regard’ Judaism, Christianity and Islam ‘as religions in any sense of the term’, meaning that the latter are to be identified with the anti-religious ‘powers of darkness’ also behind such ‘materialist’ creeds as Nazism, communism and Nehruism. The only solution for followers of such creeds, therefore, is ‘reconversion’ to the source of all ancient spirituality and civilization: ‘Hinduism’.” (p.49, with reference to Goel: Defence of Hindu Society).



Miscellaneous

Voice of India has also invested in refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory. Here, Pirbhai is totally off the mark: “Frawley makes room for another Orientalist trope – the ‘Indian’ origins of the ‘Aryan race’” (p.41) Except for the first generation, most Orientalists in the 19th and 20th century were convinced of the AIT, as the Indian secularists still are. Not that they conspired against India, as some Hindutva myth-makers think, but they didn’t know better than to believe the most popular theory around. If anything, it is the Nehruvians including Pirbhai himself who follow the Orientalists.



Finally, let us remark that Pirbhai cites the Voice of India mission statement (p.40), e.g.: “our only weapon is truth”. And after reading this paper, we find more truth on the side of Voice of India than on the side of the author.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (9) Voice of India and Islam

Meera Nanda describes Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel as “two ardent Hindu revivalists and anti-Communists”. (2011) What she does not write, is that they had been Leftists themselves in the late forties, and that Goel failed to become a Communist Party member only because of Sardar Patel’s crackdown on the party the very day Goel had an appointment at the party office. What she does not write at all is that their anti-Communist stand, brave and lonely in the fifties, has totally been vindicated by history. This she doesn’t want to know because she still has a soft corner for Marxism.

Indeed, she treats “anti-Communist” as a swearword. That  is why she calls them “anti-Communists” even as late as 1981, not to speak of 2011. After the Chinese Communist invasion in India in 1962, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel knew that Communism’s chance to take over India had gone. To be sure, the Communist hold on the entire cultural sector kept on increasing, but political control was forever with centre-left dynasts. But let us not focus on them, let us focus on Meera Nanda. In respect of anti-Communism, now a historical subject, she is still a Stalinist.   

Meera Nanda goes off on a tangent about the European Nationalist Right, about Jean-Marie Le Pen and such, who have nothing to do with Voice of India, not even with its European sympathizers such as myself. Then she turns around and asks: “One could ask: why we in India should care about these European racists?” (2009:112) Well, nobody in India paid them any attention, nobody there cares about them. It is only Meera Nanda who has them in mind. Like the medieval theologians who wondered about the earth being in the middle and the devil living in the earth, hence the universe turning around the devil, she is obsessed with European racism and drags it in where it has no place. Because she has no way of countering Voice of India’s case, she has to fall back on associations, and false ones at that.

                Or, well, there is one thing she has to say in defence of Islam. By way of conclusion, she ends her article in the Economic and Political Weekly as follows: ““Monotheism does not automatically translate into totalitarianism and polytheism is not a synonym for tolerance, as the triumphalists would have us believe. Theology is not destiny. The (more or less) peaceful coexistence of many religions that India is justly famous for, is not a gift of Hinduism: all of India’s religions contributed to it in ways without compromising their religious beliefs. To forget their contribution is to forget the love and patriotism of India’s Muslims and Christians for their country.” (2009:114)

                No, theology is destiny, if taken seriously. Of course ideas have consequences. That monotheism leads to intolerance has been admitted by Christians like Rodney Stark in his book One True God or Jan Assman in The Price of Monotheism. Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel are not the first ones to assert this, it is a matter of worldwide consensus. The great pioneers of monotheism, Pharaoh Akhenaten, Moses and Mohammed, all distinguished themselves by killing large numbers of dissidents. Fortunately, many Muslims are people first and Muslims second, they don’t take Islam very seriously and that explains their less-than-Islamic conduct.

                That Muslims love India is only Meera Nanda’s contention. In the last and only de facto referendum, the last election before independence, 87% of the Muslim electorate voted against India and in favour of the Muslim League and its programme: the Partition of India. While the Hindus voted for a multicultural India, the Muslims voted against India and against multiculturalism. That is a historical fact, and Meera Nanda cannot alter it. Today, most Indian Muslims are against a further Partition, but that is only because their leadership class has determined that the same mistake should not be made and that the Indian Muslims  should seek to Islamize the whole of India. It is only on these terms that the Muslims love India in one piece.

                As for the Christians, on p.292 of Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, the only book of mine that figures in her bibliography and which I therefore assume she has read, I have written: “However, while Christian separatism is indeed a reality in the small and peripheral states of the Northeast, in most tribal areas both native  and foreign-missionary Christians have definitely accepted the fact of India.” Contrary to what she implies, we are well aware of Christian patriotism. The only way for her of overriding Voice of India is to falsely put words into our mouths.

                Voice of India is only secondarily an Indian nationalist movement. It is first of all a civilizational revivalism. It attaches no particular importance to the differential degree of patriotism of the average Hindu, Muslim or Christian. Even if a religion fosters patriotism, as long as it troubles others and tries to impose upon them its irrational beliefs, we have to do something about it.

                According to Meera Nanda (2011): “What distinguishes the VoI-brand of Hindutva—and pushes it into the global network of Islamophobia—is its staunch opposition to the mantra of sarva dharma samabhaav, the Hindu equivalent of multiculturalism. Hinduism, they assert, is not any ordinary religion, but rather contains the very essence of religion itself: it is sanatan dharma, the Eternal Cosmic Truth. To equate Hindu dharma, this mother of all Truth, with violent, materialistic and monotheistic ‘creeds’ like Islam amounts to equating dharma with adharma, the ways of devas (gods) with the ways of asuras (demons). (…) This equality is not acceptable to cultural nationalists: if all cultures are equal, how can they oppose the influx of what they see as inferior cultures? If all cultures are equal, how can they carry on their ‘consciousness-raising’ campaigns against The Quran and Sharia?”

                We will ignore Meera Nanda’s confusion between nationalism, which only divides religions between national and non-national, and religion critique, which divides religions between true, false and every shade in between. What distinguishes Voice of India according to her is that it really practices religion critique (which, according to Karl Marx, is the beginning of all critique), whereas the RSS family only practices nationalism. The RSS, following in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi, asks people to suspend their power of discrimination and treat all religions as equal save to the extent that they are anti-national.

                In reality, religions make truth claims and these can be judged. In particular, Christianity and Islam are based on truth claims which aren’t true. They differ by more than their country of origin, they differ by their beliefs. And these can be found wanting. It is only a common use of the human mental faculties which leads to the questioning of religions.

Islamophobia is, according to Nanda, based upon the view that Islam itself is so innately barbaric, irrational, sexist, violent and aggressive that “the followers of Islam must exhibit these abominable behavioural traits”. Indeed, “Muslims are reduced to automatons prograrmmed to obey these dreadful commands”. (2009,p.106) That is again a projection from the eye of the beholder unattested in Voice of India writing. It is, moreover, logically incompatible with the reconversion option advertised many times in Voice of India publications.

As she herself writes: “To add insult to injury, debunking Islam from a Hindu perspective is supposed to be good for Muslims because: ‘Muslims of Bharatvarsha would start returning to the Hindu fold only when they realise how obnoxious a doctrine Islam is, how false and fraudulent, how degrading and dehumanising, how unethical and superficial. History has bestowed a role on Hindu nation to help Muslims discover that Islam is a prison house that deprives them of their freedom of thought, powers of reasoning and qualms of conscience… When, and only when, Muslims find out the reality of Muhammad and his creed, they would start walking out of Islam and feel proud to join their ancestral culture.” (2009:110, with reference to Abhas Chatterjee in S.R. Goel, ed., 1997: Time for Stock-Taking: Whither Sangh Parivar?, p.64-65). Exactly. And what is wrong with “reality”? What problem does Meera Nanda have with it?

But such a stand does not make Voice of India popular, for it does not go well with the widespread trait of laziness: “ It appears that eventhough the cadre of RSS are avid readers of the VoI literature, they tend to distance themselves from the Goel-Swarup camp in public ‘because of their extremist anti-Muslim tirades’.” (2009:109) At least we have it on her word that there is a deep cleavage between Hindutva and Voice of India.

                How did the Marxist intellectual Meera Nanda find employment with the Christian Templeton Foundation? Why, she led them to believe that she was a scientist and philosopher of science, sharing with her prospective employers a proven anti-Hindu animus. I do not doubt her competence to do whatever it is that microbiologists do. She has certain scientist’s skills, but she doesn’t have the mind of a scientist. She has the mind of a believer, or at least of a politician who wants to keep the believers happy. By contrast, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel had the real scientist’s mind. They questioned. In particular, they questioned the beliefs which are so obtrusively propagated, those of Christianity and Islam. They had no patience with the unscientific assumption that all religions can be equal. Of course truth and untruth are not equal.

                “Once they got rid of the mantra of sarva dharma samabhaav, VoI militants declared an open war against Islam.” This of course is Meera Nanda the liar speaking. No Voice of India author has ever hurt a hair on the head of any Muslim. By contrast, many Muslims have been killed by politicians who praise Islam. Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, Barack Obama or David Cameron have never said a bad word about Islam, but their bomber pilots have killed a great many Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. The less Islam criticism, the more Muslims get killed.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (8) Voice of India's true identity

Meera Nanda, the microbiologist turned philosopher of science, focuses her best work on a topic properly belonging to a science philosopher’s field, viz. the claim that Hinduism is a “scientific religion”. The claim has been made since at least Swami Vivekananda in the late 19^th century, and many English-speaking Hindus take it for granted eventhough they themselves have little grounding in science. I hope to give her refutation of this claim due consideration in the future, for it is truly important, being the highest-quality deconstruction of Hinduism’s most promising bid for a place in the modern world.

But some of her work is of lower quality, having only the anti-Hindu animus in common. Yet, Meera Nanda has done her homework fairly well and, with a few exceptions, avoids taking cheap shots. In a political sense, she could have afforded to, for no one who attacks Hinduism risks any censure for not getting his facts straight. It seems that her intellectual seriousness or even her conscience has prevailed: she didn’t want to be caught in the act of lying by even one informed reader. All the same, some serious inaccuracies have crept in.

Sometimes Meera Nanda ventures outside her own domain to attack other Hindu efforts to assure the survival of the Dharma. Her latest major essay in this category is “Hindu triumphalism and the Clash of Civilisations”, published in the influential Political and Economical Weekly (Delhi), 11 July 2009. She notes that it is only the third paper ever to focus on the pro-Hindu publishing outfit Voice of India. The first one was by the Japanese graduate student Mitsuhiro Kondo, who interviewed Sita Ram Goel, founder and mastermind of Voice of India. I wrote a comment on her work in Elst 2002. The second one, of which I hadn’t heard yet, is given as Reza Pirbhai: “Demons in Hindutva: Writing a Theology for Hindu Nationalism”, Modern Intellectual History, 2008, and which will get a reply in due time The third is her own.

            On personal details, she gets a few less important ones wrong regarding myself, but some pretty fundamental ones concerning the Indians involved. Writing in 2009, and after paying a visit to the Voice of India office, she doesn’t seem to know that Pradeep Goel, who managed the practical aspects of publication for over fifteen years, had passed away in 2005. She also writes about Abhas Kumar Chatterjee and others as if they are still alive. These are not just painful mistakes, but indicate a serious misunderstanding about the role of Voice of India today, viz. that it is now a thing of the past. Secularist “experts” on Hindu activism have strictly ignored this centre of Hindu thought while it was active and only discovered it near or after its end, and that too only sparingly.

            It is no surprise, then, that she gets the main things wrong as well. Thus, she associates Sita Ram Goel repeatedly with “Hindutva”. But to my knowledge, Goelji never ever applied the term "Hindutva" to his own thinking. Though a freedom fighter (i.e., in India, an activist in the anti-colonial freedom movement) in his youth, he often explicitly rejected the nationalist paradigm, especially in contexts where the Sangh Parivar was using it as a ploy to skirt around the difficult ideological issues. In RSS parlance, difficult ideological themes are systematically replaced with a simplistic dichotomy of Indian/foreign or national/”anti-national”. Thus, Babar as a "foreign" rather than "Islamic" invader, Communism as "anti-national" rather than any of the ideological things one could hold against it, the Christian mission as a "CIA vehicle" rather than a religious challenge.

Like most somewhat open-minded people, he was fully aware that the identification of Hinduism with India was becoming obsolete, with ever more Hindus settling abroad and forgetting their mother tongue, and with ever more Westerners adopting Hinduism formally or de facto. The present age is the worst moment in history to redefine Hinduism in terms of its geographical roots rather than its contents.

            On balance, though, I think his rejection of the Sangh, while having a strong ideological dimension in the mind of that hard-headed ideologue, was primarily of a different nature, stemming from his many personal experiences with the RSS and its functioning. His very first objection to the Sangh was against its personnel, against their low intellectual and moral calibre. In all dealings with them, so he told me, there is some unpleasantness, some promise not kept, some trespassing against ordinary good manners, and often some ideological betrayal. In our first conversation, in 1989, he derided the RSS-BJP as "the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history". And in our last, in 2003 (in the presence of Prof. Saradindu Mukherji and Dr. David Frawley), he gloomily said: "Hinduism will not survive unless this RSS-BJP movement perishes." And in between, he said things like: "The RSS is leading Hindu society into a trap."

She manages to accuse himof “Hindu triumphalism”, repeatedly. Like in the paper’s title, here it is the word triumphalism that catches the reader’s eye. That is about the last word I would have thought of when Sita Ram Goel’s work is mentioned. The almost opposite concept of alarmism would seem more appropriate. On the first page of his seminal booklet Hindu Society under Siege, Sita Ram Goel wrote: “But the death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which can no longer be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies.”

                As a loser, Meera Nanda quotes from Voice of India writers themselves only very sparingly, being all the more talkative about alleged “links”. Thus, she quotes from “Hindu terrorist groups like Sanatan Sanstha” (2009, p.107)  as saying much the same thing, but then alleges that “the most strident expression of Hindu triumphalism comes from a group of writers associated with Voice of India”. That is, more strident than “Hindu terrorism”. The Breivik quotes follow the same pattern: she cannot pinprick the critique of Islam given by Voice of India authors (there is no trace of it in these articles), so she just juxtaposes Voice of India with Breivik’s name and hopes readers will fall for it. Given the great demand for reassurance about Islam, and hence for ridiculing its critics, she may well have some success with what is contentswise an admission of  weakness.

                Meera Nanda shows her utter confusion, or her lack of scruples, when she tries to link Voice of India to the Nouvelle Droite. She claims that “they are finding new recruits from the European New Right”, though she cannot name any (and I as an insider can say that they are non-existent), and purports to name three cases of interaction.

One is an interview which Ram Swarup gave to Christopher Gérard (Brussels), editor of the second Antaios. It is true that Gérard was enthusiastic about Ram Swarup’s apology of Hindu polytheism, and for that reason he gave some publicity to him. But there were also deep differences, papered over in social contexts but nonetheless real. Thus, Gérard was a great believer in the Aryan Invasion Theory, while Ram Swarup opposed it. And Gérard was a great fan of Alain Daniélou, a bookish defender of Hindu traditionalism (as he conceived it, highly idiosyncratically) and of the caste system, while Ram Swarup stood in the native “tradition” of Hindu reformism. The interaction between Ram Swarup and Christopher Gérard, limited to a few meetings, did not go beyond a joint celebration of polytheism, a cause to which both of them were wedded before.

Incidentally, in describing Antaios, Meera Nanda commits several mistakes. She says it was “started by Mircea Eliade and Ernest Jûnger, both ofwhom had close connections with fascist movements in their native Romania and Germany respectively”. (2009:113) Yes, Ernst Jûnger was a Nazi in the 1920s,when it was an opposition movement repressed by the German police and being a Nazi took courage; he was also an anti-Nazi in the late 1930s when Nazism wa in power and being an anti-Nazi took courage. That makes him a very different sort of anti-Nazi from Meera Nanda, who is always found on the safe side. As for Mircea Eliade: Wendy Doniger, the darling of the Nehruvian secularists for her anti-Hindu writings, held the Mircea Eliade Chair at the prestigious Chicago University. Shall we say that she was not averse to fascist connections?

Though Antaios had the same name as a paper founded by Jûnger and Eliade, it was not founded by them. Their paper folded and Antaios was founded anew by Christopher Gérard. He in turn folded it years before Meera Nanda wrote her piece. So the title is available, and a Croat has again founded a paper called Antaios. Oh, and one more detail: Gérard’s Antaios appeared in French, so Ram Swarup never read it.

The second case of interaction between Voice of India and the Nouvelle Droite which Meera Nanda alleges, is this: “Francois Gautier, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, and more recently of Sri Sri Ravishankar, is another VoI author who had a long career with the French newspaper La Figaro, which has been described as the mouthpiece of the French New Right. Gautier is the brain behind the idea of creating a museum showcasing the Hindu ‘holocaust’ at the hands of Muslims.” (2011:113)

The only thing in common between François Gautier and the French Nouvelle Droite thinkers is probably that they are French. He has been in India for decades and is out of touch with developments in France. Yes, he has been a correspondent for Le Figaro for a while, but that was after the paper severed its links with the Nouvelle Droite authors working for its magazine ca. 1980. His museum of Muslim atrocities on Hindu society is the best proof of his non-connectedness to the Nouvelle Droite, which happens te be pro-Islamic and has nothing to do with the Counterjihad agitation now animating a new generation of European parties.

The third is me. But I already said that, save for criticizing Christianity, I have never espoused the typical agenda points of the Nouvelle Droite, not even when, long ago, writing for Nouvelle Droite publications. And here again, the opposite viewpoint on Islam is striking and significant. Luc Pauwels invited me to the Nouvelle Droite paper TeKoS precisely as a counterweight to the existing pro-Islamic tendency. Though Meera Nanda hopes to use the “New Right” as a bridge between Voice of India and the Islam-hating terrorist Anders Breivik, these champions of a “Euro-Arab alliance against the US and Capitalism” have strictly nothing to do with Breivik.

            What then is the difference between Voice of India and the established Hindu Nationalist movement? According to Meera Nanda, “While Islamophobia is not new, its expression used to be moderated by the so-called ‘essential-unity Hinduism’ – the familiar rhetoric which proclaims that all religions are equally true. (…) Even the most radical Hindu communalists occasionally said some good things about other faiths in order to show how big-hearted and tolerant their own faith is.” (2009:107)  Yes, and in fact, far more than she will give them credit for. Frequently, BJP leaders declare and the Organiser writes that terrorism has no religion, that the great religion of Islam is misunderstood by its critics and misused by its fanatics, that “Islam is more sinned against than sinning”, etc.

According to her, “This essential-unity Hinduism, hypocritical though it was, is facing new ideological threats. A new triumphalism is emerging which does not hesitate to openly and unapologetically celebrate the alleged superiority of Hinduism over the alleged depravity of Islam, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Christianity as well.” (2009:107) Yet, “the new tribe of triumphalists speak in terms of pluralism, science and tolerance which supposedly abound in Hinduism.” (2009:107) Her term triumphalism is as inept as could be: everything of value is vulnerable, and consequently Hinduism is no match for its challengers, just as Greek philosophy wasn’t. It has, according to Voice of India’s mission statement, only truth on its side. And whether Truth Shall Prevail, as India’s motto has it, remains to be seen.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (6) Koenraad Elst's real identity

As a bad loser, Meera Nanda tries to score points on the side. She avoids the main fight, which is the irrational basis of Christianity and Islam. No, not the sorry record of these religions in India and in all Pagan lands, which is only secondary, but the fact that they are based on a truth claim which isn’t true. Christianity has incorporated a lot of things that make sense, but its basic belief as laid down in the Nicene creed is nonsense. We don’t even know whether Jesus existed, but at any rate he wasn’t the son or incarnation of God. We are not sure Mohammed existed, but we are very sure that he didn’t hear God’s voice to dictate to him the Quran. As a scientist, Meera Nanda ought to realize this. But she is in a contradictory situation: she is scientist enough not to believe all this nonsense, but her employers (and possibly her convictions) force her to uphold Christianity and Islam as at least superior to Hinduism. So, to do something about the effect of people (viz. myself) pointing out this contradiction, she doesn’t face them head-on but tries to hit them sideways, as by hiding behind Breivik or by the tested tactic of “guilt by association”.

Ever since I have been writing on secularism and religious conflict, and particularly about Islam, I have had plenty of mud thrown at me. What I have never seen so far is an actual refutation of my central theses. A few non-academic bloggers have tried to muster some arguments, and I have given them a reply in return in my books. So, those who try to take me on mostly do so with “guilt by association”. This rhetorical tactic is used by polemicists of all stripes, everywhere,  and for thousands of years. In itself, it is not tied up with an ideology. Its greatest pioneers are the fishwife types, people who give colour to their humdrum existence by telling sensational tales, true or somewhat less true, about other people. When a fishwife sees how an unknown man rings the bell at the neighbouring woman’s door, and is welcomed in, she doesn’t need to go and listen at the door about what exactly is being said and done between the two of them. The mere fact that a man and a woman are together behind closed door is basis enough for a good story, the details can be filled in by the imagination.

However, on top of the universal dimension of this fishwife tactic, we do notice its popularity among Leftists. I have been a Leftist myself, I know the mentality. In a typically Leftist superstition, it is thought that opinions are contagious. They don’t hang out with people suspected of different opinions for fear of being contaminated. And this is really possible in their case, as their doctrine may not be very strong. Why, I myself lost my Leftist convictions after (apart from negative experiences) sufficient exposure to alternatives. So when they see someone speak with a Rightist party, they genuinely believe that he must be of the same opinion. The idea that different-minded people might have something to tell each other, just doesn’t occur to Leftists.

In my case, Meera Nanda avoids a head-on confrontation with the points I made and instead tries to couple me with less-than-respected political parties and movements: the Vlaams Belang party (Flemish Interest, formerly Vlaams Blok, i.e. Flemish Bloc), Flemish nationalism in general, and the New Right: “It so happens that Koenraad Elst has one foot firmly in the European New Right and the other foot in the Hindu New Right spawned by the VoI school. In Europe, he is considered a ‘leading Orientalist’, and writes frequently for The Brussels Journal, a European nationalist anti-Islamic blog, cited repeatedly by Breivik in his manifesto. Elst has also worked with think-tanks and publications suspected of links with Belgium’s far right, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant party, Vlaams Belang.”

So, last but not least, she “links” me to the “far-right, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant party, Vlaams Belang”, though not directly. That is of course the safest: she knows that she can easily be found out as a liar if she links me directly to a political party, so she does it indirectly. Well, I can put the same thing more charitably, and thank her for not directly linking me to a political party. After all, she could easily have gotten away with one more false statement, she has far more institutional support than I do.

The basis in reality of the allegation is this: in 1992 I spoke on Islam before a Vlaams Blok audience. This went by unconspicuously, but one year later it was reported in the tabloid De Morgen, where I was called an “ideologist” of the party. All claims linking me to the party go back to this one article. In reality, my ideology and the party’s were at loggerheads, even on the issue of Islam. Thus, I pleaded for an  immersion of Islamic pupils in the European school system and culture, whereas the party at the time wanted to keep Islamic pupils in a separate school system (just as the Mullahs wanted) in preparation of their return. VB-watchers logically made fun of the party’s intellectual poverty, that they could not find better guests than such as would explicitate their dissident opinions; in my case even a long-haired hippy known to frequent coloured types.

With my appearance at a Vlaams Blok gathering, I had breached the cordon sanitaire. Strictly, the cordon pertained to politicians making (non-existent) coalitions with the Vlaams Blok, but in effect it also counted for intellectuals merely talking with them. And that is the very reason why I did what I did. When  I look back those twenty years now, I am not sure I would speak to a Vlaams Blok gathering, because I would not want to make it so easy for the Meera Nanda’s of this world to avoid the real issue through guilt by association. At that time, I thought that there was no way my own position could be confused with the party’s, my writing was after all clear enough. Now I know better: nobody cares about what you write (few people read it in the first place), not even intellectuals like Meera Nanda, but they will remember all the better before what audience you read it out; that  is the way of the world. But back then, what disturbed me was that Communists forgetful about their own crimes  had decreed the cordon, which was a clear breach of freedom of opinion. They had even hijacked the name of the anti-Communist Czech platform Charta 77 as Charta 91. That is why I just had to accept the Vlaams Blok invitation: to make a gesture against this neo-Communist attack on the democratic polity. Of course the slander that befell me as a consequence will never happen to a conformist like Meera Nanda; indeed it is committed by her kind.

After that, many leftists and middle-of-the-road people broke off relations with me, and I lost a lot of job opportunities. Some people saw they had been duped but continued to avoid me, this time out of shame, but the result was the same: my social life became so much the poorer. Association with the wrong party comes at a price, which is one of the reasons I treat Meera Nanda as a debtor. But when the same paper, through the pen of a practicing neo-Pagan priest and Socialist Party activist repeated its allegation in 1999 (with nothing as his source but the paper’s own reporting from 1993), the reaction was zero or positive. By that time, everybody knew the paper was lying. And more recent references to me have not repeated the allegation either. For instance, when Russian TV interviewed me on Belgian affairs, coincidentally a day after the Breivik affair, De Morgen described me as a “new-rightist separatist”: that is not true either, but it is vague and I can live with it. When Belgian nationalists tried to exploit the mentioning of my name by Breivik, they called me a Flemish separatist or so, but the link to that party was absent. So, the imputed connection between myself and this party is dead for more than a decade among all people in the know, including my enemies.

The English Wikipedia, however, contains, thanks  to Sanjay Subramaniam, a false statement: “According to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, he has connections to the far-right Vlaams Blok”. I have no such connections, nor half-connections or part-connections. But the blot on the encyclopedia’s fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature. Among other things, Sanjay Subramaniam is neither an expert on me nor on Belgian politics, so he should not have been quoted in an encyclopedia at any rate.

Who is this Sanjay Subramaniam? He was exposed in my book Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, ch.4.3. as just another Nehruvian academic who does what his kind does best, viz. bluffing and lying: “So, practically every word in Subramaniam’s evaluation [of Arun Shourie’s book Eminent Historians] is malicious and untrue.” (p.46) He was also nominated by the BJP in 2002-04 when they set up a chair for Indian Studies in Oxford. As I had predicted, the BJP did not pursue “saffronization”, the way its enemies alleged, but a pat on the shoulder by its enemies. Of course this never materialized, but the prospect was enough to make the BJP nominate one of its known critics. At any rate, Sanjay Subramaniam was the face of saffronization, and of the BJP’s stupidity. Then I exposed him again in my book The Saffron Swastika, ch.7.2-7 for his slanderous attacks on Leftist Islam critics like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the murdered Theo Van Gogh. Exposed as a liar, he saw no other way out than Meera Nanda, viz. to shoot at the messenger. 

But no matter what he says, I have never been a member or employee of the VB. Repeat: never. I have been a member of the Christian-Democratic party in 2000-2010 and have been a member of Christian-Democratic social organizations since the 1970s. In 1999, the Christian-Democrats narrowly lost the elections and were thrown out of government after more than four decades; I thought it was finally a good time for reform. Unfortuntely I took ill right after becoming a party member, and the party was never far enough from power to allow for real reform, so nothing came of my quixotic reform plan. But if you want my real political affinity, there it is.  

If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn’t Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities.

Incidentally, other Wikipedia entries refute the said allegation. The English Wikipedia, entry Anders Behring Breivik, mentions me among his host of “sources of inspiration”, but refrains from linking me to any political party or movement. It would have liked to if it could, but it could not. So to put me down in a different manner, it calls me a “neo-Pagan writer”. That too is an insult and meant as one; it does not call the Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes “the Jew Daniel  Pipes” and rightly so: Breivik or his sources quote us for we for what we authoritatively say on Islam, not for our real or imagined religious beliefs.

The Dutch Wikipedia, entry Brussels Journal, relying on better-informed sources than a Sanjay Subramaniam, has a chapter on relations with political parties. It notes that the press tends to associate BJ with the VB because founder Paul Beliën’s wife is an MP for the VB and because “there is also a strong similarity between Beliën’s and the VB’s thinking, though in the last few years, the relation between the VB and Beliën has been rather tense.” And then it adds: “There are also writers and contributors, like Flemish law scholar Matthias Storme, who is a member of the N-VA [a rival party], orientalist Koenraad Elst, former VRT [Flemish TV] reporter Jan Neckers, libertarian VLD [another rivaling party] blogger Luc Van Braekel and others who are not VB members and express other opinions.” Incidentally, Paul Beliën left the Brussels Journal well before the Breivik affair; the paper is now managed by Luk Van Braekel.

But my own entry, while rather silent about the main things I have done, starts out by associating me with yet another political movement, the Nouvelle Droite, viz. by the factual observation that I had been a board member of TeKoS, a Flemish Nouvelle Droite quarterly, in 1992-95. So Meera Nanda adds that I have “one foot firmly in the European New Right”.

The wrongest word there is “firmly”. Those who know me, acknowledge that I am not so firm in my engagement with groups and movements; I am only firm in being an Orientalist. In this case too, the years mentioned should already have alerted readers to my not-so-firm beliefs in the Nouvelle Droite (which Meera Nanda translates as New Right). Also, there were only two board meetings yearly, which were merely social occasions, because the owner took all the decisions.

Apart from TeKoS, I only contributed a single article to any Nouvelle Droite publication, viz. to their flagship publication Nouvelle Ecole, where in 2001 I contributed a defence of the Out-of-IndiaTheory, directly flying in the face of the Nouvelle Droite position (which is very pro-AIT) and answered on the spot by both Alain de Benoist, their mastermind, and Jean Haudry, their specialist on Indo-European matters. It is a good thing that they are more open-minded than the Indian secularists, but that shouldn’t obscure our differences.

That can be generalized: though I published in the Nouvelle Droite publication TeKoS, Meera Nanda and her friends will have a hard time finding articles of mine where I develop the typical Nouvelle Droite themes, such as identity. There are even articles where I lambast the Nouvelle Droite (or the Vlaams Belang, for that matter), but they are in Dutch, which I surmise Meera Nanda does not read. Note however that it is her own unsolicited conceit that she is a specialist on the thoughts of Koenraad Elst.

Remark that Meera Nanda is silent about the leftist Islam critics. Yet, they have everything to do with it. My first article on and against Islam was in 1989 in Toestanden, a Communist weekly. My first lectures about and against Islam were for several departments of the Masereelfonds, a Communist cultural foundation. You won’t find it in my Wikipedia entry, of course, but I have the evidence. In the 1990s, the Left didn’t know what to do with Islam and looked the other way, but in recent years, leftist intellectuals have come out in large numbers to say out loud that there is something wrong with Islam.  Thus, in my country, people like Etienne Vermeersch, Geert Van Istendael, Benno Barnard, Luckas Vander Taelen,  Patrick De Witte, and many others have published articles critical of Islam, initially against their friends’ circle, but increasingly with approval. Meera Nanda might not know this, but even and especially if she did, she would not mention it because it doesn’t fit her story of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Let us conclude with a final example of how wrong she can be. From here, we will also use Meera Nanda’s article “Hindu triumphalism”, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, July 2009, distinguishing between (Nanda 2011) and (Nanda 2009). In it, she tries to prove her accusation of my “links” with both the VB and the Nouvelle Droite by writing: “Indeed, the editor-in-chief of TeKoS, Luc Pauwels, was one of the founders of the Vlaams Belang”.

Luc Pauwels, whose father spent the war as a prisoner in Buchenwald, was the editor of TeKoS till about 2001 and volunteered to be the Secretary of the Vlaamse Volkspartij (Flemish People’s Party), one of the splinters after the Volksunie (People’s Union) compromised itself in 1978. After the party’s President, Lode Claes, failed to get elected, the party died out and some of its members joined the Vlaams-Nationale Partij (Flemish National Party), the other splinter with whom the Vlaamse Volkspartij had contracted an electoral agreement known as the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc). Now, during the vote on this alliance, arguably the basis of the Vlaams Blok, the Vlaamse Volkspartij was split roughly in half: the bigger half, in favour of the bloc, was led by the Party President, Lode Claes, while the smaller half, voting against the bloc, was led by the Party Secretary, Luc Pauwels. So, when making the point that Luc Pauwels had co-founded the Vlaams Blok, Meera Nanda is as mistaken as she can be. She could still have said that Luc Pauwels was a known rightst or so, but she chose to link him to the wrong party. I don’t hold it against her that she is ignorant about something as unimportant as Belgian politics, only that she pretends to be a specialist in the matter.

As for myself, I am my own man, not a party man. I deserve to have my viewpoints examined not on their real or imagined associations but on their merits. I want my real and stated positions attacked, not those at my declared enemies' convenience.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (5) The case of Koenraad Elst

The connection between Breivik’s manifesto and Voice of India doesn’t amount to much. The main “connection” between Voice of India and Breivik appears to be a non-Indian non-Hindu individual, viz. the undersigned, Dr. Koenraad Elst: “The manifesto makes two references to a Belgian writer, Koenraad Elst. The first time Elst is mentioned is as the authority behind the highly contested claim that Muslims enslaved Hindus and drove them to their death in the Hindu Kush mountain ranges, now in Afghanistan. (This reference appears in an article by Srinandan Vyas, which is reproduced in the manifesto.) The second reference to Elst appears in his ‘recommendations to the West’ on how to make the life of Muslim minorities in Europe so difficult that they will either give up Islam or leave. Elst is quoted here to suggest that though Islam is in decline, it can still take over Europe before it collapses. (Here Elst is quoted in an article by Fjordman, the anonymous Norwegian blogger well known for his anti-Islamic views and greatly admired by Breivik).”





If you read that closely, you will find that Breivik himself never quotes me at all, he has merely included a pile of existing articles by others, and of those, two do quote me. I must acknowledge Nanda’s scholarly propriety here: to magnify the “connection”, less scrupulous pamphleteers (Le Soir, Belgische Unie/Union des Belges) have counted five mentions of my name, counting the three footnotes accompanying those two mentions as separate instances, whereas Nanda accurately counts one mention in the text and its references in footnote as a single mention.

Regardless of who quotes them, I stand by the statements which Vyas and Fjordman have discussed in their articles. That Muslims enslaved Hindus and drove them to their death in the Hindu Kush is a solidly documented historical fact, never refuted, and only a “highly contested claim” in the Nehruvian-secularist world of fact-free political polemic. Note that Dr. Nanda explicitates what Vyas has quoted from me, knowing that in India, the prevailing orthodoxy is to deny, demonize and ridicule my view; but that she passes silently over Fjordman’s quotation. It happens not to fit her narrative.

I will not deny that I see Islam as a problem, and that Breivik did likewise. That is why Breivik quotes Nandan Yyas who in turn quotes me as citing the facts on the Islamic enslavement of Hindus. But unlike Breivik, I have long outgrown the alarmist view of Islam in Europe: whether Europe will be overrun by Islam, as announced by many Islamic worthies, depends on the Europeans themselves. That is why Fjordman could quote me in the very paper quoted itself by Breivik, in an adversative sense. I think that Islam just doesn’t have the brains, that we can outwit them if we apply our minds to it, and that this is already happening. The best testimony is the growing presence of ex-Muslims in our midst, the greatest spokesmen of the case against Islam.

According to Meera Nanda: “Now that Breivik’s manifesto has revealed the names of anti-Islamic authors, bloggers, websites and groups that shaped his thinking, the great washing off of hands has begun. Just about everyone named by Breivik has issued stern statements distancing him/herself from his violent deeds. Elst himself posted a statement stating that ‘The Brussels Journal never ever carried calls to counter Islam by means of bombs and shoot-outs… It only carried criticism of Islam, but that is a perfectly legitimate exercise.’”

However, my statement about the Breivik affair (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4783, “If only he had read the Brussels Journal”) goes largely unanswered by Meera Nanda. Rather than refuting it and thus drawing her readers’ attention to it, she prefers to insinuate in general terms that “the great washing off of hands has begun”. Haha, Meera Nanda is unable to refute a rare effort to look Breivik in the eye. But most Islam critics mentioned in Breivik’s manifesto did indeed wash their hands off of his influence. Indeed, most of us had never heard of him; I certainly hadn’t. In the totalitarian world of her dreams, an accusation would have been enough to indict and imprison all affected. But in the real world, Islam critics like Robert Spencer or Andrew Bostom did reply. Well, what did she expect?

She, like most Breivik exploiters, belongs to a class of people dumbfounded by our criticism of Islam, which was based on authentic sources: statements by Mohammed himself, orthodox Islamic jurisprudence, and modern-day claims by Islamic leaders. They were simply unable to reply to Islam-critical charges, and they received Breivik’s intervention to distract attention and give a terrorist alternative to Islam criticism, as a godsend.

After all the unasked analysis given by Meera Nanda to the momentous topic of the motives of Koenraad Elst, it is my turn to analyze her motive. And it is so simple. Meera Nanda is a bad loser. She’s a loser, who by her silence has conceded defeat in the Islam debate. And she’s bad in losing, for she fails to graciously bow out of the struggle. Instead, she makes a last-ditch attempt behind Breivik’s broad shoulders.

What is worse, is that through me she seeks to attack two Hindu scholars who are not responsible for my conduct. Here we have a Templeton scholar in the paid service of the Christian lobby, who tries to implicate the long-dead scholars Ram Swarup (1920-1998) and Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), veterans of the Gandhian non-violent struggle, in the Breivik affair, when in fact Swarup and Goel were anti-Christians and she herself works for Breivik’s Christianity. From as long as they became aware of the Islam problem, they have advocated that which was the first Hindu solution, propagated since decades before anyone spoke of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, viz. shuddhi, the reconversion of the Muslims to the religion of their ancestors. They never thought that killing Muslims was the solution to the Islam problem, let alone killing non-Muslims. They stood against Communism where and when it took courage, but they never dreamed of killing ruling-party youngsters as the solution, the way Breivik did.

With her false accusation, dragging me and especially dragging Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel into the Breivik affair, Meera Nanda has dishonoured herself. I will have a hard time seeing anything but a debtor in her. But I have my Christian upbringing: I don’t believe anymore but I still have certain automatisms, and one of these is to forgive a wrong admitted. Leave it alone for now whether scholarly speaking, Christianity borrowed this trait from Buddhism or not; the point is that I made it my own. All she has to do is to admit she was wrong, and no word shall be uttered about her false Breivik associations anymore.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (3) Breivik, India and National-Socialism

According to Meera Nanda: “India, it turns out, figures quite prominently in this web of hate. So far, the India connection has been limited in media reports to the 100-odd references to India that appear in Breivik’s massive manifesto, including his ringing defence of ‘Sanatan Dharma movements’. The irony of a Muslim craftsman from Banaras embroidering the skull-and-sword badge for his army of ‘Knights Templar’, modelled on the 12th-century Christian crusaders, has also evoked much commentary. But there is a lot more to the India connection than it appears at first glance.”




One of the badges tailor-made in India for Breivik has a dagger cutting through the symbols of Islam, Communism and National-Socialism. Though the laziest pressmen have described Breivik as a “neo-Nazi”, purely out of habit, he actually presents himself as an articulate anti-Nazi. He has taken the trouble of explaining (quite sensibly) that National-Socialism is un-European at heart. Indeed, Europeans and especially Nordic Europeans are traditionally freedom-loving, individualistic and uncomfortable with the purity obsession and racial hyperfocus of the Nazis. In the Germanic pantheon, the different classes of gods, the Aesir, Vanir and Giants, freely intermarried. In real life, the Vikings assimilated into the populations among whom they settled within two generations at most, adopting the local language and religion and intermarrying with the natives.

Breivik has also pointed out that in the larger scheme of things, the Nazis have caused Europe tremendous damage. One of his heroes is Winston Churchill, whom he quotes or mentions dozens of times, because he stood firm against the Nazis as well as warning against Islam. Finally, he keeps his distance from the National-Socialists because ultimately they were losers (he advises nationalists to study winners instead, such as Mao Zedong). Only alcohol-disturbed loonies and police infiltrators join the meagre ranks of the extant neo-Nazi groups, an inspiration a contrario for Breivik to act scrupulously alone and in secrecy.

All the same, few commentators have the discipline to discuss the Breivik case without bringing in their usual cheap shots involving Nazi references. Thus Meera Nanda: “The simple fact is that some of the most revered personalities of the Hindu Right have actively cultivated and nurtured links with the European New Right. We don’t have to go as far back as the Nazi-loving founding fathers of the Sangh Parivar. The Savarkar and Golwalker generation that admired Adolf Hitler for trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’ has been replaced by a newer generation of Hindu chauvinists that raves and rants against ‘Semitic monotheistic religions’—Islam, above all. This new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the old Nazi fixation on racial purity to a new ideology of hate based on cultural and religious purity that is proving to be attractive to ‘crusader nationalists’ such as Breivik and his fellow ‘patriots’ from Europe, North America and Israel.”

We will come to the topic of the contemporary “Hindu Right”, but now let us consider the old “Hindu Right” which Meera Nanda tries to link to National-Socialism. Having written two books on the falsity of the “Hindu fascism” rhetoric (The Saffron Swastika, Delhi 2001, and Return of the Swastika, Delhi 2006), I need not go too deeply into the worn-out Nazi allegations against V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar once more. Suffice it to say that what ignorant Golwalkar applauded when he wrote We: Our Nationhood Defined in 1938 was only the intended territorial separation of Germans and Jews as an application of the homogeneous nation-state principle (itself admittedly conflicting with the Hindu tradition of internal multiculturalism, the fatal contradiction of Hindu nationalism). Golwalkar did not refer to any “trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’”, which started only in 1941 and in secrecy. Well before that, in September 1939 immediately after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Savarkar called on Hindu young men to join the British war effort, a call heeded by hundreds of thousands. Actions speak louder than words, and Savarkar contributed a lot more to the Nazi defeat than the non-cooperators Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

A minimum requirement for a Nazi sympathizer should be hatred of Jews. But in fact, in 1938 in the same publication, Golwalkar holds the Jewish people up as his very first example of resourceful nationalism, an example for Hindus to emulate; just as Savarkar had done in his 1924 manifesto Hindutva. On this, admittedly, they don’t differ much from Breivik, who likewise supports Israel against its Muslim enemies and welcomes it as Europe’s natural ally in West Asia.

Meera Nanda admits that “this new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the Nazi fixation” — as if it had ever been involved with that. The two thinkers of her “new Hindu Right” whom she is about to attack, Ram Swarup (1920-97) and Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), took their first non-Hindu inspiration elsewhere: from British liberals like Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Ram Swarup worked for the American war effort in 1944. Both were active leftists in the subsequent years, and Goel nearly joined the Communist Party of India in 1948. As they gained maturity and better knowledge of ideological and geopolitical realities, they turned against Communism; and as their reflection on the roots of the Communist evil deepened, they started rediscovering their own Hindu civilization. But they were never involved with any “Nazi fixation”, on the contrary.

This much is true, that many politically illiterate Hindus admired Hitler because they had heard he was a vegetarian and a “brahmachari” (celibate), because he had adopted a swastika as his party’s and later his country’s emblem, and because he was the enemy of the British colonizers. In reality, Hitler was entirely in favour of the British empire and its hierarchical relation between a Germanic master race and the subservient darker races, and he had advised Lord Halifax to shoot the leaders of the freedom movement. But fact remains that the war against Hitler bankrupted Britain and greatly contributed to the decolonization of India. Having read a great deal of what Hindus have written about World War 2, both during and after the event, I must say I have never encountered anything remotely resembling a call for exterminating the Jews nor applause for the Nazi extermination policy.

This contrasts with the Muslim world, where many then and later supported the idea of solving the “Jewish problem” by the most radical means. Genocide did not horrify them: in 1947 in West Panjab and again in East Bengal in 1971, South-Asian Muslims did effectively attempt to commit genocide on the Hindus. It is therefore logical for people interested in the problems Islam poses, not excluding Anders Breivik, to focus on the Indian experience.

[to be continued]


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