KOENRAAD ELST, ET AL. : HINDU BASHING FORCES FIND ALLIES AMONG NON-HINDU FRIENDS OF HINDUS AND HINDUISM, -- OR ARE THEY SINCERE SELF-REFLECTION DRIVEN HINDU REFORMISTS ?

"CASTE," "INTER-FAITH DIALOGUE", "DEMOCRACY," 

"FREEDOM OF RELIGION" ARE POLITICAL WEAPONS OF THE "WHITE CHRISTIAN WEST," MORE POWERFUL THAN CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THEIR ATTACK ON HINDU SOCIETY AND ON HINDUISM

New post on Bharata Bharati It is imperative that Hindus don’t get distracted – Vijaya Rajiva It is unfortunate that Dr. Koenraad Elst who has done sterling work in the last two to three decades on behalf of the Hindu cause has let his impatience get the upper hand and engage in castigating Hindus for their perceived tardiness in dealing with the question of Dalit rights. The present writer has already responded in a previous article 'When Non-Hindus try to defend Hindus' (Bharata Bharati, Aug. 29, 2012) by observing that a great deal of work has already been undertaken by Hindus on that question (more needs to be done). Despite that, the efforts of asuric forces are powerful not because they have any reasonable arguments or because of failure of Hindus to present their case, but because of the power of the almighty dollar/pound/euro, as you will and their overweening desire to control and subjugate. It was also pointed out by the present writer that a non-Hindu such as Dr. Elst (and Mark Tully) cannot fully understand the Hindu mind-set. This is simply a reality and pointing that out is not intended as an insult. In fact, taking that into account is important in evaluating what such individuals have to say. The reader is referred to the above article to be informed of the arguments supplied there. But two points must be clarified: first, Dr. Elst's sudden eruption against a significant Hindu woman intellectual and thinker Srimathi Radha Rajan is puzzling. Whether one agrees with all of her views, Ms. Radha Rajan remains one of the outstanding, outspoken Hindu women critics of the present UPA government, run by an alien Italian Catholic, and the general corruption and malaise of the Congress Party. Her past work on corruption and the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Indian history are already there. In addition, her recent work The Eclipse of the Hindu Nation is a remarkable reading of the freedom struggle from a Hindu perspective. The present writer recalls that Dr. Elst himself provided a favourable review of that work. It is therefore with some dismay that many Hindus on the scene view his present personal attack on Ms. Rajan's intellectual failures (see his article 'Rejoinder: The Art of Making Enemies', Bharata Bharati, Aug.31,2012). She has rightly criticised those whom she sees as betraying the Hindu cause (that does not seem to include Dr. Elst). The second point that must be clarified is that no serious person can criticise Dr. Elst for presenting the bleak picture that non-Hindu foreigners have of the caste system. However, despite the best efforts of Hindus to explain the situation, the asuric forces wilfully distort the picture because it is in their political interests to do so. It is in this context and past history that both Ms. Rajan and others have continued to speak of white racism. En passant, it might be useful for Dr. Elst to continue on his own most excellent trajectory, rather than focus on Hindu shortcomings in dealing with foreign criticisms. The brown sahibs and the brown Christians who follow the Church's attack on Hinduism are simply following their master's voice and can therefore be legitimately included in the 'white racist' category. These despicable individuals may laugh at their success (as Dr. Elst claims) but it is a hollow laughter. The Veda and Agama will not be defeated, although in their nefarious enterprises these brown clergy may cause suffering and sorrow to the aam admi. It would be helpful if Dr. Elst would without reservations join in our specific struggle, rather than pontificate from afar. His trajectory is somewhat different from ours. With his academic training and erudite mind and as a Westerner (forgive stating the obvious) it is highly desirable that he undertake a critique of the pretensions of Christianity, a critique which Hindus may not be in the best position to undertake, whether it is karma or genes or whatever else. Perhaps too, we may not be as learned as Dr. Elst in this field! The Hindu has always been reluctant to criticise another's faith when it is perceived as a universal theology. Should we imitate Adi Shankara on his triumphant Digvijaya tours? You bet many a Hindu would like to do that, but many have not succeeded to date in that task and in fact have given up halfway! Dr. Elst is already well versed in Christian theology and it would be most helpful if he could undertake that task without further delay. Hence, instead of lecturing/hectoring Hindus for perceived inadequacies, it would be wiser of Dr. Elst to continue his own exemplary work. As for Hindus, it is important that they follow their own trajectory. Friends and allies are always welcome, but the task is ours in the final analysis. And this task is also determined by our past history and our present engagements. The Veda has never condoned caste (Dr. Elst recognises that). And untouchability, the context of the Dalit problem, was a later development, according to scholars, around 300 BCE Dr. Ambedkar's accounts are interesting but not particularly helpful. His original thesis is that the Dalits were Shudras who refused to follow the diktats of the Brahmins and were degraded into untouchability. Although, some scholars have speculated that like the helots inSparta, these were captured slaves etc. The distinction between varna and jati has been made by innumerable Hindu writers (Dr. Elst himself has written a short article on the topic in Hinduism Today, 1993). And the jati as the basis of India's prosperity, similar to the guilds of Europe is also a well-known fact. Scholars such as Dr. S. Kalyanraman of theSaraswati Research Centre have written about this topic. And the jati continues to be the basis of the retail trade in India, in small and medium businesses. These are under attack from the purveyors of Walmart. And since the asuric forces have a dual strategy of concealing their historic evils and present ones by finger-pointing at the failures of Hindu society, it is important for Hindus to continue to write about THEIR historic evils (notwithstanding kindly advice). This is not only a moral imperative but is also good strategy. It is surprising that Dr. Elst (otherwise shrewd in his assessments) fails to see that. Tried and tested methods must be adhered to, even while welcoming relevant new suggestions. All the above is well-known and one need not retrace our steps here. Our present engagement requires not only continuing to deal with the Dalit question both nationally and at international forums, but it also requires that we do not forget our moorings which is Hinduism. This is a strength that is not available to non-Hindus, and it is vitally important that we do not allow their impatience with Hindu attitudes to deprive us of this strength. It was very moving to see a comment on the article (When non-Hindus try to defend Hindus) from a Hindu which said: I know Brahmins who will not eat their food until they know that no one in their vicinity is starving. This is known in Hindu parlance as annadanam. These are the small mercies that a non-Hindu cannot relate to. Many such instances can be multiplied. They are a reminder that Hindus cannot/should not forget their moorings, and be enticed by glamorous sounding solutions. » The writer is a Political Philosopher who taught Political Philosophy at a Canadian university.

"CASTE," "INTER-FAITH DIALOGUE", "DEMOCRACY," 

"FREEDOM OF RELIGION" ARE POLITICAL WEAPONS OF THE "WHITE CHRISTIAN WEST," MORE POWERFUL THAN CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THEIR ATTACK ON HINDU SOCIETY AND ON HINDUISM

REPLY TO DR. KOENRAAD ELST'S ARTICLE BELOW

BY

RADHA RAJAN

There has been a cynical attempt to provoke a section of Hindu thinkers simply as grist for the mill of keeping a website going with sensationalism.

 

First an old article by Dr. Koenraad Elst is put up on Bharata Bharati without mention of when the article was written. The Editor, a non-Indian Hindu living in India for several decades now cannot pretend that he did not know the extreme sensitivity of the issues raised in the article by Dr. Elst.

 

And yet he retrieved it on the lame pretext that he suspects more attacking articles on Hindu dharma's organic institutions like jaati, varna and kula are underway. Maybe and again, maybe not.

 

Even if we take the editor's explanation at face value, then surely retrieving an article critical of Hindu intellectuals is wrong war strategy considering that some of the best writings on our varna and jaati dharma have come from Hindu intellectuals rooted in our dharma and who are not only inward looking but also have a sound knowledge of geopolitics and how the White race uses "caste" for its geopolitical ends.

 

The role of the editor of Bharata Bharati must necessarily come under scrutiny because there is palpable discomfiture about my criticism of the white race and its relentless pursuit of world dominance.

 

The white race is a political entity which has used politics to further its religion and used religion to further its politics. More importantly it has used political instruments to do racism and used racism to do politics.

 

For Ishwar Sharan and Dr. Elst to bemoan my critic of the white race and accuse me of  "ignoring" the brown church only exposes their own shortcomings as intellectuals. As non-Indian Hindus and Hindu "sympathiseres" they are sending the signal that they will walk with us for only as long as we do not look even from the corner of our eyes at the white race and its past and present depradations.

 

The white race has not ceased from its manic desire to bring all the world under its feet either directly under the White Church through religious conversion and demographic aggression or as vassal/slave countries of the White State. Look around the world all of you and see what is happening in every corner of the globe.

 

The white race will use sections of the target people to turn against their own (good old divide and rule tactic) and eventually serve their religious and political ends. This has been the bitter experience of the Hindus of this bhumi who have seen their own leaders allow their bhumi to be partitioned. "Inter-religious dialogue", forceful imposition of "democracy" are contemporary weapons of war where the objective is to propel as leaders of the target country individuals who will be pro-white - either pro white church or white state.

 

Dr. Elst must surely know that the muslim league succeeded only because the imperial British government had already decided to partition every country in Asia and the Hindu political leadership was not only clueless about how to deal with the muslim league but they also did not know how to deal with the British government.

 

Hindus must never lose sight of the fact that we lost territory. We did not lose it because the muslim league partitioned the bhumi. We lost territory because we did not defend and protect our territory both against the msulims and also the white government.

 

All those who picked up arms against the enemy and those who destroyed the enemy intllectually were removed forcibly from public life. Isn't Dr. Elst's article an echo of something similar? (Editor's note: Retort against the defender's of Hindus as ill equipped and anachronistic ill informed duds who are not given to winning friends and influencing people using Dale Carnegie tactics, when they are in fact under siege with systematic psychological warfare spearheaded by the generic Church and Western political blocks working together with common bias and common goal of world domination)

 

Dr. Elst's perspective on the muslims, the white race, the white church and white state is natural. But to say Hindu intellectuals must also subscribe to his perspective is unnatural not to say intriguing coming from a friend.

 

I have no desire to make friends or enemies. Speaking for myself I relate to humans only when compelled to do so for the ideas they represent or propagate.

 

To reduce thinkers to the personal domain is clever war startegy but will not work with Hindus.  This undermines an important criterion when waging war - to look at the enemy as monolith. Gandhi's crime was that he exhorted Hindus and his political vehicle the INC was not to look at our enemies as monolith. He reduced the enemy to personal relationships; worse, his personal relationships.

 

Contemporary white political weapons of war include "freedom of religion" and "democracy". The white race - its church and state is pouring money into India's brown church and brown adherents. Just go to the vigil website which has reproduced the ministry of home affairs fcra website details about the quantum of money the white race is pouring into India which is empowering the brown church.

 

The century when individuals were converting because of untouchability is the past. Today people are converting because the brown church is throwing white money at India to gather people into their army for the war to conquer the world for Christ.

 

Sensitive Hindus and India's polity have been waging war against untouchability and these serious issues are not "reactive" and not at all dealt with keeping PR in mind or the white race and its vicious anti-Hindu posturing in mind. (Editor's note: See Rakesh Bahadur's treatise. Hindus have done more for its minorities than the Americans have in the 250 years for Native Americans or African Americans, these are facts, and that is Hindus have done it for 65 or more years consistently in a sustained manner with positive results

yet in India the problems are of greater magnitude and the good work is not publicized by the media. This is done not to please the West, the generic Church, RR or Dr. Elst.).

If the editor of Bharata Bharati is indeed a dasanami sanyasi he should try and look at what contemporary weapons the white race, the white church and white state are usuing against Hindus including witless jihadis. And Dr. Elst must give up his desire to make Hindu intellectuals see the whole world thru his lens.

 

Not that this is a salve for my critic of Dr. Elst but it was he who inspired me to take to combative political wiritng. Only I do it as a politically conscious Hindu nationalist. The teacher must take pride when his student makes a mark with her work which seems to rattle certain corridors of power. RR  

 

  

 

New post on Bharata Bharati Rejoinder: The art of making enemies – Koenraad Elst This article is a rejoinder to Dr. Elst's critics who commented on his Dalits and racism in anti-Hindu propaganda Hinduism and race Swami and writer Ishwar Sharan, whom I know from contributing to his book on Saint Thomas, has republished on the Bharata Bharati website a text I wrote in 2007, on how the Churches have repositioned themselves vis-à-vis racism, and how, in contrast, Hindus choose to live in the past and keep on using the language appropriate for the colonial age. Shrill tirades against “white Christian nations” will not do to counter the missionary effort in India, now mostly carried out by natives. Christianity has changed races several times in its history and its association with white racism was only a phase, long gone now and kept alive only in some Hindus’ fevered imagination. Even the odd expressions of white racism, like the recent attack on Sikhs in the US probably was, are typically condemned by the Churches. In reaction, Mrs. Radha Rajan has written on 28 August 2012: “Swamiji, why this renewed attack against Hindu intellectuals now? And permit me to be blunt, none of this will deter me from always looking out for Sonia Gandhi even in our religious domain.” Well, go ahead and criticize the Italian bar-maid who became the de facto “empress of India”. I don’t think she is all that important, but I agree that the Churches can put pressure on Christian politicians to facilitate their operations. I don’t think any country should have a foreigner as its most powerful politician, but native Christian politicians are more dangerous to Hinduism, and a few have more conversions to their credit. But more serious is that my article gets perceived as an “attack against Indian intellectuals”. Well, to the extent that Indian intellectuals identify the Churches with “foreign” and “white”, I think indeed that they are anachronistic and wrong. That is just my dissenting opinion, which I don’t conceive of as an “attack”. I find differences of opinion quite normal, the very stuff of intellectual life, and those who can only see them as attacks are not intellectuals. Hindu racism? Radha Rajan says: “I don’t want to be told how to fight my battles and what weapons to use.” My knowledge of ground realities in India is very limited, but through my journeys, through the writings of Hindu activists and now through the internet, I get the impression of Hindus suffering defeat upon defeat. There are some signs of light, some local Hindu gains, but over all, the evolution is not good. Just look at the demographic gains of Christianity and Islam, and the confused and weak stand of the Hindu’s main political representative, the BJP. So the weapons being used do not seem to be very effective. I think they could use a reality check, hence my article. Radha Rajan also wrote: “Now this is once again white intellectual elite attempting to define the parameters and idiom of racism. Racism is as much about race as it is about politics as done by the white race. The white race, as a political category is despised by its victims for the political instruments it devised and used to subjugate non christians and non whites.” The age in which the white race dominated the world lasted only a few centuries. Indeed, Hindus never tire of telling us that in the premodern age, most world trade was in the hands of the Asian powers India and China, so Western dominance was only a brief intermezzo. It is quite unhistorical to base essentialist pronouncements on such a short episode. Don’t Hindus think in ages, Westerners only in centuries? But I agree that here, Radha Rajan represents a very large Hindu opinion. That section of Hindus claims to engage with Christian missionaries but is in fact fixated on “whites”, a vanishing minority among them. But it is so much easier if you can recognize the enemy by his skin colour instead of by a complicated thing such as his religious ideology. And Hindus, just like most people, like to take the easy option. Moreover, this reduction of complex ideological issues to race is highly secular, so there is a premium in secular India on preferring the Christian or Muslim race-follow to the differently-coloured ideological friend. That is why the fearful BJP will prefer to say that, for instance, Bangladeshi intrusion on Bodo lands is not a religious but a foreigners’ problem, even while Mumbai Muslims express their solidarity not with their Bodo fellow-countrymen but with their foreign fellow-Muslims. According to Radha Rajan: “To now say that this dislike and expression of dislike of the white race is also racism is to say a rape victim's natural revulsion of the male species is sexism. The white race either wants to be ring master with the rest of the world playing circus animals or it wants us to look up at it helplessly while it assumes a paternalist role.” It is not clear whether she (and some other Hindus who have reacted) differentiates between my view and my description of the Churches’ view, but since we’re all deemed white, I guess it’s all the same. This undisguised expression of anti-white racism may earn her some popularity but is misconceived. I will not bother with the moral issues in her explicit defence of racism. Maybe she can show its successes, and they would justify it, who knows? What I want to explain, is that this is not about “natural revulsion” against the white race, but just the reverse. As US-based Communist Vijay Prashad once explained, Hindus in the US pretended to be white when being white was fashionable (basing their own claim of whiteness on the Aryan Invasion Theory) but changed over to a non-white identity when being non-white became more gainful. So, in this construction of things, which Chennai-based Mrs. Radha Rajan must know through the similar discourse of the Dravidian parties, she is a lot whiter than she pretends. Caste discrimination is presented by the Churches and their Dalit wardens as precisely a case of white racism against natives, viz. by the Aryan invaders who became the upper castes (including Radha Rajan’s own Iyengar Brahmins) against the aboriginals, who were turned into the lower castes. This is not about the British colonizers resenting the Indians’ anticolonialism and therefore criticizing anti-white racism, but about the anticolonialism of the lower castes resenting the earlier colonization by the Aryan invaders, the ancestors of Radha Rajan. To the British back then, and to the Dalit and Dravidianist spokesmen now, upper-caste imperialism is of the same kind (essentially foreign, though far more thorough) as British imperialism. Whether there was an Aryan invasion may be disputed, but I merely observe that the Churches are successfully building on that scenario. The art of making enemies This is also an occasion for me to express my amazement at Hindus’ propensity to see and make enemies everywhere, even among Hindus. In the Panchatantra, where a teacher has to instruct some princes through fables in the art of statecraft, one of the five books is devoted to the art of making friends. But today’s Hindus seem better at the art of turning friends into enemies. Radha Rajan and other Vijayvaani authors have earlier attacked the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha for its 2008 “Jerusalem Declaration”, a remarkable diplomatic victory for the Hindus. The underlying theology may have been unsophisticated, if only because the event was rather improvised, and criticism is allowed, but hey, Jews have common interests with Hindus (the defence against Muslim terrorism and against Christian missionary subversion being most acute), so this building of bridges deserved some applause. They have also criticized and antagonized the NRIs in general, Rajiv Malhotra in particular. US-based ex-businessman Mr. Malhotra has built an enormous database of highly relevant information, and developed pro-Hindu and pro-India arguments in his books. While fighting Christianity, he is attacked in the back by envious Hindus. If it can be any consolation, Malhotra is no better than Radha Rajan when it comes to making friends. I have witnessed how he antagonized many Hindus through his sharp and unforgiving (but truthful) language, even some people who were allies only a year ago. At any rate, at a time when the situation of Hindus in India and Hindus abroad is ever more similar, wisdom dictates that these two categories refrain from antagonizing each other. And now, Radha Rajan also wants to antagonize Hinduism’s Western allies. When I first came to India, the Ayodhya movement was gathering strength, and what I, as coming from the country where most EU institutions are housed, got to hear all the time from Hindu activists, was the theme of a “Western-Indian alliance against Islam”. Back then, Hindus were vaguely aware of a similarity between the West and India. Thus, colonialism started as a way of by-passing the Muslims, who threatened Europe for a thousand years and conquered parts of it. As late as the early 19th century, Europeans and even American seafarers were victims of enslavement by Muslims, just like the Hindus. (Of course Europe and the Islamic world also cooperated, though problematically: the European slave-trade, of which the abolition’s 200th anniversary occasioned my article, started as a Portuguese subcontractor’s operation in a far larger and centuries-old Muslim slave-trade.) Today, European worries about Islamic encroachment remind one of what India is going through. So, among other things, we have that in common. But now, Christianity is seen as more of a threat than Islam, and it gets identified with the West. Indeed, Westerners who have explicitly broken with Christianity are routinely dismissed by Hindu internet warriors as “Christians”. At the same time, recent interventions by America and/or NATO, made possible by their victory in the Cold War, have made the West seem very unsympathetic. Attacks on India’s old NAM ally Yugoslavia, on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (with the French and British leaders shaking hands there and looking very neo-colonial) are not liked by a people that remembers foreign invasions too well, albeit that these came from its Chinese and Pakistani neighbours. These Western interventions were criminal and mistaken, but it’s not to me that our governments will listen. At any rate, this development doesn’t change the earlier anti-Islamic equation, but it has changed the Hindus’ focus. So, some Hindus invent reasons to treat “whites” as the enemy: the Partition of India back then and the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh today is blamed on the British (The Empire’s Last Casualty is the secular-sounding title of a recent Hindu book on Bangladeshi persecution of its minorities), not on its real Islamic perpetrators; the Pakistani and otherwise Islamic terror attacks on India are blamed by Vijayvaani on covert American influence. It seems that some Hindus are white supremacists: for something meaningful to happen they always have to find a white hand behind it. Well, suit yourselves. I only tried to sharpen the Hindu perception of how the Churches function today, and therefore to correct some misperceptions. But I would never want to tell Hindus how best to face their self-declared enemies. If you prefer to live in the colonial past or in a delusional world of your own creation, do your worst. If your weapons are more effective than mine, show me the successes you achieve with them. Only, I hear laughter in the background. It must be by brown Christians who go on converting Hindus all while Hindu activists have their gaze fixed on “white racist Christian missionaries”. » This article is a rejoinder to Dr. Elst's critics who commented on  Dalits and racism in anti-Hindu propaganda – Koenraad Elst » Dr. Koenraad Elst distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and eager to dissent. He studied at the Catholic University of Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, for which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998. As an independent researcher he has earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state. See also Caste: The view from Belgium – Koenraad Elst Dalits and racism in anti-Hindu propaganda – Koenraad Elst When non-Hindus try to defend Hindus – Vijaya Rajiva