To the point, its the Congress, leftists and foreign governments that are milking this for purely strategic purposes. By the standards of this game, it is par for the course in the subcontinent alongwith the Kashmir denial, Bangladesh denial or Sikh denial.

Early History of India: Playing word games. The AIT has long since been discredited, but “diffusion theory” is still rock solid and something I accept.

The AIT is being taught in India – and to that extent, it has not been discredited – so this point is moot until the textbooks are updated.

I fully accept that there is outsize hostility towards Hindus amongst the Indian intelligentsia, but there is little actual harm that these cafe revolutionaries can do. Putting the VHP in charge will guarantee our speedy demise. Actual physical harm to Hindus is largely due to incompetence/corruption in the largely Hindu IPS and if anything minorities suffer more than us Hindus because of this.

The point about the IPS is true, but then read up above for why guns are trained elsewhere. Like any group the VHP will mobilise for those who advance its interests, but since it is not a political party, it can never be in charge. Since both Congress and BJP pander to the VHP, t is up to the parties to decide how much influence they want to grant the VHP alongside the other religious groups.

Louie,

E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (although he renounced his jati title he was proud of his jati heritage all his life, the heritage that comes from belonging to a community that migrated to Tamil Nadu from Karnataka and assumed suzerainty) was no great lover of Tamil and more than once called it a kattumirandi bashai or barbarian’s tongue.

1) Gujurat Denial: Whether or not there are Leftists milking this for all its worth in portraying Hindus as the villains of South Asia, it does not change the fact that the Modi government either abetted these crimes or looked the other way when the mobs extacted “justice”. To own up to that doesn’t prevent us from creating awareness of crimes against Hindus in parts of South Asia where we are the minority (e.g. HAF’s work). If anything we will find more secular Muslims to partner with. This has been an evolution on my part too as I had initially wanted to file this away under “sad but typical two sided blood letting”.

2) Early History of India: Playing word games. The AIT has long since been discredited, but “diffusion theory” is still rock solid and something I accept. It’s only problematic for those of the Internet Hindus that view the Rg Veda as the spring from which ALL of Hindu/Buddhist/Jain tradition flows from. Many of these much excoriated academics actually attribute only the soma cult, spoked wheel chariots/horses, Rg Vedic language and the Rg Vedic pantheon (i.e. Indra, Maruts, Varuna) to Indo-Aryans. They see the later Vedas and heterodoxies as being Sanskrit reformulations of ideas that had been bouncing around the desh before the arrival of Rg Vedic culture. These academics are not DMK flunkies either, they view this diffusion as being characterized more by intermarriage & trade than conflict. If anything Witzel would have EVR spinning in his grave (or his ashes swirling in his urn) as he posits that Austro-Asiatic (and not proto-Tamil) may have been the language of the IVC.

3) Whinging about outsider status (in India !): I fully accept that there is outsize hostility towards Hindus amongst the Indian intelligentsia, but there is little actual harm that these cafe revolutionaries can do. If we can’t capture the imagination of our brightest so they choose positions in academia & the media, perhaps we should accept the status quo. Putting the VHP in charge will guarantee our speedy demise. Actual physical harm to Hindus is largely due to incompetence/corruption in the largely Hindu IPS and if anything minorities suffer more than us Hindus because of this.

It’s been a while since I have posted, so I hope it is understood that these criticisms come from someone who is a proud Hindu

India does have a model–I mentioned him above. As for leaders, Cameron??? I think it’s high time India start looking beyond a third rate power on the verge of bankruptcy. What India needs is another PV Narasimha Rao. He was responsible for india’s emergence as a nuclear power (vajpayee was his personal rep at the un conference on disarmament), keeping Kashmir within India, the look east policy, the economic reforms, and realist statecraft. If India is to survive the tyranny of geography she is faced with, she will need another in his mold to play the high stakes game of realpolitik that is being thrust upon her.

Let’s try a Miller-Modigliani and drop assumptions

-20 hr weeks + top grad school + great job -80 hr week + OK grad school + great job

You can try many combinations like that. In many of them you are likely to come up with a scenario where smug-smirking Sagarika talking to an IH type gets Good Will Hunted and/or Annie Halled! It’s happened that is why we are talking about it! Forget the case of Witzel being pwned by BB Lal – there is some honor in getting schooled by BB Lal after all – doyen of Indian archeology. But Thapar getting pwned by a Sanskrit-Tamizh scholar who works in the bio sector in San Diego? It happens!

ah, the number of unjustified assumptions one needs to unpack in that one sentence…

That laundry list tells us what? There is an elite and it looks out for itself before it the common folks.

And this elite isn’t what I would call liberal (they wouldn’t know what it meant if it bit them in the wazoo), more like laissez faire an easy going anything goes attitude that any change is OK as long, “as it doesn’t affect our lifestyle or mangle it in any way”. What they see around them and find difficult to accept aren’t problems to be worked through, but inconveniences to be dismissed. “How can we get rid of these things with the least fuss?” It is an inbred circle that feeds off itself and reserves the time of glitterati everywhere for itself. The US MSM which is the least familiar with India goes for the Lowest Common Denominator on any story and asa rule links up with Indian correspondents who think and talk like them. Which is why many of the Sagarika Ghose types become experts on everything for the foreign media. OTOH grass roots US journos who work in India – notably my fellow Clevelander (Go Browns!) Matthew Schneeberger who has lived in Bombay for >5 years and does 1st person reporting for Rediff.com is virtually unknown to the US MSM. The chatter in the Indian MSM is construed as genuine expression of opinions in India and finds its way into policy at least at the individual congressperson’s desk in the US, less so though in UK these days.

There are fair number of fundamentalist Christian and Muslim activists and their supporters in India who have managed to cozy up with these Indian MSM mavens for a variety of reasons. First the Christian groups. Some like John Dayal seem definitely out of place, being a Catholic, because that is not the way his Church works, being very particular about method, ritual, the guidance and authority of institutions etc. But for a variety of reasons (doctrinal debates within the RC Church that have found their way into India, tension between upper caste and lower caste RC in India and the fear that the latter will turn Protestant or even worse Pentecostal/Evangelical/AG) people like Dayal have found a constituency within their Church. And they show their clout by getting US entities to back their actions in India. Where other Protestant Church groups are concerned it is entirely about harvesting souls in India come what may, Project Joshua, Project 10-40 etc., And to keep these activities funded (dollars by the boatload) there needs to be a steady stream of press about what a horrible place India is and how there is no freedom to harvest souls. There is no questioning this whine, no counterpoint to the picture they pain and no opportunity afforded to present the other side. And then we are not even talking here about congregation barons like Ezra Sargunam of hte Evangelical Church of India Chennai, who used to broker bank and railway jobs collecting 1000s for his church in the process. When the Church of S.India started losing congregants to ECI, the CSI itself went extreme and one Bishop’s son turned evangelical! Many of us know about the intellectual poseur Kancha Illiah. How many of us know or care that he has on innumerable occasions, including on TV in discussion with Sagarika Ghose, declared that his prime objective is to wipe out Hinduism by any means possible,? Remember the recent controversy over Franklin Graham or the many Faux Channel blowhards and trash like the WorldNut Daily, and the likes of Coulter and Malkin that have more than once pilloried Islams, Muslims, called for the destruction of mosques etc? How do we react to Daniel Pipes and his writings? So what does the Internet Hindu do when she (Sandhya Jain) won’t be invited to debate Kancha Illiah before Sagarika, or won;t be allowed to talk by Sagarika even if invited (like it happens always with Swapan Dasgupta) and their letters won’t be published in newspapers? Worse still the same bilge is recycled in the US MSM when textbooks are under review or some entity like the USCIRF is discussing “religious freedom” in India. From Dizzy’s lit you can see that some of these mavens and their US based Indian-American collaborators are working with some of the fundamentalist legislators from the US (and others like Santorum who have thankfully been voted out).

Just as some fundamentalist Christian activists have been working with the Indian MSM elite, fundamentalist Muslim activists too have. Again here reasons are similar. One of the problems that India’s Muslim parties (the different factions of the Muslim League) which continue to have an extraordinary hold over the lives of Muslims in several parts of India, have faced in the last 10 years in Southern coastal areas is the decline in job opportunities in the Gulf. For decades these parties have brokered jobs for unskilled Muslims in the Gulf, and collected a tithe of sorts. It has never been easy to break out of the grip of these parties, because their grip extends all the way to the wealthier business families. So whether it is coconut tapper’s son in Manjeri or tanner’s son in Kanpur, the League gets into the act, brokers the deal in some way or the other collecting a tithe and setting up an annuity. Of course Muslims in India aren’t a homogeneous group, so there are some business savvy Muslim communities that have transcended these middle-men – the Bohras, Memons, Ismailis, or even Sunnis with well established business clusters like in TN’s leather land. But what happens when traditional opportunities decline and some people cannot acquire the training necessary to tap new opportunities? In the earlier days it used to be Saudi soft-fundamentalist money that helped set up vocational centers, religious instruction centers etc., and kept underwriting expenses. Jihad groups from Pakistan naturally moved in. From then it is a competition for manpower between the soft-jihad types and hard-jihad types. There is nothing benign about Saudi funded schools as the ongoing controversy over the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax, Va., exemplifies. The Indian MSM elite for reasons best known to itself has provided a forum to every kook for balance or god knows what – including SIMI supporters and the like – who in turn have connected with legislators in the UK or US who represent large Muslim populations. We are not talking of 1000s or millions of constituents who like everyone else (regardless of religion) is busy holding down a job, educating their children, making the mortgage and paying bills. We are talking a of a few who have found a very ingenuous way to get by through “social activism” or some such thing.

What then is the Internet Hindu to do when there is so much detail that is missing in the MSM? Over 50% (some say 75%) of India’s media companies are owned by legislators (almost entirely from the Congress). The DMK family – oops political party – runs newspapers and TV channels – OK GOP owns Faux News or is it the other way round?

So there is this guy (or gal) who worked v.hard thru high school putting in 80 hour weeks, got into a good engineering program, a good US grad school, followed by a good job, and now this person finally finds the time to start reading about the wide wide world. They are smart of course so tracking down the news separating the fact from the hyperbole isn’t hard. And they are appalled at what they read. Their favourite papers, news channels, they find now have been spewing abuse. The anti-IDRF hate campaign was one such eye opener for a lot of IAs. An engg prof and a communication studies prof got together to rip the Prashad-Mathew tissue of fabrication – yes Internet Hindus can write and very well – not all of them study the sciences/engg some of them study the humanities. I talked to a bunch of students at my U about why they should – even if they aren’t going to contribute a penny – at least read about the work Ekal Vidyalaya and AIM for Seva undertake before swooning over Asha and Co. Now at the same U Ekal Vidyalaya and AIM for Seva have benefits being organized – another NGO – Udavum Karangal has quit working Asha.

Just as the late Girilal Jain used to say that secularism in India is a debate among Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs on how to take the tradition forward, a lot of the anti-Hindu activism encouraged by the Indian MSM is unknowingly helping sustain battles going on elsewhere within Christianity and Islam.

The standard one is mostly meant to be a shared mythology among a society. Intellectually we know at this age that the founding fathers were motivated as much by profit and an extreme sense of entitlement as they were by enlightenment principles, but emotionally most still conceive of them in their idealized forms as heroes. It’s healthy for kids to have those kinds of national heroes and that sort of unifying mythology. It’s only partially about who they really were, but it’s mostly about what they stood for and what we need them to be. For that you need a standard account for people to go by that’s constructive and true enough to be accurate for the layman, if not necessarily the complete and nuanced picture that the scholar or historian should understand. As you get older then you can start introducing the complexity and nuance and have people questioning the premises, but they need to be rooted in something before they can go about doing any sort of analysis. As Tagore said, “Liberation from bondage to the soil is no freedom for the tree.”