For over a decade, I have
tracked a US-based movement that has fabricated new identities like
"Dalit-Christian" and "Afro-Dalit". The notion of Dalit-Christian
was developed to convince the Dalits that they were non-Hindus, and that
Hinduism was a system of exploitation for which Christianity was the
solution. The Afro-Dalit project is based on racist ideas, according to
which, Dalits are the "blacks of India". This manipulation of
history says that just as white Americans enslaved blacks, so too Hindus
and the Indian nation have been enslaving the Dalits.
Such movements seek to separate
Indians from their own heritage, break their sense of unity and convert
Hindus. In a clever strategy, these evangelists and leftists come amongst
us as wolves in sheep's clothing, using the cover of human rights for
India's downtrodden, thereby gaining sympathy from the rich, the powerful
and the naïve.
This "Christian-Afro-Dalit"
narrative is often extended to include Dravidians into the fold. The
objective is to cause internal rift between these groups and the rest of
the country. I have labelled such movements as forces "breaking
India", and have spent considerable energy exposing them through
direct encounters.
A very large Christian seminary
located in New Jersey, barely five minutes from my home, is one of the
major factories for churning out these ideologies. This seminary is amongst
the largest in the United States and has a sizeable investment in studying
Hinduism from an adversarial perspective. Many Indian sepoys are trained
here to "break India".
This seminary's top expert on
Hinduism is a senior evangelist, Richard Fox Young. Their tactic is the old
divide-and-rule policy. They have studied the prey well and designed their
tactics with precision. They infiltrate Hindu communities as Trojan horses.
The naïve amongst us welcome them in the spirit of dharma. They pretend to
have a genuine interest in us, to want to study us and write about us for
our benefit. Most Indians do not see them for the Trojan horses that they
are, and unwittingly make themselves complicit in breaking India.
It might surprise many Indians
that such Christian projects have co-opted Indian leftists, feminists,
post-colonialists and non-Christian groups that share the common
ideological goal of undermining Hindu dharma. I use the term
"Hinduphobia" to refer to this mindset. As expected, they have
had me in their crosshairs for a long time, making unceasing attempts to
silence me. They know I have a goldmine of data on them, and that I am not
afraid to stick my neck out to unmask them.
{
|
The
irony is that I am accused of stealing my own heritage back. What is
never being mentioned is that this American scholar, in fact, has built
his career taking Indian materials and spinning them in sophisticated
English in his own name.
|
The most recent attack against
me came immediately after I announced my next book, The Battle for
Sanskrit, at the World Sanskrit Congress in Bangkok just a few weeks ago.
The traditional Sanskrit scholars loved the vision of the book. However,
Western scholars and their Indian cronies (who showing little self-respect,
blindly dance to their tune) were angered by it. They mounted a weak charge
against me, hoping that some dirt would stick even if their charge could
not, using their widespread media contacts to spread the message far and
wide.
Their one charge is that an
earlier book of mine "plagiarises" material from a scholar named
Nicholson. They avoid mentioning the critical fact that the book cites and
names Nicholson some 30 times in the chapter in which his works are
relevant. They alleged that I should have added quotation marks in a few
other instances. However, numerous independent readers have read my book in
detail, and published their findings online that, in every case, reference
was clearly made to Nicholson, explicitly or implicitly.
It also turns out that Nicholson
had copied ideas from Indian writers on the history of Hindu philosophy.
The irony is that I am accused of stealing my own heritage back. What is
never being mentioned is that this American scholar, in fact, has built his
career taking Indian materials and spinning them in sophisticated English
in his own name.
There was a backlash to Young's
vicious and unfounded plagiarism charges against me. His petition demanding
that my publishers withdraw my books garnered merely 250 signatures as
against the over 10,500 signatures in the counter-petition to support me.
Both sides presented their evidence in their respective petitions. The
public had spoken.
Rather than accepting that their
hit-job had failed, my opponents started vicious media attacks against me.
Young took on the role of the infamous General Dyer, while the Indian
media's sepoys obeyed his command to attack me. None of these media persons
seemed to know anything about the book that was the subject of discussion.
Yet, they were making judgements, not independently, but collectively, like
a mafia. The content of their writings seem to suggest a pre-packaged media
brief, a laziness to pursue independent verification, an inability to think
critically, and Hinduphobia.
This attack on me triggered a
swift and powerful response. Within a few days, numerous Hindu writers
surfaced to defend me using their own perspectives and arguments. Contrary
to my attackers' expectations, not only did we hold our ground, but we
demonstrated the ability to mount a unified counterattack against the
Hinduphobic media.
Many journalists wrote pieces
that revealed an abysmal ignorance of the issues and arguments on both
sides. One website shot off five articles in rapid succession, each
restating the same few points.
Despite the Indian media's claim
of supporting free speech and truth-telling, mainstream newspapers failed
to carry my rebuttals to their extensively published articles filled with
misinformation. They took to describing me as a "wealthy
businessman", even though I have been retired from all for-profit activities
for over 20 years now, having gifted all my business interests to the
management that had worked for me. My family did not inherit any shares or
royalty interests in any of the companies I owned. I decided to make a
clean break from accumulating wealth through any means whatsoever.
It is amazing that editors and
journalists in these top newspapers failed to gather such basic facts and
made outright errors.
It is a dishonour to journalism
that these media persons refused to balance their reporting with the widely
available counter evidence to the spurious charges against me. It seems
that their approach was geared to sensationalism. No one asked the first
and simple question: Why would I name Nicholson some 30 times if I wanted
to deny him as the source of some ideas in a chapter of my book?
It would be most laughable, if
it were not so serious a breach of ethics, that they all fell into the trap
of presenting Richard Fox Young as if he worked at Princeton University,
when in reality he teaches at a Christian seminary in the town of
Princeton.
The result has been reader
deception, a parody of journalism, injustice to me, and a cowardly refusal
to allow me to present a rebuttal in the same newspapers and with the same
prominence given to the attacks. It is a shameful day for journalism in
India.
- Rajiv Malhotra
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment