PART 1
This collection of twelve brilliant essays by Dr. Saumya Dey can have a clear alternative name: “The Dummies Guide to Deal with Communists and Liberals,” with the dummies being the gullible or anti-Hindu Indian ideologues. The twelve arrows dipped in cold reason, logic, and hard facts aim straight into the heart of the philosophy of the rainbow left-liberal-secular-communist-Marxist-Nehruvian crowd. This book deconstructs their distortive discourses antithetical to our traditional cultures, philosophies, and social structures.
The power that these academics and “thought leaders” hold, in the academic centers and the media, to manipulate public opinion is despite a shrinking political base. However, the tide seems to be slowly turning as people from the non-Left are making themselves heard. In this important group is Dr. Saumya Dey who has the authority and the experience to take on their provocative ideas — inappropriate and dangerous in the Indian context. The authority comes from being an academic historian at OP Jindal University. The experience comes because he has studied at the two hottest eternal springs of these philosophies — Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and the University of Delhi. So, he has a rare insight into the deep workings of the elements that are seeking to undermine the country at various levels in myriad forms.
Each essay makes an interesting point, with the book divided into two parts: Politics and Culture; and History. In the first part, he looks at the evolution of “Cultural Marxism,” which looks at themes of exploitation in practically anything and everything around us. This, when perpetuated by the sympathetic crowds in the media, causes immense damage to our cultural, social, and religious fabric. There is an urgent need to repair the damage and uproot the noxious influences, but before that, it is necessary to understand the “how” and “why” of the damage. This book fills that need, admirably.
In the second part of the book, the author traces the history of Pre-partition Pakistan and the dynamics of Muslim bitterness as the idea of a country based on religion came into existence. People like Ambedkar did support partition, but for completely different reasons than told to us. The author also looks at the evangelical basis of Orientalism in colonial times, which helped manufacture and nurture the Aryan-Dravidian divide, continuing till date. The anti-Hindu propaganda of the colonial times did not die after independence, unfortunately. Nehru’s dislike for the traditional Hindu values gave strength to the left-oriented powerful universities and educational centers, which in turn copiously produced highly distorted versions of history.
HINDUISM IS GOOD AND TOLERANT; HINDUTVA IS BAD AND INTOLERANT
The author sets the tone in the very first chapter, The Cultural Landscape of Hindutva. Hinduism is good and Hindutva is bad, say our liberals. Liberals are very slippery, as they pick up topics to fight for at an alarming pace, and it is difficult to pin them down to a single definition. But they exist in all forms and all colors, sometimes taking up gay rights, sometimes female oppression, and sometimes Islamophobia, and, of course, their favorite punching bag, “Hindutva”.
As Shashi Tharoor, the poster boy of liberalism, claimed, “Hindutva is Hinduism malformed and misrepresented,” because it is a denial of “the diversity within Hinduism itself” – the great variety of beliefs, practices, and social mores that it encompasses. Apparently, Hindutva amounts to a “Semitization” of Hinduism since it is contingent upon belief in “an identifiable God (preferably Rama)” and “principal holy book (the Gita)”. Hindutva is incompatible with the “lived Hinduism of most Hindus,” according to Tharoor, who mischievously claims that “Hinduism is an inward directed faith,” while “Hindutva is an outward directed concept”. This about sums up the arguments against Hindutva by the left/progressives, which Dey disagrees with completely.
Dey says that Hindutva stands for a genuine and vital expanse of the Indic civilizational model. Hindutva was the conceptualization of a cultural frame which has been a historically vital component of the collective Indic self, says the author. “Hindutva is not a word but history,” the author observes quoting Savarkar, who saw this history enclosing “all departments of thought and activity of the Hindu race”. Hindus are a “race” since they inhabit a naturally delimited geographical space – the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu – from the Indus to the seas. Using the frameworks of past thinkers, the author says that Hindutva, when treated as the totality of their ideas, is an ethical continuum that binds dharma with dharā (the land of India) and rājya (state).
With this understanding of Hindutva as a cultural truth, one finds it immanent throughout the course of Indian history. The uniquely Indic consciousness is a philosophical means to order the world and lend it an ethical sense. All culturally authentic Indians are bearers of this consciousness and, hence, of Hindutva. Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bose — all conformed to this philosophy of Hindutva as a dynamic fulfilling the three ideals of dharma, dharā, and rājya.
THE LIBERALS AND THE COMMUNISTS: APART OR UNITED?
The author shows that though they look very different, the two – “liberals” and “communists” are fundamentally the same forms of an “elite reaction.” Communism, in fact, is an outgrowth of liberalism. It is from a stage in the development of liberalism – the European Enlightenment – that communism derives its assessment of religion as being mainly “unreason”.
Similarly, both liberals and communists share the militantly anti-traditional “utilitarianism”, which tests all tradition and custom on the benchmark of “utility” and sought an obliteration of those that hindered progress. Liberalism and communism both have a similar reading of history — a linear, teleological process that should lead to an ideal goal – the universal triumph of “reason” and “progress” or the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Both naturally believe that the state ought to be an instrument in their hands and adopt, if not political, then economic means to turn it into one. In both instances, the major gains go to a small, entrenched, and reactionary elite in charge of the state in question.
Why has there been such an easy and large-scale transfer of values from liberalism to communism? The answer is simple, says the author. The class basis of both is the same – they are forms of authoritarian reaction emerging from the elite. The celebrated liberal thinkers have come from the elite or the gentry; and similarly, the most revered communist prophets too – Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara.
THE FILLING STATIONS AND THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL MARXISTS
Why does JNU have an uneasy relationship with the Indian state? The Left parties of India though sinking in the political field, have active affiliated student bodies, with a more than an active sympathy from the teachers. This is especially true in the Social Sciences and Humanities departments.
The discourses fed and perpetuated here have a constant anti-state slant, basically emerging from a communist mindset which posits that the Indian freedom movement and the later nation-state is a “bourgeois fraud played upon the masses”. The rejection of any expression of national unity like at cricket events or even at the Republic Day Parade is, for them, “bourgeois fraud”.
JNU has many “cultural Marxists,” both teachers and students, in addition to the textual Marxists following the books of Karl Marx. According to them, the Indian nation-state is “Brahmanical” and “patriarchal”; is ideologically rooted in multiple “evils” of the Hindu social order and is fundamentally inclined towards the oppression of women. They hold “Brahmanical collective conscience” responsible for the “judicial murder” of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhatt, avowed terrorists. The author says, “these cultural Marxists continuously construct new oppressor-oppressed binaries; trace continuously the ideological premises of cultural production; and politicize identities to promote a culture of victimhood”.
An “anywhere mindset” characterizes these cultural Marxists — an attitude which “places a high value on autonomy, mobility and novelty and a much lower value on group identity, tradition and national social contracts (faith, flag and family).” They are “just individuals.” But these mindsets come from typically the well-healed minority of the college, ironically.
Satya and Sundara (Truth and Beauty), in Indic thought, are facets of each other. A poster depicting a young sari clad woman with flowers in her hair drawing a rangoli becomes a cause for ruckus since it denotes a “patriarchal attitude” and is portrayed as grossly offensive because “a woman is being used as a decorative motif”. This is the practice of discovering the “ideological premises” of cultural production and making it a cause of deep offense. Cultural Marxism has this deep characteristic: in critiquing, what one feels about a work of art is paramount, not what it consciously intended to achieve or articulate. Apparently, this entitles one to critique it without taking recourse to logic and reason; and accuse it of every sort of ulterior motive.
CULTURAL MARXISM AT THE ROOT OF THE VICTIMHOOD INDUSTRY
The author quotes Dr. Mark Lila who wrote about the liberal breakdown by raising the slogan, “the personal is political,” which implies that the individual’s political life is an extension of one’s preferred identity by race, gender, sexual preference, and so on. The new politics was about seeking recognition for one’s “self-definition”, carrying the potential of infinitely fragmenting politics. This evolved into an oppressor-oppressed binary and spawning of the victimhood industry, with everyone claiming to be a victim of some oppressor. Blacks accusing whites, women accusing men, gays accusing heterosexuals — the binaries multiplying ad infinitum.
Our universities adopted this politics and this thinking not worrying about inexorably fragmenting their own society and culture. The victimhood industry works by a theoretical contrivance called ”deconstruction”, which diligently reduces a culture or society by its ideological underpinnings- “patriarchy”, “Brahmanism” or “normalization of heterosexuality”; and thus demonstrate how those might be aiding the oppression of particular groups of people – women, Dalits, and homosexuals. This goes by the more favored academic term – “critical theory”.
Thus, there is no end to the discovery of new victims and the endless atomization of victimhood in our country. Indian academia craving for prestige by its association with the West become the willing and conscious allies of Western academia in its quest to disrupt the cultural coherence of non-western societies. The cultural Marxists have formed a curious alliance with the traditional Marxists and Islamists in India. The political Left’s embracing of radical Islamists is significantly due to the reason that cultural Marxists have identified the Islamists as “victims” of an Indian state whose premise is “Brahmanical Hinduism”.
ANTI-STATISM IN THE MEDIA AND ACADEMIA
Anti-statism is an intense dislike for any form of intrusion by the state into any aspect of human existence – social, economic, or personal. It has deeply infiltrated our academia and the media; and the author worries about it. Why the soft corner for the breaking forces in the country — the Naxals and the radical Islamists?
Post-colonial theories which look at colonial knowledge systems with antipathy transformed in the social sciences into a postcolonial disaffection with the state. Indian academic anti-statism assumes that traditional Indian dharmic thought is anthropocentric after the western fashion and installs the upper caste Hindu male as the Indian equivalent of the Western white male.
Postmodern theories, which reject metanarratives or great stories possessing a unity and unfolding through history, are also at the root of disliking the state. The state, unfortunately, claims a long history, a metanarrative, through which it exists, or forms, and emerges upon the present. And by default, these metanarratives or grand stories belong to the elite upper-caste Hindu males. The “postmodern” frame of mind is generally why our “liberals” and “radicals” are so hard to engage with and are incapable of accessing the truth or beauty of any kind. Being “postmodern”, they could use anything – some part of their ethical, social, and political outlook – to critique anything under the sun, even if they know or understanding nothing of what they are critiquing.
Subaltern Studies is the third approach that promotes anti-statism in the social sciences, which look for the “subaltern”, the subordinate non-elite, by exploring the “history, politics, economics, and sociology of subalternity” as reflected in “class, caste, gender and office or in any other way.” It seeks to find the “small voice of history” by rejecting statism, the idea that “the life of the state is all there is to history.” The author says that the problem is that somehow, very patronizingly, the contributors to the project assume that the subaltern is inveterately irrational and violent. And this unity of violence and politics gets its justification because the Indian state is no different from the British colonial state.
Not surprisingly, many of the media “insurgents” writing about the victimhood of the innocent Kashmiri terrorists, or the caste atrocities, or the Dalit oppression stories are trained in these places which look at the state as an oppressive machine. The left-of-center politics of the major ruling party after independence allowed these dangerous elements in the media and academia to control the narrative in the country, with some sad and debilitating consequences. Hence, no surprises when stone-pelters in Kashmir get indulgent coverage in the media and a Dalit rape victim gets a screaming headline.
“Liberals” and “radicals” in the media and academia possess a feverish imagination and privilege it above logic and reason, says the author. So much so, that they can be extremely imaginative in randomly accusing one of crimes that they have not committed or even imagined! Feelings and emotions reign supreme, disallowing reason and logic their due place.
Another peculiar feature of these liberals is ”Discourse-ism”, which treats all artistic and literary production as the constituent units of some discourse or the other — patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and so on — in terms of what they might be “talking about”. The conscious individuality of the author or the artist is increasingly discounted when evaluating literature or the fine arts.
INDIAN ACADEMIA AND ITS COLONIZED SELF
Colonial consciousness has not left academia, despite the constant talk of post-colonialism. The social science disciplines (history, political science, economics, sociology) as we know them today originated in the West. This makes it impossible for a social scientist in a non-western society to speak with reference to traditions of knowledge indigenous to it. Our top academics, consciously or unconsciously, are eager to adapt their speech and describe their country in terms supplied by the West to gain legitimacy.
The author describes elegantly how colonialism has survived its political demise. And it is unfortunate that a civilization as vast, complex, and ancient as ours still bears the imprint of colonialism in its thought and language when India becomes “South Asia” and a mere fact of geography; Ravana gets a heroic makeover and Krishna gets transforms into some kind of an Abrahamic deity.
The implications of our academics viewing the Indian traditions of knowledge as being “truly dead” are indeed serious. Since they have no scope of taking recourse to a language that is their own, they end up articulating, and legitimizing the west’s description of it , instead of describing their country in their own language and within their own cultural framework. As an example, they routinely translate dharma as “religion” when there is hardly a correspondence between the two ideas. Dharma is a far more expansive idea than religion. The former includes ethics, morality, and variedness of spiritual paths and choices, while the latter indicates set dogma and ritual. Similar is the case of the word murti as “idol” when it is not quite that. The cow must be food since it is so in the western hemisphere. And so on — hitting hard and hitting fast at our civilizational roots.
PART 2
In the first part, we reviewed the section on “Politics and Culture” from the book. Now, let us look into the section on “History”.
HISTORICAL NOTES — THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC SYNCRETISM
In the History section, the author deals with Islamic political and social dynamics leading to the creation of Pakistan, while deconstructing the popular secular narrative of “syncretism” during Mughal rule. This narrative is the one offered in our standard history books when presenting material on the Mughal Empire, especially so in the Bengal region.
The pre-colonial Muslim imperial system was not “syncretic,” by any stretch of the imagination, says the author. If by syncretism, we mean that the system allowed an unrestricted and consistently legitimate space to non-Muslims to project their faith and culture, we have to assert that it is both a false narrative and simply a feel-good story. The Mughal imperial system was of an “Islamicate” character. It had enforced a broad political and cultural hegemony of Islam which granted Hindus limited room for cultural self-assertion. There were concessions made to Hindus by a rare but extensively cited donation to temples; these were but small islands of relief in the sea of gruesome destruction.
In medieval Bengal, despite a shared culture and a common language, a population of converted Muslims expressing its literature in Bengali sought social and religious individuality – its attitude hardly “syncretic”. The textual evidence in many works suggested a contempt for the Bengali language, labeled as a Hindu tongue. They also had contempt for Hindu deities. The author details the stress and anxiety of Muslims in Bengal in this regard in his previous book, “Becoming Muslims and Hindus”.
The belief in the special moral endowment of Muslims, when combined with the average Indian Muslims’ search for social and religious individuality, carried the potential of developing into a quest for political sovereignty.
THE CREATION OF PAKISTAN
By the end of the colonial rule and in the run-up to independence, there was more than an explicit statement of not wishing to co-exist with the “ethically inferior” non-Muslims in a multi-denominational state. The Indian Muslim aristocracy feared that it will not be even remotely “special” in a post-colonial, democratic India, while the Muslims of East Bengal sought to preserve Islamic “individuality” they had acquired after centuries of effort. The two concerns naturally coalesced to demand an Islamic State, when on March 23, 1940, the All India Muslim League (AIML) passed the “Pakistan Resolution” demanding the creation of “autonomous and sovereign” Muslim states in the “North-Western and Eastern zones of India”.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was a pronounced and visibly hostile attitude among Muslims. The Congress, in its eagerness to appease, sought to pre-emptively concede communal representation for Muslims long before the Muslim League existed. Contrary to what people may believe, communal representation was not a brainchild of the British or the Muslim League, but in fact of the Congress.
Muslim supremacism and a right to parity with Hindus – were very much inherent in the Pakistan idea. One Muslim author argued, like much literature, propaganda, and pamphlets on similar lines, that it was binding upon Muslims to create an Islamic state since “it was a central tenet of Islam”. The ideological basis of Pakistan, Jinnah’s “two-nation theory,” on the other hand, was an attempt at revising Muslims’ minority status in India.
The Muslim elite adopted an exclusivist politics that drew its cultural logic from a hegemonic supremacy they had once enjoyed and the anxiety that its visible erosion caused them, says Dey. It eventually resulted in them creating, with the enthusiastic assistance of a large portion of the Indian Muslim masses, a sovereign political enclosure – the Islamic state of Pakistan.
SELECTIVE READINGS OF AMBEDKAR
There is a curious attempt to merge Islamic causes with “Ambedkarism” these days, a concept purportedly of “equality of consideration, equality of respect and equality of dignity”. A rather strong phenomenon of merging the Muslim cause with those of Dalits and the tribal population is presently underway in what can be only a carefully planned and crafted “Breaking India” strategy by inimical forces.
Ambedkar had some rather harsh things to say about Indian Muslims during his time that scholars have glossed over. In his work, “Pakistan or the Partition of India,” Ambedkar thought that an independent India with a large Muslim population would be an impractical idea. The extra-territorial loyalties of the Indian Muslims, seeing themselves as members of a universal Islamic brotherhood, were a concern for Ambedkar. The Indian Army as it existed then, he pointed out, was predominantly Muslim in its composition. Ambedkar thought that a Muslim-dominated army would not only be of doubtful loyalty but would be hard to control and discipline for a united India. He also saw a failure of Muslims in their efforts to reform too.
As Ambedkar saw, the Congress’s policy of making concessions to Muslims had only “increased Muslim aggressiveness”. This was because Muslims interpreted concessions as a “sign of defeatism on the part of the Hindus and the absence of the will to resist”. He pointed out the concern of Muslims in accepting a Hindu-dominated government since “to the Muslims, a Hindu is a Kaffir” and, consequently, “low-born and without status”. Ambedkar quotes the infamous remark by Maulana Mohammad Ali about Mahatma Gandhi to underline the degree of contempt that a Muslim might nurture for a non-Muslim: “‘However pure Mr. Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Musalman, even though he be without character”. No wonder, Dr. Ambedkar’s thoughts on these matters are buried or severely edited, both by Ambedkarites as well as by Muslims.
Islamists embracing “Ambedkarism” therefore allows them to defeat the “Brahmanical fascist” Indian state while posing as social progressives. Several radical “Ambedkarites” are unfortunately on the same page with the Islamists (on academic campuses like JNU at least), says the author.
EVANGELISTIC BASE OF BRITISH ORIENTALISM, AND THE ARYAN-DRAVIDIAN DICHOTOMY
“Orientalist” knowledge was mandatory to fully understand the histories, religions, and customs of the Asian peoples. The imperialists sought this knowledge to control or manipulate them competently. In fact, so eagerly did the colonizers seek “Orientalist” knowledge that Lord Curzon, that imperialist par excellence, termed it a “part of the necessary furniture of Empire”.
However, in people like William Jones, a certain theological bias never left these “Orientalist” labors. Throughout, he remained prejudiced in favor of his parent’s creed, Christianity. There was no question in Jones’s mind that Christianity was the only true religion. He was in fact searching for traces of Biblical stories in Indian scriptures.
Lt. Colonel Boden thought that “a more critical knowledge of the Sanskrit language” would serve as a means of converting “the Natives of India to the Christian religion”. He bequeathed all his property, worth £25,000, to the University of Oxford to establish the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit. The first “Orientalist” selected to occupy it was H.H. Wilson, a confirmed evangelist.
Later, Monier Williams succeeded him, whose strong wish was the conversion of India to Christianity. He wrote to his wife in 1864 giving the following reason for his obsession with the Rig Veda: ”It is the root of their (Indians) religion, and to show what that root is, is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years”.
Even the much loved and glorified Max Mueller spoke of understanding Hinduism to help the missionaries contest and destroy it. Mueller’s biographer, Nirad Chaudhary says that towards the end of his life Mueller tried to persuade the adherents of the Brahmo Samaj to declare themselves Christian.
Similarly, in the efforts of Caldwell, who with philological speculations claimed that Sanskrit and Brahmins were foreign to South India, we see the attempt to splinter India. He contended that “Brahmans had brought Sanskrit with them when they moved from the north to the south, along with a strain of Hinduism that emphasized idol worship”. The original Tamil religion had neither Sanskrit nor idols, he asserted. By the end of the nineteenth-century, this malicious “race theory” had become a settled fact – that Indian civilization had emerged in the wake of a military clash between invading Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and the losing dark-skinned aborigines, who in turn became the shudras and the slaves.
THE CULTURAL UNEASE OF NEHRU — A TURNING POINT WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN
Beginning with the Islamic invasions and stretching across the Mughal empire, East India Company and the British colonial regime to the present what we see, hear, and read is a persistent attack on our civilizational, traditional, social, and cultural values. Apart from the systematic economic plunder the plunder and evisceration of our history, our cultural values, and our ways and beliefs are what constitute the cultural genocide of India. The end of the colonial rule should have been a great point of redefining ourselves and starting afresh. Most other cultures, after the lifting of their colonial yoke, did so with amazing alacrity. The pride of the growing generations for their respective countries and cultures largely remained intact. Unfortunately, this did not happen in India. Nehruvian thinking, the left-leaning academia, and the media derived from the latter grew in cohesion to continue the same distortions and civilizational shaming of/from the past.
Nehru, suffering from a major cultural disconnect with India, as evidenced from his books and letters, perhaps started all this. The Indian experience and conceptualization of the sacred and the divine made little sense to Nehru. Nehru linked religion to exploitation and the preservation of vested interests, strongly reflecting a Marxist influence. He wrote that religion is “closely associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs which are about uncritical credulousness, a reliance on the supernatural,” a Judeo-Christian description of religion rather than a description or understanding of Dharma. Despite a superficial familiarity with the Dharmic textual corpus, Nehru confidently made a negative assessment of the philosophy of the Upanishads, calling it “individualistic” and damaging to Indian society. Dey argues that this evaluation by Nehru of Indic religions and beliefs was another aspect of Nehru’s appeasement politics. Nehru demanded that President Rajendra Prasad not attend the Somnath Temple inauguration events, but he was more than eager to facilitate the Haj tours pouring hundreds of millions to transport thousands of Muslims to Mecca and back each year.
It was surprising that Nehru could make over-generalizations, like “Indian literature is very backward,” in the contemporary times of Tagore and Subramaniam Bharati. Nirad Chaudhari assesses Nehru not so kindly in his book, ‘Thy Hand, Great Anarch”. Chaudhuri had had the opportunity of observing Nehru while serving as private secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose. Chaudhary writes that Nehru had no direct access to the Indian mind and had a strong antipathy to traditional Hindu ideas and habits. Nehru was both ignorant of Hindu traditions and hostile to them.
Unfortunately, the history departments of our major universities with a left-of-center political bias made a symbiotic relationship with a Nehruvian dominant political ruling class to thoroughly disconnect the Indian student with dharma. The agenda has been to shield the pre-colonial Muslim dynasties from all infamy and promote the empirically untenable narrative of an assimilative and “syncretic” Indian Islam. Our politicians wanted the votes.
Liberals of the Nehruvian caste still dominate Indian media and academia. Hence, they scoff at Dharma but celebrate the “Islamicate,” relishing the kababs of Old Delhi and delighting a dastangoi performance.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The dichotomy of and the division between the “Right” and “Left” is a western idea having no bearing on Indic thought and Dharma. The Left borrowed its language freely and uncritically from the West and created severe distortions in the reading of our past. The Right of the Western world takes a distinctly aggressive posturing while countering the Left, a language which our traditionalists could perhaps never be comfortable with. Reading a few works of contemporaries like Roger Scruton, Jonah Goldberg, or a Ben Shapiro makes it clear that their language is imperfect to take on the left-liberal discourses in India.
Many of the conventional issues in the West raised by the Left, only to be challenged by the Right confuses us. As Hari Kiran Vadlamani says in his article, “Indic Liberal,” that “using the western framework to define ourselves (is) a unique form of (the) ‘Religious Left’ aspiring to become a ‘Liberal Right’. While Left is normally non-religious, (as a push back to the conservatism of the Abrahamic faiths), it need not be so with us. On the economic front, the necessity to provide equal opportunity to the poor warrants an understanding of the need for welfare measures, hence ‘Religious Left’ captures a socially & economically Liberal view.” Vadlamani notes that “…most of us by nature believe in free markets and limited government. Hence the term ’Liberal Right’ captures our aspiration both socially and economically. Socially, an Indic Liberal respects his or her past without needlessly glorifying it, promotes an outlook that respects tradition without being bound by it, keeps his or her religious practices in the personal domain or within the community, cultivates spiritual inquiry, and seeks to build an inclusive and non-discriminatory society.”
Our standard Left-secular-liberal-discourse went unchallenged for far too long or was so effectively squelched that it has had difficulty in being hatched anew. But we now have a rag-tag army of “social media” warriors and a small but growing band of intellectuals and academics talking back to the “left-liberal establishment” in a language invoking Indic values and Dharma. Dr Saumya Dey, who writes with care, does thorough research, and offers extensive references, is a person who can effectively challenge the “Breaking India” forces. They are going to protest, and will become more aggressive; but with patience, we can push back these destructive forces and create a more conducive climate for the growth and flowering of Indic thought.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN INDIAFACTS
RANDOM MUSINGS 