How to destroy a people in god’s name
By Dr. Gautam Sen
A fearful and persistent chorus of hostility is widespread on numerous Internet sites. They purvey rancid hatreds that amount to a call for the ‘destruction’ of Brahmins. Virtually all of it is ultimately orchestrated intellectually and financially by the American Christian Right. However, the demand for the elimination of Brahmins cannot end with their ethnic cleansing and legal restrictions on their human rights, which are already enshrined in the Indian Constitution and successive amendments to it. These policies and attitudes have become so deeply entrenched that very few, including Brahmins themselves, question their wider connotations and intrinsic legitimacy. Eventually, pogroms and mass murder are the most effective way of expelling large numbers of people because only the better off flee in response to mere legal discrimination and threats alone.
On the latter course of action, south India has become the experimental laboratory of the Church where it now has a political leadership of its choice ensconced in most places, i.e. Hindu-baiters one and all. The Church is therefore able to pursue the first element of a broader strategy of severing India from its Vedic Hindu past that it associates with India’s upper castes in general and Brahmins in particular. This is the same way polytheistic pluralism was violently extirpated in Byzantium, Europe and Latin America. And mass murder to achieve Christian ascendancy was not merely a medieval stratagem. The ‘final solution’ occurred in the twentieth century and the ancient aspiration to end the Jewish presence in the midst of Christian communities was largely achieved. The shedding of copious tears now that Jews are largely gone adds insult to injury. It doesn’t seem to prevent unctuous concern for those seeking to destroy what remains of Jewry, tragically incarcerated in the midst of the Arab world.
The political instincts for the Nuremberg laws enacted by the Nazis, against alleged Jewish ‘pollution’, are resurfacing virulently in India in a distinctive guise against the upper castes, irrespective of their socio-economic status. It is being propelled by the global Christian Right and a swathe of Indian studies departments in universities across the world, especially the US and the UK. And these machinations coincide with the dreams of world imperial domination and racial primacy that are the historic hallmark of European empires.
The Church and the imperial State have always been engaged in an embrace that may not be readily apparent today, but it has ancient roots. Underlying the mundane dispute over the portrayal of Hindus in California’s school textbooks the crude message of the Church and its academic co-conspirators was the determination to destroy Hinduism, which they openly describe as an abomination. The descendants of those who invented the grim cruelties of plantation slavery and established the Southern Baptist Convention to provide it with Christian justification should have hesitated to preach equality.
The Church is the most lethal enemy of Hindus precisely because it is conjoined politically with powerful imperialist nations, led by the US, but including Russia and most European Union countries. The virulent hatred for Hindus being displayed by the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church is in striking contrast to the official Russian penchant for dialogue with Chechens terrorists, ultimately responsible for the murder of hundreds of Russian school children in Beslan. The Church in its various denominational incarnations worldwide astutely concluded long ago that the enslavement of Hindus requires the destruction of their intellectual leadership, identified as Brahmins by them.
There is a vast corpus of Christian writing against Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular that dates back to the colonial conquests of the Portuguese, the British and the French. Hunting and murdering upper caste Hindus, with priority being accorded to Brahmins, was a sport that Islamic invaders and Christian proselytisers engaged in with great gusto. As the astute Sir V. S. Naipaul observed, you cut off the head of a conquered people by first killing its leadership. This is why, presumably, the Portuguese unfailingly engaged in feasts of blood lust for which their imperial ventures were notorious.
Nevertheless, in the end, the campaign against Brahmins will need to encompass a much wider swathe of Hindu society. Brahmins are only a part of the problem identified by the Church because of their historical importance. Many others are active as Hindus and will have to be dealt with in turn. Of course attacking your enemy in sequence rather than simultaneously is a logical tactic. And Andhra Pradesh is their principal experimental laboratory right now, where irreversible facts are being created on the ground with barely a response from supposed Hindu leaders. But a ‘final solution’ to the world’s Brahmin problem could be achieved in much the way Europe ‘solved ‘ its Jewish problem through mass murder and expulsion. For the present, the flight of some of these Hindu communities is the dominant reality. Like that of the post-WWII Jewish Diaspora it is deviously portrayed as ‘voluntary’.
Sowing seeds of discord among Hindus has remained a diabolical ploy of the Church from colonial times. The determined dissemination of vicious propaganda about upper caste perfidy continues unabated, with various racist academics active in the fray in recent months. A numerically insignificant, but influential group of mainly Dalit Christians have become the standard bearers of the criminal enterprise of the global Church to sort out upper caste Hindus once-and-for-all. They are now being actively abetted by various organs of the Indian State. A significant minority of Brahmins themselves have also turned collaborators in this project at the destruction of Brahmins and the alleged horrors of Hinduism they nurture.
Many Hindus are eager to sell their grandmothers for money and recognition accorded to them by whites, no matter how demeaning it is in reality. Significantly, every renowned Indian radical alarmed by oppression of what they pathetically describe as ‘the people’ ends up finding a well-paid niche in some US university.
Yet, the very idea that Brahmins and other supposedly high caste Hindus constitute a homogenous national group is plainly inaccurate. They are more distinguished by their internal divisions, indeed rivalries. They are deeply divided politically and socially by sub-caste and ethnic identities that are likely to become their epitaph. Yet this deliberately misleading depiction, which has an old colonial origin, is an axiom of self-knowledge in independent India. Researchers like Nicholas Dirks have pointed out that it was colonial efforts to classify Hindu communities, presumably to discover exploitable divisions useful in ruling over them that enhanced insular caste cleavages and heightened caste oppression.
The sense of Hindu identity became much more polarised directly as a result of such British colonial policy, undermining, in the process, the greater interaction between castes and the pluralism that previously existed. In the same vein, some sacred texts like the laws of Manu have been misused absurdly to claim the prevalence of reactionary legal precepts across India. The independent-minded feminist writer, Madhu Kishwar, no supporter of Hindu political aspirations, has eloquently shown such a situation to be highly implausible in a society largely dominated by local custom and practice.
continued...
By Dr. Gautam Sen
A fearful and persistent chorus of hostility is widespread on numerous Internet sites. They purvey rancid hatreds that amount to a call for the ‘destruction’ of Brahmins. Virtually all of it is ultimately orchestrated intellectually and financially by the American Christian Right. However, the demand for the elimination of Brahmins cannot end with their ethnic cleansing and legal restrictions on their human rights, which are already enshrined in the Indian Constitution and successive amendments to it. These policies and attitudes have become so deeply entrenched that very few, including Brahmins themselves, question their wider connotations and intrinsic legitimacy. Eventually, pogroms and mass murder are the most effective way of expelling large numbers of people because only the better off flee in response to mere legal discrimination and threats alone.
On the latter course of action, south India has become the experimental laboratory of the Church where it now has a political leadership of its choice ensconced in most places, i.e. Hindu-baiters one and all. The Church is therefore able to pursue the first element of a broader strategy of severing India from its Vedic Hindu past that it associates with India’s upper castes in general and Brahmins in particular. This is the same way polytheistic pluralism was violently extirpated in Byzantium, Europe and Latin America. And mass murder to achieve Christian ascendancy was not merely a medieval stratagem. The ‘final solution’ occurred in the twentieth century and the ancient aspiration to end the Jewish presence in the midst of Christian communities was largely achieved. The shedding of copious tears now that Jews are largely gone adds insult to injury. It doesn’t seem to prevent unctuous concern for those seeking to destroy what remains of Jewry, tragically incarcerated in the midst of the Arab world.
The political instincts for the Nuremberg laws enacted by the Nazis, against alleged Jewish ‘pollution’, are resurfacing virulently in India in a distinctive guise against the upper castes, irrespective of their socio-economic status. It is being propelled by the global Christian Right and a swathe of Indian studies departments in universities across the world, especially the US and the UK. And these machinations coincide with the dreams of world imperial domination and racial primacy that are the historic hallmark of European empires.
The Church and the imperial State have always been engaged in an embrace that may not be readily apparent today, but it has ancient roots. Underlying the mundane dispute over the portrayal of Hindus in California’s school textbooks the crude message of the Church and its academic co-conspirators was the determination to destroy Hinduism, which they openly describe as an abomination. The descendants of those who invented the grim cruelties of plantation slavery and established the Southern Baptist Convention to provide it with Christian justification should have hesitated to preach equality.
The Church is the most lethal enemy of Hindus precisely because it is conjoined politically with powerful imperialist nations, led by the US, but including Russia and most European Union countries. The virulent hatred for Hindus being displayed by the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church is in striking contrast to the official Russian penchant for dialogue with Chechens terrorists, ultimately responsible for the murder of hundreds of Russian school children in Beslan. The Church in its various denominational incarnations worldwide astutely concluded long ago that the enslavement of Hindus requires the destruction of their intellectual leadership, identified as Brahmins by them.
There is a vast corpus of Christian writing against Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular that dates back to the colonial conquests of the Portuguese, the British and the French. Hunting and murdering upper caste Hindus, with priority being accorded to Brahmins, was a sport that Islamic invaders and Christian proselytisers engaged in with great gusto. As the astute Sir V. S. Naipaul observed, you cut off the head of a conquered people by first killing its leadership. This is why, presumably, the Portuguese unfailingly engaged in feasts of blood lust for which their imperial ventures were notorious.
Nevertheless, in the end, the campaign against Brahmins will need to encompass a much wider swathe of Hindu society. Brahmins are only a part of the problem identified by the Church because of their historical importance. Many others are active as Hindus and will have to be dealt with in turn. Of course attacking your enemy in sequence rather than simultaneously is a logical tactic. And Andhra Pradesh is their principal experimental laboratory right now, where irreversible facts are being created on the ground with barely a response from supposed Hindu leaders. But a ‘final solution’ to the world’s Brahmin problem could be achieved in much the way Europe ‘solved ‘ its Jewish problem through mass murder and expulsion. For the present, the flight of some of these Hindu communities is the dominant reality. Like that of the post-WWII Jewish Diaspora it is deviously portrayed as ‘voluntary’.
Sowing seeds of discord among Hindus has remained a diabolical ploy of the Church from colonial times. The determined dissemination of vicious propaganda about upper caste perfidy continues unabated, with various racist academics active in the fray in recent months. A numerically insignificant, but influential group of mainly Dalit Christians have become the standard bearers of the criminal enterprise of the global Church to sort out upper caste Hindus once-and-for-all. They are now being actively abetted by various organs of the Indian State. A significant minority of Brahmins themselves have also turned collaborators in this project at the destruction of Brahmins and the alleged horrors of Hinduism they nurture.
Many Hindus are eager to sell their grandmothers for money and recognition accorded to them by whites, no matter how demeaning it is in reality. Significantly, every renowned Indian radical alarmed by oppression of what they pathetically describe as ‘the people’ ends up finding a well-paid niche in some US university.
Yet, the very idea that Brahmins and other supposedly high caste Hindus constitute a homogenous national group is plainly inaccurate. They are more distinguished by their internal divisions, indeed rivalries. They are deeply divided politically and socially by sub-caste and ethnic identities that are likely to become their epitaph. Yet this deliberately misleading depiction, which has an old colonial origin, is an axiom of self-knowledge in independent India. Researchers like Nicholas Dirks have pointed out that it was colonial efforts to classify Hindu communities, presumably to discover exploitable divisions useful in ruling over them that enhanced insular caste cleavages and heightened caste oppression.
The sense of Hindu identity became much more polarised directly as a result of such British colonial policy, undermining, in the process, the greater interaction between castes and the pluralism that previously existed. In the same vein, some sacred texts like the laws of Manu have been misused absurdly to claim the prevalence of reactionary legal precepts across India. The independent-minded feminist writer, Madhu Kishwar, no supporter of Hindu political aspirations, has eloquently shown such a situation to be highly implausible in a society largely dominated by local custom and practice.
continued...
