How do I describe this article? The article touches on the
birth, sustenance and possible destruction of "right wing ideology".
Pankaj Mishra has expanded that very same formula to Russia, China, Japan and others. Good reference material. I am still working on my article, "For every Muslim ass, there is a Hindu,
Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist ass." The right wingers like Tea Party,
Talibans, RSS, Evangelists, Jamaat Islami , hard core Zionists, and the
militants outfits Al-Shabab, Pakistan Talibans, Settlers in west bank, Bajrang
Dal, Shiv Sena, Jhangvi, ISIS are some of the most insecure people
on the earth, they are always conspiring, and scheming to annihilate the
others. They are just unable to deal with the conflict and have not grown up to
be men (or women)to dialogue, and
instead are stuck in primacy of using paws, fangs and horns. They keep everyone
on the toes, frighten others and are severely frightened themselves.
Mike Ghouse# # # #
Modi’s Idea of India
India,
V.S. Naipaul declared in 1976, is “a wounded civilization,” whose
obvious political and economic dysfunction conceals a deeper
intellectual crisis. As evidence, he pointed out some strange symptoms
he noticed among upper-caste middle-class Hindus since his first visit
to his ancestral country in 1962. These well-born Indians betrayed a
craze for “phoren” consumer goods and approval from the West, as well as
a self-important paranoia about the “foreign hand.” “Without the
foreign chit,” Mr. Naipaul concluded, “Indians can have no confirmation
of their own reality.”
Mr.
Naipaul was also appalled by the prickly vanity of many Hindus who
asserted that their holy scriptures already contained the discoveries
and inventions of Western science, and that an India revitalized by its
ancient wisdom would soon vanquish the decadent West. He was
particularly wary of the “apocalyptic Hindu terms” of such 19th-century
religious revivalists as Swami Vivekananda, whose exhortation to
nation-build through the ethic of the kshatriya (the warrior caste) has
made him the central icon of India’s new Hindu nationalist rulers.
Despite
his overgeneralizations, Mr. Naipaul’s mapping of the upper-caste
nationalist’s id did create a useful meme of intellectual insecurity,
confusion and aggressiveness. And this meme is increasingly recognizable
again. Today a new generation of Indian nationalists lurches between
victimhood and chauvinism, and with ominous implications. As the country
appears to rise (and simultaneously fall), many ambitious members of a
greatly expanded and fully global Hindu middle class feel frustrated in
their demand for higher status from white Westerners.
Narendra Modi,
India’s new prime minister and main ideologue of the Hindu-nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, is stoking old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he
calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British
rule. Earlier this month, while India and Pakistan were engaging in
their heaviest fighting in over a decade, Mr. Modi claimed that the
“enemy” was now “screaming.”
Since
Mr. Naipaul defined it, the apocalyptic Indian imagination has been
enriched by the exploits of Hindu nationalists, such as the destruction
in 1992 of the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque, and the nuclear tests
of 1998. Celebrating the tests in speeches in the late 1990s, including
one entitled “Ek Aur Mahabharata” (One More Mahabharata), the then head
of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the National Volunteers Association,
or R.S.S), the parent outfit of Hindu nationalists, claimed that
Hindus, a “heroic, intelligent race,” had so far lacked proper weapons
but were sure to prevail in the forthcoming showdown with demonic
anti-Hindus, a broad category that includes Americans (who apparently
best exemplify the worldwide “rise of inhumanity”).
A
Harvard-trained economist called Subramanian Swamy recently demanded a
public bonfire of canonical books by Indian historians — liberal and
secular intellectuals who belong to what the R.S.S. chief in 2000
identified as that “class of bastards which tries to implant an alien
culture in their land.” Denounced by the numerous Hindu supremacists in
social media as “sickular libtards” and sepoys (the common name for
Indian soldiers in British armies), these intellectuals apparently are
Trojan horses of the West. They must be purged to realize Mr. Modi’s
vision in which India, once known as the “golden bird,” will “rise
again.”
Mr.
Modi doesn’t seem to know that India’s reputation as a “golden bird”
flourished during the long centuries when it was allegedly enslaved by
Muslims. A range of esteemed scholars — from Sheldon Pollock to Jonardon
Ganeri — have demonstrated beyond doubt that this period before British
rule witnessed some of the greatest achievements in Indian philosophy,
literature, music, painting and architecture. The psychic wounds Mr.
Naipaul noticed among semi-Westernized upper-caste Hindus actually date
to the Indian elite’s humiliating encounter with the geopolitical and
cultural dominance first of Europe and then of America.
These
wounds were caused, and are deepened, by failed attempts to match
Western power through both mimicry and collaboration (though zealously
anti-Western, Chinese nationalism has developed much more autonomously
in comparison). Largely subterranean until it erupts, this ressentiment
of the West among thwarted elites can assume a more treacherous form
than the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al Qaeda, the
Islamic State and the Taliban. The intellectual history of right-wing
Russian and Japanese nationalism reveals an ominously similar pattern as
the vengeful nativism of Hindu nationalists: a recoil from craving
Western approval into promoting religious-racial supremacy.
The
Russian elite, created by the hectic Westernizing ventures of Peter the
Great, was the first to articulate the widespread sense of inadequacy
and failure created in societies trying to catch up with the modern
West. In 1836, Pyotr Chaadaev argued in “First Philosophical Letter”
that, “We belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we possess the
traditions of neither.” His eloquent self-pity, which shook up Pushkin
as well as Gogol and Tolstoy, inaugurated the semi-Westernized Russian
elite’s tormented search for a native identity to uphold against the
West.
In
the 1920s, Russian thinkers exiled to Paris and other Western capitals
by the Bolshevik revolution tried to reconfigure Russia’s place between
Europe and Asia with a doctrine they called Eurasianism. While approving
of a monolithic economy and one-party rule, these hypernationalists
exhorted a religious revival and unity across Russia to combat evil
influences from the immoral West.
In
an astonishing development, their grandiose intellectual conceits have
enjoyed both political imprimatur and popularity since the end of the
Cold War, after Russia’s apparent deception by a triumphalist West.
Today, while annexing Crimea and throttling domestic critics, President
Vladimir Putin quotes the religious theorist Nikolai Berdyaev, author of
“The Russian Idea.” And his cohorts in the media and the Orthodox
Church circulate conspiracies that present the West as intent upon
humiliating Russia with the help of NGOs, journalists, homosexuals and
Pussy Riot.
The
perils of such ideological inebriation had already been illustrated by
Japan’s descent into unhinged anti-Western imperialism in the early 20th
century. As Japan grew stronger, partly with the help of Western
imperialists, only to bump up against their presence in Asia, the
obsession with beating the West at its own game intensified. Like the
votaries of the Russian Idea, many Japanese thinkers became as frantic
about defining Japaneseness vis-à-vis the West as with championing
strict state control of domestic society.
The
catch-all concept of kokutai — which roughly translates as “national
polity embodied by the emperor” — asserted Japan’s evidently
unparalleled virtues. Philosophers of the Kyoto School, like Nishida
Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro, made more ambitious attempts to establish
that the Japanese mode of cognition through intuition was both different
from and superior to Western-style logical thinking. Such supercilious
nativism provided the intellectual justification for Japan’s brutal
assault on China in the 1930s, and then the sudden attack on its most
significant trading partner in 1941.
Today,
against the backdrop of a severe crisis of capitalism, Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe, like Mr. Putin, is asserting an unapologetic nationalism.
Vowing to “take back Japan,” partly by revising the country’s pacifist
Constitution, and disowning its previously expressed guilt for wartime
brutalities, Mr. Abe has stoked tensions with China.
This
is just the kind of retrograde 1920s-style nationalist dogma that is
making a big comeback in India, especially since last year, when Mr.
Modi, a close ally of Mr. Abe, overcame the taint of various suspected
crimes to launch his bid for supreme power. Interestingly, it is not the
R.S.S.’s khaki-shorts-wearing volunteers but rather quasi-Westernized
Indians in the corporate-owned media and mysteriously well-funded think
tanks, magazines and websites who have provided the ambient chorus for
Mr. Modi’s ascent to respectability.
India’s
recent economic travails and diminished international standing have
frustrated these rising Indians’ sense of entitlement, provoking them to
lash out at such handy scapegoats as “racist” and “Orientalist”
Westerners and Indian libtards and sepoys. Typical of their ersatz
nativism is a book entitled “The New Clash of Civilizations,” which
gleefully heralds India’s hegemony worldwide. It was written by Minhaz
Merchant, the Anglicized former editor of a defunct lifestyle magazine
called Gentleman and now a self-appointed publicist for the prime
minister. Many such “Modi Toadies,” as Salman Rushdie calls them, had
Western tails once, like the Harvard-economist-turned-book-burner.
Others
still cling to those tails, such as the wealthy businessman called
Rajiv Malhotra, hailed by Mr. Modi for “glorifying our priceless
heritage.” Mr. Malhotra routinely puts out, from his perch in suburban
New Jersey, popular screeds asserting that American and European
churches, Ivy League academics, think tanks, NGOs and human-rights
groups are trying to break up Mother India with the help of both dalits
and sepoy intellectuals.
Lest
he be accused of irrationality, Mr. Malhotra also claims that the
intuitive Indian worldview is not only different from but also
cognitively superior to the logic-addled Western outlook. Mr. Malhotra
has worked up his own version of the Russian Idea and kokutai with some
piffle about the “integral unity” of Indian philosophy, a notion that
conflates very different Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In his North
American redoubt, Mr. Malhotra runs workshops aimed at mass-producing
“intellectual kshatriyas” (intellectual warriors).
The
fantasies of racial-religious revenge and redemption that breed in
Western suburbs as well as posh Indian enclaves today speak of a vast
spiritual desolation as well as a deepening intellectual crisis. Even
Mr. Naipaul briefly succumbed to the pathology of mimic machismo he had
despised (and, later, also identified among chauvinists in Muslim
countries). He hailed the vandalizing by a Hindu mob of the Babri Masjid
mosque in 1992, which triggered nationwide massacres of Muslims, as the
sign of an overdue national “awakening.”
There
are many more such nonresident Indians in the West today, vicariously
living history’s violent drama in their restless exile: In Madison
Square Garden, in New York, last month, more than 19,000 people cheered
Mr. Modi’s speech about ending India’s millennium-long slavery. But
hundreds of millions of uprooted Indians are also now fully exposed to
demagoguery. In an unprecedented public intervention this month, the
present chief of the R.S.S., who wants all Indian citizens to identify
themselves as Hindus since India is a “Hindu nation,” appeared on state
television to rant against Muslim infiltrators and appeal for a boycott
of Chinese goods.
Such
crude xenophobia, now officially sanctioned in Mr. Modi’s India, seems
only slightly less menacing than the previous R.S.S. chief’s wishful
thinking about one more Mahabharata against demonic anti-Hindus. Japan’s
expansionist gambles in China and the Pacific in the last century and,
more recently, Russia’s irredentism in Ukraine show that a mainstreamed
rhetoric of national aggrandizement can quickly slide into reckless
warmongering. Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have
spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism,
which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear
technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can
only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to
constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical
and military manhood.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire,” among other books.
