Author: David Frawley
Publication: India Post
Date: April 4, 2003
It is amazing how little American
journalists know about other countries and can be easily taken in by false
reporting. This is particularly true relative to India which American journalists
seldom visit and rarely study except superficially! Few know any Indian
languages apart from English. Most take uncritically what they find in
certain English language newspapers in India as the final truth, though
these represent only a small segment of Indian society. If they do go to
India, they hang out mainly in expensive bars and five star hotels in big
cities, interacting only with a certain class of western educated Indian
journalists and never get beyond a narrow and hostile view of the country.
As a westerner myself who, though
more a Vedic scholar than a professional journalist, has had articles published
in many newspapers in India, including Times of India, the Hindu, Hindusthan
Times and Indian Express, I continue to be amazed by the amount of inaccurate
and manipulated reporting about India that comes out in the West, reflecting
political biases from Indian and other sources that are seldom scrutinized.
The most common such propaganda
device that turns up in western reporting is what I call the "Gandhi-Nazi"
ploy. An attempt is made to discredit certain Hindu groups under the guise
that they are abandoning Gandhi and non-violence and have Nazi sympathies
and tactics instead.
Of course everyone likes Gandhi
who was a harmless and saintly person (and who is usually the only Indian
leader that Americans know of). And no one likes fascists and Nazis. So
it is a good emotional trick to influence people who probably don't want
to take the time to really study the politics of India which are even more
complex than those of the United States.
The implication is that such Darth
Vader Hindu fascists should be opposed at all costs and prevented from
gaining power for the sake of India's Gandhian legacy, religious tolerance
and secularism and all other wholesome values. To try to support or defend
them, on the other hand, is to be a Gandhi murderer and Hitler admirer.
So it is naturally quite politically incorrect to raise any objections
in their favor or even to try to qualify this wholesale condemnation of
them.
Such anti-Gandhian pro-fascist Hindu
groups are usually said to include BJP, RSS and VHP, who are blamed for
having murdered Gandhi (though no charges were ever proved in any court
of law that we in the West are supposed to respect) and quoted as having
long been Nazi sympathizers (though they sided with the allies in World
War II). But the purpose of such reporting is not to engender critical
thinking but to encourage negative emotional reactions.
Behind the Emotional Ploy
Such emotional ploys usually hide
the bias or political agenda of those who are promoting it, which is not
hard to find if one takes a little trouble to look. The labeling of one's
enemies as fascists is the oldest leftist and communist propaganda ploy
there is. Nor surprisingly, we see that most such writers, if we examine
their own political backgrounds, are usually Indian Marxists and leftists
and rarely Hindus, much less Gandhians. Marxism still has a strong hold
in academic and journalistic circles in India, a fact that we in America
tend to forget in the post-communist era. Even the state of Bengal today
has a Marxist government which still honors Stalin and Mao.
Another curious fact is that most
such writers who complain about India abandoning non-violence, like Pakistan
lamenting India's abandoning of Gandhian policies by testing nuclear weapons,
do not believe in non-violence themselves. You would not find these Indian
journalists criticizing Islamic Jihadi attacks or communist caused violence
anywhere in the world. They were remarkably silent about the 9/11 attack
on America. Some even thought it was justified, but as staunch leftists
most are generally anti-American in their views anyway.
Yet it is not only certain Hindu
groups they call fascists but many others that we Americans would never
consider as such. For example, some like N. Ram of the Hindu, regarded
as one of India's foremost journalists according to Sixty Minutes on which
he appeared relative to a story on IIT, have called the Dalai Lama a fascist
as well (because he is against the Chinese communists). This is not surprising
given that N. Ram a few years ago proposed that the communist chief minister
of Bengal, Jyoti Basu, was the ideal person to become the Prime Minister
of the India.
Such writers have called great Hindu
leaders from the ancient Vedantic philosopher Shankara to the modern yogi
Sri Aurobindo, fascists and many others on quite a long list. They similarly
consider practices like Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedic astrology and the demand
for protection of cows to be quite regressive (if not fascist) and even
view the Sanskrit language with suspicion as if promoting it was another
form of Hindu communalism. For example, JNU where many of these journalists
hail from has a large language department, including Spanish and Arabic,
but no Sanskrit!
I have experienced this myself as
a writer for Vedic causes in India. Though I promote vegetarianism, animal
rights, Yoga and Ayurveda, and am active in the ecological movement (and
have never voted Republican in my life), mainly because of my support for
a Vedic nature to ancient Indian civilization (reflecting recent archaeological
finds in India, notably the Sarasvati River), I have also been called a
fascist by the same group of Indian journalists, who probably haven't read
a thing I have written. Often they don't even get my name right, but they
have no doubt that I am a well known fascist. One can see that their idea
of fascist includes anyone who disagrees with them on any issue they deem
significant.
Unfortunately, the American left
usually gets taken in by such propaganda of the Indian left; not recognizing
that the Indian left is still the old left of the communist era and has
very different views. The Indian left has little regard for new left issues
such as ecology and rarely has any spiritual view of life. Most of its
leaders are still hoping for the Soviet Union to return or for China to
go back to Maoism.
Relative to the pro-Nazi charge
against Hindu groups, such journalists routinely repeat the same quote
from the nineteen thirties of one Hindu thinker who for a short time expressed
admiration for Germany's national resurgence under Hitler. These remarks
should be put in their proper context. Even many Americans like Lindberg
expressed admiration for Germany in the pre-World War II era before the
world knew what Hitler really was. The communists under Stalin themselves
signed a peace treaty with Hitler and praised him then as well. Hitler
was also very popular in the Islamic world of that time. But such passing
remarks are very different than the long term action of these people once
they saw what Hitler really represented.
Let's take a statement about Savarkar,
who was mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article as such a Nazi
sympathizer. Savarkar on the contrary was the main Indian leader who encouraged
Indians to join the British run Indian Army in World War II as part of
the allied war effort against Hitler, a move which Gandhi opposed as a
violation of ahimsa. That doesn't sound like the action of a Nazi sympathizer.
He also first raised the call for India's independence in Europe in the
early twentieth century at a convocation of socialists, not fascists! But
few will bother to check the sources for such statements and see if they
are correct.
The Shadow of the Congress Party
and Nehru
Most such writers have their own
political agenda that is usually to promote the Congress Party in India,
which though they may not entirely agree with it on all issues is closer
to their more Marxist view of the world. They try to get Americans to think
that the Congress Party is the progressive party that will bring the country
forward and somehow is carrying on its Gandhian legacy.
Congress routinely brings out the
Gandhi image to gain votes and sympathy but has otherwise long since abandoned
any Gandhian policies relative to religion, economics, the pursuit of truth
or anything else, as most Indians know. To think that the Congress Party
is the party of Gandhi is like thinking that the Republican Party is the
party of Abraham Lincoln.
For example, the current head of
the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, has nothing to do with the kind of austere
life-style, simple living and spiritual practices that the Mahatma engaged
in, though she may claim to admire him. Most westerners don't even realize
that her Gandhi name is just a coincidence and has no real connection to
the Mahatma, but arises from Indira Gandhi who married a Parsi whose name
happened to be Gandhi also.
Such people are usually Nehruvian,
not Gandhian in their views, a distinction that is very important to understand.
People in the West don't realize that Nehru himself was not a Gandhian,
but a Fabian socialist and agnostic. While Gandhi said he was proud to
be a Hindu, Nehru never made any such remarks. Gandhi's choice of Nehru,
which many have regarded as Gandhi's greatest mistake, was not because
Nehru shared Gandhi's mentality or life-style, but because Nehru represented
an aspect of Indian society that Gandhi did not. Nehru was more of a British
aristocrat than someone who really understood the traditions of his country.
Nehru also never followed Gandhian
economic policies but those of the leftist London School of Economics and
Soviet five year plans. Such economists invented the "Hindu growth rate"
to try to justify why their policies failed in India just as they did in
Eastern Europe. In fact, it is some of the so-called anti-Gandhi Hindu
'fascists' like the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch that are promoting Gandhian
economics in India, not the Congress Party.
So this emotional ploy that Gandhi
and Nehru were a team and to criticize one is to criticize the other, is
not at all correct either. In fact Gandhi wanted the Congress Party, which
later became the Nehru party, to be dissolved altogether.
Yet another part of this line of
thinking is to condemn anyone who might criticize Gandhi, as if they were
committing a mortal sin. That certain Hindu groups have those among them
those who disagree with Gandhi on various points is regarded as proof that
these organizations are regressive, if not fascist. Such people ignore
the fact that many great Indian leaders and thinkers including Sri Aurobindo,
J. Krishnamurti and even Rabindranath Tagore at times were critical of
Gandhi, who himself referred to his own Himalayan blunders. One can criticize
Gandhi without rejecting Gandhi's greatness altogether, much less being
sympathetic to Gandhi's assassination or a fascist.
We should remember that Indian leftists
and communists have often been very critical of Gandhi, though they avoid
saying this in the West today, and he was opposed to them as well, considering
Marxism to be a dangerous and erroneous ideology.
Another story that has been coming
out recently is how Hindus are becoming intolerant and obstructing Christian
missionary activity in India, as if missionaries had never done any mischief
anywhere. This is an area where Gandhi is ignored. Such stories would never
quote Gandhi, who himself described missionary activity as one worst blights
on the spirit of truth and who strongly criticized it (he even was in favor
of a ban on it in India). By their account Gandhi would be another fascist
because of the objections he raised to the missionaries.
This doesn't mean that Hindu groups
can't be criticized or that Hindu extremists can't be found who might have
various prejudicial views. Nor does it mean that all Marxists, communists
and leftists are always bad or wrong in their views or that anyone who
criticizes Hindu groups must be a communist or perverted in their ideas.
It means that to really understand India, one must go much deeper than
these simplistic propaganda ploys which after over fifty years of usage
are getting a little monotonous and are entirely predictable, like a red
flag used to enrage a bull.
Unfortunately such distortions will
probably continue unless Indians and Indo-Americans make a greater effort
to challenge them. While other communities in America, including the Islamic
community, have worked hard and often successfully to counter negative
reporting even in the face of perhaps greater challenges, the Indian community
has been very lazy and apathetic, as if it were a mark of tolerance to
let one's own tradition be distorted and vilified. So in the end it is
not western journalists or even Indian journalists who are to blame for
these prejudices but the Indians who read them and remain silent.