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Gandhi, Nazis and Bad Hindus

Gandhi, Nazis and Bad Hindus

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.
 


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