Author: Sandeep Balakrishna
Publication: India Facts
Date: October 12, 2015
URL: http://indiafacts.co.in/the-half-deserted-streets-of-the-mysorepak-liberals/

Let us go then, you and I When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

“Half-deserted streets” accurately sums up the current state of the entire Left-Liberal ecosystem after a tea-seller stormed the palace, rendered the Regina irrelevant, and ever since, her entire arsenal of liveried pen-pushers have never quite recovered from that shock-bomb.

Or to once again borrow from the evil Anand Ranganathan, no more Mysorepak for the Idea of India purveyors.

The latest woebegone Mysorepak among the innumerable ones that said purveyors had received in the past is the Sahitya Akademi award. And as we’ve noticed over the past week, it is rainin’ said Mysorepaks. And Anand Ranganathan is examining these Mysorepak-returnees with ruthless regularity on his Twitter timeline.

Beginning with Nayantara Sahgal who heralded this Mysorepak-return, this bout is simply the latest expression of panic among Left-Liberals: as Amrit Hallan powerfully asks, where was Nayantara Sahgal when India actually needed her?

To put it more bluntly, these antics are nothing but attempts at attention mongering, a desperate hope to elicit this response: “no, no please don’t give it back, we agree, this is an evil, intolerant government, we’re with you in this fight, etc, etc.” Indeed, this tactic has worked for them in the past, most notably during NDA-1.

However, gauging from the response both on the ground—in coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, etc—and in the online world, it is clear that this bout has badly backfired on the Mysorepak Liberals. The reality is that the Indian people have moved on by waking up to the essential banality of such awards.

Indeed, by indulging in such petty antics, these hoary Mysorepak Liberals have only made it worse for themselves. Had they remained mum, they’d have been largely ignored. But such antics have only made people on the social media and elsewhere curious enough to dig up their careers, and what has emerged is not pretty to say the least.

A quick perusal of the Twitter timelines of say Anand Ranganathan, Alok Bhatt, J. Gopikrishnan and others is pretty revealing. Some media websites have already embarked on a deeper investigation into these Mysorepak returnees. Deshgujarat for example, reveals that the NGO belonging to the Mysorepak-winner Ganesh Devy, has received over ₹12 Crore by way of foreign funding including from the deadly Ford Foundation and ActionAid.

It’s not incorrect to aver that several of these eminences in the Mysorepak galaxy are hoping for a repeat feat of Tehelka—a deadly blackmail rag first and last—which successfully played victim and garnered huge political and economic windfall both for itself and its disgraced founder.

From a related perspective, if these capers are aimed at somehow scaring and/or putting Narendra Modi on the backfoot, it needs to be repeated that Modi’s 2014 electoral victory was also accompanied by a fundamental shift in public discourse, something that R. Jagannathan in a fine piece had predicted in March 2014.

It appears that more than the BJP—and its supporters of various hues—it is these Mysorepak Liberals who have recognized this fundamental shift: which is why the non-stop drama starting from about six months after Modi took office. It’s also notable that the only people defending the Congress is not the party itself, but these Mysorepak liberals—and at that, a negative defence in the form of these relentless attacks against Modi.

And neither are these relentless attacks confined to these Mysorepak returnees. They emanate even from the so-called Sanskritists. As recent, representative samples, we can first turn to Ananya Vajpeyi’s scholarly extremism in the pages of the Hindu.

Of course, she writes nothing that her more rabid Communist cousins of yore haven’t written about Indian society as being nothing more than millennial exercises in Brahminical hegemony and so on. Except for two key differences: she follows Rahula Sankrityayana’s model of using Sanskrit scholarship to run down this timeless culture and civilization based on Dharma, and two, of suddenly finding instances of rising Brahminical hegemony and intolerance.

The other instance is that of an incredibly haughty essay that reeks of Oxbridge bigotry by Aatish Taseer in the New York Times. As this brilliant rebuttal by Harsh Gupta accurately shows, “privileged upbringing” is an understatement when applied to Aatish Taseer.

At various points, Taseer has claimed to be proud of his Sanskrit learning and his excursions to “rediscover” his Hindu civilizational roots or whatever phraseology he chooses to couch it in.

Yet, one wonders whether all that these excursions have taught him about Hinduism and India boils down to just this screed in the NYT. Or, as Harsh Gupta says, is this harangue an expression of his fury at being left out of the Modi gravy train? In either case, it only means that his Sanskrit and classical studies have been a drain of precious national resources.

A typical Hindu who attains mastery in Sanskrit—whether in Varanasi or Vadodara—is honoured by his fellows and the larger society as someone who upholds and perpetuates a Sanatana (timeless) and sacred tradition.

Such Hindus do not find any need to “rediscover” anything. Indeed, Sanskrit is not just a language—it is, in traditional terms, Vibhuti (Exalted), and thus, attaining mastery in it yields the Vibhuti Anubhava (Exalted Experience) to the learner. To get a glimpse into this sort of learning, I will point to the experiences I partook in the Gurukulam at Tenali. At the very least, there is a certain non-expressible attitude required to learn Sanskrit. And to put it bluntly, it is clear that Aatish Taseer doesn’t have that attitude in him.

For all his learning and his snooty disdain against Modi in: “What else did a man who knew so little not know?…. with the benefit of a real education, Mr. Modi might have been something more than he was,” the answer to Aatish Taseer is this: Narendra Modi’s Ganga Arati almost immediately after he won the May 2014 elections.

There’s little that separates the Mysorepak Liberals, the Ananya Vajpeyis and the Aatish Taseers of the world weaned as they all have been on the udders of the Nehruvian statist cow.

On the other side, it is also a great tribute to Narendra Modi’s prescient and farsighted decision to completely bypass the media, ignore these bouts of phony outrage and to maintain ruthless focus on economics. Equally prescient was his decision to not appoint media advisors and not to throw freebies at anybody.

For the first time, a Prime Minister is actually teaching citizens the value of work. And that among other things is angering these relics of the Nehruvian firmament who have not only destroyed valuable things from the past but haven’t contributed an iota of value to replace what they destroyed.

If India needs to further strengthen this fundamental shift that occurred last year, we need to do two simple things.

First, we need to recognize that these Mysorepak Liberals constitute nothing beyond mere nuisance value for the nation and we must treat them as such. Anything more, and we will end up dignifying them.

Second, we need to hold them both responsible and accountable for their words.

As we observe, both these are already happening in different ways. For example, the Adarsh Liberal coinage has already captured public imagination, and this tweet by Sankrant Sanu describes it best:
Person who created the @AdarshLiberal tag and comic. Please take a bow. You will be part of the lexicon. Historic. 

One of the entries in Anne Frank’s moving diary says that it hurts more when you’re not taken seriously than it does when you are subject to humiliation or abuse. This is as much an explanation for the Mysorepak Liberals’ ceaseless outrage as it is a guidepost for building a discourse rooted in India’s civilizational and cultural values.