In December 2017 Ed Sheeran was criticised for ‘poverty porn ’ after putting up two homeless boys in a hotel. While seemingly altruistic, it smacked of patronising western neo-colonialism and racial paternalism because a white western celebrity could somehow act as the messiah for Africans. Sheeran was accused of playing the “white saviour” – swooping into people’s lives and making grand gestures, but, some think, making it all about themselves, with little understanding of the wider situation. The video made of the situation smacked of an egotistical selfie. In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch wrote that “Aid adverts featuring ‘white saviours’ may bring in cash but they remove all dignity from those who are suffering”.
Aryan Slumdog Millionaires
In similar manner Victoria Beckham visiting a Nairobi slum of Korogocho in March 2018 as part of Comic Relief, wearing a tee shirt that was the equivalent to an annual salary for those residents. The reaction on social media was excoriating, with widespread accusations that she was engaging in ‘poverty tourism’.
As the star of the show, she stayed in a £500-a-night suite, complete with heated outdoor pool, health club, spa and upmarket restaurant serving lobster and Chateaubriand. The reaction on social media was overwhelmingly negative.
However, when it comes to India, that white messiah complex is not just dominant, but the prevailing narrative. Just like the missionary David Livingstone who spoke of coming from a superior race to uplift heathen Africa with the Bible, this White Man’s Burden is the only allowed narrative with regards to Hindus. While the racist Hamitic Invasion Theory of Africa has been debunked as racist, with Hindus the Aryan racial myth is alive and kicking. To oppose this idea which was an essential ingredients in Nazism is to leave oneself ironically open to accusations of being not just a Hindu fundamentalist but also a fascist and pro-Nazi. Just as with the whites only elections in pre-1994 South Africa, the views of the ‘inferior races’ in this case Hindus, do not count.
Most victims of racial and religious intolerance are recognised. This type of intolerance can no longer masquerade as scientific fact. Instead educational programmes, academic studies, documentaries, movies and television serials and along with political and activist movements have rolled back what was once mainstream acceptance of racism and religious bigotry as the dominant narrative. However, the one groups this is not applied to are the Hindus.
Between Spielberg and Nuremberg
The Third Reich gained adulation through its skillful use of propaganda and avant-garde art with its seductive aesthetics. The Nazis knew well how cinema and the early television could be used to shape public opinion. Sadly with fake news that era is hardly dead. But with Hindus all media is unleashed to put them in their inferior place beneath the white messiah.
It is a lamentable fact that even a great film maker like Steven Spielberg who has contributed so much to cinema, has made 
movies on the Holocaust and even set up Holocaust foundations who knows better than most how racial stereotypes can lead to persecution makes a movie stereotyping Hindus doing human sacrifices while eating monkey brains, in his Indian Jones epic The Temple of Doom.
Can anyone imagine any other religion or group of people being denigrated in such a manner? On the one hand he fights intolerance with Schindler’s List. Yet in the very same breath he reworks the classic racist and colonialist stereotypes. If this was targeting any other mass of people, he would be apologising and grovelling for forgiveness.
But when it comes to those dark-skinned pagan ‘Hindoos’ then it is taken as the norm. There is precious little that divides the underlying message in Spielberg’s cinematic epic with the crass and cheap propaganda which spews forth from Christian missionaries and the colonial narrative which they infest.
Spielberg merely reinforced that message that Kali Mata was an evil goddess: hated by white Christian missionaries as the epitome of Satanism, devil worship, eternal evil, and even more so because she was a black goddess worshipped by dark skinned heathen natives.
Temple of Doom acted as the unofficial missionary arm of the churches by spewing this vile propaganda to a wider audience. It is a phenomenon which appears repeatedly. Hammer classic “The Ghoul” from 1975 already depicted Kali as a diabolical entity that demanded human sacrifice and cannibalism. It was no coincidence that the evil figure central to the plot is a defrocked Christian missionary who went to India and was awed by the evil ‘cults’ he saw there. The message of an uncivilised Hinduism and its threat to western civilisation is again unambiguous.
This is why the academia and media in the west can keep on promoting Hinduphobic racism as much as it wants, and censoring any dissenting voices with accusations that Hindus are fascists and fundamentalists if they dare challenge the racist stereotype. They always find some brown skinned willing collaborator, just as apartheid South Africa found when implementing forced removals of blacks. Imperialists have always had their willing sycophants so this is nothing new.
This more than just finding victims of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ because these people willingly collaborate with their own mechanisms of oppression. One of the stiffest opposition to ending apartheid came not from South African whites but Lucas Mangope, Pretoria-appointed president of the ‘homeland’ called Bophuthatswana to which millions of the country’s indigenous majority had been forcible moved and assigned citizenship.
Here you had a puppet leader being bolstered by white neo-Nazi militia and white supremacist paramilitaries against his own oppressed subjects. But Mangope like other homeland leaders had long been used by South Africa to ‘prove’ how blacks had rights and privileges. In the Tarantino film “Django Unchained” the head slave Stephen is more than just a willing participant in his own servitude. Indeed he runs the plantation Candyland.
Master Candy is dependent upon him for information, secrets and necessary data on how to keep other blacks under his control. Yet one step outside the plantation and Stephen is just another black slave. That’s why he laments so loudly when his master is killed. His whole existence is co-dependent upon that slave master. His life has no other purpose. Indeed because he is black he is much more brutal and callous towards fellow slaves than the white masters.
Hence these Indian experts are much more alienated and hence hostile to their ancestors and uneducated masses than the western media and academia which give them the limelight they would otherwise lack. This was the whole point of the English-speaking schooling system developed by the British Raj under Macaulay. The offspring would be brown in skin but English in thoughts and manners. Yet this system to bolster colonial rule has proved to be remarkably durable. Indeed it has increased and deepened, ironically after the British have long left. It is therefore in their own interests to keep it going ad infinitum.
These colonised collaborators dominate the Anglophone media outlets in India, and are the primary if not only source for the western left and right wing alike. If they were to lose this stranglehold, then they themselves would become obsolete.
This media assault is so relentless that it puts Nazi propagandists Goebbels and Streicher to shame. In this information war there is the same imbalance as darks-skinned natives using spears against the repeating bullets of the Maxim gun. The cases of rape are a prime example of this. On 28 June 2018, Amrit Dhillon wrote in the Times of India
“Something very odd has been going on in the Western media’s perception and portrayal of rape in India, something that is matched only by their own positively skewed image of themselves. The 550 experts seem to have been hiding under a rock, reading only the papers that give wall-to-wall coverage of rape in India while quietly ignoring the epidemic in their own backyard.”
On 22 June 2018 in Israel’s Haaretz, Ayelett Shani rejoiced in writing ‘I Thank My Good Fortune That I Wasn’t Born a Woman in India’
“But most of India’s Hindu inhabitants are believers – there aren’t actually any secular Hindus. The vast majority follow traditional ways. The country is undergoing a slow process of change in regard to women. The symbolic value of women in India is still very low, the practice of aborting female fetuses is still very widespread. That derives in part from conceptions that have their origins in ancient religious beliefs. For example, women are prohibited from lighting their parents’ funeral pyre and thus releasing them into nirvana. And there are also other practices that exist today, such as the matter of the dowry.”
On 27 March 2018 Michael Geruso and Dean Spears wrote with all seriousness in The Print, that more Hindus were averse to using toilets than Muslims. The Hinduphobic information war had quite literally gone to the gutter.
“The prevalence of open defecation (hereafter OD) is particularly high among India’s Hindu majority. Data from the most recent wave of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) of India show that as of 2005, 68% of Hindu households defecate in the open—e.g., in fields, near streets, or behind bushes. In comparison, only 43% of the relatively poorer Muslim households do so.”
We find similar stuff dripping from the pages of New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, indeed all of western mainstream media. It is as if time has not moved on from when Dr Livingstone went to ‘civilise’ the natives. In any social disturbance, Hindu intolerance is always blamed. When terrorism strikes in India, it is the Hindu victims who caused it. That assumes the victims are even acknowledged. Usually it is smothered over in use of impersonal language, which refuses to identify the victims as Hindus, when the hate crime was perpetrated for that very reason.
Unlike Schindler’s List which tapped into mainstream abhorrence of the Holocaust, the western dominated academia continues to not just minimise by outright deny historical atrocities against Hindus.
Audrey Truschke is assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University-Newark and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Using this ivory tower, in 2018 she argued that Valmiki’s Ramayana proves that Shri Rama was an uncouth misogynistic pig according to his wife Sita. Conversely in her 2017 biography of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb she tries to rehabilitate this mass murderer who spent his career trying to annihilate Hindus, claiming he has been misunderstood and was actually tolerant.
It is a myth that he persecuted Hindus and destroyed thousands of temples. This was like having David Irving as being the infallible authority on Nazism (which he admires) and the Holocaust (which he denies). One should not be surprised at this. While race theories have been largely debunked, in India, the idea of primeval Aryan race is alive and kicking. If you can distort the history of an entire subcontinent, a culture, a people a civilisation, then the limits to fake history are endless. That is why we have a mass murderer and religious fanatic like Aurangzeb being presented as an enlightened tolerant monarch. That is why there are also attempts to delink yoga and tantra from their Hindu origins.
The climate change lobby is very powerful in western countries. Despite President Trump of America being part of the right-wing sceptics, it is pretty obvious with year on year record breaking high temperatures that something is not quite right in the atmosphere. Linked to the climate warriors of the Green movement are associated campaigns for vegetarianism and veganism, that raising animals for slaughter has caused global warming, made vast ears of arable land useless and above all is cruel to the livestock. Yet at the same time these same so called liberals with their right wing camaraderie will condemn Hindus for trying to ban cow slaughter because it is fundamentalist, bigoted and deprives poor people of a cheap source of protein, which flatly contradicts their other stances on the issue.
The White Hindus
It would be very easy in tackling this racism and Hinduphobia to just use it as a stick to bash all white people. Not only would that be unethical and immoral, it would be incorrect.
Indeed it is the very public in the west who are victims of this fake news and disinformation campaign. It compromises the very freedom of speech, democracy and liberty of conscience which the western democracies hold to be so sacrosanct. Indeed there are people in the west who see through the fake news and Orwellian Newspeak. David Frawley is an American of German and Irish descent, brought up as Roman Catholic, and the founder of the American Institute of Vedic Studies:
“The so called rise of Right or Hindu right is exaggerated And to begin with I don’t believe in such terms like Right or Left. I am a practicing American Hindu and a vegetarian. I am considered Right in India, while in US, I am considered Left. So all these are just terms”
Brought up as Catholic, was Francois Gautier, from France.
“Unfortunately for India, the British, when they were here, had created an intellectual elite to act as a via media between 
themselves and the “natives,” which today, thanks to the successive Congress governments, looks at its own country not by means of its own Indian eyes but through a western prism, as fashioned by the white colonisers and the missionaries. These Brown Sahibs, these true children of Macaulay, the secular politicians, the journalists, the top bureaucrats, in fact the whole westernised cream of India, are very critical of anything Hindu.”
French scientist Michel Danino left for India in 1977 and helped translate some of the works of Sri Aurobindo. In 1999 he lamented:
“The only product of this denationalizing education has been the creation of a modern, Westernized “elite” with little or no contact with the deeper sources of Indian culture, and with nothing of India’s ancient view of the world except a few platitudes to be flaunted at cocktail parties. Browsing through any English-language daily or magazine is enough to see how Indian intellectuals revel in the sonorous clang of hollow clichés which, the world over, have taken the place of any real thinking.
If Western intellectuals come up with some new “ism,” you are sure to find it echoed all over the Indian press in a matter of weeks ; it was amusing to see how, some two years ago, the visit to India of a French philosopher and champion of “deconstructionism” sent the cream of our intellectuals raving wild for weeks, while they remained crassly ignorant of far deeper thinkers next door.
Or if Western painters or sculptors come up with some new-fangled cult of ugliness, their Indian counterparts will not lag far behind. If Western countries plan grand celebrations for the “millennium” (not a third millennium of darkness, one hopes), we in India follow suit-though we appear to have forgotten to celebrate the fifty-second century of our Kali era earlier this year. And let “politically correct” Western nations make a new religion of “human rights” (with intensive bombing campaigns to enforce them if necessary), and you will hear a number of Indians clamouring for them parrotlike.”
Originally from Detroit, Jeffrey Armstrong left his Silicon Valley career to teach yoga and philosophy, founding the Vedic Academy of Sciences and Arts. From an interview in 2015:
“This is one of the most striking things about India. Indians of pre-modern history calculated the age of the universe in trillions of years. This is also the culture that gave us zero, the numerals that we use – so-called Arabic have their roots in India – as do trigonometry and calculus, astronomical calculation and a view that says the universe is not only billions, but trillions of years in age and that we are eternal beings who are simply visiting the material world to have the experience of being here.”
Jeffery D. Long is Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, USA. He is associated with the Vedanta Society, DĀNAM (the Dharma Academy of North America) and the Hindu American Foundation. Long has authored three books, A Vision for Hinduism: Beyond Hindu Nationalism, Jainism: An Introduction, and The Historical Dictionary of Hinduism. He also denounced Hinduphobia as being every bit as ugly as racism and anti-Semitism. In 2018, Long received the Hindu American Foundation’s Dharma Seva Award “for his efforts to help mainstream Americans understand Hinduism in academia and public schools.”[
“The important distinction between Hinduphobia and what I call sincere, thoughtful critique of Hindus and Hinduism is the closed and irrational character of the Hinduphobic discourse. The Hinduphobe, in other words, has already decided, before the conversation has even begun, that Hinduism is in some way inherently flawed and problematic. Hinduphobic discourse thus follows a circular logic, in which the conclusion has already been built into the premises: that, whatever the problem or issue in question, Hindus and Hinduism are at fault.”
German scholar Maria Wirth sees the unambiguous continuity between Hinduphobia and the denigration of Europe’s very own ancient pagan past:
“‘Idol-worship’ was projected as a top negative aspect, without even trying to understand it. They did not understand that the different ‘gods’ (‘deva’ was mischievously translated as god) are in essence the same as Brahman. “Idol-worship” is a great sin, both in Christianity and Islam. So to point out that Hindus worship sun-god, tree-god, or a god with an elephant head did its job of making Hinduism look as primitive as the western pagan traditions were made to look primitive.
I remember how in school our ancestors were ridiculed that they worshipped trees or thought that god is angry when there was thunder. Children easily believe what they are told and we indeed felt lucky that we now knew the one true God, who loves us so much that he even sent his own son….”
Yet at the same time Wirth points out the immense contribution Hinduism gave to the west’s own intellectual development:
“When the Vedic knowledge first reached western universities, the intellectual elite there were deeply impressed. Prominent personalities like Voltaire, Mark Twain, Schopenhauer, the Schlegel brothers, Paul Deussen and many others spoke in glowing terms about India’s tradition. And even later, in the early 20th century scientists like Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Einstein or Tesla were in their research inspired by Vedanta and acknowledged it. Voltaire had praised the Vedas as the greatest gift for humanity. He even said “we are eternally indebted to India”.
There was real danger that the Church would lose her sheep as the Christian view of the ‘true’ God, who sits in heaven, is jealous of other gods and sends all those who are not baptized into eternal hellfire, was no match for the Indian concept of Brahman which is the one conscious essence in all forms, like the one ocean is the essence in all the waves.”
Hence the desperation of the churches to this day to increase the anti-Hindu onslaught and reduce this culture and civilisation to just caste oppression and superstition.
In America, Sri Louise , a yoga teacher and scholar:
“Anyone who remains and esteems Vedic heritage as being central to one’s understanding of Yoga, is immediately condemned as a right wing Hindu ideologue. This is how Hinduphobia works, by conflating identity and “religious” orientation with political fanaticism and violence. The resulting consequence is that Yoga, which was previously Hindu, is now a generic commodity belonging the West. If there is no cultural root, there can be no cultural appropriation…You can easily see whose interest this line of reasoning caters to.”
Mat McDermott has written about the nature, conservation, yoga, and Hinduism for more than a decade. He is currently the Director of Communication for the Hindu American Foundation, the largest non-profit advocacy organization for Hindus living in the United States. He is also an advisor to The Bhumi Project, a Hindu environmental 
program based at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
“Having been immersed in the Western yoga community for more than two decades, I’ve seen how many yoga magazines and companies have tried to distance themselves from ever using the word ‘Hindu’, preferring to use ‘yogic’, ‘Vedic’, or ‘Indic’. I’ve seen them trying to feebly claim that that traditions of of yoga are beyond time and space or don’t belong to any specific spiritual tradition.”
“The common assumption I’ve witnessed is that if you stand up for Hinduism you are automatically considered right wing, reactionary, anti-modernity, and probably a bigot too.”
The False Political Dichotomy
One of the most bizarre aspects of this is how the ardently secular and Marxist influenced largely atheist Left joins hands with its erstwhile implacable foes in the right-wing camp, notably Christian fundamentalists. The same ‘progressive’ forces that denounce how Native Americans in Canada were forced from the 1880s right into the 1990s to attend boarding schools where they were deliberately detached from their ancestral gods, culture and language, seem to think that when applied to Hindus this is a good thing.
On 18 December 2013, Annie Gowen wrote in the Washington Post how Hindus in India wanted to convert Christians. The whole time she ignored the mammoth attempts made missionaries to convert Hindus, often by force or exploiting disease and poverty – as happened to the natives in her own country. In like manner, New York Times writer Gardiner Harris wrote how Hindus were persecuting Christians quoting propagandists like John Dayal who are skilled in extracting money from useful idiots abroad.
Now both the aforementioned newspapers are liberal and progressive. Yet with the muck raking they produce on Hindus, one could almost be fooled into thinking it was Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Yet we must remember it was the same ‘progressive’ ideas which saw thousands of children, remnants of genocide by white masters in their ancestral lands, deliberately dislocated from their families and sent to church run institutions for over a century in North America and Australia.
Again they were told that their pagan and heathen beliefs were backward and equivalent to devil worship. Indeed their language was itself backward and had to be banned in favour of English. The result? Lives dislocated and destroyed through a never ending vortex of alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual abuse, prostitution, homelessness and poverty. Justin Trudeau apologised for what was done by this policy to Canada’s First Nations. Yet here we have it in full swing towards Hindus in India.
It is easy to be mislead by the false dichotomy of Left and Right, as well as atheist and evangelical Christian. But at a metaphysical level the chasm is negligible. While western ‘progressives’ will on the surface shun religion and their obscurantist past in favour of atheism, secularism and progress, these very same liberals and left-leaning types have not detoxed themselves of what we can call ‘churchism’.
In other words they may reject what they see as superstitious and irrational beliefs, but they have retained the cultural arrogance and air of superiority which the once dominant churches used to shape the west. Western secularism and atheism is thus a product of that very religious backwardness which the liberal and Left now claim has nothing to do with them.
Not only will the Left scoff at such accusations, it will also bring out its ‘useful Gunga Din idiots’ to prove that they are not racist. Whenever anti-Hindu venom is splashed over the media, it is very often not the white person who does the speaking, but someone of Indian origin who is only too happy to do the dirty work.
Again we must look beyond the very literal ‘face’ value. During apartheid the white minority government used to push forward leaders of the black ‘homelands’ or Bantustans as proof that blacks were not only happy with racial segregation, but actively enjoyed and benefited from it. So yet again Left and Right are not so dissimilar in how they manufacture the same excuses to deflect any accusation of racism.
Type ‘Mein Kampf’ into the search engine of the left-leaning Guardian and you will get results associating Nazism with Hinduism. Indeed type in ‘Hinduism’ and you will get results linking Hindus to rape epidemic in India and far right politics. Try and complain to the BBC about its constant Hinduphobia and expect to be enmeshed into a long drawn out Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare designed to make you give up and accept the subhuman treatment this media monster belches out. Historically speaking both Left and Right were infatuated with eugenics, genocide and racial hierarchy in the name of ‘progress’.
Usually the Left opposes the march of multinationals and neoliberalism. Yet in India, as with attacking cow protections as being right-wing and fascist, the very same environmentalism and resistance to globalisation is condemned by the very same western ‘progressives’ who otherwise support it. On 20 July 2018, Vamsee Juluri wrote “Left colour-codes India to draw parallel with Baldwin’s Black-and-White America”
“The Left, the traditional coiners of words like “imperialism” and opponents of anything American, mysteriously stopped blaming McDonalds and the like and somehow turned their attention to what ought to be seen as the resistance to the likes of McDonalds – the farmers and indigenous cultural activists desperately trying to protect their cows from well-organized and politically-protected industrial-scale cattle thieves. Big Burgers, Big MNCs, Big MacCulture (both literally and symbolically) either vanished from the critical discourse, or, again, mysteriously, got folded into a seemingly secondary position to the real big danger according to their critique, the continuing colonization of South Asia by the invading/slowly migrating Hindu Aryans since 1500 BCE.”
It went further, and even imported America’s racial discourse into Indian politics.
““Saffronization,” in short, became the stand-in for what the same people who coined it would have called “Coca Colonisation,” or even just “Americanisation”. And “Saffron”, to use the same example, became in this discourse the stand-in for “White”, leading to absurd extremes of color-coding liberties like Professor Wendy Doniger who has probably not felt what an African or an Indian in America has ever felt by the virtue of their skin color and professional privilege, getting compared to Sojourner Truth, an actual African American born into slavery (this was done by the American religion writer Stephen Prothero in USA Today).
And then “Saffron” became for them a symbol of privilege, to be deconstructed, like “Whiteness”, as opposed to represented, cherished and valued for being a colour of survival, dignity, and most of all, tremendous inclusiveness (I mean, we have a saffron, white and green flag still don’t we?)”
Rajeev Srinivasan focuses on strategy and innovation, which he worked on at Bell Labs and in Silicon Valley. He has taught innovation at several IIMs. An IIT Madras and Stanford Business School grad, he has also been a conservative columnist for twenty years. On 19 July 2018 he wrote “When It Comes To India, Most Expatriate Journalists Display An Inherent Racism” in Swarajya where he exposed the naked racism of ‘liberal’ western journalists. For example, Annie Gowen, a resident correspondent in Delhi for the Washington Post, insinuated that those with ‘Rudra Hanuman’ in their Twitter display pictures were fake IDs, and should be culled.
In the New York Times, Heather Timmons proclaimed grandly that Modi would never become global leader until he ‘solved’ the “Rohingya problem”. But this was an internal issue for Myanmar, not India. In Th Economist, Victor Mallet suggested that Hindu pilgrims, and the Ganga, were responsible for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
It extends into America itself. On 23 July 2018, independent (formerly Republican) senate candidate Dr Shiva Ayyadurai was attacked by a white racist supporter of the incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Warren in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Of course historically the Democrats were supporters of slavery, racial segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and white supremacy. Historically the ‘progressives’ have very murky and dubious pasts which barely distinguish them from the ‘right-wing’.
When it comes to Hindus, that past is all too obvious, as Dr Ayyadurai found out only days ago. While the western mind may not change so easily, trapped as it is by its own sense of superiority, Hindus can at least reject these fake political divisions. Rejecting the Left does not automatically mean being right-wing. Such labels are colonial imprints and adopting them only accepts the neo-colonialist Hinduphobic narrative.
