Meghnad Desai: Lord of the Lies

Meghnad Desai on his new book ‘Who Wrote the Bhagwad Gita?‘

“I wrote the book as a secular inquiry into the Gita because in a sense, I could never make head or tail of it and then I stopped trying. About two or three years ago, I was asked to deliver the Goswami lecture in Goa and I used that opportunity to speak on the Gita. It is a confused philosophical book. All kinds of people have liked it from Hitler and serious philosophers to Sufi saints and other seekers. But it justifies violence. Saying it is an allegory as Gandhiji said, that speaks of good vs evil, is something I don’t agree with — I feel that at the end of the day, it is about one man who doesn’t want to kill and who pleads, “Let me go!” And then, after a huge, philosophical discussion, he ends up killing everybody. How can people believe we are nonviolent? Is violence a godsend,”

“First, in modern India since 1885, since the first English translation by Telang came, few people knew of the Gita. Most did not know Sanskrit, the language of Adi Shankaracharya’s first commentary. With the first English translation, modern India became aware of the Gita…this was the same time that the Congress Party was formed. All of a sudden, the Gita became the text of modern India, and is part of the Independence movement, promoted as a concise form of Hindu philosophy. And lot of Bengali terrorists used it as well. Tilak approved of it. Congress revolutionaries liked the Gita. S Radhakrishnan in 1948 gave the first post-Independence commentary; he had a good, scholarly style, and it became a secular text of India,” explains Desai.  Swami Vivekananda too was skeptical of the Gita and thought that it had no single author. Moreover, we are not sure if Krishna was a historical character. 

The Gita is not suitable for modern India. It is against women. Only two shlokas refer to them and both insult women. Arjuna says if there is kulanash (genocide) women will go astray. In the ninth chapter, Krishna says ‘those born of low or degraded wombs, vaishyas and shudras can also come to Me’. Moreover, the Gita talks of nishkama karma and says that action has no consequence. If that is what we believe, then how can we overcome corruption? There is then no morality. And you are immortal, so you don’t die, so murder is nothing. It does not matter what you do,” Says  Desai.

The Lord

Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, better known as Lord Desai is an Indian-born British economist and Labour Party peer. He even unsuccessfully stood for the Speaker in the British House of Lords in 2011, being the first ever non-UK born candidate to do so. Desai has been also been awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India. Gaining his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, he has been teaching at the prestigious London School of Economics since 1965. Lord Desai was a founding member of the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) at the LSE in 1990.

As well as specialising in teaching Marxist economics, Desai has been a prolific writer. He wrote his first book Marxian Economic Theory in 1973 followed by Applied Econometrics in 1976 and Marxian Economics, a revised edition of his 1973 book in 1979. He wrote Testing Monetarism, a critique of monetarism, in 1981.

In addition he has written extensively publishing over 200 articles in academic journals including a regular column in the British radical weekly Tribune during 1985–1994, in the Indian business daily Business Standard, and in Indian Express and Financial Express. From 1984-1991, he was co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics. A selection of his academic papers was published in two volumes as The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai in 1995. His 2002 book Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism prophesised that globalisation would tend toward the revival of socialism.

The Lenin of Anti-Hindu Terrorism

Lord Desai is an atheist and Honorary President of the National Secular Society. On 4 June 1998 he was quoted in Hansard as saying the following:

“Like my noble friend Lord Dormand I am an atheist and therefore should not speak too much about religion, but I am glad that the Church of England, having lost money in real estate, is now interested in sex and making money. That is always welcome.”

But in reality Desai has been very active indeed in opinionating about religion because in true Marxist orthodoxy there is no easier way to revive Stalinist intellectual bankruptcy than using Hindus as an easy punchbag. On 5 September 2012 the Marxist professor gave a hate speech organised by Nalanda University in Bihar, India. While delivering a lecture on “The Bhagavad Gita: A secular inquiry into A sacred text” at AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Desai sarcastically and rhetorically asked:

“Why are we respecting the text uncritically, which has so many flaws?”

He continued that the ancient text was not “a suitable text for modern India”. The Professor Emeritus and unrepentant Marxist said:

“In the text, it has been asked to do karma without thinking about the consequences. How can it be said that we should not think about the consequences? Whatever we do affects others too. For example, if I start drinking and then driving without thinking about the consequences, I might kill many people on the road.”

Desai also lamented the almost total absence of women in the Gita. The very next day Bihar Religious Trust Board chairman Acharya Kishore Kunal on Friday said Lord Meghnad Desai’s interpretation of Bhagavad Gita had not only hurt the religious sentiments of millions of Hindus but also ‘insulted’ martyrs who sacrificed their lives for motherland with Gita in their hands and its words on their lips. Desai had been adamant that the Kurukshetra war had been just about land, and that Krishna preached to Arjuna that he must fulfil his caste obligations. But Kunal countered this. Shri Krishna was asking Arjuna to do his duty as a Kshatriya (warrior), which was to fight and overcome his enemies, without thinking of the consequences. Not only was this right but also had profound lessons for modern India

“Arjun was the main warrior from the Pandava side and he refused to fight in the most crucial war. It was imperative on the part of any higher authority to advise him to fight and fight relentlessly. If in the war against Pakistan Jagjit Singh Arora would have refused to fight in the last moment, thinking that thousands of soldiers would die, India would not have won.”

It was a consideration not lost on Harry Oppenheimer when he exploded the first nuclear bomb and took direct quote from the Bhagavad Gita:

       “I have become death. The destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer knew the death and destruction which his weapon would unleash. But in defeating Nazism and Japanese fascism, it was a price he felt was worth paying for the greater good that would ensure – and alternatively the nightmare that would result from not acting in accordance with his ; duty’. Much as Arjuna had faced with Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

Das Kapital or Bhagavad Gita?

But this should have come as no surprise. On 7 January 2012 the Marxist lord and hatemonger castigated Gandhi’s use of the Gita at the Prof Ramlal Parikh Memorial Lecture, organised by Indian Society for Community Education because it condoned violence

“I chose the topic as I want to raise some questions with regard to Gandhiji’s views on violence. I am going to raise two separate issues….First is Gandhiji’s endorsement of Bhagvad Gita, whose end outcome is that ultimately everybody should go out and kill everybody. Mahabharata war, if taken literally, was similar to a holocaust….Gandhiji has admired Hitler and termed him as an unclouded intellectual with no vices, clean character, a non-vegetarian. How could someone of Gandhiji’s intellect make mistake on Hitler? How could food and drink habits could be mistaken for virtues?”

In an interview with Amit Roy, published in the Telegraph of 22 June 2002 he candidly unsentimental and dry about his land of birth:

“I like going to India, but if I don’t go, I don’t feel starved or parched. I carry my roots with me. I do not rely on India for my spiritual sustenance.”

In the same article he differentiates Marxism as being different from Leninism:

“We have to go back and look at the real Marx, read him and then see that Marx is not at all the gloom-and-doom merchant that people think he is but he is really an intelligent student of how capitalism works. That’s why I like him.”

Yes let us do exactly this. Let us examine Marx and exactly why anti-Hindu hatemongers like Desai are so enamoured by this joke figure of modern history. On 25 June 1853 Karl Marx wrote this in the New York Tribune

“Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages.

Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan.”

“That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere.”

So it should not be surprising his Disciple Desai slavishly follow his human deity’s edicts by lambasting the Geeta and all else which India’s ancient spirituality has gifted to humanity. It is this spirituality which Marx found so offensive:

 “Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies….”

“We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.”

So is it any surprise that the loyal little lord will spout forth the same uneducated rubbish that his laughable pseudo-religion dictates in the unquestionable edicts of its prophet. Entitled ‘The British Rule in India’, Marx explicitly supports colonial rule in that country:

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Yet Desai has the gall to criticise the Geeta, a book for which he has no use and scant understanding. Kunal stated that while Desai may be an intellectual giant in the field of economics, he was intellectually bankrupt in the field of Indian philosophy.

He might have added that the Marxist lord is also pretty much bankrupt when it comes to history. Desai claimed that the Gita is a text which was written over 800 years and provokes hatred of lower castes, women and was a weapon used by Brahmans against Buddhism:

“It can be understood that Britishers, who ruled India, tried to divide India socially but it is difficult to pursue the agenda of a person who is enjoying benefits of two countries and is trying to divide the society by such lectures. I fail to understand wherefrom Dr Desai gets impression from the Gita that it is a Brahmanical weapon against Buddhism. It is a pre-Buddhist text and therefore there is not a single reference to any Buddhist term in the Gita.”

But then can it be difficult to understand when Marxists read class warfare into everything –  except of course into socialist paradises such as North Korea, China and the former USSR where party elites enjoy mansions, chauffer driven luxury cars and gourmet hors d’oeuvres while the masses survive on mouldy potatoes and grains? Can it be so difficult to understand when Marx himself said that it was India’s fate to be under foreign rule permanently, and for its own benefit?

Can it be so hard when Marx himself wrote that Hinduism itself was the reason for poverty and oppression in India, hence colonial rule was a necessity? In the New Left Review of May-June 1970, Desai openly advocated violent overthrow of Indian democracy in ‘Vortex in India’

“A Socialist revolution in India would be an event of fundamental significance to the international class struggle. An immense population of 550 million whose rural and urban masses are plunged in abysmal misery and unemployment make India one of the great potential storm-centres within world capitalism.

In the last decade, it has become clear that one after another the landmarks of post-independence politics are rapidly disappearing and a turbulent and uncharted future lies ahead.”

“The split in the Communist Party of India between the CPI (Right) and CPI (Marxist) in 1964 and the subsequent split in the CPI (Marxist) which has led to the formation of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist); the formation of United Front Governments in Kerala and West Bengal embracing both the CPI (r) and the CPI (m); the peasant revolt in the Naxalbari district of West Bengal in 1967 and the present emergence of a guerrilla movement in the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh; the widespread defeat of the Congress Party in the 1967 elections and the vertical national split in the Congress Party in late 1969—this chain of developments must be judged against the economic relations and class structure of Indian society which provide their fundamental background.”

At this juncture we need perhaps ask Desai what relevance does his ideology have for modern India, indeed the modern world. The attempt to cut off Marxism and Leninism into two distinct entities is but part of a well-worn strategy of the unrepentant trying desperately to salvage a dream gone very sour.

How else can Desai cling to an idea so flawed that the working-class paradise degenerated into slave labour camps, secret police, genocide, racism, anti-Semitism and social dysfunction everywhere it seized power? Leninism was the logical outgrowth of Marxism, just as Maoism, Stalinism and Pol Pot were Das Kapital put into action.

Yet while defending an idea which always had the core of mass murder and terror, Desai is so keen to attack the Geeta. If Desai is so keen to castigate Gandhi for ‘supporting’ Hitler due to similarities in diet, where is his condemnation of Marx’s overt anti-Semitism in ‘The Jewish Question’?

Where is condemnation of the Hitler-Stalin pact which raped Poland and led directly to the war which killed millions?

For the intellectually bankrupt such as Lord Desai attacking Hindus is the sure means to show relevance in order to hide a sordid past, just as supporting segregation and lynching of blacks was the easiest way for populist demagogues to gain support in the American South and diverting attention away from real issues.

That is why this unreconstructed hatemonger and demagogue never debates issues openly and clings to Marxism in desperation. Like George Gallagher he also looks in desperation for a socialist fatherland that will accept him as opposed to the ‘imperialist’ west in which he has lapped up fame and enjoyed unquestioned generosity.

It is in this area which he finds a like mind in the late dictator, Hitler-admirer and mass murderer Idi Amin who would have sent the pretentious Marxist lord packing with all his worldly belongings stuffed into a plastic bag had he had the chance.

Gaddafi-Desai Axis

Hindu Human Rights Group had its first ugly encounter with the nutty Professor Desai in 2006. The Guardian is a newspaper which prides itself on having varied viewpoints; just as long as they are not too stridently Hindu and Jewish. It is no surprise then that it let the anti-Hindu demagogue publish his letter complaining at how Asia House had withdrawn offensively anti-Hindu paintings by MF Hussain

“Hindu goddesses can be seen in a variety of poses which many may find erotic in the temples of Khajuraho and Tirupati and many others. Hindu society and religion are remarkably relaxed and tolerant about sexual practices of human beings as well as of their gods and goddesses.What we are witnessing is the import into the UK of a group which under the guise of Hindu human rights is practising censorship for which there is no sanction in Hindu religion. It is the duty of all citizens to stop this evil before it spreads too far into our body politic.”

“In my view the objection to Husain is not the so-called obscenity of his paintings. It is because he is a Muslim and hence the desire of some Hindu groups to deny his artistic freedom to take Hindu gods and goddesses as his theme.”

How exactly is it an “import” when HHR was formed by British-born Hindus in the first place? If anyone is an “import”, it is Desai. This is the same bankrupt intellectual who in Parliament claimed as an atheist he “should not speak too much about religion”. Now as to “evil” and “censorship” well coming from a Marxist that is just a bit more than an unhealthy joke. It is even more than a joke than Desai being the proud owner of an exclusive property in Hastings stuffed full of antiques and Italian marble while all the time lecturing on the evils of capitalism.

Despite its liberal leanings the Guardian has always been keen to recycle racist and colonialist stereotypes against Hindus as it forges Britain’s most effective Nazi style propaganda media machine against anything remotely Hindu. No surprise then that while excluding and censoring anything too intelligent about Hinduism, the anti-Hindu Guardian allowed Lord Desai to spout this:

“The Hindu Human Rights Group in its press release is demanding an apology from Asia House to the Hindu community for this exhibition. This is an outrageous attack on artistic freedom in the British context. Would the media have ignored such an event had the protesters been Muslims and not Hindus?”

Well why is Desai not so keen to broadcast how Husain, for all his artistic ‘freedom’. Got offered citizenship in of all places Qatar. This is the same Qatar where the state religion is the hardcore form of Islam called Wahhabism, just as it is in Saudi Arabia. This is the same Qatar which broadcasts Al-Jazeera, the news channel which boasts such prestigious guests as former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and backs al-Qaeda terrorism.

Perhaps a conflict of interest here as it was al-Jazeera which backed the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, whose son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi had completed his Phd at the LSE, under the close supervision of Desai. But the anti-Hindu demagogue did not just award Gaddafi junior his PhD. He also accepted a £1.5 million donation from him and said,

“Saif Gaddafi registered as an MSc student in 2003. Some objected, saying we should not admit a dictator’s son. But why should a university look at anyone’s parentage to decide whether to admit them or not? His scholastic record was found sufficient to admit him to the philosophy department. He went on to enter the PhD programme after passing his MSc successfully.”

In the Hindu of 4 March 2011 the Marxist demagogue lamented about being “unfairly” dragged into the Gaddafi donation row. Desai brushed off claims that Saif plagiarised his PhD and defended how the LSE accepted the financial donation

“This is over-egging the pudding. The man is evil enough – you don’t have to add that he’s a plagiarist as well.”

Of course money speaks louder than words, especially with someone like Desai who while refusing to debate with Hindus gleefully runs to accept money from dictators like Gaddafi who were busy funding terrorist organisations and extremist groups such as the National Front who would have treated Desai in the same manner as he would have experienced at the hands of the Libyan dictator’s fellow despot Idi Amin.

Desai did write in the anti-Hindu Guardian that it was unfortunate how Gaddafi was shooting his own people:

“What is happening in Libya is dreadful and one can only hope that the violation of human rights will be prosecuted by the international criminal court. If Saif Gaddafi were to be prosecuted and sentenced that would be justice. LSE is not responsible for his behaviour after he had left the institution. Yet it is paying a heavy price and the damage done by its Libyan association will take some time to repair.”

But then the regime was itself always brutal to the masses just as it was when it was encouraging the lighter-skinned Arabs and Tuareg to form a separate state in Chad from the black majority. Would the Marxist professor have been just as embarrassed if the Libyan revolution of 2011 had not taken place? On 6 march 2011 the Times of India ) reported that Desai was now saying that the “blood money” should be sent back to Libya:

“It obviously looks like we were wrong. In hindsight, it has become blood money. LSE has to clean up its image and money should be going back. Any association with Libya that looks like financial gain has to be returned.”

So his main concern is to clean up the image of the LSE not any sense of justice. It is the same desperate convulsions that lead him to try and clean up the image of his own genocidal, racist, anti-Hindu and anti-Semitic ideology of Marxism.

Here again he tries to use hindsight by unconvincingly disassociating Leninism from Marxism. So we should take with a pinch of salt and heavy skepticism when this man who follows genocidal ideas blames Hinduism for India’s poverty.

The Lord Desai Rate of Mental Stagnation

On February 2011 Desai told India’s media outfit Tehelka that Hinduism had a tendency to resort to armed struggle

“India is not a secular nation, it is a Hindu nation. And reviving the Hindu nation has been the aim of a very important branch of politics. In a lot of ways, people like Vivekananda, who are now termed secular, were not secular at all. They had no reason to be secular.”

“The lesson for (Bal Gangadhar) Tilak from the Bhagwad Gita was ‘karmayoga’, which was supposed to be a militant struggle, not just a curricular term. So one should not be surprised that Hindu religion has the tendency to take up armed struggle, because it was not called terrorism earlier.”

“And Abhinav Bharat, which (Veer) Savarkar started ages ago, is seen today planting bombs and so on. This is a longstanding tradition. Madan Lal Dhingra and Savarkar supported violence — and Dhingra is considered a hero of the freedom struggle. The Congress may not accept it but the roots of this religious violence come from them. So if there is Hindu terror, one has to understand it comes from a background where it was considered an honourable way.”

He equates this Hindu terror with Islamic terrorism and how Muslims have replaced the British as its targets. On 22 April in the Indian Express he equated this supposed phenomenon with jihad and even Maoist violence (I guess Maoism is not Marxism, a bit like Leninism then?. In the Indian Express of 2 September 2012 the Marxist leftover says that during the independence movement Congress was basically a coalition of “caste Hindus”. On 29 July he muddied the reality of jihad terrorism that the problem in Assam was one of clash between minorities and not just a simple communal conflict

In the same paper of 1 July 2012 he denies that India was ever an ancient nation

“But Bharatvarsha was never all of India; at best it was Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. You could stretch it to include UP and Bihar but Bengal (Gaud) was never part of it, to say nothing about Dakshin, all the land south of the Vindhyas.”

In actual fact the various ‘maths’ and sacred sites were dotted all over India, including the south and Assam. The Mahabharata by its very name connotes a name that covers all India. But then what can we expect from someone who follows an outdated figure such as Marx who held that India had no essential unity unless it was under the foreigner’s heel?

No wonder he speaks of “the Hindu rate of growth” (. Yet the only explicitly Hindu growth rate , if one can use such a term, has been in Gujarat where Narendra Modi holds power.

Under years of state licensing, state interference and state hampering of the economy due to the socialist ideas of Nehru, India’s main success was averting the famines it had experienced under the Raj. While the youthful Desai wrote of the need for red revolution it was the Green Revolution which changed things for the better.

However compared to the Asian Tigers, India was looking dishevelled and backward by the 1980s. Only the reforms initiated by Narasimha Rao opened up India to the world, and Indians were opened to new possibilities. Under Narendra Modi, castigated as a hardline and extremist Hindu by detractors of which Desai is many, growth has reached unprecedented pace in Gujarat. On 5 August 2012 in his Indian Express column warned of the danger Modi poses

Yet what of the danger Desai’s own Marxist effluence no matter how nice and fluffy he dresses it up? Maoism has caused untold death and misery in Nepal and parts of India, just as it did with the Shining Path terrorists of Peru. Marxist thinking held India into what demagogues such as Desai insist on labelling the Hindu rate of growth.

Marxist Matrimony

The incredible and nightmarish situation of Frederic and Rosemary West was how rare it was that two psychopaths come together to unleash an orgy of sickening violence. The last century saw legion examples of how it was indeed possible for such freaks of humanity to gain control over millions.

The Ceausescus were the but most obvious example. So we can be thankful that the Desais have not managed to become brutal overbearing despots like Marxist despots who our delightful peer does not think are as bad as non-existent saffron fascists.

Kishwar Desai is Lord Desai’s second wife, and like him also had a previous marriage. Her main area of focus has been highlighting female foeticide and infanticide in India. In tackling age-hold beliefs that condemn millions at birth just because of their gender she should be lauded.

However on 1 July 2010 she decided to be part of a chair on the screening in London of ‘India’s Forgotten Women’ by Rev. Michael Lawson. Now Lawson is a film maker who uses issues of human rights as a barely camouflaged front for hardcore missionary activates.

Having attended one of his badly attended hatefests at the London Pentecost festival the following year, Lawson openly said that his cause was not to help India’s most deprived and oppressed but

“to pray every day that India turns to Christ”.

There is nothing wrong with this but it does beg a few questions. Why is Lawson not so open about this? HHR took painstaking research to uncover his true activities as a right-wing fanatic who in his own videos speak of an Aryan racial invasion of India, and backing by the powerful fundamentalist hatecore outfit Christian Solidarity Worldwide who screen his propaganda movies. But why is a supposed atheist and secularist forging an axis with a figure as despicable as her Marxist husband but with a belief in an almighty deity who will burn unbelieving subhuman infidels like the ‘odd couple’?

In the vortex of anti-Hindu hate the axis between hardcore Marxists and Christian right-wing extremists is well-known. Marx after all would have found little to disagree with when it came to missionaries like Sister Agnes (Mother Teresa) ranting about the need to suppress superstitious Hindu practices. Indeed just as Marx saw capitalism and colonialism as higher than the feudalism which he saw endemic in all pre-colonial societies, so Marxists have long held that Christianity and Islam are at a higher stage of development than Hinduism as they offer egalitarianism over caste ridden backwardness.

Anti-Hindu by Desai’n

Unfortunately the West keeps repeating the same mistakes. When it comes to getting the token brown face to comment on Hindu affairs, Desai is wheeled out of the stock room. Just because he has an Indian name does not make him an expert on Indian issues and Hinduism. Judging by the utter failure of Marxism it is not exactly clear why he even became an expert on politics and economics. Now hindsight is a good thing but unforgiveable when not even used.

Desperate to revive a flagging career and desperate for donations now that his former student Saif al-Islam Gaddafi faces the same grim fate as his despotic father, he decides on the lowest common denominator of anti-Hindu hate.

Now George Wallace was never actually racist when it came down to it. But he knew he had to play on white fears in order win the governorship.

With Desai on the other hand we have a typical Marxist Gunga Din self-hating person of Indian origin, just as his deity Karl Marx was, like his socialist protagonist Lasalle, an anti-Semite who loathed his Jewish background and took every opportunity to denigrate it.

Western democracies are needlessly alienating Hindus and indeed India by promoting this unhealthy joke from the past whose relevance to the modern world is non-existent, save for a warning of how not to think.By promoting the Desai factor anti-Hindu venom is injected into mainstream discourse. Academic objectivity, standards and calibre are the inevitable casualties.