The recent withdrawal from Penguin Publishing of ‘The Hindus’ by veteran anti-Hindu academic and rabble rouser Wendy Doniger has brought out the usual useful idiots who clamour for freedom of speech. What these ardent democrat so conveniently forget is that it is demagogues like Doniger who have used their positions of influence to crush that very liberty we take so much for granted.
Unlike many other Hindu organisations HHR has always taken its activism from virtual to actual reality. The two overlap harmoniously in our operative measures. Such was the case in 2003 when the evil twins of anti-Hindu hatred in modern literature spoke at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Hosting Doniger at this event was William Dalrymple, one of the old school ‘hooray Henry’ types that manned the Indian Civil Service during the days of the British Raj, but now tried to prove his multicultural politically correct credentials by eating curry and wearing a long white shirt as part of his standard ethnic kitsch.
However this time Doniger’s obsession with everything in Hinduism being about sexual debauchery did not go unchallenged. But such questions were crushed by Dalrymple who banned anything which smacked of being from a Hindu perspective and tried to show Hinduism in a positive light.
In fact it went further. Right under the eyes of Dalrymple and Doniger, Lord Bagri physically manhandled and pushed off stage a Hindu lady who had dared to question Doniger. So much for freedom of speech because when confronted with the very democracy which these anti-Hindu stalwarts claim to support, and unable to answer questions which do not harmonise with their predetermined view of the world, they do not hesitate to resort to wanton violence. The parallels with South Africa under apartheid are uncanny and disturbing.
By itself this is not unusual. The misnamed Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies hosted Doniger only last year. But it would never host anything too Hindu. What that means was evident when in 1999 the centre’s fuehrer Shaunaka Rishi Das launched into a tirade at the NHSF annual conference in Coventry by saying how Hindus were so evil as they went around destroying mosques. Again any challenge to his smug language of the gutter was banned. So where is freedom of speech?
The lack of freedom of speech for Hindus has many manifestations. Dr Subramanian Swamy was about as ‘secular’ as they come, having been president of the Janata Party. Indeed he entered politics opposed to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, and even married outside the Hindu community to a Parsi: Roxna, an advocate at the Supreme Court of India. This did not save him when he dared to express his freedom of speech. In December 2011, the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences removed his course from the Harvard Summer School offerings in response to an particle he wrote which was deemed ‘controversial’. Dr Swamy was booted out of his well-respected job in Harvard. Where was the freedom of speech then?
If the anti-Hindu rabble are so keen on freedom of speech, why did they not speak up when Koenraad Elst and other academics giving a Hindu perspective denied just a basic platform to speak? Is freedom of speech a special privilege to be withheld from Hindus, while being a basic right for all others? Why is the UK government spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers money at a time of unprecedented natural disaster on a report to investigate caste by anti-Hindu academics such as Meena Dhanda who deliberately exclude Hindu input into their predetermined findings? Why the lack of protest against this freedom of speech?
So to anyone who feels even the least bit of sympathy for Doniger and her freedom of speech, remember this. The book withdrawal would not even have been necessary if this spineless hatemonger had had the decency to actually debate openly and freely in a civilised manner, rather than cowardly dodging the issue for years. But despite all this she reaped her inevitable karma. Doniger runs a whole department at the University of Chicago and determined who gets their doctorates. It is the same in much of the world, notable India, UK and the USA.
Departments dealing with Indian or Hindu studies are staffed with outdated Marxist autocrats such as Sudipta Kaviraj, Priyamvada Gopal and Meena Dhanda, who not only determine who will pass exams and vivas, but also create clones of themselves and will not tolerate what they describe as Hindu ‘fundamentalists’ under any circumstances. The lesson is clear. Change your mind or fail. It is the same with the missionary lobby who clamour against India’s anti conversion laws. Yet they either turn a blind eye to violence against Hindus or actively encourage it.
The common factor here is money, in the form of millions of pounds in grants, donations, lecture fees, and state sponsorship. This is not a level playing field and if you are an outsider like author Rajiv Malhotra you had better be prepared to battle against tsunami of hate backed by bulging purses as opposed to intellectual argument. This was never about freedom of speech. It has always been about using hatred of Hinduism to keep people like Doniger in lucrative jobs by being branded as ‘designer academics’ which of course helps in running scams under the guise of academic courses. Nice work if you can get it!
The playing field is therefore deliberately set out to be anti-Hindu in order to attract all cascade of cash which funds this Ivory Tower Benefits Street. and these protests over freedom of speech are but another example of the goal posts again being moved. It is important that we remember how fascism arose from this very bohemian avant-garde milieu which now produces anti-Hindu monsters such as Doniger who cry foul once their so-called ‘freedom of speech’ has been exposed for what it really is. An twin exercise in uncompromising hatred and scrounging off the earnings of others.
2 Comments