Rajiv Malhotra’s book, “Breaking India”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Islamic terrorism started with Osama bin Laden if one were to go by what the US politicians claim and what the media reports. But India has had the unwanted attention of the proselytizing faiths, Islam and Christianity, for centuries hell bent (to use an expression) on converting the infidels into their bloody ideologies. Terrorism is one of the tactics that people motivated by these ideologies have routinely used — although that fact does not get too much play since much of the media (and in many cases the governments of states) is controlled by the institutions founded on those monotheistic faiths. India is perhaps the oldest victim of religious terrorism and it continues to bleed copiously from it even today. India’s civilizational struggle is certainly the longest ongoing war the world has ever suffered — and it goes on only because India is still not totally vanquished. It survives but the prospects are not very good.

India is shrinking. But what do we mean by “India”? India is of course a “state” and a “country.” The word also refers to the “nation” of India. The modern Indian state is a political entity which attained political independence in 1947 but that does not mean that India did not exist before that date. European culture and ethnicity, to take a parallel, existed long before the political states that are European countries of today existed.

A nation is a group of people who share culture, ethnicity, language and/or territory. . . A nation is not necessarily equated with country in that a country is akin to a state which is defined as the political entity within defined borders. Although “nation” is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of “nation” coincides with the political concept of “state” are called nation states. [Wiki, Nation.]

The Indian nation has been shrinking for centuries. Look at the map. Or I should say look at a series of maps. Afghanistan, for instance, was a Buddhist nation and to that extent it was part of the Indic nation. Today it is a wasteland. It was conquered a few centuries ago. The land that is Pakistan today was part of that Indic civilization. It was formally chopped off in 1947 but the fate of that part of the world was sealed with the Islamic invasion of those parts. To the east, Malaysia and Indonesia are rapidly Islamizing.

If, as has been observed by many that demographics determine borders, then it should not come as a surprise that India has been shrinking because the most striking demographic change — conversion of people of Indic faiths to Islam and Christianity — is occurring for centuries. And once that demographic transition takes place, the new entity carved out of India becomes a sworn enemy intent on destroying India. Remember that Pakistanis are the descendants of people of Indic civilization who were converted to Islam. Today’s converts will in due course also take up arms against their former cultural and ethnic relatives. It will not be too long before some of the eastern Indian states will seek secession because their demographics — 100 percent Christian — would dictate different borders.

India has been shrinking and will continue to do so. Remembering that change is a fundamental feature of the universe, it is unreasonable to expect no change. But not all change is an improvement, and some change imposes immense suffering. The suffering that Islamization imposes on the population is heartbreaking, of course. Even worse, in a globalized world, the suffering of Islamic nations is quickly transmitted — often amplified — to non-Muslims. Islam claims universal domain and thus imposes suffering universally, whether you live in an Islamic country or not, whether you are a Muslim or not.

Islam’s older relative, Christianity, also caused untold suffering around the world for centuries. The natives of many countries in the Americas paid with rivers of blood and tears. Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of civilization is aware of the bloody history of those two monotheistic faiths. Samuel Huntington has pointed out Islam’s bloody borders — and innards — and he is just one of many who have argued that it is a clash of civilizations.

My central concern is suffering and how to reduce it. From that flows my interest in India’s economic growth and development. India accounts for a huge chunk of humanity and if we can do something to make India more materially prosperous, we have a shot at reducing human suffering. One of the things we have to guard against is the Islamization of India. Analytically you can argue that the Islamization of a population would be immiserizing (meaning “to increase misery”, to borrow a word from Jagadish Bhagwati) but the empirical evidence is so overwhelming that we need not tax our analytical faculties.

I don’t care what sky-daddy people believe in as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and follow the dictates of their sky-daddy in the privacy of their own home. But if they go around killing non-believers for imagined crimes against their sky-daddy, I am not going to stand for it. It is not Islam as an ideology that I am against but rather what people do under its influence that I am against.

We have a problem at hand. It is a complex problem, as opposed to a simple problem. A simple problem is one that you have and you know you have it. A complex problem is one which you have and you don’t know that you have a problem. To solve a complex problem you need to first make people aware of the problem, and only then can you propose and implement a solution.

India’s fight against the designs that institutions motivated by the destructive monotheistic ideologies requires people who address the more difficult part of the complex problem: waking up the people. Once people become sensitized to the need to fight the enemy, it will not be too hard to end the longest running war in the history of mankind.

First step is to educate ourselves. Let’s pay attention to what the smart guys are saying out of concern for the universal good. Take, for example, Mr Rajiv Malhotra and his book, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines” (co-author Aravindan Neekakandan.) We have understand the full scope of the problem before we can help with the solution. If we understand that bit, the next step will be trivially clear to us.

The rest of this blog post is about that book. All of 640 pages of carefully researched, cogently argued, heavily annotated and footnoted. First of all, it is a big fat book. You all know how I feel about big fat books. But you have to read it and do something with the understanding.

Here’s what the blurb says,

India’s integrity is being undermined by three global networks that have well-established operating bases inside India: (i) Islamic radicalism linked with Pakistan, (ii) Maoists and Marxist radicals supported by China via intermediaries such as Nepal, and (iii) Dravidian and Dalit identity separatism being fostered by the West in the name of human rights. This book focuses on the third: the role of U.S. and European churches, academics, think-tanks, foundations, government and human rights groups in fostering separation of the identities of Dravidian and Dalit communities from the rest of India. The book is the result of five years of research, and uses information obtained in the West about foreign funding of these Indian-based activities. The research tracked the money trails that start out claiming to be for “education,” “human rights,” “empowerment training,” and “leadership training,” but end up in programs designed to produce angry youths who feel disenfranchised from Indian identity. The book reveals how outdated racial theories continue to provide academic frameworks and fuel the rhetoric that can trigger civil wars and genocides in developing countries. The Dravidian movement’s 200-year history has such origins. Its latest manifestation is the “Dravidian Christianity” movement that fabricates a political and cultural history to exploit old faultlines. The book explicitly names individuals and institutions, including prominent Western ones and their Indian affiliates. Its goal is to spark an honest debate on the extent to which human rights and other “empowerment” projects are cover-ups for these nefarious activities. For more information, or to view videos about this book, visit http://www.breakingindia.com

Here’s a commentary by NS Rajaram on “Breaking India” explains why the book is important.

BREAKING INDIA MAY UNDERMINE WAR ON TERRORISM

Authors of the just released book Breaking India allege that Christian organizations are engaged in a divisive program to expand in countries like India, Sri Lanka and other former colonies by creating and exploiting divisions. This shortsighted policy may seriously undermine war against terror.

N.S. Rajaram

The war against terror is not just India’s war or America’s war: it is a war of freedom against the spread of ideology of terror in the name of God. The West, America in particular, became aware of the threat only after 9/11 but India has been waging a war against Jihadi terror for over a thousand years. As a result no people in the world today have more knowledge and experience of fighting terror than the Indians. India and the West should be working together to defeat this menace. With countries in the strategically vital Middle East sliding into turmoil, solidarity with India becomes still more important: this is a fact not seriously disputed by any serious strategic thinker in the world

But curiously, some groups based in America and Europe are actively engaged in weakening Indian society by dividing its people into mutually hostile camps on the basis of tribe, cast and religion. It is part of an ideology and academic exercise promoted by evangelical Christian and so-called ‘human rights’ organizations in an effort to spread their influence and gain converts. Many human rights organizations are little more than secular fronts of various churches that have made inroads into the media and are now trying to gain control of sections of the government. All this is brought out with profuse documentation by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan in their just released book Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (Amaryllis 2011).

Their strategy is based on creating and fanning resentments among so-called ‘minorities’— a continuation of the tactics used by bureaucrats, academics and missionaries during the colonial era. These minorities are often based on willful misrepresentation. To take an example, McDonalds is one of the world’s largest fast food chains. In the past decade or so it has begun setting up franchises in India, Sri Lanka and other countries. In India its presence is miniscule compared to local businesses in the restaurant businesses. But no one for that reason regards India’s McDonalds franchises as ‘small businesses’ that qualify for tax and other benefits. Take another example: GM makes and sells cars in India, but in numbers it is dwarfed by Indian automakers like Maruti, Tata and Mahindra. Yet no one sees GM as a small business.

But this is exactly the claim of Christian organizations like the Catholic, Anglican and evangelical churches. Even though they are multinational organizations that are much larger worldwide than any Hindu sect or organization, they insist on being treated as minorities and given special privileges in education, jobs and other areas. This is a central thesis of the just noted Breaking India by Malhotra and Neelakandan. The authors further point out that in a manner eerily similar to what happened in the century preceding the European colonization of India (and other countries), these Christian organizations and their academic and NGO affiliates are engaged in weakening the country to facilitate foreign domination. It is no accident that Church organizations enjoyed special privileges under British rule, many of which have continued after independence in the guise of ‘minority’ rights. Their activities today give the impression that they would like to see the return of colonial rule in some form.

Dividing people along tribal and ethnic lines has a long and sordid history. In India it took the form of a racial divide of Indians into two groups called Aryans and Dravidians. Science has fully discredited the notion of race while the British themselves have acknowledged their political motive by admitting that the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory “gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.” (BBC, October 6, 2005.)

In a speech at the British House of Commons in 1929, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin echoed the idea by claiming that God had told the British (presumably in English) to uplift the degraded Indian Aryans to their former heights through British rule. This is what came to be known as the White Man’s Burden in the phrase made famous by Rudyard Kipling. Neither Kipling nor Baldwin originated the idea: they borrowed it from the missionaries who claimed, and still claim that by accepting Jesus as savior, we can be saved from our sins since Jesus died for our sins. (This is an obvious incentive to sin as much as possible since we can save ourselves by converting on our deathbeds; if we don’t sin, Jesus will have died in vain.)

But missionaries and academics later went much further. They claimed that their (meaning the British) presence was necessary to correct the oppression of the ‘minority’ Dravidians by the ‘invading’ Aryans. The most influential figure in this development was Robert Caldwell, Bishop of Tirunelveli. The Google Encyclopedia describes him as: “a Colonial Era Evangelist Missionary who used native languages as a tool to proselytize the Colonized in Southern India. To aid his mission, he nativised Christianity by adopting a teleological approach to re-classify Indian languages inspired by scientific (sic: pseudo-scientific) racial theories that was popular amongst the European intellectuals in the 19th century. His works revolve around the missionary work in Tinnevelly (Thirunelveli) district in Tamil Nadu and it laid the theoretical foundation for the political and academic ‘revivalist’ movement that came to dominate Dravidian nationalism in Tamil Nadu and racial polarization in Sri Lanka.”

This polarization led to the church-sponsored LTTE terrorism in Sri Lanka that ended only with its total defeat. In India it led to the Dravidian faultline—as the authors term it—that sustains Dravidian politics especially in Tamil Nadu. The original DMK was the handiwork of Christian missionaries. It was originally called the Justice Party, claiming its goal was to bring justice to the oppressed Dravidians. It is supposed to be scientific and rationalist, but still holds on to the scientifically discredited Aryan-Dravidian theory. This division is the centerpiece of both the Dravidian parties and the LTTE: their whole ideology collapses once they accept that science has demolished their racial basis.

This Dravidian ideology, it is hardly a theory, has spawned its own brand of ‘scholarship’. According to the Aryan Invasion Theory now kept alive by Dravidian politicians (and their academic camp followers like Michael Witzel, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola), the invading Aryans destroyed the Harappan cities (of the Indus Valley) like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But these, Parpola in particular go further: the builders of these great 5000 year old cities were Dravidians who spoke an early form of Tamil. These were driven out of their cities by the invading Aryans and forced to migrate en masse to Tamil Nadu, a thousand miles to the south where they have preserved their Tamil language!

How does Parpola know that these long dead people spoke Tamil? He doesn’t but that is immaterial. He complimented the people of Tamil Nadu for preserving the ancient language of the Harappan people of which there is no trace. This pleased the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi sufficiently to give Parpola a cash award of a million rupees (about $25,000). When this news became public there was a flurry of activity in Western academic circles with several scholars claiming that they too had proof of the ‘Dravidian’ nature of the Harappan civilization. (Asko Parpola is from Finland.) But the activity died out when Mr Karunanidhi announced that the award would be given only once every five years.

A curious thing happened on the way from Bishop Caldwell to Dravidian politics— racism became inseparable from language: Dravidian language became Dravidian race. Even a supposedly great scholar like F. Max Müller became an advocate of it, at least until it became politically uncomfortable for him. This was denounced by real scientists. Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great biologists of the century wrote as far back as 1939:

“In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature…” To political and propagandist Huxley might have added ‘religious and missionary’, for it was the missionary Bishop Caldwell who created this conundrum. Even Max Müller believed in the Biblical superstition of Creation on 26 October 4004 BC! He even expressed admiration for the 17th century forger Father Robert de Nobili who produced a Biblical ‘Yesur Veda’ (Veda of Jesus) instead of the Yajurveda.

Today this brand religious ‘scholarship’ has been taken to abysmal depths by missionaries in India who now claim that the original Dravidians were Christians and the invading Aryans created the Vedas by borrowing ideas from the Bible! The authors of Breaking India cite several such examples by these missionary ‘scholars’. Here is a gem from one Deivanayagam (and his daughter Devakala) who claim that Sanskrit was brought to India (by Aryans naturally) after Jesus and prior to that India was Dravidian Christian, which is the source of the Veda. According to this theory Brahmins (Aryans) stole ideas from Dravidian Christianity and created Hindu scriptures including the Vedas. Sanskrit came into existence only 150 years after Christianity.

This raises a few difficult questions. What were Brahmins and what language did they use before they stole Dravidian Christianity and Tamil to create Hinduism and Sanskrit? What is Dravidian Christianity? According to these scholars, Dravidian Christianity was the Christianity preached by St Thomas when he came to India in 52 AD and was killed by Brahmins for that reason. Never mind that the Christian Bible (New Testament) came into existence only in the 4th century, compiled by St Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. Or that St Thomas never visited India. (He may never have existed, but that is a different story.)

What is extraordinary is that such tripe should receive support and sponsorship from Christian organizations. Not so long ago Christian institutions could produce scholars of the caliber of Father Heras, W.W. Hunter and others who for all their prejudices knew the meaning and worth of scholarship. As I will describe in a future article, this precipitous decline in scholarship is due to the decline of Christianity in the West and the emptying of the seminaries. The vacuum has been filled by aspiring seminarians from Third World countries like India. So, where formerly Biblical scholars came from the divinity schools of Yale, Harvard, Gregorianum (Rome) and others, we now have shallow propagandists coming from troubled seminaries with no academic standards. Like the proverbial neo-convert (and neveu riche) many of them have become loose cannons without any trace of scruples.

This horde is now menacing their homelands with newfound money and influence. This is an important area that needs to be studied. Most Americans are not aware of the fact that Christianity today, the missionary movement in particular is a Third World phenomenon where it is creating social and political havoc. Another fact that Americans (and other westerners) are surprised to learn is that the Christianity being propagated by these is pre-Enlightenment Christianity with its baggage of racism and anti-Semitism: churches in India still preach that Jews killed Jesus and Jews are the enemies of God.

The relationship of the U.S. governments over the years with missionaries is a complex one. Some, mainly Republican administrations have not hesitated to use them as political tools for spying and other covert activities. Democratic administrations on the other hand have supported them in the fond hope they will carry out social works and advance ‘human rights’. (Both show that Christian outfits are willing political stooges.) Human rights bodies today are heavily infiltrated by evangelic interests pushing their own agenda. It is no exaggeration to say that human rights is a neocolonial ideology that has taken the place of the White Man’s Burden— of imposing a set of their own but alien values on the people of the Third World.

But the situation today is far too grave for such games: Indian and U.S. strategic interests now overlap to a degree that was unimaginable even a decade ago. And no area is more important than fighting terrorism. Fighting terrorism presents the greatest challenge for the two countries. But Church organizations, in their tunnel vision, focused on gaining maximum converts are oblivious to the social damage it is causing and the ill will it is generating. This discord can only help the terrorists. Leaders and thinkers in both countries must recognize the dangers of this ‘Breaking India’ activity that can only benefit forces that are bent on destroying freedom and civilization as we understand them. Needless to say these evangelists and human rights-wallahs will not be in the front lines when terrorist forces strike home.

It is impossible to do justice to the full scope of Breaking India in an article like the present one. I have only touched on a few salient points, occasionally going beyond the book to highlight their historical and other background. The book needs to be studied and discussed in detail at various academic and policy forums.

I have had the privilege of meeting Mr Rajiv Malhotra during the book launch in New Delhi in February. I spent a delightful day discussing all sorts of matters with him. I am looking forward to the book launch in the SF Bay area this month. (I will announce the date here when it is finalized.)

Anyhow this post is becoming inordinately long. I wanted to give out as much information as I can about the book and about Malhotraji’s work. Who is he? He is the founder and president of the Infinity Foundation.

Rajiv Malhotra is a public intellectual on current affairs, world religions and cross-cultural encounters between East and West. His career has spanned the corporate world as a senior executive, strategic consultant and successful entrepreneur in the information technology and media industries. His Infinity Foundation, seeks to foster a better global understanding of Indian civilization. Rajiv’s work argues that the dharma offers a complex and open framework for a genuine dialogue among diverse peoples, rather then a zero sum game. He shows the limitations of globalization when it is a parochial imposition of Western paradigms. He is well known as a speaker and writer for a wide audience and is frequently interviewed and invited to deliver keynote addresses. He serves on the Board of Governors of the India Studies program at the University of Massachusetts, and served as a Chairman for the Asian Studies Education Committee of the State of New Jersey.

More information about the book at BreakingIndia.com. Also please join the book discussion group.

And to end this long post (and make it even longer), here’s an informative review of the book at Amazon. The author is Dr Vijaya Rajiva.

The book Breaking India (2011) is a landmark event in that it brings together a comprehensive account of the many forces that have in the past undermined and continues to try to undermine the national unity of India, called Bharat . The authors, well known intellectual and scholar in the Indian diaspora Shri Rajiv Malhotra and his co author Shri Arvindan Neelakandhan, have placed together under one roof the documentation and analyses gathered over a period of several years. This is the book’s strength. The documentation is meticulous and is provided dispassionately and honestly. The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.

There are 19 chapters to this voluminous work, along with detailed appendices and an impressive bibliography. Each chapter is written with care and attention. The information contained therein should capture the attention of every Indian who believes in the integrity of the nation and how this had been attacked in the past and may well happen again if timely discussion and action are not taken to prevent that happening.

The major thread in the balkanization of India process started with the emergent West’s desperate search for identity (in the early 17th and 18th centuries) and for colonizing the earth’s resources. The search for European identity began with European scholars appropriating India’s linguistic identity in the shape of Sanskrit to fulfull their own need for identity. Thus began the Aryanisation theory according to which Aryans invaded India, subjugated its indigenous population and instituted the caste system, whereby the Aryan invaders remained on top of the hierarchy. In due time they mixed with the indigenous people and gradually lost the purity of their race.

Whereas, in Europe they retained this purity. Alongside of this , the European Aryans integrated their new found identity with Christian doctrine which harked back to a Semitic identity. In order to eliminate this semitic identity Jesus now became the founder of the new religion of Aryan Christianity. The book shows many leading scholars lending credence to this dubious creation of European identity and both wittingly and unwittingly contributing to the rise of anti semiticism and the eventual holocaust in Hitler’s Germany. A similar process took place with regard to India. The many icons William Jones (the first translator of Kalidasa), Max Mueller, the Sanskritist, to name only two of those that Indians have habitually respected, are shown to have clay feet . . . .

Their aim was not simply the aims of scholarship.

The second thread (which the book does not go into) is the European search for economic dominance of the earth, its people and its resources. This aspect has been written about in detail by other scholars. But while these accounts generally restrict themselves to a type of economism , that is, looking only at the economic component of the phenomenon of colonization, this book provides the ideological underpinning of the colonization process.

For India, the significance of both aspects of the European drive for identity/dominance and colonization for resources resulted in its second major Occupation, the British Occupation,the first one being the Islamic, whose present day avatar is fundamentalism and terrorism.

One of the important contributions of Breaking India is that it shows the Western project to be an ongoing one. It is not a thing of the past. It has a new avatar as Eurocentrism and is being propagated in two ways : the ceaseless attempt at the Christianisation of the Indian population and the ongoing imposition of western models of academic enquiry.

The major part of the book is devoted to what is called the Dravidian-Christian nexus, which started with the pre independence British policy of divide and rule. India was divided into an Aryan north and a Dravidian south which allegedly had no real connection with each other, other than the dominance of the Aryan/Sanskrit north.
Likewise the tribal population was cut off from mainstream Hindu society by the British rulers. The present day Dalits (former Untouchables) are being co opted into an anti Hindu India project. This is being done with scant respect to the very real distinction between the varna-jati system and Untouchability. As is well known, Mahatma Gandhi endorsed the varna-jati system, while working tirelessly against Untouchability.

The nexus pays no attention to the very real and tangible efforts of the Government of India to enfranchise the former Untouchables by affirmative programs and by the banning of Untouchability in the Indian Constitution. It also ignores the efforts on the ground by NGOs and private organizations to eliminate Untouchability and the resulting return of many members of the Scheduled Castes to their original religion, Hinduism, from which Christian missionaries had lured them away. The book demonstrates with clear evidence that the agenda is to implicate India in human rights abuses. The malicious intent is to haul India to the United Nations as an offender. While the new found alliance with the U.S. precludes any immediate threat in this direction, the impact of evangelical Americans who want to use this particular stick with which to beat India, cannot be ignored. Nor can Indians ignore the malicious plans of some of their own fellow citizens to be part of this agenda.

The Dravidian-Christian project is founded on the misappropriation and misrepresentation of Tamil culture and literature in order to create a vacuum which can be filled by the Christian missionary agenda. Both serious efforts in this direction and the ludicrous ones such as L. Samson’s attempt to remove Hindu icons and themes from the famed Bharata Natya dance form are documented by the book. She is now the Director of the famed Kalakshetra in Chennai (Tamil Nadu)

In each case, the divide and rule policy not only helped to consolidate British rule, but it also paved the way for the introduction of Christianity. Lord Macaulay’s introduction of English education (1835) not only destroyed the previously flourishing Indian educational system but produced a new class of Indians who would actively co operate and collaborate with the rulers. This process continues even today, in independent India, with the entire educational system being subverted to destroy any remaining traces of India’s Hindu identity. Here, the Hindu Indians themselves are the willing accomplices, largely because they have been trained to inwardly despise anything Hindu, but also because they do not know better.

The book goes into great detail concerning the Indian and foreign establishments and agencies that are seeking actively to establish Western dominance on an ancient and great civilization that continues to `resist’ in many unseen and unnoticed ways. The book is a warning to all Indians regardless of their religion or ethnicity that things may not go on as happened in the past, meaning that somehow an ancient and great civilization survived the savage onslaught and will continue to do so in the future. The book warns against complacency by providing factual data.

A great and ancient civilization is caught in the crosshairs of the civilisational struggle between the West, China and Islamic fundamentalism. The concluding chapter of the book suggests that the on and off relationship with the U.S. and the European West has both its advantages and disadvantages, and it would seem that at present India has no alternative except to stick with it.

At the same time Indians should be vigilant about the many ruses and treacheries that characterized this relationship in the past and continues to the present. Navigating through the present, requires knowledge of what happened in the distant past and in the recent past.

Breaking India provides that knowledge and is a MUST read for all Indians.

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

If you have read this post (5,200 words) in its entirety, you have my admiration and gratitude. Be well, do good work and keep in touch.