Jul 06, 2011 12:42 PM
Book Synopsis
"Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines"
By Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, 2011
In the 1990s I met an African-American scholar in Princeton who casually told me that he had returned from a trip to India, where he was working with the ‘Afro-Dalit Project’. This puzzled me. I got curious. Upon inquiry, I found that this US operated and financed project frames inter-jati/varna interactions and the Dalit movement using an American cultural and historical lens. The Afro-Dalit project paint Dalits as the ‘Blacks’ of India and non-Dalits as India’s ‘whites’. This import of racist framing into India set me on the path to this book. I started investigating and discovered a vast network of activists and academics. Some of them have evangelical intentions, some truly believe what they are improving human rights of the oppressed, and many such players converge on such geopolitical scenarios.
Every nation has its faultlines, and India too has her share. But not all these faultlines are natural. Some of them are based on real grievances while others are fabricated and even imported. For a successful nation, the faultlines are harmonized and eased out into the larger nation-building processes through democratic ways and with a concern for social justice. But what I discovered was that in the case of India a host of internal and external forces were deepening the existing faultlines and fabricate new ones. These deepened faultlines in turn manufacture violent conflicts and facilitate interventions US and Europe. In other words they catalyze a re-colonization in a very deeply entrenched manner this time. They can also become instrumental in the Balkanization of India also.
To understand the mechanisms behind the fabrication, deepening and manipulation of the faultlines by foreign forces, I immersed myself in intense research that lasted for nearly a decade. I chose Tamil Nadu which has been a target of these forces historically, and studied how their operations in terms of strategy and institutional infrastructure evolved over the past two centuries. While I studied the US based organizations, and political and academic activists, my co-author studied their associates operating in India and particularly Tamil Nadu. We chose two faultlines: Dravidian and Dalit, the former fabricated and the latter real.
To understand the Dravidian faultline one should understand its Aryan counterpart. In the eighteenth century, when the traditional Christian edifice of Europe was threatened by the European secular/enlightenment movement, Europeans looked for a golden past elsewhere. In this search for identity, they began to hypothesize and construct an idealized ‘Aryan race’ through a distorted reading of Indian scriptures. Max Müller interpreted Vedic literature in terms of a clash between two races and this fuelled the idea of colonizing Aryan tribes who had civilized inferior races around the world. Fed by virulent German nationalism, anti-Semitism and Race Science, this manipulation ultimately led to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. While Europe has taken special efforts to exorcize their social psyche of the Aryan race theory, it has been kept alive in India. In many humanities disciplines like anthropology, folk studies etc. the theory has been accepted axiomatic. Though much has been said about the falsification of Aryan race/migration theory through genetic studies and archeology, ‘Breaking India’ for the first time documents what socio-political vested interests keep this theory alive, not only in India but also in the Western Indological academic circles.
This takes us to the Dravidian identity. Max Müller, in support of the racial interpretation of Vedic scriptures, tentatively put forward nose-length as one such differentiating feature. This was taken up by Sir Herbert Risley then a bureaucrat at the Royal Anthropological Institute, and developed the Nasal Index which much like Phrenology, became a tool of Race Science in an effort to classify the traits of Indian communities. During the four decades of his stay in India, Risley made an extensive study of Indian castes, based on the Nasal Index. His goal was to separate the Aryan communities from the non-Aryan communities. The castes designated as ‘non-Aryan’ were marginalized or excluded in depictions of Hindu society. In parallel, the Church evangelical scholars like Bishop Caldwell working in South India constructed a Dravidian race identity. This was further taken forward by missionaries like G.U. Pope, who de-linked Tamil culture from its pan-Indian cultural matrix, and claimed that its spirituality was closer to Christianity than to the North Indian culture. Originally rejected by serious scholarship today, this missionary-colonial racial narrative has been infused with new life by transnational funded evangelical organizations and also by mainstream churches. Historical and philological works are being fabricated to assert that quasi-Christianity had already existed in the earliest Tamil literature. Among these fabrications emerged the myth that St Thomas had preached Christianity in South India shortly after the death of Christ, an idea promoted mainly by the Catholic Church to bolster its standing. ‘Breaking India’ explains the process in its minute details with authentic documentation.
The vast institutional network involved in this project of weakening India is staggering. It runs through centuries and extends across continents. From Oxford during colonial times to Yale and Harvard in recent times, the network that Breaking India unveils involves activists, academics, politicians and evangelists. Sometimes the scholar himself doubles as evangelists like in the case of Caldwell. Sometimes he offers his expertise to evangelical institutions – such as, for example, Michael Witzel of Harvard University sharing his data with Boston Theological Institute in 1998 for the latter’s development of evangelical strategies. Then there is academic quackery like the works of John Samuel of Institute of Asian Studies which go out of the way to invent Christian influences on classic Indian spiritual traditions. Powerful politicians like Marvin Olasky, an advisor to then US President George W. Bush and later to Hillary Clinton provide tactical support to this kind of scholarship. And all these diverse forces operating at different levels thus converge to deepen the fabricated Dravidian faultline with added reinforcements through racial as well as religious divides.
In the case of Dalit faultlines, the book states that Dalits have grievances which are genuine and serious. It also shows how indigenous Dalit movements and social reform movements have for long fought for the rights and liberation of suppressed and marginalized people in India. The book exposes how western colonial and evangelical forces, without actually helping Dalit communities, merely internationalize the Dalit issue to make India subservient in the international arena and thus facilitate Western interventions. For example US based Dalit Freedom Network (DFN) which has evangelical connections, projects Indian academic and hate ideologue Kancha Illaiah as a genuine Dalit thinker while Illaiah is neither a Dalit and his writings on Hindus are similar to the Nazi caricature of Jews.
These pseudo-Dalit evangelical organizations also spread the myth that Dalits are racially different from other Indians, a myth based on the Aryan invasion theory that was strongly opposed by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Furthermore, the Afro-Dalit project aims to fuse the Dravidian and Dalit faultlines into one. According to this recent thesis, Dalits are not only socially suppressed but they are racially and religiously different from the rest of India, and India is projected as a ‘Brahminical fascist state’ where Dalits will be denied justice unless they take up arms. Thus, Kancha Illaiah calls Dalits to take up arms against India and Hinduism and refers to a civil war in India as a ‘necessary evil’.
Breaking India also shows how rightwing US senators and Congressmen who have betrayed human rights causes in their own country demand US intervention in India citing the cause of Dalits, and they are coordinated by DFN. By meticulously following the trail of institutional affiliations, Breaking India shows that DFN as well as its Indian affiliate, All India Christian Council (AICC), are affiliated with Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), and that CSW is led by extreme rightwing Christian fundamentalist Baroness Caroline Cox who was expelled from the Tory party for openly supporting hardline racism. All these organizations including CSW have facilitated the globalization of the Christian-Dalit axis, such as at the 2001 Durban conference, where it championed a stand against the government of India. Institutions and individual scholars both western as well as Indian, abound in Europe and US who further exploit these Indian faultlines for the geopolitical advantage of the interest of their states or religious institutions.
Breaking India makes a detailed study of the major institutions and think-tanks in United States, to show how the Biblical and secular lenses of USA converge to view India as a dark frontier that needs civilizing. As one of many examples of cited where such institutional forces and powerful individuals have converging interests, is Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) a powerful rightwing think-tank. EPPC conducted a conference titled ‘Hindu Nationalism vs. Islamic Jihad: Religious Militancy in South Asia’. The co-sponsor of this conference was INFEMIT, an evangelical network headed by one Vinay Samuel. Jonah Blank, a South Asian scholar participated and spoke of ‘cycles of violence’ in India that would ‘sooner or later harm the US national interest’. He demanded US intervention ‘both because it is in the US national interest and because it’s the right thing to do’
After the 2008 US election, Jonah Blank has become the key advisor on South Asia, to Vice President Joseph Biden. The head lobbyist of Dalit Freedom Network in Washington finds Jonah Blank a good choice to cultivate in order to influence the direction for South Asia policy. This is just one of the various networking operations that the book exposes.
The book also explodes the myth that in this globalized era merit and individuality alone matter. It shows that the soft power of civilization identity plays a vital role. The book establishes that religion continues to exert an influential role in guiding the foreign policies of the West and is often a potential weapon for controlling and manipulating minority groups in the third world. Transnational evangelical organizations have devised ambitious plans for evangelizing in India, using secular concepts like development. Organizations such as World Vision, which have partnered with Western intelligence agencies, have invested an enormous amount of financial capital to create huge infrastructure networks across India. Government assistance from the West, such as USAID funding, is also being channeled through these evangelical institutions. All these create in India what Christian scholar, Pradip Ninan Thomas calls as ‘Christian Umma’, a term he coins to refer to a community that is emotionally, financially and institutionally bonded to the West.
With such a massive documentation the book raises the questions about defining who is a minority in the present globalized context. A community may be numerically small relative to the local population, but globally it may in fact be part of the majority that is powerful, assertive and well-funded.
All these ultimately come to this question: Why? Why do transnational forces – government, NGOs, evangelicals, academics - do the things that the book reveals? In a single word, the answer is ‘control’. From the academics to evangelized communities they become foot soldiers of nexuses globally competing for world dominance in a planet with limited resources. Towards this end, Indians are trained to alienate themselves from their society, deconstruct their own culture and despise their own nation. Ultimately all this could lead to a broken India, a Balkanized India and that would be advantageous to Western forces in a limited way. But in the long run for the sake of the entire humanity including the West as well as Asia, it is a united India with its civilizational genius of pluralism that could make the future world a better and safer place to live. So the book compels policymakers in India and abroad to take notice of what is happening at both macro and micro level right now.
Thus the book provides a spine-chilling voyage into the underbelly of the nexuses that confluence to undermine India as a nation and civilization. It is not a rosy picture that the book provides. It gives you hard facts and truth. It will make the reader uncomfortable. But that is nothing when compared to the future prospects of becoming refugees or victims of genocidal conflicts in a Balkanized India. To prevent this from happening, every Indian should read this book.
