The leftist ecosystem spreads its web in the form of ideas, and these ideas find representation through academic discourse. Getting deeply entrenched in the academic discourse of Humanities departments of renowned Bharatiya and western universities, the anti-Bharat and the anti-Hindu ideas propagated by the left-liberal machinery become institutionalized as “knowledge” and “insight. It is this web of propaganda of supposed knowledge and insight that Rajiv Malhotra busts and exposes in Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines.
Breaking India was written way back in 2011 and since then, numerous other books have been penned down by Rajiv Malhotra either independently or in collaboration with other scholars. All these books expose various strands of the leftist ecosystem one by one and address different issues connected to the anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat ecosystem. The second part of Breaking India “Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0” was released last year. In future articles, we’ll be discussing this one and many other works of Rajiv Malhotra. But let’s start with Breaking India Part I. It’s imperative to get the gist of this book to fully understand the subsequent works of Rajiv Malhotra.
To begin with, Breaking India I is a rather long book. It has almost 200 pages of references towards the end. So you can imagine the kind of scholarly rigor that would have gone into the making of this work. I think you need to have some kind of exposure to reading academic books if you plan to read this book. If you don’t have the habit of reading academic books, you must go very slow and try and understand the main arguments of the book, even if you don’t get all the references and contexts.
To put it simply, Breaking India Part I delineates the historical trajectory of the anti-Hindu discourse that permeates both the Bharatiya and the western academia ecosystem today. The book tells you all about how European explores started appropriating Bharatiya culture and Hindu Dharma to assert the “superiority” of their own culture and civilization, and that’s how the web of propaganda against the Sanatan Dharma started getting laid even long before the British empire had set foot on the land of Bharat.
Rajiv Malhotra then goes on to explain how the anti-Bharat and anti-Hindu discourse got further consolidated during the time of British colonization of Bharat. That was the time when the Arya Dravidian theory (which has now been discredited due to lack of any scientific evidence ) got further developed and it became the basis of missionary propaganda creating arbitrary division lines between the north and south of Bharat for targeting the Dakshni Bharatiyas ( Bharatiyas living in the south of Bharat) for conversion.
Breaking India Part I connects all the dots and gives a detailed historical overview of the missionary propaganda that sought to divide Hindus along arbitrary lines and create ground for large-scale conversion of Dalits from the south of Bharat. Rajiv Malhotra also gives numerous examples to depict the appropriation of numerous elements of Sanatan culture and ancient Tamil Sangam literature to brainwash people from the south of Bharat into believing that Christianity was their original identity and that Sanatan Dharma was solely exploiting them, and that they were the oppressed in the whole apparent game of assertion of hegemony by the light-skinned north Bharatiyas or Aryans through the instrument of Sanatan Dharma.
The book delves deep into the missionary propaganda aiming at the construction of a separate Dravidian identity as opposed to Hindu Dharma and civilization, and the appropriation of the entire cultural ecosystem of Dakshin Bharat – the art, music, and dance forms to suit their missionary agenda and its forced dissociation from Hindu Dharma and culture.
Breaking India Part I investigates in detail the entire missionary ecosystem, not just its roots but its global network in current times. The book devotes an entire section to detailing the anti-Bharat and anti-Hindu activities of various Bharatiya individuals and radical organizations that run on missionary funding and run aggressive conversion campaigns and Hindu hate propaganda in the name of charity and scholarship. The book connects all the dots and explains how the activities of all these individuals and organizations supposedly based in Bharat are running on global church funding. You get to know about the history and modus operandi of these organizations, many of them supposedly running to fight for Dalit causes and identity.
Breaking India exposes the nexus between many radical Dalit organizations and the anti-Hindu missionary ecosystem. It also gives you an overview of many so- called Bharatiya activists who pull down India on international platforms, and lobby with international organizations to degrade India’s standing vis-a-vis religious freedom, democracy, etc. Rajiv Malhotra emphasizes that the missionary ecosystem keeps this quota of Bharatiya activists and scholars as its frontline warriors to pit Bharatiyas against each other. This works as a double- pronged strategy because it gets hard to pinpoint the propaganda as it is Bharatiyas who are bad-mouthing their own country and breaking Bharat from within.
A whole chapter is devoted to exposing the anti-Bharat and anti-Hindu agenda flourishing in the Humanities departments of various renowned US universities like Harvard. The book puts the spotlight on the Hindu hate material being promoted in the Indology and Post Colonial Studies Departments of such universities in the name of research. In the name of studying Hindu Dharma and Bharatiya culture from a neutral perspective, the so-called scholars of these universities apply western theory perspective and Abrahamic lens to study Hindu Dharma and thus, end up making biased, uninformed, and simplistic assumptions about the same.
Rajiv Malhotra also exposes the nexus between the anti-Hindu western academia and global policy-making vis-a-vis Bharat. This might sound far- fetched but the book makes several cross connections to show the powerful academic and research ecosystem of universities like Harvard and prominent western think tanks works actively to promote an anti-Bharat agenda at the highest levels on various international platforms. For example, the kind of pressure that the US government puts on Bharat repeatedly vis a vis the supposed lack of religious freedom in India and the apparent oppression of minorities is a part of this whole narrative. So this whole Harvard ecosystem, argues Rajiv Malhotra, has geo-political consequences for Bharat as well.
Another important point that Breaking India Part I highlights is the dependency of American politics on the institution of the church. The book shows through various examples that the church is an important stakeholder in US politics and it often runs the show from behind the curtains.
One of the most pertinent observations Breaking India Part I makes is that the left wing and the right-wing of the west work in tandem when it comes to Bharat. That is, both are willing collaborators when it comes to destroying Bharat internally and spreading anti-Hindu propaganda. They bury their mutual differences and work collectively to break Bharat from within. Bharatiyas should be under no illusion that the threat comes only from left-wing forces, the right wing in the western context represents the extreme Christian forces and they are equally dangerous.
Breaking India I is a path-breaking work that’s a must-read by all Bharatiyas. It gives you a peep into the discursive framework of the anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat forces operating globally and places them in a historical trajectory. The book is quite complex and dense so you might not comprehend everything in one go. But Breaking India I is the kind of book that will give you newer insights each time you get back to it. It also gives you a peep into the whole media ecosystem controlled by the leftists and the missionary system. You get to know about many examples of media distortion of “news” to suit the missionary agenda. A book like Breaking India I give you the critical tools and apparatus to evaluate the current wave of anti-Bharat and anti-Hindu propaganda from your own understanding and vantage point.
