Criticizing Bharatiya Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the democratically elected government of Bharat seems to have become a source of livelihood for many woke intellectuals! An entire industry has sprung up around baseless criticism of Bharat’s supposed “right-wing and Hindu majoritarian” government. Right now, a couple of words and phrases – “Hindu Nationalism”, “Hindutva”, “Hindu Majoritarianism”, and “India’s right-wing government” have become immensely popular in the Humanities and Social Sciences departments of prestigious international universities.
I think it would be interesting if someone commissions a research study to find out the number of PhD dissertations or research papers published from renowned international universities that have some element of Modi bashing in their content. I am sure the results would be something worth pondering on!
As noted scholar, author, and a pioneer in the research on civilizations Rajiv Malhotra points out in his books “Breaking India – Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines“ and “Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0”, it’s mostly so-called Bharatiya intellectuals who are used to peddle anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat propaganda by western think tanks and elite educational institutions. A Bharatiya calling the democracy of Bharat a farce perhaps brings much more credibility and authenticity to the allegations.
The latest woke intellectual to jump on to the bandwagon or perhaps not so latest is Professor Ashutosh Varshney from Brown University. Varshney is the Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Watson Institute of International Studies, Brown University. He recently wrote an article titled “Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow”. The article published in the January 2024 issue of the Journal of Democracy insinuates that what the Modi government is doing to Muslim and Christian minorities in Bharat is similar to the ruthless subjugation of black people in the United States under Jim Crow laws. For the uninitiated, Jim Crow laws are the term used to describe the set of draconian laws that were applied in the southern states of the US to racially segregate blacks. These laws reportedly existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968. The laws were deliberately designed to marginalize African Americans by denying them rights of basic citizenship like the right to vote, get an education, hold a job, etc.
The article co-authored by Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs draws wild parallels between the racial segregation of blacks under the Jim Crow laws and the supposed mistreatment of Muslim and Christian minorities in Bharat. “Methods similar to those used in the Jim Crow South – including exclusionary laws, segregation, and vigilante violence – are now being deployed in India to subdue Muslims. Such actions go against the principles of equality established by India’s 1950 constitution. As in the Jim Crow South, the judiciary in India has proven slow to play its assigned role as guarantor of liberal constitutionalism. Friends of liberal, constitutional democracy will be wise not to count on judges to salvage the situation. In the end, only the voters can decide to stop Hindu nationalism, or else underwrite its final advance”, says the article abstract.
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/hindu-nationalism-and-the-new-jim-crow/
It’s incredible how the article is insinuating a whole bunch of lies. The Jim Crow era in the US refers to specific laws that were enacted to racially segregate Blacks. The Bharatiya state has the same laws for everyone! All citizens of Bharat are equally entitled to all the welfare schemes of the government, irrespective of their religious background. If at all laws are framed, they are framed to reverse discriminate against Hindus to give more benefits to minorities. Many such government schemes exist for the benefit of minorities in Bharat. What is happening in Bharat then is just the reverse of Jim Crow laws! It’s a country where Hindus are being converted in such large numbers by minorities like Christians and Muslims that they feel the dire need for an anti-conversion law. But the electoral vote politics and the minority appeasement politics of Bharat make it virtually impossible for such a law to be enacted. Where then is the Jim Crow era in Bharat?
Notice how cleverly the abstract appeals to the Bharatiya voters to not vote for the Modi government towards the end. As Bharat is scheduled to go for general elections in the middle of 2024, it’s one of those desperate attempts by the anti-Bharat lobby to do some election campaigning for the opposition.
The article uses superficial rhetoric to trace the supposed similarities between the Jim Crow era and the Bharatiya government’s treatment of minorities. The article obviously gives no evidence of any concrete parallels between the two because there aren’t any. It does a motivated analysis based on the perceived intent of the BJP government of Bharat vis-à-vis minorities. This sort of biased subjectivity is anything but academic research. I can perceive anything to be the intent of anybody from my subjective and biased standpoint. If I have no objective facts to prove what I am saying, it’s just my personal opinion and not some pathbreaking academic analysis.
That is the problem with social science research these days. The agenda-driven research is leading to lazy scholarship where any seemingly intellectual drivel is passed for research and analysis. It’s just lazy scholarship, or rather prejudiced opinion pieces masquerading as scholarship. The article says that in Bharat, “elections are being used to create legislatures that pass anti-Muslim laws, while street-level vigilantism supports the formal politics of exclusion”. But it doesn’t give any examples of those anti-Muslim laws passed by the legislature. It obviously cannot do that because there aren’t any such laws!
If one does not know the background of the writers, one would be mistaken to think that the piece is written by an over-enthusiastic high school kid who has been given an assignment to write something against the Modi government of Bharat and to somehow prove the premise that the Modi government’s treatment of minorities is similar to the treatment of black Americans under the Jim Crow era. If you already know what to prove, then your entire scholarship will go towards weaving a web of biased arguments to reach your pre-decided conclusion. Such is the nature of this article.
Suhag A. Shukla, co-founder and Executive Hindu American Foundation recently shared a post on X regarding this article:
“Jim Crow laws? I get there are elections coming here in India, so we have to gear up for more “democracy khatre mein hai” drivel like this, but come on!
Brown University’s Varshney is comparing the abrogation of 370 and CAA to actual racial segregation laws of the 1950’s. Oh, and Islamic invaders only razed a few temples and most converted to escape “oppressive” Hinduism.
In law school, we learned to avoid presentism bias. I guess poli sci professors at Brown have no such hangups”.
Ashutosh Varshney is a serial PM Modi basher. Just google the term “Ashutosh Varshney” and you will see a barrage of anti-Modi and anti-Bharat articles with fancy titles. “Ashutosh Varshney writes: Why BJP’s Hindutva- and Modi magic – hit a wall in South India?”, “Ashutosh Varshney on BJP’s Communal Plan, Rights and the Future of India”, “What government-Adani relationship says about Indian capitalism”, Why the Modi Government Policy of “National Champions” Is Unravelling”, are a few titles of articles written by Varshney over the past year. As you can see, the common buzzword in all these articles is the Mod government. So accusing the democratically elected government of Bharat of hijacking democracy seems to be his area of specialization.
If one takes a cursory look at Ashutosh Varshney’s curriculum vitae, which can be accessed from Brown University’s website, it’s amazing how his research interests changed dramatically post-2014 when the Modi government came to power. All his research articles published over the past couple of years seem to be about Bharat’s supposedly ailing democracy and the rise of populism. “How India’s ruling party erodes democracy?”, “Populism and Nationalism”: Similarities and Differences”, “Populism and Hindu Nationalism in India”, “The Emergence of right-wing populism in India”, and “India’s Watershed Vote: Hindu Nationalism in Power”, are the titles of some of his research articles published post-2014. It certainly seems like critiquing Hindu nationalism and the Modi government are lucrative research topics for political science and South-Asian studies scholars!
After taking a close look at Ashutosh Varshney’s “research interests”, I was tempted to check out the research areas of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University that Varshney is the Director of. According to their website, their current research focus areas are Economic Inequalities and Change, Pluralism and Diversities, and Democracy and Urbanization.
They also have a Jane Brown Citizenship Index Research Project that, as written on their pages, focuses on Bharatiya citizenship in the context of urbanization. “As India continues to urbanize, a few critical questions have to be addressed: what is the quality of citizenship in urban India? Are the rising cities witnessing the emergence of citizen consciousness and a rights-based politics, heralding a greater citizen-focused deepening of the polity? Or do vertical patron-client ties between the political-elite and citizens and other forms of dependency remain obdurately strong? Is the exercise of citizenship a function of caste, class or community, as much of the literature maintains? Can citizenship lead to substantive improvements in people’s lives? Specifically, can it help improve the extent and quality of public service delivery”? says the description of this research project.
https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/research
Notice how cleverly the research project brings in loaded terms like caste, class, and community in the context of Bharatiya citizenship. This makes it an open-ended minefield for all sorts of anti-Bharat and anti-Modi propaganda. Also, using the paradigm of citizenship to interrogate the development work being undertaken in Bharat reeks of a colonial mindset, where development is only the prerogative of the west. Any developmental work being undertaken in former colonies is projected as being detrimental to the environment, biodiversity, taking away of rights of people, etc. Moreover, the research focus areas of the center including democracy and pluralism create ample scope for anti-Modi and anti-Bharat content.
One cannot emphasize enough that academic research is not a disinterested exercise. Every university has its own research focus areas. This creates a lot of scope for agenda-setting, especially in the humanities and social sciences departments. The research thrust of the university decides what kind of topics will be approved for phd and what kind of topics won’t be approved. It’s an entire nexus wherein researchers get sucked into the vortex of peddling one-sided propaganda before they even know about it.
For example, as Rajiv Malhotra has argued in his book “Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0”, a new academic trend in western universities is to map the category of caste from the Bharatiya context onto class from the American context. A whole lot of woke theories are coming up that trace apparent parallels between the subjugation of blacks in the west and the apparent subjugation of low-caste Hindus in America. So upper caste Hindus are being projected as the new Whites which is a highly dangerous trend further disenfranchising an already vulnerable minority that has faced persecution time and again.
Woke intellectuals like Ashutosh Varshney are like stooges of colonialism who are nevertheless taken seriously by a certain English-speaking elite of Bharat. The gibberish they write might not matter to the masses of Bharat but they act as elite opinion leaders in the convoluted world of academia that has a cascading effect on how Bharat is projected by the western media and what kind of global policies are enacted vis-à-vis Bharat. That’s why it’s important to expose these pseudo-intellectuals as much as one can.
The western academia seems to be obsessed with undertaking critical studies of Bharatiya democracy and polity. It’s high time we turn the tables and Bharatiya academia starts commissioning critical studies on the lack of democracy in the west and whether their development activities benefit their citizens or not.
