The East India Company has returned to a new incarnation unbeknownst to many. This is the claim of the new book, Snakes in the Ganga, by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan.
Harvard University is shown to be at the helm in this new effort to recolonize Bharat, taking the place of Oxford. In the days of the British Raj, discourse about Bharat was controlled by Oxford University. Now it’s the Americans that have taken over this recolonization project, headed by its institutions led by Harvard. The speed and scale of these efforts are also inherently American. The book uncovers the vast ecosystem and funding network created by Harvard.
What is dramatically new about this syndrome is that the Bharatiyas themselves are funding it. Moreover, these ideas have entered Bharatiya government organizations and businesses. The book shows that Bharatiya billionaires are getting this work done. They are bringing Bharatiya scholars and Bharatiya students to conferences and seminars and giving them grants and funding to brainwash them and teach them all these theories to dismantle the fundamental structures of Bharat. These students and scholars are sent back to Bharat and planted into a whole ecosystem which is being created. Harvard uses Bharat’s scholars, funding, and resources to train its new sepoy army of scholars that are Breaking Bharat at an unprecedented scale.
The authors show that Marxism is the foundational bedrock of this new discourse which takes the form of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Most people know Critical Race Theory’s purpose is to combat American racism using race warfare. CRT is certainly important in that context. But Harvard scholars have mapped it upon Bharatiya society, ancient history, and the modern nation-state. The book explains Critical Race theory and its origins at length and how CRT has morphed into Critical Caste Theory and Wokeism in Bharat. Any disparity in any field is attributed to structural casteism that has been institutionalized and hence the foundations of these institutions need to be dismantled. Thus, Hinduism itself needs to be dismantled according to them.
Snakes in the Ganga explains the social theory behind Wokeism’s worldview which is through the Marxist lens of oppressors and oppressed. Marxism believes that all society is intentionally structured by the oppressors to oppress victims, resulting in unequal outcomes favoring the oppressors. CRT uses race as the marker for group identities while ignoring the individual. This gets converted to caste as the marker in the Bharatiya context. The solution it proposes is to dismantle existing structures and institutions. In Bharat’s case, this leads to a global call to dismantle Hinduism and all the structures and institutions based on it.
The most important contribution of the book is the way it meticulously explains how Wokeism is mapped onto Bharat. The diversity of Bharat is a fertile ground to apply Critical Race Theory because every kind of difference can be attributed to structural and systematic oppression. Harvard is doing this research of transforming CRT into Critical Caste Theory and applying it to Bharat.
What we found most intriguing is how Critical Caste Theory is being used to attack Bharatiya meritocracy by calling it a mask that hides privilege and structural oppression. Meritocracy is considered an outcome of Brahmanical patriarchy and thus produces unequal outcomes for certain groups. Harvard scholars are attacking meritocracy used in the IITs and consider it institutional and structural casteism. The other factors that affect outcomes like hard work and individual talent are totally ignored by these scholars. This is a direct attack on Bharat’s institutions. Their solution is to dismantle the IITs in their current form.
Harvard has become the new Vishva Guru, from knowledge production to training of Bharatiya academia in Western theories. From setting up new institutions in Bharat to infiltrating existing institutions, Harvard seems to be the big powerhouse behind many initiatives to brainwash a whole generation of Bharatiyas. This is the direct result of importing the Western model of social sciences.
Details about this pathbreaking book are available here.
(This article was first published on India Today on September 9, and has been republished with consent)
