The election of Narendra Modi as the choice for millions in the world’s largest democracy is a bit galling to those whose concept of ‘democratic’ resembles Lenin’s armed force against the elected government of Alexander Kerensky in revolutionary Russia. Yet even before Modi’s election in what proved to be a pivotal moment in Indian democracy the anti-Hindu blood hounds were out in force. Of these Priyamvada Gopal is one the most prominent. Gopal teaches English literature at the University of Cambridge but her true passion is formulating hate speech against Hindu sentiments from the pages of the notorious British anti-Hindu rag, the Guardian on 14 May 2014.
Committed to ‘liberal’ principles, the Guardian has at its heart a very noxious form of updated White Man’s Burden when liberalism and progress meant helping the lesser races through uplifting them to become little brown and black versions of themselves. More often though they were seen as servile races who had better learnt their place or risk extermination
Gopal regurgitates the worn-out propaganda that Modi had caused a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and was part of a Nazi-style outfit called the RSS. In actual fact the RSS resemble boy scouts and use the khaki of the British Indian army and are not exactly secretive. Gopal then calls the BJP “far right”. On what basis does she use this term? What is left and right wing anyway? At one time being progressive, liberal, socialist and even Left was to actively work for the extermination of lesser breeds who were holding humanity back. This was eugenics.
Rather than let conquered peoples such as the Tasmanian Aborigines just die out through morbidly perverse Social Darwinist survival of the fittest, they were actively hunted and killed like vermin. Eugenics gained wide popularity in Britain, and more so Sweden and America, where forcible sterilisations were executed to stop the ‘wrong’ sort of people reproducing. All this in the name of progress and its supporters included such cute and cuddly figures such Charles Dickens, HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, literary greats which our dear friend Dr Gopal is no doubt eerily familiar. It is just that Gopal carries this eugenic mindset in her perspective of India and what constitutes ‘progress’.
In her latest diatribe of gutter journalism, Gopal says that Hindu extremism was a response to British attempts to portray Hinduism as effeminate. In actual fact Hindu princes and leaders had been fighting the British right from when the Honourable East India Company began its colonisation from the Battle of Plassy. Also does she honestly think that the East India Company recruit the majority of its sepoys from an ‘effeminate’ community? The next bit has to be seen to be believed:
“For all its anti-British rhetoric, Hindu nationalism played no significant role in either the freedom struggle or in creating the secular constitution of independent India.”
So we can ignore the struggles of Veer Savarkar who was exiled to the Andaman Islands for his role in the Free India Society and the Abhinav Bharat which were determined to end British rule by armed revolution. The latter produced Madan Lal Dhingra. What would Gopal make of Lala Lajpat Rai, for whom Hinduism was the very basis of his nationalism, and whose murder at the hands of British Indian police prompted the political assassination carried out by Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev?
Lajpat Rai was joined by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal in arguing that the Indian National Congress should take a more revolutionary course and were pioneers of Indian nationalism long before Gandhi. Pal criticised Gandhi for his support of the extremist Khilafat movement and as a “papal autocrat”. Tilak had used the Ganapati festival to help forge an Indian national consciousness. In 1895, Tilak founded the Shri Shivaji Fund Committee for celebration of “Shiv Jayanti” or the birth anniversary of Shivaji Maharaj. He stated:
“I regard India as my Motherland and my Goddess, the people in India are my kith and kin, and loyal and steadfast work for their political and social emancipation is my highest religion and duty”.
Hinduism was thus intrinsic as a foundation to modern Indian nationalism. Of course these are inconvenient facts to anti-Hindu haters such as Gopal who update all the killer apps of eugenics to continue the western colonialist civilising mission in India under the guise of ‘liberalism’ and a misnomered ‘secularism’. In this Orwellian Newspeak facts are anything but sacred.
She says that Gandhi was assassinated by a member of the RSS. In reality Nathuram Godse had left the RSS and had begun his political career as a follower of Gandhi and a member of Congress. She says that Hindu extremism
“benefits from the disproportionate attention given to Islamist violence, which enables other pernicious extremisms to slip under the radar.”
Well how is this attention disproportionate considering that 9/11, 7/7 bombings, terrorism in Kashmir, insurgency in Iraq, and the kidnap of Nigerian girls for the human trafficking sex trade by Boko Haram are merely the tip of a very large Islamist iceberg? Can Gopal name any Hindu parallel to this? Or should resources needed to save lives and defend democracy be used to hunt down the imaginary monsters that exist in her rather deluded universe? What drives Gopal’s very own extremism and the ugly narcissistic tendencies it exhibits?
She writes in the anti-Hindu mouthpiece:
“…over recent decades, the notion of Hindutva (Hindu-ness) has grown in force along with the unfettered capitalism it espouses.”
Unfettered capitalism? Is Gopal trying to embark on a new career as a stand-up comedian? The BJP was long known to be protectionist and against market reforms. Even now it would need a very elastic imagination to link it ideologically with something like the Adam Smith Institute.
Terms like ‘unfettered capitalism’ are typical slurs uses by unreconstructed Marxists such as Gopal who have yet to come to terms with the Berlin Wall being destroyed by the oppressed subjects of a German Democratic Republic which with its network of Stasi secret police was anything but ‘democratic’. That is why unreconstructed Marxists such as Gopal are ideologically in sympathy with Maoist terrorists such as Naxalites and act as apologists for jihadis who have raped, slaughtered or expelled all Hindus from Kashmir. Is this anything other than hate? Gopal again in the Guardian:
“And any victory for a proponent of a nuclearised Hindu India where homosexuality remains criminalised will have consequences that will be felt well beyond the subcontinent, not least in multicultural Britain.”
This is one of the most absurd as well as laughable statements. How are having nuclear weapons and proscribing homosexuality even linked? Would Dr Gopal have the same reservations about Uganda having nuclear weapons because of its strict laws against homosexuality? Does she honestly think that India will use its nuclear weapons against multicultural Britain because it has legalised gay marriage? In any case that law was not based on Hindu legalism but antiquated colonial laws originating in that very multicultural country which has legalised gay marriage.
She claims that minority Christians as well as Muslims are targets of its wrath despite the fact that individuals such as George Fernandes and Sikandar Bakht have rendered yeoman and patriotic services to India from the ranks of the BJP. Indeed this far right formation could boast of one of the few Jews in its uppermost ranks: General Jacob, liberator of Bangladesh in 1971 and a man who joined the army during the last world war to fight the Nazis for the very reason that Germany was persecuting the Jews.
If anyone would have to fear the policies of a ‘far right’ Indian party with ideological links to Nazism it would be Jacob. Yet he actually joined the BJP! Instead we find very unhealthy racist and Nazi tendencies in Gopal’s own Guardian spat:
“The Gujarat pogroms took place after an unexplained fire on a train, which killed Hindu activists and was swiftly attributed by Modi to Islamic forces and Pakistan.”
Unexplained fire? These deliberate misleading statements should have us worried, very worried in fact. The fire was begun deliberately because the Hindu ‘pilgrims’ were returning from the sacred site of Ayodhya. Yes that is right.
They were pilgrims not ‘extremists’, unless Dr Gopal wants to use that same ignorant blanket term on Muslims making hajj, Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the audience who throng St Peter’s Square in Rome to catch a glimpse of the Pope.
Now to the fire itself. Calling it unexplained is like doubting the veracity of the Diary of Anne Frank, or that Auschwitz really did have gas chambers. Hatred and bigotry thrive on ignorance, especially when it is done in the name of ‘progress’. It is equivalent to Bernard Manning, the now dead comedian who specialised in making racist jokes, saying notoriously “there were no Pakis at Dunkirk” when in reality undivided pre-1947 India provided the largest ever volunteer army to fight fascism.
But Gopal has no need to work the long graft of now disappearing working men’s clubs that were part of Manning’s circuit. Instead she has the prestige and influence offered to her by Cambridge University, which is what makes her Holocaust denying tactics even more dangerous than that of second-rate historian David Irving.
“But investigating Britain’s Hindu zealots doesn’t have the same political currency as pronouncements about getting “tough” on Islamic extremism.”
That is probably because these imaginary ‘zealots’ do not go around chopping heads off people in broad daylight, bombing the underground or navigate hijacked aircraft into tall buildings. Can Gopal name any concrete examples? She could not even mention that case of Dhiren Barot is a convicted terrorist, born in 1971 in Baroda, which is in fact in Narendra Modi’s very own state of Gujerat. Barot’s family moved to Britain from Kenya in 1973. Barot was arrested on 3 August 2004 and was charged by the UK authorities with the following offences:
· Conspiracy to commit murder
· Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance by the use of radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals and or explosives.
· Possessing detailed reconnaissance on the Prudential Building in New Jersey.
· Possessing detailed reconnaissance of the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup in New York, and two notebooks with information on explosives
He admitted to plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund headquarters, and the World Bank. Woolwich Crown Court heard that 34-year-old Barot had led a “sleeper cell” planning attacks in New York, Washington, London and across Britain. On 7 November 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to murder.
So why is Priyamvada Gopal silent on the case of Dhiren Barot? This surely would be a classic case of the Hindu extremist which she is so fearful of? Actually there is a problem here. Barot did not commit his crimes in the name of Hinduism. His co-accused conspirators were: Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 24; Abdul Aziz Jalil, 31; Omar Abdul Rehman, 20; Junade Feroze, 28; Zia ul Haq, 25; Qaisar Shaffi, 25; and Nadeem Tarmohammed, 26; all Britons of Pakistani origin. Barot himself had Barot travelled to Pakistan in 1995. He took part in militant campaigns against Indian forces in Kashmir. Using the pseudonym Esa Al Hindi, he wrote a book, The Army of Madinah in Kashmir, in 1999, discussing his experience and describing ways to kill Indian soldiers. The book was commissioned and published by Maktabah al-Ansar. He also served as an agent for al-Qaeda. This is because although he was raised a Hindu, Dhiren Barot converted to radical Islam at the age of 20.
This should lead us to ask some very uncomfortable questions. What is Dr Gopal doing using the pulpit of one of the world’s most respected academic institutions to preach her anti-Hindu hatred? How does Britain benefit inviting an honouring an outsider who has done nothing but worsen community relations? This country should have learnt valuable lessons from inviting hatemongers to become part of this society and shape the culture we live in.
After all David Duke was banned when leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately the American-born William Joyce did manage to locate to Britain in 1921. He later joined Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and became one of the movement’s leaders.
Fleeing to Germany in August 1939, Joyce became infamous as Lord Haw-Haw as he broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain with jeering, sarcastic and menacing tones given the same amount of freedom to preach hatred as the Guardian offers anti-Hindu hatemongers such as Dr Gopal. He was executed after the war for high treason. In this context is Dr Gopal doing anything really as bad as this?
The language may be more sophisticated and polished but the sinister echoes of Lord Haw-Haw are evident in her latest piece of venom which seeks to create tensions between communities in Britain where none exist. There are laws against incitement to this type of hatred, something which in her rabid excitement the Indian-born Gopal might have forgotten. Should such people be allowed to destroy the carefully evolved institutions of this country which have allowed various communities to reside and work together?
Is it inconceivable that these outside hatemongers can perhaps have their precious British citizenship revoked? In the meantime they not only poison relations between various communities but also between Britain and India. Their activities should be investigated and places such as Cambridge should look into just how do these demagogues help an academic environment where we are supposed to think and question. Why employ such people who are not even scholars but resemble the racist technocrats who staffed the Ahnenerbe, a pseudo-scientific institute founded in 1935 at SS headquarters in Berlin by Himmler purposed to research the archaeological and cultural history of the hypothesized Aryan race. For the sake of communal harmony in multiracial Britain hate preachers such as Gopal simply cannot be ignored.