Chasing the Monk’s Shadow

Title: Chasing the Monk’s Shadow – A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang

Author: Mishi Saran

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2005 (First)

ISBN: 9780670058235

Pages: 446

 

Ancient Indians were not too keen in writing history. As a result, historians are forced to resort to annals of invaders, memoirs of visiting dignitaries and oblique references in literary sources. Xuanzang was a Chinese monk who travelled to India in the seventh century CE for collecting rare religious manuscripts on Buddhism and to train himself in debating the finer points of philosophy. Born in 600 CE as Chen Yi, Xuanzang was the name given by the Buddhist order at the time of his enrolment as an ascetic. He travelled for eighteen years (627 – 645 CE) through western China, central Asia and the length and breadth of India. He meticulously wrote down what he saw and what he thought about the land and people he encountered. ‘Xuanzang’ is the reformed rendition of ‘Hiuen-tsang’ familiar to most Indians and adopted as the Pinyin system by China in 1958. Mishi Saran travels through the routes used by the monk 1400 years ago and similarly notes down her own reflections of the land and people she came up with. This journey was made in 2000-01. The author is a journalist based in Hong Kong and interested in travel writing. She was born in Prayagraj but has not lived in India since the age of ten. She is a graduate in Chinese Studies and handles the language well.

 

The importance of Xuanzang in patching up the missing pieces of not only Indian but the entire central Asian histories also is not fully appreciated by the public. So exact the monk had been in his directions that archeologists in each of the countries he traversed had used his pointers to fix and then dig up the old cities of the seventh century. The author meets with archeologists in the countries she travels in who share their findings and acknowledge the Chinese monk’s role in defining it. Xuanzang was accustomed to his country’s meticulous records, volumes of dynastic histories and genealogies copied and recopied for posterity. He could not know that his own record, inked for the Chinese emperor, would provide modern Indian historians with one of the few sources of information about the subcontinent in that era. His Chinese spelling and pronunciation is different from the common practice in India, but since it follows well-defined rules, scholars have no difficulty in identifying the places.

 

It is clear from the monk’s description that Buddhism was declining in India as well as in other places where it once held sway. Xuanzang notes with mild consternation the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Buddhist texts available in the Chinese language. This was the reason he undertook the arduous journey through inaccessible mountains and deserts infested with hostile brigands. Xuanzang learned Sanskrit in India which was the ecclesiastical language of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism to which China belonged. At the same time, he studied Hinayana treatises also, so as to argue and defeat them in discourse. Futile disputes on the finer points of religion had become fairly common even in Central Asia as attested by Xuanzang’s arguments with Mokshagupta at Kucha in Kyrgyzstan. Patronage extended by royal houses was running thin. Buddhist monasteries in the western and central regions of India were already abandoned by the time Xuanzang arrived. There were few monks and certainly no eminent Buddhist teachers.

 

Saran’s condescension on everything Indian is jarring. Having lived most of her life abroad, she looks at the country with anglicized eyes and insistently repeats the things a typical foreigner would record, such as peeling paint on building walls, vehicles that break down twice a day, potholed roads and garbage accumulated everywhere. Even then, she remarks that ‘somehow India held together. Somehow the garbage got collected; somehow there was ginger and milk for tea; somehow the rickety government buses got me to places. I had not worked out how’ (p.217). Such grudging admiration does not extend to expressing gratitude where it is legitimately due. The author’s family had connections at high places that an armed guard and a security vehicle were exclusively provided for her transport in strife-torn Kashmir. Under that security canopy, she went places and faithfully records the one-sided observations made by extremist elements or their sympathizers. This attitude is common in liberal authors who gleefully accept the comforts provided by the administration and then make a partisan narrative of the conflict. She mistakes Kapilvastu to be in Uttar Pradesh and excoriates the state government for the poor upkeep. It’s amazing that her research could not identify the place to be a part of Nepal! On the destruction of Nalanda, she places the blame on ‘central Asian invaders’ in 1197 as if history does not record their names. Every Indian knows that it was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khalji in the pre-Sultanate period characterized by frequent Muslim invasions.

 

The author’s faculty of criticism and mocking disparagement is entirely suspended when she crosses the border from India to Pakistan. On every step, she is shadowed by the security establishment, harassing even the people who help her by providing accommodation, for instance. She raises no complaints about this in the book though it was published a few years after the event. The author unconditionally yields to hardline dress codes and gets self-conditioned to accept them as good for her and the whole womanhood. Later, on seeing college girls in Swat Valley with uncovered heads, she notes that ‘they looked vulgar and their heads seemed naked’ (p.365). Saran herself takes extra care to keep those body parts – commanded by Sharia to be covered – fully in conformity to it without any grumble. Donning a burkha, she ‘sensed the power of concealment, the power of only revealing what is absolutely necessary’ (p.371). In the usual liberal fashion, the author meekly surrenders to religious injunctions when they are accompanied by an implicit threat of violence otherwise.

 

The author’s journey on the footsteps of Xuanzang was interrupted at the Uzbekistan border because the road to Afghanistan was blocked due to internal violence between the Taliban and local militias in the year 2000. So she directly flew to India. After completing the travels in India and Nepal she obtained a visa to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. The author could not visit any monument of her choice in the Taliban territory and was forced to travel the routes prepared by her male guide assigned by the Islamist regime. Public transport was non-existent and unsafe where they plied. She tried for UN aid agencies’ resources for travel and accommodation, but they refused to entertain her. Irritated by the lack of special consideration of the type she was familiar in India, the author makes a tirade against the agencies prompted by frustration. She accuses corruption in the international aid agencies. Even the funds contributed by well-meaning people gets sucked up in the great funnel of overheads and hefty staff salaries and finally only a trickle reaches the Afghans. The UN needs to have transparency regulations, provide accounts and pay attention to the bottom line. Most importantly, the author calls for a provision to fire staff when times get tough. The aid agencies would have done better if they had at least provided a car for Saran’s travel in Afghanistan!

 

The book’s title and beginnings are exciting, but the narrative gets lackadaisical once the going gets tougher. Often the script degenerates to a plain travelogue with nothing to enhance the historical content. The author has connections to very high places and scholars, but entirely fails to capitalize on it as far as the quality of the content is concerned. On the other hand, she has been successful in delineating the currents of identical cultural streams that unite central Asia with the Indian subcontinent. Even though separated by religion, they show similarities in the attitudes to life and the way to treat guests. The word ‘mehman’ for guest is common everywhere outside China. Altogether, we reach a conclusion that the book has failed to deliver what it promised in the title.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star

The Hungry Empire

Title: The Hungry Empire – How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

Author: Lizzie Collingham

Publisher: The Bodley Head, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9781847922700

Pages: 367

 

Apart from introducing new political, administrative and commercial frameworks in its colonies, the British Empire had been instrumental in radically altering what is on the dining plates of the people over which it ruled. Beginning from fish processing in Newfoundland, it introduced cotton, tobacco and sugar in the slave colonies, obtained tea from China and then spread the habit of afternoon tea in the whole of its domain. Before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the empire treated its colonies as sources of food rather than raw materials for its nascent industries. As in any item of trade, a monopoly can be sustained only by surpassing the rivals which meant suppressing them in those times. Lizzie Collingham is a historian ‘interested in linking the minutiae of daily life to the broad sweep of historical processes’. Her book ‘Curry – A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors’ was reviewed earlier. This book tells the tale of how the British shaped modernity by their relentless effort to source food from across the world for consumption as well as trade. Each chapter tells a different story, and opens with a particular meal and then explores the history that made them possible.

 

The British were rather late in the rush to the West across the Atlantic in search of spices, which was led by Spain and Portugal. Henry VIII’s break with the Pope, which added a religious angle to the already existing geographical separation, convinced the British to start their own explorations. Fishermen from West Country acquired knowledge of Atlantic currents by their mastery over Newfoundland cod fishing. This helped the explorers who went in search of a sea route to the Spice Islands. In a sense, the fishermen who mastered food-processing techniques laid down the foundations of empire. The expanding merchant marine used the competent fishermen to man its ships. The salted cod found willing customers all across the Atlantic rim, till they took to better food crops. Between 1570 and 1689, the tonnage of English shipping grew seven-fold and England emerged as a major European power.

 

Production of food and other cash crops were invariably linked to slavery for almost four centuries from the discovery of the New World. This book explains the movement of men and materiel to and from the Americas and Africa. When the indigenous Americans proved unwilling to toil in the tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations, Black Africans were forced to occupy that place. Collingham suggests that the farms at first used white labour force in the same appalling conditions as the Blacks did later. Many slaves perished in the sugar plantations that it was said that what you get by adding sugar to water was the slaves’ blood. Emancipation came with Enlightenment, but the living conditions hardly improved. As the Blacks opted not to work in farms after they were liberated, the British ushered in indentured labour as a substitute. Indians ground down by poverty accepted a paltry sum and worked for the British, almost like slaves.

 

Medieval trade worked best in a barter system between countries. As the ships are to be laden both ways, trade had had to be a give-and-take proposition. When the balance tilted in favour of one party, the other has to rebalance with gold or silver, which would cause erosion of resources in that country. This state of affairs is a prescription for instability and violence. The British desperately wanted tea from China, but the Chinese didn’t take anything in return, ensuring continuous outflow of British silver. To stem this tide, they found opium to be marketable clandestinely in large quantities in China. They grew opium in north India and an elaborate cycle was perfected. The English East India Company advanced loans to farmers to grow poppies. The produce was collected at fixed prices, irrespective of the demand. This was then auctioned at Calcutta for up to four times the price paid to farmers. The opium was then transported to Canton in private ships and sold there for equal weight in silver. This Chinese silver was collected by merchants and paid into the company’s treasury at Canton in return for bills of exchange. The company purchased tea with this bullion in its treasury and auctioned it at London. The proceeds were used to redeem the instruments of exchange held by retail traders. Thus most of the Chinese silver remained in the country. From late-eighteenth century, opium revenues were the third most important source of income for the company after land revenue and salt tax.

 

The Chinese are indignant at being forced to consume opium by the British. When the emperor ordered a ban on its trade, the British went to war with China and made it obligatory for the defeated Chinese to keep the existing trade routes open and allow more ports in which the Europeans could trade. This is often depicted as a cruel act by a colonial power on a helpless Oriental country. Collingham snaps this bubble by offering an alternate narrative that terms the Chinese position as an ‘opium myth’. The Chinese state is often presented as powerless against the superior forces of an imperialist drug cartel. This was supposed to have drained silver out of the economy while turning the Chinese into a nation of addicts who smoked themselves to death. However, a number of scholars argue that opium’s reputation as a demon drug is just hyperbole. Opium inhalation was probably one of the least physically damaging ways of taking any of the recreational drugs at that time. Besides, China was not drained of silver as the company had used it to purchase tea, porcelain and silk.

 

The British made lasting impressions on the people they ruled. In India, their political, legal, educational and commercial frameworks are still in use. But India steadfastly refused to adopt British food on their dining tables. In fact, it was the other way round, with the adaptation of Indian curry to suit British tastes. The author has not examined this aspect of the colonial interchange. On the other hand, the cases of many colonial societies integrating colonial food for own use is mentioned. The Kikuyu in Kenya traditionally used millets and sorghum for their principal dish ‘Irio’. As maize from Americas became widely available and began to be cultivated in Africa, they replaced millets with maize in Irio.

 

A book on food would also be the ideal platform to highlight the lack of it. The author has made a neat review of the man-made Bengal famine of 1943 and some other famines that ravaged British India. A touching picture of a group of highly emaciated survivors of the Madras Famine of 1876 exposes the gravity of the problem. The Bengal famine was caused by a mix of poor harvest, wartime measures that hampered the movement of rice and the government’s incompetence when they fixed rice prices too low. This channeled the supplies to the black market. At the same time, buildup of US troops had been going on in England for the invasion of the continent then reeling under Hitler’s yoke. Britain needed more ships for provisioning them and consequently, the number of ships sailing to Indian Ocean was cut by half. Famine raged in Bengal and around three million people died in miserable circumstances. When the villagers could no longer find the strength to walk to the community kitchen, they simply lay down on the cold ground and died. Hard-hearted Churchill still maintained that the colonies should feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country did. But such lofty rhetoric did not prevent the British from airlifting supplies to the Netherlands when starvation was reported. Lord Wavell himself expressed resentment at this discrimination.

 

The book displays a marked change from the common practice of British authors to don the mantle of regret and empathy from head to toe when discussing colonial matters. Collingham does nothing of the sort and evaluates the possibilities objectively. Chinese claims of victimhood on imposition of opium on the country by war are reexamined in the light of recent research which shows that China’s plight of economic distress was caused as much, if not more, by domestic policies and politics than foreign aggression. The book includes recipes for the principal item discussed in each chapter. Recipes of things which had long gone out of common use are interesting to aficionados.

 

Rating: 4 Star

Midnight’s Borders

Title: Midnight’s Borders – A People’s History of Modern India

Author: Suchitra Vijayan

Publisher: Context, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9788194879053

Pages: 320

 

There is Jules Verne’s 1872 classic ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ in which the London socialite Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days to win a wager with his friends. The duo, along with a woman they rescue in India from widow-burning sati ritual who would later become Fogg’s wife, cross the nations without the bother of any documents or personal papers which is the current norm. National borders have become solidified and imporous in the intervening 150 years since the publication of that book. There are people supports the restrictions on human movement because of the order and control a state can exert over the outsiders. Then there are the freedom lovers who detest the requirement of documentary verification to move across the planet earth which is in fact the shared home of the entire humanity. Then there are some who enjoy all the benefits the nation state confers on its citizens, but at the same time make self-righteous comments on the national borders as artificially separating groups of people. This book belongs to the third category. This is the record of a 9000-mile journey along India’s borders to meet the people who inhabit the margins of the state and ‘to study the human toll of decades of aggressive, territorial nationalism’. This is not a straightforward chronology of travel. It is a series of encounters in towns, cities and abandoned ruins and comes up with a silly indictment of the Indian Republic, which the author presumes has no right to protect its borders against unauthorized entry of outsiders. It also seems to be a made-to-order narrative western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) want to hear. Suchitra Vijayan was born and brought up in Chennai and is now settled in the US as a writer.

 

What is plainly visible in the core concept and organisation of the narrative is the trivialization of history. Suchitra stands aloof and impervious to its lessons. This is evident in her ‘imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation states’ (p.122). Even a cursory glance at history shows that the demand to divide India into two nation states and thereby to erect a boundary where none existed before came from the proponents of Pakistan. It was the Muslim League who demanded partition and followed it up with blood-curdling atrocities like murder, rape, arson and pillage in Calcutta, Noakhali and numerous other places in Pakistan. She also acts blind to the history of illegal immigration or planned demographic deluge of Assam. In 1947, the Assamese district of Sylhet was surprisingly found to be a Muslim-majority region due to unchecked migration that lasted for decades. Consequently, Sylhet was separated from India and given away to Pakistan. The author wants India to open up her borders and subsequently get drowned in the flood of often violent illegal migration. The book also proposes false pretexts such as the claim that ‘to govern India, the British introduced separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, which further stoked Hindu-Muslim violence’ (p.9). This is either a deliberate falsehood or the height of historical ignorance. Separate electorates were demanded and snatched away by the Muslims in their bid to secure sufficient number of seats for themselves in an electorate where the Hindus otherwise commanded a significant majority. Likewise, we don’t come across any serious research in the preparation of this book. The shallow findings point to a pleasure trip to the border with a camera on the shoulder. She just copies the fanciful tales told to her by interested parties without displaying any insight or critical assessment.

 

The author complains that borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. This fails to take an important idea into consideration. In all the corners she travelled in India, the fence was erected to keep the outsiders out, rather than keeping the insiders in, like the Berlin Wall did. This makes the assertion inoperative as that does not restrict anybody’s freedom. It is precisely due to the strict border controls that the 2008 Mumbai attackers, who indiscriminately shot dead 166 innocent people, had to take the circuitous route through the sea to reach India. Unfortunately, the author has interviewed only those people who have illegally entered India or who are suspected to be so. After this false step, she escalates the issue to international level and equates the Kashmir issue to Palestine – the typical Pakistani point of view – saying that what is happening at both the places are the same (p.24). What astounds the readers is the book’s romanticizing of jihadi fighters, embellishing their crooked stories of violent heroism and reproducing their photographs with lethal assault rifles strewn over the chest.

 

Suchitra displays a vehement hatred towards India, which is her home country. Even though she stays in New York apparently on a permanent basis, she is still an Indian. This hatred is so intense that she appears to be foaming in the mouth at the intensity of the feeling and the rush of invective. She repeatedly refers to Kashmir as Indian-occupied, following the Pakistani rhetoric. She accuses Indians as treating most of the natives in Arunachal border areas as savages to be tamed. Indians are said to be placing images and idols of Hindu gods and goddesses in ruined temples in border areas, as if that is a crime! Also, the statement that India ‘doesn’t issue IDs to its citizens but do so for cattle’ is an outright lie while the cattle ID seem to be taken from trolls in social media. The author finds the practice of erecting shrines to soldiers fallen in battle, offensive as they ‘protect nationalistic fantasy with no historical basis’. Suchitra writes down the names of dead soldiers of the World War from the War Cemetery at Kohima, Nagaland. Not even one Indian is mentioned, while two from present-day Pakistan is listed. But when she quotes a Naga separatist telling her that they used to name their dogs after Indian soldiers, they come out in a perfect desi flavour – Mishra, Natarajan, Singh and Mukesh!

 

This book proves that the author is not even a liberal who ought to oppose authoritative regimes. Even if the Indian state is accepted as authoritative for argument’s sake, China is infinitely more so. But the author treats China with kid gloves, never uttering a harsh word against them. Kashmir is claimed to be Indian-occupied, but the same logic is not extended to Tibet which should be called Chinese-occupied. Instead, it is the ‘Chinese province of Tibet’ (p.77). She quotes one Karunakar Gupta of London who had ‘found’ forged Aitchison treaties that clinch the argument in favour of China’s claim over Tibet. The 1962 war is said to be caused by ‘India’s suppression of facts, distortion of history, possible alterations of maps and withholding of official documents related to the borders’. She exalts an Indian PoW’s book on the military defeat against China in 1962 while remaining tightlipped on India’s successful intervention in Bangladesh in 1971 and its liberation. It is such tactical omissions and misrepresentations that make the readers doubtful about the author’s real intent and sources of financing for this book.

 

What is truly hilarious is the author’s utter ignorance of India’s judicial system. Judges in courts are said to be working under contract employment who receive better assessments if they declared more people guilty (p.135). They are accused not to be following rules of evidence, acting without supervision and without any challenge to their authority. Rules are also arbitrary which can be bent at a judge’s disposal. At the same time, we also read about ‘destitute’ intruders who are powerful enough to appeal in the Supreme Court against unfavourable verdicts of lower courts, meeting the hefty fees of lawyers who practice in the apex court. The author is naïve and gullible as to swallow their concocted stories lock stock and barrel. Suchitra narrates a personal anecdote which naturally makes her antagonistic to Indian judiciary. Her father was once assaulted by hired goons of a Tamil politician, nearly killing him. After twelve years of legal wrangling, the trial court acquitted all of them for want of evidence. Is that the reason why she is a staunch anti-Indian? Readers are left to wallow in guess work on this point.

 

Quite expectably, a considerable portion of the text is reserved to flay the ruling nationalist dispensation of India for their avowed aim to foster national coherence. India is claimed to be transforming into a violent, xenophobic Hindu state waging war against its Constitution and so many of its people. This is the usual political rhetoric heard since the current coalition came to power in the 2014 elections. The book attempts a selective picking up of atrocities that put the government at a disadvantage. Local cow protection gangs are claimed to be operating under the command of the prime minister. The author’s partiality is best exposed by her clever but false implications that only the Muslims get killed in religious riots. It provides a provocative, one-sided narrative of the 2020 Delhi riots too. The most outrageous assertion is that the Indian economy has failed and thousands are fleeing the country to seek political asylum in the US. The author does not mention whether she is speaking this from personal experience!

Suchitra’s making fun of the sacrifice of 21 soldiers’ lives in the 1971 Pakistan war while recapturing territory in Rajasthan is simply ungrateful and mean. This is mocked as ‘reclaiming a transitory sand dune’. Here also, we distinctly hear echoes of Pakistani propaganda. All these canards are being spread while remaining under the protective shield of the Indian army and paramilitary detachments. She stayed at their guest houses, ate their meals, and travelled to the border in army vehicles with armed guard. Sometimes, the guards clear away interlopers to ensure a decent photo op for the author. In return, she strikes up a conversation with lonely and bored soldiers and reminds them of India’s defeat in the 1962 war or how their home state is being oppressed by the central government in Delhi.

 

This book is a waste of time as not much research has gone into writing it which I suspect to be funded by anti-India agencies. The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

 

The Problem with Secularism

Title: The Problem with Secularism

Author: KoenraadElst

Publisher: Voice of India, New Delhi, 2015 (First published 2007)

ISBN: 9789385485022

Pages: 122

 

Koenraad Elst is a well-known Indologist and author of numerous books and papers on religio-political issues. He supports the Hindu nationalist groups in India and is always a target of malicious propaganda by liberal secularists. In this book, Elst examines the concept of secularism as an ideal and how it has performed in India in practice in comparison to the theoretical objective. It is a collection of articles about secularism and its relationship with religious communalism. The secularists in India are always aligned with Islamists and lend their support to the latter’s obscurantist ideas. This secularist-Islamist nexus is one of the wonders of the world and requires ever new exercises in hypocrisy on the part of the former, sometimes descending into grotesque buffoonery. This book provides replies to the searing criticism made by the liberal elite in media or academia and exposes the shallow roots of their agenda-driven study and research. The foreign media does not do any better as Elst argues that in addition to receiving factual material from Indian secularist scholars, they often blindly copy the conclusions and even judgments of their Indian collaborators en masse, without making a skeptical review. Moreover as part of a wider discussion on the religious front, this book presents the hypothesis that Islam – as a religion – is to blame for the sheer violence its adherents unleash in many parts of the globe. Consequently, we find studies on the basic tenets of Islam and the Prophet’s antics in this book.

 

The book makes a critical analysis of the functional subservience of Indian secularism to anti-nationals and religious bigots of non-Hindu religions. As a political framework, secularism requires that all citizens are equal before the law regardless of their religious affiliations. That is a definitional minimum. An Indian secularist would therefore first of all be found on the frontlines in the struggle for a uniform civil code. Unfortunately this is not the case because hardline Muslim interests are involved. The personal laws of all religions include discriminatory prescriptions against women and their rights. However in the case of non-Muslims, their personal codes have been reformed already and they are willing to receive a uniform code with little or no modifications from what they possess at present. But in Muslim law, we still find polygamy and preferential treatment of sons over daughters in parental property to such an extreme that in the case of an only daughter a person is forced to donate a third of his property to his brother or nephews. Divorced Muslim women are not entitled to alimony, however miserable they are. It is strange that Indian secularists support this blatant injustice on the pitiable argument that Muslims are bound to follow these by dictates of their religion. It shields from criticism even the most obscurantist beliefs if they are non-Hindu.

 

Another charge on which the secularists are arraigned is that of freedom of expression, which is an inalienable right in a liberal democracy. Elst proves that secularists follow this policy only in the case of criticism levelled against Hindu beliefs in India. See the lightning urgency in banning Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in India even before other Muslim nations made such a move. There is a pressure group in favour of opinion control regarding religion and this camp is called secularist in India. The author argues that they treat any and every criticism of Islam, no matter how experience-based, no matter how factual or scholarly, no matter how humanist or liberal, as ‘hate’ and ‘fascism’ (p.45). This book examines the case of the famous painter M F Hussein as a separate chapter. Hussein was lambasted for his reprehensible style in which he depicted Hindu gods and goddesses with suggestions of bestiality. Elst makes a careful analysis of Hussein’s other works to see if that is his preferred style in depicting historical or mythological beings. Here, readers are in for a big shock. Hussein devoutly avoids portrayal of the Prophet as per Islamic traditions. He had drawn a few paintings of the Prophet’s wives and all of them are shown fully and respectably clothed, evincing reverence! The author then establishes that this double standard is actually caused by Hussein’s deep-felt hatred towards Hinduism as taught by his religion against polytheists. By making a perverted mockery of Hinduism, Hussein is in fact venting the jihadi venom he keeps in his fangs.

 

Elst specifically analyses the role and personality of Gandhi in making a mess out of the communal situation at the time of independence. Gandhi used his ploy of fast unto death to extract concessions from true nationalists. Ambedkar had to give in to that threat and Nehru conceded a large sum of money to Pakistan on Gandhi’s threatening to die in a fast if the money is not paid. This grave error in judgment happened when Pakistan’s armed troops were already stationed on Indian territory in Kashmir. Gandhi’s mistakes are clearly spelt out in the book which goes on to doubt whether it was his nonviolent agitation that gained freedom for India. The result is put down in an informative paragraph which runs thus: “It is simply not true that India’s independence was the fruit of Gandhian nonviolent agitation. He was close to the British in terms of culture and shared ethical values, which is why sometimes he could successfully bargain with them, but even they stood firm against his pressure when their vital interests were at stake. It is only Britain’s bankruptcy due to World War II and the emergence of the anti-colonial US and Soviet Union as the dominant world powers that forced Attlee’s government into decolonizing India. Even then, the trigger events in 1945-47 that demonstrated how the Indian people would not tolerate British rule for much longer, had to do with armed struggle rather than with nonviolence: the naval mutiny of Indian troops and the ostentatious nationwide support for the officers of Bose’s Indian National Army when they stood trial for treason in the Red Fort” (p.85).

 

The author pokes fun at secularists at their wild predictions on what would happen to the minorities if the BJP came to power in India. These were so extravagant without any link to truth or commonsense that they went awry once the BJP indeed came to power. India should have witnessed genocide of the minorities if you believed the prognostications of the secularists. Of course, nothing of the sort happened anywhere. Then came the Gujarat communal riots of 2002 which the secularists used effectively to blare out loud from the roof tops. Elst makes a factual study of the episode and wonders at the clever tricks of the media to downplay the provocative spark at Godhra in which 58 Hindus, mostly women and children, were burnt alive by Muslim mobs in a railway compartment. The misinformation campaign of the secular media extended to purported attacks on Christians which had nothing to do with Hindu nationalists. The incidents of Kandhamal murders and Jhabua rapes are explained in the text. In both the cases, the culprits turned out to be Christians, but the media downplayed this and allowed the initial allegations against Hindu organisations to remain with the public.

 

Most of the articles are written in the period 2002-2007 on journals and newspapers in India or abroad. The partiality and partisanship of the mainstream media are exposed with a touch of helplessness at the injustice of this dereliction of the media’s moral duty. It was in fact the emergence of social media that set the record straight by taking media Moguls head on and holding them accountable for the canards they spread. Since the internet was at its infancy in the period during which this book was written, there are no references to checks and balances the social media brought into the game. Elst’s style is fearless and to the point. His observations on the psychological evaluations of Koranic revelations are sure to provoke believers, but many ex-Muslims are bringing the issue up in social media these days.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star