“In the west, we have labels,” commented journalist François Gautier on WION TV, during a panel about the results of India’s 2019 general election. “Right, left. Far-right, far-left. We keep applying them to India, where they’re not applicable. We cannot apply to India labels we use in the West. To say that the BJP is far-right is completely wrong.”
The election was over. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won a resounding victory, seizing power once again, with a seat-count in India’s Lok Sabha that surpassed even its decisive showing in the 2014 elections. Meanwhile, Gautier—described by India’s National Herald as a French-born “BJP cheerleader”—was speaking truth. The BJP is not far-right. But it is authoritarian and fascist.
Moments after Gautier spoke, WION’s political editor Kartikeya Sharma shed some light on how the BJP may have defeated the opposition: it has infrastructural strength. It is backed by hordes of apparatchiks. “People who are not married, who don’t have families, who have dedicated their lives completely to the party,” said Sharma. “They land up in a state two years before [the election]. They are living in rented apartments. Along with them, they have an army of youngsters. This is the way. How are you going to compete with that kind of a thing?”
Indeed, fueled by such fanaticism, the organizational power of the Modi wave (a term coined to describe the tsunami of support for BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi) has floated a second BJP victory. India is now on the brink of another five years of subjugation to an authoritarian regime. By 2024, the country will have endured a full decade of BJP rule.
I joined Sharma, Gautier and others on WION to offer my take on the election. “This is a disaster for democracy,” I began. “We have to remember that democracy doesn’t just mean taking two seconds to push a button once every five years and pick somebody to rule the country. Democracy’s actually about the society. It’s more than the act of voting. It’s about democratic rights, and those democratic rights are in short supply in India today. We can see that India is fast becoming what it has already progressed far along the path towards becoming, which is an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy—which is fascism.”
That’s when WION cut my mike and severed the interview. “This is not even acceptable that India is becoming an authoritarian state,” responded Sharma. “India is one postcolonial nation which has very successfully demonstrated its ability to transition from one regime to another regime through peaceful elections. I think this comment is unacceptable.”
The irony that fascism involves restricting free speech only to “acceptable” answers was lost on him. However, Sharma’s choice of the word regime—which is generally defined as an authoritarian government—was deeply appropriate.
Last year, an Indian high school teacher was arrested for writing on Facebook, “Voting for Modi is like garlanding a dog.” Perhaps such rhetoric is neither the most respectful nor the most constructive way to promote dialogue about the country’s political problems. Yet the arrest exemplifies the nature of life under the Modi regime, where expressing discontent, contempt and especially dissent can land an Indian citizen behind bars.
“India’s claim to democracy, rather as the world’s largest functional democracy, solely rests on its record of regularly held elections,” notes jailed Dalit activist Anand Teltumbde. “Although they are more of a ritual observed with massive money and muscle power than the expression of the will of the people, they have sustained the illusion of democracy.” Teltumbde argues that “the de jure democracy has always been de facto plutocracy, the rule of the money bags.” He concludes that it was only “a matter of time” before that plutocracy would become exactly what I told WION it was—“an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy, which is what fascism is.”
The emergence of India as a fascist nation ruled by the BJP with Modi as its figurehead is no surprise considering the origins of the BJP. Nor is it a surprise considering the identity of those unmarried, fanatically devoted party workers and their army of youngsters who provide the BJP’s infrastructural base. Nor is it a surprise considering the history of Modi himself.
The Rise of Modi: RSS Pracharak to Prime Minister
Milestones marking the route to the May 23, 2019 results were laid both a century and a half-century ago.
In 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was formed. A paramilitary force, uniformed and armed, it was dedicated to the idea that all Indians collectively constitute a Hindu race; committed to basing the entirety of Indian society, culture and politics on religion; devoted to the notion that only a race traitor would vote for anyone but a Hindu nationalist; and convinced that it was treason against the mother nation for an Indian to be anything but a Hindu.
The second milestone happened in 1971, when Narendra Modi joined the RSS as a pracharak—a full-time worker sworn to celibacy.
Modi joined in Ahmedabad, the largest city (and then capital) of Gujarat. Modi’s home state, Gujarat, lies just north of Maharashtra, the state in which the RSS was founded and in which it maintains its headquarters. At the time, M. S. Golwalkar was nearing the end of his tenure as the RSS’s longest-serving and most influential leader. Golwalkar had just excited controversy with a keynote speech at a 1968 RSS rally in Ahmedabad, in which he demanded that India be declared a Hindu rashtra (nation). The following year, his petition was sealed in blood when the RSS led riots that left over 400 Muslims dead.
When Golwalkar died in 1973, the RSS was just becoming a political force and Modi was just beginning his public life. In 1980, the RSS founded the BJP as its political wing. Its principal apparatchiks were drawn from the ranks of RSS pracharaks. Thus, in 1987—only two years after another series of riots in Ahmedabad—the RSS assigned Modi to help build the new party.
For months, beginning in February 1985, mobs led by members of the RSS and BJP first attacked lower caste communities and then Muslims. Survivors accuse even the police of joining in the violence, which left hundreds dead. Modi was definitely present in Gujarat during the violence. His role, however, remains unknown. Yet his work within the BJP soon precipitated even deadlier riots.
In the early 1990s, Modi began to validate the party’s religious nationalist credentials and emerged as a key organizer of its Ram janmabhoomi (Ram’s birthplace) campaign.
After Golwalkar founded the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) as the RSS’s religious wing, the VHP initiated an aggressive movement to reclaim the site where the mythological figure Ram was supposedly born. On that site, they insisted, now stood the sixteenth-century Babri mosque. Claiming that the mosque was built following the demolition of a Ram temple, they demanded the temple be rebuilt.
Recognizing the political potential of this move, the BJP joined the VHP’s campaign and adopted the construction of the Ram temple as a plank of the party’s agenda. In 1990, BJP President L. K. Advani began a Ram rath yatra (Ram chariot procession), criss-crossing India in a minibus decked out as a chariot. He was trailed by thousands of kar sevaks (volunteers) from the RSS, VHP and other affiliated groups.
Violence, unsurprisingly, plagued the procession. Riots broke out along the way. Hundreds died in conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. Yet this seemed to prove a successful strategy for the BJP. Despite not actually securing power, they performed exceptionally well in the 1991 general elections. In 1992, however, the movement spun out of control.
In December of that year, Advani headlined a rally outside the Babri mosque. He was joined by Murli Manohar Joshi, who had succeeded him as BJP president. As they spoke, the 150,000 strong crowd moved towards the mosque and began to tear it down. The demolition quickly devolved into a massacre. Nationwide riots, lasting for months, left up to 3,000 Muslims dead.
When India’s central government briefly banned both the VHP and the RSS, Modi joined Joshi on a trip to the US. They were greeted on arrival by Suresh Jani of New Jersey, who had in 1991—on Advani’s orders—co-founded the Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP) to counter the negative international press the party was receiving as a result of its Ram janmabhoomi campaign. During his US tour, Modi stayed with Jani, as well as with Bharat Barai of Indiana, who was then a governing council member of VHP America.
Back in India, Modi swiftly advanced up the BJP hierarchy. By 1995, he was working out of the national party headquarters in New Delhi. He did not, however, forget his friends in the OFBJP, returning to the US for another tour in 1997. When the BJP emerged victorious in the 1998 general election, he was rewarded with the powerful position of party organizing secretary.
Then he got his hands on real political power.
In October 2001, Gujarat’s chief minister Keshubhai Patel was in failing health and had lost his party’s political confidence. He resigned. Modi was appointed as his replacement. Thus, the backroom apparatchik—unmarried, with no family, whose life was wholly dedicated to the party—assumed his first ever political office. For four months, he remained an unelected executive. Finally, on 24 February 2002, he won a seat in the Gujarat legislative assembly.
Three days after the election, carnage engulfed Gujarat.
On 27 February, a train was set on fire in the city of Godhra. The passengers were mostly Hindu pilgrims returning to Gujarat from a journey to the Ram janmabhoomi. Fifty-nine people (including women and children) died in the blaze.
Modi immediately labelled the conflagration an act of terrorism and blamed it on Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). That day, his government transported the charred bodies over 100 kilometres from Godhra to Ahmedabad. Footage of the uncovered corpses was televised before they were handed over to the VHP. With BJP backing, the VHP launched a state-wide shutdown on the 28th. Then the blood began to flow.
For three days, mobs ran rampage throughout the state. Over a dozen cities witnessed major incidents of violence. By the end, up to 2,000 (or more) Muslims lay dead.
Ten years later, a special investigation team (SIT) submitted a report to the Supreme Court. It concluded that there was “not enough evidence” to prosecute Modi for involvement in the pogrom. Indeed, there was little direct evidence proving that he sanctioned the violence—although there was no exculpatory evidence either. There was, however, a mountain of circumstantial evidence.
Eyewitnesses claimed that the attackers were armed with voter lists naming Muslim victims. Witnesses identified BJP state legislator Maya Kodnani as a leader of the assailants and even claimed that she had issued weapons and given orders. Phone records later showed that she was at the scene of the crime and in frequent contact with police and government officials, including Modi’s office.
A few months after the pogrom, BJP state minister Haren Pandya told Outlook magazine that he—along with other state and police officials—was called to a meeting at Modi’s home on the night of the 27th and ordered to stand down so that the mobs could “vent their frustration.” Sanjiv Bhatt, a high-ranking police officer, later made the same claim. Survivors say that, when they appealed to police, they were sometimes told by officers, “We have no orders to save you.” Witnesses claim police even fired on victims.
Pandya was murdered in 2003. “My husband’s assassination was a political murder,” asserts his wife. In 2005, his alleged assassin was murdered. BJP state minister Amit Shah—a confidante of Modi’s—was accused of orchestrating the assassin’s killing after hiring him to murder Pandya.
In 2007, Tehelka magazine conducted a sting operation. Speaking with over a dozen perpetrators of the pogrom, they secretly filmed them not only confessing to their involvement but implicating Modi. Interviewees included a BJP state legislator as well as leaders of the RSS and VHP. “He had given us three days to do whatever we could,” said legislator Haresh Bhatt, describing Modi. “After three days, he asked us to stop and everything came to a halt … We had three days and did what we had to in those three days.”
The evidence was enough to convince the British and American governments to turn their backs on Modi. In 2002, the UK imposed a diplomatic boycott on him, forbidding its officials to deal directly with the Gujarati government. In 2005, the US denied him a visa after he was invited to speak at an Indian diaspora event in Florida.
What most politicians would have interpreted as a nail in the coffin of their political career, Modi and his supporters instead perceived as laying a firm foundation for his future. In the US, Bharat Barai set to work promoting Modi within the Indian-American diaspora. Rather than the butcher of Gujarat, he was cast as an economic messiah who introduced the world to the Gujarat model of development. Every Gujarat Day, beginning in May 2007, Barai began hosting video conferences in which Modi addressed the diaspora.
Meanwhile, in India, saffron terror—a phrase coined to describe terrorism perpetrated by the RSS or its ideological affiliates—was on the rise.
In 2006, a bombing at a Muslim cemetery in Malegaon, Maharashtra killed forty. In 2007, someone planted a bomb aboard the Samjhauta Express, a train running between Delhi and Lahore. Seventy people, mostly Pakistanis, died. A bombing at the Mecca mosque in Hyderabad killed sixteen. Then a bombing at a Muslim shrine in Ajmer, Rajasthan claimed the lives of two. In 2008, another bombing in Malegaon killed nine. As the investigation into the attacks developed, evidence implicated Swami Aseemanand (an RSS pracharak), Sadhvi Pragya Thakur (a leader of RSS-affiliated groups), and a number of other Hindu nationalist activists. In a filmed confession, Aseemanand not only named Thakur, but claimed the violence was directly sanctioned by RSS head Mohan Bhagwat.
Back in the US, as Barai continued to help Modi grow in popularity, Suresh Jani became president of the OFBJP. Fifteen years after the two American devotees of India’s BJP hosted the young apparatchik in their homes, they were now conducting a systematic campaign to boost his image and name recognition abroad. Their efforts were to prove fruitful.
By 2011, Modi was rumored to be the BJP’s candidate for prime minister in the 2014 general election. His name was floated at least a year before the Supreme Court’s SIT supposedly cleared him of guilt for the 2002 pogrom. In 2012, his backers declared the SIT’s conclusion that there was “not enough evidence” to prosecute to be a “clean chit” and treated it as a green light to push the RSS pracharak into India’s highest office.
Modi’s Regime: Birth of an Authoritarian Democracy
Modi was elected in May 2014.
His election followed a three-year campaign by OFBJP operatives in America, which began with training camps in 2011, followed by tours of the US by RSS and BJP executives in 2012. In 2013, then BJP president Rajnath Singh toured the US and Modi gave three video conferences. OFBJP sent activists to India to canvass for the BJP in the state elections. Their campaign culminated in 2014, when thousands of volunteers staffed US-based phone banks, while nearly 2,000 activists—including a team of 650 led by Barai in person—traveled to India.
After floating to power on a Modi wave for the first time, the BJP wasted no time implementing its agenda to saffronize the country.
2014 witnessed joint strategy sessions between the BJP and the RSS as they sought to rewrite the history taught in the Indian school curriculum. Then controversy broke out, as RSS-affiliated groups were accused of forcibly reconverting hundreds of Muslims to Hinduism. Subsequently, Rajnath Singh (who had transitioned from the BJP presidency to a ministerial post) and Amit Shah (who had replaced Singh as BJP president) suggested that the country adopt a national anti-conversion law to criminalize religious conversion without state permission.
2015 saw the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq, a Muslim man, who was dragged from his home at night and beaten to death on the suspicion that he had slaughtered a cow. Local BJP activists were implicated in Akhlaq’s murder. This was one of the earliest and highest profile of what were to be many beef-related mob lynchings. Over the ensuing years, similar killings of Muslims and Dalits were replicated time and time again. Meanwhile, states like Maharashtra and Haryana responded by criminalizing cow slaughter—Maharashtra made even the possession of beef punishable by five years in prison, while Haryana imposed a ten-year sentence for cow slaughter.
2016 opened with the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, who took his own life after he was suspended for protesting an RSS-affiliated event. Protests over Vemula’s death continued for months and even spilled over onto the international stage. In India, mass student protests bookended the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru University student union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was charged with sedition over the slogans allegedly used by some protestors. Kumar later claimed that the country was in the “clutches” of the RSS. As protests continued to spread, Modi expanded the central government’s cabinet, stacking a third of it with members of RSS-affiliated groups, including at least a dozen pracharaks.
In 2017, Yogi Adityanath was appointed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. While previously serving as a member of parliament in 2015, he had promised to install statues of Hindu deities in “every mosque.” Earlier, while campaigning, he had promised to kill 100 Muslims for every Hindu killed by a Muslim. His claim to fame included organizing the reconversion—voluntary or otherwise—of thousands of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. Soon after Adityanath took office, Chhattisgarh’s chief minister Raman Singh called for the hanging of anyone who slaughtered a cow.
Meanwhile, dissenting voices were being stifled. “If you speak anything except for singing praises for the government, you risk your life,” wrote Teltumbde that summer. “You could be easily charged under sedition or under any of the many draconian laws and sent for life imprisonment, if not hanged.” The state, he concluded, “has raised jingoist nationalism above people and unleashed the Hindutva gangs to carry out its writ reminiscent of the black shirts of Mussolini and brown shirts of Hitler … For the last three years, we have seen a working prototype of what a fascist regime is like.”
The truth of Teltumbde’s warning was brutally demonstrated when Gauri Lankesh, a journalist known for her candid criticism of the RSS and BJP, was assassinated in Karnataka. The investigation implicated an RSS-affiliated activist. It also connected her murder to the 2015 killings of rationalists Govind Pansare and M. M. Kalburgi.
2018 began with a rally of hundreds of thousands of Dalits in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra. The gathering devolved into chaos as Hindu nationalist outfits launched an attack. In response, Dalits called a bandh (shutdown), blocking roads and railways.
The unrest, asserted attorneys Arun Ferreira and Colin Gonsalves, was the result of “three and a half years of belligerent Hindutva rule at the center and in various states, with its rabid cocktail of blatant communal polarization, increasing atrocities against Dalits, lynching of minorities, gender violence and bans on inter-community love enforced by ruling party stormtroopers, state crackdown on dietary choices, and clampdown on universities—all accompanied by a shrill pseudo-nationalist discourse that paints all dissent as anti-national.” They argued that Modi’s regime bore “similarities with Nazi Germany” and “more and more people are coming around to identify it as a form of fascism.” Because the danger was “more long term,” they warned against exaggerating the importance of the 2019 general election and urged people to instead “forge a front against fascism.”
Then, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, an eight-year-old Muslim girl was abducted, held for a week, and repeatedly gang-raped before she was murdered. When her killers were arrested, Hindu nationalist outfits staged rallies in their support. Two BJP state ministers joined one of the rallies: they later claimed that their party had instructed them to do so.
Meanwhile, unrest expanded across India as Dalits launched a bharat bandh (national shutdown) later that year. A teenage girl set herself on fire outside Yogi Adityanath’s home to protest his administration’s refusal to arrest a BJP state legislator whom she accused of rape. Eight men convicted of lynching a Muslim man for allegedly transporting beef were released from jail—and immediately escorted to the home of Jharkhand’s chief minister Jayant Sinha to be honored with garlands.
There were staggered waves of arrests of prominent activists, writers and attorneys in multiple Indian states. Ferreira and Gonsalves, having warned about rising fascism, were among those taken into custody. K. Satyanarayana, a professor at a Hyderabad university, was not arrested but his home was searched. Afterwards, he reported that police had interrogated him about why he was “reading Marx” and keeping photos of civil rights icons like B. R. Ambedkar “instead of gods and goddesses.”
These actions informed Teltumbde’s conclusion later that year that “the country’s pretensions of being the largest democracy in the world have been fast falling apart.”
In 2019, Swami Aseemanand, the pracharak who had confessed to a string of terrorist attacks in the mid-2000s, was acquitted. Sadhvi Pragya Thakur was nominated for a seat in parliament—despite the fact that she was still facing trial for the same terrorist acts in which Aseemanand was implicated. BJP President Amit Shah sparked outrage when he referred to illegal immigrants from Bangladesh as “termites,” while Adityanath accused the opposition of being “infected” by a “green virus” (a reference to Muslims).
Also, in 2019, at the height of the Modi regime’s crackdown on dissenters to date, Anand Teltumbde was arrested. Only one year previously, he had accused the government of criminalizing dissent, writing, “The message is loud and clear to all others: to not speak against the government.”
Over the years since Modi first took office, countless students, teachers, activists and common people from all walks of life have been arrested—often on sedition charges—for sharing political memes and posting comments on social media variously labeled by the state as defamatory, derogatory or obscene. Some face charges for creating—or simply disseminating—pictures mocking Modi, other officials or even the RSS itself. Others are accused of nothing more than calling Modi names.
A Dictatorship Retaining the Form of Democracy
On May 23, 2019, after a month-long election process, in which the OFBJP again played an instrumental role, the BJP emerged victorious with 38.5% of the total vote.
“It’s not a victory of BJP,” comments Dr. Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University. “It’s a victory of Modi and Modi’s politics … After Modi came to power in the last five years, this has been turned into a personality cult. BJP is now a one-man party.” Swain describes Modi as “near to a god for a large number of his followers.” The pracharak’s divine status, he asserts, was cemented by the Gujarat pogrom. “Modi became Modi because of the 2002 killing of 2,000 Muslims,” he states. “RSS realized Modi’s value to take over the leadership, to be their prime ministerial candidate, after 2002.” Seventeen years after the pogrom, Swain believes this election was about electing a leader “for the majoritarian community to control the minority.”
Modi’s rise from obscurity was no accident. He is the result of a fifty-year project on the part of the RSS, a man who was groomed to be prime minister. He rode to victory on the backs of gangs of apparatchiks who are unmarried and completely dedicated to the party—pracharaks from the RSS, among whose ranks he got his own start in public life.
Modi’s re-election was a referendum on fascism, lynching, and the unrestrained violence against minorities, dissidents and the marginalized which has been repeatedly perpetrated with impunity by the troops of the RSS and BJP.
The 2019 Indian general election demonstrated that democracy is about more than the simple act of voting or the peaceful transfer of power from one regime to another. It illustrated the truth of the words penned by Ambedkar in 1949: “It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact.”
The essence of democracy is a free and open public forum that encourages, cultivates and protects discussion, debate and dissent. The electoral process is the least important part of a democracy. Without social democracy, political democracy is virtually irrelevant—in fact, even dangerous, because it legitimizes tyranny.
Ambedkar defined social democracy as “a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.” He warned, “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.” Quoting John Stuart Mill, he admonished India that maintaining democracy necessitates that the people refuse to “lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man.”
His words, written the year before Modi was born, were perhaps never more prescient than today. “In politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship,” he declared. Modi epitomizes Ambedkar’s prophecy.
27 comments
I request your listening ear I understand these are not easy questions christians in India advocate equality for all religions but then it should be first accounted that the Catholic Church is the largest landowner in India and a conservative estimate of its holdings is Rs 7000 crores plus (as per a media report in 2009). Much of its land and wealth was appropriated from Hindu temples during colonial times by the British and given to the church. Is it justified then for the church to hold on to the land and wealth that was acquired prior independence from the British with its land and wealth was appropriated from Hindu temples during colonial times. Does this represent a secular image when christians claim they are living in a secular country.
With more than 1 billion adherents, the Catholic Church is one of the largest, if not the largest, non governmental landowners in the world. One estimate puts the church’s holdings close to 177 million acres, or 277,000 square miles. as per a press article dated Oct 18, 2017
In India Hindu temples have to give up their wealth to the state when Christian bishops and their vast tax-free properties are not accounted nor taxed by the state. The Catholic Church in India owns the largest chunk of non-agricultural land, and is known as the second largest employer after the Government of India. It’s annual budget equals that of the Indian Navy but the Catholic community has been asking where is the money and so where is the transparency. Why there is no accountability in the spend of the church or christian charities. Until now they showed no books of accounts to the govt of India. Same time since independence the temples are required to comply to control by the govt of India.
So when Modi for the first time since independence asked the church and christian organizations to submit its past 5 years books of accounts for review. That is when the arch bishop of India together with Sonia Gandhi made plans to burn their own churches and blame it on the hindus. Thankfully eye witnesses who saw this given their accounts and testimonies but there is no police case filed against those involved in this fake propaganda against the peace loving hindu community. Thousands of social media handles were used to broadcast this fake news world wide then supported by international counterparts.
The world’s primary feudal landowner is Queen Elizabeth II. She is Queen of 32 countries, head of a Commonwealth of 54 countries in which a quarter of the world’s population lives, and legal owner of about 6.6 billion acres of land, one-sixth of the earth’s land surface.
With her 6.6 billion acres, Elizabeth II is far and away the world’s largest landowner, with the closest runner-up (King Abdullah) holding control over a mere 547 million, or about 12% of the lands owned by Her Majesty, The Queen. Acreage estimates provided by The New Statesman dated Mar 18, 2011
Meanwhile 20-25% of the land in USA is owned by the church. The media mogul controls 809,000 hectares of land across the US as per media article dated Oct 30, 2019
Interestingly while there are so many physical facts about the ramayana including the satellite images that confirm the bridge between Srilanka and India, even the physical existence and archaeological finds of the drowned city of dwarka underwater. Still to the media in India and abroad always refer the Ramayana and Hindu history as mythology but the same is not true for the bible or the quranic tales.
Even when proven that the vedas are far far older then the bible or quran. And it is also found that much of the stories in the quran and the bibles are copied from vedas in some cases the character names only changed. The Noah’s Ark story exists in quran and bible and before that in the vedic religious scriptures. Yet the people with vested interest want to prove that the message of god was different for each religion. This is cause christianity and Islam realised there is money and power and hence the vested interests were natural.
One of the interesting this I happened to find was that the vatican intentionally removed the sections in the bible about his life of Jesus as a child from apx age 3 to 30 years. Another observation is that the 3 wise men that came to visit Jesus during his birth following a star is not a christian practice used in any other christian story, where as this is commonly associated with Buddhist practice where all Lama’s (great souls) are found in exactly the same way at the time of Birth in Buddhism and the wise men follow a star to find the great soul and shower him with gifts. Could it be possible that Jesus was Buddhist or influenced by Hinduism or Buddhism and what if he were a buddhist monk, as this is how buddhists identify a divine soul at the time of birth. This is common practice in Buddhism, have you heard this practice in any other religion. Which would be a big embarrassment for the vatican who has been claiming jesus represents a religion called christianity when he only preached buddhism or hinduism and particularly when as per Bible he never ever said himself anywhere that he was god. This creates a possibility that all religions have the same source until hijacked by humans. As in the case of prophet Mohd too there were riots and power struggle soon after his death and followed by the first caliph abu bakr forced himself as the 1st caliph without prophet Mohd ever pronouncing him successor of muslims which was the reason why the shia and sunnis separated from each other. Which then lead to conflicts with the caliphate due to which the daughter of prophet was murdered and also the kins of the prophet were killed in a brutal way. If we follow the scriptures of quran it also points to the truth but no muslims will accept this cause Saudi wont let them believe what is written in the quran which clearly states god had sent his messengers to all people on earth in their own language. Then begs the question if as per quran god did send messengers to every land on earth in their own language then should the people of India or any other reason for that matter be following the arabic preachings or the preachings of the Indian messengers preachings as the quran does not distinguish between them the muslims force somethings which are not mentioned in the quran. Nowhere in Quran does it say that any of the other messengers were wrong or less important, nowhere in the quran does it say that the world should follow the messenger that came to the arabs. In Fact the quran does not say that prophet mohd was messenger of the arabs, almost 50 times the quran says that prophet muhammad was sent for the children of the Israelites, yet muslims will deny this. Religion is the sole reason why so many people on earth were killed much much more then any disease or natural cause. Several millions killed in Jihad and several millions in Jihad.
So now the christians and muslims of India want to create a propaganda 75 years after independence, after 90% hindus looked after the well being of the minorities. The minorities jointly want to brand the hindus as fascist and terrorists using fake media propaganda cause the christian church and christian ngos have unaccounted wealth in India which they do not wish to disclose to the Prime Minister of India as it does no pay any taxes on this wealth while the majority religions Hinduism does not have the same privileges in India. In a country where the constitution was made in a way that the majority Hindus do not get fair and equal right like the minorities. Now these minorities want to assert their dominance in India by using western media. And when one fellow citizen raises these questions our fellow christians and muslims will call this hate mongering unwilling to discuss these issues, each pretending that minorities in India have been persecuted the hindus when there is no evidence of that occurring in India.
So who is hate mongering then and why it is so difficult answer this in a logical and tolerant way instead of financing riots in India burning delhi and possibly in future the rest of India..
Given that the Christians and the muslims have huge money and wealth backing them along with global media where as the hindus cannot even retain the wealth from its own temples how can the hindus even create an organization without any money to defend itself against the massive wealth and organized machinery of the church and wahabi muslims organization called Wamy that is centralized and has global presence. So is Modi to RSS the fascist organization that media wants you to believe or media is just covering up the tracks of the powerful church by attacking Modi and RSS, the later seems to be th case.
United Nations speaks only when Muslims are killed
UK parliaments speaks only when Muslims are killed
EU parliaments speaks only when Muslims are killed
USA parliaments only creates Trials when Muslims are killed
New York times writes propaganda news only when Muslims are killed
Washington Post writes propaganda news only when Muslims are killed
BBC and CNN writes propaganda news only when Muslims are killed
NDTV India will writes propaganda news only when Muslims are killed
Universities in USA, UK, Canada and EU are paid to attack Hindus, RSS, Modi, BJP they will never write research papers or do research on Muslim killing non-muslims
Hindus and Sikhs cannot pay petrol dollars to the Journalists, Activists and Media nor to Universities, hence NZ Mosque shootout was big news, Rohingya was highly marketed news.
Even Khalsa Aid a volunteering organization will not go to support Hindus and Sikhs.
Money is only in doing Propaganda for Muslims
The Hindus and Sikhs in India also speak about secularism they will not religiously go and vote for BJP, instead they will go for picnic on voting day.
This is my Understanding of the world we live in 5 minutes.
1. The world we live in is like a virtual reality.
2. It would be stupid to think that by killing few kashmiris or Arundhati Roy, Sagarika Ghosh, Barkha dutt the propaganda war will be finished, no it will not new players will come from the public and replace old stooges. It is wrong to think that this propaganda network is limited to India it has global roots.
3. In Order to understand the hindu muslim or India Pakistan issue, we need to diagnose the problem the extent of disease spread and then treat it. So according to me the main issue is Rich vs Poor and Rich Nations vs Poor Nations. Let me explain how.
4. Propaganda war is not new it has been there for centuries. What we need to understand is some people who know the nature of muslims have understood their psyche. They are playing the tune like pied piper and muslims are following them like rats followed pied pied piper. This way they create a hate hysteria in the country, divide the people and create instability in the country.
5. Since time eternity rich people wanted to control the poor people and countries like Britain and America wanted to keep the poor nations poor.
6. The partition of India & India was fake and so was the Independence of India and Pakistan this was also created with this design by the British.
The british created fake partitions, keeping 30% seat reservation for a just 9% muslim population in undivided India, bribed a pork eating, alcohol drinking Jinnah and beef eating Nehru to partition India, using the psyche of muslims when 90% Indian muslims voted for muslim league to create Pakistan.
7. The British had already planned partition of India soon after 1857, created muslim league themselves in 1906, with agenda to be loyal to the British crown. Pakistan was created by the british using fake provisional elections, even the hard core muslim mullahs did not want separate pakistan, it was only the zamindars, but british played a clever card via jinnah to create it into land for islam as until that point there was no country made for a religion only 2 countries israel and pakistan have that distinction.
8. It is the British who created Saudi Arabia and gave the idea to Abdul Wahab to create a cult called Wahhabism. They used wahabi salafi hatred to further exploit the very emotional muslims.
9. Prince Mohammed bin salman of Saudi in 2019 gave an interview where he said Saudi was asked by west to fantasize and brainwash Muslims in south east Asia, he acknowledged that Saudi did do the task as requested by west. Saudi govt distributed toxic material and paid clerics all over south east Asia. The rich politicians of the world harness this hatred to control the world with saudi, turkey as its allies, let me explain how.
10. Now they have gone a step forward they use celebrities in each country to speak in favor of muslims, we seen this in America, we see this in India by bribing them Arundhati, Sagarika Gosh, Barkha dutt etc. They use media channels in each country to create a hysteria of religious and communal hate. I ask you where was this hate before Amir Khan spoke about intolerance in India, why Amir Khan was trying to get signatures of people to ban the democratically elected PM of India from getting visa of USA.
11. These people not only use media, celebrities, they also use student, look in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, syria they used students to change govt leaderships that they did not like. In india they use JNU university students to spread hatred. So they will use anyone with money.
12. They will use Rohingya as a tool of propaganda to send them in India, Thailand to achieve instability and hate war games.
13. They use Facebook, Quora, twitter as tools to support this biased approach. They will use New York times, BBC, CNN, VOX to create fake recorded programs to show one better then the other thus creating a rift or fracture between communities which can be then exploited.
14. This is a propaganda, everything you see is a virtual reality created by media propaganda. You are real but everything around you is not real.
15. In USA, UK, EU there are 10000s of universities, in each university there is a south east aria political and history department. These departments hire Indian, pakistani associate professors to create non-stop Hindu phobia, Modi hatred, BJP hatred, they even create fake Indian history by wrong translations of the vedas. These professors are then publishing countless publications around the world which they get picked up by newspapers, media and social media who then make this viral. This is how the rich control poor and developing nations by controlling their nations using fake propaganda. This is a constant and nonstop war against the nations so they can be weakened by making them fight from Inside and the outside. Thus not letting them become powerful superpowers to compete with the rich nations.
16. Why is it when khalistani terrorists ran from India they found refuge in USA, UK and Canada cause the Khalistan movement was funded by these countries and US CIA.
17. One billion Indians were killed as collateral damage during 1947 to create a rift between hindus and muslims, when The 1947 riots were manufactured by British, one man Ghulam Sarwar who started the riots in Nakholi west bengal by burning alive 5000 hindus in factory, his family migrated to UK and became members of parliament in UK. The riots spread naturally due to fear of each other. It is human behaviour to attack others to protect ones own self, British used our hatred for each other against us. .British used our own corrupt people to divide us, exactly as they did to defeat first indian emperor in battle of plassey, using Mir Jaffer the army commander of the Indian ruler.
18. It is taught in history Jinnah wanted to create islamic state for muslims, but this is not correct , if you listen to his first speech after pakistan was formed , in that speech he said he wanted a pakistan for all minorities and muslims, If he wanted to make secular nation then why he separated from India, this is because he did not have choice the british were making all decisions they were to follow only. Another point Gandhi told jinnah to become PM but Nehru refused, so these two had setting with the british, both jinnah and nehru. churchill was writing private letters to jinnah without any ones knowledge. The muslim league was created by british themselves in 1906 and its charter was loyalty to the british crown.
19. There are 10000s of websites hosted out california to support anti Hindu, anti RSS, anti BJP hatred. I am sure this is the same way they are creating anti muslim, anti dalit propaganda. I am sure this is the same infrastructure they use to attack muslims or any other groups who they wish to attack.
20. All anti BJP, anti RSS, Anti Modi Journalists often get awards in USA and west, but they are never anti Congress which suggests USA Pro Pakistan lobby and Congress are partners. And so these award winning activists and Journalists are their prostitutes selling their skills for money.
21. All attacks in India till date may it be Mumbai attack or Parliament attack all happened in collaboration of Pakistan army, congress party and our media NDTV.
22. Educate Pakistanis and Indians, Hindus and Muslims to stop acting like rats and following the pied piper. Stop voting for congress party, AAP, stop supporting the Pakistan army. Indians and Pakistani are better of trusting each other then our politicians and media.
23. If you understood this then there will be no hatred left, and if you kill hatred then the business of the this powerful global network is finished. They are looting our nation due the hatred within us. Also they have purposely made us corrupt and get use to black money.
24. Congress party of India did not create jobs for 75 years but they created IIT to created brilliant minds cause they wanted to feed the rich nations with brilliant people to develop their countries. Creating jobs in India and not using foreign goods is one way to defeat the evil rich nations who have been feeding hate at our cost. Gandhi was killed by a gun stolen from a congress man.
25. There was bomb blast by Muslim radicals in Afghanistan March 2020 where several Sikhs were killed while doing a prayer ceremony for world peace. The muslim radical shot a little girl in the brain but did you see New York times, Washington post, BBC, CNN do any propaganda news similar to what they done during the New Zealand Mosque attack or during Rohingya exodus. Did you see United Nations created any reports against Muslims. did your see the USA congress create hearing against hearings, did you hear any propaganda in UK and EU parliament over the issue. These organization only create propaganda when Muslims are killed this suggests Journalists, Media, Activists, Politicians are sold out to Petrol dollars. Money can buy Pieter Friedrich, CJ werleman type propaganda. It can buy Facebook, Twitter propaganda. News papers, University professors only when rich oil money can pay for the propaganda to favor muslims. hence Hindu and Sikh die unknown death even Indian news channel NDTV never done any propaganda nor Khalsa Aid went to offer the Sikhs any aid.
People like the author are living in a parallel reality constructed by their political beliefs and confirmation bias applied to the facts they see.
Let them live in their own world where India is a dictatorship because a party and leader they hate has won democratic elections twice in a row. Meanwhile the world’s largest democracy will soldier on.
I don’t trust the opinion of anyone who thinks ‘authoritarian democracy’ (which could describe nations closer to home as well as India) is same as ‘fascism’. Grow up and take politics a bit more seriously is my advice. Plus being young, single and committed to a cause is not, per se, the ominous thing this writer suggests.
For a more nuanced analysis from the ground, rather than from globalised elites, read on: https://www.newsintervention.com/pak-continues-to-breed-terrorists-on-its-soil-modi-is-right-in-refusing-talks-with-imran-khan/
Great article! Should be daily news in the West.
Alarming symptoms are emerging from people who cannot be dismissed as fringe elements. A minister of the Union Govenment told before Pariament elections 2019 in a meeting that they wanted to change the Constitution. An MLA of ruling party from Balia in UP has said by 2024 India will be a Hindu rashtra. Social media has started circulating various actions planned by RSS to implement so that Hindu rashtra can be smoothly ushered.
This is traumatising in effect.
‘A minister of the Union Govenment told before Pariament elections 2019 in a meeting that they wanted to change the Constitution. ‘
So? The Constitution has been changed countless times since it was created. That’s what a Constitutional Amendment is and it’s always been a part of Indian democracy.
This comment is as ignorant as the original article. And these kind of people hold pretentions of being ‘intellectual’?
I am totally unbiased Indian not shill for Godlike Modi and obviously this article is total lies. India is greatest country in whole galaxy with no crime or problems except for Muslims (but I am Muslim so is okay to say) and any slander is just racism from white people who are actually wanting to destroy India which is best it’s ever been under Genius Leader Modi.
It’s not fascism; you’re just losing.
“Nationalism is universally regarded as inherently Fascist, but this is held only to apply to such national movements as the speaker happens to disapprove of. Arab nationalism, Polish nationalism, Finnish nationalism, the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League, Zionism, and the I.R.A. are all described as Fascist but not by the same people.”
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
The deranged article you’re citing destroys this one’s claim that India is becoming fascist now under Modi. Because before Modi it was the Indian National Congress(which your article claims is fascist) that was in power.
Dear author, Joseph Goebbels would definitely like your article.
Pieter Friedrich: Please do not waste your precious time and career in going in this direction. Do not write articles just for the sake of money as everyone knows you are not really concerned about India, poor people and democracy and institutions there. It is just a money making exercise for you.
Even an academic cannot cite such articles as it has very little empirical evidence.
Now you can write 100 articles on Modi and BJP in the next 5 years but eventually Modi will retire. What are you going to do after that ?
Why are you and Ashok Swain obsessed about the democracy and institutions, development of India when you have got nothing to do with India ? (No citizenship, No passport, both of you never wish to live there, No one in the government will read your articles and tweets or even listen to your podcasts and interviews, an average Indian cannot even understand such articles
If Ashok Swain was so much concerned about India as he is on Twitter, he would be living in Orissa or any other part of India and working to help the people. He would not be sitting in Uppsala.
People like him and you talk as if the moment a person lands in New Delhi airport, Hindus will come and murder you near the taxi stand. There are billions of people in India and they are happy there with different governments. We have had so many governments in the past and BJP is just one of them. No one gets obsessed with political parties and governments like you do here.
Why are you obsessed with just one political party and government when no one cares so much about it ? Please relax.
Why are you taking a salary and writing stuff in magazines which your own conscience may not allow you to do ? Is Modi going to read your article ? No. Are average Indians going to read your article ? No. Who are you writing these articles for ? Probably 10 to 50 people
Please do not waste your precious talent in this way. You have much better skills to utilize elsewhere than just another article on Modi which is not going to read by anyone except 10 to 50 people and thrown in the trash.
“If Ashok Swain was so much concerned about India as he is on Twitter, he would be living in Orissa or any other part of India and working to help the people. He would not be sitting in Uppsala.”
If that line of reasoning had any validity, then you should also apply it to the thousands of OFBJP operatives who emigrate, renounce Indian citizenship, live in America, but return to India every five years for no other reason than to campaign for the BJP and instruct Indians who to vote for. You can read my article about OFBJP here: https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/6/16660/How-Indias-Ruling-Party-Mobilizes-Indian-Americans-to-Win-Elections
Suyash Jolly looks like another shivling worshipping clown. 1200 years a Slave.
Says the slave of an opposing idealogy.
What a load of crap. 5 years ago when modi was elected people like you wrote that muslims will be executed n minorities will be wiped out. 5 years later now u are talking as if he’s Hitler. Utter rubbish article. I m minority myself n have felt freedom of speech to have been better not worse. Fact is that he’s building a nation n aligning india with rest of the world. People are no fools to vote for him. They can see things happening on the ground. He’s raising the bar for politicians n bureaucrats too. Opposition parties are still in old india thinking while new india does not want it. Hence they lose. He will win the next election to if he’s alive.
You should’ve posted this comment under their FB post too, mate.
Hitler fight back against degeneracy of Weimar Republic.