The rape debate: How Western Universalism influences India's intellectual elite

This update is a summary of a thread on the forum which started with a storify posted by Shalini of a debate on rape that happened on twitter between a few prominent intellectuals in India. Here is the original storify which set the tone for this thread.

Sankrant Sanu and S. Gurumurthy were debating the delicate subject of rape based on their Dharmic worldview which is the one espoused by Rajiv Malhotra's Being Different.

The overwhelming consensus of the thread seemed to be that so called "Right Wing" sympathizers in English media in India today were "educated" anglicized Indians (as one commenter put it) whose worldview was shaped by ideas permeating Western Universalism.

Ravi responds:

[Kanchan Gupta's] positions are indistinguishable from typical 'educated' anglicized Indians...  Sankrant's rebuttals are to the point, but yes, twitter is not really the medium to go into depth. But he did refer to his deeper articles, so the viewer can go read.

Kanchan's only plus point is that he is a 'brand name', hence has more recognition... But the youth will be looking for more than repetitions of old worn shibboleths of his, will turn to deeper analyses. Rajiv's work is getting deeper penetration precisely for this reason.

Manish wrote in with this:

// Accoriding to Wikipedia, Kanchan Gupta is guided by the Brahmo Samaj.  The Brahmo Samaj has been criticized for reforming Hinduism in such a way that Hinduism began to look like a Protestant denomination! //

--- To think that Brahmo-Samaji Kanchan Gupta is seen as a staunchly Nationalist Hindu writer by many in the socal media space!! This exhibits the depth to which confusion has sunk inside Hindu society. A Grand Narrative based on Dharmic ''Religions'' is direly needed, if we are to ever remove that confusion. 

Rajiv's response to this was that his forthcoming book would be about the narrative that Manish was referring to. Rajiv adds that his two trips to India in 2014 made him keenly aware of the urgency for this narrative and he assured that his next book which would be full of new ideas and approaches would trigger huge debates.

The following observation from Kush was forwarded to Kanchan Gupta by another forum member and his reply to the forward was posted to the forum.

Kush's observation:

Kanchan's ideas are not beneficial to us as I have noted following him on Twitter. Vis-a-vis Dina Nath Batra issue one can have objections to banning of views but he seemed totally oblivious to the Rajiv Malhotra debate on Wendy, which frankly is a litmus test for "secular" Hindus' attitudes.

Quite frankly Kanchan appears totally absorbed in a Eurocentric worldview. This is down only to lack of reading and inquiry.

Kush's further went on to discuss the merits and demerits of Sankrant's engagement with Kanchan Gupta, on the subject but they do not have a direct bearing on this conversation.

Kanchan Gupta's response to Kush's forwarded mail [posted here as is]:

On the debate you refer to, I think I am a lot deal, and more, younger than Rajiv Malhotra (for whom I have the highest regard but would not accept as the final word as that would mean closing my mind which I am loath to do and I am sure he would not want me to do) and I definitely do not believe that I know everything or all that I know is correct. For me every day is a learning experience. I closely followed Rajiv Malhotra's online debate with his critics on the Wendy Doniger book and subsequently wrote about the issue. My views are reflected there if anybody cares to read.

At a personal and professional level, only the social and political aspects of religion interest me. I am not particularly keen on theology. Nor do I correlate theology with reality. The lower traditions of faith is what we get to see and live, not the higher traditions. As a writer who makes his living from his writing, I cannot afford to disengage from the lower traditions. Most if not all who debate religion and take theological positions have their livelihood elsewhere and hence can afford to indulge in idle debate. Unfortunately I do not have that pleasure or, if you wish, leisure. I have bills to pay at the end of the month. I would think I have not compromised on ethics as a writer; that by itself is satisfaction enough.

A last word. Kush is right, as a Brahmo Samaji (of whom only a handful remain), I am Eurocentric in my worldview. But for 1757 (for Bengalis) and later 1857 (for all of us), we would not be writing left to right but right to left. I wish the Rajiv Malhotra Group would revisit the Bengal Renaissance. Perhaps that would explain to them why some of  us are 'different'.

I am neither hurt nor flattered by misplaced criticism or praise. What I have done for Hindus and Hinduism over the past three decades as a journalist, writer, speaker and activist, my critics won't be able to match in a lifetime and more.

You are free to post this mail (without changes) on Rajiv Malhotra's Group (to which the unwashed have no access).

Rajiv's rejoinder to Kanchan Gupta's mail [posted on the forum]:

Kanchan cannot truthfully say the "unwashed have no access" to this egroup. Admitting that he is unwashed is of course his own self-assessment and prerogative. But he must know that membership of this egroup has been open and he never subscribed. Thats up to him to do. On his more substantial issues, i dont have time for response as I have responded to the same issues many times before - he should read up past writings and responses. My priority is on my new original research and not on regurgitating the same old arguments for every new person who comes along.

Rajiv went on to further clarify on the way he approaches debaters:

Lets not give too much importance to this one man. In my prioritization, I ask the following questions on a person before deciding to take them on:

• Is s/he an ideological/scholarly pioneer - i.e. has his/her own school of thought with a sort of parampara? These are my prime targets. Hence you will find my books naming such persons only and not minor ones. Their influence comes from their leverage as original thinkers with followers/students in serious numbers. ITS, BI and IN each have such targets. They are not small fry.
• Even if s/he is not originating new ideas that get market share, s/he could be a distributor of others' ideas through mainstream media - such persons are often intellectually shallow, as in the case of most Indian TV hosts, and their importance is due to their official position, not because they have knowledge of their own. Hence taking them on would be a way to influence the public. I have been less successful in getting them to discuss with me (except Mark Tully and a few others), but would like to do so. They avoid me as if I dont exist and cite excuses not to include me in their discussions. Also, their formats lack in depth discussions and tend to be short sound bites, with many voices shouting over each other simultaneously - not good for serious debates.
• Is this person with knowledge that can significantly benefit my work in tangible ways? I want to always learn to improve my game from every source.
• Am I under attack by him - in which case I might want to respond if he is causing harm by spreading misinformation. For that he has to be important enough.

At this point the reader may also read the engagement that Rajiv has had with another apparent 'right wing' luminary Swapan Dasgupta and others like him viz Sadanand Dhume and Rupa Subrahmanya. You can read it here and here.

Propounders of the eurocentric worldview and their adverse impact on the fortunes of the BJP, India's Dharmic nationalist party have also attracted attention from Arun Shourie, part of BJP's think tank and a Dharmic himself who referred to a group of six journalists who according to him run the BJP show. This was at the chintan baithak of the BJP after their electoral defeat in 2009. A DNA report alludes to this. Another report in The Tribune which has since been taken off but of which there is a screenshot also has a discussion. 

Rajiv Malhotra's path-breaking book 'Being Different' offers a fascinating and important contrast between the eurocentric/western universalist view versus the dharmic thought system. Many of India's anglicized elite, whether they are on the right or left of the aisle, appear to have failed in studying these differences rigorously. Consequently, it has resulted in erroneous assumptions that produce faulty, unsustainable solutions to India's problems.

Full Text of Rajiv Malhotra's Response to Swapan Dasgupta on a recent 'Twitter Debate'

[BLOG UPDATED ON MARCH 8, 2014 WITH RAJIV MALHOTRA'S COMPLETE STATEMENT]

HHG has fully documented Rajiv Malhotra's twitter debates a few days ago, along with a full introduction to the objectives for having such debates, as well as conclusions drawn, takeaways, and lessons learned. This particular debate on twitter had an early entry by journalist Swapan Dasgupta (@swapan55), who later blogged about this. Rajiv Malhotra has posted his full response in the forum  (March 8. 2014), which is presented below. The debate summary above, as well as the original Twitter TLs of the participants are all in the public domain.

[begin]

Since Swapan insists on continuing his twitter debate with me, I shall set the record straight going back to my first dealings with him.

1) Until the book "Invading the Sacred" came out I did not know much of him except tangentially. When ITS was about to get released, I wanted endorsements, reviews, articles, etc. So I asked Swami Dayananda Saraswati for advice, because he had been very supportive of my decade long debate with Wendy's Children and the book ITS that resulted from it. At a meeting in Delhi where a few of his followers were present, I asked for his guidance: I wanted to prevent the book being either slammed in a one-sided dismissal or simply ignored.
Swamiji named Swapan Dasgupta as the right man to do a detailed review. In front of me he called Swapan on a mobile phone and introduced me to him and asked that he help us. I held the mobile and set up a meeting with Swapan. He did not sound very enthusiastic, but complied with Swamiji's request to meet me to learn about the book.
I met Swapan and went through the history of what ITS dealt with. Swapan was non committal. He said generic nice things about wanting to help, but nothing concrete.
I then went back to Swamiji and mentioned Swapan's lukewarm response, which surprised swamiji who saw him at that time as a solid Hindu voice. But some individuals close to Swamiji felt that Swapan was in the midst of career upheaval as he had left one top media slot but not yet landed another. So he was being cautious about avoiding controversy. The bottom line is: there was zero coverage of ITS by Swapan.
But he cannot pretend that he never heard of the book, as he was among the first to receive a copy of it when it came out. (Just for the record, it was Tavleen Singh who first wrote a detailed article on ITS and her meeting with me -- it came in India Today. She was very courageous and clear.)
Sometime later, Swapan became a TOI op-ed contributor. My hypothesis is that he was negotiating something with various media houses and did not want to rock the boat by writing on ITS.

2) All these 7 years since ITS there has not been any direct interaction between Swapan and myself. But we follow each other's work. I do not have any gripes against him whatsoever. Indian journalists tend to be superficially educated and busy recycling hearsay especially when it emanates from Westerners. They thrived on one-liner wisdom long before there was twitter. (Colonial rulers destroy the leadership competence of people they subjugate and this means breaking up the mental capacity to think strategically on large complex matters that are multi-layered. Such people depend upon brand value,slogans, consensus among opinion leaders, opinions without facts...)

3) In my recent twitter debate with Darlymple (on my assertion that intellectual discourse forums were biased against Hinduism; the context being his support for Wendy Doniger), Swapan suddenly sends a tweet basically supporting my side. He said that Jaipur Lit Fest is biased. Then Swapan stopped tweeting and some others continued the debate. (My conjecture is that someone approached Swapan privately to discourage him -- see below.)

4) Suddenly, several days later the following exchange took place which I will copy below just to make this account complete.Swapan dasgupta wrote (http://www.swapan55.com/2014/03/take-offence.html):"I was slightly taken aback at the venom that was recently poured on the writer William Dalrymple, who I like to describe as Delhi’s ‘White Moghul’. Apart from the familiar charges of racism—an occupational hazard for anyone who is a co-organiser of the Jaipur literary jamborree—and being anti-Hindu, which too is becoming distressingly routine, Dalrymple’s histories have been debunked by those Arun Shourie taunted as the “eminent historians.” The reasons for their hatred of this genial Scot are three-fold: Dalrymple writes readable narrative history; his books sell and has made him a celebrity; and in burrowing through dusty archives for untapped sources, he has exposed the inadequacies of the tenured cretins."

Rajiv response: Lets get some facts straight - which Dasgupta being a participant in the Twitter debate cannot pretend not to know:

1. In this twitter debate it was Darlymple who first introduced the terms "firangi" referring to himself and "desi" referring to his co-founder Namita.  But Dasgupta faults us for "charges of racism".
2. The issue that was at stake in that twitter debate has been totally sidelined by Dasgupta. The issue was in the context of the Doniger saga wherein Darlymple has been an ardent supporter of her side of the story while trivializing ours as "throwing eggs" and being "Hindu nationalists" who want to censor free speech. In fact, Dasgupta uses the same style of journalism as Doniger supporters: in which party Y is blamed for responding to X, but the journalist is silent on the instigation by X that started the whole affair.
3. Dasgupta's list of 3 reasons many people have so-called "hatred" for Darlymple (who Dasgupta calls "genial") ignore the reasons that started this twitter debate. My reasons had to do with -- please get this Swapan -- asymmetry of discourse in forums controlled by Darlymple. I repeated this phrase many times in the course of my tweets. But Dasgupta is catering to a different audience than we...

It is clear that someone tapped his shoulder to remind him where his limits are in criticizing a westerner who controls prestigious Indian forums.

5) Since he persisted tweeting in inconsistent and random ways, I sent the following: @swapan55 love for "genial Scot" ignores that @DalrympleWill is big fan of Aurungzeb. http://dharmanext.blogspot.in/2011/05/aurangzeb-was-like-shakespeare-william.html …

I posted the link to Francoise gautier's article exposing this side of Darlymple. Many twitteraties like ZhoomIndiaMedia & JalanSahib jumped in and Swapan found himself having to defend Aurungzeb's fan.

This is when Swapan showed his predicament and tweeted that he is stuck between two sides (Leftists and Hindus). I truly sympathize with him. It happens when someone is opportunistically oscillating between two sides and not genuinely grounded in either.  So I tweeted: I sympathize plight of @swapan55 for oscillating to prove neutrality. Solution: 1) Find your true ground. 2) Project outside fearlessly.
In other words, he needs to be first internally rooted and grounded securely and only then should he articulate any positions publicly, or else he will blow randomly with the latest direction of the wind. This requires sadhana for years and no amount of hobnobbing in public can suffice.
6) Swapan once again changed the subject. He tweeted that I was "reducing a larger discussion on Indian sensitivity to foreign criticism" by discussing the JLF (i.e. Darlymple). Another attempt to deflect attention away from Uncle William! So I responded that each of my 4 large books deals with this issue of the West and hence he cannot say that I have been reducing it to JLF only. (The fact that Swapan was party to my involvement in ITS many years ago, as explained in point (1) above, means that he cannot pretend that I have reduced all these problems merely to JLF.)

7) Swapan's tweets today show desperation once again. He tweets that Rajiv "deals with the issue in US academia. Seen from India, many different perspectives are in order." This is yet another over-simplication by him and use of "selective" facts. My book "Breaking India" is not about US academics and it shows the sepoys at work in India under the supervision, funding, training and protection of Western nexuses. I deliberately avoided mentioning old issues already covered in prior books to force my readers to understand this problem INSIDE India.
Clearly, Swapan wants to slide the troubling things about sepoys under the rug -- by deflecting attention towards US academics.
The whole point of Breaking India and now Indra's Net is to show how all this is global discourse and what starts in one place impacts everywhere else. Swapan cannot isolate "US academics" from their direct impact in India. Few Indian public intellectuals like him today are sufficiently educated on Indian civilization to be able to assert positions without the backup of what Western scholars feed them like pets being hand fed.
He must appreciate that I am one of the foremost persons at this time going to the ROOTS of certain biased discourses (wherever in the world these roots might lie) and then tracking from there all the way to the public square in India where the impact is real, serious, and largely unchallenged. All attempts to deal with symptoms of the disease or isolated instances of it will contnue to fail until first there is clarity on the pathology and physiology of the disease and its end-to-end systems functioning. My goal is to research, articulate, debate and train supporters on this very deep situation. This is personally taxing on me, risky, and consumes my entire life ...
CONCLUSION: A) I want to hold Swapan in high regard and give him the benefit of doubt regarding good intentions. I also sympathize his plight having to oscillate just to prove he is not a "Hindu radical". Such are the times.
B) My real targets are twofold:

(1) the Western nexuses of various kinds of specialties - several of which I have targeted in my separate books and more of them will be targeted in forthcoming books.
(2) the Indian sepoys (of various sorts, various levels, in various capacities) who serve as the ones carrying out the same kind of work as the sepoys who fired in Jallianwallah Bagh under General Dyer's command.

C) Therefore my criticism of sepoys, potential sepoys, and fence-sitters is for the following objective:

(1) Expose those who are solidly entrenched in the Sepoy Army, especially in influential positions. Let Indians beware and not get duped.
(2) Warn those who are fence-sitters that social media is disrupting the cushy & unchallenged positioning enjoyed by such forces, and there is a price to pay if they sell out.
(3) Pressure those who are duplicitous and who pretend to be on the side of Dharma Civilization while enjoying the patronage-funding-protection-direction of the foreign nexuses. I want such persons to make a clear choice and not thrive on mumbojumbo, hocuspochus doubletalk.

D) I wish Swapan the very best and hope he will make choices based on loyalty to his dharma more than to his short-term career opportunism.

Rajiv

[end]