Aravindan Neelakandan clarifies his positive relationship with Rajiv Malhotra

Posted here is the exchange between Aravindan Neelakandan and Rajiv Malhotra which took place so that the air could be cleared on what Maria Wirth on twitter insinuated with the following tweet.

Maria Wirth: just wondering @RajivMessage,u say "My book Breaking India.." Wud it not be fair 2 say "Our book"with Neelakandan as Co-author? @arvindneela

Well, the background to the above tweet was this tweet from Rajiv Malhotra

My book 'Breaking India' now ranks No. 1 on Amazon under International Relations: http://www.amazon.in/gp/bestsellers/books/1318179031/ref=zg_bs_nav_b_2_1318176031 …

That led Aravindan Neelakandan to issue these two tweets earlier today to clarify

@Sshankara @RajivMessage "does not want to work with u anymore" is WRONG. Working on BI has been a good learning experience.

@Sshankara @RajivMessage @mariawirth1 'doesn't want to work' is WRONG. Coauthoring BI has been a good learning experience.

Here is Aravindan Neelakandan's complete response to the above tweets along with Rajiv Malhotra's comments.

[Rajiv: Maria Wirth (angry because of some unrelated issue I had with her work some time back) has tried to create tension between me and Aravindan Neelakandan on twitter. Aravindan not only rejected her presumption on twitter, but also sent this post as a clarification of his position. He re-joined this egroup after a gap, in order to post this. I encouraged him to do so. Though the main purpose is to clarify the issue of our mutual relationship, Aravindan also takes this opportunity to disagree with my positions of certain unrelated topics - theism/atheism, Subramanian Swamy, and plagiarism by Sanyal. I give my responses below in highlight. Welcome back Aravindan.]

Let me state categorically that when we started the BI project I was not intended to be coauthor and was a research assistant with Infinity. It was Sri. Rajiv Malhotra who voluntarily offered me to be the co-author. [Rajiv: I did this towards the very end when the book was nearing completion; Aravindan at first said he did not deserve it, but later accepted.] It was a graceful gesture and am thankful for that.

I value his original scholarship, its depth and new insight. I do have my differences of opinion with him. But that does not in anyway diminish my respect and administration for him.  

Being an atheist myself I find his criticism of Darwinism ill-founded and have openly expressed my criticism of his saying 'intelligent design' being influenced by Hinduism. As a person who has been working in the field of environment and organic agriculture for more than a decade, I can say that Darwin is profoundly right and only Dharmic religions have the capacity to integrate Darwin in their worldview. Intelligent Design is a camouflage for creationism and the involution Swami Vivekananda talks about including the intelligence being involuted to expand as existence has more in sync with David Bohm's implicate order than the 'intelligent design'.
[Rajiv: 

• Aravindan is certainly entitled to his position as an atheist. 
• My views on Darwin mirror what Sri Aurobindo wrote, which is a much more detailed position than Vivekananda. This is explained in some of my writings - the importance of involution-evolution process, and not the one-way evolution by Darwin. So Darwin is incomplete, as there is no upward feedback loop, which is also important in systems theory. 
• Many Judeo-Christian digesters are now borrowing this Hindu tenet to bridge the gap between "science and religion", a gap that never existed between dharma and science. Bohm himself was learning these ideas from his extensive dialogs with J. Krishnamurti and others from the dharma traditions. 
• I feel Aravindan has seen both sides of the debate mainly through Western proxies (like Darwin, Bohm Intelligent Design), none of which properly capture the dharma position on the matter. This is a separate issue I am happy to debate in a suitable forum.]

In my personal opinion he is a bit over anxious about people plagiarizing his works. I also feel he sometimes goes overboard on this account as in the case of Sanjeev Sanyal. Perhaps because he has had a few bad experiences in the past, and hence this anxiety over his works being plagiarized. I am afraid this attitude may actually be an impediment in his vision of building an institution and intellectual movement that will live for generations to come.
[Rajiv: Since Aravindan was not a member of this egroup, he is probably unfamiliar with the details written in: message 8655 (thread), message 8679 (Chronology of my interactions with SS since 2013 over my work), message 8700 and message 8761. As a good scholar, Aravindan knows the importance of studying the background evidence before passing judgment. SS has since then accepted this account and issued an acknowledgment. Plagiarism is a problem of dharmic ethics; of nurturing team work to create robust schools of thought and not random sporadic one-off blogs here and there; of encouraging hard work and discouraging the fast-food mentality of quickly jumping ahead present in many of our fellow Indians.]

I also find his endorsement of/association with Subramanian Swamy problematic, as in my personal opinion SS is also engaged in playing up the Brahmin vs Non-Brahmin binary in Tamil Nadu, apart from being pro-Chinese and pro-Sri Lankan against the Tamil-Hindu interest. Subramanian Swami's accusation of RSS in Coimbatore bomb blast in 1998 is something that has hurt me deeply as a Swayamsevak. [Rajiv: We agree to disagree on Dr. Swamy. I may not agree with 100% of issues with him. or anyone else for that matter. But I base my overall support seeing the big picture dynamics of the kurukshetra, and not get distracted by every instance and every stand of someone. I respect his tapas, long term persistence, ability to stick neck out and take risks, continue even when not rewarded formally...]    

But these are issues that do not affect my respect for his ingenious presentation of Indic Dharma, his hard work and intellectual integrity in fighting for the Dharmic-Indic civilization. He could well have chosen a happy retirement with occasional sideline charity towards Dharma. But that he plunged right into the center of the fire is something for which we as Hindus are indebted to him whether one agrees with him or not in all his stands. I will always feel it a honor to be invited to coauthor the sequel of 'Breaking India'. As a Tamil Hindu I specially feel indebted to him because 'Breaking India' had really stopped a grand plan of Christian appropriation in Tamil Nadu. Had he not come into the picture at best a few articles would have been written on the net and would have been used merely to gain some brownie points in the internet debates but only a field-worker knows what kind of effect 'Breaking India' had achieved in Tamil Nadu and the kind of awareness it had created. For this too we need to be thankful to him.

[Rajiv: I want to thank Aravindan for being more than a scholar, but also a true friend. We developed mutual interest in each other's personal well-being. That is important to bear in mind. Disagreeing on scholarly matters is not the end of a relationship.]

Avoiding 5 common mistakes when defending Hinduism

The primary background to this thread can be found in this storify exchange between Rajiv Malhotra and Tavleen Singh and in this thread which captures the whole plagiarism issue which was raised with Sanjeev Sanyal and which has since been resolved amicably..

Rajiv summarizes five mistakes that need to be avoided when defending Hinduism. He says:

Mistake 1: Dont criticize someone who is a "fellow Indian". 

This was cited by a supporter of Sanjeev Sanyal recently. However, Maoists are also fellow Indians, are they not? The kauravs/pandavs were fellow brothers, right? So how does defending dharma have anything to do with giving a free pass just because someone is a fellow Indian. Conversely, being a non-Indian does not make a person our enemy or a problem. Defending Hinduism is not about race. Hinduism is not racism.

Mistake 2: As long as the person is anti-evangelists and pro-Hinduism we must accept whatever he says..

According to this logic, Moron Smriti and other leadership issues facing Hindus should not be discussed. After all, all morons and incompetent leaders do lash out against evangelists, and they do take pro-Hindu stands. I find many Hindu  forums only capable of discussing "positive" topics and want to stay away from genuine problem-solving.

Such a policy tolerates incompetence. It is precisely why we face such a leadership crisis - lack of quality controls on leadership. By far the largest part of my Kshatriyata workshops is on the epidemic of internal leadership rot, and not on external problems caused by others. Hindus have stopped challenging the incompetence of other Hindus, and tend to go long with whosoever leads them, as long as the person says a few standard "positive" things that make us "feel good". We run the risk of becoming a tradition of the morons, by the morons, for the morons.

Mistake 3: Better to be ignorable, dont rock the boat; dont confront problems.

My entire writing career has focused precisely on issues where our own leaders are misinformed, or not informed at all. But there is resistance when one tries to educate Hindus about a serious problem they did not know. 

Example: Wendy Doniger was completely unknown to Hindu leaders when I started my criticisms of her cabal in the late 1990s. I heard all sorts of nonsense from Hindus who were disinterested in my work, or even asking me to stop it, like:

• They are unimportant, so lets not waste time; truth will triumph anyway; we know the truth in our hearts; all path will ultimately lead the person to the same final goal;
• Let us not stir things up, since we are doing so well in our personal careers; if we highlight such problems we will attract attention and spoil our image, maybe even get in trouble. (i.e. policy to remain ignorable.)

Same thing happened when I raised the Breaking India issues. In fact, the late B. Raman, who used to be head of counter-terrorism at RAW, had initially agreed to write the foreword to Breaking India. We knew each other and exchanged emails. He asked me to send him the draft when ready. But when he saw the draft he changed his mind. He also refused to attend the book launch. In fact, the publisher was informed at the last minute to remove his name from the program. Why? because BI was considered too sensational by him. Imagine such a top intelligence official being afraid to face the problems. I tried to convince him that he was free to be on the panel and disagree with my book. But he did not want to be linked to it at all. Almost as if Big Brother is watching us.

The slave APP downloaded in many Indians, triggers the desire to be non-confrontational, seeking the path of least resistance to deal with situations.

Mistake 4: Distributing whatever limited knowledge we have is all important; serious R&D to discover and develop newknowledge is unimportant.

This means my type of work can suffer, but let the plagiarists not be discouraged because they are "spreading positive ideas". We need them no matter what. Such a posture shows lack of appreciation for the critical need to encourage fresh thinking. 

This mentality encourages leaders to be rewarded based on "hustling" and "networking" and "showing off". In my workshops, I give numerous examples of this syndrome. Most such leaders are ill informed of the major issues we face. Their subject matter expertise is abysmal, often to the point of causing us harm when they speak. They can at best copy-paste the latest statements that some serious thinker has made, and use it in their next speech or blog as their own idea. Fools leading bigger fools does not comprise a kshatriya army.

Mistake 5: Support even those who might deeply undermine Hinduism by their intellectual positions, as long as on the surface they "say positive things about us", and make us "feel good".

People who facilitate digestion tend to say good things about what they are digesting. (You dont hate the food you want to eat.) Many of our leaders cannot recognize digestion and see it as a form of praise/support. The digesters have studied us well and learned to exploit these vulnerabilities.

Pollock represents a different sub-category. He is NOT wanting to digest. He is undermining Sanskrit in the deepest way that I have seen anyone do. Yet on the surface he is championing the revival of sanskrit studies, etc. My job is to first thoroughly understand his works, and then to simplify for my readers the arguments he makes, and my response to it. 

My biggest challenge here is to get people's attention span. All they care about is that he wears a dhoti with tilak on his forehead, quotes some sanskrit verses, says what a great language it is, and so forth. Applause! Awards! Funding!

Indians being starved for self respect, cannot hold back their love and enthusiasm when they hear this. Notice the huge success he has had in winning the hearts and pocketbooks of top tier Indian elites. Its their way to "feel proud" and remove the guilt they carry for betraying their dharma. He fills a unique void in their psychology.

Such Indians/Hindus see me as someone on the wrong side. They see me creating an embarrassment by criticizing their hero. Notice the reaction from Tavleen Singh, despite the fact that she and Ajit Gulabchand were extremely appreciative of Invading the Sacred. She wrote a great editorial on it after interviewing me. He was on stage when it was launched and gave a major speech.

My own policies:

• Stick to the issues and ignore the personalities involved. If the substance of someone's work is wrong, it must be criticized regardless of what kind of person they are.
• Look at the deeper layers and not the surface of a situation.
• Do serious problem-solving, and do not see the work as a "feel good" psychotropic drug.
• Be non-ignorable, audacious, willing to take the heat. (But only after doing a lot of homework to make sure I am on a solid foundation which I can defend.)
• Reject offers of help that are likely to let me down somewhere along the way.
• Most important, be rooted in sadhana, and let the prerna flow and be the driving force.

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