Debunking the false narrative of Dhruv Rathee on “dictatorship” in India

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on News18 here.

Dhruv Rathee’s two recent videos on supposed “dictatorship” in India have gone viral on Youtube. Together, they have gathered over 40 million views. Most of those people will never be able to take him on with the right questions. How can you say that India is a dictatorship? To be fair, Dhruv Rathee never said that either. He only said that India is on the way to becoming one.

But what does that even mean? If you leave Delhi and drive one mile out west, you are technically somewhere on the way to London. So unless you let us compare India’s democracy to other countries, you have told us nothing on whether India is becoming a dictatorship. So let us do just that. Let us compare our democracy to Germany. Why Germany? For one, Dhruv Rathee is based there and must know something about them. His 17 million strong base of Youtube subscribers, mostly Indians, deserve to know as well. In any case, Germany gets excellent ratings from the supposed international experts on press freedom and democracy. Also the other day, the German government began commenting on our internal affairs, totally uninvited. So let us turn it around. Let us take a look at Germany.

On social media in India, an argument between two sides might go something like this. Farmers in Germany are protesting too. They have come out on the streets with tractors. Why is there no outpouring of support from international publications such as the New York Times or the Washington Post? Do they report only on protests in India? In Western countries, do they not have folks like say Dhruv Rathee who will speak truth to power? 

Maybe not, a thoughtful Indian liberal would reply. But those countries also do not have “godi media.” And nobody in Germany called the protesting farmers “anti-national.” So, checkmate!

Except that is exactly what the German establishment, the media and the political class did. In fact, they did much worse. They accused the farmer protesters of being Nazis. In Germany, the ruling government even spies legally on the phones of the opposition. The head of the German spy agency even issued an official statement telling Germans how to vote. Imagine the outcry if the Intelligence Bureau here in India did something even close to that. But in Germany, it happens all the time. Germany is also a country where the police pulled out a 16 year old girl from school to question her over a post on TikTok that appeared to support an opposition party. 

But we Indians were not supposed to know all this. We were just supposed to assume that Western countries are better in every way. Their newspapers pass judgment on us. They push narratives. We know nothing about their domestic politics. 

German government and media demonized farmer protesters

Earlier this year, farmers in Germany feared that their subsidies would be taken away. So they decided to protest. They brought their tractors out on the street and blocked traffic. Sounds familiar?

So how did the German government deal with the protest? The Vice Chancellor was the first to go on the attack. He had been on an island holiday when he was confronted by protesters. He lost his temper and accused the protesters of being extremists who were out to uproot democracy. A week later, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the same thing. The obedient German media took it from there. The leading Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper published a headline that translates to “pampered farmers,” bashing their subsidies and sense of entitlement. The BBC went a step further and published a long article claiming that the protests had been infiltrated by neo-Nazi groups. Incidentally, John Reith, the founder of the BBC, was himself a Nazi sympathizer. But that is a story for another day.

These were not just empty words from the government and media establishment. A month later, the government announced a 13 point plan to fight the protesters. Their bank accounts would be seized. Anyone who donated to them would be identified and investigated. “Those who mock the state must be ready to face a strong state,” the Interior Minister announced. 

This demonization of working class protesters is not limited to Germany. The same happened to protesting truckers in Canada in 2022. What kind of threat did the Canadian government identify then? As a ruling Liberal Party MP explained in Parliament, the truckers had been sounding their horns. Or in other words, honking. Say that word twice, and you have “Honk Honk.” Take the first letter of each word, and you have “HH.” That could stand for “Heil Hitler.” This is the quality of evidence on the basis of which Canada concluded that the protesters were all Nazis, and imposed national emergency. The global media played along, of course.

You must be wondering. But what about elections? Are politicians in Germany not worried about angry voters in the streets? As we shall see later, they do not need to. Because of a very special provision in German law that stops new parties from winning seats.

The German state imposes Christianity in public life

Is Germany officially secular? Of course it is. But there is an easy way around it. Germany imposes Christianity simply by calling it “culture” in place of “religion.” For instance, the German state of Bavaria requires that the Christian cross be displayed prominently in every government building. The trick has been tested repeatedly in court and it works just fine. In fact, the courts themselves have to display the Christian cross. And public schools as well. Incidentally, the same legal trick is also used in Italy to display the cross in public schools. As a symbol of “culture,” not “religion.” By the way, whose idea was it originally to put the cross in Italian public schools? That would be Benito Mussolini. But that is apparently not a red flag for experts who look out for signs of dictatorship.

Believe it or not, the Church is the second largest employer in Germany, after the government itself. The Church employs over a million people directly. And millions more look up to the Church for moral guidance. This gives the Church immense lobbying power with politicians. This shows even in the names of the political parties. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been the most dominant party in Germany since the Second World War, along with its ally the Christian Social Union (CSU). The Church even collects its own taxes. Again, this power comes directly from a 1933 agreement between the Vatican and Adolf Hitler, which is still in force. Another name that is not a concern for experts who make the democracy rankings.

Germany openly embraces powerful politicians from its Nazi past

Perhaps no discussion on Germany and dictatorship can be complete without looking into the country’s Nazi past. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is descended directly from the Catholic Center Party of Konrad Adenauer, which existed before the war. It is this Catholic Party whose votes gave the Nazis the 2/3rd majority needed to pass the 1933 constitutional amendment that made Hitler dictator. In fact, Adenauer himself had been briefly arrested by the Nazis in 1934. But then he wrote a letter to the government detailing all the favors he had done for the Nazi Party as a public official in the city of Cologne. Should we call that a “mercy petition?” In any case, the Nazis released him, and granted him a pension, with which Adenauer built himself a nice home in the south of the country.

But that never hurt Adenauer’s political career. After the war, Adenauer was elected Chancellor of Germany, and he led the country from 1949 to 1963. As Chancellor, he ended the denazification process and released from jail thousands of Nazis who had been convicted for crimes against humanity. Today, Adenauer is recognized as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. A glowing profile of him on the official website of the European Parliament even refers to the embarrassing pension incident. But that is cited as one of his “struggles” against Nazism! A struggle for what, exactly? Getting a comfortable family home under Nazi patronage? But when you are white, Christian and powerful, historians tend to look at you very differently. 

As if that was not enough, there is Hans Globke. As a senior Nazi official, he had worked on the infamous Nuremberg race laws for exclusion of Jews. He had even been part of the “Office of Jewish affairs” under the Nazi regime. But after the war, he served in Adenauer’s administration as secretary of state. You must have heard of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his radio broadcasts against Jews. Those were  prepared with the help of Kurt Kiesinger, who went on to become Chancellor of Germany in 1966.

These are not isolated examples. Across the “free world,” several Nazis went on to make glowing careers for themselves. During the war, Kurt Waldheim had been a Nazi intelligence officer in Greece and Yugoslavia. He went on to become Secretary General of the United Nations and was later elected President of Austria. Prince Bernard of the Netherlands had been a card carrying member of the Nazi SS. He continued  in his royal position until his death in 2004. 

The dirty truth is that much of the western world had few problems embracing actual Nazis and Fascists after the war. At various stages, many legendary western leaders have openly expressed their admiration either for Hitler or Mussolini. The list includes Winston Churchill, Pierre Trudeau and even John F Kennedy. It even includes celebrated thinkers like George Bernard Shaw and authors such as P G Wodehouse. Tell this to the average Indian liberal who thinks they can win every argument by connecting the RSS to fascism. Who is “Whatsapp University” now?

Germany is an “electoral autocracy”

Beyond the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the other major political party in Germany is the Socialist Party (SPD). But here is where it gets crazy. The two biggest parties are almost always in alliance, ruling in a coalition government. From an Indian perspective, that would be like a BJP Congress alliance in power. So there is basically no opposition party in Germany. Angela Merkel, who ruled Germany for four terms, was from the CDU. But in three of those terms, she ruled jointly with her main “opposition.” The current Chancellor Olaf Scholz is from the SPD. He used to be Merkel’s deputy in her the previous CDU-SPD coalition government. So in the latest 2021 elections, was the ruling party thrown out of power, or voted back to power? It is impossible to say. 

But what if a new party emerges to challenge these two ruling parties? To win even a single seat in Parliament, a party must get at least 5 percent of the popular vote. That would be quite difficult. Remember that in India, there are just two parties, BJP and Congress, that win more than 5 percent of the vote. This also means that in Germany, existing political parties cannot split. Because if a faction falls below 5 percent of the popular vote, it would be down to zero seats. Also, independents cannot emerge.

Remember when we said that political parties in Germany have no reason to fear the voters? This is what “electoral autocracy” looks like. 

And once people have voted, there is the question of deciding which party gets how many seats. This is done as per complicated formulas such as the “Hare-Niemeyer method” or the “Sainte Lague-Schepers method.” And they keep changing the formula every ten years or so. Also, there are “overhang seats” and “leveling seats” that can be added or subtracted to Parliament as per other formulas. There is no way the average voter can keep track of this. The confusion means that a permanent political class stays in power.

In recent years, a new political party called the AfD has managed to break through the system. It got 10 percent in the last election. Opinion polls now show them getting above 20 percent. Now the existing political parties say they want to ban the AfD. Or at least, ban all funding to it. Apparently, that is both possible and legal. And somehow not a danger to democracy. 

How is India less democratic than Germany? Show us!

We are aware that this article breaks a number of unwritten rules. For one, we Indians are not supposed to have strong opinions about domestic matters of foreign countries. The western media give only themselves that privilege, that of judging others on their internal affairs. But that is just a mental block. We can overcome it.

We are also aware that liberals will accuse us of “whataboutery.” Okay, so someone else is bad, but why should we Indians care? Once upon a time, hypocrisy used to be a terrible thing.  But now exposing hypocrisy is considered much worse. In any case, they started it with those silly democracy rankings. Should we Indians not respond?

And when they make these rankings, they make sure to place India below Qatar or North Korea in things such as safety of journalists, or press freedom. It is a clever strategy to keep us on the defensive. Because when we see this, the temptation is to respond: how are we worse than Qatar or North Korea? 

But of course we have more press freedom than Qatar or North Korea. That goes without saying. By trolling us with these outrageously low rankings, they make sure that we do not challenge the West directly. How are we less democratic than Germany or America? Show us. That is the question we should be asking them.

We Indians need to respond. Because the reputation of our country is now under attack. Both from the inside and the outside. Both make use of the fact that Indians do not talk much about political systems outside India. But if we Indians followed politics in other countries, those who say democracy is in danger in India would have nowhere to hide.

Just look at the data : Why there was never a scam in electoral bonds

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

The electoral bonds are gone now. But we have to ask what was achieved by this moral panic. Did it make anything better? No, every party will now go back to a cash system. But they got a “win” against the Modi government. Not an electoral win, mind you. They just got some headlines, some retweets and some viral videos. In other words, they got to scratch their itch and nothing more.

Was the BJP government using central agencies to extort money from companies through electoral bonds? Let us look at the data. A simple check shows that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) carried out over 3000 raids since 2014. Just 26 companies that were raided also bought electoral bonds. And of these 26 companies, only 16 bought them close to the time they were raided. And from the companies which were raided and also bought electoral bonds, how much money went to the ruling BJP? Just 37 percent. The other 63 percent went to the opposition. What kind of “extortion” is this?

It gets even more silly. The BJP’s overall share of electoral bonds purchased between 2019 and 2024 is 47 percent. Among companies that were raided by central agencies, the BJP’s share drops to 37 percent. In other words, companies that faced action were in fact less likely to donate to the ruling BJP. Again, how is this “extortion?”

So where did the idea of a “scam” in electoral bonds come from? It came from the media ecosystem of the opposition on the internet. Since 2014, they have failed to make a single charge of corruption stick to the Modi government. With electoral bonds, these people had promised too much to their audiences. For the last ten years, they have floated all sorts of conspiracy theories about one or two big business houses funding the BJP. They have repeated these theories too many times now. For many supporters of the opposition, these theories are now a matter of religious faith. They were sure they would finally get the proof they had been waiting for.

But that did not happen. When the files were opened, the big names they wanted to see just weren’t there. How did they deal with the disappointment? By moving goalposts. They quickly revised the charge of big business houses funding the BJP. Now it is a charge of extortion. If that doesn’t work, some elements are already working on a backup charge of money laundering. For those committed to irrational hatred against the Modi government, electoral bonds are the “biggest scam in the world.” But what kind of scam exactly? Nobody knows. You can fill in the blanks any way you want. 

The media is also at fault here for not asking the right questions. Why did the BJP get the largest share of electoral bonds? Simply because it is also the largest political party in India. It has its own majority in the Lok Sabha. At any point, it has chief ministers in a dozen states. Back when the Congress had such power, they also had more money than any opposition party. That is only natural.

So the real question is this. Did the BJP receive donations that were disproportionately high compared to its political power? The answer is clearly no. The BJP got 47 percent of the donations from electoral bonds. The TMC which rules just one state got 13 percent. The BRS which used to rule Telangana got nearly 10 percent. The BJD which rules Odisha got 6 percent. The DMK has only Tamil Nadu, but it got 5 percent. 

Ironically, the Congress got 11 percent, which is less than the TMC. So if there is a lesson here, it is for the Congress. The Congress still considers itself the main opposition party in India. But the data from electoral bonds shows that nobody believes it can take on the BJP. The TMC may be limited to a single state. But they are able to fight the BJP better. Even in the opposition ranks, people are betting on winners, rather than losers. 

This data also puts another conspiracy theory to rest. No, the BJP government was not secretly tracking donations to opposition parties. If it was, opposition parties would not have put so much faith in electoral bonds. The year 2021 was the most crucial for the TMC, when there were elections in West Bengal. But in the financial year 2021-22, the TMC got more than 99 percent of its income (in donations above Rs 20,000) from electoral bonds. Clearly, the opposition realized it had nothing to fear.

In fact, look at the pattern. The first year of the electoral bond scheme was 2017-18. That year, the TMC did not use the scheme at all. That is understandable, because it was something new. But the very next year, which was 2018-19, the TMC got almost 69 percent of its donations from electoral bonds. By 2019-20, they raised it to 92 percent. And then to over 99 percent in the last three financial years! That is a startling vote of confidence by the opposition in the electoral bond scheme.

And the TMC was not alone in this. The DMK went the same way. They did not use electoral bonds at all in the first two years of the scheme. But in 2019-20, they got 94 percent of their funding through electoral bonds. In the last two financial years, this has risen to over 99 percent. Almost the same goes for the BJD. They even hit a perfect 100 percent in 2021-22. It seems that successful opposition parties such as the TMC, the BJD and the DMK have no problems with electoral bonds. There are other opposition parties which are frustrated and failing. They have to float conspiracy theories to inspire the party faithful.

This reminds us of one very special theory from ex-RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. In December last year, the Income Tax Department raided a Congress MP and recovered several hundred crores in cash. But in Rajan’s world, the Congress MP was really a victim of the electoral bond scheme. The ruling party will get clean money, the opposition will have to use dirty cash, he explained. Then at the time of the election, the government can just raid the opposition and take their money away. Nice theory, but never mind the actual data. The TMC and DMK are both part of the INDIA bloc. Why not ask them?

Yes, the electoral bond scheme was not perfect. But think about what it was supposed to replace. Instead of cash donations, parties could now take money in bonds. These were purchased through SBI. This was money that had to be properly accounted for. This was money on which taxes had been paid. It was supposed to be a step forward. But now, everything will go back to cash. Worse, nobody will ever trust a guarantee by the Indian state again. The identities of the donors had been protected by a law passed by parliament. But as we have now seen, a court verdict can make that meaningless. 

Those who are still spreading rumors over electoral bonds need to answer some obvious questions. First of all, define your accusation. If the ruling party was using agencies to “extort” money from companies, why would those companies give 63 percent of their money to the opposition? During the ten years of UPA, the Enforcement Directorate carried out just 112 raids. This rose to over 3000 in the Modi years. And just 26 companies which were raided even bought any electoral bonds. The correlation is almost non-existent. So where is the story here? If there was something for opposition parties to fear, why did they keep increasing their faith in electoral bonds? 

The outpouring on electoral bonds began with a bang, but ended with a whimper. But whether on electoral bonds, or the now repealed farm laws, this is what much of opposition politics has been over the last ten years. It has been about bitterness. The country deserves better.

The trade target story : How UPA government helped China grow at India’s expense

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

“In my third term, I promise that India will become the third largest economy in the world,” the Prime Minister said in his recent speech to the Lok Sabha. This is “Modi ki guarantee,” he added. In the last 10 years, India has jumped 6 places, from 11th largest in 2014 to 5th in 2024. The Prime Minister has now set a target of 2029 to make India the world’s third largest economy. Latest calculations by the IMF suggest it could happen even earlier, likely by 2027. That would leave the Indian economy behind only China and the United States. Compare this to the target of 2043 set by the previous UPA government while presenting its final budget in 2014. 

But senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, who had presented that budget in 2014, was not impressed. “China’s GDP is five and a half times more than our GDP,” he reminded us. Now, Mr. Chidambaram’s numbers are a bit off the mark. China’s GDP is a little under five times our GDP, not five and a half times. But that is not the point. There is a huge gap between India and China. We must deal with this difficult fact.

But how did it get this way? To begin with, here are two surprising facts. In 2004, India’s economy was about 37 percent the size of China. By 2014, it was only 19 percent. In other words, during the UPA years, India’s economic size relative to China was cut in half. Second, when you are shopping, whether online or otherwise, does it ever bother you that so much of our stuff seems to be made in China? But it was not always this way. Would you believe that in 2004, India actually used to run a trade surplus with China? It was a surplus of $1.75 billion in 2004. By 2014, it had turned into a deficit of $38 billion!  So how did we become so dependent on China? Here is that story. 

In a surprise result, the Congress party came to power after the 2004 elections. At the time, the world was just entering a period of high growth. For decades, India had been an economic underperformer. But now, everyone was talking about the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China). These four emerging powers were supposed to lead the world. Everything was going upwards: markets, business confidence, economic growth numbers. India on the way to becoming an economic superpower? The UPA government could hardly believe its luck.

But the Chinese were only too happy to take advantage of the UPA’s giddy feeling. In April 2005, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited India. By the 2004-05 financial year, India was already running a small trade deficit with China, about $1.48 billion. The Chinese premier must have felt extra welcome in India, because the UPA needed the support of the Communist parties to stay in power. That is when the UPA agreed on its first “trade target” with China. At the time, India’s trade with China was worth about a billion dollars a month, or roughly $12 billion a year. The two countries agreed to raise this to at least $20 billion over the next three years.

But this “target” was achieved quickly. Too quickly, in fact. Chinese President Hu Jintao traveled to New Delhi in November of 2006. India promptly agreed to double the “trade target” to $40 billion a year. There wasn’t much of anything ‘bilateral’ about this trade. Indian markets were being flooded with Chinese goods. The trade deficit grew by leaps and bounds. In effect, India’s “target” had become a commitment to send the Chinese more money! 

Almost unbelievably, the UPA government did not seem to notice at all. Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh even boasted about it during his visit to China. “Our trade target of $20 billion by 2008 was reached two years ahead of schedule. The revised target of $40 billion by 2010 is also likely to be reached two years ahead of schedule,” Dr. Singh told a summit of business leaders in Beijing in January 2008. Best of all for the Chinese, Dr. Singh added in his speech, “We therefore propose to set more ambitious targets.”

And he did! During his 3 day visit to Beijing, Dr. Singh raised the trade target to $60 billion. By this point, India’s deficit with China had hit $9 billion. There were some whispers of concern about this. But the UPA government said that there was nothing to worry about. Apparently, the Chinese had promised to send regular “buying missions” to India. That would take care of the deficit. Now we wonder if any of these “buying missions” actually happened, and what the results were. It does not look like anyone was keeping much of an eye on anything.

The Indian media and civil society also failed to sound the alarm. Writing in the Economic Times in January of 2008, M K Venu noted cheerfully that China was set to replace the US as India’s largest “trade ally.” Even the choice of words is surprising. The usual term is “trade partner.” This was supposed to be about business. About cold hard cash. Using the word “ally” in this context suggests a surprising level of emotional commitment, or wishful thinking.  Note that M K Venu was also an editor of The Hindu and a founding editor of The Wire. So this is really a sample of establishment thought at the time.

But the UPA government continued with its gravity defying thinking. The global crisis of 2008 disrupted many plans. But not the determination of the UPA government to keep raising these trade targets with China. In December 2010, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made another visit to India. This time India agreed to raise the trade target to $100 billion by 2015! For as long as the UPA was in power, the Chinese never went back empty handed.

By this time, the gap between India and China had already become massive. China had firmly established itself as the world’s second largest economy. On its part, India which had been 12th in 2004, had barely inched up to the 10th position. For China, the days of “peaceful rise” were clearly over. They were getting ready to use hard power. And their economic might to get their way around the world. In this situation, India setting higher and higher “targets” for what was essentially one way trade made no sense.

But if Dr. Manmohan Singh wasn’t being careful enough, some sections in the UPA government went completely overboard. In May 2010, then minister Jairam Ramesh went on a visit to China. There he went so far as to criticize the Indian government itself for being “alarmist and paranoid” about Chinese investments. “We are imagining demons where there are none,” Jairam Ramesh told the Indian security establishment, from Chinese soil. These words sparked protests, especially in Arunachal Pradesh. Many feared that India would allow the Chinese to invest in mega power and water projects in the crucial border state claimed by China. Ultimately, Jairam Ramesh’s comments earned a rebuke from the Prime Minister himself. But when key ministers say publicly that the threat from China is imaginary, it tells you a lot about the UPA government.

By 2011, Chinese incursions along the border had become common. Meanwhile, India continued to make significant progress towards the $100 billion trade target with China, reaching $74 billion that year. “Our government does not share the view that China plans to attack India,” Dr. Singh told the Lok Sabha in December of 2011.

Now for anyone wondering, the 2015 deadline for the $100 billion trade target between India and China was missed. Perhaps because of a change of guard in 2014. 

In retrospect, Dr. Manmohan Singh perhaps made the same mistake as Jawaharlal Nehru many decades ago. In the early 2000s, he was swept away by the romantic vision of a new world, where new emerging powers would end Western hegemony. In this dream, India and China were not competitors, but allies. Much like Nehru would have felt at the collapse of European empires after the Second World War. India and China were supposed to be friends in a post colonial world. But that is not how human nature works. Every country guards its interests selfishly. 

“Even though we regard ourselves as friends of China, the Chinese do not regard us as their friends,” Patel had warned Nehru in a letter written in 1950, only a month before he passed away. It is likely that Nehru failed to internalize these words. Much like Dr. Manmohan Singh many decades later.

And so, for a decade, India kept setting what we called “trade targets,” and plunged deeper and deeper into deficits with China. Goods from China flooded Indian markets. A trade surplus of $1.75 billion with China in 2004 turned into a deficit of around $1.5 billion in 2005. By 2014, the deficit with China grew to $38 billion, or as much as 25 times. It will take many years to repair the damage that this dependence has caused. From 37 percent in 2004, India’s economic size relative to China came down sharply to just 19 percent in 2014. Since then, it has crept back up to about 21 percent. But the gap is dangerous and will take many years to fill. 

In February 2014, then Finance Minister P Chidambaram stood up to address the Lok Sabha for his budget speech. “I wonder how many have noted the fact that India’s economy, in terms of the size of its GDP, is the 11th largest in the world. There are great things in store,” he seemed quite pleased with himself. We wonder if he had noted that this means India had managed to go up just 1 place from the 12th position it had in 2004. In the meantime, all three other BRIC countries, and not just China, had left us behind. In 2004, both Brazil and Russia had been behind India in terms of GDP. Now, both had moved ahead.

In his budget speech from 2014, P Chidambaram went on to say that India would become the third largest economy in the next three decades. A press release from the Ministry of Finance on February 17, 2014 then describes the roadmap set by the UPA government to achieve this goal by 2043. With all due respect, we feel that India cannot afford to wait that long. Let us hope that India will become the third largest economy by 2029. That would be 14 years ahead of schedule. At least Mr. Chidambaram was right about one thing in his 2014 speech. That year, great things were indeed in store for India.

Why the BJP deserves credit for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

“Goli nahin chalegi (police will not open fire),” the late Kalyan Singh remembered his words in a Hindi language interview in 2009. He was speaking of the time when lakhs of karsewaks had gathered in Ayodhya in December of 1992, and he was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.  The interviewer was not happy. So you let it happen just to save a hundred lives, he demanded. Again, Kalyan Singh tried to explain. The crowd was in lakhs. If the police had opened fire, there would have been a stampede. Thousands would have died. But the “liberal” interviewer would not give up on his bloodthirsty line of questioning. So what if a thousand people had died, he asked. You let India’s secular foundation be hurt just to save a thousand lives?

In case you are wondering, the interviewer was not a representative of the British Empire. Nor was he a lawyer for General Reginald Dyer, who had insisted that the firing at Jallianwala Bagh had been necessary to save the foundations of the Empire. He was just from NDTV. But this is only an example of the attacks that the BJP has faced from the “secular” establishment over the years. And the sacrifices that the party has made. The disputed structure in Ayodhya fell on December 6, 1992. That evening, Kalyan Singh resigned. Within hours, the central government, led by the Congress, dismissed the state government.

But nobody shed any tears for the elected state government in 1992. The Congress party had ruled India more or less continuously since 1947. In that period, India had become an economic basket case. Compared to the world, the average Indian was now three times poorer than in 1950! The country had been to the IMF seven times to ask for money. The latest was 1991. But for politicians, activists and the media, there was only one villain in 1992. That was the BJP, which stood accused of harming “secularism.” 

Well, times change. The date for pran pratistha at Shri Ram Mandir in Ayodhya has been set for January 22. The ceremony will be performed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, head of the BJP government at the center, elected with full majority in 2014 and 2019. He will be accompanied by Yogi Adityanath, the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. As the date approaches, there is joy and excitement across the nation. Hotels in Ayodhya are fully booked. It is just not enough. They are making new ones on a massive scale. The new airport has just been completed. The existing railway station has been expanded to cope with the wave of arrivals. BJP workers and those of the Sangh parivar are going door to door, with akshat (whole rice) in preparation for the grand event. Newspaper reports say that Gita Press in Gorakhpur has run out of copies of Ramcharitmanas. There is no way they can print 4 lakh additional copies in such a short time. Such is the Ram sentiment sweeping the nation. Ram aayenge…

Ordinary Hindus understand that this is a historic moment. They instinctively understand the parallels with the return of Ram from 14 years of vanvaas. This time, it has been 500 years.

The old secular establishment cannot understand this idiom. They are too cut off from Hindu society. But they are feeling cornered now. Why should the BJP get credit for the Ram temple, they ask. Maybe because success belongs to those who actually struggle. It belongs to those who made sacrifices. It does not belong to naysayers. And definitely not to those who tried to scuttle the effort in every way. It seems that “secular” parties and their fellow travelers are having a hard time understanding this.

What kinds of sacrifices? First, there are those who sacrificed their lives. Few would know the names of the Kothari brothers from Kolkata. They were among the lakhs of karsewaks who had gathered for the VHP in Ayodhya in 1990. The police opened fire on them and hundreds were killed. The Kothari brothers were among the dead. Even in those days, India had activists, lawyers and journalists. But nobody cared about the human rights of the karsewaks. In fact, civil society has always acted as if they deserved to die. Over a decade later, they had the same attitude towards the 59 karsewaks who were burned to death in S-6 coach of Sabarmati express near Godhra on Feb 27, 2002. The dead were smeared. They were accused of not paying for tea, thus provoking Muslim vendors at the railway station. As if 59 lives could be worth just two rupees. They were accused of harassing a girl. Anything to make it look like the karsewaks deserved to die.

The accused in the Godhra carnage, all belonging to the minority community, have been convicted. Their sentences have been confirmed by the Supreme Court. But civil society continues to spread conspiracy theories about this incident. They feed these lies to the international media, which still wont accept who set fire to the train. They will never believe us. The Ram temple is a triumph for people whose sacrifices (and human rights) the world chose to ignore.

Let us look at this another way. Would the Ram temple have been possible without the efforts of the BJP? In 1990, Lal Krishna Advani led the mass mobilization of Hindus, with his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. As fate would have it, one of the organizers of the rath yatra was Narendra Modi. How can someone deny credit to these leaders and to the BJP today?

The “secular” parties of the time did everything to stop the yatra. Advani himself was arrested at Samastipur in Bihar. With this one act, Lalu Yadav sealed Muslim votes in favor of his party, something that continues even today. So did the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh after police opened fire on karsewaks. This became a template across the country. To consolidate Muslim votes through mindless bashing of the BJP. It was just enough to get an advantage in our first past the post system. The resulting governments were often shaky, marked by corruption, and accompanied by total breakdown of law and order. But they always enjoyed the full intellectual backing of scholars, academics and civil society. 

On the other hand, the BJP paid a price everywhere. On the morning of December 6, 1992, the BJP had four state governments. Two weeks later, they had zero. Not just in Uttar Pradesh, every single BJP chief minister was dismissed by the Congress government at the center. The duly elected governments of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh were dismissed. The excuse was a law and order problem  in Uttar Pradesh! Where does this leave the constitutional structure of India?

In the 1996 elections, the BJP emerged as the single largest party. But no party would ally with them. Because they were worried about losing minority votes. As a result, Vajpayee’s government fell after just 13 days. When the BJP managed to form a coalition government in 1998, they were forced to put their three biggest ideological demands on hold. This included the Ram temple in Ayodhya, abolition of Article 370, and a uniform civil code. Even so, the Vajpayee government managed to start the excavation under the disputed structure in Ayodhya. This paved the way for the Supreme Court judgment that has led to the construction of the Ram temple today. 

Because of these three ideological issues, the BJP finds it hard to attract allies even today. Who knows what would have happened if the people of India had not given an outright majority to Narendra Modi in 2014? Would there have been a UPA 3 government? Quite possible. The same goes for 2019. In 2024, the strategy of the opposition is to somehow keep the BJP short of 272 seats. The BJP takes huge risks and pays a heavy political price because it stands by its three big ideological issues. Two of these have been achieved today. This is a hard won ideological victory for the BJP. This is their moment. 

The Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi removed the lock on the gates of the so-called Babri Masjid in 1986. But the Congress had almost had 40 years of power by then, and had failed to resolve the issue. And it seemed more of a cynical political calculation to balance out charges of Muslim appeasement after the Shah Bano case. Since then, the party has always appeared grumpy over the issue of the Ram temple. For instance, they passed the Places of Worship act in 1991. This was written to deny Hindu claims in similar disputes at Kashi and Mathura. Then came the Waqf Act of 1995. This gave sweeping powers to the Waqf boards to take over almost any piece of land anywhere in India for Muslim religious purposes.  That too without any due legal process outside of the so-called Waqf tribunals. It was not even clear if our High Courts and the Supreme Court would have the power to overturn decisions of these  so-called Waqf tribunals. It is only recently that our judiciary has begun a pushback against this.

And who can forget the haste with which the UPA government in 2007 wanted to demolish the Ram Setu between India and Sri Lanka? The BJP led an agitation against it. Curiously enough, the supposed civil society groups were nowhere to be found. Even if you set aside for a moment the matter of religious belief, why did they not come out against the ecological damage of destroying the coral ridge? Perhaps because it was more important for them to show Hindus their place in the “secular” nation.

The pran pratishtha at the Ram temple is also a deserved defeat for India’s liberal elites. For decades, they used fake narratives to deny the oppression that Hindus faced at the hands of Muslim rulers. From Ayodhya and Varanasi to Vijaynagar. Fake narratives such as Muslim rulers demolished temples for political reasons and not religious reasons. Well, every ruler in history had political power. And every ruler had political aims. Does this mean that no ruler was ever motivated by racism, xenophobia or bigotry? But their fake narratives took hold. Simply because the leftists had the echo chamber to themselves. 

But you cannot destroy civilizational memory so easily. There are local Hindu communities in Ayodhya who still remember that their ancestors had fought to save the temple that stood at the spot. Their ancestors took an oath not to wear their pagdi until the temple was rebuilt. Their honor has been restored today, after 500 years.

When the Supreme Court verdict came out in favor of the Ram temple in 2019, everyone welcomed it. Both Hindus and Muslims. There was not one incident of communal violence. In other words, the secular fabric of the nation is just as safe as it always was. The fear mongering by some political parties and their intellectual backers has come to nothing. Long years ago, a crime had been committed. And now it has been set right. Was it good that the disputed structure had to be removed the way it was in 1992? Perhaps not. But that is how history works. A great historic outpouring, such as the fall of the Bastille during the French revolution of 1789, contains many ironies.  

For Indians everywhere, the Ram temple comes at a time of great national renewal. We are building expressways, railways and airports at amazing speed and scale. We are reaching out to the last person in line with toilets, tap water, gas connections, electricity connections, bank accounts, as well as digital infrastructure. India just became the fifth largest economy. In two or three years, India will be the third. The world awaits the return of India as a great power. The return of Shri Ram to Ayodhya is symbolic in so many ways.

Why Raghuram Rajan should stop predicting doom about India’s economy

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Moneycontrol here and on News18 here.

It was one morning in December 2022. The two men sat side by side, under the winter sun. India will be “lucky to get 5 percent growth” next year, Raghuram Rajan told Rahul Gandhi. The next day it was all over the newspapers. Coming from Raghuram Rajan, it was already as good as true. But this is not the first time that the media has taken either of these two individuals more seriously than it should have. ‘If Rajan exits, so will billions in investment’ ran one headline in 2016. That was when his term as governor of the Reserve Bank was about to end. Rajan also made headlines in June 2015 when he predicted that a 1930s style Great Depression was coming. What happened to that? 

From 2013 to 2018, Raghuram Rajan has “predicted” doom for the global economy at the rough rate of once a  year. Each time, the media has covered him. The media never learns.

But this time something new happened. Something that almost never happens to star economists. People followed up. They made clippings of his “lucky to get 5 percent” speech and began posting it online. Every time India posted its high growth numbers, the videos went viral. A dazzling 7.8 percent in the first quarter of the 2023-24 fiscal year, and 7.6 percent for the second. The world is cheering on India. And people online are laughing at Raghuram Rajan.

And so it is for the first time ever, that a cornered Raghuram Rajan has been forced to defend himself. In recent interviews, he said that all these people are trolls. He says it is an organized effort against him. But it is not. It is just common people speaking truth to an economist they now see as more political than academic. For that matter, Rahul Gandhi’s so-called Bharat Jodo Yatra, during which Rajan originally made these comments, was also an organized effort. The question is whether the critics are wrong, not whether they are organized. So here are five ways in which we believe that Raghuram Rajan is wrong about India’s economic path. 

India is not growing faster simply because we are a poor country

That was the first defense from Rajan, in an interview he gave to the Wire. “We are growing faster than other large economies … Poor countries grow faster because catch up growth is easier. There is so much more to do, and we know what to do,” he said. First of all, when Rajan made his prediction in December last year, did he not know that India is a poor country? 

Second, note the obvious flaw in the argument. If India is poor now, it was even poorer during the UPA years.  Why then was India the slowest growing BRIC economy between 2004 and 2014? Between 2004 and 2014, China expanded its GDP by an astonishing 430 percent, Brazil by 266 percent, and Russia by 222 percent. In contrast, India could only manage 181 percent. In fact, Indonesia increased its GDP by 219 percent. No wonder that by the end of UPA’s term, there were calls for Indonesia to replace India as the “I” in BRIC! 

Here is another way to look at this. When the UPA decade began in 2004, India’s GDP was about 37 percent that of China. By 2014, it had been reduced to just 19 percent. In other words, India’s economic size relative to China had been cut in half. The lesson is that poor countries do not magically grow faster. You need good policy.

India has grown due to its own strength, not just because of global factors

“We have been lucky,” Rajan explained in another interview. He added that after he made his “lucky to get 5 percent growth” comment, it is not just India but the whole world that grew faster than he expected. But India’s growth was ahead of the rest of the world. Since 2014, India’s GDP has increased by 83 percent. This is well ahead of China at 68 percent, and the United States at 53 percent. Most European countries have been under 10 percent. India’s peers in BRIC, such as Brazil and Russia, have actually seen their GDP contract significantly, by 10-14 percent! As for Indonesia, it grew 59 percent, well behind India’s 83 percent. There is no longer any danger of Indonesia replacing India in BRIC.

So India went from being the slowest growing BRIC economy in the UPA years to the fastest growing since 2014. Why deny credit to India and the current Indian government?

But let us come back to the comment that Rajan made about “luck.” Not just India, but the whole world grew faster than he predicted. So he was wrong not just about India, but the entire world economy. How is that supposed to be an excuse? And why does he blame his failure on “luck?” 

Remember that Raghuram Rajan is most famous for having “predicted” the 2008 crisis back in 2005. Was that success due to “luck” as well? Worse, we should go beyond the media myths and ask if Rajan actually predicted that 2008 crisis. You see, predictions are supposed to contain specifics. Like when Rajan said that in the 2023-24 fiscal, India’s growth would be under 5 percent. So there was a date and a number against which the success or failure of his prediction could be measured. But his words in 2005 contained no specifics. He merely said that something might go wrong at some point in the future. But that was always going to happen. Every decade has at least one big economic crisis. There is always going to be another plane crash, or another earthquake, flood or drought some day. This is not a prediction. This is called stating the obvious. Since then, Rajan has predicted many more recessions, including in 2015 when he predicted a 1930s style Great Depression. None of these came true. Perhaps his luck ran out. 

India has the potential to become a manufacturing superpower

Do iPhones that are made in India smell of curry? The allegations are all over Chinese social media. Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is beginning to panic, now that more and more of Apple merchandise is made in India. Or shall we say “assembled” in India? After all, we would not like to hurt the feelings of domestic critics who seem no less nervous than the Chinese. 

What an amazing lack of vision these critics have shown! In the second quarter of 2022, Apple accounted for just 9 percent of smartphone exports from India. In the same quarter of 2023, it is more like 49 percent. This fiscal year, Apple is set to overshoot its export targets under the PLI scheme by a huge margin. Over the next 5 years, they are likely to raise production from $7 billion worth to over $40 billion. India is beginning to put together only now the basics for a manufacturing revolution. The expressways, the railway freight corridors, the sea ports and waterways are being put together. How can someone bet India’s future, as Rajan suggests, purely on services? Especially with so much of the global supply chain in the hands of China. Did we learn nothing from the pandemic? 

For example, Apple’s supplier Foxconn is the 10th largest employer worldwide, just behind the Indian Railways. Who would not want them here? And yes, we also need to get into the new race for semiconductor chip manufacturing. This is an economic necessity, and even a national security issue.

But over the last year or so, Raghuram Rajan has made a name for himself as a savage critic of India’s manufacturing prospects. Clearly, he does not understand that India has a history of starting from humble origins and making it big. From steel to cars to satellites. Back in the day, British officer Upcott had joked that he would eat every pound of steel if Indians could make any. Today India is the second largest producer of steel in the world. You don’t want to be remembered like Upcott, do you Dr. Rajan? 

India has managed to balance both stimulus and inflation fears perfectly

The patient is on a sickbed, and needs tonic immediately. So said Raghuram Rajan in his 2020 blog, as he made his case for a huge fiscal stimulus during the pandemic. One that India possibly could not afford. And one which would likely lead to runaway inflation. The support from the government, primarily in the form of foodgrains, was “meager,” he had said. But look at what happened next. India bounced back sharply, and posted world beating growth numbers in 2021, 2022 and now 2023. All this while, inflation stayed around 5-6 percent, and the Rupee was stable. Now the IMF expects India to remain the fastest growing economy at least until 2028. 

And look at what happened in the West. They handed out massive stimulus packages. But it all backfired, producing low growth and high inflation. They got a small bounce in growth figures for 2021. But it quickly went downhill after that. Most Western economies slipped back to 2-3 percent growth, while inflation soared to 9-11 percent. The US itself saw two successive quarters of negative growth in 2022. This used to be the technical definition of a recession, before “economists” changed it in 2022 to suit midterm election prospects for President Biden’s party. On his part, Raghuram Rajan has done an about turn as well. He now blames central banks in the West for not being careful while giving out big stimulus packages. Anyone who remembers what Rajan himself said in 2020 must be a “troll.”

India does not need authoritarians, democracy has served India much better

Perhaps the most puzzling comment comes from Raghuram Rajan’s recent book with Rohit Lambda. “India may have democratized too early. Perhaps strong manufacturing growth in its early years required an authoritarian hand to remove the obstacles in the way of development,” they write. Rajan doubled down on these comments in his interview with Karan Thapar. He pointed, as people often do, to the authoritarian leaders who created economic miracles in East Asia.

But Rajan ignores the facts about Indian history. Can authoritarian leaders sometimes serve the economic interests of a nation better? Yes it is true, even if it is an uncomfortable truth. But it really depends on which authoritarian. An authoritarian leader like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore? Yes. But an authoritarian leader like Indira Gandhi? No. Having an authoritarian leader is not a guarantee of economic prosperity.

In fact, how different was India from an authoritarian state between 1950 and 1991? There was practically a Congress monopoly. Leadership in the party was passed down by principle of hereditary succession. Non-Congress governments could technically be elected in states. But these were often dismissed in bulk. During this time, India went from 6th largest economy in 1950 to the 12th largest in 1991. In 1950, India’s per capita GDP was 18 percent of the world average. By 1991, it had come down to 6 percent. So the average Indian became roughly 3 times poorer between 1950 and 1991. So much for the advantages of authoritarianism. The Congress monopoly was shattered in 1991. Since then, India has become a lot more democratic. And India has done better in every way.

One final note from history that everyone deserves to know. One that Raghuram Rajan should keep in mind before he begins this dangerous talk about authoritarianism in India. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US government brought over a group of economists from Chile and trained them at the University of Chicago. These people came to be known as the “Chicago Boys.” The Chicago Boys formed the core of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, after the CIA led coup overthrew the elected government of Chile and installed a puppet regime in 1973. As a Chicago economist himself, Rajan would surely be aware of this story. And we would advise him to choose his words more carefully when talking about authoritarianism. 

Why the Congress and its fellow travelers should stop insulting the voters of India

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Karuna Gopal, appeared on News18 here.

Why did the Indian team lose the cricket world cup final? Because Australia played better on the day. But if you ask the Congress party and its supporters, there were a number of other explanations. They said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a “panauti.” He brought bad luck. Then there was the fact that the game was played in Amdavad. In their eyes, the Gujaratis are supposed to be bad people who don’t vote the right way.  That is why the team lost. So one explanation is superstition and the other is bigotry. Armed with these two explanations, Congress party supporters set social media on fire. They finally had a winning combination. Or so they thought.

It was not to be. In the recent round of assembly polls, the BJP swept three big states. The BJP got a comfortable majority in Rajasthan. All the talk of Ashok Gehlot retaining power turned out to be just wishful thinking. The BJP has been in power for nearly twenty years in Madhya Pradesh. The Congress would have expected anti-incumbency to do its job. But the BJP won a remarkable victory. It came back to power with almost two-thirds of the seats. The Congress would have been most confident about Chhattisgarh. Back in 2018, they had swept to power with 68 out of the 90 seats. The gap in vote share was 10 percent! Even if the gap came down a little, the Congress thought they would still be ahead. Again, it was not to be. The BJP won 54 seats out of 90, with a clear lead of 4 percent in vote share. Clearly, the state government had failed rather badly to meet the expectations of the people. 

For the Congress and its fellow travelers, it was time for Plan B. How would they get over the embarrassment of losing three big states? They seized upon the fact that Telangana, the one state they won, is in the south. The narrative was rolled out almost instantly. Earlier this year, the Congress had won in Karnataka, also in the south. The south they said is more literate, better educated, and richer on a per capita basis. That is why the south voted for the Congress. From top opposition politicians to public intellectuals, everyone appeared to follow this line. A DMK MP said in parliament that the BJP can only win elections in what he called the gaumutra states of the north. So much hatred for our fellow citizens? Even Ramachandra Guha fished out a quote from a long dead Australian diplomat to suggest that India is fundamentally divided between “north” and “south.” As it turns out, that long dead Australian diplomat was also a big supporter of the racist “White Australia” policy. Is anyone surprised?

Of course, the “north” vs “south” narrative is made up. It falls apart at slightest touch. First of all, has anyone seen a map of India? In what sense are Gujarat and Maharashtra supposed to be northern states? Don’t forget that these are also two of the richest states in India. Until yesterday, the Congress was in power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Did these states suddenly shift northwards on December 3 this year? Or did these states get poorer in the last five years under Congress rule? Also, if the north is so backward, what was the Congress doing for nearly sixty years? As many as six members of the Nehru-Gandhi family have represented Uttar Pradesh in parliament. Now that Rahul Gandhi has to go to Kerala to find a safe seat, they begin to notice all the problems in Uttar Pradesh. Did you know that no Congress government has been re-elected anywhere in the country since 2011? Clearly, these governments failed to meet the expectations of the people. Why blame the people? Why not look within and try to do better?

Then there is the question of what to do with Karnataka. Yes, the BJP lost power in the state this year. But they have ruled Karnataka several times. And they are likely to do so again. In the last four general elections, the BJP has been the largest party from Karnataka. Is Karnataka not southern enough for the Congress and its cheerleaders? Even in the 2023 state elections, the BJP won 16 out of the 28 seats in Bengaluru. In Telangana, the Congress won, but did not get a single seat out of the 24 in Hyderabad. What does this do to the narrative of richer, more developed parts of the country voting for the Congress? Here is another curious fact. In the current Lok Sabha, the BJP has more MPs from southern India than any other party. More than the Congress, the DMK or the YSRCP. There is really only one India and only one national mood. Stop trying to divide us.

But they always knew that. In Telangana, the BJP has already doubled its vote share from 7 percent to 14 percent. Some of the more intelligent people in the liberal ecosystem already see the upcoming reality. They have started working on a new narrative of “Karnataka and Telangana” vs “rest of south.” Writing in the Indian Express, Brown University professor Ashutosh Varshney explains that Hindus in Karnataka and Telangana still resent Muslim rulers of an earlier era. And so, the BJP can go no further in the south, beyond these two states. Wait till these academics find out about the massacre of Hindus by Malabar Muslims in 1921, in present day Kerala.  

Why does it seem like these people have just been looking for a way to divide and rule? A month ago, it was all about dividing people by caste. Now it is by language and region. The issues are being raised so opportunistically and cynically that it seems nobody believes them. Suppose the Congress had won Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. Would these liberals still have said all those terrible things about Hindi speaking people? From Jawaharlal Nehru to Rahul Gandhi, the Congress has been the political party of hereditary privilege. Does anyone believe any more that they are committed to empowering backward sections of society?

But then, the fellow travelers of the Congress party have never had much respect for the intelligence of the common voter. Even more so, now that fewer and fewer people vote for them. On the internet, there is now an army of Youtubers, former journalists turned trolls, who go around trying to prove that common people are stupid. The aim is to catch some BJP supporter off guard and make fun of them. Someone who is unused to speaking on camera. The ecosystem then works hard to make the video viral. But dismissing the voter as “Whatsapp University” does not work. 

Yes, there are a few myths circulating on the so-called “Whatsapp University.” But the truths heavily outnumber them. And these narratives get challenged and sorted out. This is much more vigorous than anything that ever happened in closed and corrupt intellectual circles. If anything, the internet made it easier to see how lazy, incompetent and biased these intellectuals actually were. Everyone knows how myths were created by these people to keep one family in power. Their hypocrisies now have nowhere to hide. Today when a common voter gets a tap water connection, a Mudra loan, or a house under Awas Yojana, it is not a myth. You can ignore the voter at your own peril.

But the Congress and its sympathizers kept building the wall higher between themselves and the common voter. Take the idea that the mainstream media, particularly TV news, has become a lapdog of the BJP. The term “godi media” is now everywhere. It even finds mention in supposedly scholarly reports that claim North Korea is more safe for journalists than India. Yes, the latest World Press Freedom Report actually says that. Anyway, the myth of “godi media” should have been shattered on December 3 when the results of the Assembly elections came out. As it turns out, the analysts on TV news, and their pollsters had been overestimating the Congress, not the BJP! 

But the myth will remain. Instead, they are interpreting the election results in creative ways, to show that it was the Congress which actually came out ahead. Apparently, if you pool the votes from the four big states on December 3, the Congress comes out ahead by 10 lakh votes. Nice thinking to include Telangana, where the BJP was not one of the two main players. Okay, so what happens to this logic if we add in the votes from say Uttar Pradesh where the Congress is not one of the main players? Apparently, the Congress may have lost in three states, but it gets credit for retaining its vote share. Okay, but the BJP also retained its vote share in Karnataka earlier this year. Does it mean the BJP “won” there as well? Could it be that elections in India are just getting more bipolar? Also, if you map the Assembly results to Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is actually down from its 2019 tally. They say this knowing well that this mapping never works. The BJP always gets more votes in Lok Sabha elections. It would be okay if some low level troll made such arguments to lift spirits among the Congress flock. But what do you do when it is someone like Yogendra Yadav? He used to be introduced on TV panels as India’s “numero uno” psephologist. That was in the old days. You know, when there was no “godi media.”

Now if the thought leaders on the liberal side are busy twisting numbers, what is left for the trolls to do? They go lower, fishing in EVM conspiracy theories. In either case, they are just insulting the voter.

Two final thoughts about the opposition alliance, the so-called INDIA bloc. First, for far too long, the Congress has managed to avoid taking responsibility for the actions of its fellow travelers. From the Communists to the DMK, to parties like the Indian Union Muslim League. But in an age of the internet, this no longer works. If an ally says something outrageous in say Tamil Nadu, there might be a price to pay in say Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. Second, a lot was made about how the BJP had been shaken up by the name INDIA. Maybe or maybe not. You will have to ask the BJP about that. But what we all see today is that the opposition alliance is falling apart. If the Congress had won on December 3, its hand would have been stronger. Now that the Congress lost, its allies want to force its hand. Anyone could have predicted that this tussle was coming. Unfortunately though, the headlines will now be forced to say that the INDIA bloc is falling apart. And as citizens of India, we do not like the sound of that.

Why Mindless Defaming of Hindu Right as ‘Nazis’ and ‘Fascists’ Must Stop

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Vijita Singh Aggarwal, appeared on News18 here.

On October 7, a terrorist attack by Hamas killed 1400 people in southern Israel. Days later, a Cornell professor led a hate rally on campus. “It was exhilarating … energizing,” he exclaimed, as the mob clapped and cheered. A Stanford lecturer separated out the Jewish students in his class. He made them stand in a corner and called them colonizers. “Yes, only six million,” he said, when he was told how many Jews had died in the holocaust. Last month, the parliament in Canada came together to give a standing ovation to a Ukrainian ‘freedom fighter.’ His name:  Yaroslav Hunka, 14th SS Galicia division, a Nazi military unit.

“It was like a Nuremberg rally,” a prominent Australian sports writer wailed the other day. But he was not talking about these shocking incidents at Cornell, Stanford, or in Canada. He was talking about fans at the cricket stadium in Amdavad in Gujarat. Apparently, they had all shown up in blue to support the Indian cricket team. And absolutely refused to cheer for Pakistan. That makes them Nazis? Seriously? 

How did the liberal rhetoric about India get so crazy? For decades, they trolled every word and every action of anyone connected to the BJP as “Nazi” and “Fascist.” Then they did this to Narendra Modi, now prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, with 230 million votes behind him. So now they do it to anyone who they believe might be sympathetic to the BJP. Such as a crowd of cricket fans in Gujarat.

No, you cannot use the N-word so lightly: Nazi. It is a horrible insult to the six million Jews who died in the holocaust. It is an insult to hundreds of millions of Indians who choose their leaders peacefully, in free and fair elections. And it helps political groups who were actually associated with Hitler’s crimes to get off easy. Who uses the Nazi jibe against the Hindu right anyway? The Communists for example. The same Communists who launched the Second World War as Hitler’s comrades in arms and gobbled up Poland. The same Communists who followed closely behind, with tails wagging, as Nazi German troops marched into Paris in June 1940. Just because we have so many Communist historians does not mean that nobody knows how Communists and Nazis used to be allies.

Why then does the Nazi jibe against the Hindu right keep happening? One reason is that the West is trying to cover up its tracks. They want people to forget the role of anti-Semitism in European Christian society, as well as in Communism. And present Nazism as if it came out of nowhere. Let me quote Hannah Arendt, an intellectual hero of the liberal left. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that Nazism “owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman.” Ironically, liberals in India often use Arendt’s work to draw parallels between Nazism and the Hindu right. Yes, if you do not want to see the roots of Nazism in the West, who do you blame instead? Someone in India, of course! They have brown skin and believe in a ‘pagan’ religion that looks strange to others.

But you cannot shrug off history so easily. Where did the Nazis get the idea of making the Jews wear the infamous yellow star? It was from the Popes who made the Jews wear yellow caps for three hundred years, while they were imprisoned inside the Roman ghetto.

And no, you cannot use the F-word so lightly either: Fascist. What is Fascism? It was a merger between the Catholic Church and governments in Western Europe. That is how Mussolini gave control of Vatican City to the Pope. During the 1930s and 1940s, Catholic and authoritarian regimes came up in Western Europe one by one: Mussolini in Italy, Petain in France, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. The Catholic party voted for Hitler to become dictator. After this, the Church quickly signed an agreement with the Nazis. Konrad Adenauer of the Catholic Party had even taken a pension from the Nazi government, after he wrote a letter explaining all the good things he had done for the Nazis as a public official. After the war, Adenauer went on to form the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and remained Chancellor of Germany for 14 years!  One of his successors was Kurt Keisinger, also of the CDU, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1966. During the war, Keisinger had been deputy for broadcasting at Hitler’s foreign office, working as liaison with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

But the Indian liberal does not want you to know these direct connections between the white Christian West and the Nazis. They want you to make long drawn out comparisons between modern democratic India and Nazi Germany. So what if Pierre Trudeau led an underground fascist organization in Canada to support Mussolini? The Trudeau dynasty is liberal royalty. Their reputation must be protected. So must Kurt Waldheim, the Nazi intelligence officer who became Secretary General of the United Nations, and also President of Austria. The Church tracked him down in his retirement and made him a knight of honor. That was only 1994, not that long ago. Remember the Pope who signed that agreement with Hitler? The Vatican tried to declare him a saint. That was 2013. 

But the liberals would rather have you worry about random things in India. Have you seen the saffron themed ‘angry’ Hanuman car sticker? Scary, right? Because liberals use the word “fascist” for anyone they do not like. If they make the meaning broad enough, people will forget the real Christian roots of Fascism. It is a neat little trick. Very clever.

There is a second reason that Nazi and Fascist jibes are used so freely against Hindus. It is because most people do not know what the Hindus have been through. Hindus have been victims of two major genocides in the last hundred years. The first was in 1946-47. It began with the call for “Direct Action Day” by the Muslim League in Calcutta, when thousands of Hindus were killed. The second was in 1971 in East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. But these events were neither studied nor documented properly. So much so that estimates of the dead vary from 300,000 to 3 million! To this, the so-called scholars have added a second layer of genocide denial. They insist on saying that the victims were “Bengalis,” not “Hindus” nor “Bengali Hindus.” That way they have completely erased the intent of the Pakistani government, and who was targeted. A bill in the US Congress to recognize the 1971 genocide is still pending. Because that bill mentions that Hindus were victims. And you cannot have that.

“Moreover, with support of Pak military, non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people’s quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus. Streets of Dacca are aflood with Hindus and others seeking to get out of Dacca.” This is the content of the aptly nicknamed Blood Telegram, sent by Archie Blood, then US Consul General in Dhaka on March 28, 1971. They know that Hindus were victims. You are just not allowed to say that.

To this list, you can add at least two ‘smaller’ pogroms that Hindus have faced. One is the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir in the early 1990s. The other was the 1921 Moplah massacre in present day Kerala. That was during the Khilafat movement, supported by the Indian National Congress, to restore the Islamic Caliphate in Turkey. The same Caliphate which had just carried out a genocide of 1 million Armenians during World War I. There is an important side note here. While Islamic in nature, the Caliphate in Turkey was also a constitutional monarchy. The actual government was run by an organization known as the “Young Turks,” who are considered secular and liberal. Yes, the first major genocide of the 20th century was carried out by liberals. 

Liberal thinkers have also played their mind games with the 1921 Moplah massacre. They have rebranded it as an uprising against landlords. Not a massacre of Hindus. As with the 1971 genocide, you just cannot admit that Hindus can be victims.

Nazism and Fascism were among the three great evils of the 20th century, the other being Communism. Together, these murderous ideologies have taken more than 100 million lives. In the case of Communism, liberals have rebranded it as some kind of human rights movement. For Nazism and Fascism, liberals have worked hard to make people forget their Western and Christian roots. So now they use these as jibes against all forms of Hindu political expression. Another reason this happens is because the liberals know that the Hindu right will not be able to hit back in sufficient numbers. Much of the Hindu right sees the English language as a colonial hangover. This may be true, but English dominates today as the worldwide link language. The Hindu right does not invest in making its case in English, let alone French or Spanish. So the liberals know they will have a free run in media around the world. They are doing the intellectually lazy thing and picking on Hindus. Because it is just so easy.

In many ways, they are just continuing what they did with the infamous Nazi symbol. Hitler called it the hakenkreuz, which means a hooked cross. But when translating from the original German, the scholars felt that the English speaking world would not be able to understand a term like “hooked cross.” So they translated it as ‘swastika.’ Did they think that the English speaking world is fluent in Sanskrit? Or did they want to subtly pass the blame for Nazi ideology from the Christian world to the Hindu world? Or from West to East? Since then, people have changed the way they use so many words. They stopped using words that may be seen as racist, sexist, or homophobic. How come nobody ever thought of changing it back to ‘hooked cross’ from ‘swastika?’ Because they have been saying it on purpose. Because Hindus are still a target. 

Fragile Five to Top Five: How India had become the fifth largest economy in 2021 itself

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

On October 20, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the newest stretch of line on the metro in Bengaluru. A journey across India’s technology capital could have taken hours even on a good day. Now it takes 45 minutes. The same day, the Prime Minister also opened the first section of a new high speed railway system around Delhi. Excited Youtubers now post videos of themselves riding high above small towns in western Uttar Pradesh at 150 kilometers an hour. Eventually, the network will spread to 3 states. This will bring millions of new people, who live hundreds of kilometers from Delhi, into the thriving National Capital Region. That week, India also welcomed the first ship to a new deep water seaport in the south. It is the first transshipment port of its kind in India, built to compete with Dubai and Singapore.

That was just one week in the life of new India. Each day is part of the relentless march ahead. Each week that goes by without making something new, now feels like a waste. India is set for yet another year as the fastest growing economy, according to the IMF. A just released report by Morgan Stanley ranks India as their standout market, the first among all emerging economies. Since the growth numbers for the latest quarter came out, India’s GDP projections have been raised by the IMF, Goldman Sachs, Fitch, OECD and SBI Research. What a difference from 2013, when India was seen as a Fragile Five economy, public sector banks were struggling with bad loans, and people asked if Indonesia should replace India in BRIC. It is also a loss of face for naysayers like Dr. Raghuram Rajan who said India would be “lucky” to get “even 5 percent” growth this year. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook report comes with a simple message. Do not bet against India. 

The IMF’s big report is published twice a year, in April and October. Apart from compiling economic data from around the world, the report contains predictions for the next five years. The October 2023 report has been somewhat lost in the news cycle. Perhaps due to news of so much conflict in the outside world, or because of the festive season in India. So here is a summary. Because there is a lot to cheer for India.

India to remain the world’s fastest growing economy till 2028

By now, we have come to expect this. The IMF has upgraded India’s GDP forecast for 2023 to 6.3 percent. At the same time, they have downgraded China to 5 percent. The most exciting part is this. The IMF expects India to be the fastest growing economy till 2028 at least, growing above 6 percent every single year! Do you know what this means? It means that for 11 of the 15 years since 2014, India would be the fastest growing economy. For comparison, how many years were there between 2004 and 2013 when India was the fastest growing economy? Unfortunately, zero. 

In the last two fiscal years, India’s GDP grew 9.1 percent and 7.2 percent respectively. Most countries posted high growth numbers in 2021, as they bounced back from the pandemic in 2020. But very few could keep up the pace like India did. The United States grew 5.9 percent in 2021. But it came down to barely 2 percent in 2022. China posted 8.4 percent growth in 2021, but only 3 percent in 2022. The European economies showed a similar path, coming down from 6-7 percent to 2-4 percent. And in the next five years, they might only do 0-2 percent, sometimes even falling below zero. But India is expected to stay comfortably above 6 percent. In other words, the IMF is counting on India to lead global growth for a long time to come.

India became the 5th largest economy in 2021 itself

When India became the world’s 5th largest economy this year, there was a lot of cheer all around. But as it now turns out, these celebrations were a bit delayed. The latest data show that India had become the 5th largest economy in 2021 itself. India’s GDP in 2021 was estimated at $3.15 trillion. This was ahead of the UK at $3.12 trillion, and France at $2.96 trillion. 

This means that beyond a doubt, the last 10 years have been the most successful for India since independence. The Nehruvian style command economy adopted in the early years knocked India down from 6th largest economy in 1950 to only 12th largest by 1991. Things changed remarkably after 1991. But it was still slow progress up the world economic ranks. From 12th in 1991 to merely 10th in 2014. And now, India has jumped 5 ranks in just 7 years. 

The only question now is this. How soon can India jump two more places and reach the 3rd position? The IMF expects that India will become 4th largest in 2026, ahead of Japan. And then 3rd largest by 2027, overtaking Germany. 

Inflation in India to stay under control, around 4 percent

In the last several years, one thing that India has always done well is manage inflation. For inflation, the ‘comfort zone’ of the RBI is around 6 percent. This is entirely reasonable for a developing economy like India. The IMF projects that India will do even better, with inflation around 4-4.5 percent during each of the next five years.

During the recovery from the pandemic, much of the western world went through a wave of inflation. In the US, it soared at times above 9 percent, and above 10 percent in the UK. For any developed economy, such numbers are shocking. But in India, inflation never went beyond the 6-7 percent range. Further, the gamble with high inflation did not pay off for the West. In 2021, their economies did recover from the shock of 2020, but they lost steam in 2022 and 2023. GDP growth crashed to around 2 percent, and many countries went into recession. India has managed to keep inflation low, and still hold on to high growth. 

India’s $5 trillion goal is essentially on target

Of course, it is not just the global ranking of the GDP that matters, but also its absolute size. In this respect, India in 2019 had set an ambitious target of achieving $5 trillion in GDP in the next five years. But that target had been set before the pandemic. 

What happened then to the $5 trillion goal? The IMF says that India will reach this milestone by 2026. Or $4.95 trillion by 2026, if you would like to be exact. Like the rest of the world, India lost two years to the pandemic. But India bounced back strongly, and did not let things slip any further. In fact, with the $5 trillion goal now in sight, there is a new buzz about $7 trillion. First there were officials at J P Morgan, who talked of $7 trillion by 2030. A more precise number came from S&P Global Intelligence the other day, that of $7.3 trillion by 2030. Indeed, if India reaches the $5 trillion target by 2026 as predicted, a further increase to $7 trillion by 2030 seems well within reach.

The gap between India and China is finally reducing a little bit

In the geopolitical great game between India and China, the biggest headache for India is the much bigger size of China’s economy. In the 2000s and early 2010s, India did well. But China grew much faster, leaving India far behind. In 2004, India’s economy was 37 percent of that of China. By 2014, this had shrunk to just 19 percent! In other words, relative to China, India’s economy had been nearly cut in half. This was also the period when India’s economy was surpassed by Brazil and Russia, leaving India as the smallest economy among the BRIC countries.

Since then, India has managed to stop the decline. And get back a little bit of lost ground. The Indian economy is now up to 21 percent of that of China. Over the next five years, the IMF expects that India will consistently grow above 6 percent, while China will be stuck in the 3-5 percent range. If these projections hold, India’s economic size relative to China will grow to 25 percent by 2028. Still a huge gap. For India, this is a time for bold economic decisions.  

India has no room for getting complacent

As India has gone up the global GDP ranks in the last few years, some dangerous myths have been floating around. Some people say India just got lucky. Others say that India’s rise is inevitable. It will continue no matter what decisions we make as a nation. Clearly, these people do not understand the importance of hard work and good policymaking. Nor do they realize how difficult it is to rise to the top and keep going. Look at Japan. There was a time in the 1980s when people thought they would replace the United States as the world’s largest economy. But that never happened. Instead, China pushed them down to the 3rd position. This year, the IMF says that Germany’s economy has also overtaken Japan.

So you cannot take anything for granted. Especially not with an ever more powerful China to the north. India is doing extremely well, for now. But India will need years of good economic decisions and the right leadership in order to complete our rise to the top. As with any democracy, our fate is in the hands of our people.

Hatred of Jews:Anti-Semitism under Christianity, Islam & Communism, and what Indians can learn

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Vijita Singh Aggarwal, appeared in News18 here.

“In practice, the Hindu is certainly not tolerant and is more narrow minded than almost any other person in any other country except the Jew.” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote this in a letter to K N Katju on November 17, 1953. We are not surprised by Nehru’s outburst against Hindus. But why the dislike for Jews? The Jewish minority in India  is too tiny to cause such strong feelings. They must have been imported from somewhere. Nehru’s close associates like V K Krishna Menon were even more vicious. In a speech in Cairo in 1965, Menon told the Arabs not to throw the Jews into the sea. Because throwing the Jews into the sea would make it polluted.

From where did they learn this intense hatred? We are still watching the reactions to the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas in southern Israel. See the crowds bursting crackers in Toronto, New York and Sydney. These are dressed up as “Free Palestine” rallies. But their obvious aim is to celebrate the death of over 1200 Israelis. Outside the opera house in Sydney, the crowd raised chants of “Gas the Jews.” How is that a slogan for a free Palestine?

Here is a basic question. Are the Jews occupying anyone’s land? Why are the Jews even in Israel? Because they were oppressed and forced out of everywhere else. Quite literally so. In 1938, the countries of the world got together and had a meeting on the shores of Lake Evian in France. Everyone refused to take the Jews. America made a couple of concessions but did little. Canada said no. All the countries of Europe and South America said no. Australia said they were a white country and did not want to import a racial problem. The Communist USSR did not participate in the meeting, but refused to take in any Jews either. The Jews were on their own, left to die at the hands of Adolf Hitler.

The biggest religion in the world is Christianity, with nearly 2.4 billion followers. Next comes Islam, with roughly 2 billion. Another 1.5 billion people live in Communist states. These three forces do not agree with each other a whole lot. Except that each one of them has spent several centuries persecuting and trying to wipe out the Jews. Mind you that the number of Jews has never been more than 15 million. But there are 1.2 billion Hindus. One might ask how the struggles of the Hindus could be similar to those of the Jews. To understand this, we must look into the history of anti-Semitism. Here is an explainer.

Anti-Semitism in the Christian world

When talking about  anti-Semitism, the first name that comes to mind is Adolf Hitler. But where did the Nazis get the idea of packing the Jews into ghettos? For over 300 years, the Popes had ordered the Jews to be kept in a ghetto in the heart of Rome. The Jews would be locked in each night. Even water was scarce. The Popes also ordered the Jews to wear yellow hats, so that the Christian population would know not to mix with them. This is where the Nazis got the idea of making the Jews wear the infamous yellow star.

After the Italian state took over Rome in 1870, the Jewish ghetto was gradually abolished. But some fifty years later, the Italian state was seized by Mussolini’s fascists. The fascists secured the support of the church by giving back control of Vatican City to the Pope, and bringing strict anti-Jewish laws. The 1930s and 1940s saw a wave of anti-Semitism across Europe. After the Catholic Party voted for Hitler to become dictator of Germany in 1933, the Vatican quickly signed an accord with the Nazi regime. A network of fascist states came up on the continent, with close ties to the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime: Petain in France, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal and Tiso in Slovakia. Many of these regimes survived the Second World War, and lasted well into the 1960s and 1970s, such as in Spain and Portugal.

Did the Church know everything about Nazi atrocities against the Jews? The Vatican archives on this were opened only in 2020, and the answer is a clear yes. But this had always been obvious. In one particularly infamous incident, the Nazi government rounded up some 1200 Jews in Rome in 1943 and held them in a building next to the Vatican. After two days, they were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Only 16 of them survived.

It should be noted that the Nazis and the Church had their differences. The Nazis were obsessed with the racial origin of the Jews. The Church focused on their religious conversion. But the end result of both was the same – more oppression of the Jews. During the holocaust, many Jewish parents had left their babies with Christian neighbors and local churches, in a desperate effort to save their lives. After the war, the Church decided that these Jewish babies were converts to Christianity, and refused to give them back to their families. In fact, it was not until 1993 that the Vatican finally recognized the State of Israel. 

Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world

You might wonder. If the Jews were persecuted in Europe, does it give them the right to take Arab land? On the internet, you must have seen that animated map of Israel since 1948. It seems to show Israel grabbing more and more land, leaving nothing for the Palestinians. That animated map is simply everywhere. Because that map is propaganda. It does not tell you that the Arab countries forced their Jewish populations to escape to Israel.

Once upon a time, Egypt had 80,000 Jews. At last count in 2022, there were just 3 Jews left in the country. Where were all the others supposed to go? Similarly, Iraq used to have 150,000 Jews. Today they have less than 5. Algeria used to have 150,000 Jews, today they have less than 200. Morocco used to have 300,000 Jews, today they have only 5000. Libya used to have 20,000 Jews, today they have none.

In fact, after the Second World War, the Arab world became a safe haven for Nazi officials escaping punishment in Germany. The Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt had secretly cooperated with the Germans during the war. After the war, Egypt also became the base for Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem who had recruited Bosnian Muslims to fight for Hitler. In the 1950s, Nasser became president of Egypt and ruled for nearly 15 years. Nasser was a holocaust denier. His successor Anwar Sadat had been imprisoned by the British for being a Nazi collaborator during the war. Worse, people like Nasser had much prestige in the 1950s and 1960s as leaders of the developing world. Nasser also enjoyed close ties with India. This is where the Nehruvians might have picked up some of their anti-Semitism. 

Anti-Semitism in the Communist world

In September 1970, the world watched in horror as terrorists blew up three planes side by side at Dawson’s Field airport in Jordan. The hijackers were from a terrorist group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Unlike what one might guess at first, the PFLP was not a radical Islamist group. It was a Marxist-Leninist group, led by a man from a Christian background. His name was George Habash. In fact, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) pays tributes to this individual even today.

The relationship between Communism and Jews has always been full of ironies. In the Christian world, they often worried that Communism was a “Jewish plot.” But the Communists also worried that there was a global Jewish plot against them! They used to call it “Jewish cosmopolitanism.” In the 1950s, the Communists held show trials in Czechoslovakia against supposed “cosmopolitans” and executed all of them.  On his part, Stalin had got rid of his Jewish ministers in 1939, because he was courting Hitler at the time for a military alliance. But the alliance between Nazism and Communism broke in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin then allowed the setting up of a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). But as soon as the war ended, his anti-Semitic impulses returned. Stalin dismantled the JAC and began a full scale crackdown on the Jews. In fact, Soviet spies used a public appearance by the new Israeli ambassador Golda Meir in Moscow to track down supposed “cosmopolitans” within the crowds. By 1953, the Communist leadership was in a state of panic, believing that Jewish doctors were out to poison them all. The terms “cosmopolitanist” and “globalist” are often used as dog whistles for anti-Semitism even today. 

Interestingly, the anti-Semitism of Communists has roots in Marxist theory itself. Technically, the Marxists reject all religions. But Marx himself believed in the stereotype of the Jew as greedy and self interested. “Money is the jealous God of Israel,” he wrote in a viciously anti-Semitic essay that he called “On the Jewish question.” And Marx believed that his ideas would create a world free of greed – and the power of the Jews.

What can Hindus learn from the history of anti-Semitism?

Karl Marx was from a Jewish background. But he held anti-Semitic views. This would not surprise Indian Hindus. Much of India’s intellectual class is from a Hindu background, but still rabidly anti-Hindu. But the similarities between Hinduphobia and anti-Semitism do not end there. The world does not like to talk about what happened (and is happening) to Hindus in say Pakistan or Bangladesh. Just like they do not talk about the Jews who have been forced out of everywhere else in the Middle East. Generations of persecution led many prominent Jewish intellectuals to reject their identity and agree with stereotypes forced on them. Hindus must be careful not to fall into a similar trap.

Much of Hindu intelligentsia balk at public displays of Hindu identity. It is not uncommon for any outward displays of Hinduism such as a Tika or Mouli to be seen as distrustful or even mocked. It is no surprise that most research on Hinduism coming from major international institutions is on regressive acts such as Sati. Or that the Harappan language has not received enough interest and funding to be decoded. The popular cultural perception is that Hindus are regressive and superstitious. This propaganda has been very effective in making Hindus reject their own identity rather than see it for the attack that it is.

Because Hindus have been so cut off from their identity, it becomes difficult to highlight injustices against them. Hindus have been persecuted in Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Indonesia. However, the larger Hindu population in India has never taken a strong stance against these crimes. One could say that this is because of internalized Hinduphobia. Similar to what Marx may have experienced, making him want to hate his own heritage.

Over centuries of oppression, the Jews have learned that to have long lasting change, there must be swift and collective action against any form of anti-Semitism. They are vocal against anti-Semitic tropes online. In real life, they act by means of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. A recent example of this collective action was when Free Palestine rallies at Harvard turned into anti-Semitic marches. Organizers of such activities were publicly shamed.  Students who participated lost job offers and scholarships.

Such collective action stops injustices from going unnoticed. Hindus must learn from this. But this cannot happen until Hindus acknowledge and accept their own identity. Much like Israel, India is often the target of genocidal hatred. Much like the Jews, the Hindus are faced with prejudice and damaging stereotypes. We must learn to recognize them when we see them. And to act against them every single time. 

The little known fascist roots of the Trudeau political dynasty in Canada

A lightly edited version of this post, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared on News18 here.

So the Indian government largely ignored the Canadian Prime Minister at the G20 meeting in New Delhi. And we Indians did make fun of him on social media. We admit that. A mature leader would have just brushed it off and gone home. And hired a better maintenance team for his official aircraft. So that he does not get stranded at international gatherings, after the party has ended and everyone has left. 

Unfortunately, Canada does not have such a leader. Instead, they have Justin Trudeau. So he goes home and accuses India of killing a Khalistani terrorist on Canadian soil. It turns into a huge diplomatic crisis. Of course, he cannot get any of Canada’s traditional allies to take his side. So Justin Trudeau is stranded, again. We wish it would be just as funny. But this time, it is not.

So why is Justin Trudeau supporting Khalistani terrorists? One reason is that he wants the extremist Sikh vote in Canada. His father Pierre Trudeau, also a Prime Minister of Canada, had protected the man who became the mastermind of the Air India Kanishka bombings. That cost 329 lives. But the crimes of the Trudeau political dynasty do not end there. One of the lesser known facts is how they were involved with some of the darkest chapters of history.

So why was Pierre Trudeau a member of an underground fascist society at the time of the Second World War? Why did he aspire to lead a ‘national revolution’ to create a breakaway state from Canada? A state that would be set up according to the ideals of Hitler and Mussolini. And why is there a painting of Mussolini even today at the Catholic Church in Montreal? That is the home ground of the Trudeaus. 

The first part of the answer relates to what was happening in France in the 1940s. The Trudeaus are from Quebec, descendants of French speaking colonizers in Canada. France gave up the province to the larger British controlled territories in North America in 1763. But its people kept close ties with the politics and culture of France. In June 1940, France signed an armistice with Nazi Germany after just six weeks of fighting. A new government was set up under Marshal Petain, a hero of France from the First World War. Petain set about creating a ‘national revolution’ in France, similar to what had happened in Italy under Mussolini. And in Germany under Hitler. This was exactly the aim of the fascist society that Pierre Trudeau set up in Canada. At the time, the French empire covered much of northern and equatorial Africa. It stretched across the Indian Ocean, from Cambodia in the east to Madagascar in the west. Most French colonists around the world rallied in favor of the pro-Nazi government of Marshal Petain. So did Pierre Trudeau.

The second part of this relates to religion. The French and the Italians are Catholics, while the British are not. Since the 1920s, the Catholic Church had backed the fascist movement in Italy. In 1929, Mussolini gave the Pope control over Vatican City. In return, the Pope referred to Mussolini as a messenger of God. In 1933, the Catholic Party voted for Hitler to become dictator of Germany. Soon after, the Vatican signed a deal with the Nazi government. The Pope endorsed Italy’s genocidal war in Ethiopia in 1935, in which over 150,000 were killed. The Church also became the driving force behind the wave of anti-Jewish laws in Europe in the 1930s. When Petain formed a pro-Nazi government in France in 1940, the Pope congratulated him for the “fortunate revival of religious life” in that country. The Catholic Church in Quebec took a similar approach.

And so it was that Pierre Trudeau and his associates wanted to form a breakaway state that would be Catholic, French and authoritarian. They called themselves “The X.” Or in French, “Les X,” or simply LX. The manifesto of LX began with a call for national revolution. The words were chosen to be the same as those of Petain in France, calling for a nation that would be purged of Jews. The next point in the manifesto was for the nation to be “Catholic and French.” Democracy would be abolished. Instead, the authoritarian state would guarantee freedoms of the people. This may sound bizarre. But that is how the Church saw it back then. Trudeau’s manifesto ended with the words “God approves.”

Armed with this manifesto, Pierre Trudeau set out gathering members for his underground organization LX. They made detailed plans for the overthrow of the government, the capture of police and fire stations. All in waiting for the day when the fascist movement would reach Canadian shores. At his peak in 1942, Trudeau made passionate speeches against those recruiting soldiers for the war against Nazi Germany. They were traitors, Trudeau said. And they would have to be impaled alive.

Only in 1944 did Trudeau begin to tone down his rhetoric. By then, the war had turned decisively against Nazi Germany. The Americans had landed in France. They had dismissed the Petain government. It was time for Trudeau and his band of fascists to give up their plans. And join the winning side. In fact, Trudeau himself moved to the United States around this time.

One would have to wonder here. Why did their history not hurt the Trudeaus politically? Because it is about who writes history. Most of these details about Pierre Trudeau came out only in 2006. It was in a biography published by Max and Monique Nemni, retired historians from the University of Laval in Canada. In other words, the story of Pierre Trudeau’s fascist past remained hidden until well after his death. But the collaboration between the Catholic Church and Mussolini’s fascists had always been well known. So were the attitudes of the pro-Nazi Petain regime in France. And its sympathizers among French colonists around the world. That includes Quebec in the 1940s. Pierre Trudeau was a member of the Quebec political elite, known for its support of fascism at the time. But nobody ever wanted to know more about Pierre Trudeau’s fascist links. Even after the 2006 biography appeared.

Why? Because it does not fit the narrative. The Trudeau political dynasty are liberal icons. Looking into their past would make powerful people uncomfortable. And so, the media obeys. The so-called historians obey. Because history is a weapon. Words like “fascist” have become weapons. They are used as labels against anyone that liberals do not like. 

When the West talks to us today, we Indians need to remember this always. Today they throw all sorts of accusations at India. One should remember that they do not just speak through official channels. They also speak through puppets in the media, think tanks, NGOs and academia. Sometimes they say that India has less academic freedom than Taliban ruled Afghanistan. Sometimes that India is more dangerous for journalists than North Korea. It does not have to make sense. They called India an ‘electoral autocracy.’ What does that even mean? Nothing. And it does not matter. Now, Justin Trudeau makes even more wild allegations against India. 

Why are they so angry with us? Because the new India will not give in. Whether it be the war in Ukraine, or dealing with Khalistani terrorists. The new India will never give up on its interests.