Narayana Murthy is being used: Trap of Hinduphobia and anti-Modi campaigns
The hoax has just gotten bigger.
It is one thing for writers and activists to protest. It is their professional predilection. They take chances and leap of cliffs. If they were right, they stir consciences. If they were wrong, they are forgotten. Not much worse for that.
But when what we might call "real world" people like CEOs and tech leaders take leave of reality and jump off the cliff, they have the potential to drag whole nations and civilisations down with them. That is why I have to offer these few words by way of a reality check to Mr Narayana Murthy, a respected citizen who has started to sound like a campus radical in his ill-informed pronouncements about gloom and doom in India.
I do not mean to single out Mr Narayana Murthy for this phenomenon, though he does represent one of its most prominent faces. I have seen this trend unfolding for several years now in India and abroad, where senior tech and management figures either with good intentions or out of boredom perhaps, decide to start playing campus radical in their later years. I also don't mean to judge them individually, but it is important to understand the broader context of the mainstreaming of "dissent" in India and the diaspora, and how a supposedly marginal and critical view has become a dominant one in academia, media, and increasingly in civil society too.
First, we must remember that there was a time when campus radicals, writers, and activists did not have a toe-hold of support in mainstream society, and in my idealistic youth I often thought it regrettable too. I recall a time two decades ago when a South Asian documentary filmmaker visited an American campus to screen his movie on Ayodhya. His supporters, mostly from the humanities and social sciences, were outnumbered by his critics, mostly from engineering and management, at least three times over. Today, the situation might well be different, and we need to understand why that is not healthy for democracy and for India.
As I have written earlier, it is mostly the techies and scientists, the people who the custodians of development and progress predicted would leave religion and tradition behind, who have kept a relatively sane view of India and Hindu civilisation alive today. The professional poets, artists, and humanities experts, who ought have been doing the same thing, on the other hand became part of a virulent tide of Hinduphobia, a phenomenon that is raging with its dying breath against a new India that is fighting not some enlightenment idea of tolerance but its opposite; a fraud of egregious proportions that conceals or condones every form of violence against India except the historically rare instance of a Hindu-perpetrated one.
This process by which South Asian radicalism gained mainstream influence needs to be understood accurately. Since the 1990s, this discourse has captured the minds of a large number of Indian middle classes and elites with liberal intentions, or illusions, as the case may be. The strange thing is that this happened not because the radicals engaged with the middle classes respectfully or fairly, but only because they were rewarded for their growing Hinduphobia with ever increasing resources and media access. The reasons for this are simple. From 2004-14, they fancifully made themselves out to be part of some heroic resistance against intolerance embodied in the form of a chief minister of one state in India from an opposition party, even as they reaped the benefits of proximity to a ruling party at the centre that rewarded them handsomely with privileged positions.
Normally, one might have excused the radicals and writers even that. A society that rewards only techies and MBAs and not writers and artists can lose its way easily. But what was inexcusable was the sheer denial of the systemic targeting of India and Hinduism by global forces of terrorist violence by these supposed defenders of non-violence and the Gandhian way. It was a most bizarre phenomenon, though one not unknown to Hindu activists of an earlier time too. The supposed critics of the supposedly rising Hindu fundamentalism were shamelessly in bed with other fundamentalisms with far more devastating track records in world history; and more importantly, with no sign of their having changed or abandoned their cruel and coercive projects to this day.
And it was not just organisational or financial co-optation, but a deeply ideological one too. An effective echo-chamber has now been created in the world of the supposedly liberal Indian middle classes. I recall a participant at a seminar in the US once, a young American who had visited India, rising to counter me when I had said "Hindu nationalism" was a more accurate and less sensationalistic term than the loosely dramatic "Hindu fundamentalism." She rattled off a list of points in an alarming tone about Hindutva almost as if she had memorised it (something along the lines of Nazis, Gandhi-assassins, armed and dangerous, prepared to use violence against Muslims and Christians…) A few weeks later, I read exactly the same list being delivered by a British parliamentarian in a news report in an Indian magazine in America. And of course, we have heard the same bullet-point analysis of supposed Hindu intolerance on our own English news studios from retired generals from other nations joining us in a spirit of good neighbourliness.
The truth is that academia and activism have been co-opted by forces deeply antithetical to the idealism with which many bright and dedicated people give up careers in engineering and medicine to pursue their "let's change the world" dreams. However, I do not see the potential for people in these fields to rise up and challenge the status quo just yet. Why should they? They are being rewarded profoundly for their delusions not only by governments and funding agencies, but increasingly by corporate benefactors who probably have no clue they are all being had. I have seen this in America too, quite a bit. Wealthy Indian tech entrepreneurs and philanthropists, perhaps tired of the same old plutocratic company and conversation they are used to, now enjoy hanging out with the geniuses of the South Asian paradigm. They fund faculty positions and offer support for mediocre minds who regurgitate the same bullet point analysis of India and Hinduism that gets flashed around from Islamabad to London to New York and back to New Delhi apparently. And when less wealthy members of the Indian diaspora, the thousands of middle class fathers and mothers working at mid or entry level positions, give up their savings to somehow fight Hinduphobia, they get branded as you know what. The view from the hills where millions and billions nest is different from those of the modest suburbs in America where temples, devotion, and a love for fellow human beings and for India is much more pronounced. From those rarefied heights of privilege, it's all like the radicals and the new radical-supporting plutocrats think it is; "those Hindus are going to their madrasas called Chinmaya Bala Vihars to foment intolerance against minorities" (that was an actual statement I heard from the radical chic South Asian jet set by the way).
The reality of privilege and marginalisation is this. Increasingly, the wealthy elites of not just New Delhi, but also of Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Silicon Valley have become a part of this bizarre cult of supposed subalternhood. I know hedge-fund managers who love the AAP and hate Modi. I have met good techies gone wrong with too many misguided aspirations of knowing better than other techies. And now I have seen Mr Narayana Murthy take off on the same propaganda that is going around now about some wave of intolerance that really has at its core, however reprehensible, three deaths in a nation of over one billion people; and none of them connected to or even condoned by the ruling party.
If leaders of commerce like Mr Narayana Murthy really do want to get into this field, then I respectfully urge them not to cease their education at the level of a bunch of clichés from the South Asianist propaganda machine just because it is dressed up in Ivy League paraphernalia (funded often by well meaning people like him clueless about what academic politics is doing to the people of India who just happen to end up at the dying end of bomb blasts and terror attacks). They need to understand, for one thing, that the disciplines of history, politics, religion, and cultural studies are very different from the sciences and technology. Just because today's experts on Hinduism in Ivy League universities say something about Hindus or India, it does not mean it is true at all; a university's computer engineering program may be cutting edge, but that doesn't mean that the same university's South Asian studies programme is current in its thinking at all.
On the contrary, as I have written in Rearming Hinduism, the entire paradigm of Hinduism and South Asian studies is in need of a critical overhaul. It is stuck in the 19th century, and it is using 19th century frameworks to advance its claims about intolerance and Hindu majoritarianism and the like today. If Mr Murthy is reading this I will say this, as I have said to many entrepreneurs like him who have unwittingly waded into the poison ivy league of academic activism: You are being used, and the modern, civil, tolerant India that you are dreaming of won't last a day if you don't urge your academic companions, whoever they are, to introspect, and get beyond their old racist clichés they peddle as knowledge. Or, to put it in the terminology of your profession, sir, you should understand that academia is currently being debugged. And you, so far, have been on the wrong side of it.