Muslim Testimonies: The Plight of Women in Islam – Virendra Parekh

August 11, 2026August 12, 2026VOI

That Muhammad, founder of Islam, was a progressive reformer for his times and his teachings improved the lot of Arab women is a fashionable belief in many elite circles in non-Muslim countries. Shruti Anerao in a recent book, Muslim Women: Through the Prism of Muslim Scholars, examines its veracity in the light of writings of Muslim scholars, which point to the opposite conclusion: Islam regards women as inherently inferior to men, and taking advantage of its injunctions they are ill-treated, oppressed and exploited in ways beyond the imagination of average non-Muslims. Each of these scholars was born of Muslim parents and brought up in accordance with Islamic tradition in an almost wholly Muslim society. No outside influence shaped their perception until they came of age and began to doubt the justice and humanity of what was going on around them. They write from direct first-hand knowledge of Islam and Muslim society.

It is nearly impossible for non-Muslims, especially Hindus, to understand the powerful influence that religion exercises on Muslims. In the Indic traditions, religious books are part of an individual’s cultural heritage and exist to guide him in his moral and spiritual quest. In Islam, religious books exist to command and control every aspect of man’s life, spiritual and material, on promise of eternal pleasures of the heaven or everlasting pain of the hell hereafter. The Quran remains for all Muslims, not just traditionalists, the uncreated word of God Himself. It is valid for all times and places for the whole of the mankind; its ideas are absolutely true and beyond criticism. To question it is to question the very word of God and hence blasphemous. A Muslim’s duty is to believe it and obey its commands. This explains the hold of Ulemas on the Muslim society as interpreters of the Quran and custodians of its knowledge and traditions. It also explains the enormity of the task facing reformers: Any question about a dogma, any talk of reform can quickly be portrayed as questioning the word of God, punishable with terrible consequences. Indeed, from the early eighth century to our own times, this has been the fate of many who just raised a question. Shruti Anerao’s book has to be viewed in this light.

From the horse’s mouth

Wafa Sultan, the Syrian lady doctor and author of A God Who Hates, says that Muslims hate their women because their God does. Her grandfather held her grandmother responsible for the disgrace of not having a son. So, he forced the woman who bore him five children to find for him a beautiful girl to marry. After the wedding, the poor lady was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home. As a medical student at Aleppo University, Wafa stayed with the family of her brother’s friend, Ahmed and Huda. She often wondered how Huda, a very beautiful woman with green eyes, pink skin and blond hair selected such a short husband with a pendulous belly and skinny limbs. Huda shared her experience of their first night. “When he came into her room, she began to shudder. The wedding guests were all waiting outside the door for the proof of her virginity. The bridegroom swooped upon her like an animal and emerged from the room a few minutes later with a piece of cloth.”

As a medical student and later as a practitioner, Wafa came in direct contact with women from a large cross section of society. She could sense the fear in their eyes. Once she won their confidence, horrendous stories of their sexual exploitation tumbled out. Many had been raped, most by male members of their family, usually the fathers, brothers or in-laws. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of the rape were killed, in most cases by the rapist himself to keep the scandal from spreading. No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate; witnesses were sufficient.

A shocking aspect of this grim reality was that the victims could not expect sympathy from any quarter. A woman came to Wafa’s department with many circular burns the size of a small coin on her thighs and abdomen. Answering the doctor she said her husband used to stub out his cigarettes on her body “to punish her for being stupid.” The male doctor—repeat, doctor—laughed and said, “You must deserve it, he wouldn’t do it if you weren’t stupid!” Fatima, a thirty-year old widow was diagnosed with a three-month pregnancy. She had four children when her husband died five years ago. Her brother-in-law was raping her every day as he fed the family since the death of his brother.

Fatima implored the doctor to end her pregnancy anyhow as “my son would kill me if he knew about it.” The doctor performed the operation without anaesthesia as she did not have enough money to pay. The operation was extremely painful and she nearly died while undergoing it. But the doctor would not forgo even a small part of his fee.

Amal, a doctor, ran to an eye hospital with chemical burns in her eyes and on the face. First she said it was boiling water that caused the burns, but later she confided the bitter truth to her friend. Amal’s brother, fifteen years younger than her, had poured a fuel bucket on her face when she insisted on going out without his permission. Her mother, when told about the incident, chided Amal, “You got what you deserved. I have warned you more than once about going against your brother’s wishes. Now you know.” Even if a woman is educated, mature and capable of taking her own decisions, she is not allowed to do so.

If you thought that this picture is confined to some countries or some sections of the society, think again. Jean Sasson in her trilogy comprising Princess: A True Story, Princess Sultana’s Daugthers and Princess Sultana’s Circle, unveiled how even women of royal family lived a life of isolation, loneliness and humiliation in an authoritarian and patriarchal society. Sultana was a Saudi princess born to uncountable wealth.

Tahmina Durrani, the wife of the powerful Pakistani politician Mustafa Khar, right hand man of Zulfikar Ali Butto, was born in an influential family and lived in high society. In her autobiographical book My Feudal Lord, she describes her childhood. “Apart from my father, brother and a few close relatives, men were alien creatures, and from my earliest moments I was trained to avoid them. My childhood was encumbered by a lengthy list of don’ts, all designed to maintain an inviolable distance between myself and the masculine world: never wear makeup or nail polish. Do not look at boys. Avoid modern girlfriends and avoid any girlfriend who has an elder brother. Never visit a friend without special permission and without your nanny. Never pick up the phone. Never go out alone with the driver. Never stand around the kitchen with male servants.”

Compliance with this code of conduct, however, did not get her a happy married life. Tahmina had left her husband and a daughter to marry Mustafa. The reward: Mustafa scolded her every time she remembered her child and missed it. When her political fortunes were down, Mustafa would take it out on servants and wives. In a month of Ramzan, the servant was five minutes late in bringing the food. Mustafa beat him until he was unconscious. Then came Tahmina’s turn, who was then pregnant. Mustafa questioned her as if she were a criminal and a liar. No answer would satisfy him. “Suddenly, he threw me down on the bed and jumped on me. Sitting astride my belly, he slapped me repeatedly with his open palm, forehand and backhand, … he pulled my hair, thrusting my head from side to side, … suddenly, he leaped off me. One hand clutched my long braided hair and jerked me off the bed and onto the floor, … he threw me against a wall, picked me up and threw me against another again and again. Something burst in my ears, I felt an agonising pain in my eyes. Something split. Something swelled. Then the pain merged into a deep sense of agony….”

We have described this heartrending incident somewhat in detail, because it is not an isolated incident. Merciless beating of women by their husbands and other relatives is a common occurrence because it is rooted in beliefs and attitudes inculcated relentlessly across centuries and geographies.

Even worse is the contempt in which girl children are held, total control exercised on every aspect of a woman’s life by persons other than herself and a complete obedience routinely expected from her in everything. It is meant to snuff out any spark of freethinking, any chance of scepticism and any possibility of rebellion. When Wafa Sultan shouted at a mullah in a TV debate, “Be quiet! It is may turn!” it sent shockwaves across the countries. How can a woman dare shout at a man?

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian American political scientist in his book, A God That Hates Women, tells us that in his family girls were considered “the most difficult of burdens and most worthless things.” In Syria, Iraq and other countries of West Asia, the role of a woman, determined on the basis of religious books, is mostly limited to taking care of home, husband, family and bearing and rearing children. Education beyond elementary level is a waste of time, a dispensable luxury. Dr. Rafizadeh’s mother secured high grades in school, but her mother declared one day that she would not be going to the school from the next day. As she put it, “Why should you keep studying if you are eventually going to stay at home? You are meant to wash asses of your children, to clean, cook and take care of your family. Girls are born to stay at home and please their men.”

Even here, a girl cannot expect to select a suitable match. He would be chosen for her by others, usually elder males in the family. Amira, Majid’s mother, was compelled to marry a 39-year-old man, 24 years older than her. On the night of her marriage, she was forced to follow his wish to consummate the marriage. As Tahmina Durrani puts it, “The common belief is that a woman is an instrument of man’s carnal pleasure; if the woman ever indicated that she felt pleasure (in sexual relations), she is a potential adulteress and not to be trusted; to think independently is a crime that he has a right to punish.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali says in her book, Infidel, that in her childhood she was taught to be an ideal wife, a barri (pure, chaste). Among other things, “If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. … If you long for love and comfort, you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable.”

What the Book says

Remarkably, every perpetrator of atrocities justified them by invoking commands of Allah in the Quran and precept and practice of the prophet in the Hadith. Like many feminists from this part of the world, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali initially attributed this mind-set and conduct to a misinterpretation of Islam and teachings of the Prophet. However, when they managed to learn Islam from the original sources through authentic translations, they were forced to change their opinion.

Ibn Warraq, a Muslim of Pakistani origin and author of a highly scholarly work, Why I am not a Muslim, had no such illusions. He quotes chapter and verse from the Quran and Hadith to show that Islam is deeply anti-feminist. Islam is the fundamental cause of repression of Muslim women and remains the major obstacle to the evolution of their position. Islam has always considered woman as an inferior creature in every way: physically, intellectually and morally. This negative vision is divinely sanctioned by the Quran, corroborated by hadiths (anecdotes of the Prophet) and perpetuated by commentaries of theologians, custodians of Muslim dogma and ignorance.

Islam regards woman essentially as a sex object created by God for the pleasure of man. It looks upon woman physically, even nakedly. The primary meaning of the word aurat is female genital organ and that of nikah is coitus. The Quran says “Your wives are your fields, so go and plough into your fields whichever way you like” (Surah 2.223)

Islam adopted the legend of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament and adapted it in its own fashion. Quran (4.1 and 7.189) says that the Allah created mankind from a single soul and therefrom he created its mate. From these, Muslim theologians have concluded that man was the original creation—womankind was created secondarily and for the repose of man. The rest follows from this. “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend their property (for the support of women). So, good are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart; and scourge (beat) them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.” (Quran 4.34). No wonder, under Shariat, a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man and a daughter’s share in parent’s legacy is half that of a son. Islam explicitly forbids certain professions to women: head of state, head of the armed forces, imam, and judge.

Equally, in numerous hadiths on which are based Islamic laws, we learn of the woman’s role—to stay at home, to be at the beck and call of man, to obey him (which is a religious duty) and assure man a tranquil existence. “If it had been given me to order someone to prostrate themselves in front of someone other than God, I would surely have ordered women to prostrate themselves in front of their husbands,” says a hadith. Omar, the second caliph, said, “Prevent women from learning to write! Say no to their capricious ways.” Ali, the fourth caliph, said, “The entire woman is evil and what is worse is that it is a necessary evil.”

According to the famous and much revered philosopher Al-Ghalzali (1058-1111), whom professor Montgomery Watt describes as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, “She should stay at home and get on with spinning, she should not go out often, she must not be well informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbours and only visit them when absolutely necessary; she should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything; she must not leave her house without permission.…”

Wafa Sultan points out that in Islam, every relationship is essentially a power equation. The nature of relationship between God and Man in Islam is that between the ruler and his subject, master and slave, husband and wife, father and son. Woman is a property of man, a child is the property of his father, a slave is the property of his master and a labourer is a property of his employer, she says.

These injunctions are enforced with the threat of eternal punishment of burning in hell. In Muslim teaching, hell is intensely real and very close. You could feel the flames at any moment. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Infidel, describes how young minds are filled with fear of hell to mould them into resolute Muslims. “Quran lists hell’s torments in vivid details: sores, boiling water, unimaginably intense thirst, peeling of skin, burning of flesh, dissolving bowels, the everlasting fire that burns you forever because as flesh chars and your fluids boil you grow a new skin. You will go to hell unless you obey.” Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the foreword to Ayaan’s book says that, “Ayaan told me that she was not completely free of her repressive upbringing until she had lost all terror of hell.”

Contrast it with the condition of women in pre-Islamic Arabia. Khadija, the first wife of Mohammad, was a wealthy and successful merchant in Mecca, rode horse, hired Muhammad for her trade caravans and proposed marriage to him. The tenth-century Arab historian Al-Tabari, gives a vivid picture of the independence of aristocratic women before Islam. Women swore allegiance much as men, took part in negotiations with the new military chief of the city, i.e. Mohammad himself, and were often frankly hostile to the new religion, he says, in his account of Hint bint Otba, the wife of Abu Sufyan, the head of an aristocratic merchant of Mecca.

The cage and the way out

Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the psychological conditioning in Islamic culture with a cage and calls Muslims as prisoners suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. She exhorts intellectuals and rational Muslims to be like Voltaire and work for their own enlightenment. The power of reason and individual responsibility, she hopes, will free the minds of individual Muslims from the burden of the hereafter, the constant feeling of guilt and temptations of fundamentalism. They should learn to become responsible for their problems and the areas where they lag behind.

History tells us that authoritarian regimes based on fear and violence appear to be very strong from outside, e.g. the Church in the Middle Ages, Mao’s China, Brezhnev’s USSR. But their rigidity proves their undoing. They implode from within. Man’s yearning from freedom and the quest for truth cannot be suppressed for long, however great the fear.

Enlightenment is catching up with Islam also, slowly but surely. Despite efforts of Ulemas, many Muslim countries have made considerable progress in the fields of education and public life. Winds of change are blowing even in citadels of Islamic orthodoxy like Saudi Arabia. Women are certainly not tied down to their homes, husbands and children as much as the orthodox would want them to be. At the other end, thousands of people in most conservative countries are leaving Islam in droves. The process is greatly aided by the revolution in information and communication brought about by technology. Thought control is becoming virtually impossible. (Thought manipulation is a different thing altogether, of course.) Yet the ease with which the theocratic regime in Iran crushed the women’s movement for reforms, the way Taliban imposed Sharia rule in Afghanistan as recently as the last decade highlights the enormity of the task before reformers.

Shruti Anerao’s book is a must read for Hindu women who have long been easy targets of a massive and systematic love jihad. It explains the tragedy that befalls many Hindu women who marry Muslim men in the mistaken belief that “what happened to others will not happen to me. My Abdul is different.” This book will help them understand what to expect from a Muslim husband after the veneer of amiability wears off.

Muslim Women: Through the Prism of Muslim Scholars. Author: Shruti Anerao. Publishers: Akshaya Prakashan, New Delhi. First Edition: 2026. Pages: xxiii+175. Price Rs 395 (Amazon).

From Troy to Tehran, the Troyjan horse still shapes global politics – Kadira Pethiyagoda

August 10, 2026August 10, 2026VOI

The false promise tactic deployed at Troy, and which Odysseus regrets, mirrors one used by Western and Northern Europeans from the 15th century onwards to colonise the world. Although deception is inherently woven into warfare, the scale and systematic nature of colonial deception set it apart. – Dr. Kadira Pethiyagoda

The defining themes in Christopher Nolan’s new epic are trust and regret. The main character, Odysseus, regrets many things, but perhaps most overarching is his regret at the fundamental breach of trust that was the Trojan Horse. The Greeks exploited the trust of the Trojans in order to obtain a victory they were unable to win on the battlefield.

Matt Damon’s Odysseus laments this lie as helping to plunge the world into darkness, a mistake that may be made again in the distant future (differing from Homer’s original). Damon’s character was correct. Two and a half millennia later, Western and Northern Europeans would use deception as a key tool to dominate the world. The trust of indigenous civilisations and peoples would be breached over and over again in order to defeat and subjugate them—from the Spanish deceiving the Aztecs to the British surreptitiously taking control of Indian kingdoms they had promised to ally with.

Throughout the Odyssey film, we are told of Zeus’s law, xenia, the welcoming of strangers—an act underpinned by deep trust. Odysseus holds the principle of trust dear, even plucking his bow to warn prey when hunting. But the backstory to the Odyssey is one of deception. The Greeks told the Trojans that the enormous wooden horse they had left on the beach was an offering to the gods and a peace offering to the Trojans. The Trojans, presumably trusting that no one would cynically exploit sacred rituals, brought the horse inside their fortified gates. The Greeks, some of whom had been hiding in the horse, then proceeded to open Troy’s gates from the inside so that the city could be ransacked and the kingdom toppled.

Both the ancient Greeks and Trojans were Mediterranean, polytheistic peoples who interacted more with the civilisations of West Asia than they did with the tribes of Western and Northern Europe. The ancient Greeks engaged in more diplomatic, economic and cultural exchange with ancient India (e.g. Greco-Buddhist art) than with Bronze Age Britain. Nevertheless, the tactic deployed at Troy, and which Odysseus regrets, mirrors one used by Western and Northern Europeans from the 15th century onwards to colonise the world. Although deception is inherently woven into warfare, the scale and systematic nature of colonial deception set it apart.

In the 1500s, after landing in Central America, the Spanish conquistador Cortés pretended to be an ambassador sent by the world’s most powerful king to deliver greetings and establish trade. He knew the Aztecs would adhere to their codes of conduct, preventing them from attacking a peaceful envoy. The Aztec ruler Montezuma welcomed the Spaniards, lodging them in the palace of his late father. Within one week, they had taken Montezuma hostage inside the very same palace. Within one century, 56 million indigenous people had died as a result of European colonisation of the Americas.

Colonisers would go on to use several Trojan horse-style tactics. Merchants, surveyors and missionaries gathered strategic information before conquest. The Great Trigonometrical Survey mapped the Indian subcontinent, providing military and administrative knowledge. The British East India Company arrived in 1608 as a trading enterprise. By the late 18th century, it had become the dominant political power. The British often posed as allies of one South Asian kingdom in its struggles against another.

At Plassey, they secured the defection of Mir Jafar and other elites, defeating Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah. British troops presented themselves as providing ‘protection’ for local rulers, who ultimately ceded control over foreign policy, becoming effectively dependent. Under the guise of law, Governor-General James Broun-Ramsay, better known as Lord Dalhousie, invoked the Doctrine of Lapse to annex states such as Satara and Jhansi because adopted heirs were ‘unrecognised’. By the time they left, the Empire had extracted an estimated $64.82 trillion from the Indian subcontinent.

In Sri Lanka, unable to defeat the Kandyans in the First Kandyan War, the British posed as liberators to persuade local elites to turn against their king in the Second Kandyan War. They promised that their Buddhist religion, customs and domestic power would be protected—that nothing would change except that they would pledge allegiance to the British Crown. These promises were not kept. Within three years, dissatisfaction contributed to the Uva-Wellassa Rebellion, or Third Kandyan War, which the British suppressed with scorched-earth tactics: land confiscation, deportation of people, and widespread destruction of crops and villages.

Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British Crown increasingly justified imperial rule under the moral Trojan horses of ‘good government’ and the ‘civilising mission’. They painted themselves as the benevolent protector of India’s women from oppression via sati.

Today, covert action is often the preferred initial method of warfare by major powers. In the 20th century, many NGOs and media entities entered countries with apparent humanitarian agendas, only to act as Trojan horses for the foreign policy goals of the states that influence them. Prior to the Libya regime-change war, a foreign-educated researcher claimed that Gaddafi’s troops had been supplied with Viagra to undertake mass rape to justify intervention—something later found to be baseless. In India, the Centre for Policy Research had its foreign funding credentials revoked after allegations that funds had been used for ‘undesirable purposes’. Most recently, during peace negotiations, the US decapitated Iran’s leadership.

In the Odyssey film, Odysseus warns that the Trojan Horse tactic and the ensuing shattering of trust and xenia would lead to the end of the era of civilisation. In Game Theory’s Grim Trigger strategy, an initial betrayal of trust by one player triggers permanent mutual distrust and the restructuring of others’ behaviour. Today, theoretically honourable doctrines such as Responsibility to Protect have had their legitimacy permanently hobbled by deceptive intentions. Trust between states is non-existent.

However, the very fact that the world’s indigenous civilisations and peoples were often trusting enough to be deceived by such tactics demonstrates that another way of thinking may be possible—one that returns moral codes to the conduct of world affairs.

› Dr. Kadira Pethiyagoda is a former diplomat, political advisor and geopolitical strategist.

Priyanka Gandhi’s ‘gaumutra’ slur – Reverse the Gaze

August 6, 2026VOI

Both siblings of the Congress’ first family have been uttering openly mocking or borderline contemptuous anti-Hindu remarks for years now, revealing how Hinduphobia has become central to the party’s ideological core. As Congress’ reliance on Islamist, Christian, Marxist and neo-Ambedkarite fundamentalists has grown, and as its leadership surrounds itself with far-left radical voices, this hate for Hindus and their Dharma has crossed into dangerous territory. – Reverse the Gaze

When Priyanka Gandhi Vadra described the accomplished IIT Madras Director, Prof. V. Kamakoti, as a “gaumutra expert” on the floor of Parliament, it was not merely a throwaway insult. It revealed something deeper—a persistent strain of contempt within India’s secular political elite toward Hindu religious and civilizational identity, along with an impulse to judge and mock Hindus for the wide and diverse range of beliefs and practices that together constitute the Hindu tradition.

Let us examine what exactly is being mocked.

In the Hindu worldview, all life is interconnected and imbued with divinity. The cow is sacred in Hindu Dharma because it combines spiritual symbolism with practical, life-giving value, and its reverence is also deepened by its association with Bhagwan Krishna. Hindu tradition likewise extends reverence to other forms of life—for instance, snakes are worshipped during Nag Panchami, the blackbuck is considered sacred by the Bishnoi community—reflecting a worldview that sees the sacred in creation itself. Gomutra (cow urine), within this framework, has been used in certain Ayurvedic preparations and ritual contexts. One may debate its efficacy, but to reduce it to a slur is to dismiss an entire knowledge tradition without inquiry.

Prof. Kamakoti is not a fringe figure. He is a highly respected computer scientist who has contributed significantly to India’s technological capabilities, including leading the development of SHAKTI, India’s first indigenous industrial-grade microprocessor. He has approached the subject of cow urine’s medicinal properties through a scientist’s lens, citing peer-reviewed research and treating it as a matter for study. Around the world, scientists maintain personal faith alongside professional rigor. ISRO scientists visiting Tirupati mandir before launches is one familiar example. Spirituality and science, in the Dharmic tradition, have rarely been seen as mutually exclusive domains.

The deeper question is this: why are Hindu beliefs uniquely singled out for mockery?

Many older religions and indigenous belief systems across the world have long shared the Hindu reverence for specific animals and their byproducts. The cow’s sacred status transcends India; ancient Zoroastrians revered the animal, and Parsi rituals today still utilize sprinkled cow urine (nirang) for purification. Similarly, traditional African pastoralist communities, like the Maasai and Dinka, view cattle as sacred symbols of life and wealth. Beyond the bovine, indigenous peoples globally center their spirituality around animals, such as Native American tribes who revere the American bison as a sacred relative and provider, or Arctic Inuit who view the polar bear as a powerful spiritual guide.

This reverence frequently extends into traditional medicine, where global systems differ widely from modern biomedical norms by utilizing ingredients that outsiders might find unsettling. Traditional Chinese practices incorporate human feces and animal penises, while Arabic and Unani remedies involve camel urine and goat testicles. Indeed, as per an authentic Hadith (Sahih al-Bukhari), Islam’s Prophet prescribed camel urine and milk to a group of sick travelers—and in traditional Arab and Bedouin societies, camel urine is still consumed fresh directly from the animal or sold commercially in bottles to local users and visiting pilgrims.

Beyond medicine, cultural subjectivity heavily shapes global views on what is normal versus taboo, as seen in American dung-throwing contests and the consumption of bison testicles or beaver urinary secretions for food flavoring. Similarly, the very thought of European ‘delicacies’ like Scottish haggis—sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs minced and cooked inside the animal’s stomach lining—would make many outsiders throw up. This visceral divide extends to livestock and pets; Westerners view horses and domestic dogs strictly as companions, yet those animals are esteemed as traditional delicacies in parts of South America, China, and Northeastern India

What is sacred or therapeutic in one culture may be rejected in another, yet in most global contexts, such differences are treated with a degree of anthropological curiosity or cultural respect. In India, however, Hindu practices are often subjected to a unique, visceral derision that minority or external traditions escape.

This asymmetry points to a profound mental colonization. It reflects an implicit acceptance of supremacist Abrahamic doctrines that dismiss Hindu Dharma as an “incoherent” or “false” religion, or reduce it to a foreign imposition by “Aryan invaders” with a name merely coined by Arabs or Persians. This mindset did not disappear with independence; it was deeply institutionalized in academia, media, and politics, producing a class of opinion-makers who comfortably critique Hindu practices in crude terms while remaining intensely cautious and respectful toward other religions and cultures.

Ironically, this disdain ignores the fact that the Hindu intellectual tradition has long accommodated debate, inquiry, and plurality. From the logical rigor of Nyaya to the linguistic precision of Panini, and from Aryabhata’s mathematics and astronomy to Kanada’s atomic theory, there has never been an inherent contradiction between spiritual exploration and empirical reasoning.

Contrast this with the modern ideological certainties of Indian Nehruvians and Marxists, who are indoctrinated to believe that only they possess a “scientific temper.” This claim to an exclusive monopoly on reason rings hollow when their own belief systems operate with the zeal of blind superstition. Their cult-like obsession and unquestioning deference to chosen figures—whether Marx, Stalin, Mao, or Nehru—completely mirror religious dogma. Indian Communists continue this blind worship despite the historical havoc wreaked by Marxism and Maoism, causing millions to perish globally. The utopian society Marxism promises—arriving after a bloody revolution and endless class conflict to create a world where borders, police and armies are obsolete and everyone lives in perfect harmony—utterly flies in the face of human history and the human condition. While Marxist dogmas collapse against reality, the Dharmic pursuit of purushartha (purpose of human life) remains profoundly viable because it recognizes human nature and the fluid dynamics of the gunas, motivating humanity to strive for genuine, balanced harmony rather than an impossible commune.

This internalized disdain is not confined to academic theory; it manifests directly as a coordinated theological assault within contemporary Indian politics. Both siblings of the Congress’ first family have been uttering openly mocking or borderline contemptuous anti-Hindu remarks for years now, revealing how Hinduphobia has become central to the party’s ideological core. As Congress’ reliance on Islamist, Christian, Marxist and neo-Ambedkarite fundamentalists has grown, and as its leadership surrounds itself with far-left radical voices, this hate for Hindus and their Dharma has crossed into dangerous territory.

Specific instances lay bare this theological and cultural hostility:

Rahul Gandhi’s denigration of Bhagwan Vishnu, and his tendency to set the Hindu deities Vishnu and Shiva in opposition, deserves serious analysis and should not be dismissed as immature commentary. It ties in with other remarks made by him during his Bharat Jodo Yatra, where he praised Bhagwan Shiva’s all-embracing detachment while contrasting it with “priestly systems” that “divide and oppress” (interestingly, ignoring the far more rigid and hereditary nature of priestly structures in Christian and Islamic traditions).

This strategy directly aligns with Left-academic, evangelical and Dravidian theories that seek to balkanize Hindu society by painting Bhagwan Shiva as an “indigenous, non-Vedic deity” who was maliciously ‘appropriated’ by Aryan invaders. By isolating Shiva from the broader Hindu landscape, this narrative seeks to decouple the deity from mainstream Hindu traditions. But when the opportunity arises, the same network and its Islamist allies do not hesitate to mock the Shivling, the sacred symbol used in the worship of Bhagwan Shiva.

Rahul Gandhi has also mocked the Hindu idea of punarjanam (rebirth) and claimed that “people have the burden of lakhs of lives on their shoulders.”

Furthermore, the drama enacted in parliament by the Samajwadi Party, Congress, and other opposition politicians recently to highlight the theft of donations at the Ram Mandir shows exactly how the Overton window has shifted in Indian secular politics into openly Hinduphobic territory. A criminal-turned-politician, Pappu Yadav, dressed up in saffron robes, holding a photo of Sri Ram, sat down with a large tin box, and MPs like Rahul Gandhi sauntered up to him wearing sandals and put some money in that box, which Yadav then pretended to steal and run away. This deliberate act of portraying Hindu sadhus and saffron robes in a bad light—when the actual theft at the Ram Mandir was done by counting staff and certain supervisors involved in handling donations, not sadhus—was not lost on anyone. The sant samaj has rightly condemned it, although not as loudly and unitedly as one would have hoped. Can one even imagine the global outrage if a BJP MP staged a similar skit, this time caricaturing child sex abuse by madrasa maulvis or church pastors—abuse scandals that have repeatedly surfaced in such religious institutions across the world?

Ultimately, the Sonia-led Congress’ opposition to Hindu Dharma is not just political, nor is it limited to historical submissions of affidavits in courts claiming that “Ram is imaginary.” It has now morphed into an aggressive theological and cultural opposition to almost everything Hindu, mirroring the exact, uncompromising contempt held by a fundamentalist maulvi or pastor. The “gaumutra” jibe, then, is not merely an isolated political insult. It represents a coordinated, malicious attempt by a mentally colonized elite to demonize the very civilizational soul of Bharat —a dangerous campaign that sacrifices cultural cohesion for electoral appeaseability and threatens to tear the nation’s social fabric apart. – Reverse the Gaze, 3 August 2026

› Reverse the Gaze is an anonymous author on Substack.

Modi’s rulership on probation, should prepare for a million mutinies now – R. Jagannathan

August 3, 2026August 4, 2026VOI

Narendra Modi

The problem with the Modi government is that well-meaning decisions driven from the top may not seem as good on the ground. Among the younger crowd, which is not used to listening to authority, they may even be seen as an imposition rather than a solution to a problem. … The important thing is to change the government’s DNA from rulership to consultation. – R. Jagannathan

By letting Dharmendra Pradhan go, albeit reluctantly, the Modi government may have bought itself some time to recoup political capital and rework its political calculations.

But the time it has bought may be weeks, not months. For once triggered, the chances are that every major citizen grievance will now be aired in public. Some could also lead to Jantar Mantar.

Already there is an E20 Janta Party in the making, comprising vehicle owners miffed about what E20, petrol blended with 20 per cent ethanol, may be doing to their vehicles. Soon you could have farmers and other groups vying to get into the action.

The Prime Minister, realising that the Jantar Mantar protests were driven by Gen Z, those in the 15–29 age group, and their Instagram posts, has himself gone on Instagram.

While there is no harm in this, he should not assume that his presence on the platform will change perceptions about this government. Reason: the Prime Minister is himself showing his age, and putting it on repeated view for a younger generation may not work with Gen Z.

So what exactly should the government be doing?

One, and most important, it must choose engagement with the youth over action driven from the top. The Gen Z grouse is not about any specific issue but about those in power not listening to what they are thinking, what they want out of life, and which things must be prioritised.

Of course, future careers are a big issue in our country, but it will not end with that. This cohort wants to be listened to. Having tasted blood at its first coming-out party, Gen Z is not going to go back to its studies.

The government has to develop the habit of listening to the youth and other social groups and then coming to decisions, rather than assuming that its own good intent is enough to justify a decision, as is the case with E20.

At the very least, it must offer alternatives to E20, even if 100 per cent petrol is priced higher. While ordinary vehicle owners are not going to create a chakka jam at Jantar Mantar, fleet operators and taxi owners might well do so.

So this is one trouble the government should see coming right now, and it should choose to engage with those raising concerns about E20. It is of course true that offering two fuel options may take time to implement, but being heard is the important thing here.

Two, this is also a kind of taxpayer revolt. While the vast majority of citizens do not pay any income tax, they do pay indirectly through the goods and services tax.

They also pay ‘private taxes’ in the form of bribes to various officials at the state or municipal levels, whether for traffic violations, birth and death certificates, or hospital and other subsidised services.

Our definition of the tax-paying middle class needs to change from one framed by income groups to a broader definition that looks at the middle-class mindset: anyone seeking to write competitive exams and pursue higher education, or consuming packaged foods, for example, should be considered middle class.

The emerging consuming classes are the larger middle class, even if their income levels do not always indicate their membership of this group.

Three, as Santosh Desai argues in his Times of India column of 27 July 2026, for Gen Z the only government they have known is the Modi government, not least because it has been seen everywhere and is also seen to be winning many elections.

So it will demand maximum accountability from the Modi government, even if most of their problems are not created by the Central government.

The Modi government would do well to start the process of devolving power to state governments, and to ask the latter to further devolve power to local bodies, for this is where citizens most interact with the state. The state governments will start feeling the heat soon enough.

The message is not merely to the Modi government but to all state governments and municipal authorities, none of whom is actually delivering good quality citizen services. They will all be vulnerable, but as the party which dominates Indian politics both at the Centre and in many states, the BJP will face searing heat.

Four, the CJP protests did not have any overt caste undertones, but many of the students protesting the NEET mess-up, and the larger problem of a lack of career opportunities, were also worried about the creeping nature of educational and job reservations.

But anyone who tries to interfere with reservations as they currently exist will inevitably face a political backlash, which could well set off a caste war.

This is precisely what will sink the BJP’s boat, for it is dependent on a Hindu vote consolidation that subsumes caste. If we end up with caste-based conflict, 2029 will be an uphill battle for the BJP, especially since minority consolidation against it is a reality.

Five, all political parties now need to heed the call for better governance and citizen services. Till now, thanks to the government’s ability to offer freebies using the Jan Dhan–Aadhaar–Mobile facility, politicians have been busy emptying the exchequer to win elections.

While no one can discount the probability of a well-aimed freebie bringing in the incremental vote, future elections will be about freebie-plus, not just freebies. If NEET can cause a political convulsion, why not garbage and traffic jams and poor health services?

Six, the judiciary and the news media should not consider themselves free from large-scale scrutiny. At the Jantar Mantar protests, many journalists were given abusive treatment, sometimes even with physical jostling.

The judiciary has not yet been a direct target, but the students on the prowl at Jantar Mantar did not have much reverence for it either. In fact the term ‘cockroach’ itself came courtesy of a casual remark made by the Chief Justice of India.

So, to repeat, what should the Modi government, or any government at any level, do?

One, it should consider initiating huge reforms by consulting Gen Z representatives, among others, apart from experts. This does not mean only the CJP, but many more youth leaders and organisations who understand the pulse of this cohort. Other political parties and citizen groups should also be kept in the loop.

Two, there should be committees and consultations for reforms in agriculture, education, health, skilling, bureaucracy, judiciary and, most important, political reforms. The last is the biggest cause of corruption.

The judiciary should know that while the executive will be held accountable for its lapses, the judiciary itself is one of the worst-performing arms of the state. So too is the bureaucracy. These reforms will not happen in a day, but if Modi is smart he will use the opportunity to drive change in the judiciary and bureaucracy too.

Three, the Modi cabinet could do with a huge amount of spring cleaning. It clearly needs fresh blood, young blood, and this must be visible. Some performing ministers, such as Ashwini Vaishnaw, are clearly overburdened, and some others seem compromised.

Nitin Gadkari is one of the performers, but he was seen to be insensitive to the concerns of vehicle owners on E20. He does not need to resign, but he could, along with petroleum minister Hardeep Singh Puri, consider setting up a panel with the aggrieved parties to take a relook at the whole E20 plan, including the possibility of gradually separating E20 from 100 per cent petrol priced higher. Consultation is key to forward movement.

Already, even after Pradhan’s exit, the Modi government has missed two opportunities.

First, it announced the formation of a committee headed by Nandan Nilekani for fixing the exam system and its infirmities. But it could have done this in consultation with some Gen Z representatives.

Second, it named Pralhad Joshi as the new Education Minister. But he does not represent change. A younger face in the ministry, even at the Minister of State level, would have been better.

The CJP movement is ultimately not about NEET or Dharmendra Pradhan. It is about demanding a higher quality of governance and performance from all arms of the state.

The Modi government is on probation, but so is the system itself. How Narendra Modi navigates these challenges over the next few years will determine whether he gets to influence the 2029 elections or is pushed aside by a rising tide of dissent. India is again at the threshold of a million mutinies.

But this is not just a threat. If Modi navigates it successfully, his legacy will not only survive but thrive. The important thing is to change the government’s DNA from rulership to consultation. – TheJaggi, 26 July 2026

› R. Jagannathan is senior journalist and former editorial director at Swarajya magazine.

When rationalists don’t get Hindu philosophy – David Frawley

August 2, 2026VOI

There is a great mystery of consciousness behind the visible world that is our real duty as human beings to discover and to realise. This mystery cannot be limited to biological patterns or to intellectual theories. We should not be content with mere outer views of life. – Dr. David Frawley

From Freudian academics to the modern media, the main examinations of Hindu deities, particularly of Lord Shiva and his family, usually give their primary attention to sexual implications. But in the process of focusing on this side—often to the exclusion of the rest of the teachings—the deeper meaning of these spiritual traditions easily gets lost.

We can forget yoga’s profound insights into the mind, consciousness and higher human evolution, as well as the subtle meditation practices taught to reveal these.

Tantric Yoga philosophy describes seven chakras from the base of the spine to the top of the head. The purpose of yoga is to raise our awareness from the root chakra below—where we are spiritually asleep in ego consciousness and physical reality—to the thousand-petal lotus at the top of the head where we can experience cosmic consciousness and self-realisation, the state of the Supreme Shiva.

The chakras indicate vibratory levels with the five lower chakras relating to the earth, water, fire, air and ether elements and the two higher chakras to mind and consciousness. The ascent through the chakras involves moving from denser to subtler vibrations, and developing a greater unity consciousness along the way.

We should not stop short at the first and second chakras, which rule over lower energies, but consider all seven chakras and their implications in examining yogic deities and practices, extending to higher realms far beyond physical reality.

We should not only consider the role of physical union but also the role of union with the divine, and with the unitary awareness behind the universe as a whole.

The symbolism of Hindu deities

It is true that Hindu deities provide a wealth of fascinating symbolisms that stretch the boundaries of our imaginations and are not easy to understand for the rational intellect. They are capable of diverse interpretations as they reflect the whole of life and all of nature in its mind-transcending magic and bewildering paradoxes.

But the primary implications of these yogic powers are relative to cosmological principles and higher states of awareness, which constitute the bulk of their traditional interpretations that are quite detailed and extensive. Modern scientists have noted these cosmic connections, with the entire universe as Lord Shiva’s dance of light.

Hindu deities, particularly Shiva and his wife Parvati, reflect the practice of yoga and the energies of all the chakras in their stories and teachings, starting with Shiva as Yogeshwara, the lord of yoga, ruling over asana, prana, mantra and meditation. Parvati is the ideal yogini and manifests the yoga shakti, the inner power of yoga that takes us from darkness to light, from death to immortality.

Recognising the primacy of ananda

It is time to move beyond such circumscribed views to recognising the deeper aspects of science, art and philosophy behind the yoga tradition and its extraordinary images and cosmic depictions. This affords us a greater appreciation of the yogis of India and their intricate teachings, not merely about the body and mind, but relative to the universal consciousness in which is infinite and everlasting bliss!

Bliss or ananda is the origin and goal of all as the ancient Upanishads so eloquently state. If we are sensitive to beauty, love or grace anywhere, it is only because of this divine ananda. May we all discover that ananda within and around us! It is much more than any media sensation and takes us far beyond the biases of the mind to a boundless vision and new creative insight at every moment. This is what higher yoga practices can lead us to. – Daily-O, 23 September 2015

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Sastri) is an American Hindu teacher and author who has written more than thirty books on topics such as the Vedas, Hinduism, Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedic astrology, published both in India by Voice of India and in the United States.

India needs to truly understand its own legacy of education – Hindol Sengupta

July 29, 2026July 29, 2026VOI

The crisis of modern civilization is not a shortage of knowledge but a surfeit of information divorced from wisdom—societies that have multiplied their instruments of power without cultivating any corresponding growth in the spirit that must wield them. – Prof. Hindol Sengupta

Few civilizations have theorised education as searchingly as India’s, and few single verses compress that theorizing as tightly as the eleventh mantra of the Isha Upanishad: vidyām cavidyām ca yas tad vedobhayam saha, avidyayā mrtyum tirtva vidyayamrtam asnute—he who knows both vidaya and avidyā together, crosses over death through avidyā and attains immortality through vidyā. That closing phrase, vidyaya’mrtam asnute—by knowledge one attains immortality—has functioned for over two millennia not as a slogan but as a standing definition of what education is for. It is worth asking what that definition actually claims, and how India’s philosophers, ancient and modern, elaborated it into a coherent idea of education very different from the instrumental one now dominant across the world.

The Upanishadic claim

The Isha Upanishad’s verse is startling because it refuses to let vidya stand alone. Avidya here does not simply mean ignorance in the pejorative sense; in context it denotes the practical, ritual, and worldly knowledge—action in the phenomenal world—that must be mastered and then transcended, while vidya denotes knowledge of the Self, the unconditioned ground of being. The verse insists that both are necessary and must be held together: avidya carries one across death (mortality, finitude, the cycle of cause and effect), and vidya alone confers amrta—deathlessness, the immortal. Education, on this reading, is not the accumulation of facts but a passage: a movement from the world of doing to the ground of being, in which the worldly is not despised but used as a bridge to be crossed, not clung to.

This is the deep structure beneath the more famous Upanishadic formula sa vidyayā ya vimuktaye—that alone is knowledge which liberates. Learning that does not liberate, in this view, is merely information; it may be useful, even necessary, but it is not, in the full sense, vidyā.

This is a demanding claim, and Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta pressed it further: ignorance (avidyā, here in its more familiar negative sense of nescience) is not a lack of data about the world but a misapprehension of the nature of the Self—the superimposition of the finite ego upon the infinite Brahman. Education in the Advaitic sense is therefore jnana yoga, the discipline of discrimination (viveka) between the real and the apparent, disciplined by shravana (hearing), manana (reflection), and nididhyasana (sustained meditation). The teacher’s task is not to fill the student but to remove a covering—to let what is already there be recognized. It is an idea of education built on the conviction that the deepest truths are not acquired from outside but uncovered from within, guided rather than installed.

Radhakrishnan’s ideas

It is Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher-president and one of India’s foremost interpreters of the Upanishads to the modern world, who translated this ancient claim into a working philosophy of education for a democratic and scientific age. For Radhakrishnan, the crisis of modern civilization was not a shortage of knowledge but a surfeit of information divorced from wisdom—societies that had multiplied their instruments of power without cultivating any corresponding growth in the spirit that must wield them. He held that the purpose of education could never be reduced to vocational training or the transmission of technique, though these have their place; its higher purpose was the awakening of the whole person—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual—toward what he called, echoing the Upanishads, an integral vision of reality. Radhakrishnan’s own chairmanship of the University Education Commission (1948-49) put this conviction into institutional form: he argued that a university’s task was to produce not merely trained specialists but educated human beings capable of self-governance, ethical discrimination, and disinterested pursuit of truth—a vision he rooted explicitly in the Upanishadic distinction between the immediate, useful knowledge of avidyā and the higher self-knowledge of vidyā, insisting that a civilization neglects the second at its peril. Education, for him, was ultimately the cultivation of the capacity to see the universal in the particular—the same movement the Isha Upanishad describes as crossing from mortality to the deathless.

Vivekananda’s reflections

Swami Vivekananda gave this idea its most quotable modern form: education is not information stuffed into the brain, but the manifestation of the perfection already existing in every human being. This is a direct descendant of the Advaitic premise—if the Self is already whole, already divine, then the teacher’s role is not to add something foreign but to draw out what is innate, through discipline, concentration, and character-building. Vivekananda’s emphasis on shraddha (faith in oneself), on physical and moral strength alongside intellectual training, and on service to others as inseparable from self-realization, extended the Upanishadic idea into a program for national regeneration—education as the means by which a colonized and demoralized people could recover their own dignity and capacity.

The ‘integral freedom’ of Sri Aurobindo and Tagore

Sri Aurobindo’s idea of “integral education” pushed the same logic toward the evolutionary future: the aim was not the reproduction of existing knowledge but the development of faculties—physical, vital, mental, and spiritual—so that the individual could become an instrument of a higher consciousness struggling to emerge in human history. Learning, in his ashram at Pondicherry, was to proceed from the child’s own nature outward, never imposed from without—a pedagogical translation of the Upanishadic insistence that vidyā is uncovered, not installed.

Rabindranath Tagore, working at almost the same historical moment at Santiniketan, gave the idea its most beloved poetic expression—his prayer for a world “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,” where knowledge is free and the mind is led “into ever-widening thought and action.” Tagore’s objection to colonial schooling was precisely that it produced avidyā without vidyā: competent clerks without free minds. His forest-school pedagogy, conducted under open skies, close to nature and to the arts, aimed to restore the wholeness that examination-driven instruction fragmented.

Dharmapal and his discovery of the indigenous

If the philosophers above worked mainly at the level of theory, Dharampal’s historical research supplied the empirical ground beneath the claim that India possessed, until colonial disruption, an education of extraordinary depth and reach. In The Beautiful Tree (1983), assembling British colonial surveys from the early nineteenth century—including reports by William Adam in Bengal and Bihar and district-level data collected for Governor Munro in the Madras Presidency—Dharampal showed that indigenous schooling before colonial rule was far more widespread across caste lines than the colonial administrators themselves had expected, embedded in local community life and sustained without state compulsion. His broader point was not nostalgic antiquarianism but a challenge to the very idea, inherited from colonial and later nationalist historiography, that Indian civilization required an external, imported model of schooling to become literate or rational. What that older system dismantled by colonial policy had transmitted was precisely the union the Isha Upanishad demands: practical, livelihood-oriented avidyā—arithmetic, craft, agriculture, local administration—taught alongside the moral and metaphysical formation that a village school, often attached to a temple or under a local teacher, considered inseparable from literacy itself. Dharampal’s work restores to the philosophical argument a historical dimension: the vidyā–avidyā synthesis was not merely a metaphysical ideal confined to ashrams and Upanishadic seminars, but had once been, however imperfectly, a lived social reality across India, dismantled rather than absent.

What unites Shankara’s viveka, Radhakrishnan’s integral personality, Vivekananda’s manifested perfection, Aurobindo’s evolving consciousness, Tagore’s fearless mind, and Dharampal’s recovered village school is the Upanishadic insistence that education is measured not by what is added to a person but by what is freed within one—and, Dharampal would add, by how deeply it is rooted in a community’s own soil. Vidyā, rightly pursued, does not simply inform but transforms, carrying the learner, as the Isha Upanishad says, beyond mortality itself. In an age that increasingly measures education by employability metrics and standardised scores, this is a demanding and unfashionable claim. It is also, India’s philosophers would insist, the only claim education can make that justifies calling it education at all. – The Sunday Guardian, 26 July 2026

› Prof. Hindol Sengupta is an award-winning historian and author of 13 books. He is professor of international relations at O.P. Jindal Global University, NCR.

Vivekananda Quote

Indian traditional wisdom on intelligence gathering for internal security – Neha Gupta

July 26, 2026VOI

Ancient Indian wisdom reveals that internal security was never viewed merely in terms of coercion or military strength, but rather as dependent upon informed governance, economic resilience, effective diplomacy and responsiveness to public grievances. – Neha Gupta

Over two millennia ago, long before the digital age of encryption and satellite surveillance, the foundations of sophisticated intelligence systems were laid in ancient India. From Kautilya’s clinical analysis in the Arthashastra to the pragmatic diplomacy of Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, statecraft was viewed as a rigorous science in which information served as a vital instrument of power. These ancient texts discuss espionage, diplomacy, and governance in ways that continue to resonate in the modern era of strategic competition and information warfare.

Kautilya, in his Arthashastra, described a sophisticated intelligence system comparable to a modern secret service, a crucial instrument of power. Secret agents (gudha purusa) were broadly divided into stationary and mobile spies. While stationary agents reported to the ruler’s chancellor, the most sensitive intelligence operations were directly supervised by the ruler himself. These stationary agents included civil servants who did routine surveillance, ascetics with religious covers, spies posing as astrologers, bankrupt farmers, artisans and merchants who monitored neighbours and customers, among others. Mobile agents, i.e., intellectually sharp female agents who infiltrated wealthy homes, artists and servants who used poison to kill, assisted elite intelligence officers reporting to the ruler personally. Espionage was directed not only against enemy states but also against ally and neutral states, for example, placing secret informants at their courts.

Hence, detailed categories of people encompassing nearly all social groups operated in various locations as spies to avoid suspicion, including children when necessary. This vast network of secret agents and informants collected information about treasonable activities, corruption, serious crime, popular mood and acted as ‘secret police’. Kautilya advocates techniques such as secret agents infiltrating enemy camps to spread disinformation often as “divine proclamations” to create fragmentation within the enemy’s hierarchy or to declare fictitious triumphs to inspire their own troops, using deception to propagate disunity amongst internal rivals by inducing a ruler’s second or third son to attempt a revolution against their own family, tracing and unmasking of enemy agents, turning exposed enemy agents into double agents rather than discharging them, employing trained killers for covert assassinations and extra-judicial killings disguised as accident, normal crime, or natural death and staging political public relations to influence public opinion.

If the secret service detects legitimate public grievances or growing anger among sections of the population, Kautilya argues that the state must first address their root causes before resorting to repression. Arthashastra looks at the ruler’s duty to secure and expand public welfare as inseparable from the strength of the state. The secret service therefore functions not merely as an instrument of surveillance, but as an “early warning system” that alerts the ruler to social discontent and policy failures, enabling timely corrective action. Kautilya also insists that statecraft must rest on empirical data and scientific knowledge grounded in reality, rejecting magic, astrology, prophecy, or impulse. He further considers a strong economic base essential to internal stability and security. Enhancing agriculture, production, trade and tax revenue was therefore central to state power. He warns that a weak state leads to matsya-nyaya, the “law of the fishes,” where the strong prey upon the weak, both within society and in interstate relations.

The Arthashastra has discussed four methods of statecraft (upayas) that predate it within the Indian traditional wisdom, in the order: saam (peaceful conciliation), daam (enticement or bribery), dand (force or punishment), bhed (division or sowing discord) for diplomatic relations. The Tirukkural (Kural) by Tiruvalluvar also considers diplomacy essential to maintaining stable inter-state relations. Tiruvalluvar emphasises that ministers and ambassadors must be skilled in statecraft, knowledgeable about world affairs, and capable of making prompt and impartial decisions. He also highlights the importance of persuasive and fearless communication in foreign courts. In matters of diplomacy, the Kural often adopts a pragmatic approach, advising rulers to reconcile with stronger powers while acting firmly against weaker adversaries.

Echoing the Kautilyan principle of dvaidibhav (dual policy), Verse 875 advises that a ruler helpless against two foes should secure one as an ally to help against the other. Verse 679 further suggests to secure alliances with the enemies of one’s enemies than to focus solely on existing friends.

Kautilya’s views on intelligence encompasses not just information collection and analysis, but also counterintelligence, i.e., manipulating the espionage picture of one’s own state for the enemy in one’s favour. He prioritises covert means such as subversion, sabotage and targeted operations over conventional wars that cause great human and material losses. Kautilya may seldom be cited explicitly in India’s strategic discourse, but his influence remains deeply embedded. Mahatma Gandhi’s preference for non-violent resistance can be seen through a Kautilyan lens of realism, choosing methods that weaken a stronger adversary without incurring unsustainable costs like a traditional war.

Kamandaka’s Nitisara (Nitishastra) also advises against frequent warfare due to its destructive consequences. At the same time, he stresses the importance of safeguarding state secrets while systematically probing an adversary’s vulnerabilities, an early articulation of what is today called information asymmetry. His intelligence framework is broad, extending even to monitoring weather, disasters and epidemics that could affect state stability.

The relevance of these ideas has remained unaltered through the ages. Intelligence agencies today continue to strive hard as agents not only of security but of strategic foresight—anticipating and pre-empting threats, preventing mishaps, shaping outcomes and protecting the nation from all kinds of threats—internal and external. Ancient Indian wisdom reveals that internal security was never viewed merely in terms of coercion or military strength, but rather as dependent upon informed governance, economic resilience, effective diplomacy and responsiveness to public grievances. In an age increasingly shaped by covert influence and hybrid threats, the above principles of intelligence continue to hold good for all times to come. – The Pioneer, 4 July 2026

› Neha Gupta is Junior Research Fellow at Bharat Ki Soch.

Why the liberal world order, built on science and reason, was doomed to fail – Pranav Sharma

July 22, 2026July 24, 2026VOI

Liberal internationalism, armed with the scientific method, imagined that democracy, free markets, and rational governance could be exported like a validated scientific theory—its value presumed universal, its implementation a technical matter. The spectacular failures of this vision, from the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, are often diagnosed as policy miscalculations or a simple failure to account for the brute realities of nationalism and power politics. – Pranav Sharma

The liberal order did not simply make miscalculations. It rested on a deeper conviction that was flawed from the start: the belief that scientific reason, applied with sufficient rigour to human affairs, would bend history toward peace.

That conviction deserves an autopsy of its own. To understand why the liberal order is unravelling, it helps to understand what its architects thought they were building, and why they trusted science to hold it together.

The myth of the neutral method

There is a general tendency in the story we like to tell ourselves about science. It is set in a pristine, sterile laboratory or a remote observatory somewhere away from human settlements, where a dispassionate mind—devoid of feeble human passions, guided by reason and evidence alone—peels back the layers of illusion to reveal universal truths. We picture the methodical transformation of chaos into coherence, of profound civilisational ignorance into enlightenment. This narrative, as immaculate and compelling as any myth, is perhaps best captured by the iconic photograph from the Apollo 8 mission, Earthrise. Our planet, a delicate swirl of blue and white, hangs in the silent, black expanse. It is an image of sublime objective reality, a portrait of ourselves delivered by the most advanced application of our scientific knowledge.

The Age of Discovery that propelled the scientific revolution, meticulous work of the botanist classifying new species or the cartographer charting an unfamiliar coastline was inseparable from the imperial project it served. The world was mastered not just with guns and ledgers, but with taxonomies and sextants. To imagine science as a dispassionate pursuit of universal truths, observing the political order from a neutral distance, is to indulge a narrative as mythic as any creation story. Science is not outside the ambit of power. It is entangled with the architectures of power, identity, and historical contingency that it purports merely to describe.

Not policy failure, but an epistemic one

However, this critique does not go far enough. The failure was not merely political; it was epistemic. It was a failure born of a worldview that treats complex human societies as if they were variables in a vast geopolitical experiment. The technocratic confidence that a nation’s political and cultural life could be engineered with the same precision as a microchip does not reflect the rigour of science so much as its domestication within the logic of managerialism. In that translation, science stops being a restless mode of inquiry and becomes a fetish, a talisman wielded by a managerial elite to legitimise intervention under the banner of evidence-based policy.

Realism, of course, has always stood as the cynical corrective, reminding us of the tragic chorus of power politics and security dilemmas. The structural realist elegantly models an anarchic world where states, like billiard balls, career across the global baize according to immutable, impersonal laws of power. It is a particularly seductive, clean, and predictive model. Yet it occludes more than it reveals, for states are not inert billiard balls; they are incandescent assemblages of identity, memory, desire, arrogance, and trauma. Their behaviour is shaped not just by rational calculations of interest, but by their ghosts of history and the affective, often irrational, intensities of belonging. A discipline that aspires to the predictive economy of physics keeps discovering that its objects refuse to behave like matter. Here lies the essential tension.

Why nationalism beats the model

Science, in its ideal form, seeks truths that are universal. Nationalism, by contrast, thrives on the singular, the irreducible, and the mythic. A nation, after all, is an imagined community, a social construction whose power lies not in its empirical validity but in its capacity to weave individuals into a narrative far larger than themselves. It is, in this sense, a kind of anti-science—not because it rejects facts, but because it privileges myth over measurement and memory over data. It reveals a profound and uncomfortable truth: science cannot fix the human condition because the human condition is not a technical problem to be solved. It is a predicament to be narrated, endured, and perpetually contested.

This is why the liberal wager keeps losing. The liberals assumed that as societies grew wealthier, better informed, and more rationally governed, the particularist passions would recede. The opposite has occurred. The nationalist turn in the United States, the populist surge across Europe, the authoritarian consolidation from Moscow to Beijing, none of these are deviations from a modernising trend that better data would have predicted and better policy could have averted. They are evidence that the model itself was wrong about what moves people.

The liberal faith ran deeper still. The belief that scientific advancement would lead inexorably to moral and political enlightenment is a secular eschatology, a story of salvation without gods. History mocks such linear narratives. The 20th century stands as a monument to this paradox. The same scientific rationality that allowed us to map the human genome also gave us the bureaucratic precision to engineer genocide. The space race, a triumphant symbol of ideological and scientific supremacy, was haunted by the shadow of mutually assured destruction. It became the epitome of logical insanity, where survival depended on the promise of total annihilation. The nuclear revolution did not make war obsolete; it reconfigured its calculus from a contest of conquest to one of existential deterrence. Progress and catastrophe are not opposites in this story. They are produced by the same machinery.

The 21st-century stress test

We now find ourselves in a new century, facing a fresh wave of disruptions. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and cyber warfare are not merely new tools; they are forces that defy our traditional categories, blurring the lines between civilian and military, public and private, human and machine. The US-China contest over advanced computing is not a conventional arms race that arms-control templates can manage; the technology is dual-use by nature, diffuse in ownership, and faster-moving than any treaty cycle. They reveal, with terrifying clarity, the inadequacy of political frameworks forged in the post-war, post-colonial age to grapple with transnational risks that recognise no borders.

Most humbling of all is the predicament of climate change. Here is the ultimate, planet-sized irony: the most profound existential threat of our time is a direct byproduct of the very industrial rationality that promised to liberate humanity from the fickle tyranny of nature. The Anthropocene is not merely a new geological epoch; it is a testament to the unintended consequences of Enlightenment ambition. The relentless quest to master nature has, in the end, destabilised the planetary systems upon which all human life depends. This is not, to be clear, a failure of the scientific method itself. It is the catastrophic failure of the narrative that framed science as a tool of unambiguous and unending human progress, the same narrative that underwrote the liberal order’s confidence in its own trajectory. The algorithm that optimises a global supply chain can equally be turned to systems of targeted surveillance, reducing individuals to predictable data points in a model of consumption and control.

Living with what science cannot do

What, then, is the proper place of science in the grand drama of nation-state and international relations? It can be neither saviour nor scapegoat. It is a contingent, historically situated practice. Science can explain the world, but it cannot redeem it. Its truths are provisional, its applications ambivalent. To grasp its place in national or global politics is to resist the seduction of both technocratic triumphalism and reactionary scepticism, and to hold instead a critical sensibility that recognises science as at once a form of knowledge and a site of power.

The realist reminders remain true as far as they go: the world is anarchic, power matters, and ideals often shatter against the wall of strategic necessity. But the deeper lesson is that realism, like liberalism, is just another story. It is a framework that imposes a semblance of order on a world that is fundamentally resistant to coherence. Science belongs to the same narrative economy. It offers not only explanations but orientation, a way of locating ourselves in a vast and indifferent universe. That is a real service. It is not the same as a guarantee.

The order now being mourned was built on the opposite assumption: that reason, sufficiently advanced, would deliver a destination. As a lengthening line of former believers concede that the destination was never reached, the temptation will be to locate the policy error that cost us the arrival. There was no such error, because there was no such destination. The question was never whether science could fix the human condition. It was how we live with the knowledge that it cannot. That is the tragic wisdom modernity keeps trying to forget. Our greatest achievements are inseparable from our deepest vulnerabilities. Our task, then, is not to seek salvation in the laboratory, but to bear witness to this paradox—to trace, with unflinching eyes, the fragile and often unsettling threads that bind knowledge to power, hope to despair, and progress to its profound and enduring discontents. – The Print, 14 June 2026

› Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan.

Why India doesn’t fit the Woke script – Yuvraj Pokharna

July 18, 2026VOI

Woke, Woker, Wokest

If you ask five people to define Wokeism, it’s likely that each will provide a unique interpretation based on their personal understanding. In a significant research paper called The Scholarly Definition of Wokeism: Why American Universities Enforce Belief without Clarifying the Doctrine, American military scientist, philosopher, and metaphysical architect Jeffrey Camlin wisely points out that Wokeism is a strict moral belief system that stifles questioning and turns conversations into ways to enforce beliefs through guilt and fear of losing reputation. The definition offered is not based on polemic opposition but on structural necessity.

The word ‘woke’ is a quintessential example of a Western term—a misfit and incongruous in the Bharatiya context and conscience—advertently superimposed and forced into our lexicon just like myriad others. Speaking in brevity, the term ‘woke’ originates in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), meaning to be alert or aware, particularly of social injustices. It first appeared in the 1938 song Scottsboro Boys by Lead Belly, urging Black Americans to stay woke to racial injustices, referencing the wrongful convictions of nine Black teenagers in Alabama. In the 1960s, activists like the Black Panthers used ‘stay woke’ to encourage vigilance against systemic racism. It gained prominence during the mid-2010s in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This phrase was supposedly a call to awareness of social injustices, especially those related to race in the American context.

‘Wokeness’ emerged as a noun in the mid-2010s to describe the state of being woke or the collective ideology of social justice awareness. It was meant to encapsulate progressive values like diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and advocacy for marginalised groups in the US. However, over time, it became distorted and transformed into ‘wokeism’, which is viewed as an ideology opposing merit, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, and even the aboriginals, who are considered the flag-bearers of the indigenous cultural legacy of the native land. President Donald Trump has expressed disdain for the term ‘woke’, arguing it’s vague and overused. In 2023, he stated, “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke’. It’s just a term they use; half the people cant even define it; they don’t know what it is.”

The MO of Wokeism is rather simple—fracture the society into countless isolated blocks and turn them against each other through either exaggerated and outright fictitious claims of oppression or by instilling a sense of perpetual victimhood within some of them. Celebrated American commentator Michelle Malkin has authoritatively commented, “Liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it, and ignore it within their ranks.” The same hypocrisy, if not more, is palpably visible in the context of Indian activists and politicians! The result is an unending and multi-layered chaos that has no certain objective. And by doing so, Wokism protects and empowers those whom it claims to fight—the ultra-rich global elite.

The modus operandi, thus, is simple: divert people’s attention from the real socio-economic issues and turn the masses against themselves to provide a protective cover to the globalist masters who wish to pull the strings of the world from behind the curtains. Wokeism, however, doesn’t stand with every section of society. After fragmenting the people’s collective into numerous pieces, it works to turn some of them against the others. It sides with those whom it sees as more conducive to its agenda in a particular country or region.

There are absolutely no objective morals or convictions behind the way Wokeism operates. While Wokes may claim to side with the minorities or less empowered sections of society, the facts suggest the opposite. If they were truly the champions of minorities, they wouldn’t have opposed the peaceful Hindu minorities in White Christian majority countries while defending the illegal Muslim infiltrators in those same places.

Today’s Woke tyranny has left many scholars in their fields in a precarious situation: a liberal utopia where the mere suggestion of biological sex is met with labelling as a transphobe. J.K. Rowling, world-renowned for the Harry Potter series, received criticism from LGBTQ activists because Dumbledore isn’t openly gay in the new Fantastic Beasts film. Is the movie really the zenith of the gay community’s oppression? The greatest perils to the LGBTQ community, as per the Wokes, appear to be diversity in a fictional film rather than Islamic states targeting gays with brutal public executions and decapitations.

The Woke, more often than not, align themselves with individuals they find convenient. They make viable attempts to weaken, negate, and cancel those who are not deemed worthy enough for their cause by creating further schisms within their ranks through paid narratives and campaigns such as #DismantlingGlobalHindutva. The same Wokes are very eager to dismantle the indigenous way of life in India, which is Hindutva, even as they claim to stand for the rights of the natives in New Zealand.

Apart from tactfully nudging society towards a state of eternal chaos, the Wokes have another agenda—replacing traditional collectives such as the family with politically motivated groups. But why? This, once again, serves the interests of their globalist overlords. How? To put it simply, collective living involves the sharing of resources among individuals. For example, a family of four shares one house.

But if all four individuals were to live separately, that would suddenly increase the demand for houses by three to four times. Then again, the houses don’t come in isolation. Along with them come all the other necessary amenities that an individual requires for proper living. The breakup of the family suddenly expands the market base by many times. That is exactly what the globalists want, and the Wokes are trying to achieve it through their concentrated anti-family propaganda.

After having wreaked havoc in its place of origin—the United States and western Europe—the hydra of Wokism has turned its heads towards a new market: India. However, unlike in the West, the Wokes find it challenging to run their business in Bharat. Why? Unlike the West, the multifaceted and diverse nature of Indian society makes it challenging to make generalisations and, consequently, to promote simplistic narratives. In the West, it is very convenient to brand the family and the church as evil. But in a society like India, which has no organised church in the same sense as the West, defining evil becomes extremely difficult. In a society like ours where homosexuals never face any kind of discrimination based on religious dogma, it becomes a complex task for the Wokes to apply their template. They do try, but the attempts are laughable and clearly hypocritical. While in the West, Wokes may still maintain some pretence of activism or concern for the weak; in the Bhartiya context, this veil comes off the moment they open their mouths. Their failure is primarily due to their cluelessness about how to apply their Woke template, which was perfected for Western society, in the Bharatiya context.

To understand the situation better, let’s take a look at some examples from recent memory to exhibit how, time and again, the Wokes have embarrassingly exposed themselves in India. In 2020, the Indian government implemented new agricultural reforms aimed at transforming Indian agriculture into a competitive industry. However, the movement gained momentum when over 3,00,000 farmers reportedly marched to New Delhi to protest against these reforms. While the farmers may have had legitimate concerns and their grievances needed to be heard, some of the most articulate left-leaning Wokes, such as Greta Thunberg, and even the oblivious artist Rihanna, weighed in on the Indian farm imbroglio, pledging support to the farmer protests.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the alleged climate activist, the flagbearer of the global Woke commune, who’s barely an adult with an IQ understandably equivalent to Delhi’s temperature, Greta Thunberg, was unaware that the reforms help combat the climate apocalypse that she claims to fight by minimising the worst annual carbon emissions across the globe through stubble burning, which also leads to significant health problems like asthma and cancer.

Rihanna, a fully monetised celebrity and a pure product of capitalism, denied the benefits of the same to millions of farmers in India, pushing them to espouse a system of agriculture that was not just mediaeval in method and practice but was first introduced in the mediaeval period itself. The hypocrisy is unreal and uncanny! However, despite strong arguments and enough support from some of the most celebrated economists from around the world, the Indian government later repealed the farm reform laws as a mark of respect for the dissent of the farmers and the people.

Another amusing instance of Woke hypocrisy is the case in 2021 when Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau. Defenders of Woke culture contended that the arrest of the 24-year-old was due to his Muslim identity. So, as per the dimwit Wokes, the son of one of the most influential Indians in the last 150 years was being marginalised. Ironically, these same individuals remained silent over the brutal murder of a Dalit man named Nagaraju, who had married a Muslim woman.

One such example of abject absurdity stems from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s female activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai who herself is an iconic victim of Islamic violence and its forceful nature. In her book I Am Malala, she writes, “Wearing a burqa is like walking inside a big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through, and on hot days it’s like an oven.” However, Malala, acknowledged globally for her intrepidness, reverses her stance by neglecting to acknowledge the real-life struggles faced by Indian Muslim women. She came all in for the Muslim girls in Karnataka, claiming they were denied entry into a government school because they were wearing a hijab, despite it being evident that Islamists were using the students as weapons to disrupt and fuel anarchy in India. Such celebrity activism reeks of hypocrisy, if not inanity. Ironically, she gratefully accepted the Nobel Prize from Norway, which has for many years banned burqas and hijabs in educational institutions.

The Woke community and rent-a-cause activists, who otherwise claim to stand for the rights of underprivileged classes, conveniently specialise in whitewashing realities and downplaying the brutal injustices faced by the Hindu community due to their unapologetic, unabated, and perpetual hate for Hinduism. To summarise, the Woke utopia wilfully ignores the murder of Nagaraju, a Dalit man, out of fear of being labelled as Islamophobic. However, it intimidates people into silence and dismisses anyone who deviates from the narrow Woke path. And this is what identity politics does to you.

Clearly, mediocre minds would rather celebrate the public inanity of the incurable nincompoops than ponder over the nuanced argument of an expert that would go over their heads anyway. The Woke utopia has begun to silence all voices except its own, justifying all evil committed by its members’ clique. It brings people together by segregating them into smaller and smaller groups, where only a handful of privileged, spoilt individuals with no credibility and numbers agree among themselves. The Woke utopia is engaging in a much larger international arena and seeping into the Indian diaspora through foreign media, celebrities, and OTT platforms. We must be careful. – Firstpost, 12 July 2026

› Yuvraj Pokharna is a Surat-based educator, columnist, and social activist who keeps a eye on contemporary issues including Social Media, Education, Politics, Hindutva, Bharat (India) and Government Policies. He is the author of the book Hindutva For Gen Z, from which the above article has been excerpted.

Why Indians should reject St. Thomas and Christianity – Koenraad Elst

July 13, 2026July 14, 2026VOI

Christians must acknowledge the historical fact that, from Bethlehem to Madras, most of their sacred sites are booty won in campaigns of fraud and destruction. – Dr. Koenraad Elst

India’s Christian Problem

In the West we don’t hear much about it, and even in India it doesn’t make many headlines, but Hindu society is faced with a Christian problem besides the better-known Muslim problem. One focus of this conflict is the history of Christian iconoclasm, which is not entirely finished, and which past history has crystallized into some hundreds of churches standing on the ruins of purposely demolished Hindu temples. This history of iconoclasm is not an accident: it is the logical outcome of Christian theology, particularly of its deep hostility towards non-Christian forms of worship.

Christian sacred places in Palestine

A book well worth reading for those engaged in controversies over sacred sites, in particular concerning Christian churches in South India, is Christians and the Holy Places by Joan Taylor, a historian from New Zealand. It shows that the places where Christians commemorate the birth and death of Jesus have nothing to do with Jesus, historically.

The Nativity Church in Bethlehem was built in the fourth century CE in forcible replacement of a Pagan place of worship, dedicated to the god Tammuz-Adonis. Until then, it had had no special significance for Christians, who considered pilgrimages to sacred places a Pagan practice anyway: you cannot concentrate in one place—hence, go on pilgrimage to—the Omnipresent. The concept of “sacred place” was introduced into Christianity by converts, especially at the time of Emperor Constantine’s switch to a pro-Christian state policy.

The Christian claim to Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace was a fraud from the beginning, as Cambridge historian Michael Arnheim has shown: through numerous contradictions and factual inaccuracies, the Gospel writers betray their intention to locate Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem at any cost, against all information available to them. The reason is that they had to make Jesus live up to an Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah was to be born there.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was built in forcible replacement of a temple of the goddess Venus, the personal initiative of Emperor Constantine. His mother had seen in a dream that Jesus had died at that particular place, though close scrutiny of the original Christian texts shows that they point to a place 200 metres to the south. Constantine had the Venus temple demolished and the ground searched, and yes, his experts duly found the cross on which Jesus had died. They somehow assumed that their forebears of 33 CE had a habit of leaving or even burying crucifixion crosses at the places where they had been used, quod non. The Christian claim to the site of the Holy Cross is based on the dream of a gullible but fanatical woman, and fortified with a faked excavation.

Remember the Ayodhya debate, where Hindu scholars were challenged to produce ever more solid proof of the traditions underlying the sacredness of the controversial site? Whatever proof they came up with was automatically, without any inspection, dismissed by the high priests of secularism as “myth” and “faked evidence”. It was alleged that there was a “lack of proof” for the assumption that Rama ever lived there. But in the case of the Christian sacred places, we do not just have lack of proof that the religion’s claim is true, but we have positive proof that its claim is untrue, and that it was historically part of a campaign of fraud and destruction.

The stories of the Nativity and Holy Cross sites were trend setters in a huge campaign of christianization of Pagan sacred sites. Joan Taylor also mentions how the Aphrodite temple in Ein Karim near Jerusalem was demolished and replaced with the Nativity Church of John the Baptist. In the same period, all over the Roman Empire, Pagan places of worship were demolished, sacred groves chopped down and idols smashed by Christian preachers who replaced them with Christian relics which they themselves posted or “discovered” there, like the twenty-odd “only real” instances of Jesus’s venerable foreskin.

Pagan symbols and characters were superficially christianized. For example, Saint George and the archangel Michael, both depicted as slaying a dragon, are nothing but Christian names for the Indo-European myth of the dragon-slayer—in the Vedic version: Indra slaying Vritra. The Pagan festivals of the winter solstice (Yuletide) and the spring equinox were deformed into the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. The Egyptian icon of the Mother Goddess Isis with her son Horus in her lap, very popular throughout the Roman Empire, was turned into the Madonna with the Babe Jesus. At the same time, devotees of the genuine Mother Goddess and enthusiasts of the genuine winter solstice festival were persecuted, their temples demolished or turned into churches.

This massive campaign of fraud and destruction was subsequently extended to the Germanic, Slavic and Baltic countries. Numerous ancient churches across Europe are so many Babri Masjids, containing or standing on the left-overs of so many Rama Janmabhoomi temples. Just after the christianization of Europe was completed with the forced conversion of Lithuania in the fifteenth century, the iconoclastic zeal was taken to America, and finally to Africa and Asia.

Christian impositions on India

India too has had its share of Christian iconoclasm. After the Portuguese settlement, hundreds of temples in and around the Portuguese-held territories were demolished, often to be replaced with Catholic churches. “Saint” Francis Xavier described with glee the joy he felt when he saw the Hindu idols smashed and temples demolished. Most sixteenth and seventeenth century churches in India contain the rubble of demolished Hindu temples. The French-held pockets witnessed some instances of Catholic fanaticism as well. Under British rule, Hindu places of worship in the population centres were generally left alone—some exceptions notwithstanding—but the tribal areas became the scene of culture murder by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. There are recent instances of desecration of tribal village shrines and sacred groves by Christians, assaults on Hindu processions both in the tribal belts and in the south, and attempts to turn the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari into a Virgin Mary shrine.

In South India, the myth of St. Thomas provided the background for a few instances of temple destruction at places falsely associated with his life and alleged martyrdom, especially the St. Thomas Church replacing the Mylapore Kapaleeswara Temple in Madras. In this case, the campaign of fraud is still continuing: till today, many Indian writers continue to claim historical validity for the long-refuted story of the apostle Thomas coming to India and getting killed by jealous Brahmins. The story is parallel to that of Jesus getting killed by the Jews, and it has indeed served as an argument in an elaborate Christian doctrine of anti-Brahminism which resembles Christian anti-Semitism to the detail. At any rate, it is a fraud.

From those Christian polemists insisting on the St. Thomas narrative’s historicity (I will be the first to welcome the unexpected demonstration of the historicity of traditions dismissed as “myths”), we may at least expect that they tell their prospective converts the whole of the story. They should not omit that it describes Thomas as Jesus’s twin brother—implying that Jesus was not God’s Only Begotten Son—and as an anti-social character who exhausted his royal protector’s patience by luring many women away from their families; and that it relates how Jesus was a slave-trader who was not even above selling his own brother.

Towards a full accounting and apology

For a proper way of digesting this dark episode of Christian iconoclasm, we suggest the following two steps. First of all, a full stop has to be put to the surreptitious forms of Christian iconoclasm which are continuing to this very day. It is nonsense to talk of dialogue and communal harmony as long as attempts are still being made to disrupt existing modes of worship.

Secondly, Hindus and Christians should take inspiration from the contemporary American attitude towards the horrible story of America’s christianization through culture murder and genocide. After all, the Christian conquests in India and in America are two sides of the same coin. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Pope awarded one half of the world—ultimately comprising areas from Brazil to Macao, including Africa and India—to Portugal, and the other half—including most of America and the Philippines—to Spain, on condition that they use their power to christianize the population. The Spanish campaign in America had juridically and theologically exactly the same status as its Portuguese counterpart in India. If the result was not as absolutely devastating in India as it was in America, this was merely due to different power equations: the Portuguese were less numerous than the Spanish, and the Indians were technologically and militarily more equal to the Europeans than the Native Americans were. The Church’s intentions behind Columbus’s discovery of America and Vasco da Gama’s landing in India were exactly the same.

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus‘s first meeting with the Pagans of the New World (1992), many Christian dignitaries have expressed their shame and regret at what has been done to the Native Americans by—or, as they prefer to put it, “in the name of”—Christianity. Even the Pope has publicly acknowledged at least a part of his Church’s guilt. Now that the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama‘s landing in India [has passed], Hindus should make sure that the Christians including the Pope do not forget to do some similar soul-searching and to offer similar apologies.

Like the Native Americans, Hindu society will not be satisfied with a few cheap words. As Hindu spokesman Arun Shourie writes:

“By an accounting [of the calumnies heaped upon India and Hinduism] I do not of course mean some declaration saying, ‘Sorry’. By an accounting I mean that the calumnies would be listed; the grounds on which they were based would be listed, and the Church would declare whether, in the light of what is known now, the grounds were justified or not; and the motives which impelled those calumnies would be exhumed.”

This is actually an application of the rules of confession, one of the Catholic sacraments: it is not enough to ask for absolution from your sins, you first have to confess what sins you have actually committed.

The Church now claims that it is no longer the aggressive Church Militant of the old days, that its whole outlook has profoundly changed. Shourie lists five criteria by which we will know whether these changes are genuine:

An honest accounting of the calumnies which the Church has heaped on India and Hinduism;

Informing Indian Christians and non-Christians about the findings of Bible scholarship;

Informing them about the impact of scientific progress on Church doctrine;

Acceptance that reality is multi-layered and that there are many ways of perceiving it;

Bringing the zeal for conversion in line with the recent declarations that salvation is possible through other religions as well.

I expect Church leaders to reply: “You cannot ask of the Indian Church to commit suicide like that!” But let us give them a chance.

Christian hostilities today

After the Church’s public self-criticism before the Native Americans, there is every reason [for Hindus] to take stock of what Christianity has done to India. But in this case, the Christians may need some insistent reminding: unlike in America, where they have had to face the facts of history, and where they have had to switch to a pro-Native stand under the aegis of Liberation Theology, the Christian Churches in India are still continuing on a course of self-righteous aggression against the native society and culture.

Seldom have I seen such viper-like mischievousness as in the most recent strategies of the Christian mission in India. It is a viper with two teeth. On the one side, there is the gentle penetration through social and educational services, now compounded with a rhetoric of “inculturation”: glib talk of “dialogue”, “sharing”, “common ground”, fraudulent donning of Hindu robes by Christian priests, all calculated to fool Hindus about the continuity of the Christian striving to destroy Hinduism and replace it with the cult of Jesus. This is not to deny that there are some Indian Christians who sincerely believe that the denomination game is outdated, that we should go “beyond the religions” and mix freely with non-Christians without trying to change their religious loyalties; but they do not represent official Church policy.

On the other side, there is a vicious attempt to delegitimize Hinduism as India’s native religion, and to mobilize the weaker sections of Hindu society against it with “blood and soil” slogans. Seeing how the nativist movement in the Americas is partly directed against Christianity because of its historical aggression against native society—in spite of Liberation Theology’s attempts to recuperate the movement—the Indian Church tries to take over this nativist tendency and forge it into a weapon against Hinduism. Christian involvement in the so-called Dalit (“oppressed”) and Adivasi (“aboriginal”) movements is an attempt to channel the nativist revival and perversely direct it against native society itself. It advertises its services as the guardian of the interests of the “true natives”—meaning the Scheduled Castes and Tribes—against native society, while labelling the upper castes as “Aryan invaders”, on the basis of an outdated theory postulating a migration in 1500 B.C.

To declare people “invaders” because of a supposed migration of some of their ancestors 3500 years ago is an unusual feat of political hate rhetoric in itself, but the point is that it follows a pattern of earlier rounds of Christian aggression. It is Cortes all over again: Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, could defeat the Aztecs, the ruling nation which had migrated from Utah three centuries earlier, by enlisting the support of nations subdued by the Aztecs, with himself posing as their liberator—of course, they were to regret their “liberation”. The attempt to divide the people of a country on an ethnic basis—whether it is a real ethnic distinction as in the case of Cortes’ Mexico, or a wilfully invented one as in the case of India—is an obvious act of hostility, unmistakably an element of warfare.

While in the post-colonial decades, Church rhetoric has markedly softened, its action on the ground has only become more aggressive. Shourie quotes intelligence reports on the role of missionaries in armed separatist movements in the North-East, and on their violations of the legal restrictions in Arunachal Pradesh on conversion by force or allurement. The World Council of Churches officially supports separatism in the tribal areas—and even among the Schedules Castes, another “indigenous nation”!—in pursuit of the long cherished project of carving out Christian-dominated independent states. In its 1989 Darwin Declaration, the WCC announces: “Indigenous peoples strive for and demand the full spectrum of autonomy available in the principle of self-determination, including the right to re-establish our own nation-states”. The churches and governments have an obligation to see [this] come to reality by providing the necessary means, without any restriction attached.” What sounds fair enough in the case of the Tibetans or the East-Timorese, is used in India as a step on the way to unrestricted exercise of clerical power, a formalization of the already existing trends in the Christian-dominated states of the Indian republic.

Therefore, “without any restriction”, Christians are teaching some sections of Hindu society hatred against other sections. You don’t normally try to create hostility between your friends, so the Church’s policy to pit sections of Hindu society against one another should be seen for what it is: an act of aggression, which warrants an active policy of self-defence and counter-attack. This counter-attack should take a proper form, adapted to the genius of Hinduism.

Why Christianity should be rejected

The Hindu response to Christian aggression should concentrate on consciousness-raising. Information should be widely disseminated on the two fundamental reasons why Christianity is totally unacceptable as an alternative to Hinduism.

The first is its historical record, with its destructive fanaticism as well as its opportunistic collaboration with whichever social force seemed most helpful to the Church’s expansion. Contrary to current propaganda, Christianity has historically supported feudalism, absolute kingship, slavery and apartheid, all properly justified with passages from the Bible. St. Peter and St. Paul gave a clear message to the oppressed of the world: “Slaves, accept with due submission the authority of your masters, not only if they are good and friendly, but even if they are harsh.” (1 Peter 2:18) And: “Slaves, be obedient to your earthly masters with devotion and simplicity, as if your obedience were directed to Christ Himself.”(Ephesians 6:5). Liberation Theology, far from constituting a break with the Church’s long-standing collaboration with the dominant powers, is merely the application of the same strategy to new circumstances: now that the masses constitute a decisive political force, now that social activism is a theme which ensures political and financial support from different quarters, the Church has decided to tap into this new source of power as well.

The other—and in my opinion the most important—fact about Christianity which ought to be the topic of an all-out education campaign, is the scientific certainty that its fundamental teachings are historically fraudulent, intellectually garbled, and psychologically morbid. Jesus was neither the son of a virgin mother nor the Only Begotten Son of God. Jesus’s perception of himself as the Messiah and the Son of God was a psychopathological condition, supported by hallucinations—especially the voice he heard during his baptism, the visions of the devil during his fast, the vision of Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor—and partly caused by his most ordinary but traumatic shame of having been conceived out of wedlock. Numerous manipulations—interpolation, omission, antedating, deliberate mistakes of translation and interpretation—of the textual basis of Christian doctrine by the evangelists and other Church Fathers have been discovered, analyzed and explained in their historical context by competent Bible scholars, most of them working at Christian institutes.

Now some Hindus will object that there must also be a bright side. I am well aware that Christian history has produced some important contributions to human progress in culture, art, philosophy. I have a rather positive opinion of some of the Christian classics, such as Thomas Aquinas‘s philosophy, or the Church’s social teachings—which are rather different from Liberation Theology—and I stand by my earlier suggestion that Hindu political ideologues would gain a lot from studying the works which inspired their natural European counterpart, the Christian Democrats. However, a closer analysis shows that the truly important elements in these contributions are ultimately of non-Christian origin.

The intellectually most attractive elements in Christian doctrine are bits of Hellenistic philosophy co-opted by the Church Fathers, without any prophetic or revelatory origins, apart from elements of Judaic tradition which predated Jesus and were in no way augmented or surpassed by his supposed teachings. The way Christianity incorporated them is often a superficial cover-up of the contradictions between mutually exclusive teachings. Thus, the Platonic notion of an immortal soul, which is part of Church doctrine, makes the central Christian message of the “resurrection of the body”—which originated in a Jewish tradition ignoring the notion of an afterlife—superfluous. If death does not really exist, if it is merely a step from this type of life to another type, why bother about bodily resurrection? And if we partake of the divine nature by sharing God’s immortality, where is the need for a saviour?

On the other hand, those contributions which set Christianity apart from the prevailing religious and intellectual atmosphere in the Greco-Roman world, are not always the most desirable. Thus, Christianity’s emphasis on the individual’s dependence on scriptural or Church authority has suffocated millions of people in their spiritual development and directly caused the persecution and killing of numerous freethinkers. Its contorted and repressive attitude towards human sexuality is notoriously responsible for untold amounts of psychological suffering. Add the negative attitude towards worldly pursuits including science; the sentimental fixation on a single historical person with his idiosyncratic behaviour, extolled moreover to a divine status—Jews and Muslims have a point when they consider this the ultimate in “idolatry”—the concomitant depreciation of all other types of human character—artist, warrior, householder, humorist, renouncer—in favour of the pathetic antisocial type which Jesus represented; and the morbid love of martyrdom. Our list of Christianity’s failures is not complete, but is sufficient to justify the evaluation on which millions of Christian-born people have come to agree: Christianity is not true.

Jesus was not God’s Only Begotten Son, and he was not the Saviour of mankind from its Original Sin. Historically, he was just one of the numerous antisocial preachers going around in troubled Palestine in the period of Roman rule. He believed the End was near—definitely a failed prophecy, unless we redefine “near”—and had a rather high opinion of himself and of his role in the impending catastrophe. We can feel compassion for this thoroughly unhappy man with his miserably unsuccessful life, but we should not compensate him for his failure by elevating him to a super-human status; let alone worshipping him as Saviour and Son of God. Whatever the worth of values which Christians claim as theirs, nothing at all is gained by making people believe in a falsehood like the faith in Jesus Christ.

Life after Christianity

Hindus with their conservative and pluralistic concern for the continuity of people in their respective faiths may wonder whether, for Christians, there is life after Christianity. Let me speak from my own experience. I have grown up in a Catholic family, gone to Catholic schools, and am a member of Catholic social organizations, so in a sociological sense I belong to the Catholic community. Moreover, I publish articles defending the Christians against the Islamic onslaught in foreign countries as well as against cultural aggression by Left-secularists in my own country. I also like to point to the worthwhile contributions of the Church tradition and of Christian thinkers and artists against the sweeping anti-Christian positions of some of my atheist and Hindu friends. Yet, like most of my friends from the same background, I have gradually discovered that Christianity is an illusory belief system, and without any outside intellectual or other pressures, my attachment to it has dissolved.

This step from belief in an irrational “revealed” doctrine towards truthfulness and the spirit of independent inquiry has not been a loss to me, nor to most people in the same situation that I know of. On the contrary, I have found that St. Paul’s dictum is fully valid: “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

For many thoughtful Westerners, the end of Christianity has not turned out to be the end of religion and morality, contrary to the predictions of our teachers. To be sure, there has been a profound change in public morality, which is partly a liberation from repressive prejudice, but partly also a real decline in moral sensitivity and responsibility, as demonstrated by the rising crime rate and the increasing number of broken families. Christianity claims to be the solution to this problem—hence the call for a “second evangelization”—but to quite an extent it should accept the blame for this development. By identifying religiosity and morality with its own irrational belief system, Christianity has made many people who outgrew this belief system throw out the annexes of moral responsibility and spiritual striving as well. Now, people are needing some time to discover for themselves that religion and morality still make sense after the demise of Christianity.

Back to pre-Christian roots

Though the decline of Christianity in the West brings a few problems with it, that is no reason to reverse the process. Instead, we are reconstructing religion and morality for ourselves. One of the sources of the post-Christian religious revival, numerically still marginal but of great symbolic significance, is the rediscovery of ancestral Paganism. Intellectually, this movement still lacks solidity and consistency, and finds itself associated with a variety of social and political concerns stretching across the ideological spectrum: ethnic revivalism, nationalism, ecologism, feminism, communitarianism, anarchism. Part of the reason is that in European Paganism, unlike in Hinduism, there is no historical continuity, so that—except for the well-documented Greek traditions—there is ample room for guessing and fantasizing about the historical contents of ancient Paganism: an open invitation to romantics and theosophists to project their own pet ideas onto the mute screen of the ancient religion. Perhaps that is why the most consistent neo-Pagan movement arose in Iceland, where the memory of ancient Paganism was best preserved.

When Pope John-Paul II visited Iceland, he was received by Christian dignitaries, but the first one to address him was the country’s senior most religious leader, Sveinbjšrn Beinteinsson (1924-93). Originally a farmer, Beinteinsson gained fame across northern Europe as a traditional singer and songwriter—what the English call, with a term from the Celtic part of their cultural ancestry, a bard—and in 1972 he founded the Asatruarfelagid, the “society for the Ase religion”, which was officially registered as a religion on 3 May 1973. As “the whole people’s invocator”[8] of the reconstituted ancestral religion, he spoke with mild irony to the Pope, about these “new fashions in religion”—meaning Christianity—which his tradition had seen arriving in Iceland.

The Icelandic example is being followed in other Germanic countries including North America. Celtic-based revivals are flourishing in Celtic countries or countries with a Celtic past—France, where some 40 different neo-Druid societies of divergent quality co-exist, England and Belgium—Slavic and Baltic countries have their own variety, with Russia and Lithuania being particularly fertile grounds for neo-Paganism. In the former Soviet provinces of Tajikistan and Ossetia, there is a revival of Zoroastrianism, while forms of Shamanism are resurfacing from Kyrgyzstan to Hungary. In North America, these movements are partly absorbing those circles which were flirting earlier with Native American spirituality (Sweat Lodge Ceremony). They now accept that the Native Americans themselves don’t appreciate this type of imitation and prefer European-descended people to rediscover their own Pagan heritage. While evangelists are working hard to christianize tribals in the interiors of Latin America, many christianized Native Americans are returning to their ancestral traditions. In Brazil, supposedly the world’s largest Catholic country, the black and mulatto populations are taking to the elaborately polytheistic Candomble cult, with the sympathy of growing sections of the European-descended people, who view this cult of African origin as the emerging national religion.

Most of these neo-Pagan groups are still too obviously immature, groping in the dark created by the Christian destruction of their historical roots; it is interesting to watch some of them adapt their own rituals and doctrines to new scholarly findings about their chosen religious ancestry. We shall have to see how this line of response to the post-Christian vacuum develops; but already, its very existence poses a powerful symbolic challenge to Christianity.

Meanwhile, the biggest actual challenge to Christianity in the West is the appeal of Oriental religions. Now long past the stage of beatnik experimentation with Zen Buddhism and hippie affectations of Indian lore, the Western daughter-schools of Asian schools of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are gaining in authenticity and respectability as well as in attendance numbers. Some people formally convert and declare themselves followers of these religions; many more just practise the techniques they’ve learned and try to live according to the teachings, all while insisting on their individual non-attachment to any organized religion. Thus, in Germany—at least among natives, as opposed to the prolific Muslim immigrants—Buddhism is the fastest growing religion with some 300,000 practitioners. Even more far-reaching is the gradual penetration of small bits and pieces of Oriental heritage: most sportsmen as well as pregnant women preparing for birth now learn some elementary yogic breath control (pranayama) techniques, while even among Christian monks and nuns there is a substantial percentage who defy the Pope’s warnings and practise non-Christian forms of meditation.

Part of Christianity’s appeal among Indian tribals and fishermen is the—waning, but still palpable—prestige of the West. They should realize that the West is gradually opening up to the traditions of India and China, even while the elites of these countries are still spitting on their own heritage and pursuing westernization. Indians living in the middle of these traditions should have no problem finding a worthwhile alternative to Christianity. Even Dalits with a grudge against Hinduism should have no problem in rejecting the eager invitations of Christianity and Islam, and in following their leader Dr. Ambedkar onto the path of the Buddha. In time, closer study of the Buddha’s teachings may well reveal to them that, just as Jesus was a Jew, the Buddha was a Hindu.

Christianity against Paganism

It is interesting to see how the mild and harmless people who run the leftovers of the once powerful churches in Europe suddenly show a streak of fanaticism when confronted with signs of life in the long-buried corpse of Paganism. In Iceland, the established Lutheran Church has intervened to stop the ongoing construction of a Pagan temple halfway; the government complied with the pressure and temporarily halted the construction work. In contemporary polemical publications from the Christian side, we see a boom in attacks on what is loosely called the New Age Movement, meaning the mixed bag of feminist neo-witchcraft, ecologist philosophy (“deep ecology”), astrology, Pagan revivalism, Taoist health techniques and Hindu-Buddhist meditation. The Pope himself has condemned yoga, and in January 1995, his derogatory utterances on Buddhism provoked an anti-Pope agitation during his visit to Sri Lanka.

By contrast, the Church leadership strongly opposes any serious criticism of Islam. In India’s Hindu-Muslim conflict, the Christian media with their world-wide impact have thrown their weight completely behind the Islamic aggressor. The reason for this uneven treatment of Paganism—in the broadest sense—and Islam is not merely the relative closeness of Islam as a fellow monotheist religion, nor just the fear which Islam inspires. Churchmen have the (correct) impression that the Pagan alternative, though softer and weaker than Islam in a confrontational sense, ultimately has a stronger appeal to the educated Western mind. They calculate that the better-educated mankind of the next century will typically go the way of today’s European intellectuals, rather than the way of today’s Black Muslims or Christian Dalits.

Islam’s money and muscle power may look impressive, certainly capable of doing some real damage to targeted countries and societies, but Islam has no chance of becoming the religion of a science-based, space-conquering world society. Exclusivist revelations have no appeal among educated people, especially after they have acquainted themselves with the Vedantic or Buddhist philosophies. That is why the churches are investing huge resources in the battle for Asia’s mind, where they face their most formidable enemy. That is why they are so active in India: not only is India’s atmosphere of religious freedom more hospitable to them than the conditions of Islamic countries, or even of non-Islamic countries where proselytization is prohibited—countries as divergent as China, Myanmar, Israel, and, at least formally, Nepal—but they also know and fear the intrinsic superiority of the Indian religion.

The role of disputed places of worship

In the present struggle to death which Christianity is waging against Hinduism, is it any use for Hindus to rake up disputes over usurped places of worship? Or, as Christians who have the preservation of their churches in mind, are wont to ask: isn’t one Babri Masjid problem enough?

The Hindu response should be in proportion to the seriousness of the matter. Within the hierarchy of Hindu sacred places, I don’t think that any of the most important ones has been usurped by Christianity, the Mylapore Shiva temple being—with due respect—of secondary rank; though I admit that this is all relative. Of course, the Church itself is welcome to make a move and offer the stolen places of worship back. In fact, until the Church voluntarily offers to give some of its illegitimate property back, there is every reason to be skeptical about its protestations of a “new spirit of dialogue”. However, in my opinion, it may be wasteful and strategically counterproductive to start clamouring for the return of stolen places of worship.

Hindu society should be more ambitious. A place of worship may be an important focus for mobilization and consciousness-raising—vide Ayodhya—but it is hardly important in itself. Better to go for the big one: attract the worshippers, and they will bring the places of worship along with them. Not the places but the offerers of worship are to be liberated from Christianity.

The fate of Hindu sacred sites at the hands of Christian missionaries, as a piece of significant historical information, may have a certain auxiliary role to play in this process of consciousness-raising. Their ruins are witnesses to the antireligious and destructive edge of a Church which now advertises itself in India as the bringer of progress and social justice. A formal “liberation of sacred sites” need not be put on the agenda, but the Hindus have every right to insist on a mental and verbal breakthrough: Christians must acknowledge the historical fact that, from Bethlehem to Madras, most of their sacred sites are booty won in campaigns of fraud and destruction. Since their theology urges a sense of sinfulness and guilt anyway, they should not find it too difficult to make such a confession.

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is an Orientalist from Belgian who frequently visits India to lecture. This article is extracted from Ishwar Sharan’s book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Fourth Edition 2019, Voice of India, New Delhi.

VOICE OF INDIA

History Politics Science Religion

Author VOI

Muslim Testimonies: The Plight of Women in Islam – Virendra Parekh

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When rationalists don’t get Hindu philosophy – David Frawley

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Indian traditional wisdom on intelligence gathering for internal security – Neha Gupta

Why the liberal world order, built on science and reason, was doomed to fail – Pranav Sharma

Why India doesn’t fit the Woke script – Yuvraj Pokharna

Why Indians should reject St. Thomas and Christianity – Koenraad Elst

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