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

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Trump - Xi - Putin

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

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.

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.

Nationalism Returns

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

VOI

Woke, Woker, Wokest

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. – Yuvraj Pokharna

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.

Woke Ideology

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

VOI

St. Thomas in San Thome Cathedral

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.

Goa Inquisition: Hindu victims with their hands nailed to posts await the Portuguese priest's judgement. They will later be burned at the stake in the center of Old Goa.

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.

Thomas and Assassin

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.

Pope Francis humbles himself before Native chiefs in Canada (2022).

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.

St. Paul sends the slave Onesimus who has come for help, back into slavery with his Christian master Philemon.

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 saves ... or else!

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.

Modern Druids celebrating at Stonehenge in England.

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.

Immaculate Conception Cathedral, Pondicherry.

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.

Koenraad Elst Quote

Ram Mandir theft, Hindu nationalism, and the poll politics of UP – S. Gurumurthy

VOI

Sri Ram Mandir Ayodhya

With elections approaching in Uttar Pradesh—the epicentre of national renaissance—the objective of the detractors is crystal clear: use the theft to fracture the temple movement which recalled and reinstated the pre-independence political philosophy of Hindu nationalism. – S. Gurumurthy

Part 1

The cash theft at Ram Mandir that dominates national and international media headlines, has escalated into a massive political controversy, recalling the ideological conflicts of the 1990s. Just as the Mandir movement assumed immense political significance then, the theft at the temple too has gained political traction with the assembly elections in UP, the nerve centre of the Mandir movement, just months away.

While this political interest is natural and understandable, the situation today presents a stark difference. The Mandir movement then did not have to face today’s hyper-competitive, minute-by-minute breaking news media. When such a frenzied media apparatus mixes with political agendas, truth can be uncovered only by taking a helicopter view that avoids the narratives arrested by contextual sensationalism.

Ram’s opponents now His devotees

The theft has miraculously transformed the erstwhile opponents of Ram Mandir into his ardent devotees chanting “Jai Shri Ram”. The Congress party, which boycotted the Pran Pratishtha ceremony in 2024, dispatched a nine-member high-level delegation for Ram Lala’s darshan last week. Even if driven by pure political opportunism, this is a welcome development, as Mahatma Gandhi, whom it swears by, regarded “Ram Naam” as cure for all ills, national and personal.

Arvind Kejriwal, who had boycotted the 2024 Mandir ceremony, too has undergone instant metamorphosis into a Ram Bhakt, declaring that the theft had deeply pained all Sanatanis and announcing his Friday visit for darshan. Most ironically, when Mulayam Singh Yadav was chief minister in 1990, he ordered the police to fire and kill 16 kar sevaks and later proudly declared he would have issued the same order even if 30 had to die. Today, his Samajwadi Party sheds tears, claiming Ram Bhakts have been cheated.

The overexcited Indian media competing for breaking news, too joined this political chorus. One media predicted long-term damage to the BJP. Another claimed this was a severe setback to BJP’s promise of Ram Rajya—the gold standard of probity in governance.

Capitalising on the geopolitical significance of the temple, global media entities with a history of anti-India and anti-Hindu bias, the Reuters, BBC, and Al-Jazeera, painted the incident as if it were a billion-dollar heist. “Stealing from the gods: India’s Ram Temple hit by corruption scandal. The temple is mired in embezzlement allegations before crucial state elections, embarrassing PM Modi’s government,” screamed Al-Jazeera.

A theft—not corruption or a scam

What has happened at the Ram Mandir is a theft. A pilferage easily executed by lower-level staff handling cash. Not a corruption or a scam. It would be corruption only if the top management had attempted to hush it up. On the contrary, within days of the theft coming to light, the higher-ups initiated severe, uncompromising action. There was no sign of an institutional cover-up which only will make it a scam.

Theft happens everywhere. To know the times we live in, one must recall Swami Chinmayananda’s observation: “In the Krita Yuga, good and evil lived in different worlds (Devas and Asuras). In Treta Yuga, they existed in the same world (Ram and Ravana). In Dwapara Yuga, they were in the same family (Pandavas and Kauravas). But in Kali Yuga, they exist within the same human being.” We live in Kali Yuga, where good and evil reside simultaneously in man.

When desire and greed overpower even inherently good people, crimes can occur in the most sacred of spaces—be it churches, mosques or temples. Stealing from a temple hundi (donation box) is notoriously easy. As the C.P. Ramaswami Iyer Committee report on temple administration astutely noted, money dropped into a hundi is sacred, but the moment it is taken out, it becomes mere currency notes. It was based on this very logic that the judiciary permitted secular governments to take over temple funds.

The true metric of integrity in any institution is not the absence of wrong doing—which is ideal—but the speed and decisiveness with which authorities respond to it. Covering up a theft is what constitutes corruption and fraud—usually orchestrated to protect higher-ups. The Bofors scandal was exposed in 1987. As it involved the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, no FIR was registered till he was ousted from power. It was filed three years later, in 1990, after he was voted out. Let us examine the Ram Temple Trust’s actions against this historical backdrop of cover-ups in recent cases of theft in temples involving the government as trustee.

The Ram Mandir theft is undoubtedly shocking and painful to anyone who cares about the nation’s reputation symbolised by the geopolitical reputation of the Mandir. Yet, the tsunami of hyperbolic news and allegations that obscured crucial facts, have unfairly cast an avoidable shadow on the national brand. Even neutral commentators have sadly failed to notice the sheer speed at which the Trust and the UP government acted, which was in direct contrast to similar instances of temple thefts, but was drowned out in the noise. Read on.

Speed of Action: Govt temple trusts versus Ram Mandir Trust

Recall the allegations of property misappropriation and idol thefts in government-administered temples in Sabarimala, Thiruvananthapuram, Puri, and Tamil Nadu. Comparing the response of the government bodies to that of the Ram Temple Trust reveals the stark difference between the Ram Mandir Trust response and government-controlled trusts in those cases. It doesn’t need turning the pages of decades of history. Today, the AI tool brings the history with references on the computer screen.

When AI tool Gemini was prompted to compare the scenarios of how the Ram Mandir Trust and government trusts in those cases acted, it replied: “Compared to how governments blocked and delayed action on allegations in temples under their control, the Ram Temple Trust’s swift action is astonishingly different.”

It noted that in cases like Sabarimala, Puri, and the Tamil Nadu idol thefts, the sheer inaction of government boards forced courts to intervene and order probes, delaying justice by years, sometimes decades. In stark contrast, the Ram Temple Trust requested the UP government to form a Special Investigation Team (SIT) within days of the crime coming to light.

The AI rightly summarised: “Driven by its ideology and self-esteem, the Ram Mandir Trust took immediate action. Conversely, government trusts acted sluggishly in a bid to protect their systems and bureaucracy.” (The very ideology that some media claimed would be tainted by this theft is precisely what catalysed such uncompromising action.)

The AI tool also said, “Furthermore, top officials of the Ram Temple took moral responsibility and resigned immediately. In government temple scandals, officials not only cling to their posts but fight legal battles using taxpayer money to protect their positions.” It concluded: Everything regarding the Ram Mandir theft—from the SIT probe to the official report and mass arrests—happened in a matter of days.

Further, it said “the Trust voluntarily submitted its finances to a comprehensive five-year re-audit. Government-run temples routinely dodge external audits citing tradition or autonomy.” An AI savvy 10th class student could have done this comparison by clicking the laptop mouse, which the multi trillion dollar global and India media in its excitement failed to do.

The unprecedented actions by the Ram Mandir Trust also clearly imply that this was a low-level theft, not a high-level scam. For political leaders, aided by the media, to suspect it as a high level affair is a tragedy. Now let us turn to the “stark contrast” in facts of the Ram Mandir Trust’s action as compared to the temple Trusts mentioned.

June 4 to 26: A timeline of lightning-speed action

It is baffling that the media missed this stark contrast: government trusts covering up wrongs till courts intervene versus the Ram Mandir Trust acting against the wrong voluntarily, at lightning speed. See the chronology of facts:

June 4: First clue emerges. An unclaimed bag containing Rs 2 lakh in cash found in a washroom in the Mandir complex. Trust officials immediately begin reviewing CCTV footage.

June 5: General Secretary Champat Rai orders an internal probe targeting key suspect Avinash Shukla. His house is raided, and Rs 58 lakh is recovered before the police even arrive. Rai struck first against a man in his own inner circle. This severe crackdown terrified other accomplices into quietly depositing stolen money back into bank accounts, leading the Trust to believe for a while that the issue could be resolved internally.

June 7: News of the recovery leaks, sparking wild rumours of stolen gold and silver. Rai, relying on preliminary assessments that the money could be fully recovered internally, states that audits showed no significant discrepancies.

June 13: Realising that assessment was wrong, the Trust formally requests the UP government to set up a high-level SIT probe. This six-day stagnation was the only delay in the entire action.

June 25: SIT probe reveals that Manish Yadav, a cash counter employee, repeatedly stole money by exploiting CCTV blind spots. An FIR is registered. Midnight raids are conducted with lightning speed into the early hours of June 26, resulting in eight arrests.

June 26: Taking absolute moral responsibility for the administrative lapses, General Secretary Champat Rai and Trustee Anil Mishra resign.

Rai, an RSS pracharak who has dedicated his entire life to the nation, is a symbol of honesty and integrity. The media unfortunately drags him into the controversy, not mentioning that he was the first to initiate action ahead of the police.

Tomorrow, read how the theft may be less than half of Rs 7.5 crore suspected by SIT, how pseudo-secular political forces are trying to weaponise the Mandir theft to smear the Hindu nationalist perspective, and how their chances of finding resonance in battleground UP are slim. – The New Indian Express, 7 July 2026

Part 2

Will theft affect Hindutva, UP poll?

The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust had outsourced the cash-counting process to the local SBI branch, which in turn hired an external agency, Sainik Security Services. SBI deployed 19 personnel, which included the few recommended by the Trust.

Of the eight arrested, six were from this counting team, and two were Trust employees—one of whom betrayed the immense trust placed in him by Trust general secretary Champat Rai on the quintessential RSS ethos that “trust breeds trust”.

The theft occurred because of over reliance on personal trust instead of systemic rigour. The counting protocols were overly relaxed, allowing for collusion.

This led to administrative negligence, paving the way for the theft. As Champat Rai himself noted, he was betrayed by someone he trusted deeply.

Bulldozer action

To date, Rs 80 lakh out of the stolen cash has been recovered. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up by the UP government is actively tracking the remaining assets of the accused and investigating if any other valuables were compromised. The government’s resolve against the wrongdoers is manifest in the move to bulldoze a Rs 80-lakh house built by one of the thieves whose salary was a mere Rs 20,000.

Stolen cash a small sum?

The Ram Mandir is said to have received over Rs 3,000 crore in donations to date, with reportedly more than 90% arriving securely via bank transfers. Between April 2025 and February 2026, Rs 74 crore was reportedly collected in cash via the hundi. It was only from this cash pool that theft occurred.

Based on internal audits and preliminary SIT reports, the embezzled amount was reportedly estimated at Rs 7 crore to 7.5 crore initially. The latest estimate of the theft gathered from Trust sources is far less, out of which most has been recovered partly in cash and partly traced as properties.

Trust sources confirm that there is not a single gram of jewellery lost. The latest estimate of the stolen cash, and the absence of any loss of jewellery, if finally established by SIT, will be a serious blow to the reckless opposition charge of a huge Rs 200 crore scam.

Already, their demand for a court-monitored investigation ignores the stark contrast between inaction in government trust cases forcing the courts to step in to initiate the probe and the super promptness of the Mandir Trust’s action.

Now come to the politics and ideological clashes triggered by the theft that is inevitable as the Mandir battleground of UP goes to polls early next year.

Hindu Nationalism: Preached by Vivekananda, accepted by Gandhi, reclaimed by Ram

Even a single rupee stolen is a tragic betrayal of Shri Ram. Ram is not merely an idol. He is the very soul of this ancient nation. He is the very symbol of the Ayodhya movement that decisively course-corrected the pseudo-secular polity, which fractured our civilisational ethos. To recall how the Ram Mandir movement reoriented our national life, here is a bit of history that the media often forgets.

After independence, the inspiring ideals and symbols of the freedom movement—the concept of Hindu nationalism expounded by Swami Vivekananda and Maharishi Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of Ram Rajya, the rallying freedom battle cries of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Vande Mataram—were marginalised. The Ram Mandir movement catalysed their renaissance.

Most of those guiding the national discourse are unaware that the concept of a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nationalism) is not an invention of the RSS. Yes, it is not the RSS’s conception. Decades before the RSS was formed, this nationalism was preached by Vivekananda and Aurobindo. It became the driving force of the freedom struggle. It was thoroughly embraced by leaders like—believe it!—Gandhi, Nehru, and even Communist stalwart Rajani Palme Dutt.

In his seminal work Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi wrote that Hindu theerth yatras, pilgrimage to chardhams and reverence for Ganga jal symbolise and proclaim our national integration and nationalism. He wrote that they “make us as one in the sense in which no two Englishmen are”. When asked about Muslims, he said they must be assimilated into the overarching national mainstream. How many in the media know this?

Jawaharlal Nehru hailed Swami Vivekananda as the pioneer of India’s freedom movement. He wrote in his Glimpses of World History (1935), “The Hindu nationalism preached by the Swami was rooted deeply in Hindu religion and culture, yet was in no way anti-Muslim.” (p. 437)

Further, Nehru acknowledged, “It is not easy to draw a line between Hindu nationalism and true nationalism. The two blend together, as India is the only home of the Hindus and they form a majority there.” (p. 720) How many participants in public discourse today have read Nehru’s Glimpses of World History?

Rajani Palme Dutt, the Indian who founded the Communist Party of Great Britain, wrote in his book titled India Today that even if Indians had grown up in monastic isolation learning only the Sanskrit Vedas, they would have undoubtedly drawn inspiration required for the freedom struggle from them. How many in the media know his name, know that he wrote that book in 1939 and revised it in 1973 and still did not change what he had said in 1939?

This freedom movement, firmly anchored in Hindu nationalism, changed course drastically on one specific day—22 March 1940. That was the day the Muslim League under M.A. Jinnah passed the resolution for partition of the nation. From that day, the Hindu nationalist perspective was systematically erased from the freedom narrative.

Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai began fading from public life. After independence, the Nehru-led Congress actively rejected the very ideals and symbols Nehru himself had once celebrated. The foundational pillars of our independence—Hindu nationalism, Vande Mataram, Bharat Mata Ki Jai, and Ram Rajya—were orphaned by the pseudo secular political establishment. It was the RSS which kept the flame of these noble thoughts and symbols alive amid the pseudo-secular tsunami drive for vote bank politics.

Finally, it was the RSS-led mass Ram Mandir movement that reclaimed the pre-independence values of Hindu nationalism and reoriented the derailed national polity. When pseudo-secularists challenged Hindutva as not compatible with India’s secular Constitution, the Supreme Court delivered a historic verdict in 1996, and ruled unequivocally that Hindutva is the national soul, culture, and way of life of the Indian people. When approached to review the ruling several times later, the court refused, thus confirming the Hindu foundations of our nation and nationalism.

Weaponising theft to sabotage nationalism

The Ram Mandir movement had successfully dismantled the pseudo-secular politics based on vote, thus restoring the Hindu nationalist perspective to its rightful place in the Constitution. Now, weaponising this Mandir theft, the forces that vehemently opposed the course-correction of the nation by the Ram Mandir movement, are desperately trying to derail it and drag the nation back into the abyss of pseudo-secularism.

The coordinated attempts by opposition parties and sections of the national and international media to undermine the reputation of the Ram Mandir movement is the present political and electoral challenge to the RSS and BJP. With elections approaching in Uttar Pradesh—the epicentre of national renaissance—the objective of the detractors is crystal clear: use the theft to fracture the temple movement which recalled and reinstated the pre-independence political philosophy of Hindu nationalism.

Since the UP election is months away, the opposition’s effort to use the theft to make an impact will depend on their capacity to keep the issue alive till polling. For, in the social media-driven ecosystem, the shelf-life of all issues is increasingly becoming short. If the SIT establishes the theft to be a smaller affair and that no jewellery was lost, the opposition will have egg on its face and the issue itself will be consigned to history well before the elections. – The New Indian Express, 8 July 2026

› S.  Gurumurthy is the Editor of Thuglak Tamil Magazine and Chairman of the Vivekananda International Foundation Strategic Think Tank.

UP opposition attacks Yogi government.

Shruti Philosophy: The Hinduism that stands forgotten – Acharya Prashant

VOI

Shankara (ca. 6th cent. BCE)

The Upanishads stand where they have always stood: patient, piercing, waiting for the reader willing to be transformed. The question is whether we will stop postponing our own clarity and embrace the self-knowledge they offer. – Acharya Prashant

The morning begins in a house where everything is already decided by the past. The daughter is told to speak softly, dress “modestly”, and remember that a woman’s honour lies in obedience. The son is served first because “that’s how it has always been.” The maid uses the back door because the front is “not for her kind.” A neighbour’s illness is dismissed as fate, a child’s curiosity as an omen. If someone disputes these practices, an elder will quote a verse from a scripture they have never read and insist that this is the culture and tradition. Discrimination turns into discipline, casteism becomes order, superstition becomes faith, and fatalism becomes wisdom, mandated by texts they neither understand nor care to.

The Upanishads are sitting in the same city, unread. Yajnavalkya’s debates on the self, Nachiketa’s meeting with Death, and Ashtavakra’s unyielding advice to Janaka: these works that used to define a civilisation’s understanding of reality are now collecting dust, as astro downloads grow.  Ask a devotee about the Kena Upanishad, which asks “By whom is the mind directed?”, and you get a blank stare. Ask about a ritual fast, and every detail is offered with aplomb.

This is not a harmless shift. It is a civilisational forgetting.

We call ourselves followers of Sanatan Dharma, yet few can explain the words. Vedanta is not one school among many; it is the philosophical culmination of the Vedic corpus, the summit toward which the Vedas move. To claim the Vedas as supreme while ignoring Vedanta is to possess a treasure and never open it.

The Bridge That Collapsed

To understand how we arrived here, one neglected distinction must be seen clearly: Shruti and Smriti.

Shruti means “that which was heard.” It refers only to the Vedas and the Upanishads. The philosopher-sages did not call themselves authors but seers. They claimed no originality; they said, “We heard.” Hence, Shruti is described as apaurusheya, not authored by human intention, making it timeless and authoritative.

Smriti means “that which is remembered.” It includes the epics, the Puranas, and the Dharmashastras. While useful for ethical guidance, Smriti is human-written and carries the colours, proclivities, and weaknesses of the human mind. These works reflect not the eternal truth but an author’s perspective influenced by the conditions of his era.

Smriti arose for a reason: The Upanishads are strict in their demand. They declare that the self one assumes is an illusion, that only Brahm is, and that one is ‘That.’ This is unbearable to the ego. Stories, rituals, and symbols were meant as a bridge toward this truth. A bridge is valid only if it leads somewhere; when it becomes the destination, preparation turns into postponement. The bridge collapsed.

Vedanta dissolves the ego. The ego resists dissolution, so it reshaped religion in its own image: gods to be pleased or angered, heavens to be earned, rituals promising reward. What was to lead toward Shruti was made a substitute for it.

Shruti remains the final authority. Whatever in tradition aligns with it is valid dharma. Whatever contradicts it, however old or popular, stands disqualified.

What Popular Religion Teaches

Look honestly at today’s Hindu practice. Much of it arises from genuine longing: the desire for meaning, protection, transcendence. That longing is not the problem. The question is whether these practices honour it or go against it. Do they align with Shruti or contradict it?

Worship as transaction: People make offerings, place requests, and wait for results. The lord is approached as a higher power who can be swayed through devotion, gifts, or persistence. Worship runs smoothly on this logic, and not many find anything wrong.

Psychologically, this breeds dependence. Instead of asking what is false within, the mind asks what must be offered to secure protection or advantage. Fear dresses as faith, obedience as devotion. The ego survives because it is never examined, only bargained with.

Vedanta dismantles this structure completely. The Mundaka Upanishad distinguishes between higher knowledge and lower, placing ritualistic action in the lower category. In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa that the Self is not attained through instruction, intellect, or accumulated acts. Ashtavakra goes even further, declaring that he solely worships the Self. Once this is realized, petitionary worship collapses. One realises one was never intended to beseech the Absolute.

Physical locations as sacred: Pilgrimage is an important part of religious life. Sacred sites promise faster spiritual progress through physical closeness. The journey is hard, the effort visible, the seriousness unquestioned.

Yet pilgrimage often becomes movement without inner movement. Distance is mistaken for depth, fatigue for transformation. The body travels far, so the mind may avoid travelling inward. One returns with memories and souvenirs, but the same unexamined self resumes its routine.

Shruti leaves no ambiguity. The Mundaka Upanishad states plainly that the Self is found in the heart, not in geography or destinations. One may travel thousands of kilometres outward and still remain untouched within.

Fasting and vows: These are widely practised as spiritual bargaining. They may build discipline, but often reduce to “Suffer now, receive later.” Endure deprivation so that destiny might soften.

Psychologically, this preserves the ego while disciplining the body. The mind stays unquestioned while the stomach is trained. One feels serious without facing the far greater discomfort of self-inquiry. Austerity becomes a substitute for understanding.
Vedanta does not endorse this trade. In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa that austerity without right knowledge does not lead to the Self. Ashtavakra is blunt: bondage arises from identification with the body, and only knowledge cuts that bond. If the problem is identification, starving the body does not address it. One can starve for years and remain as stuck as before.

Astrology and planetary fear: People fear Saturn, blame Rahu, wear gemstones and prescribe rituals. They project personal confusion onto the sky, and the adult mind goes back into infancy, seeking reassurance rather than clarity.

Vedanta does not contest astrology; it simply renders it superfluous. It doesn’t ask, “Which force governs me?” but, “Why am I so eager to believe something else does?” Astrology gives answers without understanding and predicts without responsibility. It survives only where there is reluctance to face one’s own fear, desire, and indecision. Once this question is faced honestly, planetary anxiety loses its grip.

The domesticated deity: Perhaps the most revealing distortion is what has been done to Krishna. This sentimental figure inspires devotion in millions, yet the voice of the Gita’s Krishna, revealing the structure of reality, has been softened into something manageable and harmless.

This choice is psychological. A god who demands transformation threatens comfort; a god who demands surrender threatens identity. A domesticated deity asks nothing and changes nothing.
When Arjuna breaks down on the battlefield, Krishna does not soothe him or offer emotional shelter. He calls out the confusion directly, telling Arjuna that what appears as compassion is ignorance, and that grief born of attachment is not wisdom. This is not a god who comforts a trembling mind; this is clarity speaking to delusion. One image of Krishna demands inner change, the other lets us remain as we are. We have chosen the latter, and we live with what that choice produces.

These practices differ in appearance, but they arise from the same refusal: to look directly at oneself. Ritual replaces inquiry, movement replaces insight, suffering replaces understanding, fate replaces responsibility, comfort replaces transformation. The forms are many; the avoidance is one.

The Lamp in Darkness

The irony is painful. Vedanta has awakened seekers across the world, yet remains unread in the civilisation that birthed it. The lamp was lit here, but the darkness remains here.

We recite stories with passion but often cannot explain a single Mahavakya: ‘You are That.’ We elevate Smriti above Shruti and then complain that our culture feels confused. We turn Krishna into sentiment and then wonder why courage does not appear. A civilisation does not collapse by losing rituals; it collapses by losing truth.

The test is straightforward. Whatever aligns with Shruti is dharma. Whatever defies Shruti, however old or beloved, is not. Shruti demands only one thing: self-knowledge. Everything else is ornament. Without Vedanta, Hindu identity risks becoming ritual without philosophy, sound without meaning. Offering flowers may express devotion, but it is not Sanatan Dharma. Seeing the Self is.

The Upanishads stand where they have always stood: patient, piercing, waiting for the reader willing to be transformed. The question is not whether they are available: they are, freely and abundantly. The question is whether we will stop postponing our own clarity and embrace the self-knowledge they offer. – The Pioneer, 20 December 2025

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

Hamsa

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

VOI

Trump, Xi, Modi

India with its slow and steady rise, two steps forward, one step back, is the quintessential tortoise to the Chinese and American hares. But both China and America know who won the race – Minhaz Merchant

No nation has risen from an impoverished European colony to a major global power. India’s rise has been as unexpected for China and the West as it is unsettling.

Other global powers rose through either colonialism (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal), invasion (America, Canada, Australia) or communism (China, Soviet Union).

India’s rise—chaotic and incomplete but unstoppable—is different: no colonial conquest, no extraterritorial invasion, no communist dictatorship.

If India can become the world’s third largest economy by 2030 (which it will) and the world’s fourth largest military (which it already is), then the means other major powers adopted in their rise stand thoroughly discredited.

That is why India’s rise will be a “resisted” rise. The rise of other great powers was an “assisted” rise. The British Empire, for example, passed the baton willingly to the United States. The Soviet Union helped China rise.

Washington and Beijing have now arrived at a temporary modus vivendi. They will not let their competition lead to confrontation. On Taiwan it might have but US President Donald Trump has signalled it won’t. He paused $14 billion arms sales to Taiwan days after his summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. In return Xi has pledged an uninterrupted supply of critical minerals to the US.

That doesn’t mean the world’s two largest economies don’t have friction points. Last week, Beijing expelled Vivian Wang, a New York Times correspondent based in China because the newspaper interviewed the President of Taiwan, even though Wang was not involved in the interview. The US instantly reciprocated by expelling a senior Chinese journalist from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

Beijing has placed a limit of 100 on the number of US journalists allowed to report from within China. The US has placed a similar limit on Chinese journalists based in the US. Trade between the two countries continues to fall. It has plunged from $690 billion in 2022 to $414 billion in 2025.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 30, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned: “There is rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup and the expansion of its military activities in the region and beyond. No state, including China, can impose its hegemony and hold the security or prosperity of our nation and our allies in question.”

Hegseth then offered an olive branch to Beijing: “President Trump and this administration seek a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China.”

Hegseth acknowledged India’s growing military power: “A powerful India, acting in its own self-interest, advances our shared goal of maintaining a balance of power across the region. India is modernizing its military to carry its share of the security burden, particularly in the Indian Ocean. It’s building out the heavy industrial and logistics capacity to sustain high-end military operations. We’ve also committed to pursuing co-production with India to advance capabilities like Javelin anti-tank guided munitions, real tangible steps to improve the collective readiness of our forces.”

Decline and fall

Despite their rhetoric, Trump’s America and Xi’s China are both declining superpowers. The US economy grew by a paltry annualised 1.6 per cent in the January-March 2026 quarter. China’s economy is sputtering. Consumption has plummeted. Oversupply of manufactured goods has forced Chinese companies to slash prices. Many have gone bankrupt, including dozens of electric vehicle (EV) makers.

It takes decades for the decline of major powers to manifest itself. For example, the decline of colonial Britain and France was slow at first. But after their failed joint attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, the ability of London and Paris to influence global affairs fell sharply.

Could the Iran war be America’s Suez moment? It is exactly 70 years since Washington prevented Britain and France from seizing the Suez Canal in 1956. US global power has since been unrivalled, with the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. China’s tiny economy was not yet a threat to Washington’s global hegemony.

As Washington and Beijing evaluate the rise and fall of nations across geographies over the next 25 years, they see a toothless Europe, fragmented Asia-Pacific, economically stressed Latin America, and war-torn Middle East.

India stands out in splendid isolation. Third largest economy soon. Fourth largest military already. Stable democracy with a noisy Opposition, an activist media, a strong judiciary and an economy growing at an average annual rate of 6.5 per cent, despite trade and war disruptions.

And yet. India confounds the West and China. Its bureaucracy is opaque. Regulations are onerous. Rote education stifles innovation. Corruption at state and municipal levels is endemic. Poverty is declining but millions of Indians are still destitute.

Can such a country ever rise to the stature of a major global power? Students of history recall the abject poverty of China in the 1980s and the 1990s and the famines of the 1960s and 1970s that killed millions of Chinese during Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. They also recall the Great Depression of 1929-39 in the US when the stock market fell by 75 per cent and several American traders committed suicide by jumping off Wall Street’s skyscrapers.

Much can happen in the next 25 years. What is certain is that Europe will continue to atrophy. America will begin a gentle decline. China will age, shrink and grow old before it grows rich.

India with its slow and steady rise, two steps forward, one step back, is the quintessential tortoise to the Chinese and American hares. But both China and America know who won the race. – Firstpost, 3 June 2026

› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher. 

India's Gen Z Rise

George Orwell: His war on totalitarianism, humbug, and sugar in tea – Preksha

VOI

George Orwell

On his 123rd birth anniversary, George Orwell remains a touchstone whenever societies argue about power, freedom and truth. – Preksha

In the spring of 1928, a young Englishman named Eric Blair moved into a rented room in a working-class neighbourhood in Paris. The walls of which, he would later describe as “thin as matchwood”. Despite an Eton education and five years with the Indian Imperial Police in Myanmar, he gave both up voluntarily. Seventeen years later, Blair would write the allegorical novella Animal Farm and then the dystopian novel 1984 under the pseudonym George Orwell—a name that outlived the man who created it.

During the Cold War, Orwell was the prophet of totalitarianism. After 9/11, he became a writer of surveillance. In the age of social media, algorithms, misinformation and governments that know more about their citizens than ever before, “Orwellian” has become one of the most overused adjectives in political vocabulary.

On his 123rd birth anniversary, the writer remains a touchstone whenever societies argue about power, freedom and truth. The fascination shows little sign of fading.

Perhaps, it was his first-hand experience witnessing the harsh realities of poverty, class division, and the rise of totalitarianism that influenced his later writings. Or perhaps it was writers such as Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift, but one thing is clear: George Orwell did not beat around the bush. With a sharp, crisp, and direct manner, Orwell weaponised language as an instrument of truth rather than a medium of embellishment.

Les jours sombres

Blair did not find initial success, like most authors. He lived at the Paris address for eighteen months, writing novels and short stories that no one would publish. For days, he went without food and eventually pawned his clothes to survive.

Robbed and destitute, the budding novelist took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris restaurant. Working brutal hours in the dingy kitchens, he continued writing. Drawing on these observations, he would later write in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) that “the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

In August 1929, still in Paris, he sent an essay to the Adelphi magazine in London. “The Spike” was an account of spending a night in a workhouse. It was accepted and published under his real name.

But the tide turned slowly and with help. In December 1929, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents’ house in Southwold. Over the next three years he wrote reviews, taught at a private school, and wrote and rewrote what would become his first full-length work, Down and Out in Paris and London.

The manuscript was rejected by Jonathan Cape and then by Faber & Faber. Before it was rescued by a friend, Mabel Fierz, who showed it to a literary agent. Years after Blair had left Paris penniless, Victor Gollancz published it in January 1933. And so the world came to know George Orwell.

When the time came to publish, his parents, Blair feared, would be embarrassed by what the book revealed.

“As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc., is PS Burton, but if you don’t think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Always. I rather favour George Orwell,” Blair wrote to his literary agent in 1932.

‘Bah! Humbug!’

Eric Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Bihar’s Motihari, the son of a British official in the Indian Civil Service. Before he was two, his mother had taken him and his sisters back to England. He would spend years trying to understand exactly where that placed him. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he said, “I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.”

Scholarships carried Blair to Wellington and then Eton, two of England’s most prestigious schools. “

For people like me, the ambitious middle class, the examination-passers, only a bleak, laborious kind of success was possible,” Blair later wrote in Such, Such Were The Joys published in 1952.

He explained the different outcomes possible if the middle class slacked on its upward mobility ladder.

“You clambered upwards on a ladder of scholarships into the Civil Service or the Indian Civil Service, or possibly you became a barrister. And if at any point you ‘slacked’ or ‘went off’ and missed one of the rungs in the ladder, you became ‘a little office boy at forty pounds a year’. But even if you climbed to the highest niche that was open to you, you could still only be an underling, a hanger-on of the people who really counted,” he claimed.

But the Englishman knew the ladder well enough; he did, after all, become the ultimate voice of caution against it. He left in 1921 and climbed the rung leading to colonial service in the Indian subcontinent.

In his 1936  essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” written after he had walked away from the Indian Imperial Police, Blair described having been sent to shoot a rogue elephant. Standing there, with a rifle in hand, before a crowd of two thousand Burmese, he realised that the animal no longer needed to die, but he fired because the crowd expected it.

“I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib,” he wrote.

By the time he left Burma at twenty-four, Blair had come to strongly oppose imperialism. He wrote later in his fifth book, Road to Wigan Pier (1937), “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness, which I probably cannot make clear”.

He left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate and never returned.

The following year found him in Paris: poor, unpublished, and persistently pursuing a life he had dreamt of as a child. After all, imagination cannot breed in captivity; it must be let free to roam, wander, and survive on its own.

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer,” he recalled in the 1946 essay “Why I Write.”  He tried, for a while, to want something else. Between seventeen and twenty-four he turned away and felt, the entire time, that he was “outraging his true nature.”

He came back as writers always do, like a bee to the sweet scent of honey.

“What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art,” he confessed.

But the young wordsmith also knew that work written without political fire went cold. He admitted that his purpose was not separate from his prose.

“Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

Humbug. He spent his whole life at war with it. Truth, after all, is a revolutionary act.

A war that took him from Parisian slums to the coal mines of northern England, to the blood-soaked trenches of the Spanish Civil War and eventually, a cold farmhouse on a Scottish island.

Orwell’s war with totalitarianism also led to some of his greatest works and successes in life—Animal Farm. Written in 1943 and 1944, it was a thin fable about farm animals who overthrow their human master, only to find the pigs who lead the revolution had become everything they fought against.

Knowing it was a thinly-veiled critique Stalinism, the children’s book was rejected by four publishers for fear that the book might upset the Western wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Even fellow essayist T.S. Eliot rejected it at Faber & Faber, and so did Gollancz.

It was finally taken on by Secker & Warburg and published on 17 August 1945.

But by then Orwell was already dying. On a remote Scottish island, consumed by tuberculosis, he typed the final draft himself working through fever and fits of bloody coughing. 1984 was published on 8 June 1949. It introduced terms such as “Big Brother,” the “Thought Police,” doublethink, and “Newspeak” to political discussions and popular culture. It was the dying man’s last gift to the language and the subject he had spent his life honing. 1984 went on to become one of the world’s most enduring warnings and an example of Orwellianism.

George Orwell died seven months later at the age of 46.

A nice cup of tea with Orwell

The man who gave the world biting satire also gave it eleven rules for making tea. Published in 1946, A Nice Cup of Tea finds Orwell arguing about teapots and the right moment to add milk. Like any real Englishman and tea lover, Orwell had strong views about tea, one that should never be taken lightly or messed with.

Tea, he declared, should be strong. The pot should be warmed. Milk should be added after the tea is poured. Sugar, meanwhile, had no business being there at all.

His letters are witnesses to his love affair with the world’s greatest beverage. Writing to Mamaine Koestler, the second wife of journalist Arthur, in January 1947, during the grey austerity of post-war rationing, he thanked her for sending some.

“We always seem to drink more than we can legally get, and are always slightly inclined to go round cadging it,” the tea-lover commented.

For years, the story of Animal Farm was told as Orwell’s alone. It is a version his adopted son, Richard Blair, has further elaborated on in an essay for The Guardian. In August 2025, he argued that the novel should be understood as the work of two people: Orwell and his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who typed manuscripts and offered detailed suggestions throughout.

He added that it was his mother who may have steered the project away from a straightforward political polemic toward the beast fable it came to be.

“The result of my parents’ teamwork was one of the most beautifully written books of the century,” Richard wrote.

In a world where authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, and political lying remain, he added, “We need Animal Farm by our side more than ever now.”

Looking for ‘Jaarj Arwil’ in 1984

In 1984, as readers around the world revisited Orwell’s masterpiece, journalist Ian Jack wrote a piece in The Sunday Times titled “In search of a Jaarj Arwil.”

A year earlier, the Scottish journalist had travelled to Motihari and had gone through documents kept in archives at the collectorate. Jack recounted that locals were clueless that their town was the famed dystopian writer’s birthplace.

“I found that nobody, save the district magistrate, had ever heard of Orwell,” Jack wrote.

That began to change in 2003, the centenary of Orwell’s birth, when a local businessman named Debapriya Mookherjee decided something had to be done.

“It’s a matter of pride for us that a writer of his stature was born here. When we saw that no one else was willing to come forward and save the place, we thought it was our duty to do so,” he told The Caravan.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar bows before a bust of George Orwell during his 2012 visit to Motihari.

Birth place of George Orwell in Motihari, Bihar.

With the help of the Motihari Rotary Club, Mookherjee launched a campaign to protect the site, celebrating Orwell’s birth and death anniversaries, inviting government officials and journalists. In April 2012, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar stopped by at the site while on his sewa-yatra in Motihari.

But Mookherjee met resistance at every turn. Residents rebuked him for promoting an “angrez (British)” writer.

“They simply didn’t know him,” Mookherjee said.

The town’s railway station bore a sign reading Bapudhaam Motihari—Gandhi’s town. The district had staked its identity on the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917. The tension broke into the open when officials laid a foundation stone at Orwell’s birthplace  to dedicate it as a monument to Gandhi.

The plan was eventually scrapped. The state government declared the site—the 2.48 acres of Orwell’s house and the nearby opium warehouse—a protected area under the Bihar Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1976).

Gandhi and Orwell were born thirty-four years apart, on opposite sides of the colonial divide. Orwell was not entirely comfortable with Gandhi, and he said as much plainly.

 “I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure,” he wrote in his 1949 book Reflections on Gandhi.

The temptation, with a life like his, is to make it into a monument. To begin in Motihari, pass through Burma and Spain, arrive at 1984, and call the journey complete. Orwell’s life resists such manichean characterisation.

And perhaps, no one understood that better than Orwell himself.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” he wrote in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1984).

“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” – The Print, 25 June 2026

› Preksha is a TPSJ alumnus currently interning with ThePrint.

India: The history they studied in boxes – Nick Collins

VOI

Lothal (ca. 2300 BCE)

The Vedas do not describe an invasion or refer to a homeland outside India. The rivers, mountains and animals named in them are Indian. … The archaeological record shows no cultural break between the Indus-Saraswati cities and the Iron Age cultures that followed. So, the revision from Aryan invasion to migration doesn’t work either. – Nick Collins

I spent 40 years in the international shipping industry, in London, Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai. When I decided to write a book on the history of maritime trade, I had no academic position to defend and no orthodoxy to uphold. But I had a working knowledge of how trade actually functions and a professional habit of asking challenging questions and following evidence wherever it led.

When I followed the sea lanes backwards into deep antiquity, I found that they converged on the Indian subcontinent. That was not the book I had intended to write. It was the book the evidence forced me to write. And the more I looked, the more I came to understand that the conventional account of the ancient world had been built on a set of assumptions that nobody had thought to question for a long time.

Where archaeologists chose to dig

In the second half of the 19th century, European archaeologists made remarkable discoveries in the deserts of Mesopotamia: cuneiform tablets, the Code of Hammurabi, the great ziggurats. These were genuine and important finds. They were also conveniently located. The hot, dry climate of Mesopotamia preserves clay and brick beautifully. The Biblical and classical sources European scholars had read pointed them to the region.

So, they dug there. What they found became the foundation of the standard account: Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilisation, the birthplace of writing, of urbanism, of law, of mathematics. The story moved from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Rome to Christendom to modern Europe in a tidy westward, arc. India appeared only as a colonial possession at the end of it.

What they did not do was dig with comparable intensity in north-west India. Harappa was identified in 1842 but not seriously explored until the 1920s. Mohenjo-daro was discovered only in 1922. By the time these excavations began, the dominant assumption was already set. Mesopotamia was the centre. Anything found in India had to be derivative.

What was actually there

But the Indus-Saraswati civilisation was not derivative. It was the largest and most economically productive society of the ancient world.

By the middle of the third millennium BC, it supported about 300 riverine cities, each with populations of over 50,000 people. Two-thirds of them stood on the banks of the Saraswati, the central of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda. Canals supplied water to 2,500 dependent settlements. Vedic kings ruled territory stretching, in the words of their own texts, from sea to sea—roughly 1.5 million square miles, comprising what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and most of north-west India. Egypt covered about 13,000 square miles. Sumer was smaller still.

Cities were laid out with mathematical precision. Streets ran north-south and east-west in a strict grid. Covered drains carried wastewater from brick-built houses with bathrooms. Bricks across every site followed a 4:2:1 proportion. Weights followed a binary system: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. Buildings were constructed in 5:4 ratios. A division on an ivory measuring rod found at Lothal measured 1.704 millimetres, the smallest Bronze Age unit of measurement ever recorded.

Lothal, its main port, had a dock 214 metres long, built with a million bricks, capable of handling thirty ships of sixty tons—the largest dock in the ancient world. Europe would not match it for 4,000 years. So divorced from maritime trade were the academics who first encountered it that they initially identified it as a communal bathing pool.

The Aryan invasion theory

Once the scale of these cities became impossible to ignore, the existing framework had a problem. So, the framework was adjusted.

The argument, developed by Max Müller and others in the late 19th century, was that pale-skinned Indo-European nomads, Aryans, from the Eurasian steppe, had invaded northern India around 1500 BC, bringing with them literature, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. The Vedic civilisation was therefore not Indian in origin. It was European, transplanted. The theory preserved the assumption that complex civilisation must originate from European racial stock, and it conveniently justified the colonial presence.

There was no evidence for any of it. The Vedas do not describe an invasion or refer to a homeland outside India. The rivers, mountains and animals named in them are Indian. No earlier-language place names survive of the kind one would expect if an invasion had occurred. Compare the Americas, where indigenous names like Mississippi and Massachusetts remain attached to almost every river and region. Genetic studies carried out between 1999 and 2006, reviewed by Michel Danino across nine large samples, found no trace of any invasion. The archaeological record shows no cultural break between the Indus-Saraswati cities and the Iron Age cultures that followed. So, the revision from Aryan invasion to migration doesn’t work either.

The Aryan invasion theory was a hypothesis to fit a preferred conclusion. It persisted in school textbooks well into the 21st century. It is still found in many today.

The problem of studying history in boxes

Both errors share a single methodological cause. Academic history is divided into specialities. Sumerian scholars study Mesopotamia. Egyptologists study Egypt. Indologists study India. Each discipline trains its own students, runs its own journals and rewards its own internal references. The connections between the boxes are studied less often than the contents of the boxes themselves.

This may work for political history, which universities mainly study. It works poorly for the history of trade, where everything that mattered crossed the boundaries of these boxes. The carnelian beads, timber and food (the latter archaeologically invisible) in Sumerian cities arrived on ships from Meluhha, the Sumerian name for the Indus-Saraswati civilisation. If you study Sumer alone, or Egypt alone, or India alone, the connections cannot be understood.

Correcting the record

When the artificial boundaries between geographic specialities are removed, the picture is consistent across every type of evidence: archaeological, linguistic, genetic, literary, geographic. The Indian subcontinent was the most economically productive and powerful region of the ancient world, and just as with today’s America, its influence on the rest of the world in ideas, culture and language was substantial. It was where the first long-haul maritime trade networks originated. It was the source of the Indo-European language family, not its destination. It was the cradle of philosophical and mathematical traditions that travelled westward through the same trade routes that carried cotton textiles, spices and gems.

None of this is controversial when the evidence is laid out. It only seems controversial because it contradicts a story assembled in the late 19th century by archaeologists working in a different climate, scholars working in a different intellectual tradition and political administrators working with a different agenda.

Correcting the record requires no ideology. It requires telling the story the evidence already supports. The Aryan invasion theory should be removed from textbooks where it still survives.

In my experience, many Indians already suspect this is the case. The evidence is overwhelming. But erroneous ideas are difficult to dislodge when received wisdom is protected by institutional interest. It is time to let the evidence speak. – Firstpost, 22 June 2026

› Nick Collins is the author of a three-volume history of maritime trade published by Pen & Sword Books and Garuda Prakashan. The first volume, How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World, was shortlisted for the Mountbatten Maritime Literary Award. He spent nearly forty years in the international shipping industry. 

India Maritime History of Four Millenia

3 – Babur’s Sultanate: Parasite on an affluent civilisation? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

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Babar enthroned.

When Babur established Timurid rule in Hindustan, the country already commanded about 24.4% of the world’s GDP, second only to China. Hindustan was not made rich by the Timurids. It was already rich when they arrived. – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Imagine a civilisation so wealthy that merchants crossed oceans to reach its shores, so advanced that students travelled thousands of miles to study in its universities, and so productive that its goods filled markets from East Africa to Southeast Asia. That civilisation was Bharat.

Long before Oxford came into existence, Nalanda and Vikramashila were attracting scholars from across Asia. Indian merchant guilds connected distant markets through sophisticated trade networks. Indian textiles clothed the world. Indian steel was prized across continents. Indian mathematicians and astronomers laid intellectual foundations that transformed human civilisation. At a time when large parts of Europe and West Asia were bleeding through endless wars fought in the name of God, Bharat stood as a centre of learning, production, and prosperity.

The ingredients for scientific advancement and even industrialisation already existed. We possessed abundant resources, thriving commerce, skilled artisans, and one of the world’s largest reservoirs of human capital. Yet a troubling question remains: how did such a civilisation eventually become one of the poorest regions on earth?

As we mark 500 years since Babur’s invasion, it is worth revisiting the economic legacy of the dynasty commonly and incorrectly called the Mughals, though they identified themselves as the Timurid Grkniyn. We are repeatedly told that India accounted for nearly one-fourth of the world’s GDP under their rule, as though this statistic alone proves prosperity.

But does a large share of global GDP automatically mean that ordinary people were flourishing? More importantly, was India’s GDP share not already extraordinary before the Timurids set foot on its soil?

The answer lies in the very source most often cited to glorify the Timurid era: British economist Angus Maddison. Yet Maddison’s own estimates undermine the popular narrative. According to his calculations, India possessed the world’s largest share of GDP until around AD 1000 and, at its peak, accounted for nearly one-third of global output. When Babur established Timurid rule in Hindustan, the country already commanded about 24.4% of the world’s GDP, second only to China. Hindustan was not made rich by the Timurids. It was already rich when they arrived.

What happened thereafter is even more revealing. By AD 1600, during Akbar’s reign, China’s lead had widened significantly. The claim that the Timurids created India’s prosperity struggles against the very evidence invoked to support it.

More crucially, GDP measures the size of an economy, not the wellbeing of its people. Maddison’s data shows that per capita GDP growth between AD 1500 and 1820 was negative. The empire remained wealthy, but its people did not become wealthier. The imperial treasury overflowed while large sections of society saw little improvement in their lives.

Haj caravans going to Mecca.

Contemporary travellers and court chronicles reinforce this picture. In the Baburnama, Babur records dispatching immense quantities of wealth after Panipat to Samarkand, Khurasan, Kashghar, Mecca, Medina, and Iraq. His successors continued the practice. After Akbar’s conquest of Gujarat in 1573 gave him access to Surat, enormous sums from Indian revenues were channelled into Hajj pilgrimages, gifts to Mecca and Medina, and projects designed to enhance Timurid prestige across the Islamic world.

This was not merely an expenditure. It was a sustained outward transfer of wealth from one of the richest lands on earth. The celebrated GDP figures tell only part of the story. To understand the reality of Timurid rule, one must ask a far more important question: who created the wealth, where did it go, and who ultimately benefited from it? One imperial proclamation issued during Akbar’s reign declared:

The travelling expenses of anybody who might intend to perform the pilgrimage to the Sacred Places should be paid.

The scale of wealth flowing out of Hindustan under Timurid patronage becomes stark when one examines the Hajj caravans. According to Dutch merchant-commander Wollebrant Geleynssen, in AD 1576 a royal caravan left Agra carrying six lakh rupees for Mecca. To understand this magnitude, a barber in AD 1637 earned roughly half a rupee a day. That single donation was equivalent to nearly 1.2 million days of a barber’s labour.

Nor was this an isolated gesture. The very next year, another caravan carried five lakh rupees, along with an additional one lakh rupees for the Sharif of Mecca. Contemporary accounts record that people from across the Islamic world flocked to Mecca hoping to receive a share of these riches drawn from Indian revenues.

Moghul ships moored in Surat.

Behind this generosity lay political ambition. Akbar sought more than prestige. He aspired to become the foremost ruler—caliph—of Islam. In 1579, he persuaded the ulema to recognise his supreme religious authority, adopted the title Padshah-i-Islam, and even began leading Friday prayers in imitation of the Abbasid Caliphs. When these ambitions met resistance, he founded Din-i-Ilahi in 1582. The objective remained the same: Indian wealth was increasingly spent acquiring religious legitimacy and influence far beyond India’s borders.

After Akbar, Jahangir carried forward the same tradition. In his Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri, he records allocating two lakh rupees for the sponsorship of the Hajj:

During the reign of my father, the ministers of religion and students of law and literature, to the number of two and three thousand, in the principal cities of the empire, were already allowed pensions from the state; and to these, in conformity with the regulations established by my father, I directed Miran Sadr Jahan one of the noblest among the Seyeds of Herat, to allot a subsistence corresponding with their situation; and this is not only to the subjects of my own realms, but to foreigners—to natives of Persia, Roum, Bokhara, and Azerbaijan, with strict charge that this class of men should not be permitted either want or inconvenience of any type.

Despite his reputation for religious moderation, Jahangir also continued the transfer of Indian wealth to Mecca. He gifted an amber candlestick adorned with gold, gems, and diamonds, valued at an extraordinary Rs 2.5 lakh. In AD 1650, another jewel-encrusted candlestick accompanied a 300-carat diamond to the holy city. Under Aurangzeb, such patronage expanded further. Between AD 1661 and 1667, he lavished gifts upon rulers and dignitaries from Persia, Bukhara, Kashgar, Balkh, Urganj, and Ottoman-controlled Basra, continuing a long tradition of outward wealth transfers. Sir Richard Burn, the editor of Cambridge History of India, states:

His policy was to dazzle the eyes of these princes by lavish gifts of presents to them and to their envoys, and thus induce the outer Muslim world to forget his treatment of his father and brothers. The fame of India as a soft milch cow spread throughout the middle and near East, and the minor embassies were merely begging expeditions.

The scale of this outward flow of wealth was staggering. Timurid records indicate that Aurangzeb spent nearly Rs 30 lakh between AD 1661 and 1667, while also maintaining annual donations to Mecca through his agents. In AD 1668, he gifted Rs 10 lakh to Abdullah Khan, the deposed ruler of Kashgar who had sought refuge in his court. Yet this transfer of wealth was largely a one-way street, with little of substance returning to India.

French physician-traveller Franois Bernier illustrates this vividly:

When the Ethiopian monarch’s embassy arrived in AD 1664 bearing modest gifts; a mule skin, an ox horn, and a few impoverished slaves; Aurangzeb responded with lavish presents of far greater value.

Aurangzeb’s generosity towards foreign Muslim visitors extended far beyond diplomatic courtesy. The Ethiopian ambassadors were maintained entirely at public expense during their stay in Agra. At a subsequent audience, both were honoured again with rich sashes and a gift of 6,000 rupiah. Yet even here, religion influenced imperial favour. The Muslim merchant received 4,000 rupiah, while Murat, the Armenian Christian ambassador, received only 2,000 rupiah.

The merchant then played his cards shrewdly. He promised Aurangzeb that upon returning home, he would persuade the Ethiopian monarch to permit the restoration of a mosque allegedly destroyed by the Portuguese. Tempted by the prospect, Aurangzeb granted an additional 2,000 rupiah, hoping to finance a religious project in a distant land using revenues drawn from India.

Franois Bernier records a similar pattern with an embassy from the Uzbek Tatars, who arrived bearing modest gifts: boxes of lapis lazuli, a few long-haired camels, several horses, and loads of fresh and dried fruits. Bernier himself described them as remarkable for the “filthiness of their persons” and observed that “there are probably no people more narrow-minded, sordid, or unclean than the Uzbek Tatars”.

Yet none of this diminished Aurangzeb’s favour. The envoys were publicly showered with honours, receiving two rich sashes each, 8,000 rupiah in cash, costly brocades, fine linens, silk woven with gold and silver, carpets, and jewelled daggers. While such largesse flowed freely to foreign Muslim embassies, Bernier also records a harsher reality within India, where tax-defaulting subjects could be hanged from trees. His observations help explain how imperial wealth remained immense even as per capita prosperity stagnated or declined. He writes:

Gold and silver are not in greater plenty here than elsewhere; on the contrary, the inhabitants have less the appearance of a moneyed people than those of many other parts of the globe.

Bernier informs us about Aurangzeb’s period by stating as below:

Labourers perish due to bad treatment from Governors. Children of poor are carried away as slaves. Peasantry abandon the country driven by despair. As the land throughout the whole empire is considered the property of the sovereign, there can be no earldoms, marquisates, or duchies. The royal grants consist only of pensions, either in land or money, which the king gives, augments, retrenches or takes away at pleasure. The artisans who manufactured the luxury goods for the Mughal aristocracy were almost always on starvation wages.

The glitter of the Timurid court concealed a far darker reality. The artisans who produced the empire’s celebrated luxuries were rarely allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Prices for their goods were often dictated by powerful buyers, and refusal to comply could invite imprisonment or even death. Franois Bernier tells us that the very weavers who created some of the finest brocades and textiles in the world walked about half-naked. The hands that clothed emperors could barely clothe themselves.

Mumtaz Mahal

The same contrast struck the English ambassador, Thomas Roe. In Jahangir’s court he saw dazzling displays of diamonds, pearls, rubies, and unimaginable wealth. Yet as he travelled from Surat to Delhi, another India unfolded before his eyes: an India of poverty, deprivation, and ordinary people struggling to survive beneath the shadow of imperial splendour.

Nothing illustrates this contradiction more brutally than the reign of Shah Jahan. As discussed in the introduction of my book Babur: The Chessboard King, his policies contributed to the catastrophic famine of AD 1630-32, a disaster estimated to have claimed around 7.4 million lives. It was during this very period that he commissioned the Taj Mahal at a cost of approximately 41.8 million silver coins.

The priorities of the Timurid state stand exposed in the celebrations of Nauroz in AD 1628. Shah Jahan opened the treasury with astonishing generosity. Mumtaz Mahal received 50 lakh rupiah. Jahan Ara was gifted 20 lakh rupiah and Raushan Ara 5 lakh rupiah. Contemporary records indicate that nearly 1.6 crore rupiah was distributed as rewards and pensions to the imperial elite alone.

Now place this beside the empire’s response to famine.

Contemporary accounts describe roads littered with corpses. Millions wandered in desperation for food. Fathers tried to sell their sons into slavery so they might survive. Mothers, unable to watch their children starve, threw themselves into rivers along with their daughters. Yet the relief sanctioned by Shah Jahan amounted to only 1 lakh rupiah, barely 2% of what he gifted Mumtaz Mahal on a single festive occasion. At the same time, Mumtaz’s annual maintenance was 1 crore rupiah, the treasury held 6 crore rupiah in cash, and the Peacock Throne alone was valued at nearly 3 crore rupiah.

This was not simply royal extravagance. Angus Maddison estimates that 15 to 18% of national income was absorbed by the state and its dependants. Nearly 21 million people were sustained by an imperial machine of courtiers, princes, harems, servants, slaves, eunuchs, and armies that consumed enormously while producing little. Maddison’s judgment is devastating: “As far as the economy was concerned, the Moghul state apparatus was parasitic.” He further argued that it resembled a regime of warlord predators where wealth was hoarded in jewels and precious metals rather than invested productively.

Drawing by Basawan, ca. 1595.

For a civilisation whose strength had long rested upon its farmers, craftsmen, and productive classes, this was a dangerous transformation. The burden of sustaining imperial grandeur fell upon those who tilled the soil and worked the looms, while the rewards accumulated at the top. As American historian J.F. Richards notes in Fiscal States in Mughal and British India:

The Mughal dynasty’s wealth and power was based upon its ability to tap directly into the agrarian productivity of the Indian sub-continent. Trade, manufacture and other taxes were much less important to the imperial revenues than agriculture, most estimates putting them at less than 10% of the total.

Let us again come back to the writings of Bernier:

Of the vast tracts of country constituting the empire of Hindustan, many are little more than sand, or barren mountains, badly cultivated and thinly peopled; and even a considerable portion of the good land remains untilled from want of labourers; many of whom perish in consequence of the bad treatment they experience from the Governors.

These poor people, when incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, are not only often deprived of the means of subsistence, but are bereft of their children, who are carried away as slaves. Thus, it happens that many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so execrable a tyranny, abandon the country, and seek a more tolerable mode of existence, either in the towns, or camps; as bearers of burdens, carriers of water, or servants to horsemen. Sometimes they fly to the territories of a Raja, because there they find less oppression, and are allowed a greater degree of comfort.

The reality becomes difficult to ignore once one moves beyond courtly glamour and examines the economic record. Across scholarly literature, the Timurid state never emerged as a benevolent engine of prosperity. Rather, in all those literatures, they appear a vast apparatus of extraction. Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, in State and the Economy: The Mughal Empire, described it in stark terms:

“The Mughal state was an insatiable Leviathan”.

The essays collected in The Cambridge Economic History of India, edited by Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, repeatedly underline the same point. The state appropriated an enormous share of the agricultural surplus, leaving little room for capital formation among the peasantry. In the same seminal work, it tells us that the extraction of wealth was not confined to taxation, courtly extravagance, or the export of treasure abroad. Even commerce itself was frequently bent towards serving the private interests of the ruling elite. Historians Habib and Raychaudhuri note that imperial intervention in trade often resembled organised extortion rather than economic governance.

A striking example occurred in 1640-41 when Shah Jahan and his powerful noble Asaf Khan invested 1,00,000 rupiah in cloth at Ahmedabad for export to Mocha. To secure their profits, weavers and dyers were ordered not to work for anyone else until imperial orders had been fulfilled. What should have been a free market was effectively transformed into a monopoly enforced by state power.

Habib and Raychaudhuri further point to the activities of Shaista Khan and Prince Azimushshan in Bengal. Their involvement in trade, they argue, amounted to “virtual extortion organised as commerce”. Merchants were compelled to buy and sell on terms dictated by powerful officials. Shaista Khan extended monopolistic control over commodities such as salt, saltpetre, beeswax, and even fodder. Under such conditions, trade ceased to be a voluntary exchange and became an instrument of extraction.

The consequences extended beyond immediate losses. Productive capital that could have expanded industry, irrigation, infrastructure, or enterprise was increasingly diverted into private hoards. Habib describes treasure accumulation as one of the most wasteful economic practices of the Timurid ruling class. Citing De Laet, he notes that Akbar’s treasury was estimated at an astonishing 522.4 million florins. Shaista Khan alone was believed to have accumulated wealth worth 38 crore rupiah during his tenure in Bengal. Numerous nobles left fortunes ranging between 30 lakh and 1 crore rupiah at their deaths.

The tragedy becomes even sharper when one asks what was done with this wealth. Angus Maddison noted that irrigation under the Timurids remained remarkably limited. In his words, “… But in the context of the economy as a whole, these were unimportant and probably did not cover more than 5% of the cultivated land of India”. For a predominantly agrarian civilisation, this was not a minor administrative lapse. It was a failure with consequences measured in poverty, insecurity, and stagnant productivity.

As I conclude this essay, constrained only by space and not by evidence, one question remains. The issue is not whether the Timurid court glittered. It did. The issue is who paid for that glitter. Every jewel on a throne, every gift to foreign lands, every overflowing treasury was ultimately financed by Indian peasants, artisans, merchants, and farmers. A civilisation does not become poor because it lacks wealth. It becomes poor when wealth is extracted instead of invested. The greatest myth is not that the Timurids made India rich. It is that India’s inherited wealth is mistaken for their achievement. – India Today, 8 June 2026

The Peacock Throne in the Golestan Palace in Tehran, Iran, shown Dec. 18, 1959. The Peacock Throne was constructed in 1628 in Delhi, India and in 1739 was taken by Nadir Shah back to Tehran as war booty.

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian. This is the last essay of a three-part series.

2 – If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb was harmony, why does Kashi’s Nandi still wait? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

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Nandi facing the Gyanvapi Mosque that Aurangzeb had built over the original Vishwanath Shiva Temple at Kashi.

If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is to be discussed honestly, it must be remembered in its entirety: the courtly festivals and the conquered fortresses, the poetry and the pyres, the celebrations and the massacres. For history ceases to be history when it remembers only the flowers floating upon the river and forgets the ashes carried by its waters. – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Some myths are so beautiful that people stop asking whether they are true.

As I sat down to write the second part of my series on the Timurids, a dynasty still persistently and wrongly called the Mughals, a WhatsApp message arrived carrying a recent Scroll article claiming that Jahangir sought to reconcile Vedanta with Islam. I read it carefully and could only smile. The reason for that smile will become clear soon enough.

This essay concerns one of the most fashionable phrases in modern Indian historiography: Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. It is invoked as a golden age when faiths embraced, cultures mingled, and the wounds of conquest dissolved into a shared civilisation. Curiously, this renewed celebration arrives alongside the 500th anniversary of the First Battle of Panipat (1526), remembered as the foundation of an empire but seldom as one of the earliest recorded instances of an invading army using Indian villagers as human shields.

The expression Ganga-Jamuni traditionally referred to mixtures and alloys, gold and silver, copper and brass, even mixed grains and lentils. Only in the twentieth century was tehzeeb attached to the phrase, transforming it into a symbol of a supposedly syncretic culture associated with the Sultanate, Timurid, and Nawabi eras.

Yet before we surrender ourselves to the romance of this narrative, a question must be asked: was Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly a confluence of rivers, or has history draped the wounds of conquest in the silk robes of nostalgia?

For even today, one of its most enduring monuments stands in Kashi. Nandi still waits for his Shiva, his gaze fixed upon the spot where the sanctum once stood. Centuries have passed, Timurids have crumbled, yet the faithful bull continues his silent vigil, looking towards what later generations were taught to call a fountain.

Perhaps that is the most fitting metaphor for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb itself.

A civilisation watched temples fall, sacred spaces transformed, and memories renamed. Then it was told that this was harmony. That conquest was accommodation. That loss was synthesis.

And so, before celebrating the flowers floating upon the river, it may be worth asking what became of the ashes carried beneath its waters.

My concern in this essay is only with the Samarkandis, as I prefer to call the Timurids for reasons explained in the earlier essay, and whether this celebrated Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly existed in their realm.

Jahangir visiting the ascetic Jadrup Gosain.

Let us go back to that WhatsApp message, and begin with our lover boy Salim, better known as Jahangir, whose interactions with the Vedantic philosopher Jadrup Gosain were highlighted in the Scroll article as evidence of syncretism. But can a handful of meetings really sustain such a sweeping claim?

According to the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir met Jadrup only a few times. During these encounters, he interpreted aspects of Vedanta through an Islamic lens and even remarked that Vedanta contained many ideas similar to Islam. That observation itself suggests he misunderstood Vedanta largely, filtering it through familiar categories rather than engaging with it on its own terms.

Yet let us leave aside what Jahangir understood or misunderstood about Vedanta. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri reveals a more telling reality. For all his fondness for wine, conversation, and occasional reflections on virtue, a Hindu daughter could enter a Muslim household only after abandoning her gods and embracing Shari’a. Conversion was the price of admission to the emperor’s notion of “harmony”.

If she refused, her fate would be different. She could be reduced to the status of a concubine, a silent presence in the imperial harem, her faith and dignity sacrificed at the altar of accommodation. Such arrangements may be described as coexistence, but they rested upon a hierarchy where adjustment flowed in only one direction.

But the idea of a Muslim daughter crossing the threshold of a Hindu home? Astaghfirullah! A blasphemy so grave that it invited not acceptance, but punishment. Jahangir himself thundered in the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri:

“They ally themselves with Hindus, and both give and take girls. Taking them is good, but giving them, Allah forbid! I gave an order that, hereafter, they should not do such things, and whoever was guilty of them, should be capitally punished.”

This, then, was the Timurid model of coexistence. Hindu women could be absorbed into Muslim households, but the reverse was treated as an affront to both religion and empire. Muslim honour was a fortress; Hindu society, a field open to penetration.

To portray Jahangir as inherently syncretic on the basis of a few philosophical conversations is a scam. Intellectual curiosity toward another tradition does not erase the larger pattern of conduct reflected in imperial decrees and court records.

And what of the supposedly benevolent Shah Jahan? He, too, walked in the footsteps of his father. This brings us to the curious case of Dalpat.

In the 10th year of his reign, a man named Dalpat of Sirhind married a Muslim woman named Zinab, renamed her Ganga, and raised their children as Hindus. Worse still, from the imperial perspective, he reconverted one Muslim boy and six Muslim girls to Hinduism.

Shah Jahan’s response was swift and unforgiving. Dalpat’s wife and children were separated from him, and he was presented with a choice that was often imitated as justice in medieval chronicles: embrace Islam or embrace death. Dalpat chose the sword over surrender, becoming the offering at the altar of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

But why stop at regulating marriages? Shah Jahan, never one for half-measures, decreed that apostasy itself was a capital crime. Conversion from Hinduism was celebrated as a triumph of faith; conversion away from Islam invited the executioner’s blade. The road into Islam was open and the road out of it led to the scaffold.

When his son Shuja assumed the governorship of Kabul, he carried this orthodoxy beyond the Indus. The domains of Sankar—ruler of the land—were subdued by force. Sixteen of his sons and dependents were converted, contributing to a reported tally of more than five thousand new adherents. Temples were transformed into mosques, and those who attempted to return to their former faith found little mercy awaiting them.

The rebellion of Jujhar Singh, Bundela ruler of Orchha, followed a similar pattern. Post defeat, his sons and grandsons were recast under new identities as Imam Quli and Ali Quli. His eldest son, Udai Bhan, refused conversion and chose death instead. A younger brother, still a child, too was absorbed into Islam. The women of the household, confronting the realities of conquest, chose self-immolation over captivity.

The conquest of Beglana—around present-day Dhule and Nashik districts in Maharashtra—unfolded at the same rhythm. Naharji’s son was renamed Daulatmand after his conversion, while Nasrat Jang forcibly converted a Brahmin boy, only to be repaid with a dagger in the darkness, a final act of resistance from one who had lost everything else.

Even when armies rested, the coercive power of the state remained active. Blasphemy became a crime carrying the gravest consequences. Hindus accused of insulting the Quran were executed. A Brahmin named Ghhaila, a qanungo of Berar, met the same fate for remarks deemed offensive to the Prophet.

Let us now turn to perhaps the most famous of all supposed symbols of this cultural synthesis: the legend of Jodha Bai.

The story has become so deeply embedded in popular imagination that many accept it as unquestioned fact. Yet the historical foundations are remarkably fragile. Neither the Ain-i-Akbari nor the Akbarnama of Abu’l-Fazl mentions a Rajput queen named Jodha Bai. The name emerges much later in the writings of James Tod, whose Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan often blended folklore, bardic tradition, and historical reconstruction.

The legal framework of the empire rested firmly upon Shari’a. A formal nikah with a non-Muslim woman required her acceptance of Islam. This was not a matter of sentiment but of law. No woman, regardless of lineage or political importance, could attain the status of Malika-e-Hindustan without first entering the fold of Islam.

The woman later identified as Jodha Bai appears in the sources as Mariam-uz-Zamani. Before her marriage to Akbar, she entered Islam and thereafter lived under her Islamic title. Her burial was conducted according to Islamic rites, and her tomb near Sikandra stands as a monument to the identity under which she lived and died.

More broadly, no Hindu princess who entered the Timurid zenana is known to have retained her public Hindu identity. These unions were rarely romantic tales of civilisational fusion, as Bollywood and intellectuals often tried to present. They were political arrangements shaped by the realities of theological power.

Aurangzeb with Officials

So desperate has the search for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb become that some now seek its reflection even in the life of Aurangzeb. The usual defence follows: Hindu nobles in his court, Hindu generals in his armies, and occasional grants to temples.

Yes, Aurangzeb employed a number of Hindus in his administration for certain periods. But that fact, by itself, proves very little. Empires are not sustained by ideology alone; they are sustained by revenue, manpower, and political necessity. Even the most intolerant regimes in history have often relied upon members of the very communities they discriminated against. Do check the case of Hitler.

The notion that even a bigoted medieval autocrat like Aurangzeb would govern a vast empire populated overwhelmingly by kafirs (as he repeatedly described non-Muslims) without strategically accommodating at least a section of them, defies both logic and statecraft. Yet, as his reign matured, its court grew increasingly dominated by Muslim elites, many of them foreign-born, further distancing the ruling establishment from the people and land it governed.

One of the most frequently cited examples of his supposed tolerance is the famous farman issued to Abul Hasan, the faujdar of Varanasi, on 28 February 1659. In this order, Aurangzeb directed that old temples should not be demolished, while simultaneously prohibiting the construction of new ones. This document is routinely displayed as evidence of a tolerant and inclusive monarch—yet another ruler representing Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. Yet a closer look at the circumstances surrounding it reveals something rather different.

The year was 1659. Aurangzeb had only recently secured the Timurid throne after a brutal war of succession. Dara Shukoh had been defeated, and on 5 January 1659, at Khajwa, Aurangzeb crushed another rival, his brother Shuja. The defeated prince fled eastward towards Kashi.

At that moment, Kashi was not merely a sacred city. It was a strategically important centre whose population could potentially provide shelter, intelligence, or sympathy to a fleeing claimant to the throne. Barely weeks after Khajwa came the famous farman.

The message behind it was unmistakable: pacify the local Hindu population, prevent any alignment with Shuja, and tighten the net around a dangerous rival.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar saw through the political calculations with characteristic clarity. Referring to this order, he wrote that the farman “had been issued during Aurangzeb’s struggle with Shuja just by way of a political move to win, for the time being, the good will and co-operation of the Hindus for capturing Shuja and had nothing to do with his spirit of toleration”.

The document itself raises an obvious question. If Aurangzeb’s purpose was genuine religious tolerance, why did he simultaneously forbid the construction of new temples? A ruler committed to syncretism does not merely preserve existing shrines while preventing future ones from being built. Such a policy speaks of a calculated restraint.

The chronology, too, tells a lot. The Battle of Khajwa took place on 5 January 1659. The farman followed on 28 February 1659. The two events are separated by barely 54 days. This is not a distant and speculative connection of the kind sometimes invoked to explain away temple demolitions years after the fact. Here the political context and the imperial order stand virtually side by side.

And if one seeks testimony from someone outside modern ideological battles, consider the words of the Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci, who spent much of his life in India and observed the Timurid world from close quarters. In Storia do Mogor he wrote:

“The latter [Aurangzeb], rid of a rajah [Raja Jai Singh] whose influence might have been dangerous to his kingdom, declared that very hour an open war against Hinduism. He sent orders at once for the destruction of the fine temple called Lalta, in the neighbourhood of Dihli. He also ordered every viceroy and governor to destroy all the temples within his jurisdiction.”

Whether one accepts every detail of Manucci’s account or not, it remains difficult to reconcile such descriptions with the modern portrayal of Aurangzeb as a misunderstood apostle of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

Aurangzeb's firman ordering the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple (August 1669). 

Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with many contemporary attempts to rehabilitate him and others. Every act of temple destruction is explained away as political necessity, yet every temporary act of restraint is celebrated as evidence of tolerance. Political context is eagerly invoked when it softens his image, but quietly ignored when it exposes the limits of his supposed pluralism. Read together, Aurangzeb’s farmans, the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, court newsletters, and contemporary testimonies reveal a ruler who repeatedly viewed Hindu institutions through the prism of Islamic supremacy, occasionally tempering ideology only when political expediency demanded it.

And perhaps that is where the larger question of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb must be confronted. If this celebrated ideal truly represented a relationship of mutual respect and cultural reciprocity, why must its defenders rely so heavily on exceptions while treating episodes of persecution, coercion, and destruction as inconvenient footnotes?

Before taking leave of Aurangzeb, one final irony deserves mention. It was under his reign that music itself was officially banished from the imperial court. The ruler who is today enlisted as evidence of composite culture presided over one of the most severe assaults on a tradition that had long enriched the cultural life of Hindustan.

And before I bring this essay on Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb to a close, allow me to leave you with a chilling anecdote.

Whenever the phrase is invoked, we are shown paintings of Akbar or Jahangir celebrating Holi. These scenes are endlessly reproduced as proof of a harmonious age where cultures merged like the waters of the Ganga and Yamuna. Yet there exists another Holi from the Timurid era, one that seldom finds a place in these romantic narratives.

Rajput queens commit jauhar to save their honour.

The year was 1568. Akbar had laid siege to Chittor for four relentless months. Following the fall of Jaimal, the eve of Holi witnessed hundreds of Rajput women and girls entering the flames of jauhar, choosing death over slavery to mlecchas (as addressed by Indians back then). Then came the morning of Holi itself. Contemporary accounts record the massacre of roughly 30,000 civilians after the fort fell. Akbar celebrated it as a triumph of Islam over the kafirs.

For whenever I hear of the Holi supposedly shared between the Timurids and their subjects, my mind does not wander to painted miniatures of emperors playing with colours. It returns instead to Chittor. To the smoke rising from jauhar pyres. To the cries of a city facing annihilation. To a Holi where the red that covered the land did not come from gulal, but from blood.

If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is to be discussed honestly, it must be remembered in its entirety: the courtly festivals and the conquered fortresses, the poetry and the pyres, the celebrations and the massacres. For history ceases to be history when it remembers only the flowers floating upon the river and forgets the ashes carried by its waters.

In memory of those ashes, and the countless brave men and women who became them, I now rest my keyboard. – India Today, 1 June 2026

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian.

Handprints of Rajput queens.