Tag narendra modi

Colonised Minds: Modi didn’t speak the whole truth at Ayodhya – Balbir Punj

VOI

PM Modi raising the flag over the Ram Temple at Ayodhya (Nov.25, 2025).

What Modi said at Ayodhya about the Macaulay mindset is true, but unfortunately not the whole truth. India’s influential political, intellectual, and social elite has long been influenced not only by Macaulay but also by the ideological legacy of Karl Marx. Since independence, this powerful network has worked tirelessly—both jointly and separately—to carry forward the unfinished agenda of these two, who never met but shared a hatred for India’s timeless civilisation. – Balbir Punj

Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to liberate India completely from the Macaulayite mindset. In his words:

“Alongside pride in our heritage, one more task is equally vital-and that is the complete eradication of the mindset of servitude. Nearly 190 years ago, in 1835, a Briton named Macaulay sowed the seeds of uprooting India from her civilisational roots. It was Macaulay who laid the foundation of India’s mental colonisation. Ten years from now, in 2035, that unfortunate episode will complete two hundred years. Only a few days ago, at another event, I urged the nation to adopt the coming decade as a mission-a resolve that in these ten years, we shall free India entirely from this mindset of slavery.”

PM Modi hit the nail on the head, and what better place than Ayodhya to do so. The seven-decade delay in building the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple symbolises the lingering scars of colonised mindsets. The temple could have been constructed soon after independence and marked the conclusion of India’s struggle to reclaim its self-respect and identity.

However, opposition driven by Macaulay-Marxist influences turned it into a Hindu-Muslim issue. Their colonial mindset created misleading narratives, resulting in endless litigation, damage to Hindu-Muslim relations, and the loss of many innocent lives and properties. I have explored this topic in detail in my book Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India.

What Modi said about the Macaulay mindset is true, but unfortunately not the whole truth. India’s influential political, intellectual, and social elite has long been influenced not only by Macaulay but also by the ideological legacy of Karl Marx. Since independence, this powerful network has worked tirelessly—both jointly and separately—to carry forward the unfinished agenda of these two, who never met but shared a hatred for India’s timeless civilisation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a staunch capitalist and imperialist. In contrast, Karl Marx was the pioneer of Leftist ideology, focusing on class struggle while sharply criticising capitalism. Despite their ideological differences, both shared a common goal: to diminish India’s presence in the minds and hearts of its people. As a result, when the British, in collusion with the Muslim League, moved the subcontinent towards an inevitable partition, the contemporary Left intelligentsia not only justified it but also mused about breaking India into more than fifteen smaller pieces.

Macaulay’s 1835 education policy aimed at shaping a class of Indians who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”-a group that would support British rule. His policies encouraged Indians to look down on their own civilisational roots and to detach mentally from their cultural foundations. So strong was his disdain that he famously claimed the entire “native literature of India” and learning was not “worth” even a “single shelf of a good European library”.

Macaulay’s project was not merely colonial; it was deeply evangelical. Writing to his father on  October  12, 1836, he declared:

“… Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully… The effect of this education on the Hindoos is prodigious. No Hindoo who has received an English education ever continues to be sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy, and some embrace Christianity… It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. …”

Macaulay’s thoughts aligned with the 1813 Charter Act of the East India Company, which encouraged European missionaries’ evangelical efforts in India. From this colonial origin, divisive ideas like the Aryan Invasion Theory, the Dravidian Movement, and the claim that “India is not a nation” arose, still influencing Indian politics and academia.

British rule in India, ironically, fulfilled Marx’s worldview, at least in one way. His satisfaction is evident in his column—“The Future Results of British Rule in India” published on 8 August 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune, where he wrote:

“The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindoo civilisation. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society.”

Mark these words, “… they destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry…” This sentence by Marx, over 170 years old, summarises how India was culturally and economically destroyed by colonial powers. Marx celebrated this destruction of Indian culture and industry as necessary for revolution, as culture and economics are intertwined—destroying one kills the other.

He further added in “The Future Results of British Rule in India”:

“England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”

Marx’s contempt for Indian traditions was further exposed in another New York Daily Tribune article “The British Rule in India,” dated 25 June 1853:

“… We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabala, the cow. …”

Marx authored this caricature without visiting India, yet many of his ideological successors spread this disdain in independent India. Sanatan philosophy views man as part of the cosmic order, not its master. India’s Vedic culture, with deep roots, supported a thriving economy from the first to the seventeenth century, acknowledged by global research.

The liberation from the colonial Macaulay-Marx mindset—an emancipation that should have started immediately after independence—only gained momentum after 2014, with some exceptions. The Guardian’s May 18, 2014 editorial highlighted this shift:

”Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent. India under the Congress party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means. The last of midnight’s children are now a dwindling handful of almost 70-year-olds, but it is not the passing of the independence generation that makes the difference.”

Post-independence, there was a unanimous demand in Ayodhya from civil society, the political leadership of United Provinces (as Uttar Pradesh was called then), and the top echelons of state bureaucracy for handing over the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi site to Hindus, but the colonialists led by the then Prime Minister Nehru wouldn’t let that happen.

In this context, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple in Ayodhya stands as a living symbol of Sanatan resurgence and a national resolve to break free from colonial consciousness.

When, amid Vedic rituals on  November 25, the PM raised the standard of Sanatan in Ayodhya, it was a definitive statement about India’s civilisational renaissance and its quest to dismantle the colonial mindset. No wonder the Macaulay-Marxist pack is in a funk.

› Balbir Punj is an eminent columnist and the author of “Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India” and “Narrative ka Mayajaal”.

The Modi government as an exponent of BJP secularism – Koenraad Elst

VOI

Narendra Modi

Like the previous BJP Government, the present one fails to live up to the oft-heard predictions of strident pro-Hindu and anti-minority policies. This is due to a phenomenon insufficiently realized by most India-watchers: a desire to live up to the norms upheld by the secularists and an interiorization of the disinterest in “outdated” Hindu concerns, not just among the numerous opportunists who have flocked to the new party in power, but even in the loyal core of the BJP’s personnel. Based on insider sources, this paper enumerates the data establishing the reality of “BJP secularism” and analyses the reasons for this emerging phenomenon. – Dr Koenraad Elst

A.B. VajpayeeA. B. Vajpayee’s NDA Government (1998-2004) heavily disappointed the experts who had predicted “all Moslims into the Indian Ocean” or similar doomsday scenarios—or rather, it put them squarely in the wrong. Hindu “fascism” as a threat to democracy? When Vajpayee narrowly lost a confidence vote, he meekly stepped down. War against Pakistan? Though Pakistan unilaterally invaded India (Kargil 1999), Vajpayee forbade the Army to strike at the invaders’ base across the border, and later opened a peace process, making symbolic concessions which Congress had always refused. Isolationism? He threw the Indian media market open to foreign media ownership, a move opposed by India’s entire political spectrum. The only “Hindutva” thing the NDA ever did was HRD Minister M. M. Joshi‘s clumsy overhaul of the recommended history schoolbooks, changing nothing dramatic and easily reversed. When the Government created a Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford (“saffronization!”), it selected an outspoken opponent for the job, in the vain hope of receiving a pat on the back from its declared enemies.

With the hindsight knowledge of historical reality, it would be embarrassing to reproduce the predictions by Indian and foreign experts. Today, anti-BJP discourse is less shrill, but still confidently classifies the BJP among the “Hindu Right”. This implies a prediction that once in power, the BJP would pursue distinctly pro-Hindu policies. However, in the light of our experience with the Vajpayee Government, it is no surprise that the present Government led by Narendra Modi fails to live up to this learned prediction, at least for now. (Of course, this paper will be updated by November as new developments take place.)

In spite of having a more homogeneous majority, it is reluctant to do anything pro-Hindu or perceivable as anti-minority. On the contrary, one of its first acts was to decree a new subsidy to Islamic schools. The stray Hindutva statements by loose cannon (Sakshi Maharaj, Niranjan Jyoti) were followed by retractions, condemnations by Government spokesmen, and indignant innuendos by Modi-friendly journalists (Tavleen Singh, Swapan Dasgupta). Public reconversions by the allied VHP, heavily publicized and demonized by the media, were promptly discouraged by the Government. Having learned from Vajpayee’s 2004 defeat, though, Modi does “keep the pot boiling”, does regularly throw crumbs of inconsequential Hindu symbolism to his support base, all while not formally changing anything.

However, if many BJP workers are disappointed with this Government, is not for what it does but mainly for what it persistently fails to do. Thus, it inducted no figures with a strongly ideological profile (Arun Shourie, Subramanian Swamy). Likewise, some public figures who had crossed the floor (e.g. Madhu Kishwar) were conspicuously not rewarded—a fact not considered here for disgruntled ego reasons but for illustrating the BJP’s lack of strategy: it doesn’t put people who have actually sacrificed for the BJP to any use, while awarding positions of influence to unreliable newcomers motivated by sheer opportunism. While some things on the Hindu agenda are either useless to Hinduism (e.g. declaring a “Hindu Rashtra”) and others would arouse violent protests for which the media are sure to blame Modi (e.g. a Common Civil Code, though “secular” par excellence), others are perfectly feasible and, moreover, turn out to be the most consequential for the flourishing of Hinduism.

In particular, the amending of Constitutional Articles 28 and 30, which (de facto c.q. formally) discriminate against Hinduism in education, does not take away any rights from the minorities, yet lifts an enormous burden from Hindu organizations investing in education and eliminates a major reason for Hindu sects (Arya Samaj, RK Mission, Lingayats, Jains) to have themselves judicially declared non-Hindu minorities. Similarly, eliminating the legal basis of the discrimination against Hinduism in temple management, with rich temples (but not mosques or churches) nationalized and their income pocketed by politicians or diverted to non-Hindu purposes, would give an enormous boost to Hindu religious and cultural life, without impinging upon the rights of the minorities. It has to be noted, however, and it buttresses my case for “BJP secularism”, that temple management is partly a competence of the States, and that BJP State Governments have not made the difference. At any rate, there are meaningful things a BJP Government could do specifically for Hinduism without endangering its non-religious agenda (development, cleaning India etc.) or its international standing, yet it chooses not to do them.

As for the Hindutva fits and starts of some BJP members, now considered extremists but in fact only representative of what the erstwhile Jan Sangh (1952-77, predecessor of the BJP) stood for, it should be easy to bring them in line around a more reasonable but still credibly pro-Hindu programme. It is here that the BJP is most conspicuously failing — conspicuous at least to insiders, for 99% of the outside literature about the BJP never mentions this phenomenon. Contrary to a consensus among academic and journalistic India-watchers, the supposed “Hindu extremist” party has no Hindu agenda. It relies on pro-Hindu workers to do the campaigning legwork, but once in power it cold-shoulders them, it publicizes and pursues an agenda of economic development only, and it tries to curry favour with the secularists.

The main reason is the long-standing deliberate lack of investment (pioneered by M. S. Golwalkar) in an intellectual and strategic vision of its own, the spurning of any analysis of the forces in the field and of the potential and limitations of the situation. It therefore also lacks competent personnel for the ideological struggle, e.g. for a textbook overhaul or, now, for nominating politically friendly new Vice-Chancellors. Consequently, most BJP leaders have an enormous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the secularists and, even when in office, try to live up to the norms laid down by their opponents.

This is hardly the impression created by most experts; but the primary data, the only source to which this paper pledges loyalty, tell a clear story: the present BJP is only termed a Hindu party in deference to the distant memory of its initial orientation. – Koenraad Elst Blog, 15 November 2016

» Dr Koenraad Elst is an indologist and historian from Belgium who publishes with Voice of India.