I have read books, attended lectures, seen documentaries to pass exams, killed time to get introduced to ideas, but I make sense of the world by relating observations with my own felt experiences. Pardon me now if what comes next feels like a profiling of plump kids, but it is just a description vivid in memory.
Many of us may have encountered bullies in school or college. I remember one as a huge, tall, plump guy who looked strong and was indeed bigger and stronger than most of us, but more importantly he was glib and loud. The fear was not only of getting beaten by him but that he would loudly talk about it, publicly tease us, and the shame would multiply the pain.
Bullies try to attract you with their benevolence, try to restrain you with threat, and finally malign you when you cannot be restrained. Simply described, the nature of interaction of a bully is 3-staged:
- Benevolence – Mujhe karate mein black-belt tak aati hai, koi kuchh bole toh mera naam lena. (I am good enough to be a black-belt in Karate, take my name if someone bothers you)
- Threat – Zyada hero mat ban, mujhe Karate me black belt tak aati hai. (Don’t act smart, I am good enough to be a black-belt in karate)
- Maligning – Wo padhai me achha nahi hai, wo jhuth bolta hai aur usko toh Karate bhi nahi aati. Kisi din koi sabak sikhayega tab pata chalega. (*Bundle of accusations*… and he doesn’t even know karate. He’ll learn when some day someone teaches him a lesson)
You would likely be enamored by his brave claims at first, but when you see him running with his belly button exemplifying Brownian motion and his cheeks darting about furiously, so much so that if the face had not held them together, they’d drop down to makes holes in the ground and cause a dust storm, you start to doubt their Karate claims.
When you believe in your own abilities, the threats don’t work anymore. That is when he maligns you, hoping someone else will get the better of you and he will chuckle in your dismay and maybe reassert himself once you are broken.
Anyone would be happy to get over these bullies in our lives, but that would be a mistake. Our institution called “world”, broad based the attitudes of individual bullies and made an ideology of it! We call adherents of this ideology “Liberals”!
***
Marx wrote about how the poor are poor because the rich are rich and founded the concept of history as an interplay of conflict. He postulated that only the proletariat created value and produced goods; the Bourgeoisie added no value.
It is wrong to say though that Marx himself produced no goods, hence no value. It is wrong to question whether bales of textile or an assembly of vehicles would come out of a stack of Das Capital. Marx’ work did indeed have a self replicating product. It made of factory of left liberals, who in their own right, are “thought-capitalists”.
I am focusing on these summary concepts of Marx:
- The world is driven by conflict – thus a fight is imminent and a side has to be taken
- Materialism is the basis of social dynamics. Ideology frames itself on the substrate of materialism – thus man is a slave to control of matter and has never had free will.
- Religion is the opiate of masses – a false consciousness, used by the ruling class to keep masses subdued.
- A revolution shall break down this established order and replace it with a utopian world.
He told us everything that was wrong, but not how the right world would look like (which is why communism has failed many times over). Marx-bhakts took it upon themselves to reverse the wrong he identified and hoped that a sui-generis right world would emerge.
In keeping with these concepts, the leftists strive continuously to:
- Identify a victim mass to take a side
- Mobilize the victim mass
- Overthrow the “perceived” ruling class
- For persisting dominance, indoctrinate the masses and give them new standards of morality NOT guided by religion.
History testifies that Communist regimes have succeeded only so far as grabbing power. The promise of a utopia became an even more distant dream everywhere they were in power. Liberationist liberals have given us some of the most ruthless, dictatorial and decadent regimes across the world. They successfully engineered mayhem across the world but created failed systems and failed at keeping their dominance intact.
Their failure elsewhere has an important lesson, that dominance by brute force last only as long as it successfully overpowers the resistance. But moral dominance has permanence. Morality sets standards of right and wrong and inspires uncritical obedience. For example, killing a cow may be proscribed by morality of one culture, they will protest and possibly mobilize if one legalizes cow slaughter. For complete obedience, the masses’ sense of right and wrong should align with the domineers’. In India, this morality is guided by the many millennia old Hindu culture. THIS is where the liberals came in conflict with Hinduism!
India was more difficult for the left liberals than the rest, because it has been a very complex society, not stratified on class (material possession), deeply religious, where the majority was a mass persecuted for a millennium based on religion. To side by the victims in order to mobilize them here, they would have to be sympathetic to the Hindu religion!
They tried their class struggle project in all earnestness. The Naxalbari movement is well known but ended without notable consequence, its vestiges seen only in the secular terrorism known (un)popularly as Maoism. However with the Nehruvian order in place, the liberals were comfortably placed in a position of power and proceeding with their project of moral, ideological control for full obedience.
Educational institutions and media, we all know now, have been vehicles for this journey to complete dominance. The means employed, in their gradual obliteration of our cultural moorings was sidelining Hindu history, whitewashing oppression at the hands of Jesuits and Islamic invaders and playing up the caste fault lines.
In their battle against Hinduism, the oppressed castes gave them an entity that perfectly fitted their conflict-victim model. Their efforts became more pronounced specially since 90s, in the post Mandal era when these fault lines cracked deeper. The attempt was never to reduce caste consciousness to gradual irrelevance but to make caste groups compete with one another for privileged access to power.
In this conflict, the liberals played the monkey with a balance beam and always had proximity to power as mediators. This was the era of political capitalists innovating with Muslim-Yadav, Muslim-Dalit alliances and an ever-increasing identification of politics with (caste) mathematics.
In India, Muslims have been held as a constant in liberal equations for utilitarian reasons, even though they are a religious entity. With their minority status, the course of our communal history and being a generally closed society, Muslims have long harbored insecurities vis-à-vis the majority. A ready victim is a veritable asset for liberals. Social insularity and low levels of secular / scientific education have made them impermeable to liberal indoctrination, so liberal do not even want to walk the road. They are happy appeasing them, playing up their insecurities and keeping them together as a mass at their disposal.
Like the typical bully, they were benevolent and rewarded obedience with nepotism. Like my bully’s make-believe spectacle of “knowledge of karate”, they claimed superiority by professing knowledge of “secularism and liberalism”.
The resistance that emerged in the form of RSS was threatened with bans. Popular leaders of this resistance met with untimely and unnatural deaths. Using threat with murders and attacks, to bully out the resistance is an ongoing exercise in Kerala and West Bengal. The PM of today, was hounded for over a decade with fake cases. These are quite in line with the second identified attitude of the bully.
But using threat for bullying was finally put to failure on the 14th May 2014 when despite the raucous hounding and torment, India chose Narendra Modi to be the Prime Minister. This also signaled the failure of their efforts of deepening the caste fault-lines and emergence of an evolving unity around governance outcomes and Hindu identity. The idea of using caste groups as mass victims is increasingly looking futile now.
Optimistic attempts to rejuvenate them can never be ruled out though, and there have been such persistent attempts. Every headline that starts with “Dalit man beaten….”, “Dalit woman raped…” or tweets and statements that say, “Do minorities like Muslims, Christians, Dalits have a place in this new India…” are religious attempts to break open the Hindu religion.
But now, with their quiver seemingly empty, the strongest hope of liberal bullies is that someone else punishes Hindus while they seek morbid satisfaction from their fate or get an attempt to reassert themselves with “I told you so”.
Simple observation of their narrative through tweets, posts and articles will have us realize that they are looking at the worldwide Muslim radicalization and could be optimistic about successfully alienating and infusing insecurity in India’s large Muslim population. The religious fear-mongering is not even subtle now, especially after Adityanath, a Hindu Yogi, became Chief Minister of India’s most populous state.
If he delivers material goods and services (at which he has made a strong start), the liberal song of a divorce between Hindutva and development will find no chorus. They will only be left with notional assets of “secularism” to sell, for which the number of buyers are receding by the day. Only extended communal strife can possibly make secularism a saleable entity again!
The desperation of liberals at this juncture is now webbed in dangerous possibilities. The bully I knew was a child. He grew to be a fine gentleman and a dear friend.
But I doubt that an ideology walking the beaten track for over a century despite humiliating tumbles will change for the better. Be watchful for what may come!
