“If you don’t like a book, you should not read it”. “If you don’t like a book, write a better book”. “If you don’t like a movie, don’t watch it”. “If you think a movie is biased, make your own movies”. These were some of the standard responses from the leftist ecosystem every time their books or movies faced any criticism.
These gatekeepers of academia and Bollywood were certain that they can block anyone who attempts any such thing through their influence. That is why they could throw around these taunts all the time, never expecting a mainstream book or movie to come out with the other perspective. However, some people inclined to the non-left did take up the challenge. And that has, of course, rattled the well established ecosystem.
A slow stream of books and movies opposing, countering and questioning the established leftist narrative appeared on the horizon in recent past. Supreme Court advocate J Sai Deepak’s India that is Bharat, historian Vikram Sampath’s books on Savarkar and very recently filmmaker Vivek Agnihoitri’s Kashmir Files appeared and challenged the leftist version of events from India’s past.
As these narrative challenging works appeared, the leftists ignored their own advice of ignoring these works or writing something better, as they often advised. Every attempt was made to scuttle this works, then discredit them, and then good old mudslinging on the individuals in the end.
Not only did they themselves not like these works (without reading or watching), they didn’t want anyone else to like them either.
A doyen of “decoloniality” Mignolo endorses a book that is outright Hindu supremacist. The other endorsers including the well established Islamophobes like Elst. What next? Will he be invited to Delhi to sing laurels for #Modi erasing “foreign” influence of Muslims in India too? pic.twitter.com/Xh2PRkocwF
— Dibyesh Anand 🏳️🌈 (@dibyeshanand) August 27, 2021
People who endorsed J Sai Deepak’s book had to face the ire of quite a few leftist trolls online.
This is appalling actually even by Mignolo’s standards. A disgraceful act.
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) August 27, 2021
I repeat: Hindu supremacism is colonial not anticolonial.
No scholar of any repute should be endorsing cutprice brown chauvinist bollocks passing for ‘decolonisation’ https://t.co/YACjIKrJ1l
One stopped being a scholar of repute just by liking a well written book, because the content was not consistent with the lies perpetrated by the left cabal for years.
Vikram Sampath perhaps faced the worst of these personal attacks, because he wrote about the man the left loves to hate, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In a concerted attempt to tarnish his image, and in the process discredit his works on Savarkar, several slanderous allegations were made against him.
In a letter directed to Royal Historical Society (RHS), 3 academicians from the US accused Sampath of plagiarism demanding action against him, Sampath is a member of the RHS. When this allegation didn’t get any traction beyond the leftist Twitter trolls, Sampath was accused of plagiarism in a speech he gave back in 2017 at the India Foundation.
Fed up of these allegations, Vikram Sampath took legal recourse and filed a defamation case against the 3 US academicians, Ananya Chakravarti, Rohit Chopra and Audrey Truschke. In response, Aurangzeb’s PR agent Audrey Truschke published a letter online against Sampath, signed by several notable personalities. However, there was one problem, people mentioned in the letter did not even know they had signed any such letter.
The deranged left not only resorts to false allegations, they aren’t even beyond forging signatures in order to take down their ideological opponents. That was not all, the Wikipedia page of Vikram Sampath was repeatedly vandalized by leftist Wikipedia editors as they continued to try and write an alternative history.
For last 3 decades, the Indian left as well as Congress has either tried to deny the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus, or tried to blame Governor Jagmohan, or at times even the victims themselves. Anyone trying to even correct this false narrative was always going to face serious challenges. Once Vivek Agnihotri managed to make a film on the plight of Kashmiri Hindus, he got previous little support.
The movie studio didn’t promote the film, there very previous few shows allotted to the film, several centers didn’t even bother to screen the film. Then the reviews, serious attempt was made to dismiss the film through industry’s leading film reviewers.
When all that didn’t work and the film still became a roaring box office success, the left resorted to their usual scheme, Wikipedia vandalism. Just like Vikram Sampath and Sanjeev Sanyal’s pages, Vivek Agnihotri’s Wikipedia page was vandalized.
After vandalising @vikramsampath and my Wikipedia pages, TrangaBellam has been busy vandalising @vivekagnihotri ‘s #KashmirFiles page. Must admit, she is very hard-working…… pic.twitter.com/3Zn4YXby2E
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) March 14, 2022
Since Wikipedia is the “ultimate truth” in today’s world, this is the default reaction of left to anyone who opposes their narrative, attack their Wikipedia page.
To all the hurt and angry leftists, who can’t tolerate anything written or made by the ideological right, we have only one advice, if you don’t like it, produce a better work yourself.
