Goodbye Mr. Chips: 100 years later in JNU

Here is the Wikipedia page of the original movie; 'Goodbye, Mr Chips'. (1939). Below is a satirical edit of the original plot summary in Wikipedia, edited to fit an imaginary JNU setting, and the events time-shifted forward by 100 years.

Note: JNU's expansion/definition here is like GNU: JNU is Not a University. JNU is an imaginary university. Any resemblance to any real-life, genuine university is purely coincidental.

Goodbye, Mr Chips: 100 years later in JNU

For the first time in 58 years because of a cold, PhD-scholar-emeritus Mr. Chipping misses a sit-down protest at JNU. That afternoon he falls asleep in his rocking chair and his student career is related in flashback.

When 25-year-old Charles Nurul Chipping first arrives as a Marxist student in 1970, he becomes a target of practical jokes on his first day. He reacts by imposing strict indiscipline in his classroom, making him liked and respected. Twenty years pass and he becomes the senior student. He is disappointed in not receiving an appointment as a permanent PhD scholar within the 'university' for the following year. However, the new Humanities teacher Jey Basu saves him from despair by inviting him to share an explore-the-ruins holiday to his native West Bengal.

While debris-hunting, Chipping encounters Kathy, a feisty Keralite subaltern who is on a recycling holiday with a friend. They meet again in Kolkata where she persuades him to dance to the Red Volga Waltz. This piece of music is used as a leitmotif, symbolizing Chipping's love for her ideology. Jey remarks that the Volga does not appear red, but Chipping remarks it only appears so to those who are in love. On another part of the same boat, as Kathy looks at the river, she tells her friend that it is red. Even though Kathy is considerably younger and livelier than Chipping, she loves and marries him. They return to JNU, where Kathy takes up residence at the 'university' at the taxpayer's expense, charming everyone with her atrocity literature.

During their tragically short marriage (she dies in childbirth, along with their baby), she brings "Chips" out of his shell and shows him how to be a better leftist. As the years pass, Chips becomes a much-loved institution, developing a rapport with generations of lecturers; he studies under the sons and grandsons of many of his earlier lecturers.

In 2009, when he is pressured to retire by a more 'Saffron' social media, mainstream media and the board of governors of the 'university' take his side of the argument and tell him he can stay until he is 100.

Chips finally retires in shock in 2014 at the age of 69, but is summoned back to serve as interim PhD scholar because of the shortage of non-unconscious leftists resulting from the events that year. He remembers Kathy had predicted he would graduate one day. During the loss of Tripura, Chips insists that they keep on memorizing their 'Breaking India' chanting, much to the amusement of his fellow students. As the 'Saffron' years drag on, Chips reads aloud into JNU's Roll of Honour every Sunday the names of the many former boys and professors who squandered their lives became Urban Naxals and ended up in jail.

He retires permanently in 2018, but continues living nearby in Lutyens. He is on his deathbed in 2033 when he overhears his college mates talking about him. He responds, "I thought you said it was a pity, a pity I never misled any children. But you're wrong. I have! Thousands of 'em, thousands of 'em ... and not all ... boys."

Decoding the Intellectual Kurukshetra

This post was published in the Indian Cultural Portal. This is an unedited version of the post.
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This blog is about contemporary India, but we start with a bit of European history.

Part-1: 20th Century Europe

Alan Turing 

In 1939, ace computer scientist, mathematician, and cryptanalyst Alan Turning decided to solve the challenging problem of cracking the German Navy version of the Enigma code. Why? In his own words: "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself". Thus, the great Alan Turing and his intrepid team at Bletchley Park, through hard work, intelligence, and ingenuity were able to crack the Enigma code, and helped turn the tide of World War 2. The story is well known today. At first, they were resource-strained, and by the time the intercepted messages were decoded and sent up the chain of command, the relevant events had already passed into history. However, thanks to an increase in human and computing resources, and equally importantly, by upgrading their own game, the cryptographers were able to eventually decipher the messages fast enough to reliably predict what would happen in the future. They had turned information on enemy movements into actionable intelligence. Pure gold dust. By closing this gap between interception and decoding, they were able to have a significant impact on the course of the war between the Allies and the Axis powers. So precious was their operation, their work was rated 'Ultra', even above 'Most' secret. Some of Alan Turing's research findings were hidden from public view for 70 years and only published recently. Even beyond WW2, it appears that Enigma machines were sold to 3rd world countries that were unaware that their information could be tracked by the west.

The Nazi analysts themselves believed their Enigma encryption to be fool-proof, and it is acknowledged that in principle, they indeed were. However, overconfidence, and bad operational practices gave away enough clues to Bletchley Park, who were smart enough to take advantage of these lapses. Turing's team was able to make risky predictions that turned out to be right. The allied command subsequently bet the lives of thousands of soldiers on their predictions. Theirs was a solid scientific approach supported by rigorous math and empirical testing, which allowed them to be confident in their predictions. However, if their predictions were wrong, many lives would have been in jeopardy due to faulty intelligence and their work would've been dismissed as pseudo-science. 

What distinguishes science from pseudo-science?

Around 1919, Karl Popper, a western philosopher began to actively ponder this demarcation. He narrowed down the distinction to one of testability. According to Popper, a scientific theory must be able to make somewhat risky predictions about the future. Others would try to falsify this theory, and if this falsification failed, the theory would gain credence. If the events did not happen as predicted, the theory would be weakened, and efforts would be made to either rectify the theory and re-test, or abandon it entirely. 97 years ago, Popper applied his principles to identify at least two theories popular in the west during that time as pseudo-science: the Marxist theory of history, and the Freudian psychoanalysis. Why? These theories simply did not fail! They could explain everything in the past with 100% accuracy, and were irrefutable. First-time viewers, to this day, find this ability to confirm quite irresistible. However, within a few decades of Marx's theory, it failed the risky predictability test not once, but several times. Freudian analysis met the same fate. From this western perspective, it was classic pseudo-science (although, apparently Marx was confident enough to crown himself as 'the Isaac Newton of Social Sciences'). Arguably, Marxist theory or Freudian theory did not become obsolete over time, but were born blind. By brushing away these glaring failures to predict, scientist Karl became prophet Karl. As contemporary events show, 'propheteering' is much more lucrative and unimpeachable (compared to the scientific alternative of forecasting, where a 5% increase in error in predicting product sales may have your client pulling the plug on your project). Well, what on earth has all this to do with India? We discuss this in the next section.

Part-2: 21st Century India

Indology

Welcome to western Indology (India study). The major theoretical foundations of western Indology over the last few decades are, as you may have guessed, Marxist theory of history, and Freudian psychoanalysis! Completely unchallenged, totally unhindered by any need to test predictions, many (but not all, there a few good ones) Indologists have combined to build up an entire body of Indology literature based on these pseudo-sciences. Let us examine the nature of this literature constructed.

The western approach to knowledge-building via math models employs rigorous theorem proving starting from a bunch of 'self-evident' statements called axioms. A 'purva paksha' of the way mathematics historically developed in the west would reveal, at least at a very high level, the contrast between the Euclidean western way of theorem-proving versus the Paninian Indian approach of rule-generation (refer to the talk and work by M. D. Srinivas and others). Infallible western mathematics versus the explicitly fallible Indian Ganita (science of computations) is an interesting topic in its own right, which we will explore in-depth in this space later. The theorem-proving approach allows us to reliably extend existing results, without having to start from scratch each time. By maintaining rigor and by subjecting new ideas to rigorous predictive testing, one can minimize the fallibility of the entire system. Of course, if one of those axioms or proofs were to be found wanting in some future scenario, it can open up a can of worms. 

This incremental approach of knowledge generation used in the hard sciences has been borrowed and applied by the west to social sciences as well, which as we have seen from the time of Prophet Karl, are pseudo-sciences. So we have journal papers quoting and extending the work of previous papers, results building on prior result, producing an incestuous body of Indology writing that can plausibly confirm any and all prior data about India, but is largely useless as far as reliably predicting 'risky' future events. Therefore, not only has this body of work not been useful, but these highly innovative, imaginative and intellectually engaging models have been harmful when used outside academia as a predictor to develop solutions in a real world. If, by chance, a future event does conform to a theory, they can claim credit; if it failed, then of course, the cow and goddess worshiping, "caste" obsessed, curry munching Hindus weren't smart enough to understand Marxism properly. At its core such social sciences are largely a 'Heads I win, Tails you lose' proposition. Thus, when decades of Marxist-inspired methods of planning in post-1947 India inevitably failed to yield results, it was explained away as the "Hindu rate of growth". This also justified the need to continue inflicting Marxism on Indians until they fully understood it, i.e., when enough successive 'Heads' were observed!

Indology Theory versus Hindu Practice

Recently, I visited Columbia University in New York City to add a science conference. The STEM departments in such universities are top-notch. Genuinely curious and good scientists and wonderful human beings. I have learned from them, and my interactions have been beneficial. Only in the last decade did I learn that in these same campuses, in their humanities and social sciences departments, there are other smart professors who are invested in western Indology and Hindu studies. From nine thousand miles away, they were and are doing a whole lot of theoretical model fitting using materialist Marxist and Freudian interpretations of Sanskrit texts that would appear utterly nonsensical to actual practitioners in India. The dharmic content of Hinduism that actually guides its practice is summarily rejected! On the other hand, some western thinkers outside the ivory tower who internalized Hinduism's ideas were able to practically adapt it to solve some of the biggest challenges of the 20th century. For example, the approaches of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, borrowed from the Satyagraha of Gandhi that is fundamentally rooted in Sanathana dharma. The positive and pervasive influence of Swami Vivekananda on western thought is stunning to read, and has never really been acknowledged either. 

The Indology Enigma Machine

In an earlier era, there were the 'orientalists' from a Europe that had colonized and ruined India, who studied India from the perspective of a superior 'teacher' race. These earlier Indologists have been thoroughly exposed and the new generations of Indologists that are based in the United States are much smarter. They are trained in Sanskrit, have learned from the mistakes of the Orientalists, and have proceeded to cleverly write lengthy papers and analyses using extremely convoluted English (search for example, the pomo generator). Their writings virtually became a code that only their peers, who were part of a mutual back-scratching network, could review, read, understand, and build upon. Alternative new approaches to Hindu studies in the US would be branded as "communal" and "Hindu extremism" by their gatekeepers and shut down. If you, as a graduate scholar, wanted to study Hinduism and get funding, you would have to learn their code language, and thereby also adopt the encoded views about India. Simply put, these Indologists had succeeded in creating their own virtual Enigma machine. This Indology enigma machine is then shipped to third-world India, safe in the knowledge that only the encoders in the US, and their elite disciples in India, would truly know what the messages meant. It became their ultimate inside joke on India. This Indology Enigma in principle is also a fool-proof system like the earlier WW2 model and cracking this code would require sustained, single-minded effort, enormous resources, and a high degree of intelligence to break. They progressed, unhindered for decades, until the breakthrough came in the form of a trained physicist named Rajiv Malhotra.

American Orientalism Decoded

Rajiv Malhotra has lived in the US for more than 40 years and his is another successful Indian immigrant story - he studied physics, but got into IT and Telecom and eventually became the multi-millionaire owner of 20 companies. However, it is what happened afterward that is quite extraordinary. He gave it all up (for one dollar) at the age of 44 to devote his life, full time, to Hindu and Indian studies from an insider perspective. He used his personal funds to set up a research foundation and has over the last few decades, given grants, built up a dedicated home team, and done a deep and thorough study of the Indology landscape from an Indic perspective (and this is really key). While others too have attempted such studies earlier, there is really none else who approached this problem in a single-minded manner, applying scholarly rigor, comprehensive research, and thoroughness. Rajiv Malhotra decided that he would take this up as part of his sva-dharma. He became the perfect storm that was required to crack this Indology Enigma code. Based on more than 20 years of painstaking research, and at a high personal cost, Rajiv Malhotra has authored five epic books on related topics, and we will briefly examine a specific trilogy among them, noting that the very first book, 'Invading the Sacred' demolishes the Freudian psychoanalysis applied to Hindu studies in America. 

The first book in the three we examine here is 'Breaking India', which analyzed the prior Indologists, mostly from Europe, whose theories from the 19th century have devastated Indian politics and sections of society (including in my own home state) for more than a century now. Thus, the initial decoding of Indology by Rajiv ji, while being amazing and successful, is associated with a large time lag between when these virulent messages were encoded and when they were fully decoded. However, his next book 'Indra's Net' that focused on newer but equally diabolical Indology theories reduced this time lag. Here, he was able to expertly decipher the more recent discourse around the spurious idea of 'Neo-Hinduism' being propagated in India over the last few decades. Finally, his latest book, 'The Battle For Sanskrit' was released in India a couple of weeks ago. While this book is yet to release in the US, I have studied several video overviews of its content to realize that it has exposed the ugly face of an  'American Orientalism', a new form of orientalism. 

It is clear that today, Rajiv Malhotra's systematic approach has been able to decipher the output of American Orientalism as it is happening in the US right now. In this desperate intellectual and civilizational Kurukshetra, for the first time ever, practicing Hindus will have actionable intelligence that will enable them to proactively mount a defense before these destructive theories fully percolate into the Indian discourse that is controlled by sepoys - the paid native intellectual gunmen of these western masters.

A new generation of dedicated intellectual Kshatriyas are needed to carry this work forward. Who will join this Battle for our Sanskriti?

References

beingdifferentbook.com
thebattleforsanskrit.com

Comic

Hobbes is nonplussed. Calvin needs Rajiv ji's help!

The Indian Proselytization Equation

While helping my daughter with arithmetic, I uncovered a simple but powerful application of elementary school concepts that helps me do a basic purva paksha numerical analysis of the Christian Evangelism in India. Hopefully scholars in India can analyze this serious social problem at the more sophisticated level that it deserves.

Recall Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi once talked about India's demographic dividend, viewing India's population not simply as a source of all problems, but as an asset that produces solutions? Now consider this equation.

Demographic Dividend ÷ Missionary Divisor = Soul Harvesting Quotient (SHQ)

Note the usefulness of this equation to Missionaries.

1) The size of the missionary pie is equal to Modi ji's demographic dividend.  
India's population is also a great source of joy for churches. The more the Hindu bodies, the biggest the soul harvest, the richer their rewards.

2) Conversion Efficiency
Given N missionaries allocated to India, the SHQ immediately tells their CEOs the required sales target or the per-missionary rate of conversion required for Breaking India, completely destroying dharma, and establishing dogma. For example, if you have 10^9 dharmic bodies, 10^5 harvesters , and a 100-year plan, each missionary has to corrupt an average of 100 atmas annually, over a century for achieving 100% cultural genocide. However, there are non-linearities at work.

3) Proselytization Calculus: Increased conversion rate over time

Theorem: At any point in time, if converting 50% of a dharmic population takes N decades, the second 50% will take (far) less than N decades.
 

To see this, let us apply Vivekananda's observation: A Hindu lost is not just a Hindu lost, but also an enemy gained. This means that a significant fraction of the harvested population turns vampire. If you started off with 10^5 missionaries, you may be able to continually double the number after a significant increment of harvested recruits join the sales force, without having to import foreigners. Thus, the divisor goes up, and the required SHQ comes down. Equivalently, if the missionary army maintain their SHQ rate, and the Hindu dividend does not grow as rapidly as the divisor, the time taken to harvest the remaining population keeps on reducing over time.


Conclusion
The rate of dogma growth (and reduction in dharmics) in India is likely to increase nonlinearly,  unless there is a sharp and immediate reduction in the number of soul-harvesters before critical mass is reached, at which point, the harvesting process is likely to go viral (exhibit exponential growth) and become almost surely irreversible.

The Wolf who cried Wolf

An abbreviated version of this comment was submitted on the Rajiv Malhotra forum


The Indian gov has let hundreds of missionaries into India over the years, but Indians does not get to hear the stories of the thousands of victims of child abuse by Church clergy around the world. In the US, victims are fighting back against the behemoth that has betrayed the trust they placed when they were kids, and filing lawsuits in court that are driving such churches to bankruptcy. In Barack Obama's own state of Illinois, which he so proudly represented, the statistics are quite shocking. We are now just beginning to see the same pattern being repeated in Indian churches with cases being reported in many parts of India. THIS list must be compiled and publicized. If the Indian government is sincere about protecting the rights of Christians in India, as Rajnath Singh ji tweeted today, it needs to start paying serious attention to the cases of abuse against church personnel cropping up worldwide, and study how it is unfolding in India.

The last 10 years under Congress rule has seen some of the more fundamentalist churches pretty much do their own thing in India, and one shudders to think how the faith of hoodwinked Dalits, Indian boys, girls, and prospective nuns who come to church looking for peace have been exploited. A lot of foolish Hindus signed up for Jesus (the original good cop) and Carol singing, but when they woke up, found themselves enlisted as servants of deadly multinational bad-cops. A survey of worldwide data would show that IF at all christians in India are on a hit list, the owner of such a list, with a high probability, is likely to be their own organizations. Like charity, abuse begins at home. Any attack on any place of worship, in any country, be it a Mandir, Gurudwara, Masjid, or Church must be condemned, and the culprits punished severely. But the comparative data regarding such attacks, and acts of vandalism in India and in the United States tells an entirely different story and so we must ask: is this a case of wolf crying wolf? Is the church trying to cover up its tracks in India like it has tried to in other countries, and divert attention by encouraging rabble rousers in India without proper fact checking? Is it trying to derail India's recovery under Modi? After all, it has been complicit in getting Narendra Modi's visa to the US cancelled in the past. Of course, not all churches are bad, and we are already reading about prominent patriotic Indian christians who are speaking out against nefarious conversion activities.

If Breaking India forces can organize a SHAM dalit conference in Washington with the help of 'sepoys', then surely, Indian organizations can organize genuine Church-victim conferences in India, bringing speakers from the west who have had tragic experiences with the churches there. Such conferences need not simply an exercise in generating counter atrocity literature, but can actually make a positive dharmic difference to Indian lives, while also educating India about the threat posed by these BI forces. An alternative perspective based on fact must to be provided to Indian public to compare with the totally one-sided Bollywood image of the 'cool' church-gown wedding, the wise Padre, and the kindly Mrs. Braganza upstairs who feeds and houses the homeless Hindu.

Dharmic Clock Running Out

A quick back-of-the-envelope 5-minute 'ball-park' estimate of the 'market share' of dharmic people in undivided India.

Please feel free to post corrections if the numbers are way off, so that readers may benefit.

The following three rows display a recent population estimate by country (in millions), and the approximate percentage of Hindus (dharmics) in that national population.


India: 1230M (78.5%)
Pakistan: 192M (1.85%)
Bangladesh: 158M (8%)

total share of dharmics
= (1230*0.785+192*0.0185+158*0.08)/(1230+192+158)
~ 62%

I recall reading somewhere that the percentage of Hindus in
1947 undivided India was 66% (link needed). If true, this means, from 947CE to 1947, dharmic share dropped from 100% to 66%. This gives us a decline rate of  34/1000, or about 3.4 percentage points every hundred years, on average. During this period, the Abrahamic invaders of India perpetrated the biggest holocaust in the history of mankind, dwarfing both the massive genocide of native Americans by Euro-Christian invaders, and the mass-murder of millions of Jews during WW2 by the Nazis. Most native populations around the world crumbled under such continuous onslaught, but dharma stood its ground.

Yet, post independence, in just 67 yrs since 1947, the dharmic share appears to have dropped 4 percentage points. This despite enjoying more than 3/4 majority in India and having the freedom to chart their own prosperous future, and the luxury of having no organized Abrahamic genocidal opposition to fight. Today's Hindus, in far, far more benign times, appear to be losing demographic share at roughly twice the rate at which their heroic ancestors lost ground in the previous thousand years. Instead of the decline being arrested and reversed, it appears to have accelerated. Why? There are likely to be many reasons, both internal and external. Let's look at one internal picture.

Lack of dharmic grounding?
In this era when Tamas rules Hindu minds, when educated Indians recklessly brand and market themselves using "center right wing" or "center left wing" or "regional" or "world citizen" or some other gibberish label, and some its intellectuals cumulatively devote precious man-months to intellectual gymnastic dogfights over Vimanas, this should not come as a surprise. We see respected thinkers continue to fund and celebrate the suicidal process of outsourcing the R&D of key strategic knowledge areas (which should've been their core dharma) to Hinduphobic academics in India and the west, and mock native attempts. This is not merely a sign of intellectual bankruptcy, but utter adhyatmic bankruptcy. IQ, and not dharmic quotient is revered today, and consequently, almost all of India's thought leaders have lost their dharmic compass, and it does not seem to worry them in the least.  

If Moron Smriti continues to reign, then simple math sends a message: for the first time in many thousand years, dharma will no longer be the majority in a little more than 200 years from now in its own sacred geography. That's just a few rebirths away.

Moral victories are useless in a Dharma Yuddham

'Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right' - Salvor Hardin (Issac Asimov, Foundation series).

After a recent retaliation by the Indian army, Pakistan now seeks a moral victory. Incredulous.

https://twitter.com/ANI_news/status/550628803412623361

Laughable as this sounds, such moves will have plenty of support from their support base amongst the leftist and secular sepoy ecosystem in India and both the left and right wings in the west - despite India losing the life of yet another soldier in this latest unprovoked attack. This "no first use" type policy is costing the democracies of the world, in general, and India in particular, a lot of precious lives. Despite every attempt at peace by India over the last 60+ years, Pakistan has continued its diabolical attempts to bleed India, even if it has had to sacrifice its own children in Peshawar to achieve this vision. Why?

At its core, Pakistan is a 3-D printed artifact, a synthetic unity enforced by a violent ideology and thus in a constant state of tension that can only be released by periodic acts of Himsa. And clearly, these acts are increasing in both frequency and amplitude. Unlike India, which is characterized by a viable integral unity based on dharma, Pakistan as a single entity has no basis in reality. In fact, many thousands of people from east and west Pakistan migrate back into India, seeking refuge from the Frankenstein that they themselves constructed. Like a USSR, it is inevitable that a stable peace and equilibrium can only be achieved by disaggregating such a synthetic unity into its organic, more integral constituents. Attempts to bring about such a sustainable peace genuinely represents ahimsa since it will reduce tensions, minimize the harm and alleviate the misery in the region, and thus should not be discouraged but actively encouraged by all the peace loving peoples of the world. To feign ignorance over what is happening in Pakistan may seem moral, but it is certainly not dharmic. If India truly believes in 'Ahimsa paramo dharma', then it needs to act accordingly, and not based on flaky Abrahamic notions of morality. In a dharma yuddham, there can be fairness, but no compromise. Rather than continuing to endure Himsa to gain some non-existing moral upper ground that nobody cares about, India must, like Lee Child's Jack Reacher, seriously consider getting its retaliation in first - to save dharmic lives and rip apart the synthetic unity of a Jarasandha that has made its hostile intent and actions abundantly and repeatedly clear.

The moral-relativism of India's neo-secularists

Introduction: AAP the New Party

There is much criticism of the hypocritical actions and 'U-turns' of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in New Delhi after it seized power with the support of the Indian national congress. Much of this is justified. Their:
a) inattention to governance, dangerous calls for a referendum in border states,
b) a membership consisting of a few misguided pro-capitalist elements, naive alternative-seekers, amongst a crowd of Marxist activists, and
c) rapidly mutating behaviors,

is slowly but surely made India uncomfortable and nervous. One quality of AAP is undeniable. On the surface, all of (a)-(c), when taken in combination, represents a new politics. The AAP portrays this novelty as a positive feature, and it's ability to accommodate diversity as an example of its flexible thinking. The Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's life before AAP, as well as the antecedents of other leaders of the party is now being scrutinized, and the picture is not very pleasant. When the extent of its Ford-Foundation links become fully public knowledge, AAP will be in further trouble. It is worth examining the ideological banner under which such anarchist elements have rallied to.

AAP's Guiding Philosophy
Let's briefly set aside for now their economic/political orientations, and focus on their core DNA. What is the fundamental "chip" inside that drives the AAP machine? We must be indebted to senior ex-AAP member Surajit Dasgupta, the whistle blower who has given us a ringside view of what happened in the AAP prior to its Delhi 'coup'. In particular, let us focus on the passage where Surajit notes (emphasis mine):
"...The problem was with the AAP’s erroneous understanding of the fundamentals. The name of the committee for Muslims figured under the topic, secularism! ...

how do we plan to reach a different destination by traversing the same path as that of faltering political parties before us and the British Empire that looked at Indians as separate electorates? ..."

Yogendra Yadav, AAP ideologue, responds.
"...
we have to avoid three ways of being secular: 
... Congress [secularism] which is often about selective appeasement of minorities
...BJP secularism which wants to reduce the formal equality before law just to a formality
...communist secularism that treats anything religious as untouchable. 

We need to evolve a principled approach that can relate without any guilt to religious and cultural symbols and discuss the material and community related difficulties of any community whether it is majority or minority..."

Surajit responds:
"... I have no objection whatsoever to addressing the concerns of Muslims under our project of social justice. In fact, I shall extend all-out support to such endeavours. My case is that it should not be masqueraded as secularism. "

Yadav rejects this statement and justifies this approach citing:
...you might wish to refer to Rajeev Bhargav's body of work on [secularism] that argues that Indian secularism has its distinct identity and that is not necessarily a problem..."

"... is a big tactical blunder Kejriwal committed by inviting Yadav and outsourcing policy to him.
... The party continued with its policy of multi-communalism, undeterred by the corrective suggestions members and supporters kept sending to it"

Thus, ignoring protests, Mr. Yogendra Yadav chose for AAP,  Rajeev Bhargava's new model of secularism based on the state "maintaining a principled distance" from various religious groups. This, he claims to be superior, fairer, and also a wholly indigenous alternative to the Congress/BJP/Marxist way. In particular, it claims to be better than what is universally recognized as pseudo-secularism of India since independence. We will argue that AAP's secularism, like Congress' secularism is just as anti-Hindu, and in fact, makes things worse.

Secularism has been universally rejected by Indian thinkers
Bhargava's body of work on an 'Indian secularism' has gained a lot traction within India's westernized intellectual circles, as well as in some parts of the west. In fact, Bhargava has been presenting these ideas as a universal solution for communal harmony based on a neo-secularism formulated by borrowing from the best principles of India and the west. His ideas are motivated by the failure of 'secularism' to solve India's communal problems (Bhargava's many essays on this topic invariably start from the events of December 1992). What may be surprising to some is that the total failure of secularism in India has now been accepted by at least five different groups, including:
(i) Marxists like Bhargava and the JNU-AAP ideologues,
(ii) so-called Gandhian proponents like Ashish Nandy,
(iii) the Indian nationalist parties, as well as(iv) objective thinking academic scholars like SN Balagangadhara, and
(v) dharmic intellectuals like Arun Shourie and 'Being Different' author Rajiv Malhotra.

All these thinkers have exposed the inherent flaws of secularism in their writings from diverse viewpoints. In particular, the last two groups of thinkers have in different ways, provided rigorous logical reasoning to explain why secularism or its derivative variations (in its most 'genuine' form) are guaranteed to fail in India, even if it is implemented as intended.

A common reason for all these groups rejecting secularism for India can be traced to the Abrahamic origins of secularism and the context in which it was created and is applicable to, i.e. to prevent Abrahamic institutions from running a competing government that undermines the rule of the land, aka "separation of church and state". For example, S.N. Balagangadhara constructs convincing and consistent logical argument to show that:
b) Secularism can never be neutral when it has to deal with an Abrahamic religious community and an Indian religious community

b) Secularism in India favors Abrahamic proselytizing religions over Indian ones, and consequently,

c) this western/christian model of secularism has not just helped, but has been the primary and active culprit in inciting communal violence in India.

The extensive body of work of Rajiv Malhotra on this topic represents the most comprehensive, and original Indian thought (dharmic perspective) and intellectual contribution in this area in recent times, and is very briefly touched upon at the end of this essay.  This work is already having a remarkable influence in positively shaping the course of Indian society and politics and will be covered in-depth in a future post.

Alternatives to Secularism: Go Indian
Similarly, each of these aforementioned five groups offer alternatives to secularism. Interestingly again, all their alternative claims (including, interestingly those of the Marxists) are openly derived from an Indian basis, which is quite remarkable. At this level of analysis, it sounds promising: Indian thinkers across the board have recognized and then rejected the Abrahamic-western model of secularism and have opted for an Indian replacement. But what does this replacement look like?

- Bhargava does not reject secularism altogether but proposes a 'redefined secularism' or a neo-secularism that he claims is suitable for the Indian context, which essentially allows for temporary suspensions of secularism ostensibly in the interest of fairness and neutrality.

- self-styled 'Gandhians' offer 'Sarva dharma Sama bhava'

- Indian nationalist groups (e.g. pre-Modi BJP) propose Hindutva as an alternative

- Balagangadhara does not propose a clear alternative but indicates that a solution is available within Indian traditions of pluralism that upheld communal harmony for centuries prior to colonial rule

- Arun Shourie noted that the world 'secularism' has been prostituted, and suggests 'pluralism' as an alternative in a recent NDTV panel discussion with Barkha Dutt. In recent times, it appears that he has spoken publicly about 'mutual respect' being preferable to 'tolerance', which is the critical idea tied to the approach of:

- Rajiv Malhotra (independent non-Hindutva Hindu scholar), who provides an in-depth analysis of the contradictions of secularism, and why a 'dharma sapeksha' society is a viable and sustainable alternative for India, in his book 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism'. His new book 'Indra's Net' emphasizes that such an 'Open Architecture' based on mutual respect is critical to maintaining India's unity in diversity. This approach is not bound to any particular religion, and appears to be the most preferable approach.

But first, to understand AAP's DNA, we have to study Bhargava's model which is claimed to be derived from an Indian perspective.

Bhargava's Neo-secularism: a gift to the West

There are pros and cons to the Bhargava model. The 'pros' being an attempt to present an Indian way (albeit "Indian" is limited to a post-1947 world) and a grudging recognition of the potential within Hindu tradition. A fatal flaw of this model is induced by Bhargava's seemingly desperate attempts to maintain the illusion of a neutrality of 'secularism' despite recognizing its western origins and Christian context for which it was designed. He proposes several ingenious modifications to work around this problem to create a more workable model.

His first failure is the inability to grasp the irreconcilable differences between the nature of the truth claims of history-centric religions (e.g. Abrahamic) and dharmic systems like Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. (which, as SN Balagangadhara mentioned earlier is the key reason why secularism can never be neutral in an Indian context (although SNB uses the less precise word 'pagan' instead of dharmic, which is Rajiv Malhotra's more correct terminology). Rajiv Malhotra's BD provides a more comprehensive comparison of these different truth claims by examining them from a dharmic perspective. He coined the phrase history-centrism to characterize Abrahamic truth claims, which when implemented in practice as a claim of exclusivity, are incompatible with an inclusive, open architecture based on mutual respect. It stands to reason that any modification to "classical" secularism that ignores these fundamental differences will not be neutral either. The modifications introduced by Bhargava include:

a) the state adopting maintaining a principled distance from all religious communities "which entails a flexible approach on the question of intervention or abstention, combining both, dependent on the context, nature or current state of relevant religions"

b) the state adopting a contextual secularism which "recognizes that the conflict between individual rights and group rights or  between claims of equality and liberty or between claims of liberty and the satisfaction of basic needs cannot always be adjudicated by a recourse to some general and abstract principle. Rather they can only be settled case by case and may require a fine balancing of competing claims".

This results in a "multi-value character of  secularism [as opposed to a binary separation of church/state] makes it inherently unstable and necessarily  ambiguous but that this instability is inescapable and given the context in which it is meant to work, this vagueness is a virtue."

Unfortunately, a combination of (a) and (b) without addressing the inherent bias within secularism that skews it in favor of Abrahamic religions only worsens the situation for dharmic religions, because Bhargava allows the state to negotiate with Abrahamic institutions (e.g. Church) as needed, while also allowing the state to essentially dictate to pluralistic dharmic systems like Hinduism which never had a centralized law-making institution in its traditions that competed with the law of the land. In other words not only will a prejudiced (original) secularism be unnecessarily foisted on dharmic systems like Hinduism, when it was totally unnecessary to do so in the first place, it will additionally augment this by mandating that an secular Indian state act as a proxy quasi-Hindu law-making institution for Hindus from time to time to prevent incoherent groups of Hindu traditions from misbehaving due to the "caste system, arguably the central feature of Hinduism". Therefore "in Hinduism, the absence of an
organized institution such as the Church has meant that the impetus for effective
reform cannot come exclusively from within. Reform within Hinduism can hardly be initiated without help from powerful external institutions such as the state".  One cannot but ask Bhargava if he has bought into the neo-Hinduism myth that was invented by a group of missionary scholars in the west and was emphatically debunked in 'Indra's Net'. The net result is not principled distance as intended, but an unprincipled and increased proximity to Abrahamic religions. Why does this happen?

Bhargava's second failure: moral relativism
One reason is that Bhargava has:
a) misappropriated, mangled and relabeled portions of the contextual ethics of dharma into an ill-defined and ambiguous notion of "contextual moral reasoning" - a vagueness that he himself has recognized in his exposition, and sees as its strength
b) erased its Hindu origins to make it palatable to his westernized peers and pass it off as some original contribution

Using Rajiv Malhotra's terminology, these two steps result in the digestion of the nuanced contextual ethics of dharma into western secularism.  Without fully understanding how dharma-based ethics works, Bhargava has bypassed the universal pole of Indian ethics, i.e. the 'Samanya dharma' completely, retaining only the contextual pole. Dharma works well because of the usage of the universal pole as the definitive scanner that scrutinizes the motive when contextual deviations are requested.  This is explained in detail by Rajiv Malhotra in his book 'Being Different':.
".. The frequently levelled charge of moral relativism against this [dharmic] contextual morality is inaccurate, because the conduct and motive are considered consequential in judging the ultimate value of statements. The degree of common good is the universal standard, and the well-being of all creatures, in terms of non-harming (ahimsa), is the highest truth. For the Buddha and for the sages of the Mahabharata, non-harming is the universal ideal ('ahimsa paramo dharmah') and truth, the highest dharma ('satyan paro nasti dharmah'). The contextual morality serves the universal morality and is an individualized expression of it. In other words, the contextual dharma applies the principles of higher universal dharma of benevolence and compassion to specific contexts. 

Thus, dharmic thought offers both universal and contextual poles – not just the latter, as that would be tantamount to moral relativism..."
 
An additional reference is the set of essays of Sandeep Balakrishna that critique A. K. Ramanujan's work on this topic. Historian-scholar Sandeep Balakrishna in a series of essays in 2008:
1. Dissecting contextual morality (part 1, part 2)
2.  'Dharma 101' series

examines the differences between dharma-based ethics versus the "unipolar contextual morality" trap that western thinkers (like Bhargava here) fall into.

Bhargava's contextual morality specifies no unambiguous anchoring within a universal moral reasoning that will deter unprincipled interference. He rejects dharma-based solutions, as evidenced by his reference to "filth" in India's traditions and the erase of the dharmic origin of his ideas, leaving its user with no clear universal guidance. Mutual respect is not even mentioned opening the doors to communal tension with a neo-secular government acting as the capricious policeman. Consequently, Bhargava's interpretation gives the state the right to tactically cherry-pick and make motivated choices (e.g. votebank politics, populism, foreign support) on when to and when not-to deviate from dharma. In the case of Abrahamic religions, their powerful globally-networked institutions headquartered in the west or middle-east can and will mount a vigorous defence to thwart any interference, whereas the decentralized open architecture of Hindu/Buddhist/Sikh/Jain traditions are left relatively vulnerable to such intrusions. Thus, implementation of AAP's contextual secularism of Bhargava opens the doors wide to moral relativism in the Indian context.

Breaking India

This unipolar contextual morality and resulting moral relativism is the core 'doctrine' that the founding fathers of AAP have adopted. It's now famous 'U-turns', rejection of national interest, alignment with adharmic forces and distancing themselves from dharmic peoples, invariably followed by a justification of these actions, may well be a reflection of the moral-relativism in these context-dependent actions. If the Indian National Congress practiced pseudo-secularism (which is really no better than 'genuine' secularism, as we have seen already), AAP has chosen a contextual secularism that is open to moral relativism. It appears that the more sophisticated the secularism model, the more anti-Hindu it is, and the more justifiable these actions seemingly become.

All these ideas are being bandied about ignoring the undeniable fact that  dharmic religions have been at the receiving end of ethnic cleansing pogroms and depraved indifference of colonial rulers in several parts of India for the last several centuries that has resulted in catastrophic geographical and demographic losses that dwarf the Jewish holocaust and the genocide of the Native Americans. All these adharmic models being proposed ignoring the fact that the open architecture of dharma has been the sole working exemplar for sustainable communal harmony in the history of the world. Yet, every such secularism model is justified on the never-materializing threat of the oxymoron of Hindu fundamentalism and the reductionism of the ever-evolving and self-reforming open architecture to either a fossilized Smriti or a neo-Hinduism myth. Not surprisingly, Koenraad Elst has severely condemned the Bhargava model that has now been embraced by the AAP:
"...In fact, India is not a secular state at all. Casanova is a well-meaning but unforewarned Westerner swallowing and reproducing what he is spoon-fed by Bhargava. The latter is a cunning representative of India’s rulers, who has an interest in pretending that India practices “secularism”, and that anything that might seem unsecular to Westerners is due not to a defect in India’s secularism but to the observers being Westerners who don’t understand India’s unique approach to secularism. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

... India does not satisfy a minimum definition of a secular state (which means Bhargava and all the other self-described secularists are wrong)..."


One can only wonder how many of AAP's members have been seduced by this "progressive Indian" version 2.0 of secularism.

AAP's DNA
Let us now apply Rajiv Malhotra's analysis presented in his book 'Being Different' to decipher AAP's DNA.

1. The Aam Aadmi party in its current form is dharma-nirpeksha, just like the Congress. 
Proof: Whereas the original movement of Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev was dharmic (dharma ~ that which upholds, sustains, and maintains in harmony), i.e. arose from a sustainable grass-roots movement to solve problems common to people of all faiths, the AAP has digested this movement by misappropriating the goals, embraced a virulent version of secularism, erasing its entire dharmic basis, thereby making it dharma-nirpeksha, i.e. indifferent to dharma. It follows then that AAP's objectives are unsustainable and prone to adharma and corruption.This is an entirely predictable outcome of embracing dharma-nirpeksha governance methods. Those who foolishly believe that secular parties will somehow reform themselves for India's sake first need to educate themselves by reading the essays and books linked above.

2. The AAP is also anti-Indian. 
Proof: It maintains strong and open links to the Ford Foundation that features prominently in the 'Breaking India' book of Rajiv Malhotra. Ford Foundation has never denied its links to the CIA. This angle has been investigated in-depth by any websites and agencies, including intelligence personnel, so we will not cover this very important topic in this post.


3. Secular parties are an example of an unstable, synthetic unity
Proof: The diversity of groups like the AAP does not enhance but weaken's India's unity since their constituent ideologies are all exclusivist. Consequently, any alliance formed by these contradictory power-centers can only be based on the temporary notion of mere tolerance rather the sustainable mutual-respect that promotes an integral unity within diversity. Such alliances are one of tension-filled convenience that limit such secular parties to being an inherently unstable entity held together solely by unprincipled internal compromises. The promotion of AAP and similar clones to a national stage therefore represents a clear and present danger to India's unity.

This concludes our analysis of Rajeev Bhargava's model of secularism that AAP's ideologues have adopted. We conclude with a brief postscript on a viable alternative to such secular or overtly religious models.

Postscript: A dharma-sapeksha society based on mutual respect.

Rajiv Malhotra's book "Being Different: India's Challenge to Western Universalism" provides detailed and logical arguments for why a dharma-sapeksha society based on mutual respect is the best available alternative to secularism for India. 'Indra's Net' presents this an 'open architecture model'. In other words, it demonstrates the a dharma-sapeksha open architecture based on mutual respect represents both a necessary and sufficient alternative to the biased incumbent model of secularism. In fact, Bhargava's essays on secularism run into a road-block when he talks of inter-religious dialogue because of his limited understanding of the differences between their truth claims, which can be resolved elegantly and fairly based on the dharmic concept of mutual respect. Readers are referred to Rajiv Malhotra's books on this topic to understand the complete picture.

Dharma is a universal law of the cosmos that was discovered in India, which is not limited to any religion, location, or sect in India and is thus acceptable to all. A society without dharma is unsustainable. The state as well as the religious and a-religious communities, as well as every individual entity (including the environment and animal life) in India will interact in an open architecture on the principle of mutual respect and ahimsa (the principle of minimum harm). This bi-directional respect is far better placed than the uni-directional mode of mere tolerance on the basis of which secularism and history-centric faiths interact in the western societies.

The Missing Questions in the Arnab-Rahul Interview

An interview and a plan
Prince Rahul obliged India with a TV interview after 10 years. Apparently, age did not dim his instinctive ability to respond to questions that nobody in India was asking. Rahul was mocked relentlessly for this on social media, and other unpaid media. However, we conjecture
- that maybe, just maybe, that his team worked with the PR firm Dentsu to shape a 'hedgehog strategy' customized for the princely genius.
- that the 500 crores were not spent in vain. That after Dentsu confirmed that the prince's sole trick (that in itself was surprising, given his ill-endowed gene pool) was an ability to remember and reproduce up to 4 statements, the plan was simply to get this message across regardless of the questions.
- that in any case, the UPA is so far down the opinion polls that there is no way but up for them, and they had nothing to lose. This was the right time.
- that the soap-watching, mentally colonized India would simply look at the buzz words in TV news channel tickers the next day (thanks to VIKAS PANDITA ‏@TORUKH_MAKTO Jan 27 : we have the buzzword stats:

RTI: 69 times, System: 76, Empower: 25, Women: 19 #ArnabvsRahul)

Next, here is a simple word-cloud I created using the text from the interview transcript. If people only saw these words without context, and ignore the total nonsense that links these words and the actual questions asked, it looks pretty reasonable. A serious guy talking about people, system, riots, and country. wah.

Public Response
We hypothesize that the job of the primary paid / anti-social media partners was not to actually host the actual interview (Arnab was the sacrificial goat), but to simply filter the these buzzwords from the gibberish by de-contextualizing the answers from the questions, and spoon-feed it to India as shown above. Then, for added safety, you have the English-speaking sepoys ever ready to intellectualize even such gibberish and add the right amount of sanctimoniousness to justify this diabolical plan of hoodwinking the public. As they say, once you've lost your dignity, there's nothing to lose. In fact, if one were to re-watch the interviews without looking at the questions at all, and just the answers, Rahul indeed does a plausible job. And we that was always the plan from day-1, and it was apparent with a few minutes of the start of the interview. The only problem with voting in a bright chap like Rahul Gandhi along with a UPA-3 is this:
just one example. If a Pakistan were to take advantage of this situation to declare war on India and attack Kashmir,  Mr. PM may launch an invasion to annex the Andamans. Or he may file RTIs, or launch a Rajiv Yojana to empower women that his dynasty impoverished. In real life, useful answers are tied to the question. inextricably.

What I will take away from this decision of the prince and his courtiers to make a mockery of Arnab (rather than the more loyal anchors of NDTV/CNN-IBN) is the sheer cynicism, sense of entitlement and vanity, and the utter disregard for a long-suffering public that is required to even contemplate such adharma. And of course the paid media that participates willingly in this sham.

Sane Indians responded thus:
1. Recognized Rahul's incredulously poor intelligence and laughed their heads off

2. Fact-checking web-sites scrutinized the many unsubstantiated claims in his interview and exposed him for the incorrigible liar that he was in that interview.

3. Others recognized the kid-glove treatment given to Rahul and presented the interview conducted in an alternative universe.

4. Then we have the excellent site "Ask Rahul Anything" (http://engagedino.com/askrg) that is going viral, which allows you to ask Rahul any question you want.

The Missing Questions
We managed to identify ten questions to Rahul's answers that were previously float aimlessly, orphaned without any questions to go along, using the 'Ask Rahul Anything' website. Our analysis absolves Rahul of all crimes: we show that in fact our questions result in no unsubstantiated claims, we questioned all answers briefly, honestly, and to the point, on a wide range of topics:

1.   Futility of Modi's smart cities (brightest bulb - 1)
2.   The brightest bulb in the dynasty - 2
3.   The economic race with China
4.   1:1 debate with Narendra Modi
5.   The specific women he will empower
6.   Moving from undesirable pSecularism to undesirable secularism
7.  The original interview: interview or a date
8.   The brightest bulb in the dynasty -3
9.   How Manmohan became PM
10. National security

Indus Script: Hinduphobes no longer have a monopoly

update: added pictures and edited content in the end

The fascinating CRI article by Vikas Saraswat
"Indus Script: The no script theory is a non-starter"

encouraged me to dig a bit deeper and educate myself about the 2009 work of Prof. Rao and his fellow researchers at the University of Washington, which was discussed in the above essay, and how it was received by the scientific community. Posting my notes from some googling and research.

pictures link.

1. The Witzel-Farmer tag team's response was predictably condescending: discredit, going so far as to blast the journal for publishing what they felt was a phoney paper. There was hint of panic in their response which was framed almost immediately after Rao et al.'s work was published. Basically, they had a monopoly on such matters, and Rao's work shook their conclusions in a different way.

2. Rao et al.'s work has since spawned a sequence of counter and counter-counter papers by pro-language and anti-language groups. Here are two recent rebuttals (2010, pro), and a more recent one by the anti group (2013). We have a bit of a stalemate, which is not a bad thing, given how skewed the original scenario was.

3. The pro-group's publications rely on Shannon's work in information theory to  calculate conditional entropy (as well as examining higher order of 'block' entropy) and bring into play other related mathematical laws to show that the probability of Indus script being a language has increased. They also counter the criticism that the briefness of texts is not conclusive ("absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", in their words).

Basically, these statistical models can tells us if there is just the right balance between order (low CE) and chaos (high CE) in the data. For example in English, if u fix 'Q', then probability of any other letter other than 'U' occurring after that is 0 (inflexible). However, if u fix 'Z', then there are multiple possibilities, but not all other 25 letters in the alphabet can occur next. Thus with language, there is some flexibility, but also some constraints on the sequences (pairs of letters at the simplest level) that can be constructed. CE is one of the metrics that captures this.

Data sets that exhibit too much order or too much chaos can most likely be rejected as non-languages. The Indus script passed the 'null hypothesis' test pretty well, while also exhibiting more helpful statistical properties that increase the chances of it being a language (by comparing the CE with other language and non-language data). This is why Rao's work got attention and was deemed worthy of publication. I read the whole thing and saw no hanky-panky.

(By the way, isn't this balance in language another beautiful illustration of Rajiv Malhotra's order-chaos concept?)

4. The anti-group's claims (and there are a few groups now, who appear to be more science-driven compared to Witzel-Farmer) was that such entropic methods can't conclusively discriminate between linguistic and non-linguistic data, and came up with their own data sets and conclusions. Then the pro-group came up with improved metrics, more data, to show stronger results in favor of the Indus script. However, what may be revealing is that the anti-group after lots of pages of scientific rebuttal (Jan 2013) invariably return to the 'curb appeal' argument: "Forget all the complex math. This is simple. Just look at it. The messages are too brief, so it can't be a language." 

The evidence listed in Vikas' CRI essay, combined with the Witzel-Farmer duo's bad habit of mixing prejudice with science/math hurts the anti-group cause. Witzel doesn't do much of Sanskrit at Harvard now-a-days and was last seen hosting dead-beat Marxist seminars with sepoy Angana Chatterji, after she was fired from her previous academic job.

5. My own opinion is that the Hinduphobia of Witzel & co. caused them to reach a premature and gleeful conclusion a decade ago that our old desi ancestors were mass-illiterates. Rao et al.'s systematic work and improvements to their methods since 2009, *when taken together* with lots of other independent supporting material mentioned in the CRI essay has tilted the balance, and certainly given the Indus script theory another boost. Their opposition is working hard to come up with responses that out-think or at least, out-number the pro-group's output. What is clear is that a multi-disciplinary approach can be very useful in solving such problems.

This is not over yet in the minds of many in the west, but at least the playing field if a bit more level, though still loaded against India (thanks to Indian Gov's continued and bizarre acceptance of the now-discredited AIT).  What is sad is that much of the publicized work is happening in western universities and not as much in India (though some is happening in TIFR, Chennai, etc.), whose heritage is the subject of the debate. Hopefully the next Indian government will not neglect the importance of such research, and increase funding for such worthwhile projects and staff them based on merit.

Karnataka Government's 'Improper Use of Magic' Office

[updated Dec 9]
The 'secular' states of Karnataka and Maharashtra in India (both ruled by so-called secular parties that were decimated in the recent assembly elections in several other states for their unprecedented corruption and misrule) have drafted an 'anti-superstition' bill. Here's the text of the bill, and a factual critique of the bill that exposes the government plan for what it is: a lousy, unscientific, and politically motivated plan that gives a beleaguered government the right to wantonly interfere in the affairs of any religious group and attack personal liberty, as long as the groups and persons of interest belong to a dharmic faith (like Hinduism), and prosecute them legally, as convenient.

The tragi-comic part of the bill is that these "rational" governments have pretty much recognized the historicity and authenticity of claims of a person that he, and he alone, was (and will ever be) the recipient of a one-time wireless download of divine literary material from a male-only god atop a mountain, which contradicts the prior claims of another person that he was the only (male) progeny of the same god and a human mom, conceived immaculately, and who died and will come back to life at a suitable time. Note that history-centric faiths like Islam and Christianity cease to exist if such superstitions are not accepted into evidence as historically observed and verified data. Hypothetically, if Rama is considered to be a natural human being by Hindus, who then use the Ramayana solely for its ethical and dharmic teachings, Hinduism would continue to flourish. But if Islam and Christianity likewise assumed 'son of God' and 'Koran as word of God' to be useful myth built around non-supernatural human beings, and similarly treat the text they generated as human-generated moral teachings for a peaceful and prosperous life, it invalidates the very basis of their religion in its current form!

To summarize, these truth-claims of History-Centric faiths are superstition that have to be accepted as historical fact by everybody, else they die. Rajiv Malhotra's 'Being Different', among other things, contrasts the top-down History-centric thought systems versus the ground-up dharmic thought systems, and scientifically analyzes the implications, in-depth. This book is now available in Hindi as well. 


Let the full details of this debate be made public, and let the hypocrisy that defines 'secularism' in India be exposed to its gullible public - that a secular government has used superstition to go on a witch-hunt and decide what is superstition and what isn't. Now where have we read of such a crazy scenario before?

Read the critique posted above and then the description below posted from http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Improper_Use_of_Magic_Office.
 

" The Office is responsible for investigating offences under the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery and the International Confederation of Wizards Statute of Secrecy. The Decree prohibits an underage wizard or witch from performing magic, while the Statute of Secrecy prohibits wizards and witches from performing magic in the presence of Muggles or in a Muggle-inhabited area. 

On receiving intelligence reports of a violation of the Decree, a note is sent to the offender detailing actions that will be taken by the Office. First-time offenders are usually let off with a warning while extreme cases may be referred to the Wizengamot. Thus, it appears that the Improper Use of Magic Office deals with offences that are more regulatory in nature than criminal, ... penalties can still be harsh.
Also, this is where the Animagus registration is posted, and that all Animagi must register with all their distinguishing features and traits noted, in order for them not to abuse their abilities. The registry is open to public viewing. Failing to register will receive a sentence in Azkaban.

Contact with Harry Potter

The Improper Use of Magic Office came into contact with Harry Potter repeatedly during his childhood. He received a warning letter from them when Dobby, ..... years later, Harry received notice of expulsion from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry after he used a Patronus Charm against threatening Dementors .... The letter informed him that his wand would be destroyed by Ministry officials and he would be detained until Court notice; this appears to be the standard procedure.... 
It is suggested that the Improper Use of Magic Office attends Wizengamot Court services,... It is presumed that this department has several positions and that they remained loyal to the Ministry even when Cornelius Fudge denied Lord Voldemort had risen again. 

.... it was highly unusual procedure for a case of underage use of magic. The hearing was held in Courtroom Ten below the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic. Incidentally, it was the same courtroom Harry had previously visited via the Pensieve. It was a horribly intimidating room with a chair that self-locks when the defendant sits down..."


Substitute
'Hindu Gurus' for Harry Potter,
'Yoga and dharmic institutions' for Hogwarts
'Secular Indian gov' for 'Improper Use of Magic Office''Secularist/Monotheist goon squads' for 'Dementors',
etc.
and re-read the description above. 

Of course, who 'he who must not be named' maps to in real-world India is left as an exercise to the reader. Clue: person turned 666 yesterday. Oops, mea culpa.