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!

Western Feminism as a Counter-Terrorism Doctrine

A small sample of statements by leading lights of Western feminism (WF):

(via @DeepikaBhardwaj on twitter to explain why she is not a feminist as she states in the last line of the picture above)

If these statements represent a more violent expression of a widespread but latent fear and rage among the persecuted women of some western societies, then it is both fair and useful to also analyze Western Feminism as a counter-terrorism doctrine. This suggestion should not be surprising, as the facts unearthed in the aftermath of 'India's Daughter' video show, the per-capita rate of violent crime against women in such societies are orders of magnitude worse than India (with significant under-reporting in most societies). Of course, India clearly has an emerging problem, but one that should and is being tackled boldly, and perhaps with a lot more wisdom, by women leaders in its society. More on that later. A limited point raised in this blog is this:
WF must also be analyzed as a counter-terrorism doctrine because, as data will show, there exists ample evidence to suggest that it was created to counter gender chauvinist terror inspired by History-centricAbrahamic male-dominated theology adopted in those societies. Terror victims respond violently by attacking the other gender, with scant or no regard for collateral damage in terms of destroyed families, innocent lives lost, and cultures exterminated. At best, the WF approach tolerates the male who accepts 'defeat', just like the MCP tolerates women who do the same, resulting in a constant state of tension that boils over repeatedly. In fact, one could say, that the WF members have become male gladiators for all practical purposes, in order to be successful in executing their adharmic counter-terrorism strategy. And this strategy, which looks more like a race to the bottom, is being promoted and marketed in all parts of the world as 'progressive'.

On the other hand, the Indian response is dharmic, and focuses on harmony and restoring balance via mutual respect, rather than myopically and foolishly thinking in terms of order versus chaos, of triumphant victor tolerating sore loser, and seeks to return the feminine to the highest place in the society it has traditionally occupied. This article is a good place to start.  For a detailed comparative analysis of the idea of mutual respect in dharma versus Abrahamic ideology, read Rajiv Malhotra's book Being Different'. The data has shown (read the books by Dr. R. Vaidyanathan, or the talks by S. Gurumurthy on this subject, for example) that the practical success of the traditional Indian economy (Mahalakshmi), its learning models (Saraswati), and its strength against aggression (Durga), are because they are rooted in the divine feminine. Thus, it seems clear to me that these particular choices of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga arose from the actions of ancient Indians who were actually practicing this successful approach, i.e., ground up, and in turn these deities served as exemplars for future generations to follow and be successful too. The ideas of eco-feminism, Yoga, vegetarianism, etc. that have become popular in the west, especially among women, also come from dharmic India. This is not surprising, since the very idea and source of strength is Shakti, which is important in the dharmic traditions of India. One can also understand the Indian versus western response as that of a Yogi versus the Gladiator.

Should one respond to gender-based fault-lines in societies by widening them using a counter-terrorism doctrine to achieve victory? or should one employ a dharmic solution to achieve harmony? Seems like a no-brainer.

The Original Good Cop

The Abrahamic God has often been described as a ruthlessly strong, angry, jealous male, quick to take offense, one who can toss you into eternal hellfire, etc. But being as subtle as a sledgehammer creates an image, and hence recruitment, problem. Some Abrahamic variations do not care about PR or niceties. His will will be done, one way or another, and peace is established by the fear of the sword or the fear of the bigger sword. Other cults are smarter.

Enter: son of God. The epitome of love, charity, kindness, and persuasion. Benevolence multiplied by Goodness raised to the power of divinity. Rather than put the fear of God in you right away, you first do a meet-and-greet, and then gradually get acquainted with the good son. He's the good guy, who is on your side, fighting your cause in the trenches, accepting your shameful sins, who's taken the hit for you so you won't have to, who will save you from the torrid wrath of the angry big-boss CEO upstairs. And he's the only one who can protect you from the quintessential bad cop, and all you have to do is sign on the dotted line. And it works. every time. spectacularly. You are hooked. The good guy too has a dark side - after all, he's a chip of the old Abrahamic block, but you do not want to see it until it is too late. It's like an age old retail trick that works like a charm. You are suckered by the promotion that practically gives away the core, attractive hardware, and you end up paying through your nose for the endless expensive accessory products for the rest of your life. No surprise then that billions around the world have fallen, and continue to fall for the world's first and original good-cop bad-cop trick.

The GCBC routine has since been re-employed over the years in a variety of different forms and improvisations to facilitate religious conversion and digestion of native cultures. India is a prime example. Hindus, in particular, fall for this all the time because they invariably view the junior good-cop very positively in isolation but then fail to spot the GCBC system at work, and that it is the bad cop boss upstairs that ultimately calls the shots. This failure of not adopting a systems approach is costing India. Some of the intellectual Hindu writers online fall for this and end up looking silly.

The work and methods formulated by Rajiv Malhotra to delineate the hostile ecosystems at work, expose them, guard against them, and eventually turn them back, are incredibly important to internalize. Listen to this debate between Rajiv Malhotra and a wonderful, nice, courteous, and friendly good cop in Houston. RM explains the GCBC system really well here.

The Essential Dharmic - Part 1: Necessary Conditions

This blog is as always, a work in progress, and will be revisited in the future as the ideas further crystallize. This post is introductory and leaves a few statements undefended and unexplained. This will be revisited in subsequent posts rather than make this introduction a very long one.

Background, Motivation, Preliminaries
a) This brief note was triggered by this tweet by the dedicated blogger @realitycheckind whose analysis and insightful commentary on the Indian education system, among other important topics, has helped shape a lot of minds.

b) This note uses ideas from a prior work that introduced a new modeling interpretation of History-Centrism, a concept introduced by Rajiv Malhotra in his book 'Being Different' (BD). The aim is to reintroduce the problem of 'who is Hindu' as the task of determining necessary and sufficient conditions (N/S), if any to 'be Hindu'. To answer this question, I borrow heavily from Rajiv Malhotra's new book 'Indra's Net' (IN). These posts are a first attempt to look at the ideas introduced in these books from a math-logical angle and see if any novel and useful insight reveals itself.

In the introductory blogs in this space, we saw how dharmic thought systems (DTS) were non-trivially different from history-centric (HC) ones, and the N/S conditions that used to delineate HC, and deemed "secular" and "universal" in nature, are in fact inadequate - they are neither sufficient nor necessary to distill the essentials of a dharmic. We explore this space further using ideas from 'Indra's Net'.

c) Most, if not all, of those who are trying to rediscover their dharma in their own way, belong to science, engineering, and math-based disciplines. Hopefully the language employed here is not so unfamiliar as to make it entirely unreadable.

d) Rather than just examine the Hindu issue, we follow Rajiv Malhotra and address the broader and (more powerful) general case of 'dharmic', which then allows us to treat 'Hindu' as a special/specific instance within this dharmic family.

e) These posts are less about conclusive and definitive answers, and more about getting dharmics to ask rigorous questions and initiate a debate: Who are we?
To begin to know what makes us who "we are",  a good place to start is knowing 'who we are not', so let's begin there.

Questions
First, I agree with the depicted tweet.
Reason: Abrahamics are an instance of HC religious membership, and it has been shown before that N/S conditions that define HC do not work for DTS (including Hindu Sampradayas, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs).

This leads us to three questions:
a) Are there essential features that allow a person to even qualify as a potential dharmic, and then
b) go a step even further and ask if we can stipulate conditions that are sufficient to characterize/define a dharmic?
c) What are the benefits and risks of having or not having such 'essentials'?

Separation Rule: Machine Learning Analogy
We will address these three question over the next few blogs, starting with (a) today. In particular, we are looking for a separation rule that allows us to achieve two objectives:
a) The separation rule should bring out certain salient properties of dharma thought systems, and be commonly satisfied by all instances within the system
b) These salient features should not be present in non-dharmic systems.

In other words, identify what is special and common to the dharmic cluster, but is also anathema to non-dharmic systems. This problem can be illustrated via this classical machine-learning picture that classifies incoming data as 'red' or 'blue'.
(picture source: http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html)
Imagine the blue dots to be instances of a dharmic system such as Advaita, Buddhism, Jaina, etc., and the red dots to signify instances of non-dharmic systems (including history-centric faiths like Sunni, Mormonism, Protestantism, and new-age systems like scientology, random hippie movements, tree-huggers, cargo cults, etc.). The dotted line represents a machine-learning rule such that any current or future new religion that lies to the left of the line (e.g. answer computes a "YES" to the rule) is classified as potentially dharmic, and instances that fall to the right (e.g. answer computes a "NO" to the rule) is classified as surely non-dharmic. Also the proximity of the observed data point to the line may indicate the degree of violation or satisfaction. For example, an exceedingly adharmic system that permits genocide and slavery of innocents would be "red" and far away from the dotted line while some pagan faiths may be merely borderline red. Therefore, such a separation rule would also prescribe an 'escape route' for a non-dharmic system that allows it to eventually turn dharmic by reforming itself by becoming a "YES" instance. Clearly the presence or absence of such a separation rule has important practical implications in this world.

This allows us to rephrase our questions by asking:
- does there exist a separation rule that allows us to classify an input system as dharmic or not dharmic.
- Is this rule necessary, sufficient, both, or neither?

Rajiv Malhotra answers the first question in the affirmative and specifies an instance of a separation rule in his recent works (BD, IN) by a detailed examination of a variety of historical data and other sources of information.  Whether this rule is necessary and/or sufficient needs to be carefully analyzed.



The Essential Dharmic
There are three possibilities regarding the essentials in (a):
Possibility 1. We can reliably write down necessary conditions to even qualify as dharmic. These conditions may or may not be sufficient.

Possibility 2. We can reliably write down sufficient conditions to even qualify a dharmic. These conditions may or may not be necessary.

Possibility 3. No necessary or sufficient conditions can be written down that qualify or disqualify a person from being dharmic.

Response:
1. There are necessary conditions to even qualify as a dharmic. Equivalently, these represent sufficient conditions to disqualify a person from being dharmic
In other words, before we even try to essentialize Hinduism or other members of the dharmic family, we can and must be at least be able to tell what it is not. These conditions include:
- rejection of Karma
- rejection of Punar Janm

A person who rejects Karma or Punar Janm cannot be accepted as dharmic. A rejection of any one of these dharmic beliefs is sufficient grounds for disqualification, and an acceptance indicates a basic and necessary qualification (i.e., in the sense that it does not guarantee anything and in itself is not sufficient to pass the exam, but at least allows you to take the exam). Indra's Net makes innovative use of the terms Nastika, and Astika to distinguish between those who reject, or accept these two truth claims, respectively. HC members, in particular, are disqualified, since Karma or reincarnation are irreconcilable with the N&S conditions (why?) that define their own membership. The reasons for including these two specific truth claims are quite deep and worth studying. These beliefs are shared by all members of the dharmic family, but are not (in fact, cannot be) shared by history-centric systems at least, and some other new-age cults and other historic faiths. Detailed reasons can be obtained by reading the works of Rajiv Malhotra, but we will try to present additional intuition in the next post using the models developed in this space.

 
What is also important is that this separation rule is derived from dharma and not some secular-western legalese, and are also significantly different from HC/Abrahamic type membership conditions. To see the intuition behind this, let's look at two tweets together:

Again, I would agree with statements in both tweets if it means that essential features of DTS (if any) are not same as that for HC (e.g. Abrahamic). However, given the 140-char limit of twitter, this is a bit terse and is more focused on the legal point of view. I would disagree if the intent of these tweets was 'anything goes for Hinduism'. There has to be certain necessary conditions of elimination that narrow the scope and state a basic qualification for a person to possibly be dharmic, and there can be a debate on what these necessary conditions are. The conditions stated above are based on my understanding of the discussion in 'Indra's Net'. For example:
- a person who believes in any of the truth claims in the Nicene creed would not be able to meet these conditions and thus be disqualified as Nastika from a dharmic perspective.
- A secular person or an atheist who rejects Karma or say, an Islamist or a pagan who rejects reincarnation would be disqualified and deemed a Nastika from a dharmic perspective.
- It follows that a person who is not rejected is an Astika. However, whether these conditions are also sufficient to fully and definitively answer 'who is a dharmic' i.e., is an astika = a dharmic? is a discussion for another day.
- It is also interesting to note that the Astika/Nastika dichotomy and the necessary conditions employed to come up with this classification does not depend on simplistic belief or non-belief in some dualistic 'God'. Evidently, Nastika does not equal "atheist" and Astika does not equal to 'believing in God'. This is not surprising once we see that 'atheism' and 'God' are constructs that came out of history-centric systems that has dominated the airwaves in the west and middle east for many centuries now.

A key differentiation is that HC membership rules (e.g. Nicene Creed) imply exclusivity and introduce a host of duality-ridden binary partitions like us-them, before/after, moral/immoral, atheist/theist, Satan/God, etc. that are of limited use to dharmics. Although these partitions are simple and easy to grasp, separation rules derived from HC are not universally applicable (including in legal courts), and certainly cannot be employed to narrow the scope of who dharmics are or are not. We will conclude part-1 with a case study to illustrate this point.

Case Study: The SGPC in 1925 came up with a definition of 'Sikh'. Here is Arun Shourie talking during the book release of Indra's Net:

" ...People were asked what is your religion. So, 95% of them said we are Shinto, 76% of them said we are Buddhists. It couldn't be: because it was no different for them. It was completely Judaic, Christian, Islamic notion that you can either belong to this or to that. We are Hindus, many of the people, persons like me, all my reading is Buddhist, many of my practices would be from teaching of the Buddha but nobody would say that I am less of a Hindu or more of a Buddhist or vice versa and actually this notion was fomented in India and the first time this happened is in the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee Act. In that Act, ‘Who is a Sikh’ is defined. ‘Who is a Sikh’ – He who believes in the Granth Saheb, He who believes in the Ten Gurus. Most of us could be Sikhs from that point of view, therefore a new clause was added "..and who does not belong to any other religion". You and I may think it is just an administrative thing, but that seed is sown in 1925 and you see it in the agitations of Bhindranwale and others much later... as to what happens when these seeds come into being. "

We can see that the SGPC came up with two conditions
i) the first is clearly a necessary condition: belief in Granth Saheb and Ten Gurus. Seems pretty reasonable and natural. I, like most dharmics, deeply believe in both, and I personally agree that this is an important requirement.

ii) a second necessary condition that in combination with the definition-type ruling on "who is a Sikh", makes their statement taken in totality behave like a sufficient condition for defining a Sikh, and weeding out non-Sikhs:
A Sikh is essentially one who believes in the truth claims of the Granth Saheb and the Ten Gurus, and does not simultaneously belong to any other religion.

The latter clause is a HC-like membership rule that forbids any dual-citizenship, and is likely to be a bitter pill for dharmics to swallow and I personally reject it. Why? (i) in itself is sufficient to reject all HC members (e.g all Abrahamics) who cannot simultaneously satisfy HC's N&S conditions that irreconcilably contradict (i), and have to pick one faith over the other. However, (i) is not sufficient as far as excluding members within the dharmic family who do not explicitly label themselves Sikh. Therefore, the only role of (ii) appears to be to introduce an exclusivity clause to reject those who call themselves Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, etc. Rajiv Malhotra's separation rule does not repeat this sectarian mistake, and returns the focus rightly to the biggest picture there is, the Kurukshetra where dharma battles adharma. This decision may well turn out to be one of the great turning points of the Kurukshetra. It is possibly a side-effect of the mistake by SGPC that Wikipedia today describes Sikhism as 'monotheist' - tragic fiction. Depending on the context and situation, most dharmics today operate like a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain, or one or more combinations. Clearly this kind of exclusivity based essentializing is dangerous, misinformed, and adharmic because of the harmful tensions it creates within the society. There may be disagreements within the dharmic family on the nature of the ultimate reality (e.g. Shunya or Brahman) that causes one to choose a Buddhist or an Advaitin perspective, but there was and is unanimous agreement on the primacy of (saamanya) dharma, and upholding its integral unity (ref: BD, IN).

This sets up the ground rules for coming up with such N/S conditions or rejecting such conditions. Any alternative candidate for the separation rule that is put forward to improve upon the necessary conditions for dharmics stated here has to be equally, or more sustainable and must transparently and unambiguously support dharma. Simply put, a viable alternative can only arise from a dharmic basis. Furthermore, dharma, unlike history-centric constructs, is truly universal.

Take Aways
The key takeaways of Part-1 are:
- "anything goes" and some (random) "way of life" answers to who is dharmic is non-rigorous, open to adharmic manipulation, random claims and definitions of Hindu-ness that are neither necessary or sufficient, and is especially unacceptable in a world where the dharmic market-share of demographics, geography, and global influence is shrinking at an alarming rate every year. We can and must do better.

- the presence of a separation rule that narrows down the scope of who is and is not dharmic has important practical implications and value. However, a bad choice of a separate rule brings with it its own negative side effects and risk

- necessary and/or sufficient conditions derived from History-centric theology or secular concepts are unlikely to work for dharmic classification/qualification, are not universal, and hence rejected.

- necessary conditions rooted in dharma are required to narrow the scope on who qualifies to be dharmic, and thus also prescribe sufficient grounds for disqualification.

- Necessary conditions based on the ideas from the book 'Indra's Net' are stated here.

- Note that this response rejects Possibility #3 by clearly stating that there are indeed certain essentials having a dharmic basis, that are at least necessary to be Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain (or dharmic, in general). However, are these conditions sufficient? What is so special about Karma and Reincarnation? Does having any separation rule invariably come with the burden of risk? We will discuss this in a later post.


Acknowledgements:
thanks to @sighbaboo and @DigestionResist for reviewing an early draft and sending me feedback despite their busy schedules. Errors and shortcomings in this post are entirely mine and bugs will be fixed periodically blogs as more data becomes available and understanding improves.

Alternative History or Alternate History?

Alternate versus Alternative

I would've sworn that Wendy's book on the 'Hindus' was 'an alternate history'. I rechecked the amazon book title, which said : 'alternative history'. Why is this distinction important? Wendy, like most western academics born and brought up in English, choose their words smartly. Grammarist.com (or any one of the popular grammar sites) notes:

The implicit claim in Wendy's title is that her book does not seek to replace what existed for thousands of years, but provides an alternative for today's confused Hindus, 95% of who live in Nehruvian India. An India where the assertion of  being a proud practitioner of Hinduism, a religion that offers genuine mutual respect instead of mere tolerance like Abrahamic faiths, is considered "communal".

Fantasy is not a valid alternative

If God gave Wendy Doniger lemons, you really do not want to know what she does with it. One of the assumptions that Wendy's silly books relies on is that some Sanskrit words can have multiple, context-driven interpretations and she can freely choose whatever suits her psychology ("stuck in the anal-genital chakras"). Wendy's Child Syndrome. Alternative does not mean "anything goes". Alternative re-tellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata cannot be mapped into some Star-wars or Lord of the Rings type fantasy. An alternative driving route cannot send you to a different destination. A necessary condition for any alternative interpretation of Hindu concepts and methods is that it be dharmic. Hinduism, like Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, is a dharmic thought system. Unfortunately, Wendy's approach is dharma-nirpeksha, i.e. utterly indifferent to dharma. Dharma has contextual interpretation that is neither frozen as a commandment or fatwa, nor is it "anything goes" that degenerates into moral relativism. Wendy & her children lack the cognitive capacity to comprehend such profundity. An adharmic alternative can only really be a perverse substitute that seeks to wipe out rather than serve dharma. An alternate history that mocks natives as savages is a precursor to cultural genocide.

Facts = Data aberrations = noisy signal

Shoddy scholarship is not just Wendy's problem. Mentally colonized Indian intellectuals (sepoys) have shown that they are not just clueless but also careless. The so-called intellectual output toward creating an alternate history, produced by an entire generation of India's leftists, from Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen, down to those lower in the ranks like Ramachandra Guha, etc., is defined by mediocrity: sloppy research, use of meaningless adjectives, unquantifiable claims, and a lack of scientific rigor. Unlike scientific and engineering journal papers, here the conclusions come first, and the reasoning is whatever is necessary to justify the conclusion. There appears to be some kind of a mental condition that fails to recognize that facts are ... facts and that if something happened, it did happen (some so-called 'right wing' columnists too have fallen prey to this). But no. It is possible for sepoys to time-travel and alter what happened. And it is justifiable to do so because such facts are merely an aberration, a blip in the radar that does not, and should not be allowed to, derail their grand narrative.

The Invader Avatar Theory

(update  March 2015: Refer Rajiv Malhotra's 2015 Jaipur Lit Fest video for this)
If the ancient Indian civilization is advanced, it cannot have a Hindu origin since Hinduism is backward. So it must have come from outside. So add a "n" to Arya and invent the Aryan invaders. Then a succession of "invader avatars" who show up every few centuries to give India what it needed, from Vedas to Mughlai cuisine to sports to liberalism. Any factual evidence, be it genetic, linguistic, archaeological, astronomical, economic data, which contradicts the IA theory is but an isolated violation, a series of coincidences that do not invalidate the overall narrative. If Hindu leaders perform social service, then it cannot have Hindu origins and must have been borrowed from the Christian west or Islam, because Hinduism is fully of exotic mysticism and represents a self-centered, out-worldly quest for Moksha, and does not have or even require philanthropy. If Nehruvian India failed, it is because of Hinduism and their "Hindu rate of growth", not because of Nehru's corrupt Stalinist policies that has ruined the nation. If unimpeachable data is shown that dharma civilization was a dominant in major measurement indices for most of the thousand-plus years prior to colonization, this too is an aberration - some white noise, and the overall signal-to-noise ratio of their IA theory is strong. If Marxist-Leninist-Maoist politics has produced untold misery all over the world, and yet is blindly imported by sepoys and used to destroy the economy and society of Kerala and Bengal in India, that too is an aberration, and merely improper implementation of a sophisticated IA concept. Hinduism cannot be reformed by a Sankara because Hinduism is fossilized. If it is reformed, then of course, it cannot be Hinduism, which by definition is fossilized, so this has to be some neo-Hinduism that is the invention of a nationalist-minded Vivekananda after learning from the USA (read 'Indra's Net;). Hinduism, like India the nation, never existed until recently, yet this same Hinduism, even without existing, miraculously managed to destroy Buddhism and Jainism, as Arun Shourie pointed out recently. If a Babasaheb Ambedkar who spoke up for Dalits against persecution is venerated, the fact that he became Buddhist and remained true to his dharma (like Arun Shourie) and even wrote in praise of Advaitic Hinduism and 'Hindutva', is dismissed as an aberration. 

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

If Islamic genocidal maniacs like Aurangazeb killed more than four million Indians, that too is an aberration, since he was more like Shakespeare who went wrong only towards the end of his reign when office-pressures were mounting (credit: William Dalrymple). If Tipu massacred or forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus, then that is an aberration, since he was secular on the average because he left a couple of Hindu temples intact (read this recent book for reasons). Balance! Reminds me of Pam Shriver who described a 0-6, 1-6 tennis match against Martina Navratilova: "it was a very balanced game. I broke serve once, and held once". Detailed first-hand accounts by neutral Westerners and Europeans against such fundamentalist maniacs who've committed mass-murder of Indians cannot be accepted since they are biased. Heck, blow-by-blow accounts by personal biographers of these tyrants are not acceptable because they don't really mean what they saying, unless they are speaking of non-homicidal contributions, if any.  However, the neo-Hindu oxymoron propagated by western 'missionaries in mufti' like Paul Hacker and Ursula King is perfectly balanced and acceptable to Ramachandra Guha, Ashutosh Varshney,  Pankaj Mishra (who won a $150K sepoy Baksheesh recently), Romila Thapar, etc.. The stuff of Wendy and children from the west is lauded and praised as a scholarly alternative. The racist colonial missionary myth of "Aryan-Dravidian" is acceptable. Anything said against the Hindus in any book, by anybody is acceptable; neutrality, objectivity, fact-checking be damned. The conclusion drives the cherry-picking of data. Such is the world of social "science" and humanities! If no data remains after all this pruning, then their IA theory is proposed as something that actually happened, and taught to Indian school kids to create the next generation of mentally colonized Indians.

In every instance, it is clear that the aim is not to provide an alternative picture, but an alternate narrative that is written to erase evidence and replace it with pet theories. What is the mental condition that drives sepoys to such dishonesty?

(The basis for some of the info interpreted above is derived from the works of original Indian thinkers, including Rajiv Malhotra, Arun Shourie, and S. Gurumurthy)

Why?

The Islamic mauraders and Western colonizers murdered, raped and pillaged India for centuries. Yet the vast majority of India - the hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians held on to their dharma. They endured mind-boggling physical torture and mental trauma, yet their spirit was intact, their 'Mano bal' (morale) remains alive, thanks to dharma, the very basis of anti-fragility. As Ajit Doval asks and answers: "When is a war over? The war is over only after we win". The Hindus have protected their itihasa and dharma, and with the guidance of Rishis like Rajiv Malhotra and fact-driven thinkers like Gurumurthy, they will continue until they prevail.  The only irreversibly damaged people? The sepoys. They rejected dharma, thereby allowing their intellects to be repeatedly molested, their deepest thoughts to be violently penetrated by Hinduphobic thinkers. Consequently, their deflowered minds have collectively produced ZERO original, truly alternative Indian thought, but given birth to tons of mutilated, bastardized alternate ideas of India and Hinduism that are dead on delivery. I have only pity for sepoys. Truly tragic victims of colonialism.

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.

How Sumitranandan Pant Rediscovered Dharma

Introduction
28th December is the birthday of the late, great poet of India, Sri Sumitranandan Pant.

here is the picture source.

Return from Marxism
Sumitranandan Pant appears to one of many in the Indian artistic and intellectual traditions who were initially drawn into Marxism and communism. However, over time, these thinkers became disillusioned after either seeing through the fraudulence, or the narrow materialist view of the world, and returned to their Indian roots, seeking a deeper and more honest meaning to their life and art. Fellow Jnanapith award winning poet Nirmal Sharma is perhaps another example of a poet who appears to have returned to dharmic roots after dabbling with Marxism.

Quest For Truth
The questions we can ask here is: Did they find a deeper meaning in dharmic India that Marxism failed to provide? If so, what is that? But before we get to that, a seemingly unrelated but important event occurred today. Rajiv Malhotra, author of 'Breaking India' and 'Being Different' landed in India on a trip that will soon launch his latest book:
Indra's Net: Defending India's Philosophical Unity


The connection will become clear shortly.  Let us now return to Sri. Pant's quest for a deeper truth. For that, we turn to this interesting article on Sumitranandan Pant at Yalburi.org:
"......he was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda. Another influence was also slowly making an impact on his sensibility. This was Marxism which came through his friendship with P. C. Joshi who later on became the Secretary of the Communist Party of India....Pant was also drawn towards that movement and wrote some immaculate verses about social reality. He, however, soon realised that this movement was committed only to a change in the externals and was indifferent to the urges for a basic change in the sensibility. ...The poet was convinced that it is the duty of the creative artist to unite the external and internal worlds; ... In the first phase of his creative career society was on the margin of his artistic picture while nature occupied the centre. In the second phase of his creative career it was the social reality which advanced towards the centre and occupied it. Nature and soul-stirrings remained there but they were pushed to the margin. Sumitranandan Pant was now on the brink of a new breakthrough which could unite the two worlds into a new harmony through an adequate creative alchemy....

....This breakthrough came through a contact with the famous Indian dancer and artist Udayshankar. Udayshankar had lived for sometime in Almora in Garhwal and an intimacy developed between the two kindred souls. Both became partners of a pilgrimage to search a principle of unity between the outer and the inner worlds. The ballet and other stylized forms of dance also attracted Pant. Udayshankar made a film named Kalpana (Imagination) which interpreted the outer and inner realities through stylized pictures and movements. Sumitranandan was also associated with the making of this picture. This film was made in South India where Pant came into contact with Sri Aurobindo and his philosophy. Sri Aurobindo confirmed many of Pant’s own speculations and the former’s philosophy gave resonance and richness to the ideological residue of Pant’s poetry. Like Sri Aurobindo the poet also believed that true spirituality should not mean a repudiation of external reality. It should irradiate and impregnate the external reality and make it more meaningful and oriented towards God. Sham spirituality should be replaced by true spirituality which takes as its junior partner the social reality. The later poems of Sumitranandan Pant give expression and celebrate the union of the outer and inner worlds....His poems are verbal artifacts containing warm human experience. They are neither intellectual exercises nor philosophical abstractions."

Return to Dharma 
This is an amazing narrative.
1) A poet, disconcerted by the Marxist lack of an inner reality is struck by an Indian dancer/theater artist's remarkable ability to harmoniously bridge the inner and outer realities and depict it effortlessly in art-form, and without any need to reconcile 'conflicts' between the two, and also do so beautifully. How come there is no conflict?

2) The poet, after internalizing Aurobindo's philosophy learns how the inner- and outer-reality co-exist in dharmic harmony. He was able to recognize the integral unity in dharma that was different from the synthetic unity of the west, and not even possible in the materialistic Marxism due to the outright rejection of an inner reality. Perhaps, this was Pant's 'A-ha' moment.


3) Pant was finally able to creatively replicate and incorporate into his poetry, like UdayShankar's artistic dance/theater representation, the dharmic harmony of inner-outer reality. He had elevated his poetry to a higher level and also make it more accessible by tying it to a human experience rather than stopping at either intellectual abstraction or some fuzzy spirituality. This achievement was not a fluke or a one-time thing. It is a classic example of the Bandhu, the correspondence principle of dharma at work, that also gives Hinduism its remarkable anti-fragility. As Rajiv Malhotra writes in 'Being Different':

"Bandhu is a concept used to explain how the whole and the parts are held together in integral unity. All aspects of the world stem from a common ineffable source, and what we perceive as nature is but a pointer to a higher reality. There is interlinking among the various faces of this reality, such as sounds, numbers, colours and ideas, and this interlinking is bandhu.... 

.... Not only does each discipline presume this unity; so does the relationship among disciplines. All the arts and sciences are interrelated and may be seen as manifold ways in which human nature, itself an emanation of cosmic unity, expresses itself. One discipline contains and reflects the others. Delving deeply into any one of them eventually leads to similar integral principles and structures..."

... Bandhu accounts for the survival of dharmic spirituality, for even when certain disciplines and practices were destroyed, other disciplines encoding the same principles survived and helped revive the overall tradition."

.... Natya Shastra treats Natya as the total art form, including representation, poetry, dance, music, make-up, and indeed the whole world. It is an organic and integral view encompassing the vedic rituals, Shaivite dance and music, and the epic tales..."

Integral Unity

Thus, the principle of Bandhu breathed a new and refreshing life back into Sumitranandan Pant's poetry. He was able to seamlessly integrate his social realities and nature/atma-stirring ideas into verse. These 'realities' was like a jewel that reflected the shine of the other, like those in Indra's Net, as Rajiv Malhotra further notes in his book 'Being Different':

"The conceptual matrix of Integral Unity is illustrated in the metaphor of Indra's Net ... which symbolizes a universe with infinite dependencies and relations interwoven among all its members, none of which exists apart from but only in the context of this collective reality..."

Now this is a genuinely 'holistic' (or holographic) view.

Indra's Net
The unity in diversity in dharmic India is truly integral, unlike the brittle, synthetically fused versions of unity that we see are slowly falling apart in western and middle-eastern countries as their immigrant diversity increases.  Unfortunately, external forces either opposed to or seeking to gain leverage over India (read 'Breaking India' for full details) appear to have zeroed-in on the critical role played by this integral unity in ensuring the long-term survivability of India. India's last line of defense must be defended at multiple fronts. Rajiv Malhotra's new book may tells us more.