Finally – India to Bharat

Bharat has been under subjugation and suffering that plight for about 800 years – first under Islamic rulers and then under British occupation. Even after political independence in 1947, nothing changed fundamentally. It was a ‘transfer of power’- from white skinned sahibs to more tanned version of sahibs - rather than Swarajya, or a real form of self-rule. Our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself told J.K. Galbraith, the then US Ambassador to Bharat, who he considered a friend, that ‘he (Nehru) would be remembered as the last Englishman to rule India’ (source: Name Dropping from FDR On, 1999). So for a long while, Bharat kept suffering, either trying to ignore its wound or to try and deal with it in superficial ways, but never going deep enough to diagnose the disease, leave alone address the disease head on. 

Lakshmi Narasimha Temple destroyed by Islamic Invaders in 1565AD. (Picture Credits: sarangib)

I wonder how our ancestors (Hindus as well as Muslims, and later Christians, who were the result of forced conversion), must have felt during those eight centuries or so of subjugation. Seeing their places of worship being destroyed in front of their eyes, their women molested, and their children beheaded. They must have gone into shock as people do when terrorized. The women must have lost their voice for years to come – not only those who were converted to Islam and thus silenced, but also those who were witness to that onslaught. The men must have learnt to ‘mind their own business’ and to ignore what they saw, and such a dumb pretense had to be carried on for centuries. We got so terrorized that the fear took a huge psychological toll for generations to come. Pettiness, hypocrisy, a hesitancy to speak the truth, not to stand up for one’s neighbors and near and dear ones, taking things lying down, and such other traits must have become normal over a period of time. 

And when the Britishers and other European races came, who were no less brutal than the Islamists, they added salt to the already exposed wound, and started to make us feel ashamed of ourselves. We started believing, that we were inferior in every way. Our ways, our beliefs, our culture, our clothes, our language, our religious practices – everything that was our own, became something to be left behind, to be done away with. A feeling of self-loathing created a huge inferiority complex, which resulted in mindless imitation of the English; Mahatma Gandhi once compared our educated classes to ‘blotting paper’ which indiscriminately soaks everything. Starting from Calcutta in the early 19th century, this mindset spread rapidly all over the country, and probably continues till date. The only difference now is that the object of imitation has shifted from the English to the Americans. 

There are levels and levels of imitation – the first few generations of our educated classes must have imitated crudely (as seen in the pictures of many of the kings and other royalty from this land), then slowly the skills improved and their children and grandchildren got more sophisticated in their imitation, making them eligible to get entry into the hallowed circles of Lutyens Delhi and membership into English Clubs. Imitation starts with learning to speak in English, then a complete change of attire, and then shunning of one’s religious beliefs and practices. An insidious addition to this is the imitation, even sub-consciously, of western ideas and ideologies – whether socialism or communism or fascism or capitalism or extreme liberalism in the form of wokeism, it’s all coming from the West, and swallowed by the colonized, who have been pounded over centuries into a state of intellectual stupor.  This trait in our elite, though it gives them a sense of (false) confidence, power and arrogance, is indicative of the deep wound that Bharat suffered. It is a coping mechanism. 

Our elite are unique. To merit entry into the hallowed precinct, they must be completely uprooted and alienated from the ordinary people of Bharat. They may choose to despise, tolerate or patronize them, but they cannot have any respect for them or consider them as their equals. 

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But there is another side to the story of Bharat and to understand that we need to be a bit speculative as our history has been completely distorted first by the British and later by our own alienated and indoctrinated elite. 

The early Europeans were enamored of India. They were curious to know what made this country tick – which was home to such rich and refined products (cotton, silk, sugar, steel, etc.) and such sophisticated knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, architecture, ship building, etc.. What was it out here that nurtured such ingenuity and made all this happen. They wanted to understand us. We need to remember that Columbus went in search of this country and only mistakenly landed in  North America. Later, after Vasco da Gama’s visit, a stream of westerners started coming to India. If we read their travelogues we find a constant refrain in all of them – they are not able to make sense of this country, its ways, and its people. They are amazed that people do not steal, do not tell a lie, and are relaxed and comfortable with themselves. They cannot understand ‘how we manage’. The complexity of our ways and practices and simplicity of our elite baffled them. Even the rich, the scholars, the pundits, artists/artisans, behaved and dressed like the ordinary people. They were ‘naked above the waist’, walked ‘barefoot’, and slept on a simple hand-spun mat. They found no distinction between the artist and the artisans. The artisan was also the artist, while in Europe, the artist was put on a high pedestal while the artisan had a low station. Their elite wore ‘more clothes than was necessary’, they wore boots while the ordinary wore sandals, and they  would ride a horse or a buggy. Here, they saw that the elite as well as the ordinary, both walked. The early travelers have even commented on the food – the same dish khichdi being cooked and consumed in the kitchens of both the kings and the ordinary. All this was baffling for them. The sheer complexity and difference in perspective and the way this society functioned was unfathomable to them. Yet, they could not but appreciate the sheer genius and civility of this society. I believe this still disturbs them and makes them apprehensive of us. 

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt advised the British Ambassador to United States to make sure ‘that India remains in the Western Orbit’ even after independence (source: Dharampal Papers). We need to give serious thought to their concern. Why was it so important to keep India in the western orbit? And what does it (western orbit) mean? My surmise is that the West has been afraid of the potential that India has if it went its own way, aligning with its civilizational essence, its swabhava. They see Bharat as a threat to their domination; threat to their cleverly crafted unipolar world. Therefore it has been important for them to keep us in the ‘western orbit’ to stem any possibility of us realizing our potential. 

It is not difficult to understand why. Jawaharlal Nehru was installed as the first PM of the country despite the fact that not a single State Congress Working committee nominated him. It is not difficult to understand the priority of partitioning of India for the British and for the emerging Western powers. And it is not difficult to understand what happened to that great patriot, though a bit romantic and perhaps with a trace of maverick in him, Netaji Subhash Bose and why he was silenced. The biggest threat to Nehru at that time could only be Netaji, who was managed. 

Things changed dramatically after the second World War. Western imperialist powers realized that the days of colonialism were nearing the end; that it was no longer possible to directly rule over other nations. So institutions and systems were devised to control the different nations of the world while giving the impression that they were giving independence to the former colonies. Institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and the UN, followed by various international agreements, monetary systems, human rights etc., were cleverly designed to manage and manipulate different nations to follow the same path of ‘development’ and herd every nation towards a unipolar world. 

Later, after the cold war was over, American universities were deployed to create ideas to be ultimately soaked by the educated elites of the world who were already being indoctrinated over the past 50 years or so. In the latter half of 80s and early 90s American Universities started occupying the ideological void created by the dismantling of erstwhile USSR.

After world war II the big powers entered into a tacit agreement and divided different countries of the world as their fiefdom. Big mafias have a typical style of working. While they have enmity towards each other, they enter into some kind of a strategic truce to carry on with their exploitation by dividing different regions amongst themselves where others are not supposed to interfere. Similar approach was taken after WW II. So for example while Japan was earmarked as US territory, India came under the ambit of the erstwhile USSR. Our leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru had already been schooled in socialism while in England where there was a great influence of socialist radicals. The transition – transfer of power and then alliance with the USSR – was smooth. 

Our trade with the USSR in those days was in Indian currency. While we imported expensive items like petroleum, armaments, and heavy machinery from them, they imported textiles, tea and jute from us. Obviously there was a huge trade deficit resulting in USSR holding massive amount of Indian currency in our banks. This would come in handy to not only fund the two main Communist parties in India and their offshoots, but to also cultivate and promote left of center intellectuals and infuse all the four pillars of modern democracy with people who would take the leftist agenda forward. 

The Mitrokhin Diaries reveal that at one point of time, one third of the Congress Working Committee members were in their pocket and that they ‘had even managed to infiltrate other political parties’. The question is which were these other parties? We will have to connect the dots and be a bit imaginative to be able to figure that out. 

The Russians even influenced our film industry and many suspect that people like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Raj Kapoor were cultivated by the Russians to influence Indian masses towards leftist ideology. Russians would cultivate writers and intellectuals by bestowing awards on them, by taking them on a tour of Russia, and by projecting them in the media to get them respect and popularity. The same practice continues till date. The difference is that now it is no longer the USSR but the USA which is doing it. Awards like the Magsaysay, Booker, even Nobel (especially the Peace prize and sometimes even the literature and economics) and visits to universities like Harvard etc., are used for this purpose. 

Dr. Rammanohar Lohiya and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya (Picture Credits: Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia - Ambassador Of Socialism, a film by Charu Sharma and Pt. Deen Dayal Upadhyay by Kunwar IS Rathore)

In Jawaharlal Nehru and his family, the West saw an ally. After he passed away, his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was a desi, grounded in Indian culture, was found to be an aberration. But he remained PM for only 19 months, dying an untimely death  under suspicious circumstances while on a visit to Moscow.  His death was never investigated. And who gets coroneted after Shashti ji? Of course Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi who was hardly ready for the job but then with the support of the KGB and the USSR, what was not possible at that time? She had a kitchen cabinet which was indoctrinated in the ways of the USSR – Mohan Kumarmangalam, Romesh Thapar, Dinesh Singh – to support her. But there were two thorns in her path to smooth sailing. Dr. Rammanohar Lohiya and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, though belonging to very divergent political dispensations. One, a leader of Samyukta Socialist Party, and the other from Jana Sangh (the former avatar of BJP). They had started warming up to each other. Both were patriots to the core and understood the cancer that Congress was, and they began to forge alliances of all opposition parties to throw Congress out. They partially succeeded too. In 1967 the state assembly results were unprecedented. Congress lost in 11 states – Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. At the center too, Congress just about managed to retain its majority. It is not a coincidence that fearing a major upheaval in Indian politics because of the coming together of these two stalwarts, both were done away with during 1966-67 period. One was murdered in cold blood while the mystery behind the other’s death never came to be known. Dr. Lohiya died in the then Willingdon Hospital (now named after Lohia) due to septicemia while he was being operated for prostrate. Raj Narain, his able disciple and health minister during the Janata Party regime a decade later, set up an enquiry to go into Lohia’s death, but that report was never revealed under pressure from the then PM Morarji Desai. After the two thorns were removed it was smooth sailing for Indira. 

Congress had by that time split into two. The old guards were on one side, and Indira and her leftist cronies who were on the other side had formed what was then known as Congress (I). The old Congress decided to field Dr. Neelam Sanjiva Reddy and Indira decided to bet on the labour leader V.V. Giri with support from other leftist parties. This was her moment and she decided, perhaps on the advice of her mentors, to go the whole way and make a complete break from the old guard. Those days the largest opposition parties with maximum number of legislatures - in States and in the Center – were Jana Sangh and SSP (Samyukta Socialist Party). There were other parties like the Swarajya party and the two communist parties, the CPI and the CPM apart from the Praja Socialist party, but they had small numbers. The Jana Sangh was clear that it would be going with Sanjiva Reddy, and the Communists parties were clearly going for V.V. Giri. The key to the election lay with SSP. But Dr. Lohiya had passed away. The two main leaders of the SSP then were Madhu Limaye and Raj Narain. Of these, Raj Narain was from the hinterland, a son of the soil,   while Limaye was sophisticated, “educated”, an intellectual, with strong connections with the Russians. There was a huge debate within the party as to which side the SSP should vote in the Presidential election. Till then Dr. Lohiya and SSP was always against the Nehru dynasty and against the Congress whom they considered as the main evil stopping India from finding its own way, away from the shackles of the Western ideology (both left and right). But in this debate which lasted long, Madhu Limaye with his cleverly crafted arguments prevailed and a whip was issued to all members to vote for Indira’s candidate. I remember what Bal Krishna Gupta, a longtime friend of Dr. Lohiya and a Rajya Sabha member said after casting his vote in favour of Giri. He said “I have cremated Lohiya once again”. It is not very difficult to see the Russian hand in this.This victory was crucial to stabilize the reign of Indira, otherwise Sanjiva Reddy would have won and India’s history would have been different. 

Cut to 1977. We need to connect the dots. The main architect of the fall of Janata Party and paving the way for Indira once again was none other than Madhu Limaye. He first objected to Jagjivan Ram becoming the PM and later raised the issue of dual membership as the erstwhile Jan Sangha members, now in Janata Party, were also members of the RSS. This was the beginning of the end of the Janata party and its government. That KGB had been able to infiltrate the opposition ranks rings true if we connect these scattered dots. 

After almost 18 years, in 1998 George Fernandes a political protégé of Limaye gave an interview to Amitava Ghosh in which Ghosh asked George “how could he switch allegiance from Morarji Bhai to Chowdhury Charan Singh within 24 hours?” George’s response was ‘I could not say not to Madhu, who came to my house at night’ and emotionally blackmailed George to switch over without giving any reason. It is to be noted that Madhu Limaye had passed away in 1991 and also the former USSR had by then fallen apart. George was now free. George went on to become the most trusted man of Atal Behari Vajpai! How ironical. 

Even though non Congress governments came to power intermittently, the momentum set by Jawaharlal Nehru did not abate, the power was firmly entrenched in the hands of the indoctrinated elite. By now the ordinary Indian too had been mesmerized into believing that this was the direction to take if they wanted to succeed. It has been important for the west to keep us in the “western orbit” and they have succeeded up until now.

The wound inflicted on this country continued till 2014 when by a quirk of fate there was a genuine change of regime. One of the pillars cracked. On 18th May, 2014 even the Guardian wrote – “Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of long era in which the structures of power did not greatly differ from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent. India under the congress party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means”. 

Indeed it has been is a monumental change. Many who were skeptical and apprehensive about Modi in the beginning, like the author of this piece, have over the last ten years been forced to have faith and admiration for his leadership and his acumen to steer the country in a different direction, more aligned with the swabhava of our ordinary people. Still, the challenges are immense. No other Prime Minister has had to face such vicious opposition, full of vile, hatred and spite. They oppose for the sake of opposition because they sense that Modi is fundamentally changing the rules of the game for ever. The three other pillars are still held firmly by the same deracinated class who have now been indoctrinated into believing that nationalism is wrong, to be a patriot is not progressive. 

Smriti Irani in Medina. (Picture Credits: X)

Alas they do not realize that the world is changing in a fundamental manner, and, providentially, that change is aligned with Bharat. Look at the changes happening in the Muslim world – fundamentalism is taking a back seat. Opening of a huge temple in Abu Dhabi is not a freak event – it is a sign of a major shift taking place in the Islamic world. Smriti Irani’s visit to Medina is another similar signal in the same direction. De-dollarization has begun and this too is foretelling a fundamental shift in the world order. Russia under Putin is openly challenging the West for its individualism and (fake) liberal ideas, and this is another sign of things to come. The world is certainly moving towards multi-polarity, which augurs well for Bharat. The alienated elite may have begun to wake up to this reality. India finally will rediscover its destiny and become Bharat in synch with its civilizational moorings.