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Deadly blend: Cambridge Analytica, caste and colonialism

Considering that outfits like Cambridge Analytica are meddling with India’s DNA, they should be barred from referring to caste in future surveys. Caste should be declared a no-go area for surveyors, and those who flout the law should face non-bailable arrest.

In his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’, European mass murderer Adolf Hitler wrote: “The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.” American author Tom Clancy echoed that thought in a 1995 interview with Inc (1) magazine: “If you can control information, you can control people.” It is in this backdrop that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica’s operations in India should be seen. As data analyst-turned-whistleblower Christopher Wylie tweeted (2) about his company’s “extensive” work with the Congress party in India, “This is what modern colonialism looks like.”

The allusion to colonialism should set off the alarm bells in India. Cambridge Analytica isn’t just another researcher that is scooping up vast amounts of data from India in order to sell it for profit. The new game is value addition. Wylie has revealed that the company is working with the Congress (and allegedly the Janata Dal-United) to exploit caste faultlines, helping the party devise strategies and tactics to play off different communities against each other. It’s a modern-day version of the old British policy of divide and rule.

At the outset, it needs to be understood that the British retreat from India and the Congress takeover was a single seamless event. It was unprecedented because the handover of power took place without too much bloodshed. Congress leaders Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru did not get a scratch from British batons. Their jail terms were more like vacations. The transfer of power was almost choreographed and pre-planned. It was simply one bunch of crooks moving aside to let another (trained by the first group) take over. Both Gandhi and Nehru – who inherited India’s reigns from the retreating British – were ardent admirers of the English race and wore their Anglophilia on their chests.

So strong was the Congress’ nexus with the British that it can be said colonial rule truly ended after Narendra Modi’s election as Prime Minister. The Guardian (3) editorialised: “Today, 18 May 2014, may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India. Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly 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.”

You get the picture – the rule of the Congress Party was the continuation of the dystopian British Raj. During the approximately 190 years of the Raj, the Indian economic growth was flatlining – it registered zero or negative growth. Imagine, a country without any economic growth for two centuries, and you will understand how colonialism gouged out India’s guts. Similarly, during the first three decades after independence – all under Congress and Gandhi dynasty rule – the Indian economy grew just enough (around 3 per cent) to avoid becoming a banana republic.

Like the British colonialists, the Congress too imposed severe restrictions on Indian economic activity. By setting production quotas, slapping a personal income tax of up to 97 per cent, and banning the entry of large business houses in a number of sectors, the Congress strangled the Indian economy. While dirt poor countries such as Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and China raced ahead, the Indian elephant was chained and starved.

The idea behind such enervating economic policies was that as long as Indians remained poor, the Congress could manipulate them in order to stay in power.

Divide and rule: Worked for the British, works for the Congress

There is another uncanny parallel between British and Congress rule – or rather misrule. During the nearly two centuries of the Raj, the number of colonialists rarely exceeded 100,000 and yet they were able to rule 300 million Indians by keeping them divided. Similarly, the Congress, despite having a galaxy of leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, was never a representative party. From 1947 to 1989 it was able to split the Indian electorate along caste and religious lines and thereby rule India on a minority vote. Clearly, the British had taught their Congress protégés well.

The Congress cobbled together an unlikely coalition of three small and disparate groups with no natural affinity or commonality of purpose between them – Brahmins, Scheduled Castes and Muslims. Plus, the party collected some stray votes from other communities, allowing it to corner approximately a third of the national vote.

The middle or intermediate castes, who comprise the vast majority of India’s population, and other upper castes such as Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, were (and still are) ideologically opposed to the Congress’s minority appeasement policies and socialism (which wasn’t socialism anyway, but a pernicious form of crony capitalism). But since their votes were fragmented and because there was no charismatic opposition leader to unite them, the votes of the vast majority of Indians were wasted, allowing the Congress to sneak in and form the government.

That changed with the arrival of V.P. Singh. His Mandal Commission (which reserved jobs for the intermediate castes) set off a chain of events that demolished the Congress coalition. Firstly, feeling threatened by Mandal, the BJP pushed the Ram Mandir (temple) to attract Hindus, launching L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee as national leaders. Indians finally had a choice of leaders other than the members of the monopolistic Gandhi dynasty.

Secondly, the destruction of the Babri Masjid under the Congress’ watch led the Muslims to desert the party in droves. They sought alliances with regional players such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati.

The countdown to the Congress’s doom that started with Mandal in 1990 has reached a stage today when its old allies, the Brahmins, Scheduled Castes and Muslims, have all switched allegiances to other parties. Under its Italian born Christian leader Antonia Maino (who goes by the assumed named of Sonia and the useful Gandhi tag), it has transmogrified into an apology of a party that works against the vast majority of Indians. It has nothing new to offer India’s ambitious middle class or the rapidly gentrifying villages. The upshot: with its lowest ever tally of 45 parliamentarians in the last general elections, the Congress is gasping for oxygen. For instance, in UP and Bihar, where it once ruled uninterrupted for decades, it is now the fifth or fourth party, pushed around by regional bullies. Established by the British in 1855 to prevent the rise of Indian liberation movements, the Congress is past its use by date.

Back to the drawing board: Caste as a weapon against India

It isn’t rocket science to imagine that the Congress wants to return to the status quo seventies – when there was little opposition and no charismatic opposition leaders. At a conclave organised by a media group in Delhi in March 2018, Sonia declared that she would not allow Modi to return to power in 2019. (4) What diabolic plan she has devised is anybody’s guess, but it comes as no surprise that the party that allowed India to stagnate and which messed up Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and many more for its own electoral gains is the one that has hired Cambridge Analytica for one final desperate lunge at power.

According to whistleblower Wylie, based on “micro-level” information gathered over a decade from households across 600 districts and 700,000 villages across India, the company and its parent SCL helped parties target their audiences based on factors such as caste, while also aiding candidates in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. “Our services help clients to identify and target key groups within the population to effectively influence their behaviour to realise a desired outcome,” the company said in the material that highlighted its India-related work. (2)

Caste-based research and strategising is referred to extensively in the company’s documents. “SCL undertook a behavioural research programme targeting over 75 per cent of households to assist the client in not only identifying the correct battlegrounds, but also the right audiences, messages and, most importantly, the right castes to target with their campaigns,” says SCL in its description of the Bihar elections.

The company was involved in two pieces of caste-related work in Uttar Pradesh in 2011 and 2012, to help identify core and swing voters, and the best way to mobilise supporters. “Caste research informs the definition of the target audience, the extent of voter mobilisation, and or inhibition and the overall campaign strategy and message,” said SCL. A “better understanding” of the way caste influenced political affiliation and mobilisation would allow campaign teams to “target the population in the most effective and efficient way”.

Manipulation via Facebook

In a country where everyone and their uncle has at least one Facebook account as well as multiple WhatsApp groups where people are constantly venting political steam, companies like Cambridge Analytica have struck a goldmine of data.

Carl Miller, research director at the London-based Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, says “data-driven targeting certainly could be used to drive polarisation”. (5)

A study of some 10,000 British social media users in a project called “Who Targets Me” showed how “grievances and hang-ups among small groups can be massaged and used” by politicians. “Messages that were too divisive to send out to a mass audience can now be sent to small targeted groups,” Miller said. “Almost certainly it’s making the problem worse, and reducing the common experience we have of politics – of hearing people say the same things, on a series of common themes.”

For instance, Facebook algorithms are able to detect the user’s socio-economic status quite easily. Dalits or Lingayats, for instance, can be bombarded with ads and paid articles that exploit their pet peeves. It doesn’t matter that virtually everyone in the world has their own set of individual and communal grievances, but social media echo chambers can make yours seem the most important.

Armed with psychographic data (hybrid information about the behaviour, mentality, ideology and caste of a set of people), companies like Cambridge Analytica can help political parties target and potentially sway voters. Through real time “social listening”, such firms companies can track people who are talking about a specific issue online. During elections, people can be targeted with messages and paid articles until the last minute before they are set to vote, bypassing national campaign laws.

The idea of using Cambridge Analytica is thus diabolically simple – destroy national unity by exploiting caste fissures and break the country’s foundations. Since Narendra Modi has managed to attract Hindus cutting across the caste divide to consolidate under the BJP, the Congress is attempting to break this caste unity. The spate of caste-based movements that have mushroomed since Modi came is evidence of this game. In Haryana the Jats went on the rampage, in Gujarat the Patels want job reservations, and in Karnataka the Lingayats want the status of a separate religion.

It is clear that just like the Congress surrendered a quarter of the country to the Muslim League in 1947 because it was in a rush to gain power, the party will not think twice before splitting the country along caste faultlines. All that matters is the Gandhis are able to come back to power instead of having to flee to Italy. Sonia Gandhi, the Marie Antoinette of Indian politics, can then enjoy watching the decline of the Indian economy. As the masses plunge back into poverty, she can sit back, sip Asti Spumante and say, “If they can’t afford roti, let them eat pasta.”

Roxna Swamy, who has written a book on Subramaniam Swamy, says Sonia has a “deep contempt for Indians”. (6)

Cambridge Analytics and its colonial parents

According to Professor R. Vaidyanathan of the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru, caste discrimination is a British invention that’s bigger than the steam engine. He writes: “The colonisers were part of the Abrahamic tradition, which believes in homogenisation, and the heterogeneous and non-conflicting Indian society would not have suited their design. That might have led them to construct a class-based discriminating society out of the multiple sampradayas and castes co-existing peacefully. After all, history is constructed to suit the colonisers and victors.” (7)

Vaidyanathan’s view is supported by a large number of researchers and writers. They all agree that caste (or to use the more accurately term ‘jati’) has been part of Indian society for thousands of years, but the modern malaise of the caste system or casteism is a direct result of British colonialism. In ancient India, as it is now, people were divided on the basis of their profession, but there was a large degree of freedom to move up, down or sideways in the social hierarchy. Birth wasn’t the sole determiner of an Indian’s social status.

Although the caste system was exclusive to India, it was in some ways no different from the European class system; this form of society – which exists even today in Britain – makes it nearly impossible for people of different classes to meet, let alone mix. The difference in India was that any caste could become respectable by learning Sanskrit, becoming vegetarian and generally becoming more cultured.

However, the churning in this ever-changing system slowed down considerably because of the trauma and upheavals caused by the Islamic invasions. India’s social order started freezing up with the arrival of the next group of pillagers and looters, the British. This happened when the British contributed to the categorisation of Hinduism as a unified body and system of religious doctrine, texts, rituals and practices, which it had not previously been.

In ancient or medieval India, caste had never been classified, studied or rated. This was because Hinduism was a free-wheeling, liberal religion which was open for anyone to interpret it as it suited them. Even atheism was accepted as a part of Hindu society. It is remarkable that the ancient Indians, who had codified Sanskrit grammar and Yoga – and also made their laws immutable for all time to come – did not codify their religion. The only possible reason is that they didn’t want to classify a system that offered its members the freedom to improve their social status.

When the British tried to classify the hundreds of castes and thousands of sub-castes, this age-old churning stopped.

What Cambridge Analytica is doing today – treating people as basic units of a caste – is exactly what the British did through their census. A census is normally a passive instrument of data gathering, but the British census of India created a new sense of category identity in India. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, who headed the Department of Sociology at the University of Mumbai, explained this phenomenon in his classic 1925 work ‘Caste and Race in India’. He wrote: “The conclusion is unavoidable that intellectual curiosity of some of the early officials is mostly responsible for the treatment of caste given to it in the census, which has become progressively elaborate in each successive census since 1872. The total result has been a livening of the caste-spirit.”

Bernard S. Cohn, an American anthropologist and scholar of British colonialism in India, wrote in ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’ that the British “overlooked the important fact that all these units were once tied to each other through inter-dependent relationships and thus constituted an organic whole”. (8)

Sasha Riser-Kositsky, who monitors political and economic trends and developments in India, writes in the Penn History Review: (9) “The caste categorisation of the census made possible public and private initiatives intended to benefit specific caste groups, which only served to intensify caste distinctions. Scholarships and military recruitment initiatives gave groups a direct incentive to have their jati classified one way or another. The importance of caste classification increased to the point that groups in Lahore distributed fliers to households in advance of the 1931 census listing the ‘correct’ answers respondents were to fill out on the census forms.”

The 1911 census in Bengal was so contentious that it led to high tensions between various caste leaders, leading to public disturbances in several places. Newly founded lobbying groups and organisations sent hundreds of petitions to the census commissioner, asking for slight changes in caste status, or an elevated status for various castes.

By 1943 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (10) was able to write that “today the census is a matter of first rate concern to everyone”, as Indian politics devolved into a numbers game in which every side tried its best to cook the books.

According to Kositsky, the greatest effect of the census was not on the population who furnished information, but on the enumerators themselves. “Rather, the caste consciousness of the at least 500,000 educated Indians who administered the census at the local level was aroused. This group of educated individuals made up the core of administrative officials under both the Raj and Independent India.”

How Risley created the caste divide

Indians remember a number of brutal British colonialists such as General Dyer, the butcher of Jallianwalla Bagha; Dalhousie, who destroyed the kingdom of Jhansi; and of course Robert Clive, who founded the British Empire in India. But strangely, few have heard of Herbert Hope Risley, the ethnographer who codified the caste system in the 1901 census.

In an official note in 1904, Risley, the home secretary in the Government of India, wrote: “Bengal united is a power. Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. That is what the Congress leaders feel: their apprehensions are perfectly correct and they form one of the great merits of the scheme… One of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.”

It was Risley’s advice that the Viceroy Curzon was acting upon when he divided Bengal (into East and West provinces) in 1905, thereby sowing the seeds of Partition.

Risley was an arch racist – and people like him are still produced aplenty in Britain’s elitist schools and colleges. His attempts, as the 1901 census commissioner, to combine ethnography and anthropometrical (head) measurements to identify distinct races and castes proved even more divisive. He held that invading ancient Aryans married indigenous women, creating groups of less racially pure individuals who became the lower castes. “Employed racial scientific differences hardened implacable caste divisions and contributed to caste solidarity,” writes Kositsky.

Jasdev Singh Rai, who has campaigned against the British Government’s plan to equate caste with discrimination, writes in the Huffington Post (11) that when ‘Caste’ was introduced in Indian census forms in 1871, Indians were confused particularly as many didn’t accept the varna system and their jatis were often interchangeable. “By 1921, every Indian had a caste. Within a century Indians were transformed from a people with fluid, ever changing complex and plural social systems into a rigid stratified one leaving each individual little option to change. The practices of a few Brahmin groups were universalised in India by colonialism and the achievements of reform movements sunk. India still struggles with this colonial legacy.”

There is a modern parallel to the above phenomenon. During the riots across northern India over the Mandal Commission in 1989, many of those who ended up in jails and hospitals were found to be from intermediate castes. These were rioters who stood to gain from the commission’s implementation, but lack of knowledge about their own caste had made them anti-Mandal. Like the British census, the Mandal Commission also heightened people’s caste consciousness, as in both cases it was about potential gains that came from caste-categorisation.

M.L. Middleton, the British superintendent of the 1921 census confessed, “We pigeon holed everyone by caste and if we could not find a true caste for them, labelled them with the name of hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its effect on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore.” (12)

Wrong codes in the wrong place

From the very beginning, the British couldn’t comprehend what jatis interacted. Plus, belonging to a rigid and monotheistic religion, in which their god barked down commands from time to time and set the rules for them, they found the fluid caste system, governed by none, too complex to parse.

In order to make the administration of India simple for themselves they looked for a universal Hindu law code. In 1772, Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, directed the courts of the East India Company to base their judgments as much as possible on texts such as the Manu Smriti, to formalise caste law, and to apply it much more literally than the Code had presumably been applied before.

However, as the English judges could not read Sanskrit (the Manu Smriti was not translated into English until 1794), they had to trust pandits to interpret them. This led to a situation where one particular caste, which wasn’t dominant or domineering, was suddenly thrust as the face of Hinduism. Sandhya Rao explains in ‘Castes of India’, (13) that this effectively ensured a Brahminical grip on British India by de facto granting them “the highest posts of power, profit and confidence”.

Melitta Waligora, who teaches the history of Bengal at Humboldt University, agrees the British were unduly influenced by the Brahminical view, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of caste hierarchy and identification. She believes the full might of the state arrayed behind laws based almost exclusively upon caste redoubled the importance of caste in daily Indian life, and gave the institution governmental legitimacy it had not enjoyed since during the time of Manu, if even then.

According to Kositsky, “Regardless of the intent, the Raj benefited immensely from the creation of thousands of competing caste groups, making it unlikely that Indians could present a united anti-British front. At the same time, this ensured that the degradations of caste on the human spirit continued unabated.”

Wendy Doniger (hardly a friend of Hindus) also asserts that the British colonial administration nourished and sustained the caste system because it echoed the subtle and deeply entrenched social hierarchy already prevalent among the British themselves. Subsequently, the colonial state deliberately raised the caste consciousness of the sepoys of the Bengal army, manipulating Brahmins and Jats both to regard themselves as elite and to become more particular about jati principles such as the preparation and eating of their food.

Doniger has noted that the notions of caste, which in India had traditionally been relatively fluid and secondary, became rigid because the sepoys were made to understand caste as being central to their notions of self identity and respect. “Subsequently, the idea that the caste is the basis of the Indian social order and that to be a Hindu is to be a member of a caste became a dominant colonial axiom.” (Doniger 2009).

The close of the colonial period saw the institution of caste instilled with renewed vigour, setting back the cause of social equality on the sub-continent. The British transformed caste from a loose, discriminatory hierarchy in which the main differences between castes were political, into an officially structured and state sanctioned hierarchy backed by the weight of ‘science’.

Struggle for mind control in India

The attempts to keep India mentally colonised did not end with the rollback of colonialism. Indeed, it is a measure of how much the West wants to co-opt and possibly re-colonise India that according to CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the US sucks up more information from India than from Russia or China. If you look at this piece of information with cold logic, the only conclusion is that the West considers India a bigger threat than Moscow or Beijing.

Snowden has revealed how consultants working for American corporations are in reality NSA and CIA agents. Similarly, western churches have long been doing dirty work for the CIA and its allied spy agencies in the West. It seems nothing has changed since the colonial period when the clergy and traders provided advance intelligence and supplies for invading western fleets.

The Ford Foundation, which was founded by the CIA to further American Interests around the world, has been outed as the single biggest source of funds for the modern day sepoys of the Aam Admi Party (AAP).

Project Joshua

However, there is a much bigger – and less visible – plan by Western agencies to encircle India. One of these is the Joshua Project, based in Denver, Colorado, a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise; its stated aim is the conversion of all humans to Christianity. Christian churches have collectively launched this massive project, which uses pin code-wise tactics to convert all Indians to Christianity. Indian Government reports show that in just a single year, 2005-06, the US channelled at least Rs 2,500 crore into India through Christian missionary organisations. A substantial part of this funding is controlled by powerful groups such as the World Vision church.

One the most exhaustive exposes of this effort to destabilise India was conducted by journalist V.K. Shashikumar in a February 2004 report for the left wing Tehelka magazine. The report has since been pulled from the magazine’s website in line with Tehelka’s apparent policy of gradually removing reports that have exposed the shenanigans of Christians, Muslims and other Breaking India forces. The report is, however, available on other websites.

The report, titled ‘Bush’s Conversion Agenda for India’ (15), says that American evangelical agencies have established in India an enormous, well-coordinated and strategised religious conversion plan. “The operation was launched in the early 1990s but really came into its own after George W. Bush, an avowed born-again Christian, became president of the United States in 2001. Since then, aggressive evangelists have found pro-active support from the new administration in their efforts to convert some sections of Indian society to Christianity. At the heart of this complex and sophisticated operation is a simple strategy – convert locals and then give them the know-how and money to plant their own churches and multiply.”

In the decade 1990-2000 they ran a global intelligence operation so complex and sophisticated that its scale and implications are no less than staggering. This operation has put in place a system which enables the US government to access any ethnographic information on any location virtually at the click of the mouse. This network in India, established with funding and strategic assistance from US-based TMOs, gives US intelligence agencies virtually real time access to every nook and corner of the country.

Organisations like the International Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, Christian Aid, World Vision, Seventh Day Adventist Church and multi-billion enterprises run by evangelists like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and Roger Houtsma, among many others, were instrumental in running a coordinated conversion campaign in India under the banner of AD2000. These later became the Joshua Project and when the decade-long movement officially closed down in March 2001, Joshua Project II was launched to sustain conversions and intelligence-gathering.

The many faultlines running through the country-divisions in terms of ethnicity, caste, creed, language and class-were all factored in during the generation of ethnographic data. Shivakumar says that the Joshua Project was also a large-scale intelligence operation that brought together American strategists, theologists, missionary specialists, demographers, technologists, sociologists, anthropologists and researchers to create a comprehensive people group profile. In fact, the ethno-linguistic profiling of the people groups in India, probably, cannot even be matched by data with the government of India.

The launch of the Joshua Project in the mid-1990s resulted in scores of American research teams arriving in India to lay preliminary roadmaps for the church-planting mission. Everyone came on tourist visas and, on their arrival in India, their respective mission partners took them in. This partnership with Indian researchers resulted in the production of enormous field data on various people groups in the country. This, in turn, led to the identification of areas and regions where evangelical activities could be carried out in a focused and methodical manner.

Joshua Project II is a continuation and expansion of the original plan. Its professed aim is to “highlight all the least reached peoples (non-Christian) of the world and to help build ministry networks and partnerships focusing on these people.” The constant research and updating of ethnographic data from India should ring alarm bells within the intelligence agencies in India, warns Shivakumar.

Interestingly, the character Joshua from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible is described by American historian Will Durant as a “plain, blunt warrior”. Commanded by ‘God’, Joshua and his followers killed countless numbers of innocent men, women and children. In Canaan, he was ordered by god not to spare even the sheep, cattle and birds. Nearly 3500 years have passed but the genocide of the Canaanites remains the most sordid chapter you will find in any religious book. Incredibly, Christians worldwide rejoice in these slaughters and Joshua has continued to be a popular name among Christians worldwide.

In Durant’s words, Joshua was “ruled by the second law of nature— that the superior killer survives”. The Joshua Project is therefore a metaphor for Hindu Holocaust. It presents as serious a danger to Indians as the historical Joshua posed to the Canaanites and other settled communities in the Middle East. These peaceful States were destroyed because a wandering prophet heard voices in his head commanding him and his followers to commit genocide at random.

Proceed with extreme caution

The caste system has been exploited against the Hindus for the last two centuries. As well as the British and Christian missionaries, it has been also misused by secular historians, communists, modern Indian politicians and even journalists for furthering their various agendas.

Tinkering with caste can only have dire consequences for India’s long-term unity. The violence unleashed by Dalit groups across the country over a Supreme Court judgement is an example of how conflicts originating in caste-based issues can bring the country to a complete halt.

Considering that outfits like Cambridge Analytica are meddling with India’s DNA, they should be barred from referring to caste in future surveys. It seems counter-intuitive but despite rapid economic growth and increasing military might, India has become a playground for NGOs, missionaries and similar Breaking India forces. They are all going to attack India’s soft underbelly, its caste faultlines, in an attempt to bring down the last major stronghold of polytheistic religions. Caste should be declared a no-go area for surveyors, and those who flout the law should face non-bailable arrest. We have seen how the British created thousands of caste divisions in a few years by asking a seemingly harmless questions. Today’s surveyors have more sophisticated methods, such as psychographic weapons, to cause greater damage.

Sources

  1. Inc, https://www.inc.com/magazine/19951215/2653.html
  2. Twitter, https://twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/978921850448371715
  3. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2014/may/18/india-narendra-modi-election-destiny
  4. India Today, https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/20180326-india-today-conclave-2018-upa-chairperson-sonia-gandhi-interview-1191061-2018-03-15
  5. South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2139719/cambridge-analytica-asia-modern-day-colonialism-or-empathy
  6. First Post, https://www.firstpost.com/politics/sonia-gandhi-has-a-deep-contempt-for-indians-roxna-swamy-tells-all-in-book-on-husband-subramanian-swamy-4115299.html
  7. R. Vaidyanathan, Daily News & Analysis, http://www.dnaindia.com/money/column_caste-discrimination-a-british-invention-bigger-than-steam-engine_1152940
  8. Bernard S. Cohn. ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’ (1987). Oxford in India Readings, Themes in Indian History: Caste in History, edited by Shita Banerjee-Dube, pages 28-39
  9. Sasha Riser-Kositsky, ‘The Political Intensification of Caste India Under the Raj’, page 42
  10. G.S. Ghurye, ‘Caste and British Rule’, page 43
  11. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jasdev-singh-rai/caste-not-class-is-the-ma_b_2989148.html?just_reloaded=1
  12. M.L. Middleton, Superintendent of the Government of India, in the Census 1911 Report for Punjab and Delhi (Vol. 15, Part I, page 343).
  13. Sandhya Rao, ‘Castes of India’, page 118
  14. Melitta Waligora, ‘What is Your Caste? The Classification of Indian Society as Part of the British Civilizing Mission’
  15. V.K. Shashikumar, Tehelka, https://www.scribd.com/document/200663569/Bush-s-Conversion-Agenda-for-India-Preparing-for-the-harvest-Tehelka
  16. Will Durrant, The Story Of Civilization – Part I – Our Oriental Heritage, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.109804

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