A few years ago, based on a Facebook debate that I had with an Indian journalist representing the Left-wing thought, I had written a three-part article “Opposing the Left is not Right”

where I had clearly stated that the moment you turn the eye of critical inquiry on the thoughts of the Left, the Left-wing ideologues right away (pun intended) put you in the category of the Right. These people operate strictly in the domain of Left/Right binary and do not let you explore or promote a space which goes beyond the aforementioned binary. This positioning is not very different from what George Bush, Jr. once had stated, “Either you are with us or against us.” And, of course, we so clearly know what great critics of George Bush the Left-wing media has been—this article is not on the merits or demerits of George Bush’s foreign policies, so I will not delve on this matter anymore; all that I wanted to show was the Right-wing-like mentality that the Left-wing ideologues show. In addition, it does not take them too long to insinuate extremism on the critic and slap epithets against the latter such as Nero, Nazi, or Fascist. In mainstream academia and media, the current position is that any thought which is not Left leaning or has not been inspired by Left thinking, is not correct, right, truth-leaning, emancipatory or liberatory: on the contrary, it is nothing but Right-representing which needs to be demonized, slandered, and shown to be dim-witted in order to strangulate it and suppress it. The same freedom of expression, which is so sanctified in mainstream academia and media, is denied to the critic—and paradoxically, it is done in the name of freedom of expression. Though I would encourage the readers to read all the three parts of the earlier article, if they do not have time, at least the eleven points that I make towards the end of the third article. I quote from one of the eleven points:

“And the surprising part is that they will use the pretext of their divine right to freedom of expression to specifically silence the voice of their critics. The sanctity of freedom of expression is held only till the time their citadel is not pierced. The moment there is a critical look at their paradigm, freedom of expression goes off the backdoor and the extra-academic of painting the dissent black, red, or saffron begins. In the academia of social sciences in India, the divine right to freedom of expression only belongs to the Indian left. All others who dissent with them belong to the camp of violent extremists and fascists, who are out to destroy India—I really wonder at the stupidity and sheer arrogance of this reductionist discourse.”

The Indian Left, whether it is in mainstream English-speaking media (barring one) or academia, maintains its hegemony and uses all extra-academic methods to silence dissent or to not allow any perspective to emerge which is not inspired by the thought of the Left. This is specifically in relationship to all the highly nuanced darshana systems that have existed in India before the advent of Islam by categorizing them either in the category of religion or Brahmanism. Or, let me put it bluntly: anything which can be identified as Hindu. One of the chief characteristics of Fascism is that it is rabidly against Freedom, in particular Freedom of Expression. By raising the false bogey of attack on Freedom of Expression, these left-wingers are the greatest opponents and suppressors of Freedom of Expression—because of which they are fascists or show fascist-like tendencies. I therefore write:

The question is why should the lens or lenses of the Indian left—panning across the spectrum—be considered absolute? Can there be other lenses in which scholarship be done? Will they allow space for other scholarships, specifically which challenge them? If they do not allow the space, then who is turning into a fascist? They, or the dissenters?

The fascists are also masters in inverting the truth—positing contentions that are absolutely in contra-distinction to what the reality is. This is evident from the Nazi use of Swastika. If you look at the Nazi Swastika, it looks very similar to the Hindu Swastika. But when you look deeper, you find that the Swastika has been inverted—it is opposite to what the Hindu Swastika looks like.

Look at how the Left-wing media has covered the Delhi riots. It made it seem to the entire world that the riots were instigated by the BJP politician Kapil Mishra and that under the supervision of the current BJP government, a pogrom was launched against the Muslims. What is the truth that is emerging? It was a riot meticulously planned by a section of Muslims for days if not months, as is evident from the sacks of stones which were put on the rooftops, acid packets and petrol bombs made, catapults created to launch the stones, petrol bombs and acid packets on intended targets. In fact, catapults made of iron were even mounted on a cycle rickshaw so that all these various “missiles” could be put to maximum use.

The police were meticulously targeted and one intelligence officer, Ankit Sharma, was murdered in cold blood. His body was found thrown in a drain with at least 400 stab wounds, and the postmortem report suggests that acid was poured into all the places where he was stabbed. His eyes had been gouged out and acid put in, and his ears suffered a similar fate. A Muslim politician from the Aam Aadmi Party, Tahir Hussain, who is absconding currently, has been captured in a video footage directing the rioters in one of the areas affected by the mayhem.

If anyone is familiar with the history of the Jewish people vis-à-vis the Nazis, they would know about the ingenuity of cruel methods used in their killing: concentration camps, gas chambers, transportation in sealed freight trains, and medical experiments that led to their deaths. The cruelty with which Ankit Sharma was put to death is screaming to identify the ‘consciousness” which was behind the riots.

After authoring the “Opposing the Left is not Right,” I continued on with a further investigation of Fascism and wrote another article titled “The Confluence of Marxist and Fascist Ideologies”

in which I argue that there is an intimate relationship between Marxism and Fascism—in fact, I show in the article how a slight tweak in Marxist philosophy culminates in Fascism, and it was for this very reason that many Fascists in their early “political career” have been Marxists. Also, in writing the article, I discuss some characteristics of Fascism, which we will make use of here (for complete details, please read the article in full):

1. Fascism is against reason and rationality. Opposing the Enlightenment values of reason and rationality, it favors instinct and irrationality.  
2. The irrationality of the crowd can be accessed by a powerful leader, which can be drummed up to create a violent revolution.

To the above I add, Fascism is essentially against democracy and law when it imposes itself where people do not have a voice.

Now, let us examine the role that Harsh Mander has played in the video that has come out in social media on March 4, 2020. There is no clarity as yet as to when the video was recorded but it was uploaded on December 16, 2019; therefore, the possibility is quite high that the video was recorded before the violence of December 15 in which the students of Jamia Milia Islamia University had participated, leading the police to take action against them. The students had engaged in violence against the police and had destroyed public property, including burning of buses and vehicles. The mainstream English media, Indian as well as World, and Wikipedia CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) description, have termed these protests against CAA as peaceful. Harsh Mander had given the speech in Hindi, which I am translating word-for-word for the readers:

“This fight cannot be won in the Supreme Court. We have seen the Supreme Court. In the last few days, in the matters of NRC, in matters of Ayodhya, in the matters of Kashmir, the Supreme Court has not protected humanity, equality, and secularism. We will make efforts there—the Supreme Court is ours—but the decision [on CAA] will not be made in either Supreme Court or in the Parliament. What the future will be of this country—you are young; what kind of country you want to give to your children—will be where? One: It will be on the road.”

It is amply clear from the above that Harsh Mander does not believe either in a democratic process through the Parliament or the judicial process through the Supreme Court of India. He is indeed interested in settling the matters through the rule of the mob. He is tapping into the mob-mentality. He is also addressing the irrationality of the people because when one dispassionately examines the details of CAA, one knows very clearly that,

1. CAA was brought into existence to save non-Muslims from horrendous religious persecution that they have been undergoing in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. They are persecuted for their faiths and women folk kidnapped, raped, and forcibly converted to Islam. The non-Muslim population in these countries (primarily Hindus) has reduced drastically over the years.
2. CAA is about giving citizenship to persecuted religious minority in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. It does not bar Muslims from these neighboring countries to become citizens of India—there is a separate process for that, like the one used by Britain-born singer of Pakistani origin Adnan Sami.
3. CAA is not about denying citizenship to any Indian Muslim or any Indian of any religion.
4. CAA and NRC (National Register of Citizens) are not connected. NRC is about maintaining records of Indian citizens whereas CAA is about granting citizenship to foreigners. Besides, no decision has been taken on the implementation of NRC.
5. NRC is not about Indian Muslims—it is about all citizens of India irrespective of jati, creed, religion, gender, etc.
6. The Citizenship Act of 1955 which deals with the issue of citizenship of India, has the provision of granting citizenship to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsis on grounds of religious persecution.
7. Both the Congress and Left parties from time to time have been demanding a CAA-like legislation.
8. If there is any illegality about CAA, the Supreme Court of India will make a judgment as the present Kerala government has already filed a petition against it.  

Given the above facts, people like Harsh Mander have been instigating the people, primarily the Indian Muslims, by inciting and fomenting the fear that they would lose their Indian citizenship and would land in detention camps. They have been erroneously telling the Indian Muslims that the current government is out to get them, and that the way to settle the CAA/NRC issue is by taking to the road. And to the road the people did take where they rioted on December 15 and between 23^rd and 25^th February in Delhi: whereas the violence on December 15 looks spontaneous and unplanned, the one in February seems meticulously planned. Harsh Mander and his cohort, which include people like Sharjeel Imam, have succeeded in fanning the irrational fears of a section of the Indian Muslim population, brainwashed a section of the students that CAA is against humanity, equality, and secularism (clearly whitewashing the gross human right violations that are happening to non-Muslim population in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan) by inverting the truth, and instigated the crowd in not believing in democratic and judicial means of settling the issue and resorting to violent means, causing massive suffering to a lot of people in Northeast Delhi. I do not need to spell out who the real fascists are: the paradox is that it is these fascists who keep calling every other person who opposes them as fascists. It is of capital importance that these people are thoroughly exposed, because in the garb of protecting the Constitution, they are the biggest enemies of the Constitution. In the name of protecting and advancing humanity, they are the enemy numero uno of humanity. Under the pretext of promoting the highest values that the majority of the contemporary world holds, they get into the hearts of the students and turn them into anarchists and rebels by twisting and turning the truth on its head. They mislead generation after generation, and by the time the young discover that they have been taken for a ride, the energy and purpose of youth is finished and gone. The identification of the real fascists is important because it is they who are holding India to ransom. India bleeds, and they ensure that the world does not even recognize the real reason for its bleeding.

Featured Image: Deccan Herald

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Kundan Singh

A former Core Faculty at Sofia University, Palo Alto, California, Kundan Singh, PhD is currently a core doctoral faculty at the Hindu University of America where he is engaged in developing a completely new field in academia, Postcolonial Hindu Studies: https://www.hua.edu/academics/areas-of-study/post-colonial-hindu-studies/

He is also the Vice President of the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco and Senior Fellow at Hindupedia, Cupertino, California where he is diligently involved with changing the representation of Hinduism and India in grade-school textbooks in California and across the US. Author of the Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda and numerous book chapters in edited books, and joint author of Making Children Hinduphobic: A Critical Review of McGraw Hill’s World History Textbooks with Krishna Maheshwari, he has lectured extensively in San Francisco Bay Area and has many academic presentations at international and national conferences to his name.