STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Rise of India?
By Staff News & Analysis - November 06, 2010

US "Scholars" are like Snakes. Be careful before you let them in … Recently this news caught my eyes. Panel, Sibal differ on foreign varsity … The government-appointed Yash Pal committee on higher education has cautioned against allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India, challenging human resource development minister Kapil Sibal's plans to expedite their entry. In a recommendation that could embarrass the government, the panel has argued that liberalising visa restrictions to allow foreign scholars access to Indian universities may prove more beneficial than letting in foreign universities. The panel has also recommended in its report submitted to Sibal yesterday that any foreign university that sets up a campus here should give an "Indian degree" and follow all rules and regulations binding on Indian universities. – Indian Realist

Dominant Social Theme: India has its Dalits – just as America had its Afro-American slaves. And this should not be tolerated. The West will do what it can to help.

Free-Market Analysis: We must confess if there is one country that remains a mystery to us, it is India. India's former city-states may have hosted some of the world's most ancient advanced cultures and civilizations. But Indian pre-history and archeological evidence has received short shrift in the West. In our view, this is because the country poses many challenges to the current Western-centric paradigm of civilization promoted by the Anglo-American power elite.

In this article, we shall explore this perspective at greater length and also examine how the West may be attacking India once again via a kind of divide-and-conquer stratagem. Obviously such an attack, if it is taking place, has significant ramifications from investment, employment and cultural standpoints. It may even have certain sociopolitical and economic reverberations.

A tip of the hat to author and feedbacker Lila Rajiva – as she sent us a link that began our modest investigations for this article. The growing "Afro-Dalit" movement (see below) in India is apparently part of the challenges that a modernizing India must face. It is probably an outgrowth of a larger schizophrenia of the West as regards India. This is an age-old problem in our view because unlike China, India was not consolidated into a country prior to its British colonial takeover. The approach of Western elites has wobbled between co-opting an India of over a billion people and undermining it.

Why the Western elite would want to practice "divide and conquer" on India once more is not particularly clear. It has been suggested by some Indian scholars that the West fears that India will eventually turn into another fiercesome competitor on the world stage as China has apparently done. What is considerably clearer, apparently, is that India is already under attack by Western forces (once more) via India's soft underbelly which is its caste system.

It is, in fact, the problem of the lower (lowest) castes that has apparently proven intractable and thus provides a continued, tempting target. It is explained in an Indian blog (see excerpt at the beginning of this article), which draws on speech given by Rajiv Malhotra, entitled, "Where is India in the Encounter of Civilizations?" as follows:

Now what caught me started on this course of understanding America's intervention with India's break up was a very interesting meeting I had with a scholar in Princeton University. We were just sitting and having lunch and he has just come back from India and I said "What did you do in India?" And he said "Oh I went there as part of the Afro-Dalit project" So I asked him what is this Afro Dalit project. So he said, "Oh we go to India we do youth empowerment and training programmes" I said "It is very interesting. Can you tell me what it is? Who are the Dalits?" And he said "Well. … They are Africans. They are the blacks of India and the non- Dalits are the whites of India. And this is the black-white history of India which is mirroring the black white history of America. And the Afro-Dalit project is to educate our Dalit brothers." This was amazing to me. And my whole thesis started when I started searching on Afro-Dalit project.

And there is a whole library of what they are up to and who funds them. And they are very much active in Tamil Nadu building up a whole network of youth empowerment and youth training to give them a contrary sense of history that they are historically a kind of oppressed people and non-religious and so on. The Church has a vested interest in it because if you can dislocate their identity from the rest of India then you can re-programme them and give them a new religion and so on. This is called Dalitstan project.

So I was invited to this scholar's office. And I saw this map. This is the map of the Dalitstan that was hanging there. On the northern part is Mughalstan which is from Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the way to Bangladesh. This turns out to be what Mullah Omar says when he states that he wants to put the flag of Taliban on the red fort of Delhi and recreate the Mughal Empire. And the southern part of India is Dalitstan and Dravidstan. So these guys are working on it.

So I was very much amazed that nobody is talking about it. Nobody seems to have noticed. Yet these guys have an open project. If you just Google Afro-Dalit you will come across a lot of hits and you yourself can see that. Then I started getting deeper into it and found that there is merit in the thesis that says that the local minorities are being appropriated by global nexuses. Afro-Dalit Project is just one example.

One can make the case of course that the Dalit initiative is merely political correctness run amuck. Having deeply polarized America over the black/white divide, the US educational establishment (or part of it anyway) has turned its focus serendipitously on India. But from our point of view, such an effort is perhaps NOT a coincidence but another Western elite promotion – an emergent dominant social theme – designed, probably, to keep India in check as it emerges as a world power.

What also emerges from this concern – voiced by the Indian writers we have quoted in this article – is the acuteness of understanding regarding Western challenges. We wrote recently of one Indian military observer who had speculated that India could erect a missile shield within the span of a few years that would render it impermeable to Western attacks. The idea of India not only as a nuclear power in the world but as a dominant one is somewhat startling from a Western point of view. But it is certainly not beyond the scope of possibility.

The concerns being voiced about Western aggressiveness in sociopolitical venues – potentially generating Dalit unrest throughout India – are both startling and perceptive as well. The Internet, we wish to note, is a major player in propagating these views, spreading the alarm, in other words. We are not sure what will come of this impending controversy, but chances are that a forewarned nationalist Indian intelligentsia will be much better able to resist Western incursions than one that is not.

This is not of course to downplay the many problems and prejudices in India. But these are INDIAN problems to be solved by Indians, presumably. The idea that the US (with or without the blessings of the Anglo-American elite) is exporting a quasi-Black Power movement to India reeks of the worst kind of aggressive patronization. Having virtually Balkanized the US (racially anyway), those proponents of racialism have turned their sights, apparently, on the larger world. India is to receive this dubious export, one of America's most virulent.

Of course, we do have some trouble believing it is mostly or entirely "coincidence." From our point of view the entire Western academic apparatus is hopelessly comprised. Almost any field of endeavor one cares to name has been infected by political correctness promoted by the elite in its efforts to control Western populations while attempting to build up the rudiments of world government.

Much of what takes place in academia today (especially in the US) involves bigness – the kind of bigness only money can buy. Thee are very few universities that do not receive substantial government grants. There is a huge network of state colleges and universities that are supported to a great degree by local, state and federal taxes. Even "private" colleges and universities receive substantial government bequests.

And what has been the result? American education is subject to the same kind of inflation as the dollar. There is more of it, but it is worth a great deal less. Examples abound. There are degrees given in "Homeland Securities" studies now as well as in the larger field of "criminal justice." From our point of view (not being fans of the growing US police state) this is somewhat analogous to the former USSR offering degrees in "KGB studies."

It is much worse of course. Political correctness runs throughout American education these days. Classical liberalism has fallen by the wayside. Government and state solutions are exalted. Economics still focuses on Keynesianism. Literature focuses on the misery of the working class and the exploitation and meaninglessness of capitalism (when it is not celebrating nihilistic hedonism.) Science is held in thrall to 20th century physics. Astronomy ignores intriguing theories having to do with an "electrical universe." Psychology focuses on Skinnerian interpretations of humans as metaphorical computers with standardized inputs and outputs. Highbrow music, art and theatre have all been divorced to varying degrees from the human experience itself in order to celebrate the sterile embrace of the state – which seeks abstract compositions devoid of philosophical or political commentary.

We could go on at length. The corruption of education in the West involves, of course, the tragedy of mercantilism. Having successfully infiltrated education with government funds, the elite now uses taxpayers' own money to inflict a kind of mind control. Most every problem that eager students tackle have to do with problems of private enterprise. Most every solution is statist. This is certainly true of feminist and afro-centric studies. Over and over, problems are represented as arising from culture itself – and only government has the answers.

Now it well may be that India suffers from similar problems. But certainly the idea that India is now under sustained attack by US institutions of higher learning does not bode well. The virus of grievance scholarship has increasingly hollowed out Western academia. With the exception, perhaps, of a few fields such as engineering, what young people imbibe has more to do with propaganda than scholarship.

One graduates at any level, it seems, with a predilection to suggest state solutions, and to find fault with private enterprise. A society such as India, wracked with problems having to do with prejudice and income disparity, is certainly a target for the kind of education currently in vogue in the West. Its virtues, having to do especially with an ancient, non-consumerist philosophy, are ignored. The worst predilections of the modern state are increasingly in evidence, and encouraged by the West and by Indian facilitators. The Indian commentators cited above are correct in their diagnosis, we believe.

India should be celebrated by the West as an ancient and glorious civilization; not merely attacked for its inequities. It is perfectly possible that India has hosted advanced civilizations as long as 15,000 years ago. There are surprisingly detailed descriptions of "flying machines" with mercury engines in various sacred texts. Apparently a long-lost city of massive proportions has been located off the coast of India, with artifacts dating back as far as 8,000 or 9,000 years or more. Here is a description of ancient Indian technology from HinduWisdom.com:

In the Vedic literature of India, there are many descriptions of flying machines that are generally called Vimanas. India's national epic, The Mahabharata, is a poem of vast length and complexity. According to Dr. Vyacheslav Zaitsev: "the holy Indian Sages, the Ramayana for one, tell of "Two storied celestial chariots with many windows" "They roar like off into the sky until they appear like comets." The Mahabharata and various Sanskrit books describe at length these chariots, "powered by winged lighting…it was a ship that soared into the air, flying to both the solar and stellar regions."

There is a just a mass of fascinating information about flying machines, even fantastic science fiction weapons, that can be found in translations of the Vedas (scriptures), Indian epics, and other ancient Sanskrit text.

There are no physical remains of ancient Indian aircraft technology but references to ancient flying machines are commonplace in the ancient Indian texts. Several popular ancient epics describe their use in warfare. Depending on one's point of view, either it contains some of the earliest known science fiction, or it records conflict between beings with weapons as powerful and advanced as anything used today. Above all we need to remember: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Western "civilization" has emerged in about 5,000 years time. Why then should it have taken humans 45,000 years to discover farming (and thus ascend to the Neolithic)? Isn't it possible that civilizations have emerged repetitively? Perhaps humans have created and recreated "modern" civilization not once but twice or even three times. Perhaps much evidence of these civilizations has been wiped away by cataclysmic disasters, manmade or otherwise. Perhaps some of this evidence lies drowned in the shallow depths of seas around the world – for once upon a time icecaps melted and seas rose, as related in flood mythology throughout the world.

After Thoughts

In our humble view, this sort of scientific inquiry should be welcome within the groves of Western academe. Instead, unfortunately, the primary focus of Western universities is organized around private problems and state solutions and intended to encourage the primacy of the Western state as the paragon of civic virtue and the fount of solutions to every kind of problem imaginable. In this sense Western education, as it evolved in the 20th century, is an elite promotion, one intended to manipulate an emergent India. And Indians are right to be suspicious of it.

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