The creation of a 25 per cent Abrahamic vote-bank in India is within shouting distance and hence the shrill Western campaign against Narendra Modi’s attempt to secure India’s place under the sun without becoming a nation beholden to the West. – Dr. Gautam Sen
The Islamophobia Bill passed by the US Congress recently was, in reality, discreetly promoted by the White House and the US State Department and the target for its attention was unambiguously identified as India. China was already quite beyond the pale and Myanmar too small to merit such unusual legislative focus despite the ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas.
Anti-India and anti-Hindu Somali-origin Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, notorious for her dalliance with Pakistan, and a gullible Jewish Congressional Democratic representative were chosen to sponsor it, though the Democratic caucus in Congress does indeed habitually adopt hostile positions towards India.
The reason for the role accorded to them as sponsors of the Islamophobia Bill was to divert attention from the fact that it was the product of discussions between US evangelist organisations and State Department officials who coordinate and oversee their global political operations under the cover of religious freedom. This is the purpose for according prominence to the generally discredited USCIRF, compromised with Islamists and evangelists, because it is the policy vehicle annually deployed against India.
The most important US and Western target for religious conversion and subversion for past decades has been India and it has made prodigious advances during 2004-14. It might also be remembered that the campaign to rescind Narendra Modi’s US visa after the Godhra riots was orchestrated by US evangelist groups and the prolonged funding of groups within India to besmirch his reputation and convict him for complicity in the 2002 violence originated in the US as well. In addition, a senior US politician blackmailed Indian diplomats successfully during the negotiations for the India-US nuclear accord to ease the entry of US evangelists into India.
The US Islamophobia Bill is an instrument designed to put pressure on India by tarnishing its reputation and forcing it to desist from actions that hinder the conversion activities of evangelists. Evidently, a key immediate motive for the introduction of the US Islamophobia Bill is the passing of India’s revised FCRA in 2020 that curbs the nefarious activities of NGOs, which have been engaged in massive religious conversion activities across India in recent years. The revised FCRA forced many covert evangelist NGOs to cease receiving foreign funds and they did not reapply for renewal of permission to receive such foreign largesse because an undertaking had to be given, among others, stipulating that they would not engage in proselytising activities.
There was shock and anger in Western chancelleries, not least, Washington and London, because religious conversion had been proceeding very successfully in the preceding period. It had virtually turned Andhra Pradesh into a Christian enclave and joining with Tamil Nadu and other southern states to espouse separatist sentiments to potentially become a secessionist Christian southern federation. Christian convert and pseudo-Christian Tamil DMK votes, in combination with Muslim votes, have ensconced a new and dangerous separatist political status quo in both states that cannot be easily dislodged, much like Kerala historically.
India’s foreign adversaries in the West, “frenemies” in contemporary parlance, see Islam as their natural ally in India to curb the rise of Indian nationalism, although it is not really Hindu in any meaningful sense and remains mostly secular in its aspiration to achieve economic and political autonomy on the global stage. The creation of a more numerous Christian constituency in India to combine with a disciplined Muslim vote-bank would only require something in the region of 20-25 per cent of India’s population to permanently disbar Indian national self-assertion.
The basis for demonising it as Brahminical Hindu and casteist would provide the ideological justification for dehumanising it, in an echo of the post-nineteenth century Germanic academic literature denouncing Slavs as a sub-human species that paved the way for Hitler’s genocide, in his attempt to extirpate Judaism and murder Slavs en masse. The creation of a 25 per cent Abrahamic vote-bank in India is within shouting distance and hence the shrill Western campaign against Narendra Modi’s attempt to secure India’s place under the sun without becoming a pliable nation, ideologically and psychologically beholden to the West, which means remaining a Hindu country in some opaque sense. It might be recalled that WikiLeaks revealed the involvement of US Mumbai diplomatic officials in inciting Christian groups to oppose the Kudankulam nuclear power plant because the US was upset that it was Russian and not American despite the latter facilitating India’s entry into the nuclear club.
Thus, the US expects that a strong community of converts to Christianity in India, in conjunction with the Muslim vote-bank can be manipulated to serve US and Western goals in India; it is Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, who revealed in an interview that it was the US that had urged his country to spread Wahhabism, not least radicalising Indian Muslims to a much greater degree than Britain had before 1947.
The second purpose of the US Islamophobia Bill is to intensify ongoing US efforts to destabilise India and install a more cooperative government in New Delhi by inciting Islamic terrorism and street violence. Both these two aims are being achieved handily, with the Indian authorities besieged by relentlessly hostile international media coverage and growing violent unrest in Indian cities.
Finally, it ought to be realised that many Indians resident in the US and indeed the UK, evidently with access to power centres in Delhi, have been suborned by their intelligence agencies and should be kept at arms-length because they are covertly reinforcing efforts to subvert India in myriad ways. – Firstpost, 8 July 2022
› Dr. Gautam Sen taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed are personal.
Filed under: india, USA | Tagged: anti-india, hinduphobia, islamophobia, US imperialism, USCIRF |
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