Ironically, It is India’s own scholars, funding, and resources that Harvard is using to train a new sepoy army of scholars that are ‘breaking India’ from the top down. – Rajiv Malhotra
In the days of the British Raj, the discourse about India was controlled from Oxford University. Now it’s the Americans that have taken over this recolonisation project, with Harvard University playing a lead role. The speed and scale of these efforts are also typically American. In effect, the East India Company has returned in a new incarnation with Harvard University stepping into the shoes of Oxford.
Many of Harvard’s ideas have entered Indian government organisations and businesses. And there are Indian billionaires funding this work. The mechanisms within American Ivy Leagues are bringing Indian scholars and Indian students into conferences and seminars and giving them grants and funding to align them with the theories developed at Harvard. These scholars are then sent back to India and used to build a whole new ecosystem. Ironically, it is India’s own scholars, funding, and resources that Harvard is using to train a new sepoy army of scholars that are “breaking India” from the top down.
This ecosystem is informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theory based on Marxism. Most people who know about Critical Race Theory see it as a way to combat American racism. CRT is certainly important in that context. But certain Harvard scholars have mapped it onto India’s society, ancient history and the modern nation state, and this new form is called Critical Caste Theory. Now structural casteism is being dressed up as the foundational problem responsible for all kinds of social, cultural and political challenges facing India.
Furthermore, to dismantle social abuse, the strong position being taken is that Hinduism itself needs to be dismantled.
Marxism believes that all society is intentionally structured by oppressors to oppress victims, and this is the only reason for unequal outcomes that favour the oppressors. The book, Snakes in the Ganga, explains how the Marxist lens of oppressors and oppressed gets applied to produce this new social theory popularly called Wokeism.
CRT uses race as the marker for group identities and organizes them into oppressor/oppressed categories. In India’s case, this gets converted to caste and religious minorities as the markers of oppressor/oppressed identities. The Marxist solution to the oppressor/oppressed problem is the dismantling of all existing structures and institutions. In India’s case, this has led to a global call to dismantle Hinduism and all the structures and institutions based on it.
An important contribution of the book Snakes in the Ganga is its meticulous explanation of how Wokeism is being imported and mapped onto India. The diversity of India is being exploited for creating divisiveness because every kind of difference can be attributed to structural and systematic oppression.
Critical Caste Theory is being used even to attack Indian meritocracy by calling it a mask that hides privilege and structural oppression. Meritocracy is being considered an outcome of Brahmanical patriarchy that produces unequal outcomes for various groups. Harvard scholars are attacking meritocracy used in the IITs and consider it institutional and structural casteism. The other factors that affect outcomes like hard work and individual talent are totally ignored in such theories. Their solution is to dismantle the IITs in their current form.
› Rajiv Malhotra is a researcher, writer, speaker and public intellectual on current affairs as they relate to civilisations, cross-cultural encounters, religion and science. His latest book is ‘Snakes in the Ganga’.
Filed under: india, USA | Tagged: critical race theory, harvard university, marxism, western social sciences, wokeism | Comments Off on Harvard and Wokeism: How an American university is leading the ‘Breaking India’ project – Rajiv Malhotra
