Ramachandra Guha: The fake patriotism of paranoid Chaddis

by Guest Sun Apr 30, 2017 7:38 am

I spent the first half of April 2017 in the United States, speaking at universities on the East and West Coasts. At each place, I had been preceded by identical mails from the working president (external) of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, warning my hosts about the kind of Indian they had invited. "Based on my experience in reading him, and also viewing some of his talks," wrote this VHP man about me, "he has nearly no empathy for the country that has educated him, as well as provides him with the necessary means of living."

"Given the background of Mr Guha," the gentleman from the VHP continued, "I would like to suggest that he is an incompetent interlocutor as far as India is concerned." As evidence of my utter lack of competence, the VHP man adduced comments on a particular tweet of mine, "nearly all of them negative" (that these came from his own end of the political spectrum, and were very likely orchestrated as such attacks are now known to be, was left unstated).

I knew this particular gentleman well, for he had written many anxious mails to me in the past. Despairing of converting me from my anti- Hindutva views, he now sought to warn Western universities against being poisoned by my noxious misrepresentations of the Motherland. He wanted to offer these universities an alternative and authentic point of view, so as to keep them "informed about what is really happening in India".

This VHP leader was naïve, in thinking that a great modern university would endorse his view that abusive tweets were enough to negate the books and research papers that a scholar had published. However, while he was merely chastising me with words, his fellow VHP activists were lynching an innocent man in Alwar, the latest in a series of attacks by the armies of gau gundas that have gathered strength in the past weeks and months. Reading the news from home, I was horrified by the attack, and even more so by the way it had been legitimized by the ruling parivar in Rajasthan and beyond. The home minister of Rajasthan suggested that those who lynched Pehlu Khan had the right ideas but perhaps not the right methods. The chief minister of Rajasthan, having stayed silent on such lynchings in her neighbourhood and under her watch for a long time, tweeted sympathies for the victim of a terror attack in distant Stockholm. A so-called sadhvi of the Rashtriya Mahila Gau Rakshak Dal called ostentatiously on one of the murderers and compared him to a modern-day Bhagat Singh.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170429/jsp/opinion/story_148801.jsp#.WQXZ6VKZM_V