A Short Biography of A Desh-Drohi, aka, An Urban-Naxalite or The Lutyens’s-Delhi-Crowd

Panegyrics, encomiums, and hymns of government’s stellar achievements ceaselessly flash across media: print, social, radio, or television. Journalists, academicians, social and political commentators, higher judiciary, legislators, executives, university vice-chancellors, ministers, chief ministers, all race breathlessly to outdo the other.

In this deluge of eulogia, she wants to know that which government is not doing right. 

After the takeover of current-affairs-channels by corporate houses, no channel broadcasts news. She eschews TV. She reads Indian Express and Hindu. She pours over the long reportage that go by the name of investigative journalism in Caravan. 

Patriots (aka Bhakts, Ultra-nationalists, Desh-premees) do not read any daily. Social media is their perennial fount of knowledge. It pronounces open-and-shut judgmental verdicts. They have unswerving faith in this received wisdom. This saves them futile exercise of their reason. 

Knowledge corrupts. Curiosity kills a cat. Pointless nosiness has incarcerated many and killed, not a few Urban-naxalite-cats. Inquisitiveness and the fake-knowledge that it proffers, can only turn a person renegade.

She is sceptic of dogmas and holy truths in any sphere of life. Devotees revere given knowledge. They highly regard unquestioning acquiescence in revealed truths. Intellect and patriotism share an inverse relation. Hence, a bhakt’s contempt for intellectuals and for all pursuits of mind.

Reading, a habit she cannot live without, is a subversive trait. As if this were not a sufficient crime, among many writers she appreciates are Ramachandra Guha, Romila Thapar, Aakar Patel, Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen, Christophe Jefferlot, Jean Dreze, Bertrand Russel,  Eric Hobsbawm and many other. This brands her a leftist. This is a serious invective reserved for incorrigible derelicts. 

Bhakts’ God of knowledge, the social-media, has decreed that any ideology opposed to the ruler’s is left and is condemnable. Communist, liberal, left, and socialist, are execrable ideologies. Are they same? Yes, they are left. What is left? That which is not right. And right? That which agrees with Party’s.  

A prominent feature of this flag-waving zealous-patriotism is patriarchy. Wellspring of this hyper nationalistic movement, the grand hundred-year-old organisation, has not a single woman in its large repository of idealogues. Leader’s worth in the cult is measured by the girth of their chests. Hence, their worst ire is reserved for woman writers, activists, and politicians who shamelessly wear their left-leaning hearts on the sleeves of their western attires, speak and write in English, and pretend to be intellectuals.

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She likes poetry. Other than poets like Mahadevi Verma, Harivanshrai Bachhan, Jayashankar Prasad, she is also fond of Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Kaifi Azami, and Ahmad Faraz, among many other. In this fondness is hidden her seditious nature.

Urdu is the language of Ghuspaithiyes (infiltrators) – Bhakts aver. It is merely incidental that devotees have not read  any poetry, Hindi or Urdu; But, for some kitsch couplets, falsely ascribed to Ghalib or Faiz. Poetry does not sell on media platforms they patronize.

Far from being a foreign tongue, linguists inform her, Urdu is a creole language born in our country. It borrowed vocabulary from old Hindi – Hindawi, Persian, and Arabic. Its syntax and grammar are largely same as of Hindi, a Sanskritic language. It was not the language of the uncultivated gangster-ghuspaithiye kings – they spoke Turkik tongues while adopting Persian as their court-language. Urdu, as it spread, became the lingua franca of the masses. Britishers gave it the sanctity of a court-language in late nineteenth century. 

This useless research irks bhakt-ideologues endlessly. An army of them spends precious time in devising strategies to spread post-truth in the wake of these corrupting historical truths.

History is the fad of hyper-nationalists today. Marauder-ghuspaithiyes ransacked our country more than a millennia ago. Their oppressive regimes, lasting for many centuries, were an era of darkness. All that was glorious in our past, advent of atomic science, flying machines, wireless communication,  and plastic surgery (there is no mention of Kalidasa's Meghdoot, caves of Ajanta and Ellora, or the temples of Challukya and Pallava period) happened before these uncouth plunderers overran our country. In last decade we have regained much of this lost glory, but much remains to be reclaimed.

She is forever suspicious of these neat cause-and-effect schools of history. She probes the history written by diverse historians and has come across books that offer a nuanced analysis of our past. It horrifies her to learn that the history being peddled by bhakt-idealogues, and now being taught in schools and universities, is the identical twin of myths woven and promoted by the British empire in mid-nineteenth century. This was the time British had suffered abject humiliation in Afghanistan. She also learns that this synergy in the interpretation of past between the bhakt-scholars and the British historians has been unveiled by some Indian academicians – the anglophile, Harvard-educated, communist historians.

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Variety of experiences in life is the essence of her living: In music, books, travel, people, politics, or ideologies, and ways of looking at the world. Patriots want a nation that has one language, one culture, one religion, and one ideology. Preoccupation with variety reflects dissatisfaction with your station in life. Besides, it is harbinger of a rebellious nature and sullies the purity of our culture. 

She feels travel liberates her mind. It untethers her from moorings, although only temporarily, and lets her soul explore newer skies. 

Travel abroad is another source of impurities in the mind of Urban-naxalites. The tallest patriarch of the nationalist-patriot family spends a major chunk of his time abroad – proportion of his photo-shoots create this illusion. But this is in the call of his duty. It is not for recreation. Why travel abroad for tourism? Patriots ask indignantly. Our country offers a wide choice. Fondness for international tourism is a sign of feeble patriotism. It is futile to note that foot-soldiers of the new bhakti-cult rarely venture out of the perimeters of their districts.

The overseas destinations she has visited is a miniscule fraction of native places she has been traveling to all her life. It is true that she is despondent for some time when she returns from a visit abroad. The potholed roads bordered by stinking mounds of festering refuse, the homicidal traffic, derelict parks in residential colonies, touts infesting every government department, drive her to despair. This proves bhakts’ assertions. Foreign travel generates disaffection for your own country.

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Bhakts place high value on purity: purity of mind, purity of heritage, purity of language, purity of religion, purity of political affiliations. Western education, imparted in missionary schools difiles this purity. A child taught in English will have a servile mentality, will be an anglophile – another word of abuse in their dictionary. Stalwart patriots have their wards in expensive English-medium schools of the country. Many send their children to the ivy-league universities abroad - Their admissions propped by the assurance of a perennial source of funds from a rich, influential alimni.

She has studied in state-run schools where even English was taught in Hindi. But she dreads the future. The most powerful acolyte of the supreme leader has declared that 'time is not far away when people speaking in English in this country will feel ashamed'. Her affection for the English language betrays her creed.

Impurity of food is another aspect of cultural diversity Bhakts find unacceptable. They are emphatic in their belief that a particular species of Bovidae family that they worship is forbidden as food by their scriptures. Apparently, this injunction is only for the Indian member of the Bovidae family – as enunciated by a past Prime Minister, a lifelong idealogue of Bhakts’ philosophy. He pronounced this law when caught eating the meat of this holy bovine in a foreign country.

A meddlesome nature provokes her to find out how this dastardly practice found a foothold in our purest of the pure country. ‘Atho annam vai gauh’ (the cow is verily food) is from Taittriya Brahmana, a commentary of Yajurveda, composed probably in 300-400 B.C. She came across this and other shocking profanities in a meticulously researched work by an Indian historian, a past president of the Indian History Congress. What else illustrates the depraving effect of the western ways of reading past?

Nothing raises a patriot’s heckles more than the suggestion that we, the people of the country, have a mixed inheritance. Gospel, that we are the purest and the first Aryans, is incontrovertible. The seed of the Aryans, that is us, was dropped from heaven, on this pious land, long, long, long ago. How long ago? Such queries are frivolous. In a faith with an unending cyclical time, where each Yuga lasts hundreds of thousands of years, dates and chronology of past are meaningless.

She is beholden to the recent researches in Ancient DNA, linguistics, and archaeology, that have convincingly mapped migration of modern humans out of Africa beginning about 80,000 years ago. This sacrilegious belief, that denies us purity of our genes, is the greatest proof of her anarchic tendency.

...

Knowledge-bug also makes her suspicious of the truthfulness of adulatory bombast. Third-largest-economy status does not appear to be reflected in the sagging infrastructure of our cities, towns, and villages. Rich countries do not have to feed 800 million of their people. Prosperous countries do not rank 130 out of 193, in human development indices. They do not harbour highest number of tuberculosis infections in the world. There is something fishy about GDP. Growing wealth of country is not being shared equally. Wouldn’t per capita income be a better criterion? By this reckoning, her country ranks 142 among 193.

Data-obsession is another distinguishing feature of the Khan-market-types. They want data-confirmation of every spectacular achievement of the nation in last decade: decreasing number of poor (Is people’s per capita expenditure been increasing steadily in last decade? Are there much less stunted, underweight children in country today?), increased access to health-facilities (Is hospital-delivery widely prevalent in villages now? Is people's expenditure on health as proportion of their earnings much less today?), increasing status of the country in the world (Does Indian passport rank among top twenty in the world now?). 

Truth cannot be reached through the dumb figures. Government, committed to the growth of country, has been trying hard to twist, manoeuvre, alter, suppress, and delete these errant data that tell a spurious, misleading story. 

…

Such-such are the depredations of the Lutyens’s-Delhi crowd. 

A fifteen-hundred-word essay cannot claim to be a comprehensive portrait of this complex multifarious personality. The fact that the largest department of the government is perpetually busy, 24 X 7, in highlighting these evil activities, bears witness to the enormous  task that confronts the guardians of the purity of our country and its people.

Two faiths - hers and bhakts’ - are antipodean. She wants a life of liberty not besmirched  by fictitious fears. She wants freedom to love whomever and however she wants, freedom to read whatever her soul revels in, to follow or unfollow the Gods her heart craves for. She wants a life free of untruths where she can look at her fortunes and misfortunes square in the face and enjoy the blessing to be alive.

This appears a tall order in our country today.