If you have grown up in the 70s, 80s, or even 90s, you will realize that career options for our youth have changed enormously. When we came out of college, applying for jobs at one of the “industries” – an Indian English term for manufacturing companies was the only option for thousands of graduates, if you ignore Government or government-owned Bank jobs. A few went into traditional professions like teaching, law, etc. But that was about it.
- Even careers we associate with enormous wealth and fast-track richness – cricket and Bollywood to name but two – were not that well paid. For every person that made good you had thousands that died in penury, often not leaving enough even to give them even a decent funeral.
- But things changed. Initially, the pace of change was gradual but it soon picked up momentum.
- Who’d have thought of rewarding careers like gym instructor, wedding planner, influencer, and the like, not to speak of “activist” and “public intellectual”.
Indian Leftism – a bit of history
Let us understand a bit of history.
Leftists of the pre-independence era and even in the 1950s/60s never looked at their political ideology as a career. In fact, they sacrificed quite a lot of comforts to serve the “cause”. Leftist groups like IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) to name but one, had many stalwarts who genuinely felt their ideology was serving the poor.
One can speculate that if they had known the truth of Mao or Stalin’s mass murders and savagery, had lived through Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Kim Jong Il and other murderous communist regimes, economic and environmental devastation of Eastern Europe, even as the western part flourished, they would have surely changed their minds.
They were patriots not serfs of a despot in Beijing or Moscow.
You may be amazed to know that many Muslim poets, writers, and Bollywood celebrities were proud lifelong communists. They were truly secular, mostly atheists not Islamists or anti-Hindu bigots in leftist camouflage. They were trying to reform society as a whole, in a leftist way. They were not “hijab is freedom, mangalsutra is patriarchy” type of leftists.
Poet Kaifi Azmi, for instance, was a hardcore Marxist. He even lived in a commune for a while, giving away all his earnings to the party in exchange for survival allowance.
To understand leftists and their conduct, one has to understand China and the Soviet Union (SU). Just as there is no point studying Coca-Cola or McDonald's in India without knowing anything about their holding company in the USA.
Back then SU was a superpower, competing on equal footing with the United States, even as its economy was rotting from the inside. Of course, that didn’t matter because they had “intellectuals” in the West to declare that SU was prospering and would overtake the US. Paul Samuelson, a well-known economist, whose textbook was a “classic” and prescribed reading material for every student studying Economics in the USA and elsewhere for decades, was one of them.
And then there was China, communist in ideology but geopolitical rivals of SU. They even had a violent ideological rivalry with SU over what is pure communism, somewhat like Taliban and ISIS beheading each other over who is purer. Needless to say, the rivalry at the holding company level affected its subsidiaries in India and they split.
SU being the superpower was able to bankroll global communism a lot better than China ever could or did. China was very poor and could not afford much other than offering free medical treatment to its serfs in India until it threw the red book away in the 90s thanks to Deng.
Juicy tales of Indian politicians and babus paid off by SU abound on the net. You can Google. KGB insiders have written books about this. Of course, that will be promptly dismissed as hearsay, speculation, or motivated lies unless there’s a word in there about Modi, Savarkar or RW then it is gospel.
But you have to understand one big difference. Even those leftist poets, writers, and intellectuals that were supposedly begging the SU embassy for Vodka bottles trips to Moscow, and other trinkets, were mostly asking for very petty stuff. There was hardly any big money involved unless you are talking about politicians.
For the most part, theirs was a labor of love, not a cynical career move.
Leftism – now a smart career move
But SU is gone. China is a cowboy capitalist. It has Reagan and Thatcher dancing in their graves. The Sahir Ludhianvis and Kaifi Azmi will be shocked beyond belief. Change did not happen overnight. It happened on many fronts too.
Plus Nehru’s misguided but starry-eyed and innocent leftism gave way to Indira Gandhi’s cynical fascism, my way or highway mindset, and the naked power lust and corruption of her progeny. Simultaneously the left started waning as a political force except for brief flashes in the pan and strongholds.
Another big change was that the middle class, consumerism, and materialism were growing fast. Keeping up with the Jones’ was getting harder by the day. Gone are the days when you could brag about getting a free vodka bottle or a trip to visit the GHQ in Moscow. That was OK when everybody was poor and living in slums. It has to be Geneva trips, frequent flyer miles, Lutyens bungalows, and your own little NGO with good cash flow (that Modi now wants you to keep books, face audit – what a fascist!).
How to survive and prosper in this new world?
Enter – dynasty!
This is where the left’s alliance of convenience with dynasties in general and the Indira dynasty in particular, whether formal or undercover, really turned out to be useful.
The gist of this unwritten understanding is that in exchange for acting as enablers for draconian laws, naked fascism, corruption, nepotism, lavish lifestyles, and power lust of these dynasties, the left was allowed to infiltrate and takeover academics and media, on top of enjoying well-paid gigs in taxpayer-funded institutions and think tanks.
For the comrades in Politburo, its battalion of intellectuals and academic serfs moonlighting at the Palazzo didn’t matter much. In fact, it saved them the bother of having to keep them employed and happy. As long as they knew where their primary loyalty lies.
This the leftists planted in civil society knew. In fact, some of them, including one well-known Kannada writer, openly declared their support for the dynasty is only because Communists cannot directly come to power and only until then.
So a beautiful arrangement was put in place. What was lost in the ballot box or the failure of revolutionary’s gun or SU’s fall was more than adequately compensated in academia, media, and civic space and more importantly in the marketplace controlled by these groups. And the market itself grew, thanks to global woke-ism.
A whole industry sprang up around singing Nehru’s praise, Indira’s genius, and Rajiv’s foresight. Today it is kept busy cleaning up after Rahul’s verbal diarrhea, launching him or his sister whenever they need a new launch. And that can be quite often. As and when it suited their convenience this valuable service was extended to Lallu Prasad, Mulayam, and other dynasts. The latest beneficiary is the Thackeray clan.
So leftism is no longer about living in a commune, sipping hot tea, and waiting for the revolution. It is about living in Lutyens bungalows or costly condos, sipping Chianti or Scotch and checking out the next flight to Geneva or Paris, and lamenting the high price of business class tickets.
No wonder it attracted a lot of talent, often from amongst the upper caste elite that was looking for new opportunities to continue in their familiar lifestyles.
But this supplementary source of income, while considerable, was firstly becoming inadequate, especially when converted into dollars, secondly seriously threatened when BJP started winning state elections, then AB Vajpayee became PM and subsequently Modi’s spectacular victory in 2014.
There were other sources of income too. Young upper caste/class boys and girls signed up for jobs at Western NGOs like Greenpeace or Amnesty, morphing pictures on Photoshop and flying to London (not Cuba or Pyongyang) to argue the case of poor tribal (the real tribal will be left back home, of course, 🙂 ) and protesting that Modi is a fascist if he tries to stop them. To them it was just like a job at IBM or Coke, only comes with woke pride and media celebrity status.
But this leftist embrace of corruption, nepotism, and admittedly anti-left agendas required a nice intellectual façade.
Enter, anti-Hindu bigotry
Anti-Hindu(TVA) as a saleable commodity
Left was always anti-religion. In fact, the intellectuals of the 50s that we cited earlier, were openly anti-religion. But they were anti religions. That can be respected. But then, opposing Islam and Christianity, two of the world’s biggest organized religions, eventually became dangerous.
One for their necks and the other for their cash flow and royal lifestyles.
In fact, the “all-weather” relationship between Islamist Pakistan and communist Beijing has also cast a long shadow on how leftists in India react to Islamist violence and terror. It made them partners has also opened up newer sources of revenue.
By adopting anti-Hindu hate as their main plank, cleverly packaging it as anti-Hindutva, they could kill several birds with one stone. First continue in their old tradition of being anti-religion, as the only religion worth following is their own ideology. And the only God is the despot in Beijing.
The second and the most important reason was that it opened up yet another source of cash flow! You see, simultaneously, the world was changing. Openly racist policies such as white only Australia etc. were giving way to more nuanced bigotry, liberalism, and “political correctness” bordering on ridiculous and farcical without any real progress for the affected. No longer could evangelist groups attack Hindus as heathens, pagans living in darkness. You get roasted on SM. More sophisticated and smart ways to get the same things done need to be found.
As colonials have shown time and again, the best tactic is to hire local serfs to get dirty jobs done! By outsourcing attacks on Hinduism to the leftist cabal, whether or not dressed up as anti-Hindutva, you get the job done and you are still politically correct! Viola!
If you study what little information is available about lucrative donations to leftist NGOs and other frauds to spend on Chianti bottles, you will see quite a few evangelist groups from the West in the list.
Obviously, if you start a real NGO and do really good work, such as planting trees or educating poor children, you will get nothing. At the very least you have to drop some anti-Hindu sound bytes. Or maybe hold beef-eating festivals.
It is not just through NGOs, numerous other dollar earning opportunities were now made available, if you fit the bill. Academic stints, Scholarships, Op-Ed journalism for $2 a word or more, phony awards & rewards, well-paid positions in global leftist controlled shindigs such as Amnesty, the list was long and kept growing.
Net net, “Activism” pays, provided you choose the activity carefully. You have to be a leftist activist. So anti-Hinduism is now a full-fledged career. Comedians, academics, Bollywood starlets, lawyers, journalists, and everyone else can sign up to reap the rewards!
Some tips
Some tips to aspiring youth chasing the anti-Hindu dollar:
- Be clever and careful. Always conceal it as anti-hate or anti-this or anti-that, but never openly anti-Hindu.
- But at times, when the ecosystem wants more positive proof of your loyalty and work done, before it can open the purse wider, openly declare that Hinduism and Hindutva are the same and attack both. Like some intellectual did in the “dismantling” conference recently.
- Get your feet wet slowly. Start attacking Hindu festivals or janeu, mangalsutra, Karva Chauth, etc. That way you have plausible deniability. Look ma! I am only criticizing some practices.
- If someone says why not pick on some other religion, then say you are a proud Hindu questioning certain aspects of your own faith. Why should I interfere in someone else’s?
- At other times, pretend to be atheist or agnostic.
- Keep a big “ashamed to be Hindu” placard ready, bring it out at moment's notice. It can pay for itself many times over.
- Remember, nothing ever done by anyone is a stain on their religion, unless he is Hindu. Then refer to (6) above.
- Your “comedy” should only target Hindu Gods, even if you happen to be non-Hindu. In that case point (4) will not apply to you. You are free to attack Hindus and call it “freedom of expression”.
See you at some Business class lounge of some nice European airport! Or sitting in a Paris cafe, sipping wine, attacking Modi for putting his picture on a government document, as if he’s the first and only Indian politician to do so.
Wish you good luck!
Originally published by the author on substack, republished with permission. You could read the original article here.
