1971 a watershed y= ear

1971 was a watershed year in the history of Post Independen= ce India. It was the year that India decisively defeated = Pakistan in a war that she did not desire, consequent to circumstances not of her making. Rarely has there been a conflict that ended in so short a time and resulting in such a massive captures of huge numbers of prisoners of war. We will discuss the war and the events leading up to it later in the book, but= the aftermath of the war has been noteworthy from several different aspects. Th= ere was the realization, if such indeed was necessary, that to equate India and = Pakistan militarily was an ex= ercise in futility and not borne out by the reality of the disparate sizes and economies of the two countries. Old habits die hard however, and there rema= in significant numbers in the US foreign policy establishment including the St= ate department that continue to indulge in the fantasy that India and Pakistan = are roughly equivalent in their military and economic capabilities. They practi= ce the hyphenation of India and Pakistan= with disastrous consequences for the region and the world. There is also growing realization in India that in spite of the intellectual and informational resources available, the foreign policy elite in the US is incapable of viewing the Indian subcontinent in strategic terms that wou= ld be of mutual benefit to the US and India. The suspicion is growing that the US is mired in a perpetual cycle of tactical moves to keep the dictators in Islamabad happy a= nd content.

The 1971 war also demolished the notion of the two-nation t= heory even as the antediluvians of Pakistan cling precariously to this outmoded and medieval vivisection of a land based solely on religious criteria. The two nation theory has its origins in Isla= mic theology that postulates the world as divided in two halves, Dar-ul-Harb (W= orld of Conflict) and Dar-ul-Islam (World of Islam). The variant proposed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding leader of Pakistan was that the subcont= inent was in actuality the home to 2 nations one Muslim, one Hindu. This simplist= ic view of course ignores the immense diversity of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent that has been home to a bewildering variety of beliefs and Darshanas (world view or Weltanschauung) as well as a plethora of cultural = and ethnic groups over the millennia. Clinging to the fig leaf of the two-nation theory, Pakistan laid claim and continues to do so, to any and all territor= y in the subcontinent, where there dwelt Muslims, even if their percentages in t= he overall population of the subcontinent were negligible. With the creation o= f Bangladesh in 1972, this notion was effect= ively decimated and Pakist= an could no longer claim to be the legitimate home to ‘all’ the Muslims of= the subcontinent. The Bengali speaking population of Bangladesh effectively discar= ded the notion that religion is the sole determinant of nationhood. This was especially galling for Pakistan which had refused to acknowledge that the majority of Muslims in the erstwhile state of Pakistan (prior to 1971) actu= ally lived in Bangladesh or what was then called East Pakistan and would not all= ow a Prime Minister to be named from that region even though they won the majori= ty of the seats in the assembly.

The 1971 war was also a psychological boost to India, which was saddled with a history, a= s recounted by the English, who in turn took great pains to emphasize that India h= ad rarely won her decisive battles. It was also clear that the notion, assiduo= usly cultivated by the British, that India had a preponderance of non-martial ethnic groups who would succumb easily to any threat of invasion, was a facile and false one.

But the newfound confidence exhibited by India i= n the aftermath of the 1971 war had its contrarian consequences as well. There we= re many in Western capitals who were alarmed at the military progress of India and their fears were magnified when = India d= etonated its first nuclear device in Pokhran in May 1974. The disparate groups of pe= ople who were not thrilled with the prospect of a nuclear India, now came togeth= er and decided to chart a course of action that was adversarial to the Indic civilization, the main purpose being to bring down the Indian tricolor a pe= g or two by using means which were primarily non-military. The military option of using Pakistan, to act= as a counterweight to Ind= ia, clearly had not worked after repeatedly being put to use over 3 decades. It= is this course of action or actions and the resulting challenges to India t= hat will be the subject of discussion of this chapter.

Challenges faced by India

What then are the pre-eminent challenges to the Indian repu= blic? Simply put, it is convenient to classify such challenges as external, inter= nal and civilizational

External threats can be grouped under threats to the sovere= ignty and territorial integrity of India, threats to the economic growth and prosperity and business interests of India and threats to the lives of Indian citizens inside and outside India due to state-sponsored terrorism.

Nations intent on bringing down a powerful rival whose philosophy, as originally founded, was compelling and entirely opposite from that nations own, resort to a stratagem to help them destroy themselves from within. This is especially true of a country that it would not or could not= be able to confront militarily from the outside. When the rival country is destroyed from within, the destruction is accomplished by using that countr= y's own resources and population. No blood is spilled in the process and the physical infrastructure is left undamaged. Internal threats can be grouped = as threats to national unity as manifested by divisive events such as riots, a= nd alienation of different sections of society caused by a breakdown of law and order in safeguarding the lives and property of Indian citizens, threats of anti-social elements such as criminal gangs to the overall well being and economy in the country, threats from the secessionist and terrorist element= s in various parts of the country both covert and overt (ably aided and abetted = by purveyors of first group or some form of indigenous movements that are expressions of opposition to the established legal authority by alienated sections of the population), and threats from illegal aliens and refugees f= rom across the border (threat of reduction in per capita income due to human inflows an also potential of anti-national activities of such aliens). Thre= ats due to political instability and weak political structure due to manipulati= on from major powers are pertinent to this topic. The causes of such a threat = are discussed in this and succeeding chapters.

Civilizational Threats

A particular threat to the Indian civilization is caused in= part by the aiding and abetting of internal potentially divisive elements by external agencies such as, Madrassah (Religious schools) funding by the Kin= gdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and possible divisive agendas of Christian missionary organizations from overseas, especially in the North East. There is also the threat to the integrity of India due to the divisive agendas of anarchist media, leftist parties and intelle= ctuals. The issue is not one of freedom of speech or freedom of choice but one of secession from the rest of India as a consequence of such proselytizing. This threat will be analyzed in det= ail in this document and we will examine trends which show how the Civilization= al memory of the Indic traditions and Indus valley are sought to be erased in a long term plan. The final goal is to er= ase the ‘idea of India�= � from the people of India and break up the state. In any country, there are but a few key areas that determine how the citizens of that country mature, live, and develop their beliefs. These are the focal points that mu= st be attacked to destroy the nation. In his book, On War, Clausewitz[1] referred to this concept of identifying and then focusing on a few select points as attacking the center of gravity of a nation state. The center of gravity is that key element, w= hich if controlled or destroyed, would most hurt the opponent and thus is the critical factor to achieving the objective. In this case, when taking contr= ol of or destroying a country from within, the key is to attack and control the mind of the inhabitants—one must shape = the way people view life and the values upon which their life is based. Sha= pe the mind of the people and major powers control their direction. Control th= eir direction and major powers can lead them down a beguiling pathway to unchar= ted destinations.

The three centers of gravity chosen by an adversary to shap= e in orchestrating a enemy country's destruction in the long term from within are the enemy country’s

1. Perception of current truth,

2. Political philosophy and

3. Future generations – the shaping of their thought pro= cesses.

We will elaborate on the application of these ideas by stat= e and non-state agencies external to the Indian Republic.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We need to go back t= o the beginning to an earlier era in order to understand the manner in which these threats developed. A good place to start is the European incursion into India i= n the 16^th century.

The early lead that the Europeans established as a result of their explorations of the new world gave them an advantage over the Asian powers who had lost their earlier inquisitiveness and adventurousness, about the nature of the world. The control of the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire forced the Europeans to circumvent t= heir dominions and expand their naval power. The pre-eminent naval powers of that day were Spain, Portugal and England, although the Dutch p= layed also a not inconsequential role. It is instructive in particular to dwell on the example of the European conquest of India.

Ascendancy of the western powers

There was a military revolution of far reaching dimensions = that permitted the European powers to take control of the world’s oceans and v= ast portions of territory around the globe, beginning in the 15^th century. The "military revolution" refers to the technological and organizational innovations that enabled Europe to replace Asia as the world's dominant military power between the Renaissance and Industri= al Revolution. During the late middle Ages, Asian armies routinely crushed European forces, as demonstrated by the collapse of the Crusades, the Mongo= lian invasion of Central Europe, and the Turk= ish conquest of the Balkans. The success of the Ottoman Turks in particular off= ered a powerful indictment of the superiority of Asian infantry and cavalry tact= ics, gunpowder weaponry, command hierarchies, and logistical support over the feudal armies of the West. Yet the military mig= ht of western Asia paled in comparison to the power of eastern Asia. The Ming Dynasty of China in the 15th century and the Mughal Empire of India i= n the 16th century each employed large standing armies armed with sophisticated weaponry and centralized bureaucracies. Nevertheless, by the late 18th cent= ury a revolution had occurred: European powers were routinely and decisively defeating Asian armies, as demonstrated by the Russia's conquest of the Crimea, the British East India Company's conquest of Bengal, and the French invasion of Egypt. China's turn at military humiliation would come with the First Opium War (1839–18= 42). This transfer of military superiority was the result of Western flexibility= and Eastern rigidity with regard to technical and organizational changes. The motivation of Europeans to invest continuously in naval, siege, and field warfare innovations during the military revolution was a direct response to their interminable political conflicts.

Illustrating this process was the rise of Western naval sup= remacy during the 16th century. Especially critical was the Portuguese work of the 15th century under Prince Henry the Navigator and King John II. The Portugu= ese developed oceangoing vessels that relied on inanimate power for both propul= sion and defense, and astronomical science for navigation. The result was the employment of the light and maneuverable caravel, and the heavy, fortressli= ke carrack for ocean voyages. By the early 16th century, these vessels employed both lanteen and square sails, and were armed with muzzle-loading artillery. Their navigators used the compass, quadrant, and tables of solar declinat= ion to determine latitude, as well as a Ptolemaic mapping system [2] to chart their course. Equally significant was the carrack's ability to function simultaneously as a commercial and military vessel. Western naval rivalries stimulated the innovation of increasingly powerful warships during the late 16th century, including the oar- and sail-propelled galeasse that the Hapsburgs used to crush the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, and the sleek galleon that the English = used to deflect the Spanish Armada in 1588. Such naval innovations accelerated during the 17th century with the use of increasingly specialized naval vess= els, including bomb ketches for offshore bombardments, frigates for long-range privateering, heavy warships with multiple gun decks for concentrated engagements, and the flutte for economical transportation. Consistent funding of scientific education and research also became a standard naval strategy in 17th-century Europe. The Royal Observatory founded by Charles II= and the Paris Academy of Science founded by Colbert and Louis XIV are the most direct examples. The political demand for a practical technique to measure = longitude, in fact, motivated much of the astro= nomical and horological research conducted during the 17th and 18th centuries.

On land, the Ming and Qing Dynasties of China, as well as t= he Mughal and Maratha Empires of India built enormous fortresses that were virtually impregnable to heavy siege artillery. They routinely employed gunpowder weaponry in their active defense as well. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, excelled in assaulting fortresses. Their siege of Constantinople in 1453 was a brilliant example of coordinated artillery, naval, and infantry action, while their sieges of Rhodes in 1522= and of Cambria in 1669 demonstrated a master= y of mining attacks. In terms of developing a comprehensive system of siege warf= are, however, Western siege armies were outclassing their Asian counterparts by = the early 16th century. Although Europeans had used large-caliber bombards to b= oth assault and defend fortified positions during the second half of the 14th century, their enormous weight rendered them difficult to transport, while their stone projectiles made them difficult to supply. Towards the end of t= he Hundred Years' War (1338–1453), the French developed smaller caliber guns= with higher muzzle velocities and placed them on stable carriages for greater mobility. The employment of corned gunpowder and iron shot further increased such artillery power. Thus armed, the French reduced all British stronghold= s in France except Calais during 145= 0–51, and crushed English field armies at Formigny and Castillon. Armed with such artillery, the Spanish reduced the Moslem fortresses in Granada to wrap up the Reconquista by 1492.

Another central element in the military revolution was the transition from small decentralized armies focused around feudal cavalry fo= rces to disciplined national armies dominated by infantry and artillery firepowe= r. This transition began during the 14th. The vast training needed to use the longbow effectively, however, led to the crossbow's becoming the dominant missile weapon= for Western infantry forces during the 15th century, followed by the harquebus = or matchlock during the 16th century. The Spanish ability to discipline and coordinate their infantry to fight in such an integrated formation rendered them virtually invincible in 16th-century field warfare, as demonstrated in= the conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires, the Battle of Pavia (1525), and the field actions of the Dutch Revolt. Nevertheless, such infantry innovations hardly gave the West a decisive advantage over Asian military armies. Europeans, after all, did not dare engage the Ottoman Turks in a large-scale battle for most of the 16th and 17th centuries.

By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, however, the str= ength of Asian field armies was in decline. Western European field armies were routinely employing innovations in military technology that gave them significant advantages. As initiated by Maurice of Nassau during the Dutch Revolt and developed by Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), such drill enabled infantry units to concentrate their fire = in devastating volleys even under terrifying combat conditions. The growing strength of Western field warfare in the 18th century also depended on artillery innovations. While the basic smoothbore-artillery design of the 1= 5th century remained, a series of artillery reforms created both powerful and maneuverable field artillery systems. This began with Gustavus Adolphus's introduction of the three-pounder regimental artillery piece into the Swedi= sh army during the 1620s. The trend accelerated during the mid-18th century wi= th the artillery reforms of Austria and France that furnished the first heavy field guns that could be moved routinely in combat. Equally significant was the way such 18th-century artillery was use= d. Following the ballistics research conducted during the War of= the Austrian Succession, the killing efficiency of Western field artillery impr= oved significantly when directed by officers trained in Newtonian science.

The Portuguese used their naval innovations to control the = coast of Africa and enter the Indian Ocean by = 1494. Their initial probe into Chinese waters, however, was decisively crushed in 1522 by the gunships of the Ming Dynasty. Chinese naval power was demonstra= ted during the early 15th century when Admiral Cheng Ho's fleets of war junks dominated the Indian Ocean. Changes in political priorities rather than technical conservatism led the Ming Dynast= y to abandon its commitment to naval expansion. This left a partial vacuum in th= e Indian Ocean that the Portuguese quickly exploited.= This paved the way for the Europeans to enter India. First the Portuguese i= nvaded the coastal ports of Western India, foll= owed by the Dutch, the English and the French in quick succession.

Discovery of India and the genesis of European Perspectives on India
Whe= n the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama = [3]= lande= d at Calicut in 1498, he was restoring a link between Europe and the East that had existed many centuries previously. The most widely publicized connection between the two regions h= ad been Alexander the Great's invasion of the Punjab, 327–325 BC. In the 2nd century BC, Greek [4]= adven= turers from Bactria had found= ed kingdoms in the Punjab and the bordering areas. Western contact with Indian civilization was around the period 1500 AD. However, not until rather late did the West begin to unders= tand and appreciate the spiritual heritage of India. While it is true that sketchy accounts of India (mainly French and some Dutch) began to appear in Eu= rope in the 16th and 17th centuries, these were decidedly contemptuous and dismissive.

More substantial and positive assessments began to circulat= e only in the latter half of the 18th century. At that time, a few generally sympathetic Englishmen, brought to India by the British conquest, began a more serious examination of the history, philosophy, and literature= of the "Hindoos." Of these, some of the most important were Charles Wilkins, who provided the first translation of The Bhagvat Geeta, or D= ialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon; Sir William Jones, (the first expert in the fie= ld of what was to be known later as Indology), whose early essays "On The Hindus," "On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India= ," and "On the Chronology of the = Hindus" were widely read in England and Europe; and Thomas Colebrook, who contribut= ed the first serious analysis of the Vedas by a Westerner. All of these works = were to travel across the Atlantic, important= ly influencing the philosophical development of American philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The perception of India by the west as a complex, religious country has been projected to the rest = of the world for the last 300 years and this view is the dominant view prevale= nt in the west. This view is not too favorable to India currently and will need= a major update by Indians. The ethn= icity in the sub-continent according to such a view is divided as Muslims and non-Muslims among whom the Muslims are connected to the outside world from their history of conquest. In this perception, the Muslims were the invader= s of the subcontinent and the current Indian population is comprised essentially= of the remnants of a conquered civilization.

Contrary to such perceptions in the West, the influence of = India on her neighbors, specifically those in Central, East, and Southeast Asia, = has long been recognized, largely because peoples of these other nations went to great lengths to accurately translate and disseminate Indic knowledge into their own languages and cultural idioms. This resulted in an accurate trans= mission that maintained respect for the cultural source. Indians had immense trading networks that ran through Central Asia and Eastern E= urope until as late as the 1700s. Why did this trading network collapse completely and what were its consequences?

It is instructive here to digress with a brief overview of = Indian colonization of the Far East. By the tim= e of the first 5 centuries of the Common Era Indian traders actively participate= d in trade with the Far East and established trading colonies in the Siam, Camb= odia, Vietnam and Malay peninsula. They were accompanied by several Kshatriya and Brahmana immigrants who started establishing Indian-styled monarchies in the region. Most of the early Brahmanist colonies were locali= zed to Takua Pa, Nakhon Sri and Dhammarat in the peninsula. By 400 AD the Shrivijaya Kingdom was founded in the Island of Sumatra by Kshatriyas. By 500 AD t= he Kshatriya Purnavarman founded a kingdom in Western J= ava. By around 600-700AD Kshatriya Sanjaya founded a mighty kingdom in Central Java. By around mid 700s the Shailendra Emp= ire arose in Java who started one of the most remarkable series of conquests of= the Eastern Indic potentates. They annexed all the pre-existing Indic states in= Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo and further islands of modern Indonesia. Subsequently they raided Vietnam and Cambodia and established control over these regions for some time. Their empire know= n as Suvarnadvipa established diplomatic relationships with the Cholas and Palas= in India and with the emperor of China. = They also built a university modeled after Nalanda and Kanchi in Java. The great tantric Dipamkarashrigyana from Bengal s= tudied there at some point. The Shailendra emperor Maravijayottungavarman was a gr= eat ally of Chola emperor Rajaraja, who helped him with the construction of Vih= ara in Java. The Shailendras fell out with the Cholas after an apparent dispute over trade with Chin= a. This resulted in Rajendra launching a massive amphibious assault on the Shailendras. It resulted in a total rout of the Shailendras with the Cholas seizing the Malay Peninsula, Java and Sumatra.

In the West, however, this transmission of Indic knowledge occurred largely indirectly and remained confined to a small number of academics, with the result that the vast majority of the population in America and Europe<= /st1:place> remains ignorant about the source and scope of Indic knowledge. It is rather unfortunate that when Europe and India d= id directly encounter each other it was under coercive conditions, resulting, ultimately, in the colonization of the latter by the former. Such a grossly inequitable relationship is not naturally conducive to mutual understanding= and respect. As a result, European portrayals of India were riddled with depic= tions of Indians as irrational, mystical savages. Occasionally, when Europeans did borrow from Indian thought, they denied the source of these findings becaus= e to openly acknowledge that the West had something to learn from India w= as to implicitly undermine the myth of cultural superiority, the flimsy justifica= tion for colonial exploitation.[5]

India's cultural diversity and lack of political unity has often invited its compar= ison with Europe. Certainly, India i= s not a homogeneous country, by any classification. Also the boundaries of India h= ave changed very often. The present boundaries of India do not include all the regions that have been part of 'Classical India' at = some time or another in history, and doubtless, the nation-state of India a= s we see it today is a very recent political entity. There is no pretense on the par= t of the current Republic to lay claim to all the geographies that were once par= t of the Greater Indic civilization.

According to the European perception that has currency even today; the people of India were broadly categorized as Aryans who were synonymous with the upper caste (class) and Dravidians who are the lower class. It is important to recognize that the word Aryan has no basis in traditional Vedic literature, as a noun. Its use in the Vedas is primarily as an adjective (e.g. Aryaputr) and not a= s a noun. In a recent exposition Thomas Trautman[6] has recounted the manner in which Aryan came to signify race and ethnicity = in the European mind rather than as a behavioral trait which is the context of= the word as used in the Vedas. This is a significant issue and the dual use of = the word Arya as a noun and as an adjective tends to obfuscate discussion and t= hat in turn has given rise to spurious notions of racial superiority based on t= he mythical concept of an Aryan race.

There is substantial evidence that the vast majority of the Muslims in India share significant genetic material with the non-Muslims of the subcontinent. Nevertheless the British went to extraordinary lengths to drive a wedge bet= ween the Muslims and non-Muslims belonging to the subcontinent and constructed a narrative in which the Muslims were more connected genetically and cultural= ly to the outside world from their history of conquest than they were to their Hindu brothers and neighbors. So it was that a myth was propagated where the Muslims were regarded as the original (prior to the British) invaders of the native people and the Hindu was assigned the role of a conquered subject.

Civilizational States= [7]

Both China and India are ancient empires that produced brilliant civilizations. Empires are stat= es that rule over a great diversity of peoples and extend over huge tracts of lands. Civilizations are cultures on a vast scale. And culture can be defin= ed as the ways people live, work and think together.

Some empires rest on the creation of great civilizations, others do not. The former last very long while the latter do not. China and India are the world's greatest examples of the former. And great empires like the= se seek peace and prosperity. It's the short-lived empires that stir up wars, = like the ones led by Napoleon and Hitler.

The Indians and Chinese have three or four millennia of civilization embedd= ed in the minds and souls of their huge populations. Now they also have well-functioning states highly respected throughout the world. It's not coincidental that Indian and Chinese youngsters do well in many areas of education. They are all immersed in stories about great heroes and heroines that mould their minds and give their souls direction. Their most powerful direction is education. Furthermore, both civilizations radiated out to many countries, near and far. These collateral youngsters perform just as well as those of the root civilization. For one thing, they share the traditional stories of the root civilization. Even way back in history when foreigners ruled India and China t= hese rulers accepted much or all of the great civilizations that surrounded them= .

And over the centuries many of those foreign rulers gave th= eir Indian and Chinese subjects the peace that provided security to farmers, traders and intellectuals. The governments of both countries now know that = the combination of a strong state and a brilliant civilization can give their h= uge populations what they most want, peace and prosperity.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 B.C.,= Europe only had only short-lived empires. Charlemag= ne's attempt lasted less than two decades. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1= 804 and met his Waterloo in 1815. Hitler's Thousand Year Reich didn't even last a decade. Around the beginning of the second millennium Europe did create a civilization, the Renaissance, that still sends rays of knowledge = and beauty all over the world. But they were not able to create a Roman-style empire in Europe. Britain built a vast empire all over the world but shunned E= urope. France's dominion over Europe died at Waterloo. Like many empires, A= ustria had great diversity but was never able to create a strong state. And today, while Europe is still struggling to build a strong European state, India and = China are using their histori= cal capital to create both brilliant civilizations and strong states.

What’s in a name; ‘India’ and the ‘Indian’= Identity

Other Asian civilizations such as the Chinese civilization = have Civilizational memories of India, her culture and her people. Even the Arabs before Islam and after Islamic civilization have a Civilizational memory about the people of India t= hrough trade and commerce. However, such memories have been superseded by the view= points of the Anglo Saxon world. The rest of the world even today has views about India/Hindus set by Europeans [Anglo Saxons] and missionaries in the 1800 a= nd 1900s. Hence the country and Indians/Hindus are already stereotyped with particular set of images and perceptions for the most part from the British= and colonial perspective. The British due to their interaction with India from = the early 17th century and later their long experience with colonial rule became the global power by the end of 19th century and were able to influence and build a worldwide image of Hindus, the non-Muslims, along with India and In= dian civilization, an image that was in accord with their views of the world. Th= is is very critical to understand in the 21st century. This British image of Indians and India was perpetuated throughout the 20th century with the advent of the communication revolution. India has never been able to change the perception much after independence. Europ= eans by the time of World War II looked at India and Indians, Muslims and non-Muslims in certain way from their historical experience. An English authority, Sir John Strachey, had this to say about India: ...... this is the first and most essential t= hing to learn about India -that there is not and never was an India or even any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political [8]. His was not an isolated opinion. Reginald Craddock, Home Minister of the Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford, in The dilemma in India <= /i>(1929) denied the existence of an Indian nation: An Indian Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist. = It never existed in the past, and it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselv= es that we created it? If so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for 'Indi= an' in any vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for 'India'.= Nor is there any reason why there should be an Indian Nation. The bond or union am= ong the races to be found there is that they have for the last century and a ha= lf been governed in common by a Foreign Power.[9] P. C. Bobb sums up Craddock's vie= ws nicely: By this account 'Indian' wa= s the same kind of misnomer, applied by the English, as the term 'European' when applied to the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India was merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of Europe and Asia, whose peoples had "roamed over the whole" in prehistoric times. Down the centuries nationalities had become localized, until Europe and India, for example, each cont= ained well over twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India lo= oked like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or distance. India's cultural diversity, and lack of political unity has often invited i= ts comparison with Europe.

As we have already remarked, cultural diversity and ethnic diversity are two different aspects of society and one can have one without= the other. It is our contention that India is culturally unique wh= ile being ethnically diverse.

The renowned Islamic scholar, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi develops a variant of a widespread idea about the origin of the name 'Hind': Before the advent of the Muslims, there was no single name for the country = as a whole. Every province had its own name, or rather a state was known by the = name of its capital. When the Persians conquered a province of this country, they gave the name 'Hindu' to the river, which is now known as Indus, and which was called Mehran, by the Arabs. In the Old Persian and also in Sanskrit, the letters 's' and 'h' often interchange. There are many instanc= es of this. Hence Sindh became in Persian Hindu, and the word 'Hind' derived f= rom Hindu, came to be applied to the whole country. The Arabs, however, who were acquainted with other parts of the country, restricted the word 'Sind' to a particular province, while applying the = word 'Hind' to other parts of the country as well. Soon this country came to be known by this name in distant parts of the world. The Western nations dropp= ed the 'h' and called the country Ind or India. = All over the world, now, this country is called by this name or by any one of its ma= ny variants. (Nadwi, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi, Indo-Arab Relations (An Engl= ish Rendering of Arab O' Hind Ke Ta'all= uqat) By (Translated by Prof. M. Salahuddin), The Institute of Indo-Middle East Cult= ural Studies, Hyderabad, India P. 8). An influential historian, André Wink, wri= tes about the fashioning of "India" from whatever geographical and cultural and human materials were present in= the region now known as India: We will see that the Muslims first def= ined India a= s a civilization, set it apart conceptually, and drew its boundaries. The early Muslim view of India includes, to be sure, a close parallel to the Western Mirabilia Indiae in the accounts of the "aja'ib al-Hind". It also includes a number of stereotypes which were already familiar to the ancient Greeks: of India as a land of self-absorbed philosophers, high learning, "wisdom", the belief in metempsychos= is, of sacred cows, elephants, and, again, great wealth.

The Arab geographers are perhaps uniquely obsessed with Ind= ian idolatry and polytheism, "in which they differ totally from the Muslims". But the Arabs, in contrast to the medieval Christians, devel= oped their conception of = India in direct and prolonged contact with it. In a political-geographical sense, "India" or al-Hind, throughout the medieval period, was an Arab or Muslim conceptio= n. The Arabs, like the Greeks, adopted a pre-existing Persian term, but they w= ere the first to extend its application to the entire Indianized region from Si= nd and Makran to the Indonesian Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia. It therefore appears to us as if the Indians or Hindus acquired a collective identity in interaction with Islam. (Wink[10]),. According to this view, the idea of "<= st1:place w:st=3D"on">India" or "Hindus&q= uot; itself emerged in interaction with Islam. The Arabs must have called a vast land 'al-Hind' as a shorthand term, just as a modern textbook of geography might club diverse nations under the umbrella term '= Middle East'. Another example is the term Sudan. It was the Arabs who n= amed a vast tract of land (without delimiting it exactly) as Bilad al-sudan -"land of the blacks". The various peoples of that region did not refer to themselves as 'Sudanese' until modern times‘‘ Yet the alert reader who reads the above excerpt would surely notice that the concept of an Indianized region stretching from Makran (Baluchista= n) to Indonesia has somehow wriggled its way into a discourse which would deny= (a priori) the existence of an "India". A question arises immediately: What was it about the region from Sind to Indonesia that merits the term 'Indianized', which caused the Arabs to call this region collectively as 'al-Hnd'? A partial answer to this question can be formulated by quoting what Vincent Smith, an authority on early India had said: "Indi= a, encircled as she is by seas and mountains, is indisputably a geographical u= nit, and as such is rightly designated by one name."

Wink's statement says: "We will see that the Muslims f= irst defined India as a civilization, set it apart conceptually, and drew its boundaries. The = fact that the word "= India" is ostensibly of foreign origin; is used to insinuate that the very idea of= an Indian nation is a contribution by outsiders. No matter how the name India originated, it eventually came to me= an something quite well-defined, and the use of a single term, India, = is justified, and not only as a shorthand for a hazy notion. Vincent Smith[11] explains: “The most essentially fundamental Indian unity rests upon the f= act that the diverse peoples of India have developed a peculiar type of culture or civilization utterly different from any other type in the world. That civilization may be summed up in the term Hinduism. India primarily is a Hindu country, the land of the Brahmanas, who have succeeded= by means of peaceful penetration, not by the sword, in carrying their ideas in= to every corner of Indi= a. Caste, the characteristic Hindu institution, is utterly unknown in Burma, Tib= et, and other borderlands, dominates the whole of Hindu India, as well as in distant outposts of Indian civilization such as Bali= , and exercises no small influence over the powerful Muslim minority. Nearly = all Hindus revere Brahmanas, and all may be said to venerate the cow. Few deny = the authority of the Vedas and other ancient scriptures. Sanskrit everywhere is= the sacred language. The great gods, Vishnu and Shiva, are recognized and more = or less worshipped in all parts of India. The pious pilgrim, when going the round of the holy places, is equally at h= ome among the snows of Badrinath or on the burning sands of Rama's Bridge. The seven sacred cities include places in the far south as well as in Hindustan. Similarly, the cult of rivers is common = to all Hindus, and all alike share in the affection felt for the tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. India beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity, far more profound than that produced either by geographical isolation or by political suzerainty. That unity transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, col= or, language, dress, manners and sect.”

The reader may not agree with all that Vincent Smith says b= ut the idea of a culturally united India -call it a nation, or a civilization --clearly did not depend upon the Arab= s/ Muslims. Nor was the idea born out of the labors of the Western Orientalist= or the British colonial administrator. "I= ndia" --the name which launched a thousand ships, and which has fired the imagina= tion of explorers for ages, predates the emergence of Islam and Western Indology, by centuries, if not millennia.

The studies of India and of Indians - Indian= s are moldable and ‘like this onlee’

The history of modern western social science started with colonial India to study the kinship pattern and different social behaviors of Indians. Amo= ng the observations of Indians as distinct from other ethnics that the British made were the following.

1. The Indians were easily colonized

2. They are small, dark, and short in stature

3. They have a unique religion and civilization

4. The Indians as a people, or at least the vast majority= of them, have lost the memory of their past and history of their civilizatio= n. The Indians do not keep a record of their history and they have lost the origin of their civilization. This was the perception of Englishmen like Macaulay and the most famous of all Indologists Friedrich MaxMueller. Whe= ther there is much truth in this observation the fact remains that this is the perception in the west that has been assiduously cultivated and spread. So confident were they in this assertion that it prompted MaxMueller to inve= nt Indian History by essentially conjuring the Aryan Invasion Theory out of = thin air in 1860s.

5. The British soon came to realize that the Indians made= no special distinction, at least during the first few decades, when it came = to the Europeans and regarded them merely as the latest in a wave of invaders dating back to several centuries. Every analyst including H Kissinger quo= tes this observation. This fascinates them and the consequences of this deeply held belief by the British needs to be studied by Indians.

The modern perception about Indians/Hindus and India b= y the west and in particular by the Anglo Saxons include the following traits. Na= mely that the Indian

Can easily be shamed to be subservient.

Is easy to brainwash

Converts to another religion without excessive effort or persuasion

Believes in what he hears without questioning much, especially from a westerner.

Is susceptible to be colonized.

Is partly superstitious in nature and unscientific.

Falls for deceptions and lies more easily

In the early 20th century, Sir John Woodroffe[12], a scholar and writer on Indian philosophy, published a book entitled, Is India Civilized? He wrote= it in answer to negative criticism of Indian culture by the English drama critic William Archer. There is persistence, to this day, of many of the negative ideas and images of Indian culture, which many have addressed over 80 years ago. This document will try to describe and discover the underlying reasons= for the endurance of these negative portrayals.

The critical juncture in India’s modern intellectual= and political history was the Indian War of 1857, fought between the British and their Indian subjects. After the war, Whitehall assumed direct responsibility for the administration of India, ending 250 years of rule by the British East India Company. In the then Bri= tish view of the time, Whitehall’s administration proved a triumph for the forces of progressivism. The British government moved quickly to establish new universities modeled on Cambridge and Oxford and intended specifically to train future generations of leaders for India. = This policy had far-reaching consequences, for it permanently redefined the Indian political elite. The consequenc= e of this policy was that the elite of the west needed only to deal with the eli= te of India who are alrea= dy educated in the west or western style of education in India w= ith English as the medium of learning. The elite of India are assumed to have a commanding role in shaping the values and opinions in the country, and by changing t= he perception of the elite in India the west hopes to change Indian society and political structure permanently= to their advantage.

But the west, more particularly the Anglo-Saxons hides their intent about the sub-continent. John Mearsheimer[13] writes in his book 'The tragedy of great power politics', p.26 "It sho= uld be obvious to intelligent observers that the US speaks one way and acts an= other. In fact policy makers in other st= ates have always remarked about this tendency in American foreign policy. As long ago as 1939 for example, Carr pointed out that states on the European conti= nent regard the English speaking peoples as 'masters in the art of concealing th= eir selfish national interests in the guise of the general good' adding that 'this kind of hypocrisy is= a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo Saxon mind'".

Nehru remarks on this penchant among the Anglo Saxon leader= ship class also in 'Discovery of India'. In reality, this is widespread among nations; however, the Anglo Saxons indulge in this practice with great gusto and panache, a behavior that we now call 'spin'.

One of the self-imposed missions of the English colonial po= wers was to civilize Indian society, which for all practical purposes meant the Hindu society, the part of India to whom they had greater access. This is considered one of the proud achievements of the English in India and it is even today an achievement in which the British take inordinate pr= ide. The seeds of this policy were laid out 150 years ago during the time of Macaulay in 1835. Karl Marx had proclaimed that the British have a "du= al mission" in Ind= ia: they were there to destroy and = rebuild Indian society. First, they must dismantle those archaic institutions that = had produced centuries of barbarism and stagnation in India, blocking her progress = to higher forms of economic organization. Once this historical debris had been removed, the British would lay the foundations of a civilized society, duly equipped with property rights, labor markets and an indigenous bourgeoisie.= India w= ould then be ready to join the civilized world as a near equal of European natio= ns. India p= roved to be more refractory than Marx had anticipated. As a result, when the British left India, some two hundred years after they began their dual mission, it was hard to = tell if they had completed or were still completing the first phase of their mission. But when they left they created enough leverage within the people = of India s= o that they could get what they wanted. The split of the sub-continent for the geo-political needs of the Western alliance planted the seeds of change ins= ide India in order that one day it would sprout into a full grown Islamic jihad tree , a tree that will revive inside India in the future. Anglo-Indian protagonist of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, = sees it all coming when he writes to an English friend in 1940, I think that there's no doubt that in the last twenty years—wheth= er intentionally or not—the English have succeeded in dividing and ruling, a= nd the kind of conversation I hear ...makes me realize the extent to which the Eng= lish now seem to depend upon the divisions in Indian political opinion perpetuat= ing their own rule at least until after the war, if not for some time beyond it. They are saying openly that it is "no good leaving the bloody country because there's no Indian party representative to hand it over to." They prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahman), are constitutionally predisposed to Indian princes, emotionally affected by the thought of untouchables, and mad keen about the peasants who look upon any = Raj as God ...

In 1500, India was wealthy, by contemporary standards, and an active participant in the wo= rld economy, with trade caravans heading westward to Arabia and eastward to China, = and Indian products featuring strongly in European markets. The revenue of the Aurangzeb Empire was in the range of $450 million in 1700. The next wealthi= est king in the European continent Louis XIV was 10 times less rich. In 1913, <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">India was still a big participant in the w= orld economy, albeit primarily in the free trade yet ordered market of the British Empire -- exports in that year totaled the equivalent of $830 million. In 1948, India's share of admittedly shrunken world merchandise exports was a still substantial 2.2 percent. In 1985, that share had shrunk to 0.5 percent, and while it has since recovere= d, it languishes at 0.7 percent in 2000. All these happened due to the direct intervention of the colonial masters and geo-political events before and af= ter the independence. China’s domestic production in 2001 is $1,100 billion and per capita domestic production is $887 whereas the comparative figures for India a= re $426 billion and $424 respectively. Within a span of twenty years i.e., 1979-99,= China's= export has reached 18 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product, including it within = the top ten exporters in the world. The share of industrial production has been= 50 per cent in China wher= eas in India it is about 23 per cent. Foreign investment in China is about $40 billion annually but in India it is only about $3 bil= lion. Its income from exports is six times more and the foreign currency reserve = is about three times more than that of India.

The role of the In= dian Diaspora

Throughout the centuries or at least until a thousand years= ago Indians were inveterate travelers and plied the oceans in search of trade opportunities and to spread their unique civilization without any coercion. After a hiatus, caused by invasions and turmoil in the land Indians have renewed their wanderlust and in the modern era have started to emigrate to = the west from late 19th century and this trend has merely accelerated through t= he 20^th century. The liberal movements after the world war led to r= apid emigration for better life in the western modern economy. The immigrants du= ring the cold war were astonished when they discovered the different and mythical perceptions about In= dia resulting from the thousand yearlong isolation of the Indic civilization fr= om the rest of the world. However, the immigration of Indians to foreign lands continued to increase. The maximum increase in Indian emigration to the European Union (EU) and US was in the 90s. Their experience in the west will result in a totally different version than the previous generations who migrated to the west. The isolation from the West that India experienced during her occupation by invading armies continued, albeit to a lesser degree for around 30 years due to the cold war( a deliberate policy)= and only a small number had experience with the west. Even after 170 years of contact with the west there are merely 20-30 million people of Indian origin who are living outside India and in comparison to the Chinese Diaspora the numbers are far smaller.

The Indian population in the United States has witnessed a tremendous growth since 1965, and the global Indian Diaspora has now become= an important part of world culture. There are now 1.8 million Indians residing= in the United States, and= in countries as diverse as Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, South Afr= ica, and Malaysia Indians account for a significant portion of the population, e= ven, in some cases, constituting the majority of the population. Though many commentators have spoken of the globalization of India, others prefer to call attention to the Indianization of the globe, pointing= to India's= export of its samosas, gurus, sitar music, even beauty queens. Bollywood, as the Indian movie capital in Mumbai is popularly referred to in India, while always popular in the Middle = East, North and East Africa, Russia, and elsewhere, is now becoming globally known.

The increased presence of Indians globally is one of the ca= uses for the rekindled interest in India and the Indic civilization. Some of the key anthropological questions being studied by the western universities are: How are questions of race and color negotiated? How are the animosities of the Indian sub-continent reflected in the Diaspora, and what are the anxieties of a largely middle-class, professional Indian Diaspora in the US? Do notions of Indian "culture" get refined, contested, transmuted, and in what ways? D= oes the Indian nation state live in its Diaspora as well, does it indeed receive succor from the Diaspora, or can the Diaspora become a site from where the politics of the nation-state can be productively challenged?

The west has observed that the average Indian is unaware of= the change in the outside world and have taken advantage of these perceived fla= ws in the Indian psyche. The Indian way of thinking as expressed by Max Muelle= r in the 1860s: includes inconsistency, an apparent inability to distinguish self from non-self, and a lack of universality. This uninformed nature of the general Indian public is used to the maximum and exploited by the western media, academics and policymakers. The Indian leftist and intellectual foll= ows the western academic in looking at an average Indian in a similar way. In o= ther words the colonial British after 1950 have created an entire class of India= ns leftists who look at the rest of Indians similar to the western academic. <= /p>

Each of these questions involve new experiences for the Ind= ians and these questions are being asked while simultaneously Indians are forming new relationships and associations in the west. It is not surprising that t= he West would like to shape the perception and loyalty of these global Indians towards India.

The Geopolitics of Recent History

There have been geo-political events such as world wars and= cold wars in the last 150 years in the Eurasian landmass that have profoundly affected India and her surroundings. A significant policy initiative begun by India�= �s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was based on the premise of Non-alignment. = For a country with few real cards to play in the international system after independence in 1947, non-alignment ostensibly offered a viable route to promote its diplomatic profile on the world stage. It allowed India t= o become one of the few countries in the world to receive economic assistance from b= oth camps in the international system, and yet retain the right to criticize bo= th the Eastern and Western alliances on specific international issues. The foc= us on non-alignment did not prevent India from developing a secur= ity policy that was sensitive to shifting alignments in its neighborhood. Its productive relationship with Moscow had the effect of balancing American military ties with Pakistan during the early Col= d War. But non-alignment while suiting the personality and prejudices of Nehru was= a flawed weltanschauung both in concept as well as execution right from the outset.

The reality has been that P= akistan has consistently been able to parlay its strategic location as a neighbor o= f India t= o boost its importance far beyond that warranted by its attributes such as size, population, economy. It has been able to do this primarily at the cost of <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">India. = When a de facto strategic consensus emerged between Pakistan, China and the United States at the turn of the 1970s, India was constrained to deepen its relati= onship with the Soviet Union through a ‘peace= and friendship treaty’ in 1971. 1971, as we mentioned at the outset, was a se= minal year for the future of the subcontinent while the testing of a nuclear devi= ce in 1974 triggered events, which made India, a target of major powe= rs for eventual balkanization. The 1979 Iranian revolution increased US inte= rest in Sunni Islam and US tried to create a political center of Sunni Islam and a Islamic geo-political block without much success.

However, the key event that transformed American interest i= n the region was the Soviet invasion of the Afghanistan. This action by t= he Soviets, a step into a region that the Czars coveted and would have dearly loved to accomplish as part of th= e Great Game between Britain a= nd Russia,= but did not, created a huge dynamic process, which is still reverberating in the so= uth Asian region.

….”

T Sreedar of IDSA says:

“THROUGHOUT THE 1980s and the 1990s, India looked at the developments in Afghanistan with a certain amount of dismay. It could not fathom the former Soviet Unio= n's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Initially, the policy makers in New= Delhi tried to find a political way out —gently persuading the Soviet Union to withdraw. India even offered to work with Pakistan to find a political solution. But Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq refused= to oblige. The Cold War politics practiced by the Great Powers in Afghanistan was too complex for India to intervene effectively.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, India kept a close watch on Islamaba= d's game plan. New Delhi's moves such as helping Burhanuddin Rabbani met with extremely limited succes= s. Alarm bells began ringing with the Taliban's arrival on the scene in 1994. Ind= ia saw a link between the developments in Jammu and Kas= hmir, the Taliban's creation and the way it was consolidating its position in Afghanistan. India's= efforts to sensitize the great powers about this development had no success. After = the capture of = Kabul in September 1996, I= ndia closed down its mission there.

….”

"According to the official view of history," Zbig= niew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, admitted in an interview in 1998, "CIA= aid to the mojahedin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded = Afghanistan... But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise."= At Brzezinski's urging, in July 1979 Carter authorized $500m to help set up wh= at was basically a terrorist organization, an organization that was eventually become the core group of Al-Qaida. The goal was to lure Moscow, then deeply troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet central Asian republics, into the "trap" of Afghanistan, a source of the contagion. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the chessboard was passed to the C= linton administration. The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban, now rule= d Afghanistan. After the collapse of the Soviet till 1997 Th= e US turned a blind eye to the rampant Islamic extremism and terrorism that was being exported from Afghanistan, in the hope that it was for the greater good of the = Western Alliance, by furthering their oil interests and creating a wes= tern controlled oil and gas pipeline. In 1997, US state department officials and executives of the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas. They were entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes in <= st1:City w:st=3D"on">Houston. They ask= ed to be taken shopping at a Wal-Mart outlet and flown to tourist attractions, inclu= ding the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Mount Rushmore in South D= akota, where they gazed upon the faces of American presidents chiseled in the rock. The Wall Street Journal, bulletin of US power, effused, "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan= at this moment in history." In January 1997, a state department offici= al told journalists in a private briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil protectora= te, "like Saudi Ara= bia". It was pointed out to him that Saudi Arabia had no democracy and persecuted women. "We can live with that," he said. The pipeline "dream" faded when two US embassies in east Africa were bombed in 1998 and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was made. The chi= ld that the US had spawned in the 80’s had grown to become a Frankenstein and had begun = to bite the hand that fed him.

The aftermath of the Afghan war created a pan-Islamic world vision, which used the globalization in the 90s to expand far and wide. This pan Islamic movement resulted in the change of history with the attacks on = WTC in United States of America on 911.This document looks at various covert and overt pressure on India in the last 40 years by the superpow= ers in their geo-political games surrounding India. In this evolution the = major powers have also looked at the vast swath of the Eurasian landmass in the southern region from Middle East to the Indonesia and planned out a strategic geo-political block, which will take care of Western Interest. Th= is block is supposed to be Islamic in nature and will hold steady for several centuries. By creating this block the western powers intended to have a surrogate power(s)(Littoral states) across the entire southern oceanic base= of the Eurasian block( Indian Ocean Region) for the next few centuries. The on= ly obstacle to this plan was the presence of I= ndia as a non-Islamic country, which juts out from the Eurasian landmass into the Indian= Ocean. The strategic position of Indian southern peninsula is not really talked ab= out in the open but is a major threat to major powers in their security of ener= gy resource. The SLOC and proximity to the ME oil resource; Central Asia future oil resource and SE Asia emerging economy make India a target of major power= s. The main alliance in the Eurasian landmass was between China, US and Saudi Arabia du= ring the cold war against the Soviet Union. <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">Japan and = South Korea were partners wit= h US. After the cold war other alliance such as R= ussia, China and India w= ere proposed. Iran is also becoming a player in the Asian landmass and in the future the Euras= ian land mass is gaining importance as an economic region.

The British colonization of India was instrumental in categorizing the people of the subcontinent primarily as Muslims and non-Muslims. With the exception of Muslims, Asians (and I include Indians in this category) in general have not paid primary importance to religion as an identifier of one’s individuality. This insistence by the British on using religion as a primary identifier has had a profound impact on the geo-polit= ical evolution and demographics of the sub-continent.

Author and Journalist Christopher Hitchens has this to say:= In the Subcontinent the empire tended to classify people as Muslim or non-Musl= im, partly because the Muslims had been the last conquerors of the region and a= lso because—as Paul Scott cleverly noticed—it found Islam to be at least recognizable in Christian-missionary terms (as opposed to the heathenish polytheism of the Hindus). The Br= itish were closer to Muslims of the sub-continent and employed them, in greater proportion to their population, for their global leadership during the First World War and 2nd world war. This entente was continued after the British withdrawal in 1947 and they had the leverage and still pulled the strings o= f Pakistan. The UK and the US acted as a pivot between India and = Pakistan for most of the independent history. The British control over the subcontinent was in effect replaced after 1947 by the US immediately under George Marshall. India did attain her freedom = but her leaders and institutions maintained a colonial approach to most decisions a= nd Indian leaders starting from Nehru did little to shake the established world order. The new generation of Indians after 1990 has effectively broken the = link from the colonial and major powers. During the cold war Pakistan was closer to the western camp du= e to the historical soldier connection in the British Indian Army and strategic position with Afghan= istan. The culmination of Pakistan’s moment of glory under the sun was the afghan war fighting with the mujahide= ens in the 80s against the advancing Soviet Union.

Simultaneously, Pakistan went through a transformation with a Islamist ideology taking over the coun= try under Gen Zia. The major powers tried hard to change India in the 50 years to their geo-political goals but could not other than engag= e India b= y the end of the decade in 2000. It is hard to break a lifetime of habits of thou= ght and there remain influential elements among the elite of the major powers w= ho continue to maintain that India and its population and religion can be changed to suit their geopolitical interests.

There remains considerable skepticism that the Indian nation state and the republic for which it stands is a viable entity. The longevit= y of the Indian republic is in question. The perception is still that country is really not one and the people do not have sense of one single country and h= ence does not need any attention as one country and be given political legitimac= y. The main method long term to reduce India and make it impotent; is to split India into multiple warring s= tates. The other parallel method is to work on the population so that they are not monolithic and do not create a nationalistic ethos. Yet another approach is= to push the process of evolution with an Islamic character inside India s= o that the country becomes an Islamic one in the long term with a Islamic political center.

US pol= icy on India has been mostly one of detached inte= rest and support to India= ’s rivals after 1971. India was neglected as part of the cold war policy due to the India’s tilt with former Soviet Union and India could only come out of = the closet after 1991 but in a increasingly globalized world. Only three US presidents visited India – Eisenhower, Jimmy C= arter and Bill Clinton in the last 56 years. There is a certain ambivalence about Indians and Indian culture by the elite and the policymakers in the US. Thi= s can be explained by the experience of Americans in their history from 1945 and thi= s is discussed later in this document. Samuel Huntington says that China h= as been successful in creating a idea of a Chinese civilization and a class of homogeneous people(Huns) who are nationalistic and modern. This has given t= he Chinese an identity and a place on the world map. China has created an entire economy, which can drive the economies of other surrounding countries from Japan, Koreas to South East Asia. It has even come close to driving the destiny of the south Asian countries and much of the Asian land mass. Nobody talks about <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">India or its Indian civilization or Hindu identity in the world in a similar manner as they talk about China. = This is avoided and the ancient Indic civilization is rarely talked about and activ= ely negated in the western world. The entire Indian state and civilization is g= iven less coverage in the media and academic world.

In the best of all possible worlds Chinese analysts would l= ike to assign India a status of an illegitimate power that does not have the right to a regional power status. What they mean is that the Indian state was born out of providence and that there is no previous history of such a land mass with a civilization and therefore cannot be a legitimate nation state now or in the future. Or so the Chinese would have the rest of the world believe. The inordinate attention that China gave India in 1962 by = taking great pains to humiliate India militarily belies such a public posture and indicates that the Chinese pay = far more attention to In= dia than they would have us believe.

Long Term Legacy of the Cold War

The current assault and challenge on India is multi dimensional an= d has been executed for more than 50 years as part of the cold war policies. The threat to India as we have mentioned already is external, internal, civilizational and long term in nature. Some of the most = far reaching plans are still being executed inside and outside India to negate the idea of I= ndia in the long run. A recent manifestation of= such a cold war legacy is to confer MNNA (Major Non-NATO Ally) statu= s to Pakistan[14].The long term plan is part of the cold war plan where Pakistan (and other Islam= ic states such as Saudi Arabia) is one of the partners and has helped the major powers to win the cold war. This plan is to bring about sufficient change inside India, which would help them in their common goals.

1. One of the most penetrating long term plans is to chan= ge the interpretation of Indian history and society in the eyes of Indians in the long run. Influence of historians and social research projects by US and other western government from 70s is very deep. Research funding for subaltern studies in Indian universities spurned the growth of Indian exp= erts in social anthropology and Indian leftists who were influenced to negate = the Hindu ethos and Hindu history and to deny the existence of a Indian/Indic civilization. By this process for a long time the aim was to create a civilization vacuum inside the minds of Indian people and Indian people. = How long is this going on. It is hard to find out but can be traced to the ti= me when the Aryan invasion theory was postulated which was around 1863. This reduces the ‘idea of India’ and never builds a Civilizational identity among the new generation of Indians.

The British during colonial rule, attempted to erase out of= the Indian mind every vestige of Indian heritage, but not through sheer brute f= orce as the Muslims had done. As we know, besides their primary object of plunde= r, they viewed—or perhaps justified—their presence in India as a “divinely ordain= ed” civilizing mission. They spoke of Britain as “the most enlightened and philanthropic nation in the world” and of “the justifiable pride which = the cultivated members of a civilized community feel in the beneficent exercise= of dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spread= ing the highest kind of civilization.” Such rhetoric was constantly poured ou= t to the Britons at home so as to give them a good conscience, while the constant atrocities perpetrated on the Indian people were discreetly hidden from sig= ht.

The major change in Indian history teaching in current time= s came after the 1971 war and separation of Bangladesh. The Indian Counci= l of Historical Research [ICHR], a major academic body was constituted on 27 March 1972 that comprises reputed historians and archaeologists. This 27-member council was constituted as an *autonomous* body with the mandate of setting high standards of research for the writing of Indian history. It currently operates under the Department of Education of the Human Resource Development Ministry, administers several historical projects (such as the "Towards Freedom" research and publication ventures), awards various fellowships and scholarships, and provides leadership for research in the disciplines of history, archaeology= and so forth. Indian historiography and Indian historians have built a globally high reputation over the last few decades. But the hidden agenda was to reinterpret Indian History with a bias towards Mughal history and revive th= e Pakistan ideology even after separation of= Bangladesh. This is discussed in more detail later.

2. It is important to note that in the case of most "civilizations" the states are in control over how their histor= y is taught, which influences their societies self image and thus prepares the populace for the future. As a corollary , it can be stated that those sta= tes that don’t have control of the narratives of their history will have a greater difficulty being accepted as a Great Civilization. The Chinese, Europeans, Americans and other centers of civilization all have their own grand narratives about who they are. In the case of India however, its history has been consistently in the hands of outsiders’ u= p to this day. These outside interests have found it very useful to manipulate Indian History to suit their own agendas. This is a fundamental cause for= a contested history and the debate between different civilizations and cult= ures inside India. Negation of Indian history outside India is a long-term plan by other pow= ers to stamp out all the Indic symbols which are outside and inside India so = that India will neither reclaim the history and nor the external land. The gro= wth of the Indian population has caused considerable concern, as one indicato= r of its potential future power. Recall the importance that we paid to 1971 be= ing a seminal year, at the beginning of this chapter, that initiated several paradigms of thought and action during the succeeding years. The plan to negate Indian history was rejuvenated around 1971 after India rolled back one part of history wi= th the creation of Bangla= desh. To stop this rollback and the inevitable reclaiming of Indian history by Indians in the future, there is a slow negation of Indian history across influential academic and political areas around the world.

One of the interesting proclivities that the West has indul= ged in, that Rajiv Malhotra has pointed out is the danger of U-turns wherein Christian missionaries penetrate Hindu organizations, and hijack them and s= teal Hindu ideas like Yoga etc This mosaic of Hinduism which is not monolithic is advantageous to outsiders who have ulterior motives. Since there is no cent= ral repository and a central authority to lay claim to the Indic traditions and practices there is free for all attitude to the interpretations of the Indic practices. Only books written by the western authors are acknowledged. No b= ook written by Indian authors about Indian history is fully praised including t= he favorite authors of the western academics. Quote about a book written by Ro= mila Thapar titled [preferred author for the west] EARLY INDIA: “Written in dense academese, it opens with a long theoretical introduction containing the usual cap-doffing to Edward Said and Orientalis= m. It is more than 70 pages before we meet our first hunter-gatherers. There is little sense of narrative progression and the writing is far from colorful. This is all the sadder as there are precious few well-written accessible histories of India, Jo= hn Keay's excellent Ind= ia: A History being a notable exception. This, as much as anything else, has allowed myths to replace history among India's voraciously literate middle class. Unless Indian historians learn to make t= heir work elegant and intelligible, attractive to a wide audience, unhistorical myths will continue to flourish”.

3. External pressure from Pakistan in the form of incursions along the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir, threats and diplomatic pressure at vario= us international forums has been relentless. This created a sense of a blown= up Pakistan, which is equal in strength to = India and can defeat India= in case of war. The US tappe= d the pride of the Ashrafs in Pakistan in their Mughal history to bolster the confidence of the Pakistani elite after their defeat in 1971. The pride and the confidence of Pakistani Ash= rafs were bolstered by the major powers so that it can become a counter weight= to the growing power of India and in turn help P= akistan create a powerful Islamic political center. Subtle use of media and image creation inside India was used to brainwash the general masses inside India. This is actually a long-term plan of the major powers.

How big is this plan? It could be as big as a clash of the = Ummah with the Indian civilization in the long run. Aspirations of a global Sunni Political Islam were present for a long time and it was the deliberate poli= cy of the US after the 1979 Iranian revolutions to nurture such aspirations with a long = term plan to create a core state of Islam. This core state would create the political center and be representative of Islamic civilization in the world= . Turkey and Pakistan were considered ideal countries for this role. Pakistan was one of the aspirants due the history of Mughal rule and familiarity of = the Ashrafs to the Anglo-Saxons with Ashrafs who held the respect of the rest of the Muslims in the sub-continent. The concept of the Pakistan flag on the Red Fort in Delhi<= /st1:place> has significant political meaning among the Muslims of the subcontinent. Sh= ah WaliUllah a Islamic scholar in 1700s had expressed a vision of creating a center of political Islam in the heart of <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">India to become the center of Islamic world. This has been actively encouraged by the Western powers and = China d= uring the last 50 years. By pushing the aspirations of the Sunni political Islam = to the sub-continent the major powers have deflected all the Islamic jihadi en= ergy and confrontation with the west against India. Traditional adversarie= s such as Islamic predatory institutions from Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Kingdom of Saudi Ar= abia are used to change the identity of Indian minorities and to create chaos in= the Indian political and social sphere. Islamic pressure through funding of madrassas all across India by Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is actively encouraged by internal groups and external countries from the w= est. In India= , an increasing number of madrassas are being taken over by the even more ext= reme Jamiat Ahle Hadith and Tablighi Jamaat groups, which does not bode well for= the world's largest democracy.

Creating examples out of Kashmir with experiments in supremacy of Islam (Nizam e Mustafa) was a plan to chan= ge the psychology of an Islamic society. The creation of Taliban in Afghanistan was noteworthy as it was the first Islamic state to be so created in 100 years.= LeT and HuM openly flaunted the security and law of the land to kill innocent Indians with impunity. The psychological impact on rest of India w= as being monitored every year and is still done. Global terrorism report from the State Dept did not put the center of terrorism to South Asia until the year 2= 001. This may be due to the earlier cozy relationship between the terrorist grou= ps, Pakistan and US agencies. Successive US Governments have had a stake in the continuation of jihadi activities at least in the sub-continent for their long-term goals as enunciated here.

The implications for India<= /st1:country-region> in developing a strategy against Pakistan are profound. Pakistan, in such a paradigm would no long= er be interested in the military conquest of India. The goal of the elite = in Pakistanis, and some in the West, would be the breakup of India preferably from within and the establishment of several warring states amon= gst whom a Mughalistan patterned along the Caliphates of the medieval era would= be a pre-eminent power. Such a scenario would suit the geopolitical interests = of the superpowers and would thereby negate the emergence of an alternate cent= er of power. This is a key conclusion to grasp, because most Indians feel the threat from Pakistan= is primarily military. Clearly that is not what Pakistan is capable of and hence the focus of Pakist= an will increasingly be the breakup of India from within

4. The threat from internal subversive groups such as acade= mic and influential intellectuals who are aligned with the western powers knowi= ngly or unknowingly is most devastating. This threat is debilitating in a free a= nd totally open society such as India and most of the Indian leftists intellectuals are pawns in this game. The leftists, academia, social anthropologists and intellectuals have been cultivated in the last 40 years in the western universities with south Asian chairs. The perception of these intellectuals is actually that they are doi= ng something to change and civilize the Indian society [ in this desire they a= re reminiscent of their erstwhile colonial masters from whom they have imbibed= a Macaulayite theology ] which is mired in ‘old culture’ into a progressi= ve culture. So most of the Indian studies in the western universities are actu= ally a project to map the Indian society and come up with a plan to change the society to suit the aims of the western powers. On such example is to create chaos among a ethnic minority during the time of need to put pressure on the Indian government. The Indian elite has been the eyes and ears of the major powers to observe and change the Indian society. The most significant aspec= t of the unique Indian society has been its perceived diversity and this has been seen as a weakness to be exploited by the major powers for their goals. Significant sections of the illiterate population and less privileged secti= on in the society have been susceptible to influence from these Indian elite, = NGO and western organizations including the religious ones.

5 The demographic threat is a long term threat to the Civilizational identity of India. The British understood the need to study the Indian population in a more detailed manner to create schism with the society. The first census was conducted in 1881. The emphasis of the census was on categorizing the Indian population primarily by caste. It was the expectation of the colonial master that such a taxonomy would attain canonical status and be accepted as reali= ty by his Indian subjects. That expectation has arguably been realized in large measure by the Indian Republic as she has= used the List of Scheduled Castes and Tribes originally developed by the British= in 1881, to fashion her quota and reservation policies, which are the cornerst= one of her affirmative action policies. Recent studies by Center for Policy Studies in association with the Indian Council of Social Science Research show the current trend of demogra= phic changes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the last 100 ye= ars. With globalization and creation of liberal society in the last several deca= des there has been steady change in the demographic profile of the country with reduction in Indian religionists due to conversion.

There were two spurts of growth of population of India. = One was the after 1965 and the other was after 1985. There were major policy change= s by other powers against India at these two data points.The percentage of Hindus according to the study (including Buddhists, Jain and Sikhs, for which the three authors have give= n a common term of Indian Religionists) would be reduced to minorities in the second half of the century. The s= tudy says the percentage of Indian religionists in the region had dropped from 78 per cent to 67 per cent in a century. This is a fairly large decline for a single religious community and 57 per cent of the population lived in two-thirds of the country, where Hindus constituted more than 90 per cent of the population. However, there were some pockets of Muslim-dominated areas = and some Christian-dominated ones. On the Gangetic belt, comprising 19 per cent= of the area and 38 per cent of the population, the share of Indian religionists had come down by four per cent, which cannot be considered a normal phenome= non. In the border districts of India, the share of Indian religionists had come down by seven per cent, which he = said was very high, while those in Kerala had declined by 12 per cent. Alarming = was the condition of several states of the northeast, where the Christian population was increasing very fast. Now there are only small pockets, which were dominated by Indian religionists. The British were perhaps even more contemptuous of the fundamental Civilizational and religious principles of = India t= han the Turko-Afghans and Mughals. They, through their patronage and propagation of Christianity, introduced another source of religious heterogeneity in India. = But more than the spread of Christianity, t= he British contributed to the increase of heterogeneity by systematically nega= ting and suppressing the civilizational homogeneity of India. Thus, even though = the growth of Christianity in India during the British rule was less than spectacular, the share of adherents of indigenous religions began to decline precipitously during this period. This decline has not been arrested yet.

6 Uneven development in critical regions in India close to the borders is threatening = the integrity of India. From UP to Assam there are 400 million people whose per capita income is below international standard and the per capita growt= h is less than the population growth. The breakdown of the civil administration = and law enforcement has made the region ungovernable and non-developmental. This area was the target of leftist campaign to bring about revolution from 1970s resulting in total collapse of the government. This region is a prime targe= t of various external organization including religious ones for change and event= ual disorder. Marxist organization to communal organization control large areas= of the countryside.

South Asia Studie= s

South Asian studies department may have started during the = early decades of the British Raj when Macaulay laid the foundation of education u= sing English in India. Western style academic study of India's traditions was started in the 19th century colonial era as the field called Indology - the study of India by the West for the West. Even today, Indians seeking to advance in the stu= dy of their own traditions face the conventional power structures that survive decades after colonialism. They must at the very least 'prove' their objectivity sometimes by alienating themselves from Indian ways of thinking, including having to adopt the use of Western categories and language for th= eir work. Given the natural ambitions of many Indians to study about India, numerous Indian scholars become 'Macaulayites', exactly as hoped for by Lord Macaulay in 1835, when he re-engineered India's education to "form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern;= a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opini= ons, in morals, and in intellect." Over time, a theology which we w= ill term Macaulayism was planted within Indian minds, invisible and harder to f= ight than physical dominance. The endgame was the universalizing of colonial ide= as and values, through prominence of their writings. This subliminal adaptation has helped many Indians to enter, survive and advance in the field of Relig= ious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, or Social Studies. Those who have tri= ed to stand up to such a hegemonic situation have often been blatantly declare= d as fundamentalists, or else marginalized in subtle ways. Max Mueller was one of the principal figures in the interpretation of the Indian culture and text = and Indian behavior/psychology for the Europeans. It is no coincidence that Max Mueller was hired by Macaulay for the express purpose of exposing all that = was indefensible in the Vedic and Puranic texts from a modernist perspective. M= any universities such as Yale, Col= umbia and other Ivy League campuses have a continuing south Asian/Indian studies dept. After independence these studies continued with many Indian scholars taking over many departments but they still had the colonial mindset and interpretation of the Indian sub-continent. Quote about India in the 1930s - Lastly there is this further point to which attention should be paid: the attachment (such as it= is) of the Mohammedan world in India to English rule is founded mainly upon the gulf between the Mohammedan and Hindu religions. Every step tow= ards a larger political independence for either party strengthens the Mohammedan desire for renewed power. The Indian Mohammedan will more and more tend to = say: "If I am to look after myself and not to be favored as I have been in = the past by the alien European master in India which I once ruled I wi= ll rely upon the revival of Islam." For all these reasons (and many more might be added) men of foresight may justly apprehend, or at any rate expec= t, the return of Islam. But after 1971 (and the creation of Bangladesh) a new thrust was given to the south Asian studies with focus on the subaltern studies and Muslims of the sub-continent. To contain Soviet influence, the = US State Department allocated funds to American universities for studying the non-Western world, and the new field was called 'Area Studies'. Under this rubric, the notion of a 'South Asia' was born, along with far reaching consequences of balancing India with Pakistan, and trying to 'South Asianize the identity of Indians and Indian civilizati= on. This grouping of countries is a politically correct way of referring to for= mer British colonies. It is the American equivalent of colonial Europe's field of Indology. Within these area studies, are somewhere between three a= nd five faculty positions for East Asia (China= , Japan, etc) studies, f= or every one position for South Asia. The government's funding was based on geo-political importance at a given time based on its strategic interests. The studies were more strategic and were designed to create experts in anthropology and social scientist who would w= ork with the western experts. The leftist groups and NGO and media were also cultivated to create a gigantic network in the name of social studies and progressive culture. The progressive ‘culture’ in India gained momentum by earl= y 80s and was dominant by mid 90s. The purpose of the new studies and greater foc= us on India= is explained in the next few sections. Anthropologists have positioned the Indians being studied as ‘native informants’ in an asymmetric relations= hip. Given the power imbalance, often these native informants supply the data th= at is expected of them to fit into the western scholars’ paradigm, and the representation tends to be that of a primitive people as compared to the superior, ‘rational’ west. Hinduism has been studied when the new disci= pline ‘Indology’ was created in late 1800s. This started as a study of compar= ative language between Sanskrit and European languages but later took up the stud= y of Hinduism and other religious texts. Academic scholars of religion reduce Hi= ndu into exotica, sociology and anthropology, a story depicting backwardness in wait of western cures. Psychology scholars have been appropriating meditati= on, kundalini, tantra and related Hindu- Buddhist ideas, repackaging them into = ‘new age’ and western representations, while letting the traditions' roots die= out. Adept yogis/meditators are often reduced to laboratory subjects in the same manner as laboratory rats, when in fact they deserve to be co-scientists and co-investigators of the inner realm. The colonial missionaries laid the foundation of distorting the Indian religious traditions for their long-term motive and created academic traditions, which are still followed in universities across the world. In the forum for south Asia called Religions= of the South Asia [L-RISA] every religion is studied except Hinduism. Hinduism is denigrated as much as possible and is never treated as a equal religion to be researched. The religion is negated= as far as possible in every forum and the concept of a tradition is ignored as nonexistent. The western academy of philosophers has largely ignored non-western philosophies, and many openly proclaim that there is no such th= ing as non-western philosophy. India's own Macaulayite elitist intellectuals have often sold out their traditions, rather than championing the revival and proper place of these traditions for the benefit of all humanity. Most of the western experts are proselytizers = and use colonial lens and are Judeo-Christian controlled within an institutional fortress. They focus on negative stereotypes while ignoring the positive aspects.

Among academicians in American universities who are special= ists in South Asian Studies and also in History departments in many institutes of higher learning in India, there is a tendency, perhaps an unwritten rule, a consensually agreed upon approach that systematically discourages objective discussions of the early years of the Islamic interface in the Indian Subcontinent. Academia has for decades sidetracked and stonewalled research projects or in-depth discussions that focus too closely on the destruction = and dislocation associated with the many incursions led and organized by mediev= al Central Asian invaders who entered into the Indian Subcontinent over the co= urse of five or six centuries. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and later Sikhs endured hundreds of years of what could be called "medieval imperialism" initially characterized by a tremendous amount of religious intolerance and iconoclasm. Military adventurism inspired by Islam, brought serious pressur= es on indigenous religious, cultural, and political institutions. These indige= nous Indian communities were able to sustain and continually reassert themselves. Strangely, their resistance, resilience, and cultural tenacity are not topi= cs found in most treatments of Indian history. It is a period almost devoid of indigenous Indian voices.

A well-known group of "Marxist/Leftist/Progressive&quo= t; Indian intellectuals, who refer to themselves as "The Delhi Historians' Group" has during the past three decades created an academic blockade that, has been very effective and nearly impossible to transcend. The strid= ent efforts of this group of Indian scholars have helped to institutionalize the widely accepted taboo against teaching about the topic of medieval terrorism and Islamic imperialism. In academic institutions in many countries in the = west and in India -- in departments of South Asian Studies -- there is a prejudice against the study of indigenous resistance to Imperial Musim rule. The indigenous respo= nse that resisted the pressures to Islamize created by centuries of the politic= al and military

presence of Islamic ruled states, kingdoms and fiefdoms is a taboo topic. At present, there is no room in the academic world for such research, which by inference must have referents to the violence which characterized that period of military aggression, violence brought on by invasions, circa 1000 CE onwards. Some of the quotes from the leftists are = as follows about Hinduism compared to other religions.

- First, tribal people exposed to conditions of modern life= and modern education desire a transition to a broader social and cultural life = than those available under their ancient tribal institutions. Hinduism with its numerous taboos and pollution norms makes this transition difficult and hed= ged with restrictions. Christianity makes for an easier and more democratic tra= nsition. However, Christian preachers and priests often instill a kind of exclusiven= ess bordering on bigotry among the converts. Militant faith and convictions lea= d to more antagonistic relationships with the neighboring Hindus; and indeed with their own animist" brethren, also significantly turned "Hindus&qu= ot; by Christian preachers.

Quote from Yvette C. Rosser an academic with interest in the history of the subcontinent. In 1993, when I began graduate school as a stu= dent of South Asian Studies, I noticed a bias. This bias was seemingly addressed= and partially engaged by a number of thoughtful scholars spurred on in the eigh= ties by Edward Said's Orientalism movement and in the nineties by Ron Inden's no= vel approach to Indic studies. However, as the bias spun on the many analyses in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it took on the proportions = of a typhoon. The Hindus were all somehow thrown together with fascists and Hind= uism was blown into fragments so it was not even a religion at all, just a colle= ction of cults. Even Sanskrit studies had to erect a facade to protect its pundit purity from association with actual Hinduism and practicing Hindus. Indology became a socio-economic area of concern or a playground for Freudian analys= is. Hindutva in many ways became synonymous with Hinduism. In a field that has become guided by a quest for the exotic and/or focused on the negative, the= re seemed to be very little room for the personal appreciation and respect tha= t I felt for the traditions of India. Antonio de Nicholas, now retired as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at SUNY writes:

"Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, even Shinto s= tudies have found a place in the American Academy and are bei= ng taught by scholars of those traditions. All but Hinduism, the earliest of a= ll ancient cultures recorded in writing, the store house of our own internal habits of soul, mind, society, mortality, immortality; the reference of lat= er cultures and mystics, the mother, literally, of our own human possibilities= has neither found an autonomous voice in the Academy nor have the children of t= his culture, Hindus, allowed to represent themselves in the American Academy wh= en Hinduism is taught by non-Hindus, or patronized or vilified or simply ignored."

Force of History

This doctrine says that a certain evolution of history is a= lways going on and in a particular direction and there is a historical order of things. In the case of India and the sub-continent it means that the process of Islamization going on fr= om 1000 years will continue to its logical end. Hindus do not pay much attenti= on to the historical order of things," wrote Al Biruni in 1030 AD. "= They are very careless in relating the chronological succession of things."= The millennium-old censure of the Hindus' lack of historic sense by a medieval Muslim historian appears to still apply, particularly to the Indian histori= ans of the present day. This has been exploited by the Islamists, British and modern day communists in India for the last 200 years and continued by the western academics The Islamist believes in this doctrine of history since i= t is part of the Islamic history as represented by Islam and is read by all the students who go training under the ulema and madrassas. The Islamic history= has been preserved for a long time with accuracy and also has been presented wi= th a sense of force of

history. This makes the faithful to believe that the faith = will take them to the destination, which they strive for. This is the reason why= Pakistan army and the Islamic parties are confident of in the long run to change the history of south Asia to their advantage. By showing Islam as a winning religion in the sub-conti= nent the non-Muslim tradition could be totally wiped out of the sub-continent or made a minority.

According to this doctrine of force of history, creation of= Pakistan and Bangladesh is part of the evo= lution from the Middle Ages ( a third phase of expansion of Islam) and the entire sub-continent will also one day will be a Islamic country. During the cold = war the US and Pakistan forced this history as the final destination of south Asia. The hatred of Hindus particularly the Brahmins by the ashrafs and sections of Anglo Saxon (because to the independence in 1947) created a powerful pact between them along with

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a cold war plan= to change the history of south Asia forever= to their advantage.

The protection of Pakistan<= /st1:country-region> by Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and US[ and China] for so many decades is= for this reason of force of history and for geo-political goals of the hyper po= wer. The reason is that by supporting and protecting the center of Islam inside = the sub-continent the force of history will work its own way to force change wi= th the population. This process of evolution is still going on working for the last 35 years since 1971 even= after the collapse of FSU. US with its vast resources and control of the world me= dia is providing the powerful push to this force of history to become a reality= . US with the help of proxies inside India is also doing its social reengineering and conversion to break the Indian society [kinship and old traditions] and accept an Islamic govt. The US policy to treat South Asia as one entity– consisting

of Muslims and non-Muslims – is to make sure that non-Mus= lims do not gain dominance( culturally, leadership) over the Muslims and in due time over the course of history all the people will be of same ethnicity – Mus= lims. The communists believe in this doctrine since they consider revolution as t= he modern version of the process of the evolution of history. The revolution in the communist world is similar to the jihad in the Islamic world. Hence Ind= ian leftist and communists are also part of this game and have similar views ab= out the future destination of India and are collaborating with the external organization to bring about the cha= nge in India= . How much is the interaction and to what extent is the link is yet to be determined. The perception of the leftists and communists about non-Muslims= in the subcontinent is the same as of their earlier colonial masters. The forc= e of history is believed to change the non-Muslims to final destination.

Doctrine of Phases=

This doctrine proposes that a series of events and a sequen= ce in time will lead to a course of history. It may take few days or many months = and year even decades but the course of events (history) is such that it will m= ove in a particular direction. One example is that of the Palestinians against = the Israeli state. The ultimate goal is to make the state Palestinian and the J= ews second-class citizens of that state. Something similar is going on Kashmir. The sequence of events is by now all too familiar; first the protest, next the killings, next the political dialogue= and then international attention. The killings transformed the society into a nizam-e-Mustafa, which is supremacy of Islam in the = Kashmir valley over the non-Muslims. So every gruesome murder was a jihad and for t= he benefit for Islam.

When the population in a predominant Islamic society gets r= adicalized they adopt jihad to change the status quo and is done in stages. In Kashmir the madrassas were radicalized in the 70s. = So by early 80s by the middle of 80s many Kashmir youths were fighting in Afghanistan as mujahideens. This gave them sufficient support to start a jihad for their o= ld nationalistic grievances in their hometown. By 1989 the jihadis had started= the jihad in Kashmir and reached the peak by= 1994. Pakistan increased the= scope of this jihad after 1992 for the entire country with the aim of radicalizing the entire Muslim population within India and start a bigger phas= e in its doctrine. The aim was to weaken the state and make it easy to spread Is= lam throughout India.

Negationism in Indian History

This topic borrows heavily from the book by Koenraad Elst,<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Negationism in = India. Negationism simply means in this instance, the denia= l of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The t= erm Negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also know= n as the holocaust (Greek: fire sacrifice) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in s= uch a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted. The negationists themselves prefer to call themselves revisionists, after all they think that there is nothing to deny or negate, and= that the known facts of history are a fabrication which will be exposed when his= tory is given a second look or revised. Many commentators use the two terms interchangeably, and it has become impossible to use the word revisionism (= once used as a Maoist term for Khrushchev's de-Stalinization) except in the sens= e of Negationism. Only a few purists, like the Flemish scholar Gie van den Bergh= e, insist on the distinction between Negationism alias revisionism, and the legitimate revisionism.

Revisionism stricto sensu is then defined as the normal act= ivity of historians, viz. the reassessment of given historical facts. By contrast= , in negationism, facts are not re-interpreted but denied. Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to rewrite history and to deny the millennium long attack of Islam on Hindu= ism. Today, most politicians and English- writing intellectuals in India w= ill go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of communal amity between Hindus and Muslims. Making people believe in a history of Hindu-Muslim amity is not an easy task: the number of victims of the persecutions of Hindus by Muslims is easily of the same order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy, though no= one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the cour= se of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is taboo). On top of these there is a similar number of abductions and deportations to harems and slave-markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and cultural destruction. The American historian Will Durant summed it up thus:"The Islamic conquest of = India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for = its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate compl= ex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." The original source material leaves us in no doubt that conflict often erupted on purely religious grounds, even against the political and economical interests of t= he contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore consists in keeping = this original testimony out of view. A good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's recent book, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. As the title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (another term with a peculiarly nuanced meaning to be found only in India meaning the opposition= to Islam based on the expose of extremist theology in Islam) had been construc= ted by the British for colonial purposes and out of colonial prejudices, was la= ter internalized by Indians looking for new, politically profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society. But the negationists are not satis= fied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the Nat= ional Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other directives, it stipulated that: "Characteriza= tion of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, Negationism has become India's official policy. The political context of the first attempts at Negationism= was chiefly the attempt of the independence movement, led by the Indian National Congress, to eliminate all factors of disunity between Hindus and Muslims. = The Congress leaders were not yet actively involved in the rewriting of history. They were satisfied to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur in 1931, a Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy - im= age by changing the contents of the history-books. The next generation of polit= ical leaders, especially the left wing that was to gain control of Congress in t= he thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess Negationism ve= ry explicitly. The founder of the communist movement in India and later self styled radical humanist (i.e. bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam = had fulfilled a historic mission of equality and abolition of discrimination, a= nd that for this, Islam had been welcomed into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had occurred, it was as a matter of justified class strugg= le by the progressive forces against the reactionary forces, meaning the feudal Hindu upper castes. Of course like other assertions b communists, this one = was also constructed out of thin air with no basis or evidence from history that this ever happened

Around 1920 Al= igarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of= the Indian religious conflict. The main points of his version of history are the following. Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail to notice = that the Islamic chroniclers (including some rulers who wrote their own chronicl= es, like Timur and Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction= of their women and children, and the destruction of their places of worship mo= st gleefully. But, according to Habib, these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please their patrons. Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus, which Habib was prepared to adm= it as historical, is not to be attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors. Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but this = was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples (ergo plunder is perfectly acceptable in Islam). Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage rid= ers from the steppes who would need several centuries before getting civilized = by the wholesome influence of Islam[15]. Their inborn barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam. Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of mi= nor importance in the establishment of Islam in India. What happened was not = so much a conquest, but a shift in public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smrti) a= nd Muslim law (shariat), it chose the latter. The Aligarh school has been emulated on a l= arge scale. Soon its torch was taken over by Marxist historians, who were buildi= ng a reputation for unscrupulous history rewriting in accordance with the party line.

In this context, one should know that there is a strange al= liance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime Minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementa= tion of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language,= and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the education= al and research institutes and policies.

Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on t= he Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the Soviet system, tho= ught completely in Marxist categories. They accepted, for instance, that religio= us conflicts can be reduced to economic and class contradictions. They also adopted Marxist terminology, so th= at they always refer to conscious Hindus as the communal forces or elements (Marxism dehumanizes people to impersonal pawns, or forces, in the hands of god History). The Marxist historians had the field all to themselves, and they = set to work to de-communalize Indian history writing, i.e. to erase the importa= nce of Islam as a factor of conflict. In Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, the Mecca of secularism and Negationism) = in Delhi, write that= the interpretation of medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back projection of contemporary religious conflict artificially created for poli= tical purposes. In Bipan Chandra's famous formula, communalism is not a dinosaur;= it is a strictly modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny that before the modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity or Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between Hindus and Muslims, only between rule= rs or classes who incidentally also belonged to one religious community or the other. They point to the conflicts within the communities and to alliances across community boundaries.

After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims= as such were non-existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries= of a misunderstood non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theo= ry: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the= sly British colonialists. They carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they incited the communal separateness. = Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divi= de has become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a secularist. More Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar's theory (in = her contribution to S. Gopal's book on the Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the current Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, n= ot because the Hindus feel besieged by hostile forces, not because they have a memory of centuries of jihad, but because "a monolithic religion is more compatible with capitalism" (to borrow= the formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the political Hindu movement is merely a concoction by Hindu capitalists, or in her own words "part of the attempt to redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the middle class", in which "modernization is seen as linked to the growth of capitalism". She reads the mind behind the capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: "Capitalism is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if capital= ism is to succeed in Ind= ia, then Hinduism would also have to be molded in a Semitic form".

Subaltern Studies

Subaltern studies are the studies of the marginalized and minorities in any nation or society and this field started albeit at a slow pace after Independence in India and given recognition by vested interests in western academic circles after 1970. Such studies were sponsored mostly by western academic institutions in the last 30 years and = were mainly focused on the Gangetic plains where the Muslim population of India w= as the most concentrated. The new interpretations and concocted history have found roots in American academe and given a "scientific" label for recognition. Some Indian historians and their particular take on the events= of the past and present have found resonance in American academe so that their influence in India is enhanced.

The ICHR has= been the conduit for patronizing scholars through travel grants. It isn't just t= he reward of a foreign trip that the grantee gets. More important are the impressions that are created; the "scholar" gets known abroad as a leading historian of India, his drivel comes to be regarded as the Voice of Indian History; and back home, each trip redoubles his influence -- for one thing, by confirming the fact that he is close to the sources of patronage.= So, since 1972, who has got how much of these travel grants? But these [the for= mer members of ICHR] are not just partisan 'historians’ but are nepotists also. Their doings in the ICHR have been true to pattern. How is it tha= t over twenty five years persons from their school alone have been nominated to th= e ICHR? Dedicated as they were to the cause of = the illiterate downtrodden Indians argued they must have the works of leading historians translated into our regional languages. And which were the "historians" whose books -- old, in many cases out-of-date books - got selected for translation? R. S. Sharma: five books. Romila Thapar : thr= ee books. Irfan Habib: two books -- one being a collection of articles. Bipan Chandra :two books. Muhammad Habib: three books. D. N. Jha : two books. S. Gopal : four books. Nurul Hasan: two books. Even sundry leaders of the Communist parties got the honor -- E. M. S. Namboodripad, P. C. Joshi, even Rajni Palme Dutt, the leader of the British Communist Party who functioned = as the controller and director of the Indian Communists in the forties. As a result, the books and pamphlets of these fellows are available in all regio= nal languages, but the works of even Lokmanya Tilak are not available except in Marathi! Second, in 1972, almost simultaneously with the establishment of t= he ICHR, a project was launched to collect and p= ublish a record of the Freedom Struggle from the Indian point of view. The British= had launched their Transfer of Power Documents series -- which deliberately made out that the British, were ever so ready to leave, and it was only the cussedness of and discord among Indians which delayed their doing so. The project was to be based on Indian documents. New interpretation of the Indi= an people and Hinduism has created a neocolonized generation of Indians in the last 30 years. Rajeev Malhotra ( Infinity Foundation )says: “While subaltern scholars have depicted Hinduism as elitist and Brahmana controlle= d, the sadhus have been subaltern people; the bhakti saints were almost always subaltern people; tantrikas were subalterns and not Brahmins; and the Purana rituals have traditionally been performed by all jatis. Hence, these schola= rs have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because they simply assumed Ma= rx' conclusions about Abrahamic religions as being universally applicable to all cultures - the blind spot from becoming neocolonized.”=

Such changes and wrong depiction of Indian society and cult= ure is done to change the perception of newly educated Indians about India a= nd Indian culture. It creates a class consciousness within the Hindu society a= nd also creates a elite which can be demonized for past wrongs. Social fragmentation is one of the purposes of these studies. This was one of the major campaigns for the reservations for the SC/ST category of the Hindus before and during the independence. Insurgency attracted special attention = when the subaltern studies in the 70s were being done on the history of India. = In India, = the 1857 centenary had stimulated new histories of rebellion, some directly inspired= by rebels like Kattabomman Nayakkar. Romantic heroism was attached to old rebel histories, but in addition, the sixties and seventies raised concern about revolution in the present. Even the Indian Home Ministry feared revolution = and this was being noted by the western academic and more importantly the strat= egic and policy makers in the western capitals. In this context, more scholars t= ook up studies of insurrection and elements of its intellectual history go back to= the twenties, when early Indian studies of Indian rebels sought to recuperate insurgent mentalities. Indigenous Indian theories of peasant revolt had eme= rged in the thirties, among communists and in the Kisan Sabha but in the sixties, the academic study of insurrection came into its own. The western powers ha= ve nurtured various insurgencies inside India<= /st1:country-region> with the help of Pak= istan for several decades [circa from 50s] waiting for upheaval on significant section of the population.

The interaction of these studies with the western universit= ies helped them to understand the nature of these insurgencies and nurture them= if they wanted to. The year 1972[ After the Bangladesh war] proved to be a tur= ning point. It was the year of formation of major and pioneer organizations of nearly all the new social movements and of regional-national organizations = as well. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the AllAssam Students Union, the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), and such farmers' organizations as the Zamindari Union of Punjab, the Tamilnadu Agriculturalists' Association,= and the Khedut Samaj of Gujarat were all fou= nded in that year. In addition, the Anandpur Saheb Resolution (demanding autonomy for Punjab) was drafted in 1972, and India's most famous environme= ntal movement, Chipko, began at that time. But of all the new organizations, the= one that most immediately caught the imagination of youth and progressive intellectuals throughout India was that of the Dalit Panthers, the organiza= tion of ex-untouchable (or Dalit, literally "downtrodden") youth of Maharashtra which represented the first wave of a new anti-caste movement. = In the seventies, this possibility of revolution had become a serious problem, because state institutions had remained substantially unchanged despite many decades of popular insurgency, nationalist agitation, and tumultuous independence not only in 1947 (India and Pakistan) and 1948 (Sri Lanka) but also in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Modern states did not prevent rebellion, but insurgency had not become revolution. Why did nationalism provoke Revolution in China and Vietnam, but not <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">India? = How do oppressed people take over governments? How do nations redesign states? Why= not revolution in South Asia? More attention= was paid to UP and Bihar due to large Muslim population. These were pressing questions for India mainly the Marxists who= se aim was a revolution and willing to wait as long as possible. But the real aim = for the western academic was to find a way to create centrifugal forces inside = India f= or eventual split. This was being monitored by the western strategic community= and institutions and being passed on to Pakistan intellectuals. Pakis= tani commentators during the 90s keep referring to 27 insurgencies going on insi= de India simultaneously for several decades and report that no country can survive t= hat many. Their understanding of the insurgencies inside India seems to have substantial US information given to them from the US academic studies. Subaltern Studies joined debates about insurgency and nationality at the breach betwe= en popular unrest and state power during the 70s( the unrest was of course supported by the agencies in the western governments to create chaos/disord= er inside India). 1975-6 is taken to be turning point in many discussions of recent trends in Indian political culture. The year is significant since it was the year of emergency and Government led by Indira Gandhi exploded the first atomic tes= t in May 1974 and after that there were serious policy initiatives by the US as p= art of the cold war policies. The US was not happy with India supporting insurgency in Pakistan. Till 1977 the Indira Gandhi government actively worked for the democratic aspirations of the Baluchis and Pathans. Baluchi fighters were trained in t= he deserts of Rajasthan. India also provided them with financial and diplomatic assistance. With Bangladesh free, Indira Gandhi reckoned th= at Sindh, Baluchistan and Pakhtunistan shou= ld follow. After her electoral defeat in 1977, Vajpayee as the Janata governme= nt's foreign minister made his first attempt to normalize relations with Pakistan by withdrawing the help to Baluchi and Pushtuns. In India , the breach between insurgency and nationality was widening at the time, in part because, despi= te rampant crises, dominant state institutions had managed to survive as though secure inside a mountain fortress high above the plains. Muslims had acquir= ed a separate political history (and this was the final objective of the western powers in the subcontinent and supported by the western institution and scholars such as Stanley Wolpert. By creating a rival political center their goal is to create a rival and ultimately replace the Indian state) that bec= ame more prominent in the context of Hindu majoritarianism. One of the goals of= US during the 70s and 80s was to make sure that Pakistan had a secure Muslim political history derived from the history of the sub-continent. The proble= m of self-identity for Muslims in subcontinent began when Muslim imperial rule ended. Till 1857 the Indian Muslim who was capable of thinking seriously lo= oked upon himself as a "ruler", a member of the elite, a part (even a = cog is a part) of the imperial machine. This feeling was indefinable, vaguely comprehended, imperfectly conceived, and not commonly expressed in writing = or speech. General Zia ul Haq from 1980 in the name of a debatable patriotism = and an infirm ideology, made his control over history writing and teaching comp= lete, arbitrary, coercive and totalitarian. He (1) subjected all textbooks of Soc= ial Studies to the scrutiny and approval of the Federal Ministry of Education, i.e., a group of civil servants, (2) created a new subject of "Pakistan Studies"; made it compulsory= for all undergraduates in arts, sciences, medicine and engineering, and all graduates in law; and got a special textbook prepared for it by several committees and panels of experts working in close collaboration, and (3) dictated that all these books must meet the requirements of an ideology. Af= ter 1980, an expanding gulf in India between the histories of peoples and states ripped many old bonds between academics and politics. Scholars who claimed to speak for people who had be= en left out of nationalism marched away from scholars who continued to fuse popular history with national politics. Social fragmentation of the kind not seen before became common. But more importantly for many others, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 made the Indian state blatantly dictatorial. A= s new popular movements arose from many quarters in India -- communal, regional, = and expressing radical aspirations among women, peasants, workers, and tribal groups -- old nationalism lost legitimacy and the Left and the Right fought= for its legacy. To quell the disturbances of Punjab and other places the army was called in many times during the 80s. During 8= 1-82 the army was called in more than 60 times, in 82-83 more than 90 times and during 83-84 the army was called more than 150 times. This gives the scale = of insurgency inside In= dia which was planned from outside. The leftist gained in strength by late 70s = and they started a campaign to reduce the kinship between various social classe= s. The old kinship and order was systematically being broken in every sphere i= n India f= rom early 70s. Leftists with active support from the western agencies started a defamation campaign against upper castes and upper caste government officia= ls on a large scale including trade union strikes. This started to break the o= ld kinship and order to bring about social fragmentation of castes, religious = and labor class. This campaign was started after some detailed social economic study of various communities of India in the south Asian studies department in western universities. How long have they been doing this? This could have been planned and executed for several decades with studies possibly from even a century when the first census was done in 1881 under the British rule. The social changes and unrest; was bei= ng watched by the academic and the India watchers in the west with obvious interest. They were forming their own conclusion about the loss of old nationalism. One conclusion was that there would be no new nationalism in future and the state would become weak due to constant dissent and eventually break apart. By using education and media n= ew nationalism was never allowed to flourish. Most of the focus was in UP and = Bihar since they had the largest representation in = the national political structure. Any fragmentation of the polity within these = two states will weaken the central political structure of the country. Popular resistance to state power became a prominent academic theme in the eighties= . In 1986, James C. Scott's Weapons of t= he Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance announced a broad move away = from studies of revolution into the analysis of localized, personal resistance to the power of the elite and states. Foucault’s influence was spreading. By= the nineties, an array of scholars inside and outside India had made everyday resistance a basic feature of life in South Asia. Left-wing extremism, which includes Naxalites and Maoist= s, was turning out to be a major law and order problem in States like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Many Naxalite leader= s like Kanu Sanyal and Charu Majumdar had become icons in the late 60s till mid 70= s. The movement had attracted many urban youths as well including many from middle-class families. The nation was facing a severe economic crisis and social unrest. Many producers suc= h as Khwaja Ahmed make movies glorifying the Naxalites. The conclusion the weste= rn political analyst and the strategic community which they may have drawn watching the development in 70s and 80s was that India was ripe enough for political instability and long term social disorder and eventual balkanizat= ion. The analysts gained insights into weakness in the formation of the political structure at the center in Delhi and in st= ates specifically UP and Bihar containing lar= ge Muslim population. The supporters for Pakis= tan and pro-Pakistan policymakers in the US administration were in the forefront of south Asia policymaking during the = 80s and early 90s and they had come out with a strategy to cap and rollback the= WMD capabilities of the Indian state and even= tual collapse of the Indian state just like the former So= viet Union. The other conclusion they may have derived is that the country gets united when a major war is waged against India since there is a enemy political cen= ter which is identified such as the state of Pakistan. But what is observe= d is that when low intensity conflict is waged in one corner of the country with= out a political center, the public opinion is divided and is not able to rally = to support the government. This is one of the reasons that low level insurgency keeps simmering in different parts of the country but does not get the attention of a critical mass of the population.. By using the press not to focus on the political center of the threat the public can be deceived into complacency. This has allowed Pakistan to continue the low intensity conflict in Kashmir under a nuclear shield without any repercussions during the last 13 years. = The last major offensive that took place along the mountain heights of Kargil, = was also planned the same way with the Pakistan officials denying the involvement of the government and hence a political center behind the war. = The threat perception of the Indian public is vague and can be easily reduced through media and other propaganda. The political parties can be easily sub= dued with coercion and bribery to reduce their rhetoric against threat to the na= tion or any community. By reducing the old historical kinship among communities = the long term plan was to create sub nationalism and political identity which c= an be given support to reduce the political nation. The revolution method was = one which was tried in the early decades to reduce the bonds among communities = and in the last few decades after the globalization of religious conversion, is being used as a tool to break old social bonds and kinship among communities throughout the country. India has never been remotely as united or strong as it is today, and neither is = it a Hindu state. Because of this lack of any precedence the other powers are not able to read correctly the stre= ngth and future of Indian state and social dynamics inside India.<= /p>
But is it possible that such a large scale gigantic conspir= acy is being waged against = India for several decades even after independence. It is hard to believe but the facts and writing of large number of people show a pattern where a large nu= mber of Indians have been mental slaves of foreign institutions and have been subverting India without realizing it.

Anthropology

The history of Indian anthropology was never given due impo= rtance by Indian anthropologists. It neither formed a part of the teaching curricu= lum nor a subject of research. A few like Vidyarthi first reviewed in detail the developments after the introduction of anthropology as an academic discipli= ne in an Indian University in 1920. Although some scholars made brief attempts, no one has discussed the pre-1920 history in detail. In the early years of teaching of anthropology during British days = in India, = Vedas, Upanishads, Samhitas, Puranas <= /i>and other ancient Indian texts formed a part of the curriculum. Later the study= of these ancient Indian texts was discontinued and the subject became heavily dependent on the ‘Oxbridge tradition’ since Oxfor= d and Cambridge became the centers of Indian studies. After 1960 the influence of American anthropology especially that of the ‘Chicago-Cornell school’ prevailed = over the British school. U Chicago and Cornell U had taken over the Indian studies f= rom the British by 60s. From the 70s after the partition of Pakistan ; Colombia and U of California, Berkeley<= /st1:place> had become the centers of Indian Studies. Thus Indian anthropologists were never free from western influence and consequently Indian anthropology lack= ed a distinct identity. Most of the Indian interpretations were actually the interpretations of the west since they were heavily influenced by the weste= rn thought.

Internal Disorders and Strategic Security of India
A western perception of Ind= ia’s internal crisis - National Events: A Spate of Crises describes India with troubled history.

”Even by the= standards of India= ’s troubled history since independence, the domestic situation in the 1980s was grim. As the center concentrated more and more power, relations with the st= ates became warlike. During these years, the increased use of the army was a mea= sure of the civilian bureaucracy’s failure to redress genuine grievances. Alth= ough some of the domestic crises were inevitable, others were created by the poor relationship between New Delhi= and the state capitals. “The army has been increasingly employed for long periods to counter various separatist and insurrectionary movements. The seriousness of the threat is revealed by the number of people killed—16,0= 00 since the Punjab movement began in the 1980s, 5,000 in Assam s= ince 1979. This has led to the deployment of the army from the borders to within= the country for internal security duties. According to one estimate, three and a half divisions had to be withdrawn from the border with China. = In Punjab, 120,000 troops have been used for internal security; some of these troops were previously part of the strike corps and= had to trade their armor for rifles and machine guns.

A Pakistan view of Indian political scene describes India as an argumentative democracy. �= �India is an argumentative democracy cobbled with complex and fluid coalitions. Econ= omic inequality will easily corrode the delicate social contract. The initial gr= owth burst in the early 1990s saw Western states (Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, and = Maharashtra) tear away from the pack. Now it is the= South (led by Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka). But the gigantic states in the Cente= r, the North and the East (Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Laloo Prashad’s Bihar) accounting for a third of the population and two-thirds of India�= �s poor are mired in caste politics, mis-governance and economic deprivation. For maintaining India’s political cohesion, the challenge is to create employment and income opportunities in these states, and this will not be easy. The threat of communal discord to = India’s economic ambitions cannot be underestimated. While Hindutva appeals to upper-caste Hindus and binds them together, it causes great discomfort to Sikhs, Muslims and Christians, all significant minorities in India. = Combine these with Harijans and other low-caste

Hindus marginalized by Hindutva and you have a large segmen= t of the population that is deeply concerned about the excesses of the new found ideology. An ideology that appears to be blessed by the State at the highest levels. More incidents such as the one in Gujarat last year could unleash retaliatory action that would seriously undermine t= he investment climate.” The wrong impression and perception of Indian societ= y and social movement by the elite in Pakistan could be used for taking wrong conclusions and actions by their military.

Chronology of Key Internal disorders

1974 – May - Testing of first bomb in Pokhran in Rajastha= n in India.

1974,November – Internal problems in Congress Party and i= ncrease in dissent with the help of outside agencies. This change after the Indian testing of the Bomb in May 1974 created enough disorder in the government a= nd society that with the global oil crisis put the economy under pressure.

1975,June - Emerg= ency declared. There was wide spread dissent and resistance. There are strikes, chaos and anarchy in many places. But government offices and public sector = were running efficiently.

1977 - Lifting of emergency. The leftist and other parties = were received by the western agencies and academic by giving them support during= the persecution

1979 - Nationalization of Indian business and Indian banks.= Fall of the first non-congress govt. 1980 – Punjab problem with the help of Pakistan.

1981 - The army was called more than 60 times for internal = duty

1982 - The army was called more than 80 times for internal = duty

1983 - The army was called more than 160 times for internal= duty

1984 - Assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Punjab problem with riots

1986 - Operation Brasstacks. Punjab<= /st1:place> problem at its peak

1989 - Bofors scandal which was initiated to put pressure o= n RG government to withdraw from the Brasstacks formation in the western border = and remove him from office, Rajiv Gandhi never recovered from this, April start= of Kashmir terrorism

1990 - Kashmir problem intensifies

1990 - V.P. Singh Government - ordinance was withdrawn by M= r. Singh on October 21, 1990, by which the disputed structure and the land aro= und it were acquired for handing it over to the VHP. As it was vehemently oppos= ed by Muslim leaders and imams, the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, had threatened that he would not allow the ordinance to be implemented.

1991, May - killing of Rajiv Gandhi. Four prime ministers s= ince 1989-1991. The conclusion among western policymakers was that the Congress Party would wither away to a rump organization and would also bring about t= he downfall of India.

1992,December - Ayodhya incident and riots in 1993

1996 - Unstable government at the center with Deve Gowda an= d IK Gujral as PM till 1997. India has seven Prime Ministers in 10 years between 1988 and 1998

1998 - Election and new government which is a coalition of = 23 parties. Pokhran II nuclear testing.

1999 - Fall of Government with a vote of confidence and Kar= gil war in May.

George Perkovich in his book India’s Nuclear Bomb refers= to internal disorder many times and during those times the western policy make= rs have observed that Indian polity looks inwards and does not react to extern= al events. Pakistan looks= at the internal political disorder inside India as a ‘continuous cris= is of leadership’ since 1989, and down hill national resolve’. General Sundar= ji remarked in his book that between 1975 and 1985 the national security of the country was neglected and there was no focus on the external threat. This decade is called the neglected decade in Indian security. This decade was a= lso the decade of maximum turmoil in Indian independent history with emergency = declared. In the book American Prosperity the authors talks about creating/starting strikes inside India= if there is increase of productivity which threatens the industries in the = west because of cheap imports. From a vantage point the Indian society and econo= my is seen as something which can be manipulated to the advantage of the weste= rn countries. The perception of internal disorder inside the Indian army and polity is very important to understand how the Pakistan leadership makes dec= ision. This is the general analysis by Pakistani military establishment about the = India a= rmy during the 80s and early 90s. Typical of such Pakistani viewpoints is the following;

“The Indian military, since the early 1980s, has been a v= ictim of Indian bureaucratic inefficiency and as a result of that, has been extremely curtailed in its military posture and its ability to wage offensive actions= , as seen in the recent crisis, has often been questioned. Starting with the bri= bery allegations in the Bofors scandal, the Indian military has consistently wat= ched as petty political infighting has denied it the resources necessary to main= tain its force in a credible war-fighting mode. The Indian Army was so desperate= for financial assistance that it could not even pay its officer corps with the result that most of its best and brightest officers left the service to pur= sue lucrative jobs in the Private sector. This created a potential leadership g= ap in the Indian Army and hindered the viability of its infantry units, the backbone of any professional army, to carry out their objectives. The Indian middle class, who had traditionally staffed the officer corps of the Indian Army, was leaving it in droves and the army was becoming a hollow shell wit= hout any officers to lead it. This shortfall of financial resources has prevente= d it from modernizing its forces and most of its units are operating equipment, which has far outlived its life expectancy. In a more critical sense, this = lack of funding has made it difficult for the Indians to deploy new weapons syst= ems and they have been gradually losing their qualitative, but what is even wor= se their quantitative edge over the Pakistani armed forces since the mid 1980s. Another troubling omen for the Indian Army was the penchant of the Indian politicians to use it as an well organized riot police to quell domestic political agitation within India itself. Since the political disturbances, which lead to the Indian Army's involvement in the Golden= Temple crisis of the early 1980s, it has been periodically used to prevent sectarian violence, o= ften as a result of the Indian politicians' own shortsighted policies. In the process, especially in the case of the Golden Temple crisis, it has seen its traditions of non-involvement in politics questioned and by being repeatedly being embroiled in such instances, it has witnessed= a loss of morale in its officers and enlisted personnel. This is, because the purpose of an army is to defend its countrymen and not seek to be their jai= lers by fulfilling a role, which can best be done by the local constabulary. The= end result of all this has been that the Indian Army lacks a strategic doctrine spelling out its mission and seems to be divided over its role as a local policeman in Indian politics. As if to add insult to injury, the Indian politicians expect the Indian Army to undertake such duties willingly. They= do not seem to realize that, in lieu of receiving no monetary aid from New Delhi, the ar= my has to use its own budgetary resources, which are poor at best, to finance its = newfound role, bequeathed to it courtesy of the Indian politicians.”[16] Pakistan from 1998 has= been looking at the political situation inside <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">India as crisis of leadership= and will take the opportunity to increase its leverage by being aggressive. The= debate between the secular and the Hindu right inside India is also seen as a weakness inside India to be exploited. Pakistan has increased its leverage inside= India w= ith various NGO to instigate internal disorders such as riots. The presence of a large minority population and other disenfranchised people has been taken u= p by Pakistan= as a Trojan horse to be exploited.

The trade unions and the leaders of the radical parties hav= e been influenced by the west to create disturbances and other chaos in key indust= ries and public sectors which can cripple the government and also bring the government to its knees. This has been used effectively by the western powe= rs to bring the Indian government to the table to talk and yield to pressures.= In Indian public sector and government department; one department takes up iss= ues against another department and goes to the court to solve their differences instead of the administration being the mediator to solve differences for a common goal of national interest as in other countries. The period before emergency with strikes was a period of anarchy which forced the government = to declare emergency. Leaders such as Jaya Prakash Narayan were in the forefro= nt of agitation but were really influenced by outside agencies. Certain sectio= n of the polity has been already influenced by the western academic world and du= ring the cold war the non-communist left has been systematically cultivated so t= he west can influence the course of politics right inside India.<= /p>

Since 1975 the internal disorder has been watched very care= fully by the major powers. They are extremely aware of the fecklessness of the In= dian politicians. The major years which had them change their policy towards India a= re 1975, 1977, 1984, 1989, 1991 and 1996. All these years the political disorder was seen as a crisis in leadership and withering of the largest national party = – congress party and which was also seen as the beginning of the division of = India. = The widespread perception was that a weakened central political core will incre= ase centrifugal forces. One of the reasons for this assessment is that the west= ern policy makers have not been familiar with any party which is non-Congress a= nd which is totally removed from the independence era. India had seven Prime Ministe= rs in 10 years between 1988 and 1998. Most of the non-Congress party rule was dur= ing this period. Stephen Cohen of Brookings Institute opines that the Indian domestic politics is chaoti= c, faction ridden and violent in many states but is expected of a developing c= ountry undergoing simultaneously economic, class, caste and ideological revolution= s.[17] He also says that the center is weak and is unable to create national policy for the entire country. When there is political unity especially during the earlier congress regime of Indira Gandhi internal dissent have been encoura= ged to break the political structure starting from 1975. The political decisions have been to known to be taken by few key people and this provides ample opportunities to create disorder by creating suspicion. Whenever there is a strong political unity among Indians anywhere in the Diaspora the adversari= es have found ways to break the unity. Some riots or controversy can be started which immediately makes the Indian groups to squabble without looking at the big picture political unity for long term. This tendency has been exploited= by the anti-India groups against Indian origin people in US, UK and = other countries. Recent riots in Gujarat has been exploited by Pakistan and Indian leftist to create wedge inside Indian American community and accuse Hindu groups with alleged support for funding riots in India.

In 1975 ABVP-led Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat and the Sam= poorna Kranti agitation led by Jayaprakash Narayan (J.P.)( funded by external agencies) in Bihar had made an impact in= those States. Indira Gandhi appealed to the Supreme Court for an absolute stay or= der against the High Court judgment. On June 24, the Supreme Court granted her a conditional stay, depriving her of voting rights in the Lok Sabha, but allo= wing her to continue as Prime Minister. On June 25, J.P. and other Opposition leaders, including Morarji Desai, held a public rally at the Ram Lila groun= ds in Delhi where they declared that Indira Gandhi should resign; they urged the people to jo= in them in a non-cooperation movement. The following morning, Indira Gandhi announced a national Emergency assumed in view of "threats to national security". The Nav Nirman and the J.P. movements were described as among the threats to national stab= ility. Opposition leaders were arrested, censorship was imposed, and a ban was soon announced on grassroots organizations. Campaigns for discipline and productivity were instituted, including Indira Gandhi's 20-point program, but what became most controversial was Sa= njay Gandhi's five-point program. Two of those five points were mainly pursued, namely, sterilization campaigns, allegedly aimed disproportionately at Musl= ims, and urban "beautification" drives beginning at settlements in the Jama Masjid area in Delhi. The backlash against these campaigns was widespread. After this the congress party lost its supporters and the old bond among regions and regional congr= ess blocks due to earlier nationalism withered away. This was the ultimate moti= ve of the outside powers to reduce the political cohesion of Indian union form= ed by the earlier nationalism. When Shah Bano petitioned the lower courts for continuing maintenance from her former husband in 1986, she could little ha= ve imagined that her name would become synonymous with the rightists' charge of 'Muslim appeasement' by so-called secular parties. After three rounds in the courts, the Supreme Court finally found in her favor, noting for good measu= re its deep regret that some of the interveners who supported the appellant [ie, the man; Shah Bano was the respondent in this case], took up an extreme position by displaying an unwarranted zeal to defeat the right to maintenance of women who are unable=

to maintain themsel= ves.] The divisive political debate on= this case created a set of motions which went out of control. The secular and ri= ght wing debate became shrill after this legislation. That broad swipe by the supreme court at the despicable conduct of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, however, didn't cut any ice with a government bent on maintaining its political support from minorities, engineered through the machinations of religious figure-heads. Making possibly the worst judgment of his forgettab= le tenure at the helm of the Congress Party, Rajiv Gandhi turned to his landsl= ide majority in Parliament to help the extremists reassert control over everyday Muslim life. From there, one might observe, it has been plainly downhill, a= nd 'appeasement' has become the catch-phrase of rightists' criticism of the secular parties.

Prolegomena to the rest of the Book

The intent of this narrative is to understand the sequence = of events since Independence and especially after 1971 and the forces that benefited thereby. The inexplicable hostility of the policy making elite in the US to the rise of the Indic civilization c= an now be explained as a pattern given the assumptions that were made by the Weste= rn Powers, primarily the Anglo Saxons led by the US and its satellite Br= itain.

The germination of the plan to create an alternate center of Sunni Islamic power instantiates with William Skawen Blunt[18] in the nineteenth century. The leaders= hip of the Atlantic alliance has never wavered from this fundamental paradigm and = the execution of the plan has continued to this day. The constant appeasement of the Islamic Ummah within the subcontinent prior to partition and the five decades long courtship of Pakista= n by the US/UK axis now begins to take= shape as a long term strategy to bolster a Sunni Islam state within the subcontin= ent and encourage the eventual extinction of the Indic civilization in its ancestral homeland.

What was imagined to be a project that would take at most no longer than 2 decades after the independence of India, took some unexpected t= wists. Contrary to expectation India occupied Kashmir, a move that Britain never forgave India<= /st1:place>, accustomed as they were, to having their way in the subcontinent. Little did they expect that the men of straw ( a characterization by Winston Churchill describing the caliber of the Indian leadership) from the subcontinent would produce a Sardar Patel who unified the Princely states in a masterful displ= ay of persuasive diplomacy. In fact this was the second disappointment for Britain, that India was able to unify these states so rapidly and with such skill in such a short time. Especially so, since they had coached the Princes and emphasized the option of independenc= e, specifically where I= ndia was involved.

The third setback was the decisive defeat of Pakistan in 1971. Never in their remotest calculations had they figured that the martial races of Pakistan woul= d so decisively be humbled and humiliated by the Babus (bureaucrats) of India.<= /p>

The fourth setback (and I am certain not the last) was the declaration by India= that she was a Nuclear Power in 1998. The prevention of India f= rom becoming a nuclear power was a canonical commandment of the US State Depart= ment Brahmins. The resulting discomfiture is one from which they have yet to recover.

Old habits die hard however and the quest for the creation = of a Sunni Islamic center in the Subcontinent, of which Pakistan is only considered an unfinished result, goes on unabated. Succeeding chapters will explore speci= fic aspects of these events in greater detail.

1971 a watershed y= ear

Challenges faced by India

Civilizational Threats

Ascendancy of the western powers

Civilizational States= [7]

What’s in a name; ‘India’ and the ‘Indian’= Identity

The studies of India and of Indians - Indian= s are moldable and ‘like this onlee’

The role of the In= dian Diaspora

The Geopolitics of Recent History

Long Term Legacy of the Cold War

South Asia Studie= s

Force of History

Doctrine of Phases=

Negationism in Indian History

Subaltern Studies

Anthropology

Chronology of Key Internal disorders

Prolegomena to the rest of the Book

[16] F.R.Khan,A Road to Siachen An analysis of the Pakistani military thought a= nd its interests in the Kargil crisis.http://babriet.tripod.com/articles/art_r= oadsiachen.htm