Intellectual terrorism - By N S Rajaram

jun 8th, 2008

bloody racist sepoys, these pseudo-secularists are.

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From: Sush

Intellectual terrorism 

 

By NS Rajaram

Edit page dailypioneer.com June 3, 2008

 

Apropos Mr Saradindu Mukherji's article, "Humiliated and broken" (May 31), I would like to point out that Nehruvian feudalism leading to the setting up of national institutions like ICHR and ICSSR has given rise to a media-scholar nexus that has created a climate of intolerance in which any deviation form the politically correct norm is ruthlessly suppressed in the name of 'secularism'. I had a taste of this when I was nominated member of the Indian Council of Historical Research (which I declined for personal reasons). The JNU-AMU 'secular' priesthood launched a vicious media attack on me, with a leading New Delhi-based newspaper writing editorials about my 'anti-secular' sins. Being an independent scholar it had no effect on me, but one can easily imagine the terror it would strike in the hearts of young and vulnerable workers in academia.

 

The results of this scorched earth policy are there for all to see. At the time of independence, India had historians of the stature of RC Majumdar and Jadunath Sarkar. What is the scene like today? All the important advances in Indian history have come from the work of non-establishment scholars like VS Wakankar, Natwar Jha, Shrikant Talageri, David Frawley and their colleagues. Our 'eminent historians', beginning with Romila Thapar, have done nothing comparable beyond tinkering with what they received from their colonial masters and recasting it in the secular-Marxist straitjacket.

 

A particularly ugly aspect of this 'secularist' mindset is the continued attachment to racist abominations like the Aryan myth. In my nearly 25 years in the US and Europe, I never felt disadvantaged because of my race. But here in India, the intelligentsia is excessively deferential towards anyone with fair skin, covertly using it to proclaim the superiority of White scholarship to denounce new ideas put forward by Indians. This came to the fore when the disgraced Harvard linguist Michael Witzel and his charlatan colleague Steve Farmer were trotted out by 'secularist' scholars and the Leftist media to launch personal attacks on workers who demonstrated the Vedic-Harappan identity and overthrew the Aryan invasion theory.