Sunday, February 15, 2015

8 Indian Anti Hindu Intellectuals

1. Angana Chatterji

 Books:
  • Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa
  • Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival in Orissa
Pronouncements:
  •  In Gujarat, Hindu extremists killed 2,000 people in February-March of 2002. 
  •  Grassroots democracy threatens upper-caste Hindu dominance and contradicts elite aspirations.
  • In Orissa, egregious infringements of human rights are taking place with the disintegration of Adivasi and other non-Hindu cultures through their hostile incorporation into dominant Hinduism.
  • After being nominated Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001, Mr. Narendra Modi incorporated the teachings of Hindutva in his governance of Gujarat. .
  • India’s contrived enemy in Kashmir is a plausible one — the Muslim “Other,” 
  • Disenfranchised caste and other groups, Assamese, Nagas, Sikhs, Dalits (erstwhile “untouchable” peoples), and Muslims from Kashmir
(Links 12 & 3)
Career Summary
  •  Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA, “Save the Narmada Movement”).
  • Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL), , Friends of South Asia (FOSA) 
  • PhD in the Humanities from California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).
  • United Nations Bodies, the European Parliament Human Rights Subcommittee, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congressional Commissions and Task Forces.
  • Chatterji is the Co-chairman of the Research Project on Armed Conflict and People’s Rights at the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership, University of California at Berkeley
  • Chatterji co-founded the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir with Parvez Imroz in 2008 and served as Co-Convener from April 2008 to May 2012.
  • Angana Chatterji was suspended from CIIS on 19 July, 2011 and on 25 October the CIIS Academic VP has recommended her termination. This was due to her links with Ghulam Nabi Fai, an ISI mole in the USA.
2. Romila Thapar

Books:
  • Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, 1978
  • Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, 2003; Oxford University Press
  • Cultural Transaction and Early India: Tradition and Patronage
  • Dissent in the Early Indian Tradition
  • Early India: From Origins to AD 1300
Pronouncements:
  • Early India“Some settlements in the north-west and Punjab might have been subjected to raids and skirmishes [by the Aryans], such as are described in the Rig Veda…
  • “I do not see the medieval period as one where the Muslims are the conquerors. 
Career Summary:
  • After graduating from Punjab University, doctorate School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London in 1958. Professor of Ancient Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.visiting professor at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the College de France in Paris.
  • General President of the Indian History Congress in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. members of t Delhi Urban Heritage Foundation due to her proximity with Najeeb Jung, Lt. Governor of Delhi.
  • believes in the discredited theory of Aryans invading India.
  •  non-existence of a temple in the disputed site of Ayodhya. 
  • Romila Thapar’s named in the factual expose by Arun Shourie in  Eminent Historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Exposed by Sita Ram Goel,  Arun Shourie and similar scholars  the fact that she does not know Sanskrit.
3. Father Cedric Prakash

Books : Yes, We Can! Book series. (Books on moral science)
Notable articles: 
  • Let Us Not Be Naive About Naveen Patnaik
  • Can the election on April 16 in the Kandhmals ever be free and fair?
  • Vibrant Gujarat: Lies, Half Truths and Illusions
  • India: Gujarat Government Continues With Communal Agenda
  • Gujarat Carnage: Seven Years On . . . Seven Major Concerns and More
The aforementioned articles are mainly about the Kandhamal violence and the Gujarat government then headed by Narendra Modi.
Pronouncement:
In June 2002, he testified before the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in Washington. Gujarat riots
Career Summary 
  • Father Cedric Prakash is a Jesuit Priest of the Gujarat.
  • He graduated from St. Xavier’s College in 1972.
  • AICUF (All India Catholic University Federation) in Chennai  World Council of Youth.
  •  Director of PRASHANT, the Ahmedabad-based Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace 
  •  critic of Narendra Modi,  in collaboration with John Dayal and Teesta Setalvad.
  • associated US-based think tank, Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC),activistLocal Capacities for Peace Project at the Harvard University. ­
  • Cedric Prakash was also invited to Luxembourg in 2002 and later, to London for discussions with the European Union and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government.
Prakash has won several awards including:
  • The Kabir Puraskar by the President of India in 1995.
  • The Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Award by the Indian Muslim Council (USA) in June 2003.
  • Chevalier de la Legion Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the President of the French Republic in July 2006.
  • Minority Rights Award from the National Minority Commission, Government of India in December 2006
  • The Human Dignity Award from the Diocese of Ahmedabad in February 2010.
4. John Dayal

Notable books:
  • Human Rights: A Close Look.
  • Justice & Peace Commission, All India Christian Council: Gujarat 2002: untold and re-told stories of Hindutva lab.
  • John Dayal : A matter of equity: freedom of faith in secular India.
Pronouncement: 
AT the Policy Institute for Religion and State (PIFRAS) held a South Asia Conference, sponsored by “United Methodist Board of Church and Society and the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA” John Dayal, as a participant, had contended that “minorities could not count on the Indian state to protect them, or to prosecute crimes committed against them.” 
Career Summary: 
  • Closely associated with the activities of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), which was instrumental in several nation-wrecking legislations.
  • National Integration Council,a witness to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC)’s hearingtitled “Plight of Religious Minorities in India” 
  •  Communal Violence Bill.
  •  supported, sponsored, nurtured and protected by the Congress party.”
5. Vinay Lal:

Books:
  • Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy
  • The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India
  • Empire and the Dream-Work of America.
  • Introducing Hinduism
Pronouncement:
Labelled the Ramayana as a sectarian text that spoke of a clash between Shaivites and Vaishnavites because Ravana is a follower of Shiva and Rama is believed to be an avatar of Vishnu. He also dubbed the Puranas as sectarian texts.
Career Summary:
  • He was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku).
  •  Presently associate professor of history at UCLA.
  •  Earned his B.A. and M.A., both in 1982, from the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins Universityand wrote his Master’s thesis on Emerson and Indian philosophy.
  •  Studied cinema in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a PhD with Distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1992.
  •  Was William Kenan Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University in 1992–93.
  •  In his blog titled Lal Salam (Red Salute, making no secret of his commitment to Communism), he describes himself thus: His views on American foreign policy and the pax Americana have earned him a place in David Horowitz’s book on the 101 ‘most dangerous’ professors in America today, while his critiques of extreme Hindu nationalism have made him a target of Hindutva venom in the US. These are reliable indicators, to his mind, that he is performing some useful public service, and that academics and scholars must remain vitally engaged in the wider public domain.
6. Martha Nussbaum:

Books:
  • Cultivating Humanity
  • Sex and Social Justice
  • From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law
  • Plato’s ‘Republic': the good society and the deformation of desire
  • The clash within: democracy and the Hindu right
  • The new religious intolerance: overcoming the politics of fear in an anxious age
Pronouncements:
  • In India, the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special case of Kashmir) but Hindus who sought ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European anti-Semitism of the 1930s.
  • A Hindu nation is not a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland.
  • The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims (The clash within: democracy and the Hindu right)
  • What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world.
Career Summary:
  • current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago,
  • Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program.
  • philosophy while at Harvard University,
  • Amartya Sen with whom she shared an intimate relationship,
  • She does not have any qualification or training in archeology, Sanskrit, geology, or metallurgy, yet writes with authority about the dating of the Vedas.
7. Vijay Prashad

Books:
  • The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
  • The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
  • Arab Spring, Libyan Winter
  • Uncle Swami: Being South Asian in America
Pronouncements:
  • caste system that is Aryan in origin,the Dalits or Untouchables.
  • . Early conversions are not by the sword but by the merchants .historian Romila Thapar’s superb book ‘Samantha: The Many Voices of a History’ (Penguin, 2005). …..
Career Summary:
  • Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies, at Trinity College in HartfordConnecticut.
  • Prashad is one of the founding fathers of the FOIL and is the author of several books regarding South Asia, and has often written articles and papers on US imperialism and capitalist hegemony and impacts of this across the world.
  • In case of India he has often supported Kancha Ilaiah who made his academic repute by tossing out ill-informed interpretations of Indian mythology, presenting them as ‘Aryan-Brahminical’ conspiracies against the down-trodden, while simultaneously claiming to be a follower of the rationalist Ambedkarite school of thought.
8. Meera Nanda

Books:
  • Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays
  • Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India.
  • Postmodernism And Religious Fundamentalism: A Scientific Rebuttal To Hindu Science
  • The God Market
Pronouncements:
  • The roots of “Vedic science” can be traced to the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist constructions of Vedic antiquity as the “Golden Age” of Hinduism. Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism, important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta, key Hindu nationalist reformers – from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – began to find in it all the elements of modernity. Vivekananda took the lead in propagating the view that the monism of Advaita Vedanta presaged the future culmination of all of modern science. Since modern science denied the role of any supernatural force outside nature, Vivekananda claimed that only Vedantic monism was truly scientific for it treated God as an aspect of nature and did not invoke any force external to nature…. (Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India)
  •  The Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to Hindu “renaissance”, which they claim to be similar to the European Renaissance that ushered in the modern age in the West. What they forget is that the Renaissance in the West re-discovered the humanistic and naturalistic sources of the Greek tradition that had been overshadowed by the Catholic Church – the Renaissance humanists rediscovered this-worldly philosophy of Aristotle and critical-realist Socrates over the other-worldly philosophy of Plato. The neo-Hindu “renaissance”, in contrast, re-discovered the most mystical and anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic inheritance – Advaita Vedanta – that had always overshadowed and silenced the naturalistic and scientific traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. Neo-Hinduism is no renaissance, but a revival. There is no denying that the neo-Hindu “discovery” of modern science in ancient teachings of Vedas and Upanishads had a limited usefulness. Since they had convinced themselves that their religion was the mother of all sciences, conservative Hindus did not feel threatened by scientific education. As long as science could be treated as “just another name” for Vedic truths, they were even enthusiastic to learn it….. (Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India)
  • Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis…. “Not as Old as You Think… …nor very Hindu either. There is telling evidence to debunk this nationalistic myth”, Open The Magazine, Online Edition,
Career Summary:
  • Meera Nanda is an Indian writer, historian and philosopher of science with a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was a John Templeton Foundation Fellow in Religion and Science (2005–2007).
  • From January 2009, she became a Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Study, in the Jawaharlal Nehru University for research in Science, Post-Modernism and Culture besides being a visiting faculty of history and philosophy of science at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.
  • The bulk of her writings is a critique towards any attempt to study Hinduism in the light of science. Interestingly as she was associated with the John Templeton Foundation, she did praise the Protestant work ethic whereas the notion of Practical Vedanta is criticized.

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