Indian director, screenwriter and author
In India, people fight with all their might to kill an idea. The privileged people. The biggest problem with our establishment is that it has no space for a new idea. Art, cinema, and media haven’t developed enough to present new ideas for adoption. They are engaged in the politics of survival and therefore the outcome is mediocre and very often regressive. Most of the ideas are perceived as dissent. As disruption. As treason. Sometimes ideas like Naxalism, become violent and seditious. Despite being a democracy, in our country there is very little room for an alternate narrative. Whenever a child comes up with an innovative idea, parents, neighbours, teachers, and society crush the idea by telling him 'Kyon apna waqt barbad karte ho, yahan kuch nahin hone wala—don't waste your time.’ It can't be that all of them are idiots. They speak from their experience. 'Aise hi chalta hai … don't be stupid '…. Nothing is going to change… you don't know their power.'
The people who work as their mouthpieces also know very well but they succeed in spreading the lie as they have been controlling the narrative. We broke into it, challenged it and tried to introduce a new narrative. In the last six months, we have travelled in deep Bastar and recorded umpteen stories of Naxal barbarity and exploitation of Adivasis. The awareness the film created has given a lot of confidence to ex-Naxals who have been secretly wanting to share their stories with me. This is the victory of Buddha.
They tried to shut me up by painting me as a part of the Hindutva campaign. But it was never about Hindutva. It’s neither about freedom of speech or intolerance. This is a tactic employed to protect their castles. They confuse the issue by bringing in lots of counter news and views. They quote laws. They try to make it look like an anti-RSS, anti-BJP issue. This isn’t about any of the above. It’s about a war against India. In 2010, there was an intelligence report that terror groups were making inroads in Indian universities. Everyone ignored it exactly like when intelligence said Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber. They believe in intelligence reports only when it suits them. This is India’s real threat.
But as soon as you enter a university, we witness a radical and communal face of Communism. Here, they propagate the weaknesses and evils of Hindu culture. They manipulate and twist ancient books to misrepresent them and provoke students. For example, they use Tulsidas' chaupai, without mentioning the rest of the Ramcharitmanas, which is the real context. "ढोल गंवार शूद्र पशु नारी, सकल ताडना के अधिकारी." Dhol ganvar shudra pashu nari, sakal tadana ke adhikari. The above lines are spoken by the Sea Deity Samudra to Ram. When Lord Ram got angry and took out his weapon in order to evaporate the whole sea, the deity appeared and said the above lines in the context of boundaries that are created by God himself in order to hold his creations. What Leftists do is that they very cleverly translate it literally in Hindi, ignoring the fact that Ramcharitmanas is written in Awadhi and the same word means one thing in Hindi and another in Awadhi. While the literal meaning of the line in Hindi is 'Drums, the illiterate, lower caste, animals and women deserve a beating to straighten up and get the acts together', its real meaning in Awadhi is different. In Awadhi, tadna means to take care, to protect. Whereas, in Hindi, the same word means punishment, torture, oppression. Samudra meant that like drums, the illiterate, Shudra, animals and women need special care and need to be protected in the boundary of a social safety net. In the same way, the sea also needs to reside within the boundaries created by God. And hence, Samudra gave the suggestion to create the iconic Ram Setu. Here, Shudra doesn't mean lower caste or today's Dalit. It meant people employed in cottage industries. I remember there is a book by R.C. Dutta, Economic Interpretation of History, in which he has said that when the Indian economy was based on the principles of Varna, handicrafts accounted for over twenty-five percent of the economy. Artisans and labour who were involved in the handicraft business were called 'Shudra'. If there was so much caste-based discrimination, why would Brahmins use their produce? Both Dutta and Dadabhai Naoroji have written that the terminology of 'caste discrimination' was used by the British to divide Indian society on those lines. Manish continues, Like the British, they provoke young students to believe that Hindu scriptures are against Dalits and women and want them to suffer torture. Young students are emotional and passionate. They come here with the dream of changing the world. The concept of "revolution" attracts them and they get swayed by an illogical logic.
Another problem with our media, intellectuals, elites and posh class is that they are always negative. Desperate. Insecure. All signs of a weak institution. They are scared that if the hungry masses get empowered, they will destroy their empires built on the blood and sweat of the same people. That’s why they constantly try to keep the masses deprived, and their very existence in fear. They never let the masses forget who is Superior and who is Inferior.
I open the newspapers but there is no news about the sabotage. It would have been national news backed up with protests if I were a Dalit or a Muslim or a Leftist or a liberal. Indian media, especially the metro-based English media, is the most dishonest institution of India. They are always in a hurry, their questions are statements, they have no courtesy, they are arrogant, rude and humiliating. They are always running late for something and, therefore, have no concentration. I am not talking about those hundreds and thousands of hard-working young girls and boys who are running from one breaking news to another. I am talking about those who instruct them to twist the news. Or who twist it themselves to further their or someone else’s agenda. And it’s no rocket science to understand the design of this parallel politics. They have become victims of their own agenda. For the last 70 years, English media has loved to paint any rightist organization, especially RSS, as regressive, uncivilized, aggressive and fundamentalist. Any organization connected with RSS e.g. ABVP is considered a party of goons. Whereas the student members of left-wing parties are considered rebels, revolutionaries, progressive and intellectuals. It’s more like a perception battle. The media has created a ‘group of somebodies’ and a ‘group of nobodies’. Those raising slogans against the State of India are painted as The Superiors and the ones singing ‘Vande Mataram’ as The Inferiors. This is the reason why people like to associate themselves with the left – The Superiors. Some people like to believe they are liberals. Liberals are those who do liberal things, not the ones who are against the right. If you look at the reporting of the Jadavpur University crisis after the seditious JNU incident, they always wrote ‘left-wing students’ and ABVP goons or outsiders. I realized this when a journalist asked me at JU, ‘What do you have to say about the presence of some outsiders, ABVP goons?’ I wondered, ‘Aren’t they students here? Aren’t they called Akhil Bhartiya VIDYARTHI Parishad? Vidyarthi means student.’ She was taken aback and said ‘But…no… yeah… But…’ I knew she had no answer, only biases. I again asked her, ‘Aren’t they students of the same university? What do they need to do to be recognized as students? Raise anti-India slogans?’ She got upset and left me to cover the protesting students – the real students, according to her.
[He said:] ‘Students belonging to SC/ST are attracted to Leftist propaganda because of the fraud theory of Aryan-Dravidian divide. Leftists have also misrepresented Indian epics like Manu Smriti and manipulated Indian history books to brainwash students. Students from Kashmir with a jihadi mentality easily get attracted towards Leftists as they both have a common agenda of weakening India.’
A pattern is emerging. The Urban Naxals are installed in top institutes. Institutes which matter, which engineer the narrative. They are using these campuses as ‘intellectual training zones’. Like in the military, no point of view other than the combat is allowed to enter a soldier’s mind; in these campuses, no narrative other than theirs is allowed to pass through the minds of their intellectual soldiers.
They work exactly like religion. Most religious books are based on fear. If you do this, that will happen. Nobody knows what ‘this’ or ‘that’ is. Social justice, if it has to come, will come only from a free and fair market. Why didn’t our liberals tell us this simple truth? When agendas, vote banks, and self-delusion take over, reasoning and sympathy are needed to keep up a common conversation. Without it, there is aggression, deafness, and an obsession with purification; hence the divisive politics of Boutique Liberalism. Boutique Liberalism is an Indian tragedy and a very damaging detour into the quicksand of communalism. Indian Liberalism has come to mean the colour opposite of saffron. That’s their failure. In a desperate attempt, their new mantra is – ‘We don’t care if you are a murderer, we want to know whether you are a liberal or a Sanghi murderer?’
The intellectual hierarchy has been demolished. It’s a sad commentary that in the world’s largest democracy, writers’ protest has become a subject of jokes. The power-hungry artists, writers, academics, and media-persons in India waste a huge amount of time making political statements to hide behind their lack of intellectual stands. Michel Houellebecq wrote Submission, a strong political statement; he didn’t get press coverage for returning some award. The lustre is gone from our intellectual discourse. Secularism has lost its ideological currency. Artists, writers, activists are all suspect. Media czars have lost their access to the corridors of power and to people’s hearts. It’s the overclass’ space that has been taken over by the underclass. Their discomfort is with the new order where the others are also heard. Hence, the feeling of shrinking space. They are intolerant of this new phenomenon – the emergence of the underclass. They try to devalue this new, empowered underclass by associating it with Modi and, therefore, Hindutva, and that’s a grave mistake. The universe that was full of their voice has expanded to accommodate this new voice. This is what they call an attack on FoE and growing intolerance.