Harvard versus Subramanian Swamy - Dr. Gautam Sen

Harvard versus Subramanian Swamy

Jan 5 2012 |


Harvard university versus Dr Subramanian Swamy

The views of Harvard University academics on the state of the world and their opinions on the morality of lesser breeds cannot be ignored. The cancellation of Dr. Subramanian Swamy’s summer school courses by a vote that barely met the quorum of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences should presumably nevertheless have elicited penitent silence. It is ultimately also backed by the might of the most formidable military machine in world history. A country whose record of chastisement of lesser breeds across Asia, since President McKinley, makes Caesar’s pacification of Gaul akin to a headmaster’s rap on the knuckles.

The reasoning of Harvard faculty, especially when espoused by pen pushers of uncertain intellectual acumen like Diana L. Eck and Sugata Bose, rather nag at the Baniya-Brahmin sense of logic excoriated in the prolonged Anglo-American assault against India since the 1950s. Sugata Bose would have reached the apogee of his less than stellar academic career, as head of department in a provincial British university had it not been for his family antecedents and powerful patronage. Of Diana Eck I know little, but note her propensity for undergraduate hyperbole, masquerading as ethical rectitude, deep thought of the kind many non entities in universities indulge. But fortune favours the mediocre in a morally depraved and politically corrupt world.

Dr. Subramanian Swamy’s extravagant sentiments on what Indian Muslims should acknowledge, in the aftermath of repeated mass killings of Indians by their Pakistani co-religionists, appear to have three components. First that Muslims accept the banal truth that their ancestors were largely of Hindu origin. It happens to be an unexceptionable truism that any Muslim could admit in passing, even while planning the next bomb outrage to murder descendants of the self-same Hindus with whom Muslim ancestry is shared. It is perhaps a less stringent demand than the exacting German injunction against Holocaust denial, to which Republican France is minded to add denial of the Armenian genocide as deserving criminal sanction as well. It is unnecessary to note that many fascists, Islamic Jihadis and indeed sovereign Muslim governments transgress these injunctions without batting an eyelid or encountering the threatened sanctions.

Second, Dr Swamy’s plaintive appeal that Muslims recognise a common ethnic and religious ancestry with Hindus, rather than Sugata Bose’s devious imputation that it represents a demand to acknowledge Hindu primacy, is coupled with a somewhat childish threat of disenfranchisement. In the context of the pained appeal to remember long lost brotherhood with Hindus in the antecedent plea, the threat of disenfranchisement is equivalent to a parental promise to one’s persistently naughty offspring that being thrown straight out of the window is in prospect. It is both impassioned and completely exaggerated, for effect!

The third, more potent demand is not so much the counterpart of an errant child being told to return usurped toys to siblings, but restitution of some, though not all, Hindu holy sites destroyed by iconoclastic Islamic invaders. To paraphrase the words of historian Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Muslim invaders destroyed all temples they could reach in northern India and those that survived did so because they eluded their reach. Understandably, the temple of imperial learning, Harvard University, Christian in its deepest sources of inspiration, cannot sympathise with the anguish of pagan Hindus. The most ambitious Hindu demand is for the restoration of a mere three temples, out of tens of thousands trampled underfoot by Muslim rulers. Perhaps the monotheistic, Harvard professor of religion, Diana L. Eck, empathises with the need to end the obscenity of polytheism, so sternly forbidden by her own austere faith.

In the 1920s a Harvard University President had sought to limit the numbers of Jews being admitted though supposedly only to protect these awfully gifted students from a feared Christian backlash! Evidently, racial and ethnic animus has always lurked beneath the surface of a country founded through genocide and sustained by plantation slavery. Thus it was no surprise when another Harvard President gleefully recommended in 1991 that lesser breeds be exposed to the toxic consequences of environmental depredations of which his ilk in wealthy countries would be the principal beneficiaries. He was forced to resign only after he appeared to categorise white American women with these lesser breeds evidently suitable for exposure to toxic death. No wonder an American company was able to escape appropriate punishment for mass murder in the worst industrial calamity in India’s history.

Dr. Subramanian Swamys’ easily misunderstood cry of despair on behalf of beleaguered Hindus created a fortuitous occasion for Harvard University to demonstrate solidarity with bigoted Islamic regimes that publicly denounce Jews and advocate their erasure in war. And it accepts with shameless alacrity lucre from these criminal regimes, even when nineteen nationals of the most villainous among them have committed the greatest act of mass murder in American history since the Civil War. But then Harvard also continued to harbour war criminals like Henry Kissinger despite their obscene violation of the most basic tenets of decency and humanity. Perhaps Harvard University has inadvertently done Dr Subramanian Swamy and Hindus across the world a favour by reminding them both of its own hypocrisy and criminal duplicity.

Dr.Gautam Sen
(Taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science for more than two decades and is co-author of Analyzing the Global Political Economy, Princeton University Press, 2009)

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