Jews and Hindus are experiencing increased — and more diverse forms of — prejudice. It’s time we forge a partnership to fight it

GREAT DEAL has been discussed about the failure of Israel’s intelligence apparatus and political leadership to anticipate and prevent the horrific events of October 7, even in the face of clear evidence. I’d like to discuss, however, a more pervasive intellectual failure — the failure to recognize the threat that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs pose to Jews — and the opportunity this presents for American Jewish and Hindu allyship.

In the early days of DEI, many Jews and Hindus were instinctually supportive of its goals. How could there be anything wrong with supporting other minority groups in the service of a richer society? But both groups were largely blind to the theoretical underpinnings of the movement, and further to its potential weaponization in the aftermath of October 7. Hedge-fund manager and major Democratic and Harvard donor Bill Ackman admitted as much in an extended January 3 post on X (formerly Twitter), including a trenchant and compelling critique.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.

And Ackman is one to know; his undergraduate thesis at Harvard was entitled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.” It is specifically these groups — often described as “model minorities” who have made much of the American dream — who have ended up on the oppressive side of the DEI ledger, specifically on account of their success.

But the very term “Asian American” elides a great diversity of nationality and religious affiliation. A 2012 Pew Research study entitled “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths” found Asian-American Hindus to be the most financially successful ethno-religious group in the United States. Forty-eight percent have a household income above $100,000, whereas the second-most successful religious group by this metric — Jews — are at 40 percent. In the realm of education, Hindus and Jews outstrip other minorities by an even greater margin. “Eighty-five percent of Hindu-Americans are college graduates, and 57 percent have some postgraduate education, which is nearly five times the national average.” Pew numbers from 2016 show an undergraduate-degree rate of 59 percent for Jewish Americans.

These statistics underscore why Jewish and Hindu Americans are not only left unprotected by DEI but are in fact considered to be part of the problem by virtue of their overrepresentation. But in an age of DEI, isn’t it curious that, despite their ubiquity on college campuses, “only 5 percent of colleges had groups for Hindu students” according to a 2022 study?

What this amounts to is an emerging shared reality for Jews and Hindus, one in which they are subject to the hateful consequences of achievement — a paradoxical form of prejudice characterized by accusations of disproportionate wealth on the one hand and, on the other, inferiority. In August 2022, as reported by The Washington Post, the Coalition of Hindus of North America hosted a briefing, highlighting “memes and online social cyber signals referring to perceived ‘dirty’ and ‘scamming’ qualities of Hindus,” according to lead researcher Joel Finkelstein. “Many of the memes were manufactured out of commonly used tropes against Jewish people, using tilaks, swastikas and bindis to signify Hindu culture.”

In academia, antisemitism and Hinduphobia both draw from Marxist models that take aim at the Jewish and Hindu national projects, particularly vis-à-vis their relationship to the Muslim populations in their respective homelands. It is an ironic offense given that both traditions predated Islam by generations, only to be supplanted and persecuted by the imperial forces of Islam. In the case of Hindus, this persecution was especially present within their own homeland. The Islamic invasions of the Indian subcontinent started in the seventh century in what is now Afghanistan and then Sindh, moving toward the Indian heartland steadily over several centuries. To this day Muslims persist in claiming property rights over key sites that were long sacred to Hindus before Muslims arrived. Somehow, progressive on-campus indignation about imperialism focuses only on its Western version.

This alliance between Islamism and progressive intellectualism is fragile and shortsighted because of fundamental incompatibilities in their core tenets. Bound only by their shared antipathies, they are strange tactical bedfellows in their quest for power, seeking to dismantle the prevailing social order and replace it with alternatives that are mutually irreconcilable. Their views on a host of issues — personal autonomy, religious freedom, feminism, political legitimacy, to name but a few — could not be further apart, yet together they offer a momentary mix of righteous indignation and sophisticated pedigree, religious rage and liberal credibility. But the commonalities between Hinduphobia and antisemitism reveal a deeper connection between Jewish and Hindu heritage in contradistinction to the violent Christian–Muslim drama that animated the Eastern Hemisphere for much of the past 1,400 years. Unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism and Hinduism have been mostly internally focused rather than driven by external aggression, ambitions of foreign conquests, or proselytization. They have generally been on the receiving end of expansionist belief systems, conversion campaigns, and religiously motivated crusades. They have a posture of mutual respect toward other faith traditions, free from any mandate from God to build a global community. Fittingly, we find ourselves today in a moment of flourishing Jewish-Hindu interfaith activities, including summits in New Delhi and Jerusalem and books by leading Jewish scholars such as Alan Brill and Alon Goshen-Gottstein.

The natural question arises: How should Jews and Hindus work together to face the current predicament? There are several actions to take that can collectively be referred to as an Intellectual Iron Dome — a set of measures and initiatives designed to anticipate and intercept these attacks on the culture of meritocracy.

Most immediately, Jews and Hindus should learn more about one another. Given the number of institutions of higher learning that host large Hindu and Jewish populations, it is rather astounding how little the communities interact. Introductions should be formalized by communal organizations both on and off campus.

Hindu and Jewish parents must stop sending their children to institutions that practice unmeritocratic admissions policies, and by extension donors must end their funding and affiliations. The two communities have contributed immeasurably to the intellectual heft of these institutions. Originally, we needed them to succeed. Now, we should create new educational institutions that champion meritocracy and genuine free speech.

A think tank devoted to Jewish and Hindu partnership should be established. In addition to finding opportunities for mutual thriving, it should analyze intellectual threats to each community.

It is also time to harness the powers of AI as a force multiplier in the arsenal against Hinduphobia and antisemitism. An AI-based system can be designed to monitor and examine trends in antisemitism and Hinduphobia online and predict problems before they manifest. Such a system could be equipped to disseminate counter-messaging for threats to meritocracy, free speech, and the dignity and safety of Jews and Hindus.

A complementary system could create and disseminate indices that rate bias by individuals and institutions, to help the public make informed decisions in choosing vendors and organizational partners.

Just as the Iron Dome is necessary for protecting the citizens of Israel, the Intellectual Iron Dome is crucial for securing the reputations and identities of the next generation of Jews and Hindus as the custodians of their respective civilizations. Jews and Hindus owe it to their heritages to invest in such an initiative not just for their own traditions but also to safeguard the world from the regressive movement against merit. 

This morning, Times of India celebrates the headlines that, “Harvard gets biggest international donation in 102 yrs, from Tata Group.”  The timing on the eve of Obama’s India visit has strategic importance. This whopping $50 million gift is part of a massive trend that deserves some thought, so here I go…

Many years ago, when RK Mishra (Dhirubhai Ambani’s right-hand man) was alive, he and his wife stayed a weekend with me specifically to get briefed on what to do about Harvard’s request for funding chairs there. I brought in 6 scholars who were part of my team studying the state of South Asian Studies in the west. The data we supplied were eye-openers for Mishra, as they had never been made aware of the anti-India tilts in places like Harvard. One talk I gave compared how harvard studies China with great respect, while India is seen through the human rights lens – caste, women’s “oppresion”, minority “oppression”, etc… Others gave specific areas of biases as well – from Aryan theory on. The result was that Mishra went back and advised the Ambanis to NOT give Harvard a dollar, until they would make changes to their stance on India. China, I was able to show, gets treated as a serious civilization. One factor was that China studies is done largely in Mandarin while India is studied in English. Also, China regulates visas for western scholars such that it blacklists those it finds troubling, whereas India is open and welcomes everyone without supervision, and fails to do any analysis after the fact as to whats being produced. In fact, Indians find it a compliment when westerners study them, as though suffering from an inferiority complex of feeling left out. Finally, a key difference is that Indian intellectuals are heavily anti-India because of pseudo-secularism and marxism deeply entrenched in Indian intellectual circles, and most important Indian scholars are western trained and/or funded and/or craving to be in their good books for fame and prestige. Chinese do not suffer such complexes, which in India are the after-effects of colonization. This is because Gandhi got superseded by Nehru in defining the elitist Indian ethos. Gandhi was emphatic about his Indianness, whereas Nehru bragged to John Kenneth Galbraith that he was the “last white man to rule India.”

This intervention by me through R.K. Mishra did put a temporary dampener on their crusade to dip into the pockets of rich Indians. It also put me on the hit list of harvard. I also ended Infinity foundation’s annual sponsorship of the Indology Roundtable at Harvard which was my “listenind device” of what they were up to. As a follow up to this saga, my friend, JC Kapur in Delhi, called up the head of FICCI at the time, and told him point-blank to stop supporting Harvard’s PR campaign with Indian industry for such funding. This too worked, and grudgingly the FICCI head at that time stopped opening doors for harvard in India. But the lure to become famous in harvard and dine with the who’s who of white american establishment is too powerful for Indians to resist. The real “success” for most is when they are recognized by the west. This is what the west knows well, having studied Indian culture for centuries, and used precisely this knowledge to manage, control and topple one raja after another in the 17th and 18th centuries. Take the kids to Cambridge, play polo with them, have western women to flirt, etc. – so they can feel like admitted to the club as honorary whites in front of other Indians. After independence, the brits got replaced by the americans, hence the strategic importance of places like harvard.

Some years later, there came a call from a prominent Indian that Anand Mahindra was being roped in by Harvard, and he had given them office space in his Mumbai HQ. So I was set up for a persional one-on-one meeting with Anand Mahindra. He is a very decent, gentle, open-minded executive for sure. He listened to my frank talk. He was unaware of these issues which clearly bothered him. But he made clear that he owed a lot to harvard, as they had given him a scholarship to study there when his father had refused to support him go there. So it was payback time for him, nothing more. Not to worry, he said, because he was giving only very small sums of money, such as $20,000 at a time, and that too for Indian students to go there as scholars. He suggested that I write to him my objections concerning harvard, so he could pass it on, and make sure they change their approach. I also suggested to him that Indians who want to fund Harvard should fund their business school, which has become pro-India, but NOT the humanities which are the nexus of this “south Asian” nonsense. A few days later, at Mr. Mahindra’s suggestion I had a brief phone chat with Harvard’s Sugata Bose who was visiting India as harvard brand ambassador to raise funds. I have publicly criticized Sugata Bose for his writings that depict pre-Mughal India as uncivilized, his idea of colonial problems focusses only on British but exempts the islamic colonizers, and he sees de-colonization as the return to a unified south asia under quasi-islamic civilization (positioned as “secularism”). This, of course, his girlfriend and co-author, Ayesha Jalal, has very skillfully managed to make into the core curriculum on south asia at places such as Harvard. (Jalal while not on the Harvard faculty was on the committee of their South Asia program until I pointed this strange anomaly out, and then she suddenly left that visible spot.) Prof Bose was cordial and frank, and we agreed to continue to chat later – which never materialized. Bose also lashes out against his great grand-uncle, Subhash Chandra Bose, the freedom-fighter, portraying him as a fascist. Music to the ears of the harvard establishment. These folks bring in Kashmir separatists, Maoists, “abused Hindu women”, Dalit activists, etc. routinely as the “voices of the real India.” Anand Mahindra announced last month that he is donating $10 million to Harvard specifically designated for the Humanities.

About 5 years ago, my colleague at Infinity Foundation, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and I went to see Rajat Gupta (McKinsey) to meet privately for several hours. I raised the topic that before Indian philanthropists give funding to US unversities, people like Rajat should do “due diligence” on what a given program has produced, how it fits into the image of India that the philanthropist has. After all, no management consultant proposes an investment by his wealthy client in any venture without due diligence. It struck a chord with him. Then I pointed out that nobody other than me had attenpted any such arms-length critical study of South Asian Studies in USA. I mentioned that Chinese government and Chinese private donors do an annual report on the state of China Studies in the west, just like any industry analyst would do for an indistry, and this guides them where and how to invest. This gives them the basis for evaluating a given program and negotiating from a position of knowledge about what is what in the discipline. He was candid in confessing that he had not studied the south asia studies discipline to be able to tell me what went on in depth. But, he remarked in typical India style, he thinks the persons involved in such studies seem like “nice guys” and decent folks. I responded that in evaluating a business investment, the due dligence would not be based on whether the management team were “nice guys” or decent folks in their personal lives, but that it would look for hard-hitting data and evidence to evaluate. Had he or anyone else studied the writings of such departments over the past 50 years, to be able to evaluate what was going from the Indian point of view? The answer then reamins the same today – no, they have not!

In one meetng after another for 15 years, I have raised such issues. One example of such an article I wrote in 2003 is on Rediff.com, titled, “Does South Asia Studies undermine India?”. I have also proposed that India could use its own India Studies and even South Asian Studies based in Indian universities (as a way to study neighbouring countries with an India-centric lens). I have argued that the money used to fund one Harvard chair (at least $5 million) could fund a whole department of scholarship in India. The irony is that even those who claim to be patriotic, nationalists, including those being described as “Hindu nationalists,” seem confused and mixed up. The GOI has given major funding to western studies of South Asia – including both BJP and Congress led governments. Yet there is not a single government or private philanthropist report on the state of this “industry” that studies India, which consists of several thousand scholars full-time who come from various disciplines – religious studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, human rights, women’s studies, etc. On the other hand, China Studies in the academy is secure in China’s hands, with western scholars are “outsiders” craving to be allowed entry.

Before spending money, one must have a strategic clarity as to what ideas of India are to be promoted. Otherwise, well formulated ideas of India by various other institutions get to dominate – such as ideologies of seminaries, US government thinktanks, academic south asian marxists-islamists, etc. Indians participate but not on their own rules. Tragically, Indians do not even have clarity on this amongst themesleves much less being able to project it. At a gathering at Ram Jethmalani’s house last year, I was invited as the featured speaker for the evening. I spoke on this very issue that Indians must take control of India Studies. One prominent woman activist (Madhu Kishwar) diverted the issue by asking whether the studies would be done in Hindi! The whole gathering easily got distracted by any odd and irrelevant idea, that should not have diverted them from the core proposition being discussed. Some others asked “whose idea of India” would be studied, would it be the Muslims’ idea and dalit idea, or would brahmins dominate? Indians do not even have a consensus on what is India as we want to see it.

Earlier this year, there was a rumor that Infosys founder Narayan Murthy was giving $15 million to harvard to translate and publish ancient Indian texts into English, for popular reading. On the surface this seems good for us. But the details count and such details are typcially glossed over by Indians. The editor appointed for the series is none other than Prof. Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), even though he takes an explicitly Marxist view of Sanskrit – explotation by brahmins of dalits, women, muslims, etc. His famous writing, “The Death of Sanskrit” laid out his idea of its history as a source of power in the hands of a few. He has been editor of the CLAY series of Indian Classics already, and one has to see that to get an idea of his biases. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Sanskrit_Library ) While doing a great job bringing out the “beauty” of the indian materials, the fact remains that he simply assumes and states the Aryan invasion/migration theory as a given without even raising any issue with it. Very elegant and beautifully produced, this series already has 46 volumes in print, and its influence is considerable. My concern was that the Murthy family might not have invested time and resources to go into the details of the issues at stake in the translation of Indian classics in the west. The Murthy donation will also take this new series from harvard, and send it back into Indian education, making this “Made in USA” depiction of Indian Classics the canon for Indians to study as their definition of themesleves. This is what max Mueller’s works did a century ago. It is their money and they have a right to do what they please with it. But wouldn’t it have been wiser if they had funded something to do with their area of expertise and competence, so they could at least evaluate and monitor professionally, and not depend on “they are nice fellows” level of naivete. When this rumor was critiqued by me, the head of the Hindu American Foundation inquired and concluded that the runor was false based on his “inside” information from the Murthy’s. A few days later the official announcement was made. Also, Prof. Pollock was awarded the Padma Shri award by GOI at a Republic Day ceremony in Rashtrapathy Bhavan, for his great contributions to the study of sanskrit.

None of the reactions from the “Hindu activists” have made any sense either, be it issuing petitions or writing angrily to the parties concerned. They have failed to understand the deeper mechanisms at work. You dont fight a patient’s infection by holding playcards shouting slogans against the germs! The doctor has to understand the mechanisms of the disease and how/where to intervene. But a lazy, incompetent man (despite his good intentions) would have no time to go to med school and learn all that, and THEN be competent to defeat the disease. He is in too much of a hurry, wants to make a big splash in public to look important; and hence he stands outside the hospital shouting slogans against the germs. This sounds like a strange analogy, but if you examine closely the “activists” at work, it is a fairly accurate one.

By: Rajiv Malhotra

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities—but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. —Winston S. Churchill, The River War

Introduction

It is difficult to avoid noticing that many conflicts in different corners of the world involve Islam. As Samuel Huntington pointed out a generation ago, Islam has bloody borders the world over. And no matter how the designated enemies may differ from one another, the issues among Muslim fighters—both the ideology and the rhetoric—are remarkably similar. Were these merely local secular clashes of territorial rivalries, as most Western observers tend to assume, or do we need to look deeper? Instead of playing out as independent conflicts, however, one even finds shared leadership training camps at both physical and online sites as well as shared financial and political support; and even many of the boots on the ground are transnational.

Are all these conflicts merely remarkable coincidences? Are the various conflicts indeed separate and independent issues that put Muslims around the world at odds with their neighbors, or are they local manifestations of a larger, consistent global phenomena.

A mere correlation of disparate situations could be coincidental and does not prove a causal relationship.  But, given how many and how pervasive these Muslim—infidel conflicts are around the world, such correlations should certainly provoke a deeper inquiry into the possibility of some global forces or shared myths that could be driving many of these flareups.

This article investigates a completely different diagnosis of Islam’s conflicts with others. It proposes that the key factor driving these conflicts could be Islam’s deep-rooted aspiration (subliminal or explicit) for re-establishing a global Caliphate. The idea of a Caliphate—a theocratic Islamic government under a single ruler (Caliph) who serves as both a political and religious leader of the Muslim world—stems from Islamic history and theology and was derived from a combination of Quran and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet).

A Caliphate is an Islamic global political system superseding and overriding all national and ethnic boundaries. The law of a Caliphate must be Sharia, as set by Allah and the Prophet Mohammad, and this overrides all man-made laws. The Muslim term for the rule of the Caliphate is Dar al-Islam: the realm of submission (to Allah), and the term for infidels in that realm is dhimmi, as those both legally and socially inferior to Muslims.

In its 1,450-year history, Islam has been ruled by a Caliphate (i.e., Islamic theocracy) almost all the time for the first 1,350 years. Only in the past hundred years, since the Ottoman empire was dismantled in 1924, has there been a long period with no Caliphate. Islam’s grand narrative sees the Caliphate as the desired state of triumphalism.

I use the term Caliphate Project to refer to a variety of campaigns whose combined effect is to encourage a unified Islamic political assertiveness worldwide. This is a powerful religious movement led by holy warriors bent on the extermination of their demonized enemies and the conversion or subjugation of the infidel world. The Muslim term for the nations that are as yet not part of Dar al-Islam is Dar al-Harb, the realm of the sword (warfare), and infidels in that realm are harbis, those destined to the sword.

The term Caliphatists refers to those who directly or indirectly subscribe to the Caliphate Project in any form. A Caliphatist is a Muslim who believes that a global Caliphate should arise to subject all infidels to Sharia. Such a person is invested in this grand mission to unify all Muslims and overthrow non-Islamic laws and nation-states.

This article problematizes the Caliphate Project and Caliphatists and does not accuse all Muslims or Islam of these imperialist drives. Indeed, there are many Muslims who reject this project, and they find themselves attacked by the hardliners. It is important not to alienate the Muslims but to isolate the Caliphatists and thereby encourage the liberal Muslims to shut down transnational terror networks that victimize innocent infidels and Muslims alike.

This article cites numerous surveys showing that support for a Caliphate varies from 33% among British Muslims to an average of 66% of Muslims in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Support for Sharia as the law of the land is even higher, more than 75% in most Muslim majority countries, including Pakistan. Clearly, this aspiration impacts all non-Muslims worldwide.

Given this body of evidence, it seems plausible that the variety of conflicts around the world can be explained (at least in part) as local manifestations of the Caliphate Project. My exploration is based on citing Islam’s own holy texts, the centuries-long history of Caliphates, and the views of Muslims today in Muslim majority countries.

Even if this thesis is only partially true, and the Caliphate Project is one among multiple factors, it would call for a wider approach to analyzing conflicts, and a new and courageous approach to policymaking. This would generate a radically new kind of conversation with open minds that, unfortunately, most people presently want to avoid. It is ill advised to ignore the Caliphatist’s ideologies, and to project secular wishful thinking and a non-Islamic value system to interpret their long-cherished aspirations.

The problem is the complete denial of such a phenomenon even though it is the elephant in the room as this article shall demonstrate. Secularists have blocked such a thesis from consideration, and their posture is an enabler of the syndrome we are discussing, because it provides cover for the Caliphatists.

Those who dare speak up with evidence to present such a thesis are muzzled by the cancel culture today and declared Islamophobic. Caliphatists and Leftist “progressives” eager to avoid the slightest suspicion of prejudice, have united to assert ownership of the public sphere to control the discourse on Islam. They intimidate anyone attempting to connect the evidence in any fresh, imaginative, and more accurate way.

To make real progress in resolving these conflicts, it is important to evaluate such a diagnosis with an open mind, and to invite people across the ideological spectrum to discuss one of the root causes of global conflicts. Many Islamic Initiatives—such as Jizya (a tax historically levied on non-Muslims living under Islamic rule), Halal food certification (compliance with Islamic dietary laws and scriptural mandates that have started dominating the food supply chain even for non-Muslims), Islamic banking (Islamic laws pertaining to money), and even social issues such as the Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK—are frequently interpreted as isolated incidents/initiatives driven by localized interests. However, this view underestimates their strategic coherence. These measures are, in fact, integral to the broader geopolitical grand narrative of the Caliphate project with a long-term vision of influence, expansion and control. They represent the infrastructural foundations of a systematic effort to entrench Islam’s presence globally and reshape regional and global power dynamics in the Caliphate project’s favor.  These are major topics beyond the scope of this introductory article.

As a case study, I will show that the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan cannot be understood properly by reducing it to a secular border dispute. Rather, it is being driven by the global jihadi forces whose stated agenda is to establish Sharia law. The global jihadis use local vulnerabilities and tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims to ignite conflicts and bring in transnational jihadi fighters from a variety of Muslim countries for their common cause. The funding for this enterprise is also global as is the ideology, training, weapons, and political support.

Unfortunately, this dimension of many of these conflicts, most recently the India-Pakistan conflict has been slipped under the rug out of fear and for the sake of political correctness. But such suppression helps to camouflage jihad as a merely secular territorial conflict. This is the cover under which the jihadi networks proliferate quietly until they find opportunities to erupt.

Part 1: Project for an Islamic World Order

Islamic Caliphate

The Quran, though not explicitly prescribing a Caliphate as a political system, has frequently cited verses compelling all Muslims to have unity, leadership, and common governance. For example, Surah Al-Imran (3:103) urges all Muslims everywhere to “hold fast to the rope of Allah and do not be divided,” which is interpreted as a call for political unity under a Caliph. Surah An-Nisa (4:59) commands obedience to “those in authority among you,” which is interpreted as support for a centralized Islamic leadership.

The Hadith provides stronger support for the Caliphate, with several sayings of the Prophet emphasizing it. A well-known Hadith states, “Whoever dies without having pledged allegiance (to a Caliph) dies a death of ignorance.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 20, Hadith 4562).

Early Islamic scholars in the Sunni tradition developed the concept of the Caliphate as a necessary institution to uphold Islamic law (Sharia) and maintain the unity of the Muslim community (Ummah). (In Shia Islam, the concept of leadership differs, focusing on divinely appointed Imams rather than an elected Caliph. But the results are the same: the rule of Islam.)

The Caliphate’s legitimacy is heavily based on the example of the Rashidun Caliphs (the first four successors to Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, ruling 632–661 CE). Their leadership (despite the constant internal strife) is considered a model of good governance. The continued conquests to the east and the west, galvanized the project to create the Caliphate as a divinely sanctioned institution. This was followed by the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), and then the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258). The fourth major Caliphate was the Ottoman Caliphate from 1517 until it was formally abolished as part of the 1924 Western global hegemony after World War I. Thus, for most of its history, Islam has had a Caliphate except for the past hundred years.

The modern period of Western dominance (since 1800) has produced an unresolved cognitive dissonance among Muslims who cleave to this narrative of Allah-granted dominance. Western superiority undermined the proof of their faith’s destiny to dominate. The sudden superiority of the West, particularly the unexpected success of the Jews only two decades after the dissolution of the Caliphate’s end in 1924, triggered a school of Muslim scholars who saw the US and Israeli superiority as an existential threat to Islam itself, and as the apocalyptic battle of the End of Time (Sayyid Qutub).

The response to this dissonance ignited the dream of a Muslim world empire. If it were only dreams, we might live with them, but this medieval dream of conquering and subjecting the infidels the world over has fervent believers who will do extraordinary deeds to prove the glory of Allah. Calls to genocidal violence occur frequently in both their writings and preaching, especially the apocalyptic Hadith about killing the Jews before the Day of Judgment.

Soon after the end of the Ottoman Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged making the case that the Caliphate should replace modern nation-states because these nation-states are man-made and hence artificial and imposed by colonial powers to fragment the Ummah and destroy the Faith. This narrative has become standard among the global jihadi groups, valorizing the historical unity under the early Caliphs and the Quranic call for unity (e.g., Surah Al-Anbiya 21:92, “This Ummah of yours is a single Ummah” (implying that the worldwide Muslims are one community.) Only this unity of purpose can save Islam from the modern tsunami of secularism.

In 1979, a new wave of apocalyptic movements emerged, dedicated to reasserting Islam’s destiny to rule, both among the Shia (Iran) and Sunni (Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Afghanistan). They inspired other such groups (Hizballah 1982, al Qaeda and Hamas, 1988, proliferating, producing ISIS and its abominations. The massive violence and dislocation that has plagued Arab lands like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, reflects the success of the Caliphatists’ global Jihad to sow the conditions of chaos.

This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy of a few extremists, but a deeply held grand plan that goes back to the earliest Muslim conquests. Nor is this war aimed at the West alone; it targets infidels everywhere, in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, India, Myanmar, and Indonesia.

The allegiance to a Caliphate is not universal among Muslim groups. Many Muslims and scholars argue that the Caliphate is not mandatory provided a man-made nation-state upholds Islamic principles. This serves the interests of rulers in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Indonesia that do not want to relinquish power to a Caliphate.

I am not denying that Muslims have genuine issues in different parts of the world and that resistance and conflicts are often justified. Many such situations are not driven or exacerbated by global Islamic forces. These are secular issues faced by Muslims just like other communities. However, the situations being problematized in this article are those where Muslims in one country with no stake in the problems of another country get aligned and support with Islamic rhetoric, just for the sake of rallying together against infidels.

Sharia Versus Man-Made Laws

Sharia means “the path” or Islamic law and is derived from the Quran and Hadith. The Quran is seen as the ultimate source of authority, and Sharia is its practical application. Its adherents believe it represents divine injunctions and is superior to all human-made laws. For example, Surah Al-Ma’ida (5:44) states, “Whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed, they are disbelievers,” which Caliphatists interpret to mandate that Sharia must supersede all man-made laws. Democratic human legislation cannot override divine will. In addition to rejecting secular constitutions, this view also freezes the Sharia permanently, because any amendments would be man-made and hence illegitimate.

Some Muslim scholars argue that Sharia can coexist with man-made laws in those areas that are not explicitly covered by Islamic texts (e.g., modern traffic laws, international trade regulations). Some go further and accept the principle of “public interest” (Maslaha) to adapt Sharia to contemporary needs. Therefore, the implementation of Sharia varies: Turkey combines it with secular laws, while Saudi Arabia (until very recently) applied Sharia far more comprehensively.

Democracy, Caliphate and the Global Left

In recent years, the Global Left has joined Islam to defeat their common enemies in the prevailing world order. This is the nexus of woke ideology that is manifested at places like Harvard and other campuses. Though Caliphatists and Leftists both want to dismantle the present world order, they have conflicting commitments to what would replace as the new world order (i.e., theocracy vs. secular progressivism). Hence their present alliance is temporary; the Left does not realize that it too is the target of Caliphate enmity. Hence, we see several parodies like gays and feminists for Palestine.

The good cops among Caliphatists, the non-violent cognitive warriors, are engaged in a relentless but undeclared war on the principles of secularism even as they infiltrate and embed in secular society by exploiting its freedoms. But they betray their liberal host at a later stage by supporting the bad cops (jihadis) or even converting to become the bad cops. The bad cops openly see democracies as blasphemies and incompatible with Sharia. For them there are no innocent infidels, the very act of disbelief in the message of Allah’s last Prophet demands punishment by death.

The Caliphatist cognitive war seeks to subvert the enemy by using the enemy’s own ideology, rhetoric, laws, and culture – freedom, equality, human rights. Initially, this entails a Muslim minority gaining acceptance as law abiding citizens contributing to society and complaining about any criticism of Islam as “Islamophobia”. The effect of this has been to generate massive ideological support from non-Muslim liberals and secularists, to highlight the Muslim “plight” in the West as a primary human rights cause. This has culminated in a formidable alliance between the Left and Islam, and especially in movements like feminism and decolonialism, despite how misogynist and imperialist the Caliphatists are.

As a recent example of this alliance, a self-proclaimed feminist named Ather Zia puts her stance in her article’s title, “Intifada: From Palestine to Kashmir.”[1] She writes: “Kashmir is often compared to Palestine and sometimes referred to as ‘another Palestine.’” She justifies the leftist-Islam goal,

to fortify a decolonial transnational feminist praxis that dreams and stands vigil for collective liberation from all modes of European imperialism, a decolonial feminist solidarity that becomes evident in all expressions of humanity—poetry to protests, analysis to arguments. That is, a decolonial feminist praxis that makes our existence resistance.

She goes on to elaborate:

Kashmiris have always seen their resistance reflected in the Palestinian struggle against a European settler occupation. They have historically been in solidarity with Palestine, organizing passionate demonstrations and rallies. … A big part of the political culture in Kashmir is public prayers deployed as protest, which resonates with supplications for the freedom of Palestine as much as for Kashmir’s own. … The ideas Edward Said puts forward in his essay “Intifada and Independence” resonate with the political tragedy of Kashmir and its hapless resistance. … Supporters of the Kashmiri freedom movement invoked “Kashmiri intifada” to honor and reiterate the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and draw inspiration and momentum for their fight for azadî. I have argued that this is a form of “affective solidarity” from Kashmiris to Palestinians.

 She conflates Kashmir and Palestine both as “remnants of colonial hegemony”. And therefore, “Kashmiris’ resistance has been influenced by Palestinian literature …”

The reality of Kashmir is far more complex, but the Leftist supporters have no interest in getting into the details.

Surveys on Support for Caliphate among Muslims

There is no recent global data that reliably quantifies support for a Caliphate across all Muslim-majority countries. However, there are surveys by competent organizations during the period 2006-2013 that give some indication.

The WorldPublicOpinion.org Survey (2006–2007) was conducted in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It found that about 66% of Muslims in these countries agreed with the goal of unifying all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate. This is limited to four countries and may not reflect Muslim opinion worldwide. The sample size and methodology details are also limited.

A 2008 YouGov survey of Muslim students in the UK found that 33% supported “a worldwide Caliphate based on Sharia law.” This is a specific demographic (young, educated Muslims in the UK) and not representative of the broader Muslim population. But it could be representative of teachings in several mosques.

The 2013 Pew Research Center survey is considered one of the most extensive studies on Muslim attitudes. However, the concept of a Caliphate was not explicitly covered as a standalone question. The pollsters probably considered it best to be ignored.

Surveys on Support for Sharia among Muslims

There is much better data available on Muslim opinions regarding Sharia. The 2013 Pew Research Center survey, based on over 38,000 face-to-face interviews across 39 countries, is the most comprehensive and robust data on Muslim attitudes toward Sharia. It asked whether Muslims want Sharia to be “the official law of the land” in their countries.[2]

Globally, most Muslims surveyed favored Sharia.

• In south and southeast Asia: There was nearly universal support in Afghanistan (99%), very high in Pakistan (84%), Bangladesh (82%), Malaysia (86%), Thailand (77%), and Indonesia (72%).
• In Middle East and North Africa: Widespread support in Iraq (91%), Palestinian territories (89%), Morocco (83%), Egypt (74%), Jordan (71%), but lower in Lebanon (29%) and Tunisia (56%).
• In Sub-Saharan Africa: High support in Niger (86%), Djibouti (82%), DR Congo (74%), Nigeria (71%), but lower in Ghana (58%) and Ethiopia (65%).
• In Central Asia and Southern/Eastern Europe: Much lower support, e.g., Turkey (12%), Kazakhstan (10%), Azerbaijan (8%).

The type of support also varied. A significant percent of Muslims who support Sharia believe it should apply only to Muslims, and not non-Muslims. Opinions also vary regarding the extent to which Sharia should be imposed. Many Muslims support it for matters of justice, family law, or moral guidance, and not necessarily for harsh punishments or theocratic governance. The support is strongest for applying Sharia to family and property disputes like marriage and inheritance, with over 75% in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia favoring Islamic judges for such cases. However, support for severe punishments (e.g., amputation, stoning) is lower, with less than half in many regions, though higher in South Asia (over 75%).

Muslims who pray multiple times daily are more likely to support Sharia, with differences as high as 37 percentage points in Russia and 28 points in Lebanon compared to less religious Muslims.

Besides Pew Research, there have been a few other, more recent surveys:

• A 2016 Policy Exchange survey in the UK found that 43% of British Muslims supported “the introduction of Sharia law,” with 49% in London favoring “Sharia provisions” with British law. Younger Muslims (18–24) showed 35% support, and nearly half of those over 55 supported at least some provisions.
• A 2016 Channel 4 survey in the UK found 23% of British Muslims in some regions supported introducing Sharia law.
• A 2015 Center for Security Policy survey of 600 U.S. Muslims found that 19% believed violence in the U.S. is justified to make Sharia the law of the land, but this poll’s methodology (online opt-in panel) and small sample size raise methodological questions.

This data suggests that there is a massive recruiting pool for Caliphatists to respond to the call of the global Caliphate. This could potentially be an explosive “audience,” and its appeal increases as the goal seems to be within reach.

Jihad: Violence explicitly based on Islam[³]

Caliphatists consider any means to bring about the victory of Islam as legitimate including lying, dissembling, deceiving, threatening, and making war. They are convinced that eventually all infidels must face conversion, submission, or death.

Caliphatists do not believe that there are any possible compromises to be made with the infidel: it’s a non-negotiable zero-sum game. Amicable relations with infidels are forbidden or allowed only tentatively until a more assertive form becomes practical to achieve. A real friendship with an infidel who does not plan to convert is often seen as a betrayal of the cause. They take the principle of al Wala wal Bara to mean love your fellow Muslim no matter what he does, right or wrong, and hate the infidel whether he is right or wrong. Jihadis consider infidels as transgressors resisting Islam’s truth. For many Jihadis all infidels are legitimate targets of their attacks. Those who struggle for the Caliphate dedicate the entire beings to the grand project right down to blowing themselves up for the cause.

Between 1979 and May 2021, at least 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks took place worldwide.[4] These caused the deaths of at least 210,138 people.  The list below gives a small sample of this lethal attitude towards infidels among Jihadis; it is not a list of the great terrorist attacks, but rather a violent global everyday contempt.

• In September 2013, at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, Caliphists murdered people who couldn’t answer[5] questions about Islam.
• In 2015 Mali,[6] Caliphists screaming “Allahu Akbar” took hostages, freeing those who could recite the Qur’an and killing others.
• A Caliphist in Minnesota[7] in 2016 asked mall shoppers if they were Muslim and then stabbed the non-Muslims.
• A testimony before the UN Security Council hearing on the massacre of 26 civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2017, stated,[8] “They [the attackers] also recorded information about each person, including their name and religion. They asked them why they had not converted to Islam and showed the Qur’an to one of them. Photos of the dead show that they had been bound and some had been tied together. After the killings, they shot in the air twice, saying that they had killed all the “kafir”.
• In July 2017 in Kenya,[9] Islamist terrorists asked Christians to “recite Islamic dogmas” and murdered them when they couldn’t do so.
• In September 2018, in Kenya,[10] Islamist terrorists murdered two non-Muslims for failing to recite the Qur’an.
• In Mozambique in June 2021,[11] Islamist terrorists were hunting for Christians door-to-door.
• In Burkina Faso[12] in November 2021, Islamist terrorists asked villagers if they were Christian or Muslim, then killed the Christians.
• In January 2022 in Nigeria, a man recounted[13] that Fulani jihadis stopped him and started beating him. Then they asked him if he was Muslim or Christian. When he said he was Christian, they intensified the beating.
• In the Philippines[14] in February 2019, Islamist terrorists murdered a man for failing to recite Qur’an verses while releasing six others who could recite them.

All the above examples reflect the fundamental Caliphist belief that it is a crime to refuse to accept the mandates of Islam. Even in the 1971 India-Pakistan war, there are multiple documented references to religious mullahs issuing fatwas and statements that encouraged treating Hindu Bengali women—as “war booty” or “loot” as per Sharia.

Between August 2007 and May 2022, the UN Security Council condemned acts of terrorism 115 times. In all these cases except one, the entities committing the terrorism were self-identified Muslims or were done in circumstances or places that suggest their Muslim identity.[15] The only exception was the Christchurch Mosque attack in New Zealand by a white supremacist in March 2019.[16] The victims of Islamist terrorism include persons of all faiths, including several Muslims.

A European Union research paper on “The root causes of violent terrorism”[17] specifically mentions “a Salafi-jihadi interpretation of Islam.” It asserts that “Political seekers are usually seeking support and are driven by political engagement. They tend to view themselves as saviors defending the people of ‘the nation’ or ‘the umma’.” They are motivated by a sense “that Islam is under siege” and a desire to “protect ummah under assault.”

Europol defines Jihadism[18] as “a violent ideology exploiting traditional Islamic concepts. Jihadists legitimize the use of violence with a reference to the classical Islamic doctrine on jihad, [which in] Islamic law is treated as religiously sanctioned warfare”.

It is important to distinguish between non-state terror actors and state actors, even though the former are often used as a tool in an asymmetric war by the latter—as in Kashmir and Gaza.

Failure of the International Community to Name the Root Cause

Unfortunately, despite all this compelling evidence, the international community has not named the religious ideology that drives most international terrorism. This is despite the fact that even the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has stated, “There is an international obligation of prohibition of incitement to hatred.” Specifically, Article 20, paragraph 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”[19]

Furthermore, according to OHCHR,[20] under international human rights standards, expression labeled as “hate speech” can be restricted under articles 18 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on different grounds, including respect for the rights of others, public order, or sometimes national security.

The UN definition[21] of hate speech is “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behavior, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender or other identity factor.”

One of the reasons for the failure to name certain interpretations of Islamic texts and ideology is the fear of being branded Islamophobic. However, in April 2021, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed—himself a Muslim and a former foreign minister of the Maldives—admitted to the UN Human Rights Council [22] that the term Islamophobia is “contested because charges of Islamophobia have been inappropriately and dangerously leveled at persons who challenge majoritarian interpretations of Islam, such as human rights activists and women’s rights advocates; members of minority Muslim communities within majority Muslim contexts; non-Muslims, including atheists and other religious minorities; and dissidents in authoritarian States.” He also stated,[23] “international human rights law protects individuals, not religions” adding that “Nothing in [his] present report suggests that criticism of the ideas, leaders, symbols or practices of Islam is something that should be prohibited or criminally sanctioned.”

OHCHR has stated that,[24] “the right to freedom of religion or belief, as enshrined in relevant international legal standards, does not include the right to have a religion or a belief that is free from criticism or ridicule” and that “the right to freedom of expression implies that it should be possible to scrutinize, openly debate and criticize belief systems, opinions, and institutions, including religious ones.”

It is true that there is considerable diversity of views among Muslims on the issues of Caliphate, Sharia, and jihad. And many Muslims projecting themselves as liberals use this diversity to muddle the public debate on such an important topic. There is a managed ambiguity presented by Muslim apologists that gives Islam the benefit of doubt as the easy way to avoid controversy. Often, Muslims play the roles of good cops (those who decry violence) and others who play bad cops (promoting violence. Yet, the boundaries between these camps are fluid. There is funding leaking from the mainstream Muslim sources that finds its way indirectly to help the extremists. One also finds numerous instances of well-educated, modern and liberal Muslims raised in Western society and values suddenly flip and turn into radicals of the worst kind.

Clearly, the subject calls for open and unfiltered conversations in which Muslims and non-Muslims should participate with mutual respect and honesty.

Network of “Regional Caliphates”

It is important to note that a Caliphate must operate under Sharia law, but the converse is not true: Sharia law by itself can be implemented in each and any sovereign entity independently. Hence, there are Muslim groups championing local or regional nation-states under Sharia. In fact, while the Caliphate Project is a centripetal force bringing Muslims together for a common cause, the ethnic divides—-like the rivalry between Arabs, Iranians and Turks—acts as a centrifugal force pulling the Caliphate Project apart. But this does not keep them from aspiring for regional or ethnic versions of the Caliphate under their respective controls, like regional Islamic empires. In some ways, the US strategy has been to encourage such ethnic divides and prevent a truly global Caliphate from coalescing.

This situation is akin to a global franchise with Sharia as the common legal constitution, and the local franchisees are given varying degrees of autonomy in implementing that Sharia, variations often reflecting the rapports de force between Muslims and infidels in each state.

For the Caliphatists, this can serve as an initial stage in which separate Sharia-based Muslim states operate like a network of allies held together with Islam as their grand narrative. The global jihad forces work towards consolidating these into a Caliphate. Let us consider what keeps Turkey and Iran from joining a global Caliphate today.

Turkey, as a secular republic founded by Atatürk, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, but there have been accusations that President Erdoğan harbors ambitions to revive a form of Ottoman hegemony as a regional Caliphate. Examples of this hegemony include Turkey’s regional role in places like Syria as well as its direct support for its Muslim ally, Pakistan, against India. However, the secular structure of Turkey’s government, its NATO membership, and public opinion (a 2019 poll showed 59% of Turks supported abolishing the Caliphate) make a Caliphate restoration unlikely in the near term.

Iran, as a Shia-majority Islamic Republic, prioritizes Shia religious leadership and explicitly rejects the concept of a Caliphate rooted in Sunni Islamic tradition. Its leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, focuses on exporting its revolutionary model and supporting Shia communities across the region. Its support for Shia militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, or backing Hezbollah are driven by regional strategy and sectarian alignment, not a push for a global Caliphate. Iran’s support for proxies and its anti-Israel stance are efforts to expand regional influence and challenge U.S. and Sunni dominance. Historically, Iran’s Safavid Empire (1501-1736) competed with the Sunni Ottoman Empire, and modern Iran continues to prioritize Shia identity over pan-Islamic unity. On the other hand, Iran has supported Turkey for pragmatic reasons in Syria. Iran’s Shia ideology and rejection of Sunni institutions render it a regional and ethnic competitor unlikely to support a global Caliphate.

Most scholars of Islam agree that the Caliphate Project is unlikely to fructify in the near term as a ground reality, but my point is that the aspiration of an Islamic world order looms large and serves as a powerful myth driving extremism.

Reform Movements

Many liberal Muslims have made efforts to reform Islam from within, and align it with non-violence, pluralism, and compatibility with modernity, while distancing themselves from expansionist or militant interpretations. Their attempts include reinterpreting Islamic texts, promoting ijtihad (independent reasoning) to emphasize flexible, ethical and pluralistic principles over rigid jurisprudence (taqlid).

Such attempts started in the 19th century in response to Western challenges. For instance, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) promoted the adoption of Western sciences and institutions to strengthen the Muslim world against what he saw as Western imperialism. His disciple, Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), continued this by promoting educational reform and reinterpreting Islamic texts to modernize it. Another example was Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) in India who sought to reconcile Islam with rationality and established what later became known as Aligarh Muslim University in India, embracing the English language as well as secular studies. The goal in all such cases was to strengthen Islam against Western hegemony by adapting Western methods.

Some of these reformers like Rashid Rida (1865–1935) supported the Caliphate while at the same time wanting to make it coexist with democracy and modern governance.

More recently, Muslim leaders like Asra Nomani have founded the Muslim Reform Movement (2015) denouncing violent jihad and extremist ideologies. They posted their declaration on the doors of the Saudi-affiliated Islamic Center of Washington, DC, as a direct challenge to conservative Islam. They emphasize personal faith over institutional control and male domination. So far, they have had a minimal impact.

There are other reformists like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Fatema Mernissi, and Edip Yüksel who are reinterpreting Islam’s holy texts to advocate women’s rights and non-violence. They espouse teachings for social justice. Some contemporary liberal Muslims see themselves as returning to the early principles emphasizing the ethical and pluralistic intent. They reject theocratic or expansionist models like the Caliphate. By promoting ijtihad, reinterpreting texts, and engaging in democratic processes, liberal Muslims seek to make Islam a personal, non-violent faith compatible with global coexistence.

However, unlike the highly unified and empowered forces of pan-Islamic aggression, such reformers tend to be isolated in different countries with feeble resources and audiences. They have so far failed to gain mainstream support from Muslims.

Another factor that dampens the impact of reformers is that they often face accusations of being Western puppets. Meanwhile, the ultraconservative movements have been backed by wealthy Gulf states, and they promote a puritanical, often expansionist Islam.

There are recent shifts in the Saudi and UAE royal families toward the modernization of their societies. But it is too early to predict their impact on global Islam.

Part 2: The Kashmir Conflict as a Case Study

Khalifat Movement and the origins of Pakistan

The Khilafat Movement (Khalifat being a spelling for Caliphate commonly used in the Indian subcontinent) and the Moplah Massacre were significant events in early 20th-century India that shaped communal dynamics and contributed indirectly to the ideological and political groundwork for the formation of Pakistan.

The Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) was a pan-Islamic political campaign launched by Indian Muslims to pressure the British government to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate after World War I. It was supported by Gandhi’s Indian National Congress, the famous freedom fighting movement, which saw it as an opportunity to foster Hindu-Muslim unity against British colonial rule.

Though the intention was to overthrow the British, the Khalifat Movement had serious unintended consequences. It galvanized Indian Muslims with a sense of collective religious and political empowerment, highlighting their distinct concerns separate from those of Hindus. This laid the groundwork for Muslim separatism.

There was a temporary period of Hindu-Muslim unity for a united anti-colonial struggle. However, upon the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, the Muslims were disillusioned that the Khalifat Movement had failed and their leaders started projecting it as a betrayal by Hindus. This deepened Hindu-Muslim communal mistrust.

The Khalifat movement had elevated Muslim leaders and organizations like the All-India Muslim League, which later championed the demand for Pakistan. It also radicalized sections of the Muslim populace, making them more receptive to separatist ideas. Some leaders exacerbated Hindu-Muslim tensions by emphasizing Islamic solidarity over India’s national unity. This contributed to a growing sense of separate communal identities.

The Khalifat movement spurred the Moplah Rebellion (1921) in Kerala as an anti-British and anti-landlord uprising by Muslims wanting to express their economic grievances. While initially anti-colonial, the rebellion took a communal turn, with Moplahs targeting Hindu landlords and, in some cases, Hindu communities, partly due to perceived Hindu dominance and economic disparities. This escalated into communal violence, with Muslim rebels attacking Hindu landlords, tenants, and communities. Official estimates suggest thousands were killed, and many Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. B.R. Ambedkar described the atrocities against Hindus as “indescribable,” noting widespread horror among Hindus.

The Moplah Massacre intensified Hindu-Muslim tensions across India. Hindu nationalist narratives portrayed the violence as evidence of Muslim aggression, while Muslim leaders defended their violence as resistance against economic oppression. This polarized communities further.

The massacre fueled Hindu distrust of Muslim political movements, strengthening organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha, which opposed secular nationalism. Conversely, Muslims felt increasingly alienated by the secular freedom movement pushing them toward separatist ideologies.

The Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (who later became founding father of Pakistan) used events like the Moplah violence to argue that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist in a single nation. The massacre became a reference point in the narrative that Muslims needed a separate homeland to protect their interests. Khilafat meetings in Malabar incited communal and anti-colonial feelings.

While the massacre was localized, its repercussions were national. It contributed to the growing perception among Muslims that their religious and cultural identity was under threat in a Hindu-majority India, bolstering what galvanized as the Two-Nation Theory to partition India into India and Pakistan.

In this way, the Khilafat Movement provided the ideological mobilization of Muslims, while the Moplah Massacre underscored the potential for communal conflict, making the idea of Pakistan more appealing to Muslims. The Movement trained a generation of Muslim leaders and activists, many of whom later joined the Pakistan movement. The Moplah Massacre, meanwhile, provided a cautionary tale that separatists leveraged to rally support.

The British exploited these communal tensions, further encouraging separate electorates and political divisions. By the 1940s, these events had contributed to a climate where the demand for Pakistan, formalized in the 1940 Lahore Resolution, gained widespread Muslim support, culminating in the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

After Independence and Partition

The 1947 partition of British India was rooted in religious identity, with Pakistan demanded as a homeland for Muslims. Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution declared Islam the state religion and requires laws to align with the Quran and Sunnah, reflecting a legal framework that largely incorporates Sharia.

The India-Pakistan conflict, particularly over Kashmir, is often reduced to a territorial or nationalist dispute, but this is a mask hiding the ideological goals of militant groups. A deeper examination reveals the top-down role of Islamic jihad with the goal of establishing a Caliphate governed by Sharia law. This perspective is based on the role of militant groups, their ideological underpinnings, and the complicity or strategic alignment of elements within Pakistan’s state apparatus.

The Islamization went into high gear when General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988) introduced Sharia-based laws (e.g., Hudood Ordinances), madrassa proliferation, and state patronage of Islamic orthodoxy, creating a fertile ground for jihadist ideologies. Zia even changed  the army’s motto from “Faith, unity, and discipline” to “faith, piety, and Jihad in the way of Allah” and had close ties with Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party founded in 1941 in Lahore.  The party’s primary goal has been to promote Islamic values and establish an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.[25] This era saw the rise of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which coopted local grievances to propel global jihad. Their rhetoric, as seen in LeT’s publications, like Why Are We Waging Jihad?, explicitly calls for a Caliphate, invoking historical Islamic empires and Sharia as the ultimate governance model.

Clearly, Kashmir is much more than a territorial prize. It is a symbolic frontier for global jihadists. Since the 1989 insurgency, militant groups have framed their violence as a religious struggle to “liberate” Kashmir from India’s “Hindu rule” and establish an Islamic state under Sharia. The 2008 Mumbai attacks by LeT, which killed 166 people, were not merely anti-India operations but part of a broader ideological campaign to destabilize India’s secular democracy and inspire a transnational jihad. LeT’s leader, Hafiz Saeed, publicly advocated for a Caliphate extending beyond Kashmir, aligning with global jihadist movements like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which share the vision of a Sharia-governed Islamic Caliphate. LeT and JeM draw strong ideological and material support from global jihadi networks, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

In 2015, former President Pervez Musharraf admitted to training Kashmiri insurgents in the 1990s. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been accused of supporting militant groups, as noted in U.S. intelligence reports and declassified documents (e.g., 2010 WikiLeaks cables). This support is strategic: Jihadi proxies weaken India without direct military confrontation by the Pakistani state. It reflects ideological sympathy within Pakistan’s military and political elite, who view Pakistan as a vanguard of Islamic governance. The Pakistani military’s use of Islamic imagery in propaganda, such as calling soldiers “ghazis” (Islamic warriors), reinforces the jihadist narrative. This alignment suggests that the state enables groups whose ultimate goal is a Sharia-based Caliphate.

The 2019 Pulwama attack, claimed by JeM, which killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel, was framed as a defense of Muslim rights against India’s secular state. Such attacks aim to radicalize populations and erode India’s pluralistic framework, creating conditions for an Islamic governance model.

The use of foreign fighters in Kashmir clearly ties the conflict to global Jihadist ambitions. After the Soviet-Afghan war ended, the transnational jihadi pool of mujahideen were redirected from Afghanistan to Kashmir under Pakistan’s Operation Tupac. Groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Hizbul Mujahideen, and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami have openly recruited fighters from several countries to fight for their common cause that transcends man-made boundaries.[26]

Furthermore, financial support from Pakistan’s ISI and other countries in the Middle East and UK sustains this jihadi ecosystem, channeling funds through hawala (money laundering) and groups like World Association of Muslim Youth and Jammat-e-Islami.

The most explicit international support for Pakistan’s fights against India come from far-flung countries like Turkey that have no direct interests in the region and that are driven entirely by religious zealotry. Turkey, of course, also has the memory of being the Caliphate in the past.

The Appendix gives a partial list of the major Islamic groups classified as terrorists by the Indian government.

Common Counterarguments and Our Rebuttals to them

A variety of counterarguments have been put forth by analysts, including apologists of global jihad, moderate Muslims, and Western leftists wanting to deny religion as a fundamental driver of geopolitics. These are summarized below followed by my rebuttals to show that these arguments do not negate the significant role of Islamic jihad in driving the India-Pakistan conflict toward a caliphate with Sharia law.

• Territorial, Geopolitical and Economic Factors: Critics argue that Kashmir’s strategic location, water resources, and historical claims fuel the rivalry. Pakistan’s struggling economy drives the export of militancy as a low-cost proxy war, not a religious crusade. Competing global alignments (e.g., India with the U.S., Pakistan with China) have at times exacerbated the tensions.

• Rebuttal: LeT and JeM’s public statements consistently prioritize religious objectives—establishing Sharia and a Caliphate—over mere territorial control. Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind’s main objective is to impose Sharia law upon Kashmir and to “spread the Islamic state caliphate to Jammu and Kashmir,” opposing democracy as being in violation of Sharia[27]. Pakistan state’s ISI’s support for groups like LeT, as documented in reports by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, leverages religious fervor to sustain low-cost militancy, with the ideological goal of weakening India’s secular state, a prerequisite for a Sharia-based order. Kashmir is a means to an end, a symbolic battleground to rally jihadists, as seen in their global recruitment efforts.

• Internal Political Dynamics: Some argue that militancy is a byproduct of Pakistan’s internal politics, where the military uses Islam to consolidate power against civilian governments. The conflict is less about a Caliphate and more about maintaining domestic power and justifying defense budgets.

• Rebuttal: Pakistan’s military’s tolerance of jihadist groups suggests ideological sympathy. The military’s failure to dismantle LeT and JeM, despite international pressure (e.g., UN sanctions), indicates a shared vision of Pakistan that Kashmir is a frontier for broader Islamic expansion.

• India’s Policies as a Catalyst: Critics contend that India’s heavy-handed policies in Kashmir, such as human rights abuses, the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, and the 2019 revocation of Article 370, provoke domestic militancy. The conflict is thus a legitimate reaction to oppression.

• Rebuttal: The anti-India global jihadi groups emerged before these issues. Besides, their attacks, like the 2001 Indian Parliament assault, target India’s sovereignty broadly, not just Kashmir, reflecting a rejection of secular governance. The Caliphate narrative is proactive, not merely reactive.

• Diversity of Actors: The militant landscape is diverse, with some groups focused on ethnic Kashmiri autonomy rather than a global Caliphate, such as the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Not all actors share the same ideological goals.

• Rebuttal: While militant groups vary, the dominant players like LeT and JeM share a jihadist vision, as evidenced by their literature and global affiliations. The consistent invocation of Sharia and a Caliphate in LeT and JeM’s literature transcends local pragmatic disputes. Local autonomy movements are often co-opted and used by these groups, whose actions—such as the 2019 Pulwama attack—align with a transnational Caliphate agenda.
  Moreover, many political and charitable organizations in Pakistan such as Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) serve to propagate and support the Caliphate project through Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a political organization was founded with a goal to establish an Islamic state governed by Sharia law, rooted in the vision of its founder, Syed Abul Ala Maududi, and it supports LeT. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) (JUI-F) is a Deobandi Islamic political party with a goal to implement Sharia law supports JeM in Kashmir.

In summary, the jihadist ideology aiming for a Sharia-governed caliphate is a major driver of the conflict, intertwining with territorial, geopolitical, and political factors. The consistent religious rhetoric, state complicity, and global jihadist connections underscore this global jihad ideological core, making it a critical lens for understanding the India-Pakistan conflict.

Pakistani Public Support for Caliphate and Sharia

There is no recent, comprehensive survey specifically asking Pakistanis about their support for a Caliphate. However, the WorldPublicOpinion.org Survey (2006–2007) found that 65% of Pakistani respondents supported the goal of unifying all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate.

More robust data exists on support for Sharia as the official law of the land, primarily from the 2013 Pew Research Center survey and a 2018 Gallup Pakistan-Gilani poll. The 2013 Pew Research Center Survey showed that 84% of Pakistani Muslims supported making Sharia the official law of the land. Of those supporting Sharia, 78% (roughly 65% of the total population) said laws should “strictly follow the teachings of the Quran,” while 16% (about 13% of the total) said laws should follow Islamic principles but not strictly the Quran. Only 2% said that laws should not be influenced by the Quran. The Pew report noted that 62% of Pakistanis supported the death penalty for apostasy, indicating strong support for certain Sharia-based punishments, though this is lower than in Afghanistan (79%).

2018 Gallup Pakistan-Gilani Research Foundation Survey found that 67% of Pakistanis said Sharia should be the only law in the country. The survey suggested a trend toward radicalization, with a 16% increase in support for Sharia as the sole law from 2010 to 2018.

Pakistani Political Leadership Support for Sharia 

Pakistan’s Parliament has passed Sharia-related legislation, and the country’s legal system already incorporates Sharia in certain domains. The 1991 Enforcement of Shariat Act, passed by the National Assembly under Nawaz Sharif’s government, declared Sharia the “Supreme Law” of Pakistan, stipulating that courts must interpret laws in line with Islamic jurisprudence. This bill was supported by a majority of MPs, indicating broad parliamentary backing for Sharia.

The Federal Shariat Court, established in 1980, has the power to nullify laws deemed un-Islamic, and the Supreme Court’s Shariat Appellate Bench reviews its decisions. These institutions reflect parliamentary support for Sharia’s role in governance. Specific Sharia-based laws, such as the Hudood Ordinances (1979), Qisas and Diyat Ordinance (1990), and blasphemy laws (1980s), were either passed or upheld by Parliament, suggesting strong historical support.

Even Benazir Bhutto, a leftwing liberal supported by Western feminists and an opponent of Zia’s Islamization, did not repeal these laws during her tenure (1988–1990). Her PPP, despite being historically more secular, continued the Sharia laws when in power, suggesting that even its MPs acquiesce to Sharia’s role to avoid political backlash.

Besides the small fringe parties (with 5%-10% share of parliament seats) supporting Sharia, even the mainstream parties (PTI, PML-N, PPP) holding 90–95% of seats, support Sharia in specific areas (e.g., family law, blasphemy, banking), as evidenced by their votes for the 1991 Shariat Act and related laws. However, they also uphold certain secular elements like the British-based penal code, indicating a mixed system.

In 2023, the Federal Shariat Court struck down parts of the 2018 Transgender Persons Act as un-Islamic, and no major parliamentary opposition emerged, indicating continued support for Sharia-based judicial oversight.

A 2016 Dawn newspaper article cited a survey showing that 78% of Pakistanis “strictly support” Quranic teachings influencing laws, suggesting that MPs face pressure to align with Sharia.

In summary, approximately 80–90% of Pakistan’s MPs support Sharia law as a significant or primary legal framework, based on historical votes (e.g., 1991 Shariat Act), the constitutional mandate, and public sentiment (84% in 2013, 67% in 2018). This includes 100% of religious party MPs and a majority of mainstream MPs. Only 10–20% (likely PPP liberals or urban elites) might favor limiting Sharia to personal laws while prioritizing secular codes.

Conclusion

The contemporary geopolitical landscape is increasingly shaped by competing visions of global order, each rooted in distinct ideological foundations. On one end, the progressive Left advances a globalist framework centered on equity, inclusion, and wealth redistribution—essentially a reimagined form of Marxism adapted for the 21st century. This vision emphasizes transnational governance, climate justice, and social equity as the pillars of a just world order. In stark contrast, the Islamist vision aspires the myth of a unified Caliphate governed by Sharia law, encompassing not just religious authority but a comprehensive sociopolitical and administrative system. Meanwhile, a third vision is being crafted by technocratic elites and Silicon Valley futurists, who envision a hyper-automated world stratified between a super-rich managerial class and a vast underclass, sustained through AI-driven surveillance, digital currencies, and post-labor economies.

A possible fourth contender is the resurgent nationalist bloc that rejects supranational institutions and globalist agendas in favor of sovereign control, traditional values, and ethnocentric governance.

These competing world orders—progressivist, Islamist, technocratic, and nationalist—are increasingly in friction, each seeking to shape the norms, rules, and institutions of the emerging global system. These paradigms are not merely theoretical; they actively inform real-world policy, diplomacy, and conflict.

Institutions such as Islamic banking, halal certification networks, Sharia-based legal systems, madrasa education, WAQF boards, and even historical frameworks like the jizya tax are not merely religious or cultural practices—they form a ready-made infrastructure that could be rapidly mobilized on a global scale as part of a Caliphate-oriented movement. These systems are transnational in nature, already embedded in multiple countries, and could serve as the administrative, economic, and ideological backbone of a broader Islamist political order. Their integration into state structures under a unified Caliphate would provide both the tools and legitimacy to enforce conformity, control dissent, and reshape governance along rigid theocratic lines.

Thus, the Caliphate project poses significant dangers to the sovereignty of nations, pluralism, individual freedoms, and liberty. It starts with soft influence, extends its reach through strategic expansion, and culminates in the consolidation of its chokehold. To gradually expands its foothold, it leverages the existing tools and freedoms of democratic systems—such as legal protections, electoral participation, and free speech—not to uphold them in the long run, but to eventually weaken them from within. It often forges uneasy alliances with elements of the progressive Left, exploiting shared rhetoric around rights, identity, or anti-imperialism, to advance its initial objectives until it no longer needs such partnerships.

American policymakers should examine the thesis that Gaza, Kashmir and other sites for Islamic conflict are local manifestations of this very old, partly invisible, global war since the beginning of Islam. Unfortunately, this is not easy to discuss publicly out of fear of retribution. The fear of being accused of Islamophobia and being cancelled by the cancel culture prevalent in American public spaces has kept this issue from getting the scrutiny it deserves.

Appendix: Main Islamic Groups Classified as Terrorists by the Indian Government

• Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT): LeT, founded in 1987, is a Pakistan-based militant group designated as a terrorist organization by India, the United States, and the European Union. It is notorious for high-profile attacks, including the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which killed over 160 people. LeT is allied with other militant groups and has ties to al-Qaeda. LeT’s ideology, rooted in Ahl-e-Hadith (a Salafi-inspired movement), envisions a global Islamic struggle against perceived Muslim oppression. While its primary focus is on Kashmir and weakening the Indian state, LeT’s broader rhetoric aligns with establishing an Islamic governance model based on sharia. Its vision of the caliphate is less explicit than that of groups like ISIS but draws on the idea of a unified Islamic order under divine law, inspired by historical Muslim empires like the Mughals. LeT’s attacks aim to destabilize India as a step toward this broader goal, though it does not explicitly declare a territorial caliphate.
• Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM): Founded in 2000 by Masood Azhar, JeM is a Pakistan-based group designated as a terrorist organization by India and the United States. It emerged from Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and is linked to the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the 2019 Pulwama attack, which killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel. JeM’s ideology is Deobandi, emphasizing jihad to establish Islamic rule. Like LeT, its immediate focus is on Kashmir, but its rhetoric includes a vision of a broader Islamic governance system. JeM’s leader, Azhar, has referenced the restoration of Islamic rule in India, evoking the Mughal era, but the group does not explicitly advocate for a global caliphate like ISIS. Its vision aligns with a regional Islamic state under sharia, potentially as a precursor to a larger unified Islamic polity.
• Hizbul Mujahideen (HM): Formed in 1989 as the military wing of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, HM is a Kashmir-based militant group designated as a terrorist organization by India and the United States. It is one of the largest militant groups in Jammu and Kashmir. HM’s primary goal is ethno-religious nationalism, focusing on Kashmir’s liberation. Its ideology, influenced by Jamaat-e-Islami, emphasizes sharia-based governance and its vision of a caliphate is secondary to its regional objectives of a local Islamic state.
• Indian Mujahideen (IM): IM, operational since 2003, is a homegrown Indian militant group acting as a proxy for LeT and other Pakistan-based groups. It is designated as a terrorist organization by India and linked to attacks like the 2008 Jaipur bombings and the 2010 Pune bombing. IM’s ideology aligns with LeT’s Salafi-jihadist framework, emphasizing jihad against India’s secular state. IM’s propaganda, including publications like *Voice of Hind* (linked to ISIS), rejects nationalism and promotes joining a global Islamic order. Its vision likely mirrors LeT’s goal of establishing sharia-based governance, potentially as part of a broader caliphate-inspired movement.
• Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS): ISIS and AQIS are global jihadist groups with limited but growing presence in India. ISIS has inspired attacks like the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, while AQIS, formed in 2014, aims to expand al-Qaeda’s influence in South Asia. Both are designated as terrorist organizations by India. ISIS explicitly aims to establish a global caliphate, as declared in 2014 under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, governing through a strict interpretation of sharia. Its Indian affiliates, like Junudul Khilafah al-Hind, promote this vision via propaganda like *Voice of Hind*, urging Indian Muslims to reject nationalism and join the caliphate. ISIS’s caliphate is territorial, centralized, and expansionist, aiming to control regions like Jammu and Kashmir as provinces.
• AQIS: Al-Qaeda’s vision involves a caliphate as a long-term goal but prioritizes jihad to weaken enemies (e.g., India, the West) first. AQIS sees India as a battleground for global jihad, aiming to establish sharia-based governance through violence. Its caliphate vision is less immediate than ISIS’s, focusing on creating conditions for Islamic rule rather than declaring a territorial state.
• Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HuT): HuT, a global pan-Islamist group founded in 1952, was declared a terrorist organization by India in October 2024 due to its advocacy for a global caliphate and alleged jihadist activities. Unlike other groups, HuT officially promotes non-violent means but is criticized for radicalizing youth. HuT envisions a centralized, transnational caliphate governed by sharia, with a detailed constitutional model. It seeks to unify the Umma under a single caliph, rejecting nation-states and promoting intellectual and political mobilization to overthrow secular regimes. In India, HuT’s propaganda emphasizes replacing the secular state with Islamic governance, though it avoids direct violence, focusing on ideological influence.
• Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB): JMB, a Bangladesh-based group, is designated as a terrorist organization by India for attacks like the 2013 Bodh Gaya bombing. It has a presence in eastern India and collaborates with other jihadist groups. JMB’s ideology aligns with global jihadist movements, particularly ISIS, emphasizing sharia-based governance. Its attacks and propaganda suggest support for a regional Islamic state as part of a broader jihadist vision, potentially linked to ISIS’s caliphate model.
• Harakat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM): HuM, founded in 1985, is a Pakistan-based group designated as a terrorist organization by India and the United States. It shifted focus from Afghanistan to Kashmir in the 1990s and is linked to the 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking. HuM’s ideology, rooted in jihadism, envisions Islamic rule in Kashmir as part of a broader struggle. While not explicitly advocating a global caliphate, its ties to al-Qaeda suggest alignment with a vision of sharia-based governance, potentially as a step toward a unified Islamic polity.

The various groups’ postures toward Caliphate may be summed as follows:

• Some are explicit about wanting the Caliphate, while others see that as a long-term goal and want to focus on the immediate goal of a regional caliphate.
• Some groups prefer to focus strictly on weakening the Indian state and democracy, and do not want to be considered pro-Caliphate, even though their anti-India terrorism facilitates the work of pro-Caliphate groups.
• Most of them advocate violence, but a few advocate peaceful means to establish Sharia as the first step.

___________________________

[1] https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/intifada-from-palestine-to-kashmir/. Downloaded February 27, 2025.
[2] The 2013 Pew survey did not cover major Muslim populations like India, Saudi Arabia, or Iran due to political sensitivities or security concerns. More recent global surveys are scarce, and localized polls (e.g., UK, U.S.) may not reflect broader trends.
[3] The specific examples cited in this section are drawn from the work by Rahul Sur (unpublished document)  in documenting Islamic violence.
[4] https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks-in-the-world-1979-2021/
[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2428875/Kenya-mall-shooting-survivors-reveal-gunman-executed-non-Muslims.html
[6] https://www.yahoo.com/news/gunmen-attack-luxury-hotel-mali-capital-hostages-084238110.html?guccounter=1
[7] https://www.twincities.com/2016/09/17/several-people-injured-in-stabbing-at-st-cloud-mall/
[8] https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n18/128/36/pdf/n1812836.pdf?OpenElement
[9] https://morningstarnews.org/2017/07/christians-coastal-kenya-fearful-slaughter-13-non-muslims/
[10] https://jihadwatch.org/2018/09/kenya-muslims-murder-two-non-muslims-for-failing-to-recite-the-quran
[11] https://www.mnnonline.org/news/mozambique-insurgents-hunt-christians-door-to-door/
[12] https://www.churchinneed.org/burkina-faso-christians-face-resurgence-of-terrorist-attacks/
[13] https://www.persecution.org/2022/01/16/man-abducted-fulani-militants-asked-muslim-christian/
[14] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1083760/logger-killed-in-basilan-for-failing-to-say-quran-verses
[15] https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un_documents_type/security-council-press-statements/page/4?ctype=Terrorism&cbtype=terrorism#038;cbtype=terrorism
[16] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/new-zealand-mosque-shooter-sentenced-to-life-without-parole
[17] https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/63770ad9-8c0b-44c4-a568-254bb22a8009_en?filename=ran_root_causes_of_violent_extremism_ranstorp_meines_july_2024.pdf
[18] https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/european_union_terrorism_situation_and_trend_report_te-sat_2020_0.pdf
[19] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights
[20] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Rabat_draft_outcome.pdf
[21] https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/what-is-hate-speech
[22] https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc4630-countering-islamophobiaanti-muslim-hatred-eliminate
[23] https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g21/086/49/pdf/g2108649.pdf
[24] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Rabat_draft_outcome.pdf
[25] https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/jamaat-e-islami
[26] Afghan militants, particularly those linked to the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989), infiltrated Kashmir after 1989 under Pakistan’s Operation Tupac to spread radical Islamist ideology. Between 1991 and 1999, 279 Afghan jihadists were killed in Kashmir. Groups like Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, associated with al-Qaeda, had Afghan connections, with leaders like Ilyas Kashmiri in the region. Examples of Pakistani operatives include Talab Mansur (Gujranwala), Rashid Aziz and Abu Isha (Sialkote), and Abu Salama (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir). Between 1991 and 1999, 383 Pakistani militants were killed by Indian forces. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) trained and armed these fighters under the guise of “mujahideen” waging jihad.A small number of Saudi militants were killed in Kashmir between 1991 and 1999. Six Sudanese militants were killed in Kashmir between 1991 and 1999, and Sudan has been linked to broader Islamist networks supporting jihadist movements. Four Yemeni militants were killed in the same period. Two Lebanese militants were killed between 1991 and 1999. Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Turkey, Tajikistan, and Bangladesh have each contributed with at least one militant killed in Kashmir between 1991 and 1999.
[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansar_Ghazwat-ul-Hind

I did not have the honor of knowing or meeting Mr. Hegde personally. But Bharadwaj gave me some reading material which was very informative and very impressive. And in fact the rise of disruptive forces, which was already referenced, is an extremely important lecture he gave in 1992. It resonates with lot of my own work.

How much I wish he were here as a collaborator! Because I am trying to take forward the same sort of ideas which he mentioned in 1992 and a lot of what I am going to talk about is where these disruptive forces are today.

It turns out that the disruptive forces have become stronger and more institutionalized and more organized but worst of all they have become internationalized and linked with global forces. So while Hegde talks about Khalistan movement, North East movement, Dravidian movement and various other disruptive movements, in that era before the globalization, they were contained locally within certain space and there were no connections with forces outside of the country, global nexuses, which now exist. And that would be an important part of what I want to talk about.

“Disruptive forces” – Centrifugal forces

Some of my research interests, which I am presenting in this lecture, have to do with India’s centrifugal forces, which are what Hegde would call the disruptive forces. Centrifugal forces are as you know anything that tears the system apart. And these are both external and internal. Internal disruptive forces are today known as communalism and also socio-economic disparities of various kind.

There is another dimension of centrifugal forces which are external. It is not just Pakistan stirring up disruptive forces in India; it is not just China linking up with Maoist forces in India; it is not just Baptist church in North America stirring up separatism in North Eastern India and Dravidian separatism in South India. It is all of these and more.

So the centrifugal forces are more complex and globalized. But there are also centripetal forces which are opposite which bring the nation together – for instance, development of the corporate kind, infrastructure building, and national governance – these kinds of things. They bring the nation together.

Nation’s Sovereignty and the Role of Civilization

I am interested in what is the role of civilization in preserving a nation’s sovereignty. In other words, can a nation be sovereign very long if it does not have the cohesive shared civilization? Can a random collection of people continue to exist as a nation with all these centrifugal forces unless there is some cohesive sense of identity that can bring them together?

I am also interested in the role of Indian civilization as a positive force in the world. What are its contributions to the world? That is an important area of my work. And finally what are the prospects for India and what are the pre-requisites for India to harvest and harness these prospects.

A civilization briefly defined, as I am going to use it, is a shared identity or the collective images that we have of us as a people, a collective sense of history and shared destiny we have. It brings a deep psychological bond that makes citizens feel that the nation is worth defending. If this bond does not exist, then what is the “we” we are going to defend, that we are going to make sacrifices for? So civilization is that which gives you the sense of ‘We’ – in a positive sense. Breaking the civilization is like breaking the spine of a person. If the social spine is broken then the nation is crippled and also behaves unpredictably.

Cynical Attitudes in India

I come across cynical attitudes in India with this regard. For instance there are people who say that there is no such thing as Indian Civilization. It is a hotch-potch of many things put together and that the British gave us a nation. So there is a debate on whether India is five thousand years old or sixty years old and where you end up on that debate tells a lot about your views on Indian civilization.

There are others who say that if there is an Indian civilization, then it is a bad idea because it is responsible for all our problems. It is what makes us primitive, oppressive and so on. Then there are those who feel that civilization and identity, whatever they might have been, they are obsolete. Because what we have is a flat world like Thomas L. Friedman says and that you are an individual in today’s meritocracy and the concept of identity with groups does not matter. I disagree and I will explain later why.

There is another attitude that differences are a bad idea. Anything that makes you different is potential for trouble. Therefore differences are to be eliminated. I hear this quite a lot here. On the other hand one could say that differences are to be celebrated. That is a world view that Indians have. That is an ancient world view that says differences are inherent in nature. They are an inherent part of the fabric of reality of the Cosmos. Plants, animals, and seasons – everything has differences built in to them.  Differences are built into the way human beings are composed – in their bodies and minds and their cultures and languages. So difference can be celebrated.

If you know how to celebrate differences which I see as the quintessential Indian contribution in civilization, then you do not have the problem which you have when you feel difference has to be eliminated. Because the moment you say difference has to be eliminated, well then how do you do that? Do you change to me, to my way, to eliminate difference? Or do I convert you to be like me so you do not have the anxiety over different?

Do I genocide you because it bothers me because you are different so that I can get rid of you?  Do I enslave you?  All these are things that happen in the name of eradicating difference and to have one world. And we actually face more problems as opposed to learning how to live with difference and celebrate it.

Finally even discussing the topic of an encounter of civilization is often viewed with great suspicion. People think that there is some kind of a conspiracy theory going on or some kind of a negative thing going on and it would be better off if we talk about just how every thing is great and we are singing and dancing and doing Bhangratogether- kind of like a Bollywood ending. People often tell me to make sure to have a Bollywood ending in the talk. But I am not sure I would live up to that.

Escapism

There is also another prevailing attitude which I call escapism. Escapism is this very lofty and apathetic kind of approach moralizing which says things like “There is no other” “We believe in everything. All paths lead to the truth” “We survived for five thousand years and will survive no matter what.” “We have the truth and the mantras and the deities on our side” and “in any case it is all maya / mithya so why bother” But even great spiritualists like Sri Aurobindo wrote aggressively against this mindset as defeatist, other-worldly, world-negating mindset which is not what true spirituality is about. True spirituality is about engaging the world and dealing with the issues.

Then there is another kind of escapism which accepts the problems but does not accept the responsibility and tends to see it as some one else’s problem like saying “USA will do this for us.” If not United States, then it is United Nations. It is like putting us for adoption and I keep saying an elephant is too big to be adopted. You cannot look into today’s world for a guardian parent. You have to look after your selves. That is the message of my today’s talk that looking at all the options, you have to come down and take responsibility in your own hands for India and its civilization. 

“Disruptive forces – Fragments

I want you to recollect Hegde’s 1992 speech “The Rise of Disruptive forces,” in which he lists half a dozen, what he calls, “disruptive forces.” These forces I term as ‘fragments.’ These are identities, these are sub-nations within India that are having a hard time with the rest of the country. Hegde says that these groups for thousands of years did not have any problem with each other or the nation and they were Ok. It was too much interference into their internal affairs which has caused reaction from these groups and so they are becoming disruptive.

As this talk unfolds you will see that how I am actually picking that theme and observe how it has developed over the last sixteen or seventeen years. We will see how these disruptive forces have become fragments and how these fragments have become global movements with India as sort of epicenter for these global movements.

Three Scenarios for India’s Future

I will present three scenarios for India taking into account the global civilizational encounter and India’s internal fragments that are in tension with each other. Scenario A is where I shall spend lot of my time. It is a negative scenario. And this has to be discussed and understood before we can move on.

Scenario A is that India’s fragments get taken over as parts of the West, Pan-Islam and China. Scenario B is that Indian “culture” succeeds globally but Indian nation-state disappears. (“India is not a nation but a culture.”).Scenario C is that India emerges as a thriving nation-state with its own civilization and helps the world.

Scenario A says that India’s fragments, that is, all the disruptive forces will be taken over by others. Some parts will go to the West, some parts may belong to pan-Islamic expansion and some may be taken over by China. So India may actually disintegrate or large parts of it may be taken over by others. This I call “fragmentation and disintegration of India” scenario. And I will talk a fair amount about this.

There are people who say “India is not a nation but a culture.  So why defend it?” We are not a nation, we are a grand new system, they argue. We are an idea. As long as the culture lives, whether the nation lives or not is immaterial, they say. I consider this scenario B as basically short-lived. If scenario B happens, then it will quickly be followed by scenario A . Soon, neither India will exist, nor its culture. This is because once the nation is not there to act as the container, as the vehicle or the vessel which nurtures and protects and projects its unique culture, then the culture sort of scatters and gets eaten up by various other civilizations. Soon that culture will also dissolve. It will become part of various other entities and lose its original self. So if Indian culture has to exist, it is important for the Indian nation to exist.

And then there is scenario C. It is a positive one which says that India emerges as a thriving nation-state with its own civilization and helps the world. Really, A and C are the only two real scenarios. Scenario B is sort of a very graceful and dignified way of ending up in scenario A. It is a way of saying “OK, we loose with honor. We are finished but we won because our culture thrives.” It is like the deer saying, “So what if the tiger eats me up. In the belly of the tiger, I will be alive and you know the tiger runs fast and I will be running fast and I will be part of his DNA and I will nurture him and make him a loving creature from within.”

But it does not work because after the deer has been eaten, the tiger remains a tiger. He is just a stronger tiger. So scenario B is kind of a delusionary kind of attitude that you hear very often, particularly from very spiritual minded people who would say: “What nation?! What do you want to defend? The culture is good. It is doing well. They eat our food and listen to our music and do our Yoga and wear our clothes and watch our Bollywood movies . So it does not matter whether there is India or not but as a culture we will survive.”

Globalization and Civilizational Competition

Globalization intensifies competition among civilizations because of factors such as scarcity of world resources, growth of population and increasing expectations of people, that is, everyone everywhere in the world wants to live the Page 3 American lifestyle though there are not enough resources to sustain this. There will be nine billion people on earth by the middle of this century. There are just not enough resources to make the American Page 3-type lifestyle possible for everyone in the world.

Then there is the collective power of a group identity. Groups worldwide are coalescing. Rather than the group identity weakening and dissolving over time, it is actually the opposite that is happening. Group identities are growing and strengthening. For example, in India vote banks — which are nothing but group identities — are intensifying. And if this is happening in India, why should we think that something similar is not happening in other parts of the world?

Group identities are developing and hardening on a global scale. The phenomenon that we in India call as “vote bank identity politics” is occuring at the civilizational level throughout the world. People feel that if they are able to negotiate and bargain collectively using group identities, they can get a much better deal. This is resulting in an intensified competition worldwide among various civilisational groups.

Top Three Civilizational Competitors 

The West, China and Pan-Islam, each of these three civilisational groups publicly projects its claim of being a superior civilization than others and asserts its plan of total world domination. The West represented by the United States certainly feels that it is the world leader and does not want to give up that claim. China feels that by the middle of this century, it can claim the Number One position in the world in every respect. This is a claim China makes publicly and there is nothing to be embarrassed about it. And, of course, Islam has an age-old doctrinal commitment to world domination.

I realize here that my term ‘West’ is not a simple one and that America and Europe are separate entities. But I am going to continue to use it as my thesis is already complex. I can put five civilizations or eight civilizations instead of three (West, China and pan-Islam) but that will not change the bottom-line as far as India is concerned. So I am using only these three terms. I also realize that Islam is also a complex phenomenon and that there are many factions and types of forces within it. But for my purpose here, just calling it ‘Islam’ suffices.

Now, these top three civilizational groups have the following attributes. Each has collective super ego with common values as well as a chauvinistic grand narrative of history, such as who they are and how great their ancestors were, fully backed up with glorifying ideas and stories about them. Each is committed to achieving global dominance. Each actively nurtures its civilization and projects it via academics, education, media and international policy. This image projection is not something on the fringes of their existence, but is very consciously and deliberately pursued by them. This fact counteracts the Flat World individual meritocracy.

United States has got major projects going on all the time about its sense of history, its founding fathers, its parades, its monuments in Washington, the presidential libraries and great American flags that are seen everywhere – even outside a car dealership or outside a gas station. This generates a sense of shared nationhood and patriotism in Americans that is larger than life. And this trend is not going away. Instead, it is getting stronger by the day. All of this counteracts the idea of the flat world where one thinks “only my merit counts for me to succeed in this world” and so on.

Success Factors for Competing Civilizations

Now here I have taken a grid. I have put the three civilizations I have been talking about in this study. And I am looking at what are the success factors. I already talked about historical identity and a sense of manifest destiny. But also modern institutions are important as a source of strength. This grid I use in workshops with westerners with Chinese people with Islamic and try to figure out their ideas of who is where on this grid.

Success Factors West China Islam
Historical Identity and Manifest destiny
Modern Institutions
Financial Capital
Political/Military Capital
Intellectual Capital

Now modern institutions have three forms of capital: there is financial capital; there is political/military capital and there is intellectual capital. Now we have a Varna system which can also be seen as a form of capital. In fact, that is how I see it and not as caste or privilege of birth and all that. Varnas are forms of capital. Financial capital is Vaishya and Kshatriyas are political/military capital. So laws, courts, Supreme Court, international treaties, United Nations – not just military but all governance thus becomes Kshatriya capital.  Nations and civilizations need that.

Then there is intellectual capital – the knowledge, the know-how that is the Brahminical capital. So one could also say is that the job of the modern institutions in a civilization is to enhance its Vaishya capital, its Kshatriya capital and its Brahminical capital. This is a different perspective than the caste perspective.

China

Now if you look at China, they have a very explicitly stated plan and a definite mission to be the world leaders by the middle of this century in economic, military and civilizational terms. They have constructed a grand narrative of China which is formulated and projected with great force. It deals with how the Chinese civilisation began developing five thousand years ago on the bedrock of Confucianism, what is the great China story and how the Chinese became modern and how they are now moving on confidently to the future.

This is a very seamless and continuous story that the Chinese have constructed about themselves. This is what they are teaching their people and projecting to others. The Chinese government is doing a major promotion of Chinese positive history worldwide. The Chinese story has none of this undercurrent of shame and guilt that afflicts the Indians, with self-demeaning arguments such as “We are ashamed or we are guilty that we have abused people in the past, we are sorry for ourselves, we shall apologize for Indian civilization and for our existence to everyone who has taken offense.” The Chinese have none of this in the story of their civilisation that they have formulated for themselves.

A comparison of course curriculum of Chinese studies and Indian studies in the Harvard University is like comparing night and day. If you look at the topics of public talk on China, the available courses on Chinese civilisation and dissertations on China and contrast these with the Indian studies, it will reveal to you how China is projecting itself very positively in the world while India is not. The Chinese have established hundreds of Confucian study chairs worldwide. They have done this with the help of the Chinese government and their private sector and entrepreneurs. China Institutes exist in San Francisco, New York and many other places in the US.

The Chinese insist that they have their own strain of modernization which is different from Westernization. They assert that their youths are modernizing rapidly but they have their own approach to modernity which is uniquely Chinese. This approach rejects the notion that to modernise the Chinese youths have to mimic the West. The Chinese modernize using all consumables and modern technological marvels, but they make sure that there is a quintessentially Chinese philosophical and civilizational ethos behind their modernity.

In India, on the other hand, we often hear the debate if Indians should remain traditional or become modern. This argument implies that modernity and tradition are opposites that cannot be reconciled and if we have to become modern, we have to essentially become Westernized. This means that we are incapable of becoming modern in the Indian context.

Unlike the Chinese, we Indians lack a civilizational approach to modernity that is uniquely Indian. An Indian approach to modernity is considered an oxymoron in India, but the Chinese openly assert that they have their own version of modernity built around the essence of Chinese civilisation. They see no problem in being modern and Chinese at the same time. But Indians keep confusing modernity with Westernisation and abandonment of indigenous Indian traditions.

Pan-Islam

Pan-Islam has a theological grand narrative from God. China does not claim that their grand narrative is from God. It is something the Chinese have built up over time. But Islamic grand narrative is claimed to come directly from God which gives Muslims an identity, meaning and direction. Islam has a sacred geography. So, for example, the Kaba is sacred for Muslims and they cannot face any other direction such as the local Jama Masjid to pray. The sacred geography of Islam is unique.

Islam also has a literalist account of history. “Literalist” means it is not metaphorical and thus cannot be reinterpreted for modern times. All events of Mohammad’s life are considered actual historic events. You cannot mess with them. When God Himself is one of the protagonists in a historical event, you better not try to update what He might have said. You cannot amend such history because God Himself has spoken. It is literal history.

In addition, Islam has a pre-ordained trajectory into the future.  Not only the past historical events of Islam are fixed, its future is also divinely pre-ordained and all Muslims have to live in a way to achieve that vision. Islam thus has a scenario of “us” versus “them” – Dar-ul-Islam (us) versus Dar-ul-Harb (them). But Islam is not just one monolithic or doctrinal entity. There are cultural variations in Islam. There are at least four.  There is the Arab version and then there is the Persian version which is very different – their language is different and their history and links with Islam are very different.

There is also the Indic or South Asian version of Islam which is very eclectic and the most liberal of them all. It would probably be a very important asset for Indian civilization if it manages to harmonize with this version of Islam because it is a highly exportable model. Rest of the world has to learn how to live with Islam and India has the longest experience of doing that. Indian Islam is different than the type of Islam found elsewhere. Hopefully it can remain like that and not get taken over by the Saudi (Arab) version of Islam and similar forces.

Then there is the Western version of Islam which exists in Europe and US. People who are Islamic in the West have a whole new political and social value system. Finally, there are fringe movements in Islam to liberalize it but these remain just that — fringe movements. They do not have the center of power.

Islam is today poised where Christianity was when its reformation started. And once the reformation movement began in Europe, it took 200 years of fighting before the reformation could be firmly established and the Church-State separation could occur. The Christian Church no longer has Fatwa-like powers which it used to enjoy at one point in time. So Christians have a reference point to understand Islam because Islam is sort of pre-reformation Christianity in terms of where it stands today.

Civilizational Encounter Between US and India

Now I am going to focus on United States to give you the worst case scenario of how a foreign civilization can come and intervene in India. I do not do this because I have a problem with the United States. I have lived there. I love it and think that it is India’s best ally in terms of another civilization. I do this because I think Indians must understand the propensity of America.  America does not have just one point of view. It has no stable point of view either – it keeps shifting, just like in the case of India where we have many points of view on a complex issue and the views shift over time.

The scenario I am going to develop also applies to Islam, China and other civilizations but I focus on United States because I have lived there for thirty-forty years. I know the US very well and have studied its history for the last ten years in a very systematic manner. Therefore I can talk about the US with better confidence. But the scenario I am going to outline for the US also applies to other civilizations in terms of intervention into India.

USA has some very positive things going on about India. Let us start with that. There is business success. I am also product of that business success of US. America’s gifts to Indian youth both for higher education and career opportunities are very well known. America has a love affair with Indian pop culture. That is also very encouraging. And India is America’s friend after 9/11. These are some of the positive things you can list.

USA’s Civilizational Threat Psychosis

However, America’s outlook is far more complex and unstable, and this is where I am going to develop my scenario. Before we start talking about India, we have to understand that America has its own problems with China as well as Islam. America has a dual psychosis in terms of civilizational threats that it perceives from these two.

I start with the left hand side of the chart and then go to right hand side. In the left hand side, there is a clash between US and China which I call the ‘clash of modernities.’  It is a clash of modernities because China is saying to the US that we are going to compete with you on modernity. The competition between China and US is based not on religion or ideology but on modernity, industrial economy, military, political power, consumerism and materialism. China says, “We are going to become more American than America itself!” And this assertion of China is what is eating America at the very core of its modern industrial society.

I call this a “Father-Son clash” because China’s industry has been sort of produced or exported by United States.  It was US that has been sending capital to China from the Nixon-Kissinger era.  The Americans sent the industries, the technology, and the machines, and they bought the finished goods. So the US actually transplanted its entire industrial complex and shifted it off to Pacific Ocean and China. Now the son (that is China) is saying to the US: “Thank you Dad. I learnt this from you. You gifted it to me. I have improved upon it. Now I can do better than you. And guess what. I am actually going to take you over. I am now better at this modernity than you are.” So there is a Father-Son clash over modernity going on between US and China. That is one of the two psychoses of United States.

The other psychosis which I have depicted in the right hand side is the clash of fundamentalisms. Islam is not looking for modernity. Muslims are not clashing with America because they have better machines and factories or they export more consumer goods than the US. They are not worried about that. Muslims are competing against fundamentalist Christianity and its rival claims over historical prophets each of whom claim finality. Christianity and Islam, each is claiming that it has got God’s franchise – in fact the exclusive franchise — and other franchise are bogus and hence not valid. Both say they have the franchise from Goa to take over the world.

This fundamentalism versus fundamentalism between American Christianity and Islam is also a ‘Father-Son Clash’ in the sense that Islam is an offspring of the lineage of Judaeo-Christian prophets. It is interesting that Islam as an offspring or sequel to Christianity is now taking on its own father. Islam says: “We respect Jesus and the prior prophets. What they say is true and we should respect them. But our prophet is more recent and supersedes.” It is like a lawyer saying that, “the contract you have is valid, but I have a more recent version. And the more recent version supersedes the older version. Not that your version is wrong but my version is better because it’s newer.” This is also the son taking on the father on the father’s own terms.

Now you can see that United States has got a problem because it considers itself as consisting of Christian ethos as also a very modern enlightened secular ethos. But both these are threatened by the two offspring or two civilizations which ironically America has created and gifted them the tools in a metaphorical sense.

Challenged America Hedging its Bets on India

How does all of this play into India? With the Chinese threat on one side and the Islamic threat on the other, a challenged America has developed a schizophrenic attitude towards India. This is what I will explain to you. United States is hedging its bets on India. That is why it is impossible to characterize America one way or the other with respect to India on a long-term basis.

I am going to go through the left hand side of the slide first which is the move to build up India. The right hand side of the slide says “Fragment India.” America has thus two opposing views on India. The “build up India” voices in American think tanks and policy institutes are saying, let us invest in India financial capital market and labor, let us have military alliances, let us have regional political alliances with India. And the benefit to US is that such alliances will counter China’s hegemony and contain Islamic threat. This will be good for US corporate interests and India will be a stabilizing force in the third world.

But there is also a caution at the bottom that says that if this happens and India becomes too successful then in the long term America will have another China-like threat. This scenario says: “One China is bad enough for the US. What if another brilliant people became another kind of China and are as successful in competing wth United States? Then America will have to worry about not one but two China-like threats.” So while there is a voice in American policy making circles that says let us build up India, there is also a voice that is concerned that India may get out of hand and become too strong. Therefore let us come to the right hand side of the slide that says” Let us fragment India.”

The “Fragment India” voice is a much older one than the “Build up India” voice. The “Build up India” voice is more of a corporate and political voice that has emerged only over the last ten years. But the “fragmentation of India” voice has been there since the cold war. In the fifties and sixties, United States had the attitude of divide and rule with respect to India. They built up the Dravidian movement, Annadurai was built up and all kinds of movements were built up to fragment India and play one group against the other. When Nehru was pro-Soviet, then the United States used the Dravidian movement to counteract Nehru’s programme of unifying India. So the fragmentation of India is a very old policy of the US. And it says, exploit dalits vs. the Brahmins, Dravidians vs. the so-called Aryans, women vs.  men and minorities vs. the Hindus.

The benefits to the proponents of this voice are that United States will avoid China-like competition from India. With this approach, America can still outsource and use Indian workers. It can get a whole lot of cheap labourers from India but they will never get out of hand, they will never be too strong and they will never rebel against the US. America can still use the Indian workers on its own terms and keep them weak.

This “fragment India” approach will also accelerate evangelism in the subcontinent because when the state is weak, the evangelists can have clear paths and there will be less resistance to what they are trying to do. And think what a great market for weapons exporters will emerge in a fragmented India! Imagine if the army of Gujarat wants to buy tanks and the army of Maharashtra wants to buy anti-tank missiles. What a great thing this will be for American arms merchants! Their stocks will go up if there is a disruption in India. If the disruptive forces of Hegde would become outright civil war, that would be good news indeed for weapons exporters.

Now the United States is also very concerned if this fragmentation of India happens. It is good to talk about it but if it actually materializes then it is worst nightmare for United States to have anarchy or chaos in India. with India many times the size of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan it would be the worst nightmare for United States if there is fragmentation of India.

US Interventions in India

So I call this the Mother-in-law syndrome. Do I want the couple to be united and happy or do I want them to fall apart? If they are too united, they will not listen to me. I don’t have a voice. I do not have the power. So I have to go and meddle around and play one against the other and create some friction. But then if that gets to the point they would divorce and go apart , then again I am in trouble. So I kind of play between these two poles and do not want either pole to happen too much. So United States’ policy towards India keeps vacillating between these two poles of “Build up India” and “Fragment India” And you cannot expect a long term stability in the way.

I have also been studying for the past decade various US interventions in India. And this is a very significant chart. At the top is the United States – Academy, Government, Church, Funding agencies – how they work together and fund the money with US ideology in training, leadership training, all kinds of things to be done in India and India receives that through the academy, funding agencies, church subsidiaries, NGOs and so on.  This is a kind of asymmetry because India does not do this up in the other direction.

Deconstructing India

And the way India is deconstructed, is shown here. This is how the “Fragment India” tank of the US looks at India: they look through both the secular lenses shown in the left and the Biblical lenses in the right and in between are the problems they study.
So the first building blocks to study are the castes, minorities and women. They keep showing that they have problems; they are oppressed and the civilization is bad. This feeds into a negative approach to Hinduism. And the negative approach to Hinduism feeds a negative approach to Indian civilization. Finally at the top there is a group of scholars who look at why India is not a valid nation-state; what is wrong with it and what are the human rights problems and other kinds of problems. So this is the kind of deconstruction of India template, if you will, which is quite commonly found in South Asian studies.

By the way I have looked at the last thirty two years of conferences on South Asia which is held at Madison every year. I got all the proceedings and abstracts. They were surprised that somebody wanted to buy all of them. It portrays India as an anti-progressive country, frozen in time, poverty-causing like a patient with caste, Sati, dowry, feticide, untouchability etc with West as the doctor. Further India is mystical and the West is rational. Whenever I hear this very common statement in United States, I say “Look. The chances are that your doctor is Indian. He is not irrational or with some mystical background. And the chances are that the lot of technology you are using is Indian and it is not created by a bunch of mystical people but by pretty rational people. So why do you keep thinking that way? It is just one of the old stereotypes that have not gone away.”

Invasion Theory of India

Then there is this idea that everything good about India was imported into India. The so-called Aryans brought Sanskrit. The Greeks brought philosophy and rational thought; Hinduism was a colonial construction; Indian culture was started by the Mughals and British gave Indians a nation and cricket and now we have to import our human rights from America. So everything we need we should import.

And I call this the invasion theory of India which means if we want something we should select who is the best invader who will give that to us. So we do not have any selfhood or we do not have any civilization we need to be invaded to have something of value. And this means that we are doomed to dependency also.

Afro-Dalit Project

Now what caught me started on this course of understanding America’s intervention with India’s break up was a very interesting meeting I had with a scholar in Princeton University. We were just sitting and having lunch and he has just come back from India and I said “What did you do in India?” And he said “Oh I went there as part of the Afro-Dalit project” So I asked him what is this Afro Dalit project. So he said, “Oh we go to India we do youth empowerment and training programmes” I said “It is very interesting. Can you tell me what it is? Who are the Dalits?” And he said “Well. … They are Africans. They are the blacks of India and the non-Dalits are the whites of India. And this is the black-white history of India which is mirroring the black white history of America. And the Afro-Dalit project is to educate our Dalit brothers.” This was amazing to me. And my whole thesis started when I started searching on Afro-Dalit project.

And there is a whole library of what they are up to and who funds them. And they are very much active in Tamil Nadu building up a whole network of youth empowerment and youth training to give them a contrary sense of history that they are historically a kind of oppressed people and non-religious and so on. The Church has a vested interest in it because if you can dislocate their identity from the rest of India then you can re-programme them and give them a new religion and so on. This is called Dalitstan project.

So I was invited to this scholar’s office. And I saw this map. This is the map of the Dalitstan that was hanging there. On the northern part is Mughalstan which is from Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the way to Bangladesh. This turns out to be what Mullah Omar says when he states that he wants to put the flag of Taliban on the red fort of Delhi and recreate the Mughal Empire. And the southern part of India is Dalitstan and Dravidstan. So these guys are working on it.

So I was very much amazed that nobody is talking about it. Nobody seems to have noticed. Yet these guys have an open project. If you just Google Afro-Dalit you will come across a lot of hits and you yourself can see that.  Then I started getting deeper into it and found that there is merit in the thesis that says that the local minorities are being appropriated by global nexuses. Afro-Dalit Project is just one example.

“Disruptive Forces” – Frontier India

So Hegde’s “Disruptive forces” of 1992 have turned into Frontier India mindset where the following wild things are happening. Local minority is co-opted as a branch office of some Global Nexus; many minorities are apart of some global majority and are used for trans-national agendas; third world intellectual franchises are set up to deconstruct their own nation.

It is very interesting that America’s very own sense of nation is becoming stronger and stronger and also the nation of China, the nation of Russia and the nation of Japan are becoming stronger and they are not deconstructing. They are not going out of style. And the European Union is becoming a strong super nation. But somehow the intellectual fashion of the day that is being exported to Indian intellectuals and third world intellectuals is that please go back to your country and deconstruct yourselves. We have to ask them to first do that to themselves.

Now you may say that there is a lot of post-modernism in American campuses and they are doing it to them also. But they are doing it from the fringes. The people who are doing it do not have clout. Nobody takes them seriously. The media does not quote these kind of people. They are not policy makers. They do not influence think-tanks. They just are cocoon in the academy and doing some deconstruction of America but the powers to be are very patriotic and the nation state is as strong as ever.

Minorities as Part of Global Majorities

So this also led me to question the definition of minority. And I want to leave this provocation with you.

If you are at the Macdonald’s in Delhi and you have local establishment with twenty employees you would not say that this is a minority institution. You would say that it is part of global empire. It is part of a huge global multi-national. Some one may say that all these twenties are from minority classes in India. You will still not be convinced because as individuals working there may be minorities in their personal capacity. But the institution they are working for is a branch office of a large multinational and not a minority.

Now why don’t you not apply the same thing to the Southern Baptist Church or Baptist Church which is a huge multinational which has set up a big network of churches in Nagaland and Tamil Nadu and they have a plan of twenty thousand churches in South India. So why do you call them minorities and not call them branch offices or subsidiaries of global multinationals? Why is it that if the product being sold is God’s love then all of a sudden the rules of the multinational do not apply? Because it is God’s love, God’s love is exempt from scrutiny and transparency.

I would submit to you that the definition of minority has to be modulated and if a minority is working for or funded by appointed by trained by a foreign global nexus, then it is not really a minority. It is part of a bigger enterprise. And that enterprise should be studied rather than these isolated twenty thirty people in a place whom we call minority. So I even provoke you to rethink the definition of minority itself in this age of globalization.

Positive India Narrative

Now there is a new positive India narrative in the US Business schools. this is the response we like to hear. Finally India’s time has come because I have lived there for last thirty eight years and only in the last seven years this voice has started. Otherwise there is always there is only the kind of discourse that I have stated earlier.

Now there is positive focus on investment, markets, labor force and all that. So what we have are two competing discourses. There is a positive discourse which says “Build up India” and this is primarily in business schools. So when my friends want to donate something for the study of India or South Asia, I always tell them to give it to the business schools and not to South Asian studies because South Asian studies are built on fragmentation of India -”Why India is a problem” kind of thesis built upon the old humanities or social sciences.

And now the irony is that both these views are also encased in India. In India also you have the technocrats, industrialists those kind of people who believe in a positive sense of India. Then you also have people in social sciences (and a lot of social science views are actually imported) in India who do not have faith in India as a nation. So you have both voices within India also.

Hypothetical Situation for US Intervention in India

Now I come to a more troubling part of my thesis.

I am going to give you hypothetical scenario for US intervention in India. Suppose South Asia becomes the epicenter of USA vs. Islam which can happen. Suppose the Taliban takes over nuclearized Pakistan. Ten years ago I wrote a paper on such a scenario but did not publish it because I thought it was sensational but today it is a possibility. What can happen is Taliban takes over ISI and ISI takes over the Pakistan army indirectly and we all know that Pakistan army runs Pakistan.

So Pakistan could have a democratically elected government which can act as a nice front for PRO purposes but really they do not have the power and they do not call the shots. It is even worse than having Musharaff. Because at least there it was transparent as you were dealing with an army. But here Pakistan can fool one to think that they are dealing with some group of importance while really that group does not have any power.

Let us say under such scenario Taliban takes over Pakistan and thus is now nuclearized Taliban. Now let us say US is fighting and years go on and the causalities build up and US faces economic pressures at home and another election is coming. So this fight turns into Obama’s Iraq. This fight with Talibanized nuclear Pakistan becomes Obama’s liability and US is desperate to exit but exit with honor.

So Obama or the future president has to figure out a way for exiting. So when the US exits, after having flared it up, then it has become a mess that somebody is going to encounter and guess who is going to bear that brunt of it? that will be India. I will also surmise in this hypothesis that Taliban will then have their vision of setting up that Mughalstan. They will see that they have enough disruptive forces sitting in India which can be incited by them and then they can get going with a huge revolution. Now that US has gone they can take over. Number Two. United States may also have another kind of intervention in India which is to safeguard Christians being persecuted. Some of you may think this is far fetched.

But when I started to research on this I saw a Wall street journal front page article two or three years ago titled US evangelists driving foreign policy intervention. It is a very long article that showed a hundred years history of evangelicals not only driving domestic policies like abortion and gay and nowadays on stem cell research very successfully but also very strong on foreign policy. And all foreign policy they want is that the United States should intervene wherever there is a pocket of Christians who consider themselves to be under threat. Once the United States agrees that that is the policy then they go and create some trouble and use that to bring United States intervention in there.

Now the dossier of such cases of persecution of Christians in India is growing and it is a huge dossier in United States and there are regular hearings in Washington for which they invite those Indians who complain and there is a long line of such people who are granted Visa and travels grants to go and give testimony in the US congress. Also there are well organized networks in India which have been funded by these entities to provoke trouble, to monitor persecution and then go over to report and lobby in Washington. This is all over the US media. So United States may decide “Ok Taliban has got North India. We can go and intervene here and there and get some Christianized pockets in South India. We have built our own base there and we have built a network of support.”  So this is the worst case scenario.

Now similar analysis also applies to Islam and China intervening, as each of them has stakes in India and ambitions in India. One can do scenarios like what if China and Pakistan jointly take military action. China would love to have Arunachal Pradesh because of the water -the Brahmaputra river water which can then be taken to Tibet. China would love to take Nepal because most of the water that comes to Ganga comes from Nepal and filters down to India. So this fight over water makes this geography very strategic and China would love to have all these. So you could build four scenarios of type A which shows how globalization brings civilizational threats to India.

What India can Contribute to the World?

Now I shall go to part- II. Now I want you to set aside the disturbing scenario I have explained. Now let us see what is positive that India can offer to the world -how India could be a successful civilization and do positive things.

So to start with what are the problems the world faces where India can offer a solution? I will list just three. One is that development- the cycle of economic development is not sustainable or scalable. It is not ecologically possible to have development of such large number of people and achieve the per capita consumption of the western standard and also you cannot scale to the whole world. Then the Abrahamic civilizations are based on exclusivity and a mandate to take over the world and that is not going to sustain peaceful environment. Finally the human rights laws that exist protect the individual but not cultures. There is no law broken if the language is made extinct or if your culture or your rituals are gone. If you as an individual are not violated then the culture as an entity does not have a status. Only the individual has a status.

So I will not go through this in detail because that will be a whole presentation by itself on what are some of the contributions that Indian civilization can make. There is a large reservoir of know-how of consciousness development, enhancement – what is called mind-sciences, intuition, creativity which is now at the cutting edge of western research in cognitive sciences, neuro-sciences, psychology and this is an asset that India has which is actually being acknowledged by the scientific community. So India brings a lot in this dimension.

There is a whole worked out system in Indian society on ecological sustainability starting with being content with less consumerism. The whole Ashrama model where you divide life into four stages has you as a consumerist in the second stage as householder (Gruhasth). But in the stages before and after that you learn life to be happy without much consumerism. These are social models which may be of application to world order where you cannot expect every body to live hundred years old and be a consumerist from zero to hundred at the American level.

Then there is the concept of groups that are de-centralized and self-organized without a state or a very centralized government or authoritarian government running the show. This is a very old Indian social organization that is highly de-centralized and the groups do not need some one else to give them laws and commandments as they are very well self-organized. There is the banyan tree metaphor which is sometimes used to describe this kind of society that is not one trunk or one system but lots of it together. And all of this results in pluralism, dignified aging and decentralized social security.  In India we have dignified aging because you do not end up in old age home. But today because of modernity you do. Old age homes have been started here because of the tendency to westernize. But the tradition has a dignified aging.

And there is kind of social security from one’s own community. Jaathi was social security network. But now we break families now and we break Jaathi structure and make it into caste. Now who is going to give you old age security? State does not have the money. Even in United States, the social security is going broke. So I do not think any country like India can provide such social security. So these are some ideas regarding Indian civilizational contribution.

Civilizational archetypes: Yogi vs. Gladiator

Now I want to introduce two archetypes. I call them the Yogi archetype and the Gladiator archetype. These are archetypes for civilizations. The Yogi archetype is illustrated by Emperor Asoka, who was a gladiator, a fierce warrior who surrenders to Yoga; In the case of Emperor Constantine the opposite happens.  Constantine is a Gladiator who has a Jesus experience or Christ experience. But rather than surrendering his Gladiator nature and becoming a Yogi through the spirit of Christ he actually captures Christ and turns him into a weapon for imperialism. He takes the vision of the cross and he says in the cross he is wielding a sword for conquest. Next day he goes to the battle with this idea and wins and makes Christianity a weapon. So in the case of Roman appropriation of Christianity, the gladiator takes over Yoga, whereas in the case of Asoka, Gladiator surrenders to the Yoga. These are then the two different systems.

Yogi’s Dilemma

So at the base of this I have Yogi’s dilemma when facing the aggression of a Gladiator. So this is the question I ask those who are very spiritually inclined people. Imagine you are a Yogi and a Gladiator comes to you and says I am going to kill you and you cannot change his mind and you cannot run away. The question is what do you do? One option is that you do not fight and he kills you. That is one option you have. The second option is you become a Gladiator and fight him.  You would beat him. But you are no longer a Yogi because now you become the Gladiator. You turn into a Gladiator and fight the Gladiator. So you are no longer the Yogi. So the dilemma is either way you are not a Yogi. So what do you do?

Indian civilization has to solve this dilemma. And we will see two ways. One is Mahatma Gandhi’s and the other is Bhagavat Gita: non-violent and violent. You remain the Yogi within but you fight the Gladiator. We will come to that. Let us keep this as an idea. So this is the dilemma that Indian Civilization – the Yogi’s Dilemma. Earlier I mentioned there is a scenario B that I will just quickly get rid of and then we will go to scenario C.

Scenario B is somebody saying Indian culture will win but the nation will be gone. And who cares. The nation is gone but we don’t care as the culture shall win. That is scenario B. So the Yogi lets the Gladiator take over. But he does this with a glorifying mindset saying that “I will be gone, I will be dead but the Yoga will win because the Gladiator is doing the Pranayama. Even though he is finishing me off the Yoga will live through the Gladiator” But in reality that does not happen. With Pranayama the Gladiator becomes a tougher Gladiator. For example they are using Yoga Nidra for US troops in Iraq, not to turn them into Yogis but better fighter. So scenario B is actually a graceful, dignified respectful way of ending up in Scenario A. Therefore I will dispose it off.

Now let us talk about Scenario C which is where I want to conclude my talk.

Scenario C is where Indian civilization survives; India survives as a nation and has something to offer to the world. Here there are two possibilities. One is that India solves the Yogi’s dilemma and the second is that India does not solve the Yogi’s dilemma and becomes a Gladiator in order to survive. In the first possibility India solves the Yogi’s dilemma through Gandhi’s Satyagraha as a model against the Gladiator and there is Gita’s war against the Gladiator. In both cases it is very difficult thing to do and the idea is there. But I am not sure if we as Indians are very for it because of the self discipline and sacrifice it takes is incredible. What it says is that be a Yogi inside and be very tough outside. So don’t let them walk over you and don’t let them take over you; you must fight them to win but do not turn that into hatred.

You carry out your Dharma in the Kurushetra and that means you have to fight. But you do not turn into their mindset and their mentality. This is a very difficult thing and this is not something I can discuss in two minutes. But this is a topic that is a very central theme for the survival of India as a civilization. The obstacles to this are, India lacks the hard power in terms for economics, governance, military, geopolitics etc. India also has a clash of soft power generally because its own discourse is colonized. The minute you talk about civilization they will ask “which civilization” and they will try to break you up into many camps to fight.

Then there is the internal clash of nation vs. its fragments similar to a transplanted organ which is facing rejection by body’s immune system. When you have a transplanted organ the body’s immune system rejects it and you have to lower the immune system for internal harmony. So when you lower your immunity to create harmony inside you become vulnerable to infections from outside So it comes to saying do not have national security or defense in India, Don’t have anti-terror law in India because this will affect the harmony with minorities. But then you become vulnerable to external forces and threats. So this is the dilemma or rather internal clash that India faces.

And the final obstacle India faces is its loftiness, apathy of the world, other-worldliness etc, which we have seen before.

I have said three things.  There is a global reality of three major civilizations at peace and war. And their competition will intensify for self-interest. We can wish otherwise but this is the reality. India is a major playground and battle ground for these global forces. The reality of India is that there is internal fragmentation which is worsening and the disruptive forces that Hegde talked about have worsened. These are supported by cycle of vote banks, quotas and bribes. Minorities are becoming branch offices for global nexuses and are receiving funding and ideological and political support. These are the centrifugal forces threatening India’s future.

As far the future for India, I see that presently India lacks the civilizational Conesus and power necessary to survive as a nation-state in a dangerous world. India itself will disintegrate and its parts assimilated into others while India’s culture will flourish as their.  Or if India’s civilizational foundation can be secured, then it could be a key solution provider to world problems.

Published: March 16, 2009

राजीव मल्होत्रा का कॉलम:एआई टेक्नोलॉजी हमारे मन को मैनेज क्यों कर रही हैं?

व्यक्तियों की भावनाओं को बदलने के लिए निजी अनुभवों को टेक्नोलॉजी निर्मित करने लगी है। मनुष्यों की कमजोरियों और संवेदनशीलता पर सक्रिय शोध चल रहा है। जब स्क्रीन पर कोई पॉप-अप प्रकट होता है, तो मशीन-लर्निंग प्रणाली इसे ट्रैक करती है कि कौन-से संदेशों को उपयोगकर्ताओं द्वारा देखे जाने की अधिक संभावना है। जो प्रतिक्रियाएं आती हैं उन्हें रिकॉर्ड किया जाता है और डेटाबेस में एकत्रित किया जाता है। एआई प्रणालियां इनका उपयोग करके प्रत्येक व्यक्ति के मनोविज्ञान का नक्शा तैयार करती हैं।

उदाहरण के लिए उपयोगकर्ता द्वारा अभी हाल में खोजे गए उत्पाद के विज्ञापन दिखाने पर, उसका ध्यान उस विज्ञापन की ओर जाने की कितनी संभावना है? या किसी विशिष्ट राजनीतिक षड्यंत्र की चर्चा या चिंताजनक घटना के समाचार द्वारा उसका ध्यान आकर्षित करना कितना संभव है?

एआई मॉडल ये भी भलीभांति जानते हैं कि कोई व्यक्ति खुशामद से कितना प्रभावित होता है या फिर उसे उसके अहंकार को तुष्ट करने वाली तकनीकों के झांसे में कितनी आसानी से फंसाया जा सकता है। साथ ही ये मशीनें ये जानने में भी माहिर होती हैं कि व्यक्ति के नीरस जीवन को किस तरह के मनोरंजनात्मक डिस्ट्रैक्शन से रोचक बनाएं।

करोड़ों लोगों की भावनाओं, पसंदों, अरुचियों, प्राथमिकताओं और कमजोरियों का मानचित्रीकरण बड़े ही वैज्ञानिक तरीके से हो रहा है। उनकी गतिविधियों को अनेक रूपों में रिकॉर्ड किया जा रहा है। उदाहरण के लिए आवाज, अक्षर, छवियां, हस्तलेखन, बायोमेट्रिक्स, खरीदारी से संबंधित व्यवहार, परस्पर वार्तालाप, यात्रा के विकल्प और मनोरंजन से संबंधित पसंदें। मशीनें न केवल निजी जानकारी को पकड़ने में कुशल हो गई हैं, बल्कि मानव गतिविधियों में निहित प्रयोजनों को भी वे अच्छी तरह से समझने लगी हैं।

एआई अनुसंधानकर्ता अब व्यक्तियों के इन मॉडलों के अलावा समुदायों और संस्कृतियों की भी मॉडलिंग कर रहे हैं। यह डेटा ऐसी मनोवैज्ञानिक प्रोफाइलें विकसित करने में मदद करता है, जिनका उपयोग मानव-समूहों में हेर-फेर करने या विशिष्ट आदतों और रुझान रखने वाले समूहों को प्रभावित करने के लिए हो सकता है।

उदाहरण के लिए, ऐसी प्रणालियां इसकी व्याख्या कर सकती हैं और समझ सकती हैं कि कैसे उइगर चीनी अन्य चीनियों के मुकाबले भावनात्मक स्तर पर भिन्न हैं। एआई समूहों के विशिष्ट मनोवैज्ञानिक और भावनात्मक नक्शों को निश्चित कर सकती है, चाहे वे अमेरिका के एफ्रो हों या गोरे। वे अमेरिका में रह रहे पंजाबी, दिल्ली के जामिया मिलिया विश्वविद्यालय के छात्र, पश्चिम बंगाल के वामपंथी उपद्रवकारी या कोई भी ऐसा दूसरा मानव-समूह हों, जिसकी आप कल्पना कर सकते हैं।

इन मनोवैज्ञानिक प्रोफाइलों के उपयोग से सोशल मीडिया को एक हथियार के रूप में बदला जा सकता है। एक ऐसा हथियार, जिससे किसी भी व्यक्ति की निजी भावनाओं में बदलाव किया जा सकता है। इसके लाभार्थी स्वयं वह सोशल मीडिया मंच हो सकता है, जैसे- फेसबुक और गूगल या फिर उनके ग्राहक, प्रतिस्पर्धी, राजनीतिक उम्मीदवार या कोई भी अन्य व्यक्ति, जो किसी लक्षित समूह को प्रभावित करना चाहता है।

इस तरह के निजी मनोवैज्ञानिक मॉडल, उन्हें प्राप्त होने वाले फीडबैक से निरंतर सीखते जाते हैं और अधिक चतुर होते जाते हैं। कृत्रिम वास्तविकता से जुड़ी कई प्रकार की प्रणालियां इस समय विकसित की जा रही हैं : वीआर (वर्चुअल रियलिटी), जो आभासी परिवेश देती हैं; और एआर (ऑगमेंटेड रियलिटी) जो भौतिक परिवेश को अधिक रोचक बनाने के लिए उसे मॉडिफाई करती हैं।

आज करोड़ों लोगों की भावनाओं, पसंदों, अरुचियों, प्राथमिकताओं और कमजोरियों का मानचित्रीकरण बड़े ही वैज्ञानिक तरीके से हो रहा है। उनकी गतिविधियों को रिकॉर्ड किया जा रहा है। यह सब डेटा आखि​र किसके काम आएगा?

इनका लक्ष्य व्यक्ति की पहले से ही जान ली गई जरूरतों के अनुसार अनुभवों को निजी बनाना है। प्रारंभ में यह टेक्नोलॉजी वियरेबल उपकरणों से अनुभवों को मनपसंद बनाएंगी। बाद में शरीर में लगाए जाने वाले इम्प्लांट्स उनका स्थान ले सकते हैं। 

जब उत्तरी-अमेरिका में यूरोपीय उपनिवेशी मूल-अमेरिकियों की भूमियों पर कब्जा कर रहे थे, तब कुछ श्वेत लोगों ने मूल निवासियों की सहायता के लिए हस्तक्षेप किया। उन्होंने मूल निवासियों की स्थिति के साथ सहानुभूति दिखाई, उनकी ओर से संघर्ष किया, और सत्ता में बैठे श्वेत लोगों के साथ वार्ता करने में उनका प्रतिनिधित्व किया। उन्होंने मूल निवासियों के विश्वास को जीता, परंतु अंततः उन्हें धोखा देते हुए यूरोपीय औपनिवेशिकों से जा मिले।

मूल निवासी यदि स्वयं अपना प्रतिनिधित्व करते, तो इतनी बुरी स्थिति में नहीं होते। जो पहले संरक्षणकर्ता बन रहे थे, उनमें से कुछ बाद में यह कहकर अपने अपराध-बोध से मुक्त हो गए कि उन्होंने सर्वोत्तम प्रयास किया, परंतु असफल रहे। कुछ ने अपने पक्ष से पलटने के लिए मूल निवासियों पर ही उलटे यह आरोप लगा दिया कि उनके समाज में मानवाधिकारों का स्तर खराब है।

अंत में गोरे लोगों को मध्यस्थ बनाकर मूल अमेरिकी निवासियों द्वारा अपनी लड़ाई लड़ने की नीति हानिकारक साबित हुई। उन्हें अपनी भूमियों से हाथ धोना पड़ा और नरसंहार का शिकार होना पड़ा। अश्वेत अमेरिकियों के विषय में भी इसी घटना ने स्वयं को दोहराया। अमेरिकी इतिहास में रीकंस्ट्रक्शन (1865-77) नाम से ज्ञात समय के पश्चात, अश्वेतों को भी यही सबक मिला कि अपने हित को आगे बढ़ाने के लिए गोरों के नेतृत्व पर निर्भर होना एक महत्वपूर्ण भूल थी।

इसी समय अश्वेतों ने अपने स्वयं के समाधानों और नीतियों के साथ स्वतंत्र रूप से प्रयोग करते हुए- और उनका विकास करते हुए- अपने स्वयं के नेताओं को तैयार करने का निर्णय लिया, जो कि गोरों के संरक्षण के अंतर्गत नहीं थे। भारत की सहायता के लिए संरक्षक के रूप में स्वयं को स्थापित करने वाली विदेशी अकादमियों जैसे कि हार्वर्ड विश्विद्यालय के साथ भी यही समस्या है।

वे भारत के जटिल विषयों में कूद पड़ते हैं, महत्वपूर्ण डेटाबेसों पर नियंत्रण बना लेते हैं, और मुद्दों को अपने अनुसार प्रस्तुत करते हैं। हां, उपर्युक्त उदाहरणों से भिन्नता यह है कि वे अपने संरक्षण के अंतर्गत स्वयं भारतीयों को ही प्रशिक्षित करते हैं। भावी नेताओं को तैयार करते हैं और उनके कॅरियर में सहायता करते हैं। यह अंततः भारतीय समाज पर औपनिवेशिक नियंत्रण जैसा ही है।

यह अंग्रेजों द्वारा पूरे भारत में जमींदारों के तंत्र को विकसित करने के समान है, जो अंग्रेजों को सर्वसाधारण के ऊपर शासन करने में उनकी सहायता करने के बदले में उनसे सहायता प्राप्त करते रहे थे। हार्वर्ड के पाठ्यक्रमों, संगोष्ठियों और अनुदानों की बहुत सारी विषय-वस्तु भारत के विकास के लिए उपयोगी प्रतीत हो सकती है, लेकिन समस्या उन अन्य प्रभावों से है जो युवा मस्तिष्कों में प्रवेश कर जाते हैं।

ऐसा लगता है कि भारत ने अपने भावी नेताओं की विचारधाराओं, सम्बद्धताओं और प्रतिबद्धताओं, तथा पहचान की समग्र-भावना को विकसित करने की परियोजना का कार्य विदेशी विश्वविद्यालयों को सौंप दिया है। जबकि चीन ने एकदम भिन्न दृष्टिकोण अपनाया है। वह विज्ञान, प्रौद्योगिकी, इंजीनियरिंग और गणित से संबंधित रणनीतिक प्रौद्योगिकियों पर ध्यान केंद्रित करते हुए अमेरिकी ज्ञान को अपने देश में लौटा लाता है, किंतु सामाजिक, आर्थिक और राजनीतिक प्रभावों को अमेरिका से चीन में लाने में रुचि नहीं दिखाता।

चीन अपनी सीमाओं के अंदर अमेरिकी वोकइज़्म को स्वीकार नहीं करता, उलटे वह अमेरिकी समाज पर प्रहार करने के लिए वोकइज़्म का उपयोग करता है। चीनी कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी द्वारा वित्त-पोषित चाइना ग्लोबल टेलीविजन नेटवर्क का उपयोग करके चीन अमेरिकी बच्चों को लक्षित करते हुए अंग्रेजी में अनेक वीडियो का प्रसारण करके उलटे अमेरिका में ही क्रिटिकल रेस थ्योरी को बढ़ावा दे रहा है। हार्वर्ड की भारत-संबंधी परियोजनाओं को भी अन्य मुद्दों से अलग करके देखना भ्रमपूर्ण होगा।

• इंडोलॉजी के नाम पर विदेशी अकादमियां भारत-केंद्रित ज्ञान का एक संग्रह तैयार कर रही हैं। इसका रणनीतिक रूप से दुरुपयोग करते हुए भारत में सामाजिक और राजनीतिक परिवर्तन लाए जा सकते हैं।