The Puranic story of Raktabijasura is one of my all-time favourites. Very briefly, Raktabijasura is a Rakshasa, a demon who is endowed with a boon that he thinks will make him deathless. Accordingly, each time a single drop of blood falls from his body, a new Raktabijasura is born. That pretty much sums up the entire sleaze-town called the Indian English media. Given that the original Raktabijasura was bombed out of power in 2014, these mini and micro-mini Raktabijasuras have mushroomed across the landscape of public discourse. They are waging the proverbial battle of a million cuts against India in the following order of priority enemies:
How do you vanquish an opponent like that? Fortunately, our Devatas had someone like Kali who annihilated Raktabijasura. Our contemporary challenges are slightly different, to put it mildly.
Without further ado, here are four major ways in which Hindus can and must counter these modern-day media Raktabijasura progenies.
Fundamentally, these media Raktabijasuras are depraved to an unfathomable extent. Ordinary rules don’t apply to them. Recall that the ongoing “me too” hullaballoo originated from and continues to tumble out from the dark recesses of the black souls of these selfsame deplorables. In a way it’s good. The depraved eating the depraved. On odd days they’re gleefully mocking the austere lifestyles of traditional Hindus, on even days, when their hypocrisy gets called out, they’re busy playing victim.
These are the same media Raktabijasuras who have indulged in every criminal and anti-national activity that one can conceive of: arms racketeering, insulting and planting stories against our military, celebrating when Hindu Matadhipathis are targeted and arrested, sucking up to the worst of crony capitalists, blackmailing, fudging data, faking stories, character assassination, and as a hobby, practising elevator-journalism.
In effect, those who should’ve been in jail are in newsrooms.
So, Hindus are essentially well-placed because this is the true nature of their opponents. Remember, the greatest strength of these deplorables is their brazenness and their well-oiled network. However, Hindus will discover that their greatest and real strength lies in recovering their lost confidence in the durability of their traditional values: Satya, Dharma, Kshatra, and the endurance of the Grihasta and Rashtra-Dharma.
The IQ, knowledge, and common sense of English-language journalists in India in the last three decades has plummeted down to sub-zero levels. About three or four years ago, I recall reading a piece in which a “respected economics” journalist wrote that XYZ company was in poor financial health because its operating ratio was low. Even earlier, the wife of the street goon Rajdeep Sardesai, wrote a pompous piece about “rewriting” the Purushasukta or something to that effect. But going by an even earlier record of her own writing, it appears that her understanding of rewriting the Purushasukta is that the revised version should be on the lines of a text that celebrates the glories of female orgasm.
These guys continue to not only retain their jobs but get promoted.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that an overwhelming percentage of this breed of journalists would’ve barely passed their mathematics and science papers in school and college. And then they don’t know history: forget Indian history, I’m pretty confident that they wouldn’t know the history of the last forty years of their own locality. And they can’t spot Aizawl on a map of India on which the names of cities and towns are not printed. They rant about the evils of capitalism on an iPhone X. They think that 0 is just another way of pronouncing the alphabet O. And I have merely scratched the surface. In short, they are ignorant, incompetent, barely read, constantly use the calculator, have a weak memory, have abysmal comprehension abilities, and have atrocious handwriting.
If you have children, make sure they stay far away from this species.
Given this, Hindus who take such painstaking efforts at researching, collecting facts, making a cogent and reasoned argument have nothing to fear. My plea: do not write rebuttals unless absolutely required, do not argue with these sub-zero species. Instead, use that time to constantly, relentlessly mock them, caricature them, and lampoon them. Don’t forget who their idol is: the National Joke named Pappu. If this idol has been reduced to a mere adjective, why do you Hindus continue to indulge his media hirelings by taking them seriously?
Now that the aforementioned points have given a bird’s eye view of the lay of the land, let’s examine another important point. For the longest time since the Nehruvian Stalinist establishment captured our institutions of public discourse, the Hindus, ever on the defensive have constantly indulged in rebuttals and attempts to “convince” the “other side.” As history shows us, Hindus continue to remain the only losers in this race to the bottom, to the very pits.
At the risk of generalization, commonsense tells us that one can convince an honest person and an ignorant but open-minded person. One is reminded of Bhartruhari’s immortal verse which ends with Jnanalavadurvidagdham brahmaapi naram na ranjayati (But the one infatuated with [his own greatness at] half-baked knowledge is impossible to be appeased even by Brahma.) Besides, in a complex system like electoral democracy and an amorphous, invisible entity called public discourse, the business of convincing should generally be left to politicians.
A hugely positive outcome of the Internet is the fact that almost every single fundamental text of Sanatana Dharma as well as thousands upon thousands of commentaries, histories, scholarly and popular works are freely available on the Internet. Yet, as the proverb goes, Hittala gida maddalla (we always ignore the medicinal value of the plant freely available in our backyard), Hindus seem to be fascinated by newer theories, more complex explanations that really don’t mean anything, and so on. These freely-available texts are the real sources of their strength. They have stood the test of time and they will continue to do so.
Revive them. Disseminate them widely. Educate. Inform. Perhaps the only extra work that it might need is to clothe them in a more contemporary idiom. The convincing will happen on its own. As we’ve shown, the other side is dumb. By playing its game, Hindus will join the same race to the bottom.
If there’s one thing the Communists got it right in the infancy of their genocidal “movement” in India, it was their innate appreciation of the power and impact of art: prose, poetry, theatre, painting, cinema. With a solid eighty-plus years of investment, it is small wonder that they continue to have a near-absolute stranglehold in these domains. Dogs and non-Leftists are prohibited. And among insiders, deviation is an apostasy punishable by career destruction and financial ruin.
All Hindus have been left with even as we speak are empty and powerless rants against say, an M F Hussain, or his current-day equivalents in the form of Sacred Games. Needless, there is merit in the claim from some Hindu quarters that the said Leftist stranglehold and/or the expensive affair of producing movies, etc have all acted as effective deterrents. However, the other side shows that it has folks Vikram Chandra (author of the novel, Sacred Games) who have the patience, discipline and staying power of authoring a 900-plus page novel. Or a Romila Thapar who constantly churn out books. The quality, accuracy or otherwise is immaterial—when the sheer quantity, volume and consistency is so overwhelming, it pays rich dividends in the long term.
On the Hindu side, the record has been dismal to say the least. And the number of people who have endeavoured in these areas have done so purely on the strength and motivation of their inner calling. And 99% of such artists have written in Bharatiya Bhasha, not English. And have succeeded mightily. But today, the Hindu side no longer has any excuse. Filmmaking is no longer an expensive proposition. Writing books, plays, poems is a solitary endeavor. As numerous masters of the past have averred, “your art must have the capacity to lift and transport the Rasika into a better world.”
It is also an opportunity and a challenge. On the one side you have the mindless filth churned out by Bollywood and almost all film industries in India. On the other, you have films that fail to attract even 10% of seating capacity or its online equivalent in terms of views. And therefore they need to be desperately branded as “Hindu” or “nationalist” or “anti-Congress” or whatever.
Of course, there has been widespread acceptance and success of fiction work that can loosely be called “Hindu,” but these works lack depth, and some are downright misleading in their conceptual understanding and resort to shortcuts while dealing with historical facts and personalities. But a beginning has been made, thank God for small mercies.
Perhaps this is the most effective of all methods. Hindus must embrace art in all its forms. Art that’s honest and not ideological. Remember: Bharata is the land that has still kept its glorious oral and epic traditions alive. Turn to your backyards. You’ll find not just medicinal plants, but Amrita itself.
When this happens, no matter how vicious or widespread, propaganda will implode by itself. Like how Rahul Gandhi implodes each time he opens his mouth.
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