Lutyens Stenographer in Grief: The Irascible Rage of the Entitled Aatish Taseer

Arch-ingrate Aatish Taseer is enraged. At the sure-shot prospect of Prime Minister Narendra Modi returning to power this summer. He spills his 3828 words-long rage on the pages of the Time magazine which cover-stories it with the now-notorious title, India’s Divider in Chief. Unsurprisingly, it is a naked hate piece and a hit job written in Taseer’s typical bumptious style and follows the left-liberal template to the hilt. You could even alter the author’s name and it would still read the same. It is the latest hate-Modi garbage spewed out of the innards of the Left-Liberal-Secular Malice Manufacturing Factory.

When you peel off the excess lard from the bloated piece, what you get is this:

• A rambling diatribe against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
• A no-holds-barred, sadistic attack against Hindu civilisation, culture, and traditions, a 21st Century textual assault modelled in spirit after the bigoted medieval Arab barbarians who invaded Bharatavarsha.

And how does Taseer choose to do it? By initially setting up a bogey as his premise: Narendra Modi as a practitioner of populism and denouncing him for it. And from that vantage of phoniness, firing a volley of slurs against him and Hindus, their culture, history, and civilisation and massacring logic and facts with impunity.

Here is the dictionary meaning of populism: support for the concerns of ordinary people; the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people. Surely, nothing wrong with being populist. If Swacch Bharat, Jan Dhan Yojana, and Jan Aushadi are populist, they cannot be commended highly enough. But what alternative does Aatish Taseer offer to govern the second-largest populated country in the world? Paper-panaceas like secularism and socialism? The same things that after seventy years have left an India which nearly resembles a carcass left behind after the Congress party and its clones and cronies have gorged off with insatiable greed.

Aatish Taseer must have injected or snorted or consumed something incredibly, brain-alteringly potent before writing this screed. I’m not making this up. It is his own honest admission elsewhere: that he is a “louche liberal” who enjoys “raves” than “discussions about Hindu civilization.” Nothing else explains the fact that he compares Modi’s supposed populism to Turkey of all places!  

That elsewhere I mentioned in the previous paragraph is another 2016 hate-Hinduism-and-Hindus pamphlet that he wrote after attending a conclave in Goa, which he describes as a “ragtag coalition that collected at a sprawling resort…organized by the India Foundation, a think tank… openly supported by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.” Taseer’s latest invective in the Time magazine is just a rehash of that 2016 textual toxin. So what does Taseer do after being sponsored to attend and speak at that expensive conclave? Like a loyal left-liberal, he turns around and spits on it on the pages of the India-hating The New York Times.

Arch-ingrate.   

Because the greatest hallmark of a Left-liberal is ingratitude. Political power, the acquisition and worship of power, and willing slavery to the powerful is their only stock-in-trade. Because it lets them scavenge on taxpayer money with full patronage and has no consequences. And the Lutyens club which Aatish Taseer is an embedded member of embodies these traits like nothing else.

Think about it. How many proverbial “ordinary Indians” can afford an education like Aatish Taseer: Kodaikanal International School and Amherst College, for starters? Taseer could because of his parentage and nobody should grudge him for that. But when he indulges in brazen falsehood and heaps denunciations about an entire civilisation and people and against a duly elected Prime Minister, questions will obviously be raised. For example, when Aatish Taseer writes just that his father was a Pakistani Muslim, the obvious question arises: what about the mother, Tavleen Singh, who is an Indian Sikh? So, when he calls India as the place of his “origin,” one wonders about the true extent of his sickness which impels him to hurl nonchalant abuse on its majority, the Hindus, their true history, customs, and institutions and completely omits mentioning the appalling and prolonged suffering they underwent during both the Muslim and the colonial British rule? But Aatish Taseer is absolutely right when he claims that

a deracinated Hindu elite, in cahoots with minorities from the monotheistic faiths, such as Christianity and Islam, maintained its dominion over India’s Hindu majority.

Ingratitude apart, the other great hallmark of the Lutyens elite is their incurable Hindu-hatred, a direct consequence of their colonised psyches. Over the last seventy-plus years, it is not Akbar or Jahangir or a similar medieval Muslim ruler but the Lutyens Hindu elite who are the cherished patrons fostering the depravity called Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, a euphemism for celebrating all perversities available in the court of a medieval Sultan or Nawab.

For the longest time, Tavleen Singh, the Kitty Party Aunty of Indian journalism, was intimately ensconced in the Nehru-impregnated Lutyens Durbar and wrote an angry, gossipy book aptly titled, Durbar for two reasons: she was rudely ejected from the Nehru Durbar thanks to Sonia Gandhi, and two, because like all Durbaris, she sensed the beginnings of the extraordinary political change that Narendra Modi was starting to unleash as early as in 2012. There are Durbaris, loyal to the same dynasty till the end. Then there are Durbaris whose loyalty changes with the regime. Then there are scorned Durbaris. Then there are scorned Durbaris who have permanently burned bridges. Guess where Tavleen Singh belongs?

One should only recall the kind of columns—“calumnies” is a more appropriate word—she wrote in The Indian Express against Narendra Modi when he was Gujarat Chief Minister. As also when Yogi Adityanath was declared the UP Chief Minister…going to the extent of sharing morphed pictures of Yogi drinking cow urine. Even during his tenure as Prime Minister, the flip-flops by Tavleen Singh on Narendra Modi are…breathtaking to say the least. Her venomous and crass contempt for the RSS and people and organisations sympathetic to Hindu causes are visceral, hardly befitting a supposedly independent and neutral journalist. So it’s unsurprising that she has to indulge in far too many uncomfortable acrobatics on Twitter to somehow defend her son’s latest hate-Modi slur in the Time magazine. And do damage control.   

When Aatish Taseer writes

Whatever else might be said about the election, hope is off the menu… I knew, as someone of Muslim parentage (my father was a Pakistani Muslim) and a member of India’s English-speaking elite, that the country Modi would bring into being would have no place for me.

What he really means is this: “despite numerous attempts at jumping on the Narendra Modi gravy train, I have been denied the opportunity of opening my Kirana shop like in the old days. And I see no hope of ever jumping on the said train. Therefore Modi is evil and will destroy India.”  But scratch this surface and something else…surfaces. Aatish Taseer is of mixed parentage: Muslim father and Sikh mother. The fact that he feels the need to partially shield something so fundamental as one’s birth reveals more than it conceals. Second, Aatish is not an Indian citizen so why is he bothered whether he has a “place” or not in “Modi’s India?” And perhaps unwittingly exposes his truth about what India means to him: it is the selfsame India of

unassailable founding fathers, such as Nehru, then sacred state ideologies, such as Nehruvian secularism and socialism.

Unassailable? One only needs to dig out the scathing criticisms hurled against Nehru by his own contemporaries both inside and out of Parliament. And how he systematically maligned, slandered, sidelined, and wrecked the careers and lives of his critics using every dirty trick known to humankind. The list of Nehru’s victims is truly long. Including such stalwarts like C. Rajagopalachari. The only reason the full truth of Prime Minister Nehru’s misdeeds didn’t see light of the day was because he was so skilled and adept at manipulating the media and kept a tight leash on most avenues of information dissemination.

But Aatish Taseer sounds both nervous and ridiculous when he uses “sacred state ideologies” in the same breath. Secularism and socialism are Godless ideologies; they are theories based on the repudiation and rejection of the very notion of sanctity. There’s a reason I subtitled my book, Seventy Years of Secularism as “Unpopular Essays on the Unofficial Political Religion of India.” Oh! And the real founding fathers of India are our Rishis. India has survived the Nehruvian nightmare because of the enduring foundations that they laid thousands of years ago. And why it has rebounded time and time again outliving uncountable generations of Aatish Taseers.

We shall examine just two prominent slurs in Aatish Taseer’s hitjob because they are so repulsive and are equally representative of his entire piece.

Modi…has demonstrated no desire to foster brotherly feeling between Hindus and Muslims.

If anything, there is considerable frustration and anger in sections of Modi supporters because they feel he hasn’t done enough to contain Muslim illegal infiltration in border states like West Bengal, the silent Rohingya demographic invasion, Love Jihad, the Jihadi spectre looming large in Kerala….the list is really long. More importantly, Aatish Taseer conveniently, despicably ignores the fact that there has not been a single Hindu-Muslim riot in India under Modi’s Prime Ministership. On the contrary, almost every single Hindu-Muslim riot has occurred under the Congress…which ruled India for 55 long years. And as Dr. Koenraad Elst shows in his brilliant Decolonising the Hindu Mind, almost every Hindu-Muslim riot historically, has been initiated by Muslims.

The other bit—in fact his entire piece—is a vulgar jibe against Hindu culture and civilisation about which he knows little, understands nothing and has an innate hatred towards. His haughtiness is astounding when he makes this vicious generalisation against an entire people:

What Modi cannot–or will not–do is tell India the hard truth that if she wishes to be a great power, and not a Hindu theocracy, the medieval Indian past, mired in superstition and magic, must go under.

It was this selfsame medieval Indian past, “mired in superstition and magic” that produced such grand temples, built expansive empires, centres of learning, art, music, painting, dance, and generated enormous riches which is precisely what attracted every alien Muslim barbarian, invader, and tyrant who saw war as the pious fulfilment of a religious diktat divinely handed down to a self-appointed prophet. There’s also an inconvenient truth about medieval India which Aatish Taseer understandably hides. This is the same medieval India under Muslim rule which built nothing on the smoking rubble of the Hindu grandeur it had so zealously destroyed. Aatish Taseer should tell the name of one institution that medieval Muslim rulers built comparable to say, the Nalanda University that Bhaktiyar Khilji burnt to the ground.

Oh! And a Hindu theocracy is a much-needed reform that India must urgently adopt. At the very basics, it will be based on Dharma.   

Just to make it easy for the reader, here is the sum and substance of the garbage that Aatish Taseer takes 3828 words to say. The glowing illustration of what his expensive liberal arts university education has taught him. The vile and crass Christian fundamentalist and Dravidian disgrace Seeman Sebastian for example, says more or less the same thing.

• Narendra Modi is a Neo-fascist, political hypocrite, Muslim hater and a friend of the mob.
• Yogi Adityanath is a hate-mongering Hindu priest in robes of saffron, the color of Hindu nationalism.
• Sadhvi Pragya is a saffron-clad female saint, who stands accused of masterminding a terrorist attack.
• Tejasvi Surya is an exponent of poisonous religious nationalism in India.
• 2733 Sikhs were killed by unknown, mysterious people but two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi.

But it is not difficult to understand why Aatish Taseer has written in this fashion: his long form textual rubbish is aimed primarily at the Western audience that knows nothing about India nor cares to know. But because the Time magazine, like The New York Times, is in many ways one of the relics of colonial racism (it hasn’t even bothered to get something as basic as an SSL certificate for its website) so is Aatish Taseer an identity crisis-ridden, Hindu-hating sepoy of these racists. His career so far, like that of so many of his ideological compatriots like Ramachandra Guha, resembles a parasitic and expensive graveyard of entitlement, privilege and ingratitude.  

Postscript

Oh! Aatish, you shouldn’t really underestimate your readers by referring to Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy merely as A.K. Coomaraswamy or calling him a mere “historian.” Forget scholarly sources, even Wikipedia is enough to reveal the extraordinary credentials of Coomaraswamy as one of the fearless champions of Hindu civilisation, art, culture, music, dance and literature. And as a courageous fighter against colonial slurs levelled at Hindu civilisation, etc. Even worse, you should be really careful before quoting him blindly. Here’s the full context of your “In India, as in Europe, the vestiges of ancient civilisation must be renounced…” That quote is taken from Ananda Coomaraswamy’s brilliant essay, Young India, included in his Dance of Shiva volume. Click the image below for the full size.

And please don’t get me started on his other classics like Essays in National Idealism and Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power and puncture your own liberal bubble. Aatish Taseer quoting Ananda Coomaraswamy is a rather big self-goal. It’s hard to believe that he doesn’t know that Coomaraswamy holds a high distinction among people and organisations sympathetic to Hindu causes. Was he banking on ignorance on the reader’s part? Or the fact that readers won’t verify his quote? Or was it monkey balancing, that other routine left-liberal tactic?

A word of parting advice to you Aatish Taseer: your mother is also a Sikh. Recall the exact circumstances under which the truly elevating Sikh Panth was founded. There’s a Sanskrit proverb that applies to folks like you:

| kṛtaghnasya na niṣkṛtiḥ |
There is no atonement for the ungrateful