Putin’s Battering of the Wokes is an Opportunity for India to Reassert Global Sanatana Leadership

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S SLEDGEHAMMER SPEECH on October 21 at the Valdai International Discussion Club was understandably underreported by the Western, and specially, the American media because it knocked the West where it hurts the most: the solar plexus of the woke world. In fact, it was a frontal charge against the ever-expanding gamut of Woke insanity including but not limited to gender fluidity, reverse racism, erasing history, elimination of traditional values, and the destruction of the family unit.

It is also a bit tragic that Putin’s purposeful speech did not receive the attention it really deserves in India. In fact, his speech is also a dauntless declaration of his intent to protect Russia from the cancel culture of the West. As far as India is concerned, it is a tremendous opportunity to begin to carve for itself and retake its historical mantle as a global leader in all that is culturally virtuous, noble, wise, and refined. Or as they say in some circles, the position of that ill-defined term, Vishwaguru. That pedestal will and must be raised on the rebuilt foundations of the historical Sanatana civilizational superstructure.

The woke mania, which represents the irretrievable echelon of the bottomless decline of the West, will only grow worse. This decline has come roughly after three hundred years of unprecedented rapine of the planet and unrestrained annihilation of hundreds of cultures and traditions. But the greatest destruction has been the destruction of the spirituality innate in all of us.

Here is a quote from Putin’s speech:

Show me exactly one president of the US in the last half-century who spoke like this. This is because that alleged civilization now in terminal decay can no longer produce leaders of this calibre. The US situation is akin to the mediaeval Muslim barbarians who invaded Bharatavarsha and were dumbstruck at the awesome resplendence of our temples and sculptures and saw in them a reflection of their own fear of true beauty. This psyche among others is why the US Government acting in concert with its corrupt media still peddles the balloon that Russia is evil and Putin is a monster.

AS ONE OF THE PROUD inheritors of the values of the Sanatana spiritual civilization, I hold no candle either to the US or Putin’s Russia. But as a pragmatic and honest observer of the continuous unfolding of an alleged democracy in India after 1947, many portions of Putin’s speech have much value. At best, India’s democracy after seven decades, can only be called preparative. But it has come at the cost of appalling cultural erosion. As I noted in an earlier essay, the tighter we embrace Western democracy, the more Christianized our outlook becomes.

But in the present context, this danger is compounded by soul-sucking materialism as both the means and the end. It can be argued that this unhinged materialism was and remains a great contributor to the pathological Left ideology. If you can’t preach philosophy to an empty stomach, you can’t preach it wokeism either: try and preach the “virtues” of a “birthing parent” to a person who earns less than ₹ 100 a day. Or go to a village in India and tell their women that they must take consent from their infants before they can breastfeed them, and see what happens. Like culture and spirituality, even degeneracy and insanity does not occur in a vacuum. The overfed and consequently, lazy nations of the West after World War II, having steadily abandoned what was good and valuable in their own cultures, began experimenting with itself. This was the incubator that birthed, nurtured and created the monster that is today known as the Woke and Cancel phenomenon. Five years later, it might acquire a new nomenclature depending on how heightened its craziness is but the fundamentals will remain the same.

The tragic fact for India is that its so-called elite have embraced wokeness wholesale. That in turn is the consequence of a conscious policy of deracination adopted by successive Nehruvian regimes. There has scarcely been a decade of decolonization after we got a questionable political independence. Quite the contrary. At every turn, when India was confronted by major problems, the first place that large swathes of our political class and even the judiciary turned to was the West: what does the American Constitution say? What was England’s solution to this particular knotty economic issue? Why don’t we adopt the French model of education? What does Australia’s defence policy say in this matter?

More than a century ago, the iconic DVG wrote as follows:

At the moment, the tragic answer is this: Western commercialism seems to have won the day at least in India. Nowhere is this more visible than in the class of our super-rich Hindus whose psyches have been hijacked and rigged especially by the American capitalist model. The early generations of the Tatas, Birlas, and business houses of that league contributed to temples, Mathas, and a general spirit of Dharma informed most of their activities. Their role models and heroes included the likes of Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, and Mahaperiva. The financial side of their philanthropy was an outward expression of their spiritual wealth. Today, the likes of Tanishq openly peddle advertisements that militate against these great savants and Rishis, and their philanthropy is an expression of insecurity, which is what makes them exercise such tight control over giving. When the recipient is made to feel needy instead of deserving, it is a direct inversion of the Sanatana philosophy of Daana, outlined in the essay linked below.

The rewiring of this Hindu business class can only occur through an initial process of unlearning, and then a return to the proverbial native roots. And it might perhaps never occur in the foreseeable future.

But a few pointers in that direction are worth mentioning.

ONE OF THE BUILDING BLOCKS of Bharatavarsha’s social structure was and remains the profound precept and practice of Yajna or sharing. Even today, no Hindu villager will refuse a stranger seeking food, but ask him why he does it? He has a one-word answer: Punya. But how many of these villagers have read or fully understand the Sastric reasoning behind this deeply spiritual and timeless tradition of food-sharing? Neither do they need to “understand” it because it is in their DNA. It is natural, like breathing. And it pervades throughout India. It is the same value that enabled our Yatris (pilgrims) throughout history to take shelter and food in the homes of strangers in faraway lands.

Thus, going to the roots of and re-inculcating all such values is one of the first steps in the aforementioned re-education of our contemporary, capitalism-infected Hindu business class.

But especially in America, the original home of this marauding capitalism, a new business class has now acquired an almost unchallengeable power, which is fundamentally different from anything in recent history. In an earlier era, a good chunk of super-rich businessmen in the West were non-negotiable nationalists and patriots. Today, it appears that no government in the Western world is powerful enough to punish just one George Soros or Bill Gates let alone ten of them. They recognize no borders or laws because the ego is truly borderless and these new-age pashas have enough money and power to feed its insatiable appetite regardless of the human and other costs. They are practically playing God by engineering wars and violent regime changes and governments are helpless before them.

In this context, the following excerpt from Putin’s speech is really bang on target:

If this is said openly by the leader of a country that birthed political power to Communism, which in turn ravaged its society, destroyed its history and suffered the economic horrors that followed its fall, what prevents the oldest and continuously surviving non-Abrahamic civilization to declare that Dharma is the bedrock and backbone on whose strength it will chisel its ensuing destiny?

As we see, Bharatavarsha can today boast of a decisive leadership that can indeed make such a frank declaration, precisely outlining what India stands for. On her own independent merit, civilizational heritage and spiritual convictions. Our ties with other nations must not be a barrier or a bargaining chip for negotiating our cultural foundations.

This echoes a remarkably insightful essay by Sita Ram Goel written as early as 1956 when the Cold War was peaking. Here is an excerpt from it:

Thankfully, the Russia of today, to paraphrase Putin’s speech has not only learnt from that dark past but looks upon it as poison and as a nightmare which it has vowed not to repeat. The US on the other hand, is in a frenzied rush to inflict the selfsame nightmare upon itself. Except that it is inflicting it on other nations like India as well. That is what we must severely guard against whether we get business from it or no. Once again, Sita Ram Goel provides some hints as to how this can be done:

To which we can only say Sadhu! Sadhu!

Bharatavarsha has suffered for an entire millennium and is perhaps steadily discarding its crutches and finally trying to firmly stand upright. In the current global scenario, it is clear that there is no nation on earth that can teach it anything it doesn’t already know in the realms of statecraft, society, culture, civilization and spirituality. The systems and institutions that were introduced by and hailed as emulative models by the so-called leaders of the global order are miserably failing in their own countries.

Only a fool or an indoctrinated slave will choose to import a rotten vegetable from an alien land when there are tons of fresh ones available in his own backyard.