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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Civilizational Confidence

For decades, independent India suffered from a peculiar form of historical insecurity. A nation that inherited one of the world’s oldest living civilizations often appeared reluctant to speak confidently about its own past. While political independence was achieved in 1947, intellectual independence remained elusive in the Nehruvian era and the decades thereafter. That is why the Ministry of Culture’s recent efforts to showcase India’s civilizational heritage on social media and other...

Civilizational Confidence

For decades, independent India suffered from a peculiar form of historical insecurity. A nation that inherited one of the world’s oldest living civilizations often appeared reluctant to speak confidently about its own past. While political independence was achieved in 1947, intellectual independence remained elusive in the Nehruvian era and the decades thereafter. That is why the Ministry of Culture’s recent efforts to showcase India’s civilizational heritage on social media and other platforms deserve applause. Consider the famous Pashupati Seal discovered at Mohenjo-daro. Dating back more than four millennia, the steatite seal depicts a seated figure in a yogic posture surrounded by animals, believed to be a proto-Shiva figure. While scholars may continue to debate its precise interpretation, what is impossible to deny is that India remains the living cultural inheritor of the civilization that produced such artefacts. Civilizational continuity is determined by living traditions. The yogic practices, Shaivite symbolism, ritual forms, philosophical concepts, and cultural motifs that emerged across millennia continue to animate Indian life today. The thread connecting ancient India to modern Bharat was never severed. The Ministry’s celebration on X of a 4,500-year-old terracotta dice from the Indus-Saraswati Civilization similarly highlights the important truth that cultural memory endures even when empires vanish. Predictably, these efforts have triggered outrage from a familiar ecosystem of professional contrarians, ideological activists masquerading as scholars, and academics who seem to regard any positive articulation of Indian civilization and Hinduism as a threat. For this crowd, India’s past must always be fragmented, contested, and stripped of continuity. The moment Indians speak of civilizational inheritance, they are accused of ‘myth-making.’ Any interpretation that strengthens a sense of civilizational continuity is treated with suspicion, while theories that sever Indians from their own historical inheritance are celebrated as sophisticated and progressive. For decades, this self-appointed priesthood of the Indian Left-liberal academy exercised an extraordinary monopoly over historical discourse. Their approach was remarkably consistent. Hindu traditions were to be endlessly deconstructed and disparaged. Civilizational pride was to be treated as inherently suspect. Meanwhile, fashionable western academic jargon was deployed to obscure what was often little more than ideological prejudice. What particularly irritates this ecosystem is that Bharat today is increasingly refusing to seek such permission. The return of Chola-era copper plates from the Netherlands, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, forms part of this larger civilizational recovery. These records illuminate the maritime power and global reach of the Chola Empire. Likewise, the documentation of more than 8.5 million manuscripts under the Gyan Bharatam National Survey of Manuscripts represents one of the most significant cultural preservation exercises in modern Indian history. Such initiatives expose the intellectual bankruptcy of those who spent decades insisting that India’s civilizational consciousness was little more than a modern political invention. The Ministry of Culture’s recent initiatives reflect something more important than mere government messaging. They reflect a nation rediscovering its historical confidence after decades of elite condescension.

Selective Outrage

India’s left-liberal media has long prided itself on being the torchbearer of secularism, dissent and moral rectitude. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ the precision military strike launched by the Modi government against Pakistan-based terror camps, it has revealed its not a principled commitment to peace or truth, but a disturbing penchant for ideological prejudice, performative sanctimony and selective outrage.


The operation itself was a textbook display of calibrated force and geopolitical prudence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, often caricatured as ‘authoritarian’ by the ‘liberal’ English-language commentariat, chose patience over provocation. He consulted opposition leaders, held detailed discussions with defence chiefs and took key international stakeholders, notably the United States and Russia, into confidence before authorising limited military action. The symbolism of ‘Operation Sindoor’ was also carefully crafted: a pointed reminder that the attack’s real victims were Hindu women widowed by Pakistan-sponsored militants in Kashmir. The government’s briefings were also strategic and symbolic as two ranking female officers, one of them Muslim, were made the public face of the mission, underlining a new Indian confidence that blends military muscle with democratic pluralism.


But this was unacceptable for India’s entrenched ‘left-liberal’ press, steeped in academic jargon, Western validation and a knee-jerk hostility to anything remotely ‘Hindutva.’ That a Muslim officer briefed the nation on ‘Operation Sindoor’ was branded ‘tokenism’ by such commentators. Others crudely alleged that the April 22 Pahalgam massacre was the logical culmination of reported atrocities against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014.


The semantic nitpicking over ‘Operation Sindoor’ was maddening. An editor of a prominent magazine dubbed the operation’s name as ‘patriarchal’ and coded in Hindutva tropes. In a bizarre case of moral inversion, sindoor was likened to symbols of ‘honour killings’ and gender oppression, ignoring both its cultural resonance and the cruel reality that these women had lost their husbands in cold blood. For years, India’s ‘secular’ commentariat nurtured a preordained binary: the Congress may be flawed but was at least ‘secular’ while the BJP was an inveterate ‘fascist.’ Thus, the 2002 Gujarat riots are always focused upon but the Congress-backed pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984 is either downplayed or rationalised. Terrorism in Kashmir is tragic, but state retaliation is ‘jingoism.’ A strong Muslim voice in government is ‘tokenism’ but its absence is ‘exclusion.’ Even journalistic rigour is selectively applied. When Pakistan claimed to have downed Indian jets, some Indian outlets rushed to amplify the story before verification, inadvertently echoing enemy propaganda.


Dissent is vital in any democracy. But when its becomes indistinguishable from disdain, when editorial choices are dictated by ideological conformity, then the press becomes a caricature of itself. Ironically, many of these journalists enjoy robust free speech and loudly lament India’s supposed slide into ‘fascism’ from the safety of their X handles. Yet they turn a blind eye to Putin’s repression, Erdogan’s purges or Xi Jinping’s camps. In their eyes, Modi remains the greatest threat to democracy even as they broadcast their outrage freely, without fear of censorship or reprisal. ‘Operation Sindoor’ was a statement of cultural self-confidence. That confidence has rattled those who have spent their careers gatekeeping Indian discourse. Today, their monopoly is over. The people are watching and they no longer believe that the emperor has clothes.

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