Intolerance unplugged
Meera Nanda.
The academic Meera Nanda is under attack for her article on the Hindu right wing’s positions on the history of science. By DIVYA TRIVEDI
MEERA NANDA, a prominent
academic based in the United States who works in the field of history
and philosophy of science and religions, is being hounded for her views
in the article “Hindutva’s science envy” in Frontline (September
16, 2016;
http://www.frontline.in/science-and-technology/hindutvas-science-envy/article9049883.ece).
With publications such as The God Market: How Globalisation is Making India More Hindu, the award-winning Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India, and Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science,
Meera Nanda is no stranger to attacks from Hindu majoritarian
agenda-setters. She does not mind criticism and even welcomes it if it
is constructive. But the circulation of mass emails to her peer circle
without substance and with personal attacks is something she considers
uncalled for. “I am not worried that people are attacking me. They have
chosen this particular method to humiliate me in front of my colleagues
and as a form of censorship,” she says.
Her
colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
(IISER), Mohali, where she is currently a visiting faculty member, and
other eminent persons in institutions across the country were spammed by
emails sent from Canada and Australia. Insinuating that Meera Nanda
uses academic freedom to denigrate Vedic science, Ragini Sharma, one of
the spammers, attached a response published on the online forum Hindu
Post. She quoted Rajiv Malhotra, founder of the Infinity Foundation. The
Foundation promotes Indic Studies, and Malhotra, a Hindu nationalist,
and his followers have often targeted Western scholars whose works do
not subscribe to the Hindu majoritarian world view. In her mail, sent on
September 6, Ragini Sharma went on to attack Sheldon Pollock, Wendy
Doniger and Paul Courtright. All three, in addition to others such as
Jeffrey Kripal, Richard Fox Young and Anantanand Rambachan, have been
the favourite targets of Malhotra at some point or the other.
The
spammer wrote: “So what is the context for Nanda’s work? She is, using
Malhotra’s terminology, a Sepoy—loyal to her American Orientalist
heritage and its creators towards the political and academic goal of
denigrating Hindu Dharma (what they label as Hinduism). This is evident
in her callous depiction of Hindu scholars and icons such as Swami
Vivekananda and others, as described earlier.” Malhotra himself
subsequently tweeted Ragini’s response to Meera Nanda.
Another
spammer, Prabhat Gupta, on September 5 did not even keep up the
pretence of an academic engagement and called Meera Nanda a traitor, a
cocky fool, a dog with a collar, a canine and so on and so forth. Sample
this: “I note that you are strong on ATHEISM... but I see something
that I need to describe to you first. It is called ‘dog with a collar’
effect. Effectively a collar around the neck keeps the dog behind a
line. How does it work, I hear you say?: Well if the dog crosses a line,
the master, via a remote, is able to pass a small voltage which is non
life threatening and therefore keeps the dog in line. Academics like you
remind me of that canine ...they will bark but never cross a line. Let
me illustrate it further: We know you are a leftist/marxist radical and
some of you call for separation of India with POK etc.”
Meera
Nanda’s colleagues at the institute have stood up for her right to
academic freedom. Dr Arvind, Professor of Physics at IISER, wrote to
Prabhat Gupta requesting him to not copy him in such mails in the
future.
Prof. Anu Sabhlok, a member of the
Humanities faculty at the institute, felt that academic disagreements
could be expressed in a more respectful manner and in appropriate forums
such as journals and conferences. She told Frontline: “If Meera published her piece in Frontline, then a commentary on the piece by those in disagreement can be sent to Frontline—and
so the discussion can continue in a public forum. Alternatively, if
people do not agree with her book, then they can write a book review and
circulate it in public forums. Writing personal e-mails and cc-ing it
to her colleagues is an act of cowardice and is very unprofessional.”
She also felt that social scientists are trained to look at social
structures, political processes, economic exchanges and cultural
transformations in an analytical manner, which is often critical. “We
cannot let our work be driven by fear. Such intimidation has to be dealt
with seriously at the outset as it has the potential to silence a lot
of critical and good work. Meera is an established scholar and is also
courageous—if there are threats and undignified backlashes, then a lot
of younger scholars who are not yet secure might self-censor their work.
This will be the death of good scholarship,” she said.
Prof.
V. Rajesh of the Department of History objected to the language used in
the mail and said it amounted to a racist and patriarchal attack on
Meera Nanda in the garb of patriotism and national pride. “Clearly, this
is a tactic to intimidate and issue threats in the form of exerting
pressure on colleagues and officials in power to ‘act’ for the views
expressed by the author. This is a fascistic attempt to impose outdated
views and values which don’t stand the test of scientific rigour and
verification. In fact that shows their [the Hindu right wing’s] poverty
of imagination, method and scholarship: they don’t have any other civil
and civilised methods of response apart from intimidation, personal
slander and issuing threats,” he said.
Defending Meera Nanda’s article in Frontline,
Prof. Rajesh said: “Those who sent emails to us against Meera Nanda
have totally failed to understand the method and the corresponding
argument of the author in her publication. For example, they were
accusing Meera Nanda of being an agent of American Indology, so on and
so forth—all familiar tropes of the Hindu right wing’s accusations
—atheists, Marxists, colonialists, and so on. What Meera Nanda attempts
in her writings on the history of science is a comparative method and a
scrutiny of some of the claims made in the history of science in India.
The comparative method is totally alien to nationalist and Hindu
right-wing ideology, which thrives on misplaced patriotism and Hindu
pride. When some of the received wisdom in the history of science in
India is questioned using the method of comparative history, the typical
response from the nationalist and Hindu right-wing groups is to attack,
dismiss and dump the author as agent of American Indology.”
Part of a trend
The
attack on Meera Nanda cannot be seen in isolation. It is part of a
dangerous trend of the Hindutva brigade becoming increasingly hostile to
individuals and groups not conforming to their world view. And the
Internet serves as an easy battlefield. A case in point is the attack on
Wendy Doniger. Her book The Hindus: An Alternative History was
pulped after a legal complaint was filed by Dinanath Batra of the
Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, a right-wing NGO. An egg was hurled at
her at a lecture in 2003 in London by a protester who objected to a
non-Hindu like Wendy Doniger talking about Hinduism. But there are also
others who have been similarly hounded. Prof. Richard Fox Young, who
teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) along with Andrew J.
Nicholson, author of Unifying Hinduism, accused Malhotra of plagiarism from Nicholson’s book in his Indra’s Net.
When Prof. Young called him out on Twitter with evidences of
plagiarism, mass emails went out to his colleagues at the seminary from
Ram Jagessar, an Indo-Caribbean Canadian-Hindu journalist writing from
Toronto. “Characterising my tweets as the ‘rantings of a person crazed
by envy and rage’, Jagessar referred to himself as a member of the
‘5,000 strong Rajiv Malhotra Discussion Group’. Stating that he was
‘about to launch a wide ranging expose’ of me as ‘an ugly Christian
academic troll’, he boasted of being able to unleash against PTS a
barrage of digital missiles, using a ‘list of 4,500 Hindu organisations
world wide’. The ‘gloves [would] come off’, Jagessar warned, unless his
conditions were met—an apology from me to Rajiv Malhotra, ‘admitting the
error of my ways’ and promising to ‘cease and desist [my] idiotic and
useless tweets’,” wrote Prof. Young in Caravan. Malhotra
subsequently removed all references to Nicholson’s work from his book
and earlier this year, when he was at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences in Mumbai, he defended the plagiarism charge by passing it off
as “copy editing errors of a technical nature”.
Young bemoans: “My experience has much in common with that of Anantanand
Rambachan, a professor of Hinduism Studies here in the U.S. who has
been a target of Malhotra’s anger even longer than I have. And when PM
Modi first visited the U.S. after his election, and American South
Asianists and Indian American scholars signed a petition warning of the
risk of IT projects involving the Indian government, the same Malhotra
poison pen writers went to work, the most mischievous of all being a
Toronto-based follower, @ Ram Jagessar. Jagessar, though, was exposed by
IndiaWest, a California online magazine catering to the NRI
community. He was named and shamed for his harassing letters laced with
vague threats of retaliation. Where is the solidly academic,
non-polemical essay that appears in the mainstream print?”
Do
these attempts at silencing alternative viewpoints through intimidation
resonate with the academia there? “Scholars generally want to be left
alone, but when the smallish, loud-mouthed and obnoxiously RW cohort in
the NRI population breathes down their necks, they often become guarded
and self-protective. For good reason, considering the injuries many have
suffered!” says Young.
