From India to Iran: How Hitler redefined 'Aryan' for Nazism

Suzanne Cords  

DW

05/05/2026

According to Nazi ideology, an ideal "Aryan" was blond, blue-eyed with athletic features. The term is still tied to Nazi Germany, but its origin lies elsewhere.

This propaganda photo embodied the Nazis' ideal of the Nordic race

Image: Scherl/SZ Photo/picture alliance

Like many Germans, Adolf Hitler had neither blond hair nor was he particularly tall. That didn't stop him and his Nazi party from perpetuating the ideal of so-called "Aryans," with roots in Northern Europe, as being a superior race. Desirable Aryan traits included blonde hair, blue eyes and a tall, athletic stature.

Following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the notion of ancestry became more important. From 1935, all German citizens had to provide what was known as an "Ariernachweis" or "Aryan certificate" to prove that their ancestors did not include Jewish or Romani people for at least three generations. Civil servants, doctors and lawyers already had to start providing the "Ariernachweis" in 1933. Time-consuming research was often necessary before citizens could submit their documents to the Reich Office for Genealogical Research (in German, Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung) for verification.

Exhibitions and classroom instruction on Nazi racial doctrine were commonplace during the Third Reich

Image: Scherl/SZ Photo/picture alliance

The Nazis considered Germans to be the "superior master race." Conversely they falsely saw Jews as an inferior race whose members had no place in Nazi Germany.

In propaganda films, the Nazis claimed that Jews wanted to destroy the world order and wrest control from the "master race." In caricatures, especially those printed in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, Jews were portrayed using grotesque and antisemitic tropes, for example with hooked noses and greedy facial expressions. The Nazis used this racist ideology to first systematically exclude Jews and then to murder them.

There were other population groups that the Nazis associated with Aryan features though, especially Nordic and Scandinavian peoples. When the Nazis encountered blond and blue-eyed children in countries such as Latvia or Poland, they had no scruples about kidnapping them and sending them to homes run as part of the "Lebensborn" eugenics program. Some 200,000 of these "racially pure" children ended up in German children's homes. These homes served the purpose of "Germanization" — it was a project developed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi regime's eletie SS guard, who sought to promote the growth of a "racially valuable" population.

The 1938 "New People" calendar was a tool of propaganda intended to educate Germans on racial categories

Image: akg-images/picture alliance

The term Aryan also became the basis for "Aryanization" — the confiscation and transfer of ownership from Jewish businesses and Jewish property to non-Jews.
The true origin of the 'Aryans'

Even though the term Aryan was common in colloquial language, Nazi "race scientists" didn't use it much. Instead, they would refer to "German or kindred blood." They knew the term had originally been used to refer to linguistic similarities and not to inherited physical traits.

Archaeological discoveries show that the term Aryan has existed for more than two millennia. The Persian king Darius I had a rock-cut tomb carved in Naqsh-e Rostam in modern Iran. The inscription reads: "I am Darius, the great king … a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan descent." The word also appears in Sanskrit in sacred texts from India.

Darius, King of the Persians and, by his own account, an Aryan, is buried at Naqsh-e Rostam

Image: Evaldas Mikoliunas/imageBROKER/picture alliance

Originally, the term "Arya" was used to mean "noble" or "honorable" — as a self-designation by peoples in India and Iran. They are thought to have descended from nomadic peoples who migrated from the region now made up of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and southern Russia. After discovering similarities between most European languages and languages such as Persian or Sanskrit, scientists later classified Aryans as members of a shared Indo-European linguistic family.

Racist reinterpretation of the term

The racist reinterpretation of the term Aryan began in the middle of the 19th century. In his four-volume work "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races," French writer and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau divided humanity into three groups, the white, yellow and black races. His conclusion was that the white, Aryan original race was superior to the others, characterized by its "immeasurably superior intelligence," and was destined to rule over the others. He also warned against "racial mixing," as this would endanger both the quality of the Aryan original "race" and humanity as a whole.

Gobineau's theory was largely ignored by his contemporaries but later found traction after being appropriated and altered to serve nationalist, far-right ideology. A large number of scientists and academics subsequently used Gobineau's racial theory as a basis for their own writings on the subject.

One of them was British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain — who would later also become the son-in-law of Richard Wagner. In his 1899 book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," Chamberlain raised Gobineau's racist theories to a new level.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain's antisemitic theories made a strong impression on Hitler

Image: Scherl/SZ Photo/picture alliance

Chamberlain glorified the "Germanic race". However, he was aware that not all Germans matched the physical ideal Aryan type described by Gobineau, so he based his claims on so-called German virtues that he believed were inherited through blood: honesty, loyalty and diligence. He characterized the "Jewish race" as lacking creativity and idealism and as being driven solely by material interests, thereby posing a threat to the "Germanic Aryans." While Chamberlain did ascribe a certain "noble disposition" to individual Jews, he simultaneously emphasized their alleged "incapacity and inferiority" in comparison to the "Aryan race."

Chamberlain's work was well received in Germany. Among his admirers was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who repeatedly invited him to his royal court.

Brothers in spirit: Chamberlain and Hitler

Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' — a racist work filled with hate speech and violent fantasies

Image: Daniel Karmann/dpa/picture alliance

In 1917, Chamberlain joined the far-right, nationalist and antisemitic German Fatherland Party. Adolf Hitler visited him on 30 September 1923 and apparently left a strong impression. A few days after the meeting, Chamberlain wrote to the future Führer: "That Germany in its hour of greatest need has given birth to a Hitler is proof of vitality."

Hitler, in turn, regarded Chamberlain as one of the philosophical "evangelists" of his worldview. In his book "Mein Kampf," he repeatedly refers to Chamberlain and also praises the supposed superiority of the "Aryan race."

It has long been scientifically established that there is no biological basis to "race." The Nazis misused the term Aryan to further spread and legitimize their inhumane ideology. To this day, racists around the world still use this false interpretation of the term.

This article was originally published in German.
Suzanne Cords Globetrotter with a passion for culture

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ARYAN SUPREMACY

Opinion

Welcome to Modi's India, the training ground for Western fascism

Fascism is evolving. Marching under the banner of Islamophobia, Hindu and white nationalists have become increasingly worrying bedfellows, says Ashok Swain.

Ashok Swain
12 Mar, 2025
The New Arab 

Hindu nationalism serves as a model of a non-Western movement that builds a majority-based state while upholding religious and racial hierarchy, writes Ashok Swain [photo credit: Getty Images]


Over the past decade, the global far-right has changed in major ways. In the past, it was mostly focused on white supremacism and European nationalism. But now, it is forming alliances with non-European groups, most notably Hindu nationalists in India.

This growing connection between Hindutva and far-right movements in the US and Europe raises serious questions about how modern fascism adapts beyond racial boundaries.

This connection is not new. The relationship between Hindu nationalism and European fascism dates back to the early 20th century.

At that time, the idea of an "Aryan race" connected German nationalists with privileged caste Hindus, who were seen as having a common ancestry.

Some European thinkers, like Savitri Devi Mukherji, strengthened this connection by combining Hindu mysticism with Nazi racial ideas. She praised both the Hindu caste system and Hitler’s vision of a racial state.

Despite these historical ties, today’s alliance between Hindutva and the Western far-right is more about shared enemies than shared origins. Both movements promote Islamophobia, oppose secularism, and aim for an ethnically or religiously dominant state.

In the US and Europe, far-right populists blame Muslim minorities for social problems and see them as threats. In India, Hindutva groups, led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have passed policies that target Muslims, Christians, and Dalits.

This shared ideology has led to real-world collaborations. For example, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik praised Hindutva in his manifesto, and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders defended a BJP politician’s derogatory remarks against Prophet. Other links include Steve Bannon’s admiration of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindu nationalist leaders participating in far-right events like the National Conservatism Conference.

One of the most striking aspects of this convergence is the increasing presence of Indian-origin figures in Western far-right politics.

People like Suella Braverman and Priti Patel in the UK, Kash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy in the US, and Alice Weidel’s partner in Germany (possibly of Tamil origin) show how Hindutva-aligned elites have entered white supremacist spaces. These individuals gain acceptance by supporting nationalist, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant policies.
A new multiracial fascism?

This shift reveals the changing nature of far-right politics. Historically, white supremacy excluded non-Europeans from power. But today, the global far-right is strategically expanding.

Hindu nationalism serves as a model of a non-Western movement that builds a majority-based state while upholding religious and racial hierarchy. This approach appeals to Western far-right groups, which also seek to replace liberal democracy with nationalist, ethno-religious states.

The American Sangh (HSS), a network of Hindutva organisations in the U.S., has played a crucial role in strengthening these ties. Groups like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) and the Republican Hindu Coalition present themselves as defenders of Hindu rights while aligning with conservative and Islamophobic causes. Their influence is seen in efforts to end affirmative action and block caste protections in workplaces.

Far-right collaboration is also visible in publishing and ideology-building. The alt-right publishing house Arktos has helped spread books that mix Hindu mysticism with far-right ideas. Its co-founder, Daniel Friberg, claims to have met with over a hundred influential figures in India, including politicians and religious leaders.

Arktos has ties to far-right parties across Europe, including France’s National Front, Germany’s National Democratic Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord. Figures like Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin, who advocates for an anti-liberal world order, are embraced by both American far-right groups and Hindu nationalists.

One recent example of this ideological connection is the growing link between India’s Hindu nationalist networks and Sweden’s far-right Sweden Democrats. Both groups share anti-Muslim rhetoric, as seen when Sweden Democrat Richard Jomshof shared controversial cartoons from an Indian nationalist site.

However, the growing influence of Hindutva within the far-right does not signify an abandonment of racial hierarchies. Rather, it reflects a conditional arrangement in which Hindu nationalists are accepted as subordinates within the framework of white supremacy.

Their inclusion serves the strategic interests of white supremacists, but only as long as they acknowledge and operate within this hierarchy. The presence of Indian-origin far-right figures does not indicate a dilution of white supremacist ideology; instead, it demonstrates its ability to incorporate useful allies while maintaining racial dominance. Those who conform to this structure remain within the fold, while those who challenge it — such as Vivek Ramaswamy — are quickly discarded.

The liberal response to this growing alliance has been inconsistent at best. While many Western liberals strongly oppose white nationalism, they are often hesitant to criticise Hindu nationalism. This hesitation comes from a view of India as a tolerant and democratic society.

As a result, Hindutva has gained more legitimacy in global politics, despite promoting many of the same extreme policies and even worse as the Western far-right.

Zionists & Hindu nationalists unite for a Trump election win
Arun Kundnani

The growing connection between Hindutva and the Western far-right is a warning sign. Fascism is evolving. It is no longer limited to white supremacism but is forming alliances with non-European movements that share authoritarian and exclusionary goals.

To fight this new far-right, progressives must recognise that white nationalism and Hindu nationalism are linked. Just as anti-fascists resist far-right extremism in the US and Europe, they must also challenge Hindutva’s influence worldwide.

The fight against far-right politics cannot be isolated. Stopping authoritarian nationalism — whether in the form of white supremacy in the West or Hindutva in India — requires global cooperation. Marginalised communities must unite to challenge racial and religious supremacy while defending democracy and pluralism. The rise of a multiracial far-right is a reality that cannot be ignored.




Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden

Follow him on X: @ashoswai

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ARYAN NATIONALISM

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ARYAN

As protests grow, Belgium faces its racist colonial past

By RAF CASERT

1 of 17

 https://apnews.com/b405027b7232c42b8d9dab407ff87aa1/gallery/5c89763e6f054791a5e3d7f62e636559
In this June 10, 2020, photo, a statue of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with paint and graffiti in the center of Brussels. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

WHITE SUPREMACY ARYAN SUPREMACY IS THE CULTURE OF IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM

BLACK LIVES MATTER IS A GLOBAL RESPONSE 

TO THE GLOBALIZED RACISM OF IMPERIALISM

TERVUREN, Belgium (AP) — When it comes to ruthless colonialism and racism, few historical figures are more notorious than Leopold II, the Belgian king who held Congo as his personal property and may have been responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese more than a century ago.

Yet across Belgium, the monarch’s name is still found on streets and tunnels. Cities are dotted with his statues and busts, even as evidence of his misdeeds has piled up over the decades.

Now a reckoning seems to be at hand.

The protests sweeping the world after George Floyd’s death in the U.S. have added fuel to a movement to confront Europe’s role in the slave trade and its colonial past. Leopold is increasingly seen as a stain on the nation over which he reigned from 1865 to 1909. Demonstrators want him removed from public view.

In just the last week, a long-running trickle of dissent that resulted in little more than occasional vandalism has turned into a torrent, with statues of Leopold defaced in a half-dozen cities. In the port town of Antwerp, where much of the Congolese rubber, minerals and other natural riches entered the nation, one statue was burned and had to be removed for repairs. It is unclear whether it will ever come back.

“When you erect a statue, it lauds the actions of who is represented. The Germans would not get it into their head to erect statues of Hitler and cheer them,” said Mireille-Tsheusi Robert, president of the Congolese action group Bamko-Cran, which wants all Leopold statues removed from Belgian cities. “For us, Leopold has committed a genocide.”

On Wednesday, an internet petition to rid the capital, Brussels, of any Leopold statue swept past 70,000 signatures. Also this week, regional education authorities promised history course reforms to better explain the true character of colonialism. And at the University of Mons in southern Belgium, academic authorities removed a bust of the king, saying they wanted to make sure “nobody could be offended by its presence.”

Similar efforts are unfolding in Britain, where at least two statues of prominent figures connected to the slave trade have been taken down by protesters or city officials. London’s mayor has promised a review of all monuments. In the U.S., protesters tore down a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis along Richmond, Virginia’s famed Monument Avenue on Wednesday night. The death of Floyd has prompted similar Confederate monument removals around the nation.

In Kinshasa, a replica of the main Leopold statue in Brussels had already been relegated to a museum park ages ago. The equestrian bronze was first erected in 1928, but seven years after independence from Belgium in 1960 it was ordered taken down by then dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In 2005, authorities put it back up, intending it to serve as a reminder of the horrors of colonial rule — with an updated plaque. Only a day later, though, it was removed following a public outcry. For the last decade, it has sat in a park of colonial monuments.

In this June 9, 2020, photo, the bust of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with paint and graffiti on the grounds of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Leopold ruled Congo as a fiefdom, forcing many of its people into slavery to extract resources for his personal profit. His early rule, starting in 1885, was famous for its brutality, which some experts say left as many as 10 million dead.

After his ownership of Congo ended in 1908, he handed the central African country over to the Belgian state, which continued to hold sway over an area 75 times its size until the nation became independent in 1960.

Leopold has come to symbolize the racism and inequality citizens of Congolese descent have had to endure. Next to the royal palace stands an equestrian statue with Leopold gazing solemnly toward the horizon. On Wednesday, his hands and eyes were covered with red paint, and expletives were spray-painted on the side of the monument.

Maximilian Christiaens, an architect with a Congolese mother and Belgian father, who came to see the statue after the defacing, realizes the issue is part of his identity. Since Congo achieved independence, Belgium’s Congolese population has swelled to about 230,000 in a nation of 11 million.

“You know, we feel at home here, but seeing symbols like this in the city and all over the country gives us the opposite signal,” Christiaens said. He would like to see them torn down.

A similar struggle is playing out in the majestic woods east of Brussels in Tervuren, where the palatial Royal Museum for Central Africa stands. It was built over a century ago to glorify Leopold’s colonial exploits and to convince Belgium citizens that their country was delivering civilization to the heart of wild Africa.

In this May 6, 1961, file photo, the bust of former Belgian King Leopold II (1835-1909) lies on the ground on the Avenue General De Gaulle in Stanleyville, Congo. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/File)

In this June 9, 2020, photo, the bust of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with red paint and graffiti on the grounds of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Museum Director Guido Gryseels fully understands the challenges and the sensitivities, especially after a Leopold statue was defaced in the gardens outside the museum last week. He has sought to shift the museum’s views on colonialism into a contemporary reassessment of a flawed past. This week, the Black Lives Matter logo was displayed on digital screens at the museum entrance.

In this June 9, 2020, photo, a sculpture of an elephant and its riders stands outside the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The present museum was completely renovated in 2018. One of the biggest challenges they faced was presenting a contemporary vision of Africa in a building which had been originally designed as a colonial museum. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

In this photo taken on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, a man stands at the ticket kiosk as a message is displayed on a screen above his head at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The present museum was completely renovated in 2018. One of the biggest challenges they faced was presenting a contemporary vision of Africa in a building which had been originally designed as a colonial museum. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

As part of a major renovation he oversaw, Gryseels consigned the racist statues of Congolese and the glorifying busts of the Belgian military to the “depot” of outdated sculptures in the museum’s cellars.

“We wanted to keep them somewhere so that the visitors could still see, so that we could explain: ‘This is how we looked at Africa before,’” Gryseels said.

Upstairs, in the grand rooms, the only bust of Leopold on display is made of ivory and aims to explain how the plunder of the country extended to the wholesale slaughter of elephants.

As a listed architectural treasure, Leopold’s royal double L monogram is still plastered all over the building. But Congolese artists have been asked to make a counterpoint, and in the main hall now stands a sculpture of a skull of a Congolese chief who was beheaded by a Belgian. In front of statues that could not be moved because they were protected, there are now transparent drapes with images criticizing Belgian actions in Congo.

In this June 9, 2020, file image from ATV video, a statue of Belgium's King Leopold II is removed from its pedestal, in Antwerp, Belgium. Authorities in Antwerp removed the statue of the country's former monarch Leopold II for repairs on Tuesday after it was damaged during anti-racism protests. (ATV via AP, File)

“It would have been impossible 30 years ago, but there is a step forward,” Robert said. Still, she said the changes do not go far enough and the museum needs to better embrace Congolese in its management structure.

Just about everybody acknowledges that Belgian society needs to take a hard look at its past. The Catholic church, the dominant force in education during much of Belgium’s existence, was at worst an active participant in colonialism, at best a passive bystander. And since many Belgians had family members who went to Congo to seek their fortunes, there is a sense of unease in confronting the history of racism and exploitation.

“The amnesia is linked to the money the Belgians made in Congo,” Robert said.
For many years, Belgian colonial authorities peddled the idea that the king went to Congo to stop the slave trade, Gryseels said, when it was really “a pretext to make big economic gains.”

___

Jean-Yves Kamale in Kinshasa contributed.
___

Read all AP stories about protests against racism and police brutality at http://apnews.com/GeorgeFloyd

Colleges in Nazi Germany thought giving in to government demands would save them

Students and other Nazi supporters gather at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1933. 

AP Photo

The Conversation

April 09, 2025

Many American universities, widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech, are giving in to demands from the Trump administration, which has been targeting academia since it took office.

In one of his first acts, President Donald Trump branded diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory. His administration also launched federal investigations into more than 50 universities, from smaller regional schools such as Grand Valley State University in Michigan and the New England College of Optometry in Massachusetts to elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale.

Trump ramped up the pressure by threatening university research funding and targeting specific schools. In one example, the Trump administration revoked US$400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged failures to curb antisemitic harassment on campus. The school later agreed to most of Trump’s demands, from tightening student protest policies to placing an entire academic department under administrative oversight – though the funding remains frozen.

Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania have also recently had grants frozen. Harvard was sent a list of demands in order to keep $9 billion in federal funding.

Now, across the United States, many universities are trying to avoid being Trump’s next target. Administrators are dismantling DEI initiatives – closing and rebranding offices, eliminating positions, revising training programs and sanitizing diversity statements – while professors are preemptively self-censoring.

Not all institutions are complying. Some schools, such as Wesleyan, have refused to abandon their diversity principles. And organizations including the American Association of University Professors have filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders, arguing they violate academic freedom and the First Amendment.

But these remain exceptions, as the broader trend leans toward institutional caution and retreat.

As a scholar of comparative and international education, I study how academic institutions respond to authoritarian pressure – across political systems, cultural contexts and historical moments. While some universities may believe that compliance with the administration will protect their funding and independence, a few historical parallels suggest otherwise.



German universities: A lesson

In the 1975 book “The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of German Universities,” historian Frederic Lilge chronicles how German universities, which entered the 20th century in a golden age of global intellectual influence, did not resist the Nazi regime but instead adapted to it.

Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazi Party was closely monitoring German universities through nationalist student groups and sympathetic faculty, flagging professors deemed politically unreliable – particularly Jews, Marxists, liberals and pacifists.

After Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents. The 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service mandated the firing of Jewish and other “non-Aryan” professors and members of the faculty deemed politically suspect.

Soon after, professors were required to swear loyalty to Hitler, curricula were overhauled to emphasize “national defense” and “racial science” – a pseudoscientific framework used to justify antisemitism and Aryan supremacy – and entire departments were restructured to serve Nazi ideology.

Some institutions, such as the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, even rushed to honor Hitler with an honorary doctorate within weeks of his rise to power. He declined the offer, though the gesture signaled the university’s eagerness to align with the regime. Professional associations, such as the Association of German Universities, stayed silent, ignoring key opportunities to resist before universities lost their autonomy and became subservient to the Nazi state.

As linguist Max Weinreich wrote in his 1999 book “Hitler’s Professors,” many academics didn’t just comply, they enabled the regime by reshaping their research. This legitimized state doctrine, helping build the intellectual framework of the regime.

A few academics resisted and were dismissed, exiled or executed. Most did not.

The transformation of German academia was not a slow drift but a swift and systemic overhaul. But what made Hitler’s orders stick was the eagerness of many academic leaders to comply, justify and normalize the new order. Each decision – each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department – was framed as necessary, even patriotic. Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge – they served power.

It would take more than a decade after the war, through denazification, reinvestment and international reintegration, for West German universities to begin regaining their intellectual standing and academic credibility.
USSR and fascist Italy suffer similar fate

Other countries that have fallen under authoritarian regimes followed similar trajectories.

In fascist Italy, the shift began not with violence but with a signature. In 1931, the Mussolini regime required all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Out of more than 1,200, only 12 refused.

Many justified their compliance by insisting the oath had no bearing on their teaching or research. But by publicly affirming loyalty and offering no organized resistance, the academic community signaled its willingness to accommodate the regime. This lack of opposition allowed the fascist government to tighten control over universities and use them to advance its ideological agenda.

In the Soviet Union, this control was not limited to symbolic gestures – it reshaped the entire academic system.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks oscillated between wanting to abolish universities as “feudal relics” and repurposing them to serve a socialist state, as historians John Connelly and Michael Grüttner explain in their book “Universities Under Dictatorship.” Ultimately, they chose the latter, remaking universities as instruments of ideological education and technical training, tightly aligned with Marxist-Leninist goals.

Under Josef Stalin, academic survival depended less on scholarly merit than on conformity to official doctrine. Dissenting scholars were purged or exiled, history was rewritten to glorify the Communist Party, and entire disciplines such as genetics were reshaped to fit political orthodoxy.

This model was exported across Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, ministries dictated curricula, Marxism-Leninism became mandatory across disciplines, and admissions were reengineered to favor students from loyalist backgrounds. In some contexts, adherents to older intellectual traditions pushed back, especially in Poland, where resistance slowed though could not prevent the imposition of ideological control.

By the early 1950s, universities across the region had become what Connelly calls “captive institutions,” stripped of independence and recast to serve the state.

A more recent example is Turkey, where, following the failed 2016 coup, more than 6,000 academics were dismissed, universities were shuttered and research deemed “subversive” was banned.
History’s warning

The Trump administration’s early and direct intervention into higher education governance echoes historical attempts to bring universities under state influence or control.

The administration says it is doing so to eradicate “discrimatory” DEI policies and fight what it sees as antisemitism on college campuses. But by withholding federal funding, the administration is also trying to force universities into ideological conformity – by dictating whose knowledge counts but also whose presence and perspectives are permissible on campus.

Columbia’s reaction to Trump’s demands sent a clear message: Resistance is risky, but compliance may be rewarded – though the $400 million has yet to be restored. The speed and scope of its concessions set a precedent, signaling to other universities that avoiding political fallout now may mean rewriting policies, reshaping departments and retreating from controversy, perhaps before anyone even asks.

The Trump administration has already moved on to other universities, including the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender policies, Princeton for its climate programs and Harvard over alleged antisemitism. The question is which school is next.

The Department of Education has launched investigations into over 50 institutions, accusing them of using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” How these institutions choose to respond may determine whether higher education remains a space for open inquiry.

The pressure to conform is not just financial – it is also cultural. Faculty at some institutions are being advised not to use “DEI” in emails and public communication, with warnings to not be a target. Academics are removing pronouns from their email signatures and asking their students to comply, too. I’ve been on the receiving end of those warnings, and so have my counterparts at other institutions. And students on visas are being warned not to travel outside the U.S. after several were deported or denied reentry due to alleged involvement in protests.

Meanwhile, people inside and outside academia are combing websites, syllabi, presentations and public writing in search of what they consider ideological infractions. This type of peer surveillance can reward silence, incentivize erasure and turn institutions against their own.

When universities start regulating not just what they say but what they teach, support and stand for – driven by fear rather than principle – they are no longer just reacting to political threats, they are internalizing them. And as history has shown, that may mark the beginning of the end of their academic independence.

Iveta Silova, Professor of Comparative and International Education, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A Tale of Two Gandhis: Make Black History of India Matter

BY SHOBANA SHANKAR
SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Debating Ideas is a new section that aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It will offer debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books.



On the University of Ghana, Legon, campus, in December 2018, a Gandhi statue unveiled in June 2016 was removed after many months of controversy. A petition for its removal, citing Gandhi’s racism towards blacks during his time in South Africa, gained more than 2000 signatures. “Give us a statue of Ambedkar, not Gandhi,” demanded Obádélé Kambon, research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, in an interview with the online Indian magazine Caravan. Gandhi “was always fighting for Indo-Aryans—to use his own term—not Black people.”

These events were part of a crescendo of African-Indian tensions, as Indian mobs attacked African students two years earlier and protests against Gandhi statues around the African continent. Now, since the murder of George Floyd on May 25 and the swell of political demonstrations and activism around the world in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement and others, statues of the Mahatma have been under attack again, particularly in the UK, where his likeness in Parliament Square was boarded up for protection, along with those of Churchill and Mandela.

While these protests have unleashed a spirited and necessary debate about the Mahatma’s career in South Africa and civil rights more broadly, relatively less notice has been given to the solidarity expressed by Ghanaian intellectuals and other Africans with the movement to end Dalit oppression and Aryan supremacy. African-Indian relations, particularly racial and cultural relations, are complicated and not reducible to the career of a single man.

Indeed, Ghanaians’ deep understanding of India goes back years earlier. Another older Gandhi likeness is in Accra, unnoticed, not too far away from the Legon campus at the Hindu Monastery of Africa in Odorkor. This milky, shiny Mahatma, adorned with a dhoti and walking stick, perches outside the resting place of Swami Ghananand Saraswati, the first Hindu African monk, whose black stone face has carefully applied sacred ash and fresh flower garlands, the respects paid to a guru beloved by both Africans and Indians. Before Swami Ghanananda’s death in 2016, Indians often sought his blessings and permission to perform pujas (worship). One ceremony was to honour the syncretistic deity Ayyappa, a sexually ambiguous celibate god, born of two males (Shiva and Vishnu in female form, Mohini), whose worshippers included Indians from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and other parts of “non Aryan” South India, including Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and now Ghanaians. The irony is that, while the worship of Ayyappa at the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala excluded women between the ages of 10 and 50 until a landmark 2018 Indian Supreme Court case, in Ghana, the blessings of a black Swami had given the Indian diaspora religious freedom and gender equality even before.

African-Indian diasporic entanglements have long involved struggles for rights and freedom from oppression, but how utopian visions have been articulated have not always been the same in every time and place. In Ghana, unlike the Indian Ocean regions of Africa, few Indian labourers and merchants migrated until after Partition, with the influx of Sindhi refugees from Pakistan and, from the 1960s, more South Asian teachers. Indeed, the largest diaspora likely went the other way, as contingents of Gold Coast soldiers, along with Nigerians, went to the battlefields in India with the British Army. Returning solders, getting no recognition and little material support after helping Britain defeat the Axis powers, were key leaders in anti-colonial protests in Gold Coast. They also probably sowed the roots of Ghanaian Hinduism. In the decade after the war, a traditional healer named Kwesi Essel formed a Hindu study group, which sponsored his study at the Divine Life Society in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges, in 1969. He became Swami Ghanananda upon his return to Ghana and the spiritual leader of a multiracial spiritual community.

Ghana’s history with India—with its multidirectional diasporic flows and its intellectual and spiritual sides—is not the same to be found in other parts of the African continent. And the specific circumstances of history help explain the lesson the Indian government learned with the precipitous unveiling of the Gandhi statue at the University of Ghana, where the preference for Ambedkar reveals more than a deep knowledge of Indian history. The opposition was a demonstration of commitment to the cause of caste reform in India and social reform more broadly. The petitioners noted questions about Gandhi’s legacy in South Africa, referring to a recent book by South African scholars Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed. This revisionist history has been dismissed by historians like Ramachandra Guha in India for judging the Mahatma harshly for his racism towards Africans and “lower” Indians and kowtowing to the British colonizers as part of his early formational period in his life, before Gandhi’s “maturation” into a non-racialist and anti-colonial fighter. While Desai and Vahed have continue to disagree with Guha on his misunderstanding of South African history, Jon Soske’s recent book has noted the fierce South African-led opposition to white domination in the early 1900s that Gandhi would have had to all but cover his head in the sand to miss when making claims that Africans were not civilized enough for self-government. Gandhi’s chief underestimation appears to have been to oversimplify black politics; the Indian government’s cheap symbolism with the Gandhi statue could be seen as another symptom of this. It would be an additional mistake to miss what Ghanaian scholars are saying about Ambedkar by focusing on apparent anti-Gandhianism, as historian Dilip Menon does: “Gandhi is a metaphor for the Indian presence in Africa and histories of both Indian racism as well as commercial wealth … while Gandhi becomes increasingly sidelined in the maelstrom of Indian politics, in Africa he has come to stand in for the Indian presence.”[1] This view does not, unfortunately, acknowledge diversity of African thought and experience.

Africans’ positions on Gandhi, Ambedkar, or any other historical figure should not be divorced from the politics of knowledge and reduced to a crude general naivety. These protests are debates over representations and realities in history. It makes sense, too, that more African-Indian contentions are in the realm of knowledge-production, as African students today account for the largest contingent of foreign students in Indian universities. It should be remembered that African students have been among the victims of Indian mobs, a class and racial dynamic that has largely gone unremarked.

What and how postcolonial students learn is no apolitical issue but one that occupied the minds of Afrocentric leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Senegalese President Léopold Senghor. Senghor, in 1974, undertook a unique African-Indian collaboration to explore race from non-Western and non-white perspectives. The Indo-African Studies Department he established, the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noir in Dakar, focused on the study of the deep past, the possible linguistic, cultural, and social affinities between black Africa and Dravidian India. His interest in bringing India into the black world, during a high point of Afrocentrism, even if it was not sustained with financial and political commitment by his successors, foreshadowed alternative veins of today’s Afro-Indian thought. South Indian scholars and activists have since engaged in Afro-Indian cultural questioning. The Dravidian Movement and Black Movement, by Dr K. Ponmudy, outlines a different approach, suggesting a comparative framework rather than a common root of African-American and Tamil nationalisms. The author drew inspiration from his personal witness to the 1960s liberation movements. Besides drawing from the requisite secular social theory derived from Western thinkers, Ponmudy notes the impossibility of ignoring white and Brahmin supremacy in religious-ethical as well as political arenas.

Today’s African-Indian knowledge engagements may not focus as much on humanistic and cultural inquiry, but it is the religio-spiritual ethicism, or non-material humanitarian interest, of Afro-Indian thought that Ponmudy, Kambon, and others bring back to the fore—the postcolonial world should not lose sight of the moral and ethical possibilities it envisioned in struggles for independence.

Independence today does not merely mean from the West but also critiquing power within the Global South. This power is material—in putting up statues in the service of a tired nationalism—as much as it is non-material—in thinking about who gets to think and be respected for their thought and action. Afro-Indian politics is about intellectualism, in which religion is a vast field, inseparable from other forms of knowledge as in Western enlightenment ideas. Hence, the Hindu Monastery of Africa has been a place to think for some of Ghana’s greatest minds, like late physicist G. K. Tetteh. African-Indian relations could bring greater freedom of thought, not less.

Old and new diasporic movements between Africa and South Asia have brought new forms of freedom and pluralism—like in Ghana’s popular gender-creative worship of Ayyappa. These forms may not fit into the familiar paradigms of neo-colonialism that the West relies on in doomsday predictions about “Asia’s scramble for Africa”(Obama advised African leaders in 2015: get “a good deal for Africa,” “like the kind of partnership America offers”). Cultural and intellectual knowledge produced in African-Indian diasporic entanglements is potent, especially when we confront reductionism and defensiveness that prevent critical reflection on multiple perspectives that have been erased for the sake of nationalism.

Author’s book in the African Arguments series published with Hurst
End Note


[1]Dilip Menon, “Was Mohandas Gandhi a Racist?”, Africa is a Country, March 10, 2017; https://africasacountry.com/2017/03/was-mohandas-gandhi-a-racist

SMOKERS’ CORNER: IN SEARCH OF THE 'NEW MAN'

Nadeem F. Paracha 

DAWN

Published March 31, 2024

Illustration by Abro

Till the 1960s, the idea of engineering an ideal society was an earnest endeavour. It did not draw the kind of cynical ridicule or even dread that it often evokes today. The concept of ‘social engineering’ is now understood as a rather sinister idea — but it just might be making a comeback.

The study of social engineering is often tied to the study of ‘ideologemes’ (a way of expression or representation of a particular ideology), such as the ‘New Man.’ The concept of the ‘New Man’ was a popular unit of various ideologies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The concept first emerged during the 18th century French Revolution, when radicals (the Jacobins) took control of the revolutionary regime and looked to create a whole new society by completely destroying the old. To do this, the regime felt it needed to shape a new kind of citizen through a new set of knowledge and morals. This pursuit led to excesses, in which hundreds of ‘bad citizens’ were brutally executed.

In the 19th century, two books — one in Czarist Russia and the other in Germany — would go a long way in popularising the idea of the New Man. The first was a novel written by the Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He called it The Story About The New Man.

After gaining prominence in the 19th century and its proliferation in the 20th century, the concept of ‘social engineering’ in order to create an ‘ideal society’ seems to be on the rise once more

The protagonist of the novel sees himself as one of the “new breed of men” in Russia entirely dedicated to forming a new society. He is a self-appointed messiah, envisioning a utopia. He even suppresses his sexual urges for this and is inclined to treat women as equals, as long as they are willing to work towards creating a new society.

The second book was by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In it, a ‘prophet’ tells the people about the coming of a new kind of man, the Übermensch (or the ‘overman’).

The Übermensch was to rise by shattering established ideas of morality, destroying the ‘decadence’ of the modern world, and would fill the void created by the figurative “death of God” with a new set of morals. The Übermensch was passionate, intuitive and unabashedly egotistical in his pursuit for power and glory.

These two tomes went on to influence experiments in social engineering in the 20th century, mainly in the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The founder of communist Russia, Vladimir Lenin, was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky’s novel.

Lenin’s Bolshevik party set out to create the ‘New Soviet Man’ and the ‘New Soviet Woman.’ Lenin understood the Russian society to be ignorant and emotional due to the manner in which it was ‘brutalised’ by the old order.

Policies were launched to engineer a society that preferred consciousness over instinct and emotion, and worked towards creating classlessness. The ‘New Soviet Man’ had to be physically and mentally strong, disciplined by Marxist-Leninist ideology. He had to completely forgo his ethnic and racial identity.



The ‘New Soviet Woman’ was to be his equal — a fellow comrade, a securer of the Revolution but also a wife and mother. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, asked the party to become “engineers of the human soul.” He said that society needed to be remoulded, “just as a gardener cultivates a tree.”

To Stalin, this required rapid industrialisation. Plans to do this were put into action. But whereas the Soviet Union achieved industrialisation at an impressive pace, this was at the cost of millions of deaths in the countryside, due to food extortion by the state to feed the cities, and the introduction of forced labour to build factories, roads and dams. The period also witnessed the mass execution and exile of thousands of “socially harmful elements.”

In Nazi Germany (1933-45), initiatives were launched to create the ‘New Aryan Man.’ He was to use instinct and intuition over reason and consciousness. He was to be a man of sheer will — not as an individual, but as an extension of a collective striving to serve a new Aryan society. The New Aryan Woman was to be a mother, the breeder of children of “pure German blood.”

Crude experiments in eugenics were carried out, millions from “undesired races” were exterminated, brutal military invasions were undertaken, and a bloody world war was fought to hasten the creation and supremacy of the ‘New Aryan Man.’

Nietzsche’s Übermensch was an inspiration to the Nazis, especially the Übermensch’s amoral and passionate impulse for power through grand military means and an unabashed lust for glory, even if this meant causing outright destruction.

The Chinese communist ideologue Mao Zedong tried to create a ‘New Chinese Man.’ The New Chinese Man was to be engineered to construct a new Chinese society. For this, Mao launched a campaign of “thought reform” in the cities. “Bourgeois thoughts” had to be expelled from the mind and replaced with thoughts of communist ‘sages’, such as Mao.

Then, reforms were initiated to create ‘New Chinese Men’ in the countryside. For this, peasants were forcibly organised into large collectives. ‘New Chinese Women’ were to be equals of men. In fact, they were treated as men and given similar tasks.

In 1966, Mao launched a ‘Cultural Revolution’ to galvanise Chinese youth to lead the way in persecuting those who had supposedly retained “bourgeois thoughts” and habits. Some 30 million people starved to death due to the collectivisation policies in the countryside, and the death toll during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) is said to have been two million. Many were killed by young men and women who were turned into fanatical believers of “the thoughts of Chairman Mao.”

In South Asia, the Muslim poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal wrote about the need to create a ‘New Muslim Man.’ Iqbal took the romanticised and mythologised dimensions of Islamic history to conceptualise the New Muslim Man, who was to be intuitive. He would passionately seek to shatter orthodoxy as well as ‘decadent’ modernity. A kind of Islamic Übermensch.

Iqbal’s ideas, in this context, went on to inspire Islamist ideologues such as Abul Ala Maududi, Islamic modernists such as Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, Islamist revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ruhollah Khomeini, and populists such as Imran Khan.

The Hindu nationalist V.D. Savarkar sought to create a new kind of Hindu who was militant and proudly chauvinistic, or the opposite of the archetypal ‘peaceful Hindu.’ Decades later, Savarkar’s status suddenly rose to that of a ‘sage’ with the rise of populist Hindu nationalism in India.

A fascination with ideas of social engineering is clearly present in the political populism that has engulfed various regions of the world from 2010 onwards — a dreadful development.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 31st, 2024

Hinduism Is Fascism

Modern Hinduism is fascism and racism. It is the origin of what we would call modern Fascism. Based on a religious caste system that is Aryan in origin, it divides up the world into three castes, warriors, priests, merchants, and in a slave class; the Dalit's or Untouchables. India Caste System Discriminates

The influence of Hindu Fascism on the Occult is well documented. Especially in the racialist constructs of Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical movement. It is the concept of the Secret Chiefs, of higher beings who contact select humans, usually Caucasian Europeans, while relegating other 'races' of humanity to lesser rungs in the celestial hierarchies. Hence the belief in reincarnation, karma, dharma, etc. gets interepreted as the need for these lesser races to evolve to be accepted into the divine prescence fo the Secret Chiefs.

Later Aryan racialists would look at India as the home of the purist of the Aryan social constructs, that is the caste system, which they equated with the Indo-European peoples and as dating back to the orginal Aryan/Germanic expansion into the region. Savtri Devil, Hitlers Priestess was such a Indo-Aryan revivalist. The underlying construct of Hinduism is of whiteness/light verus black/darkness, which appealed to the Aryan racialists.

Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India
Originally published in India under the title Apartheid in India, V.T. Rajshekar's passionate work on the plight of the Indian Dalits was first introduced to North American readers through the publication of DALIT: The Black Untouchables of India in 1987. This book is the first to provide a Dalit view of the roots and continuing factors of the gross oppression of the world's largest minority (over 150 million people) through a 3,000 year history of conquest, slavery, apartheid and worse. Rajshekar offers a penetrating, often startling overview of the role of Brahminism and the Indian caste system in embedding the notion of "untouchability" in Hindu culture, tracing the origins of the caste system to an elaborate system of political control in the guise of religion, imposed by Aryan invaders from the north on a conquered aboriginal/Dravidian civilization of African descent. He exposes the almost unimaginable social indignities which continue to be imposed upon so-called untouchables to this very day, with the complicity of the political, criminal justice, media and education systems. Under Rajshekar's incisive critique, the much-vaunted image of Indian nonviolence shatters. Even India's world-celebrated apostle of pacificsm emerges in less saintly guise; in seeking to ensure Hindu numerical domination in India's new political democracy, Mahatma Gandhi advocated assimilating those whom Hindu scriptures defined as outcastes (untouchables) into the lowest Hindu caste, rather than accede to their demand for a separate electorate. Rajshekar further questions whether the Brahminist socio-political concepts so developed in turn influenced the formation of the modern Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy, placing the roots of Nazism deep in Indian history.

At the Culture and the State Conference at the U of A three years ago there was a concurrent conference of Dalit's from across North America. It was organized by my comrade John Ames. It was there I picked up their materials denonucing Hinduism as Racism and Fascism. These texts advocated a secular socialist humanist perspective on the Dalit struggle against the feudalist religion and politics of Hinduism.

Many Dalit groups, taking their cue from civil liberties organizations, ignore much of the economic ground for untouchability. Communist leader Brinda Karat notes that “only Communist inspired movements, enabled by the active participation of Dalits, have led to concrete gains against casteism.” In West Bengal, she shows, the Communist government initiated land reform that now forms “the backbone of Dalit self-respect and dignity in the State.”Badges of Color

Dalit Voice - The Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights
Dalit Voice was the first Indian journal to expose this closely guarded secret and shock the outside world and make history. That is how Dalit Voice has become the organ of the entire deprived destitutes of India, the original home of racism. Started in 1981 by V.T. Rajshekar, its Editor and founder, Dalit Voice, the English fortnightly, has become the country's most powerful "Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights". A veteran journalist, formerly of the Indian Express, powerful and fearless writer, V.T. Rajshekar, had to face the wrath of the ruling class, arrested many times, several jail sentences, passport impounded and subjected to total media boycott.

The Dalits are not only literal shit collectors in India they are also the largest group of workers in the service sector including government and the public sector. The political activism of the Dalits has been to unite in unions, broad based populist political parties, movements for womens rights, etc. to confront the Hindu Caste State in India.

Dalit Rising

Ghettoised Indians of the gutter society, eternally condemned. Not anymore, writes Amit Sengupta. The uprising is not a revolution, but it is no less

Buddha Smiles: Mass-conversion of dalits to Buddhism, November 4, 2001 Delhi

The sun of self-respect has burst into flame Let it burn up these castes!
Smash, Break, Destroy These walls of hatred
Crush to smithereens this aeons-old school of blindness Rise, O People!
Marathi song, anti-caste movement, 1970s

In other words, five thousand years and more after, almost 60 years after ‘Independence’, dalits in India are a priori condemned, even before they are born. Even after they die when they are buried in separate village graveyards. Even when they become educated or employed, within or outside the politics of half-fake affirmative action.

Unlike in Punjab, with plus 30 percent dalit population, many of them economically well-off, not dependent on land, where Kanshiram begun his first mobilisation. The dalit-sufi secular traditions (they control dargahs) are as strong here, as is the old Ghadarite-Leftist-radical traditions — be it during the freedom struggle, or in the great sacrifices made against terrorism. The Mansa and Talhan movements are examples of organised dalit reassertion: political and ideological (see story).

In Bant Singh Inquilabi’s amputated limbs, lies the epic story of a nation defiled, like his raped daughter in Mansa. But the truth is that this ‘invisible nation’ is refusing to accept its fatedness anymore. As in Gohana in Haryana, in Bhojpur in Bihar, Ghatkopar in Mumbai, Talhan in Punjab, this rising is rising like a wave on a full moon night. It’s only that we only want to see the dark side of the moon.

The Politics of the Caste System and the Practice of Untouchability The Hindu religious belief that" ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT BORN EQUAL" is deeply entrenched in the psyche of the upper-caste Hindus, leading them to see themselves as a superior race destined to rule and the out-castes (the Untouchables or Dalits) an inferior race born only to serve. This system, which has resulted in the destitution of millions of people due to racial discrimination, has not changed one iota after 50 years of Indian independence.

"For the ills which the Untouchables are suffering, if they are not as much advertised as those of the Jews, and are not less real. Nor arc the means and the methods of suppression used by the Hindus against the Untouchables less effective because they are less bloody than the ways which the Nazis have adopted against the Jews. The Anti-Semitism of the Nazis against the Jews is no way different in ideology and in effect from the Sanatanism of the Hindus against the Untouchables.The world owes a duty to the Untouchables as it does to all suppressed people to break their shackles and set them free."

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in a preface to his book,

"Gandhi and the Emancipation of Untouchables" - 1st September 1943

Man who redefined Dalit politics- The Times of India

October, 10, 2006

NEW DELHI: Kanshi Ram, the Dalit icon who changed the political landscape of north India, was cremated as per Buddhist rituals at a funeral conducted by his political legatee, Mayawati, after Delhi High Court turned down the plea of his family for staying the last rites.

For a man who single-handedly turned the politics of North India on its head by thrusting Dalits as a factor in the regional power-play, Kanshi Ram's end was rather sedate, passing away on Monday, at 72, after being confined to bed for almost four years.

As in life, Kanshi Ram, in death, did not miss to shock his main haters — the urban middle classes — as he pulled the subaltern in droves on to the Capital's roads, throwing them off gear in sweltering heat.

Post-independence, Kanshi Ram redefined Dalit politics in the idiom of defiance. Hailing from a Ramdasiya Sikh family of Ropar and employed as a research assistant in a defence ministry lab, he resigned over the right of Dalit staff to get leave to celebrate Ambedkar and Valmiki jayantis.

What unfolded was a long-drawn mobilisation of Dalits, which changed political faultlines of the Hindi belt, marked by rebellious rhetoric and neat networking.

Kanshi Ram first targeted the better-off among Dalits, who had benefited from job quota. The result was the birth in 1978 of the Backwards and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), the first countrywide network of government employees from these categories.

APPRAISAL

KANSHI RAM

The Dalit Chanakya

If Ambedkar was theory, Kanshi Ram was practice. Roaring practice.

RAMNARAYAN RAWAT

Magazine | Oct 23, 2006

The dalit in India - caste and social class

THE dalit or "Untouchable" is a government servant, the teacher in a state school, a politician. He is generally never a member of the higher judiciary, an eminent lawyer, industrialist or journalist. His freedom operates in designated enclaves: in politics and in the administrative posts he acquires because of state policy. But in areas of contemporary social exchange and culture, his "Untouchability" becomes his only definition. The right to pray to a Hindu god has always been a high caste privilege. Intricacy of religious ritual is directly proportionate to social status. The dalit has been formally excluded from religion, from education, and is a pariah in the entire sanctified universe of the "dvija." (1)

Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word "pariah" itself comes from a dalit caste of southern India, the paRaiyar, "those of the drum" (paRai) or the "leather people" (Dumont, 1980: 54).

Barbaric Assault on Bant Singh (AIALA Leader)
Petition to Prime Minister of India

We the undersigned condemn the savage and barbaric assault by powerful Congress-backed Jat landlords which has left Bant Singh, Dalit leader of the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha (All-India Agrarian Labour Association) in Mansa, Punjab, with both hands and one leg amputated. Further we note that this criminal attack was planned in retaliation for Bant Singh’s sustained campaign against caste and gender based power and violence, and in particular, his struggle to bring his minor daughter’s rapists to justice. We stand by Bant Singh and his family in the face of this unspeakable tragedy and we believe passionately that such atrocities cannot be acceptable in 21st century India.




Dalit Religious Conversion

A Struggle for Humanist Liberation Theology

The development of Buddhist and Christian conversions as a political force for change is key to the Dalit philosophy. Rather than being absorbed into their new religion, the Dalit's use religious conversion to counter the hegemonic cultural domination of Hinduism. In that they adapt their new religious affiliations to meet their needs, ironically which are based on a humanistic and secular view of the world that oppresses them.

Hindus set to convert to Buddhism

Despite advances, India's lowest Hindu castes remain downtrodden

Tens of thousands of people are due to attend a mass conversion ceremony in India at which large numbers of low-caste Hindus will become Buddhists.

The ceremony in the central city of Nagpur is part of a protest against the injustices of India's caste system.

By becoming Buddhists low-caste Hindus, or Dalits, can escape the prejudice and discrimination they normally face.

The ceremony marks the 50th anniversary of the adoption of Buddhism by the scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

He was the first prominent Dalit - or Untouchable as they were formerly called - to urge low-caste Indians to embrace Buddhism.

Similar mass conversions are taking place this month in many other parts of India.

Several states governed by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, have introduced laws to make such conversions more difficult.

Dalit Theology-

Dalit-liberative hermeneutics is scientific and praxis-oriented.

The Travancore Pulaya mass conversion movement to Anglicanism in the latter half of 19th century was an expression of social protest. For thousands these conversions were protests heralding exit from the inhumanity of the caste system. These oppressed also saw the doors opening for them as a way out of the misery with the success of the anti-slave campaign championed by the missionaries.

Guru Ghasidas

Guru Ghasidas according to delivers of the Satnami panth was born on 18th December 1756 and died at the age of eighty in 1836. He was born in village Girodhpuri in Raipur district in a dalit family. Ghasidas was born in a socio-political milieu of misrule, loot and plunder. The Marath the local had started behaving as Kings. Ghasidas underwent the exploitative experiences specific to dalit communities, which helped him the hierarchical and exploitative nature of social dynamics in a caste-ridden society. From an early age, he started rejecting social inequity and to understand the problems faced by his community and to find solutions, he traveled extensively in Chhattisgarh.

Ghasids was unlettered like his fellow dalits. He deeply resented the harsh treatment to his brotherhood', and continued searching for solutions but was unable to find the right answer. In search of the right path he decided to go to Jaganath Puri and on his way at Sarangarh attained true knowledge. It is said that he announced satnam and returned to Giordh.On his return, he stopped working as a farm worker and became engrossed in Tapasya. After spending six months in Sonakhan forests doing tapasya Ghasidas returned and formulated path-breading principles of a new egalitarian social order. The Satnam Panth is said to be based on these principles formulated by Ghasidas.

Dissident Sects & Anti-Caste Movements:

Both Vedic ritualism and gnosis [supremacy of Brahmans] were bound to be called in question by the common people. The popular discontent found expression in dissident sects like Jainism (540-468 B.C.) and Buddhism (563-483 B.C.). There is no doubt that Jainism and Buddhism were the first attacks or revolts in general against the caste system.

Lord Buddha initiated a radical critique of contemporary religion and society. He was forthright in repudiating the caste system and the notion of ritual purity associated with it. One of his famous sayings runs like this:

No Brahmin is such by birth,

No outcaste is such by birth.

An outcaste is such by his deeds,

A Brahmin is such by his deeds.”

From out of the struggle between Vedic religion and heterodox movements like Jainism and Buddhism was born what is today called Hinduism, which reached its golden age in the Gupta period (300-700 A.D.). Many factors were responsible for this new development. Brahminism succeeded in integrating within itself popular religions. Popular deities were absorbed into the Vedic pantheon through a process of identification or subordination. Even Buddha was given the status of a vishnuite incarnation.

Dalit poems and sayings on evil brahminic system

Tell a Slave is a Slave!

Surely and invariably he will rebel!

For most of times Slaves know not they are Slaves!

Always they only keep enjoying and relishing their Slavery!

They say that had been their lives generations after generations!

That too over the many many millenniums!

Slogging in the fields and mines for the landlords!

Taking just a pittance in return and still be proud and happy!

Listen to this! This is what the landlords, who had raped butchered killed otherwise murdered in cold-blood, and burnt SC&ST Dalits say –

We had all along for generations employed them paid them given them grains, fed them and looked after them! Now they had forgotten all that, to believe in the Govt, go for Education, seek Govt Employment, trust the Parties, run behind the Party Workers, follow the useless Leaders, pin their Hopes on the meaningless Govt Programmes, lean on the fake NGOs, and repose faith in all those stupid Activists! And, they have turned against us, we who have been feeding them for Generations! We can’t understand this! Hence we had to teach them a Lesson! Discipline them! Put them in their Places! They are like our Children! They are our Responsibility! And in fact it is our Duty to Discipline them, and bring them back to the right path – their old ways!

That is it. The Landlords want now to reclaim the SCs&STs, bring them back under their total and tight control, and keep them in their fold, as in the good old days! The old bondage and slavery!

Yes, it is true! Many SC&ST Dalits still toil as Slaves to crude cheap landlords and goons! They don’t realise their status and slavery. They don’t know that the World had changed!

One need not be surprised or feel shocked by this ignorance, and lack of knowledge or realisation of the World. After all they are poor rural labourers of backward feudal areas! But even the educated and employed SC&ST Dalits are not aware of all their Dues and Rights! In fact the depth of their ignorance is shocking! If the Dalits’ Knowledge of Dalit Issues are so shallow, what can we say of others understandings of Dalit Problems! It is for this reason that any writings on Dalit Issues, and Dalit Views have to be in so much of, perhaps what appears to be too detailed! That includes Dalit Poetry on Dalit Issues and Problems! Hence, the Prose like Poetry, or Prose rendering of Poetry! That may not matter, but that also so inevitable!

Dalit Womens Struggles

The oppression of women is a double burden in slave societies, and amongst the Dalit's women have played an important role in linking their struggles with that of being Dalits and women. It has created a syncratic feminism that is reflected in the movement regardless of their religious affiliations. Again emphasising the humanist nature of Dalit relgious conversion.

Ruth Manorama, voice of Dalits
Ruth Manorama is a women's rights activist well known for her contribution in mainstreaming Dalit issues. Herself from the Dalit community, she has helped throw the spotlight on the precarious situation of Dalit women in India. She calls them "Dalits among the Dalits." A peacewomen profile from the Women's Feature Service and Sangat.

DALIT WOMEN: The Triple Oppression of Dalit Women in Nepal

Terai Dalit Women - Violation of Political Rights

Attacks on Dalit Women: A Pattern of Impunity - Broken People ...

FEMINIST DALIT ORGANIZATION

Dalit Women Literature Review

Dalit Feminism By M. Swathy Margaret

EMPOWER DALIT WOMEN OF NEPAL is a small human rights organization for Dalit women, the “untouchable” women on the lower rungs of Nepal’s caste hierarchy.

Five pledges for dalit shakti By Freny Manecksha
Martin Macwan’s Dalit Shakti Kendra in Gujarat provides vocational training to dalit youth. More importantly, it gives them a sense of identity
It began as a small agitation in Ranpur, Dhanduka taluka, Gujarat. Women of a particular dalit sub-caste, who still performed the menial task of manual scavenging despite legislation against it, had asked the panchayat for new brooms but were refused on grounds that there was no budget for it. This was a seminal moment for Martin Macwan, a dalit activist who had set up the Navsarjan Trust in 1989 against scavenging. “What totally devastated me was that they were not agitating against the practice. They were merely begging the panchayat to give them more brooms to prevent their hands from being soiled with shit. They didn’t dream of eliminating scavenging.” (Mari Marcel Thekaekara in Endless Filth, Saga of the Bhangees)

Globalization and the Dalit

The Green Revolution in India as well as the later developments around GMO's etc. have had a disproportionate negative impact on the Dalit's agricultural communities. Modernization and industrialization have not benefited these peasant economies, as much as chaining the Dalits to their landlords.

Free Trade – A war against Dalits & Adivasis

Dalits and Adivasis have never been the part of the conventional trade systems. Today they are faced with the horrible hostility of trade and market policies. In recent times trade entered the scene on mass scale through the principles of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. Mega industrial production still plays the key role in all trade deal not only at the national level but also at the international level.

Industrialisation, which made a colourful and dreamy entry, is turning out to be the worst form of human development. The steady economic growth of industries with active support from the state machinery is directly proportional to the unchecked exploitation of masses. Most of them belong to marginalized communities such as Dalits, Adivasis, women, working class, etc. Though during the independence struggle “land to the tillers” and “factory to the workers” prominently came on to the national agenda, nowhere in India had we witnessed the later one being implemented in the post independence era. Resultant displacement, migration, repercussion of workers, loss of land and livelihood, pilfering state revenue, forest resources, etc. has outgrown to monstrous level.

This has amplified particularly with WTO taking the centre stage of all sorts of trade related agreements and transactions at the international level. Trade is no longer buying and selling of goods and services but it encompasses issues like Intellectual Property Rights. With this the global market has wide open for exploration and exploitation of resources under the aegis of free trade. Industrialised nations found their tools to maintain supremacy on world trade. Prophets of trade and commerce argue that free trade maximises world economic output. This is what is considered to be progress. But what we have been witnessing with the Dalits and Adivasis in India is diametrically opposite to these claims.


Dalit woman shows the way to better yields


Dalit Academic Perspectives

A Dalit Bibliography

558, February 2006, Dalit Perspectives

Seminars and Workshops of Deshkal Society | Seminars on Dalit


Dalit Resources

Nepal Dalit Info

CounterCurrents.org Dalit Issues Home Page

Dalit Freedom Network: Abolish Caste, Now and Forever

Dalit foundation - Accelerating change for equality

Dalit Welfare Organisation (DWO)

Dalit Human Rights

Punjab Dalit Solidarity-A blog

National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR)

The Bhopal Dalit Declaration

International Dalit Solidarity Network

Formed in March 2000, the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) is a network of national solidarity networks, groups from affected countries and international organisations concerned about caste discrimination and similar forms of discrimination based on work and descent.

IDSN campaigns against caste-based discrimination, as experienced by the dalits of South Asia to the Buraku people of Japan, the sab (low caste) groups of Somalia, the occupational caste people in West Africa and others.

The work of IDSN involves encouraging the United Nations, the European Union and other bodies to recognise that over 260 million people continue to be treated as outcasts and less than human and that caste-based discrimination must be regarded as a central human rights concern. IDSN insists on international recognition that "Dalit Rights are Human Rights" inasmuch as all human beings are born with the same inalienable rights.

IDSN brings together organisations, institutions and individuals concerned with caste-based discrimination and aims to link grassroots priorities with international mechanisms and institutions to make an effective contribution to the liberation of those affected by caste discrimination.

More than 260 million people worldwide continue to suffer under what is often a hidden apartheid of segregation, exclusion, modern day slavery and other extreme forms of discrimination, exploitation and violence.

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India



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