Whats’s Left of Hinduism after Nick Cohen?

In 2006 Hindu Human Rights Group wrote, in the most respectful manner, to Nick Cohen of The Guardian, following his attack on us as religious bigots. Needless to say Mr. Cohen declined to reply and certainly skirted around any idea of an open debate. The futile dialogue was the result of Cohen defending the right of the late MF Husain to exhibit art denigrating Hindu sacred imagery. While attacks and even insults to religious sentiment should ideally be allowed in a free and open society where democracy is the norm, HHR drew attention to the fact that Husain’s artistic endeavours were happening in an environment where Hindus are being attacked with impunity, not just on the level of verbal insults, but actual physical annihilation in places such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Cohen however continued to avert his gaze from Hindu victims of genocide and indeed on 12 June 2011 once again made Hindus the target of his vitriol in his piece in the Guardian. He claims that Husain was driven into exile by “Hindu national extremists” which have also been allowed to flourish in Britain . While not explicitly naming HHR, Cohen’s What price freedom of expression now? nevertheless clearly alludes to us.

The whole anti-Hindu outburst is very interesting because on 12 February 2009 Nick Cohen wrote Hatred is turning me into a Jew in the Jewish Chronicle. In the light of rising new wave anti-Semitism Cohen has suddenly rediscovered his Jewish roots. It is a well argued article which exposes the Left’s indulgence of radical Islam and its hypocrisy towards Israel especially in how it lambasts anyone defending that beleaguered state, the only democracy in the Middle East, is labelled as “tools of the Zionists” – as if “Zionist was even a pejorative term in the first place. But it is also a poignant article which exposes Cohen’s very own double standards which he throws at the Left. Back in 2006 HHR explained to him why we as an organisation were formed. If he once again needs reminding, assuming he even read our correspondence in the first place, it was to highlight the very persecution, discrimination and marginalisation of Hindus worldwide, which he himself ignores.

In fact Cohen’s anti-Hindu hatred reaches such levels that he sheds tears over the late MF Husain having to be “exiled” from India . And where did Mr. Husain go? Dubai , where freedom of expression is severely curtailed, Israel is rubbed off every atlas, sex trafficking is rife, and poverty stricken Third World labourers are exploited in a country where slavery was only abolished in 1963. Which nation then offered him citizenship? Qatar , the headquarters of news channel Al-Jazeera. In his book The Confrontation, Lebanese born Walid Phares exposes this Doha based news channel as helping to foster jihad ideology. Of course even its milder English version brooks no criticism of Qatar ’s absolute monarchy, and is saturated with anti-Israel propaganda. What would Mr. Cohen say to that? In fact what would he say to the even more uncomfortable fact that Al-Jazeera has been praised by notorious American “designer look” neo-Nazi, the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke who makes anti-Semitism look as American as apple pie and Huckleberry Finn, for breaking the alleged Jewish stranglehold over the media? Indeed Fuhrer Duke appeared on al-Jazeera’s talk show Without Borders spewing out how Mossad used its prior knowledge of 9/11 to ensure that Israelis escaped the World Trade Centre carnage. Such are the delightful friends MF Husain was associated with. The artist also thrived in India even after the lawsuits against him. Rather strange for someone who is somehow being persecuted? Also why did Husain wait until his twilight years before choosing to undertake exodus from the land of his birth where things were apparently so ‘dire’ that he made millions? His exile has more to do with suspicious business transactions, financial impropriety and money laundering schemes linked to his wealthy customers than him seeking political asylum. It is a line of investigation which once again Cohen is either ignorant of or deliberately ignores. After all does it not beg the question as to how many artists, for whom free expression is a non-negotiable facet of their often bohemian lifestyle, would wish to quit the world’s largest democracy known for its demographic diversity for the plastic, hedonistic and claustrophobic cartoon style Brave New World of the absolute monarchies which infest the Gulf region?

None of this bothers Cohen. In fact he argues that Britain can best offer tribute to Husain by sticking two fingers up at the insidious force of Hindu nationalists and having the Royal Academy organise “a major retrospective of his art and include in the exhibition the supposedly offensive works” because “in free societies, artists have the right to paint what they damn well want and citizens have the right to look at what they damn well want”. Indeed they do, and what if this freedom of expression is taken to its logical extreme by exhibiting crude anti-Semitic propaganda so rampant in the modern Middle East, sponsored by such delightful bastions of free expression [sic] such as Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, replete with a constant rendition of Richard Wagner compositions to provide the necessary atmospherics, and enhanced by a special display of hand painted postcards of early twentieth century Vienna by a failed artist known as Adolph Hitler? Does it bother

Cohen that the very same states which kissed the feet of MF Husain belong to a region so intellectually moribund and stagnant that the badly written rag of Mein Kampf and the sick fantasies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are best sellers in their Arabic versions? Cohen tries to bolster his argument by providing a link to one of Husain’s less offensive paintings. Of course this carefully omits Husain’s notorious portrayal of Hindu gods having sex with animals. Now if Cohen regards debased pornographic smut as somehow artistic that is his choice but does his deliberate selection of one of Husain’s more mainstream pieces not have the sinister echoes of biased news reports against his beloved Israel which show poor Palestinian children throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, yet all the while obscuring the fact that these kids are merely being used as human shields by snipers?

Lastly let us examine these very “Hindu nationalists” which Nick Cohen has declared himself at war with in the self-righteous pursuit of what he calls freedom of expression. As someone who declares that he has rediscovered his Jewish roots in the face of bigotry on the Left and the unfortunate hatred towards Jews which has become acceptable and commonplace in the name of political correctness, Cohen not only deliberately ignores the suffering of millions of Hindus but also insults his own Jewish roots. It may not matter to him that Hindus are raped, kidnapped, forcibly converted and suffer discrimination in other ‘softer’ ways, treatment which if meted out to Jews he would no doubt – and indeed rightly – find unacceptable. But Cohen appears deliberately ignorant of an even more uncomfortable fact. In his multi volume opus on anti-Semitism, French scholar Léon Poliakov mentioned that only in India did Jews flourish without the hatred which has plagued them in every other country (save China, where the Jews of Kaifeng were assimilated by the much larger host community). It is a theme which was elaborated further by Dr. Nathan Katz, professor and founding chair of the Department of Religious Studies, as well as Founder-Director of the Program in the Study of Spirituality, at Florida International University in Miami . In his 2000 book Who Are the Jews of India ?, Katz stated:

“Jews navigated the eddies and shoals of Indian culture very well. They never experienced anti-Semitism or discrimination at Indian hands…..Indian Jews lived as all Jews should have been allowed to live: free, proud, observant, creative and prosperous, self-realized, full contributors to the host community.”

Now assuming that Mr. Cohen even has the decency to reply he may make the distinction between Hindus and Hindu “nationalists”. Yet in this present discourse does not the distinction smack of the anti-Semite claiming he/she has nothing against Jews, just “Zionists”? And who are these “Hindu nationalists”? It may be news to Mr. Cohen that it was the Hindu oriented Bharatiya Jan Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party which had always supported Israel’s right to exist at a time when India’s ‘secular’ government refused to even recognise the Jewish state and only Middle East democracy. Is Cohen aware that while it was the “Hindu nationalist” VD Savarkar who espoused sympathy with Zionist aspirations as far back as 1924, it was the ‘secular’ Nehru who openly sympathised with pro-Nazi elements in Palestine, was invited in an official capacity by the Third Reich, and who in 1953 made clear his anti-Hindu and anti-Semitic statements to his home minister, Kailash Nath Katju:

“In practice the Hindu is certainly not tolerant and is more narrow-minded than almost any person in any other country except the Jew”

In the light of these rather uncomfortable truths, which certainly push the boundaries of knowledge to areas which Cohen would rather self-censor himself, perhaps our anti-Hindu bigot should look at what he means by tolerance and freedom of expression. In 2006 he was attacked Islamic Human Rights Commission for labelling the protesters against the Muhammad cartoons as the “brown far right”. Is this latest myopic outpouring therefore merely a cheap attempt by Cohen to ingratiate himself with the Muslim community by using the late MF Husain as merely a convenient pawn with which to browbeat Hindus, in the smug belief that they will not so much as even verbally react? By claiming to rediscover his Jewish roots he would benefit in looking at a country, culture and civilisation which has been free from what Israeli scholar Robert Wistrich described in a book of the same name as The Longest Hatred. Does it irk Mr. Cohen that the Hindus who he fumes so much against have been unfortunately so innocent of the very anti-Semitic hatred which was an integral feature of the very political Left to which he not fully disowned? He would do well to take lessons from these words transcribed ad verbatim from the aforementioned book by Dr. Katz:

“The three very different communities of Jews in India had one determining factor in common: the absence of indigenous anti-Semitism. All three testify that maintaining Jewish identity is not merely a defense mechanism against a hostile world. On the contrary, the Jews of India demonstrate how Jewish communities flourish in an atmosphere of amity. Save for isolated incidents – Portuguese rule in Cochin , for example, or the pro-German faction of the swaraj movement – Jews in India have always enjoyed the respect and affection of their Hindu, Christian, Muslim and other neighbours. Indeed, today Jews play a significant role in Indian political discourse, in which Hindu tolerance is a major theme. The so-called Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi recently appointed a Jew, General Frederick Jacob, as governor of Goa and recently promoted him to the demanding position of governor of the Punjab .”

Ranbir Singh is a member of the Hindu Human Rights  group

Also See

• The Guardian : ‘Comment is free’ to abuse Hindus
• Nick Cohen and the Protocols of the Elders of Hinduism
• The Hindu Rate of Fascism
• What’s Not So Great About Hinduism According to Dinesh D’Souza

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the The Chakra website and staff.