Swamy and his Harvard enemies I : the real story
An anti-Hindu clique has made a mockery of academic freedom using an unwieldy administrative mechanism to cancel Subramanian Swamy’s courses. The result has been a fierce backlash.
Part I
Dr. Navaratna Rajaram
Background: Insular Indologists and generous donor
Georges Clemenceau (1841 – 1929), prime minister of France during World War I once said: “War is too important a matter to be left to the generals.”
This wisdom can now be applied to those calling themselves by names like Indologist, India Studies Expert, South Asia Expert (the latest fashion) and so forth. Thanks to their ham-handed expulsion of the economist and visiting professor Dr Subramanian Swamy, Harvard now has a major public relations problem on its hands.
To understand the nature of Harvard’s public relations problem, it helps to recognize that Harvard has a dual personality: it is a university that is also a business. Harvard University is part of the Harvard Corporation which answers to its board. (Actually it has two boards, of fellows and of overseers—don’t ask me why.) It is the richest university in the world with assets (called endowment) valued at $32 billion (over one lakh sixty thousand crore rupees in today’s values). Its assets are managed by the Harvard Management Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard.
In 2007, its assets stood at $36 billion. During the global economic downturn Harvard endowment lost 22 percent of its value or eight billion dollars. It has recovered somewhat in the past two years and is now valued at $32 billion, better but still well short of what it was five years ago. To grow, Harvard needs money from two sources— income from its assets and contributions from its ‘customers’. The latter may now take a hit thanks to the controversy and the backlash following the cancellation of Subramanian Swamy’s courses.
Like any successful business Harvard treats customer loyalty as its most valuable asset; it takes extraordinary care to cultivate and nurture good relations. Its customers are its alumni. They donate generously and also send their children to Harvard. Increasingly, Harvard is drawing its students—and donations—from the wealthy Indian-American community and in recent years from businesses and professionals in India. In the past year alone, individuals from major Indian business houses like Tata, Infosys and Mahindras (to name just a couple) have given tens of millions of dollars to Harvard.
Hubris results in backlash
The last thing that Harvard needs at this juncture is as it is just recovering from the fallout of the financial crisis is a public relations disaster of this nature. A question that needs to be answered is— how could Harvard, whose public relations skills are second to none, allow itself to be blindsided by an avalanche of this magnitude? The only answer I can think of is hubris—it took the goodwill and loyalty of an important segment of its ‘customers’— the Indian alumni and students—for granted and failed to respond adequately to their complaints over the shrill anti-Hindu and anti-Indian rhetoric and propaganda of some of its faculty. The worst offenders were Indologist Michael Witzel and a few of his associates.
The dismissal of Subramanian Swamy was the last straw. He is regarded as a hero by a large number of Indians because of his uncompromising stand against terrorism and his crusade against corruption. Judged by Witzel’s record over the past several years, going back to his unseemly involvement in the California school curriculum controversy— and the anti-Hindu rants of his hate group IER (Indo-Eurasian Research), it was a disaster waiting to happen. I had brought his unsavory activities to the attention of Harvard administration more than once, but they had always advised me that however disagreeable it may be, Witzel’s (and other’s) views were protected by academic freedom. (This was before Dr Faust took over as president.)
All this was public knowledge, and I was not the only one to object. Now for Harvard to dismiss Subramanian Swamy at the instigation of people like Witzel and his departmental colleague Diana Eck looks like hypocrisy of the first order. It is not only Indians that are outraged by this decision: academics and free thinkers who have nothing to do with India or Hinduism have expressed their outrage. This is made worse by the fact that other institutions like Yale have also buckled under Islamist pressure. Last summer (2011), Yale expelled Dr Charles Small (of the Yale Initiative for the Inter-disciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism), because he held a conference in which Islamic anti-Semitism and Islamic terrorism were discussed. The following excerpt from a blog by a non-Indian (Pamela Geller) gives an idea.
[Lila: Pamela Geller is of course a shrill war-monger, but on this subject she’s isn’t wrong]
“In response to the triple bombing in Mumbai on July 13, 2011 that left 26 people dead, Former Indian Law Minister Dr. Subramanian Swamy published an op-ed in a mainstream Indian daily called ‘How To Wipe Out Islamic Terror’. Dr. Swamy is not much loved by the current Indian government as it was through his anti-corruption campaigning efforts that the previous Telecoms Minister ended up in jail on corruption charges, and he is actively pursuing other high ranking members of the government on similar charges.
“The article was unquestionably provocative, but what it provoked was debate — a good thing for any democracy, especially on a difficult topic. However, it seems, it was too much free speech for Harvard University. For years Dr. Swamy, a Harvard Ph.D. and former Commerce and Industry Minister of India, has taught summer courses in economics at Harvard. This year, in an unprecedented move, his courses were taken away based on the article.”
The author of the article went on to point out that the Harvard Crimson justified the move by saying, in part, “there is the further concern that his publications may incite religious violence.” Religious violence where? On the Harvard campus? There were no incidents of ‘religious violence’ in India following the publication of Dr. Swamy’s article. The Harvard Crimson seems to have a low opinion of the intelligence and maturity of its readers, of Harvard students and faculty in particular.
[Lila: In India, in contrast to the practice (not profession) of the US, “backward castes”, Muslims, Christians, and women have all held the highest offices in the land – President and Prime Minister. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, with over 30% of its population Muslim. Before the British empire, Muslim rulers ruled large parts of India for nearly a thousand years – the entire medieval period. Lectures on pluralism and tolerance from either Christians (or Jewish-Christians) or Muslims directed at Hindus, on the subject of religious pluralism and tolerance, are thus in the nature of ex-convicts lecturing their victims on financial probity}
Unwieldy administration, disgruntled faculty
It is understandable that Harvard President Drew Faust should have caught of much of the flak in this avoidable backlash. Actually, she seems to have been a victim of circumstances beyond her control: a combination of circumstances allowed a disgruntled faculty in its shrinking Sanskrit and India Studies program to take advantage of an unwieldy administrative mechanism. I will look at the former in some detail later, but a brief observation on the latter as seen by a U.S. academic (and administrator) with several decades of experience may be in order. (A phone call to the President’s office at Harvard elicited the response that she, the President had nothing to do with the cancellation.) Here is how the cancellation of Swamy’s courses seems to have come about.
The procedure at Harvard requires that the whole faculty of the college in question vote on the courses and instructors for each term, in this case the college of arts and sciences on the summer courses to be offered in 2012. Swamy’s economics courses were voted down at the instigation of Diana Eck, a religious studies professor who heads something called the ‘pluralism project’. As we shall see later Eck invoked reasons which made faculty competence irrelevant and steamrolled over the wishes of the economics department chair.
This strikes one as an unwieldy and inefficient procedure. Things were quite different in colleges where I taught. Once the department in question gets its budget approved by the college, the department chair, assisted by a departmental committee decides on the courses and assigns instructors. After all they have the competence. One cannot have the absurd situation—as happened at Harvard—of a theologian exercising veto power over science and mathematics courses! (One of the courses cancelled was ‘Quantitative Methods in Economics’.) The last time anything like it happened was in Italy 500 years ago when Galileo was forbidden by the Church to teach astronomy.
Actually there is more to this bizarre episode than meets the eye. Diana Eck was sending a political message to President Drew Faust no less! Eck gave the game away when she haughtily told the faculty why Swamy’s courses should be cancelled. Here is a revealing report (The Harvard Crimson):
“In her remarks, Eck emphasized the ‘destructive’ nature of the positions Swamy advocated in India, and characterized the proposals as going well beyond free speech to the advocacy of abrogating human rights, curtailing civil rights, and intruding on freedom of religion. She wondered why the courses had not been ‘quietly dropped’, rather than submitted for approval in 2012. Swamy’s positions crossed the line to ‘incitement’ and to ‘demonizing’ Indian minorities, and were therefore sharply at odds with Harvard’s pluralism,” Eck said.
But here was the real message: “Given President Faust’s planned trip to Mumbai and New Delhi in January, it would be important for people in that country to know where the faculty stood on the views Swamy advocated.”
(Dr Swamy’s response: “… the vote at Harvard was nothing serious. …non-economists at Harvard don’t like my views on how to protect India.” Citing Eck and a colleague who also wanted his courses dropped, Swamy tweeted: “I have been held accountable at Harvard for what I write in India. This means India studies’ [Michael] Witzel and Eck are accountable in India. Healthy?”)
To get back to Eck’s reasoning, she wants President Faust to tell ALL Indians—1.2 billion of them— most of whom have never heard of Harvard let alone Professor Eck, that they should toe the line drawn for them by this religious scholar— a Christian who claims to speak for all of Harvard in the name of ‘pluralism’. Hinduism is and has always been a pluralistic “religion,” which Christianity and Islam with their exclusive beliefs are not, but this Christian theologian would stand this on its head as only a theologian can.
L’affaire Swamy: policing academic freedom
So this committed Christian fanatic masquerading as a ‘pluralist’ wants to turn the Harvard President’s goodwill visit to India into a crusade against Hinduism! It is not hard to imagine what President Faust can expect if she were to carry Diana Eck’s message to India! As it is, she can expect a torrid time defending the sacking of Dr Swamy against Harvard’s own professed policy of safeguarding academic freedom.
This brings us back to Eck’s (and her colleagues’) contempt for academic freedom when it rubs against their Orwellian brand of pluralism. It may not be out of place here to mention that a large number of Christian theologians led by Diana Eck signed a long letter of apology addressed to Muslim divines for past Christian violence against Muslims including the Crusades. No such apology has been forthcoming for violence against Hindus and other pagans during the Goa Inquisition in India (instigated by ‘Saint’ Xavier).
[Lila: This is because the Muslim world is “already in the bag” for the West. But India and China are not quite there yet. Allowing Hindus to do their own thinking would be dangerous at this point. The Muslims are Abrahamic brothers of the Jews and Christians, ultimately, and when necessary can help present a monotheistic front against the Hindus so as to render them as impotent as the Chinese Confucians have been rendered by the communists, secular monotheists descended from the Abrahamic faiths]
It is hardly necessary to point out that academic freedom cannot come with strings attached. In the memorable words of Abraham Lincoln, 150 years ago, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” This applies to academic freedom no less than to personal freedom. But Diana Eck was able to persuade her faculty colleagues that her higher principle of pluralism cancelled out Swamy’s academic freedom along with the freedom of the economics department to choose whom it may to teach its courses.
When it comes to curtailing academic freedom, the problem is where to draw the line? Can a theologian like Diana Eck be allowed to act as thought police cum moral police to rule on the freedom of others? What if one were to apply a similar standard to Eck and her ilk? It is no secret (see Wikipedia) that she (and her likeminded colleague Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago Divinity School) follows a lifestyle that many in India and even in the U.S. consider perverse. Can this be brought up in approving Eck’s fitness to teach her courses? It can be argued, and has been argued that such people should be kept away from impressionable young minds who might be corrupted by their teaching and example. There would be howls of protests if Eck were treated in the same manner as Swamy for her personal conduct in her private life and for her negative public image in the eyes of majority in the U.S.
Actually what Subramanian Swamy wrote and said had been said before by others before him including Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar. (In addition, Swamy himself has close relatives who are non-Hindus including a Parsi-Zoroastrian wife and a Muslim son-in-law. He doesn’t need any lessons in pluralism.) All that is beside the point, what is at stake is academic freedom being derailed by moral policing. Even at Harvard, other faculty members have engaged in hateful activity (which Swamy has not) that has been defended in the name of academic freedom. Diana Eck’s colleague Michael Witzel is a prime example.
It is unnecessary to go into the details of the now discredited campaign by Michael Witzel and his associates trying to stop the removal of references to the Aryans and their invasion from California school text-books. What is remarkable is that a senior tenured professor at Harvard of German origin should have concern himself with how Hinduism is taught to children in California. Witzel is a linguist, but he presumed to tell California schools how Hinduism should be taught to children. It turned out that Hinduism was a convenient cover; his real concern was saving his pet Aryan myth from being erased from books. (This is not to deny his dislike of Hindus, especially those who question him, more of which below.) In the same way, Eck and her colleagues too are concerned about academic survival— of themselves as well as their discipline.
Preserving a defunct belief system
The reaction of the likes of Eck and Witzel can be understood only when we recognize that though Nazism and European colonialism, the twin pillars that supported Indology up to World War II are now defunct, some of their beliefs are part and parcel of what these academics represent. In particular they hold on to the notion of Indians, especially Hindus, as an inferior subject race who should submit to their stereotyping and behave accordingly. The fact that they don’t makes them react viscerally when challenged as seen in what Eck did to Swamy and Witzel’s reaction to Hindus rejecting his Aryan theories. Having seen Eck’s reaction, it is worth taking a brief look at Witzel.
In addition to his support for the Aryan theories and the California campaign, Witzel is known for his association with the notorious Indo-Eurasian Research (IER), which has been accused of a hate campaign against the Hindus. An article that appeared on December 25, 2005 in the New Delhi daily The Pioneer (for which Rudyard Kipling used to write) began: “Boorish comments denigrating India, Hindus and Hinduism by a self-proclaimed ‘Indologist’ who is on the faculty of Harvard University has unleashed a fierce debate over the increasing political activism of ’scholars’ who teach at this prestigious American university.
“Prof Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, is in the centre of the storm because he tried to prevent the removal of references to India, Hinduism and Sikhism in the curriculum followed by schools in California which parents of Indian origin found to be inadequate, inaccurate or just outright insensitive.” The author of The Pioneer article (Kanchan Gupta) went on to observe: “Witzel declared Hindu-Americans to be “lost” or “abandoned”, parroting anti-Semite slurs against Jewish people. Coincidence or symptom? Witzel’s fantasies are ominously reminiscent of WWII German genocide. He says that ‘Since they won’t be returning to India, [Hindu immigrants to the USA] have begun building crematoria as well. …”
This extraordinary behavior on the part of Witzel, Eck and their colleagues can be understood only when we recognize their venial fear that the academic discipline which they represent may be on the verge of extinction. This is what we may look at next.”
Comment:
Swamy’s article (“How To Wipe Out Islamic Terror,” DNAIndia.com, dated July 16, 2011 in the URL which doesn’t work, republished at Pamela Geller’s blog with the date July 14) was certainly strident and, given his position in Indian politics, unwise. But it was a reaction to the Mumbai bomb attacks just a day before, July 13, that left 17 (?) dead and 131 injured.
India, unknown to much of the reading population, is at the epicenter of terrorism in Asia, suffering repeatedly since Independence from insurgent violence from Muslim and Sikh separatists in the NW; Mizo and Naga rebels funded by foreign elements in the east; and Eelam Tiger (Tamil Tiger) insurgency on its southern front.
It’s also ringed around by US military bases (Diego Garcia in the West and NATO bombing in Af-Pak) threatened by both Pakistani and Chinese infiltration and revanchist claims on both sides, and by internal friction between dozens of states, hundreds of languages, and thousands of dialects, not to mention religious differences between the half-a-dozen major faiths represented in its population.
That is the context of Dr. Swamy’s remarks.
Furthermore, if everyone in academia were held to the standard applied to Swamy, the faculty lounges of the US would be empty.
Third point. Omitted in analysis of Dr. Swamy’s remarks, both among his supporters and among his critics, is another case of academic free speech about the Indian subcontinent, the case of Dr. Angana Chatterjee and her husband, Richard Shapiro, professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies. CIIS is supposedly devoted to the promotion of mind-body studies in the Hindu and neo-Hindu tradition, but if this case is typical, it is apparently a hot-bed of political activism.
Dr. Chatterjee was dismissed from her post on July 19, a couple of days after Swamy’s DNA article. The reason seems to have been that Chatterjee went beyond expressing her opinions to active participation in radical groups, allegedly sponsored by/associated with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI of Pakistan).
A member of the ISI, one Ghulam Fai, was arrested by the FBI on the same day as Angana Chatterjee’s dismissal. Fai was allegedly implicated in lobbying and bribery of US representatives.
The actual grounds for Chatterjee’s dismissal as stated by the institution were dereliction in her duties as a teacher and the fostering of an intimidating atmosphere in the classroom. Since July, former students and associates, as well as human rights organizations, have been bombarding the media with requests for her release.
My question. Could this campaign have something to do with Swamy’s dismissal?
Point Four. As some supporters of Dr. Swamy have pointed out, Harvard has free speech for the likes of Dr. Alan Dershowitz (well-known for advocating torture) and for Danish cartoonists who caricature the Prophet Mohammed, but it forbids what are essentially factual statements by an Indian nationalist in an Indian newspaper, one day after a terrorist bombing that is part of an ongoing multi-decade low-level war conducted against India.
Part of that low-level war is the academic war to subtly demonize, trivialize, and mock Hindusim.
In this war, Islam is an ally where necessary, and the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) provides the racist justification – white Aryans naturally gave Indic people everything of worth in their culture.
Michael Witzel, a vocal advocate of this increasingly discredited theory, is a scholar of German origin. Of all people, he should be sensitive to the connotations of the word Aryan, which has never been used in the racist sense in the Vedic texts, but was generally used in that way in 19th-20th century European literary and political circles, out which Nazism, most notably, derived its ideology.
But Witzel’s inflammatory anti-Hindu rhetoric and history of anti-Hindu activism have not been censured at all. Instead, they may have fueled the action against Swamy and the broader campaign against Hindu identity.
That campaign is being conducted within scholarship about Indic religion/Indian area studies (now suitably renamed South Asian studies, in order to demote nationhood in that region) by American Marxist and gender activists posing as disinterested academicians.
By the way, Diana Eck and her partner are the first lesbians to become dorm parents at Harvard and Wendy Doniger, another anti-Hindu Indologist, is also gay. Their gender preferences are issues here, only because of their own reductive and highly sexualized psychoanalysis of symbols and myths in Hinduism, in a manner often completely at variance with actual texts, practices, and learned commentary. Unfortunately, few people in the US know Sanskrit well enough, even in the academic community, to take them to task.
And the almost completely white circle of American Indologists seems to be at war with the Indian community. Yet another example of how liberal projects supposedly meant to foster minorities are actually tools to dominate and break them.
That it’s all political and not principled is clear from related facts.
To wit, Eck is happy that “Boston is part of the Islamic world” and supports the outspoken pro-Islamicist activist, Tariq Ramadan. By the standards deemed fit to foist on Dr. Swamy, Ramadan is a good deal more objectionable.
[Correction 1/6/2012]: I should note, in fairness, that the video of theRoxbury mosque sermon is by MEMRI, a neoconservative outfit which has a documented history of distorting its excerpts from the Arabic press in order to inflame. Also, at least in one instance I was able to spot, the text accompanying the video was actually false. However, the general tenor of the speeches would be deemed at least as offensive as Mr. Swamy’s article by any objective reader.]
So is the Islamic Society of Boston, which is behind the Boston mosque that Eck applauds.
Here is Ramadan on video praying for Allah’s help and retribution against the enemies of Allah all over the world, including those in Palestine and those in Kashmir.
In Palestine, Muslims surely are within their rights, even if their methods are not.
But the case of Kashmir, especially, is different. In 1989, it was the Hindus – some 350,000 of them – who were ethnically cleansed from their native land by the Muslim majority and who have yet to be allowed to return.
Legally, Kashmir’s Hindu king acceded to India quite legitimately, in accordance with the British policy during partition. In the princely states, the decision whether to join Pakistan or India was left to the monarch, not to the population. Historically, Kashmir has been part of ancient Bharatvarsha.
It was only because of subsequent Pakistani infiltration and terrorism over the years, leading to the dispute with India, that the population dynamics changed, and with it, political sentiment in favor of secession.
Eck is no unworldly activist, oblivious to the history and political dimensions of her academic positions.
She is a gender activist, a Jewish progressive activist on reconciliation with Muslims, and a diversity guru.
She should know that Islamicist groups, not Hindus, advocate death for gays.
Islamicist groups, not Hindus, are at war with Jews.
In fact, Hinduism, in its popularized form, supplies the only growing religion in the US, outside of Islam, in the so-called New Age.
Hinduism both in doctrine, organization, and actual history, is also the most libertarian of all the major religions.
Sanatana Dharma, the way of life it prescribes, is really the mode of interfaith existence practiced successfully in India for thousands of years. In Hindu India, Jews flourished for two thousand years, without persecution.
The same thing cannot be said of either Christianity or Islam.
Eck, the diversity guru, might show a little humility toward the religion that gave her her intellectual career, if not her moral practice; that sheltered the Jewish people when they were persecuted elsewhere; and has lit the path of plurality and tolerance for centuries, in the opinion of many objective students of history.
Ironically, Eck heads an influential project on religion called the “Pluralism Project”.
Ironic, because it is a product of “foundation” (NGO) activism, and thus no more than a branch of state power. The project is funded by the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the latter two well-known to work hand-in-glove with US intelligence.
Eck is also a member of the State Dept. Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom abroad, a twenty-member group that advises the Sec. of State on religious issues in the context of human rights.
What that means is she is a leading member of the “soft power” arm of American empire in its internationalist mode. She is one of those opinion leaders who get trotted out on human rights issues to bolster US/globalist policy, as needed. I have called this “liberventionism” or human rights interventionism. [note: I used this term a few years ago in a discussion about Jean Bricmont, but I should note that Joseph Stromberg used it in 2002. I can’t tell if I coined it myself or got it from Stromberg unconsciously, but it’s likely the latter].
This liberationist activism of Eck and Co. is predictably inflected with the egalitarianism of cultural Marxism. But that is only the tolerant mask worn by the totalizing rationality of the state when it presents itself as distinct from religion, operating in its own space.
In fact, the state competes with religion for the same space. And what is demanded is not tolerance at all. It is power. Power that is never content with parity but inevitably demands supremacy.
Eck, Witzel and their fellow travelers are no more than mandarins of empire.
And their action against Dr. Swamy was not in defense of pluralism. “Pluralism” and “diversity” are just deployed strategically to provide ammunition for an ongoing sub-rosa war on all civilizations resistant in any way to globalist values and ultimate control.