Muslims & the Indian Grand Narrative

[Music] my research on Indian grand narrative I want to first explain what the term means it's a technical term and not just okay America Hanukkah that's a popular term but there's a technical meaning also and then I'll talk about one particular chapter which is which I've never spoken about before publicly and it's a particularly controversial chapter so you guys pay attention first the general perspective you know after India's independence there were five waves five waves of studying India five different Trish T's five different types of Sidhant on studying India from the west and I've talked about it the five waves of in dalla G 1 of them is post-modernism post-modernism is particularly dangerous because it seems to talk like Vasudeva cotton become type of discussion we are all one no borders and so on but actually it's the most dangerous thing that we could be hosting and are especially our English honors people and social sciences people have brought it in in a big way so I want to spend a little bit on that because the term grand narratives is something that they coined so the West developed you know modernity science technology that was the age of modernity but then they were very shaken up that modernity had climaxed in to exceedingly horrifying things one was Nazism they were one they were the most modern state so that's the culmination of modernity in the 20th century it horrified these intellectuals and the second was the rise of communism and it killed a hundred million people so people who were Marxists who are looking for a different spin without giving up Marxism they were looking for a different spin and they also wanted to find out how come many countries did not have a communist revolution although there's a big disparity between rich and poor they just didn't have a communist revolution so they kept coming up with different theories now in that month and among the left with in foreign within the Europe and us which got exported to India they came up with this idea that a grand narrative and this is their term and that's why I'm giving a response to that term a grand narrative is inherently abusive inherently oppressive because it's the result of elitists so whether the Nazis came and built a grand narrative whether the Communists came and built a grand narrative whoever builds a grand narrative is never something that is bottom-up it's never off the people it is always some male narrative of a female majority or minority so these are all grand narratives so what they decided is that there should be something called history from below which means the aam aadmi history and that they called some molten studies which means study this minority is narrative that minorities narrative study the narratives plural many many small narratives from below which are trying to challenge and topple the one grand narrative and this is where the breaking India comes in because the whole idea of this project of toppling the grand narrative is to empower small small little fragments separatist groups create their narratives create a narrative of you know Maoist creative narrative of this tribe or this jothee or this community this particular religion against the big narrative now the interesting thing is the people who came up with this theory did not intend it for India they intended to deconstruct the French grand narrative in Africa and give the power back to the French and the British grand narrative in the colonies and give it back to the colonies so the purpose of Europeans create this grand narrative thesis that grand narratives are bad and you should replace them that was different but Indian leftists took this brought it in and started deconstructing Hinduism as the grand narrative and started deconstructing India as the grand narrative so in the 80s and early 90s it was very fashionable to talk about grand narrative and you will see many dissertations and many books and papers when they talk about grand narrative with some horrible evil think it is oppressive it is top down so I decided to do exactly the opposite that is why I picked their terminology and turn it around and give it a whole different meaning in fact point by point I find flaws in their whole scholarship so that is why I use the term grand narrative not some random not a term with a sort of common meaning but a very technical meaning during my business days the introduction mentioned from Ganesha had companies in 20 countries one of the things I always did was try to understand the grand narrative of any place I did business whether it's France whether it is Korea whether it is you know China whether it is Mexico Poland Hungary Czech Republic or all kind of places I would always spend a certain amount of time Indonesia I learned a lot I would spend a lot of time asking who are you how do you see yourself what is your sense of history what keeps you together what are your aspirations what is your religion you know all kind of things that one would study with the sympathy and I found that corporate leaders in these countries were very proud of their grand narrative so it convinced me that this whole leftist postmodernist project had failed it had failed because you know in France while they're very leftist and all that post modernists but every Frenchman knows what is pride of his you know whatever it is whether it is a wine but whatever it they are proud of fashion's you know every country has this pride of heritage some thing very extraordinary about them so I started in as part of my corporate my entrepreneurship I started understanding the grand narratives and people took me seriously so I would come back next time to Poland and tell them not what I have what else have learned about their granite is a very impressed they thought that nobody has no other Indian had come and taken it this matter seriously because the typical Indian businessman goes there he doesn't want to hear all these kind of things he just want to talk about you know secular you know financial stuff accounting stuff market share all that very no culture involved and I was very interested in understanding culture so for example I understood in Indonesia why they have Hindu names they are called Ram Sita their bank and their Muslims most of them are Muslims but they have the Hindu names why is that so what is the origin of that and and and in after numerous conversations I got a lot of insight and this was actually a business tool you can you can relate to business people in other countries better if you understand that culture with sympathy and they realize that you are honest about it and you're not just pulling a fast one so I don't know why are the Tatas and the Infosys and these kind of people don't inculcate training about other countries grand narratives as part of the corporate training in fact I have some relatives who are very senior in some of these top few Indian companies I don't wanna name and when they visit the US they visiting one of the subsidiaries they visiting some factory and all that and they're having some argument with the local workers it's very clear that the Indians coming from headquarters in India just don't understand the grand narrative of these people which is not very conscious it is unconscious in them in their in their psychology it is clear and so there is this barrier because the Indian is talking to them without really knowing how they are thinking deep inside and so this is this kind of a lack of appreciation I was inspired as a child when I was reading the history of the East India Company I was very inspired by the investment the East India Company made in understanding Indians and we think we think that they did us a favor their translating some squit books and max Miller came maximum who didn't come but he was translating and this other fellows came and what all they did you know various Sanskrit scholars and anthropologists and social sciences people came actually they were trying to understand how we who we are to be able to manipulate to be able to make us laugh make us cry make us fight to rule over us you need to understand so this business of understanding the grand narrative of people became very important to me being based in the US for the past forty seven years which means I have lived there longer than the vast majority of Americans have because younger than that most of them so having lived there so long and being a very keen person studying the grand narrative issue I I have written or actually two or three big volumes which I have yet to publish on the American grand narrative and how it pertains to their policy towards India and what India should know about it now United States has an official name for their grand narrative this is very interesting there's a name for him it's called American exceptionalism if you search American exceptionalism you will find that since the late 1800s this term has been used actually the term started even earlier in the 1600 before there was a USA but in the in the mid late eighteen hundreds it became very popular and since then every single president doesn't matter which party has talked about American exceptionalism as his ideal and you can watch Fox News which is right-wing you can watch MSNBC which is left-wing they're all proud of the American exceptionalism idea all of them so you got to understand and this is taught in schools the founding fathers you know what is great American exceptionalism in a nutshell means that we the Americans are the world's exceptional people we are the world's exceptional people now there's many versions of it there is the judeo-christian version which says this is the Garden of Eden as described in the Bible there is the secular left-wing version of it which as we have this work ethic we have this great Constitution we the land of rnd and Science and Technology everybody wants to come here so whatever the particular point of emphasis might be from one interpretation to the other they all believe in the American exceptionalism there's a name for it and the bottom line is that we are the world's exceptional people now other countries may not have a name but it is clear that China has this manner when I used to do business Chinese leaders this I'm talking about before they became so powerful I'm talking about early 90s when I used to visit there a lot Chinese leaders were inculcated from childhood there is something grand and special about our country Japanese very clear very clear so French of course British Russians all these kind of places so I started systematically looking at the issue of Indian grand narrative and I feel that at one time remind was a grand narrative it was performed in every village every jati was part of it it was a story of our story this is our story a grand narrative is is that kind of a thing that brings us together I remember even in my childhood in the 60s 50s and 60s in Delhi we used to do ram-leela it took a month you know everybody who had some role we all spent time you know making a bow painting this painting that like that so I used to a play Lakshmi that was my role so you know it's like in the neighborhood there was a hammer Lakshmi your Lakshmi right that so how you not so somebody is known in this way some tough guy is robbing like that so you know we are kids we're having fun there is no barrier no boundary and you go to you go and and you go to villages you'll find that ram-leela was a collective celebration of grand narrative unfortunately destroyed and turned from a participatory thing but are you participating to a passive viewing TV so first it became something that the ram-leela used to be then enacted in a very high-class way in Delhi there was a ram-leela I think government so instead of us doing it now neighborhood every 100 different neighborhoods doing their own ram-leela everybody would just go and watch the ram-leela so we became passive but at least the the performance was live and then a few years later it became TV so now that's gone so the the idea is no longer that I put it in my body I enact it I feel a certain way I feel certain way towards my you know fellow actors in this and so on so this is actually a granularity you live your grand narrative grand narrative something and body so when you when you want to interpret whether it is Donald Trump or whether it is his opponent or some previous guy or whether it is some fellow from the US or Russia or wherever who comes to India and you are negotiating you must know their grand narrative in order to understand who it is what is he talking about when he's saying this what does it mean what's real what's not real how do I tell him something so I make a strong point but I don't hit him hard where it'll really hurt him and he may come back at me so how how to negotiate you need to know the other side I mean this every every businessman knows that you got to understand the other person psychology and to understand their psychology you have to understand their grand narrative it's absolutely mind-boggling that Ministry of External Affairs I CCR which is the Indian Council of cultural relations don't have a clue about this because I've sat and talked to some other people the narrow Center people and various people nor do I think that Culture Ministry nor do I think our HRD or any of those really understand this idea of grand narrative be it somebody else's or be it our own so this is a pretty serious state of affairs so grand narrative is a much bigger broader deeper subject than just writing you know what is our history and how great we are as a nation there's a lot more to it now this book has three parts then the book I'm writing called the Indian grand narrative what one is the early history of the grand narrative and what the narrative was and how it evolved they're versions of it how it evolved and the evidence for it part two is the disruption how it got disrupted we have the Islamic invasion we have the European we we also have the post-independence five waves of in dalla ji a very very destructive Enterprise over the last 70 years very very destructive to our grand narrative now many people when they talk about colonialism they limit themselves to British actually there's an Islamic colonialism and this is a controversial point I mean my fellow Indians don't like this is not Remy Islamiyah was a colonial system they don't like it I'm not anti Islam by the way my controversial point which I'll come to is actually to tell you that what my view is of Islam and it's not an anti-islam thing their Islamic invaders and a Muslim should disown them and say that just because he's my religion doesn't mean he's good I mean dr. Swamy doesn't say that because some corrupt fellow you know who is a Hindu or something and maybe he's doing puja and all that therefore we give him a free pass I mean if he's a crook he's a crook and so we have to we have to do that so the second part is the disruptive and the third part is the most important one which is the future which is the future what is so there is a disruption and there is a construction what is the constructive aspect how do we construct a grand narrative which is scientific for today which accepts the reality we have minorities it's a reality we have problems all sorts of problems that's a reality we have you know so it you have to be very realistic in evaluating the circumstances we are in and then then you can propose construct discuss what the solution is to that now the research that I've been doing is not a description of this invasion happened this fight happened this is the history it goes into deep structures deep structures of our civilization there are deep you know frameworks starting with the Vedas and so on very deep frameworks there is the role of Sanskrit there is a role of sadhana there is so many things these keep get assimilating more and more changes the smithee's keep changed the shruti's are the same the smithee's change so when you want to study the grand narrative which is not frozen in time it is not like yeh kahani Hamasaki ICT it has changed at the same time you can't say that okay it's a new country a new narrative totally so how do you reconcile something is the same and something is also different so one way I propose is that we have been reincarnated that's our idea so Bharat has been reincarnated into modern India and sanatana-dharma got reincarnated into modern Hinduism so it is both modern and it is also continuous akin continuity of an old old Atma old Atma the India loop Adi I call it GT that every nation has a Chitti and the body could go new one comes but there is a Chitti we should understand and we should build a whole society around that Chitti and I've lectured many times that unfortunately the Dean Dr apotheon died very early as you know and his project was just nobody continued it you see this is a part of a kind of laziness we have we feel cakey Cioran occurred yet so I don't have to do anything a lot of people asked me why are you doing this so and so Vivekananda already wrote this or orbán's already wrote it the point is the point is the opponents are on the move the disruptive forces are always doing something new you cannot say kitten dhul-qarnayn century like Aditi to ibeacon cuckoos can engage with Nia the point is you have to you have to do your work what was done at that time was good at that time but you see even in Dean the other party has time Marxism existed Marxism existed post-colonial studies which Edward Sayid developed was after deen dayal upadhyaya that was another wave then leading to subaltern studies then leading to post-modernism studies now there is something new called neo Orientalism so they've come up with these fancy terms and these are it's like if somebody wants to study with an you can't just study Adi Shankara you have to study all the future all the subsequent developments you can't just study and say okay what about the Eternity Koga because you have to study all the nuances or all the variations although subsequent the challenges and answers and all that so same way when we have intellectuals who got to respond to the International bombardment that we faced the disruption that we faced it is not enough to say we waken and gave an answer because he gave it for his time three Armando gave it for his time D in the other path they gave it for his time and these people actually one over the other evolved they all had something different and new to say so now in the 21st centuries where are the deen dayal upadhyaya as we need to we need to do this new thinking so this is this is something we haven't difficult to come across and it's not just a few speeches here and there it's serious work serious hard work that you we have to do so that's what I'm trying to do and that is what I will summarize in this book called the Indian grand narrative now I will turn to the controversial chapter I want to talk about I have a certain amount of minutes left and I want to focus on this one chapter it'll be one of maybe a dozen chapters altogether the chapter it has deals with where are what is the place for Indian Muslims in our grand narrative and you can see there's a very hot topic you know the untouchable nepai right so I I started conducting some interviews in Delhi with Muslims young broad-minded educated Muslim see and many of them are involved in this triple sale the lack you know fighting people to Larkin and all this polygamy and things like that and I started asking them questions about everything controversial even and I have videotapes I'd put them on videotape I'm going to edit put them out on public and they are willing so I found to my surprise there are substantial number of Muslims who've had it with Orthodox Islam and who feel that the vast majority of Indian Muslims are not well educated people and they are therefore driven by whatever the Imam says and the Imam is looking for his own power structure and these more educated professional type Muslims don't like it they are they have fear some of them and there is kind of not necessarily an organized approach so there is an also leadership issue they need some encouragement they need something some organizational help so I figured this is a this is a fruitful enterprise fruitful area of my investigation as part of my grand narrative because imagine if I wrote a book called the Indian grand narrative and there's nothing about Muslim Muslims except that they've destroyed some things you know a thousand years ago they destroyed which they did and my book is very clear very strong on all the Muslim destruction but the question still remains what about today what do we do Trey so I don't accept the voice with the Muslim voice which says reject Islam so the Tariq Fateh type because if you reject with Lomb maybe a few people will go wrong with that but the majority of Muslims are not going to just say okay we reject Islam and the Guru opsi is going to be fine for some people I think it's not a practical idea that you will do Gaurav opps you of the whole lot of people I don't think that's going to work so these are fine they're okay I mean there should be internal criticism in every religion so some people are anti Islam from within that's fine that's their choice and some people may want to do Cara Bobbsey that's also their choice but I wanted to find out is there a narrative where the person is a proud Muslim but he's before that first to know first and foremost he's a proud Bharatiya and I wanted to investigate [Applause] so I have a name for it and I have a domain names also and there's going to be a chapter with that name and this is I'm calling such people for these sheet Muslims that's mad now people ask why not Indian and I said because you know when you say Indian Tobi's party I was India 70 years old British make it was it Hindustan so you know I don't want a diversion people like to divert and our people then go into arguing that so they see Muslims has no there's no no kind of ambiguity what it means swirl dish this is my dish so if I if I were to say are you an Indian Muslim crowd he'll say yeah ayah but when you go deep into it he is only talking in a certain camouflaged way he's not really what I am looking for but when I say is this yours for dish mathrubhumi pit 3 boo me this is it which means and I define very clearly that your ancestors are from here they didn't come from the Middle East so when we talk about be colonizing getting rid of the British influence then also D : d colonizing the D Arab izing is something you ought to do because Islam if you claim Islam is the universal faith that Allah has brought to everybody in the world then Arab customs dress names habits are not necessarily going to supersede the Indian customs and culture you can still be a Muslim so I challenge this and I have this on videotape and when I go back to Delhi tonight Tuesday I have another meeting with this group so every time I'm telling them go bring bring a few more friends and we will see how far it will go but I think it will become an interesting movement so I I've even said things like the Swadeshi Muslim it has to claim our heroes the heroes of the soil rather than the invaders as the heroes so the may be the invaders were of your religion and your ancestors were natives Swadeshi who lost and you you became you now adopt the religion of the of the invaders and I do not ask you to convert I'm not asking to do anything that you can remain that but can you be a Muslim without being arabised or person iced or Turkish can you be a volunteer style Muslim and this is a very interesting thing I tell them that my experience in Indonesia has been very helpful because in Indonesia they say their language is Basha they write in the English alphabet but the writing Basha and when I asked them who are you with Muslims so why what is this Basha thing and so they're saying that our ancestors came from India they're saying our civilization came from India actually this is a very it started as a I'll give you an anecdote just to dry word a little bit I was leasing office premises for my company so this Indonesian general manager very good friend of mine very soft-spoken Muslim but he's one of the philosophers that I would talk to at night you know and then he would introduce me to college professors of history and so on to teach me about their history their grand narrative so he took me to this negotiation and the landlady was a Chinese so he says you talk because you're American and she'll take you more seriously than taking me so I said why it's your country so he said but in our country we have an inferiority complex we think Chinese a superior it only that and then he said but we think that the Indians are even more superior to the Chinese this is what he told me so he's very interesting [Applause] so I learned a lot about you know their idea and then he's the one who said if you really want these appointments with the telecom pick Minister this one this one bring an American blonde lady they all give appointments so I learned this cultural thing you know actually it worked I then took this I had a secretary so I told her we give you card saying vice president all that you sit there next to me I'll do the talking and I'll just sit smile and all that don't don't say anything so we brought her to be in India also it works there in India before all these phone companies we had something called MTNL MTNL and VSNL was the international carrier monopoly only we are Center calls and empty and L was domestic so to do this venture that we were doing we had to do business with these people so I remember she was so successful in getting meetings with these people they would all say they would be like ignoring me and talking to her but I'm the boss actually I own the company and she's a secretary that we've glorified cockade people will take her seriously so they're all into hand ing ing ing co coconut la botella though and then wanted nothing to do with any coconut nah but they were really into pampering her that she's this diet person is white lady come you know blonde so it got into her head so then you know when they would ask to negotiate the contract the deal whatever I was presenting they would start talking to her and she got into her head that way I am powerful so she started talking to them and I am left out so one day I gave her a warning I said in front of them it looks VP and I am the president and all that when they may be wanting to talk to you but do not do not outsmart my terms of agreement because my company you can't negotiate but she was got into so much power because it started inviting her and all that and she would try to cut her own deal so I fired her I fired her then I was very concerned here I need a solution so someone told me you go and hire an actor because actors Nokia script a script so I put an ad at the Rutgers University which is in Princeton big University they have a theater department I went to put an ad saying we'll pay the expenses you'll perform the role of an American corporate executive you'll go to foreign country you live in a 5-star we will get first-class flying back and you to perform this role so then I auditioned some people hired somebody and said first thing I said is it's not your deal the producer and director is telling you what you have to say and you just say it and so anyway that was a very big success but back to the Indonesia story I learned a lot about Muslims who have not become Ashraf ice-t-- Ashraf means those Muslims who feel we are answers we are our ancestors were Arab or Iranian or Turk it's like anglo-indian started thinking among Raisa yeah and for a while when I was a kid every Christian used to think a Mirabeau grandmother it's now 1/8 or something was English and all everybody wanted to have some little trace of British blood to kind of legitimize and say I'm a little superior to you and today you find that among the guns you go to go there a lot of people who would want to say I'm Portuguese hey and all that I know some going friends who don't like it that go and Christians who don't like it but there is a sense of superiority over you know some foreign DNA so Muslims have this problem Ashraf and when you when they tell you can aapke caste system air we don't have a caste system you can talk right back and say you have Ashraf a giraffe and a Slav these are Muslim castes in India they don't marry with each other they consider themselves to be separate com you know and so on and this is a very serious problem in Pakistan the ones who are from Bihar are considered lower caste and so forth so if you really do the DNA test of Indian Muslims you will find that actually most of them are swarthy she's they don't know it but so we would just sort of re-educate them that this is who you are there's also scientific way it's a very very tiny fraction of the DNA component of the Muslim population that would be oops so I tell them so back to my research I started telling them that you know Arabs are not as civilized as we are you should be proud of our heritage mostly you can be a religion is different from being an Arab race and an Arab culture it is different and so there are certain practices that enter a religion because it's in the culture around you know like maybe tlick or maybe multiple wives and all these kind of things but they are not really part of the original region there is a certain context I wish they had to separate its murthy from shruti I wish they had done that then we could argue very clearly KRT Shruti mania this is in your smithing you can change it and why do you want to bring Arab smoothly here you can bring the truth in which is it universal but the ability has to be locally localized and updated and that way they could be modern technological scientific there could be you know Swadeshi Muslims there absolutely because they have to accept that their origin is for Asia and their heroes hispid Asia their sacred land and sacred sites are here here so when you talk about decolonizing and there are all these conferences conclaves article there's almost one Conclave every day or every two three countries a week at least going on all over India month on Conclave this and that lit fest going on and decolonizing is a very common fashionable theme but you know they're decolorizing from the Europeans they're afraid to talk about decolonizing from the Muslims and T and one of the things our demand the as a criteria for being as proper Swadeshi Muslim is that you should accept that we ought to decolonize the Muslim population from the Arab identity and this I should Rafa Ashraf business this we should be proud to be who we are and we can be very proud to be Muslims so I don't I'm working with these experts some Imams I've entered this group some lawyers have entered and we'll see where it goes but I'm experimenting with this idea that can there be a total for Mattie to Islam which is not hostile to this sacred nation and to the Hindus and which is not sort of more loyal to the West Asia type of cultures the Arabs who were the origin who were the place where Islam originated and Jerusalem where you know various places in Israel where first judaism originated and then christianity originated and then in the same general region Islam originated these are desert religions their desert religions we are a forest civilization green forest waters fertile plenty we are not sort of hungry for food because nothing grows you see so so it the desert tribes have a different kind of ethos and we it's not a not a desirable thing that every Indian Muslim has to copycat the desert method is a type of lifestyle so this is a this is a as I told you it's a controversial it's going to be risky and I am willing to take that risk but I think that if we can create a core group even small who say we are so they see Muslims it will be the beginning of a quite a big tipping point and it can have a ripple effect and I would like to put that as my take on Islam or Muslims in my Indian grand narrative that were you see if we don't do that the breaking India forces are all controlled from its way so you want to snap that link from elsewhere whether it is all the money coming I mean there's nothing wrong have madrasahs have universities fine but why Saudis dictating who will be the appointed you know of the faculty and what the curriculum will say why is the ultimate Adhikari of knowledge sitting there when you have your Koran you can interpret it and so and then similarly with British with with sorry Western Christian I I see every minority group mischaracterized as a minority or let me put it this way those minority groups that have a foreign Nexus that are a footprint local footprint of an international powerhouse are mischaracterized as a minority actually it's a branch office of a powerful majority because if you had a small office of if you had a small office of IBM where there's hundred people you wouldn't say well 130 co-venture it must be minority and if you see McDonald's with 20 employees you're not gonna say it's a minority we'll just give the minority status so similarly if you have a church Orem or a madrasah with a small number of people I mean the point is that they are controlled they are appointed they are funded they're trained by a global headquarters they're more like an MNC and if you look at the rules governing the Vatican the Catholic Church the Vatican appoints please note this the Vatican appoints every bishop in India so if a foreign headquarters is appointing who the manager will be in every branch every branch they control the funding they certainly control the ideology they send them there for training how can you say this is not a foreign enterprise it is of an MNC and Vatican is also a sovereign state it is a member of the United Nations the United Nations so they're a sovereign state so when a sovereign state appoints somebody to represent them it's a consulate so rather than saying that they are a minority and get special privileges they are actually foreign consulate every Church is a foreign consulate I mean I mean it may sound politically incorrect but the fact is that hiding under the garb of religion and religious freedom and religions Kikuchi a heinous act a point is that under the garb of religion it is a sovereign state which is running this operation this whole franchise of local establishments this is something we ought to discuss we ought to be able to have free conversations and maybe litigation also or maybe let the courts intervene and say you know China has a good precedence China decided that there's no bar on Christianity but there's a bar on Foreign Church intervening so they do not accept foreign appointed bishops their demand that the Chinese have to organize you can read the Bible you can worship Jesus no problem but why you need somebody sitting somewhere else to appoint you so this is a very powerful argument that our people need to need to take forward the Muslims who I might I'm formulating right now and if those of you are interested in joining can email me and we can include you in the discussion but I'm formulating with the help of Swadeshi Muslims a few of them it's Charter which is written by them I'm not saying this is what it is I'm suggesting ideas and so far they've accepted that you know cow slaughter is not a required part of Islam not a required part of Islam the u.s. Commission on religious international religious freedom which puts out a report every year and accused in the india of human rights violations and all that in the latest report they one of the big arguments they put up is that this cow slaughter is a violation of Islamic rights so I went they invited me because I always keep criticizing then they invited me in watch to Washington DC to have a discussion with them and I found out that the young man in charge of writing and human rights violations of India is a Pakistani scholar I have his card he's very proudly he got a PhD from American University on South Asian Studies religious freedom issues so he's become an expert very smart of the Pakistani he APNIC young coda niccolo's me you know and then put him in all these jobs so he given me all this stuff and I'm sitting there with all all the white people the Jewish Christian people the commissioners and all the people are the people and I'm saying this guy doesn't know in Islam you say cow does not exist is not exist in the desert cow is a tropical animal it is not a desert animal and the Arabs eat goat and camel they don't eat cow the cow just now it's a luxury item some sheiks might eat it and all but 4000 years since the you know beginning the the 1,400 years or whatever the the Arabs have not been cow by beefeaters so why you say it's a requirement it is not a requirement it's just a they've adopted it and in fact if you look at the harem paths research the rem-pod showed that cow slaughter is something the british popularized you're on a big scale it existed on a small scale it was not like a massive industry of millions and millions of cows like we're having today that industrialization of cow slaughter happened starting in the british and after independence it became even bigger so this is not a something of that started in saudi arabia or any of that stuff so there's something that when I mentioned these facts the so they XI Muslims that I am working with accepted and said yes we we think out slaughter should be stopped because why why do we want to hurt our Hindu friends that's the kind of mentality I'm looking for another controversial thing I have asked them is Ram temple I said that in your in Islam there are holy sites but no sacred sites sacred means this stone is not a stone this is the divine present this is a divine presence I'm talking to the divine hi hello hello now you I'm having a conversation with the divine the protocol is the agama me protocol and I'm having this conversation you considered blasphemy if somebody says that inside the inside the mosque is aware or lies Allah is not in the mosque they know that they know that so what is a mosque a mosque is a community center a mosque is only a community center it's a convention center a community center where Muslims can go to one place and feel that okay from together we can just pray to Allah it is from where you are praying to Allah a very arbitrary place it cuz there is no reference on how what kind of place it has to be what it can't be it can be anywhere it you can pray from your house you can pray on the street you can pray in a mosque you can pray anywhere you want you can pray in an airport there is no requirement there is nothing comparable to pran Protista in Islam which would make a particular mosque a sacred place so this is why if you ever tell Muslim that I love your sacred mosque if he's a knowledgeable fellow he's not agree with it because it is considered idolatry he says it's not a sacred place matter is not sacred there is no sacred River sacred you know tree or mountain or building there is no form there is no Allah is not informed so we have the divine taking form so Allah is not informed and therefore you can't consider the mosque at all to be a sacred place so if we tell him that and the fact that I have so many examples of Saudi Arabia and all the different Muslim countries are demolishing moving relocating mosque from here to there there is absolutely no reason whether see the burden of proof should not be on us that this is the birthplace of ROM the burden of proof is that we have been worshipping here for a long time for whatever reason it is our house of worship but the fact that we did plant Patricia makes it a sacred place and the fact that the Babri must be there is nothing you couldn't do pranapratishta means it can be moved that is the argument it has nothing to do with whether it ROM was born there or not I happen to believe he was so there's no point in taking a higher burden of proof than necessary so this is why i SWA means argument is very brilliant he says he has a right to worship there he has a right to worship there and it is nothing to do with all the other arguments he said I have a right to worship because the deity of ROM had brown protest I was here that we can establish and I as a Hindu have a right to worship a deity that's it so why create higher hurdle for us to have to jump over and so we can just say this the difference between prime Protista of Marathi and no such equivalent in a mosque is a decisive argument that when you move the mosque you are not violating anything when you destroy a multi you are so when I say it like this to the my small group of Swadeshi Muslims they actually like it they saying you know we should actually help our Hindus to create the temple there's not some of them self so this this and then I have talked about 370 they feel there's no reason why it should be separate from the rest of India I've talked to them about uniform Civil Code and they've said you know we should be treated like the rest of especially I tell you we should start with educated professional young women they're very fed up of this whole Imam dominated male-dominated kind of interpretation they would like to get out of it and we can help them we can give it rather than saying I'm going to knock out Islam I'm against Islam Islam is wrong because that is not going to attract a whole lot of people and rather than saying ok you convert and become Hindu again if you just say I want they were very relieved when I said to them I want to respect you as Muslim but it has to be mutual you respect me as Hindu I respect Islam and the core core tenets of Islam I am not at all against any of them I think that this Arabization and this politicization and this word banking and all these kind of things that have happened over time are the ones that you have to decolonized from when i say it like that they are very interested in joining us because believe me they are also looking for a way out they feel that they are also stuck in this very very old you know closed-minded interpretation which is not going to work in this in the modern world it is not going to work so this is my suave she Muslims initial initiation my Muslims movement now I have a whole lot which I don't maybe we can take it in the in the Q&A but I I have a I have a diagram in my book which is a game board so there is the existing game and then there is another diagram which is how I want to change the game so the existing game is this the Muslims are in at the center and they have all these forces these Arabs funding you know Arabs Iranian sending funding some of that is through the agents they're called they're trained Imams to think a certain way there is this whole authorization which is also a problem I feel because nothing requires that in Islam that you have to order wise you could be in malayalam bengali the whole reason east pakistan was split off and became among the nation's because Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won the election on the basis that he wanted Bengali and not all to which the Pakistanis were not willing to give so he won the election and they separated so there is nothing in Islam that says you got to order eyes or Arab eyes so all these are sort of identity engineering gimmicks that give political clout and create breaking india forces so I'm against that I'm not against Islam at all so when I when the game board present game board shows Muslims with all these forces left-wing manipulating them political people bringing them this way that way to promise them you know they are against modernity there's a tension with modernity so the Muslim is sitting inside with all these tensions he's got so many tensions and he's not able to play the game make his moves and win so the new game board all these middlemen and forces are out the at the so they she Muslim and Hindus let's start with Hindus first and then we can bring in other faiths are in direct conversation direct dialogue to find an equilibrium which is mutually respectful so mutual respect as a principle for equilibrium is what I'm trying to achieve and I want them to just ignore all these other forces that have been controlling them and talking on their behalf equilibriums are related to grand narrative there are equilibriums in nature so for instance you have an ecosystem you have a water cycle you know there's an equilibrium of the solar system there's an equilibrium so the body are you rate tell you when the equilibrium is disrupted is the first stage of disease you know then something is going to accumulate and blockades and whatnot there are four stages of disease the first is that some equilibrium is little bit disrupted so there are many kinds of equilibrium there is social equilibrium the Varna system had a kind of a cyclical equilibrium among the different social capital that got disrupted so that is now become a problem so I what I told them is that if there is a healthy dynamic equilibrium between Swadeshi Muslims and Hindus this will be strengthened the Indian grand narrative because the grand narrative will become a stable equilibrium we currently have an unstable tentative volatile equilibrium we do have it but it is always ready to you know there's so much so many centrifugal forces we are always on the brink of something or other happening and we are spending a very large percentage of our GDP on internal equilibrium just maintaining the maintaining the internal you know unity in so much hard power so much hard power has to go so if we could crack this soft power problem of the Muslim mind psychology and and create a wave of Swadeshi Muslims even if it starts with very few but then we let them go and expand as more get educated and as I get into science and get into professions I would see that the Swadeshi Muslim you know clout and power and importance will increase so I'm I'll conclude by saying that I'm going to create a small group of Swadeshi Muslims give them empowerment tell them you defined I've put all this stuff out now you define how you want it and we can sponsor a regular seminars on Swadeshi Muslims run by them run by them and promote them and encourage them to have to run this website so it is not going to be me doing it but encourage them to do it once this is launched and in their hands and operating I also intend to create a so they see Christians another one so I will conclude because I have taken a lot of time and thank you very much for inviting me and I'm delighted to be here thank you [Music] you

Channel: Rajiv Malhotra Official

Views: 313,162

Rating: 4.8263741 out of 5

Keywords: muslims Indian, Dr Subramanian swamy latest, Subramanian swamy latest, Subramanian latest, grand narrative meaning, grand narrative definition, grand narrative india, Dr Subramanian swamy interview, swadeshi muslims, indian grand narrative, Subramanian, Subramanian interview, grand narrative, swadeshi movement, lit fest, Subramanian swamy, Dr Subramanian swamy, Rajiv Malhotra, Infinity Foundation

Id: yKbX0SI21lo

Length: 53min 41sec (3221 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018