Thursday 28th March 2024,
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India’s Russian Dolls

India’s Russian Dolls

Russian dolls are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. Unpackaging Russia itself has been an issue for western commentators.

It was after all Winston Churchill who defined Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” and his words in 1939 spoke eloquently to the Western sense of it as the “other” – an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules. This was certainly felt true when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, something which almost all ‘experts’ got wrong. India abstained from the subsequent United Nations vote to condemn Russia’s actions.

Britain’s trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan has admitted she is uncomfortable about India “sitting on the fence” over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Certainly, India’s stance has incensed USA and UK in particular. After all why will the world’s largest democracy not stand together with a small state being invaded by its hostile neighbour?

Various reasons have been given such as India’s reliance on Russia’s oil and weapons. But all these miss one major factor. When India has suffered exactly as Ukraine has, western countries have armed the enemy, given it succour, soft power and blanket support in the information war. Just like unpacking the Russian doll, one in the other, so this is to quote Churchill a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; and that began with Churchill himself.

Kashmir Files

The Kashmir Files is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language movie written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri. The film presents a fictional storyline centred around real-life events and the exodus of indigenous Kashmiri Hindus from Kashmir. It depicts the early-1990 exodus accurately as genocide. The BBC, France 24 and other western media have condemned this film for supposedly fomenting hatred against Muslims in India, and indulging in conspiracy theories.

This is because the extermination of Kashmiri Hindus from their ancestral homeland is hushed up in a manner that would be unthinkable for the Holocaust, Armenian genocide or the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Even when there is scant recognition there is always that sly comment, that underhand jab.

For example, Mery Sebastian for the BBC makes it a point to describe the Hindus as “upper-caste Pandits” (. This is in keeping with the BBC and its Hinduphobia. France 24 has condemned the film as feeding into “Islamophobia” which is ironic considering how powerful the National rally party is and France’s own massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961 (directed by a former Nazi collaborator).

The hostile reaction to Kashmir Files and India’s stance towards Russia must be understood in this context. Even if India followed western condemnation of war against Ukraine, it would have not have garnered new friends. It would not have earned the respect and support of the west. Indeed it would have had to face the encircling axis of Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. China is integral to western nations due to being the global factory. Pakistan meanwhile has long been a western ally. After all it was created by Churchill.

This was the same Churchill who condemned the ‘beastly religion’ of Hindus. he raged against India being dominated by upper-caste Hindus and Brahmins, despite his very own aristocratic and privileged background, as well as crushing aspirations by the proletariat. Pakistan was carted by Churchill working with Muhammad Ali Jinnah to deprive an independent India of full victory in throwing off British rule.

Now while Churchill’s racism has been condemned, his anti-Hindu views have not only escaped criticism but have become more entrenched. The UK and then USA and France supplied Pakistan with weapons to attack India and commit genocide in Bangladesh. British officers initially commanded the Pakistan military when it sent Pushtun proxies to fight in Kashmir in 1947.

Islamic fascist groups have long been the darlings of all political persuasions in the corridors of power. British MPs have openly led mobs to attack the Indian High Commission in London. Yet, these are the same countries that expect India to follow its lead.

It only demonstrated that the old colonial racism is alive and well, and not just on the right. It thrives and is pushed by the left. This is the very same left that once advocated eugenics, genocide and other nasty mechanisms to ensure ‘progress’.

Indeed when it comes to Hindus, there is no left and right. It is just one monotheist behemoth against the stubbornpagan heathenmillions that refuse to quietly become extinct. This is what enrages them about the Kashmir Files is that it tells of the genocide from a pagan perspective, something unacceptable to any monotheist whether religious as in with America’s evangelical right, of in its upgraded secular version such as the secularism of France.

For the extreme right such as Marine Le Pen, David Duke, and Gregory-Lauder Frost, Russia is seen as the messiah against liberalism, wokeness and everything degenerate in western societies. It is the saviour for Christianity and the white race. While these elements would differ on major points, when it comes to India they are of one voice. It is a degenerate heathen mass.

Fourth Reich?

Putin claimed that he was invading Ukraine to cleanse it of neo-Nazis. This is all very strange when one considers how ultranationalism thrives in Russia itself. While liberals such as Boris Nemtsov have been liquidated, neo-Nazis operate largely unfettered. The streets of Moscow and St Petersburg were unsafe for anyone too dark, especially foreign students and Central Asian immigrants, who were mercilessly killed by skinhead gangs and the slaughter proudly posted on social media.

Putin only reigned this in when this same neo-Nazis became too powerful and threatened his own rule. However helped by RT news channel, Russia openly began backing far-right elements in western countries. Rinaldo Nazzaro, an American, has been running The Base, the international neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, from an apartment in St Petersburg.

A video posted online in March 2019 shows Nazzaro in Russia wearing a t-shirt bearing an image of President Vladimir Putin along with the words “Russia, absolute power”. American white supremacist and alt-right leader Richard Spencer called Russia “the sole white power in the world.”

Moscow has indeed become the nexus for neo-nazi, white supremacist and similar organisations, notably the Russian Imperial Movement, and the influence on Putin of ultranationalist Alexandr Dugin. Russia has also sent in the Wagner Group to fight in the war. It is led by Dmitry Utkin, who uses the cover name “Wagner”. He was inspired by the German composer Richard Wagner, whose oeuvre was also admired by Adolf Hitler. 

However, the ultranationalism and racism evident in Russia is also found in Ukraine. Indeed the invasion by Putin has split the far right on how to respond.

Ukraine has long had its own problem with neo-Nazism, notably the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and the activities of Nazi militia such as the Azov Battalion. Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the US-backed coup in February 2014. Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov include Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the US Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

In June 2019 a white supremacist concert featuring Nazi bands took place in Kyiv under the name of Fortress Europe.

Then later that year was the Asgardsrei festival, hosted in the same Bingo Club venue as Fortress Europe, organised by figures within Ukraine’s Azov movement, including Alexey Levkin, a notorious Kyiv-based Russian neo-Nazi. Asgardsrei draws devotees of National Socialist black metal (NSBM) from across Europe. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance released a series of info cards in which it claimed that the Ukrainians were more racially pure Slavic than Russians.

News footage could not ignore how only whites were allowed to board trains leaving Ukraine. Africans and Asians were excluded, barred and kicked back

While western media downplays the Nazi element in Ukraine’s struggle but magnifies it with Russia, the interesting fact is how they constantly play it up in India. From all political sides, India is accused of having a right-wing, fascist, Hindu fundamentalist government which admires Nazis.

It is said to have an elite of upper castes, or more specifically Brahmins, who since the Aryan invasion have oppressed and dominated the darker masses. In reality India’s has a prime minister of backward caste who grew up in poverty. It has a president who has Dalit background and was raised in the extreme poverty of a mud hut.

Neither of them would meet the racial criterion of the Wagner Group or Azov Battalion. As for this Aryan invasion it is the common thread that links the neo-Nazis supporting either Ukraine or Russia, and their erstwhile liberal opponents opposing fascism. The idea of an Aryan race is the plank on which hatred of India’s backward pagan masses unites the Azov Battalion with wokeness. It is the result of constant distortion of facts in media and academia right from the time of colonialism

Information War

When the BBC’s Malcolm Muggerridge went to Kolkata to film Mother Teresa, he did not just create an icon, and make a hero out of a scheming embezzler who dressed as a nun. He further entrenched how India needs the white saviour and how Christianity needs to obliterate this seething Hindu pagan heathenism.

Since then the BBC has kept to these usual low standards when it comes to Hindu issues. Joined by France 24, CNN and even RT news, the issue in Kashmir is portrayed as one of self-determination of oppresses masses.

The genocide of Kashmir’s original Hindu inhabitants is barely mentioned, and when it is the entire reporting is warped. Facts are called conspiracy theories. With all the outpouring for refugees from Ukraine in a tragedy unfolding before our very eyes, there was scant sympathy in evidence when Pakistan-backed and western-armed jihadis forced Hindus out at gunpoint from Kashmir.

Many of them continue to languish in refugee camps. Others have had to forget their suffering from a world that does not want to know. Others internalise the oppression and blame themselves in a macabre Stockholm Syndrome.

The reason why there have been such contrasting reactions between the Hindu refugees from Kashmir and the refugees from Ukraine can be due to the fact that Ukraine is in Europe and its security is linked to that of nations surrounding it. It is a breach of international law.

But there is also the fact that they are not seen as ‘alien’. CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata found it hard to believe that the invasion was taking place in the “relatively” European city, Kyiv. It is relatively civilised and relatively European too. NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella was seen on video saying Ukraine was not Syria and its people were Christians, White people. Qatar-based global news channel, Al Jazeera, was not left behind when it came to racism.

A news presenter said, “Some of the refugees are trying to get out of Ukraine… What’s compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous, middle-class people, obviously refugees trying to get away… they are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa… They look like any European family. “

However, they have focused on something. Kashmiri Hindus do indeed not fit the above. Despite the BBC comment about them being high-caste Pandits this does not give them the necessary racial and religious qualification with which to elicit sympathy. In fact it does the very opposite.

Before it was taken off air, RT news channel was decried as a Putin mouthpiece. It boasted professional presenters, interesting programmed by independent film makers, and its own slant on world affairs. Several British politicians featured on it, notably George Gallagher, and the SNP’s Alex Salmond. Having such divisive figures was never going to evade criticism.

But then RT retorted how western governments backed anti-government groups in Russia itself. Once taken off air, the British presenters on RT were denounced as modern day Lord Haw-Haw, a reference to William Joyce who was executed in 1945 for broadcasting propaganda from Berlin to Britain during the war. However what RT did, and Iran’s Press TV before that, was merely the mirror image of what happens in not just British media, but in the corridors of power itself.

Now imagine the outcry from the UK if India was to publish a map with Ulster calling it “British-occupied Ireland”. What if India’s parliament passed resolutions for the liberation of Scotland from Britain? What is it had an all-parliamentary group for the self-determination of Cornwall. Or if Indian MPs led a mob to attack the British High Commission in Delhi demanding it leave Wales; and this done on the Queen’s birthday.

But in Britain this is actually quite normal behaviour. On 3 September 20189 Labour MP Liam Byrne joined and fomented a violent street jihad to attack the Indian High Commission in London. From across all parties there is a group in Parliament to urge that India leave Kashmir. Resolutions are passed condemning Indian military action while ignoring the plight of Kashmir’s Hindu refugees and jihad victims.

MPs across all parties condemn Hindus for defending themselves against terrorism and violence. Just this week there was an almost complete blanket ban on Hindus being killed by jihadi mobs for daring to celebrate Ram Navmi. Instead Hindu mobs were blamed for killing Muslims. It should be remembered how Jews in Germany were blamed for Kristallnacht by Goebbels in 1938. That mentality remains but is now directed at Hindus.

The reason for this is that Hindus have not grasped the importance of the information war. Facts mean nothing unless they can be forged into an effective propaganda tool. The outrage at India not condemning Russia is the same one which was outraged at the Kashmir Files movie, the abrogation of Article 370 on Kashmir, the CAA to assist minorities fleeing persecution in neighbouring Islamic states, and above all minimising or warping the violence in Godhra when Hindu pilgrims were burnt alive for daring to visit Ayodhya. In this Putin is doing nothing different with his plans to de-Nazify Ukraine, or RT news with its own version of events. They merely follow a precedent with what BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera and France 24 have done with India; claiming the threat of fascism where it does not exist.

New Order

The war in Ukraine has been a magnet for neo-Nazi militants to join in either side in order to take part in the racial Armageddon. Of course it is never as simple as that. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was born to Jewish parents. Putin’s most trusted ally is Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechnya, and Chechen fighters have been deployed to Ukraine.

While Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has backed Putin’s war as a crusade against decadent western civilisation that threatens Christianity, Salakh Mezhiev, an Islamic scholar based in Groznyhad declared the Russian invasion a “jihad.” Chechen soldiers, he explained, were fighting “for the Koran, for God” and to save both Russia and Islam from “filth” spread by NATO.

On the front lines, Russian Muslims find themselves pitted against fellow Muslims defending Ukraine. Chechens are fighting on both sides. Said Ismagilov, one of Ukraine’s top Islamic leaders, who is of Tatar origin, called on the Muslims in the world to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. Turning Russia into a white ethno state not only risks tearing apart this complex nation, but would cast doubt on the very racial purity of the majority of Russians. Founded by Swedes and populated by Slavs, the embryonic Russian state was ruled by the Mongols.

Russia was under Mongol rule for two centuries. The Golden Horde khans shaped modern Russia both ethnically and culturally. Seeing their own nations in decline, western detractors on left, right and middle idealise Russia. Putin is seen as the Christian messiah, the saviour of the white race, or someone who can stick it to western imperialism. In short he and Russia is anything the person wants to project as the antidote to the sickness facing western civilisation.

This is nothing new. In the nineteenth century German romanticists looked to India as the pure land free from Christian influences, as they constructed this idea of an Aryan race. As French philosopher Georges Sorel wrote in Reflections on Violence, a myth does not have to be true. It merely needs the power to motivate. Hence neo-Nazis can flock to the war in Ukraine to fight for a Russian army comprising obvious non-Aryan types or a Ukraine run by a Jewish president.

Cultural conservatives can idealise a pure Christian orthodox Russia that uses Muslim troops under the command of a despot who implements sharia law in Chechnya. Left and woke crowds can cheer on the attacks on western imperialism by an autocrat who would have them silenced in the same manner he has with Boris Nemtsov or the band Pussy Riot.

Even in the mainstream there is an incredible lack of any sense. China and Russia are seen as a common axis. Fact is that both of these vast countries are empires run by men who only look for their own benefit. A clash between them is not just likely but inevitable. The west feels aggrieved by being backstabbed by Russia and China, and now India.

When communism collapsed western nations could have helped build a stable, democratic Russia. Instead they treated it like a defeated enemy in the Cold War. This was combined with the now discredited neoliberal capitalism, which morphed into anarcho-capitalism in Russia. Inflation spiralled, living standards plummeted and people barely survived.

Meanwhile, mafia style groups grabbed vast swathes of wealth and influenced government in their favour. The vacuum was created for a strongman to enter politics. Enter Vladimir Putin. Helped by rising oil prices Russia regained some of its standing as conditions improved. Western nations looked the other way as the opposition was crushed, especially if it espoused liberalism. Yet after the fall of the USSR, Communist China was courted.

The myth was that if China could be brought into western commercial sphere, it would liberalise. In fact the reverse happened. China grabbed the world’s manufacturing making those western nations dependent on it. Just as it has made smaller nations around the world now under its imperial grip using generous loans, so will the fall outcome with Russia. In the meantime, however, China backs Russia; just as the USA backed Pakistan, the result of which was Osama Bin Laden and 9/11.

If western ‘experts’ continue to get it so wrong on Russia, we need to examine their false narrative on India. Repeatedly they outsource their white guilt and sordid past to India, in the same manner as the German romanticists did in the past, the white nationalists do with Russia now, and the BBC did with Muggeridge’s’ camera making Mother Teresa’s criminal enterprise look like a charity.

India is not run by an upper-caste clique, but has the most powerful positions in the country held by figures from very deprived backgrounds. There is not self-determination in Kashmir. It is jihad with Kashmir merely the stepping stone to bring the whole of India under the rule of a new caliphate were Hindus will be exterminated.

The movie Kashmir Files brings up this sordid truth which the west prefers to ignore as it was UK, USA and France that funded the terrorism which led to the 1990 genocide. For that reason, these same countries take extreme offence when India will not do what it is told.

Making the series Bridgerton full of ethnic minority characters to create a multiracial utopia that simply did not exist has not changed the mentality. To western countries, India is still the Gunga din standing on alert to the demands of the white master. Having an independent thought of his own is an anathema. At the heart of this lies the monotheist arrogance against polytheism. Russia and China after all are monotheist states; one Christian and partly Islamic, the other communist. Pakistan is also acceptable because Islam is part of western monotheism. Hinduism is of course not and represents a diametric set of values. India abstaining from the vote and following its own course of action only reminds them of this. This is now a multi fractured world far removed from the simple dualism and bifurcation into good and evil which monotheism demands.

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About The Author

Ranbir Singh : Writer and lecturer, HHR chairman : BA (Honours) History, MA History from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London : , Have lectured previously at De Montfort University, London School of Economics, Contributor to various political and human rights discussion outfits.

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