America, India, Bangladesh and the Weaponization of Whiteness

by Nandita Chaturvedi

​We in India stand at a new crossroads. We are part of the broader movement throughout Asia of greater democratic possibilities as more of our people emerge from the dark dungeons of illiteracy and poverty. Today we are asking as a nation, who will we be? Our history is being brought into question, and ideas that held a sacred place in our national discourse, such as satyagraha and non-alignment, are being questioned and re-examined. This is of course a necessary process, and every people must undertake the task of reassessing their history. Yet, this process needs intellectuals who are in democratic and close dialogue with the nation’s people. 

We are faced today with the presence of a middle and upper middle class who aspire to the West. This group was first intentionally manufactured to provide clerks and lawyers for the British during colonialism, responsible for ruling on behalf of the British empire as half-white men. The Indian freedom movement challenged the middle classes to examine their own people and history, and side with the tide of resistance against the British. It is then that several who were trained by the British committed class and race suicide to join and lead the freedom movement. A large section of them later joined the project of nation building under Nehru’s leadership.

The next generation would lose their ideological and moral moorings and be unable to respond as our nation faced a crisis of leadership after the assassination of Indira Gandhi and, eventually, the opening up of the economy to foreign investment and the nation to Western ideas. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this class has grown and amassed unprecedented wealth as the financial reforms benefitted them over all other sections of Indian society. They now have access to Western goods in Indian markets, and overwhelmingly send their children to either the US or Europe for education. Several of them work for international companies, and perhaps a majority of them have a family member who lives in the US. What has happened is the creation of a class of people who are aspirational to whiteness, want to escape the nations where they live and believe in the white images projected to the world through mass media, Instagram and Facebook.

Our middle classes have, then, a double consciousness. They see their people and themselves through two vantage points, one of the Indian freedom struggle, and the other of the white world. Each successive generation has lost its anchoring in the Indian and Nehruvian traditions, becoming more and more white in their world view. They are now isolated from the majority of their countrymen, in contrast to earlier times when the elite was intricately connected to the aspirations of ordinary people. The urban upper middle classes have been consumed by universal selfishness, and have no sense of their responsibility to their nations. This is easily seen in their call for a new ‘non-aligned movement’ based on pragmatism that would align India with Europe and Japan. Even in the midst of an anti-American wave they see their kin in Europe, for they are white in their self conceptualization. This grouping shows a complete lack of historical, principled or even practical thinking.

On the other hand, the creation of this class has been possible only because of the unprecedented success Indians have had as an immigrant group in the United States. Built initially on the gains of the civil rights and African American freedom movement, the acceptance of Indians in positions of economic and even political strength is second perhaps only to the Jews in America. The Indian Americans wield a disproportionate influence on the Indian mind, culture and even economy. Their visibility has led the middle class youth within India to believe that paradise awaits at the end of immigration in the form of an American corporate job, unimaginable material success and a cultural community of Indians. They have shown the world that a narrow cultural nationalism for Indian civilization is indeed compatible and maybe even complementary with becoming white. 

All of this, and their acceptance into the American racial hierarchy has made Indian Americans, specially first generation, decadent and flabby. They believed that the American dream would last forever, and the message for Indians was that there would always be a place for them in the white world order. Yet, all of this was constructed on the older neo-liberal assumptions of the American world order which are now falling away with Trump. We are now seeing the assumptions behind the veneer of Obama and Biden as the American empire turns on itself. A recent New York Times article showed the confusion among Indians trying to immigrate to the United States. Several of the people interviewed in the article claimed to have “worked hard” to get where they were, and that they deserved a job from American companies. This belief, in the context of a nation where the African American experience shows that wealth and upward social mobility is not the result of ‘hard work’, betrays a sense of entitlement never before seen among Indians. We should welcome seeing the truth of whiteness rather than retreat into cowardice at having the illusion of a benevolent America taken from us. Middle class Indian youth have a  conceptualization of their path towards whiteness, which will continue to break down. An alternative sense of self is needed.

Middle class youth in India are uneducated in their own history of struggle, and do not know what has produced them. They do not know how their education and financial prosperity has been built up on the sacrifice and struggle of their people, and in particular how they have reaped the benefits of the Nehruvian state in their education and employment. Instead, they are guided by sentiments that align well with the American liberal intelligentsia. They uphold abstract notions of ‘democracy’ which to them signifies the freedom to do as they please and have access to the products of American capitalism. Ironically, the BJP government, which is, on the surface, critical of liberal cultural norms has facilitated this by attempting to come closer to the US both economically and culturally.

To some this article may read as an angry tirade against our middle classes. Yet, a national assessment is necessary. The events in Bangladesh, Venezuela and Iran hold a warning for us. Bangladesh specially showed that a westward facing youth population, unaware of its own history can be easily manipulated to go against their governments. Facilitated by social media companies, known to work in the interests of American intelligence, protests of thousands can be organized overnight. These protests have no clear leadership, and appear ‘spontaneous’. In Bangladesh, youth burned down Sheikh Mujibur’s house, maybe unaware that they were actively facilitating the Western takeover of their self determination. Some entered Hasina’s bedroom and put on her clothes, partaking in the Western denigration and humiliation of their own people and the legacy of their freedom movement. While the concerns that initiated the protests may have legitimacy, their evaluation becomes impossible in the face of a coup d'etat.

In Iran, several thousands of protesters and hundreds, possibly thousands of security personnel have been killed in protests against the government. While the protests were initially addressing an economy made weak by Western sanctions, this turn to violence is worrying for the stability of the Iranian state. There is nothing that Israel and the American ruling elite would like more than to have a destabilized Iran descend into chaos. Israeli and American politicians have openly announced that Mossad agents are among the protesters inciting violence. Are all the violent elements in the protests direct agents, or could some of them be useful idiots? We cannot clearly know for certain, but the ideological infiltration of Iranian society by liberal Western ideas definitely opens up that possibility. This has, again, been made possible by the Iranian Americans lobbying for the West’s involvement in Iran. Lastly, Maduro’s capture from a Venezuelan security facility could not have been possible without deep infiltration of its state and government by the CIA. 

Infiltration is a time tested tool of the American empire, but in our times it has been perfected to be even more subtle. You need not pay people to become CIA agents any longer, all that is needed is the cultural and ideological conditioning of a national elite to believe in whiteness. All that is Western must appear to be good. A kind of desperation and suicidal tendency among the elite then makes possible the orchestration of anti-government movements. The lack of clarity on what will take its place once the state and government falls makes it easy for American backed forces to fill in the void and undo the gains of the anticolonial struggles fought the world over.

The Modi government’s actions show that they do not think this process can ever take place in India. They are trying to ride two horses going in opposite directions -- claiming to be pragmatically for their own ‘national interest’ while avoiding any confrontation with the West. Even in a time when Trump’s actions leave no room for vacillation, they have not made any statements defending self determination or national sovereignty in the case of Palestine, Venezuela, Iran or Bangladesh. We are left with no friends on the world stage as we try to play both sides on all world issues. We cannot afford to be cowardly in this time of global change. 

We in India need to understand that, seen without its clothing of liberal multiculturalism, the white ruling elite of America consider the darker world subhuman. At best they tolerate your participation in their world system to ensure its stability, an exchange is now crumbling as they lose the support of the American people. No amount of appeasement will get you unconditional support from the American elite, who cares only for its own survival. For the American elite, even a world destroyed by nuclear war is better than a world without them at its center. India’s strength lies in a principled foreign policy whose template was set by the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement was an extension of our freedom struggle and drew upon the Gandhian ideal of satyagraha. We need to go back to the principled positions on world events taken on by Nehru and Indira Gandhi. We must recognize the ways in which Indira Gandhi extended the policy of non-alignment with the Indo-Soviet treaty, her involvement in Bangladesh and her close friendship with the leaders of Afro-Asia. We in India have something to defend: a tradition of fighting for human freedom, and struggling to uphold the human and civilizational principles of peace, truth and justice. 

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Nandita Chaturvedi is an editor of Vishwabandhu Journal.