Allah’s apostle said: “I have been ordered by Allah to fight the people till they say that none has the right to be worshipped except Allah” – Sahih Bukhari, 1.8.387

Now, just imagine the Panch Makkars – the Five Frauds – Mullah, Missionary, Marxist, Media (Lutyen’s), and Macaulay Putras as the apostles. Then you can easily add the corollary that ‘none has the right to be worshipped other than what these apostles recommend’. It is in this context that one has to understand the Book Jihad undertaken by certain apostles of this disreputable cabal. Make no mistake, the de-platforming of the book ‘Delhi Riots 2020 – An Untold Story’ by Monika Arora and others by Bloomsbury India was on the dictation of these self-same apostles. The truth is now out that the impresario in this theatre of the absurd was the writer of bad fictional history, the Mughalophile William Dalrymple with the side cast being taken up by Khaled Hosseini and Kamilia Shamsie. As they say in Hindi movies – bas naam hi kaafi hai.

This is probably the first instance of a book being de-platformed, withdrawn, or banned even before it was released and read by anyone. The first instance was that of Savarkar’s ‘First War of Indian Independence’. That book was banned even before it could be published.

The reasons are not difficult to fathom. The phenomenon of the Liberals having been infiltrated by the Leftists is starkly visible for some time now. The Western Liberalism, in any case, was never very liberal. It was heavily steeped in Christian values that are essentially 2-valued, and have a closed definition of ethics and morality based on their Book. These values have found their echo right from the time the scandal of Indology started taking root in Europe in the mid-19th century. These values hold the Biblical chronology to be valid, are deeply anti-science, and are totally illiberal as they privilege their values and morals over the rest of the world’s civilisation. This is a variant of the classical Eurocentrism, as evident in Hegel and even his critics like Nietzsche.

This supremacism of the West was inherited by the Marxists, and as the Liberals started inching closer to the progressivism of the Left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the distinctions blurred. The economic Left was defeated, but the Cultural Left took over, and smug in the defeat of hard Communism, the Liberal Right lost its sense of proportion in the West.

In India, thanks to Nehruism and total control of the Academia vested in the Left by successive Congress government, Liberalism was stillborn. The most you needed to be called a liberal was to favour a pro-market economy, while culturally you could remain and thrive as a liberal in spite of holding completely bigoted views towards the most beautiful thought system ever devised, the Dharmik society, covering all Indic systems. The common thread of a different Time concept, multi-valued Logic, an Epistemology with direct evidence being treated as the highest evidence, Cosmology of the infinite, Liberation as the goal of life, and immanence of divine as the high value, ran through all of them. The West did not understand and appreciate it then, and does not appreciate it today. The only persons who regarded the Indic values with any kind of high regard have been the western scientists. The Liberal World in the West has been blissfully dismissive of the Indic values. It was, therefore, poetic justice when the Science community in the West distanced itself from the Left during the BLM agitations, another chapter in the violence of the Left.

In India, the Left has enjoyed primacy in Academia and Media for so long that it has been unable to cope up with the challenges thrown to it by the democratization process of the Media brought in by the proliferation of Social Media. It has tried to meet this challenge by throwing down the gauntlet of intellectual privilege, Nehruvian entitlements, fine English, and loads of bluff and bluster. Reason and rationalism have been missing almost entirely.

The Left then suffered a terrible loss of political power. The decline set in in 2009, with a terrible blow in 2011 in West Bengal, and was complete in 2014. The friendly quasi-Left of Congress also went into a terminal decline. Now they fear losing their final bastion of JNU as the old hags retire and a transparent process of recruitment threatens their hegemony.

So you have to understand their discomfiture at their space being taken away even in the field of publishing by the Indic authors. The Bloomsbury fiasco is a result of this existential trauma of the Left. Yet, they won the small battle of de-platforming the book by Monika Arora and others – Delhi Riots 2020, the Untold Story, but lost the war when an Indic publisher immediately took over and sold 15000 copies on Day 1 of pre-orders. The opinion editor of Print India fumed at her liberal colleagues and called their act as ‘another self-goal by the Liberals’. She darkly pointed out that it could lead to an Indic publishing house getting established. She was proved right within a few hours as the existing publishing house, Garuda Prakashan, jumped in immediately and made the book, its authors, and the cause famous. That it will also earn financial rewards at the expense of Bloomsbury India is also clear.

As for Bloomsbury India, most of the Indic authors have withdrawn, including yours truly. It has been defamed so badly, and it looks doubtful whether they will survive going forward.

And yes, make no mistake, Freedom of Speech and Expression is the last thing on the mind of those who protested against the Delhi Riots book. They had no qualms in another book glorifying the Shaheen Bagh protest, blatantly anti-India, being published by the self-same Bloomsbury. It was all about loss of power, privilege and entitlement that they sought to protect. Now Bloomsbury should start worrying about the Harry Potter Series, its most valuable product, and its activist authors, William Dalrymple, Khaled Hosseini, and Kamilia Shamsie. We, who quit, will ensure that these titles also do not find any takers except with their cosy club members of the deep Left.

Bye, bye, Bloomsbury…….

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