VAMSEE JULURI@VamseeJuluri
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Peter Navarro’s Jabs at Brahmins Won’t Help President Trump Make America Great Again
Vamsee Juluri & C. Raghothama Rao
"Jalajeṣṭanibhākāraṃ jagadīśapadāśrayam
jagatītalavikhyātaṃ jagannāthaguruṃ bhaje."
-Harikathāmruthasāra
We begin with a tribute to a Brahmin. His name at birth was Srinivasacharya. But history remembers him by the name Jagannatha Dasa (1728-1809); the name his guru adorned him with when he undertook a vow to dedicate his life to singing the glories of Vithala for, and with, the people. Today, the ninth day of the month of Bhadrapada, is observed as the day of his “Aradhana,” or adoration. His songs were sung then by thousands of devotees then, as they are now. His most famous literary work, the Harikathamruthasara, offers profound and yet practical guidelines for living in joy and adoration of Lord Vishnu. While most other Brahmin scholars and saints of his time wrote complex scholarly works, Jagannatha Dasa, along with Purandara Dasa and others, made such philosophical ideas not just meaningful, but a “lived reality” for the people of Vijayanagara and other regions of Bharat. That “lived reality” of course was not that the people were inferior, stupid, sinful, irredeemable, or otherwise “lowly,” but simply that all of them, every one of them was a “pratibimba” or reflection of that one absolutely resplendent, flawless, beautiful, and good and supremely divine entity.
It may be nice to also picture the wider global context of the time that Jagannatha Dasaru and his Brahmin contemporaries lived. An atlas of world history shows the world in 1763 (about halfway through his life) as dominated by two vast empires, both with a clear religious order to them. Sprawling across West Asia and North Africa and Eastern Europe is what the map calls the “Islamic economic area” centered around the Ottoman Empire. North and South America are colored pink, for Europe, newly reorganized from what had been a vast “Holy Roman Empire,” but busy with religious “differences” within Christians nonetheless. India is divided between the Mughal empire, the Marathas, Mysore and others. The map also indicates that the “Atlantic slave trade was at its peak.” And in the same century, even as the Haridasa singers spread in India, another kind of religious fervor was rising in Saudi Arabia, a school of thought that would be called Wahhabism.
Fast-forward to the present. The word “Brahmin” is bouncing off our eyes and ears from our phones and tablets and TV sets. Peter Novarro, the United States government’s trade counselor, accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of buying cheap oil from Russia in order to benefit “Brahmins” over ordinary Indians. While reasonable observers noticed that it was a rather provocative slur, some Indian politicians took the surprising view that Navarro’s comment was a mere difference in idiom, that he meant it in the manner of the phrase “Boston Brahmin,” connoting wealth generally, rather than a particular ethnic group.
Boston Brahmins vs. Blaming Brahmins
Navarro’s Brahmin comment needs to be seen not in some vague wider context of American idioms about Boston Brahmins (which in recent years was used only once prominently, when the Wall Street Journal called the Democrats’ college loans policies a “Brahmin” one), but simply in terms of his own messaging. The escalation of his tweets into both tastelessness, and truth-lessness, have been stunning. Navarro entered something like what Democrats might call “Birther” territory by labelling the Russia-Ukraine conflict as “Modi’s war.” This was the first shift in terrain, moving the goalpost not just from a dispute about reciprocal tariffs (as Trump’s earlier comments in the year used to sound like) to a contrived causal claim about how Modi is responsible for American taxpayers having to fund Zelensky (a few days ago an American guest on Republic TV was even more forthright on this new party line; he essentially shouted that India had Ukrainian blood on its hands).
After the leap in logic and causal tenability, Navarro then brought in an outrightly Hinduphobic element to his diatribes; in a tweet accusing India of “madness,” he used a striking color photograph of Prime Minister Modi wearing religious markings and meditating. Navarro (or his team) could have just as easily built on their earlier narrative about India-Russia culpability (however flawed that claim), by using a picture of Modi and Putin, for example. But the fact that such a dramatically Hindu-themed photograph was used, with a “dot” on the Prime Minister’s brow at that, has to be noted. The “Brahmin” invocation therefore isn’t just about inequality, or India, or trade, or Russia. It is a Hinduphobic trope, and Hinduphobia is racism.
And as international propaganda, it is deeply effective. Most Americans know very little about Prime Minister Modi. College students often assume he is from the wealthy, oppressive Brahmin-caste (a natural assumption for them, considering the newspapers call him a religious nationalist). Novarro is messaging insultingly, but also strictly in concordance with the usual foreign intervention playbooks, making a distinction between the "people" and the elites (in this case, the "Brahmins"). This kind of rhetoric stoking class, race, and religious resentments all at once, is something they seem to believe will not have pushback.
All Animals are Equal, Until...
There is understandable anger in India about the seeming betrayal by President Trump, who, after all, received some of the warmest welcomes any foreign leader has ever seen in India. That warmth was of course dismissed by critics as simply bonding over Islamophobia by Trump and Modi supporters, but it was perhaps more complex. Even in the 2016 elections, the Indian American vote was overwhelmingly pro-Democrat. If it shifted somewhat by 2024, some of it may well have been because of the overtly pro-India and pro-Hindu messaging made by Trump, and the brazenly discriminatory profiling in rhetoric and policies advanced by some of the Democrats around speciously argued “anti-caste” laws like SB403 in California. In any case, just like the bewildered animals in the last scene of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Hindus are probably looking at Republicans demonizing Brahmins and Democrats demonizing Brahmins and wondering if they can even tell who is who any more.
Regardless of who wins or loses elections in America, the “Brahmin” as a bogeyman seems destined to remain, for now. The reasons for why a lie should remain for so long though remains a fascinating one.
Inequality, discrimination, oppression, violence, greed, all of these exist in the world. But anyone sincere about fighting these would get to a truthful account of how these play out, and not hide behind diversions and distractions. Unfortunately, whether it is politicians in India or America, they all know that truth, about Brahmins, about sanatana dharma, or just truth, will force them to address the real issues. So, to the scapegoat they turn; Brahmins, Hindus, and as they often used to in Europe, Jews.
Like the famous meme which shows a British colonial office telling a native massaging his feet that the other native fanning him is the “Aryan invader,” the rich and powerful of this world, whatever their hue, will find a motherlode of distractions and lies to find in the figure of the Brahmin.
From New World Order to New World Truth Order
But the big picture to look forward to beyond the present testiness between India and America is this. Whether we realize or not, we are moving into a new world order. In the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR, they called it NWO. Just another “NWO” would not mean much. But an NWTO, a New World Truth Order, that should be the goal of India’s push now.
India has the oldest unbroken cultural memory alive left in the world today, and there is no surprise in why countries like Japan and China and others in Southeast Asia and elsewhere gravitate at least at the level of the heart towards us. They are “oldies” too. The other “oldies,” centered out of the Middle East, have much to sort out. The oldest of them sees us as friends, but old as we both are, and bashed as we both are, the differences are complex.
The US meanwhile is divided between competing visions of its future and past; the Dems and the “Wokes” saw their own past as pure racist evil and wanted to flee from it into a utopian-equality future heroically heralded by the likes of Hamas. The Reps and the “MAGAS” on the other hand, for all their talk of enlightened post-racist conservative values, meritocracy, and legal immigration, turned on the one group they saw as an even bigger rival to them than anyone else, though it was perhaps the one group which was trying hardest to stay legal, respectful, and fit in. The Great-Againers looked to their past to shape their future, and somehow found it was not the Crusades and the “Saracens” they had to fight now but their own primal myth-battle itself; their war against the Roman Empire with its priests and “Pagans.”
Everyone has to deal with the lies they were fed now. Including India.
It is indeed strange that the central trope in that system of lies which is becoming exposed again and again is that of the Brahmin.
Neither America, with its “Red-Green-MAGA” madness, nor Europe, nor West Asia, nor the rest of the world, can get over its interrupted (and incepted) memory problem without India.
There can be no new world truth order without India.
There can be no India without the truth about sanatana dharma.
And there can be no sanatana dharma without truth about the Brahmanas.
From 16th century colonial missionaries to 21st century free trade evangelists, there must be a reason why everyone who wants to come to rob us settles on the same bogeyman isn’t it?
If you admire your ancestors for resisting a thousand years of colonialism and bestowing you with the freedom to own your own name and gods, take a lesson. They were not fools. There had to have been reasons for why they did not reject the gods, or the community that was charged by the rest of society with the greatest honor and most rigorous responsibility for the safekeeping – and dissemination - of knowledge of the gods. As for our knowledge of humans, the following verse from a kirtana in Kannada by Pranesha Dasa, a disciple of Jagannatha Dasa, tells us quite a lot about the realities of the supposed wealth and privilege of Brahmanas in late 1700s Indian society:
Beegara utike bhogavu
Jolavu ogara braahmanareleyolu
Khammane thuppa thammaniyavarige
Khammatu thuppa devabraahmanarige.
The people are feasting upon lavish food
While serving devas and brahmanas
With just maize and foul-smelling ghee.
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