Most people in the West may recognise Narendra Modi but might have no idea who the Prime Minister of India is, says Australian sociologist and academic Salvatore Babones. “I have heard prominent Australians in the international affairs world calling him ‘President Modi’,” he told Firstpost.
It is this low-information milieu that worries him. “In a low-information society, a minuscule but deeply institutionalised voice sets the narrative for the entire society. Unfortunately, this voice in the West is inherently anti-India,” he said.
Right now this narrative is confined to academia and journalism, said Babones. “But then in a low-information environment, as is the case in the West, the anti-India image being created in academia and journalism mostly gets filtered in the public sphere,” he added.
Prof Babones sees it as a relic of the colonial past and “the idea that Hinduism is a heathen religion”.
“Even though most Western critics of India would be secular and atheist, that cultural aversion to non-Abrahamic faiths, particularly to Hinduism, remains strong. The second reason may be the romanticisation of Islam in the West. They would thus call India a fascist nation, which is an absolutely bogus and fake narrative, but not say a word on the lack of democracy in, say, Saudi Arabia. There are so many people in the West wanting to be Lawrence of Arabia: While they would not want an Islamic caliphate for their own State, they romanticise it for Muslims,” he said.
Prof Babones also called the Western intellectual class’s bluff on liberalism, especially vis-à-vis Islam. Giving the example of Prophet Muhammad, he said that the Western intelligentsia as a class doesn’t respect Prophet Muhammad out of reverence but due to sheer fear. “They believe Muslims are aggressive and prone to violence, thus they should not be provoked. Had they been true to their calling, they would have ideally expected Muslims to be peaceful and democratic, like the rest of us,” he said. They see Muslims as naturally violent and anti-democratic, and thus they prefer them to be “left alone”, Babones added.
“This is what I call the tyranny of low expectations. The nexus between Western Islamic scholars and Muslim political Islamists is an unholy alliance. The real challenge for a democratic country like India will not be so much of Indian Islamists or the Muslim nations, but the unholy alliance between international Islamists and Western academics,” he said, as he emphasised how India’s ties with the Muslim world have always been strong. “Actually India, more so today’s India under Narendra Modi, has good relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. India doesn’t have any problem with the Muslim world. India has a problem with Western academia and journalists who often collude with global Islamists.”
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