The irony couldn’t be lost. The Left, after being done and dusted in India both electorally and ideologically, has kicked off a new campaign for a new narrative. Hold your breath! The new narrative of the Left is that it should be given credit for the birth and rise of Hindu nationalism post-independence!

A number of post-colonial studies by Leftist scholars, as well as research papers, have started getting published across the world around this theme. This appears to be a part of a concerted and well-planned campaign to hijack the Hindutva narrative that is driving the Indian polity right now. The latest intellectual heist by the Left is US-based Marxist academic Meera Nanda’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason. Nanda’s book is an attempt to strengthen this latest narrative peddled by her fellow Marxist intellectuals — that the Left’s efforts to decolonise the Indian mind resulted in the birth and rise of Hindu nationalism.

The core argument of Nanda and her fellow Marxist academia is deeply flawed, as their fundamental assumption is that ‘Hindu nationalism’ is a new ideology born in the 20th century. This argument not only betrays a lack of understanding due to shoddy academic rigour but also poor research and intellectual dishonesty, as she selectively picks reference material to support a preconceived narrative.

It is important to set the record straight in this context as far as ‘Hindu Nationalism’ is concerned.

‘Hindu Nationalism’ is quite different from European or Western nationalism. In this context, it is important to bust the myth propagated by Marxist scholars like Meera Nanda that the rise of nationalism in India was an outcome of British rule and hence followed the footsteps of ‘European Nationalism.’ The trajectories of European and Hindu........

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