 "US campus protests: What Indian students, parents and professors need to know to get serious about future")
Vidyaa vivaadaaya dhanam madaaya shaktihi pareshaam paripeedanaaya|
Khalasyaha saadhoho vipareetametad jnaanaaya daanaaya cha rakshanaaya||
(For a wicked person, education is used only to make arguments, wealth is used in displaying arrogance, and strength is used in harming others. On the other hand, a good person uses their wisdom to spread knowledge, donate wealth, and protect others.)
—Subhashitam
The fires raging through American universities at the moment, and what they mean for the Indian international student populations there, need to be taken very seriously if we are to avoid a different kind of “Partition” between families, friends, and even religions, cultures and civilisations.
That Partition is already underway. On one side are people who believe that bloodshed is morally wrong only if it happens to a university-certified, celebrity-endorsed “oppressed” group and violence done to other human beings, whether actual combatants or civilians, is permissible because they can be certified as “colonisers”. ‘On the other side are people with a range of confused opinions, baffled by the rapid normalisation of violence, dehumanisation, divisiveness, and moral relativism. The latter group may be a simple majority in the world, in America, and even in American universities, still, but is being enormously outplayed at every corner by the first.
October 7 is a new normal in the global propaganda scenario. Like the famous line from Avatar: The Last Airbender, “There is no war in Ba Sing Se,” the expectation in colleges is that one has to say “There was no Terror on October 7” (and of course, 26/11, 1971, 1528 and so on).
Lost in a Lost World
The two largest international student groups, Indians and Chinese, are probably wondering what to think or how to even think in this strange, intrusive, pervasive, and creepingly coercive situation.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsReports in the Indian press suggest that Indian students (international students) are staying away from protests because of “ideology,” or fears about losing scholarships, and even visa status. Such reports of course assume that to join the protest against Israel now is perhaps even natural, but only visa-fears and “ideology” are keeping international students away. That is how deep the assumption has spread in some sections about how correct the cause is. And among students less vulnerable to deportation issues, such as South Asian-descent American citizens, the inclination to join protests seems larger.
There is a tendency to view this situation in simple Left-Right terms, with “Palestine” on the Left and “Zionism” on the Right. But that is not the whole picture, and ends up falling into the trap set by Far-Right Religious Imperialist lobbies of conceding to them an “underdog” status in the eyes of the world, and the eyes of impressionable college students in particular. Instead, a longer, multigenerational, and of course, inter-civilisational approach is in order.
Colleges and Propaganda: From Cold War to Present
American universities are “inter-civilisational” melting pots, and proxy-sites for inter-civilisational geopolitical struggles, that much is evident now. In the distant Cold War era it was the “West” as a civilisational entity that sought to control its own universities and research in order to assert its power against the “East” (the USSR and communism) through a range of investments, from weapons-friendly scientific research to propaganda-projects ranging from creative writing and the arts to the social sciences. That was also perhaps the last time that universities saw protests on a widespread scale, against the Vietnam War. One might argue that there was a personal stake then for many students with the draft and direct US involvement in a foreign war, unlike the present situation where the social-psychology fuelling protest-energy is more complicated.
After the Cold War ended and the US moved into a more cynical form of neo-liberalism where greed and generational myopia dominated elite thinking (the Clinton era), the notion of American colleges as a site for cultural let alone civilisational reproduction dissipated. “Critique” replaced “Classics.” First, it was critique based on economic class, an issue which many students especially in government colleges from modest backgrounds could relate to. Then, it became gender, race and sexuality. In just thirty years, from “America is the Greatest,” the dominant belief in colleges now seems to be “America must fall.” But then, this was not taking place in a vacuum, but in the context of full-blown globalisation in economic, political, and of course, technological terms. Samuel Huntington presciently wrote around the start of this period that in a few years the West may not remain the West, but other civilisations (Islam and China), would remain strong themselves and assert themselves as rivals for global dominance.
And in the vast array of theatres available for global politics, both China and certain civilisationally-aware Middle Eastern countries recognised that there was a very precious commodity easily available for their taking — the young American mind. As the book The Arab Lobby by Mitchell Bard tells us, the investment in shaping American student thinking ran into hundreds of millions of dollars, and was taking place even as most people thought only about the “Israel Lobby” in America. The latter was perhaps at best a success story in Washington, in political influence. But by the 2000s, especially after the 9/11 attacks and consequent guilt in America about the Iraq war, Guantanamo, and racism towards Muslims, the destiny of how a new generation of Americans would think about themselves and other groups in the world was set.
Year after year, from K-12 classrooms, and all the way through college, a new alternative story emerged, sweeping away all the old nuances. If class-Marxism had replaced civilisational-patriotism in the 1970s and 1980s, and gender-race-sexuality replaced that concern in the following decades, by the early 2010s and certainly by the 2020s, “Islamophobia” took over as perhaps the great global concern of American education (also see the NCRI study on Qatari funding of U.S. universities here).
The Burden of ‘Gen Z’
In the early 2000s, at the peak of the 9/11 backlash and the Iraq WMD lies, the Islamophobia argument might have had some moral purchase; but by 2016, with a new political discourse (Trump), a new technology environment (the smartphone and social media), and a new generational experience (the “Gen Z,” born 1995-2010, showing peaks of unprecedented mental health concerns by 2012-2015, and strongly believing that the United States was founded in irredeemable racist sin, and that radical change in government was the only way ahead), the conditions were ripe for a triumph of propaganda.
No one who came to college in the last ten years could escape the new sociology. College teachers could see the change in “vibes” by around 2017, even if our students, having been born into the world that they knew, could not see the multigenerational change immediately. Gen Z in college was vulnerable, emotionally, and otherwise, in more ways than previous generations. It did not look up or at each other in the classroom. It avoided human contact, and excelled in screens and texting, leading iGen author Jean Twenge to comment that this was a generation that could read emojis better than human faces.
And it believed racist speech to be “violent” but had little grasping power to condemn physical violence. Perhaps this was a consequence of childhood rooted in “safetyism” as Jonathan Haidt has called it, where verbal violence is probably the greatest source of hurt they have faced, while images of physical violence like the Hamas videos of October 7 perhaps appear to some of them like scenes in a video game. Desensitization? Loss of human empathy? Hard to say. But little surprise perhaps that after the October 7 massacre, about 50% of Gen Z and Millennial voters were saying the attacks were “justified.” This could not have happened after 9/11. In those days, students asked why bin Laden did it, or why America was hated. But no one rationalized the murder of civilians the way it is happening now.
The Indian ‘Cultural Difference’ (For Now)
The crisis in knowledge, moral understanding, and what constitutes purpose and duty in life today as a student is enormous.
Indian international students, especially at the graduate level, may come to study abroad for a variety of reasons, but there is still a sense of purpose and duty that is drawn from more traditional social customs. Compared to the data from surveys of Western youth (Gen Z), youth in India still seem to worry about the future in terms of familial duties; getting a job, getting married, taking care of elders, and so on.
The idea of marriage, and even a steady relationship, are in decline in the West (Jean Twenge talks about the phrase “catching feelings” which is popular among the Gen Z; this is the idea that it is “uncool” to form emotional bonds of a long-term sort, whereas “Hooking Up” for quick physical intimacy is fine).
To summarise, the student body, especially at the undergraduate level, is one which has experienced tremendous mental stresses at the early teen age itself thanks to the impact of phones and social media (see Jonathan Haidt’s website for more). This domestic student body also includes many America-raised students of Indian descent.
Now, a distinction has to be made between different kinds of Indian-origin students for purely academic reasons; based on religion, colleges have quietly normalised the division of students into different categories of concern as possible victims of racism and bigotry. Islamophobia is seen as a serious concern faced by Muslim students. Antisemitism is also acknowledged as real, but perhaps increasingly only as a form of lip-service. But Hinduphobia is not even in the ball-park of either legal-political power or perceived cultural legitimacy in campuses. Not unlike some Judaic studies academics eager to fight “Zionism” rather than anti-Jewish terrorism, most “South Asia Studies” and Hinduism/ Religious studies professors fail to acknowledge that Hindus can have human rights too, and dismiss Hindu student pleas for recognition of Hinduphobia as “Hindutva.”
‘Kill the Hindu’, Save the ‘South Asian’
Given a lack of empathy from Indian-descent professors (intellectual corruption and cluelessness among the social sciences and cowardice and Indian political cult-worship among the STEM lot), Hindu students are facing a lonely path ahead as they wade into campuses turned into turf wars for global power games.
There are more and more behavioural expectations in college placed on supposedly oppressor-groups like Hindus. While these expectations perhaps appear non-existent at the graduate school level except in rare cases, undergraduate Hindu students have certainly been speaking about it.
Simply put, you cannot be Hindu in college, except in the terms dictated to you by bizarre, hateful, genocide-priming nominal “Hindu” lobby groups set up seemingly for this purpose of grooming Gen Z Hindus into shame, pain and self-erasure.
This tactic of social engineering is not new at all. In the early 1900s, there were “German” American organisations set up to spew hate against other German-Americans as the United States prepared for war in Europe. Before that, there was the even more egregious example: the Native American boarding school project which enacted a policy called “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. They kidnapped indigenous children, cut off their traditional long-hair, removed sacred adornments, dressed them in drab prison-like uniforms, tortured them into abandoning mother tongue and gods, and trained them to be servants for white masters.
“Civilisations” with serious “power trips” do that. Changing name, language, appearance, sense of self; this is how they play their nastiest games.
How Far Down Can You Keep Your Head?
This, briefly, is the ominous reality that students from Hindu families have to know they are walking to. At the everyday level, of course, life may seem mostly pleasant. You can study, have a little fun, keep your head down, graduate, get a job and go on with life. Hindu students have been doing this in American colleges year after year, decade after decade, and have seemingly done “very well”. But what is becoming clear to at least some students now as they enter college, is the fact that the degree to which you have to “keep your head down” has increased a lot, lot more than before.
I see so many videos now of young Hindus in American colleges, and I can see what they are going through (and not just Hindus, but others too) as a form of “hyperpersuasion” stress. The old forms of social status signalling and “fitting in” which existed in American high schools and colleges has morphed into a proxy-battleground for global geopolitical forces, expressing themselves as psychological power-plays. Everyone now has to have a stand, a position; if you don’t actively “perform” against something, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, Brahminism, Hindutva, you are then actually causing it yourself. Bush said “with us or against us,” at a geopolitical level. Today, it’s a mind-game gnawing at young lives day after day.
Step Up, Gen-Parents!
Our young, Hindu students in some clear ways, other students too in more complex ways, are all in need of a responsibility and commitment from our generations (their parents, teachers, professors, community leaders) unlike any other in history. It is not enough to “provide” just economic and educational springboards to our children. We have to be actively engaged in what is going on in their minds, in fact, all our minds, thanks to the smartphone level wargame being done on us. What we have to bring to this engagement though is more than just casual cliches and talking points picked up from the usual Left-Right online spats, but an all-out effort at multi-generational memory revival.
What we are all up against is becoming increasingly clear. The challenges include both what is out there, as described above, and what is lacking in us, which is perhaps a topic for a follow-up piece.
For now, the following Subhashitam might help us recognise the real nature of the theatre playing out in American colleges a little better:
Vanaani dhato vahne sakhaa bhavati maarutah.
Sa eva deepa naashaaya krushe ksyaasti sahrudayam
The same wind which acts like a friend to the fire when it is raging through a forest will turn around and blow it out when the fire is but a small flame in a lamp. Where then, is kind-heartedness?
The money that Indian students and parents slog and save and send to US colleges seem to be like the small flame here, while the billions that foreign governments and lobbies spend seem to be like a raging forest fire commanding the wind itself.
What will be the future of students born in a “gnyana jyoti” culture like ours against such odds? Will American higher education ever find its heart (and mind) again?
(To be continued)
The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C. Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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