A defeatist tendency exists in the psyche of many modern Indians that is perhaps unparalleled in any other country today. An inner conflict bordering on a civil war rages in the minds of the country�s elite. The main effort of many of its cultural leaders appears to be to pull the country and her culture down or at least to remake it in a foreign image. To this end they always support forces that are not only alien, but even hostile to India and her civilization.
The elite of India suffers from a fundamental alienation from the traditions and culture of the land that would not be less poignant had they been born and raised in a hostile country. The ruling elite appears to be little more than a native incarnation of the old colonial rulers and other invaders who sought to destroy the native civilization. This new English-speaking aristocracy prides itself in being disconnected from the very soil and people that gave it birth.
There is probably no other country in the world where it has become a national pastime among its educated class to denigrate its own culture and history, however great. When great archaeological discoveries of India�s past are found, for example, they are not a subject for national pride but are ridiculed, as if they represent only the imagination of backward chauvinistic elements within the culture.
There is probably no other country where the majority religion, however enlightened, is ridiculed, while minority religions, however fundamentalist, are doted upon. The majority religion is taxed and regulated while minority religions receive tax benefits and have no regulation. While the majority religion is carefully monitored and limited as to what it can teach, minority religions can teach what they want, even if anti-national or backward in nature. Books are banned that offend minority religious sentiments but praised if they cast insults on majority beliefs.
There is probably no other country where regional, caste and family loyalties are more important than the national interest. Political parties exist not to promote a national agenda but to sustain one region or group of people in the country at the expense of a whole. Each group wants as big a piece of the national pie as it can get, not realizing that the advantages it gains means deprivation for other groups. Yet when those who were previously deprived gain power, they too seek the same unequal advantages that cause further inequality and discontent.
India�s affirmative action code is by far the most extreme in the world, trying to raise up certain segments of the population regardless of merit, and prevent others from gaining positions however qualified they may be. In the guise of removing caste, a new casteism has arisen where one�s caste is more important than one�s qualifications either in gaining entrance into a school or in finding a job when one graduates. People view the government not as their own creation but as a welfarestate from which to take the maximum personal benefit,regardless of the consequences for the country as awhole
.Outside people need not pull Indians down. Indians are already quite busy keeping any of their people and the country as a whole from rising up. They would rather see their neighbors or the nation fail if they are not given the top position. It is only outside of India that Indians succeed, often remarkably well, because their native talents are not stifled by the dominant cultural self-negativity and rabid divisiveness that exists in the country today.
Pandering to foreign interests to further their ambitions, Indian politicians will manipulate the foreign press to denigrate their opponents, even if it means spreading lies and rumors and making the country an anathema in the eyes of the outside world. Petty conflicts in India are blown out of proportion in the foreign media, not by foreign journalists but by Indians themselves seeking to use the media to score points against their own opponents in the country. The Indians who are responsible for the news of India in the foreign press spread venom and distortion about their own country, perhaps better than any foreigner who dislikes the culture ever could.
The killing of one Christian missionary becomes a national media event of anti-Christian attacks while themurder of hundreds of Hindus is taken casually as without any real importance. Even when it was exposed thatseveral Christian organizations were engaged in a childkidnapping and selling racket using adoption as a cover,there was no outrage in the media, in striking contrast toits behavior during real and imagined attacks on Christians.Missionary aggression is extolled as socialupliftment, while Hindu efforts at self-defense againstthe conversion onslaught are portrayed as rabid fundamentalism.One Indian journalist recently lamented that Western armies would not come to India to chastise the political groups he was opposed to, as if he was still looking for the colonial powers to save him!