In the middle of all the tragic news from Israel, two heartwarming news items should not be missed. The electorate in New Zealand has decisively thrown out Labour and voted in Conservatives. The Australians have convincingly rejected an absurd, divisive, guilt-ridden, woke proposition put out on referendum. Conservatives everywhere should rejoice. This might just be the beginning of not just winning in the political arena, but of reclaiming for the conservative cause lost territories in the universities, in the larger academic world, in journalism and, perhaps, even in bureaucracies.
The Labour government in New Zealand has been, for some years now, soft on China, woke in its pronouncements and policies, and generally participating in the elaborate exercise of guilt-tripping White voters and looking down on Western civilisation. Labour had a very woke leader in Jacinda Ardern, whose well-publicised charisma was lauded by the usual elite suspects: BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Le Monde. One can only be happy that the non-elite New Zealand voters have been left unpersuaded.
In Australia, the Labor Party has done some really bizarre things. In some provinces controlled by it, Covid-19 was used as an excuse for violating all dissenting views. Labor-controlled provincial governments virtually conducted their own pro-China policies. Fortunately, the central Labor Party has realised that being explicitly pro-China would be a vote-loser. But the completely unnecessary and now clearly disastrous idea of endlessly accusing White Australians of being racist if they did not support veto rights, not for Aboriginal people, but for selected Aboriginal elites, has backfired.
The few Australians I have met are very feisty in sports matters and will rarely, if ever, concede that they may have some weaknesses in their cricket team. But quite frankly, I have never faced any racist responses or slurs from them. My personal experience can be dismissed as anecdotal and statistically invalid. But to use the vocabulary of my Leftist friends, it is “authentic” and deserving of a “safe space”. In other words, I should have the right to loudly proclaim that White Australians are not racist!
The pusillanimous response of the Australian government to demonstrators shouting “Gas Jews” in Sydney tells us something. The Left-wing politicians not only in Australia but, as we poignantly know, in Canada are completely beholden to and under the control of diaspora groups, like the Muslim extremists in Australia. Unfortunately, this is also true in our erstwhile coloniser, Britain. Palestinian apologists are allowed to protest in large numbers even as incidents of antisemitic violence quadruple in the country.
Between obsessions with White guilt and the need for votes from select minority extremists, the Anglo-Saxon world seems to be caving in.
Also read: Stop seeing caste from western lens. Move away from ‘Sanskritisation’ to ‘Vaishyavisation’
What do these developments suggest for India?
Just like White Australians and New Zealanders have resisted and rejected accusations of racism, perhaps it is high time that the Indian middle class completely reject the totally preposterous accusation that we are bigoted, casteist, majoritarian (whatever this absurd word means) and so on. We want to get richer. We welcome everyone to join us on this journey. We like our businesspersons. They create wealth and jobs. We do not envy them; we admire them. We are unabashed about our liking for yoga, meditation, pujas, temples, and festive processions. Such celebrations have been celebrated in sculptures from our collective antiquity that have survived for not just centuries, but for millennia.
We are not a perfect society. We have our share of unfair, misogynistic, and even inhumane traditions. We do not deny them. We do not defend frozen texts of the past. We continue to improve as a society. No one can deny that women and lower classes are better off today than they were a hundred years ago. As an aside, it would not be inappropriate to mention that these groups would today have been even better off if we had not had about 40 years of the socialist Permit-License Raj.
Just like the Conservatives of Australia and New Zealand, we Conservatives in India should take a firm stance rejecting this invitation we are constantly given to “feel guilty” and keep pandering to absurd Leftist grievances. We know that they wish to destroy our society. They are the disciples of Lenin, Pol Pot, and Gramsci. They will quite casually ally with our country’s adversaries; they will quite willingly instigate divisiveness in our society. They hate so many things about us: family, faith, upward mobility, admiration for success.
We must learn from the Conservatives in Anglo-Saxon countries. They are not giving up even when the odds are stacked against them. We are today on a good wicket politically, but our universities, our newspapers and remnants of our bureaucracy are still infected by Leftist thought processes. The bureaucracy is an interesting element here. In Australia, the only support received for their silly referendum was in the Federal Capital of Canberra.
In India, we are painfully aware that our government employees wish to bankrupt the country by lobbying for the absurd and completely self-serving Old Pension Scheme. We must stand firm. If Conservatives can reassert themselves in countries like Australia, where every university has gone woke, and in countries like New Zealand, where an unsuitable leader was given the compliment of charisma, there is no need for Conservatives in India to feel worried. We can, and we should, fight it out.
Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)