With the benefit of hindsight – much like Ultron deciding to destroy the world after spending a few seconds online and seeing humans interact with one another – the warrior priest Parashurama’s divine fury is quite understandable, given how the word “Brahmin” has become a bogeyman in modern parlance, not just in India but globally. For the uninitiated, Parashurama is a Chiranjeevi (an immortal, not a popular Telugu actor), who eradicated 21 generations of Kshatriyas for becoming too arrogant and to bring balance to Dharma.
The latest one to join the Brahmin Bogeyman bandwagon is Donald Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro – the living embodiment of the Peter Principle – whose current job description is simply to make inane statements about India. After claiming that Russia-Ukraine was Modi’s war, kind of like blaming Arjuna for the Trojan War, Navarro had a message for Indians: “Brahmins are profiteering at the expense of Indian people,” which means pretty soon he will be chanting “azaadi” at a government-subsidised central university, writing signed letters as a member of civil society, holding Dismantle Global Hindutva conferences, and giving sermons on Brahminical UC-cis-hetero-normativity – which in turn would mean that he might even find himself on the shortlist for “intimate” book launches.
Now, even if one were to accept that New Delhi’s desire to buy oil is simply to enhance the fiduciary capacity of the have lots, one would be hard-pressed to prove that those have lots belong to the Brahmin caste. Of course, India’s political talking heads soon got in on the act, with one group even arguing that Navarro’s usage was a reference to “Boston Brahmins,” the erstwhile elite WASPs of America, a community which was a feeder school for the White House.
But jokes and commentary aside, the Brahmin Bogeyman is a peculiar and very long-standing secular tradition of Indian politics and academia, which goes back to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. From an Ayn Rand socialist utopia in the North to a Stalinist one in the South, Brahmins have been an easy scarecrow politically. In America, it was an easy code to target high-achieving Indians, accusing them of caste oppression and complicity, with even attempts at state legislation to “eradicate caste,” which was ostensibly shut down by a powerful voice in the White House.
The Brahmin Bogeyman also sustains academia, and the inanity was perfectly captured in a session held at a leading institute where a post-colonial scholar known for speaking up for subalterns, got into an altercation with a young scholar, over the pronunciation of a surname, which led to accusations of “Brahminism” until it emerged the young scholar was actually Dalit.
The entire incident reciprocated how even someone born Dalit was not exempt from the petard that is the Brahmin Bogeyman.
Perhaps that’s because Brahminism – imaginary or real – is the easiest target in the absence of any real issues. It’s an old line of attack, taking Karl Marx’s bourgeois-proletariat class divide and seizing the means of production from capitalist forces, which is ironic because, generally speaking, seizing the means of production, as we have seen across the world, ends up meaning ceasing the means of production.
But what’s most interesting about Navarro’s attack on Brahmins – hailing from Boston or Benares – is that it would appear MAGA is now taking a leaf from their sworn enemies: the left-liberal ecosystem. But why would he do that?
The truth lies at the intersection of Occam’s and Hanlon’s Razor.
For the uninitiated, Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle that states when faced with competing explanations, the simplest one – with the fewest assumptions – is generally the most correct. Hanlon’s Razor, on the other hand, argues that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. And the reason Navarro made the comment is most probably because a lazy intern searched something online or an LLM and handed him a note.
The Brahmin Bogeyman is simply a metaphor for laziness: political, academic, ecumenical, and even spiritual. Over the years, MAGA has come up with various bogeymen who must be flogged when things go south. After Mexicans, Haitians, the Chinese, and woke people, MAGA has simply found the laziest trope that has always been popular with the global left. All in all, as an Indian, it’s heartening to see that we have found our place among the chic oppressors of the world: not just for the global liberal system but MAGA as well. The insanity, the incoherence, and even the inanity would probably make the perennially incandescent Parashurama chuckle as well.
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