How India’s Far Left Fuels White Nationalism Abroad

The most common mistake when analyzing India is transplanting the Western Left and Right onto India. Rather than viewing India in terms of (Western) Left versus Right, it’s better to understand India’s political struggle as gravitational – between centripetal forces that pull India towards a civilizational core versus centrifugal forces that push India towards its diverse and sometimes isolated expressions.

The centripetal side believes India’s unity rests on Dharma – the ancient, elastic idea that has bound its many peoples for millennia. The centrifugal side comprises those who either shrink into parochial identities of caste and language or look outward to ideologies imported from elsewhere, whether from the Middle East or the West. One side emphasizes the whole; the other, the parts.

The centrifugal section of this tension then produces an intelligentsia that grows nauseous of the ideas of Hinduism and even India itself. Instead, this block attaches primacy to things like caste, (non-Hindu) religion, linguistic identity, or superfluous class markers such as how one speaks English, what shows one prefers on Netflix, or who can produce the least catastrophic Indian variant of pasta (no doubt still overcooked and over-sauced). They curse fate for birthing them as an Indian.

And it’s from this block that the archetypal Indian Leftist emerges. An Indian Leftist despises everything Hindu, and thus naturally, everything Indian. They turn their noses up at a lotus. They avert their gaze from the glare of orange. They view yoga as fascist and Diwali as Naziesque. India is inherently irredeemable to them. Accordingly, you will hear some common phrases from them like slavishly pleading that they’re “not that type of Indian” or mouthing off “can confirm I’m Indian” to affirm the most vitriolic of racist bile or the classic “I swear I’m one of the good ones!”

So what happens when this self-loathing specimen escapes its Indian environment into infinite cyberspace? Well, like any other Indian travelling abroad, they bring way too much baggage.

The Horseshoe

If you peruse the hellscape masquerading as a timeline on X, you will certainly encounter some anti-Indian sentiment. The reasons for this are for another time. But for every reference to cow excrement, impotent deportation threats, jibes at monkey gods, or generic dehumanization of Indians, you will find an Indian Leftist trailing at the boot of a white nationalist like a used toilet paper piece.

This is because of a shared antipathy toward all things Indian.

The Indian Leftist sees Hinduism as an oppressive, casteist, and Islamophobic force whose only saving grace is the occasional wayward reference to feminism by way of a goddess that is otherwise maligned for the other 364 days of the year. The white nationalist views Hinduism as a barbaric, heathen faith that must be shattered by the cross of Christ and the one true God.

The Indian Leftist hates Indians for not bowing to global ideas of left-liberalism and instead daring to elect a government that does not wallow in the squalor of a plurality of its population defecating in the open and rotting in slums. Instead, this government delivers economic growth, strikes back against terrorism, honors the Gods, and indeed this government drags Indians kicking and screaming from the streets and fields that they once used as an open-air toilet. The Indian Leftist hates Indians for choosing basic human dignity over being permanent practitioners of poverty porn and one-sided secularism.

The white nationalist hates Indians because they are simultaneously low-IQ but replacing white elites, incompetent subhumans but taking their jobs, flooding the country but ultra 0.0000001% selected, and casteist against other Indians but ethnic nepotists––thus we have Schrödinger’s Indian. The schizophrenia of India’s rise as a country that cannot clean its streets properly yet can execute moon landings cracks the brittle brain matter of these basement-dwelling malcontents. That is not to mention the rage over the increasing visibility and achievements of India’s diaspora.

Perhaps the most ironic element in this tryst is how white nationalists, ever skeptical (and rightly so) of American left-wing media, will gladly borrow tropes written by Indian leftist journalists in papers like the New York Times or Washington Post as ammo in their assault against Indians.

Yet this now begs the question of how are these American media outlets finding so many of these self-hating Indians?

Clayton Bigsby

Dave Chappelle’s infamous 2000s comedy sketch show, the Chappelle’s Show, featured various memorable characters. But it is one man in particular we need to recall.

Clayton Bigsby was a blind black man who believed he was white. He became a high-profile white supremacist author and Klansman, extolling the depravity of blacks and greatness of whites in an outrageous, humorous fashion. At a pivotal moment in the sketch, Bigsby delivers a speech in full KKK garb, removes his hood, and shocks the audience and later himself with the realization that he is indeed black.

Similarly, many Indian Leftists simply do not conceptualize themselves as “Indian.” They attach themselves to other centrifugal identities or are just frank separatists.

A Khalistani may look like the most stereotypical Indian in the world (a brown man with a beard and a turban), but will still try to explain he is ‘Punjabi not Indian.’ An Indian Muslim dunking on ‘cow-piss drinkers’ is just another ‘jeet’ to a white nationalist. Dinesh D’Souza can hail Mary 500 times but will still be told to ‘go back.’ An Indian Leftist may twist their accent into another dimension but will still be mocked with SAAAAAAR. Watching this from a third-person point of view is like reliving the Clayton Bigsby sketch from Chappelle’s Show.

It is simultaneously hilarious and yet disturbing because it is real. And this reality increasingly has consequences.

You Can’t Unsee It

If you think I’m exaggerating, look what happens when the Clayton Bigsby’s of India see daylight.

Consider Palavi Patel, a self-styled “progressive” politician whose modus operandi is caste-mongering and insulting Hinduism. The common fecal obsession of ‘cow dung and urine’ smears the lips of Western white nationalist and Indian Leftist alike. With accents stripped, their voices and vocabularies become identical.

Across the globe, Trump’s trade czar Peter Navarro lifted another common trope straight from India’s Left: that a tiny cabal of Brahmins enslaves all other Indians. As I’ve remarked in my article about caste, it is ludicrous to claim that Brahmins, a group comprising about 3-4% of India’s population, have mind controlled 97% of other Indians across 4000 years and 2 million square miles. The irony of all this is that Brahmins are not India’s wealthiest caste. Those would obviously be India’s merchant castes, the Vaishyas.

Every so often, the Indian Left becomes alarmed when white nationalists borrow their slurs and tropes wholesale. They bemoan how the Western far right’s lifting of Indian leftist caste rhetoric undermines their own efforts of caste conflict. Those who are more callous simply hop on the pipeline and recycle hatred towards Indian diaspora to dump on Indians at home.

When a Canadian nativist recently spat that Diwali celebrants were “braindead Indians” turning his country into a “shithole,” some (not me) would expect Indian progressives to recoil. Instead, a sitting MP of West Bengal’s far-left and ethnochauvinist Trinamool Congress endorsed open anti-Indian hatred resoundingly.

These are not simple coincidences. They are signs of a deeper pathology – that of a civilizational self-hatred so toxic that it constantly seeks outside validation of their self-harm. Which brings us to the question that of course follows such evidence: “Why does this slavishness persist?”

The Apostate

Ancient Indians did not have a concept of apostasy. India, in its infinite diversity blooming into multitudes like a kaleidoscope of cultures, possessed acceptance for various ways of life. At most, we find those who transgress caste norms to be rendered outcaste but rarely victims of genocidal violence. There was a tolerance of deviance, which later morphed into stoicism towards betrayal.

Those that were jettisoned from their caste or clan were not hounded by knives in the night. They would form their own groups or would join new groups that had arrived. Castes that allied with foreign or more powerful kings were seen as wily and crafty, ensuring their survival rather than traitors to the common cause of the people of the land. In the zero-sum game of community versus community that defined Indian society, those castes who found a way to rise in power, no matter how devious and deceitful the method, would be the ones with the bigger stick.

This was the Law of the Fish, Matsya Nyaya as the ancients referred to it, where a big fish would always devour a smaller fish. This was just how the world worked, at least in the absence of a righteous ruler or Dharma. In dire times, each community would gnaw and scrape at each other in order to escape the fate of being at the bottom and gorge on the glory of being allied with the victorious. As such, the concept of the commons melted in the heat of conflict, and treason became truth.

So, Indian Leftists are just a continuation of this normalized treachery and tolerance for deviance. Indian Leftists transgressing Indian norms is alright because India is a pluralistic and fantastically tolerant society open to new ‘castes’ forming as they had for millennia. That they ally with those who despise Indian religion and people is par for the course of Indian history, where Hindu kings would look the other way when their Muslim lords would smash idols and destroy temples, as long as they got their bag. There is a long-standing sickness in Indian society that is an unfortunate drawback of its beautiful diversity and large-heartedness. Thus, what the Indian Leftist does is not new at all. They are simply being quintessential Indians.