About a year ago, I remember liberals on Twitter widely sharing and praising a video of Audrey Truschke, where she apparently ‘destroys an entire bhakt rant with 4 simple words.’ She was speaking at some event, when a guy, evidently a Hindutva supporter from the audience, confronted her. With mike in hand and an opportunity to speak in public, he unloaded angrily on her. He gave her a piece of his mind, on everything from twisting Indian history to being a white person interfering with our affairs.
It didn’t work. Audrey was completely cool. She pointed out her credentials as a trained historian. She added smoothly that it must be that Hindutva supporters cannot bear to hear strong opinions from a woman. Leave aside for a moment what you think of the two people speaking in the video and the arguments from their respective ideological camps. There is no doubt that Audrey won the argument just by staying calm and choosing the right keywords. The guy who confronted her was angry, inexperienced in public speaking, and let his emotions get the better of him.
I had written a blog post about this at the time, noting that Hindutva supporters often fall short of choosing the right words (no pun intended) for the modern audience. This is deeply ironic since Hindutva is fundamentally a movement for the emancipation of a community that has been oppressed for one thousand years. In the modern world, victimhood is the most sought after commodity. And nobody has as much of it as Hindus do. We just lack the tools (i.e., right words) needed to exploit it. And yet, the modern world has labelled us as historical oppressors rather than victims. It’s like people having to line up for bread in Venezuela, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. I had added that the day Hindus learn to speak woke (i.e., pick up the right tools), we will become the highest moral authority on earth.
That day hasn’t quite arrived, though Hindus are getting better at using their tools. Why do you suppose liberals fight so hard to deny representation to Hindus on every forum? They know that with practice, Hindus will easily learn the tricks of the trade. Give that man from the audience five years of experience with public speaking and he will get the better of Truschke easily.
But this post is not about what Truschke said a year ago. Instead, it is about an amusing turn of events that I did not anticipate in the whole Audrey Truschke affair. Get a load of this. (By the way, I’m stealing these screenshots from around the web. You see, Truschke blocks people a lot because she can’t handle criticism).
And it gets ‘better.’
Don’t get too provoked by these tweets. Because Audrey Truschke has cooked her own goose now. She did this to herself. She took a wrecking ball to her own intellect. This is what hatred does to people.
Why am I saying this? Because we already won the argument. Do you really need to persuade any Indian that these tweets are wrong and filled with hatred against Hindus? No, the swastika in India is an ancient Hindu symbol and everyone knows that. There is nothing ‘ambiguous’ about it. And Truschke here is trying to shift the Overton Window of international opinion on this. First, a generation of liberal historians slyly translated the German ‘Hakenkreuz into ‘swastika’ to open this window. Now, folks like Truschke are working on this opening, gradually making it bigger. Now she tries to alter the status of the Hindu swastika from an ancient religious symbol to an ‘ambiguous but mostly positive.’ What will they claim in ten years? Literally every Hindu who sees this tweet will figure it out easily.
And what happens when you show them the tweet that describes Indian revolutionaries as Hindu terrorists? You don’t have to argue with anyone over this. Every Indian will be furious if someone refers to people like Chandrasekhar Azad, Khudiram Bose or Ramprasad Bismil as terrorists. And that too Hindu terrorists! That’s when every Indian will agree with you that this person simply hates Hindus.
So, by all means, give widespread publicity to tweets like this from her. Show them to everyone you can. And when they are outraged, be sure to tell them that Audrey Truschke is a hero of Indian liberalism. Make sure you highlight this part as much as possible. Make sure you give people links to all the articles in mainstream liberal news portals praising Audrey Truschke.
You did it, Audrey. You made everyone hate you.
Did you notice that the big liberal portals, who generally follow closely behind her, wagging their tails and picking up her mess, have been silent on her latest outburst? They are silent because they are strategic. They know that her latest outburst is a public relations disaster. So what should the Hindutva supporters do now? Give as much publicity as possible to all the liberals who have aided and abetted Audrey Truschke. Make sure everyone knows that she is a start for the Indian liberal intelligentsia. Get them all to share in the blame.
Audrey Truschke is the new Arund***i Roy. That person has done more to make Indian liberalism an object of hatred and ridicule than any Hindutva supporter. At some point, the baton had to pass to someone new.
In retrospect, I should have seen this coming. Her mental degeneration was already evident when she tried to blame Hindutva for the riots at Capitol Hill. In fact, she was crazy enough to declare publicly that she was going to teach this in her course at Rutgers University. All this is based on a social media rumour that turned out to be totally false. What kind of person does something so radically foolish? Someone whose brain has turned to mush because of all the hatred that she has stockpiled against Hindus.
If I remember correctly, Audrey Truschke burst onto the Indian intellectual (political) scene around 2015 or 2016, with her book on Aurangzeb. The Communist historians had left Aurangzeb alone, believing he was far too despised. But if every other Muslim emperor can be airbrushed, why not Aurangzeb as well? This was her big idea. She spent the next few years adroitly, fielding questions and deflecting criticism. Most professional historians already hate Hindus, so they were supportive anyway. In other words, her peers would never ask anything. And a common person trying to confront her would always be at a structural disadvantage in the argument. Because she is a professional historian. Imagine trying to win a legal argument with a trained lawyer, no matter how fair your case is.
What Audrey perhaps did not realize was that too much hatred was frying her brain. Each time her liberal friends applauded her propaganda, they egged her on to more and more ridiculous things. Now she has driven herself straight into a ditch. The job of the Hindutva supporters is to make sure every liberal follows her into that ditch. We must hold every liberal accountable for every word that Truschke says now. They loved her, they anointed her as an intellectual giant, and now they must own up to her words.
So what is Indian liberalism? Indian liberalism is now the ideology that calls Khudiram Bose a Hindu terrorist. Everyone who identifies as an Indian liberal must now own up to this. We are quoting your favorite historian. Don’t blame us. Remember how Indian liberals held PM Modi personally accountable for some drunk guy throwing a stone at a church in Navi Mumbai? Well, let’s make sure that every Indian liberal is held accountable for the words of their favorite historian.
One final word. Given all sorts of twisted incentives there, perhaps Audrey Truschke will benefit from the attention, whether positive or negative. I have come across Hindutva supporters who act as if that’s a problem. But if you ask me, who cares? So what if Truschke makes a little bit on the side while becoming the number one tool to discredit Indian liberalism?
