Rajiv Malhotra discusses why Hinduism, despite being a religion of around a billion people, has never been understood or defended in the same way as Christianity and Islam. He calls on Hindus to understand and reproduce today the ancient tradition of purva-paksha (Sanskrit for ‘the first objection to any assertion in a debate’), that is, understanding the ideology or belief-system of another culture on its own terms.

While Christianity has produced an enormous range of texts to explain its world-view and to defend it and “place” it among other religions and traditions, modern and ancient, Hinduism has failed to do so, subscribing to a quietistic belief that possession of knowledge or truth within oneself is sufficient.

Thus, among all religions, Christianity, in all its variants, has produced the greatest quantity of discourse, and the most widely dispersed, allowing it to colonize intellectual discourse across the board.

This is true, even while it’s true that orthodox Christianity is under attack from secularists. Many Christians indeed feel themselves singled out for attack, among all religions.

However, that feeling is misleading. The real problem is that secularism (an outgrowth of liberal Christianity itself) is creating the friction.

It is not that other religions are attacking Christianity so much as that secularism, while still attached to its parent religion, Christianity, is colonizing the intellectual spaces of other cultures. Secularism uses the symbols and beliefs of Western Christianity as a target, although the real social ills under attack (consumer culture, racial or gender oppression etc.) belong to the societal structure of post-Christian Europe.

The globalist agenda, which involves the export of cultural Marxism to other cultures, draws the people in those cultures away from producing an effective discourse of their own real indigenous traditions. Instead, it seduces them to take up the globalist cultural Marxist discourse because of the opportunities for advancement that discourse offers through the international network attached to it.

Thus, a young Indian in school will be told that India has no “liberal arts” or “libertarian” tradition. He must get it all from the West. And when he does, thanks to foundation funding, it comes wearing the friendly face of “universal human rights”, “democracy”, “women’s rights’ or “gay rights”, under which lies a dominant secular discourse that in turn disguises an imperial and colonial agenda.

The colonialism is not the old-style colonialism of occupying land and taking over homes, although that too can be found in one of the cockpits of the globalist project, Israel.

The other cockpits in Europe and in America content themselves with propagating ideology that permits the colonization and domination of other people’s homelands through transnational state-capitalism, but they also try to protect they own homelands from reciprocal movement, by restricting and demonizing third-world immigration. They want freedom for their businesses, to put it bluntly, but no freedom for other human beings. That not only preserves the power of the Western establishment, but enhances it.

The new colonialism is cultural colonization. The subversion and destruction of civlizations, not simply Islam, but any civilization in the path of the globalist agenda.

In that sense, the Hindu civilization in India and orthodox forms of Christianity or non-European Christian communities, are also under attack.

The only difference is that the Christians have an enormous tradition, a dominant media and academic presence, and considerable wealth behind them.

So far, argues Malhotra, Hindus have not had anything similar. They build temples and endow charities, but they have not spent the same time or money defending and exposing to the public their own intellectual and cultural heritage. It might be time for them to do so aggressively.