Author: Dr. David Frawley
Publication: Hindupost.in
Date: March 15, 2016
URL:   http://www.hindupost.in/politics/sri-sri-ravi-shankar-or-kanhaiya-kumar-which-vision-of-bharats-future-should-be-followed/

Two very different figures have dominated Bharat’s media in recent weeks. The first is a young JNU student protester promoting his lal salaam or red salute to comrades, hoping to encourage a new revolution much like the communist revolutions of old. The second is a senior world spiritual teacher dressed in white, promoting Bharatiya culture and world peace in Delhi on perhaps the largest stage ever built.

My examination of these two figures is not meant to compare them personally but to show the different movements they represent, which go back for decades.
Kanhaiya Kumar

Kanhaiya Kumar is an expressive and articulate student from the JNU radical left. His background is controversial and his recent anti-government statements extreme. The question is whether his words and slogans should be tolerated as free speech or prosecuted as sedition, an issue that is now in the courts.

Yet much more importantly, behind Kumar loom the older figures of Sitaram Yechury, head of the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M) and D Raja of the Communist Party of India (CPI), whose student union at JNU Kanhaiya is the head. This means that Kanhaiya is the new youth image of the Communist Party that died in the West in the twentieth century and faded in Bharat – which is hoping to use youths like him to return to prominence.

Kanhaiya like his mentor Yechury looks back to the last century. In calling his enemies sympathisers with Mussolini and Hitler, he reflects the mindset of the early twentieth century, and calls up Joseph Stalin as his ally and role model – a figure that Yechury and his party have not yet rejected. Kanhaiya embraces the Marxist-Leninist tradition, including their stifling economic vision of state socialism.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is one of the most well known gurus from Bharat with an extensive following at the highest political, educational and economic levels of the West. His Art of Living movement started twenty-five years ago and his teachings are widely studied and emulated.

Sri Sri began as a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was responsible for making meditation and mantra into household words throughout the world. Maharishi encouraged us to look to a new age of consciousness and Vedic knowledge, which Sri Sri has amplified.

Influence of Swami Vivekananda

Behind their work is the modern Yoga-Vedanta movement since Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteenth century, who made Yoga world-renowned. Vivekananda also inspired Bharat’s independence movement, which was rooted in the Bhagavad Gita.

However, Nehruvian leftists, who came to dominate Bharat’s academia and media after Independence, removed this earlier nationalist Yoga-Vedanta approach. Instead, they encouraged Bharat’s students to follow Marxists from the West who did not support Bharat’s dharmic heritage on any level.

Meanwhile, the world Yoga movement that Swami Vivekananda started exploded in popularity in the West in the nineteen sixties. It was taken up by the very student protestors of the anti-war era that Kanhaiya Kumar emulates, including rock stars like the Beatles. Today the democratic left in America embraces Yoga and meditation much more than does the left in Bharat, and many western liberals follow gurus from Bharat.
Political Responses in Bharat

The Congress Party, reflecting its increasing rejection of Bharat’s dharmic traditions, has been staunchly against Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the World Cultural Festival. Like their earlier rejection of World Yoga Day in 2015, there were no Congress leaders at the Festival and they encouraged its boycott. Congress has removed itself far from the Yoga-Vedanta inspiration of the Independence movement and is now firmly in the camp of the Old Left.

The BJP is a product of the Hindu movement going back to Vivekananda and has renewed itself under PM Narendra Modi, with his new promotion of World Yoga. The BJP finds itself comfortable with gurus like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and featured its leaders, including the PM, at the Festival.

Arvind Kejriwal seems caught between both camps. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was an important part of Anna Hazare’s Anti-Corruption movement that launched his political career, and Hazare included Swami Vivekananda among his guides. Kejriwal spoke with praise for Sri Sri’s World Cultural Festival, but elsewhere defended JNU student radicals as well.

Sri Sri himself made no criticism of student protestors but tried to orient their youthful idealism into a yogic direction.
Strange Media Responses

How Bharat’s media has responded to these two figures is quite revealing and shocking. Most media leaders greeted Kanhaiya Kumar with kindness, respect and almost adulation, smiling with him in interviews as if he were a long lost son, highlighting Sitaram Yechury’s remarks as well.

Meanwhile, they greeted Sri Sri – though a religious figure of world respect – with criticism and denigration, and tried to downplay the success of his World Cultural Festival. Yet this is not surprising, when you consider that many media leaders in Bharat today are children of Congress and the Old Left, struggling to keep themselves relevant.
For the Future

Which inspiration will allow Bharat to flourish in the new twenty-first century? Is it the nostalgia of the Old Left for the last century of mayhem and genocide their revolutions brought? Or is it a new vision of universal consciousness, rooted in Yoga and Vedic knowledge, such as has been emerging in Bharat and worldwide since Swami Vivekananda?