Jaipur Dialogues Sets The Tone For Hindu Narrative Building And Networking

Ever since the Jaipur Literature Festival was started in 2006 by India’s Lutyens “liberals” and “wokes”, the Dharmic side has felt the need to create a counter-narrative for the excluded.

Over the last decade, even as the government foolishly supported the Left-liberal Jaipur LitFest across the world, many such litfests have been begun to tell the other side of the story, including the multi-centre Festival of Bharat, and the Mangaluru and Pondy litfests, to name just a few.

And one litfest that takes the Leftist cabal head-on is The Jaipur Dialogues, pioneered by Sanjay Dixit, a former IAS officer of the Rajasthan cadre. Started almost 10 years after the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2016, the dialogues resumed in physical mode after two years of Covid-related retreat to the online mode.  

Held in the pink city of Jaipur on 5-6 November, Jaipur Dialogues has now established itself on the Dharmic calendar as an unmissable event.

This year’s event, devoted to the broader theme of Amrit Kaal, focused on 11 topics after the inaugural session.

Addressed by nearly 90 speakers and participants, it was a roaring success, with most of the sessions exceeding their time limits, but with the audience showing no signs of fatigue.

Final sessions that were supposed to end at 5.30 pm on the two days invariably continued well till 7.30 pm.

Given below is a thumbnail impression of some of the key sessions, and the sentiments that emerged from each of them.

The inaugural session had two great speakers, Swami Vigyananda and Sudhanshu Trivedi of the BJP, both brilliant speakers.

While Swami Vigyananda focused on the challenges Hindu faced, Trivedi’s brilliant oration helped bring in the BJP’s perspective at a conference where the BJP was found short on the issue of pushing Hindu interests.

The very first discussion session, titled Are All Religions The Same? in which Bharat Gupt, Amber Zaidi, Ajay Chrungoo and Sanjay Dixit participated with TV’s effervescent Anand Ranganathan moderating, made it clear that Hinduism was different.

This contrasts with the normal Hindu chant of all religions being equally good. The Abrahamic religions came in for much criticism for their exclusivity and intolerance.

The second session, titled Past, Present and Future, had Omendra Ratnu, Tufail Chaturvedi, Neeraj Atri, and Raghu Hari Dalmia as participants, with Abhishek Tiwari as moderator.

Ratnu, in a separate documentary shown later, asked Hindus to become more giving in order to help other Hindus in difficulties.

The third session on article 370, in which Guru Prakash of the BJP, Ajay Chrungoo, Ankur Sharma and Sushil Pandit, was debated passionately.

The discussions turned critical of the Narendra Modi government, with many speakers pointing out that abolishing article 370 was not enough, and Kashmiri Hindus continued to suffer and be targeted in the Valley even now.

Clearly, the government has to do more to help the Pandits, and take a firmer stand on tackling jihadi violence. The clear message: the Kashmir problem is about violent Islamism, not lack of development.

The last session of the day focused on Ancient India: History of Dynasties or of Science and Arts?

With C K Raju, Meenakshi Jain, Abhijit Chavda, Ved Veer Arya and Sankrant Sanu (moderator) as participants, the session focused on Leftist distortions of Indian history, and the attempt to whitewash Mughal rule to the detriment of stories about the consistent resistance to Islamism and tyranny.

Some of the speakers emphasised that Indian history cannot just be about ruling dynasties, but about Hindu art and science.

Day 2 had six deliberative sessions, starting with a session on Why Civilisational Resistance Matter, with participants including Anand Ranganathan, R Jagannathan of Swarajya, Vishnu Jain (the lawyer of the Hindu side in the Gyan Vapi dispute), Pandit Satish Sharma, a Dharmic leader in the UK whose sane voice carried the narrative during the recent Islamist Leicester and Birmingham violence. OpIndia founder Rahul Roushan was the moderator.

The central takeout of this session was that while government support matters, Hindu civil society also needs to get itself organised to offer resistance to Hinduphobia and Hindumisia. The need for Hindus to open their purses to support Hindu causes was paramount.

Two historians, Meenakshi Jain and Vikram Sampat, and two writers with interests in history, Aabhas Maldahiyar and Sandeep Balakrishna, made it abundantly clear in another session that there was no Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb during Mughal Rule. Attempts to whitewash Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan were decried.

Another session, titled the Slide and Slide of Bollywood, was devoted to exposing Bollywood’s subtle Hinduphobia over the years, including its debasement of Hindu music, art and culture.

There is little doubt that Jaipur Dialogues has filled an important gap in the development of the Hindu narrative, and in providing a forum for Dharmic networking. It is going from strength to strength.