America’s Sacred Hypocrisy

America’s praise of India as “the world’s largest democracy” is among the emptiest slogans in modern diplomacy. From the Cold War onward, Washington has armed and funded Pakistan—an Islamic military theocracy—while lecturing India, a pluralist civilization older than the Bible, about freedom and human rights. The contradiction is not accidental. It is theological. Beneath the rhetoric of democracy lies an Abrahamic bias: the West feels instinctive comfort with monotheistic allies, however repressive, and unease toward a civilization that believes truth can be many, not one.

In 1971 that bias became policy. When Pakistan’s generals slaughtered millions in East Pakistan, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger backed the killers, not the victims. The Seventh Fleet sailed toward the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India for defending the Bengali people. America called Indira Gandhi dangerous while embracing Yahya Khan as an ally. This was not realism; it was moral inversion. A secular democracy was punished, a theocratic junta rewarded.

The pattern endured. Ronald Reagan hailed the Afghan mujahideen—forefathers of the Taliban—as “the moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers.” Those Founders were deists who rejected revelation; the men Reagan blessed were medieval fundamentalists. Washington’s crusade against “godless communism” turned into an alliance with jihad. Every time India asserted independence, it was scolded; every time Pakistan armed extremists, it was subsidized. The world’s oldest living civilization was treated as suspect because it would not fit inside the Abrahamic frame.

That frame still governs American thought. U.S. foreign policy, whether evangelical or liberal, speaks a biblical language of chosen nations and moral missions. It can understand atheism and it can understand monotheism; it cannot understand polytheism or philosophical pluralism. India’s gods, philosophies, and heresies collapse their categories. When Washington calls India “confusing,” it means non-Abrahamic. When it calls India “unpredictable,” it means unconvertible. For two centuries the West has mistaken variety for chaos and faith in dialogue for lack of faith.

This theological psychology explains America’s selective morality. It forgives Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because they pray to one God; it distrusts India and China because they pray to none or many. The Anglo-American mind still imagines order as monotheistic: one truth, one book, one law. India’s metaphysics are the opposite—dharma as contextual duty, not divine decree; Tat vam asi as cosmic equality, not tribal election. That difference is civilizational, not political. The West mistakes it for rebellion because it cannot conceive of plural reason.

To free itself from this illusion, India must stop seeking theological approval from the Atlantic world. The Abrahamic imagination conquers not only territory but definition; it makes others doubt their own categories. Real independence begins when a civilization defines truth for itself. India’s answer should not be isolation but alliance—an alliance of civilizations that share its non-Abrahamic soul.

That alliance already exists in embryo. China, despite Marxist rhetoric, is profoundly Confucian and Buddhist. Its ethics arise from harmony, not salvation; its cosmology from Tao, not Genesis. Russia, beneath its Orthodox surface, retains pantheistic mysticism and dialectical materialism. Both reject revelation as the source of law. The West calls them authoritarian because they refuse its theology of liberal conversion. But these societies, like India, represent older ways of thinking: reason grounded in culture, morality without prophecy.

A United Dharmic Alliance—linking India, China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, and the Buddhist-Hindu-Shinto world—would restore civilizational balance. It would not be anti-Western or anti-Islamic; it would be pro-reason. Its foundation would be the simple idea that truth does not need monopoly and civilization does not need revelation. It would replace the crusader’s “believe or die” with the philosopher’s “understand and live.” Such a bloc would control most of Eurasia’s population, resources, and intellect. More importantly, it would defend the right of every culture to think without divine supervision.

The West will sneer, as it always does, that this is authoritarian romanticism. But the record of so-called Western liberalism is soaked in conquest—from the Inquisition to Iraq. It preaches pluralism while destroying plural worlds. When it speaks of “universal values,” it means Abrahamic values: man created in one image, history moving toward one kingdom, salvation through one revelation. The Dharmic idea begins elsewhere: that reality itself is plural, that opposites coexist, that morality is relational. In that worldview, even Marxism and Vedanta can meet as dialectical cousins—one material, one metaphysical, both anti-theological.

India must therefore become the philosophical nucleus of a post-Abrahamic order. It should lead not by sermon but by demonstration: by showing that democracy can thrive without the Bible, that science can flourish without sin, that compassion can exist without conversion. It must decolonize its universities, purge its thinkers of missionary guilt, and reclaim intellectual sovereignty. Its diplomats should speak the language of dharma and dialectics, not borrowed liberal pieties. Friendship with America should remain pragmatic; reverence must end.

China and Russia, too, have a stake in this emancipation. Both are targeted not for tyranny but for theological heresy. Western strategists instinctively demonize non-Abrahamic systems because they expose the myth that morality requires monotheism. Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, and the Upanishads all argue that virtue is empirical—learned through reason, not revelation. The day those ideas unite politically, the West’s metaphysical monopoly collapses.

The world does not need another empire; it needs equilibrium. The Dharmic Alliance would not conquer—it would correct. It would offer a model of global order based on dialogue, not dogma; on reason, not faith. Its moral charter could be summarized in four words: In Reason We Trust. That is the true counter-creed to the theology that built empires in God’s name.

When historians look back, they will see three great ages: the age of revelation, the age of ideology, and the coming age of Dharma. The first enthroned God, the second enthroned the State; the third must enthrone reason. America’s lip service to democracy will then appear as a relic of an era when even freedom was a sermon. The civilizations of India, China, and Russia—joined by the Buddhist and humanist East—can end that sermon peacefully by outthinking it. The victory of the Dharmic world will not be military but mental: the quiet revolution of civilizations reclaiming the right to define truth without permission.

When that happens, humanity will return to balance. Gods will no longer divide; ideas will. And those ideas will be tested, not worshiped. In that world, there will be many paths and no chosen people—only chosen thoughts. The empire of revelation will fall to the republic of reason, and the oldest civilizations on earth will again become the newest.

Citations

1. Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).
2. Ronald Reagan, Remarks to Afghan Freedom Fighters (1983), Reagan Presidential Library.
3. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (Knopf, 2012).
4. Tu Weiming, Confucianism and Human Rights (Columbia University Press, 1998).
5. S. Radhakrishnan, Eastern Religions and Western Thought (Oxford University Press, 1939).
6. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845).
7. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford University Press, 1934–61).