By Theodore Shoebat

For years Steve Bannon has been working for the cause of Hindu nationalism. This is obvious for the fact that Bannon has been collaborating with Indian-American industrialist and Hindu nationalist Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar, a Hindu lobbyist who, alongside members of his family, donated over a million dollars to Trump Victory, who also lobbies for the Hindu nationalist political party, the BJP. 

In May of 2019 Bannon did an interview with India’s WION TV channel, in which he praised India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi. He boasted about how he has been promoting Modi for years:

“When Modi first won five years ago I was very proud of the fact that Breitbart … we covered that election very closely and the reason was, the day he won we put a headline that he was India’s Reagan. And I have been incredibly impressed with Modi since the first day I heard of him and started following him in Indian politics.”

Bannon wants to see a coalition against China consisting of Trump in the United States, the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, and the Japanese nationalist Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe (the same Abe who said that Japanese comfort women centers — where women were raped by Japanese soldiers — “were simply part of the licensed prostitution system of the day.”) He sees these three as a part of an international network of nationalist leaders (ironic how nationalists go internationalist simultaneously) also consisting of politicians like Matteo Salvini in Italy:

“If this thing’s [China] going to be pushed back on, its gotta be Japan, India and the United States. Those are the three most important nations to do this. … And when I look at on our side of the football, and I see Abe in Japan, Modi in India, Trump in the United States, and people like Nigel Farage coming up in the UK, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Bolsanaro in Brazil … and the three most important: Abe in Japan, Modi in India, and Trump in the United States, are the type of men that can really put together I think a very impressive coalition.”

But the most interesting part of this interview was Bannon’s fascination for Hinduism. The interviewer asked him:

“I am told you are an avid reader of the Bhagavad Gita, you follow the Hindu philosophy. I’m very curious to know, what got you so interested in Hindu mythology?”

To this Bannon said:

“Yes, thats true. One of the most powerful books — I’m a Roman Catholic and a devout Catholic, I try to be as devout as I can, I’m a practicing Catholic. But one of the most powerful books, as a young person, I read, was a book by a Frenchman called Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, and that got me very interested in Hindu spirituality, in the study of Hindu religion. There was another book by a German professor, called the Philosophy of India, by a professor named — I believe his name was Zimmer — who wrote this book in the 1930s or 1940s. Had a very powerful impact on me. So I’ve studied, to the degree that one can study, I’ve taken a lot of time of my life to study Hindu spirituality.”

In fact, Julia Jones, Bannon’s s longtime Hollywood writing partner and former close friend, recounted that Bannon is obsessed with war and the Hindu concept of Dharma (cosmic law) in the Bhagavad Gita, or the most popular text of Hinduism which teaches on holy war for the cause of Dharma. Jones said:

“Steve is a strong militarist, he’s in love with war—it’s almost poetry to him … [He] used to talk a lot about dharma — he felt very strongly about dharma … one of the strongest principles throughout the Bhagavad Gita.”

The book that this “devout Catholic” (Bannon is tied with the “trad” or traditionalist Catholic movement which has a substantial amount of nationalism) follows, the Bhagavad Gita, actually legitimizes murder (so much for Thou shalt not murder, Mr. “Devout Catholic). In Hinduism, to kill an enemy is not murder, because the one killed has an eternal soul that lives on. To kill is not to kill, as we read in the Bhagavad Gita:

Therefore, great warrior, carry on thy fight. If any man thinks he slays, and if another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in man cannot kill: the Eternal in man cannot die. …When a man knows him as never-born, everlasting, never-changing, beyond all destruction, how can that man kill a man, or cause another to kill? (Gita, 2.19, 21, trans. Juan Mascaro, ellipses and bolding mine)

In the same Hindu text the concept of Karma is used by Krishna as a means to killing as he exhorts war and slaughter, dispelling the leftist idea that Karma and Krishna are both “peaceful.” It reads:

Arise therefore! Win thy glory, conquer thine enemies, and enjoy thy kingdom. Through the fate of their Karma I have doomed them to die: be thou merely the means of my work. (Ibid, 11.33)

Bannon reveres Hinduism and supports Hindu nationalism by vocally backing Narendra Modi and his BJP party [Bharatiya Janata Party]. The BJP is an anti-Christian Hindu nationalist party. It wants to implement the NRC or the National Register of Citizens, or a document that is meant to have all of the names of all “genuine citizens” in the state. Currently the NRC is only in the Indian state of Assam, but the BJP wants to implement the surveilling system of the NRC on the whole country. The president of the BJP, Amit Shah, declared on April of 2019 that he wants the NRC to be applied to all of India so that all religions except for Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism would remain in the country while all “infiltrator” religions would be removed:

“We will ensure implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs. … We have promised in our manifesto that when Narendra Modi forms government once again, we will implement NRC in the entire country”.

So Bannon is actually supporting a political party that wants to remove Christianity from India, which would mean the extermination of Christians in that country. He calls himself a “devout Catholic,” but truly he is a part of the “trad” (short for traditionalist Catholic) ideological strata that masquerades itself with Catholicity while supporting fascist ideas or entities. This is not surprising at all, given the fact that Bannon backs insidious political parties in Europe like the Front National — founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen who collaborated with Ukrainian Nazis, and the  Vlaams Balang — whose leader, Filip DeWinter, wants to create a “White Europe” . If Bannon is supporting racialist parties in Europe, it is not surprising that he is backing a party that hates Christianity.

BJP officials have done other things that are demonstrative of their own sinister ways. In January of 2018, Hindus kidnapped an eight year old girl, ragingly saying: “this is the daughter of a Muslim, kill her and they’ll get scared and run away”. They kept her in a Hindu temple where they drugged, tortured and gang raped her for a week. They eventually murdered her. Eight men were charged for the murder. Hindu nationalists took to the streets to protest in favor of the murderers. Attending the rally were two BJP ministers, Chaudhary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga.

Singh belittled the crime by saying that: “This one girl has died and there is so much of investigation. There have been many deaths of women here,” as if to say that the rape and murder of the girl is insignificant because many girls are raped. This warped and perverted mentality did not disgust the heads of BJP who did not want to remove the two ministers. But after weeks of pressure, eventually the BJP acquiesced. Modi himself admitted: “The party did not want Mr Ganga and Mr Singh to step down. They resigned because media created an impression that they were supporting the rape accused”.   

So why is Bannon lobbying for such a party? Given the fact that he backs the racialist parties in Europe, what this indicate is that this shill of the American Right-wing is himself an antichrist. People will argue and say that he is a good Catholic. Bannon is a part of the “trad” Catholic circles and has ties, through the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (Institute for Human Dignity), with major Vatican officials like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Cardinal Robert Sarah who said that “everyone was created by God to be placed in a specific place, with its culture, traditions, and history,” a logic that can be easily used to justify ethno-nationalism. There are many “trad” Catholics who would fall into the ideology of ethno-nationalism (just look at Leon Degrelle), and Bannon is an example of how the trad movement is entrenched in this ideology.