The Only Language They Know.
Sharing here a post by Balamohan Shingade that he wrote for the CARE website in which he talks about how Indian News, a local outlet that is a Hindutva mouthpiece, reacted to an article in the NZ Herald where they interviewed him. We commend Balamohan for his bravery and for standing up to Hindutva bullies.
AAPI's blog is a register for resistance against all forms of Hindutva extremism in Aotearoa. This includes anti-Black and anti-Maori racism.
Thinly-veiled threats: A response to The Indian News by Balamohan Shingade
by Balamohan Shingade
The Indian News Editor interviewing mainstream politicians in Aotearoa
I’ve just received a thinly-veiled threat from an Auckland outlet called the Indian News.
It's in response to the story I'd shared with the Herald on being the target of a conspiracy theory by a Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) platform, which tried to establish a link between me and the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. (See Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians's website for more on the conspiracy theory, part of a far-right strategy of propagating hate).
Today's piece in the Indian News (February 17th, 2022) is built around a key deceit. In reference to the Herald report, the editor-in-chief writes that the Herald "has quoted some staged, fake narratives of a couple of gullible anti-Hindu and anti-India left leaning youngsters. [...] it only confirms any doubts of some bigger and nefarious designs working behind the scenes, against Hindus and the Indian nation."
Nope. You'd hope a newspaper that calls itself "New Zealand's most trusted Indian media group" would contact its subjects and check the story. But actually, it's a routine part of their "journalism." The quotes the Herald draws on are from recorded interviews with two researchers, both of us Indian origin youth in the diaspora, which are portrayed by the Indian News as “staged”.
As an aside, are we gullible or nefarious? They're two quite opposite things... the first presumes we're "youngsters" being manipulated by some anti-Hindu, and by extension, anti-India force, whereas the second suggests we're larger-than-life puppeteers doing the manipulating.
How is it that the Indian News feels emboldened to circulate disinformation when the New Zealand Media Council upheld two complaints against them late last year for breaching ethical standards of journalism? The Media Council wrote of one of the complaints, "Comment should not cross the line into personal abuse, nor should it undermine trust in a publication's ability to distinguish fact from opinion, or robust debate from abusive personal attack. In this case the Council believes The Indian News has crossed that line."
When the Media Council's rulings aren't holding much water, what's left to do? Of course, we'll follow the complaints process... but friends, what else?
It is clear that the Indian News is an important platform for Hindutva groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. In fact, their editor-in-chief is part of the Coalition of Hindus who organised an online petition in November last year to promote fascist ideologues like M. S. Golwalkar, who wrote in 1939, "Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. [...] a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” And he sits as a trustee at one of Auckland’s most important temples, the Bharatiya Mandir.
The threat in the Indian News to those who dissent against the divisive politics of Hindutva is characteristic of its chauvinism: "The harsh reality this nexus miserably fails to recognise is, that India and its majority population are not the same anymore. They do not take any nonsense, anymore from anyone whether in India or in overseas."
The funny thing is, friends: This is all in response to my fairly innocuous Facebook posts and that single interview with the Herald. I've made very little of my ethnographic studies on Hindu Nationalism available to anyone outside my research team.
The Indian News continues to attempt a nastily tight grip on who gets to represent the ‘Indian community’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. They do so using intimidation and issuing diktats, all the while patting themselves on the back for serving “Indian and multicultural communities,” and collecting endorsements from MPs of major political parties and ‘community leaders.’ No wonder then that so many Indian youth of Aotearoa New Zealand find platforms such as the Indian News to be importing the worst of the regressive patriarchal nationalism ripping through India today. And in their dominating presence in our media landscape, speaking out is risky. But as my quote ran in the Herald: “The danger is if you don’t find your voice, other people will find it for you.” And it is clear from today’s op-ed that the Indian News wishes to do just that.
Petitioners endorse Hindu supremacists V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar: The circulation of Hindutva in Aotearoa New Zealand
In its latest avatar, the Hindutva campaign targeting academic freedom, initiated by Hindu Youth and Hindu Council, has taken the form of an online petition. Having failed at their earlier attempts to silence academic freedom, the campaigners in their desperation are attempting to recruit Hindus to their hateful ideology by once again strategically conflating the fascist ideology of Hindutva with Hinduism.
As on the week of November 8th, 2021, a petition by Coalition of Hindus of New Zealand has begun on the website Change.org with the title “Support Hindu Community to have the freedom to follow cultural practices of Hindu Dharma.” The petition is intended “to New Zealand Parliament,” and the petitioners, “ask Massey University and its employee Professor Mohan J Dutta to cease and desist from such activities [...].” Their reference is to Prof. Dutta’s scholarship, including the publishing of a white paper in May 2021 titled Cultural Hindutva and Islamophobia. In this paper, Professor Dutta explains how narratives of Hindu supremacy help to prop-up a sense of pride in the Indian diaspora, and how this pride is intertwined with the circulation of Islamophobia.
Among the many pieces of disinformation in the petition, the worst is the whitewashing of the Hindu supremacists V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar. The petition mentions the founders of Hindutva, Savarkar and Golwalkar, and what’s more, they ascribe to these two men the honorific “Sri”. The petitioners’ claim is that the writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar do not mention the narrative of Hindu supremacy, and accuse Professor Dutta of misrepresentation.
Savarkar, who was the inventor of the term Hindutva and the founder of the movement, clearly stated that Hindutva is not Hinduism. In his text Essentials of Hindutva (1923), he rejected the term Hinduism and along with it the pluralistic religion it describes. As he wrote, “If there be any word of alien growth it is this word Hinduism and so we should not allow our thoughts to get confused by this new fangled term.” Instead, Savarkar vigorously promoted Hindutva and its core political objective of crafting India as a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu Nationalism). In the words of Savarkar, “a Hindu Rashtra where some Indians will be more equal than others.” In an interview in 1944 (here), Savarkar was asked by an American war correspondent, “How do you plan to treat Mohammedans?” Savarkar replied, “As a minority, in the position of your Negroes.” The fundamental value of racial inequality (jati) advocated by Savarkar is in order to create the idea of Hindu supremacy, which continues to form the basis of Hindutva today.
As Vinay Lal puts it (here) in his analysis of Savarkar’s contribution to 20th Century anti-colonial movement in South Asia, “Savarkar imbibed the worst of Western political and social traditions, and his warped ideas about race superiority, the survival of the fittest, and the nation as a “blood entity”, so to speak, were derived from the most objectionable strands of Western thinking. [...] If Savarkar is at all to be remembered, let it not be forgotten that as Nathuram Godse plotted to take Mahatma Gandhi’s life, Savarkar blessed him and wished him success in his God-given task.” The Hindutva ideology formed the ecosystem that led to the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
Similarly, consider the writings of Golwalkar from his 1939 book: “German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. [...] a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” In Golwalkar’s writings, it is clear to see how the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) was developed through sustained interaction with ideologues in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Hindutva is a supremacist force based on aggressive and strategic deformations of Hinduism, and an organized attack on the pluralistic character of India and its diaspora. Fascist in the classical sense, Hindutva threatens to strip the subcontinent of its pluralism and syncretism, of its many cultures and creeds. What’s more, the political ideology of Hindu Nationalism is opposed to and indeed aims to undo the secular foundations of India. Indeed, Hindutva is a global threat as it destroys all forms of stability in the subcontinent with repercussions far beyond.
We reiterate that Hindutva is not the same as Hinduism, and the false conflation of the two is a deliberate strategy of Hindutva, which aims to spread disinformation based on distortion, manipulation and obfuscation. (We have written about the difference between Hinduism and Hindutva in significant detail in our open letter on October 3rd, here).
To continue the narrative that the two are the same thing shows clearly that the organisers of the petition are aligned with the poisonous ideology of Hindutva. It is plain to see that the petitioners, and each signatory that endorses V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar, are Hindutva-aligned, seeking to further circulate the ideology of Hindutva hate in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Given the abundance of evidence on the difference between Hindutva and Hinduism, for the organisers of this petition to continue to pursue the narrative that the two are the same is a deliberate attempt to prop up their supremacist ideology. They have made this abundantly visible in their attempt to whitewash Hindu supremacists. Savarkar and Golkwalkar are to Indians what Adolf Hitler was to Germans and the world. Therefore, petitioning the democratic parliament of Aotearoa New Zealand to support falsehoods about Hinduism, and to further push Hindu supremacists as idols is a very dangerous exercise. It should not be summarily dismissed as a silly attempt out of desperation, but rather should be read as a Hindu supremacist propaganda that should be surveilled on an ongoing basis. We should be gravely concerned that these forces of hate feel so emboldened to target the New Zealand parliament, much like we should be concerned by the attempts of Trump supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists in attacking the New Zealand democracy.
Screenshot from the Change.org petition, accessed 10 November:
In the context of the petition, the one-off and contextless mention of Professor Zaheer Baber’s article Religious Nationalism, Violence and the Hindutva Movement in India (2000) demonstrates the petitioners’ persistent misreading and misrepresentation of scholarly work. Baber’s work is precisely on the violence of Hindutva. Here is an extract from Baber’s passages mentioning Savarkar:
The History Of Resisting Hindutva In Aotearoa
Resistance to hate does not bloom overnight but is nurtured and sustained by the spirit of activists who constantly question and disrupt the narratives of supremacy crafted by the brokers of that hate. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Hindutva ideology has been challenged on an ongoing basis by activists, who have continually shone a light on their agendas of divisiveness. In 2007, the Hindu Council, an organisation attached to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a militant Hindu religious entity, held an inaugural event, titled “Contribution of Hindu community to the national life of New Zealand.” The event, with funding from the Asia:NZ Foundation, was attended by then Prime Minister Helen Clark and mayor of Manukau City Barry Curtis. We are re-publishing a blog post written by one of the co-founders of AAPI, Dr. Sapna Samant, after attending this event in 2007. It was published on the site sikhcentre.wordpress.com in 2008. The blog post and the ensuing exchange show how concerns were raised over a decade ago about the agenda of the Hindu Council to impose a monolithic agenda and the project seeking to speak for all Hindus in Aotearoa.
We must remember and document this history of resistance challenging Hindutva especially as Crown structures have deliberately ignored evidence confirming the fascism of this ideology, perhaps to accommodate conveniently the vote bank politics of the ruling parties
The current campaign organized by the Hindu Council targeting Professor Dutta, CARE, and Massey University is reflective of this hate ideology of the Hindu Council Dr. Samant had presciently warned against. The Hindu Council does not speak for Hindus in Aotearoa New Zealand but propagates a supremacist upper caste idea of India. Therefore it certainly does not speak for Indians in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We reject its divisive politics and urge the Crown to actually stand behind its rhetoric of social cohesion. It is not enough for Minister Radhakrishnan to just give statements acknowledging their presence while not actively renouncing the fascism and supremacy.
*********
"Saffron flags emblazoned with Aum fluttered in the afternoon sunlight as I made my way towards the venue of 1st Hindu Conference in New Zealand on 12 May. The alarm bells in my head rang loud and clear. This was fundamentalist territory. The Hindu Conference was organised by The Hindu Council. A sophisticated arm of the Hindu extremist parties like the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad). Its cousins being the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the militant Bajrang Dal. The alarm bells had triggered off ever since I got the press release that invited participants and said that this was not a religious or philosophical conference. Delegates would be vetted and allowed only if they had any contributions to make (read no troublemakers). ...."
Why Is The High Commission Of India In Aotearoa Spreading Disinformation?
Hate works through the seeding of disinformation. The creation and circulation of disinformation propels this agenda in the hate factories of India.
Those that spread hate profit from repetition of disinformation. Those that produce hate bank on the idea that if you repeat the disinformation enough number of times, it will somehow stick.
Unfortunately, it seems the High Commission of India has fallen into the same trap.
In an article, “Indian diplomats weigh in on Hindutva spat”, published by Newsroom, the High Commission of India defends its decision to share a disinformation-based video piece done by Roy Kaunds 4and published on Apna TV.
In an earlier analysis, we had shared how Kaunds repeats the lie targeting Prof. Mohan Dutta’s white paper “Cultural Hindutva and Islamophobia,” accusing the paper of attacking Hindus. We noted then:
“Primary among the insidious narratives Kaunds employs is the false conflation of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) with Hinduism, Hindu peoples, and Indian New Zealanders in order to obfuscate, distort the matter of facts, and ultimately aims to silence the critique of Hindutva. Kaunds’ report is unjustifiable. It misconstrues what is at stake in NZ Herald’s articles and the scholarship of Prof. Dutta, which is the unmistakable presence of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the circulation of Islamophobia.”
In multiple analyses since the white paper came under attack by Hindutva ideologues, we have pointed out categorically that the attacks have been driven by this strategic conflation of Hindutva and Hinduism, meant to serve the Hindutva agenda.
In another analysis of the initial press release by Hindu Youth that started the campaign targeting Prof. Dutta and CARE, we pointed out the mischief being played by Hindu Youth to strategically confuse the audience, accusing a criticism of Hindutva as a criticism of Hinduism and by extension, an attack on all Hindus in New Zealand:
“The only false equivalence at play is in the press release of Hindu youth council, a nugatory exercise to equate Hindutva and Hindu Nationalism with Hinduism and Hindus. Projecting this lie allows Hindu Youth then to play victim, throw in the label Hinduphobia, and then demand apology.”
We had asked Hindu Youth, a recipient of crown funding, to “explain their position with regard to the right-wing political ideology of Hindutva.”
In another analysis of the campaign being orchestrated by the Hindu Council (international arm of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, recognised earlier as a militant extremist organisation by the CIA and part of the Hindutva structure), we showed how the campaign targeting CARE was carrying out the Hindutva agenda.
We were not surprised when we saw Roy Kaunds generate and amplify this disinformation. After all, he is the producer of Talanoa Sa’o and appears on the platform Counterspin Media founded by the key architect of disinformation in the West, Steve Bannon, voicing hate content targeting Māori and spreading disinformation in Aotearoa.
But we were shocked and disappointed that the High Commission of India shared the video. We had noted:
“That the HCI shared this video is deeply alarming since this official body is supposed to be aligned with the Constitution of India. However, the HCI’s active endorsement of Kaunds’ video is seen as a signal that the HCI intends to shift away from a commitment to the principles of secularism, which is at the heart of both the Indian and New Zealand democracies. Instead, it demonstrates the HCI’s complicity in the promotion of a “Hindu Rashtra,” as envisaged by the ideologues of Hindtuva such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad.”
Rather than reflect on its decision in the interview to the Newsroom, the High Commission decided to repeat the same disinformation that has been targeting Prof. Dutta. The High Commission stated that the Apna TV clip was shared “with the objective of promoting understanding and [a] balanced point of view”, arguing the video was not critical of Dutta’s work but “tried to remove some misconceptions about Hindus living in New Zealand”. It is concerning when the High Commission has to resort to a disinformation-laden view to give a 'balanced' point of view.
The spokesperson of the High Commission then goes on to state that most people of Indian origin were hurt by Prof. Dutta’s white paper, which it frames as “selective and one-sided in depiction of the truth” and accuses it of having “attacked the entire Hindu community”. Observe here how the same lie that is distributed by the online trolls, Hindu Youth, and Hindu Council is also repeated by the High Commission purporting to speak on behalf of all Hindus in a monolithic voice to produce this false account of hurt. Framing a white paper on Hindutva as attacking the entire Hindu community.
The facts are, many Hindus are deeply concerned about Hindutva and its hate politics that is spreading here in Aotearoa and fanning divisiveness. Many of these Hindus, including several of us, are concerned about our own safety, security, and access to India, to be able to speak up against the Hindutva organisations and the High Commission.
We ask, has the High Commission spoken to all Hindus living in Aotearoa? We ask, is it the High Commission’s role to go against the Constitution of India? We ask if the High Commission of India has actually made an effort to listen to the voices of Indian minorities who have been raising publicly, including on the High Commission’s own page, concerns about Islamophobia and Hindutva?
The spokesperson adds, “People who disrupt this harmonious relationship existing between the communities by hate speech or provocative statements should not be encouraged.”
Let’s break down this statement carefully. One is the irony of the insinuation here, that an academic analysis and accompanying media reports documenting Hindutva, a fascist ideology driven by hate, are labelled as hate speech and provocative.
Second, the use of the word harmonious. It is fascist code for order. An order that does not allow the questioning of authority and where conformity is considered ‘peace’. For the High Commission, Indian migrants living ‘in harmony’ in Aotearoa means not only not showing concern about their people suffering under Hindutva, but also not engaging with democracy and the right to dissent while benefiting from it at the same time. It implies keeping your head down (*unless it is to cry anti-Indian racism only against themselves).
Seeking validation from colonial whiteness and upholding the power of that whiteness is a deep desire of Hindutva. VD Savarkar, the Hindutva idol, wrote multiple petitions to the British, seeking mercy and promising not to oppose the colonial government. While he may has started out as a violent ‘revolutionary’, provoking others to kill British officials, he could not face jail himself and chickened out. That pardon from the British, and the subsequent loyalty to them has continued within Hindutva adherents to this day.
It seems that the harmonious relationship the High Commission seeks is the Hindutva version where the diaspora voices of Muslims experiencing Islamophobia or Sikhs facing hatred and violence will be erased or will have to get into line with the Hindutva ideologues.
Finally, the High Commission fails to recognise the long history of protest and struggle for social justice by the tangata whenua of Aotearoa, groups like the Polynesian Panthers and the mass opposition to the Springbok Tour. Resistance that has had Indian allies.
Thus, for the High Commission, a harmonious relationship is a suppliant relationship. Of silencing dissent against the toxic forces of Hindutva.
The irony takes the cake toward the end of the article where the High Commission states it does not support the online trolls who have harassed and continue to harass Prof. Mohan Dutta, and places the onus on New Zealand authorities “to investigate any allegations about Hindutva and Islamophobia in the country”. Here it seems, the High Commission does understand the concepts of Hindutva and Islamophobia and seeks to distance itself from the online trolls.
If that is indeed the case, and the High Commission does understand the concepts of Hindutva and Islamophobia, why is it propagating disinformation based on a lie that paints a critical analysis of Hindutva as an attack on all Hindus in Aotearoa? The High Commission must recognise that it feeds the armies of trolls when it regurgitates the disinformation being spread by the Hindutva machinery.
More importantly, given the evidence that has now emerged of the presence of Hindutva and Islamophobia in Aotearoa, what is the High Commission going to do to address the growing concerns about the divisive forces of Hindutva that are being expressed by Indian minorities here?
Owning Our Whakapapa And Resisting White Colonialist Attacks
Owning Our Whakapapa And Resisting White Colonialist Attacks.
The Māori concept of whakapapa situates decolonising struggles in connections with ancestral origins. Referring to genealogy, as a fundamental principle of Māori culture, it offers the basis for a Māori person to claim their identity, connecting oneself to land and tribal groupings and to the mana of those.
Whakapapa serves as the basis for locating oneself, one’s knowledge, relationships, and practices in the context of ancestral teachings and practices.
As Indian origin activists in Aotearoa, we whakapapa to the diverse and plural spaces of India, connecting our lived experiences in Aotearoa with the strong traditions of democracy, secularism, and socialism that form the basis of the republic of India. Our struggles for the soul of India amidst the large-scale onslaught of fascist forces attacking its fundamental constitutional values are deeply intertwined with the ways in which we construct our identities as deeply connecting to the land, relationships, and commitments.
We remember the anticolonial struggles of our ancestors against the whiteness of British colonialism, resisting its divide and rule policies that seeded hate and inter-religious strife. Our resistance to the rise of Hindutva here in Aotearoa and at home in India is also a resistance to the ongoing colonial politics of whiteness.
White supremacy and Hindutva are intricately linked. Hindutva is a facsimile of the white supremacist ideology so rampant in Europe on the 1920s and was initiated as a project in 1925. Hindu ethno-nationalism aimed at purging Muslims and other but not the British colonisers. Hindutva organisations like the RSS never resisted British rule did not play a role in the mass freedom movement that eventually led to a secular, democratic India.
It is here that Indian origin activists in Aotearoa find their force and energy. A movement that the colonial politics of whiteness does not acknowledge as it cuddles up to the hyper nationalism of Hindutva in the name of Hinduism.
The everyday lived experiences of Indians, in India and within the diaspora, are syncretic and negotiated within the framework of culture. They own it, irrespective of region and religion.
The irony is both comic and deeply troubling that the whiteness of the colonizer conveniently takes up the identity of the Hindu to rally behind the divisive forces of Hindutva while at the same time driving up a campaign that silences Indians in the diaspora challenging the destructive forces of Hindutva by labeling them as Hinduphobic.
Australian white woman, Sarah L Gates, who set off a barrage of trolls against Professor Mohan Dutta is one such example. While flaunting her own Hinduism and seeking a Hindu nation for India, she chooses to ignore the lives and heterogenous practices of millions of Indians from the subcontinent and the ancestral struggle for an independent, secular, democratic India. Instead using violent language to attack their whakapapa all the while located in the white privilege of the settler colonialism of Australia.
As Vikram Zutshi writes, “Caucasians converting to ethno-religions like Hinduism, normally associated with brown skinned people from the Indian subcontinent raise some contentious issues.”
The white Hindus portray themselves as more authentic, mimic the ‘Orientalist archetype’, hold up the conservative order and suppress the diverse voices of Hinduism. While being the white colonialist they are.
(See link below.)
Sarah L Gates not only targeted Professor Dutta but also AAPI and the activist group“Hindus for Human Rights” for their ongoing dissent against the divisive forces of Hindutva that threaten the syncretism and pluralism of Hinduism.
She celebrates violent acts by Indians against other Indians in the name of Hindutva.
Recent Islamophobic tweets about the terrible attack on the Durga Pooja celebrations in Bangladesh also deny the complex history of the subcontinent, the Partition of India, Bangladesh’s own struggle to separate from Pakistan, the common Bengali culture so seeped into the daily lives of those who live there and in the diaspora.
The disinformation she creates and spreads is a security threat for several of us, including jeopardizing our links with India threatened by the authoritarian forces of a fascist regime.
That is the privilege of whiteness. To enter spaces of colour, appropriate and extract for one’s benefit, negate the histories and struggles of those people, and aggressively silence them.
For Sarah L Gates this bullying is immensely profitable in the digital networks of hate with Hindutva ideologues recognizing her as a ‘better Hindu’ than those fighting for the soul of India.
However, much like how our ancestors resisted the whiteness of colonialism, we will continue to resist Hindutva and its collaborations with whiteness/white supremacists to secure the syncretic, plural, democratic, and secular traditions of India. Because this is who we are.
Inquilab Zindabad.
https://www.newslaundry.com/2017/05/19/who-are-the-white-hindus
A Response to the High Commission of India in New Zealand
It comes as a shock to us that on October 7th the official Facebook page of the High Commission of India in New Zealand (HCI) shared misinformation, false reporting, and propaganda video aired by the Apna Network. Apna’s journalist Roy Kaunds has been regularly scrutinised for the spread of fake news as well as questioned for content that is bigoted, hate mongering, Islamophobic, and misogynistic. (See Byron Clark’s investigations on Webworm. Link and images below)
Apna’s video is another in a series of Kaunds’ highly problematic reporting, this time allegedly in response to the NZ Herald’s articles on the existence of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) in New Zealand, and the scholarly work of Prof. Mohan Dutta, Massey University, particularly his white paper “Cultural Hindutva and Islamophobia” (May 2021).
Primary among the insidious narratives Kaunds employs is the false conflation of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) with Hinduism, Hindu peoples, and Indian New Zealanders in order to obfuscate, distort the matter of facts, and ultimately aims to silence the critique of Hindutva. Kaunds’ report is unjustifiable. It misconstrues what is at stake in NZ Herald’s articles and the scholarship of Prof. Dutta, which is the unmistakable presence of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the circulation of Islamophobia.
That the HCI shared this video is deeply alarming since this official body is supposed to be aligned with the Constitution of India. However, the HCI’s active endorsement of Kaunds’ video is seen as a signal that the HCI intends to shift away from a commitment to the principles of secularism, which is at the heart of both the Indian and New Zealand democracies. Instead, it demonstrates the HCI’s complicity in the promotion of a “Hindu Rashtra,” as envisaged by the ideologues of Hindtuva such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
Against the backdrop of these comments, AAPI would like to ask the High Commission of India in New Zealand the following questions: Before sharing the misinformation, false reporting, and propaganda aired by the Apna Network, did you communicate with Professor Dutta to solicit his views and to understand the white paper and its purpose? And did you communicate with the NZ Police to obtain the facts of Hindutva-aligned groups and individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Not all Indians and New Zealanders subscribe to Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism), and consequently, such persons have the human right to non-discrimination in Aotearoa New Zealand. As per the Human Rights Act of 1993 Section 21(1), the prohibited grounds of discrimination includes “political opinion.” The consequence of HCI sharing Apna Network’s discriminatory content on Facebook indicates foreign interference in the matters of, and, poses a threat to academic freedoms and freedoms of the press in Aotearoa New Zealand. Furthermore, HCI’s endorsement of Apna Network’s video presents a personal risk to the life and livelihood of Professor Dutta.
We should like to know, as Indians and New Zealanders, whether you are complicit with the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism), and its project of the “Hindu Rashtra,” which actively aims to undo the secular and democratic foundations as per the Constitution of India?
On the official Facebook page of the High Commission of India in New Zealand (HCI), 7 October 2021.
Below is an excerpt from part II of Byron Clark’s investigations into New Zealand’s fake news, which includes Roy Kaunds' deeply problematic journalism. For the full report, click here.
Finding ourselves as targets of a Hindutva disinformation plot.
We at AAPI woke up on a mid-week morning to a diagram that located us and Professor Mohan Dutta in what is called a “Red-Green Ecosystem.” The diagram has been tweeted by a white Hindutva espousing yogini in Australia, Sarah L Gates, who has been the key player in the dissemination of the Hindutva disinformation campaign in Australia and Aotearoa.
Presented as a flowchart, the diagram of boxes and circles placed us within networks, connecting us to other activists and organisations globally challenging the hate politics of Hindutva.
Diagram: Flowchart created by the Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network (SHHAN)
The diagram created by the Stop Hindutva Hate Advocacy Network (SHHAN) is hilarious in the wild goose chase it pursues. It is a classic example of disinformation, connecting AAPI to the US-based Professor Vijay Prashad and FOIL, folding in The Humanism Project in Australia that has been challenging there the spread of Hindutva, and linking up Hindus for Human Rights, an organisation that started in the U.S. by challenging the destructive effects of Hindutva on Hinduism.
The flowchart then goes into the favourite targets of Hindutva, Muslims. It ropes in International Council of Indian Muslims (ICIM) and Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC). The preposterous claims made by the diagram then connects Hindus for Human Rights through IAMC to the favourite bogeyman of the fascists, Pakistan ISI.
The disinformation campaign is ominous in its mirroring of strategies of seeding disinformation planted by the digital ecosystem and pro-fascist media in India to silence, intimidate and incarcerate dissenters.
Disinformation campaigns and silencing of dissent
Recall how the Indian youth climate activist, Disha Ravi, a founder of the Indian branch of Fridays for Future, a global youth-led protest movement created by Greta Thurnberg, was harassed and arrested by the Modi regime for allegedly creating a toolkit in support of the Farmers’ Protests in India in opposition to the draconian Farmer Bills seeking to loosen the policies around the sale, pricing and storage of farm produce that have protected farmers from the free market amidst the aggressive neoliberal reforms.
The toolkit was tweeted by prominent youth climate activist Greta Thurnberg and had drawn global attention to the repression of farmers by the Modi regime in India. A tweet by the superstar Rihanna placed the farmer protest on the global map and drew the wrath of the digital armies and media ecosystems of Hindutva, and unsettled the Indian government.
The strong and principled protests of the farmers sustained over a year and in the face of a wide array of repressive strategies used by the regime, is one of the most vital ongoing sites of dissent against the Hindutva apparatus.
Ravi was charged of sedition for allegedly seeking to wage war against India, with disinformation strategies connecting her to the journalist Pieter Friedrich who has been exposing the workings of the Hindutva networks in US politics. In an interview, Friedrich had noted that he did not know Disha and the other youth activists who were targeted.
What is SHHAN?
SHHAN is an Islamophobic anti-Christian Hindutva organisation with an online presence. It projects its objective as tracking individuals and organisations that it labels as advocate hatred toward Hindus.
Under the guise of tracking Hinduphobia, it does the propaganda work of Hindutva, creating a list of individuals and organisations that are critical of the Islamophobia that makes up Hindutva.
In the section “about us,” the organisation spells out its Hindutva ideology.
Including snippets of video conversations from the Hindutva ideologue, Tejasvi Surya, who is alleged to have delivered/tweeted hate speeches targeting Muslims in the past, the website defines Hindutva as the following:
“Hindutva is an intellectual, political, socio-response, of Hindus to prevent themselves from aggression, predation and proselytisation from semitic Abrahamic faiths like Christianity and Islam.”
Note here the framing of Abrahamic faiths like Christianity and Islam as aggressive, predatory, and proselytizing.
In response to the question “What is the need for Hindutva?” the site goes on to paraphrase Surya,
“Abrahamic faiths by very nature are predatory, proselytising and negate the existence of other faiths as false faiths. As long as Abrahamic faiths continue their existence as proselytising religions, Hindutva will be there to protect itself.”
The framing of Abrahamic faiths as aggressive serves to project Hindutva as a defensive response.
The twitter handle of SHHAN @HinduHate follows the twitter handle of Kapil Mishra, a local Hindutva politician in Delhi whose fiery speech targeting the protests against the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act (ACT) played a key role in the Delhi riots.
What can we do?
Disinformation forms the basis of the campaigns of hate that are spread by Hindutva, reflective of the campaigns of hate that are carried out by supremacist groups such as Action Zealandia.
In any instance we see diagrams, stories, links thrown at us that project some form of “othering” (such as in the figure above targeting AAPI connecting us tenuously to the Pakistan intelligence agency through Hindus for Human Rights), we should closely look at the story being offered. We should ask, what is the pattern of storytelling here?
We should then look for evidence for any of the pieces of information being offered to create the story. Disinformation campaigns are built on lies, and just a little digging under the surface will expose the lie.
In the diagram for instance, ask what is the organisation “Hindus for Human Rights” and what does it do? A little research from credible sources will reveal that this is an organisation created by Hindus who seek to take back the religion from the hate politics of Hindutva.
The Hindu community in Aotearoa has been the target of Hindutva strategies over the past decade, and these forces have been emboldened by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Asking critical questions is the first step to countering the influence of this hate politics that unfortunately leverages digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to work across borders in spreading hate.
On the Statements by the Hindu Council of New Zealand (HCNZ), and Hindu Organisations, Temples and Associations Forum (HOTA)
The Hindu Council of New Zealand (HCNZ) and Hindu Organisations, Temples and Associations Forum (HOTA) are seeking co-signatories on an email intended for Massey University and others with a request that the University apologise for their support of Professor Mohan J. Dutta's scholarly activities, and that they rescind his publishing.
In our open letter, we explain the harmful nature of HCNZ and HOTA's positions. Their statements make several factual errors and omissions, and thus misrepresent Prof. Dutta's work. We believe this distortion is unjustified, and that it is part of a greater harmful movement that many Hindus are becoming unknowingly absorbed into.
To read AAPI's letter, click here or continue scrolling.
OP-ED: A Response to Hindu Youth Council's Press Release
Opinion:The grievance performance of Hindu Youth Council New Zealand
The press release issued by Hindu Youth Council New Zealand ‘criticising’ Prof. Mohan Dutta's white paper titled “Cultural Hindutva and Islamophobia,” is full of whataboutery, claiming the ownership of wider Hindu community and seeking to camouflage the existence of cultural Hindutva across the globe and particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The press release starts with an allegation that the white paper contains ‘several accusatory and unsubstantiated assertions against Hindus and in particular, the Hindu community living in Aotearoa'. This is a false accusation, without any evidence or actual reference to anything stated in the paper. The paper clearly and in depth, analyses cultural Hindutva, and not Hinduism. The press release mischievously conflates this fundamental distinction that forms the basis of the white paper.
The claims in the press release are so preposterous that I doubt whether the individuals who prepared this press release actually read the white paper at least once.
If the authors of the press release actually read the white paper, I would suggest their statement be reworded as the following ‘several accusations and unsubstantiated assertions against cultural Hindutva and in particular the Hindu supremacists living in Aotearoa’. That will give you a better chance to debate the content of the white paper on its terms. Hindu Youth can then go about explaining why they have a problem with critical analysis of a right wing majoritarian political ideology that is described in the literature as almost fascist. Perhaps, Hindu Youth ought to explain their position with regard to the right wing political ideology of Hindutva.
Anyone who read the white paper will understand without a doubt that Prof. Dutta was focusing on Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), a far-right political ideology based on Hindu supremacy which is at work towards transforming the diversity of India into an exclusive concept of a Hindu nation. This process of imposing a monolithic reading of religion on India draws on monolithic language and monolithic cultural stories. To make up this monolith, Hindutva colonizes diverse Hinduisms and erases the caste and gender inequalities in society.
Cultural Hindutva is a key element in the dissemination of Hindu supremacist ideologies through their strategies of storytelling that continually construct the other. The creation of the Muslim other as the basis of domination forms the basis of Islamophobia in cultural Hindutva. In conflating Hindutva with Hinduism, the Hindu Youth press release mirrors the strategy of Hindutva organizations in India and in other parts of the world, producing the smokescreen of Hinduphobia to silence the criticism of a fascist ideology. They even throw in a term Hindumisia that is in vogue in the Hindutva twitter sphere.
Furthermore, the press release accuses Prof. Dutta of drawing ‘many false equivalences, which attack the cultural and religious practice of Hindus'. I understand that false equivalence is a logical fallacy in which an equivalence with the flawed reasoning is drawn between two or more things. Now I went back and read the white paper again thinking I might have missed that part of false equivalences attacking the practices of Hindus. I couldn’t find any false equivalences or any mention of cultural and religious practices of Hindus in that 2-page white paper. There were no mentions made in the entire white paper on cultural practices of Hindus.
The only false equivalence at play is in the press release of Hindu youth council, a nugatory exercise to equate Hindutva and Hindu Nationalism with Hinduism and Hindus. Projecting this lie allows Hindu Youth then to play victim, throw in the label Hinduphobia, and then demand apology.
The press release then moved on to attack the ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva,’ Conference, drawing on the Hindutva strategy of accusing it of aiming to vilify the global Hindu community.
It peddles the lie that many reputable Universities globally have withdrawn their support for the conference, while the facts are that every university that committed to the conference supported it. The threats by Hindutva forces led to a large number of additional Universities signing up. By the time it wrapped up, the conference had 30,000 attendees from across the globe.
In the face of the efforts of tarnishing the Conference, it gained tremendous support from the leading intellectuals of South Asia. In this sense, Massey University is in stellar company of some of the leading institutions across the globe which include Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, to name a few. Hindu Youth should at the very least get their public relations team to do basic homework, lest they lose any and all credibility, and be seen as an extension of the Hindutva troll army.
Moving on, the Hindu Youth Council claims Hindu are advocates of free speech and academic freedom, which is actually one of the only accurate claims in the press release. But the question is not about the wider Hindu community, the question is what is the legacy of Hindu supremacists when it comes to free speech and academic freedom? The number of unlawfully incarcerated students, scholars, academics and political activists in India will give us the answer to this question.
The Hindu youth council, self proclaimed advocates of free speech and academic freedom have concluded their media statement with a message from their president Mr Murali Magesan, “The last thing Hindu Youth New Zealand wants to be doing is trying to inform more than 150,000 Hindus in New Zealand that Massey University endorses Hinduphobia and Hindumisia and Hindu students should look to alternative Institutes of higher education where they will not be marginalised and can feel safe". That sounds like a threat, and a campaign to boycott Massey University. Perhaps for the Hindu youth council, these are strategies of advocating for free speech and academic freedom.
Letter to a Young American Hindu
"Since last week's Dismantling Global Hindutva conference (10 – 12 September 2021), there’s been an outpouring of emotion everywhere, including hatred and abuse against scholars in Aotearoa New Zealand like Prof. Mohan Dutta
During this time, Vijay Prashad’s Letter to a Young Hindu American written almost 15 years ago has been a guide for me. (He might as well have addressed it to us, here!)
Read and listen below:
Originally posted on the blog Pass the roti on the left hand side (21 May 2007)
Dear Friend,
Like you, I was raised in a mixed family. My parents' families came to Bengal from Punjab, and from Burma. One side leans towards Hinduism; the other to Sikhism. The city, the metro, provided its own cultural mooring, and in secular India, I found myself interested in all religions and deeply schooled in none. Id meant fellowship with my Muslim neighbors and friends; a Navjot meant a crash course in Parsi life; Nanak's birthday meant a visit to Gurudwara Sant Kutiya in the center of town; Christmas, which is Bara Din in Calcutta, meant a brightly lit Park Street and a visit to St. Paul's Cathedral; and, of course, Diwali and Holi represented the high-points of our festival culture. Religion was colorful, and friendly. It didn't represent either the harshest of personal morality nor the resentments or distrust of others.
I learnt a few prayers and songs, but this learning was not systematic. Some of my friends were better schooled than I in their various traditions. Our diversity was not simply across religion, but also a diversity of the density of our engagement with religion: agnostics or religious illiterates were as welcome as those who were committed to their faith. The festival that I most liked was Saraswati Puja, the day when we wore yellow and put all our schoolbooks at the feet of the goddess. The respite from study was welcome, as you can imagine.
My morality came from elsewhere than religion, from recognition of the pain in the world. Religious teachers whom I encountered sometimes talked about this suffering, but they didn't seem to have more than charity to offer to those who suffered. It struck me that while religious festivals were beautiful, religions themselves were not adequate as a solution to modern crises. But religion, as I came to understand while reading Gandhi many years later, can play a role in the cleansing of public morality. In 1940, Gandhi wrote, "I still hold the view that I cannot conceive politics as divorced from religion. Indeed, religion should pervade everyone one of our actions. Here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe. It is not less real because it is unseen. This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality" (Harijan, February 10, 1940). In other words, politics should not be simply about power struggles, but it must be suffused with moral concerns. It is not enough to win; one must strive to create, what Gandhi called, Truth in the world.
To strive for Truth does not mean that we, as humans, can be sure that what we believe in or what we aspire to is some transcendental truth. Gandhi's autobiography was not called I've Found Truth, but The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The use of the word "experiments" is revealing, since it refers to a scientific tradition that privileges verifiable testing (this is also the case with the Gujarati word "prayago," which is in the original 1927 title, Satya-na Prayago athva Atmakatha; Professor Babu Suthar links "prayoga," the singular of "prayago," to the ayurvedic and yogic sense of treatment and practice. An ayurvedic doctor must ask the patient to "prayoga" a medicine, which would imply, try it out to see if it works). Religious traditions are resources to guide us, as social individuals, through the difficulties and opportunities of our lives. They are not dogmas to tear people apart from each other. In a powerful essay against compulsory widow segregation, Gandhi wrote, "It is good to swim in the waters of tradition, but to sink in them is suicide" (Navajivan, June 28, 1925). Let tradition be a studied resource, not a set of inflexible, unchanging rules.
The Gita
More than a decade ago, I was teaching South Asian history in central New York. A few young students invited me to their Gita reading group. I was delighted to join them, not because I was an expert in the Gita, but because it pleased me to see second-generation South Asian Americans take an interest in the history and traditions of the subcontinent. The students, dutifully, read their section for the evening and proceeded to have a discussion about it. They had little guidance apart from the text, and they valiantly drew from the analytical skills they learnt in their classes to make sense of the Gita. For them, religion was not an "experiment with truth," but because of their context, it was the Truth that had to be unmasked by their close, devoted reading. I felt myself sinking into it.
The Gita is a remarkable book, precisely because of its history (it was composed long after the Mahabharata, written in classical Sanskrit of the Gupta era, and interpolated into the long epic much later). Frustrated with the hierarchy promoted by Brahmans through the Vedic traditions, scores of people turned to Sramanic traditions (most familiarly, Buddhism). The Gita is a sublime response to the power of Buddhism with concepts such as karma drawn from it. The genius of the text is that it takes concepts and ideas from these popular traditions and brings them into line with some of the central principles of Brahmanism (varna, mainly). The Gita is awash with contradictions: it preaches ahimsa, and yet is set in a battlefield, where Krishna must convince Arjun to go into the fight; it validates the importance of caste hierarchy, and yet shines a light on the equality of all before the awesome might of divinity. The contradictory nature of the text allows every reader to find something beneficial in it. It works as a mirror to our reality.
Then there is bhakti, one of the foundation stones of modern Hinduism. It is the Gita's central concept. Personal devotion (bhakti) drew out from the oppressed peoples of the subcontinent the ability to challenge those who stood between them and divinity (the Brahmins, for instance) and those who stood between them and a peaceful life (Kings, for instance). The concept, Bhakti, was the central idea for a series of important spiritual and social rebellions, led by such people as Andal, Kabir, Mirabai, Tukaram, and above all, Jnanesvar. Jnanesvar, the 13th century Marathi poet, wrote an extended commentary on the Gita in which he not only went after the powerful, but also bemoaned the great harm done to the people for whom religion had become a crutch rather than an engine. "The peasant farmer sets up cult after cult, according to convenience," he wrote. "He follows the preacher who seems most impressive at the moment, learns his mystic formula. Harsh to the living, he relies upon stones and images; but even then never lives true to any one of them." Jnanesvar's powerful critique was not met with an equally powerful movement to overthrow the foundation of the social order of his time. As the historian D. D. Kosambi wrote, "Though an adept in yoga as a path towards physical immortality and mystical perfection, there was nothing left for [Jnanesvar] except suicide." The ideas were glorious, but there was no institutional platform to realize them.
Noxious Hindutva
All this is lost if one reads the Gita as settled Truth rather than an experiment in truth. When Gandhi claimed to base his ahimsa philosophy on the Gita, he faced opposition. "My claim to Hinduism has been rejected by some," he wrote in Young India (May 29, 1924), "because I believe [in] and advocate non-violence in its extreme form. They say that I am a Christian in disguise. I have been even seriously told that I am distorting the meaning of the Gita when I ascribe to that great poem the teaching of unadulterated non-violence. Some of my Hindu friends tell me that killing is a duty enjoined by the Gita under certain circumstances. A very learned Shashtri only the other day scornfully rejected my interpretation of the Gita and said that there was no warrant for the opinion held by some commentators that the Gita represented the eternal duel between forces of evil and good, and inculcated the duty of eradicating evil within us without hesitation, without tenderness…My religion is a matter solely between my Maker and myself. If I am a Hindu, I cannot cease to be one even though I may be disowned by the whole of the Hindu population."
Those who criticized Gandhi for his "misuse" of Hinduism came from the organizations of the Right. The Hindu Mahasabha (1915) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (1925) provided this Right with an institutional nucleus to sharpen the assault on both Indian society and on the Indian freedom movement (whose undisputed leader at this time was Gandhi). The leadership of this Right considered Gandhi a "traitor" to the "Hindu people," and it was their cadre that murdered him in 1948. The RSS, the spearhead of the new "Hindu nationalism," eschewed the mass Freedom Struggle that emerged in the 1920s, sharpened in the 1930s and eventually defeated the British Raj in the 1940s. In 1928, the RSS inaugurated its Officer Training Camp to train its own storm-troopers, not to do battle with the powerful British and its institutions, but with the relatively powerless Muslim masses. The swayamsevak, or volunteer, took an oath, "offering himself entirely – body, mind and wealth – for the preservation and progress of the Hindu Nation." The complexity of India, its diverse heritages and its fluid cultural resources, was anathema to the RSS and its doctrine of Hindutva (Hinduness).
The influence of Italian fascism and German Nazism pervaded the RSS, becoming clarified in the 1939 book by M. S. Golwalkar, "Germany has shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." For Golwalkar, the role of the "Jew" within India was to be played by the "Muslim" (it should be said that his 1939 book was reprinted in 1944 and in 1947, after the Holocaust was known to all, and yet there was no revision of this section). No wonder Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen considered the ideology of the RSS to be "communal fascism." The RSS remained a marginal element in Indian political life, having played no role in the Freedom Struggle and having a noxious view of the complexity of Indian social life that appealed only to a few among the dominant castes who felt left out of the new Indian republic.
Indian Honeycomb
That complexity is something that Gandhi and others well understood. In 1992, the Anthropological Society of India published the first of an ongoing series of monographs with the omnibus title, The People of India. In this volume, the late K. S. Singh laid out the basic findings of this immense study of the Indian people. There are, he wrote, 4635 identifiable communities in India, "diverse in biological traits, dress, language, forms of worship, occupation, food habits, and kinship patterns. It is all these communities who in their essential ways of life express our national popular life." Strikingly, the scholars working under Singh's direction discovered the immense overlap across religious lines. They identified 775 traits that related to ecology, settlement, identity, food habits, marriage patterns, social customs, social organization, economy and occupation. What they found was that Hindus share 96.77% traits with Muslims, 91.19% with Buddhists, 88.99% with Sikhs, 77.46% with Jains (Muslims, in turn, share 91.18% with Buddhists and 89.95% with Sikhs). Because of this, Singh pointed out that Indian society was like a "honeycomb," where each community is in constant and meaningful interaction with every other community. The boundaries between communities are more a fact of self-definition than of cultural distinction. This Gandhi knew implicitly. Unity was a fact of life, not a conceit of secular theory.
When I went to Punjab in the early 1990s to do my dissertation research, I was startled to find communities that considered themselves on the fence about their religious identification. Three in particular (that make their way into Singh's study) stood out: the Mirasi, Sonar and Rajputs, who claimed to be both Hindus and Muslims. The group I had gone to study, the Balmikis, had a wonderfully rich religious history, where they crafted their own spiritual tradition around the preceptor Bala Shah Nuri and Lalbeg. Bala Shah's poems attacked both the Brahmins and the Mullahs for their perpetuation of untouchability and their refusal to stand for justice. Ram te Rahim kian chhap chhap jana, the followers of Ram and Rahim will hide themselves in fear, sava neze te din avega, hade dosakh pana, and when the sun sets, Bala will send them to hell. This evokes the kind of language of that other great Punjabi poet, Bulle Shah, who sang, Musalman sarne to dared hindu dared gor, dove ese vich mard eho duha di khor (Muslims fear the flame, Hindus the tomb; both die in this fright, such is their hatred).
Hindutva, or the ideology and movement of Hindu chauvinism, attempts to do to this richness what agro-businesses do to bio-diversity. They want to reduce the multiplicity and plurality of cultural forms into the one that they are then able to control: a deracinated "Hindu," like a Genetically Modified form of rice or barley. The joy of religious life, of social life, is reduced into a mass-produced form of worship, cultivated out of hatred for other religions rather than fellowship for humanity. With the RSS and its parivar (family), we are no longer in the land of religion. We are now in the land of power and politics, hate and resentment.
Till the 1980s, the RSS remained on the margins of Indian politics. Rejected at the ballot, the movement emerged only through assassination and intimidation, through riots and mayhem, through which it sought to define the political and social space. In the 1980s, conditions changed, as the Congress abandoned its soft socialism/soft secularism for neo-liberal globalization and the politicization of religion (first by patronizing Sikh separatists). The RSS family won over the Congress' "Hindu vote bank" through an aggressive campaign against dalits (over the Mandal Commissions attempt to deepen reservations), against Muslims (over the Meenakshipuram conversions and the controversy over the mosque at Ayodhya) and against the Left (by deeming its ideology to be "foreign"). Flamboyant campaigns designed to make the most of the television media and harsh rhetoric against minorities attracted the dispossessed, who now joined with disgruntled dominant castes to bring the BJP to power.
The Indian honeycomb began to breakup in this period. It was also in this time that Hindutva went overseas with a new confidence.
Yankee Hindutva
More than a decade ago, I used the term "Yankee Hindutva" to describe the way Hindu chauvinism came into the United States. Eager to branch out to the Diaspora, the RSS and its subsidiaries took advantage of multiculturalism to build their foothold here. Not for the American audience an unadulterated anti-Muslim rhetoric (that would come only in some "safe" spaces, and more aggressively, after 9/11). Initially, the RSS organizations, particularly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) and its youth wing, the Hindu Students Council (HSC), promoted the idea that Hinduism is denigrated in the U. S. and that if other cultures are being celebrated, why not Hinduism too. This is an unimpeachable argument, but it came with some implementation problems. First, it assumed that "Hinduism" is a singular thing, not a clumsy name for a diversity of beliefs and affections that litter not only the subcontinent but also the South Asian Diaspora (from Trinidad to Fiji). Second, because the VHPA and the HSC jumped in the game first, and because the most stringent are best often to claim to speak for a religion, the conservatives took control of this issue. There was no liberal critique of the denigration of Hinduism, and when liberals and radicals did dare to tread, the conservatives harshly shut the door to them as being inauthentic defenders of the Culture. This was the tenor of the battle over the 2005-06 revisions of the California text-books. We didn't like the old books either. But we didn't like the sanitized version of Indian history promoted by the conservatives. We wanted "India" to appear for what it is, a land of contradictions, not an unblemished "brand" that needs to be sold so that we can feel falsely proud.
In 1990, a group of committed activists of the hard Right formed the Hindu Students Council (HSC) in the woods of New Jersey. Their public pronouncement was along the grain of liberal multiculturalism, that they wanted to assist Hindu students who struggle with the "loss and isolation" due to their "upbringing in a dual culture Hindu and Judeo-Christian….We try to reconcile our own sorrows and imperfections as human beings in a variety of self-defeating ways. And we usually go through this confused internal struggle alone. It was precisely to assist you with this spiritual, emotional and identity needs that HSC was born." Given the strictures of liberal multiculturalism, everyone, including college administrators, stood by and applauded. But the HSC was never simply about the identity struggles of those whom it called Hindu Americans. It was also the youthful fingers of the long-arm of Hindutva-supremacy in India. The HSC was initially a "project of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America," the far Right "cultural wing" of the hard Right Sangh Parivar (Family of the Faithful). When activists of the Right destroyed a five hundred year old mosque in 1992, the VHP egged them on, the VHPA cheered, and so did the leaders of the HSC. For them, concern over the identity struggles of young Indian Americans could easily be reconciled with their anti-Muslim politics. Multiculturalism in the U. S. provided cover for the cruel, cultural chauvinism in India.
Young South Asian Americans, such as yourself, come to the HSC not always for its politics, but as a space for shelter and struggle against anti-Indian racism. Falguni Trivedi, who participated with the HSC in 1997, tells the story poignantly, "When I was twelve years old, American kids would gang up on me at the bus stop, yelling 'Gandhi Dot' and ask, 'why do you people in India worship cows and drink cow urine?' It is pretty tough for young Hindus stuck between two cultures." When Trivedi went to her parents, they, like many first-generation migrants, offered her the ostrich-strategy. "Adjust" to the verbal abuse, they said. Trivedi, however, wanted her parents to offer clear answers to the questions posed by the racist youth, such as answers about the cow. The parents didn't have ready answers. "Parents don't know," said Dheeraj Singhal, now a lawyer in Ohio, "they're lost. They don't know where to look. Kids are really desperate to know who they are, the meaning of their customs. This giant void of ignorance facing them is a great issue." It is here that the HSC and other such organizations (including the non-communal South Asian Student Associations on various college campuses) come in. But the HSC is actually unable or ill-fitted to deal with U. S. racism. It tells the youth that they come from an ancient heritage and that they should be proud of it, but the HSC makes no attempt to undermine the structures of racism that produce this sort of off-the-cuff racist remark. To promote Indians as the "model minority," who have a great and ancient culture, and not combat the racism that devastates the world of color and pits people of color against each other, is inadequate. It simply lifts up one minority, us, and says that we shouldn't take this nonsense because we are culturally great.
Groups like the HSC and the VHPA are less concerned with the broad problem of racism and of Indian American life, than they are to push the Hindutva agenda in the U. S. and Canada. Here are two examples:
(1)Air-conditioned Sadhus.
By the late 1990s, Hindu temples could be found in most of the areas where Indian Americans lived (or where American Hindus did, such as in Hawaiii). The Prathishtapanas for the Middletown, CT., Satyanarayan temple near where I live took place in 1999 (although families in the area had worshipped in their basements since the early 1980s). These temples are a resource for Hinduism, with ceremonies and festivals, "Sunday Schools" and devotional sessions. The VHPA has other ideas for the temples. In 1998, at a VHPA Dharam Sansad, the conclave decided that all temples and cultural organizations "should associate, endorse and/or affiliate with the VHPA to make the Hindu voice more effective." In 2000, the VHPA sent a hundred God-men from India on a Dharma Prachar Yatra "in a manner so that all of America is covered with Hindutva," as a VHPA activist put it. One of the tasks of the Yatra was for the sadhus to "clear the misconceptions about the VHP" and to assert "the VHP's point of view about issues like Ayodhya movement and attacks on Christians." All talk of "inter-faith dialogue" and of Hinduism as tolerance was out the window. These God-men went on tour, not to offer solace, spiritual guidance or to explain the travails of racism – they came out to plug for the BJP, the VHP and its campaigns against Muslims and Christians in India.
The God-men were treated like touring rock-stars. Luckily I was teaching the Manavadharmasastra (or the Laws of Manu) that semester: "A priest should always be alarmed by adulation as if it were poison and always desire scorn as if it were ambrosia" (II. 162). Our air-conditioned priests are far removed from even the barest humility asked of them by their calling.
(2)Representing Hinduism.
For decades, there has been an ongoing debate within the broad field of India Studies. Influenced by social historians who opened up the world of Indian popular culture and the struggles of ordinary Indians, and by the intervention of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), these scholars fought against the racism and conservatism of the academy. Sanskrit studies, for instance, treated India as an ancient resource with no lived heritage of Hinduism; political scientists saw India in terms of U. S. or British foreign policy, not in terms of what is in the best interests of the Indian people. Graduate school in the 1980s and early 1990s was a hive of conflict against what some of us saw as a racist representation of the subcontinent.
In 2000, Rajiv Malhotra of the Infinity Foundation published a long essay against the tenor of Hinduism Studies in the U. S. As if he were a lonely pioneer, Malhotra went hell-for-leather against the entire U. S. academy. Much of what he said is correct (there is an insensitivity toward the Hindu tradition, and a disregard for the real living Indians), and it had been the basis for a long-standing debate around the institutions. With his access to the Indian American media, Malhotra (and the soon to be formed Hindu American Foundation) went after individual academics and then the California 6th grade textbooks. It was a lot of flash and lightning: many of us liberals and radicals were already in the thick of these fights, and much of our work has been fruitful. But we were not invested simply in making India look good: we wanted to ensure that the diversity of India's history and its struggles be represented in the curriculum and in the research agendas. "The social science and history textbooks do not give as generous a portrayal of Indian culture as they do of Islamic, Jewish, Christian cultures," carped Malhotra. When asked about the struggles of dalits and women in ancient India, Suhag Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation grumbled, "In terms of men and women, I think, first of all if you look at Christianity or Judaism or Islam, no-where in the textbooks is there any discussion of women's rights. Then to pull it in for Hinduism, is a different treatment of Hinduism." All culture must have equal treatment, all contemporary representatives of that culture should be able to create their sense of self-worth based on this representation. Shukla has a point: no tradition is in the clear on these issues. The solution is not to brown-wash the textbooks on ancient Indian history, but to write more honest books about the contradictions of all civilizations.
Malhotra's assault to get a politically correct interpretation accepted or nothing at all is the genteel version of the Shiv Sena and VHP activists in India who went after James Laine's book on Shivaji (by book burnings and physical assaults on his collaborators).
These issues are brought to the center by the VHPA, the HSC, the HFA: all to blind us from other issues, such as racism in the U. S., the Iraq War, economic uncertainty and distress in India, rising numbers on sexual assault and female infanticide in India, and the Gujarat pogrom. Yankee Hindutva is a set of blinders, not an optic to see the world clearly.
What Would You Have?
yadidam svayamarthanam rocate tatra ke vayam
If the objects themselves are like that, who are we?
Dharmakirti (7th Century).
The suffocating presence of the VHPA and the HSC, of the RSS and the BJP does not exhaust the capacity of either Hinduism or of its adherents. Our affection for its resources is not diminished, nor should we turn away from our traditions because the RSS and its family try to debase it.
In 2004, the Indian people, and a majority of them being claimants to the title Hindu, rejected the parties of the far Right in the parliamentary election (they were defeated again in 2007 in the Uttar Pradesh state elections). The mandate was offered to the Congress and the Left, who crafted a Common Minimum Program that promised a more generous set of policies for the working-class, the peasantry and the indigent, as well as a more secular defense of the public sphere. The parties of Hindutva went into a self-imposed period of infighting, as scandals interrupted their claim to holding the high-moral ground.
In the Diaspora, there was some reflection of this change in the Indian political landscape. The far Right moved to consolidate its agenda despite changes within India – closer ties between Indian American lobby groups and pro-Israeli lobby groups, to sharpen the idea that the Indo-Pakistani problems can only be resolved in the Israeli fashion, through force; the creation of the Hindu American Foundation (whose main campaign in 2004-05 was the Diwali resolution, and who was an active leader of the California textbooks campaign); an assault on scholars of India and Hinduism, led this time by the Infinity Foundation. But not a word from any of these organizations on the farmer's suicides in Andhra Pradesh, on the deepening problem of unemployment across India, and on the cataclysmic child malnutrition rates across the country. These matters were not, apparently, of importance. Discussions about Planet India, as Mira Kamdar puts it, eclipsed the burgeoning social crises in India. As Gandhi warned his fellows ninety years ago, "The test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses" (Muir Central College Economics Society, Allahabad, December 22, 1916). Equally, these organizations remained silent after 9/11 at the attacks on South Asians and Arabs and at the illegal detentions of hundreds of South Asians (the civil rights and activists groups, such as South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow and Desis Rising Up and Moving were in the lead here). Immigration reform, "Operation Meth Merchant" (against the small Indian shopkeepers in Georgia) and other such issues were equally off the radar of the HSC, the VHPA and HAF.
If I were you, I'd abandon the Hindu Students Council and create a new organization called Sarvodaya (Compassion for All), a word Gandhi coined for his variety of social justice. You can still have intellectual and spiritual investigations of the Gita, you can still hold inter-faith discussions, you can still educate your fellows about the rich and diverse tradition of Hinduism, and you can also promote egalitarianism and social justice as values derived from your tradition.
The Hinduism that cares more for its reputation than for its relevance is no longer a living tradition. It has become something that one reveres from a distance. To keep it alive, Hinduism requires an engagement with its history (which shows us how it evolves and changes) and with its core concepts (what we otherwise call philosophy). "Every formula of every religion has, in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent" Gandhi wrote in 1925. "Error can claim no exemption even if it can be supported by the scriptures of the world" (Young India, February 26, 1925). Submit all faith to experiments, to see how they are able to assist one in the messy world we live in: to detach faith into self-indulgence is to patronize those traditions. That's the nature of experimentation, a far better approach to faith traditions than empty reverence.
The choice lies between giving over the traditions you love to the forces of hatred who might masquerade as the defenders of tradition; or to the force within you, and around you, a force of love and ecstasy, passion and pain to transform the world. What would you have?
Vijay Prashad
May 17, 2007.
