Sadbhistu līlayā proktaṃ śilālikhitam akṣaram. / Asadbhiśśapathenoktaṃ jale likhitam akṣaram. (Even words said in fun by good people are like letters carved in stone. / Even oaths sworn by bad people are like letters written on water.) – Subha****ham
US Hindu groups are expressing a sense of vindication and concern after a press release from California’s Civil Rights Department (CDR) showed that 23.3 per cent of all acts of religious hate reported to the Department’s Anti-Hate Hotline in the last year were anti-Hindu incidents.
Not surprisingly, the largest category of religious hate incidents recorded were anti-Jewish in nature (36.9 per cent) but possibly quite surprisingly, for certain well-funded anti-Islamophobia groups (including some self-styled ‘progressive’ Hindu groups), the percentage of anti-Muslim hate incidents (14.6 per cent) recorded was lower than that of both anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu incidents.
On the face of it, this data confirms what many Hindus have been saying all along: that Hinduphobia is real and incidents of anti-Hindu bigotry and violence are on the rise. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, for example, at least six Hindu temples were vandalised in the past few months. Before that, there were notorious examples of random outbursts of hatred against Hindus in public spaces in California, such as the vicious abuse of a Hindu customer at a Taco Bell in Fremont by an American of South Asian descent and the religious profiling and harassment of a Hindu family at a July 4th fair by a white agitator.
Gaslighting of Victims of Hinduphobia
Yet, even while some Hindu organisations have tried to push for recognition of growing Hinduphobia, other, more influential and more effectively culturally-legitimised South Asian lobby groups have stood their ground insisting that there is no such thing as Hinduphobia. One Harvard professor even wrote an op-ed in The New York Times gaslighting possible victims of Hinduphobic racism in advance by calling on employers and university employers to effectively ignore such complaints because they might be made by “Modi-aligned factions”.
Even now, with the California CRD’s press release, there is no guarantee that this data will lead to greater recognition of Hinduphobia, or support for anti-Hinduphobia legal and educational measures in society. CRD doesn’t exactly have high credibility with the American Hindu community since this was the government organisation involved with the witch-hunt against Ramana Kompella and Sundar Iyer in the scandalous Cisco “Caste Discrimination” non-case (which was thrown out by the court finally).
Furthermore, even if the CRD is, on the face of it, recording complaints of anti-Hindu hate, it is unclear if its intent is to effectively support Hindu victims against Hinduphobia, or merely “manage” the problem to the extent of further legitimising and supporting nominally ‘Hindu’ organisations which vehemently deny the existence of Hinduphobia and blame the victims as a rule. CRD’s resource page for religious community groups lists only one well-known ‘progressive’ Hindu group as a resource for Hindu victims of hate. This group has no record of recognising or fighting Hinduphobia.
Stage Managing Hindu Pain
It may be fair to assume that the CRD is in the process of acknowledging the existence of anti-Hindu hate to the extent of validating current academic assumptions or propaganda (for example, saying that Hindus can be victims of hate, but not because of Hinduphobia but only because of side-effects from Islamophobia or “anti-Brown” prejudice). This would not be inconsistent with the way the harsh reality of anti-Semitism has also been ‘managed’ by establishment institutions and discourses in America: it is ‘admitted’ to the extent that it comes from the American Right Wing, and completely denied, or even repackaged as “anti-Zionism” and celebrated, when it comes from far-Left White activists and West Asian/South Asian far-Right Religious Supremacists.
This would also parallel the continuing deployment of management initiatives for Hindu college consumers such as ‘Hindu chaplaincy’ positions (some of which have been used to deny the existence of Hinduphobia as in the case of the Reza Aslan CNN controversy of 2017 when a ‘Hindu Chaplain’ vindicated Aslan’s excuse that he was merely exposing the horrors of the Hindu ‘caste system’).
All in all, the status quo will likely remain. Entrenched anti-Hindu propagandists will use their power and location within the system (academia, NGOs, governments, corporates, foundations) to deny the validity of Hinduphobia and call it a ‘Hindutva’ supremacist slogan, while Hindu community groups who are seemingly trying to get recognition for Hinduphobia and protect Hindus from harm will also remain where they have been—on the margins of the system, the culture, and most alarmingly, their perceived legitimacy in the eyes of their own children growing up in the American madhouse without the support of a delusion-free community that can actually guide them to their real ancestral, cultural, and spiritual strengths.
Why Hindu Americans Fail to Change Narratives
The harsh truth is that no matter what the data says, Hindu American community groups have been largely unsuccessful in pushing for mainstream cultural legitimisation of Hinduphobia as a real concern. In a way, it is not surprising because they have rarely been pushing for what people think they are pushing for. Given the nature of Hindu organising to operate as a voluntary, community-donations-based effort (with of course, one “meta” organisation trying to dominate everything and anything ‘Hindu’ including the few independent efforts which get sucked in or sabotaged or silenced along the way), Hindu organisations do tend to end up trying to be all things to everybody in their little social bubble.
Sometimes, ‘Hindu’ organisations try to be all about training the next generation to ‘have’ a Hindu cultural identity. Sometimes it is about talking to politicians and showing them Hindus have votes and pay taxes and want some recognition from them. Sometimes, it is “Hinduphobia”, sometimes, it is some other issue. But always, one common theme that runs through these organisations is the focus on building a machine, which means manufacturing ‘leaders’, and sometimes ‘intellectuals’ too, for the most part without any foothold in academia or relevant academic disciplines (even if individually well-informed on occasion).
Hindu Groups Build ‘Leaders’ while Hinduphobes Build Narratives
To emphasise this point again: Hindu Americans fail to change narratives because their primary focus is not on changing narratives but only on building leaders and followers.
We can see such trends quite plainly over the years. Until the 1980s or so, “Hindu organisations” in the US meant mostly groups which tried to offer weekend classes in temples for children on “what is Hinduism” and also on Indian history. In the early 2000s, some of the children who grew up from these experiences and felt secure of their professional and financial standing in American society sought to create organisations that would be more US-centric, and engage with American civic processes.
But no matter how much they emphasised their “American-ness,” and accused critics of using xenophobic “dual-loyalty” slurs against them, the truth is that some of these groups remained thoroughly India-centric, party-centred, and personality-constrained. Even forgetting the formal political affiliations aside as not all Hindu Americans may be involved formally or organizationally with Indian political groups, the operating principle is the same. The Hindu American diaspora is pretty much used by Indian organisations as a staging ground for promoting ‘leaders’ in India and the diaspora.
Take the example of the controversy over a professor at a New Jersey university organising a small student demonstration over Kashmir on her campus a few years ago; already, there was a full plate of actually unacademic, Hinduphobic, statements from that professor which a focused Hindu activist community could have organised on, but instead what did they do? They picked not the religious bigotry card, but the political criticism point to mobilise, a weak ticket to start with. And even then, what was their chosen approach? A group of grad students or professors in political science or history to rebut that professor’s criticism? No, but an imported celebrity from India being projected to Hindu American kids as their role-model and saviour.
Similarly, on the West Coast, the Hindu groups are agog about importing speakers from India to teach Hindu American kids about fighting Hinduphobia (even though some of those speakers are on the record mocking the idea of Hinduphobia themselves). When asked about the wisdom of Hindu American groups platforming Indian speakers who say the same things about the ‘Caste System’ and evil Brahmins as South Asian activist groups they are fighting, the Hindu groups say that it is better for the American children to grow up with just ‘anti-Brahmin’ rhetoric from “one of our own” rather than ‘anti-Hindu’ rhetoric from the South Asia studies professors and activists.
The Sad Truth of Hindu Assimilation
The sad truth is that even after more than twenty years of existence, and millions of dollars in donations, Hindu organising in America remains peripheral to mainstream American life, and maybe even mainstream Indian-American diaspora life.
The Indian American community is an extremely conformist, and “artha” defined one, and lacks the tools for understanding the mainstream society and culture beyond its material or professional-transactional existence. It “adjusts” to whatever is prevalent, while doing more and more contortions to try and stay still culturally, which of course, is not a winning strategy. It simply does not have a well-researched and creatively-expressed story about “why do they (the Americans)” say and do what they will, but merely keeps trying ever harder to explain to imaginary bosses and economically successful social peer groups “why do we” (remain Hindus, essentially). For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Indian diaspora was small and consisted mostly of doctors and engineers, I recall many of them leaning towards the Republican party. The reasoning was largely economic (“taxes”) but also cultural (“family”). But the interesting thing is that because of the overt overlap between the Republicans and conservative Christianity, Hindu American parents did not get fooled into conformity beyond a point. They cheered all the Republican talk about hard work and family values, but knew that Christians were Christians and Hindus were Hindus.
But for the post 1990s Indian immigrants (and Indian American children), the situation was different. They moved overwhelmingly towards the Democratic party as their natural home as liberals and as Hindus. Part of the shift was the early polarisation that started from the Right with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh type rhetoric perhaps, which was overtly exclusionist and nasty at times. The Democrats of course then got their dream recruits, eager to please, eager to serve, and ask for very little in return.
But the cultural and psychological aspect of this shift away from US conservatism to US liberalism also had a religious dimension that hasn’t been noticed. By the late 1990s and 2000s, the American cultural mainstream was clearly no longer ‘religious’ (as in Christian). Perhaps that sort of liberal-atheistic-cosmopolitan culture became easy to adopt as a natural home for Millennial and Gen Z Indian Americans. Within that space, we now see the different groups and trends operating. Among the most conformist, we find the multicultural, interfaith, dharma-lite quoting ‘Hindu’ groups which talk about ‘human rights’ for everyone except for Hindus and deny Hinduphobia. Next, we have the India-centric (if not India-meta-controlled), Hindu groups which are also conformist but somewhat old-school liberal and try to find a seat at a fast-shrinking table in American politics.
Their weakness is that they operate in the weekend Indian social bubble no matter how American their jobs and accents might be, and don’t make a scratch on American minds in the spheres that matter, like pop culture and education. Their work sadly is a performance for politicians in Washington, and indirectly, sometimes, New Delhi. But to their credit, they have not conformed to the point of selling out their good intentions. Their issue is incompetence, rather than a lack of integrity, perhaps. There are of course also individuals outside these two clusters who work towards raising awareness of Hinduphobia. Their work has had mixed results, but again, has remained needlessly outside the cultural mainstream for a variety of reasons, one of those reasons again being the peculiar navel-gazing tendency of the diasporic community. I have seen people who impressively quote anti-Hinduphobia books in temple parking lots to other Indians like preachers, but then I don’t know if they are able to equip their children to pull off the same thing in their schools before non-Indian audiences.
Ever New Hinduphobia
To summarise, Hindu organisations and initiatives are trapped in a social history they haven’t really tried to understand, and have been doing variations of the same things over and over again (leader-building, weekend-gathering, politician-meeting) expecting different results while things remain obdurately the same, or get worse. And worse, it is indeed getting, considering there have been more direct attacks on Hindu institutions in the past two years in the diaspora. What is also concerning is that these have found the cover of indifference or even legitimacy by the mainstream American institutions like academia and media.
We need to therefore consider how Hinduphobic actors have pulled off this feat of keeping Hindus and Hindu organisations inconsequential beyond the latter’s own inadequacies and limitations.
Proper, professional, organisations that focus on a mission, idea, or narrative (such as those on the anti-Hindu side), tend to stay incredibly focused on the narrative. Just consider how steadfastly the narrative about Hinduism has remained unchanged in the American educational system. They will never let go of the wholly fictitious ‘caste pyramid’ image no matter how much Hindus say there is no such image in the scriptures, nor that the “Purusha” is actually lying down and the feet are as important as the head, or even the most relevant sociological data-point, that the “Brahmins” are not the richest group in India.
The narrative is paramount in a propaganda society, and the West is a propaganda society (Orwell, Ellul, Postman, and many more scholars attest to that). It builds institutions, practices, careers, everyday social incentives, for the purpose of perpetuating narratives; and unfortunately, the “heathen” remains a key figure in that narrative, and even more unfortunately, for the two or three whole generation of Hindu-descent children born in America, their parents have rarely understood the full import of the society they are in, accepting soft-adjustment into deracination, de-generation (in the literal sense I mean of breaking from ancestral memories and practices that were upheld for hundreds of generations), and increasingly, denigration of the truth, and humiliation of the self through cooptation in the denial of the truth. It is not too difficult to understand this trend when we remember the climactic last scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Winston Smith is tortured and humiliated until he accepts, with full desperation of conviction, that “2+2=5”. Inquisitors and propagandists and brainwashers know what they want and how to get it. When a human being’s sense of truth is broken, nothing is left of him or her. It is worse than losing material comfort and even freedom in some ways. Hindus, unfortunately, have been clinging to the illusion of their access to these two without realising what is being taken away from sanatana dharma, one generation after another.
What Hinduphobia-deniers See, What Hindu Organisations See
It is hard for Hindus, even the most alert anti-Hinduphobic activists, as well as the more indifferent mass of mainstream immigrants, to recognise that something can be taken away very quickly. We have Hinduphobia-denier friends (who are of course very concerned about Islamophobia and Zionism and Hindutva) telling us there is no Hinduphobia because they visited the vast Swaminarayan Temple in New Jersey and how could Hindus build so many temples if there was Hinduphobia? Naturally, our friend is unaware perhaps of the kind of legal and psychological attacks that the temple builders faced. As a small cultural business owner himself he should have been sympathetic to what would happen to his image and his life’s hard work if a big newspaper made up a story about him being an Amrish Puri/Moola Ram-type “slave-owner” who has used religion to coerce “lower castes” to build giant structures for him. BAPs presumably though is a big enough organisation to have cleared its name in the courts and continues to pursue its mission. Sundar Iyer too was ‘privileged’ enough to fight it out. But what of the thousands of poor Hindus, many of them in precarious visa or financial situations, who can be utterly ruined by false allegations that run amok that can be levelled with impunity by vested actors simply because Hindus would prefer to say there is no Hinduphobia rather than fight it?
But then, it is not just the “progressive” Indians who are to blame for this situation, nor the inept but well-intended Hindu groups forever trying to prove to American liberals that Hindus are the OG liberals and of course we hate Trump but Modiji is not Trump and etcetera. If the “meta” Hindu organisations bring their stamp of Indo-idiocy into the already and forever-floundering American Hindu groups so they can boast back home, the “mega” Hindu religious organisations that manage to raise and build mega-temple or mega-service projects are also guilty of upholding the Hinduphobic status quo in American establishments today.
It is worth sharing a memorable conversation with a friend from one such organisation who works interestingly enough in their media relations office, and naturally had a professional interest in the US media world. After a long dialogue, he raised his hand to the top to about eye level, and said that for him, “Businessmen” were the most important interlocutors. Next, he lowered his hand slightly, he said, were “Politicians”. Then, he said, came “Celebrities,” and lowered his hand some more. And then, perhaps as a hasty concession or courtesy to the poor liberal arts Hindu professor in his company, he lowered his hand only slightly, and said “Academics”. Finally, for the climax, he extended his hand somewhere below knee-level, and slightly contemptuously (he is too pleasant to be really contemptuous), declared, “Journalists”.
To summarise, this is the world Hindus are in today. We are so successful in the ‘practical’ realm, pulling donations from businessmen for temples, campaign funds for politicians, organising talks and lectures and zipping people around, but then, we don’t have a clear and precise story about ourselves or the world that we are in. Without that story, no matter how much money and professional success we have to boast about, we will never win our way back to dharma. And what we are fighting for isn’t just a label called ‘Hindu’ but the existence and continuity of something beautiful, true, inviolably sacred and inextricably natural, called “Sanatana Dharma”, isn’t it? – Firstpost, 25 May 2024
› Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C. Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber.
