Hindu extremists try to silence Harvard and other Western academics
Up until last month, to most Western scholars studying India, the verbal and physical attacks by Hindu extremists on their critics in India were alarming, yet appeared distant - some 8,000 miles away from Harvard and Princeton.
That changed dramatically when an online conference, “Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” was held September 10-12. It was organized and co-sponsored by several History, South Asian studies, human rights, political science, religious studies and other multi-disciplinary departments and centers at several U.S., European and Canadian universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, and University of Toronto.
Topics discussed at the conference included Hinduism and Hindutva, Caste and Hindutva, The Political Economy of Hindutva and Hindutva Propaganda and the Digital Ecosystem. Organizers included non-Hindu faculty members as well as Meena Dhanda, at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K., Dheepa Sundaram, of the University of Denver, Colorado, Rohit Chopra, Santa Clara University, California, and other Hindus.
A Coordinated Harassment Campaign
Weeks before the conference began, organizers and speakers living in the U.S., Europe and Canada, faced what Anand Patwardhan, a filmmaker, Neha Dixit, a journalist, Nandini Sundar, a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, and other Hindu participants from India face almost daily.
They were targeted as anti-Hindu by a coordinated harassment campaign by right-wing U.S. and India-based extremist groups, “including death threats to their young children” as well as appeals to India’s home minister to take action against India-based speakers, according to PEN America, a human rights organization that works to protect free expression - specifically “the freedom to write” - in the U.S. and the world. PEN America is the U.S. branch of the PEN International network.
“If this event will take place then I will become Osama bin Laden and will kill all the speakers, don’t blame me,” an email sent to the organizers stated, according to The Guardian.
The aim of the groups was to silence and “cast a chilling effect on academic inquiry and analysis” of the global implications of Hindutva, noted PEN America. Hindutva, the PEN statement added, is a right-wing political ideology espoused by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that is based on the belief that India should be a Hindu state.
Audrey Truschke Faces New Threats
Under a story in part titled, Speakers at the Dismantling Hindutva Conference, OpIndia.com stated the aim of the conference is “to justify the impending genocide of Hindus.” The publication identified ten speakers, including two “foreign vested” interests behind the conference. One was Christophe Jaffrelot “who wants to be in the good books of the Indian liberals,” OpIndia.com stated. His agenda is “amply clear….RSS, its affiliates, BJP, Hindutva, lynchings, majoritarianism, democracy, human rights are usual themes. He terms RSS as a ‘deep state,’ and everything that is wrong with Modi’s India—the ‘cruelty’ against Muslims and Dalits—is part of a larger design.”
Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris, a leading academic institution in France. He is the author of Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, published by the Princeton University Press this year. The book “is a masterpiece of careful research," wrote James Crabtree, a former India correspondent for the Financial Times in a review for the newspaper.
The other foreign vested interest, OpIndia.com stated, is Audrey Truschke who “has built a reputation in the anti-Hindu propaganda industry.” India-based OpIndia.com reportedly has ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governs India with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.
Truschke contacted the police after receiving a threatening voicemail before the conference. The police are investigating. Fluent in Sanskrit, she teaches South Asian history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S. She faces threats for her research, writing and presentations on India’s Mughal history.
“For more than five years, I have received hate mail from Hindu nationalists or Hindu supremacists nearly every single day,” Truschke stated in a virtual briefing to the U.S. Congress last month. “I have been the target of so many death and rape threats that I have lost count…My family, too, have been threatened with all manner of violence, including my children who are currently ages seven, five, and three.” She has armed security when she speaks in public about modern or ancient South Asian history.
Hindu supremacists lobby for critics to be fired from their jobs
“Hindu supremacists based in the United States have taken on a leadership role in the campaign of fear and intimidation against the academic conference,” Truscke added. They included the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh USA and the Coalition of Hindus of North America. The campaigns by these groups included petitions, emails, media interviews and YouTube videos. The campaigns were prominently covered by OpIndia.com and other pro-BJP media in India, U.S. and elsewhere.
The groups sought to pressure universities, including through their donors, to cancel their support for the conference. HAF, for instance, wrote to the presidents and key administrators of all 41 universities listed as event co-sponsors, asking them to “distance themselves” from the conference which ”veers into promoting Hinduphobia and anti-Hindu hatred.” Established in 2003 and based in Washington D.C., HAF is a lobbying group with a staff of 14.
The Hindutva groups “use the language of American multiculturalism to brand any critique as Hinduphobia,” Gyan Prakash, a historian at Princeton University, a Hindu and a speaker at the conference told The Washington Post.
The groups seek to pressure universities to fire employees critical of Hindu supremacists. “Hindu nationalist groups have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to prompt my employer, Rutgers University, to take punitive action against me,” Truschke stated. “Many Hindu supremacists openly discuss trying to influence the New Jersey state government, elected officials, and Rutgers administrators in order to silence me, a scholar.” HAF has filed a lawsuit against Truschke alleging defamatory statements.
Hindutva is a fascist ideology
Hinduism and Hindutva are two different things. “Hinduism is a term used to describe a wide range of religious practices and beliefs that are heterodox,” the conference organizers point out. Hinduism comprises “several and varied systems of philosophy, belief, and ritual…it refers to a rich cumulative tradition of texts and practices, some of which date to the 2nd millennium BCE or possibly earlier,” according to Britannica.
By contrast, “Hindutva is a political philosophy styled after European fascism of the early twentieth century, an ideology that privileges a cult of personality and authoritarian leadership,” note the conference organizers. This de facto ideology of the current Indian state, “doubles down on using supremacist tools in the service of a toxic and genocidal unifying theory of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ or Hindu nation…(It) demands an unquestioned allegiance to a myth-oriented, hate-mongering dogma that reifies and sanctions its violent modes of operation.”
Hindu supremacists have made a concerted effort over several decades to equate their manufactured term “Hindutva” with Hinduism, the organizers note. The Hindutva ideology was formulated in the early 20th century, by the founders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They contrasted “Hindutva’s muscularity with the effeteness of Hinduism.”
Founded in 1925, the RSS is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organization, according to a factsheet by Washington D.C. based Georgetown University. In 2020, it had almost 585,000 members and over 57,000 branches, including a trade union wing, women’s wing, student wing and an economic wing. Three out of four ministers in the ruling BJP government are members of the RSS, including Prime Minister Modi, according to The Print.
The attacks on the conference boomerang
Instead of silencing the organizers and speakers, extensive, crtical coverage of the Hindu nationalist attacks, in The Guardian, Times Higher Education and other Western media, brought in wider support. When the attacks began, the conference was backed by around 45 departments and centers from 41 universities. Following the attacks, the conference was cosponsored by more than 70 entities from 53 universities.
Also, the American Historical Association issued a statement, cosigned by the American Sociological Association and over 40 other academic groups, noting that the attacks “represent an assault on the principle of academic freedom,” and that they stand unequivocally “with participants in this conference and its sponsors in their right to exchange ideas without fear of threats and intimidation.”Nearly 1,000 Western as well as Indian academics and intellectuals declared their support for the conference, including Partha Chatterjee, Veena Das, Arjun Appadurai, Arundhati Roy and other Hindus.
Since the early twentieth century, Hindu supremacists have sought to “shield themselves from legitimate critique for their extremism by claiming to speak for a persecuted Hindu community, despite Hindus being a sizable majority in India,” the conference site notes. “Most recently, they have been leveraging the language of being a religious minority in the United States to evade criticism of their supremacist ideologies.”
As Audrey Truschke, Rutgers University, told the Congressional hearing, “South Asia has always been a diverse place where many cultural and religious groups coexist, and this basic historical fact poses a huge challenge to the political project of Hindu nationalism. Hindu supremacists find much of South Asian history threatening.”
