Inside the campaign to malign India in the West

Prof. Dr Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, and an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. His book ‘Methods for Quantitative Macro-Comparative Research’ is a standard source for the statistical analysis of international comparisons.

He is the Author or Editor of fourteen books and several dozen academic research articles.

The Pew Research Center is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Hindu, but precisely because of its perceived objectivity, it has become an institutional target for the opponents of both Israel and India. … Pew’s stellar reputation has made it a particularly valuable asset for both anti-India and anti-Israel activists. This is Part 2 of the Article.

Missionaries and Muslims

Pew’s Social Hostilities Index grew out of research conducted by the sociologist Brian J. Grim while he was a PhD student at the Pennsylvania State University. This research, as well as Grim’s PhD thesis on a related subject, were funded by the John Templeton Foundation, a controversial charitable organisation founded by the Anglo-American investment Guru Sir John Templeton.Grim was the senior researcher on the initial international religious freedom report published by Pew in 2009, which was also funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He now runs an independent organisation that is at least partly supported by the Templeton Religion Trust. Grant records available from the John Templeton Foundation website, though incomplete, suggest that Pew receives more than $1.2 million per year to support the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project. Pew’s annual international religious freedom reports are the flagship publications of this project, and its mammoth 2019-2020 survey of religion in India was also funded by the Foundation.

The Templeton Foundations and their eponymous founder have often been criticised for their idiosyncratic approach to funding, their comingling of science and religion, and their support for Christian conservative causes. To be clear, there seems to be no evidence to suggest that the foundations are in any way explicitly anti-Indian or anti-Hindu. Nonetheless, their broadly Christian outlook – combined with a broadly American approach to study of religion – has the potential to generate unintended consequences. For example, the Social Hostilities Index gives six times greater weight to ‘incidents of hostility over proselytizing’ than to ‘deaths motivated by religious hatred or bias’. This is to give greater prominence to the typical concerns of American Christians than to those of, for example, Indian Hindus. A Hindu-influenced Social Hostilities Index, by contrast, might prioritise religious toleration and penalise proselytization as a form of hostile ‘poaching’.

Interestingly, in their initial 2009 international religious freedom report, Pew chose to use India to illustrate the methodology for its evaluations, perhaps because India was one of the few countries to lose points on every single dimension of social hostility to religion. This sample coding exercise focused on the analysis of religiously-motivated physical assaults. Of the 31 assaults examined by Pew in this exercise, 25 alleged Hindu violence against Christians, 5 alleged other forms of intercommunal violence, and 1 alleged intercaste violence among Hindus. Thus in this illustration, more than 80% of the evidence presented related to complaints made by Christians – in a country where the vast majority of Christians do not believe that there is discrimination against Christians, and 97% of Christians say they are free to practice their own religion.

Pew’s coding examples come as no surprise. Nearly all of them were sourced to the US State Department’s OIRF reports. These reports, in turn, are sourced from complaints made to US embassies in the countries concerned, supplemented by complaints made directly to OIRF in Washington by Non-Governmental organisations. American missionaries and associated lobbying groups are much more likely to complain to the State Department (and to have their complaints heard) than are other segments of foreign societies. For example, it is unlikely that an Indian Hindu activist group concerned about Islamist violence in their country would turn to the US embassy in Delhi for support.

The result is that in a country like India, where serious intercommunal violence almost always unfolds along a Hindu-Muslim axis, the overwhelming preponderance of OIRF complaints involve Christians.

It may well be the case that Christian complaints that they face social hostility in India are justified, although the evidence for systematic violence is weak. The leading American quantitative analyst of anti-Christian violence in India finds that ‘relative to the size of their respective populations, the number of incidents of anti-Christian violence in India is lower than the number of hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims in the United States (according to FBI data), and would be well below the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US even if I were severely undercounting Indian incidents of anti-Christian violence’. Whatever the reality behind Christian complaints, however, it is strangely ironic to see them used to support a narrative that focuses almost exclusively on India’s supposed hostility toward Muslims.

For example, the text of the most recent (2021) Pew international religious freedom report highlighted 3 specific incidents of religiously-motivated social hostility, all of them alleging Hindu hostility toward Muslims. Yet the underlying State Department OIRF report on which it is primarily based documented 20 attacks on Christians, 7 on Muslims, and 5 on Hindus. In addition, the OIRF report also cited submissions from seven Non-Governmental organisations alleging 293, 279, 208, 200, 135, 75, and 49 attacks on Christians (respectively), though it is unclear to what extent these allegations may have overlapped. None of this was picked up in Pew’s narrative summary. Press reports on the most recent Social Hostilities Index, when they mentioned the precarity of any particular religion, invariably focused on Islam.

Islamist activists, too, seem to have learned the lessons of leveraging Christian complaints – and of leveraging US religious freedom legislation. In 2021, an investigative organisation called DisInfo Lab published a detailed report into the efforts of a nexus of Muslim-American activist groups to influence USCIRF reporting on India. Although this India-friendly DisInfo Lab has been criticised by some other people associated with what might be called the ‘disinfo lab’ movement (there are more than half a dozen civil society groups with similar names, mostly staffed by student activists), its findings are detailed and well-documented. According to DisInfo Lab, a network of Muslim-American organisations began seeking influence at USCIRF in 2013, an effort that came to fruition with the appointment of a sympathetic political operative (Nadine Maenza) to the commission in 2018.

Maenza would ultimately serve four years as a commissioner, including one year (2021-2022) as USCIRF chairperson. DisInfo Lab’s research suggests that she may have played a key role in having India named a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ by the USCIRF in 2021, an action that (in what seems to have been an unprecedented step for an organisation that generally works by consensus) was taken over the strenuous objections of two of the nine commissioners. The designation of India as a Country of Particular Concern by USCIRF is only advisory; it does not automatically trigger a parallel official designation by the State Department. Thus it has only rhetorical value, for the moment. In late 2022, the USCIRF took the further unprecedented step of publicly expressing ‘outrage’ with the State Department for not acting on its advice to sanction India.

The new anti-Hinduism

These efforts to manufacture the impression that democratic India has become a kind of Hindu Iran are very energetic, but ultimately they lack sufficient empirical evidence to be convincing. In order to convince disinterested observers, they must be supported by a persuasive ideological narrative. One such narrative has been put forward by a loose grouping of humanities scholars centred on an organisation called the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC). These scholars do not seem to be publicly associated with the campaign to have India named a Country of Particular Concern by the US State Department, but they do provide the seemingly objective ideological support that is required for the campaign to have a realistic chance of success.

At the core of the SASAC scholars’ intellectual program is the stigmatisation of the concept of ‘Hindutva’ (Hinduness), which they define as ‘a modern political ideology that advocates for Hindu supremacy and seeks to transform India, constitutionally a secular state, into an ethno-religious Nation known as the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (Hindu Nation)’. Hindutva is a highly contested term. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines it as ‘an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values’.In India, Hindutva is closely associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party that has governed India since 2014, although the term is also used by some other competing parties.

For its part, the BJP defines Hindutva simply as ‘the cultural nationalism of India’. The BJP insists that ‘Hindutva accepts as sacred all forms of belief and worship’, and in this context, it should be noted that the English words ‘Hindu’ and ‘India’ are derived from the same Sanskrit root.

The SASAC scholars (and fellow scholar-activists who are also associated with the SASAC-sponsored ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ campaign) routinely characterise Hindutva in terms that closely resemble those used by antizionists to characterise Zionism. That is not in itself surprising; the parallels between Hindutva and Zionism are in fact widely recognised by both critics and supporters. Yet academic critics of Narendra Modi and the BJP have used this comparison to explicit liken the status of Muslims in India to that of Arabs in Israel.And just as Zionism is often equated with fascism by its trenchant critics, Hindutva is routinely characterised as ‘fascist’ by anti-BJP activists and academics. Widely-read Middle Eastern news outlets are not shy about drawing associations among Zionism, Hindutva, fascism, and Nazism.

Needless to say, neither Hindutva nor Zionism has anything in common with the fascism described by Benito Mussolini in his Doctrine of Fascism or the Nazism described by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. Those who oppose Hindutva, like those who oppose Zionism, tend to use these morally-weighted terms not as precise descriptions of political philosophies, but as generic political insults. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the intellectual playbook that for decades has been used to stigmatise Israel has recently begun to be deployed against India – and by circles of (mostly US and UK based) intellectuals that overlap substantially with established antizionist circles.

As the BBC concludes in its explainer on antisemitism and antizionism, ‘few would deny there are anti-Semites who call themselves antizionists, or that it’s possible to criticise Israel without being a racist or a bigot”. Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said for anti-Hinduism, anti-Hindutva activism, and India. Just as antisemites are widely suspected of shielding their antisemitism behind antizionism, those who oppose (at least some strains of) Hinduism seem to have learned to shield their anti-Hinduism behind anti-Hindutva activism. Opposition to Hindutva is, in itself, a legitimate political position, both within India and abroad. But as with academic antizionism, it is the extreme emotional intensity of much Western academic opposition to Hindutva that suggests that some of it may be motivated by factors other than intellectual idealism.

The anti-Hindutva activism of SASAC and its associated scholars is the intellectual support structure that has the potential to hold together the unholy anti-India alliance of Christian missionaries and Islamist activists. Both the missionaries and the Islamists have solid political motivations for their anti-India campaigns, and although their targeting of India lamentably tends to undermine international democratic solidarity, there is no reason to believe that it is motivated by anything other than legitimate policy goals. Academic anti-Hinduism, however, is more than merely lamentable; it is positively perverse. The anti-Hindutva activism with which it is associated provides intellectual cover for what would otherwise be seen as transparently self-interested attacks by missionaries and Islamists.

The only way to fight these intellectual warriors is to insist on seeing the facts. The facts strongly suggest that freedom of religion is alive and well in India. No Indian has ever been arrested for silently praying. Quite the contrary : In India, people of many different religions regularly pray in public, often very loudly. Religion is everywhere, and everywhere overt, making some degree of religious friction inevitable. But in a country where most elections are decided on razor-thin margins, people with complaints about religious discrimination or harassment don’t have to turn to the US State Department for help. The ballot box offers a surer, swifter, more immediate form of redress.

(Courtesy : Excerpts from an Article on voiceofindia.me, 6^th June 2023)

Pew chose to use India because it was one of the few countries to lose points on every dimension of social hostility to religion !

The only way to fight intellectual warriors is to insist on seeing the facts, which suggest that freedom of religion is alive in India !