The Attacks on Hindus : Threats to Hindu Interests from North American Entities

Dr Ramesh Rao is Professor of Communication Studies, Department of Communication, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA. He serves as the Chief Editor of ‘India Facts’.

He has presented numerous papers on Indian American identity, the coverage of India and Hinduism in Western media.

The Mainstream Media

At what point did American media turn patently Hinduphobic or Indophobic is a matter for media historians to carefully delve into. Unfortunately, this is one area of American history that has not been systematically probed into by Indian scholars. There has been work done on the early responses to Asian migration to the US, especially about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – the causes and the consequences, and of laws barring ‘miscegenation’ – and of the struggles of Asians, in general, as they came to the US in search of opportunities.

As Shaya noted in an essay in 2012, ‘The power of the press is also the power to misinform,’ and that ‘…the press is never simply a force for cohesion… (as) it can just as easily serve the ends of division, giving voice to conflicts of all shape’.

We cannot delve into the history of American media here, but what we can note is the increasingly strident attempts in the legacy, mainstream, powerful, and influential media establishments to demonize Hindus and cast blame on the BJP, the RSS, and other Hindu-affiliated organizations for what they claim is the reshaping of ‘secular India’ into a ‘majoritarian, Hindu nationalist India’.

But then, the attacks on Hindus, the BJP, the RSS, and Hindutva are part of a larger package where, in the pursuit of a grand, brand, new, ‘egalitarian’ world, truth and facts shall serve and can serve only the interests of those who have been ‘discriminated against’, and the selection of the ‘discriminated against’ is left to the very same people who have blinkers on their eyes, and who are bedfellows with some of the most racist, violent, colonial, supremacist, and monopolist forces.

So it is that Hindus are now one of the targets in the shooting range of this Left / Marxist / Muslim / Missionary cabal. As Sullivan (2023) notes, in a New York Times staff meeting in 2019, a reporter asserted that racism should be ‘in everything’ that the newspaper reported – in ‘culture reporting, in our national reporting… and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country’. Sullivan also alludes to a Washington Post opinion piece in which Leonard Downie Jr., who served as the executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008, writes that ‘objectivity has to go’.

So, just as in the United States now every report, every opinion piece, and every chapter in every book on every subject should include something about ‘systemic racism,’ so too should any report, any opinion piece, any book on India, or any chapter in any school textbook in the US should include a mention about ‘Hindu supremacy,’ ‘Hindu nationalists,’ ‘the fascist RSS,’ ‘the authoritarian Modi,’ and blame Hindu ‘upper castes,’ ‘Hinduism’ for every shortcoming in Indian society.

While The New York Times, the most influential of American newspapers with a global reach, is now considered the petri dish of ideologically inspired fabrications, we must understand that the most powerful and influential media in the US and Western Europe, along with the media in Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere are so far tilted left that they can only present the world upside down, lopsided, jaundiced, prejudiced. There is no escaping that fact. So is the coverage in The Washington Post, the newspaper now owned by the billionaire Jeff Bezos. The coverage is so biased that India’s Minister of External Affairs called the newspaper on the mat (Outlook India, September 26, 2022).

The list is endless. Any complaints about bias go unremarked. Letters to the editors do not get published. The New York Times continues to publish opinion pieces that are consistently anti-Hindu, anti-Hindutva, and anti-India, and offers no space for alternative voices. So is the habit of editors of The Washington Post who have hired rabble-rousers like Rana Ayyub as one of their Global Opinions page editors. Here is a sample of the titles of her articles in The Washington Post :

‘India just took a dangerous step on disinformation’ (January 26, 2023)
‘The world continues to ignore the radicalization of India’ (October 17, 2022)
‘Raise your Indian flags high : There’s much injustice to cover up’ (August 14, 2022)
‘The world is finally reacting to India’s descent into hate’ (June 07, 2022)
‘As violence and threats grow, India’s Muslims fear the worst’ (May 12, 2022)
‘I tried watching ‘The Kashmir Files.’ I left the theater to screams of ‘Go to Pakistan’.’ (March 29, 2022)
‘In India, calls for Muslim genocide grow louder. Modi’s silence is an endorsement’ (Dec. 29, 2021)

If these provocative, dangerous lies are repeatedly broadcast by the newspaper which is published from the most powerful capital city in the world, we can rest assured that this is not just happenstance. We know this is a conspiracy, however slickly and glibly they claim that they are in the pursuit of truth.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is the founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon, which is also now one of the largest book publishers. Recently, Amazon, which published Saurav Dutt’s Modi and Me : A Political Reawakening pulled it off the Amazon site. The author was not aware before Amazon took the book off the platform. Amazon even went to the extent of deleting the author’s account, and then informed him that their decision was made because the book allegedly promoted Hindutva. They also claimed that the book ‘triggered those and hurt those individuals who may become upset by the kind of content’.

This, then, is the level of and the organizing capabilities of the anti-Hindu and anti-India forces around the world.

The Academic Establishment, including Think Tanks

It is American universities that train American journalists, diplomats, politicians, policymakers, business leaders, artists, scientists, and entertainers. American academe, as we have noted earlier, have become hotbeds of partisan politics, and by far, professors in the academic establishment tilt left. But Gross (2016) argues that does not mean students are fed ideologically skewed views. But we also know that bias ‘extends to perceptions of verifiable fact’ (Pazzanese, 2020). A recent study by the ‘Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology’ found that ‘the ideals of the university – to establish a tolerant ethos open to questioning received wisdom – is being perverted by political aims’ (Kaufmann, 2021). This is not just in the US, but also in Britain and Canada.

It was Rajiv Malhotra who in the early 2000s first began tracking the anti-Hindu bias in American academe, and made the phrase ‘Wendy’s Children’ well-known, characterizing Prof. Wendy Doniger’s major influence in training and teaching at the University of Chicago as a professor of Sanskrit and Indology, biased, tainted, Hinduphobic. Soon, a book was published, titled, ‘Invading the Sacred’ (2007), which offered a collection of essays analyzing the Hindu studies programs in American academe. The book, in which this author also has an essay, points out the turn in American scholarship, and how Hindus have been demonized, and Hinduism eroticized and exoticized. They write :

For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as a dishonest book; declared Ganesha’s trunk a limp phallus; classified Devi as the mother with a penis and Shiva as a notorious womanizer who incites violence in India; pronounced Sri Ramakrishna a pedophile who sexually molested the young Swami Vivekananda; condemned Indian mothers as being less loving of their children than white women; and interpreted the bindi as a drop of menstrual fluid and the ‘ha’ in sacred mantras as a woman’s sound during orgasm.

Nothing much has changed over the past two decades. Indeed, the ‘establishment’ Indologists have dug their heels, commandeered their students and former students, and ensured that there is no scholar or student allowed into the hallowed chambers in elite American and Canadian universities who will challenge their narratives, their interpretations, and their control over the academic purse-strings, over journal editorship, and the titles published by top academic and university publishers.

These people have also weighed in on matters of what to include in school textbooks about Hindus and Hinduism. That battle too has been carried out over the past two decades, and Hindus have faced an uphill battle (see the Hindu American Foundation’s summary of this battle, titled, ‘Seeking Change in How Hinduism and Ancient India are Taught in California’).

Opposing Hindus are not just ‘left, egalitarian’ academics, but a retinue of anti-Hindu groups including Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, feminists, and the so-called ‘secular’, ‘South Asianist’ groups filled with deracinated, ‘progressive’ Hindus who see no ill in others and who see Hindus and Hinduism as contaminated, hierarchical, and in-egalitarian.

American think tanks, whether left, liberal, right, conservative, or nonpartisan, offer no space to any pro-Hindu, pro-India scholars. Even the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, both conservative think tanks, have Indian American experts (Sadanand Dhume, Tunku Varadarajan) who are decidedly skeptical Hindus if not anti-Hindu, and their writings in The Wall Street Journal have never, ever offered pro-India, pro-Hindu commentaries.

With the BJP in power, their writings are decidedly standoffish on the Indian economy, Indian politics, society, and culture. With the liberal or centrist think tanks, with quite a handful of India experts and Indian American scholars, the tilt against Narendra Modi is more than obvious. That these are the people who influence policy and policymakers goes to show how deep sometimes the anti-Hindu narratives have seeped into the establishment.

There is much work to be done in identifying the scholars in different university departments who have trained, organized, planned, and pursued an anti-Hindu, anti-Hindutva political agenda masquerading as scholarly work.

That the gathering of these academic forces is not just happenstance was seen in the organization of the so-called ‘conference’ titled, ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ (DGH) ironically enough on the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 incidents in the United States. Responding to that announcement, seventy-five academics wrote to the American and Canadian universities supporting that ‘conference,’ reminding the universities that this conference was a closed conference, limited to those who wished to spread hate against Hindus (IndiaFacts, September 10, 2021).

The concerned academics also pointed out that in their attempt to ‘dismantle Hindutva,’ the DGH organizers were promoting Hinduphobia, and that the DGH website defined Hinduism’s meaning as one ‘under contestation’ and ‘contradictory,’ and alleging that Hinduism is at the root of ‘deep inequities in Indian society, most importantly for the caste system’.

They also expressed serious concern that speakers invited to the DGH event included those who deny that Hindus face systemic persecution in different parts of the world. That top US and Canadian university departments and well-known scholars were involved in supporting this event goes to show how deep and widespread the hatred towards Hindus and the concept of Hindutva is, and how these academics and academic institutions are involved in political action and propaganda in the pursuit of their ideological goals.

The official involvement of these universities is still starkly evident as can be seen in the website announcements of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, the Institute of South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the Center for South Asia at Stanford University, and others.

A hundred graduate theses and dissertations can be written about the ingrained Hinduphobia in these academic institutions of the West. A couple of hundred books can be authored to track the history of this anti-Hindu activism of Western academics aided by their Indian collaborators. Alas, our attention is drawn elsewhere, we do not have trained and expert writers to conduct the careful investigation needed to do this.

Students who attend these universities are subject to being brainwashed by their professors about who Hindus are and what Hinduism is all about. These students now include children of Indian parents in the US, Canada, and Europe, and the parents have to face the ire of their children or worry about the self-esteem and self-identity of their children.

Finally, there is no better evidence of the Hinduphobic nature of American higher education than the habits and provocations of Audrey Truschke, Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University (Elst, 2022). The mocking and trolling of Hindus and Hinduism she has indulged in over the past few years has made her globally known, at least among those who follow Indian and ‘South Asian’ matters (Kumar, 2021). Her lies, her deliberate misinterpretation of Hindu epics, her collaboration with anti-India and anti-Hindu groups in the US, and her disregard for Hindu students on the Rutgers campus, have not only had no negative effect on her academic career but that it has led her to be awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to write a history of India, and that the Princeton University Press plans to publish that book goes to show what American academics can get away with. If Prof. Truschke would have even dared make one little negative remark about Muslims, Blacks, women, or gays and lesbians, she would have been out of a job, as a poor professor at a university in Minnesota did – showing students in her class images of the Prophet Muhammad (Brown, 2022).

Reviewing Malhotra’s book (2016), titled, ‘Academic Hinduphobia,’ Elst (2021) acknowledges that Malhotra ‘correctly lays his finger on the links between Christian traditions and present-day Leftist techniques to undermine India’. But we now know that joining the Christian agencies and interest groups is their interesting assortment of bedfellows, each one opposed to the other, but all together seeking to decimate their common Hindu enemy.

The latest attack on Hindus by American universities is to adopt new regulations against ‘caste bias’ (Shukla, 2022). Brown University’s announcement on December 1, 2022 added ‘a new provision to its nondiscrimination policy that explicitly prohibits caste oppression’.

As Rao (2023) points out this new anti-discrimination regulation at Brown University opens a can of worms, but then the universities rushing to adopt these new anti-caste regulations seem completely unaware of the kinds of discrimination Hindus will face in the wake of these regulations – now in place at the University of California-Davis, Harvard University, Colby College, and Brandeis University. Joining hands with Dalits and South Asian activists is an army of ignorant Black Lives Matter activists, and the academics and administrators behind the ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ movement.

(Courtesy and excerpts from : indiafacts.org.in/the-attacks-on-hindus-a-global-strategem, 10.9.2023)

Students who attend American universities are subject to being brainwashed about who Hindus are and what Hinduism is about !