The Academic Denial Of Hinduphobia:
The South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC) actively denies Hindus (including scholars) the right to define or even opine on what Hinduphobia is and how it impacts us as a people, by dismissing the term as something coined recently by the “Hindu Right.” The group even goes as far as calling the term a “flawed analogy” and “smokescreen for casteism and anti-Muslim prejudice.” Anyone who challenges such a premise is swiftly dismissed as engaging in “bad faith argument.”
For SASAC, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon due to the horrors inflicted by the Nazis and other instances of discrimination, hate, etc faced by the Jewish community. Similarly, according to them, Islamophobia is real, due to American foreign policies which resulted in the killings of civilians in the Middle East as well as the immigration policies of the Trump administration. However, Hinduphobia “…cannot be easily linked to casualties on such horrific scales.” In this monstrous admission, SASAC claims Hinduphobia is not real because not enough Hindus have died.
Their intergenerational trauma, resulting from systemic targeting and oppression in Jammu & Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Bangladesh, does not count. If body count is to be the metric for -phobia, would SASAC claim that homophobia is not real?
This year marks the 54th anniversary of the Bangladeshi Genocide, in which nearly 400,000 women were raped and close to 3 million people killed. The Pakistani army specifically targeted Hindu men, women and children and went on a rampage of mass murders, rapes, and brutalization. Gary Bass, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, has described the ordeal in painstaking detail in his book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. Speaking on the Senate floor on November 1, 1971, the late Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy described the dire situation of the Hindus as follows:
“Field reports to the U.S. government, countless eye-witness journalistic accounts, reports of international agencies such as the World Bank, and additional information available to the Subcommittee document the reign of terror which grips East Bengal [East Pakistan]. Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in some places, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H’. All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad.”
SASAC does not find such horrors of history as worthy of inclusion under any anti-Hindu bias. This illustrates an overtly prejudiced take on matters related to Hindus.
Various scholars including Jeffrey Long, Stephen Prothero and Vamsee Juluri have written extensively on the topic of Hinduphobia and shown the long history of the phenomenon in the United States and beyond. Others such as Vishwa Adluri and Arvind Sharma have critiqued academia’s silencing of scholars who provide differing viewpoints than those in power.
So how old is the term Hinduphobia really?
Th cultural studies researcher Sarah Louise Gates has traced the usage of the term “Hinduphobia” going back to the late 19th century and into early 20th century. According to Gates, “Hinduphobia” first appears to be used by Sir Edward Sullivan in 1866 to critique James Mill for his disdain of Hindus and the denial of India’s wealth prior to Mughal king Akbar’s reign. It then appears as common parlance (without quotations) in the York Newspaper in 1883 (from York Newspaper March 20, 1883) to discuss European attitudes towards native Indians (majority of whom were Hindus). The paper uses the metaphor of the wolf “wickedly accusing” the lamb to describe the dynamics between the colonizers and the natives.
According to the Gates’ research, modern cases of Hinduphobia coincided with Indian migration into the United States and the UK.
In Hinduphobia (The Cosmopolitan Student, May 1914) Dr. Sudhindra Bose, representing the Hindu and Indian side of the argument, recalls a House Committee hearing of the 1914 Hindu exclusion bill which would impact 4,974 Hindus in the United States “…over fears they might compete for both education and [labor] with the American colonial class.” Dr. Bose feared that the the bill will not only impact the laborers but also Hindu students studying in the United States.
Gates also shows instances of the word being used in Indian Constituent Assembly Proceedings in the 40s and 50s, along with numerous newspapers, academic writings, etc. using the word to describe the attitudes of various political leaders and media outlets towards Hindus and the people of India.
Numerous instances of Hinduphobia are prevalent today – in academia, media, politics, and popular culture. To illustrate how even young, unassuming Hindus, can be subjected to Hinduphobia, a young Hindu girl interning for NASA in the United States was recently subjected to Hinduphobia and hatred when she posed in a picture for NASA with images of Hindu deities on her desk. She was attacked for merely expressing her heritage, with comments such as: “Wtf! Is that really her room?!” or “I see a right wing Hindu kid with right wing Hindu gods in a pic” or “Wherever Hindus (Brahmins) will go they will divide the nation into caste.” or “NASA and gods don’t mix. The Indian kid seems to have some kind of an obsession with gods.”
Scholarly works cannot be used as a smokescreen to support those with a history of hatred against an entire community. We would not want this type of treatment for any religious community or group, nor would such bigotry be tolerated about any other minority group.
To conclude, SASAC has been formed with the express purpose of gaslighting dissenting voices. These voices are pre-declared to be “far right,” conjuring up similarities with popular images of people in white sheets burning crosses on the lawns of these professors and scholars. Nothing could be further from the truth. As concerned Hindus, we will continue to voice our outrage when academic freedom is used as a cover for bigotry by these professors and scholars. And, if voicing our concerns is deemed as harassment to shield their own bigotry and Hinduphobia, that is on their fragile but monumental egos, which seem to be allergic to the truth.
When professors who sit in privileged positions and have a large social media megaphone, decide to peddle such falsehoods, Hindus are fully within their rights to raise concerns in a just and uncompromising manner. Not doing so goes against the very teachings which pervade our sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita.
(This was an excerpt taken from a report by CoHNA (coalition of Hindus of North America) to read the full report check out the source mentioned below in this post.)
