How Hindutva groups in the US have adopted the strategies of White supremacists and Zionists

The narratives of victimhood being propagated by Hindutva supporters in the US are remarkably similar to those of White supremacists. In both cases, privileged groups are attempting to portray themselves as the real victims. In addition, Hindutva supporters see Zionists as useful allies in their effort to draw parallels between antisemitism and “Hinduphobia.”

These overlapping interests are being leveraged quite effectively by Hindu supremacists to push their agenda in the US in favor both of Hindu elites and the Narendra Modi government.

Their claims of widespread “Hinduphobia” are being given a sympathetic and sometimes apologetic hearing by many US lawmakers, interfaith groups and human rights organisations, which fail to look critically at the underlying data.

The victim card

Hindutva supporters have learnt from the Israel lobby how to play the victim card to accumulate political power disproportionate to their numbers. This has allowed them to convince US lawmakers and governors to support their regressive positions on matters like stopping legislation against caste discrimination.

More often than not, their policy positions are in sync with the Modi government and are designed to shield it from any criticism in the diaspora.

The most recent example is California’s Assembly Bill AB 3027 on transnational repression. The bill was introduced in response to the attempted assassination of an American Sikh leader, allegedly by operatives of the Indian government.

But the bill would also provide an improved sense of personal security to many Indian Americans who have taken a principled stand against the policies of the Modi government and are already facing repression of various sorts – for example, threats to Overseas Citizen of India privileges; blocking of social media accounts and baseless allegations spread by the BJP’s propaganda wing known as the IT Cell.

Of course, India has every right to defend itself against terrorism, but Modi’s recent statement doubling down on India’s right to assassinate adversaries overseas is being taken very seriously by human rights activists in the diaspora.

AB 3027 is currently stalled in the California Senate Appropriations Committee, and Hindutva groups like HinduACTion and the HAF are taking credit, calling it an “anti-Hindu venomous bill” that “implicitly targets Indian Americans”.

This baseless argument is very similar to the self-serving argument used by these groups to oppose SB 403 caste discrimination bill, which had sailed through the legislature, only to be vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom at the urging of a major donor to Democrats.

The fact of the matter is that the AB 3027 bill had received support from several law enforcement agencies, which recognise the need for state-level training to combat foreign governments’ repression tactics within the US. One would have thought that those worried about potential unfair targeting of Indian Americans would have welcomed such training.

Hindutva groups are clearly placing the interests of a foreign government over the safety and security of Californians.

Playing politics

Another self-victimisation strategy by Hindu supremacists is to claim that any criticism of Hindutva ideology is an attack on all Hindus and on India. This is very similar to the recent assertions by Zionists that any criticism of Israel is itself antisemitic.

However, in order to sustain the analogy with the Jewish community, they need to convince US lawmakers and the courts to view Hinduphobia on par with antisemitism and Islamophobia. To this end, they are busy with a spate of advocacy efforts to legitimise the notion that Hinduphobia is rampant in the US.

There is just one problem: there are only a handful of recent incidents that have been categorised as “anti-Hindu” by law enforcement. In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigation consistently ranks anti-Hindu hate crimes at the lowest end of 30 or more communities tracked in its hate crimes statistics.

Even among those incidents, many recent ones are attributed to Khalistani separatists, who unfortunately choose Hindu temples as targets to send their political message to the Indian government.

In order to justify the claim of rampant Hinduphobia, organisations such as the Hindu American Foundation are now casting a much wider net by redefining “Hinduphobia” itself, contrary to the commonly understood definition of a phobia.

They have prepared a glossary of terms that they claim are “Hinduphobic,” which includes terms like Brahmanism, dual loyalty, exotic, model minority, Hindu fatalism, Hindutvadi, bhakt and savarna.

“When the spectrum of terms and tropes listed in this glossary are used regularly, over time, the perception of Hindus as grotesque, untrustworthy, bigoted, evil, or violent grows and generates greater and greater levels of danger to Hindus’ lives and wellbeing,” they explain.

This a blatant attempt to censor honest dialogue in the community. For example, Dalits and Bahujans refer to privileged dominant castes as savarnas, a term popularised by Dr. Ambedkar, and now used routinely in caste conversations. It would be adding insult to injury to suggest that the use of the term is now considered “Hinduphobic.”

White supremacists

In their quest to assert themselves in the US, Hindutva groups have increasingly been looking to partner with White supremacists. Unlike White supremacists, Hindutva groups already draw considerable power from the frameworks of minority rights in the US and multiculturalism born out of the civil rights struggle. But the similarities in their “self-victimisation” strategies and their invocation of the right to defend themselves against fictional attacks on their culture lend themselves to a natural partnership.

One such partnership is led by the Republican Hindu Coalition, founded by the Hindu billionaire and Trump supporter Shalab Kumar, and chaired by Steve Bannon, the former advisor of Donald Trump. One of their major goals is to build a “Hindu Holocaust Memorial” in Washington DC, a plan that Trump has endorsed.

In July, the Republican Hindu Coalition was in Washington to participate in the National Conservatism Conference, NatCon 4, which featured prominent right-wing personalities from several parts of the world.

At the conference, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologue Ram Madhav declared that under the leadership of Modi, India had already attained its National Conservatism goals and is now in a position to play the vanguard role in taking the conservative agenda forward world-wide.

One report about the event said that Madhav “would now like the Indian role in America to be…as influential as the pro-Israel lobby…Madhav also wants the US to embrace the Modi government’s model of dealing with India’s religious minorities and its Muslim neighbours.”

The RSS leader also claimed that over a billion Indians support his vision of National Conservatism. This is a vast exaggeration, given that only about one-third of India’s voters typically support the BJP. In the US diaspora, surveys estimate that only 69% of Hindus support Modi and 40% of them disapprove of Hindu majoritarianism.

Where this could go

These are dark times for Hinduism when a small section of the community is trying to reserve for itself the right to decide who’s a “real” Hindu and who is anti-Hindu. Anyone who does not share their narratives of Hindu victimhood and antipathy towards other faiths is being labeled “anti-Hindu”.

This is a travesty.

The march towards the abyss can only be stopped by Hindus who wish to reclaim a tolerant and inclusive faith. They must unequivocally condemn Hindutva bigotry and hate crimes in India. In the diaspora, we must for the sake of future generations of Indian-Americans soundly reject the misappropriation of the term “Hinduphobia” in their self-victimisation strategies to gain political ground and expose the nexus between Zionist extremists, White supremacists and Hindutva advocates.

The scholar Mahmood Mamdani, who has written about the state of mind of majority Hutus leading up to the Rwanda genocide, says that “self-victimisation can be a warning sign that could be used to prevent genocide”. In Rwanda, the world ignored those warning signs and paid a heavy price in human lives.

India has already gone past such warning signs, with state complicity in violence against the minorities and open calls for Muslim boycotts and genocide by people claiming to be Hindu priests. It is imperative that the world not make the same mistake again by placing geo-political interests over the ground realities in Modi’s India.

Raju Rajagopal is a Co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, which opposes Hindu supremacy and caste discrimination and speaks up for minority rights.