Hindu Demonization: Orchestrated, Engineered, Potted Plots

Image courtesy: nbcnews.com

The tsunami of anti-Hindu, anti-Hindutva, anti-Hinduism articles, reports, commentaries, and editorials over the past few years, reaching a crescendo now, has been well-organized and strategically let loose to overwhelm Hindus the world over. That despite these well-engineered political and ideological plots and narratives before the general elections in India in May 2024 Indians in general, and Hindus in particular, have not given up their faith in the present dispensation in New Delhi. This goes to show that India is a healthier democracy than the diseased versions in the US, Canada, and Western Europe that have teetered on the edge of dissolution by identity fragmentation.

That the attacks against Hindus will get nastier should not surprise or shock us. The global forces arrayed against Hindus are the old genocidal, millennial religions and their god-less new adherents who are conveniently in bed with similar millennial goals. The deracinated, self-hating, “secular” Hindus who either don’t care about the grand Hindu darshanas, the multitude of epics, puranas, poetry, and commentaries, or who have succumbed to the lures and lores of these millennial faiths and ideologies. They constitute the “fifth column,” and they are happy to be on a suicide mission more deadly than the individual Islamist with bombs strapped to his chest.

So it was that in a recently shared video, a young man, presenting himself as a Hindu fighting for human rights is interviewed by an old establishment media personality in India. He tells the viewers that “good” Hindus and “good” Hindu leaders and gurus are really quaking with fear because of the danger “Hindu nationalists” pose to them. These “Hindu nationalists” have made India a dangerous place for “minorities,” especially Muslims, he says. He is not asked to present any hard data. He is not asked about his organization’s affiliations with the Indian American Muslim Council, with Christian faith groups, and Washington, DC, networks of “human rights” and “interfaith” organizations that have completely marginalized Hindu Americans. He is not asked about his organization and who funds their work. The young man, neatly decked in a kurta, with his University of Chicago credentials, is allowed to make unverifiable claims and indulge in his innuendos.

That led us to go looking for data: how many attacks on Muslims and Christians by Hindus have been recorded over the past nine years since the Narendra Modi-led government has been in power? Do a quick Google search with the keywords “attacks against Muslims in India,” and Google will spit out in about three-quarters of a second 26,300,000 results! That is an amazing number, is it not? It goes to show the power of the echo chambers and the eco-system now in place where reality is being manufactured and algorithmically programmed. Those twenty-six million plus items begin with western media coverage, and of course “reports” by western human rights organizations and think-tanks. Here are some headlines:

• India’s Hindu extremists are calling for genocide against Muslims. Why is little being done to stop them? — CNN
• Hindu extremis in India escalate rhetoric with calls to kill Muslims – NBC News
• India’s Hindu Festivals Bring Increasing Anti-Muslim Violence – Human Rights Watch
• India’s Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalized Population – Council on Foreign Relations
• As Officials Look Away, Hate Speech in India Nears Dangerous Levels – The New York Times
• ‘Red Alert’: Anti-Muslim Violence in India Reaching Critical Levels as Homes and Businesses Burn and at Least 24 Dead – Common Dreams
• Is India Headed for an Anti-Muslim Genocide? – Time
• Muslims Have Become a Persecuted Minority in India, Experts Warn — Forbes
• Expert warns of impending ‘genocide’ of Muslims in India – Al Jazeera
• Blamed for Coronavirus Outbreak, Muslims in India come under Attack — NPR

These are just ten of the 26.3 million results! Surely, with these many reports we might expect that Muslims are being driven out of the country, murder and mayhem, looting and desecration of mosques, the rape and torture of Muslims all over the land, trains crammed with Muslims being led to some “genocidal chambers” in Uttar Pradesh! There would be pictures of the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS with a Kalashnikov in his hands and spewing venom on Muslims and Islam.

Do we find any of this? Has India become some dystopic land where Hindu men and women are on a bloodletting binge? Of course not! This drumbeat is not based on real events, verifiable data, or any honest investigation. Even reading the English newspapers in India that are viscerally opposed to the BJP-led government, we do not find any such daily litany of horror and desecration in their pages. Yes, there are the usual “experts” offering their slanted opinions, who then are hired on handsome wages to repeat their bilge in foreign media outlets or be interviewed by western “experts” seeking desperately some support for their speculations.

Do we find foreign consulates shutting down their offices in Delhi, or the Gulf nations stopping their petroleum supplies to India? Has any nation imposed sanctions on India? Has the United Nations passed any resolution against India? Have the OIC member states begun arming themselves to send their armies to stop this “genocide”? Yes, India’s immediate western neighbor has been sending radicalized Muslim young men to go blow themselves up in India, as at Phulwama, or training their soldiers to infiltrate Indian territory. Take a look at a brief list here of the terrorist attacks carried out in India, and a more detailed data list of terrorism incidents in India, here.

With the kind of drumbeats announcing imminent “genocide” of Muslims, a visitor would not be able to find one living Muslim soul in India. As far as we know there is increased international tourist traffic to India, and traffic jumped after the Narendra Modi government took power in Delhi. It only fell as the pandemic swept across the world. As far as we know, Muslim population growth has been the highest in India – more than that of Hindus, over the past seven decades since India got independence. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, and will soon become the largest Muslim country in the world, and there has been little change in India’s religious make-up. India’s Hindus will increase by 35 percent from 2010 to 2050 to 1.38 billion by 2050, according to estimates, but India’s Muslims will increase by 76 percent from 176 million to 310 million in the same period. “The largest increase in the Muslim population of South Asia will occur in India,” says Riaz Hasan, in this YaleGlobal report. However, we have witnessed that after India was split in two in 1947, and Pakistan was split in two in 1971, the Hindu population has precipitously declined both in Pakistan and Bangladesh, with Hindus on the verge of extinction in both countries. Where is the hue and cry in the world about what is the real, carefully planned decimation, the “genocide” of the Hindu population in both these countries that were once part of India?

And as we have pointed out earlier, the three most genocidal faiths are Christianity, Islam, and Marxism. There are 119 Christian majority countries in the world, 50 Muslim majority countries, and there are 57 members in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. There are 21 countries that are officially Christian. There are seven Islamic states, and thirteen countries with Islam as the state religion. The distinction is mere hair-splitting. How many Hindu states are there in this world? None!

This led us to another Google search regarding the accusation that Hindus have historically been equally destructive as Muslims. A Muslim academic at the University of Delhi made bold to claim that in fact Hindus themselves destroyed temples, and not only that they also “desecrated” Buddhist monasteries too, he says this in his article:

• “Muslim rulers were not the only ones who defiled Hindu temples. Swami Vivekananda shared the fact that ‘the temple of Jagannath is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet’ (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 3, p.264). It was not an isolated incident of desecration”.

What Swami Vivekananda says on that page makes for very interesting reading. He starts by writing that a “Russian gentleman, who claimed to have found out a very curious life of Jesus Christ… that Christ went to the temple of Jagannath to study with the Brahmins, but became disgusted with their exclusiveness and their idols….” Shamsul Islam, the Muslim academic from the University of Delhi cleverly ignores the lines preceding what the good Swamiji wrote, and what else the Swamiji wrote on that page. Yes, he says that the Jagannatha temple was an old “Buddhistic” temple, and that the Russian was falsely claiming that at the time of Jesus it was a Hindu/Brahmin temple. He also points out that the Buddhists had become corrupted after the times of the Buddha. He writes:

• “Thus, in spite of the preaching of mercy to animals, in spite of the sublime ethical religion… the whole building of Buddhism tumbled down piecemeal; and the ruin was simply hideous…. The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism” (p. 264-265).

So, the Hindus who rebuilt the Buddhist temple/s did not “desecrate” Buddhist monasteries, as Shamsul Islam claims, but there were other dynamics in play. Indeed, the Buddhists themselves acknowledged the symbol and power of Lord Jagannath as can be seen in many of the old statues still lying around uncared for in the region. For an explanation of the connection between Buddhism and Lord Jagannath, see here.

Alas, we do not repeat these facts over and over again unlike the made-up stories that those who seek to decimate Hindus and destroy Hinduism do. Just Google “three most genocidal religions/faiths” and nothing comes up that points to the 2009 study by Naveed Sheikh – “Body Count: A Quantitative Review of Political Violence Across World Civilizations,” in which he offers data from 0 CE to 2008 CE to show that Christianity is the most genocidal religion, followed by the “Antitheist” (Communist) states and movements. Third on the list is what he labels the “Sinic civilization,” fourth, the Buddhist, fifth the “Primal-Indigenous,” and sixth is Islamic. The “Indic” civilization, he points out, is and has been the least violent. One can delve further to see if indeed the Islam-inspired destruction around the world, and especially in India, is as little as Sheikh claims. Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup argue otherwise. Dr. Bostom, a medical doctor, who teaches at Brown University, has written in his book “The Legacy of Jihad” that “jihad conquests were brutal, imperialist advances, which spurred waves of Muslims to expropriate a vast expanse of lands and subdue millions of indigenous peoples”. See more from Dr. Bostom here.

So, to circle back to where we started. Why this drumbeat against Hindus? What is the agenda? Why the lies? Who are behind the generation of millions of reports against Hindus? Monopolist, supremacist, violent forces have not changed their agenda: to make the rest of the world theirs. Hindus, Hinduism, and the Indian state are the easiest of targets at this juncture, and they will strategize and plan to weaken if not destroy us, especially as we near the 2024 general elections, and especially because the BJP is speculated to come back to power. Anyone who dares stand up and challenge them therefore is labeled a Hindu nationalist, as “far right,” or “rightwing,” or a “Hindutva” agent. They have sought to push us into corners, and in escaping if we seek any support elsewhere, we are branded “racist,” and supporters of “white nationalists”. Every trick in their ugly trade is vicious. But stand up, we must. Respond, we should. Call out their lies, over and over again, we better!