The Attacks on Hindus: A Global Strategem

Image courtesy: Entitymag.com

This essay, under a different title, was published in the book titled, “Four Decades of Hindu Renaissance” earlier this year. In the few months following the publication, we have seen, among other things, the passing of the SB403 Bill in the California Assembly, which is now on the desk of Governor Newsom for his signature. There is no doubt that he will sign the bill into law. The bill, crafted by a first-term Afghan-American legislator, with help from her left-extremist, Khalistani, Muslim, and Christian enablers, purportedly protects Californians from being discriminated against based on their caste status. Nonsense! It is just the latest fusillade in the coordinated global attacks targeting Hindus. Alas, most Hindus either do not know about these matters or they do not care. Our task therefore is to inform those who do care and those who do want to know.

Introduction

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” is not an Arab proverb but a Sanskrit one, Cordesman (2014) pointed out, reminding Indian students of the adage credited to Kautilya in Book VI of the Arthashastra (1915): “The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy. The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror)”. Unfortunately, at present, for India, it is not just the border states that may be inimical but others – nations across the world, political ideologies and ideologues, faith groups, academics/scholars, the powerful Western media, and the institutions inspired by the so-called “great” religions – who have conspired to plot, strategize, and enact various plans together or in tandem to discredit and destabilize India, if not “break India,” through a variety of strategies, both short term and long term, and trap Hindus in pincer moves from which they cannot escape, or push them into corners from which they cannot emerge.

This belief in such a conspiracy against India is unsupported, unverifiable, and paranoid, say those who seek to dilute the “Hindu” in “Hindustan,” or those who see Hindus and Hinduism as the primary threat to their “idea” of India (see Jaffrelot, 2019; Sahoo, 2020; Dore, 2020; Purohit, 2019; Frayer, 2021). But these interests have conspired, we can surmise, because of the variety of smoking guns brandished in powerful capitals around the world by forces who are otherwise opposed to one another but are keen on winning their quantum of Indian spoils; or the amount of ink spilled on diatribes masquerading as “analyses,” “opinion pieces,” and “editorials” in newspapers, magazines, think tank reports, and official government reports; the number of books, dissertations, and journal articles published demonizing Hindus and decrying Hindutva; or the number of “conferences” held and the number of papers presented at conferences that have targeted Hindus and Hindutva. These numbers, starting as a trickle in the late 1970s, began to grow in the 1980s, emerged as a major stream in the 1990s, and over the past two decades have become a deluge. It should lead to the simple and obvious question: “Why?” A corollary to that question is this: “What makes these forces, otherwise aligned against each other elsewhere, join ranks to target Hindus and India?”

We forget that the world had been conquered and divided for nearly two millennia between the two most violent, supremacist, exclusivist, Abrahamic religions: Christianity and Islam. The consequences of their quarrels, their millennial ends, and their inherent violent tendencies led to the rise of the so-called “great religions” that divided the world’s spoils between them till communism emerged in the late nineteenth century, gained traction in the early twentieth century, and ensured for a few decades at least that there was a third “major player” in the global arena: the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and their major spheres of influence. With the “collapse” of communism and the Soviet Union, and the emergence of China as a crypto-communist-capitalist state, the world’s political, and religious playgrounds have changed. However, to this day, we know that Islam and Christianity are the backroom representatives of about 170 of the 193 sovereign states that are members of the United Nations. While these countries claim that they are secular (at least the Christian nations), we know that they are not. The lone Jewish state in the mix Israel; the United States is a Christian country with more than seventy percent[1] of the population claiming a Christian identity, and every president and vice president since the country was founded swearing their oath on the Bible and attending a local church nearby to show their Christian fealty, and Washington DC playing home to the largest number of Christian, faith-based, lobbying groups[2]. The Vatican has the status as a member of the United Nations. We know enough about the power and influence of Islam because Muslim states pay little heed to the idea of “equality” and do little to hide the status of non-Muslims in their countries. Despite their Islamic constitutions, they are members of the United Nations, and whatever their bloody quarrels with each other, they organize and plan their foreign policy through institutions such as the Arab League and the OIC. India is the lone nation that has any clout in terms of the number of Hindus in the country, but it has hobbled itself, and tied one hand behind its back, by proclaiming to be a “secular” state, inviting the world to come prey on Hindus and Hinduism as they had done over the past two millennia.

The nature of supremacist ideologies, faiths, and religions is to prevail, to use violence, and to claim monopolistic rights. Whereas, Indian thought, especially Hindu traditions, are based on “reason, logic, and experiential knowledge”. As it is said in the Taittiriya Upanishad, “Brahma-vid apnoti param, tad eshabhyukta, satyam jnanam anantam brahma” (Tait. 2.1.1), which means that the highest reality is not a white-bearded person sitting in heaven, or his “prophet” who claims he is speaking for “Allah” who are offering the truth but satyam, the Supreme is impersonal, the infinitely pervading consciousness which appears as this universe. Hindu sages and seers arrived at this cosmic truth not by unverifiable claims but through a rigorous logical process, by experiment, and by experience. This highest truth does not need vast armies to conquer lands and subdue people. No imperial lords and bloodthirsty warriors, nor armies of believers thumping their books are needed to propagate Hinduism, like what the Abrahamic religions and communist/Marxist faiths and political ideologies require. Truth does not need propaganda. However, the paradox is that these three genocidal faiths and ideologies account for almost all of the genocides over the past two thousand years (Sheikh, 2009), whereas “the Indic civilization is the most pacific civilization with no instance of genocidal violence (despite the Bombay and Gujurat [sic] Riots in recent years). It is at the bottom of all tables, with only 7 instances of large-scale political violence, out of 321, and less than half a percentage of the total death toll”.

The “New” World

The world has changed this past century: industrial development, population growth, environmental depredation, religious conflict and war, and galloping changes in how we communicate and travel, have brought changes, fast and furious. The colonized have become free people, in new nations carved by old hands. Indians, unshackled from the British, but living in a land sliced in half by the British, have struggled to understand themselves and their colonial heritage (Deepak, 2021), their history (Deepak, 2022), and be good neighbors with suspicious, smaller neighbors, some of whom have waged an incessant battle to undermine Indian unity (Sabharwal, 2022).

The “new world” is stitched from old, some very old cloth: that of cultural, civilizational, linguistic, religious, economic, racial, and other divides which make our world a fractious place. Why this, now? Well, human beings are an invasive species, and our population has grown from about 1.65 billion in 1900 to about eight billion as we write. We jostle for space, we try to protect what is ours, and we erect barriers to protect our borders. India has always been the jewel that outsiders have sought to put in their crown. At the crossroads of world civilizations, a home to nature’s bounty, the place where the sage and the wise have constructed human spiritual and intellectual edifices that continue to beckon all, India that is Bharat has attracted both the spiritual seekers and the brigands of the world.

At present, we see a confluence of the political, religious, national, and technological dynamics that have spurred the old brigands to renew their quest to raid and weaken India, if not conquer it, break it, divide the spoils of war between them, or refashion it to their own ends. India has always been a people-rich place, given the comfortable range of climate, vast arable lands, and a rich and bounteous nature. It may have overtaken China on January 17, 2023, to become the world’s most populous nation (The Economic Times, January 18, 2023). Added to the native population growth is the migration of people from neighboring countries into India. There is legal migration and there is the illegal variety. According to the United Nations, some 281 million people were living outside their country of origin in 2020[3]. While India-born migrants number about 17.5 million around the world, the number of illegal immigrants in India is about 20 million, mostly from Bangladesh (Business Standard, 2016). While the reasons for illegal migration are many, how some of this illegal migration into India has been leveraged by anti-India forces to destabilize the country and queer its demographic profile is also a story rarely or fully told.

The “Coalition” of the Willing, the Willful

In this essay, we shall try to tell the story of how India has been targeted and sought to be discredited by forces outside the country using a variety of strategies: informational, demographic, faith and religious proselytism, academic manipulation, and political destabilization. We will list and identify those agencies, faith groups, media establishments, political actors, and global movements that seek to undermine India by demonizing Hindus and Hinduism, and who claim deceptively that their target is not Hinduism or Hindus but “Hindtuva,” and that it is not their intent to break India but to keep India “secular”. What brings these otherwise and inherently violent, monopolistic, and supremacist groups and ideologies together? And, why is it that those who label themselves “progressive” and “liberal” join forces with these ruthless squads of monopolists? That their targets are India and Hindu/Hindutva is a story that has garnered little attention and found little traction. But, the story must be told. “Hindu nationalists want a Hindu majoritarian state,” say those who wish to Balkanize India, and those seeking to protect India from division again must take care not to separate India that is Bharat from Bharat that is Hindu, however threatening and demoralizing the headlines are in international media, however wanton the provocation by ideologues masquerading as academics, and howsoever clever the plots manufactured by activists masquerading as interfaith leaders and human rights advocates.

It has been pointed out (Rao, February 07, 2022) that India is one of only two Hindu-majority countries in the world, whereas Muslims have majorities in forty-nine/fifty countries (Desilver & Masci, 2017), including ten countries where they constitute more than a 98 percent majority (World Population Review, 2023). India is home to the second-largest number of Muslims, after Indonesia. It is estimated that Muslims will number about 2.76 billion by 2050 making up about 30 percent of the world’s population as Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world (Lipka, 2017), and by 2050 India will have the world’s largest Muslim population (Varma, 2015).

There are fifty-seven member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) the world body representing Muslims and Muslim countries. According to the OIC, the “… Organization is the collective voice of the Muslim world…”. However, the OIC does not include or allow India as a member – a country which has the second largest Muslim population in the world, and which by 2050 will have the largest Muslim population of the world. There are twenty-two members of the Arab League. They play a dominant role in global politics and given the enormous oil wealth that some Arab nations have gathered, their power and influence are oversized. The increasing presence of Muslims in Europe and the US has led to a new dynamic in the region where Muslims have begun to claim that they are under threat (see Caldwell, 2010). Islam will change Europe, but Islam will not be assimilable in Europe, Caldwell concludes, saying Muslims pose a demographic challenge and Islam a philosophical challenge (p. 286). He says that “Muslim countries or groups are either at war or in a hostile truce with every civilization that Islam abuts, from Nigeria to Xinjiang” (p. 132), and we see how Muslims worldwide strategize and conspire to demonize (Rao, December 12, 2022) and attack (Goel, 2023) Hindus and India in international arenas.

Christian Europe, now secularized in the west of the European continent, now faces a dilemma about Muslim immigrants they began inviting after World War II. After about seven decades in Europe (we shall not foray into the past, centuries-long Muslim presence in Europe), Muslims have not just proved intractable about their claims to their religious and cultural exclusivity, their predisposition to resort to violence, their inclination to have large families, their intransigence about keeping their demanding faith “pure,” they pose an existential threat to the “Christian/secular” Europe. While Christians are a majority in 119 countries of the world, with ten of those countries having more than a 95 percent majority Christian population, and Christianity is the largest religion in the world making up almost one-third of the world’s population (Hackett & McClendon, 2017), the Christian/secular dilemma in Europe is about what to do with their recalcitrant and hostile Muslim residents. It is a problem, quixotically, which they wish to foist on the rest of the world, including India: the problems they confront with their Muslim citizens and residents include dual loyalty; lawless zones in many of their major cities and large towns; violence, crime, and rioting; tribalism and extreme ideology; intimidation; and resistance and jihad (Caldwell, 2010).

This detour into religious demography is fundamental and foundational to the argument in this essay about who is behind the attempts to discredit Hindus and Hindutva as the primary threat to Hindus and Hindutva/Hinduism comes through demographic changes. Scammon and Wattenberg said, back in 1970, in a different context, that “demography is destiny”. Demographic warfare waged in India is centuries old. While demography is fundamental, how people can be lured and divided based on “faith,” “religion,” “ideology,” and “national identity,” are other pieces of the puzzle in the “division of the Indian spoils”. At present, the war strategy to divide India and rob Hindus of their homeland includes splintering the Hindu vote, balkanizing India, deepening the divides in the Hindu communities based on jati/caste, and converting the poor or ignorant Hindu to Christianity or Islam, or the educated Hindu to become a “secularized” and/or “left/liberal” “Indian”.

Democracy, Liberalism, Fundamentalist Religions, and Egalitarianism

The challenge that liberal democracies face – in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand – is a challenge that India has faced in the past and now is confronted with again, but in the context of a new world. Caldwell (2010) forcefully argues that while Europe is reeling from a demographic decline it is also weakened by a continuous dilution of moral order, a crisis of faith, and an obsession with “neutrality in all matters of government religious policy and impose (ing) it on individual citizens as a requirement in their private utterances” (Caldwell, p. 170). This makes any criticism of Islam as a religious ideology and Muslim behavior and attitudes illegal. Being wedded to “multiculturalism” that by its very definition would be inclusive of extremist, supremacist, monopolist ideologies, western European nations are befuddled about what exactly their civilization values are, and what it is that they are defending in the name of “secularism,” “multiculturalism,” “liberalism,” and “democracy”.  Caldwell offers a slew of evidence to show how the political leadership and the elites in France, Germany, England, Sweden, Spain, and Italy have failed by refusing to listen to the majority of voters who are wary of their Muslim neighbors, and of Islam. What Caldwell fails to note, explicitly enough, is that these very determined and small group of intellectuals, political elites, and deracinated group of Europeans (and their ilk in North America, Australia, and elsewhere) want to Europeanize the rest of the world. Ironically, this Europeanization will not lead to the creation of “secular, liberal democracies,” but the building of a “New Caliphate,” a violent, new Islamic world whose faithful will cling more firmly to unverifiable facts about their prophet, their faith, and their global ambitions, or an “egalitarian world” where, in the pursuit of “equity,” “inclusion,” and “diversity,” a new authoritarianism will play out, where all members of some groups will be labeled “oppressors,” “racists,” “unfair,” and all members of some other groups will all be considered victims (Rauch, 2002; Wildavsky, 1991).

In this quest to remember, refashion, and reclaim the past the impulse of these new authoritarians will be to “politicize all academic disciplines,” and “…snuff out dissent” (Rauch, 2002). This connection of dots in the ideational world of the “left, liberal, progressives” where Hindus are cast as “oppressors, racists, unfair,” and where Muslims, Christians, secularists, Khalistanis, feminists, Dalits, or whatever other “non-Hindu” “minority” group are presented as “victims” is important. This task has not been undertaken in any depth or with any consistency because Hindus/others who wish to challenge this narrative are effectively shut out of all debate in the major, powerful academic institutions in the West as well as in India, and their voices are stifled or mocked in the influential, powerful media outlets around the world. That many diplomats in the US and European capitals are also anti-Hindu is rumored but finding evidence for their chicanery and their antipathy would be a difficult task, unless we begin to see leaks from these establishments. Mishra (2023) reports on how some in the US State Department manipulated information about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Hindus.

There have been some efforts in India to connect these dots, but they have focused on specific anti-India, anti-Hindu groups, like in the books by Shourie on “eminent historians” (1999), on Christian proselytizers (2006), on sharia in India (1995), and the role of communists (1991) in Indian affairs. Shourie was prescient and a keen observer. Writing about the communists and the Indian academic establishment that provided a haven for the communists, he says:

They have made India out to have been an empty land, filled by successive invaders. They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such than as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity – that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period. They have denounced ancient India’s social system as the epitomy (sic) of oppression, and made totalitarian ideologies out to be egalitarian and just. They have belittled our ancient culture and exaggerated syncretistic elements which survived and made them out to have been an entire ‘culture’, the ‘composite culture’ as they call it.

There have been some new attempts at compiling information on and describing the strategies of these “breaking India” forces (Malhotra & Neelakandan, 2012; Malhotra & Viswanathan, 2022), but they have been too sparse, and they have been quickly ignored by those whose gameplan is to vivisect India. Work supported by the Infinity Foundation[4] has gone a long way in informing Indian audiences about the global forces working to undermine India and the Indian ethos. Work done by some institutions affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, like the Hindu Vivek Kendra,[5] the Vishwa Hindu Parishad,[6] and others have ensured that there has been at least a continuous effort at informing the Indian public, the Indian Diaspora, and global actors about the threats that India and Hindus face, and how the word “Hindutva” has been made a “devil term”. There have also been some systematic academic efforts, like the ones initiated by Prof. Balagangadhara at Ghent University[7], to counter the strategic and long-term efforts by academics to “misread” and “misinterpret” India. Students of Prof. Balagangadhara have produced some impactful work on matters regarding history, caste, crimes against Dalits, etc. There are interest groups, started by the Indic Academy[8], to revive and revitalize research about India, about Hindus and Hinduism, and as a counter to the propaganda mills churning out hundreds of books each year seeking to disparage India and Hindus. But these are not enough, and the efforts to pull the anti-India/anti-Hindu threads together to present the ghastly picture of anti-India forces have not borne much quality fruit. Given the billions of dollars poured into India for proselytism purposes, the billions of dollars that the oil-rich Middle Eastern kingdoms have poured into US and European academic institutions, and the deep roots that the “egalitarians” have planted in academic and media institutions in India, the road to gaining relevance of the Hindu voice and for the Hindu presence has been both steep and a minefield.

While there are common fears expressed about Islamism, left-Marxist extremism, religious fanaticism, and other matters that threaten the safety of the people and the foundational tenets of liberal democracies around the world, what worries us is that the people who do express such concerns seem, paradoxically, in bed with the very same forces that are seeking to undermine India and demonize Hindus. The left/progressive/liberal academics have been seriously at work in undermining liberal Western democracies, and they are also the most often found in bed with Islamists, with fundamentalist Christians, and with the rabidly violent Sikh-Khalistan groups seeking their pounds of the Indian and Hindu flesh. At some point, however, these immoral and “strategic” alliances must give way to a general malaise if not the destruction of civil society, the emergence of new extremist groups, or circular firing squads.

Rauch (2002), writing about the strange alliance of “Mullahs and the Postmodernists,” cites Prof. Wildavsky, who presciently (1991) wrote about “egalitarianism” as the new left/liberal belief system and how in that scheme of things, American academics, like their counterparts in Europe, have used egalitarianism as a “belief in the moral virtue of diminishing differences among people of varying incomes, genders, races, sexual preferences, and (especially) power,” but ironically, strangely have brought and are bringing “seemingly opposed groups” to fight the traditional West, with its “western” and “Christian” values. “The Marxists and the mullahs are natural enemies, as Stalin and Hitler were, and their alliance, such as it is, will prove equally fleeting. But their convergence is as revelatory in today’s context as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in 1939, and for much the same reason: it brings two usually opposing pole stars into temporary conjunction, and reminds the rest of us where we stand,” writes Rauch, but he might not only have spoken too soon, he was also focusing on only the United States. After the events of 9/11, Rauch saw only Marxists in bed with Muslims, ignoring the various other “egalitarian” bedfellows in the US and the West, including the most important egalitarian group – the Christians, close cousins of the Muslims, who share similar monopolistic goals and supremacist worldviews, joining hands with Muslims to do to India what they have done to other nations and regions of the world: divide the spoils of their Abrahamic warfare. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, almost all folk/indigenous religions have vanished. Christians now make up about 63 percent of the population, and Muslims about 30 percent. By 2050 Christians would make up about 58.5 percent in this region, and Muslims about 35.2 percent[9].

The world did change after the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington, DC, and elsewhere on September 11, 2001, but not in the way many expected. Instead of a death struggle with Muslims, or instead of the United States enabling the democratization of the Islamic world, what we now see is that the ties between the Marxists and the Mullahs have strengthened, so much so that every academic institution and every media house in the US, big and small, are concerned more with “Islamophobia” rather than with the threat that Islamists pose — demographically, culturally, civilizationally, and in every other manner. Muslims have been embraced wholeheartedly by left/liberal forces in the United States, and conditionally by Christians, as they have been in Europe, as they all together seek to make the world “egalitarian”. These are the very same forces that are targeting Hindus and India.

Tracking the Anti-India/Anti-Hindu Forces Around the World

To return to our mention in the introduction about the adage that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Rauch says that if indeed the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, “then it is not so surprising that postmodern Marxists should make common cause with radical mullahs”. Thus, if the common enemy of fundamentalist Christians, Islamists/Muslims, and Marxists/progressives are Hindus, then they will work together to defeat Hindus, despite also being opposed to one another. “Although the radical-Islamic and radical-egalitarian senses of justice could hardly be more different, they are less opposites than counterparts in opposition to the dominance of individualism,” writes Rauch, and what way of life and belief could be more individualistic than that of Hindus?

This essay, we hope, offers a little insight into, and presents the big picture of the global efforts at demonizing Hindus and undermining India. The next section of the essay is organized under the heading “Threats to Hindu interests from North American entities”. For a study of the global and international threats Indians and Hindus face, we could also do careful studies of threats to Hindu interests from European entities; threats to Hindu interests from Middle Eastern entities; threats to Hindu interests from Pacific Area entities; and threats to Hindu interests from African entities. Given the limits of space and given the nature of the compendium that this essay appears in, the focus will be on the United States and Canada, and where the threats have emerged from, and continue to be presented.

Threats to Hindu Interests from North American Entities

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. An interesting summary of this work is in Kumar’s (2022) observations about how Hindus (anyone from then, colonial India) had to confront laws against interracial marriage, and of the kind of media coverage of such interracial marriages. There are thumbnail sketch summaries of Indian immigrants in the US (Hoffman & Batalova, 2022). Interestingly, in this 2022 piece, the authors claim, without any evidence, that the increase in illegal migration of Indians into the United States, could be “due to growing religious and political persecution in India against non-Hindus…”. The Hindu American Foundation offers yet another summary of the history of anti-Hindu bias in the US[10]. A book by Mann, Numrich, and Williams (2008) offers a short history of the challenges that Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs have faced and face in America, and another one by Long (2020) focuses on Hinduism in America. An article, by this author, on Indian migrants in the American South was first published by the South Writ Large (Spring, 2016), and later included in an anthology titled, “South Writ Large: Stories, Arts, and Ideas from the Global South” (2022). But, to repeat, no work till date comprehensively probes the American media depictions of India, Indians, and Hindus.

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, however, 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.

This author has in a series of articles pointed out how The New York Times has systematically conspired to undermine India and demonize Hindus: see Rao (March 21, 2020; April 01, 2020; April 13, 2020; May 28, 2020). For an analysis of The New York Times’ bias, distortions, and fabrications, see Rindsberg’s book (2021).

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. Thus, the National Public Radio’s bias has been recorded by Juluri (September 12, 2019), Kumar (December 26, 2019), Dutta (January 16, 2022), and others. 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” (December 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 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 inegalitarian.

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,[11] the Institute of South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley,[12] the University of Chicago,[13] the Center for South Asia at Stanford University[14], 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 December 1, 2022, the announcement 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 U 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.

Government Entities (USCIRF, US State Department’s Annual Reports, the Ambassador at Large Office of International Religious Freedom):

The United States is unique in taking on the role of policing, judging, and teaching the world, and acting as the “haranguer in chief” as its various government institutions periodically publish reports on who is good and who is bad in the world. There are also private institutions that do so too, and we will focus on them next. The two government institutions that we will focus on here are the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and the United States Department of State. This writer, when he was a member of the Executive Board of the Hindu American Foundation, had the opportunity to visit the offices of USCIRF, and visit the State Department headquarters colloquially referred to as “Foggy Bottom”.

USCIRF was created in 1998 as a mandate of the International Religious Freedom Act, and both political parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – nominate members of the USCIRF Board. It is an advisory body only able to make non-binding recommendations to the State Department and the US President, but as Shukla (2017) points out, “the credibility for the commission has been elusive since its inception for two reasons:  inbuilt bias and lack of transparency”. She says that the USCIRF not only publishes annual reports but a series of special reports, one of which targeted India, and which was titled, “Constitutional and Legal Challenges Faced by Religious Minorities in India”. Shukla rightly points out that throughout its history, the Commission has been chaired by activist Christian conservatives. What was dangerous and unprecedented about USCIRF’s special report on India was that it was not authored by the USCIRF’s expert staff but by a British activist, Iqtidar Cheema, a native of Pakistan, and who has been honored by several Pakistani government bodies!

Kalra (2018) writes that the USCIRF lacks “any semblance of genuine religious diversity (notwithstanding a small handful of non-Christian Commissioners through the years),” and that its agenda has been to promote and further Christian missionary and conversion activities. HAF has also pointed out[15] how many of the people and activist groups that USCIRF consults with about Indian matters are committed anti-Hindu activists.

There is more to USCIRF’s continued malfeasance and mischief. Unfortunately, the two Hindu Americans appointed as USCIRF commissioners in the past twenty-five years have either been lacking in resolve or worse yet, uncaring of or suspicious about Hindus and India.

The US State Department also publishes annual reports on “international religious freedom,” and has done so since 1998, and without fail, India gets tarred and targeted for attacks on “minorities”. Interestingly, President Biden has appointed an Indian American Muslim, Rashad Hussain, as the “Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom”. In the 2021 report, authored under the imprimatur of Amb. Hussain, we read this about India,[16] going to show the inveterately anti-Hindu bias of the Department’s staff and the Ambassador:

Attacks on members of religious minority communities, including killings, assaults, and intimidation, occurred throughout the year.  These included incidents of “cow vigilantism” against non-Hindus based on allegations of cow slaughter or trade in beef.  According to the UCF, the number of violent attacks against Christians in the country rose to 486 during the year from 279 in 2020.  According to Catholic news agency Agenzia Fides, Hindus committed 13 instances of violence and threats against Christian communities in Uttarakhand, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi.  According to UCF, most of the incidents were reported in states ruled by the BJP and included attacks on pastors, disruption of worship services, and vandalism.

Nothing more needs be said about these reports, about the global agenda of the United States, how the different identity groups in the US, paradoxically, work and leverage their American citizenship status to undermine different nations and religious groups, including their own home countries and fellow religionists. When historians look back on twentieth-century American dominance of the world, they will surely find that the “land of the free” was deeply compromised, and decidedly partisan, if not deadly to some nations and peoples across the world. America has beckoned people from around the world, and still beckons, but for reasons not entirely seemly, and not entirely right. That it might combust itself because of identity politics taken to the extreme, and the immoral and unethical collaboration between extremist and monopolist groups and agencies, is entirely probable.

Inter-faith, Religious, and Political/Activist Organizations (National Prayer Breakfast, the IAMC, FIACONA, South Asian organizations, Khalistan Movement, Feminist organizations):

The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual Washington, DC event, that takes place on the first Thursday in February and is now attended by almost 3,500 delegates. The annual “prayer gathering” was launched in 1953 during Eisenhower’s presidency, and initially attracted about 400 delegates. Eisenhower speaking at the first gathering remarked about the relationship between religion and government. At that time, of course, the religion that was alluded to was Christianity. That is still so, despite the jostling of imams, mullahs, rabbis, monks, granthis, and the rare Hindu delegate, like Rajiv Shah, the Director of USAID, who was the keynote speaker in 2014. The Dalai Lama addressed one of the Prayer Breakfast-related events (a lunch!) in 2015. Invited to this event are diplomats, politicians, missionaries, business leaders, and heads of state, including Benazir Bhutto who was supposed to have attended more than one meeting. Basically, in the garb of religion and prayer, the event has enabled networking among the powerful, and for the Christian leadership to assert the Christian identity of the United States. In an interesting article, Lindsay (2006) argued that one of the most powerful religious groups in the US, referred to as the “Fellowship” administers the National Prayer Breakfast. But this year, matters have changed somewhat, but the point is Christian groups and influence peddlers are the ones who have guided the political careers and the making of policy in DC for a long time.

Joining the Christian influencers are now the Muslim groups, and among the wealthiest lobbying groups in the US these days is CAIR – The Council on American-Islamic Relations – which is flush with Arab oil money. CAIR has funneled some of the money to the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), which in turn works with a variety of local Christian, South Asian, Khalistan Movement, and Dalit groups in a “Coalition of the Anti-Hindu”. Thus, the IAMC came out with a “State of Religious Minorities in India” report in 2022, a slick and glossy report on “atrocities against minorities, the genocide of Indian Muslims, Hijab Ban, Hindutva, and Islamophobia”. The IAMC works with the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations (FIACONA), so-called “South Asian” groups, the Left-Marxist groups, and the slyly named “Hindus for Human Rights” group, which has not brought to the public’s attention one case of anti-Hindu discrimination, goes to show how these organizations have banded together to target Indian Americans and Hindu Americans. The image below shows the closely linked anti-India and anti-Hindu groups and activists:

Image courtesy: Hindu American Foundation

The members of these groups then network with larger American/global/international Christian and Muslim networks and put in positions of power their spokespersons, who then bar the entry of any Hindu advocate into the group or any position of influence. This goes to show how strategically they have organized themselves, and how the only agenda they have is an anti-Hindu agenda. Thus, for example, the International Religious Freedom Roundtable is a powerful Washington, DC group, whose working group on India is chaired by Ajit Sahi of the IAMC, John Prabhdoss of FIACONA, and Nikhil Mandalaparthy of the so-called “Hindus for Human Rights” group. They ensure that no Hindu advocate is allowed into their working group, and if they are, have no voice in influencing the agenda of the group. Who pays for the expenses of these groups is a mystery. But we do know that they are fellow anti-Hindu conspirators working from the most powerful capital in the world.

We have seen recently how the Khalistan groups in Australia have vandalized Hindu temples and taken out aggressive, anti-India processions (Sharma, 2023). Canada-based Khalistanis were involved in the bringing down of the Air India flight Kanishka in 1985, and the successive Canadian governments dithered in the investigation of the groups and people suspected in that dastardly terrorist attack that killed 329 people (Sharma, 2022). Khalistani groups have been involved in the desecrating and destruction of Gandhi statues in California (PTI, 2021), New York City (Ke, 2022), as well as the destruction of a Shivaji statue in California (PTI, 2023).

How these anti-Hindu and anti-India groups have organized, how they have found support in local city councils, state houses, and even in the Congress should be a cause of concern not only for Hindu Americans or the Hindu Diaspora but for the Hindu homeland, Bharat.

Human Rights Organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch):

Human rights agencies, mostly headquartered in cities and capitals of Europe and the US, have sought to, joining hands with governments in these capitals, bring about a new “right-based” human order around the world. They ignore the blight, the genocide, the colonialism, and the bankrupting they caused and committed in the past, but now, climbing onto moral pedestals, they seek to hector and lecture the rest of the world. Of course, human rights are fundamental for the well-being of both human beings and other beings in the world. However, the lack of acknowledgment that the manner in which the West let the rest of the regions in the world suffer by their acts of dismembering their lands, destroying their cultures, and robbing people of their livelihoods are rarely the focus of Western human rights organizations. We could even ignore their ignorance of history if they did not play favorites and be partisan in their reporting of the human rights condition around the world.

When it comes to India, it is therefore not a surprise that the only ones who are ever accused of human rights abuses are Hindus, the BJP, and the RSS. We noted in our book (2002) how the Human Rights Watch (HRW) group misreported the riots in Gujarat in 2002. In the book, Shukla (2002) notes in horror that the HRW devoted just one paragraph on page 13, three sentences out of 75 pages, describing the killing of innocent Hindus on a train set on fire that sparked the riots in the state. Shukla also notes this: “Perhaps none of the distortions and none of the insidious lies expose the HRW agenda as clearly as chapter 6 on page 39. Entitled ‘The context of violence in Gujarat’, this chapter is the ultimate in political ham-handedness. Incredibly, the entire history of communalism in Gujarat is attributed to the rise of the Sangh Parivar”. In an essay following Shukla’s, Arvin Bahl (2002), also commenting on the HRW report on the Godhra riots, says, “More alarming, however, is not merely the lack of context in HRW reports, but the outright distortions contained in them. Blaming ‘Hindu nationalists’ for church blasts carried out by Islamic terrorists, violence against Dalits and wanting to maintain the caste system, the 1984 riots, and insinuating their involvement in Jhabua rapes are evidence of a concerted effort by HRW to advance a political agenda — an agenda of the political left, an agenda of Christian proselytizers, and the agenda of those who wish to undermine India’s Hindu ethos and its long history of accommodating people of every hue, color, and conviction”.

Twenty years later the BBC broadcasts a “documentary” on the Gujarat riots, characterizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the architect of the riots. The documentary has been characterized by some as “a propaganda piece that is designed to push a discredited narrative” (Verma, 2023), but it is also engineered to be played and publicized at the time when Narendra Modi is about to complete two successive terms as the Prime Minister of India, successfully, and has an approval rating of almost seventy percent among the electorate. That human rights groups have conspired to work with the BBC in spreading the lie against the BJP, Narendra Modi, and Hindus, goes to show the power and influence of these groups in shaping human rights policies at the highest levels – from the United Nations and world bodies to the offices of presidents and prime ministers around the world.

As to the dyspeptic take by Amnesty International on Indian matters is known by all, what we did not know is how the India Chapter of Amnesty International got a Muslim activist as its chapter director, and the organization was accused of violating laws of foreign funding. Amnesty International has not only had trouble with the present Indian government but also with governments in the past. And it is also not just the Modi Government that has found Amnesty International violating Indian laws but also the Manmohan Singh Government in 2009 (WION, 2020). Amnesty International has also been accused of collaborating with “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban,” Moazzam Megg. So, what we can surmise from the activities of these human rights organizations is that they are not nonpartisan organizations working for the welfare of people around the world but partisan, ideologically inspired, international groups explicitly working to undermine national governments. That Hindus and the BJP are their targets should not come as a surprise.

Amnesty International has also been accused of creating a toxic work environment for its workers, paying exorbitant salaries for its top staff, selection bias, foreign policy bias against non-Western countries, etc. We Hindus therefore need not fear that we are the only ones who have faced the skullduggery of this human rights organization. Many other countries have complained too (Mudge, 2021).

City Councils, State Houses, the Congress:

Finally, we have to note where some of the biggest threats to Hindus, against Hinduism, and India emerge from legislative bodies in the West – from city councils and state houses to the parliaments and congresses. Here too we will limit our narrative to a few events, and incidents, but for those willing to spend the time and do the investigation, there is a treasure trove of information about the anti-Hindu bias and the collusion of anti-Hindu forces in the US, in Western Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, and elsewhere.

We can start with some “breaking news”: the Virginia Board of Education booted out Suparna Dutta, a Hindu American, appointed by the Governor, Glenn Youngkin. Dutta was labeled a “far-right extremist” by the Democratic Party members (Lambert & Myers, 2023). Moreover, a member of the Virginia Senate, Ghazala Hashmi, an Islamist, originally from India, slandered Dutta as being aligned with “white supremacists”.

Anti-India, anti-Hindu resolutions have now been passed in Chicago (Illinois), San Francisco (California), Seattle (Washington), Albany (New York), St. Paul (Minnesota), and Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Meanwhile, the newly ousted member from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ilhan Omar, introduced an anti-India resolution in the House of Representatives in June 2022, calling upon the Biden Administration to designate India as a country of particular concern for alleged violation of religious freedom (PTI, 2022). That the so-called Indian American members in the House of Representatives – Pramila Jaypal, Ami Bera, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ro Khanna, and Shri Thanedar – all Democrats — voted in favor of keeping Ilhan Omar on the House Foreign Affairs Committee goes to show the toothless personality of these committee members or their mindless voting according to the diktats of their party whip.

Political and social dynamics in the United States are beginning to reflect the political and social dynamics in Western Europe. There is a marriage of incompatible partners, collusion between avowed foes, all intent on sharing the “India spoils”. Hindus are a primary target. Caldwell’s book (2010) captures the European political and social dynamic very well. It may be time for him to write one about the new political and social reality in the United States.

Conclusion

This essay has exceeded the page and word limit given to the author, simply because the subject and topic are so vast, and the amount of material that needs to be gathered, culled, and organized is even greater. What we can conclude briefly, therefore, is that Hindus and Hinduism have been the targets of both jealousy and envy, and subject to the ignorance and the malice of the forces of monopoly, violence, supremacist beliefs, and “egalitarianism”.

Pope John Paul II, when he came to visit India, was brash and arrogant enough to call for a “crusade” in Asia (Schmetzer, 1999). There was no sleight of hand, no secret, and coded call by the pontiff. He was brazen: “The 79-year-old pontiff exhorted a synod of Asian bishops to evangelize the region in the coming millennium. He told them to go forth and conquer the continent for Christ just as the church had done in Europe during the first millennium and in the Americas in the second”. That we continue to have others lie through their teeth, and get away with it, is also not surprising. They think they can pull the wool over Hindu eyes, and in fact, they have been successful in doing so over many Hindu eyes, and even their fellow “good” Christians’ eyes.

That journalists, academicians, politicians, diplomats, activists, human rights advocates, and interfaith interlocutors all continue to throw dust into Hindu eyes should also not come as a surprise. It is in the nature of monopolists and supremacists to do so. They will make compromises with avowed enemies in the short term to win their war on Hindus and Hindutva. They see no shame in it. Morality and ethics are for demagogic purposes, not for real, and not seriously considered in their pursuit of millennial goals – the end times that so many fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Jews subscribe to, and in a strange, and not so surprising a manner, the left extremists too whose wish to bring equality is premised in bringing an end to the world as we know it (Zizek, 2018).

So, the challenge is this: What can Hindus do about this global challenge and threat to Hindus and Hinduism? It is not a matter of prevailing over these violent and monopolist faiths and ideologies, but how, as Hindus, we can ensure the well-being and survival, both at home and abroad of our culture, our traditions, of our grand understanding of this grand cosmos. The work being done by organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, its many affiliates, individual scholars of Hinduism, the traditional Hindu monasteries, teachers – in schools and colleges around the world, and the ordinary Hindu householders, carrying on the deeply meaningful actions and activities to ensure that dharma and rta prevail.

So be it – tataastu!

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Footnotes:

[1] Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/#religions

[2] Pew Research Center, “Lobbying for the Faithful,” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/11/21/lobbying-for-the-faithful-exec/

[3] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2020). International Migration 2020 Highlights. https://www.un.org/en/desa/international-migration-2020-highlights

[4] Infinity Foundation, https://infinityfoundation.com/

[5] Hindu Vivek Kendra, https://www.hvk.org/

[6] Vishwa Hindu Parishad, https://vhp.org/

[7] https://research.ugent.be/web/person/balagangadhara-rao-0/projects/en

[8] https://indica.in/

[9] Pew Research Center, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050”, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/sub-saharan-africa/

[10] “History of Anti-Hindu Bias and Hinduphobia in the United States,” Hindu American Foundation, https://www.hinduamerican.org/hinduphobia-history

[11] https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/research/moynihan-institute-of-global-affairs/events/2021/09/10/default-calendar/dismantling-global-hindutva

[12] https://southasia.berkeley.edu/virtual-dismantling-global-hindutva

[13] https://salc.uchicago.edu/dismantling-global-hindutva-september-10-september-12-2021-virtual-event

[14] https://southasia.stanford.edu/events/dismantling-global-hindutva

[15] “South Asia Citizens Web: Another Spate of Hinduphobia Exposed,” Hindu American Foundation, https://www.hinduamerican.org/south-asia-citizens-web-hinduphobia-exposed

[16] https://www.state.gov/reports/2021-report-on-international-religious-freedom/india/