Insistence on 'Hinduphobia' as a reality will divert attention from real purveyors of anti-Hindu propaganda

My article questioning the notion of Hinduphobia appears to have unsettled an established consensus that it definitely exists as a phenomenon. It has understandably prompted some disquiet because many have been confidently suggesting it is a reality for some decades. However, the truth must prevail, supported by logical argumentation and empirical evidence. Refuting the idea of Hinduphobia is also necessary to uphold intellectual honesty and political prudence. A false narrative on Hinduphobia will also prove damaging to the very Hindus the idea of gaining official recognition for Hinduphobia is intended to safeguard. On this count, it is unclear what such official recognition for Hinduphobia will specifically amount to except empty gestures, even Hindus are usually content with such frippery. I also reiterate that the apparent official support, at this political juncture, for the notion of Hinduphobia in Britain is the product of the cynical political calculation of the Conservative Party to mobilise Hindu votes for the 2024 general elections. There appears to be an impression, judging from Professor Vamsee Juluri’s article, I was mainly opposing the notion of Hinduphobia to avoid drawing a parallel with a non-existent Islamophobia. This is indeed true, but that was not my principal rationale for suggesting the unwisdom of campaigning for official recognition of Hinduphobia. My disquiet with the notion of Hinduphobia is due to entirely different reasons, as will be reiterated below. However, on reflection, some points might be reinforced since the unfortunate parallel between Islamophobia and Hinduphobia is not just about semantics. This latter imputation, made by Rajiv Malhotra, is a slothful argument that avoids engaging with the substantive issues arising out of the inevitable parallel that will be drawn between the alleged phenomena of Islamophobia and Hinduphobia. In the first instance, the belligerent campaign to establish the non sequitur of Islamophobia, as a prerequisite for all legitimate political discourse and social deportment is covert Taqiya, as suggested by a senior academic, Dr. Prakash Shah, for imposing blasphemy through the backdoor. If accorded even greater validity than being forcefully asserted already it will forestall any questioning of Islamic verities that deny humanity of the Other, Hindus most of all. The reasonable demand that the individual Muslim should not suffer discrimination and be treated with respect is already being used an excuse to implicitly justify murder for alleged insult to Islam and implicitly endorse the sexual slavery practiced by ISIS. It is no noteworthy that the campaign against alleged Islamophobia coincided with a surge of major Islamic terrorist incidents and the chorus against it was substantially aided by the OIC. Accusations of Islamophobia are also a form of abusive denunciation to shun debate on facts, as illustrated by a Lucknow student’s recent article in a London daily publication. She asserts that Muslims routinely suffer discrimination in India across the board and lynching is an everyday experience for them. The data on the extraordinarily disproportionate share of benefits gained by Muslims in every programme of the Narendra Modi’s government, from student scholarships and housing to government-backed loans for business is simply ignored to libel Hindus, the hated Other of Islam. It is worth repeating that there is no phobia whatsoever against Islam, which would imply an instinctive and irrational revulsion towards it. Terrorism has become synonymous with Islam and violence has also always been associated with it, whether on the streets of India or abroad. Stone pelting, bombings, individual assassination and grooming of vulnerable young women for sexual exploitation are widespread. It is the reason why the anonymous individual across continents has a negative view of Islam. Allegations of Islamophobia seek to censor this private estimation with threats of sanctions. Besides, the constant accusations of Islamophobia, which recognition of Hinduphobia will avowedly legitimate, are ultimately directed against India, not Hindus in general everywhere. US Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar’s attempt to create a legal obligation on the US State Department to monitor Islamophobia globally was mainly directed against India. It was intended as an aspect of US state policy of leverage against India for entirely unrelated other US policy goals, like forcing India to support the use of Ukraine to achieve regime change in Russia. Of course there is a phenomenon known as statistical discrimination, which means over generalization from an unrepresentative sample and negative feelings about Islam do stem to a degree from it. However, this statistical discrimination would no longer be an explanatory factor for distaste of Islam if the overwhelming majority of attempted terrorist attacks had succeeded and not been interdicted by vast expenditure on intelligence gathering and preemption. It is also relevant to note that Muslims in general have not been vociferous in denouncing terror acts committed by co-religionists though protest over Kashmir and Palestine can instantly mobilise thousands. There have been no marches to denounce the horror of the sexual enslavement of Yezidi girls and women by their devout co-religionists, who according Hugh Kennedy, a major Islamic scholar, have been meticulous in observing Islamic religious injunctions in all their actions. There is no comparable negativity in the daily lived experience of Hindus, certainly in the UK and one very much doubts it is different in the US. Countless millions in the US practice Yoga, two-thirds believe in reincarnation and, contrary to fundamental Christian dogma, most accept religious pluralism. Accusing such ordinary white non-Hindus of Hinduphobia will be both unjust and highly provocative and might even incite the very alleged distaste for Hindus that it is intended to curb. It is also worth probing whether supposed Hinduphobia is constituted by repugnance of Hinduism the religion or antipathy towards individual Hindus as well because it converges somewhat in the case of Islamophobia. In my very long experience of the UK, I have encountered racial aversion, even in the August academic institution where I spent my entire professional life, but I cannot recall prejudice motivated by my supposed religious identity. I am sure many harboured skepticism about Hinduism and their heads were filled with the idea that Indian Hindus compulsively engaged in casteism, etc., but that perception did not affect my daily interaction with white British colleagues. If there is any phobia about Hinduism it is Islamic in origin because Muslims are socialised from a very early age to abhor polytheism and polytheists. All the evidence points to a Muslim phobia of Hinduism that is as deep as it is subterranean. Such Muslim Hinduphobia will not be amenable to official pronouncements that Hinduphobia exists and accusing everyone else of it. The curbing of Muslim Hinduphobia is beyond the capability any government in the world to implement. It would require revision of the sacred texts of Islam if not their outright banning and the imposition of penalties on mosques and madrassas that daily spew venom against polytheists, as the principal enemies of Allah and his divine messenger. The only other group that has always suffered such phobic hatred is Jews because it was deeply embedded in Christian cultures, of long historical provenance and given flesh in repeated mass murder. The practical expression of European Christian anti-Semitism, its historic Jewish problem, was effectively ended by physically liquidating the Jewish population in their midst altogether. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism has still not disappeared despite Jews now having become a minuscule minority in Europe. Hindus really do not encounter the same predicament abroad. The insistence that Hinduphobia is a reality, against all the evidence, suggests an undue reputational investment of some in the idea that it is a societal phenomenon and ordinary people are culpable. It will have the extremely unfortunate and completely unwelcome consequence of diverting attention from the real purveyors of anti-Hindu hate propaganda. It is the Western political establishment, embodied in state institutions and the church, which have for centuries been virtually the exclusive source of anti-Hindu propaganda. Christianity and its institutions became political instruments of the state very early in their history though it also has its own sordid evangelical purpose of erasing Hinduism, as it has violently done everywhere. Turning India Christian will also achieve its political enslavement to Europeans in general and Anglo Americans in particular. Christianity, though evidently not all Indian Christians, are allies of Western imperialism. Every Christian organisation allied with Jinnah’s Muslim League and rebuffed Jawaharlal Nehru’s overtures. They all supported India’s carve up, as instructed by British politicians, with a mere three Christian votes ensuring the partition of the Punjab. As revealed by WikiLeaks, Christian organisations acted on cue, upon instructions by the US Consulate in Mumbai, to oppose Kudankulum. Such Christian organisations also routinely invent lies about attacks on churches and sometimes instigate it themselves. As for universities and the media, these are, have always been and will remain shameless creatures of the state in all Western countries. That is also true of a majority of their counterparts in India itself except their loyalty is also to the State in Western countries rather than their own. Universities in the US and the West more generally have always been hand in glove with the State, conducting research on weapons development and aiding intelligence gathering abroad under the guise of academic research visits. Their social science and humanities departments are mostly supine co-conspirators with the State and an overwhelming majority of Indian-origin academics in university departments of the West, are eager collaborators as well. Lucre apparently has no religion and momentary official recognition seems to be irresistible for individuals with ancient colonial heritages. The print and visual media also do the bidding of the State automatically and the pretense of independence is increasingly forsaken with the phenomenon of embedded journalism during actual military operations, as occurred during the destruction of Iraq. The US propagandists of the national media shamelessly supported US aggression against Vietnam and are now dutifully repeating US government lies on the war in the Ukraine. In this context, Hindu supporters of the campaign for officially recognition for Hinduphobia are displaying cupidity though some, likely in the UK, act as agents of the State. They might be deliberately trying to obscure the source of anti-Hindu propaganda and absolve the Western State and its agencies of blame, which would be extremely politically convenient. The Western State has always spewed anti-Hindu hate, mostly anti-Brahmin to be exact and its universities are obsessively focused on the issue of caste as the racism that totally defines Hinduism. The purpose is to justify religious conversion to supposedly save the majority of deluded Hindus brainwashed and oppressed by so-the called Hindu upper castes, Brahmins in the main. The rationale is obvious and crystal clear, which is because Brahmins have been chief inciters of rebellion against foreign rule though countless others have also been active in struggles to remain free. Once empire was formally ended, the attempt to resume control of India indirectly through informal empire continued unabated and anti-Hindu hate is the principal ideological platform that is deployed to justify it. The supposed Hindu upper castes, who are held to control India, are viewed as more resistant to Western blandishments on everything petty and serious, from removing duties on the import of motor vehicles and now smart phones to reluctance to join Western imperialist ventures everywhere, from Russia to Afghanistan to Iraq. This is the reason for the anti-Hindu hate propaganda emanating from the Western State and its myriad creatures of the media and universities. Hindu activists are condescendingly deluded to believe they can resolve this huge historic problem by persuading congenitally anti-Indian Western politicians to rescue them by legislating on Hinduphobia and taking meaningful action. Anti-Hindu propaganda really only pertains to India and activists abroad should not imagine they are more than collateral damage and that too is being exaggerated. The anti-Hindu hysteria of the Western media is invariably aimed at India, rather than Hindus living abroad. It has fused opportunistically with libeling Narendra Modi in recent years because he has been recreating India as a united people while advancing its economic transformation. There is, in fact, very little venom aimed specifically against Hindus and their religious practices abroad, with the exception of the nefarious campaigns on caste and that too has India in mind as the real objective. Unfortunately, the politics of the entire libelous caste campaign in the UK and the US have effectively been hijacked by some suspect Hindu activists. It is abundantly clear that some of them have been working covertly on behalf of the authorities to undermine serious efforts to end all foreign intervention in the issue of caste. Specifically, opponents of all foreign judicial intervention on caste issues had sought to not only end the threat of legislation on the issue, but also remove it from the statute altogether, so that accumulating case law instances would not be used to justify proceeding eventually with the suspended legislation on caste. In any case, accusations of casteism are indeed, ultimately, directed against India, not Hindus abroad. The fabrication of claims of caste discrimination by upper caste Hindus abroad against so-called Dalits is completely cynical and demonstrably untruthful. There is no credible empirical evidence whatsoever of such discrimination in the UK though activists have foolishly focused on Shastra verities to argue against it. It is the absence of any factual evidence of discrimination on the grounds of caste that would have sufficed to destroy motivated contentions of caste discrimination. The real purpose of the attempt to legislate against alleged caste discrimination in the UK and the US, by fabricating evidence, which has just been repudiated in the US Cisco case, is to put pressure on India. The goal is to first legislate on caste domestically, followed by ensuring its adoption in fellow Christian polities and then use equality provisions in the charters of international organisations to demand reservations for non-Hindu religious minorities in India. A corresponding nefarious legal assault was tabled in the Indian Lok Sabha by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, constructed in conjunction with an Oxford Law don, to vastly expand the reach of judicial purview in India in order to curtail most traditional societal notions of equity and dispute resolution. Evangelists have long considered the ineligibility for reservation quotas for non-Hindu minorities the major barrier to religious conversion en masse and wish to have it amended. In both California and the UK there is an attempt justify the extension of reservation quotas to non-Hindu minorities by arguing caste in India is so overpowering that it transcends the bounds of Hindu society. Of course, reservation quotas for non-Hindu minorities have already been conceded in practice in most parts of India, through subterfuge and the complicity of India’s political establishment, contrary to Indian Constitutional provisions. As I have insisted earlier, the remedy to anti-India and any global anti-Hindu hate propaganda lies within India. India’s authorities need to seize the country’s own narrative back from foreign academies and think-tanks. They should also automatically mete out apposite disdain and boycotts against hostile foreigners, as the Chinese unhesitatingly do. But that seems like an unlikely prospect as far as India is concerned. The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed are personal Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.