Why no eyes on Hindus of Bangladesh?

Why isn’t the plight of Hindus important enough for Hollywood and Bollywood celebrities to show solidarity and support for? The way they do for Rafah, Gaza? Is the life of the Hindu in Bangladesh any less substantial than the lives of Muslims in Gaza? The answer, in no small measure, lies in the “aesthetics of victimhood”. It comprises a conceptual framework that contextualises why victims have a pecking order worldwide and why the Hindus rank very poorly on the list.

It is imperative, therefore, to identify the markers of a victim worth supporting and standing up for and the social dynamics that buttress it—the semiotics of victimhood celebrated in liberal public spaces. What actually narrativises and defines victimhood emerges as an influential image that has pervaded public discourse—its aesthetics, history, and politics. The battle around the identification of “who is a victim” and, therefore, as a corollary, who is not remains pervasive across the liberal democratic sphere.

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In truth, it is all about positioning. Historically, imagining and positioning oneself as a victim is rooted in debates around colonialism, global migration, patriarchy, economic disparity, and precarity. As such, the Jewish, African, Armenian, and Irish diasporas are viewed as the original “victim” diasporas wherein their displacement and outmigration owed themselves to persecution, violence, and genocide. The working class under capitalism and women under patriarchy have made claims to injury as a result of economic and political structures that subordinate and disenfranchise social groups.

So, where do the Hindus stand in this schemata?

The Hindu diaspora across the world is primarily perceived as a largely upwardly mobile, economically and financially well-to-do, and assimilative, model minority diasporic group. Close to 7.6 million Hindus born in India live outside the country in various diasporic pockets. Add to this the foreign-born Hindus, and you arrive at a pretty significant figure. The United States has the most Hindu immigrants outside of South Asia, with an estimated 1.3 million first-generation Hindus. Other countries that receive Hindu migrants include the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Most Hindu immigrants in the US are gentrified middle-to-upper-middle-class folks, comprising business holders and white-collar workers, with the IT, banking, and health sectors being major concentrations.

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American Hindus have the highest rates of educational attainment and the highest household income among all religious communities and the lowest divorce rates. The incoming Trump administration will have the highest number of Hindus on it, with Tulsi Gabbard (proposed Director of National Intelligence), Sriram Kishnan (Senior White House Advisor on Artificial Intelligence), Kash Patel (proposed Director of the FBI), Vivek Ramaswamy (proposed head of the Department of Government Efficiency), and Jay Bhattacharya (proposed director of the NIH) being the most prominent names. While Usha Chilukuri Vance, wife of Vice President-elect JD Vance, is a practicing Hindu with roots in Andhra Pradesh, some top-of-the-line global conglomerates are led by Hindus, America-born or otherwise.

While the levels and phases of Hindu gentrification remain uneven across continents, the general trend assumes an upward trajectory, both in terms of economic status and social location. For instance, the Sarnami Hindustanis in the Netherlands, made up mainly of Hindus, remain one of the most successful minority diasporic communities in the country, with members occupying and having occupied significant positions on the political and public landscape. And mind you, the community emerged from the indentured labour migration of their ancestors on slave ships to plantation colonies in the Caribbean.

The global perception of Hindus in India (and Nepal) has ranged from simple folks who delight in their penury to India being the spiritual destination of on-the-edge or over-the-line Hollywood and tech celebrities. None of this, however, has done any good for Hindu victims of persecution and genocide across the world, the most recent and unfolding instance being the plight of the minorities in Bangladesh. The left-liberal academic discourse is as much responsible, and not in any small degree or form, for playing a debilitating role in building the global chimaera of dominance against the Hindus by foisting one element of Hindu social organisation as a hallmark of their culpability—caste. The caste narrative has gained significant ground, positing upper caste Hindus as a community of privilege and therefore automatic candidates for reverse persecution. And those with privilege and a socially dominant position cannot be victims, right?

Of course, no consideration is lent to the fact that on an overwhelming number of occasions, the perpetrators of genocidal violence do not perceive Hindus in terms of caste but routinely refer to the community as “kaafirs” or infidels. Not a word more, not a word less. Look at Bangladesh as an example. Would the post-adolescent jihadi dolts and Jamaat lunatics spewing venom against the Hindus (and India) in video after video replete on social media ever refer to Dalit Hindus or upper-caste Hindus? Needless to say, Chinmaya Krishna Prabhu was not arrested and is being tortured in custody because he is a Brahmin monk but just because he is a Hindu religious leader who dared to speak up. The lungi-clad hordes carrying swords roaming the streets of Dhaka looking for Hindus to butcher will certainly not differentiate between a caste Hindu and a Dalit!

The disappointing lack of response from the global community of professional protestors and bleeding-heart advocates of human rights for the Hindus in Bangladesh, therefore, is part of a grand design of acceptability—even celebration—of certain kinds of victimhood, whereas the rest are relegated to the margins or even wantonly ignored. While the kaffiyeh-wearing promoters of Free Palestine on American university campuses have no time to spare for the ongoing bloodshed in Bangladesh, senatorial and congressional committees routinely don’t deem it fashionable enough to even pay lip service to violence against Hindus. While Bollywood celebrities of all hues—notwithstanding their levels of general, social, or global awareness or the lack of it—were supremely concerned about the massacre in Rafah, directing all eyes on the refugee settlement, no one seems to give a rat’s ear for the suffering Hindus in Bangladesh. The answer may lie in the aesthetics of victimhood. It is simply not fashionable enough to champion the cause of the Hindus.

Roshni Sengupta is a professor of politics and media at IILM University Gurugram. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.