Comment by Riaz Haq on November 9, 2022 at 2:43pm

Dr. Audrey Truschke
@AudreyTruschke
Invisibilizing Hindu terrorism through the “War on Terror” --

The latest in a series of essays on Hindutva and the Shared Scripts of the Global Right

https://twitter.com/AudreyTruschke/status/1590436023489949697?s=20&...

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https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/11/09/invisibilizing-hindu-terrorism-thro...

At a recent rally celebrating India’s Independence Day on August 15 in New Jersey, a bulldozer bearing images of the far-right Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath and the Indian Prime Minister Modi roamed the streets with Hindu nationalist slogans chanted in the background. Under Adityanath, who is currently the chief minister of India’s most populous state and a political stronghold in the country, Uttar Pradesh, instances of police brutality (popularly known as “encounter killings”) against Muslims and Dalits (so-called untouchables) have raised alarm among several transnational human rights organizations. Speaking about Muslim women protesting against discriminatory legislation in 2020, Adityanath asked his followers to “feed them bullets, not biryani” (traditional North Indian Muslim cuisine). Today many Hindu nationalists view Adityanath as an able politician who might eventually replace Indian Prime Minister Modi to head the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Uttar Pradesh nowadays, the bulldozer has become a potent instrument for demolishing Muslim homes when they protest against violence, humiliation, and discrimination. For Hindu nationalists, it has clearly become a celebratory symbol within and outside India.

While 9/11 has etched the figure of the Muslim terrorist in the Western imagination, the phenomenon of Hindu terrorism has received little scrutiny. In a strategic move to politically cement their power at the global stage, Hindu nationalist actors in both India and the Western diaspora have not only appropriated Islamophobic discourses of the “War on Terror” but actively thrived through it to wantonly mark disposable Muslim bodies for death, rape, violence, and statelessness through their support for an Indian state that enacts these brutalities as an active component of its Hindu nationalist/Hindutva ideology. Older histories have proved to be fertile grounds for the ongoing persecution of Muslims in India, following the colonial legacy of British institutional efforts to cause a schism between Hindus and Muslims, racializing Muslims as more masculine and violent than subservient and effeminate Hindus, and distorted school history textbooks that presented Muslims as medieval foreign invaders to the country. Today Muslims are problematically and singularly blamed for the Partition of India in 1947.

This anti-Muslim animus in postcolonial India gained further momentum under the country’s unique trajectory of Brahmin supremacist racializing, gendering, and demonizing of Muslims and Dalits through casteist lenses of desirability and belonging, propagated through popular mediums such as Bollywood movies, demographic myths, and, as some scholars have argued, the structures of liberal representative democracy itself. Importantly, Hindu privilege as a majority in India and Hindus as model minorities in the West, rather than being a monopoly of the Hindu right, is baked into Western liberalism. This is not to deny the century-old exceptionally violent project of Hindutva heralded by Savarkar and Moonje since the 1920s or the links between Nazism and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), or the fact that several Hindu nationalists were troublingly also members of the Congress Party prior to the Partition of 1947. Nor is it to downplay the racism that Hindus face in the West. However, scholars must reconsider how majority-minority dialectics are structurally implicit in representative liberal democracies and how these representations draw on national and international discourses.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 9, 2022 at 2:44pm

Invisibilizing Hindu terrorism through the “War on Terror”



https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/11/09/invisibilizing-hindu-terrorism-thro...

India’s international standing insulates it from repercussions for discriminatory legislation and practices. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will prevent Muslim refugees like Ahmadis, Afghans, Rohingyas, and internally displaced Kashmiris from getting citizenship and equitable access to asylum in India as they flee persecution and conflict. This act will also expel and expunge India’s very own population of overwhelmingly poor and illiterate Muslims, who would be made to produce documents to prove their ancestry on the lands they have lived for centuries. Perhaps it should not come as a shock that India has violated the Geneva Convention and sent Rohingya refugees facing persecution back to Burma. Yet the United States continues to tout India’s reputation as the world’s largest democracy in diplomatic endeavors and for several reasons.

India’s geopolitical location and economy also make it a natural American ally. For the West, India is not a threatening or communist power like its neighboring country China. It is not deemed as a terrorist haven like Pakistan in popular representations. It is not a poor Muslim-majority country like Bangladesh which currently faces trade deficits due to neoliberal Western financial institutions. It is not a small crisis-ridden country like Sri Lanka or landlocked Nepal. Rather, India provides a large consumer market and cheap land for multinational corporations. Subsequently, savarna Hindus who advance the project of Hindutva have greatly benefited from the current international relations scenario, especially since 9/11, both as a community and as individuals.

Despite many cases of Hindu terrorism in India, the figure of the Muslim as a terrorist in Indian society lurks in no small part due to post 9/11 Western discourse of the “War on Terror.” That the Malegaon bombasts, Ajmer Dargah attack, and Mecca Masjid blast were carried out by Hindu terrorists is somehow comfortably forgotten in mainstream narratives. In each of the instances mentioned above, many Muslims were politically targeted and killed, yet young Muslim men were arrested and tortured in prisons for these poorly investigated crimes, often without evidence, and sometimes for decades. Much like white bodies that allegedly do not commit terrorism in mainstream media narratives, even when white supremacists shoot down Black people, so do Hindu extremist outfits allegedly not commit politically motivated acts of terror. For example, in 2007, the Samjhauta Express, a train running between New Delhi and Lahore, was attacked and bombed by Hindu terrorists. However, in 2019, all nineteen culprits, including Swami Aseemanand who had openly declared that he had masterminded the attack, were acquitted. There can be no Hindu terrorism if there is no court of law to recognize that Muslims can be victims of terrorism from non-Muslim perpetrators. Recently, some have claimed that other instances of bombings in India have been carried out by far-right Hindutva cells, with the intent to set up more “terror training camps.” Yet any reference to the term “saffron terror” to indicate growing Hindu terrorism in India can be used a disciplinary ground by the Election Commission of India for allegedly endorsing a “political conspiracy.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 9, 2022 at 2:44pm

Invisibilizing Hindu terrorism through the “War on Terror”



https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/11/09/invisibilizing-hindu-terrorism-thro...


Even in some liberal Indian media forums, articles have been published commending Muslims for using a secular discourse to assert their rights as citizens during the anti-CAA protests. The assumption here remains that the Muslim body is always on the brink of terrorism, and not choosing that route makes their nonviolent resistance commendable. It also implicitly seeks to regulate expressions that can be construed as forms of Muslimness, preventing the community from finding solace in their religious beliefs against very real oppression. In doing so, such liberal discourses like Hindu Nationalism do not permit Muslims to articulate a resistance that is a little more nuanced than simply violent and nonviolent. Muslims cutting off the roads to keep the army at bay, in order to protect themselves from being thrown into abysmal detention centers, are likened troublingly to Islamist terrorists. Moreover, many activists and academics are calling upon us to rethink the very term “terrorism,” seeing how certain nation-states, like the notorious Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, use the term to target dissenters and activists. But this should be distinguished from State monopoly on violence (and mechanisms to surveil and punish) against those who challenge it. The insidious violence by the genocidal Hindutva Indian State and its vigilantes is not interpreted as terrorism, just as the terrorism committed by the USA on innocent civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan in South Asia.

Significantly, what gets overlooked in these contested terms and representational politics of Muslim terrorism in India is the issue of foundationally discriminatory institutions and laws that have become more emboldened under the current regime of Hindu Nationalists to harm marginalized communities. Meanwhile, Modi continues to use the discourse of terrorism to represent India in a favorable light internationally and to win elections repeatedly. Just before the 2019 Indian elections, Modi raised the familiar South Asian trope of the enemy within—the figure of the Muslim terrorist—following the controversial Pulwama case in Kashmir that witnessed the deaths of forty Indian army men. To date, international investigations of the case dispute any conclusive evidence over who was responsible for the incident. Tellingly, similar discourses of terrorism have been used against Sikhs, another religious minority in India, very recently when they protested and eventually succeeded against the passing of polemical agricultural laws that Hindu nationalists had initially sought to pass. In other words, all minorities in India except for the figure of the upper caste Hindu can be cast with aspersions over charges of terrorism.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 9, 2022 at 2:45pm

Invisibilizing Hindu terrorism through the “War on Terror”



https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/11/09/invisibilizing-hindu-terrorism-thro...


Notably, consorted efforts to resist the label of terrorism among Hindu nationalists exceed India’s borders. Privileged diaspora Hindu nationalists in North America have happily catered to the White gaze as model minority immigrants who are successful doctors and engineers, or taxi drivers with PhDs. All the while, the largest funding for Hindu extremist projects has come from diaspora Indians in the West since the 1980s. Within the United States, Hindu Nationalists have also funded research scholarships and advocated for caste-based oppression to be removed from California school history textbooks. Significantly, they have sought to fund political campaigns of young right-wing cadres as representatives of the Indian community to the White House across the Democratic-Republican political aisle. Even in popular media representations, Hindus are represented as affable “people of color”/people without a caste, unlike images of the undesirable or dangerous Muslims that pervade most of Hollywood. India has successfully branded itself as “Incredible India,” a land ripe for Western tourism, with yoga serving as an important force for Modi’s ‘soft power’ diplomacy. Meanwhile Kashmir, the world’s most militarized region finds even less solidarity than Palestine when it comes to the draconian occupation and subjugation of its peoples and land. Secular and liberal Hindus are often unwittingly complicit in downplaying if not invisibilizing Hindu terrorism when they use questionable vocabularies or give endless warnings about India at the “brink” of “descending into fascism,” while Muslims in the country are already suffering without the need to portray the public calls for genocide and rape against them as “impending” in academia. For Indian Muslims and Kashmiris, the horror and suffering has already begun or started even before the Partition of 1947, yet their appeals as imperfect victims in the era of global Islamophobia falls short in most analyses of Hindutva State terrorism.

It needs to be vigorously asserted lest we forget: Modi came to power as a Prime Minister in 2014 in India after he was accused of being complicit in the Gujarat Massacre of 2002 that killed over a thousand Muslims by the government’s own conservative estimates. In recent times, Hindu leaders have been elected to the Indian Parliament after they have committed known acts of terrorism, including planting bombs in mosques that killed people. As India increasingly gets synonymized as Hindu, and academic-activist works interrogate Hindutva, we must investigate the pre- and post-9/11 impact of the “War on Terror” in invisibilizing Hindu terrorism and the consequences that has had within and outside India. In fact, an honest examination would require how overlooking the material consequences of naming Hindu terrorism, aka “certain activities,” has facilitated an openly fascist-inspired Hindutva movement to be elected twice to state power with historic majorities and unabashedly organize rallies in America to celebrate it.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 19, 2022 at 10:45am

Ravi Nair
@t_d_h_nair
This BJP spokesperson says that Savarkar wrote a series of mercy petitions to the British Crown because Chhatrapati Shivaji wrote five mercy petitions to Aurangazeb!!!

https://twitter.com/t_d_h_nair/status/1593985786042798080?s=20&...

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 20, 2022 at 8:40pm

India At 75: Hindu Faith Bottled And Home-delivered

https://www.barrons.com/news/india-at-75-hindu-faith-bottled-and-ho...

High in the Himalayas, where the mighty Ganges is still a frigid glacial stream, labourers fill jerry cans with its holy waters to be distributed to Hindus all over India.

Buyers sparingly use the precious liquid to bless important occasions, from births, weddings, and funerals to festivals such as Diwali or the purchase of a new car.

"This is for every faithful Hindu who can't get here personally," said one of the workers in the pilgrimage town of Gangotri, giving his name as Ramesh.

"It feels blessed to be part of a project that reaffirms our Hindu faith and delivers this divine water to all corners of the country," he told AFP.

The scheme is run by the Indian postal service and is one example of a raft of initiatives, from the symbolic to the gargantuan, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi promoting Hinduism in the country 75 years after independence.

The water is considered purest closest to its source so is collected in Gangotri, where the Ganges starts its roughly 2,500-kilometre (1,550-mile) journey across India, and trucked to a bottling plant 100 kilometres downstream.

After being left to settle for three or four days, it is filtered in tanks before workers decant it by hand into 250-millilitre plastic bottles.

Bought over the counter at post offices around India, they cost just 30 rupees ($0.37) each -- customers can also order them online for home delivery at 321 rupees for a pack of four.

Millions of the little containers have been sold since the scheme launched six years ago.

Since winning elections in 2014, Modi has put Hinduism front and centre of his government in the officially secular nation of 1.4 billion.

The core tenet of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its militaristic ideological parent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is that Hinduism is India's original religion.

This worries India's 210 million Muslims and other minorities. Social media is rife with hate speech and attacks on Muslims and Christians have risen, activists say.

Modi's biggest religious construction project is a grand temple being built in the ancient city of Ayodhya.

Hindu zealots destroyed a centuries-old mosque there three decades ago, triggering sectarian violence that killed more than 1,000 people -- most of them Muslims.

The government has also pushed a $1.5-billion highway project in the northern state of Uttarakhand, which will make it easier for Hindu pilgrims to reach Gangotri and three other Himalayan temples.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 20, 2022 at 8:41pm

India At 75: Hindu Faith Bottled And Home-delivered

https://www.barrons.com/news/india-at-75-hindu-faith-bottled-and-ho...


The sites already receive hundreds of thousands of devotees each year, and environmental activists are concerned about building grand highways and tunnels in the ecologically sensitive region.

Modi's government has made clear it will not let up on its vision, however, channelling money into researching the properties of cow urine -- a sacred animal in Hinduism -- and finding "proof" of legends in Hindu scriptures.

Some school textbooks have been rewritten to airbrush the role played by Muslims in Indian history, while Islamic-sounding names of cities have been changed.

These "dramatic initiatives... create an ethos of a majoritarian nation and sublimely reinforce the feeling that we now see ourselves as a de-facto Hindu country," said Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine.

"Modi knows exactly what he's doing," he added.

"If critics now raise concerns about minorities or injustice, they can be labelled as someone who's against such schemes delivering holy Ganges water -- and shut them up."

Recipients of the precious liquid, though, have no such concerns.

New Delhi postman Rupesh Kumar, 23, has made several deliveries of the holy water, including during the current auspicious festive period.

He feels "additional responsibility" whenever he is carrying it to a customer for their ritual needs, he told AFP.

"We also used Ganges water in the family for all special and religious occasions," he said.

"People are often very thankful and polite after I deliver these bottles to their homes."

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 27, 2022 at 10:34am

The Guardian view on Modi’s India: the danger of exporting Hindu chauvinism
Editorial
New Delhi’s foreign policy won’t be insulated from its domestic politics, which demonise India’s 200 million Muslims

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/27/the-guardian-...

hen the US state department recently told a court that the Saudi Arabian crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, should have immunity in a lawsuit over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it portrayed its argument as a legal and not moral position. By way of evidence, it pointed to a rogues’ gallery of foreign leaders previously afforded similar protection. Nestling between Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who, it was claimed, assassinated political rivals, and Congo’s Joseph Kabila, whose security detail was accused of assaulting protesters in Washington, was India’s Narendra Modi.

Dropping Mr Modi into such a list was no accident. It is a reminder that while New Delhi basks in its diplomatic success at recent G20 and Cop27 summits, it might find the international environment less accommodating if Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) continue to stir up hatred to win elections. Washington’s gesture suggests that its strategic partnership with India cannot be completely insulated from domestic political issues. Mr Modi’s failure, as chief minister of Gujarat, to prevent anti-Muslim riots in 2002 that left hundreds dead saw him denied a US visa, until he became Indian prime minister. The message from Foggy Bottom was that the ban had not been withdrawn, but suspended, because Mr Modi ran a country that Washington wanted to do business with.

India is considered a geopolitical counterweight to China and, in many ways, an indispensable actor on the world stage. But Mr Biden’s team appears to see the position as more contingent, and will be less tolerant than the Trump administration of Mr Modi’s attempts to remould Indian democracy so that Hindus become constitutionally pre-eminent, with minorities reduced to second-class citizens. Last week, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom accused New Delhi of a “crackdown on civil society and dissent”, and “religious freedom violations”. The Indian foreign ministry hit back at “biased and inaccurate observations”. Officials would do better to reflect on where their country is going.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 27, 2022 at 10:35am

The Guardian view on Modi’s India: the danger of exporting Hindu chauvinism
Editorial
New Delhi’s foreign policy won’t be insulated from its domestic politics, which demonise India’s 200 million Muslims

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/27/the-guardian-...

While a rising power, India’s ascent depends on building bridges with others. The Middle East is a key energy supplier and regional trade partner that supports 9 million Indian workers. India’s security depends on Arab states sustaining a hostile environment for terrorism. So when BJP functionaries made derogatory remarks about the prophet Muhammad this summer, Gulf states lodged formal protests with New Delhi. Chastened, the Modi government was spurred into action – suspending one party official and expelling another, as well as saying it accords “the highest respect to all religions”.

Bland assurances may not be enough. The intimidation of India’s 200 million Muslims is hiding in plain sight. State elections in Gujarat begin on Thursday, weeks after BJP ministers approved the premature release of 11 men convicted of rape and murder of Muslim women and children during the riots. On the campaign trail last Friday, India’s home minister claimed troublemakers had been “taught a lesson” in 2002. This sounded like a signal to Hindu mobs that they could do as they pleased.

Worryingly, there are signs that the communal clashes seen in India are being copied elsewhere. In Leicester, many south Asian Muslims – like the city’s Hindus – have Indian roots. Yet when violence erupted between these communities this September, escalating into attacks on mosques and temples, the Indian high commission in London condemned the “violence perpetrated against the Indian community in Leicester and vandalisation of premises and symbols of [the] Hindu religion”. Pointedly, there was no condemnation of Hindus’ violence against Muslims. Once careful to proclaim its secularism, India’s government appears content to export its Hindu chauvinism. That should trouble everyone.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 3, 2022 at 11:21am

Vice Chair Abraham Cooper: “The
@StateDept
’s failure to designate #India a CPC is inexplicable given their own reporting of the country’s religious freedom violations. Their documentation shows that India's violations are systematic, ongoing, & egregious."

https://twitter.com/USCIRF/status/1598805296771735560?s=20&t=3c...
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IFFI's Foreign Jurors Back Lapid on 'Kashmir Files', Say Their Criticism Is Artistic, Not Political

https://thewire.in/film/iffi-jury-members-nadav-lapid-kashmir-files

At the closing ceremony of IFFI, with Union ministers in attendance, Lapid had said his thoughts on the “propaganda” film were shared by the jury, but Sudipto Sen – the Indian jury member – later disputed this claim.

Breaking their silence, the three foreign members of the IFFI jury have now said they stand behind what Lapid said.
On December 3, fellow jury member Jinko Gotoh tweeted a statement expressing the support of all the foreign members of the jury for Lapid’s stance on the Kashmir Files.

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