NIVEDITA MENON: If Hindutva is dismantled, whom will it harm?
An upcoming conference in the USA, “Dismantling Global Hindutva”, organized by Indians in the USA, most of whom are legally “Hindus”, and supported by over 40 US universities, has provoked the ire of the Hindu Rashtravaadis there as well as in India. Conflating Hindutva with Hinduism is the first step. Based on this, the Hindu American Foundation claims this conference is “Hindu phobic”, that it will put the well-being of Hindu students and faculty at risk, and that “they may feel targeted or threatened, or face hostility or harassment” as a result of “the kinds of generalisations, misunderstandings, and ‘otherising’” the event will perpetuate.
Ho hum. Just another
day in Hindu Rashtra-that-is-India then, for most of us “Hindus” who oppose the
politics of Hindutva that promotes misunderstandings and otherises us, all the
way to mob and media violence, lynchings and jail. It is from Hindutva that “Hindus”
are most at risk in India today, not from any non-Hindu “Other”.
(Why these repeated
quotation marks around “Hindu”? We will come to that).
An
article in Firstpost uses words like “genocidal” and “xenophobic” to
describe what this conference is going to be. The conference brochure shows
“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) figures being uprooted, roots and all, with
the claw end of a hammer”, and this is “genocidal” according to the author.
Showing the German Nazi Party being uprooted would amount to genocide too, in
this understanding, perhaps? Since Hindutvavaadis are actively seeking
co-victimhood with victims of anti-Semitism, as
another article explicitly states, they might want to reconsider this
second conflation, of the neo-fascist RSS with “Hindu”. This second article
says the conference will “dehumanize Hindus everywhere” and asks indignantly if
a conference titled “Dismantling Global Jewry” would be acceptable.
But “Jewry” refers to
the Jewish people. Hindutva is a political ideology espoused by some
Hindus. Large numbers of Hindus oppose Hindutva, and some of those Hindus
are organizing the conference! This analogy between Jewry and Hindutva is
dishonest and misleading….
https://kafila.online/2021/08/24/if-hindutva-is-dismantled-whom-will-it-harm/
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