Check your facts you FANATIC…

If you notice, Christians are active in the tribal belt (Gujarat, Maharashtra, MP, Jharkand, Chattisgarh and Orissa) and the members of various tribes can get really violent. The people who are “disingenuous” here are those who present the warfare between Christians and the members of the tribes as persecution of Christians by Hindus.

There is sufficient evidence to prove that those who do this do it on purpose. That is what is the problem. For example, USCIRF members know the identity of those who killed Swami Laxmanananda and also the nature of Christian Maoists and their violent methods, yet they went the extra mile to suppress these facts. It was the same in case of Gujarat riots. USCIRF had information that hundreds of Hindus too had been killed in the riots, yet they went the extra mile to deliberately inflate the number of Muslims killed to 2000 and scrub out the fact that Hindus had been killed. This decision was a conscious decision taken after a meeting that lasted several hours.

Well, I won’t, and hopefully haven’t, commented on the group without sourcing what I was saying, but based on the blogpost of Shukla and his comments here, I wouldn’t be surprised. It also doesn’t help that their founder and President, Mihir Meghani, was a member of the VHP-A governing council (google it). A lot like Sonal Shah (google it). Whose sister is the HAF’s development director (google it).

Start to see some connections?

I actually think a deeply objectional part of their work is defining who is a Hindu and who is not – and specifically that their version of Hinduism is the ‘correct’ one. That Hindu American Foundation was deeply involved in the California textbook rewrite effort. It’s bad enough to have to deal with the bullshit that non Hindus will give you about Hinduism, but when the response that comes from alleged spokespeople for you flies in the face of academic scholarship and lived realities, that’s embittering.

But I guess I’m not a Hindu according to their ally’s definition of Hinduism, since I don’t care what the Vedas say and they’re “the source of Hinduism.” Personally, I prefer this broader reading of what Hinduism can or should mean.

Fair enough. However, I think it’s fair to criticise the ideas of people who don’t share our beliefs and that at particular moments, I can be subject to the tendency to criticise the person rather than the behavior or action or to attribute values or beliefs to people who do not share them. However, that’s the process of learning – I make mistakes, and if I have been unfair, I feel bad. I try to apologise.

Actually this is the basic error that I think bothered me about your post. The assumption that any social or political advocacy, activism, or involvement that is Hindu centric or Hindu motivated is automatically Hindutva They might find common cause with the Hindutva movement on a variety of subjects, but if the worldview is fundamentally different it doesn’t make sense to lump them all together on a list of “enemies.” I understand it’s fashionable to sling the label around since it helps load the language in one’s favor, but exploiting biases isn’t going to persuade anyone except the already biased.

Tell me what standards you use to judge whether or not to use a ‘Hindu’ identity in supporting a mobilisation. For me it is when the issue itself is about people being attacked for being or perceived to being Hindu, when there are broader issues of power at issue, and when there are not other identities or groupings that I would rather ally myself with (including in conjunction with Hinduism). For example, the dotbusters comes to mind – so does the Simpsons depiction of Hinduism.

But the central issue for me is that it is about social justice, or about togetherness, or about political activism that actively questions and combats issues related to power. That makes it very hard for me to imagine a circumstance in which I would be actively allying myself with someone who ‘finds common cause with the Hindutva movement on a variety of subjects’ because we probably wouldn’t share the same outlook and moreover would be attentive to issues of power (which are central to me) at different levels. Sometimes, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it might not be a duck, but it’s close enough to avoid because it really really likes ducks. engaging with or talking to very much because it really really likes ducks and thinks they have a lot to contribute

All that said, again, yes, when I make overly broad statements or am unfair, that’s not right. However, it wouldn’t be right to not call attention to specific failings of language or action (whether in accuracy, strategy, or, in some cases, moral). This can be done in a variety of ways, but it has to be done, because regardless of what anyone says, there IS an active and virulent rightwing Hindu fundamentalist social movement that is centered in India but operates in the diaspora as well.

What makes you think I won’t feel the same criticisms in those cases There are two concepts that I think are relevant – ‘strategic essentialism’ which is basically putting yourself and organising a group identity when it makes sense in terms of your overall politics in terms of power; and democracy – which is an ideal, but there are considerations of ethos, of institutional structure, what mechanisms are used to generate the appearance and/or substance of consent, to what extent divergences of opinion or differences are taken into account, etc. That’s why I am more inclined to favor membership based organisations than organisation that depend on funding sources, for instance.

But I digress.

Actually this is the basic error that I think bothered me about your post. The assumption that any social or political advocacy, activism, or involvement that is Hindu centric or Hindu motivated is automatically Hindutva.

They might find common cause with the Hindutva movement on a variety of subjects, but if the worldview is fundamentally different it doesn’t make sense to lump them all together on a list of “enemies.” I understand it’s fashionable to sling the label around since it helps load the language in one’s favor, but exploiting biases isn’t going to persuade anyone except the already biased.

If it looks like a duck, but doesn’t walk or quack like one, then it’s probably a platypus. But I have found that the reaction has frequently been to assert that platypuses are secretly “soft ducks,” or “duck sympathizers,” or any other formulation that lets us otherize those who don’t share our political beliefs.

Dr. A, I see your point, but which groups out there even the ones who “advocate for human beings” don’t end up in some shape or form speaking on behalf of a group. Think, the Congressional Black Caucus doesn’t speak for all African Americans or AIPAC represent all American Jews-but they put forth their arguments as if they do.

Quite frankly, the “South Asian” progressive groups do it as well-I think its pretty clear that they usually don’t speak for a large section of the South Asian Americans but they act as if they do, and vice versa with whatever Hindu group might enter the fray.

In an ideal world, this wouldn’t happen, but its how things are. And as such, HAF has stepped in to fill in the void by bringing attention to Bangladesh, Kashmir etc.because no one else will, or at the very least, presenting an opposite viewpoint which at times has very legitimate perspectives. In fact, I think that it demonstrates the failure of South Asian groups that present themselves as being against communalism to actually try and represent all south asians that people felt the need to start something like HAF.

Lastly, I think its a serious stretch to say that the HAF is a “hindutva” group-last I checked they weren’t advocated the Hindu identity to be placed onto Indian religious minorities or even saying it should be india’s dominant culture for everyone, which is what Hindutva is.

It’s a fair point to make which revolves around how people understand things like communalism (e.g. if you have an overcompensation towards one side, do you then overcompensate on the other side?). Personally, I think the best way to do it is to point out the failings in the entire way of speaking and thinking that makes up communalism (which, to draw an anology, many Palestinian rights supporters do by making sure people understand the distinctions between zionism, the israeli state, israeli society, and jewish people). So you can make an argument that he provides a socially valuable service through his description from a Hindu communal vantage point.

However, the problem with this argument is that the audience he is addresses is in the Washington Post and in the United States and on the Internet. The space is ALREADY biased against Muslims and does not need any more of that, ALREADY inclined to take both sides of the issue on Gujarat because they don’t know what the dynamics actually are. As I pointed out above, it IS useful that he is pointing out the connections between evangelical Christianity proselytization, but he doesn’t take it a step further and view it as a form of soft imperialism – in fact, his main complaint seems to be that India and the U.S. should unite against Pakistan, and then to lay out how he thinks that might happen.

So perhaps you are right that this is the best way to generate a factually accurate profile of a nation riven by mutually antognistic communal tensions. It is true, I believe, that I would not have had my attention drawn to the issues facing religious minorities and other disempowered groups in Bangladesh if Hindutva commenters here and elsewhere had not raised them frequently and complained about the lack of attention they receive. However, I STILL beleive that it is worthwhile to make a much strnoger attempt at accurately describing the world as it is, rather than how we would like it to be, much less how we think it is best described in order to manipulate public opinion to meet our political agenda, than what Shukla does. It is simple good faith and openness and a different brand of politics that does not depend on polarisation and fear but instead on some amount of epistemological rigidity, but much less so and coming from stronger traditions of establishing ‘true’ statements about the world.

You can notice it in the way that I respond to you here rather than how I responded to Shukla’s blogpost – I am expressing more willingness in this comment to accept that you are speaking in good faith than I could with Shukla’s blogpost. You are presenting an explanation I can argue with despite that it is one that I disagree with pretty strongly, of the value of having Hindu communal lenses on India/the US/the world, and you are speaking only for yourself, not for all “Hindu Americans”.

You’re conflating communalism with communal violence and suppression of religious freedom. Nice semantic wordgame, but that’s like saying you identifying yourself with the GLBT community must mean you are, likewise, perpetuating “communalism.”

The basic error you’re making is in assuming that I think that Hindutva is a group, rather than a political movement/set of ideas/part of a discourse/organising principle for seeing the world. This is different from a person who identifies as Hindu or as part of a Hindu community, in some fashion or another. So the equivalent statement would be that if you are are identifying with GLBT separatism, you are promoting ‘communalism.’

Further, the correct version of the argument that you are attributing to me (whether group identification is intrinsically problematic) has been made and written about extensively and has been made quite forcefully. I think it’s not very useful and some version of strategically identifying in a group identity depending on power dynamics are (in India, ‘Hindus’ rank higher in the communal discourse), what the context is (whether you are talking about Bihar, California, New Jersey, London, women, men, heternormative, LGBT, etc.), and your overall worldview, is more useful. This also has its issues and taken in the wrong context can lead to things like Hindutva, but it seems to make more sense if your basic concern is with issues of power and disempowerment and you’re more inclined to humanism than Hindu unity.