Rising Tide of Anti-Hindu Bigotry

By Avatans Kumar

(The author is an award-winning journalist)

Another day and another Hindu Mandir is vandalized and desecrated in the US. This time, it was the turn of the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Chino Hills, Southern California. The perpetrators spray-painted the walls of the Mandir with graffiti that called for death to the land of the Hindus and death to India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Hindu haters frequently attack Mr. Modi for his perceived pro-Hindu persona.

Hindu organizations and advocacy groups condemned these attacks. Even the Indian government, through its Ministry of External Affairs, put out a statement condemning these violent acts and requested the US government “to take stringent action against those responsible for these acts, and also ensure adequate security to places of worship.”

There has been a spate of anti-Hindu violence in the past few years in the United States and Canada. Some of these acts had direct links to the Khalistani separatists who are sworn to breaking up the Indian state. The violent acts included harassing and verbally abusing Hindus and vandalizing their places of worship. 

In targeted attacks on Indian Americans, perpetrators desecrated Mahatma Gandhi’s statues in DC and California. The consular office in San Francisco was set on fire by miscreants, and Indian-owned businesses were burglarized. While California has seen disproportionate levels of such attacks, other states have also had their fair share.

Anti-Hindu bigotry is not new in America. Vishal Ganeshan, a lawyer and an independent researcher, has studied the history of such bigotry in the US. One of the dominant patterns Ganeshan noticed in the late 19th-century American literature regarding Hindus was the frequency with which Hindus were described as “fanatic.” 

Arvind Sharma, a professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University, has studied the British colonial rule over India from (Edward) Saidian perspective. Sharma writes that the Orientalist project primitivized the Hindus, even if they did not appear primitive in some respects. The need to portray Hindus as primitive, savage, uncivilized, or vicious arose from the urgency of the colonizers to present themselves as civil and enlightened. As a result, we end up getting a “situation in which a people were made more primitive than they were, or presented as more primitive than they were, or perceived as more primitive than they were, either deliberately or out of ignorance.”

Sharma also discusses the “outsider to insider” mode of exchange of ideas in the study of Hinduism. In this mode, non-Hindu Western academics and scholars have become the prominent authority on Hindu texts and traditions. This agency has misrepresented Hinduism in many ways. 

The Marxist-Leftist representation of Hinduism not only misrepresents Hinduism, but its ideology of looking at everything from perspective, conflict, and victimization has weaponized it against Hindu adherents. The South Asia centers of US universities have also added to the misrepresentation.

The current spate of violence must be seen against this background. As the Hindu population in the US breaches its response threshold, it is increasingly refusing to abide by the dogmas and orthodoxies of the secular religion and its ideologues in media, academia, and public offices. 

With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, Hindus worldwide have also found a political voice. This increased awareness creates a dissonance among the established stakeholders, who increasingly feel disempowered and disenfranchised due to the shifting power dynamics. Their incentives are also shrinking.

Despite the Hindu renaissance and resurgence, Hindus in the US have been disproportionately meek in their response. As a model minority, Hindu Americans lack political clout, and it shows. Beyond a few press statements and X posts, no significant step has occurred either from within the community or the government. 

If we want to give the next generation of Hindu Americans a safe space to practice their faith with dignity, things need to change fast.