The trajectory of the recent incidents that have been taking place in quick succession since Rashmi Samant of Oxford University made it to the news, what we see is an escalated attempt to victimise and demonise the Hindus and their identity. Be it Deepawali firecracker ban or the entire Jashn-e-Riwaz episode of FabIndia, the hatred for Hindu symbols, Hindus and everything that is related to Hindu has been both subtle and open.

Right from the organisation of the Global Hate Campaign on ‘Dismantling Hindutva’ to the increasing attacks on non-Muslims especially in Kashmir, and the attacks on Hindus of Bangladesh, vandalising of Durga Puja pandals, including the latest incident of attack against ISKCON Temple in Bangladesh, the blind hatred against Hindus is there on the surface. It is now no longer limited to only the political level, but has also penetrated deep into the cultural and social levels. These are all but the symptoms of a larger malaise prevailing not just in India but elsewhere too.

Selective targeting of Hindus must therefore be treated as a stark manifestation of Hindu hatred. Multiple assaults on the Hindu identity in multiple countries and multiple platforms, including social media, all at the same time, have been always been going on so casually and in such a manner that it now seems to have become too normalised. Time and again, we have been fed this false argument of the difference between Hindutva and Hinduism as it was visible during the ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ Campaign. No wonder, it is very much espoused and propagated by an elite coterie of Indian “Liberal Intellectuals” and the Indian media too.

These examples are enough to prove that Hindumisia is definitely a problem which is existing everywhere and in all spaces, from the political to the cultural and entertainment. Whereas the common word used throughout the world for expressing hatred towards Hindus and their religion is Hinduphobia, a more suitable and apt term for the same is Hindumisia. Phobia implies fear, whereas the term misia with its origins in the Greek language, means open hatred. Hindumisia therefore means ‘hatred for Hindus’. Phobia has connotations that are milder and gentler in tone compared to misia. E.g., xenophobia is the fear of foreigners, aerophobia is the fear of flying, et.al.

It clearly means that unexplained and illogical hatred towards a certain group/community of people must not be categorised as a phobia. Today, the explicit hatred and violence towards Hindus has engulfed almost every aspect of our daily lives. E.g. the web-series Paatal Lok, the different TV advertisements related to the celebrations of our festivals, the appeal of different celebrities to the common public to avoid the burning of crackers on Deepawali or the flying of kites during Makar-Sankranti, etc. they all indicate towards a pre-planned concerted assault to demonise the Hindu identity. It has now been demonised to such an extent that if an atrocity happens on a Hindu community or a Hindu person, it then becomes a non-issue.

E.g. rapes and murders of Hindu women in Islamic countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindu genocide in Kashmir at the hands of Islamists, destruction and loot of Hindu Mandirs, violent murders of our Hindu sadhus and gurus, cultural appropriation of our Devis and Devtas by the missionaries in the name of ‘salvation’, etc. are not because of any phobias. All these have been the result of hatred which is very well organised and too dangerous to be ignored anymore. Such hatred is being inflicted with the ultimate objective of annihilating Hindus completely.

In order to achieve this target, the idea at first is to dehumanise the entire Hindu civilisation and the identity associated with it. After dehumanising it, the aim is to kill and eradicate the Hindu population which eventually becomes normal in due course of time. Since Hindutva here is the demon, so Hindus naturally become the demons which then make them easy targets for eradication. This is the strategy which is quite very much visible in nearly all the social media platforms too, India included. In the recent Kashmir violence, people were being killed by asking for their names and their identity cards. The attack on the Hindus of Bangladesh began after the circulation of a fake news of the desecration of the Quran.

Western academia has moved on from indirect Hinduphobia to open Hindumisia — full-blown Hindu hatred. As long as Hindu hatred was restricted to some academics like Audrey Truschke, who has called Sri Rama a “chauvinist pig” and the Bhagavat Gita a manual for mass slaughter, one could ignore the rants. But now this hatred has taken on a new dimension with over 40 universities supporting a conference whose literature and publicity visual says it all: “Dismantling Global Hindutva”. It is no longer about opposing Hindutva as a political ideology, but about “dismantling” it.

Among the contributing and supporting sponsors of this conference are blue-blooded universities like Northwestern, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Emory, apart from Rutgers, Trushcke’s own university, where she recently faced a blowback from Hindu students upset over her denigration of their religious icons and identity.

Apparently, dismantling Hindutva is fine and non-Hinduphobic, when none of these universities would dare hold similar conferences titled “Dismantling Islamism” or “Dismantling Born Again Christianity & Evangelism”, both of which constitute huge threats to peace in the parts of the world that are not majority Muslim or Christian.

Equally clearly, political Islam, political Christianity and political Buddhism is fine, but not political Hinduism, which is what Hindutva broadly is. It is about unifying Hindus to defend their common interests even while reducing caste-based discrimination and pisiveness. But then you can’t dismantle Hindutva without piding Hindus.

The visual material for the conference (see here), scheduled for 10-12 September, shows its real intent. It shows a row of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) figures being forcibly removed like nails from woodwork, using the reverse side of a hammer. This is not about opposing the RSS’s ideology, but about targeting them just as Jews were targeted by Hitler.

It is interesting that at a Kerala procession of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an Islamist organisation, two inpiduals dressed in RSS uniforms we paraded in chains. ‘Fact-checkers’ quickly got into the act to absolve the PFI of any hateful ideas, and said that these characters were merely role-playing RSS workers and not actual Sanghis (read here, here, here).

This assumes that the attempt to dehumanise an entire organisation as worthy of being chained in not hateful enough. A pliant mainstream media converted the story from being about hateful depiction of a group to one of victimhood, where the PFI was wrongly accused of chaining actual RSS members.

Those ill-disposed to the Sangh will get the message: the Sangh and all its supporters are fair game for intimidatory tactics, and even violence. Consider what would have been the reaction if the reverse was the case: PFI members being shown in chains in an RSS procession.

Despite formally differentiating between Hinduism and Hindutva, an unholy alliance of evangelical groups, woke liberals and Islamists is trying to label all those standing up for Hindu rights as Hindutva activists and Islamophobes.

This is how anti-Semitism begins, by de-humanising people and imagining the worst about them. The end-result is often ethnic cleansing and genocide, as we saw in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and even inside India in Kashmir Valley. All efforts to help discriminated Hindus get labelled as Islamophobia, as we saw with the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests.

The targeting of Hindu organisations began quite soon after Hindu students at Rutgers sought action against Audrey Truschke, but the university administration did nothing of the kind. Instead, it offered some mealy-mouthed words of concern for Hindus without condemning Truschke in any way. Soon after, the Hindu American Foundation was targeted, and the latter has sued its accusers for libel in American courts, including Islamist TV channel Al Jazeera.

The speakers at the September Hindumisic conference include known Hindu haters, RSS-baiters and self-loathing Hindus and Muslims — with no speaker giving any different viewpoint. The speakers include Anand Patwardhan, Ayesha Kidwai, Christophe Jaffrelot, Kavita Krishnan, Mohammad Junaid, Nandini Sundar, Neha Dixit and Meena Kandasamy. Two of the writers are unabashed supporters of the murderous Maoists, who apparently do not deserve to be “dismantled”.

This open warfare and targeting of Hindus under the guise of “dismantling Hindutva” is yet another wake-up call to Hindus. Two things need to happen.

First, Hindus need to realise that Hindumisic forces, and academic dhimmis who whitewash every Islamist crime, are now openly gunning for them. They have no other option but to organise themselves and take the ideological war into the enemy camp.

Second, the Narendra Modi government should realise that this is not just about political opposition to it, but a wholesale assault on Hindus abroad which will soon extend to India. The massive electoral victories of three Hinduphobic forces — in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal — has given global Hindumisics new enthusiasm.

The government should now actively discourage Indians from seeking admissions in universities where Hindus will be targeted by issuing an advisory in this regard. The government must seek specific guarantees from universities about fighting Hindumisia before endorsing them as safe for Hindu students to study there.

If the government does not do even this, it does not deserve to be called Hindu nationalist.

What we need to accept here is that Hindumisia is a multidimensional problem having significant historical, religious and sociological ramifications. They are now revealing themselves in some of the most brutal and violent ways both in India and the West. The antagonism towards Kafirs (non-believers) enshrined in several verses of the so-called ‘Holy Book’ of Islam is plain and distinct. At the educational level, Hindumisia has been practised in India since 1947 largely through the NCERT textbooks, blessed and supported by the successive Education Ministers of post-independent India since the time of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

The scornful attitude of the Christian educational institutions towards symbols and marks of identification related to the Hindu identity is also the by-product of a Hindumisiac mindset. E.g., meting out punishment to girl students for putting mehndi on their hands, expelling boys from the schools for sporting a shikha on their head, etc. Hindumisia has now infiltrated into the Indian bureaucracy as well, and it has become all too evident. It was just a few months back that IMA Chief Dr. Johnrose Austin Jayalal was issued summons by a Delhi Court, accusing him of misusing his office for carrying out proselytisation activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Johnrose later revealed that the pandemic gave him and other proselytisers a chance to preach the Gospel to those who were affected by the virus, even in secular institutions. This includes hospitals and other institutions run by non-Christians and the Government too.

The most important question that now stares at the face of every Hindu at this hour of crisis is how to fight back the blatant Hindumisia around us? Definitely, the first step must be to accept the problem the way it is and then talk about it in the public, defying the absurdity of political correctness. It calls for continuous effort in the way of building a new narrative that would also help to bring to light the Hindumisia inherent in the Constitution of India and the ‘Secular’ credentials of the Indian state on the one hand and the Dharmic civilisation on the other.

References:

indiafacts.org.in - R Jagannathan
myind.net - Ankita Dutta