British colonial rule drew on this fundamental logic of whiteness to seed division and circulate hate, reproducing hate to serve the hegemony of colonial rule.
The whiteness of colonialism in British India drew on and catalyzed Brahminical forms of power and control and Islamic fundamentalism to seed hate. The 1905 partition of Bengal epitomized this infrastructure of hate, imposing the geographic division of Bengal along colonial lines with the goal of quelling the anticolonial resistance.
Both the political formation of Hindutva as ethno-nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism organised toward a monolithic nation state emerged out of this colonial formation. Hindutva, the articulation of a Hindu nation organised on the principles of religion, is a modern project, mired in whiteness and its colonial ambitions.
The structure of hate deployed by Hindutva works through the ongoing production of the Muslim "other" and is rooted in the whiteness of the colonial project. Consider the writings of one of the key architects of Hindutva, MS Golwalkar:
Moreover, it writes over the diverse spaces and contexts of syncretism, dialogue, and creative conversations across faith traditions evident across India. It actively communalizes these spaces to achieve its political agenda of colonization. It targets Indigenous communities across India with their diverse spiritual practices, seeking to impose on these communities a monolithic ideology.
The decolonization work of CARE seeks to co-create voice infrastructures at the "margins of the margins." In the context of CARE's ongoing work in India and in the Indian diaspora, this decolonization is constituted in the co-creation of voice infrastructures for the minoritized, raced, classed, gendered margins.
As an ongoing element of this decolonization work, I published a white paper titled “Cultural Hindutva and Islamophobia." The paper outlines the cultural strategies that disseminate Hindutva, an ethno-nationalist strategy that constructs India as a Hindu nation. The essay reflects the broader argument of the culture-centered approach that interrogates cultural essentialisms in the service of colonialism and capitalism, and simultaneously seeks to co-create communicative infrastructures for diverse voices at the "margins of the margins."
The paper depicts the cultural pedagogy of International Chinmaya Mission as rooted in the ideology of Hindutva. The observation that Swami Chinmayananda, the
founder of the International Chinmaya Mission, was also involved in the
creation of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a militant religious organisation that has been
linked to violence, the paper calls for closer examination of cultural elements
of Hindutva in New Zealand.
On August 21, in response to a talk posted by CARE on
twitter on Hindutva and Hinduphobia, X (a white woman claiming to be a yogini) responded, tagging me and the University, "I just read the white paper, Hindutva and Islamophobia
where the Chinmaya Mission is called the hub of Hindutva and accused of hate
crimes against muslims. If that is correct, @MasseyUni should be able to
provide evidence to other scholars. I did not see any and it is
disturbing."
The tweet intentionally sets up a false narrative. It strategically unsees the evidence that is presented in the paper, which X later draws upon and communicatively inverts in a blog piece to drive up the hate. Note the internal inconsistency here. X could either claim there was no evidence presented in the paper or could claim that she disagreed with the quality of evidence. Also worth noting is the intellectual dishonesty in the dismissal of evidence, where X refers to the Economic and Political Weekly as a Mumbai charity journal with academic credibility issues. To raise the question of credibility targeting the EPW, she cites an article referring to the political pressures on the EPW to retract an article critical of the Adani Group, a group that has concentrated power since the rise of Modi. The article linked by X to discard the quality of EPW specifically refers to an open letter signed by renowned academics including Nobel Economic prize winners Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, stating its historically high standards, then noting:
India is currently living through a dark period in which there are real concerns about freedom and independence of intellectual expression, both for academics and journalists, with significant corporate takeover of major media houses and increasing instances of overt and covert intimidation of independent thinking and debate.
The articles referred to in the CARE white paper were both published in a timeframe that falls outside of this dark period referred to in the article.
When told that they didn't have the skillset to read the arguments of the paper, X responded,
“Asking you, as a scholar for evidence that
Chinmaya are accountable for hate crimes is not bullying. Your white paper
either needs references or you can prove it now.”
They went on to tweet a number of twitter handles known to be
organised around the narratives of Hindutva and Hinduphobia.
Note here the rhetorical fallacy, producing rhetorical slippages to produce a false narrative, which is then deployed to organize a bullying campaign, seeking legitimacy in the Hindutva hate infrastructure.
The tweets from X need to whitewash the hateful ideology of Hindutva to build the structure of legitimacy.
“I just read Sarvarkar Hindutva and can't find a single
sentence of hatred. Do these Dismantling Hindutva people even bother to read
their own bloody references? It said, 'there's only one race, the human race'.
Our first nations folk say exactly the same thing. People don't read.”
Note here the performance of erasure, a key tool of colonization, to actively delete the scholarship on Savarkar and the ideology of hate, produced by Indians. The structures of whiteness work through the erasure of critical knowledge generated from within contexts and from within communities by scholars residing in those communities and engaged in struggles against the apparatus of hate.
Also significant here is the act of equating Savarkar's Hindutva ideology of hate with the first nations people. This is another layer of colonial violence, with the structure of whiteness at work to impose on Indigenous people facing the everyday oppressions of whiteness in a settler colonial state a pernicious ideology of hate. In all this posturing, X of course conveniently erases their white colonial ancestral lineage and how that connects with the ongoing oppression of Indigenous communities in the settler colonial state. It is the expertise of whiteness that must take over the mantle of defending Indigenous people by erasing Indigenous voices, and by simultaneously imposing a racist ideology on Indigenous people that reproduces the colonial architecture.
The white paper then gets picked up
by Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network (SHHAN),
“@MasseyUni professors have written white paper
accusing @ChinmayaMission of spreading hate against Muslims without any
evidence. @EducationGovtNZ baseless targeting of Hindu students is
unacceptable. Indian students pay fees to study in NZ, pls do not sully your
reputation.”
Note here the rhetorical fallacy constructed by X that gets picked up by the Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network. The production of the concern for Hindu students turns the critique of Hindutva into a question of safety for Hindu students. Moreover, Hindu students are then turned into Indian students. This rhetorical move is at the heart of the colonizing forces of Hindutva that seek to obliterate the diversities within India, and by extension among Indian students, by incorporating them into a monolithic category organized under Hindutva. Note here the colonial erasure performed on Hindus. Under this ideology, the only Hindus are the ones that identify under the ideology of Hindutva. The production of the Indian student as being targeted because of the particular critique of Hindutva as an ethnoreligious ideology renders visible the colonizing ideology of Hindutva.
The notion that the safety of Indian students is threatened by a white paper on the cultural strategies of Hindutva forms the basis of the targeted attack on me, on CARE, and on the University. This rhetorical strategy is photocopied directly from the strategies being used to attack the conference "Dismantling Global Hindutva."
The tweet by SHHAN is then shared by X, “Surprise
surprise. Chinmaya has finally found out about the white paper. This is called
academic freedom, when you give all sides the opportunity to speak. If you take
a look at the evidence for this report, don’t go bashing the Professor on his
wall. Take it to Massey.”
They offer strategies, asking the posters to
delete their comments and write to the University.
Worth noting here are the interplays of the strategies of harassment. Urging protestors to write to the University is the tactic of harassment of the networks of Hindutva to silence academic freedom.
Consider the strategies of
hate from twitter accounts that label me a Maoist and a Communist. The assumption
of my Bengali background are used to label me a Maoist. Consider similarly explicit forms of sexual violence targeting me that reproduce the ideology of racist whiteness, and that are reproduced by X with the statement "This one made me laugh." The hate catalyzed by X on a YouTube video targeting CARE builds the infrastructure for attacks on BIPOC South Asian academics, including BIPOC women organizing in solidarity with CARE and with the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" conference.
This targeted bullying is accompanied by the performance of victimhood by co-opting the language of social justice.
The co-option of the rhetoric of social justice that forms a key element of struggles against power and control into a politics of hate is the very basis of silencing critiques. Any critique of Hindutva and its pernicious effects on the "margins of the margins" is constructed as unsafe, labelled as bullying, and targeted as Hinduphobia. Similarly, the language of decolonization is communicatively inverted to hold up a deeply colonizing structure of hate rooted in whiteness. And of course, the decolonizing work is carried out by a white woman embedded within the networks of privilege of the settler colonial state.
This communicative inversion is a key strategy of whiteness that erases the violence of its colonizing force.
The production of the victim to uphold Hindutva supremacy mirrors the production of the victim in white supremacy. Consider the parallels between the strategy of victimhood deployed by the structures of Hindutva and the attack on Critical Race Theory deployed by white supremacists under the Trump administration in the U.S.
Note here the whitesplaining at work to save Hinduism from a brown-skinned Hindu. I am produced in this discourse as the bad Hindu, the brown sepoy, that is the threat to Hinduism. Also worth noting is the performance of the classic trope of white victimhood that is integral to the colonial-carceral project.
The marking of my body, my decolonizing work and the decolonizing practice of CARE as the deviant "other" that must be disciplined offers the cultural cache for a white woman to seek legitimacy and gain currency in the networks of Hindutva. A twitter account with hardly few "likes" usually picks up the "likes" by tagging Hindutva ideologues and mobilizing them to attack me. My and our imaginations of Hinduism as polymorphic practices and syncretic dialogues rooted in dialectics must be attacked violently and erased to establish the monolithic colonizing agenda of Hindutva. My whakapapa engaging with syncretic Hinduisms must be erased to mark me as the heathen to be civilized.
It is this colonizing force of Hindutva that is the threat to the plural and polymorphic imaginaries of Hinduism, to the progressive possibilities of transformation, and to the ongoing work of decolonization.
It is paradoxical that Hindutva ideologues that attack scholars located in the West who critically document the dangers of the pernicious ideology of Hindutva draw on whiteness to circulate their politics of hate. This paradox is rooted in Hindutva as a fundamentally colonial project, deeply intertwined in whiteness. Hindutva needs its white saviors to give it fuel.
It is only in the dismantling of Hindutva that plural Hinduisms can flourish, transform, and progress. It is only in dismantling Hindutva that the ongoing project of Indian democracy rooted in secularism and syncretism can be recovered. Decolonization is dismantling Hindutva.