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Whiteness of hegemonic interfaith dialogues

 

Hindutva forces attacking Muslim prayers

As I have been witnessing my social media feed inundate with stories of Muslims and Christians being attacked by Hindutva forces in November/December 2021, listening to genocidal speeches delivered by Hindutva ideologues calling for attacks on Muslims, I am reminded of the powerful communicative inversion, the turning of materiality on its head through symbols, carried out by Hindutva organizations in the diaspora. 





Hindutva, deploying violence targeting religious minorities in India, mobilized around symbolic and material strategies rooted in hate, appeals to multiculturalism and multi-faith accommodation in Western democracies to forge the space for itself. It turns itself into a minority, appealing as a minority, building persuasive registers that speak to the overarching logic of diversity and inclusion in Western democracies. 

This communicative inversion, the turning of its materiality of hate into a symbolic appeal to the accommodation of difference, forms the infrastructure of global Hindutva.

Protests against Hindutva attacks on Churches

Hindutva-linked organizations in the diaspora obfuscate their links with Hindutva in India, backgrounding the empirical evidence documenting the flow of people, money, and resources between Hindutva in India and Hindutva in the diaspora. 

In the worst of these excesses of obfuscation, Hindutva ideologues in the diaspora claim that they have nothing to do with Hindutva in India, or that these (referring to Hindutva hate in India) are problems in India that are being imported by critics (often themselves minorities from India) into the diaspora.

The grotesqueness of this communicative inversion lies in the deployment of claims to inclusion by a religiopolitical ideology that is at its core rooted in hate and othering. To obfuscate the materiality of hate and violence that forms the infrastructure of Hindutva, it communicatively inverts the articulations of Hindutva violence as hate speech. Materially-rooted, contextually situated, empirically based accounts of the violence propagated by Hindutva in India and in the diaspora are labeled as hate speech, having been rhetorically displaced as an "attack on all Hindus." Communicative inversions in the diaspora in liberal democracies enable Hindutva organizations to operate with impunity, participating in propagating the ideology of hate while claiming victimhood.

These communicative inversions of Hindutva are rendered possible and perpetuated by the whiteness of interfaith dialogues in western democracies. 

Hegemonic interfaith organizations are complicit in the perpetuation of hate to the extent they platform Hindutva organizations. The very platforming of Hindutva ideologues in inter-faith spaces undoes and unsees the hate and violence experienced by Indian minorities. It fundamentally undermines the very spirit of interfaith dialogues by actively participating in the sponsorship of hate. To witness Hindutva ideologues and organizations being platformed in interfaith spaces in the diaspora perpetuates additional layers of violence for Indian minority communities of diverse faiths in the diaspora.

Let's turn to the question, why do interfaith organizations in Western democracies platform Hindutva, or worse, erase concerns about Hindutva that are raised by critics?

Whiteness, the universal values of white culture, establish as universal white, colonial approaches to dialogue, reading dialogue through normative assumptions of civility. These values of civility, read as tools to foster inclusion, are often complicit in the perpetuation of violence by erasing the voices of the margins. The desire to avoid conflict to have palatable conversations that look good on the surface underlies the active silencing of voices that foreground the hate perpetrated by Hindutva. 

Note, historically, the very tools of dialogue have been integral to erasure, co-option, and deployment of violence in colonial land grab. The performance of dialogue has worked to erase articulations of sovereignty at the margins. 

The politics of inclusion crafted by the whiteness of interfaith in western democracies selectively includes hegemonic actors that offer a register of a cultural essence as difference. Simultaneously, it erases diverse religio-spiritual articulations that fall outside the hegemonic essence. It works actively to undermine the very articulations from within faith traditions that challenge the hegemonic essence. Note here the strategies of colonial divide and rule that have historically worked to play up cultural essence as difference to establish colonial hegemony, simultaneously erasing the voices from within cultural spaces that challenge the oppressiveness of hegemonic claims-making. 

In the diaspora, the whiteness of interfaith results in public claims denying the existence of Hindutva hate and violence in the diaspora. In the diaspora, the whiteness of interfaith results in interfaith support for Hindutva organizations. In the diaspora, the whiteness of interfaith results in the performed lack of knowledge about Hindutva and its politics of hate.

This performed ignorance keeps intact the hegemonic privilege of whiteness while continuing to perpetuate harm directed at diaspora minority communities.

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