Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more