Social justice, the articulations of justice rooted in equality, attend to the question of human dignity for all, especially for those at the margins of societies.
Amidst the global rise of the far-right and its infrastructure of hate, social justice forms the dialogic anchor for resistance.
Given the role of religion in the attacks carried out by the far-right, interfaith dialogues are key registers for social justice.
Through the conversational spaces created for diverse faiths, registers can be built to organize against the politics of hate.
In these interfaith conversations, majority communities have a vital role to play in listening to the articulations of justice at the margins, in fostering the spaces for claiming human dignity, and in building infrastructures for religious freedom.
In India, the rise of the far-right Hindu nationalist forces is embodied in the mobilization for Hindu nation (Hindu rashtra). This Hindu nation is built on the monolithic imposition of Hindu sanskriti (culture) by a Hindu jati (race).
This racist conceptual basis of Hindutva manifests in organized attacks on religious minorities, both symbolically and materially.
The mobilization of attacks on mosques is a key feature of Hindutva. Hindutva has mobilized its political power through the symbolic and material attacks on mosques and praying spaces of Muslims. The ascendance to political power of Hindutva in the mid-1990s was organized through the attack on the Babri masjid.
In recent months, between August and December 2021, we have witnessed multiple ongoing attacks of Hindutva goons on the praying spaces of Muslims across India. We have witnessed images including photos and videos of Hindutva armies attacking Muslims performing prayers in open spaces. These material attacks have been mobilized by Hindutva narratives suggesting Muslims are taking over public spaces.
Similar attacks have been carried out on Churches, convents, and Christmas celebrations. In the past several days, around Christmas, we have witnessed Christmas celebrations being attacked. Video narratives document Hindutva hoodlums taking over Christmas celebrations with children and shouting Hindutva slogans.
In an irony that is both comic and ominous, in a video, Hindutva groups are witnessed chanting "Down with Santa Claus" and burning effigies of Santa Claus.
To counter the violence of Hindutva targeted at religious minorities in India and in the Indian diaspora, inter-faith dialogues are urgently necessary.
A culture-centered turn to interfaith dialogues foregrounds the voices of the margins as the basis of building the dialogues. Centering the voices of India's Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and other diverse minorities is vital to countering the hate propagated by Hindutva.
In the Indian diaspora globally, centering the voices of India's diverse religious minority communities in interfaith dialogues is a key ingredient to witnessing the oppression carried out by Hindutva, to documenting the pernicious effects of this oppression, and to countering the oppression.
The whiteness of the dominant approaches to interfaith dialogue that see interfaith as the spaces to avoid conflicts by silencing conversations on difficult topics, is complicit in the perpetuation of violence. The erasure of the voices of Indian religious minorities in the diaspora and the centering of Hindutva voices in interfaith spaces perpetuate the grotesque violence of Hindutva in the Indian diaspora.
The unseeing and erasure along with the platforming of Hindutva ideologues in interfaith spaces is disempowering, is an attack on the dignity of Indian minorities, and threatens the religious freedoms of minority Indian communities at the "margins of the margins" of the diaspora.
We must organize to decolonize the whiteness of interfaith spaces to build registers for actual religious freedom at the margins. The white tastes of universality holding up dialogue as erasure are complicit in the reproduction of violence. These tastes and their affinities must be dismantled to enable the articulations of justice.