Why Are You Here Chanting "Jai Shri Ram"? The Contradictions of Diaspora Hindutva
A procession winds through a street in Melbourne. A rally fills a park in Edison, New Jersey. A stadium in Auckland rises to its feet. The chant is the same everywhere: Jai Shri Ram. In India over the past decade, this invocation of Ram has been remade from a devotional greeting into the war cry of Hindu majoritarianism, shouted at lynchings, painted on bulldozers, hurled at Muslims as a demand for submission. Underneath the footage circulating online, a local commenter reaches for the oldest line in the nativist playbook: if you love India so much, why are you here? Why don't you go back?
The question is racist. It casts the Brown immigrant as a perpetual outsider, welcome to write code and pay taxes but never to belong, and it carries a particular hypocrisy in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, nations built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by settlers who were never asked to give up their languages, their churches, or their names as the price of arrival. And yet the taunt, for all its ugliness, points at a contradiction the diaspora's loudest voices refuse to name.
The contradiction belongs to Hindutva, and Hindutva must be separated from Hinduism at the outset. Hinduism is a plural, internally contested, living set of traditions practised by more than a billion people, including the families organising Diwali in community halls from Sandringham to Edison. There is nothing suspect about a temple, a festival, or a grandmother teaching her grandchildren a prayer in Tamil or Bangla. Hindutva is a political ideology, formalised a century ago by Savarkar and institutionalised through the RSS, that defines India as a Hindu nation and treats Muslims and Christians as outsiders to it. It claims to protect an eternal Hindu culture from erasure. What it actually produces is a narrow, upper-caste, masculinised version of that culture, imposed on the immense diversity of Hindu life itself.
The diaspora that now carries Hindutva into Western cities was produced by neoliberal globalization. India's 1991 liberalisation generated a surplus of English-speaking technical labour just as the American IT industry, running on H-1B visas and Silicon Valley's appetite for skilled workers at lower cost, began pulling hundreds of thousands of Indian engineers westward, with parallel migrations into Britain, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa. These migrants built their lives inside liberal multicultural arrangements. Freedom of religion protected their temples. Freedom of speech protected their processions. Anti-discrimination law, however imperfectly enforced, gave them standing to fight exclusion. Multicultural policy funded their language schools and festivals.
The professional diaspora has learned to use every one of these protections while bankrolling a political project in India that dismantles their equivalents. The same organisations that file complaints about Hinduphobia in California and lobby councils in Auckland for cultural recognition sit inside transnational networks that fund and legitimise the politics of bulldozer demolitions, citizenship laws that sort belonging by religion, and a media ecosystem that manufactures the Muslim as an existential threat. In my research across diaspora communities over two decades, I have described this pattern as communicative inversion, the turning upside down of material reality through discourse. A movement fused with state power in India, commanding its institutions and its streets, presents itself in Melbourne and Toronto as a persecuted minority. The language of anti-racism, forged by Black, Indigenous, and subaltern struggles, is captured to shield a supremacist project from criticism.
The culture Hindutva claims to defend is also a fabrication of power. Its "eternal samskriti" is a Brahminical monolith, and building the monolith requires demolition. Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi histories of caste violence, the syncretic shrines where Hindus and Muslims have prayed together for centuries, the regional lifeworlds that never fit the Hindi-Hindu template: all of this is edited out or rewritten into the majoritarian script. In the diaspora, the monolith does real psychological work. It offers coherence and pride to communities living with everyday racism, and that longing for rootedness deserves respect. But the pride is organised from above. Upper-caste, affluent professionals convert their economic success into the authority to define what Indian culture means abroad, and the communities Hindutva silences in India are silenced again in the diaspora's self-presentation.
None of this hands a victory to the commenter demanding assimilation. Settler states that demand cultural erasure from Brown migrants while refusing to reckon with the violence of their own founding have no moral standing on questions of belonging. White nativism and Hindutva are not opposites; they are mirror images, each supremacism feeding on the caricature the other provides, each eroding the pluralism that ordinary people, Hindu and Muslim, migrant and Indigenous, actually depend on to live.
So the answer to "why are you here?" is simple: because people move, because capital moved them, because belonging in a multicultural democracy does not and should never require cultural erasure, for Hindus or anyone else. The harder question is the one the diaspora must put to itself. What does it mean to claim the protections of pluralism in Auckland while financing its destruction in Ayodhya? A diaspora serious about its culture would defend the rights of Muslims and Christians in India with the same intensity it defends temple permits in New Jersey. It would amplify Dalit assertions of dignity instead of scrubbing caste from the curriculum. It would treat Indian culture as what it has always been, contested, syncretic, alive, and carried by a thousand voices rather than one chant. A civilisation confident of itself does not need to arrive as a threat.