We live in an era of particularly messy racial politics. From the competing over oppression with claims of “no other minority” to litigation over terms like ‘BAME’ and ‘PoC’, mainstream anti-racist discourses are often more concerned with irreducible differences between groups than building coalitions between racialised people. It’s every community out for themselves, with solidarity looked at with something like suspicion.
At the heart of this fractious competition for visibility, recognition and bandwidth comes an opportunity for the nationalist right to turn minorities against one another by nurturing a sense of grievance. Already, a new demographic is falling prey to this tired pattern – and the left need to be ready to confront it head on. Brace yourself for the ‘Hinduphobia’ moral panic.
This autumn, tensions in Leicester – a city with a sizeable Indian Hindu population, as well as a Pakistani Muslim one – flared into widespread disorder. On 17 September, around 300 Hindu youths marched into an area of the city home to a large Muslim community, chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, a religious slogan which has been repurposed in recent years as a battle cry during outbreaks of communal violence. In retaliation, a group of 200 Muslim youths descended on a Hindu neighbourhood in Leicester, and a video of a flag being ripped down from a temple went viral, drawing condemnation from politicians and religious groups in India. But what’s striking about this isn’t just that sectarian conflict is playing out on British streets – it’s the response of Hindu community organisations.
The Vishva Hindu Parishad, a Hindu nationalist (or “Hindutva”) organisation founded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), swiftly penned a letter to then-prime minister Liz Truss blaming the disorder on “Islamic extremists and hoodlums”. Hindu groups in Leicester have said they’ll be boycotting an independent review led by Dr Chris Allen into the unrest, arguing that his background in studying Islamophobia makes him biased. Protests were organised by Hindu groups outside The Guardian and the BBC’s offices, alleging a pattern of anti-Hindu and anti-India bias in their coverage. The fact that protesters singled out articles which reported attacks on religious minorities in India by Hindu nationalists as evidence of this bias was telling: the charge of ‘Hinduphobia’ is intimately connected with the defence of Hindutva.
It’s tedious even writing this, but having been accused of being an “Islamist” who “hates Hindus” for my criticisms of Hindtva, it’s frustrating to have my own heritage denied. My surname should be a little clue to having some direct experience of Muslim-Hindu coexistence. I’m the product of an interfaith marriage, and while I followed in my mother’s footsteps of being both a wonky Muslim and devoted follower of Tottenham Hotspur, my sister takes after my father in supporting Manchester United and identifying as Hindu.
For my niece’s mukhe bhaat (the Hindu rice-feeding ceremony), I was given the task of administering her first spoonful of basmati; in a few years she’ll get Eidi money just like we did as kids (not adjusted for inflation). Contrary to the beliefs of some particularly aggressive Hindutva accounts on Twitter, I’m proud to be part of a family where mixed relationships and religious diversity are the norm.
Hindus in the UK, and across the Global North, are subject to cultural insensitivity, discrimination, profiling by the authorities and racist violence. In Bangladesh and Pakistan, where the sectarian massacres which followed Partition are still in living memory, Hindu minorities have been victims of targeted violence, false accusations of “blasphemy”, and have undoubtedly been denied even what legal protections exist on the statute books.
This story was originally published in novaramedia.com . Read the full story here