Meera asks not to use her real name. She is worried about retribution. Already, her small business in Melbourne has been the subject of harassment and abuse from far-right Indian nationalist groups. “It’s been awful,” she says. “We were getting abusive calls and reviews. We got over 3000 one-star reviews in three days, abusive emails.”
Meera says people affiliated with the so-called Hindutva movement made certain demands of her business, with which she refused to comply. After that “they started posting our personal photos on Facebook groups. Very important Facebook groups like ‘Indians in Melbourne’ who have over 90,000 to 100,000 Indian people following – basically our direct customers.”
Meera reported the matter to police, but the abuse continues. “Business has gone slow … I’m getting threats saying that ‘we’ll find each and every member of your family and beat them up’.”
This week marks 75 years since India became independent from British Colonial rule. One of the post-independence ideals of which many Indians are proud is religious tolerance. But in the years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, there’s been an increase in Hindu nationalism. This has reportedly led to an increase in violence against those who go against this ideology. There are fears violence might make its way to Australia.
“There have been forms of Hindu nationalism around maybe since the early 20th century, but a specific form of Hindu nationalism which is espoused by the ruling regime in India is a Hindutva version…” Dr Priya Chacko, of the University of Adelaide, says. “[The] concept of India was that it was a land of Hindus and that Muslims and Christians were invaders. So, to be Indian, you had to be Hindu and you had to follow a religion that was from the soil of India, which is Hinduism or Buddhism or Sikhism and so on. But Muslims and Christians were considered foreigners. So that’s the basic ideology that underpins the governing practices of the current government in India.”
India is a secular liberal democracy, with most Indians identifying as Hindus. But Chacko argues that Hindutva differs from Hinduism because it isn’t a religion but rather a political ideology. She says it’s worrying that this ideology has made its way to Australia. “The thing about Hindutva is that it’s exclusionary toward minorities, but it’s also patently anti-democratic because there’s this focus on unity. Anything that dissents from the vision that is espoused by the ruling party is considered dissent and disunity and has to be marginalised.”
Chacko adds that religious minorities aren’t the only ones being targeted by this ideology in India. “You see left-wing academics being persecuted because they have different ideas about what constitutes justice in India; they’re thrown in jail, arbitrarily on made-up charges and things like that.”
According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, there are more than 700,000 India-born people in Australia. This community is becoming increasingly influential. Both Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison courted the Indian diaspora communities during the recent federal election campaign.
They attended separate events where they took part in cultural activities that included being draped with orange scarves. But these weren’t just ordinary scarves – they carried the logo of a far-right Hindu nationalist group, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), which was named by the CIA as a “religious militant organisation” in its 2018 World Factbook. Formed in India in the 1960s, the VHP is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right Hindu nationalist organisation that aims to create an ethnic Hindu-majority state.
Chacko says the VHP and RSS are “quite radical groups” that have been associated with violence in India, and this should have made Australian politicians wary of being linked to them.
“The VHP and RSS, their activists were responsible for tearing down a mosque in 1992, which led to violence, which led to the killing of 2000 people who were mostly Muslim,” Chacko says. “Politicians should know this sort of thing – we can Wikipedia it. It’s not hard to find this information. It’s odd that there’s so much ignorance about this stuff in Australia.”
Peter Varghese, who was Australia’s high commissioner to India from 2009 to 2012 and is now chancellor of the University of Queensland, says the incidents involving the VHP scarves underlines the importance of political leaders being aware of who they are meeting from across Australia’s multicultural communities.
“In all of our migrant communities, there’s going to be a whole range of factions and groupings and it’s easy to sort of stumble into them if you’re not familiar with them.”
Waseem Razvi, a community activist based in Melbourne’s outer south-west, says much of the tension between those affiliated with Hindutva ideology and other members of the community began in 2020 following the farmers’ demonstrations in India. The farmers, from mostly Sikh communities, were protesting over Modi government laws that they argued would ruin their livelihoods.
Razvi says the protests were supported by some in the Indian community in Australia. “That started to have a bit of heat between hate groups here and the Indian Sikh community.”
This story was originally published in thesaturdaypaper.com.au . Read the full story here