During the long summer between the crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses across the country and the start of the fall semester, an organization called Hindu on Campus, or HoC, stayed busy. “Dedicated to safeguarding Sanatana Hindu Dharma on college campuses,” HoC is an internet affinity group that uses social media to promote other well-established Hindu organizations while churning out a robust feed of content aimed toward a Gen Z audience. Over the summer, they promoted content related to everything from “Hindu Persecution Awareness Month” to Kamala Harris’s presidential run—but the bulk of their content focuses on geopolitics in South Asia.
In June, they zeroed in on an attack in Jammu in the disputed region of Kashmir in which unidentified militants killed nine Hindu pilgrims, and more recently, the popular uprising in Bangladesh, in which the protesters successfully facilitated the overhaul of their prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s repressive, India-allied Awami League party. HoC dubbed the popular anti-corruption movement the “Bangladeshi Hindu genocide.” To illustrate this, HoC’s youth director Surya Naga shared a visual—“Land Loss of the Native Hindu Population”—that shows a map and timeline of Bangladesh spanning from 3000 BC to the present. Over the course of five thousand years, the map fades from a Hindu red to Islamic green, indicating the religious shift of the region.
To the untrained eye, this map might evoke other visualizations that track the depopulation of indigenous Palestinians or Native Americans. What it actually depicts—crudely, selectively—is the transformation of the region’s religious landscape over the course of millennia, conspicuously omitting Buddhism, syncretic folk religion, and many other faith expressions that have long histories in Bangladesh. The misappropriation of the terms land loss and native attempts to situate Hindus in Bangladesh as suffering from a form of settler colonialism, an ongoing ethnic cleansing at the hands of Muslims—an ancient conspiracy to purge the land of its “indigenous” character.
Hindu on Campus represents a new generation of Hindu supremacist extremism in the diaspora.
The argument advanced by infographics like this—and by HoC in general—is that Hindus should have the right to self-determination in the form of an ethnostate, providing a pseudo-historical justification for the Hindu right wing’s openly fascist aspirations in India. Since the current prime minister Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2014, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has empowered a mass mobilization of Hindu nationalists—who comprise the movement known as Hindutva—across government, the media, film, and perhaps most troubling, in the streets. But Hindutva’s reach extends far beyond India itself. Hindu organizations in the diaspora play a pivotal role in lobbying and fundraising on behalf of the BJP’s interests.
HoC is part of a loose constellation of Hindu student organizations on Anglophone college campuses that purport to shed light on anti-Hindu discrimination, as well as promote Hindu culture among students. Some of them, such as the youth wings of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and Hindu Yuva, are well-established and, in the case of the latter, part of an entrenched web of Hindu supremacist organizations funded by wealthy individual members, philanthropists, and entities such as the Uberoi Foundation. They have been around for decades and have developed outreach beyond the university in their quest to push right-wing, Hindu supremacists positions. Hindu on Campus, established in 2021, represents a new generation of Hindu supremacist extremism in the diaspora. While they don’t have any physical chapters, they boast tens of thousands of followers across various platforms, who are served pithy infographics and ethnonationalist talking points laundered through the language of social justice.
HoC’s revisionism mirrors the Hindu fascist’s narrative about India’s past and relies on several ahistorical assumptions. Hinduism, for one, is not a monolithic, atemporal category; the term “Hindu” broadly describes the varied expressions of Vedic belief across the subcontinent and largely came to prominence during the British colonial period. The introduction of Islam to the subcontinent, similarly to the Christianization of Europe, was an immensely complicated process that occurred through both violent and nonviolent means: Sufi missionaries, Mughal conquest, cultural contract through trade, and willing conversions that allowed for people to retain many pre-Islamic customs. Furthermore, HoC’s framing of history, in which Hindus were perpetually victimized by Muslim invaders, defies the subcontinent’s rich history of blending Islamic and Hindu traditions—to many worshippers throughout history, these two categories weren’t entirely distinct. Not to mention there are actual indigenous tribes all over South Asia—Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and Animist, among others—who have been displaced from their ancestral lands by industrialists since 1947, when India was liberated from colonial rule. (Amusingly, HoC makes no mention of these actual instances of dispossession.) But, in HoC’s view, a “Hindu genocide” in Bangladesh is the only frame through which the last six thousand years of history ought to be understood.
This story was originally published in thebaffler.com. Read the full story here.
