Thread by @aparna_gopalan

After months of reporting and dozens of interviews with Hindu nationalist groups and their critics, my @jewishcurrents piece on Hinduphobia is out today

I found a worrying trend. The Hindu right is developing a very effective new strategy to shield Hindutva from criticism🧵1/

At a 2022 New Jersey parade celebrating India’s independence, Hindu nationalist groups added a bulldozer to the lineup of floats. To South Asian minorities who were watching bulldozers demolishing Muslim homes in India, the symbolism was clear. Hindutva had come abroad 2/

Initially, NJ politicians condemned the bulldozer as an Islamophobic symbol. A local chapter of the NJ Democratic Party went further, calling on the FBI and CIA to act against US-based Hindutva groups—strip them of tax-exempt status and deny visas to their extremist speakers 3/

But Hindu nationalists acted quickly to move the conversation away from Indian ethnonationalism and towards Hindu victimization. In a statement, 60 Hindu groups decried the “hate-filled” critics of the parade, who they said “[demonized] the entire Hindu American community” 4/

Before long, this strategy yielded fruit: local politicians began to denounce critics of the parade as “anti-Hindu.” The state Democratic party soon followed. In the coming weeks, Sens. Booker and Menendez both released statements condemning “anti-Hinduism” 5/

The incident was one of many in which Hin­du groups had managed to silence criticism of Hin­du nationalism by decrying it as anti-Hindu or “Hinduphobic.” Such allegations have already prevented the passage of two house resolutions critical of Modi 6/

“The Hindu right wants to distract from India’s catastrophic human rights record,” historian @AudreyTruschke told me. “So there’s a lot of value in portraying Hindus as victimized people.” (Incidentally, Audrey has been repeatedly called “Hinduphobic” in recent years) 7/

Like much Hindu nationalist activity in the US, the Hinduphobia strategy is modeled on the work of Jewish groups like American Jewish Committee (AJC) and AIPAC, especially their efforts to codify a definition of antisemitism that places much criticism of Israel out-of-bounds 8/

Since 2021, there has been a flurry of activity trying to codify “Hinduphobia.” The executive director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) explicitly told me this effort mirrored “the Jewish community coalescing around the IHRA working definition of antisemitism”  9/

Under the resulting definition, the HAF says that slurs like “cow piss drinker” and “heathen” are Hinduphobia, but so are “portrayals of Narendra Modi and his political party as supremacist or fascist” 10/

The goal of this definition is to “conflate Hindutva with Hinduism—to prove that a criticism of Hindutva is an attack on Hinduism,” Kashmiri American journalist @raqib_naik of @HindutvaWatchIn told me 11/

Despite the definition's alignment with Hindu nationalism, it has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the US. Universities are adopting it in their grievance processes; congresspeople are holding briefings on it; there’s even a “Campus Hinduphobia tracker” you can report incidents to 12/

The codification of Hinduphobia fulfills a long-held goal. “What was missing was the institutionalization,” one Hindu right leader told me. “The idea is to first introduce the topic, then institutionalize the topic, and then popularize it in government bodies and education” 13/

Armed with this new narrative of Hindu victimization, Hindu right groups have stepped up efforts to silence critics. In 2021, HAF launched a “grassroots campaign” that sent 1 million emails to universities to oppose an academic conference on “Dismantling Global Hindutva” 14/

HAF claimed the conference was an “all-you-can-eat-buffet of Hinduphobia” and that it sought to “oppose and ‘dismantle’ the Bharatiya Janata Party, a democratically elected party in India”—collapsing of the distinction between Hinduism and the BJP 15/

Hindu right groups have also used Hinduphobia allegations against anti-caste activism, calling a recent Seattle law banning caste discrimination is “racist and discriminatory” and “classic Hinduphobia.” Activists suspect Hindu right groups might sue to oppose the law 16/

In fact, a Seattle city council member who voted “no” on the anti-caste law mentioned the risk of lawsuits from Hindu right groups as a reason not to ban caste discrimination 17/

“Speaking as a steward of our public resources, the last thing we need is yet another costly lawsuit,” she said, adding that “singling out Hindus as the perpetrators and victims of caste discrimination will only generate more anti-Hindu discrimination” 18/

Intimidation tactics like lawsuits are scary. But for me, the scariest part of the story is that it is not just rightwing groups that are falling for this Hinduphobia strategy 19/

No less a figure that @RevJJackson followed Hindu right groups’ lead in condemning journalist @FriedrichPieter as racist for his criticism of Hindu nationalism 20/

Progressive group @Hindus4HR told me that HAF’s early social justice work has granted them this credibility despite their rightwing leanings—so much so that HAF is in coalitions with @hrw and @amnesty, who are otherwise vocal critics of Hindu nationalism 21/

But despite its civil rights credentials, HAF’s politics are clear. Here’s HAF's executive director on the Indian equivalent of Fox News—in a show discussing how the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference was part of a global Islamist plot 22/

And Jewish groups are helping Hindu groups every step of the way. In 2022, StandWithUs hosted a webinar with HAF that was devoted to platforming the concept of Hinduphobia. Jewish and Hindu right leaders also told me of informal friendships and conversations 23/

Religious studies scholar @shana_sippy told me that by emulating Jewish groups’ weaponization of antisemitism, the Hindu right hopes to “cultivate a narrative of Hindu victimization that is robust enough to justify contemporary atrocities” 24/

Why does all this matter? Well, “Hinduphobia” is reframing the conversation about India at a moment when the country’s image as the world’s largest democracy is in jeopardy; even the State Department is tracking the rise in human rights violations under Modi 25/

As journalist @YasmeenSerhan has written in The Atlantic, under Modi “the Hinduization of India is almost complete.” The Hindu right has long been inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride,” and that vision of India is close to being realized 26/

The US Hindu right is determined to facilitate this outcome, and “Hinduphobia” is the tool they are using to do so. They want to make sure that the US does not act on its findings on human rights so Hindutva can continue unchecked 27/

What is remarkable about the Hinduphobia strategy is its emotional power. My rightwing sources repeatedly called it an “existential” threat” and “a foreshadow of real-life violence to follow" 28/

One source said she would now feel uneasy driving into Seattle because of the ban on caste discrimination, and another argued that the new law made Dalit activists the “judge, jury, and executioner” of Hindu Americans 29/

The president of a prominent Hindu right group told me that the Hindu American community was not responding with enough alarm to the writing on the wall. “It took a decade for the Nazis to do what they did,” he said. “It wasn’t an overnight thing; it developed slowly” 30/

Anti-Hindutva groups are debating the best approach for combating what Sippy calls an “affective politics of fear.” In that effort, they are turning to antizionist groups like @jvplive, and in that collaboration might lie the only hope of defeating US Hindutva /end

Update: I want to acknowledge and correct for an omission in my piece. The @IAMCouncil has been central to the anti-Hindutva organizing—and a target of the Hindu right backlash—described in the piece. I hope to be able to cover their important work better in future reporting!