Today in Hinduphobia: June 6, 2019
Here’s a round-up of examples of media Hinduphobia shared on some of my social media feeds today.
- The Guardian on BJP’s return and attacks on sexual minorities
The Guardian published an article about Dutee Chand, “India’s first openly gay athlete” being “disowned” by her village.
The article talks about the traditional attitudes of her community, and then somewhat gratuitously inserts this part about mystery mobs that “appear from nowhere”:
“Some are worried about her safety in the current climate, in which extremist mobs can appear from nowhere to assault or lynch Muslims or those of a different sexuality. On 26 May, a 19-year-old woman in Odisha was dragged out of her house, tied to a tree and beaten by villagers for being in a lesbian relationship. Reports say the assault happened after villagers found the two women in bed.
Payoshni Mitra, a former government-appointed adviser to Chand who now works as an athletes’ rights activist, said: “With the return of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata party to power, a series of attacks on minorities, including sexual minorities, are being reported.”
While there is no stated connection between the “rightwing Bharatiya Janata party” and what Ms. Chand is facing, the party is somehow named and blamed all the same.
There are also other propagandistic elements in this article such as the evocation towards vague alarmist labels like “current climate,” and the theoretical construction of the BJP as being linked to attacks against “minorities” of all kinds.
The article notes a modification to its previous use of the phrase “extremist mobs,” I am not sure what else they said before but perhaps it had the word “Hindu” somewhere there?
2. BBC on India’s “Rape Culture”
The BBC World Service ran a story about a courageous woman in India fighting back against what it characterized as “India’s rape culture.”
The problem with such a characterization, as Chitra Raman writes in her comment to the BBC is:
“To suggest that rape is a CULTURAL attribute of India is an outrageous generalization by a media outlet of the BBC’s supposed standards of professionalism. On the other hand, your coverage of Saudi women — who have not a *fraction* of the independence afforded Indian women — could serve as a case study on reverential non-judgment and eggshell-walking.
Rape occurs anywhere in the world not because of some depraved “cultural” sanction but because of the *expectation of impunity.* That is as true in the sexually permissive US as it is in conservative India.
Do inspect your lenses more often for bias and distortion.”
3. The Washington Post on “Pious Hindus” (who may even be atheists) leading to a Hindu State.
In an article entitled “Is India becoming a Hindu State?” at The Washington Post, Professor Ajay Varghese writes about the “pious Hindu” discovered by his survey in Bihar.
Varghese makes some necessary methodological concessions to local context by offering a construct of Hindu religiosity that is different from standard Western/Christian questionnaires that measure “church attendance” and the like (though I find his argument that a “pious Hindu” may also be an atheist intriguing, a “cultural Hindu,” yes, but “pious”?). However, what stands out here is his seeming inability to imagine, let alone operationalize, the key issue any objective, open-minded social scientist must address in this context: the sense of Hindu vulnerability or grievance in the face of perceived constitutional discrimination against temples and Hindu institutions compared to Muslim and Christian and other institutions.
Conducting a survey which assumes a priori that Hindus don’t have any sense of vulnerability or grievance (whether the researcher agrees with the rationale for such a position or not) shows a lack of respect for what has been happening in the lives and minds of Hindus facing terrorist attacks, media smear jobs, and routine harassment and crime for several years now, and a rather strained attempt to find data to justify the popular media narrative advanced by the comedian Hasan Minhaj and others that the BJP is trying to make India “more religiously Hindu.” This is a persistent blind-spot in the field of South Asia studies today and studies seem to be blindly reproducing orientalist concepts about majoritarian Hindus who seem to have appeared with no history, subjectivity or voice at all. Academic constructs, not subjects or people at all.
In any case, although Varghese admits that most Hindus in his survey did NOT express open bigotry against Muslims, he still concludes that “pious Hindus” rejected the idea of equal treatment for all religions by wanting more government support for temples than for mosques. This, he concludes, is the core of the “idea of a Hindu state.”
I do not know if a longer paper will address the legal and historical realities of the situation (the Upword video on discrimination against Hindus by the government in the matter of temples might be a useful resource for him), but at the moment, his study seems rather a hypothetical one, like someone asking Black respondents in apartheid-era South Africa if they thought they should have more rights than Whites, and concluding then that they want a majoritarian state!
4. Article 15 Movie Trailer: Let’s Be “Indian” and Fight Those Saffron Rapist-Casteist Thugs Who Pretend to Bow to the Constitution
Several Facebook friends of mine have pointed out that a trailer for a new Bollywood movie called Article 15 indulges in some overt Hindu-smearing and seems to depict a specific community, Brahmins, as the evil villains who rape and kill “lower-caste” women. This is troubling in several fronts. Indian movies have been notorious for presenting the Hindu priest, and attendant symbols and markers such as saffron clothes, the shikha, and the tilak, as signs of villainy for a long time, but the topic of this new movie supposedly being a real-life rape-murder makes it even more tricky, and troubling: especially since it appears the culprits in that crime were not “Brahmin priests” (a link to some protests emerging on this, here).
The brazenly Hinduism-blaming media frenzy that erupted after the tragedy in Kathua last year is a sign of growing danger against Hindus everywhere; clearly, anti-Hindu propagandists feel assured that most Hindus are naïve or self-absorbed enough to realize that there is no logical reason for their sacred deities and icons to be depicted as violent symbols of rape except to perhaps stoke genocidal hatred against a whole community. Even as more Hindus are becoming alert to media racism and religious-intolerance against them, the complacence and complicity of “Middle Hindus” who somehow con themselves into thinking that cartoons showing Shiva’s Trishul penetrating a girl’s reproductive organs are making a noble moral statement is a frightening reality that all Hindus must consider.
(Caution: Graphic images below from 2018 media campaign blaming Hinduism for Kathua tragedy)
While I am not sure exactly how this movie unfolds since it is not yet released, the narrative in the trailer, and its use of flashing saffron-coded violent imagery is quite revealing. The hero seems to be a modern and idealist young Indian who is baffled by the complexities of caste in rural India, and discovers for himself how rape and casteism are interrelated. It could make for a powerful critique, but on the face of it, the movie seems to follow a textbook academic-media discourse popularized in the West which holds “Brahminical Patriarchy” and therefore Brahmins somehow responsible for crimes done even by non-Brahmins (similar to the New York Times columnist blaming the Hindu obsession with caste purity for Pakistan’s blasphemy violence!).
The saffron mob images appear quickly in the trailer, almost to evade detection. There is also a strange comment in there about praying to the Constitution but not following it; perhaps a sly dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s earnest gesture of genuflection to the Constitution recently.
Those are four examples that showed up in just one day. I conclude with a summary of media bias elements and Hinduphobic tropes in these four examples in the table below, and will address more examples as they appear in the near future.
