Today in Hinduphobia September 16, 2019: An Analysis of NPR’s Depiction of Hindus in 2019
National Public Radio, a well-regarded public broadcaster in the United States, has found itself in the news for controversial reasons. Last week, a producer for NPR in India who is also credited or partially credited with several reports on India, Kashmir and “Hindu Nationalism” tweeted a highly intolerant and contemptuous message against Hindus. This message has been painful for Hindus for two reasons (well, the fact that I have to spell it out since many readers likely don’t even get that anymore might make it reason number three).
One, this perception of Hinduism as a contemptible culture and Hindus as a sub-human group whose only redemption is to convert out of their religion has been a heavy one in our past; we retain memories of our ancestors and sacred lands that fell to armies driven by such ideologies, whether in the name of Islam, Christianity, or a more somewhat secularized “civilizing mission.” Two, this particular tweet comes not as an aberration from current discourse on Hindus in Western (and parts of the Anglophone South Asian) media, but simply as a slightly uglier form of it.
It is this second concern that I wish to expand upon in this article through a close study of NPR’s “Hindu” coverage this year. It is my hope that the evidence I present in this case will persuade those who believe that this matter is closed and done with (since the person in question has apologized and has reportedly resigned) that this ugly tweet part of a systemic problem in journalism today when it comes to the Hindu community. Even after this outrageous event, NPR has not really responded to the community’s concerns beyond passing the blame to the individual producer. NPR needs to look objectively and professionally at the nature of the systemic bias, bigotry, and mediocrity in its recent India coverage with regard to its treatment of Hindus and/or “Hindu Nationalism.” I have already expressed my desire to meet and help NPR with its training programs for avoiding Hinduphobia, and I hope this study helps them understand what exactly they have been doing wrong.
The Rationale, Sample and Method
My goal in this analysis is to objectively lay out what NPR’s coverage of Hindus and Hinduism looks like when seen closely and systematically. I do so first of all because of a larger lack of research on this topic in media studies, South Asian studies, and Asian American studies. Scholars have examined the depictions of South Asians in US media (Shilpa Dave and Bhoomi Thakore, for example), and activist-artists like Hari Kondabolu have also addressed issues of racism in pop culture around Brown, South Asian and Indian identity.
However, neither the documentary The Problem With Apu, nor various critical academic studies of media representation of South Asians have engaged with the question of how Hinduism, specifically, is depicted within that broader “South Asian” framework, much less with the growing concern from the Hindu community and some scholars about Hinduphobia (the Apu documentary, and the dozens of reviews about it, studiously avoid mentioning the “H” word even though Apu’s character is depicted quite explicitly as Hindu in the series). I believe that the reason for this gap is a deep-rooted colonial-orientalist legacy in South Asian studies that views the term “Hindu” primarily as a dominance-construct like “Whiteness,” rather than as a postcolonial, subaltern identity that includes Hindu women, men, children, elders of various class, caste, and national backgrounds too; all of whom come from a history of being colonized, and othered, by colonial and postcolonial discourses.
This question, in my view, has often been avoided in academia because of a trite anecdotal excuse that “Hindus” are a majority in India and a successful minority in America so there cannot be a thing as Hinduphobia. While one can always debate the question of what exactly Hinduphobia is, we must at least begin our study and conversation in earnest by admitting that it concerns human beings, and in the case of this study, the need for the media to maintain integrity in their work. (Note: For a useful position paper on Hinduphobia I refer readers to Professor Jeffery Long’s article which carefully separates what might be reasonable criticism of Hinduism or Hindu Nationalism from totalizing destructive prescriptions which if expressed for any other human group today would be instantly recognized as bigotry and hate speech. I believe that there is such a tendency at work in some positions in the discourse today, and it is best described, following the growing acceptance in civil society and academia of the terms Homophobia and Islamophobia, as Hinduphobia. You can find the link at the end of this essay).
For the sake of addressing the question of NPR’s coverage, I have examined all the articles that appeared with search term “Hindu” from January 1, 2019 to September 15, 2019 (I have also written about broader issues in the discourse of Hinduphobia from colonial times here, and examined some case-studies such as US media coverage of Indian elections, here, and the New York Times’s coverage of the Pulwama suicide bombing that killed over 40 Indians here).
I examined each article for its relevance first, and eliminated a few hits that did not seem significant for study here (such as results about the “Hindukush” mountains). I looked at widely used indicators for studies of bias and representation such as labelling, headlines, use of sources, subjects used in photographs, and for widely recognized colonial-racist-orientalist tropes as discussed in the media studies literature such as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s important book Unthinking Eurocentrism).
My goal here is to simply understand if there is a diversity of representations around the word Hindu, and what sort of a story broadly speaking, is being driven about Hindus and Hinduism by NPR. Are Hindus depicted as whole human beings with agency, voice, desire, dignity and history, most of all; or as monolithic, stereotyped, de-individualized characters lacking a past, memory, or human’s right to justice and hope? Are they presented in a variety of positions, or largely as criminals and violent actors? Are their grievances and pains recorded, or is that part suppressed or erased? Does NPR’s discourse on Hindus, in other words, look like the colonizer’s fantasies of the 19th century when Europe sought to “civilize” the other, or is it closer to modern, professional journalism as befits a world where universal human rights are recognized and practiced?
Admittedly, these are broad questions, but I share them since I teach media studies and believe that a better media will make for a better world. For now, and to help us get there, I share my findings along four broad themes: a) The normalization of “Hindu Nationalism” as the dominant message around Hindu lives today b) The normalization of sloganistic, unexamined, and sometimes inaccurate definitions of the term Hindu Nationalism c) The criminalization and demonization of Hindus and Hinduism broadly, leading up to d) The silencing of anti-Hindu violence, and the normalization most importantly of cultural, political, and possibly existential genocide of Hindus.
Normalizing “Hindu Nationalism” as the Major Issue in Hindu Coverage
Forty five of 73 articles, that is about 62% of articles on Hindus in the last year had something to do with what is often called “Hindu Nationalism.” It may be the case that this large proportion had something to do with the intense coverage of India during an election year (they even had a whole series titled “Faith and Power”), but my sense (which I will corroborate with further study) is that it is perhaps not an aberration given the widespread use of “Hindu Nationalism” as a framing-device and master-concept in media commentary and academic discourses these days.
While I examine these articles more closely below, it is important to point out that the remaining 28 articles that did not explicitly mention “Hindu Nationalism” are not exactly all about neutral or positive topics either. An article on sewage in Mumbai comes up in this list (how it showed up in a “Hindu” search is somewhat surprising, but filth is a common colonial trope nonetheless). Another somewhat surprising result for a “Hindu” search is an article on a viral video about potholes in India (the first result in fact, from September 15), though in this case it seems to have been due to a reference to “Yamraj, the Hindu god of death.” There are also more seriously disturbing news stories about crime and death in which Hinduism or Hindus feature, which I address shortly.
What is also interesting is some of the cases in which “Hindu” stories appear in Western contexts. While some of these are routine mentions of the word “Hindu” in the context of interviews or stories on Western artists, the word “Hindu” also occurs in other contexts that raise questions about appropriateness and appropriation. A report on Pop Culture Happy Hour dated 3/8/2019 on American Gods talks about “Mama-ji, a Hindu war-goddess.” While this may be a reference to another production and not an editorial judgment by NPR’s staff, the question does remain as to how “Hindu” references by non-Hindus, even fantastic concoctions of non-existent cultural forms, get normalized in US discourses while Hindu viewpoints are ignored.
One of the few cases where a proud, devout Hindu voice is represented (though the phrase “Devout Hindu” is also demonized as I show later) is a June 28 report on Stonewall which quotes Manvendra Singh Gohil as saying: “As a Hindu, Stonewall is a place of worship for me.”
Otherwise, we don’t seem to see Hindus proud or happy about anything, much less Hindus standing up for civil rights, freedom, or anything decent at all (and two movie reviews about Hindus and Muslims falling in love with each other, maybe that counts too).
The first key issue I explore below though is the much used phrase “Hindu Nationalism.”
b) How is Hindu Nationalism Explained?
NPR’s story on Hindu Nationalism began in early 2019 with ridicule (a report on a Science Congress where some speakers made ludicrous comments) and reached a climax of sorts with epic-genocidal-fears (reports quoting Pakistan Prime Minister Khan’s tweet accusing India of “ethnic cleansing” and “Srebrenica style massacre” (where 8,000 men and boys were killed). In between, we see several experts say more or less the same things about the threat that Hindu Nationalism presents to minorities and the ideal of India as its “founding fathers Gandhi and Nehru” envisioned it and so on. Examples of “Hindu Nationalism” are mentioned like a “surge in lynchings,” revision of citizenship lists, changing place names, and so on. But on the whole, it is not difficult to appreciate that there is neither clarity, nor basic grasp of historical information, in what is essentially a repetition-machine. The vague platitudes include statements like:
-Hindu Nationalists want to revise mainstream Indian norms along Hindu lines. (emphasis added)
-Modi is a Hindu Nationalist who wants the country’s majority Hindu faithto play a bigger role in public life
- BJP is a Hindu Nationalist party.. brought majority Hindu faith into politics & public life in unprecedented ways
There is also one statement (from the April report on Ayurveda and cow excreta) which sounds rather precise, but I really wonder if it can be substantiated by NPR:
-That is also Modi’s message: that the Hindu faith is being diluted by globalization, secularism or immigration.
My sense is that Modi really hasn’t talked about “Hindu faith” in this particular manner at all, and has often taken the opposite view, that Yoga needs to go out and help the whole world through International Yoga Day and so on. In fact, most of his rhetoric in the past few years has been on nationalism (“India First!” and “Make in India” and so on) rather than about “Hindu faith.” He does signal his Hindu practices with photo-ops doing Yoga, meditating, and so on. But to assume that his message is about globalization diluting his Hindu faith sounds like a cut-and-paste move from some other nation’s religious fundamentalism story.
These vague comments about what “Hindu Nationalism” must be is indicative of an absence of nuanced engagement with what is actually happening in India, and lack of understanding of what is being said directly and without preconceived academic notions that sometimes equate something that is simply “Hindu” with being “Hindu Nationalist” (as the notorious New York Times article on the Sari did). But since these narratives are often connected with the real crimes and tragedies that take place in mob-violence events, it is important to take them seriously.
My view is that if we sincerely wish to understand the truth-claims of this sort of discourse as a whole, we must focus on the key claim being made here: that Modi, BJP and RSS are all primarily invested in a violent “religious”expansion project of some kind, and that it is religious belief of a Hindu nature, that is the cause of this violence and so on. That claim inevitably gets us into main concern here, which is not so much what is or isn’t “Hindu Nationalism,” but really what is being said about and done to Hindus, in the name of this supposed journalism about “Hindu Nationalism.” But before we turn to that, we must note at least some obvious problems in what is being said here about Hindu Nationalism too.
Frayer tries to make a distinction in one report along the lines that Shashi Tharoor and others have of late made between Hinduism and Hindutva. That is a commendable effort. She says that Hinduism is “many gods, diversity,” good so far, and that Hindu Nationalism is political, the idea that faith and culture should shape the state (though most early “Hindu Nationalist” figures as far as I know seemed more concerned with Hindus surviving imperialist Christians and Muslims who wanted them to convert or die, actually).
Then, she adds, Hindu Nationalism has its roots in the 19th century in opposition to liberal Hindu reformers, Portuguese colonialism and Christian missionaries. Let us be generous and say that she got the Portuguese and British mixed up. But the key issue here is the framing. According to this conceptualization, “liberal Hindu reformers” and colonizers and missionaries were all in the same, “good guys” category. This view is not inconsistent with the bizarre ways in which some scholars of South Asia studies have performed twists and turns and laments over the past few years in order to keep their bugbears looking alive enough. In any case, Frayer ends up doing what the “Hindu Nationalists” keep saying too, which is that their origin, and present course, are all fundamentally anti-colonial in nature. So, either Frayer has unwittingly complimented them as anti-colonials, or more likely, she has decided the colonizers and missionaries and their collaborators were actually the good guys.
Criminalization and Demonization of Hindus (not “Hindu Nationalists”)
Despite the one occasion on which Frayer attempts to distinguish between Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism, what we find in the whole conversation on Hindus here is an easy conflation of the two terms, and of course, the collapse of both into a demonization pattern. In some instances, we find phrases like “devout Hindus” being used for murderers and criminals, presumably because they want really hard to believe that whatever crimes happened in India these past few years involving Hindus and Muslims took place because of Hindus being too driven by their faith (interestingly, one report on the daughter of a Hindu woman who converted from Hinduism to Islam and joined ISIS that appeared around the time of the Sri Lanka church attacks side-steps the question of radicalization as being related to “devout” religiosity there, and instead blames the “Hindu Nationalist” government as one of the factors driving ISIS recruitment in India).
If not “devout Hindus,” sometimes even just plain “Hindus” get blamed. For example, Rana Ayyub’s quote on August 21 does not say it’s “Hindu Nationalists” but Hindus to blame(“India’s Hindu majority tacitly supports not murder but some discrimination against Muslims” “hey, this household has beef in their fridge, let’s go attack them”). Now this perception may be consistent with the theory which has been built in several Western news media outlets since 2015 that Hindus are like the Whites of India and Muslims the African Americans (a theory which of course also demands that all mention of a Hindu past before the arrival of Islam is silenced; like in the case of the Allahabad renaming report which totally avoids admitting that it was a name change back to the older name!).
The key question I examine now is what is really happening around the use of the word “Hindu.” For that, it is useful to go wider than the stories in which it is specifically “Hindu Nationalism” that is talked about. In the following table, I look at reports that name and/or blame Hindus (or a particular construction of Hindus and Hinduism) in relation to crime, violence and suffering, and also point out how some examples are prevalent “tropes” about Hinduism since colonial times that can be found dominating across media.
The picture of the “Hindu” that emerges in these stories is not particularly in contrast with the “Hindu Nationalist” one in terms of accuracy, and in terms of negativity. Hinduism and Hindu identity are evoked (and not even “Hindu Nationalism” here) as a cause or centrally relevant issue in stories about Indian soldiers’ funerals, the timing of a US political appointment, a musician’s experience of racism in Myanmar, farmers’ poverty, death due to smoke inhalation in Nepal, and the rape and murder of a child. While these reports can each be examined through fact-checking for veracity and one can argue about where the “Hindu” label was appropriate and where it might be gratuitous (and a comparative study of labels for crimes concerning other communities would also be useful), here, I draw attention to the broader discourse, and the use of recognizable colonial-orientalist tropes in several reports. Why is an indigenous cultural tradition (broadly calling itself Hinduism) sought to be portrayed as the cause,or at least an “angle,” in so many stories that deal with violence, depravity, and oppression? Conversely (as I show in the next section), why is there a profound omission of reports about the same community being demonized here as victims of violence, depravity, and oppression?
For one thing, it is clear that there is a double-standard at work already (and one that goes back to racism and religious-supremacism from colonial times): the quietly normative way in which Frayer privileges the claim of Kashmiri Muslims to exclusivity if not purity in the last example is a telling contrast to the systematically different ways in which Hindus are perceived in the media to this day. Frayer has no qualms at all apparently accepting this view of Hindus as “contagion,” as somehow by their very presence (if it happens that is, 370 change notwithstanding), “diluting” the Muslim culture of Kashmir. Picture this sentiment with the terms reversed, and you will see, hopefully, why it is so profoundly wrong (and if one believes that such a claim is okay because Kashmir is the “only Muslim majority state in Hindu majority India,” well, one can also get perspective perhaps by noting how many Hindu majority and how many Muslim majority and Christian majority countries there are in the world).
The Silencing of Violence Against Hindus
We have noticed two trends so far in NPR’s coverage of Hindus; the first is the over-representation of the “Hindu Nationalism” or “Faith and Power” claim common in academia and media today, and the second is the frequent association of Hinduism with crime, violence and suffering, either as an explicitly causal claim, or just by casual mention. There is however, a far more important theme that must be addressed here, and that is of absence. The study of absences in media often reveals a lot more about power and identity than sometimes what is actually being said too. It is important at the outset to understand what kind of absence specifically we are talking about here too; too often, Hindu community leaders in the U.S. tend to argue that Hindus deserve better representation in the media because we are successful, law-abiding, “model minority” and so on. Media, in turn, view that, as they do Hindu lives anyway, with contempt. Who likes vanity anyway?
The key issue here though, at least for me as a media researcher, is not about “better press” for Hindus, but about a stand against dangerously dehumanizing propaganda. Members of the Hindu community, and the media professions, really need to pause and consider the insanity of this runaway train of Hindu-labelling that is going on today in mainstream media. It is a pathology, and while I do not indulge in conspiracy theories or speculation about intent, I do have to say it is as I see it about consequence. The consequences of propaganda are horrifying; whether it is of religious propaganda in medieval times or modern propaganda in the early 20th century. And Hindus, believe it or not, have been victims of this consistently through history, and if one were to get past the deliberate media silencing, we might see that this goes on today as well.
(Note: there is one instance in which anti-Hindu bigotry is noted; a July 23 story entitled “Trump’s remarks against Congresswoman are not the only example of the ‘go back’ taunt” quotes Zeenat Rahman as saying that white football players said “Gandhi, Hindu, go back to where you came.” Ms. Rahman notes she isn’t Hindu. Another South Asian American, Anjali Upadhyaya also reports racial slurs. I should add here that I have written several times that Islamophobia and Hinduphobia affect people not of those faiths and should be contested with equal vehemence and moral force).
Conclusion: Hinduphobia Today
How NPR’s coverage of Hindus sustains a climate of media Hinduphobia is best understood by recounting how Hindu representation operates at three levels.
At the first level, we have the basic issue of journalistic professionalism and competence. Are reporters and editors open to debate, new views, and change, or are they caught up in defending their own preconceived notions, slogans, and, well, bigoted beliefs about some fellow human beings? We have seen several examples in NPR’s coverage that suggest that this dimension is somewhat lacking in NPR. There is no diversity of views among the experts they bring in, nor is there a clear understanding of what is happening in India beyond ivory-tower labelling.
At the second level, we see the play of the media manifestation of what Edward Said calls the “restorative citation of antecedent authority” (and Stuart Hall calls the problem of “old movies” that keep being made again and again). Under the seemingly objective, contemporary, drive to report on modern-day India, Nepal, and other countries, we see the presence of what are old colonial tropes about the other; some of these tropes are broadly colonial and racist in nature, and some are quite specific to old missionary propaganda about the Hindus who resist conversion (“priests,” “idols,” and so on).
Finally, at the third level, we need to understand Hinduphobia as not just a media phenomenon, but a real-world problem, a political phenomenon. And this, we can do, only if media and academia get over their willful suppression of information about violence, organized and otherwise, against Hindus and for simply being Hindu at that.
At the moment though, our society is resisting that change intensely, and by resorting to ever more increasing denial, and dehumanization. This is violence, and it must end.
Postscript: Unsilencing Hindu Pain (Suggested Links)
Prof. Jeffery Long’s essay on Hinduphobia
“I am a Hindu living in exile.” — video by Ashish Dhar
HHR London (Hindu Human Rights) is one of the finest resources on anti-Hindu human rights violations around the world.
