As a minority community in the United States, amounting to less than 1% of the population of this nation, Saba Sattar’s article in The Main News on November 9, 2021 smacks of Hinduphobia, which the Hindu American Foundation has defined as “A set of antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes and behaviors towards Hinduism and Hindus…” This article put forth imagined connections and unfounded assumptions to generative a false and dangerous narrative about Hindus, the 3rd largest religious and spiritual community in the world, and about India, the world’s largest democracy, an important American ally, and a nation is known for millennia for its pluralism and generous refugee policy for religious minorities who are facing genocide in neighboring Muslim and communist countries.
Here are two errors, representative of the sort of glossing over of important detail Sattar makes, that make the threats about the future of India’s democracy and secularism fall flat.
In the first line there is the menacing assertion that India’s Muslims are “increasingly targeted”.
While inter-community violence in India does occur, in Pew Research Center’s comprehensive surveys of religious life in India some 80% of Indians feel free to practice their religion, with near-identical responses from Hindus and Muslims. Furthermore, 84%84% of Indians believe that respecting other religions is “very important”. To the surprise of many, in a nation with over 200 million Muslims, 19% of Indian Muslim voters voted for the ruling coalition which Sattar attempts to describe as Hindu nationalist.
Pew’s stats show a far greater religious tolerance than what headlines lead you to believe.
The second major error concerns the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference.
Sattar states 53 American universities sponsored this conference. This is simply false. The reality is, as a result of unprecedented pushback from the Hindu American community, highlighting the grossly Hinduphobic nature of some of the conference panelists, many of the universities touted by the organizers clarified that they did not in fact sponsor the conference at all. Harvard, among many others, demanded that their university logo be removed from conference promotional materials.
At the same time, though conference organizers tried to claim that they were were only discussing ‘dismantling’ Hindutva, rather than targeting Hinduism as a religion, a disturbing number of presenters made anti-Hindu statements. One moderator even proposed that the conference ought to be discussing dismantling Hinduism as a whole. Many panelists made bigoted statements about Hinduism.
Articles like this, rather than promoting understanding and truth, promote political and intercommunity tensions. West Texans deserve to have a more accurate and balanced perspective.
Padmaja Patel
Chair of Hindu Association of West Texas board of directors
