Imagine turning on the TV one day and finding yourself the target of a smear campaign. You know you are innocent but the campaign has picked up momentum. Wherever you look online, people are calling you names, accusing you of something you have not done.
Then, it spills into real life. A cold look or brush-off from a once-cordial classmate or co-worker. A sneer. You miss out on a promotion, and other things you had going for you.
What do you do then? Fight back, show people how they have been fooled, and clear your name? Or ignore it, hoping it’s just a nuisance that will go away?
Both are reasonable options. But then, there is one option that’s not.
Let’s say you get on your Twitter-Facebook-WhatsApp, set your keys to Caps-Lock, and boast to all the world that you are in fact actually what the smear campaign says you are.
Absurd, isn’t it? Unless you have some super-smart strategy lined up, the only loser in this scenario is you. There’s no way smears go away if you confirm them with your conduct.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the nature of the Hindu community’s response to the war presently being waged on its reputation worldwide.
Yatha Raja, Tatha Praja?
I have written about the propaganda war on Hindus, and the Indian government’s inadequate responses earlier. In this article, I will show how the Hindu community has failed to defend its reputation by choosing to project a highly self-defeating story about itself. This story might make sense to Hindus in private, but in public, it makes neutral observers think the propaganda about us must be true.
What exactly is this point on which anti-Hindu propaganda and Hindu self-image have converged? Let us look at three common tropes.
First, the label “cow piss drinker.” It’s a common insult now for Hindus. It is vicious, but still, only an insult. No one believes it literally.
Next, the “Hindu Nationalist” label. This is widespread, but its use has acquired a bit of an in-house wink-wink in the anti-Hindu establishment now. Recall Hasan Minhaj’s 2019 Indian elections programme on Netflix. Even as he warned viewers about the RSS, he couldn’t help cracking jokes about their obviously non-threatening appearance.
I suspect that the only people who believe (or pretend to believe) that “Hindu Nationalists” are like ISIS or Al Qaeda are upper-class Indians in posh colleges and colonies who also believe the 9/11 massacre was not as bad as the 6 January Capitol Hill riot. Everyone else, like the Leicester liars, just deploy “Hindu Nationalists” as a distraction tactic, or an inside joke.
So, the two common labels for Hindus in the public mind today are not necessarily widely believed. But there is one image against us that has stuck. It is that of the vain, boastful, money and status-obsessed Hindu.
‘Slumdogs’ and Underdogs
Remember the obnoxious quizmaster played by Anil Kapoor in the movie Slumdog Millionaire? That is just a slightly exaggerated version of how non-Hindus see Hindus who boast about money and status.
I do not doubt that Slumdog Millionaire was a vile piece of propaganda designed to dehumanise Hindus. But effective propaganda often contains small bits of truth, and this is the one bit of truth that anti-Hindu forces have figured out can be weaponised quite easily.
Hindus simply don’t realise that the world doesn’t respect materialistic preening as much as they think, and not from us anyway. When we share proud little memes online about how many CEOs are Indians, how Hindu Americans have high incomes, and other seemingly harmless posts about the “new, confident Hindu,” they look very different to outsiders (and remember, the Internet is public, and everyone is reading everything). It makes Hindus look weak, and then, when we blame Hinduphobia not on sheer religious bigotry but on economic envy, our concern looks even more unconvincing. “If you’re so rich, why complain about Hinduphobia?” is what a lot of people are thinking about all our complaints, frankly.
Where has this image come from?
Let’s begin with real-life. Whether it’s true or false, Indians in the diaspora have a bit of a reputation in their dealings with others, especially working-class Americans and labourers, of being, well, tight with money. This may not be uniquely Indian or Hindu, but unfortunately the image has stuck. We are seen as not just well-off, but also exploitative and greedy. That is not a good thing, and our online boasting makes us appear even worse.
The image of the classist/casteist Hindu isn’t just impressionistic but also exists as a core belief in influential institutions such as academia. University professors, especially of “South Asian” identification, and some of their white-allies, teach this idea of Hindu privilege (either as “Brahmin” or just “Hindu”) to thousands of students. And they believe it. Some of them are indeed privileged, being children of first-generation Hindu immigrants to the US who earned a decent living. They project their particular economic advantages to all Hindus, or Brahmins at the very least. They truly believe that Hindus are privileged oppressors, and therefore anti-Hindu prejudice is a myth.
Many online Hindus of course like to think this is just a problem with the “left liberals” but this image also exists in the opposite side of the Western political spectrum. Conservatives in the US and UK see Hindus as rich, elitist, and casteist. The only difference between the Left and Right’s story about Hindu privilege is about its causes. The Right thinks it is because of the benevolent civilizing influence of the British Raj (as a UK conservative minister of Indian descent recently and embarrassingly put it), while the Left believes that it is because upper-caste / Brahmin Hindus from India have used Western diversity quotas to get cushy jobs for themselves here, and on top of it are now denying the same diversity protections for their traditional caste-victims.
Of course, the strong common belief among both Left and Right is that this elitism is the core behavioural outcome of Hinduism itself. It’s the religion that causes inequality, in real life, and also in Hindu behaviour.
The third space in which this image of Hindus as classist/casteist is playing out is in the minds and social relationships of diaspora children. I notice Hindu children responding in one of two broad ways as they go through high school and college here. Many of them quickly join the “South Asian” bandwagon where they get strength and courage, a sense of moral fulfilment which is more rewarding spiritually than their Hindu parents’ strict focus on jobs and money (and of course, good jobs too in academia and elsewhere). Others, especially children of newer (post Y2K) immigrants, are probably more explicitly Hindu-identified, join Hindu groups on campus, and also speak out, a little, against anti-Hinduism. But these children’s social-political understanding, possibly derived largely from their parents and their informal social media conversations, sees the causes of anti-Hinduism as strictly economic: “They hate us because we are rich.”
Analysing the Hindu self-image
Why do Hindus like to boast about success on social media when they face Hinduphobic attacks?
First, it is a gut reaction to absurd levels of gaslighting, hate, and lies. Granted.
Second, it is an attempt to reaffirm a set of beliefs they have about Western society which is threatened by the anti-Hindu narrative; the belief that if you work hard and follow the rules, you will get your reward; a faith in American (and post-liberalization / private-sector Indian) meritocracy.
Third, it draws on very limited social knowledge about the world today, accompanied by ignorance about current cultural sensibilities (or what one might call “soft skills”) and compensates by echoing memes from the Indian/Hindu/RW echo chamber, many of which any objective reader would find obnoxiously prejudiced (for example: an Indian politician’s classist “puncture-walla” slur; the British Hindu leader’s insistence on national TV that Hindus should stop saying “Hinduphobia” because “phobia” words are used by “other communities,” who are implicitly seen as inferior to Hindus).
Given this attitude, Hindu complaints about Hinduphobia rarely come across to many non-Hindus, and even some Hindus, as those of a community facing real problems in life (on that note, the few times Hindus who do actually go out to protest in real life often fail to prepare for the camera – photos of Hindu protests invariably show people smiling rather than like they are serious about the genocidal issues they are facing).
Human rights monitoring and activism, protests, all of these take training, funding, professionalism and hard work. Without these, Hindu complaints about anti-Hinduism will barely come across as serious concerns to outsiders, and even to Hindu children.
A deeper cause of the problem
Another broader issue to think about here is that Hindus, whether they have good jobs and houses or not, are highly boxed in by persuasive forces on a global scale today and Hindu “leaders” and organisations have failed to see that no one really has a serious stake in the Hindu collective image as such today.
As individuals, Hindus can still slip out of the collective reputational damage already done to Hindus by outside interests and inside incompetence (though that wriggle room has decreased greatly). But as a group, no one has a stake really in the “Hindu” brand except perhaps a handful of Hindu-named groups who do mostly shadow-boxing — and Indian politics fronting.
That too, unfortunately, is a harsh truth that must be told.
Hindu American groups are seen as “Hindu Nationalist” fronts at least partly because they don’t maintain a clear line between fighting for Hindu human rights and promoting the BJP government. For example, have Hindu American groups ever protested the murders of Hindus in India since 2014? Why not?
And just last week, when the New York Times carried an ad alleging human rights violations by the Government of India, it was Hindu groups abroad sounding off on Twitter, not the Government of India setting the record firmly straight.
The sins of the State
These examples point to another problem. It’s bad enough that Hindus are seen as boastful and vain about their wealth. On top of that, Hindus, mostly powerless and harmless ones individually, are now also carrying the burden of defending a ruling party and the Indian State itself.
I am not saying it’s illegal, since it’s everyone’s right in a democracy to do so. But once again, all this makes Hindus appear to be well-off and without real problems (unlike say those Rohingya refugees everyone talks about) and also oppressive, because we have the whole Indian government promoting us at the cost of minorities. I know that’s not true at all. But that is the image Hindus have today.
As Krishna said to Arjuna
To conclude, I would like to offer a simple bit of advice on understanding the communication-Kurukshetra inspired by Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Gita.
We have to practice the art of removing our egos from our own social media activities to understand what our words objectively look like to strangers. The more we identify with our own internal narratives, whether those come from fear, or vanity, the less we understand how our actions and words in public are making us look.
Social media is not like an intimate tea-shop chat, or a private phone call, or inland letter. It is a nonstop public theatre which can work against you easily. Whatever you type is seen not only by your like-minded friends, but others too, including your own children.
Even if you are anonymous and think you are safe, Hindus as a whole, including possibly your own children, can be endangered by the impulsive words you spew out simply to scratch an itch online.
So if we really wish to win a communication war, we must remember that unlike the monotheisms, we are not backed up by vast, centralised propaganda institutions, and it is left to each of us to protect and preserve Hinduism in our own lives and ways.
Learn from elders
We may not have much by way of PR funds, but our own life stories and memories can help us wrestle our poor and harmful image and self-image back to our control now. Remember your own family memories in between your Twitter and WhatsApp reactions.
Ask yourself just one thing: Would your grandparents’ generation have gone around bragging to strangers about how well off they were?
Probably not.
There is a clear social history to this generational change. Sociologists point out that it was only after liberalisation in 1991 that even “conspicuous consumption” became the norm in Indian families (it was “conspicuous frugality” before that).
The present-day tendency of Hindus to be so openly boastful is a new one, and hopefully not a permanent one. If you are successful, people can see it anyway, and if you are greedy, people can see that too.
We have to abolish this vaasana that has got us trapped in our haters’ propaganda without delay if we are to avoid becoming the scapegoat for the rage that is rising against the groups and ideologies actually causing massive inequality and exploitation on a planetary scale.
Remember the Gita. Remember “Gandhi’s Talisman” (picture the face of the poorest man you have seen before you do anything). Jai Sri Ram. Jai Hanuman. May Mother Lakshmi give us enough to serve, and Mother Saraswati grant us the wisdom to deserve it.
This is the concluding part of a three-part series. Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.
The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). Views expressed are personal.
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