Hindus in America, both FOB fresh off the boat first-generation immigrants as well as US-born ABCDs American-Born Confused Desi, rarely stop to think about the deeper causes for their largely unsuccessful efforts in battling Hinduphobic racism.

For about 20 years, many Hindus in America have complained bitterly about Hinduphobic media, Hinduphobic school textbooks, Hinduphobic professors, Hinduphobic activists, and Hinduphobic politicians. At the moment, they are complaining, desperately, about rather nakedly obvious Hinduphobic legislation in California.

Yet, despite this complaining through many Facebook posts, WhatsApp forwards, X-Tweets, meetings with politicians, and some minor achievements like resolutions from government bodies appreciating Hindus and of late even recognising anti-Hindu prejudices, Hinduphobia continues to be normalised rapidly in American institutions and discourses. Lobbyists and enablers of Hinduphobia are able to push through ever more unbelievable lies about Hindus and Hinduism into mainstream respectability and lies, while the ability of their opponents to resist them remains equally pitiable and laughable.

What I say here is not new. I see many smart commentators on social media trying to analyse this continuing weakness in the diasporic Hindu community. Some talk about the need for “unity.” Others lament the lack of funding. Some feel betrayed by the politicians they supported thinking they would reciprocate that support by advancing Hindu concerns. These solutions, and of course, the problem, all remain as they are, despite years of effort.

Two stories

It is this impasse I would like to try and offer a path out of now, using as a comparative case study the communication styles of two figures in the American Hindu community.

One is a real person, Vivek Ramaswamy. He has struck a chord in the once-insular American conservative community, inspiring hope for America and at least some respect for his ancestral cultural heritage with his eloquent words. Observers are not just curious, but actually bewildered by his seeming success so far. Indian American politicians in the past let go of their ancestral traditions and even names in order to try and succeed. Ramaswamy appears to be winning hearts and minds even while refusing to abandon his heritage, or perhaps, precisely by refusing to abandon his heritage. It is impressive. So far.

The other figure I will invoke by way of contrast is a fictitious, composite one. Let’s call it “UHF”. Maybe it can stand for “United Hindu Friends”. Now, UHF might also sound like Ultra High Fortune, but let’s ignore that. It’s fictitious. No one person or organisation is intended to be insulted.

But every example of statements made by them we will discuss below is, sadly, real.

Before we begin, I would like to remind us that I approach this exercise as a professional student of communication, and also as a writer. Most UHF ecosystem conversations in the US take communication for granted, perhaps because most Hindu Americans are functional in English. There is however a difference between writing for personal reasons, writing for career and business, and writing for collective cultural and social change; a challenge even more arduous given how slickly weaponized and pervasive anti-Hindu propaganda is in the American cultural mainstream (media, schools, colleges, and corporate policies, for sure, even if not quite in everyday social life, yet).

Equality, underdogs, victims

One key issue in both Ramaswamy’s message and that of the UHF is equality. Equality is of course a hotly contested and convoluted idea in US politics today, and I will not go into the details in this piece. I will however point out that Ramaswamy, and the UHF complaining about Hinduphobia are both in their own way trying to win over people to their vision of American equality. Ramaswamy, of course, wants equality in the sense of a noble American vision that he believes is in danger of extinction without a dramatic course correction (just one generation away, even). He also wants the nomination, votes, and hopefully, a double-term Presidency which he will leave in 2032 with a sense of a job well done. That is what he says so convincingly.

UHF’s idea of equality is of course more community-centred, and comes from a growing frustration that America is not the meritocratic place they had once imagined it to be, for Hindus. They do not necessarily want special treatment for Hindus, but just equal treatment. They do not want to be told they alone are casteist, oppressive, and so on, so they oppose SB403 and the attendant caste discourse around it. Yet, they are seen as demanding special treatment because of “fragility,” in the words of their opponents.

All of this is understandable. But this is the point at which the divergence between reality and the UHF vision of equality starts. Ramaswamy goes out into the world with a story about how the American dream lost its way from being one of cheering the underdog to one of being hijacked by claims of victimhood. Race, religion, class, “differences”, are real in his view too, but only to the extent they are.

American unity, indeed the American Dream, is bigger than differences. It’s a good story, being told well, and it is getting him ahead.

Other Hindu Americans, our UHFs, are also in a way trying to make a case that something is not right in America today, but somehow fail to make a dent in the mainstream. What they say lands on blank faces. Moreover, whatever they say seems to make the professional Hinduphobes even more powerful, brazen, and confident. Why is this the case?

It is because, in my view, the UHF narrative about being Hindu in America rests not on an understanding of either America, Hinduism, or even the science and art of narrative, but simply on a set of boastful, “We Hindus are better than you” propositions. I propose that these are the four most prevalent, and self-sabotaging tropes in our discourse today:

Boast Number 1: ‘We are Better than Muslims’

This bizarre obsession that many diaspora Hindus have about trying to prove to their (White) employers and co-workers that Hindus are “better” than Muslims has surfaced again and again, and only confirms to neutral non-Indian observers whatever they have been reading about “Islamophobia” and “Hindu Nationalists.” This issue has come up often, and in the weirdest of contexts.

A couple of years ago, during the Dismantling Global Hindutva controversy, a Hindu community leader in the UK tweeted that his organisation got the UK government to remove anti-Hinduphobia protections from anti-hate legislation because, well, they thought Hindus shouldn’t get associated with Muslims in their employers’ perception. Now, many of the same Hindu organisations go around chanting “Hinduphobia” but get tossed aside so easily by governments, academics, and other institutions.

This is just one issue. The most outlandish example of the “Better than Muslims” obsession though has to be the 9/11 fantasy UHFs have kept repeating over the years. A few years ago, some UHFs noticed that Swami Vivekananda’s historic Chicago speech was given on 11 September. So they have been going around ever since saying that the world has to choose between “the Muslim 9/11 and the Hindu 9/11.” They have no idea how sad that sounds.

Boast Number 2: ‘We are better than Blacks and other minorities’

This has been a long-repeated trope among diasporic Hindus in a variety of contexts ranging from the openly racist to more contextual observations on economic indicators. This sort of thinking (and posturing) reached an ugly peak around the summer of 2020 during the BLM protests and riots. It got so contagious that even non-Indian Hindu leaders were tweeting away about how awful the world media were for not praising Hindus for not rioting. It is a statement that serves no purpose other than to pamper the egos of Hindus, and absolutely fails to have the effect that they think it has on neutral readers’ minds.

UHFs think that by rattling off Hindu income, education, and incarceration statistics and factoids, they are proving something about their innocence or goodness. At best, it comes across as infantile. At worst, it marks them, once again, as perfect stooges for the propaganda that has been produced about Hindus for decades as casteist, classist, racist and elitist. A UK newspaper even published a subtly Hinduphobic piece with a headline sarcastically repeating what UHF Hindus keep saying anyway: “UK Hindus: Smart, rich, and very well-behaved” (emphasis added). Pat-Pat. Good boy.

Boast Number 3: ‘We pay more taxes than you’

This is a variation of the older classist inferiority-complex tropes which appears to have started earlier this year in relation to the SB403 legislation in California. I have no idea what this boast is supposed to accomplish, but UHFs frequently post on social media now that Hindus are 1 per cent of the population but pay 6 per cent of taxes in the United States. If this claim has had some magical effect on California legislators, I don’t know. I doubt it, frankly.

Boast Number 4. ‘We are better than useless liberal arts and humanities people’

I understand that for the average Hindu in the diaspora reading about outrageous statements made by US professors about Hindu deities it seems like the problem is somehow with the whole arts, humanities, or social science profession itself. But even this problem is rarely framed by our UHF social media warriors in a way that other students and scholars in these professions can understand, and sympathise with. Instead, once again, what comes across is the boast, and very often, an empty, useless, self-defeating boast: “We have STEM and MBA degrees (and of course, earn a lot more than you), while you study useless things like arts and humanities, so, (once again), we are better than you.”

Guess what? Those “useless” liberal arts majors are having the last laugh about you as you cry and squirm about Hinduphobia, ineffectively, are they not?

I do not mean to be too mean about this, but as someone who studied engineering for two years, and then switched to the social sciences, I can see how a lack of respect for knowledge and learning, regardless of one’s discipline, does not help anybody, least of all Hindus.

After all, whatever we call Hinduism is not just about science, math, or management, but really about fields of knowledge that today would fall into the arts, broadly speaking, not STEM.

So, when UHF Hindus go around trying to educate Hindu parents about Hinduphobia in colleges by haughtily dismissing the liberal arts as “useless,” they only come across to the next generation of Hindu college students as proof, once again, that what the Hinduphobic professors and peers say about their wealthy, elitist, casteist parents must all be true. And then, no one should be surprised then if their devout, Bala Vihar attending Hindu American kids come back after two years in college calling their parents “fash” (fascists).

On that note, I should also point out that it is a Hindu graduate student in the liberal arts, Sarah Gates, who has relentlessly tried to defend the Chinmaya Mission from scurrilous misrepresentation by critics that their Bala Vihar classes were “Hindu Nationalist” indoctrination camps; it is the arts and humanities scholars Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee whose research has helped so many Hindus understand and critique the colonial Protestant roots of Indology, and of course, the erudite and respected students of culture at the Ghent School, who have all sought to resist the total destruction of truth in the academy all these years; UHFs need to get over this contemptuous attitude towards fellow Hindus in the academy even while using our work or watered-down versions of our work.

To make the long story short, the collection of boastful tropes is the picture that one part of the diasporic Hindu community has made for itself in the eyes of the world today.

Jihwagre Vijayam Prapthi?

The saying “Jihwagre Vartate Lakshmi, Jihwagre Bandhanam Prapthi,” seems very appropriate. Through their tongue, they have earned material prosperity, and yet, through their tongue, they have bonded and subjugated our gods, goddesses and great truths to the insulting, degrading, destructive deeds of Hinduphobic actors. There is a need to recognise this stark reality, and to change.

It is on this note, that we might learn a thing or two from that other Hindu American’s rhetoric, as a Hindu, and as an American.

Vivek Ramaswamy is able to speak as both of these because he avoids coming across as “better than you” with his listeners. It is not an easy task, naturally. American everyday egalitarianism even without the Hindu angle can be harsh and snarky when engaging with “eggheads” or intellectuals (“if you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” is of course something that may not work with Ramaswamy).

Ramaswamy could have chosen the more convenient option like many second-generation diasporic Hindu Americans of erasing or tokenising his identity completely, as many politicians, business leaders, and activists have done. He has instead seen the value of presenting himself as himself, and there is perhaps a lesson in that to the UHFs who somehow have deluded themselves into thinking that the more they boast about how much better they are than everyone else, the more persuasive they are being.

No wonder when Hindus, Indians or “South Asians” talk about racism or Hinduphobia, the response most often is “you just want to be treated like you’re special,” not “we’re sorry for being racist, or not knowing better.” I am not saying that the goal of Hindu American narratives should be to stoke or manipulate guilt in others. That is a whole different game which may or may not be right for us. But we have to recognise that almost every argument we, or our UHFs, have made in terms of our boastful attitude, is self-defeating, ugly, and ill-advised.

We should try to do better not against others but in comparison to our own actions and practices so far, especially in generational terms.

And the rest we should leave to the blessings of our ancestors who obviously did a lot better than we are doing today in ensuring our survival until now.

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 in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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