A recently held mega online international conference titled ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ in the US was the first academic attempt initiated by academia to understand the undercurrents of Hindutva and its impact on western societies including western campuses of renowned universities.
The conference was addressed by speakers from leading universities in the world including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, and Berkeley. Over 600 academics across the world attended the online event.
The participants expressed their concerns that Hindutva was becoming a global phenomenon and even the western universities were not safe from its influence propagated by the Indian Hindu students.
The conference highlighted that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was promoting Hindutva. Motivated by the Nazi ideology, its regulatory principle was to transform India from a secular democracy to a Brahmin state where Muslims, Christians Jews and other religious minorities were demoted to the position of second-class citizens.
Speakers were of the view that Hindutva was a political philosophy styled after European fascism of the early twentieth century, an ideology that privileged a cult of personality and authoritarian leadership.
The speakers also noted that the term Hindutva was a strategy based on violence, hatred and terrorism. It is an enemy of democracy and has been targeting freedom of speech since the BJP came into power.
They were of the view that hatred was being generated by the Hindutva narrative which was against humanity because the philosophy placed Hindutva as a vehicle, and the message was actually the supremacy of Brahmin Varna over any human bearing stark resemblance to Hitler’s neo-Nazi ideology.
Speakers were of the view that in the western world, Hinduism was promoted as a culture rather than a religion during the last half a century but now it has changed its face as a brutal and extremist religious monster that wanted to kill everybody except Brahmins.
Hindutva had a history of ill-treatment of women, zero respect for transgender rights, minority exploitation, and extreme policies towards Muslims, Christians, Jews and non-Brahmins. It violated the basic fundamental rights of everybody.
In the name of Hindutva, the Indian government had instituted discriminatory policies including a ban on beef, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination through controversial India’s citizenship laws.
These measures led to a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynching and rapes directed against Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and dissident Hindus. Women of these communities were being specially targeted.
Global experts have warned that India became an epic centre of social terrorism, using highly negative trends for creating communal division and hatred. The experts and media analysts are classifying India as a factory of communal and social terrorism exporting the same globally.
