Abstract

Excerpted From: Dheepa Sundaram, An Academic Conference, A Bomb Threat, and A Title VI Complaint: U.S. Hindu Nationalist Groups' Litigious Assault on Academic Freedom, 16 Drexel Law Review 837 (2024) (244 Footnotes) (Full Document)

“Bomb threats, death threats, and rape threats.” This was the response I provided to a Washington Post reporter when asked about the kinds of threats organizers had received in relation to an online academic conference, “Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives,” which took place September 10-12, 2021. Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) conventionally refers to the political ideology of Hindu nativism and exclusivity that recasts the multiethnic, multifaith Indian subcontinent as a homeland for Hindus. More broadly, this ideology holds-- controversially, at a minimum--that Indians are culturally and ethnically Hindu regardless of other religious or cultural affiliations they may hold. The conference organizers received an email that read, “If this event will take place then I will become Osama bin Laden and will kill all the speakers, don't blame me.” Conference speakers also received emails containing veiled statements to do harm, including one in which a picture of keynote speaker Meena Kandasamy's child was posted online alongside a direct death threat. Some organizers believed that their families in India were being pressured financially (e.g., pensions withheld, employment threatened, etc.) because of their involvement with the conference.

Despite the immense pressure from Hindu Right groups both within the United States and abroad, the conference proceeded and garnered more than 30,000 unique impressions on YouTube. Why did an academic conference provoke such vitriolic response from Hindu groups? The threats of violence that conference organizers and speakers received suggests the weaponization of what scholar of public culture Arun Chaudhari describes as “anxious futurism” or how U.S. Hindu communities grapple with a sense of belonging that was shaped in part by a “narrative of Hindu persecution.” While Chaudhari spoke of American Hindu activism in the early 2000s, U.S. Hindu Right groups' recent organized assault on an academic conference on Hindutva suggests that: (1) concerns regarding who speaks for Hinduism have grown in intensity since the early years of Hindu activism; and (2) strategic conflations of Hinduism and Hindutva to suggest criticism of the latter constitutes impugning the former have become a central aspect of U.S. Hindu Right groups' advocacy campaigns. Hindu Right groups in the United States have foregrounded these concerns and shrouded them in the language and framing of social justice to advance Hindu supremacist beliefs while aligning with a Hindu nationalist agenda, particularly within academic and educational spaces. Increasingly, U.S. Hindu Right groups have turned to litigation and other forms of legal advocacy to advance this agenda.

This Article shows how the litigious responses of Hindu nationalist groups in the United States emerge from the lengthy history of these groups' campaigns against academics with whom they disagree, their assaults on critiques of casteism and Islamophobia, and their attempts to rewrite, and in some cases efface, historically-grounded understandings of Hinduism and Hindutva. Further, the Article situates the legal advocacy of the U.S. Hindu Right within the broader assaults on academic freedom and diversity, equity, and inclusion measures. The increasing litigiousness of the U.S. Hindu Right, particularly with respect to educational spaces, has resulted in a significant threat to academic freedom, open inquiry, and discussion of matters related to Hindutva and Hinduism. To provide context for these developments, Part I offers a brief overview of Hindutva, the development of U.S. Hindutva organizations, and why Hindutva-aligned organizations in the United States found an academic conference threatening. In Part II, the Article historicizes “Yankee Hindutva,” U.S. Hindu and Hindutva political activism, and the major controversies over depictions of Hinduism in textbooks in California in 2006. Part III discusses the litigious history of these groups, and Part IV analyzes a recent complaint under Title VI that these groups have filed against the University of Pennsylvania. In Part V, the Article compares these attacks on academic inquiry on Hindutva and caste with conservative legal assaults on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and “wokeness.” The conclusion examines how U.S. Hindutva groups seek to develop and position community members and student groups as the face of the movement.

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I have argued elsewhere that the focus on student harms through student voices constitutes a shift in U.S. Hindutva strategy, evidenced by lawsuits Hindu Right groups filed in 2022 and 2023. In so doing, HAF, CoHNA, and a new crop of Hindu student organizations have sought to position the recognition of “Hinduphobia” as a vital social justice concern for Hindus. While HAF's 2007 report on Hinduphobia focused on Christian websites that denigrated Hinduism and other non-Christian traditions, its more recent efforts to expose Hinduphobia have focused on academics and college campuses. This shift is evident in the definition of Hinduphobia that appears on HAF's website:

Hinduphobia or anti-Hindu hatred have a tragically long history which continues to this day across the globe. They are fueled by a range of factors, including religious intolerance, religious exclusivism, a lack of religious literacy, misrepresentation in the media, academic bias still rooted in oftentimes racist, colonial-era misportrayals and, in the diaspora, generalized anti-immigrant xenophobia and hatred.

The inclusion of “academics” as potential perpetrators of Hinduphobia also represents a notable shift from the focus of the 2007 HAF-commissioned report, which exposed Christian extremism online and encouraged readers to embrace religious pluralism. HAF's founding members reiterate these points in a 2009 interview with Hinduism Today in which they described their organization as “different” from other Indian organizations because of its focus on the U.S. experience of being Hindu, rather than “communalism and violence.” They also claim that they suffered “McCarthyesque” attacks by academics and claimed that no other organization had been on the front lines fighting against casteism. However, just three years earlier, in context of the California textbook case, HAF advanced positions on Hindu traditions, South Asian history, and caste that many academics and scholars of South Asia found untenable. In other words, it seems that the pluralist idealism espoused by HAF's founding members in its early years has given way to a Hindutva-aligned activism. To this end, HAF's website now features an extended definition of Hinduphobia which references Hindu genocides, mirroring language in the BJP's platform and other manifestos in support of Hindutva positions.

In its Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania, HAF draws upon social justice frameworks to characterize Hindus as vulnerable but valuable contributors to the American polity. As such, the complaint urges the adoption of “remedies” that are modeled on “on anti-racist frameworks for mitigating harm including: a public acknowledgement of Hinduphobia, a public statement acknowledging ‘negative stereotypes, slurs, and distorted facts about Hindus and India,’ and mandatory training on Title VI for the South Asia Center.” However, by using or mirroring the language of antiracist and antisemitic “harm” (stereotypes, slurs, and the like), the complaint characterizes Hinduphobia as a systemic form of discrimination. Such a move appears to be premised on a claim to be an authentic and authoritative voice on Hinduism and, by extension, Hindutva. The DGH conference necessarily challenged and threatened this claim, since it sought to engage multiple voices and perspectives in discussion on the best way to combat the rising global threat of Hindu nationalism. In doing so, it also unsettled the notion of a single “Hinduism.” Such critiques require accurate histories, in-depth, evidence-based analyses of Hindu beliefs and traditions, honest discussions regarding the state of political and public institutions in India, and efforts to confront caste/casteism in Hindu communities worldwide. In other words, when Hindutva groups label mundane academic inquiry as a material harm, scholarly work on India and Hinduism is stifled. Such maneuvers not only risk shutting down discussions on Hinduism that elicit discomfort, but also risk supplanting scholarly approaches to Hindutva with a so-called insider perspective. Such moves would limit rather than encourages diverse scholarship on Hinduism.

In a 2009 presentation to donors, HAF's then-director of development (and current chief financial officer and managing director) informed the room of the next frontier of their advocacy: children. To this end, the organization has produced a wealth of educational materials for K-12 curricula that focus on Hinduism, but fewer materials that focus on higher education. The organization's legal activities suggest that it no longer sees academics as partners or sees its own mission as being a “progressive voice” for Hindus. Rather, the Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania and the organization's vigorous opposition to the Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives conference reiterate what the organization's development director made clear in her 2009 speech: Hindu students are indeed the future.

These legal maneuvers have sought to position Hindu students as being on the frontlines of the academic freedom debates taking place in U.S. college and university campuses and as the face of these organizations' activities. HAF's complaint against the University of Pennsylvania, coupled with its recent legal complaints against anti-caste discrimination measures, align the organization with conservative groups which have argued that higher education is a threat. Many such groups are viewed favorably among many conservative Hindus in the United States, who view U.S. Democratic Party values as inconsistent their own conceptions of Hindu values. However, by couching its concerns in the language and framework of antiracist work, HAF nevertheless continues to frame its efforts as designed to protect Hindu rights and defend religious freedom. Such arguments can be appealing to Hindu college students, who often have legitimate concerns about white supremacist and Christian supremacist violence, anti-Asian hate, and other forms of anti-minority discrimination. In this sense, the threat that U.S. Hindutva groups present is formidable. By characterizing their efforts to interfere with academic inquiry into Hindutva as a matter of civil rights, these groups effectively skirt the traditional divides of progressive and conservative politics to suggest that critical scholarship on Hindutva harms Hindu religious freedom.

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Denver. B.A., Indiana University; M.A., University of Illinois, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature; Ph.D., University of Illinois, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature.