Tag hindutva opponents

Confronting the many faces of Hinduphobia in the West – Arun Anand

VOI

School of Oriental and African Studies with Thiruvalluvar statue.

Hindus in the West continue to face hostility, misrepresentation, and institutional indifference. They also raise serious questions about the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion in many Western societies. To address Hinduphobia, it is important that global academic, media, and policy discourses approach Hindus and their faith with fairness, intellectual honesty, and sensitivity. – Arun Anand

A series of disturbing events in the Western world have once again brought the issue of Hinduphobia to the fore. The latest incident is an attack on a Holi celebration in Harrow in the United Kingdom.

An X post by UK Insight, a well-known public advocacy group in the UK, gave details of this incident. It said: “Local Hindu families, including women and children, gathered to celebrate peacefully. What should have been a happy occasion was disrupted when a group of Muslim youths reportedly came from a nearby mosque and attacked the event, pushing over speakers and attempting to intimidate those celebrating. After initially leaving, they returned with around 20 others and began attacking members of the gathering. Police were called and arrived approximately an hour later, taking statements from those present.”

The UK Insight group flagged this incident, emphasising: “No one celebrating a religious festival in Britain should face intimidation or violence. The right to celebrate our faith peacefully is fundamental and must be protected equally for all communities. We demand that the authorities investigate this incident thoroughly and ensure accountability. Community harmony cannot be built on silence when one group is targeted. Hindus in the UK deserve the same safety, dignity and protection as everyone else.”

It may be recalled that the UK witnessed riots in Leicester in September 2022, where Muslim mobs went on the rampage targeting Hindus after an India-Pakistan cricket match.

Incidentally, a recent report that emerged from the United Kingdom made wide-ranging allegations against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its ideology of Hindutva in the context of these riots, while brushing the role of Muslim mobs under the carpet. Hindus, who were the victims of these riots, have been mischievously projected as the perpetrators. The report titled “Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester” was funded by known Hindu and India baiter George Soros through his notorious Open Society Foundation.

The report was jointly authored by the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and The Monitoring Group. The fact of the matter is that the RSS functions only in India, and yet Hindus and their philosophy were targeted in this report by dragging in the name of the RSS without any evidence.

According to the New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies, “A central analytical weakness of the report lies in the disconnect between what it descriptively documents and what it prescriptively recommends: it records intimidation, property damage, temple-targeting, and anti-Hindu harm, yet its principal recommendations are directed towards identifying, isolating, and confronting Hindu ideological formations.”

It further adds: “By elevating “Hindutva extremism” into the core policy category, the report risks institutionalising a framework in which Hindus are acknowledged as having suffered harm but are nevertheless rendered the primary object of institutional suspicion, monitoring, and civic management.

The report itself acknowledges verification limits in relation to some of its most politically consequential claims, including alleged involvement of Hindutva-associated actors in the 17 September march and unsupported attributions such as references to ‘Hindutva RSS thugs’. These admissions materially weaken any strong causal inference linking Leicester’s violence to organised Hindutva structures.”

Read as a whole, the report does not merely analyse Leicester; it helps construct an official-sounding interpretive framework in which anti-Hindu harms are acknowledged but subordinated to a broader narrative of Hindu ideological risk. The result is a form of institutionalised asymmetry with implications for safeguarding, equality recognition, media discourse, and the public understanding of Hinduphobia in Britain, says the CIHS’ detailed analysis of this report.

In another incident, the Harvard University’s South Asian Studies Department used derogatory images to promote the department’s Elementary Sanskrit course.

After the Coalition of Hindus of North America (COHNA) objected to these images, the department apologised and withdrew them. According to a report in Harvard’s student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, the official statement from the department read: “The South Asian Studies Department deeply regrets the posting of an insensitive image in relation to our Sanskrit programme. … As a department, we have a long and celebrated history of teaching Sanskrit, and we remain committed to teaching the language and the great intellectual and cultural tradition it carries.”

The Harvard Crimson quoted Pushpita Prasad, chief of communications at the Coalition of Hindus of North America, as saying: “It is very rare for practising Hindus and mainstream Hindu organisations to be consulted on Hinduism.”

These incidents point to a pattern where Hindus in the West continue to face hostility, misrepresentation, and institutional indifference. They also raise serious questions about the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion in many Western societies. In contrast, reality often reveals a gap between principle and practice. To address Hinduphobia, it is important that global academic, media, and policy discourses approach Hindus and their faith with fairness, intellectual honesty, and sensitivity. – News18, 11 March 2026

› Arun Anand is an author, journalist, columnist and broadcaster.

G.S. Talib Quote

Hinduism vs Hindutva: A battle of British colonial construct – Adit Kothari

VOI

Hindus in Hindustan

Hindutva is not ritualistic “Hinduism”, but when etymologically translated from Sanskrit, it simply is the essence of being Hindu—a civilisational consciousness rooted in land, memory, culture, and continuity. – Adit Kothari

The word “Hinduism” itself is not ancient. Neither is it native nor organic. The very suffix “ism” within the word “Hinduism” reeks of Western taxonomy, aiming to confine the civilisation within rigid, dogmatic lines, much like the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam. Such a framework is violently alien to Sanatan Dharma, which never sought reduction into a closed creed.

The Hindu civilisational experience is fluid, plural, evolving, contradictory, and unapologetically non-dogmatic. As Atal Bihari Vajpayee observed in his 1998 interview with Javed Akhtar, India’s secularism flows naturally from Hindu civilisation itself. Hindu thought binds no one to a single prophet, a single book, or a compulsory theology. One may be astika or nastika, devotional or sceptical, ritualistic or philosophical, and still remain within the civilisational fold. There is no concept of blasphemy, apostasy, or enforced belief.

“Hinduism” was not born in Kashi or Kanchipuram. It was midwifed in colonial census offices and missionary tracts. European orientalists and British administrators required a neat category to govern, classify, and evangelise. In doing so, they lumped together diverse Indic traditions—vedic, tantric, bhakti, folk—under a single label, often distorting them to fit monotheistic templates. The term gained currency only in the early 19th century. By freezing Sanatan Dharma into “Hinduism”, colonialism hollowed out its essence, morphing it to fit within their monotheistic template.

Hindutva, contrary to hysterical propaganda, does not destroy this civilisational ethos, but it vociferously exposes the artificiality of the colonial box it was forced into. Hindutva is not ritualistic “Hinduism”, but when etymologically translated from Sanskrit, it simply is the essence of being Hindu—a civilisational consciousness rooted in land, memory, culture, and continuity. It encompasses all Indic traditions, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, bound by culture, history, and geography, not narrow dogma. One does not need to pray to Ram to be Hindu. One does not even need to believe in God. One only needs to belong, to a civilisational inheritance that predates and outlives religious dogma.

This is precisely why Hindutva terrifies the pseudo-liberal establishment. Pseudo-liberals peddle the lie that Hindutva endangers “Hinduism”. This is inverted propaganda from a deracinated elite, conditioned by Macaulay’s education system. In truth, Hindutva is the purest secularism India has ever known. Unlike Western secularism’s hostile separation of state and faith, or India’s pseudo-secularism that panders to Muslims while demonising the Hindu, Hindutva treats all born of this soil as heirs to a common civilisation. It demands loyalty to Bharat first, allowing diverse dharmas to flourish without privileging imported exclusivism. This is true pluralism: equal cultural dignity, not appeasement.

Colonialism weaponised “Hinduism” to divide. It was deliberately marketed as superstitious Paganism ripe for “civilising”. Reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, while alleviating genuine social evils, inadvertently reinforced colonial frameworks by engaging Hindu civilisation in Abrahamic terms. Ironically, this was made possible precisely because the Hindu was never a codified faith and therefore remained open to reform in a way dogmatic religions like Islam are not. Post-independence, Nehruvian secularism entrenched minorityism, alienating the majority, while left-leaning narratives painted any Hindu assertion as “communal”.

Hindutva is accused of being “majoritarian” by the very people who reduced Hindus to a religious minority within their own civilisation. They denied them cultural rights while enthusiastically funding, protecting, and politically mobilising every other faith identity.

India’s Anglophone elite, left-leaning intelligentsia conditioned by colonial education and Nehruvian secularism, loathe the term “Hindutva” not for any supposed majoritarianism—their go-to smear—but because it ruthlessly exposes their lingering colonial hangover. Hindutva asserts an unapologetic, indigenous civilisational identity tied to India as a civilisational land, history, and ethos, shattering the superiority complex these elites inherited from Macaulay’s system. Conditioned to see India’s value system as backward or in need of Western “civilising”, they embraced abstract secularism, Muslim appeasement, and cultural alienation as badges of progress. Hindutva strips that facade, reclaiming agency for the rooted majority, highlighting their detachment from the masses, unease with confident Hindu assertion, and the hollowness of power built on post-colonial mimicry rather than authentic heritage. It forces uncomfortable self-reflection on their enduring mental colonisation, and that’s precisely why they hate it.

In Bengal, this conditioning runs deep. The Bengali intelligentsia, shaped by the Bengal Renaissance and later Marxist dominance under decades of Left Front rule, has long leaned leftward. They are often virulently anti-Hindutva, viewing it through a lens of colonial-era secularism and Soviet-inspired atheism. Calcutta’s elite, influenced by British education and communist hegemony post-1947, internalised narratives dismissing Hindu civilisational pride as retrograde.

This brings us to the [recent] spectacle. On January 11, 2026, at the prestigious Calcutta Club, the Calcutta Debating Circle in association with The Telegraph, hosts a debate on the motion “Hinduism Needs Protection From Hindutva.”

For the motion are relics like Mani Shankar Aiyar and Ashutosh, feral loudmouths like Mahua Moitra, and distorians like Ruchika Sharma peddling tired pseudo-secular tropes. Against the motion stand stalwarts like Swapan Dasgupta, J. Sai Deepak, Agnimitra Paul, and Sudhanshu Trivedi, who, unlike the flustered opposition, conduct themselves armed with logic and history.

The Left-leaning intelligentsia, long cocooned in culturally alienated narratives, are in for a total feast. For decades, they’ve parroted that Hindutva is “fascist” or “majoritarian,” ignoring how it liberates Dharma from colonial chains. This event will hopefully pierce that bubble, forcing confrontation with truths, that “Hinduism” is the real threat to authentic Dharma and Hindutva its saviour. Hopefully, by the end, even the most conditioned will glimpse the propaganda they’ve swallowed, emerging informed and even perhaps awakened.

The death knell of that construct has sounded. Hindutva is not a threat but a reclamation. Not destruction, but resurrection. And it is precisely this mirror, held up to enduring mental colonisation, that its critics find impossible to face. – News18, 10 January 2026

› Adit Kothari is a Calcuttan residing in London as a Pravasi Bharatiya, working to dismantle the plethora of false narratives and misinformation against India and Hindutva.

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