The war on lives faced by Hindus might be a very old one, and one which earlier generations managed to fight and survive. But the war of lies that is being currently waged against Hindus is something that needs to be studied and understood closely.
Take the case of the ongoing attacks on Hindus in the UK. There is a barrage of false claims being made by street-level jihadist operatives about non-existent Hindutva/Hindu crimes against Muslims (They approached a girl! They attacked a mosque! Their girls dance on the roads during their festivals!). These lies are then amplified and given respectability by big media houses like he Guardian which have already built up the same set of lies about Hindus over many years now.
When a whole environment of lies exists across media, academic, NGO and governmental platforms, the task of anyone trying to speak the truth and stand for the truth becomes even harder. It becomes almost impossible for people who have not been following events carefully to even contemplate the magnitude of the lies they have been subject to./em> Even people on the conservative side in the West who mistrust newspapers like The Guardian on most matters end up assuming that while the liberal news media may be wrong on some things, they cannot but be right when it comes to what they say about Hindus.
Such is the reality when we have been outplayed in a war of lies.
Pushback is good, but not permanent
There has of course been some pushback in this communication battlefield. The Indian government seems to have finally gotten over its old inertia about “not commenting on internal matters of other countries” and has spoken out through its embassies and diplomats against the attacks on Hindu temples in the UK, Hinduphobic events in Canada, and against “religiophobia” and “Abrahamic” bias in the UN. This is a decent but still barely adequate step.
The emerging Hindu social media space has also seen consistent engagement with anti-Hindu lies over the past few years, although the quality of this engagement varies greatly, and so does its effectiveness in reaching the mainstream (outside the usual self-styled “RW” echo chambers). A handful of intelligent and courageous Hindus (and some non-Hindu friends) are documenting the lie-campaign against Hindus meticulously on social media. These are certainly good things that are happening.
But is it enough to stop the tide, the tsunami, that is coming?
Deep propaganda, dirty propaganda
Are “ecosystems” that have billions of dollars invested in anti-Hindu propaganda going to fold suddenly because of a little Twitter pushback, or a few snappy retorts from Indian officials?
We can see that in the last eight years, they have not done that. Instead, they have doubled down on their lies and incentivised the thousands of activists, academics, journalists, students and others in their sphere of influence into believing and standing firmly by even crazier lies than ever before.
The coming years will be increasingly insane and dangerous because it is quite clear to many that while much of what is being said about Hindus is false, Hindus have proved incapable of shattering the lie. Anti-Hindu interests no longer have to work on persuading anyone to believe what they say is true. They are only in the end game of protecting each other and each other’s lies as they try to enforce mass compliance with their theory that what they say about Hinduism and Hindus, is in fact true. As several incidents have shown, despite some pushback here and there, it is Hindus who are being forced to comply through self-erasure (such as removing symbols from homes and cars, hiding, avoiding going to temples, etc).
Survival depends on understanding propaganda as communication
Understanding anti-Hindu propaganda requires understanding propaganda as a communication phenomenon. Hindus have a good amount of material on anti-Hinduism as a phenomenon (thanks largely to the monumental foundation laid by Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst and the Voice of India group and updated by new generations of scholars). But communication, persuasion, and media, also need to be studied carefully, and every Hindu’s communication adjusted accordingly, in order to ensure our survival (first, and then revival). Many alert Hindus have been spotting and pushing back against propaganda on social media and YouTube. These pushbacks broadly take two forms. One is at the level of facts, language, narrative and spin, and the other is in terms of networks, interests, possible funding sources and so on.
While these are all useful, it is useful for all concerned Hindus to have an understanding of the long-term trends in propaganda, the story as it has been constructed over the past few decades. We need to understand the story about Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism in the Western academia and press since the 1990s to the present, and also the “counter-narrative” as it were, the story about the anti-Hindu forces and interests that has been constructed in the Hindu/Nationalist/”RW”/ RSS-BJP ecosystem (identifying each of these not identical but overlapping categories). I will look at the latter in a different article, but focus on the main issue here below.
Hindu nationalism: Their story
Although the roots of Hinduphobia have a long history of several centuries dating back to monotheistic-imperialist theologies, and more recent forms of Hinduphobia in secular guises may be spotted in later 19th and 20th century discourses, I will focus on the period from 1989 to 2022 as the most relevant ones here.
There have been two subtle shifts in this period in the nature of the propaganda that is worth recognising. From 1989 to 2002, the Western academic-media discourse largely focused on “Hindu Nationalism” as its concern and the success of the BJP (beginning with the elections, then the Rath Yatra, and then the 1992 Ayodhya events). It defined Hindu Nationalism as a form of religious revivalism and extremism inspired by Nazism. It provided an ahistorical, selective view of Indian history, and pretended it was just Hindus fooled by their “myths” who had suddenly come to believe their god was real and really born in Ayodhya that had acted violently. There were plenty of falsehoods for sure. But in this phase, the direct demonization of Hinduism was not yet in play.
Post-2002, this entered a new phase. The main context to this was not just the Gujarat riots but the broader flux in the Western liberal establishment following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the misguided “War on Terror” launched by Bush-Blair, Inc. Martha Nussbaum and many South Asian professors decided that “Hindu Nationalism” was the worst embodiment of Islamophobia, presumably because Hindus were the ones launching wars against Muslim countries and running rendition camps and such. This phase of the discourse also centred around the figure of Narendra Modi, who I recall thinking of as “steely” and “cold”.
This period was also deeply disturbing because this period of slow fear-mongering about Hindutva as a greater danger to the world than Al Qaeda was also accompanied by relentless terrorist attacks on Indian civilians culminating in the 26/11 invasion of Mumbai. The Hindutva bogey was being raised over twenty years precisely as real-life bomb blasts against Hindus and other bystanders were happening regularly, not unlike what we saw play out in the media coverage of Leicester. This was propaganda as distraction, and they built this up efficiently, milking Western liberal embarrassment for cheering the Iraq war (a lot of liberals did do that, including the liberal press icons like the NYT) into getting liberals to now do something to stop Islamophobia from the Hindus, even as they were getting bombed to bits.
The 26/11-Slumdog Millionaire Peak
This phase of propaganda hit its highest moment, like the terrorist attacks, also in November 2008. The movie Slumdog Millionaire, a runaway hit because of its relatable story of an underdog triumphing against the tyranny of globalisation, capitalism, and of course, Hinduism, completed the narrative that had been started in blood in real life. Terrorism from now on would have to be seen as social justice by heroic young Robin Hoods against the new Hindu Rate of Growth (the old one was too slow, the new one was too fast, apparently). Slumdog Millionaire played on and cemented emerging stereotypes of the prosperous Indian, now recast as the ultimate symbol of capitalism, greed, inequality, cruelty. For good measure, they threw in some disgust tropes like excreta as well.
The third phase of anti-Hindu propaganda is what began about a year after Modi’s 2014 election. I discuss this, and the Indian government and ruling party’s (complicatedly ineffective) responses to this, in my next piece. But the broad trend in this phase must be noted, so we can see where it’s all heading. Modi had done or said very little to lend credence to the hysterical levels of fear-mongering about Hindu Fascism most of the world’s very reputed writers, professors, and celebrities had pleaded with us about in his first two years. Yet, the establishment began a new re-definition of Hindutva as an upper-caste Hindu project that hated not only Muslims but also Dalits and Adivasis. This was an ambitious move indeed, considering that Modi’s voters happened to come quite heavily from outside the “upper castes” too, and marks the levels at which propaganda is operating now. They no longer need evidence to keep their believers convinced. This phase is also marked by the rise of a toxic level of dehumansation through disgust-tropes, most notably, the cow-piss campaign.
The Thirty-Year narrative
To recap, from the late 1980s to the present, we see the Hindu Nationalism trope starting with an ahistorical treatment of Ayodhya as some sudden revival of irrational religious belief started by a TV show, shift to a distraction and justification campaign for actual terrorism, then focus on the demonisation of one “dictator” figure like Saddam or Hitler, and finally, settle on the most toxic levels of dehumanisation possible today against Hindus accompanied by outright lying directed to endanger Hindus (like the multiple false allegations made in the UK about Hindus attacking Muslims or mosques).
This is a three-decade evolution, most of which happened when India was under non-BJP rule. However, the most toxic and dangerous phase of propaganda Hindus find themselves facing, since about 2015, has taken place with the BJP firmly in command. In my next article, I will examine in detail how the government and ruling party have fared in dealing with this onslaught on reality through communication warfare unleashed on Hindus everywhere. There is a pat answer among many BJP supporters that all the propaganda unleashed on Hindus is just proof that things are now actually very good for Hindus, that all the hate is a sign of the anti-Hindus’ frustration at losing. We can see how this attitude has led to complacence, and worse, total defeat in the narrative wars, if not for a party that is good at winning elections or even growing the economy, for every Hindu painted into a corner by a global media campaign to assassinate their reputation and repudiate any claim to human right protections as Hindus. Simply put, the BJP can explain away all the anti-Hindu hate as just inconsequential rantings of their political rivals. But can Hindus afford to ignore this hate coming for them?
[To be continued]
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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