Firstpost is convinced that Dismantling Global Hindutva (DGH), a three-day online conference (from Sept 10-12) planned by anonymous organisers in the US, is a partisan and politically-motivated event designed to malign an ancient religion and its adherents. Through columns and reported pieces, this Firstpost series exposes why such programmes are misleading, agenda-driven, and nothing but thinly-veiled Hinduphobia.
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It was perhaps the dates that triggered it.
On 11 September - the anniversary of the Islamist terrorist attack that brought down the Twin Towers in Manhattan and led to the US entering a two-decade war in Iraq and Afghanistan - the Taliban, cocking a brutal snook at the US, is set to inaugurate their Sharia-compliant government full of men who have been declared terrorists in various parts of the world.
The leader of this government is Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, notoriously on a United Nations blacklist. It gets worse. The Interior Minister is from the infamous terrorist group, the Haqqani Network. Sirajuddin Haqqani is wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and has a $5-million reward on his head.
11 September also happens to be a day that is significant for India and Indians. It is the day that Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda gave a famous lecture at the Parliament of World's Religions in Chicago and changed the perspective of Hinduism and India in the Western mind, in many ways, forever. This speech is one of the most important events in the history of modern Hinduism, one of the oldest faiths in the world.
On this day, not surely by coincidence, a controversial conference called 'Dismantling Global Hindutva' is being held. Organisers say it is supported by departments of many of the world's top universities. Organisers also say the target of the conference is 'Hindutva', or political Hinduism, the ideology followed by India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Click here to read stories on Dismantling Global Hindutva
This conference has led to one of the biggest examples of public mobilisation among Hindus around the world, especially in North America - from where the event is ostensibly being organised. Tens of thousands of letters have been written to universities against the online conference. Several of these institutes have clarified that some specific departments, and not the university per se, are participating in this event.
Critics and Hindu advocacy groups say the "partisan" event is a thinly disguised attack on Hinduism, which has faced - and faces - ostracism and misrepresentation, especially in Western academia. This part of the battle has been going on for about a decade or more, as practising Hindus have pointed out errors and misrepresentations of aspects of the religion as depicted in Western academia.
Among the most criticised academics – and who have headlined this conference – is a professor from Rutgers University, Audrey Truschke. She once infamously claimed that the Ramayana, one of the two greatest epics of Hinduism, says that Lord Rama, its hero and one of the most revered figures in Hinduism, is a "misogynist p**". And then she claimed that this was from a translation from the Sanskrit original by Robert Goldman, a well-known scholar of Hinduism and Sanskrit. Goldman dismissed the claim, saying it was false. "I find it extremely disturbing but perhaps not unexpected to learn that AT (Audrey Trushcke) has used such inappropriate language and passed it off as coming from Valmiki (the author of the Ramayana).
"Neither the great poet nor we used such a vulgar diction and certainly Sita would never have used such language to her husband even in the midst of emotional distress. Nowhere in our translation of the passage do we use words you mention at as using. She is in no way quoting our translation but giving her own reading of the passage in her own highly inappropriate language," he wrote in an email exchange.
It is because of the presence of people such as Truschke and poet Meena Kandaswamy - who called Rama a "d*****ad" - headlining this conference that protesters argue the event has little to do with politics or Hindutva, which even the organisers agree cannot be accurately defined.
All this would be one more fracas driven by Twitter activism if it wasn't so serious.
The response to this conference marks the first major mass assertion of Hindu politics, especially in North America. This has been building up for a while as Hindus in the US have campaigned against representation of their faith in school textbooks in California a little more than a decade ago, and against various scurrilous academic references.
For every Western academic like Wendy Doniger or Christophe Jaffrelot (also headlining the conference), who claim that the fears are unfounded and the protests merely political, there are others like Lavanya Vemsani and Jeffery Long, who assert that Hinduphobia, or cultural fear and ostracism of Hindus, is on the rise. And that it carries the legacy of old colonial and Abrahamic tropes of hatred against "pagan" faiths.
This debate will no longer remain within the boundaries of quarrelling academics or even pressure groups. Some of the most highly educated and wealthy Hindus of North America are now in this, and their influence has already started bringing in members of American politics into this debate.
This is the moment when Hindu politics has started going mainstream – globally.
Hindol Sengupta is a multiple award-winning historian and author.
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