Hindutva

What are the key features of Hindutva in the US?

Hindutva outifts are masters in creating different institutional forms that settle into the crevices of systems. In the last three years, the Hindutva lobby has decided to take on the US education system. Under multicultural policies, American children are exposed to world history by the 6th grade. There was a huge battle in California last year when institutions like Hindu Education Fund, Hindu American Foundation and Vedic Studies Foundation got into the curriculum review process to present mythology as history. It took action from a range of academics to bring that to a stop. The next set of textbook reviews come up next year in conservative states like Texas. Unlike in India, three or four big US states decide the curriculum for the entire country as other states adopt their textbooks. We’ll have a big battle on our hands.

Over the last two years, Hindutva organisations have modelled themselves on the Zionist lobby. The alliance between the Hindutva and the Zionist lobbies is building up at several levels. Hindutva has people working in Washington on the Beltway to try and influence policies. That infrastructure mirrors the Zionist infrastructure. They are desperately trying to penetrate universities like the Zionists’ did. They are trying to set up chaired professorships for which they are paying the money so they have a say in who gets it. They were also trying to go through [Sri Sri] Ravi Shankar. There was an attempt to use Swraj Paul’s company, Caparo, to set up chaired professorships.

How did they use Sri Sri Ravi Shankar?

Just walking down the beach in Nagapattinam will tell you the story. Ravi Shankar, Mata Amritanandamai and the VHP are deeply implicated with each other in rehabilitation efforts there. Ravi Shankar came to the Pioneer Valley where there are five colleges of repute: the University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Holyoke College, Hampshire College and Amherst College. Four of them are really top-rank liberal arts institutions. One is a toprank public institution. He [Ravi Shankar] was setting up a meeting with the presidents of those universities to start a centre. But a group of people from University of Massachusetts started a campaign and put and end to that. One of the campaigners was harassed by calls at her home from obviously VHP folks.

One of the big VHP projects is to bring all temples together. In India that’s an impossible project because there are all sorts of temples and if someone comes and tells them to join a particular temple they will just slap him and send him home. In the US that effort has been on for two years. The third US National Temple Conference has just been held. I’ve been following one of their activists for the last 12 years who is specially deputed for this task. I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be such consolidation.

Who makes up the Hindutva lobby? What motivates them?

If we stand on the corner of Jackson’s Heights in New York, probably the largest Indian market in the US, and ask the first 10 Indians who pass by, maybe six or seven would be pretty sympathetic towards and support Hindutva. The post-1960s wave of migration from India to the US was in large part upper and middle-class, urban professionals. They are the base of the Hindutva movement. Doctors, engineers, professors are so positioned by the American economy that their work disperses them. From the 1960s to the 1980s you tend to see the consolidation of Hindus in the US. In the 1980s the trading classes started migrating. At this time, Hindutva also began to grow. That group started to set up institutions and the older professionals started plugging into them. A significant number are ideologues with institutional connections in India.

But I must say it gets a very interesting set of inflections in the US. Even a suburban Hindu family that is not seriously into Hindutva finds the bal vihars the only way out. There’s a Hindu Students’ Council (HSC) which runs cabs. I know reasonable middle-of-theroad Hindu families that send their children to an HSC camp. Not because they are dramatically Hindutva but because they are in a moment of crisis, they have no way to control their culture, and they feel their own identity is getting frail at the edges, especially the second generation. At that moment they go to the packaged form. As Romila Thapar says, this is syndicated Hinduism.