Dismantling Global Hindutva: A Valiant Venture to Delegitimise Braving the Eponymous Gang

[Sukla Sen]

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

That's how the old saying goes. 

Today is the last day, the session would be available at: <dismantlinghindutva.com>.

Also available a host of info about the conference and the subject matter.

Here's an explanatory as regards what the conference is about.

<https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/global-hindutva-conference-us-7501478/>

Here're two speeches on the very first session of the first day:

I/II. 

<<The [Savarkar's] book ['Hindutva'] makes ahistorical, illogical and contradictory claims and must have been confusing even to Savarkar’s followers, as 80 years later, right up to 2003 when the Bharatiya Janata Party began to glorify Savarkar, only seven editions were published. Savarkar claimed the deepest antiquity for Hinduism, treated the Ramayana as actual history, while admitting that the term Hindu originated from Greeks, Persians and Arabs. Indeed the term Hindu cannot be found in scriptures like the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagvad Gita or any of the Smritis and Puranas.

...

...Hinduism is less a religion etched in stone or written by the hand of god than a composite of cultures that evolved over time as indigenous populations came into contact with an endless stream of visitors, some who came temporarily and others who stayed permanently...

...

Hindutva [a political ideology] ranked their enemies in order – Muslims, Christians and Communists. It applauded Hitler’s “national” pride and invoked the Nazi model of dealing with minorities. Like Hitler, Hindutva believed in race superiority and dreamt of world dominance. Yesterday it collaborated with the British. Today it flaunts the tricolor it had openly denigrated, pretends to uphold a Constitution it wanted replaced with the Laws of Manu, a misogynist, Brahminical text, and is busy selling every available public asset to the nearest foreign or Indian crony.>>

<https://scroll.in/article/1005159/anand-patwardhan-if-hindutva-is-hinduism-then-the-ku-klux-klan-is-christianity>

II. <<"Most of the websites of the Sangh Parivar that have been developed are not located in India" Jaffrelot added, alleging that more than half of them are located in the US, UK, Netherland, Belgium, Canada and Europe.

He said, “there was a clear intensification of the investment of the RSS and Sangh Parivar at large” at the turn of the 21st century.

“The visit of the RSS chief to Africa, Europe, US after 1995 is probably the turning point," Jaffrelot suggested, adding that their leaders realised they could easily raise funds since the Hindus in the West were very affluent.

“When Narendra Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat, he continued to raise funds but also attracted investments from non-resident Gujaratis.”

Jaffrelot said Hindu nationalists had cultivated a love-hate relationship with the US and the West:

“Hindu nationalism is directly deriving from ethnic nationalism that Germans have invented. There is this thought that the West has invented a form of modernity that has to be emulated.">>

<https://www.thequint.com/news/dismantling-global-hindutva-multidisciplinary-perspectives-dgh-a-three-day-global-scholarly-conference-begins>

Two reports:

I/II. <<Some of the prospective speakers have been trolled and even subjected to rape and death threats. That a lot of this threat-mongering is happening despite the online conference being a ‘North American’ enterprise suggests those doing the threatening either reside elsewhere or are confident that their patrons in the ‘pitrabhoomi’ can fend off the law enforcement agencies in their adopted motherland.

One of the critics of the event has asked, somewhat disingenuously, why such a conference is  “being organised ostensibly in North America rather than India”. Though he notes that “the event is online and virtual rather than live and in real time”, the answer, surely is obvious. Had an attempt been made to hold a conference critiquing Hindutva as a physical event in India, none of the foreign scholars due to speak would have been given visas. Assuming the police did not cite a threat to public order as a ruse to cancel the event, no public university would have given space and it is doubtful any private university would have been brave enough to step in to the breach. Last year, the external affairs ministry sought to impose restrictions on the participation of overseas speakers for online seminars too.

At the heart of the question – ‘Why critique Hindutva in the US?’ – is the desire to seek extra-territorial application of the restrictions the Modi government has placed on academic and political discourse. Not content with policing Indian universities, the Sangh parivar now wants to dictate what can and cant be discussed abroad.>>

 <https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/what-hindutva-really-is-and-why-its-risky-to-debate-it/amp>.

II. <<An academic conference in the US addressing Hindu nationalism is being targeted by rightwing Hindu groups, which have sent death threats to participants and forced several scholars to withdraw.

The conference, titled Dismantling Global Hindutva, which is co-sponsored by more than 53 universities including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers, has come under attack after several groups in India and the US accused the event of being “anti-Hindu”.>>

<https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/09/death-threats-sent-to-participants-of-us-conference-on-hindu-nationalism>