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University of Hindutva

Meet the group spreading Hindu supremacist propaganda on college campuses The Baffler

During the long summer between the crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses across the country and the start of the fall semester, an organization called Hindu on Campus, or HoC, stayed busy. “Dedicated to safeguarding Sanatana Hindu Dharma on college campuses,” HoC is an internet affinity group that uses social media to promote other well-established Hindu organizations while churning out a robust feed of content aimed toward a Gen Z audience. Over the summer, they promoted content related to everything from “Hindu Persecution Awareness Month” to Kamala Harris’s presidential run—but the bulk of their content focuses on geopolitics in South Asia.

In June, they zeroed in on an attack in Jammu in the disputed region of Kashmir in which unidentified militants killed nine Hindu pilgrims, and more recently, the popular uprising in Bangladesh, in which the protesters successfully facilitated the overhaul of their prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s repressive, India-allied Awami League party. HoC dubbed the popular anti-corruption movement the “Bangladeshi Hindu genocide.” To illustrate this, HoC’s youth director Surya Naga shared a visual—“Land Loss of the Native Hindu Population”—that shows a map and timeline of Bangladesh spanning from 3000 BC to the present. Over the course of five thousand years, the map fades from a Hindu red to Islamic green, indicating the religious shift of the region.

To the untrained eye, this map might evoke other visualizations that track the depopulation of indigenous Palestinians or Native Americans. What it actually depicts—crudely, selectively—is the transformation of the region’s religious landscape over the course of millennia, conspicuously omitting Buddhism, syncretic folk religion, and many other faith expressions that have long histories in Bangladesh. The misappropriation of the terms land lossand nativeattempts to situate Hindus in Bangladesh as suffering from a form of settler colonialism, an ongoing ethnic cleansing at the hands of Muslims—an ancient conspiracy to purge the land of its “indigenous” character.

The argument advanced by infographics like this—and by HoC in general—is that Hindus should have the right to self-determination in the form of an ethnostate, providing a pseudo-historical justification for the Hindu right wing’s openly fascist aspirations in India. Since the current prime minister Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2014, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has empowered a mass mobilization of Hindu nationalists—who comprise the movement known as Hindutva—across government, the media, film, and perhaps most troubling, in the streets. But Hindutva’s reach extends far beyond India itself. Hindu organizations in the diaspora play a pivotal role in lobbying and fundraising on behalf of the BJP’s interests.

HoC is part of a loose constellation of Hindu student organizations on Anglophone college campuses that purport to shed light on anti-Hindu discrimination, as well as promote Hindu culture among students. Some of them, such as the youth wings of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and Hindu Yuva, are well-established and, in the case of the latter, part of an entrenched web of Hindu supremacist organizations funded by wealthy individual members, philanthropists, and entities such as the Uberoi Foundation. They have been around for decades and have developed outreach beyond the university in their quest to push right-wing, Hindu supremacists positions. Hindu on Campus, established in 2021, represents a new generation of Hindu supremacist extremism in the diaspora. While they don’t have any physical chapters, they boast tens of thousands of followers across various platforms, who are served pithy infographics and ethnonationalist talking points laundered through the language of social justice.

HoC’s revisionism mirrors the Hindu fascist’s narrative about India’s past and relies on several ahistorical assumptions. Hinduism, for one, is not a monolithic, atemporal category; the term “Hindu” broadly describes the varied expressions of Vedic belief across the subcontinent and largely came to prominence during the British colonial period. The introduction of Islam to the subcontinent, similarly to the Christianization of Europe, was an immensely complicated process that occurred through both violent and nonviolent means: Sufi missionaries, Mughal conquest, cultural contract through trade, and willing conversions that allowed for people to retain many pre-Islamic customs. Furthermore, HoC’s framing of history, in which Hindus were perpetually victimized by Muslim invaders, defies the subcontinent’s rich history of blending Islamic and Hindu traditions—to many worshippers throughout history, these two categories weren’t entirely distinct. Not to mention there are actual indigenous tribes all over South Asia—Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and Animist, among others—who have been displaced from their ancestral lands by industrialists since 1947, when India was liberated from colonial rule. (Amusingly, HoC makes no mention of these actual instances of dispossession.) But, in HoC’s view, a “Hindu genocide” in Bangladesh is the only frame through which the last six thousand years of history ought to be understood.

Hindus in Bangladesh were not immune from violence. Like all Bangladeshis, the country’s Hindus were subjected to immense violence during the monstrous U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Pakistan in 1971, at times targeted by Yahya Khan’s soldiers on the basis of religion. And during more recent uprisings, there have been isolated incidents of Hindu properties being targeted and destroyed. This context matters, but the revisionist histories peddled by HoC, which conflate the experience of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority with indigenous people in actual settler colonies, have no room for such nuance. Bangladeshi Hindus were never moved onto reservations or Bantustans, forced into bondage, nor segregated in an apartheid system similar to the South African or Israeli regimes.

The construction of Hindus as victims of history is part and parcel of the broader Hindutva lobby’s concerted, well-funded effort to exert influence on the American political machine. HoC attempts to solve a difficult problem: convincing young South Asians in the diaspora to care about the causes and goals of Hindu supremacy in a faraway country that is not their own.

One of the ideological campaigns embraced by diasporic Hindutva organizations has been upholding the caste system across oceans, particularly in Silicon Valley. In 2023, California was on the cusp of criminalizing caste discrimination in the workplace before Governor Gavin Newsom, under pressure from Hindutva groups, vetoed the bill. Hindu organizations across the United States—from the scrappy HoC to the well-established Hindu American Foundation (HAF)—have attempted to recast this and other anti-caste legislation as itself a form of discrimination. In the words of HAF’s recommendation for how reporters should understand caste:

Caste as a specific class also suggests that there is a form of prejudice and malice amongst only people of Indian and/or South Asian descent and Hindus that is so entirely different and abhorrent that it renders this group a suspect class meriting special monitoring and policing on the basis of their race, national origin, ethnicity, or religion.

In conjunction with the context of caste, the fabrication of “Hinduphobia” as a matter of pressing concern relies on a similar distortion of reality that drives fascist paranoia in India: that an empowered Hindu majority are somehow at risk of annihilation from India’s Muslims, who, in the words of the prime minister, represent a class of “invaders” intent on defiling India’s “democracy.”

HoC relies on this manufactured sense of victimhood as the basis around which to organize and radicalize students. Since its inception, HoC has leveraged accusations of “Hinduphobia” at student organizers at Concordia, Columbia, Loyola, and most notably Rutgers—which moved to formally recognize Hinduphobia after HoC’s targeting of historian Audrey Truschke, whose robust scholarship is at the forefront of inquiry into the growth of Hindu extremism in the United States. This strategy echoes the pro-Israel lobby’s well-developed practice of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As Andrew Cockburn pointed out in a recent essay for Harper’s, the American Hindu-nationalist lobby “inevitably invites comparison with the pro-Israel lobby, an acknowledged source of inspiration.”

With the emergence of the Gaza solidarity movement among college students, many campus organizers have been vocal about the structural similarities between the occupations of Palestine and Kashmir in India. Kashmir, not unlike the West Bank, is an ultra-militarized conflict zone in which the Indian military expropriates land from locals and routinely kills, tortures, and rapes civilians with impunity. Kashmiri liberation movements—like their Palestinian counterparts—have been smeared endlessly by HoC and X accounts such as “Campus Jew Hate” as violent extremists. During the pro-Palestine protests this past spring, for instance, HoC took to their social media channels to portray Columbia and Barnard students’ rallying call for azaadi, or “freedom,” as a dog-whistle for Hindu genocide—mirroring the hysterical manipulation of the term intifada.

Hindu supremacist organizations around the world have a long history of radicalizing students through youth programming. In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the most illustrative example. The RSS is a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization whose members have infiltrated politics throughout the state and, more recently, Indian universities. For the RSS, India’s commitment to secularism following its independence was a major obstacle to reestablishing what they believed was India’s ultimately Hindu destiny. Early on, it established grassroots “training camps” across the nascent country to indoctrinate Hindus of all ages. A young Narendra Modi first attended RSS training sessions when he was eight years old, where he received martial training alongside other youths. Modi then steadily worked himself up the ranks of the organization before becoming the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, where he helped facilitate an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002—for which he was barred entry to the United States during Obama’s administration.

Under Modi’s reign, the RSS has exercised considerable influence. They have had a particularly profound effect on the writing of textbooks and have helped shape the version of history that is subsequently promoted by HoC and similar organizations in the diaspora. Increasingly in Hindu scholastic circles, the caste system is dismissed as an invention of the British and Hindu supremacy reframed as a legitimate anti-colonial movement. Such scholarship provides an intellectual face to the political goals of India’s Hindu right wing.

Hindu-American organizations, including HoC, also push this notion that caste as it exists today was a “colonial construct” imposed on Hindus by the British and that anti-caste criticism is merely a means of collectively punishing Hindus who have no responsibility over it. According to an infographic on HoC’s Instagram, “Caste is a racist, colonial, classist construct that was imposed on the indigenous Hindu populations during the colonial rule of India.” While this framing may seem crass, it parrots HAF’s more buttoned-up rhetoric: the term casteis derived from Portuguese, and that “there is no equivalent concept to caste as such in Indian languages.” Meanwhile, HAF has targeted academic conferences and platformed right-wing voices that belittle anti-caste discourse as “critical caste theory.”

It is unclear whether the anonymous “watchdog” HoC has any formal relationship to the broader Hindutva lobby. Its origin is murky, and very little information about how it was founded is available on its website. (The organization did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) They do solicit donations but are not tethered to a larger nonprofit like other campus organizations in the same vein as Hindu Yuva and CoHNA’s youth organization, CYAN. Other than its youth director Surya Naga, the group boasts no easily identifiable personnel. On her own account, Naga’s purview expands farther than South Asia. She applies the sensationalized framework of the victimized Hindu in India to the very real persecution of minorities in the Middle East. In one Instagram story, she calls Iraq an “Arab-Muslim false occupied state built on Assyrian, Yazidi, and Mandaean lands,” appropriating the ISIS-led genocide of Yazidis to fit a warped political narrative. 

What canbe observed is how HoC repackages and advances a laundered vision of India’s history to reach Hindus raised in the United States. They affirm testimonies of anecdotal anti-Hindu discrimination on American campuses and even have an online “Hinduphobia tracker,” inviting students to submit their own stories. They present themselves as a common sense resource, one that endeavors to simplify complex topics: India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, the movement to add caste to American antidiscrimination law, and the Indian occupation of Kashmir.

India’s global crusade against dissent takes many forms. Much of the work to control the narrative is carried out by an international and intergenerational coalition of students and lobbyists in the diaspora. This is not to suggest some grand conspiracy, but all of these players share a common goal: to advance the ideological objectives of global Hindutva, whose key stratagem is misrepresenting an ethnonationalist vision as human rights forward. Thus HoC’s co-option of anti-racist language is perfectly suited for the college-aged audience. Why wouldn’t a well-meaning social media user who posts in solidarity with decolonial struggle, racial equity, or other identity-based advocacy campaigns not be moved to support HoC if they are led to believe that Hindus comprise an indigenous people under constant threat?

Riding the larger movement to constantly challenge institutional biases in curriculum, discrimination policy, and more recently the right to free speech, HoC is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. When young Hindus confront how their own lineages are structured by religious fascism, it can be a real reckoning. Many join the ranks of the left, recognizing the interconnectedness of Hindu ethnonationalism with other totalitarian movements—potentially to the dismay of their own families. Others evade responsibility entirely and choose fear, even if it appears to be in good faith.