Almost daily, I read an article about my Hindu American community that shocks me. These stories, increasingly alleging caste discrimination, often assume an angle that is discordant with our reality and ignorant of our history. My micro-minority religious community—we are 1% of the US population—is fighting for the right to define our own religious beliefs while protecting our brothers and sisters around the world, persecuted by the same forces targeting us.
The American Anti-Caste Movement
The groups pressuring universities and lawmakers to pass bills like California’s SB403 “banning” caste discrimination are capitalizing off of a caste narrative that is being increasingly racialized. As we know well, it is uniquely American to view conflict through a reductive racial lens. In this case, Hindu Americans are labeled the “white supremacists” of the Asian diaspora while their alleged victims, the “caste oppressed”, are likened to Black Americans. This elicits a powerful, but misplaced, emotion in many well-meaning Americans and is fomented by influential personalities in universities like Harvard and Rutgers.
The forces pushing these angles depend on the deeply ingrained association between Hinduism and caste built into the American consciousness. In fact, anti-Hindu prejudices are often subconscious and have been reinforced through high school textbooks and missionary literature. Just Google the word “caste” and the link to Hinduism is ubiquitous. With these foundational biases in place, private groups like Equality Labs claim that these bills don’t target the Hindu community specifically, but rather, South Asians at large.
At the heart of the push for “caste equity” is the posturing that Dalits, formerly referred to as “untouchables,” are inherently oppressed by virtue of their birth, no matter where they are located or what they are doing. There are ample testaments from American Hindus, including Dalits, that systemic discrimination simply isn’t present in the diaspora, which the 2021 Carnegie Endowment’s study on Indian Americans clearly chronicles. American Dalits like Sudha Jaganathan and Aldrin Deepak, and senior leaders in the Coalition of Hindus of North America, have regularly challenged the claim that Equality Labs speaks for their communities. Their stories and these positive narratives rarely get coverage.
These narratives then lead to American legislators drafting anti-caste bills. The flaw in these bills is fundamental: they fail to delineate how to identify someone’s caste. Such lack of clarity in legislation causes tremendous damage. These bills assign American understandings of “privilege” and “oppression” onto poorly understood religious and ethnic communities. They interpret Hindu Americans in terms alien to their culture, making them victims of another wave of colonization.
Deafening Silence While Muslim Pakistan Persecutes Hindu Dalits
The truth is that the anti-caste movement is not interested in uplifting Dalits. Instead, it targets Hinduism and Hindu organizations. This is evident because the American anti-caste movement is supremely indifferent to Dalit persecution in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Dalits Hindus are treated as second and third class citizens in these majoritarian Muslim countries. Yet the plight of Dalit Hindus is rarely highlighted in The New York Times or Harvard.
I have some familiarity with Dalit Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In 2011, I participated in the Hindu American Foundation’s annual DC Advocacy Day and highlighted the forced conversion of minor Hindu girls to Islam. We visited several congressmen to request that the US put human rights on the agenda and use its leverage with Islamabad thanks to endless cash flow from the US to Pakistan.
Pakistan, an Islamic republic, has the strictest blasphemy and apostasy laws in the world. Like other minorities, Dalit Hindus are actively persecuted by the state. Rape is often used to pressure kidnapped minority women and boys to convert. Even as their families fight to retain custody of their children, the act of conversion is immutable, prohibiting the children from returning to their birth religion.
The cases of Rinkle Kumari and Kareena Kumari (no relation) have made international headlines, even though both women were denied justice and are both living with husbands who abducted them against their will. In 2022, 15-year-old Pooja Kumari was murdered by an older man. He wanted to marry her and wanted her to convert to Islam. She rejected his proposition and was executed on the front step of her home. This phenomenon continues today. In March 2023, 13-year-old Krishna Bheel was abducted while returning home from school.
Most of these girls happen to share a surname, Kumari, because they are Dalits from the Pakistani province of Sindh. Other common surnames for the missing Hindu children are “Kholi” and “Bheel,” belonging to other Dalit communities.
Over 90% of Pakistani Hindus live in Sindh. In the 1931 British India census, Sindh’s Hindu population stood at 26%. Partition in 1947 saw an exodus of Hindus to India. Today, Hindus live in rural areas and are overwhelmingly Dalit. The government forces Hindus to choose classification as “Hindu” or “scheduled caste” (Dalit). The 2017 census puts the number of Hindus at 6.9% and Dalits at 1.74%. Experts believe the number of Dalits to be much higher because many like to be called Hindus. The Pakistani state discriminates against both categories and many Islamists seek to convert all of them to the Muslim faith. Abducting, raping and forcibly marrying Dalit Hindu women is all a part of the holy jihad in the service of Allah.
In the US, far-left groups rarely shine the spotlight on Pakistan. They clamor for caste laws in the US, cite violence against Dalits in India and focus on sexual violence. Far-left groups allege that anti-Dalit discrimination is baked into Hindu society. Yet these groups ignore state-sponsored violence and rape against Dalit Hindu children in Pakistan. To me it seems that this focus on Dalit emancipation is rooted in Hinduphobia instead of concern for Dalit lives.
The Ignored and Persecuted Hindus of Bangladesh
Pakistan is not alone in targeting Hindus. Despite the fact that Bangladesh was liberated by India in 1971, Hindus have been persecuted in this country too. Their fate is completely ignored in the US.
Last year, House Resolution 1430, recognizing the Bangladeshi genocide and the special targeting of Bangladeshi Hindus, failed to make it to vote in the US Congress. While simultaneously targeting Bengali intellectuals and political leaders, the Pakistani army unleashed a wave of brutality against Bangladesh’s sizable Hindu minority. This disproportionate violence towards Hindus came from Pakistan basing its national identity in Islam, rejecting its Indian and Hindu roots. Hindus accounted for nearly 80% of those killed.
House Resolution 1430 faced strong opposition from the same groups pushing today’s anti-caste measures. One of them is misleadingly called Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). HfHR opposes official recognition of the genocide of Bengali Hindus in 1971. Instead, it is running an international campaign to highlight the impending “genocide” of Muslims in India. HfHR ignores the inconvenient fact that the population and percentage of Indian Muslims have steadily risen since 1947. From 1951 to 2011, this percentage has gone up from 9.8% to 14.4% and is now about to reach 180 million.
HfHR acknowledged the Pakistani army’s anti-Hindu atrocities. However, it claims that these atrocities occurred because of anti-Bengali sentiments. This narrative denies facts well recorded by many sources, including the US State Department. The Blood Telegram by Princeton professor Gary J. Bass has chronicled “the hardhearted policy and outright bigotry” of even the Cold War US policy in supporting Pakistan.
This amnesia about 1971 and wilful ignorance of the persecution of Hindus in South Asian Muslim nations is shameful. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh have systematically carried out ethnic cleansing of Hindus. These Muslim nations take the view that Hindus are idol-worshiping pagans who need to be converted to the only true faith: Islam. They base their identity in West Asia, not South Asia. HfHR does not address this anti-Hindu ethos and persistent Hindu persecution in South Asian Muslim nations. Instead, it deliberately deploys a false narrative about a law that gives persecuted minorities, including Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and even Christians, a fast-track path to Indian citizenship. HfHR wants India not to shelter these persecuted minorities. Instead, it wants them to remain stateless.
Let us focus again on Bangladesh. Like Pakistan, most Hindus who remained behind in the country after 1947 are Dalits. The first post-independence census of 1951 placed the Hindu population of East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then known, at 22%. Per the 2011 Bangladesh census, the percentage of Hindus has dropped to less than 9%. Hindus are fleeing Bangladesh because, like Pakistan, they are persecuted. When Khaleda Zia won the 2001 elections, her supporters unleashed violence on Hindus for about 150 days.
Over the last two years, Islamists have organized attacks on the Hindu celebrations of Navratri, a nine-day autumn festival. In 2021, the attacks were savage. Mobs vandalized 100 Hindu temples and killed up to 10 Hindus. This has fueled fear in the Bangladeshi Hindu community.
No wonder, Hindus are fleeing to India or converting to Islam in Bangladesh. The group Nagorik Uddyog, an advocacy group based in Dhaka, estimates the Dalit population to be 5.5 million. This overwhelmingly Hindu population faces constant discrimination. Crimes against Bangladeshi Hindus get even less coverage than crimes against Pakistani Hindus. Remember that Pakistani Hindus get very little attention themselves. So, Bangladeshi Hindus are almost completely ignored.
HfHR and Equality Labs call themselves activists fighting global Islamophobia. However, they systematically ignore the plight of minorities in Islamic countries. They fail to call out dangerous Islamist ideologies followed by the likes of the Taliban or Lashkar-e-Taiba. These activists have created an atmosphere in the US where any mention of Dalit Hindu persecution is damned as Islamophobia.To me it seems that leftist activists, the establishment media and top universities in the US now suffer from Hinduphobia. When the city of Fremont passed a symbolic anti-Hinduphobia bill in April, the executive director of Equality Labs broadcast an angry tirade. Sadly, like influential members of the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective, she refuses to use her privilege to protect the most vulnerable Dalits in the world. There is a strong anti-Hindu prejudice among these activists, which fuels their fervor. As I see it, American anti-caste legislation was never about protecting Dalits. Instead, it was always about profiling, defaming and colonizing Hindus.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
The post Why American Anti-Caste Measures Aren’t Really About Uplifting Dalits appeared first on Fair Observer.
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