CHICAGO, USA - The globalized religious politics swirling around the Modi state visit in particular and US-India relations more generally have generated troubling connections between two strains of right-wing extremists: white Christian nationalism and Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, of which Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is the leading proponent,write Francesca Chubb-Confer and Andrew Kunze in the Divinity School of Chicago University paper.
A fundamental stance that both defines these groups and brings them together is their virulent Islamophobia. In the post-9/11 era, the specter of terrorism has been leveraged by Republicans and Democrats alike to pass damaging policies like Trump’s infamous “Muslim Ban,” “Countering Violent Extremism” or CVE programs, and continued violence overseas towards Muslim communities caught at the wrong end of American empire.
In India, similar approaches have seriously escalated in the past few years, from an amendment essentially creating a religious test for Indian citizenship, to vigilante violence in the name of “cow protection” or preventing “love jihad,” to bulldozing Muslim homes and businesses, to literally erasing India’s Muslim history from school textbooks.
In neither the US nor India is Islamophobic rhetoric purely rhetorical—it results in very real, and in India often quite public, violence. The threat of anti-Muslim genocide in India has been identified as increasingly likely. This kind of dangerous rhetoric is hardly limited to India, either—last year, anti-Muslim symbols appeared at a community parade in Edison, New Jersey, and violence broke out between Hindu and Muslim communities in Leicester, England.
Around the global Hindu diaspora, there is widespread support for Hindutva (lit. “Hindu-ness”), the political ideology of India as essentially and eternally a Hindu nation, to the exclusion of other religions, mostly (but not exclusively) Islam.
This should not surprise scholars of religion and globalization. Religious diasporas —Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist— very often become strong supporters of religious nationalism back in the homeland, usually nostalgically romanticized as a place where traditions are dominant and pure.
In the last decade, the South Asian population in the US has grown to about three million, or one percent of the country’s population. At the same time, Hindu Americans (not to be conflated with South Asian Americans) have become key economic, political, and religious supporters for Hindutva in India.
