(RNS) — In late October, Rutgers University, New Jersey’s flagship state school, held an academic panel on the rise of Hindu nationalism in the United States. The conversation between a South Asian history professor and a graduate student traced how Hindutva — a far-right political ideology distinct from Hinduism — influences politics in the sprawling Indian diaspora.
The topic has been a focus for scholars of Indian history and politics since 2014, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won national elections and named Narendra Modi, BJP’s leader, prime minister of India. But the topic is also a sensitive one for Hindus, who worry that talk of Hindu nationalism might brand them as biased. The day of the panel, a small group of students silently protested outside of the university’s Alexander Library, holding signs that read “Hindu rights are human rights” and “American Hindus are not foreign agents.”
Ayushi Sharma, a Rutgers senior who attended the protest, said a man began filming the group, calling them “terrorists” and threatening the students in English and Punjabi. As the protest escalated, campus police broke it up. “That incident really shook me to my core, because, like, that’s the first time I’ve ever experienced something so blatantly Hinduphobic.”
Soon the panel had stoked alarm far beyond Rutgers’ campus.
“We support free inquiry and debate, but academic freedom must not be used as a shield for disinformation that demonizes an entire community,” wrote the Hindu American Foundation, the largest Hindu advocacy organization in the United States, in an open letter urging Rutgers to disassociate publicly from the event. The Coalition of Hindus of North America, a watchdog organization that fights Hinduphobia, launched its own campaign that sent more than 100,000 emails to Rutgers administrators and New Jersey public officials.
A few days later, U.S. Reps. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, Shri Thanedar of Michigan, and Sanford Bishop and Rich McCormick of Georgia sent a letter to Rutgers President William F. Tate IV. “We are concerned that the rhetoric of the report may fuel further prejudice, particularly impacting Hindu students on college campuses who may feel unfairly targeted or unsafe,” they wrote.
The reaction to the panel had to do in part with Rutgers’ high profile in the diaspora. Close to northern New Jersey’s most densely populated South Asian communities, Rutgers sponsors more than 25 diaspora student organizations and enrolls hundreds of Indian international students. It has been a hotbed of Hindu American debate for more than a decade, during which time the administration or faculty has denied accusations of institutional Hinduphobia and Hindu students have been accused of extremist politics.
This “negative undercurrent” on campus, say some Hindu advocates, has contributed to fear in Hindu parents, pushing some to think twice about sending their children to the school.
The friction also had to do with the professor who spoke at the panel: Audrey Truschke, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Newark campus who heads the school’s Asian Studies minor and teaches several courses on South Asian history, politics, religions and, occasionally, Hindu nationalism. Truschke is notorious among Hindus in the U.S. and India for her 2017 biography of 17th-century Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, in which she attempted to moderate the Muslim ruler’s reputation as a fanatical oppressor of Hinduism during his reign over northern India. In 2018, her seemingly off-the-cuff comment calling Lord Ram “a misogynistic pig” drew accusations of blasphemy.
In April 2021, the Hindu Students Council co-hosted its first Understanding Hinduphobia conference, and a resolution recognizing a “working definition of Hinduphobia” was passed unanimously by the Rutgers University Student Assembly.
In September of that year, Rutgers itself co-sponsored an academic event, the Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference, with several other U.S. universities that examined the ideology’s history and modern-day implications. The conference caused an uproar, with a large coalition of Hindu advocacy and student organizations, including HAF and CoHNA, criticizing what they saw as activism rather than institutional neutrality and a conflation of Hinduism and Hindutva.
HAF sent a letter to the sponsoring universities at the time, saying, “The event platforms activists with extensive histories of amplifying Hinduphobic discourse even while denying the existence of Hinduphobia. Many of these activists equate the whole of Hinduism with caste bigotry and other social ills; deny the subcontinental indigeneity of Hindus and Hinduism; and support or minimize violent extremist and separatists movements and deny the resulting genocides and ethnic cleansings of Hindus.”
Hedges spelling Rutgers at the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (Photo by Tomwsulcer/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
Much of this criticism was aimed at Truschke, and it was renewed when she was named co-chair of the now-disbanded University Task Force on Caste Discrimination, which studied whether Rutgers should add caste to the university’s anti-discrimination policies, as other schools had done. The task force’s recommendation was eventually rejected by Rutgers.
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Truschke said the agitation against her work comes almost entirely from outside the university. “Nine out of 10 things that I do internally at Rutgers, there is no external response, like, we’re all fine,” she told Religion News Service. “Students appreciate the classes, we talk about lots of interesting things, people have lots of different ideas. That’s what college is all about.”
She added, “I continue to think, as I have for years now, that people attack a character of who they think I am. I hear the Audrey Truschke that they hate, and I would hate her too, but that’s not me.”
Truschke’s appearance on the October panel was cause for outrage, said one Rutgers junior, who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of backlash from the administration. “A professor is allowed to teach what a professor wants, but it’s still that kind of emotional, essentially mental trauma … from just outright, blatantly, kind of bashing your culture, and it’s on the basis of teaching it to you,” he said. “Every opportunity I wanted to take to really speak up, I felt like my voice wasn’t necessarily welcome.”
The report that occasioned the panel, “Hindutva in America: A Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism,” was equally troubling to some Hindus. Produced by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights, which studies “underlying structural and systemic causes of Islamophobia and xenophobia against people of Arab, African, and South Asian descent,” according to its website, the report said that Hindutva is pushed by what is known as the American Sangh: a network of Hindutva-oriented groups operating from the U.S.
“In the United States, Hindutva proponents seek to silence the voices of Indian Americans and others who disagree with their ideology, promote harmful policies favorable to India’s Hindu nationalist political parties, and control knowledge about South Asia’s diverse, multireligious history,” the report says. “In so doing, Hindutva advocates undermine American pluralism and spread hate against Muslims, Sikhs and other minority groups within American society.”
Of particular concern to some Hindu advocates is the naming of several Hindu American organizations, including HAF and the Coalition of Hindus of North America, as “proxies” or “affiliates” of Hindutva parent organizations in India. Also named are Hindu YUVA and Hindu Students Council — two of the oldest college campus affinity groups, both of which have a strong presence at Rutgers.
Truschke worries that CoHNA and other Hindu activist organizations have misled Hindu students, making a “patently false claim,” Truschke said, that the CSSR report calls for Hindu student groups to be surveilled and that “every student who attends a Diwali celebration will be called a Hindu nationalist.” She said she hopes students will “think in concrete terms” about their fears, pointing out that the Hindu Students Council and other groups are “very free to operate on Rutgers’ campus. No one has infringed on that, and as far as I know, nobody plans to infringe on that.”
She said she has pushed for the right of students to protest anywhere on campus and for security measures to be provided by the school in tense situations such as a 2019 Q&A session sponsored by the Hindu Student Council with controversial Indian film director Vivek Agnihotri.
Vivek Kembaiyan, who belongs to the anti-nationalist Hindu organization Hindus for Human Rights, said groups on the “Hindu far right” exploit what he called misunderstanding about the lot of Hindus on campus, with students and the Hindu community. “They’re organized, well-funded and present themselves as representative of the whole community, when their ideology is a marginal one in our community,” said Kembaiyan during a Nov. 12 webinar on the CSSR report.
Nikunj Trivedi, chairman of CoHNA and a former president of Rutgers Hindu Students Council, calls his time as an undergraduate between 1996 and 2000 a “foundational experience for me about my identity as a person and as a Hindu.” At the time, he said, Hindu students faced claims of being “idol worshippers” and “Hindu extremists” and said it was then that “the sort of systematization started to come when certain professors and a certain environment started to happen on campus.”
Rutgers’ administration, said Trivedi, has erred on the side of supporting academic freedom, while admitting that it has allowed a range of Hindu advocates to host their own events. “The best way to challenge such misconceptions is to have your own voice on campus, because you’re not going to be able to dethrone professors with tenure,” he said.
But CoHNA complains that it has applied twice to establish a presence for its CoHNA Youth Action Network on campus, but the administration told the group, said one student, “there are too many Hindu student groups on campus, and that these groups all align with each other.”
In an email to RNS, Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin stated:
Rutgers University is proud of the rich cultural and religious diversity of its faculty, staff, and students. All the members of the Rutgers University community — our faculty members, students, alumni, and staff — are free to express their viewpoints, including viewpoints that may differ from many in the university community. The University protects freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry, even when views expressed may be controversial or generate disagreement.
But Sharma, the student protester, said that scholarly inquiry can impact how Hindu students feel about their sense of belonging on campus. She said she came to college looking for a place to relate to other Hindu students trying to “navigate Rutgers while also trying to progress spiritually.” HSC, Hindu Yuva, the Bhakti Club and BAPS Campus Fellowship, as well as several Indian regional cultural associations, provide a feeling of community, she said, but that can easily be undone if Hindus are identified as supporters of Hindutva.
“We deserve to go to our clubs and celebrate our religion, our culture, just like every other religious group does,” said Sharma. “But it’s just scary, because it’s so easy to label people as Hindutva nationalists, as extreme BJP supporters, when we are literally just students.”
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