The current western establishment is extremely guilty about the chaos they’ve wrought upon the ME and for pushing countless Muslims into radicalisation who feel like their people, cultural heritage sites and holy lands are being attacked in what’s essentially a “war on Islam” (recall IS recruitment videos was full of hatred towards the US). This created a cultural demand for “liberal Islam” among the “good people”, so they keep pointing to the violent chapters of Christianity’s history to essentially say that all religions have this phenomenon. But Christianity today is largely harmless, so they point to Hinduism instead to show how it is in fact committing violence against minorities and overplay it out of proportion that you’d think 1000s of people are dying every year due to communal violence.

The current zeitgeist claims to be very anti-racist and it sees Hinduism as racist due to caste (notice how some academics even say its proto-Nazi), so that was already a big black mark. But the perceived notion of oppressing subaltern groups (Islamic) is what’s really driving the mainstream headlines (it doesn’t matter to them that the reverse is true in 2 of our neighbouring countries, and far more vulgar, because criticism of Islam will raise eyebrows). Compare everything you don’t like maniacally with Nazis and you got the current sociopolitical trend. So “Hindu Nationalists have appropriated anything and everything native to India so everything native to India is bad”. Its dumb but it is what it is. In the current ethical framework, a “nazi” is the worst charge they could land on your moral compass.

Also keep in mind that Indians are a “model minority”, richest ethnic group in the US and among the most educated. As a religious group, Hindus are the most educated in the US and second most successful financially (behind Jews). What this means is that you’re seen as a privilged minority and not a subaltern group like Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, etc. Jews suffered the holocaust so they can also take part in the oppression olympics. Yes, we’re brown but we’re excluded from the “no human is illegal” list because we’re seen as some “upper caste fascist supremacist”. So we’re more like the Irish or German immigrants, because of our socioeconomic status.

On MSM at least, its woke hatred. We’re not an interest group so we should be given sermons about our “bigotry”. Even the non-woke and even the right leaning crowd shares this belief (though not with an active agenda) because literally no one can suggest that things are a little more complicated on the ground than how they seem without being faced with rhetorical hostility. If you may recall, Krzysztof Iwanek, a liberal Indologist, had said that he fully reaffirms his confidence in India’s democracy during the peak CAA riots period, and dismissed the fascist charge as a severe exaggeration. BUT he supported India on Kashmir, took a positive view on various economic reforms, defended Atmanir bharata and even the farm bills IIRC. So when he says he’s only against Hindutva, not Hindus, its easier to believe him at face value. But you’d probably never heard of him because he doesn’t tell the Establishment clowns what they want to hear like a dilettante. So he’s not the go-to person on anything concerning India unlike Jaffrelot and Truschke, who DO tell them what they want to hear with the correct phraseology. No doubt its a huge cause of irritation for the wokes that Hindu extremist violence is non-existent in the west, ergo few people will take them seriously about the threat that you pose.

This is largely constrained to the reddit and twitter crowd that’s more likely to have an idea about India than those who aren’t very active, the latter group seems to be the majority in my experience however. So the vast majority doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

A lot of western academics are infested by post modernism and their scholarship is misleading at best (see many historians on America, etc). Why would western scholars of India be any different? Best to find individuals who care about the truth–regardless of their ideology–and listen to them. Sometimes it may be unpleasant and sometimes it will be grand but the truth will never lead one astray.

A lot of Anglophone scholarship on Hinduism ranges from kind of untrue to outright disinformation. The solution to this problem is calm and dispassionate critiques of this ‘scholarship’. Follow Saul Alinksy’s rules, use the rulebook of your enemy against them!

Academics are sort of like celebrities, once we stop respecting them (not all of them just the ones publishing crap!) and caring about what they think, especially when their evidence is weak, their linguistic ability is poor and their reasoning spurious, then they stop mattering! What many academics want and crave is recognition, a good income and respect; and neither the American public nor higher education system offer anything of that kind.

Hindus should be funding and supporting academics and writers who are publishing good quality scholarship and writing, ones that aren’t morons, rather than spending their time engaging on low effort, low IQ Twitter battles. When you offer a calm and scholarly critique of an academic book, you’re reducing the ability of these midwit professors to misrepresent you as the Desi SS!

In USA, I doubt much would change unless one side gets weaker. Hindus in USA , i feel are already closer to the glass ceiling, and they wont reach the economic prosperity to browbeat the academics into submission. While on the Academics side they will always carry the mark of being less/non Hindu to really impact the Hindu side. Irrespective of how much woke the next gen hindu kids be, they are already starting from such a conservative base, that there will always be a catchment area for Hindu/Hindutva.

Yeah during the Gabby Petito thing, my mom (parents are pro-BJP normies wrt India, here former Reaganites that abandoned the GOP when Trump went apeshit) asked quite innocently that if they knew that the boyfriend did it, why couldn’t they just force a confession out of him?

My father explained to her what being Mirandized was, and the constitutional rights of the accused. She snorted with derision.

Apparently “encounter killings” are a pretty big thing in India (and the other “South Asian” countries) too, with fairly negligible outcry except for the usual activist and academic crowd.

We’re pretty much the farthest thing from a liberal society hahaha.

Among the leftist academics I know in India, none of them really care for freedom of expression and they state that openly in front of me.

It’s only ‘liberals’ who pretend to care for FoS but they can’t go overboard about it because:

1. The masses in India don’t care about it. So liberals can’t antagonise groups that are allied with them for tactical reasons like Muslims or Dalits.
(And from whom liberals derive most of their authority since they themselves do not have any political base)

2. They can’t antagonize progressives either who form a bulk of the academia in places like JNU.

In any case, it is hilarious that Hindutva is specifically being called out for this when every single faction in India from communists to Dravidians to Congress have been guilty of it and often at a much greater scale.