By Twocircles.net Staff Reporter
San Francisco: In December of last year, support for Hindu nationalism from a largely ”upper”- caste Indian diaspora in the United States was on full display at the Howdy Modi Event at Houston’s NRG Stadium. The event saw a crowd of over 50,000 Indian Americans cheering for a Prime Minister whom American lawmakers had even previously banned from entering the country for years, citing a well-documented history of “severe violations of religious freedom” while he was the chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. The event was hosted by the Texas India Forum, which has direct links to the Hindu nationalist groups associated with the Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh (RSS) in India. And it was active advocacy by groups such as these that helped revoke the ban.
While there has been a lot of coverage in the media, both in India and the US, on the support that these leaders enjoy from the members of the Indian diaspora, what has remained unreported is the growing discontentment among many. Hundreds of Americans, in the wake of the current passing of laws such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as well as the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), have been coming out on the streets demanding accountability from the Indian Government and to roll back these discriminatory laws and policies. As part of their protest, on the 19th of January, 2020, many in the Indian American diaspora organised a first-of-its-kind National Day of Action in around Indian-American districts around the United States.
These protests, spearheaded by Equality Labs, a Dalit-feminist organisation based in the US, are declared to be ‘in response to the Indian government passing the Citizenship Amendment Act that bars Muslim immigrants from becoming Indian nationals and lays the legal foundation to force the country’s 200 million Muslims into a registry to be placed into a series of detention camps’, as stated in a press note released by them.
Many of these Indian-American heavy neighborhoods have rarely seen protests against Hindu nationalism. Among the locations where different organizers are organising there are Artesia Boulevard in Los Angeles, Devon Street in Chicago, Moody Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, Patel Plaza in Decatur, Illinois, and Newark Street in Jersey City to name a few.
“With respect to genocide, the UN states that ‘The vastness of number and the targeting of one particular community with the clear intent to ‘destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’In this case it is Muslims, and there is enough evidence to say that India is in a pre-genocidal stage.” said Tara Brown, a student of International law, who was part of the protest.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Executive Director of Equality labs says that it is with the financial and other support from many ‘upper caste Hindu networks’ in the diaspora, that the present government is able to achieve its ‘fascist ideologies’. “We’re mobilizing a National Day of Action with South Asian American grassroots groups across the U.S. to uplift the demand that these networks immediately cease their support and divest from the spread of Hindu fascism. We are drawing a line in the sand: the diaspora will not be complicit with genocide”, she adds.
Many Indian-Americans are stepping forward and rejecting this perceived politics of complicity. Organisations like Equality Labs and South Asian Solidarity Initiative (SASI), Indian American Muslim Council and API Chaya have been at the forefront of fighting against this right wing nationalist agenda whether it is their efforts to ensure that advocacy by them to erase caste from history textbooks in California schools is not successful,or addressing India’s Islamophobic anti-minority policies through organised protests such as these.
Bilal Hussain who has been leading the mobilisation in Artesia, New Mexico mobilisation was among the first to join the call. “I have not slept since the CAA passed. I am Muslim, I am queer. And I am of Indian descent. The CAA has genocidal implications for all of my communities and we will not be silent”, he says.
Hundreds of protesters organised in Atlanta, Chicago, Bay Area, New York, New Jersey, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles on the 19th, could be seen registering their absolute rejection of the CAA, NRC and NPR. In fact, across the world, Indian diasporas, students in universities and others have been organising against these policies, openly calling them unconstitutional and discriminatory
In addition, this particular series of protests, also aimed to question support of Hindu right wing groups in the United States towards what the protestors have been calling ‘funding genocide’. A young protestor in the Bay Area was heard saying, “You cannot expect us to be silent when our Muslim and Dalit brothers and sisters are being segregated to be put in detention centers for not being able to prove their citizenship. We will fight till the end, their struggle is our struggle”.