12

A Bloated Hinduism
Vinay Lal

North American Hindus and the Imagination of a Vanguard

hinduism without the hindus, almost

he most common narratives of the origins of Hinduism in the United States commence either with the palpable interest shown in certain Hindu scriptures by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other intellectuals together known as the American Transcendentalists, or with what has been described as the electrifying performance by Swami Vivekananda, who would in time become the most eminent disciple of the Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa, at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Neither Emerson nor Thoreau had any familiarity with everyday Hinduism, nor can they even remotely be described as practitioners of the faith; indeed, they derived their understanding of Hinduism through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations that, over the last few decades, have been roundly criticized as displaying an Orientalist sensibility. There can be no gainsaying the fact that the mid-nineteenth century American understanding of Hinduism was bookish in the extreme, and the texts that came to stand for Hinduism were enlivened, not only by the learned commentaries of such scholars as Sir William Jones and Henry T. Colebrooke, but also by imaginative and often lurid accounts of Hindu superstitions. Indeed, Emerson was still in his teens when he penned Indian Superstition, the opening lines of which furnish ample clues about the young mans impressions of a subjugated land and its bizarre faiths: Dishonoured India clanks her sullen chain,/And wails her desolation to the main.1 However, if one turns to the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, rather than to their scholarly interpreters, one is also struck by their ecumenism, intellectual curiosity, and wide generosity of spirit; moreover, they can scarcely be criticized when one considers, as shall become apparent in due course, that many of the most virulent advocates of Hindu nationalism are, if anything, much more beholden to the positivism of colonial intellectual traditions. As for Vivekananda, his success in the US has been amply documented: he quickly gathered a number of American disciples

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around him and to many it seemed as if an Eastern yogi had at long last made his way to the US.2 There was, we may say, too much of rugged Yankee individualism in Thoreau to enable him to be a perfect yogi; but the arrival of Vivekananda, a proponent of Raja Yoga who thought of the yogi as someone who dared to cross the last frontier of consciousness, in the US, long viewed as the frontier that (alongside Australia) remained to be opened to Western civilization, seems perfectly apposite. However much he bestrode the horizon as a colourful and yet magnetic representative of an ancient faith, the singularity in which Vivekananda has been positioned is also misleading. Even as Vivekananda was being invited to consort with the gentility in their living rooms in Boston and Chicago, Indians were beginning to gravitate towards the west coast of the US and Canada, arriving there as farmers, lumbermen, and students, their numbers bolstered by revolutionaries and political dissidents seeking to foment resistance to colonial rule in British India from distant shores.3 In the years following, Vedanta, yoga, and other Hindu teachings established something of a presence in small pockets of American society.4 However, the consumers of such teaching and practices were overwhelmingly Americans, more so after the early 1920s when immigration laws excluded Indians and other Asians from entering the US. The US Census of 1960 accounted for a paltry 8,745 Indians in the entire country, and it is only in the aftermath of the immigration reforms of 1965, which eliminated the restrictions that had effectively barred all but a few Indians from the US for over four decades, that the religious, cultural, and social life of diasporic Indian groups would begin to take on a new vibrancy. Hinduism has registered nothing short of a spectacular growth in the US, most particularly after the first generation of Indians in the post-1965 period had, in a period of something like 1520 years, solidified their presence on the American scene. Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta, a Bengali Vaishnava who unabashedly claimed to be in the direct spiritual lineage of the great bhakta Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, arrived in the US in 1965 and established the International Society for Krishna Consciousness [ISKCON]. The Hare Krishnas, as his followers were dubbed, were soon a ubiquitous presence at airports and university campuses. They chanted at street corners, distributed Hindu religious literature, and enticed the general public with generous offerings of food. It matters little that the Hare Krishnas have gone to court in a bid to have themselves described as adherents not of Hinduism but of Krishnaism: they remained, in the early years, the public face of Hinduism in the US, and they still occupy

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something of a unique presence in public life with, to take one example, their annual procession of chariots on the occasion of Janmashtami culminating in a vegetarian feast amidst grand cultural activities on Los Angeless famed Venice Beach. In the incipient years of the Hare Krishna movement, when temples built by immigrant Hindus were few and far between, Indians frequented the ISKCON temples though few Hindus joined the movement. Sometimes the Hare Krishna temple was the only Hindu edifice in town and it even came to serve as a small community centre; in the Hare Krishna temple, some Hindus also received, in the 1960s and 1970s, the only semi-institutional affirmation in American society of their vegetarianism. By the mid-1970s, the Indian population had registered considerable growth and the community could think of commissioning new temples or, what was then still more practical converting existing unused structures, such as churches, into temples and community centres. There was little appetite for philanthropic activities among Indian professionals, and there is no record of any Indian gifts in this period to educational institutions, or any sign of ambition on the part of wealthy Indians to promote Indian studies. Their energies seemed to be directed mainly at facilitating the arrival of family members to the US, or, what is more germane to the arguments of this chapter, directing some of their affluence towards the construction of new temples. If, as many Hindu Indian Americans claim,5 their religion is inadequately understood in the US, or that stereotyped representations of Hinduism still dominate in the American media, there is little to suggest that the first generation of post-1965 Indian immigrants, whose preoccupation with making a living and seeking acceptance in American society would be understandable, sought to generate more complex public understandings of Hinduism.

temple hinduism and the emergence of a community

The growth of temples in the Chicago area amply illustrates certain aspects of the history of Hinduism in the US since the rise of a professional Indian class. Between 1980 and 2000, the Indian population in the greater Chicago area nearly quadrupled to around 125,000, and the public profile of Hinduism grew commensurately. Indian professionals established the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago (HTGC) as a not-forprofit organization in 1977 and a 17-acre site was purchased for USD 300,000 in Lemont in the outlying suburbs. The HTGC website states

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that the complex has two separate temples. They provide a congenial atmosphere for worship, spiritual advancement and also serve as a focal point for cultural and educational activities. The two temples in question are a Ganesh temple, which was inaugurated by Lata Mangeshkar in 1985, and was subsequently expanded to house the deities of Shiva and Durga, and a larger Rama temple for which the kumbhabisekham, or formal dedication was held on 4 July 1986. For the present, it is enough to underscore the fact that the dedication ceremony was performed on 4 July, celebrated as Independence Day and doubtless the most iconic of the holidays that help to recall what countless others before Barack Obama have described as the Spirit of America. The Rama temple is built to specifications in the authentic style of the Chola dynasty, states the website, while the GaneshShivaDurga (GSD) Temple emulates the architecture of Bhuvaneshwar, Orissa. The ShivaVishnu temple in Livermore, California displays an identical form of architectural eclecticism. The HTGC temple complex, however, was to be many years in the making, and by the early 1980s, when ground for the temple had still not been broken, the Telugu professionals in the Greater Chicago area had committed themselves to a construction of a Sri Venkateswara, or Balaji Temple in Aurora, also in the western suburbs. Former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai attended the groundbreaking ceremony of the Balaji temple in 1985, and the temples board and principal donors availed of the services of Muttaialstapathy, who is an expert on temple construction in south India. Over USD 4 million were invested in the Balaji temple, a landmark of Hindu temple architecture that now finds mention in some Chicago tourist guidebooks, but the Hindu community was by the mid-1990s determined to scale new heights of opulence that would lift the community beyond other faiths. In a phenomenon rather similar to that commonly witnessed in India in the aftermath of neoliberalization, where practitioners can argue that their Hanuman is bigger than the Hanuman of the other, Hindu organizations have sought to outdo others in demonstrations of their devotion. The USD 40 million Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, which opened in Bartlett, some 40 miles from Chicago, in August 2004 uses limestone from Turkey and marble from Italy and Makrana (India), and nearly 500 craftsmen in India laboured over the 108 marble pillars which support 15 domes. One might argue that the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), one of the three groups of the Swaminarayan sect to whom the temple belongs, is particularly prone to ostentatious temple

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architectureif their equally grand temples in Neasden (London), Gandhigram, and Delhi may be adduced as evidence. But the indisputable fact remains that as the Indian community acquires increasing influence, and gains self-confidence, it has sought to register its presence in the public sphere by grand religious edifices. The same justifications that have always existed for such enterprises, namely, that monumental houses of worship are fitting expressions of the glory of God, or that the devotees are spurred to greater heights of karma (action) and bhakti (love) in the midst of such grandeur, are trumpeted out on these occasions. One should perhaps not be surprised that there has been little if any expression of discontent at such affluent displays of Hindu religiosity. The BAPS temple is an affirmation not only of community and ethnic pride, but also of the alleged values of Hinduism and the civilization with which it is indelibly linked. Recognizing the supreme place of the museum modality in the culture of the modern West, the BAPS temple, in what might be called the Gallery of Indian Achievements, showcases the contributions of ancient India and purports to establish the persistent modernity of India. The permanent exhibition on Understanding Hinduism, divided into five sections, commences with Glorious India. The ancient Indians, the viewer is told, were familiar with aviation, atomic energy, even aeronautic surveillance; indeed, in whatever domain of knowledge, the ancient Hindus not merely excelled, but somehow anticipated the very scientific developments for which the modern West takes credit. India was the first to introduce the concept of the Zero to the world in 700 bce, the reader is told, and since this is one achievement that cannot be doubted, the reader is lured into believing the rest, namely, that the law of gravity was first discovered in 600 bce, by Maharshi Kanad, an Indian Physicist; and, furthermore, the first history book, the first university, the first Hospitalall founded in India, hundreds of years before any thought of [these arose] in countries across the world.6 The question is not whether some if not nearly all of these claims are fraudulent,7 but what relationship achievements in surgery, physics, metallurgy, and mathematics have to Hinduism. Why should religion have to validate itself in the language of science? The necessity of attempting to demonstrate the compatibility of modern science with the tenets of an ancient faith apart, what is just as striking is the effortless ease with which Hindu elides into India. There is, in the exhibition at the BAPS temple in Bartlett, the reassurance that it was the Hindu mind that discovered the law of gravity or wrote the first textbook of surgery.

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It is possible, then, to speak at this juncture of Temple Hinduism and of certain marked characteristics taken on by the faith in its new setting. Where before temples were, on the whole, casual affairs, and immigrants showed a willingness to adapt to diasporic conditions, now many temples are increasingly ostentatious affairs. One may claim, if a trifle bit of exaggeration were permitted, that million-dollar temples are becoming as common as million-dollar homes. A certain turn towards textualism appears to have become more pronounced with the growing affluence of the community. Temples are increasingly built to conform to the specifications enumerated in the shilpa shastras, or manuals of temple architecture. Specialists versed in temple architecture are likely to be hired as consultants. The temples are decidedly grander, but Hindu communities and organizations seem much less disposed to innovate or negotiate with other communities. A proposed BAPS temple in Chino Hills, an affluent portion of San Bernadino County in southern California, was the subject of much dispute in the city council meeting in 2004, where it was demanded that the proposed temple spires, from 5280 feet, be reduced so that they did not exceed the 43-foot height limit stipulated in the city code. However, BAPS representatives refused to entertain the suggestion, putting forward the argument that the proportions specified in the shastras could not be violated. BAPS representatives could nonetheless have preserved the inviolability of the proportions by lowering not only the temple spires but also altering all other dimensions of the temple and its images by the same ratio. There are other considerations as well: not only are the images carved in India, as one would expect, but priests continue to be drawn to this day from India. The Hindu American Foundation, about which I shall have more to say shortly, is among the organizations that have attempted to facilitate the entry into the US of pandits under the Religious Worker Visa Programme. On occasion, the priests have been drawn from other diasporic sites: the priests at the Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir in Richmond Hill, New York, which services largely Indo-Guyanese now settled on the East Coast, are themselves drawn from this community. Indeed, when some members of this community moved to Orlando, where a branch of the temple was opened in 1992, the priests followed in their wake. The Indo-Guyanese diaspora already has such a complex history of its own that one is not surprised that members of this community feel more comfortable with priests who share their history. Wherever in India or in the wider Indian diaspora Hindu priests may have been drawn from, they often go American embracing credit cards

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as much as American slang. But, from the standpoint of worshippers, the priests still bear marks of a cultural and religious authenticity. The history of the aforementioned Shri Lakshmi Narayan temple is illustrative of a third marked tendency, namely, the fact that many temples are associated with distinct Hindu communities. The clientele at the various Sri Venkatesvara temples is largely of South Indian origins, just as the Swaminarayan temples are patronized overwhelmingly by Gujaratis. Murugan temples, likewise, attract mainly Tamilians. Unarguably, there is nothing exceptional in this at all, but what we might call a regional sectarianism persists even when communities are quite smalland even when, as we shall see, simultaneous claims about how the US furnishes hope for a less divisive Hinduism are implicitly advanced to project the notion of Indian American Hindus as constituting something of a vanguard for the faith. It is possible, as well, to speak of the distinct if related idioms of pluralism in which Hinduisms history in the US is perhaps most productively etched. It has sometimes been suggested that Hindus in the diaspora may be less attentive to distinctions which hold sway in India, such as those between north and south, Vaishnavas and Saivas, and so on. Whether this is partly on account of their own minority status in the US is an interesting and yet unresolved question. Whether this phenomenon is as distinct as is sometimes argued is also somewhat questionable. At the brand new Hindu Temple of Central Florida (Orlando), where a substantial portion of the pan-Indian Hindu pantheon is to be found, one gopuram (gate) is described as being in the Chola style, the other in the Naga or northern Indian style. The temples board of trustees claims that Hinduism is synonymous with diversity, and that Hindu temples in the US must attempt to meet the varying requirements of Hindu communities and their styles of worship. But this clichd claim about diversity, which has now reached the point of monotonous excess in American culture, is much more substantive than it appears, since the supposition is that the practice of Hinduism in the US is more likely to approximate the ideal of Hinduism than the practice of the faith in its myriad instantiations in India. Second, though commentators have occasionally commented on the social aloofness of Indians, and Indian shopkeepers have sometimes been criticized for keeping their stores open on 4 July, which is celebrated with fanfare as Independence Day, Hindu and Sikh communities are more cognizant of American mores and customs, indeed even the countrys physical geography, than is commonly recognized. The

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Rama shrine at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago was consecrated on 4 July, and we can be certain that the temples trustees and devotees held to the view that Hindus not only share in the (purported) blessings of American freedom, but that Hinduism enables a more enriched and spiritual conception of freedom with its stress on spiritual emancipation and self-realization. As Indian American Hindus would be inclined to argue, 4 July marks not only the emergence of an American nation stitched together from diverse strands, all encapsulated in the formula, E Pluribus Unum, From Many, One, but also, keeping in mind the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the public and secular affirmation of the timeless wisdom of the Hindus, captured most succinctly in the Vedic notion, Truth is One; Sages Name It Variously.8 Arriving on the shores of the New World, Columbus thought that he had wound up in India; but with the firm landing of Indians on American soil, that mistake has finally been rectified. Hindus, on this reading, help America to be a fulfilled place, lending a poignancy all of their own to the meaning of 4 July; Hinduism furnishes America with a vindication of its pluralism that it had scarcely imagined. By the same token, Hindus feel immensely grateful to America: 4 July, having taken an ancient truth and democratized it, has now brought Vedic teachings into the global public sphere. And just as remarkable as these attempts at temporal commensurability is the Hinduization of American landscapes. The Penn Hills temple in Pennsylvania, on which construction started in the bicentennial year of the American Revolution, standsaccording to a souvenir published by temple authoritiesat the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and the subterranean river, an unmistakable allusion to Prayag in north-central India, where the Yamuna, Ganga, and the underground Saraswati rivers by popular belief converge and thus lend the place its extraordinary sanctity.

indian americans and the anxiety of influence

I have, so far, delineated the contours of Temple Hinduism, but the allusion to the subterranean river furnishes the occasion for suggesting the other, less commonly acknowledged and more potent, registers in which Hinduisms history in the US might be written. It is my submission that a profound anxiety of influence pervades the Indian diasporic communities of North America at the very moment when India appears to have asserted its place in the global political and cultural economy. The sources and manifestations of this anxiety are numerous, but for the

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present it will suffice merely to take note of some of the more salient ones. Though in the US, which now houses the most sizeable Indian diasporic population in the world, Indians have done spectacularly well, and exercise a hugely disproportionate influence on the professions, the feeling that they remain invisible has long persisted. A staple feature of local Indian newspapers are the pages enumerating the names and accomplishments of Indians raised to the ranks of Rhodes or Marshall Scholars, or otherwise victorious as winners of spelling bees.9 But these celebrations are not long-lasting, since the cultural capital acquired in being viewed as studious, law-abiding, and dutiful sons and daughters does not yield political dividends. Until the election of Piyush Bobby Jindal to the House of Representatives several years ago,10 only one Indian, Dilip Singh Saund, had ever served in the US Congress, and that at a time, from 195662, when the Indian community was of no consequence, numbering in the few thousands. Even in statewide offices and state legislatures, Indian representation is generally poor. While pleased that they are regarded as a model minority, a term whose politics the Indian community naively accepts as innocent, as a correct representation of what a minority can achieve if it sheds off the alleged laziness, refractory ways, and sneering habits of the black community, Indian-Americans nonetheless are pained at their own political insignificance. The anguish of diasporic Indians extends much further to the thought that the world rides roughshod over India. A country with a billion-strong population should be deserving of more respect: for its size, India was for decades, doubtless, the most unimportant country in the world, though recent developments, such as the much coveted exemption to the nuclear non-proliferation regime sought and gained by India, or Indias entry into the space club, has done much from the Indian American standpoint to bring India to the notice of the world as an emergent power. To be an Indian, nevertheless, is to extend an invitation to the world to trample upon oneself; to be a Hindu is to open oneself to a much worse fate. As the authors of the online Hindu Holocaust Museum insist, no greater holocaust was ever perpetrated upon a people than that visited upon unsuspecting Hindus over centuries:
When we hear the word HOLOCAUST most of us think immediately of the Jewish people and their plight during the few years that Adolph Hitler held the world hostage. Today, with an increased awareness of minority rights, many of us are also aware of the Holocaust of the Native American peoples under the European

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invasion of the Americas. Many also remember the genocide of the Armenian peoples by the Turks. Even the huge loss of life and culture sustained by the indigenous Pagan peoples of Europe has become a well-known fact. But no one ever seems to have even heard of the 1,000 year-long holocaust of Hindus, which continues today.11

India has not only the oldest continuous civilization in the world, but also the longest running holocaust: whatever the plight of the Jews in the years that Nazi Germany sought world domination, the few years of their suffering could not have been much more than a minor grievance when set against a history of 1,000 years of merciless oppression.12 And such are the ways of a callous world: where everyone knows about the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people, the Hindus must bear their suffering in singular isolation. There is no one to commiserate with the aggrieved Hindus. Here, too, this pervasive anxietyan anxiety not only that Indians are treated with scant respect, barely recognized as the inheritors of a great civilization and equally as the torchbearers of a future that will be theirs to claim, but that even in their victimhood they remain unacknowledgedstems from a wide array of considerations, only a few of which can be entertained at present. There is, to begin with, much resentment over the fact that China, a communist regime, appears to receive far more attention in American political and diplomatic circles than India. Diasporic Indians express incomprehension over the American preoccupation with China when, from their standpoint, the largest democracy in the world is clearly the more fitting partner for an alliance with the worlds most advanced democracy. Troubling as diasporic Indians find the American ambivalence over China, a country whose political shortcomings are apparently overlooked with ease as it has become the worlds pre-eminent manufacturer of consumer goods, they positively rankle at the fact that Pakistan, a two-bit military dictatorship for a good bit of its history, has seemed to be on a more or less equal footing with India in American foreign policy. They are pleased that periodic announcements from the American establishment show awareness of Pakistans status as a failed state. Indian Americans stress Pakistans links to terrorist groups and its long-standing support of the Taliban, but their pleasure at increasing American recognition of Pakistan as the epicentre of terrorism is dulled by the painful awareness that Americas mandarins simultaneously continue to repose faith in Pakistan as an indispensable ally in the prosecution of American national interests.

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But Pakistan is more than just an irritant, a country that, thankfully, has never been viewed as a prospective candidate for permanent Security Council membership. Pakistan is perforce, from the standpoint of middleclass Indian-American thinking, a reminder both of what India is not, namely, an Islamic state, as well as a painful reminder of, at best, the liminal status of Hinduism in the American imagination. Strange as it may seem to put it this way, until the advent of 9/11 Indian-Americans both despised and secretly admired Islam. The abhorrence with which the theological system of Islam is viewed cannot be overstated, and representations of Islam as a supremely intolerant, dogmatic, and intellectually primitive faith abound. Islam is despised for being the very antithesis of Hinduism: it was conceived as a religion that is shaped by a conviction that, to quote the observations of a former official of the Indian espionage agency RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), it cannot coexist with other religions and that to kill in the interests of Islam and the Shariat is a religious obligation and not a sin, even if the killing involves the use of weapons of mass destruction.13 Yet Islam was also admired for its ability to command the faithfula congregation almost vast beyond comprehension, scattered to the ends of the earthand encompass its teachings in a single text unquestionably authoritative for every Muslim. Islam, unlike Hinduism, at least attracted the attention of the worldquite unlike the non-resident Indian (NRI) Hindus who, ensconced in their spacious homes in affluent American suburbs, went about their business and remained largely unknown to the world outside. Islam had, at least, the virtue of necessitating the clash of civilizations thesis, a sign of its visibility and potency. To be a Hindu, by contrast, is nearly to be condemned to oblivion: it is to be relegated to the space that Dante described as limbo, to which are confined those who deserve neither praise nor blame. The invisibility of Hinduism is something of a source of anguish, but it is also one of the more abiding features of the faith calculated to give at least some NRIs a modicum of pleasure. If religion is a private matter, the silence enveloping Hinduism in the US cannot altogether be deplored and must even be welcomed; on the other hand, many diasporic Hindus hold to the view that the obscurity surrounding Hinduism leaves it without protections available to more organized, and visible religions. I have elsewhere documented, at substantial length, the work undertaken by certain organizations in the US to safeguard Hinduism against aggressive corporatism and to restore to Hinduism the dignity that, as has been argued, other religions can take for granted. The efforts

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of American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD) to have removed from the market products that subject Hindu sentiments to ridicule, or that make mockery of Hindu deities, are among the more prominent public gestures designed to furnish NRI Hindus with some sense of satisfaction that they cannot, so to speak, be taken for a ride. I advert, for example, to AHADs most spectacular campaign to date, against the toilet seat manufacturer Sittin Pretty, which placed images of Shiva, Kali, and Ganesh on toilet seat covers.14 AHAD contends that Hindu images, which are cool and popular among followers of Semitic faiths who may well be starved of images of the divine, are assumed to be public property,15 and that the reverence extended to other religions is entirely wanting in the American experience of Hinduism. AHAD is at a loss to explain why, if Hinduism appears to bear the burden of commercial obscenities, Sittin Pretty should also have placed the Holy Mary on one of its toilet seat covers. What could have been a critique of the relentless logic of the market becomes, in AHADs hands, resentment over the base treatment that is apparently reserved for Hindus and their faith. That Sittin Pretty can so casually place Hindu deities on its toilet seat covers is an expression not necessarily of contempt for Hinduism, but more so of the fact that categories such as reverence and sacred have lost much of their purchase under conditions of modernity. What AHAD needs to be engaged with here is a critique of modernity and market-place morality, but this is much too difficult: its own frame of reference is furnished by the very institutions and cultural practices that devolve from modernity, such as the idea of demanding a political apology. (Human rights organizations and progressive activists make demands of the state; the days of genteel requests and petitions are a thing of the past.) Thus, AHAD demanded, and received, an apology from Sittin Pretty, whose co-owner, Lamar van Dyke, described our beloved Goddess Kali and Lord Ganesha as deities to whom we feel personally close, adding: We meant neither harm nor insult, and apologize to the Hindus of the world for unintentionally upsetting them.16 Little does AHAD realize that an epidemic of apologies has engulfed us, and that apology itself has become a category of market-place morality.17 The existence of American Hindus Against Defamation and other similar organizations is evidence not, as is commonly supposed, of the belated awareness that Hinduism is as much entitled to protection as any other religion, but of a profound anxiety at the heart of (militantly) resurgent Hinduism. Many commentators have characterized Hinduisms turn towards Hindutva as an emulation of the Semitic faiths. Though the

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utility of such hermeneutics is to be questioned, it would nevertheless be difficult to overstate the intensely masculinist metaphors of Hindutvas public discourses, the glorification of martial values in Hindutva writings, the unabashed celebration of virility as a virtue without which nation-states cannot thrive, and the openly chauvinist and patriarchal leanings of Hindutva ideologues and their supporters. But in the land of its birth, diasporic Hindus may well argue, Hinduism is constrained by its long history, the immensely varying and contradictory registers in which its popular expressions are encountered, the onus placed on its practitioners to be charitable to the adherents of minority faiths, the strands of femininity and even androgyny which populate the culture of the masses, and much else. If it took an NRI, Mohandas Gandhi,18 who spent over 20 years in South Africa before he returned to India, to deliver the country from colonial servitude, is it not conceivable that Hinduisms new vanguard will likewise lead the country from afar?

the geopolitical strategies of north american hinduism

It may serve some purpose to speak of the aspiration on the part of some Hindus that Hinduism be granted the dignity of a world religion that is also adequate to the purposes of a modern nation-state. Hinduisms most ardent votaries in the US have devolved to bring Hinduism into the public space and to mark it as a religion that ought to have a special resonance in American life, and in the remainder of this chapter, I offer a brief explication of these strategies that, from the standpoint of their advocates, would also enable Hindus in the US to transform themselves into a political force. First, if prior to the events of 9/11, non-resident Indian Hindus harboured, as I have already suggested, a certain ambivalence towards Islam, a world religion that could at least claim an ummah, a worldwide following and recognition as a faith with an enviable heritage of art, history, and culture, such ambivalence has almost entirely disappeared and given way to the recognition that, at least for the foreseeable future, Muslim identity is an unquestionable liability. Indian-Americans have long complained that the US was not sufficiently sensitive to the threats of terrorismIslamic terrorism, needless to sayfaced by India, and privately some Indian-Americans, even if they deplored (as most if not all no doubt did) the loss of innocent lives in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, also expressed satisfaction that such attacks were certainly calculated to awaken the US to the perils of Islamic terrorism.

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At long last, the US and India can make common cause; and the Indian-American, who straddles both cultures, is best positioned to produce the idea of this common greater good. Islamic terrorism after 9/11 gave the Indian-American lobbyist in Washington a new calling in life; and the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in late November 2008 further emboldened many Indians and Indian-Americans, whose suspicion of Muslims ran deep, into pressing forward comparisons between 9/11 and 25 November 2008. What, after all, makes the bold takeover of Mumbais landmark buildings in November 2008 similar to the spectacular attacks of 9/11 on American soil? Although the secular credentials of a gifted writer such as Suketu Mehta cannot be doubted, it is striking that he could give his New York Times op-ed piece on the Mumbai attacks no more imaginative a heading than What They Hate About Mumbai.19 Just who are they? Mere terrorists, or terrorists who, by sheer coincidence, are but always Muslims? And what is it they hate, if not, predictably, Mumbais freedoms, the entrepreneurship of its residents, and the bonhomie of life in a great metropolis? How is one to differentiate the they of Mehtas opinion piece from the they who were repeatedly, insistently, and with unmistakable venom charged when 9/11 transpired with hating the freedoms promised by America? Altering only a few facts of history, Mehta could easily have substituted New York for Mumbai and his piece would have been mistaken as a commentary on the 9/11 bombings. What he, the cosmopolitan bearer of liberal values and the lover (as the Muslim, with his all-consuming hatred, surely is not) of all goods things in life, could not say aloud others who are less mindful of the perils of seeming to incite hatred have openly declaimed. That most zealous defender of Hinduism, the French Indophile Francois Gautier, has accused Sonia Gandhi of not warning Indians of the grave dangers of Islamic terror for cynical election purposes,20 while Israels Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, has given it as his firm opinion that while it may be trueand probably isthat not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim.21 Second, there can be little question that Indian-American Hindus are increasingly committed to a substantial enhancement of ties between themselves and American Jews, and correspondingly the state of Israel has itself become supremely symbolic in Indian-American thinking of the beleaguered state that has survived against all odds. There are far too many strands to unravel in these developments, but one would have to commence with the dramatically changed relations between India and Israel over the course of the last 15 years. Though India recognized Israel

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at its birth in 1948, it established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state only in 1992. In the aftermath of Indias decision to open up its economy, shed some of its ties to the socialist block, attempt to forge closer links to the US, and reduce the non-aligned movement to a relic of the past, it was but natural that India would revisit the question of its relations to both Israel and the Arab world. Israel was, for its part and not surprisingly, in the minority of states that refused to issue a condemnation in the wake of Indias nuclear tests of 1998, and two years later at least one writer cogently argued that the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) had borrowed the formulation of a national security state under constant threat from Ariel Sharon and that Likuds doctrine of military might resonated with Indian hawks.22 If Israel was quick to pounce upon Pakistans nuclear tests as holding the entire world hostage to an Islamic bomb, India reciprocated by resolutely opposing attempts, widely endorsed by the Arab world, international NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations), and significant sections of the international human rights community, to equate Zionism with racism at the controversial World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban in 2001. Though India officially still claims to adhere to the view that its relations with Israel will not be at the expense of sacrificing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,23 the growing defence ties between the two states, and Israels ascendancy to the rank of the number two supplier of military hardware to India, tell their own tale about Indias shifting priorities. Together with the international community and as victims of terrorism, says a joint statement released by Ariel Sharon, on his state visit to India as prime minister of Israel in 2003, and then-Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Israel and India are partners in the battle against this scourge.24 Indian-Americans have long been great admirers of the powerful lobby that in the US advances Israels interests, spearheaded by the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and other organizations. The IndianAmerican politician Kumar P. Barve, majority leader in the Maryland House of Representatives, confessed in an interview in 2003 that Indian Americans see the American Jewish community as a yardstick against which to compare themselves. Its seen as a gold standard in terms of political activism.25 Jewish Americans invite emulation in several respects: they remain the model of the eternally vigilant community, and their denunciation of any incident that in howsoever miniscule a fashion appears to betray feelings of anti-Semitism is held up by Indian-

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Americans as an illustration of the aggression with which Hindus in the US should combat insults to their own faith. There is even a suggestion that anti-Hindu sentiments have taken the place of anti-Semitism, and on 16 June 2005 the Hindu American Foundation and the American Jewish Committee jointly sponsored a programme at Stanford University entitled Countering Biases Against Hindus and Jews on the College Campus. The more extreme practitioners of Judaism and Hinduism in the US have even begun to see themselves as joined at the hip: thus, in a remarkable incident in 2001, the US-based website of the Bajrang Dal, HinduUnity.org, which was shut down by its service provider because of complaints that it advocated hatred and violence towards Muslims, was rescued by radical Brooklyn Jews who claim allegiance to the assassinated Rabbi Meir David Kahane and agitate for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. We are fighting the same war, said Rohit Vyasmaan, who helps run the Hindu Web site, HinduUnity.org, from his home in Flushing, Queens. Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam.26 The Jewish American writer, Richard L. Benkin, who has described an alliance between India, Israel, and the US as the last great hope for humanity, echoes Vyass views. Benkin becomes almost lyrical as he binds the countries into a poignant narrative of loss, redemption, and resistance: if Israel has been bedeviled by nation-states and terrorist groups determined to destroy it ever since its birth, the only nation on earth that has never known a day of peace, so India was born with an enemy dedicated to its destruction on its northwest border.27 The excision of the colonial state from this narrative of birth pains is all too transparent. Along with the United States, Benkins elsewhere writes, India and Israel are the nations most prominently in the crosshairs of Islamists everywhere.28 In the sphere of international relations, it is not surprising, then, that Indian-Americans should marvel at how Israel invariably obtains the green light from the US to repulse attacks from Hezbollah or Hamas, and they have similarly wished that the US would permit India to take out terrorist camps across the line-of-control (LoC) and to go in hot pursuit of jihadi networks in Pakistan.29 Indian-Americans carried from Israels relentless bombing of Lebanon in 2005 and the worlds inaction the lesson that there is virtually no price to be paid for the slaughter of Muslims. The impeccable logic of the nation-state system and the zero-sum politics by which the modern world is defined is well understood by Indian-American Hindus, a point driven home by the furor over certain remarks made early in 2008 by Arun Gandhi, co-founder and president

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of the University of Rochesters M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. In his short blog for the Washington Post entitled Jewish Identity Cant Depend on Violence,30 Arun Gandhi described the future of Jewish identity as bleak: even as many Jews remain locked into the holocaust experience, not merely convinced of the absolute exceptionality of the Holocaust, but firm in their view that their victimhood gives them unique entitlements, the state of Israel, which is the guarantor of Jewish life, history and culture, remains unapologetically tethered to the view that it has every right to exercise unquestioning dominance over its neighbours and its own Palestinian subjects besides having a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. However, in describing Israel and the Jews as the biggest players in this culture of violence, Arun Gandhi undoubtedly erredinsofar as he failed to make a distinction between Jews, by no means are all of whom Zionists, and the state of Israel. Fast and furious was the response to Arun Gandhi: he graciously responded with an apology, stating unequivocally that he does not believe and should not have implied that the policies of the Israeli government are reflective of the views of all Jewish people.31 One might understand, if not accept, why the Israel Lobby in the US, not satisfied by this apology, should have forced Arun Gandhis resignation; but what is more intriguing, and germane from the standpoint of this paper, is the heavy-handed critique of Gandhi unleashed by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which describes itself as a non-profit 501(c)(3), non-partisan organization, promoting the Hindu and American ideals of understanding, tolerance and pluralism. The simplistic and biased comments by Gandhi were not just unbecoming of one who presumes to lead a conflict resolution institute, but dangerously misguided, said Nikhil Joshi, Esq., a member of the HAF Board of Directors. Laying claim to Hinduisms distinct legacy of tolerance, Joshi gave it as his opinion that Arun Gandhi had violated the norms to which both Hinduism and the Hindu American Foundation subscribe, namely that true inter-faith dialogue must be predicated on mutual respect, tolerance and understanding.32 The ease with which the Hindu American Foundation allowed itself to become the custodian, not merely of Hindu values but even of the Jewish faith, is quite remarkable; and what is equally noteworthy is its apparent endorsement of the idea that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism. Third, Hinduisms adherents in the US have displayed a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, furnish Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, engage in debates on

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American multiculturalism, and partake of the protocols of citizenship in the digital age. While it is reasonable to aver that adherents of Hinduism are not alone in being predisposed towards digital media, and there are at present no quantitative studies that might enable us to gauge internet usage among different religious communities, there is an overwhelming amount of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to suggest that Hindus have been particularly conscientious, if not innovative and aggressive, in mobilizing members of the perceived Hindu community through the internet. Only Hinduism, I have suggested in some of my writings, can match the internets playfulness: the religions 330 million gods and goddesses, a testimony to the intrinsically decentred and polyphonic nature of the faith, find correspondence in the world wide webs multiple points of origin, intersection, and dispersal.33 Moreover, the rise of Hindu militancy in India since the late 1980s has had its counterpart in the creation of new Hindutva histories on the internet. Indian-American Silicon Valley engineers, and hundreds of Indian male graduate students in the computer sciences, laboured over websites dedicated to revisionist and Hindu nationalist accounts of Indian history and culture. These public histories, which have been wholly discredited by scholars of Indian history, have nonetheless been received with wide approbation by Hindus settled in the United States.34 Fourth, Indian-American Hindus have amply demonstrated their awareness of how discourses of multiculturalism might be productively deployed by a minority in a pluralistic society to secure certain entitlements and advance their political interests. Much the same could be said for all other communities, of course, and Indian-American Hindus are certainly not singular in invoking multiculturalism to claim equal treatment. However, the apparent reasonableness of all this is significantly undermined if we call to mind the fact that many Indian-American Hindus, adding their voices to those of communally minded Hindus in India, have not hesitated to characterize the accommodation to minorities in India waging similar battles for entitlements as forms of appeasement. The unwavering support for the Ramjanmabhoomi Movement among many Indian-Americans points to their absurd conviction that Hindus have become a minority in their own country. But I would like to dwell at much greater length upon the fierce controversy that arose in California in 2006 when certain Hindus, availing themselves of the six-year review of world history textbooks for sixth- and seventh-graders mandated by the State Board of Education, proposed over 200 changes to portions of the texts pertaining to ancient Indian history and Hinduism. They argued,

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for instance, that Hinduism should be represented as a monotheistic rather than polytheistic faith, and they vigorously averred that in ancient India men had not more rights than women, a claim encountered in these texts, but rather that men and women had different rights. Though scholarly communities engaged in ancient Indian history, comparative linguistics, Indo-European studies, and comparative religion are nearly unanimous in holding to the view that there were Aryan migrations to India commencing around perhaps 2000 BC over the course of a few hundreds of years, the Hindus who agitated for the changes claim that India is the original homeland of the Aryans. Led by the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation, both organizations based in the US, Indian-American Hindus waged, predominantly over the internet, a relentless campaign to energize the Hindu community into action. The State Board of Education reported, throughout late 2005 and early 2006, being flooded with emails, faxes, letters, and phone calls from irate Hindus who claimed that textbook representations of Hinduism and the caste system were calculated to make Indian-American school children feel ashamed about their faith and heritage, and that in multicultural America Hindus are entitled to as much respect as adherents of any other religion or community. As is now widely known, the proposed alterations to the textbooks would have been implemented but for the last-minute awakening of scholars of Indian history, of Indian origin and otherwise, who were in agreement that at least some of the proposed changes could not be justified. There was a widespread sentiment, across both sides of the divide, that certain passages and pronouncements of fact in one of more of the textbooks clearly required alteration, such as the statement that Hindi is written with the Arabic alphabet. But scholars understood equally that other proposed changes had to be firmly opposed, among them, to take one illustration, the view that men and women had different rather than unequal rights. Several internet campaignsone among recognized scholars of Indology from around the world, the other among South Asian scholars in the humanities and social sciences at leading American universities, and one waged by secular activists, progressives, and Hindus who disputed that the advocates of Hindutva could speak for all Hindus, not to mention other Indianseventually led the State Board, at two contentious meetings, to reject the most controversial of the alterations proposed by those acting in the name of the Hindu community.35 In the textbooks controversy, a number of important issues come to the fore as we attempt to understand the rules of civic engagement

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and the protocols of citizenship in the age of digital trans-nationalism. Hinduism has no common church, no historical founder, and no singular authoritative text to which all Hindus subscribe, and one cannot speak of any medium, axis, or contrivance through which all Hindus have been bound in conversation with each other. The religions most famous practitioner of the twentieth century, Mohandas Gandhi, pointed to what might be called the anarchic nature of the faith when he even declared that a man could call himself a Hindu and yet not believe in God.36 Hinduisms vociferous adherents, none more so than the cyber-inclined Hindus of the US, have consequently been riddled by what I have previously described as an anxiety of influence, an anxiety that Hinduism is not taken seriously as a religion, and that, ironically, Hinduism would be best served by transforming it into something more akin to the very Semitic faiths that Hindu nationalists profess to abhor. They see the internet as the medium through which Hinduism can be forged into a worldwide religion, and pliant Hindus, both in India and in the older Indian diasporas of the nineteenth century, can be brought to an awareness of the global strengths of a modern Hindu community. It is not surprising that, as India begins to rise in the worlds estimation as a nation-state, even imagining itself as an emerging world power, the Hindu community in the US, which contributes substantially more to direct foreign investment in India than Hindus elsewhere, should begin to feel emboldened, mindful of its rights and prerogatives; nor is it surprising that these Hindus should view themselves as the vanguard of what I have described as revolutionary internet Hinduism. Their forms of political participation point, however, to considerations that have been inadequately addressed. Though nationalist Hindus in the US take recourse to arguments about multiculturalism, they have not at all been hospitable to multiculturalism or even Indian variants of pluralism in India itself. Other scenarios come to mind: will the unbridled enthusiasm for the internet diminish among Hindu nationalists when they come to the awareness that mobilization of Islamic jihadi groups also draws heavily, and increasingly, upon the internet? In this vein, it is also worth pondering whether increased internet mobilization of the Indian-American Muslim community might have done something to mitigate the pogrom against Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. One must, consequently, probe whether there are rules of civic engagement that are easily broken by internet citizenship; conversely, one might reflect upon what rules, if

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any, internet citizenship can bring to political discussions when the rules of civic engagement are still pliable. At this present juncture of history, as I have argued, the Indian diaspora gives rise to uncertainties even as it celebrates its accomplishments and revels at diverse signs of the Indianization of the globe. I have placed at the centre of my argument the idea that, in the first instance, a pervasive but, contrary to common sense, now a self-aggrandizing rather than debilitatinganxiety of influence is attendant upon the engagement of middle-class modernizing Indians, especially NRIs, with the world. Studies of the Indian diaspora (especially in the affluent North), as well as of Hinduism, have been largely indifferent to, indeed oblivious of, such considerations, but this may, perhaps, be one of the more productive ways to gain a grasp over the complex issues that have come to the fore with the advent of globalization. What some commentators have described as the Semitic turn in Hindu nationalism might, with greater justice, be described as the turn towards globalizationa turn that is aimed at homogenizing Hinduism, transforming it into a world religion, and placing it within categories of knowledge that would make it into a proper religion. If we are attentive to the history of colonialism, and to the representations of Hinduism under colonial rule, we may not be amiss in wondering whether this new phase of working over Hinduism does not have some uncanny resemblance to the aspirations of colonial elites to bring Hinduism under their ambit. Whether Hinduism will resist this onslaught, which in some fundamental respects is led by NRI Hindus, remains to be seen.

notes
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1954), Indian Superstition, Hanover, New Hampshire: Friends of the Dartmouth Library, Lines 9, 1314. For a detailed discussion of Emersons early interest in India, see Lal, Vinay (1982), Emerson and India, Unpublished MA thesis, Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University, pp. 1840. 2. Lal, Vinay (2008), The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America, New Delhi: HarperCollins, pp. 656; see also Burke, Marie Louise (1966), Swami Vivekananda in America, New Discoveries, Calcutta: Advaita Ashram. 3. Lal, The Other Indians, pp. 1230; and Jensen, Joan M. (1988), Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America, New Haven: Yale University Press. 4. Thomas, Wendell (1930), Hinduism Invades America, New York: Beacon, is much less alarmist than it sounds, and its irony and humour are salutary when one considers the reverential tone in which Indian gurus are still received by many in the West. 5. The observations of the founding members of the Hindu American Foundation, which in 2009 became the first recipient of the Hindu Renaissance Award conferred by

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Hinduism Today magazine, are entirely typical of this sentiment. Dr Aseem Shukla, a pediatric urologist, describes himself as frustrated by ignorance in the mainstream media about Hinduism and its basic tenets. Too often, even well-meaning commentators in the media would so misrepresent our religion that Hinduism invariably came across as ephemeral, inscrutable, indifferent and irrelevant. The attorney Suhag Shukla recalls, I remember the embarrassment I felt and the incessant teasing I faced after grotesque media depictions of Indian culture, such as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They have been chronicled by Melwani, Lavina (2009), Meet the Young Hindu American Foundation, Hinduism Today, AprilJune, pp. 2430, who introduces these young Hindu-American professionals with the remark that not only have they kept their faith, they have become articulate interpreters, protectors and ambassadors of a religion which is often misunderstood and maligned. 6. See http://chicago.baps.org/Exhibition/Exhibition.htm (accessed on 24 March 2009). We do not know what history book the creators of the exhibit had in mind, unless it be the Mahabharata, which is far from being anything like what might pass for history. The anxiety to demonstrate the fidelity of Indians to historical thinking has its origins in the colonial period, as I have discussed in (2005), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, esp. ch. 1. 7. I am certainly prepared to accept that Indian achievements in the sciences and mathematics were seldom recognized in the West, and that the conventional narrative, which, to simplify, equates modern science with the West, cannot withstand scrutiny. See, for example, Raju, C.K. (2008), Is Science Western in Origin? Penang: Multiversity and Citizens International, and Raju, C.K. (2007), Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. X, Part 4 of the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed. D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, and Pearson Longman. 8. Rig Veda 1.164.46. 9. A not inconsiderable portion of the community life of Indians revolves around these spelling bees, in which Indians have acquitted themselves very well; indeed, Indians have dominated the national championship over the last decade. One of the more arresting insights into the culture of the Spelling Bee is the spell-binding documentary Spellbound (2002, directed by Jeffrey Blitz), not to be confused with the much earlier Hitchcock thriller of the same name. The film follows eight competitors vying for the National Spelling Bee championship, among them an Indian-American boy whose father organizes mass pujas in India to facilitate his sons success. 10. Jindal relinquished his seat after serving in the House of Representatives for three years upon his election as Governor of Louisiana. However, if one should be inclined to think that Jindal can rightfully be credited with having broken the barriers that hitherto appeared to have obstructed the political advancement of Indian-Americans, it is worthy of consideration that Jindal claims no particular allegiance to the IndianAmerican community. The Hindus who harp on his conversion to Christianity from Hinduism commit another folly, insofar as they assume that the Christian-Indian is somehow inauthentic; but what is far more germane is Jindals absolute and unequivocal identification with the extreme fringe of right-wing American politics. Barring Jindals ancestry, from his standpoint an accidental fact of history, he has never displayed the slightest interest in Indian-American affairs as such, though, of course, he is not reluctant

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to court the support of Indian-Americans as might any other candidate with an eye to the affluence of the community. 11. http://www.hinduholocaust.com/HinduHolocaustMuseum.htm (accessed on 25 March 2009). 12. Some Dalit writers have also dwelled on a 1,000-year old history of unremitting oppression experienced by Dalits at the hands of caste Hindus. I would not be surprised if this narrative of Dalit oppression became the template for Hindu narratives of Muslim tyranny. Victimhood clearly engenders its own cultures of competition and excess. 13. Raman, B. (2002), Stop Barking, Start Biting, India Abroad, 26 July, A22also available at http://www.saag.org/common/uploaded_files/paper495.html (accessed on 25 March 2009). 14. Sundaram, Viji (2000), Hindus Incensed Over Sacred Toilet Seats, IndiaWest, 24 November, A1, p. 40. 15. Sittin Prettys activities were brought to the attention of the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Indian Parliament, where a demand was voiced that the Indian government should pressurize the US government to take legal action against the Seattlebased firm. Vijay Singh Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal is reported to have said that there was a current craze in the U.S. about Hindu gods and firms were exploiting it by painting figures of Hindu gods on toilet covers. See Anonymous (2000), Parliament Slams Hindu Gods on Sanitaryware, IndiaWest, 1 December, p. A28. 16. Viji Sundaram (2000), Sacred Toilet Seat Maker Apologizes to Community, IndiaWest, 1 December, p. A28. 17. For a more extended discussion, see my piece (1999), An Epidemic of Apologies, Humanscape, Vol. 6, No. 4, April, pp. 3841. 18. See GandhiThe Greatest NRI Ever (2003), Asian Voice & Gujarat Samachar, January, Vol. 11. 19. New York Times, 28 November 2008, available at http://www.nytimes. com/2008/11/29/opinion/29mehta.html (accessed on 25 March 2009). I am aware of the constraints placed upon writers by newspaper editors, and writers do not always get to choose the titles of their pieces; but the tenor of Mehtas piece is such as to suggest that the title could easily have emanated from his pen. 20. Gautier, Francois (2008), Sonias Presence in Delhi is Costing India Dearly, New Indian Express, 2 December, available at http://francoisgautier.wordpress. com/2008/12/03/sonia%E2%80%99s-presence-in-delhi-is-costing-india-dearly/ (accessed on 1 February 2009). 21. Alam, M. Shahid (2006), Not All Terrorists Are Muslim, Counterpunch, 24 October, available at www.counterpunch.org/shahid10242006.hmtl (accessed on 1 February 2009). In critiquing vigorously the suggestion that all terrorists are Muslims, many commentators nearly forget the insinuation that all Muslims are terrorists. That there are some people who even remotely feel justified in expressing the latter thought ought to generate outrage, but one of the many successful strategies deployed by xenophobes and purveyors of the idea of clash of civilizations is to postulate an obnoxious idea followed in quick succession by a milder expression of that idea such that, in drawing attention to the more attenuated form of that idea, the original formulation is allowed to go unquestioned. 22. See the piece by journalist Randeep Ramesh in the 14 February 2002 edition of the Guardian.

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23. From a speech by then Foreign Minister K. Natwar Singh on 31 May 2004; see Israel Ties Wont Affect Palestine Ties: Natwar (2004), Indian Express, 12 July; and Pant, Harsh V. (2004), India-Israel Partnership: Convergence and Constraints, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 4, available at http://www.bharat-rakshak. com/SRR/Volume14/harsh.html (accessed on 20 April 2009). 24. Sharon Ends Landmark Visit (2003), BBC News, 10 September, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3096058.stm (accessed on 20 March 2009). 25. Cooperman, Alan (2003), India, Israel Interests Team Up, Washington Post, 19 July, available at http://www.hvk.org/articles/0703/210.html (accessed 20 April 2009). 26. Murphy, Dean E. (2001), Two Unlikely Allies Come Together in Fight against Muslims, New York Times, 2 June, p. A1. 27. Benkin, Richard L. (2009), An India-Israel-United States Alliance: The Last Great Hope for Humanity, available at http://www.analyst-network.com/article. php?art_id=2563 (accessed on 20 April 2009). 28. Benkin, Richard L., India and Israel: Common Allies; Common Targets, available at http://www.freechoudhury.com/images/India&Israel.htm (accessed on 20 April 2009). 29. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3096058.stm (accessed on 22 April 2009). 30. Gandhi, Arun (2008), Jewish Identity Cant Depend on Violence, 7 January, available at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/arun_ gandhi/2008/01/jewish_identity_in_the_past.html (accessed on 20 April 2009). 31. Gandhi, Arun (2008), My Apology for My Poorly Worded Post, 10 January, available at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/arun_gandhi/2008/01/ my_apology_for_my_poorly_worde.html (accessed on 20 April 2009). Close to 450 people responded to Gandhis first post, and another 350 to his apology; the comments can be followed on the link in this note and the previous one. 32. Hindu American Foundation, press release of 27 January 2008, available at http:// www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/?q=/media/pr/20080127_disturbed_by_comments_ about_jews (accessed on 20 April 2009). 33. See, in particular, Lal, Vinay (1999), The Politics of History on the Internet: Cyber-Diasporic Hinduism and the North American Hindu Diaspora, Diaspora, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 13772. 34. Ibid. 35. The Friends of South Asia website maintains the most complete set of documents originating among those opposed to many of the alterations proposed by the Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation. See http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/ textbook/index.html (accessed on 22 April 2009), especially the link to textbook edits. See also, on this site (under Letters of Support), Lal, Vinay (2006), School Textbooks Pertaining to Ancient India, India Journal, 17 February, p. A6. 36. See Sharma, Arvind (1996), Hinduism for Our Times, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.