Re-Envisioning Hindu Heritage Month

Adapted from a speech delivered by HfHR Co-Founder Sunita Viswanath for the 2021 Parliament of World’s Religions:

We did not create “Hindu Heritage Month.” This campaign has been spearheaded by Hindutva-aligned groups in the United States. And yet, we at Hindus for Human Rights will celebrate this month by uplifting our vision of Hindu identity — a vision that rejects caste, Hindutva, and Islamophobia.

A number of Hindu American organizations have worked hard to get October declared Hindu Heritage Month in several American states, through governor’s proclamations and one joint legislative resolution. These states include Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas.

One may ask, what could be wrong with that? Hinduism, a set of diverse traditions that counts over one billion adherents in the world, has around a million and a half in America.

The only problem is that the Hindu groups behind Hindu Heritage Month are aligned with an extremist form of Hinduism: Hindutva, or Hindu Nationalism. And therefore, the innocuous-sounding Hindu Heritage Month can be understood more clearly as a mechanism to legitimize the ideology of Hindutva in the United States.

At Hindus for Human Rights, we will also celebrate Hindu Heritage Month. But our Hindu Heritage Month will lift up a vision of Hinduism that rejects caste and Islamophobia, a Hinduism that sees God in every individual and every aspect of the universe, a Hinduism that sees equality of the sexes and all genders, that can accept no Ram without Sita, a Hinduism for whom the salutation to Lord Rama calls for a world as “vasudhaiva kutumbaka”: (the world as one family), not where Jai Shri Ram is the chant of murderous and raping mobs.

One of the main forces behind the Hindu Heritage Month initiative is the VHPA (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, or the World Hindu Council of America). New Jersey’s “Hindu Heritage Month” proclamation commends the VHPA by name, declaring that the VHPA "has cultivated a sterling reputation over the course of its history through the efforts of its associates.”

Let me tell you about the VHPA and its associates. The VHPA is the same organization that earlier this year invited a Hindu religious leader and priest, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, to recite the Ramayana for a Hindu festival, Chaitra Navratri. Saraswati has stated: “We cannot find words enough to praise Nathuram Godse ji. I consider Veer Savarkar ji and Nathuram Godse ji as my biggest heroes.”

Nathuram Godse is the Hindu extremist who assassinated Gandhi in 1948, and “Veer” Savarkar is an ideological inspiration for groups such as the RSS, the explicitly fascist Hindu organization that Godse belonged to. 

Saraswati is the head priest of a Hindu temple in India where a fourteen year old Muslim boy was thrashed this year for drinking water. His comment about the incident was that the only mistake was filming the thrashing.

Saraswati has also stated, “Those we call Muslims in our current era were called demons in earlier eras.”

Saraswati is the holy man of choice for the main group behind Hindu Heritage Month. 

Another Hindutva “holy man”, Jagadguru Paramhans Acharya Maharaj, has demanded that all Muslims and Christians be stripped of their citizenship. All 200 million of them. He was on hunger strike and said he would drown himself in the holy Sarayu River if India was not declared a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) by October 2nd, Gandhi Jayanti (Gandhi’s birthday).

And this is the ultimate end game for the forces of Hindutva: that the India which was born as a secular democracy and touted as the world’s largest democracy, be transformed into a Hindu rashtra where non-Hindus have no rights, no place. 

I am a Hindu, and my Hinduism is radically inclusive and egalitarian at heart. 

Hindutva ideology is an aberration of my religion, and is being propagated in all the Hindu spaces I consider home.

Hindutva is exclusive and Islamophobic, whereas my Hinduism teaches that we are all one. 

Hindus believe that the divine resides equally and identically in a Hindu and a Muslim, in every part of the universe. In my Hinduism, the Divine is formless, genderless, timeless.

Hindutva is violent and para-militaristic, whereas my Hinduism embraces ahimsa (non-violence and non-harm).

Hindutva is hyper-masculine, whereas my Hinduism teaches that there is no Shiva without Shakti, no Ram without Sita — no male energy without female energy.

Hindutva teaches Hindu young people to be so proud of their religion that they defend it with the sword, whereas my Hinduism teaches that all paths lead to the same truth.

My remarks may seem political to you, and I did not want to make a political speech here. However, I hope you can see that the space where these Hindu extremists are operating is the political space. And what is being hijacked in the process is the country I was born in, its democracy, the sense of inclusiveness in the diaspora Hindu spaces I consider my home, and most painful of all, my faith itself. 

The only way I can be a human rights activist, a women’s rights activist and a Hindu, is to alert the world to the genocide in the making in the country I love, in the name of the religion I love.