Anti-Hindu sentiment

Anti-Hindu sentiment is a negative perception or any sentiment against the practice and practitioners of Hinduism.

Quotes

• God and Muhammad engaged you to extinguish the idolatry of the Indians.
  • Babur was exhorted by a noble of Kabul to conquer India with these remarks, as cited in: S.R. Sharma, Mughal Empire in India p. 28. [1] Also cited in Harsh Narain, The Ayodhya Temple Mosque Dispute: Focus on Muslim Sources

• The only resolute defender of Hinduism in this intellectually hostile atmosphere was Bankim Chandra Chatterji. He was well-versed in Western literature and philosophy and his knowledge of Hindu Shastras and history was deep as well as discerning.... “If the principles of Christianity,” he wrote, “are not responsible for the slaughter of the crusades, the butcheries of Alva, the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the flames of the Inquisition... If the principles of Christianity are not responsible for the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics and Jews which till recently disgraced the English Statute Book, I do not understand how the principles of Hinduism are to be held responsible for the civil disabilities of the sudras under the Brahmanic regime. The critics of Hinduism have one measure for their own religion and another for Hinduism.”
  • Bankim Chandra Chatterji, in: S.R. Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996), quoting from: Das, Sisir Kumar, The Shadow of the Cross, New Delhi, 1974. p. 117-118.

• The symptom of the kings being the protectors of religion is this:- When they see a Hindu, their eyes grow red and they wish to bury him alive; they also desire to completely uproot the Brahmans, who are the leaders of kufr and shirk and owning to whom kufr and shirk are spread and the commandments of kufr are enforced…
  • Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi. citing Shykh Nuruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi . Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

• Alexander Duff was convinced that “of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen men, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous” and that India was “the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion.”
  • Alexander Duff, cited by S.R. Goel History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

• But some media outlets have chosen to craft a false narrative of intrigue by profiling and targeting all of my donors who have names of Hindu origin and accusing them of being “Hindu nationalists.” Today it’s the profiling and targeting of Hindu Americans and ascribing to them motives without any basis. Tomorrow will it be Muslim or Jewish Americans? Japanese, Hispanic or African Americans? I too have been accused of being a “Hindu nationalist.” ... To question my commitment to my country, while not questioning non-Hindu leaders, creates a double standard that can be rooted in only one thing: religious bigotry. I am Hindu and they are not. ... Religious bigotry and attempts to foment fear of Hindus and other minority religions persist. During my 2012 and 2014 elections, my Republican opponent stated publicly that a Hindu should not be allowed to serve in the U.S. Congress and that Hinduism is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. In the 2016 race for Congress, my Republican opponent said repeatedly that a vote for me was a vote for the devil because of my religion. ... Those who are trying to foment anti-Hindu sentiment expose the dark underbelly of religious bigotry in politics and must be called out. To advocate voting for or against someone based on religion, race or gender is simply un-American.
  • Tulsi Gabbard: Religious bigotry is un-American, 2019 [2]

• While one should always be vigilant for traces of totalitarianism in any ideology or movement, the obsession with fascism in the anti-Hindu rhetoric of the secularists is not the product of an analysis of the data, but of their own political compulsions.
  • Elst, Koenraad, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

• Thus, to depict Rama as a virile warrior was a sin against Hinduism, an imitation of colonialist virility myths, a betrayal of the feminine passivity of genuine Hinduism. Or, to organize the Hindu religious personnel on a common platform (the Dharma Sansad, more or less 'religious parliament') is an un-Hindu imitation of the Bishops' Synod in the Catholic Church. Or, to alert the Hindus against Muslim or Christian conversion campaigns is an abandonment of the cheerful Hindu indifference to sectarian name-tags, the only thing which really changes upon conversion. Indeed, anything that could play a role in upholding and preserving Hinduism was found to be un-Hindu, while anything that could make or keep Hinduism defenceless and moribund, was glorified as true Hinduism. Anything that smacked of vitality and the will to survive was dubbed 'Semitic'.
• Elst, Koenraad, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

• The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.”
  • Gandhi cited by S.R. Goel, Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

• If we would reveal our intentions, without hiding them at all, we hold that the Hindu Puranas and Hinduism must disappear from this land; and the sooner they disappear, the more welcome.
  • J.P. Leonard, S.J. Archbishop of Madurai, Brahmachari Vishwanathji : ‘A Survey of Christian Missionary Activities in Andhra Pradesh’, p. 1

• If a scholar were to refute the very existence of Allah..... it would be called Islamophobia. .... An analogous situation exists in the way an attiutde gets classified as anti-Semitic. Hindus should be alarmed by the existence of a double standard in Western academics, because the same sensitivity and adhikara to speak for our tradition is not granted to Hindus. ..... We need to define a level playing field for characterizing a work as Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Hinduphobia, etc.
  • Rajiv Malhotra: The Battle for Sanskrit

• I do not know the meaning of the secularism. Yet I do not understand. Of course the dictionary meaning is absolutely different. There was a time when people were talking about the secularism, they were about the simply [sic] religious harmony. Slowly it changed the colour. Then, secularism means a lip sympathy to the minorities. Then slowly the colour changed. Then, secularism was [...] means appeasement to the minorities. Then the secularism changed the colour. Focus only on the Muslims' votebank in the name of secularism. Then the secularism changed the colour. Then, hate Hindu means secularism.
  • Narendra Modi, Speech 14 January 2008 (on YouTube). Speech commemorating the 38th anniversary of Thuglak.

• One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India
  • About Max Muller. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999. p. 68.

• A violent propaganda campaign was launched by Carey and his associates against Hinduism in Bengal which seemed to them to be in a state of dissolution. But Hindu orthodoxy reacted vigorously and Lord Minto felt obliged to prohibit such propaganda in Calcutta. Minto's letter to the Court of Directors is worth quoting: `Pray read the miserable stuff addressed specially to the Gentoos (Hindus) in which . . . the pages are filled with hell fire, and hell fire and with still hotter fire, denounced against a whole race of men, for believing in the religion which they were taught by their fathers and mothers. . .
  • K. M. Panikkar. Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945.

• [Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India.... I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.'
  • Radhakrishnan, 'The Spirit of Man', cited in Rajiv Malhotra, Indra's Net, p. 316., 1st ed.

• “India is like a mighty bastion, which is being battered by heavy artillery. We have given blow after blow, and thud after thud, and the effect is not at first very remarkable; but at last with a crash the mighty structure will come toppling down, and it is our hope that some day the heathen religions of India will in like manner succumb.”
  • Richard Temple, ‘Oriental Experience’, London, 1883, p. 142

• “You train and educate and clothe and pay men to do what ? To come over to my country to curse and abuse all my fore-fathers, my religion and everything…… They walk near a temple and say, ‘you idolaters, you will go to hell’. But they dare not do that to the Mohammedans of India, the sword would be out.... And whenever your ministers criticise us, let them remember this : If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us.
  • Swami Vivekananda, ‘The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda’, Vol. III, pp. 211-212

• Jeffery Long, a Professor of Religion and South Asian Studies, defines Hinduphobia as “an intense and deeply rooted aversion — a fear and hatred… of Hindus and Hinduism [which manifests itself] as a set of intellectual claims that portray Hindus and Hinduism in a negative light.”
  • Jeffery Long quoted in [3]

• However, and this is a key point that Elst notes, the sheer demographic scale of Hindu populations also means that in absolute terms even a small percentage of Hindu populations being exterminated implies a very large number of casualties, mass slaughter by any lens imaginable. According to his framework, Hindus have been subjected to at least two forms of genocide listed in his schema above; the slaughter of the “backbone” or spiritual and cultural leader ship, and mass negligence or indifference to deaths due to colonial, racial, or religious bigotry as in the case of the famines under British rule. More recent cases of Hindu genocide, such as their slaughter in East Pakistan in 1971, and the forced displacement of Hindus from Kashmir in the early 1990s, are also rarely acknowledged as a sufficient real-world cause of concem in the scholarly literature to perhaps justify taking the study of media whitewashing of violence against Hindus seriously. However, what media researchers need to engage with in order to further develop the rationale for the scholarly study of Hinduphobia is not only the phenomenon of silencing and exclusion of Hindu victimhood in media discourses but also the deeper question of “epistemicide” (Viswanathan, 2019) and dehumanization that continues through the prolif eration and normalization of essentially colonial-era anti-Hindu tropes from the imagination of racist-eugenicists like Katherine Mayo even in present-day entertainment like the movie Slumdog Millionaire. By erasing Hindu views of our own symbols, sacred and secular, by overwriting our own languages and meanings with their own propagandistic terminology such as BBC’s translation of “Jai Sri Ram” or “Victory to Lord Ram” as “Hail Lord Ram” with its close insinuation of the Nazi “Heil,” media Hinduphobia also involves an act, through brute force of technology and capital investment, of cultural genocide. There are no human rights, essentially, is what this machine seems to say, if you are Hindu. If you erase the name “Hindu,” then and only then can one bedeemed worthy of human rights discourse, just as Hari Kondabolu sought to do in the space of pop culture.
  • Vamsee Juluri, in Ethics, Ethnocentrism and Social Science Research, Divya Sharma, 2020 page 168

• A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes.... The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism... During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune.
  • Ram Swarup, On Hinduism (2000)