ERS'Hindutva USA

Hindu nationalism in the US:
changing con® gurations of political

practice
Arvind Rajagopal
Abstract
The meaning and implications of Hindu nationalist expression in the United
States are different from those at home, but both are linked through trans-
national circuits of communication and exchange. In India, the invocation of
religion summons up the unresolved debates between nationalism and social
reform, and presents Hinduism as an implicitly conservative force. By con-
trast, in the US, Hindu religion is more self-consciously a medium of cultural
reproduction. This article points to the ways in which Hindu nationalism
seeks and promotes transnational afliations even while espousing a rhetoric
of insularity, cultural pride and self-sufciency.
Keywords: Religion; nationalism; Hindutva; globalization.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the growing internationalization of

markets and communications, and the declining ability of nation-states
to police their territory, numerous nationalist movements have arisen in
different parts of the world. They have provoked fears that primordial-
ist forms of allegiance might be on the rise, precisely in response to the
erosion of border controls and the accompanying processes of ‘globaliz-
ation’. Thus, we might have ‘Jihad versus McWorld’, in the words of Ben-
jamin Barber, for example, with religious nationalism rising to oppose a
modernity that is experienced in its crudest commercial forms. Arjun
Appadurai, in contrast, describes perceptions of the apparent resurgence
of nationalism in recent times as ‘the Bosnian fallacy’, arguing that terri-
torial nationalism does not express the fundamental character of these
movements, and as such is a misleading symptom of their motivating
impulses and ultimate aims. New forms of afliation and of expressing
solidarity are made possible in today’s world, which neither necessarily
seek nor assume identication with the nation-state. He argues that
because of the proliferation of new modes of communication and the
mobile character of audiences, individuals are forging links with each
Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 23 Number 3 May 2000 pp. 467–496
© 2000 Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd
ISSN 0141-9870 print/ISSN 1466-4356 online
468 Arvind Rajagopal
other across national boundaries, unsettling conventional assumptions
about the relationship between cultural afnity and political identity,
through new, implicitly transnational forms that require understanding
(Appadurai 1996, pp. 165–66).
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the meaning and impli-
cations of nationalist expression abroad are continuous with those at
home. Although the signicance of the local context has diminished with
increased transnational connections, it remains crucial, but in ways that
cannot be predicted in advance. In this article, I address the question how
to understand contemporary manifestations of Hindu nationalism in the
United States as against developments in India.
The project of Hindu nationalism in India is to ‘Hinduize society’,
through its political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party [Indian People’s
Party, or BJP], its cultural wing, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad [World
Hindu Council, or VHP], and overseeing these, the Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh [National Volunteer Corps, or RSS], which provides the
ideological backbone and the grass-roots cadre for the Hindu national-
ists. Through a series of aggressive and violent campaigns, for long anti-
Muslim, and lately anti-Christian too, Hindu nationalists have sought to
mobilize support and terrorize dissidents into submission.1 Unable to
command the kind of inuence it seeks, partly due to the rise of lower
caste assertion and of regional political parties, Hindu nationalism
wavers between a politics of compromise and capitulation, and cam-
paigns of increasing brutality. At the same time, it presents itself as
investor-friendly to the international community and appears as an advo-
cate of market liberalization.
In the US, Hindu nationalism seeks to accommodate itself to its minor-
ity status in a pluralistic but racially polarized society. Asserting the dis-
tinction of Hinduism in the lofty but sedate terms of its cultural greatness
and tolerance, it takes its place in a multicultural society, and is for the
most part absorbed in the internal matters of the US-based Indian com-
munity. At the same time, the size and afuence of this community, as
being the ethnic group with the highest household income, endow it with
a potential inuence over their mostly poorer fellow-Indians at home,
and Hindu nationalists have been at the forefront of attempts to tap this
inuence. 2 Themselves largely immigrant or permanent resident,
members of Hindu nationalist organizations for the most part subdue
their political rhetoric, and concentrate on issues of cultural reproduc-
tion, presenting themselves as well-meaning guardians of Hindu values.
The activities of Hindu nationalists in the US diverge considerably
from those of their parent organization in India, but they join under the
sign of Hindutva, or Hinduness, whose universalizing ambitions are
suited to an age of globalization. Hindutva thus presents a kind of newly
valorized currency in a globalized environment. As an ideology of cul-
tural rejuvenation and national distinction, it offers the protection of an
Hindu nationalism in the US 469
age-old identity in a newly uncertain environment while in many ways
advancing the entry of transnational business interests, often at the
expense of indigenous interests. For those in the US, Hindu nationalists
at home articulate the political interests of a long-suffering Hindu com-
munity until recently marginalized in its own country. For those in India,
the expansion of Hindu nationalist organizations in the US and else-
where in the West is testimony to the strength and power of Hindu
values, and afrms the importance of their own mission. An unacknowl-
edged politics of location operates within these differing perceptions.
To understand how Hindu nationalism has changed in recent times, a
rapid sketch of the broader context of its emergence in India is helpful.
Recent revisionist scholarship has pointed out the ways in which the
Indian independence movement worked through a bifurcated concep-
tion of the nation as a way of managing the contradictions of challenging
colonial rule (Chatterjee 1993). Even as Indians acknowledged their in-
feriority vis-à-vis the worldly achievements of the British Empire, Chat-
terjee has argued, they presumed a sense of inner, cultural superiority
that justied their quest for independence. The freedom movement
could thereby focus on ousting imperial power without being weakened
by internal conict, or by appearing to accept the colonial contention that
many Indian traditions were oppressive and needed extensive reform.
This argument, however, does not pursue the consequences of achieving
national independence in this way. An élite compromise with religious
orthodoxy, and a tacit agreement to refrain from politicizing questions of
social reform, returned to haunt post-independence politics. The with-
drawal of British forces appeared to full the truth of nationalist claims,
of the exceptional character of Indian culture. Just what the implications
of this exceptionalism were, however, was not clear. Here lay the unre-
solved argument between progressive and conservative fractions of the
nationalist movement, with the former being more secular, and key sec-
tions of the latter seeking Hindu hegemony over an otherwise plural
society.
The Congress Party, which led the nationalist movement, embarked
on a project of establishing a secular state, and the thrust of its efforts
was focused on economic development. If Indian identity had been
dened against the West, its internal differences were not explained so
much as embraced within a vague conception of a secular national unity.
It was one thing to sustain such a notion when struggling against exter-
nal rule. As different sections of Indian society became politicized with
economic development, however, the differences between groups
became redened, sharpened and polarized. A benign secularist con-
ception of national identity was inadequate to contain these contests.
Challenges to the status quo were not couched exclusively in the lan-
guage of modern politics, however. Rather, they were posed in terms of
language, caste, regional and religious identity, against which state power
and more often partisan political power tended to be asserted, in increas-
ingly ineffective ways.
The independence struggle and the Hindu nationalist movement had
converged in one crucial aspect: their leaders were predominantly upper-
caste Hindu men. Secular as the Congress Party declared itself to be, the
compromised character of its own constituency and leadership rendered
an effective challenge to Hindu nationalist mobilization difcult. Once
the ruling Congress Party itself began seeking a ‘Hindu vote’ to shore up
its declining popularity, and at the same time made counter-efforts to
placate the Muslim right wing, the path for the Hindu Right’s growth was
cleared (Basu et al. 1993; Ludden 1995).
It was against this background, taken together with the failure of post-
independence economic development, that Hindu nationalism came to
appear as an effective counter-ideology, having a natural constituency by
virtue of its name and its symbolism – for was not the majority ‘Hindu’?3
Hindu nationalism, in fact, presented itself as successor to the Congress’s
secular developmental ideology, with the latter now declared to be a
failure. The Hindu nationalist right thus came to prominence in India as
the cultural complement to economic liberalization, which began to be
instituted in the latter half of the decade.4 What, according to the BJP,
would take its place was a more thickly cultural identity, undergirded by
a more authoritarian state. This was understood to compensate for the
problem of political legitimation, while preparing the state to meet the
challenges of economic growth in a globalizing economy. Hindu religious
ritual and symbols became a resource for expanding political partici-
pation, even as minorities and lower castes contested its use. The recent
currency of Hindu nationalism in the US has to be understood in this
context, as a phenomenon that sought to be in tune with globalization
rather than as a form of religious reaction as such. Thus, the Hindu
Right’s conference in the US in 1993, held in Washington DC, was
labelled, appropriately, Global Vision 2000 (Rajagopal 1993).5
The BJP has since come to rule as the head of a multi-party coalition,6
although the coalitional character of the government compromises the
kind of power that the BJP had hoped to wield. Precisely how this
changes the Hindu Right in the US is difcult to answer. Although inu-
ential, the BJP has been in the role of minority opposition for most of its
history. In an earlier incarnation, it was briey part of a coalitional
government with the Janata Party, between 1977 and 1980 (Graham
1990). 7 But its present occupation of the Centre follows on the most
public and intensive phase of militant, explicitly Hindu mobilization in
recent history.
Ideologically, the BJP came to prominence by a religio-cultural cam-
paign, so that a coherent politics could not, in fact, be distilled from its
various pronouncements beyond that of Hindu hegemony itself. Peasants
and villagers were promised a return to a golden age of righteous and
prosperous rule; urban residents were offered a blistering denunciation
of corruption and degradation; and businesses were guaranteed a strong
regime capable of transcending the social pact underwriting Nehruvian
development, and ushering in an era of privatization. Although Hindu
symbolism helped to conceal these ssures, and the moderate persona of
the party’s prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, helped to reconcile doubters,
the occupation of ofce has imposed limits on the BJP’s ability to main-
tain its multivocal methods of retaining and expanding its constituency.
The exigency of ruling in a coalition government curtails the party’s room
for manoeuvre even further. It is not surprising that long-simmering ten-
sions within the Hindu Right should surface, between moderate and
more extreme fractions of the Hindu Right, for instance.8 After decades
of cultivating a loyal constituency as an oppositional force, the Hindu
Right’s rapid expansion in recent times, and its subsequent assumption
of political power would, in the Indian context, have made the rise of s-
siparous tendencies all the more likely.
In India, the invocation of religion summoned up the unresolved
debates between nationalism and social reform, and presented Hinduism
as an unchanged, implicitly conservative force. By contrast, in the US,
religion was more self-consciously a medium which diverse Indian com-
munities could use to forge a meeting ground, and for purposes of cul-
tural reproduction. For the most part educated and afuent, their staging
of religion as public grounds for their identity in the US had implications
that in important respects were different from those faced by Indians in
India. Although language and region dened the spaces where Indians
interacted most intimately with each other, Hindu ritual proved a con-
venient means of drawing Indians together across these boundaries. His-
torically, Hindu nationalists in India had avoided explicitly religious
grounds of mobilization precisely because they felt that invoking Hindu
symbolism would only summon the divisiveness of sects and castes. I
have argued elsewhere that the syncretic practices of Hindus abroad may
have provided the model inuencing the shift to ritual-based mobiliz-
ation, which was led by the VHP, till then principally active abroad.9
In the US, three factors interact to create a changing context for Hindu
nationalism. First, there is the growth of the Indian population in the US,
with large numbers of new would-be immigrants entering over the last
several years, and a second generation beginning to emerge from colleges
and universities. Secondly, there is the concomitant fanning out of Hindu
Right organizations themselves, as mentioned above, reecting this
demographic diversity. Finally, Hindu nationalism is changing in India
itself, creating a different reference point for its supporters abroad. For
the Hindu Right to be an oppositional and, in its own way, a critical force
is one thing. But becoming part of the political mainstream with only
minority support provides a different kind of test. If the BJP had
succeeded in increasing its hold over its allies, and in more effectively
establishing its political dominance, the resulting impression of strength
could have resolved differences between its supporters, and helped to
mask any divergence between the party’s pronouncements and its
actions. However, with the organizational weakness and ideological
inconsistency that the BJP has demonstrated, especially after its assump-
tion of ofce, there must inevitably occur a separating out among its sup-
porters, between a core of party loyalists and peripheral groups whose
loyalty is rather to Hindu nationalist ideas as they understand them, and
who distance themselves from the way these are actualized in the current
manifestation of the Hindu Right.10
Minority identity in the US

Religion offers Indians a relatively safe and familiar means of dening
themselves in the US, as well-educated but dark-skinned immigrants con-
fronting their ambivalent class status. Religious identity becomes a way
of evading racial marginality, and of appearing to side-step the great
chain of being that has whites above and blacks beneath. With the legacy
of Puritan settlement in the US in search of religious freedom, pluralism
in matters of faith has had a far less beleaguered history than its politi-
cal counterpart. Indeed, a succession of religious movements has shaped
the space of cultural assertion and debate in the US. Religion has thus
become a culturally acceptable means of identifying one’s particular
place in the social hierarchy, with church denomination reformulating
racial and class divides, from Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Church of
Christ above, and to Methodist and Baptist at the bottom, to take Protes-
tantism alone. Protest and rejection of this hierarchy, as a racial order,
also frequently take religious form, as, for instance, with the struggles led
by Martin Luther King Jr. or Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.11 For
Indians, to be ‘Hindu’ is to bask in Orientalist visions of an ancient civiliz-
ation and so compensate at the present time for its bygone glories while
muting the stigma of racism. In an environment where multiculturalism
is inuential in sanitizing cultural difference without interrogation or
introspection, ‘Hindus’ can take pride in being placed within the trim
precincts of a pluralist society.
Thus, religion serves as a tacit device for upholding the story of the US
as an open society, for reformulating the identities of racially diverse
immigrants, and aiding in their absorption into American civic life. But
there are limits to this story, as the case of African-Americans illustrates
most strikingly. That nomenclature, and the shifts that preceded it, from
negro to black to African-American, tell an important story, of the split-
ting open of the myth of a monolithic American national identity, and
the acknowledgment of what Michael Walzer has called hyphenated
Americans, who remained identied by their nationalities of origin even
if formally US citizens (Walzer 1994). The combination of the 1965
Immigration Act, with which commenced the rst waves of non-white
immigrants since the ‘twenties, together with the 1964 Civil Rights Act
which preceded it, signalled what has been called a ‘great transformation’
of the political terrain, leading to a qualitative change in prevailing politi-
cal norms (Omi and Winant 1986).12 It was in this context that expatri-
ate religious nationalism began to emerge. In the case of the Hindu
Right, a variety of manifestations can be noted. I shall briey describe
their chief components below.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America

Organized Hindu Right effort in the US for the rst twenty years of its
existence (1970–1990), centred on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of
America.13 The VHP of America publishes literature on the ‘Hindu way
of life’, arranges seminars and lecture tours for visiting spiritual gures,
provides family counselling ‘with a Hindu outlook on life’, and operates
social service projects mostly in India.14 In addition to these activities,
they form a network of contacts and afliations with other Indian
religious and social organizations in the US, and often their own
members may occupy prominent positions in these other organizations.
Thus, its inuence extends well beyond its enrolment. In the last few
years the VHP has grown rapidly, from having a presence in thirteen
states to maintaining branches in more than forty states.
The keystone of the VHP of America’s efforts is in intervention at the
level of the family. Mahesh Mehta, for many years president of the
organization, claims the credit for evolving a strategy designed for the
problems distinct to Indian families in the US. Although questions of
their cultural identity might not have troubled young professionals
during their early years in the US, it was when their children started to
confront the fact of their difference in school that parents began to notice
their own inadequacy. Children needed to know why their families did
things differently, whether in terms of lighting lamps, worshipping idols
(and so many of them) or avoiding beef. Parents found they were unable
to answer most questions satisfactorily. Invoking tradition or parental
authority, enough in most situations, did not sufce where Indians were
in a minority, and the children themselves needed defences against the
interrogation of their peers.
The importance of having a good answer to these questions usually
could not be appreciated by the parents, whose own experience provided
no clues to the problems that their children might have in the US. Even
if the parents tried to teach their children traditional values, they often
failed for this reason. They were now required to approach their own
customs and behaviour from a rationalist perspective, and to construct a
new set of reasons for them. This was not something most of them could
do unaided. As the VHP told the story, the crisis came as the children
approached their teens. The question how to deal with their children’s
sexuality would be a difcult one for parents. Again, in their own lives,
the rst generation were for the most part obedient to the demands of
their own elders, in their choice of domestic partners as in most other
things. It would be difcult to prepare for the challenge they would
experience, since their US-born children declared their freedom to desire
as they wished. One Gujarati engineer and his family had packed up, sold
their house and abruptly returned to India within a week of their daugh-
ter closeting herself in her room with her boyfriend one day for several
hours.
Telling me that story, Mehta drew the lesson. Without constant ex-
posure to Hindu values, and a proper education in Hindu culture, young-
sters were liable to go astray, and families would disintegrate. Here the
VHP of America was able to step in, and act as a reservoir of knowledge
and skills, in teaching families how they could retain their culture. Con-
ducting Sunday schools and Hindu youth camps, where children could be
taught why their families were different and, indeed, why this difference
was a form of superiority, through stories from Hindu mythology, and the
examples offered by the heroes of (a suitably rendered) Indian history.
Perhaps most importantly, the children were able to make friends with
others of their own age, who shared similar problems of adjustment, and
could help overcome each others’ sense of vulnerability and develop
mechanisms of coping with the larger society.15
In the course of making cultural assumptions salient and creating a
rationale for Hinduism, the VHP could inect these assumptions with
nationalist meanings, presenting the Hindu nation as the most advanced
product of antiquity rather than as their own fabrication. At the same
time, the VHP was active in social organizations, such as temple societies,
language, regional and professional networks, as well as India Associ-
ations. Their members could thus provide input into decisions taken by
the different regional groupings of the Indian community, and shape
them if possible. During the movement to build a Ram temple (at what
was alleged to be his birthplace, on the site of a sixteenth-century
mosque), in Ayodhya, in India, shila pujans [brick worship] were per-
formed not only in villages across the country. In the US, too, groups in
thirty-one cities participated, sanctifying bricks through ritual and
sending them to Ayodhya for the proposed Ram temple. These contri-
butions were themselves substantial, and constituted an important nan-
cial support to the Hindu campaign.16
The bridging of continents by the Hindu Right means that, in effect,
two somewhat different sets of politics are joined within one organiz-
ational congeries. In India, the Hindu Right is loud in its excoriations of
Muslims and, increasingly, Christians and seeks to achieve Hindu hege-
mony over Indian society. It is militant in its efforts to combat what it
perceives as constraints on Hindu expression, and openly outs the law.
It argues for swadeshi, that is, for promoting the indigenous economy,
and demands boycotts against multinationals. It denounces birth control
and labels women who use it as akin to prostitutes. Its activism is built
on the basis of recruiting individuals rather than families, or of address-
ing specically family-related issues. In the US, there is for the most part
a downplaying of militancy vis-à-vis Indian politics, in tacit recognition
of the fact that the majority of well-to-do US-based professionals and
their families are likely to be wary of controversy, and to shun the no-
toriety of Hindu Right activism. Signicantly, political issues concerning
Hindus in the US, even say symbolic ones of, for instance, the ways in
which Hindus are represented to the wider public, have been avoided.
Instead, the Hindu Right in the US is focused most intently on expand-
ing the numbers of people congregating under Hindu auspices, and using
its programmes of Hinduized pedagogy oriented to the domestic sphere.
One VHP old-timer, Babu Suseelan, revealed the organization’s inter-
est in inuencing the larger US society itself, rather than the Indian com-
munity exclusively. In recent times, Hindu religion, he said, had been
propagated most successfully by the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness [ISKCON]. Swami Prabhupada had devised a brilliant
method for the purpose, Suseelan said, arguing that if Americans wor-
shipped the Son of God, what about the Father? This gure, Prabhupada
had declared, was none other than Krishna. Whether this was the key
explanation for ISKCON’s success or not, it was revealing in the kind of
strategic claims of syncretism that Suseelan admired, and which indeed
were made by Hindu nationalists in India.17 In any case, Hinduism had
gained some inuence with the intellectual classes in the US, and with
3,800 cultural organizations in the US and a preponderantly professional
Indian population, this work could continue. As proof of Hinduism’s
growing inuence, he pointed to the increasing belief in reincarnation,
professed by half of all Americans today, he said, up from 10 per cent
fty years ago. This could only be coming from Hinduism, he argued.
What was lacking however, was a programme of unication across these
many organizations.
To address this and related issues, the VHP of America had convened
a Dharma Sansad, or Parliament of Religions, in Saylorsburg, PA., in
November 1998, bringing together nearly thirty swamis, men and
women, from the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, as well as
more than 200 community leaders, to address the special problems faced
by expatriate Hindus in the West. The objective of the meeting was to
develop a code of conduct relevant to Hindus. Describing this as a ‘most
difcult task’ because of the society’s divisions into sects, castes and lin-
guistic groups, and because of foreign rule, the chief guest Ashok
Singhal, secretary general of the VHP in India, emphasized that the
swamis were central to bringing about unication.18
In this respect, Singhal was enunciating a principle that he had utilized
to great effect in Hindu mobilization in India.19 Attempting to bring all
the Hindu temples in the Caribbean and the Americas together under
one organizational umbrella was seen as crucial in this task of unication.
At the meeting, the prevention of exogamy was presented as critical for
the preservation of the Hindu community. It was claimed that between
30 and 40 per cent of ‘Hindu girls’ were marrying non-Hindus. Whether
men marrying outside the fold was a concern or not, cultural regener-
ation was framed as a task of Hindu men saving their women from
Muslim men, thereby demarcating the character and limits of the VHP’s
American project. The absence of an ostensible interest in wider politi-
cal issues could render it a relatively non-controversial presence in the
US. At the same time, dening its mission as one of protecting the Hindu
patriarchal family enabled the stigmatizing of the non-Hindu other, cru-
cially the Muslim male, thus reinforcing the VHP’s emphasis on Hindu
identity.
The Hindu Students Council

With the growth and maturing of the Indian population in the United
States, Hindu Right organizations themselves have evolved, as the sangh
parivar has branched out and sought to address different segments of the
population through appropriate organizational channels. Of these, the
most prominent is the Hindu Students Council [HSC]. Established in
May 1990 and run entirely by students, the HSC claims over fty chap-
ters and thousands of members across college campuses in the United
States and Canada. They publish a weekly bulletin across the net called
Hindu Digest and a quarterly newsletter (previously, a monthly),
Samskar [Culture]. The organization is divided more or less equally
between graduate students from India, many of whom may return to
India, and Indian-Americans raised in the US.
Senior members of the Hindu Right repeatedly spoke of the HSC as
having highly dynamic members who were critical in expanding its
membership. In 1993, HSC organized a youth conference parallel to
VHP’s Global Vision 2000 Conference in Washington DC, attended by
over 2,100 youth. The HSC has been instrumental in expanding the
Hindu Right’s presence on the internet, creating sites for each university
chapter, and as well, organizing an overarching website, the Global
Hindu Electronic Network containing links to numerous other sites,
including those of the various branches of the sangh parivar. (See below
for more on websites.)
HSC’s introductory pamphlet states its two-fold aim: rst, to promote
among Hindu students ‘an understanding of Hindu culture and philos-
ophy’, and secondly, ‘a sense of identity . . . community spirit and a
feeling of an extended Hindu family’.20 But the HSC faces a delicate task
as it seeks recruits, many of whom are teenagers raised in the US. Many
of the latter have to contend with mainstream American perceptions of
Hinduism as a backward or pagan system, and with the deeply compro-
mised manifestations of actually existing Hinduism, entailing caste and
gender-based discrimination. Its promotional literature thus denes the
word Hindu in purely philosophical terms: ‘The word Hindu embraces
all the people who accept, respect and follow the eternal values of life,
ethical and spiritual, and practices that have originated in the holy land
of Bharat. . . . It is a cultural ethos’.21
The HSC dissuades from associating caste with Hinduism, a view that
was, for instance, fundamental to B. R. Ambedkar’s interpretation of
Hinduism. Thus, an essayist in Samskar argues
The practice of untouchability contradicts the very basic tenets of

Hindu Dharma that God resides in every human being. Therefore, by
declaring one untouchable, we are refusing to touch God! How can we
reconcile such contrasting viewpoints? . . . Untouchability has been
declared illegal. . . . But a social cancer like this is very hard to eradi-
cate. It continues to linger in rural India22 (Mitra 1995).
Racism, too, contradicts the universalistic principles of Christianity,

but social practices are rarely threatened by logical contradictions; they
usually thrive on them. But here Hindu culture is conceived in immacu-
late form; ‘feudal’ and ‘foreign’ inuences, however, contaminated what
was once ‘perfect’:
When we study our Hindu history of the last 5000 years, we come
across many changing phases of women’s status in our society. In the
beginning, in the Vedic period, it was perfect equality. Then the feudal
period and foreign invasions came, and women’s freedom became
abridged. 23
The HSC itself offers a sanitized version of Hindu culture for youth
who express a sense of cultural difference, and seeks to focus this by
dening India as ‘the Motherland for Hindus’. The HSC thus argues that
‘the unity, integrity and strength of Bharat’ are crucial for ‘Hindu society’
to remain strong. As in other branches of the sangh parivar, Hindu
society here is clearly understood as a global cultural community and,
indeed, the HSC invokes the notion of a global village. A Global Hindu
Youth Activities Network [GHYAN] is under way to bring together
Hindu youth across the world. A Kashmir Education Campaign to raise
awareness about the killings of thousands of ‘innocent people’, namely,
Hindus, serves as an important focal theme.24 But it is the Indian gradu-
ate students who for the most part sustain the HSC’s interest in Indian
politics. Second-generation Indians themselves tend to be uneasy with
the controversy surrounding Hindu Right politics in India, and are
reluctant to espouse what in mainstream US society would be considered
extremist views.
The Federation of Hindu Associations

Recently there has emerged the Federation of Hindu Associations
[FHA], headquartered in the Los Angeles area, which is careful to dis-
tinguish itself from the RSS, the VHP, and other mainline Hindu Right
organizations. The FHA is critical of spirituality, and of what they see as
the useless chanting of bhajans and kirtans [devotional songs], although
they admit their utility. The FHA is offered a public platform by The
India Post, a Fremont-based newspaper bankrolled by a rich supporter,
and brought out in a colour edition simultaneously on both coasts, the
only Indian paper in the US to do so.25 The organization may appear to
the wider public as little more than an energetic champion of a minority
Indian culture, and thus take its place in a widely-sanctioned view of
multiculturalism.
The FHA seeks to unite Hindus who are otherwise divided by their
allegiance to different deities or gurus, and by language and region. It
aims to bring about unity by promoting awareness of their common heri-
tage and interest. Composed mostly of rst-generation immigrants who
are sympathetic to but have not necessarily been active in the sangh
parivar, they tend to be impatient with what they see as overly cautious
behaviour on the part of the Hindu Right leadership. If Hindus are being
killed and temples destroyed in Kashmir, political leaders ought to spell
it out in precisely these terms, instead of tiptoeing around it, as the FHA
believes they are doing, to avoid offending Muslims. Similarly, according
to the FHA, no politician was prepared to work to abolish caste, because
they relied on caste groupings for votes. Since electoral constraints effec-
tively tied the hands of the BJP, and consequently those of its non-politi-
cal afliates too, they could not address some of the key issues troubling
Hindus, in the view of the FHA.
The FHA aims at bringing existing organizations together for specic,
coordinated public actions, rather than building a new organization from
the ground up.26 As such, it works with a relatively small core group of
people, with about twelve members on its executive committee. As dis-
tinct from the sangh parivar, the FHA calls itself the Hindu parivar
[family]. The BJP and its allies were not willing to take strong positions,
Prithviraj Singh, the President of FHA said in an interview, and hence an
organization outside it was necessary. In India, Singh confessed, ‘We
were not good Hindus’. A combination of age, experience and geo-
graphical displacement had awakened his conscience, and that of his
friends.27
I met with eight of the twelve member Executive Council of the FHA,
in my visit to Prithviraj Singh’s hilltop residence in Diamond Bar, CA, in
May 1997. They were all well-to-do, rst-generation Indians, with strong
views on Indian politics, convinced of their ability to serve as a positive
inuence, by virtue of their location and afuence. Their diagnosis of
Indian affairs was simple: Nehruvian socialism and corrupt politics rep-
resented the problem. A strong Hindu nationalist identity, backed by
political power, was the answer to all subcontinental ills. Prithviraj Singh
spoke of the Ram temple campaign as great. ‘I was in San Francisco at
the time [December 1992], and there were pictures of Hindus sitting on
top of the mosque with an axe in hand and all – I thought to myself – is
that the same Hindu?’ Interestingly, they dismissed the caste question as
mere pandering or opportunism on the part of politicians. On the one
hand, they wanted to ‘abolish’ caste. They revealed that an untouchable
would be priest at the Hindu Unity Temple they proposed to construct.
On the other hand, they were silent when I suggested that the Hindu vote
had been fractured by the recent lower-caste upsurge, by the political
assertion of Dalits [formerly, Untouchables] and Backward Classes.
Simplistic they may be, but the FHA is nevertheless active and visible,
and often more so in its less threatening activities within the US context.
The Festival of Lights, Diwali, often observed along with the commem-
oration of the slaying of the demon king Ravan by the god king Ram,
Dussehra, was used by the FHA annually to attract huge numbers of
people. Its organizers took pride in the fact that for the last few years,
their celebration dwarfed that of the Federation of India Associations,
its ‘secular’ rival in the area. Thus, on 17 October 1998, FHA conducted
the Dussehra Diwali Hindu Mela [Festival], which the organizers claim
drew up to 12,000 people, more than twice as many as for the much older
Federation of India Associations [FIA], and raised $51,000 over a period
of three weeks.28
The FHA has become a vocal lobby group for defending the ways in
which Hindus are represented, politically as well as culturally. In pursu-
ing the latter goal, many of their battles have led to their engaging in rep-
resentational politics within the US itself. When some companies in the
US recently used Hindu images in their advertising campaigns (for
example, Sony and The Gap), the FHA unleashed a fusillade of news
releases, phone calls and press conferences, accusing them of disrespect
for Hindu culture. It succeeded in getting the companies to withdraw the
campaigns and issue public apologies. Television shows were criticized,
too. For example, a character on the cartoon show, The Simpsons, was
shown throwing peanuts at a statue labelled Goofy Ganesh, their ren-
dition, apparently, of the Hindu deity. The FHA wrote to the Fox
channel, arguing that similar scenes involving Christ, for example, would
be unthinkable. Prithviraj Singh took satisfaction in the fact that these
characters and themes did not reappear.
The FHA pays attention to the Hindu community in the US as well as
in India, but without a clearly articulated politics of location. If for
Savarkar, the author of Hindutva’s rst manifesto, it was the territorial
nation-state that was sacred, for the FHA, Hinduism is located purely as
a religio-cultural concept that an increasingly mobile, globally diffuse
population can deploy according to its perceived interests. This might be
seen as a curious analogue of the latest phase of the globalization of
capital, where a politics of cultural identity is exibly deployed according
to location, concomitant with increasingly exible systems of production
and accumulation (Visweswaran 1997). The activism of the FHA is
various and many-sided. They stage protests against visiting politicians
from South Asia of whom they disapprove, which covers all those opposed
to the BJP in India, and all politicians from Pakistan. They demand that
action be taken against those allegedly destroying Hindu temples. But at
the same time, they address US-based issues too, because they do not have
an India-based constituency to protect, and so need not apologize for
taking up what would likely seem supercial to that audience.
‘Real’ Hindutva: a Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh camp

In this section I offer an ethnographic account of a Hindutva camp, to
illustrate and qualify the arguments made in this article with glimpses of
how Hindutva appears in its actual practices in the US. Too many
accounts of Hindu nationalism examine it from the outside, as a political
problem caused by the manipulation of sentiments. What this ignores is
the cultural signicance that it has for its adherents; any understanding
would be incomplete without this component.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [National Volunteer Corps], which
is the think tank and organizational backbone of the Hindu Right in
India, has long operated as a grey eminence, choosing to keep out of
party politics, and working mainly at the grass roots and behind closed
doors. Departing from this decades-long policy, with its decision to go all
out to win political power, beginning in the late eighties, the RSS went
public in a major way, beginning with year-long centenary celebrations
of its founder Dr. K. B. Hedgewar in 1989. The visibility of the Hindu
Swayamsevak Sangh (retitled to acknowledge its foreign membership,
with the ‘national’ component of the title dropped) is an expression of
the same determination.29
In the summer of 1997, I had the opportunity to attend a three-day
camp conducted by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh.30 Although the HSS
has existed in the UK and elsewhere for many years, it is a relatively
recent entrant to the US most likely in the early nineties. Yet its growth
has been quite rapid. One senior member estimated that there were over
150 shakhas [branches] in the tri-state area alone, that is, New York, New
Jersey and Connecticut, with an average weekly attendance of between
15 and 20 at each. He attributed the increase to three factors: the ascen-
sion of the BJP to ofce at the Centre in India, the large number of
software engineers coming into the country annually,31 especially in the
wake of efforts to tackle the ‘millennium bug’, and perhaps most import-
antly, the entry into the US of a number of dedicated RSS activists who
were also software engineers, and who were recruiting large numbers of
new members.32
An earlier generation of immigrants, arriving from the Presidency
Colleges (in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras) and national Institutes of
Technology (in Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kanpur and Kharagpur, near
Calcutta), usually having spent several years and sometimes their entire
lives in one of the metropolises, tended to be relatively well-schooled in
the modes and mores of modern, professional life. The sometimes
lengthy experience of graduate school within the US was usually a trans-
formative experience as well, as students encountered the often diverse
intellectual currents within a university setting, as well as people from
different parts of India and the rest of the world.33 A substantial per-
centage, up to about half of the most recent wave of immigrants,
however, have diplomas in computer programming acquired over a short
period of time (sometimes no more than three months, but more often
one or two years), and come from a far greater spread of cities and towns
than before, many of them from small towns in the Indian hinterland.34
I decided to attend a summer camp because of the cross-section of
people I could meet there; shakhas themselves tended to reect the pecu-
liarity of the neighbourhoods they were in. A combination of three
different kinds of activities/experiences is provided in the camps. First,
there is an experiential form of bonding, with members participating
together in a variety of activities, structured as well as improvised. The
practice of engaging in relatively unquestioning, cooperative forms of
activities is believed to build solidarity, and is part of the secret of the
sangh’s ability to evoke loyalty on the part of its members. But lest it
lapse into mere self-indulgence, this is leavened by two other features,
physical exercise and pedagogical activity, in a combination of drill and
lecturing. In typical shakha activity in India, discipline is, in fact, the
dominant motif, with blind obedience to the leader being inculcated.
Organizing well-paid professionals in the US is another matter, however;
the stern RSS discipline was noticeably soft-pedalled at the camp I
attended, with frequent apologies being made for such regimentation as
there was. For the 10 per cent or so who were involved in the actual
organizing, the camp was extremely hard work, with little sleep and
endless chores; the remaining participants were more or less enjoying a
free ride, in this respect.
There were about 150 people in all, comprising three groups: young
male software engineers, a smaller number of older professionals, mostly
men; and a still smaller number of children of the latter group and of
other sangh sympathizers who had dropped them off for the weekend.
The few women present were there with their husbands, or they were
teenagers. The young men were from a range of medium-sized cities and
smaller towns, such as Coimbatore, Davangere, Faizabad, Hubli and
Indore. The latter represented a different phase of immigration, respond-
ing to the enormous growth of the software industry beginning in the
eighties, drawing not only on the usual reservoirs of educated pro-
fessionals in the metropolises, (which with the exception of New Delhi,
are all on the coast) but reaching beyond to the hinterland.35
This was also a new phase of globalization, due to the improvement of
transnational links, with representatives of companies headquartered in
small towns in India, and having branch ofces in New York or San José.
Imagine a company based, say, in Rajkot, Gujarat and New York, com-
pletely skipping the usual metro ofce in Mumbai or Delhi. According
to one estimate, at any given time, there are about 2,000 Indian entre-
preneurs touring the US, hawking resumés collected from software engi-
neers back in India, and seeking contracts for data processing, mostly
from accounting rms such as Arthur Andersen and from communi-
cations companies such as AT&T.36 As a result, there are imports fun-
nelling into the US from hitherto little-exposed strata of Indian society,
completely bypassing the usual socialization of the bigger cities.
In these hinterland regions, after years of grass-roots effort, Hindu
nationalism now circulates within the common sense of the upper caste,
educated strata, with few other ideologies available to compete with it.
It is not surprising, then, that with improved communications they should
be more evident. The sangh offers to these small-town aspirants to the
upper middle classes, a way of being modern. It blends familiar signs of
auspiciousness and authority (Sanskrit prayer, and other invocations of
Hindu religion) with a martial sternness that seems appropriate for the
new work culture that they sought to absorb. In this sense, the sangh can
be seen to capitalize on the Nehruvian absence of a cultural policy, medi-
ating modernity for the small-town upper castes.
Participants at the camp were grouped roughly according to age and
sex, and there were about a dozen groups of as many members each. The
camp schedule consisted of general assemblies and collective exercises,
including salutes to the bicornuate saffron ag, games and martial arts,
lectures and prayer, and mealtimes. A sixty-dollar fee covered the cost
for each person. I later learnt that HSS members paid about a third more,
subsidizing what was meant as a recruiting venture. Plenty of food and
games and good company were meant to provide a memorable experi-
ence, and a positive association with the sangh. One participant observed
that the camp was like a Microsoft seminar in the profusion of its offer-
ings of food and drink. Clearly, the asceticism of the sangh in India was
missing here.
There was a good deal of recitation and chanting of slogans and
mantras, which blended into each other. People sat in neat rows, repeat-
ing after the incantator of the moment – Jai Bharat Mata Ki, Jai Bhavani,
Jai Shivaji [Victory to Mother India, Victory to Bhavani, Victory to
Shivaji], and were exhorted to shout ever louder. There was a trace of
embarrassment on some faces at having to do this. But the speakers were
for the most part mild in their approach; only two of the four main
speakers mentioned the sangh, and the tone was gentle rather than hec-
toring, acknowledging the possibility of the audience’s disagreement.
There were martial arts exercises, with sticks, where we were taught how
to strike an opponent on the head. Later, as we passed the older men’s
group, I heard the leader tell them, ‘You can really hit them wherever
you can, between the legs preferably’.
There was an ‘Upanishadic management consultant’, K, who spoke to
an avid crowd of engineers at the camp. He applied the insights of the
Upanishads to management. Reality is shaped in our minds, he
explained; we have to understand how our own minds create our reality,
to behave towards others with compassion and respect, and always to
leave open the possibility of our being wrong. As he ended, one of the
young engineers had a question. The idea of paying respect to others was
a good one, he said, but what if it was required to retaliate or strike back
at them? Respect, the consultant replied smoothly, comes from the Latin
word meaning to look again, to re-evaluate. It represented a striking
change of tone. The RSS old-timers beamed. Not for nothing was K. a
management consultant. More than that, one suspected, here was the
age-old gure of the wily brahmin, able to bend his philosophy to serve
a patron’s convenience.
There was a pretty teenager who danced a number from the lm
Rangeela [Colourful] at the nal evening’s entertainment. She appeared
to be a skilful dancer, but she wore a capacious shalwar kameez that com-
pletely hid her torso, although the dance and the music suggested a
provocative intent. It made for a curiously abstract experience. No doubt
the audience was hardly an appropriate one for the occasion; indeed, she
may perhaps have felt required to look restrained, so that even when she
heaved her bosom, her face was expressionless.
The ‘Madanlal Dhingra’ group, named for a terrorist patriot in the
independence movement, was the teenagers’ group. On the last evening,
they put on a ‘slide show’, compered with gawky elan by a pre-med
student. Two boys held up a sheet, and behind it several youth arrayed
themselves in various postures. ‘Since we are Indian, and family is such
a big part of Indian life,’ they said, they would present a ‘3-D slide show’
of their visits to family in India. The show focused on the shock of seeing
cows on Indian streets, being overfed at relatives’ houses, the stench of
Indian bathrooms, being chased by something ‘my father has warned me
against – goondas’ (rufans) being deserted by the girls because they
couldn’t ght the goondas, nally being killed on the streets of India! and,
‘because we’re Hindu, we believe in reincarnation’ – the nal frieze
showed them striking extravagant postures of deant return. Their use
of images was interesting, as a way of handling discrepant realities and
of describing a society they preferred to see from the outside. Their
Hindu identity itself thus appeared as an after-thought rather than as a
felt attitude. The show seemed to conrm the difculty the second gener-
ation had in tting into the spirit of the camp, so that even when they
tried to assert their belonging, they only underlined their inability to
relate to it.
For the rest, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh offers Hindutva as a mode
of disciplining themselves into modernity, that is, for rst-generation
immigrants whose own class inheritance and education could not com-
pensate for the absence of a state cultural policy accompanying the
developmental process. With a combination of companionship, coun-
selling and exercise, woven together with spiritual discourse and Hindu
nationalist history, the camp sought to provide a set of intellectual and
bodily practices framing the process of class and cultural mobility for
upwardly aspiring individuals. Thus, there was a strong endorsement of
traditional authority, while subtly inecting it with rationalist approaches
to personal problem-solving in modern urban life. One participant, from
Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, told me that he had only heard negative
things about the RSS when growing up, and only after coming to the US
had he really come to know them, and to see what ‘brainwass’ (sic) it was.
Not only the affective bonding provided by the camp, but also the ways
in which it made sense of a changing landscape for new arrivals made the
‘negative things’ secondary or even perhaps justied them.
Virtual Hindutva
With the proliferation of software engineers from India, the internet has
become a site for expansion as well, and a number of Hindu websites
have been formed. Central websites include the Global Hindu Electronic
Network [GHEN], which is a project of the Hindu Students Council,
located at www.hindunet.org/hsc/. GHEN also runs soc.religion.hindu, a
moderated newsgroup devoted entirely to Hindutva. In addition, dis-
cussion groups appended to news services such as CNN or the advertis-
ing agency Rediffusion (which operates an internet news magazine) can
become nodes for particular interests. Thus one columnist on the much
frequented Rediff.com website, Varsha Bhosle, who labels herself ‘a mild
fundie’, that is, a ‘mild’ Hindu fundamentalist, is billed as its most
popular writer. Bhosle writes in a chatty, informal style, not appearing to
take herself too seriously but nevertheless expressing strong opinions,
about oppressed Hindus and corrupt politicians unwilling to defend
what, in her view, is a truly national cause.
The English language media are understood to paint an ‘essentially
negative’ picture of Hindutva. A wealthy Mumbai-based businessman,
Ashok Chowgule, who is also the head of the Maharashtra state Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, has established the Hindu Vivek Kendra [Hindu Aware-
ness Centre], with a view to making it an intellectual resource base and
‘nerve centre’ for Hindutva, gathering and publicizing selected writings
on various aspects of the subject, and encouraging research. Signicantly,
it lists among its activities keeping track of writings ‘both pro- and anti-
Hindutva’ in the international eld, that is, as a monitoring centre.37
There are several far-right Hindu websites, such as Sword of Truth
(www.swordoftruth.com), which in turn offers links to Voice of Bharat,
Satyameva Jayate [Truth Alone Triumphs], and Nation of Hindutva. The
rst website claims to uncover ‘the extent of the lies that have been per-
petuated for ages’ (Sword of Truth), another, to unveil the true India
lying ‘concealed beneath that Westernised, pseudo-secular, colonial-
hangover muck that coats it’ (Voice of Bharat), a third, to ‘cutting out all
the diplomatic, PC garbage, and getting straight to the point, . . . [pro-
viding] an intensely detailed study of the threat posed to the world by
Islamic fundamentalism’; a fourth, promoting the cause of the Hindu
Nation ‘and enabling it to survive and prosper in an increasingly hostile
environment’ (Nation of Hindutva).
There are also links to Zionist organizations, such as the Freeman
Center for Strategic Studies, which seeks to aid Israel ‘in her quest to
survive in a hostile world’, and which lists former Israeli Defence Minis-
ter Ariel Sharon among its frequent contributors to its monthly journal,
The Maccabean Online.38 The example of Judaism, as one of an ancient
culture whose people succeeded in wresting control of territory from
hostile Islamic peoples, and yet continue to be embattled, is presented as
a model for emulation by the Hindu Right. Interestingly, Hindu Right
leader M. S. Golwalkar, in one of his early writings, is noteworthy for
having idealized Hitler’s treatment of minorities in Nazi Germany, and
presenting it as a lesson to be learnt about the proper uses of state power.
The internet is seen not simply as a channel of communication, but as
a key battleground that must be occupied and defended as the always
copious varieties of ‘pseudo-secular’ criticism proliferate. In the words of
the Nation of Hindutva, if the internet is ‘the last arena on earth where
censors do not suppress facts’, the advantage it allows suppressed facts
can be more than made up by ‘the vast array of anti-Hindu and anti-
Indian propaganda’ circulating through the web.
The intoxication of unfettered communication on the web, and of the
prospect of being able to initiate newcomers into all the truths is nurtured
by these groups. The proliferation of Hindu Right groups on the web are
to some extent an artice of new and relatively inexpensive media, that
enable small groups to acquire impressive dimensions in virtual real
estate, and to express themselves as forcefully as they might choose. With
a relatively educated population, and convenient and accessible means
of expression available to them, the kind of disciplining force exercised
by the sangh parivar at home is more difcult to achieve. There is a
growing impatience with the demands of politics, with the need to nego-
tiate through the constraints imposed by other groups. At the same time,
there is a sense of mutual loyalty among these groups, presenting a single
if many-faceted cause to the world. Thus, these websites offer links to
those of the BJP and its afliates, presenting a spectrum of attitudes to
the same political cause.
The Hindu bomb meets the Muslim bomb

If Hindu nationalism abroad sought to masquerade as a garden variety
of multiculturalism, nothing could complicate this assertion as much as
its sudden disruption of the prevailing geopolitical balance. The nuclear
tests conducted by the BJP government in May 1998 dramatically illus-
trated the contrast between exhibiting Hindu nationalist power and man-
aging the consequences of doing so. At the same time, it showed the
limits to which nationalist expression could be insulated within one
country, and represented differently to its transnational supporters.39
The BJP government had, in fact, come to ofce determined to turn the
country into a nuclear weapon state, in order to demonstrate national
pride.40 The new status, it was declared, was ‘not a conferment that we
seek, nor . . . a status for others to grant’. It was ‘an endowment to the
nation by our scientists and engineers’. It was also ‘India’s due, the right
of one-sixth of humankind’.41
The tests were typically regarded as an assertion of the BJP’s will to
power. They can be understood equally as a response to the party’s weak-
ness, and an attempt to overcome it, both in terms of the absence of any
coherent policy and in terms of the BJP’s precarious leadership over a
multi-party coalition. The nuclear tests became a kind of technological
quick x, meant to repair self-esteem and to boost the nation into a suit-
ably exalted status vis-à-vis other nations. India ‘can no more be called
a third world country’, declared BJP leader Jaswant Singh, then Deputy
Chairman of the Planning Commission. He declared that the nuclear
tests symbolized the spirit of a resurgent India, and urged Indians abroad
to play a greater role in Indian affairs.42 Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee
for his part made varying statements about the tests, saying at one point
that they were meant for self-defence only, and in the same breath, that
the government wished to develop peaceful atomic energy to alleviate
electric power shortages.43
A statement signed by the Overseas Friends of the BJP and other
Hindu Right groups defended the blasts: ‘The vast majority of Indian
Americans who comprise one of the most educated groups in the US, and
the 900 million people of India, have given their overwhelming support
to India’s testing’, the statement said. Any idea that the testing was unjus-
tied was out of the question, according to the announcement. It went
on to observe that the Pakistani nuclear missile red after the Indian
tests, was named Ghauri, ‘after an Afghan Muslim conqueror who was
notorious for the destruction of Hindu temples, the mass murder and the
rapes of Hindus’. This was like a missile aimed at Israel being named
Hitler, the statement went on to say.44
On electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms, the support for the
nuclear tests was strong. One message on a CNN interactive website, was
entitled ‘India nukes, the world pukes’, and argued:
Isn’t it stupid to even raise the questions of basic amenities before

national safety when we are all aware that we are surrounded by
nuclear scoundrels with no morality or ethics. . . . Hail to our new
leaders. At least they had the guts to stand on their two feet and thumb
their noses at the powers that be.45
One enthusiastic reader wrote to the New York based News India Times:
After ve nuclear tests, the world suddenly acknowledged India. The
world’s largest democracy of 980 million has been abused as a doormat
by the super powers . . . A mere 130 million Muslims claim equality
with 980 million strong Indians. India, on the contrary . . . is standing
tall on its own feet.46
The strange logic at work in the nuclear assertion is indicated here,

where 980 million Indians are told they must put a country of 130 million
in its place. Instead, what the nuclear tests achieved, by provoking an
immediate response from Pakistan, was precisely to put two very unequal
countries on a more nearly equal strategic footing, as could have been
predicted at the outset. The instant notoriety earned by the BJP at the
same time seriously complicated its efforts to portray Hindu nationalism
as a politically respectable entity, even while it demonstrated its vote-
getting powers at home. If Hindu nationalist organizations in the US
were at pains to dene themselves as purely cultural in intent, it could
hereafter be more difcult to blend quietly into a multicultural environ-
ment, with the US government’s fears about nuclear proliferation. On
the other hand, the contrarian character of expatriate nationalism, as a
minority identity asserted against the simple demand to assimilate, could
even thrive in these circumstances. In any case, when the BJP govern-
ment tried to stage a redemptive fund-raising exercise shortly afterwards,
it ensured that rational interest of non-resident Indians need not be
clouded by any patriotic sentiment.
The economics of identity

International economic sanctions provided an opportunity for the BJP
to back up its nuclear posturing. A bond offering, labelled Resurgent
India Bonds was, in fact, devised, apparently as a deliberate response to
the funds shortage anticipated to result from international reprisals
following the nuclear tests. The scheme, devised by a Finance Ministry
team a few weeks after the blasts, was meant as a statement to the inter-
national community that India was not easily cowed and could, more-
over, comfortably compensate for the loss of foreign support.47 By
demonstrating the deep reserves of commitment of its expatriate sons
and daughters, the country’s ability to shrug off international disapproval
could be decisively demonstrated, it was felt.48
A decade earlier, India Development Bonds had yielded $1.8 billion,
and the new offering was expected to earn at least as much. At the end
of their ve-year terms, they could be recouped entirely in dollars; bonds
were also available in British pounds and German marks. The proceeds
were to be used for the construction of roads, telephone lines and other
infrastructure projects in India. At an annual return of 7.9 per cent, they
offered over two percentage points more than US treasury bonds. In
addition, they were declared completely exempt from income, gift and
wealth tax, and premature encashment was also tax-free, although these
privileges applied solely to rupee transactions.49 Clearly, if the govern-
ment was invoking a ‘resurgent’ patriotism, it was hardly banking on it.
Rather, a spectacle of patriotism was being created at considerable cost
to itself, one that Indians at home were perforce excluded from con-
tributing to. Investors had to buy a minimum of $2,000. Indians world-
wide bought $2 billion worth in less than two weeks and double that
amount in three. One Hindu nationalist organizer summed up with satis-
faction, ‘Our currency went down by 7 or 8 per cent, and resurgent bonds
had to be used to back up the currency’.50
While the BJP government’s bond offering appeared to strike a deant
pose, a closer analysis of its legislative and policy initiatives revealed
another story. The week following the nuclear explosions, the Cabinet
promptly passed Central Government counter-guarantees for four fast-
track power projects in different states, assuring high returns to foreign
investors, even in the event of rupee depreciation. Simultaneously, a
number of oil-exploration contracts and mining concessions were also
awarded, mostly to US-based companies. Shortly after, the Export-
Import Policy ushered in a substantial liberalization of consumer goods
imports, which was surprising in the context of a substantial trade decit
and domestic recession. Finally, two hotly debated bills, relating to the
Patents Act and to opening up the insurance sector to domestic and
foreign business, were pushed through Parliament.51 Taken together, the
economic policy measures starkly contradicted the BJP’s own stated pre-
election position of ‘calibrated globalization’, and served as an instruc-
tive complement to the party’s show of nuclear deance. Nationalist
rhetoric, even extending to pretensions of nuclear brinkmanship, was for
local and regional consumption, the BJP appeared to be saying, while an
investor-friendly climate would be maintained through it all.
Conclusion
As the Indian population in the US grows larger and older, there is

inevitably a diversication in terms of cultural and political expression as
well. Simultaneously, as Hindu nationalism changes from the ideology of
an oppositional party to one of a ruling party, the contradictions between
its cultural parochialism and its market opportunism are raised to an
international level. It is, arguably, the traditionalist agency through which
forces of globalization are advancing in India, dissimulating its openness
to transnational corporations through a rhetoric of Hindu chauvinism. To
say that it amounts to nothing but an unprincipled opportunism,
however, ignores the cultural bases on which it relies, and must repro-
duce for its organizational survival.
Transnational Hindutva attains its global form only by virtue of the
interconnections of its varying local forms, through specic signs, chiey
that of Hinduness itself, and through Hindutva’s organizational frame-
works. Against a perspective that identies globalization with the West
in a simple linear fashion, Hindu nationalism provides an instructive
lesson in the variable forms that globalization may take, and in the
contradictory and uncertain processes through which it may progress.
Hindutva’s practices in its US sites reect the aspirations of Hindu
nationalism in India and vice versa; together they form an entity that rein-
forces each of these parts but it cannot be reduced to either of them. The
mainly cultural emphasis exhibited by Hindutva in the US represents,
perhaps, the fruition of Hindu nationalists’ ecumenical assertions, in
many ways difcult to achieve in the context of highly politicized divisions
of caste and community in India. The more aggressive practices of
Hindutva in India, on the other hand, which seek to establish hegemony
over a political regime in transition (from Nehruvianism to liberaliz-
ation), express the kind of assertion unrealizable in the US context, and
compensate for non-resident Indian experiences of marginality.
Hindu nationalism, in so far as the sangh parivar is concerned, seeks
to redene itself organizationally in the US to accommodate a very
different historical context while retaining its primary and dening
allegiance in India. With the greater prominence of Hindu nationalism
in India, the implications of afliation or support for the Hindu Right
become harder to fold into a benign expression of cultural identity. Cor-
respondingly, one response has been to become more visible and explicit,
as in the mushrooming of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh within the
sangh parivar, or of organizations like the Federation of Hindu Associ-
ations without. At the same time, there is a more grey area, such as is
represented by the Hindu Students Council, whose purpose overlaps
with the political purpose of the Hindu nationalists but is not coincident
with it, since the interests and sensibilities into which it feeds have more
to do with the US context.
Indians in the US tend to seek a religio-cultural denition of their
identity, partly because of a desire to sidestep the issue of their racial
marginality, and partly because of a well-established pattern of reformu-
lating cultural difference through religious afliation. This is especially
true of the second generation, whose class and cultural background make
their dark-skinned status in the US particularly problematic. For this
generation, the social practices associated with Hindu religion become
progressively less important in relation to their utility as a marker of their
cultural or civilizational distinction, and as a set of privately-held beliefs.
Hindu nationalists in India have for long cultivated the support of
Indians abroad. Successive election-time manifestos of the BJP have
specied that Non-Resident Indians’ [NRIs] interests are a high priority
for the party. Although its long-standing promise of dual citizenship for
NRIs may never gain the support of other parties, the BJP has attempted
to placate this constituency by agreeing to issue Person of Indian Origin
or PIO cards, to extend some of the benets of dual citizenship to NRIs.
What Indians abroad promise is to invest in India, and provide it with
much-needed capital and foreign exchange. What they may receive in
return is not only acknowledgement and acceptance of their national
belonging by their home countries, from which they have often long since
departed, but also tacit endorsement of their superiority, as deserving
privileges denied Indians who never left home.
Culture thus appears as both cause and effect of the increased globaliz-
ation of capital. As such, it is endowed with a false unity and needs dis-
aggregation. With the decline of state regulatory capacity and improved
communications, new transnational forms of expression do indeed arise,
indicative of emergent forms of social expression, as Appadurai has
argued. It remains necessary to correlate political relations with the cul-
tural forms in which they manifest, and to determine the consequences
of the affective ties engendered by particular cultural idioms. This article
has pointed to the ways in which new transnational afliations might in
fact be integral to the ‘success’ of a rapidly shifting Hindutva whose core
practices become more aggressive, while being complemented by more
inclusive practices enacted for more limited and situated interests.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chetan Bhatt, David Ludden and Parita Mukta for their
close reading and thoughtful comments.
Notes
1. Following convention, I use the term Hindu Right to refer to the complex of Hindu
nationalist organizations usually called the sangh parivar (roughly translated, organiz-
ational family). The term is a little misleading, however, since it presumes a political terrain
divided between left, right and centre in the same way that these positions obtain in the
West. But in the West, the left arose without and opposed to the absolutist state, whereas
in a country like India, the left was largely co-opted by the developmentalist state. It is the
‘right’ that has usurped to itself the role of challenging the state, in the process conating
anti-modern and anti-state tendencies. This renders the Hindu ‘Right’ potentially quite
different from, say, the Christian Right.
2. According to the 1990 Census, there were 890,000 Asian Indians in the US, of whom
two-thirds were foreign-born. 65.7 per cent of the males and 48.7 per cent of the females
had a bachelor’s degree or higher. This compares with 43.2 per cent for all Asian males and
32.7 per cent for all Asian females, and 23.3 per cent for all males and 17.6 per cent of all
females in the total population. The per capita income of Asian Indians in 1989 was $17,777
p.a., as against the national per capita income of $14,143 p.a. and the per capita income for
whites of $15,687 p.a. Asian Indians were below only the Japanese (American) per capita
income of $19,373 p.a. The poverty rate for Asian Indians in 1989 was 9.7 per cent, below
the 13 per cent for the entire nation and the 14 per cent for all Asians (Hmong, Cambodian
and Laotian accounting for a disproportionate percentage of the Asian poor). See We the
American . . . Asians. U.S. Department of Commerce: Economics and Statistics Adminis-
tration, Bureau of the Census, September 1993.
3. In fact, lower castes, who composed the majority, were denied equal privileges, and
those who championed Hindu identity for political purposes were predominantly upper
caste.
4. I have argued this in ‘Communalism and the Consuming Subject’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 2 February 1996, and at greater length in Politics After Television, forth-
coming.
5. See my ‘An unholy nexus: expatriate anxiety and Hindu extremism’, Frontline
(Madras), 10 September 1993.
6. In March 1998 the BJP came to power at the head of a 13-party coalition, but the
government was brought down by the withdrawal of one of its coalition members and a
vote of no-condence. Subsequently, in October 1999, the BJP returned to power at the
head of a newly formed 22-party coalition, the National Democratic Alliance. The number
of seats won by the BJP remained constant, at 182, in a house of 537 seats, but its vote share
increased from 20 to 25 per cent of the popular vote. Over time, the electoral base of the
BJP shows a steady upward graph, from 2 seats in 1984 to 88 seats in 1988, and 120 seats
in 1991. See www.electionstimesondia.com. With its failure to obtain support from
Muslims and lower castes, however, its reliance on coalitions will not be short-lived.
7. See Bruce D. Graham, Hindu Nationalists and Indian Politics: The Bharatiya Jana
Sangh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
8. This is indexed by the recent attacks by the Hindu Right on Christians, and dissen-
sion within the BJP on the appropriateness of such acts. The labelling by BJP Parliamentary
Affairs Minister Madanlal Khurana of the recent immolation of an Australian missionary
and his two sons in Orissa as symptomatic of the ‘pseudo-Hindutva’ growing within the
party, and Khurana’s subsequent resignation testify, I suggest, to increasing tensions within
the Hindu Right.
9. See my ‘Hindu immigrants in the US: imagining different communities?’ forth-
coming in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, (Oakland, CA), pp. 51 –65.
10. This can manifest itself in terms of caste contradictions within Hindutva as well as
on issues of more national scope. At the state government level, the BJP is often reduced
to purely caste-based politics, with backward caste and forward caste groups pitted against
each other, for example, in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Bihar. On national issues, the hard
line taken by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad [World Hindu Organization, or VHP], the cultural
arm of Hindutva, on matters of nuclear weapons and enmity with Pakistan, is noteworthy.
On a VHP leader’s advice to Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee to drop nuclear bombs on
Pakistan rather than make conciliatory gestures towards it, see, for example, Virender
Kumar, ‘Skip the bus, take the tank: VHP to Vajpayee,’ The Indian Express, 7 February
1999.
11. In an inuential volume, Robert N. Bellah et al., 1985, in Habits of the Heart:
Individualism and Commitment in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1985, argue persuasively that religion has in fact provided the medium of political discourse,
and that it has been crucial in creating a sense of common interests and shared historical
destiny.
12. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the
1960s to the 1980s, New York: Routledge, 1986.
13. Although it was formally registered only in 1974, the VHP of America began
conducting meetings by 1970. Mahesh Mehta, interview, 12 January 1999.
14. Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Brochure, n.d.
15. The phenomenon of Hindu youth camps, which have become one of the most
important mechanisms of acculturating the second generation, extends beyond the Hindu
Right as such, with many temples and other religious societies conducting their own, such
as Pittsburgh’s Sree Venkateswara Temple, and the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylors-
burg, Pennsylvania. At the same time, the efforts of the Hindu Right to inuence and incor-
porate independent Hindu organizations have been substantial, and few choose to distance
themselves explicitly from a conservative political interpretation of Hinduism. Thus, the
VHP’s Dharma Sansad in 1998 was held in the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam at Saylorsburg.
For a useful discussion of the acculturation process in Hindu youth camps, see Emily
Tucker, ‘Identity, Religion and Dialogue: The Rearticulation of Hinduism in America’, BA
thesis, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, 1993.
16. The mosque was destroyed by Hindu militants in December 1992, following a
tumultuous mobilization that was decisive in increasing its vote base, and leading to
communal riots that left thousands dead. Hindu nationalism’s external funding has long
been a matter for speculation. According to news reports, in 1989, the VHP asked the
Reserve Bank of India [RBI] permission to bring in hundreds of millions of rupees donated
by its supporters worldwide for the Ram temple campaign. The RBI had objected that the
VHP was a political organization, and had denied permission. Subsequently, according to
Income Tax Commissioner Viswa Bandhu Gupta, large amounts had been brought into
India in cash form with the help of illicit currency traders, or what in India are called hawala
transactions. See Om Prakash Tiwari, ‘Where is the missing le of the VHP?’ Rashtriya
Sahara, New Delhi, 6 February 1999. Tr. V. B. Rawat. Posted on South Asia Citizens Web,
<aiindex.mnet.fr>.
17. See my Politics After Television, forthcoming. Indicating that the assumption of
syncretism was a pretence, Suseelan went on to point out that in fact Hinduism was more
tolerant than Christianity, because Christians were socially stratied in terms of the church
they attended, whereas Hindus were not. Telephone interview, 7 January 1999. Such a
claim, of course, overlooked the prolonged struggles for entry into temples that untouch-
ables had waged over the twentieth century, and assumed moreover that admittance was
proof against discrimination.
18. Ela Dutt, ‘VHP seeks code of conduct for Hindus in West’, India Abroad, 28 August
1998.
19. Ashok Singhal was the leader of the Ram Janmabhumi movement. An RSS-
sponsored hagiography of Singhal dwells on his orthodox, ritualistic upbringing, and his
devotion to Vedic sanskar, Ramkumar Bhramar, Ayodhya ka Pathik [Ayodhya’s Traveller],
Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 1993, p. 55 –56.
20. Kanchan Banerjee (ed.) Vision of a Hindu Students Movement, Pamphlet (Boston:
Hindu Students Council, 1990).
21. Hindu Students Council brochure. n.d.
22. Sitansu Sekhar Mittra, ‘Caste System in Hindu Dharma’, Samskar, quarterly publi-
cation of the Hindu Students Council, October 1995, p. 6.
23. Swami Ranganathananda, ‘Shubhashito (Noble Thought): Hindu Women,’
Samskar, quarterly publication of the Hindu Students Council, October 1995, p. 6.
24. Mihir Meghani, ‘Hindu student activities in the USA’, Sangh Shakti Vijetreeyam.
This Organised Strength is Destined to be Victorious, Souvenir – Vishwa Sangh Shibir,
Vadodara, India. Amdavad: Amar Rashtriya Sahyog Pratishthan, 1995, pp. 116–18.
25. Personal interview, Yatindra Bhatnagar, Editor, India Post, Fremont, CA, 12 May
1997.
26. Directory of Temples and Associations of Southern California and Everything You
Wanted to Know About Hinduism, Federation of Hindu Associations Inc., 1995, p. 166.
27. Personal interview, Prithviraj Singh, President, Federation of Hindu Associations,
Inc., Diamond Bar, CA, 20 May 1997.
28. Telephone interview with Prithviraj Singh, 2 Dececember 1998.
29. The word rashtra refers to nation, and rashtriya is the adjectival form of rashtra.
30. The camp was in Loma Mar, California, and was held in May 1997. The HSS
was founded in the early sixties when a few activists from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh settled in the UK; it was formally launched on Guru Poornima Day, 2 July 1966. See
Sangh Sandesh: Newsmagazine of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (U.K.), vol. VI no. 2,
March –April 1995, p. 25.
31. The number of H-1B visa holders, that is, workers with specialty occupations, most
of whom are software engineers, admitted in 1996 totalled 20,239, out of a total of 36,999
non-immigrants admitted that year; this amounted to nearly 80 per cent of non-immigrants
admitted. Tables 3 and 40, 1996 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, p. 32 and p. 114, United States Department of Justice. The H-1B visa limit was
increased from 65,000 to 115,000 from 1 October 1998 onwards.
32. Vijay Gupta, Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh, telephone interview, 17 January 1999. A
number of other VHP and HSS members reiterated what Gupta said.
33. It is the Indians who were born in the US or who came as children that form the
bulk of the Hindu Students Council, broadly, the second generation, as I explain below.
Coming after the rst generation, we should note, were the family connections brought into
the US by these immigrants, spouses and siblings who then brought their own spouses and
siblings. This second phase of immigrants typically arrived at a later stage of their lives, and
were consequently unable to reproduce the success of their sponsoring relatives.
34. This is an estimate, based on conversations with several software engineers working
in the US. I thank in particular, Sambasivan Amarnath, P. S. Srikkanth, and Hari Reddy.
35. For a useful account of an Indian company providing large numbers of software
engineers to US companies, see the case-study by Sanjeev Dheer, Brian Viard and John
Roberts (1995), ‘Tata Consultancy Services: Globalization of Software Services’, SM-18,
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University 1995. India’s software exports have
grown at a rate of 53 per cent p.a. since 1985. Ibid., p. 12.
36. Telephone interview, Sambasivan Amarnath, software engineer, Princeton, NJ, 5
February 1999.
37. See http://hindunet.org/hvk
38. See wysiwyg://178http: //freeman.io.com.
39. The demolition of Babur’s mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, and the riots
following it, was an earlier instance. In the latter case, however, the Hindu Right equivo-
cated in terms of accepting responsibility for the demolition, whereas with the nuclear tests
there was no ambiguity whatsoever.
40. Reiterating almost verbatim the BJP’s party platform, the National Agenda framed
by the BJP and its coalition partners upon entering ofce stated, in regard to its nuclear
policy: ‘To ensure the security, territorial integrity and unity of India we will take all
necessary steps and exercise all available options. Toward that end we will re-evaluate the
nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons.’ Soon afterwards, Prime
Minister A. B. Vajpayee sought to clarify the government’s position by inserting the words
‘if need be’ to the exercise of the nuclear option. But barely a month later, the tests were
conducted, which suggests that preparations began immediately. R. L. Hardgrave,
‘Fractured Verdict: India’s New BJP Government’. H-Asia posting, 2 April 1998.
41. Cited in N. Ram, ‘From Nuclear Adventurism to Appeasement’, Frontline, 19 June
1998.
42. Upendra Sabat, ‘Singh for NRIs’ Greater role For Resurgent India’, News India
Times, 19 June 1998.
43. C. S. Puri, ‘Our nuclear tests for self-defense only: Vajpayee’, India Post, 2 October
1998.
44. ‘OFBJP feels offended by Time’, News India Times, 12 June 1998.
45. ‘Manku’, cited in Taani Pande, India Abroad, 29 May 1998.
46. Letter from Dilip Mukkhtyar, News India Times, 5 June 1998, News India Times
itself made no secret of its editorial inclinations, and published half page and full page ads
congratulating the Indian government and its scientists, on 22 May 1998 and 29 May 1998
respectively.
47. To the concern about the imposition of sanctions, however, one newspaper reader,
‘Sanctionbuster’ replied: ‘We Indians are the highest-earning group in the U.S. and we’re
a million strong. Just a couple of bucks from each of us and we can trump the sanctions.’
Cited in Taani Pande, India Abroad, 29 May 1998. The sanctions were actually estimated,
at rst, as costing the Indian economy about $20 billion; later this was scaled down to about
$2 billion. That the costs on the Indian economy were in fact serious was later conrmed
by a World Bank Annual Report, due among other things, to the denial of loan approvals
by the World Bank. Cited in Editorial, ‘Impact of Sanctions’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 25 September 1999, p. 2765.
48. Shibi Alex Chandy, ‘The making of the post-Pokhran bond’, India Abroad, 7 August
1998; Somini Sengupta, ‘India taps into its diaspora; expatriates buy bonds for love of
country, and 7.75% interest,’ New York Times, 17 August 1998.
49. A. N. Shanbhag, ‘Tax-exempt bonds offer 7.9% return’, India Abroad, 7 August
1998.
50. Vijay Gupta, telephone interview, 17 January 1999.
51. See Jayati Ghosh, ‘The economic effects of the BJP’, Frontline, 21 May 1999,
pp. 100 –102.
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ARVIND RAJAGOPAL is Associate Professor of Culture and Com-
munication, New York University.
ADDRESS: Department of Culture and Communication, New York
University, 239 Greene Street, Suite 737, New York, NY 10003, USA.

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Hindu nationalism in the US:

changing con® gurations of political

Keywords: Religion; nationalism; Hindutva; globalization.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the growing internationalization of

Minority identity in the US

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America

The Hindu Students Council

The practice of untouchability contradicts the very basic tenets of

Racism, too, contradicts the universalistic principles of Christianity,

The Federation of Hindu Associations

‘Real’ Hindutva: a Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh camp

The Hindu bomb meets the Muslim bomb

Isn’t it stupid to even raise the questions of basic amenities before

The strange logic at work in the nuclear assertion is indicated here,

The economics of identity

As the Indian population in the US grows larger and older, there is

Websites and periodicals

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Hindu nationalism in the US:

changing con® gurations of political

Keywords: Religion; nationalism; Hindutva; globalization.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the growing internationalization of

Minority identity in the US

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America

The Hindu Students Council

The practice of untouchability contradicts the very basic tenets of

Racism, too, contradicts the universalistic principles of Christianity,

The Federation of Hindu Associations

‘Real’ Hindutva: a Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh camp

The Hindu bomb meets the Muslim bomb

Isn’t it stupid to even raise the questions of basic amenities before

The strange logic at work in the nuclear assertion is indicated here,

The economics of identity

As the Indian population in the US grows larger and older, there is

Websites and periodicals

Вам также может понравиться

ERS'Hindutva USA

ERS'Hindutva USA