West needs to wake up to rising religiophobia

Another Bay Area temple in California has been defaced — this time Vijay’s Sherawali Temple in Hayward. In a similar incident in December 2023, the walls of a Hindu temple in California’s Newark city were defaced with anti-India and pro-Khalistan graffiti with the name of Bhindranwale scrawled across it in large letters. The US authorities treated this as a hate crime. The Hindu American Foundation also dealt with this as an anti-Hindu hate crime “specifically meant to traumatise temple goers and create a fear of violence”. The Government of India treated this, and quite rightly, as an act by extremist and separatist forces against India. Interestingly, it did not treat this incident as a hate crime against Hindus, even though it was scrawled on a temple wall.

It was India that first brought up religiophobia against non-Abrahamic religions at the UN Security Council (UNSC) in October 2021, when the minister of state for external affairs, V Muraleedharan, said: “…we are witnessing how member-States are facing newer forms of religious phobias. While we have condemned anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Christianophobia, we fail to recognise that there are more virulent forms of religious phobias emerging and taking root, including anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh phobias.” He warned presciently that the world ignores this new form of religiophobia only at its own peril. And sure enough, in February 2023, after India left the Security Council, for the first time, phobias against Abrahamic religions were expressly mentioned in a UNSC presidential statement. There was no mention of non-Abrahamic religions. The division of the UN, and the world outside, on religious lines is well on its way.

Attacks against non-Abrahamic religions, including attacks against temples and gurudwaras and forcible conversion of Hindu minorities, are increasingly playing out, especially in our neighbourhood. However, worryingly, these have exponentially increased in the West, especially in the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere supported by those whipping up separatist agendas against India. The Prime Minister and the external affairs minister have taken these up with their counterparts. While the US is witnessing the rise of anti-Semitic and Islamaphobic forces in American college campuses (thanks also to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict), they ignore the anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh propaganda on campuses, which, ironically, targets Indian-American youngsters. Indian students are labelled as racists and casteists and subjected to undue pressure, while American campuses allow blatantly anti-Hindu activities.

We recently witnessed outrage by US senators and American public figures to the unwillingness of the presidents of three premier universities to condemn anti-Semitism. The US administration also expressed serious concern. But the same US administration, which was quick to condemn anti-Semitism, has maintained a stoic silence on the open threat in the media issued from American soil by American-Canadian Khalistani extremist Gurupatwant Singh Pannun against Hindus, temples, Air India flights, Indian Parliament and just about anything in India he can think of. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom is silent on anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh hate crimes. The fight against religiophobia cannot be selective.

Canada has remained a silent spectator in the face of attacks on temples and on Indian diplomatic premises on its soil, mostly by Khalistani radicals and terrorists, citing freedom of expression. But when a 55-foot idol of Hanuman was put up in Canada’s Brampton, there were vehement protests that Hinduism was being imposed on Christian-majority Canada. However, the mix in Canada is more potent since three forces have come together — terrorism, Hinduphobia and separatism. Canada has condoned Hinduphobia (which is affecting its own Hindu minority citizens) and ignored the Khalistanis’ separatist agenda in India.

In Tamil, we have a proverb: One’s bad actions will burn oneself. True enough, Khalistani Hardeep Singh Nijjar is killed on their soil but the Canadian authorities are quick to allege that India killed him. However, in the same breath, they say that open threats by their citizens to kill Indians on Indian soil are “not actionable”. The designation of two Canada-based members of the terror outfit Babbar Khalsa International — Lakhbir Landa and Goldy Brar, self-confessed killers of singer Sidhu Moose Wala, as “terrorists” by India is only the latest in India’s attempt to combat this menace from Canada over the years.

Fortunately, some are waking up to the danger. The US state of Georgia became the first US state to acknowledge the rise of Hinduphobia. The Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution in March 2023 condemning Hinduphobia and anti-Hindu bigotry. More and more Americans are becoming aware that the true target of such hate crimes is their citizens. But not enough is being done. It shouldn’t require an Israel-Hamas war to wake Americans up to religiophobia in their society.

As the first country to flag the issue in the UN, it becomes even more important for India to be active in calling out such attacks on non-Abrahamic religions. More importantly, religiophobia, like Islamophobia, should not be allowed to be used to condone terror. India stopped such attempts in the UN by Islamic countries led by Pakistan when the UN Global Counterterrorism strategy was being finalised.

While it is not India’s case to interfere in the exercise of freedom of religion in other countries, it cannot keep quiet when religiophobia against India is encouraged abroad. Being a pluralistic country should not stop us from being vocal about hate crimes against non-Abrahamic religions. Nor should India feel defensive about countering such hate. On the contrary, the more silent India is, the more encouragement these forces receive to question our multi-religious and multi-ethnic fabric.

TS Tirumurti is a former Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations. The views expressed are personal