Are India’s nationalist politicians trying to export the ethnic and religious conflicts they stir up at home? Clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the UK city of Leicester last September suggest they are. According to the BBC, more than half the 200,000 tweets about the violence came from users in India (with multiple accounts) who support Hindutva, which seeks to establish Hindu hegemony (1).
The term Hindutva was popularised by the politician Veer (Vinayak Damodar) Savarkar (1883-1966) in his book Essentials of Hindutva (1923), which became one of the founding texts of the nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps). Founded in 1925 on the lines of Mussolini’s Italian Fasces of Combat, the RSS is considered the forerunner of modern Hindu nationalism. It has a host of affiliated organisations in India and abroad, including trade and students’ unions, a women’s branch and a publishing house.
The RSS was twice banned in India: in 1948, after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, father of the struggle against British rule, by a long-term RSS supporter; and again during the 1975-77 state of emergency under Indira Gandhi. The RSS leadership then decided to strengthen contacts with the diaspora by establishing foreign affiliates. In 1976 RSS supporters in the UK founded Friends of India Society International (FISI), to promote Hindutva ideology. FISI remains active in the UK and continental Europe, notably in Paris.
In India, the RSS has its own political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party). Prime minister Narendra Modi, a longstanding RSS member, became a BJP organiser and eventually led the party to election victory in 2014 and again in 2019.
Who is a Hindu?
Hindutva, primarily an ethnonationalist movement, is concerned more with the make-up of the population and territory than with religion or philosophy. Its followers regard India as a Hindu country and see all Hindus as Indian, even if they live elsewhere. Non-Hindus are at best guests, at worst invaders, and must be identified, watched, deprived of certain rights, and in some cases expelled or even eliminated. The main victims of this ideology are Muslims (13% of the population) and Christians (2.3%), Dalits, tribal peoples – and even Hindu women who fail to conform to patriarchal norms.
Nationalists oppose mixed Hindu-Muslim marriages, calling them a ‘love jihad’ that aims to convert Hindu women so that their offspring will be raised as Muslims. This paranoid fantasy has encouraged violence and widespread denigration of Muslims.
The Indian diaspora (30 million across 110 countries) provide significant political and especially financial support to the Sangh Parivar, a network of pro-Hindutva organisations linked to the RSS. Early on, the RSS realised that in order to grow it needed to attract Indian expatriates. These included many IT students and engineers (2), and in 1996 the RSS launched the Global Hindu Electronic Network (GHEN), enabling members to take part in virtual meetings.
The BJP’s digital army
Indian journalist Swati Chaturvedi has investigated the BJP’s ‘digital army’ and uncovered the existence of brigades of trolls, made up of BJP supporters in India and abroad, and bots operating under the command of party officials (3). A 2018 report for the French foreign ministry highlights the presence of an IT cell within the BJP, and describes how individuals critical of the government are harassed online (4). This propaganda and intimidation targets minorities, women (especially lesbians and those from a lower caste or religious minority) and journalists. On Twitter, the trolls use keywords such as ‘sickular’ (a portmanteau of sick/secular, to suggest that secularism is a disease) and ‘presstitute’ (press/prostitute).
But ideology alone doesn’t explain why political groups (and politicised individuals) in India interfere in other countries’ affairs. Or why people of Indian descent living in other countries would import Indian thinking and methods. The real reason is that the diaspora are a vital source of funding and influence for the Sangh Parivar, which in return supports Indians who have migrated to other countries.
After an earthquake devastated the city of Bhuj, in the state of Gujarat, in 2001, and severe anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, donations from the diaspora (in particular in the US and UK) flooded in.
But these were mainly used to build pro-Hindutva schools, intended to ‘re-Hinduise’ tribal peoples, and to fund a campaign for the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya, where, in 1992, Hindu nationalists had destroyed the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque. In 2002 and 2004, reports by the NGOs Sabrang Communications and Publishing and Awaaz South Asia Watch (5), and a documentary by UK broadcaster Channel 4, exposed the Sangh Parivar’s illegal system of funding through the diaspora, and the structural, hierarchical and personal links between the diaspora in English-speaking countries and Hindu nationalist organisations at home.
Yet the Indian Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), founded in 1989 and based in Maryland, US, which raises funds for the Sangh Parivar, is registered as a non-political, non-sectarian and nonprofit charity. The IDRF is made up of 75 organisations, of which 60 are affiliated to the Sangh Parivar. Between 1995 and 2002, the IDRF officially handed out more than $5m to 184 organisations, but 80% of the donations not earmarked for a specific cause by the donor (or 75% of total funds collected) went to Sangh Parivar-affiliated organisations. Sabrang reports that ‘since its inception in 1989, the IDRF has systematically grown and developed into a core participant in the foreign fund drives organised by the RSS’ (6).
Ideology alone doesn’t explain why political groups in India interfere in other countries’ affairs. The real reason is that the diaspora provide funding and influence
It’s the same for Sewa UK, based in Birmingham, UK. According to Awaaz South Asia Watch, it raised at least £2.3m after the Bhuj earthquake, of which £1.9m went to Sewa Bharti Gujarat, which used a third of that to build pro-Hindutva schools, notably in tribal areas, although the funds had been raised to rebuild villages destroyed in the quake. Awaaz claims funds collected by its parent organisation Sewa International went to an RSS-allied organisation implicated in ‘the violent “cleansing” of all Muslims from [a Gujarati] village and the illegal occupation of premises and land previously under the charge of [Muslims].’
A number of academics have studied these networks, including Vijay Prashad, who writes of ‘Yankee Hindutva’, Thomas Blom Hansen, who has examined the role of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, the RSS’s religious branch) in South Africa, and Aminah Mohammad-Arif, who has documented the VHP’s rise in the US. Nevertheless, the structure of this global Hindu network remains opaque.
Wealthy donors for Hindutva
It includes wealthy donors. In the US, in recent years, Subhash and Sarojini Gupta (publishers), and Ramesh Bhutada (a businessman and president of the Sangh Parivar-affiliated social and cultural organisation Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh) and his son Rishi, have all given millions of dollars to pro-Hindutva organisations through their foundations (7). This has enhanced their standing in their local Hindu communities, made them a political force (supporting the Republican Party), and given them contacts in India – with material and symbolic benefits. A 2022 report from South Asian Citizens Web reveals that 24 US organisations – charities, thinktanks, political focus groups and higher education organisations with collective assets worth nearly $1bn – have links to Sangh Parivar in India and promote Hindutva ideology in the US, notably through the education authorities (8).
The same is true in the UK, which is home to influential entrepreneurs and big donors such as businessman Manoj Ladwa, and brothers SP (Srichand) and Gopichand Hinduja, who head the Hinduja Group; these are wealthy, educated, high-caste Hindus who have connections with local authorities and diaspora associations’ leaders. A drive to recruit the future elite can even be seen among pro-Hindutva student organisations.
In most Western countries it’s illegal to contribute financially or otherwise to political activities in other countries, especially if they lead to human rights abuses, as is the case for the RSS, the BJP and their Indian affiliates. So outside India, the Sangh Parivar takes care to appear innocuous. Amid calls (especially in the US) for the organisation to be placed on a watch list, or even designated as a terrorist group, Hindutva supporters try to appear harmless by claiming their activities are consistent with multiculturalism. This helps attract Hindus interested in cultural or educational activities, and establishes their organisations as a legitimate part of the political and social landscape. It also helps them avoid the attention of tax or political authorities.
In August 2022 RSS head Mohan Bhagwat concluded an international members’ conference in Bhopal with an appeal to the diaspora to work hard to make India prosperous and become a vishwa guru (world leader). For the champions of Hindu nationalism, that means fund-raising, political lobbying and demonising Islam.
