Indian and American media and social media platforms are abuzz with discussions over a bizarre incident that took place recently in the city of Bakersfield, California.
Riddhi Patel, an Economic Development Coordinator for the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, let loose a sharp salvo of murder threats at the members of the Bakersfield City Council in a public meeting for their alleged lack of concern for victims of oppression in Palestine and elsewhere.
In her passionate speech, Patel calls on the Council to support a resolution drafted by a pro-Palestine organisation, and then declares that she has no faith that the Council will do so, because “you [the Council members] are all horrible human beings, and Jesus would have probably killed you himself.”
She concludes with a stern declaration: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”
Patel was arrested for threatening public officials and faces a total of 18 charges, including “threatening with intensive terrorizing,” with bail set at $ one million.
Shock to the community
While South Asian American activists protesting for Palestine have been a common sight in America for some time now, the sharpness of this particular outburst, and the official response to it, has made waves.
The tone and substance of the commentary are varied; some community leaders are compassionate and tell us that the small Bakersfield Hindu community is in shock. Her family, we are told by community members, tried in vain to correct her angry path but failed.
Other posts talk about politics. One image on social media, presumably from Patel’s Facebook wall, says “F–k Hindu Fascism”, while an old teacher of hers named Dave responds appreciatively.
The collective conclusion seems to be that the ‘Leftist’ influence of teachers, liberal arts academia, Bernie Sanders, and others, turn children of Hindu American parents against their family and religion and that this is all very worrying.
Understanding the causes
It is perhaps inevitable that when adults do something wrong, we see them as people with agency and therefore responsible for their actions. But when children do something wrong, it behoves us a little more to try and understand the chain of causes leading up to it. Of course, Patel is not a child and is facing the legal consequences of what she has done as an adult. But as someone who has taught social science people of her generation for several years and as someone who has been concerned about Hindu children’s education and Hindu parents’ own understanding, I would like to offer the following points.
First, I would like us to recognise that certain behaviours and beliefs might be connected to cultural, political and psychological pressures. Now, the pressure to protest and condemn oppression, inequality and racism, has been growing at every level of American society. Particularly since 2016, when Trump’s win upset many in the education community who were expecting a historic win for Hillary Clinton.
School as theatre of protest
In its most benign form, the drive to protest has come from the institution itself. Many American schools led students out of classes and onto the streets to protest against Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. This marked a new trend. While schools have long celebrated non-violent leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr and their protests against colonialism and racism, this was possibly the first time protests were organised in schools over a disappointing election result. Concerns about race, gender, and climate change, and learning to organise and protest against them, are also prevalent a lot more in children’s media and popular culture now. Such a trend is also visible in Indian schools. The recent civics textbooks in India, for example, go far beyond merely listing facts about the Constitution (as they used to when my generation was in school many years ago) and offer powerful pedagogy that trains students to agitate effectively for social change. This should be clear to Hindu parents who seem to assume that their children suddenly become “andolanjeevis” because of some surreptitious “leftist” influence later in life!
But the bigger source of pressure on those who came of age in this period is friends, both in class and online. By always being on social media, judging and being judged became inescapable. You could get into trouble not only for what you posted but also for what you did not. If all your friends changed their display picture to a black screen to condemn racism and you did not, you could be cancelled or shamed.
And this played out even more in the complex world of identity politics. American high school culture has always been intensely divisive, tribalistic and hierarchical. Sociologists have studied high school peer group dynamics and concluded that the phrase “caste system” best describes it.
I once had a college student of Indian origin ask me if it was okay to call ourselves “Indian” because a dorm mate had said to them that if we (South Asians) called ourselves Indian it would be offensive to American Indians/Native Americans.
Smartphones and the ‘Anxious Generation’
An even more intrusive, powerful and complex form of influence whose effects are just becoming known is the smartphone. When I think of Riddhi Patel’s outburst or the harsher behaviour of many young protestors, what comes to mind is not the details of the controversies over Zionism or Hindu Fascism but what NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has written about in his new book, The Anxious Generation—the very intense time in recent social history where American (and other Western) teenagers (the Gen Z, born between 1995-2010) got hit by a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and even self-harm—due to the coming of the smartphone.
Many activists in America today are probably part of the cohort that experienced dramatic rises in mental health worries during their early teen years. Haidt avoids connecting the political dots in his book, but his work is essential reading for any Hindu parent in America today. Your children were part of the first cohort to slip from a play-based childhood to a screen-based one. Maybe in their twenties, they are finding the courage to express themselves against ‘oppressive systems’. And they have been persuaded into declaring Modi, Hindutva, and even Hinduism, as one of those oppressive systems.
Hinduphobia and gaslighting
The last point leads me to another possible cause that is especially relevant to children of people who have been classified as oppressors or privileged groups. “Whites” have been considered privileged for a long time. Jews and Hindus, though have found themselves in a more complex re-arrangement in recent years. I will focus on the Hindu case. While antisemitism had wide recognition, Hinduphobia was never formally recognised in American academia or law.
The recent popularisation of the term among Hindus has been met by cynical dismissal or gaslighting by anti-racist, anti-oppressive activists and academicians. Professors say and write things that would be deemed hateful and racist in other contexts but get away with it because of dexterous verbal footwork among Hinduphobes. Meanwhile, attacks on Hindu temples have been on the rise in America. In the Bay Area alone, at least six temples were vandalised recently.
All of these attacks on Hinduism are being witnessed by children in America. They are being told through the formidable combination of academic consensus, peer pressure, and social media that none of this is Hinduphobia. They have to now stand up to a pervasive and powerful lie that goes against what they are seeing and feeling. They have one of two paths ahead. They either fight, or they accept that there is no Hinduphobia and that Hindu identity is innately bad and oppressive.
A few decades ago, only Hindus who walked into “far Left” fields like the arts or social sciences had to deal with it. Now, everyone is dealing with it. Eventually, it might reach a point of no return as it nearly has in the American Jewish community. As Bari Weiss writes in her book How to Fight Antisemitism, a lot of kids don’t recognise antisemitism as such because they have no comprehension that they are being insulted. They have no touchstone of their past or culture that makes them feel that something about them is being violated.
Hindu parents
There are probably two kinds of pressures children get from Hindu parents; the first is a generic one about studies, admissions, jobs, money and careers.
The second pressure has to do with a mix of cultural issues; Hinduism, India, and often, support for Narendra Modi. Alternately, many liberal millennial (or Gen X) Indian American parents have no stake in their children’s cultural or spiritual ‘choices’. At best, they might say, we want our children to grow up to be good. Or, they might actively make a statement about being liberal or atheist by dissing what their children’s more Hindu-focused peers are doing.
I once heard a Hindu American parent say disdainfully in front of their children that the Chinmaya Mission’s Bala Vihar class was nothing more than a “Hindu Madrasa”.
All of these positions, unfortunately, work in a less than commendable way when it comes to Hindu children already facing pressures from school, peers, social media and Hinduphobia to renounce any attachment to Hindu culture. But then, sooner or later, Hindu children find out that saying “I am an atheist” or “I am South Asian and not Hindu” won’t save them from the inquisition that Western civilisation is trapped in.
Now, as for parents who are aware their children are facing Hinduphobia, they have their own limitations. Even as schools, colleges, and workplaces are inundating children with the message that “Hindu” is a “bad” identity, Hindu parents somehow see “more Hinduism” as the answer not “anti-Hinduphobia”.
So they go and get a few more classes, or books. But even if some of these classes are great, and even if some children end up becoming good scholars of Sanskrit and performers of classical arts, they still won’t have a handle on the phenomenon that is eating away at them.
The issue is not just Hinduphobia, but the broader Western world in which they are living. There is no turn to “Westology”, though the foundations of such a body of work are happening. The scattered nature of this effort shows in the small world of Hindu community activists too. For years, they shrunk from the word “Hinduphobia”, thinking it would hurt the ‘good image’ they had with White employers. Then, when they finally came around to it, they started to squabble about whether to call it Hinduphobia, Hindumisia or Hindudvesha. They have no concern whether people outside the Indian bubble can understand something or not.
An existential turning-point
The bigger issue is that there is an existential turning point coming rapidly at the prosperous but clueless Hindu community in America. If we don’t have our own story about it, our understanding to convey to our children and others, we will be stuck and silenced by the stories of others. It could be the Left one day, and the Right another. Hindus should be teaching their children to get the insight, clarity, and courage, to win over this divide. Being good employees alone will no longer protect them, let alone win them respect.
The more specific problem in Hindu parenting in Hinduphobic times though pertains to our inability to learn. I see the absence of a fighting presence in the West for Hindus as a result, in part, of the way we learn. The Indian model of learning is more imitative, practical, and group-derived, whereas the Western model of learning is abstract, theoretical, and individualistic. Hindus run on anecdotes about how to get by in America, not on theories about why it is the way it is, and why we are the way we are when we are around them. We merely imitate earlier immigrants or peers. (For more on this idea of two styles of learning, please see As Others See Us by SN Balagangadhara).
Learning to learn again
We have to leave behind stories for the next generation on how they got here, and where they are likely to go when they are adults and have children of their own. It is deeply saddening to see children growing up to become subservient to anything other than their own ancestral legacies and traditions.
Hindu parents in America must get their story, especially about the last 30 years, together. Pretending everything was fine in America till some fringe Leftists got Hindumisia and spoiled a few children is very shallow and will help no one.
Gen Z, and the coming Gen Alpha, are probably the first two generations in American history where a majority are going to be raised by parents who themselves have no religion. Perhaps politics has become the new religion. And the new identity too.
The saying, “If you are not liberal when you are young you don’t have a heart and if you are not conservative when you are older you don’t have a brain”, is becoming meaningless now. Lifelong liberals and progressives believing in what was said to the Bakersfield City Council will be the norm.
–Vamsee Juluri
(The article was published on Theprint.com on April 15, 2024 and has been reproduced here)
