Dismantling Global Hindutva is brazenly hypocritical. That’s the hubris that comes with being elitist gatekeepers. They keep doubling down on how they are the disenfranchised ones and how they have all this institutional support. It doesn’t add up. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

I took the signatures on their public letter as data and took a subset of that data – only scholars who have clearly identified with an established Academic institution. Here is what I found. 727 scholars are within 268 institutions.

Here’s a snapshot of the top 25 most represented (by signatures) institutions. 316/727 (~43%) of the signatures come from the top 25/268 (~9%) of the institutions.

I’m having a hard time understanding how all of these people can claim to be speaking from and for a position of vulnerability when they are quite literally the gatekeepers of some of the most elitist, moneyed, powerful academic institutions in the world.

How anyone within these top 25 (or top 40 or 50) can claim that their academic freedom is threatened in any way when they have the support of so many of their colleagues while they are also actively and successfully demonizing the voices and suppressing the agency of any Hindu who disagrees with them and actively erasing documented Hindu genocide and persecution.

How are they successfully engaging in such overt categorical discrimination while benefiting professionally and with so much institution support without being the ones in power?

I haven’t even yet parses this list out by ethnicity and region of origin. How many of the signatories are white and Western? How many are Indian elite? When have any of these people ever stood up for anything that doesn’t benefit them at the expense of those with less power?

Anytime any movement (if we want to call DGH that) that claims to be anti-oppressive has this much institutional consensus, it is critical to examine why this is the case. A responsible, ethical movement would do this themselves.

That is clearly not the case here. Their goal is to create institutional consensus in order to justify silencing dissent.

To be clear this is what they’re gathering consensus around. It is premised on misleading conflations, lies, and misrepresentations. If anyone disagrees with this, though, they are “Hindutva” (their definition).

(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread of Dr Indu Viswanathan @indumathi37 )

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