Hindutva with Pranay Somayajula

Hindutva with Pranay Somayajula

Yulia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I am Yulia Gilich, a member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today we are talking to Pranay Somayajula about the term hindutva as a keyword in critical zionism studies. 

Hindutva is a strain of ethnic supremacy and Indian nationalism that Pranay will help us unpack in the episode. It is specifically anti-Muslim, and – like Zionism – it has been fueled by British colonialism. In the present, Hindutva is more and more entwined with Zionist politics. To give a quick glimpse into these connections, I’ll read a quote from an article by Vijay Prashad, “How the Hindus became Jews,” which is linked in the episode notes. He writes, “A political ideology within India that draws from European racist ideas of nationhood, Hindutva has taken the view, since its emergence in the 1920s, that Muslims do for it what Jews do for Nazism.” In our conversation, Pranay untangles hindutva’s parallels and connections to Nazism and to Zionism.   

In fact, this episode covers a lot of ground – we discuss the close military, political, and diplomatic relationship between India and Israel, the ideological underpinnings of the two countries’ nationalist regimes, the growing alignment of Hindu American organizations with the Israel lobby groups, and the solidarity and collaborations between anti-Hindutva and anti-Zionist organizers.

A bit more about our guest. Pranay Somayajula is an Indian-American writer and organizer, based in Washington, DC, who currently serves as Organizing and Advocacy Director for Hindus for Human Rights. In 2021, Pranay wrote his senior thesis at George washington university on the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and the ‘Jewish State.’ It’s a comparative analysis of the ideological foundations of hindutva and revisionist zionism that we will discuss in the episode and link in the episode notes as one of the resources for our listeners. We are also including Pranay’s more recent essay called “we are all palestinians: notes on solidarity and collective resistance,” we will also link Hindus for human rights’ zine on hindutva and zionism, and Aparna Gopalan’s investigative reporting article, “THE HINDU NATIONALISTS USING THE PRO-ISRAEL PLAYBOOK” published last year in the Jewish Currents.

Let’s get to it. Pranay, welcome, thank you for being here. Thank

Pranay: Thank you so much for having me.

Yulia: I think the first thing we have to establish is a definition. So can you help us define Hindutva?

Pranay: The term Hindutva is often used interchangeably with Hindu nationalism or Hindu supremacy. These all refer to the same idea, which is to say, an ideology of ethnic nationalism that holds that India should be constituted not as a secular, liberal, pluralistic democracy, which is what it has, at least on paper, been since its independence, three quarters of a century ago, but instead should be reconstituted as a majoritarian Hindu nation. The term you often hear used by supporters of Hindutva is the Hindu Rashtra, which just translates to Hindu nation. And in the Hindu Rashtra, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other non-Hindu minorities, as well as Dalits or Adivasis or caste oppressed communities in India as well, would be treated as second class citizens or even expelled or even exterminated genocidally. 

So it is, you know, at its core a deeply reactionary, deeply racist, deeply hateful ideology. It’s very root, its origins lie in the Hindu revivalist movements of the late 19th century that sort of starts to articulate a resurgent Hindu identity as an antidote to colonial oppression. But it was really in the 1920s and 1930s that Hindutva as an ideology, was really articulated in concrete terms by two people, in particular, V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, who are generally considered to be the ideological fathers of Hindutva. So in the early 20s, Savarkar published a pamphlet called “The Essentials of Hindutva.” And in 1939, Golwalkar published a slightly longer pamphlet called “We or Our Nationhood Defined.” And these two texts kind of are, in many ways, the original manifestos, you can call them, of Hindutva ideology, in which the contours of this idea are really laid out. 

And you really see a movement that is trying to articulate a homogenized, monolithic idea of Hindu identity, and that’s really important, because Hindu is and always has been, an extremely broad and diverse umbrella term. You really can’t define it according to one doctrine. There’s no central church. There’s not even a consensus among Hindus, among what the holy book is. People often say the Bhagavad Gita is the Hindu holy book, but there are many Hindus for whom it’s just a philosophical text, and it doesn’t have that scriptural significance that the Bible might have for Christians. But of course, that diversity of pluralism isn’t convenient to a nationalist project, which requires some sense of constructed unity.

So the project of Hindutva has been and you see this again in the writings of these early founders, a project of homogenizing and constructing a monolithic Hindu identity that is framed in civilizational and even quasi-racial terms. And the version of sort of Hindu identity that is drawn upon to articulate that is very much a brahminical, very much dominant caste tradition that completely erases and ignores and sidelines various vernacular, subaltern, non dominant traditions, particularly those practiced by Adivasi, indigenous, or tribal communities or by caste-oppressed communities. And so it’s obviously deeply problematic on the philosophical level, and then, of course, inherent violence and exclusionary nature compounds that as well. 

And I’ll conclude just by saying too that it’s a movement that was founded with explicit inspiration from Nazism in Germany and from Italian fascism, which, of course, in the 20s and 30s were both gaining steam in those countries, and the experience of those movements was a source of inspiration and guidance for the early founders of the Hindu movement. 

Yulia: I’m hearing a lot of parallels to Zionism, but also some divergences. So can you explain why even talk about Hindutva in the context of Zionism? How does it help us understand either political project better?

Pranay: Sometimes there’s a tendency, as is the case in many activist circles, to overstate the similarities, because there’s certainly not a complete one to one connection between the two. But I think the reason why it’s useful to think about these two movements, these two ideologies, in connection with one another, is because Zionism as an ideology predates Hindutva by several decades. We’re talking about when, for example, Theodore Herzl was writing in the mid 19th century, this is decades before Savarkar and Golwalkar were on the political map. But if you look at the writings again of these early Hindutva figures, you really see an affinity towards the Zionist project. Golwalkar, the phrase he used was “the reconstruction of the Hebrew nation in Palestine” as sort of evidence of his theory of a nationhood. And he saw the Zionist movement as an affirmation of that. 

Savarkar, I think, similarly praised Zionism on similar ground. Of course, both movements also praised Germany for its treatment of the Jews, so do with that what you will. If we’re taking Zionism as a very archetypal version of ethno-nationalist ideology and framed in religious terms as well, I think it provides a very useful framework for understanding, given that inspiration. And it also provides a framework to understand the much more concrete sort of political and diplomatic and military affinity between India and Israel since independence, in particular in the last few decades, as the Hindutva movement has gained power increasingly in India and has sought closer ties with the most right wing elements in Israeli society.

Yulia: Right. And I think this comparative framework also helps to deexceptionalize Palestine, not in ways that deny the exceptional brutality and violence that Palestinians experience at the hands of the Zionist project, but in ways that help us understand how power operates on the global scale. 

Pranay: Absolutely, I could not agree more, but there’s a tension because, on the one hand, Palestine is such a North Star for so many people in their politics. It is just really the distillation of so many issues that are of importance to the global left. And so in some ways, it is exceptional, in a sense. And of course, as you said, just the scale of the violence too, is quite unparalleled in many cases. But also liberals, or sort of mainstream political culture treats it as this unique situation. And I think that that exceptionalization is also what fuels this conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism. You know, if this is an exceptional thing, so if you are criticizing it, then you are inherently against Jews. But I think if you’re able to deexceptionalize it by drawing its connections to, you know, Hindutva is my area of expertise, but I’m sure there are many other cases of religious in particular ethnonationalism, that you can draw these parallels to. And the more we’re able to do that then, as activists and as advocates, it makes it easier for us to poke holes in that completely bogus narrative that, you know, there’s something unique about it that makes criticism of it equivalent to antisemitism.

Yulia: Definitely. You mentioned that since independence, but particularly in the past two decades, there has been a growing affinity between India and Israel and Hindutva and Zionism. Can you spell out for us how that affinity manifests, be it ideologically or materially.

Pranay: Where even to begin. Obviously, as individual figures, Modi and Netanyahu are often kind of talked about as sort of analogous, in many ways, part of this broader upsurge of authoritarian right-wing, nationalist strongmen around the world, you know, Trump, Bolsonaro, and others. But in particular, Modi and Netanyahu share a particular affinity, and their parties, the BJP in India and the Likud in Israel, I think, occupy a very similar position within the political life of their respective countries. Also, there is just a very well documented and growing military and diplomatic relationship between these countries. India is the largest purchaser of Israeli armed exports, and Israel is India’s fourth largest arms supplier. 

And even though, since October 7, since the beginning of the genocide, India has kind of tried to play both sides, they’ve issued tepid calls in the UN and other fora for a ceasefire. They’ve continued to purchase arms from Israel at really alarming rates, and also have supplied arms as well. There was a recent report in Al Jazeera about shrapnel from bombs that were found in Gaza that said, made in India on them. And I think a very key element of this nexus is, in particular, the one Indian billionaire oligarch named Gautam Adani, who is one of the richest men in India. He is a very, very close ally of Modi. In fact, when Modi became prime minister in 2014 he flew to Delhi to take the oath of office on Adani’s private jet. And you know, the Adani Corporation, conglomerate, empire, has its finger in many pies, one of which is defense and the military industrial complex, and has a major and significant investment in Elbit Systems, one of the largest Israeli arms manufacturers. And in fact, the only factory in the world outside of Israel that produces the Hermes 900 drone, which is one of the drones being used to bomb Gaza as we speak. The only factory in the world outside of Israel producing that drone is in India and is operated by the Adani Corporation. And so I think that there is this really material way in which the India Military Industrial Complex has been arming Israel. 

And the last thing I’ll say, I think, to this point, is particularly in the post 9/11 era, as the war on terror has become just such a major force within international relations, both countries have embraced the rhetoric of a war on terror, embraced this sort of Clash of Civilizations framework or analysis to kind of position themselves as beacons of democracy. You know, Israel called itself the only democracy in the Middle East. India called itself the largest democracy in the world. These beacons of democracy and liberal values that are besieged by, you know, these supposed hordes of jihadi extremists, and this, like, civilizational clash between Hindus and Muslims, and between Jews and Muslims, and so that also as a really key source of affinity between these two movements that manifest in the close security and defense and military cooperation between these countries. 

Yulia: This material, financial and political cooperation is, of course, key. But I want to turn to your senior thesis that offers a comparative framework for the ideological underpinnings of Hindutva and Zionism. Can you walk us through a few aspects that we see in both ideologies? 

Pranay: There are a lot of very, very key parallel ideological themes between Hindutva and Revisionist Zionist ideology. There is very much this politics of national regeneration or renewal. There’s a narrative, and this is true of all manner of ultra-nationalist or even fascist movements, but this narrative of needing to restore some sort of lost civilizational glory. If you read the writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar, they are extolling the virtues of this ancient Hindu civilization that they claim existed, and they claim the beginning of the end of this was the first invasions of the Indian subcontinent by Muslim empires and the Mughals and other dynasties, and that they claim that these invasions marked at the beginning of the end of Hindu civilizational glory, a weakened Hindu nation, enough that then eventually the British could come and colonize as well. And so that in order to achieve true independence, true empowerment, you had to sort of revive Hindu culture by building up a new sense of self worth, a new militarized identity, and emphasis on the sort of spiritual and physical development of Hindus into the fighting force those who are willing to take up arms or come to blows to defend their civilization. Again, this is, you know, their framework, not mine. 

And I think very similarly, if you look at the writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father revisionist Zionism, you see very similar narratives around the great derision with which he talks, for example, about Jews in the diaspora as sort of being feeble, weak, susceptible to pogroms and other forms of persecution. He was writing before the Holocaust itself. But the antisemitic persecution that Jews faced in Eastern Europe, in many ways, seemed to almost be blamed on the perceived weakness of the Jewish Diaspora itself. And his argument was that you needed to recreate a militarized, robust, strong Jewish identity that could establish a forceful Jewish state in the Holy Land and that could defend it against its enemies, both internal and external. And so that is a theme that I think runs very closely through both. 

Another key theme that actually doesn’t get talked about, but I think is very, very interesting and very terrifying as well, is this aspect of territorial maximalism that is present in both movements. And what I mean by that is in Revisionist Zionist ideology, a very key theme is the idea of Eretz Israel Hashlema, the Greater Land of Israel, and the idea that the Jewish state’s borders and sovereignty shouldn’t just be within the 1948 borders of Israel, or even the occupied territories of 67 but should extend into the territory of what is now Jordan, what is now Syria, Iraq, even Egypt. We’re talking about almost a Zionist empire in the Middle East. And that is the vision. And you know, there have been controversies where Naftali Bennett once in a speech in the Knesset held up an ancient coin that showed a map of the Jewish homeland that extended far beyond the borders of Israel. And that was sort of seen as a nod to this maximalist vision. Netanyahu has used a similar map where Israeli sovereignty is extended far beyond the current borders. 

And similarly, in Hindutva ideology, you have this idea of Akhand Bharat, Akhand Hindustan, which means Undivided India, United India. And that is a Hindu Rashtra, again, a Hindu supremacist state, extending beyond just India, but into what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, really, throughout the Hindutva empire, if you will, encompassing all of South Asia. And I think that the fact that both of these movements have these imperial maximalist territorial visions is really key also to understanding the way they see themselves. You know, it’s tied up with the politics of national renewals. 

Yulia: Yeah, this territorial maximalism, as you call it, is really significant. And I wonder if thinking about Kashmir specifically in relation to Palestine, can help us further understand the connections and parallels between Hindutva and Zionism, like the settler aspect of both projects, the military occupation, and maybe how the two of them diverge. 

Pranay: Yeah, this is a really important question, because Kashmir and Palestine, especially I think in protests over the last nine months, are often held up as sort of analogous. You know, you often hear slogans like “From Kashmir to Palestine, occupation as a crime.” And absolutely without a doubt, there are many, many key similarities between the situations in both places. On the one hand, you have the settler colonial project in Palestine, the attempts to annex the West Bank and, you know, flatten Gaza so that Israel could take it over and to sort of culminate the design of settler colonial project. Similarly, you have BJP officials and right-wing pundits in India talking about implementing an Israeli model in Kashmir, assert Indian sovereignty over this territory that has never been clearly defined as belonging to India. 

I don’t necessarily personally disagree with the settler colonial framework being applied to Kashmir, especially when you talk about the specific policies that have been used by the Indian government. Part of the sort of revocation of Kashmiri autonomy in 2019 was also the revocation of constitutional provisions that had made it so only native Kashmiris could own land in Kashmir that was taken away so now you could be an Indian from Delhi, or from Mumbai, or from Chennai, or wherever it may be. No Kashmiri connection whatsoever, but you can now go buy up land and build a house there. Kashmir is promoted as a tourist destination to sort of cultivate this colonial desire for it in the Indian imagination, also, there are talks about constructing settlements for Indian military officers and their families to go and settle in Kashmir. 

So those are aspects of Indian policies in Kashmir that certainly can be considered, in my view, at least settler colonial in nature. But I also think that you know, anyone who uses the word disputed territory to refer to Palestine, you should, you know, run as far as you can in the other direction. Because obviously that is a way to whitewash and sort of sanitize the reality of what is happening in Palestine. Palestine is not a disputed territory. It’s a colonized territory. Kashmir, I think there is actually more of an argument to be made that it is, in fact, a disputed territory in the sense that Kashmir, it was a princely state during the British era. It was a Muslim majority region ruled by Dogra dynasty, a Hindu dynasty of kings and the Maharaja Hari Singh ruled as like a brutal tyrant oppressing his population. And at the time of independence and of partition, Hari Singh, like the other princely leaders, were given the choice of, do you want to accede to India, do you want to accede to Pakistan, or neither. 

Ultimately, he signed a document of accession to India to make Kashmir a part of India. But that was only after pressure from India, because there were Pakistani backed insurgents who had launched a military campaign against his rule, and so India promised support to put down that insurgency, in exchange for him signing the document to sign a sovereignty over to India. That, of course, prompted the first war between India and Pakistan, because Pakistan also laid claim to Kashmir, and the resolution of that was a UN-brokered ceasefire, which included an agreement for a plebiscite, for a referendum, where the people of Kashmir could vote to decide their own future. Do they want to be part of India? Do they want to be part of Pakistan? Do they want to be independent? 75 years later, that never happened. And so, for example, the organization I work for, Hindus for Human Rights, we don’t take a geopolitical stance on the question of Kashmir. We don’t say it belongs to India or Pakistan or it should be independent. Our position is one of self-determination for the Kashmiri people, because that is an unfulfilled promise that has been, unfulfilled for many decades. And I think Kashmir is a disputed territory in the sense that its actual sovereignty is up in the air, because there has never been a satisfactory resolution to that. 

I think that that is a nuance that can sometimes get lost in the very easy one to one comparison between Kashmir and Palestine. But I think the situations are similar in more ways, and they’re different. You know, Indian military tactics of repression, the brutality with which violence is. Deployed against Kashmiri civilians closely mirrors tactics that the IOF uses against Palestinians Indian military officers and militarized police officers train in Israel in the same way that militarized American police train in Israel and bring those tactics of colonial repression back to the population that they police, including Kashmiris in the Indian case. And you know, many, many billions of dollars of weapons and military technology that India is buying from Israel to support its supposed counterterrorism efforts, much of it is being used to carry out horrific human rights violations in Kashmir. So while it’s not a one to one comparison, it’s not an unfounded comparison either.

Yulia: I think this nuanced distinction that you make is helpful as well as the affirmation that regardless of that distinction, the two states deploy similar and often the same tools and tactics which produce the shared material reality of state repression and military occupation that Kashmiris and Palestinians experience. 

Another thing I want to ask you about has to do with the legacy of British colonialism in India and Palestine and the partition. In 1947 the British left. India was partitioned into two independent nation states, India and Pakistan. The same year, the UN adopted the plan to partition Palestine. And in 1948 the British Mandate ended and Israel declared its independence. So while the political context for Indian and Israeli independence is actually quite different, I can see how the timing and the partition make it seem kind of analogous. So what interests me is how Zionists use this to co-opt and appropriate histories of anti-colonial struggles to portray Israeli settler colonialism as the Jewish independence movement and the establishment of Israel as a victory of national liberation. So with that in mind, I want to ask you how the legacy of British colonialism and anti-colonial struggle get deployed in Zionism and Hindutva.

Pranay: This history, the shared history of British occupation colonialism in both places, even just down to the fact that in both countries, a lot of the architecture of state repression, whether you’re talking about emergency laws, the built infrastructure of prisons and military camps, or even the institutions or the police themselves in both India and Israel in the post colonial era are holdovers from the British like the same laws have been on the books in many cases in both countries since pre-independence in both India and Israel. And there was a British police officer, Charles Taggart, who was the police commissioner of Kolkata and oversaw the brutal repression of anti-colonial revolutionaries in Kolkata in the 1920s and then, after his sort of tour of duty there was completed, the British sent him to their holdings in Palestine, where he set up some of the same prison camps, interrogation and torture centers that are still being used to this day. And he took the lessons he learned from suppressing anti-colonial resistance in India and brought them to Palestine. 

And so that legacy of British colonialism is very much present in both countries. Zionists, you have this weird sort of double-edged sword of on the one hand, this pride that has taken in the fact that so many of Israel’s post independence generation of leadership were involved in the underground we might call terrorist campaign against the British Mandate, and this invocation of anti-colonial legacy coupled with not only the settler colonial reality of the Zionist project, but also the fact that post independence and Israel also has really aligned itself with the imperialist West, the US and the UK, among others. And so that’s just a really interesting, I think, kind of dichotomy. 

But I think that the way that these legacies are invoked in India, it’s slightly different in the sense that one partition is very much weaponized against Indian Muslims, because you often hear Muslims being told, you know, if you don’t like it here, go to Pakistan. You have your own country. We went through partition. If you feel put upon here, if you feel oppressed here in our lovely Hindu Rashtra, then just go across the border to Pakistan. They’ll be happy to have you. You hear that sort of rhetoric being used a lot more broadly speaking, anti-colonial and decolonial rhetoric being weaponized by the Hindu right wing in really interesting and chilling ways. Modi talks about getting rid of the colonial mentality among Indians. One of the most common pejoratives that are deployed, particularly by online trolls against you know, leftists or liberals or secularists in India is Sepoy, which refers to the Indian soldiers who were press ganged into serving the British Army during the British Raj, and so this idea of you’re betraying your people by capitulating to the white master, as it were. So those legacies of colonialism and anti-colonialism have absolutely and continued to be weaponized in really interesting and again, very chilling ways by the Hindu right wing in India and the diaspora as well.

Yulia: It makes me think of how Zionists call anti-Zionist Jews kapos as a traitor to your people. 

Pranay: Yes, yes.

Yulia: Wow. That’s a convergence I didn’t expect. But now I want to move the conversation to the diaspora and ask you about the Indian diaspora in the US and its relationship with the Israel lobby. What can you tell us about that connection?

Pranay: The Indian American diaspora. In particular, the Hindu American diaspora is one of the most significant sources of material and ideological support for the BJP and for the Hindu movement in India, it is a very wealthy diaspora. There’s a lot of growing political influence here in the US as well. Indian Americans are an increasingly sought after voting bloc by both parties, even though historically, have been reliably liberal voters on those domestic issues, tend to hold very conservative positions on issues relating to India, and tend to have high approval ratings for Modi, for the BJP, to hold various Islamophobic views. This is largely, I think, due to the demographics of the Indian American and again, specifically the Hindu American communities, where we don’t have great data on the caste demographics of Hindu Americans, but we do know that, like in broad strokes, probably about 80% of Hindu Americans come from a dominant caste background, Brahmin or other dominant caste, whereas in India, it’s more like five to 10% and so that pyramid is inverted, and that has to deal with the history of racist immigration laws in the US, where only quote, unquote, highly skilled or highly educated. You know, Indian immigrants could even come here in the first place. 

So it kind of creates this self-filtering, but as a result, you get this weird sort of divergence within the community where reliable Democratic voters, very pro-LGBT, pro-stopping climate change, anti-racist in a lot of ways, et cetera, et cetera, pro-reproductive rights, but then will hold often very reactionary positions on India issues. And anecdotally, I’ve seen this happen just in the community that I grew up in. And what we’ve seen also, you know, in the last 20-30 years, is the emergence of organizations, particularly the Hindu American Foundation, among others, that have sort of sought to position themselves as the organized voice of the Hindu American community, the representatives of our community in the broader civil society space. And again, these organizations, like if you go to the Hindu American Foundation website, you just look at their “About us” and “What we believe” page on their website, you will think that they’re a liberal civil rights organization in a lot of ways. They talk about climate change, LGBT rights, reproductive justice, education justice, etc, etc. But then also, they whitewash Hindutva. They promote this narrative of Hinduphobia, which claims that criticizing the Indian government or speaking negatively of Hindu nationalism is Hinduphobic. And this is really intentional. 

I mean, it’s really analogous to, for example, the ways that the ADL positions itself as an authority on civil rights, on they track hate crimes, attract far-right extremism have given themselves as veneer of legitimacy, and then use that legitimacy as cover to to launch the most horrific attacks on anti-Zionist activists, including anti-Zionist Jews. And this has been an intentional, you know, intentional practice. There was a really great piece in Jewish current from last year, called the Hindu nationalists, using the pro Israel playbook, about how groups like the Hindu American Foundation and others have explicitly sought to emulate the model of the ADL, the AJC and other sort of Zionist lobby groups, you know, in particular, with the weaponization of Hinduphobia in the same way that antisemitism is weaponized. 

HAF, the Hindu American Foundation, has co-hosted, for example, a series of events with the organization Stand with Us, which is a notorious pro-Israel lobby group. The title of those events is “Shine a light on antisemitism and Hinduphobia.” And after the 2021 dismantling global Hindutva conference, which was a virtual academic conference that received hundreds, if not 1000s of death threats and threats of violence from Hindutva supporters towards as organizers, many participants had to withdraw in the aftermath of that conference that just received so much hate and vitriol from the Hindu right wing, both in India and the US. You had another conference that was convened by Hindutva groups at Rutgers University, called the understanding Hinduphobia conference, where they literally compiled a working definition of Hinduphobia. It could not be more explicitly modeled off of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. 

I mean, these tactics, it’s almost laughable how just blatant it is. There’s not even, like, a shred of originality. And it’s really alarming in a lot of ways, to see the convergence between these movement here in the US, particularly around the times the student encampment, like the Gaza encampment at Stanford, was met with a counter protest that was billed as an interfaith rally against terror that was hosted by Zionist groups on campus. And the Hindu American foundation also turned people out to that, and it was supposed to be Hindus and Jews standing together against Hindu foes and antisemites. So we’ve seen this really amplify in the month since October 7.

Yulia: That Jewish currents article that you mentioned is a really exceptional expose. We will link this article and our other podcasts dedicated to the IHRA definition in the Episode Notes. But now I want to ask you about how this Hindutva and Zionist affinity operates on social media, because what I’m noticing is a very one sided expression of support. Namely, I see people who appear to be Indian or based in India to post we love Israel, we support Israel, we stand with Israel. But I don’t particularly see Israelis or Zionists in general saying we stand with India under post criticizing Modi or Hindutva. So what’s going on with this online discourse?

Pranay: Absolutely. Setting aside the like direct relationship between these governments, it’s definitely one-sided. There are memes about how this recurring pattern of the IDF will post something on Twitter or the Israeli government will post something on Twitter. And then you’ll have right-wing Indians replying, “Oh, India stands with you.” And then you’ll have some right-wing Israelis replying, “We don’t want you. You guys smell like shit.” It’s just the most horrific racism will often be directed against Indians in response to the support that Indians are giving to Israel. I’ve seen this time and time again. It would be funny if it wasn’t so disgusting. 

So it’s very much, especially on social media, I think is very one-sided. That doesn’t mean convergence seriously because when it actually comes down to brass tacks, in terms of who is actually making decisions, there is absolutely alignment there. And we see that with the relationship militarily and economically between these countries and the fact that Israel is arming India and India is arming Israel, and the violence being carried out by both governments is supported by the others. So in that regard, where I think it actually has the most material consequence, certainly not one-sided.

Yulia: Right this explains a lot actually. I can’t say that it’s surprising that racism is the culprit, not that I want to see that fascist affinity deepen, but this display of racism is quite telling. 

I’d like to go back to your thesis for a moment. You wrote it in 2021. Are you seeing any significant changes? Like if you were to write it today, what major updates would need to be made?

Pranay: If I were writing this today, I think one thing that has changed, or at least not changed so much, as one thing that has developed, I think has been the role that the US plays in all of this and the relationship that each country has to the United States. Where you have, particularly since October 7th and as genocide in Gaza has gotten more and more intense, there’s a sense that the US actually doesn’t have as much control over the Netanyahu government as maybe they thought they did. I was reading an article in Politico recently about how when Bibi comes to DC in a couple of weeks, Biden’s advisors are worried that he is going to use that speech to embarrass Biden. And I think that the US government, just from like a purely realpolitik standpoint is, kind of scrambling a little bit to try and get a better control on this imperial vassal state that has gone a little rogue, again, from the perspective of American Empire.

By contrast you have India which, in the last few years in particular has become an increasingly attractive partner for the U. S. Government, especially as sort of a counterweight to China And that both the Trump and the Biden administrations have really sought to court India’s favor. Last year Modi visited the US and got the red carpet treatment when he came for a state visit to Washington. That’s definitely a development that I would want to think more about.

Yulia: Last thing I want to ask is a more hopeful one. The parallels between Hindutva and Zionism that we’ve been discussing at least in part also mean parallels between movements against both projects. So I wonder if you could talk about collaborations and solidarities between anti-Hindutva and anti-Zionist organizers.

Pranay: Absolutely, there has been, especially in the last 9 months, increased interest from a lot of people in different ways that we can draw these connections between Hindutva and Zionism. this stuff. More and more people are seeing these connections, and want to learn more. You know, we at Hindus for Human Rights, we produced resources for the student encampments. We produced a zine and also a template for a teach-in on Hinduism and Zionism. Those resources were used at several encampments around the country. If folks are interested in learning more about Hindus for Human Rights and the work that we’re doing, to organize within our community, check out our website hindusforhumanrights.org.

I said earlier in our conversation that Palestine is a North Star politically for so many people and I recently wrote an essay for my substack about what is so unique or special about Palestine solidarity. And I think that there is this element of internationalism that has been woven into the Palestine solidarity movement, to the Palestinian struggle, for decades. It’s been really heartening to see the increased appetite for people to draw these international connections to cases like India. And I think for a long time, it has not been getting much attention because it’s been written off as this issue that only affects India, but now people are seeing – no, this is part of a broader far-right, fascist, ethno-nationalist axes that is rising. We’re seeing it in the genocide in Gaza, we’re seeing it in India with Hindutva, we’re seeing it here in the US with the rise of the far-right and the alt-right. And I think that people being able to draw those connections is absolutely a good thing and a very encouraging one. Hope that we can continue to build these connections with other movements and other causes because I think that’s going to be the only way that we win.

Yulia: Very much agreed. Thank you Pranay for this conversation and for all the work that you and Hindus for Human Rights are doing. 

Listeners, you can find Pranay Somayajula’s biography, transcript of this conversation, and links to all of the resources we mentioned in this conversation in the episode notes or on our website criticalzionismstudies.org.

Until next time,

Solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.