#anti-hindutva

[curtwilde]

The oldest Sufi shrine in Delhi has been demolished.

"The earliest Sufi Shrine in Delhi - belonging to a relative of Prithviraj Chauhan and dating from BEFORE the Turkish conquest - has been Demolished by the Delhi Development Authority in an "anti encroachment" drive.

In the late 12th century, a group of Afghan pastoralists, suddenly burst onto the world stage. In a matter of years, they toppled their rulers of Ghazni and seized major Persian cities like Herat, and then established the major Indian sultanate in Delhi.

We often think of this "Islamic invasion" as the start of the Muslim presence in India. Yet recent scholarship has shown that by the time of Ghori's conquest of Delhi, Muslims were already a central part of Indian society

Some of the earliest mosques are found in Kerala, dating from a few decades after the prophet Muhammad's death. Tamil Pallava, Chola and Pandya kings all built sizeable mosques

Delhi also had a single sufi shrine before the Afghan conquest - this one.

Until 31 January, when it was demolished, the shrine of Baba Haji Rozbih had been located by the Fateh Burj, or Victory Gate of Lal Kot. The grave next to it under a reddish Chador belongs to his female disciple Bibi. Bibi was said to be a close relative of Prithviraj Chauhan who embraced Islam under the aegis of Haji Rozbih.

This demolition is an UTTERLY MINDLESS LOSS and complete cultural desecration.

What's more the "anti encroachment" drive is apparently scheduled to include the Aashiq Allah Dargah dated to 1317AD which is where the great Punjabi Saint Baba Farid used to meditate, and his small 'chillagah' is still visible here.

Please do share and write about this so we can save what remains! "

- from the historian Sam Dalrymple .

...

This is the third Islamic structure to be demolished in Delhi this month. Isn't it funny how only certain structures are the victim of anti- encroachment drives? This is part of a planned programme by the current right-wing government of India that is violently islamophobic and wants to create a hindu ethnostate modeled after Israel.

[whippersnappersbookworm]

I love reading how upper class Brahmins adapted the culture of so called dalit communities during the middle ages. I love how they bramhinized the culture of the people whom they discarded from their society to save their religion during the Islamic Invasion. The lower class communities created their own gods to fulfill their needs as they were not allowed to worship the gods of the upper class. They created god like Manasa(the godess of snakes), Chandi(a localised version of Durga), Dharma ,Annoda or Annapurna. Even the Radha whom the desiblr adores and worships was primarily a local goddess a local myth, she was not a part of the veda purana tradition of upper class Hindus. The only reason they decided to adopt these local, small deities is because the bramhins felt threatened by the rise of Islam in India . Therefore they decided to include these gods in their upper class stories by creating new tales so they could appeal to the common mass.

[metamatar]

man the way congress is presenting their refusal to attend the ram mandir ceremony is so fucking suspect no one in this country dares to actually say no to the hindutva narrative. it is evil to celebrate the illegal and violent destruction of a mosque and the contruction of a temple at that site, a move long planned and dreamed of by members of right wing organisation that is among other things infamous for assassinating gandhi for being too soft on muslims. how hard was that? no instead they're waffling about how its not enough of a separation of church and state and party and govt.

[bfpnola]

definitely a longer piece so these excerpts are far from showcasing everything this piece has to offer! read the whole thing on your own time, and in general, just check out jewish currents, an educational, leftist, anti-zionist jewish magazine!

Every August, the township of Edison, New Jersey—where one in five residents is of Indian origin—holds a parade to celebrate India’s Independence Day. In 2022, a long line of floats rolled through the streets, decked out in images of Hindu deities and colorful advertisements for local businesses. People cheered from the sidelines or joined the cavalcade, dancing to pulsing Bollywood music. In the middle of the procession came another kind of vehicle: A wheel loader, which looks like a small bulldozer, rumbled along the route bearing an image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi aloft in its bucket. For South Asian Muslims, the meaning of the addition was hard to miss. A few months earlier, during the month of Ramadan, Indian government officials had sent bulldozers into Delhi’s Muslim neighborhoods, where they damaged a mosque and leveled homes and storefronts. The Washington Post called the bulldozer “a polarizing symbol of state power under Narendra Modi,” whose ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is increasingly enacting a program of Hindu supremacy and Muslim subjugation. In the weeks after the parade, one Muslim resident of Edison, who is of Indian origin, told The New York Times that he understood the bulldozer much as Jews would a swastika or Black Americans would a Klansman’s hood. Its inclusion underscored the parade’s other nods to the ideology known as Hindutva, which seeks to transform India into an ethnonationalist Hindu state. The event’s grand marshal was the BJP’s national spokesperson, Sambit Patra, who flew in from India. Other invitees were affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international arm of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary force Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Modi is a longtime member.

...

On December 6th, 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindus, many of whom were affiliated with the paramilitary group the RSS, gathered at the Babri Masjid, a centuries-old mosque that is one of the most contested sacred sites in the world. Over the preceding century, far-right Hindus had claimed that the mosque, located in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, was built not only upon the site where the Hindu deity Ram was born but atop the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. The RSS and its affiliates had been campaigning to, in the words of a BJP minister, correct the “historical mistake” of the mosque’s existence, a task the mob completed that December afternoon. “They climbed on top of the domes and tombs,” one witness told NPR. “They were carrying hammers and these three-pronged spears from Hindu scripture. They started hacking at the mosque. By night, it was destroyed.” The demolition sparked riots that lasted months and killed an estimated 2,000 people across the country.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was arguably Hindu nationalism’s greatest triumph to date. Since its establishment in 1925, the RSS—whose founders sought what one of them called a “military regeneration of the Hindus,” inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride”—had been a marginal presence in India: Its members held no elected office, and it was temporarily designated a terrorist organization after one of its affiliates shot and killed Mohandas Gandhi in 1948. But the leveling of the Babri Masjid activated a virulently ethnonationalist base and paved the way for three decades of Hindutva ascendance. In 1998, the BJP formed a government for the first time; in 2014, it returned to power, winning a staggering 282 out of 543 seats in parliament and propelling Modi into India’s highest office. Since then, journalist Samanth Subramanian notes, all of the country’s governmental and civil society institutions “have been pressured to fall in line” with a Hindutva agenda—a phenomenon on full display in 2019, when the Supreme Court of India awarded the land where the Babri Masjid once stood to a government run by the very Hindu nationalists who illegally destroyed it. (Modi has since laid a foundation stone for a new Ram temple in Ayodhya, an event that a prominent RSS activist celebrated with a billboard in Times Square.) The Ayodhya verdict came in the same year that Modi stripped constitutional protections from residents of the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir and passed a law that creates a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants, laying the groundwork for a religious test for Indian nationality. Under Modi, “the Hinduization of India is almost complete,” as journalist Yasmeen Serhan has written in The Atlantic.

To achieve its goals, the RSS has worked via a dense network of organizations that call themselves the “Sangh Parivar” (“joint family”) of Hindu nationalism. The BJP, which holds more seats in the Indian parliament than every other party combined, is the Sangh’s electoral face. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the movement’s cultural wing, responsible for “Hinduizing” Indian society at the grassroots level. The Bajrang Dal is the project’s militant arm, which enforces Hindu supremacy through violence. Dozens of other organizations contribute money and platforms to the Sangh. The sheer number of groups affords the Sangh what human rights activist Pranay Somayajula has referred to as a “tactical politics of plausible deniability,” in which the many degrees of separation between the governing elements and their vigilante partners shields the former from backlash. This explains how, until 2018, the CIA could describe the VHP and Bajrang Dal as “militant religious organizations”—a designation that applies to non-electoral groups exerting political pressure—even as successive US governments have maintained a warm relationship with their parliamentary counterpart, the BJP.

...

The most extreme figures in the Hindu nationalist and Zionist movements were especially frank about the nature of their partnership: “Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans, or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam,” Bajrang Dal affiliate Rohit Vyasmaan told The New York Times of his friendly relationship with Mike Guzofsky, a member of a violent militant group connected to the infamous Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane’s Kach Party.

...

In 2003, Gary Ackerman—a Jewish former congressman who was awarded India’s third-highest civilian honor for helping to found the Congressional Caucus on India—told a gathering of AJC and AIPAC representatives and their Indian counterparts that “Israel [is] surrounded by 120 million Muslims,” while “India has 120 million [within].” Tom Lantos, another Jewish member of the caucus, likewise enjoined the two communities to collaborate: “We are drawn together by mindless, vicious, fanatic, Islamic terrorism.”

[rosetta-stoned-bitch]

The argument that Kashmir belongs to India to do to it whatever the fuck the Centre wants just because it was acceded by the then-monarch is hilarious to me because this is their literal thought process

Majority population of Religion A ruled by a monarch of Religion B: the monarch is tyrannical and oppressed the public and never once acted as a beneficiary of the people. The people now deserve to "decolonise".

Majority population of Religion B ruled by a monarch of Religion A: the monarch had the best interests of people and knew what to do, the people are delusional and can't be trusted to know what they actually want. Oh and they are all terrorists so obv we can't listen to what they say now.

Gotta love the hypocrisy and mental gymnastics 🤌

[hussyknee]

I accidentally deleted this ask yesterday but fortunately had a screenshot. Ngl I'm kind of ??? about it because...why would you single out Hinduism to pick the most fundamentalist, cultural and political aspect of it, that's not even practised in most the Hindu minorities outside of India? Nearly every community in India has a caste system regardless of religion. Within Hinduism there's no just one caste system either. Eelam Tamil Hindus have a caste system, but it's not as violent as India's (although of course still violent and oppressive). Sinhalese have a caste system too, and the ones still invested in it would swear blind this was related to Buddhism somehow, a doctrine that preaches against inequality of any kind. Caste systems are literally haram in Islam and yet some Muslim communities managed to rationalize creating one because they wanted to assimilate into the worst of us I guess.

I know fuck all about Hinduism to tell you the truth, but my sister is a convert and devotee of Durga Matha. I asked her about it and she sent me this:

There are as many variants of Hinduism as there are varieties of grass. The only thing they have in common is the Vedas which is a bunch of hymns and stuff. It doesn't really go into detail about caste.

The caste system comes from a book called Manu Smriti. Some accept it as a Hindu text, some don't. Hinduism isn't even a religion actually. It's a bunch of similar belief systems that the Britishers lumped in together for ease of classification. Within Hinduism there are many sects- Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, etc. So to define Hinduism as some sort of oppressive religion doesn't make sense because it isn't a religion as Westerners define it. Anyway, truth is everyone cherry picks the parts of religion that suits them and discards the rest. Some think that's being dishonest. I think that's just common sense.

This makes sense to me. It's very colonial to monolithize belief systems that evolved from the disparate religious texts and syncretic practices of dozens of kingdoms and dynasties over 4000 years, just because it shares the unique character of belonging to the Indian subcontinent. (Which is precisely why its propagated by Hindutva nutcases. They're imperialist colonizers permanently snorting Indian manifest destiny crack.)

Bestie. Friendo. My guy (gender neutral). Ideology doesn't shape society. People wrap ideology around what they already want to believe and do. This is how you get Zionists (both Christian and Jewish), Wahabi/Salafi Muslims, Hindutvas and... whatever we're supposed to call this current iteration of Theravadin Buddhism that is also characterized by ethnosupremacy and genocide. Religion takes the character of the individuals and ideologues that choose to follow it. There are no exceptions.

To reiterate the point that inspired this ask: Some LGBT folks's queerness is inextricable from their religious identity. Stigmatising and ostracizing religion in queer spaces is alienating, racist and violent. Just like no one should force religion on you, no one should force secularism on people either. There is enough air for us all to breathe free.

[pitrsattabhaadmeinjao]

part of the indian experience is reading about the horrifying crimes of hindutva followers, while in the next room, your dad plays news on a biased channel where people are supporting muslim suffering and shouting for the superiority of hinduism.

[rathiman]

Do the Hindu religious bloggers who keep complaining about anti hindutva people criticising Hindutva/Hinduism in the hindublr tag think they own the hindublr tag or something? Like bestie the block button is right there, why are you crying about hindublr being "politicised"? The rampant Islamophobia that some hindublr blogs have here showing up on the desiblr tag is also very inconvenient but I deal with it because it is an online space and no one's father runs Tumblr

[insertsareallycoolname]

For People who are still crying about Ram mandir

This is the pic of mosque that is going to be built on parcel land which will be almost 22 km away from Ram mandir.

The mosque will be named "Masjid Muhammed bin Abdullah", after Prophet Muhammad. It is likely to take three-four years to complete. And from what I've researched it's construction has already started (u can look up to its Wikipedia page).

All I want to say is that please stop now. Enough is enough.

[curtwilde]

If you think Ram Mandir was built on donations this is how the "donations" were collected.

[whippersnappersbookworm]

Ok so if we are talking about reclaiming" Hindu Mandirs and culture" based on apprently "credible" historical accounts, we can also talk about other religion reclaiming their own "indigenous stolen culture " right? I will not talk about Islam because obviously these people will say they are invaders , not part of our Indian culture etc etc. I will rather talk about a religion that was very much part of Indian history, and that is Buddhism. There is historical accounts from ancient and mediaeval India citing instances where Hindu rulers destroyed Buddhist monasteries (also Jain temples).

I have already wrote this on a reblogged post , but posting it again to point out how history works. Every single time there is change in the ruler , they try to impose their religion on their subjects because religion is the easiest way to conquer people, it's the weakest point. This cycle of destroying and imposing religion has been going on for centuries, it's not limited to one religion only. Every religion does this to exploit the helplessness of poor people. Stop trying to propagate that your hindu dharma is peaceful, because it is not. Stop trying to erase the stories of countless individuals who suffered under the dharama which discriminate between people. It's okay to love your religion but don't ignore the bad parts of it. Don't erase the history with your myths .

[athenassideblog]

found this on Pinterest; named 'Lana del Slay'

This is especially gorgeous to me because of the വാഴകൾ around, in a time when its so difficult to relate to your culture because of its religious extremism, Kerala is my little haven.

(Hilariously, most people reblogging this is hindutva crazy, just proving that they cant really read lol)

[meerawrites]

Now feels like a good time to bring this back...

Thanks for the backup, @no-depression-for-vampires, @taliabhattwrites, @tiredguyswag & @brokenbackmountain ❤️

[metamatar]

i don't actually use social media where people use their real names but i occasionally log in to instagram so i can experience despair about my country. one of my former coworkers posted some shit like why isnt everyone reposting ram mandir propaganda are you afraid of being seen as uncool so im now posting about ram ke naam.

[that-was-a-bit-stupid-of-you]

blocking desi blogs with the word sanatani cuz which self-respecting person admits that in public

[whispers-into-the-void]

hate hate hate this ayodhya temple hate it. hate this grotesque monument built on the ashes of criminal activity. hate the temple whose bricks house hatred. hate this temple which goes against every fibre of the god it commemorates. hate everyone who is wearing orange tomorrow. hate the path this country is taking. i hate it all.