Are Hindu Americans Being Victimized by Allegations of Dual Loyalty? Really? – By Sunita Viswanath & Rasheed Ahmed
Cries of “dual loyalty” have often been followed by pogroms and genocides around the world…. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) is now attempting to add Hindu Americans to the ‘endangered list’ by claiming that the community has been accused of dual loyalty. (See Suhag Shukla in American Kahani, May 20, 2021) There is no factual basis for that baffling claim, coming from a powerful advocacy group that would like to portray itself as representing all Hindus in America.
The fact of the matter is that most Indian Americans, regardless of their faith and political leanings, are much more likely to express positive feelings towards both the U.S. and India – an inclusive version of dual loyalty, if you will…. It is unfortunate that Shukla, with her imagined grievance, completely elides over the real victims of the “dual loyalty” charges, namely India’s Muslims: It is no secret that Indian Muslims are frequently told to ‘go back to Pakistan’ and are the targets of abuse and violence every day by Hindu nationalists.
The fact of the matter is India’s Muslims, who constitute the second or third-largest Muslim population in the world, have been facing charges of disloyalty from the very inception of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in the 1920s. The foundational ideology of these Hindutva “pioneers” was Islamophobia and Christophobia, and it remains a key aspect of the Hindu supremacist worldview to this day. This has been amplified many times over under Modi’s BJP rule, in which mob killings and violence by Hindu nationalists have become the norm rather than the exception….
