Hindutva Harassment Field Manual
The Hindutva Harassment Field Manual offers educational and practical resources for the targets, allies, students, and employers of Hindutva-led assaults.[1][2] It was written and is maintained by the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective.
The manual was published in 2021, a year that saw Hindutva attacks on North American academics accelerate significantly, including violent threats.[3][4][5][6] Free Expression groups, including PEN America flagged this issue.[7] Scholars have placed the Field Manual within a larger "anti-Hindutva discourse" that organized in online spaces in 2021.[8]
Reception
The field manual has been received positively by academics and negatively by Hindutva-aligned group. For example, it was cited in a 2023 Research Council report at the University of Massachusetts that recommended steps for addressing "public harassment and defamation of faculty." [9] A University of Chicago professor noted in 2024 that the field manual was helpful for addressing politically-motivated complaints against United States-based scholars whose work "is inconvenient for the RSS narrative."[10] In contrast, the Hindu American Foundation, a Hindutva organisation, included the manual within a Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania.[11]
Timeline of Harassment
One section of the field manual documents Hindu Right attacks on the North American academy dating back to the mid-1990s.[12] This section was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2022.[13]
References
- ↑ "Hindutva’s threat to academic freedom" (in en-US). Washington Post and Religion News Service. ISSN 0190-8286. https://religionnews.com/2021/07/07/hindutvas-threat-to-academic-freedom/.
- ↑ Writer, Staff (2021-07-07). "South Asian Scholars Launch Online Resource for Those Under Attack by Hindu Nationalists" (in en-US). https://americankahani.com/lead-stories/online-resource-for-those-under-attack-by-hindu-nationalists/.
- ↑ Venugopal, Arun (2021-07-21). "At Rutgers, and Beyond, Scholars Are Under Attack For Their Critique of India’s Far-Right Government" (in en). http://gothamist.com/news/at-rutgers-and-beyond-scholars-are-under-attack-for-their-critique-of-indias-far-right-government.
- ↑ "Hindu nationalism fears spur US scholars into action" (in en). 2021-08-30. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/hindu-nationalism-fears-spur-us-scholars-action.
- ↑ "Death threats sent to participants of US conference on Hindu nationalism" (in en). 2021-09-09. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/09/death-threats-sent-to-participants-of-us-conference-on-hindu-nationalism.
- ↑ "North America Has a Hindu Nationalist Problem, and Scholars are On the Frontlines of These Right-Wing Attacks". Religions Dispatches. https://religiondispatches.org/north-america-has-a-hindu-nationalist-problem-and-scholars-are-on-the-frontlines-of-these-right-wing-attacks/.
- ↑ "Threats to Participants in Hindu Nationalism Conference Risk Silencing Academic Freedom" (in en). 2021-09-10. https://pen.org/press-release/threats-to-participants-in-hindu-nationalism-conference-risk-silencing-academic-freedom/.
- ↑ Kim, Sophie-Jung H. (2023). "The Global Turn in Nationalism: The USA as a Battleground for Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism". Religions. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/10/1265.
- ↑ Special Report of the Research Council Concerning Recommended Use of Administrator Toolkit for Responding to Harassment of UMASS Faculty for their Research, Teaching, and Public Engagement, 2023, https://www.umass.edu/senate/media/628/download
- ↑ Ollett, Andrew (2024). "Double South Asian Studies!". Comparative Global Humanities in Action 9 (1). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/729082?download=true.
- ↑ Sundaram, Dheepa (2024). "An Academic Conference, A Bomb Threat, and A Title VI Complaint: U.S. Hindu Nationalist Groups' Litigious Assault on Academic Freedom". Drexel Law Review 837. https://drexel.edu/law/lawreview/issues/Archives/v16-4/sundaram/.
- ↑ https://www.hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org/timeline
- ↑ South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (2022). "Timeline of Specific Incidents of Hindutva Harassment of Academics in North America". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 90 (4): 788–794. https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/90/4/788/7207618.
External Links
- Prakash, Priyali. "‘Targeted by hate’: Audrey Truschke on why she helped write a ‘Hindutva Harassment Field Manual’" (in en-US). https://scroll.in/article/999710/targeted-by-hate-audrey-truschke-on-why-she-helped-write-a-hindutva-harassment-field-manual.
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