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

  1. ↑ "Hindutva's threat to academic freedom". Washington Post and Religion News Service. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  2. ↑ Writer, Staff (2021-07-07). "South Asian Scholars Launch Online Resource for Those Under Attack by Hindu Nationalists". American Kahani. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  3. ↑ Venugopal, Arun (2021-07-21). "At Rutgers, and Beyond, Scholars Are Under Attack For Their Critique of India's Far-Right Government". Gothamist. Retrieved 2021-07-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ↑ "Hindu nationalism fears spur US scholars into action". Times Higher Education (THE). 2021-08-30. Retrieved 2021-09-10.
  5. ↑ "Death threats sent to participants of US conference on Hindu nationalism". the Guardian. 2021-09-09. Retrieved 2021-09-10.
  6. ↑ "North America Has a Hindu Nationalist Problem, and Scholars are On the Frontlines of These Right-Wing Attacks". Religions Dispatches.
  7. ↑ "Threats to Participants in Hindu Nationalism Conference Risk Silencing Academic Freedom". PEN America. 2021-09-10. Retrieved 2021-09-10.
  8. ↑ Kim, Sophie-Jung H. (2023). "The Global Turn in Nationalism: The USA as a Battleground for Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism". Religions.
  9. ↑ 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
  10. ↑ Ollett, Andrew (2024). "Double South Asian Studies!". Comparative Global Humanities in Action. 9 (1).
  11. ↑ 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.
  12. ↑ https://www.hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org/timeline
  13. ↑ 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.
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