India Overseas Report
Hinduphobic tropes – such as the portrayal of Hindus as fundamentally heretical evil, dirty, tyrannical, genocidal, irredeemable or disloyal – are prominent across the ideological spectrum and are being deployed by fringe web communities and state actors alike, on social media and mainstream as well as extremist messaging platforms, says a new study by Rutgers, authored by Prasiddha Sudhakar, an Analyst at NCLabs at Rutgers.
“Despite violent and genocidal implications of Hinduphobia, it has largely been understudied, dismissed, or even denied in the public sphere,” it says.
John Farmer, Former Attorney General of New Jersey and Director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, in a foreword to the study, writes about his experience with the infamous organization ‘dot busters’ who exposed him “to the ugliness, bigotry and violence of anti-Hindu hatred” in New Jersey, in 1987.
The so-called ‘dot busters,’ a largely white, largely young gang had embarked on a campaign of vandalism, violence, and murder designed to terrorize Jersey City’s Hindu population and to drive them out of the city. An Indian man, although not Hindu, was beaten to death while walking home from Hoboken; his white friend was left unharmed. Another person, a physician, was beaten into a comatose state with baseball bats as he left his office in Jersey City Heights; still another was beaten with a metal pipe while in his apartment, and a New York cab driver was killed on a Jersey City street.
“As our reports on Antisemitism and, now, Hinduphobia have shown, hate has a long memory. While hate speech — and the acts of violence it spawns – may wane and lie dormant, it never entirely disappears. The “dot busters” may no longer be active in New Jersey, but their ideology surfaced as recently as 2021 in Atlanta. The essential first step in combating hate speech is to call it out,” writes Farmer.
Researchers, led by Sudhakar – who graduated from Rutgers in May with a double major in computer science and economics and minor in critical intelligence studies – used artificial intelligence to better understand the development of a disguised and coded language pattern shared on social networks. According to their analysis of one million tweets, Iranian trolls disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes to fuel division as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of perpetrating a genocide against minorities in India.
Sudhakar and other researchers worked with high school students from the New Jersey Governors’ STEM Scholars program to assemble and analyze the data. They taught them about cyber social threat detection through machine learning, open-source intelligence gathering and the dimensions of anti-Hindu disinformation.
“In July the signal on the Hinduphobic code words and memes reached record highs that could inflame a spill out to real world violence, especially in light of escalating religious tensions in India and the recent beheading of an Indian shopkeeper. Social media platforms largely are unaware of the code words, key images, and structured nature of this hatred even as it is surging,” the study, “Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media”, noted.