Editorial
Spectacle Without Actors
By Achal Mehra
It is incumbent upon the media to occasionally pull back the curtains and turn on the lights to expose this saffron vaudeville for what it is: a stage with multiple mirrors without actors.
In recent months, Indian Hindus in America have expressed outrage at the music group Aerosmith for disparaging Ganesh with an image on an album cover. And they have fumed at Madonna for usurping the Mehendi and sanskrit sholakas. They have railed against Pat Roberston's frequently bigoted outbursts against "Hindoos." And now they are taking up arms against Xena the Warrior, who has teamed up with Krishna in another dumb TV adventure.
I wished that my fellow Hindus in America weren't so touchy about their religion. I never cease to be baffled by Hindu fundamentalists, considering that Hinduism alone among the world's major religions recognizes no established priestly order, no particular sacred text and no established rituals.
Indeed, one could well argue that fundamentalism is antithetical to the core tenets of Hindu philosophy and that these Hindu zealots are fundamentally clueless. I have always found it supremely ironic that Hindu fanatics share a passion for a doctrinaire form of the religion, not unlike fundamentalist Muslims and Christians, against whom they constantly inveigh. Nothing, they say, is so like the North Pole as the South Pole.
Whatever the politics of Hindu chauvinism and religious bigotry in India, the Hindu chauvinists in America defy all logic. It is befuddling that these people have elected to safely put a distance of 10,000 miles from the fires they are stoking on the subcontinent. In many instances, members of such organizations as the Overseas Friends of the BJP and the even more militant Vishwa Hindu Parishad have taken out U.S. citizenship. Why they would seek to commit India to a Hindu theocracy when they presumably will not be riding the udankhatolas or chariots there boggles the mind.
These bigots protest the bigotry of the religious right in this country as well as the comic appropriation of exotic Hindu icons by the global forces of commodification. And yet they are apologists for and constantly seek to rationalize on behalf of the armed thugs who assault Muslim and Christian shrines and murder people in the name of Hinduism back in India.
The fundamentalist Hindu groups in the United States are a microscopic though very voluble minority. By all accounts, the Overseas Friends of the BJP has fewer than 400 members. The Hindu Swayamsewak Sang (HSS) professes 800 members, while the Vishwa Hindu Parishad klan is even smaller. Some 5,000 Indian American youngsters have apparently participated in HSS youth camps, which are modeled after the RSS, but which are attended by kids for lack of any other form of Hindu religious experience for Indian families in America. These youth scarcely share the zeal of the Sangh's American pariwar. This 2,000 odd Hindu rump is a laughable footnote in the life and experience of the 1.2 million strong Indian American community. But their dedication and zeal, in the face of widespread political and religious apathy among Indian Americans generally, has given them an influence far beyond their puny numbers.
It is unlikely that their zeal will ebb any time soon. And it is equally unlikely that the overwhelming majority of Indian Americans will shake off their indifference to their silly American spectacle.
Under the circumstances, it is incumbent upon the media to occasionally pull back the curtains and turn on the lights to expose this saffron vaudeville for what it is: a stage with multiple mirrors without actors.