Why white supremacists and Hindu nationalists are so alike
Aadita Chaudhury, PhD Candidate in Science & Technology Studies at York University, in Toronto, Canada/Aljazeera
White supremacy and Hindu nationalism have common roots going back to the 19th-century idea of the ‘Aryan race’.
Over the last few years, especially after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election, we have been witnessing the normalisation, and rise, of a white-supremacist, ultranationalist brand of right-wing politics across Europe and the United States. While the shift towards extreme right alarmed many across the world, far-right ideologues of the Trumpian era swiftly found support in a seemingly unlikely place: India.
Many members of the so-called “alt-right” – a loosely knit coalition of populists, white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis – turned to India to find historic and current justifications for their racist, xenophobic and divisive views. Using a specific, “white nationalist” brand of Orientalism, they projected their fantasies about a racially pure society onto the Indian culture and in response received a warm welcome from Hindu fundamentalists in India.
While an alliance between the Hindu far right and the Western alt-right may appear confounding on the surface, it actually has a long history, going all the way back to the construction of the Aryan race identity, one of the ideological roots of Nazism, in the early 20th century.
In the 1930s, German nationalists embraced the 19th-century theory that Europeans and the original Sanskrit speakers of India who had built the highly developed Sanskrit civilisation – which white supremacists wanted to claim as their own – come from a common Indo-European, or Aryan, ancestor. They subsequently built their racist ideology on the assumed superiority of this “pure” race.
Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas), a French-Greek thinker and mysticist who later became a spiritual icon of Nazism, helped popularise the idea that all civilisation had its roots in this Aryan “master race” in India. She travelled to India in the early 1930s to “discover the source of the Aryan culture” and converted to Hinduism while there.
She quickly integrated herself into India’s burgeoning Hindu nationalist movement by promoting theories that support privileged caste Hindus’ superiority over Christians, Muslims and unprivileged caste Hindus in the country. In 1940, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Hindu nationalist and Indian supporter of Nazism who had praised the Third Reich’s commitment to ethnonationalism, seeing commonalities between the goals of the Hitler Youth and the youth movement of Hindu nationalism, Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS).
Devi worked as a spy for the Axis forces in India throughout World War II and left the country after the defeat of Nazi Germany using a British-Indian passport. In the post-war period, she became an ardent Holocaust denier and was one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists, a conglomeration of neo-Nazi and far-right organisations from around the world.
Devi still has a strong influence over the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Her 1939 booklet titled A Warning to the Hindus, in which she cautions Indian nationalists to embrace their Hindu identity and guard the country against “non-Aryan” influences, such as Islam and Christianity, is still widely read and highly regarded among Hindu nationalists. Perhaps not surprisingly, recently Devi and her theories have also been rediscovered by right-wing ideologues in the West and she is now considered an alt-right icon.
However, the current connection between far-right groups in the West and Hindu nationalists is limited neither to Devi’s teachings nor the old myth of the Aryan race.
Today, the two groups share a common goal in eroding the secular character of their respective states and a common “enemy” in Muslim minorities. This is why they often act in coordination and openly support each other.
In the US, the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group with strong links to the Hindu nationalist movement in India, has been rallying behind President Donald Trump’s controversial immigration policies, like the Muslim ban and the border wall. Trump’s campaign strategist and prominent alt-right figurehead Steve Bannon once called India’s Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi “the Reagan of India”.
Meanwhile, in India, a far-right Hindu nationalist group named Hindu Sena (Army of Hindus), which has been linked to a series of inter-communal incidents in India, has been throwing parties to mark Trump’s birthday. The group’s founder even claimed that “Trump is the only person who can save mankind.”
In Canada, far-right Islamophobic organisations such as Rise Canada, which claims to “defend Canadian values” and combat “radical Islam”, are popular among Hindu-nationalists.
The group’s logo even features a red maple leaf rising out of a lotus flower, which is often associated with Hinduism.
In Britain, the National Hindu Council of Temples (NHCTUK), a Hindu charity, recently caused controversy by inviting far-right Hindu nationalist Tapan Ghosh to speak at the parliament. Ghosh has previously suggested the UN should “control the birth rate of Muslims” and said all Muslims are “Jihadis”. During his visit to the UK, Ghosh also attended celebrations of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, with cabinet ministers Amber Rudd and Priti Patel, and met the former neo-Nazi leader Tommy Robinson.