Seymour's use of chant mainstreams extremism, Hindutva critic says
Government Minister David Seymour has been accused of ignoring the plight of Indian Muslims and mainstreaming Hindu extremism, as Modi inaugurates Ram Temple.
Government minister David Seymour’s use of a chant associated with Hindutva violence against Muslims has signalled extremism is acceptable in New Zealand, a high-profile Indian researcher says.
Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University, Mohan J Dutta, told In Context Seymour proclaiming “Jai Shri Ram” (Victory to Lord Rama) at a recent event held to celebrate the consecration of a controversial Hindu temple in India also suggested to Muslims in Aotearoa their fears and anxieties did not matter.
Traditionally a pious religious greeting in India, the phrase has been increasing used as a type of threat to Muslims by the Hindu far right.
Seymour says he was simply expressing respect for Hindu religion.
He attended the ‘Ayodhya’ event at Eden Park on January 21, which offered prayers to Lord Ram, ahead of the inauguration of the near-constructed temple to the Hindu deity in the city of Ayodhya. Ethnic Communities Minister Melissa Lee also appeared at the event.
After declaring “Jai Shri Ram”, Seymour said:
“I want to congratulate everyone in India, including PM Modi for his leadership that has made this construction (Ram Temple) possible after 500 years, ready to last another 1000 years. I wish PM Modi courage and wisdom as he helps over a billion people in India navigate the challenges of the world today. I hope that he will have strength and faith. I'd be delighted to visit the Ram Temple.”
That ‘Pran Pratishtha’ (establishment of life force) event the next day in India was attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and leader of Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat, to much fanfare across the country.
It was boycotted by opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress. Many view it as a celebration of Hindu domination and division and the temple itself a symbol of a new era of sectarian rule.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had promised voters it would build the temple on the 70-acre site of a 500-year-old mosque, the Babri Masjid, destroyed by hammer and pick-axe wielding Hindu gangs in 1992.
The mosque had been deemed a ‘disputed property’ and closed since 1949. Its demolition sparked communal riots, causing the deaths of 2000 people, mostly members of the country’s Muslim minority.
The movement to build the temple had involved protracted legal battles, with advocates arguing a mosque had been built on the site of Hindu temple destroyed by Muslim invaders in the 1500s at the place of Lord Ram’s birth. It helped propel Modi’s party into the political ascendency.
India’s Supreme Court decision in 2019 to allow the build to go ahead, as well as Modi’s laying of a foundation stone at the site in 2020, was seen to many as a clear sign India was morphing into a Hinduist state, leaving behind a secularism and societal pluralism that leaders like Mahatma Gandhi had worked to achieve before and after independence in 1947.
Seymour sending out message
Dutta said the chant used by Seymour, being connected to acts of violence perpetrated against Muslim citizens in India, was both highly politicised and polarising.
“Hindutva groups have used that chant during communal tensions to attack or while attacking Muslims, when carrying out lynchings of Muslims that have led to murders, deaths, in front of mosques to intimidate and threaten Muslims,” he said.
One of the most notorious examples of the phrase’s association with sectarian violence was when it was chanted by the mob attacking former Muslim MP Ehsan Jadri. He was killed in the Gulberg Society massacre during communal riots in 2002 that tooked 69 lives.
“So, it's very clear that this particular chant has an extremist and violent purpose,” Dutta said.
Seymour, by chanting that, is sending out two messages. It signals to the significant number of Hindutva groups in Aotearoa that it is okay to participate in this kind of rhetoric. While the chant is already mainstreamed in India, this minister of the Crown, by voicing that chant, mainstreams it further into Aotearoa and brings it legitimately into the discursive space here, along with other Hindutva activities.
"Secondly, there is a significant cross section of Indian Muslims here in Aotearoa and the message it sends out to them is that they don't matter - their anxieties, their fears produced by that chant and the violence of that chant, don't matter.”
According to the Pew Research Centre there are approximately 213 million Muslims living in India, out of a population of 1.4 billion. About 11 percent of the world’s Muslims live in the country.
Dutta asked whether Seymour took into account Indian Muslims when he referred to India and the Indian diaspora. He said the Hindutva movement was particularly concerning post-Christchurch terror attack.
In a reply to In Context, Seymour said: “Jai Shri Ram is a religious greeting used on a daily basis by people of Indian origin. While some academics might interpret it as a political greeting, I used it to show respect for the customs and traditions of the group hosting me.
“This is common practice for attending any religious event. Respect for each other’s religions and backgrounds is what makes New Zealand a unique and inclusive country.”
Dutta said he saw a natural connection between Seymour’s right-wing popularism and that of Modi’s, particularly in how the two brands of politics challenged the constitutional foundations of both India and New Zealand.
“What I see is an overlap between Seymour's form of majoritarian populism that you're seeing. For example, in the referendum that he's calling for on Te Tiriti and the kind of majoritarian populism that motivates Hindutva - and particularly, since 2015, a strand of authoritarian, populist Hindutva that has really taken very extreme proportions.”
Modi’s party’s rise to power coincided with the vitiation of India’s secular constitution, which enshrined equality under the law.
A Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), signed into law in December 2019, for example, granted citizenship to refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who are Christians, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Hindus or Zoroastrians if they entered India before 2015. Muslims were excluded from the list.
Hindutva spiritual foil for neo-liberalism
University of Canterbury lecturer Dr Josephine Varghese said Seymour’s Ram temple comments were more likely a reflection of his lack of knowledge on global affairs, rather than a conscious move to support the Hindu right-wing in India.
“That said, as a minister of the New Zealand government, he has a responsibility to be aware of the details and context of events he participates in,” she added.
Varghese, who was born in the Indian state of Kerala, said the temple’s consecration was a culmination of nearly 100 years of Hindu nationalist politics in the country and was in ways the modern outworking of India’s colonial past.
“The Hindu nationalist movement that took formal shape with the founding of RSS in 1925, was, in part, an expected outcome of Britain’s ‘divide and rule’ policy, which aimed at fracturing the unified anti-colonial struggle against the British in India,” she said.
“The early implementation of this policy can be seen in the partition of Bengal in 1905, along the lines of Muslim majority and Hindu majority regions. Britain’s strategy to divide communities along religious lines in India ultimately resulted in disparate political movements with irreconcilable differences, which led to the partition of India, a violent and unsettled chapter in the history of South Asia.”
Varghese said the ascendency of Hindu right-wing forces in post-independence Indian politics quickened in the early 1990s during a period of harsh neo-liberal ‘reforms’, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid playing a key role.
“This was a violent event that changed the communitarian fabric of India. It is important to note how this coincides with India’s liberalisation - opening up of India’s economy to global capitalism - as per loan conditions set by neocolonial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank,” she said.
“When the state fails to deliver people’s basic needs, it creates fertile grounds for identitatarian, nationalist forces, which base their political power on exclusionary narratives about the nation state and blaming the constructed ‘other’ for the nation’s challenges.
“With corporate India fully backing the BJP and vice versa, public discourse has also shifted radically. This is indeed a deeply worrying situation.”
Although an important member of the BRICS-plus trading block led by China and Russia, US ‘forever’ wars in the Middle East and Israel’s ongoing onslaught against Palestinians had also helped shape India’s internal political landscape, she added.
“From a western perspective, it is important to note how western Islamophobia, which reached a fever pitch in the post 9/11 world, has reinforced and supported the anti-Muslim narratives of the ruling party in India.
“As some of the most powerful western nations stand by Israel, actively supporting a genocide carried out by a similar, exclusionary nationalist ideology in Zionism, it is not surprising that Hindu nationalist forces in India feel emboldened to breach key principles of India’s constitution, which include secularism and equality.”
I was at first sceptical of the suggestion that David Seymour acted as he did out of ignorance. However when explaining why he didn't attend the Ratana Pa celebrations this week he is reported to have said ""My understanding is a guy came out as a prophet of his own religious movement in the 1870s. And politicians feel a strange obligation to be there every year. I've never felt that." (Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana was born in 1873 but did not "come out" as a spiritual leader until 1918, leading to the subsequent establishment of the Ratana church). So it would appear that Seymour has little knowledge of Ratana, and his contemptuous dismissal of T W Ratana and the Ratana church is in stark contrast with his gushing praise of Narendra Modi and Hindu extremism. At the end of the day Seymour is both ignorant and contemptuous of our history and our people. His main interest seems to be in finding ways to support the global hegemony of the United States, regardless of the cost in human suffering. That is all rather strange and it is hard to see what future there can be for a politician who scorns his own people.
New Zealand politicians were not slow to recognise that the combination of the new MMP electoral system and increased ethnic diversity - a "super diverse" society as Mai Chen calls it - could be used to create a personal power base. The first to put the idea fully into practice was Peter Dunne MP whose United Future party featured candidates from a range of ethnic minorities which were not well represented in the ranks of the major parties, and for a time Dunne's United Future Party achieved what it set out to do, making Dunne a key figure in parliamentary politics. Dunne's courtship of ethnic minorities was benign, but clearly there is a capacity to work political mischief in an ethnically diverse society with an MMP political system, and David Seymour seems to be doing just that. His proposed Treaty Principles Bill looks like a cynical attempt to capitalize on anti-Maori sentiment among a certain small section of the New Zealand population and his entry into the fray between Hindu extremists and Indian Muslims is another example of what a responsible politician would never do. As the article makes clear, this conflict has international ramifications, with the Five Eyes states and the State of Israel establishing connections with Hindu extremism in an effort to draw India away from the BRICS grouping and into a closer alliance with the Five Eyes which will be anti-Muslim, anti-China and, more problematically for the Indian side, anti-Russian. David Seymour will have no illusions about that. He is a loyal Five Eyes defender and staunchly pro-Israel. That is bad enough in itself, but what makes it worse is his apparent willingness to aggravate divisions within New Zealand's religious and ethnic minorities in pursuit of a neo-colonialist geo-political programme and the electoral vote tally of his own party.