By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Nov 19 2007 (IPS)

Last July, a 35-year-old Indian American financial services executive was visiting Lake Tahoe in the San Francisco Bay Area with his fiancée and her cousin. As the group walked along the beach, a couple approached and called the women “Indian sluts and whores”.

When the victims confronted them, the two local residents responded with a volley of racial slurs, including “Indian garbage”, “terrorists”, and “relatives of Osama bin Laden”. As they walked away, the pair followed them, maintaining their verbal assault and then brutally attacking the man.

The couple, Joseph and Georgia Silva, is now facing felony assault charges with a hate crime enhancement that could increase the sentence if they are found guilty.

There are no official statistics on anti-Hindu hate crimes in the United States. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Hate Crime report does not have separate numbers for Hindu victims. They are instead counted in the “anti-other religions” category.

However, an IPS Lexis Nexis search of the last 10 years found eight high-profile cases of hate crimes against Hindus.

“Many of them go unnoticed,” Ishani Chowdhury, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a human rights group providing a voice for the two-million-member Hindu American community, told IPS.

In a report published in February titled “Hyperlink to Hinduphobia: Online Hatred, Extremism and Bigotry Against Hindus”, HAF found that websites promoting religious hatred and intolerance towards Hindus and Hinduism are proliferating.

The 52-page report argues that exposing online hate-speech is a crucial first step in combating a major factor behind prevalent negative stereotypes of Hinduism.

The foundation traces the origins of online religious hate and bigotry, and lists 37 such websites, many of them Christian sites with harmless sounding names like familybible.org, mission1.org, CBN.com, but others with openly derogatory titles, such as exposingsatanism.org, demonbuster.com and religion-cults.com.

According to statistics provided in the report, “demonic” and “satanic” are the terms most commonly used today to describe Hinduism by numerous anti-Hindu websites easily accessible on the Internet.

Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest spiritual traditions. From its emphasis on non-violence and respect for all living entities, to its introduction of practices such as yoga and meditation, Hinduism has had a great impact on the wider world.

But the report points out that through the spread of inaccurate and malicious content over the Internet, online readers are too often taught that the deities Hindus worship are demonic figures and that Hindu beliefs and practices are morally degrading. Hindus are portrayed as a condemned people destined for hell, even as their lasting contributions in science, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine are appropriated and separated from their source. The religion is falsely described as a racist construct and such social evils as untouchability, female infanticide, and bride-burning are conflated with Hinduism.

Despite considerable efforts by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), the American Jewish Committee and others such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre in combating online hatred, there has been scant focus on hate sites against Hindus.

Perhaps the sole previous effort was a collaboration between the SWC and the Hindu American Foundation, an effort which resulted in the inclusion of websites promoting hatred against Hindus in the SWC’s annual online hate report, “Digital Hate and Terrorism 2005.”

“The proliferation of websites promoting religious hatred is an unfortunate consequence of the universality of access to the Internet,” said Vinay Vallabh, lead author of the report, and member of the foundation’s executive council.

The foundation wanted to create awareness about this problem and that was the primary reason for releasing this report, Chowdhury told IPS.

“Many Americans have no contact with Hindu Americans, because most Hindus have settled in urban areas. For those people the Internet is the primary source of information about different cultures and people. And a lot of people in the United States end up with misconceptions about Hinduism. These misconceptions are then used to attack not only groups but also individuals,” said Chowdhury.

The attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 also led to a long-term spike in hate crimes against Hindus and South Asians in general. According to the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, there were 507 bias-motivated hate crimes against Asian-Americans in 2001, a 23 percent increase over 2000.

After 2001, a coalition of civil rights, educational and religious groups submitted comments to the Department of Justice recommending that the FBI include in the “Religion” section a line for “anti-Sikh” and “anti-Hindu”.

In some cases, Hindus are confused with Muslims. For example, in 2003, Saurabh Bhalerao, a 24-year-old Indian graduate student in Massachusetts who had a part-time job delivering pizza, was robbed, beaten, burned with cigarettes, stuffed in a trunk and stabbed twice before being dumped along a road in an attack that police and community leaders described as a hate crime. The suspects apparently mistook Bhalerao, who survived, for a Muslim, screaming comments like “go back to Iraq” as they assaulted him.

In his foreword to the report, Prof. Jeffrey Long, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, wrote, “Though it is less well-known in this country, anti-Hindu bigotry is every bit as ugly and dangerous as anti-Semitism or racism, and every bit as present on the Internet. As we all know, murderous rampages have been inspired by anti-Semitic and racist websites. And it is not necessary for a website to exhort its readers to actual, physical violence for it to lead to such violence.”

Drawing from her own experience, Chowdhury explained that as a Hindu growing up in the United States, she faced a lot of misconceptions about her religion.

“I am alarmed that even today a lot of people have a distorted view of my faith,” she said, adding that perceptions about Hinduism are not always negative but that skewed ideas can cause severe trauma among people, especially children.

HAF’s legal department is now trying to work with Internet Service Providers to see if the owners of hate sites can be brought to justice for violating their contracts. Contracts with ISPs usually state that a website cannot be used to spread hate speech and ideas. “But this has to be done on a case-by-case basis and it will take a long time,” said Chowdhury.

While past incidents such as the Dotbusters (a street gang by that name started attacking and threatening Hindu Americans in New Jersey in 1987 and killed a 30-year-old Indian immigrant bank manager, Navroze Mody, while chanting “Hindu, Hindu!”) and one in which a Minnesota temple was vandalised in 2006 are fresh in the minds of Indian Americans, many in the community were still shocked to read the results of the February report, Chowdhury said.

“It’s alarming for a community because when you see something like these denigrating websites, you wonder if this is the way the majority of the people view your faith and that is a scary thought,” she said.

Excerpt: