India: Meet the 'Internet Hindus'
By Jason Overdorf
June 19 2012 at 9:32 AM
New Delhi: Internet Hindus are like swarms of bees, Indian television anchor Sagarika Ghose tweeted in 2010. They come swarming after you."
The "Internet Hindus" Ghose refers to actually, she coined the term are right-wing bloggers and tweeters who seem to follow her every move,
pouncing on any mention of hot-button issues like Muslims or Pakistan.
Liberal journalists and netizens sympathized with Ghose's exasperation. But for right-wingers, it was like throwing gasoline on the fire. Since Ghose's tweet, Hindu nationalists and other conservatives opposed to the Congress Party of Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have, if anything, multiplied and grown more organized embracing Ghose's derogatory term and making it their own.
Today there are perhaps as many as 20,000 so-called Internet Hindus, many tweeting as often as 300 times a day, according to a rough estimate by one of the community's most active members.
You will find thousands with similar sounding IDs [to mine], a Twitter user who goes by the handle @internet_hindus said in an anonymous chat interview. Some [others] prefer to openly do it with their own personal IDs."
Freedom of speech
Internet Hindus, largely because of their numbers and influence, find themselves smack in the middle of India's censorship debate. There are signs the country's growing problem with controversial online content has already eroded legislators' commitment to free speech.
In April 2011, India added new rules to the 2000 Information Technology Act that required websites to remove content authorities deemed objectionable within 36 hours of being told do so. The amendment specifically targeted allegedly
[Congress party] supporters tend to shout 'Troll' early and leave, said Samit, a 37-year-old marketing consultant based in Mumbai. The reason, in my opinion, is simple. Nationalists tend to have stronger views and are more assured about
I want the Hindu dignity of India to be restored, said another 23-year-old Internet Hindu who has yet to join any political organization, in a representative comment. We've had a glorious past but the Muslim invaders, the Mughals and the Brits destroyed our sense of pride. After independence, the [Congress] continued with that policy. It continued with laws and acts drafted by the British and never bothered to frame new laws which incorporated the spirit of Bharat [India]. It continued with blatant Muslims appeasement while Hindus were reduced to second-grade citizens in their own land.
At various points in history, Hindutva and the RSS sort of like Boy Scouts of America crossed with the Ku Klux Klan have proven problematic. One of RSS's chief ideologues, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, expressed open admiration for Adolf Hitler's ideas of racial (or in this case, ethnic) purity in We or Our Nation Defined, one of the founding texts of Hindutva, in 1938.
Kar sevaks or volunteers inspired by the ideology tore down the 16th Century Babri Mosque in 1992, sparking nationwide Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of the Bajrang Dal an organization affiliated with the RSS and known for beating up couples on Valentine's Day burned to death an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons in 1999. And breakaway Hindutva extremists have been accused of perpetrating terrorist attacks on Indian mosques and Muslim shrines in 2007 and 2008.
That said, however, few, if any, of today's Internet Hindus profess support for such extreme manifestations of the dogma.
[Muslims] are equal citizens of this country. This country belongs as much to them as much to me and everyone else. As long as they don't indulge in terrorism and/or forced conversions, I have nothing against them, said Suresh Nakhua, a BJP member who attends RSS functions.
According to an informal online survey, the Internet Hindus are mostly young, educated professionals as one might expect in a medium that requires a computer and a strong command of English. More than half of them are under 30 years old, 80 percent have undergraduate or graduate degrees, and two-thirds of them earn more than $10,000 a year putting them on the high end of India's middle class.
Moreover, in branding them as fanatics and trolls, more liberal or secular Indians risk missing just how mainstream their anger has become.
Why is it if there's such vocal Hindutva anger among the middle class, English-speaking classes, why don't we get to know it? said Shivam Vij, a blogger with a left-wing political commentary site called Kafila.org. In our English mainstream media, the right wing has very little voice.
India: Meet the 'Internet Hindus' | GlobalPost
