Foreign Policy magazine has published an article talking about that Hindu nationalism has helped spread anti-Islam and anti-Islam around the world, and that multicultural Canada - in particular - finds itself faced with a problem that has driven it.
The article written by journalist Stephen Zo in the magazine explains that the administration of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long been criticized for discriminating against an estimated 200 million Muslims in India, and tensions have escalated between this large minority and Hindu nationalists who support the ruling BJP in recent years, This led to disturbing laws, dangerous harassment and deadly mob violence in India.
Zou added that this hostility has now moved beyond the borders of India, as social media and fanatical Indian nationalists in the diaspora and supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government have spread it worldwide, and this global spread has also contributed to multiplying diplomatic problems for India's allies.
In the Gulf region
The writer says that this also appeared in the Gulf region, where millions of Indian expatriates live, noting that the relations that Modi has carefully established with the Gulf regimes are threatened by this hostility by the Hindu nationalist extremists spread across the Internet. Although much of this hostility is directed at the Muslim population of India, it has also taken the form of social media posts distorting Islam in general, as well as the image of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, on a global scale.
In the West, Hindu hostility and fear of Islam has found an enthusiastic partner among far-right forces, as illustrated by recent developments in multicultural Canada. For example, city councils across Canada voted in April to allow the call to prayer for a few minutes a day during the blessed month of Ramadan, because the Canadian government hopes to foster a sense of inclusion as mosques and other places of worship are closed due to the Corona pandemic. The decision sparked a strong response online, as the far-right there began to suggest that Islam had penetrated Canadian society and politics.
Silence the call to prayer in Canada
Some members of the Canadian Hindu diaspora echoed these sentiments, tweeting with comments saying that broadcasting the call to prayer is part of an "Islamic strategic campaign across the world" and that "loud loudspeakers" cannot be "peaceful". Since then, the speakers have quietly stopped broadcasting the call to prayer.
One of the Canadian Hindu leaders, Ravi Hoda, who is a board member of a regional school in the Toronto area, has published a tweet that resulted in a debate that summarizes hostility to Islam and Muslims by Hindu nationalists. Goats and "laws" obligate all women to cover themselves from head to toe. " When the tweet was investigated by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a war broke out on Twitter. Dozens of accounts supporting the anti-Islam tendency came, often with user names containing a series of eight numbers, a common indicator of fictitious accounts, to defend Hoda, and the local controversy immediately took on an international character.
A wide Hindu network in the world
It is noteworthy that Hoda is a volunteer in the local branch in Canada, a large Hindu-Yemeni nationalist organization that promotes "Hindu nationalism" and has 500 branches in 39 countries around the world and adopts an ideology that says India is a purely Hindu nation, and Moody himself is a permanent member of this organization as well as the majority of his ministers .
The writer says that the spread of right-wing Hindu nationalism in Canada interferes with the efforts of Indian intelligence agencies to "secretly influence" Canadian politicians to support Indian government positions through misinformation and money.
The European Union's "Desinfo" laboratory last fall gave a glimpse of the global spread of Hindu nationalism in a report detailing a network of more than 260 "fake local media outlets in Europe" pro-India spanning 65 countries. These media outlets bear the names of local European cities and towns, but none of them have any real connection to the sites they claim to represent, and all have pro-India and anti-Pakistan content. Every news site has been registered by the Srivastava Group, an Indian company that last year took right-wing European politicians on a trip to Kashmir, where they met Modi.
A strong Hindu lobby in America and the West
This spread of hostility and hatred for Islam and Muslims can also be seen in the efforts of Indian American expatriates and Indian working in the United States who organized the "Moody Hawdy" celebration last fall in the American city of Houston attended by 50 thousand people, including US President Donald Trump and other Republican and Democratic politicians. The aim of the festivity was to strengthen relations between Trump and Modi, as well as to mobilize the diaspora centered in the United States around the Bharatiya Janata Party, thereby enhancing the popularity of the Prime Minister at home.
The writer says that elected officials in Western countries have come to think twice before criticizing India, an already rising and influential force, for fear of angering their constituents. After the massacre of Muslims in Delhi last February, the worst sectarian violence that India has seen in years, Canada has been almost silent. In his talk with his Indian counterpart after the riots, the Canadian foreign minister presented a note of vague concern, which was strongly criticized by the Canadian media. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made no statement, and the four Canadian Indian members of the liberal Trudeau rally expressed similar reluctance to comment, which drew criticism from community organizations.
Likewise, foreign governments remained largely silent last summer when Modi Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim country, was stripped of its own status and placed under a brutal military closure. This has sparked observers who question whether "pressure groups defending Hindu nationalism in the West" have succeeded in their goals in building global influence from A to Z.