Hindu Nationalism

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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

The web has seduced us — and by us I mean me — into a life of 24-7 journalistic overload. For me, that can mean running out of bandwidth before getting to a story that actually deserves close attention. My limited brain can digest only so much before it shorts out.

Even a strung-out news junkie such as myself needs to log off every so often. Self-styled media literacy is as addictive as blissful ignorance.

Religion coverage has suffered greatly in this new journalistic reality. We’re provided an abundance of attention-grabbing stories about clergy hypocrisy, largely involving sexual, material or political excess. We get too few stories that connect the data points of everyday religious complexity that allows us to understand issues more deeply.

Here are two recent stories that struck me as worthy of the attention that’s too often withheld. One involves China, the other India. The only connection between them is that they both reveal deep truths about the religious reality of the societies they report on.

Let’s start with China, the more straightforward of the two stories.

It comes from Foreign Policy and ran under the intriguing, but incomplete, headline: “The Chinese Communist Party Is Scared of Christianity.”

Why incomplete? Because as the writer notes, it’s not just Christianity that scares China’s totalitarians rulers. It’s all unauthorized official thinking, religious or otherwise.

Did the headline mention Christianity alone because editors figured that would play best with their mostly western readership? Is this another example of algorithmic journalism?


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Air India goes veggie; The New York Times and India's The Hindu play it way, way differently

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Sometimes a story grabs my interest simply because of its timing. That’s the case this week with a New York Times piece out of India that I came across just a day prior to flying back to the United States following several weeks in Israel and Greece. It's about an Air India decision to serve vegetarian meals only to coach passengers on all its domestic flights.

So what's this beef all about? (Bad pun, I know. I promise I'll make up for it below.)

Try humanity’s Achilles’ heel, the often toxic mix of religious identity mixed with politics -- either real or imagined -- that accounts for so much of what we think of as religion news. This story ties together some powerful symbols.

About to endure two more coach flights from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Washington, D.C. -- the last of six international flights booked for this trip abroad -- this story felt as if it was written just for me.

Perhaps that's also because I always order the Hindu vegetarian meal on international flights no matter the airline. I’ll say more about why, further down.

Here’s the top of the Times piece.

NEW DELHI -- Coming from some other debt-ridden airline, it might have been shrugged off as just another service cutback. But not this time: When Air India announced on Monday that coach passengers on its domestic flights would now be offered only vegetarian meals, the move provoked an uproar on social media.
G. P. Rao, a spokesman for the government-owned airline, said the change was made a week ago strictly to reduce waste and cut costs. But what people eat can be a sectarian flash point in India, especially since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party took power.
Many members of the Hindu majority are vegetarians, while the country’s Muslims and some other minorities eat meat. So the airline’s action was seen by many as discriminatory and part of a wave of religious nationalism sweeping the country.
“Only veg food on Air India,” Madhu Menon, a Bangalore-based chef and food writer, wrote on Twitter. “Next, flight attendants to speak only Hindi. After that, stand for national anthem before flight take-off.”

The story next offered a defense of Air India’s scheme (in Indian English, “scheme” loses its negative connotation; it's used as Americans might use “plan” or “proposal”).


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Hindu Nationalism, Indian Christian persecution and the global rise in right-wing populism

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Hindu Nationalism, Indian Christian persecution and the global rise in right-wing populism

Right-wing populism is the global political backlash du jour. Cultural, religious and ethnic competition are the prime causes. They, in turn, are directly traceable to the swift and societal-altering changes flowing from economic and demographic globalization.

India -- home to the world's second-largest population, more than 1.25 billion people, just short of 80 percent of them Hindu -- certainly has not escaped this trend.

At play in India is a slow decline in the Hindu population growth at a time when the Muslim population of about 14 percent is growing. That's a scary proposition for Indian Hindus, who have been in conflict with their Pakistani Muslim neighbors since the 1947 partition.

That, plus a Hindu nationalist backlash against India's increasing secularization and an overall Western cultural tilt, also thanks to globalization, have produced the right-wing backlash that's comparable to what we are also seeing in a host of nations -- from the Philippines, across Europe, to our own United States.

Read this Times of India analysis that explains the connection between Indian right-wing populism and what's happening elsewhere.

Indian Christians -- who for Hindu nationalists become conflated with Western inroads into traditional Indian Hindu culture -- are caught up in the larger Indian Hindu-Muslim competition, even though they account for only about 2.3 percent of the population.

I've written about all this before, including one of my earliest GetReligion posts that focused on Hindu criticism of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, perhaps still better-known as Mother Teresa.

So why rehash the above info?


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