Ultra-radical leftist and Hindu hater Dheepa Sundaram is an Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver. Her work focuses on “hate politics, ritual, nationalism, and digital culture in South Asian contexts.” Her pronouns are She/Her/Hers. She is the founding member of the South Asia Scholars Activists Collective (SASAC) along with Audrey Truschke. She was the organising member and speaker at the highly Hinduphobic conference Dismantling Global Hindutva. She claimed it was because of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in Modi’s India that the conference was facing “bomb threats”. She was a member of the left-leaning The Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective A.K.A The Auntylectuals who helped organise Dismantling Global Hindutva. Dheepa Sundaram also serves as Co-Chair of American Academy of Religions North America Hinduism Unit along with fellow Auntylectual, Shana Sippy.
Ken Chitwood, a Lutheran theologian, pastor, and professor at the University of Bayreuth‘s Department of Religion, edited and produced a guide on Hindu nationalism for journalists. All members of the SASAC contributed to this guide, in which they describe Hindu nationalism as a “far-right political ideology of Hindu supremacy…Also known as Hindutva”. According to the guide Hindu nationalism/Hindutva’s core objective is to transform India, “a constitutionally secular state, into a Hindu Rashtra (nation) where some Indians will be more equal than others”.
In an interview with Quint, Dheepa Sundaram defended the need for a Hindutva Harassment Field Manual saying, it’s “intended specifically for those who are suffering bullying, harassment and hate from Hindutva extremists to offer support, protocols, procedures, resources for responding to administrators, deans, students, as well as the general public”.
Dheepa Sundaram in “Hinduphobia is a smokescreen for Hindu nationalists” as part of the Auntylectuals group, argues “Hindutva is a political movement that claims that only Hindus can be legitimate citizens of India, excluding India’s thriving Muslim, Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities.” They further write that Hindus faced no persecution, which makes them use the term “Hinduphobia” as a smokescreen that “co-opts the language we use as social justice activists to challenge racism, white supremacy, casteism and Islamophobia, even as Hindu nationalists claiming victim status troll and threaten South Asian studies and Hindu studies scholars.” According to them, Hindus use the classic tools of fascism – Hinduphobia, violent Hindutva rhetoric, misinformation and fear.
In “Hindutva’s threat to academic freedom” Dheepa Sundaram, as part of SASAC, calls for the recognition of Hindutva as a political hate ideology that is distinct from Hinduism. She argues that Hindutva has “been instrumental in transforming India’s once pluralistic and secular democracy into an ethnonationalist state defined by Hindu supremacy and human rights violations.” The authors unwittingly agree that they want to gate-keep India’s history, preventing Hindus from seeking out India’s true history. “Such hate seeks to undermine our genuine, nuanced research, which presents a vision of South Asian history, religions and cultures as multifaceted and pluralistic. Our scholarship undercuts Hindutva’s project to remake India and Indian history.”
As a speaker at the 2021 Dismantling of Global Hindutva Conference, Dheepa Sundaram remarked that “Devout Hindus want to create discrimination in society and establish ‘Hindu Rashtra’” and that the “Indian media serves the RSS version of Hindutva.” She also praised several ultra-leftist civil rights organisations in America for organising Congressional briefings on the dangers of Hindutva to democracies across the world. Moreover, she went on to equate Hindutva with Zionism and White Supremacy. In another instance, Dheepa Sundaram linked Yoga, Hinduism and Namaste with the riots at Capitol Hill on January 6th 2021. In “Namaste nationalism: Yoga, whiteness and extremism on Jan. 6” Dheepa Sundaram wrote of a White supremacist yoga practitioner ” offering practising yoga and claiming to be shaman as evidence that he was not engaged in violence are learned tactics that leverage perceptions of Asians as inherently peaceful.” Note throughout the article Dheepa Sundaram attributes Yoga to Asia.
In 2022 Dheepa Sundaram wrote “The neocolonial futurism of US Hindutva” in which she objects to Hindus using the term “decolonisation” as an anti-colonial movement as “such efforts undermine anti-racist solidarity and de-colonial efforts in the US and transnational contexts to promote a neocolonial Hindutva futurity.” She describes Hindu nationalism or Hindutva as “the political ideology of Hindu nativism and exclusivity that recasts the multi-ethnic, multi-faith Indian subcontinent as a homeland for Hindus.” Additionally, she posits that Hindus invoke decolonisation “to inoculate themselves against charges of discrimination” against caste-based and anti-Muslim violence. According to Dheepa Sundaram, “the neocolonial futurism of Hindutva co-opts this language to promote a vision of Hindu majoritarianism that profits from a mythologized past in which casteism, anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-Blackness, and other discriminatory practices endemic to Hindu communities are the result of outside forces that have the goal of undermining Hindu values, culture, and Indian political and economic independence.”
In a Muckrack attributed article “Invisibilizing Hindu terrorism through the “War on Terror” “Dheepa Sundaram co-authored the article with Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California Hajar Yazdiha, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Texas Austin Blanca Ramirez, Stanford University’s Islamic Studies scholar Anna Bigelow, the authors argue that Hindu nationalists have appropriated the Western Islamophobic “War on terror” thus “invisiblizing” Hindu terrorism that seeks to persecute Muslims in India. According to them, persecution is “racializing Muslims as more masculine and violent than subservient and effeminate Hindus,” to present Muslims as “medieval foreign invaders to the country” to “problematically and singularly” blame them for the Partition of India in 1947, to “prevent Muslim refugees like Ahmadis, Afghans, Rohingyas, and internally displaced Kashmiris from getting citizenship and equitable access to asylum in India as they flee persecution and conflict. ” They go on to lie that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) “will also expel and expunge India’s very own population of overwhelmingly poor and illiterate Muslims, who would be made to produce documents to prove their ancestry on the lands they have lived for centuries.”
Further, they say that the Indian courts of law are also hands-in-glove with Hindus that refuse to “recognize that Muslims can be victims of terrorism from non-Muslim perpetrators”. They say that Muslims are treated as terrorists in Indian courts for calling for “cutting off the roads to keep the army at bay” which was “to protect themselves from being thrown into abysmal detention centers,”. Writing on the 14th February 2019 Pulwama terror attack that resulted in the death of 40 Indian Army soldiers, the authors say the case is disputed as “international investigations of the case dispute any conclusive evidence over who was responsible for the incident.” This again is a blatant lie to cover up Islamic terrorism as Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility for the attack. America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) helped Indian counterparts to establish Jaish-e-Mohammed’s role in the terror attack. The authors also lie that “Modi came to power as a Prime Minister in 2014 in India after he was accused of being complicit in the Gujarat Massacre of 2002 that killed over a thousand Muslims by the government’s own conservative estimates.” At the time of this article, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was acquitted in all cases regarding his administration’s complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots. A prominent left activist was later charged with fabricating evidence to implicate Modi and plotted for this death sentence.
In 2023 writing on abortion and Hindutva “Ironic Progress: The Hindu Right’s Expansion of Abortion Access” Dheepa Sundaram says “Hindu perspectives on abortion rights in India are directly related to the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) project to establish a Hindu state….that reproduces the cisgender, heteronormative, Brahmanical patriarchy of Hindu majoritarianism.” She criticises the Indian government’s description of a family consisting of “biological males” and “biological females” reinforces “the militant Hindutva view that India is a nation of and for caste-privileged Hindus alone.” She says the Hindu right uses abortion “as a tool to shape Indian society through an upper-caste) Hindu lens.” By drawing parallels between Hindutva, Nazism, Fascism and White Supremacy, Dheepa Sundaram says “Hindutva policy positions are rooted in a vision of the traditional nuclear family and Brahmanical Hindu values”. In conclusion she says Hindutva’s view on abortion and access to abortion should be seen like this: “aborting caste-privileged Hindu babies is bad, while terminating the pregnancies of non-Hindus (read: Muslims) is good for population control.”
In 2022 speaking, on the Jamat-e-Islami’s front, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) platform on caste, 17 civil rights organisations organised a Congressional briefing on the threat of caste in the United States, “Caste Protections are Under attack in the United States, Professor Dheepa Sundaram introduces herself as “as a dominant caste, South Asian American woman, from a Hindu background, who is cis-gendered, able-bodied, and an assistant professor at a prominent institution in the US, I hold several privileges including those of class, caste, and profession.” She makes a case for caste as it is “a social, cultural and political hierarchy that continues to proliferate in South Asian and Hindu communities both within and outside the Indian sub-continent.” She further says “caste is cultural violence that must be addressed through civil rights protections Varna and jati are found in many brahminical Hindu texts such as the Vedas, Laws and Manu and Bhagavad Gita.” According to her “privilege and protection are intersectional and zero sum”.
In an article for Religion News Service Dheepa Sundaram and her SASAC colleague, Simran Jeet Singh, “Why Cal State’s new caste discrimination policy is a critical step“, argued in favour of adding “caste” to California State’s discriminatory policy. They stated, “As scholars and practitioners of South Asian religions, we both continue to wrestle with our caste privilege by naming this privilege and working to dismantle the caste discrimination we witness in our communities.” The authors referenced the Equality Lab’s caste survey as evidence of caste issues in the US. However, critics have questioned the scientific validity of the survey. Hindu American Foundation firmly opposed the study calling it “misdirected at Hindus”. Toward the end of their article, the authors state “Recognition of casteism in the South Asian diaspora is important because of what it signals to these communities: They might be racialized and minoritized by virtue of their ethnicity, but they can still have privilege and oppress others based on other identities they hold.”
George Soros-funded, Canadian-Pakistani Vice Media’s coverage on “Hindu Extremism” titled “A New Brand of Hindu Extremism is Going Global | Decade of Hate” requires the viewer to log into their Google account to watch. The video has significant amounts of propaganda as noted in our X handle. Dheepa Sundaram states that “the violence the rhetoric tells us there is a growing support for Hindutva ideology within the US”. She comments that “India’s democracy is under threat and I would argue that India is a global threat”.
During a webinar titled “Understanding the Globalisation of Hindu Nationalism” at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, located within Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Dheepa Sundaram discussed the Dismantling of Global Hindutva Conference. She noted that Hindus online “tried to push to talk about Hinduism as Hindutva and this is part of the Hindutva futurism push that any criticism of Hindutva is necessarily an attack on Hindus.” Hindus on Campus compiled a video featuring speakers from the conference who criticized Hinduism and equated it with Hindutva. In this context, Dheepa Sundaram herself inaccurately claimed that Hindu festivals, such as Durga Puja, are tied to caste oppression.
While discussing the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, Sundaram suggested that laws addressing domestic violence and protections for the LGBTQ+ community were already in place in Kashmir prior to the abrogation. This assertion is misleading, as around 800 central laws of India, including those regarding domestic violence, the Right to Education, the prohibition of child marriage, and protections for marginalized groups, were not applicable in Kashmir. Furthermore, she falsely stated that during the violence in Leicester, Hindus “organized themselves to march through the streets of Leicester, chanting Hindu nationalist war cries before physically attacking Muslims on sight which startled the wider UK public.” Dheepa Sundaram also mischaracterised the nature of the violence, claiming it escalated due to “misinformation from both sides and was not specifically directed against any one group”. She drew a parallel between white nationalists and Hindutva, comenting that both share two common interests: “anti-queer politics and anti-Muslim politics,” and support for an “ethnic nation-state, with a need for a homeland for a particular group.”
We captured some of Dheepa Sundaram’s posts before she locked her X profile.
STOP HINDU HATE ADVOCACY NETWORK 