On 28 June, I woke up to the news that my name was plastered across the Indian press. Many media outlets including Hindustan Times, Zee News, News18 and Bharat Times ran the headline, “Who is Sunita Viswanath?” I received concerned calls and messages from friends and family all around the world. Our family WhatsApp group, mostly people based in India, shut down any political conversation, and some members quietly left.
I am a New York-based human rights activist, the co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, an organisation that mobilises the Hindu community in the US to reclaim our religion from the Hindu nationalist ideology of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I co-led protests in New York and Washington, DC, during Modi’s recent United States visit. I am used to hateful remarks by right-wing Hindus. But this was a new low.
At a televised press conference on 28 June at the new BJP headquarters, minority affairs minister Smriti Irani held up a picture of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi giving a talk at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, with me sitting a few chairs away, my face circled in ink, and asked, “Why is Mr Rahul Gandhi hobnobbing with those who are funded by George Soros?” and “Is it true that Shri Gandhi met with Sunita Viswanath during his trip to the United States of America?” She then alluded to nebulous claims that philanthropist George Soros plans to destroy the Republic of India. All these wild accusations emerged because of a picture of me attending a DC town hall with Rahul Gandhi for about 50 India policy experts.
The photograph Irani shared was also tweeted by a BJP leader with the allegation that I am “nothing but a proxy of George Soros, who has committed $1 Bn to meddle in India’s internal affairs, through a network of Opposition leaders, Think Tanks, journalists, lawyers and activists.” In the same tweet, Malviya also claimed that the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), one of our close allies, is a proxy for Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party based in Pakistan, and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. Somehow, George Soros and the ISI, according to Malviya’s insinuations, have come together, through me, to destroy India.
In the US, we are quite familiar with antisemitic conspiracy theories by the far-right portraying Soros as a master manipulator and villain. Malviya’s tweet refers to a report by the Hindu nationalist platform, Disinfo Labs, which alleges that my Jewish husband and I are the perfect puppet couple to destroy Israel and India. Soros is the Indian Right’s new favourite bogeyman, with the BJP sharing a doctored video depicting Rahul Gandhi as a literal puppet of Soros.
After Smriti Irani declared that I am a Soros agent, the Indian press reported it as fact. My uncle asked his son, “Have you heard of a man called George Soros? He is destroying India!” Indians around the world have swallowed the lies of the mainstream Indian media, hook, line and sinker. A prominent Indian journalist wrote to me, “The country has gone mad.”
To set the record straight, I neither hobnobbed with Rahul Gandhi, nor am I an agent of George Soros. My organisation helped organise some events for Gandhi to meet diaspora audiences, because we want to encourage community discussions about democracy in India. And while I do not personally know Soros, I have known many staff members of his Open Society Foundation over the decades, and I hold him in high esteem for his lifelong contribution to protecting democracy all over the world. His recent statements about India do not sound like the words of someone set on destroying the country. He echoed my own heartfelt wish: “I may be naïve, but I expect a democratic revival in India.”
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Fighting an army of Hindu nationalists
On one level, my husband and I are being used as cannon fodder in the BJP’s attempts to distract from Gandhi’s visit to the Northeastern Indian state of Manipur, which is enduring months of ethnic violence under the BJP’s watch. But on another level, I’m being targeted because I, a practising Hindu woman, am mobilising a positive, Hindu alternative to Hindu nationalism.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui faced vicious backlash from Hindu nationalists because she asked Prime Minister Modi a question about human rights at a joint press conference with President Joe Biden. She did what any American journalist would do in a press conference. Modi’s allies, who rarely see the Prime Minister face journalists, lashed out at Siddiqui for doing her job. After a coordinated, Islamophobic, and misogynistic campaign against her, Siddiqui was forced to post about her family’s history and dispel rumours that she was anti-Indian. The Wall Street Journal issued a statement defending Siddiqui, the White House denounced the attacks, and the White House Correspondents’ Association condemned this targeted hate.
Siddiqui and I are not alone. Rana Ayyub, Thenmozhi Soundarajan, Leena Manimekalai, Aatish Taseer, Kshama Sawant, Rep. Ro Khanna, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal are some Indians and Indian Americans who have landed in the crosshairs of Hindu nationalists. But the most vicious attacks are saved for Indian American Muslims and those who experience casteism. My colleague Tazeem Ansari of IAMC was also named by Irani in connection with Gandhi’s visit. He has been unfairly maligned as a supporter of Pakistan’s 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. Prominent Indian American Muslim activist Amina Kausar was one of many Indian Muslim women who were put up for a demeaning virtual slave “auction” in the sexually explicit Bulli Bai app. When Leena Manimekalai released a poster of her movie, where the Goddess Kali holds an LGBTQ flag and smokes a cigarette, her family and collaborators received threats from more than 200,000 accounts online, as she later told The Guardian.
Hindu nationalist smear campaigns are a form of digital transnational repression, according to Freedom House. The vicious attacks are designed to stop political dissent abroad and accompany an array of tactics to close civic space in India. The Indian government actively jails critics, raids free media offices, shuts down civil society organisations in India, and stifles dissent abroad through vicious online attack and doxxing, and in some cases, denial of entry to India.
The international community has presented fierce criticisms of Modi and his allies. So, to scare off these dissenters, the BJP deploys an internet army to create a toxic deluge of hate against critics of the Indian government. In the US, Hindu nationalist organisations, like HinduAction, organise their bases to amplify this hate. The Hindu American Foundation sued my colleagues and me for defamation after we spoke to the press about the organisation’s ties to Hindu nationalists. (Their attempt to use American courts to silence us was expensive for them and unsuccessful.)
The hatred is reinforced by official actions. When Rep. Pramila Jayapal condemned human rights violations in Kashmir, she faced fierce backlash online and the Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar, canceled an official meeting with her. Journalist Rana Ayyub has faced so much judicial harassment, alongside online harassment, that the UN issued a statement in support of her. American lawmakers tell us that they’re afraid to speak out more forcefully against the Indian government because they will face targeted abuse online.
We may feel trapped as the Indian state and allied institutions circle around us. But we must not be intimidated by the Indian government and its social media army. Because Indian Americans don’t face the physical dangers that minorities and human rights defenders are exposed to in India, we feel an obligation to use our relative safety to keep speaking out on behalf of a country and people we love. We must band together across faith, gender, class, caste, politics, and geography to defend the Indian Republic against the scourge of Hindu nationalism, and to defend inclusive democracy and human rights everywhere in the world.
Sunita Viswanath is the executive director and co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights. She tweets @SunitaSunitaV. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)