As CoHNA, we reject the caricatures of Hindus as a “bigoted fringe.”
Harvard itself removed the ghoulish image and apologized for insensitivity.
The BAPS case closed in Sept 2025 with zero charges after 4 years of DOJ/FBI probe and the opposition SB403 because U.S. laws already ban discrimination by ancestry/ethnicity; Gov. Newsom agreed.
The article misreads Manusmriti and Purusha Sukta, the British colonial census hardened what was fluid. Many tropes in it echo 19th-century colonialism.
Let’s debate with Veritas, not recycled stereotypes.
The article is written be an ill informed and mis informed individual. It is obvious that the author has a very shallow understanding of Hindu religion and culture. These kinds of articles often hurt the institutions they represent.
This article's central claim collapses on its own opening image. The artwork, "Master of Puppets," was created by Anirudh Sainath (Molee Art), a devout Hindu digital artist, as cover art for his father's book on spirituality. The figure is not "a high-caste figure pulling strings." It is Śrī Kṛṣṇa — God — depicted as the sūtradhāra, the divine puppeteer of the five Pāṇḍavas, a deeply reverential bhakti image rooted in the Gītā (18.61: the Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings, causing them to revolve as if mounted on a machine). The five "marionettes" are Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva. The authors saw a tilak and assumed "Brahmin pulling strings." They mistook God for a caste group. That's the level of theological literacy driving this piece.
The textual case is worse. The article quotes Ṛg Veda 10.90.12 (the Puruṣa Sūkta) and declares it "not a misunderstood metaphor" but "a claim of inherent, ethnic hierarchy." The Puruṣa Sūkta is a cosmogonic hymn describing the entire universe — sun, moon, animals, the Vedas, the cardinal directions — emerging from the sacrifice of the cosmic Puruṣa. Isolating one verse about social groups from a hymn about the origin of the physical cosmos is a basic exegetical error. More importantly, this is the ONLY hymn in the entire Ṛg Veda mentioning a fourfold division. The word "śūdra" appears exactly once in 10,600+ verses. If the varṇa system were the foundation of Vedic religion, its near-total absence from the rest of the Ṛg Veda would be inexplicable.
Meanwhile, the Ṛg Veda itself shows fluidity. In 9.112, the poet says: "I am a poet, my father is a physician, my mother grinds grain." Multiple occupations, one family, no hint of birth-locked status. Kavaṣa Ailūṣa, a Ṛg Vedic ṛṣi, was the son of a dāsī (slave woman). Viśvāmitra was born a Kṣatriya king and became a brahmarṣi through tapas — impossible under a rigid birth-based system.
The article calls the Manusmṛti "the primary law book of this tradition." It is one of 20+ Dharmaśāstra texts whose authority has been contested within Hinduism for centuries. Ambedkar publicly burned it in 1927 — celebrated by Hindu reformers, not condemned as heresy — because Hinduism has no single binding legal code. The Bhagavad Gītā (4.13) says varṇa is based on guṇa and karma, not birth. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa (7.11.35) says a person's varṇa should be determined by conduct, not lineage. And in the Mahābhārata's Vana Parva (3.177-178) — the very epic whose characters are in the artwork — Yudhiṣṭhira is asked directly, "Who is a Brāhmaṇa?" He answers: conduct alone determines status. If a Śūdra has noble qualities, he is a Brāhmaṇa; if a Brāhmaṇa lacks them, he is a Śūdra. "Na yoniḥ nāpi saṃskāro na śrutaṁ na ca saṁtatiḥ / kāraṇāni dvijatvasya vṛttam eva tu kāraṇam" — neither birth, nor saṃskāra, nor learning, nor lineage is the mark; conduct alone is. That's Dharmarāja himself speaking in the text Hindus call the fifth Veda.
The method here — cherry-picking the harshest legal texts and declaring them the essence of a religion — could destroy any tradition. Leviticus 25:44-46 authorizes hereditary slavery. Exodus 21:20-21 says a master who beats a slave is unpunished if the slave survives a day because "the slave is his money." 1 Samuel 15:3 commands the slaughter of infants. Ephesians 6:5 tells slaves to obey masters "with fear and trembling." Quran 4:3 and 4:24 permit taking slave women as concubines. Surah 9:5 instructs: "Kill the polytheists wherever you find them." Classical fiqh codified slave markets across all four madhāhib.
No serious person reduces Christianity to Leviticus or Islam to Surah 9:5. These are traditions of billions, defined by their spiritual and ethical cores, not by their harshest ancient legal texts. The same courtesy is owed to Hinduism. And defending a community against reductive bigotry is not endorsing historical texts. CAIR opposing Islamophobia doesn't mean endorsing jihad. Jewish groups opposing antisemitic imagery aren't endorsing Deuteronomy 20. Hindu Americans objecting to their faith being caricatured as a slavery cult aren't defending the Manusmṛti. These are the same principle.
On SB 403 — Newsom's own veto message says caste discrimination is already covered under California's existing ancestry protections, which state law mandates be "liberally construed." You can disagree with that legal analysis, but the article doesn't engage with it at all — it just asserts without evidence that the veto was bought by a "Brahminist lobby."
Finally, this is the Harvard Salient — shut down by its own board months ago for publishing material including language echoing a 1939 Hitler speech, internal chats with racial slurs, and unpublished calls for mass executions. Their own board, including Harvey Mansfield, called it "wholly inimical to conservative principles." Publishing an article on relaunch day that labels an entire religious community's civic participation as "radical," "anti-American," and "segregationist" suggests the reform is cosmetic.
Veritas requires reading texts carefully and understanding traditions in their full complexity, not through the worst verses you can find. This article fails on every count.
The incident with the Harvard South Asian Department isn’t an isolated case. CoHNA is not a grassroots Hindu civil rights organization. It is a node in a transnational Hindu nationalist network directly tied to India’s ruling BJP and its ideological parent. Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative formally describes as a supporter of “the discriminatory policies of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party” that has “engaged in campaigns targeting academics and politicians who call attention to the dangers of Hindu nationalism.” The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights’ 2025 report explicitly lists CoHNA as a US-based node of the Sangh Parivar, the global organizational network of the RSS, the paramilitary organization that founded the BJP. Public PAC filings further document that CoHNA’s Vice President runs the Hindus of Georgia PAC, which received approximately 40% of its total funding from donors with verified OFBJP and RSS involvement, and the Overseas Friends of BJP is itself registered with the DOJ as a foreign agent of the Modi government.
This is not CoHNA’s first time suppressing academic discourse. In 2021, CoHNA coordinated a campaign sending over 1.3 million emails to more than 53 universities demanding they withdraw from the “Dismantling Global Hindutva” academic conference, while scholars received death and rape threats serious enough to force some to withdraw. Al Jazeera, Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, and The Print all documented this campaign. CoHNA has also been caught citing Disinfo Lab, which the Washington Post exposed as a front operation run by RAW, India’s own intelligence agency, in attacks against American critics. When Harvard apologized and removed an image because this network called it offensive, it did not act inclusively. When an institution with the motto Veritas apologizes and removes an image because a foreign-government-aligned lobby called it offensive, it has not acted inclusively.
This response, while detailed on organizational genealogy, does not engage with the substance of my original comment. My argument concerned the article's theological and textual claims. Nothing here addresses any of that, because the article's failures on those grounds are independent of whoever objected to the image. That is a separate discussion. But the sources cited here deserve scrutiny of their own. The Georgetown Bridge Initiative is housed in the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, established with a $20 million gift from a Saudi prince. Its institutional mandate is the study of Islamophobia — a valuable mission — but it possesses no demonstrated scholarly expertise in intra-Hindu theology or Hindu American community organizations. The Hindu American Foundation documented factual errors in Bridge's "fact sheets" concerning Hindu organizations and submitted a detailed rebuttal to Georgetown's president and provost in June 2021. Georgetown never responded. Citing Bridge's characterizations of CoHNA as though they represent the findings of a disinterested academic body is not the neutral sourcing it appears to be.
The specific claims you raise — CoHNA's Vice President running the Hindus of Georgia PAC, the 40% donor overlap with OFBJP and RSS affiliates, and the Disinfo Lab connection — closely track the original reporting of Pieter Friedrich, who has published this precise chain of argument on his Substack and in testimony before Georgia city councils. The provenance of that source matters. Friedrich is a former Christian fundamentalist who wrote in 2003 that "the modern-day nation of Israel is cursed by God" and that "there is no longer any such a thing as a Jew in the Biblical sense, unless by 'True Jews' we mean Christians." He has documented anti-LGBTQ writings from the same period. He is closely associated with the Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI), whose founding director Bhajan Singh Bhinder was the subject of a U.S. Customs Service undercover investigation for attempting to purchase C-4 plastic explosives, M-16s, AK-47s, grenade launchers, and Stinger missiles for the Khalistan separatist movement — a deal Bhinder ultimately backed out of. Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. publicly condemned Friedrich's rhetoric outside Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi's office, calling it "racist, bigoted, incendiary rhetoric that does not belong in our political or civic discourse." Whether or not you are drawing directly from Friedrich's work, the analytical architecture you have presented — Georgetown quote, Rutgers report, Georgia PAC donors, OFBJP foreign-agent registration, Dismantling Global Hindutva emails, Disinfo Lab — is his construction. That context is relevant when evaluating the framing.
On the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference: CoHNA organized an email petition to universities. Email petitions are a standard instrument of civic advocacy. The ACLU runs them, AIPAC runs them, CAIR runs them. Your comment places CoHNA's email campaign and the death threats scholars received in the same paragraph, implicitly connecting them as cause and effect. That is guilt by temporal proximity. Organizing a petition is not sending a death threat. If individuals made criminal threats, they should be prosecuted as individuals. Attributing anonymous criminal conduct to a named organization without evidence of direction is the same logic that has been used to hold Muslim advocacy organizations responsible for extremist acts committed by individuals who happen to share their religion.
The deeper structural problem with your argument is the chain of association itself: CoHNA → PAC donors → OFBJP → BJP → RSS → therefore everything CoHNA says is foreign-government propaganda. This is a guilt-by-association framework with a long and ugly history in American civic life. It was deployed against Japanese Americans in the 1940s, against Jewish Americans through "dual loyalty" accusations, and against Muslim Americans after September 11th. Indian Americans, like every other diaspora community in this country, hold political opinions about their country of origin and organize accordingly. Irish Americans funded causes in Ireland through NORAID for decades. Cuban Americans have shaped U.S. Cuba policy for sixty years. Greek Americans lobby on Cyprus. The existence of diaspora political engagement is not evidence of a foreign-agent conspiracy. It is a normal feature of American pluralism.
None of this, however, is the central point. Even if every claim you have made about CoHNA were correct, the Salient's article would still be wrong. The theological analysis remains incompetent, the image identification remains incorrect, the textual citations remain cherry-picked, and the framework of reducing Hinduism to the Manusmṛti would be recognized immediately as bigotry if applied to any other religious tradition on earth. Organizational critique of CoHNA is a separate conversation. It does not rescue an article that cannot correctly identify the figure in the image it is writing about.
Full disclosure: I was a former writer for the Salient, and a member of the BAPS Swaminarayan temple mentioned in the article.
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I'm not going to comment on other sections of this essay, except for the portion on the DOJ investigation into the Swaminarayan temple in Robbinsville. This is a temple I have visited dozens of times and know quite intimately.
I would expect writers at the Salient to carefully cite mainstream media sources, specifically the New York Times. I gather the author drew most of their facts from the initial NYT piece, but it should come as no surprise that many of these facts are incorrect or exaggerated.
For example, this particular sentence indicates that the writer has never visited the temple: "They discovered workers allegedly confined to a guarded compound."
The temple has always been managed by volunteers drawn from the surrounding community. Describing it as a "guarded compound" is comical once one understands that manning the entrance gate is often a retiree volunteer. There are no armed guards or even a professional security force on the campus. It is open to anyone.
Additionally, what leads you to say the "closure of the case is deeply suspicious" other than the fact that over half of the plaintiffs withdrew their initial complaints? Do you have additional information to prove that the change in plaintiff sentiments was due to "legal coercion"? After all, didn't the 12 plaintiffs themselves claim they were coerced by their initial counsel? Why do you feel confident identifying certain instances of legal coercion over others? Or do the results of this case simply not conform to your priors?
Furthermore, if one conducted additional research, one would also have discovered that BAPS has always condemned caste-based discrimination. In one of our most sacred texts, the Satsang Diksha, penned by our spiritual leader and read faithfully by all members of the sect, one of the first and most prominent verses strictly and clearly condemns any caste-based discrimination. Here is that verse verbatim:
Verse 14-16 (out of 315 total) "All men and women of all castes are forever entitled to satsang, brahmavidya and moksha. Do not attribute notions of superiority or inferiority based on varna. All people should shun their ego based on their caste and serve one another. No one is superior and no one is inferior by birth. Therefore, one should not quarrel based on caste or class and should joyfully practice satsang."
This article highlight a growing trend of lobbyists aiming to sugar coat plainly un-American, un-democratic, and value-degrading practices, and moreover own the narrative. This article’s emphasis on universities and government confirming to truly un-American and dishonest ideals showcase both shyness from harsh truth, and ignoring unpleasant realities veiling being sectarian divides to address these issues of upholding and protecting constitutional rights of each citizen.
I'm half-Dalit and I support the efforts to get rid of these fake anti-caste discrimination bills. I hope you understand that there is discrimination in every society in the world. There is caste discrimination in South Asia just as there is racial discrimination in the West. However, what evidence do you have to say that there is any caste discrimination happening in the USA? Other than a random survey done and a failed Cisco lawsuit, there is no proof of it happening here. Because of crazy people like you and others, a hatred and bias against Hindus is engendered. You have no right to say my community brings un-American values.
Reza, your response relies on several factual errors and logical fallacies that
First, the Cisco case did not “fail.” California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed suit in 2020 and the case was settled in 2023 after significant legal proceedings. It was not dismissed for lack of merit. More importantly, Apple, Google, and Netflix have all independently updated their workplace anti-discrimination policies to explicitly include caste, not because of activists, but because their own internal HR and legal teams documented caste-based incidents happening in American offices. These are corporations with legal liability on the line. They do not update policy over nothing.
Beyond corporate documentation, the Carnegie Endowment’s 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey and Equality Labs’ survey both corroborate that caste consciousness is actively practiced in diaspora communities in the United States. Seattle passed a caste discrimination ordinance in 2023 only after Dalit Americans testified before city council about lived experiences here, not in South Asia. Legislators do not pass laws in response to zero evidence.
Second, your argument that discrimination exists everywhere proves my point, not yours. The United States responded to racial discrimination by passing the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and Title VII. The entire premise of American democratic governance is that we name discrimination, legislate against it, and protect every citizen equally regardless of origin. Arguing that caste discrimination should go unaddressed because “every society has discrimination” is the exact logic that opponents of every civil rights bill in American history have used. It is not a counterargument. It is an argument against civil rights legislation as a concept.
Third, your individual experience does not neutralize documented, systematic data. There are Black Americans who have opposed affirmative action. There are women who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Personal identity does not override empirical evidence, and it does not make the data disappear.
Fourth, opposing caste-based discrimination is not opposing Hinduism. The Carnegie Endowment survey shows the vast majority of American Hindus reject Brahminical caste theology. Conflating civil rights advocacy with religious bigotry is precisely the rhetorical tactic my original comment was referring to. If someone opposed racially discriminatory practices within a specific institution, you would not call that anti-Christian bigotry. The same standard applies here.
My original point stands. When lobbying organizations use religious identity as a shield to obstruct civil rights protections, and when universities and elected officials capitulate to that pressure without engaging the documented evidence, that is a failure of American constitutional values. Nothing in your response disproves that.
As for the typo, A minor typo in an online comment does not touch any of the arguments made. Correcting spelling as a closing move when you cannot refute the substance is not helping you one bit.
I'm tired of non-Dalits and non-Hindus being patronizing and acting like they are our saviors. You don't know anything about Hinduism and the Indian American experience. We do not need your sympathy. You say "universities and elected officials capitulate to that pressure without engaging the documented evidence". Harvard used a demonic portrayal of Lord Krishna wielding skeleton puppets to advertise its Elementary Sanskrit course. Are the efforts to get it removed "Bramhinical"? I am a Dalit. I not a Bramhin. Lord Krishna is not a Brahmin, he's from the cow herder caste. Our God is not a Brahmin or from an upper caste. If your main objection is about caste discrimination, then how dare you support that unflattering portrayal of Hinduism's strongest anti-caste symbol? If Prophet Muhammed was shown that way on an Elementary Arabic class advert, would you not be angry? I know I would. I do not care if there are satirical portrayal of my God on the Internet, but how can I feel included if my professor uses it on a course advertisement. How come you have nothing to say about this? You don't give a damn about Dalits. This is the marginalization I am fighting against: Just because we are a minority community, anyone can say and do anything that offends us -- and when we speak up, we are called casteist because we are Hindu. What crazy double standards?
Also did you even read what the lawsuit was about? In 2023, a California judge had dismissed the claims against the individual managers saying the complaint did not sufficiently show the Dalit engineer was personally discriminated against. The dispute involved a workplace grievance about promotion and compensation that was later framed as caste discrimination. Companies settle for a confidential resolution and avoiding a long trial, not because there was proven discrimination. Anybody can file a lawsuit in court. President Trump has dozens of case pending in court. That says nothing about the merit of those cases. When most of the case is dismissed and the only part of the case left remaining is against Cisco for its general anti-discrimination policies, you know that this has very little to do with caste discrimination per se. A bunch of companies doing something also says nothing about whether there is systematic caste discrimination happening either. These are the same companies that had DEI boards that mandated everyone name themselves they/them on Zoom calls. If you are 'woke' and support that, then why the hell are you spending your time defending the Hilter sympathetic Harvard Salient? You don't even know what side of the political aisle you are on.
Your point on the Carnegie survey tells me that you're probably new to university and academic research in the social sciences. Are you aware of non-random sampling? The Equality Labs survey was not based on a random sample of Indian Americans. The participants self-selected through activist networks and online outreach. The sample does not represent the broader diaspora. The survey relies on self-reported discrimination. The experiences reported cannot be independently validated through the survey itself. Many Indians in the diaspora do not identify strongly with their caste, do not know their caste category, and interpret caste differently. The survey definitely had classification uncertainty in the way it was framed. The findings were then extrapolated beyond the data. I will not buy advocacy-led research. An unrelated but useful comparison is The Sentience Institute's poll that found that 49% of Americans support a ban on factory farming. Is that actually true? I wish it was. Or a Faunalytics Survey that found 71-85% of Americans opposing factory-farm practices like battery cages and gestation crates? I want large peer-reviewed studies and investigative journalism done by reputable news organizations to uncover caste discrimination in the US. None of this has happened yet. Odd, right?
Because you keep bringing up the civil rights movement and foolishly suggest that my logic is against anti-race discrimination, consider this: Identical resumes were run with different names to measure racial bias. Race discrimination was proven to exist. No such study was done for caste discrimination in the USA. Unless I see something like this, I will not support any anti-caste discrimination bills when there are already protections in place against discrimination.
I am tired of people like you trying to say there is a problem when there is not one. I am tired of others looking at me as oppressed and as a victim. We can take care of ourselves and do not need outsiders like yourself making a spectacle of us, while also offending our religious beliefs.
We have a harvard directory where harvard affiliate can check who is a harvard affiliate(you were indeed not on there meaning you are faking your affilation), the fact you dont know this questions everything youve said thus far.
The fact that you look people up on directories says a lot about how creepy you are. I have never felt the need to. You have still not responded to my comment. I can't believe we both go to the same school. If you put two brain cells together, you will realize that my religious name isn’t the same as the legal name used in university records.
Fact checking someone who claims to go to a school is creepy? We do not go to the same school. Okay bro, your comment said nothing and you shouldve said ohh my religous name is different than my name here on your inital message, instead when you find out about a directory you makeup stories. The article mentions routinely that this is not a representation of Hindiusm in spite of your message, is it that upsetting to be told you cannot discriminate based on caste in the us? That concept is anti American.
Dear Harvard Salient -- Here is some critical data about SB403, the California caste bill. May new data change your mind. It seemed to have changed the mind of "the American Atheists", and maybe a few others. No mainstream media will publish the truth about SB403, the California Caste Bill. But hope the Harvard Salient has higher standards than the NYT, Washington Post, Politico, and the mainstream media. And may your students, learn the art of critical thinking.
[Hard working Hindu and Indian Americans] of all walks of life, want to be treated the same way as every other human -- where you judge them based on truth and evidence. If you want to see the difference between the Hindu American Foundation and Equality Labs (the primary sponsor of SB403), please interview both of them, or watch their several videos online, and make up your own mind. One speaks objectively and eloquently, and the other spews vitriol without substance. You be the judge.
PY has addressed this in detail but it is time to put the 'Purusha Sukta said that....' trope to rest. That one has been used to beat Hindus over the head for centuries by people who have never read past the translation of 'brAhmaNosya mukham AsIt...'
They stop at 'padbhyAgum shUdrO ajAyatA' ( from the feet was born the shudra). The very next line is चन्द्रमा मनसो जातः। चक्षो सूर्यो अजायत। मुखाद इन्द्रश्च अग्निश्च। प्राणदः वायुर् अजायत।
the moon was born out of (purusAs) mind; the sun from the eyes; from the mouth emerged Indra and Agni; From breath emerged vAyu, the wind.
The moon was born from the mind because it reflects the sun, just like the mind reflects the parabrahma. The eyes become the sun because symbolically, they enable is to 'see' the truth. Agni from the mouth since the stomach, where matter is converted into energy by the symbolic agni has its gateway in the mouth. And the cosmic life breath - prana - turns into the wind that prevails around man.
The Purusha sukta is a beautiful and allegorical description of the creation of the universe. Reading it literally is folly and ignorance. To suggest some hierarchy because the 'mouth is above the feet' is just stupid.
The hierarchy argument is also self defeating. If Brahmanas are the head and shudras are the feet, the Purusha Suktha declares them to be equal : It begins with 'Purusha has a thousand heads and thousand eyes and thousand feet'.
Very interesting. Before reading this, I was completely unaware of these issues. I learned a lot, and by the way, I like that term "rhetorical ventriloquism." Never heard that one before, either!
“Men are caretakers of women because Allah has given one more strength than the other and because they spend of their wealth… As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, forsake them in bed, and strike them…”
2. Qur’an 2:191
“Kill them wherever you find them and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is worse than killing…”
3. Qur’an 9:5
“Then when the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush…”
4. Qur’an 9:29
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day… among the People of the Book until they pay the jizyah with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
5. Qur’an 8:12
“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So strike them upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.”
6. Qur’an 8:39
“Fight them until there is no more persecution and religion is wholly for Allah…”
7. Qur’an 5:33
“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land is execution, crucifixion, cutting off their hands and feet on opposite sides, or exile from the land…”
8. Qur’an 47:4
“When you meet those who disbelieve in battle, strike their necks until you have subdued them…”
9. Qur’an 4:24
“…And [also forbidden are] married women except those whom your right hands possess…”
10. Qur’an 33:50
“O Prophet, We have made lawful to you your wives… and those whom your right hand possesses from what Allah has granted you…”
As CoHNA, we reject the caricatures of Hindus as a “bigoted fringe.”
Harvard itself removed the ghoulish image and apologized for insensitivity.
The BAPS case closed in Sept 2025 with zero charges after 4 years of DOJ/FBI probe and the opposition SB403 because U.S. laws already ban discrimination by ancestry/ethnicity; Gov. Newsom agreed.
The article misreads Manusmriti and Purusha Sukta, the British colonial census hardened what was fluid. Many tropes in it echo 19th-century colonialism.
Let’s debate with Veritas, not recycled stereotypes.
Read our Dalit and Bahujan Leaders respond https://cohnaofficial.substack.com/p/not-so-salient-the-caste-police-strikes
The article is written be an ill informed and mis informed individual. It is obvious that the author has a very shallow understanding of Hindu religion and culture. These kinds of articles often hurt the institutions they represent.
This article's central claim collapses on its own opening image. The artwork, "Master of Puppets," was created by Anirudh Sainath (Molee Art), a devout Hindu digital artist, as cover art for his father's book on spirituality. The figure is not "a high-caste figure pulling strings." It is Śrī Kṛṣṇa — God — depicted as the sūtradhāra, the divine puppeteer of the five Pāṇḍavas, a deeply reverential bhakti image rooted in the Gītā (18.61: the Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings, causing them to revolve as if mounted on a machine). The five "marionettes" are Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva. The authors saw a tilak and assumed "Brahmin pulling strings." They mistook God for a caste group. That's the level of theological literacy driving this piece.
The textual case is worse. The article quotes Ṛg Veda 10.90.12 (the Puruṣa Sūkta) and declares it "not a misunderstood metaphor" but "a claim of inherent, ethnic hierarchy." The Puruṣa Sūkta is a cosmogonic hymn describing the entire universe — sun, moon, animals, the Vedas, the cardinal directions — emerging from the sacrifice of the cosmic Puruṣa. Isolating one verse about social groups from a hymn about the origin of the physical cosmos is a basic exegetical error. More importantly, this is the ONLY hymn in the entire Ṛg Veda mentioning a fourfold division. The word "śūdra" appears exactly once in 10,600+ verses. If the varṇa system were the foundation of Vedic religion, its near-total absence from the rest of the Ṛg Veda would be inexplicable.
Meanwhile, the Ṛg Veda itself shows fluidity. In 9.112, the poet says: "I am a poet, my father is a physician, my mother grinds grain." Multiple occupations, one family, no hint of birth-locked status. Kavaṣa Ailūṣa, a Ṛg Vedic ṛṣi, was the son of a dāsī (slave woman). Viśvāmitra was born a Kṣatriya king and became a brahmarṣi through tapas — impossible under a rigid birth-based system.
The article calls the Manusmṛti "the primary law book of this tradition." It is one of 20+ Dharmaśāstra texts whose authority has been contested within Hinduism for centuries. Ambedkar publicly burned it in 1927 — celebrated by Hindu reformers, not condemned as heresy — because Hinduism has no single binding legal code. The Bhagavad Gītā (4.13) says varṇa is based on guṇa and karma, not birth. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa (7.11.35) says a person's varṇa should be determined by conduct, not lineage. And in the Mahābhārata's Vana Parva (3.177-178) — the very epic whose characters are in the artwork — Yudhiṣṭhira is asked directly, "Who is a Brāhmaṇa?" He answers: conduct alone determines status. If a Śūdra has noble qualities, he is a Brāhmaṇa; if a Brāhmaṇa lacks them, he is a Śūdra. "Na yoniḥ nāpi saṃskāro na śrutaṁ na ca saṁtatiḥ / kāraṇāni dvijatvasya vṛttam eva tu kāraṇam" — neither birth, nor saṃskāra, nor learning, nor lineage is the mark; conduct alone is. That's Dharmarāja himself speaking in the text Hindus call the fifth Veda.
The method here — cherry-picking the harshest legal texts and declaring them the essence of a religion — could destroy any tradition. Leviticus 25:44-46 authorizes hereditary slavery. Exodus 21:20-21 says a master who beats a slave is unpunished if the slave survives a day because "the slave is his money." 1 Samuel 15:3 commands the slaughter of infants. Ephesians 6:5 tells slaves to obey masters "with fear and trembling." Quran 4:3 and 4:24 permit taking slave women as concubines. Surah 9:5 instructs: "Kill the polytheists wherever you find them." Classical fiqh codified slave markets across all four madhāhib.
No serious person reduces Christianity to Leviticus or Islam to Surah 9:5. These are traditions of billions, defined by their spiritual and ethical cores, not by their harshest ancient legal texts. The same courtesy is owed to Hinduism. And defending a community against reductive bigotry is not endorsing historical texts. CAIR opposing Islamophobia doesn't mean endorsing jihad. Jewish groups opposing antisemitic imagery aren't endorsing Deuteronomy 20. Hindu Americans objecting to their faith being caricatured as a slavery cult aren't defending the Manusmṛti. These are the same principle.
On SB 403 — Newsom's own veto message says caste discrimination is already covered under California's existing ancestry protections, which state law mandates be "liberally construed." You can disagree with that legal analysis, but the article doesn't engage with it at all — it just asserts without evidence that the veto was bought by a "Brahminist lobby."
Finally, this is the Harvard Salient — shut down by its own board months ago for publishing material including language echoing a 1939 Hitler speech, internal chats with racial slurs, and unpublished calls for mass executions. Their own board, including Harvey Mansfield, called it "wholly inimical to conservative principles." Publishing an article on relaunch day that labels an entire religious community's civic participation as "radical," "anti-American," and "segregationist" suggests the reform is cosmetic.
Veritas requires reading texts carefully and understanding traditions in their full complexity, not through the worst verses you can find. This article fails on every count.
The incident with the Harvard South Asian Department isn’t an isolated case. CoHNA is not a grassroots Hindu civil rights organization. It is a node in a transnational Hindu nationalist network directly tied to India’s ruling BJP and its ideological parent. Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative formally describes as a supporter of “the discriminatory policies of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party” that has “engaged in campaigns targeting academics and politicians who call attention to the dangers of Hindu nationalism.” The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights’ 2025 report explicitly lists CoHNA as a US-based node of the Sangh Parivar, the global organizational network of the RSS, the paramilitary organization that founded the BJP. Public PAC filings further document that CoHNA’s Vice President runs the Hindus of Georgia PAC, which received approximately 40% of its total funding from donors with verified OFBJP and RSS involvement, and the Overseas Friends of BJP is itself registered with the DOJ as a foreign agent of the Modi government.
This is not CoHNA’s first time suppressing academic discourse. In 2021, CoHNA coordinated a campaign sending over 1.3 million emails to more than 53 universities demanding they withdraw from the “Dismantling Global Hindutva” academic conference, while scholars received death and rape threats serious enough to force some to withdraw. Al Jazeera, Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, and The Print all documented this campaign. CoHNA has also been caught citing Disinfo Lab, which the Washington Post exposed as a front operation run by RAW, India’s own intelligence agency, in attacks against American critics. When Harvard apologized and removed an image because this network called it offensive, it did not act inclusively. When an institution with the motto Veritas apologizes and removes an image because a foreign-government-aligned lobby called it offensive, it has not acted inclusively.
This response, while detailed on organizational genealogy, does not engage with the substance of my original comment. My argument concerned the article's theological and textual claims. Nothing here addresses any of that, because the article's failures on those grounds are independent of whoever objected to the image. That is a separate discussion. But the sources cited here deserve scrutiny of their own. The Georgetown Bridge Initiative is housed in the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, established with a $20 million gift from a Saudi prince. Its institutional mandate is the study of Islamophobia — a valuable mission — but it possesses no demonstrated scholarly expertise in intra-Hindu theology or Hindu American community organizations. The Hindu American Foundation documented factual errors in Bridge's "fact sheets" concerning Hindu organizations and submitted a detailed rebuttal to Georgetown's president and provost in June 2021. Georgetown never responded. Citing Bridge's characterizations of CoHNA as though they represent the findings of a disinterested academic body is not the neutral sourcing it appears to be.
The specific claims you raise — CoHNA's Vice President running the Hindus of Georgia PAC, the 40% donor overlap with OFBJP and RSS affiliates, and the Disinfo Lab connection — closely track the original reporting of Pieter Friedrich, who has published this precise chain of argument on his Substack and in testimony before Georgia city councils. The provenance of that source matters. Friedrich is a former Christian fundamentalist who wrote in 2003 that "the modern-day nation of Israel is cursed by God" and that "there is no longer any such a thing as a Jew in the Biblical sense, unless by 'True Jews' we mean Christians." He has documented anti-LGBTQ writings from the same period. He is closely associated with the Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI), whose founding director Bhajan Singh Bhinder was the subject of a U.S. Customs Service undercover investigation for attempting to purchase C-4 plastic explosives, M-16s, AK-47s, grenade launchers, and Stinger missiles for the Khalistan separatist movement — a deal Bhinder ultimately backed out of. Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. publicly condemned Friedrich's rhetoric outside Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi's office, calling it "racist, bigoted, incendiary rhetoric that does not belong in our political or civic discourse." Whether or not you are drawing directly from Friedrich's work, the analytical architecture you have presented — Georgetown quote, Rutgers report, Georgia PAC donors, OFBJP foreign-agent registration, Dismantling Global Hindutva emails, Disinfo Lab — is his construction. That context is relevant when evaluating the framing.
On the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference: CoHNA organized an email petition to universities. Email petitions are a standard instrument of civic advocacy. The ACLU runs them, AIPAC runs them, CAIR runs them. Your comment places CoHNA's email campaign and the death threats scholars received in the same paragraph, implicitly connecting them as cause and effect. That is guilt by temporal proximity. Organizing a petition is not sending a death threat. If individuals made criminal threats, they should be prosecuted as individuals. Attributing anonymous criminal conduct to a named organization without evidence of direction is the same logic that has been used to hold Muslim advocacy organizations responsible for extremist acts committed by individuals who happen to share their religion.
The deeper structural problem with your argument is the chain of association itself: CoHNA → PAC donors → OFBJP → BJP → RSS → therefore everything CoHNA says is foreign-government propaganda. This is a guilt-by-association framework with a long and ugly history in American civic life. It was deployed against Japanese Americans in the 1940s, against Jewish Americans through "dual loyalty" accusations, and against Muslim Americans after September 11th. Indian Americans, like every other diaspora community in this country, hold political opinions about their country of origin and organize accordingly. Irish Americans funded causes in Ireland through NORAID for decades. Cuban Americans have shaped U.S. Cuba policy for sixty years. Greek Americans lobby on Cyprus. The existence of diaspora political engagement is not evidence of a foreign-agent conspiracy. It is a normal feature of American pluralism.
None of this, however, is the central point. Even if every claim you have made about CoHNA were correct, the Salient's article would still be wrong. The theological analysis remains incompetent, the image identification remains incorrect, the textual citations remain cherry-picked, and the framework of reducing Hinduism to the Manusmṛti would be recognized immediately as bigotry if applied to any other religious tradition on earth. Organizational critique of CoHNA is a separate conversation. It does not rescue an article that cannot correctly identify the figure in the image it is writing about.
Full disclosure: I was a former writer for the Salient, and a member of the BAPS Swaminarayan temple mentioned in the article.
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I'm not going to comment on other sections of this essay, except for the portion on the DOJ investigation into the Swaminarayan temple in Robbinsville. This is a temple I have visited dozens of times and know quite intimately.
I would expect writers at the Salient to carefully cite mainstream media sources, specifically the New York Times. I gather the author drew most of their facts from the initial NYT piece, but it should come as no surprise that many of these facts are incorrect or exaggerated.
For example, this particular sentence indicates that the writer has never visited the temple: "They discovered workers allegedly confined to a guarded compound."
The temple has always been managed by volunteers drawn from the surrounding community. Describing it as a "guarded compound" is comical once one understands that manning the entrance gate is often a retiree volunteer. There are no armed guards or even a professional security force on the campus. It is open to anyone.
Additionally, what leads you to say the "closure of the case is deeply suspicious" other than the fact that over half of the plaintiffs withdrew their initial complaints? Do you have additional information to prove that the change in plaintiff sentiments was due to "legal coercion"? After all, didn't the 12 plaintiffs themselves claim they were coerced by their initial counsel? Why do you feel confident identifying certain instances of legal coercion over others? Or do the results of this case simply not conform to your priors?
Furthermore, if one conducted additional research, one would also have discovered that BAPS has always condemned caste-based discrimination. In one of our most sacred texts, the Satsang Diksha, penned by our spiritual leader and read faithfully by all members of the sect, one of the first and most prominent verses strictly and clearly condemns any caste-based discrimination. Here is that verse verbatim:
Verse 14-16 (out of 315 total) "All men and women of all castes are forever entitled to satsang, brahmavidya and moksha. Do not attribute notions of superiority or inferiority based on varna. All people should shun their ego based on their caste and serve one another. No one is superior and no one is inferior by birth. Therefore, one should not quarrel based on caste or class and should joyfully practice satsang."
This article highlight a growing trend of lobbyists aiming to sugar coat plainly un-American, un-democratic, and value-degrading practices, and moreover own the narrative. This article’s emphasis on universities and government confirming to truly un-American and dishonest ideals showcase both shyness from harsh truth, and ignoring unpleasant realities veiling being sectarian divides to address these issues of upholding and protecting constitutional rights of each citizen.
I'm half-Dalit and I support the efforts to get rid of these fake anti-caste discrimination bills. I hope you understand that there is discrimination in every society in the world. There is caste discrimination in South Asia just as there is racial discrimination in the West. However, what evidence do you have to say that there is any caste discrimination happening in the USA? Other than a random survey done and a failed Cisco lawsuit, there is no proof of it happening here. Because of crazy people like you and others, a hatred and bias against Hindus is engendered. You have no right to say my community brings un-American values.
Reza, your response relies on several factual errors and logical fallacies that
First, the Cisco case did not “fail.” California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed suit in 2020 and the case was settled in 2023 after significant legal proceedings. It was not dismissed for lack of merit. More importantly, Apple, Google, and Netflix have all independently updated their workplace anti-discrimination policies to explicitly include caste, not because of activists, but because their own internal HR and legal teams documented caste-based incidents happening in American offices. These are corporations with legal liability on the line. They do not update policy over nothing.
Beyond corporate documentation, the Carnegie Endowment’s 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey and Equality Labs’ survey both corroborate that caste consciousness is actively practiced in diaspora communities in the United States. Seattle passed a caste discrimination ordinance in 2023 only after Dalit Americans testified before city council about lived experiences here, not in South Asia. Legislators do not pass laws in response to zero evidence.
Second, your argument that discrimination exists everywhere proves my point, not yours. The United States responded to racial discrimination by passing the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and Title VII. The entire premise of American democratic governance is that we name discrimination, legislate against it, and protect every citizen equally regardless of origin. Arguing that caste discrimination should go unaddressed because “every society has discrimination” is the exact logic that opponents of every civil rights bill in American history have used. It is not a counterargument. It is an argument against civil rights legislation as a concept.
Third, your individual experience does not neutralize documented, systematic data. There are Black Americans who have opposed affirmative action. There are women who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Personal identity does not override empirical evidence, and it does not make the data disappear.
Fourth, opposing caste-based discrimination is not opposing Hinduism. The Carnegie Endowment survey shows the vast majority of American Hindus reject Brahminical caste theology. Conflating civil rights advocacy with religious bigotry is precisely the rhetorical tactic my original comment was referring to. If someone opposed racially discriminatory practices within a specific institution, you would not call that anti-Christian bigotry. The same standard applies here.
My original point stands. When lobbying organizations use religious identity as a shield to obstruct civil rights protections, and when universities and elected officials capitulate to that pressure without engaging the documented evidence, that is a failure of American constitutional values. Nothing in your response disproves that.
As for the typo, A minor typo in an online comment does not touch any of the arguments made. Correcting spelling as a closing move when you cannot refute the substance is not helping you one bit.
I'm tired of non-Dalits and non-Hindus being patronizing and acting like they are our saviors. You don't know anything about Hinduism and the Indian American experience. We do not need your sympathy. You say "universities and elected officials capitulate to that pressure without engaging the documented evidence". Harvard used a demonic portrayal of Lord Krishna wielding skeleton puppets to advertise its Elementary Sanskrit course. Are the efforts to get it removed "Bramhinical"? I am a Dalit. I not a Bramhin. Lord Krishna is not a Brahmin, he's from the cow herder caste. Our God is not a Brahmin or from an upper caste. If your main objection is about caste discrimination, then how dare you support that unflattering portrayal of Hinduism's strongest anti-caste symbol? If Prophet Muhammed was shown that way on an Elementary Arabic class advert, would you not be angry? I know I would. I do not care if there are satirical portrayal of my God on the Internet, but how can I feel included if my professor uses it on a course advertisement. How come you have nothing to say about this? You don't give a damn about Dalits. This is the marginalization I am fighting against: Just because we are a minority community, anyone can say and do anything that offends us -- and when we speak up, we are called casteist because we are Hindu. What crazy double standards?
Also did you even read what the lawsuit was about? In 2023, a California judge had dismissed the claims against the individual managers saying the complaint did not sufficiently show the Dalit engineer was personally discriminated against. The dispute involved a workplace grievance about promotion and compensation that was later framed as caste discrimination. Companies settle for a confidential resolution and avoiding a long trial, not because there was proven discrimination. Anybody can file a lawsuit in court. President Trump has dozens of case pending in court. That says nothing about the merit of those cases. When most of the case is dismissed and the only part of the case left remaining is against Cisco for its general anti-discrimination policies, you know that this has very little to do with caste discrimination per se. A bunch of companies doing something also says nothing about whether there is systematic caste discrimination happening either. These are the same companies that had DEI boards that mandated everyone name themselves they/them on Zoom calls. If you are 'woke' and support that, then why the hell are you spending your time defending the Hilter sympathetic Harvard Salient? You don't even know what side of the political aisle you are on.
Your point on the Carnegie survey tells me that you're probably new to university and academic research in the social sciences. Are you aware of non-random sampling? The Equality Labs survey was not based on a random sample of Indian Americans. The participants self-selected through activist networks and online outreach. The sample does not represent the broader diaspora. The survey relies on self-reported discrimination. The experiences reported cannot be independently validated through the survey itself. Many Indians in the diaspora do not identify strongly with their caste, do not know their caste category, and interpret caste differently. The survey definitely had classification uncertainty in the way it was framed. The findings were then extrapolated beyond the data. I will not buy advocacy-led research. An unrelated but useful comparison is The Sentience Institute's poll that found that 49% of Americans support a ban on factory farming. Is that actually true? I wish it was. Or a Faunalytics Survey that found 71-85% of Americans opposing factory-farm practices like battery cages and gestation crates? I want large peer-reviewed studies and investigative journalism done by reputable news organizations to uncover caste discrimination in the US. None of this has happened yet. Odd, right?
Because you keep bringing up the civil rights movement and foolishly suggest that my logic is against anti-race discrimination, consider this: Identical resumes were run with different names to measure racial bias. Race discrimination was proven to exist. No such study was done for caste discrimination in the USA. Unless I see something like this, I will not support any anti-caste discrimination bills when there are already protections in place against discrimination.
I am tired of people like you trying to say there is a problem when there is not one. I am tired of others looking at me as oppressed and as a victim. We can take care of ourselves and do not need outsiders like yourself making a spectacle of us, while also offending our religious beliefs.
Also, please learn to spellcheck. You mean 'conforming', not 'confirming'.
What Harvard directory? Also what did I say that was not true?
We have a harvard directory where harvard affiliate can check who is a harvard affiliate(you were indeed not on there meaning you are faking your affilation), the fact you dont know this questions everything youve said thus far.
The fact that you look people up on directories says a lot about how creepy you are. I have never felt the need to. You have still not responded to my comment. I can't believe we both go to the same school. If you put two brain cells together, you will realize that my religious name isn’t the same as the legal name used in university records.
Fact checking someone who claims to go to a school is creepy? We do not go to the same school. Okay bro, your comment said nothing and you shouldve said ohh my religous name is different than my name here on your inital message, instead when you find out about a directory you makeup stories. The article mentions routinely that this is not a representation of Hindiusm in spite of your message, is it that upsetting to be told you cannot discriminate based on caste in the us? That concept is anti American.
An embarrassing portion of this article was clearly written by ChatGPT. At least have the gumption to make these accusations yourself.
A most egregious example was:
"This is not a misunderstood metaphor; it is a claim of inherent, ethnic hierarchy"
The "this is not just an __; it is a ____" sentence structure is such a tell
Dear Harvard Salient -- Here is some critical data about SB403, the California caste bill. May new data change your mind. It seemed to have changed the mind of "the American Atheists", and maybe a few others. No mainstream media will publish the truth about SB403, the California Caste Bill. But hope the Harvard Salient has higher standards than the NYT, Washington Post, Politico, and the mainstream media. And may your students, learn the art of critical thinking.
[Hard working Hindu and Indian Americans] of all walks of life, want to be treated the same way as every other human -- where you judge them based on truth and evidence. If you want to see the difference between the Hindu American Foundation and Equality Labs (the primary sponsor of SB403), please interview both of them, or watch their several videos online, and make up your own mind. One speaks objectively and eloquently, and the other spews vitriol without substance. You be the judge.
Peace and Love.
Hyperlink follows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KxtHYFpsO5rDjZ-_2BYEd_eVfiGIMUuR/view
PY has addressed this in detail but it is time to put the 'Purusha Sukta said that....' trope to rest. That one has been used to beat Hindus over the head for centuries by people who have never read past the translation of 'brAhmaNosya mukham AsIt...'
They stop at 'padbhyAgum shUdrO ajAyatA' ( from the feet was born the shudra). The very next line is चन्द्रमा मनसो जातः। चक्षो सूर्यो अजायत। मुखाद इन्द्रश्च अग्निश्च। प्राणदः वायुर् अजायत।
the moon was born out of (purusAs) mind; the sun from the eyes; from the mouth emerged Indra and Agni; From breath emerged vAyu, the wind.
The moon was born from the mind because it reflects the sun, just like the mind reflects the parabrahma. The eyes become the sun because symbolically, they enable is to 'see' the truth. Agni from the mouth since the stomach, where matter is converted into energy by the symbolic agni has its gateway in the mouth. And the cosmic life breath - prana - turns into the wind that prevails around man.
The Purusha sukta is a beautiful and allegorical description of the creation of the universe. Reading it literally is folly and ignorance. To suggest some hierarchy because the 'mouth is above the feet' is just stupid.
The hierarchy argument is also self defeating. If Brahmanas are the head and shudras are the feet, the Purusha Suktha declares them to be equal : It begins with 'Purusha has a thousand heads and thousand eyes and thousand feet'.
See? they are exactly equal. :-))
Very interesting. Before reading this, I was completely unaware of these issues. I learned a lot, and by the way, I like that term "rhetorical ventriloquism." Never heard that one before, either!
Crazy bar.
1. Qur’an 4:34
“Men are caretakers of women because Allah has given one more strength than the other and because they spend of their wealth… As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, forsake them in bed, and strike them…”
2. Qur’an 2:191
“Kill them wherever you find them and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is worse than killing…”
3. Qur’an 9:5
“Then when the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush…”
4. Qur’an 9:29
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day… among the People of the Book until they pay the jizyah with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
5. Qur’an 8:12
“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So strike them upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.”
6. Qur’an 8:39
“Fight them until there is no more persecution and religion is wholly for Allah…”
7. Qur’an 5:33
“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land is execution, crucifixion, cutting off their hands and feet on opposite sides, or exile from the land…”
8. Qur’an 47:4
“When you meet those who disbelieve in battle, strike their necks until you have subdued them…”
9. Qur’an 4:24
“…And [also forbidden are] married women except those whom your right hands possess…”
10. Qur’an 33:50
“O Prophet, We have made lawful to you your wives… and those whom your right hand possesses from what Allah has granted you…”