Haq's Musings: Professors

Thursday, February 3, 2022

Upper Caste Hindu-American Professor Acknowledges Internalized Islamophobia

Dr Saiba Varma, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California in San Diego (UCSD), has recently been under fire for hiding her familial ties to to a top RAW official while working on her book "The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir". “As an upper-caste and upper-class Indian citizen and subject, I have actively and passively internalized anti-Muslim racism my entire life. I am complicit in the colonization of Kashmir and other regions forcibly incorporated into the Indian nation-state", she acknowledges in her book released last year.

Dr. Saiba Verma

“Borrowing and extending techniques from British colonial rule, the Indian state enacted the world’s most established, sophisticated, and pervasive systems of emergency rule and legislation and repeatedly criminalized pro-independence demands as ‘conspiracies’ and ‘anti-national.’ The Indian state’s global image as ‘the world’s largest democracy,’ a generous aid donor, and non-interventionist actor have helped disguise its military excesses in Kashmir and other border regions", she adds.

In her defense, Dr. Saiba has tweeted: “My father (a top official of Indian Indian intelligence RAW posted in Kashmir) had no direct bearing on the research I’ve done. Recognizing the need to acknowledge this relationship, however, during my fieldwork I disclosed it to Kashmiri scholars and journalists I was close to. My ethical practices and scholarly arguments are accountable to them". “In my book, I write: "As Stuart Hall once stated, there is no innocent discourse...There is no innocent way for any scholar of Indian origin, including myself, to engage with Kashmir."

American academia has substantial and growing numbers of upper caste Hindu faculty. More than 80 faculty members of the California State University (CSU) have spoken out against a recent decision of CalState University system to include caste in its non-discriminatory policy. Praveen Sinha, a professor at CSU Long Beach said. "We cannot but oppose the unique risk that CSU's move puts on us as they add a category that is only associated with people of Indian descent such as myself and thousands of other faculty and students in the CSU system. It is going to create divisions where they simply do not exist".

Devesh Kapur, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America (Oxford University Press, 2017), says that the vast majority of Indian-Americans, including university professors, are upper caste Hindus. He explains the phenomenon of high-achieving Indian-Americans as follows: “What we learned in researching this book is that Indians in America did not resemble any other population anywhere; not the Indian population in India, nor the native population in the United States, nor any other immigrant group from any other nation.”

Kapur talks about what he calls “a triple selection” process that gave Indian-Americans a boost over typically poor and uneducated immigrants who come to the United States from other countries. The first two selections took place in India. As explained in the book: “The social system created a small pool of persons to receive higher education, who were urban, educated, and from high/dominant castes.” India’s examination system then selected individuals for specialized training in technical fields that also happened to be in demand in the United States. Kapur estimated that the India-American population is nine times more educated than individuals in the home country.

The results of the Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS) conducted in 2020 show that India's Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi's massive popularity among Hindu Americans. The findings of the survey sponsored by Washington-based think tank Carnegie Endowment For International Peace reveal that 69% of Hindu Americans approve of Mr. Modi's performance. 70% of Hindu Americans agree or strongly agree that white supremacy is a threat to minorities in the United States, compared to 79% of non-Hindu Indian American. Regarding Hindu majoritarianism in India, however, the data point to a much sharper divide: only 40% of Hindus agree that Hindu majoritarianism is a threat to minorities, compared to 67% of non-Hindus, according to the 2020 IAAS Survey.

69% of Hindu Americans Support Modi. Source: Indian American Attitudes Survey 2020

The 7 in 10 approval rating of Mr. Modi by Hindu Indian Americans stands in sharp contrast to that of barely one in five Muslim Indian Americans. Indian American Christians are almost evenly divided: 35 percent disapprove, 34 percent approve, and 30 percent did not express an opinion. Twenty-three percent of respondents without a religious affiliation and 38 percent from other faiths approve of Modi’s performance, respectively. The share of “don’t knows” is the smallest for Hindus and Muslims compared to other religious categories, suggesting that views among respondents of these two faiths are the most consolidated.