Indophobia
Encyclopedia
Indophobia refers to hostility towards India
ns and Indian culture. Indophobia is formally defined in the context of anti-Indian prejudice in East Africa and Australia as follows: "Indophobia is a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian
extraction against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits". Its opposite is Indophilia.
supplying cheap labour to lay railroad tracks, mostly in California and elsewhere in the West Coast
(see also Sinophobia
). In xenophobic
jargon common in the day, ordinary workers, newspapers, and politicians uniformly opposed this "Yellow Peril
". The common cause to eradicate Asians from the workforce gave rise to the Asiatic Exclusion League
. When the fledgling Indian community
of mostly Punjab
i Sikh
s settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to combat not only the East Asian Yellow Peril, but now the immigrants from British India, the "Turban Tide", equally referred to as the "Hindoo Invasion" [sic].
" and "Indophobia" in colonial era British Indology
has been discussed by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann
(1997). Trautmann finds that Indomania had become a norm in early 19th century Britain as the result of a conscious agenda of Evangelicalism
and Utilitarianism
, especially by Charles Grant
and James Mill
. Historians have noted that during the British Empire "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania
that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."
In Charles Grant
's highly influential "Observations on the ...Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796), Grant criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindu's "true place in the moral scale", and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant however believed that Great Britain's duty was not simply to expand its rule in India and exploit the subcontinent for its commercial interests, but to civilise and Christianise the natives.
Lord Macaulay, serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India. He convinced the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic which were then used in the institutions supported by the East India Company. He claimed: "I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia
." He wrote that Arabic
and Sanskrit works on medicine
contain "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English Farrier - Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school - History
, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long - and Geography
made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".
One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill
was criticised for being prejudiced against Hindus. The Indologist Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work is "evil". Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth, and so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones
, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."
However, the Indologists were also often under pressure from missionary and colonial interest groups, and were frequently criticised by them.
intensified during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857
, known as "India's First War of Independence
" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, when Indian sepoy
s rebelled against the British East India Company
's rule in India
. Allegations of war rape
were used as propaganda
by British colonialists
in order to justify the colonization of India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls were generally uncommon during the rebellion, this was exaggerated to great effect by the British media
in order to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent
.
At the time, British newspapers
had printed various apparently eyewitness accounts of British women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, but with little physical evidence to support these accounts. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created in order to paint the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden
". One such account published by The Times
, regarding an incident where 48 British girls as young as 10-14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi
, was criticized as a false propaganda story by Karl Marx
, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore
, far from the events of the rebellion. A wave of anti-Indian vandalism accompanied the Rebellion. When Delhi fell to the British, the city was ransacked, the palaces looted and the mosques desecrated in what has been called 'a deliberate act of unnecessary vandalism'.
Despite the questionable authenticity of many colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of protecting British "female chastity" from the "lustful Indian male" had a significant influence on the policies of the British Raj
in order to prevent racial miscegenation
between the British elite and the native Indian population. While some restrictive policies were imposed on British females in order to "protect" them from miscegenation, most of these discriminatory policies were directed against native Indians. For example, the 1883 Ilbert Bill
, which would have granted Indian judges the right to judge British offenders, was opposed by many British colonialists on the grounds that Indian judges cannot be trusted in dealing with cases involving the rape of British females.
In the aftermath of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre
, the long-held stereotype of Indian males as dark-skinned rapists lusting after white
British females was challenged by several novels such as E. M. Forster
's A Passage to India
(1924) and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown
(1966), both of which involve an Indian male being wrongly accused of raping a British female.
community and the increase in offshoring
of white-collar
jobs to India by American multinational corporations. Societal prejudices against South Asians in the west manifest through instances of intimidation and harassment, such as the case of the Dotbusters
street gang.
. According to Tufts University
professor Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
, Indophobia in Pakistan increased with the ascendancy of the militant
Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami
under Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi. According to Nasr, the first victims of Indophobia in Pakistan were not Indian nationals, but the Muhajir Urdu immigrants who were accused of dual loyalty
with India by the Jamaat and their cohorts, providing them with ammunition needed to justify discrimination
and physical attacks on the Muhajir Urdu minorities.
In addition, racialist ideas such as the Martial Race
theory were central to the Pakistan Army which believed that since the Pakistan Army
comprised soldiers of the "martial races", they should easily defeat India
in a war, especially prior to the Second Kashmir War. Based on this belief in the martial supremacy, it was popularly hyped that one Pakistani soldier was equal to four to ten Hindus soldiers. and thus numerical superiority of the foe could be overcome.
On 9 December 2010, major Pakistan
i newspapers (such as The News International
, The Express Tribune
and the Daily Jang
) and television channels carried stories that claimed to detail U.S. diplomats' assessments of senior India
n generals as "vain, egotistical and genocidal", also saying "India's government is secretly allied with Hindu
fundamentalists", and that "Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan's tribal belt and Balochistan
.". The claims were credited to an Islamabad
-based news service agency that has frequently run pro-Pakistan Army
stories in the past.
Later, The News International admitted the story "was dubious and may have been planted", and The Express Tribune offered "profuse" apologies to readers. Urdu-language papers such as the Daily Jang, however, declined to retract the story.Declan Walsh, a reporter for The Guardian
, summarizes these claims made in Pakistan as a "bogus story, a laundry list of Pakistani nationalist accusations against archrival India", and that papers have apologized "to readers for publishing anti-Indian comments alleged to have been said by US officials."
i pan-Islamist groups sympathetic to the Pakistani regime, such as the Razakars
, Al-Shams and al-Badr
Islamist militias, who were, in part, responsible for the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities
. These attitudes were vigorously encouraged by the East Pakistan
administration. Often, racism and prejudice directed at Bengalis (Hindus, Muslims, Indians or Bangladeshi Bengalis) incorporated Indophobic attitudes. The term "Indophobia" is first applicable to denote these prejudices when they began to morph from traditional anti-Hinduism in the Muslim communities to political accusations against Bengali Hindus specifically pertaining to dual loyalty
with India.
The Muslim identity of present-day Bangladesh
was sought to be established way back in 1901 and 1947 during the partition of India
, and although a sizeable Hindu minority remained in East Pakistan
(which later became Bangladesh), growing anti-Hinduism caused steady migration into India. The phobia that had grown from anti-Hinduism into Indophobia is also a part of ethnic Bengali
Nationalism in the country, which continues to mark an average Bangladeshi’s perception of Indians. The ruling Bangladeshi class had realized this soon after the formation of Bangladesh and consequently made successive attempts to project not only the anti-India stance of the country, but also Islamic extremism
which came to be basis of anti-India propaganda.
Political disputes like the Farakka Barrage
, Indo-Bangladesh enclaves
and Indo-Bangladeshi barrier have created rift between the two. Persecution of Hindus
in Bangladesh by the rising tide of militant Islamists and cross-border infiltration into India by illegal Bangladeshi immigrants has created likewise anti-Bangladeshi sentiment in India. Indophobia in Bangladesh is coupled with anti-Hinduism in Bangladesh, whereby Bengali Hindus are persecuted and accused of dual loyalty
with India by militant Islamist parties such as the BNP
and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh.
to India.
Despite India's alliance with the Sri Lankan government during the Sri Lankan Civil War
, anti-Indian hatreds and prejudices are fairly common among the ethnic Sinhalese
, fuelled by Buddhist Nationalism and militancy. Attitudes among sections of Sri Lankan society towards the minority Tamil
s of the country is associated with Indophobia, and Tamil minorities are scapegoated as "Indian spies". Indian traders and businessmen, patronized by the Tamil minority, have been shunned and attacked by the Sinhalese.
During the 1950s, a series of discriminatory measures taken by the Sinhala regime targeted Indian traders (typically from the Indian states of Tamil Nadu
and Kerala
), resulting in the traders being forced out of Sri Lanka. Following this, trade with India was deliberately scuttled, as was the sale of Indian magazines.
The Indophobia of that era also resulted in the Sinhala government going after the so called Tamils of ‘recent’ Indian origin. These immigrant plantation workers imported by the British more than a hundred years earlier had already been stripped of their citizenship by a prior legislation – the first Legislative Act of the newly independent Sri Lanka in 1948. Since then, these Tamils had been living as ‘stateless’ persons, many have repatriated to India.
have many citizens of South Asian descent. They were brought there by the British Empire
from British India
to do clerical work in Imperial service. In academic discourse, racial prejudices directed against these people from their host countries fall under the rubric of Indophobia. The most prominent case being the ethnic cleansing
of Indian (sometimes simply called "Asian
") minority in Uganda
by the dictator
Idi Amin
.
According to H.H. Patel, many Indians
in East Africa
and Uganda
were as tailors and bankers businesses, where they were kept forcibly by the British colonialists. Since the representation of Indians in these professions was high, stereotyping of Indians in Uganda
as tailors or bankers was common.
Also, some Indians perceived themselves as coming from a more advanced culture than Uganda
. Indophobia in Uganda thus predated Amin, and also existed under Milton Obote
. The 1968 Committee on "Africanization in Commerce and Industry" in Uganda
made far-reaching Indophobic proposals.
A system of work permits and trade licenses was introduced in 1969 in order to restrict the role of Indians in economic and professional activities. Indians were segregated and discriminated against in all walks of life. After Amin came to power, he exploited these divisions to spread propaganda
against Indians involving stereotyping and scapegoating the Indian minority.
Indians were stereotyped as "only traders" and so "inbred" to their profession. Indians were attacked as "dukawallas" (an occupational term that degenerated into an anti-Indian slur during Amin's time). Indians were stereotyped as "greedy, conniving", without any racial identity or loyalty but "always cheating, conspiring and plotting" to subvert Uganda.
Amin used this propaganda to justify a campaign of "de-Indianization", eventually resulting in the expulsion
and ethnic cleansing
of Uganda's Indian minority. About 25,000 British passport holding Asians out of an estimated 80,000 expelled Asians (Indian-origin) settled in Britain
.
street gang calling themselves the "Dotbusters
" targeted, threatened and attacked South Asians, specifically Indians. Indophobia in the United States has risen in certain circles due to anti-immigrant
sentiment against Indian American
s, attempts by extremists to undermine US-India cooperation, as well as myths and misconceptions about them propagated on the internet.
Vamsee Juluri, author and Professor of Media Studies
at the University of San Francisco
, identifies Indophobia in certain sections of the US
media as part of a racist postcolonial/neocolonial discourse used to attack and defame India and encourage racial prejudice against Indian Americans, particularly in light of India's recent economic progress, which some "old-school" colonialists find to be incompatible with their Clash of Civilizations world view. Juluri identified numerous instances of bias and prejudice against Indians in some prominent sections of US media, such as the New York Times and Foreign Policy
.
and Trinidad and Tobago
, as well as some Caribbean
islands, racism against the India
n populations are quite present, and sometimes even violent.
provoked a violent backlash against the Indo-Fijians for a time and persecution is still present between Indo-Fijians and native ethnic Fijians.
and a perceived poor response by the police sparked protests in Australia. Rallies were held in both Melbourne and Sydney. Impromptu street protests were held in Harris Park, a suburb of western Sydney with a large Indian population.Representatives of the Indian government met the Australian government to express concern and request that Indians be protected. The Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd
, expressed regret and called for the attackers to be brought to justice.The United Nations termed these attacks "disturbing" and rights commissioner Navi Pillay has asked Australia to investigate the matters further.
There were internet groups on Facebook which set up anti-Indian groups on the Facebook. The Rudd Government has set up a special taskforce, headed by the Prime Minister's national security adviser, Duncan Lewis, to deal with the proposal to make sending of a text message encouraging someone to commit a racial attack to become a federal offence. The proposed amendment to the existing legislation would strengthen the powers of the police to respond to attacks against Indian students. Internet based racism has been a problem due to lack of legislative powers to effectively lay charges on the perpetrator due to privacy laws. The current system allows the commission to investigate complaints of racial vilification and then attempts to resolve complaints through conciliation with ISPs and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
. Rediff reporter, Arindam Banerji, has chronicled numerous cases of Indophobic bias from the BBC regarding reportage, selection bias, misrepresentation, and fabrications. Hindu
groups in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of anti-Hindu bigotry and whitewashing Islamist hate groups that demonize the British Indian
minority
In protest of the biased coverage of the BBC, renown journalist Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar
has elected to boycott the BBC to speak about the Mumbai terror attacks. British parliamentarian Stephen Pound has supported these claims, referring to the BBC's whitewashing of the terror attacks as "the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone."
Writing for The Hindu
Business Line, reporter Premen Addy criticizes the BBC's reportage on South Asia as consistently anti-India and pro-Islamist, and that they underreport India's economic and social achievements, as well as political and diplomatic efforts, and disproportionately highlight and exaggerate problems in the country. In addition, Addy alludes to discrimination
against Indian anchors and reporters in favor of Pakistan
i and Bangladesh
i ones who are hostile to India.
Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
, Alasdair Pinkerton analyzes the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war
, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist
stance.
Writing on western media bias
regarding South Asia in the journal of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
, media analyst Ajai K. Rai strongly criticizes the BBC for anti-India bias. He writes that there is a total lack of depth or fairness in the BBC's reportage on conflict zones in South Asia, and that the BBC has, on one occasion, fabricated photographs while reporting on the Kashmir conflict
in order to make India look bad. He also writes that the BBC made false allegations that the Indian Army
stormed a sacred Muslim
shrine, the tomb of Hazrat Sheikh Noor-u-din Noorani
in Charari Sharief
, and only retracted the claim after strong criticism from the media in India for several weeks.
with its slanted and negative coverage of India. American lawmaker Kumar P. Barve
has called a recent NYT editorial on India as full of "blatant and unprofessional factual errors or omissions", and having a "haughty, condescending,arrogant and patronizing" tone that reminded him of the British Raj
. Sumit Ganguly, a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has similarly criticized the NYT in Forbes
, finding anti-India bias in The Times coverage of the Kashmir Conflict
, the Hyde Act, and other India-related matters.
, Christian
, Naxalite
and ethnic nationalist radical movements. The regions with long term activities against India today are Bihar
, Jharkhand
, Jammu and Kashmir
and Seven Sister States
(the main anti-India movements in Jammu and Kahmir and the Seven Sisters are independence and autonomy movements). In the past, the Punjab insurgency
led to militant activities in the Indian state of Punjab
as well as the national capital Delhi
. As of 2006, at least 232 of the country’s 608 districts were afflicted, at differing intensities, by various insurgent and terrorist movements. In August 2008, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan has said that there are as many as 800 terrorist cells operating in the country.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
ns and Indian culture. Indophobia is formally defined in the context of anti-Indian prejudice in East Africa and Australia as follows: "Indophobia is a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian
extraction against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits". Its opposite is Indophilia.
Historical anti-India sentiment
By the late 19th century, fear had already begun in North America over Chinese immigrationChinese immigration to the United States
Chinese American history is the history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States. Chinese immigration to the U.S. consisted of three major waves, with the first beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century worked as laborers, particularly...
supplying cheap labour to lay railroad tracks, mostly in California and elsewhere in the West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
(see also Sinophobia
Sinophobia
Sinophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment is the fear of or dislike of China, its people, overseas Chinese, or Chinese Culture...
). In xenophobic
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...
jargon common in the day, ordinary workers, newspapers, and politicians uniformly opposed this "Yellow Peril
Yellow Peril
Yellow Peril was a colour metaphor for race that originated in the late nineteenth century with immigration of Chinese laborers to various Western countries, notably the United States, and later associated with the Japanese during the mid 20th century, due to Japanese military expansion.The term...
". The common cause to eradicate Asians from the workforce gave rise to the Asiatic Exclusion League
Asiatic Exclusion League
The Asiatic Exclusion League, often abbreviated AEL, was a racist organization formed in the early twentieth century in the United States and Canada that aimed to prevent immigration of people of East Asian origin.-United States:...
. When the fledgling Indian community
Indian American
Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestral roots lie in India. The U.S. Census Bureau popularized the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Indigenous peoples of the Americas who are commonly referred to as American Indians.-The term: Indian:...
of mostly Punjab
Punjab (India)
Punjab ) is a state in the northwest of the Republic of India, forming part of the larger Punjab region. The state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the east, Haryana to the south and southeast and Rajasthan to the southwest as well as the Pakistani province of Punjab to the...
i Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
s settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to combat not only the East Asian Yellow Peril, but now the immigrants from British India, the "Turban Tide", equally referred to as the "Hindoo Invasion" [sic].
Among nineteenth-century Indologists
The relation of "IndomaniaIndomania
Indomania and Indophilia refer to the special interest India has generated in the Western world, and more specifically, the culture and civilisation of the Indian subcontinent. During the initial period of colonialism everything about India had an aspect of novelty, especially in Britain...
" and "Indophobia" in colonial era British Indology
Indology
Indology is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent , and as such is a subset of Asian studies....
has been discussed by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann
Thomas Trautmann
Thomas R. Trautmann is an American historian and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of London...
(1997). Trautmann finds that Indomania had become a norm in early 19th century Britain as the result of a conscious agenda of Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
and Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
, especially by Charles Grant
Charles Grant (British East India Company)
Charles Grant was a British politician influential in Indian and domestic affairs who, motivated by his evangelical Christianity, championed the causes of social reform and Christian mission, particularly in India...
and James Mill
James Mill
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo, and the father of influential philosopher of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill.-Life:Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of...
. Historians have noted that during the British Empire "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania
Indomania
Indomania and Indophilia refer to the special interest India has generated in the Western world, and more specifically, the culture and civilisation of the Indian subcontinent. During the initial period of colonialism everything about India had an aspect of novelty, especially in Britain...
that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."
In Charles Grant
Charles Grant (British East India Company)
Charles Grant was a British politician influential in Indian and domestic affairs who, motivated by his evangelical Christianity, championed the causes of social reform and Christian mission, particularly in India...
's highly influential "Observations on the ...Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796), Grant criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindu's "true place in the moral scale", and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant however believed that Great Britain's duty was not simply to expand its rule in India and exploit the subcontinent for its commercial interests, but to civilise and Christianise the natives.
Lord Macaulay, serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India. He convinced the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic which were then used in the institutions supported by the East India Company. He claimed: "I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India
Indian literature
Indian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. The Republic of India has 22 officially recognized languages....
and Arabia
Arabic literature
Arabic literature is the writing produced, both prose and poetry, by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is adab which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and implies politeness, culture and enrichment....
." He wrote that Arabic
Unani
Unani-tibb or Unani Medicine also spelled Yunani Medicine means "Greek Medicine", and is a form of traditional medicine widely practiced in South Asia...
and Sanskrit works on medicine
Ayurveda
Ayurveda or ayurvedic medicine is a system of traditional medicine native to India and a form of alternative medicine. In Sanskrit, words , meaning "longevity", and , meaning "knowledge" or "science". The earliest literature on Indian medical practice appeared during the Vedic period in India,...
contain "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English Farrier - Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school - History
History of India
The history of India begins with evidence of human activity of Homo sapiens as long as 75,000 years ago, or with earlier hominids including Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from...
, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long - and Geography
Geography of India
The geography of India describes the physical features of India, a country in South Asia, that lies entirely on the Indian Plate in the northern portion of the Indo-Australian Plate. The country lies to the north of the equator between 8°4' and 37°6' north latitude and 68°7' and 97°25' east...
made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".
One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill
James Mill
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo, and the father of influential philosopher of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill.-Life:Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of...
was criticised for being prejudiced against Hindus. The Indologist Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work is "evil". Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth, and so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones
William Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones was an English philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages...
, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."
However, the Indologists were also often under pressure from missionary and colonial interest groups, and were frequently criticised by them.
Among nineteenth-century colonialists
Stereotypes of IndiansStereotypes of South Asians
Stereotypes of South Asians are oversimplified ethnic stereotypes of South Asian people, and are found in many Western societies. Stereotypes of South Asians have been collectively internalized by societies, and are manifested by a society's media, literature, theatre and other creative expressions...
intensified during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...
, known as "India's First War of Independence
India's First War of Independence (term)
The First War of Indian Independence is a term that is sometimes used, predominantly in India, to describe the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which has been described variously outside of India as "uprising", "revolt" and "mutiny".- History :...
" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, when Indian sepoy
Sepoy
A sepoy was formerly the designation given to an Indian soldier in the service of a European power. In the modern Indian Army, Pakistan Army and Bangladesh Army it remains in use for the rank of private soldier.-Etymology and Historical usage:...
s rebelled against the British East India Company
East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
's rule in India
Company rule in India
Company rule in India refers to the rule or dominion of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent...
. Allegations of war rape
War rape
War rapes are rapes committed by soldiers, other combatants or civilians during armed conflict or war, or during military occupation, distinguished from sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service...
were used as propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
by British colonialists
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
in order to justify the colonization of India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls were generally uncommon during the rebellion, this was exaggerated to great effect by the British media
Media of the United Kingdom
Media of the United Kingdom consist of several different types of communications media: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and Internet-based Web sites. The UK also has a strong music industry. The UK has a diverse range of providers, the most prominent being principle public service...
in order to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
.
At the time, British newspapers
History of British newspapers
During the 17th century, there were many kinds of publications, that told both news and rumours. Among these were pamphlets, posters, ballads etc. Even when the news periodicals emerged, many of these co-existed with them. A news periodical differs from these mainly because of its periodicity...
had printed various apparently eyewitness accounts of British women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, but with little physical evidence to support these accounts. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created in order to paint the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden
The White Man's Burden
"The White Man's Burden" is a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure's in 1899, with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands...
". One such account published by The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, regarding an incident where 48 British girls as young as 10-14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
, was criticized as a false propaganda story by Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
, far from the events of the rebellion. A wave of anti-Indian vandalism accompanied the Rebellion. When Delhi fell to the British, the city was ransacked, the palaces looted and the mosques desecrated in what has been called 'a deliberate act of unnecessary vandalism'.
Despite the questionable authenticity of many colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of protecting British "female chastity" from the "lustful Indian male" had a significant influence on the policies of the British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
in order to prevent racial miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
between the British elite and the native Indian population. While some restrictive policies were imposed on British females in order to "protect" them from miscegenation, most of these discriminatory policies were directed against native Indians. For example, the 1883 Ilbert Bill
Ilbert Bill
The Ilbert Bill was a bill introduced in 1883 for British India by Viceroy Ripon that proposed an amendment for existing laws in the country at the time to allow Indian judges and magistrates the jurisdiction to try British offenders in criminal cases at the District level, something that was...
, which would have granted Indian judges the right to judge British offenders, was opposed by many British colonialists on the grounds that Indian judges cannot be trusted in dealing with cases involving the rape of British females.
In the aftermath of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre
Jallianwala Bagh massacre
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre , also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, and was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer...
, the long-held stereotype of Indian males as dark-skinned rapists lusting after white
White people
White people is a term which usually refers to human beings characterized, at least in part, by the light pigmentation of their skin...
British females was challenged by several novels such as E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
's A Passage to India
A Passage to India
A Passage to India is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library and won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Time...
(1924) and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown
The Jewel in the Crown (novel)
The Jewel in the Crown is the 1966 novel by Paul Scott that starts his Raj Quartet.-Plot introduction:Much of the novel is written in the form of interviews and reports of conversations and research from the point of view of a narrator. Other portions are in the form of letters from one character...
(1966), both of which involve an Indian male being wrongly accused of raping a British female.
Contemporary societal Indophobia
Contemporary Indophobia has risen in the western world, particularly the United States, on account of the rise of the Indian AmericanIndian American
Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestral roots lie in India. The U.S. Census Bureau popularized the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Indigenous peoples of the Americas who are commonly referred to as American Indians.-The term: Indian:...
community and the increase in offshoring
Offshoring
Offshoring describes the relocation by a company of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting. Even state governments employ offshoring...
of white-collar
White-collar worker
The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...
jobs to India by American multinational corporations. Societal prejudices against South Asians in the west manifest through instances of intimidation and harassment, such as the case of the Dotbusters
Dotbusters
The Dotbusters was a hate group in Jersey City, New Jersey, that attacked and threatened South Asians in the fall of 1987. The name originated from the fact that traditional Hindu women and girls wear a bindi on their forehead .In July 1987, they had a letter published in the Jersey Journal stating...
street gang.
Pakistan
Anti-Indian sentiments, coupled with anti-Hindu prejudices have existed in Pakistan since its formationPartition of India
The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...
. According to Tufts University
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...
professor Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
Vali Nasr
Vali Nasr is a leading expert on Middle East and Islamic world, a best-selling author, influential commentator and Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, and a columnist for...
, Indophobia in Pakistan increased with the ascendancy of the militant
Militant
The word militant, which is both an adjective and a noun, usually is used to mean vigorously active, combative and aggressive, especially in support of a cause, as in 'militant reformers'. It comes from the 15th century Latin "militare" meaning "to serve as a soldier"...
Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami
Jamaat-e-Islami
This article is about Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. For other organizations of similar name see Jamaat-e-Islami The Jamaat-e-Islami , is a Pro-Muslim political party in Pakistan...
under Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi. According to Nasr, the first victims of Indophobia in Pakistan were not Indian nationals, but the Muhajir Urdu immigrants who were accused of dual loyalty
Dual loyalty
In politics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially conflict with each other.-Inherently controversial:While nearly all examples of alleged "dual loyalty" are considered highly controversial, these examples point to the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between what...
with India by the Jamaat and their cohorts, providing them with ammunition needed to justify discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...
and physical attacks on the Muhajir Urdu minorities.
In addition, racialist ideas such as the Martial Race
Martial Race
Martial Race was a designation created by Army officials of British India, where they classified each ethnic group into one of two categories: 'Martial' and 'Non-Martial'. A 'martial race' was typically considered brave and well built for fighting. The 'non-martial races' were those whom the...
theory were central to the Pakistan Army which believed that since the Pakistan Army
Pakistan Army
The Pakistan Army is the branch of the Pakistani Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The Pakistan Army came into existence after the Partition of India and the resulting independence of Pakistan in 1947. It is currently headed by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The Pakistan...
comprised soldiers of the "martial races", they should easily defeat India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
in a war, especially prior to the Second Kashmir War. Based on this belief in the martial supremacy, it was popularly hyped that one Pakistani soldier was equal to four to ten Hindus soldiers. and thus numerical superiority of the foe could be overcome.
On 9 December 2010, major Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
i newspapers (such as The News International
The News International
The News International , published in tabloid size, is the largest English language newspaper in Pakistan. The News has an ABC certified circulation of 140,000. It is published from Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi/Islamabad...
, The Express Tribune
The Express Tribune
The Express Tribune is the first internationally affiliated newspaper in Pakistan, in partnership with The International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times....
and the Daily Jang
Daily Jang
The Daily Jang is an Urdu newspaper based in Pakistan. It is the oldest newspaper of Pakistan in continuous publication since its foundation in 1939. Its current Group Chief Executive & Editor-in-Chief is Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman....
) and television channels carried stories that claimed to detail U.S. diplomats' assessments of senior India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n generals as "vain, egotistical and genocidal", also saying "India's government is secretly allied with Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
fundamentalists", and that "Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan's tribal belt and Balochistan
Balochistan
Balochistan or Baluchistan is a region which covers parts of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. It can also refer to one of several modern and historical territories within that region:...
.". The claims were credited to an Islamabad
Islamabad
Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. Located within the Islamabad Capital Territory , the population of the city has grown from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.7 million in 2011...
-based news service agency that has frequently run pro-Pakistan Army
Pakistan Army
The Pakistan Army is the branch of the Pakistani Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The Pakistan Army came into existence after the Partition of India and the resulting independence of Pakistan in 1947. It is currently headed by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The Pakistan...
stories in the past.
Later, The News International admitted the story "was dubious and may have been planted", and The Express Tribune offered "profuse" apologies to readers. Urdu-language papers such as the Daily Jang, however, declined to retract the story.Declan Walsh, a reporter for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, summarizes these claims made in Pakistan as a "bogus story, a laundry list of Pakistani nationalist accusations against archrival India", and that papers have apologized "to readers for publishing anti-Indian comments alleged to have been said by US officials."
Bangladesh
Historically, anti-India sentiments were expressed during the liberation of Bangladesh from foreign domination by PakistanPakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
i pan-Islamist groups sympathetic to the Pakistani regime, such as the Razakars
Razakars (Pakistan)
The Razakar was the paramilitary force organized by the Pakistan Army during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.The Urdu word razakar literally means "volunteer". The Razakar force was composed of mostly pro-Pakistani Bengalis and Urdu-speaking migrants living in erstwhile East Pakistan...
, Al-Shams and al-Badr
Al-Badr (East Pakistan)
The Al-Badr was the paramilitary wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh that collaborated with the Pakistan Army against the Bengali nationalist movement in the Bangladesh Liberation War. The present chief of the Jamaat, Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami headed the Al-Badr organisation as the...
Islamist militias, who were, in part, responsible for the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities
1971 Bangladesh atrocities
Beginning with the start of Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1971 and continuing throughout the Bangladesh Liberation War, there were widespread violations of human rights in East Pakistan perpetrated by the Pakistan Army, with support from local political and religious militias, especially...
. These attitudes were vigorously encouraged by the East Pakistan
East Pakistan
East Pakistan was a provincial state of Pakistan established in 14 August 1947. The provincial state existed until its declaration of independence on 26 March 1971 as the independent nation of Bangladesh. Pakistan recognized the new nation on 16 December 1971. East Pakistan was created from Bengal...
administration. Often, racism and prejudice directed at Bengalis (Hindus, Muslims, Indians or Bangladeshi Bengalis) incorporated Indophobic attitudes. The term "Indophobia" is first applicable to denote these prejudices when they began to morph from traditional anti-Hinduism in the Muslim communities to political accusations against Bengali Hindus specifically pertaining to dual loyalty
Dual loyalty
In politics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially conflict with each other.-Inherently controversial:While nearly all examples of alleged "dual loyalty" are considered highly controversial, these examples point to the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between what...
with India.
The Muslim identity of present-day Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
was sought to be established way back in 1901 and 1947 during the partition of India
Partition of India
The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...
, and although a sizeable Hindu minority remained in East Pakistan
East Pakistan
East Pakistan was a provincial state of Pakistan established in 14 August 1947. The provincial state existed until its declaration of independence on 26 March 1971 as the independent nation of Bangladesh. Pakistan recognized the new nation on 16 December 1971. East Pakistan was created from Bengal...
(which later became Bangladesh), growing anti-Hinduism caused steady migration into India. The phobia that had grown from anti-Hinduism into Indophobia is also a part of ethnic Bengali
Bengali people
The Bengali people are an ethnic community native to the historic region of Bengal in South Asia. They speak Bengali , which is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. In their native language, they are referred to as বাঙালী...
Nationalism in the country, which continues to mark an average Bangladeshi’s perception of Indians. The ruling Bangladeshi class had realized this soon after the formation of Bangladesh and consequently made successive attempts to project not only the anti-India stance of the country, but also Islamic extremism
Islamic extremism
Islamic extremism refers to two related and partially overlapping but also distinct aspects of extremist interpretations and pursuits of Islamic ideology:...
which came to be basis of anti-India propaganda.
Political disputes like the Farakka Barrage
Farakka Barrage
Farakka Barrage is a barrage across the Ganges River, located in the Indian state of West Bengal, roughly from the border with Bangladesh near Chapai Nawabganj District. Construction was started in 1961 and completed in 1975. Operations began on April 21, 1975. The barrage is about long...
, Indo-Bangladesh enclaves
Indo-Bangladesh enclaves
The Indo-Bangladesh enclaves, also known as the chitmahals are the enclaves along the Bangladesh–India border, in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal....
and Indo-Bangladeshi barrier have created rift between the two. Persecution of Hindus
Persecution of Hindus
Persecution of Hindus refers to the religious persecution inflicted upon Hindus. Hindus have been historically persecuted during Islamic rule of the Indian subcontinent and during the Goa Inquisition...
in Bangladesh by the rising tide of militant Islamists and cross-border infiltration into India by illegal Bangladeshi immigrants has created likewise anti-Bangladeshi sentiment in India. Indophobia in Bangladesh is coupled with anti-Hinduism in Bangladesh, whereby Bengali Hindus are persecuted and accused of dual loyalty
Dual loyalty
In politics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially conflict with each other.-Inherently controversial:While nearly all examples of alleged "dual loyalty" are considered highly controversial, these examples point to the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between what...
with India by militant Islamist parties such as the BNP
Bangladesh Nationalist Party
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party , commonly referred to as the BNP, is the mainstream center-right political party in Bangladesh. BNP ruled Bangladesh total 18 years since her independence, the longest than any other party in Bangladesh...
and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh.
Sri Lanka
In Sri Lanka, Indians are called by the derogatory term 'Kalla-Thonis', originally used to denote smugglers. It is suggested that anti-Indian prejudices in Sri Lanka may be caused by the island nation's historically antagonistic relationship towards larger and more powerful empires in India (such as the Chola Empire), as well as their ethnic tensions with Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, who are accused of dual loyaltyDual loyalty
In politics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially conflict with each other.-Inherently controversial:While nearly all examples of alleged "dual loyalty" are considered highly controversial, these examples point to the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between what...
to India.
Despite India's alliance with the Sri Lankan government during the Sri Lankan Civil War
Sri Lankan civil war
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a conflict fought on the island of Sri Lanka. Beginning on July 23, 1983, there was an on-and-off insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam , a separatist militant organization which fought to create an independent Tamil state named Tamil...
, anti-Indian hatreds and prejudices are fairly common among the ethnic Sinhalese
Sinhalese people
The Sinhalese are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group,forming the majority of Sri Lanka,constituting 74% of the Sri Lankan population.They number approximately 15 million worldwide.The Sinhalese identity is based on language, heritage and religion. The Sinhalese speak Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language and the...
, fuelled by Buddhist Nationalism and militancy. Attitudes among sections of Sri Lankan society towards the minority Tamil
Tamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...
s of the country is associated with Indophobia, and Tamil minorities are scapegoated as "Indian spies". Indian traders and businessmen, patronized by the Tamil minority, have been shunned and attacked by the Sinhalese.
During the 1950s, a series of discriminatory measures taken by the Sinhala regime targeted Indian traders (typically from the Indian states of Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
and Kerala
Kerala
or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....
), resulting in the traders being forced out of Sri Lanka. Following this, trade with India was deliberately scuttled, as was the sale of Indian magazines.
The Indophobia of that era also resulted in the Sinhala government going after the so called Tamils of ‘recent’ Indian origin. These immigrant plantation workers imported by the British more than a hundred years earlier had already been stripped of their citizenship by a prior legislation – the first Legislative Act of the newly independent Sri Lanka in 1948. Since then, these Tamils had been living as ‘stateless’ persons, many have repatriated to India.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Former British colonies in Sub-Saharan AfricaSub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...
have many citizens of South Asian descent. They were brought there by the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
from British India
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
to do clerical work in Imperial service. In academic discourse, racial prejudices directed against these people from their host countries fall under the rubric of Indophobia. The most prominent case being the ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
of Indian (sometimes simply called "Asian
Asian people
Asian people or Asiatic people is a term with multiple meanings that refers to people who descend from a portion of Asia's population.- Central Asia :...
") minority in Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
by the dictator
Dictator
A dictator is a ruler who assumes sole and absolute power but without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship...
Idi Amin
Idi Amin
Idi Amin Dada was a military leader and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military...
.
According to H.H. Patel, many Indians
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
in East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
and Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
were as tailors and bankers businesses, where they were kept forcibly by the British colonialists. Since the representation of Indians in these professions was high, stereotyping of Indians in Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
as tailors or bankers was common.
Also, some Indians perceived themselves as coming from a more advanced culture than Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
. Indophobia in Uganda thus predated Amin, and also existed under Milton Obote
Milton Obote
Apolo Milton Obote , Prime Minister of Uganda from 1962 to 1966 and President of Uganda from 1966 to 1971, then again from 1980 to 1985. He was a Ugandan political leader who led Uganda towards independence from the British colonial administration in 1962.He was overthrown by Idi Amin in 1971, but...
. The 1968 Committee on "Africanization in Commerce and Industry" in Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
made far-reaching Indophobic proposals.
A system of work permits and trade licenses was introduced in 1969 in order to restrict the role of Indians in economic and professional activities. Indians were segregated and discriminated against in all walks of life. After Amin came to power, he exploited these divisions to spread propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
against Indians involving stereotyping and scapegoating the Indian minority.
Indians were stereotyped as "only traders" and so "inbred" to their profession. Indians were attacked as "dukawallas" (an occupational term that degenerated into an anti-Indian slur during Amin's time). Indians were stereotyped as "greedy, conniving", without any racial identity or loyalty but "always cheating, conspiring and plotting" to subvert Uganda.
Amin used this propaganda to justify a campaign of "de-Indianization", eventually resulting in the expulsion
Expulsion of Asians in Uganda in 1972
On 4 August 1972, the then President of Uganda, Idi Amin, ordered the expulsion of his country's Indian minority, giving them 90 days to leave Uganda...
and ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
of Uganda's Indian minority. About 25,000 British passport holding Asians out of an estimated 80,000 expelled Asians (Indian-origin) settled in Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
North America
Hate crime statistics against Indians in North American countries are unavailable. Though not at all widespread, it is believed that sporadic bouts of communal and institutional hatred against Indians have occurred, though their frequency may have decreased in recent years. In the late 1980s a Jersey City, New JerseyNew Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
street gang calling themselves the "Dotbusters
Dotbusters
The Dotbusters was a hate group in Jersey City, New Jersey, that attacked and threatened South Asians in the fall of 1987. The name originated from the fact that traditional Hindu women and girls wear a bindi on their forehead .In July 1987, they had a letter published in the Jersey Journal stating...
" targeted, threatened and attacked South Asians, specifically Indians. Indophobia in the United States has risen in certain circles due to anti-immigrant
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...
sentiment against Indian American
Indian American
Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestral roots lie in India. The U.S. Census Bureau popularized the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Indigenous peoples of the Americas who are commonly referred to as American Indians.-The term: Indian:...
s, attempts by extremists to undermine US-India cooperation, as well as myths and misconceptions about them propagated on the internet.
Vamsee Juluri, author and Professor of Media Studies
Media studies
Media studies is an academic discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the 'mass media'. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass...
at the University of San Francisco
University of San Francisco
The University of San Francisco , is a private, Jesuit/Catholic university located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California and the tenth-oldest university of...
, identifies Indophobia in certain sections of the US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
media as part of a racist postcolonial/neocolonial discourse used to attack and defame India and encourage racial prejudice against Indian Americans, particularly in light of India's recent economic progress, which some "old-school" colonialists find to be incompatible with their Clash of Civilizations world view. Juluri identified numerous instances of bias and prejudice against Indians in some prominent sections of US media, such as the New York Times and Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy is a bimonthly American magazine founded in 1970 by Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel.Originally, the magazine was a quarterly...
.
South America
In countries such as GuyanaGuyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
and Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...
, as well as some Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
islands, racism against the India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n populations are quite present, and sometimes even violent.
Fiji
A significant percentage of the population of Fiji are Indo-Fijians (of Indian ancestors). Indo-Fijians account for about 37% of the total population. There was a period worked as indentured laborers and a period of major religious and social divisions. The Fiji coup of 2000Fiji coup of 2000
The Fiji coup of 2000 was a complicated affair involving a civilian putsch by hardline Fijian nationalists against the elected government of a non-native Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, on 19 May 2000, the attempt by President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara to assert executive authority on 27 May, and...
provoked a violent backlash against the Indo-Fijians for a time and persecution is still present between Indo-Fijians and native ethnic Fijians.
Australia
In May and June 2009, allegedly racially motivated attacks against Indian international students2009 attacks on Indian students in Australia
During 2009, the media of Australia, mostly in Melbourne, and India publicised reports of crimes and robberies against Indians in Australia that were described as racially motivated crimes. A subsequent Indian Government investigation concluded that 23 incidents involved "racial overtones"...
and a perceived poor response by the police sparked protests in Australia. Rallies were held in both Melbourne and Sydney. Impromptu street protests were held in Harris Park, a suburb of western Sydney with a large Indian population.Representatives of the Indian government met the Australian government to express concern and request that Indians be protected. The Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2010...
, expressed regret and called for the attackers to be brought to justice.The United Nations termed these attacks "disturbing" and rights commissioner Navi Pillay has asked Australia to investigate the matters further.
There were internet groups on Facebook which set up anti-Indian groups on the Facebook. The Rudd Government has set up a special taskforce, headed by the Prime Minister's national security adviser, Duncan Lewis, to deal with the proposal to make sending of a text message encouraging someone to commit a racial attack to become a federal offence. The proposed amendment to the existing legislation would strengthen the powers of the police to respond to attacks against Indian students. Internet based racism has been a problem due to lack of legislative powers to effectively lay charges on the perpetrator due to privacy laws. The current system allows the commission to investigate complaints of racial vilification and then attempts to resolve complaints through conciliation with ISPs and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
BBC
In 2008, the BBC was criticised by some for referring to the terrorists who carried out the November 2008 Mumbai attacks as mere "gunmen", This follows a steady stream of complaints from India that the BBC has an Indophobic bias that stems from its culturally ingrained racism against Indians, stemming from the British RajBritish Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
. Rediff reporter, Arindam Banerji, has chronicled numerous cases of Indophobic bias from the BBC regarding reportage, selection bias, misrepresentation, and fabrications. Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
groups in the United Kingdom have accused the BBC of anti-Hindu bigotry and whitewashing Islamist hate groups that demonize the British Indian
British Indian
The term British Indian refers to citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestral roots lie in India. This includes people born in the UK who are of Indian descent, and Indian-born people who have migrated to the UK...
minority
In protest of the biased coverage of the BBC, renown journalist Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar
M. J. Akbar
Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He has recently taken charge as Editorial Director of India Today, India's leading weekly English news magazine published by the Living Media group...
has elected to boycott the BBC to speak about the Mumbai terror attacks. British parliamentarian Stephen Pound has supported these claims, referring to the BBC's whitewashing of the terror attacks as "the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone."
Writing for The Hindu
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
Business Line, reporter Premen Addy criticizes the BBC's reportage on South Asia as consistently anti-India and pro-Islamist, and that they underreport India's economic and social achievements, as well as political and diplomatic efforts, and disproportionately highlight and exaggerate problems in the country. In addition, Addy alludes to discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...
against Indian anchors and reporters in favor of Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
i and Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
i ones who are hostile to India.
Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television is an academic journal dedicated to the study of media history. It is published quarterly by Routledge on behalf of the International Association for Media and History. The current editor-in-chief is James Chapman ....
, Alasdair Pinkerton analyzes the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control...
stance.
Writing on western media bias
Media bias
Media bias refers to the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the...
regarding South Asia in the journal of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses , New Delhi is India's premier think tank for advanced research in international relations, especially strategic and security issues, and also trains civilian and military officers of the Government of India. Established in 1965, IDSA is funded by but...
, media analyst Ajai K. Rai strongly criticizes the BBC for anti-India bias. He writes that there is a total lack of depth or fairness in the BBC's reportage on conflict zones in South Asia, and that the BBC has, on one occasion, fabricated photographs while reporting on the Kashmir conflict
Kashmir conflict
The Kashmir conflict is a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, the northwesternmost region of South Asia....
in order to make India look bad. He also writes that the BBC made false allegations that the Indian Army
Indian Army
The Indian Army is the land based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. With about 1,100,000 soldiers in active service and about 1,150,000 reserve troops, the Indian Army is the world's largest standing volunteer army...
stormed a sacred Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
shrine, the tomb of Hazrat Sheikh Noor-u-din Noorani
Sheikh Noor-ud-din Wali
Sheikh Noor-ud-din, also known as Nund Rishi, was a famous Kashmiri saint who belonged to the Rishi order. He belonged to a Rajput lineage of Kisthwar. He was born in 1377 CE, corresponding to 779 Hijri and he died at the age of 63 years in the year of 1440 CE or 842 Hijri...
in Charari Sharief
Charari Sharief
Charari Sharief is a town and a notified area committee in Badgam district in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India.-Geography:...
, and only retracted the claim after strong criticism from the media in India for several weeks.
New York Times
Critics have also charged that The New York Times is Indophobic, and promotes neocolonialismNeocolonialism
Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control...
with its slanted and negative coverage of India. American lawmaker Kumar P. Barve
Kumar P. Barve
Kumar P. Barve is an American politician. He is a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing district 17 in Montgomery County.-Legislative career:...
has called a recent NYT editorial on India as full of "blatant and unprofessional factual errors or omissions", and having a "haughty, condescending,arrogant and patronizing" tone that reminded him of the British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
. Sumit Ganguly, a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has similarly criticized the NYT in Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
, finding anti-India bias in The Times coverage of the Kashmir Conflict
Kashmir conflict
The Kashmir conflict is a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, the northwesternmost region of South Asia....
, the Hyde Act, and other India-related matters.
Terrorism
Due to the large size and diversity of India, there are various forms of anti-India activities all over the country. Racism, regionalism and militancy are prominent forms of anti-constitution/anti-India activities. Terrorism in India is primarily attributable to Islamic, SikhSikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
, Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
, Naxalite
Naxalite
The word Naxal, Naxalite or Naksalvadi is a generic term used to refer to various militant Communist groups operating in different parts of India under different organizational envelopes...
and ethnic nationalist radical movements. The regions with long term activities against India today are Bihar
Bihar
Bihar is a state in eastern India. It is the 12th largest state in terms of geographical size at and 3rd largest by population. Almost 58% of Biharis are below the age of 25, which is the highest proportion in India....
, Jharkhand
Jharkhand
Jharkhand is a state in eastern India. It was carved out of the southern part of Bihar on 15 November 2000. Jharkhand shares its border with the states of Bihar to the north, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to the west, Orissa to the south, and West Bengal to the east...
, Jammu and Kashmir
Jammu and Kashmir
Jammu and Kashmir is the northernmost state of India. It is situated mostly in the Himalayan mountains. Jammu and Kashmir shares a border with the states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab to the south and internationally with the People's Republic of China to the north and east and the...
and Seven Sister States
Seven Sister States
The Seven Sister States also called "Paradise Unexplored" is a name given to the contiguous states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland & Tripura in northeastern India. These states cover an area of about 250,000 sq. km. or about 7 percent of India's total area. They...
(the main anti-India movements in Jammu and Kahmir and the Seven Sisters are independence and autonomy movements). In the past, the Punjab insurgency
Punjab insurgency
The insurgency in the Indian state of Punjab originated in the late 1970s. The roots of the insurgency were very complex.-Punjabi Suba Movement:In the 1950s and 1960s, linguistic issues in India caused civil disorder when the central government declared Hindi as the national language of India...
led to militant activities in the Indian state of Punjab
Punjab (India)
Punjab ) is a state in the northwest of the Republic of India, forming part of the larger Punjab region. The state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the east, Haryana to the south and southeast and Rajasthan to the southwest as well as the Pakistani province of Punjab to the...
as well as the national capital Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
. As of 2006, at least 232 of the country’s 608 districts were afflicted, at differing intensities, by various insurgent and terrorist movements. In August 2008, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan has said that there are as many as 800 terrorist cells operating in the country.
See also
- AntiziganismAntiziganismAntiziganism or Anti-Romanyism is hostility, prejudice or racism directed at the Romani people, also known as Gypsies.As an endogamous culture with a tendency to practise self-segregation, the Romanis have generally resisted assimilation with the indigenous communities of whichever countries they...
- Lusignan (Guyana)
- 2009 attacks on Indians in Australia
- 2008 Indian embassy bombing in Kabul2008 Indian embassy bombing in KabulThe 2008 Indian embassy bombing in Kabul was a suicide bomb terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan on 7 July 2008 at 8:30 AM local time. The bombing killed 58 people and wounded 141. The suicide car bombing took place near the gates of the embassy during morning hours when...
- Barbara CrossetteBarbara CrossetteBarbara Crossette is an American journalist and instructor in journalism.She wrote for The New York Times for over twenty years, and served as the paper's chief correspondent in South East Asia...
- Arundhati RoyArundhati RoyArundhati Roy is an Indian novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays...
External links
- Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, University of California Press (1997), ISBN 0-520-20546-4, (chapter 4: British Indophobia)
- http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-1607(197224)2%3A4%3C12%3AGAATIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23
- Idi AminIdi AminIdi Amin Dada was a military leader and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military...
& Indophobia: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-1607(197224)2%3A4%3C12%3AGAATIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 - http://www.apcss.org/Publications/Edited%20Volumes/ReligiousRadicalism/PagesfromReligiousRadicalismandSecurityinSouthAsiach3.pdf
- http://www.acdis.uiuc.edu/Research/OPs/Saikia/SaikiaOP.pdf