The Subcontinent Project is a graduate student organization aiming to engage with the Northwestern community about South Asian politics and culture.
India’s right-wing, pro-Hindu ruling party — the Bharatiya Janata Party — passed the Citizen Amendment Act in 2019, easing the path to citizenship for Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Parsi and Sikh immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
However, the policy does not grant the same benefits to Muslim immigrants.
“Hindu cultural nationalism sanctifies India as intrinsically Hindu and marks the non-Hindu as its adversary,” Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email to The Daily.
Chatterji said laws like the CAA privilege Hindus while putting religious minorities’ rights and privileges — particularly those of Muslims — at “grave risk.” She said the ascent of Hindu nationalism that has occurred since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s election and re-election to the government in 2014 and 2019, respectively, has amplified the majoritarian state of the country.
Opposition to the CAA has resulted in a series of protests worldwide, including in the Chicago area.
Several South Asian graduate students from Northwestern — along with students from the University of Illinois Chicago and Loyola University Chicago — protested the CAA at the Consulate General of India in downtown Chicago in 2019. The group hoped to raise awareness of international opposition to nationalist elements of Indian politics.
These protest efforts sparked the formation of The Subcontinent Project in 2020, a graduate student organization aiming to engage with the NU community about South Asian politics and culture.
“I think it’s especially important that there is such a space on campus given the rise — especially in the last year and a half — of very explicitly Hindu supremacist organizations on campus,” said Raina Bhagat, a fourth-year comparative literature Ph.D. student and former TSP president.
Hindu YUVA is a NU religious student organization with the aim of bringing Hindu and non-Hindu students together. According to the official website, the group is a student program of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, a social and cultural organization which aims to promote Hindu values.
However, Bhagat said she believes the HSS funds terror in India. She said HSS has connections to India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary, which some religious minorities in India criticized for fostering intolerance and hate towards minority groups.
This story was originally published in dailynorthwestern.com . Read the full story here
