What India’s student uprising asks of Hindus

(RNS) — On July 20, I stayed up all night watching terrifying livestreams from Delhi. Student protesters including teenagers faced tear gas and police batons as they tried to march toward the parliament building demanding an accountable education system in the wake of repeated exam failures and a chief justice calling unemployed youth activists “cockroaches.”

For more than a decade, through Hindus for Human Rights, I have tried to mobilize Hindus in India and the diaspora against the erosion of civil rights, minority rights and democracy under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose politics are rooted in the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva. The ideology uses Hindu identity to justify majoritarian rule and can make equality feel, to some Hindus, less like justice than the loss of a privileged place.

Hindus must take note: This uprising is different. This protest reached deep into the Hindu constituency Hindutva claims — Hindu and middle-class families — and then refused the communal politics Hindutva offered.

This protest is different because it showed that Hindus can be mobilized in large numbers, in solidarity with people whom Hindu nationalism has taught us…