My shoulder started throbbing again last week. The pain has become unbearable. Only this time, it’s not because I’m misidentified as Muslim. Now it’s because I am Hindu and because progressive intellectuals don’t recognize or acknowledge that they are righteously, ceaselessly championing anti-Hinduism activism.

It breaks my heart when I hear Hindu friends say, “They just want us to shut up and die.” I’ve said it myself.

Hindu persecution doesn’t matter to the world.

Sensationalism Overrides Sensibility

The stunningly bizarre response to the Citizenship Amendment Act drove this point home for me. The Western press, with its unethical, shoddy coverage of the legislation, is so obsessed with its “India is headed towards Hindu theocracy” fear-mongering sensationalism that they not only buried the lede, they seem to have obliterated it completely.

Not a single headline from these two popular progressive sources identifies the purpose of the legislation — to help ease the citizenship pathways for religious refugees from oppressive Muslim nations. Not a single headline acknowledges their oppression. Anyone who relies on these journals would naturally assume that the sole purpose of the CAA is malicious and Islamophobic.

Let’s look more closely at how The Washington Post reports on the legislation:

They have made it about Islamophobia. Nowhere does this description center the persecution of the religious minorities seeking a permanent safe home, nowhere does this piece acknowledge that the three nations from which they escaped are theocracies. Nor do they acknowledge the fact that it would be cruel for India to send these people back to a State which constitutionally discriminates against them.

Yet, the incontrovertible fact is that the CAA was created only because non-Muslims — including and especially Hindus — have been persecuted in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, the three Muslim nations covered in the legislation. Hindus are being forcibly converted, murdered, kidnapped, raped, terrorized, and ethnically cleansed, often from homes on their ancestral land.

From 1964 to 2013, around 11.3 million Hindus left Bangladesh due to religious persecution and discrimination which means on an average 632 Hindus left the country each day and 230,612 annually. (Dr Abul Barkat, Dhaka University) As we speak, the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh is getting worse and worse. Between 2001 and 2011, an alarming decrease in the number of Hindus within Bangladesh was recorded. According to statistics available with government sources, the proportionate decrease in the Hindu population is around nine hundred thousand. The statistics show an almost elimination of the Hindu population in fifteen districts in the country. Most of the Hindu families in those districts were forced to leave the country. (Rachel Avraham, Foreign Policy Association)

But not a single headline in a major progressive newspaper in the West contextualizes the CAA in that lived reality.

The beneficiaries of the Citizenship Amendment Act are not wealthy or university-educated or gaming some evil Hindutva system of privilege. They are ordinary people seeking the freedom to lead their lives without the constant fear of being actively persecuted by the State for their faith. They can only do that in India.