Hindu Human Rights held a protest outside New Zealand House, the high commission in London, to highlight the growing Hinduphobia in that country. The attack only last month by Ahamed Samsudeen, a radicalised asylum seeker from Sri Lanka in Auckland, and the shootings in 2019 by Australian neo-Nazi Brenton Harrison Tarranton who targeted innocent worshippers at the Christchurch mosque has demonstrated that New Zealand is far from immune to the politics of hate. The aforementioned were radicalised by material that had brainwashed them into thinking that they needed to attack anyone deemed the ‘enemy’. This in effect meant other people who they regarded as subhuman. These attacks would not have happened had material and ideas not been circulating. But with Hindus, these negative elements have gone mainstream.
Both Massey University and the New Zealand Herald have been complicit in this anti-Hindu propaganda. Despite the stabbings by Samsudeen and the massacre by Tarrant, Massey University, the NZ Herald and especially its Professor Mohan Dutta are directly accountable for inciting racial and religious hatred in the New Zealand community against Indian immigrants and Hindus of New Zealand and Australia. Statements of NZ Herald, Professor Dutta at Massey University and his supporters, trolls, media and a foreign NGO in support of Dutta have systematically demonised and vilified Hindus as violent extremists for the past month relentlessly. The prejudiced headline: ‘Police aware of concerns about right-wing Indian Nationalist groups in New Zealand’ repeats the inaccurate claims of Dutta that New Zealand Indians and Hindus are security threats.
The headline deliberately stokes fear solely based upon the false allegations of Dutta which he made to police a month earlier. This raises the question of newsworthiness and why the NZ Herald would deem the headline fit for publication. This is especially considering that NZ Herald published an attack on an Indian immigrant taxi driver in July 2021 where a man punched the taxi driver in the eye saying ‘f**cking Indians’. Our voices have not been heard. Our concerns have been shut down. Hindus of New Zealand, Australia and the world deserve better than to be smeared as violent extremists from our academic institutions and media. Samsudeen and Tarrant did not just randomly select their victims. They were nurtured through like-minded people and online hate in the murky corners of the web and society. The difference now is that attacks on Hindus and Hinduphobia are being justified and given sound basis by academics at Massey University and the writers at the New Zealand Herald. It is the type of mainstream acceptance that Tarrant could only dream of.
