A powerful statement of solidarity between concerned Indians, Hindu and Muslim, South Asian Americans and others against the growing Islamophobia manifest in the United States after the Donald Trump victory has been issued.
The text of the Solidarity Statement:
We issue this statement as concerned Hindus, South Asian Americans, and members of the AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian) community who are tired of defending our people from hate and living in fear for the safety of our families. While Islamophobia and xenophobia are not new—and neither are resistance and solidarity—we believe this is a particularly urgent moment that requires a response from all of our communities. We as Hindus bear a particular responsibility in this moment of rising U.S. fascism, alongside rising Hindu fundamentalism in India.
As Hindus, we believe we have a particular responsibility to stand up against this hate and for the U.S. - and world - we want to live and thrive in. We have a long history of being divided against our Muslim brothers and sisters, EVIDENCed in the ‘divide-and-conquer’ colonization of the Indian subcontinent. When the colonial project was finally abandoned, it left a deep rift in our homeland - separating “Hindu India” from “Muslim Pakistan”. In reality, we know that Hindus and Muslims lived together for centuries, sharing their spaces and resources, inter-marrying, living as neighbors and friends, before our communities were violently separated by colonizer-imposed borders.
The long list of hate crimes since the San Bernardino shooting and the election of Trump includes violence on places of Sikh and Muslim worship, physical assault on AMEMSA community members, vandalism, hate speech, and hate mail. We reject any normalization of this violence, and are committed to a vision where Hindus resist this trajectory with our AMEMSA family.
White supremacy culture and xenophobia are overwhelmingly prevalent in the US today. Earlier this week, 60 million people cast ballots for radical right wing presidential candidate Donald Trump, who ran on pledges to deport millions of immigrants and require Muslims to register. This rhetoric is part of a vicious cycle of hate which fuels and is fueled by the deeply embedded racism on which the United States economy was originally built. The same ideology shows up in public institutions through racial profiling and armed police forces that brutally attack communities of color and Black people in particular; it shows up in the militarization of our borders, and the refusal of Syrian refugees displaced by climate chaos; and it shows up in renegade self-appointed “saviors” and vigilantes physically attacking Muslims, Black people, and anyone else who doesn’t fit into the white supremacist narrative of who and what America is.
In that context, the South Asian diaspora of today has often been pushed to separate and divide itself. Particularly since the racial profiling and government-sanctioned surveillance that has followed the 9/11 attacks, it has become commonplace for non-Muslim South Asian Americans to distinguish ourselves by religion, feeding into false binary narratives of good vs. bad South Asians. But for us this is defeat - surrendering to white supremacy and condoning racist violence against our own. The only value of distinguishing ourselves as non-Muslims is to recognize how we are impacted differently, so that we are better equipped to stand in solidarity as allies.
We must pledge resistance in our homelands, as we see the rise of Hindu fundamentalism under the Modi government in India, and how this supports Islamophobia and U.S. Empire globally. And we must pledge resistance in our home the United States, where one man can paint Nazi symbols and “go home” on a Somali restaurant before setting fire to it a few days later, and another can bomb threat a Muslim community center - and both can walk free with barely a blink from the media or local law enforcement.
Enough is enough. We pledge to resist hate and to organize our people and resources towards an America where all people are free to live without fear: free to work, play, pray, raise their families, and serve their communities without being dehumanized, targeted, incarcerated or attacked. We will work towards a world without Islamophobia. We will live and work in active solidarity, and we will move together towards a vision and practice of collective liberation.