https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-britain-can-no-longer-turn-blind-eye-hindutva-extremism
Britain Doesn’t Have a Hindutva Extremism Problem — It Has a Hinduphobia Narrative Problem
When Middle East Eye published its dramatic piece claiming that Britain “can no longer turn a blind eye” to Hindutva extremism, it attempted to inflate a fringe narrative into a national security concern. But the reality behind its centrepiece example—the Leicester disturbances of 2022—tells a story very different from the one MEE insists on. Evidence from police statements, intelligence assessments, and independent investigations showed that the earliest sparks of violence were triggered not by Hindu groups at all, but by radical Islamist misinformation networks, many operating from outside the UK, which spread fabricated claims of “Hindu mobs” and coordinated efforts to inflame communal tensions. These online campaigns—identified by both community monitors and open-source intelligence researchers—deliberately misrepresented events, mobilised crowds through incitement, and created an atmosphere of hostility that spilled into the streets. Yet MEE sidesteps this documented digital radicalism entirely, choosing instead to retrofit the unrest into a story of Hindu extremism that the facts simply do not support.
The Leicester example reveals the central problem with the MEE narrative: nuance disappears the moment it conflicts with a convenient political storyline. While Leicestershire Police made it clear that the disturbances involved multiple actors and were fuelled heavily by misinformation, the article pushes aside this complexity, eager to portray an entire religious minority as an organised extremist bloc. This selective reading becomes the foundation for a much broader—and equally unfounded—claim about Hindutva extremism supposedly rising in Britain.
The article then pivots to vague insinuations about “RSS-linked groups” operating in the UK, yet conspicuously avoids naming a single organisation. The reason for this avoidance is straightforward: no registered Hindu charity or cultural body in Britain has ever been flagged by counter-terrorism units, the Home Office, or the Prevent programme for extremist activity. Prevent, which explicitly monitors Islamist radicalisation, far-right extremism, and conspiracy-driven ideologies, has never identified Hindutva as a concern. Hindu groups in the UK operate openly, register transparently, and focus on cultural education, seva, youth mentorship, yoga programmes, and humanitarian projects. The absence of any substantive evidence forces MEE to rely instead on insinuation.
This reliance becomes more pronounced when the article attempts to use events in India as proof that Hindu extremism is spreading transnationally. But domestic Indian incidents cannot be casually projected onto diaspora communities, especially when the incidents themselves are misrepresented. The banning of the Popular Front of India (PFI), for example, was not a product of “Hindutva governance,” as MEE suggests, but the culmination of years of documented involvement in radicalisation, political violence, and recruitment pathways connected to global Islamist networks. Even Indian Christians have been targeted by ISIS-linked groomers, as documented in Swarajya’s reporting on trafficking and indoctrination cases in Kerala. Yet the MEE article avoids engaging with this extensive record of Islamist extremism, preferring instead to redirect attention toward Hindus—who have no comparable extremist footprint.
This selectivity extends to the article’s choice of “experts.” Rather than consult security professionals, intelligence analysts, or counter-extremism researchers, MEE turns to ideologues whose work depends on depicting Hindu identity as inherently oppressive. These commentators offer no primary data—no arrest records, no intelligence findings, no court cases, no patterns of radicalisation within the British Hindu community. Their authority is purely rhetorical, based on ideological predispositions rather than empirical evidence.
The deeper challenge is the longstanding misalignment between British multicultural discourse and the realities of Indian civilisational identity. British institutions, conditioned by Western racial frameworks, often misinterpret Hindu cultural expressions by squeezing them into categories such as “majority supremacy” or “ethno-nationalism,” frameworks designed for Abrahamic contexts. This misreading transforms cultural self-identification into proof of extremism. It is precisely this epistemic distortion that fuels the MEE narrative: by misunderstanding Hindu concepts, it invents threats where there are none.
What is most striking, however, is what the MEE article leaves out. Britain’s most persistent extremist threats have never come from Hindu groups. They have come from Islamist networks, far-right cells, and ideological ecosystems that have existed for decades. Scores of British citizens have travelled to fight for ISIS; Hizb-ut-Tahrir maintains a long-standing organisational presence; and radical preachers have inspired attacks on British soil. None of this, apparently, warrants space in MEE’s article. Instead, the publication conjures a novel “Hindutva threat” to dilute attention from the ideologies Britain actually confronts.
By misunderstanding Hindutva, the article also fundamentally misrepresents Hindu civilisational philosophy. Hinduism’s core is pluralism: a non-dogmatic worldview, a refusal to monopolise truth, and a historical record of coexistence unmatched by many civilisations. Hindutva, shaped by this civilisational ethos, is not an exclusivist doctrine. It is a cultural-national articulation rooted in shared heritage, not in religious supremacy. It cannot be meaningfully compared to the rigid, absolutist ideologies that define modern extremist movements.
The danger in MEE’s framing lies not in identifying a genuine threat but in manufacturing one. By presenting British Hindus as potential extremists, the article risks creating the very hostility it claims to warn against. Hindus have become targets of online harassment, misrepresentation, and prejudice precisely because narratives like this one feed public suspicion without offering evidence. It is not “Hindutva extremism” that threatens Britain—it is the growing willingness to mischaracterise a peaceful minority for political convenience.
Britain does not need moral panic about a fictitious Hindu threat. It needs intellectual honesty, empirical grounding, and a multicultural ecosystem capable of distinguishing between real extremism and manufactured narratives. Until then, British Hindus will continue to bear the burden of others’ political imagination.