The Hindutva Harassment Field Manual offers educational and practical resources for the targets, allies, students, and employers of Hindutva-led assaults. It was written and is maintained by the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective.
The manual was published in 2021, a year that saw Hindutva attacks on North American academics accelerate significantly, including violent threats. Free Expression groups, including PEN America flagged this issue. Scholars have placed the Field Manual within a larger "anti-Hindutva discourse" that organized in online spaces in 2021.
Reception
The field manual has been received positively by academics and negatively by Hindutva-aligned group. For example, it was cited in a 2023 Research Council report at the University of Massachusetts that recommended steps for addressing "public harassment and defamation of faculty." A University of Chicago professor noted in 2024 that the field manual was helpful for addressing politically-motivated complaints against United States-based scholars whose work "is inconvenient for the RSS narrative." In contrast, the Hindu American Foundation, a Hindutva organisation, included the manual within a Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania.
Timeline of Harassment One section of the field manual documents Hindu Right attacks on the North American academy dating back to the mid-1990s.https://www.hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org/timeline This section was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2022.
References
External links Hindutva Harassment Field Manual