Anti-Indian sentiment

They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity – that has been their stance.

Anti-Indian sentiment refers to negative feelings and hatred towards the Republic of India, Indian people, and Indian culture. Indophobia is formally defined in the context of anti-Indian prejudice as "a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian extraction against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits". Its opposite is Indomania.

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G

• The prime minister sliced into Pakistan, which, she declared, based its existence on stoking hostility to India. Pakistan had long felt that it would get U.S. support no matter what it did, encouraging Pakistani “adventurism and Indophobia.” She complained that Pakistan turned every issue into a clash between Hindus and Muslims: “Indophobia was clothed in the metaphysics of holy wars and the defence of Islam.”
  • Indira Gandhi, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• The truth is that I spoke clearly to Mr. Nixon [about the situation of the Bangladesh Liberation war]... I told him without mincing words that we couldn’t go on with ten million refugees on our backs, we couldn’t tolerate the fuse of such and explosive situation any longer. Well, Mr. Heath, Mr. Pompidou, and Mr. Brandt had understood very well. But not Mr. Nixon. The fact is that when the others understand one thing, Mr. Nixon understands another. I suspected he was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan—not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India.
  • Indira Gandhi. Quoted in Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Indira Gandhi, in : Interviews with history and conversations with power. New York: Rizzoli, 2001.

N

• There’s a huge public relations campaign here. Many of our friends in the other party, and including, I must say, some of the nuts in our own party, soft-heads, have jumped on, have completely bought the Indian line. And India has a very great propaganda line.
  • Richard Nixon, quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

S

• They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British... – that has been their stance.... Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony. This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it... India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation...
  • Arun Shourie (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.

R

• Pakistani textbooks have a particular problem when defining geographical space. The terms "South Asia" and "Subcontinent" have partially helped to solve this problem of the geo-historical identity of the area formally known as British India. However, it is quite difficult for Pakistani textbook writers to ignore the land now known as India when they discuss Islamic heroes and Muslim monuments in the Subcontinent. This reticence to recognize anything of importance in India, which is almost always referred to as "Bharat" in both English and Urdu versions of the textbooks, creates a difficult dilemma for historians writing about the Mughal Dynasties.
  • Yvette Rosser, Islamization of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks, 2003