Religion and societal harm in Hinduism

The harm-critique of Hinduism focuses most sharply on caste. The traditional varna-jati system, with scriptural grounding in texts from the Rig Veda's Purusha Sukta through the Manusmriti, produced and legitimized the most elaborate system of hereditary social stratification in human history. Dalits ('Untouchables', now numbering over 200 million in India) were, until legal reforms in the twentieth century, systematically excluded from temple access, education, water sources, and economic opportunity. B.R. Ambedkar — architect of the Indian Constitution and himself born into a Dalit family — produced the most influential internal critique, ultimately renouncing Hinduism and converting to Buddhism in 1956 with hundreds of thousands of followers.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have added a second charge: communal violence. Partition in 1947 killed perhaps a million people across Hindu-Muslim-Sikh lines. Subsequent flashpoints — the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, the 2002 Gujarat riots — have kept the question of Hindu nationalism's relationship to violence central to Indian political life. Hindutva ideology, developed by V.D. Savarkar and now institutionalized through the BJP and the RSS, has been charged by critics like Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, and Wendy Doniger with producing a politically exclusionary Hinduism that betrays the tradition's more pluralist strands.

Defenders push back on several fronts. Traditional Hindu scholars argue that caste abuse represents a corruption of dharmic teaching rather than its expression; reformist movements from Chaitanya in the sixteenth century through Vivekananda, Gandhi, and contemporary gurus have long opposed it. Hindutva intellectuals argue that the communal-violence charge is selective: Hindus have been victims as well as perpetrators, and Islamic expansionism caused significant harm in historical India. Academic historians like Romila Thapar, D.N. Jha, and Audrey Truschke have written extensively on the history in both directions. As with Christianity, the cleanest version of the critique is not 'Hinduism causes harm' but 'these institutional patterns, historically entrenched within Hinduism, have caused specific harms that the tradition's internal critics have contested for centuries.'