Hindu faith mocked; sacred Kalava denigrated as symbols of slavery by Ambedkarite singer
Bara Banki, Uttar Pradesh, India 
31 August, 2024
Case Summary
In Bara Banki, Uttar Pradesh, the self-styled Ambedkarite-Buddhist singer Sanghmitra Baudh, a repeat offender who has previously appeared in videos openly denigrating Hindu deities, beliefs, and religious practices, was once again seen mocking Hinduism in another viral video. This time, she targeted the Kalava, the sacred thread worn by Hindus during religious rituals, and portrayed it as a symbol of slavery and bondage. Baudh then used the story of Raja Bali to reinforce her attack on Hindu traditions. She portrayed the Brahmin figure in the story as an Aryan who deceived Raja Bali and took away his kingdom. She also presented daan and dakshina, established Hindu practices of religious giving, as tools through which Raja Bali was supposedly dispossessed. She further linked the Kalava and the mantra recited while tying it to this version of the Raja Bali story. According to her, the thread that Hindus regard as a religious blessing actually represented the supposed enslavement of their ancestors. She described wearing the Kalava as being "bound in the chains of slavery" and urged people to stop wearing it. She invoked B.R. Ambedkar as the person who had broken these supposed chains and presented abandoning the practice as a means of liberation. Baudh also mocked other Hindu religious threads and protective amulets. Pointing towards black threads worn by women and girls for protection from the evil eye, she dismissed such practices as andhvishwas, meaning superstition, and pakhand, meaning hypocrisy or sham. She similarly criticised the use of taveez and other protective objects, arguing that they could not prevent illness or physical suffering. She then extended the narrative to a broader claim about India's history, portraying Aryans as foreigners and invaders who entered India and took control from its supposed original inhabitants. She referred to the pre-Aryan population as Mool Niwasi and claimed that the Aryans acquired land, wealth and political power through deception and conspiracy. She connected this narrative to the Brahmin figure in the Raja Bali story and to Hindu practices such as daan, dakshina, and the Kalava. Notably, this is not the first instance in which Sanghmitra Baudh has publicly targeted Hindu beliefs and religious practices. In an earlier programme, she repeatedly mocked Hindu idol worship, Hindu deities, Gau Mata, Nag Devta, Lord Ganesha, Govardhan worship, puja, bhog, daan-dakshina, and beliefs concerning Swarg and Narak, describing them as andhvishwas (superstition), andh bhakti (blind devotion), pakhand (hypocrisy) and dhong (pretence). Hinduphobia Tracker documented this incident, where she also mocked Hindu devotees for bowing before idols and ridiculed rituals involving cow dung and sacred threads. The earlier remarks establish a recurring pattern in which Baudh does not merely promote Buddhist or Ambedkarite thought but does so while repeatedly denigrating Hindu deities, traditions, and devotees. Her latest remarks therefore form part of a continuing pattern of hostility towards Hindu religious beliefs and practices.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
The primary category selected for this case is: Hate speech against Hindus. The subcategory selected for this case is: Anti-Hindu slurs, mocking faith. Anti-Hindu slurs and the deliberate mocking of the Hindu faith owing to religious animosity involve the use of derogatory terms, stereotypes, or offensive references to religious practices, symbols, or figures. One of the common anti-Hindu slurs used against Hindus is “cow-worshipper” and “cow piss drinker”. The intention of using this term is to demean and mock Hindus as a group and their religious beliefs, since Hindus consider the cow holy. Additionally, some symbols and the slurs attached to them have a historical context that exacerbates the insult, hate, stereotyping, dehumanisation and oppression against Hindus. Cow worship has been used for centuries to denigrate Hindus, insult their faith and oppress Hindus specifically as a religious group. There has been overwhelming documentation about how cow slaughter has been used to persecute Hindus, with cow meat being thrown in temples and places of worship. There has also been overwhelming documentation that cow meat (beef) has been force-fed to Hindus to either forcefully convert them to Islam or denigrate their faith. Apart from cow worship, the Swastika – which holds deep religious significance for Hindus – has also been misinterpreted and distorted to be used as a slur against Hindus. Similarly, the worship of the Shivling has been used by supremacist ideologies and religions to denigrate Hindus owing to religious animosity. Such slurs and denigration stem from inherent animosity and hate towards Hindus and their faith; therefore, it is categorised as hate speech targeted at Hindus specifically owing to their religious identity. The strongest religious marker in this case was Sanghmitra Baudh's attack on the Kalava, a sacred thread worn by Hindus during religious rituals and auspicious occasions. She did not merely question whether the practice had any religious value. She described the Kalava as a "chain of slavery" and told people that by wearing it they remained bound by the supposed oppression of their ancestors. She urged the audience to stop wearing it and presented abandoning the sacred thread as a form of liberation. By taking a widely recognised Hindu religious symbol and deliberately associating it with slavery and bondage, she turned an object regarded as auspicious and sacred by Hindus into a symbol of humiliation. The Kalava also has a long history in Hindu ritual practice. The practice of using ritual threads predates the modern use of the term Kalava and appears in Vedic literature. The Rig Veda 10.85.28 refers to relatives tying a red and black thread in a marriage ritual, while the Atharvaveda contains references to ritual protective threads. The significance of such threads developed through Hindu ritual traditions, where they came to be associated with protection, blessings, vows, and auspicious observances. Baudh therefore did not ridicule an arbitrary piece of thread but a religious practice with an established place in Hindu ritual life. She then used the story of Raja Bali to give the Kalava a new and hostile meaning. In the traditional Vamana narrative, Bali encounters Vamana, who asks for three paces of land. Bali grants the request as an act of generosity, after which Vamana assumes his cosmic form and covers the earth and heavens in two strides, leaving Bali to offer his own head for the third. The story appears in several Puranic traditions, including the Bhagavata Purana and Vamana Purana. Baudh departed from this religious understanding and presented the story as one of deliberate deception by a Brahmin who dispossessed an indigenous ruler. She then connected the Kalava to this interpretation, claiming that the thread worn by Hindus today represented the continuing bondage of Raja Bali's descendants. The connection allowed her to take a sacred Hindu symbol and present it as evidence of oppression rather than as part of Hindu religious practice. The same treatment was given to daan and dakshina. In the Vamana story, Bali's offering is framed within the religious concepts of dana, sacrifice, truthfulness and fulfilment of a promise. The Vamana Purana explicitly describes Bali granting the three strides through a ritual act of giving, with the water-offering marking the completion of the gift. Baudh instead presented daan-dakshina as mechanisms through which Hindu religious authority had supposedly deceived and dispossessed the indigenous population. This again replaced the religious meaning of an established Hindu practice with an interpretation designed to portray it as exploitative. Her broader narrative then placed these claims within the Aryan versus indigenous framework. She described the Aryans as foreigners who entered India and took control from the Mool Niwasi, presenting Brahmins and Hindu traditions as part of that process of dispossession. The idea of an Aryan invasion or conquest of an indigenous population has a long history in colonial Indology, but it remains a contested subject in modern scholarship. Oxford scholarship, for example, describes the Aryan migration debate as involving competing interpretations of linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence, while Cambridge scholarship has specifically examined how the older Aryan invasion narrative shaped ideas of Indian identity. The significance in this case is therefore not merely that Baudh discussed a contested interpretation of ancient history. She used that narrative to give a negative meaning to living Hindu religious practices, particularly the Kalava. A sacred thread was presented as a chain, daan-dakshina as a mechanism of exploitation, and the Brahmin figure as an agent of deception. The historical narrative was thus brought into the present and used to portray Hindu religious traditions themselves as remnants of an oppressive system. Her remarks also extended to other Hindu practices and protective objects, including black threads and taveez, which she dismissed as andhvishwas and pakhand. This reinforced the broader pattern of portraying Hindu ritual practices as superstition rather than engaging with their religious meaning. What makes the incident significant, therefore, is the deliberate inversion of religious meaning. A symbol that Hindus wear as part of their religious practice was recast as a symbol of slavery, while a Puranic narrative was reinterpreted as evidence against the very traditions from which it emerged. This went beyond promoting Buddhist or Ambedkarite ideas and became a sustained denigration of Hindu religious identity and practice. Moreover, the repeated nature of Baudh's remarks points to a deep-seated hostility towards Hinduism and its adherents. This was not an isolated disagreement with a particular ritual or theological belief. She repeatedly singled out Hindu symbols, religious narratives, rituals and devotees, stripped them of their religious meaning, and recast them as symbols of superstition, deception and slavery. Her continued use of Hindu religious traditions as objects of ridicule, while urging people to abandon them, demonstrates a sustained animosity towards Hindu faith and practice rather than a mere difference of religious or ideological opinion. Disclaimer: The video is from 2024, but no exact date is available. Therefore, we have used the known year and aligned it with the date the incident was documented, recording it as 1 September 2024.
Case Status
Unknown
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Others
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
female
Sources 
