[Levin]

By Tracey Tully
Published Sept. 25, 2022
Updated Sept. 27, 2022


EDISON, N.J. — The India Day Parade featured a pretty standard lineup of festival fare.

A Bollywood actress waved to fans from the top of a handmade float. Indian flags fluttered in the breeze. Flashy cars and quirky ads (“Kidney donors are sexy,” read one) passed by.

Then, toward the middle of the caravan, came a small, yellow piece of construction equipment decorated with photos of India’s prime minister and a hard-line protégé who has been called “bulldozer baba,” or father bulldozer — words written in Hindi near his picture.

To some bystanders, the solitary wheel loader, which resembles a bulldozer, was no more than an oddity as it rumbled past during the parade last month in Edison, N.J.

But to those who understood its symbolism, it was a blunt and sinister taunt later likened to a noose or a burning cross at a Ku Klux Klan rally.

“I felt disgusted,” said Deepak Kumar, 50, a co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, who attended the parade celebrating the 75th anniversary of India’s independence from Britain.

In India, where a divisive brand of Hindu-first nationalism is surging, bulldozers have become symbols of oppression, and a focus of the escalating religious tension that has resulted in the government-led destruction of private homes and businesses, most of them owned by members of the country’s Muslim minority.


Read full article at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/nyreg...ersey.html