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+--- Thread: An Anti-Muslim Symbol From India Is Paraded on Main Street, New Jersey (/Thread-An-Anti-Muslim-Symbol-From-India-Is-Paraded-on-Main-Street-New-Jersey)
An Anti-Muslim Symbol From India Is Paraded on Main Street, New Jersey - Levin - 05-10-2022
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/nyregion/bulldozer-indian-parade-new-jersey.html