Score: 2.49 out of 10 — Advocacy-Grade
What this report is
The South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC) published the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual. It guides people who say they face Hindutva-related harassment. Hindutva is a Hindu nationalist political movement. The manual tells readers how to identify attacks, respond to them, and find support.
What we looked at
How a study is done determines whether you can trust what it found. The Citation Integrity Dashboard (CID) scores methodology (which means how the research was done). It does not score conclusions (which means what the research found). A report’s findings could be completely correct and still get a low score if the methods behind them are weak.
We classified this manual as a TYPE 6 Advocacy Document. That means its main purpose is to advance a specific position, not to collect original data. We scored it on six dimensions (which means categories of evaluation). Two dimensions that only apply to data-driven reports were skipped.
What we found
The report only looks in one direction. We scored coverage symmetry (which means whether the report’s framing matches what it actually covers) at 2 out of 10. The pipeline detected the title framing as “Intersectional Hate.” That phrase implies broad coverage. The actual content is not broad. Anti-Hindu directional content makes up 100% of the terms our pipeline flagged. “Hindu” appears as a target of harm 31 times and as an agent of harm 4 times. No section considers harassment flowing the other direction. The report names specific organizations (RSS, HSS, BJP, HAF, CoHNA) as sources of harassment. It does not define harassment by behavior. It defines it by who does it. That fails what CID calls the Swap Test: if you removed the group names and applied the same criteria to reversed identities, the criteria would not work both ways.
The sources cite each other in a loop. We scored source independence (which means whether the evidence comes from genuinely separate places) at 2 out of 10. Out of 131 links in the manual, 107 point to advocacy sources. That is 81.7%. The manual’s own website is the top-cited domain with 16 links. SASAC’s own site adds 8 more. Combined, 18.3% of all citations point back to the authors. Equality Labs and Rutgers (whose CSRR report CID already scored at 3.7 out of 10) contribute more. These groups share scholars, cite each other’s work, and treat that cross-citation as independent confirmation. It is not.
The manual never engages with criticism. We scored counter-evidence (which means whether a report acknowledges limits or responds to critics) at 1 out of 10. There is no limitations section. There is no corrections policy. No scholar who questions the manual’s framing is cited or addressed. The Hindu American Foundation appears 7 times, but only as a subject, never as a voice whose perspective is engaged.
You cannot independently check the claims. We scored verification standards (which means whether an outside reader can confirm what the report says) at 3 out of 10. The manual does contain 131 links across 72 domains. That is a real citation effort. But when 81.7% of those links lead to advocacy materials, checking citations means checking whether one advocacy group correctly quoted another. It does not mean checking whether the underlying claim is true. No original data is available. No access process exists. CID classifies that as Tier 3 data access, the lowest tier.
The bottom line
The SASAC Hindutva Harassment Field Manual scored 2.49 out of 10 under CID Rubric v0.3.2. That falls in the Advocacy-Grade band (which means scores between 2.0 and 3.9). Documents in this band function as advocacy material, not independent research. No non-compensatory cap (which means an automatic score limit from one failing dimension) was applied. The dimensions that trigger caps did not apply to this document type. The grade was stable across all three weighting methods CID uses to check its own math. This score reflects methodology only. The manual’s claims about harassment may be accurate. But the methods behind those claims do not meet the standard required for independent readers to verify them.