Hindu Nationalism Reporting Guide

The guide includes a Key Terms section and a glossary covering Hindutva, Sangh Parivar, RSS, BJP, and caste terminology. For a journalist-facing document, this is above-average effort. The problem is precision, not presence. Characterizing terms that carry analytical weight, ‘far-right’ (4 uses), ‘ethnonationalist’ (2 uses), ‘extremist’ (2 uses), appear without operational definitions. The guide states that ‘the presence of key Hindutva ideas defines a group as Hindu nationalist’ but does not specify which ideas are necessary versus sufficient, or how a reporter would distinguish Hindu nationalism from Hindu conservatism, Hindu religious revivalism, or Indian cultural nationalism. Five trained coders applying these definitions to borderline cases would produce inconsistent classifications. The definitions describe rather than operationalize.

SWAP_TEST_PARTIAL_FAIL

The title (‘Introduction to Hindutva’) is particularist. The content matches: Hindu/Hindutva terms appear 312 times; the guide is explicitly about one political ideology. Particularist scope is not penalized under D4. The guide earns credit for not making universalist claims about religious freedom broadly while covering one movement specifically. Two problems keep the score at 5. First, the Swap Test. The guide’s criteria for identifying Hindu nationalist groups are not written symmetrically. A reporter could not take the same framework and apply it to Islamic nationalism, Christian nationalism, or Sikh separatism without substantial rewriting. The criteria identify one direction of identity-based nationalism. A particularist organization can pass the Swap Test if its criteria are genuinely neutral even though its monitoring scope is not. This guide does not clear that bar. Second, scope creep. The guide extends beyond its stated reporting-guide function into claims about Indian democratic backsliding, Indian American political behavior, and US policy. None of these extensions are flagged as outside the guide’s core scope. Section headings like ‘MANY OBSERVERS NO LONGER CONSIDER INDIA A FULLY FREE DEMOCRACY’ and ‘ANTI-MUSLIM BIAS AND PERCEPTIONS CONTRIBUTE TO THE HINDU NATIONALIST LEANINGS OF SOME INDIAN AMERICANS’ are political assessments, not reporting guidance. The expansion is not acknowledged.

CIRCULAR_SOURCING

The citation base is numerically broad: 244 URLs across 107 unique domains, Herfindahl Index 0.0193 (low concentration). That breadth is real but misleading. The source type split tells the structural story: 146 of 244 URLs (59.8%) are classified as advocacy_or_other. Academic sources account for 29 (11.9%), media for 56 (22.9%), government for 13 (5.3%). The self-citation problem is specific and documentable. The Hindutva Harassment Field Manual (hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org) appears 6 times as a cited source. The Field Manual is a SASAC product. SASAC cites SASAC. The two documents share authors (Audrey Truschke appears on both). This is the circular sourcing pattern D5 is designed to detect: formally separate publications from the same organizational network presented as independent references. The guide also cites USCIRF 16 times. SASAC members have provided testimony to USCIRF. If USCIRF findings are partly informed by SASAC-adjacent testimony, and the guide then cites USCIRF as an independent government source, the provenance chain is shorter than it appears. This is not proven circular. USCIRF draws from many sources. But the structural conditions for a provenance loop exist. The guide has never published a finding that contradicts or complicates SASAC’s prior work.

ADVOCACY_SOURCE_DOMINANCE

Under adapted TYPE 6 criteria, D6 evaluates citation accuracy: do cited sources actually say what the guide claims they say? The guide provides 244 URLs for a 15-page document. That citation density is a genuine strength. The verification problem is structural. When the guide characterizes Hindu nationalism’s threat to minorities, the supporting citations often point to other advocacy organizations’ characterizations (HRW, Freedom House, Amnesty) rather than to primary evidence. The claim is supported by another organization’s claim, not by the underlying data. A reader tracing a characterization back to its empirical basis would pass through multiple layers of advocacy interpretation before reaching primary documentation. The denominator audit flagged 15 claims. Most are false positives: census-level demographic percentages (80% Hindu, 14% Muslim) with well-established denominators. The voting statistics (73% Biden, 77% Clinton) cite Carnegie Endowment surveys with published methodology. These are clean citations. The issue is not individual citation accuracy but the structural reliance on advocacy-layer sources for analytical claims. No archiving against link rot. No verification tiers. No mechanism for a reader to assess the reliability gradient across different claims.

Funding disclosure present. Named authors listed. The ‘scholar-activist’ self-designation is itself transparency. It signals advocacy intent more honestly than organizations that claim objectivity while operating as advocates. Missing: conflict of interest statement, published data ethics policy, clarity on editorial governance within the collective. It is unclear who exercises editorial control over a ‘collective,’ whether decisions are made by consensus, by founding members, or by a designated editor. No external financial audit. No corrections policy.

The structure audit detected a counter-evidence section. The guide includes a 'Disinformation' section that addresses counter-narratives, specifically claims made by Hindu nationalist organizations that the guide anticipates journalists will encounter. This is better than ignoring opposing views entirely. The framing is diagnostic rather than dialogic. Counter-narratives are presented as disinformation to be evaluated and debunked, not as arguments that might contain partial validity or that point to genuine interpretive disputes among scholars. The guide does not engage with scholars who study Hindu nationalism and reach different conclusions about its nature, scope, or threat level. Scholars who characterize Hindutva as cultural nationalism rather than supremacism, or who dispute the guide’s framing of specific policies, are absent from the conversation. No corrections policy. No limitations section. No evidence of methodology updates in response to criticism. Under adapted TYPE 6 criteria, the absence of a corrections policy and limitations acknowledgment weighs more heavily than the quality of counter-evidence engagement.