SU BME officer Tara Choudhury has made a statement on an ongoing row between English Professor Priyamvada Gopal and the Cambridge University Hindu Cultural Society (CUHCS).

Defending Gopal against accusations made in a statement by the CUHCS that some of Gopal’s tweets were “hinduphobic”, Choudhury stated on 14/09 that Gopal had been on the receiving end of an “orchestrated pile-on”. She emphasized the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva, reiterating Gopal’s defense that she had critiqued only the latter in her tweets.

Choudhury also accused the CUHCS of “deliberately depriving [Gopal’s] tweets of context in order to depict her as inciting bigotry towards Hindus.”

The CUHCS statement to which Choudhury refers, released on the CUHCS Facebook page (08/09), condemns Gopal for her “recent” tweet referring to Hindus as “sickos” and wishing that “Western countries should block naturalization for Hindus”.

The statement also outlines that Gopal “mocked” the memorial for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre by referring to it as a “whale p**is” in a tweet from August this year.

The CUHCS condemned the tweets as “blatant hinduphobia” and said that it made “Hindu students feel unsafe on campus”.

In response, Professor Gopal claimed that in the original twitter thread she wasn’t referring to all Hindus as “sickos”, only those “who support the Citizenship Amendment Bill”, and that the tweet was in response to an article from the New York Times she quotes with the heading ‘India Steps Towards Making Naturalization Harder for Muslims’.

The CUHCS statement, she said, was part of a “smear campaign” that defamed her character “through selective quotation”.

Gopal’s tweets after the CUHCS’ statement were met with replies calling her a “bigot” and a “Liar, cheater, slave”, as well as other offensive comments.

Gopal went on to claim in a tweet that the CUHCS was “instructed by the NHSF [National Hindu Students’ Forum] & their handlers from the top of Hindutva echelons to attack me”, connecting the incident to right-wing groups targeting threats against the Destabilizing Global Hindutva conference last week (09/09).

The CUHCS is a member of the NHSF, with the NHSF logo included in the Facebook post of the statement in its bottom-right corner. On Twitter, the NHSF said they were “immensely proud of our Cambridge chapter”.

An anonymous ex-committee member of the CUHCS told Varsity that while CUHCS is a member of the NHSF, they didn’t think it was a branch. Indeed, though the NHSF referred to the CUHCS as its chapter, their website does not list them as one of its 45 affiliated University societies.

Varsity has contacted the CUHCS for comment.