The solo Indian flag that made an appearance among the vast swathe of Trump supporters storming the Capitol building in Washington D.C. recently, caught the attention of many. It was even more of a surprise when it was revealed that a Malayali Christian na-med Vinson Palathingal was responsible for it.
However, truth be told, Palathingal is just one of the many Malayali Christians who are fervent advocates of the Christo-racist nationalism represented and championed by Donald Trump and his band of supporters. For those wondering how an exclusivist White supremacist anti-Muslim ideology and rhetoric that underpins Trumpian politics appeals to these migrants and their ilk from the Global South, the answer may be found in the latter’s own social location within the Kerala society in India.
Beyond the general term Christian, there lies a more nuanced identifier for the community that people like Palathingal hail from – Syrian Christians. A traditionally privileged and landed community, they claim their origin from the proselytisation mission of Jesus Christ’s disciple St. Thomas in the first century CE. There are visible tendencies among the Syrians, who are also called St. Thomas Christians, to go back and revive what they imagine to be their Syriac liturgical tradition.
The most popular myth about their origin is that they hail from Brahmins who were proselytised by St Thomas. While inquiring into the veracity of these claims is not what I intend to do in this article, I think it is indeed an indication of the “superior” status that they seek to utilise to distinguish themselves from their fellow Christians who are mostly from “lower” castes…
Antagonism towards Muslims is not new and has been a popular, but private, sentiment among the members of the community majorly in the erstwhile central Travancore region. As such, one needs to ask why, suddenly, this made its entry into the public sphere with such fervour. For one, it is clear that ‘love jihad,’ the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque, halal food controversy, terrorism etc, have been used instrumentally to plug the local antagonism towards Muslims into the global discourse, adding much-needed legitimacy to the anti-Muslim social imagination. This also helps in rhetorically translating the antagonism in such popularly recognised ‘common sense’ terms that would look normal and legitimate.
To avoid appearing explicitly casteist, myths like family ‘cultural differences’ which are pitched as monolithic and hereditary, are cited. Moreover, this caste blinded-ness is also a reason why the self-proclaimed protectors of ‘Christianity,’ fi-ghting against a so-called global Muslim conspiracy, choose to ignore the long history of violence inflicted by Hindutva organisations on Dalit and other ‘lower’ caste Christians in other parts of India. As such, it is imperative that we need to make visible the caste violence being furthered by ‘savarna‘ Syrian Christians, as they pitch the fiction of unified Christianity in their rhetoric against Muslims.

Bipin Sebastian
PhD student at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois