Author and researcher Neeraj Atri is a fellow with the Hindu far-right organization Sarayu Trust (Sangam Trust). He served as the head of the Chandigarh-based National Centre for Historical Research and Comparative Studies.
Atri, a fervent Hindu supremacist and ardent anti-Islamist, wants to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation).
He co-authored ‘Brainwashed Republic: India’s Controlled Systemic Deracination’ (Abhishek Publications, 2017), a book in which he offered a Hindu nationalist historical account of India’s past.
Atri railed against Islam at the 2017 Hindu Convention, which was put on by the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), and called it the cruelest religion in the world. He led seminars at the three-day convention that promoted the ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘Ghar wapsi’ propaganda and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. He objected to India’s public performance of Islamic rites and ceremonies.
He frequently participates in various Hindu far-right YouTube shows and has a 262,000-subscriber Youtube account where he spreads anti-Muslim misinformation and an Islamophobic agenda. On his shows, he frequently welcomes well-known Hindu extremists like Yati Narsimhananda and Tufail Chaturvedi.
He also convenes several programs on another Hindu far-right Youtube channel, Sangam Talks, which is replete with blatant vilification of Islam and Muslims.
At Neeraj Dixit’s The Jaipur Dialogues, he co-conducts a hateful show, ‘Deen Ki Dawat.’ The show’s sole purpose is to vilify and disparage Islam by misquoting and misinterpreting the Quran and other Islamic text
He urged “sensible Indian Muslims” to “outgrow Islam,” which he compared to “drug addiction,” at one of these programs. He asserted that only terrorists can be considered “good Muslims,” and that Indian Muslims, who “are all converts,” have a psychological makeup that is significantly more compassionate, cannot be considered “good Muslims.”
On the eve of India’s independence from British imperialism in 1947, he said, it would have been preferable if the country had done away with “Islamic imperialism.”
He opposed Muslim girls’ demands that they wear the Hijab (a scarf) while attending school and claimed that this practice is spreading as a form of cultural aggression by Muslims that would essentially lead to a full-fledged jihad to establish an Islamic state in India.
He routinely exhorts Hindus to arm themselves with guns and rise up against Muslims and what he claims is Islamic rule in India, while also warning Muslims of the ‘Hindu awakening’ and its dire ramifications.
Atri frequently posts hateful and bigoted content on social media.
He wrote on Twitter in February 2023, “Enough is enough. Anyone who asserts that Islam is a religion of peace is eligible to win 1,000,000 Indian rupees. Otherwise, renounce Islam, stop promoting the untruth, and turn into a kind person.