CyberLN, because they banned me from their Facebook group for explaining the exact same thing.

My point is, Hinduism isn't just a religion. Its a culture and a compilation of religion & non-religious works. As i said, if you look at Arab & Persian works- ANY of them (and i can provide translations of the original), they refer to all of us as 'Hindu'. Including the Buddhists. You know what they call buddhists in most instances ? 'shaven headed hindus'. That occurs a lot more than 'worshippers of Boddo'.

You simply see it as a religion, because thats what you've been told. In reality, Hinduism is not a religion, its a religion + philosophy. 99% of Hindus are theists, following Vedic stuff. 1% is atheist, following non-vedic, non-theist stuff called Carvaka.
Think of hinduism as analogous to 'Greek-ism' : it would contain Orthodox Christianity, Platonic thought, etc- all forms of religion & philosophy practiced by the Greeks through the ages. Now, 99% of 'Greek-ism' would be Orthodox Christians today. Same with Hinduism. 99% are theist Vedanta practitioners. There is the 1% that are lumped along- who are atheist. Its not an oxymoron, its simply the fact that atheist schools are lumped under hinduism as well and have been for 1000+ years.

So why are the atheist Hindus being disenfranchised ?

Hindu atheism is simply an atheist seeing themselves as an atheist and also as a Hindu.
To most laymen, it sounds contradictory. But it is not. You don't think of yourself as an American atheist/ Canadian atheist but if you consider yourself an American/Canadian, then you most likely think of yourself as an American/Canadian and also an atheist. I am a Canadian and an atheist, for example. Hindu atheist matters, because we've been ignored for the last thousand years and still are today.
Ie, we still have to justify to our atheist kindred (as is the case here), why/how we can be Hindu and atheist at the same time. Hence we identify with being Hindu atheists.

Neither is it the same sophistry as 'Atheist Christians/Athiest Muslims'.
This is because while the term 'atheist' and 'christian/muslim' are incompatible, in the fundamental tenet of their religion, it is not with Hinduism. This is because there hasn't been a single muslim/christian theologian or scholar, who've accepted the notion of 'atheist christian/muslim'. It is also a direct diktat in their religion to not be atheist. While in Hinduism, there are several major theologians & schools that accept atheism: Swami Vivekananda accepts atheism as Hinduism. So does the controversial V. Savarkar (note : I am not a fan of Savarkar personally. That doesn't change the fact that this guy was and still is a renowned Hindu scholar). So does many a swami. I can cite works of prominent Indian scholars - such as the Marxist Debiprasad Chattopadhyay- who considered themselves avowed 'Hindu atheists'.

The reason is simple, because the Hindu identity owes itself to Islamic servitude. We've never called ourselves Hindu,till the muslims started to rule over us. Not only that, the word 'hindu' isn't used by any Chinese scholar that visited and wrote about India in the 1st millennium CE. From Faxian to I-Tsing, the word 'hindu' is absent.

The word itself is a Persian word, imported to Indian identity via the Persian-ized Turks & the subsequent Muslim rule.
The muslims themselves rarely make distinctions between Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. The reference to Jains by their name is extremely rare in Muslim literature. We are all 'hindus'.

Now, Buddhists and Jains remained separate to us Indians, owing to the simple fact that despite falling steeply in numbers over the subsequent centuries, Buddhism and Jainism represented significant minority population of India in 1st millennium CE. India, for example, was host to several massive Buddhist universities that failed during & or directly due to Islamic conquest of Indian subcontinent.
A host of minority schools - like Charvaka, Mimamsa, Samkhya, etc. were lumped in with Hinduism and were neither large enough, nor diversely present enough to survive the Islamic onslaught. Bear in mind, being atheist in 900s-1300s AD, to invading Islamic armies usually meant instant death.

This, is the history of Hindu atheist in a nutshell.

Whether Athiest Republic likes it or not, the simple fact remains : Atheism is a simple lack of belief in a creator God and there are millions of Hindu atheists, who identify both as Hindu and atheist.

You may ask 'well if you are an atheist, wha is hindu to you that is not atheist' ?
The answer is simple:
a) I enjoy my festivals. We don't care if Durga is real or not, we care about the yearly investment in organization, art-work, the gathering, the food at hand. Unlike Christians or Muslims, our religious celebration does not strictly revolve around religion. Infact, as a participant in my own neighbourhood Durga Puja, i can state, that 80% of people don't spend a moment in worship or go by the actual priest to participate in the puja. They see the statues, listen to the traditional beats, then beeline for the food and move on to the next neighbourhood.

b) To be hindu, is to accept and identify with the culture of India as the predominant identifier. Just like how one identifies culturally as 'western', so too many hindus identify with 'hinduism' on a cultural basis.

To ignore us, is to ignore practically the largest chunk of non-Chinese, non-western Atheists on this planet.