BJP Future - 5

[acharya]

http://www.lines-magazine.org/Art_Feb05/RaviAshRaja.htm
Dollars Funding Pogroms: The case of Hindu neofascist organizations in the US
-- Ashwini Rao, Ra Ravishankar and Raja Swamy

"$365 a year for one school. A dollar a day, for which we can't even buy a Coke in New York. Talk to your friends. This is our debt to our country where we were born." -- Veena Gandhi [1]

"The death and destruction wrought by nature's fury in Southern Bharat, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. is beyond comprehension ... How much to give? Swami Vivekananda said: Give, give and give till it hurts. [2] "

At first glance, these appeals seem perfectly reasonable, even laudable, particularly in the aftermath of terrible natural disasters like the recent tsunami. However, such appeals to diasporic guilt and instrumental use of tragedies have been the hallmark of the Hindu Right's fundraising agenda in the US. The names of the fundraising fronts and their professed causes are but minor details in the grand scheme of things -- that of bankrolling the sectarian agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Organizational Structure

The RSS is an organization inspired and modeled on the Italian fascists and the Nazis [3] , and has been implicated in numerous instances of violence against non-Hindu minorities [4] , most recently in the massacre of 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat [5] . The RSS exists in India through several front organizations, collectively referred to as the Sangh Parivar (Sangh, for short). Prominent constituents of the Sangh Parivar are:

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the religious wing
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing
Bajrang Dal (BD), the paramilitary wing
Sewa Bharati (SB), the service wing

The RSS is not registered as a charity or as a non-government organization, which frees it from any legal or financial responsibilities. The public responsibility of establishing Hindu cultural hegemony (VHP), Hindu youth militancy (BD) and parliamentary presence (BJP) and collecting donations (SB) are divided among the constituent organizations. All key members of the Sangh, however, pledge their allegiance first to the RSS and its extremist ideology of fashioning India into a Hindu nation. Such “division of labor“ allows the RSS to spread its hate agendas through multiple organizations while remaining in the background.

A similar organizational structure has been replicated in countries outside India wherever the Sangh has managed to establish itself. In the US, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) takes on the role of the RSS. Similarly, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP), Hindu-unity and India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) are the US equivalents of the VHP, BJP, BD and SB. While the Sangh in India is very open about its sectarian agenda [6] , its wings in the US operate primarily through deception (under the cover of cultural and development organizations). As a consequence, people who would otherwise keep a safe distance from the Sangh, unwittingly end up bankrolling Sangh operations in India.

Donation Structure

The VHPA quotes Swami Vivekananda as saying, "Give, give and give till it hurts." Unfortunately, it was only after such "giving" had caused irreparable harm that the Sangh's deceptive fundraising practices came under the scanner.

The Sangh has worked hard over the years to create a multi-faceted structure through which money is collected and channeled to Sangh organizations in India.

One facet of this structure is the takeover of various religious and cultural institutions by the VHPA and the HSS. With members of the Sangh family ensconced within the power structure at many temples (such as the Ganesh temple in New York) and Hindu cultural institutions across the US, the VHPA and the HSS are able to collect donation money from individuals. While this does not raise a lot of money for the Sangh, it performs the function of legitimating the Sangh and making it more acceptable among Hindus in the U.S.

A second part of the structure is to raise funds for well known Sangh projects in India through the student wing of the Sangh in the US, the Hindu Students Council. HSC has 77 chapters in universities across the US [7] . Many of these chapters raise money for projects such as the Ekal Vidyalayas (one teacher schools in tribal areas that are used for propagating a virulent form of extremist Hindutva ideology), for Hindu victims of violence in the state of Kashmir, and for organizations like Indicorps, that share a very cozy relationship with the Sangh [8] . As with the collection of individual donations through temples, HSC does not serve to fill the Sangh coffers as much as to provide the Sangh legitimacy within secular university spaces through which to recruit future middle-of-the-road supporters. Its purpose is to inculcate youth into Hindutva by exploiting their insecurities regarding identity in a multicultural setting.

A third part of the structure, one which has yielded large donations for Sangh affiliated organizations, is through corporate matching fund programs. This fundraising effort has largely been spearheaded by the service division in the US through the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF). IDRF has been successful at collecting donations from large corporations such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco systems, Microsoft corporation etc. by appealing to their large Indian immigrant workforce. While the donations are collected by IDRF purportedly for relief and development projects in India, a large proportion of this money has found its way to organizations linked with the RSS in India. Activists in the US have been raising this issue for several years now, but it was only after the Sangh-orchestrated anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat that the US mainstream media took notice.

In the May 22, 2002 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Kanwal Rekhi and Henry Rowen warned diasporic Indian Hindus that their well-meaning donations might be misused to "destroy minorities (Christians as well as Muslims) and their places of worship." Later that year, the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH) released a report [9] that incontrovertibly established IDRF as a fundraising front of the Sangh. This link is clear not only from IDRF documents presented to the Federal Government at the time of its inception, but also from the strong personnel and organizational connections between IDRF and the Sangh. Furthermore, in the period from 1992 to 2000, IDRF distributed over 80% of the available funds to organizations that are part of the Sangh. The CSFH report was based primarily on material published by the Sangh, so the Sangh has been unable to come up with a meaningful response.

The final part of the donation laundering structure comes into play soon after natural disasters, a time when well-meaning individuals are most vulnerable to appeals to donate generously. At times of such crises, all the different constituents of the Sangh get into the fundraising act. This was seen after the cyclone in Orissa in 1999, and after the massive earthquake in Gujarat in 2001. Now, after the Asian tsunami disaster, the VHPA, HSS, and IDRF promptly posted appeals for donations on their websites [10] . In fact, two days after the tsunami, the Sangh launched a new service organization, Sewa International USA, for collection of donations for tsunami relief. We believe that the Sangh was forced to launch this new organization, given the bad press that its primary service division (IDRF) had received in the past two years, as a result of the CSFH investigative report.

Sangh’s silencing strategies in the U.S.

While on this, the Sangh's public relations strategy deserves some analysis. Never one to take kindly to criticism, the Sangh in India is wont to take to violence. However, in the US, it lacks state support for indulging in physical violence [11] , so it has had to resort to verbal violence. For instance, in response to the WSJ article, the Sangh launched an ad-hominem attack on Rekhi claiming crudely that since Rekhi's wife is Christian, he is biased against Hinduism. This tendency to translate challenges into claims of attacks on Hinduism as a whole is part of the strategy of exploiting multiculturalist sentiments in the U.S. That it is constantly evoked to organize genocidal violence against minorities in India is conveniently forgotten by those sympathetic to this fallacious view.

Unfortunately, the Sangh's tactic of branding dissenters as "anti-Hindu", "anti-India", "commie" etc. seems to have served its purpose, at least for now. Ostensibly in fear of the Sangh, several service organizations in the US have taken to the "See no evil, hear no evil" approach. Thus, while they come out in full force in the wake of natural disasters (earthquakes, cyclones), they have remained mute spectators to human-inflicted disasters like the (state sanctioned) Gujarat pogrom. This, despite the fact that survivors of the Gujarat pogrom had greater odds to overcome -- not only had they lost their loved ones, their future was also clouded in uncertainty and fear what with the killers roaming around freely and promising more violence. Thus, while numerically not very significant, the Sangh in the US has been effective in shifting the ideologies of some of the service organizations to the right.

Using Disasters to Spread Hate Agendas

As mentioned above, natural disasters such as the recent tsunami offer the Sangh a unique opportunity to ask for donations in the name of relief and rehabilitation, and to carve out a legitimate space for itself within the affected communities. Once it infiltrates the community, it begins its program of creating divisions within the communities and attempts to re-convert low-caste communities and the Dalits (the outcasts of the Hindu caste system) to Hinduism. These are people who converted to Islam or Christianity to escape the hegemony of the caste hierarchy but the Sangh seeks to keep them in its ranks and use them as “cannon fodder for Hindutva” [12] . This process has led to large scale violence, most recently in Gujarat in 2002, where the Sangh had infiltrated small towns and village communities after the earthquake in 2001.

As part of its “rehabilitation” efforts, the Sangh created divisions within the community by pushing the Adivasi, Dalit and Muslim communities to the outer edges of the villages [13] . Several villages were re-fashioned with Hindu identities with new temples, and some villages were even given new Hindu names. Schools were set up by the Sangh in which the curriculum was subverted to present the Christian and Muslim communities as invading marauders. Within a few months of the earthquake, the RSS and its affiliate organizations were able to create a vitiated atmosphere in much of Gujarat that was to lay the foundation for the widespread incitement against the Muslim community. This hatred was then harnessed to distressing proportions in the pogrom when 2000 Muslims were killed, several hundreds of women and young girls raped, and hundreds of thousands rendered refugees.

With the tsunami disaster, we are witnessing for the first time, the same strategy of the Sangh play out in real time. Within the state of Tamil Nadu, the RSS and its affiliates have not had a stronghold even though its affiliate organization, the Hindu Munnani has been attempting to infiltrate the coastal fishing communities, in particular. A large proportion of the fishing community is composed of people who converted to Christianity a few decades ago. Since the coastal communities were the worst hit by the tsunami, the Sangh immediately pressed into action under the pretext of providing relief to these communities. Many press reports have indicated that the RSS is promoting its hate ideology in the pretext of providing relief [14] .

While the front organizations collect large amounts of donation money through their individual public relations efforts, on the ground there seems to be no distinction between any of these and the RSS. Thus while IDRF claims to raise money for relief, its workers on the ground pose for photographs in RSS regalia (complete with saffron headbands and khaki shorts) and present themselves as RSS activists [15] . In the days following the tsunami, the government of Tamil Nadu announced that it was giving RSS and its affiliates the charge of re-building a few villages in Nagapattinam, one of the worst hit areas. Given the experiences in Gujarat and Orissa, it seems likely that the RSS will attempt to re-build these villages by attempting to erase any non-Hindu presence. If its history of incitement, provocation and brutal violence teaches us anything, it is that the time for all secular, human rights, and community organizations to come together to prevent the Sangh from laying the foundations of a future genocide, is now.

Ashwini Rao, Assistant Professor at Columbia University
Ra Ravishankar, Graduate Student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Raja Swamy, Graduate student at University of Texas at Austin
All three are contributors to the Campaign to Stop Fuinding Hate.

[1] Veena Gandhi is a former Vice-President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), the American branch of the Hindu supremacist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council), and the school she is pitching for is the Ekal Vidyalaya (One Teacher School). Ekal Vidyalayas were started by the VHP in aboriginal villages to indoctrinate students with Hindu supremacist ideas.

[2] http://www.vhp-america.org/appeals/Tsunami_appeal.htm

[3] http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollecti...ve/casolari.pdf

[4] http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/hinrole.htm & http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/sep/christians.htm

[5] http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/04/gujarat.htm

[6] VHP Working President Ashok Singhal called the Gujarat carnage a “successful experiment”, threatened to repeat it “all over the country” and spoke glowingly of villages being “emptied of Islam.” [http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story....nt_id=8831] He also claimed that the anti-Muslims carnage “had the blessings of Lord Rama.” [http://www.expressindia.com#ullstory.php?newsid=33391], VHP leader Praveen Togadia called secularists the “impotent fringe” and threatened to “make a (violent) laboratory of the whole country.” [http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5905_120559,0008.htm]

[7] See the HSC website for details on the individual chapters at http://www.hscnet.org/chapters.php

[8] See the national HSC sewa website at http://www.netseva.org/projects.php

[9] The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva; http://www.stopfundinghate.org/sacw

[10] See the IDRF appeal (http://www.idrf.org/dynamic/modules.php?...le&sid=157), the VHP-A appeal (http://www.vhp-america.org/appeals/Tsunami_appeal.htm)

[11] The Sangh did succeed – using the threat of violence -- in canceling the screening of Anand Patwardhan's film, “In the name of Ram”, at the American Museum of Natural History.

[12] See http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/opinion_3.htm

[13] See Edward Simpson. “Hindutva as a rural planning paradigm in post-earthquake Gujarat”. In The politics of Cultural mobilization in India (Eds.) J Zavos, A. Wyatt and V Hewitt. Oxford university press. 2004. pp. 136-165.

[14] See http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=41600. As further evidence of (IDRF-funded) RSS indoctrination during tsunami relief, see the deification of the first two dictators of the RSS (KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar) at http://www.idrf.org/dynamic/modules.php?op...6&orderby=dateD

[15] See the pictures on the IDRF website at http://www.idrf.org/dynamic/modules.php?op...showgall&gid=40