IDRF Admits to
Being an RSS Operation:
Issues New Report Defending the RSS
The Campaign to Stop Funding
Hate Press Release
March 3, 2003
After spending the last three months claiming that the report, A
Foreign Exchange of Hate,which exposed the links that the
IDRF has to the Sangh Parivaris wrong, IDRF now not only acknowledges
the links in a newly released report (and goes on to defend the RSS
for doing good work), but attempts to conceal this by aggressive
posturing of independence and factuality.
The report A Factual
Response, written by a group of IDRF supporters calling themselves
Friends of India, says,
"the RSS and its affiliates
are neither sectarian nor hate organizations but the victims of unrelenting
propaganda by vested Indian and foreign interests"
Having acknowledged that
IDRF is indeed part of the Sangh, the report sidesteps all charges of
Sanghs documented role in violence against minorities, and its
orchestration of communal violence, such as the Gujarat carnage of a
year ago, and instead claims that the RSS has a peerless record
over the decades in providing timely, selfless and courageous disaster
relief work. All of this, behind a thin veil of asserted independence
and factuality, which is curious, since the authors seek to establish
the credentials of RSS by quoting from RSS sources such as HV Seshadri
and KR Malkani, and using office bearers of the VHP, HSS and IDRF as
consultants.
But of course, the report
wants us to ignore the much more forceful and convincing claims by office
bearers of various Sangh outfits, as illustrated by the following typical
examples:
Kaushik Mehta, one of the
two joint general secretaries of the VHP in Gujarat said:
Then it was decided
there should be a model for reprisals. It was important to teach a lesson
that could be emulated
. We had also sensed that once again the
Centre was moving towards blaming the ISI for perpetrating the Godhra
attack. All the 2,000 men, women and children could not have been ISI
agents [so we had to move fast]. (Excerpt from an hour-long conversation
with The Telegraph of Calcutta in the VHP office in Ahmedabad on March
7, 2002.)
and
Harish Bhai Bhatt, vice president
of VHP Gujarat and all-India vice president of the Bajrang Dal):
I am the first enemy
of the Muslims. ... Killing Muslims [hundreds of innocent ones in the
past five days of rioting was] necessary. All Muslims had to be taught
a lesson
. If the Muslims do not learn, it will be very harmful
for them. (New York Times, March 5, 2002)
Admitting the RSS Link
As quoted in the July 22,
2002, issue of Outlook magazine, Dr. Vinod Prakash, President of IDRF,
told Outlook reporter Ashish Sen that The IDRF has given absolutely
no money to the RSS. This was followed quite immediately by Nagraj
Patil, an IDRF VP who categorically stated on Sulekha that There
is no relation between VHP/RSS and IDRF. Fullpoint. Thirteen weeks
after the release of the A Foreign Exchange of Hate (FxH)
report and the start of the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, IDRFs
supporters are reduced to saying that there is no legal
link between IDRF and RSS. We agree. It would be impossible to have
a legal link with the RSS since the RSS is not a legal entity: No registration
under the law of any country. No membership rolls, and no publicly audited
financial statements.
But read the latest document
closely, according to the FIS report, The RSS is not registered
as an organization. However, the various trusts, which in turn actually
manage the activities carried out under the name of the RSS, are registered
Then, does not giving money to the various trusts which
engage in the actual activities of the RSS amount to giving
money to the RSS? Why is the IDRF engaging in such sophistry? If the
RSS is indeed such a peerless organization, as they would now like us
to believe, why spend all this time trying to deny the relationship?
The FIS report makes no effort
to deny that over 80% of the IDRF-designated funds are being disbursed
to RSS affiliates or that IDRF office bearers have extensive links with
other Sangh Parivar organizations in India and the US. Having admitted
on all counts that it is an RSS operation, IDRF now has no choice left
but to defend the RSS on grounds of doing service. A fascist organization
is difficult to defend except along the grain that it undertakes service
work and therefore its hate mongering and violence must be discounted.
The Defense of the RSS
The basic idea that this
new report from the Sangh Parivar tries to deliver is that the RSS,
in spite of its hate education and violent pogroms, must be seen for
the good it does through the service work it undertakes. The FIS report
refuses to confront the various documentations of Sangh involvement
in anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat last year (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and the European Union reports), or the charges of anti-Christian
violence in 1999-2000 (Human Rights Watch, the US State Department).
Instead, the FIS report presents
the service work as the only one that must be evaluated by heaping on
the reader again and again the numbers of homes rebuilt after the Gujarat
earthquake for instance. It attempts to suggest that the FxH report
somehow missed this aspect of the work of Sewa Bharati. Not only does
the FxH not miss the RSS work in the Gujarat Earthquake, it highlights
how the earthquake relief was disbursed along communal lines, that the
RSS disrupted the relief efforts by non-Hindu organizations, and that
the homes and villages that IDRF helped RSS rebuild had temples and
crematoriums, but no mosques, churches or graveyards. Newspapers articles
reported that food packets were offered by members of the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal only to those who shouted, "Jai
Siya Ram." Members from the minority communities and those belonging
to the lower castes were deprived of tents and other facilities which
were grabbed by the upper castes. One of the "Hindutva" champions,
Ashok Singhal of the VHP, screamed that the Catholic Church's donation
of Rs. 20 crores for quake relief should not be accepted because of
the Pope's alleged obsession with conversion. (Of hope beyond,
V. Gangadhar, The Hindu, Feb 25, 2001). The FIS report refuses to engage
with the fundamental fact of discrimination in its overwhelming zeal
to prove the yeoman service provided by RSS volunteers.
While characterizing the
RSS as a social service organization with the good of all Indians at
heart, the authors of FIS carelessly leave out the warning contained
in the 2002 RSS resolution Let the Muslims understand that their
real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority. The same resolution
also justified the Gujarat violence in which over 2000 Muslims were
killed and over 100,000 Muslims were displaced as natural and
spontaneous. Similarly, while characterizing the VHP as being
active in delivering a wide range of social, educational, and
relief services, the FIS folks apparently overlooked the fact
that the VHP admits to active participation in the anti-Muslim violence
in Gujarat and is now providing legal help to its cadres charged in
the riots. See what Keshavram Kashiram Shastri, chairman of the Gujarat
Unit of the VHP had to say in a tape-recorded interview to Rediff.com
on March 12, 2002
In the morning (of February
28, 2002) we sat down and prepared the list [of shops owned by Muslims
in Ahmedabad]
.
Karvun j pade, karvun
j pade (it had to be done, it had to be done). We don't like it, but
we were terribly angry. Lust and anger are blind
. [the rioters
were] kelvayela Hindu chokra (well-bred Hindu boys).
The VHP has formed
a panel of 50 lawyers to help release the arrested people accused of
rioting and looting. None of the lawyers will charge any fees because
they believe in the RSS ideology."
The VHP President, Ashok
Singhal, praised the ethnic cleansing that took place in Gujarat, and
spoke glowingly of
how whole villages had been emptied of Islam, and how whole
communities of Muslims had been dispatched to refugee camps. This was
a victory for Hindu society, he added, a first for the religion. People
say I praise Gujarat. Yes I do, he told an appreciative, but modest,
audience. (Indian Express, Sept 3, 2002)
The FxH does not ignore the
evidence of service as FIS claims. It simply says, the so-called social
service wing of the RSS is not separate from the wing that indulges
in violence. They are of the same ideological and operational structure.
Building schools is crucial to recruiting cadres that have been tutored
in a certain ideology that treats every Christian and Muslim as a foreigner.
Working in tribal areas is necessary to RSSs aims of using tribals
as foot soldiers in the next pogrom against Muslims and Christians.
The FxH report details the hate that is being spread through RSS schools
and tribal welfare centers, facts that have been independently verified
by investigations conducted by the British TV Channel 4 and the Financial
Times of London. The FIS report would have done better by explaining
why communal violence in Gujarat has sharply increased only in those
tribal areas where RSS outfits such as Ekal Vidyalays and the Vanavasi
Kalyan Ashram are active, rather than offering testimonials by a self-professed
researcher of dubious scholarship.
The Independence of Being
Led by the Nose
The FIS report attempts to
lay its claims to factuality based on unsubstantiated claims to independence
and plurality. Let us examine these:
The FxH report uses IDRFs
own documentation to prove its links to the Sangh, and RSSs own
literature to highlight the Sanghs hate ideology. It would have
been far easier for the FxH report to make the exact same case that
it does by quoting a whole range of journalists and reporters who have
already positioned themselves against the Sangh. In sharp contrast,
the consultants to the FIS report are all without exception Sangh leaders.
Outside of the data provided by the Sangh leaders the report quotes
extensively from other articles written by its own authors as data
Mr. Raos Sulekha pieces written with the sole intent of propagating
the Sangh come back as evidence. How convenient! However this should
not surprise us, for the IDRF is a past master at such deception. Look
at their website. IDRF quotes its own volunteers as if they were independent
evaluators of a project.
The FxH report and the CSFH campaign have drawn the support of more
than 300 academics, many of them well known South Asia experts. This
endorsement of the report by a large number of senior professors who
have risen to excellence within the domain of South Asian studies should
mean something. However, the only thing that the FIS report has to say
about this is, That many of these South Asia experts are viscerally
opposed to the RSS and its affiliates can be seen from a variety of
academic discussion lists. So much for the FISs independence
and their capacity to respect a diversity of opinions.
Investigative reporting by
British media (Channel 4 and the Financial Times) has also verified
the conclusions of the FxH report. Many other newspaper and magazine
articles have examined the report in detail and found its conclusions
worthwhile. Even the FIS authors rue that We thus see the unrelenting
press of articles, editorials, interviews, letters to editors, and campaigns
to inform the public about the IDRF, and almost an overwhelming
majority of them being anti-IDRF. While they easily dismiss this
as demonization of the RSS by a secular orthodoxy,
we believe that this widespread acceptance of the report is a far firmer
test of independence than anything that the FIS authors have to offer.
The claim to a liberal pluralist
ethos is an ingenuous one. Hiding behind a cloak of language which preys
on two predispositions that it hopes its readers will have a fear
that to say anything negative about Hinduism within the multicultural
framework would be politically incorrect, and the second an assumption
that if one slaps a Marxist/left label on to people, their work can
then be dismissed without argument. The FIS report makes no effort to
explain how the FxH report can be considered as furtherance of an argument
for proletarian revolution (to be considered Marxist), nor
how a charge of Marxism changes the conclusions regarding IDRFs
connections to the RSS. It is revealing of the Sanghs mindset
that calling for an end to hate and violence against marginalized communities
now automatically gets one labeled everything from anti-Hindu to anti-national
to Marxist!
In short, the FIS report hardly contradicts the FxH charge that IDRF
funds sectarian and hate activities. All that the authors attempt to
do is to justify, and worse, confer respectability to, sectarian hatred
and violence.