SACW #1 | 05-08 March 2004

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  #1  |  5-8 March,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[Notice: Apologies to all for being unable to 
fully resume the daily SACW dispatches. Various 
problems are impeding the process and more time 
will be needed before we get to the 'normal' 
rythms...]

[1] Pakistan: Sectarianism Inc (Editorial Daily Times)
[2] Pakistan: Sectarianism and state policy (Kunwar Idris)
[3] India: Hindu Popes, . . . imitating Europe's 
medieval past (Ramachandra Guha)
[4] India's tribal schools -Teaching promotes 
bigotry, fanaticism, rights groups say (Jehangir 
Pocha)
[5] India: Vote Vajpayee, install Advani! (Praful Bidwai)
[6] UK- India: Alms For The Killer (Harsh Kabra)
+ In Bad Faith? British Charity and Hindu Extremism


--------------

[1]

The Daily Times (Pakistan)
March 05, 2004 

EDITORIAL: Sectarianism Inc

This has been a bloody Moharram. Forty-seven 
people have died in Quetta and more than 150 
injured. Angry mobs later burnt down or ransacked 
shops, mosques, vehicles and a private TV office. 
There was also minor trouble in other places like 
Phalia in the Punjab, but Quetta stands out for 
the tragedy that unfolded in that city. Last year 
on July 4 the city saw the worst sectarian 
incident in Pakistan's history when a Shi'a 
imambargah was attacked, leaving more than 50 
people dead and scores injured. That attack came 
within a month of the June 9 incident in 
Balochistan which 12 Hazara Shi'a police recruits 
were gunned down by sectarian terrorists. How 
should one interpret this carnage?
A PTV survey after the tragedy showed people 
voicing a common refrain: "Muslims cannot do 
this; this has been done by foreign intelligence 
agencies". This is patently untrue. While the 
involvement of foreign agencies cannot be 
dismissed through penetration of certain groups, 
two things cannot be glossed over: Muslims are 
capable of perpetrating sectarian violence, and 
there is a lot of evidence of the involvement of 
Deobandi sectarian and jihadi groups in this 
business. Take the example of last year's attack 
on the imambargah. We now know that prior to the 
attack, anti-shi'a literature had been circulated 
in the city. One prominent Hazara shi'a cleric 
when contacted by a private TV clearly pointed a 
finger at some parties in the MMA. These parties 
are also known to have been affiliated with 
Deobandi groups running the jihad in Afghanistan 
and Kashmir and indulging in sectarian attacks on 
the sidelines. Later, when the police caught the 
suspects in the Quetta tragedy, at least one of 
them happened to be the son of a Jamiat 
Ulema-e-Islam leader in Quetta.
The whole business of the so-called jihad was 
Janus-faced. Police officers have all along known 
that activists of one group would operate for 
other groups and the dividing lines were drawn in 
sand. Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Lashkar-e Jhangvi, 
Jaish-e Mohammad, to name just three, operated 
through the same pool of militants. When the 
Lashkar terrorist Haq Nawaz was finally sentenced 
to death for the 1990 murder of Iranian consul 
general Sadiq Ganji, it was Azam Tariq of the 
SSP, now dead, who offered to pay blood money on 
his behalf to Tehran. It was the SSP which tried 
to mount a campaign against his sentence. When 
Lashkar supremo Riaz Basra was killed in a police 
encounter in May 2002, his body was wrapped in 
the SSP flag and buried. Even so, the SSP has 
refuted the charge of having a sectarian agenda!
The argument that such things don't happen among 
Muslims is also historically incorrect. Three of 
the four rightly-guided caliphs were 
assassinated. The violent streak in Islam, born 
of those power struggles and begotten of tribal 
differences, is well recorded in Maulana Abu Ala 
Maududi's book, Khilafat aur Malukiyat (Caliphate 
and Kingship). It is also instructive to read a 
March 4 article by Dr Israr Ahmed in Nawa-e-Waqt. 
The thrust of his argument is that Pakistan, like 
Iran, needs to constitutionally have just one 
fiqh. Clearly, in Pakistan, it cannot be Fiqh 
Ja'faria since, as he says, the country is 
inhabited by Ahnaaf (followers of Hanafi fiqh). 
This is sectarian sophistry at its worst and is 
responsible for translating itself into the kind 
of tragedies that we have seen. First, they 
deepen the sectarian fault-lines, then they 
recommend doing away with sects by subsuming the 
shi'a into the Hanafi fiqh. What is ironic is 
that Dr Israr's article is titled, Shia-Sunni 
Ittehad Ki Ahmiyyat (The Imperative of 
Shi'a-Sunni Alliance).
Let's face it. Sectarianism has acquired 
political dimensions and what we see today can be 
traced back to Gen Zia-ul Haq's policies and the 
Afghan 'jihad'. Whether there is a foreign hand 
in these events, as Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the 
Jama'at-e Islami doesn't tire of saying, is up to 
the security agencies to unearth. But two things 
must be remembered. Foreign elements can only 
fish in troubled waters; they cannot trouble the 
waters themselves in order to fish. Two, Qazi 
Sahib knows that he is politically allied with 
parties whose hands on this score are not clean. 
Since the Jama'at itself cannot be blamed for 
sectarian tendencies, Qazi Sahib is giving a 
red-herring to everyone when he tries to give a 
clean bill of health to some of his allies in the 
MMA fold.
The Pakistani establishment knows that the jihadi 
groups have a sectarian streak. It tried to curb 
it but had to look the other way when some of 
these militants got out of hand. The Friday Times 
published a secret report just before the August 
1998 US tomahawk attack on camps in Afghanistan's 
Khost province which killed many Harkat 
activists. That report mentioned the same camp 
and drew attention to how some Harkat militants 
had planned the attack on shias in the Momanpura 
graveyard of Lahore and ended up killing more 
than 20 shi'a mourners. These are facts 
Pakistanis tend to sweep under the carpet because 
we have got used to living in a data-free 
environment. Facts can create trauma because they 
penetrate through the cuirass of platitudes, 
half-truths and indoctrination which protects us.
But we have to face the fact that increasing 
numbers of people in this country are developing 
a sectarian outlook. It may not be very 
pronounced in regard to the shias as yet but that 
cannot be taken for granted. It is time for us to 
debunk the myths about ourselves and look the 
reality in the eye. *

_____



[2]

Dawn (Pakistan)
07 March 2004

Sectarianism and state policy
By Kunwar Idris

Presumably, the carnage at Quetta must have left 
the president and the prime minister not just sad 
but enraged. Only a day earlier they had jointly 
expressed satisfaction on the state of law and 
order and preparedness to prevent its breach as 
the Muharrum mourning reaches its culmination.
The ritual grieving over, the dead buried and 
compensation paid to the bereaved, the president 
and the prime minister, before they sink back 
into their politics of reforms, must ponder long 
and hard how and why the sectarian strife has 
become a central feature of Pakistan's life. And 
how in their time of professedly liberal (not 
secular, for that is tabooed) outlook it has been 
aggravating. The Quetta killings of last Tuesday 
were more numerous and cold blooded than ever 
seen before. The initial reports suggest there 
was no provocation not even an argument, it was a 
one-sided massacre of unwary mourners.
Not a routine enquiry with its long course and 
uncertain outcome but a fundamental change in the 
state policy will reverse the rising tide of this 
bloody sectarianism. No enquiry howsoever high 
its level or severe its indictment has prevented 
the recurrence of religious violence in the past 
nor will it this time round for the hatred and 
suspicion which nurture it are built into the 
legal, electoral and political systems of the 
country. The enquiries inspire no confidence 
among the victims nor would deter the assassins 
of the future.
In 1947 we started with the resolve that the 
first duty of the newly-independent state would 
be to maintain law and order so that the life and 
property of its citizens are safe and, secondly, 
religion will have nothing to do with the 
business of the state. This was not a mere 
resolve but an article of the state policy 
spelled out by the founder of Pakistan himself to 
the people and makers of the basic law.
In 57 years we have turned this principle upside 
down. Law and order has become the last duty of 
the state and religion its first business. It is 
continuing neglect of law and order by the state 
and burgeoning fanaticism under its patronage 
which has spawned religious hatred. The Quetta 
massacre is the latest and most tragic 
manifestation of this policy both in brutality 
and loss of life - quite a few among the 50 or so 
dead and a large number wounded were children.
There are many claimants to power and privilege 
that flow from control over the law and order 
institutions but no one is willing to own 
responsibility or to receive blame for 
lawlessness and disorder. It is no longer a view 
of the cynics alone. The Chief Justice of 
Pakistan, too, in a recent obiter dictum has 
affirmed that the arrangement for law and order 
introduced under the new local government and 
police laws has made it worse.
The intervention of the government in matters 
religious has weakened the writ of the law and 
entry of the clergy in politics has diminished 
its moral influence over the community. The 
government, at one time or the other, tends to 
become an ally of religious parties which are 
essentially parochial in character for their hard 
core arises from a particular sect or school of 
thought. The institutions of the state thus get 
involved in sectarian politics.
The long running civil war in Afghanistan pitched 
Pakistan against the predominantly Shia north. 
The international pressure and national interest 
persuaded the government of Pakistan to switch 
its support from the militant Taliban to moderate 
Northern Alliance but not so persuaded were the 
religious elements dominating the Balochistan 
government.
The Shias, it seems, have become the victims of 
religious politics that straddles the frontiers 
of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In recent months it 
is their third massacre in Quetta alone. Nothing 
whatever came out of the executive action or 
judicial enquiry that followed the previous two 
incidents, nor would in this one.
The perpetrators of numerous other random or 
targeted killings of the members belonging to 
other sects and religions have similarly gone 
untraced and unpunished. The government and the 
people are left only to wait and see how soon and 
severe is the next round of killings. The 
assurances coming even from the highest level 
that the culprits will be given exemplary 
punishment thus are meant to be shrugged away for 
the culprits have to be caught before an example 
is made of them. That rarely if ever happens.
In its short history, Pakistan has experienced a 
variety of stresses which in course of time have 
tended to subside or, at least, lose their 
violent edge. The sentiments of race, region, 
language and profession persist and the 
deprivations related to them do lead to outbursts 
which can be angry but seldom bloody.
The religious or sectarian sentiment however 
tells a different story. The doctrinal 
differences overlaid by dogma and bigotry are a 
source of perennial and growing stress on 
national life. Violence is never far from the 
surface and the toll of life and property it 
takes is heavy.
In a manner of speaking, the religious elements 
in politics have held the peace and progress of 
the community hostage under every government to a 
varying degree. Every government either dithered 
or balked at acting against them for it needed 
their support in countering the aspirations of 
the progressive sections of society.
Ziaul Haq's policy made clerics and seminarians 
into fighters. The weapons and money they 
acquired are now being used against their 
sectarian rivals. The age-old schism thus has 
been converted into warfare inflicting enormous 
pain and grief on a people who feel the 
government should worry about their welfare and 
not about their religious belief.
The involvement of the state in religion has 
inevitable bearing on the working of the 
bureaucracy and its more independent institutions 
like the judiciary and the election commission. 
At present the civil servants in NWFP, for 
instance, cannot be seen to be acting in the same 
manner and pursuing the same policy as their 
colleagues in Sindh would be doing. The 
neutrality of civil servants, already under 
siege, is thus exposed to greater danger.
More worrying however is the effect on the courts 
and election machinery. The trials under the 
blasphemy, Hudood and posing-as-Muslim laws 
enacted by Ziaul Haq and the murder of the 
alleged offenders and dissenters, in prisons or 
on the streets, before judicial verdicts, all 
have lowered the dignity and fairness of our 
judicial system.
Likewise, the election commission agreeing under 
the pressure of some religious groups to prepare 
a separate roll for a minority group when all 
citizens irrespective of their belief have to 
vote for the same candidate and can also contest 
from the same constituency is legally absurd and 
morally reprehensible. The world has not failed 
to make a note of it.
Lastly, because of religion weighing heavily on 
its domestic policies and international 
obligations, Pakistan remains for ever vulnerable 
to the charge of terrorism and now also of 
nuclear proliferation. That is just a step short 
of being a pariah. The moment has now arrived to 
keep the government and religion apart. It will 
do good to both.


_____


[3]


The Telegraph (India)
March 06, 2004

  HINDU POPES
- India seems to be imitating Europe's medieval past
Politics and Play

Ramachandra Guha

When the Babri Masjid was demolished in December 
1992, a prominent mahant of Ayodhya called it the 
first step in making the town the "Vatican of the 
Hindus". I was recently reminded of that 
statement while reading the Oxford historian R.W. 
Southern's classic Western Society and the Church 
in the Middle Ages. This book skilfully sets 
medieval Christianity in its social context. 
Southern analyses the relations between church 
and state, and the economic bases of both. He 
foregrounds the primacy of the papacy, yet tells 
us also about the monastic orders which attracted 
some of the ablest minds of the time.

Reading Southern, I asked myself - where would I 
find a comparable account of Hinduism? Where is 
the book that elegantly and authoritatively maps 
out the different theological trends, sects, 
orders and authorities that make up this 
particular religious complex? So far as I know, 
no such study exists. For religious history is an 
undeveloped field in India, despite the diversity 
of faiths to be found in the subcontinent, and 
despite the continuing hold of religion on the 
popular imagination.

As a scholar, I hope that works like Western 
Society and the Church in the Middle Ages will 
inspire comparable studies of Indian religious 
traditions and institutions. Meanwhile, as a 
citizen, I was struck by the parallels between 
Christianity as it was practised in medieval 
Europe, and the contemporary Indian movement 
known as Hindutva. Consider the following.

One, medieval Christianity was obsessed with 
defeating Islam, viewed as the main and sometimes 
sole enemy. Representative here is a letter 
written in 1267 by the pope in Rome to the Greek 
emperor in Constantinople. "The Crusade is being 
prepared," wrote the pope, "and the whole of 
Europe is rising at our bidding. If you will 
attack the Moslems on one side while the 
Crusaders attack them on the other, we shall see 
an end of their damnable religion for ever."

Two, the Vatican drew much of its authority from 
the presence of the physical remains of Jesus's 
proselytizing apostle St Peter, he who brought 
the faith to the previously pagan terrain of 
Europe. Rome was the "most holy burial place of 
the most blessed body of St Peter". The pope was 
the representative of St Peter; St Peter the 
representative of Jesus; and Jesus the son of 
god. Having the apostle's remains buttressed the 
Vatican's claim to be the centre of the Christian 
community. In a similar fashion, the association 
of Ram, the best loved incarnation of Vishnu, 
with Ayodhya, shall justify that city's claim to 
be the Vatican of Hinduism.

Three, medieval Christianity was a centralized, 
quasi-totalitarian, political system. Thus the 
edicts of the influential 11th century pope, 
Gregory VII, proclaimed that "the pope can be 
judged by no one"; that "an appeal to the papal 
court inhibits judgment by all inferior courts"; 
that the pope "alone can make new laws, set up 
new bishoprics, and divide old ones"; and, most 
importantly, that "the Roman church has never 
erred and never will err till the end of time".

This credo reminds one of communism in its pomp. 
Neither Mao nor Lenin were ever known to have 
made a mistake. Nor, I believe, has the 
sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Four, the pope and his bishops were especially 
keen to gain the allegiance, and preferably 
obeisance, of the political rulers of the day. As 
Southern observes, the church authorities were 
always at pains to emphasize "the inferiority of 
the secular to the spiritual power". Kings and 
nobles had continually to defer to the pope. Much 
is the case with modern day Hindutva. Our prime 
minister bows and scrapes before the 
shankaracharya, and our chief ministers are sworn 
in before rows upon rows of bearded gentlemen 
dressed in saffron.

Five, while some religious leaders had a genuine 
interest in matters of the spirit, some others 
were more keen on matters of the mundane world. 
In the historical record, says Southern, there 
are "few signs that the cultivation of (a 
Christian) character was the main preoccupation 
of the bishops of the western church. It is as 
organizers, administrators, magnates and 
politicians that the surviving documents mainly 
depict them". Likewise, a future historian 
studying the periodical literature of the India 
of the Nineties is likely to conclude that sants 
and sadhus preferred politics and administration 
to theology and doctrine. Southern writes of a 
particular German bishop that he was "simply a 
political agent in ecclesiastical dress". Much 
the same could be said of many of our Hindu holy 
men today.

Six, notwithstanding the professed ideals of the 
church, then, "secular motives were everywhere 
uppermost and everywhere prevailed". In the 12th 
and 13th centuries, writes Southern, "many 
contemporaries were beginning to think that the 
church was a conspiracy between secular and 
ecclesiastical authorities for the exploitation 
of ecclesiastical wealth." How true this is of so 
many temples today.

Seven, as men of this world, the clergy took most 
interest in their own well-being. Southern calls 
the priesthood "the greatest of all trade unions" 
in the Middle Ages. Hindu swamis likewise have 
been quick to understand the importance of acting 
collectively in their own self-interest.

Sociologists have written of Hindutva as being an 
attempt to "Semiticize" Hinduism. By this they 
mean that a previously plural, diffuse, 
unorganized and even anarchic religion is being 
refashioned along more formal lines. Hindutva 
aims to create a clear chain of command, a 
definite centre of authority, where previously 
there was none. For Hindus have failed to act as 
a unified, cohesive community, complains the 
sangh parivar. They have been hampered by the 
absence of one holy book, a Quran or a Bible, and 
the absence of one holy place, a Rome or a Mecca. 
Ram, and Ayodhya, will be made to step into the 
breach.

Of the three great religions that are "Semitic" 
in origin, Judaism has had the least influence in 
India. But Islam and Christianity have both made 
a powerful impact on the subcontinent. Indeed, 
much of modern day Hinduism can be understood as 
a response to the challenge of those two faiths. 
Some Hindus, like Gandhi, were provoked by Islam 
and Christianity to attack the evils in their own 
society, such as discrimination against women and 
low castes. Other Hindus, such as those clustered 
in the sangh parivar, seem to have taken an 
altogether different lesson from the Semitic 
religions. From them they have learnt to blur the 
boundaries between church and state, to claim 
infallibity for their own faith, and to demonize 
other faiths.

Karl Marx once claimed that "the more developed 
society shows to the less developed the image of 
its future". In this, as in so much else, the 
bearded German prophet got it wrong. For modern 
India seeks to emulate medieval, not modern, 
Europe. Sadly, this is true both for Hindutva and 
for its political opponents. The apostles of the 
sangh parivar are inspired by long dead mullahs 
and padres; but so, it seems, are men such as 
Laloo Prasad Yadav. Listen now to this final 
quote from R.W. Southern's Western Society and 
the Church in the Middle Ages: "Nepotism, 
political bribery, and the appropriation of 
institutional wealth to endow one's family, were 
not crimes in medieval rulers; they were part of 
the art of government, no less necessary in popes 
than in other men." India's present, Europe's 
past?


_____


[4]

Boston Globe
March 7, 2004

India's tribal schools are questioned
Teaching promotes bigotry, fanaticism, rights groups say

By Jehangir Pocha, Globe Correspondent,

GONASIKA, India -- The students in this remote 
tribal school gathered under a billowing saffron 
banner to sing a timeless ode to Saraswati, the 
Hindu goddess of knowledge. To the pupils and 
their parents, most of whom are tribals, or 
Indian aboriginal people, the school is a ray of 
hope in an otherwise grim future of desperate 
poverty.	 

"My family sent me here because they couldn't 
afford me," said Dyneswar Juang, a 7th-grader. 
"Here I get everything for free, and I have a 
future."

But human rights organizations in the eastern 
state of Orissa, which has the lowest per capita 
income in India, say the students are unwitting 
players in a political experiment driven by 
ancient Indian hatreds and partly funded by 
donors from the United States.

They say the schools, run by India's foremost 
Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya 
Swayamsevak Sangh, are indoctrinating students 
with a militant version of "Hindutva" (literally, 
Hinduness): hatred of Muslims and Christians and 
a desire to turn India into a Hindu state, using 
violence if necessary.

The National Council for Educational Research and 
Training in New Delhi, the government body that 
evaluates teaching materials, said the schools' 
curriculum is "designed to promote bigotry and 
religious fanaticism" and has asked state 
governments to prevent the publishing and use of 
RSS textbooks.

Yet the RSS and its allies, collectively called 
the Sangh Parivar, say they have enrolled more 
than 5 million students in about 30,000 Hindu 
religious schools across India.

"These . . . are like a Trojan horse," said 
Sudarshan Das, president of a nongovernmental 
organization's umbrella group in Orissa. Das says 
the real aim of the schools is to co-opt tribals 
who have traditionally been wary of the RSS into 
embracing the Hindutva ideology and supporting 
the RSS's political offshoot, the Bharatiya 
Janata Party. The BJP rules India through a 
coalition, and with elections due in two months 
the party is looking to expand its voter base.

Subash Chauhan, the Orissa state secretary of the 
Bajrang Dal, a Sangh Parivar organization that 
runs many of the schools, denies that they are 
political tools.

"We are a social organization," he said. "Our 
schools are meant to promote Hindu culture and 
uplift poor Hindus."

Still, Vidya Bharati, the Sangh Parivar's largest 
operator of the schools, says on its website that 
they aim to "develop a national system of 
education which will mold a new generation of 
youths fully saturated with the feelings of 
Hindutva."

Fundamentalist religious organizations have long 
used schools to groom adherents. Muslim 
madrassas, or Koranic schools, abound in India 
and, as in other parts of the world, have been 
fertile recruiting grounds for extremists in 
Kashmir and elsewhere. The Sangh Parivar also 
accuses Christian evangelists of using the 
schools they operate in India to lure Hindus into 
Christianity.

But what makes the Sangh Parivar's schools so 
insidious to critics is that almost none of the 
students enrolled in them are Hindus, said Major 
A. Somnath, of the Dalit Solidarity People's 
Party.

"Because they need our votes, they are trying to 
make us Hindus," Somnath said, referring to 
tribals as well as Dalits -- "untouchables" at 
the bottom of India's caste system. "It's a kind 
of social engineering which has very dangerous 
effects."

Tension over the schools reflects an age-old 
social schism that continues to haunt Indian 
politics.

About 2,000 years ago, Indian society organized 
people into a hierarchy of castes based on their 
"ritual purity." Brahmans (priests) came out on 
top, followed by Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaisyas 
(traders), and Sudras (peasants). Tribals and 
some nontribal groups, who now call themselves 
Dalits, were considered too impure to belong to 
any caste.

Excluded from mainstream Hindu life, tribals and 
Dalits developed their own systems of worship. 
Tribals follow animist beliefs, praying to trees 
and stones; Dalits pray to supernatural forces 
and earth goddesses.

The Sangh Parivar says tribals and Dalits are 
simply "waylaid Hindus." With the caste system 
banned since 1950, Sangh Parivar theologians say 
tribals and Dalits must be brought back into the 
same fold that once rejected them.

"People should realize all Indian faiths -- 
tribal, Dalit, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain -- are all 
just branches of Hinduism," Chauhan said. "We are 
only leading [tribals] back to their original 
faith."

Tribals and Dalits make up about 35 percent of 
India's population. Traditionally, they have 
joined India's Muslims, who account for 12 
percent of the population, in voting against the 
BJP. Winning more tribal and Dalit votes will be 
essential for the BJP if it wants to form a 
majority government, analysts say. But Chauhan 
denied that the Sangh Parivar is "converting" 
tribals for political purposes.

"It is foreign forces, Christians and Muslims, 
who are converting Hindus," he said from his 
spartan office in Bhubaneswar, Orissa's state 
capital. "If Hindus do not unite, we will soon 
become a minority in our own country."

Although census figures do not support this 
argument, the Sangh Parivar has been successful 
using it to rally Hindus, including many living 
abroad. Vijay Prashad, director of International 
Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, says that 
Indians living in the United States have given at 
least $6 million to fund the Hindu schools across 
the country via a network of charitable fronts 
and illegal money transfers.

Hardly any of this money is used for genuine 
development work, Prashad said. A visit to 
Gonasika supports that assertion.

Cracked mud huts and malnourished residents 
indicate that the village is not on anyone's 
development map. There are almost no signs of 
modern life, except for an official notice tacked 
up in a community grain-storage center telling 
people how to update their voter records.

"Yes, we are Hindus," Lahuri Juang, the village's 
tribal priest, declared matter-of-factly. 
However, minutes later he performed a ritual 
sacrifice that involves beheading a chicken and 
anointing his forehead with its blood -- a 
distinctly un-Hindu act.

Willy D'Costa, national secretary of the Indian 
Social Action Forum, a human rights group in the 
western state of Gujarat, says tribals are "too 
innocent, too needy" to see what is happening to 
them. D'Costa says the worst threat the tribals 
face is that the Sangh Parivar is using them as 
shock troops in its violent anti-Muslim and 
anti-Christian pogroms.

Evidence of this emerged during the Hindu-Muslim 
riots that rocked Gujarat, a BJP stronghold, in 
March 2002. Several independent investigators 
reported that tribals from areas where the Sangh 
Parivar operated schools had perpetrated some of 
the worst violence against Muslims.

The Hindu right "does not want any rival religion 
in India," said Somnath, the Dalit activist, 
shaking his head. "They tried to destroy Buddhism 
all those years ago, now they are doing it to us."

_____


[5]

Hindustan Times  (India)
March 5, 2004
  	 
Vote Vajpayee, install Advani!
Praful Bidwai

  L.K. Advani's rath yatra is a grotesque 
reassertion of Hindutva's centrality to the BJP 
and aims to make a sectarian-exclusivist appeal 
to voters

LK. Advani would have us believe that he's a 
model of rectitude and sobriety. As soon as he 
heard of the election-schedule announcement in 
Tumkur, Karnataka, he decided to discard the air 
force helicopter and hit the road. It's another 
matter that he wants Delhi's roads routinely 
blocked and 'sanitised' for himself, like they 
are for Vajpayee.

The rectitude claim is dubious. Surely, rectitude 
demands that someone indicted for a serious 
crime, like the Babri mosque demolition, should 
not become India's home minister, of all things, 
until cleared of the charge. It means the chief 
conspirator in that organised, sustained campaign 
should not be Number Two in a cabinet which 
presides over the Central Bureau of 
Investigation, politicises and corrupts it, and 
so manipulates the Ayodhya litigation that the 
conspiracy charge is dropped altogether. (In 
other words, that well-planned, hate-driven 
agitation had no subject, no agency!)

Surely, rectitude entails that India's home 
minister should proactively bring the 
perpetrators of the worst pogrom since 1947 to 
book. Gujarat was a national shame, indeed a 
crime against humanity, which at minimum deserves 
national-level prosecution and punishment. Advani 
fails each of these tests. Indeed, he turns out a 
petty-minded person, who got his own ministry, 
not even the PMO, to ask the Election Commission 
to allow him to use State aircraft during his 
campaign - at par with Vajpayee.

It'd be unfair to deny the man his ambition. 
After all, it's Advani, not Vajpayee, who built 
up the BJP through the medieval revenge-driven 
Ayodhya campaign, raising its Lok Sabha tally 
from a miserable two to 86. Central to his 
exertions was the Toyota van-based 1990 rath 
yatra, which left a trail of blood from Somnath 
to Samastipur. Its principal slogan was frank and 
simple, like the abiding message from all BJP 
campaigning: Muslims can only be second-class 
citizens in India; or else, they must choose 
between Pakistan and kabristan (graveyard).

Expectedly, Advani wants to exploit his hold on 
the party apparatus to boost his position within 
the cabinet. He periodically makes such bids. 
Thus, he got a special office (deputy PM) created 
for himself, for which there is no constitutional 
sanction. Then, he got his protégé Venkaiah Naidu 
to propose parity between vikas-purush Vajpayee 
and loh-purush (iron-man) - himself.

But ambition is one thing, rectitude quite 
another. Cynical realpolitik and crude power play 
don't sit easily with constitutional propriety 
and democratic decency.

The BJP is forcibly trying to marry them. This 
amalgam finds expression in a grotesque new 
tactic: exploit the Vajpayee 'brand' for its 
deceptive 'soft' image within the middle-class, 
but use Hindutva's belligerent, muscular reality 
through Advani. Get Vajpayee's 47 per cent 
acceptance rating to neutralise Advani's pathetic 
2 per cent, which is lower not just than Sonia 
Gandhi's 23, but even Mulayam Singh's 3 per cent 
(India Today, February 9) to push the core agenda 
of Hindutva-plus-neoliberalism.

This has meant using the two leaders 
interchangeably at times, and in complementary 
combination (apparatchik and parliamentary 
leader) at others. Above all, it has involved 
trying to lower the resistance to Advani's 
substitution for and succession to Vajpayee. Even 
when the BJP denies this equation-substitution - 
as Naidu did on the 'twin mascots' issue as soon 
as Vajpayee petulantly challenged the BJP to 
fight the elections under Advani's leadership - 
it gets its NDA allies to accept parity as 
something 'normal' and 'natural'.

The strategy is simple: Vajpayee must pave the 
way for the 2 per cent-rating man to take over. 
The BJP knows Advani is like Dick Cheney - 
equally devious, but more rabble-rousing and 
demagogic - who cannot match Bush's ratings. 
Therefore, gullible sections of the public and 
the BJP's upper middle-class supporters are being 
cajoled to vote for Vajpayee - only to install 
Advani as PM, if not today, then tomorrow.

Put this way, the choice would shock most people 
- and not only because of the 2-to-47 
disproportion. The public simply can't stomach 
the equation of low cunning with leadership, and 
parochial, sectarian agendas with universal 
values. It might tolerate tasteless poetry. But 
venomous prose, oozing with prejudice? Probably 
not.

That's where Advani's rath yatra comes in. It's 
more than just an election stunt. It's the BJP's 
way of 'normalising' hardline Hindutva and 
diluting its aggressively Vajpayee-centric 
campaign. The yatra will reaffirm the BJP's 
Hindu-supremacist core ideology and stamp 
Advani's hawkish visage upon its canvassing. The 
yatra's route and timing are suffused with Hindu 
religious symbolism. More important, it has, 
according to Advani himself, a "conceptual and 
emotional link" to the 1990 Ram rath yatra.

Advani's journey will stress parallels and 
continuity with the original. The BJP's plan is 
to 'normalise' weird practices associated with 
hate-driven mobilisations typical of Hindutva. It 
might appear ironical that Advani will ride a 
Swaraj-Mazda bus earlier used by Dilip Singh 
Judeo, of cash-on-camera fame. But Judeo isn't 
just another corrupt politician; he's a firebrand 
Christian-hating fanatic.

It's only appropriate that Advani should ride 
Judeo's vehicle. It's also appropriate that the 
public should condemn this procession of hatred 
and punish the BJP.


_____


[6]


Outlook (India)
March 8, 2004

Alms For The Killer
A damning report from London uncovers evidence on 
how charity outfits in the UK fund the Sangh's 
communal hate campaigns
Harsh Kabra

Overseas funding for the RSS is yet again raising 
a storm. Hindutva organisations in the UK and 
India have gone on the defensive after Awaaz: 
South Asia Watch Limited (ASAW)-a London-based 
watchgroup-presented evidence last week that 
millions of pounds collected from the British 
public as charity for victims of the Gujarat 
quake and the Orissa super-cyclone were used to 
fund Sangh organisations in India.

In an 80-page report-In Bad Faith? British 
Charity and Hindu Extremism-released in the House 
of Lords on February 26, just before the second 
anniversary of the post-Godhra Gujarat carnage, 
ASAW has urged the UK Charity Commission to 
revoke the charitable status of Hindu Swayamsevak 
Sangh-UK (HSS-UK), VHP-UK and Kalyan Ashram 
Trust-UK (KAT-UK), all part of the Sangh parivar, 
and act against their trustees for keeping 
unsuspecting British donors in the dark about 
their affiliations and funding of extremist RSS 
organisations on the sly.

ASAW has also appealed to donors, politicians and 
organisations to refuse funds to these outfits 
and publicly dissociate from them.

The ASAW report, dedicated to those who died in 
the Gujarat riots, begins with the story of a 
victim of the post-Godhra carnage and goes on to 
say that those at the receiving end got no 
assistance from either the Sewa International-UK 
(SIUK) or the HSS. The report alleges this was 
because many of the Sangh organisations involved 
in the rioting were being funded by their 
UK-based fraternal organisations. The report 
reads: "Most striking of all was the behaviour of 
these organisations in the wake of the Gujarat 
carnage in 2002, which left 2,000 dead and over 
2,00,000 displaced and languishing in refugee 
camps. The response of the SIUK, the HSS, the 
VHP, the National Hindu Students Forum and every 
other UK Hindutva group to appeals for 
humanitarian relief was silence. This was despite 
considerable coverage of the carnage in the UK 
media and desperate appeals by secular Gujarati 
NGOs. This is not surprising: the majority of the 
victims were Indian citizens who were 
Muslims.They were victims of the VHP, the RSS and 
the Vanvasi Kalyan Samiti, organisations which 
are promoted and glorified by the HSS-UK, the 
VHP-UK and the SIUK." The report goes on to say 
the money collected after the Gujarat quake and 
Orissa cyclone had all gone into funding groups 
that promoted communal hatred.

ASAW's charges are serious:

*	About a third of the money collected for 
earthquake rehabilitation was spent in setting up 
RSS schools.
*	The charity money went to Sangh outfits 
like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (allegedly 
involved in the Gujarat riots), Lok Kalyan 
Samiti, Border Jankalyan Samiti, Sewa Bharati and 
Orissa's Utkal Bipanna Sahayata Samiti (UBSS).
*	Sewa Bharati, on the vanguard of several 
anti-minority crusades, received over £2 million 
from SIUK, the fund-raising arm of HSS-UK.
*	The money was collected in Britain but 
the RSS leaders in India jumpstarted projects and 
handed the money over to the concerned people 
only after the projects were completed. This was 
meant to bring these territories into the 
parivar's grip.
*	The money was also used to glorify the 
RSS, which used it to provide relief to 
upper-caste Hindus, run shakhas in camps, spread 
anti-minority messages, rebuild temples, villages 
and community centres, which it named after its 
leaders.
*	ASAW alleges accounts have been 
doctored-while SIUK claims it funded between 10 
and 25 Gujarat villages after the quake, ASAW 
says it funded only six.
*	HSS-UK and SIUK have intentionally 
refrained from providing any comprehensive data 
on the disbursement of funds.

"We don't think it's a coincidence that the 
Gujarat and Orissa, where Hindutva networks, 
violence and hatred have grown phenomenally in 
recentyears, had natural and human tragedies 
followed by massive amounts of funding to 
Hindutva organisations from overseas in the guise 
of humanitarian charity," says the report. "It's 
ironic that Sangh organisations have attacked 
foreign funding of minority groups when they 
themselves use such funding to expand their own 
influence."

The HSS, for instance, runs around 70 physical 
and ideological training cells in the UK. SIUK, 
now a private limited company sharing its address 
with the HSS-UK's Leicester office, is not a 
registered charity and has been using HSS' 
registration number to raise money, often without 
mentioning the parent organisation. These 
connections were unknown even to SIUK patrons 
like Adam Patel, a British Muslim and a member of 
the House of Lords, who eventually resigned on 
learning about it. Incidentally, even before the 
report, the UK Charity Commission had started 
probing the HSS and SIUK.

The ASAW report states that "the main purpose of 
SIUK is to raise funds in the UK for RSS projects 
in India in order to directly help the expansion 
of the extremist RSS's networks across Indian 
society in line with the long-term political and 
sectarian aims of the RSS".

ASAW says it now has evidence that almost all the 
£ 2.3 million raised by SIUK during its India 
quake appeal were meant exclusively for Sewa 
Bharati, its Indian counterpart, whose licence in 
MP had been cancelled for its anti-Christian 
violence. HSS-UK has declined comments, so has 
the RSS spokesperson in New Delhi. But VHP's 
Ashok Chowgule said in an interview: "We deny all 
the allegations. We do genuine social work for 
the downtrodden and it is not the Hindu way to 
discriminate against people."

According to the report, RSS affiliates, keen to 
make their presence felt, hijacked relief 
supplies donated by other agencies, prevented 
international NGOs from undertaking relief 
operations, accused even the likes of Janpath, 
which ran a helpline for children, of "receiving 
foreign funds for proselytising people" and 
"prowling for Christians". Further, the report 
says the RSS ransacked relief camps set up by the 
likes of ActionAid India and even abducted and 
tortured a student working for an NGO simply 
because his name "sounded" Christian.

Money has also been raised by SIUK for other 
Sangh organisations such as the Vanvasi Kalyan 
Ashram, implicated in anti-minority violence in 
Gujarat, Orissa and elsewhere. Without mentioning 
the growing participation of adivasi groups in 
anti-minority violence, the highly controversial 
Ekal Vidyalayas have been presented in the UK 
simply as literacy projects aimed at neglected 
'tribal' groups.

In Orissa, says ASAW, the main beneficiary of the 
Orissa Appeal was the UBSS, which enjoys the same 
address in Cuttack as that of the RSS and 
received at least £2 million after the 1999 
super-cyclone. HSS-UK stated that the funds were 
channeled through volunteers to 
organisationswhich got their workforce from the 
RSS. Other SIUK beneficiaries of the Orissa 
appeal were Vidya Bharati and the abvp.

According to South Asia Solidarity, which had 
demanded the annulment of the charity status of 
HSS-UK and SIUK last year, the latter is the 
biggest Indian charity in the UK and has 
increased its gross income from £7,48,355 in 2000 
to almost £2.2 million in early '03. HSS' total 
assets have also gone up from £6,66,384 in '95 to 
around £1.64 million in '02. But Fair Credit 
Reporting Act (FCRA) regulations prohibit foreign 
funding for RSS organisations sans prior 
government permission to discourage interference 
in India's political affairs. Therefore, notes 
ASAW, any foreign funding amounts to FCRA 
violation.

Chetan Bhatt, a reader in sociology at London's 
Goldsmiths College and ASAW spokesperson, told 
Outlook: "This report details the depth of 
theconnection between SIUK and the RSS, and the 
extent to which RSS fronts in India are dependent 
on overseas funding. One key finding is of SIUK 
making smaller donations to legitimate British 
causes to gain respectability here, while sending 
the bulk of its funds to RSS fronts in India." Of 
the non-earthquake donations made over March 
'99-June '02, only around £6,000 had been made 
for British and non-Indian causes.

The London-based Charity Commission has already 
been at work on the funding case. "There are some 
serious allegations. We're looking intopotential 
links between the charity and India's extremist 
organisations and alleged payments to these 
groups by the charity," says a commission 
spokesperson "We're looking at the kinship 
between the HSS and SIUK, and also the 
administration of the funds collected for the 
Gujarat quake," she added.

Rebecca Draka, another spokesperson for the 
Charity Commission, reveals the commission is 
"waiting for the trustees of the charity to 
provide more information, which is taking a long 
time". After officials of the Charity Commission 
were denied entry visas last year to carry out 
research in India, Draka informs the commission 
has requested the Indian government to reconsider 
that decision.

Funding has always been a sore point as far as 
the parivar is concerned. There has been no probe 
in India into this ever since the NDA came 
topower. Perhaps, an independent international 
investigation could throw light on the monies 
that pour in from abroad to keep the Sangh 
parivar machinery rolling.



o o o o

[In Bad Faith: British Charity and Hindu Extremism
Published by Awaaz South Asia Watch  Limited (London) 2004
ISBN 0 9547174 0 6
download and read the full report at:
www.awaazsaw.org/ibf/index.htm



_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on 
matters of peace and democratisation in South 
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit 
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South 
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
The complete SACW archive is available at: 
bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

South Asia Counter Information Project a sister 
initiative, provides a partial back -up and 
archive for SACW:  snipurl.com/sacip
See also associated site: www.s-asians-against-nukes.org

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.

--