Biju Mathew Interview Transcript
Biju: I am Biju Mathew and I work with a whole bunch of different groups on questions related to Hindu prayer rituals Hindu fundamentalism especially presence and activity in North America and its impact on communities back in India. We’ve been doing this work for the last decade or more and in the last 3 or so 3 or 4 years we’ve run into really fascinating situation because we’ve seen several of our efforts of putting together networks of various kinds coming to fruition with the situation where in the last 4 years we have had a series of really fascinating victories against the Hindu right wing and different forces in the United States.
DF: Can you tell me who the “we” are? Geographically lay out for us who is part of the organizing.
Biju: Much of the early organizing of Hindu work in the United States and North America generally started out through 2 formations. The earliest was a news group or NewsNet called Alt.India.Progressive which kind of became the space for rallying a disparate set of left and progressive forces of South Asian descent who were spread all across North America. One of the most important things to remember is that when you are talking about diasporic communities who are concerned about politics back at home you must realize that depending on the history of the diaspora they are spread out they are not in the same geographical area.
So the first task becomes finding a way for them to recognize each other. If there are two people from the left who are really concerned about Hindu… Hindu-right wing politics and its emergence who are sitting in Denver Colorado, those two must be able to recognize the three others who in a similar situation and are sitting in Pittsburgh and one other person sitting in Cedar Rapids, Iowa or some place… every small little town all across the US.
So I think the first task is a gathering task and I think a lot of that early work of gathering was in some part done immediately after the destruction of the Babri Mosque in India in 1992, when I along with a couple of other people started up a news group on NewsNet called Alt.India.Progressive. I served as a moderator for the news group for around five years or so. That was a place based for progressives to rally around initially. That experiment led us to what we began to conceive of as an automatically wide network of left intellectuals and activists from India called FOIL, the Form of Indian Leftists. So that was way back in the mid 90’s and what that leaded for us was a space where in we could initiate projects and figure out who amongst us has the bandwidth to carry it forward. So it was kind of a resource of management structure in significant ways.
So immediately after FOIL started up for instance, one of the ideas was that the Hindu Nationalist in the United States were finding ways of taking… taking a lot of Indian American Hindu youth who were struggling with their identity questions. And so on FOIL we had a discussion about how to challenge that and around ten people sitting across the country who had bandwidth to spare got together and started what then became a local project in New York called Youth Solidarity Summer. So there lots of different projects like that; that were started up through FOIL identifying resources, bandwidth, etc.
By the time we came to the early 2000’s I think the situation began to change to some degree, because apart from the FOIL network there were several other networks that were started up of various hues and colors of localized ones. For instance in Chicago there would be a local group -- South Asian Progressives – where ever large metros large South Asian diasporic concentrations local groups began to emerge.
Simultaneously a lot of minority groups began to emerge – The Muslim groups started organizing themselves. The Christian groups started organizing themselves. So a lot of different groups began to emerge all across the country. And so, in 2001… 2002; basically in 2002 when the Gujarat pogrom happened, when the massacre of Gujarat Muslim minorities happened we put out a call on FOIL basically saying we are starting our project; looking at the money that the Hindu Right-wing was gathering in the United States and funneling back to the violent Neo-Nazi groups back in, the Neo-Fascist groups back in India. And we got a response just as usual in FOIL those where the bandwidth.
A group of us formed ourselves into a campaign called, into a campaign called The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate. Now that campaign has the most interesting history, because over the next eight month period we did some of the most fascinating investigative work. All of which was based on the Internet. Now the Internet has some really fascinating resources. For instance, I don’t know whether people know; there used to be a machine called Déjà vu, there used to be a site called Déjà vu, which stored pictures of every Internet site possible; many versions of the same page for several copies… several versions of it into the past. That’s been kind of rolled into a project called the way back machine right now. And so you can go and look at our page, how it looked back in 1995, ’96, ’97, etc., etc., etc. So also Déjà vu then got … a lot of the Déjà vu archive got bought into Google groups, so you could go back and trace archives of some of these discussion that the Neo-Fascist were having back in the 90’s. Some of the original discussions that they were having on some of their news groups trying to create their organizational structures. Right, so I mean literally and anybody who knows about the Internet knows there are unprotected folders, etc. on the Internet. And, so literally it became an Internet trawling exercise for eight months where in we gathered so much data that in the end along with some IRS records we are able to account for every single penny that they had funneled officially to India for around a six year period.
Right, so that’s the power of it in terms of how much we are able to do just by nine or ten of us sitting behind computer terminals and crawling every night. And just collecting data and systematically recording it. Literally, getting it notarized, every single thing that we are getting off the web, we are getting it notarized, authenticating it and putting it away. Now that became a huge project.
Now that project in a certain sense and the report that came out at the end of it, the report was called The Foreign Exchange of Hate, which was all the money that was being funneled from here became huge, especially in India, which is where the impacted needed to be also. Again there are, of course there is a really, really significant Internet-based aspect of the campaign in as much as the ten of us who were did the report or the twelve of us who did the report; I think most of us did not know each other. We had never ever physically met each other. We actually met for the first time after the report was release and after the report became a really big huge event in India. So after that we actually met each other and actually figured out how who looks you know. Before that we were just an Internet community, before that we were just a set of people who had been on FOIL and had recognized each others posting on FOIL and therefore knew we could trust each other and we just got together.
DF: Who were your targets?
Biju: So our targets, especially for instance for that campaign were a bunch of it. Again that was an important part of our strategy as to who would react to Internet-based stuff. Right, I mean one part of the target was of course the Indian-American community itself, but we were not particularly hopeful that they would react very significantly to an Internet-based campaign. But another part of the campaign was aimed at some of the large technology multi-nationals like Intel, Cisco and all of these companies, which willy-nilly without knowing were handing out money on third world development and diversity accounts to the Hindu Nationalist.
Right, we knew that they would be extremely sensitive to Internet-based publicity, negative publicity, right? But we also knew that they wouldn’t, we wouldn’t get a rise out of them, because of the fact that the American media would not pick the story. It’s too small a story, too much about these brown people going nuts kind of story for them to do. We knew that, we are pretty clear that the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t necessarily pick the story very easily. So instantly we switched our focus and we felt that the Indian, that the electronic media based in India and the television media based in India would be much more interested in the story. So we literally sent off two people from the campaign to India to launch the report there. And so suddenly the report and the news around this became huge in India. Some of the largest Internet sites; news sites out of India like rediff.com, etc. were carrying the story as a “biggie.” All the newspapers and their Internet-based portals were carrying the story and the news became big. And, because all of these companies like Cisco and Intel, etc. have India operations, the India operations started getting attacked and then they reacted and forced the California based operations to respond. And so on day two of our campaign, at the end of day one literally of our campaign, Cisco pulled out. And so it was like literally the campaign had not even begun when we got a huge victory, right.
DF: So how did that then lead you to a campaign to stop Chief Minister Modi coming to the US?
Biju: Now that campaign what it did, the funding campaign what it did was it galvanized a whole bunch of groups that had, as I said, begun to emerge by the early 2000s. And so suddenly we came into again non-physical contact completely based on the web and Internet and email and all of that with a large number of South Asian diaspora groups that were really, really keen on working together.
And so when the news came that the Gujarat Chief Minister Modi, alias the “Butcher of Gujarat” was going to come to the United States, it was easy for us based on purely the reactions to the petitions we had carried with the “Stop Funding Hate” campaign, based on purely the reactions and the personal contacts we had made through that process. Immediately began a conversation. One of the groups that had really come out strongly to support us during the “Stop Funding Hate” campaign was a group of young Muslim professionals who had kind of decided that they need to do some work outside of their own religious community, on issues related to secularism called the Indian Muslim Council. So the President of the Indian Muslim Council Shaikh Ubaid reached out to us and very soon in a small set of conversations between some ex-FOILERs, some CSFH folks and Indian Muslim Council and few other groups like that we were able to put together a coalition of around forty organizations who were only connect only through one listserv and through a weekly conference call.
Now the weekly conference call also an interesting issue in the sense that one thinks of a weekly conference call as not connected to the Internet, but it is because these are VOIP calls. These are entirely based the only reason why we could all afford to get on to, the only reason why we could all afford to get on to a call together and be channeled together is because it was a wide call. So it became an intense period around, around a month of activity against Modi. So the targets for that campaign included the Asian American Association of Hotel Owners in the United States, which is primarily a South Asian American group in large part because of the motel structure in the United States being significantly owned by South Asians, who were one of the groups that had invited Modi, right.
But simultaneously, because it was the American Association of Hotel Owners, there were a whole bunch of other corporate sponsors from American Express to Ramada to the Hyatt’s in the world, so every big hotel chain was also one of the sponsorship, so they became a target. Madison Square Garden which was going to be a place where he was going to speak; so, became a target, so a large number of really high profile places and organizations became targets.
DF: And what did you do?
Biju: So again it was an Internet-based thing in terms of we had organized a phone bank in terms of people calling into Madison Square Garden, people calling into American Express. I mean, for instance, the American Express corporate offices literally one day I mean there were two or three officers in there who were the people in charge of this particular project couldn’t pick their phones that day. I mean the only phones coming in were South Asians sitting across North America who were calling in say “What the hell are you guys doing inviting this butcher over,” right. So it became a nightmare for them.
Well before the South Asian, well before the American Consulate, the American Consulate in Bombay decided to deny Modi a visa and I’ll come back that complement part of the story in a minute. All of these corporate sponsors pulled out. So that was already a huge victory. At one level we didn’t care actually whether Modi came in, because it was perfectly okay if Modi came in, because there were other complements to this. Because part of the threat we were holding out was not just this Internet-based campaign, but if Modi ever showed up at Madison Square Garden we would have five thousand people outside.
So that’s the only other thing I want to emphasize here; while we talk about Internet-based campaign, Internet-based campaign are important as Internet-based campaigns, but you need to do, you need to have several other levels of work alongside it for it to be a successful campaign. I mean in the CSFH campaign we couldn’t have pulled it off without two people from here flying into India, sitting there and doing a bunch of work. You know spending twenty days traveling from city to city in India; setting up the press for it and stuff like that.
So I think that’s the other part that I wanted to clarify, but one of the things that happened was that we were able to do a lot of really compacted information dissemination through this process, right. So we put out really compact profiles of Modi, the whole profiles of what happened in the Kudrat program, etc., etc. And these compacted kind of documents began to circulate on the Internet, right. And one target of that circulatory efforts, that messaging effort was the democratic senator congressman and so Conyers from Detroit who has a large Arab American quote unquote Muslim population as his base was one of our primary target. And Conyers actually took the first step in congress to open up and said “This man is a dangerous guys and I need to ask the question what the basis was for him to come in.” Now interestingly and most surprisingly for us the support Conyers got was from the right, Christian right in congress where Senator Pitts, Congressman Pitts jumped on to the bandwagon and because I think he was part of various he had been hearing about the Hindu right through complaints from the Christian Evangelical groups trying to operate in India who had been targeted by the Hindu right, right.
So it became a strange coalition, but again the origins of that, that whole thing was a targeted attempt to hit out at some of the Democratic Liberal Congressmen who received this stuff, etc. And then the Christian right wing also jumped on to it. And at some level, one must say that the success of stopping Modi from coming into the United States was part of, it’s only the tail end of the story where an opportunistic American state makes the best decision it can make at that point and time. It needed to find a way to position itself using Muslims in the United States, etc., etc. and a whole bunch of other pressures that it was facing and so Modi just became a convenient thing in that sense. It was a campaign, which the greatest success of the campaign was not just that the American states stopped Modi from coming in at that point in time, but the fact that we actually managed on an issues like Modi to make companies such as American Express or any of the bug hotel chains, etc. to back off.
Chris Matthews, he was supposed to be co-speaking with Modi at the, for the American Association of Hotel Owners, right. So he backed off, so the fact that we were able to take a whole bunch of all these biggies American Express to Christ Matthews, to the Ramada Institute to the Best Western to God knows what to start from a point where they had no clue to politics in South Asia to a point where they had no choice but to back off mark, was I think, was mark of how well some of these campaigns will work.
I think informational campaigns where in you really plan out a long haul strategy. I think the thing about informational campaigns on the Internet you need, you can’t think of it as an event. You can’t think of it as I am going to do this. I am going to put this report out and some how this report is going to do its stuff, that’s not the point. You need to put the report out and think through the process of how to draw attention to the report and then plan ten steps ahead. You know it’s only a complete campaign mode that makes the Internet successful.
Posted by VVG 6:12 PM
Labels: Biju Mathew, CSFH, Deepa, transcript
