Interviews with Activist Biju Mathew

Deepa Fernandes talks to Biju Mathew about his Internet-based activism

Continued...




Biju Mathew discusses his campaign goals

Posted by Lizzie 8:26 PM 0 comments

The Gujarat-USA Netivism Story

By DEEPA FERNANDES AND BASHARAT PEER

In February 2002 a Hindu-led massacre of Muslims took place in the Indian state of Gujarat. As the killing was occurring, the highest elected official of the state, Narendra Modi of the BJP party, did nothing to stop the rampage, and in fact directed the police not to act. In a matter of a few days more than 1,000 Muslims were killed and thousands more were displaced from their homes and businesses. In the aftermath of the massacre, the state government made no serious moves to bring those responsible to justice. Narendra Modi was reelected to another term as Chief Minister of the state. Indians living in the United States watched the unfolding events in Gujarat with a mix of horror and approval. One group of Indians, geographically spread across the US who had been active on various political issues for the past decade (Biju Audio Interview: Time code: 0.48 – 4.36) decided they needed to respond. Their main organizing tool: the Internet. Calling themselves the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, the activists (including Raja Swamy and Girish Agrawal) first followed the money (Biju Audio Interview: Time Code: 4.37 – 8.10). What they discovered through the internet based community they had formed, and through research and data compilation, was that the groups responsible for the Gujarat massacre received significant funding from Indians in America. The campaign then took on dual elements. One strategy (Biju audio: Time Code: 8.10 – 9.38) was to target the individuals, groups and even US companies who were sending money to the very groups responsible for the carnage. The campaign wanted to inform the donors of who their dollars were actually supporting. This netivism met almost instant success (Biju Audio: Time Code: 9.40 – 10.21).

The other campaign was born in March 2005 when Chief Minister Modi was invited to the United States by the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. Called the Modi Campaignbroad coalition (Biju Audio: "Biju on Goals of CSFH, 3.43 mins file) the activists built a (Biju Audio: 10.30-12.30) using the internet to support the organizing effort to prevent Modi from being granted a visa to come to the US. The activists also targeted advertisers and supporters (Biju audio: Time Code: 12.30-14.09) of the Modi tour and pressured them not to align themselves with the "butcher of Gujarat." The net-based campaign was also mobilizing for the possibility that Modi would be granted a visa in which case the organizers wanted to bring a mass protest (Biju Audio: Time Code: 14.10 – 14.43) to the front of Madison Square Garden where the Chief Minister would be speaking.
While a successful example of both diasporic organizing and internet activism, the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate blended (Biju Audio: Time Code: 14.45-18.34) many of the elements of traditional organizing while also bridging geographic distances and borders through a finely honed internet strategy.

Listen to Biju Mathew talk about organizing against Modi's proposed visit to the U.S.

Listen to a brief clip of Biju Mathew discussing campaign goals

Read a profile of Narendra Modi

See a pictogram of the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate's strategy

Read a longer history of the situation in Gujarat

Read about NYC community reactions to the riots

Posted by Lizzie 9:55 AM 0 comments

Labels: audio, CSFH, Deepa, Gujarat, overview

A Brief Interview With Biju Mathew on Campaign Goals

Posted by VVG 1:13 PM 0 comments

Labels: audio, Biju Mathew, Deepa

Biju Mathew: An NYC-Based Activist Fights Back

Deepa Fernandes talks to Biju Mathew about his Internet-based activism

Continued...





See photos of CSFH

See a five-minute interview with Biju Mathew

See a pictogram of CSFH's strategy

Posted by VVG 1:11 PM 0 comments

Labels: audio, Biju Mathew, CSFH, Deepa, YouTube

Campaign to Stop Funding Hate: Strategy Pictogram

Strategy steps

1. 1992-93: various activists of Indian origin in the US start a web newsgroup/list-serve to talk about politics in India – alt.india.progressive.usnet
   

2. 1995-96: List-serve and news group formally creates an identity: Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL)

3. 1997 – FOIL members in NYC form a youth chapter as a summer based conference to do political education for south asian youth called Youth Solidarity Summer. The FOIL internet based network is enlarging.

4. 2002 – after massacre in Gujarat, the FOIL members discussing actions to take and one group decides to follow the money and form a sub group called the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate. It is a complete internet based research campaign where key members troll internet looking for money and funding links to those responsible for the massacre. Their findings are shocking and they put together report which they release in November 2002.

5. In 2005 the same group is now called the Campaign Against Genocide and they are using the internet to work different angles of the campaign. When the head of the state of Gujarat announces he has been invited to the US, the group decides to try and stop the visit. The ‘Stop Modi Campaign’ begins to use the internet to collect a broad coalition of organizations to participate. They succeed in building a coalition of 42 groups (Muslim groups, Tamil groups, Sikh organizations etc – all US based and all using the internet.) The coalition begins using a list-serve and internet-based conference calling (VOIP) to meet, plan, strategize.

6. 2006: California Text Book campaign.

***

Listen to Biju Mathew talk about the goals of the campaign.

See profiles of CSFH activists Girish Agarwal and Raja Swamy

Go to the profile of Narendra Modi

Go to a history of the massacre

Go to a recently released report by CSFH and the response from the Hindu Students Council

Posted by VVG 12:53 PM 0 comments

Labels: CSFH, Deepa, pictogram, strategy

Profiles of the Hindu Right

Rashtriya Syawemsevak Sangh (RSS)

Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, also known as the Sangh or the RSS, is a Hindu extremist organization founded in 1925 by a man called K.B. Hedgewar, who was inspired by HItler's ideas of racial purity. The RSS seeks the foundation of India as a Hindu state. It believes
that India will be united and a developed nation only after non-Hindu citizens are purged or willingly submit to the superiority of the Hindu majority.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) was founded in 1964 by a group of leaders from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to strengthen the Hindu religious and political identity. It shares close ties to its parent organization, the RSS, which seeks the foundation of India as a Hindu nation.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party)(BJP), which led the federal Indian government and the Gujarat government at the time of the Gujarat massacres, was earlier known as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS). The BJP was established in 1951 as a political wing of the
RSS as the RSS became a hated organization in most of India following the assasination of Mahatama Gandhi by a former member of the RSS, Nathuram Godse. The BJP emerged as a political presence only in the early 1980s, when its sister organization VHP led campaigns against the conversion of lower caste Hindus to Islam.

VHP leaders announced in 1984 their plan to built a temple for the Hindu god Ram in the north Indian town of Ayodhya on the site of Babri Masjid, an ancient mosque. Both the BJP and the VHP leaders led the campaign, which eventually led to the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya.

Posted by VVG 12:30 PM 0 comments

Labels: Basharat, Hindu right, Modi

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 0 comments

Labels: Biju Mathew, CSFH, Deepa, transcript

Narendra Modi: A Profile

Narendra Modi, the 57-year-old chief minister of Gujarat, grew up in the small town of Vadnagar in a middle-class Hindu family. He received a Master's in political science from Gujarat University. As a member of the Hindu supremacist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), he was a student activist of the RSS’s political wing, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the late eighties Modi, who worked as a RSS propagandist, was made the General Secretary of the Gujarat chapter of the BJP. His proximity to the RSS bosses, his organization skills and his dedication to Hindu supremacist ideology led to his meteoric rise to power. He took over as the chief minister of Gujarat in October 2001. His personal website describes him as “ a powerful orator, an avid reader and an original thinker.” Many more paragraphs describe the economic achievements of Gujarat and growth in foreign investment in the state under his leadership. The slogan, “Vibrant Gujarat” runs across the homepage along with eleven photographs of Modi in different outfits.

What is missing from his website is any mention of the February 2002 riots. Modi did nothing to stop the militant Hindu mobs from burning Muslim houses and businesses or murdering the Muslim citizens of Gujarat. Police officers repeatedly told Muslims seeking protection from mobs that they had no orders to help them, and simply watched the carnage. Many secular activists in India and Human Rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented Modi’s complicity in the violence. After the riots, his party workers continued with a campaign to threaten Muslims with further attacks if they testified before federal investigating agencies. A BJP legislator close to Modi offered 250,000 Indian rupees to Zaheera Sheikh, a Muslim woman who was an eyewitness to mass murder in Gujarat. Around six months after the riots, which killed more than 1,000 Gujarati Muslims and turned thousands homeless, Gujarat had elections for the state legislature. Modi lead an aggressive and brazen anti-Muslim campaign, equating every Muslim with terrorism. Modi and the BJP were re-elected, with the greatest gains in the areas worst affected in the riots. Modi’s website mentions his re-election as “his administrative acumen, clear vision, and integrity brought him a landslide victory in the general elections held in December 2002 and he was sworn in as the Chief Minister for the second term.”

Barely any perpetrators of the 2002 violence have been prosecuted. Muslims continue to live fear in Gujarat, reduced to bare lives, with no protection and no de-facto rights of citizenship. Yet Modi continues to enjoy immense support from the Hindu right in India and the right-wing sections of the Indian diaspora in the United States. After the State department denied him a visa to the States in 2002, the Hindu right-wing group which had invited to speak at the Madison Square Garden telecast his speech through satellite and around 4,000 people turned up to listen to him. On narendramodi.org, half of the blurbs under “Public Opinion” are from US-based Gujaratis. Two such posts read:

Pujya Naredrabhai,

It's not enough in words to express the respect we have for you & how proud we feel when we hear about the growth, prosperity & development in Gujarat. It is the fortune of the state to have you as our Chief Minister & we have lot more hopes from you. May God Bless you & help you for fulfil your vision & reforms. Jai Hind

Devang Brahmbhatt, Edison, NJ 08817

respected sir,

i listening your speech in mumbai .i really u deserve a chief of gujarat...sir you are great person....i lived in usa but i have lots respect for you sir....good luck to my gujarat.

raju, milwukee

LINKS

Posted by Lizzie 6:06 PM 0 comments

Labels: Basharat, Modi, profile

Gujarat Photo Essay

In February 2002, activists of the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP gathered at the site of the demolished Babri Mosque in Ayodhya to place a foundation stone for the temple. After two weeks of negotiations, the Indian government allowed a token ceremony. The jubiliant activists were returning home when some of them had a fight with some Muslim shopkeepers at the railway paltform in a Gujarat town called Godhra. A Muslim mob attacked the Hindu-activist filled Sabarmati Express train. It caught fire and 59 were burnt. A federal enquiry later declared that the attackers did not set the train on fire but it broke out inside the train compartment.

Posted by Lizzie 3:39 PM 0 comments

Labels: Basharat, Gujarat, photos

CSFH at Work

Posted by VVG 11:47 AM 0 comments

Labels: CSFH, Deepa, Modi

Campaign To Stop Funding Hate: Raja Swamy

NAME: Raja Swamy

AGE: 36

OCCUPATION: Graduate student, Ph.D program in Social Anthropology, U-Texas at Austin

ROLE IN CSFH: Member of collective since 2002. Various responsibilities including research, writing and tech support.

REASONS FOR ENGAGEMENT: Primarily sought to contribute to a radical response to the virulent growth of Hindutva, particularly in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide. Also interested broadly in the relationships between neoliberalism and the wider Indian right, and the growing ties between the Hindu right and Zionism. The folks who started CSFH were extremely committed and displayed sheer brilliance in designing strategies to confront Hindutva's growing appeal among expatriates and second-generation Indians within the multiculturalist U.S. mainstream.

See CSFH's Girish Agarwal

Look at a pictogram of CSFH's strategy

Posted by VVG 10:56 AM 0 comments

Labels: CSFH, Deepa, Gujarat, Hindu right, Modi, Raja Swamy

Campaign To Stop Funding Hate: Girish Agrawal

NAME: Girish Agrawal

AGE: 43

OCCUPATION: Civil engineer & lawyer-in-waiting

ROLE IN CSFH: Founding member of CSFH. Did background research on the Sangh Parivar, analysis of tax documents, writing and editing sections of the report, media outreach

REASONS FOR ENGAGEMENT: "The immediate impetus for the campaign was my outrage over the anti-Muslim pogroms organized by the Sangh Parivar in Gujarat, and the extensive support that this ethnic cleansing received from Sangh Parivar outfits based in the U.S., support that included collecting large amounts of money from the U.S.-based diaspora in the name of development, but transferring it to India to fund the activities of hate groups associated with the RSS. In the background was my long, intimate familiarity with the RSS and its various front organizations operating in India and in the U.S."

See CSFH's Raja Swamy

Look at a pictogram of CSFH's strategy

Posted by VVG 10:48 AM 0 comments

Labels: CSFH, Deepa, Girish Agrawal, Gujarat, Modi, RSS, Sangh Parivar

Reactions From Hindu Right Leaders in India and New York

The Indian-American Hindu right groups have mostly remained silent on the question of Gujarat. There are a few references to the Godra train killings but an expected silence about the more than1,000 murders, arson , and rape in Gujarat afterwards. Vishwa Hindu Parishad America (World Hindu Council America):

On February 28, 2002, Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America strongly condemns the dastardly act of torching of 59innocent Hindus including 25 women and 17 children in the Sabarmati Express at Godhara, Gujarat on Feb 27, 2002. It is an act of terrorism in continuation with the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, and the attack on the Indian parliament on December 13th. This attack, from all indications, was preplanned, premeditated and carried out by over 2000 people equipped with gasoline cans. We urge Hindus of America and world over to impress upon the Indian Government to facilitate the construction of temple.

A later press release in March reads: Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) strongly condemns the barbaric attack and torching of Hindu pilgrims in Sabarmati Express in Godhara and the despicable violence in its aftermath.Hinduunity.org, a militant Hindu website doesn't talk about the violence either but links counter claims against Biju Matthew and the Committee Against Genocide. It also features Matthew on a Hindu Hit List.

Ashok Singhal, President, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) on Gujarat riots: "What happened in Gujarat after the Godhra carnage had the blessings of lord Rama. The VHP would not rest and prepare for any sacrifice till the Ram temple in Ayodhya was built." Indian Express, Delhi-based English Newspaper.

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the riots:

"The innocent Sikh was murdered after 9/11. Why? Because he looked like the terrorists. If the educated in America can get provoked, why use a different yardstick to evaluate Gujaratis?"

On former Parliamentarian Ehsan Jafri's murder:

Modi also said that Jaffri had fired in the air with a personal weapon when confronted by the mob. This, he said, had further incensed the mob.

More Reactions:

“With the entire population of Gujarat very angry at what happened in Godhra much worse was expected”.-- Narendra Modi at a Press Conference in Gujarat, Feb 28.

“Asked about the violence, Modi quoted Newton's third law – ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ - to virtually justify what is happening.
-- The Times of India, March 3, 2002.

Gujarat Police Commissioner, P.C. Pande: "Police were not insulated from the general social milieu… (When) there’s a change in the perception of society, the police are part of it and there’s bound to be some contagion effect." -– The Telegraph, March 2, 2002

Professor Keshavram Kashiram Shastri, 96-year-old chairman of the Gujarat unit of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad: "In the morning we sat down and prepared the list (of shops owned by Muslims in Ahmedabad). 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 well-bred Hindu boys.

“From Godhra to Ahmedabad, in so many places, there are so many incidents of people being burnt alive, including helpless women and children. This is a blot on nation’s forehead and has grievously harmed India’s image in the eyes of the world”.-- Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then Prime Minister of India, statement on March 3, 2002.

Blog by Ramesh Rao, an Indian-American supporter of the pro-Modi groups, who is a professor of communication at Truman State University.

Listen to Biju Mathew speak about organizing against Modi's visit to the U.S.Look at a photo essay of the riots in Gujarat

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Labels: Ashok Singhal, Basharat, clips, Gujarat, press, quotes

Legacy of Hatred: The Campaign To Stop Gujarat's Chief Minister From Coming to the U.S.

On an October 1947 morning, a few months after the partition of British India and the creation of independent nation states of India and Pakistan, Nathu Ram Godse, an activist of the Hindu supremacist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, (National Volunteers Group), which draws inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini and aspires to the creation of a Hindu India “purified of Muslims and Christians”, assassinated the greatest Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was preached harmony between the Hindus and Muslims of India. Gandhi’s murderer was arrested and sentenced but the group he belonged to worked in silence, ran indoctrination schools throughout India, strengthened its cadre base and waited for its moment.

In 1992, as India was opening its socialist economy to global markets, LK Advani, a leader of Bhartiya Janata Party, the electoral wing of RSS, came up with a plan to engineer the rise of his Hindu nationalist party. Throughout the late eighties, Indian state television had been airing an immensely successful series based on the Hindu epic, Ramayana, which tells the tale of Hindu God and Prince Rama’s exile from his city of Ayodhya and his battle against the demon king Ravana of Lanka, who kidnapped Rama’s wife Sita.

Advani sought to raise support for building a temple in honour of Ram in the northen Indian town of Ayodhya, which many Hindus believe corresponds to the mythical Ayodhya of Ramayana. Advani and other leaders of the Hindu right argued that a general of the medieval Muslim ruler of India, Babar, had destroyed the original temple of Ram and built a mosque known as Babri Mosque in its place. Volunteers of the RSS and the BJP went door to door throughout India seeking cash donation and bricks to rebuilt the Ram temple. Advani rode a chariot--- like old Hindu kings did—from the western Indian state of Gujarat to the small town of Ayodhya in the northern state of Utter Pradesh, urging people enroute to assemble in Ayodhya to “rebuilt” the Ram temple.

On 6th December 1992, after many clashes with the local police, activists of the RSS and the BJP cheered by many leaders including LK Advani, charged at the medieval Babri mosque and demolished it. Most secularists saw it as the darkest day for a secular, democratic India. Sectarian violence throughout the towns and cities of India followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque. Hundreds of Muslims were killed and their houses burnt in Bombay, where the Hindu right had gained strength. Reprisals followed when a Muslim underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim organized “revenge attack” and a series of bomb blasts ripped the city killing hundreds in 1993.

Religious tensions continued, the Hindu supremacist and nationalist groups, RSS and the BJP grew in strength. The BJP rose from two representatives in the India parliament to lead a coalition government in 1996. It further fueled the “Hindu pride” by conducting nuclear test in 1998 and propelling the arch-rival Pakistan to conduct its own tests. RSS and BJP members took parcels of the nuke-blasted sand from the test site in Pokhran desert and worshiped it at temples. BJP, which had risen to power on the promise of building the temple for Ram at Ayodhya had yet to fulfill that promise.

In February 2002, as various Indian states were going for elections (which were bound to impact the forthcoming 2004 national elections), volunteers of the RSS and the BJP gathered again at Ayodhaya, demanding they be allowed to set a foundation for the Ram Temple. India feared sectarian violence for the two weeks the Hindu right activists, known as "karsevaks," negotiated with the federal government. They were allowed to place a token stone at the site. Hundreds of the karsevaks were from the states of Gujarat, where the Hindu right is the strongest and also the neighboring state of Maharashtra.

After the token ceremony at Ayodhaya, the karsevaks, took the trains back to Gujarat. When one of those trains stopped at a small town in Godhra, the karsevaks got into an argument with the Muslim tea-vendors at the platform. As the train left the platform, a mob of Muslims from a neighbouring slum attacked it. The train caught fire and 57 people were killed. Most believed the Muslim mob had set the running train on fire though a federal inquiry later determined that the fire had started inside the train only.

Hours after the burning train reached Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, volunteers of the RSS and the BJP armed with computer print outs of the Muslim houses and business spread out throughout Gujarat, murdering Muslim men, raping women, and setting Muslim-owned establishments to fire. Narendra Modi, the chief minister (highest elected official) of Gujarat, allowed the rioters proceed with the carnage and directed the police to do nothing. More than a 1,000 Muslims were killed in a few days and thousands were displaced from their homes. Modi told the press, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” The dead included a distinguished former member of Indian Parliament, Ahsan Jafri, a Muslim, who lived in Gulbarga Housing Estate, a sort of gated community surrounded by Hindu houses. Before a mob hacked him to death and burnt Gulabarga Hosuing Estate, Jafri had made several phone calls to Narendra Modi and the police chief of Gujarat. Modi did not take his call. Luke Harding, the Guardian’s India correspondent, who reached Jafri’s house a few hours after his death wrote, “At the bottom of his stairs I discovered a pyre of human remains - hair and the tiny blackened arm of a child, its fist clenched. Two police officers in khaki told us the situation was dangerous, and that we should leave; they seemed resigned or indifferent to the horror around them.” Apart from Jafri, the dead included scores of pregnant women, stabbed by tridents in their wombs.

After the rioting stopped, thousands of Gujarat’s Muslims were forced to leave their homes and move to slum-like refugee camps on the outskirts of various cities and towns. India’s liberal English-language media and non-governmental organizations pressed hard for prosecution of the rioters. Nothing happened. Trials held in Gujarat were more like farces; eye-witnesses to murder, like a woman Zaheera Sheikh, who watched twenty-two people being murdered in a bakery called Best Bakery, were intimidated and offered millions of rupees to turn hostile in the court, by legislators of Modi’s party. Modi was only emboldened when he won the Gujarat state elections with an overwhelming majority a few months after the pogrom.

Gujarat’s Muslims continue to live in the refugee camps in a fear-filled world, very far from the democratic that exists elsewhere. Modi continues to rule Gujarat, appear in newspaper pictures and on television talking about making Gujarat India’s most investor friendly state and inviting American and European companies to set up offices there. He remains a despised man, a slur for the liberal India, who has faced continued protests at most high-profile functions he attended in India. But for the Hindu right in the Indian-American community, Modi is a hero.

In March 2005, the mostly Gujarati Asian American Hotel Owners' Association (AAHOA), whose 7,000 members own over businesses worth $ 40 billion but lack any influence invited Modi to be the chief guest at its annual function and he agreed. Earlier invitees to the functions of this cash-rich, prestige-seeking group have been Indian-origin US congressman, Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Louisiana. MP Rama, the AAHOA President described the invitation to Modi as a “cultural boost” and “opportunity to talk about business potential in Gujarat.”

But the other invitation for Narendra Modi was to deliver a lecture at Madison Square Garden. It came from Association of Indian Americans for North America, a group formed by the members of American chapters of the various Hindu right wings groups like Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the overseas RSS, and the Overseas Friends of the BJP. They described Narendra Modi as the "Lion of Gujarat" and a "Visionary and Dynamic Young Leader of India".

After a group of Indian-American left/liberal activists led by Biju Mathew of Coalition Against Genocide, led an intensive web campaign and ensured the US State Department deny a visa to Narendra Modi, the main organizers of his Madison Square Garden lecture, Mahesh Mehta, the founder of VHP (US), Suresh Jain, Sudhakar Reddy and Mukund Mody of the Overseas Friends of BJP, broadcast Modi’s lecture via satellite to a crowd of the Hindu-right Indian Americans at Madison Square Garden.

Listen to Biju Mathew talk about organizing against Modi's visit to the U.S.

Read profiles of the Hindu Right

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Labels: Basharat, Gujarat, history, Modi

How To Embed a File, by Technically Competent Liz

Can you see this file?

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