The report titled “Foreign Exchange of Hate” is clearly a political document more than anything else, and in the customary style of statements and reports from communist entities, it mixes specifics with large amounts of political rhetoric. In this section, we simply list the “points” made in "The Foreign Exchange of Hate", and classify them into 3 categories, in order to extract any specifics:

Allegations: These are specific allegations of wrong-doing or evil intent.

Rhetoric: Many of the “points” are seen to be merely rhetorical: for example, the argument that “Hindutva has under girded much of the communal violence in India over the last several decades”. One must first accept the definition of “Hindutva” given in "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" before proceeding to this argument – a highly unlikely progression indeed, since it directly contradicts decisions made by the Supreme Court of India on precisely that issue, besides common sense. While India, a nation of over 1 billion people surrounded by totalitarian regimes, has seen much violence in the past 55 years, the fact is that India has survived, and grown much stronger and wealthier, over those “last several decades”.  Very few of the violent deaths, injuries or property damage in the “last several decades” have been due to “communal violence” – the Marxists, the Pakistanis, the Red Chinese and secessionist movements encouraged by one or more of the above, have claimed far more lives and done far more damage. Even in the incidents of “communal violence”, it is far from clear who plans such events, if indeed they are planned, and who starts them – many “riots” have originated from such events as someone throwing a stone at a religious procession.  Two days of slum-burning and murders later, no one recalls exactly who threw the first stone. Thus a sweeping declaration such as the above has to be considered to be rhetoric. There are many such declarations among the “points” made in the “Foreign Exchange of Hate”.

Whines: For example, consider the statement: “(IDRF is)….a major conduit of funds for Hindutva organizations in India”.  What exactly is the allegation here? IDRF collects money legally, and sends it to organizations which are authorized by Indian law to receive it. These organizations then route the money to those best equipped to use it for the originally intended purpose, to the satisfaction of IDRF, who must report the level of success to their donors. The main unhappiness of the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" appears to be with what they imply with the term “major”. IDRF is not a “major” fundraiser compared to many other fundraising organizations operating in America, nor is IDRF fundraising even comparable in magnitude to what Indians and Indian-Americans of all religions donate to their respective places of worship and the associated organizations. Hence we must conclude that it is IDRF’s growing success, based on an impeccable reputation for simple, honest, and efficient charitable work, which riles the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" the most. We classify such statements as “Whines” for lack of a more apt and succinct description in the elegant literature. The “Points” are listed in Table 1 below, classified, and numbered for detailed cross-referencing later in this document.

Table 2.1: Allegations, Rhetoric and Whining  ‘Points” made in the Summary pages of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate".

Allegations

We will first deal with the serious-sounding accusations. From "The Foreign Exchange of Hate”:

A3: “IDRF beneficiary, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in Gujarat – extensive involvement in anti-Christian violence between 1998-2000

-including physical destruction of Christian institutions, schools, churches, colleges and cemeteries – and

-forcible conversion to Hinduism”

In Table 2.2, we present Sabrang/FOIL’s own data, quoted from Appendix H of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate":

Table 2.2 Data presented in Appendix H of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate", citing IDRF funding given to organizations in Gujarat during the 4-year period claimed to have been "studied" by the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate".

“Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram” in Gujarat has received no funding from IDRF !! 

What the above organizations do is discussed in greater detail where we discuss how the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" cook up their classification of organizations to fit their own hate-filled conclusions. We must wonder if Sabrang/FOIL got someone to translate the word “Vanvasi” for them  (literally, “forest dweller”), and brilliantly associated the word “LIONS’ Club” with it. It is true that the Gir Forest in Gujarat is the nation’s largest lion sanctuary.  We doubt if the very urban LIONS’ Club members would appreciate that association or accusation…

This shows that the most “serious” allegation contained in the entire report is completely baseless – it has no basis in the data presented by the report authors themselves!

Now it may be true that IDRF funds projects of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram elsewhere in India, and has done so for a number of years. The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram project has apparently existed for over fifty years! These projects are success stories where schools were built in forests where they had no schools before, and, seeing that the kids coming to these schools were weak from hunger, hot lunches are provided to them. The schools concentrate on the middle-school years, sending the kids on to government-run high schools with the basic, caring preparation which allows them to survive and excel in the outside world. Their record in preparing these under-privileged kids to survive in mainstream Indian society is in fact an outstanding record of care and determination.

But the allegation about violence is not about those projects elsewhere – its about Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in Gujarat. The source of Sabrang’s glee is obvious – an IDRF web page seeks future support for such schools in Gujarat as well. This page mentions the name of the person who coordinates activities of the Ashram in those Gujarat districts, about whom Sabrang/FOIL’s cohorts have made allegations elsewhere  – but the point is, so far, as far as can be determined, no IDRF funding has gone to Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, intentionally or unintentionally, in Gujarat!!

More to the point - the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" must have known from their own "meticulous research conducted over many months" that there was NO BASIS in their data to make such an allegation. That did not stop them from making the allegation.

One sees immediately the quality of “research”, competence and honesty which went into the preparation of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” report – they appear to have downloaded the web page from IDRF, and did not even bother to cross-check that with their own Table of funded projects (also downloaded from IDRF web pages, by the way). They made absolutely no effort to check their allegations before publishing them in the worldwide press – or maybe they knew they were publishing lies – and went ahead regardless?

In a later section of this report, we will present specific evidence of how this process occurred. We will see how readers of the "draft" of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" cited  being “flummoxed” by the Report’s allegations and lack of basis – and how their warnings were ignored.

A4: “Secondary documentation – show that same Hindutva organizations involved in anti-Christian violence of 1998-2000 were involved in the Gujarat carnage of 2002

-         by most reliable accounts, more than 2000 people, mostly Muslims, were massacred.”

What Sabrang/FOIL mean by “secondary documentation” or “most reliable accounts” is best left to the reader’s imagination in view of the standards demonstrated above. Ignoring that for a moment, it is a moot point as far as we are concerned, whether the “same Hindutva organizations” in Gujarat were involved in murder, conversion, laughing at Sabrang/FOIL’s contortions, or anything else, since IDRF did not fund them. Unlike Sabrang / FOIL, we are not interested in power politics - beyond trying to ensure that there is a free democracy. Proper investigations are likely to reveal that any massacrers, converters etc. in Gujarat were funded by Sabrang/FOIL’s own friends and sponsors in the Marxist and Congress parties, but that is left to other authorities to investigate.

The hollowness of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” and its authors is patent from the two examples above – and we will show many more examples of this in later sections. We now proceed to the rest of the “accusations”.

A2: “In summary, in excess of 80 percent of IDRF’s funding is allocated for work that is clearly sectarian in nature”

We have now spent quite some time investigating the basis of this claim – and in proving, which turned out to be as trivial as typing the organizations’ names into the internet search engine “Google”, that this claim is also baseless. The claim involves misrepresentation of facts, deliberately misleading readers, and data manipulation. The organizations included under the category of “sectarian work” include orphanages, rural medical centers, Leprosy Patient Care Centers, agricultural technology assistance centers, yoga centers, elementary schools, secondary schools, organizations set up to teach elementary skills to slum-dwellers….  The organizations claimed to be “RSS-Affiliated” include at least one hospital affiliated to a Christian church, where the funding was provided by IDRF per specific request from a donor. These facts are readily available to anyone equipped with the basic discipline to use an internet search engine, before publishing their work as a “detailed comprehensive in-depth report” generated through "5 years of research" by a team of “academics, students, artists and other professionals” - as Sabrang/FOIL have done and claimed. Elsewhere in this document, we present twenty-eight or more organizations about whom data are quite easily available - where readers can form their own independent opinion regarding the fairness and honesty of the authors of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate".

A1: “Another sixth is given to Hindu religious organizations for purely religious use…. whose primary work is religious conversion and ‘Hinduisation’

This is also seen to be baseless. What “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” describes as “purely religious use” includes hospitals, orphanages, medical missions, schools..

Rhetoric

We now turn to the rhetoric.  The entire scaffold of rhetoric of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” rests on one primary assumption:

R 1: “Hindutva, the Hindu supremacist ideology”

In section 2.2, page 4, of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate”, this is expounded in a manner which leaves no doubt: “Hindutva – which translates literally to Hinduness or Hinduhood”.

In one sweeping generalization which reveals all too much about themselves, the authors of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” declare that 800 million Hindus are “supremacist ideologues” and that Hindus in America have nothing but sinister intent in donating their hard-earned money for development and relief work in their native land!

This definition is of course false, as any “researcher” or middle-schooler would have discovered in minutes – and these probably did, but lied about it regardless. Hard as it may be to believe, there is in fact an authority situated a bit higher than South Asia Professors, however distinguished their Chairs may be – this authority is called the Supreme Court of India. Here’s what they have said on this subject: [i]

“These Constitution Bench decisions, after a detailed discussion, indicate that no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms Hindu, Hindutva and Hinduism; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage. It is also indicated that the term Hindutva is related more to the way of life of the people in the subcontinent. It is difficult to appreciate how in the face of these decisions,the term Hindutva or Hinduism per se, in the abstract, can be assumed to mean and be equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry, or be construed to fall within the prohibition in sub-section (3) and/or (3A) of Section 123 of the R.P. Act.

Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and it is not to be equated with. or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism.” The blatant bigotry of the Sabrang/FOIL authors defines the tone of the entire contents of “The Foreign Exchange of Hate”. For those of us (like the present author) who reject these blanket characterizations of “supremacist ideologue” with the contempt that such tactics deserve, the rest of the rhetoric collapses without further ado. There is nothing illegal, immoral or unethical in:

n         IDRF being a charitable organization being run by people who happen to worship according to their interpretation of any religion, including the  Hindu religion.n         IDRF accepting donations from a population which is probably 80% Hindu

n         IDRF carefully selecting well-known, trusted acquaintances and organizations, approved and authorized under Indian law and with a long history of public service, to oversee the disbursement of donated funds, and submitting a list of such organizations to the IRS

n         IDRF then expanding this list to include more organizations as donors’ confidence and preferences expand

n         The recipient organizations disbursing the money carefully through trusted grassroots-level social workers, who happen to be deeply religious people themselves

n         IDRF ensuring that the end recipients are the intended recipients – tribal people, underprivileged children including orphans, and families left destitute by terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

We now return to the two blood-libel accusations about IDRF funding riots – related to A3 and A4 above – given by innuendo elsewhere in the report. As shown above, even Sabrang/FOIL has not been able to cook up any basis to claim that IDRF funds went to any organization which indulged in violence – with or without IDRF encouragement.  Careful examination of the statements throughout "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" shows that the entire claimed basis is that one or two local residents in Gujarat – and political leaders elsewhere in India -  may have made statements which reflected poor judgement – at a time of heightened tensions and violence. The link to IDRF is that two of these persons are identified as the local leaders to be contacted for relief work that IDRF sponsored after the earthquake - or run schools which have programs like hot lunches for the kids - that IDRF suggests as possible projects for donors to consider funding in future!

Never mind that (a) no money has gone to this school or (b) the spending of IDRF rupees for earthquake relief was supervised to the satisfaction of IDRF donors, and the governments of India and U.S. – the claimed report that these people later spoke unacceptable words is the “proof” that IDRF is funding hate!! Consider that the same media reporters who made those allegations have also blared out the "conclusions" of "The Foreign Exchange of Hate" with no ethical qualms!!

The rest of the statements in Table 1 are similar to the “accusations” that a British Parliament candidate is said to have used in his election debate – where he pointed to his rival and thundered : “Are you aware that my opponent has a sister who is a Thespian?”  These may have sounded like killer arguments to the authors of  “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” and their distinguished South Asian Faculty Petition signors, but to us they are insults to the reader’s intelligence.

Whines

We don't want to waste your time and ours on discussing the whines. Its sad enough that these adults have spent five years coming up with such things in their "Summary".

Organization of the rest of this document

This document is a quick look at “The Foreign Exchange of Hate”. More philosophical, intellectual and/or political rebuttals are left to those competent, patient and interested enough in developing those. In the next section, we look at Sabrang/FOIL’s further attempts to “clarify”, through an “FAQ” page posted on their Petittion site – and analyze the statements given there in comparison to reality. In the following section, we report the results of our investigation of several organizations which “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” describes as “RSS-affiliated” or “set up to spread sectarian hatred”. This includes real-life experience of what IDRF actually does, giving experience-based comments from several individuals, including one of the present authors, who are familiar with IDRF operations.  This concludes Part I of this report.

In Part II of this report, we will deal with the background, organization, and evolution of the attack against IDRF,  and turn the focus on those involved in the attack.