Funding religious extremism and the
diaspora M V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, November 28, 2002
For years it had been
widely suspected that the Sangh Parivar, the group of right wing
Hindu extremist organisations, has been receiving large amounts of
funding from Indians living in the USA. Now with the release of the
report produced by The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CTSFH)
appropriately titled “The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the
American Funding of Hindutva” (available on the internet at
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex and http://www.sabrang.com) this
suspicion has been meticulously documented in the case of one
organisation. This is the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF),
an organisation based in the state of Maryland, that has disbursed
US-raised funds to several groups in India associated with the Sangh
Parivar.
Religious groups have generally attracted
communities and individuals in the diaspora. Living amidst a
“foreign” culture often prompts a turn towards one’s “traditional”
culture. But this culture is largely reduced to religion, that too
of a narrow and frequently chauvinistic variety. As C. M. Naim
observed, “the religious heritage that is being projected here and
sought to be preserved and passed on to the next generation is
closer to an ideology than a faith or a culture... it would rather
exclude and isolate than accommodate and include.” The fact that in
the US there are mosques and temples but no equivalent of a dargah
where people of different faiths can come together reflects
this.
One end of the spectrum of results produced by this
kind of exclusionary practice is support for and active
participation in religious extremist agendas. Examples of this
phenomenon are the right wing Zionist Jewish Defense League founded
by Rabbi Meir Kahane, Sikhs that supported the demand for a separate
and theocratic Khalistan and volunteers for Jihad in Afghanistan
from the UK. However, these are largely fringe elements, though the
increase in their numbers in recent years is frighteningly
large.
There are the equivalents of these among the Hindu
right as well. There is, for example, Hindu Unity, the US
counterpart of the Bajrang Dal, which openly advocates violence
against minorities in India and maintains a “hit list” of people
opposed to its views (including some members of the CTSFH!). But
they have a relatively small support base. Where Sangh Parivar
groups have had greater success is with moderate
circles.
With such groups, the modus operandi followed by the
Sangh Parivar has been to not only stress religious culture but also
to tap into their interest in “development” related activities,
especially education, back in India. This has become particularly
prominent with the boom in the migration of professionals —
software, medical and so on — from India to the US in the late 1980s
and 1990s.
Because their professional success is due to their
educational qualifications, this section of the immigrant community
perceives India’s problems as being largely due to lack of adequate
education. Largely for this reason, it is attracted to education
projects in India. This is, of course, a very worthy cause. However,
this interest ties in neatly with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s
(the RSS, which is the backbone of the Sangh Parivar) own technique
of running schools as a way of recruiting members and imparting
appropriate ideological orientation.
One particular section
of Indian society that the Sangh Parivar has targeted in its
educational activities are tribals or Adivasis (literally, first
inhabitants). Historically, they have been marginalised from the
mainstream of Indian society through the caste system. The Sangh
Parivar hopes to include them within the Hindu fold since their
larger project demands that only Hindus should be considered native
inhabitants of India.
Setting up the India Development and
Relief Fund (IDRF) was therefore a way for the Sangh Parivar to tap
into the diaspora for collecting funds for activities it was
involved in already. IDRF’s stated aim was to raise money for
organisations in India “assisting in rural development, tribal
welfare and urban poor”. IDRF’s founders were all linked in various
ways to the Sangh Parivar; the majority of the “sister
organisations” that it named were affiliated with the Sangh
Parivar.
IDRF has been very successful at raising funds for
these sister organisations and other such groups in India. According
to its tax filings, it raised $3.8 million in 2000. At about Rs. 50
per dollar, this is a lot of rupees. In this effort, it has been
aided by various Sangh Parivar organisations in the US that have
done extensive publicity for IDRF, completely excluding several
other worthy groups whose “fault” is that they typically fund
non-sectarian organisations in India.
IDRF also took
advantage of Silicon Valley’s financial success in recent years and
its employment of a large number of Indians, including some Sangh
supporters. In the words of Biju Mathew, a Professor at Rider
University in New Jersey and one of the contributors to the report,
“Many large US corporations such as CISCO, Sun, Oracle, and H-P
[Hewlett-Packard] “match” employee contributions to US-based
non-profit organisations. Unsuspecting corporations end up giving
large amounts of money as matching funds to IDRF as employees of
these firms direct funds to IDRF.”
The publication of the
report has come as a shock to many of these corporations; some of
these corporations have already announced an end to such funding.
The other group that was shocked by the report was, naturally, IDRF
itself. Thanks to the extensive documentation and great care that
went behind preparing the report, all IDRF could respond with was to
indulge in name-calling; there has been no factual rebuttal
whatsoever.
Though a tremendous contribution, CTSFH’s report
is only the first step in a larger battle. It can at best stop the
inadvertent funding of the Sangh Parivar by people who really want
to fund developmental work in India. The larger challenge is to stop
the conscious and deliberate funding of hate mongering groups, and
the growth of religious extremist views in the diaspora.
