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News :: Right Wing |
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Oh, the craving for filthy lucre -- RSS and the politics of disaster relief |
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by Ra Ravishankar
Email: ravishan (nospam) uiuc.edu (unverified!) |
15 Oct 2005
Modified: 05:03:15 PM |
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In the wake of the recent earthquake, the RSS's fund-raising fronts in the US -- India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) and Sewa International USA (SewaUSA) -- now seek to raise funds for the very people that the RSS has all along despised, Muslims! |
"In order to weed out the evil of Pakistan, it is inevitable that we erase
the existence of Pakistan itself from the face of the earth. Pakistan was
born in hatred and violence. How can such a seed of poison give rise to
fruits of love and amity? The more we feed it with the milk of love and
generosity the more venomous it grows ... As long as Pakistan exists, it
is bound to be a constant source of irritation to us."
Golwalkar, the second dictator of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was not
one to mince words. His above comments aptly describe the modus operandi
of the RSS -- stigmatization of and a longing for the extermination of the
Other (Muslims and Christians). Not surprisingly, if there is one set of
people that's smugly delighted with the earthquake that has devastated
Pakistan, it has got to be the Hindu fascists owing allegiance to the RSS.
RSS apologists routinely point to its alleged relief work during disasters
(as if this could compense for its numerous crimes), but a peek into the
Hindutva listservs offers a different reality.
Here, one finds warnings about the danger of helping the "snakes" (a
reference to Pakistanis and Kashmiri Muslims, as was made clear in the post)
that are likely to bite "us" and letting the "islamic disease grow". A smartass opined, "As it is there is no [check] on the growth of this virus, when
[nature] is helping in this regard, why not go with her this once?" A
proposition that help in times of need could convert the "islamists to the path
of dharma [justice]" was deemed too optimistic for the latter allegedly
"reproduce too fast to be neutralized by [conversion]." I could go on, but I
guess you get the point. Besides, this and much more has been said by RSS
ideologues in public fora, so there's hardly anything new here.
What, however, is new is that the RSS's fund-raising fronts in the US -- India
Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) and Sewa International USA (SewaUSA) -- now
seek to raise funds for the very people that the RSS has all along despised,
Muslims! Even by its long history of deception, this is a new high for the RSS.
And IDRF and SewaUSA might very well get away with this, given the mainstream
media's short term memory and uncritical reporting. For instance, even when
clear evidence of IDRF's links with the RSS were presented (in the report
href="http://www.stopfundinghate.org/sacw">"The Foreign Exchange of Hate:
IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva"), most of the media
coverage stuck to the "he-said she-said routine". Come the next disaster, these
RSS fronts engage in "relief" work, get praised for their service and morph, in
the public imagination, into harmless religious/immigrant groups. Disasters
help such groups in more ways than one -- they are also apt occasions for making a quick buck, a technique they have perfected.
Despite suffering a major setback earlier this year, when Gujarat Chief
Minister Narendra Modi was denied a US visa for his role in the February 2002
anti-Muslim pogrom, the RSS enjoys significant clout in the US. In the recent
past, it has made significant forays into universities (see
href="http://ghadar.insaf.net/April2005/MainPages/neofascists.htm">"US
Universities cozy up to the Sangh"), lobbying (see
href="http://ghadar.insaf.net/June2004/MainPages/zionism.htm">"Zionism
and Hindutva in the US)" and the media.
The South Asian diasporic media's collusion with the RSS deserves special
mention, for this is a miniature version of what has plagued coverage of the
Iraqi invasion: embedded-in-the-power-structure journalism. For instance, in
the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the South Asian Journalists
Association advertised a bunch of RSS fronts as engaged in relief work along
with this warning in
small print: "SAJA does not endorse the fund-raising efforts of
any of these groups and encourages donors to conduct their own research into
the missions of the groups and their track record with disaster relief." Email
alerts (to those maintaining this page -- Sreenath Sreenivasan and S. Mitra Kalita) as to the real nature of these organizations were to no avail, except
that now more organizations were added to this list. Forget about being the
"eyes and ears of the people", these folks want to simply ignore unpleasant
news! This being largely the case, be forewarned and please help spread the
message: Stay clear of IDRF, SewaUSA, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), Hindu
Students Council (HSC) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), all of
which are fronts for the RSS. For more, see
href="http://www.stopfundinghate.org"> http://www.stopfundinghate.org
Click on image for a larger version 
Click on image for a larger version 
Click on image for a larger version  |
See also:
http://www.stopfundinghate.org
http://www.sacw.net
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This work is in the public domain |
