April  2003 
Year 9    No.86

Special Report

The saffron dollar

Lessons from battling Hindutva in the diaspora

For at least four years now, the RSS has been receiving millions of dollars, in some
part siphoned off from large American corporations such as Sun and Cisco, all in the name of development, welfare and relief. In 1989 the RSS inspired the creation of an organisation in the USA, innocuously called the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF).

In its original filing for tax–exempt status, the IDRF claimed that it was a secular, non-sectarian organisation. However, in the same application it showed a sample of nine organisations that it was set up to fund — all nine, without exception and doubt, were RSS organisations.

The modus operandi of the plan was simple. Very few non–Sangh affiliated Indians know that the Sewa Bharati (one of the original nine in the tax exemption application), for instance, is an RSS outfit. If large numbers of Indians do not know that Sewa Bharati is an RSS operation, it is just as true that most Americans and American corporations would have no clue to the links between the RSS and IDRF. Having thus constructed a cover of innocuous names and non–sectarian claims, the IDRF positioned itself as a premier Indian organization funding development and relief efforts in India.

Many large US corporations have a policy of "matching gifts". For every dollar in charity that an employee gives, the same charity is given a dollar or more by the corporation. For instance, in the year 2001, Cisco gave two dollars for every dollar that a Cisco employee gave to IDRF. The millions collected from corporate and individual donations are then sent to the FCRA cleared Sangh network in India — the Sewa Bharati, the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad or the Vidya Bharati, to name just a few of the standard Sangh operations that have received such foreign funds.

Once in India, the funds could be used for a whole plethora of activities – from running schools that teach unadulterated hate to doing adivasi welfare laced with a communal ideology. Thus, in these times of a globalised economy, the Hindutva movement has successfully gone global too, deploying funds and ideological solidarity from the US and Europe.

Now for the good news! On November 20, 2002, the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH), a small collective of secular Indians who came together through multiple networks, began a campaign aimed at all the high tech corporations, exposing this deception. On the same day, a report – the Foreign Exchange of Hate — with research input from the US, was published by South Asia Citizens Web, France and Sabrang Communications, Mumbai (see our website, sabrang.com — editors) that detailed all the links between the IDRF and the Sangh as also detailed statistical work on how much money from IDRF had gone to which specific Sangh operation over the last six years.

The report documented that more than 80% of the funds that IDRF controlled went to Sangh operations in India. So also the report showed how in excess of 60% of the IDRF funds were being deployed for Hinduisation programmes. Companies moved to protect themselves. Cisco and Sun announced within 24 hours that they had suspended IDRF. Oracle followed. Other corporate donation portals such as Giving Station alerted their corporate clients that IDRF had been compromised by the CSFH campaign.

The press in India and abroad picked up the story. Every major Indian daily followed it up and soon the Financial Times (London) and the Wall Street Journal (NYC) had both carried stories, especially the former, which even ran a large centre page feature. The Financial Times story was motivated in large part because of another significant development. Less than a month after the CSFH campaign began in the US, Channel 4 of Britain featured a 16-minute news story on a similar scam running out of Britain.

In the British case the front organisation was Sewa International, which had gone much further. It had managed to deceive top British officials and social elites and was, to boot, openly using the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS – the RSS’ foreign operation) charity account number for all its collections.

High profile Indians reacted. Lord Adam Patel who had unwittingly joined the Sewa International Trustees resigned in disgust. Lord Megnath Desai was loud and uncompromising in his critique of the RSS. Chetan Bhatt, a professor in London’s Goldsmith College who had helped the Channel 4 team with much data, found that suddenly there were many in the diaspora who wanted to know more about this tale of subterfuge and deception. Further, the Channel 4 story provided an immediate push to a pending investigation by the charity commissioner of UK.

As the story broke in the press, and US corporations and the UK charity commissioner responded, the RSS was caught with its back to the wall. For all its claims that only Muslim and Christian organizations received funding from outside, it suddenly became clear that the home-grown fascist Hindutva movement was itself receiving large dollops of dollars and pounds. In India the reaction was marked by a studied silence, in the hope that the crisis would blow over. In the US, and to some extent in the UK, the reaction was precisely the opposite. A vicious campaign aimed at getting the corporations to rescind their decision to suspend funds and to effect damage control among the diasporic population was launched by non–resident swayamsevaks.

The contours of the counter–campaign are interesting in itself. One primary strategy is obfuscation. Especially aimed at the corporations, the RSS strategy has been to try and sell the idea that "RSS does good work." The basis is again simple. Corporations operate under the broad auspices of multiculturalism where anything that brown and black people do under the umbrella of culture is accepted, because to not accept it "may be" racist. And if the brown or black people claim to be doing welfare — even better.

The RSS hopes that if it highlights real instances of its relief and rehabilitation work and refuses to acknowledge the trail of mass violence then corporations will find it difficult to sort out how fascism and welfare work go together. In reports and counter–reports aimed at the corporations, the Sangh has consistently refused to address the question of its role in the fascist build up and instead only talks about the villages it has reconstructed after the Gujarat earthquake or the Orissa cyclone. Ignoring the question of hate education among adivasis that the VKA indulges in, the Sangh tries to portray the VKA as doing welfare and education work alone.

This strategy is itself quite indicative of how the Sangh operates. Biju Mathew of the CSFH clarifies this aspect of RSS strategy:

"Working on this campaign has made one thing very clear. The RSS is an organisation without a formal structure. It has a leadership and it trains swayamsevaks and seemingly does little else. No bank account, no tax returns, no registered trust, nothing… The question we need to ask is how does it then have so much influence. The answer is equally simple. A swayamsevak once trained becomes part of the organisations that are legally not connected to the RSS but do its core work of ideological dissemination. These are the organisations of the Sewa Vibhag of the RSS.

"If you look at a book written by an RSS ideologue, say Sudarshan or Seshadri, then you will see regular mention of the Sewa Vibhag. However, the Sewa Vibhag does not exist officially, as the RSS itself has no published structure. What it then amounts to, is a large network of service organisations placed across the Indian landscape — the Sewa Bharatis, the Sishu Mandirs, the Bal Vihars, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams, the Ekal Vidyalayas, the Vidya Bharatis, the various Rakapedis (bloodbanks), the Vaidehi Sewa Samithis… the list is endless. It is these bodies, supported by charity monies that sustain the swayamsevak and do the most consistent ideological work. In other words, the Sewa Vibhag of the RSS, a loose network, is their core daily operation, which creates the basis for fascism in India…"

This vast array of legally independent service organisations is what the RSS is putting out in front, as the evidence for "good work", and with the hope of obfuscating the findings of the report. Of course the CSFH has been aware of this strategy because the very basis of their work is located in an understanding of this strategy, as Mathew indicates above. The success of the FxH report and the CSFH campaign lies in the fact that it anticipates this strategy.

The second tactic of the Sangh has been one aimed at both the American State and at the Indian middle class. This is one wherein it attempts to paint the campaign and the report up as a leftist/communist plot. The report’s contents have nothing to do with anything beyond a warning to liberal donors that they are being misled. However, the mobilisation against the report and CSFH uses the potential fear of communism and Islam liberally. Shalini Gera of CSFH is repeatedly dubbed a Hindu–hater and Muslim–lover. Biju Mathew is crafted as a communist because he has a background in labour organisation.

As a matter of fact, the nature of the ideological blinkers that they attempt to set in place becomes clear if one were to look at the Bajrang Dal’s official website — hinduunity.org. Here they have a hit list; people the Bajrang Dal feels should be killed. In a new segment on Biju Mathew, the Bajrang Dal site lists a page full of reasons as to why he is a communist (works with the taxi union in NYC, coordinates FOIL etc. etc.) and then without losing a breath says that he is also a Christian evangelist and proceeds to reproduce the curriculum vitae of some other Biju Mathew who happens to be a Christian preacher in the US!

Material like this is then picked up by other Hindutva apologists such as Francois Gautier in their newspaper columns and written about. The RSS obviously knows the difference but they are willing to hurl anything at anybody in the hope that the US state will latch on to an ‘anti-commie’ rhetoric and segments of the Indian middle class will latch on to both the anti–commie vitriol as well as the anti–Muslim/Christian spin.

That doublespeak aimed at obfuscation and witch–hunts are old RSS strategies (remember Arun Shourie’s anti–communist articles of the 1980s) is known to significant segments of the progressive community in India. What they need to glean from the success (and responses to) the CSFH campaign is that the most urgent work that needs to be done on the ground, for a long term push back of the fascists, is to counter their real on–the–ground Sewa Vibhag work.

Unless grass roots organisation on basic issues of development — income, health and education — is linked to anti–communal strategies there are no victories possible. Volunteer armies of anti–communal workers are a pipe dream that some segments of the secular middle class can identify with and feel good about, but it is not sustainable in the long run. In contrast, a basic health training and mobilisation campaign, which shows that most illnesses can be diagnosed and treated by local expertise needs to create a cultural component — say a celebration of the fact that Hindus and Muslims fall ill and recover in the same ways, that survival and death are the same for all, and the problems of old age are identical for people of all religions — that addresses communalism.

Such an approach deals with the daily aspirations of a human being while producing a secular lived cultural artefact alongside it. Biju Mathew of CSFH argues for such an approach as a lesson from their campaign:

"When we look at questions of daily survival, then much becomes clear. Secular values cannot be created as abstractions and pure secular gyan is not going to interest anybody. In contrast, if my mode of tackling a daily problem is understood and lived through a secular cultural action then it automatically secularises the person. Look at our own history… where there is a strong union that fights for the rights of all workers equally and creates a cultural notion of all workers being sisters and brothers irrespective of religion, there you will find the possibility of communal problems to be minimal. If building culture from the basic material struggles of life is something we take seriously then we will produce a secular polity."

The lessons lie in our own history. However, culture and cultural work seem to have become disconnected from struggles around questions of economic survival. If we are to draw a moral from the CSFH story then it simply is: Locate secular culture within development organising. 

(Written in conversation with Biju Mathew.)
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