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VHP(A)
wants space for Hindus in Holocaust museum The
VHPA began operations in the US in 1970 and registered its first
office in New York state in 1974 as a cultural organisation with the
goals of "add[ing] cultural enrichment and cultural awareness
to American society, based on time-tested "Eternal Hindu
values". It claims to have active "member families"
in forty states of the USA, a base it has built up over a decade of
work. The
largely professional Indian immigrant wave that started in the 1960s
continues to contribute, even today, the most significant component
of immigration into the US from India. Products of elite and more
recently semi-elite urban institutions, these immigrants are
themselves products of Nehruvian modernism and thus relatively adept
at interfacing with the dominant white society. However,
the petit-bourgeois element (small businessmen, traders) that
entered the immigration channels in the late 1970s was different not
only in that it did not enjoy the same easy passage into Anglo-Saxon
America and its corporate cultural form but While
the professional community was dispersed all over the USA within
universities and corporations based on the spread of such
institutions, the small businessmen were often located at close
quarters of each other in metropolitan areas or in the immediate The
1970s thus saw its slow growth with two more certified offices in
Connecticut and Illinois. However the 1980s saw an enormous
proliferation with ten offices established between the years 1980
and 1990. The early VHPA documents, written in the 1980s show some
evidence indicative of the petit-bourgeois basis of VHPA's initial
formation. The nature of the English used in some of these VHPA
documents, for instance, indicate that these may have been produced
by the non-elite small businessmen who had Apart
from this extensive network of certified offices the VHPA has its
student wing - the Hindu Students Council (HSC) that functions in
many ways as the most visible flagship organisation of Hindutva in
US. It can be seen as a novel solution to the problem of a small and
committed leadership that was not mobile and culturally at a
disadvantage. The
oldest HSC in North Eastern University dates back to 1987 and by
1995 they had grown to have 45 chapters spread all across the US and
Canada. The typical HSC is organised and run in most cases by a
first generation immigrant graduate male student who has, in
significant number of cases some real connections to the Sangh
Parivar in India - either a parent who is part of the RSS or BJP or
a family that has a historical link with one of these organisations
or its earlier incarnations such as the Jan Sangh. Each
HSC is organised along strictly hierarchical lines with a president
and general secretary at the local level who report directly to a
regional co-ordinator. The regional coordinators, normally also the
presidents of the largest HSC chapter in an area, report to the
National Council of Chapters (NCC) that runs out of the HSC HQ in
Needham, MA. The insistence on hierarchy reveals much, as it often
translates to local HSC leaders, While,
in nomenclatural terms these are two distinct organisations, it is
far more correct to read the VHPA, as the primary organisation which
is run by an older generation of petit- bourgeois Indian men who
control all the, resources and give the ideological direction to the
complex, while the HSCs with some ideologically committed members at
the helm, work towards the presentation and further propagation of
the complex. In
addition to these two main organisations, the VHPA operates through
multiple other front organisations - some of which are produced for
a purpose and then allowed to fade away while others have a long
term functional utility. Such organisations include the Concerned
Non-Resident Indians - a group formed immediately after the
destruction of the Babri Masjid by a set of VHPA activists
essentially to take care of urgent public relations work needed for
damage 'control immediately after the incident. Other
more long standing organisations include the Friends of the BJP
which often plays host to the many visiting political figures >from
India and plays a role during other special occasions such as
elections; and small town Mahila Samaj organisations With
such an extensive organisation, one would expect that the VHPA would
be a far more public institution if not in the general space of
white Civil society at least within spaces that are marked by a
preponderance of South Asians - South Asian neighbourhoods, temples,
conferences, commercial district's etc. This is however not true at
all. With
a registered office in New York city and with a working office in
Berlin, Connecticut, the VHPA does not figure in the telephone books
of either; not even as an unpublished number. It simply does not
exist. If one were to take the alternate route and investigate via
the Nets, surely one finds both telephone numbers and addresses for
VHPA in each city. However,
these phone numbers and addresses would lead us not to an office,
however small, in the cultural or commercial districts of the town
but to a suburban mansion - buried away and isolated - not easily
accessible for more than simple reasons of being in the suburbia but
also because you go to a door step of a suburban house only on being
invited. Even
at the most obvious moments the VHPA takes care to make itself as
unnoticeable as is possible. L. McKean (1 994) one of the few
scholars to study the VHPA in some depth, arrives at a similar
conclusion. In 1993-94, the "centenary year" of
Vivekananda's much publicised address to the Parliament of World
Religion in Chicago in 1893, the VHPA made a concerted effort to
appropriate Vivekananda as their patron saint. And
yet as McKean reporting on the 1993 parliament says: "The VHP
of America was listed on the program as a co-sponsor and its
delegation marched in the opening procession. However, the program
neither listed any sessions as sponsored by the VHP nor indicated
that the Hindu Host Committee had members who are VHP supporters.
For those unfamiliar with the way that the Hindu nationalists
construct and disseminate propaganda, the VHP's presence would have
been far more subtle." The
electronic nets were however abuzz with Vivekananda. Alt.Hindu (AH)
(recently converted to Soc.Religion.Hindu (SRH)), a newsgroup
started by one of the oldest and most dedicated HSC SCI
also saw the emergence in the year preceding Dec 6 1992, long and
extended discussions on such topics as "Why are Muslim men bad
in bed?" and "Are Muslims dirty?" - questions that
can be read in the context of a resurgent Hindu nationalism in India
that revolved around notions of Hindu purity and its violation by
Islam and the central icon of the post 1980s wave of
Hindu nationalism Hindu manhood. In
the months that followed Dec. 6,1992, Vivekananda was liberally
mixed with discussions on "Eating beef and the sexuality,"
"Muslim rates of procreation" and "Have we taught
them a lesson?' referring to the battle cry of the VHP leaders in
India that they were out to teach "Muslims a lesson.' These
discussions continue to this day sporadically on the nets. Outside
of the nets that season of death and carnage following December 6,
was celebrated by the VHPA with their World Vision 2000 conference
of 1993. The razing of the Masjid itself elicited only a strong
silence from VHPA. However, many of its front organisations were
active during this phase. On
January 16 1993, a group euphemistically called Concerned NRIs
published an advertisement in The Indian Express in India claiming
to represent "900,000 of the 1 million NRI's living in the US'
who "call Bharat their mother." They called "brothers
and sisters in India" to pressurise the Indian government to
lift the ban that had
been imposed on "nationalistic organisations" such as the
VHP and RSS. Similarly
the numerous announcements for the World Vision 2000 event were
publicised by HSCs and other front organisations and rarely by the
VHPA itself, except for the sponsorship line in the announcements
themselves. Why,
we may ask, does an organisation like the VHPA prefer to remain in
the shadow, especially in a time when the right fringe of the white
society has itself gone more and more mainstream? Apart from the
straight forward organisational imperative of growth, why does the
VHPA prefer to operate on the Nets? Why and how does a student
organisation namely the HSC become the public face of the VHPA? And
finally how successful has the VHPA been in expanding its base in
the US? To
answer these questions of visibility/ invisibility, the electronic
media as the medium of choice and student politics as mode of growth
one needs to step out of a simple analysis of what happens on the
nets and look at the specifics of how the Indian immigrant class is
positioned in the US. In other words one If
one were to follow a "few discussion threads" on
newsgroups such as AH, SCI or Soc.religion.hindu (SRH) more
recently, we would immediately realise that these networks provide
the most efficient but fundamentally ahistorical discourse on
'Hindu' cultural forms. We must note, at the outset, that the Indian Products
of their own uniquely narrow family prejudices, and thrown into
residential institutions at an early age, they remain
"protected" from the social world outside and yet have
been instructed through the Nehruvian dream that to be technically
competent is to be part of building the nation. This package of However,
arriving as they do from the IITs, RECs and IIMs, they have no basis
for meeting either the alienation felt in entering a different
cultural space nor the demand placed on them to produce their
difference for the market. Further the spatial dispersion of the
diasporic community ensures that the nets are The
VHPA/HSC responds to such a need. If one looks at the Web pages of
the HSC and the VHPA, it offers a series of cultural information
packages, from a database of Hindu names to a collection of articles
and nuggets which all answer the question "Who is a
Hindu?" from such ideologues as Golwalkar and Dattopant
Thengady and an English version of the Gita to selected writings of
Vivekananda. Apart
from such "packaged" information the "open"
discus-sions that ensue on the nets are equally instructive. They
often unfold as a series of notes that work out the details of one
small aspect of a larger issue. Rarely does a discussion stay
focused on the larger issue that may have been the starting point of
a Most,
if not all of these responses, would be suffused with references to
hypothesis, assumptions, axioms and logic. This mode of conversation
in which a text is fragmented into a set of hypothesis, axioms,
assumptions and "facts" immediately after it is put up and
only those aspects which are "convenient" picked up for
discussion and the rest abandoned is discussed by Janaki Nair (1994)
in her essay, Questions of a Historian Reading E-mail. "Popular
challenges to questions of history, judging from just a sample of
assertions on e-mail in the USA, are increasingly being mounted by
Indian professionals of a science and technology background, who
express open distrust for the methods of historians, and who are
convinced that they are better equipped by the positivist traditions
of science to make decisive assertions about Indian history... The
new positivist knights rescuing history from its practitioners
produce a version of history that bears curious resemblance to a
balance sheet". Not
only is this mode to be understood as simply positivist as Nair
points out (which it is) but also it deploys a particular discursive
strategy of fragmenting texts that finally produces not only an
ahistorical picture but also gives them an inventory of isolated
cultural packets that work successfully as symbolic While
Nair suggests that "discredited' or "thin" evidence
is used, the mastery of the Hindutva lobby must be understood in
that it also constructs evidence. In the same article that Nair
refers to above on the Hindu Kush mountains and its name referring
to a genocide of Hindus many, references that the article
"used" were found not to exist on close scrutiny. Thus,
the packaged "knowledge," positivist and fragmentary
history and outright incorrect history that the Hindutvavadi doles
out on the nets gives to the immigrant both modes of dealing with
his/her own alienation and the cultural capital they need to work
within the market of multi-culturalism. This mode Indian
immigrants to the US, both the professional bourgeois and the
petit-bourgeois, arrive in the US already sold to the Great
"White' American Dream. Their relation to nationalism and
questions of identity is therefore not just a product of the
nationalist construction of India but also continuously mediated >From
within such a configuration of social desire, the immigrant Indian
is forced to accommodate his/her nationalism and identity in such a
fashion that it always remains contained within the sphere of
"white" cultural hegemony. It is this contradiction that
produces the discourse of model minority. We
must here note that the model minority is as much a construction of
the dominant white society as it is an understanding of the self
that Asians deploy constantly. >From
within the landscape of race politics, the dominant white society,
without doubt seeks out the Asian as a model against the black who
stands condemned by the "success" of the recently arrived
immigrant. For
the Asians, to be a model minority means not just to distance
oneself from the black American, but also and far more importantly,
he/she must integrate him/herself with the model "white"
itself. How successful would an organisation like the VHPA that
speaks in the name of "all" Hindus in a Christian land be
at remaining "unnamed?" No organisation that claims to be
Hindu without paying attention to how this Hindu can be both
distinct from the black American and be part of the white liberal
structure of value can hope to work effectively. It
therefore projects itself on the one hand through HSCs and on the
other through individuals in electronic space where the individual
can be read back into different discourses of universalism -
professional or engineer or scientist-as marked so often in the
electronic spaces by headers (att.com; intel.com; columbia.edu) or
footer, (elaborate plan files which often include quotes from some
"great" thinker on questions of truth and falsity) or by
the general structure of his/ her argumentation (the scientific/
positivist structure). The HSCs are an organisation uniquely suited
to the task of ex-nomination by virtue of its capacity to integrate
itself into the liberal ideology of multi-culturalism' The liberal
academy in the Their
primary sites of growth in the early 1990s were not the hundreds of
universities that dot the American landscape and cater to middle
America, but interestingly in the ivy league institutions and other
super-elite institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Tufts,
Boston University Carnegie-Mellon and Princeton. It is only after
this initial burst wherein it established itself in nearly all of
the elite eastern seaboard institutions that it spread. On
numerous occasions the HSCs have made full use of multi-culturalism
to draw 'in a diverse body of people and thus legitimise itself. On
nearly every campus, the HSCs begin their activities with a
"ethnic food festival" or a popular film screening. These
events not only draw in an audience but in as The
VHPA/HSC's clarity on how multi-culturalism can be used as an
effective tool in its propagation is exemplified best by a document
called "Opening a Chapter of HSC" circulated on the nets
by VHPA activists to any interested party who shows some willingness
to open a HSC chapter on their campus. This five page document takes
the interested individual, through a step- by-step procedure on how
to go about opening a chapter - in other words, how best to use the
structure of liberal multi-culturalism to its advantage. The
services offered include a pre-prepared "Statement of
Objectives" or "Constitution" from the National
Council of Chapters (NCC) of the HSC that meets the multi-cultural
definition of a religious student group, advice on how to choose a
faculty adviser, warnings on how not to sign any modifications to
the Constitution unless cleared by the NCC and modes of
circumventing the minimum number of signatories required clause on
the grounds of being a minority. The
awareness that this document exhibits of multi-culturalism's
definitions within liberal academy is illuminating. The HSC's
Mission statement has multi-culturalism framed as one of its central
principles. And
so the saffron stays in the shadow and the VHPA melds away into the
inaccessibility of the suburb to emerge primarily through the HSC.
The HSC arrives in public not with its ideological label written
across its forehead like a caste sign but more appropriately painted
in the multiple shades of multi-cultural red, white and blue. The
VHPA, we can be sure, will stay in the shadow of the HSCs till it
finds an universalism into which it can fade. At the margins, one
can see the efforts constantly to find such an universalism. The
most recent effort is to produce the Hindu as the most oppressed
community in humanity's history. Stories of holocaust have been
steadily constructed, the one that Nair mentions of the Hindu Khush
mountains being only one of the many. During 1996, the HSCs
sponsored a long discussion on SCI and other nets on the number of
Hindus killed in the 1971 war that created a separate Bangladesh,
quoting in the process every-thing >from
US Intelligence reports to RSS literature and producing figures
of dead Hindus as high as eight million. Around
the same time, there was a proposal voiced in private circles to
begin lobbying for a space in the Holocaust museum in DC or, if not
that, a similar space in the national capital. Maybe this one too
may fall by the wayside, but the effort, one can be sure, will
continue. Source:
Communalism Combat |
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