Why is the National HSC Scrambling to restrict
access to its archives?
Last week, we had pointed to the National HSC
changing the domain registration details for
hscnet.org and the contact page on Hindunet
(http://www.hindunet.com/contact.htm)
in an effort to distance itself from the Sangh
Parivar's electronic infrastructure that it
had set up and continues to maintain (see our
Week #2 question to the National HSC; http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org/PRs/pr_Question2.html).
This week, we look at yet another belated and
unsuccessful attempt by the National HSC to
hide its ideological affinity with the Sangh
Parivar.
Before the world wide web became popular in
the mid-1990s, Usenet newsgroups were used for
communication and sharing information. Through
the early 1990s, the Hindu Students Council's
announcements and discussions were carried extensively
on the Usenet newsgroup alt.hindu. GHEN/Hindunet
maintains an archive of alt.hindu at http://www.hindunet.org/alt_hindu,
and this was one piece of evidence we used in
our report to establish the ideological and/or
material linkages between the National HSC and
the Sangh Parivar. This archive was public when
our report was published, but now it requires
a password for access. If one goes by the dates
on Google caches of alt.hindu messages, this
change happened some time in May 2007. The timing
of this change coincides with changes made to
the WHOIS domain registration pages of the National
HSC website (we discussed these in our last
week's question to the National HSC, but there
has been no response yet).
Our question to the National HSC for Week #3:
Why has the National HSC password protected
the alt.hindu archives? Why has it NOW sought
to hide discussions that happened in the public
domain in the mid-1990s?
The most plausible explanation is that the
National HSC is trying to hide virulent Hindutva
content in the alt.hindu archives. As we scan
through the archives, we find that even as HSC
chapters posted announcements about meetings
and so on, National HSC leaders and other Sangh
ideologues posted Hindutva propaganda including
strong statements of support on the destruction
of the Babri Masjid, the programs of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and
VHP of America, as well as glowing tributes
to Hindutva. Besides, alt.hindu messages in
1994 and 1995 acknowledged HSC as being sponsored
by the VHPA, even as the HSC's history page
says that in 1993, "HSC becomes an organization
by itself is run independently of VHPA"
(http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org/footnotes/026.pdf)
The alt.hindu archives going back to 1994 are
available on the Internet archive (http://web.archive.
org/web/20010605 055130/www. hindunet. org/alt_hindu)
and an incomplete archive of the newsgroup is
also available on Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hindu).
We will be glad to share the archives, as a
zip file, with anyone interested.
For more information, contact: Raja Swamy (raja.swamy@gmail.
com) or Samip Mallick (samipkmallick@
gmail.com)
full : http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org/PRs/pr_uestion3.html
