SOUTH ASIAN COMMUNITY SUCCESSFULLY MOBILIZES TO
PREVENT THE INJECTION OF HINDU SUPREMACIST IDEOLOGY
INTO GRADE-SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS IN CALIFORNIA
THE CALIFORNIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION MUST
MAKE SURE THAT SECTARIAN GROUPS SUCH AS THE
HEF & VF DO NOT AGAIN HIJACK THE TEXTBOOK
REVIEW PROCESS
SAN FRANCISCO: The Campaign to Stop Funding
Hate (CSFH) applauds the successful mobilization
of the South Asian community in response to
the Hindutva [Hindu supremacist] attempts to
inject their sectarian political ideology into
California school textbooks.
On Monday, February 27, 2006, people of diverse
backgrounds, faiths and ethnicities testified
at a public hearing before a committee of the
California State Board of Education (SBE). The
SBE held the hearing to consider proposed changes
to the new history-social science textbooks
for the 6th grade in public schools in California.
Eight books, and the associated teachers’
guides and students’ workbooks, were put
forward by different publishers last year, and
released by the SBE for public review and comment.
Several Hindutva groups inserted themselves
into the review process by claiming to be representative
of the diasporic South Asian community, and
began pushing the SBE to accept sectarian, unscholarly
edits. Leading the attack were the Hindu Education
Foundation (HEF) and Vedic Foundation (VF),
backed by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF),
a Hindutva front posing as a 'human rights'
organization. Outraged scholars and community
members from California requested the SBE to
stand firm and not cave in to sectarian pressures.
The public hearing was organized to allow everyone
to air their views
Even as the HAF, HEF and VF sought to erase
Dalits from the ancient past and portray the
caste system as a benign form of social classification
instead of the brutal system of oppression and
exploitation that it really is, the Sangh's
view of caste was on full display at the public
hearing ("Sangh" and "Sangh Parivar"
refer to the family of Hindutva organizations
that have been spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, the RSS, of India). While the worldwide
Sangh Parivar is busy celebrating the birth
centenary of M S Golwalkar -- the second supremo
of the RSS, an admirer of Hitler and his genocide
of Jews, and of Manu, the Hindu lawgiver who
codified the oppressive caste system [1] --
every mention of caste found the Hindutva supporters
squirming in their seats and exchanging unpleasant
glances. Some of them, laboring under the illusion
that they were whispering, spewed vitriol about
the SBE "allowing all these chura-chamars
to speak" (chura-chamar, literally scavenger-cobbler,
is one of the derogatory terms commonly used
by upper-caste Hindus to insult Dalits and lower
castes). But the HAF/HEF/VF members weren't
just fulminating in private, their arrogance
and hate of Dalits and lower castes overrode
the warnings to be cautious being whispered
to them by the senior handlers that the RSS
had sent along. Among the comments made by HAF/HEF/VF
members is included this choice gem: "If
Dalits are so oppressed in India, how did some
of them come to America?" As testimonies
from Dalits who have made California their home
continued, Gaurang Desai of HSS, the U.S. analogue
of the RSS, got very agitated and screamed at
the Board members that he once cleaned his own
toilet and did not feel oppressed, so Dalits
who are forced in India to carry human waste
on their heads cannot claim to be oppressed
either!
The SBE heard testimonies from many individuals,
from representatives of several groups—including
the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America
(FeTNA), Friends of South Asia (FOSA), and Coalition
Against Communalism (CAC)—and most importantly,
from members of local Dalit communities. All
of these people expressed their strong opposition
to the brazen attempts by HAF, HEF and VF to
infuse Hindutva ideology into school textbooks
in California.
Numerous scholars and academics—including
some of the most renowned and respected members
of the faculty from the various campuses of
the University of California system—also
testified and presented their views on why the
Board must overturn the distortions introduced
by the HEF/VF/HAF.
These testimonies should finally put to rest
not only the notion that the HAF/HEF/VF represent
all, or even a plurality of Hindus, but also
that the Hindutva forces have any scholarly
credibility. As Girish Agrawal, a member of
the CSFH collective noted with amusement, "despite
the couple of hundred people that the Sangh
Parivar had bused and flown in from around the
United States, they could not produce a single
scholar to back their pseudo-history."
Girish Agrawal also commended all the commentators
opposing the Hindutva changes for speaking forcefully
and eloquently, and especially for staying calm
in the face of the thuggish behavior of the
HAF/HEF/VF members and supporters: "All
in all, I think the HAF/HEF/VF showed their
true colors today and it would be hard for them
to live down their own boorish behavior and
the exposure of their complete lack of concern
for anything beyond their narrow agenda of hate."
Commenting on the textbook issue, CSFH collective
member Ra Ravishankar said: "The Sangh's
claim that its suggested edits are meant to
enhance the self-esteem of young children is
first irresponsible, for how can children learn
to recognize and act upon oppressive and discriminatory
practices in the present if the past histories
of these practices are erased and whitewashed?
And second, it is a lie because the edits that
the Sangh is fighting so hard to retain are
not the ones their ideologues spout as examples
in every forum. Most of those edits were minor
corrections that are not disputed by anybody.
Clearly, the Sangh effort is an opportunistic
one to use the relatively few and minor problems
in content as a Trojan horse to bring in the
supremacist political ideology of the Hindutva
movement." CSFH applauds the California
Department of Education for seeing through the
HAF/HEF/VF’s façade and rejecting
their attempts to mythologize history. The Board
is now fully aware that the HAF/HEF/VF are tied
to virulently supremacist anti-minority agendas.
The CSFH has fought a protracted battle against
the neo-fascist Hindutva movement in the United
States since 2002, and we have a deep understanding
of how the Hindutva movement operates globally.
We are a small volunteer collective of academics
and professionals who came together in 2002
after the "Gujarat Pogrom" where more
than two thousand Indian Muslims were killed
by organized paramilitary mobs of the Hindutva
movement in India (the RSS and the Sangh Parivar,
as the family of RSS organizations are collectively
known). We set for ourselves the task of investigating
and reporting the massive movement of funds
from the U.S. to the various arms of the Hindutva
movement in India - funds which are used to
support the Sangh's violent, anti-minority activities
in India. The results of our investigation were
published in a report titled Foreign Exchange
of Hate - IDRF and the American funding of Hindutva
[2], and resulted in several major corporations,
including Cisco Systems, revamping their charitable
giving policies.
The following paragraph is a synopsis of the
connections between HEF/HAF and the Sangh Parivar.
We will be glad to provide more detail.
Briefly, the HEF is a creation of the HSS (Hindu
Swayamsevak Sangh), the U.S. arm of the RSS,
and its board of advisors includes several senior
Hindutva leaders and ideologues. The HAF is
a creation of the VHP of America. The VHP is
the militant religious arm of the RSS. HAF's
president and founder, Mihir Meghani, is a former
governing council member of the VHP of America.
That their current interventions have nothing
to do with minority rights should be obvious
from the fact that Meghani's HAF and the HEF
are avowed opponents of the rights of religious
and ethnic minorities in India. As CSFH collective
member Raja Swamy noted: "The same U.S.-based
Sangh Parivar organizations and individuals
who have spent the past four years 'defending'
the butchering of 2,000 men, women and children
in Gujarat, have now come out in defense of
the HEF and HAF."
Notes:
[1] Golwalkar had explicitly endorsed Hitler's
campaign against the Jews in Germany by calling
it a form of "race pride"" India
should emulate. He lays bare his casteism in
his praise of Manu as the "first and greatest
lawgiver of the world [who] lays down in his
code, directing all the peoples of the world
to go to Hindusthan [sic] to learn their duties
at the holy feet of 'eldest born' Brahmins of
this land." A random selection of the ‘wisdom’
found in the Manusmriti on caste is as follows:
* Serving Brahmins alone is recommended as the
best innate activity of a Shudra; for whatever
he does other than this bears no fruit for him
(123, Chapter X).
* They should give him (Shudra) the leftovers
of their food, their old clothes, the spoiled
parts of their grain, and their worn-out household
utensils" (125, Chapter X).
* A servant (Shudra) should not amass wealth,
even if he has the ability, for a servant (Shudra)
who has amassed wealth annoys priests"
(129, Chapter X).
[2] See http://www.stopfundinghate.org/sacw
