What Gets The NRI Worked Up

• India's negative portrayal in the western press before it became an economic success story. Articles about cows, caste system, corruption were front-page news.
  
• Pro-Pak policies of the US in the '80s, including tacit acceptance of missile transfers from China to Pakistan
  
• Promiscuity in the American society at large and the need to protect Hindu cultural values back home
  
• Any questioning of Pokhran II, the Gujarat violence or the trinity of Modi-Advani-Vajpayee
  
• 'Pseudosecular' media's soft treatment of Sonia Gandhi
  
• The perceived support by Indian Muslims for the Pakistani cricket team

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Their essential thesis goes thus—Bharat is besieged from within and without, it is maligned and abused, and it must rise to defend itself.

"The American NRIs let their fears about cultural loss come to the fore and find expression in a form of cultural chauvinism." Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University

As soldiers stationed abroad, they wage the daily battle via the internet to defend all things Hindu, preposterous or perfunctory, ludicrous or legitimate. In the end, logic takes a backseat to hate and wisdom marks a striking absence. Chat rooms, message boards, blogs, petitions, protests and e-mails generated by the Hindutva-bathed Non-Resident Indians in America burn with an angry nationalism, a hypersensitive edge and a general sense of victimhood. Is there any method in the madness?

Their story begins in the Golden Age of the Vedas when all knowledge emanated in Bharat, from zero to infinity. It was nurtured by the good men and spread by them to the barbaric rest. Debate and democracy came naturally to us. Astronomy and economics were understood while others were roaming the jungles. Even women sages were welcome. The caste system was merely division of labour and gems were falling off the robes of kings for the less fortunate.

"Is it just noise? Would anything in the Indian political scene change if these (hate) groups were not there? I don't think so." Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Centre for Policy Research

This era without errors abruptly ended with the invaders, all terribly Muslim and plundering. They wreaked havoc with Bharat, stayed on to rule, converted and coerced at will. Lying, cheating, Mir Jaffers all.

You want to talk about Modern Times. One name should suffice—Pakistan—that warring home of a terrorist nation, which cannot accept that a Hindu king voted Kashmir into India. Started three wars against Bharat, got defeated but still continues to slash with a thousand cuts, killing innocents with bicycle bombs. Even the gullible Americans now know that all terrorists have a Pakistan address at least once their active life. Pakistan has corrupted Bangladesh too with its terror ideology and sleeper cells all working against India. They breed, and talk of Lebensraum, that Hitleresque idea of demanding "living space", slowly seeping into India, migrating illegally by the millions. "Awake, you Hindu," goes the cry.

The most rabid website—HinduUnity.org—complete with a "hit list" of all the enemies of Hinduism and their dripping blood was run by Rohit Vyasmaan of Queens, NY. Advertised as the official website of the Bajrang Dal, it was reportedly registering 17,000 hits a day when it was blocked in 2001 under orders from Mumbai police only to be temporarily revived with the help of another rabid group, the extremist Jewish Kahane movement, in the name of "common suffering" at the hands of Muslims. Vyasmaan proudly told the New York Times his financial backers included a man from Long Island who struck the hammer at the Babri Masjid in '92. He and many others were expecting to die in the battle for Hindu supremacy.

The NRI psyche began throbbing with anger somewhere in the 1980s when "cross-border terrorism" crippled normalcy in Kashmir and thousands died in the proxy war. The soldier abroad was frustrated at mighty Bharat's inability to take "decisive action". The plight of the Kashmiri Pandits touched him deeply. Then came the BJP government in Delhi and the anger found articulation, morphing into hate speech and laying bare a distinct anti-Muslim slant. The communication revolution of the internet helped distribute the anger.

But mostly the NRI rants consist of pseudo-statistics and mendacious arguments, alarmist declarations—geography is demography—and phony fears. Nothing is too "iffy" to field, no claim too audacious. The massacre of 2,000 mostly Muslim citizens of Gujarat was a "spontaneous" outpouring of anger because of the senseless killing of Hindu pilgrims in Godhra. Call Narendra Modi to America and he can explain it all. Except, the US government refused Modi a visa in 2005 under pressure from a coalition of rights activists, Christian missionaries, Muslim associations and secular groups. What an insult, cried the Hindutva votaries, to deny a legitimately elected CM a visit. But they didn't do more given the delicacy of their own visa situations. Green cards in process, H1B being extended or awaiting citizenship—couldn't jeopardise that.


Don't cross: Muslim Indians protest outside the Indian consulate in NY during the Gujarat riots

The Hindutva-sworn NRI does his bit where he can. He methodically creates websites, alerts the community about upcoming Hindu festivals, explains the pantheon, offers online courses on Sanskrit and Vedic Mathematics and even creates Hindu e-cards. He regularly looks for ways to wangle legitimate invitations for parivar spokesmen from universities and sundry associations innocent of India but looking to educate themselves. He not only donates his time but also dollars to the cause back home. Organisations linked to the VHP, RSS and the BJP are often the beneficiaries. He likes that. After all, uncountable amounts flow into India from Christian and Muslim charities. Sumit Ganguly, professor at Indiana University, who has been at the receiving end of the Hindu ire, says, "They let their fears about cultural loss come to the fore and find expression in a form of cultural chauvinism," He was constantly heckled in New York while on a 2001 tour to promote his book on Indo-Pak relations. The Hindutva crowd got a massive injection from India post-Ayodhya and a BJP government in Delhi and the "social and intellectual climate in India made it possible to air views that were previously anathema and the Indians abroad felt they could now join this unholy chorus".

I myself saw the transformation of a college friend from Delhi University, who landed in New York in the early '80s never to return, from a regular Dylan/Stones-listening, adventure-loving woman into a strident Hindutva-spouting virago. She read copiously on the internet, learnt Sanskrit during the holidays and bought into the whole myth of the majority being treated as the minority in India. She began looking for traces of anti-Hindu bias in the articles I wrote from Washington, berating and sending links galore.

It's true that hundreds of extremist Muslim websites, including some created specially for women, spread even more hate, teach terror and generally lash out at the "infidels". It is also true that the lefty crowd generally feels constrained calling them on it. It defends all manner of retrograde declarations in the name of "religious sensitivity". When an Indian-born Muslim woman took up the fight to pray alongside men in the mosque, there was little support either from the larger South Asian academic world or from women in general.

One must remember, however, that the NRIs reflect the same bandwidth of opinion as Indians back home, from the right to the left, from mild nationalism to the rabid, from the merely questioning to the always emphatic and everything in between. And Hindutvawalas are just a part of the larger NRI community, now 1.3 million strong. But they are noticeable because they are loud and often obnoxious. Also true that globally all religions are resurgent from the Vatican to Mecca, from Jerusalem to Jeddah so why would Hinduism buck the trend and not grab space in the public square of opinion? As to the question of how influential they are, it is hard to say.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an eminent Indian analyst and president of the Centre for Policy Research, asks, "Is it just noise? Would anything in the Indian political scene change if these groups were not there? I don't think so." He warns against jumping to alarmist conclusions. "As Indian politics has got more polarised, so has Indian opinion both at home and abroad." And yes, the Sangh parivar systematically cultivates links with NRIs through various groups. The donations and the influence are both welcome.

Biju Mathew, associate professor at Rider University, NY, who has battled the Hindutva brigade for years, says, "Religion has been forced into the equation of nationalism, sometimes as the defining element or as a strong second layer, as being Christian has now become part of American nationalism. But it turns pathological when you look at the third transformation, which occurs in people who identify with a specific territorial space but don't live in it anymore."


An Incredible India campaign bus in Manhattan

"They face many contradictions—a liberal, pluralist India vs a Hindu India, the guilt of having left the country they claim they love. And finally the demand to be "American", which means giving up a certain set of markers about their original identity. They are forced to push their Hinduness or their Muslimness, for that matter, into the private spaces, creating a sense of siege," Mathew says. In a study of the Hindu right-wing in the US completed in 2000, the author exposed how the Maryland-based India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) was actually sending NRI donations to many RSS-affiliated groups in India, some of which were directly involved in violence against Muslims and Christians in three states. While the IDRF claimed to be a charity organisation and enjoyed tax-exempt status under US laws, it violated the rules which prohibit charities from funnelling money to sectarian groups.

"More than 50 per cent of the funds disbursed by the IDRF are sent to Sangh-related organisations whose primary work is religious 'conversion' and 'Hinduisation' in poor and remote tribal and rural areas of India. Another sixth is given to Hindu religious organisations for purely religious use. Only about a fifth of the funds go for disaster relief and welfare—most of it because the donors specifically designated it so," the report found. The amounts raised by IDRF are not small. Since the early '90s, it has raised over $2 million while the Hindu Heritage Endowment has collected $2.6 million.

While taking care of the flock back home, the Hindutva believers also concentrate on the young, throwing a nationwide net of Hindu Students Councils across US university campuses to "provide opportunities to learn about Hindu heritage and culture" and "foster awareness of issues affecting Hindus". The inductees may be unaware that the hsc is a VHP baby. No less a person than Ashok Singhal, now the VHP president but then the general secretary, called the hsc his most important overseas project in '93.

The hsc website offers the Dharma life project, the Samskar newsletter, a Hindu Women project and even NetSeva to students. The activities are designed to reduce the burden of being the "other" which sometimes gets too heavy to bear, once the miracle of arrival on American shores is already absorbed and digested. The cavernous aisles of mega stores become humdrum, the freedom to drive uninterrupted from "sea to shining sea" feels routine and the crisp skyscrapers no longer shock and awe. Meanwhile, the essential loneliness of life in the west has begun encroaching. The tug is powerful and the diaspora desperate. It seeks affirmation in a thousand contradictions, creates an order of battle on the Net, to fight the "good war" for India.

The tactics of the Hindutva brigade can be transparently intimidating. In the 11 years of journalism in Washington, I witnessed incidents that left me wondering if the academic freedom in US varsities was being misused to spread hate. Once at the University of Maryland while attending a speech by a BJP leader, the event ended in a meltdown after a student dared to question the perfectly made-up image of India. A seething office-bearer of the Overseas Friends of the BJP was at his throat shouting, "What do you know about India?" I wrote about it in The Telegraph, earning the wrath of the saffron brigade and blacklisting from future events.

Fast forward to September '04 when RSS spokesman Ram Madhav was invited by two prominent US varsities to give a talk on 'How India Views its Neighbours'. The wisdom of giving a platform to Madhav was questioned by many but in the end, the need for providing a plurality of views won. Madhav talked of the rate of reproduction of South Asia's Muslims and how it threatened Hindu India. An army of RSS supporters confronted student activists opposed to Madhav's presence, tore up fliers, even threatened to sick the fbi on them.

This battle is joined by Indian secularists, liberals, leftists, academics and others abroad who resent the narrow and history-denying presentation of India. Groups such as Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, Friends of Indian Leftists and NRIs for a Secular and Harmonious India counter the onslaught as best as they can. There's much hand-wringing but as Ganguly says, "Few are prepared to enter the public arena, speak in a language that addresses the anxieties and fears of large numbers of Indians and Indian-Americans, however strange it may seem to liberal intellectuals. Fashionable left-wing and post-modernist jargon that heaps contempt on the rest has to be avoided."