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***Feel free to repost this message on the Dalit Lists or elsewhere on the Web, so long as the post is cited in full; for print use, contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** HINDUTVA WOLVES IN DALIT CLOTHING Would the Hindutva groups involved in the California textbook controversy set up phony Dalit websites? They would and they just have, and it is one of the biggest Hindutva scams ever. The anti-Witzel and anti-Harvard hate campaign is just the tip of the iceberg: Now the Dalits are a prime target. -- First the California campaign run by the Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), aided by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), tried to strip references to Dalits out of California textbooks; indeed, the retired Hindutva academic recommended by the Department of Education to vet their own proposed edits, claimed in recent edit notes ascribed to him by the Hindutva press that "Dalit is a Marxist term"...; See here edit #86 at <http://tinyurl.com/86bsm> -- When the Dalits complained to the California Board of Education, the Dalits were accused by well-known Hindutvavadis Kalavai Venkat and Koenraad Elst and others on the main Hindutva List (IndianCivilization) as being pawns of Christian missionaries. (Point of fact, not that it should matter: not one of the Dalits who spoke before the Board of Education on January 12th was a Christian.) -- And now, sinking to new depths, Hindutva activists are pretending to be Dalits. The phony Dalit website set up in the middle of the California campaign is run by a Hindutva activist in Texas who runs a long list of other Hindutva sites, some quite notorious (discussed with links below). Those sites include Hindutva-run anti-Christian and anti-missionary sites; anti-Muslim sites; *fake* Christian sites aimed at Muslims; and at least three phony Human Rights sites. The phony Human Rights websites are especially interesting, since they feature people or groups diirectly involved in the California textbook campaign, including Yvette Rosser, who works with the Vedic Foundation, and the Hindu American Foundation. (All this is in Internet cache, so if they change this stuff will just post the cache versions.) But let's start with the story of the phony Dalit site -- of "Hindutva Wolves in Dalit Clothing", or to use the alternate title proposed by a clever Indian friend, "Little Saffron Riding Hood". ********************* The story began late afternoon yesterday, when I received the following email. The email came after all the publicity surrounding the global distribution by Google of the Dalit video over the last few days: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3966452794541360953 The email made it clear that it was sent in response to events in California. > From: Dalit Human Rights <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Fri Jan 20, 2006 4:33:13 PM US/Pacific > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Dalit Human Rights > > Dear Dr. Farmer, > > We are very impressed by your efforts to accurately portray > the plight of the Dalits in the California syllabus. We > would very much appreciate if you could promote our website > on your site and discussion lists. Please let us know if > there are any additional ways > in which we can work together. > > Regards, > > The team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR) > www.dalithumanrights.com At first I fell for it. I wrote back saying that I'd be happy to help. But then an Indian-American friend noticed something odd about the website. At first sight it looks like a sophisticated news portal that focuses on Dalit interests. The oddity is that mixed in with the usual stories found on such sites ("Dalit woman raped", etc.), you'll also find in their carefully manufactured "Archives" (started just three weeks ago) stories of an obvious Hindutva cast (no pun intended), taken from Hindutva newspapers that no Dalit would ever cite favorably. The Archives contain stories from _The Pioneer_, the same rightwing paper that ran the hate article against Michael Witzel on Christmas day). Other stories are taken from the RSS-run _Organizer_ or other rightwing sources. Moreover, the Archives only go back three weeks. The site itself was registered on December 19th, exactly one day after we published a long post that underlined the Hindutva orgins of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) -- which likes to call itself a "Human Rights Organization". The very next day, the HAF put out a press-release shedding tears for four Dalit women who were denied entry to a temple in Orissa -- the first such tears they had ever shed of this sort -- and the same day the dalithumanrights.com domain name was registered. No data are found on the Website that identifies the "team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR)". (But see below!) But do check out the stories in their "Archives", e.g., the story on how Dalits and upper caste Hindus joined together to kill Muslims in Gujarat. Or the provocative story entitled "Hours of Anti-India, Anti-Hindutva Rhetoric at 'Indian' Muslim Meet": http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926508 Also check out the story attacking the "Aryan Invasion" theory and extolling the beauties of the ancient caste system, which "was based on the unfoldment of the consciousness within each individual through the chakras": http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926555 ************** Not believing that this was a "Dalits for Hindutva" site -- that would be an historical first -- we became curious about who owned the domain name "dalithumanrights.com". That's easy enough to check: Go to the Whois data base at Network solutions at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml and type in "dalithumanrights.com" in the search field. You'll be taken to a page where you'll find that the owner carefully registered the name by "proxy" in order to hide his identity. But you *will* find the IP address of the site listed -- 66.226.242.126 -- at the bottom of the page. When you investigate IP 66.226.242.126 further, using the Whois data base, you'll discover that the same IP address hosts at least 22 extremist Hindutva webpages owned by Hinduworld, Inc., in Houston, Texas -- run by a well-known Hindutva activist named Rajiv Varma. I say "at least", since many more websites registered by "proxy" may also use that address. Here's a List of these 22 other Hindutva sites, some of which are quite well-known: http://whois.webhosting.info/66.226.242.126 To see the owner's name and address, click on the links. You'll find that the owner of all of them (and hence of the fake Dalit webpage) is: Rajiv Varma Hinduworld, Inc. 10592-A Fuqua St. #174 Houston, Texas 77089 530-239-7548 (If you call the Hinduworld, Inc., telephone number listed here, all you'll get is a robot voice asking you to leave a message.) Hinduworld, Inc., also runs other Hindutva sites, but let's just focus on the ones I've mentioned above, put in some kind of order: 1. Our fake Dalit Human Rights site, which as noted above was registered right after we began publicly complaining about the removal of references to Dalits in California textbooks. You have to study this website a bit before you notice its Hindutva origins, which is revealed in the mix of Hindutva stories mixed in with legitimate Dalit stories; we have to assume that the mix would get more obvious as time went on -- if we did indeed publicize the site: http://www.dalithumanrights.com/ Besides the other stories in their carefully pruned "Archive", noted earlier, check out this one on why Anti-Conversion Laws are needed; it is taken from the far-right RSS newspaper, _The Organizer_! http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926484 2. The Hindutva.org site, which is among the craziest Hindutva sites on the Web. This one takes the extreme Hindutva line currently favored by Koenraad Elst: that the BJP isn't Hindutva enough: http://www.hindutva.org/ The craziest of the crazy material is in the "frame" story on the left, which is worth reading in full. It is signed at the end: > - Hindutva Team > on behalf of hindutva.com which is interesting to compare with the similar final line of the phony Dalit email I got yesterday: > The team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR) > www.dalithumanrights.com Same author? Who at hindutva.com may be the main Hindutva Wolf in Dalit Clothing? We're not sure, but one of the main Webmasters of hindutva.com is Sudheer Birodkar, who you can easily look up on the Web. Besides his work here, Birodkar also runs forums on the Hindunet.com Website with fellow Hindutvavadis deeply involved in the California campaign and the closely related anti-Witzel issue -- including Vishal Agarwal, NS Rajaram, and David Frawley. I particularly love Sudheer Birodkar's nutty "Hindutva pledge" posted at Hindutva.com -- tolerant and anti-casteist and atheistic at points and viciously anti-Muslim and anti-Christian at others: your average Hindutva intellectual at work: http://www.hindutva.org/pledge.html 3. Two identical anti-Christian sites, which pay special attention to anti-conversion issues in India, well worth exploring: http://www.christianaggression.com/ http://www.christianaggression.org/ 3. Further anti-Christian and anti-conversion sites, all three identical but with different URLs; a lot of work and money went into creating these: http://www.conversionwatch.org/ http://www.crusadewatch.com/ http://www.crusadewatch.org/ 4. Phony human rights sites; note Yvette Rosser's name prominently displayed on the home page of these sites. (Rosser is deeply involved with the Vedic Foundation, one of the two groups to offer Hindutva edits in California.) Click on the button that carries her name on any of the pages and you'll be taken directly to Rosser's biography, given quite extensively: http://www.hinduvigil.com/ http://www.hinduvigil.net/ http://www.hinduvigil.org/ If you click on the "links" page, you'll find Hindutva misinformation at its finest. Here you'll find links to legitimate Human Rights groups, like Amnesty International, mixed in with phony Human Rights groups like hinduhumanrights.org, which glorifies the destruction of Ayodhya -- the great mythical moment in recent Hindutva history during which Hindu mobs destroyed Babri Mosque in December, 1992: http://www.hinduhumanrights.org/ (watch out for popup ads when you play with the links!) We also find on the page direct links to the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which as we found out in the California case claims to speak for 2 million Hindu-Americans -- which according to the US State Department is over 500,000 more Hindu Americans than exist. (And certainly all those who exist aren't Hindutvavadis!) The President of HAF, as noted previously on the List, is Mihir Meghani, who is also deeply involved in the California campaign. Meghani is the author of the famous manifesto at the BJP website in India: http://bjp.org/history/htvintro-mm.html 5. Straight anti-Muslim hate sites: http://www.historyofjihad.org 6. Anti-Muslim site with a heavy focus on Kashmir, etc. To see all this, you have to explore the links. You'll also find links here to Koenraad Elst's site, to Hindu Unity (another famous Hindutva website: go to http://hinduunity.org/aboutus.html ), and more: http://www.islamreview.org/ 7. Still another anti-Islam site. This one is of special interest since it pretends to be written by Christian activists: the Hindutvavadis not only are fake Dalits, when the need arises, but like to pretend to be Christian's as well. The site at times is quite funny: http://www.islamreview.com/ To see the faux Christianity, click on "About Us", which talks about their supposed "Ministry", which doesn't exist: http://www.islamreview.com/aboutus.htm There is a lot more of interest here to explore on this site: take some time with the links. 8. Another anti-Islam site apparently aimed this time at Americans. Click on the flag icons and you'll find links to rightwing sites around the world. Do click on the flags, which take you to odd and scary places -- but also watch out again for the popup ads! http://www.newsonterror.com/ 9. News site (minimally working) meant to follow anti-Hindu news stories; this one is apparently a project underway, or one that never fully made it: http://www.hindumediawatch.com/ http://www.hindumediawatch.org/ 10. Under construction or not working, but presumably stay tuned: http://www.dharmaeducation.com/ http://www.dharmaeducation.org/ http://www.jesusreview.com http://www.jesusreview.org http://www.vhs-net.com/ http://www.vhs-net.org/ http://www.hindurenaissance.com/ http://www.hindurenaissance.org/ 11. I should mention that Hinduworld, Inc., runs other Hindutva sites as well, some with overlapping content. I didn't search for their IP addresses. Some of these other sites include: http://www.waronjihad.org http://www.historyofjihad.com But the worst of the worst is the phony Dalit website. Presumably, our Dalit friends will have something to say publicly -- and loudly -- all over the Web about this newest Hindutva deception. Will the Indian press pick it up? And how long before this site, and much that I talk about above, goes down the ever deepening Hindutva 'memory hole'? (Well, we have it all downloaded, so no problem!) Best, Steve Farmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Knowledge is power... share it equitably! http://www.gnu.org
