Why is Rahul Gandhi a target for Hindutva, Zionist groups? By Jawed Naqvi THERE was this bald news item last week, carefully bereft of the context. The owner of a Hindutva website has been sent a legal notice by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi for publishing slanderous literature about him, it said. The website run by non-resident Indian Rohit Vyasmaan hinduUnity.org had been banned by ISPs in India following a Mumbai police request in April 2004, for propagating anti-Muslim articles.
After the original posting on Rahul Gandhi on the website had been copied by other websites, Rahul Gandhi decided to trace where the original write-up had come from. A notice has been sent via email and to a post box number belonging to Vyasmaan in the United States. Senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvis legal notice said: This publication exceeds and excels even the worst standards of scurrilous, perverted gutter writing acting at the behest of maliciously motivated elements who cannot stand Rahul Gandhis standing and popularity in India and abroad. We intend to prosecute you and conspirators under all relevant civil and criminal laws. The above article in the Indian Express seems to highlight the implied virtue of criminal litigation as a means to confront Hindutva, which incidentally happens to be a major rightwing political movement that threatens to swamp India in a very short time if it is not checked right away. In fact, as some would say, it may already be too late. What the Express report did not highlight was the fact that the offending website owner was a leading pointman in New York for a flourishing alliance between two rabid groups based in the United States rightwing Zionists, as opposed to the mainstream liberal Jews, and rightwing Hindutva campaigners, as opposed to the immensely liberal Hindu diaspora. In other words the people who targeted Rahul Gandhi are the same as those that were seeking a myopic Israeli-US-India partnership during the Vajpayee administration. A report by The New York Times journalist Dean E. Murphy on June 2, 2001, barely a month before the India-Pakistan Agra summit, gave a detailed account of how the Hindutva-Zionist nexus worked. The report referred to Vyasmaans group as militant Hindus based in Queens and Long Island quarters of New York. A picture on another website showed Vyasmaan in an orange attire of the Bajrang Dal with other members of the group holding aloft their banner. Murphys report reveals how Vyasmaans website was once shut down in 2001 following complaints that it advocated hatred and violence towards Muslims. But a few days later, the site was back on the Internet. The unlikely rescuers were some radical Jews in Brooklyn who are under investigation for possible ties to anti-Arab terrorist organisations in Israel. Excerpts from Murphys report could be useful in assessing the political challenges that lie ahead for Rahul Gandhi and others, challenges that cannot be tackled by any amount of litigation against this or that Hindtuva group settled abroad. The unusual alliance brings together two extreme religious philosophies from different parts of the world that, at first glance, have little in common, observes Murphy. But living elbow-to-elbow in the ethnic mix of New York, the small groups of Hindus and Jews have discovered that sharing a distant enemy is sufficient basis for friendship. So tight is their anti-Muslim bond that some of the Hindus marched alongside the Jews in the annual Salute to Israel Parade on Fifth Avenue last month. Yesterday, several of the Jews joined a protest outside the United Nations against the treatment of Hindus in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime, said the report on June 2, 2001. We are fighting the same war, Murphy quotes Rohit Vyasmaan as saying. Vyasmaan helps run the Hindu website, HinduUnity.org, from his home in Flushing, Queens. Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam, says Vyasmaan. How he turned Rahul Gandhis tormentor is another story. The budding Hindu-Jewish relationship presents a view that counters a popular perception of New York City not as an open door to immigrants seeking a better life, but as a political way station, where some people come or stay not to make money but to engage in politics from afar. For some of the Jews in Brooklyn and the Hindus in Queens and Long Island, their time in the United States is temporary, made necessary only because of the threat of Islam in South Asia and the Middle East. Ultimately, members of both groups told Murphy, they must leave New York to confront the enemy face-to-face. I would love to move back to India provided the situation improves there, Mr Vyasmaan said. We have made a promise to do so. Mr Vyasmaan, who is 36 and came to New York from New Delhi when he was 13, said matter-of-factly that he and many others expect to die in the battle for Hindu supremacy. Nonetheless, he is protective of the identities of some of HinduUnity.orgs biggest financial backers. Some of them have been implicated in Hindu nationalist acts in India and are only in the United States biding their time, he said. One of the sites major supporters on Long Island was involved in destroying an ancient mosque at Ayodhya in northern India in 1992, Mr Vyasmaan said. HinduUnity.org advertises itself as the official site of Bajrang Dal, a fundamentalist Hindu movement in India that has chapters throughout that country and has frequently clashed with Muslims and was among the groups blamed for the 1992 attack. The website also goes by the name Soldiers of Hindutva, a term that refers to the primacy of Hindu religion and culture. Mr Vyasmaan said the website has 500 people affiliated with it. The Jews in Brooklyn, meanwhile, are followers of Rabbi Meir David Kahane, the assassinated Israeli politician whose teachings advocated the expulsion from Israel of all Arabs, most of whom are Muslim. Their headquarters in Brooklyn was raided in January (2001) by the F.B.I. as part of a federal investigation into their association with two Kahane political parties that were banned in Israel and designated as terrorist organisations by the State Department. The Brooklyn group runs a website, Kahane.org, that aims to keep the Kahane movement alive despite the political crackdown in Israel and the terrorist designations in the United States. The sites manager, Michael Guzofsky, said the Jewish-Hindu relationship in New York is a practical one that reflects a common suffering at the hands of the differences in their religious traditions, which, he acknowledged, the two groups have never addressed in detail. I definitely understand their pain even if I dont know much about their faith, Mr Guzofsky said of the Hindu fundamentalists. Their website is a little more militant than ours, but an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth kind of speech is something you can find in the Old Testament. I am not going to judge people who have been oppressed by others and who fight back. Murphys report, now almost six years old, may yet be an eye opener for people like Rahul Gandhi who once said that he could only pity the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political arm of the group Mr Vyasmaan works for. They are a sad joke, he had said of the BJP famously after the 2004 elections that catapulted his Congress party to power. That was not a terribly political thing to say. Nor is criminal litigation the most appropriate way to fight a movement that has such a canny resemblance to what we have come to know as fascism. ABDUL WAHID OSMAN BELAL --------------------------------- It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar.
