AWAAZ - SOUTH ASIA WATCH is a UK-based secular network of individuals and organisations committed to monitoring and combating religious hatred in South Asia and in the UK.

AWAAZ STATEMENT: TUESDAY 15 MAY 2007
Email: contact@awaazsaw.org
Telephone: (+ 44) 020 8843 2333

UK Commissioner on Integration reportedly pays tribute to admirer of Nazism and Fascism

Ramesh Kallidai, a member of Secretary of State Ruth Kelly’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion, paid glowing tribute to an extremist who admired and promoted Nazi-like, fascist and violent ideas in India and who believed that what occurred to European Jews under Nazi Germany was a model that India could learn and profit from – according to recent reports.

Mr. Kallidai was speaking at an event to celebrate the birth centenary of M. S. Golwalkar (1906-1973), the second “supreme leader” of the Indian neo-fascist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Mr. Kallidai, who is general secretary of the Hindu Forum of Britain, was reported in the RSS’s weekly paper as saying that trying to pay homage to M. S. Golwalkar “was like holding a candle to the Sun”. The paper writes that he went on to praise the expansion of the RSS and its “exemplary” ideology.

The RSS’s extremist ideology of Hindu supremacism has been widely blamed for large-scale anti-minority violence in India. The RSS has been banned three times in India since Independence. The murderer of M. K. Gandhi was a former RSS member.

The event in London on the 12th April was organized by the supremacist Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the British branch of the Indian Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Golwalkar continues to be universally venerated by the organization despite his support for Nazi-like views. The event took place at the Advait Cultural Centre in Wembley, north-west London.

Earlier, in December 2004, Ramesh Kallidai, speaking at the Parliamentary Select Committee on Home Affairs, defended the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council), an offshoot of the RSS, from the accusation that it is an extremist organisation. Kallidai said that the VHP works for the “social and moral upliftment of Hindus”. According to Human Rights Watch, the VHP was among the organisations “directly responsible” for the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, in which thousands were killed over the course of three days of carnage. (We have no orders to save you: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, Human Rights Watch, April 2002, page 4.)

The Indian RSS’s joint general secretary, Suresh Soni, was a major guest at the Wembley event. The event was also attended by key figures from the National Council of Hindu Temples, the Swaminarayan Mandir, ISKCON – Bhaktivedanta Manor, the Hindu Council UK, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (UK), Singh Sabha Gurudwara (Southall) and other Hindu organizations.

The Commission on Integration and Cohesion was set up by the Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly and one of its main tasks is to address the dissemination of extremist ideologies.

“Next month, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is due to publish its findings on how communities can tackle extremist ideologies and overcome tensions between different groups. The credibility of the Commission's findings may be seriously limited if its own Commissioners are seen to endorse individuals widely considered to be extremist”, said Arun Kundnani, spokesperson for Awaaz – South Asia Watch.

Awaaz deplores the fact that someone who the British government has appointed as a Commissioner working towards good community relations and harmony between groups appears to have commended and endorsed a man whose life-long ambition was to promote ideas and organizations in India inspired by Nazi, fascist and racist thinking, organisations that have been repeatedly indicted for anti-minority extremism, intolerance and violence.

NOTES

Who was M. S. Golwalkar?

Madahav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906 – 1973) was the second leader of the paramilitary RSS, a Hindu supremacist organization formed in 1925 devoted to turning India into an exclusive Hindu state. Golwalkar supported Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In his key book We, or our nationhood defined, published in 1939, he openly supported the anti-semitic policies of Nazi Germany towards German-Jews, openly supported Hitler’s violent invasion of other sovereign territories, lauded Fascist Italy and said these were models which India could learn and profit by:

“German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” (Golwalkar, We, or our nationhood defined, Bharat Publications, Nagpur, [1939] 1944, page 37.)

In the 1950s, even when the horrors of Nazi Germany were known across the world, the RSS called these ideas of Golwalkar an “unassailable doctrine of nationhood” Golwalkar also stated that in India, minorities deserved no rights whatsoever, not even any citizen’s rights. Minorities could

“live only as outsiders, bound by all the codes and conventions of the Nation, at the sufferance of the Nation and deserving of no special protection, far less any privilege or rights. There are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at the sweet will of the national race. That is the only logical and correct solution. That alone keeps the national life healthy and undisturbed. That alone keeps the Nation safe from the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic of the creation of a state within a state. From this standpoint, sanctioned [by] the experiences of shrewd old nations, the non-Hindu peoples of Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-long traditions but must also cultivate a positive attitude of love and devotion instead - in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment - not even citizen’s rights.” (Golwalkar, We, or our nationhood defined, Bharat Publications, Nagpur, [1939] 1944, pages 48-9.)

For Golwalkar, minorities were to either give up their beliefs or live at ‘the sweet will of the majority’. In 2002, the RSS stated that the safety of Muslims in India lies in ‘the goodwill of the majority’.

Golwalkar also actively promoted racism and race superiority as central to the Indian nation:

“It is superfluous to emphasise the importance of Racial Unity in the Nation state. A Race is a hereditary Society having common customs, common language, common memories of glory and disaster; in short it is a population with a common origin under one culture. Such a race is by far the most important ingredient of a Nation…We will not seek to prove this axiomatic truth, that the Race is the body of the Nation, and that with its fall, the Nation ceases to exist.” (Golwalkar, We, or our nationhood defined, Bharat Publications, Nagpur, [1939] 1944, page 21.)

What is the RSS?

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers’ Corps) was formed in the period 1925-1926 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur, Maharashtra state, north-west India. Golwalkar became its second “supreme leader” after Hedgewar’s death. The RSS is an exclusively male organization devoted to the political ideology of Hindutva (or Hindu nationalism) and represents an Indian version of fascism. Hedgewar formed the RSS as an organization of young boys and men that was based on military drills, physical exercise, weapons training, propagation of the ideology of Hindutva and anti-minority hatred. Hedgewar, together with another key founder of the RSS, Balkrishna Shivram Moonje, was also influenced by Fascism and Nazism. In 1934, Hedgewar presided over a meeting in Nagpur aimed at propagating Mussolini’s fascist thought in India. Moonje not only met Mussolini but was a strong admirer of Nazism and Fascism. He is today called Dharamveer – hero in the religious struggle – by the RSS. He said that India not only needed a dictator like Hitler but that a scheme to bring such a dictator had to be urgently carried out. The RSS is not a democratic organization but based on the idea of one ‘Supreme Leader’ (sarsanghchalak), obedience to the one Supreme Leader (ek chalak anuvartitva) and of the Supreme Leader as “the principle one who is to be venerated” (parampoojaniya). Today, the RSS is at the core of a large family of extremist Hindu nationalist organizations operating in India and transnationally, including the UK.

Original report from RSS newspaper, Organiser available here

Who Sets the Faith Agenda in Britain? - an Awaaz - South Asia Watch Forum, 10 May 2007, 7.00pm - 9.00pm, School of Oriental and African Studies, London

AWAAZ STATEMENT: SUNDAY 4 MARCH 2007
Email: contact@awaazsaw.org
Telephone: (+ 44) 020 8843 2333

BRITISH POLICE AND GOVERNMENT SUPPORTING A HINDU FUNDAMENTALIST AGENDA?

AWAAZ - SOUTH ASIA WATCH condemns what it believes to be an attempt by London's Metropolitan Police to lend authority to dubious claims being made by Hindu fundamentalist groups in Britain. These claims mainly centre around the allegation that Muslim students on university campuses are engaging in 'aggressive conversions' or 'forcible conversions' of Hindu and Sikh girls.

On 21 February 2007, the Hindu Forum of Britain and National Hindu Students Forum (NHSF) held a 'Hindu Security Conference' at the London School of Economics. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Ian Blair, was a keynote speaker and a number of senior policemen, including officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad and Diversity Directorate, were present. Tony McNulty, the Minister for Policing and Security, was also a keynote speaker. The audience was mainly composed of about 120 students.

THE 'AGGRESSIVE CONVERSIONS' CLAIM

At a conference workshop on the subject of 'campus security', chaired by a police officer from the Met's Diversity Directorate, NHSF students related accounts of what they described as aggressive conversions.

These were the worst examples they presented: one Hindu male student described how a Muslim friend has suggested he come to a lecture on the meaning of Islam. In another case, a group of Muslim students allegedly told a Hindu male student that he should convert to Islam and predicted that, by the end of the university term, he would do so -- a statement which this student felt carried an element of menace. Both these were defined as examples of 'aggressive conversions'.

Mention was made of leaflets, alleged to have been produced by Islamic organisations and distributed on campuses, in which instructions were given on how to convert Hindu and Sikh girls by getting them drunk. Such leaflets have long been used by groups on all sides wanting to stir up trouble in British Asian communities. Police officers, in the past, have generally dismissed them as a hoax.

WHY ONLY MUSLIMS?

The poster for the Hindu Security conference advertised 'radicalisation and violent extremism' as one of the topics under discussion. But, in fact, the only extremism under discussion was of the Islamist kind.

At the conference, a representative of the Union of Jewish Students described what he regarded as a special relationship between Hindus and Jews, explaining that what Israel faces in Palestine is the same as what India faces in Kashmir.

Islamic societies on campuses were being singled out as the sole guilty parties on conversions. When one attendee at the workshop pointed out that many evangelical religious organisations, including Christian ones, attempt to convert students, the police officer chairing the workshop said they were only interested in Muslim attempts at converting people.

At one point in the conference, an officer from Scotland Yard's SO15 Counter Terrorist Command showed an al-Qaida propaganda video, explaining that it was important for the audience to know what Muslim students were being exposed to. Awaaz believes that this is a reprehensible attempt to link violent terrorist organisations and acts with the separate issue of alleged forcible conversions in the UK.

WHAT THE PAPERS REPORTED

The day after the Hindu Security event, a number of articles on 'aggressive conversions' appeared in the press. The Metro wrote of 'Muslim extremists who try to force teenage Hindu girls to convert' and spoke of a 'new police crackdown' (22 February 2007). Ian Blair was quoted as saying 'There is a feeling in the Hindu community that we have not given them as much attention as other groups.' In the Daily Mail (22 February 2007), Blair also spoke of the need to clamp down on 'aggressive conversions' by 'extremist Muslims'. Both newspaper articles reported uncritically the Hindu Forum of Britain's allegations that 'hundreds of mostly Sikh and Hindu girls' are being 'terrorised' into converting.

AWAAZ'S VIEW

Neither at the conference nor in subsequent newspaper reports was there any solid evidence of coercion.

Awaaz strongly condemns any attempt to intimidate or threaten students into religious conversion or religious conformity and believes that this must be tackled by university authorities. We condemn, for example, some reported incidents of Islamist groups trying to coerce Muslim women into wearing the hijab. But we believe that the National Hindu Students Forum is grossly exaggerating the issue of 'aggressive conversions' as part of its own political agenda. It is indulging in dangerous and divisive scare-mongering. The organisation itself, and the claims it is making, are being given undue credibility by the police and the government.

The National Hindu Student's Forum is an organisation closely allied to Indian Hindu supremacist groups, such as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). The RSS, once banned in India because of its fascist and violent history, has a virulent anti-Muslim agenda and pursues this effectively through its sister organisations abroad. Indian groups with links to the RSS are often also anti-Christian (more information on these groups is available here). Neither the British organisations nor the Indian ones represent the majority of Hindus in either country.

Awaaz believes that the NHSF in Britain is trying to turn any kind of conversion -- whether coercive or not -- into a matter involving the police and criminal justice system. This agenda has been imported directly from Hindu supremacist groups in India, such as the violent Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an organisation that the Hindu Forum of Britain has defended. A number of anti-conversion laws have been introduced in some Indian states after successful lobbying by these groups. These are part of an anti-Muslim and anti-Christian communal politics which has led to restrictions on religious freedom in India.

Hindu supremacist organisations in Britain have long targeted campuses in order to promote their divisive ideology. What is new is the overt collusion of the police in a political agenda that is itself a serious threat to community cohesion.

AWAAZ STATEMENT: THURSDAY 13 JULY 2006
Email: contact@awaazsaw.org
Telephone: (+ 44) 020 8843 2333

AWAAZ CONDEMNS PERPETRATORS OF MUMBAI BLASTS; STANDS IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE VICTIMS & THEIR FAMILIES

Eight bomb blasts in Mumbai have led to the deaths of more than 200 people and the maiming and injury of hundreds more. Awaaz - South Asia Watch unequivocally condemns this horrendous atrocity afflicted on the people of Mumbai by political extremists.

Though no one has claimed responsibility, the bombings point directly to a highly planned, sophisticated and well organised attack aimed at killing civilians. Press reports have suggested the involvement of the Lashkar-e Tayyiba, groups associated with Al Qaeda, groups associated with or financed by Dawood Ibrahim, the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), or the possible involvement of another as yet unknown group. There is no evidence yet of which specific organization is responsible.

The cowardice and bigotry of the extremists is obvious: they chose to deliberately target and indiscriminately murder commuters returning home from work in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in India. This stands in sharp contrast to the humanity and bravery of ordinary Indians. The courage and compassion showed by Indians of all communities in helping the victims has been humbling. It is a demonstration of the refusal to be divided by religious extremists of any persuasion. We acknowledge the strength and bravery of Indians who have faced this tragedy with fortitude and have risen above communal bigotry.

We urge the Indian government to take immediate steps to bring the perpetrators to face justice. We urge the government to take immediate preventative steps to ensure that this appalling tragedy is not exploited by religious extremists from the Hindu Right who want to target minority groups and engage in communal violence. We are especially concerned by the inflammatory statements made by members of Mumbai's Hindu Right Shiv Sena political party.

We also urge Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis of all faiths in the UK to stand together against religious extremism and not be swayed by bigotry and prejudice.

AWAAZ PRESS RELEASE: MONDAY 8 MAY 2006
Email: contact@awaazsaw.org
Telephone: (+ 44) 020 8843 2333

Awaaz Condemns Extremist Hindu and Muslim Violence in Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir

Thirty-five people have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir and several more have died in Gujarat in sectarian attacks and communal violence over the last ten days. Awaaz condemns the perpetrators of the violence against Muslims in Gujarat and Hindus in Kashmir, and urges the Indian authorities to take immediate preventive action to protect citizens and prosecute the perpetrators.

GUJARAT

In the city of Vadodara, Muslims are living in a state of fear and siege being deliberately targeted and attacked by Hindu supremacists over the past week. The recent violence in the state follows the horrific communal attacks in the state in 2002, which left around 2,000 people - mainly Muslims - dead.

During the recent riots, as in 2002, the state police have been standing by, and sometimes encouraging, mobs of Hindu supremacists who have been running rampant, harassing and attacking Muslims and their property. The state government, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, appeared to be doing little to bring an end to the attacks.

A 38 year old man Rafik Abdul Ghani Vohra was set upon by a Hindu supremacist mob as he was driving back from work. He was burnt to death in his car. The mob had been collecting on the road during curfew hours in the presence of the police who made no attempt to stop them. The Times of India reported: "his family complained that police refused to heed their distress calls and even attempt to stop the mobs. Other residents in Muslim-dominated areas said their calls to the police control room were met with the response, "Go to Pakistan for help." Human rights organizations have reported that the Hindu mobs were often led by members of the Hindu supremacist Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

The violence followed the demolition on 1 May of a dargah (a mainly Muslim, but often multi-faith shrine) as part of a municipal drive to demolish structures encroaching on public land. Several Muslims in the city held a demonstration in protest at the demolition.

Police fired on the demonstrators, killing several people. The police say they were provoked, but questions remain over why they shot directly into the crowd instead of using other restraining measures. In further violence, two Hindus were stabbed to death later. At least five people have died during the violence and tensions remain high. Many Muslims fear an escalation of violence against them, as occurred with the active complicity of the Gujarat state in 2002.

A court order has now stopped demolitions of structures of religious significance, but Awaaz would like to know what is being done to bring the perpetrators of the violence to justice.

JAMMU AND KASHMIR

In the northern state of Jammu and Kahsmir, as many as thirty five Hindus were rounded up from their homes and killed on April 30 and 1 May in the Doda and Udhampur districts of Jammu and Kashmir. The perpetrators are reported to be violent Kashmiri Muslim groups. Awaaz strongly condemns these acts. In the past fifteen years more than 90 per cent of Kashmiri Hindus who lived in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley have fled their homes for fear of attack and are living as refugees in the lowlands and in India's cities. The government of Pakistan is urged to investigate if groups from within territories it controls are responsible, and to take appropriate action.

Violent attacks by armed Muslim militias against especially Hindu civilians in Doda district have escalated, particularly since 1998. Several armed militia groups, including the Harakat-ul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e Tayyiba are strongly implicated or involved. Mass targeted attacks on civilians have occurred in the Kashmir Valley and Jammu. Both these organizations have been fostered or sponsored by sections of the Pakistani state.

We are urging people living in the UK to add their voice to the calls for action. Individuals and organisations you can write to:

For further information contact: Awaaz Secretariat on 020 8843 2333 or email at contact@awaazsaw.org

Awaaz South Asia watch is a UK based South Asian secular network committed to challenging all forms of religious hatred and intolerance.

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Islamism in the UK, Pakistan and Bangladesh

Awaaz is involved in several areas of work focused on political Islamism (Islamic fundamentalism) and its spread in South Asia as well as in the UK. This includes the treatment of religious and non-religious minorities and of women in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the attacks on human rights by Islamist organizations and movements in south Asia.

We are especially interested in organizations involved or associated with the MMA alliance in Pakistan's NWFP. We are also interested in several Islamist organizations active in the UK, as well as a range of Islamist ideological tendencies that work to spread their ideologies within UK South Asian communities and among some groups of students. If you are interested in helping Awaaz around this work, or want to get involved, contact us.