CAMPAIGN TO STOP FUNDING HATE: PROJECT SAFFRON DOLLAR

A Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva
A Report by Sabrang Communications Pvt. Ltd. (India) / SACW (France)
Mirror Sites

Faculty Letter sent to corporations.

We write to thank you for being willing to investigate the places and purposes to which your charitable donations may go, and for considering the possibility of withdrawing your support from the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), an organization that sends monies to sectarian organizations in India, and that until very recently saw fit to hide this fact from the individual donors and corporations that support it.

We appreciate your willingness to contribute to charities in India. Given the diversity of non-profit and voluntary organizations that operate in the U.S. in the interest of developing nations, we would imagine that your donations office can identify other organizations that would better fit more democratic and inclusive ideals of development. Although collectively we have no official or institutional links with such organizations, several come to mind as some that have been visible in our communities for their inclusive and compassionate outreach. We provide a partial list below, athough we are sure there other organizations that are also worthy of support.

The report of the campaign to "Stop Funding Hate," and the IDRF's statements in its own defence, raise a debate that has wracked the Indian subcontinent dramatically during the past year, in the wake of mass killings of minority populations in the state of Gujarat. While the debate is too complex to summarize here, we are struck by how the concerns and findings of the "Report on the Foreign Exchange of Hate" appear to be in consonance with the those of the The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and several other respected human rights and democracy commissions. These findings highlight the widespread participation of Hindu religious activists from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the violent deaths of 2,000 Muslims during Feb/March 2002, and implicate in those killings allegedly cultural or charitable non-profit organizations on the ground.

Indeed, an independent BBC Channel Four investigative report of December 12, 2002, as well as the findings of the Citizen's Tribunal in India (November 22, 2002) confirm that some RSS charities like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA) to which the IDRF has made significant contributions, were directly involved in the Gujarat massacres of Feb/March 2002. The IDRF has made no effort to distance itself from the organizations that have been identified as instrumental in these riots. Indeed, many links on the IDRF website, and sites supporting it, continue to idealize organizations of the "Sangh Parivar" such as the RSS and the VHP. It seems to us that no matter how many benevolent projects the IDRF may well have supported over the years, this fact should give us all pause.

Many of us specialize in the study of India's development, and there is a wide range of opinion and critique amongst us as to the forms development should take and which policies are the best ones. Yet we are agreed that sectarianism in the guise of development erodes the basis of a secular, democratic, and plural society and can only be detrimental to India in the long run. We wish to reafirm our commitment to secular development work which neither singles out one particular community as more deserving than others, nor discriminates against other communities.

If there is any chance that our charitable monies might be travelling to sectarian causes, we would like our communities and corporations to help us take a closer look.